Ivan Cat - The Burning Heart of Night

Left to its own, Long Reach would chew over what it saw, somehow pick a star, and go there.

However, when humans first captured four adolescent fugueships feeding on Saturn's rings, three thousand years ago, scientists had quickly figured out the purpose of the eye-dish array and devised an easy way to trick the huge creatures into going wherever their would-be human masters wanted them to.

Karr called it the carrot-on-a-stick method of interstellar navigation.

Attached where the poles came to a point, on a remote controllable arm, was a translucent sphere that glowed warm, yellow light: the starlure. The starlure simulated types of starlight that Long Reach found irresistible. It was only about eight inches in diameter, but because it was so close and so bright compared to real stars, the fugueship inevitably preferred it and tried to move in the direction of the decoy star. Move the lure one way, and Long Reach went that way. Move the lure the other way, and Long Reach went that way. The blackout tent eliminated any possible distraction. It was simple and effective.

And thanks to Bob, broken.

Karr leaned in and pressed colored studs on the back of the crystal globe. Different types of starlight strobed in a test pattern. The lure itself was unhurt, but the articulated arm was jammed. Long Reach was mindlessly following a misplaced starlure into deep space. Karr knew that the regulation-approved solution for this situation was to fix the mechanism.

Instead, he pushed the mess aside.

Before coming outside, Karr had pored over star charts, searching for a new star to set course for, a star within one degree of Long Reach's present disastrous trajectory, which also had a colony.

According to the charts, half a dozen stars beyond Evermore were candidates for colonization, which lessened Karr's anxiety a bit. The human race was obsessed with expansion. If stars could be colonized, they would be colonized and there was a decent chance that another fugueship had already made a run through that area, planting colonists wherever it could. Unfortunately Karr's charts had been compiled a century ago by long-range observation; the slow speed of interstellar communication deprived him of more recent information about which of those stars now had colonies and which did not. Karr fretted long and hard. Any choice he made was necessarily a stab in the dark and an unlucky choice would find his beloved Long Reach trapped orbiting a star barren of planets, without even a gas giant to refuel from.

That would be a death sentence.

So Karr removed the blinder fabric completely from the tent poles. He would not choose a destination at all? he would let Long Reach choose. Karr had great faith in the beast. It had a certain headstrong simplicity in the way it liked to do things: easily, directly and? quite frequently? correctly.

Long ago Karr figured out that the less he fought its instinctual behavior, the better things turned out. And while no one had ever handed over the reigns before, whatever natural methods fugueships used to select a destination had to be better than Karr's wild guess.

He hoped.

For half an hour nothing happened. Karr hung from the cleats and forced himself to be patient. He patted the lumpy hide overhead. "That's all right. Take all the time you need." More time passed. Karr was looking down at the small slice of stars visible between shafts of engine fire and feeling the intense vertigo, when the living reflector dish flexed, then flexed again. It focused on one star, then another and another.

"That's it," Karr encouraged, fascinated. "Now you've got the hang of it."

Long Reach cycled through the candidates, narrowing from many to few. Eventually three patterns repeated. Long Reach pondered these for a long while, apparently confused.

"Come on, you can do it." Karr held his breath. Finally Long Reach eliminated one of the three. After that it didn't take long to make the cut from two down to one.

The eye focused and held in position.

"Yes!" exclaimed Karr.

He felt a gentle flexing of hide above him and saw a change in engine output. The nozzle orifice on the galactic core side contracted, decreasing that column of thrust, and the opposite orifice widened, increasing proportionally. Long Reach was turning. Karr did not let up his death grip on the pinch-cleats, but a small portion of tension relaxed its grip on his muscles. For better or for worse, his ship had made its choice.

The outdated star charts identified Long Reach's selected destination as CG-423, a third-rate yellow sun circled by planets in habitable orbits. It was far beyond Evermore and would lengthen the remaining portion of the mission to seventeen years. Karr checked the radio waves for signs of a colony beacon.

There was only static. So far CG-423 didn't sound great, but again he forced himself to be patient.

Maybe a colony had recently been seeded there and transmissions just hadn't made it out far enough for Karr to pick them up.

With no further time trouble, Karr went back to his quarters and dosed up on fugue. After that, the years ticked off at the subjective rate of one per day. Karr fixed the starlure. He did not turn it on, but he had to fix it; broken things drove him crazy. After that he kept busy tending his ailing ship. He had become very attuned to its life rhythms over the centuries and those rhythms were far out of balance.

Cycles of creation and destruction, which resorbed old tissues to make room for new ones, were fighting one another, new tissue destroying new tissue, old layering on top of old. Karr had never seen the likes of it. Entire regions were dying.

"We're going to make it. I'll keep you going," he would say, pouring his heart into his work and somehow he did keep the ship going during the seventeen-year detour, which was testimony to his skill as a Pilot, although Karr didn't see that in his self-recriminating mood.

When Long Reach slowed to the point that its electromagnetic ramscoop could no longer funnel up interstellar hydrogen and therefore switched to internal reserves, Karr's worries abated a bit. Operating long range interferometers from the brainroom, he identified several Jupiter-mass planets orbiting CG-423. And, CG-423-B, a small planet in the habitable range, showed spectra for nitrogen, oxygen, and methane, good indications of life. No beacon as of yet, but Karr focused on the good news.

Later, when Long Reach decelerated into the CG-423 system, Karr was downright relieved. There, nestling eighty-seven million kiloyards close to the warm yellow sun, was a silvery-blue orb flecked With white clouds. CG-423-B was a habitable world. Upon seeing it, no fugueship Pilot could pass by without planting a colony. Karr was certain of that.

Karr scratched the brainroom walls affectionately. "Excellent choice."

It was six realtime months to CG-423-B? twelve fuguetime hours? and they were a roller coaster of hope and disappointment. Karr was prepared to fight the ship's tendency to steer for a gas giant, as it normally did upon entering a new system; feasting upon ring belts and atmosphere, Long Reach was able to replenish stores of fuel, carbon, and other heavy elements. However, Long Reach surprised Karr by heading straight for the silver-white planet. Karr attributed the peculiar behavior to a symptom of its sickness and spent his time monitoring its condition and looking for signs of a colony.

There was a satellite in orbit around CG-423-B.

And Karr was not talking about any of the planet's four small celestial moons, but a man-made satellite? probably a weather-communication satellite. Karr had set them up for each of the colonies he planted. Another fugueship had been here. Good news. Unfortunately, the satellite did not respond when Karr interrogated it. More urgent levels of communication protocol all failed. Only Karr's own weak signal echoed back. Bad news. The satellite was dead. That meant the colony had lost the capability to service it. The only useful information to be gleaned from the dead satellite was the colony's probable location, which should be on the surface, directly under its geosynchronous position.