Cave of Stars (Macrolife Book 2) Read online

  He wanted to tell her that he was trying to save her life, that after Bely and he were gone she would be without protectors; and for a moment he imagined her death, and saw himself trying to explain to her after the fact that he had tried to prevent it…

  The stillness became a desert between them, and when he looked up again, she was gone.

  9

  The late-breaking storm had been mild, passing quickly. Ondro came out to the beach at midnight and spotted the Sun of humankind’s beginnings where it rode high among the stars along with bright Vega and Sinus, and once again felt himself a stranger to Tau Ceti IV, the world of his birth, now reduced to an island in the sea.

  He had thought too deeply about the violent transplanting of a fragment of humanity to an alien world to feel completely at home. Increasing knowledge had chased that childhood complacency from his mind. Granted, no adaptation of colonists to an Earthlike world could be perfect; the life of Earth itself had not been a perfect fit to any era of its past; but it was the absence of nearly all written discussion after the first fifty years of settlement that he had found suspicious during his explorations of the papal library. An unsettled continent sat on the other side of the world, and he wondered what waited there for human-kind. His deepest feeling was that humanity’s hold on Tau Ceti IV was precarious, and becoming more so, unless medicine progressed.

  Weed and driftwood from the storm washed up along the beach. Crabs stole across the starlit sand. He began to walk, enjoying the night, emptying his mind of the past that sometimes seemed like a bad dream from which he would awake. His own past seemed to be the dream gone bad of other pasts which stood like walls around his time. Lifetimes were prisons to begin with, walled by the shortness of their stay. The time in his father’s house had once been an eternity of secure waiting for his life to begin; now it seemed an instant of ignorance, opening into a minefield of knowledge.

  His father, who had finished bringing up his boys after his wife died of influenza, had said to Ondro: “Find your own place in this world. Love your architecture. Your buildings will outlast the big problems you love to worry about.” His father had seen into him, Ondro knew, and had warned him about nurturing the thoughts that had exiled him to this place. “The world’s problems are too big for you or any one person to carry around on his shoulders. Your mother read too much, thought too much, and it made her very unhappy. I think she was glad to die.”

  His father, Ondro thought, had been an example of a legendary Earth animal, the hedgehog. The hedgehog knew one big important thing, while the fox knew many things. His father would have said that his son Ondro knew too many things for his own good.

  Jason, who learned just as quickly and saw as far, kept his thoughts to himself, and this seemed to reassure their father. Jason’s love had been theoretical mathematics, but their father saw him only as a valuable partner in their future architectural business. He had also died of influenza before he could see his boys finish university—or see them imprisoned.

  Ondro stopped and looked toward the horizon. An unfamiliar bright star hung low over the sea. He sat down and waited to compare its position to known stars, and saw that it was moving slowly, as if it were an inner planet or an asteroid coming sunward on a cometary orbit. He was sure that he had not seen the object before.

  After a few more minutes he felt sure that the object’s motion was too swift for a planet or an asteroid; it had to be much nearer to show such obvious change of position, perhaps even near enough to be in a wide orbit around his world.

  He watched until the new star fell below the horizon, certain now that planetary rotation alone could not account for all its movement. The more he thought about it, the more he felt that its motion was a sun orbit; but there was no planet only a few hundred thousand kilometers sunward. So maybe it was an asteroid coming in on a cometary, and had just missed Ceti. He knew what that might have meant, and shuddered at the general ignorance of his world, which could have done nothing to prevent being wiped out in a matter of moments.

  He sat there, thinking of the lurking diseases that waited to thrive in human bodies, and of the inheritable flaws that hid in the poorly understood structures of the human genome. He mourned the short human lives that rarely exceeded a century; and he despised the mockery of education dispensed through the schools of a transplanted vestige that stood uneasy on its rock of insistence.

  10

  It sometimes both puzzled and impressed Voss Rhazes that humankind existed in any large numbers outside the mobiles. He knew only his own habitat, but he had taken for granted from his earliest years that the reproducing mobiles were the primary form of humanity derived from Earth and the true future of the species. His mobile had met only one other, its originator. The estimate was that there had to be at least two dozen others, and perhaps half of these had reproduced.

  But the scattering of ships in a thousand-light-year radius of Earth had brought into being a still-undetermined number of planetary colonies. Judging by the six he had seen through the Link, the settlers were content with modest levels of technology and low levels of medical and genetic praxis, enough to make their worlds manageable during their short lifespans. The peoples had apparently grown attached to their forests, plains, high plateaus, and mountain valleys, even while imposing their own modifications on the local biology, and seemed only vaguely aware of the mobiles of macrolife beyond their sky. During rare encounters, it had been difficult to convey to planet dwellers that a mobile habitat’s many-leveled structure contained more usable surface area than any planet and was filled with light and clean air, where people grew into lives undreamed of by the mass of historical humanity—all inside an egg shape one hundred or more kilometers long, consisting of hundreds of urban shells, sometimes wrapped around the foundation of an asteroid core. The growing backwardness signaled by this ignorance of simple geometries made it plain that these planetary colonies were rapidly slipping into a dark age from which they might never recover; therefore, contact with the mobiles might well be essential to the very survival of these communities.

  For Voss, mobiles were the civilized places from which to confront and explore the universe. Only suns were greater in their massive use of energy. Inside the macrolife habitats, energy use was subtle and variegated, flowing to enhance the life of a mobile’s citizenry. It was the difference between the circulation of blood in an organism, nourishing each cell of every organ, and an open fire. Knowledge and the energies needed for life flowed through the people of the mobiles, but understanding counted for much more than simple survival and longlife; it was the center of life.

  This was not so in the planetary colonies. There, simply to live, grow weary, and pass life on apparently counted for much more man to know, and understanding was the smaller part, even a luxury.

  In his experience, knowledge and thought were a whirlwind, the central power of living, by which all that was novel and absorbing was achieved. No previous human culture had ever had macrolife’s control over itself or more possibility for varied growth. Past humanities had taken their chance, and as they failed for what seemed the last time, macrolife had bolted free from the planetary cradle.

  The mobiles were always remaking themselves, multiplying to accommodate population and the need for social experiment. Unchanged humanity’s persistence on several planets intrigued Voss, but he shared the view of many others that without help these colonies would fail and die, and that to do nothing would make the mobiles complicit in that dying.

  Nevertheless, this old humanity, it seemed to him, wished to remain poor and powerless in a universe of wealth and beauty—and even though it was an oversimplification of deeply layered group histories, he was always struck by the easily counted degree of truth in this judgment. Human organisms in purely nature-given environments adapted to scarcity, riving in balance with the environment through basic work until they died. Deep bodily satisfactions rewarded the organism occasionally, enough for them to launch the nex
t generation of organisms. Attempts to progress from this state produced profound difficulties. On Earth it had led to diverse adolescent technological cultures whose individuals felt as if they had been expelled from a dimly glimpsed paradise of nature.

  The first flush of growth beyond given nature had produced imbalances. Wealth beckoned with the promise of an end to scarcity, but it had also brought the disuse of minds and bodies in large, suddenly unnecessary populations, sweeping away values built on the striving for mere survival and material security. Tribal issues of descent and territory became exaggerated, leading to organized warfare and environmental catastrophe. Earth’s most influential civilizations, numbering more than thirty in less than fifteen thousand years, had been unconscious accretions of beliefs, rituals, and scraps of applied knowledge. The predominant mood at their various endings had been bewilderment; they did not know what had happened to them.

  Earth’s final planet-wide civilization had failed to make the transition to a culture of rational values and goals. It had resisted, from motives of greed and power, new forms of social and economic organization, and had finally lost the high-energy state that was the prerequisite for creative goal-seeking; genuine progress would have put too many groups out of power. And it was the example of Earth’s failure, as well as the loss of records and teachers, that kept its desperately established planetary colonies cautious, backward, and fearful of repeating the past.

  But macrolife, the hardiest flower of Earth’s romance with science and technology, had survived the last civilizational collapse and was proliferating. It was not known how many seed worlds had escaped Earth’s sun-space, but it seemed inevitable that developing mobiles would one day contact each other. It seemed unthinkable to Voss that his mobile would always be alone, just as it seemed unlikely to him that the future of humanity would ever belong to planetary colonies.

  Voss felt, as did most of his fellow citizens who were under a century in age, that the time had come for the building of a new mobile. His world’s visit to the Tau Ceti system, therefore, had several clear aims. Raw materials would be gathered for the construction of the new social container. This activity would be the natural occasion for a goodwill mission to the planetary colony on the fourth planet, which had not been contacted before by his mobile, or by any other mobile, as far as anyone knew. Also, a group of malcontents would be given the opportunity of settling on the planet. This might create some opposition from the planetary authorities, since the group would bring a high technology to a backward world; but this would be unavoidable, since it would be suicide for the settlers to do without the medical skills of their parent world or to accept a lower energy level of daily life. It was also possible that people from Tau Ceti IV might wish to emigrate to the new mobile being built in their sky.

  As these projects went forward, Voss’s assignment was to make contact with the planet’s civil authorities and gauge their reactions to the mobile’s visit and plans to leave settlers behind. Preliminary scans had revealed that the people of Ceti IV had not managed to lay claim to the entire planet by this time, so a suitable remote area might be found: but the matter had to be at least mentioned to various leaders.

  Voss had discussed possible complications with First Councilman Wolt Blackfriar.

  “I find it difficult to understand,” Voss had said, “why such a group would wish to leave and take so much of our way of life with them. What’s the point?”

  “They imagine that they want to live on a planet,” Blackfriar had said. “Some of them will feel that they have found what they wanted, others will not. They have to learn for themselves.”

  Voss felt uneasy as he entered the small flitter on the outward engineering level. He had never felt this kind of uncertainty, and wondered for a moment how he might feel or which group he might belong to once he had spent some time on a planet; but he knew the cause of his uncertainty: multiple implications were crowding over the horizon of his awareness, triggering vague synergies of instinct and insight.

  “Voss?” Blackfriar asked inside him as he made his way forward in the ovoid flitter and sat down.

  “I’m here,” he answered aloud.

  “What I’m planning to do,” Blackfriar said, “is to set our colony down as early as possible, so they can get a taste of the planet while we build the new habitat. That will give those who wish to come back a chance to return, either to us or to the new mobile.”

  Voss said aloud, “I’m ready to go.”

  “You’re set to land at the square in front of the papal palace in New Vatican, the capital city. We’ve had word by radio from Paul Anselle, the prime minister, that he will receive you. Later you’ll probably meet with Pope Peter the Third, the religious and political head of the planetary government, which seems to be the only one. There is still no sign of any human settlement on the other continent.”

  “Any signs of hostility?”

  “No. They seem to know about us—at least Anselle seems to. According to him it’s been three centuries since they’ve had contact with offworlders. Your fast-load of Euro-English should start you off well enough, and Link feedback will take care of what you’re missing as you go along.”

  Blackfriar withdrew. Voss sat back and flowed outward through his Link, testing his connections to his world. Forests of data stood all around him in visual manifestation as he swooped through their woven centuries of growth. He took a moment, despite the routine action, to appreciate the beauty of the standing infrastructure, which held so much and was constantly growing from outside data and from emergent implications within existing lattices.

  The flitter shot out into the void. With eyes still closed, he link-looked at the egg-shape of his world behind him, and his mind filled with the tide of understanding that was the foundation of his life. Here was an entity composed of a thoughtful humankind and its offspring, worthy of all the hopes of history—a constantly growing culture, secure at the basic levels of material need, yet open to the vastness of spacetime and to its own inner possibilities, poised to confront all of reality. The human individual had always looked to something deathless—to family, leader, nation, god; but they had all failed, while his world gave him longlife and endless chances at happiness and satisfaction.

  He turned inwardly from the mobile and gazed at the planet.

  With its fragile veil of atmosphere, its lumbering gravitational effect, its fractured masses of crust floating on a molten core and washed by oceans, it seemed an oblivious creature rolling through the night, waiting to swallow him.

  11

  “What do they want?” Bely asked like an aged child.

  Paul shifted his great bulk in his high-backed chair and gazed out through the long, for-the-moment motionless curtains of the papal study. Then, accepting that he would be uncomfortable no matter how he adjusted himself, he explained what he had learned during his radio conversation with the visitors.

  “But who are they?” Bely demanded, obviously failing to make all the connections in Paul’s report.

  “Descendants of people from Old Earth, as we are,” Paul repeated, “except that they live in mobile habitats not tied to any planet.”

  “Is that possible?” Bely asked, grasping his hand rests with both hands and leaning forward toward his desk.

  “They do it. With their level of technology, they can, it seems, use resources from just about anywhere. These kinds of habitats are well discussed in several volumes in our library.”

  “Yes, yes—but perhaps they’re lying, and it’s only another colony ship wanting to settle here.”

  “I doubt it,” Paul said. “But they do wish to settle about fifty people with us.”

  “Only fifty? Why so few?”

  “They are people who wish to leave their world.”

  “Leave? Why? Maybe they want our resources?”

  “No,” Paul said. “They can get those anywhere in this solar system. They’re here for the reasons they’ve given—to contact us while t
hey go about building a new habitat. Most of their business has little to do with us.”

  Still gripping his armrests, the old man fixed him with a stare, then leaned back. “Why are you so ready to believe what they say, Paul?”

  Because I want to, Paul thought as he watched the uncertainties show in the old man’s decaying face. Because I have nothing left to believe in.

  Bely said, “They have no right to come here and ask us for anything.”

  “You will refuse them?” Paul asked.

  The old man seemed uncertain again. “Perhaps we should,” he muttered. “We must think very carefully about this.”

  “We could benefit from them,” Paul said. “They command vast power and knowledge.”

  “Will they threaten us if we refuse to take their colonists?”

  Paul shook his head. “No, of course not, but we won’t be able to dictate to them.”

  “Yes, yes, you’re right. We have no reason to refuse, and much to gain, as you say. But we can’t just ignore the fact of their power and ability to do as they please, can we?”

  Paul watched the old man’s eyes, which would not meet his own. Bely’s reaction to the mobile’s arrival was one of confusion and thinly concealed fear, as if the heavenly host had arrived to tell him that his Church was a fraud. And there was something else. Paul knew it because he felt the same confused hope. It reached out from both their deeps and sought to embrace something that had been missing for a long time—a sense of the future, not beyond the event horizon of death, but in the life around them.

  Bely sighed and put both his palms down flat on his desk. “We must learn more. Will you speak to them first?”

  Paul nodded. “I’ll report to you as soon as possible. Voss Rhazes, their envoy, will be landing soon.”

  Bely sat back and nodded. His hands came into his lap and grasped each other like gnarly tree roots. “That will be best,” he said, sounding relieved, but unable to banish the look of confusion from his eyes.