The Far Shore of Time

If I had had any uncertainty about where we were, the sight of that night sky removed it. My dearly beloved astronomy expert, Pat, had suspected that the prison planet we were on was in the middle of a globular cluster which, she said, was a collection of maybe thousands of stars crowded so close together that the whole clutter of them was bound by each other’s gravity, sailing around in complex orbits and all very, very near all the rest. There were certainly hundreds in that overhead night sky that were very near to us: giant brilliant lightbulbs hanging in the heavens, blue and red and yellow and white and all the shades in between. At least a dozen of them were as bright as the Moon from Earth, and a couple so incredibly bright that I squinted when I looked at them. In one corner of the sky there was a cobwebby film of white, brighter than the Milky Way. It wasn’t anything like the Milky Way, though, according to Pat. The Milky Way was made up of millions and billions of individual stars, so distant that their light smeared together into a luminous blur. This stuff, she thought, was masses of gas and plasma that some of the stars were stealing from each other.

Pat had had something else to say about this display. According to her, in a globular cluster novas and supernovas might be relatively common, and when a star exploded in one of those ways it was likely to release floods of seriously damaging radiation, with very bad results for any living thing nearby.

When I said something about that to Pirraghiz, she said, “Of course that is so, Dannerman. Showers of deadly radiation are quite frequent. That is why the Horch restored the protective shield over this planet as soon as they finished occupying the base. It was down for only a few days, but in that time many persons of many species died from it.” Then she touched my throat with one of her lesser arms and frowned. “You are being too active for your first time out. Come back. You can eat, and then you should rest some more. There will be plenty of time to explore.”

I didn’t actually need to do a lot of exploring. I already knew this place very well.

Before we escaped back to Earth-I mean, before the ones of us that did successfully escape did-we had spent a lot of time here. It was a prison, or zoo, where the Beloved Leaders kept a few samples of the sentient races they had met-and, often, exterminated. We lived in the yurts, but we didn’t build them. Some others had lived here before us and, we guessed, died here too, because all that remained of them was their works.

Now the compound belonged to the liberated Docs, or at least to the thirty or so surviving ones that had managed to escape being killed in the fighting. The Docs looked a lot different now. The ones I had been used to seeing were silent; they obeyed orders, and when no orders were given they stood frozen, waiting for the next command. These present Docs were never still, as they worked around the compound, chattering back and forth in their high, chirpy voices. And they were fully clothed. They wore decorous trousers over their lower parts, and above the waist a sort of loose, gaily colored blouse, with sleeves for all six of their arms. Each wore a huge, floppy hat to keep the sun away.

As I peered inside the surviving yurt-it looked like the one we had kept our food in, but it was empty now-I felt that gentle touch on my neck. I turned. It was Pirraghiz, of course, once more taking my pulse or whatever it was she did when she touched me there. “Are you getting tired?” she asked anxiously.

I assured her I wasn’t, though I was pretty certain she knew my condition better than I did. I pointed to the yurt. “How come you left this one standing?”

She looked faintly embarrassed, or as much so as a creature with a great, moss-covered moon of a face could look. “It did not seem right to remove them all. The people who built them are gone, and there was no other way to remember them. I know this is not a sensible thing, Dannerman.” Then she patted my shoulder with a lesser hand. It wasn’t a medicinal touch, this one, or even a particularly affectionate one. It was the way your mother might put her hand on your shoulder when she wants your full attention. “I have a question for you, Dannerman. You have been all over this area, looking at everything. Yet you have seen almost everything here before, so what is it that you are looking for?”

The truthful answer was, a way to get out of here and go home. I was pretty sure she suspected as much. But I didn’t want to confirm it for her, and anyway there was something else I’d been hoping to find.

So I told her the other thing: “A grave. A friend of mine died here. Her name was Patsy, and she was killed by some electric amphibians. We buried her around here.”

She bought it without question. She patted me again, consolingly this time, and said, “I will lead you to it.”