Going Interstellar (43 page)

Then—as soon as we could—we asked the Wise Old Owl what to do about Ciar. It could not—so much the worse—magically open the door to his cell. It was directly wired to the ship’s navigation and landing systems, but not to the rest of the ship. All it could do was access the other computer’s memory and tell us where Ciar was kept.

That was enough, I assured Ennio. Even with the cell locked, I probably could open it. And when gravity stopped most people—even if alerted—would be disoriented long enough to lose track of keeping watch on a prisoner.

They didn’t know how to cope with null g, while
I
did. Null-g maintenance jobs are rare but they do happen aboard ship, and I’d been trained to handle that kind of environment.

The problem was that we were not on Earth. There was nowhere to run.

This was when the computer pitched in with the information that the landers were also scouts. As soon as we’d escaped the pull of the star around which we’d slingshot to slow our velocity, the larger of the lifeboats could take us there, and it would have provisions for the month we would need to land and for one more month afterwards.

We could lock ourselves in the boat and hide if the computer didn’t reveal our location until we’d departed.

I looked at Ennio, “If there’s no life on the planet, or no life compatible with ours. If we can’t eat the plants and animals of the world, we’re going to starve long before they come down with seeds and animals.”

A muscle worked on the side of Ennio’s face. “I know. But if we
don’t
do it, Ciar will die.”

What else is there to say? It went as planned. Well, almost as planned. Yes, the guards that had been assigned to Ciar’s cell were floating above us, completely unable to guard anything. Yes, opening his cell—with a cutting tool around the lock—was easy.

The hard part was keeping Ciar and Ennio moving properly in null-g till we could reach the capsule that took us to the chamber of the Wise Old Owl and, this time, beyond it, to the lifeboats.

The lifeboat—and why was it called that? It’s not like exiting to space would have saved anyone—was more comfortable than any of our lodgings, and had enough food for four people for two months.

And the planet turned out to have food of a sort. The bodies of water contained algae. A strange fish that looked like a jelly fish had a high speed collision with a salmon. Apparently they weren’t even really fish at all, but something between a plant and an animal, which has kept our scientists baffled so far, and will probably keep them so for many years to come.

But they were edible enough to keep us alive. Us and those who came after us.

We’ve used Earth food plants to colonize the land and start our farms.

It’s been thirty years since we landed and I’ve almost forgotten the stomach-churning fear of falling upward. I can look up at the deep blue night sky and feel nothing but wonder at how far we’ve come.

Thirty years later, I realize how lucky we were. We found the computer just in time to stop confusion and rioting and to know we’d arrived. If we’d not found the computer, the administration could have said the loss of gravity was a temporary malfunction. Only astrogators would have known we were orbiting a star, and, depending on how the computer records had been changed, they might have thought it was a different star. They could have been forbidden from asking further questions. We could have been prisoners in the ship for generations.

Perhaps forever.

Oh, some people still remain in the ship, orbiting the world. But living in the world is so much more rewarding, so much more free, that most everyone has come down, little by little. The young first, and those with some spirit of adventure. Which of course, had been squelched during the generations of living in a closed system, but apparently not entirely bred out.

My children would never know how to live in that close and regimented society. They’ve fanned out over the world, planted the land, grown animals, lived by their labor and answered to no man.

I
did
marry. Which of them? Can’t you guess?

Last year I had my first grandchild and I sing it to sleep with the songs that will tell them where we came from—so that if everything else is lost they’ll still know we came here from another world and that there will be other humans out there when their world is developed enough to send ships to
other
stars. I don’t doubt they will. All animals have a biological imperative to expand or die. And humans have been expanding their territory since they came down from the trees in a semi-tropical area of a little world now very far from us. We’ll continue expanding, beyond Alpha Centauri, beyond the Milky Way, on and on forever, until our species is so widespread no single calamity can render us extinct; till the fruits and knowledge of a thousand worlds make every single human freer and happier and wealthier than we can even dream.

So I’ll sing my grandchildren to sleep as I sang my children to sleep: to stories of our once and future voyages.

The big ship sails in the vacuum, oh.

SIREN SONG

Mike Resnick

If we actually achieve a serious space flight capability, it’s likely we will spend a long time in the Solar System before anybody actually makes for the high country. With experience, propulsion systems will improve, as will life support. What is now little more than a dream may one day become no more than a sporting event, a race, perhaps, through the Saturnian rings. Will this type of casual event signal that we are ready to move on? Perhaps. A better indicator, however, might arrive when we reach a point at which space travel begins to develop its own mythology.

Mike Resnick has won five Hugos and been nominated a record thirty-five times.

***

So let me tell you about
the Great Regatta of 2237, because the press had it wrong, as usual, and when was the last time the self-appointed pundits ever knew anything except what other self-appointed pundits were thinking?

The public had grown increasingly weary of races on Earth’s oceans. After all, the oceans were so . . . well . . .
limiting
. Lift your gaze, the reasoning went, and there’s a whole universe up there, and it’s a lot bigger than an ocean. Okay, we couldn’t reach most of it, couldn’t even visit Alpha Centauri during
one
lifetime, let alone make the return flight. But we could reach just about any place in the solar system, and even if the distances weren’t measured in parsecs, they stirred the imagination the way mere miles and fathoms no longer could.

There were six ships entered in the race. Five were sleek, bullet-shaped vessels, powered by fission or fusion—and then there was the
Argo
, the only ship in the Regatta that made its way through the void by the use of solar sails.

The course was mapped out by the most sophisticated computers: they would start from orbit—four of the ships had been built in space and would die having never touched down on a planetary surface—and each ship would have to pass within a thousand miles of four buoys that would register their passage. The designers didn’t want to chance losing a ship due to a gas giant’s gravity, so while they put one buoy in orbit around Mars, the other three would be in position not around Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus, but rather their moons: Ganymede, Titan, and Umbriel.

May 1 was a special day in many cultures—not for the reasons it once was, at least not in most countries—and it was decided that the race would begin at exactly twelve o’clock noon, Greenwich Mean Time, on that date.

The ships could choose any course they wanted, which was meaningful since their goals were in constant motion. Once the race began, they were not permitted to communicate with each other, even to warn of dangers such as ion storms or meteor showers. And finally, if a ship touched down on any solid surface—planet, moon, asteroid, anything—for any reason, it would be disqualified.

It was the
Argo
that caught the public’s fancy, partially because solar sails seemed somehow romantic, conjuring up visions of the sailing ships of yore, and partially because of the captain. His name—and no one except the public believed it could possibly be his real one—was FarTrekker Jones, with the capital T right in the middle of it, and they couldn’t have been more taken by a name if he’d chosen Odysseus or Horatio Hornblower.

He shared the
Argo
with two others, a co-pilot and a navigator—he didn’t trust navigational computers, though of course the ship had one—and the three of them were a hard-bitten lot. No one knew what had driven them to space (I almost said “driven them to sea”), and they weren’t much for giving interviews—but the people loved them anyway, and if no one knew anything much about them, why, that just lent a little romantic mystery to the race.

They lined the six ships up in orbit, each about five miles from the next, and suddenly they were off and running, or probably I should say off and flying. The
Silver Streak
jumped out to a quick lead, followed by the
Galaxy Roamer
. The
Argo
wasn’t exactly left at the gate—for one thing, they didn’t have a starting gate—but it was soon bringing up the rear.

They reached Mars in fourteen to sixteen days, depending on which ship you were rooting for. The
Galaxy Roamer
was now in the lead by seven hours, with the
Silver Streak
and
McGinty’s Marvel
five minutes apart in second place, and the
Argo
still bringing up the rear.

The first five ships followed a predetermined route to get to Ganymede, which was their next checkpoint. It was a reasonable route, and a safe route. They had to go through the Asteroid Belt, of course, but bad stories and worse videos to the contrary, most of the asteroids are so far apart that actually seeing two or three while traversing the Belt breaks the monotony (and monotonous it is, for Jupiter is a lot farther from Mars than Earth is).

But not all the Belt is like that. Some of it is what you might call densely populated, not by people but by asteroids, and in fact there are a few places where there are so many and they are moving so swiftly, that they can be damned dangerous. Moreover, there’s a lot of rubble out there, rocks the size of bricks, or footballs if you prefer, that are so small and so fast that a ship’s sensors will miss half of them, but any one of them, if it hits the right spot at the right angle, can put a ship out of commission . . . and I mean permanently.

Of course you’ve figured out by now what I’m going to tell you, and you’re right: FarTrekker decided the only way to make up lost time was to take the shortest route to Ganymede, a route the other five ships had avoided because of the danger involved.

A number of media ships had been posted along the route, reporting back on the race, but when the
Argo
changed its course they followed it only long enough to determine where it was going, and then wisely refused to follow it. As they reported, only a crazy man would take this route, and especially in a ship with a solar sail, which presented a much bigger target to the myriad of flying rocks, and of course once the sail was destroyed the ship would be without motive power. (“What will they do then?” asked one of the self-appointed pundits. “Row?” Twenty-seven other pundits used that same line during the next day, and eleven presented it as their own, which is of course what self-appointed pundits do.)

The
Argo
entered the Belt, and Knibbs the navigator—no one ever knew his first name—went to work, charting all the asteroids that were big enough to chart, and trying to position the ship so that anything too small to chart was more likely to hit the hull than the solar sail. They figured to be eight days crossing the Belt, but if they made it to the other side, they’d have picked up more than a week on their rivals.

And, oddly enough, they were not touched by so much as a pebble for the first five days. The sail remained intact, they actually were running two hours ahead of schedule, and Knibbs announced that they’d passed through the worst of it, that the asteroids were starting to look like baby planets again, rather than large rocks and small boulders.

And then, on the sixth day, the co-pilot (whose first name was Vladimir, and I won’t bother with his surname since no one could pronounce or spell it anyway), Vladimir was sitting at the control panel when he fell asleep, and his head or his hand—they never knew which, and it doesn’t really matter anyway—brushed against some of the buttons and switches and knobs, and suddenly the
Argo
was filled with this haunting sound, like a melody you heard when both you and the world were younger and more innocent, and try as you would you could never quite remember it, though you knew it had brought tears to your eyes the one time you’d heard it. In fact, you probably looked for it on and off for years, but
privately
, because you didn’t know quite how to tell anyone you were looking for a melody that made you cry.

“What is that?” asked FarTrekker, suddenly alert.

“I don’t know,” said Vladimir, blinking his eyes. He checked the control panel, but while a number of the switches and buttons had been flicked and pressed, none of them had anything to do with the ship’s radio.

“I know that song,” said Knibbs wistfully. “I heard it once, a long time ago.”

FarTrekker shook his head. “No, that’s my Leucosia’s song.”

“I didn’t know you had a girl,” said Vladimir. “At least, I’ve never seen you with one.”

“I had one once,” said FarTrekker, staring sadly at the viewscreen. “She was coming home when her ship was lost. They never found her.”

“Surely they looked for her?”

“They did,” said FarTrekker. “But it’s a big solar system.” He sighed deeply. “That was her song.”