Cave of Stars (Macrolife Book 2)

by George Zebrowski

  56

  “We’ll try small jumps,” Blackfriar said. “Iannon thinks this will stitch us through to our destination. Short bursts of the drive will be less dangerous than a single output of energy, which is more subject to chaotic drift.”

  Voss gazed at their destination, a double star that was a faint patch of light in the loose cluster. Days had passed since their last attempt. He looked at the image with a sick feeling that this was as close as they would ever get to the star.

  The timer reached zero. The stars flickered, but the tank view seemed unchanged. Then the stars became distorted, as if something had smeared them.

  Reset did not come back on.

  “What happened?” Blackfriar demanded over the intercom.

  “We made some distance,” Brunei replied, “but very small. Shutting down now. There’s just no reliable control left.”

  “Do we still have conventional push?” Voss asked.

  “Yes,” Brunei said. “I’m putting on constant acceleration. We must get the highest velocity possible, just in case.”

  Yes, Voss thought, so we’ll make the base no matter what happens, however slowly.

  “We’ll hold a meeting now,” Blackfriar said. “It’s time everyone knew what we are facing.”

  Each of the ship’s six main holds had been partitioned to accommodate five hundred people. Voss divided the holo tank display into six segments, so that Blackfriar would face everyone when he spoke, whether they were only listening in their cabins or watching simple screens in the common areas.

  The tank filled with anxious faces.

  “All of you already know our predicament,” Blackfriar began. “We’re nearly adrift and it doesn’t appear likely that we can repair the jump drive to get us to our destination. If our conventional pusher holds up, we might get there in a century. We have no rejuvenation capability with us, so some of us may die when our bodies run beyond their current settings or acquire classic degenerative ailments. What happens will vary according to the individual, depending on when each was last treated. Still, most of us can hope to live more than a century, long enough for us to reach reversal.”

  All except the Cetians, Voss thought. Josepha would not out last a century, perhaps not even seventy years.

  “We might attempt to put people into cold sleep,” Blackfriar continued, “but without the Link’s maintenance this could be unreliable and costly in both monitoring and power use. Fortunately, sleep berths will be in short supply, so power and monitoring will not be the problem posed by the prospect of putting us all into suspension. We must consider how best to use the berths.”

  Josepha would need one, Voss thought.

  Blackfriar said, “We will set about making the ship as fit as possible for the passage. It was not made for this relativistic passage, and we could not have fitted it for a long journey during the evacuation of the mobile. We expected to make a quick jump to Praesepe and begin our recovery.”

  He paused for a moment. The heads in the tank were still, watching him.

  “Some of you may wish to consider having children,” Blackfriar continued, “since you may not live out the journey yourselves. Unfortunately, only the bodily method is available.”

  “Can’t the jumper be repaired?” a male head asked. Voss looked at the screen, but did not recognize the speaker.

  “We will continue to study the condition of the drive,” Blackfriar said. “It works, but we lack the equipment to make the correct navigational settings.”

  Looks of dismay and despair showed on the faces in the tank, and Voss realized that he was beginning to notice facial expressions in place of intimate link subvocalizations.

  Discussion broke out among the heads. Voss recognized Avita Harasta, who was over two centuries old. When she turned her head, the view pulled back and Voss glimpsed Josepha, Jason, and a few of the other Cetians behind her. For the Cetians, he knew, there would be no other world than this vessel.

  Voss recalled the apprehension that had entered his mind when he and Josepha had finally made love. At first he had thought it might be caused by Jason’s resentful glances in the dining hall. But now, as he gazed at the faces that seemed to be imprisoned in the tank, he realized that for Josepha, lovemaking was not just a physical pleasure, that for her and the Cetians the moment of bodily ecstasy announced that flesh had done all that was possible to assure its future, the perpetuation of its own aspect, and it was this urgency that had come forward in his old human brain. Bodies sought to assert themselves over others, but only half of each design was passed forward in time. Jason’s half might not survive. His rivalry carried itself with the strength of ancient impulses that welled up from deep structures and would not be easily denied.

  There was nothing new in this, Voss told himself as he saw the look of fear and dismay in many of the faces, and he realized that the coming together of Josepha, Jason, and himself in unexpected circumstances had developed his feelings in ways that made him a partial stranger to himself. He was now an amalgam who would never have come to be if his world had not been destroyed. He was struggling to discover what his unpredictable self might do, but saw no single, clear way without the Link.

  Blackfriar continued: “Form small groups, according to your knowledge and skills, and begin checking our environment for durability. Our power units are in sound condition, so we will produce air, water, and nutrients indefinitely from recycled materials. The synthesizers exist in threes within each section of the ship. If even two fail, the third can produce what we need. Our backup is to run each at half output. We have only one gravity generator, so we’re going to run it at three-quarters for as long as necessary. Those of you who may choose to raise offspring will need the gravity, so that your children will not grow up physically unused to the gravity of an Earth-sized planet, or to the habitat that we will construct. It’s possible that we may have to depend on the planet at our destination for some time. Although the base is sizable and will give us a good start on a new habitat, we may need the relative safety of a planet’s ecology before our new mobile can function on its own. I’m assuming that the base is still there, that it hasn’t been stripped. If it is not there, then we won’t have access to fresh Link cores, or to rejuvenation, and the planet will be our only hope, where we will have to build anew and hope to contact another mobile. Some of you may wish to settle on the planet, but we will have to see what the colony there has to say to us.”

  Blackfriar paused for questions and discussion, but in the silence Voss faced the possibility that both planet and base would be gone, that there was nothing at the double star in Praesepe except a hostile planetary environment in which they might all perish.

  Blackfriar said, “The oldest among us will be prepared for suspension as soon as possible. If any of you refuse, the next oldest will be offered the berths. But remember that our sleep units carry risk. You may not reawaken, or you may be revived to nothing better than what we have now…”

  As he listened to Blackfriar’s comprehensive litany of difficulties, Voss thought again of Ceti IV, whose few survivors would now have little or no chance of survival during the century or more that would pass before any help could be sent back—and he found himself beginning to mourn the loss of Josepha.

  57

  The oldest survivors from the mobile, only a dozen people, had been given small cabins along the central axis of the ship. As she came to Avita Harasta’s door, Josepha paused, suddenly doubting her own motives for seeking out the woman. There was a self-assurance in the woman she had met in the apartments of the mobile that reminded Josepha of the nuns who had taught her in the convent school after her mother’s suicide.

  “You must remember,” Sister Perpetua, who seemed old beyond imagining, had said to her, “that you have a benefactor who has placed you in this school. He seeks to give you the opportunity for education, here and at university. You must not grieve for your mother, humble Sister of Martha though she was, but look to be everythi
ng she could not have been.”

  “My benefactor?” Josepha had asked. “Is he my father?”

  Sister Perpetua had ignored her question, Josepha recalled as she touched the door plate, and had never told her how her mother had died. Mercifully, Josepha had learned the truth much later.

  The door slid open.

  “Yes?” asked the small woman.

  Josepha was again struck by the softness of Avita’s large brown eyes. The woman’s hair was short, but long enough to show that there was no gray in the brown that matched her eyes.

  The woman smiled as Josepha said, “I’m one of the Cetians.”

  “Of course,” Avita replied. “I remember you well, Josepha.”

  “May I come in and speak to you?”

  Avita moved back from the door.

  Josepha stepped into a cabin that was much like her own, but with room for only one bed. Avita Harasta motioned for her to sit down on the bunk, then sat down cross-legged on the floor.

  “How may I help you?” the woman asked, looking up.

  “You may find it strange,” Josepha said cautiously, feeling uneasy sitting on the bunk, “but I want to ask you about Old Earth, about your life on the habitat, and how you see what may come…so that I may be able to understand better, and find my place. I’m very afraid of what is to come. You know who you are. I fear losing myself.”

  Avita smiled and nodded. “You remind me of the times when men and women lived quite different lives, in same-sex unions and men with women. You knew some of that on your backward world.”

  Backward, Josepha repeated to herself.

  But the woman’s voice was low, caring, without malice, and Josepha knew at once that Avita Harasta could say whatever she pleased, however harsh the words might sound, and it would not be offensive. How was she able to create such complete sympathy? It seemed to Josepha that Avita was about to take her inside her mind and show her around.

  “My age alone should not impress you,” Avita continued. “It’s not something I can take credit for. I take satisfaction only in what I have understood in the time given to me.”

  “What will happen to us?” Josepha asked.

  “We may all die—or regain what we have lost. I’m not fearful of dying, as long as we regain what we have lost. But until men, every individual is important, for the knowledge each carries in his or her brain and body. I’ve seen a lot of dying. Most of humankind died in Earth’s sunspace. Some of us who survived built a new way of life, while others settled planets around other suns and took too much past with them. But we needed to see what our work would bring, so we extended our lives rather than pass on what we had gained to new, amnesiac generations. Yes, that’s what they are, requiring a lot of upbringing and education. It takes a century to truly understand the character of the way we call macrolife. We wanted to be ourselves, and remain ourselves as we grew. We did not need the empty-minded, survival-driven human being who persists in nature through default programs inherited by natural selection, or even the partly educated predators of the twenty some civilizations of Earth’s history—all come and gone now.”

  “But new people were born and raised on the mobile,” Josepha said.

  Avita nodded and said, “But slowly, as great works are made.” She smiled sadly. “But we haven’t done so well in this divergence of macrolife, have we? We’re at a knothole again, struggling to slip through and make good our mistakes. And we may fail.”

  “You seem resigned,” Josepha said, puzzled by the woman’s stoicism.

  “No,” she said. “Elsewhere, macrolife lives and proliferates, and through my understanding I am part of it.”

  Josepha shrugged. “I suppose my life has been too short for me to know what you are talking about. You speak of macrolife…”

  “A word,” Avita said, “referring to a mobile as an organism comprised of human and human-derived intelligences. It’s an organism because it reproduces, with its human and other elements, moves and reacts on the scale of the Galaxy. A mobile of the size you have seen is larger inside, in square kilometers, than the surface of a planet. And larger still within its minds.”

  Josepha smiled. “Yes, I know.”

  Avita said, “You’re anxious to know how we will overcome our present difficulties. We will do so only by reaching the base at Praesepe.”

  Josepha nodded. “Will we?”

  “We will try.”

  After a few moments of awkward silence, Josepha asked, “What was Earth like? We grew up with so little knowledge of it, and with so much disapproval.”

  Avita seemed to gaze into the past. “The cities of the twenty-first century were full of convenience, full of squalor and wealth, side by side. The architecture was extravagant, rising kilometers into the sky as new building materials were discovered. But more than seven billion people perished when one such building material, bulerite, became unstable. A strange physical anomaly swallowed the Moon. Nuclear war broke out in the chaos of blame that followed. Fortunately, there was enough humanity in the habitats, on Mars and the moons of Jupiter, to start over.”

  “Will we survive and start over?” Josepha asked.

  “What we are will survive,” Avita said, “even if we do not.”

  Josepha’s heart quickened. She had never known her mother. Her father’s guilt had given her what protection and privilege had been possible for a daughter who could never be acknowledged. Josepha felt weak and embarrassed suddenly, realizing that she had come here in search of another mother who might make her less afraid to face the future.

  “I can’t make you brave or control the future,” Avita said as if reading her mind, “but I can guess at the feelings of most of us on this journey. We have lost our worlds, but our answer must be to keep growing beyond ourselves.”

  “Just wait, then?” Josepha asked.

  “Have children, with Voss—and with anyone else you fancy. You can do that—and more later.”

  Josepha looked into Avita’s large brown eyes, and wondered whether the woman was an individual at all, or even cared if she lived. For a moment it seemed to her that Avita Harasta was a ghost, a fragment of history that was still somehow able to speak. Where was her life, her loves?

  Avita sighed, seeming impatient, as if she were still reading Josepha’s mind, then said, “Let me say something more to you. The time and distance which you fear is also an inner distance through which we must pass. It is the price we must pay to regain what we have lost, and the new foundation on which we will rebuild our dedication to life. This has always been true, from the simplicity of crossing an open field or reaching out across light-years.” She smiled. “Once long ago I crossed a field of weeds and dry grass to board a shuttle that took me and others to build a habitat in the Moon’s orbit. I had arrived, time was short, and I had to go through a hole in a fence.”

  “Parables are all well and good,” Josepha said, “but where do I find the conviction I need?”

  “You already know enough to realize that you need it, daughter,” Avita replied sternly. “If you simply try to behave as you think you should, without making the inner journey, then all the hardships that now face us will be meaningless, because even if you should survive you will not deserve the victory, not in the eyes of others, or in your own.”

  “But our salvation is not guaranteed,” Josepha said.

  “If we make this passage and reach the tools of knowledge that are waiting for us, our strength will grow from how we value the experience. If we do not rise to this ordeal, we will have nothing to start with again, even if we survive.” She paused, then said, “It is possible, you know, for us to survive shamefully.”

  “But what must I do?” Josepha asked desperately, not quite understanding the woman’s last words.

  “Do what is given to you at every opportunity,” Avita said, “and imagine that every positive act is a brick in a great structure that you are building within yourself.”

  Josepha gazed into the woman’s fac
e and knew that her father would have said, “Daughter, you are talking to a devil among devils.” And one who was simply trying to make her accept the inevitable more easily.

  “All life is a gamble,” Avita continued. “Conscious life has sought to establish itself in greater safety and permanence, beyond simple survival. On this ship we have the beauty of a way of life to regain. We will act as we must, and so will you.”

  “When I think of my father’s crime,” Josepha said, “I wonder if it might be best for me to die by my own hand.” My mother, she thought, had taken her life for much less.

  Avita smiled. “A great philosopher once said about suicide that it asks a question of life, but will not stay to have an answer. You are not your father or mother, or anyone else of your world, however much you may feel them reaching after you—unless you let yourself be one of them.”

  “There’s so little I can do,” Josepha said, feeling defeated as she thought of Voss and Jason.

  “It will be everything,” Avita replied.

  58

  Iannon Brunei sat at Blackfriar’s station on the bridge. Alone, Voss turned to hear what the engineer had come to say.

  “I want only you and Blackfriar to know this for now,” Iannon said, “because I don’t wish to create false hopes. I’ve already spoken with him.”

  “I understand,” Voss said.

  The big engineer’s large black eyes became sad, and he seemed to shrink in his seat, as if afraid of what he had to say.

  “It’s possible that we could take one of our two small craft and jump a few people ahead to the base,” he said, looking at the tank. “They could bring back medical supplies and the equipment we’d need to recalibrate our jump drive.”

  Voss took a deep breath. “Can this be done?”

  Iannon turned and gave him a harried look. “We’re not that far from our destination, as measured by our usual capabilities. But it’s not as promising as it sounds. That’s why I’m restricting my conversation to you and Blackfriar. Right now we can’t be sure that either small jumper would work. They might have been affected as badly as our main drive. Remember, everything was in the mobile when the thermonuclear pulse went through it. We’d have to try it once to be sure, but that’s part of the problem. It might work only once, holding the chart memory for one complete round trip—maybe. Testing it would use up our one chance.”