The Bloodwing Voyages

by Diane Duane

  The news hit hard, though the travelers had disowned him; there was mourning in the ships, and S’task was not seen for many days. There was a ship’s council meeting scheduled during the period when he was missing, and the other councillors, S’task’s neighbors, were too abashed by what they had heard about the depth of his grief to inquire of him whether he planned to attend. When they came together into the council chambers of Rea’s Helm, they found S’task’s chair empty, but laid across it was a sword, one of the S’hariens that Surak had brought him. The councillors looked at it in silence and left it where it was. When S’task returned to council a month or so later, he would not comment, he simply found himself another chair to sit in. For many years thereafter, the sword remained in that chair, unmoved. After Rea’s Helm made planetfall, and new chambers of government were established on ch’Rihan, the chair sat in them in the place of honor, behind senators and praetors and an abortive Emperor or two, reminding all lookers of the missing element in the Rihannsu equation: the silent force that had caused the Sundering, and still moved on the planet of their people’s birth, though the man who gave it birth was gone. To touch the sword in the Empty Chair was nothing less than a man’s death. Even naming it was dangerous—oaths sworn on it were kept, or the swearer died, sometimes with assistance.

  The journey went on, and had no need to turn homeward for its griefs: it found others. The second starfall, around 198 Eri, was disastrous. It was not quite as bad as it might have been, since numerous of the ships’ councils had elected to have the ships accelerate at different rates, thereby stringing the ships out somewhat along their course. With psilinked communications, ships farther along the course could alert others of whether a star was viable or not, and the other accompanying ships could change course more quickly. The tactic was a sort of interstellar leapfrog, one that many other species working at relativistic speeds have found useful.

  This might have worked out well enough, except that communications with Vulcan were again impossible. There was therefore no way that the travelers could be warned of what Vulcan astronomers had detected in the neighborhood of 198 Eri with equipment newly augmented by improvements obtained from the Hamalki. Seven of eighteen ships were lost over the event horizon of a newly collapsed black hole. Pennon, Starcatcher, Bloodwing, Forge, Lost Road, Lance, and Blacklight all came out of the boost phase of the psi-based “bootstrap” acceleration to find themselves falling down a “hole” through space in which time dilated and contracted wildly, and physical reality itself came undone around them. Even those ships that had warning were unable to pull out of the gravitational field of the singularity, though every jump-trained adept aboard the ships died trying to bootstrap them out again. The inhabitants of those ships spent long days looking through madness at the death that was inexorably sucking them in. No one knows to this day what the final fate of the people aboard the ships was—whether they died from the antithetical nature of “denatured” space itself, or whether the ships mercifully blew up first due to gravitational stress. Those from the surviving ships unlucky enough to be in mindlink with them succumbed to psychoses and died quickly, possibly in empathy, or slowly, raving to the end of their lives.

  The tragedy slowed down the journey immensely, as the ships approached 198 Eri and found its planets as hopeless as 88s had been. Every argument that could come up about the conduct of the journey did so almost immediately, and the arguing continued for several years while the ships orbited 198 Eri and stored what stellar power they could. Should the travelers turn back? Little use in that, some said. Vulcan might not want them back, and besides, what friends and families had been left behind were all old or dead now: relativity had taken its toll. Or keep going? Unwise, said others, when even empty-looking space turned out to be mined with deadly dangers you could not see until they were already in the process of killing you. Should they keep all the ships together (and risk having them all destroyed together)? Or should they spread them out (and risk not being able to come to one another’s aid)? Should they stop using the bootstrap acceleration method, despite the fact that it used no fuel and conserved the ships’ resources more completely than any other method? And the question was complicated by the fact that there was no more help available from Vulcan, even if any would have been offered them. The ships had recently passed the nine-point-five light-year limit on unboosted telepathy. Even at nonrelativistic speeds, no adept heard anything but the mental analogue of four-centimeter noise, the sound of life in the universe breathing quietly to itself.

  Three and a half years went by while the ships grieved, argued, and looked for answers. They found none, but once again will drove them outward: S’task had not come so far to turn back. Many in the ships were unwilling, but S’task carried the council of Rea’s Helm and declared that his ship at least was going on: and the others would not let him go alone. Under conventional ramscoop drive at first, then using bootstrapping again as the memory of pain dulled a little, the ships headed for 4408A/B Trianguli, a promising “wide” binary with two possible stars.

  4408B Tri is, of course, the star around which orbits the planet Iruh, and the travelers could not have made a worse choice of a world to examine for colonization. If they had analyzed the Etoshan data more thoroughly, they might have avoided another disaster, but they did not. At one time the Inshai had cordoned off the system, but they were now long gone from those spaces, and all their warning buoys had been destroyed by the Etoshan pirates during their own ill-fated attempt to subdue the planet. So it was that the travelers’ ships came in cautiously, by ones and twos, and found 4408A surrounded by worlds covered in molten rock or liquid methane, and 4408B orbited by six planets, one of which registered on their instruments as a ninety-nine percent climatic match for Vulcan…and rich in metals, which Vulcan at its best had never been. The first two ships in, T’Hie and Corona, slipped into parking orbits and sent shuttles down to take more readings and assess the planet’s climate and biochemistry. The shuttles did not come back, but long before there was alarm about the issue, it was too late for the travelers in orbit.

  The Iruhe were doing as they had done with so many other travelers: they had sensed their minds from a distance and insinuated into their minds an image of Iruh as the perfect world, the one they were looking for. What use is an accurate instrument reading when the mind reading it is being influenced to inaccuracy? And not even Vulcans were capable of holding out against the influence of a species rated one of the most mentally powerful of the whole galaxy, with a reconstructed psi rating of nearly 160 (the most highly trained Vulcans rate about 30: most Terrans about 10). The crews of the shuttles served as an hors d’oeuvre for the Iruhe, and confirmed what had fallen into their toils, a phenomenal number of fiercely motivated, intelligent, mentally vigorous people. With false “reports” from the shuttles that seemed absolutely true, because the crewpeople seeing them were supplying familiar faces and details from their own minds, the Iruhe lured Corona and T’Hie into optimum range—close synchronous orbit—and proceeded to suck the life force out of the entire complement of both ships, over twelve thousand men, women, and children. Then they crashed the ships full of mindless, still-breathing husks into Iruh’s methane seas, and waited eagerly for the rest of the feast, the other travelers.

  The torpor of a whole species of intellivores after a massive and unprecedented gorge was the only thing that saved the other ships. Sunheart coasted in next, and her navigations crew noticed with instant alarm that the ion trails of T’Hie and Corona stopped suddenly around Iruh, and did not head out into space again. Sunheart’s command crew immediately made the wisest decisions possible under the circumstances: they ran. They veered off from the paradisial planet they saw, and warned off the other ships. In the hurry there were several mistakes made in navigations, and Firestorm and Vengeance fell out of contact with the other ships and only much later made the course corrections to find them again. But the hurry was necessary: there was no telling how long or
short a grace period they would have had before the Iruhe “woke up” and noticed the rest of their dinner arriving.

  The travelers were, in any case, very fortunate. Few species had gotten off so lightly from encounters with Iruh: many more ships and several planets (after the Iruhe got in the habit of moving theirs around that arm of the galaxy) were to fall victim to the insatiable mind-predators. Not until some seventeen hundred years later, when the Organians were asked to intervene, could anything effective be done about the Iruhe. And the irony is that no one knows to this day just what was “done.” The planet is empty and quiet now, and there is a Federation research team there, sifting the ruined landmasses for what artifacts remain.

  The courses of the traveler ships still remaining become harder to trace from this point onward. Firestorm and Vengeance wandered for a long time, hunting the other ships, hearing the occasional psi-contact and using the vague directional sense from these to try to course-correct. The other ships meanwhile went through much the same experience—years and years of wandering among stars that turned out barren of planets, or among stars that had planets that were useless to them. The travelers had thought that the odds of finding a habitable world, away from the aliens that troubled them so, were well in their favor. They found out otherwise, painfully. Here again, paying attention to the data from the Etoshans might have helped them. The Etoshans knew how poor in habitable worlds the Eridani-Trianguli spaces had been. It was one of the reasons they had been so surprised to find the Vulcans in the first place.

  But might-have-beens were no use to the travelers. They spent the next eighty-five standard years of relative time—nearly four hundred and fifty, out in the nonrelativistic universe—hunting desperately for a world, any world, that might suit them. Now they would be glad to Vulcaniform a planet, if they could only find one at all suitable, but most of the stars in deep Trianguli space were older Population I stars that had long before lost their planets, or were too unstable to have any to begin with. The planets they did find were uniformly gas giants or airless rocks that nothing could be done with in less than a couple of centuries.

  The desperation was even worse because the ships had been built with hundred-year “viability envelopes.” No one had expected the search for a new world to take much longer than fifty years, and their supplies, systems, and facilities had been designed with this timing in mind. Food was beginning to be scarce in some of the ships, systems were breaking down, and almost all the replacement parts were used up. Warbird was lost to a massive drive system malfunction; she had no adept left who could bootstrap her, and she fell into 114 Trianguli trying to slingshot around the star to pick up more boost. Memory went the same way, trying to use a black dwarf. The pulses from the small X-ray star produced after the collision are still reaching Earth.

  The remaining ships—Rea’s Helm, Gorget, Sunheart, Vengeance, and Firestorm—kept going as best they could. It was never easy. Odd diseases began to spring up in all the crews. There was speculation that radiation exposure was causing new mutagenic forms of diseases to which Vulcans were normally immune…since the symptoms for some of the “space fevers” resembled already-identified Vulcan diseases like lunglock fever, though they were more severe. The medical staff of all the ships had been attenuated by deaths from old age as well as from the diseases. They were able to do little, and before the epidemics began to taper off, from fifty to seventy percent of each ship’s complement had died.

  These diseases only aggravated—or, one might also say, “ended”—a problem that had been worsening with the decay of the ship’s viability envelopes. There were no more psitechs. Those that did not die bootstrapping the ships now died of disease, and there were no completely trained techs to replace them—partly because much of the oldstyle Vulcan psi-training required “circles” or groups of adepts to bring a psi-talented person to viability. There were no longer enough adepts to make up the necessary groups.

  The documentation available—though quite complete—was also too objective: people who tried to teach themselves the mind techniques “by the book” never became more than talented amateurs. The direct “laying on of hands” was necessary to properly teach telepathy, mind-meld, and the other allied arts. So they died out as the ships voyaged, and the sciences of the mind became the matter of legend. The Vulcans believe that present-day Rihannsu possess the raw ability to be trained in the mind sciences, but the actual experiment will doubtless not happen for quite a long while.

  Meanwhile, the diseases took their toll everywhere. S’task’s wife and children all perished within days of one another during Rea’s epidemic of mutagenic infectious pericarditis. S’task himself came very close to dying, and lay ill for months, not speaking, hardly eating. It was a very gaunt and shaky man who got up from his bed on the day Rea’s chief astronomer came to him to tell him that they thought they had found yet another star with planets.

  The star they had found was 128 Trianguli, one of the group 123–128 Tri: a little rosette of dwarf K-type stars so far out in the arm as not to have been noticed by even the Etoshans. It would require Rea some ten years of acceleration—all their bootstrap adepts were now dead of old age or jump syndrome—and another ten to decelerate. This was the worst possible news: the period was well outside of Rea’s viability envelope.

  “We may all be dead when we get there,” said the chief astronomer to S’task.

  “But we will have gotten there,” said S’task. Still, he took the question to Council, and the surviving population of Rea agreed that they should take the chance and try to reach the star. The other surviving ships concurred.

  They began the long acceleration. Other authors have covered in far more detail the crazed courage and dogged determination of these people as they bent their whole will to survival in ancient, cranky spacecraft that had no reason to be running any longer. But the spacecraft had, after all, been built by craftsmen, by Vulcans who loved their work and would rather have died than misplace a rivet out of laziness, and the workmanship, by and large, held. Nine years into deceleration they came within sensor range of 128 Tri and confirmed the astronomers’ suspicions: the star had six planets, of which two were a “double planet” system like Earth and Earth’s Moon…and both of the two were habitable within broad Vulcan parameters.

  There were, of course, major differences to be dealt with. The two worlds had more water than Vulcan did, and their climates were respectively cooler. In fact, both planets had those things that the Vulcans had heard of from the Etoshan data but never seen, “oceans.” Some people were nervous about the prospect of settling on worlds where water was such a commonplace. Others entertained the idea that in a place where water was so plentiful, one of the major causes of war might be eliminated. S’task, looking for the first time at the early telescopic images of the two green-golden worlds, and hearing one of his people mention this possibility, was silent for a few moments, then said, “Those who want war will find causes, no matter how many of them you take away.” This proved to be true enough, later. With survival needs handled, the Rihannsu moved on to other concerns, matters of honor, and fought cheerfully about them for centuries. But that time was still far ahead of them. Right now they were merely desperately glad to find a world, two worlds, in fact, that looked like they would serve them as homes instead of the tired metal worlds that were rapidly losing their viability.

  The year immediately following starfall was spent in cautious analysis of the worlds and how they should be best used by the travelers. The larger of the two worlds had the biggest oceans, and three large landmasses, two with extensive “young” mountain ranges. The third was ninety percent desert, though its coastlines were fertile. The other planet, the one “frozen” in orbit around the larger body, again like Earth’s moon, had five continents, all mountainous and heavily forested. Both worlds revealed thousands of species of wildlife, a fact that astonished the travelers: Vulcan has comparatively few, only three or four phyla with a spread of s
everal hundred species, mostly plants.

  The ships’ scientists were fascinated by the fact that the species on both planets were quite similar, and there were several near-duplications. Arguments immediately began as to whether these planets had been colonized or visited by some other species in the past, or whether this astonishing parallel evolution had happened by itself. No artifacts suggestive of any other species’ intervention or presence, however, were ever found. The question has never been satisfactorily answered, though there are possibilities: the 128 Tri system lies in the migratory path of the species known to Federation research as “the Builders,” who played at “seeding” various planets with carbon-based life, predominantly hominid, some two million years ago. There is no ignoring the fact that ninety percent of the wildlife on the Two Worlds is compatible with Vulcan biochemistry, even if only by virtue of being carbohydrate. Levorotatory protein forms, common on almost every “nonseeded” planet, were almost completely absent in the ch’Rihan/ch’Havran biosystems.

  Research went on, while the travelers, eager to stop traveling, decided the questions of who should live where. No logical method could be approved by everyone, especially since there were several pieces of especially choice real estate that one or more groups had their eyes on. There was also concern that people should be sufficiently spread out so as not to overtax the resources of any one area in the long term. After several months of extremely acrimonious argument in ships’ Meetings, S’task wearied of it all and suggested that the ships merely choose areas to live in by lottery. To his extreme surprise, the complements of the other ships agreed. Some ships preferred to go into the lottery as entire units, others divided up along family or clan lines, so that septs of clans scattered among the four surviving ships would all go to one area together.