The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 18

by Gardner Dozois

  Rusel’s stomach filled with dread. “It’s a heavy force,” he said.

  “They’ve come for the Pharaohs,” Diluc said grimly. “The Coalition is showing its power. Images like this are no doubt being beamed throughout the system.”

  Then it began. The first touch of the energy beams, cherry-red, was almost gentle, and Port Sol ice exploded into cascades of glittering shards that drifted back to the surface, or escaped into space. Then more beams ploughed up the ice, and structures began to implode, melting, or to fly apart. A spreading cloud of crystals that began to swathe Port Sol in a temporary, pearly atmosphere. It was silent, almost beautiful, too large-scale to make out individual deaths, a choreography of energy and destruction.

  “We’ll get through this,” Diluc muttered. “We’ll get through this.”

  Rusel felt numbed, no grief, only shame at his own inadequacy. This was the destruction of his home, of a world, and it was beyond his imagination. He tried to focus on one person, on Lora, to imagine what she must be doing – if she was still alive – perhaps fleeing through collapsing tunnels, or crowding into deep shelters. But, in the ticking calm of this lounge, with its fresh smell of new equipment, he couldn’t even picture that.

  As the assault continued, numbers flickered across the status display, an almost blasphemous tallying of the estimated dead.

  Even after the trauma of Port Sol, work had to continue on booting up the vital systems that would keep them all alive.

  Rusel’s own job, as he suddenly found himself the senior nanochemist on the Ship, was to set up the nanofood banks that would play a crucial part in recycling waste into food and other consumables like clothing. The work was demanding from the start. The banks were based on an alien technology, nanodevices purloined from the occupying Qax. Only partially understood, they were temperamental and difficult.

  It didn’t help that of the two assistants he had been promised a share of – most people were generalists in this small, skill-starved new community – only one had made it onto the Ship. It turned out that in the final scramble about 10 percent of the crew hadn’t made it aboard; conversely, about 10 percent of those who actually were aboard shouldn’t have been here at all. A few shame-faced “passengers” were yellow-uniformed Guardians who in the last moments had abandoned their posts and fled to the sanctuary of the Ship’s interior.

  The work had to get done anyhow. And it was urgent; until the nanofood was available the Ship’s temporary rations were steadily depleting. The pressure on Rusel was intense. But Rusel was glad of the work, so hard mentally and physically in the high gravity he had no time to think, and when he hit his couch at night he slept easily.

  On the fifteenth day Rusel achieved a small personal triumph as the first slab of edible food rolled out of his nanobanks.

  Captain Andres had a policy of celebrating small achievements, and she was here as Rusel ceremoniously swallowed the first mouthful of his food, and she took the second. There was much clapping and back-slapping. Diluc grinned in his usual huge way. But Rusel, still numbed inside, didn’t feel much like celebrating. Half the crew, it was estimated, were in some kind of shock; people understood. He got away from the crush as quickly as he could.

  On the twenty-first day the Ship was to encounter Jupiter.

  Captain Andres called the crew together in the acceleration-couch amphitheater, all two hundred of them, and she set up a Virtual display in the air above them. The sun was just a pinpoint, though much brighter than seen from Port Sol, and Jupiter was a flattened ball of cloud, mottled with grey-brown bruises – the result, it was said, of an ancient battle. Few of the crew had travelled away from Port Sol before; they craned to see.

  The most intriguing sight of all was four sparks of light that slid across the background of stars. They were the other Ships, numbers One, Two, Four and Five; the little fleet would come together at Jupiter for the first time since leaving Port Sol, and the last.

  Andres walked though the crowd on their couches, declaiming loudly enough for all to hear, her authority easy and unforced. “We Pharaohs have been discussing destinations,” she said. “Obviously the targets had to be chosen before we reached Jupiter; we needed to plan for our angles of emergence from Jupiter’s gravity well. The Coalition is vindictive and determined, and it has faster-than-light ships. It will soon overtake us – but space is big, and five silent-running generation starships will be hard to spot. Even so, it’s obviously best to separate, to give them five targets to chase, not just one.

  “So we have five destinations. And ours,” she said, smiling, “is the most unique of all.”

  She listed the other Ships’ targets, star systems scattered through the disc of the Galaxy – none closer than five hundred light-years. “All well within the Ships’ design parameters,” she said, “and perhaps far enough to be safe. But we are going farther.”

  She overlaid the image of the shining Ships with a ruddy, shapeless mass of mist. “This is the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy,” she said. “Twenty-four thousand light-years from Sol. It is the closest of the satellite galaxies – but it is beyond the main Galaxy itself, surely far outside the Coalition’s grasp for the foreseeable future.”

  Rusel heard gasps throughout the amphitheater. To sail beyond the Galaxy?

  Andres held her hands up to quell the muttering. “Of course, such a journey is far in excess of what we planned. No generation starship has ever challenged such distances before, let alone achieved them.” She stared around at them, fists on hips. “But if we can manage a thousand years of flight, we can manage ten, or fifty – why not? We are strong, we are just as determined as the Coalition and its drones – more so, for we know we are in the right.”

  Rusel wasn’t used to questioning the Pharaohs’ decisions, but he found himself wondering at the arrogance of the handful of Pharaohs to make such decisions on behalf of their crew – not to mention the generations yet unborn.

  But Diluc muttered, “Can’t say it makes much difference. A thousand years or ten thousand, I’ll be dead in a century, and I won’t see the end . . .”

  Andres restored the images of the ships. Jupiter was expanding rapidly now, and the other Ships were swarming closer.

  Andres said, “We have discussed names for our vessels. On such an epic voyage numbers won’t do. Every ship must have a name! We have named our Ship-homes for great thinkers, great vessels of the past.” She stabbed her finger around the Virtual image. “Tsiolkovsky. Great Northern. Aldiss. Vanguard.” She looked at her crew. “And as for us, only one name is possible. Like a band of earlier pilgrims, we are fleeing intolerance and tyranny; we sail into the dark and the unknown, carrying the hopes of an age. We are Mayflower.”

  You didn’t study history on Port Sol. Nobody knew what she was talking about.

  At the moment of closest approach Jupiter’s golden brown cloudscape bellied over the upturned faces of the watching crew, and the Ships poured through Jupiter’s gravity well. Even now the rule of silence wasn’t violated, and the five Ships parted without so much as a farewell message.

  From now on, wherever this invisible road in the sky took her, the second Mayflower was alone.

  As the days stretched to weeks, and the weeks to months, Rusel continued to throw himself into work – and there was plenty of it for everybody.

  The challenges of running a generation starship were familiar to some extent, as the colonists of Port Sol had long experience in ecosynthesis, in constructing and sustaining closed artificial environments. But on Port Sol they had had the ice, rock, and organic-chemistry resources of the ice moon itself to draw on. The Ship was now cut off from the outside universe.

  So the cycles of air, water, and solids would have to be maintained with something close to 100 percent efficiency. The control of trace contaminants and pests would have to be ferociously tight: swarms of nanobots were sent scurrying in pursuit of flakes of hair and skin. And the sealing of the Ship against leakages was vital – more nano
machines labored to knit together the hull.

  Not only that, the Ship’s design had been hastily thrown together, and the vessel wasn’t even completed on launch. The construction had been a hurried project anyhow, and the shaving off of those final ten or twelve days of preparation time, as the Coalition fleet sneaked up in the dark, had made a significant difference. The crew labored to complete the Ship’s systems in flight.

  The most significant difficulty, Rusel believed, was the sudden upping of the design targets. A thousand-year cruise, the nominal design envelope, was one thing. Now it was estimated that, cruising at about half lightspeed, it would take Ship Three fifty times as long to reach Canis Major. Even relativistic time dilation would only make a difference of a few percent to the subjective duration. As a consequence the tolerances on the Ship’s systems were tightened by orders of magnitude.

  There was yet another goal in all this rebuilding. The Ship’s essential systems were to be simplified and automated as far as possible, to reduce the skill level required to maintain them. They were trying to “future-proof” the project, in Andres’s jargon: to reduce the crew to the status of nonproductive payload. But a key lesson of ecosynthesis was that the smaller the biosphere, the more conscious control it would require. The Ship was a much smaller environment than a Port Sol habitat, and that presented problems of stability; the ecological system was poorly buffered and would always be prone to collapse. It was clear that this small, tight biosphere would always have to be consciously managed if it were to survive.

  As Diluc put it with grim humor, “We can’t allow civilization to fall in here.”

  Despite the horror of Port Sol, and the daunting timescale Andres had set – which Rusel suspected nobody believed anyhow – the rhythms of human life continued. It was as if they were all slowly healing, Rusel thought.

  Diluc found a new partner, a plump, cheerful woman of about thirty called Tila. Diluc and Tila had both left lovers behind on Port Sol – and Tila had been forced to abandon a child. Now they seemed to be finding comfort with each other. Diluc was somewhat put out when they were both hauled into Andres’s small private office to be quizzed about their relationship, but Andres, after much consulting of genetic maps, approved their continuing liaison.

  Rusel was pleased for his brother, but he found Tila a puzzle. Most of the selected crew had been without offspring, back on Port Sol; few people with children, knowing they would have to leave them behind, had even offered themselves for selection. But Tila had abandoned a child. He saw no sign of this loss in her face, her manner; perhaps her new relationship with Diluc, and even the prospect of more children with him in the future, was enough to comfort her. He wondered what was going on inside her head, though.

  As for Rusel, his social contacts were restricted to work. He found himself being subtly favored by Captain Andres, along with a number of others of the Ship’s senior technicians. There was no formal hierarchy on the Ship – no command structure below Andres herself. But this group of a dozen or so, a meritocracy selected purely by proven achievement, began to coalesce into a kind of governing council of the Ship.

  That was about as much social life as Rusel wanted. Otherwise he just worked himself to the point of exhaustion, and slept. The complex mass of emotions lodged inside him – agony over the loss of Lora, the shock of seeing his home destroyed, the shame of living on – showed no signs of breaking up. None of this affected his contributions to the Ship, he believed. He was split in two, split between inside and out, and he doubted he would ever heal.

  In fact he didn’t really want to heal. One day he would die, as so many others had, as Lora probably had; one day he would atone for his sin of survival in death.

  Meanwhile there was always the Ship. He slowly widened the scope of his work, and began to develop a feel for the Ship as a whole. As the systems embedded, it was as if the Ship were slowly coming alive, and he learned to listen to the rhythm of its pumps, feel the sighing of its circulating air.

  Though Andres continued to use the fanciful name she had given it, Rusel and everybody else thought of it as they always had: as Ship Three – or, increasingly, just the Ship.

  Almost a year after Jupiter, Andres called her “council” together in the amphitheater at the base of the Ship. This big chamber had been stripped of its acceleration couches, and the dozen or so of them sat on temporary chairs in the middle of an empty grey-white floor.

  Andres told them she wanted to discuss a little anthropology.

  In her characteristic manner she marched around the room, looming over her crew. “We’ve had a good year, for which I thank you. Our work on the Ship isn’t completed – in a sense it never will be completed – but I’m now satisfied that Mayflower will survive the voyage. If we fail in our mission, it won’t be the technology that betrays us, but the people. And that’s what we’ve got to start thinking about now.”

  Mayflower was a generation starship, she said. By now mankind had millennia of experience of launching such ships. “And as far as we know, every last one of them has failed. And why? Because of the people.

  “The most basic factor is population control. You’d think that would be simple enough! The Ship is an environment of a fixed size. As long as every parent sires one kid, on average, the population ought to stay stable. But by far the most common causes of failure are population crashes, in which the number of crew falls below the level of a viable gene pool and then shuffles off to extinction – or, more spectacularly, explosions in which people eat their way to the hull of their ship and then destroy each other in the resulting wars.”

  Diluc said dryly, “Maybe all that proves it’s just a dumb idea. The scale is just too big for us poor saps to manage.”

  Andres gazed at him challengingly. “A bit late to say that now, Diluc!”

  “Of course it’s not just numbers but our population’s genetic health that we have to think about,” pointed out Ruul. This lanky, serious man was the Ship’s senior geneticist. “We’ve already started, of course. All of us went through genetic screening before we were selected. There are only two hundred of us, but we’re as genetically diverse a sample of Port Sol’s population as possible. We should avoid the founder effect – none of us has a genetically transmitted disease to be spread through the population – and, provided we exert some kind of control over breeding partnerships, we should be able to avoid genetic drift, where defective copies of a gene cluster.”

  Diluc looked faintly disgusted. “ ‘Control over breeding partnerships?’ What kind of language is that?”

  Andres snapped, “The kind of language we’re going to have to embrace if we’re to survive. We must take control of reproductive strategies. Remember, on this Ship the purpose of having children is not for the joy of it and similar primate rewards, but to maintain the crew’s population levels and genetic health, and thereby to see through our mission.” She eyed Diluc. “Oh, I’m not against comfort. I was human once! But we are going to have to separate companionship needs from breeding requirements.” She glanced around. “I’m sure you are all smart enough to have figured that out for yourselves. But even this isn’t enough, if the mission is to be ensured.”

  Diluc said, “It isn’t?”

  “Of course not. This is a desperately small universe. We will always rely on the ship’s systems, and mistakes or deviances will be punished by catastrophe – for as long as the mission lasts. Nonmodified human lifespans average out at around a century; we just haven’t evolved to think further. But a century is but a moment for our mission. We must future-proof; I’ve said it over and over. And to do that we will need a continuity of memory, purpose, and control far beyond the century-long horizons of our transients.”

  Transients: it was the first time Rusel had heard her use that word.

  He thought he saw where all this was leading. He said carefully, “Port Sol was not a normal human society. With respect. Because it had you Pharaohs at its heart.”

  “
Yes,” she said approvingly, her small face expressionless. “And that is the key.” She lifted her hand before her face and inspected it. “Two centuries ago the Qax Governor made me ageless. Well, I served the Qax – but my deeper purpose was always to serve mankind. I fled to Port Sol, with others, to escape the Qax; and now I have had to flee Sol system itself to escape my fellow human beings. But I continue to serve mankind. And it is the continuity I provide, a continuity that transcends human timescales, which will enable this mission to succeed, where even Michael Poole failed.”

  Diluc pulled a face. “What do you want from us – to worship you as a god?”

  There were gasps; you didn’t speak to a Pharaoh like that. But Andres seemed unfazed. “A god? No – although a little awe from you wouldn’t come amiss, Diluc. And anyhow, it probably won’t be me. Remember, it wasn’t a human agency that gave me my antiageing treatments, but the Qax . . .”

  The Qax’s own body architecture had nothing in common with humanity’s. They were technically advanced, but their medicinal manipulation of their human subjects was always crude.

  “The success rate was only ever some forty percent,” Andres said. She inspected her hand, pulling at slack skin. “Oh, I would dearly love to live through this mission, all fifty millennia of it, and see it through to its conclusion. But I fear that’s unlikely to happen.” She gazed around at them. “I can’t do this alone; that’s the bottom line. I will need help.”

  Diluc suddenly saw it, and his mouth dropped open. “You aren’t serious.”

  “I’m afraid so. It is necessary for the good of the mission that some of the people in this room do not die.”