“Will we be able to outrun it, do you think? By the time the wave-front catches up, will it still be—are we dead?”
Herb gave me a baleful look. “How long is a piece of rope?”
“He’s right,” Solomon said. “Tell me exactly what happened to the sun, what percentage of its mass was converted to what forms of energy in what proportion by the explosion, and perhaps a horseback guess could be made, by somebody as smart as Matty was. But we know hardly anything beyond the bare fact of humanity’s annihilation. It could easily have been a violent enough event to fry us even as far away as Bravo. Indications are it was. We may be as dead as those poor bastards in Luna—just on a longer string.”
“Jesus Christ!” Pat said, at the same time I said, “Covenant!” in the same tone of voice. I’d never heard him say that before, and took it as a clue to why discussion of religion upset him. Diehard closet Old Christians in the family might even help explain what a man like him was doing on a voyage to nowhere in the first place.
“If the explosion was that powerful,” Herb said, “we’ll never reach Immega, will we? At no time will we exceed the speed of light, and the wavefront is only six years and change behind us—”
“Ten years and change,” Solomon corrected. “We’ve been traveling for 6.41 years. But we passed half the speed of light in the first year, and by now we’re making more than ninety-seven percent of it. Lorenz time contraction. It adds up.”
“So will it catch us along the way, or not? I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to think of the question.” I’d always prided myself on being quick on the uptake…but I decided to give myself a pass, this time.
Solomon shrugged. “I can’t believe I don’t have the exact answer ready for you. Al Mulherin’s been crunching away at it, but I haven’t checked since yesterday. We’ve all been thinking of other things than survival, that’s all. Give me a second.” He began tapping on a keyboard.
I tried to work it out roughly in my head. The Sheffield and waves of evil start out just under ten and a half light-years apart, then race. Us at a very high fraction of c which will get even higher, but will never reach one. Them at c. At what point will the second train catch the first? It seemed like a classic grade school math puzzle. But relativistic factor kept royally screwing up my calculations. And then I realized I’d forgotten to factor in deceleration… I gave up and waited for Solomon. I knew my father would have closed his eyes for a moment and just known the answer.
“I think we’re all right,” Solomon said finally “As long as the ramjet keeps ramming. We expect to reach Bravo after twenty years, our time, 90.4 years in Sol time.” He winced slightly as the phrase left his lips, but kept going. “Assuming a lethal concentration of gamma rays is in fact after us, it will arrive at our neighborhood about seven and a half years later. With luck, we can get dug in deep enough to weather it out in time.”
Herb stood up to his full height and clapped his hands together, loud enough to make all of us flinch. “Well, that is just the best fucking news in the fucking Galaxy,” he said loudly. “That makes my fucking day.”
He spun on his heel and went to get the Irish whiskey. Solomon and I exchanged a nervous glance. If Herb were to go berserk in this enclosed space we would have a serious problem. He turned around and caught us at it, and his booming laughter was as loud and almost as startling as his handclap had been.
“You dopes, I’m serious! The distance between one and infinity is nothing compared to the distance between zero and one.”
I decided to assume he was not cracking up. “What do you mean, Herb?”
“Think it through. There’s one and only one reason we know, for sure, what’s happened behind us. Chance dictated that two of our three telepaths in the System were in blast shadow. For my sister, Hell didn’t arrive at lightspeed, but at something closer to the speed of Terra’s rotation. She had time—barely—to hear and comprehend what was coming at her.”
Get him off this subject. “Okay. I don’t take your point.”
“How many other colonies do you think were that lucky?”
Oof.
“Prophet’s prick!” Pat said. “I never even thought—”
“Telepath pairs were even scarcer on the ground in the early days,” Herb said. “Most of the earlier colonies made do with two. And most of those that shipped three are down to two, now Li kept up on such things.”
“We’ve got to send a laser!” Pat cried, and started to get up.
Solomon caught his shoulder and pulled him back down. “Calm down, son. Captain Bean has already long-since notified the only colony we can help.”
“But there are—” He frowned. “Oh. Oh. Shit.”
Any laser or radio message we sent would travel at lightspeed. Only one human colony happened to even lie in the constellation of Boötes: 44 Boo, from which our destination had been discovered. Taking into account the offset (it was not dead ahead), it was something like thirty-five years ahead of us by laser…and doom would arrive there in forty-one years. That was the one and only colony we could possibly hope to warn, and we could give them an absolute maximum of six years in which to prepare. That had already been done.
Any other colony lacking a telepath whose partner had chanced to be in apposition at the moment of explosion, and thus needing us to warn it, was screwed. Hellfire was coming for them at the speed of light, and we were powerless to alert them in time.
Between us, the Sheffield and 44 Boötes probably now held the very last surviving fragments of the human race. All the rest would probably be gone within sixty-five years.
We had to get to Bravo. We had to survive. It was far more than just our own lives at stake, now. It was our species. We were The Last Of The Solarians.
I remembered a spiritual book Dr. Amy had had me read the year before, by a man named Gaskin. I had been easy to persuade because the farmer in me had resonated to its title, This Season’s People. It turned out to derive from a famous saying of the Jewish mystic Shlomo Carlebach:
We are this season’s people.
We are all the people there are, this season.
If we blow it, it’s blown.
I was the guy who had been trying to run away from all responsibility. And found just that.
I often wish I could believe in a deity, so I could compliment Him or Her on His or Her sense of humor. And then go for His or Her throat.
“How long, Sol?” Herb asked.
Solomon winced to hear his own name. “How long what?”
“Blue sky it with me, here. Optimistic assumptions throughout. I just want to get a vague sense of how far away the payoff is.”
“I’m still not understanding you.”
“Assume all goes as well as we can reasonably hope, from here on in. The folks at 44 Boo dig in successfully, and survive with zero fatalities. We make it to Bravo, dig in successfully, and also survive with no further fatalities. Round our numbers off to five hundred for convenience, and assume 44 Boo has twice that population by this point.”
Sol nodded. “All right.”
“The human race now numbers fifteen hundred, total, plus an indeterminate number of frozen ova. It’s in two pieces, forty-odd light-years apart, with no telepathic links. That’s our starting gene pool and situation. We have specs for virtually every piece of proven technology the System had when we left, 44 Boo nearly the same, and we’ll both get better and better at making our own parts, so again let’s simplify, and just say we’ll be able to build new relativistic ships again in a single generation.”
Sol was dubious. “That’s a damn big simplification.”
“On the time scale I’m talking about, it’ll disappear in the noise,” Herb insisted.
“Go on.”
“Here’s what I want to know, and I’ll settle for a very rough approximation: how many centuries will it be, do you suppose, before we have rebuilt and protected our civilization sufficiently so that we can track down those shit-sucking ba
ck-shooting baby-burning vermin and blow up THEIR fucking star?”
His voice rang in the silence that followed. Standing there tall with a fifth of whiskey in his hand and death in his eyes, he had never looked more like a Viking chieftain.
“How many generations?” Herb continued. “A lot, I know—but roughly how many, do you suppose? How far away were we ourselves from having the power to make stars go nova?”
“I repeat,” Sol began, “I really think we should be careful not—”
“You’re right, sorry,” Herb conceded impatiently “A nova is a natural phenomenon, and we know this probably was not. G2s don’t nova. That is a point worth remembering. So: how far away were we from being able to make stars go boom? How far do you suppose we are now from being bright enough to reverse-engineer it, once we start getting some hard data on exactly what was done?”
“It won’t even start to happen in our lifetimes,” Solomon said.
“I know that. I’m not talking about me. I’m talking about the human race. It numbers fifteen hundred people, and it has only two tasks. Hide. And hit back. I’d like to try and get a loose sense of how many centuries it’s going to be before there’s likely to be any good news again. My intuitive feeling is, on the order of five hundred years. What’s your guess?”
The idea was breathtaking, heartbreaking. I had vaguely understood that a very long, very hard task lay ahead of me. Until now I had not grasped that it probably lay ahead of my remotest descendants.
Nobody had an answer for him.
I stood up and went to him. “Unhand that bottle.” He passed it over, and I topped up my Irish coffee, which had been down to its last inch, tried it, and it seemed the right concentration for the moment.
“Damn it,” Pat said. “Damn it to all hells at once. We managed to evolve beyond war. Why couldn’t they?” He shook his fist angrily in the general direction of the hull, and the stars beyond it.
“We didn’t evolve beyond war,” Herb said. “Just beyond violence—and we’ve only been free of that for a whole whopping century and a half. You still know how to shake your fist. There was a trade war going on back in the System last week, remember? The first. Who knows how far it might have gone?”
“Even if that’s true, we were getting better,” Pat cried. “Are we really going to have to go back to thinking and acting like the Prophets, and the crazy Terrorist nuts and Cold War nuts before them? Just when we were finally starting to grow up?”
There was a truly depressing thought.
I remembered Solomon’s dichotomy of the Thrilled and the Threatened. Was the human race really going to have to spend the next half a millennium or more being as conservative, as paranoid, as utterly pragmatic and cynical and ruthless as Genghis Khan, or Conrad of Conrad?
What is thrilling—if entities that can burst a sun want you dead? Anything besides simple survival itself?
Would any human above the age of six ever again look up at the stars in the night sky in simple wonder?
For that alone, I wanted revenge. Never mind billions of unearned deaths by fire.
I went to the Star Chamber, alone. I couldn’t talk any of the others into coming along. Solomon nagged me into taking a sandwich along. Autodocs feed you well but do not fill the stomach, he pointed out. I had to admit that something to soak up all the Irish coffee did seem like a good idea.
The Star Chamber might seem like a pointless waste of cubic, but few aboard the Sheffield ever thought so. Sure, the Sim illusion you get with naked eyeballs in that huge spherical room is nowhere near as convincing as what you can get while wearing the rig. How could it be? And there’s only the single illusion.
But you can share it.
In conventional Sim, in a tiny cubicle, wearing all the gear, you can have people around you, totally convincing ones…but you never really forget they’re not real. And only partly because the smells are never better than close.
But in the Star Chamber, you could look at the stars in the company of other human beings. Just then, I could not have borne to look at them by myself.
As I’d expected, it was just as heavily in use as the rest of the Sim Suite. I had to wait awhile for a space to become available. An argument was going on behind me as I reached the head of the line. “I know G2s can’t go nova, I never said it was a nova,” someone kept repeating. “What I said was, and is, there could be some equally natural process, other than the nova mechanism, by which a star can explode. Obviously it would be an exceedingly rare event, I’m not a fool—”
It was only when a bystander interrupted, “You play one brilliantly, Citizen,” that I realized the speaker was Robin. My oldest living girlfriend. “We all took your point the first three times you made it,” he went on. “And I imagine my great-grandchildren will be both the first to know whether you’re right or not…and the first to give a damn. But right now, and until the day they’re born, could you possibly shut up?”
Some atavistic hindbrain mechanism caused me to consider intervening on her behalf. But I did much prefer the silence the stranger had produced.
Five minutes later it was broken—from inside the Chamber.
At first, all I could tell was that someone was yelling in there, very loud. But as they got him closer to the outer door, his tone and then his words became audible. I don’t think it took any of us on line more than half a second to understand. He was screaming at the top of his lungs, with berserker rage. At the stars.
“—shit-eating piss-drinking pig-fucking goat-sucking maggot-licking baby-raping well-poisoning illegitimate spawn of degenerate diseased vermin-vomit”—he was shrieking as they forced him out into the corridor—“I’ll pop your mutant eyeballs with your own—” and at that point Proctor DeMann came trotting past me, touched him gently near the base of the neck, and caught him as he fell. He stood there with the man in his arms, his breathing as slow and measured as if he’d been standing in line with me, and gestured with his chin.
“Next!” he said.
I nodded to him, stepped into the lightlock, waited for the outer door to iris shut, then opened the inner one and entered the Chamber, almost on the heels of the two people who’d ejected the screamer. I stopped and waited for my eyes to adjust, and for the self-appointed bouncers to resume their seats so I could tell which was the empty one. The experience of the room came on like a powerful drug rush.
There was nothing to the Star Chamber, in one sense. A spherical room that was cut into upper and lower hemispheres by a floor filled with sling couches—but seemed not to be because the floor and couch frames were transparent. That was basically it. Until it was powered up.
But then one of the Sheffield’s countless servers caused the walls to display the universe.
Not perfectly, as I said. But well enough to fool the subconscious. And the heart.
Not the unrecognizable mess we would have seen out of portholes, if there had been such silly things—but a corrected image, which removed the eye-wrenching distortions and displacements of relativistic Doppler effect. The universe as it actually was out there right now, for anybody who was not racing photons. As we would see it if somehow it were magically possible to instantly shed all our hideous inertia and decelerate to sublight velocity for a few moments. Well, obviously not as it was right now; there had to be some lag, and some assumptions made. But close.
It was quiet and still in there, now that the sufferer had been removed. By the time my pupils had finished adjusting, I saw that the room had been reprogrammed as I had expected it would be. Known it would be.
When humans sit together to look at the stars, they look up. It’s way older than rational thought, possibly older than thought. So the Star Chamber was customarily programmed to place whatever part of the universe the Chamber’s inhabitants found most interesting directly overhead. Most of the time, though by no means always, that had meant Immega 714 could be found at galactic high noon.
Today, Peekaboo was directly under our feet, a
nd we were all looking at where Sol had been.
As I had expected, someone had explained to the computer that it could delete Sol from its permanents, now. To have seen it there still blazing in the sky would have been unendurable. I had vaguely wondered if they would attempt some graphic representation of the explosion, but of course they had had better sense. To watch that happening forever in slow motion would have been equally unendurable.
What was there was endurable—but only just. Only just barely. It was shocking, and…neither “pitiful” nor “humbling” even come close to touching it, but those are the two closest words I can find. It didn’t matter in the slightest that I had fully expected it, that I understood it intellectually and had for all my adult life, that it was old news.
It was simply heartbreaking, mind-numbing, soul-chilling, to see, with my own eyes, what an incredibly tiny, insignificant hole the removal of Sol left in the fabric of the Galaxy.
If I had not known exactly where to look, and been thoroughly familiar with that particular degree of the sky I’d have missed it. Anyone would have.
As I stared, mesmerized, it came to me for no reason at all that the very first cinematic work to take starflight seriously had been titled Star Wars. The irony was mind-melting.
I thought I felt a great disturbance in The Force—as if millions of voices had cried out as one, and then were silent.
Millions, you say? Hell, son, suck it up and walk it off! For a second there, I thought you had a problem.
Try forty-seven billion.
That was why I had come here, I realized. I’d had to see it with my own eyes. Among other things, I needed to put my brain more in synch with my mind.
My mind understood all about the universe and its correct scale and mankind’s terrible insignificance in it—intellectually. It always had. But my brain had always seen things differently. To it, the Solar System was practically everything there was, and tiny hypothetical little Brasil Novo was the rest, and in between the two lay nothing but a gap in the map—one wildly out of scale. Like a Mercator projection of a globe, it was a false representation of reality that was much more useful than the truth.