Iterations and other stories (collection)

Bokket himself came to collect us. His spherical ship was tiny compared with ours, but it seemed to have about the same amount of habitable interior space; would the ignominies ever cease? Docking adapters had changed a lot in a thousand years, and he wasn’t able to get an airtight seal, so we had to transfer over to his ship in space suits. Once aboard, I was pleased to see we were still floating freely; it would have been too much if they’d had artificial gravity.

Bokket seemed a nice fellow—about my age, early thirties. Of course, maybe people looked youthful forever now; who knew how old he might actually be? I couldn’t really identify his ethnicity, either; he seemed to be rather a blend of traits. But he certainly was taken with Ling—his eyes popped out when she took off her helmet, revealing her heart-shaped face and long, black hair.

“Hello,” he said, smiling broadly.

Ling smiled back. “Hello. I’m Ling Woo, and this is Toby MacGregor, my co-captain.”

“Greetings,” I said, sticking out my hand.

Bokket looked at it, clearly not knowing precisely what to do. He extended his hand in a mirroring of my gesture, but didn’t touch me. I closed the gap and clasped his hand. He seemed surprised, but pleased.

“We’ll take you back to the station first,” he said. “Forgive us, but, well—you can’t go down to the planet’s surface yet; you’ll have to be quarantined. We’ve eliminated a lot of diseases, of course, since your time, and so we don’t vaccinate for them anymore. I’m willing to take the risk, but…”

I nodded. “That’s fine.”

He tipped his head slightly, as if he were preoccupied for a moment, then: “I’ve told the ship to take us back to Derluntin station. It’s in a polar orbit, about 200 kilometers above Soror; you’ll get some beautiful views of the planet, anyway.” He was grinning from ear to ear. “It’s wonderful to meet you people,” he said. “Like a page out of history.”

“If you knew about us,” I asked, after we’d settled in for the journey to the station, “why didn’t you pick us up earlier?”

Bokket cleared his throat. “We didn’t know about you.”

“But you called us by name: Pioneer Spirit.”

“Well, it is painted in letters three meters high across your hull. Our asteroid-watch system detected you. A lot of information from your time has been lost—I guess there was a lot of political upheaval then, no?—but we knew Earth had experimented with sleeper ships in the twenty-first century.”

We were getting close to the space station; it was a giant ring, spinning to simulate gravity. It might have taken us over a thousand years to do it, but humanity was finally building space stations the way God had always intended them to be.

And floating next to the space station was a beautiful spaceship, with a spindle-shaped silver hull and two sets of mutually perpendicular emerald-green delta wings. “It’s gorgeous,” I said.

Bokket nodded.

“How does it land, though? Tail-down?”

“It doesn’t land; it’s a starship.”

“Yes, but—”

“We use shuttles to go between it and the ground.”

“But if it can’t land,” asked Ling, “why is it streamlined? Just for esthetics?”

Bokket laughed, but it was a polite laugh. “It’s streamlined because it needs to be. There’s substantial length-contraction when flying at just below the speed of light; that means that the interstellar medium seems much denser. Although there’s only one baryon per cubic centimeter, they form what seems to be an appreciable atmosphere if you’re going fast enough.”

“And your ships are that fast?” asked Ling.

Bokket smiled. “Yes. They’re that fast.”

Ling shook her head. “We were crazy,” she said. “Crazy to undertake our journey.” She looked briefly at Bokket, but couldn’t meet his eyes. She turned her gaze down toward the floor. “You must think we’re incredibly foolish.”

Bokket’s eyes widened. He seemed at a loss for what to say. He looked at me, spreading his arms, as if appealing to me for support. But I just exhaled, letting air—and disappointment— vent from my body.

“You’re wrong,” said Bokket, at last. “You couldn’t be more wrong. We honor you.” He paused, waiting for Ling to look up again. She did, her eyebrows lifted questioningly. “If we have come farther than you,” said Bokket, “or have gone faster than you, it’s because we had your work to build on. Humans are here now because it’s easy for us to be here, because you and others blazed the trails.” He looked at me, then at Ling. “If we see farther,” he said, “it’s because we stand on the shoulders of giants.”

Later that day, Ling, Bokket, and I were walking along the gently curving floor of Derluntin station. We were confined to a limited part of one section; they’d let us down to the planet’s surface in another ten days, Bokket had said.

“There’s nothing for us here,” said Ling, hands in her pockets. “We’re freaks, anachronisms. Like somebody from the T’ang Dynasty showing up in our world.”

“Soror is wealthy,” said Bokket. “We can certainly support you and your passengers.”