Майкл Бишоп - The Final Frontier - Stories of Exploring Space, Colonizing the Universe, and First Contact

She thought of Sergei, saying in his bad accent and absent grammar, which he exaggerated for effect: this is shit. You say me Alpha See is best? Absolute impossible. Is double star, no planet in habitable orbit—yes yes, whatever, minima maxima, zone of hopeful bullshit. Ghost Planet Hope. You shoot load there?

How long they had argued over this—their destination .

Gliese 581 .

Impossible .

Roger, it’s a rocky planet with liquid water .

That’s three mistakes in one sentence. Something is orbiting the star, with a period of thirteen days and a mass of two Earths and some spectral lines. Rocky, water, liquid, that’s all surmise. What’s for sure is it’s twenty light-years away. Plus, the star is a flare star. It’s disqualified twice before we even get to the hope-it’s-a-planet part .

You don’t know it’s a flare star! There are no observations!

In the absence of observations, we assume it behaves like other observed stars of its class. It flares .

You have this agenda for Alpha C, you’ve invented these criteria to shoot down every other candidate!

The criteria are transparent. We’ve agreed to them. Number one: twelve light-years is our outer limit. Right there we’re down to twenty-four stars. For reasons of luminosity and stability we prefer a nonvariable G- or K-class star. Now we’re down to five. Alpha Centauri, Epsilon Eridani, 61 Cygni, Epsilon Indi, and Tau Ceti make the cut. Alpha is half the distance of the next nearest .

Bullshit, Roger. You have bug up ass for your Alpha See. Why not disqualify as double, heh? Why this not shoot-down criteria?

Because we have modeled it, and we know planet formation is possible in this system, and we have direct evidence of planets in other double systems. And because—I know .

They ended with Alpha because it was closest. Epsilon Eridani had planets for sure, but they were better off with a closer Ghost Planet Hope than a sure thing so far they couldn’t reach it. Cosmic rays would degrade the electronics, the ship, their very cells. Every year in space brought them closer to some component’s MTBF: mean time between failures .

Well, they’d known they might lose Shackleton. It was even likely. Just not so soon.

She’d been pushing away the possibility that things had gone so badly on Earth that no one was left to reply.

She remembered walking on a fire road after a conference in Berkeley—the Bay dappled sapphire and russet, thick white marine layer pushing in over the Golden Gate Bridge—talking to Roger about Fermi’s Paradox. If the universe harbors life, intelligence, why haven’t we seen evidence of it? Why are we alone? Roger favored what he called the Mean Time Between Failures argument. Technological civilizations simply fail, just as the components that make up their technology fail, sooner or later, for reasons as indivually insignificant as they are inexorable, and final. Complex systems, after a point, tend away from robustness .

Okay. Any receivers on Earth will have to find their new signal. It was going to be like SETI in reverse: she had to make the new signal maximally detectable. She could do that. She could retune the frequency to better penetrate Earth’s atmosphere. Reprogram the PLLs and antenna array, use orthogonal FSK modulation across the K- and X- bands. Increase the buffer size. And hope for the best.

Eighty-four years to go. My God, they were barely out the front door. My God, it was lonely out here.

The mission plan had been seventy-two years, with a predicted systems-failure rate of under twenty percent. The Weibull curve climbed steeply after that. At eighty-four years, systems-failure rate was over fifty percent.

What could be done to speed them? The nuclear rocket and its fuel were for deceleration and navigation at the far end. To use it here would add—she calculated—a total of 0.0002 c to their current speed. Saving them all of three months. And leaving them no means of planetfall.

They had nothing. Their cruise velocity was unalterable.

All right, that’s that, so find a line. Commit to it and move.

Cruise at this speed for longer, decelerate later and harder. That could save a few years. They’d have to run more current through the magsail, increase its drag, push its specs.

Enter the Alpha C system faster than planned, slow down harder once within it. She didn’t know how to calculate those maneuvers, but someone else would.

Her brain was racing now, wouldn’t let her sleep. She’d been up for three days. These were not her decisions to make, but she was the only one who could.

She wrote up detailed logs with the various options and calculations she’d made. At last there was no more for her to do. But a sort of nostalgia came over her. She wanted, absurdly, to check her email. Really, just to hear some voice not her own.

Nothing broadcast from Earth reached this far except for the ACK signals beamed directly to them from Shackleton. Shackleton was also an IPN node, connecting space assets to the Internet. For cover, the ACK signals it sent to Gypsy were piggybacked on bogus Internet packets. And those had all been stored by the computer.

So in her homesick curiosity, she called them out of memory, and dissected some packets that had been saved from up to a year ago. Examined their broken and scrambled content like a torn, discarded newspaper for anything they might tell her of the planet she’d never see again.

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Weapon tensions under Islamic media policy rebels arsenals strategic counterin-surgency and to prevent Federal war law operational artillery air component to mine mountain strongholds photorecce altitudes HQ backbone Su-35 SAMs part with high maneuverability bombardments of casualty casuistry

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Hurriedly autoimmune decay derivative modern thaws in dawn’s pregnant grave shares in disgust of high frequency trading wet cities territorial earthquake poison Bayes the chairs are empty incentives to disorder without borders. Pneumonia again antibiotic resistance travels the globe with ease.

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Lost, distant, desolate. The world she’d left forever, speaking its poison poetry of ruin and catastrophe and longing. Told her nothing she didn’t already know about the corrupt destiny and thwarted feeling that had drawn humankind into the maelstrom Gypsy had escaped. She stood and walked furiously the meager length of the curved corridor, stopping at each slab, regarding the sleeping forms of her crewmates, naked in translucent bodysuits, young and fit, yet broken, like her, in ways that had made this extremity feel to them all the only chance.