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could go on living without the additional treatments that Days would buy, but you would grow old. Immortal, but senile.
No wonder they were hiding out. Joel was grabbing a sort of immortality, Chang was at least escaping the crash. Probably the less levelheaded were doing things like taking a space walk without a suit.
There must be millions of us, Kin thought. We complain about never eating a dish we haven’t eaten before and the colours slowly draining out of life. We wonder if the short-lifers live more vividly, and dread learning that they do, because we gave up the chance of children. It would be so unfair. As if a man has only a certain allocation of things like elation and delight and contentment, and the longer he lives the more they must be diluted.
But life is still sweet and death is just mystery. It is age we dread. Oh hell.
‘Did they look for him?’ she said.
‘Everywhere. We know he’s been to Earth, because all the Terminus probe records in the Spaceflight Museum have been wiped clean.’
‘Then we know nothing about him at all?’
‘Right. Find a bolthole, Kin.’ He gave a short laugh. ‘At least Company policy was right. Our worlds will last.’
‘One man can’t bring down a civilization,’ said Kin.
‘Show me where it says that’s a universal rule,’ he snapped, and then relaxed. ‘This cloak … really invisible?’
‘We-ell, if you looked directly, I remember things behind it being just slightly blurred. But you wouldn’t notice if you weren’t expecting it.’
‘Useful for old-fashioned espionage, maybe,’ mused Joel. ‘Very odd, though. I don’t think we would make one. You have to have a pretty high technology for that sort of thing, and in a high technology invisibility wouldn’t be a very great asset. So many other things would detect you.’
‘I wondered about that,’ said Kin.
‘Then all this about matter transmission – all the theories say it isn’t quite possible. The Wasbile double effect almost does it, the same way you can always build an almost-perpetual motion machine.’
The satellite at the Line’s end was a bright star ahead. Joel glanced down the controls.
‘I’d have liked to have met him,’ he said. ‘I read about the Terminus probes when I was a wee lad. Then once when I was on New Earth I went to see Rip Van LeVine’s farm. He was the one who landed on the planet and found—’
‘I know about him,’ said Kin.
If Joel had noted the tone in her voice – and surely he must have done – he didn’t show it. He went on cheerfully. ‘Couple years ago I saw this film they made of the T4 and T6. They’re the ones who are still travelling. There’s a charity on New Earth, every ten years or so they put a couple of ships on a flick-orbit to build up acceleration and—’
‘I know about that, too,’ said Kin.
The ships built up acceleration by diving into New Earth’s sun, then making an Elsewhere jump back a few million miles, then diving, then jumping … and finally popping out of nowhere a few hundred light years away at a light-squashing speed and a few miles from the probes.
Terminus Four hadn’t decelerated at turnover point, and a fault in Six’s primitive computer had guided it precisely to a star that wasn’t there. In the normal course of events the pilots would have decomposed centuries ago. Suspended animation had been pretty primitive then, too. But the ailing machinery had long ago been piecemeal replaced, and the visiting crews added refinements every decade or so.
It wasn’t cheap. It would have been a lot easier to thaw out the pilots and bring them back to a life of luxury. But Rip Van LeVine, the death-and-glory Terminus pilot who after a thousand-year voyage landed on a world settled by Elsewhere-driven ships three hundred years previously, had been a rich man when he suicided. Rich enough to employ good lawyers, and to insist that his trust do everything that could be done for the last two pilots – except wake