By the time they were ready to start, there were about four hundred people in the dining room. It was of course a well-off crowd, handsomely attired in satins and silks. Men wore the white or gold neckerchiefs and sashes popular at the time, and the women displayed formfitting gowns which in some cases left remarkably little to the imagination.
The waiters brought an array of meats, greens, and fruit. A bottle of wine showed up in front of Kim, but she passed on it, intending to wait until after she’d spoken. She was seated near the lectern, immediately to the right of the hotel’s CEO, Talika McKay. McKay was a petite brown-haired woman, with angelic eyes, a benign smile, an effervescent manner, and the compassion of a shark. Kim had twice seen her in action when publicity efforts had gone awry.
Tripley was in the middle of the room, in earnest conversation with the other diners at his table, but his eyes occasionally found her. When they did there was an intensification of force, and the dining room tended to recede while Tripley came sharply into focus. I know your secret, he seemed to be telling her, you are a woman who chases phantoms. You come here and pretend to be a person of scientific achievement, but you are really quite attractive and very little else.
The head table was given over to McKay and Kim, to the president of the Greenway Travel Association, and to Abel Donner, who had supervised the conversion of starship into hotel. McKay functioned as master of ceremonies.
When the diners had finished, McKay stood up at the lectern, welcoming everyone to the grand opening of the Star Queen Hotel, giving mild emphasis to the last word. It would, she said, carry on in the grand tradition of the celebrated liner. She briefly outlined the capabilities of the Star Queen, recommended its facilities for executive training, and introduced the president and the chairman of the board, each of whom briefly gushed over his pleasure at being present.
She described some of the vacation packages that would be available, pointed out that a special connection had always existed between the Star Queen and the Seabright Institute, and turned to Kim, who wondered what the special connection was.
“Our principal speaker this evening—” she began.
Kim understood that politics had brought her to this event. Somebody at the Star Queen had owed somebody at the Institute a favor. They needed a representative, the Institute needed exposure, and voila, Brandywine arrives at the lectern. They understood she’d make her pitch for the Institute, but she was also expected to say nice things about the new hotel.
Lecterns had survived the advance of technology that rendered them obsolete because they served to provide a barrier behind which a speaker could hide. Kim disliked them for that reason: they blocked her off from her audience. Had she been able, she would have pushed it aside.
“Thank you, Dr. McKay,” she said. She went through the customary greetings, told a couple of jokes on herself, and described the one other time in her life she’d been aboard the Star Queen. “I was an intern with the Institute and we were scheduled to take a flight out to the physics lab on Lark. It happened that the Queen had just docked. It was in from Caribee. Just a detail, but I never forgot it. How far’s Caribee? Eighty-some light-years? They were letting visitors on board, and we had a little time, so we came in through that entrance over there. By the ferns. And into this hall. The captain and a couple of his officers were shaking hands with passengers, saying goodbye, and I tried to imagine how far they had come, how big the void was between Greenway and Caribee.
“We all know there was a time when people thought such a voyage could never happen. Not ever. The travel that we take for granted was once somebody’s dream.
“We launched an automated probe from Earth toward Alpha Centauri nine hundred years ago. Alpha Centauri, as I’m sure you know, is only four light-years from Sol. Four. But that probe is still en route. It’s not quite halfway there. And we ask ourselves, why did they bother? They were all going to be dead by the time the probe arrived. Dead for two thousand years. Why do we do these things?
“Why did we just explode Alpha Maxim? We too will be gone for thousands of years before any results can possibly come in.” She paused to sip from her glass of water. “I’ll tell you why. We launched the long probe to Alpha Centauri for the same reason we built the jump engines that powered the Queen: We don’t like horizons. We don’t like limits. We always want to see beyond them. We don’t stop at the water’s edge, do we? What is a beach to us but a place from which to launch ourselves at the future?”
Tripley seemed distracted. His eyes locked on a point somewhere up near the ceiling lights.
“We’re here this evening to celebrate the retirement of one of the symbols of that dream. The Queen has been carrying people and cargo among the Nine Worlds for a century and a half. She’s earned a rest. And it’s nice to know she’ll get that rest in a place where future generations can touch her. Can know at least a little of what she was about.”
She connected the Star Queen to the research ships operated by the Institute, mentioned Max Esterly’s contribution to jump engine technology, and ended with the assertion that the ships would continue to push the frontier outward. “Some of us wonder why the cosmos is so large, so inconceivably huge that we can never even see more than a fraction of it. No matter how powerful the telescope, there’s a universe of light out there that simply hasn’t had time to reach us. Fifteen billion years, and it still hasn’t gotten here. Well, maybe things are this way to reassure us, to let us know that no matter how far we go, there’ll always be a horizon to challenge. There’ll always be another bend in the river.”
Tripley returned from wherever he’d been, caught her watching him, and tried to adopt a look of congenial interest.
A number of people came up afterward to ask about current Institute projects, always a sign that a presentation had gone well. They talked about Beacon, and the president of the Greenway Travel Association, a lovely blond in green and white, wondered whether it wasn’t possible to do something similar in hyperspace, an all-points signal that would draw attention to itself, but which wouldn’t require two million years to get a response.
“The problem’s directional,” said Kim. “You can’t send a transmission that simply spreads out in all directions. Hyperspace communications have to be aimed. So, yes, if we knew where the celestials were, we could say hello.” When the last of them had wandered off, Cole and McKay shook her hand, and Tripley approached.
“That was pretty good, Kim,” he said when they were alone. “But I know you don’t really believe it.”
“What don’t I believe?” she asked coolly.
“That we won’t stop at the water’s edge? That we don’t like limits.” His voice suggested it was a naive notion.
Kim was by no means above stretching the truth in a fund-raiser. But she truly believed that curiosity and the pursuit of knowledge were basic to the human character. “Do you?” she asked.
“Do I what?
“Accept limitations?”
“It’s a different matter.”
“Why?”
“That’s me. You were talking about the species.”
“We’re all wired pretty much the same, Ben. When you’re willing to lock in the status quo and kick back on your front porch, let me know. I’d like to be there.”