And So On, and So On

James Tiptree, Jr.

In a nook of the ship’s lounge the child had managed to activate a viewscreen. “Rovy! They asked you not to play with the screen while we’re Jumping. We’ve told you and told you there isn’t anything there. It’s just pretty lights, dear. Now come back and we’ll all play—”

As the young clanwife coaxed him back to their cocoons something happened. It was a very slight something, just enough to make the drowsy passengers glance up. Immediately a calm voice spoke, accompanied by the blur of multiple translation.

“This is your captain. The momentary discontinuity we just experienced is quite normal in this mode of paraspace. We will encounter one or two more before reaching the Orion complex, which will be in about two units of ship’s time.”

The tiny episode stimulated talk.

“Declare I feel sorry for the youngers today.” The large being in mercantile robes tapped his Galnews scanner, blew out his ear sacs comfortably. “We had all the fun. Why, when I first came out this was all wild frontier. Took courage to go beyond the Coalsack. They had you make your will. I can even remember the first cross-Gal Jump.”

“How fast it has all changed!” admired his talking minor. Daringly it augmented: “The youngers are so apathetic. They accept all these marvels as natural, they mock the idea of heroism.”

“Heroes!” the merchant snorted. “Not them!” He gazed challengingly around the luxe cabin, eliciting a few polite nods. Suddenly a cocoon swivelled around to face him, revealing an Earth-typer in Pathman grey.

“Heroism,” said the Pathman softly, eyeing the merchant from under shadowed brows. “Heroism is essentially a spatial concept. No more free space, no more heroes.” He turned away as if regretting having spoken, like a man trying to sustain some personal pain.

“Ooh, what about Ser Orpheian?” asked a bright young reproducer. “Crossing the Arm alone in a single pod. I think that’s heroic!” It giggled flirtatiously.

“Not really,” drawled a cultivated Galfad voice. The lutroid who had been using the reference station removed his input leads and smiled distantly at the reproducer. “Such exploits are merely an expiring gasp, a gleaning after the harvest if you will. Was Orpheian launching into the unknown? Not so. He faced merely the problem of whether he himself could do it. Playing at frontiers. No,” the lutroid’s voice took on a practiced Recorder’s clarity. “The primitive phase is finished. The true frontier is within now. Inner space.” He adjusted his academic fourragere.

The merchant had returned to his scanner.

“Now here’s a nice little offering,” he grunted. “Ringsun for sale, Eridani sector. That sector’s long overdue for development, somebody’ll make a sweet thing. If some of these young malcontents would just blow out their gills and pitch in!—” He thumped his aquaminor on the snout, causing it to mew piteously.

“But that’s too much like work,” echoed his talker soothingly.

The Pathman had been watching in haggard silence. Now he leaned over to the lutroid.

“Your remark about inner space. I take it you mean psychics? Purely subjective explorations?”

“Not at all,” said the lutroid, gratified. “The psychic cults I regard as mere sensationalism. I refer to reality, to that simpler and deeper reality that lies beyond the reach of the trivial methodologies of science, the reality which we can only approach through what is called aesthetic or religious experience, god-immanent if you will—”

“I’d like to see art or religion get you to Orion,” remarked a grizzed spacedog in the next cocoon. “If it wasn’t for science you wouldn’t be end-running the parsecs in an aleph Jumpship.”

“Perhaps we end-run too much,” the lutroid smiled. “Perhaps our technological capabilities are end-running, as you call it, our—”

“What about the Arm wars?” cried the young reproducer. “Ooh, science is horrible. I cry every time I think of the poor Armers.” Its large eyes steamed and it hugged itself seductively.

“Well, now, you can’t blame science for what some power-hounds do with it,” the spacedog chuckled, hitching his cocoon over toward the reproducer’s stay.

“That’s right,” said another voice, and the conversation group drifted away.

The Pathman’s haunted eyes were still on the lutroid.

“If you are so certain of this deeper reality, this inner space,” he said quietly, “why is your left hand almost without nails?”

The lutroid’s left hand clenched and then uncurled slowly to reveal the gnawed nails; he was not undisciplined.

“I recognise the right of your order to unduly personal speech,” he said stiffly. Then he sighed and smiled. “Ah, of course; I admit I am not immune to the universal angst, the failure of nerve. The haunting fear of stagnation and decline, now that life has reached to the limits of this galaxy. But I regard this as a challenge to transcendence, which we must, we will meet, through our inner resources. We will find our true frontier.” He nodded. “Life has never failed the ultimate challenge.”

“Life has never before met the ultimate challenge,” the Pathman rejoined somberly. “In the history of every race, society, planet or system or federation or swarm, whenever they had expanded to their spatial limits they commenced to decline. First stasis, then increasing entropy, degradation of structure, disorganisation, death. In every case, the process was only halted by breaking out into new space, or by new peoples breaking in on them from outside. Crude, simple outer space. Inner space? Consider the Vegans—”

“Exactly!” interrupted the lutroid. “That refutes you. The Vegans were approaching the most fruitful concepts of transphysical reality, concepts we must certainly reopen. If only the Myrmidi invasion had not destroyed so much.”

“It is not generally known,” the Pathman’s voice was very low, “when the Myrmidi landed the Vegans were eating their own larvae and using the sacred dream-fabrics for ornaments. Very few could even sing.”

“No!”

“By the Path.”

The lutroid’s nictating membranes filmed his eyes. After a moment he said formally, “You carry despair as your gift.”

The Pathman was whispering as if to himself. “Who will come to open our skies? For the first time all life is closed in a finite space. Who can rescue a galaxy? The Clouds are barren and the realms beyond we know cannot be crossed even by matter, let alone life. For the first time we have truly reached the end.”

“But the young,” said the lutroid in quiet anguish.

“The young sense this. They seek to invent pseudo-frontiers, subjective escapes. Perhaps your inner space can beguile some for a while. But the despair will grow. Life is not mocked. We have come to the end of infinity, the end of hope.”

The lutroid stared into the Pathman’s hooded eyes, his hand involuntarily raising his academic surplice like a shield.

“You believe that there is nothing, no way?”

“Ahead lies only the irreversible long decline. For the first time we know there is nothing beyond ourselves.”

After a moment the lutroid’s gaze dropped and the two beings let silence enshroud them. Outside the Galaxy was twisting by unseen, enormous, glittering: a finite prison. No way out.

In the aisle behind them something moved.

The child Rovy was creeping stealthily toward the screens that looked on no-space, his eyes intent and bright.

Administrivia:

From: 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories (Robert Weinberg, Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, Martin H. Greenberg, editors)

Scanned/Proofed: MNQ

Version: 1.0

Table of Contents

Start