“There’s hardly any chance at all we’ll hit a comet,” Nita Sistrunk said yesterday in the G-Tower mess.
But Bao added, “It isn’t the comet-sized bodies we must fear. Remember, though, if big masses whirl around out here, there may also be smaller but more perfidious bodies impossible to detect at a distance.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“You don’t really want to know.” And Bao deftly changed the direction of our talk.
In any event, more and more personnel aboard our three wheelships have come up-phase. We still have some journeying to do to reach New Home, at least another standard year’s worth, but excitement mounts. Also, the staggered awakening of adults from the enchantment of ursidormizine slumber has delighted the children, and each pulse of our matter-antimatter engines seems a quickening heartbeat. The peculiar atmosphere of a seminar-cum-carnival has gripped Annie; also Chandrasekhar and Zwicky.
I wonder if Pharaoh’s royal architect had a like sense of culminating accomplishment upon realizing that only a few more blocks would complete his master’s pyramid.
Lily has come up-phase. She still can’t believe that nasty Kazimierz Mikol has ingratiated himself with Dean—altogether sincerely, however—as a kind of uncle. Nor does she believe that Kaz and I have become friends. And, in fact, I prefer Thich Ngoc Bao’s company to his, or Nita Sistrunk’s, or Matthew Rashad’s, a compatriot among the geologists. Our personalities (mine and Kaz’s, that is) scrape against rather than complement each other’s.
Nevertheless, we’ve hammered out a crumpled sort of mutual respect. Lily can’t imagine how. I’ve told her about Helena Brodkorb’s death and our rim-car trip to and from D-Tower, but, not having experienced these herself, she remains skeptical of everything about Kaz except his clear, if startling, affection for Dean.
“It’s like the tiger and the lamb on the same bed of straw,” she says. “A fearful symmetry whose opposing balances I can’t quite grasp.”
“Don’t try,” I tell her. “Just enjoy.”
Lily simply shakes her head and laughs, a gruff chuckle so like Dean’s that I gape. My look prompts more laughter and a sudden peck on my cheek.
“I like you more today than when we first met,” she says. “More than on DeBoy’s last birthday, even.”
“Why is that?”
“You’ve started going gray,” Lily tells me. “I’ve always liked older men.”
* * *
Commander Stefan Odenwald stood in Annie’s pilot house, supervising its computer-aimed passage through the Barricado. Our other two arks ran parallel to Annie’s course at port and starboard distances of about seventy kilometers. Nonetheless, each of the other ships remained dimly visible to everyone in the pilot house, either on TV monitors or through the shielded viewports of the domelike bridge. A simultaneous look at the two vessels depended, of course, on the pilot house’s rotating to either the top or the bottom of the fuel wheel’s orbit vis-à-vis the headlong motion of the other two ships, but this happened often enough to thrill Dean and me, and seldom enough to increase our anticipation.
For a long time, I guess, Odenwald had realized that Dean enjoyed looking at the stars as much as anyone else aboard; therefore, he had invited us into the pilot house, a structure midway between Towers A-B and G-H on the ever-clocking fuel ring, and had there installed Dean in the thronelike chair that inevitably, and a bit sardonically, we call the Helm, as if it willy-nilly grants its occupant both authority and navigational savvy.
The Helm swallowed Dean. His feet dangled half a meter from the deck, and his chunky little body resembled that of a ventriloquist’s dummy. Thankfully, he took no notice of the chair’s scale, but turned his neckless head from side to side, ceaselessly ogling the universe.
“You look like—” Odenwald began. He turned to the other officers in the pilot house. “Who? You know, that holovid space explorer, what’s-his-name?”
“I’m almost completely ignorant of such entertainments,” I admitted—with an undercurrent of pride that Odenwald did not seem to find off-putting. It suggested, as it should, that I had better things to do.
On the other hand, I had often petitioned Odenwald for this audience, here in Annie’s control center, for my handicapped son, and surely that petition told him more about me than did any cheap slam at the junk on holovid.
“Cuhn I?” Dean said. “Cuhn I steer?”
“Have you mastered astronavigation, wheelship helming, and the rights and obligations of cybernetic command?”
“No suhr,” Dean told Odenwald meekly.
“Well, then, you can’t steer. But you’re the only person besides myself to occupy that chair since we left lunar orbit in our own solar system.”
“So far as you know,” I put in.
Odenwald laughed. “Yes. So far as I know.”
The TV monitor taking transmission from the Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar showed all of us on the bridge the face of a haggard Caucasian male. I recognized him as one of Commander Joplin’s lieutenants, Wolfgang Krieg.
“Attention! Commanders Odenwald and Roosenno, attention!” the haggard face said. “We appear to be on a collision course with a stream of frozen debris—gravel, call it—that initially composed a single mass about two meters in circumference. This stream of material—”
Odenwald took the mike. “Initially?” he said. “What do you mean, initially? What happened to it?”
“When we radar-sighted the object, we could see it would hit us,” Krieg said. “Having no time to change course, we used our laser to try to deflect it.”
“By vaporizing one side of the body to push it in another direction?” Odenwald theorized.
“Yessir,” Krieg said.
“But, instead of moving aside, the object fragmented?”
“Yessir. The resulting stream of debris will strike us in two minutes fifty-three seconds.”
Odenwald said, “How may we assist?”
“Get yourselves out of here,” Krieg replied. “You might also want to pray.”
Odenwald gave an order to activate the siphons to draw fuel from the C-D to E-F hydrogen tanks down the spokes to their matter-antimatter propulsion system. Kaz appeared from nowhere to do exactly that, while Odenwald ran the ignition programs. Bridge officers on Zwicky followed suit. Despite their size, both wheelships shoved agilely ahead, out of the energy-saving coast marking the latest stage of our years-long deceleration process.
“Don’t look at the exhaust trail!” I told Dean.
But Dean was looking at it, a blazing bore of magnesium-white light that had already turned our wheel’s opposite inner arc into an eye-stinging mirror. If he kept looking at it, he’d burn out his retinas. Blessedly, just as I started to push his face into his lap, Dean averted his gaze.
At that instant, the monitor receiving from Chandrasekhar filled with popping kinetic snow. Chandrasekhar itself, one instant past a platinum ring on a bolster of sequined black felt, flashed out like a miniature nova, a wound of radiance even brighter than Annie’s exhaust trail. Then, after the flash, in the place where the space ark had been: nothing but blackness. Every light on its rim, every light in its habitat towers, snapped out.
Immediately, though, a series of explosions on the wheel went off in astonishing sequence, like a silent Fourth of July gala with Roman candles, phosphorus bombs, and self-shredding parachutes of light. The sight of these distant fireworks froze me in place, for, as the disaster unraveled, there was nothing that anyone on either of our sibling arks could do—except imagine both the terror and the agony of our companions aboard the splintering ship.
Later, Bao and others postulated, the biggest chunk of the fragmented rock tracking Chandrasekhar had hit and severed its rim. Simultaneously, the gravel from Krieg’s misguided attempt to deflect this object ripped into the fuel spokes cum support cables. Then centrifugal force took over, tearing the vessel apart. Broken tentacles of diamond writhed in the blackness. The electromagnetic levitati
on tanks holding the antihydrogen ice clear of the ordinary matter making up the ark’s set-apart propulsion unit took ricocheting hits of their own, emitting, as a result, such hot bursts of radiation that the sky flared again and many of the ark’s buckled compartments actually began to melt.
This catastrophe stunned me. I could think of nothing very like it in the history of spacefaring. The Challenger disaster might qualify, or the fate of the Chinese ship Wuer Kaixi off Titan late in 2057, but these events seemed so remote, and so happily limited in their life-taking scale, that the emptiness off to starboard, the afterglow of so many doomed lives, left me groping for some competent or humane response.
“Whuh?” Dean murmured. “Whud happen?”
Odenwald looked at him. Dean, in turn, looked to him for some hopeful reordering of the chaos that had inflicted itself on the sky outside our blister.
The incandescence, then the cold.
The kaleidoscopic brightness, then the dark.
“Please tell him, sir,” I said. “And don’t sugarcoat it.”
Voices from Fritz Zwicky rattled in the pilot house. Radio operators in the communications well bent to their tasks. Two of Odenwald’s lieutenants rushed in from the attached day room and lounge. Their concern—their activity—could not reverse the fate of Chandrasekhar or rescue a single person in any of its radiation-drenched habitation towers. All, like data in an irretrievably crashed program, were gone or going, already almost less than ciphers.
But it was Kaz, not Odenwald, who finally knelt in front of Dean’s chair. “They hit something, or something hit them. A chunk of ice about like so.” Kaz made a circle of his arms. “Maybe even a little smaller. Which split into pieces when the people on Chandry tried to move it.”
“Bud how…?”
“As fast as we’re going, hitting an object that size makes a bang like the burst of a fission device.” Kaz looked at me. “Sorry. He’s never heard of Hiroshima, right? Or the Sashimi attacks on New York and L.A.?”
“Cuhd id happen to uz?”
Kaz looked to me for permission. I nodded.
“Yes, it could,” Kaz said. “At the moment, though, we’re outrunning the blast. If this helps at all, Dean, we should go fairly quickly if we hit something.”
Dean began to cry. “I’m sorry thad happen,” he said. “I’m sorree-sorree.”
“Me too,” Kaz said.
Odenwald came over and said he wanted Dean and me off the bridge. I picked Dean up, and Odenwald advised us to retreat to the day room while he spoke with Roosenno and some of his lieutenants about the morale and logistical implications of the disaster.
Dean and I left.
Two hours later, when it seemed to Odenwald and his closest advisors, including Bao, that we’d outrun any pursuing debris, our ships cut their engines and drifted back into the coasting mode of our long advance on Epsilon Eridani II.
If we survive the Stream, none of us will ever forget what has happened out here. Ever.
* * *
Mere chance enabled Dean to witness the destruction of another wheelship. Nonetheless, I blame myself for putting him in a place to see the spectacular melting or vaporization of sixteen-hundred human beings.
And Dean? He understands that Chandrasekhar and all its passengers have passed into physical oblivion. Kaz and I both tell him it’s possible that God has received their souls, but, despite my religion, I remain a militant skeptic on this point, and Dean no longer asks if the victims of the disaster have gone to heaven. It both frets and wearies him to hear me say, “Dean, I don’t know.”
He also grasps, by the way, the perilousness of traveling at even a mere fraction of light-speed. He knows that Annie Jump or Fritz Zwicky could blaze out, novalike, as Commander Joplin’s wheelship did. This knowledge has penetrated his awareness as deeply as, if not more deeply than, anything else he has ever learned. Sometimes (for me, red-letter occasions for guilt and moroseness), he remembers the catastrophe, bolts upright, and begins to rock and sway.
“Why?” he says. “Why?”
The basic existential inquiry.
And I wonder if Lily and I sinned against Dean, ourselves, or the incessant nag of the life force by bringing him to be in this precarious flying tin can.
Kaz says to ice the gloom-and-doom, the self-debates, the ontological kvetching.
A word to the wise? Not with this target audience: I don’t qualify.
* * *
An arkboard month has passed. We have broken clear of the Barricado Stream—computationally, if not in our hearts. Our learned astronomers inform us that we have wide riding ahead, unobstructed glissading to New Home. Scant solace to the dead, of course, and scant comfort to either Dean or me.
More than once I’ve tried to eulogize the victims of this prodigious calamity. My words back up on me; my rhymes, even the off ones, don’t quite slot; my rhythms, sprung or unsprung, drill like drugged anacephalics in jackboots. At last I wrote a stanza:
With a charged, chance suddenness,
The all of spinning Chandrasekhar,
The all of its ark, flashed to dark and spun to less
Than a heat-dead, hooded star:
A nova, an aura, an aroma of light-speed-sizzled thought,
Brains broiled, skin fried, the atomizing mystery and mess,
Actinic sabotage of each blind arrogance we bought
With the hardware-software-psycheware of our ever-shoving-onward
high-tech-tied success.
Yesterday Bao asked if I’ve made any headway on the elegy everyone assumes I’ll write. Reluctantly, I showed him this stanza. “Read it aloud,” he said. There in the G-Tower mess, I lowered both head and voice and recited it.
Only Bao, thank God, could hear me. Kaz would have flung my comppad aside and stalked off, to seek better company in the finch-filled atrium.
“That’s pretty,” Bao said. A dig.
“So was the little mishap that triggered it.”
“True. But I would have never taken you, my friend, for a Hopkins enthusiast.”
This remark startled me. Bao had realized from the get-go that the paradigm for my stanza was an elegy by Gerard Manley Hopkins. I sat back and stared at him.
“Nor I you,” I said.
Bao laughed. Then, with no physical prompts whatsoever, he recited:
“With a mercy that outrides
The all of water, an ark
For the listener; for the lingerer with a love glides
Lower than death and the dark;
A vein for the visiting of the past-prayer, pent in prison,
The-last-breath penitent spirits—the uttermost mark
Our passion-plunged giant risen,
The Christ of the Father compassionate, fetched in the storm of his strides.”
“How can you do that?” I said. “Remember it all?”
Bao laughed again. “Stanza thirty-three. Because I’ve had Heraclitus call it up repeatedly since the accident. Balm from a long-dead Jesuit.”
“I would have never taken you for an incarnationist, Bao, and certainly not one of a papist stamp.”
Nothing marred Bao’s hollow-cheeked amiability. “The wise take their comfort where they can.”
“The wise seldom choke down such bilge.”
Bao, grunting, grabbed his chest as if I’d just slipped a blade into his heart. He recovered at once, a fey smile on his lips. “Your stanza clatters where the Jesuit’s sings, my dear unable Abel.”
“Then I guess I’d better delete it.”
“Ah, a wiser man than I’d supposed.” He put a hand on my wrist. “Don’t, though. Save it, as a ward against hubris.” He released me, finished eating his vegetable shell, and, with a smile and a bad parting joke, excused himself. None of Bao’s observations on either wisdom or comfort-taking had recast my own opinions; however, sitting and talking with him had cheered me. I kept the lone stanza of my come-a-cropper elegy, but attempted no others.
Later, in a geolo
gy carrel, I had Heraclitus call up “The Wreck of the Deutschland” and read it twice from beginning to end. If mere language can redeem a disaster, I believe Hopkins redeemed his.
* * *
Fuel rings turning like mountain-high Ferris wheels, Annie Jump and Fritz Zwicky have completely traversed the Barricado Stream. We have penetrated the orbit of Epsilon Eridani V, the system’s outermost planet, an ice ball known to every member of our expedition as Cold Cock. New Home lies nearly 5.7 billion kilometers farther in, in the direction of Eppie herself; and our fleet, calamitously dispossessed of one of its arks, flies at a scant percentage of light-speed, a million kilometers per hour. At this rate, given the need to slow still more, it will take almost a year to reach our destination.
The hydrogen harvesters we deployed shortly after entering the Barricado, great funnels of molecularly strengthened mylar, will not only add calibrated drag to our deceleration, but resupply the exhausted tanks on the rim arcs between habitat towers. From the G-Tower observatory, it sometimes appears that we haul behind us the iridescent bladders of immense Portuguese men-of-war. Floats or wings? No one seems to know how to regard them. Sometimes, we can’t see them at all. In any case, gathering hydrogen makes little sense, given that, by the time we reach New Home, our ships will have almost wholly depleted the antihydrogen ice required by our matter-antimatter rockets for further travel.
Ours not to reason why …
Days (or arkboard hours comprising their equivalent) ghost past as our last two vessels simultaneously plummet and wheel through this alien system. Up-phase scientists, technicians, engineers, and support personnel work methodically to prepare for planetfall and the colonization of New Home. Much of this preparation—plan comparisons, logistical projections, computer simulations—has to do with adjusting for the loss of the vital skills and labor units destroyed along with Commander Joplin’s Subrahmanyan Chadrasekhar. On the other hand, our expedition’s organizers factored in an atoning redundancy: personnel on any one ark can meet and overcome, by themselves, the environmental challenges of our target world. If a disaster befalls Zwicky, then Annie has the wherewithal to succeed.
The Year's Best SF 12 # 1994 Page 68