The Best of Bova: Volume 1 (26 page)

TO TOUCH A STAR

The story you are about to read,
“To Touch a Star,”
is an example of a tale that is heavy with science.

Two points need to be made: First, that science-fiction stories are those in which some element of future science is so crucial to the story that it would collapse if the scientific element were removed from the tale. If you took away the science aspects of
“To Touch a Star”
there would be no story left.

Second, in a science-fiction story the author is free to invent any new scientific discoveries he or she wants to—as long as no one can prove the author is wrong. In
“To Touch a Star”
I write about a spaceship that makes a journey of a thousand light years to another star. Impossible by today’s level of technology. Maybe impossible for centuries to come. Maybe such interstellar flight will always be impossible.

But no one today can show that such a voyage violates the fundamental principles of the universe, as we now understand them. Palm-sized computers and artificial satellites and genetic engineering were all once impossible dreams. They were the stuff of science-fiction tales, once. Today they are commonplace.

Notice that I do not use the concept of faster-than-light travel in this story. I have nothing against the idea of FTL, even though physicists since Einstein have believed that nothing in the universe can travel faster than light. There may be ways around that limitation, those same physicists warily agree.

However, think of the dramatic possibilities of staying within the light-speed limitation. Two men love the same woman. One of them is sent on a flight to another star. He will not age at the same rate as the woman and the other man, who remain on Earth. The eternal triangle now gains a new dimension: time. The challenge of dealing with the universe as we understand it creates a new capability for the tellers of stories.

Let’s add a third point: Even in a story that is heavily dependent on science, the scientific background must not get in the way of the storytelling. The characters and their conflicts are what the story is really all about. The futuristic science is the background.

A story—any story—is about a character struggling to solve a problem. Nothing less will do.

* * *

The first thought
to touch Aleyn’s conscious mind after his long sleep was, I’ve lost Noura. Lost her forever.

He lay on the warm, softly yielding mattress of the cocoon staring upward for the better part of an hour, seeing nothing. But whenever he closed his eyes he saw Noura’s face. The dazzle of her dark eyes, the glow of firelight sparkling in them. The rich perfume of her lustrous ebony hair. The warmth of her smile.

Gone forever now. Separated by time and distance and fate. Separated by my own ambition.

And by Selwyn’s plotting, he added silently, his mouth hardening into a thin bitter line. If I live through this—he won’t, Aleyn promised himself.

Slowly he pulled himself up to a sitting position. The sleep chamber was familiar yet strange. The cocoon where he had spent the past thousand absolute years was almost the same as he remembered it. Almost. The cocoon’s shell, swung back now that he had been awakened, seemed a slightly different shade of color. He recalled it being brighter, starker, a hard hospital white. Now it was almost pearl gray.

The communicator screen was not beside the cocoon anymore, but at its end, by his feet. The diagnostic screens seemed subtly rearranged. The maintenance robots had changed things over the years of his sleep.

“Status report,” he called, his voice cracking slightly.

The comm screen remained blank, but its synthesized voice, a blend of Aleyn’s parents and his university mentor, replied:

“Your health is excellent, Aleyn. We are on course and within fifty hours of our destination. All ship systems are operational and functioning within nominal limits.”

Aleyn swung his legs off the cocoon’s mattress and stood up, warily, testingly. The cermet floor felt pleasantly warm to his bare feet. He felt strong. In the reflections of the diagnostic screens he saw himself scattered and disarranged like a cubist painting of a lean, naked young man.

“Show me the star,” he commanded.

The comm screen flickered briefly, then displayed a dully glowing red disk set among a background of star-studded blackness. The disk was perfectly round, ruddy like the dying embers of a fire, glowering sullenly against the dark depths of space.

Aleyn’s heart nearly stopped.

“That’s not a star!” he shouted.

“Scorpio 18881R2434,” said the comm screen, after a hesitation that was unnoticeable to human senses.

“It can’t be!”

“Navigation and tracking programs agree. Spectrum matches. It is our destination star,” the screen insisted.

Aleyn stared at the image a moment longer, then bolted to the hatch and down the short corridor that led to the ship’s bridge.

The bridge screens were larger. But they all showed the same thing. Optical, infrared, radar, high-energy, and neutrino sensors all displayed a gigantic, perfectly circular metal sphere.

Aleyn sagged into the only chair on the bridge, oblivious to the slight chill against his naked flesh until the chair adjusted its temperature.

“We thought it was a star,” he murmured to no one. “We thought it was a star.” Aleyn Arif Belierophontes, son of the director of the Imperial Observatory and her consort and therefore distrusted by Admiral Kimon, the emperor’s chief of astroengineering; betrayed by Selwyn, his best friend; exiled to a solitary expedition to a dying star—Aleyn sat numb and uncomprehending, staring at a metal sphere the size of a star.

No. Bigger.

“What’s the radius of that object?”

Numbers sprang up on every screen, superimposed on the visual display, as the computer’s voice replied, “Two hundred seventeen point zero nine eight million kilometers.”

“Two hundred million kilometers,” Aleyn echoed. Then he smiled. “A metal sphere four hundred million kilometers across.” He giggled. “A sphere with the radius of a water-bearing planet’s orbit.” He laughed. “A Dyson sphere! I’ve found a Dyson sphere!”

His laughter became raucous, uncontrolled, hysterical. He roared with laughter. He banged his fists on the armrests of his chair and threw his head back and screamed with laughter. Tears flowed down his cheeks. His face grew red. His breath rasped in his throat. His lungs burned. He did not stop until the chair, reacting to an override command from the computer’s medical program, sprayed him with a soporific and he lapsed into unconsciousness.

A thousand lightyears away, scientists and engineers of the Hundred Worlds labored heroically to save the Earth from doom. The original home planet of the Empire was in danger from its own Sun. A cycle of massive flares would soon erupt across the Sun’s normally placid face. Soon, that is, in terms of a star’s gigayear lifetime: ten thousand years, give or take a few millennia. Too feeble to be of consequence in the lifespan of the star itself, the flares nonetheless would casually boil away the air and oceans of Earth, leaving nothing behind except a blackened ball of rock.

Millions of technologists had struggled for centuries to save the Earth, following the mad scheme of a woman scientist who woke from cryonic sleep once each thousand years to survey their progress. It was not enough. The course of the Sun’s evolution had not yet been altered enough to avert the period of flares. The Earth’s daystar would go through its turbulent phase despite the valiant efforts of the Empire’s best, most dedicated men and women. In all the vast storehouses of knowledge among the Hundred Worlds, no one knew enough about a star’s behavior to forestall the Sun’s impending fury.

Three young scientists, Aleyn, Noura, and Selwyn, hit upon the idea of monitoring other stars that were undergoing the same kind of turbulence. Aleyn had fought through the layers of academic bureaucracy and championed their joint ideas to the topmost levels of the Imperial hierarchy, to Admiral Kimon himself.

It had been a clever trap, he knew now. Kimon, reluctantly agreeing to the proposal of the son of his chief rival within the Imperial court, had sent out a fleet of one-man ships toward the stars that Selwyn, Noura, and Aleyn had listed. He had assigned Aleyn himself to one of those long, lonely ventures. Selwyn the traitor remained at Earth. With Kimon. With Noura. While Aleyn sped through the dark star-paths on a journey that would take twenty centuries to complete.

And now, rousing himself slowly from the soporific dreaminess, Aleyn realized what a cosmic joke it all was. Their research had shown that Scorpio I 8881R2434, a dim reddish star some thousand light-years from Earth, was flickering and pulsating much as the Sun would during its time of agony. A good star to observe, an excellent opportunity to gather the data needed to save the Sun and Earth. Better still, this star in Scorpio lay in the direction opposite the alien worlds, so that a scout ship sent to it would cause no diplomatic anxieties, offer no threat to aliens sensitive to the Empire’s attempts at expansion.

But the star was not a star. Aleyn felt the cold hand of chemically-induced calm pressing against his heart. The joke was no longer funny. Yet it remained a colossal irony. He had discovered a Dyson sphere, a gigantic artifact, the work of an unknown race of aliens with undreamed-of technological powers. They had built a sphere around their star so that their civilization could catch every photon of energy the star emitted while they lived on the inner surface of their artificial world in the same comfort, breathing the same air, drinking the same water as they had enjoyed on their original home planet.

And Aleyn felt disappointment. The discovery of the eons was a crushing defeat to a man seeking knowledge of the inner workings of the stars. Despite the tranquilizing agent in his bloodstream, Aleyn wanted to laugh at the pathetic absurdity of it all. And he wanted to cry.

The drugs allowed him neither outlet. This nameless ship he commanded was in control of him, its programming placing duty and mission objectives far beyond human needs.

For three Earth-normal days he scanned the face of the enormous sphere while his ship hung in orbit beyond its glowering surface. He spent most of the time at his command chair in the bridge, surrounded by display screens and the soft reassuring hum of the electrical equipment. He wore the regulation uniform of the Imperial science service, complete with epaulets of rank and name tag, thinking nothing of the absurdity of such formality. There were no other clothes aboard the ship.

The sphere was not smooth, he saw. Not at all. Intricate structures and networks of piping studded its exterior. Huge hatches dotted the curving surface—all of them closed tightly. The metal was hot; it glowed dull red like a poker held too close to a fire. Aleyn saw jets of gas spurting from vents here and there, flashing briefly before dissipating into the hard vacuum of interstellar space.

Not another body within light-years. Not a planet or asteroid or comet. They must have used every scrap of matter in their solar system to build the sphere, Aleyn said to himself. They must have torn their own home planet apart, and all the other worlds of this system.

All the data that his ship’s sensors recorded was transmitted back toward Earth. At the speed of light, the information would take a thousand years to reach the eager scientists and engineers. Noura would be long dead before Aleyn’s first report reached the Empire’s receivers.

“Unless she got permission to take the long sleep,” Aleyn hoped aloud. But then he shook his head. Only the topmost members of the scientific hierarchy were permitted to sleep away centuries while others toiled. And if Noura received such a boon, undoubtedly Selwyn would too. They would share their lives even if they awakened only one year out of each hundred.

That evening, as he brooded silently over the meal the ship had placed on the galley’s narrow table, Aleyn realized that Selwyn had indeed murdered him.

“Even if I survive this mission,” he muttered angrily, “by the time I return to Earth, more than two thousand years will have passed. Everyone I know—everyone I love—will have died.”

Unless they take the long sleep,
a part of his brain reminded him. Just as you did while this ship was in transit, they could sleep in cryogenic cold for many centuries at a time.

There is a chance that Noura will be alive when I return, he told himself silently, afraid to speak the hope aloud.
If
I return. No, not if. When! When I return, if Selwyn still lives I will kill him. Gladly. When I return.

He pushed the tray of untouched food away, rose to his feet, and strode back to the bridge.

“Computer,” he commanded. “Integrate all data on Noura Sudarshee, including my personal holos, and feed it all into the interactive program.”

The computer complied with a single wink of a green light. Within moments, Noura’s lovely face filled the bridge’s main display screen.

Aleyn sank into the command chair and found himself smiling at her. “I need you, dearest Noura. I need you to keep me sane.”

“I know,” she said, in the vibrant low voice that he loved. “I’m here with you, Aleyn. You’re not alone anymore.”

He fell asleep in the command chair, talking with the image of the woman he had left a thousand lightyears behind him. While he slept the ship’s life support system sprayjected into his bloodstream the nutritional equivalent of the meal he had not eaten.

The following morning Aleyn resumed his scan of the sphere. But now he had Noura to talk to.

“They don’t seem to know we’re out here,” Aleyn said. “No message, no probe—not even a warning to go away.”

“Perhaps there are no living people inside the sphere,” said Noura’s image from the comm screen at Aleyn’s right hand.

“No people?” He realized that her words were being formed by the computer, acting on the data in its own core and relaying its conclusions through the interactive Noura program.

“The sphere seems very old,” said Noura’s image, frowning slightly with concern.