by C. Gockel
“Can you make it go faster?” said Nguyen.
Lary answered, “Well, yes, there’s a way to project the terraforming on a time scale ten times faster. But with less detail.”
“Would you do that, please? I’m curious.”
From the flight station, Catharin heard the countdown to the second and final thruster burn. This one would fix the engine in position, pointing at Sagittarius, the Ship turning its back on the farther stars. Suddenly she remembered what Chief Donovan’s mother had said: Embrace what God gives you, even if you’re given no arms to embrace with. A spasm of bitter recognition shook her. That kind of fatalism was exemplified by what they were doing now, here.
“Firing!” Joel said. “Xpos, Xneg, Y—Hey! Zneg just fizzled out.”
“Up the thrust on the rest!”
“Too late!” Aware of the eyes of the others on him, Joel explained. “One thruster array largely failed, its partner never even came on. We didn’t quite stop the yaw. Should be able to manage a stop on the next revolution, though.”
“Y’s?” Bix asked.
“Did just fine. Yneg appreciated the attention we gave it the other day.”
Unwillingly, Catharin wondered if Joel had deliberately misfired the thrusters. He hated the idea of stopping here. But what would such an act accomplish, except to protract a painful hour? More slowly now, the ship revolved around its xaxis, drifting back toward its original position as Bix and Joel ran test patterns on the thruster control circuits.
Nguyen and Lary returned to the planetary model.
“We’ve got seas with coral reefs and old-growth forests,” crowed Lary. “Ten thousand A.C.”
“That is very beautiful,” said Nguyen, longing and sadness in his voice. Then, “What happens when the planet’s axis tilts?”
“I don’t know when that will be.”
“I do. I worked it out just today. Eighty-three thousand years after colonization. Can we see what happens then?”
“If you insist. You’re aware that that’s longer than modern humans existed on Earth? It’s hard to imagine our descendants on this planet not coping.” Clicks and beeps came from their station as Lary busied himself with Nguyen’s request.
Lary, even Lary, had said “this planet.” Not even he had bothered to give it a name. That was a bad sign, evidence of a lack of emotional bonding to the new world. Yet they were in the very act of committing themselves to make it their home.
“Begin the main engine countdown at T10 minutes,” Bix ordered.
“Tokay,” Joel said.
“Thruster burn countdown at T3 minutes.”
“Tokay.”
“Get it right this time. The window won’t stay open forever.”
“We’re good for five to six revs, even at this rate,” Joel replied evenly. “And this isn’t the only window.”
“I want to get it over with now.”
At least Lary and Nguyen had found a distraction for themselves. But Catharin had nothing to do but watch. Her own pulse and respiration rate soared.
At fortysix seconds before the thruster burn, Lary let out a yelp.
Bix glowered.
“Look, everybody, look!” Lary sounded choked.
“Now?!”
Nguyen said, “It is sad!”
“Hold the counts.” Dead calm, Bix said, “What is it?”
“It had seas,” Nguyen said, “but they will freeze.”
“Glaciation of an unprecedented order of magnitude,” said Lary. He sounded stunned. “And the glaciers flow. It’s awful.”
“Awful?” Bix repeated. “Scrape the domes off the land?”
“That’s not the point,” said Lary. “It had seas, grasslands, rain forests, living deserts, a diversity of ecosystems. But the world turns on its side because there’s no moon to stabilize the tilt of its axis, and then the equatorial seas ice over. The species die-offs in seas and on land are phenomenal. Nine-tenths of all species gone. Glaciers overrun the forests and grasslands and estuaries alike. It’s like scraping a painting off a canvas, almost back to where it is now.”
Joel stirred. Fearing that he might want to jump in with a rash remark that would antagonize Lary, Catharin shot him a warning look with a slight shake of her head.
“So far in the future, humans might not exist there anymore,” Nguyen murmured.
“That’s not the point. I can’t agree to stay here.”
All of a sudden, Catharin understood Lary. He was Martian, and it did not matter to him whether his remotest descendants had to live in domes forever, or whether they finally went off to another new world. But the beauty of the future terraformed world had entranced him, and he could not stand to see its eventual doom, so graphically illustrated by the virtual model.
The ship continued to revolve, passing its original position. Bix glanced at the chronometer.
Nguyen said in a plaintive tone, “What else can we do?”
Bix replied, “Something called the Ramamirtham Maneuver.” He rapidly explained the maneuver and how it might bring the ship to the spiral arm in Sagittarius. “The really tricky part is the fancy footwork around those dwarf stars,” he concluded. “It’ll take a couple of years. Too long to stay awake, and manual piloting would be pointless anyway. It’s got to be a billiard ball shot, a damn near perfect one, out of interstellar space into the dwarf system that we’ve been calling Nguyen’s Vandals. If we didn’t have an Intelligent autopilot as good as this one, and if we didn’t have Nguyen to code it, there’s no way I’d attempt the maneuver. But Nguyen can do it.”
Nguyen stared at the window, at the untwinkling stars, troubled. “If we make for Sagittarius, can we bias the Moonseeker code toward more desirable planets?”
“Definitely,” said Bix. “At least till time gets short, say in the last shipcentury. Which gives us two thousand of the stars’ years for browsing.”
“All right.” Lary turned the screen off.
“Nguyen?”
Trepidation in his voice, Nguyen answered, “We would be entering the leading edge of the Sagittarius arm, where stars are still forming in clouds of gas and dust. Terrestrial planets might be very abundant there, though not all of them old enough to have evolved life. But it’s dangerous.” Nguyen floated to Catharin’s side. “What do you say?”
“This isn’t the first I’ve heard about the maneuver. I’ve had time to think about it,” she replied. “It is dangerous. It is also the bravest and best choice for us.”
“But reasonable?”
“Reason includes a certain amount of daring, doesn’t it?”
“How can it be reasonable to throw away the Book?” he pleaded.
“It would not be reasonable to throw the Book away, but no one has proposed doing that.” She said gently, “We may just outgrow the need to adhere to every letter of it. We can think for ourselves, which is eminently reasonable.”
He floated there, thinking hard. Then his face cleared. “Yes.”
“Unanimous.” Bix heaved a sigh. “No braking. We accelerate instead. A hyperbolic pass by this sun, such that we leave on course toward Nguyen’s Vandals. Joel and Nguyen, you two calculate the course.”
Joel started out of what seemed to have been a daze. “Yes, sir!”
Aeon revolved around until the engine pointed toward Earth and streams of thruster fire stopped the yawing. The main engine flared on, the shock of it taking long seconds to communicate through the ship’s bulk to the crew level. Pouring out a cataract of plasma, the ship accelerated.
Mild inertial gravity pushed Catharin down into her seat. It felt good, like certainty.
“Open the matter scoop full,” said Bix. “On our way through this system, we’ll pick up some fuel for the trip to Nguyen’s Vandals.”
“We’ll let this old beast feed,” Joel replied, grinning.
Bix crossed his arms decisively. “Before we leave this sun, we’re gonna have the thrusters working right, even if Cat and Lary have to learn to turn a z
erog wrench!”
For the last meal this side of stasis, they forsook the drab little pigeonhole galley on the crew level. Instead, forks, plates, food, and all, they carried the meal down-Axis, to Level Seven and the ship’s prime dining hall.
The ship’s acceleration away from the vandalized yellow sun created enough inertial gravity to keep food on the plates. The inertia also kept the astronauts in place. They seated themselves on what would be the south wall of the dining hall when the ship reached its final destination and spun around its axis to create a full g of spin-gravity for its populace.
The hall’s other wall, above their heads, had another of the ship’s tall, narrow, deep-sided windows embedded in it. During star flight, the window was protected by its location deep in the shadow of the star shield and by the shutter, which had been rolled back for this special occasion, and the window overhead was full of stars.
Catharin said, “Lary, this beef Wellington of yours is delicious.”
“‘Tisn’t quite the real thing,” he replied. “When you’re stuck with a space galley, you learn the art of food fakery.”
“Where’d you learn to fake food so good?” asked Joel.
Lary laughed. “Triton Station, also known as the tail end of nowhere.”
Galleyware clinked all around. With four to six weeks of wakefulness, appetites for food as well as for sleep had returned to their owners. Stasis effects simply wore off.
Joel waved his fork. “Nguyen’s code is beautiful, just beautiful. We’ll really waltz with the Vandals.”
“It was just a kind of degenerate three-body problem,” Nguyen said.
“I’d say it was more than that, son,” said Bix.
Catharin noticed how deep the silences in the conversation sounded. The dining hall was huge and shadowy. Over their heads the hall’s window faced the stars in front of Aeon. The Ship rotated very slowly in its gyroscopic stabilization. Stars arced from side to side across the window with almost imperceptible motion. The size and gloom of the dining hall and the appearance of the window reminded Catharin of early medieval architecture. In old Europe on Earth, she had seen Romanesque churches and castles, massive walls with narrow wary windows, erected against an outside world of darkness and danger.
When the last bits of the meal had been polished off, Lary produced a pitcher. He poured green liquid into glasses for everyone. “This concoction is brought to you by myself and Catharin. It contains the first round of gotosleep drugs, camouflaged by synthetic crème de menthe.”
Bix eyed his drink. “To the future!” he said finally.
At last there was time to sit still and think about that. Taken in small sips, the drink tasted sweet and wildly minty. Catharin remembered the casualties below, the few who had died because of the vagaries of physiology, and the many who had been assigned to Seventeen Wedge T. No more, she hoped and prayed; no more accidents like that. A hundred in one place had been too terrible a tragedy. At least their dream was alive, the dream of all of the voyagers of Aeon, as the ship hurtled toward its rendezvous with the dwarf binary star and toward their hope of a good green planet.
Joel said, “Here’s another toast. To the Milky Way.”
“That is my sister’s name,” said Nguyen softly. “Ha Minh. In Vietnamese it means River of Light. She’s down there in the passenger vaults.”
“That’s a good sign,” said Joel. “How about turning off the rest of the lights so we can see it?”
With the hall in darkness, the stars in the high window blazed. “See the brightest blue star? It’s called Nunki,” said Nguyen. “It’s one of our navigating reference points for the next leg of the trip.”
As Catharin sipped the drink, her eyes adjusted to the darkness. The River of Light eddied near the blue star Nunki. Her glass felt smooth and cool to the touch. Tonight they would return to the glass time of stasis.
“My eyes must be adjusting to the dark,” said Joel. “Anybody else see what I see?”
“I didn’t know it would do that,” Nguyen whispered.
Lary said, “What? I only see stars.”
“The Ship’s magnetosphere is in high gear,” said Bix, “and we’re plowing through a solar system. So particles hit the magnetosphere and get channeled to the south pole. Into the matter scoop. We get more fuel for the trip and a light show to boot.”
Almost invisible against the Milky Way in Sagittarius, a pale pink light glimmered in front of the stars. “It looks like the Northern Lights,” Catharin whispered.
“There’s no atmosphere outside the ship, so it’s not a true aurora,” Bix answered. “It’s kin to the charged-particle shuttle-glow around spacecraft in low Earth orbit.”
“Starship-glow.” Joel turned on the small communication console in the nearest table—which, attached to the dining room floor, was vertical with respect to Joel. The screen illuminated with a picture of Aeon as the ship would look from the outside now. And Catharin saw that the glow circled the ship’s north pole. The light made a flickering halo around the starship’s new course.
6 Aeon
“We made it. We went light-years farther than any ship sent out from Earth before us,” Catharin said.
Becca listened intently, but her eyes flicked around the small, spare cubicle, furnished only with medical equipment. Cross-legged on her pallet, Becca sat very straight. Catharin knew why: just out of cryostasis, it hurt to flex the backbone, hurt to move at all, as though one’s whole body had fallen asleep, with a needly numbness in every part. Including the tongue. “So’s everyt’ing okay?”
“After almost three centuries, we reached the star that was our destination.”
“Ship?” There were several urgent queries packed into the one-word question. Is the Ship damaged in any way? Is it heading for planetfall? What’s my job going to be like? “There’s something more I must tell you.”
Becca’s attention riveted to Catharin. “Whassat?”
Catharin took a deep breath to steady her voice and explained the Vandal stars, the missing moon.
Becca’s blue eyes widened. “Are we there? Or where?”
One white wall featured a large rendition of the mission logo: the Ship on a black field of stars. The star field represented a couple of constellations, the names of which were now irrelevant. Aeon had traveled so far that the constellations of Earth were gone. And that was what Catharin had to explain to Becca. “We sent the Ship toward the binary dwarf.”
“But no planets there.”
“The Ship used the stars to accelerate.”
Catharin could visualize how it had been, the white stars, small and dim and dense, whirling around their common center of gravity. And then the starship fell into the picture, on a precise trajectory: a path that let the Ship fall around one dwarf, picking up speed—and then be wrenched away by the gravity of the second dwarf to whip around that one, before returning to the gravity of the first one. And so on: the Ship used the dynamo of the paired, dense stars to accelerate. Faster and faster. Finally the starship broke away from the whirling white dwarfs, accelerated to relativistic speed. “Becca, the Ship did the Ramamirtham Maneuver.”
Becca gaped. “That’s not what the B-Book said do!”
“It wasn’t our first choice. It was our last. We told the Ship to use the dwarf stars to accelerate, to go farther than ever, and faster, and find a green world for us.”
“How’d the structure take the Ram maneuver?”
“As far as we can tell, it did no damage to the Ship.”
Becca frowned, struggling to rev her mind up to its usual running speed, to comprehend what Catharin was telling her. “Did the Ship find a green world?”
“Yes.”
Becca heaved a sigh, one with a wheezing edge. Not congestion: a stiff, sore diaphragm. Becca seemed healthy—a miracle that Catharin did not yet dare believe in because she wanted it so much. Becca started moving her arms, doing the isometric exercises to rehabilitate muscle function. “Ouch—! Tell me more.�
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“The planet has an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere, seas, and continents. And one more thing. The landmasses have green markings detectable even at this distance. That means abundant plants of some kind.”
Becca unfurled a grin, then clapped her hands to her mouth with a muffled, “Ouch!”
“I know, it feels like knitting needles in your arms and legs, and sewing needles in the facial muscles. Keep using them and the pains will diminish.”
“Keep talking to me.”
“The Ship is approaching the new sun in a highly eccentric elliptical orbit like a comet’s. After a rather close approach, the Ship will swing out to the planet.”
Becca started rotating her shoulders. Her movements were becoming more supple. “Does it have a moon? Tides and good stuff like that?”
“It’s a double planet, with approximately the separation of Earth and Luna. Both are approximately Earth’s size.”
Becca’s blue eyes sparkled. “Two for the price of one?”
“You might say that.” A corollary came unbidden to Catharin’s mind: we don’t know yet what the price is. “The one that we’re calling the moon is covered with seas.”
“I get it. We’ll settle on the one that isn’t all wet, since we’re not equipped to terraform a planet-sized ocean.” Becca clambered off the pallet. “Why didn’t you tell me the good news right off the bat?” But she cheerfully supplied an answer herself, sparing Catharin. “You’re so methodical—you never do tell the end before you tell the story, Cat!” She started into torso rotation. “So is Orlov up and running?”
“No. He’s still in stasis. Not many people are up as of yet.” Catharin named them: Captain Bixby, Joel, environmental engineer Miguel Torres-Mendoza, and Lary Siroky-Scheidt. “You may not know Lary. The original schedule didn’t call for getting a planetologist up before planetfall, but then the double planet wasn’t what we had in mind.”
Becca stopped the isometrics. She ran a hand through her hair: her I’m-thinking-about-this gesture that kept the flaming red hair perpetually tousled. “Why isn’t Orlov up?”