James P. Hogan (12 page)

Dreese had flown down in a military chopper to accompany the force detailed to occupy the sprawling logistics base at Yaquinta. It was still night, and the column of vehicles had drawn up before the main gates, which stood chained and locked in the illumination of searchlights. Detachments taking other routes had sealed the other entrances around the perimeter. The stipulated five minutes since the issuing of an ultimatum by loudhailer to open up and refrain from offering resistance had elapsed. There had been no response, either directly or by radio, and no sign of movement beyond the fence. Dreese nodded to the commander standing with him beside the open staff car.

“Okay, take it out.”

The commander gave an order, and the cordon of infantry around the gate area opened up to allow passage for the earth mover that had been waiting behind them. It rolled forward into the searchlight glare on its huge wheels, and used its front bucket to demolish the gates in a crash of rending metal.

“Follow on through. Secure all objectives according to plan,” Reese instructed.

“The last links are broken. The ties are cut. There can be no going back to the past. So let us all look as one to the future, and the new life that is about to begin.”

Andri Lubanov listened to Ormont’s final words from a seat in a communications room opening off from the
Aurora
’s bridge. A screen dominating the room showed a view of the ship’s Hub structure and the base of one of the support booms connecting to the outer Ring. Observing from a place this close to the nerve center of the operation was a privilege earned by his undercover work inside the Sofian Internal Security Office. Ormont held the mission to be permanently in his debt, and would always be a friend. They thought alike.

If Lubanov’s personal views conflicted with the mission’s ideals, he would have to learn to live with them or resolve them, he reflected. There could be no going back now. But whichever way that worked out, from now on he would be able to breathe and sleep easily, free from the threat of revenge vendettas catching up with him from the far side of the world. And the days of double-dealing and deception, which had never left him savoring the best of tastes, were over.

Years ago, back in his own country, he had believed in the martial tradition of duty and honor, but been disillusioned by the realities of experience. From what he had seen of human nature, the time would come when the values that
Aurora
stood for would have to be defended, and his kind would be needed. The difference this time would be that there was something worth defending.

The view on the screen changed to show Ormont and his two principal senior officers on the raised dais at the forward end of the bridge. Around Lubanov in the communications room, figures turned in their seats, and faces looked up from consoles expectantly. Ormont pushed away the microphone that he had been using and looked to one side.

“Disengage final overrides. Confirm exit vector.”

“Vector confirmed on all, sir.”

“Initiate main and hold.”

“Positive function, holding at intermediate.” It meant they were lifting from orbit.
Aurora
was straining to go.

“Bring her up to full power.”

There was nobody left in the base, anywhere…. Dreese stood, nonplused, in the staff car outside the main office building as the officer who had gone inside with a squad reappeared at the doors and came over at a crisp pace. “Nothing, sir. It’s deserted.”

Soldiers were breaking open the coverings of what looked like cargo loads, stacked in rows awaiting transfer to the pad area. They were dummies, consisting only of wooden frames, piles of rock and sand, and empty crates. The materiel to be shuttled up was gone. Inside the opened doors of a storage shed to one side, the lights came on to show it cleared out. Beside the driver in the front seats of the car, an adjutant who was talking to an officer with the forward unit looked up from his phone. “It’s the same everywhere. Nobody around the pad area. The control center is empty.”

And then, light coming suddenly from above caused Dreese to look up. A column of white was glowing high overhead, lengthening as he watched, until it extended across half the sky. Around him, the other officers squinted and shielded their eyes as the brightness intensified, revealing the buildings of the base with the gantries and shuttles behind in an eerie, artificial day.

Dreese stared, his hand covering the peak of his cap. And despite himself, a smile spread slowly across his face, and his lips curled back to show his teeth as the realization came to him of what it all meant.

“Go, baby, go!” he breathed. “Good luck, guys!”

PART TWO:
The Void

TWELVE

Sofi’s uniqueness attracted the talented and gifted from far and wide, many of whom, for that reason, had been misfits in the various circumstances that they came from. As a consequence, Sofi became a meeting ground for a multitude of views concerning the principles a society should be based on and how it should be organized to reflect them. Since coercion was anathema to the kinds of people that typified the cultural mix, and its eventual ineffectiveness in any case evident to most, the system that emerged was pluralistic, tolerant, and firm in respecting such freedoms as the right to dissent and individual self-determination.

This social foundation had become established by the time the
Aurora
project was conceived, and raised the question of how the society-in-miniature that would make up the mission itself was to be structured and organized. Since the answer to this would influence the architecture and functional layout of much of the ship in many ways, it was an issue that had to be addressed in the earlier years, when Sofi’s achievements were already unparalleled anywhere, and its commitment to idealism was at its height.

Disagreements quickly broke out among the mission planners over the philosophy that should govern the ship’s design. Should residential units be zoned together as such, or distributed across areas that mixed different kinds of use? If zoned, should they be segregated by type? To what degree should they be customizable? Would services and amenities be better centralized or localized? At what point would conformity become stifling to the point of provoking antisocial behavior, while at the other extreme, at what point would opportunity for endless variety begin to dissipate energies uselessly in nonsensical competition and displays of status? On more significant scales, what would be the psychological effects of large interior vistas and outside panoramas of stars, compared to the sense of security imparted by more restricted and enclosed spaces? Would giving high visibility to the offices and presence of the Directorate, and the ultimate authority over ship’s affairs that it embodied, serve as a source of reassurance? Or should it be kept discreetly backstage to avoid reminding the inhabitants of so much that had been left behind forever?

Then some began to see the problem as lying not in the choice of which of the contending plans to go with, but in the zealousness that was being shown over wanting to plan everything in the first place. Everyone was trying to promote their vision of the ideal society – and in the process, reflecting the practically universal but seldom-acknowledged human conviction that the world would be a better place if more people were like themselves. Whichever version of utopia was considered, the question arose of what to do about those who didn’t share the ideals that the vision presumed. And for a society that sought to accommodate a spectrum of values embracing the full variability of human nature, this was no small matter. In short, what was to be done about the social dissidents and misfits that would always exist, no matter what the planners came up with?

Proposals for screening prospective migrants against an approved set of psychological and other standards were rejected. Such procedures worked for creating specialized military units or recruiting teams for demanding work such as the space ventures that had taken place in recent years, but
Aurora
was a one-way ticket and fully self-contained. A choice that turned out to be wrong couldn’t be relieved from duty or transferred out when the tour was over. And beyond that, having to set special standards would be equivalent to admitting that the community didn’t reflect the real human condition to begin with, which would have been in conflict with the policy of preserving a broad representation of human diversity. In any case, even with an ideal initial population, aberrants would inevitably be born later, who didn’t conform to the original selection criteria, so the criteria would become irrelevant.

Imposing a mandated order that would brook no dissenters was out of the question. Besides going against every principle that Sofi had been founded on, enforcing conformity over generations would surely destroy the very capacities for creativity and innovation that had made
Aurora
possible. The descendants who would one day arrive at Hera would need the resourcefulness and abilities to open up and settle an unknown world – faculties that would have been long stifled in a population conditioned to passive obedience and turned into a human sheep pen.

Reasons could always be found for requiring people to live the way others thought they should, in the name of serving a greater common good. Once the “common good” had been identified, then any questioning of it automatically became the mark of the common enemy. In an artificial space habitat, safety and security considerations afforded ready-made justification for sacrificing individual freedom to authoritarian demands. The importance of efficiently managing its limited physical resources provided another. It would have been ironic if, after making such an investment of talent and effort to escape from the oppressive forces that were threatening once again to engulf Earth, the mission found it had, at the end of it all, to resort to precisely such measures in order to survive. Or had it to conclude that the way of life that it had been conceived to preserve wasn’t suitable for exporting into space at all?

In short, there would be those who objected to whatever the designers came up with, and there seemed to be no universally acceptable way of dealing with them. The question therefore reduced to finding a way to avoid confronting them with any set-piece plan that it was possible to disagree with. Or put another way, how to design a society whose one, overriding attribute would be that of not being designed?

The solution that the designers’ thinking finally converged upon was not to try. Instead, they decided to let the eventual form of the mission design itself. Arguing over how people should live, work, and play, what sort of social order they should exist under, and how they should think, for generations who were not even born yet, in a situation that nobody had ever experienced before, was probably futile anyway. For the simple fact was that nobody knew, or probably could even imagine, what the conditions might be of such an expedition ten, twenty, thirty years out, or what kind of stresses might arise to challenge its resourcefulness. Quite possibly, even the natures of the people who would have come into being by that time could be completely alien to the comprehension of anyone shaped by planet-bound perspectives.

The correct approach, then, was surely to try to anticipate nothing, but to build in the flexibility that would enable the people concerned to create their own style of society as they went. And since, from the disagreements that had precipitated the whole debate in the first place, one form of society would never suit everyone, this would have to mean “societies.” There was no need for ideologues or experts to specify in advance what kind of geometry the descendants in years hence would inhabit, the way their society would be organized, or how they would function in it. Because, as the unpredictable factors that time would bring began to unfold, and different groups emerged with their own ideas about the kind of world that they thought they wanted to live in, they would be able, simply, to
go out and build their own
.

So the idea took root – inspired in some ways by biological genetics – of an “organism” being sent into a new and unknown environment, carrying with it the seeds of its subsequent evolution in response to the cues that an unpredictable future might provide. A difference, of course, was that biological organisms could build themselves from materials supplied by the surroundings, whereas a starship conceived to spawn embryonic communities would have to carry its own with it. Hence, the final form of
Aurora
came to include large repositories of extra materials and equipment of the kind used for the craft’s construction.

In the years while the main ship was taking shape, the stockpile that it carried was supplemented by making some of the test platforms launched ahead serve also as freight rafts, to be overtaken and consolidated in the course of the voyage. Their prime purpose was to investigate propulsion systems intended to drive a starship, and realistic results required stretching performance to the limits. This meant giving them realistic loads to haul, with the result that the amount of mass distributed along the course ahead – even after some losses due to the inevitable failures – eventually came to total several times that used for the construction of
Aurora
itself.

All of the rival schools of thought, weary from arguing their own pet theory, warmed to the idea. What better way could there be to allay the disgruntlements that were bound to surface among any human community shut up for a long period in a limited space, and provide an outlet for surplus energies than getting involved in creating a new world? Tired of seeing the same mall-like concourses and residential decks every day, with the same patches of hydroponic greens overhead, interspersed with star-filled sky windows? Fine. Get a like-minded group together and design yourselves a world that looks like a town on Earth, one made up of village-scapes and small-holdings, or maybe a collection of bright lights and amusement parks… or anything else you want. Those who didn’t agree with the form of government inherited from Sofi could set up a monarchy or political system patterned on one of the nations back on Earth; a sect devoted to some emergent cult figure; or even an experiment in collective ownership and living if it appealed to them.