Collected Short Fiction, page 773
One spring Don Ignacio came home to open a shop for the sale and repair of small computers. Carlos worked there at first for no pay, learning all he could of the computer arts that the Don said might be useful on the starbirds if he ever found himself allowed to touch them.
When his mother’s time had come, he lit candles for her in the church. She blessed him before the saints received her, and told him where to find the American dollars his father had brought, dollars which she had buried in a glass jar under the floor because she was afraid to spend them.
Trusting the saints, he left the pueblito and went north to seek the stars. El norte had no welcome for him. New electronic devices punished those who tried to wade the river, and the guards on the bridge turned him back.
Half his dollars went to a Juarez abogado for a security card and a driver’s license and a labor permit. He crossed the bridge with these and walked the highway to Las Cruces. Beyond the mountains, a contractor from El Paso picked him up and carried him on to a tall fence of woven steel which was hung with yellow signs of danger. The wide arch above the gate was lettered:
WE SEED THE STARS
Clumps of dead black stubble littered the desert beyond, which the Spanish explorers had named Journado del Muerto, “the Journey of Death.” The brush had been killed, the contractor said, by takeoff flashes. When Carlos asked about the starbirds, the contractor pointed to a thin silver bullet-shape aimed into the dusty sky a dozen kilometers farther on.
“Number Ninety-Nine,” he said. “Taking off tomorrow.”
He had no badge to show the guard at the gate, and the contractor left him with a little group of people standing outside along the road under a drooping Fairshare banner. Most of them young, they all looked as road-worn as he was, sunburnt and grimed with sweat-caked dust. They carried battered signs: AMEN RIGHTS! SAVE THE STARS! EARTH’S ENOUGH!
A van from a wrecking yard followed the contractor through the gate, and then a taxi with a woman and two small children in the back seat. He saw her from the edge of the road when the taxi stopped. Una rubia, young and very fair, with a beauty that took his breath. While he smiled at the little girl, she never looked toward him.
Wondering who she was, he envied those fortunate enough to know her, those of money and learning and power. Don Ignacio had spoken of them, builders and masters of the birds of space, sometimes kind but seldom really friends. Father Francisco had warned him of the temptations that must have trapped his father. The rubia’s world, he knew, was not for him, but his eyes followed the cab through the gate.
When the road was empty again, the Fairshare people dropped their signs and invited him to the ragged tents where they camped. They shared their lunch of melting candy bars and stale fast foods and spoke of their long war to stop or delay the Starseed flights. He thanked them for the food and told them he didn’t understand. Why shouldn’t the starbirds fly?
“Look back, my friend.” The speaker scowled through a dirty straggle of beard. “Look back at the explorers of our own Earth. Remember what we’ve done to forests and rivers and native cultures. Even the air. We’ve ruined and wasted and polluted everything. What do you think gives us any right to foul the stars?”
Carlos didn’t try to argue. He simply said that he had come to ride into the sky and visit the stars for himself.
“You’re a little late for that.” Laughing at him, a sun-blistered girl turned to gesture toward that far silver tower. The Mission’s finished. We’ve killed all the talk of another hundred ships. Ninety-Nine will be the last. Taking off tonight.”
He felt sick.
¿Esposible? Don Ignacio had taught him English, but still he thought in Spanish. “Could one get aboard?”
“Stow away?”
“Is that possible?”
She laughed again, but a man in blue coveralls turned to study him.
“Why not?” Eyes narrowed, the man looked at the girl.
With guts enough and luck enough, he might try. If he has a little money.”
He could pray for machismo and la suerte. He emptied his pockets to show the dollars he had left. The man counted them, nodded for the girl to follow him out of the tent, and came back to say that perhaps his dollars would do.
“I’ve been spying.” He glanced toward the gate and dropped his voice. “Digging for ways to cripple them. I worked at the Hundred site till they laid me off. Unloaded trucks for Ninety-Nine. Pushed dollies aboard. That’s all done. If you want my badge, we can strike a deal.”
He wanted the badge. The girl wanted his dollars. Generous, the man gave him the blue coveralls as well as the badge, and made a rough map of the ship that showed a place where perhaps he could hide.
“If you have to talk, say you’re on the clean-up crew,” the man told him. “They wear the coveralls. The foreman’s named O’Hara. Better duck him. Get under cover as soon as you can. Wait out the countdown. When it ends, you ought to be somewhere in zero G. If you’re lucky.”
“We’ll get you on a salvage truck.” The girl made a face at the ship. “But if you’re really lucky, they’ll find you and throw you off the ship before it ever flashes off.”
2
The cab stopped at the foot of the passenger ramp beneath the ship. She slid out, a trim quick woman in a green Mission jumpsuit, and turned to help the little girl, who held a huge panda doll hugged close against her.
The boy was already out.
“Dr. Virili?” The guard read her badge and smiled with approval. “You’re coming with us?”
“Rima Virili. Chief of the bio service team.”
With a smile of silent approval for her, he looked at his monitor and turned to the children. “Kipler Virili?”
“Kip,” the boy said. “Just Kip.”
“Day Virili?”
“And Me Me.” The girl held up the panda. “Don’t forget Me Me.”
Frowning at the doll, the guard turned to Rima.
“I’m sorry, dear.” She bent to hug Day and the panda, I told you the ship won’t have room for Me Me.”
But it’s so big—”
Day choked up and squeezed the doll tighter. The driver was lifting three small bags out of the cab. The guard set them on his scales.
“Sorry, hon.” He tried to warm his voice. “I know the ship looks big, but we have to load another ninety people. The limit on personal effects is only five kilos. Your bag’s already four point nine. That means your friend will have to wait.”
She looked up at her mother, blinking hard. Rima gulped and said nothing.
“Please, sir.” She kissed the panda’s nose and handed it back to the driver. “Please, won’t you take care of Me Me? Till we get back?”
“Don’t you know—” The driver caught himself and set the doll beside him in the cab. “Sure, sis. I have a little girl named Velda. She’ll take good care of Me Me.”
The guard set the bags on a conveyor. Rima wiped her nose and paid the driver. Catching the children’s hands, she led them up the ramp and stopped at the edge of the concrete pad, turning with them to gaze out across the flash-blackened landscape.
“Look around us,” she urged them. “All around!”
“Why?” Kip muttered. “It’s all so black and ugly.”
“The burnt ground here, maybe, but not the hills.
Look how white and bright they are, under the new snow! The sky so blue and clean! Our own good Earth! Take a long look. I want you to remember.”
Kip shrugged. Day stood waving after the departing cab. Rima was turning to lead them aboard when Captain Alt came off the ship. A seasoned veteran of space, graying at the temples but still hard and straight in his Mission green-and-gold, Alt had returned from Farside Moon Base to take this last command.
“Rima!” He hugged her and held her away from him to search her face. “Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“I do want you with us, but the children—” He looked down at them and sharply back at her. “You’re really sure?”
“It’s cost a lot of sleep.” She made a tired grimace.
“But you know my situation. The Mission job gone. The kids to care for. It looks like our best chance. I always longed to go, and I talked to Kip about it. He calls it a great adventure.
Alt nodded. “The greatest.” He caught her hand for a moment and then went on down the ramp to a temporary platform set up for the waiting media.
“Fairshare, sir.” The first question was shouted from the back row. “What do you think of them?”
“I’ve met them.” He tipped his head toward the distant gate. “They’re sincere. The difference is assumption and philosophy. They imagine that the galaxies are full of Earthlike planets inhabited by innocent primitives we might destroy the way Cortes and Pizarro wiped out the Aztecs and the Incas.
“We disagree. We’re not conquistadores. We are pledged to respect the rights of any life we find. Frankly, however, we have found no evidence of the friendly universe they assume. We’re launching a hundred wavecraft instead of only three because we’ll be lucky if three or four survive.
“Primitive life-forms are probably common. Many, I suspect, we wouldn’t recognize as life at all. All the evidence, however, says that intelligence is rare. Ours may be unique. We can be pretty sure nobody else has developed wavecraft technology, or they’d have already been here. Perhaps to save us from ourselves. If we find a universe empty of sentience, it’s surely ours to claim.”
“Captain?” A lanky man in the front row raised a hesitant voice. “A more personal question, if you don’t mind. If the odds are so bad, what brings you to the Mission?”
“The stakes.” His voice quickened. “Think of our goal. Escape! Before wavecraft, we were prisoners here, doomed to share the fate of our little planet and finally perish with it. The Mission exists to scatter our seed across the universe, every ship another pod. When you look at that goal—the ultimate survival of our kind—odds hardly matter.”
The reporter persisted. “What about you? Have you no regrets? For your family? For all the friends you must be leaving? For the world you’ll never see again?”
“It hurts.” Alt nodded, with a lingering glance at the snow-dusted mountains beyond the flash-burnt plain.
“But I’m ready. I’ve told my friends good-bye. My wife’s gone. We had no children. My estate has helped fund this final flight.
“And look at Ninety-Nine!”
His face lit with a sudden smile as he turned to gesture at the wavecraft, a thin silver projectile poised over the launch pit behind him.
“My Farside tour was over. I’d planned to travel, maybe write a book about lunar exploration, play a bit of golf. Nothing I really cared about. This command is a new life, just begun.”
“Jane Blake, Global Vues.” Two rows back, a stocky rust-roan woman slung a holocam to her shoulder and came to her feet, announcing herself in a bullfrog voice. “You’ve been launching these so-called seed ships for nearly twenty years. They’ve cost a lot of money and carried a lot of good people off to I don’t know what. They never come back. Now you tell us that most of them were probably lost. Your Mission Starseed looks to me, to a lot of us, like a very crazy game. Can you explain the risks? And the rules? In words that we can understand?”
“I can try.” Alt grinned and paused for a moment to find the words. “Though we really have no way to know the risks. And we don’t make the rules. They come out of physics. Relativity. Chaos theory. Quantum science.”
She swung her holocam to scan the shimmering hull, and he waited for the lens to return.
“Taking off, the ships flash and vanish because they have become virtual waves, moving at the speed of light—”
“What’s a virtual wave?”
“I’ll try to explain that”—he shrugged and grinned again—“though the science gets abstract. Briefly, quantum mechanics gives every particle certain aspects of a wave. Taking off, the ship may be regarded as a virtual quantum particle converted into a virtual quantum wave. As a wave packet, it has no definable parameters. Becoming a virtual particle again at the point of destination, it recovers the aspects of momentum and location.
“If you get that.”
“I don’t.” She swung her holocam to sweep the faces around her, most of them frowning. “Who does?”
“The paradoxes can seem confusing.” He nodded sympathetically. “We prove the theory, however, with every takeoff. And it’s the relativity paradox that makes wave flight feasible. Time slows as speed increases. It stops at the velocity of light. A flight may last a thousand years, as we on Earth perceive the time. Perhaps a million. Only an instant, however, on the ship itself.”
“How do you know?” her voice sharpened. “If they don’t come back?”
“They can’t return.” His grin turned quizzical. “Because the reconversion happens somewhere in the future. Could be a billion years from now. Time can’t be reversed.”
“Okay.” She shrugged. “But that suggests another question. If time stands still on the ship, how do you steer it?”
“We don’t. Can’t even stop it. The waveform moves on until it encounters a gravity field strong enough to reverse the launch conversion.”
“A planet?”
“More likely a star. Nothing else has the concentrated mass. Of course,” he added, “we do have auxiliary nuclear rockets. Once out of the quantum mode, we can move under rocket thrust within the star system. With luck, we can reach some world where we can land and live.”
“Suppose you don’t hit a star?” Eyes narrowed, she lowered the holocam. “Or anything big enough?”
“That probably happens. Often. I imagine. One reason we’re launching a hundred ships.”
“What becomes of those that don’t get stopped?”
“Nothing nice.” He made a wry face. “Ultimately, I suppose, the interference of cosmic dust and debris would degrade the wave shape. Scatter it. finally, into gamma radiation.”
“You’re welcome to your flight.” Ups tight, she shook her head. “I’ll stay home.”
She raised her lens to catch his profile, tilted again into the sun-glare off the ship. A jet had come down on the nearby airstrip, and now a jeep came roaring to the ramp in a cloud of yellow dust, horn howling. Her holocam swung to pick up Mission Director Tory sleeker as he tumbled out of it and came striding to the platform, another Mission man trotting behind him. Vi turned to greet him.
Younger than the captain. Stecker made a dapper figure in stylish crimson mods, his golden hair waved and long. More rumpled than modish, with his black beret and a straggle of iron-gray beard, the other man prowled around the edge of the group till he found a vacant chair. Sliding into it, he sat watching Stecker with a sardonic grin.
Stecker sprang to the platform. Ignoring Alt’s extended hand, he stepped forward and posed like a model for the lenses before he turned to the lectern. With a gesture for silence, he let his well-practiced voice spill out into the flash-blackened desert.
“Fellow citizens of the universe—” He shook a golden-nailed finger to reprove a grinning reporter “That’s who we are, we in the Mission. More than just Americans or Asians, Latins or Russians, we have bee: me the champions of our species, striving against ultimate extinction.
He paused for effect, and shrugged in in comic dismay when Captain Alt stumbled off the steps in his retreat from the platform. With a murmur o: assumed regret, he turned to lift his voice again, now above the rumble of a passing truck.
“Here on the launch site, we kneel a: the altar of our grand hope to sow the human seed across the planets of other suns, perhaps in other galaxies If we succeed, our race may live forever Our sacrifice has been enormous, in resources already depleted, in herculean effort, in precious human lives. In twenty years of worship, we have offered almost a hundred of these splendid wavecraft and ten thousand daring volunteers.
“If we fail—”
His words were drowned by the roar of trucks lumbering off the site, loaded with salvaged steel from dismantled cranes and gantries. With a shrug of exasperation, he stood waiting for them to pass.
“Alt just told us that,” Jane Blake murmured to the man beside her. “In plainer words.”
Perhaps Stecker heard her. Flushing, he concluded the briefing and climbed the ramp to inspect Ninety-Nine. The jet waited for him on the airstrip. The driver sat sweating in the jeep, but Director Stecker never came off the ship.
It was Captain Alt who finally emerged, tight-lipped and looking dazed. His shaking hand clutched a crumpled envelope. Without another word to anybody else, he had the driver take him to the jet.
The media departed. Security closed the gates, cleared the area, and broadcast warnings of the takeoff flash. The Fairshare protesters piled their tents and sleeping bags into their ancient vans and drove away. Launch crews reported to their work stations in the underground bunkers. Sirens hooted, diesels, droned, and the ship sank smoothly into the launch pit.
An hour after midnight, signal rockets boomed and blazed against the desert stars. Police stopped traffic for two hundred miles around, warning drivers to cover their eyes. The takeoff flash lit the sky over half the state. The sonic boom broke windows as far away as Juarez. Ninety-Nine left the pit, a sudden blinding beam of virtual radiation.
Alt returned to Mission headquarters at Las Cruces. That crumpled envelope contained a notarized letter from Stecker, naming Alt to replace him as acting director of Mission Starseed. Stecker himself was resigning from that position to take command of Ninety-Nine, “in the best interest of the Mission.”
