A shadow passed above his face. It was another suited face peering down into his. A weight rested on his chest.
"Get off," he said.
"He's alive!" Bothogi's voice cried. "Dr. Gothon, he's still alive!" The world showed no more scars than it had at the beginning—red and ocher where clouds failed. The algae continued its struggle in sea and tidal pools and lakes and rivers—with whatever microscopic addenda the breached dome had let loose in the world. The insects and the worms continued their blind ascent to space, dominant life on this poor, cratered globe. The research station was in function again, repairs complete.
Desan gazed on the world from his ship: it hung as a sphere in the holotank by his command station. A wave of his hand might show him the darkness of space; the floodlit shapes of ten hunting ships, lately returned from the deep and about to seek it again in continuation of the Mission, sleek fish rising and sinking again in a figurative black sea. A good many suns had shone on their hulls, but this one had seen them more often than any since their launching. Home.
The space station was returning to function. Corpses were consigned to the sun the Mission had sought for so long. And power over the Mission rested solely at present in the hands of the lord-navigator, in the unprecedented circumstance of the demise of all five lords-magistrate simultaneously. Their clones were not yet activated to begin their years of majority— "Later will be time to wake the new lords-magistrate," Desan decreed, "at some further world of the search." Let them hear this event as history.
When I can manage them personally, he thought. He looked aside at twenty-year-old Desan Six and the youth looked gravely back with the face Desan had seen in the mirror thirty-two waking years ago.
"Lord-navigator?"
"You'll wake your brother after we're away. Six. Directly after. I'll be staying awake much of this trip."
" Awake, sir?"
"Quite. There are things I want you to think about. I'll be talking to you and Seven both."
"About the lords-magistrate, sir?"
Desan lifted brows at this presumption. "You and I are already quite well attuned, Six. You'll succeed young. Are you sorry you missed this time?"
"No, lord-navigator! I assure you not!"
"Good brain. I ought to know. Go to your post. Six. Be grateful you don't have to cope with a new lordship andfive new lords-magistrate and a recent schism." Desan leaned back in his chair as the youth crossed the bridge and settled at a crew-post, beside the Captain. The lord-navigator was more than a figurehead to rule the seventy ships of the Mission, with their captains and their crews. Let the boy try his skill on this plotting. Desan intended to check it. He leaned aside with a wince— the electric shock that had blown him flat between the AI's tires had saved him from worse than a broken arm and leg; and the medical staff had seen to that: the arm and the leg were all but healed, with only a light wrap to protect them. The ribs were tightly wrapped too; and they caused him more pain than all the rest.
A scan had indeed located three errant asteroids, three courses the station's computers had not accurately recorded as inbound for the planet—until personnel from the ships began to run their own observations. Those were redirected.
Casualties. Destruction. Fighting within the Mission. The guilt of the lords-magistrate was profound and beyond dispute.
"Lord-navigator," the communications officer said. "Dr. Gothon returning your call." Good-bye, he had told Gothon. I don't accept your judgment, but I shall devote my energy to pursuit of mine, and let any who want to join you—reside on the station. There are some volunteers; I don't profess to understand them. But you may trust them. You may trust the lords-magistrate to have learned a lesson. I will teach it. No member of this mission will be restrained in any opinion while my influence lasts. And I shall see to that. Sleep again and we may see each other once more in our lives.
"I'll receive it," Desan said, pleased and anxious at once that Gothon deigned reply; he activated the corn-control. Ship-electronics touched his ear, implanted for comfort. He heard the usual blip and chatter of corn's mechanical protocols, then Gothon's quiet voice. "Lord-navigator."
"I'm hearing you, doctor."
"Thank you for your sentiment. I wish you well too. I wish you very well." The tablet was mounted before him, above the console. Millions of years ago a tiny probe had set out from this world, bearing the original. Two aliens standing naked, one with hand uplifted. A series of diagrams which, partially obliterated, had still served to guide the Mission across the centuries. A probe bearing a greeting. Ages-dead cameras and simple instruments. Greetings, stranger. We come from this place, this star system. See, the hand, the appendage of a builder— This we will have in common. The diagrams: we speak knowledge; we have no fear of you, strangers who read this, whoever you be.
Wise fools.
There had been a time, long ago, when fools had set out to seek them . . . in a vast desert of stars. Fools who had desperately needed proof, once upon a quarter million years ago, that they were not alone. One dust-scoured alien artifact they found, so long ago, on a lonely drifting course.
Hello, it said.
The makers, the peaceful Ancients, became a legend. They became purpose, inspiration. The overriding, obsessive Whythat saved a species, pulled it back from war, gave it the stars.
"I'm very serious—I do hope you rest, doctor—save a few years for the unborn."
"My eldest's awake. I've lost my illusions of immortality, lord-navigator. I hope to spend my years teaching her. I've told her about you, lord-navigator. She hopes to meet you."
"You might still abandon this world and come with us, doctor."
"To search for a myth?"
"Not a myth. We're bound to disagree. Doctor, doctor, what goodcan your presence there do?
What if you're right? It's a dead end. What if I'm wrong? I'll never stop looking. I'll never know."
"But we know their descendants, lord-navigator. We. We are. We're spreading their legend from star to star—they've become a fable. The Ancients, the Pathfinders. A hundred civilizations have taken up that myth. A hundred civilizations have lived out their years in that belief and begotten others to tell their story. What if you should find them? Would you know them—or where evolution had taken them? Perhaps we've already met them, somewhere among the worlds we've visited, and we failed to know them."
It was irony. Gentle humor. "Perhaps, then," Desan said in turn, "we'll find the track leads home again. Perhaps we aretheir children— eight and a quarter million years removed."
"O ye makers of myths. Do your work, spacefarer. Tangle the skein with legends. Teach fables to the races you meet. Brighten the universe with them. I put my faith in you. Don't you know—this world is all I came to find, but you—child of the voyage, you have to have more. For you the voyage is the Mission. Good-bye to you. Fare well. Nothing is complete calamity. The equation here is different, by a multitude of microorganisms let free—Bothogi has stopped grieving and begun to have quite different thoughts on the matter. His algae-pools may turn out a different breed this time—the shift of a protein here and there in the genetic chain—who knows what it will breed? Different software this time, perhaps. Good voyage to you, lord-navigator. Look for your Ancients under other suns. We're waiting for their offspring here, under this one." 1985