“I understand.”
“I know that every department has told you their experiments are absolutely crucial. Remember that biology comes first. Obtaining a full biometric scan or a tissue sample should take top priority in your negotiations.”
“I’ll remember.”
“You will be the only one on board who has both a purpose and a reasonable means of achieving it. Compromise if events require it but don’t sell us short.”
“Yes, sir.”
At Xijiao Jichang Airport to the northeast of Beijing, the Shuttle orbiter
Aquila
waited in the waning late afternoon light for its passenger Zhang Wenyuan. A quarter-mile away, Wenyuan knelt before Tai Chen and received his final charge.
“You must not let them deceive us,” said Tai Chen. “Trust no one. You will have no allies aboard
Pride of Earth
, least of all Tilak Charan.”
“He is nothing more than his father’s robot. I will handle him.”
“Take no action until you reach the rendezvous point. Wait until the mission’s failure is evident to all and the foolish extravagance of the Rashuri directorship is exposed. Then take the ship. The elimination of failure will justify many actions. Protect our interests, and see to their advancement, and you will return a much-honored man.”
“I will labor for the glory of the Party and our people.”
A soaking drizzle continued to fall in Delhi, where well over two million people waited at Palam and in the streets to see the Shuttle orbiter
Pegasus
carry Captain Tilak Charan to his new command. Moraji walked with Charan toward the transfer car and offered some last-minute advice.
“Be wary of Wenyuan. He has made himself capable of handling the ship alone, and though he insists his only purpose is redundancy in crucial skills, I am not convinced.”
“What of his toys?” Taken care of. But he would not need them to carry out a mutiny.”
“I won’t forget.” They had reached the car, and Charan looked at his watch. “Nearly time.”
Moraji clasped Charan by the shoulders. “The greatest burden lies with you, Tilak Charan. The others are slaves to their orders and their ideologies. But you must stand for more than that. Whatever else you may think of him, your father’s vision for Earth is a selfless and noble one. All of us now entrust that vision to you. You will not just represent us. lb the Senders, you will
be
us.”
“I am not eager for the burden.”
“I know. But your father has chosen well. Had you not been the man you are, he would have chosen another. Be confident in yourself.”
“I will remember your words.” He looked at his watch again. “It’s time.”
In a planet-wide ballet choreographed for the eyes of PANCOMNET, each envoy in turn walked across airport pavement and climbed the open stairs of a boarding ramp to a Shuttle access hatch: first Major Wenyuan, who did not pause at the top to wave, then Commander Charan and Dr. Rankin, who did, and Scion Joanna, who stopped to kneel in brief prayer.
Hatches closed and boarding ramps were rolled away, and on the screens of PANCOMNET four clocks marked the progress of the countdowns. First went the
Aquila
, the yellow-white of the carrier’s short-burning solid assist motors bright in the darkening sky over China. Five minutes later it was
Pegasus,roaring
up from the ground and bearing east southeast over the populous Ganges Valley.
Third was the
Southern Cross
, delayed a minute by the carrier controller because of a troubling readout. When airborne, it skimmed low across the industrial heart of Europe before turning to its ascent heading. Last to go was
Orion
, spectacular in the morning skies of North America.
By that time,
Aquila
was ready for space. Cameras on a chase plane passed on the sight as the carrier reached fifty thousand feet, angled upward, and fired the liquid-fuel motor in its tail. In its element, the ungainly pair quickly outran the chase plane. Three minutes later, on the fringes of the atmosphere, a camera in the carrier revealed the sight as explosive bolts shattered, the
Aquila
lifted gracefully, and its engines roared to hurl it on into orbit.
In all, ten million saw the moment of liftoff for one ship or another, and twenty times that number tracked a Shuttle through their skies. Twenty times
that
number gathered before PANCOMNET’s phosphor screens and pretended. For the people of Earth, this was the leavetaking, the event toward which they had been pointing. And in every city which played host to Rashuri’s last and greatest propaganda pageant, the common memory would be that the roar from human throats rivaled the roaring engines of the Shuttles themselves.
Six weeks later, Aikens and Rashuri stood together in Unity’s observation module watching as the tugs towed
Pride of Earth
away from the assembly dock.
“Do you wish you were going?” asked Rashuri.
“Jeri Anofi and I were talking about that yesterday,” said Aikens, shielding his eyes as the space station’s spin brought the brilliant disk of the sun into view at the corner of the viewport. “We agreed that out of the entire Science Service, we might be the only ones who wouldn’t be suffering from an aggravated case of envy right now.”
“Why is that?”
“Because when that ship leaves, we’ll have reached a point where we can feel as though our job is finished.”
“Ah—you enjoy that illusion, do you?”
“What do you mean?”
“The illusion of completeness.” Rashuri smiled in a knowing way. “Our kind never sees the finish line, Marc. We are runners in an infinite relay race. Each of us runs our leg alone, with no one but ourselves to see how hard we push or how demanding the course is or how much longer our part is than what they told us. When the will or body falters we pass the baton to the next runner and trust that he will not stumble or decide the race is not worth running. That’s the way life is—if you are doing anything that matters.”
“What a depressing outlook.”
“I am surprised that as a scientist it does not seem more familiar to you. Is not the history of your profession one of ideas rather than individuals? Where was the scientist ever who wrote the final word in his field?”
“But you can pose a problem within that field and see it through to a solution.”
“And there is your illusion, a blessing you enjoy because your problems are drawn from nature and need only a machine or an equation for solutions,” said Rashuri wistfully. “When your problem is human nature, you can never say you are finished.”
“You’ve built as well with people as we have with titanium. You’ve made the Consortium strong enough to carry on without you,” protested Aikens.
“Not until we have survived the shock still to come when the Senders arrive. The people’s foolish egocentric skepticism has been replaced with equally foolish hopeful dogma. They give the appearance of being ready, but it is mere rationalization. Their inner selves have not come to grips with what it means for there to be life elsewhere in the Universe.”
He shook his head. “Two generations. It takes two generations to make such changes. If you had come back and told us, ‘They will be here in sixty years,’ then at the end of sixty years they would have been ready. But
sixteen
years—” He turned away from the viewport and smiled faintly. “I have lost sight of it. Help me to my chair, please, so that I can watch the rest on the NET.”
NET commentators were calling it the “departure” of
Pride of Earth
—an appropriately unevocative word for an event in which all of the drama would be intellectual, not visceral. There would be no tongues of flame, no roiling clouds of smoke, no mechanical thunderclaps. No familiar objects would give scale to the starship and no familiar experiences to its 10g acceleration.
Few who watched—and hundreds of millions did, though more dutifully than joyfully—were capable of the mental imagery needed to grasp the dimensions of the stage where the drama would be played out. The numbers were too far beyond the ordinary. The sun was not 150 million kilometres away but a close and familiar companion in the sky; the stars not fantastically distant suns but pale lights in patterns, prone to fall from the heavens and bury themselves in a farmer’s field.
Pride of Earth
itself seemed toylike, shrunken by the screens on which it was viewed, suspended by nothing amid nothing—for most videos could not resolve the pinpoint stars unless they were artificially matted in, unnaturally large. At the same time, views of the inside of the starship left an unwarranted impression of capaciousness, since the tendency was to compare the envoys’ home with one’s own and forget the prospect of being housebound for six years or more.
As though the NET news director was aware of those shortcomings, when the last checklist was complete and the final countdown commenced, she kept the attention, focused on the crew. A camera in module A’s bridge showed Charan and Rankin seated at the controls before a one metre-wide high-resolution video “window,” while the others floated behind them, clinging to handholds near the passway in the cabin ceiling. As a consequence of the redesign, they would actually be flying feet-first—up was aft, down was forward. But since they would be in freefall and thereby weightless, that mattered little.
Continuing the emphasis on people, there were also canned shots of Driscoll at work, of Greta standing among the spectators on Unity’s observation deck, and of Rashuri’s tour of
Pride
with the Kenyan girl Jobyna. To Driscoll’s annoyance, the NET director also chose to show Laurence Eddington, beaming like a new father and surrounded by several aides from his privately funded Center for MuMan Research, acting for all the world as though the credit for the moment belonged to him.
When the countdown reached zero and the navcomp activated the drive, there was a basso thrumming, so deep it was more felt than heard, as though the vibrations from a hammerstrike were racing back and forth the length of the ship. Joanna and Rankin both felt a brief, chilling moment of vertigo, as though the AVLO field had reached through the hull to touch them.
Pride of Earth
moved out smartly, smoothly, and at first, slowly. But in the first minute its tremendous rate of acceleration became evident, as it shrank to an indistinguishable dot even in Unity’s high resolution telescopic cameras. In half an hour, it crossed the orbit of the moon. In an hour it was more than a million kilometres from Earth and still accelerating, arrowing up at an acute angle out of the plane of the ecliptic toward Cassiopeia and leaving the solar system behind.
“Godspeed,
Pride of Earth
. Good luck.”
“Roger, Unity,” said Rankin. “Keep the porch light burning.”
The shipboard routine had been constructed with two major goals in mind: to keep the crew busy and to keep them apart. It was agreed that it would be better for them to be tired than tired of each other, that company rather than privacy be in short supply.
On paper, those goals were easily accomplished. In addition to assorted duties relating to their skills and the ship’s housekeeping needs, each crew member was assigned to a daily six-hour watch in the mod A control room. The watch checklists were long and perhaps more detailed than safety or systems maintenance required, but the watches themselves went a long way toward meeting the goal of a busy crew. The staggered sleeping schedule those watches created took them out of each others’ way.
But the training schedule had allowed no time for long simulations, leaving it Charan’s task to turn paper into practice. Moreover, it would be his responsibility to cut back on the workload when the risk of rebellion arose and to cut back on free time when debilitating boredom threatened.
Achieving both would be a neat trick, considering the diversity of purposes and the weakness of his own authority. Though all the others were nominally under the same contract as any Consortium crew, Charan knew that each of his shipmates had another master. He was dependent on whatever respect his experience and knowledge could garner him, and on his ability to avoid creating conflicts between his expectations and their orders.
Unfortunately, from the moment of departure there had existed a situation which demanded confrontation. Charan faced it squarely. On the second day, when his schedule ordinarily called for him to be abed, he went to mod B and opened the rack bearing the communications electronics. He did not expect to be interrupted. Joanna was asleep, Rankin in mod E doing a power-up check of the systems on the alien half of the conference chamber, and Wenyuan was standing watch in mod A.
Following the instructions Moraji had given him before leaving, Charan removed one palm-sized plug-in subassembly and replaced it with a spare. After securing the rack, he destroyed the circuit board and placed the fragments in the waste compactor.
He then went to mod A, propelling himself through the curving connecting tunnel with an ease the others would not match for weeks.
“Major?”
“You are early,” Wenyuan said in a clipped voice.
“I’m not here to relieve you of the watch.”
Wenyuan said nothing, content to occupy himself with the console before him. “I’m wondering if you understood the rules, which were to govern communications to Earth.”
“Is it your intent to insult me by suggesting my memory is inadequate?”
“The pre-flight agreement was that whenever the com unit isn’t tied up with telemetry, we’d all be free to say what we want to the people we’re responsible to on Earth—just as they are free to listen in on all transmissions. No censorship, no secrecy. Ten minutes ago I removed a circuit card from the com unit—”
“I now understand the transient fault which appeared on the trouble board.”
“—which would have provided you with a private frequency transmitter. I should also tell you that the doctored spares were removed an hour before we left.” He paused, but Wenyuan said nothing. “It would have been an easy thing to conceal from this end, just you sitting all alone on watch. I suppose you were willing to take the chance that PANCONTRAC would decide to monitor us on a wider bandwidth. Or had Tai Chen arranged to prevent that?”
Wenyuan tilted his chair back so that he could better see Charan. “Your accusation is misplaced. I know nothing of what you say.”
“We both know that’s a he. If the pretense is important to you psychologically, feel free to continue it. But I won’t let you place your interests above the purpose of this ship.”
Because there’s nothing I want more than to finish this job in the shortest possible time and get on with my life
.
“I will not interfere with the purpose of this ship. I only wonder if anyone else aboard properly understands what it is. Not the woman—her kind is responsible for the fact that we are defenseless. Not Dr. Rankin—he cannot see beyond his experiments. And only you know that secret agenda the great Chairman Rashuri gave you.”
“I won’t defend Rashuri to you. What’s happening on Earth has little to do with us.”
“It has everything to do with us. China is the greatest nation on Earth, with more brave workers and a longer, more glorious history than any other. We have earned the right to shape the course of the future.”
Charan sighed amusedly. “Another True Believer. My sanity may not survive the voyage.” With a push of his fingertips, he launched himself at the passway. “I’ll be back to relieve you at oh-six-hundred.”
But before that time came, Wenyuan declared himself a victim of space adaptation sickness, too ill to work. Rankin and Joanna accepted the declaration at face value, but Charan knew it was Wenyuan’s defiant answer to the destruction of the transmitter.
With no specialist in space medicine aboard, Charan could see no profit in challenging Wenyuan’s claim. It would require making the transmitter incident general knowledge, and if he asked Joanna to examine the Chinese, Wenyuan would no doubt be willing to employ an emetic or a finger to provide tangible evidence of his incapacity.
Another consideration was that Wenyuan’s excuse would not be tenable for long, since the adaptation process had been found to last only a few days in even those most seriously afflicted. Charan changed the watch schedule to an eight-hour, one-in-three rotation, used the fact that smaller volumes hasten adaptation as a pretext to confine Wenyuan in his quarters, and waited. When Wenyuan missed his second watch, Charan included that fact in his report to Earth, informing Wenyuan afterward.
Charan had thought that perhaps the prospect of losing face would motivate a “recovery.” It was only when Wenyuan did not react with indignation did Charan realize he had been manipulated. Wenyuan’s “illness” was undoubtedly not for Charan’s benefit alone but also to inform Tai Chen that the transmitter had been destroyed. Almost predictably, the next morning Wenyuan was “well” again.
By the third day out, the velocity of
Pride of Earth
had reached the point where the star field shown by the high-res display in mod A began to show changes. Charan was the first to notice it: a slight curvature at the edges of the field, the few red stars in the field noticeably more orange, the thousands of white stars faintly blue. He said nothing, having expected it and being willing to allow the others their own moment of discovery.
When Joanna arrived to spell Charan, the change was obvious to him but apparently not so to her. Though he was eager to share the discovery if she took notice, when she did not remade on it in the few minutes he lingered, he did not either.
But six hours later, Rankin found Joanna sitting and staring, spellbound by the sight now revealed on the giant screen. The ship seemed to be falling slowly down a short black tunnel towards a perfect circle of blue-shifted stars.
“Doppler shift,” said Rankin. “I wondered when we would start to see it.”
“My aunt had a farm downstate,” said Joanna, not taking her eyes off the screen. “When we’d visit in the summer I used to ride my bike at night down the little side roads as fast as I dared, nothing but the branches of the trees overhead and the wind in my face and the fireflies dancing over the road ahead of me. I probably wasn’t going twenty miles an hour, but it felt like I was flying. It looks the same out there, except now we really are flying and it feels like crawling.”
Rankin settled in the seat to Joanna’s right. “We should dump this image back to PANCONTRAC. There’re some people who’ll be interested in it.”
“Is that all you see in it?”
Rankin smiled to himself. “No. That’s just what I see first.” He buckled himself in loosely. “Then I see the hallway in the house where I grew up. The hallway led to the back door, which I was always forgetting to lock, so I’d end up having to do it just before I went to bed. The hallway’d be dark but the doorway was lit up by a streetlamp outside.” He chuckled. “I always ran, because I was scared to death thinking that some night some
thing
was going to open the door from the outside before I got to it to lock it.”