Reave the Just and Other Tales (40 page)

Determination had a lot to do with it. People who came so far from Earth in order to procure the endurance of the human race didn’t look kindly on anything that was less than what they wanted. But determination required an object: people had to know what they wanted. The alternative was a history full of wars, since determined people who didn’t know what they wanted tended to be unnecessarily aggressive.

That object—the dream which shaped Asterin life and civilization from the earliest generations, the inborn sense of common purpose and yearning which kept the wars short, caused people to share what they knew, and inspired progress—was provided by the legends of Earth and
Aster.

Within two generations of the Crash, no one knew even vaguely where Earth was: the knowledge as well as the tools of astrogation had been lost. Two generations after that, it was no longer clear what Earth had been like. And after two more generations, the reality of space-flight had begun to pass out of the collective Asterin imagination.

But the
ideas
endured.

Earth.

Aster.

Nicians and puters.

Cold sleep.

On Aster perhaps more than anywhere else in the galaxy, dreams provided the stuff of purpose. Aster evolved a civilization driven by legends. Communally and individually, the images and passions which fired the mind during physical sleep became the goals which shaped the mind while it was awake.

To rediscover Earth.

And go back.

For centuries, of course, this looked like nonsense. If it had been a conscious choice rather than a planetary dream, it would have been discarded long ago. But since it was a dream, barely articulate except in poetry and painting and the secret silence of the heart, it held on until its people were ready for it.

Until, that is, the Asterins had reinvented radio telescopes and other receiving gear of sufficient sophistication to begin interpreting the signals they heard from the heavens.

Some of those signals sounded like they came from Earth.

This was a remarkable achievement. After all, the transmissions the Asterins were looking at hadn’t been intended for Aster. (Indeed, they may not have been intended for anybody at all. It was far more likely that these signals were random emissions—the detritus, perhaps, of a world talking to itself and its planets.) They had been traveling for so long, had passed through so many different gravity wells on the way, and were so diffuse, that not even the wildest optimist in Aster’s observatories could argue these signals were messages. In fact, they were scarcely more than whispers in the ether, sighs compared to which some of the more distant stars were shouting.

And yet, impelled by an almost unacknowledged dream, the Asterins had developed equipment which enabled them not only to hear those whispers, sort them out of the cosmic radio cacophony, and make some surprisingly acute deductions about what (or who) caused them, but also to identify a possible source on the star charts.

The effect on Aster was galvanic. In simple terms, the communal dream came leaping suddenly out of the unconscious.

Earth. EARTH.

After that, it was only a matter of minutes before somebody said, “We ought to try to go there.”

Which was exactly—a hundred years and an enormous expenditure of global resources, time, knowledge, and determination later—what
Aster’s Hope
was doing.

Naturally enough, people being what they were, there were quite a few men and women on Aster who didn’t believe in the mission. And there were also a large number who did believe, who still had enough common sense or native pessimism to be cautious. As a result, there was a large planetwide debate while
Aster’s Hope
was being planned and built. Some people insisted on saying things like, “What if it isn’t Earth at all? What if it’s some alien planet where they don’t know humanity from bat dung and don’t care?”

Or, “At this distance, your figures aren’t accurate within ten parsecs. How do you propose to compensate for that?”

Or, “What if the ship encounters someone else along the way? Finding intelligent life might be even more important than finding Earth. Or they might not like having our ship wander into their space. They might blow
Aster’s Hope
to pieces—and then come looking for us.”

Or, of course, “What if the ship gets all the way out there and doesn’t find anything at all?”

Well, even the most avid proponent of the mission was able to admit that it would be unfortunate if
Aster’s Hope
were to run a thousand light-years across the galaxy and then fail. So the planning and preparation spent on designing the ship and selecting and training the crew was prodigious. But the Asterins didn’t actually start to build their ship until they found an answer to what they considered the most fundamental question about the mission.

On perhaps any other inhabited planet in the galaxy, that question would have been the question of speed. A thousand light-years was too far away. Some way of traveling faster than the speed of light was necessary. But the Asterins had a blind spot. They knew from legend that their ancestors had
slept
during a centuries-long, space-normal voyage; and they were simply unable to think realistically about traveling in any other way. They learned, as Earth had millennia ago, that c was a theoretical absolute limit: they believed it and turned their attention in other directions.

No, the question which troubled them was safety. They wanted to be able to send out
Aster’s Hope
certain that no passing hostile, meteor shower, or accident of diplomacy would be able to destroy her.

So she wasn’t built until a poorly paid instructor at an obscure university suddenly managed to make sense out of a field of research that people had been laughing at for years: c-vector.

For people who hadn’t done their homework in theoretical mathematics or abstract physics,
c-vector
was defined as
at right angles to the speed of light.
Which made no sense to anyone—but that didn’t stop the Asterins from having fun with it. Before long, they discovered that they could build a generator to project a c-vector field.

If that field were projected around an object, it formed an impenetrable shield—a screen against which bullets and laser cannon and hydrogen torpedoes had no effect. (Any projectile or force which hit the shield bounced away “at right angles to the speed of light” and ceased to exist in material space. When this was discovered, several scientists spent several years wondering if a c-vector field could somehow be used as a faster-than-light drive for a spaceship. But no one was able to figure out just what direction “at right angles to the speed of light” was.) This appeared to have an obvious use as a weapon—project a field at an object, watch the object disappear—until the researchers learned that the field couldn’t be projected either at or around any object unless the object and the field generator were stationary in relation to each other. But fortunately the c-vector field had an even more obvious application for the men and women who were planning
Aster’s Hope.

If the ship were equipped with c-vector shields, she would be safe from any disaster short of direct collision with a star. And if she were equipped with a c-vector self-destruct, Aster would be safe from any disaster which might happen to—or be caused by—the crew of
Aster’s Hope.

Construction on the ship commenced almost immediately.

And eventually it was finished. The linguists and biologists and physicists were trained. The meditechs and librarians were equipped. The diplomats were instructed. Each of the nician and puter teams knew how to take
Aster’s Hope
down to her microchips and rebuild (not to mention repro) her from spare parts.

Leaving orbit, setting course, building up speed, the ship arced past Philomel and Periwinkle on her way into the galactic void of the future. For the Asterins, it was as if legends had come back to life—as if a dream crouching in the human psyche since before the Crash had stood up and become real.

But six months later, roughly .4 light-years from Aster, Temple and Gracias weren’t thinking about legends. They didn’t see themselves as protectors of a dream. When the emergency brapper went off, they did what any dedicated, well-trained, and quick-thinking Service personnel would have done: they panicked.

But while they panicked they ran naked as children in the direction of the nearest auxcompcom.

_______

In crude terms, the difference between nician and puter was the difference between hardware and software—although there was quite a bit of overlap, of course. Temple made equipment work: Gracias told it what to do. It would’ve taken her hours to figure out how to do what he’d done to the door sensors. But when they heard the brapper and rolled off the pallet with her ahead of him and headed out of the capsule chamber, and the door didn’t open, he was the one who froze.

“Damn,” he muttered. “That repro won’t cancel for another twenty minutes.”

He looked like he was thinking something abusive about himself, so she snapped at him, “Hold it open for me, idiot.”

He thudded a palm against his forehead. “Right.”

Practically jumping into range of the sensor, he got the door open; and she passed him on her way out into the corridor. But she had to wait for him again at the auxcompcom door. “Come on. Come
on,
” she fretted. “Whatever that brapper means, it isn’t good.”

“I know.” Leftover sweat made his face slick, gave him a look of too much fear. Grimly, he pushed through the sensor field into the auxcompcom room and headed for his chair at the main com console.

Temple followed, jumped into her seat in front of her hardware controls. But for a few seconds neither of them looked at their buttons and readouts. They were fixed on the main screen above the consoles.

The ship’s automatic scanners showed a blip against the deep background of the stars. Even at this distance, Temple and Gracias didn’t need the comp to tell them the dot of light on the phosphors of the screen was moving. They could see it by watching the stars recede as the scanners focused on the blip.

It was coming toward them.

It was coming fast.

“An asteroid?” Temple asked mostly to hear somebody say something. The comp was supposed to put
Aster’s Hope
on emergency alert whenever it sensed a danger of collision with an object large enough to be significant.

“Oh, sure.” Gracias poked his blunt fingers around his board, punching readouts up onto the other auxcompcom screens. Numbers and schematics flashed. “If asteroids change course.”

“Change—?”

“Just did an adjustment,” he confirmed. “Coming right at us. Also”—he pointed at a screen to her left—“decelerating.”

She stared at the screen, watched the numbers jump. Numbers were his department; he was faster at them than she was. But she knew what words meant. “Then it’s a ship.”

Gracias acted like he hadn’t heard her. He was watching the screens as if he were close to apoplexy.

“That doesn’t make sense,” she went on. “If there are ships this close to Aster, why haven’t we heard from them? We should’ve picked up their transmissions. They should’ve heard us. God knows we’ve been broadcasting enough noise for the past couple of centuries. Are we hailing it?”

“We’re hailing,” he said. “No answer.” He paused for a second, then announced, “Estimated about three times our size.” He sounded stunned. Carefully, he said, “The comp estimates it’s decelerating from above the speed of light.”

She couldn’t help herself. “That’s impossible,” she snapped. “Your eyes are tricking you. Check it again.”

He hit some more buttons, and the numbers on the screen twisted themselves into an extrapolation graph. Whatever it was, the oncoming ship was still moving faster than
Aster’s Hope
—and it was still decelerating.

For a second, she put her hands over her face, squeezed the heels of her palms against her temples. Her pulse felt like she was going into adrenaline overload. But this was what she’d been trained for. Abruptly, she dropped her arms and looked at the screens again. The blip was still coming, but the graph hadn’t changed.

From above the speed of light. Even though the best Asterin scientists had always said that was impossible.

Oh, well, she muttered to herself. One more law of nature down the tubes. Easy come, easy go.

“Why don’t they contact us?” she asked. “If we’re aware of them, they must know we’re here.”

“Don’t need to,” Gracias replied through his concentration. “Been scanning us since they hit space-normal speed. The comp reports scanner probes everywhere. Strong enough to take your blood pressure.” Then he stiffened, sat up straighter, spat a curse. “Probes are trying to break into the comp.”

Temple gripped the arms of her seat. This was his department; she was helpless. “Can they do it? Can you stop them?”

“Encryption’s holding them out.” He studied his readouts, flicked his eyes past the screens. “Won’t last. Take com.”

Without waiting for an answer, he keyed his console to hers and got out of his seat. Quickly, he went to the other main console in the room, the comp repro board.

Feeling clumsy now as she never did when she was working with tools or hardware, she accepted com and began trying to monitor the readouts. But the numbers swam, and the prompts didn’t seem to make sense. Operating in emergency mode, the comp kept asking her to ask it questions; but she couldn’t think of any for it. Instead, she asked Gracias, “What’re you doing?”

His hands stabbed up and down the console. He was still sweating. “Changing the encryption,” he said. “Whole series of changes. Putting them on a loop.” When he was done, he took a minute to double-check his repro. Then he gave a grunt of satisfaction and came back to his com seat. While he keyed his controls away from Temple, he said, “This way, the comp can’t be broken by knowing the present code. Have to know what code’s coming up next. That loop changes often enough to keep us safe for a while.”

She permitted herself a sigh of relief—and a soft snarl of anger at the oncoming ship. She didn’t like feeling helpless. “If those bastards can’t break the comp, do you think they’ll try to contact us?”