“Cut some timber,” Tu Shan ordered the robots. He pointed. “Over there. See if you can make planks.”
“So,” acknowledged the principal, and led its work gang off with their energy projectors, fluid reactants, and solid tools.
Wanderer swung his head toward his companion. The weight of the induction helmet reminded him that he wasn’t in a dream box. He was supposedly training his entire organism; but he stood in a place that surely didn’t exist as it was being presented to him. Well, he could believe that something not too unlike it did, on his new world. “What’re you doing?” he demanded.
“We’ll need wood suitable for construction, wherever we decide to settle,” Tu Shan explained. “We don’t want to depend on the wretched synthesizers, do we? Wasn’t that the point of leaving Earth?” He smiled, narrowed his eyes against the brilliance, dilated his nostrils, breathed deep. “Yes, I like it here.”
“You won’t farm this kind of site!” Wanderer cried.
Tu Shan stared at him. “Why not?”
“There’ll be plenty of others. This, it would be … wrong.”
Tu Shan scowled. “How much of the planet do you want to keep for your private hunting preserve, forever?”
It shocked Wanderer: Have we carried the enmities of our forefathers through all these centuries and now through these light-years?
17
THE NANOPROCESSORS would take any material and transform it, atom by atom, into anything else for which they had a program. Out of their recycling came air, water, food. They could produce a complete, excellent meal, and often did according to individual choice. However, as a rule Mac-andal took just the basic ingredients and, aside from drink, made dinner for everybody. She was a gifted cook, enjoyed the work, and felt it was a service, something that lent her life some meaning. No pretense; machines lacked the personal touch that this archaic crew needed.
Certainly they did at a time of celebration. The ship’s calendar held many feasts, holy days and national days that Earth had mostly forgotten, private anniversaries, special occasions upon the voyage. Each fulfilled year of it was among them. That was by inboard time, of course. The faster Pytheas flew, the shorter a span became in relation to the galactic wheel.
“It’s getting kind of drunk out,” she remarked to Yukiko on the third of those evenings.
Having dined, folk had moved from the saloon to the spacious common room. Simulacrum panels had been raised, hiding the murals. They gave no scenes from home; it had been found that such were too likely to make an alcoholic party go somber. Patterns of light shifted and drifted, glowed and sparkled, through a violet-blue dusk. Nevertheless Hanno and Patulcius sat, goblets in hand, reminiscing about the twentieth century—the two widely sundered twentieth centuries that had been theirs. Wanderer and Svoboda revived the waltz, rotating embraced over the floor, earplugs giving Strauss to them alone; their eyes also excluded the world. Tu Shan and Aliyat danced, whooping and hand-clapping, to some livelier melody.
Kneeling as of old, Yukiko sipped at the bit of sake she was allowing herself. She smiled. “It is good to see cheer-fujness/’ she said.
“Yes, I’ve felt tension in the air,” Macandal replied. “Not that it’s gone away.”
“—poor old Sam Giannotti, he tried so hard to get a little modern physics into my head,” Hanno related slurrily. “Hell, I could barely manage a half-notion of what classical physics had been about. Made a song, I did, at last—”
Sweat darkened Tu Shan’s tunic beneath the arms and sheened on Aliyat’s bare shoulders and back.
“You should go join the fun,” Macandal said. sang Hanno off-key,
“Black bodies give off radiation,’ “And ought to continuously. Black bodies give off radiation, But do it by Planck’s theory.
“Bring back, bring back,
Oh, bring back that old continuity!
Bring back, bring back,
Oh, bring back Clerk Maxwell to me.”
Yukiko smiled again. “I am enjoying myself,” she said, “But why don’t you go? You were never a passive person, like me.”
“Ha, don’t you kid me. In your peculiar ways, you’re as active, as much a doer, as anybody I ever met.”
“Though now we have Schrodinger functions,