by Ben Bova
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About the Author
Copyright Page
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To Christi and Joe Hucks, with thanks for their many kindnesses
We may prefer to think of ourselves as fallen angels, but in reality we are rising apes.
—Desmond Morris
THE DEATH WAVE
Humankind headed out to the stars not for conquest, nor exploration, nor even for curiosity.
Humans went to the stars in a desperate crusade to save intelligent life wherever they found it.
A wave of death was spreading through the Milky Way galaxy, an expanding sphere of lethal gamma radiation that had erupted from the galaxy’s core twenty-eight thousand years ago and now was approaching Earth’s vicinity at the speed of light. Every world it touched was wiped clean of all life.
Guided by the ancient intelligent machines called the Predecessors, men and women from Earth sought out those precious, rare worlds that harbored intelligent species, determined to protect them from the death wave, to save them from the doom that was hurtling toward them at the speed of light.
STAR FLIGHT
All star flights are one-way voyages.
The stars that beckon to us at night are mind-numbingly distant. Even traveling at nearly the speed of light, it takes decades, centuries to reach just the nearest of them. Then, when the star rovers come back home to Earth, more decades, centuries will have elapsed. The returning travelers will be strangers on the world of their birth.
Some humans accepted that inescapable fate. Some men and women willingly boarded the starships and journeyed into the unknown, driven by personal demons that outweighed all other consequences. Some were among humanity’s best and brightest. Some were fleeing into the future willingly. The psychotechnicians who examined and tested them realized that in some cases, the difference between genius and madness was too slim to separate.
MITHRA
The star was called by humans Mithra, after an ancient Persian deity of light and the upper air. In the religion of Zoroaster, Mithra became an attendant of Ahura Mazda, the god of light and goodness.
Mithra was a red dwarf star, less than a tenth of the brightness of the Sun. Some two hundred light-years from Earth, the star was accompanied by six planets, four of them bloated gas giants the size of Jupiter and larger, two others smaller, rocky worlds—like Earth.
Mithra Alpha, the planet orbiting closest to the star, was a “hot Jupiter”: a gas giant world slightly larger than our own solar system’s biggest planet, and orbiting so close to its star that its “year” was a mere twelve Earth days long. Covered with gaudy striped clouds, it bore a planet-wide ocean beneath the cloud deck, populated by a complex biosphere including tentacled octopus-like creatures that filled their world-girdling ocean with sounds.
Communication?
Intelligence?
The next two planets—Beta and Gamma—swung ’round their red dwarf star in forty-year-long, highly elliptical orbits that nearly intersected when they were at their closest approach to the star. Both were small, rocky, Earthlike worlds. Mithra Beta appeared to be lifeless, but Gamma, the outer of the two, bore a thin skin of atmosphere, small seas of liquid water—and life.
Intelligent life.
Preindustrial, little more than paleolithic creatures living in scattered villages, they were totally unaware that the death wave was hurtling toward them.
Mithra’s three outermost worlds orbited far from the “Goldilocks” zone where water could be liquid. They were frozen iceballs; lifeless, sterile, silent, and aloof.
Like all the life-bearing planets in the Milky Way galaxy, the Mithra system was threatened by the expanding wave of intense gamma radiation that would kill everything, scrub those planets down to barren, smoking ruins.
If the star-traveling humans didn’t save them.
THE CHILDREN’S CRUSADE
In all the hundreds of billions of planets in the Milky Way, nothing was so rare as intelligence. Intelligent species seldom arose, and often destroyed themselves before they could give rise to practically immortal intelligent machines.
The ancient machine intelligences of the Predecessors recognized the threat that the death wave posed, and had striven for millennia to save as many intelligent species as they could reach. The Predecessors enlisted the help of Earth’s humankind in their ongoing race against the death wave. In return, they gave the humans the shielding that would protect Earth and the rest of the solar system from inevitable catastrophe. And the knowledge to build ships to span the light-years between the stars.
Humankind rose to the challenge and sent expeditions to the worlds nearby where intelligent species lived, preindustrial civilizations that were blithely unaware of the doom rushing toward them at the speed of light.
Starship Odysseus was one of those missions. It was a lenticular-shaped vessel, propelled by dark energy and capable of reaching relativistic velocity, close to the speed of light.
Its crew and passengers slept the centuries that it took to reach Mithra, their bodies frozen into deepsleep and their memories downloaded into the ship’s master computer, then uploaded back into their brains once they were thawed and revived.
Now they faced the task of saving a world, and the intelligent creatures who lived on it.
Odysseus’s technical staff were a strangely youthful group, picked with meticulous care for their star mission. Nearly all of them were alone in the world, orphans or loners who had no families, no loved ones to keep them from leaving the Earth they knew, hardly any people they cared for or who cared for them.
They flew off to save a world from annihilation, knowing that they would never return to the world of their birth, not caring that when—if—they returned, it would be to an Earth that was more than four hundred years changed from the planet they had left.
BOOK ONE
Discoveries are often made by not following instructions, by going off the main road, by trying the untried.
—Frank Tyger
STARSHIP ODYSSEUS
Adrian Kosoff stood at the rail of the balcony circling the starship’s main auditorium, smiling like a genial paterfamilias at the young men and women down on the main floor celebrating their arrival at Mithra’s planet Gamma.
There were almost twelve hundred scientists and engineers on the expedition’s technical staff: mostly young, mostly recent graduates from the best schools on Earth, all of them volunteers for this star mission, all of them aware that they had exiled themselves from their homes and everything they knew back on Earth, all of them happy to have completed the two-hundred-light-year voyage successfully. After two years of training on Earth and two hundred years sleeping away the distance to Mithra, they had arrived at last at their destination.
Kosoff
was a burly figure of a man, thick torso and limbs, his bearded face square and blunt-featured, his eyes a piercing blue, his thick mop of mahogany-dark hair and bristling beard showing streaks of gray that he refused to alter with rejuvenation treatments.
“We’ve made the trip here to the Mithra system successfully,” he said to the men and women looking up to him, his amplified voice booming godlike across the auditorium. “No human being has ever traveled so far from Earth. This night we celebrate our safe arrival. Tomorrow we begin the task of saving the intelligent creatures of planet Gamma from the death wave.”
They applauded. They cheered. Then they started their celebration, mixing and swirling across the auditorium floor. Music sounded. Some couples began to dance. Others headed for the makeshift bars that had been set up along one side of the cavernous room. Laughter and the sounds of conversations filled the air.
The key leaders among the technical staff were almost all former students of Kosoff’s or students of his graduates. Kosoff thought of himself as the respected—even revered—leader of this scientific expedition. Head of the family. He knew that some of the younger echelons thought of him as a beneficent dictator, even an enlightened tyrant. So be it, he told himself.
Satisfied that the celebration was well and truly launched, Kosoff turned from the railing and went to the table where the ship’s captain was sitting behind a collection of bottles and glasses.
Kosoff sat across the table from Rampalji Desai, captain of Odysseus. Nominally, Desai was Kosoff’s superior, but the two men had formed a friendly partnership: Kosoff ran the technical staff, Desai ran the starship. Conflicts between them were nonexistent, so far. Of course, like all the humans aboard Odysseus, they had both slept the two centuries of the voyage in cryonic suspended animation.
Desai was actually several centimeters taller than Kosoff, but so lean and quiet in demeanor that he gave the impression of being the smaller man. Dark of skin and hair, his eyes were large and liquid, nearly feminine, and his voice was almost always hushed—but when he had to, he could roar out a command that made everyone on the bridge jump to comply.
Now, leaning slightly across the bottles and glasses scattered on the round table that separated the two of them, Desai pointed to the partying throng below and said in his soft, almost lyrical voice:
“They seem to be enjoying themselves.”
“Why not?” said Kosoff. “They’ve arrived safely, thanks to you and your crew.” Nodding toward the wall screen that showed the lushly green planet they orbited, he added, “Tomorrow they begin the task of saving the natives of the planet. Tonight, it’s eat, drink, and be merry.”
“I think perhaps they are happy that their memory uploads were successful.”
Kosoff waved a hand airily. “I’m not so sure they’re celebrating the uploads. There are plenty of memories that I’d rather have done without.”
Desai smiled, gleaming white teeth against his glistening dark skin. “Ah, but you have led a vigorous life. Very vigorous, from what I’ve heard.” Gesturing at the gyrating crowd below, he went on, “They are mere children, they don’t have any regrets that they want to forget.”
“Not yet,” said Kosoff, dead serious.
Desai merely sighed.
BRADFORD MACDANIELS
Brad MacDaniels leaned his lanky frame against the makeshift bar that had been set up on the auditorium’s floor and sipped at his lime juice.
He was an impressive figure, just a fraction of a centimeter over two meters tall, slender as a laser beam, his unruly dirty-blond hair flopping across his brow, his pale green eyes watching his fellow passengers enjoying themselves.
The youngest member of the anthropology team, Brad had the reputation of being a loner, but in truth he longed to be in the midst of the festivities—he simply didn’t know how to do it without making a liar of himself.
The French among the scientists called him “deux metres”; the others, “Beanpole” and “Skyhook” and less gentle nicknames. Brad accepted their ribbing with a slow smile and a patient shrug, but inwardly he stung from their attempts to humiliate him.
Born and raised at the Tithonium Chasma scientific base on Mars, Brad had never been to Earth until he volunteered for a star mission. He had survived the avalanche disaster that had wiped out half the base on Mars, including both his parents and his younger brother. He had cremated his family, then helped rebuild the base and gone on to win a doctorate in anthropology for himself. He had volunteered for the star mission, knowing that he would be leaving everything he had known behind him, forever.
Good riddance, he told himself.
He kept his hurts to himself; he bore a scar that he never showed, an inner wound that bled every day, every night, every minute. If they knew, he told himself, it would kill me. They would all hate me.
So he stood leaning against the bar, alone in the middle of the swirling, dancing, laughing throng.
“Hey, Skyhook, why so glum?”
It was Larry Untermeyer, a fellow anthropologist, short and a little pudgy, with a lopsided grin on his round face.
“C’mon, Brad, join the party, for Chrissakes. You look like a flickin’ totem pole.”
Larry gripped Brad’s wrist and towed him out among the dancers. “God knows we’re not gonna be partying like this for a looong time,” Larry shouted over the din of the music and the crowd. “So enjoy yourself.”
And he left Brad standing amidst the dancers. Brad could sense people eying him, a solitary beanpole poking up in the middle of the crowd. For several agonizingly long moments Brad just stood there, trying to think of what he should be doing.
Then a dark-haired, good-looking young woman glided up to him and held out both her hands. With a smile she asked, “Like to dance?”
Brad made himself smile back at her and took her hands in his. She was tiny, not even up to his shoulder. Brad recognized the game. His erstwhile buddies had talked the woman into getting Brad to dance. They thought it would be funny to see the Skyhook stumbling across the floor with a tiny partner.
Brad took her firmly in his arms and stepped out in rhythm to the blaring music. He felt a trifle awkward but, calling up the memory of his school-day dance lessons, he quickly caught the beat. Just don’t step on her feet, he warned himself.
Craning her neck to look up at him, she said, “My name’s Felicia Portman. Biology.”
Brad saw that she was really pretty. Gray eyes, deep and sparkling. Trim figure. “I’m—”
“Brad MacDaniels, I know,” Felicia said. “Anthropology.”
“Right.” And Brad realized that they all must know the beanpole that stuck up above everybody’s head.
The song ended and she led him out of the crowd of dancers, toward the tables arranged along the side wall of the auditorium. Felicia pointed a manicured finger to a table that was already half filled.
“Some of my bio teammates,” she said.
Brad followed her and folded himself into a chair beside her as she introduced the others. A robot trundled up and took their drink orders.
“Lime juice?” asked one of the other guys.
Brad nodded. “I’m sort of allergic to alcohol.”
“Allergies can be fixed,” said one of the others.
“It’s not an allergy, really,” Brad said, trying to keep his face from showing the embarrassment he felt. “Not in the medical sense.”
“Ah … a psychological problem.”
“Sort of.”
Felicia changed the subject. “What’s an anthropologist doing on this mission? Why do we have an anthro team, anyway?”
“Yeah. They stuck you people on board the same day we left Earth orbit. Like you were a last-minute idea.”
“Besides, the creatures down on the planet aren’t human. What’s an anthropologist going to do with them?”
Brad answered, “We’re not here to study the aliens. We’re here to study you.”
“Us?”
“What d
o you mean?”
“The people here on this ship form a compact group isolated from other human societies,” Brad explained. “It’s an ideal laboratory to study the evolution of a unique society. All of the star missions have anthropology teams with them.”
“I’ll be damned.”
“I don’t know if I like being the subject of a study.”
“Well, you are,” said Brad, “whether you like it or not.”
The looks on their faces around the table ranged from curious amusement to downright hostility.
Brad said, “We’re only a small team: twelve people. I’m the juniormost.”
“We’d all better be on our best behavior,” Felicia said with a grin.
Several of them laughed and the tension eased away.
* * *
As the party finally wound down, Brad walked Felicia to her quarters, squeezed her hand gently as he said goodnight, then left her at her door and went along the curving corridors until he found his own compartment.
He stripped and slid into bed, the only light in the room coming from the wall screen, which showed the planet they were orbiting: green from pole to pole, except for some grayish wrinkles of mountains and a few glittering seas here and there.
Hands clasped behind his head, Brad dreaded the inevitable sleep and the inescapable dream that it brought. He recalled the poem that was never far from his consciousness:
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars—on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.
PLANETOLOGY
Brad saw Professor Kosoff a few paces ahead of him, striding purposefully along the corridor, a sturdy, compact bear of a man, marching as if he were leading a parade.
He caught up with the staff’s director in two long-legged strides.