No doubt the Worldcomps chose well these sleepers to be potential colonists. Still, we were under orders that none of them should be awakened unless a colony was possible. Perhaps this trip would turn out to be just another disappointment, in which case the corpsicles were never to know that they had been on a journey twenty thousand parsecs and back.
“Let’s dock,” I said eagerly. “I want to get going.”
Alice smiled. “Always the impatient one. The deepspacer’s deepspacer. Give it a day or two, Joshua. We’ll be winging out of the nest soon enough.”
There was no point in reminding her that I had been latewaiting longer than she—indeed, longer than nearly any other human left alive. I kept my restlessness within and listened, in my head, to the music of the spheres.
3
In my time there were four ways known to cheat Einstein, and two ways to flat-out fool him. On our journey Pelenor used all of them. Our route was circuitous, from wormhole to quantumpoint to collapsar. By the time we arrived, I wondered how the deepprobe had ever gotten so far, let alone back, with its news.
The find was in the nearby minor galaxy, Sculptor. It took us twelve years, shiptime, to get there.
On the way we passed close to at least two hundred goodstars, glowing hotyellow, stable, and solitary. In every case there were signs of planets circling around. Several times we swept by close enough to catch glimpses, in our superscopes, of bright blue waterworks, circling invitingly like temptresses, forever out of reach.
In the old days we would have mapped these places, excitedly standing off just outside the dangerzone, studying the Earth-like worlds with our instruments. We would have charted them carefully, against the day when mankind finally learned how to do on purpose what Seeker had accomplished in ignorance.