Federations

“No,” said Ling. “I said face the dish the other way. I want to hear what’s coming from Soror.”

The computer actually sounded miffed. “The dish is facing toward Soror,” it said.

I looked at Ling, realization dawning. At the time we’d left Earth, we’d been so worried that humanity was about to snuff itself out, we hadn’t really stopped to consider what would happen if that didn’t occur. But with twelve hundred years, faster spaceships would doubtless have been developed. While the colonists aboard the Pioneer Spirit had slept, some dreaming at an indolent pace, other ships had zipped past them, arriving at Tau Ceti decades, if not centuries, earlier—long enough ago that they’d already built human cities on Soror.

• • •

“Damn it,” I said. “God damn it.” I shook my head, staring at the screen. The tortoise was supposed to win, not the hare.

“What do we do now?” asked Ling.

I sighed. “I suppose we should contact them.”

“We—ah, we might be from the wrong side.”

I grinned. “Well, we can’t both be from the wrong side. Besides, you heard the radio: Mandarin and English. Anyway, I can’t imagine that anyone cares about a war more than a thousand years in the past, and—”

“Excuse me,” said the ship’s computer. “Incoming audio message.”

I looked at Ling. She frowned, surprised. “Put it on,” I said.

“Pioneer Spirit, welcome! This is Jod Bokket, manager of the Derluntin space station, in orbit around Soror. Is there anyone awake on board?” It was a man’s voice, with an accent unlike anything I’d ever heard before.

Ling looked at me, to see if I was going to object, then she spoke up. “Computer, send a reply.” The computer bleeped to signal that the channel was open. “This is Dr. Ling Woo, co-captain of the Pioneer Spirit. Two of us have revived; there are forty-eight more still in cryofreeze.”

“Well, look,” said Bokket’s voice, “it’ll be days at the rate you’re going before you get here. How about if we send a ship to bring you two to Derluntin? We can have someone there to pick you up in about an hour.”

“They really like to rub it in, don’t they?” I grumbled.

“What was that?” said Bokket. “We couldn’t quite make it out.”

Ling and I consulted with facial expressions, then agreed. “Sure,” said Ling. “We’ll be waiting.”

“Not for long,” said Bokket, and the speaker went dead.

• • •

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.”