Seed of Stars

The story of the human race is that of one man and one woman. This is the basic relationship that determines the history of mankind.

These two have many names.

Here they are Piet Huygens, Lieutenant j.g. (Medic Branch) Space Corps, and Mia Mizu-no, leading crewwoman, Space Corps.

These two were complete opposites, totally different in family background, education and personality, but when they met their love was complete and intense, desperate and consuming. That love altered the destiny of an entire planet, Kepler III—altered it at a time when the colonists were seeking something as important and intangible as love—independence.

Also by Dan Morgan and John Kippax

A THUNDER OF STARS

Available from Ballantine Books

SEED OF STARS

Dan Morgan

and

John Kippax

BALLANTINE BOOKS • NEW YORK

Copyright © 1972 by Dan Morgan & John Kippax

All rights reserved.

SBN 345-02503-2-095

First Printing: February, 1972

Printed in the United States of America

Cover art by Vincent di Fate

BALLANTINE BOOKS, INC.

101 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10003

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Seed of
Stars

They lay side by side on the narrow bunk In the cramped gray-metal box of his quarters. Naked, his long Nordic body close to hers, small, golden, dolllike, Piet Huygens felt a sudden chill as he raised himself on one elbow to look down at her.

"Escape?" he said. "Surely what you really mean is
desert?"

Mia smiled up at him, her round, exquisite Nipponese beauty lighting up the grayness. "Desert—a word, a Corps word."

"We
are
Corps."

She readied up, her fingers caressing his cheek. "Piet, love. We are also human."

"Up and leave the Corps—just like that?"

"Just like that," she murmured.

Looking down at her, he knew that she meant what she was saying. For her it was a simple matter of feeling and truth.

"But our obligation," he said.

"To serve the Corps? To spend the rest of our lives traveling from planet to planet inside this metal hive?"

"That is what we signed for—the promise we made."

"And had no right to make," she argued. 'Then, we were filled with the heroic dreams of the Corps. We had no experience of the day-to-day reality, an aseptic, sterile reality that says a man is a man and a woman a woman, but if that man is an officer and the woman crew, then it is wrong for them to follow their natural instincts."

"But still a promise."

"We didn't know what we signed for, we didn't understand," she argued quietly. "In our family, father and mother always made sure we knew what we were committing ourselves to before we made a promise. If you find that you can't keep a promise, isn't it honest to—to stop living a lie?"

In her family . . . were there really such homes, where parents and children lived together, sharing emotions, brawling, laughing, loving? She had told him many times of her family, living at the top of Fuji Tower, the nearest block to Haneda port, Tokyo, but still it was outside his experience. His reality was a big, impersonal apartment in Lake Cities; he was the only child of two academic near-geniuses who had raised him according to the book, molded him into their pattern of mature responsibility, demanding that he act logically at all times. That was his life; he knew no other. And then he became a Space Corps officer, and that was a role for which his previous molding had already fitted him, until now...

"What about responsibility, Mia?"

She sighed. "Responsibility..."

"To the rest of the crew."

She pulled him down towards her, smiling. "Who'd miss
me?"

The tension in his mind began to ease as he moved closer to her warm body. "I would," he said.

"Well thank you,
sir,"
she said, laughing.

"I love you, Mia," he said, clutching her to him, telling himself that this was his reality, this lithe, responsive body so attuned to his own.

"Then what else matters?" she murmured, her small mouth close to his ear.

They lay together, complete, the muffled hum and throb of
Venturer Twelve
all around them, protecting them against the whirling, star-slashed terror of space through which they traveled at many times the speed of light. He caressed her back, the smooth curve of her buttocks, gently; not because he felt a rising of passion so recently slaked, but because he knew she loved to have him stroke her. Times were when she almost purred...

"It would have been simpler for you if you had chosen an officer to go to bed with," she said teasingly. "Lieutenant Hoffman—she's a beauty, for instance."

"But I love
you,"
he repeated. "Until I met you I didn't really know what love was."

"And now?"

"And now it is different"

"But only so long as nobody knows," she reminded him. "And how long can that be? One of these times someone, some busy P.O., is going to see me sneaking in here, and then..."

She was right. For a month, a whole month, they had been lucky, but their luck could not hold forever. And then, for her, disciplinary action, and for him, a swift reprimand.
Conduct unbecoming an officer of the Corps...

'That's why we have to do it, don't you see, Piet, love?" she said quietly.

"Desertion..."

"Escape
—freedom to live a real, meaningful life together. No barriers, Piet, just you and I."

"But how? Where?"

"Where we are going—Kepler III."

"A colonial planet?"

"But of course a colonial planet, a new world with space for our children to grow up in, a world where they would be welcomed, not killed at the moment of conception by compulsory birth control."

Conditioned as he was to life on overcrowded Earth and in the compulsory sterility of the Space Corps the thought was a new, exciting one. Their children, his and Mia's...

"You realize that the colonists on Kepler III are almost one hundred percent eastern Asiatic in origin?" she said.

He considered this for a moment in silence. He had tended to look upon her as a doll, a plaything, almost, in the early days of their relationship, but as he grew to know her better he had begun to recognize that beneath the fragile exterior beauty there was a will stronger, perhaps, than his own. This idea of a new life on Kepler III was no snap, impulse decision on her part, it was something she had been dreaming, thinking, planning for the two of them, because she loved him. Then surely it must be what he wanted, too?

"The Keplerians are proud of their racial heritage— Indonesians, Chinese, Laotians, Malays and, mostly, Japanese. All Keplerians, but my people, don't you see?"

"Your people, but not mine, Mia," he said.

Her mouth trembled a little, then set resolutely.
"Our
people. You are my man, and I will not be parted from you. Neither will I share you with the Space Corps and the rest of the galaxy. As for what you look like—a scrap of surgery on your eyes, and your hair blackened, and you could be a man with a Northern Chinese ancestry."

"Even so, a strange planet... we would be quite alone, with no one to help us."

He had anticipated a protest, but instead, oddly, she laughed. "No, that's where you're so wrong, Piet There is a branch of my own family on Kepler."

He raised himself up on one elbow and looked down at her incredulously. By the door of the cabin, the time numerals changed to 2014 hours, ship time. "A branch of your family? But the last colonists left Earth for Kepler nearly a hundred years ago. There can have been no personal contact between the two branches for several generations. Granted some relationship exists in theory, but in practice it is surely nothing more than a tenuous matter of record?"

Now it was her turn to look surprised. "Piet, love, that is not at all so. Two, three, ten generations—we are still family. Though time and space separate us, nothing can change that. We are family, and the family will help us."

He shook his head in wonder. "You mean it You really do."

Now she was soft and urgent. "Piet, love, until I met you, I was content with what I had. I was doing what I thought I wanted most of all, right from the time my eldest sister got a job at the Akai factory and brought home her instruction manuals. The day I opened
Principles of Electronic Circuitry
I was finished with childish books for good. But now that is changed. Now I have you, and I want to settle on Kepler III, and have your children. And if you want me as I want you, then this is what we must do."

Her assurance was breathtaking and complete, but still he could not share her faith.

"Even if your family were prepared to help as you say, I would still need a job," he said.

She laughed. "You wonder about a job? How many Earth-trained doctors do you imagine there could possibly be on Kepler III? You will be more welcome than the spring rains."

Reason told him that she must be right in this, at least. Even on Earth there were never enough doctors. On a planet like Kepler, isolated from Earth by the vast wastes of space, there must inevitably be a much greater shortage; and such doctors as there were would for the most part be Kepler-trained, without knowledge of new Earth techniques such as lay at his own fingertips. His mood brightened as he considered the prospect Aboard
Venturer Twelve
he was merely a junior-grade Medic lieutenant, but on Kepler III he would automatically become a person of considerable importance . . . with even minimal help from Mia's relatives this must be so.

"Piet, love, what are you thinking?" she asked, a touch of uncertainty in her voice.

Tm thinking that it will be good to be appreciated, to be something more than Maseba's errand boy," he said; "to live and work in a real community."

Her face brightened. "Then you've decided?"

"We
have decided," he said.

"Oh, Piet—you won't regret it, I promise you," she said joyfully. "We will be happy together, and I will give you many fine sons."

"We must make our preparations carefully," he said. "There will be certain things to be taken with us that may be irreplaceable, medical texts, a set of surgical instruments..."

"And there will be gifts to be selected," she said.

"Gifts?" he looked at her, jolted out of his consideration of essential items.

"Of course—for the family," she explained patiently. "It would be unthinkable for us to appear on their threshold empty-handed. Is it not your custom to exchange gifts in this way?"