Starborne Page 7

  — I hear you, yes.

  The signal was pure and clear and sharp. And so it remained, day after day.

  Throughout the strange early hours of the voyage Noelle and Yvonne were rarely out of contact with each other for more than a moment, and there was no perceptible falling off of reception as the starship headed outward. They might have been no farther from each other than in adjacent rooms. Past the orbital distance of the Moon, past the million-kilometer mark, past the orbital distance of Mars: everything stayed clear and sharp, clear and sharp. The sisters had passed the first test: clarity of signal was not a quantitative function of distance, apparently.

  But — so it had been explained to them — the ship at this point was still traveling at sublight velocity. It took time, even in nospace, to build up to full speed. The process of nospace acceleration — qualitatively different,conceptually different, from anything that anyone understood as acceleration in normal space, but a kind of acceleration all the same — was a gradual one. They would not reach the speed of light for several days.

  The speed of light! Magical barrier! Noelle had heard so much about it: the limiting velocity, the borderline between the known and the unknown. What would happen to the bond between them, once the Wotan was on the far side of it? Noelle had no real idea. Already she was in a space apart from Yvonne, and still could feel her tangible presence: that much was immensely reassuring. But when the starship had crossed into that realm where even a photon was forbidden to go? What then, what then? No one had discussed these things with her. She scarcely understood them. But she had always heard that traveling faster than light involved paradox, mystery, strangeness. There was an element of the forbidden about it. It was against the law.

  That terrible tension rose in her all over again. One more test — the final one, she hoped — was approaching. She had never known such fear. As they entered the superluminal universe it might become impossible for her mind to reach back across that barrier to find Yvonne’s. Who could say? She had never traveled faster than light before. Once more she contemplated the possibility of an existence without Yvonne.

  She had never known a lonely moment in her life. But now — now—

  And again her fears were proven needless. Somewhere during the day they reached the sinister barrier, and the starship went on through it without even the formality of an announcement. They had, after all, been outside Einsteinian space since the first moment of the voyage; why, then, take notice of a violation of the traffic laws of another universe, when they were here, already safely journeying across nospace?

  Someone told her, later in the day, that they were moving faster than light now.

  Her awareness of Yvonne’s presence within her had not flickered at all.

  — It’s happened, she told her sister. Here we are, wherever that is.

  And swiftly as ever came Yvonne’s response, a cheery greeting from the old continuum. Clear and sharp, clear and sharp. Nor did the signal grow more tenuous in the weeks that followed. Clear and sharp, clear and sharp. Until the first static set in.

  Hesper is in his element. The year-captain has called a general meeting of the crew, and Hesper will lecture them on his newest findings and conclusions. The year-captain has resolved to make his move. He will declare that Hesper has identified a world that holds potential for settlement — several, as a matter of fact — and that they will immediately begin to direct their course toward the most promising of them with the intention of carrying out an exploratory landing.

  Large as the Wotan is, and it is very large indeed as spaceships go, there is no chamber aboard the ship big enough to contain all fifty voyagers at the same time. The general meeting is held in the great central corridor on the uppermost deck, spilling outward from the gaming lounge. People sprawl, lean, cling to the rungs on the sides of the walls.

  Hesper, standing before them with his arms folded cockily, flashes the brightest of grins, first-magnitude stuff, and says, “The galaxy is full of worlds. This is no secret. However, we ourselves have certain limitations of form that require us to find a world of appropriate mass, appropriate orbital distance from its sun, appropriate atmospheric mix, appropriate—”

  “Get on with it,” Sieglinde calls. She is famous for her impatience, a brawny, heavy-breasted woman with close-cropped honey-colored hair and a brusque, incisive manner. “We know all this stuff.”

  Hesper’s brilliant grin vanishes instantly. The little man glowers at her.

  “For you,” he says, “I have found just the right planet. It is something like Jupiter, but reallylarge, and it has a mean temperature of six thousand degrees Kelvin at its surface, beneath fifty thousand kilometers of corrosive gases. Will this be satisfactory? As for the rest of us—”

  Sieglinde continues to mutter, but Hesper will not be turned from his path. Relentlessly he reminds everyone once again that the sort of world they need to find is the sort of world that they would be capable of living on. Hesper spells this tautological platitude out in terms of temperature, gravitational pull, atmospheric composition, solar luminosity, and all the obvious rest, and then he asks if there are any questions. Sieglinde says something uncomplimentary-sounding in German; Zena nudges her and tells her to hush; the others remain silent.

  “Very well,” Hesper says. “Let me show you now what I have found.”

  He touches switches and conjures up virtual images at the far end of the corridor, where the beams of a communicator node intersect.

  Hesper tells them that what they see is a star and a solar system. Hesper’s star seems not to have a name, only an eight-digit catalog number. So evidently it hadn’t ever registered on the consciousnesses of those old Arab astronomers who had given Rigel and Mizar and Aldebaran and all those other stars such lovely poetic designations, somewhere back a thousand or two years ago. All it has is a number. But it has planets. Six of them.

  “This is Planet A,” he announces. The assembled voyagers behold a small bright dot of light with six lesser dots arrayed in orbits around it. He explains that this is merely the decoding of a reality-analog, not in any way an actual telescopic image. But it is a reliable decoding, he assures everyone. The instruments with which he pierces the veil of the nospace tube are as accurate as any telescope. “Main sequence sun, type G2. Type G and perhaps Type K are the only acceptable stars for us, of course. This is a yellow-orange sun, G2, not uncomfortably different in luminosity from our own. I call your attention to the fourth planet.” A small gesture of a finger: one of the six small dots expands until it fills the visual field. Now it is a globe, green faintly banded with blue and red and brown, dabs of white above and below. It has a cheerily familiar look. “Here we see it, not a direct image, of course, but an enhanced transformation of the data. Its diameter, by all indications, is Earthlike. Its distance from its primary is such that small ice caps are present at the poles. The spectral reading indicates a strong dip in brightness at 0.76 micron, which is a wavelength at which molecular oxygen absorbs radiation. Nitrogen is also present — somewhat overabundantly, in truth, but not seriously so. The temperature range seems to be within human tolerability. Also we have indications of the presence of water, and the distance of this world from its primary is such that water would be capable of existing on its surface. Now, notice also the sharp absorption band at the far red end of the visible spectrum — 0.7 micron, approximately. Green light is reflected, red and blue are absorbed. This is a characteristic of chlorophyll.”

  “So what time do we land?” Paco calls out.

  Unperturbed, Hesper continues blandly: “We note also the minute presence of methane, one part in 1.5 million. That is not much methane, but why is there any? Methane rapidly oxidizes into water and carbon dioxide. If this atmosphere were in equilibrium, all the methane would have been gone long ago. Therefore we must not have an equilibrium here, do you see? Something is generating new methane to replace that which is oxidized. Ongoing metabolic processes, perhaps? The presence o
f bacteria, or larger organisms? Life, anyway, of one sort or another. Every indication thus far points toward viability.”

  “And if the place is already inhabited?” asks Heinz. “What if they don’t want to sell us any real estate?”

  “We would not, of course, intrude on a planet that has intelligent life of its own. But that can readily be determined while we are still at a distance. The emission of modulated radio waves, or even the visual signs of occupation—”

  “How far is this place from our present location?” Sylvia wants to know.

  Hesper looks puzzled. He spreads the fingers of his precise little hands and glances uncomfortably toward the year-captain.

  The year-captain says, “There’s no easy way of answering that. While we’re in nospace we don’t have spatial coordinates relating to anything but Earth.”

  “In relation to Earth, then,” Sylvia says.

  “About ninety-five light-years,” Hesper tells her.

  There is murmuring in the corridor. “Ninety-five light-years” is a phrase that carries the weight of serious distance.

  “We should be able to reach it,” says the year-captain, making a quick and probably slightly hazy estimate, “in about seven months.”

  Hesper says, “The other prime prospect, Planet B, which is eighty-six light-years from Earth, has similar characteristics, although with perhaps keener indications of the presence of organic molecules.” A new virtual pattern springs into the air in the hallways, eleven pips of light clustered about their bright little star. He begins to speak once more of spectral lines, insolation levels, temperature gradients, probable size and gravitational pull, electromagnetic emissions, and all the other criteria they must consider.

  Somebody cautiously asks if they have enough information to make a decision about a landing.

  The year-captain says they do. Enough to allow him to recommend a reconnaissance mission, at any rate. And what they don’t know now, they will be able to learn by sending down drone surveillance vehicles before deciding whether to undertake an actual manned exploration. But first they must agree to take the steps that will bring them out of nospace and carry them to the vicinity of the designated world. There are certain risks in that; there will be risks every time they move from nospace to normal space or back again. But those are risks that must be taken.

  He calls for the motion. He proposes a survey of Hesper’s Planet A; and if A proves unsuitable, a look at Planet B.

  No one is opposed. They have come out here, after all, to find a place to live.

  PlayingGo seems to ease the tensions of Noelle’s situation. She has been playing daily for weeks now, as addicted to the game as any of them, and by now she has become astonishingly expert at it.

  The year-captain was her first opponent. Because he had not played in years he was rusty at first, but within minutes the old associations returned and he found himself setting up chains of stones with skill. Although he had expected her to play poorly, unable to remember the patterns on the board after the first few moves, she proved to have no difficulty keeping the entire array on her mind. Only in one respect had she overestimated herself: for all her precision of coordination, she was unable to place the stones exactly, tending rather to disturb the stones already on the board as she made her moves. After a while she admitted failure and henceforth she would call out the plays she desired — M17, Q6, P6, R4, C11 — and he would place the stones for her. In the beginning he played unaggressively, assuming that as a novice she would be haphazard and weak, but soon he discovered that she was adroitly expanding and protecting her territory while pressing a sharp attack against his, and he began to devise more cunning strategies. They played for two hours and he won by sixteen points, a comfortable margin but nothing to boast about, considering that the year-captain was an experienced and adept player and that this was her first game.

  The others were skeptical of her instant ability. “Sure she plays well,” Paco muttered. “She’s reading your mind, isn’t she? She can see the board through your eyes and she knows what you’re planning.”

  “The only mind open to her is her sister’s,” the year-captain said vehemently.

  “How can you be sure she’s telling the truth about that?”

  The year-captain scowled. “Play a game with her yourself. That ought to tell you whether it’s skill or mind reading that’s at work.”

  Paco, looking sullen, agreed. That evening he challenged Noelle to a game; and later he came to the year-captain looking abashed. “She plays very well. She almost beat me, and she did it fairly.”

  The year-captain played a second game with her. She sat almost motionless, eyes closed, lips compressed, calling out the coordinates of her moves in a quiet steady monotone, like some sort of clever automaton, a mechanical game-playing device. She rarely needed much time to decide on her moves and she made no blunders that had to be retracted. Her capacity to devise game patterns had grown with incredible swiftness just in those first few days: no more than thirty minutes into the game he found that she had him nearly shut off from the center, but he recovered the initiative and managed a narrow victory. Afterward she lost once more to Paco and then to Heinz, but again she displayed an increase of ability, and in the evening she defeated Chang, a respected player. Now she became invincible. Undertaking two or three matches every day, she triumphed over Leon, Elliot, the year-captain, and Sylvia. Go had become something immense to her, something more than a mere game or a simple test of mental agility. She focused her energy on the board so intensely that her playing approached the level of a religious discipline, a kind of meditation. On her fourth day of play she defeated Roy, the ship’s reigning champion, with such economy that everyone was dazzled. Roy could speak of nothing else that evening. He demanded a rematch and was defeated again.

  And now she plays almost all the time. She sits within a luminous sphere of Noelleness, a strange otherworldly creature lit by that eerie inner glow of hers, and finds some kind of deep and abiding peace in a universe of black and white stones.

  So it is decided. We are to make our first planetary visit.

  The first of how many, I wonder, before we discover our new home? Will we find a world on this first attempt that’s almost good enough but perhaps has one or two more or less serious drawbacks, and will that cause us to get embroiled in a long, dreary battle over whether to stay or leave? We don’t want to pick a place that doesn’t really work, of course. But what’s our definition of a place that works? A planet that’s 99.77 percent identical to Earth? Blue skies, fleecy clouds, green forests, easy gravitation, a pleasant climate, ripe and nicely edible fruit on every vine, lots of easily domesticated useful animals close at hand? We aren’t going to find a place like that. If we hold out for a perfect simulacrum of Earth, we’re going to be roaming the galaxy for the next fifty thousand years.

  What we’re going to have to settle for is some place that’s 93 percent Earthlike, or 87 percent, or maybe only 74 percent. Obviously we need an oxygen-based atmosphere and plenty of available water, and we aren’t going to be able to manage if the biochemistry of the place if pure poison to our systems, or if the gravitation is so strong that we can’t take a step without falling on our noses. But we will need to understand that wherever we settle, we’re going to have to make changes in the environmental conditions to the limit of our ability to effect them, and probably we’re also going to have to make significant genetic changes in ourselves to the point where there’s likely to be some serious debate over whether our children can really be considered human.

  Will people be willing to settle for a planet like that on the first or second or even tenth try? Or will they vote again and again to reject what we find and look elsewhere for something a little better? We can waste our entire lives looking for the perfect world, or even the almost perfect one.

  An autocratic year-captain could force them to settle for the first plausible-looking planet we find, simply by decree. But the year-capta
in isn’t supposed to be that kind of an autocrat. And in any case I’m not going to be year-captain, am I, by the time we reach Planet A. My year will be up. They could reelect me, I suppose, if I agreed, and then I could do whatever was within my powers to influence our decision about where we found our colony. But if I want to be part of the landing team, somebody else has to be elected captain. And I do want to be part of the landing team. I can’t have it both ways.

  Who will succeed me? Heinz? Roy? Sieglinde? I don’t immediately see an ideal candidate. That makes me uncomfortable. And anything at all can happen once this collection of prima donnas starts to vote, which makes me feel even more troubled about the whole idea of handing the job over to someone else.

  One other thing to consider. Are we really going to be able to jump in and out of nospace with the greatest of ease? This is experimental equipment we’re flying here. We aren’t entirely sure about its stress tolerance. It may have plenty of surprises waiting for us. Apparently there’s a mathematical angle too, which had only now begun to surface in something I heard Sieglinde and Roy discussing. The star-drive, it seems, is governed by probabilistic phenomena that aren’t fully understood, that in fact are scarcely understood at all. Whenever we make a jump in or out of nospace there’s a small but distinct possibility that the ship will do something completely unexpected. It might just happen on any given shunt that something critical will have gone awry that is beyond our capacity to correct, and we won’t be able to make the equipment work any more, so that we wind up stuck wherever we happen to be, whether that’s in nospace or out of it. Come to think of it, we might find that the first time we try to get back into normal space we simply can’t do it.

  That’s quite a spread of worries, for one little journal entry. But it’s of some therapeutic value, I suppose, to set all this stuff down. In actuality I’ll deal with all of those problems the way I deal with everything, tackling them one at a time in the appropriate order. No need to worry about our rejecting a nearly suitable world until we’ve found one. No need to worry about whether the shunt mechanism will fail until it does. As for choosing the next year-captain, I ought to trust to the common sense and good judgment of my companions, instead of fretting about my own supposed indispensability and the likelihood that they will replace me with some clown.