Contact - Carl Sagan [175]
"Give Nina a kiss for me," she said just before he left on the night flight to Moscow.
Over breakfast, she asked Xi if he was disappointed.
"Disappointed? To go there"-he lifted his eyes skyward-"to see them, and to be disappointed? I am an orphan of the Long March. I survived the Cultural Revolution. I was trying to grow potatoes and sugar beets for six years in the shadow of the Great Wall. Upheaval has been my whole life. I know disappointment.
"You have been to a banquet, and when you come home to your starving village you are disappointed that they do not celebrate your return? This is no disappointment. We have lost a minor skirmish. Examine the disposition of forces."
He would shortly be departing for China, where he had agreed to make no public statements about what had happened in the Machine. But he would return to supervise the dig at Xian. The tomb of Qin was waiting for him. He wanted to see how closely the Emperor resembled that simulation on the far side of the tunnels.
"Forgive me. I know this is impertinent," she said after a while, "but the fact that of all of us, you alone met someone who…In all your life, wasn't there anyone you loved?"
She wished she had phrased the question better. "Everyone I ever loved was taken from me. Obliterated. I saw the emperors of the twentieth century come and go," he answered. "I longed for someone who could not be revised, or rehabilitated, or edited out. There are only a few historical figures who cannot be erased."
He was looking at the tabletop, fingering the teaspoon. "I devoted my life to the Revolution, and I have no regrets. But I know almost nothing of my mother and father. I have no memories of them. Your mother is still alive. You remember your father, and you found him again. Do not overlook how fortunate you are."
In Devi, Ellie sensed a grief she had never before noticed. She assumed it was a reaction to the skepticism with which Project Directorate and the governments had greeted their story. But Devi shook her head.
"Whether they believe us is not very important for me. The experience itself is central. Transforming. Ellie, that really happened to us. It was real. The first night we were back here on Hokkaido, I dreamt that our experience was a dream, you know? But it wasn't, it wasn't.
"Yes, I'm sad. My sadness is…You know, I satisfied a lifelong wish up there when I found Surindar again, after all these years. He was exactly as I remembered him, exactly as I've dreamed of him. But when I saw him, when I saw so perfect a simulation, I knew: This love was precious because it had been snatched away, because I had given up so much to marry him. Nothing more. The man was a fool. Ten years with him, and we would have been divorced. Maybe only five. I was so young and foolish."
"I'm truly sorry," Ellie said. "I know a little about mourning a lost love."
"Ellie," she replied, "you don't understand. For the first time in my adult life, I do not mourn Surindar. What I mourn is the family I renounced for his sake."
Sukhavati was returning to Bombay for a few days and then would visit her ancestral village in Tamil Nadu.
"Eventually," she said, "it will be easy to convince ourselves this was only an illusion. Every morning when we wake up, our experience will be more distant, more dreamlike. It would have been better for us all to stay together, to reinforce our memories. They understood this danger. That's why they took us to the seashore, something like our own planet, a reality we can grasp. I will not permit anyone to trivialize this experience. Remember. It really happened. It was not a dream. Ellie, don't forget."
Eda was, considering the circumstances, very relaxed. She soon understood why. While she and Vaygay had been undergoing lengthy interrogations, he had been calculating.
"I think the tunnels are Einstein-Rosen bridges," he said. "General Relativity admits a class of solutions, called wormholes, similar to black holes, but with no evolutionary connection-they