Children of the Comet

by Donald Moffitt

  “We’ve reached our goal, haven’t we?” his companion said bitterly. “We found our Earthlike planet and our longer-lived K-type sun, and we’re well along in the job of making babies. We don’t need Time’s Beginning anymore, do we? The young folk are impatient, and you can’t blame them. They don’t want to waste any more time looking for something better. Leave it to future generations to fill this galaxy. It’ll only take a paltry thirty million years of logarithmic expansion, according to the First Civilization theory that sent us here in the first place.”

  He turned his head for a rueful look at the gigantic shape of the starship silhouetted against the planet below. They were close enough to see swarms of mite-sized specks that were spacesuited workmen crawling over its blackened and pitted surface. Jets briefly flared, and one of the enormous habitat modules came free and started drifting slowly away from the core of the ship, a score of the silvery specks clinging to it. As the two of them watched, a nearby tug closed in and took possession of it.

  “That doesn’t sound like the Delbert Karn I know,” Joorn replied. He stared accusingly at Karn. “It seems to me that it was only a couple of months ago that you stormed into a Council meeting with a crowd of your followers and made an impassioned speech demanding that they leave what’s left of the ship intact and turn it over to you and your followers.”

  “I’m through with words,” Karn said heatedly. “Our only hope is direct action.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Talk is useless. Our faction numbers over three thousand now. And not just the old fogies like you and me. They’re bright young people who aren’t ready to settle for a latecomer like 3C-273. They’re fired by our old dream of chasing down a quasar at the boundary of the observable Universe, a quasar that was present at the creation.”

  “An impossible dream, Delbert. The quasars that gave birth to the original galaxies are fifteen billion light-years away. The more the Universe expands, the faster they race away. You can never catch up, no matter how closely you crowd the speed of light. You’d be chasing a chimera.”

  “The human mind is a chimera, my old friend. Life is a chimera. Maybe the Universe itself is a chimera. My young people think that those of their contemporaries who are content to plant themselves here are hopeless dullards. And they think that your faction, the would-be returnees, are irrational sentimentalists.”

  “Irrational?” Joorn flared. “You’re calling us irrational?”

  “The home you people want to return to will have ceased to exist by the time you got there. The sun will be a red giant, on its way to becoming a white dwarf. It will have swallowed Earth. The net drift of Alpha Centauri toward Sol means that by the time you got there, the solar system will be part of a multiple star system with four stars—a red giant on the way down the Main Sequence to becoming a white dwarf, a white dwarf that had enough original mass to beat it there, and a K-type star that was small enough and long-lived enough to survive as a viable sun, only somewhat dimmer than Sol was in its prime. With Proxima Centauri circling the whole shebang at a distance. The Oort clouds of the three other stars will have merged to become a forest of comets. Not to mention that just about now”—Karn pretended to look at an imaginary wristwatch—“the Andromeda galaxy will have collided with the Milky Way.”

  “The Milky Way is still our home,” Joorn protested, with anguish in his voice. “The cradle of the human race, even though we didn’t know the First Ones already owned it. There’ll still be plenty of real estate there. Maybe one or two of the planets of the Centaurian system will have survived. Maybe Earth will have solidified enough to form a crust that life can be planted on. We planted it here, didn’t we? Maybe enough of Jupiter’s atmosphere will have boiled away to leave a rocky core we can terraform. The Others must have gone extinct in the two and a half billion years that have already passed. We own our home galaxy again.”

  When Karn spoke again, he didn’t bother to disguise his pity. “Fairy tales, my friend. You’re telling yourself fairy tales.”

  “I’m only an unemployed ship’s captain, not an astrophysics genius like you. But I’ve done all the math too—the life span of G3 and K5 stars, the rate of Alpha Centauri’s drift toward Sol, the consequences of the collision with Andromeda—I’ve run and rerun the old computer models that show the gravitational distortion of both galaxies and two spiral galaxies becoming one big elliptical galaxy. And I’ll tell you this. There’s one thing you’ve left out of all your calculations.”

  “Which is?”

  “The power of the homing instinct. The yearning. It trumps everything else.”

  “Give it up, Joorn. Between the two of us, we could bring the Council around. Otherwise …”

  “Otherwise what?”

  Karn became evasive. “I’m going to bring my case before the Council one last time. Then we’ll see.”

  With a faint sense of alarm, Joorn said, “Don’t do anything rash, Delbert.”

  “Rash? Don’t trouble yourself about it, Joorn. Just go on dreaming your dreams, and I’ll dream mine.”

  Without another word, they both triggered their altitude jets and spun on their vertical axes, turning together to watch as the habitat module maneuvered into position for atmospheric entry, carrying yet another twenty thousand inhabitants to the growing settlement on the ground.

  CHAPTER 6

  Only a few hundred people were left in a habitat module that had been home to thousands for most of their lifetimes. Joorn could almost feel its emptiness as a tangible presence as he propelled himself through the vast echoing corridors with a small handheld fan—the most practical way to travel now that there was no more up and down.

  He passed only a half dozen people on the way to his quarters, swimming like him through the stagnant air with the help of their little propellers. Most of them didn’t bother to stop. They gave him a negligent wave—or in the case of the older ones, an actual salute—and perhaps a “Hello, Captain,” or “How goes it?” One old shipmate, pulling his wife along with a hand at her elbow, pointed his fan in the opposite direction long enough to say, “It’s going to feel strange to leave the old thing, but the rep from the Council says they’ll have housing for us any day now.”

  He’d replied, “You’ll get used to it, Stefan. We all will.”

  The man’s wife, her eyes moist, started to say something, but the air currents drew them out of earshot.

  Another half mile of travel took him to what had been the captain’s suite. It was lonely enough now, with his wife gone these many years and his son, Alten, working on Rebirth’s still-untamed surface, lending his engineer’s talents to the job of getting a civilization going.

  He looked around at the main salon. It was spartan enough. He’d spent the years since his wife’s death simplifying. But there were still the mementos from an Earth that no longer existed. An Oriental rug hanging on one wall—a relic of the centuries when they still made such things by hand. An actual piano of carved rosewood; his wife had played old music on it, and he hadn’t had the heart to get rid of it. A glass dome enclosing an arrangement of dried leaves from a rain forest that had been long gone even then. A velvet sofa. Framed prints of paintings by vanished painters. A sculpted model of Time’s Beginning, with its long shaft surrounded by the oblate spheres of the habitat modules and the forward umbrella to ward off the deadly radiation that came from slamming into interstellar hydrogen at more than ninety-nine percent of the speed of light. There was no resemblance to the earlier starships with their spinning wheels to simulate gravity; Time’s Beginning had been designed to accelerate, then decelerate, at one G for the entire two and a half billion years.

  He took a shower to get rid of the grime and sweat of the spacesuit, then thought about supper. He wasn’t hungry, but he still presided over a captain’s table of sorts, and he owed it to the others to put in an appearance.

 
There was still time to make a call to his son on the planet’s surface. Alten, as far as he knew, was working at a construction site a few miles from the growing city of Rebirth’s capital-to-be, New Brussels.

  He tried to dial him up and was informed by the Time’s Beginning communication center that the relay satellite—the first and so far only one—was currently behind the planet but that his call could be placed in two hours.

  When he got back from dinner, he was a little depressed. He’d had to preside over an argument between one of the Endgamist majority and an obnoxious member of Karn’s firebrand party. The dispute got complicated when a colonist with a third point of view became vehement. “We’ve only planted settlements in four star systems in 3C-273, including this one!” he’d said, thumping the table for emphasis. “That’s not what I call seeding the galaxy. We’ve still got four habitat modules left, each with its own shuttle and everything needed to get started. I say let’s finish the job!”

  Joorn didn’t want to take sides, but he managed to get them to calm down. “It ate up an extra twelve years of lifetime to do those other three stars, building up our gamma from scratch each time,” he’d said diplomatically. “I can understand why most people are travel-weary. But look at the bright side. We’ll inherit the four unused habitats and their starter kits, won’t we? We’ll have five times the resources and five times the people. That’s quite a head start over the other three focal points we planted. That’ll make this colony the crown jewel of the galaxy.”

  “And it’ll still take twenty million years for the colonization front to fill the galaxy,” the Karn partisan grumbled. “That is, if the human species hasn’t evolved itself out of existence by then.”

  The Endgamist got in one last barb. “Which is what we hope the First Ones have done by now back in the Milky Way,” he said. “Well, we’re the First Ones here, and it’s not going to help matters to waste the ship’s resources by going off on a wild goose chase to the end of the Universe.”

  Most of the others at the table nodded in agreement at that and went back to placidly eating their dinners.

  By the time Joorn got back to his quarters, the relay satellite had risen over the horizon and his screen was blinking impatiently to tell him that his call could go through. Alten picked up almost immediately.

  “What’s up, Father?”

  “Can you get back to the ship before the weekend rush?”

  Alten’s voice was reluctant. “Well, we’re not quite finished here, but I suppose I could leave Daryl in charge. Why? What’s happening?”

  “I’d like you to be here for the Council meeting on Freeday. Karn’s up to something, and I’d like you to hear what he says.”

  “I’m just a lowly engineer these days, Father. Karn’s still the big cheese in the astrophysics department.”

  “You were quite a Karn disciple in your youth, as I recall. His protégé, in fact. You’re capable of following his thought processes much better than I can. Besides, as an astrophysicist yourself, you could clear up any confusion he might stir up at the meeting.”

  Alten laughed. “I’m still a youth, relatively speaking. And no longer an astrophysicist. That part of our hegira’s over, and it’s time to get down to business. We’re here, and the daydreams are over.”

  “You sound like an Endgamist,” Joorn said reproachfully.

  Alten grew serious. “I’d like to return to Earth too, Father. At least to its former neighborhood. You know that. But it isn’t practical. Earth’ll be gone—its charred remnants taken out of the baking oven and the oven left to cool off. And the neighborhood will be gone to hell. This is what we’ve got now, and there are things to do here.”

  “Don’t you think I know that?” Joorn snapped. He got himself under control again. “I’m resigned to following the will of the majority, but until they’ve finished nibbling away at Time’s Beginning, I’ll continue to advocate for turning it over to the Homegoing party. But Karn’s up to some mischief.”

  “There’s nothing he can do, Father. His faction’s smaller than yours.”

  “I’d like you to come anyway. If Karn succeeds in swaying any of the Council members to his way of thinking, it can only hurt our cause.”

  There was a pause at the other end. “All right, Father. I’ll book myself on the shuttle for tomorrow’s flight.”

  The meeting hall was still unfinished. In ten or fifteen years there would begin to be lumber from actual trees, but until then the colony was making do with composites formulated from feeder stock provided by the local carbon-based vegetation, gigantic fernlike fronds that hadn’t yet developed woody stems. There were stacks of new panels waiting to be installed, scaffolding everywhere, and irregular rows of folding chairs cannibalized from one of the habitats still in orbit. There was a lingering smell of synthetic resins, which together with the slightly higher oxygen content of Rebirth’s atmosphere, gave one a mildly heady feeling.

  Joorn and Alten were seated with several committee members in the front row, while the Council was arranged on a makeshift platform. Karn, sitting opposite their table, was holding forth.

  “To answer that,” he was telling one of the Councilors, “I’d like to remind you why we ended up here in the first place.”

  With his legs crossed, Karn looked quite relaxed and in command of the situation. But then, Karn had always been a bit of a con artist at meetings. It was one of the reasons he had risen so quickly in the scientific community when he was young.

  “There he goes,” Joorn whispered, nudging Alten.

  “Remember that the original idea behind Time’s Beginning was to chase down a quasar at the so-called edge of the observable Universe, dating from the era when the first galaxies were being formed. That’s where the name of our ark came from in the first place, isn’t it? The reasoning, at least of the politicians who funded it, was that, according to what was known as the First Civilization hypothesis, in a very young galaxy intelligent life had not yet had a chance to evolve—remember, it took a couple of billion years for that to happen on Earth—and that human beings had a chance to become the Firsts in a new galaxy.”

  He had the Councilors nodding. He smiled pleasantly and went on.

  “Of course the reasoning was fallacious. But try to explain that to a politician. It was the early years after the discovery of the First Ones, and there was a lot of public hysteria. We weren’t alone in the galaxy, it seemed. In fact, we were being crowded out of the Milky Way by a prior race that already owned it.”

  He uncrossed and recrossed his legs. He was still smiling. “It was quite a shock. It was only fifty years since the Higgs drive had made human starships possible, and we were full of ourselves. We were going to conquer the Universe. We’d already planted a tiny outpost on a planet of Tau Ceti, and another on a quite Earthlike planet of Delta Pavonis, a full twenty light-years away. The Milky Way was our oyster.”

  “Here it comes,” Joorn whispered.

  “But it turned out that someone else had won that first toss of the dice some thirty million years earlier. While mankind, if you want to count the early hominids, had only been around for a couple of million years. The First Civilization hypothesis says that the earliest intelligent race to emerge in any galaxy gets to own it. The calculation is that it takes only thirty million years of logarithmic expansion to fill a galaxy, and the race that starts first wins.

  “Humans, unfortunately, started second. By the time we were capable of interstellar travel at relativistic speeds, there was no habitable real estate available in the Milky Way. The First Ones had already made an alien suburb out of virtually every F-, G-, and K-type star system in the galaxy. Our little bubble had a radius of only about twenty light-years when the wave front of the First Ones’ diffusion reached us. They left us alone. There’s no conceivable profit in interstellar war, not at the distances involved. And there can be no such thing as
a galactic empire, not when communication at the speed of light would take sixty thousand years to cross the galaxy. There’s a twenty- or thirty-light-year limit for any imaginable kind of politics. So they stopped short of our little bubble. And we were boxed in.”

  The Councilors shifted uncomfortably in their seats. It was an old bedtime story, one nobody liked. Karn went on relentlessly. He wasn’t smiling anymore.

  “Of course there was a lot of public nonsense about alien invasions and alien attacks and alien takeovers. The pundits fed the hysteria, and the politicians catered to it. In the meantime, the First Ones simply ignored us. Neither trade nor conquest had any interest for them. We were simply an unimportant bump in their road.”

  One of the Councilmen cleared his throat. “Excuse me, Professor Karn, but where are we going with this?”

  “I didn’t mean to try your patience, Councilman Brego,” Karn said nastily. “We’re only talking about the fate of the human species in the Universe.”

  The other members of the Council didn’t like that. They exchanged glances. Brego had acquired two ruddy patches on his cheeks.

  “That did it,” Joorn said to Alten. “Karn never learns.”

  Karn went on, oblivious. “As I was trying to say, you don’t populate a galaxy the way you populate a planet, increment by straightforward increment. The distances just grow too great for meaningful communication, even at twenty or thirty light-years. Instead, it has to become a process of diffusion. When a colony’s grown enough to have the resources to send out starships of its own, each new colony becomes a focal point in itself, and so ad infinitum. The process can be described mathematically, and it was so described in the late twentieth century by scientists at Princeton and Cornell—two institutions that were still going strong two hundred years after Time’s Beginning left Earth and that were instrumental in choosing the quasar 3C-273 as our target.