Starfarers (7 page)

“You may never publish it, you know. When we come back, we may not find any world here.”

“I realize that. I dare hope—meeting the Yonderfolk, learning from them—will matter to humankind.” Mokoena fanned the air dismissingly. “But I don’t want to sound stuffy, either. By going, I can set something right here and now.”

“What?”

She sighed. “It hurt, forsaking medicine. The need is so great. I felt so selfish. But I—I did not think I could stand seeing much more utter misery, unless I hardened my heart to it, and I didn’t want to do that. My parents are ministers of the Samaritan Church. My work was through it, on its behalf. When I quit, they, felt betrayed.” Her fingers tightened around her tumbler. “
Envoy
badly needed one like me. I joined on condition that the Exploratory Foundation make a substantial grant to their church, a sum that’ll make a real difference. We are reconciled, my parents and I. They say they’ll wait for me in the afterlife and welcome me gladly. I don’t, myself, know about that. But they are happy.”

He regarded her somewhat wonderingly. “You’re a saint.”

She put down her drink, threw her head back, and let laughter ring. “Ha! Absolutely not, Mr. Ruszek, nor ambitious to be one. I expect I’ll enjoy most of what happens. I usually have.”

After a moment: “In fact, since we’d like to get acquainted, why don’t you stay for dinner? When I cook for myself, I cook well, but it’s more fun to do for company.”

“That’s the best offer I’ve had all week,” he said, delighted.

“One thing—”

“Oh, I have a room at the Hotel de Klerk.”

“No, no, what I meant was—It had slipped my mind, but we have a chance to learn something about our second engineer.”

“Alvin Brent? I’ve already met him.”

She grew grave. “What was your impression?”

“Why, … not bad. He knows his business. Not too much the physics of the quantum gate, but the nuts and bolts. If anything happens to Yu Wenji, Brent can get us home.”

“But as a person? You see, I’ve never met him. I’ve only seen the reports and some news stories.”

“His background is no worse than mine.”

American, born in Detroit, parents service providers struggling to keep afloat amidst depression, taxes, and controls. Alvin was their single child, apparently wanted more by the father than the mother, she was dutiful, as the New Christian Church commanded women to be and the Advisor commanded citizens in general to be. A misfit in school, he showed a talent for computers and machinery, which his social isolation reinforced. On recommendation of his local gang boss—the Radiums were in favor with the regional commissioner—he won appointment to the Space Academy. There he flourished. Though still not given to camaraderie, he got along, and his grades were excellent. Having trained on Luna and between planets, he became involved in the Space War, aboard “observer” ships that saw occasional combat. During those four years he did several courageous things.

They availed him little. Having been stripped of most of its interplanetary possessions, the United States must needs scale down. Discharged into a hand-to-mouth existence, Brent finally got a minor position with Consolidated Energetics. He was well aware that a robotic system would replace him as soon as the capital to install it became available.
Envoy
offered more. Whether for weal or woe, nobody knew.

“I am thinking of his ideas,” Mokoena said.

“What difference will they make, where we’re going?” Ruszek countered.

“Bad for our unity, our morale, if they are offensive. He’s been in the news quite a bit, you know, because of those things he keeps saying. But what they mean isn’t clear to me.”

“Don’t worry. If he should get obnoxious, I’ll sit on him. But he struck me as fairly sensible. About as sensible as anybody can be who’d go on an expedition like this.”

“I saw on the news that he’ll give a live talk in Australia about that North Star Society he belongs to. At 2100 hours. In a few minutes, our time.”

“And we can watch it happen, hm? All right, if you want to.”

“I’d rather. When so much of all our input is recorded or synthesized or virtual—Call it a superstition of mine, but I think we belong in the real world.”

“I do, too. When we can get at it.”

Mokoena rose and led the way inside. Ruszek glanced around. The living room was clean but cluttered: cassettes, folio books, printouts, pictures, childhood toys, seashells, souvenirs ranging from garish to gorgeous, woven hangings, old handicrafted pieces—tools, bowls, musical instruments, fetishes, masks, two assegais crossed behind a shield. She sat down on a worn and sagging couch, beckoned him to join her, and spoke to the television.

It came alight with a view of an auditorium. The building must date back at least a century, for it overwhelmed the hundred-odd people who had come in person to hear. However, on request the net reported that some twenty million
sets were tuned in around the globe. Doubtless several times that number would carry replays, or at least excerpts. “Aren’t we the sensation, we
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crew?” Ruszek gibed. “Every sneeze and fart of ours is newsworthy. How long till they forget, once we’re gone? Six months?”

The scan moved in on Brent as he advanced to the forefront of the stage. He was a forty-year-old of average height and soldierly bearing, dressed in plain military-style gray tunic and trousers, a Polaris emblem on the collar. His black hair was cut short, his beard suppressed. His features were regular and sallow, distinguished mainly by intense dark eyes.

“He is attractive,” Mokoena remarked.

Ruszek raised his brows. “Heh? I wouldn’t know. He doesn’t seem to chase women.”

Mokoena smiled. “Part of the attraction.” Seriously: “And his … his burningness.”

The invitation to speak had come from a group sympathetic to his views. Australia, too, had suffered losses in space. The chairman introduced the guest speaker rather fulsomely. By sheer contrast, Brent’s level tone caught immediate hold of the attention.

“Thank you. Good evening. To all on Earth who share our concern, to all like us through the Solar System, greeting.

“I am honored to be here, I who will soon leave you for a span longer than recorded history. Why have I come? To offer you a vision.’ To tell you that hope lives, and will always live while men and women are undaunted. My own hope is that you will follow this vision, that you will redress our wrongs and start the world on a new course, that what I find when I return will be glorious.”

The voice began to pulse, and presently to crash. “… yes, the North Star Society says we were betrayed. In the Federated Nations they bleated about ‘peace’ and brought every pressure to bear on us they could; but no more than a token on our enemies. The intellectuals, the news media, the politicians squealed about nuclear weapons let loose on Earth if the fighting got ‘serious’—as if it wasn’t! The bankers, the
church bosses, the corporation executives, they had their hidden agendas. Believe you me, they did. And so we withheld our full strength. We pretended we were not in a war at all. And brave Americans, brave Australians, died for lack of our aid. Do you want them to have died for nothing?”

“NO!”
the audience shouted.

“It’s no wonder his government is discouraging that club of his,” Mokoena muttered. “This is explosive stuff.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Ruszek answered. “They’re not stirring up any mobs.” His mustache bent upward with his sneer. “The mobs are at home, wrapped up in their virtual-reality shows. Maybe that’s why he signed on with us—frustration. He can’t do any harm where we’re bound.”

Mokoena shook her head. “I don’t think he is an evil man. I think he’s terribly embittered and—Yes, let’s see if we can help him heal.”

“Let him do his job and I’ll be satisfied. Not that he’ll have much to do, while Yu is in charge.”

“A mere backup. It must be a hard knowledge.”

Brent continued. His tone grew shrill when he denounced the conspirators and called for a rebirth of Western will. Toward the end, though, he quieted again; and tears were on his cheeks as he finished:

“… I leave the work in your hands. I must go, with my comrades, across the galaxy, to meet the nearest of the great star-faring civilizations. You, your children, your children’s children, they must found our own, and take possession of the stars for humankind. What we in our ship will find, nobody knows. But we, too, will carry destiny with us, human destiny. And when we return, when we bring back what we have won, to join with what you and your blood have built, humankind will go onward to possess the universe!”

The audience cheered, a sound nearly lost in the hollowness around them. Mokoena told the set to turn off. For a minute she and Ruszek sat silent.

“Do you know,” he said, “I think he really believes this.”

“Destiny? Yes, I daresay he does. And you don’t?”

“No. I believe in—slogging, is that your word? Slogging
ahead, the best way we can; and if we fail, then we fail. Bad luck, nothing else.”

“I feel there must be some purpose to existence. But the purpose can’t be that we take over everything at the expense of … everybody else.”

“Words, just words. I tell you, don’t worry about Al Brent. I’ve known men with wilder notions who operated perfectly well. Captain Nansen wouldn’t have accepted him—no matter how scarce qualified volunteers have been—if he was any kind of danger.”

She eased. “You two should be shrewd judges.” Slyly: “And I confessed he’s attractive.”

“That is something our crew members will decide about each other,” he answered.

She smiled. “We could begin now.”

The evening and the next few days passed very pleasantly.

Seen from
afar, against blackness cloven by the Milky Way and crowded with stars, Earth a blue spark lost in the glare of the dwindling sun, spaceship
Envoy
was jewelwork, exquisite in her simplicity. Two four-spoked wheels spun with glittering speed, an axle motionless between them. From the after hub projected a lacy cylinder, the plasma drive accelerator. From the forward hub reached, far and far, thin and bright as a laser ray, a lance, the wave-guide mast for the shielding force field. Both were now inactive. The ship had reached the desired velocity and was outbound on a cometary orbit. There was no immediate radiation hazard.

Hurtling closer, Jean Kilbirnie saw the true enormousness swell before her. Those wheels were four hundred meters across, their toroidal rims ten meters thick, each spoke a six-
meter tube. They counterrotated almost one hundred meters apart. The accelerator extended 40 meters, the mast a full kilometer. Other starcraft had similar lines, but none were like unto this.
Envoy
bore a quantum gate with capacity to give a gamma, a relativistic mass-length-time factor, of a full five thousand. She must carry everything that ten humans and their machines might imaginably need on a journey into the totally unknown.

Not yet had she embarked on it. This was a one-month shakedown cruise within the Solar System. The zero-zero drive would not awaken. Nothing about the ship required testing. Robots had done that, over and over, and all flaws were mended. The crew were testing themselves.

Kilbirnie peered at viewscreens and instruments. Subtler clues flowed into her through the bioelectronic circuits. Almost, she
was
the spaceboat. The ship waxed as if toppling upon her. The axial cylinder filled her vision, a curving cliff of sheening metal plated on composite whose strength approached the ultimate. Turrets, bays, dishes, tracks, ports, hatches, the whole complexity leaped forth athwart shadows. It was the outer hull, fifty meters in diameter. The inner hull projected slightly at either end, twenty meters wide, encased there in sleeves that held the magnetic bearings of the wheels. Kilbirnie was overtaking from aft, as doctrine required. No person was in that wheel, only machinery, supplies, and equipment awaiting whatever hour they would be wanted.

Time! Her fingers commanded full thrust. Deceleration crammed her back into the recoil chair. Blood thundered in her ears, red rags flew across her sight. The brief savagery ended and she floated weightless in her harness. She had not set those vectors. Living nerves, muscles, brains were too slow, too limited. Yet hers was the mind that directed the robotics that animated them. “Ki-ai!” she shouted, and spun
Herald
around.

The next maneuver was actually trickier, but did not rouse the same exuberance. Having matched velocities just as she came even with her dock, half a kilometer off, she boosted
delicately inward. The dock extended arms, caught hold, swung the boat parallel to the ship, drew her in, and made her fast.

Kilbirnie sat still, letting her heartbeat quiet down. The comscreen lighted. Captain Nansen’s image looked grimly out. “Pilot Kilbirnie,” he said, “that approach was total recklessness. You left no margin of safety.”

She pressed for transmission. “Och,
Herald
and I knew what we were doing,” she replied.

He glared at her. Blood still atingle flushed a narrow face with strong bones, straight nose, broad mouth, and blue eyes under thick black brows, framed in light brown hair bobbed below the ears. Coverall-clad, her body was rangy to the point of leanness. It was thirty-three years old, but Tau Ceti had added twenty-five to its calendar.

“You endangered your boat, the ship, the whole mission,” he snapped.

Lajos Ruszek broke in, though he didn’t bother with splicing to video. His vessel,
Courier
, sister to
Herald
, had barely come into naked-eye view, a blunt bullet tiny among stars. “Captain, I gave her leave to do it,” he said. “I knew she could. We’ve maneuvered enough together, we two.”

“Why did you?” Nansen demanded of Kilbirnie.

“Not to show off or experiment, sir,” she explained, slightly chastened. “That would have been foul, taking unnecessary chances. It was to practice. We’ve unco short time left for reinforcing our skills. Then we’re off on the big jump and can’t again for a year. Who kens what we’ll meet at the far end? Lajos and I had better be well drilled.”