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Building our house. A sun hangs at the upper center of our dome. The powdery
hills carry grass and bushes and trees again  real this time. Rain falls at
unpredictable intervals. The air is cool, vivid, changeable. Anna designs the
rooms, which will be made in the Japanese style of my day. I study all that is
known about nonhuman beings. We have purchased a huge library of select source
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material for my work. Here, I can feel the weight of my past lives, and the
eyes of those who watched me, every instant, who watched all I did, and
recorded it perhaps, and studied me as I now try to study them. Anna maintains
they were not Gods  not even kami
 but I wait for my own conclusions.
The dome is broad enough to have its own kind of weather, a playfulness which
contradicts the environment machines. We may, if we wish, have a few animals 
birds, insects. They wait to be cloned or grown from eggs. A luxury of
terrestrial life waits in one box, more than we could ever need, but most
human colonies have such a box, Anna says. It s the germ plasm of Earth,
insured against loss by its presence on thousands of worlds. Perhaps we ll
find such a box from another world, left behind by beings long dead. This
world? No. I think not! (
Laughter
.) That would be too much to hope for. But elsewhere.
I take walks outside the dome at least once a week, surveying the plains but
mostly looking and trying to feel for the missing things. At one time there
must have been buildings, streets, perhaps vehicles  and
Perfidisians. Sometimes Anna goes with me. We have a small cart which we use
for longer trips, and a larger one which hasn t been used yet. In time we will
cover a fair portion of the planet, place instruments at various points, and
study its long-term behavior. Anna thinks we ll find very little of interest.
She s probably right. But it serves as a distraction while I work on other
problems.
Reading histories of many races and beings now, starting with my own kind.
Aighor literature  most of the works that have been translated  Crocerian
saga-histories. With electronic amplification, I can read a book of a hundred
thousand words in twenty minutes, from a tapas. Still not fast enough. My head
swims with dissociated facts. Lifetimes to process them all! So I am more
selective now. I go back to source documents, earliest records, experience
tapas when possible.
Of great interest at the moment is the period of first contacts, when two
species acknowledged awareness of each other and began to set up
relationships. For humans most such contacts occurred between 2035
and 2145. The politics and cultural changes of this period are fascinating.
Each day my love for Anna grows. She is still strong, independent, but we
touch whenever we can. She enjoys being stroked, like a cat. She feels some
embarrassment about this, but it comes so naturally the embarrassment is an
afterthought. Sometimes she will try to avoid contact, but we always come
together again to touch, compare our thoughts, reenergize. All of my past life
is like a shadow compared to this.
Memento mori
 itcannot go on! Not forever. What will we feel when one or the other is
gone?
Unimaginable.
A week ago we took the small cart out on one of the (to her) monotonous
journeys. She grew bored early.
After suggesting we turn around before dark, which we didn t, she became
silent. In the dark, the cart s roof-mounted lights shining across featureless
concrete, we felt more alone than we had between the stars. Here was isolation
at its most extreme  just ourselves, ten thousand kilometers of planet under
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Beyond Heaven's River our feet, and a few machines. She said she was afraid
we d lose our souls here but couldn t explain why.
The hair on my neck raised and the dark was filled with ghosts. She began to
cry. Humans have long since learned that some residue of living things
persists after death, as a record of organized particles moving in personal
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spaces. Why not with the Perfidisians? By the time we reached the dome, we
were both terrified. It took us several hours to calm down. She was angry with
me for two days after.
But the Perfidisians were too thorough to leave ghosts behind. So what do I
look for, when I go from point to barren point on the plains?
For that one overlooked item. No living being is perfect. Perhaps some
individual Perfidisian forgot one tiny artifact, the equivalent of a nut or
bolt, too minor to be detected by the Centrum and USC
instruments. Anything. And while I look, I work, try to recall & What is that
key I know exists, but which can t be remembered?
Anna is patient. She may last me out.
The
Peloros has been gone for a month. It will take another four months to
complete its missions and return to check up on us.
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Thirty-Four
Oomalo Waunter took away the sheet of paper from the bulkhead, leaning against
a foam pad on the scaffolding. If there was the faintest hint of a seam, he d
find it. He was convinced the ship had secret hiding places. The conviction
wasn t entirely rational  the Crocerians would almost certainly have found
any hidden artifacts of value. But it was something to do. While he did it, he
worried.
Since the seizure by the USC ship, Alae had brooded and done very little work.
They d left the Ring Stars and set up a deep-space orbit around galactic
center while they considered where to go next. Perhaps that was what she was
brooding about. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]