Stellaris: People of the Stars

by Robert E. Hampson

  “I sent them our detailed manifest from the cargo hold,” I said. “They probably don’t understand what half of the stuff is, but we’ll show it off anyway. Right now, they’re scrambling to find goods or raw materials that we’ll accept in trade. It looks like a good place to stop, Captain.”

  Doctor Max agreed with his characteristic chuckle, and the others looked forward to another shore leave, even though they had barely noticed the two centuries of passage since the last one on Jherilla. Aboard the Time’s Arrow, it was just one planet after another with a fast-forward journey in between.

  But Amos was surly. He had grown clearly impatient at the previous three or four stops. “I’m sick of this routine. I really can’t stand the shit anymore.”

  “Then stay awake in realtime and redecorate your quarters,” Dorothea said. “Take up a hobby.” Over the past couple awakenings, she’d grown impatient with his attitude.

  “It just feels pointless.” Amos rested his elbows on the table, looking down at his barely eaten food. “We had a great haul at Jherilla. We’re all rich, but what do we do with it?”

  “We’re going to trade it for other things on Irrac, and then we’ll do it again. And again and again,” said Elber, one of the other scouts. “It’s what you signed up for.”

  “Ten thousand years ago.” He picked at his vegetables and meat.

  “I thought you wanted to see the galaxy,” Dorothea said.

  “I’ve seen it.” Amos glanced at the images of Irrac, and his face took on a wistful look. “Maybe I just want to settle down.”

  “Go right ahead,” said Delman. “Plant your roots in the dirt. More shares for the rest of us.”

  Frustrated, Amos scowled at him. “Shares for what? What is it for?”

  I scooped the last few bites off my plate and stood. I’d never been much interested in conversation, and especially not arguments. “I’ve got to prep for orbit and landing. When I get the engines reset and the orbital curves plotted, I’m dropping back down to slowtime. You all can debate the meaning of life for the next three weeks if you like. I don’t want to waste my time on something I can’t answer.”

  I left the galley and returned to the command module and transmitted a positive response to the colony, this time using perfect Irrac dialect. And since I’d have to be here when we reached the planet so I could guide the ship in, I didn’t even bother to leave the bridge deck. I took a seat in the padded chair and dropped down to zero.

  * * *

  When I sped back up to realtime three weeks later, the planet filled my view as if a huge world had popped out right in front of me. Irrac had all the right colors: blue, green, and brown with swirls of white clouds, breathable atmosphere, temperate climate. The scan showed more than a hundred cities scattered across several continents. The Time’s Arrow comm log showed countless unanswered messages and reports the colonists had transmitted to us as they grew excited at our approach, although I had made it abundantly clear in the last transmission that the crew would be in slowtime and no one could respond.

  The starship had automatically gone into orbit. Dorothea came to the bridge and placed a hand on my shoulder as we both observed the planet. “It all looks good,” I said. “No military buildup, no panic or unrest.”

  “Then take us down. No need to be skittish. We spent two centuries getting here, and you and I only woke once at the same time for a little exercise.” She smiled.

  I put my hand on top of hers. “That was a couple of hours well spent.” Yes, even after thousands of years she was still a damn fine woman.

  We were surprised to discover that Amos had returned to realtime a full day before the rest of us so he could review the Irrac transmissions in private. He’d even used the comm to speak to people down in the main city, even though such an unauthorized transmission was technically forbidden.

  The other seven crewmembers sped up on their own schedule, and everyone was fully awake and alert as Time’s Arrow descended to a large open area outside the main city. It wasn’t an actual spaceport, but our ship easily made do.

  A large welcoming committee had gathered for us, cheering crowds waving colorful banners to welcome the exotic visitors from so far away. I thought of parades and marching bands on Earth, but I wondered if anyone other than the Time’s Arrow crew even remembered such things from more than ten thousand years in the past.

  Though I’d been the one to make initial contact with the colony leader, Dorothea was the face of our expedition. I prefer to stay in the background, not needing the applause or the attention; in fact, I don’t like it. As we emerged, I stood with my companions in formal uniforms, just another part of the crew. Captain Dorothea gave an engaging and inspirational speech about our journey, told of the wonders Time’s Arrow had seen and the exotic goods we brought. She explained how much she appreciated such a warm welcome from the people of Irrac.

  I had heard the speech close to thirty times before, and so, without anyone noticing, I slowed down my internal clock so that the boring part sped by in just a few subjective seconds.

  Oddly enough, Amos was singled out and welcomed by the people. All of Irrac knew who he was because of the direct conversations he’d sent from the ship while the rest of us were in slowtime. Families came to meet Amos, starry-eyed, giving him warm embraces. He surprised us further when he informed the captain he’d been specially invited to join a large clan grouping for feasts and parties. Normally, the crew kept close to one another, but shore leave was shore leave. When the opportunity arose, we all caroused and sampled the local pleasures. This wasn’t overly unusual.

  For the next several days we unloaded the extensive goods we had carried from planet to planet. The exotic items, the metals and materials, strange artwork, music recordings, jewelry, incredible food samples from other worlds—to the humble people of Irrac it was all breathtakingly priceless. The town leaders despaired that they had nothing we would find of value in trade.

  What they didn’t understand was that a normal, pleasant colony was a rare thing, and their forested hills provided a wealth of beautiful lumber. The wood seemed all too common and of little value to Irrac, but Dorothea insisted it was worth its weight in gold, a cliché that the dialect chips translated into the appropriate local phrasing. Gold, in fact, was easily obtained on any number of rocky asteroids, but tall trees were extremely valuable, and the captain knew she could sell the lumber at a premium on some other austere colony where real wood was a rarity. Dorothea and the colony leader were both satisfied with their bargain, and our mission to this world was a complete success.

  Except when Amos came up to us on the day before our departure. I had just emerged from the cargo hold, wiping my hands on a towel after storing more than five metric tons of fresh wood, and saw the crewman nervously reporting to the captain. “I’ve made up my mind, Dorothea. I’m staying here.”

  A pretty, young woman stood next to Amos, a little blander than his usual type. She had a little girl at her side no more than three years old, clutching her mother’s hand. They both stared in awe at our landed starship.

  Dorothea’s brow drew together, and her eyes didn’t have much of a sparkle at the moment. “You’re staying behind…how?”

  “I’m opting out of my contract. I’d like a reasonable share of profits so I can set up a stake and make a good home for myself here. I’d like to live the rest of my life on Irrac. It’s the best place we’ve seen in a long time.” He reached out to take the young woman’s hand, and she gave him an adoring look. “Alila’s family has offered her to me in marriage. She lost her husband last year, and her beautiful little daughter here has no father.” He swallowed and said, “I’ve always wanted a family. Now I can have everything I want. If I stay here.”

  I stepped forward, still rubbing my hands on the towel. “If you do that, there’s no turning back, Amos. You want to spend the rest of your life in realtime?”

  “I can always drop down if I need to, turn into Rip Van Winkle.�
�� He chuckled at the joke, which he knew that no one understood but us. “Why would I want to? I’ll have a home, a wife, a daughter to adopt, maybe other children someday. I’ll be comfortable and happy for my lifespan, however long that might be. Isn’t that what we all want? I can finally have it.”

  “Your life will be over in the blink of an eye,” Dorothea said. “On the Time’s Arrow, you’ll keep traveling for centuries and centuries.”

  Amos shook his head. “If I choose to live out my time here with Alila, what’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing at all,” Dorothea said with a resigned sigh. “Nothing at all. Go with my blessing. I know you’ve been dissatisfied for a long time. We’ll figure out how to pay you in some currency that’s valuable to these people. The ship will just get by with one less crew member from now on.”

  I refrained from pointing out that Time’s Arrow could get by with almost no crew at all, but the ten of us had been together for so long, this was like losing a family member.

  Over the following day, we all said our farewells. Every hour, the condensers had filtered and stored air, so our reserves were at capacity. I loaded up our reservoirs with water from a local lake. We were ready to go.

  I kept expecting Amos to lose his nerve and change his mind, but he didn’t. The clan units welcomed him, and he seemed anxious to begin his life with his new wife and daughter. As Time’s Arrow departed, leaving Irrac, I zoomed in on the image of the crowds waving goodbye. I saw Amos staring at us with a triumphant and satisfied expression.

  He would be dust by the next time I had a chance to think about him.

  * * *

  Six more centuries passed en route to our next destination, a planet called Riece on the old charts. It was a long trip, but the point of our constant nomadic mission was not to reach any particular place. The journey itself was its own goal, one world after another. The expansive galaxy, all the places we could go and see, and all the history we were unrolling behind us—that was what mattered to me.

  Time’s Arrow was hardened and self-sufficient, with low-level AI monitoring systems to take care of any routine maintenance, so the ship could effectively fly through empty space forever. Even so, I still made it a habit to return to realtime once every year or two, just to have a look around. Yes, I was burning minutes of my lifespan, but I enjoyed the solitude, slowly wandering through the ship, looking at the motionless slowtime figures of my eight remaining fellow crewmembers. Sometimes a person just likes to have time to think.

  I would sit alone in the command module and stare out at the empty sea of stars and imagine the distances, how many uncounted years that starlight had been shining, the same way that Time’s Arrow had been flying through the void. From my perspective, we had left Irrac only a few days ago, but I knew that by now Amos was long dead, as was his young wife. The pretty little daughter would have grown up, started her own family, grown old, and died, along with the next generation and the next.

  But we were still here, still flying.

  Amos could have still been alive, but he’d chosen to stay behind. I hoped he didn’t regret his decision after we left. I tried to imagine myself doing that, but couldn’t. Life wasn’t a race or an endurance test, and the universe didn’t hand out a prize for the person who managed to stick around longest. As I looked out at the stars, I imagined an ancient sea captain gazing across the uncharted ocean and hoping there must be some new land beyond the horizon.

  What I wanted was to see the universe, but also to see the universe change. With my own eyes, I was watching the cosmos evolve, stars form, nebulas coalesce. It was like observing the universe on fast-forward.

  The Time’s Arrow crew was my family, and Captain Dorothea was my lover. Often on my brief maintenance walks, when I was the only one in realtime, I would look at her calm and beautiful face, the frozen expression reflecting whatever thoughts had been in her mind when she’d dropped down to slowtime.

  The captain and I had our arrangement. We would agree on a schedule and both speed up simultaneously so we’d have the silent ship to ourselves, privacy for our lovemaking. I would often accelerate a few minutes before Dorothea awoke so I could be standing there with a smile. When she became animated and looked at me with that sparkle of anticipation in her eyes, I’d fold my arms around her and pull her close. With the rest of the crew unaware, she didn’t have to be the captain and I didn’t have to be the engineer. We became just two human bodies touching. Captain Dorothea was independent and firm, I liked my alone time, but we both needed a certain amount of companionship. I’m not sure any of the crew even knew about our relationship.

  Dorothea and I would sometimes take an hour or more to make love, in no hurry. Afterward, we would just lie together in her captain’s bunk, feeling the warmth of skin and sweat. This time, we talked about Amos, because I couldn’t stop thinking of him on Irrac, his home, and his family. He had a bed, a kitchen, chores to do, bills to pay, mundane concerns that none of us aboard Time’s Arrow had thought about in millennia. And he was long gone, though I remembered seeing him only a few hours ago.

  “You think he was happy?” Dorothea asked.

  “I think he’s dead now. Was the happiness worth burning all of his years so fast?”

  She mused for a long moment before finally answering, “The measure of a life is what you do with it, not how long it lasts.”

  “I liked Amos, so I’ll be optimistic,” I said, stroking her hair. “But I’m not going to turn the ship around and fly back to Irrac to see if his name is still listed in their history books.”

  She chuckled and kissed me. “We don’t look at history books, Garrett. They’re not relevant. We’re just moving forward, always forward.”

  We stayed awake long enough to make love again, and then we both dropped to slowtime while still lying in her bunk. I would speed up in a year or two anyway for my maintenance round, and I could get dressed then.

  * * *

  Toward the end of the six-century run to Riece, I grew bored and only sped up every fifteen years or so. Constantly outbound for millennia, by now Time’s Arrow had reached the far fringe and some of the most isolated colonies in the expansion of the human race. Any colonists who had traveled this far either had truly grandiose dreams or they were running from something.

  Over the past several decades on our journey, I had picked up a few scattered broadcast transmissions from Riece, so I knew the colony was still there. When we were a year out from the system, I returned to realtime, intending to do a little preliminary snooping—and I immediately smelled smoke, an old, bitter tang of wrongness that hadn’t been fully scrubbed by the near-dormant life-support systems.

  Feeling sudden urgency, I accelerated, moving even faster than realtime. In a blur I raced to the monitoring systems, found that there had indeed been a serious fire in the rec room—three years ago, by ship’s time. After so long, there was no need to hurry, but I still ran.

  The rec room was a scorched mess, smoky, still sealed. The basic fire-suppression systems must have failed. Time’s Arrow was ten thousand years old, after all. I ran a diagnostic every century, but maybe I had grown complacent. The heater unit, which Captain Dorothea considered a homey touch, had malfunctioned, starting a fire.

  Three crew members had burned to death, unrecognizable at first glance. Their bodies were charred. One had collapsed on the floor. I soon identified them as Delman, Thea, and Olivia. They had been sitting around the table, and I saw playing cards. A poker game. Apparently, they had arranged to speed up to realtime to enjoy a card game while the rest of us were dormant. Neither I nor Captain Dorothea had been invited. I wondered how long that had been going on.

  For some reason, the three had dropped into slowtime after finishing a round, maybe taking a break, and they had burned to death before even realizing what was going on. Olivia, the one collapsed on the floor, had apparently sped up to normal…but too late. She had dropped from the flames or smoke inhalation. All three were tr
uly dead, not just slowed down to zero.

  Worse, although the main fire in the rec room had been suppressed by the automated systems, an electrical fire had raced through the conduits, causing more severe damage to other parts of the ship.

  I ran up to the bridge to scan the monitors and see how bad the situation was. The command module was intact—it was the most secure bastion on the vessel and could fly as its own self-contained starship—but one of the stern engines and some systems in the cargo bay were severely damaged.

  I checked the log and navigation systems, verifying that we were still a year out from Riece. Even if I spent weeks, or even months, of my own time, alone, I couldn’t complete the repairs here. I could patch up some of the basic systems but I needed a place to land, a technological society, or at least the raw materials for the fabricators. I transmitted a distress signal to the distant colony planet, letting them know we were coming. This would give them months more notice than we usually did, but Time’s Arrow needed their help.

  I scanned for more transmissions from Riece, but the people were quiet—either shy, reclusive, or they had fallen back to more primitive technology, which might make full repairs more challenging for me.

  Keeping the news to myself for now—what could the captain or anyone else do at this point?—I stayed in realtime for a week inspecting ship systems, doing the grim work myself. I took the three bodies to the infirmary and packaged them up. Doctor Max might want to have a look, but I doubted he’d have the ambition to perform an autopsy. There was nothing he could do for Delman, Thea, and Olivia.

  I fixed the systems I could, but the burn was especially extensive in the cargo-bay controls. Finally, I roused Captain Dorothea from slowtime so I could give my full report. When I told her, I watched the hard beauty of her face melt into grief. She realized the loss of our friends, our family, how greatly our crew was diminished, not only after Amos left us at Irrac, but now three dead in the fire. We only had six crewmembers remaining.

  Since the two of us were still alone in our own time continuum, I held her, sharing strength. When she composed herself, she asked, “We’re still on course to Riece? You’re confident we can make repairs there?”