by Judith
Blazing in deep space.
Orbiting a world belonging to another star.
Four and a third light-years from Earth.
Four months ago.
Cochrane closed his eyes to see the stars as he had seen them then, the constellations familiar to billions of his fellow beings shifted to new perspectives never seen before.
Four and a third light-years. A world so far away the fastest impulse-powered probes took more than two decades to reach it, and then took more than four years longer to transmit back the data they recorded.
And Zefram Cochrane had gone there and returned in two hundred and forty-three days.
Faster than any human had ever traveled before.
Faster than light.
Cochrane blinked open his eyes at the sudden feeling that the stars here were staring down at him with shock and approbation for daring to invade the sanctity of their domain. In response, he felt laughter rise up in him. He couldn’t help it. He stamped his foot into the engineered soil beneath his boots and unexpectedly bounced a few centimeters in the moon’s half-gravity.
The awkward moment as he waved his arms for balance broke the previous moment’s spell, and he finally realized that the pleasing harmonies he heard were not from the offended stars above, but from the string quartet that played in the assembly hall of the governor’s home adjoining the domed field. The faint melody, festive even over the perpetual background hum of the immense air circulators and muffled howl of the outside winds, sounded like something by Brahms, but he couldn’t place it.
Cochrane looked down at the bare soil beneath him, the crushed and sterilized decomposed rocks of an alien world in which Earth bacteria worked to change its composition, cleansing it of Titan’s octane rain and hydrocarbon sludge. Someday grass and trees would grow here, so that children would run in play and lovers would stroll and old people would sit in contentment on benches by a splashing fountain as they grew old together, gazing [23] up at the stars and knowing that others like them looked back from different distant worlds.
Now the laughter that had been growing in him faded and he felt tears form in his eyes for no reason he understood. What books would he never read that were still to be written on those different distant worlds? What poetry would he never understand? What music? What paintings, what sculpture, what histories unimagined would play out without him now that the human stage had been expanded to ...
“Infinity.”
Cochrane jumped at the word so aptly spoken, startled by the unexpected company. He recognized the voice, of course. His ship, the Bonaventure, had cost more than 300 million Eurodollars, and the precarious state of the world was such that government agencies were not inclined to turn over that level of funding to thirty-one-year-old physicists who had the audacity to question the most basic tenets of nature. But the voice belonged to the man who had paid for his ship—Micah Brack.
Brack owed allegiance to no government funding committee or board of directors. The debit slips the tycoon had authorized over the eight years of Cochrane’s single-minded pursuit to overturn the Einsteinian mind-set of the Brahmins of modern science had come from Brack’s own pocket. Considering that most data agencies placed him among the ten wealthiest individuals in the system, with holdings on every planet and moon humans had colonized, that pocket was virtually without limit. Most of Christopher’s Landing existed because of Brack’s foresight, and his impatience with those who merely looked up at the stars, unable to grasp the promise they held. In Micah Brack, Cochrane had found a champion, a backer, and most importantly, a friend.
“Sorry to startle you.” Brack put his hand on Cochrane’s shoulder, glancing up to see what Cochrane had seen, so far away. He nodded to the sounds of the reception coming from the lit doorways and windows of the governor’s metal-walled home. “But they’re about to notice the star of their party is missing.”
Cochrane knew that as well. Since his return to the system, less than fifty hours ago, he had had no time to himself. He wasn’t used to that kind of intrusion. He didn’t like it. Never had. And [24] he had no intention of ever getting used to it, even though Brack had warned him about the public’s probable reaction to news of his accomplishment almost three years ago. At the time of that conversation, they had been out past Neptune, with Sternbach and Okuda, literally bouncing off the walls of the John Cabal, an old lunar ice freighter Brack had refitted as Cochrane’s microgravity lab. The freighter had allowed Cochrane and his team to conduct their research light-hours from Earth’s military surveillance nets and the gravimetric disruptions of the sun’s gravity well.
Brack had been with them that day, on one of his infrequent trips from Earth—the day the team’s first, hundred-kilogram, fluctuation superimpellor test sled had literally warped itself into a smear of rainbow-colored light and streaked off into something other than normal space-time. Eight minutes later, Cochrane’s scanners had picked up the distinctive radiation signature of the miniature particle curtain he had rigged to self-destruct the sled one minute after launch. It had been a drastic measure, but at the time he had known of no other way to cause a continuum-distortion generator to reenter normal space at a precise moment, had no precise idea of how far the sled would travel, and had no way to predict in which directions it might drift while not in normal space.
When the signature had been confirmed, the vast, hollow drum of the John Cabal’s science bay had echoed with cheers. The sled had traveled eight light-minutes—more than 143 million kilometers—in sixty seconds.
The prototype superimpellor was massive in proportion compared to the initial test devices Cochrane had used in his twenties at MIT to accelerate electrons to twice the velocity of light. But its size had not lessened the effect of the distortion and it had transported the sled at a pseudovelocity eight times faster than light, corresponding to a relativistic time-warp multiplier factor of22!
That day they had toasted farewell to the Einsteinian universe, drinking hundred-year-old cognac from squeeze tubes—microgravity was no place for effervescent champagne. It wasn’t [25] that Einstein and Hawking and Cross and all the other giants of physics had been proven wrong—the universe had simply opened another window onto its infinite, unpredictable nature for humans to peer through, and a whole new science had to be created to describe phenomena that earlier scientists had never seen, and that some, like Einstein, had refused to imagine.
In that refusal, at least, Einstein had been wrong. Because, as Cochrane had predicted, and as he had finally given up trying to explain to nonscientists, whose eyes inexplicably yet inevitably glazed over whenever multidimensional equations entered the conversation, the effects of relativity were limited to normal space-time alone. Cochrane’s subsequent bench tests on rapidly decaying particles had shown that once the superimpellor had entered a fluctuating continuum distortion, the well-known time-dilation effects of very fast-speed travel no longer occurred.
Because there was no way for information to be exchanged between the normal universe and the volume contained within the distortion—for now, his team continued to remind him—time could progress within the continuum distortion at the same rate it had progressed when it was last in contact with normal space-time, without contradicting anything that had been established about light-speed being the fastest anything could travel.
Of course, Cochrane knew that eventually, given enough fluctuation-superimpellor-driven ships visiting enough distant stellar systems with their own rates of relativistic time, variations in timekeeping would mount up. He could see that eventually, given enough superimpellor-driven spacecraft visiting enough distant planets, a whole new technique of timekeeping and date-recording would have to be developed to account for those local rate-of-time variations and relate them to each other in a meaningful, if complex, way. But by slipping the bounds of Einsteinian space-time, time dilation was no longer a limiting factor to the human exploration of space. More importantly, Brack had observed that day, neither w
as distance.
However, Brack had gone on to warn, there was a price that would have to be paid. When Cochrane returned from the stars as the first human to have traveled faster than light, his name would be uttered in the same breath as Armstrong, Yoshikawa, and [26] Daar. He would no longer be able to lead a normal, low-profile existence—he and his life would belong to the world. To the universe.
Judging from Cochrane’s reception in Christopher’s Landing, everything Brack had said had come true. Cochrane sometimes wondered about the insight or science behind his friend’s ability to predict the future. He did it so often and so well. But Brack himself denied having any special gifts. “The events of the future are reflected in the events of the past,” he often said. He claimed only to be an attentive student of history.
Cochrane looked back up at the dome, but the brief twilight clearing had passed. The mists of Titan’s night billowed beyond the transparent slabs, roiling in the external floodlights, as if the colony were a lone oceangoing vessel, plying Earth’s North Atlantic in the winter. Cochrane tried not to think about icebergs.
“What was that you said about infinity?” he asked his friend.
Brack grinned and the years dropped from his face. Cochrane guessed the billionaire was in his fifties, middle-aged for the citizens of Earth’s industrialized nations. His short hair was white—Brack paid no attention to fashion or fads—and worn in a style reminiscent of the Caesars. But his eyes sparkled like those of a much younger man, and the smile in his rugged face was always full of the promise of youth. Cochrane guessed having enough wealth to affect the course of human history might give a person reason enough to feel young and energetic, but he often thought there was more complexity within Brack than the man would ever reveal.
“I saw you looking at the stars,” Brack answered. “So wasn’t that what you were thinking? About the new limits to human growth? Or, should I say, that now there are no limits.”
“But how did you know that was what I was thinking?”
Brack glanced away, a smaller smile flickering at the corners of his mouth. Cochrane recognized the expression. Brack wasn’t going to answer the question. Instead he asked one of his own. “What are the prospects for a colony?”
“At Centauri B II?” Cochrane was surprised by Brack’s sudden change of subject. He was operating in his business mode now. [27] “Those surveys were complete before I left,” Cochrane answered. “They were complete practically before I was born, weren’t they?”
The whole world knew the prospects for a colony at Alpha Centauri were good, and had for decades. Of the hundred or so known solar systems detected beyond Earth, the Centauri system was the most thoroughly mapped, primarily because it was also the closest solar system to Earth’s.
Seen with the unaided eye, Alpha Centauri was the third brightest star in the sky, though only visible south of latitude +30°. Its brilliance was due to its closeness and to it being, in fact, a ternary system composed of three separate stars. Alpha Centauri A was a spectral-type G2 star, a close twin to Earth’s own sun, gravitationally locked to Alpha Centauri B, a slightly larger and brighter K0 star. Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B orbited each other about the same distance apart as the diameter of Earth’s solar system. The third stellar component of the system, Proxima Centauri, was a much smaller red dwarf star, in excess of 400 times more distant from A and B than they were from each other.
Just after the turn of the century, astronomers on Earth, using ground-based, adaptive optic telescopes, had resolved at least two additional bodies in the Alpha Centauri system: two large planets caught up in a complex, oscillating orbital pattern around the A and B stars. The scientific world was shocked by their discovery because common wisdom presumed that no planet could maintain a stable orbit between two such closely situated stars.
In the decades that followed, a new generation of astronomers employed liquid vacuum telescopes on the moon’s farside to resolve three more planets in the Alpha Centauri system. One, about the size of Mercury, was locked in an eccentric orbit around Alpha Centauri A. The other two Earth-size planets occupied interweaving orbital paths around Alpha Centauri B, in a region roughly corresponding to that defined by the orbits of Mars and Venus in Earth’s solar system. Such an orbital pattern was, of course, also considered impossible. The charting of the Alpha Centauri system made it a fascinating time to be an astronomer.
[28] Lunar-based spectroscopic interferometry analysis of the five Centauri planets eventually confirmed that one of the two Earth-size planets orbiting B exhibited a strong oxygen-absorption line. Since the planet’s size and mass and, therefore, gravity were only a fraction higher than Earth’s, and since oxygen is a light enough gas that it would dissipate within a few thousand years under Earth-type gravity, the strong concentration of oxygen in that planet’s atmosphere could mean only one of two things—either a completely novel chemical reaction was occurring on the planet’s surface, constantly replenishing the supply of oxygen—
—or there was life.
The news electrified the world. In the solar system, only on Earth had life taken hold with such success. Mars had merely shown promise. The microfossils excavated from its ancient seabeds had shown the existence of early forms of plankton and archaeobacteria—suspiciously similar enough to forms that had evolved on Earth to lead several scholars to suggest that some agency other than catastrophic meteoric impact had been responsible for the same seeds of life being sown on Earth and Mars together.
As the new century progressed, uncrewed probes were launched toward the Alpha Centauri system. Most met the same fate as the disappointing Nomad series at the turn of the century, rapidly and inexplicably failing after passing the heliopause surrounding Earth’s solar system. The development of efficient, vectored impulse drives led inevitably to a second and third generation of probes launched toward Centauri and other likely extrasolar systems at substantial fractions of light-speed. Though some of these new series also met with unexplained failures and disappearances, dozens of probes did succeed, blazing past alien worlds as they transmitted relativistically attenuated data back to Earth.
By the time of Cochrane’s own birth in 2030, scientists were as certain as scientists could be that a fully evolved, self-regulating, Gaia-type ecosystem was flourishing on Centauri B II, just as on Earth. So certain were they that crewed expeditions were launched. But a further series of mysterious failures, culminating in the tragic loss of telemetry from the NASA vessel Charybdis, [29] brought an end to the first attempted wave of the human exploration of extrasolar space. Some commentators fond of conspiracy theories even put forward the idea that Khan Noonien Singh and his followers were not frozen in some long-lost sleeper ship, but were prowling the outer solar system, blowing up space probes, keeping their genetically inferior conquerors planet-bound.
Whatever the reason for Earth’s initial difficulties in pursuing advanced exploration, as the political tensions of the mid-twenty-first century worsened, funding for purely scientific endeavors became less popular and harder to obtain. As had happened so often in human history, Brack assured Cochrane, even with the potential rewards of cooperation and exploration so obvious, humankind once again turned in on itself, becoming insular and distrustful and forgetful of the need to look beyond the immediate.
There was always a weariness in Brack when he spoke about the incessant repetition of failure in human affairs. Cochrane detected that same weariness now.
“I know what the scanners say,” Brack continued impatiently. “I’ve seen the simulations, read the reports, the speculations.” He gestured dismissively. He was a man who only wanted results. “But what I came out here to ask you, Zefram, is what did Centauri B II look like to you? What did it feel like?” He held out both hands as if beseeching Cochrane. “I know what the oxygen percentage of the atmosphere is. But what did it taste like to breathe alien air? Do you think a man could live there and call it home?”
Cochrane recalled
the tang of that air sere, dusty, but filled with the scent of life. After the fact, he knew he had been a fool to slip off his breathing mask even for the few minutes he had allowed himself. Computer analysis had shown the ecosystem of Centauri B II to be DNA-based with the same range of amino acids—more fuel for the fire of those who thought Earth and Mars had been deliberately seeded. There was no way of knowing what kind of bacteria and viruses he had exposed himself to with those lungfuls of air never before tasted by humans. But other [30] than two days of sinus discomfort, and some stinging grit in the corners of his eyes, Cochrane had suffered no ill effects. Maybe he had been lucky. Or maybe humanity was meant to go to other worlds unencumbered.
“Yes,” he told Brack, numbers and scanners aside. “No night for half the year, but it’s a place where people could live with no more hardship than desert equatorial regions on Earth.”
“Good,” Brack said. He winked at Cochrane. “You remember the law of mediocrity?”
Cochrane understood the law was a much misunderstood scientific principle, which translated to the lay public as “things are pretty much the same all over.” If chemistry behaved a certain way on Earth, then the law of mediocrity suggested that chemistry would behave the same way on a planet a thousand light-years distant, or on Earth a billion years in the past. Cochrane knew what Brack was getting at.
“You’re thinking that if the first planet we visit in the first solar system we explore has an Earth-like planet, then the galaxy is filled with them.”
Brack nodded. “And humans will be like dandelion seeds blown on the wind, filling them all.”
Cochrane smiled at his friend’s grandiose dream. “You know how long it would take to establish even a single colony in another solar system—even with the superimpellor? You know how much it would cost?”
