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

What do we know about Adel Ranger Santos?

That he was sixty-five percent oxygen, nineteen percent carbon, ten percent hydrogen, three percent nitrogen, two percent calcium, one percent phosphorus, some potassium, sulfur, sodium, chlorine, magnesium, iodine and iron and just a trace of chromium, cobalt, copper, fluorine, manganese, molybdenum, selenium, tin, vanadium and zinc. That he was of the domain Eukarya , the kingdom of Animalia , the phylum Chordata , subphylum Vertebrata , the class Mammalia , the order Primates , the family Hominidae , the genus Homo and the species Novo . That, like the overwhelming majority of the sixty trillion people on the worlds of Human Continuum, he was a hybrid cybernetic/biological system composed of intricate subsystems including the circulatory, digestive, endocrine, excretory, informational, integumenary, musculo-skeletal, nervous, psycho-spiritual, reproductive, and respiratory. That he was the third son of Venetta Patience Santos, an Elector of the Host of True Flesh and Halbert Constant Santos, a baker of fine breads. That he was male, left-handed, somewhat introverted, intelligent but no genius, a professed but frustrated heterosexual, an Aries, a virgin, a delibertarian, an agnostic and a swimmer. That he was nineteen Earth standard years old and that until he stumbled, naked, out of the molecular assembler onto the Godspeed he had never left his home world.

The woman caught Adel before he sprawled headlong off the transport stage. “Slow down.” She was taller and wider than any of the women he’d known; he felt like a toy in her arms. “You made it, you’re here.” She straightened him and stepped back to get a look. “Is there a message?”

—a message ?—buzzed Adel’s plus.

minus buzzed—yes give us clothes—

Normally Adel kept his opposites under control. But he’d just been scanned, transmitted at superluminal speeds some two hundred and fifty-seven light-years, and reassembled on a threshold bound for the center of the Milky Way.

“Did they say anything?” The woman’s face was tight. “Back home?”

Adel shook his head; he had no idea what she was talking about. He hadn’t yet found his voice, but it was understandable if he was a little jumbled. His skin felt a size too small and he shivered in the cool air. This was probably the most important moment of his life and all he could think was that his balls had shrunk to the size of raisins.

“You’re not… ? All right then.” She covered her disappointment so quickly that Adel wondered if he’d seen it at all. “Well, let’s get some clothes on you, Rocky.”

minus buzzed—who’s Rocky?—

“What, didn’t your tongue make the jump with the rest of you?” She was wearing green scrubs and green open-toed shoes. A oval medallion on a silver chain hung around her neck; at its center a pix displayed a man eating soup. “Can you understand me?” Her mouth stretched excessively, as if she intended that he read her lips. “I’m afraid I don’t speak carrot, or whatever passes for language on your world.” She was carrying a blue robe folded over her arm.

“Harvest,” said Adel. “I came from Harvest.”

“He talks,” said the woman. “Now can he walk? And what will it take to get him to say his name?”

“I’m Adel Santos.”

“Good.” She tossed the robe at him and it slithered around his shoulders and wrapped him in its soft embrace. “If you have a name then I don’t have to throw you back.” Two slippers unfolded from its pockets and snugged onto his feet. She began to speak with a nervous intensity that made Adel dizzy. “So, Adel, my name is Kamilah, which means ‘the perfect one’ in Arabic which is a dead language you’ve probably never heard of and I’m here to give you the official welcome to your pilgrimage aboard the Godspeed and to show you around but we have to get done before dinner which tonight is synthetic roasted garab…”

—something is bothering her—buzzed minus—it must be us—

“…which is either a bird or a tuber, I forget which exactly but it comes from the cuisine of Ohara which is a world in the Zeta 1 Reticuli system which you’ve probably never heard of…”

—probably just a talker—plus buzzed .

“…because I certainly never have.” Kamilah wore her hair kinked close against her head; it was the color of rust. She was cute, thought Adel, in a massive sort of way. “Do you understand?”

“Perfectly,” he said. “You did say you were perfect.”

“So you listen?” A grin flitted across her face. “Are you going to surprise me, Adel Santos?”

“I’ll try,” he said. “But first I need a bathroom.”

There were twenty-eight bathrooms on the Godspeed; twenty of them opened off the lavish bedrooms of Dream Street. A level below was the Ophiuchi Dining Hall, decorated in red alabaster, marble and gilded bronze, which could seat as many as forty around its teak banquet table. In the more modest Chillingsworth Breakfasting Room, reproductions of four refectory tables with oak benches could accommodate more intimate groups. Between the Blue and the Dagger Salons was the Music Room with smokewood lockers filled with the noblest instruments from all the worlds of the Continuum, most of which could play themselves. Below that was a library with the complete range of inputs from brainleads to books made of actual plant material, a ballroom decorated in the Nomura III style, a VR dome with ten animated seats, a gymnasium with a lap pool, a black box theater, a billiard room, a conservatory with five different ecosystems and various stairways, hallways, closets, cubbies, and peculiar dead ends. The MASTA, the molecular array scanner/transmitter/assembler was located in the Well Met Arena, an enormous airlock and staging area that opened onto the surface of the threshold. Here also was the cognizor in which the mind of the Godspeed seethed.

It would be far too convenient to call the Godspeed mad. Better to say that for some time she had been behaving like no other threshold. Most of our pioneering starships were built in hollowed out nickel-iron asteroids—a few were set into fabricated shells. All were propelled by matter-antimatter drives that could reach speeds of just under a hundred thousand kilometers per second, about a third of the speed of light. We began to launch them from the far frontiers of the Continuum a millennium ago to search for terrestrial planets that were either habitable or might profitably be made so. Our thresholds can scan planetary systems of promising stars as far away as twenty light-years. When one discovers a suitably terrestrial world, it decelerates and swings into orbit. News of the find is immediately dispatched at superluminal speed to all the worlds of the Continuum; almost immediately materials and technicians appear on the transport stage. Over the course of several years we build a new orbital station containing a second MASTA, establishing a permanent link to the Continuum. Once the link is secured, the threshold continues on its voyage of discovery. In all, the Godspeed had founded thirty-seven colonies in exactly this way.

The life of a threshold follows a pattern: decades of monotonous acceleration, cruising and deceleration punctuated by a few years of intense and glorious activity. Establishing a colony is an ultimate affirmation of human culture and even the cool intelligences generated by the cognizors of our thresholds share in the camaraderie of techs and colonists. Thresholds take justifiable pride in their accomplishments; many have had worlds named for them. However, when the time comes to move on, we expect our thresholds to dampen their enthusiasms and abort their nascent emotions to steel themselves against the tedium of crawling between distant stars at three-tenths the speed of light.