Cave of Stars (Macrolife Book 2)

by George Zebrowski

  “It only seems that way to you,” Voss said. “But you can’t change physical facts.”

  “So you say.”

  “They know more about it than you do,” Jason added, convinced now that everything would be lost because both sides were fools—and he could not bring himself to act.

  “We’ll get you there,” Lemuel said to him. “You’ll see.”

  64

  As they waited for the reset, Lemuel loosened the noose around Josepha’s neck. She began to breathe more easily, and watched as Jason tried to engage her captor in conversation, but the man refused all words. Lemuel sat staring at the screen, ignoring her, as if fearful of losing his resolve.

  The rest of the Cetians sat on the deck, becoming more impatient with each quarter hour. Josepha avoided Jason’s eyes, fearing that he might act impulsively if he saw her fear. She could not guess what Voss and Wolt were thinking, but she was sure that they were unused to physical violence. She had never seen any enforcement of civil order on the habitat, and there was no police force of any kind on the ship. She had been told that the Link had a means of restraining individuals by inducing sleep, but that it had been rarely used—and the Link was dead.

  She sat very still and tried to breathe normally, thinking of what she could say or do that might help—and whether anyone had thought it would be best to let her die.

  Slowly, the screen timer was counting down to zero. The wire, she noticed, was loose in Lemuel’s hands. Being this close to him, she saw that he looked old and tired, and pitiably stoic, but his physique was thin and wiry, with more strength than was apparent.

  As she looked around at Lemuel’s group of Cetians, she realized that he was clearly their leader and had probably always been a leader, even on the island. From the time when they had realized that they were different from the political exiles, this group had kept together—and that might be why they had survived the mobile’s destruction. They had been together somewhere, probably in the hollow, the environment most like their world, when the explosion came.

  “It’s time,” Voss said.

  Josepha tensed as the timer reached zero and the stars flickered in the navigation tank.

  Lemuel groaned. Josepha noticed that he seemed suddenly ill, and felt his grip loosen on the wire.

  Jason leaped out of his station and caught Lemuel’s hand. Josepha felt the wire constrict as she was pulled down. Voss was suddenly next to her, working his fingers in between her neck and the wire.

  “Stop them!” Lemuel cried.

  She felt blood running down her neck. Then, as Jason worked to pry Lemuel’s fingers from the wire, she glimpsed the tank. The universe of stars seemed to be going through a strange agony as Jason separated Lemuel’s hand from the wire, threw him back, and sprang forward to pin him down on the deck. Voss managed to remove the noose and freed her hands from behind her back.

  “The neck wounds are superficial,” Voss said, examining her.

  “Get him off me!” Lemuel cried as Jason held him down.

  There were too many, Josepha thought. Even with her help, Voss and Wolt would not be able to overcome all the Cetians. Four men were on their feet. Lemuel cursed as Jason pinned him.

  “We’ve jumped!” Blackfriar shouted as he got to his feet.

  Voss helped Josepha into his station chair, then sat down in the other and examined the readings.

  “Yes!” he shouted. “We’re now twenty-five light-years nearer.”

  “Do it again,” Lemuel said bitterly, “and we’ll get there yet.”

  Josepha turned around as Jason raised Lemuel to his feet and held his hands behind his back.

  “It was a fluke,” Blackfriar said, “but we’ll get there sooner.”

  “How long?” Lemuel demanded.

  “In fifty or sixty years,” Blackfriar said.

  Lemuel laughed grotesquely and spat on the deck. “If it hadn’t been for us,” he said, “you wouldn’t have even tried.”

  “It was only chance,” Blackfriar said, “that it worked.”

  “So you say. Try again.”

  “We might still be thrown at random,” Voss said, “and lose every gain we’ve made.”

  Josepha touched the drying blood on her neck. Jason was looking at her, and she knew his thoughts. He had defended her, but she would not be his.

  “Try again!” Lemuel shouted, his face full of hate as he struggled in Jason’s grip.

  “It can’t work,” Voss said calmly.

  “I don’t believe you!” Lemuel cried.

  “Why should we lie to you?” Voss asked. “We want to get there as much as you do.”

  “After we’re all dead!”

  Josepha looked around at the other Cetians. They seemed lost, unable to decide what to do. Even the old fool Padraic was silent. No one moved to help Lemuel.

  “Try again!” he shouted. “Cowards! Fools!”

  “Nothing will happen,” Voss said. “Look—we don’t even have time left to reset.”

  “You won’t make happen what they can’t do themselves,” Beata Lorenz said to Lemuel.

  “Do it!” Lemuel shrieked, as Jason restrained him.

  Blackfriar said, “Show him. It can’t hurt now.”

  Voss turned to the controls and touched in the commands.

  The stars remained steady in the tank.

  “Even if we could get reset, nothing would work,” Voss said. “What happened was a freak effect. It can’t happen again.”

  “So what now?” Terence Ohar asked.

  “We’ll get there,” Blackfriar said, “but we’ll still have to do it the hard way.”

  Lemuel roared like a wild animal, broke free of Jason’s grasp, and stood up defiantly in the center of the deck. “I got us closer! I did it!”

  “That you did,” Blackfriar said. “Now quit while you’re ahead, and no one’s dead.”

  “He’s right,” Jason said.

  Josepha took a deep breath and knew that an agreement of some kind had been reached.

  65

  When he imagined how the social prosthetic that was his ship might look from afar, Voss Rhazes knew that it would always seem lost. Powerless to subvert spacetime, the patchwork vessel pulled along on its gravitational oars, determined to cross the cave of stars to its port, however slowly and modestly. An objective observer might have concluded that the voyagers had been very foolish, or very brave, to have come out into the night at such an agonizing pace.

  But the pace quickened as ways were found to shield the ship. Five decades of slow, dying life came to an end one day. The narrow bridge of patience was crossed—into sunlight.

  Brightness flooded the bridge from the tank as Voss adjusted the glare and scanned for the inner planets of the double star.

  Josepha stood next to him, frail but still healthy. Next to her stood their son, Ardys, tall and thin at fifty-three; his son, Axel, seemed youthful at thirty, and was taller than his father. Josepha’s granddaughter, Lucina, sat next to Voss. She was expecting a child, but had insisted on coming to the bridge to see the entrance into the sunspace of the double star.

  Jason was nearly eighty now. Ondro, his son by Josepha, stood by his side with his wife, Adria, and their three grown daughters, Perenna, Antonia, and Ariadne.

  Voss remembered the dead. More than half the people of the mobile were gone, among them Wolt Blackfriar. Wolt’s son, James, was now captain of the ship. He stood to one side of the tank, rather than sitting at the command station, in deference to the expectant mother, Lucina.

  All the Cetians, except for Jason and Josepha, had lived out their lives, but a few had left children. Voss remembered his first daughter, also named Lucina, who had died of a malformed heart. He had mourned for years, much longer than Josepha, unable to accept the fact that growing her a new heart had been impossible.

  The oldest from the mobile were still in cold sleep; no one had wished to see their years perish, despite the seeming unfairness of giving them preference o
ver others, but it was still uncertain how many would awaken. Their privilege waited to pay a price.

  “Is the base there?” Ardys asked eagerly.

  James said, “Orbiting the fifth planet at two hundred thousand kilometers. No answer from it yet, or from the planetary colony.”

  Voss felt an old stirring within himself, and realized that it was the base Link reaching out with test routines. He answered subvocally with basic information, then asked about the shuttle.

  ‘There has been no vessel arriving from you,” the Link replied, and Voss felt that he was hearing from an old friend, now somewhat unfamiliar, but unmistakable.

  At the same time, he realized that the shuttle must have been thrown randomly on the leg out and had never been able to find its way back. For a moment he saw Iannon Brunei and his team struggling to set and reset the drive, and each time finding unfamiliar stars in their tank. If he had lived, Lemuel Annan would have learned that it was unclear whether he had been responsible for losing the shuttle, since it had never arrived at the base; so its presumed inability to find its way back to the ship on its previous course after the two wild jumps might not have been the cause of its disappearance.

  And yet, Voss thought, it might have returned to the ship’s first position from some far space, and might still be drifting there with its dead, having been unable to jump again. There was no way to be sure except by going out and finding it.

  “I hope the planet is livable,” Josepha said. “I’ve been so long without outdoors and daylight.”

  “Still no answer from the planetary colony,” James said, and Voss realized that there might have been something about the planet that had made it unlivable.

  As he looked at Josepha’s long gray hair, Voss felt the mystery of having loved her, and it seemed to him that he would not mind if death took him now, near this life’s end.

  But the voice of the new Link, much like that of the one he had lost, whispered to him, saying that the body’s ancient ways dulled the caring of those who reproduced, preparing them for death. Soon now, the Link assured him, he would defeat this anesthetic longing with a new beginning. He looked over at James and saw Blackfriar rebuilt in his son; but James was not Wolt.

  We will grow again, Voss told himself, cheered by the electric yellow-white glare of the double star—and by the returning presence of the Link within himself. We’ll build, he said silently, until our shard of macrolife plays again on the great galactic stage.

  66

  The growing mobile became a new star in the fifth planet’s night sky, eventually outshining both the starship and the globe of the base-depot. As the resources of the base and starship were exhausted, tugships went out into the sunspace and diverted metal-rich asteroids. Construction machines reproduced and maintained themselves as needed, and the base Link directed them into ever more subtle tasks.

  The new mobile’s Link began to develop after a deposit of the old one’s fragments was made into a fresh brain core, adapting to the needs of the survivors.

  There were setbacks in the decade that it took to make the new mobile functional and capable of further growth. The reversal of aging was not entirely successful with several hundred of the survivors. Half the sleepers failed to revive, and as a last effort, some of their personality patterns were turned into the Link, in the hope that their experience would not be entirely lost.

  James Blackfriar joined the new colony on the fifth planet, named Lea. The settlement consisted of those survivors who had been denied the chance to settle on Ceti IV and a number of those whose bodies had not responded well to rejuvenation and who now wanted to start families before dying. Exploration teams failed to find any signs of the previous colony.

  When the mobile was complete, with one asteroid core and ten shells, Voss restocked the base, overhauled the patchwork starship, and left it in high planetary orbit; the time might come when the surface colony would need them both.

  On the day before the mobile’s departure, Voss and Josepha went down to Lea and visited with James Blackfriar and his family in their wooden home, lingering with their good-byes until the slow mill of the night ground the bright stars into an ashen dawn.

  67

  Josepha, in the first years of her renewed life, sought a better understanding of what had happened to the world of her birth. She constructed a record that presented the observations, thoughts, and feelings of all the survivors, and arranged these echoes of the catastrophe, through the Link, into an artifact that might reveal hidden relationships and provoke understanding.

  She shaped it into a whole, then recast it several times to include second thoughts, qualifications, and even the most irrational judgments. This virtual history, accessible to all through the Link, revealed the events at Tau Ceti, the interstellar passage, and the new beginning at the double sun in Praesepe.

  Characters flickered in the forever-incomplete fluidity, analogs of the living and the dead. One day she hoped to add the stored personalities and question them. As she worked on the past in this way, the effort burned away her feelings of pity and regret, and she began to doubt both the accuracy and necessity of her efforts. The dead spoke, but the complex infrastructures of endless motives and actions always seemed to elude her. She wore the faces of others; figures walked within her; thoughts swirled; places poured in like rivers. The death of her birth world played itself out again in endless variants, affirming and denying her previous convictions and feelings. Her effort at truth, her hope for a permanent bridge with the past, threatened to collapse.

  But there were moments when her recreation seemed better than the truth:

  “We did nothing to deserve destruction,” Voss’s simulacrum said bitterly.

  “You humiliated an old man who feared death,” she heard herself reply boldly. “And a man is a world in himself.”

  “That’s only a confused way of speaking,” Voss said coldly.

  “These ghosts you’ve summoned live in hell,” her father said, fixing her with his gaze. “And you live in a mock-heaven devised by the damned to keep you from the fellowship of God!”

  She shaped the field, unfolding the story’s variants and contradictions, until its figures cried for peace. The enormity of suffering and loss was always the same.

  The inwardness of the hopes for Lea also eluded her. One group had settled the planet; the rest reached out again to macrolife; but the divisions were never decisive. Lingering doubts and curiosities about natural planets carried into new ages of macrolife, never quite succumbing. The communal-conscious of the mobiles always retained a love of the artful, communal-unconscious of sunlit worlds.

  One day, Josepha asked the echo of Avita Harasta for a lasting judgment.

  “The crossing was brave,” replied the pattern of the lost old woman, “but don’t make an Aeneid out of it. Look ahead now.”

  Josepha laughed, and suddenly the fever of shaping left her.

  68

  Jason, as he retreated in delighted wonder from death, saw that his new life gave him more than he and Ondro might ever have achieved in their dreamed of revolt against Josephus Bely. At least Ondro had lived to see something of what was possible, only a few steps up from humanity’s past. Young Ondro seemed very much like the brother Jason had lost.

  There was no point in returning to Ceti. Either there would be no one left alive, or the survivors would be well into a new age that might not welcome another intrusion. The passage of time, so much greater there than aboard the relativistic starship, might have already played out a new epic of conflict between angels and devils.

  Jason wanted no part of it, and in time he let his memories go, until they existed only in Josepha’s hyper-tapestry, now lost in the Link’s often scholastic continuum of knowledge and personalities, where she sang of the painful love of a worn-out past.

  He let go because pasts do wear out. Human nature hits a wall, and will pass through only by loosening its previous constraints, by leaving its given humanity be
hind for a greater humanity.

  He let go because the lessons of his past became so small one day that he could safely forget them. Earlier, he had become alienated from his past because he knew it too well, but had still concluded, out of insecurity, that alienation and forgetting would yield no future. Finally, he saw that alienation and some remembrance would help make his future.

  But with his ongoing future made, he routinely let dissolve the lowest standing layer of remembrance.

  69

  Voss Rhazes held on longest to the memory of the crossing to the double star in Praesepe, when time had become a stone wall to wear away, space a cave of stars, and consciousness a mote slipping toward death. He wanted to keep, for a time, something of the bravery common to all shortlived creatures who yearned uselessly to step out from the abyss of themselves.

  In Josepha’s virtuals, she asked him, “What have we learned here?”

  And he said, “We knew again what we had not properly left behind, the tenacity of a past that reached into our lighted future with a murderous rage. We should never have stepped into its shadow, but instead left it to fade away.”

  “And now?” she asked.

  “Forget what cannot come again. Drown all sorrows and pities offered by broken constancies….”

  “And where will we cross to now?” she asked.

  ‘To the inconstancies of joy,” Voss had said—and it took her a long time to find him in “The Inconstancies”—virtual islands of mad love and ecstasy—served by a great link from Procyon, where she sometimes visited him through a tachyon hookup.

  70

  Finally, only the Link retained the record of Ceti’s ruin, the passage to Praesepe’s double sun, the settling of Lea, and the rebirth of the lost mobile’s life from a handful of individuals.