Star Crossed

by C. Gockel

Bix interrupted him. “Nothing about the Ship is wrong. Not yet. Some casualties were expected. So were a few mechanical problems. Let’s all get on with the job.”

  They were skirting panic like a basketball rimming the hoop. Years of training and simulations, the ingrained reflexes of space work, kept them from falling into that panic.

  The med log chronicled thousands of fluctuations in the temperature of the stasis vaults over the years. As with the attitude thrusters, however, the ship corrected most temperature problems before they got out of hand. No dangerous hot spots cropped up in the first century of star flight. For that Catharin thanked the ship and the designers who had made it to be selfregulating, selfrepairing, intelligent.

  Nguyen spoke. “Captain, I’ve made a preliminary evaluation of our choices for going on. One of the options specified in the Book looks very good.”

  “The Eta Sagittarii option?” Joel said

  “Yes.”

  “What makes that star so good?” Lary asked.

  “Nothing by itself. But from the vantage point of Eta Sagittarii we can take a good look at three more stars, each of which is known to have a planetary system, probably with large moons at the habitable planets. That is, the autoobservatory can look for us. Then the ship can choose the best of those three and use Eta Sagittarii to change our course in that direction.”

  Joel stepped over to look at Nguyen’s screen. “Piece of cake to change course here and head for Eta Sagittarii! Just swing toward this sun and back out again.” He added, “It’d be a pity to waste the speed we’ve built up so far. Remember, until we brake the Ship, we’re still accelerating. That’s why our feet are on the floor.”

  “Sounds like you want to play rocket jockey,” Lary said.

  “Damn right!” Joel shot back. “It means getting to someplace worth going to.”

  Catharin listened intently. Lary sounded nervous and irritable, which was normal for him, stasis or not. Nguyen had been acting quiet and serious—again, in character. And Bix and Joel sounded like their old selves. But if Bix felt ill he would conceal it and carry on.

  She had to ask the most vital question. “What’s the time frame for a planet search?”

  “A few decades to Eta Sagittarii,” said Nguyen, “thanks to our present speed. Then, depending on which tangent the ship takes, as much as a century more.”

  Joel said, “We won’t know the difference. We’ll be asleep.”

  “Don’t ever call stasis sleep!” Catharin said sharply. “It isn’t sleep. It isn’t natural. If it goes on too long it will destroy you, cell by cell.” The med logs told Catharin that the real trouble had begun in the second century of travel, when the global cooling system developed a slight but definite imbalance. The fatal hot spot made a brief appearance, but the stasis program corrected it. Had the journey ended before the third century began, Seventeen Wedge T would have lived. At worst, thirty or forty individuals might have suffered frostbite.

  “We don’t know if the Eta Sagittarii tangents will pan out,” said Lary.

  “Eta Sagittarii is the prime option in the Book,” Bix said.

  “Quoth the Captain,” Lary muttered with a trace of insolence.

  Catharin fretted. Bix was a man of action, not words. He said what a commanding officer was expected to say whether it sounded wooden or not. Frequently it did. Which would cost Bix some respect on the part of cynical, articulate Lary Siroky-Scheidt.

  Catharin resumed reading the med log. The fatal hot spot reappeared in the third century, this time persistent. It took an unacceptable fraction of the ship’s energy reserves to counter that intractable entropy. So, with the same remorseless reasoning that led it to shut down the Yneg thruster, the Ship’s Intelligence abandoned the hot spot. It confined the stasis system’s temperature problems in one place. But the triumph came at a high price: 107 human lives.

  “Bix. That hot spot . . . .” There was no point in sharing this, knowledge as useless as it was horrid. But Catharin could not stand being the only one to know. “It persisted over the last eighty years. The whole wedge. Off and on. I’m sure the people didn’t feel anything. But everyone in there is goo by now. There aren’t any bones or organs any more. Just—”

  Struggling to hold back tears, she felt Joel’s comforting hand on her shoulder.

  Night fell with automatic dimming of the lights in Aeon’s crew level. The Axis illuminated the core of the level with a thin ring of red light.

  Six wedgeshaped rooms surrounded the Axis. The day had begun in the recovery room, the galley, and the flight deck. It ended in the break room and the bunk room. The sixth wedge was the flight lab, which Catharin had not yet opened up. It could wait until the morning.

  Another of the tall slit windows loomed in the break room. Leaving the lights off, she stretched out on a couch to watch the stars spin by. Her head spun too, with the events of the first day, facts, and discoveries too recent and uncomfortable to sleep on. She sighed and took down her hair, stowing the clips in a pocket. The bedtime ritual might make her feel sleepier. She kept her long blonde hair braided and clipped up, except at night. The single braid fell down on her shoulder. Stroking it, she wondered about herself. The others seemed to have come through in decent emotional shape. And she? She had always had abundant emotions, braided: woven together to stay under control, but never repressed, never cut off, passions flexible enough to be intelligently shaped. But today she felt brittle as never before. She remembered waking up and the desolation of being alone, and the cold glass dream before that. Undoing the braid, she combed her hair with her fingers, then buried her face in it.

  Someone else came in. He was darker than the rest of the break room. “Cat?”

  “I’m awake, Joel. Unfortunately.”

  “I can’t sleep either.”

  “What about Bix?”

  “Out like a light.”

  “That man could sleep through the end of a world.” She smiled in the darkness.

  “Lary, however, is pacing in the bunk room, and Nguyen’s in there meditating, which seems to be how they deal with insomnia.”

  “What do you do?” she asked him.

  “Find somebody to talk to.”

  Talking would do both of them good. “Insomnia doesn’t surprise me,” she said. “In the stasis experiments on Earth, it affected one person out of three. On top of that, we’re under terrible stress. We’re the only people awake in this gigantic icebox, which for some is already a morgue, and we’re responsible for the whole damned thing.”

  “Yeah—stressful setup!” He settled down on a chair, rubbing his neck. “You know, while I should have been sleeping and was wide awake instead, I started to dream.”

  She had been reclining on the couch. She sat up straight. “Hallucinations?”

  “No, Doc,” he laughed. “Dreams, like in my namesake’s book, the book of Joel in the Bible. There’s a verse that says ‘Your old men shall dream dreams.’“

  She collapsed back. “Oh.”

  His teeth flashed in a grin. “More than three hundred years qualifies as old.”

  “Do you feel old?”

  “No. Hell, for a starship pilot, I’m young. For a starship’s physician, you are very young.”

  “The Foundation wanted us that way as a hedge against the effects of stasis.”

  “But Bix is fine. Stasis works great in practice, just like the ship,” he said with confidence that Catharin could not share.

  “Tell me about your dream.”

  “Ever heard of the Ramamirtham Maneuver?”

  She shook her head.

  “It’s the Apocrypha in the Mission Book,” he said mysteriously.

  “Whatever do you mean?”

  “Aeon scoops up interstellar matter for fuel to burn by hydrogen fusion and mass to expel. We spent most of the three centuries coasting, and the rest of the time accelerating by degrees as the Ship found hydrogen and dust between the stars to burn. Slow way to go—but we’ve been at it for a whi
le. We’re up to a fair fraction of the speed of light.” He had an expressive baritone voice that sounded like a storyteller’s, Catharin thought. “But the Ram Maneuver is a way to get a lot more speed in a hurry. And we’ve got what it would take. A good strong ship and lots—” He broke off, struck by a flood of golden light that lasted for a minute or two as the new sun crossed the window. It gilded his dark-skinned, handsome face. He resumed, “Lots of initial speed, and a handy binary star.”

  “Eta Sagittarii?”

  “No, the A star is an orange giant, a huge bag of hot gas. It would fry us if we tried to loop around at Ram distance. But Nguyen’s Vandals, that’s a different story. That’s an ideal binary star for the Ram Maneuver.”

  “Why?”

  “The Vandals are two white dwarf stars whirling around a common center. Basically the ship does figure eights around them. The ship loops around one star, accelerated by the star’s gravity. Comes around and shifts course to fall around the second star. Back and forth. Ten or a hundred times or more. Faster and faster. Relativistic effects lead to diminishing returns, though, because the faster the ship goes, the more massive it is, and harder to speed up. At some point you declare victory and the ship breaks away and shoots out of the binary dwarf system going more than half the speed of light, maybe a lot more.”

  “Without having been fried?”

  “No. They built Aeon’s hull like a thermos, with one helluva a layer of insulation between the outer and inner hulls, both of which are incredibly hard and strong. Aeon could take the Ram Maneuver.”

  Interested, she curled up on her side and propped her head on a hand. “Are you suggesting we go to Nguyen’s Vandals and accelerate like that? That would cut down our travel time to a new destination, so we could be there in only a few decades, wouldn’t it?”

  “Aeon could loop around the Vandals in only a few years, since they’re small and close together, repeat the Maneuver as many times as it took to build up enough speed.”

  “Enough?”

  “To go to where there are lots of stars, stars and planets like a grains of sand in a sand bar in a river.”

  “Where, Joel?”

  “Look out the window and wait. . . . There.” Through the window the stars were thick as diamond dust. “We’re looking at a spiral arm, the next one inward from the Sun’s. On Earth it was known as the Milky Way in Sagittarius. Look at the stars and the dust. Planet stuff.”

  “It is beautiful.”

  “Between the galactic arm where we are now and that one, space is relatively empty. So why not go ahead and cross the desert? And go toward the heart of the Milky Way!”

  “It’s far, isn’t it?”

  “Two thousand light-years.”

  “How soon could we get there?”

  “Earth year 5000.”

  “Then you are making up a story to tell me. It’s a wonderful one, though. Thank you.”

  He looked at her, his expression intense, then said, “I’m talking relativistic speed, Cat. For the ship and us, the trip would be more like seven hundred. We’ve only gone three centuries so far. Seven more is still inside the stasis limit.”

  Catharin sat bolt upright. “One thousand years is the hypothetical maximum for stasis before irreversible organic damage occurs. We can’t commit to pushing the limit like that!”

  “Yes we can. The stasis is just as good as it was cracked up to be.”

  She retorted, “I’m the physician. I’ll decide that.”

  “We could look for planets as we go. Modify the Moonseeker code to account for a lot more speed. A planet with a big moon might turn up between here and there.”

  “Forget the Book’s options? Just like that?”

  “It’s in the back of the Book,” he answered. “Just not the prime option, not one of the easy, incremental options. I don’t think the Foundation meant us to be slaves to the Book. They meant us to go find a future.”

  The Book had been written by the Aeon Foundation. Behind it there had been wealthy and powerful men and women—mostly old people. Too old to go to the stars: stasis would have killed them outright. But they had been convinced that a starship and a new world meant the future of human civilization. “The Book is all that we have to go by.”

  He shook his head. “No. We’ve got ourselves—education and dreams and all.”

  Amazed by him, she replied, “To say the least, we’ve got to correct the stasis. There can’t be any more hot spots. And I have to determine just what the stasis has done to us so far.”

  “So put that education of yours to work,” he said, and smiled.

  “Besides, it can’t be that easy to do your maneuver. Can it?”

  “It’s like a billiard ball shot. The ship has to roll in on the perfect course at the perfect speed. But we’ve got Nguyen to figure it out for us.” He gazed at the stars beyond the window. “The other problem is the interstellar medium. It’ll help that the space between the spiral arms is emptier than most. Still, at most of the speed of light, the wind from the stars is nothing less than violent. But we’re shielded, insulated and otherwise protected far more than we had to be just for the little trip here. The ship’s magnetosphere is our friend. Instead of the Ship colliding with all of the interstellar matter, it deflects ions and channels ‘em around to the matter scoop for fuel. And the magnetic field gets stronger the faster we go.

  “We could do it, Cat. All the way to the Sagittarius arm. We’d find lots of planets there, maybe even green ones. Planets with moons. With rivers and seas. Maybe even trees.”

  Catharin said slowly, “I believe you. But I’m not ready to agree to go anywhere.”

  He crossed his arms. “Remember Starlink? And how they were going to transmit messages to us, and news?”

  “Of course I remember Starlink.” The huge radio telescope stood on the far side, the star side, of Earth’s Moon. It could send radio signals as well as receive them. In all of the Solar System, only Starlink had the power to send messages to Aeon as the starship journeyed farther and farther away; only Starlink had the sensitivity to detect the ever fainter whispers of reply.

  “Well, maybe they listened to the automatic reports from Aeon the whole time. We only got sixtynine years worth of messages from them. Then the signal stopped coming.”

  “Stopped?” she repeated, incredulous. “Why? Did something happen to the machine, or to the Moon?”

  Joel shrugged. “The last twenty or so years of messages was just media news. Hard for me to understand. Words I wasn’t sure about the meaning of. But I get the idea bad things happened—greenhouse floods, religious wars. The colonies on the Moon and Mars may not have fared too well either. I think the Aeon Foundation was right. Earth was going to hell in a handbasket. And we just got out in time. Anyway, the signal stopped, and I didn’t find a good-bye, either.”

  “But Starlink—,” she began, and broke off, unable to say her thoughts.

  The Starlink telescope had been constructed on the Moon six decades before Aeon left Earth. The hardworking radio astronomer who supervised the project happened to have been Catharin’s greatgrandfather. That coincidence had encouraged her profoundly. She knew that the ephemeral train of radio signals between Aeon and Earth would also be hers, a slight but very real link to her own origin.

  The link was shattered on the end that had been home.

  4 Valley Of Dilemma

  The selection process for starship astronaut culminated in a three-day interview at the Aeon Foundation’s biosphere in the California desert. The process left all of the candidates exhausted and some with minds changed about going to the stars. Dr. Catharin Gault did not change her mind. But she was forced to clarify it to an uncomfortable degree.

  After the interview, Catharin accepted the offer of a ride into LA from Rebecca Fisher, one of the other candidates. Becca’s jet, a small but capable Kestrel, made short work of the runway at Unity Habitat, soaring into the sky like its namesake falcon. Exhilarated, Catharin momentari
ly forgot the ache of exhaustion and the pain of self-knowledge.

  As Becca turned the jet westward, Catharin looked down at the huge biosphere called Habitat. The astronaut candidates had toured the facility the first day here, trouping through walkways and stairs built on the outside to observe the ecological test bed for a new world. Under mid-morning desert sun, Habitat’s rain forest flourished inside a pyramidal greenhouse. A miniature ocean made waves behind the glass bastion of Habitat. Catharin thought she could see the sun glint on the little ocean’s surface.

  Gaining altitude, the Kestrel skirted the Chocolate Mountains—corrugated landforms, more beige than brown in color, dotted with stunted trees and slashed with canyons. “I grew up on a farm in Tennessee,” Becca remarked. “But I’ve come to love desert. Good thing, because that’s what the new world will be at first.”

  Becca was off the Air Traffic Control Net and expertly doing her own flying. If the Aeon Foundation wanted experienced astronauts with additional skills needed by a young colony—such as piloting and farming—then Becca Fisher was almost certain to be chosen, Catharin reflected. Her own chances seemed uncertain. Much depended on whether the selection board had liked her answers to the Big Questions.

  The Kestrel arrowed through a wispy cloud. Becca laughed. “I love cloud bashing. There aren’t many places to do this anymore, fly on your very own.”

  “Is that what you told them?” asked Catharin. The first Big Question posed to a candidate was Why do you want to do this?

  “No. I said that to explore is to discover the human spirit. When we reach far from home is when we meet ourselves, personally and as a race. That’s why I’m an astronaut.”

  “That must have been a good answer. You were only in there for an hour.”

  “Well, a short interview by the board either meant you gave them good easy answers or bad easy answers.”

  “I tried an easy answer,” Catharin said. “I said I want to help build a better world on a new, Earthlike planet.”

  “Lots of people sang that tune. Rumor had it that’s what the board wanted to hear.”