Ark of the Stars

by Frank Borsch

  A holo appeared above the heads of the crawler's crew. It showed space and in its center a massive shadow that rapidly grew larger. The shadow's outlines took shape, revealing it to be the widely-used all-purpose transport vehicle called a Shift.

  The Akonians' Shift.

  The Akonians. Pearl wondered what to expect from them. "Don't trust any Akonian!" Sharita had advised her, but Pearl had dismissed the idea almost immediately. The Akonians were human beings like them, weren't they?

  She would soon find out.

  * * *

  Solina Tormas wondered what the Terrans would be like. She had never met one in the flesh. Not that she hadn't dealt with them. As a historian, she regularly took part in conferences that included Terrans, but for reasons of cost, or perhaps because her superiors were afraid of what direct contact with Terrans and other aliens might stir up in her, such meetings had been strictly virtual—up to now. Admittedly, in the thirteenth century of the New Galactic Era, a virtual conference was recognizable as such only on the third look and then by careful observers. An academic institution's syntron projected simulations of the participants in the lecture hall and placed them in the seats. When a participant spoke, his digital avatar stood up and talked and gestured exactly like a being of flesh and blood.

  And yet ... something was lacking. Was it some last gap in the behavioral model the syntron used to animate the avatars? Or the uniformity of the model that could never imitate the diversity of actual living beings? What Solina missed was somewhat more concrete: odors. Avatars were bodiless, didn't smell, and even when the entire lecture hall was fully packed with them, Solina's nose perceived only the sharp odor of the cleaning fluid that the robots used on the floor every night.

  What did a Terran smell like?

  She would soon know the answer, and much more as well.

  "Everything all right, Robol?" She turned in her seat in the direction of the logistics officer, who had taken over guidance of the Shift.

  The man, unusually brawny for an Akonian, gestured in the affirmative. "The Terrans are right in front of us. Strange looking crate."

  He pointed to the hyperdetector holo showing the Terran ship. No, not a ship. Vehicle. Solina had the impression that someone had pounded on a Terran spacesphere with a colossal sledgehammer until it was as flat as one of the predatory fish that pressed themselves into the seafloor along the shallow coastlines of Shaghomin, except that the giant hadn't stopped until he had beaten a hollow into the center. And the Terrans didn't seem to care much about their engineering; it was surrounded by a simple High-energy Overload (HO) shield, scant protection that the Shift's on-board gun could have blown away at any time.

  "What do you expect, Robol?" replied Hevror ta Gosz. "They're Terrans!" The two men laughed. Solina hesitated, then joined in. It felt good to relieve the tension a bit, and she didn't have to worry on Hevror's account. He wasn't a Terran-hater, but simply carried on Akon's sacred tradition of making fun of the Terrans. It felt good to always have someone to blame or to sneer at. Solina often thought that if the Terrans didn't already exist, her people would have had to invent them.

  Hevror adjusted the quiver-like bag he carried slung over his back. More than two meters in height, he was tall even for an Akonian. His skin was weather-beaten and wrinkled, and occasional bright spots of pigment stood out from the otherwise velvety brown of his skin, a souvenir of the uncounted suns Hevror had walked under without protection.

  Most of the crew members of the Las-Toór considered Hevror ta Gosz a little crazy. For Solina, he was the closest thing she had to a friend. Hevror had called her as soon as the expedition was a go.

  "Solina, I've got to come along!" was all he had said.

  "You?" she had asked.

  "I'm a specialist in planetary ecologies."

  "True."

  "That thing on the screens may be a metal cylinder, but I swear that you can use somebody like me there. Care to bet that thing has its own ecosystem?"

  "That could be," Solina had said simply, but in her heart she had already decided to bring Hevror. It would be good to have a friend along, even if he was a bit crazy. To her surprise, Jere von Baloy supported her choice.

  When Hevror had arrived at the Shift, the long, leather bag was dangling on his back.

  Solina had frowned. "What do you want with that?"

  "The same as always?"

  "In the Lemurian ship?"

  "We'll see," Hevror had answered and disappeared into the Shift.

  Solina had let it go. What did she care if Hevror dragged along his bag? The thing was light. It wouldn't get in his way. And hadn't she railed against conformity all her life?

  In front of the Terran vehicle, a huge dark shape emerged from the blackness.

  The Lemurian ship.

  They approached it near the bow. The gigantic ship—now that they had the thing right in front of their noses, the hyperdetector was finally delivering consistent data—had a length of some five kilometers. The diameter of the hull was nearly five hundred meters. At that size, it was bigger than any of the ships ever built in Akonian shipyards. Now, size meant little by itself. Solina was certain that viewed through the eyes of a technician, this ship represented an anachronistic scrapheap. But that wasn't the point. What was critically important was understanding the effort behind building the ship. Building such a massive artificial structure would have required considerable financial means, persistence and an iron will. Solina could hardly believe that the construction and launch of such a ship had been forgotten, but that exact possibility was the fascination of her profession: the past held mysteries and wonders without end, and every answer one found led to a dozen new questions.

  And they still knew so little about the Lemurians!

  The onslaught of the Beasts had destroyed the Great Tamanium of the Lemurians, nearly wiping out the human race. Only by escaping to Andromeda was humanity's survival ensured. Those who remained behind eked out a miserable existence in the ruins of their once-glorious civilization. The Akonians had been the one major exception. Once, they had comprised the Eighty-seventh Tamanium of the Lemurian Imperium, in which separatist tendencies had been evident even before the Beasts attacked. The later Akonians managed to seal themselves off so far from the outer universe that they had been left untouched by the great cataclysm that struck the Lemurians.

  But the Lemurians' knowledge had been lost. What hadn't been consumed in the firestorms launched by the Beasts was eaten away by the simple passage of time. The tens of millennia had hit even the highly advanced Lemurian technology so hard that only a very few of the data storage units that researchers found were still readable, let alone intact. Even in the Blue system, where the flow of civilization had never been interrupted, the legacy of the Lemurians had been forgotten.

  It was just human nature. Each new generation saw the world in its own terms, interpreted it according to its own ideas—and gave little thought to what had gone before. Computer nets were remodeled; in the passing millennia cities were rebuilt many times over until their origins were erased.

  So they actually knew very little about their ancestors. So many surprises lay hidden in Lemurian history. And some of them, as Solina was now seeing with her own eyes, could be big enough to equal the mass of multiple Akonian battle cruisers.

  The Lemurian ship lay directly before them. Its "antennae" stuck out from all sides like a wreath. About halfway along their length they supported a ring. The other Yidari on board the Las-Toór had unhesitatingly identified the projections as antennae, but Solina had her doubts. Since their emergence into normal space in the vicinity of the ship, the presumed antennae had not emitted a single comm signal. Well, they might be defective, or the Lemurian crew—if there was one—might be trying to hide their existence, but that last seemed illogical to her. Why build such colossal antennae if they weren't used?

  "Robol, can you get anything more about those antennae?" she asked, turning to the logistics office
r. In their team of historian, planetary ecologies specialist and logistics officer, he served as technician.

  "Let's see." Robol von Sarwar busied himself for a moment with the hyperdetector data. He was so deeply absorbed in his work that he unconsciously grinned when he found something. It wasn't a pretty sight. His teeth were black, the result of a childhood accident. The progress of the poison was stopped and even the stimulus for growing new teeth had functioned. But the new ones grew in pitch black. Along with his dark eyes, the teeth gave people the impression he was a robot, so Robol generally avoided showing them.

  Robol raised his head and looked at Solina. "I've found something," he said, speaking in his usual fashion by barely moving his lips. "Between some of those antennae are neutrino-capturing fields."

  "Energy fields? That sounds like five-dimensional technology!"

  "Could be. It could also be coincidence. The fields come and go in a rapid rhythm. There can't be much getting caught."

  "Neutrinos ... " Solina thought out loud. "Assuming that they're trying to capture them intentionally ... what for?"

  At that point she was distracted. The Terran craft had reached the level of the antennae. Since the entire Lemurian ship turned along its long axis, the antennae spun like the spokes of a wheel. It took the ship just forty Terran seconds per single rotation.

  "What's he trying to do?" Robol exclaimed. "Has he gone crazy?"

  Solina saw what he meant. The Terran craft was not trying to avoid the spinning antennae. Just the opposite: the pilot was heading straight toward them, traveling along the ship's hull to where the distance between the antennae was only a few dozen meters. With awe-inspiring precision, the craft slipped between two antennae.

  The pilot must have nerves of steel.

  Solina watched as the Terran craft slowed its speed and paused a few meters above the spinning hull, apparently looking for an appropriate docking point. Then she noticed how the Lemurian ship's antennae were growing larger, the slender masts turning into massive towers.

  "Robol, have you lost your mind?"

  The pilot of the Shift kept his eyes on the instruments. "On the contrary. The Terrans are trying to humiliate us. They want to prove that they're braver than we are. I'll show them!"

  The gigantic cylinder of the Lemurian ship suddenly expanded, filling the entire view from the Shift's forward window, rising before them like a wall of steel.

  Robol clearly wasn't worried about it. With his pitch-black teeth bared—was he whistling a tune or did Solina only imagine it?—he fixed his gaze on the steel colossus ahead, and at the last second, when Solina was convinced they were about to crash, he gave the impulse jets a precisely calculated energy thrust. The Lemurian ship seemed to jump. Out the corner of her eye, Solina saw the base of a massive tower racing toward them, and then they were past it.

  The Shift glided barely above the spinning hull.

  Jere von Baloy's worried voice came from the acoustic field. "Solina, is everything all right with you three?"

  "Of course, Maphan," she replied serenely. "What shouldn't be all right?"

  She did not suspect that more than just discoveries about Terrans and Lemurians awaited her.

  17

  Launt seldom returned to the house which more than one metach secretly envied him. The spacious rooms, whose sheer emptiness soothed him and allowed him to find some distance from the innumerable duties of a Tenarch, now seemed deserted, almost silently accusing, since the day Denetree had mounted her bicycle and rode off to begin her new life.

  He had not seen her since and hopefully never would. If he met her again, it would in all probability be as a result of the new duty the Naahk had assigned him. That thought robbed him of the few hours of sleep remaining in this rest period.

  The problem was not that Launt was in love with Denetree. During the first few days after her departure, he had carefully listened to his inner voice, but had found no evidence of such a feeling. He did not even feel physically attracted to her. As a Tenarch, he had virtually free choice of partners for coupling among the metach. It was not a right provided for in the Ship's code, but few women would refuse a Tenarch, whether out of awe for what he represented, or out of fear of his influence. In fact, Launt recently had accepted a woman who had come to him on her own. That night also was sleepless, but at least Denetree and the other traitors were not preying on his mind.

  During the day, Launt had no such convenient distraction from his troubled thoughts. Even as a young man, he had always relied on his work to divert his mind, and his fervor was rewarded. Practically from the moment of finishing his obligatory service in the fields the young, intelligent man, bursting with enthusiasm for the Ship's mission, had attracted attention. He climbed the Metach'rath with uncanny speed until he reached the top of the Ladder of Life and became a Tenarch.

  Never in the history of the Ship had such a young metach been appointed Tenarch.

  Launt had achieved what others only dreamed of—but it was then that his problems really began.

  As a Tenarch he had access to nearly all information available on the Ship and its inhabitants, information only slightly less complete than that available to the Naahk himself. The Tenarchs were where all the threads of life aboard the Ship came together, more obviously so as the Naahk retreated further into the background. Rumors claimed he was afflicted by a disease that robbed him of his strength and decisiveness: this did not concern the older Tenarchs. During the decades in which they had occupied their positions, they had experienced many highs and lows in the life of the Naahk. "It's only a phase," they said. "A new upswing will follow the decline."

  Launt accepted that the Naahk might regain his old energy and authority and return to lead them all as strongly as in the past, but the curse of his intelligence and knowledge also forced him to accept that even an all-powerful and robust Naahk would be helpless to stop the Ship's decay. Here a shelter collapsed because the plastic it was made from had reached the end of its lifespan. There, an important machine failed after centuries of continuous use, or—and it happened more and more often—work stopped because a single moving part wore out. The spare parts bins grew emptier and the ability to make new replacement parts dwindled.

  It wasn't the fault of the metach; they were bright and dedicated. The problem was that the Ship itself bent under the burden of age. Most worrying was the ongoing and ever more rapid loss of memory storage units. The memory storage specialists long had been waging a discouraging rearguard battle against the decay. They erased less important data to allocate room for more life-critical information, and to back up that information. The end of this downward spiral could be foreseen, and the angle of the decline became increasingly steeper when more data storage units failed, necessitating more erasures, and what had been assumed to be unimportant knowledge turned out in hindsight to be indispensable.

  Another decade, maybe two, and the metach community would be in free fall.

  The end might come quickly if the hull of the Ship collapsed and the vacuum suffocated the metach, the way it had the forty-three Tenoy Venron dragged along in his flight into space. Or it might come gradually if the Kalpen could no longer accomplish their makeshift repairs of the air supply system.

  Launt hoped for the first alternative. He saw no higher, hidden purpose in suffering. Suffering was simply suffering, and anyone who was intelligent avoided it.

  Sometimes Launt dreamed that he could still avert disaster. He dreamed of refuge for the metach—on a planet.

  His privileged status gave Launt access to data about the home world of Lemur. Their forefathers had fled that planet for reasons he didn't question. But Lemur had provided its inhabitants with everything naturally that on board the Ship they maintained artificially with constantly decreasing success: a stable ecosphere with environmental conditions that were beneficial for a metach.

  Launt gradually became convinced of a singular fact. For the Ship's community to survive, they must find a Le
mur-like planet and leave the Ship. Launt believed this plan supported their forefathers' intentions. The forefathers had placed survival of their race ahead of all other considerations, and had left everything behind that was familiar in the certain knowledge they would never see it again.

  It was time to follow their example.

  Launt had investigated, so he knew the Ship possessed the means. Besides the shuttle that was destroyed in Venron's attempt to escape, there were another forty-seven shuttles of the same design waiting to be used.

  Why, Launt asked himself, would the forefathers have put shuttles on board if they hadn't planned for their descendants to leave the Ship someday?

  It was a revolutionary, outrageous thought—and an unspeakable one.

  Launt's tentative attempts to touch on his idea in conversation ran into utter lack of understanding. Either literally—the mental horizon of most metach was simply not wide enough to imagine life outside the Ship—or, with the more intelligent of the metach, figuratively, as they tried to guess at his motives. Just to think of leaving the Ship seemed to them like treason. It bordered on a miracle that none of the metach had reported Launt to the Ship.

  Launt had retreated to the luxury of his house, to the soothing monotony of the Ship's daily routine, and waited for the thoughts that haunted his mind to die. But he was the one dying. Day by day, even while he continued on as though his efforts had a point, as though there were a goal they could reach, as though destruction did not await the Ship.

  On the evening he watched Denetree lose consciousness at the Tenoy checkpoint, he had acted so decisively that it seemed as though he had been waiting his entire life for this moment. It wasn't that Denetree herself mattered to him—he would have rushed to the aid of any of the traitors—it was what she represented. He simply couldn't watch and do nothing while the only metach able to consider the future of their community were eliminated, even if that outlook was naive and unrealistic.