Cave of Stars (Macrolife Book 2)

by George Zebrowski

  53

  Voss Rhazes felt a moment of triumph as the ship’s gravitational push engines came on. As stars slipped from the display tank’s field of view, he felt hopeful that his kind would survive.

  “We’ll go in three jumps,” he said. “That shouldn’t overload our power draw.”

  The jump drive timer showed that potential would be at maximum in five minutes.

  “Does everyone agree?” he asked the engine room crew.

  “Ready,” a man answered over the com, and Voss recognized the voice of the oldest engineer, Iannon Brunei. “Your board should show everything as on.”

  “It does,” Voss said, and sat back with relief.

  He glanced at Blackfriar next to him. A globe of Ceti IV appeared at his touch. Fires glowed on the nightside. The planet was dying, and nothing could be done about it. Voss reminded himself again of how much was gone and was about to be lost. All thought and feeling were inadequate before the unfolding fact. His life had always stood above the difficulties of decision; enough had been given to him to meet all circumstances; but now it seemed that he was reaching up from the bottom of a deep hole, and he felt that he would not always be able to grab the edge and pull himself out.

  The timer reached zero.

  Voss felt an instant of vertigo, and almost expected the Link to show him an accounting of the vast energy flowing into use. It had been won by the ingenuity of countless human minds as they had struggled to climb out of scarcity and constraint, and he was suddenly anxious that this legacy be used effectively—because once the instrumentalities by which power was drawn from the void were lost, they could not easily be replaced.

  The stars blinked, revealing new configurations. Ceti IV was gone from the tank. The timer reset, and gave twenty-five hours as the buildup required for the next jump.

  “How big is the base at Praesepe?” Voss asked.

  “A globe two kilometers in diameter,” Blackfriar said. “It contains full medical facilities, factories, supplies, even small vessels. Not only a base, but a seed world.”

  “Why was it built?” Voss asked, and for a moment, out of habit, expected the Link to answer.

  “I helped set it up,” Blackfriar said, “when a group of our people settled the planet there, long before your time. We decided to leave them a place to turn to if they should ever need it.”

  Voss felt a twinge of fear. “Then it’s possible that it may have been used.”

  “Even if it was used,” Blackfriar replied, “I doubt they could have used it all. There will probably be more than enough for us to start over with.”

  Voss still felt uneasy. “But it’s not a certainty, is it?”

  “No, it’s not,” Blackfriar said, leaning back at his station.

  “Nothing is certain now. We may have to turn to the colony for refuge.”

  “If it’s still there,” Blackfriar said.

  “And it may not welcome us.”

  “It’s all we have left to go to,” Blackfriar said.

  Voss gazed at the tank, still feeling that if he searched within himself he might find the Link. A few times he had caught himself reaching out to it while he slept, only to wake up feeling lost. He longed for the return to freedom that the new mobile would bring.

  The timer reached zero.

  Alone this time, Voss again felt a moment of vertigo as the stars winked out and a new configuration appeared in the tank. Drive reset returned. Twenty-five hours later, all would be ready for the last step to Praesepe.

  He sat back, feeling calmer and more reassured. The beauty of the drive’s victory over distance filled him with confidence, and he recalled the Link’s description of jump mechanics. Macroscopic quantum potentials enabled the drive to shift from the simple gravitational field-effect push to a discontinuous jump. Large amounts of power were needed to climb the mountaintop of large-scale quantum potential, from which the ship could be braked to the more level ground of normal spacetime. Wormhole theory was another way to describe the collapse of distance along a direction. Nearly all the power being drawn from the void by the makeshift starship was going into the jumps. The rest went into life support and deflection shielding.

  Voss remembered again how the Link had taught him in childhood, and he wondered how long it would be before he would achieve the same feeling of ease and character with the new Link. It would be a different intelligence, of course, that would be awakened to grow with the new mobile, and would not repeat exactly the previous mind’s development. He thought about how much could never be regained—individuals, their art and literature, their way of looking and speaking, their lost. No single individual’s memory could regain what had been lost. Even small groups of a dozen linked individuals had counted as much as whole nations in humankind’s past…

  He thought of Josepha’s vulnerability, and how her losses had brought her to him. She would have so much to learn as the new mobile was being built, scarcely realizing how she might become an entirely different person, but he felt eager to help her, and the prospect that she would be with him for some indefinite time filled him with an irrational pleasure.

  “Life support agrees with our bridge monitors,” Black-friar said as he sat down at his station next to Voss. Only a few minutes remained before the final jump. “We’re in good shape for food, air, and water production.”

  It still seemed strange, Voss thought, to take over so many functions once overseen by the Link, to enter commands into primitive equipment, and to be constantly studying manuals for programs that had always run themselves. Fortunately, the effort would not have to be maintained for long.

  Reset time ended.

  Voss tensed, expecting vertigo, but it did not come, and the stars in the tank did not wink out. They flowed into branching treelike shapes, stopped, then flowed again….

  “We’re not going through,” Blackfriar said.

  “Shut down!” Voss ordered over the com, fearing that the ship would be twisted and torn apart, compressed into small, irregular spaces by the chaos that now filled the holo tank, until all familiar experience was replaced by strangeness and agony. Leaning forward, he felt a strain in his back muscles, as if they were about to tear, and wondered if this might be the last moment of his life.

  The timer again reached zero.

  New stars appeared in the tank as the stress of irregular passage faded.

  Voss recognized the stars of the Praesepe cluster, but they were still too distant. An accurate passage would have put the ship within ten astronomical units of the destination star, well within the open cluster.

  “What happened?” Voss asked.

  “It’s the calibrations,” Iannon Brunei’s voice answered over the com. “We can try again in five or six hours.”

  Voss looked over at Blackfriar and said, “It’s the electromagnetic flux from the thermonuclear blasts. It affected the mobile’s drive and controls, and probably our calibrating equipment as well. We just can’t measure jump accurately through warp.”

  “We may not be able to repair this,” Blackfriar said.

  “Let’s see,” Voss said, his confidence shaken. He leaned forward and entered a navigational query manually.

  The answer read on the small display:

  Distance Remaining: 50.36 Light Years

  He looked at the figure with dismay, then sat back. “Better go get some rest before the next try,” Blackfriar said.

  Silently, Voss got up and made his way to the narrow passage that led aft. He moved slowly in the light gravity, thinking of how much depended on the drive. The rebirth of his world and any help that might be sent back to Ceti IV required that this ship reach the double star in Praesepe—and quickly—to be of any use to survivors on Josepha’s world.

  He came to his cabin door. It slid open with a squeak. He went inside and saw Josepha asleep in her bunk. He gazed quietly at her youthful face, one of the last from a people now at the edge of extinction. The abyss would swallow them more quickly than
his own.

  “Voss,” she whispered, opening her eyes.

  “Go back to sleep,” he said, climbing into the overhead bunk.

  Sleep failed to come. Rest so often eluded him without the Link. The cave of stars around the ship grew smaller. He reached out with dream hands and felt the cave’s cold, rocky walls. They moved along with the ship, and he saw no way out.

  Josepha stood gazing at him. He lay awake in the upper bunk and watched her as if she were far away and could not see him.

  “How long have I slept?”

  “Through the night hours,” she said.

  He sat up, realizing that the next jump had already been made.

  She stepped up on the lower bunk and touched his face with concern. “Why, you’re in a cold sweat!”

  “Let me up,” he said.

  She stepped down. He put his legs over the side and slid down to the floor.

  “What is it?” she asked, stepping back.

  “We didn’t make the last jump completely,” he said, looking away from her. “There’s still trouble in the drive.”

  He saw the question in her eyes.

  “I don’t know if it can be repaired,” he added.

  “Voss, what if we don’t get there? Will we all have to live and die on this ship?”

  He nodded, feeling a knot form in his chest. She stepped forward and embraced him. “I would have died on Ceti,” she said, “either from the disaster or when my life ran out.”

  He did not know what to say to her.

  She looked up at him and half-smiled. “I was taught that the life of the flesh was not something to cling to. Each generation was one great life, a moral universe responsible for itself. You’ve always known that your life would reach into posterity, and that much of that posterity would be you. In my life on Ceti, we were nothing before an all-powerful divinity, and our world was nothing before the paradise of light and worship waiting for us beyond death. I lost my belief in that, but I see now what you have lost.”

  He looked into her eyes and felt her inwardness reaching out to him, almost as if she were about to speak within him. He felt that he knew her inside herself, and how she had grown toward a hope that would replace the faith of her world.

  As she touched his cheek and he kissed her, he could not help feeling that the fatal blow against all their hopes had already been struck.

  54

  The suns of the Praesepe cluster blazed in the tank when Voss returned to the bridge. The holo imaging of the navigational aid showed these stars closer together than in reality, but their separations were accurate in the jump system, which did not need visuals.

  “Are we there?” he asked, then saw that no star was bright enough, or near enough to show a disk.

  Blackfriar did not turn around. “We’re in the cluster,” he said, “but still some twenty light-years from our star. It was an erratic jump. We came out too far right and below our destination.”

  Disappointed, Voss sat down at Blackfriar’s left and gazed into the tank. The brightest suns were close enough to show smudges of gas. Fifty stars in all made up the central region of the open cluster, some thirteen light-years across, all moving together. Three hundred fifty other stars surrounded the central area of the cluster, some of them much closer than twenty light-years, but they held no prize of renewal and rebirth.

  “Can we jump again?” Voss asked.

  “Unreliably,” Blackfriar said. “Brunei’s engineers insist that another try might be extremely chaotic, and we might never find our way again. The calibration instruments are damaged at quantum levels, so we can’t simply reset the drive to give us precise increments of direction.”

  “So what does Iannon suggest we do?” Voss asked.

  “Accelerate to our destination in relativistic time,” Blackfriar said. “That would take about a century, using as much power as we could draw and divert to push. Life support and shielding would have to be cut back. Our oldest people might die in that century. You’d probably live long enough; I wouldn’t. But all that would count is to have a group to renew at the base.”

  If it’s still there, Voss thought. “How many people can we put into sleep?” he asked.

  “Not many, and not reliably,” Blackfriar said. “This ship is nothing more than a shell with life support and a jump drive attached. It wasn’t meant for a long journey. We have minimal maintenance for our power generators, much less for other systems. We couldn’t count on our structural integrity at more than a quarter of light speed, and our shielding system against heavy particles is limited. The question is, could we draw enough power to do all that and run our food, air, water, and basic health systems? We can draw a lot of power, but we don’t have the means of storing it, which would give us enough power. We need more than half light speed to get us there in a century, ship time.”

  Ship time, Voss thought, thinking of Josepha. There would be no going back to help her world any time soon. Unable to jump, this ship would become a prison.

  He looked at Blackfriar and said, “Then maybe we should risk another jump.”

  “If it went wrong, we’d lose everything. At least now we can still aim at a clear destination.”

  Voss gazed at the bright stars of Praesepe and found himself unable to accept the limits that were closing in around his life.

  “Iannon will work on the drive,” Blackfriar continued, “but he lacks tools. Mostly he just thinks about it, trying to do the work that the Link would have done in a few moments.”

  “Can he accomplish anything?” Voss asked.

  “Sometimes he talks as if he can, but it will take time. Some of it is his pride, which can’t accept that for some problems there may be no solution, or one that will come too late.”

  “So we must prepare for the worst possible case,” Voss said.

  “Until some better course of action presents itself,” Blackfriar said.

  Josepha would die, Voss told himself. Lifespan for her would not exceed seventy-five years even under the best conditions. He might live to start again, just barely, if everything went well. This, he realized, was the old truth of interstellar travel, before ingenuity born of knowledge had defeated time and distance. The universe in which his people had satisfied want and desire, into which they had cast their self-reproducing worlds, had suddenly closed up into a cave. Space, across which his kind had moved like swift thoughts, had shrank to the size of a solar system, to that of a planet, and finally to the constraints of one inadequate ship.

  Feeling powerless, Voss thought of the daylight of planets. He imagined that every solar system was an exit from the vast cave of stars, and longed for the mobile’s bright hollow. The loss of his world, he realized, had made his thinking sluggish, as his body fell back into another time, where survival was the central ambition of life and the world that had made him was now only a dream of the future.

  55

  Josepha sat, very still, in her bunk as Voss told her of the ship’s predicament. When he was finished, she was silent for a long time.

  “Maybe,” she said at last, “we will have to learn not to hold our lives so dearly.” He glimpsed resignation in her eyes. “That shouldn’t be so hard for me,” she continued, “because it was what I expected before you came to our world. It will be harder for you. We’ll both have to give more of ourselves away.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked, puzzled.

  “Is it possible to have children on the ship? If what you say is true, then we’ll have to raise at least one generation or have no claim on the future.”

  “Perhaps not,” he said. “We may be able to sleep, in suspension, and then renew our bodies when we reach our destination.”

  She looked away from him. “You may,” she said. She turned toward him again, and he saw the distress in her face as she asked, “Can we have children?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Can we all sleep?”

  “It’s not certain,” he said, feeling that everyt
hing was still regressing, rushing toward a black pit; and once over the edge and down, there would be no way up.

  “How did you have children?” she asked. “I never saw any.”

  ‘There were so few,” he replied, sitting down next to her.

  “How were you born?” she asked.

  “We all belong to each other…” he started to say, then told her of the people, Blackfriar among them, who had contributed to his genetic inheritance, of the womb that had been grown for him to occupy, and the exemplar-mentors who had raised him, the Link among them. She had been told a little of this before, and he supposed that she might have found the process impersonal at first, so he emphasized how much care and attention was given to the upbringing of children.

  “Do you know that you can carry a child?” he asked, shuddering at what she might suffer if she tried.

  “I would have to try to know,” she said.

  He forced himself to smile and said, “It may not be necessary. We have a few things still left to try.”

  Alone, Josepha felt a moment of betrayal. Everything that was left of the mobile’s promise was still endangered. She imagined her own death, which would come long before Voss’s, and saw again that children might be her only victory. She imagined the years ahead, marking the distance of light-years, and she understood that Voss and his people would rediscover only what she had always known—that everyone died—and died alone. Her tormented father had faced it, had tried to cheat the dissolution that waited for him at every possible exit from his life. The window of his faith had looked out into darkness, and the door of knowledge that had opened briefly in his sky had been rudely closed in his face. Now she would have to face death in her own way.

  For an instant she saw a ship of skeletons arriving at the double sun…

  “No,” she whispered as she lay down and composed herself. “Voss will find a door,” she said.