Robert Silverberg: Starborne

“I doubt that it’ll work, Noelle.”

“Will you teach me anyway?”

I have not yet ceased to wonder at the fact that we are here, aboard this ship, carrying out this voyage, acting out this destiny that the universe has chosen for us. How many times have I made this entry in my journal, after all? Five? Ten? I keep returning to this one slender point, worrying it, prodding at it, marveling that this is happening and that it is happening to us. Not to me, particularly — what good would all my training on the island have been if I were still the center of my own world, like a child? — but to us, this larger entity, this group of individual and disparate and oddly assorted people who have come together willingly, even joyously, in this curious endeavor.

How odd it all is, still! Traveling through endless night to some unknown destination, some virgin world that awaits our finding. There has been nothing like it in all of human history. But this is the proper time, evidently, for it to be happening. It is our fate that we fifty people live at just this moment of time, this present epoch, when it has been made possible to journey between the stars, and so here we are, making that journey, seeking a new Earth for mankind. Someone had to do it; and we are the ones who have stepped forward to be selected, Leon and Paco and Huw and Sylvia and Noelle and I, and all the rest of us aboard this vessel.

In the minds of all those myriad people who have come and gone upon the Earth before our time, when they look forward toward us and try to envision what our era must be like, we are the godlike glittering denizens of the barely imaginable future, leading lives of endless miracle. Everything is possible to us, or so it seems to them. But to those who are not yet born, and will not be for ages, we are the merest mud-crawling primitives, scarcely distinguishable from our hairy ancestors. That we have achieved as much as we have, given our pitiful limitations, is fascinating and perplexing to them.

To ourselves, though, we are only ourselves, people with some skills and some limitations: neither gods nor brutes. It would not be right for us to see ourselves who sit at the summit of Creation, for we know how far from true that is; and yet no one ever sees himself as a pitiful primitive being, a hapless clumsy precursor of the greater things to come. For us there is always only the present. We are simply the people of the moment, living our only live, doing our best or at least trying to, traveling from somewhere to somewhere aboard this unlikely ship at many multiples of the speed of light, and hoping, whenever we let ourselves indulge in anything as risky as hope, that this voyage of ours will new shaft of light into the pool of darkness and mystery that is the reality of human existence.

The year-captain leaves the lounge and walks a few meters down the main transit corridor to the dropchute that will take him to the lower levels, where Zed Hesper’s planetary-scan operation has its headquarters. He stops off there at least once a day, if only to watch the shifting patterns of simulated stars and planets come and go on Hesper’s great galactic screen. The patterns are abstract and mean very little in astronomical terms to the year-captain — there is no way to achieve a direct view of the normal universe from within the nospace tube, and Hesper must work entirely by means of analogs and equivalents — but even so it reassures him in some obscure way to be reminded that those whose lives are totally confined by the unyielding boundaries of this small vessel sixteen light-years from the world of their birth are nevertheless not completely alone in the cosmos.

Sixteen light-years from home.

Not an easy thing to grasp, even for one trained in the mental disciplines that the year-captain has mastered. He can feel the force of the concept but not the real meaning. He can tell himself, Already we are sixteen kilometers from home , and find that concept easy enough to understand. Already we are sixteen hundred kilometers from home — a little harder, yes, but he can understand that too. What about Already we are sixteen million kilometers from home? That much begins to strain comprehension — a gulf, a gulf, a terrible empty dark gulf of enormous size — but he thinks he is able to wrap his mind about even so great a distance, after a fashion.

Sixteen light-years, though?

How can he explain that to himself?

Somewhere just beyond the tube of nospace through which the ship now travels lies a blazing host of brilliant stars, a wilderness of suns all around them, and he knows that his gray-flecked blond beard will have turned entirely white before the light of those stars glitters in the night sky of distant Earth. Yet only a few months have elapsed since the departure of the expedition. How miraculous it is, he thinks, to have come so far so swiftly.

Even so, there is a greater miracle. An hour after lunch he will ask Noelle to relay a message to Earth, summarizing the day’s findings, such as they are, and he knows that he will have an acknowledgment from Control Central in Brazil before dinner. That seems a greater miracle to him by far.

He emerges from the dropchute and is confronted by the carefully ordered chaos that is the lower deck.

Cluttered passageways snake off in many directions before him. He chooses the third from the left and proceeds aft, crouching a little to keep from banging his forehead on the multitudinous ducts that pass crisscrossingly just above him.

In the year-captain’s mind the starship sometimes appears sleek, narrow, graceful: a gleaming silver bullet streaking across the universe at a velocity that has at this point come to exceed a million kilometers per second. But he knows that the actuality is nothing like that. In fact the ship is not remotely like a bullet at all. No Newtonian forces of action and reaction are driving it, nor does it have the slightest refinement of form. Its outlines are boxy and squat and awkwardly asymmetrical, a huge clunky container even more lopsided and outlandish in shape than the usual sort of spacegoing vessel, with an elaborate spidery superstructure of extensor arms and antennas and observation booms and other excrescent externals that have the appearance of having been tacked on in a purely random way.

Yet because of the Wotan’s incredible speed and the serenity of its movements — the ship is carrying him without friction through the vast empty cloak of nospace at a pace already four times greater than that of light and increasing with every passing moment — the year-captain persists in thinking of it as he does, an imaginary projectile, sleek, narrow, graceful. There is a rightness to that which transcends mere literal sense. He knows better, but he is unable to shake that streamlined image from his mind, even though he is familiar with the true shape of the vessel inside and out. If nothing else, his routine movements through the labyrinthine interior of the starship each day provide constant and unending contradiction of his fanciful mental picture of it.

The tangled lower levels of the ship are particularly challenging to traverse. The congested corridors, cluttered with a host of storage domes and recycling coils and all manner of other utility ducts, twist and turn every few meters with the abrupt lunatic intricacy of a topological puzzle. But the year-captain is accustomed to moving through them, and in any case he is a man of extraordinary grace of movement, precise and fastidious of step. His outward physical poise reflects the deep strain of asceticism that is an innate part of his character. He is untroubled by the obstacles of these corridors — to him they have no serious existence, they are barely obstacles at all.

Lightfootedly he makes his way past a dangling maze of thrumming conduits and scrambles over a long series of swelling shallow mounds. These are the cargo nodules. In sheltered chambers beneath this level lies all the precious furniture of their journey: mediq machines, bone banks, data bubbles, pre-read vapor chips, wildlife domestication plaques, excavator arcs, soil samplers, gene replacement kits, matrix jacks, hydrocarbon converters, climate nodes and other planetary-engineering equipment, artificial intelligences, molecular replicators, heavy-machinery templates, and all the rest of their world-building storehouse. Below all that, on the deepest level of all, is the zygote bank, ten thousand fertilized ova tucked away snugly in permafreeze spansules, and enough additional sperm and unfertilized ova to maintain significant genetic diversity as the succeeding generations of the colony unfold.