Starfarers (10 page)

After the words had been said and the thoughts had been thought, he stayed for a while, his mind still speaking to God. He knew that was not quite orthodox, but he had been influenced by a largely European education.

Peace to the soul of Osman Tahir
, greatest man of the Ahmaddiyah Movement since Abdus Salam.
He inspired me to this, for Your glory.

Peace to you, darling Narriman, and to the children. You, God, Who see my inmost heart, You know I was not being wholly selfish when I forsook them to go to Epsilon Indi. Was I? Yes, the science lured, but it would surely benefit mankind. It
did.
Primitive though the life on that planet is, we learned much there, and already the physicians have use of our findings. And always, as Your prophet Ahmad taught, through the knowledge of Your works we exalt and come nearer to You.

A visiphone sang. Zeyd rose to answer. The caller, an old acquaintance, gave him specific information about arrangements to bring him discreetly to a certain establishment. A Cordon Bleu meal was in preparation—yes, vintage wines—and the entertainment afterward would be rather special.

“Indeed I will come,” Zeyd said. “Many thanks.” He had his ideals, but no pretensions to being a holy man.

A nearly
full Moon rose over the mountains and threw a trembling glade across Lake Louise. A breeze lulled, cold and pure. Cleland wished he could linger. He had an appointment, though, and the chance might not come again. With a sigh, he made his way to the lodge.

Banners still flapped around the paved lot, but the torches and their bearers were gone. The speaker had spoken, his listeners had cheered, now the rally was over. Police were the
last solid evidence of it, a squad that had not yet left, hostility and suspicion on their faces.

Cleland passed unchallenged, unrecognized, and went inside. An ascensor took him from the fake ruggedness of the lobby to the top floor. The speaker’s door admitted him to the suite.

Brent got up from a table on which stood whiskey, ice, and splash. “Hi,” he greeted, advancing to shake hands. “Sorry I couldn’t meet with you sooner, but you saw how it was.”

“Ye-es,” Cleland said hesitantly. He hadn’t attended. Instead he had enjoyed the beauties nearby: manicured, overused, nonetheless beauties such as he might well never see again in anything but virtuals.

“Not that it was a big deal,” Brent admitted. He took the other man’s elbow and urged him to a chair. “The government, you know, did everything possible to damp us down. I wish they had more reason to. How do you like your drink?”

“Mild, please. … Thanks.”

Brent took a stiffer one and seated himself also, leaning back, legs crossed, attitude and quasi-uniform suggesting a soldier at ease after a battle. “Well,” he said, “I can hope we’ll grow. That our cause will, everywhere.”

Because his aim was to explore this man, Cleland made bold to reply, “We’ll never know, you and I, will we?”

Though Brent’s voice stayed level, something kindled in it. “Maybe we will. Even after ten thousand years, what we do in this day and age may matter.” He shrugged, smiled, and sipped. “At least it’ll be nice having a sympathizer aboard ship.”

Cleland mustered bluntness. “I—I came … to find out. I don’t necessarily agree with you.”

“Besides,” Brent said shrewdly, “you hadn’t anything much better to do, did you?”

Taken aback, Cleland floundered. “Uh, well—why, I could have—”

“Sure, all sorts of stuff. Most of our crew are taking advantage, I gather. But you’re not the type.”

“Since we—we’ll be living side by side—”

Brent took him off the hook. “Okay. Why don’t I give you just a few words tonight, then we’ll relax? We can argue on the trip if you want.”

“I—when I got in touch, I told you I was interested to hear your side of things. The news—”

“Yeh, the news,” Brent scoffed. “It makes the North Star out to be a pack of ravening chauvinists who want to start a second Space War and wouldn’t mind nuking targets on Earth. How many people
listen
to us?” His lip curled. “Governments find us inconvenient. We might stir up a real popular feeling. Naturally, they and their toadies make us out to be dangerous lunatics.”

Cleland swallowed before he managed: “I must say, I don’t think Americans should die to get General Technology’s asteroids back for it.”

Brent slammed a fist on the arm of his chair. “Slogans!” he exclaimed. More calmly: “Okay, the North Star has a slogan, too, but is it really unreasonable? ‘Renegotiate from a position of strength.’ Do we have to be forever victims? Look, the Jews decided two, three centuries ago they’d had a bellyful of that; and today, the Israeli Hegemony. Are we any different?”

“What do you mean by ‘we’?” Cleland challenged.

“Ordinary folks like you and me. North Americans, Australians. I’d say Westerners, if the Europeans hadn’t craw-fished and the South Americans hadn’t stood aside. You were born and raised hereabouts, weren’t you? Well, think back. Look around. What’s wrong with our people having their fair share of the Solar System? What’s wrong with the whole human race, if we can get it together under the right leadership, taking its fair share of the universe?”

A vision
, Cleland thought.
A certain grandeur

He wasn’t convinced, but Brent was worth hearing, and proved surprisingly likeable.

Sundaram Sat
on the ground, on a bank of sacred Ganges, and gazed across the water. It rippled and sheened beneath the
Moon, through the night, broad, powerful, with now and then a glimpse of darkling wings or a crocodile gliding past. One could forget that works of man controlled and purified it, and imagine it as eternal. Leaves rustled overhead, a stand of bamboo rattled ever so faintly, in a breeze warm and full of silty odors.

He was alone in this mite of a park. The multitudes who revered him and clamored for a touch of his hands gave their mahatma his solitude when he needed it, and fended outsiders off.

They might have been bewildered to know that, sitting there, he did not contemplate the Ultimate. His thoughts were of the Yonderfolk. What language was theirs? The principles of mathematics and physics hold true across the cosmos, from fiery beginning to cold extinction. Is there, then, a basic law for communication? How shall we talk with that which is utterly strange to us?

He had won his fame by proving relevant theorems. More stirred within his mind.

Falling free,
each second laying more than a hundred new kilometers between her and a shrunken Sol,
Envoy
was about to enter the deep.

Her crew had not been aboard during the weeks of outward acceleration. There was no need of adding that to the unforeseeable stresses ahead of them. Two high-boost spacecraft overtook while the living cargo rested dreamless under brainpulse in weight-supportive tanks. Roused at rendezvous, they said their farewells and shuttled across to the starship.

It was the last valediction. Word from Earth would have
taken an hour to reach them. After all the pomp and speeches, they agreed this was a mercy. Nevertheless it was lonely watching the other craft vanish into remoteness.

Here, at their distance from the sun’s mass, space had flattened enough that the quantum gate could function. As nearly as instruments could tell, they were aimed close to Zeta Centauri, a marker on their way to the goal. It set the direction in which the energy from beyond space-time would take them: speed, a scalar, becoming velocity, a vector.

They went quickly to their individual stations, a business rehearsed so often that now it was automatic and felt not quite real. In a sense, the feeling was right. Computers, circuits, machines would do everything. Humans only commanded, and at this hour the only commander was the captain.

His voice rang over the intercom: “Stand by for shield generation”—purely ceremonial, but ceremony had grown very needful.

A whirring followed as the main fusion plant came to full power, and ebbed away in steadiness. Eyes watching electronic viewscreens saw no change. The stars crowded brilliant against blackness, images reconstructed to hold fast though the wheel turned and turned. But gauges registered current through great superconducting coils, and magneto-hydrodynamic fields sprang into being as a shell surrounding the ship at twenty kilometers’ remove.

“All well,” said the quasi-mind governing them.

“Stand by for zero-zero drive,” called the master.

Muscles tightened, fists clenched, throats worked. No one feared. Crews had traveled like this, unharmed, for generations. Though
Envoy’s
gate was the most capacious ever built, to bring her gamma factor to an unprecedented five thousand, robots had tested and retested it, had even taken animals along, proving utter reliability.

However, the gate was mighty because the journey would be.

“Go,”
said Nansen quietly.

Aft in the inner hull, switches flipped. Most of them were not material, but the quantum states of atoms. An eerie oneness awoke to existence. Between the two plates appeared a naked singularity, wherein the familiar laws of physics no longer held. Through it flowed a little of that underlying energy which the universe had not lost at the instant of its birth.

A little—enough to multiply the mass of ship and payload five thousand times and send her hurtling forward at a minuscule percentage less than the haste of light.

No sensation struck, except that viewscreens went chaotic, with swirls and flashes of formless hues. The energy entered everything equally, almost instantaneously, a quantum leap.

Notwithstanding, the power plant within labored close to its limit, while the governor of the shielding fields calculated and issued orders at a rate possible to nothing but a quantum computer. Space is not empty. Apart from stars and planets, it may be a hard vacuum by our standards; but matter pervades it, dust and gas—hydrogen, some helium, traces of higher elements—averaging about one atom per cubic centimeter in Sol’s neighborhood, and cosmic rays sleet through it well-nigh unhindered. Had the ship rammed directly into this at her speed, radiation would soon have been eroding her; the crew would have been dead within the first few seconds. No material defense would have availed. Multi-megawatts must go to work.

Guided and shaped by the boom forward, the fields were an envelope of armor. Laser beams, aimed forward, ionized neutral atoms, which the forces thereupon seized and sent as a wind that bore other stuff with it, flung aside and aft. In effect, a giant, streamlined shape flew through the medium, cocooning the vessel inside.

X rays did pierce it from dead ahead, made fiercer by Doppler effect, but no more than wheel and hull could ward off. Otherwise aberration caused them to pass through an aftward cone, attenuated both by distance and by lengthening of their waves. Well did
Envoy
guard her people. Yet the
battle was incessant and the power requirement high. Meanwhile she must fill her capacitors with still more energy.

Thus did she run, for some two hundred astronomical units, far out into the Oort cloud of comets. Observers orbiting Sol registered the time as a bit more than an Earth day. To her and those aboard her, it was slightly under twenty seconds. And both were correct. Her relativistic time dilation was the inverse of her gamma factor, and just as real.

Then the loan fell due. The quantum field collapsed, the high-energy state ended, she moved on trajectory no faster than she had done before, about 150 kilometers per second; for her, lengths and passages of time were the same as they had been at home. Like the acceleration, the deceleration happened too swiftly and pervasively to be felt.

She must repay her loan in
full
. She had done work, moving interstellar matter aside, moving herself farther from Sol. The collapsing field would have reclaimed the deficit from her atoms, disastrously, were she not prepared. As it was, the energy in her capacitors flowed into the field and satisfied. The net expenditure had been precisely zero.

“Jump one!” cried the captain, as was traditional.

It was a gesture, not repeated. Already, in a fractional second, the gate had reopened and
Envoy
was again running on the heels of light.

The optical
system soon compensated, and viewscreens once more displayed the stars. Three showed the heavens weirdly distorted by speed, for purposes of monitoring the flight. The rest took photons captured in the brief intervals between jumps and let computers generate an image shifting evenly from point to point. Thus far the scene had scarcely changed. A few light-days, a few light-years, are of little consequence in the vastness of the galaxy. But Sol dwindled fast from a small disk to the brightest of the stars, and second by second it diminished further, as if it were falling down a bottomless black well.

Nansen and Dayan stood in the command center, looking.
They belonged together in this first hour, captain and physicist. Theirs were the intuitions, instincts, judgments that no artificial intelligence could ever quite supply. Did it seem best to abort the voyage, they would decide.

They found no reason to. Around them instruments gleamed and gave readings, the ship murmured impersonally, a breeze pretended to blow off a field of new-mown grass. They watched their sun waning, and silence was upon them.

Nansen broke it with a whisper. “…
el infinito

Mapa de Aquél que es todas Sus estrellas.”

“What?” asked Dayan, almost as softly.

“Ay—”
He came out of his reverie and shook himself, like a swimmer climbing ashore. “Oh. A poem that crossed my mind.
‘The infinite map of the One who is all His stars
.’ By Borges, a twentieth-century writer.”

She regarded the lean, grave face before she said, “It’s lovely. I didn’t know you were such a reader.”

He shrugged. “There is much time to fill, crossing space.”

“And it makes a person think, doesn’t it?” She stared out at the cold galactic river. “How insignificant we are to everything except ourselves.”