Cave of Stars (Macrolife Book 2)

by George Zebrowski

  But if the drive failed for the instant needed to send out the minimal shot of gravitational energy required for deflection, then it would be a mercy for the planet to shorten the slow agonies inside by pulling the mobile into itself.

  36

  The great strength of the mobile’s materials and construction had contained and concentrated the heat and shock of the thermonuclear explosions. They went like maniacal shouts of hatred into an unsuspecting ear. The forward sections of the thirty urban levels became incinerators. Entire neighborhoods were vaporized by the sweep of the hot Shockwave toward the far end of the egg-shape. Halfway through, the barrier of the fused metallic asteroid core split the wave front and lessened its force, but it flowed like a river around the rock on all sides. Locks had closed and slowed it significantly all along the way, together with structural barriers; but many of these failed, and the heat also passed through the ventilation systems.

  The Link intelligence isolated levels, rerouted power and air, and kept the imperiled in touch with one another to their last moment of life. It sealed off sections from the streams of poisoned air; but without renewal, the remaining air would last for only a limited time. The habitat had not been designed to survive such ruin; its builders had never imagined that a deliberate destructive action of this magnitude might ever be taken against it.

  The caretaker of the habitat’s humankind was intact inside the asteroid core but dead at its extremities. The central mass of the great Link intelligence could not act without external inputs and instrumentalities. It continued to command repair drones, but received only broken feedback to confirm that the work was being done. Many of these actions were now being carried out by virtual phantom limbs doing no actual work, and in some cases the Link could not tell the real from the unreal. It assisted its dying human minds with information; but if the living and able failed to restart the world’s drive and change course, the Link knew that it would be crushed against the nearby planet.

  The system of artificial intelligences that made up the Link’s Humanity II Minds had never known the certainty of destruction. The threat now loomed within its vast field of analysis as an irreducible possibility, inevitable for as long as specific conditions prevailed. There was nothing beyond this ending, no possible patterns of reconstruction after collision with the planet….

  The Link knew that another like it would be built—but not this specific array. It knew that it was different from the minds that benefited from its work. It was humankind’s other self, its child, free of the instincts and feelings so necessary to species following the adaptive necessities of given nature. Joined to a treasure of knowledge, the Link’s mentality was a mill of reason without an overriding ego. It was composed of countless egolike awarenesses, an interlocked galaxy of intellects whose purpose was service. It was a coral reef of knowledge in a transcendent ocean of physical truth, a subtly faceted accretion of human history and vision, a library of mental processes that had been constantly growing—and now faced death.

  It dealt with this problem as with any other, by doing all that it could do. It strove repeatedly to start the drive, wooing the gravitic generators with millions of random impulses; a few small bursts, even as spurious as those caused by the pulse of the nuclear detonations, might be enough to alter the mobile’s trajectory by slowing its forward motion enough to miss the planet.

  But when the gravities failed to warm to its entreaties, the Link waited, holding together the shrinking net of human minds, knowing that their remedial action might still come before the time in its keeping stopped.

  A deity had lost control of its domain, and now depended on its charges to save it from death.

  37

  From an angle that now hid the damaged forwards, the dying habitat seemed whole and peaceful as it moved along a sun orbit that would intersect with Ceti IV.

  From afar, Voss had seen a silent nuclear disemboweling—a quickly fading flash, while inside, he knew, winds had howled and raced, vaporizing, twisting, crushing, and melting what they touched, depending on the degree of resistance encountered.

  As his shuttle came around for an approach to the rearward docks, he considered whether there was any chance of another explosion, but concluded that if there had been additional bombs aboard the old starship, they had either been destroyed by the initial explosion or had been part of the sum of that explosion.

  “Wolt,” he called within himself, “how is it with you?”

  “Yes, I’m here,” Blackfriar replied after a few moments. “I’ve found a vehicle on first engineering, and am trying to move it along through the tubeway to the rear docks. Most of the people on this level may have survived. Not many, of course, since this is a service level, but it had the advantage of multiple locks stopping the wash as it hit the core. Others are coming out from the core.”

  “Are you wearing protective gear?” Voss asked.

  “Yes, I found some—” Blackfriar’s voice broke off.

  “Wolt?”

  Voss heard the Link’s silence. It sent a wave of dismay through him unlike anything he had ever known. For an instant he thought that something was wrong with his mind, as if the Link’s sudden withdrawal had taken something essential from him.

  As a test, he reached out for several routine mathematical functions.

  They were not in their usual virtual space.

  He called up the periodic table of the elements—but only a vague cloud appeared in his visual field.

  The Link matrix was clearly damaged, and he knew what had been taken from him. The assumed background that he had known all his life was not there, or only intermittently present. He felt and feared its loss for the first time, as the reality of his history, education, and personal identity were about to vanish.

  He decided not to dock. If Blackfriar reached the docks, there would be more than enough vessels there to bring out survivors, whether this shuttle was in contact with them or not.

  “Wolt,” he said, “if you can hear me—I’ll keep the shuttle at a safe distance and take a repair pod into the auxiliary control section myself. It’s the most direct thing I can think of doing, and the most effective—if I succeed.”

  Silence.

  “If you disagree, I’ll set the shuttle to dock on automatic before I go.”

  Silence.

  “Wolt?”

  38

  “If the drive is not restarted for the moments it would take to change the habitat’s course,” Voss said to the colonists assembled in the main hold of the shuttle, “our mobile will strike the planet.”

  He looked around at the group of one hundred and fifty-five men and women and recalled how he had tried to understand why, at this well-developed stage in macro-life’s proliferation, there were still people who were drawn back to planets. The rational reasons were weak, given the difficulties of planetary life and the even greater problems of adapting to alien ecologies; but the primitive emotional impulses to emigrate were greater—one heard the call or one did not.

  But now, as he looked into the faces of the people standing and sitting in groups on the large floor in the midst of supply containers, air and surface vehicles, he was almost grateful that they had chosen as they did; they would live—if not on the planet, then to build a new habitat.

  “But all those still alive in the mobile will not be the only ones to die,” he continued, determined to state the worst possible case. He wondered how many second thoughts were flashing through the minds before him, so willing to leave the Link behind. “Dust thrown up by the strike will shut out the planet’s sunlight, causing plant life to perish in the false winter that will follow. Then animal life will die. Agriculture will fail. You…we will not have a place to live.”

  “But it won’t last forever,” a young man said. “We can wait it out.”

  “Forests will die,” Voss continued, “and much of the life will never return. We will inherit a perhaps fatally damaged world.” He included himself for a moment,
because it was possible that he would have to stay with these colonists.

  They all looked up at the screen. The shuttle was again coming around to the forward end of the habitat. It was a ragged stump. Severed cables suggested a sea creature feeling for prey in the drifting debris, which included bits and pieces of decompressed humankind. And for a moment he also faced the possibility that if the habitat was lost there would be no chance at all to rebuild.

  “They’re calling for help,” a young woman shouted.

  Voss strained to hear, but his Link was silent. The troubled faces of the colonists looked at the screen in shock. Some closed their eyes, obviously hearing what was not getting through to him.

  “I can hear them dying,” the young woman whispered, and he felt the same strangeness that she was feeling. Dying was a word rarely applied to any current experience, only to history.

  Voss looked around at the gathering of people who had so recently committed themselves to a new life on the planet and were now facing the loss of both worlds. When he had briefly considered the case for joining them, it was with the assumption that the habitat would always be there, waiting if it should ever be needed. Now it seemed that he and the colonists would have only a ruined world to look to, without the habitat’s resources to aid them. This shuttle might be all that would survive.

  “I’m going to try to reach the auxiliary drive controls,” Voss said. “They’re our only hope now.”

  He nodded to the gathering, then made his way down through the open hatch at his feet, and into the short passageway that led into the utility bay. Cries echoed as the hatch slid shut behind him. He stopped and listened within himself, but his Link was still silent, as if it had decided to speak to the others but had forsaken him.

  In the bay, he climbed inside the smallest pod and strapped in, then imagined for a moment that he might die in the mobile as the violence being done to it ran its chaotic course, preventing him from leaving before the planetary collision. He thought of Josepha, Jason, and Ondro. They and all the Cetians he had rescued might already be dead.

  He touched the eject plate, and the pod shot out into space. The mobile suddenly stood before him, seemingly immovable among the stars, yet rushing toward its end.

  The habitat had to regain sun orbit, he realized, if only to serve as a resource and base for the building of another.

  He inhaled deeply as the pod sped toward its great parent. Unfamiliar currents of feeling surged through him, and he realized how much he had loved his home while never thinking about it directly. Gathering his resolve, he reminded himself that his world had not come here to die, but to reproduce itself, to distribute its humanity, to birth a new Link intelligence, and to contribute to the growth of macrolife.

  As the pod drew closer, he looked to the rear third behind the core. No damage was visible where Josepha and Ondro had been staying, but from here it was impossible to judge the extent of interior damage. The most obvious destruction was at the amputated forwards.

  His feelings surprised him as they overtook his thoughts. He longed for the young Cetian woman, even though she lacked the inwardness made possible by the Link. But it was likely that in time they might have come to share in the great forests of knowledge and insight that grew within his world, as Josepha passed beyond the bonds of self that had shaped her and became a greater self….

  The pleas of the trapped and dying suddenly tore through his head. The Link was no longer perfect. It gave him some pain to hear it—but he did not refuse, and listened.

  “Help us…it’s so dark…”

  “What has happened…”

  “Can’t breathe…I’m burning!”

  Cries. So many. Pain greater than his, and no way to stop it…

  Linkless, trapped within herself, he knew that Josepha could not cry out for help if she was hurt.

  The mobile blotted out the stars as he moved in toward one of the docks in the upper rearward quad. He looked along its length in time to see Ceti IV, still more than twenty hours away, pulling the habitat toward its ocean of air. As he looked, the mobile blotted out the planet, and he felt the muscles of his face tense at the sight.

  The cries within him became a torrent, but he did not try to shut them out. Is this what Josephus Bely wanted us to feel? It was impossible to think that his world was dying, unable to swim away to safety…that the future would be vastly different than what he had always expected.

  “Help us!” a woman’s voice cried through him as the pod confronted a lock, but there was nothing he could have done even if he knew her location—not even if it had been Josepha. The habitat came first, or everything was lost.

  He inserted the pod into the lock. The hatch at his feet opened with a hiss. He floated down into the chamber, hoping that this entryway would give him a direct route to the auxiliary control center. He heard the hatch close above him. He grasped a handhold, faced the inner door, and pressed his palm to the touchplate.

  Finally, the indicator turned green, but he wondered by what tortuous reroute the system had identified him. He pulled himself forward to the next lock, breathing cautiously. It cycled when he touched it, and he entered level thirty, the outer engineering shell.

  He peered left and right, but saw no one under the low-ceilinged spaces. There was nothing strange in this, since it was one of the two basements of his world, both of them service areas. Level one was a service and interface level from the core to the urban levels; level thirty was the interface to the space beyond his world. Backup controls for the main drive were located in several places. The drive itself, located in the forward part of the asteroid core where it had originally been constructed, was one of the most heavily shielded areas in the mobile. Unfortunately, its position had faced the thermonuclear Shockwave head-on, leaving only its shielding to protect it. Still, the drive might work long enough to accelerate the mobile back into a sun orbit. Deceleration would do just as well; a fifty-kilometer miss would be enough, maybe less.

  With that accomplished, he would help organize the survivors into search-and-rescue teams. There would be time to repair and rebuild.

  He pushed off with his feet and reached an open entrance directly ahead. He grabbed a handhold, pulled himself inside, and worked his way along the wall. In a moment he was through another open doorway and inside the giant drum.

  White light flickered through the ceiling, which in zero gravity might just as well have been a floor. Four young men hovered over the control panel in the center. They turned their heads as he drifted over to them.

  “What is it?” he demanded, seeing the look of defeat in their eyes.

  “There’s no chance here,” one of the men replied wearily. “The flux was too great…everything inside might just as well have been fused solid. We’d have to replace these massive units, but the spares were all in the forwards.”

  Voss did not recognize any of the men, and the Link did not answer his query about their identities. Like him, they were all very young, in their thirties or forties.

  He asked, “So what are you trying to do?”

  “We’ve tried recalibrating settings, but the Link cut off before it could give us a trial sequence.”

  “Why not simply restart the drive?” Voss asked.

  The dark-haired youth nodded. “We’ve been thinking…that could destroy whatever is left, or push us into a faster collision. When the Link told us, we discussed a sudden restart, then asked for recalibration standards. Without the Link it would take a week to bring in the right instruments and do the job manually. There’s no time for anything except a blind restart.”

  “You all know this panel?” Voss asked.

  “Yes,” said the one who seemed youngest.

  The touchplates, glowing in primary colors, tempted Voss as he looked at them. If a blind restart failed, and the chance was overwhelming that it would fail, then maybe no one would have time to flee the habitat. The question was how it would fail. It might be better to leave well enou
gh alone and give the habitat its sure twenty hours to impact. But that would risk losing the chance of saving it.

  “There would be no way to correct a wild acceleration,” the dark-haired youth said, further emphasizing the agony of the choice. “Still—“

  “I know,” Voss said.

  “You’re Voss Rhazes, aren’t you?”

  Voss nodded. “We have to give those who are making their way to the rear docks a chance to get free before we try this kind of restart.” He looked at each of the youths in turn, and one by one they nodded in agreement.

  “There’s a cross elevator to the tube,” the dark-haired youth said. “It was still running when we got here.”

  “Yes,” Voss said as he stared at the panel, “we’d better go.”

  39

  Snow was falling on the city, warming Josephus as it settled on his blankets. Soon it would shield him completely, making him safe from the wrath beyond the sky…

  He turned and saw Paul’s head wandering near him, the face expressionless, chained to his gaze.

  “No escape,” Josephus whispered at it.

  The snow would protect him, Josephus knew. It would give him the strength to rise from his chair and hurl the head into the sky…

  The flakes grew large as they drifted closer to his eyes. Each pattern was impossibly identical, faithful, confirming to him that a miracle was taking place, carrying God’s grace into his body. He felt it flow through him, rebuilding his heart, smoothing his circulation, restoring youth to his muscles and mind. A merciful Lord had granted him what the cruel visitors had withheld.

  “Can you hear me?” Paul’s curling lips asked.

  Josephus watched him and saw a vein pulse in his minister’s forehead.

  “You killed your daughter,” Paul’s lips said, “and countless others. Do you know what you’ve done?”