Starborne (2 page)

How odd it all is, still! Traveling through endless night to some u
n
known destination, some virgin world that awaits our finding. There has been nothing like it in all of huma
n history. But this is the proper time, evidently, for it to be happening. It is our fate that we fifty people live at just this moment of time, this present epoch, when it has been made po
s
sible to journey between the stars, and so here we are, making tha
t journey, seeking a new Earth for mankind. Someone had to do it; and we are the ones who have stepped forward to be selected, Leon and P
a
co and Huw and Sylvia and Noelle and I, and all the rest of us aboard this vessel.

In the minds of all those myriad pe
ople who have come and gone upon the Earth before our time, when they look forward toward us and try to envision what our era must be like, we are the godlike glittering denizens of the barely imaginable future, leading lives of endless mir
a
cle. Everything
is possible to us, or so it seems to them. But to those who are not yet born, and will not be for ages, we are the merest mud-crawling primitives, scarcely distinguishable from our hairy a
n
cestors. That we have achieved as much as we have, given our pitif
ul limitations, is fascinating and perplexing to them.

To ourselves, though, we are only ourselves, people with some skills and some limitations: neither gods nor brutes. It would not be right for us to see ourselves as gods who sit at the summit of Creati
on, for we know how far from true that is; and yet no one ever sees himself as a pitiful primitive being, a hapless clumsy precursor of the greater things to come. For us there is always only the present. We are simply the pe
o
ple of the moment, living our
only lives, doing our best or at least trying to, traveling from somewhere to somewhere aboard this unlikely ship at many multiples of the speed of light, and hoping, whenever we let ou
r
selves indulge in anything as risky as hope, that this voyage of ours
will send one new shaft of light into the pool of darkness and mystery that is the reality of human existence.

***

The year-captain leaves the lounge and walks a few meters down the main transit corridor to the dropchute that will take him to the lower lev
els, where Zed Hesper
’
s planetary-scan operation has its headqua
r
ters. He stops off there at least once a day, if only to watch the shifting patterns of simulated stars and planets come and go on Hesper
’
s great galactic screen. The patterns are abstract an
d mean very little in astr
o
nomical terms to the year-captain
—
there is no way to achieve a direct view of the normal universe from within the nospace tube, and Hesper must work entirely by means of analogs and equivalents
—
but even so it reassures him in som
e obscure way to be reminded that those whose lives are totally confined by the unyielding boundaries of this small vessel sixteen light-years from the world of their birth are nevertheless not completely alone in the cosmos.

Sixteen light-years from home.

Not an easy thing to grasp, even for one trained in the mental disc
i
plines that the year-captain has mastered. He can feel the force of the concept, but not the real meaning. He can tell himself,
Already we are sixteen kilometers from home
, and find that
concept easy enough to u
n
derstand.
Already we are sixteen hundred kilometers from home
—
a little harder, yes, but he can understand that too. What about
Already we are sixteen million kilometers from home
? That much begins to strain co
m
prehension
—
a gulf, a gulf, a terrible empty dark gulf of enormous size
—
but he thinks he is able to wrap his mind about even so great a distance, after a fashion.

Sixteen light-years, though?

How can he explain that to himself?

Somewhere just beyond the tube of nospac
e through which the ship now travels lies a blazing host of brilliant stars, a wilderness of suns all around them, and he knows that his gray-flecked blond beard will have turned entirely white before the light of those stars glitters in the night sky of
d
istant Earth. Yet only a few months have elapsed since the d
e
parture of the expedition. How miraculous it is, he thinks, to have come so far so swiftly.

Even so, there is a greater miracle. An hour after lunch he will ask Noelle to relay a message to Earth
, summarizing the day
’
s findings, such as they are, and he knows that he will have an acknowledgment from Control Central in Brazil before dinner. That seems a greater mir
a
cle to him by far.

***

He emerges from the dropchute and is confronted by the carefu
lly ordered chaos that is the lower deck. Cluttered passageways snake off in many directions before him. He chooses the third from the left and pr
o
ceeds aft, crouching a little to keep from banging his forehead on the multitudinous ducts that pass crisscro
ssingly just above him.

In the year-captain
’
s mind the starship sometimes appears sleek, narrow, graceful: a gleaming silver
bullet streaking across the universe at a velocity that has at this point come to exceed a million kilometers per second. But he knows that the actuality is nothing like that. In fact the ship is not remotely like a bullet at all. No Newtonian forces of a
c
tion and reaction are driving it, nor does it have the slightest refinement of form. Its outlines are boxy and squat and awkwardly asymmetrical, a huge clunky container even more lopsided and outlandish in shape than the usual sort of space-going vessel,
w
ith an elaborate spidery supe
r
structure of extensor arms and antennas and observation booms and ot
h
er excrescent externals that have the appearance of having been tacked on in a purely random way.

Yet because of the
Wotan
’
s incredible speed and the serenit
y of its movements
—
the ship is carrying him without friction through the vast empty cloak of nospace at a pace already four times greater than that of light and increasing with every passing moment
—
the year-captain pe
r
sists in thinking of it as he does, an
imaginary projectile, sleek, narrow, graceful. There is a
rightness
to that which transcends mere literal sense. He knows better, but he is unable to shake that streamlined image from his mind, even though he is familiar with the true shape of the vessel
inside and out. If nothing else, his routine movements through the lab
y
rinthine interior of the starship each day provide constant and unending contradiction of his fanciful mental picture of it.

The tangled lower levels of the ship are particularly challe
nging to traverse. The congested corridors, cluttered with a host of storage domes and recycling coils and all manner of other utility ducts, twist and turn every few meters with the abrupt lunatic intricacy of a topological pu
z
zle. But the year-captain is
accustomed to moving through them, and in any case he is a man of extraordinary grace of movement, precise and fastidious of step. His outward physical poise reflects the deep strain of asceticism that is an innate part of his character. He is untroubled
by the obstacles of these corridors; to him they have no serious existence, they are barely obstacles at all.

Lightfootedly he makes his way past a dangling maze of thrumming conduits and scrambles over a long series of swelling shallow mounds. These are t
he cargo nodules. In sheltered chambers beneath this level lies all the precious furniture of their journey: mediq machines, bone banks, data bubbles, pre-read vapor chips, wildlife domestication plaques, excavator arcs, soil samplers, gene replacement ki
t
s, matrix jacks, hydrocarbon converters, climate nodes and other plan
e
tary-engineering equipment, artificial intelligences, molecular replic
a
tors, heavy-machinery templates, and all the rest of their world-building storehouse. Below all that, on the deepes
t level of all, is the zygote bank, ten thousand fertilized ova tucked away snugly in permafreeze spa
n
sules, and enough additional sperm and unfertilized ova to maintain si
g
nificant genetic diversity as the succeeding generations of the colony unfold.

He r
eaches a Y-shaped fork where the passageway abruptly widens and takes the abrupt left turn into Hesper
’
s little room. A blare of co
l
ored light confronts him, blue and green and dazzling incandescent red. Things blink and flash in comic excess. Hesper
’
s scr
een is the center of the universe, toward which everything flows: from every corner of the firmament data comes streaming in torrents and somehow it all is ca
p
tured and reconstituted into visual form here. But only Hesper can u
n
derstand it. Possibly not ev
en he, the year-captain sometimes thinks.

The air in Hesper
’
s room is warm and close, dense moist jungle air. Hesper likes heat and always keeps humidity turned to the max. He is a small black-skinned man with thin, perpetually compressed lips and a startl
ing angular beak of a nose, who comes from some island on the far side of India. The sun must be very strong there; the fair-skinned year-captain imagines that he would find himself baked down to the bone in a minute, if ever he were to set foot in that l
a
nd. Is it a place like that toward which all of Hesper
’
s zealous scanning is bent, one with a sun of such ferocity?

“
Look here, year-captain,”
Hesper says immediately. “
Four new prospects!”

He taps the screen, here, here, here, here. Hesper is an eternal o
pt
i
mist. For him the galaxy brims and overflows with habitable worlds.

“
How many does that make? Fifty? A hundred?”

“
Sixty-one, within a sphere a hundred and thirty light-years across. Plausible suns, probable planetary configurations.”
Hesper
’
s voice is l
ight, high-pitched, inflected in a singsongy way. “
Of course I
’
m not yet ready to recommend an inspection of any one of them.”

The year-captain nods. “
Of course.”

“
But it won
’
t be long, year-captain! It won
’
t be long, I promise you that!”

The year-captain
offers Hesper a perfunctory smile. One of these days, he knows, Hesper actually will find a planet or two that will be worth taking a look at
—
it
’
s an article of faith for everyone on board that there
must
be such a world somewhere
—
but he understands that H
e
s
per
’
s early enthusiasms are just that, enthusiasms. Hesper is a quick man with a hypothesis. No matter: the voyage has just begun, really. The year-captain doesn
’
t expect to be greeted here with any real discoveries, not yet. He simply wants to stare at
the screen.

Hesper has told him, more than once, what the blazing sworls and squiggles on the screen are supposed to signify. The sequence of criteria for habitable worlds. The raw astronomical data, first. Each sun
’
s place on the main sequence, the indica
tions of the presence of planetary bo
d
ies in constructive positions. Mean orbital distances plotted against l
u
minosity. And then a spectroscopic workup. Evidence for the presence of an atmosphere. The chemical components thereof: suitable or not? And then
—
biospheric analysis
—
conditions of thermodynamic disequ
i
librium, indicating the possible presence of transpiration and respir
a
tion
—
the temperature range, probable mean highs and lows
—

The starship has data-gathering tentacles reaching far out into the i
n
com
prehensible void. A host of sensory receptors, mysteriously capable of piercing the nospace tube in which the ship travels and extending into the dark reality beyond, collects information tirelessly, information that is not actual realspace data but is so
m
ehow a usable equivalent of such data, and processes it into these bright designs. Over which this bubbly little man hovers, evaluating, discarding, reconsidering, unendingly searching for the ultimate new Eden that is the goal of their quest.