by Ben Bova
“He’s using the pulsars for navigation fixes,” Gregorian explained. He actually seemed to be admiring.
“Of course!” Nikki exclaimed. “How clever of you, Alex.”
Ignatiev felt his face redden.
The rest of the crew rose to their feet as they neared the table.
“Professor Ignatiev,” said the redheaded engineer, in a tone of respect, admiration.
Nikki beamed at Ignatiev. He made himself smile back at her. So she’s in love with Gregorian, he thought. There’s nothing to be done about that.
The display screen above the table where the crew had gathered showed the optical telescope’s view of the star field outside. Ignatiev thought it might be his imagination, but the ruddy dot of Gliese 581 seemed a little larger to him.
We’re on our way to you, he said silently to the star. We’ll get there in good time. Then he thought of the consternation that would strike the mission controllers in about six years, when they found out that the ship had changed its course.
Consternation? he thought. They’ll panic! I’ll have to send them a full report, before they start having strokes.
He chuckled at the thought.
“What’s funny?” Nikki asked.
Ignatiev shook his head. “I’m just happy that we all made it through and we’re on our way to our destination.”
“Thanks to you,” she said.
Before he could think of a reply, Gregorian raised his glass of amber liquor over his head and bellowed, “To Dr. Alexander Alexandrovich Ignatiev. The man who saved our lives.”
“The man who steers across the stars,” added one of the biologists.
They all cheered.
Ignatiev basked in the glow. They’re children, he said to himself. Only children. Then he found a new thought: But they’re my children. Each and every one of them. The idea startled him. And he felt strangely pleased.
He looked past their admiring gazes, to the display screen and the pinpoints of stars staring steadily back at him. An emission nebula gleamed off in one corner of the view. He felt a thrill that he hadn’t experienced in many, many years. It’s beautiful, Ignatiev thought. The universe is so unbelievably, so heart-brimmingly beautiful: mysterious, challenging, endlessly full of wonders.
There’s so much to learn, he thought. So much to explore. He smiled at the youngsters crowding around him. I have some good years left. I’ll spend them well.
BOOK TWO
To follow knowledge like a sinking star, Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
TWENTY YEARS LATER: STARSHIP INTREPID
Alexander Alexandrovich Ignatiev abruptly adjourned the executive committee meeting and stomped back to his quarters, alone. He let the door slide shut behind him, leaned against it for a moment, then went to his favorite recliner chair and sat in it. Wearily, he sank his head in his hands. Unbidden, a line from Hamlet came to his mind:
The time is out of joint. O cursèd spite,
That ever I was born to set it right!
Ignatiev was the oldest person aboard the starship Intrepid, the grand old man of interstellar exploration, the one who had successfully piloted the earlier Sagan through the clouds of interstellar plasma to its destination star, Gliese 581, only to be rewarded by being assigned to the crew of this newer, bigger vessel and sent even farther into the lonely abyss of stars.
And closer to the fast-approaching death wave.
The irony of it, he thought.
He was nearing his two hundredth birthday with the enthusiasm of a man facing a firing squad. Rejuvenation therapies extend our lifespans, he thought, but all that really does is give you more to regret.
He thought of that day at the Saint Petersburg clinic, a day of physical exams in preparation for this new star mission. A gloomy, miserable day, heavy gray clouds spitting rain across the city. The head doctor’s face looked just as disconsolate as the weather.
“Motor neurone disease?” Ignatiev had asked. “What’s that?”
The doctor was a large man, the type who could have played a fat and jolly Father Christmas with ease. Instead he replied despondently, “It is a disease of the brain cells that control your muscular systems: arms, legs, breathing, heartbeat. That sort of thing.”
Before Ignatiev could truly digest that information, the heavyset physician went on, “In the West it’s called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. ALS.”
“ALS,” Ignatiev repeated numbly.
“The Americans call it Lou Gehrig’s disease, after some famous athlete.”
“He suffered from it?”
“Yes.” Morosely.
“How did it affect him?”
“It killed him. He was thirty-eight.”
“Oh.”
Brightening a little, the doctor said, “Of course, that was back in the twentieth century. Today we have stem cell replacements, rejuvenation therapies, genetic manipulations, telomerase renewals, and many other possible treatments.”
“Yes,” Ignatiev muttered. “I see.”
“Unfortunately, although we can delay the effects of the disease, nothing seems to block its course entirely. It’s the downside of our rejuvenation successes: the longer you live, the more inevitable that something will eventually catch up with your metabolism. And working deep inside the brain is still very difficult, nearly impossible, you know, even with automicromanipulation techniques.”
“I’m going to die, then?”
“Not for many years,” the doctor said, suddenly loud with counterfeit cheer. “Many, many years.”
“Then I can go on the star mission?”
“Yes! Of course.”
But Ignatiev saw through his false front. I’m going to die, he realized. Modern treatments might delay the disease’s effects for decades, but eventually, inevitably, my brain’s neurons will decay and the slow, crippling ruination of the body’s nervous system will lead to paralysis and death.
So what? he thought. Sonya is gone. What difference if I die here on Earth or on some starship?
Stunned, Ignatiev slowly got to his feet, shook the doctor’s hand, and left the clinic. As he stepped out onto the rain-spattered street, one thought overpowered all the others whirling through his mind. I’m going on the star mission. If I’ve got to die, it will be on a starship.
Even on the starship, though, Ignatiev felt the disease creeping up on him, felt the stiffness in his hands and feet, the dull pain that was slowly overcoming his body, the approach of death.
He told no one about the disease. Only the physicians knew. He was enjoying his outward life too much to allow the world to know he was dying.
There’s no one to blame but yourself, he admitted bitterly. You came back from the Gliese expedition a hero. Saved the expedition from failure. Ignatiev the champion! How you basked in that glory. And look what it’s got you.
Outwardly, Ignatiev appeared to be an elderly but vigorous man, his hair and beard dead white but still thick, bushy. His shoulders were straight, not yet slumped by the disease nor by the burdens thrust upon him. He could still laugh—occasionally. And he still found excitement in trying to unravel the mysteries of the unending star-studded universe.
Intrepid was sailing through those clouds of stars, heading farther than any previous human mission had dared to go. On a mission of mercy, the ship’s orders claimed. More likely a fool’s errand, Ignatiev thought.
Expanding beyond the limits of the solar system, human explorers had met an ancient race of intelligent machines who called themselves the Predecessors, machines that had been studying humankind for centuries. To make the shock of contact with another intelligence as painless as possible for the humans, the Predecessors had created a planet orbiting the star Sirius A and peopled it with creatures who were human in every way, since they were bred from tissue samples taken from humans over centuries of clandestine visits to Earth.
The humanoids from Sirius revealed that the Predecessors had spread out into the Milky Way galaxy to wa
rn every intelligent race they could find that all life in the galaxy was in imminent danger of being wiped out. A deadly wave of high-intensity gamma radiation was spreading outward from the galaxy’s core, turning inhabited worlds into blackened, lifeless cinders.
Nothing in the universe is so rare as intelligent life, the Predecessors told humankind. And they enlisted humanity’s help in warning and protecting the worlds where intelligence was in danger of being snuffed out.
Humanity rose to the challenge. Starships were built, based on the advanced knowledge of the Predecessors. Expeditions were flung into the depths of the spiraling galaxy, to seek out and save the precious few intelligent races scattered among the stars.
Intrepid was one of those ships, a mammoth sphere of metal and organics, crewed by nearly two thousand men and women. Most of them slept in cryogenic suspension while the ship sped toward its target star at nearly the speed of light. Once they arrived in the star’s vicinity, the sleepers were awakened.
But not all of them. A tiny minority of cryonic sleepers could not be revived. Even the finest technology of the Predecessors could not return them to life.
One of them was supposed to command the revived crew. Once the ship’s artificial intelligence system finally admitted that the woman was beyond recovery, it selected Ignatiev to take her place. The AI system was the ship’s actual commander, Ignatiev knew, running every circuit and sensor aboard Intrepid femtosecond by femtosecond.
“You adjourned the executive committee’s meeting very brusquely,” said the AI’s avatar from the display above the fireplace of his sitting room.
“You named me head of the committee without even asking me about your choice,” he groused.
“To be named committee head is a great honor,” the avatar replied, smoothly, softly.
“This is an honor I don’t want,” Ignatiev snapped to the holographic image. “I don’t want the responsibility. Pick someone else.”
The crew had dubbed the AI Aida, not for the opera character but as an acronym for Artificial Intelligence Dimensional Avatar: the appearance that the AI system presented on the ship’s three-dimensional displays.
Aida had the face of a woman, young by Ignatiev’s standards, yet mature enough to maintain control of the nearly two thousand scientists and technicians that made up Intrepid’s crew. She had pleasant, unblemished features, framed by straight hair the color of ripe wheat that fell to her shoulders.
Ignatiev stared into her cool blue eyes and thought of his late wife, Sonya. The image didn’t really look much like Sonya, but every time he saw it on a display he thought of Sonya, long, long dead yet still alive within him and as vital to his life as the blood pumping through his veins.
In a softly understanding voice, Aida asked, “Is that why you dismissed the meeting?”
“Yes,” Ignatiev said. “I thought it would be better if we had this argument in private.”
His quarters were more than comfortable. Ignatiev’s sitting room was thickly carpeted; its “windows” were wall screens that could be programmed at will to show anything from the world’s most beloved works of art to sweeping views of the starry universe outside. It even had a fireplace with warm-looking flames flickering in it. But they were merely holographic projections. The room was not real; it was a decorator’s concoction, a reproduction: cold, too precise, too perfect, like a display in a furniture store’s showroom.
Home sweet home, he thought bitterly. But his real home was nearly two thousand light-years away. This was a cheap imitation.
The psychotechnicians who guided the interior decorators thought it important to make the accommodations aboard Intrepid not only comfortable, but restful and secure. The crew would be facing unknown problems and dangers, they reasoned. Best to make their quarters as emotionally relaxing as possible.
The avatar smiled slightly. “Alexander Alexandrovich, there is no argument. You are next in line in the command chain. You cannot refuse the responsibility.”
“I’m an astrophysicist, not some brass-hatted general commanding troops! I had enough of it on the Gliese expedition. I won’t do it! Get somebody else.”
Aida’s smile widened. “You will do it, Alexander Alexandrovich. I have your complete personality dossier in my memory bank. You won’t decline the responsibility. You won’t put your personal desires ahead of the welfare of the ship and crew.”
The damned bucket of circuits was right and he knew it. The curse of the Ignatievs, he thought: a sense of duty.
“And my study of the pulsars?” he grumbled.
“You’ll make time for that, I am sure.”
Aida knew of Ignatiev’s ALS, but was under the strictest level of security to reveal his disease to no one outside of the ship’s medical staff. He could depend on that, he knew. He wanted no sympathy, no tearful condolences. He would carry the burden alone, as he always had, despite the pain.
Ignatiev got up from the recliner, paced across the room’s luxurious carpeting, finally turned back to the display above the fireplace.
“You know me too well,” he growled.
DATA BANK
The star was known only by a string of alphanumerics that identified its position in Earth’s sky: BA14753209. It was nearly two thousand light-years from Earth—and a bare two hundred light-years from the wave of lethal gamma radiation rushing through space toward it at the speed of light.
The planet that Intrepid was hurtling toward was the fourth outward from the star, and was therefore officially BA14753209-04. Most of the ship’s crew called it simply “Oh-Four.”
The star was slightly smaller and cooler than the Sun, a pale orange in the eyes of the humans. The three planets orbiting closest to it were barren cinders. The six worlds beyond Oh-Four were gas giants, bloated oblate spheres whose highest forms of life were huge whalelike creatures that swam in the depths of their worlds’ globe-girdling oceans. Not intelligent, but worth saving.
Oh-Four possessed an oxygen-rich atmosphere and a strangely truncated biosphere—the result of remorseless extinction events in its past.
But the Predecessors had found that there was an intelligent species on Oh-Four: intelligent machines that had built a planet-girdling civilization for themselves. According to the Predecessors (machines themselves) this was not unusual. Organic intelligence was short-lived, they told Earth’s humans. Machine intelligence lasts for eons. Perhaps forever.
Like intelligent species almost everywhere, the machines of Oh-Four called the planet on which they lived Home. The star they orbited they called, in their own language, the Sun.
CHAPTER TWO
The starship Intrepid carried the technology to erect shielding that could protect whole planets from the onrushing death wave—and eager, bright-eyed young men and women to erect the shielding devices and make them work.
And I’m supposed to be their leader, Ignatiev groaned to himself. The Grand Old Man of the starways.
He laughed aloud, in the privacy of his quarters. All I want is to be left alone so I can study the pulsars. But no, the damned AI system has other plans for me.
His comm unit chimed once, and the AI’s image on his wall screen was immediately replaced by the earnest features of Jugannath Patel, leader of the ship’s digital technology group.
Ignatiev thought Patel’s face looked like a death mask, brownish skin stretched tight across high cheekbones, delicate chin, a prominent hawklike nose, a brow that always seemed furrowed with apprehension. His dark eyes were luminous, as though on the verge of tears. His thin lips seldom smiled.
“Professor Ignatiev,” he began, “I am so sorry to intrude on your privacy like this.”
Privacy, Ignatiev thought. I’ll have no privacy from now on.
Patel went on, “But we must make preparations for the deceleration phase of our flight and the maneuvers necessary for establishing orbit around Oh-Four.”
“Not for another week,” Ignatiev said.
“Ah, yes. Another week. But
we should use that week to make our preparations. Every system on the ship must be checked. The crew must be properly indoctrinated. There is much to do.”
Ignatiev nodded solemnly, thinking, It begins. This Punjabi techie is already trying to take control away from me. If I’m supposed to be the king of this chessboard, he’s a pawn working his way across the board, striving to get to the last row of the opposition so that he can make himself into a king. He bears watching.
His thoughts surprised him. For a man who doesn’t want the job of leader, he told himself, you’re awfully possessive about it.
“I have checked the mission profile requirements,” Patel went on. “As we decelerate from relativistic velocity, we should begin high-resolution scans of the planet.”
Again Ignatiev nodded, not trusting himself to speak.
“Do I have your permission to issue the necessary orders, sir?”
Ignatiev forced a smile that he hoped was fatherly. “No, Juga. I’m afraid the mission profile requires that the ship’s chief executive issue the necessary commands. That would be me.”
Patel blinked once, twice. Then, “I have taken the liberty of drawing up the commands. They are ready for your signature.”
“Thank you, Juga. Transmit them to me and I’ll review them.”
“Yes, of course.”
Ignatiev terminated the call with a vocal command and the screen went blank.
It begins, he repeated to himself. The primate struggle to be the alpha male. Thinking of the women on the executive committee, he realized that several of them had the ambition to become alphas, as well.
I won’t lack for competition, he told himself. Then he grinned. At least that will make the job more interesting.
* * *
Two days later, Ignatiev strode along the ship’s central passageway, heading toward the astrogation center. He nodded and smiled pleasantly to the men and women he passed. They all smiled back. Several greeted him respectfully.
