Starfarers (11 page)

“Does that trouble you?”

“No.” The red head lifted defiantly. “Ourselves are what we have to measure everything by.”

“I am not so sure of that. The fact that there are countless things we will never know, and many that we could not possibly know, does not mean they do not exist—only that we cannot prove it. I am a philosophical realist.”

“Oh, me too. No physicist today takes seriously any of that metaphysics that sprang up like fungus around quantum mechanics in its early stages. I meant just that we’re tiny, an accident, a blip in space-time, and if and when we go extinct it won’t make, we won’t have made, a raindrop’s worth of difference to the cosmos.”

“I am not so sure of that, either.”

“Well, your religion—” She broke off, half embarrassed. “I’m not observant of what’s supposed to be mine.”

Nansen shook his head. “If anything, what faith I have comes from this material universe. It doesn’t seem reasonable to me that something so superbly organized, its law reaching down beneath the atom, out beyond the quasars, through all of time, that it would throw up something as rich as life and intelligence by chance. I think reality must be better integrated than that, and we are somehow as much a part of it and its course as the galaxies are.” His smile quirked. “At least, it’s a comforting thought.”

“I guess I’d like to share it,” Dayan said, “but where’s the actual evidence? And we don’t need comforting, or ought not to. Whatever we are, we can be it in style!”

He considered her. “Yes, you would feel like that.”

She met the look. “You would, too, regardless,” she answered.

For several pulsebeats they stood mute, unmoving.

“I should get back to my laboratory,” she said quickly. “Everything seems in order here, and you remember I have some experiments going. At our gamma factor, who knows what we might detect?”

Journey commenced.
The rest of the expedition had, in an unspoken mutuality, sought the common room. Together they sat watching Sol recede. In a few more hours of their time, it would no longer be the dominant star. In a day and a night of their time, thirteen and a half years would pass on Earth.

Sundaram rose from his chair. “I believe that suffices me,” he said. “If you will pardon me, I shall retire.”

“For a nap?” Kilbirnie asked, as lightly as she was able.

“Possibly,” he replied in the same spirit. “Or possibly I can pursue an idea a trifle further.” He went out.

Brent squinted after him. “Good Christ,” the second engineer muttered, “is he anything but a thinking machine?”

“Much more,” Zeyd told him sharply. “I have taken the trouble to become acquainted.”

Brent lifted a palm. “No offense meant. If he doesn’t care
for women, it makes things easier for me, if he doesn’t make a pass at me.” He saw frowns and tightened lips. “Hey, sorry, just a joke.”

Yu stood up. “I think we would be wise to inspect the recycler systems,” she said.

“Why, is there anything to fear?” Zeyd wondered.

“No. I am confident they have themselves well in hand. However, the final responsibility lies with my department,”—responsibility for the nanotechnics and processings that turned waste back into fresh air, pure water, food, and the luxuries that were almost as vital. “One more go-through, now that we are under zero-zero, will secure us more firmly in our teamwork.”

“Oh, all right “Brent said.

“Actually, a welcome diversion.” Zeyd made a gesture at the awesomeness in the screen. As the biochemist, he was involved.

“Should I come, too?” asked Mokoena, biologist and physician.

“No need, unless you wish to,” said Yu. She led Brent and Zeyd out.

Mokoena stayed. “That was neatly done,” she told those who also remained. “She defused what could have become an awkward situation.”

Cleland stirred, cleared his throat, and spoke tentatively. “Do you mean Al might have, ah, lost his temper? I don’t think so. He’s not a bad man.”

“I didn’t say he was,” Mokoena answered.

“Besides,” Ruszek put in, “I think what Wenji wants is to give her group something to do. The sooner everybody’s busy, the better. Sitting and gaping at … this … is no good.”

Mokoena chuckled. “As for that, we can trust our captain to have some ritual planned for our first supper.”

Ruszek shrugged. “Probably. He didn’t approach me about it.”

Kilbirnie jumped to her feet. “Meanwhile, we do jolly well need a break,” she exclaimed. “Who’d like a hard game of handball?”

Ruszek brightened. “Here’s one,” he said. Side by side, they left for the gymnasium.

Cleland started to follow but sank back down. “Wouldn’t you care to join them?” Mokoena asked.

His glance dropped. “I’d be too slow and clumsy.”

“Really? You’ve handled yourself well in some difficult places.”

He flushed. “That was … competing against nature … not people.”

“You mustn’t let jealousy eat you, Tim,” she said gently.

His head jerked up to stare at her. “What do you mean?”

“It sticks out of you like quills.” She leaned forward and took his right hand in hers. “Remember what the captain told us on our shakedown. We cannot afford hostility or bitterness or anything that will divide us.”

“I suppose we … should have made … our personal arrangements before we embarked.”

“You know that wasn’t practical. Especially when relationships are sure to change as we go.”

“You and Lajos—”

“It is friendly between us,” she said. “But it’s not binding on either one.” Her smile offered no more than kindliness, a kindliness without urgency or need to be anything other than itself.

The town
began as a district in a small city. Humans tend to cluster together, the more so when their way of life makes them ever more foreign to everybody else. As time passed, the district became a community in its own right. And it abided, while change swept to and fro around it like seas around a rock.

On this day, descending, Michael Shaughnessy saw it as roofs and sundomes nestled among trees. A powermast reared from their midst as if pointing at the clouds that drifted by, billowy white against blue. Otherwise grass rippled boundless. Sunflowers lifted huge yellow eyes out of its silvery green. A herd of neobison grazed some distance to the south, unafraid; only wild dogs and master-class men hunted them, not very much. Crows flocked about, black, noisy, and hopeful. Northward a long, high mound and a few broken walls were the last remembrances of Santa Verdad. Grass hid scattered slabs and shards, as it had hidden the remnants of earlier farmsteads. This region of central North America was now a vicarial preserve.

Shaughnessy set his rented vehicle down in a lot on the edge of settlement and got out. Air blew mild, full of odors the sun had baked from the soil. There was no guard, but neither was there any call for it. He walked on into town.

The street he took was immobile, with antique sidewalks. Its indurite was beginning to show the wear of feet and wheels through centuries. The trees that shaded it were younger, replaced as they grew old and died. Behind their susurrant leafage, homes stood in rows, each on its patch of lawn and garden. The houses were ancient, too, but not the same age. Most were half underground, topside curving in soft hues up to a dome: a style archaic enough. Some, though, harked further back, even to times when forms still more outmoded were enjoying revivals—a rambling ivy-grown bungalow or a peaked roof on two stories of brick, with windows and a chimney. Most displayed a token of the family who held it—a nameplate, a
mon,
an ancestral portrait, a line of calligraphy, a stone from a far planet—and the crests of ships on which members had served. Nevertheless, perhaps because they were all of modest size, perhaps because they were all in one way or another marked by time, they engendered no disharmony; they belonged together.

Not many people were about at midafternoon in this residential section. A few children sped past, a whirl of color, shouts, and laughter. A few adults walked or rode purring motorboards. Here among their own kind, they were generally
in traditional groundside garb, which ran to flamboyancy. The headbands of men glittered, their tunics were of shimmering metalloid mesh, colorful trousers banded with gold went into soft half-boots. Women’s coronets were gemmed or plumed, filmy cloaks fluttered from shoulders, lustrous biofabric shaped and reshaped itself to them as they moved. None of them knew Shaughnessy, but they greeted him with an upraised palm, a gesture he returned.

A young woman who came striding toward him stood out amidst them. She was in uniform, an opalescent sheathsuit with a comet emblem on the left breast, beret slanted across the black curls. Doubtless she was bound for a rendezvous with other officers of her ship, a business meeting or a party. Although her outfit was new to him, he realized what the ship must be.

Seeing him, she broke step. Her hand snapped to her brow, a formal salute that had not changed. He stopped and reciprocated, enjoying the sight. She was short and dark—as more and more starfarers seemed to be—and comely. He smiled. “That was kind of you, Ensign,” he said.

Her eyes searched him. He stood gaunt, tall, and gray; his own uniform, which he had donned on impulse, was blue with red trim. “You are … a captain, aren’t you?” she asked.

Her accent was not too strong for him to follow. Space-folk’s English was apparently stabilizing—especially after English ceased to be the main language spoken on this continent.

“I am that by rank, though not a shipmaster,” he replied. “How did you know?” The bars on her shoulders were the same as they had been when he wore them, but his present sunburst was quite unlike the spiral nebula that identified a captain nowadays.
No doubt emblems will also eventually stabilize,
he thought.

“We learn the history in school, sir.”

“You do? I am happy to hear that. We did in my youth, but a lot has happened since then.”
Yet what are we without our history?

“You must be newly back from a long voyage, sir,” she said. “That would be the
Our Lady.
”

“Indeed she is, home again from Aerie and Aurora.”

“I’m leaving soon,” she said eagerly.

“And that would be the
Estrella Linda,
for a longer circuit than ours was. May the passage be easy, the worlds welcoming, and your return gladsome.”

Her eyelashes vibrated. “Thank you, sir.”

She’d like to talk more,
he thought,
and I would, too, but we’re bound on our separate ways. Later? Yes.
“A good day and evening to you, Ensign.”

Both of them proceeded.

Shaughnessy’s route took him past a number of shops and service enterprises. Some were family-owned, operated by hirelings or retirees. Others belonged to outsiders: who might, though, have lived here for generations. All were antiquated.
Well, when you are gone for twenty, thirty, fifty, a hundred years, you had better have something familiar waiting for you.

He came to a house on another street of homes. A veranda fronted its stucco walls. He had called ahead from his aircar and the occupant stood in front. “Greeting, Captain,” Ramil Shauny hailed. He waved the visitor ahead, onto the porch. “Please have a seat. What may I offer you?”

Stooped and white-haired in a plain brown robe, he somehow kept the bearing of an officer. His aspect was not a shock; Michael Shaughnessy recalled the young Ramil Shauny, but you had to expect that decades would do their work, and anyhow, they had met again, not long before. What felt odd was that Ramil, a hundred and ten biological years of age and the mayor of the town, should defer to another who was just seventy. But then, Ramil was Michael’s great-grandson.

They settled into formchairs, side by side. A neochimp servant—a type of creature new to Michael, and the idea a bit repugnant—took their orders for drinks. For a while they sat unspeaking in the shade and breeze, looking out at the street. One girl who walked by carried a batcat on her wrist. Michael wondered what provision she’d make for it when
she grew up and shipped out. If she did, of course. Maybe she would rather forsake the kith of the starfarers. Theirs wasn’t an easy life. Maybe she, being smart as kithfolk usually were, could get a well-paid position in a guild or in the vicarial bureaucracy. Or maybe she, being pretty, could become a mistress of a local magnate and ride forth in twilight to fly her batcat at homing crows. Or maybe she would choose the stars.

She passed on out of sight.

“And how did your travels around Earth go?” Ramil asked.

Michael grimaced. “Not well. I thought something of Ireland would be left. I was away less than a century.”

A swing around by two suns with a planet apiece where humans can live. I should be grateful for the few such we’ve found. Without them, would any starships besides
Envoy
be running yet? It is the colonies and their need, their need less for material goods than for human contact, novelty, more word than a laser beam can bring—and, rarely, a passenger or two—it is they and what trade they carry on among each other that keeps us going.

Oh, yes, we make our occasional exploratory ventures, and sometimes one of them reaps a great profit, but most do not. I think the only reason for them, or for any starfaring, is that some people still wonder about what there may be beyond their skies.

May they keep on wondering. The voyages, the discoveries, the adventures!

But meanwhile, at the heart of it all, is Earth growing old?

“I have no more wish to settle there,” Michael said.

“Well, it’s been a hard century,” Ramil conceded.

“So I gather.”

The servant brought the drinks, whiskey and soda for Michael, wine of Maian skyberries for Ramil, together with kelp crackers and garlic nuggets. Ramil gazed into the air. “In many ways I envy you,” he said. “I wish I could have gone back to where you’ve been. But Juana would never have been happy aboard a ship. And now it’s too late for me.”

“She was worth giving up space for, though, wasn’t she?” Michael replied softly.