Arkwright (25 page)

“First, I'd like to thank all of you for making the long trip to Ile Sombre for the launch,” she said. “For most of the foundation's history, we've worked quietly, shunning public attention as much as possible. We've done this to avoid the political interference that has hampered previous long-term space efforts, but we'd also hoped that, in the end, the world would pay attention to what we've achieved. Through you, that's become possible, and for that, you have our appreciation.”

“While it lasts,” Jill softly added, and Ben nodded. He knew what she meant.
Galactique
would probably remain front-page news for a few more days, and then something would come along to take its place. The news cycle would inevitably change, and the launch of humankind's first starship would slip from the top of the public agenda. It wouldn't be completely forgotten, but a year from now, most people would have to struggle to recall the details of a story that had held their attention twelve months earlier.

“The Arkwright Foundation was the legacy of my grandfather, Nathan Arkwright,” Kate continued. “Nat was a visionary, a writer who used science fiction as an imaginary means of exploring space. Many were written before the first rocket even left Earth's atmosphere. His Galaxy Patrol novels and the media franchise based on them made him rich, but he had little use for money, and so at the end of his life, he turned his wealth to a higher purpose—establishing a foundation that would further the goals in which he believed.”

Ben looked at Matt and quietly nodded. His son reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a remote. He held it ready at his side and waited for his grandmother to finish.

“Before he passed away,” Kate went on, “my grandfather left a message. He had no idea when it would be heard, but it's directed to those who are here today.” She paused. “Gentlemen, ladies … Nathan Arkwright.”

Ben turned to the lighting control panel on the wall behind him and used the dimmer switch to tone down the ceiling panels. When the room was dark enough, Ben touched a stud on the remote. The two of them had rehearsed this just a little while before the press conference, and it worked beautifully. The room had just begun to dim when a shaft of light appeared on the stage to the left of the table, and within it was the seated figure of an elderly man, frail and ill looking, his hands folded together in his lap.

“
Hello,
” he said, his voice coming from speakers hidden beneath the stage. “
I'm Nathan Arkwright…”

The image wasn't perfect. Life-size holographic technology wasn't widely available when Nathan had his friend George Hallahan make a digital recording of him just a few weeks before his death. The foundation had taken the recording to a Hollywood postproduction facility, where they'd transferred Nathan's features to a hologram of an actor dressed and seated just the way Nathan had been. In this way, they were able to make a reasonable facsimile of Nathan speaking to an audience in some future time he'd never live to see.

“
If you're seeing this,
” Nathan said, looking directly at the camera, “
then it means that, on this day, the Arkwright Foundation has achieved its primary goal—the launch of the first starship from Earth. Aboard is the genetic material of dozens of volunteers that, in time, will become the inhabitants of some distant world far from Earth. They will be the citizens of the galaxy…”

Ben smiled. Every time he heard that line, he got a kick out of it. He wondered how many people in the room would catch the reference to Nat's favorite Heinlein novel. Probably about as many as those who'd realize that he'd lifted this entire scenario from a scene in Asimov's
Foundation
. No one appreciated the classics anymore.

“
We can only imagine what worlds they'll discover out among the stars. In time, though, our descendants will meet them in the places where they've made a home for themselves. Because this is only the first step. This is the beginning of just one journey. Before us is an infinite and endless voyage…”

Ben always thought that part sounded just a bit hokey. When he'd suggested editing it out, though, his mother had just about ripped his head off. Great-Grandpa's last message would remain untouched, even if the old man had a taste for overstatement. Jill took Ben's hand, and when he looked at her, he caught the amused look in her eye. She felt the same way, but this was Kate's show.

“
So today, we dedicate ourselves to the task of following them into the future. The foundation's work is far from finished. In fact, it has only begun…”

A smile crept across his aged face as he raised a hand. “
Thank you,
” Nathan said, “
and farewell.
”

Matt stopped the projection, and Ben raised the lights again. Applause swept through the room, and a few reporters were sufficiently moved to rise to their feet. They'd all get a copy of the recording later, and Ben had little doubt that, by the end of the day, Nathan Arkwright's final public message would be heard around the world.

Ben glanced at his son, and Matt looked over at his mother. For a few moments, none of them said anything. Instead, they shared a quiet smile. Ol' Nat was right about one thing. The hard part was done, but their work wasn't over yet.

“Okay, then,” Ben said quietly. “Let's pack up and head for the mountains.”

 

BOOK THREE

The Long Wait

 

1

My name is Dhanishta Arkwright Skinner, and this is the story of my life. But to tell it correctly, I must begin not in the place where I was born but a long way from there.

On the day of my birth—February 7, 2070—humankind's first starship, the
Galactique
, was beyond the farthest reaches of the solar system, riding a microwave beam projected from a satellite in L-4 orbit approximately 238,000 miles from Earth. From the perspective of an outside observer—that far from Earth, there were none—the starship would have appeared to be an enormous disk, sixty-two miles in diameter but only a few fractions of an inch thick, parabolic in form and vaguely resembling a parachute. The carbon-mesh beamsail slowly spun clockwise on its axis, and dragged along behind it by threadlike nanotube cables was the vessel itself, a cylindrical collection of modules 330 feet long, with various antennae, including a small pair of barrel-shaped laser transmitters, protruding from its hull and the bell-shaped fuselage of a landing craft flaring at its stern.

This hypothetical observer would have caught only the briefest glimpse of
Galactique
as it flashed by. Although the ship began its journey at the stately rate of 1.9 meters per second, over the course of weeks and months, it had gradually gained velocity while Earth shrank to a tiny blue star and even Jupiter and Saturn became little more than small bright orbs. By the time
Galactique
passed through the orbit of Neptune and entered the Kuiper Belt, it was traveling at nearly a quarter of the speed of light and still accelerating.

Within the ship, all was dark, cold, and quiet. I wasn't aboard. In fact,
Galactique
carried no living crew. Its passengers—some of whom were destined to become my descendants—were sperm and egg specimens sealed within a cryogenic crèche, circular rows of stainless-steel tubes that looked like silver pens covered with a thin skein of frost. The only open space was a central passageway running down the length of the vessel, but even if I had been there, the shaft would have been barely large enough for me; it was there solely to provide access for the spiderlike robots that occasionally emerged from their cubicles to perform the routine inspection and maintenance tasks delegated by
Galactique
's quantum-computer artificial intelligence.

The AI was a purely logical machine-mind. It possessed no soul and dreamed no dreams, its thoughts—if they could be called that—little more than digital processes of an unliving thing. It had great patience, though, because it was programmed to regard time itself as nothing but an abstraction, and it understood the language of its creators only when their words were translated to its own coded input. It maintained a log of its journey that was periodically pulsed to a receiving station on the far side of the Moon, but it wrote no poems, sang no sea chanteys. Although I often fantasized what it might be like to be a passenger, I'm glad I wasn't;
Galactique
's guiding mind would have been lousy company.

So there was no one aboard
Galactique
who would have appreciated the fact that, on the very same day it achieved the cruise speed of half the speed of light, 0.6 light-years and 920 days from Earth, I was born.

 

2

Let me tell you about my home.

The Juniper Ridge Observatory rests atop a mountain in the Berkshires, just outside the small town of Crofton, Massachusetts. Built in 1926, it was a relic of astronomy's golden age, when the planets and stars were studied through optical telescopes in remote locations. Juniper Ridge was a planetary observatory established by Massachusetts State College—later the University of Massachusetts—and for nearly a century, students had traveled to it from the Amherst campus, where they assisted professional astronomers in such tasks as confirming Clyde Tombaugh's discovery of Pluto and continuing Percival Lowell's observations of Mars.

By the end of the century, though, Pluto had been reclassified as a Kuiper Belt object, American and Russian probes had discovered Mars to be nothing like Lowell imagined, and large instruments like Juniper Ridge's thirty-inch Cassegrain reflector had been made largely obsolete, first by radio astronomy and later by orbital telescopes. When UMass and four other western Massachusetts schools built the Five College Radio Astronomy Observatory near the Quabbin Reservoir, Juniper Ridge's usefulness for scientific research came to an end. The observatory remained open for a few more years as a place to teach undergraduate physics students and a location for star parties, but in 2012, the university closed Juniper Ridge for good. The telescope was dismantled and sold to the Museum of Science, Boston, and the aperture of its concrete dome was sealed.

The observatory and its adjacent buildings went up for sale and might have been eventually sold to a real estate developer and torn down to make room for a resort had it not been for the Arkwright Foundation. The Galactique Project was in its early planning stages by then, and the foundation knew that it would need a permanent location for their operations after
Galactique
's components were launched on the Caribbean island of Ile Sombre and assembled in Earth orbit. A closed-down observatory would be an ideal site, and the fact that Juniper Ridge wasn't far from the former home of the foundation's benefactor and namesake appealed to the board of directors. So the foundation purchased the property and renovated it as the new Mission Control Center, and in August 2067, the Galactique Project moved in.

I came into the world on the very same day
Galactique
achieved its cruise speed of .5c, so my birth was overshadowed by the activity in Mission Control, located on the ground floor of the former observatory dome. At that point, it would be nearly seven months before the lunar tracking station received the laser telemetry from the distant starship and relayed it to Juniper Ridge, so the control team had to go by faith and previous reports that the ship was still on course. Nonetheless, they cheered when the mission director—my grandfather, Benjamin Skinner—issued the order for the beamer to be shut down.
Galactique
's two-and-a-half-year boost phase was over; the vessel was now on its own.

While this was going on, a young midwife who lived in Crofton was handing a newborn infant (me) to the woman lying in an upstairs bedroom of the adjacent house (my mother). Despite my father's reservations, Chandraleska Sanyal Skinner had insisted upon giving birth at home and not in a hospital. She'd spent too much time in Bay State in recent years, undergoing long-term therapy for the head injury she'd sustained on Ile Sombre in the weeks just prior to
Galactique
's launch—a truck bomb had gone off near the launch site, a story that I won't repeat here—and the less she saw of the place, the better. My father—Matthew Arkwright Skinner, another member of the control team—had gone along with my mother's wishes only reluctantly, and not until after my grandmother found a local midwife. Dad had become accustomed to Mom's mood swings; if it was less stressful for her to have the child in the house they shared with his parents, it would be better for everyone.

My father took a few minutes to cradle me in his arms and agree with my mother that my name would be Dhanishta—eventually shortened to Dhani, just as Mom abbreviated hers to Chandi—and that, like him, my middle name would be in honor of my great-great-great-grandfather, the author Nathan Arkwright. Then he surrendered me to Mom and went back to the observatory to tell my grandparents the other great news of the day.

And then he got in his car, drove down the mountain into town, walked into Crofton's one and only bar—a country roadhouse called the Kick Inn, which I'd grow up hoping would burn to the ground—and celebrated this momentous day by getting plowed. My family didn't see him again until late that evening, when his car brought him home after someone deposited him in it and set the autoreturn.

Sadly, this was something I'd come to expect from my dad.

By the time I was old enough to realize that he had a drinking problem, I'd become Juniper Ridge's child-in-residence. Seven people lived there: my parents, Matt and Chandi, and grandparents, Ben and Jill, who shared the two-story New England saltbox that had once housed the staff astronomers and visiting scholars, and Winston and Martha Crosby, a young couple who occupied a smaller cottage that once belonged to the observatory's maintenance staff. The Crosbys were childless, making me the only kid among a half dozen grown-ups. So while I had no siblings or immediate playmates, I didn't lack for adult supervision … which was fortunate, because my parents, while loving, had troubles of their own.