She leaned close. Her smile trembled. “That is enough to start.”
YET ANOTHER Christmas drew nigh, in the ship’s chronology. It was meaningless to ask whether it did on Earth just then—doubly meaningless, given the physics here and the forgottenness yonder. Hanno came upon Svoboda hang-ing ornaments in the common room. Evergreen boughs from the nanoprocessors were fresh and fragrant, bejeweled with berries of hotly. They seemed as forlorn as the Danish carols from the speakers. She saw him and tautened. He halted, not too close to her. “Hello,” he proffered.
“How do you do,” she said.
He smiled. Her face stayed locked. “What sort of party are you planning this year?” he asked.
She shrugged. “No motif.”
“Oh, I’ll keep out of the way, never fear.” Quickly: “But we can’t go on much longer like this. Well lose skills, including the skills of teamwork. We must start having simulations and practicing in them again.”
“As the captain directs. I suppose, though, you’re aware that Wanderer and I, at least, are doing so. We’ll bring others in presently.”
Hanno made himself meet the blue gaze, and made it stay upon his. “Yes, naturally I know. Good. For you two above aU. A phantom wilderness is better than none, right?”
Svoboda bit her lip. “We could have had the real thing.”
“You will, after we’re through at Tritos. You wanted to go there first yourself. Why don’t you look forward to it?”
“You know why. The cost to my comrades.” She closed a fist and clipped: “Not that we can’t cope. I outlived many bad husbands, dreary decades, tyrants, wars, everything men could wreak. I will outlive this too. We will.”
“Myself among you,” he said, and continued on his way.
It was to no particular goal. He often prowled, mostly at shipnight or through sections where nobody else had occasion to be. An immortal body needed little exercise to keep fit, but he worked regularly at his capabilities and developed new ones. He screened books and shows, listened to music, played with problems on the computers. Frequently, as in the past, when stimuli palled and thought flagged he disengaged his mind and let hours or days flow by, scarcely registering on him. That, however, was in its way as seductive, easily overdone as the dream chamber which he shunned. He could but hope that his crew rationed themselves on illusions.
Today impulse returned him to his stateroom. He sealed himself in, not that anyone would come calling, and settled down before his terminal. “Activate—“ The command fell so flat across silence that he chopped it short. For a while he stared at the ceiling. His fingers drummed the desktop. “Historical persons,” he said.
“Whom do you wish?” inquired the instrumentality.
Hanno’s mouth writhed upward. “You mean, what do I wish?”
What three-dimensional, full-color, changeably expressive, freely moving and speaking wraith? Siddhartha, Socrates, Hillel, Christ — Aeschylus, Vergil, Tu Fu, Firdousi, Shakespeare, Goethe, Mark Twain — Lucretius, Avicenna, Maim on ides, Descartes, Pascal, Hume — Pericles, Alfred, Jefferson — Hatshepsut, Sappho, Murasaki, Rabi’a, Mar-grete I, Jeanne d’Arc, Elizabeth I, Sacajawea, Jane Austen, Florence Nightingale, Marie Curie, Isak Dineseri — yes, or if you liked, the great monsters and she-devils — Have your machine take everything history, archaeology, psychology knew of a person and that person’s world, down to the last least scrap, with probabilities assigned to each uncertainty and conjecture; let it model, with subtle and powerful abstract manipulations, the individual whom this matrix could have produced and who would have changed it in precisely those ways that were known; make it write the program, activate; and meet that human creature. The image of the dy was a mere construct, as easily generated as any other; but while the program ran, the mind existed, sensed, thought, reacted, conscious of what it was but seldom troubled thereby, usually enthusiastic, interested, anxious to disOld myths and nightmares have become real,” Svoboda said once, “while old reality slips away from us. On Earth they now raise the dead, but are themselves only half alive.”
“That isn’t strictly true, either side of it,” Hanno had replied. “Take my advice from experience and don’t caU up ‘anybody you ever actually knew. They’re never quite right. Often they’re grotesquely wrong.”