The ions and energies that were to surround them would blank out electromagnetic communications. Modulated neutrinos passed easily through, and Pytheas was equipped to receive them, but the beams it could cast dispersed too rapidly. That huge facility which was capable of sending an identifiable message hundreds or thousands of light-years was fixed in place, locked on remote targets that might eventually respond.
Now, through the net and beyond it, out to thousands of kilometers, the harvester fields came into being. Their forces meshed, intricate, powerful, precise, an ever-changing configuration molded by the controlling computers and what came to them through their sensors. New laser beams sprang from the ship’s bows, swordlike, cleaving electron from nucleus. The fields seized on the plasma and swept it backward, well away from the hull; impact on metal would have released X-rays in swiftly lethal concentration. Aft to the fire chamber, which was itself a magnetohydrodynamic vortex, the gas went.
Another immaterial engine released a little of the antimatter it held suspended, ionized it, sped it into the maelstrom and the star gas. Particles met, annihilated, became energy, the ultimate conversion, nine tunes ten to the twentieth ergs per gram. That fury lit fusion reactions among other protons, and continued them. Behind the heavily shielded stern of Pytheas, a tiny sun blazed forth.
Powered by it, the fields hurled most of the plasma aft. Reaction drove the ship forward. Full weight came back to her crew, an Earth gravity of acceleration, nine hundred eighty centimeters per second added every second to velocity.
At that rising pace, in just less than a year the voyagers would transit half a light-year of distance, and their speed would be close to that of light.
14
Nothing natural could have steered the ship. It did itself, a set of systems joined in a unity as complex as a living organism, maintaining its motion and existence outwardly, its livable environment inwardly. Humans became passengers, occupying their tune as best they might.
Living quarters were bleakly functional, eight individual staterooms, a gymnasium, a workshop, a galley, a dining saloon, a common room, certain auxiliaries such as bathrooms and a dream chamber. Making them pleasanter gave enjoyment to those whose talents lay in that direction. Yukiko urged that they begin with the common room. “It is where we shall most be together,” she said. “Not simply for ease and company. In trouble too, or communion, or awe.”
Hanno nodded. “Our marketplace,” he agreed. “And markets began with temples.”
“Well,” cautioned Tu Shan, “we’d better plan things so the decorating doesn’t interfere with the use.”
The three found themselves alone there one evening. The ship maintained Earth’s immemorial cycle of day and night, the clock to whose beat life had arisen and evolved. It would gradually shift to the different rhythm of the destination world. Dinner was past and others had withdrawn to their rest or their recreations, none of which happened to be here. In the corridor beyond, twilight deepened toward darkness. Soon the widely spaced soft ganglights would turn on.
Tu Shan fixed a box to wall brackets he had forged in vine shapes. “I thought you were going to carve decorations on that first,” Hanno remarked.
“I want to put soil in it now and begin raising flowers,” Tu Shan explained. “Later I will make an ornamental railing and attach it.”
Yukiko gave him a smile. “Yes, you do need flowers,” she agreed. “Living things.” What grew beneath her own hands was a mural painting, a landscape of hills, village, bamboo, in the foreground a blossoming cherry bough.
“I will carve the railing in animal shapes.” He sighed. “If only we could have animals aboard.” Their DNA patterns reposed in the databank. Someday, if all went well, there would be synthesis, growth tanks, release.
“Yes, I miss my ship’s cats,” Hanno admitted. “But a sailor got used to doing without most things. It made going ashore that much the happier.” His fingers plied rope, knot-work to hang at certain spots. Its Phoenician pattern would not clash with the Asian motif. He glanced at the mural. “That’s becoming lovely.”
Yukiko bowed in his direction. “Thank you. A poor copy, I fear, of what I can remember from a building that perished centuries ago.” —before things were recorded, for presentation at will in total-sensory imaging.
“You should have done it on Earth.”
“Nobody seemed interested.”
“Or had you simply lost heart? Never mind. We’ll beam it back from our planet. It’s as special as anything we’re likely to find there.” Its physical self would long since have gone down into the databank, its materials into the nanotech processors, converted to whatever was needed for the next project.
Aliyat had contended that the whole idea was foolish. No one wanted to spend fifteen years staring at a changeless picture. Why make it, to destroy and replace with something else, when projection panels could instantly create any of thousands of simulacra?
“I think before then, our friends will accept that this work was worth doing,” Hanno added.
“They kindly let me indulge in my pastime,” Yukiko said.
“No, I mean for its own sake. More than a pastime. We could invent plenty of mere amusements. We doubtless will. If necessary, we can just wait. A year goes by fast after you’ve had hundreds or thousands of them.”
“Unless much happens,” Tu Shan observed.
Hanno nodded. “True. I don’t pretend to understand what the physicists mean by time, but for people, it isn’t so-and-so many measured units; it’s events, experiences. A man who crowds his life and dies young has lived longer than one who got old sitting in tame sameness.”
“Perhaps the old man was finding his way toward wisdom,” Yukiko ventured. She lowered her brush. Her tone grew troubled. “For me, that was never possible. My years of quietness always Became, at last, a burden. It is the penalty of never aging. The body does not ease its hold on the spirit.”
“Nature meant us to die, get out of the way, leave whatever we gahied to the new generations,” Tu Shan said heavily. “Yet nature brought forth our kind. Are we monsters, freaks? Today everybody is like us. Should that be? Will it in the end cost the race its soul?”
Hanno kept busy with his ropework. “I don’t know,” he answered. “I don’t even know if your questions mean anything. We are unique, we Survivors. We were born into age and death. We grew up expecting them for ourselves. Then we endured them, over and over and over, hi everybody we loved, till we found each other; and that didn’t end the losing. The primitive world shaped us. Look at what we’re making here. Maybe that’s why it’s us going to the stars. We’re the oldest people alive, but maybe we’re also the last of the children.”
15
A stateroom had space for little more than a seat, a dresser that doubled as a desk with terminal, and a bunk; but the bunk had width for two. Patulcius had stuck printouts of pictures onto his walls, scenes that existed no longer in their cities. The sonic playout gave a muted background of early twentieth-century jazz. That was the single kind of music on which he and Aliyat could agree. Later styles were too abstract for her, older Near Eastern tunes roused bad memories.
They lay side by side, sharing warmth and sweat. His passions were always rather quickly slaked, though; he liked to laze for a while afterward, daydreaming or talking, before he either fell asleep or went in search of refreshment.
Presently she stirred, kicked, sat up, hugged her knees, yawned. “I wonder what’s happening now at home,” she said.
“As I understand it, ‘now’ means very little to us ... now,” he answered in his plodding fashion. “It will mean less and less, the faster and farther we go.”
“Never mind. Why can’t they stay in touch?”
