Starborne Read online

  Starborne

  Robert Silverberg

  In Starborne, Silverberg takes the Utopia theme and turns it on its head. The scene is Earth many centuries in the future, where all of life's problems have been solved. But while humanity may be well fed, amply clothed, in perfect health, and rich beyond imagination, people are bored nearly to death. To bring a little spark back into the lives of humankind, the people of Earth band together to build a starship and begin the search for habitable planets in the rest of the universe.

  Starborne

  by Robert Silverberg

  Friends, take heart, banish all fear.

  One day — who knows? — we will

  look back even on these

  things and laugh.

  — The Aeneid, Book One

  For Dave and Nancy Deroche

  Sixteen light-years from Earth today, in the fifth month of the voyage, and the silken force of nospace acceleration continues to drive the starship’s velocity ever higher. Three games of Go are in progress in the Wotan’s lounge. The year-captain stands at the entrance to the brightly lit room, casually watching the players: Roy and Sylvia, Leon and Chang, Heinz and Elliot.

  Go has been a craze aboard ship for weeks. The players — some eighteen or twenty members of the expedition have caught the addiction by this time, more than a third of the entire complement — sit hour after hour, contemplating strategies, devising variations, grasping the smooth black or white stones between forefinger and second finger, putting the stones down against the wooden board with the proper smart sharp clacking sound. The year-captain himself does not play, though the game once interested him to the point of obsession, long ago, in what was almost another life; his shipboard responsibilities require so intense an exercise of his energies that he can find little amusement in simulated territorial conquest. But he comes here sometimes to watch, remaining five or ten minutes, then going on about his duties.

  The best of the players is Roy, the mathematician, a large, heavy man with a soft, sleepy face. He sits with his eyes closed, awaiting in tranquillity his turn to play. “I am purging myself of the need to win,” he told the year-captain yesterday when asked what occupied his mind while he waited to put down his next piece. Purged or not, Roy continues to win more than half of his games, even though he gives most of his opponents a handicap of four or five stones.

  He gives Sylvia a handicap of only two. She is a delicate woman, fine-boned and shy. Genetic surgery is her specialty. Sylvia plays the game well, although slowly. She makes her move. At the sound of it Roy opens his eyes. He studies the board the merest fraction of a second, points, and says, “Atari,” the conventional way of calling to his opponent’s attention the fact that her move will enable him to capture several of her stones. Sylvia laughs lightly and retracts her move. After a moment she moves again. Roy nods and picks up a white stone, which he holds for nearly a minute, hefting it between the two playing fingers as though testing its weight, before he places it. Which is not at all typical of him: ordinarily he makes his moves with intimidating speed. Perhaps he is tired this morning. Or perhaps he is simply being kind.

  The year-captain would like to speak to Sylvia about the anaerobic gene-cluster experiment, but evidently the game is barely under way; he supposes that she and Roy will be occupied with it for another hour or more. His questions can wait. No one hurries aboard the Wotan. They have plenty of time for everything: a lifetime, maybe, if no habitable planet can be found. All the universe is theirs to search, yes. But it may well be the case that nothing useful will be found, and this ship’s walls will mark the full boundary of their universe, forever and a day. No one knows, yet. They are the first to venture out this far. At this point there are only questions, no answers. The only thing that is reasonably certain is that they are bound on a voyage from which there is no expectation of returning.

  All is quiet for a time in the lounge. Then Heinz, at the far side of the room, loudly places a stone. Elliot acknowledges it with a little chuckle. Chang, at the board next to them, glances over to look; Sylvia and Roy pay no attention. The year-captain scans the board of Roy and Sylvia’s game, trying to anticipate Sylvia’s next move. His eyesight is sharp: even at this distance he can clearly make out the patterns on the board. Indeed, everything about the year-captain is sharp. He is a man of crisp boundaries, of taut edges carefully drawn together.

  Soft footsteps sound behind him.

  The year-captain turns. Noelle, the mission communicator, is approaching the lounge. She is a slim sightless woman with long gleaming blue-black hair and elegantly chiseled features. Her tapering face is a perfect counterpart of the year-captain’s own lean, austere one, though she is dusky, and he is fair-haired and so pale of skin that he seems to have been bleached. She customarily walks the corridors unaided. No sensors for Noelle, not even a cane. Occasionally she will stumble, but usually her balance is excellent and her sense of the location of obstacles is eerily accurate. It is a kind of arrogance for the blind to shun assistance, perhaps. But also it is a kind of desperate poetry.

  He watches in silence as she comes up to him. “Good morning, year-captain,” she says.

  Noelle is infallible in making such identifications. She claims to be able to distinguish each of the members of the expedition by the tiny characteristic sounds they make: their patterns of breathing, the timbre of their coughs, the rustling of their clothing. Among the others there is a certain skepticism about this. Many aboard the starship believe that Noelle is simply reading their minds. She does not deny that she possesses the power of telepathy; but she insists that the only mind to which she has direct access is that of her sister Yvonne, her identical twin, far away on Earth.

  He turns to her. His eyes meet hers: an automatic act, a habit. Her eyes, dark and clear and almost always open, stare disconcertingly through his forehead. Plainly they are the eyes of a blind person but they seem weirdly penetrating all the same. The year-captain says, “I’ll have a report for you to transmit in about two hours.”

  “I’m ready whenever you need me.” Noelle smiles faintly. She listens a moment, head turned slightly to the left, to the clacking of the Go stones. “Three games being played?” she asks. Her voice is soft but musical and clear, and perfectly focused, every syllable always audible.

  “Yes.”

  What extraordinary hearing she must have, if she can perceive the sounds of stones being placed so acutely that she knows the number of game-boards that are in use.

  “It seems strange that the game hasn’t begun to lose its hold on them by now?”

  “Go can have an extremely powerful grip,” the year-captain says.

  “It must. How good it is to be able to surrender yourself so completely to a game.”

  “I wonder. Playing Go consumes an enormous amount of valuable time.”

  “Time?” Noelle laughs. The silvery sound is like a cascade of little chimes. “What is there to do with time, except to consume it?” Then after a moment she says, “Is it a difficult game?”

  “The rules are actually quite simple. The application of the rules is another matter entirely. It’s a deeper and more subtle game than chess, I think.”

  Her glossy blank gaze wanders across his face and suddenly her eyes lock into his. How is she able to do that? “Do you think it would take very long for me to learn how to play?” she asks.

  “You?”

  “Why not? I also need amusement, year-captain.”

  “The board is a grid with hundreds of intersections. Moves may be made at any of them. The patterns that are formed as the players place their stones are complex and constantly changing. Someone who — isn’t — able — to see—”

  “My memory is excellent,” Noelle says. “I can visualize t
he board and make the necessary corrections as play proceeds. You would only have to tell me where you are putting down your stones. And guide my hand, I suppose, when I make my moves.”

  “I doubt that it’ll work, Noelle.”

  “Will you teach me anyway?”

  I have not yet ceased to wonder at the fact that we are here, aboard this ship, carrying out this voyage, acting out this destiny that the universe has chosen for us. How many times have I made this entry in my journal, after all? Five? Ten? I keep returning to this one slender point, worrying it, prodding at it, marveling that this is happening and that it is happening to us. Not to me, particularly — what good would all my training on the island have been if I were still the center of my own world, like a child? — but to us, this larger entity, this group of individual and disparate and oddly assorted people who have come together willingly, even joyously, in this curious endeavor.

  How odd it all is, still! Traveling through endless night to some unknown destination, some virgin world that awaits our finding. There has been nothing like it in all of human history. But this is the proper time, evidently, for it to be happening. It is our fate that we fifty people live at just this moment of time, this present epoch, when it has been made possible to journey between the stars, and so here we are, making that journey, seeking a new Earth for mankind. Someone had to do it; and we are the ones who have stepped forward to be selected, Leon and Paco and Huw and Sylvia and Noelle and I, and all the rest of us aboard this vessel.

  In the minds of all those myriad people who have come and gone upon the Earth before our time, when they look forward toward us and try to envision what our era must be like, we are the godlike glittering denizens of the barely imaginable future, leading lives of endless miracle. Everything is possible to us, or so it seems to them. But to those who are not yet born, and will not be for ages, we are the merest mud-crawling primitives, scarcely distinguishable from our hairy ancestors. That we have achieved as much as we have, given our pitiful limitations, is fascinating and perplexing to them.

  To ourselves, though, we are only ourselves, people with some skills and some limitations: neither gods nor brutes. It would not be right for us to see ourselves who sit at the summit of Creation, for we know how far from true that is; and yet no one ever sees himself as a pitiful primitive being, a hapless clumsy precursor of the greater things to come. For us there is always only the present. We are simply the people of the moment, living our only live, doing our best or at least trying to, traveling from somewhere to somewhere aboard this unlikely ship at many multiples of the speed of light, and hoping, whenever we let ourselves indulge in anything as risky as hope, that this voyage of ours will new shaft of light into the pool of darkness and mystery that is the reality of human existence.

  The year-captain leaves the lounge and walks a few meters down the main transit corridor to the dropchute that will take him to the lower levels, where Zed Hesper’s planetary-scan operation has its headquarters. He stops off there at least once a day, if only to watch the shifting patterns of simulated stars and planets come and go on Hesper’s great galactic screen. The patterns are abstract and mean very little in astronomical terms to the year-captain — there is no way to achieve a direct view of the normal universe from within the nospace tube, and Hesper must work entirely by means of analogs and equivalents — but even so it reassures him in some obscure way to be reminded that those whose lives are totally confined by the unyielding boundaries of this small vessel sixteen light-years from the world of their birth are nevertheless not completely alone in the cosmos.

  Sixteen light-years from home.

  Not an easy thing to grasp, even for one trained in the mental disciplines that the year-captain has mastered. He can feel the force of the concept but not the real meaning. He can tell himself, Already we are sixteen kilometers from home, and find that concept easy enough to understand. Already we are sixteen hundred kilometers from home — a little harder, yes, but he can understand that too. What about Already we are sixteen million kilometers from home? That much begins to strain comprehension — a gulf, a gulf, a terrible empty dark gulf of enormous size — but he thinks he is able to wrap his mind about even so great a distance, after a fashion.

  Sixteen light-years, though?

  How can he explain that to himself?

  Somewhere just beyond the tube of nospace through which the ship now travels lies a blazing host of brilliant stars, a wilderness of suns all around them, and he knows that his gray-flecked blond beard will have turned entirely white before the light of those stars glitters in the night sky of distant Earth. Yet only a few months have elapsed since the departure of the expedition. How miraculous it is, he thinks, to have come so far so swiftly.

  Even so, there is a greater miracle. An hour after lunch he will ask Noelle to relay a message to Earth, summarizing the day’s findings, such as they are, and he knows that he will have an acknowledgment from Control Central in Brazil before dinner. That seems a greater miracle to him by far.

  He emerges from the dropchute and is confronted by the carefully ordered chaos that is the lower deck.

  Cluttered passageways snake off in many directions before him. He chooses the third from the left and proceeds aft, crouching a little to keep from banging his forehead on the multitudinous ducts that pass crisscrossingly just above him.

  In the year-captain’s mind the starship sometimes appears sleek, narrow, graceful: a gleaming silver bullet streaking across the universe at a velocity that has at this point come to exceed a million kilometers per second. But he knows that the actuality is nothing like that. In fact the ship is not remotely like a bullet at all. No Newtonian forces of action and reaction are driving it, nor does it have the slightest refinement of form. Its outlines are boxy and squat and awkwardly asymmetrical, a huge clunky container even more lopsided and outlandish in shape than the usual sort of spacegoing vessel, with an elaborate spidery superstructure of extensor arms and antennas and observation booms and other excrescent externals that have the appearance of having been tacked on in a purely random way.

  Yet because of the Wotan’s incredible speed and the serenity of its movements — the ship is carrying him without friction through the vast empty cloak of nospace at a pace already four times greater than that of light and increasing with every passing moment — the year-captain persists in thinking of it as he does, an imaginary projectile, sleek, narrow, graceful. There is a rightness to that which transcends mere literal sense. He knows better, but he is unable to shake that streamlined image from his mind, even though he is familiar with the true shape of the vessel inside and out. If nothing else, his routine movements through the labyrinthine interior of the starship each day provide constant and unending contradiction of his fanciful mental picture of it.

  The tangled lower levels of the ship are particularly challenging to traverse. The congested corridors, cluttered with a host of storage domes and recycling coils and all manner of other utility ducts, twist and turn every few meters with the abrupt lunatic intricacy of a topological puzzle. But the year-captain is accustomed to moving through them, and in any case he is a man of extraordinary grace of movement, precise and fastidious of step. His outward physical poise reflects the deep strain of asceticism that is an innate part of his character. He is untroubled by the obstacles of these corridors — to him they have no serious existence, they are barely obstacles at all.

  Lightfootedly he makes his way past a dangling maze of thrumming conduits and scrambles over a long series of swelling shallow mounds. These are the cargo nodules. In sheltered chambers beneath this level lies all the precious furniture of their journey: mediq machines, bone banks, data bubbles, pre-read vapor chips, wildlife domestication plaques, excavator arcs, soil samplers, gene replacement kits, matrix jacks, hydrocarbon converters, climate nodes and other planetary-engineering equipment, artificial intelligences, molecular replicators, heavy-machinery templates, and all the rest of their world-buil
ding storehouse. Below all that, on the deepest level of all, is the zygote bank, ten thousand fertilized ova tucked away snugly in permafreeze spansules, and enough additional sperm and unfertilized ova to maintain significant genetic diversity as the succeeding generations of the colony unfold.

  He reaches a Y-shaped fork, where the passageway abruptly widens and takes the abrupt left turn into Hesper’s little room. A blare of colored light confronts him, blue and green and dazzling incandescent red. Things blink and flash in comic excess. Hesper’s screen is the center of the universe, toward which everything flows: from every corner of the firmament data comes streaming in torrents, and somehow it all is captured and reconstituted into visual form here. But only Hesper can understand it. Possibly not even he, the year-captain sometimes thinks.

  The air in Hesper’s room is warm and close, dense, moist jungle air. Hesper likes heat and always keeps humidity turned to the max. He is a small black-skinned man, with thin, perpetually compressed lips and a startling angular beak of a nose, who comes from some island on the far side of India. The sun must be very strong there; the fair-skinned year-captain imagines that he would find himself baked down to the bone in a minute, if ever he were to set foot in that land. Is it a place like that toward which all of Hesper’s zealous scanning is bent, one with a sun of such ferocity?

  “Look here, year-captain,” Hesper says immediately. “Four new prospects!”

  He taps the screen, here, here, here, here. Hesper is an eternal optimist. For him the galaxy brims and overflows with habitable worlds.

  “How many does that make? Fifty? A hundred?”

  “Sixty-one, within a sphere a hundred and thirty light-years across. Plausible suns, probable planetary configurations.” Hesper’s voice is light, high-pitched, inflected in a singsongy way. “Of course, I’m not yet ready to recommend an inspection of any one of them.”