“Our ships left automated tracking probes to follow the arcologies and report on their movements, and headed for home.
“It may seem strange to you that we had so little interest in the arcologies. But we were in no hurry. We could wait in S-space and see what developed. And certainly we had plenty of other things to interest us, because by that time Earth was finally being visited again on a regular basis.
“Still we had doubts that humans could thrive there. The long dust-winter had exterminated ninety percent of the plant species, and all land-based animal forms bigger than the rat — I mean an Earth rat, not one of the thirty-kilo monsters you call rats on Pentecost. We also found that the surviving plants and animals had changed from their old forms. The grasses were unrecognizable. Many of the old food plants tasted wrong in subtle ways, and some had lost all their nutritional value. We all realized that it would take millennia to restore Earth and make it a place worth living. But oddly enough, we all thought it a worthwhile effort — even those who had found life on Earth absolutely intolerable before the holocaust.
“By the time that the Earth visits began we were feeling much more comfortable about S-space. Some of us had been living there for many Earth-generations, and we were all fine — better than fine, because we didn’t seem to be aging at all. Our best estimate, based on limited data, was that the aging rate was twenty times as slow subjectively as it was in normal living. That extrapolated to a seventeen hundred year subjective lifetime — and even if we were wrong by a factor of two, that was still a mighty attractive thought.
“When our result became known, naturally more and more people wanted to move to S-space. It didn’t happen overnight, but as time went by we learned how to make the transitions both ways, with minimal danger. By then we also knew the big problem with S-space existence.”
“You keep referring to problems and never telling us about them,” said Elissa. “What problem?”
“I’ve not been talking because I’m not supposed to talk,” said Ferranti. “No one back on Pentecost should know what I’m telling you until they’ve been through indoctrination, and not one of you has; but you’ll realize the problem for yourselves in two seconds as soon as we arrive at local Headquarters, so I’m not revealing any great secrets.”
Olivia Ferranti moved her thin hands to her cheeks, framing her eyes. “You’ll find no children at Headquarters,” she said abruptly. “A woman cannot conceive in S-space, or a man produce active sperm. S-space is a wonderful place for an individual, but it’s an evolutionary blind alley. Worse than that, anyone who makes frequent transitions between S-space and normal space suffers reduced fertility.
“That presented us with a terrible choice. Did we opt for extended personal life span in S-space, or would we guarantee the survival of the human race by staying in normal space?
“While we were still agonizing over that, we received a signal from the probe that had been tracking Melissa. The colony ship was in the Tau Ceti system, and it had finally found a habitable planet. They were exploring it. We eventually found out that they had named it Thule.
“It was twelve light-years from Earth, which made it a four week one-way journey in S-space when we allowed for acceleration and deceleration. I don’t think I mentioned it, but no matter how we tried we had been unable to come up with an economical drive that would take us much faster than a tenth of light-speed. But it wasn’t important any more. As you can see, that’s good enough when you live in S-space.
“Our ship went out, and in due course it made contact with Melissa. That first meeting was traumatic for the Melissa inhabitants. They had left Earth twelve thousand years earlier — five hundred generations of shipboard life. Earth was nothing but a distant legend. It was something that was still talked about, but stories of Earth’s destruction were regarded as of the same practical importance as tales about the Garden of Eden. When our crew contacted them and claimed to remember the death of Earth, that was too much for the Melissans to take. “After we learned something of their history since leaving the solar system, we could see why. They had never had a stable and trustworthy government that lasted more than a century. We found historical evidence of every form of rule from water-control to neo-Confucianism. When they discovered Thule they were just recovering from the effects of a long dictatorship. Their mistrust and suspicion was considerable. Even the most rational of them had difficulty believing that our intentions were wholly innocent, nothing more than curiosity to learn how another culture was faring after so long without any kind of planetary home. They would not let us visit their colony on Thule. Putting it mildly, they suspected our motives.”
Olivia Ferranti slowly shook her head. “And, of course, they were wholly correct in doing so. Even in S-space, one is not wholly protected from accidents and disease. There would inevitably be deaths, and without replenishment we foresaw our society shrinking — not at once, but over many thousands of Earth years. In Melissa and the other arcologies we saw a possible answer.
“Either we were unusually stupid, or we were simply naive. To make the Melissans believe us, and to show how we could be people who actually remembered Earth’s final war, we explained S-space to them.
“They went crazy. They wanted S-space more than anything else in the Universe. You see, we were misled by our own experiences. We had been slow to accept and move to S-space. We didn’t realize that our reluctance wouldn’t apply to them. They hadn’t been there for the early, risky experiments. To them, our existence proved that S-space must be safe. So they thought we were deliberately goading them, tormenting them with a look at immortality while refusing to share its secret with them.
“Most of our ship’s crew had gone on board Melissa. They took them, eight men and six women, and tried to draw the secret of S-space from them by force. It was useless, of course. The conversion equipment was on the ship, as it is on this ship, and the crew had used it to go from S-space to the perception rate of the Melissans. But they didn’t know the theory, any more than Garao or Captain Rinker know the theory.
“The inquisitors tortured those crew members to death. Only the two who had remained on our ship were able to escape and come back to tell us what had happened.
“That’s when we adopted our rules for interaction with all colony ships and colony worlds. We would have limited contact, and it would be handled with great care and with fixed procedures. We would never again return ourselves to normal space for the purpose of first contact, as was done with Melissa. Contact would be done with robots as intermediaries; and we would never, under any circumstances, allow ourselves to fall into the hands of the colonists.” Olivia Ferranti shrugged. “We just flunked that one, right here. Well, let’s skip forward four thousand years. That’s when another of the arcologies, Helena, finally found a habitable planet. They named it Beacon’s World, colonized it, and moved on. That’s when we learned another lesson. Beacon’s World was settled long before we sent a ship to visit it. When our ship finally got there we found that the population had increased from the original few thousand to forty million; but along the way much of their scientific knowledge had been lost, or had degenerated to hearsay and legend.
“We tried to help. We reintroduced the basis for a more advanced technology. They were keen to receive the information from us — but they applied it to weapons development. Then they started a war, between the two major settlement centers on Beacon’s World. Our ship and crew felt helpless, watching while they slaughtered each other. But we felt we had to do something — it was impossible to stand by, uninvolved, when we knew the information we provided had allowed the conflict to be so savage. The crew of our ship tried a desperation tactic: through our robots, they ordered the warring parties to stop fighting — without saying what would happen if the order were disobeyed.