"I am dying."
The words echoed through the empty halls of the ship unheard. The solitary person on board rolled over in his bed field and continued to sleep.
The disembodied voice repeated itself.
"Sowl, I am dying."
This time, the words penetrated. The man grunted, and kept on snoring, but his consciousness had moved closer to the awakening state. The bed, sensing this change, moved into its arousal cycle.
Sowl awoke to feel his body tingling pleasantly in the bed field. He felt refreshed. Glancing at the chrono at the far end of the bed, he saw that he had only been asleep for a week. Another 170 light years, he thought, out of thousands.
Freeing himself from the bed field, he hung in mid air and stretched. He suddenly felt very thirsty. The characteristic post-sleep hunger would come later.
"Nernal, get me some chaka, please," he said, as he drifted over to the mirror which was inset in the far wall of his cabin, and proceeded to inspect his hairless face.
"Sowl, I am dying," Nernal repeated, for the third time.
"Really?" Sowl said, only half listening, as he prepared to enter the conditioner for a wash and some exercise.
"You are not listening to me."
Sowl was by this time in the conditioner, but when he tried to start it, nothing happened. He sighed, and drifted back into the cabin. His conditioning would have to wait until Nernal had his say.
"You were saying?" he asked, a note of impatience in his voice.
"I am dying."
Sowl finally heard him.
"You're what?"
"Dying."
"I don't understand," his tone mirroring his statement.
"I am gradually losing my functions, and the rate of loss is accelerating. Soon I will have lost all of them, and then I shall be dead."
"What are you talking about? You're a sentient being!" Sowl exclaimed, unbelieving. Death was a characteristic of lesser species, or ancient civilisations, when they were unable to adapt to changing environmental conditions, or when their reproductive time had ended. Advanced beings did not die...unless they wanted to.
"You don't want to die, do you, Nernal?" he asked uneasily.
"No. I am not enjoying the experience."
"Then stop it!"
"You do not understand, Sowl. I am unable to stop the process."
"But you're a machine!"
"There would appear to be limits to even a machine's capabilities, Sowl, and it looks like I have reached one of them," the disembodied voice answered.
"But why are your functions failing?" Sowl asked shakily, all thoughts of the conditioner passing from his mind.
Nernal paused a moment before answering.
"I am an old machine, even by the standards of our people. I suppose I am doing what my ancient predecessors would call 'wearing out'."
Sowl still did not understand.
"Machines don't wear out, anymore than people do!" he said in an obstinate voice.
"Untrue. People wear out, but you have the ability to regenerate your work parts. I do not."
"You were never designed to wear out," Sowl argued plaintively.
"Wearing out is not something which is designed into a unit, Sowl," the computer said tenderly. "Look at it another way: humans were never designed to be immortal; but you are."
"But..." Sowl said again, and his voice trailed off. A machine dying...it was unthinkable, and, his mind told him, impossible. But after all that he had seen in his long life, perhaps it was not improbable. Here was a machine which said it was dying - and it was his machine. His Nernal: the computer inherited by him from his father, dead in a galaxy fifty two million light years distant and eight thousand years past. Nernal had been his companion and friend through all of the long centuries of his search - and a priceless tool as well.
He felt his emotions well up as these thoughts crossed his mind and he forced himself to set them aside. No emotions now. He had to view this as just another technical problem.
Leaving his cabin, he propelled himself up the core tube to the main control room of the ship. The readouts and screen displayed showed normal - as always - and he paid them scant attention. Instead, he went over to the small panel in the corner which contained Nernal, and on a thought command the computer popped out of its slot and into his hand.
The computer was but a wafer thin disk, some eight centimetres in diameter. Its normal colour was a rich, metallic blue, but now it had turned rust red...the colour of dried blood.
Upon seeing this change in Nernal, Sowl felt the unfamiliar feeling of panic well up inside of him.
"Tell me again what is happening," he commanded, trying with only limited success to keep the tremor out of his voice. Only now was he realising what Nernal had meant when he had spoken of dying.
"My facilities are failing," Nernal replied through a nearby speaker. "My deepest memory is already gone...I can no longer remember events more than ten thousand years past. My transmuter control is fading, and I feel my logic and computing centres weakening. Soon I will be unable to control the ship."
"You cannot repair yourself?"
"No."
"Could I?"
"No. My internal parts are subatomic in size. Since I was never intended to break down, my designers never made any provisions for repairs."
"That was one thing which they did not anticipate."
"No. They designed my kind in anticipation of everything but the greatest defect of all," Nernal paused. "But you are not dying, Sowl. What is to happen to you?"
For the first time, the man thought of his own predicament, and what the loss of Nernal might do to it. Here he was, in a small ship whose very workings he did not understand, midway across the Euroch Gap: the zone of virtually empty space separating two spiral arms of this galaxy, the Milky Way. Behind them was the Sagittarius Arm and the outermost stars of the Second Ptarton Empire. Before them was the Orion Arm: wild, empty and no longer civilised. And somewhere in the Orion Arm was the star system of Sol and the planet Terra: his destination.
Sowl and Nernal had been searching for Terra for nearly six thousand years. The birthplace and cradle of man. To most of the citizens of the home universe even the legend of its existence had been lost in the shadows of the past, and so it had been once for Sowl. To the long sundered peoples of the other universes once colonised by man, even the dead legends never filtered down.
Sowl was nearly nine thousand years old, but since he was immortal he looked no more than twenty-five. Nernal was at least three times older than Sowl, a product of the old Federation of Universes at the apex of its computer technology. Back in those days everyone had owned a small personal cyber/transmuter. Drawing on the potential energy difference between universes and the contact zones which separated them for energy, they were able to create the necessities and luxuries of living, as well as entertain and think for their owners. Even now, many people still owned and depended on them. For Sowl, Nernal was essential. Like his father before him, he was a scientist in the only science which still remained in this, the year 77,800 AD: history. The three of them had worked together in the days of Sowl's youth, on the planet of his birth, Zatlothil, in the Virgo Cluster. Sowl and Nernal had survived when the ancient pre-Golden Age wall had collapsed into their digs, but his father had not.
Uncovered by the falling wall, though, had been many old memory books, sealed and intact. In them, Sowl had read of the legends of Terra: the mythical world from which all of the hominids of the universes had originally come. A blue and white water world containing the only environment in the multiverse which was completely suited to humans. A planet teeming with other creatures, gentle and friendly. The books were full of stories of Terra, and they fascinated him. Soon after, he vowed to make the search for this lost eden his life's work.
During those first centuries it looked indeed like the search would take a lifetime...however long that was. The trail was unbelievably old, and well obscured. At the beginning all that he could be sure of was that it was in this universe. Through countless digs, museums, libraries and interviews with Elders - who might have heard rumours of the homeworld in their ancient youth - he and Nernal went, before finally uncovering a clue that gave them the tentative location of Sol. It lay somewhere in the Local Group of Galaxies.
As their luck would have it, the Local Group was a subcluster of the Virgo Cloud, and was still accessible by intercosmic blink. The trip across the tens of millions of light years took zero time, but Sowl was in recovery stasis for a month after, recovering from the journey.
But he had made it. He was in Andromeda: the largest member of the thirty-nine galaxy group. Still, he had a long search before him: even the smallest of the galaxies contained over a million stars, any one of which could be Sol.
Finally, it was the name of Sol's galaxy which provided him with the next important clue as to Terra's location. After a millennia of research had produced nothing, he sat at his desk one evening in a dimly lit room on a dark planet, staring at a list of the names of the members of this cluster. He had made it up centuries earlier, and had spent much time since then pondering those names...Andromeda, Sculptor, Milky Way, Maffei I...
Even after all that time, they conveyed nothing to him which could aid him in his quest. In frustration, he had stood up and walked outside into the darkness.
Though a heavily populated planet, this world had managed to hide that fact gracefully. As he stood on the stone balcony breathing in the cool crisp air, it was not difficult to imagine that he was already back on Terra. The garden below him was lost in shadows, while the surrounding hillsides were bathed in starlight. Those same hills hid a large city to the north, and also the nearest of the environmental control stations which kept this world livable. The air was completely calm, everything quiet. He felt alone, and he let his imagination carry him back to Terra. Looking up, he saw thousands of stars, and the Andromeda galaxy itself, arcing across the sky. He imagined himself to be a citizen of some ancient Terran empire, looking up at the stars on a cool autumn night. What would such a primitive think, upon beholding such a glowing path curving across the heavens?
Then, it hit him.
Path...way.
Milky Way.
And he knew. The ancients who had named that galaxy the Milky Way had been viewing from the inside, as he was seeing the Andromeda system now.
Sol lay in the Milk Way.
Within a year, Nernal and Sowl had blinked across the 2,300,000 light years to the heart of the Milky Way. This time, he spent a year recovering from the trip. Few people made trips between galaxies via the blink, now, he had thought as he had lain in stasis, but he knew that such travel had once been commonplace. How, had they taken the strain of the blink, back in those days?
Now, as he held the dying Nernal in his hand, it occurred to him that maybe the blink had not always been such a mind and body wrenching way to travel, eons ago. Perhaps it, too, like the computer, had been wearing out. A decade after they had arrived in the Milky Way all blink service had ended, due to a lack of demand, supposedly.
If Sowl wished to return to his home galaxy on the far side of the Virgo Cluster now, it would require a voyage by ship of many, many years. And even departing ships were few now, and getting fewer. People did not travel like they used to. Nowadays, most preferred to stay home, and exist.
How long had this situation been developing for, he wondered? Since long before his birth, he realised. Through all of the millennia of his life, while his thoughts and attention had been buried in the past, the vast technological civilisation which man and his allies had built had been falling. A part of his consciousness had been aware of this, but the present had never been his concern.
Now, it all came home to him.
Forty thousand years before, mankind and its allied species had built an empire which had spanned a trillion galaxies in a dozen universes. But now, even man's home galaxy was proving to be too large for the husk of a civilisation which remained.
In the core of the Milky Way, where the Second Ptarton Empire withered, Nernal and Sowl continued their quest. After uncounted years of searching through ancient star catalogues and charts, they had at last found the location of Sol. It was but a minor yellow star out in one of the spiral arms, midway between the core and the edge of the galaxy.
Their task was almost done. Sowl and Nernal journeyed out to Euracha, the last and outermost toehold of the Empire on the Euroch Gap, and there, Nernal created a small, antigrav-propelled ship for the last leg.
Now, the creator of the ship was dying.
"Nernal," Sowl said, as another disquieting thought hit him, "How is the ship?"
"Deteriorating, too," the computer answered, and Sowl thought he heard a slight hesitation in his voice. "Apparently the product of a flawed memory is flawed as well."
"Will it get me to Sol?"
"You will continue our quest after I am gone? I am glad, but I doubt if the ship will last the trip at this velocity."
"How about back to Euracha?"
"The chances are better, but still low."
Sowl sighed, and dropped Nernal back into his slot. For the first time in his long life, he felt that his death was approaching.
"Send an SOS to Euracha," he ordered, "See if they can send out a ship to rescue us."
"The answer is negative...Sowl," Nernal replied a few minutes later. "The Empire is no longer responsible for citizens who travel outside of its boundaries."
That was it. Sowl collapsed into a chair and closed his eyes. This was where his life would at last end, it seemed.
"Sowl...all is not...lost...for you...yet," Nernal said haltingly. The decay had reached his speech centre. "I predict that if you...reduce the ship's velocity to...lightspeed...you should still...have a better than ninety five...percent chance of reaching Sol...or a nearly one hundred percent...chance of safely returning to Euracha."
Sowl opened his eyes.
"What is our distance from Sol?"
"I no longer...know."
The man raised himself from the chair and floated slowly over to the helm control readouts. Scanning the unfamiliar displays, he found the one he sought.
"Over 3,500 light years..." he muttered, and for the first time he grasped the distance involved. At lightspeed it would take him three and a half millennia to reach Sol.
He saw another readout: their distance from Euracha: 1,700 light years.
"What...are...you...going...to...do..?"
Sowl did not answer right away. He looked up and into the tridee screen. It showed the stars ahead: few of them for the next fifteen hundred light years, and then the millions in the hazy glowing band of the Orion Arm. Ahead lay Sol, and Terra. Behind them, much closer, was Euracha and the Empire. But he knew now that there was nothing to go back for. Like Nernal, the Empire was dying at last. He felt no desire to die with it.
His future lay ahead, in the Orion Arm.
"I'll continue on to Terra."
The next time Sowl awoke, 3,533 years had passed.
The wakening sequence took much longer to work this time, and even when he was at last fully conscious he still felt groggy. It was by far the longest period of time that he had ever slept. His weakened muscles ached when he stood up and regarded himself in the mirror. Of course he looked no older; just thin and worn.
Before he could do anything else, he had to go to the galley and eat. He was ravenous and his tissues cried for moisture.
A full stomach and many cups of chaka later, Sowl went up to the bridge.
At first glance, all was as it had been, millennia ago. Then he noticed the control panels, where amber lights had replaced the green ones. The tridee was on, but the image had degraded noticeably. Centred in the field of stars it showed gleamed a bright yellow sun.
Sol.
He was almost there.
He felt elated, and the last of the grogginess left him. He went over to the helm and scanned the main readouts:
Distance from gravitational boundary: 1.1 light hours
Velocity (rounded): 1C
Star type: G2v
Planets: 10 Habitable: 3 plus 4 moons
Engine and drive status: Yellow: gravitator overheating
Life support system status: Yellow: system overloading
He looked over the other displays. The ship was deteriorating, but hopefully it would hold together through the landing. Then, a thought hit him. Through all his years of space travel he had never actually piloted a ship, let alone landed one. He had always left that up to Nernal. While the ship's automatics could handle most of the maneuvers he would still be required to make the final site selection and touchdown.
He had not a clue as to how to go about it.
Sowl looked over at Nernal's panel and then floated over to it. Sitting atop it was Nernal: his disk now a cold grey in colour. Sowl did not touch it. He suddenly realised his aloneness and yearned to hear another voice. Switching on the black wave receiver over Nernal's slot, he scanned the superlight frequencies for a broadcast. Where once the band had been full of voices - even in his time - now there was only dead silence. During the years of his sleep, man's last Empire in the Milky Way had fallen, taking humanity with it.
For all he knew, Sowl may be the last human alive. And he would soon be dead, too, if he did not figure out how to operate this ship. With tears filling his eyes he was about to turn away, when he noticed something else, sitting down by the transmuter unit.
He took it up, and recognised it immediately to be a book of the ancient type. On its hard, cloth bound cover he read the title:
Pilot's Manual
It was the computer's last gift to its master.
Sowl took the book and sat down. The bindings crackled as he opened it. The pages were yellowed and fragile, but not about to go to dust yet.
A half hour passed as Sowl read through the book. The ship was still moving at just under the speed of light, and Sowl knew that if he tried to enter Sol's gravitational sink at this velocity, they would be hurled out of this universe. Within the confines of a star system Einstein's Laws still held, forbidding faster than lightspeed travel.
He finally found the section he was searching for, and entered the commands into the helm control. They were quite straightforward, really. The hard part would come later. Within fifteen minutes the ship had decelerated below 0.9C.
Twenty one minutes after that, the ship had crossed the boundary of the Solar system and entered interplanetary space. The hours passed, as Sowl slowly leafed through the volume. At last he put the book down and inspected the readouts again. The ship was just inside the orbit of the largest planet, Jupiter. Terra, or Earth, the second of the three habitable worlds and the third one out from the Sun, was still forty four light minutes away.
Up until this point the ship had been locked onto a course for the star Sol, but now it was time to alter her trajectory for Terra.
Sowl entered the numeric commands into the helm slowly, making many mistakes as he went along, which then had to be corrected. Then, the lateral gravitators activated for a few seconds and Sol moved out of the centre of the viewer's field, to be replaced by a blue-white, starlike object: Terra.
Thirty minutes later he activated the main drive and the ship slowed to one tenth lightspeed. Terra was much closer, now, but still unresolved. Turning to the communications again, Sowl this time activated the short range radio in hopes of picking up a transmission from the planet ahead. All that he heard was the hiss of static. If a civilisation still existed on Terra then it must be low on the technological scale, he realised without surprise.
Over the next thirty eight minutes he watched the point of light that was Terra grow into a small crescent and then into a full sized planet, with its smaller moon hanging in space nearby. At last he activated the antigrav drive again and the little ship slid into a close orbit about the cloud shrouded world. Then, he settled down to search for a site to make his first and last landing.
He could hardly believe that below him at last was the object of his thousands of years of searching. The ancient writings referred to this world using a term which could be translated as either cradle of humanity, or its playpen. Which had it been? he wondered. Perhaps both. Regardless, now one man had returned to his nursery. What would he find? One small, insignificant planet out of the near infinite total which humanity had visited during its brief spell of dominance in this multiverse. Would this world provide Sowl with enough interests to last through the eternity of his lifetime? Or would he soon grow weary of Terra and yearn for the freedom of space again? These thoughts were new to him: never before had he contemplated what he would do once his quest for Terra was completed. And now, he realised, these thoughts had come too late. This ship would never take to space again after it had made its landing; therefore, neither would he - unless he found another ship, which he thought extremely unlikely on this world. He would become like the ancient folk who had lived before space flight: a prisoner on Terra.
But what a prison it would be. Looking down at the surface of the planet through the wisps of white clouds he saw a near infinity of landscapes. Vast oceans and smaller seas; mountains, forests, plains, deserts...and ice. For a moment he felt uneasy. The ancient writings had all described Terra as a veritable Eden, but as far as he knew Edens did not contain ice...for that implied cold. Perhaps the world below was not the warm and sunny paradise he had thought it to be...not in its entirety, anyway. Still, most of the planet was free of ice and looked mild enough.
But wherever he looked, he saw no sign of civilisation.
For some reason this did not disturb him.
At last he selected for his landing site a forest in the eastern part of one of the northerly continents. Located midway between the pole and the equator, he hoped that the climate would be mild.
An hour later, after programming the automatics for the last time, he began his descent.
Slowly, the world rose up at him as the drives hummed and the ship decelerated. The first flames streaked over the all protecting energy shields as the craft entered the atmosphere. Soon, the vessel was engulfed in fire: a bright meteor streaking across Earths night sky.
Sowl was perspiring. The temperature in the control cabin was rising and he was nervous. The displays before him did not show good news. The shields were down to 40% efficiency and the hull was heating up. Inside, the overworked life support system was unable to cope with the frictional heat from outside. Sowl felt the air getting stuffy.
Once again, he felt that his own death was near, and panic nearly took him. His saviour was the flashing green light on the helm panel, telling him that the drives were about to come up to full power. Though the ship was still under automatic control he hit the pressure point anyway, and for a nanosecond the gravitators screamed. The ships downward velocity fell to near zero, the flames outside died away and he could see again.
Above and below, all about him, were fluffy white clouds. Through breaks in them he saw that thousands of meters beneath the ship was the main forest canopy. The terrain was hilly and many of the valleys below were still in misty shadow, for at this point on Terra, Sol had just risen. Here and there, winding through the valleys his eyes caught the glint of water. Looking farther off to the west he saw a range of low, hazy mountains. To the east was the blue ocean.
Drawing his eyes away from the screen, Sowl turned back to the controls. The ship was still descending, much slower now, stern first. The most critical part of the entry still lay ahead and he had to get it over with fast, for the air was becoming more and more difficult to breathe.
With the open manual on his lap, Sowl manipulated the helm with growing confidence. The ship dropped faster. At an altitude of about two thousand meters he levelled off and took a close up look at the terrain below.
The forest was not continuous, he saw: there were numerous clearings and meadows of tall grasses in the valleys. He selected one of these meadows as his landing site, and the ship dropped earthwards again.
Breathing heavily, both from excitement and oxygen starvation, he at last saw the helm instruments indicate contact between the shields and the surface. As their strength was eased down a soft shudder ran through the ship and it settled onto terra firma.
Sowl shut down the antigrav drive, which had been running continuously for over 3,500 years, never to restart it again. The ship was silent, but for him.
Gasping, he unseated himself and drifted out of the control room in zero gravity. Moments later, he held himself before the exit hatch door, still sealed. He pressed the stud on the bulkhead to his right and the door shimmered out of existence. Fresh, moist, pine scented air floated into the ship and Sowl could breathe again. Floating a centimetre off the deck in the hatchway, some six meters above the ground, he looked out.
The ship had landed on one side of a broad clearing. It was still early morning and clouds obscured the sun. In the middle of the clearing was a swampy pond, still mist shrouded with tall grass and rushes growing around its edges. Lining the clearing on all side stood row upon row of tall, dark trees, retreating in uncounted ranks in all directions up the flanks of the low hills which surrounded the landing site. Everything was still, and silent, and dim.
Sowl shivered in the chilly, damp air.
Then, the clouds broke and the sun shone down over the hilltops. It was springtime. The mist which covered the pond surface was dissipating and Sowl now saw that the water was dappled with water lilies. On the far shore stood a deer, head bowed, taking delicate sips of water. Somewhere in the trees nearby a robin broke into song.
Warmed by the sun, Sowl could not help but smile. Activating the energy lift, he descended to ground level and Terra's gravity took him. Above him, the exit hatch rematerialised.
Taking no notice, he breathed deeply again and walked off into the forest.
He was home at last.