ONE OF HER PATHS


IAN WATSON


IN APRIL 2120 THE test ship ProbeleftEarthorbit,poweredbytheannihilationofmatterandantimatter.Sincethediscoveryadecadepreviouslyofatinyanti-ironasteroidanditssuccessfulharvestingemployingelegantcontainmenttechniques,newsuperthrustengineshadempoweredshipstoboosttotheorbitofSaturnwithineightweeks,asituationwhichtheavailablesupplyofantimatterwouldpermitforanotherthirtyyears.
ButProbewasnottestingantimatterpropulsion. Probewastotestthe Q-drivewhichtheoreticallyshouldadvanceashiptothenearerstarsthroughprobability-space,theunderlyingconditionofreality,withinseveralmonthsinsteadofdecades . Probe’sdestination:TauCeti,twelvelightyearsaway.

ByJune2120ProbewassufficientlyfaroutofthegravitywelloftheSunforthe Q-drivetoswitchon,and,asplannedandhopedfor,thetestshipvanished—toreappearinthesolarsystemalittleoversixmonthslater,inwardbound.

WhenProbewasrecovered,thedozenratsonboardwerestillalive,haleandhearty,andofthesixlittlemonkeys,fivesurvivedindecentshape.Thesixthwasavictimofitsfoodsupplyjamming.Alltheanimalshadbeencagedseparately,thoughspaciously,suppliedwithex­erciseequipmentandtoys.Time-lapsecamerasrecordednothinguntowardduringthejourneythrough Q-spacetotheoutskirtsofTauCetiandback.

WhileProbehadlingeredonthoseoutskirts,ithadestablishedthat,oftheplanetsofTauCetialreadydetectedfromthesolarsystem,thesecondpossessedapromisingbiosphere:anoxygen-nitrogenatmosphere,oceans,weathersystemsoverthescatteredlandmasses.Evenifonlysimplecellslivedonthatworld,theyhadbeenbeaveringawayforalongtimetogoodpurpose.

In2123constructionofEarth’sfirstcrewedstarship,Pioneer,began.Fouryearslaterthelargeshipwasready.. . .



Long before Doctor Mary Nolan entersPioneer itself, she is thoroughly familiar with the spacious interior from virtual reality training. The Q-drive pod jutting ahead like a long battering ram tipped with a samovar, then the antimatter containers amidships that feed the en­gines at the stern, together form a long central spindle around which the great doughnut of living quarters rotates quickly enough to provide imitation gravity at half a gee. The doughnut houses a hundred cabins, one for each crew member.
Bed-couches are big enough that the dozen couples who are already married or partnered can bunk with one another, though who knows what may happen during the course of such an expedition? The potential for privacy is important. On top of her medical qualifications Mary’s second string is psychiatry. Aside from the months necessary to progress beyond Saturn, and the six-month trip through Q-space, plus at least a year spent in the Tau Ceti system, colonization is possible (three shuttles are strapped to the spindle), so the ship is provisioned for a generous four years, not to mention the food that will be grown on board hydroponically.

After the obligatory pre-departure fortnight spent in quarantine—ten persons per isolation unit—the interior ofPioneer strikes Mary as particularly spacious. (After another year or so, will it still seem so roomy?) At half a gee her tread is buoyant—yet deliberate and cautious, as is the pace of other colleagues newly aboard.

“Hi, Gisela!” It’s dark-haired athletic Dr. Gisela Frick, who is qualified in microbiology and biochemistry as well as medicine and physiotherapy. Mary did not share quarantine with Gisela, nor with the expedition surgeon Dr. Yukio Yamamoto, nor with dentist and geologist Howard Coover. A surprise infection must not catch the prime medical team all together. Back-up personnel were in separate quarantine units as a precaution—a whole duplicate crew had trained.

“How does it feel to you, Gisela?”

“To be really aboard at last? Great! Ah, do you mean the motion. . .? It’s okay.” Gisela swings her head skittishly. “Oops.”

The floor consists of flat sections each a couple of meters long, gently tilting with respect to one another. Curved flooring would have presented an engineering problem as regards the furnishing of cabins and the mounting of lab equipment and in many other respects, but the sense of down-orientation shifts subtly as a person walks. What’s more, there are the effects of Coriolis force. Hurrying, or abrupt changes of direction, could disorient and nauseate.

“The anti-nausea pills seem to be effective,” says Gi­sela. Of course without the centripetal semblance of gravity the rate of boneloss would be unacceptable. “I wonder whether there could be long-term problems with tendonitis? Might we end up like birds gripping imagi­nary branches?”

This is not something that the virtual reality tours were able to simulate. At the moment the difference from true semi-gravity is trivial. Can it lead to physical impairment in the long run? Not that anyone will tryrunning around the main corridors, but only jogging on stationary treadmills.

Greeting colleagues after a fortnight’s separation from them, and nodding to fellow quarantinees, Mary and Gisela head for their clinic, not to inventory it, but more to check that it corresponds exactly with virtuality.



Which it does. As do the two gyms and the science labs and the restaurant (for the sociable) and the recreation hall and the hydroponics-cum-botany garden. . . . Yes, the ship is surely big enough for a hundred people to share and work together harmoniously for ages. Failing harmony and happiness, there is always recourse to one’s private cabin with computer access to a treasury of literature, music, games, and virtual experiences from skiing to scuba-diving, all the way through the alphabet of possibilities and back again.


People, people—under the command of Commander Sherwin Peterson. Mary knows those with whom she was in quarantine quite intimately by now, many others rather well to varying degrees, and none of the others are exactly strangers; besides which, she can screen all available data about them. No excuse, after the first few days of waiting in Earth orbit, for not matching names to faces instantly.
The official language ofPioneer is English, but she hears occasional German and French and Japanese too. The four co-operating powers behind the expedition are America, the Euro-Union, Australia, and Japan. If a foothold can be established on Tau Ceti 2, the Chinese plan their own independent ship. No one can argue with that.

Here’s John Dolby, the climatologist, John James Pine, geologist and one of the three shuttle pilots, Eric Festa, nutrition, botany, and hydroponics, Denise Dubois, astrophysics, Carmen Santos, engineering, Chikahiro Suzuki, computer systems, navigator Nellie van Torn. . . .



Two months later,Pioneer has passed the realm of Saturn (although its be-ringed monarch is far away) and no failures have occurred, neither of machine nor man, nor woman, aside from various minor ailments, swiftly diagnosed and cured. Mary and her two medical colleagues monitor everyone’s health, making sure that sodium and iron levels do not rise. In liaison with Eric Festa they supply mineral supplements where required. An Australian pair of partners, Sandy Tate and Jeff Lee, oceanography and life science respectively, are pregnant—or rather, Sandy herself is. She must have conceived before entering quarantine, either acciden­tally or irresponsibly. Their child will be born toward the end of the six-month transit through Q-space, a first for the human race. Mary will keep a careful eye on Sandy. By now almost everyone is on first name terms. Pilot Pine is Jay-Jay; Dr. Suzuki is Chika. The ship is a family. How appropriate that a family should have a baby. A few other pairings are occurring, Jay-Jay and Denise, for instance. Mary is feeling a growing fondness and shoots of desire for Eric Festa, who reciprocates her feelings. Eric, from Dortmund, is a nourishing person to know. The two often sit in the botany section and talk amidst the orchids—for beauty—and tomatoes and carrots and soy beans for a nutritious diet.
On the evening, ship-time, preceding Q-day there’s a feast in the restaurant from the ample store of varied vacuum-packed reduced sodium and iron gourmet meals.

“Compliments to the chef!” someone calls out.

“Chef’s back on Earth!” dietitian Eric declares, prompting laughter and applause. Spirits are high.

Afterward, Com Sherwin reminds everyone of pro­cedures. When the time comes to switch on the Q-drive, all personnel other than those on the bridge must be in their cabins tethered to their bed-couches.Probe encountered no visible problems when entering Q-space. Nevertheless, err on the safe side. Transient side effects that rats and monkeys could not report might affect hu­man beings. Psychological or perceptual glitches, akin to the mild imbalance caused by Coriolis force.



Com Sherwin has an Air Force background, back in his younger days where backgrounds should be, his route from daring test pilot to astronaut training. He piloted the first hazardous antimatter-asteroid reconnaissance. Later, famously, he had risked his life takingTheDart on a flythrough the clouds of Jupiter, en route ramming a gas-whale and carrying it back into space with him spitted onTheDart , indeed draped aroundTheDart , its collapsed quick-frozen carcass almost enfolding his ship, a gift to science although a cause of some contro­versy. Of the numerous probes that had dropped into Jupiter only two had ever spotted gas-whales.
Interviewed onSystemwide: “Aren’t the gas-whales very rare?”

Peterson: “Not in that huge volume of atmosphere. Not necessarily.”

“Weren’t you risking your ship and your life on a sudden impulse?”

Peterson: “I had several seconds to think. I reckoned I had a good chance.”

“Apparently your pulse rate didn’t even rise.”

Peterson had merely grinned, engagingly.

“So what’s your favorite book then,Moby-Dick ?”

“No, actually it’s Linda Bernstein’sBeYourOwnLeaderatPeacewithYourself . I read a page a night.”

Peterson was solid. Capable of split-second decisive­ness, yet possessing a balanced serenity, and also a folksy touch if need be.



Mary is lying abed dressed in mission multipocket-wear, green for medic, in the cabin that by now seems as familiar and homelike as her girlhood room in Michigan, listening to the calm tones of Com Sherwin from her comp speakers as Sherwin talks through the Q-sequence, only partly understood by her. She remembers doing her best to understand a lecture at Mission Control, given as part of the year-long training schedule.


“Fundamentally,” a dapper, bearded Physics Professor had said, “the Q-drive functions as a quantum computer that is given the problem of translating a ship from Sun-space to Tau Ceti space. Your actual ship’s computer for everyday use is a super-duper Turing-type machine. When you access your ship’s computer, it may sound to you like an artificial intelligence—the software’s designed to be user-friendly—but we’re still twenty years away from genuine AI.
“Aw, sixty years ago people were saying the same, and AI hasn’t happened yet, so I ain’t making any prophecies.

“Anyway, if you set a Turing machine a really big task—for example, tell it to factorize a 500-digit num­ber—it’ll tackle solutions one after another, and that will takeages , even if the machine is really fast. In a quan­tum computer, on the other hand, all the possible an­swers are superposed. Superimposed simultaneously, as it were. Bingo, the wrong answers cancel each other out, and you get the right one.Not that this happens instan­taneously—it still takes time. In the case of determining a route to Tau Ceti all routes are considered including going via Sirius or Andromeda or even by way of a quasar at the far side of the universe. Quantum theory sums over all paths between two points, as we say, and that means all possible paths.”

“Does this mean,” someone asked, “that we might end up in another galaxy?”

“No no,Probe proved that won’t happen. The nonsense routes cancel out. Now a quantum device such as the drive is very specialized and needs to be kept as isolated as possible. It’s entangled with the ship, but reg­ular computing on board still has to be done by your Turing machine.”

Some wit had stuck up his hand. “I’d say that the Q-drive is the real touring machine!”

“Very droll. I was referring to computer pioneer Alan Turing, who unbelievably was hounded to suicide because he was differently sexed.” Evidently a cause of anguish and anger to this lecturer.



Sum over paths, Mary muses.
Some Over-Paths. Ways of jumping from here to there. Or perhaps of burrowing.

Samovar Paths, in view of the shape of the Q-drive unit. . . .

Summer Paths, the bright way to the stars. However, the appearance of Q-space as recorded byProbe ’s cameras was an ocean of gray frogspawn. . . .

* * *

“Initiating primary power uptake. . . .We have four green balls. . . . Sixty seconds to Q-insertion. . . .”
“Thirty seconds. . . .”

“Fifteen. . . .”

The seconds pass. The cabin quivers and shimmers and is the same again. Same photos of family and friends and scenery sticky-tacked to the walls. Same dream-catcher mobile of feathers and knots. Same everything.

Except for the silence, silence apart from the softest hum from the speakers.

Has communication failed? In Q-space can no one hear you make announcements over electronic equip­ment?

“Uh, testing?” she queries the silence, and she hears her own voice clearly enough.

Mary untethers and sits up, goes to her door, slides it open. The corridor is empty; other cabin doors remain closed. Evidently she’s the first to emerge. Gisela’s cabin is only three doors down.

Mary knocks, then slides the door open.

Gisela’s cabin is empty apart from her personal possessions.



Likewise Carmen’s cabin, likewise Denise’s. . . .
All the cabins Mary tries are empty. It seems impossible that everyone can have untethered before her and gone to the bridge to look at the viewscreens,impossible . But what else could they have done? Mary must have suffered a lapse of consciousness, a gap in awareness.

To the bridge, then! Though without running or rush­ing.

The bridge is deserted, instruments and controls un­tended. Lights glow on boards, equipment purrs. On the viewscreens is the mottled gray of Q-space. No stars, just endless dimensionless frogspawn. Exactly as expected.

“Where’severyone?Willsomebodyanswerme!”

No answer comes.

Has everyone hidden in the rec room or in the hydroponics section to play a joke on her. . .? She’ll go to the rec room and ninety-nine voices will chorus,Boo . Oh really, at this momentous moment, the first entry of the first crewed ship into Q-space? And why pick onher ?

Nevertheless, she does go to the rec room, which is deserted, then to the empty restaurant, then to the bot­any area where only plants are to be seen.

A type of hysterical blindness and deafness is afflicting her—people are here yet she is failing to hear and see them.

This has to be nonsense.

“Gisela!Eric!Yukio!ComSherwin!Whereareyou?”

They are gone, all gone. She is alone onPioneer .



The reason for this mass disappearance must be something to do with the nature of Q-space—an effect of the Q-drive as regards conscious intelligences such as human beings. So Mary reasons.
Why didProbe ’s cameras not show monkeys and rats as missing? Ah, but the test animals were all caged separately from one another. Conceivably they did notexperience the presence of their fellows in the other cages. But they could not report their experience, or lack of it.

Can it be that each conscious observer on board thePioneer has given rise to a copy of the ship, each of which contains only one person? Right now one hun­dred copies of thePioneer are heading through Q-space toward Tau Ceti. When all of these arrive and switch off their drives, will all the copies reintegrate and become once more one single ship with a hundred people aboard it?

Collapseofthewavefunction. . . that’s the phrase, isn’t it? Something to do with multiple probabilities becoming one concrete reality, as Mary recalls. Surely that stuff happens at the subatomic level, not to an entire ship massing thousands of tonnes.

Still, it’s a lifeline to cling to: in six months time everyone will come together.

During so many months the hundred ships can hard­ly remain identical. Mary will consume certain supplies; absent colleagues will account for different supplies. She remembers the ripple that occurred as she entered Q-space. On emergence, will the merging ships adjust so that there are no discrepancies?

What if two people happen to be in exactly the same place? Is one of them displaced? Does that happen gen­tly or violently?

The more she thinks about it, the more iffy the idea of reintegration becomes.



The deserted ship subtly menacing. Random noises might be phantom footfalls. A reflection or trick of light and shadow could be a glimpse of someone moving out of sight. Her vanished colleagues may, in their own copies of the ship, be experiencing minor psychotic episodes or hallucinations.
Suppose someone monkeys with the controls. Suppose that a copyship re-enters normal space prema­turely, or is disabled. Reintegration might never be able to occur.Pioneer might fly onward forever.

She mustn’t let this notion obsess her. She has hun­dreds of years’ worth of food and drink if consumed by one person alone. She shan’t starve!

If each ship is similarly stocked this seems a bit like the miracle of the loaves and fishes. How can reality multiply in such a way? Maybe Mary’s is the only ship. Maybe only one conscious observer could remain in ex­istence. By sheer chance this happened to be her.

No, no, remember all the rats. And all but one of the monkeys.

* * *

“Talking to yourself, are you, Mary?”
“Nothing wrong with that. People do talk to themselves. That’s how we monitor what’s going on. Helps us plan what to do next. Evolution didn’t give us fast random-access memories—so we tell ourselves a story, the story of our self. That’s how we remember things. It reinforces short-term memory.”

“Adults generally talk to themselves silently, not aloud.”

“Well, there’s no one around to take offense. There’s just me.”

“Just you, eh? After a while, if you talk aloud to yourself, it’s as if there are two of you—the talker, and the person you talk to.You can become the audience, hearing words which simply seem to emerge. In that case who is doing the talking? Listen: when we all come to­gether again maybe we might re-enter any of a hundred different universes.”

“Surely a star very like Tau Ceti has to be in the same location, otherwise how could we emerge from Q-space?”

“Ah, but maybe we would pick up no ten-year-old radio signals from the solar system, supposing we had a powerful enough receiver. In that other universe the human race may never have evolved.Pioneer may be the only abode of life. Tau Ceti 2 may not be habitable.”

“Thanks a bundle.”

“Look, why don’t you talk to thecomputer more?”

“Because the computer only simulates having a mind of its own. That’s why it has no name. A woman’s voice, yes, and a woman’s avatar-face if we want one, but no name so we won’t be fooled. A psychiatrist seeking aid and counsel from a program is absurd. However sophisticated the program is, it cannotknow . It merely listens and responds as appropriately as possible. After a while, that’s maddening. Ask it how to repair a solar power plant or remind you how to fix a ruptured spleen, fine and good. It goes through its repertoire. If we did have true artificial intelligence, I dunno, maybe there would be some magic quantum link between the AIs in all the ships and we could all communicate. But we don’t, and there isn’t.”

Of course she already asked Computer what is hap­pening.Pioneer is transiting through Q-space, Mary. Do you want a full status report? No, just where is everybody else? Where is the Commander? I don’t know, Mary. She may as well ask herself. She doesn’t wish to confuse Computer. Just take us to where we’re going and carry on with the housekeeping.

Playing her favorite arias by Puccini throughout the ship turns out to be a bad idea. The music seems to mask rustlings and whispers.



When Mary was sixteen she thought she saw an angel. Most likely she was dazzled by sunlight while hiking through woodland. A tiny lake was a silver mirror, and bushes were covered and linked by innumerable be­dewed spiders’ webs. She saw a being with wings, spar­kling bright. Of a sudden bird-song seemed to combine in a single rhapsody of musical counterpoint the mean­ing of which only just eluded her. She felt called. A few centuries earlier she might have become a nun. In the event she specialized in psychiatry after earning her medical qualifications.
Her parents were both practicing Catholics, who con­fessed and went to mass regularly. They always denied themselves some treat during Lent—generally, in her Dad’s case, drinking with the fellows on a Saturday night. None of the fellows were Catholics, nor was the town a Catholic one—her Mom and Dad needed to drive twenty miles to attend mass—so Dad had adopted a jokey, ironic front for his faith. “Next year I might give up fast food for Lent.” “Oh we don’t need to worry about what to believe—we’retold what to think.” He did good works, quietly, simple kindnesses to neighbors and col­leagues. Mary had already begun lapsing into agnosti­cism by the age of fourteen, and she encountered no pressure or reproach from her parents, but where it came to good works, Dad was a beacon to her.



Without the medical attention provided by herself or Gi­sela or Yukio or Howard, what if others fall ill during the next six months? No longer quite six months—by now a week of that stretch has passed. Just one damn week!
Personally she’s rather more bothered right now about the hydroponics. Fluids and nutrition are automated, but the care of carrots and tomatoes and bean sprouts is not her field at all.

WhataboutSandy’spregnancy?Sandy is on her own, expecting a child, and knowing now that she will have to give birth to it unassisted. What if Sandy de­velops toxemia? How will she control that? What if she suffers a difficult delivery? What if shecannot deliver until reintegration?

How can Sandy bealone if a fetus is growing inside her, four months old by now? Did the separation-event treat her and her child as one unit—or did the event rip the fetus untimely from its mother’s womb, aborting it into yet another copy of the ship, perishing on Sandy’s bedcouch? This is too awful to contemplate.



Something else is aboard with Mary. Something quite unlike an angel, and besides she doesn’t believe in those.
“Whatareyou?”she cries.“Whereareyou?”

Armed with a kitchen knife, she ranges around the great doughnut, searching and finding nothing. It’s as though she, the reluctant would-be observer of the Enigma, is always where there’s a low probability of finding whatever it is. Where it is, she is not. She can sense a sort of semi-absent presence, never enough for actuality.

Isn’t there something called an exclusion principle?

“Maybe you should put yourself on tranquilizers.”

“No, you must stay alert!”

Maybe she arouses the curiosity of whatever it is yet it wants to avoid harming her. Alternatively, it finds her daunting and, although in a sense summoned by her, it keeps out of her way, sniffing and tasting where she has been.



“All right, you’ve been alone for a fortnight now. Twenty-two more weeks to go. People have spent far longer periods on their own without all the amenitiesyou enjoy!”
Movies, if desired. The hustle and bustle of actors. Any number of computer games. Virtual reality sight-seeing, VR adventures. Whatever, whatever.

She tried to watchTheSoundofMusic as a safe choice in the rec room, but she couldn’t concentrate. She dares not enter a virtual reality—the Enigma might creep up on her while she is immersed.

“All those people who spent time alone: they still knew that other people existed in the same world as them. I know the contrary!”

“Mary, Mary, how contrary, how does your garden grow?”

“So many bean sprouts already! Do I harvest them? I hate bean sprouts. Give me the deluxe meals any day.” More than enough of those to make every day a special occasion. “Why shouldn’t I hog on those?”

“Why not cook something special for yourself?” The frozen food store contains a wealth of raw ingredients in case the vacuum-packed foods somehow fail, or pall.

“Since when was I a chef? It’s stupid cooking for one.”

“Cook for me too.”



“This sensation of something unseen sharing the ship with me—I can’t tolerate it for months on end!”
“Even if the sensation may be preferable to total isolation?”

“Showyourselftome!In a mirror, if you can’t manage anything more substantial.”

And there the Enigma is, in her cabin’s mirror.

But it is herself that she sees.

Maybe the Enigma is floating directly behind her back, tucked out of sight. Abruptly she shifts aside. Oops, a little surge of nausea. Oh the Enigma is too quick for her by far.

She cannot catch it full-frontally. She must seek it by indirect means. Mary must practice a sort of Zen art of not-looking, not-seeing.



As a psychiatrist Mary understands the principles of meditation and she has even practiced a bit in the past. The silent, empty ship is an ideal focus of vacancy. Session by session—interspersed by more mundane tasks—she blanks her personality. After each session she surfaces to rediscover herself, the only con­sciousness hereabouts, a mind amidst a void.
Is there a risk that she may remain in tune with the void until her motionless body starves to death? Grum­bling guts recall her to activity—so far, at least.

After many days of annulling herself. . . .



A perception emerges from the medium through which thePioneer travels.
<<You believe that your identity is confined here in this ship.>>

Well yes, she does.

<<Fundamental being is forever transforming itself. Think of bubbles in boiling water. Think of flames in a fire. Think of weather cells in an atmosphere. Being is the process, not the particulars. Its facets constantly manifest themselves only to disintegrate and then reintegrate.> >

Such is the perception that scrutinizes her.

<<You are a bubble of mind, a tongue of living flame, which might last for a hundred orbits of your world around your sun, a mere moment of cosmic time. But you are also one facet of a hundred-fold being, the crew of this ship. This hundred-fold being has separated itself from a many-billion-fold being—which you call Humanity.>>

A many-billion-fold being?

<<Humanity from the dawn of consciousness until final demise exists as a four-dimensional blaze of mem­bers arising and dying and replacing themselves, all linked, ever loosening, ever relinking, within which flickers your own particular flame.>>

Why is she being told this? Does it help, or is some godlike entity inspecting her coolly? Alternatively, is she hallucinating?

<<Realize! From birth to death an intelligent plan­etary species is a single mental entity, its mentality made of all the minds that compose it. Individual units of Hu­manity process tiny parts of its totality. Each individual is part of an eon-spanning exchange of information—unaware of this except in rare moments of insight. Or outsight. Beatific moments, poetic moments, shamanis­tic, hallucinatory. You often misinterpret such partial, fleeting glimpses as encounters with Gods or spirits or ghosts or fairies or, more recently, encounters with fly­ing saucer folk.>>

“Tell me more.”

<<During the millions of years of its existence the species-entity may remain alone. Such beings are few and far between in space and time during any mega-era. Even so, their number is considerable overall, for the present universe was spawned from a parent uni­verse, and in turn gives rise to daughter universes, a great tree of universes.>>

This is big stuff. Is she capable of imagining all this on her own? Quite possibly. Why should a godlike entity bother to communicate with her?

Ah, but an answer comes.

<<Some planetary species send parts of themselves through space on a journey lasting generations to the worlds of other stars, creating an offspring of themselves. Some of these offspring encounter an alien spe­cies and the two beings either destroy or corrupt one another or else become a hybrid. A very few planetary species send the exiled part of themselves not through ordinary space but through the underlying space of probabilities—and here they encounter its entities, as you do now.

<<Your ship is not yet far from its home. You are still entangled. The entity, Humanity, can now be rec­ognized and addressed. And if addressednow , Humanity as a whole is also addressed in the past and in the future.

<<Was,is,andwillbe.> >



Mary has had a vision. What is she to make of it?
Is she and is everyone else who ever lived, or who will live, only so many iotas in a single entity spanning millions of years? By traveling through Q-space, has she encountered a higher entity—and caused Humanity to be contacted in the past and the present and the future? On this, um, higher level of metaconsciousness, to which individual persons only ever have fleeting and partial access at best?

IfPioneer had never been built, nor some similar Q-space ship in the future, humanity would probably have remained isolated and uncontacted. Yet because contact occurs now, contact also applies retroactively. Total-Humanity may understand this paradox, but it fazes Mary. No individual human being has ever or will ever be aware of more than a jot of the communication between Pan-Humanity and the Probability Entities. This will elude mere people, much as the betting on a tortoise race eludes the tortoises. Or perhaps that should be: a race between fireflies.

Mary feels she is like a single brain-cell present dur­ing a few moments of a symphony.



If the hundred copies of thePioneer do reintegrate successfully in another five months’ time, and if she an­nounces her revelation, will psychiatrist Mary be for the funny farm?
The air in her cabin smells musty. Surfaces look dusty.

Quite nimbly, in the circumstances, she rises from her lotus position. With a fingertip she traces a line across her com-console.

God almighty, thedatedisplay . . . .

The date, the date.

Q + 178.

Q +178 .

A hundred and seventy-eight days, very nearly six months, have passed since thePioneer entered Q-space and she found herself isolated. Mary has been advanced through time itself. She has been extracted and rein­serted later, abridging her lonely journey from months to days.

“Oh thank you!” she cries into the silence. “Thank you so very much!”

Yet now there’s no sense of Another on the ship with her.

Full of wonder and gratitude, she sets off to check on hydroponics. What a riot of life and death she finds there—rot and fecundity, the air so heady and reeking. Is it possible that Gisela and Eric and all of her col­leagues may also have been advanced through time?

Including Sandy, no longer condemned to give birth all alone?



Mary muses, in the dispensary. If the hundredPilgrims do reintegrate successfully, and if her ninety-nine col­leagues havenot been blessed as she has been, what may the medical team need to provide quickly in the way of sedatives or stimulants or vitamin supplements?
Of a sudden the warning siren blares automatically,whoop-whoop-whoop , such a shocking hullabaloo that her heart races.

Thank god for it, though, thank god. She has fifteen minutes to return to her cabin and tether herself. Should she bother to do so, or simply stay here? If Gisela or Yukio are in this dispensary she might bump into them, disastrously. Her cabin is safer.



The cabin writhes, as before. Every surface shimmers. It’s as if her eyes are watering. Then all is clear and sharp again, herphotos, her mobile, her terminal.
Com Sherwin’s voice comes briskly. “All hear me. Re-emergence from Q-space achieved.Pioneer has acquired Tau Ceti space.”

Acquired, acquired!Pioneer has acquired a whole new solar system. And rejoice, Mary has regained her fellow human beings!

“Tau Ceti 2 is visible at 9.8 A.U.”

Have her fellows arrived here with a skip and a jump, or the slow way?

“Fellow pioneers, we were all separated—for which there may be various explanations.”

Yes? Yes?

“I hope we are all together again. I see that the main bridge team is with me, at least. All non-flight personnel proceed to the restaurant right away for rollcall. Dr. Su­zuki is to be in charge of rollcall. Back-up is Major Pine. Second backup is Dr. Santos. Preliminary debrief to fol­low later. Do not close your cabin doors after you leave. Medical team, check all cabins.”

Good thinking. If Chika is not available, Jay-Jay will tally numbers. And if Jay-Jay is not present, Carmen will coordinate. Some people may not be able to leave their cabins. How long has Com Sherwin had to think about contingencies?

“Proceed. Bridge out.” He has not said whether he himself spent months in Q-space—or only a single month followed by a couple of days.

People emerging into the corridor. Heartfelt greet­ings. Some tears of relief.

“Denise,”Mary calls out,“howlongwereyouinQ-space?”

They embrace. “Oh Mary, it felt like forever! Six long months.”

“Were you alone all that time?”

“Entirely.”

“You, Carmen, how long?”

“Six shitting months. I must get to the restaurant, Mary.”

“Of course.”

Babble, babble as people proceed as instructed. Eric’s cabin is further away around the doughnut out of sight. Be methodical: check inside each cabin even if a door is wide open. There’s Gisela in the distance, opening a door and popping inside. Despite instructions a few peo­ple may have shut their doors unthinkingly behind them. Here’s a door that is closed, belonging to:SandyTate . Sandy, Sandy! Mary knocks, calls her name.

Freckled, ginger-haired Sandy is sitting on her bed-couch, a swaddled baby held in her arms. She hugs it to herself protectively. Protectively?—no, it looks more as if Sandy isrestraining her baby—and it barely a week or two old.

“Mary, thank god, I’m going crazy—”

“You did give birth! All on your own—that must have been utterly grueling and scary. But you did okay?”

“I managed—I read up all I could beforehand.”

“Well done, Sandy! I’ll examine you and your baby as soon as—”

“Mary, this baby is trying to talk to me!”

“To talk?”

“I don’t understand him, but he’s trying to.”

Is Sandy suffering, understandably, from delusions?

“He can’t talk, Sandy. A baby’s brain isn’t fully grown. Learning to speak simply can’t clock in so soon, and would be totally pointless because it’s physically impossible for a baby to vocalize. You see, its larynx is in the wrong position. For the first nine months the lar­ynx is high up, locked into the nose, so that a baby can drink and breathe at the same time without choking.”

“I’m telling you he’strying! I didn’t say he canmanage it.”

The months of loneliness, the fear and worry, the need for another person to communicate with. . . .

“Sandy, you’re misinterpreting the noises he makes.”

“I amnot misinterpreting.”

“Let me see him, Sandy.”

As Mary sits on the bed-couch beside her, Sandy flinches. Then she reveals her child, a bundle of feeble struggle which, at presumably blurred sight of a person new to its world, produces sounds that are indeed unlike any regular infantile crying or red-faced bawling. It’s as if a strangled voice, using an unknown language, is heard through distorting filters and muffles.

“Sandy, I should tell you something—” How can Mary take time out just now to tell about her own relevation, and her translation through time? “He does sound different, Sandy, I agree! At a quick glance there doesn’t seem to be anything physically wrong with ei­ther of you. . . .Do you think you can get to the restaurant?”

“I’m his restaurant,” she says. “If he had teeth, he’d bite.”

The baby certainly does seem assertive.

“What have you called him?” Mary asks gently.

“He calls me—but I don’t know what he wants to say.”

“You must have thought of a name beforehand. Boy or girl, whichever.”

“James.”

“Hi, James.”

Those strange noises, as if in reply.

“How about bringing him to the restaurant? I think that’s important. Important, yes. And you need to mingle again.”

“Where’s Jeff? Why isn’t he here? That’s why I waited. Is he dead?”

“You heard Com Sherwin’s instructions. Jeff will be waiting for you at the restaurant.”

“Why didn’t he come here so we could both go to­gether?”

“Maybe he expected to find you at the restaurant. Come on, Sandy, chin up.”

“I can’t take my baby there—he’s a monster.”

Post-natal depression? Not necessarily.

“If James seems a bit odd, Sandy, I might—just might—know the reason, but I need to explain to all the others too. You’ve coped splendidly so far. Come on, it’s okay.”



All is not quite okay. An American physicist, Greg Fox, is dead. Appendicitis, says Gisela. Must have been agonizing. Did Greg manage to lay his hands on morphine, maybe an overdose? Post-mortem will tell. He has been dead a couple of months. Unpleas­ant corpse to find. And one of the Japanese is deeply disturbed, mumbling in his native language, English now eluding him. How shall Mary cope with him? With appropriate drugs and with Yukio’s help as translator, she hopes.
The assembled crowd, not least Jeff, are delighted to see a baby born on board. People mob Sandy, causing her to hide James from curious eyes. Jeff definitely ought to have gone to her cabin first. Now Sandy seems ambivalent toward him. She feels betrayed by him—which he cannot understand. Maybe she feels betrayed by what his seed wrought in her.

“Listen up,” Com Sherwin calls out to the assembly. “We came through.” And he has maintained his grizzled crewcut between whiles. “We sustained one fatality. Six months’ surprise solitary was tough on us all, right?”

“Wrong,” Mary interrupts. “Not on me.”

Sherwin grins; his blue eyes twinkle. He’s efferves­cent. “Dr. Nolan, we cannot all be psychiatrists.”

“That is not what I mean. . . .”

When she has finished speaking, her colleagues stare at her in a silence that continues for quite a while.

“And there’s one other thing,” Mary adds, moving closer to Sandy and child. “Sandy believes that her baby is trying to speak already, and I think she may be right. . . .”



Two bombshells, the second less appreciated than the first, at least to begin with. Has Mary flipped? is what people are visibly thinking. Eric eyes her with particular concern.
“Do you have any hard proof of this?” Com Sherwin asks. “Not that I’m doubting what youexperienced . Still, it’s a large claim.”

“I can’t prove it, although it’s true. Little James here may throw some light on this, as time goes by, when his larynx shifts. And maybe not.”

“Mary,whydidn’tyoutellmethisrightaway?”

“Yeah,why not?” Jeff joins in on Sandy’s complaint, to exonerate himself for not thinking to be with her as soon as possible.

“If we could harness this effect—” says someone else. Mary can’t see who.

“I don’t know that it’s something we can harness,” she tells whoever. “It was granted to me.” “Granted” sounds a bit messianic.

“And to no one else,” she hears. “Why not?”

“Maybe it’s because of the way I meditated. I emptied myself. Then it was able to communicate.”

“And to jump you through time.” Resentfully: “Why not us? Didn’t you ask the same on our behalf?”

“I didn’task it to jumpme . I never imagined such a thing was possible.”

What Mary has said is at once overwhelming and embarrassing. She’s distanced from everyone else, as sole recipient of a revelation and a boon.

Although what strange gift might Sandy have re­ceived, in the shape of James?

“I think for the time being we must take what Dr. Nolan says at face value,” Sherwin declares judiciously. Quite! Suspicion of lunacy mustn’t deprive them of a key medical person. “No doubt what Dr. Nolan has told us will fit into context sooner or later. We’ll talk about this at greater length once everything’s less confused. Meanwhile, we should inventory the ship, calculate what we each used and work out how much has come together again—try to get a practical handle on what happened. Something measurable.”

Of those present, it transpires that only Sherwin himself and Chika and John the climatologist thought to log every last item they used by way of food and drink.

“Is that information still in the ship’s memory?” asks Chika.

Indeed, what datais, from a hundred separate journeys, fifty years’ worth of overlapping auto-logs plus whatever data individuals may have entered?



Pioneercontinues inward toward the position which the second planet of Tau Ceti will occupy many weeks hence.
The ship’s log contains backup after backup of status data that seem to vary in only minor respects, occupying megabytes of memory. Computer has no explanation for this massive redundancy. It runs diagnostic checks, and megabytes are dumped into cache. Could Computer be in any way compromised by an encounter with Dr. No­lan’s supposed probability-entity? Apparently not.

Eric works overtime putting the hydroponics area to rights. Naturally his own Q-space version was main­tained in apple pie order. Sad to see it become so cha­otic.

“I should have done more,” Mary says ruefully.

“Then this would have been two percent tended. It wouldn’t have made a great deal of difference.”

“And I didn’t know what to do.”

“Do you think that announcing your experience straight away was the best course?”

“If I waited longer. . .”

“. . . the more difficult it would become?”

“By the way, you guys, I happen to have been con­tacted by a Higher Entity—but I didn’t feel like men­tioning this until now. Also by the way, I traveled through time.”

“You’re probably right. Though now some people are a bit wary of you.”

“Does that include you, Eric?”

“Of course not. This must be such a strain for you.”

“And you are loyal to your friends. Do you truly believe me?”

“That’s an unfair question, Mary. If I had experienced what you experienced—what youundoubtedly experi­enced. . . .”

“There’s no doubt in my mind, but that’s onlymy mind.”

“Is your experience repeatable—I mean, by someone else?”

“We aren’t in Q-space any longer.”

“On the way back if we all meditate the way you did maybe we can all take a short cut. Or many of us can. That would be a blessing.”

“Shall I start up classes in meditation?”

“Ah. . .but we might begin colonizing the second planet, depending on what we find.”

If that happens, eventually only the flight crew will returnPioneer to Earth to bring more material and col­onists and frozen embryos and such. Mary’s experience may be of no use to the majority of those presently on board. It can be set aside for a long time yet, uncon­fronted.

Offers flood in to time-share James, but Sandy will have none of them.



Chika Suzuki gives a lecture on his idea of what may have happened, and how it might be avoided in future if only a starship’s computer itself could be a quantum computer.
Sum over Paths. Some Overpaths.

“I’d say we experienced traveling a hundred possible paths between the solar system and Tau Ceti. A myriad other paths got explored at the same time, but since those were absurd we could not experience them. If only we could experience the sum over paths collectively to­gether, not separately the way it turned out! Yet that might have been an experience the individual human mind couldn’t cope with. All of us experiencing each other’s experience. . . .”



Not everyone wishes to marginalize Mary’s revelation as something at once too huge and too fugitive to contemplate. Dr. Yukio is fascinated. As an insight into a sit­uation where the specialist in afflictions of mind has herself become afflicted? Chika Suzuki is also enthralled. What Mary says about the multi-million-year mind of all Humanity whenever processing information through its myriad units dead and living and yet unborn—this stirs his programmer’s soul, whether he gives her cre­dence or not. Likewise, astrophysicist Denise. And a bi­ologist, Maxim Litvinov. And Sophie Garland, another cybernetics person who is an ordained pastor of the Ec­umenical Church. Last but not least—perhaps last yet least as regards stability—there is Hiroaki Horiuchi, the chemist who flipped during solitude but who is now re­sponding quite well to mental stabilizers and is coherent in English once again.
Eric, alas, remains ambivalent. In a sense he’s a glo­rified gardener who values neatness and order, nature methodized, not rampant across the eons and imbued with some kind of transcendent mentality, at least as regards the human species. Furthermore, Eric is a no-frills evolutionist. For him life has no goal other than life itself in its many forms during all of its eras. Not that Mary claims that Humanity writ large has any par­ticular goal, yet now that the Higher Entity has inter­vened—retrospectively as well as in the now and in the henceforth!—it certainly seems as if some kind of destiny is implied, or at least an upgrade to a higher level of existence or state of awareness.

Mary’s supporters hold study sessions with her, and Hiro’s presence seems therapeutic for him. Exploring Mary’s experience helps Hiro come to terms with his own phantoms and demons—though he might be im­printing on Mary emotionally, as his sensei of sanity, or the opposite.

Three of Mary’s co-explorers are Japanese. Yukio remarks that his own people feel a strong sense of themselves as a unique collective entity, so they can empathize with the concept of Overlife, Pan-being, or whatever.

The interest of these six does indeed support Mary, otherwise she might be as lonely now as she was during those initial weeks of isolation in Q-space—she might be the specter at the feast of renewed companionship. Even so, sometimes she feels like screaming out to the entity that shifted her through time,Comeback!Pleaseshowyourselftomorethanmerelyme!



Meanwhile, Sandy puts a brave face on being mother to a baby who is evidently abnormal, although bursting with health. It’s as though a perfectly normal baby has been overwritten by a program that cannot yet run in him—not until he matures a bit more—yet which nev­ertheless keeps trying to express itself, and testing its environment. . . maybe modifying its environment as it does so, tweaking developmental pathways? Jeff does his best to help nurture their son, frequently taking James off Sandy’s hands—to the botany area and to the rec room. Just as he ought to. Fair dooze, sport. No other couples have yet conceived. Potential parents are await­ing what James may become.


Weeks later,Pioneer enters orbit around Tau Ceti 2, eighty kilometers above what is basi­cally a world-ocean girding half a dozen scat­tered and mottled distorted Australias, all but one of them situated in the temperate zones. The odd one out straddles the north pole and wears an ice cap. River sys­tems are visible, and mountains, one of which is smok­ing vigorously, an eruption in progress. Elsewhere, a typhoon is blowing. The planet seems lively; not overly so, it’s to be hoped. The signatures of vegetation are down below, so at least there is botany. Where there is botany, zoology too? Very likely marine biology at least, but no moon pulls any tides ashore.
After three weeks of intensive global survey work Jay-Jay will pilot Shuttle One,Beauty , down to the land mass already dubbed Pizza, the result of a random com­puter selection from a list of names suggested by all personnel and okayed by Com Sherwin. In time, hopefully, people will be able to feed upon Pizza if its soil proves amenable. Accompanying pilot-geologist Jay-Jay will be Maxim Litvinov, Jeff Lee, and John Dolby, representing life sciences and climate.

To gaze upon an alien world, from the bridge or on-screen, is riveting. Those warped Australias are like pres­ents under the Christmas tree. What exactly is in them? What is the topping on Pizza?



The answer, three weeks later, proves to be weed— thongs, tangles, ribbons, bladders, variously jade-green and rusty-red, bright orange and emerald in the light of Tau Ceti. Suited and helmeted, Maxim describes the scene that is onscreen everywhere throughoutPioneer . (The three passengers onBeauty had tossed the only coins within light years for the honor of being first-foot on the new world. Pilot excluded. Mustn’t risk him.)Beauty rests upright on an apron of flat rock amidst assorted vegetation, a vista that looks somewhat like an offshore domain that has been emptied of its water. The actual shore is a couple of kilometers away. Shouldn’t be hard to hike there. Some of the weed piles a meter deep but whole stretches are as flat as a pancake.
Cautiously Maxim pokes around with a probe. Amidst a larger mass of weed he soon comes across a number of little hoppers and scuttlers—“they’re a bit like fleas and tiny crabs—” and even captures some speci­mens, before he cuts samples of weed, then bags soil that is variously gritty and sludgy, inhabited by some wriggly tendrils and purple mites.

John descends fromBeauty to join Maxim, carrying an atmosphere analyzer to confirm orbital readings. This done, Jeff comes bearing a white mouse in a transparent light-weight habitat. Mice are biologically very similar to men. Will the mouse, Litmus, turn virulently red or blue because of hostile microorganisms? Even if nothing obvious happens, in another few days once back onPi­oneer Litmus will be sacrificed and dissected.



After a day of intensive investigation of the vicinity, next day Maxim and Jeff set off for the seaside under gray clouds. Rain will move in later, though nothing torrential. What will they find? Leviathans cruising offshore like mobile islands? Torpedos with flippers and goggly eyes nursing pups on the beach?
No. No.

“Weed and sand. Pebbles and boulders.” As is seen onscreen while Maxim pans his camera.

Some great thongs of weed emerge from the breeze-rippled sea, right across the shore and beyond, like vast creepers that the ocean has rooted upon the land. No wildlife bigger than hoppers and scuttlers and sliders, and nothing in the empty and now melancholy sky.

Presently Jeff fires nets into the sea, one to trawl, the other weighted to dredge. What comes back are floaters and wrigglers and squirmers, none bigger than a little finger.

Back onBeauty in its resealed habitat Litmus the mouse is still perky and white.

* * *

The day after, Shuttle Two,Charm , lands half a world away in a broad river valley on the huge island or mini-continent christened Kansas, somewhat further inland thanBeauty landed. Weed webs its way from the river over the terrain, yielding to flexible dwarf ribbon-trees and inflated lung-plants. More little hoppers and scut­tlers and variations, nothing big.
All in all this is wonderful, if a bit bleak. Here on Tee-Cee, as the planet is coming to be called, is an ecol­ogy, primitive but functional. Years ago it was decided that biological contamination of the Tee-Cee environ­ment is of much less consequence than the chance of inhabiting a whole new world, if at all possible. After all, the expedition had cost its partners upward of forty billion dollars. Agronomy experiments get under way, a range of seedlings transplanted directly into the local soil and also into heat-sterilized grit and sludge under protection.



All of this rather puts Mary’s revelation and baby James to the back of people’s minds, except for the members of the support group consisting of Yukio, Chika, Denise, Hiroaki, and Sophie. Plus an apprehensive Sandy with James in a head-supportive carry-sling. Jeff being down on the surface has robbed her of his help, an unavoid­able repeat of his earlier failure to be present. And there’s Eric too, although in his case simply out of loy­alty. But no Maxim. He’s on the surface of Tee-Cee. The eight—or nine, if James is counted—meet in the hydro­ponics section, like conspirators or members of a cult. Maybe their infant messiah is in their midst, albeit inarticulate as yet.
“We are each other,” says Hiroaki. “That is the mean­ing. The unity of all human life.”

Sophie asks him gently, “Were Adolf Hitler and a rabbi in an extermination campunited ? What about people waging ruthless war on each other throughout history?”

“If our immune system goes wrong, it can attack our own bodies. But I am talking about lives going way back and stretching far ahead. I am my ancestor and my dis­tant descendant! If we could know the lives of the fu­ture! Pan-Humanity already includes those future lives.”

“Future lives haven’t yet been lived!” protests Denise. “If we could dip into them now, why, everything is fixed in advance unalterably. It would only be because of our blindness to the future that we bother to do anything at all in the present. No, wait: we couldn’t even choose to do, or not to do, something if all is foreordained. Pan-Humanity can’t be calculating or thinking or dreaming or doing whatever it does across the millennia unless genuine changes happen within it! Otherwise it would be just one big super-complicated thought, a four-dimensional abacus forever in the same state.”

“Whatis its purpose?” asks Mary. “What does it do, what does it dream?”

“Maybe it merely exists,” says Eric. “Maybe that’s all it does.”

“Surely it must come to conclusions. The computing power it has! Using all our billions of brains!”

“Conclusions? Final extinction is conclusion enough. The tree grows, the tree dies.”

“Maybe,” suggests Chika, “it avoids extinction by be­ing closed in upon itself. Its end and its beginning join together. So it always exists, even though time moves on beyond the epoch of its physical existence.”

“Contacting the probability-being must have caused a change—”

“As soon as this happened, it had already happened long ago too—”

“We don’t have the minds to understand this—”

“Only the overmind possesses the overview—”

“It must understand existence. Not just experience existence, butunderstand as well—as part of its process of existing—”

“We are all part of God,” Sophie declares. “Any highly evolved species is a God in total. Yet we cannot follow God’s thoughts. All of us are just little bits of those thoughts.”

“The probability-being was a bit more forthcoming!”

“Because you weren’t a part of it, Mary. Because you were its modem to our God, our species. It had to exchange signals through you.”

“And then it went away, because chatting to me was probably as interesting as talking to an ant.”

“At least it lifted you from one end of the branch to the other.”

“So effortlessly. If only our God would do the same for us.”

“Maybe,” Sophie suggests, “you should pray real strongly, Mary. Sort of meditation with a punch to it.”

“What should I prayfor ?”

“For James,” says Sandy. “Let him be—”

“—normal?” asks Sophie. “Or gifted with tongues, real soon? So that the babe begins to speak instead of just gurbling at you?”

“I think. . . normal.”

“Normal would be a waste, don’t you think?”

Sandy sobs. “How long’s Jeff going to be down there?”

“It’s why we’re here.”

“Let me take James off your hands for a few hours,” offers Sophie, not for the first time.

“No. . . .” Only Jeff is permitted to share her baby, because it is his duty to.

Whatever happens, Sandy seems very unlikely to harm her baby. If she does so in any way, then that is Mary’s responsibility. Mary feels she cannot intervene too intrusively, having, as it were, a vested interest.



Some of the seedlings fail, but most survive, even quite a few of those which are fully exposed to the Pizza environment. Some even thrive. Monitor cameras record efforts by hoppers to snack, and one definite quick fa­tality, although most nibblers quickly hop away into weed. In a bottle of formaldehyde the dead hopper is an amulet of hope. Perhaps. Supposing that hope equates with the superiority, or at least resilience, of organisms from Earth.
Litmus remains perky.Beauty returns toPioneer . Time for intensive lab work, and confirmation of results by Computer.



Many tests have been performed, many protocols faithfully obeyed, but there comes a time when a volunteer must personally dip his toe into the bathwater. In the middle of Kansas, Jeff removes his helmet. Computer has approved, although approval is merely advisory. Despite Jeff’s best efforts at child-sharing, maybe he is betraying Sandy yet again by being a hero.
The supporters’ group join hands in hydroponics and pray for Jeff, even though by now they remember that they are perhaps no longer part of the processes of hu­manity, being altogether too far away.

“It smells sort of sweet. . .and sort of musty too, a bit like rotting wood.”

Jeff breathes for five minutes. No sudden sneezes. Resuming the helmet, he wears it insideCharm for three boring hours. Nothing untoward happens to him, so he unsuits. Saliva and mucous swabs and a blood sample taken by Gisela seem normal under the microscope.

“We appear to be lucking out in a big way,” Com Sherwin tells everyone.



Charmis the ideal isolated quarantine facility. Jeff and Gisela and tubby agronomist Marcel Reynard and pilot-geologist Werner Schmidt take turns working and ex­ploring outside fully suited. AboardCharm Gisela mixes a fecal sample with a sample of local soil and organisms; some of the organisms die. After a week Jeff ventures outside to breathe the air of Kansas for several hours.
Three days later Jeff drinks boiled, filtered Kansas wa­ter. Gisela tests and retests his urine. Two days afterward, he is wearing a coverall rather than a suit when outside. Ungloved, he has already handled samples of vegetation inside the shuttle, and no rashes resulted. Now he handles living vegetation. On the soil he deposits a fecal sample he brought in a bag, marking the spot with a day-glo flag. What may the hoppers and scuttlers and sliders make of this offering if they had any glimmering of true con­sciousness rather than mere programmed instincts? Evo­lutionarily speaking, the equivalent of God-like beings have descended from the sky. Next day, inert hoppers and sliders lie nearby—the food of the Gods, or rather the waste products, were too much for them.



James’s developmental pathways must indeed have al­tered; his larynx is descending early. Beware of the risk of him choking. Connections in his brain may be pro­ceeding more rapidly—he looks alert, bright-eyed, on the verge of what exactly? No longer does he attempt in vain to vocalize, as if he has come to some understand­ing with himself, or of himself. What a patient, ame­nable baby he is now, and still so young. He stares at his mother, and at Mary too, and at the members of the supporters’ club, which is his supporters’ club as much as it is Mary’s.
The third shuttle,Color , has gone down to joinCharm , to erect a habitat-dome for thirty persons along with a solar power plant and a number of wind-power whirlies.



Only now, perhaps, are many potential colonists begin­ning to appreciate the full implications of a whole future spent on Tee-Cee. Sure, there will be much scientific stimulation. Sure, there will be a wealth of human cul­tural resources on tap for entertainment. Sure, more col­onists will arrive from Earth within, say, two years at the most, counting in time for mission assessment and the turn-around ofPioneer . But oh, the comparative bar­renness of Kansas. . .!
“If we go down there. . .,” says Sandy.

“Not if, but when,” says Chika. “We didn’t actually think this would happen, did we? I confess I didn’t, not in my heart. The planet wouldn’t be habitable, or there would be alien viruses we couldn’t cope with. But it is, and there aren’t.”

Sophie tries to sound a bright note. “In another hun­dred years there will be human cities. Networks. People whosegrandparents were born on Tee-Cee Two.”

“For us,” says Sandy, “just work work work. A few days’ hike in any direction for a working holiday if we’re lucky. Lots of trips to the seaside for me. We’ll be sac­rificing the best of our lives.”

“That’s why wecame here,” says Mary. “We’repio­neers . Your Jeff especially.”

“Easy for you to say! You won’t be stuck here. Com Sherwin is bound to take you back through Q-space in the hope of a shortcut through time for anyone aboard. If that can’t be cracked, isn’t six months’ solitary going to be a bit of a disincentive to those who’ll supposedly follow us? Well, isn’t it?”

“Do you mean. . .you think there might neverbe another shipload of colonists? Surely not! Even if people are obliged to endure isolation en route, they’ll still come. At least they’ll know they have a secure desti­nation!”

Eric eyes Mary uneasily. “I wonder ifI’ll be taken back. Normally I would have expected to go back to look after the hydroponics, but there can’t be much point if there are eight or so different versions ofPioneer . Com Sherwin is almost bound to take you as ship’s doctor rather than Yukio.”

“Even if I have nobody to doctor but myself? Talk sense.”

Eric nods. “Because of your other possibility.”

The Commander must be haunted by decisions he has yet to make.

Maybe this is why, after a long and inconclusive in­terview with Mary months ago, he has not discussed her revelation again with her in any depth. Something new may yet happen to her. Or if not her, then as regards baby James.



Denise has gone to the surface. From now on her astrophysics will be restricted to the close study of Tau Ceti, which is important, of course. Sunspot cycles, the wind from the new sun. Jay-Jay has deployed an instrument platform in orbit for her to uplink with, but habitat-tending work will occupy much of Denise’s time.
It’ll be another month until a second habitat-dome is erected, and several more whirlies, time enough one hopes for any teething problems with the first habitat to become apparent. Since a habitat does not need to be sealed off fully from the environment, problems should not be too serious. The air and the water freely available down on Tee-Cee Two are such a boon, as is the soil in which crops can grow. Genetic engineering may not be necessary at all. Unprotected fields of lupins may provide fodder, and some beauty. Frozen embryos of pigs, goats, and rabbits may be quickened and brought to term in the artificial wombs all the sooner. And chickens hatched. And ponds dug for carp and trout—and a network of irrigation channels.

James will have chicks and bunnies and piglets as part of his nursery experience.

The pioneers were prepared to provide full protection to the tithe of terrestrial life they brought with them. This would have limited the options. Now, not so.

Sophie conducts a multi-faith ceremony of thanks and blessing, although God is absent, or at least ex­tremely diminutive, if God is the collective superconsciousness of the whole human race.



A husband and wife team, Bjorn and Heidi Svenson, vets who will be in charge of husbandry, visit Mary in the clinic. Heidi has brought a urine sample.
“You’re pregnant. Definitely!” Mary tells Heidi joyfully. “Oh, congratulations!”

Turns out to be only a week ago that the Svensons engaged in something of a marathon, six times in two days at mid-month in Heidi’s cycle. If James was ever a jinx, that jinx is exorcised now that Tee-Cee promises fertility. In place of a certain apprehension is an eager­ness to bear the first child on an alien world. It’s early days yet to be sure how viable the Svensons’ embryo is, but Heidi does not intend to keep quiet about it. Next day, another husband and wife and a pair of Afro-American partners visit Mary for the same test. The former have not conceived, but the latter have succeeded. With luck James will have peers not too much younger than he is.



Mary and Sophie and Hiroaki and Chika, and inevitably Eric, are taking a coffee break in hydroponics, perching on the sides of plant-troughs, their backs brushing the emerald foliage of carrots and the stalks of tomato plants bowed by bright red globelets.
Sandy comes in at a pace that risks balance-nausea, James swaddled tightly in her arms as if he might fall and break.

“Hestartedspeaking—!”She displays her child, who gazes at Sophie, then at Mary.



What the baby says is: “I am a Voice. I answer. Ask me.”
And Mary asks,“Whatareyou?”

“I am a Voice of the linking to All-Humanity. The echo of the event in what you call Q-space. I am a Voice left behind.”Sandy’sbabyisactuallytalkingtothem .

Its tones are somewhat squeaky.

“Whywere you left behind?”

“As a Guide to what is and what may be.”

“Shouldn’t we get the Commander here?” butts in Eric.

“Not yet, not yet,” says Hiroaki, eager for enlight­enment.

A Guide to what is. . . .

“Do you mean,” Eric asks, “you can tell us, for example, whether Tee-Cee is as suitable for us to colonize as it seems to be?”

“Maybe the problems are within yourselves. You are all too special. Specialists, multi-specialists. Over-endowment oozes from your fingertips, from the pores of your skin. Better to have sent here a hundred trained peasants or low-caste laborers for whom the work would mean freedom from the restricting past and who would feel like lords. Tee-Cee is weed, water, dirt. Compel a chess grand master to play nothing but checkers for years.”

“Pioneerwill bring more people here in a couple of years—fewer Ph.D.s, more blue-collar types, I guess.”

“Sleeping two to a cabin, like animals in an ark? Will you first founders be their superiors, their directors? Even so, the numbers will still be too small.”

“Another ship will be built—more ships.”

“Requiring four years each, costing forty billion moneys each? Almost bankrupting the backers? Shall the Earth be taxed dry? Only so, if threatened by certain extinction. If your sun is about to flare. If a dark star enters your solar system. If a big comet passes by and will return in a hundred years and strike your Earth.”

“We could fire anti-matter at a comet,” says Chika. “Completely destroy it while it’s still far away.”

Within such a short time-frame what threat could be big enough and certain enough?

Mary recalls. “You—or the being you represent—told me that other species do manage to set up colonies by sending generation ships or whatever.”

“Perhaps with thousands of persons on board. Perhaps those species command a much larger energy budget than Humanity. You may be too soon. Premature. Your best effort, not big enough.”

“I think,” says Sophie, “you’re looking on the gloomy side. You’ve been overhearing people having a few last-minute doubts.”

A guide to what may be. . . .

“James, can you foretell the future?” asks Hiroaki.

“I can tell what may most probably be,” answers the baby. “The most probable paths. Sometime, within in­finity, an improbable path becomes actual. How else could the first parent universe arise?”

“Oh kami kami kami,” Chika exclaims, “he’s a quan­tum computer. A hand-held quantum computer—and he’s an artificial intelligence too! No, I don’t meanar­tificial —he’s biological, a biological quantum computer. Of course that’s what we all are in a limited sense if it’s true that quantum effects create our consciousness. . . . But we don’t have access to. . .we aren’t linked. . .we aren’t directly plugged in to the background, the big picture. . . .”

“What he is,” says Sophie, “is anavatar .”

“You mean like the face Computer has, if we want to see a face onscreen?”

“Originally avatar is a Hindu term. For an incarna­tion of a god, a manifestation.”

How cautiously Sandy holds on to what is biologi­cally her son, as though maybe she should lay him down among the tomato plants in case her grasp fails her.

“Does he have powers? Can he make things happen?”

“Ask him,” says Sophie, compassionate, apprehen­sive.

Sandy bows her head over her baby.

“James, can youdo things? Can you. . .can you make abird appear in here?”

“Mother, I am a Voice, not a Hand that can pluck a creature from one place to another.”

“You have hands—two little hands. You do.” Carefully she unswaddles a chubby pink baby arm, little fin­gers, tiny coral nails.

“But I am not a Hand.”

“Could you become a Hand?”

“That is a very unlikely path. Then I might not be a Voice.”

“Can you see what is happening with Jeff there down on Tau-Cee?”

“I am not an Eye.”

Hiroaki interrupts. “Are there any other beings like you thatare Hands or Eyes?”

James yawns. “I am tired now. This was an effort. I am a baby.” His eyes close.

“I got to get a message to Jeff! He must come back!”

“We got to tell the Commander right now,” says Chika.

“He’s asleep.”

“Com Sherwin? How do you know?”

“No. James is asleep.”



Sherwin Peterson quickly comes in person to hydropon­ics after Chika’s call.
“Can you wake him up?”

“I don’t think we should,” says Mary. “He’s fatigued. Let him wake in his own time.”

“I can hardly doubt the word of five of you. . . .”

Not unless this is some weird hoax, and what would that serve?

The Commander bangs his fist into his palm as if the sudden noise might startle James awake.

“Let me get this straight. He’s saying that this ex­pedition is too soon and too few and the wrong sort of people.”

Thatmight be the point of the hoax, is a thought which obviously crosses his mind. Psychological sabo­tage by a small group of conspirators who wish to avoid effectively being marooned down on Tee-Cee. This feel­ing might spread like an infection. Let’s just do the sci­ence, then let’s pack up and go home in relative comfort. If the baby wakes up and says nothing at all the hoax will be rumbled within a few hours at most. Yet a seed of, yes, mutiny might still have been sown.

“I am ordering you to say nothing about this until I can talk to the baby myself.”

How can he enforce his order? A Commander should not issue orders that cannot be enforced.

“I’m appealing to you to keep quiet for a few hours. How long will it be?” A mother should know. And a doctor should know. Oh yes really, a psychiatrist who claims she met an inhabitant of probability, whose voice this baby now is?

“His brain is altered,” Mary says. “I don’t know how long he needs to sleep after making a big effort. We might harm him.”

“This could harmus , Doctor, in ways you mightn’t imagine!”

“He’s a living quantum computer,” says Chika. “Maybe James can help you pass through Q-space again without the same isolation. Maybe he can pull the time-jumping trick.”

“And maybePioneer will slide off the edge of the universe. This ship vanishes, and that’s the end of star travel. How do you know this baby isn’t some sort of virus that Dr. Nolan’s famous super-being inserted on board? Better the devil of isolation than a devil we don’t know.”

Paranoia due to the strain of command? The weight of responsibility for human hopes and for forty billion dollars.

“I think we’ll have ample time to find out,” says Chika.

The Commander squares himself. “We’ll all wait. Right here.”

“I have work to attend to, Commander.”

“What would that be? Reprogramming the computer to accept input from the virus-baby?”

“Of course not. There’s a lot of data from the surface to process.”

“No one leaves, and no one enters. Make yourselves comfortable.” True to his word, the Commander parks his butt on the edge of the big tomato trough, plucks a ripe tomato, grins, bites into it, sticks his other hand in his pocket.

“James should be lying on my bed,” says Sandy. “Waithere ? He’s a bit of a weight. Look, I’ll take him to my cabin. I guess we can all fit in there. And that’ll be more private.”

“I said we wait here.”

“Com, that’sunreasonable .”

“In your professional opinion is it lacking in reason?” Sherwin asks Mary. “A sign of insanity? Sufficient grounds for my Second Officer to take over?”

From his pocket, to their astonishment, the Com­mander pulls a pistol, which he points at Sandy—or at James.

Tightly Sophie says, “I didn’t know there were any weapons onPioneer .”

“Sure there are. And on the shuttles too. Kept well out of sight, locked away, available in emergency to certain personnel who are sworn to secrecy. What if we encountered actively hostile indigenes on Tee-Cee? What if a hostile alien entity boards the ship? What if that has happened already?”

It is as if a trapdoor has opened, from which blows a very cold draft.

Com Sherwin chews and sucks at the tomato, and regards the five, and slumbering James. Hiroaki is stand­ing tensely as if calculating whether he can disarm Sher­win.

“Commander,” says Mary, “if you put the gun away we agree to stay here and never say anything about this. There might be an accident.”

“My child,” whispers Sandy.

“Ah but is he or ain’t he? How much of him is your child if his brain has been tampered with, as you say? Is he even human if he’s actually a bio-computer? Some guns came along with us in case of unforeseen emer­gency. I think this amounts to something of an emer­gency putting the mission in peril, admittedly in a peculiar way. I would like to be obeyed without argu­ment.”

“James may be quite wrong about us being unsuit­able settlers.”

“In that case, Dr. Nolan, would I let it have a say in how this ship operates in Q-space? As you have just suggested, Dr. Suzuki.”

“He may have powers,” Sandy says.

“That’s exactly what I’m bothered about. You people really are blind. Indulged. Let’s be patient, let’s not leap to conclusions, let’s keep hush. I’m the Commander. Some weird baby isn’t.”



This is all very unfortunate. Com Sherwin had seemed steady as a rock. An easy-going rock, you might even say. Ten light years distance from Earth is a long thin thread. Thin threads can snap if tugged unexpectedly. He still sounds composed. Does he not understand that producing a gun to enforce author­ity seriously devalues his position as well as poisoning the atmosphere aboard? A gun, to confront a mother and baby. He is like a King Herod panicked by rumors of a messiah. It is outside of his scope.
“Whatever happens,” Mary tells the others, “we mustn’t say anything about this. Understood? This is a can of worms.” Can she persuade the Commander to accept counseling?

“Perhaps,” suggests Sophie, “I should say a prayer to focus us.”



No one else wanders into hydroponics. If someone did, would Com Sherwin detain them too at gun point? He whistles to himself monotonously and tunelessly, as if time-keeping, holding the pistol slackly. Occasionally he answers a message on his com. He eats a couple more tomatoes to sustain himself, a breech of proper con­duct—hydroponics is not for anyone to sneak into and snack—but in the circumstances Eric does not demur.
Mary thinks of Commander Bligh and theBounty . And of isolated Pitcairn Island, where the mutineers ma­rooned themselves, not to be recontacted until many de­cades later, while Bligh and his few rowed something like four thousand miles by dead reckoning to regain eventually the bosom of authority. An epic journey, al­most equivalent to the crossing of light years. In this case is the Commander the mutineer? On the Pitcairn Island of Tee-Cee does he maroon his crew while the officers make their escape?

By his own lights the Commander may be right to be holding that gun, in case James is a lot more than they imagine. In case James needs to be killed quickly.

Err on the safe side.



After an hour James wakes. With his gun the Com­mander motions all but Sandy and her baby well out of the way. Hiroaki especially.
“Hi there, Kid, I’m the Commander. I hear you found your voice. That true?”

“Iam the Voice, Commander.”

“I’m kind of upset to hear you cast doubts on our chances of settling Tee-Cee.”

The baby peers at him, focusing. “I am realistic. Too few, too soon, too concerned with individuality.”

“Pardon me that we aren’t a hive. Maybe this is Earth’s only chance of having our eggs in more than one basket. Question of available resources and politics.”

“So you feel obliged to try to succeed.”

“Obliged, right. Now what’syour agenda? Try to dis­suade us? Something important about Tee-Cee? In a squillion years might the weedhoppers amount to more than Einstein and Hawking and Mozart? That it?”

“What are Einstein and Hawking and Mozart?”

“I guess their fame hasn’t spread much. We aim to remedy that. Any advice about Q-space? How to keep us all together while we’re in transit through your realm? How to speed things up a bit?”

“Would you prefer that a hundred different journeys are undertaken by everyone? And only one actuality emerges? The wave fronts of all the other ships collaps­ing, experienced subjectively as catastrophe, shipwreck in void, the dissolving of substance and life?”

“You could fix that, could you, given access to our computer and the Q-drive controls? Excuse my being confrontational, by the way. Commander’s prerogative if a mission seems in danger.”

“There are ways to arrange different parameters.”

“I guess no one would ever take another Q-space trip if there’s a ninety-nine percent likelihood of being an­nihilated.”

“The one percent that prevails becomes one hundred percent. Nothing is actually lost.”

“Except that ninety-nineme ’s experience termination.”

“You, who prevail, would not know.”

“Okay, I’ll take that on board, under advisement. Wouldn’t ninety-nine or whatever number ofyou go down kicking and screaming also, in ghostland?”

“Unimportant. Inessential. The survivor survives. Re­sult: unity. You overvalue the idea of the self.”

“There’s a real cosmic perspective. Dr. Tate, lay the child down by those carrots, will you?”

“Why should I do that? What’s in your mind?”

“Thoughts, Dr. Tate. Muchos thoughts.Kindlydoit now .”

“I won’t. You’re mad.”

The gun points. “Do it, and nothing bad will happen to you.”

“Not to me, but. . . .”

“I’ll count to five. At five I pull the trigger.”

With greatest reluctance Sandy unslings James.

“Position him so he can see me. Now, back off.”

She backs off a pace, another pace. She’s tempted to throw herself in between.

“Okay. Voice, can you see me clearly?”

“Yes,” says the baby.

“Do you know what this is I’m holding in my hand?”

“A tool that I think can kill.”

“Exactly. It fires a bit of metal called a bullet, very fast with a lot of punch. I’m pointing it at your head, which contains your brains. You’re an alien infestation. I’m going to count to five and then I’m going to fire.”

“Don’t do this,” begs Sandy. “He needs feeding and changing.”

“Should we have a short intermission? No, I don’t think so.” Sherwin starts to count. James stares at him, neither begging nor flinching. When Sherwin reaches five, he pulls the trigger.

Click.

“Gee, the safety is on. . . .” And immediately, “Now it isn’t. But the test is over. He’s just a Voice, that’s all. Unless he’s telepathic, of course, but he gave no signs so far. All right, all relax. I’m sorry about this bit of theater. Had to be sure he doesn’t have powers.”

“And what,” asks Sophie, “if he had vanished the gun from your hand? Sent it into the middle of nowhere? What would you have done then, try to strangle him with your bare hands?”

“No. Been very circumspect. I sincerely apologize, people. Middle of nowhere is where we are, or rather at the other end of nowhere, and that’s wherehe comes out of, even if he looks like a baby and poos like a baby, a very disarming disguise. I had to be certain what we’re dealing with. Exceptional circumstances call for excep­tional reactions. What to ordinary souls may appear to be an irrational reaction, right out of left field, may be inspired and correct.”

“A commander has to be decisive,” agrees Chika po­litely.

“I was quoting Linda Bernstein. This brings us back to the problem of damage to morale, and what if anything we might do about rejigging the Q-drive.”

“You’re actually entertaining the idea?”

“How can I ignore it, Dr. Suzuki? I’m not blinkered.”

No, but maybe he is on the edge of himself.

“I think we established something important—the baby’s limitations, at least at present.”

“You were justified,” says James. Healingly, perhaps. Or shrewdly.

The Commander tucks his pistol away.

“Okay, Voice, these different parameters that can be arranged. . .can our ship’s personnel all skip ahead through time on the trip back to Earth if we put up with a bit of isolation? Without most versions of us getting extinguished?”

What a gift to science and star travel this will be. And how much more supportive for the settlement on Tee-Cee. Beats harpooning a gas-whale into a cocked hat.

“I am tired again,” says the baby.

“Sandy.” Bonhomie, now. “For the moment I want you to keep the Voice out of the way of everyone other than those here present. Will you promise this?”

Of course.



The Commander ordersCharm to carry a final habitat down to Kansas, and a load of supplies.Beauty conveys another thirty settlers to the surface.Pioneer is becoming quite empty, and proportionately huger, so it seems. The six, and James, remain aboard as though they are engaged in a covert project. Which of them will be sent down at the last moment? Sherwin must at least already have con­fided in his Second Officer. He is abridging any planned schedule effervescently. A year at Tau Ceti and all the planetary science work? No, the stay in orbit will be mea­sured in months, maybe as few as two, as though Sherwin is now itching to depart, the sooner to return bringing more settlers and equipment. Colonization is the prime priority. This is proceeding more successfully and speed­ily than anyone had expected—just so long as no one in­volved in it hears of the Voice’s doubts, not for a long while yet. Colonization must be buttressed, reinforced, ASAP. The toehold must become a full deep footprint.
Jeff still does not know about his son’s achievement. Jeff is distant now. Undoubtedly Sandy will stay aboardPioneer to care for James. Her oceanography can wait, and Jeff will have to wait.

Conversations with the Voice continue, in Sandy’s cabin. Sophie or Mary frequently stay with James to let Sandy off the leash for exercise and a change of scene, as now. Chika and Hiroaki are also helping baby-sit. The bed-couch is crowded.

“So we are all tiny parts of a vast species-overmind?”

“Yes, Mary,” says James.

“What does the overmind do? What is its aim? What thoughts does it think?”

“I do not have access to it. I am only the Voice of the Other, left behind.”

“Is there any way a person can access our species­overmind directly and comprehensibly?”

Mary thinks of the angel she once saw. The angel was cobwebs and dew and sunlight.

“Being enfolded into its psychospace and becoming fully aware: that is a way.”

“What does that mean?”

“Ceasing your life in ongoing space-time. All the bil­lions of lives that ever were remain embedded in its wholeness. Like true dreams. Can you awake lucidly within the dream that was your life, once it has ended? Can you edit the life that was yours? Can you rewrite it? Can you corrupt the data of your history recorded in the psychosphere? This may compel the attention of the overmind.”

“Could you help me do this?” asks Mary.

“Perhaps.”

“He’s talking about youdying first!” says Sophie. “He isn’t saying that you can report anything at all to the living.”

“I am talking,” says the Voice, “about myself ceasing along with you after I help hoist your mind.”

“Hoist my mind?How ?”

“I can hypnotize you and, as it were, change mental settings.”

“Good thing Com Sherwin isn’t hearingthis ,” Sophie says. “But anyway, we’re only talking theoretically.Aren’twe,Mary ?”

Mary nods.

“I would volunteer for this,” Chika says softly.

“Only Mary Nolan is suitable,” the Voice states, “because her mind already linked in Q-space. And a gap was caused. She went ahead in time.”

“Oh, kami kami,” murmurs Chika.

“If I can edit my life-data after I die,” asks Mary, “do I alter the real events that occurred?”

“Skeins may unravel and reform, within limitations. Threads will shift. A different probability will manifest. The large pattern will remain similar.”

“Itis like time-travel, isn’t it? A sort of time-travel? I go back and I do something a bit differently.”

“You adjust what already happened and what re­sulted. Within limits.”

“And if the overmind does not agree?”

“It must focus upon you. You who are part of it.”

“Can I focusit upon what happens in the real world?”

“I do not know this. My brain heats. I am tired. I must cool.”



The final shuttle trips come so soon.Pioneer almost empties its stores of supplies. Chika and Yukio, Sophie and Hiroaki are to become settlers.
Hiroaki hangs himself in his cabin. In the partial gravity his strangulation may have taken a while, and perhaps this was his plan—to approach death more slowly so that the boundary between life and death might become as blurred as his vision, allowing him to slip through, to be both dead and alive at once for a while so that he might enfold into psychospace while still fractionally aware. He too was touched by what transpired in Q-space. To a certain extent Hiroaki’s men­tal settings had been changed. Or perhaps he could not bear to be exiled on Tee-Cee, away from the Voice, or from Mary who may attain a kind of satori, if not in this life then in the data-dream-stream of her life, the eddies within the vast river of the overmind.

Hiroaki’s death is a shock. Still: balance of his mind tragically disturbed ever since isolation in Q-space. After a brief service conducted by Sophie, his body joins that of Greg Fox in cold store. Sending bodies down to be buried on Tee-Cee would not be a good omen.

“WhatdidtheVoicetellhim?”Com Sherwin wants to know. Has to be something to do with James.

Mary confesses to the Commander. “I think Hiroaki got the idea that he might be able to contact the overmind by dying, because he was touched by it in Q-space.”

“Touched, as in loony. . .?”

“Maybe he couldn’t bear to be separated from. . . .”

“From his therapist?”

“No, from what may happen in Q-space the next time.”

* * *

Pioneeris outward bound. Farewells have been said. In an entirely literal way: fare extremely well. . . until the starship returns. Which it will, there’s no doubting. Es­pecially, don’t doubt yourselves.Charm has been left in Kansas, almost like an emergency survival hut that can be sealed off, though of course will never need to be. Or like an escape route, admittedly an escape to nowhere. Even so, more reassuring than otherwise: a visible link to space and wider horizons, an earnest of more tech­nology due to come. The settlers will now need to ac­quire a different mind-set, vigorous yet also patient.
Jeff could not understand why Sandy was not join­ing him. There’s one of the settlers already feeling iso­lated, betrayed as if in tit-for-tat. Although in the end Jeff seemed resigned. Sandy herself cried and needed comforting.

On board are Mary, Sandy and James, and Eric of hydroponics, Com Sherwin and his Second, Max Muller, Engineer Sam Nakata, Navigator Nellie van Torn, Comp and ship-systems manager Bill Brooks, and shuttle pilot Dan Addison. Ten souls, or nine plus something else.



Com Sherwin is in several minds.
The Voice has decided that if Computer reprograms the Q-drive in such and such a way, then each traveler will find himself or herself accompanied by a copy of the Voice.

How can James be in nine places at once—until, at journey’s end, he becomes a single person again? He is not any ordinary baby. He is a child of reality and prob­ability.

The journey time can be shortened considerably—not by time-jumping such as benefited Mary, but by “com­pression,” which James cannot explain in comprehen­sible words. The result should be a journey time of one month rather than six.

It may be that James’s entangled presence will permit a limited amount of communication between the oth­erwise isolated stellanauts, via him, although such mes­sages may be unreliable, even if comforting. Or otherwise.

Of course, him being an infant, albeit an infant prod­igy, his copies will need caring for. How well up on the care of infants are Com Sherwin, Max Muller, Dan Ad­dison. . .?

The downside is that there will be phantom journeys too, otherwise there would not be enough paths to sum over.

The voice likens those phantom journeys to you standing between two mirrors and beholding repeated reflections of yourself diminishing and disappearing into the distance. The first five or six reflections certainly seem like authentic representations; thereafter you become increasingly vague and distant. Thus it will feel to the phantoms. Seven or so will feel like you, and will disperse when you—oroneoftheothers—exits from Q-space. Others will not possess enough substance to ex­perience more than a dream-like state, the unraveling of which will hardly be too traumatic.

So there’s about a one-in-eight chance that you per­sonally will reintegrate. Seven echoes will hope for this but fail to achieve it. Much better odds than one in a hundred—though even so!

Mary has slightly better odds. If she tosses a dice to decide whether to euthanize herself and James while in Q-space so as to enfold herself into psychospace—by far the best way to choose, namely by chance—and if one of her selves does indeed toss the number for death, then one of her will definitely die but will not have lived in vain, and one of the remainder will survive.

A link may even endure between her dead self and her living self, so the Voice surmises.

“So,” says Com Sherwin to those who are all gathered in the restaurant, “do we go for it?”

Is he recollecting the dive ofTheDart into Jupiter and the harpooning of the gas-whale?DoIgoforitordoInot ?

“I’d like an advisory show of hands. Purely advisory for the moment.”

The dissenters are Sam Nakata, Nellie van Tom, and Bill Brooks—engineering, navigation, and computer sys­tems respectively. Com Sherwin may or may not have prevailed previously upon his Second, Max Muller. As a pilot Dan Addison has coped with risks before, and he’s rather too extravert to endure another spell of six months all on his own. Mary and Sandy and Eric are united in going for it, although are their votes quite equal in weight to engineering or navigation?

“Well,” says Sherwin, “that’s five to three in favor, ignoring myself and the Voice.”

“Commander,” says Sam Nakata, “we have absolutely no reason to opt for this, thisexperiment —on the say-so of a baby! It’s our duty to takePioneer back through Q-space by a route that demonstrably succeeds. If that involves six months alone, we already hacked it once. At least this time we’re forewarned.”

“Obviously he’s no ordinary baby. But more to the point, if we cut the journey time by five months each way, that’s almost one year sooner we can bring more people and equipment to Tee-Cee. Imagine returning and finding the colony falling apart because we didn’t take the fast route. I thinkthat bears thinking seriously about.”

“Yes. It does.If .”

“We shouldn’t worry about some of us not arriving,” says Sandy, “so long as one of each does. We won’t know anything about the ones who don’t arrive.”

“Plenty of fish in the probability sea, eh?” remarks Nellie van Torn. “I don’tlike to think of five of me evap­orating, especially if the one who evaporates isme .”

“It’s an identity problem,” says Bill Brooks surprisingly. “If you could copy your mind into an android, say while you’re unconscious, and if the act of mind-scanning erases your brain, is the android simply con­tinuing your own life? The android will certainly feel as though it’s doing so, indistinguishably. If you were dy­ing of terminal cancer you would opt for this continu­ation, wouldn’t you?”

“Are you changing your informal vote?” asks Com Sherwin.

“I don’t like to think that I may be putting ninety-odd other people in jeopardy just because of qualms about myself, when actually my self will survive intact in one version or another.”

There is much to mull over. Mary begins giving clas­ses on the medical aspects of infant care, and Sandy on the practical details. James begins hypnotizing Mary.



The time has come. Nellie and Sam have agreed under protest. Computer has accepted complex instructions from James who has crawled and is now taking his first precocious steps. He’s also toilet-trained and able to eat mashed pap. In view of his huge linguistic skills he oughtn’t to be much bother to look after. On the con­trary, a valuable companion.
Mary lies in her cabin.

“Sixty seconds to Q-insertion. . . .”

“Thirty seconds. . . .”

“Fifteen. . . .”

The seconds pass, the cabin ripples, silence from the speakers.

She is alone with the Voice.



“Can you contact Sandy, Voice?”
The Voice’s eyes grow glazed.

“Hi Mary, Sandy and James here, James and Sandy here, We’re here. I hear you, You already said, You called me just now—”

Six or seven Sandys are talking through James’s lips one after another, all saying much the same thing, whereverhere may be. Certainly isn’t this cabin. A bab­ble of ghosts. These may be difficult conversations to keep up.



“Can you contactmemyself , Voice? I mean, another me?”
James concentrates.

Presently: “Whenare we going to do it?” Commit suicide, and Jamesicide—she knows what she means.



“Should we all do it at the same time?”
“Is that really me?”

“We never got a chance like this to discuss things.”
“We talked to ourself in Q-space before, but this is very different!”

“Hey, what about our Hippocratic Oath?”

Babel, from James’s lips. The nine voices of Mary. Beats schizophrenia any day. This procedure offers very little counsel or comfort, and is perhaps a Bad Idea.



Q + 3. She needn’t feel isolated in the ship. She can summon up voices—but it is better not to hear them. Better to be alone with James, the better to concentrate her mind, in case it might fly apart. Doubtless her other selves have decided likewise, since they do not call her. Several Com Sherwins do call, wanting status reports. What is the point of them asking for those? Perfectionism? Several Erics also call, wishing her well, better, best. James is with everyone.


Q + 4. Do it today. Today is a perfectly fine day to end one’s life.One’s life? What if all of the Maries roll a four, unlucky number in the minds of the Japanese becauseshi which means four also means death, thank you for that knowledge, Hiroaki. What if all or none roll a four? Is Maries the plural of Mary?
She has brought overdoses of morphine from the dis­pensary, morphine to send one to sleep, a very deep sleep.

“Are you ready, Voice? Any last wishes? Some mashed carrots?”



Mary is an Angel in a woodland by a tiny lake. And she is also Mary who sees the Angel and now understands what she sees. Her vision spans forward—inside a starship a dark-haired athletic woman is grinning at her.
“To be really aboard at last? Great! Ah, do you mean the motion. . .? It’s okay.” The woman swings her head friskily. “Oops.”

Switching her attention, Mary sinks to her knees amongst the bushes aglitter with spiders’ webs.

“Overmind, Overmind!” The words seem like the start of a prayer, a prayer that can perhaps be answered.



Com Sherwin’s voice comes briskly. “Hear me. Re-emergence from Q-space achieved. We’re in the home system—we’re home. Crew present on bridge: Muller, Nakata, van Torn, and Brook, and me. Call in please in order: Nolan, Tate, Festa, Addison. Nolan?”
“Present, Commander.”

Oh yes, what a present. She is alive. Alive.

“Tate?”

Sandy’s voice comes over the speaker. “Present. So is James.”

James the Voice. James the Link. James the Knowl­edge.

Eric and Dan Addison also report in.



Glimpses of eons of human experience crash in upon kneeling Mary, rocking her. Billions of souls batter at her like a plague of butterflies. Bird-song sounds like the high-speed warble of data-flow from which an audible message may somehow emerge, if only it can step down to her level.
And she feels such a twinge within, somewhere in her belly, as the glimpses flee, and the butterflies vanish, and the bird-song hushes.

She knows that inside her is the beginning of a Voice.