“Do we have to have reaction braking at the far end?” asked Guthrie in the humanoid.
Aulard looked at him. “W’y, no. Not if—Yes, I recall discussions long ago—” He tugged his chin. “M-m, we send a’ead very soon se little von Neumann machines to multiply semselves and sen build an industrial plant sat can make a sun-powered laser adequate to slow se ships w’en sey arrive. . . .”
“Now you’re talking!” exclaimed the senior Guthrie. “All we need do is boost our ark or arks to one-tenth light speed or thereabouts, and put ‘em on trajectory. Is this workable?”
“I must compute before I can be sure, naturellement,” Aulard replied, “but I suspect it will still come close to exhausting your energy supply.”
“That won’t matter.”
“No,” said Guthrie in the humanoid, “it’ll antimatter.”
Unreasonable laughter met the childish pun, followed by a sudden excited seriousness.
* * * *
42
A
Peace Authority squad had gone by, afoot, as Kyra neared the Blue Theta. She realized that sight was not uncommon in the North American megalopolises, and Erie-Ontario seemed peaceful enough. Nonetheless it struck at her. She remarked on it to Robert Lee.
“What did you expect?” he replied. His voice was flat. When she hugged him in greeting, his response had been brief and she felt him tremble. He sat slumped in the recliner opposite her chair. “The Liberation Army is organized and disciplined, but it’s tiny. The Chaotics were only united in their hatred of the Avantists. Now they’re falling apart into their separate factions—and paying off scores—and quite a few ordinary citizens did have a stake in the old order of things, you know, and are unhappy and revengeful themselves—and the economy’s a wreck—” He shrugged,
Kyra was looking at the viewscreen. The sky soared crystalline blue above the towers, save where clouds scudded as dazzlingly white, trailing their shadows across and between them. Wind blew keen with approaching autumn. Abruptly she longed to be out in it. Lee had overheated the apartment, in spite of his thick shirt. This air lay dead upon her. “What will come of it all?” she wondered,
“My guess is, the present arrangements between the provisional government and the Federation Council will set themselves fast. Or, rather, they’ll expand. I wouldn’t be surprised if here we have the seed of a truly rationalized society, such as the Avantists only dreamed of. Feasible, because it isn’t imposed according to an ideology, it’s developing according to a demand. In that case, it’ll gradually spread its kind beyond these borders.” The momentary intellectual enthusiasm died away. “My guess.”
She turned back toward him. “Only your guess?”
“I’m not doing any intuitional analyses yet. Not up to it.”
She considered the boyish face gone gaunt, dark rims under the eyes and the darknesses behind them. Pain for him deepened within her. “You do look scooped out,” she said low.
He grimaced. “It still feels that way.”
“After what they did to you.” To your chemistry, your brain, your spirit. Physical torture would have been less invasive.
“Let’s not talk about that,” he snapped. “I’ll recover.” His tone gentled. “Meanwhile, Fireball’s providing for me very decently. Including privacy, the best medicine of all.”
Kyra nodded. “Yes. Guthrie’s like that, and he has the power to hold the news media off you.” Pass the word around, a hint here, a bribe there, perhaps a veiled threat or two. How much longer could he work such beneficences?
“You didn’t escape them,” Lee sympathized.
“No, my part was too damn splashy. But I didn’t care a lot, and by now I’m fading out of the public mind, thank God.”
“Back to a pilot’s career, hey?”
“I don’t know.” Kyra tried to keep her speech calm. “Nobody knows what’ll happen. Doubtless my kind of tech will be wanted for years to come, at least, but—” She recoiled from the subject. “What about you, Bob? What are your plans?”
He stared at the hands folded in his lap. “I don’t know either. It isn’t . . . comfortable any more, being a Fireball consorte on Earth.”
“I should think folk hereabouts would appreciate us.”
“Some do. Others are, bueno, ugly. Most haven’t decided where they stand. It makes for awkward relations.”
“Might you be easier elsewhere? Maybe in L-5? I’m sure it can be arranged for you.”
“Maybe. Or maybe I’ll resign.” He saw the near shock upon her. “It wouldn’t be desertion. Fireball—Fireball doesn’tfeel the way it used to. Can you understand that?” He half smiled. “If you can, explain it to me, por favor, because I can’t. Everything’s confused and—” a whisper—”and somehow empty.”
Hearing him thus, beholding him, what could she but rise, go lean over the bowed head, lay her arms around him and draw him close to her?
“Gracias,” he mumbled after a minute or two. “That’s sweet of you.” She released him and stepped back. His gaze followed her. “You’re good people, Kyra. Just your coming to see me, that means more than I can say.”
Warmth washed over her brow and cheeks and breasts. “I wouldn’t leave an amigo with never a word to him.”
“I hope ... we can get together again.”
“Me too. Sure. We’ll make it happen.”
They were silent for a span.
“Look,” Kyra decided, “what you need right now is to get the hell away from here. It’s absolutely lovely out. Let’s hop over to Niagara Park and totter around a few hours, except when we sit in the gardens, and then have dinner some nice little place, like amongst your Arab friends, and then I’ll tuck you in early.”
For the first time, Lee showed something akin to liveliness. “That sounds wonderful, but we can do better,” he said. “I’m in the quivira quite a bit these days. Why don’t we go there before we get that dinner?”
She frowned.
“Don’t shy off,” he urged. “It’s nothing perverse, nothing fantastic. The program I elect is pure nature. Hills, woods, seashore, wildlife, and nobody else. Freedom to wander, room to be alone, time to think. You can’t find anything like it in a park or a preserve or anywhere in poor, crowded reality. It’s healing me, Kyra.” He hesitated. “I’d love to share it with you.”
“The best you’ve got,” she murmured, moved.
“I’m afraid so,” he replied.
* * * *
43
S
hall we hold our discourse outside?” Rinndalir had proposed.
“Why the devil that?” Guthrie exclaimed.
The Lunarian’s gesture flowed about the blue dusk of the room and the shifting, drifting pallors over its vault. Neither he nor the knight-shape his visitor wore seemed out of place among the fragrances and cold minor-key flute music. Nevertheless, “Here we are caged,” he said quietly.
Thus they walked forth together from the castle and down the mountain. The watch was near midnight and Earth stood almost full, barely above the horizon. Rocks and craters in the valley below laid kilometers-long shadows under its beams. The light sheened off Guthrie’s metal, rippled in Rinndalir’s cloak, turned his wings to opal. The spark atop his wand swayed to his stride, as if one of the stars crowded overhead had descended to dance.
Guthrie willed that his radio voice remain prosaic. “Do you really want to leave this, and forever?”
“Nay, not all my race so desire,” answered Rinndalir. “I and certain others.”
“To skip the consequences of your share in the late unpleasantness?”
Laughter purred. “Scarcely that. Have we not staved off every demand by the Federation for our extradition and trial? It would be amusing to continue that game.”
“Instead, you’d give up your power and luxury to try for a fresh start in what’s a wild-ass gamble at best? I don’t recall as how aristocrats ever went in for pioneering. They left that to the bums, failures, desperados.”<
br />
Rinndalir’s voice became dispassionate. “The move will be politically convenient for the Lunar state. If this handful of us admit complicity with you, who shall prove otherwise? Then the Selenarchy dispatches us, for our crime, into the same exile that you are negotiating for yourself. Why do you protest, my lord? The resources that Luna can contribute will expedite your faring by years and make your survival the less unsure.”
“Ha, you want me to believe you’d go on this forlorn hope out of patriotism? I suppose next you’ll offer to sell me the ticket concession at Armstrong’s footprints.”
“It is perhaps forlorn for your human party,” said Rinndalir, unruffled, “but scarcely for us. I need not remind you that the Alpha Centaurian System holds abundant asteroids. Yours is the task, the dream, of bringing alive a world the size of Earth, until destruction overtakes it. In space, my breed will soon be at home.”
“You can be right around Sol.”
Waves went through the argent locks beneath the cowl, within the helmet, as Rinndalir shook his head. “Nay. Civilization—the logical, organized, machine future—would find us however far we might remove ourselves. I dare trust another star is remote enough.”
“For you to brew more trouble,” Guthrie rasped.
Rinndalir smiled. “Fear us not. Like your contingent, we will be much too busy engineering our new habitations.”
Guthrie’s lenses bore fixedly on him. The silence between them hissed with cosmic noise. Dust puffed up from their feet, captured Earthlight and starlight, arced downward again.
“Were you plotting this all along?” Guthrie asked at last.
“Not precisely,” Rinndalir admitted. “We are no gods, to guide history— if indeed the very gods have any foresight over chaos. But, yes, we have taken what opportunities we found, done what we were able, to break the crust of things, to hasten the destruction whence rebirth arises.”
“You bastards,” said Guthrie dully.
“It is our nature.” The easy tone went grave. “Set aside your resentment. You need us, I say. And do you in honesty regret the necessity now upon you? It is not even that. Well do you know you could compromise, temporize, maintain your merchant adventury much as it has been for another lifetime or two. Instead, you yourself choose to go free.”
“But you—”
“We also, we of Luna, see before us the end of the life that was ours, a wall toward which we helplessly career. Not that it was so wondrous a life any longer, my lord. Pleasures, illusions, intrigues, games—” In him, the sudden fury was astonishing: “How weary I am of playing games!” His voice leveled, though a pulse still beat through it. “Let us, your kind and mine, let us escape into reality.”
* * * *
44
E
lectrons, photons, fields interacted, their play more fast and their scope more vast by orders of magnitude than ever could be in a living brain. To the hypercomputers, a thousand years were as a day and a day was as a thousand years—of work, if not of awareness. They neither perceived nor willed, they were tools for minds that did. Someday soon that would change. Meanwhile, obedient, they enacted in mathematics a million different destinies of matter and energy. Within them there came into being whole new realms of machinery and chemistry, missions and enterprises, set into motion, carried to destruction, devised anew, tested again, over and over, in a span of real-time months. It was as if the actuality would be anticlimax.
Guthrie was not among the men and women who programmed the computers that wrote the ultimate programs. Nor was he among those who studied the outcomes and, by instinct or intuition—experience, creativity, desire—sensed when the course of pseudo-events was going awry and decreed: “Try something else.” His skills lay elsewhere, commanding, cajoling, conniving, conspiring, as captain and pilot of Fireball through its last voyage.
Piece by piece he jettisoned parts of it or burned them for fuel or sold them off to buy time from his enemies. One by one his crewfolk dwindled from him, into death or retirement or undertakings that held more promise for them. He had foreseen. But he might not have made harbor without his twin, who now shared his full memories, to double his days. Between them, by whatever expedients came to hand, they weathered each exigency and stayed on their course.
No matter how occupied, he—it made little difference which of him— took what chances he got to follow along in the progress of his enterprise. United with the net, he saw directly its vision and, in a way, made it dream his dream. Like a shaman of old, he rested in trance while his spirit ranged afar.
Orbiting Mercury, he felt sunlight cataract against the mirrors that focused its rage on the barrenness under them. There instrumentalities cunning and potent made that spate of energy into negative nuclei and their positron satellites, wrapped them in the forces of cryogenic coils, and shipped them out to regions where flesh dared venture. Their annihilation with ordinary material drove spacecraft from end to end of Sol’s domains.
It barely sufficed for his present venture. Though he ordered antimatter production increased, he must still hoard most and starve the fleets of Fireball. Essential commerce continued. Sailships bore their mineral cargoes, indifferent to time. Powercraft boosted into trajectory and made their economical crossings. But ever fewer were the torchcraft faring from world to world in days. At last they flew only in emergencies, or for the very wealthy. Exploration returned to what it had been in the beginning, the business of robots in slow vehicles with specific destinations.
Few people on Earth cared. The planets, moons, asteroids, and comets were understood; nothing remained to discover but details. What had human travelers ever really accomplished except to further enrich Fireball? Enjoyed themselves?
The spirit of Guthrie followed an antimatter container to a depot in Earth equilateral orbit, safely distant from the mother planet should it fail and the contents spill forth. Nearby grew the ship it would feed, newly designed, swiftly a-building. Constructors swarmed antlike. The skeleton gaped huge, for this was the vessel that would hurl a payload at nearly half the speed of light to Alpha Centauri and there bring it to rest—a payload massing whole tens of kilograms.
Guthrie moved forward in time, upon that flight not yet begun. One of him would be aboard, together with other downloads, inactive through the nine years of passage. With them would go a store of programs and certain tiny machines, mostly of molecular dimensions. The magnetohydrodynamics that guarded them from the radiation provoked by their haste would not have protected anything truly alive; but they were life’s forerunners.
Arrived, they awoke and went to work. The downloads took over, supervision of the robots that had patiently continued science on Demeter and transmission of what was learned. They redirected effort to practical ends, mining, refining, laying foundations, raising walls, producing equipment. Meanwhile the microdevices borne in the ship ran loose on the planet. Strange sperm and ova, they mated to form things larger, more complex, which nourished themselves on metals and chemicals, grew, matured, accepted new programs, and embarked on their various special tasks.
They built robots that built more robots, a geometrical multiplication exploding across Demeter and the Centaurian asteroids. Solar accumulators swung aloft, beaming power down to stations whence flowed electricity and water-derived hydrogen for combustion, the heartbeat of growth. An industrial plant developed, proliferated, diversified, labored untiring. Within years, it was ample to carry out the plan for which it was made.
Robots went into space. Across millions of kilometers they spun their web, collectors, transformers* transmitters, linked by communication beams. The laser system they wove would use energy from Demeter’s sun to slow the big ships when those arrived.
* * * *
“You need not spend tons of antimatter accelerating them,” Mukerji had said. “Build a laser booster at this end, too. Leave the antimatter for us and earn some goodwill.”
“Like hell, ma’m,” Guthrie replied. “It’d have t
o stay in operation for at least half the transit time. I don’t trust any government that much.”
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