As the asteroid rotated into the night, and the canopy darkened overhead, Sam returned to the temporary quarters he shared with Eichra Oren, thinking about his unproductive interview with Aelbraugh Pritsch and of one or two similar conversations that had followed it.
Chief of Security Tl*m*nch*l was one of the sapient crustaceans Soviet Americans called "giant bugs with guns." Asked what he knew of the nautiloids' purpose on 5023 Eris, he had expressed a belief that, after a hiatus lasting fifteen thousand years, the Elders were again seeking other alternate-world beings. On the other limb, Clym Pucras, the machine-tool designer that Eichra Oren had heard in a professional capacity, argued that if the mission were seeking anything, it was traces of a vanished species of sapients even older than the Elders, now extinct in all known versions of the Solar System. Neither being had offered much in the way of evidence to support his position.
At the moment, Sam was wondering whether Eichra Oren had given him this unproductive assignment simply to keep him out from underfoot with regard to Toya. They would soon leave this impersonal apartment, he thought, and not a moment too soon. He wondered whether Eichra Oren would be coming home tonight. The dog was too proudor he wasn't sure whatto contact the man and ask. When not actively assisting his human companion, he often succumbed to periods of lonely meditation. It appeared he might have another night of it ahead of him to look forward to.
"Hello, Sam."
Someone was waiting at the door when he arrived. "Hello, Dr. Nguyen. Eichra Oren isn't here right now, and I don't know when he'll be back." Sam liked her. She was small and soft and golden-brown. Despite a lingering hint of disinfectant perceptible only to his canine senses, she always smelled good. He waited for her reply before going inside.
"That's all right, Sam. It's you I wanted to see, anyway. I wish you'd call me Rosalind. May I come in, please?"
"Follow me." He was surprised and pleased. Scutigera's wry observation was correct to an extent. He preferred the conversation and company of human females to that of his own kind, although it had never gone further than that and never would, despite the centipede's innuendo. "Can I fix you something to drink?"
She was looking around, but it didn't take long because there wasn't much to see. "In a little while, perhaps. There's something I'd like to ask you about first, if you don't mind."
Another thing Sam liked about her was that she didn't ask, as many of her fellow humans had already, how he could accomplish something like fixing her a drink when he didn't have any hands. "I will if I can. Please find a chair." He hopped onto a corner of the bed, lay down on his belly, and crossed one paw over the other. "What's all this aboutRosalind?"
Across the little room she smiled, but her tone was grim and there was no relaxation in her posture. "Sam, there's a rumor going around about Sergeant Pulaski, that she's been given a special assignment by the KGB. You probably remember that EstrellitaMajor Reille y Sanchezwas the last one to be given such an assignment. You're aware of what happened to her."
He nodded. "You worry that the same thing might happen to Toya?"
She bit her lip and nodded. "There's no end to the surprises on this asteroid. Startling, mind-altering discoveries. Why most of them should center on the only human among the nautiloids is more than I can"
"You're afraid that, like her predecessor, Toya may make the wrong discoveries about Eichra Oren? That isn't what killed Estrellita, Rosalind, although I must admit that the private life and personal statistics of a p'Nan debt assessoror of any human being if you ask me, no offenseare more bizarre the more you learn about them. Somehow I feel that isn't what you're getting at."
"It could be." She shook her head, contradicting herself. "Most of his friends and clients are such alien creatures. Like that giant centipede"
"I was just thinking of Scutigera. And don't forget Sam the Wonderdog."
She went on as if she hadn't heard him, locking her fingers together and staring at the floor. "On the other hand, my life among sapients of only one species must seem narrow and dull to him. Until I began meeting his friends, this hadn't occurred to me," she concluded glumly. "And no, I'm not forgetting Sam the Wonderdog. It's icing on the cake that his best friend and assistant happens to be a cybernetically augmented sapient canine."
"Best friend and assistant. Watson to his Holmes, eh what? Let me tell you something about thatalthough I thought this was about Toyabut first I'd better fix you that drink I promised. What'll you have?"
"Nothing alcoholic, thanks." She smiled. "This visit is technically professional, and I'm on call."
"Nothing alcoholic coming up!" He nodded at a wall panel which melted away to reveal a shelf of glasses beneath a row of dispensers. A glass slid from one nozzle to another, filling itself with a brown, foamy liquid. The niche was closer to Rosalind than Sam. She rose and took the glass before the wall went solid and sat down again.
She drank, then looked up. "Why this isSam, the formula for this is supposed to be a trade secret. How"
"Another advantage," he grinned, "of being able to crack any code. I was about to tell you that my kind were intended by the Elders as nothing more than remote-controlled conveniences. I'm supposed to serve Eichra Oren the same way Mister Thoggosh's detachable limb serves him. But somewhere, the nautiloids' biological engineers made a mistake. I'm much more than thatall of my kind areboth to myself and my `master.' "
"I can see that." She took another sip. "What do you mean, specifically?"
Sam gave it thought. "Well, I learned recently from you Americans about `Seeing Eye dogs' for the blind."
Rosalind nodded. "A better analogy than you know, Sam." She hesitated, then: "You may have to be Eichra Oren's `thinking-brain dog' for a while. He seems to be having trouble in that department himself lately."
"Bringing us to the purpose of this conversation?" He chuckled. "I can't say I haven't been worried about him, although if I were truly man's best friend . . . I'll settle for being his partner. It isn't always easy. In fact, I often find myself wondering . . ."
There was a long, empty silence.
"Wondering what?" Rosalind asked.
"Suppose the Elders had kept searching fifteen thousand years ago, through the infinite worlds of probability. Mightn't they have found some alternative reality in which the dogs grew hands, walked erect, and invented technology so they'd have more time to spend wallowing in self-doubt? You know, all of the things that make you human?"
She laughed openly and honestly. He liked the sound of it. "Sam, this is about you, isn't it? You must know that you're liked simply for yourself. That's especially true of us Americans who don't know anything about any role you're supposed to play in nautiloid society. It doesn't matter to me anyway, and I don't think any of us see you as a mere appendage, to Eichra Oren or anybody else. Besides, in that other universe you're talking about, you might not even recognize the evolutionary result as a dog. They might not recognize you. To those canine somethings somewhere, you'd be like a . . ."
"Like a chimp to your people? Somehow that fails to comfort me."
She raised her eyebrows. "Is that what it was supposed to do? I thought I came to ask you questions. Seriously, I'm curious about all sorts of things. For example, what's it like to be tied permanently into a sort of mental internet?"
He had to think for a moment before he realized what she was getting at. "You mean the Elders' implant network?"
"Yes, to me it's a real wonder, given that item of technology, that individualism has managed to survive at all among the nautiloids. I'd have expected it to be swept away by all that brain-penetrating machinery."
"Well, implants are analogous to something the Elders were born with and had several hundred million years to get used to. The Elder who invented what you'd call the Faraday cageand mental privacyis revered as the greatest . . . nautiloiditarian . . . who ever lived, sort of a combination of Thomas Edison and Albert Schweitzer. And even if what you say about the danger to individualism were true, there was no one with the political power to do any sweeping away. It wouldn't be the same on your world, would it?"
"There we agree. The fact is, nothing is the same here. Just as an example, and strangest of the strange: Sam, that burden which has rested heaviest on human shoulders throughout all recorded and inferred history has no influence whatever on you, or Eichra Oren, or any of your associates."
He cocked his head. "Now you've lost me."
"I know I have." She grinned and he knew that she'd been struck all over again by the contrast between their conversation and the kind of being she was having it with. "That's my point. And whatever else we may agree on, it makes for a fundamental difference between us. We might as well be from different species, people like Eichra Oren and myself. It's like a chronic debtor trying to imagine the world from the viewpoint of someone who has never had to worry about money."
"Well it's true that we're a wealthy culture, but"
She shook her head vehemently. "I'm not talking about wealthor I am, but not about money. Sam, in my experiencemy people's experiencemen and women are confronted from their first adult thought, maybe even their first waking moment, with the inevitable prospect of aging and death. I often heard my father lament that, just as he was beginning to acquire some skill at living his life, it was beginning to end. And as it happened, he died prematurely, even for someone of his time and place, at the age of fifty-nine."
"I'm sorry." Sam didn't know what else to say.
She looked down at her hands. "So was he. He hated it. No amount of talk about what's natural or normal ever made him hate it less. I feel the same way. It may be natural, but it doesn't feel right. I think that's why I became a doctor. Nevertheless, I've always lived with the fact that I, too, will grow old, get wrinkled, become feeble, and eventually die." She looked up at him. "Species associated with the nautiloids, however, everybody in the category `Appropriated Persons,' enjoy extraordinarily long lives, don't they?"
Sam nodded. "Certainly by your standards. It was part of the Great Restitution the Elders made for having removed them from their native environments."
"That much I know. There were other benefits: cerebro-cortical implants, useful companions like yourself, full participation in nautiloid society, whatever that means. Somehow, knowing Mister Thoggosh, I doubt it has anything to do with voting. I'm certain it has nothing to do with taxes. But" Her expression changed. Suddenly she was a small child wanting answers. "How long do they live, Sam? Until now, I haven't been able to find out."
"Probably because nobody knows."
She frowned, puzzled. "How can that be?"
"Well . . ." Weary of the position he was in, Sam slid onto the floor, stretched, then crossed the room. To Rosalind's left was a small table, and, beside that, another chair. He hopped onto it and sat. She turned to face him, both hands on the left arm of her chair. "The Antarctican disaster occurred fifteen thousand years ago, when the Earth's magnetic poles shifted naturally, as they do from time to time, disrupting the planet's climate. A civilization was buried beneath a fall of permanent snow. Soon that snow became three kilometers of glacial ice which still cover the continent in our time."
She was impatient. "I've heard this. What does it have to do with"
"I'm getting to it, Doctor. Antarctican culture was cut off almost at the initial moment of its greatest achievements"
She sat back, relaxing for the first time since she'd entered the room. "I've been told it was about where England was at the time of Napoleon."
"Seems about right," Sam agreed. "They had fair maps, good navigation, very good ships for all that they were wood-built and wind-powered. When the climate changed, some Antarcticans took to these sophisticated sailboats and escaped, to the place you call India. But a shipload was `collected' by the Elders during one of their remote surveys." He paused, trying to think of how to phrase the next idea. "That happened fifteen millennia ago, long before the present civilization on Earth. But there are a few human beings still alivein the Elders' universewho personally remember it."
"What?" Rosalind sat up and stared at him.
"Eneri Relda, Eichra Oren's mother, for one, and sort of a living legend. She was a girl of seventeen or eighteen at the time, and still looks about that age."
Rosalind sat back again, shut her eyes, and marveled, "You're telling me that she's older than the sequoias, older than the bristlecones . . ."
"That's what I'm telling you. She's older than the pyramids, the tablets of Sumeria, and the legend of Gilgamish. She's three times as old as the entire length of recorded human history in your worldwhich, I suspect, says more about recorded human history than it does about Eneri Relda."
Rosalind was visibly stunned, but Sam knew she had the advantage of the best general scientific education her rather narrow and impoverished culture was capable of providing. He made some comment to that effect. Until now, she answered, she'd concentrated mostly on fields related to space travelproblems of freefall, acceleration, decompression, and radiation.
"Still, I have enough general biology to know there's no reason why the small handful of degenerative diseases we collectively refer to as `aging' should forever remain incurable. Every one of them was arrested or slowed in lab animals in the twentieth century." She shrugged. "Having an imagination better than my education, I confess that I believe it, in part, simply because I want to."
"Exactly as Eichra Oren might have predicted." Sam sighed. Life, apparently, had never been so miserable for Rosalind Nguyen that she was unwilling to extend it. Maybe there was hope for these people, after all.
Rosalind blinked at him. "How's that?"
"I was just thinking out loud."
"Then so will I. Sam, I wonder what living a hundred and fifty centuries feels like. Does time continue to pass more quickly as you grow older? Do the decades seem to flee like weeks for someone fifteen thousand years old? Are the centuries beginning to seem like nothing more than years to Eneri Relda?"
"It isn't the kind of thing one asks, Rosalind. Maybe time reaches some sort of cruising speed and levels off, I don't know. I can tell you that Eneri Relda is unusual in another respectit's why I brought her up in the first place. The average human living among the Elders has an indefinite theoretical lifespan. But in practical terms, that means a considerably shorter life expectancy than hers, although it hasn't anything to do with aging or disease, but with statistics."
"Oh?"
"Sure. People at home run the usual gamut from adventurers and athletes to what you call `couch potatoes.' They have the technology to eradicate biological maladies. Even relatively serious injuries can be dealt with by nautiloid science. But sooner or later almost everyone among the Elders, including the Elders themselves, dies violently, simply because unpredictable catastrophes of one kind or another are the only thing left to die from."
Rosalind shuddered and wrapped her arms about herself. "What a prospect to look forward to. I wonder how they live with it."
"You should ask," Sam grinned, "whether the inevitable prospect of violent death is too much to pay for prolonged life."
She blinked. "I find that easy to answer, Sam. If that's the price, it's cheap. How long could I expect to live, statistically?"
He reached up to scratch an ear. "A thousand years, give or take."
"A thousand years." She set her mouth. "And Eichra Oren?"
"I thought you'd never ask. He's a mere youngster, Rosalind. On his last birthday, as I recall, he was a mere five hundred and forty-two years old."