The Fleet of Stars Read online

  Thus did the Terrans of Demeter escape to other stars: going as downloads, to wait—most of them inactive, unconscious of the years or decades or centuries—until there was a Life Mother on the next world to raise them to life anew.

  Thus could a man or a woman pass through life after life, immortal.

  It had taken half a millennium to get this revelation and make it reality. But they were ordinary humans on Demeter, and a Mother who evolved very slowly from modest, practical beginnings. The Teramind could have deduced the possibility at once, from first principles, and calculated every necessary step.

  Why did the Teramind not proclaim its knowledge, so that Earth might have a Mother and all children of Sol live forever?

  "Because to Earth, the cost would be unbearably high," said Ibrahim.

  Lunarians rejected the gift, also at Centauri. They would rather die among the naked stars, individuals independent of everyone and everything, than live by the law that a goddess laid on animals and plants. Most Terrans felt differently. But nowhere in the Solar System existed the kind of society that developed on Demeter. Nor was the biosphere of Earth ever integrated. It would essentially have to be remade, replaced, bit by painful bit, over centuries. This would threaten not just the stability of ecology and climate that global reforestation had brought about. It would break the whole peaceful, prosperous order that history had finally reached. The equilibrium was always precarious; upset it, and what would follow was unforeseeable even by the Teramind, but would surely be horrible. Simply imagine the cost and consequences of downloading a billion people every generation, to await a problematical resurrection—a resurrection that would necessarily be into a world gone altogether alien, through which they would stumble bewildered, helpless, and grieving for what they had lost. Of this much, the Teramind was certain.

  "It may be right," Fenn muttered, "though what about the Terrans yonder?"

  "As for the Terrans at the stars," said Ibrahim, "they became what they are gradually, lifetime by lifetime. By now they are themselves alien to us, more so than home folk can really grasp. In many senses, they are no longer human."

  "I'll judge that when I've met a few."

  Seen with the eye of eternity, as the Teramind saw, the genesis of the Life Mothers was less a triumph than a tragedy."

  "A tragedy for who?"

  "And after all, literal immortality is a myth, an impossibility. The human brain has a finite data-storage capacity; a thousand years will fill it. Well before then, the geometrical increase of correlations will overwhelm it. Result: dementia. Oh, in theory you can choose what memories your next incarnation shall not inherit. You can record them elsewhere, for reference if wanted. But thus, rebirth by rebirth, you attenuate the personality that once was yours, until at last what lives is a stranger, haunted by the wispiest of ghosts. And no matter how often the unnatural descent goes on, branching and rebranching, in the end, one way or another, each line is bound to go extinct."

  "Um-m, a point. But I don't think I'd mind a run of several thousand years, myself. And after that—who knows?"

  "No, best that humankind in the Solar System stay with what it has, a long and pleasant life, a serene and accepting death. Needless to say, this is not a decree. The Synesis has neither the power nor the desire to make destiny. Perhaps—perhaps—it can find a road to take, something that no one, nor the cybercosm, conceives of today. All thoughts, wishes, personal data are welcome. Input yours to the database, and in due course we shall see. Meanwhile, conduct your lives as you wish. This news from afar has brought misfortune, but we shall overcome. We will overcome."

  "And egotists who can afford it will get themselves downloaded when they're about to kick off, and stashed away, just in case," Fenn muttered. "Yah, the wonder is not that the news touched off some explosions, but that we didn't have more. Resentment, frustration, envy—But I suppose most people really are reasonably content, and most of the rest are fairly well resigned, and—''

  And for the likes of Fenn, what?

  The remainder was anticlimax, probably deliberately so. His heart went wild when Ibrahim turned to the rumors of superfast spaceships. "Yes, a field drive exists. The Synesis saw no urgency about developing one, after the theoretical possibility emerged. A stable economy needs little interplanetary travel, and interstellar exploration is in any case a millennial undertaking, more for sophotects than for humans. But once the Centaurians had done the engineering, and passed their knowledge on to the Proserpinans, the Synesis must definitely have its own such craft. Yes, that meant reactivating the antimatter plants on Mercury. Though a field drive consumes less energy than jets do, it is bound by the same conservation laws and a given delta v entails a certain minimum. In light of the many uncertainties in the whole situation, the Council deemed it safest to keep silent about all this until now. Reports from probes to neighbor stars will soon be made public. They are interesting, but merely fill in details of what was already known. Life in the universe is a rare and fleeting thing.

  "It is not feasible to take humans across light-years, except as downloads. Nor have they any sensible reason to go, in any form.

  “As for tales of some tremendous secret uncovered by a solar lens, those are sheer fantasy. Certain enigmatic observations have been made. The scientists, including sophotects, prefer not to discuss them openly until they know more. The Teramind has offered'no explanation. Perhaps there is none that a lesser intellect could comprehend. More likely, the Teramind wishes us to work it out for ourselves. Every teacher knows that insight comes from solving problems."

  "And that doesn't ring quite true either," Fenn said to the image. "How much do you know, amigo, that you aren't letting on?"

  Possibly nothing. Ibrahim might well be honest. The cybercosm was—wasn't it?—and you got into the habit of relying on what it told you. All the way from the sum of a string of numbers, through the personalities of Isaac Newton or Sun Yat-sen for a dreambox program, to the stabilization of the terrestrial climate or—or policy at home and abroad.

  The sense of his helplessness clamped down on Fenn. What use were his questions, doubts, suspicions? Those who shared them must be in a microscopic minority, and unable to prove a thing. Nor would anybody else pay attention.

  Besides, he could be mistaken, he told himself, trying to cool the fury climbing up into his throat. Or if what he'd heard fell short of the whole truth, that was probably due to the highest and purest of motives. He should be realistic, which meant accepting the fact that he couldn't have everything he wanted when he wanted it. Self-pity, chronic rage, those were for the likes of Pedro Dover.

  Fenn tossed off his drink and left. Never mind hearing the Prefect's peroration.

  His walk home was too short to calm him. A post-Lunarian settlement, Mondheim was compactly laid out, businesslike, no two places far apart, no seigneural palaces behind ornate doors or crystalline caverns for esthetic rites.

  Ordinarily the atmosphere of his apartment was cheerful. He kept it spacecraft-neat but had accumulated a hoard of items, mostly out where he could look at them— a woodcarving kit, a few figurines and other objects he had made but not yet given away, his marksmanship and martial arts trophies, spacing gear, unusual Lunar rocks he had come upon, a fishing rod from times in the Lunar woods, hiking boots and a kayak paddle from times in Yukonia.... This even watch, it felt gray.

  He took a fresh beer out of the preservator before he noticed that two calls had come in. At the first name and return number, his pulse sprang. lokepa Hakawau—on Earth! Twice the kanaka had visited the Moon since their first meeting, once accompanied again by He'o, and in between they had kept somewhat in touch. But what the flame could this be about?

  The second name was his mother's. She had called an hour ago, and from the surface. He'd better start with her. The beer in his grasp, he took a tingly mouthful as he touched the eidophone. He remained standing.

  Elitha's face appeared, helmeted, sidelit, chiaroscuro in airlessness
. Full day prevailed where she was, on the slope of the Cordillera, but she had erected a canopy and in its deep shade used laserlamps. "Fenn!" she nearly gasped. "How are you? The riots—"

  "I'm fine. Wasn't ever in any danger." He didn't feel like telling her what he had undergone. Not right now. "What about you?"

  Relief washed tension out of the strong, fair countenance and the husky voice. Nonetheless, he heard how she must force lightness. "Wrestling with my art. I'm afraid that at the moment it's winning."

  "Can I see?" He hadn't had a look in quite a while, and this might steer her off the events of today.

  "If you wish." She had deployed several scanners in order to study the piece from different perspectives. Her image in his screen gave way to a panorama. Earth hung low in the west, a blue sickle blade above pockmarked desolation. Westward rose the mountains, wan heights and murky clefts, their edges blurred by the meteoritic rain of megayears but their ramparts mighty. From one ridge the walls and towers of Zamok Vysoki lifted stark into heaven. Metal cupolas caught sunlight to crown their stones with fire.

  Fenn knew she showed him the scene, familiar though it was, because the setting would belong to the work. Next she gave him a view of it, and thus of herself. She stood with her tools on a scaffold, above a sealtent and assorted apparatus. A pinnacle had reared four meters tall at the rim of a ledge half a kilometer from the castle. Elitha was shaping it into a female figure, a lean woman who strained forward, arms raised, as if into a wind that sent her hair and robe streaming—but this was the solar wind, and she a wraith. Already in those lines lay a certain strangeness, a concept foreign to artists who for generations had been refining and varying the classic forms.

  "Looks grand to me," Fenn said.

  Elitha gusted a sigh. "It's competent. But somehow— I'm feeling my way forward, you know—somehow I haven't yet gotten quite the—whatever it'll take. Simulations on a computer are not the reality out here in the open. This should give a sense of rebellion, of infinite longing—"

  Yes, Fenn thought, it should, and thereby make a few fat, placid souls shake just a bit, just for a minute. He recalled what trouble Elitha had had winning permission to do it. The problem was less that her style was controversial than that she proposed a monument to Niolente, the last great Lunarian rebel against the Federation, Never mind that that was merely a romantic memory and Niolente's stronghold had been a historical relic these eight hundred years, empty except for caretakers and the occasional tourist. The authorities hadn't liked the idea. Fenn suspected that word against it had come down from the cybercosm—but indirectly, filtered through mind after mind, weak enough by the time it reached the park administrators that a determined group of artists and academicians could wring consent out of them.

  Maybe the objection was that something like this might excite the Proserpinans? But what rag of difference could that make, as distant as they were?

  Although—field-drive ships—

  "That's why I called you, dear," Elitha was saying. She nicked back to her personal image. "Not only the trouble today and what might have happened to you, but this news from space ... how does it touch you?''

  Fenn drank of his beer before he replied, "I... need to think it over."

  "I can see you're angry. Ypu always are, inside, aren't you?”

  Fenn chose his words with care. They fell heavily. "I've got a notion we're being lied to, and I resent it."

  "Are we? They admit they decided to keep quiet, and still can't comment on many details, pending verification. You know from experience, administrative confidentiality has to be allowed, or administration would be impossible." Elitha gave him a shrewd look. "You're an agent of the Synesis yourself, you know. Technically not, but in practice you are, because you help maintain its peace. Have you never been party to some breach of regulations, when it was necessary to prevent something worse, and said nothing about it afterward?''

  Memory stabbed. Two or three times—as when he and his partner used a certain .device to fool a coded lock, getting in and out of a well-protected apartment with never a trace in the sentinel circuits—Their clues had been misleading, their suspicions wrong, the eminent resident was not holding a woman against her will, and why embarrass everybody by confessing the breakin later? The fact that he could not respond frankly to his mother stoked his ill humor.

  "Administrative discretion is not the same as administrative lying," he growled. "Look, in my line of work we develop pretty sharp noses. I tell you, there's a stink over this whole data stack. Argh, it's faint, you can't trace down where it's coming from, but—well, for instance, this business of the solar lens. Why not tell us what it's spotted? If the scientists haven't fumbled out what it means, what harm? I should think a puzzle like that might start a little original thinking here at home."

  Through the shadows he saw the fear upon her and added in haste, "Don't worry, Mamita. Credit me with the brains I got from you and Sire. I'm not about to go demonstrate in the passages, or throw rocks, or otherwise make an anus of myself."

  "No," she agreed softly, "you are too intelligent for that. But if some wild off-chance came along—The Proserpinans brought this crisis on. Purposely? They could have helped us learn the facts more gradually, and didn't. To undermine the Synesis?"

  "Is it so marvelous?" he retorted, and realized that wasn't what a man should say who'd been seven years a police officer, since he turned eighteen.

  "It's what we have." However well he knew her, her intensity surprised him. "It means peace, health, well-being, long life, and, yes, freedom to do and be the best we can." Her art. Her new man and their child.

  "Then why are you putting up a monument to Niolente?" They had talked about it before, but now his question became a challenge.

  Her spirit rose to it. “Why do we have monuments to the heroes of every lost, wrong cause? Because they were heroes. That's all I'm trying to show here. I don't praise what she stood for. She fought for no liberty but her own. How free were men when government squeezed half their earnings from them and sent them off to die in wars anytime it chose?"

  'Fenn produced a smile. "Don't worry. I'm not planning to start a revolution."

  She grew somber. "Don't get caught up in one, either."

  "Huh? Where are any?"

  "Everywhere. Oh, they're quiet revolutions—so quiet, with so many shapes, that we aren't really aware of them, and nobody can guess where they'll end."

  She's a wise woman, Fenn thought. She could be right. Maybe the mobs, the cults, the preachers and plotters, maybe they're froth on a tsunami, and we're out in mid-ocean and don't recognize the slow, easy swell for what it is.

  He would not admit to her what a flash of exhilaration the idea sent through him, but his mood visibly lightened. "I'll just keep plugging along daycycle by daycycle. Uh, when can I come around for dinner?"

  Elitha didn't handcook, but she had wonderful programs in her cuisinator. And mainly, she had a home.

  Visiting Birger in his woods wasn't the same.

  She brightened too. "Let's set a date."

  They talked for a while longer. He flicked off feeling almost happy.

  Nevertheless, excitement exploded as he called lokepa.

  After some remarks about the news: "Fenn, we've been giving you mau thought. You've been a good guide, a good friend, and you seem to be a man we need. Would you like to come here and let us explain?"

  7

  SOMETIMES HIS EARLIEST memories came back to Chuan in such strength that he lost the world around him. For that moment it was almost as if he were lying in a dreambox, body comatose, brain interacting with the program he had chosen—or as if he actually were a child again and at home. Sunlight spilled down multitudinous intense greens on the valley walls to flash off the broad brown river where a fish leaped or a crocodile basked on a sandbar, a butterfly went past in royal hues, warmth drew fragrance out of soil, blossoms, leaves ... the monsoon rain roared, silver-bright; he ran forth naked and laughin
g for joy.... It went away. He stood at the viewport in his living room. Vision swept past a garden outside, copper-leaf, scarlet ramona, blue vanadia, downhill to the roofs, domes, towers, and masts of Crommelin. A dwarfed sun was approaching the near western horizon, and in the east the pale pink sky was darkening through rose toward purple. He weighed about three-eighths of what he would have weighed on Earth. The air he breathed was temperate, no moister than health demanded, windless, and, at present, odorless.

  He shook his head. A rueful smile crossed his round, amber-brown face, beneath the narrow eyes and low-bridged nose. Why at this exact moment? he wondered. Am I getting old already? Seventy-one years— thirty-eight on the calendar here—seems a bit early to start sighing for a day when everything was young.

  Nor would I go back through time if I could. Chuan's glance went around the room. Its austerity was deceptive. The furnishings, though sparse, were designed for comfort. The floor lay warm and springy underfoot, aglow with rich colors. Patterns in the walls interwove and changed, slowly, beautiful to anyone who appreciated abstract art, twice lovely to him who could see the mathematics at play. And that was what mattered, not material possessions or prestige or power, but the intellect he had gained and his communions with the ultimate intellect.

  The house sounded a musical note and told him, "A person requests admittance." It screened an image of her, newly come uphill through Draco Tunnel to stand before his main ascensor.