Starfarers (62 page)

“Yes, we have to ride the comet,” he was saying. Nansen, who had gained fluency in the language but hadn’t encountered all its idioms, was momentarily puzzled, then translated from context, “catch the tide” or “strike while the iron is hot.”

How much else don’t I know yet?
The question pierced him daily. And he hadn’t even been very active in public affairs. Steering from Sol to Tau Ceti … tumultuous welcome … appearances, interviews, celebrations … lectures, conferences, helping interpret the torrent of data downloaded from his ship … getting Hanny and himself established, the whole crew, and that handful of Earthlings who threw everything away that they might go with him to an unknown destiny. … The years stormed through memory.

He hauled his attention back to Chandor. If his influence—and, yes, the substantial sum he became able to contribute—had made the founding of the League possible, then it behooved him to answer this appeal for his help.

The director leaned forward, intent and intense. “Our
beginning may have been too successful,” he said. “We’re in danger of being overwhelmed. Hundreds of youngsters are applying, clamoring, to us. If we can organize them into a nucleus, something active, actually taking the first steps forward, we’ll recruit thousands, around the globe and throughout the system. But if we don’t show any real accomplishment soon, I’m afraid the excitement, the support, will die.”

“That fast?”

“There’ll be forces working to quench it. Are you aware; sir, what powerful interests are against us? They look on our goal as insane. They don’t believe a serious revival of starfaring is possible. They want the capabilities you’ve brought developed and used at home for undertakings they know will be profitable.”

Nansen scowled. “This is a free society, isn’t it? How can they forbid us applying our knowledge to make money and spending the money as we see fit?”

“They have funds, resources, and influence of their own, more than we’ll have for years. They can undercut our fledgling businesses, put pressure on those who’d help us with financing, and flood the world with disparaging, discouraging propaganda. I’ve reason to think they’re already subsidizing the Seladorian missionaries.”

“Can a few evangelists make any difference in the time span that concerns us?”

“If the eloquent preaching the laser beams carry from Earth gets featured regularly in major news media, perhaps yes. What you have revealed is so new. How many people have understood the implications? For millennia we’ve been resigned to—the stars only lights in the sky, a few threads of communication, a rare ship with an alien, clannish crew.”

“Do you seriously think we’re threatened?”

“No, not really, thus far,” Chandor admitted. “I fear we soon can be, but it need not happen if we keep our momentum—and if we don’t suffer some major setback; but that’s beyond our control.

“And so, Captain Nansen, I believe we must take the wave
of hopefulness you’ve raised and give it the impetus to mount higher. We should begin accepting recruits now, start their education, prepare them to receive the next Kith vessel and befriend her people. She may arrive at any year, you know.”

“Hm. Are you ready for such an effort?”

Chandor nodded. “Yes. We have our database organized, adequate staff, ample computer capacity. Of course, at first we can only offer home-study courses, but they ought to lay a firm foundation. By next year we should have facilities for simulator training, and in two years for the elements of practical spacemanship. A small cadet corps, true, but a
corps
, a living body.”

“That’s quick work,” Nansen said, impressed.

“Work worth doing! I asked you to come see me—this sort of thing goes far better in person—to counsel us on what to teach and how. We have the theory, you have the actual experience. And you are the hero. I could well say you’re the prophet. We need your imagination.”

Nansen felt uncomfortable about that. But no matter. The zeal before him lighted his own fire afresh. This was not about gain or glory, it was about the nature of humankind and humankind’s place in the universe.

A musical note sounded. “Pardon me,” Chandor said, and to the visiphone: “Accept. Proceed.”

“Search for Captain Ricardo Nansen,” stated the voice.

Chandor gave his visitor a surprised look. Nansen nodded, equally unsure what it meant.
Hanny, are you all right?
“I am here,” he said.

The scanner found him. The wall opposite generated an image panel. He saw a short, dark man in a tunic with an emblem on the left breast. A transparency behind showed dusk falling where he was. Nonetheless Nansen recognized the high-peaked roofs, archaic, unlike any hereabouts; and he knew the man also. It was Kenri Fanion, calling from the Kith village on the Isle of Weyan.

“Apologies for disturbing you, Captain Nansen.” He spoke in the dominant language of Harbor. Once in conversation he
had confessed that his Kithish was rusty; they didn’t use it much anymore in the settlement, apart from rites and ceremonies. Besides, it had drifted from the versions spoken in the ships into a dialect of its own.

Yet, though he had never gone to the stars, he was a Kithman in blood and heritage, his community the last abiding rendezvous, he an information broker for a living but by dedication a member of the Kith’s Tau Ceti service establishment. He addressed the commander of
Envoy
straight-forwardly but with awe in his eyes.

“It could wait,” he said. With grimness: “It will have to. However, I thought you should know immediately, before the news comes out.”

Nansen grappled calm to himself. “Thank you. What is it?”

“I have just heard from Shipwatch,” the system of orbiting instruments that kept track of starship trails. “Bad word. A vessel bound for us … won’t arrive.”

Chandor gasped. “Say on,” Nansen ordered.

“Shipwatch has recorded a trace.”
From far off. Else the craft, running close to the speed of light, would be in telescope range
. “Suddenly it blanked out.”

“They may have gone normal for a while to take observations or for some other reason,” said Nansen, knowing how empty his words were.

“It’s been five hours, Captain. And why would they lay to at all? They
know
this vicinity.” A tic pulsed in Fanion’s cheek. “We’ll keep alert for a sign, of course. But I think something has gone radically wrong.”

“Do you have a location?”

“About seven and a half light-years distant, inbound from the Cassiopeia sector. We’ll have a better figure when the readings from the far-orbit stations come in.”
Longer baselines, for triangulation. Not that a few billion kilometers either way are important, across a gap like that.

Chandor’s knuckles stood white above the arms of his chair. Somehow he achieved the same quietness. “Cassiopeia. That suggests
Fleetwing
. She hasn’t been here
often. Generally she’s plied remote parts, the Brent and Olivares regions, or even farther.”

Fanion’s head jerked, a nod. “Yes. The oldest left, wasn’t she?” He blinked hard. “Well, I suppose death finally caught up with her, too.”

“Too?” asked Nansen.

“Word reaches us eventually, by laser beam if not by ship. Whether or not a particular vessel has called on us in centuries, she’ll have done so elsewhere. When nobody’s seen or heard of her for a very long time—then nobody ever does again.”

The things that can fatally happen. … But what did? There shouldn’t be any hazard in a familiar region like Tau Ceti’s, nothing she hasn’t dealt with over and over in her thousands of star-years.

“That’s my message, Captain Nansen,” the Kithman finished. “I wish it weren’t. I’ll inform you as soon as we learn more.”

“If you do,” Chandor said.

“Yes, if. God keep them yonder.” Fanion ended transmission, maybe afraid he couldn’t have gotten through the usual formalities.

Ghosts of nacre drifted in a wall gone bare. The sky outside shone as it had no right to shine. The city mumbled.

“God keep us all,” Chandor said, “and the hopes we had.”

“What do you mean?” Nansen demanded.

“You should know, Captain. How few and far between the Kith ships are. Now we probably won’t see any for more than a hundred years. When you and I are dead.”

“Unless another one happens to be bound here, too.”

“Hardly.” Chandor’s tone flattened. “It could chance to, I suppose, as thin as the trade is and as loosely organized as it always was. But in general, the ships settled long ago on a cycle of routes. It’s complicated and variable, no doubt—I don’t know the details—but roughly speaking, if this was
Fleetwing
’s turn to call on us, nobody else will for at least a century.”

“Oh, yes. Pardon me. I’ve heard that, but forgotten.”

Chandor smiled sadly. “Understandable, sir, as much as you’ve had to learn in four short years, and as much as you’ve been doing.”

Staving off grief as best he could, Nansen forced some resonance back into his voice. “This doesn’t have to be a disaster for the League.”

“I’m afraid it is, sir. Our opponents will be quick to take advantage. The psychological effects—”

“Well, you know your society better than I do.”
A free society with an ideal of enterprise, where the story of the great pioneering era has the power of myth. Would its young really surrender their newborn dreams so soon?

Maybe. Those dreams are so very new.

“And, you know,” Chandor trudged on, “we were counting on a shipful of starfarers, their experience and example, their help.”

“Yes. We were.”
He’s right, this could be the blow from which we can’t recover
. “They may not be lost.”
Don’t let it sound forlorn
. “They may start up again—have started up again—and arrive in another seven or eight years.”

Chandor shook his head. His shoulders sagged. “I can’t believe it, sir.” He drew breath. “Once, before
Envoy
returned, I got to wondering about the mysterious disappearances. I’ve been interested in the Kith my whole life, you recall. I retrieved everything about them that’s in their database on Weyan. It goes back millennia, and includes many observations made elsewhere. Three times in the past, Shipwatch systems have detected trails—not bound their way, as it happened, but detectable—that suddenly ended. No one knows why.”

“Did no vessel make a search?”

“None were on hand. Except—let me remember—yes. A ship that stopped at Aerie, decades after an observation there, did go look, since the distance was fairly short, a few light-years. But she found nothing, Cumulative effects of uncertainties in the data, during the time that had passed. The search volume was too huge.”

“Wouldn’t survivors have broadcast a signal?”

“None was detected. The searchers gave up. Nobody else ever made such an attempt. They couldn’t afford to.”

A chill coursed through Nansen. He tautened. After a minute he said, gazing past the other man, out at the sky, “Perhaps we can.”

Chandor gaped. “Sir?”

“Let me use your visiphone, please.”

First Nansen called Dayan at their home and spoke briefly with her. Thereafter he told the communications net to find the rest of
Envoy
’s crew, widely scattered over the planet. It was to bid them get in touch and come to him as soon as possible.

“Now, pardon me,” he said, rising. “We’ll talk again later. Meanwhile, carry on.”

“Yes, Captain,” Chandor whispered. In his face bewilderment struggled with something that dared not yet be rapture.

Nansen had
ported his aircar two or three kilometers from the Venture building. He liked to walk. He did not like the stares he drew on a street. Not that they meant trouble. Most were friendly, many close to adoration, especially in this city. A few were wary or even resentful—
Envoy
had brought great strangeness to Harbor, and already the changes were felt—but not blatantly. Nor did anyone hail the famous man, though some nodded or gave him the hand-to-temple salute of deference. He simply didn’t enjoy being a spectacle.

The boulevard was wide, lined with the sweetly curved double trunks and feathery orange foliage of lyre trees. Vehicles glided along it, pedestrians through the resilient side lanes. The buildings behind were seldom more than ten stories high, set well apart on lawns of golden-hued native sward or green terrestrial grass. They ran to fluted or color-paneled façades with turrets elaborately columned and spired. Argosy was founded about six hundred years ago, by Kithfolk who despaired of wandering. Assimilation was not entirely complete. Ancestral genes revealed themselves here and there in small, trim bodies and craggy visages. More
pervasive and meaningful was ancestral tradition, an ethos half forgotten, now stirring awake. It made Argosy a favored site for an organization that aimed to launch fresh emprises among the stars.

And Harbor itself is a favored world. Jean’s world. We were lucky, arriving when we did, when a new civilization is reindustrializing the planetary system and dynamic individualists are seeking their fortunes. It can’t last.

Though who knows what real interstellar traffic, whole fleets of ships, might bring about that never was before in human history?

Having claimed his car, he set it to wheel out past city limits and take off. Field drive, miniaturized for bubbles like this, would make it safe to land and lift anywhere. That alone meant enormous wealth for the innovators. But let somebody better qualified find the right managers to reap it. Nansen was no businessman; his skills and goals lay elsewhere.

From above he spied a cluster of buildings lately erected, laboratories for research and development in the nascent technologies. The League’s financial backers did not lack vision—if their vision was largely financial, what of it?—while today’s computers, robotics, and nanotech made for rapid progress.

The sight fell behind him and he flew over a tawny plain. Shagtrees lined riverbanks with vivid yellow, fireplumes with scarlet. This part of Duncan had reverted to nature during the death agonies of the Mandatary; several circular marshes were warhead craters. Reclamation was under way, hampered by disputes over ownership. Twice, however, he crossed a broad swathe of green, cropland and pastureland, where a village nestled as a center for single farmsteads.