“You did go, and I did,” the boy said with a certainty that stopped her. “And we did go outside. And Shan and Gveter were Support, in the lander. And I took samples. They’re in the Stasis closet.”
“I don’t know if Shan was in the lander or not,” Gveter said, rubbing his forehead painfully.
“Where would the lander have gone?” Shan said. “Nothing is out there—we’re nowhere—outside time, is all I can think—But when one of you tells how they saw it, it seems as if it was that way, but then the next one changes the story, and I…”
Oreth shivered, drawing closer to the fire.
“I never believed this damn thing would work,” said Lidi, bearlike in the dark cave of her blanket.
“Not understanding it was the trouble,” Karth said. “None of us understood how it would work, not even Gveter. Isn’t that true?”
“Yes,” Gveter said.
“So that if our psychic interaction with it affected the process—”
“Or is the process,” said Sweet Today, “so far as we’re concerned.”
“Do you mean,” Lidi said in a tone of deep existential disgust, “that we have to believe in it to make it work?”
“You have to believe in yourself in order to act, don’t you?” Tai said.
“No,” the navigator said. “Absolutely not. I don’t believe in myself. I know some things. Enough to go on.”
“An analogy,” Gveter offered. “The effective action of a crew depends on the members perceiving themselves as a crew—you could call it believing in the crew, or just being it—Right? So, maybe, to churten, we—we conscious ones—maybe it depends on our consciously perceiving ourselves as…as transilient—as being in the other place—the destination?”
“We lost our crewness, certainly, for a—Are there whiles?” Karth said. “We fell apart.”
“We lost the thread,” Shan said.
“Lost,” Oreth said meditatively, laying another massive, half-weightless log on the fire, volleying sparks up into the chimney, slow stars.
“We lost—what?” Sweet Today asked.
No one answered for a while.
“When I can see the sun through the carpet…” Lidi said.
“So can I,” Betton said, very low.
“I can see Ve Port,” said Rig. “And everything. I can tell you what I can see. I can see Liden if I look. And my room on the Oneblin. And—”
“First, Rig,” said Sweet Today, “tell us what happened.”
“All right,” Rig said agreeably. “Hold on to me harder, maba, I start floating. Well, we went to the liberry, me and Asten and Betton, and Betton was Elder Sib, and the adults were on the bridge, and I was going to go to sleep like I do when we naffle-fly, but before I even lay down there was the brown planet and Ve Port and both the suns and everywhere else, and you could see through everything, but Asten couldn’t. But I can.”
“We never went anywhere,” Asten said. “Rig tells stories all the time.”
“We all tell stories all the time, Asten,” Karth said.
“Not dumb ones like Rig’s!”
“Even dumber,” said Oreth. “What we need…What we need is…”
“We need to know,” Shan said, “what transilience is, and we don’t, because we never did it before, nobody ever did it before.”
“Not in the flesh,” said Lidi.
“We need to know what’s—real—what happened, whether anything happened—” Tai gestured at the cave of firelight around them and the dark beyond it. “Where are we? Are we here? Where is here? What’s the story?”
“We have to tell it,” Sweet Today said. “Recount it. Relate it…Like Rig. Asten, how does a story begin?”
“A thousand winters ago, a thousand miles away,” the child said; and Shan murmured, “Once upon a time…”
“There was a ship called the Shoby,” said Sweet Today, “on a test flight, trying out the churten, with a crew of ten.
“Their names were Rig, Asten, Betton, Karth, Oreth, Lidi, Tai, Shan, Gveter, and Sweet Today. And they related their story, each one and together…”
There was silence, the silence that was always there, except for the stir and crackle of the fire and the small sounds of their breathing, their movements, until one of them spoke at last, telling the story.
“The boy and his mother,” said the light, pure voice, “were the first human beings ever to set foot on that world.”
Again the silence; and again a voice.
“Although she wished…she realized that she really hoped the thing wouldn’t work, because it would make her skills, her whole life, obsolete…all the same she really wanted to learn how to use it, too, if she could, if she wasn’t too old to learn…”
A long, softly throbbing pause, and another voice.
“They went from world to world, and each time they lost the world they left, lost it in time dilation, their friends getting old and dying while they were in NAFAL flight. If there were a way to live in one’s own time, and yet move among the worlds, they wanted to try it…”
“Staking everything on it,” the next voice took up the story, “because nothing works except what we give our souls to, nothing’s safe except what we put at risk.”
A while, a little while; and a voice.
“It was like a game. It was like we were still in the Shoby at Ve Port just waiting before we went into NAFAL flight. But it was like we were at the brown planet too. At the same time. And one of them was just pretend, and the other one wasn’t, but I didn’t know which. So it was like when you pretend in a game. But I didn’t want to play. I didn’t know how.”
Another voice.
“If the churten principle were proved to be applicable to actual transilience of living, conscious beings, it would be a great event in the mind of his people—for all people. A new understanding. A new partnership. A new way of being in the universe. A wider freedom…He wanted that very much. He wanted to be one of the crew that first formed that partnership, the first people to be able to think this thought, and to…to relate it. But also he was afraid of it. Maybe it wasn’t a true relation, maybe false, maybe only a dream. He didn’t know.”
It was not so cold, so dark, at their backs, as they sat round the fire. Was it the waves of Liden, hushing on the sand?
Another voice.
“She thought a lot about her people, too. About guilt, and expiation, and sacrifice. She wanted a lot to be on this flight that might give people—more freedom. But it was different from what she thought it would be. What happened—What happened wasn’t what mattered. What mattered was that she came to be with people who gave her freedom. Without guilt. She wanted to stay with them, to be crew with them…And with her son. Who was the first human being to set foot on an unknown world.”
A long silence; but not deep, only as deep as the soft drum of the ship’s systems, steady and unconscious as the circulation of the blood.
Another voice.
“They were thoughts in the mind; what else had they ever been? So they could be in Ve and at the brown planet, and desiring flesh and entire spirit, and illusion and reality, all at once, as they’d always been. When he remembered this, his confusion and fear ceased, for he knew that they couldn’t be lost.”
“They got lost. But they found the way,” said another voice, soft above the hum and hushing of the ship’s systems, in the warm fresh air and light inside the solid walls and hulls.
Only nine voices had spoken, and they looked for the tenth; but the tenth had gone to sleep, thumb in mouth.
“That story was told and is yet to be told,” the mother said. “Go on. I’ll churten here with Rig.”
They left those two by the fire, and went to the bridge, and then to the hatches to invite on board a crowd of anxious scientists, engineers, and officials of Ve Port and the Ekumen, whose instruments had been assuring them that the