When I can manage them personally, he thought. He looked aside at twenty-year-old Desan Six and the youth looked gravely back with the face Desan had seen in the mirror thirty-two waking years ago.
“Lord-navigator?”
“You’ll wake your brother after we’re away, Six. Directly after. I’ll be staying awake much of this trip.”
“Awake, sir?”
“Quite. There are things I want you to think about. I’ll be talking to you and Seven both.”
“About the lords-magistrate, sir?”
Desan lifted brows at this presumption. “You and I are already quite well attuned, Six. You’ll succeed young. Are you sorry you missed this time?”
“No, lord-navigator! I assure you not!”
“Good brain. I ought to know. Go to your post, Six. Be grateful you don’t have to cope with a new lordship and five new lords-magistrate and a recent schism.”
Desan leaned back in his chair as the youth crossed the bridge and settled at a crew-post, beside the captain. The lord-navigator was more than a figurehead to rule the seventy ships of the Mission, with their captains and their crews. Let the boy try his skill on this plotting. Desan intended to check it. He leaned aside with a wince—the electric shock that had blown him flat between the AI’s tires had saved him from worse than a broken arm and leg; and the medical staff had seen to that: The arm and the leg were all but healed, with only a light wrap to protect them. The ribs were tightly wrapped too; and they cost him more pain than all the rest.
A scan had indeed located three errant asteroids, three courses the station’s computers had not accurately recorded as inbound for the planet—until personnel from the ships began to run their own observation. Those were redirected.
Casualties. Destruction. Fighting within the Mission. The guilt of the lords-magistrate was profound and beyond dispute.
“Lord-navigator,” the communications officer said. “Dr. Gothon returning your call.”
Goodbye, he had told Gothon. I don’t accept your judgment, but I shall devote my energy to pursuit of mine, and let any who want to join you—reside on the station. There are some volunteers; I don’t profess to understand them. But you may trust them. You may trust the lords-magistrate to have learned a lesson. I will teach it. No member of this mission will be restrained in any opinion while my influence lasts. And I shall see to that. Sleep again and we may see each other once more in our lives.
“I’ll receive it,” Desan said, pleased and anxious at once that Gothon deigned reply; he activated the com-control. Ship-electronics touched his ear, implanted for comfort. He heard the usual blip and chatter of com’s mechanical protocols, then Gothon’s quiet voice. “Lord-navigator.”
“I’m hearing you, doctor.”
“Thank you for your sentiment. I wish you well, too. I wish you very well.”
The tablet was mounted before him, above the console. Millions of years ago a tiny probe had set out from this world, bearing the original. Two aliens standing naked, one with hand uplifted. A series of diagrams which, partially obliterated, had still served to guide the Mission across the centuries. A probe bearing a greeting. Ages-dead cameras and simple instruments.
Greetings, stranger. We come from this place, this star system.
See, the hand, the appendage of a builder—This we will have in common.
The diagrams: We speak knowledge; we have no fear of you, strangers who read this, whoever you be.
Wise fools.
There had been a time, long ago, when fools had set out to seek them . . . In a vast desert of stars. Fools who had desperately needed proof, once upon a quarter million years ago, that they were not alone. One dust-covered alien artifact they found, so long ago, on a lonely drifting course.
Hello, it said.
The makers, the peaceful Ancients, became a legend. They became purpose, inspiration.
The overriding, obsessive Why that saved a species, pulled it back from war, gave it the stars.
“I’m very serious—I do hope you rest, doctor—save a few years for the unborn.”
“My eldest’s awake. I’ve lost my illusions of immortality, lord-navigator. She hopes to meet you.”
“You might still abandon this world and come with us, doctor.”
“To search for a myth?”
“Not a myth. We’re bound to disagree. Doctor, doctor, what good can your presence there do? What if you’re right? It’s a dead end. What if I’m wrong? I’ll never stop looking. I’ll never know.”
“But we know their descendants, lord-navigator. We. We are. We’ve spread their legend from star to star—they’ve become a fable. The Ancients. The Pathfinders. A hundred civilizations have taken up that myth. A hundred civilizations have lived out their years in that belief and begotten others to tell their story. What if you should find them? Would you know them—or where evolution had taken them? Perhaps we’ve already met them, somewhere along the worlds we’ve visited, and we failed to know them.”
It was irony. Gentle humor. “Perhaps, then,” Desan said in turn, “we’ll find the track leads home again. Perhaps we are their children—eight and a quarter million years removed.”
“O ye makers of myths. Do your work, space-farer. Tangle the skein with legends. Teach fables to the races you meet. Brighten the universe with them. I put my faith in you. Don’t you know—this world is all I came to find, but you—child of the voyage, you have to have more. For you the voyage is the Mission. Goodbye to you. Fare well. Nothing is complete calamity. The equation here is different, by a multitude of microorganisms let free—Bothogi has stopped grieving and begun to have quite different thoughts on the matter. His algae-pools may turn out a different breed this time—the shift of a protein here and there in the genetic chain—who knows what it will breed? Different software this time, perhaps. Good voyage to you, lord-navigator. Look for your Ancients under other suns. We’re waiting for their offspring here, under this one.”
JOHN CROWLEY
Snow
John Crowley’s writing has earned comparisons to the epic fantasy of J. R. R. Tolkien and the magic realism of Gabriel García Márquez. He is generally regarded as a writer of mythic fantasy who has freely mixed elements of science fiction into his allusive and richly symbolic fiction. His first three novels all develop fantasy plots in nominally science fictional settings. The Deep tells of a medieval power struggle convulsing two feudal households on a planet geographically distinct but historically similar to Earth. Beasts is set in a balkanized near-future America where proponents of totalitarian centralized government struggle to stamp out a war of independence spearheaded by genetically manipulated human/animal hybrids. Engine Summer unfolds a primitive rite-of-passage tale against the backdrop of a postapocalyptic America descended into a new dark age. Crowley’s World-Fantasy Award–winning Little, Big marked his departure from science fiction–accented explorations of the human social structures for modern treatments of traditional high fantasy. Redolent with echoes of classic romantic literature, the tale chronicles an eccentric multigeneration family alive in a reality-skewed modern world who enjoy a rapport with the world of faerie that is eventually threatened by the rise of a president with antipathy to the faerie kind. Considered a landmark of modern fantasy, this inventive novel sets the pattern for Crowley’s subsequent work with its playful depiction of ordinary lives touched by the strange and magical. Aegypt, Love and Sleep, and Daemonomania are the first three in a projected quartet of novels intended to interlock as a single all-encompassing philosophical romance that blends historical fact, imaginary world fantasy, occult mystery, Renaissance metaphysics, alternate history, quest legend, and classic mythology. Crowley’s collection Novelty features four visionary novellas concerned with artistic creation. His fiction has also been collected in Antiquities.