Starfarers (63 page)

Not
too
favored a world. Population rising steeply again, more and more lands overcrowded. Yes, technics feeds, clothes, houses, medicates everybody, but it can’t create living space; and poverty is relative. The economy today is ruthless; for each person who succeeds, a hundred or a thousand go under. And there are other malcontents, misfits in religion, politics, lifeways—and some who look at the stars with a pure kind of longing.

At least open land could still be had, square kilometers of it, if you could pay. Nansen’s aircar slanted down toward his
estancia
, where Dayan awaited him.

He had
not copied the house of his childhood. That would have been a mockery, here where grass was only slowly spreading outward and only terrestrial saplings rose from it. Rower beds decorated a lawn, but a big arachnea dominated, like a spiderweb against the sky, swaying and rustling in a wind that smelled faintly of spices no human ever tasted. Two dogs lolled near the porch, panting in the warmth, but the glittery mites dancing in the air around them were not insects, and a sunhawk overhead, watchful for prey, had four wings. Yet the house was high-ceilinged and rambling, stone-floored, red-tiled, and a fountain played on the patio.

The
Envoy
crew sat near it, under a vine-draped trellis. Household staff had brought drinks and withdrawn. There was no need for servants as such; in most respects, robots would have done better. These youngsters, though, were like apprentices, here to be with Don Ricardo and Doña Hanny, to learn from them and someday win berths on their ships. They were like family.

But they were not those who had fared with Nansen. His glance ranged over his crew. As erstwhile, they were in a semicircle facing him. His beloved sat on the right, her hair a flame above a cool white gown in the fashion of Duncan. Sundaram sat beside her, the usual mildness on his brown visage, the usual contemplativeness behind it. Yu showed a measure of weariness. Zeyd’s lean frame was tensed. Mokoena’s arms cradled an infant.

Nansen stood up. “The meeting will please come to order,” he said.

It was not pomposity. They needed a touch of ritual to focus their attention. Until the last of them arrived, they had talked mainly about their roles on the planet—Yu and Zeyd planting the seeds of an industrial revolution, Dayan and
Mokoena of a scientific revolution, Sundaram trying to guide the religious and philosophical transformations that were afoot after the revelations from the Holont. Now they must turn their minds back to the deeps.

Nansen sat down. For a span only the clear song of the water sounded forth.

“You know what the situation is,” he said. “The question is, what shall we do about it?”

Mokoena responded promptly. “First, I think, we had better ask if we should.”

They were not surprised.

“We have too much to lose.” She held her baby closer. “Everything we’ve gained, homes, new lives; everything we’re accomplishing.”

“Yes,” Sundaram concurred. They could hear his reluctance. “Why squander the years we have left, and
Envoy
, to seek a derelict?”—
Envoy
, the sole working starship in tens or scores of light-years.

“Are we certain she is a derelict?” Nansen answered.

Yu’s eyes brightened. “Do you mean this might be just a quantum gate malfunction?” The light faded. “If so, the energy shift probably destroyed the vessel, or at least the crew.”

“Or maybe not. Hanny, will you explain?”

Looks went to the physicist. She spoke fast, impersonally, as if to keep emotion out from underfoot. “You remember what we learned at Tahir and the black hole, about the Bose-Einstein condensate having a small probability of going unstable. Not all the borrowed energy goes smoothly back to the substrate. It’s reclaimed instead from the surrounding matter, violently. This is in the data we downloaded here, of course, but in that cataract of information, it seems to have gone almost unnoticed.

“Well, since we mastered the modern computer systems, I’ve used their power to work on the equations, off and on. I’ve only mentioned this to Rico. Damn it, there hasn’t been time to prepare a paper! But I’ve found a solution that suggests
how to eliminate the danger. A matter of devising quantum-wave guides.” She could no longer wholly restrain herself. “Oh, when humans go back to the stars, they’ll go with that, and field drive, and so much else!”

“If they go,” Sundaram said.

“Yes,” Nansen conceded. “Chandor Barak, whose judgment we’d better listen to, thinks that most likely we have a threshold to get across—here, now, on Harbor—and if we don’t, star traffic will continue dying till it’s as extinct for humans as for … all others?”

“We expected a Kith ship would become our ally,” Zeyd said. “But this disaster—”

“They may be alive aboard her,” Dayan stated.

“What? In God’s name—”

“That’s something else that’s come out of my solution. The manner of energy reclamation when a gate fails. It takes the form of deceleration of matter in the immediate vicinity. That would definitely ruin the engine part of any ship. But, depending on what the energy differential is, the front section might not be too badly damaged, and the deceleration might not be lethally high.”

“I’ve studied plans of Kith ships,” Yu breathed. “They show an emergency nuclear power plant forward in the hull. Given self-sealing, self repair—an essentially intact life-support system, recycling everything—the crew could survive.”

Mokoena spoke raggedly. The baby sensed her unease and wailed. She rocked it. “Recycling is never perfect, you know. A ship is not a planet. She can’t hold a full ecology. She doesn’t have plate tectonics, or any broad margin of tolerance. Wastes accumulate, toxins, unusables. Adrift in mid-space, with no proper means of flushout and replenishment—if a crew did live through the shock, I wouldn’t give them more than twenty years.”

“What a ghastly, slow death.” Zeyd turned to Nansen. It blazed from him: “But Rico, you think you can save them!”

“If they are in fact alive, which we don’t know, I think
perhaps we can,” the captain replied carefully. “And I think it’s worth trying.”

“Allah akbar!”
Zeyd cried. “The old crew faring again—”

Mokoena laid a hand on his arm. “No,” she said, gentle and immovable. “I’m sorry, Selim, darling, but no.”

“She’s right,” Nansen agreed. “It’s more than your child, and other children we mean to have. It’s everything we’re building here. The whole future we’ve dreamed of, lived for. Your advice, example, and inspiration are absolutely essential. Your duty, all of you, is to stay.”

“But not yours?” Yu challenged.

“I’m the most dispensable. The League can carry on without me—if people see that it is carrying on, that the industrial and social foundations for a starfleet are being laid—if they can keep a hope alive that the work will be rewarded in their lifetimes.”

“What will you do for crew?” Zeyd growled.

Nansen smiled. “Oh, we have no dearth of adventurous young souls. They’ll fight to go. Fifteen years’ absence won’t seem terribly consequential to them, and anyhow, they’ll experience just a few days. But they’d better have a seasoned commander.”

Sundaram shook his head. “Fifteen years for us without you, dear friend. Or perhaps forever.”

“We’ve time to be together,” Nansen said. “
Envoy
can’t leave tomorrow. Her gamma makes her safe enough from a quantum accident. But there are other kinds. And the Kith did make technological advances while we were gone. She needs a dozen sorts of retrofits. And the crew will need training, and—I don’t suppose we can start for at least a year.”

Mokoena’s gaze rested dark upon him. “An added year for them in that ship. You’re cutting it close, Rico.”

“I have no choice. Nor, really, about going. But I want to consult and work with my former crew.”

“You realize, don’t you,” Dayan broke in, “I’m going also.”

“We’ll argue about that later,” Nansen said roughly.

“We will not.” Dayan rose to her feet. “There is no argument.” She came over to stand above him. “I’m experienced, too. How can you imagine I’d accept fifteen years without you, and being too old for children when you got back? Meshuggah!”

For thousands
of years among the stars, for hundreds of her own years, the ship had been great and proud. She was akin to
Envoy
in her general plan—seen across fifty kilometers, the unlikenesses were few, the most obvious a proportionately larger hull—but of more than twice the linear dimensions, ten times the burden. Even the wreckage of her had kept majesty; Nansen remembered Machu Picchu, Kerak des Chevaliers, the Lion Gate at Mycenae. It still belonged in the reaches she had sailed; he remembered the Gokstad ship, the
Mary Rose
, the
Constitution
, and thought that
Fleetwing
had found a better ending.

But maybe the ancient crews had found better deaths.

He reduced viewscreen magnification, retaining light enhancement, to survey the entirety again. Lesser wounds dwindled out of sight and he saw the forward wheel turning as before, slower than his because it was bigger but creating interior weight as of old. That meant the frictionless magnetic bearings around its hollow axle were there, which meant that the superconductors generating the fields were operative, which meant that a fusion power plant was, which meant that life within the rim might yet be possible.

The force boom, though, projecting from the hub to make and shape the radiation screen fields, was warped, a fourth of its two-kilometer length snapped off. The outer hull was rotating, oppositely to the wheel, something that should never
have happened. That it had not long since grated ruinously against the inner hull was a tribute to the remnants of the bearing system—to the engineers who designed it and the honest workers who built it, dust these many centuries. The eight boats that had docked on the exterior, two sets of four spaced equally around the circumference, were gone. The magnetics that held them fast had failed, doubtless in the moment of catastrophe, and they drifted off with the debris.

The huge cylinder terminated in ripped and ragged metal. A few interior members stuck out, torn across, like bones in a compound fracture. The inner hull was hidden from view, a stump. No after wheel spun athwart the Milky Way. Its fragments were also forever lost. They might not have receded fast, but in sixteen years they would have traveled into tracklessness.

Nansen consulted a display of data his instruments had obtained and interpretations his computers had calculated. The dry figures joined with the stark sight to tell him
Fleetwing
’s story.

Her normal-state velocity in the galactic frame of reference had been about seventy-five kilometers per second. When the substrate reclaimed the unpaid part of her debt, as much matter decelerated to zero as would carry that much energy at that speed. It occurred in a fractional second, thus with appalling force. In ship terms, the zero-zero engine immediately crashed aft, rending off its section of the inner hull. The pieces rammed into the solid hub at the end. They bore it and the plasma accelerator it supported away. Unsecured, seized by incidental forces—electrostatic, if nothing else—the after wheel withdrew as well. Whirling and wobbling, its axle sleeve struck the outer hull, smashed through decks, entangled structure. Its linear momentum left a hole agape in the stern of the cylinder, its angular momentum left a spin.
Fleetwing
pitched and yawed. That put more torque on the long, thin mast than it was meant to bear, and it gave way.

Not that it or its screen fields were needed by then
, Nansen thought.
This ship will never again race with light.

Incredible, that the systems up forward could save anything of her, yes, actually restore a kind of stability.

No, perhaps not really unbelievable. She was made so well that she had already endured everything else the cosmos threw at her. And likewise her Kithfolk.

He stood in
Envoy
’s command center with Hanny Dayan and Alanndoch Egis. His second officer was youthful; all aboard from Harbor had seen less life span than he and his wife. She was fair-haired and gray-eyed, tall in her one-piece blue uniform; but starfaring ancestors had bequeathed her her face.

Consoles, meters, displays, encompassed them. The air at present bore a tinge of pine smell. Retrofits had not changed old
Envoy
much.

Alanndoch stared at a radio monitor. The instrument searched from end to end of that spectrum and back again, lest a message come in that the audios were not tuned for. “No answer yet,” she said, uselessly and desperately. “Are they dead, then? Their broadcast goes on.” She
was
young.

“It would,” Dayan reminded her. “Automatic. Evidently the best transmitter they could rig was crude, but they built it rugged. The call will continue for decades more, till the power plant gives out.”

Nansen ran a hand through his hair. It was going white at the temples. “They should have seen us,” he muttered, just as pointlessly. “If nothing else, they could modulate or modify that signal. Interrupting it every few minutes would show that they’re alive.”

Dayan’s voice bleakened. “Maybe nobody looks out any longer. Maybe they’ve turned off their viewscreens. Sixteen years of watching naked space—”

“That doesn’t sound like what I’ve heard of Kithfolk,” Alanndoch said.

“After all this time, under those conditions, what may they have become?”

“Dead.” Alanndoch’s head drooped. “We’re too late.”

Seven and a half years—half an Earth-day for them—to the approximate location. Zigzagging to and fro, zero-zero
jumps that closed in on the goal. Laying to, straining outward with opticals, neutrino detectors, every capability on hand. The radio signal, barely obtainable, a broadcast gone tenuous over these distances, and no more than a wave band not found in the interstellar medium; yet unmistakably a beacon, proof that somebody had survived the disaster. (Well,
Fleetwing
was massive, and no doubt bore a considerable tonnage of cargo. Evidently the shock had not jarred her fatally hard.) Homing in on the source. A final approach under normal-state boost. Matching velocities at a safe remove. Quest completed.