by Ben Bova
The sky seemed to shudder. Ghostly shimmering veils of delicate pale greens and pinks rippled across the encroaching darkness. The aurora, never seen at this latitude except when a starship taps the core of the Earth’s magnetic field.
The dancing sheets of pastel colors seemed to be waving good-bye to the departing starship. A farewell from the planet. A farewell from all of humankind.
De Sagres waved too. Both his arms, like an eager child, until the light of the starship and the answering gleam of the aurora both disappeared and left the sky empty—except for thousands of glittering stars.
Dhouni Nkona stood outside his house and saw the silver arrow of light streak across the night sky of Africa. He watched, fascinated, as the aurora glowed the way it had thirty-three years earlier, when the alien’s ship had first appeared in Earth’s skies.
Beside the gray old man stood Lela Obiri, young, strong, slowly recovering from her ordeal of eight months earlier.
The star sister within her had confirmed what Nkona had tried years ago to teach her: that all living creatures are linked, united into a single form of life that spans Mother Earth. Yet her star sister expanded even that insight: all living creatures are linked even among the far-scattered stars. All life in the universe is one.
That vision had nearly destroyed Lela. The guilt and shame she felt over her murder of five men almost drove her insane. Almost. For months she could not face another human being. She lived in the preserve with the great apes while her star sister gradually, patiently helped her to understand her own depths of fear and hatred.
Now she stood beside Nkona, ready to take her place in the world of imperfect men and women once again. The old man gave her a fatherly smile. Lela was stronger now than she had ever been. The wound in her spirit was healing; the scar would always be there, but she would be all the stronger for having suffered the wounding and surviving. Men and women were imperfect, it was true; but they were striving toward perfection. Nkona believed with all the fierce passion in his soul that each human being was truly perfectible.
Less than fifty kilometers from where they stood, outside Nkona’s modest home on the fringe of the university campus, several hundred gorillas lived in peaceful contentment at last. No one had even tried to bother them, not since the star brethren had shown all who received what Lela had known from the beginning.
In Bangladesh it was nearly morning. Walking slowly along the sandy shore, Chandra Varahamihara turned his gaze from the gently lapping sea to the dark forest that lined the beach with tall swaying coconut palms and thickly gnarled goran mangroves.
He was a lonely figure, this frail bald-shaved lama in his saffron robe. But he was not alone. Within him dwelled a star brother, and he sensed all the hundreds of millions, the billions of humans who also shared their blood with brethren from the stars.
Once this region where the five mighty rivers met the sea was called the Plain of Death. The rivers would flood and thousands who had no dwelling place except miserable shacks along their banks would be swept away. The sea would be heavy with drowned bodies for weeks afterward.
Now, in his mind’s eye, Varahamihara could see the mighty dams far to the north in the mountains of Nepal that controlled the flow of the rivers. And the forests that had been planted to hold the moisture of the monsoon rains and prevent the erosion of the soil that the people needed to grow their food. Almost, he smiled. Nepal was becoming a rich nation, selling its hydroelectric power not only to Bangladesh but to India, China, and even the Soviet Union.
But the smile never came to his lips. The Horror had been particularly cruel in the great Indian subcontinent. Its ravages were diminishing as the visitors from the stars joined in the unity of life, but what a terrible, excruciating toll it had taken! Yet perhaps such pain was necessary. The wheel of life is lubricated with human blood, it seems. At least now the teachings of the Buddha were becoming the true frame of reference for all the people of Earth.
Yet he wondered. What changes will come when all men and women are linked with star brothers and sisters? We will survive the Horror, that much seems sure now. But can we survive the cure?
The lama lifted his worried face to the glowing dawn that touched the sea’s horizon with pink.
A streak of brilliant light rose in that brightening sky and climbed across the heavens. Varahamihara watched the starship until it disappeared from sight, uttering a prayer of peace to those who were heading for the stars. And of thanks.
But most of all he prayed for understanding.
In the dimmed lighting of the starship’s observation dome, Stoner and his son seemed to be standing on nothing, suspended in space, as the Earth dwindled to a mere point of light. Stoner rested one hand on Rickie’s shoulder and realized that the boy was already chest-high to his father.
Wherever they looked the stars crowded thickly against the blackness of space, like sprinklings of brilliant gems that dazzled the eye.
“We’re on our way!” Rickie shouted, a mixture of excitement and fear in his voice.
Stoner tousled his son’s hair. “Yes, we are. This is going to be our home for a long, long time, Rick. You’ll be a grown man before we return to Earth.”
“How long will it take to get to the world where the star brothers came from?”
Stoner called up the figures in his mind. “It will seem like a couple of years to us.”
“Cathy will be born by then, won’t she? She’ll be a little baby.”
“You’ll be her big brother, Rick. You’ll help to take care of her, won’t you?”
“Sure.”
Stoner and his son walked back to the living quarters, where there were normal-looking walls and furniture. He had designed this part of the ship to look as much like their home in Hilo as possible, even down to the plant hangings and carpets.
Half the scientists of Earth had wanted to go along on this first human flight to the stars. Politely but with implacable firmness, Stoner had refused them all.
“The ship’s sensor systems will be transmitting data to you constantly,” he had said. “That will have to do until more starships are built.”
The only other one aboard their ship, other than Jo and Stoner and their children, had been the dead and frozen body of Kirill Markov. The first duty that Stoner had performed once the ship had cleared the Earth/Moon region was to release Kir’s sarcophagus and send it searching outward among the stars.
“Good-bye, old friend,” Stoner had whispered. “May you find eager minds wherever you travel.”
Now he lay in bed next to Jo, watching the stars through the transparent diamond ceiling above them.
“Just like home,” Jo murmured.
“This is our home,” he replied. “All the home we’ll know.”
“I’ll miss seeing the Moon.”
He smiled. “You’ll have other sights to entertain you. Have you noticed that the stars aren’t just pinpoints of light anymore?”
“No…” Jo stirred slightly beside him, as if concentrating her attention on the panoply of stars above them.
“See? They’re like little oblate spheres. Almost like teardrops.”
“Oh yes! They’re all that way.”
“In another few days they’ll look like streaks, smears that are red on one end and blue on the other,” he told Jo.
She moved closer to him, pressed against his bare flesh. He slid an arm around her lovely shoulders. The scent of her hair was like jasmine.
Jo asked, “Are you certain we had to leave?”
He turned and looked at her in the light of the stars. “Helluva time to ask.”
“We could always turn around.” But she was grinning at him.
“I had to leave, Jo. Maybe you and the kids didn’t, but I had to. I’ve done everything I could do. If we had stayed on Earth they’d start to treat me like some kind of royalty. Or worse, a deity.”
“You wouldn’t like to be worshipped?”
“I haven’t done anything
to be worshipped for,” he said tightly. “I failed, really. I wanted to introduce the star brethren gradually, gently, give the human race enough time to absorb the changes that nanotechnology will bring. But I failed.”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
“Still…”
“You did everything you could.”
Stoner did not reply.
Propping herself on one elbow, Jo looked down at his starlit face and said, “I’m glad it worked out this way. If it hadn’t, you’d have spent the next hundred years trying to ease them into nanotechnology. You’d have broken your heart trying to make things right for every last idiot on Earth. Now they’ve got to do it for themselves.”
“But can they? Can they absorb this without destroying themselves?”
With a shrug of her bare shoulders, Jo answered, “We’ll find out when we come back.”
Stoner thought about it for a few moments. Then, “Maybe you’re right, Jo. I thought I could give them a new world, but maybe in the final analysis nobody can give the human race anything. They’ve got to make it for themselves.”
“Sink or swim.”
“Ten billion lives,” he muttered.
“Less than that, after the Horror,” Jo corrected.
Nodding absently, “Well, the human race has beaten other challenges in the past. The Ice Ages, wars, famines…”
“They’ll make it,” Jo said confidently. “By the time we return they’ll have statues of you in every city on Earth.”
“God forbid!”
She laughed.
“That’s exactly what I wanted to avoid,” Stoner said. “That’s why we had to leave. If I had stayed on Earth they would have never left me alone. They would have wanted to…to…”
“To deify you. Or at least make you a saint.” Jo lay back on the pillows. “Saint Keith of the Star Brethren. They’d hang your portrait in the Vatican.”
“That’s not funny.” Despite himself he was grinning at her.
“No, it isn’t. Especially when we both know you could have never said no to any of them. Never duck that damned sense of responsibility of yours.”
Stoner changed the subject. “I know it was a lot to ask, Jo, bringing you and Rickie—taking you away from everything, away from home…”
“My home is with you, Keith.”
“You won’t miss Vanguard? The power?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I will. But I want to be with you,” she said, her eyes searching his.
“Even out to the stars?”
“Even out to the stars,” Jo said. Then she added, “It is kind of scary, though.”
“Scary?”
“Flying out to the stars aboard a ship completely unlike anything that’s ever been built before. Don’t you have any doubts? And questions?”
Stoner wrapped his arms around her. “I think it’s time you received your very own star sister. Then you would understand much better than you do now.”
“I don’t need it now,” Jo said. “There’s no danger of the Horror here.”
“There’s no danger of anything here, except maybe an equipment failure. But the ship is self-repairing, self-regenerating. Just like me.” He waggled the five fingers of his left hand.
Jo was quiet for a moment. Then, “Keith, I can’t trust what I don’t understand.”
“But…”
“Let me finish.” She touched a finger to his lips. “I trust you. If you think I should have a star sister, I’ll do it. Not because I want it, but because you want me to.”
Stoner kissed her. “I’ll have to prick your finger.”
“Can’t you do it while we make love?”
He blinked with surprise. “I never thought of it…” His star brother smiled within him. “Yes, of course. If that’s the way you want to, why not?”
“I’ll get my star sister by injection,” Jo teased.
Stoner laughed and kissed her again.
Nearly an hour later, as they lay side by side staring up at the stars, a sheen of perspiration on their naked skins, Jo said, “I don’t feel any different.”
“You will tomorrow. And all the tomorrows afterward. The next time we make love, you’ll see.”
“Really?”
“The symbiotes can damp down on your emotions, when it’s necessary,” he said, grinning. “But they can also enhance them. You’ll see.”
“So that’s how…” Jo pursed her lips.
Stoner became serious again. “You’ll start to understand why I couldn’t let you kill Hsen.”
“That would have been an execution,” she snapped.
“It would have been a vendetta murder, and sooner or later you would have felt the full impact of its guilt.”
“The last of the warlords,” Jo muttered.
“What?”
“Hsen—he always reminded me of an old-fashioned oriental warlord.”
Stoner smiled at her. “Good analogy. Only, he wasn’t the last of the warlords, Jo. You were.”
“Me?”
“Not all the warlords were evil,” he quickly added. “Still…maybe it’s a good thing that you’re heading for the stars with me. You might have decided to make yourself empress of Earth.”
For some while she did not reply. They lay together and watched the stars.
“I’m sure you would have made a good empress,” Stoner offered.
Jo laughed softly. “Sure you are.”
“Want to go back and try it?”
Instead of replying, she said, “Everything always changes, doesn’t it? Whether we want it to or not.”
Nodding in the starlight, Stoner answered, “Some changes we deliberately cause, some we have to adapt to because we can’t avoid them.”
“Keith,” she asked, her voice suddenly urgent, “where does it all end? Where are we heading? What are we doing?”
He smiled at her. “We’ve helped the human race make the transition to the brotherhood of the stars, Jo. That’s the greatest achievement we or anyone else could have accomplished.”
“And now what?”
“And now we have the whole universe to play in. No matter what happens, we have each other and our children.”
“And the stars,” Jo said.
“And the stars,” he agreed.
She turned toward him again. “Keith…you could have gone on this journey without us.”
“Without you?”
“You left me once. For eighteen years.”
“That was a long time ago. A lifetime ago. I couldn’t leave you now. I love you, Jo. I want you beside me always.”
She smiled in the starlight and twined her arms around his neck.
“That’s what I wanted to hear,” Jo said.
“You didn’t know?”
“I still like to hear you say it.”
Stoner kissed her lightly on the lips. Then he began to sing an old tune that Jo recognized from her student years. He’s never sung to me before, she thought. And at that moment all her fears disappeared like a rime of frost evaporating in the morning sun. Jo smiled, content to be with this man and their children, wherever their destiny would take them.
And Stoner sang, in a surprisingly gentle and romantic voice:
“If the world should stop revolving, spinning slowly down to dust
“I’d spend the end with you,
“And when the world was through
“Then one by one the stars would all go out,
“Then you and I would simply fly away.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The epigraphs used in this novel are from Walt Whitman, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” John Donne, “Holy Sonnet X” The Gospel According to St. Matthew, 5:21–22; The Sacred Pipe, by Joseph Epes Brown; the Bhagavad Gita; Genghis Khan, Emperor of All Men, by Harold Lamb; and Caesar and Cleopatra by George Bernard Shaw.
The lines quoted from David Gates’s song “If” are copyright © 1971 Colgems-EMI Music, Inc.
The concept of nanote
chnology is best described by its originator and leading proponent, K. Eric Drexler, in his book Engines of Creation (Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1987). The basic work is his, but he is not responsible for the liberties that I have taken with his innovative ideas.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.
VOYAGERS III: STAR BROTHERS
Copyright © 1990 by Ben Bova
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.
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ISBN: 978-0-8125-3236-4