The Winds of Altair

by Ben Bova

  "If a wolfcat were brought to Earth," Carbo went on, his soft voice picking up speed with enthusiasm, "it would probably be just as blind as we are on Altair VI."

  "Perhaps. Perhaps," Bishop Foy replied impatiently. "Bring the tapes to my office as soon as you can. There are many details I must discuss with you, in private."

  The picture screen abruptly went blank.

  Carbo stared at it for a moment, then made an elaborate shrug that took in his shoulders, arms, hands, and even the expression on his face. He turned to Amanda and said, "Make sure he gets plenty of food and rest. He has a lot of work ahead of him."

  Amanda gave a small sigh and motioned Jeff toward the door that led out of the control room. Jeff went with her, feeling more like a laboratory animal than a human being. I wonder if they're going to dissect my brain when this is all finished? he asked himself.

  The official name of the ship was Melvin L. Calvin, but the five hundred students, Elders, and scientists aboard called it simply, the Village.

  It did not look like the sleek starships Jeff had seen on video shows, nor like the ungainly rockets that had explored the Moon and the planets of Earth's solar system—all of which were so far away now that the Sun itself was no more than a pinpoint of light, one of the millions of stars that could be seen through the ship's viewports.

  The Village was a cluster of globes, bubbles of plastic and metal linked by spidery tubes. It had no front or back in the usual sense, no up or down. Each globe housed a few dozen people, or was a facility of some sort: a library, a meeting hall, a grassy park lined with trees.

  In actuality, the Village was like a barge or a houseboat that had no real propulsive power of its own. It had been towed from Earth to Altair VI by a squat, stubby vehicle that was little more than a massive engine with a tiny bubble of living quarters for its crew: Captain Olaf Gunnerson, his son, daughter, and son-in-law—and their computer.

  Gunnerson was a professional star-sailor, and his vehicle was nothing more than a tugboat. But it was a tug that could span interstellar distances, for a fee.

  His engines were gravity field drives, not rockets. Generating the kind of gravity warps made in nature by Black Holes, the gravity field drive allowed the human race to expand outward among the stars—again, for a fee.

  The first to go had been robots, of course. Riding the earliest gravity field ships, they had explored the dead gas giant worlds of Barnard's Star and returned in less time than it took light to span the distance. Physicists argued bitterly over whether or not the gravity drive actually propelled the ships faster than light. One of the rock-bottom principles of the universe was being shaken, and campuses all over Earth trembled with the ferocity of the debate. The younger physicists declared that Einstein had been overthrown. Their elders insisted that this was not possible; even though the ships had seemed to go faster than light, what had actually happened was that the gravity warp had bent spacetime so out of shape that the ships left the universe momentarily and then re-entered it elsewhere, lightyears away.

  The politicians didn't care which way the physicists decided. They now had a tool in their hands that they could use.

  "Colonize the stars!" they cried.

  They started to build starships, to be filled with the poorest, most ignorant, least desirable people of Earth. "Export your problems," they whispered to one another. "Send them off to where they'll never bother us again."

  But before they could do that, before they could exile the unemployed, the uneducated, the untouchables, they had to send out their best and their brightest—to pave the way.

  The least desirable people of Earth could not be launched out into the interstellar void to fend for themselves. Not even the politicians were that insensitive. Robot ships were built to find Earthlike worlds, and then teams of the eager, bright, idealistic young men and women of Earth were sent to prepare these worlds for the colonists to come.

  To these young men and women, the politicians sang of challenge and commitment. "Tame the new worlds!" they urged. And the eager, bright, idealistic young men and women took up the challenge. Just as the politicians' social technicians had predicted they would.

  Jeff made his way back to the dome where he lived. He was twenty-three years old, an undergraduate degree in meteorology freshly awarded him. He had been aiming for a doctorate in weather modification when the call to "Tame the new worlds!" had overtaken him. After six months in the Village, he wondered if he had chosen wisely.

  He was slightly taller than average, yet no one thought of him as "big," not even he himself. Jeff had the broad shoulders and strong arms of a farm boy, and a slow, easy smile that often prompted strangers to think he was easy-going, perhaps even lazy. His hair was dark and thick, his eyes the gray of a stormy sea. His psychological profile showed him so close to all the norms that the social technicians thought him dull (only the psychologically weak or unusual interested them). They were quite surprised when their own computers picked him as the student best qualified psychologically to attempt making contact with one of the animals of Altair VI.

  He lived in one of the Village's domes with nearly three dozen other students. They were all within a year or two of his own age. Half of them were women. All of them, naturally, were reliable Church members, Believers who had been sent by their Church to tame this new world for all the Believers who were to come as colonists.

  All the students had taken vows of celibacy as a matter of course, just as they had while on campus. Sex was a powerful weapon for either good or evil; it had to be channelled properly.

  Their vows were duly registered with Bishop Foy, the spiritual and temporal leader of the Village. The vows were also protected by the network of security cameras that watched every dormitory room, every meeting hall, every corridor and chamber of the Village. And the cameras were backed up by dorm mothers in each of the Village's residential domes. The dorm mother in Jeff's dome was a flour-white giantess with the unlikely name of Bettina Brown. The students had quickly dubbed her Brunhilda. She was flaxen haired, fully two meters tall, almost as wide, and strong enough to pick up two students Jeff's size, one in each ham-fisted hand, and shake them until their teeth rattled.

  Between Brunhilda and the computer-monitored sensors, Jeff and his dorm mates had little chance for mischief. And little time. Their hours were filled with work, study, and prayer. Even though the gravity field drive made the jump to Altair almost instantaneously, Gunnerson's tug had to tow them for two months out to the edge of the solar system before the jump could be made, and then for two more months they spiralled inward to take up an orbit around the sixth planet of Altair.

  The time was spent studying planetology, planetary engineering, and all the other special knowledge they would need to transform Altair VI into a fully Earthlike world, suitable for large-scale colonization. And praying. Prayer was as much a part of their lives as breathing. They prayed when they woke up in the morning. They prayed before each meal and after it. Every task began with a prayer for strength and success. Every night ended with a prayer that their efforts to tame Altair VI might prove fruitful.

  But they might as well have saved their energy. Their first few weeks of struggling with the wildly inhospitable environment of Altair VI convinced even the most devout Believers that the planet was beyond redemption, no matter what the robot explorers had reported.

  If they could have, they would have returned to Earth.

  "It was weird," Jeff was saying to his friends. "It was like—blast, I can't tell you what it was like. There aren't any words for it."

  They were sitting around one of the larger tables in the dome's autocafeteria, a dozen students, including Laura, the redhead that Jeff had lusted over so badly that he spent hours in the chapel trying to pray her out of his mind. It did little good.

  Most of the students added decorations to their drab coveralls, to put a little color and individuality into their dress: a bright scarf, a medallion or a jewelled pin. Jeff hims
elf clipped the gold symbol of his school's meteorology club to his breast pocket every morning. Laura did not need any decorations; her flame-red hair and jade-green eyes were all the color she needed.

  Like all the student domes, theirs was built to remind them of a university campus. The rooms around the periphery of the dome were deliberately decorated in the genteel shabbiness of academia. The center of the dome was a grassy quadrangle edged with scrawny young trees that stretched their branches toward the artificial sun hanging at the dome's zenith.

  Every student had an individual dormitory room. Jeff's had seemed spacious to him when the voyage began; now it was starting to feel cramped and tiny. The autocafeteria was a favorite meeting place, with its food dispensers, long straight rows of tables, and general openness. Even the surveillance cameras were tucked away where they wouldn't be too obvious.

  Dom Petrocelli was the self-appointed student leader of Jeff's dome, not because he was bigger physically or faster intellectually than the others. Dom was a Convert, and always behaved as though he had to prove to the other Believers that his faith was true. Besides, he seemed to enjoy hurting people with his sarcastic tongue.

  He leaned back in the plastic cafeteria chair, making it squeak under him, and eyed Jeff with an amused smile.

  "So you got inside the wolfcat's brain, is that it?" he asked.

  "Right," Jeff said eagerly. "It was like we shared our minds."

  "Must have boosted your IQ a hundred points!" Petrocelli smirked.

  The others laughed, and Jeff joined the laughter too, even though he was thinking what a wolfcat could do to Petrocelli's thick skull.

  As the giggling died down, Laura—who was sitting next to Jeff—asked, "You really killed one of those deers?"

  Jeff replied, "The wolfcat did. I didn't try to stop him."

  Laura was very pretty, especially when she smiled. Red hair the color of autumn leaves, deep green eyes, skin like cream. "I don't understand how this mind-sharing business works. It sounds kind of . . . well, psychic, almost."

  "No," Jeff said. "It's just electronics. You know the kind of electronic probes they put into criminals' brains, to control their violent behavior?"

  Laura and several others nodded.

  "Well, that's what we're using. Dr. Peterson and a team of scientists went down to the planet's surface a few weeks ago, stunned some of the animals, and put probes in their brains."

  Petrocelli yawned ostentatiously. "We all know that. And they almost killed two men doing it."

  Ignoring him, Jeff went on, "Then they hook somebody up to the equipment in Dr. Carbo's lab. It's kind of like a video show, except that you see what the wolfcat is seeing, you feel what he feels. Your mind is linked to the wolfcat's mind."

  "I thought they weren't going to try that anymore," one of the other girls said. "Isn't it awfully dangerous? The first two people who tried it both died, didn't they?"

  "And Dr. Mannheim is in the cryonics freezer, totally out of it."

  "Well, I made contact," Jeff said, trying to keep his pride from showing. "We've made the first step toward taming this planet."

  Petrocelli started to make a comment, but the sad-faced little engineer next to him said first, "Well, we'd better tame this planet. They won't let us back home until we do."

  Nods of agreement went around the table. They all knew that they would either tame Altair VI or die there.

  CHAPTER 3

  Dr. Francesco Ignacio Carbo sat in his room, staring at the stars. He knew that Earth was an invisibly tiny speck in the universe gleaming before his eyes. He could not even identify the Sun out of the countless sparks of light that glowed against the infinite darkness.

  Darkness and light, he said to himself. The eternal struggle.

  Dr. Carbo's quarters were a spacious combination of office and apartment, handsomely furnished with his own possessions. Bishop Foy and the Elders frowned on such luxuries as a waterbed and genuine oil paintings, but Carbo insisted that he was not going to travel almost seventeen lightyears from Earth without some of his own comforts. Still, he missed the cool marble floors of his apartment in Rome, the noise from the streets, the warm night breeze and the splashing of the fountain in the Piazza di Navaronne.

  He sighed heavily. Not for these austere Americans, the marble splendor and gaudy crowds of Rome. Here on this ship, this antiseptic womb of metal and plastic, there was no room for the splendors of the past, no patience for noise or dirt or people who splashed in fountains and sang late into the night.

  You knew what you were getting into when you agreed to go with them, he told himself. But another part of his mind argued, How could you know what they would be like? How could you understand how it would be to live with these puritans day after day, month after month?

  He leaned back in his recliner chair and stared at the stars through the plastiglass window set high up along the curving wall of his living room. The stars stared solemnly back, unwinking. They reminded him of Bishop Foy and the Elders. Even their smiles were without joy.

  Carbo was the only bachelor among the scientists and social technicians of the Village. There were a dozen single women and unmarried daughters among the staff, and hundreds of nubile maidens among the students. But scientists did not fraternize with the students, who apparently took their vows of celibacy quite seriously, from what Carbo could see. Either that, or they were afraid of getting caught. Even with the staff women, half of them belonged to the Church and the other half seemed to be intent on getting married.

  It was an uncomfortable situation for an unmarried Roman of thirty-two.

  But face it, Francesco, he told himself, Rome was becoming unbearable.

  The Eternal City had endured invasions by the Huns, the Goths, countless mercenary armies, the Nazis, and even swarms of American tourists. But year by year the streets became less and less safe. Starving children begged for pennies, and if you turned your back, they or their older brothers took with violence what they could not earn peacefully. As the ancient buildings and monuments crumbled under the attack of automobile pollution, the very fabric of society was falling apart under the weight of too many hungry, homeless people.

  Carbo remembered his own childhood, running through the narrow twisting streets of the city, always in a pack with other boys his own age, always armed with at least a knife. It was a miracle that the Jesuits took him in, a ragged homeless waif, before he either was killed in the streets or killed someone else. The priests were stern and unyielding. They caught him in one of their periodic sweeps of the city, threw him into the terrifying machine that tested his mental abilities, and decided he was going to receive an education. Period. No recourse, no appeal. Little Francesco, who never knew his father and barely remembered the teenaged girl who was his mother, now became a ward of the Jesuit order.

  The Jesuits had long boasted, give us the child for its first six years and he will be ours forever. Francesco was too old and too street-wise for such brainwashing. But under the inflexible discipline of the priests he learned to become a clean, polite, soft-spoken young student. And he fell in love—with learning. For the mind-testing machine had been quite accurate: beneath the filth from the streets, Francesco had a first-rate brain. By the time he was fifteen, he had discovered science and plunged into studies that even his Jesuit mentors could not fathom. On his twentieth birthday they reluctantly released him to the University of Pisa, reminding him sternly that he would be in the shadow of Galileo. To their credit, the Jesuits had led the Vatican to exonerate the contentious Renaissance genius some four centuries after he had been condemned by the Inquisition.

  Francesco nodded at the priests' mention of Galileo, but in his heart he was more interested in the work of Fermi and the more contemporary Italian scientists.

  At the university he found that a special branch of physics intrigued him more than any other: electronics. And this led him into the fascinating world of neuro-electronics, where the transistors and microcircuitry
of molecular electronics were being linked to the nerves and brains of human test subjects.

  By the time he was twenty-eight, Dr. Francesco Carbo was an international celebrity, and widely touted as a certainty to be awarded the Nobel Prize. His work in neuro-electronics had produced the miniature probes that now could actually control human behavior. Criminal violence was becoming as extinct as the dinosaurs, because every violent offender was fitted out with a neuro-electronic probe that controlled his antisocial behavior.

  The streets of Rome were safer, thanks to Dr. Carbo. The streets of every city in the world were safer. And Dr. Carbo could not sleep because of the nightmares his guilt spawned in his own mind.

  The world government seized on the neuro-electronic stimulator as the solution to violent crime. But in reality, the probes merely made such crimes impossible. They did nothing to solve the problems that caused the crimes. The police swept criminal offenders off the streets and into the hospitals for their quick, almost painless brain surgery. But poverty still existed. Hunger still existed. The vast gap between the rich and poor grew wider.

  Pacified criminals no longer threatened society. Instead, they tended either to go insane or commit suicide. But crime still existed. The neuro-electronic stimulators themselves became a major source of crime; electronic stimulation of the brain's pleasure centers replaced narcotics and even sex as the world's premier vice. People died smiling with pleasure, starved to death or their brains destroyed by an overload of current.

  By the time he passed his thirtieth birthday, Dr. Carbo had himself flirted with the idea of suicide. Even though the world government banned public report of the harmful effects of the neuro-electronic stimulator, he knew what was happening, and the knowledge filled him with remorse. Only his years under the Jesuits stayed his hand. He had never fully accepted their religious teachings, but their moral principles had sunk into the fiber of his being. If it is wrong to kill, then it is equally wrong to kill oneself. Logic was the Jesuits' most effective weapon, especially against a man in love with knowledge.