Tom Rice, Kelly the Android and
Mirrick (alien professor-background)
discover a High Ones Artifact
Robert
Silverberg’s “Across a Billion Years” (1969)
Scattered throughout the globe of human-occupied space is evidence of a civilization that bestrode the galaxy before humanity was born. Now, a strange device has been discovered that shows the details of that great civilization. The details include a star map and hints that the High Ones are not extinct after all.
The map beckons, and humans, being what they are, will follow. To the next great step in human destiny—or ultimate disaster.
Robert
Silverberg’s YA story of an archeological expedition that comes face to face
with the history they are studying is one of the best YA novels that I have
read. It is told in an epistolary
fashion through the device of “message cubes” that the protagonist, Tom Rice, a
young graduate student on his first deep space expedition, is recording for his
disabled telepath sister left behind on Earth.
This
mixed race expedition of humans and aliens is on the trail of the High Ones, a
near God-like race that ruled the galaxy a billion years ago. Despite the high concepts of the book,
ancient powerful aliens, machines that run for a billion years, Dyson spheres
and more, it is in the down to Earth details of Tom Rice’s life and perceptions
that the piece pulls you in. Tom is not
a politically correct young man, which is in a way refreshing; he is having to
deal with prejudices about aliens and artificial humans. He is snarky and over-opinionated. Tom reveals this aloud through the messages to
his sister and one does see him develop as a human being both in tolerance and
humility as the expedition plows forward into greater and greater danger and
hardship.
One
scene I did find a bit off-putting was his indifference to a young lady getting
molested by another team member while they were uncovering a great discovery. While the incident is not a serious assault, and
she wards off the hapless “lady’s man” with ease, it is none-the-less something
that takes you a bit by surprise and reduced my identification with the
character. The book was written before
1969 and like other movies and books is a product of its time and the attitudes
then. Occasionally one can risk one’s
POV character being a jerk (witness the scene in the 2004 movie Sideways where
the character played by Paul Giamatti stole money from his mother) but it is a
dangerous move in first person story. Still
Silverberg makes it work.
His
understanding of women and love grows also in the story starting out with some
fairly typical and close to cliché interactions with Jan, who ends up being his
girlfriend. But he is very young and how
well did anyone of us understand the opposite gender at that age? So he is not unsympathetic in his fumbling
toward romance and understanding.
From
this more or less young “everyman’s” perspective we see the expedition uncover
a series of finds that bring the long lost alien’s closer to our own time. Here Silverberg excels with the sense of
wonder and excitement until we come face to face with working technology of the
High Ones. But no discovery is without
cost and a deadly one is extracted.
Further discoveries abound until we stand on the edge of a new future
that could imperil everything from the past and we learn that those we had
looked on as near Gods, may have had feet of clay.
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