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

What for?

Roger stared off into space .

He immiserates the Earth, Roger .

We all ten billion immiserate the Earth by being here .

Kakopoulos returned .

Make yourselves comfortable. Even at Mach 25, it takes some time .

It was night, and the Earth was below their window. Rivers of manmade light ran across it. Zia could see the orange squiggle of the India-Pakistan border, all three thousand floodlit kilometers of it. Then the ship banked and the window turned to the stars .

Being lord of the dark had a touch of clairvoyance in it. The dark seldom brought surprise to him. Something bulked out there and he felt it. Some gravity about it called to him from some future. Sun blazed forth behind the limb of the Earth, but the thing was still in Earth’s shadow. It made a blackness against the Milky Way. Then sunlight touched it. Its lines caught light: the edges of panels, tanks, heat sinks, antennas. Blunt radar-shedding angles. A squat torus shape under it all. It didn’t look like a ship. It looked like a squashed donut to which a junkyard had been glued. It turned slowly on its axis.

My safe house, said Kakopoulos .

It was, indeed, no larger than a house. About ten meters long, twice that across. It had cost a large part of Kakopoulos’s considerable fortune. Which he recouped by manipulating and looting several central banks. As a result, a handful of small countries, some hundred million people, went off the cliff-edge of modernity into an abyss of debt peonage .

While they waited to dock with the thing, Kakopoulos came and sat next to Zia.

Listen, my friend—

I’m not your friend .

As you like, I don’t care. I don’t think you’re stupid. When I said my foundations make people feel better, I meant the rich, of course. You’re Pakistani?

Indian actually.

But Muslim. Kashmir?

Zia shrugged .

Okay. We’re not so different, I think. I grew up in the slums of Athens after the euro collapsed. The histories, the videos, they don’t capture it. I imagine Kashmir was much worse. But we each found a way out, no? So tell me, would you go back to that? No, you don’t have to answer. You wouldn’t. Not for anything. You’d sooner die. But you’re not the kind of asshole who writes conscience checks. Or thinks your own self is wonderful enough to deserve anything. So where does that leave a guy like you in this world?

Fuck you .

Kakopoulos patted Zia’s hand and smiled. I love it when people say fuck you to me. You know why? It means I won. They’ve got nothing left but their fuck you. He got up and went away .

The pilot came in then, swamp-walking the zero g in his velcro shoes, and said they’d docked .

The ship massed about a hundred metric tons. A corridor circled the inner circumference, floor against the outer hull, most of the space taken up by hibernation slabs for a crew of twenty. Once commissioned, it would spin on its axis a few times a minute to create something like lunar gravity. They drifted around it slowly, pulling themselves by handholds .

This, Kakopoulos banged a wall, is expensive. Exotic composites, all that aerogel. Why so much insulation?

Roger let “expensive” pass unchallenged. Zia didn’t .

You think there’s nothing more important than money .

Kakopoulos turned, as if surprised Zia was still there. He said, There are many things more important than money. You just don’t get any of them without it .

Roger said, Even while you’re hibernating, the ship will radiate infrared. That’s one reason you’ll park at a Lagrange point, far enough away not to attract attention. When you wake up and start using energy, you ‘re going to light up like a Christmas tree. And you’re going to hope that whatever is left on Earth or in space won’t immediately blow you out of the sky. The insulation will hide you somewhat .

At one end of the cramped command center was a micro-apartment .

What’s this, Nikos?

Ah, my few luxuries. Music, movies, artworks. We may be out here awhile after we wake up. Look at my kitchen.

A range?

Propane, but it generates 30,000 BTU!

That’s insane. You’re not on holiday here .

Look, it’s vented, only one burner, I got a great engineer, you can examine the plans—

Get rid of it .

What! Kakopoulos yelled. Whose ship is this!

Roger pretended to think for a second. Do you mean who owns it, or who designed it?

Do you know how much it cost to get that range up here?

I can guess to the nearest million .

When I wake up I want a good breakfast!

When you wake up you’ll be too weak to stand. Your first meal will be coming down tubes .

Kakopoulos appeared to sulk .

Nikos, what is your design specification here?

I just want a decent omelette .

I can make that happen. But the range goes .

Kakopoulous nursed his sulk, then brightened. Gonna be some meteor, that range. I’ll call my observatory, have them image it .

Later, when they were alone, Zia said: All right, Roger. I’ve been very patient .

Patient? Roger snorted .

How can that little pustule help us?

That’s our ship. We’re going to steal it .

Later, Zia suggested that they christen the ship the Fuck You .

Eighty years later, Zia was eating one of Kakopoulos’s omelettes. Freeze-dried egg, mushrooms, onion, tarragon. Microwaved with two ounces of water. Not bad. He had another.

Mach 900, asshole, he said aloud.

Most of the crew were dead. Fungus had grown on the skin stretched like drums over their skulls, their ribs, their hips.

He’d seen worse. During his mandatory service, as a teenager in the military, he’d patrolled Deccan slums. He’d seen parents eating their dead children. Pariah dogs fat as sheep roamed the streets. Cadavers, bones, skulls, were piled in front of nearly every house. The cloying carrion smell never lifted. Hollowed-out buildings housed squatters and corpses equally, darkened plains of them below fortified bunkers lit like Las Vegas, where the driving bass of party music echoed the percussion of automatic weapons and rocket grenades.

Now his stomach rebelled, but he commanded it to be still as he swallowed some olive oil. Gradually the chill in his core subsided.

He needed to look at the sky. The ship had two telescopes: a one-meter honeycomb mirror for detail work and a wide-angle high-res CCD camera. Zoomed fully out, the camera took in about eighty degrees. Ahead was the blazing pair of Alpha Centauri A and B, to the eye more than stars but not yet suns. He’d never seen anything like them. Brighter than Venus, bright as the full moon, but such tiny disks. As he watched, the angle of them moved against the ship’s rotation.

He swept the sky, looking for landmarks. But the stars were wrong. What had happened to Orion? Mintaka had moved. The belt didn’t point to Sirius, as it should. A brilliant blue star off Orion’s left shoulder outshone Betelgeuse, and then he realized. That was Sirius. Thirty degrees from where it should be. Of course: it was eight light-years from Earth. They had come half that distance, and, like a nearby buoy seen against a far shore, it had changed position against the farther stars.

More distant stars had also shifted, but not as much. He turned to what he still absurdly thought of as “north.” The Big Dipper was there. The Little Dipper’s bowl was squashed. Past Polaris was Cassiopeia, the zigzag W, the queen’s throne. And there a new, bright star blazed above it, as if that W had grown another zag. Could it be a nova? He stared, and the stars of Cassiopeia circled this strange bright one slowly as the ship rotated. Then he knew: the strange star was Sol. Our Sun.