Gift From The Stars

by Gunn, James

  Jessica thought back to her own beginnings. She had grown up secure and happy in a supportive California family, free to go where she wanted, to surfing or the tennis court or off to college, never doubting that she had a place to return to and people who loved her, no matter what, until the quake of ’21 hit and her family was in the middle of it. The Energy Board could solve or ameliorate most human problems, but it couldn’t control the natural processes of the Earth. Jessica never knew whether her family was killed when their house collapsed or by the tsunami that washed everything out to sea.

  In the aftermath of that catastrophe, the recruiters for the Energy Board had looked like a new family, and she had reached out to them blindly. She had accepted one harmless assignment after another, mere bureaucratic information gathering, unaware that she had been identified by the agents working for William Makepeace. Even when she received the assignment of feigning an affiliation with a group of space enthusiasts, it seemed like only another way to gather information, and simulating a relationship with a man she had never met, and never heard of, seemed innocent enough. She was part of a family, and family did no wrong.

  And then when she met Frances and later Adrian she discovered that life was not so simple. Life demanded choices between options that seemed equally attractive. Nobody knew how choices would turn out, so it was a matter of weighing facts and the logic that connected them. Ultimately, though, it boiled down to temperament: either you were conservative, like Makepeace, valuing what he possessed and what those around him possessed, which formed a seamless wall of covenants, and you were apprehensive of the change that might endanger those possessions; or you were adventurous, willing to try something new even if it cost you everything, enraptured by a dream and pursuing it past the point of pragmatic reality, hitching your wagon, literally, to a star.

  That was why she had abandoned the family she knew for the dream she had only barely understood—that and the attraction of the man who owned the dream, or was owned by it, the unprepossessing Adrian Mast, whose soul was illuminated by his belief in humanity’s future in space.

  “So,” he was saying, “we will test ourselves and our ship today. Nobody will hold it against anyone who wishes to leave. In fact, we will make it easy. There will be no guard on the exit hatch, and the monitors will be turned off. Those who choose to leave will be given an opportunity to rejoin the ship after the test run, or they may return to Earth on the next shuttle. Are there any questions?”

  Cavendish looked as if he wanted to speak but remained silent.

  “All right, then,” Adrian said, “the test will begin in two hours. And may good fortune be with us on our maiden voyage.”

  Jessica looked at Frances and then at Adrian and finally at all the faces with whom she had grown familiar over the past few years. She realized that what she had chosen was a new family, but a family all the same, and the possibilities were great that this day she would lose this one, too—and life itself.

  The engine started smoothly, almost imperceptibly. Louder than the whisper of the exhaust were the exhalations of breaths within the control room. Jessica hadn’t realized until then that waiting for the moment of truth had been like waiting for the dentist’s explorer to touch an exposed nerve or reaching the point on the roller coaster ride where it hesitates at its apex before plunging into space. She looked at Adrian, who was strapped into the pedestal chair next to her. He glanced at her and grinned. It was an expression at least as much of relief as joy.

  Two other crewmembers in the control room monitored the engine-room gauges and the remote sensors, but otherwise it was Jessica and Adrian. Frances had complained of a headache and gone to the unmarried women’s dormitory to lie down, but Jessica thought it was because she didn’t wish to risk being space-sick in front of Adrian when the ship began to move.

  Jessica looked at Adrian again. He nodded. She edged the ship out of orbit with the manual controls, careful not to approach the remains of the space station where members of the crew, as yet unspecified, had absented themselves, or to point the ship’s exhaust in that direction. The antimatter should be completely annihilated in the magnetic-bottle reaction chamber, but no one knew if the design was perfect or if it had been perfectly translated into metal and strange metal. In the world where matter met antimatter , nothing less than perfection sufficed.

  Jessica had not slept well the previous night. In fact, she did not remember sleeping at all. But now she felt alert, alive, exhilarated, as if she had set out to kill a dragon but had captured it instead and tamed it and rode it, wings flapping, into the sky. The ship that they had put together piece by piece and part by part, that had seemed as if it would never be complete or if complete would never function as intended, was an entity, by some gestalt magic turned into a living creature. Even the feeling of weight was different, pressing them into their seats, giving reality to what had seemed like airy insubstantiality.

  The control room was silent as people concentrated upon their tasks, but a murmur came from the corridor. It was a sound like the well-bred approval of a Wimbledon point well-played, and Jessica realized that the crew, at stations throughout the ship, had broken into relieved conversation. “We’re off to see the universe,” she said to Adrian.

  He nodded and grinned, as if he did not trust himself to speak.

  As soon as the ship had cleared near-Earth orbit, Jessica accessed the next preprogrammed maneuver. Their velocity would gradually accelerate until the ship reached an orbit beyond that of the moon, which would be, by that time, on the other side of the Earth.

  “I’m going to check on Frances,” Jessica said.

  “I should have thought of that,” Adrian said.

  Jessica made her way to the single women’s dormitory, adjusting to the realignment of walls and floors under acceleration pressure. She missed the freedom of weightlessness, but that loss was balanced by the exhilaration of motion.

  The dormitory was empty.

  Jessica felt a flash of hope that Frances had, somehow, slipped away to join those who had absented themselves from this test run, but recognized the folly of that thought. Frances could not have left and would not have left, and Jessica did not want her to leave. The competition between them was nothing compared to their friendship.

  Jessica found Frances in the single men’s dormitory. She was standing in front of an open locker. Frances turned to look at Jessica as she entered. “I thought it was time to check on the absentees,” Frances said.

  “Adrian said—”

  “Leaders can afford to be magnanimous only if they have skeptical lieutenants,” Frances said. “We’re launched on an adventure, and in every adventure scenario there’s a weak character who is going to endanger everybody, and the quest itself.”

  “I always thought you had me picked for that role.”

  Frances shook her head. “That was always a possibility, but it’s either the one you don’t expect or the one you know is going to break, like Conway’s brother in Lost Horizon. In this case, it was most likely to be someone who wasn’t on the test flight.”

  “And how did you figure out who that was?”

  “I turned the monitors back on. Nine people left the ship: Cavendish and eight of the people who were with him from the start, back at the abandoned Kennedy Space Center.”

  “Why am I not surprised?”

  “That was clear after his accusation. The accuser is either unwisely ignored or is trying to shift suspicion from himself.”

  “Or trying to convince himself that his treachery belongs to someone else,” Jessica said.

  “That, too. But this pretty much clinches it,” Frances said. She pulled an object from the open locker and held it, dangling, from her hand.

  Jessica stared at it, trying to decipher what it was. Then it came into focus: it was a latex mask, like a man’s skin slipped intact from his head. There was a bald head mottled with spots of age, a tanned and aged face, and a long, white beard. . . .
/>   “The bearded man,” she said. “And the locker?”

  “Peter’s,” Frances said.

  From over the public address speakers Adrian’s voice said, “I thought you’d all like to know: I’ve started the next programmed flight sequence.”

  Jessica knew what that meant. The ship was launched on a course for Mars. One of the tragedies of manned spaceflight was that the energy behind space exploration had dwindled before humanity had an opportunity to investigate any of the planets, even the nearer ones, and on their maiden test flight Adrian hoped to rekindle the popular imagination with a flyby.

  The information about Cavendish may have come too late.

  By the time Frances and Jessica reached the control room, plodding along in the traditional step-by-step that pleased Frances and annoyed Jessica, the ship had been accelerating for five minutes at a steady one gravity. The control room wasn’t at all like those on the television shows Jessica had grown up with: it was sparse and utilitarian, with a semicircle of pivoting armchairs mounted on pedestals and equipped with velcro belts. The chairs faced a curved, plastic counter top inset with dials and keyboards. Above that a series of vision screens showed the various working areas of the ship and exterior views in all directions.

  No windows. Jessica recalled Adrian chuckling when Peter asked about the plans. “Windows!”

  Jessica shook herself before she fell into one of Frances’s genre pits. Identifying the genre wouldn’t help this time.

  Adrian swiveled around to face them, pleased with himself and his world. Jessica hated to spoil his mood. She looked at Frances.

  “I found this in Peter’s locker,” Frances said, holding out the mask.

  Adrian took in its meaning at a glance. “So,” he said, suddenly sober, “Peter is the bearded man. I wonder what he hoped to gain by that. What does he have to say?”

  “I don’t think we’ll ever know,” Jessica said.

  “He isn’t around to ask,” Frances added.

  “That’s a pretty fast search,” Adrian said.

  Frances shrugged. “He was among those who left.” She seemed much more in control now that her trial by weightlessness was over. “You know the way things work. You propose and I dispose.”

  Adrian accepted Frances’s breach of his word without comment. Jessica didn’t know whether it was because he expected it or because they had more serious concerns. She hoped it was the latter. She didn’t want to reevaluate the relationship between Adrian and Frances while she was still struggling with the implications of Frances’ last sentence and Adrian’s failure to react to it.

  “That means we may be sitting on a time bomb,” Adrian said.

  “Clearly,” Frances said.

  “I feel sorry for Peter,” Adrian said.

  “I know.”

  Jessica looked from one to the other impatiently. “Why are you talking about poor Peter when there’s so much to done?”

  “The question is,” Adrian said, “what’s to be done?”

  “The ship is working like a dream,” Frances said, “but there’s no way of knowing when it will turn into a nightmare.”

  Jessica looked from Adrian to Frances and back again. “What are you saying? You don’t even know what’s wrong. You don’t even know if anything is wrong.” She moved impatiently to the pilot’s chair and began looking at the readouts.

  “If there’s anything wrong,” Adrian said, “—and there almost certainly is something wrong—it will be in the computer. The glitch in the computer program two days ago was a test.”

  “And a warning we should have paid more attention to,” Frances added.

  Jessica hated the way Adrian and Frances completed each other’s thoughts, like an old married couple. She typed in the command for the computer to switch to manual, but the ship continued its acceleration unaltered.

  “We all knew how much this project meant to Peter,” Adrian said. “It’s still hard to believe that he would sabotage the only thing that would bring him peace.”

  “What we didn’t know,” Frances said, “was how great his fear still was.”

  Adrian shook his head, as if he was trying to clear it of clutter. “He started the whole thing. Without him there would be no alien message, no designs, no project.”

  “He stood in for humanity itself,” Frances said. “Attracted by the mystery; afraid to find the answer. Attraction and repulsion. Balanced in most. Exaggerated in some, like Peter, to the point of anguish. Finally the fear got the better of him.”

  “We may well be in a difficult situation,” Adrian said, “but it’s Peter I feel sorry for. He’ll never know. He has to know, and yet he never will.”

  “I hate to say this,” Jessica said, “but that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. Peter has been working for Makepeace. Only Makepeace could have arranged for the capsule that fit so neatly into what was left of the station, and only Makepeace could have come up with the scenario that landed us here. He doesn’t want us to succeed. For earthbound humanity’s reasons, sure, but most of all for Makepeace’s reasons. I’ve worked for him and I know how he thinks.”

  Adrian and Frances exchanged glances.

  “That may be true,” Adrian said, “but it doesn’t change anything.”

  “Well then, try this,” Jessica said. “The manual controls don’t work.”

  Adrian nodded. “And I’d guess there’s nobody aboard who knows how to reprogram the computer.”

  Jessica looked at their eyes, first Adrian’s and then Frances’s. They were curiously unafraid. She realized that they were looking at her eyes, as well, and that in them they would read frustration and impatience and, yes, fear. She turned to the vision screens while she tried to gain control of her emotions. The rear view showed a rapidly retreating moon, and the one slightly to the side, a disappearing Earth still looking a fertile blue streaked with white. On the other side, where the sun would have been, the overload had closed down the receptors. Ahead was the star-strewn blackness of outer space.

  She looked at the readouts. “We’ve been underway for an hour,” she said calmly. “Our speed is thirty-five kilometers per second, and we’re almost sixty-four thousand kilometers from Earth.”

  “If the program maintains this acceleration,” Adrian said, “by tomorrow we’ll be about one-sixth of the way to Mars.”

  Jessica input an inquiry. “Our course and speed has us arriving at Mars orbit two hours before the planet does. Unless something changes, it seems likely that Peter had something else in mind.”

  “And it seems likely,” Frances said, “that if Peter had intended to destroy the ship, it would have exploded by now. Some celestial fireworks would have been a good object lesson for the rest of humanity.”

  “The question is,” Adrian said, “what were Peter’s intentions?”

  “Jessica,” Frances said, “you just got that information from the computer, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You said it had locked you out?”

  “I said it wouldn’t let me change our acceleration or course, or switch to manual,” Jessica said. “Everything else is proceeding normally. It’s providing readouts, controlling air composition and temperature, showing us views, everything it was built to do—except letting us choose where we want to go and how fast. Like a virus that’s taken over that one part of the computer.”

  “That means that Peter had some kind of plan.”

  “Like a one-way ticket to an unknown destination,” Adrian said.

  “I guess we’ll know when we get there,” Frances said.

  “If he just didn’t want to get rid of us with a ticket to nowhere,” Jessica said.

  Adrian shook his head. “That wasn’t Peter’s way. He had these twin compulsions of fight and flight. He couldn’t bring himself to fight, but he couldn’t bring himself not to seek the answers his neurosis needed. So he has sent us to find out the answers.”

  “Which he’ll never know,” Jessica said impat
iently.

  “Which he’ll never know,” Frances agreed. “And he’ll grow old never knowing. He’ll have psychotic episodes when he wants to kill himself because of guilt and others when he thinks he’s getting messages from us or from his aliens. He’s going to have a miserable existence and die a miserable death, wishing he were here, but at least he’s going to know that we’re out there, looking.” Frances gestured toward the forward vision screen with its star-sprinkled vastness.

  “It could be the aliens themselves,” Jessica said. “It could be an alien virus, inserted who knows when, intended to bring us to them, like sheep to the slaughter.”

  “That sounds like Peter’s paranoia,” Adrian said.

  “Or Makepeace’s,” Frances said.

  “On the other hand,” Adrian said, “Peter may well have had information that he was withholding.”

  “What kind of information?” Jessica asked.

  “Information about where to go once the ship was built.”

  “Instructions from the aliens?” Jessica asked.

  Adrian nodded.

  “But why would he withhold it?” Jessica asked.

  “Maybe he concealed it even from himself,” Frances said. “Because it was too horrific.”

  “If it was too horrific for him, why shouldn’t it be horrific for us?” Jessica asked.

  “Because he’s paranoid,” Adrian said, “and we’re not.”

  Jessica turned back to the keyboard at the pilot’s station. “Maybe you’re satisfied with going where Peter’s paranoia takes you, but I’m going to learn how to master this computer. I’ll break into its programs and make it take us where I want to go! After all, we’ve got all the time in the universe.”