Going Interstellar (collection)

So how do we get from where we are today, flying solar sails that are only a fraction of the size required for true interstellar travel, to those that will give us the stars? First of all, we start flying them for more near-term exploration of our own solar system. As the technology matures, we build increasingly large and lighter-weight sails, eventually crossing the threshold to use beamed energy to augment their sunlight provided thrust. Figure 8 shows one strategy for getting from here to “there.”

Solar and laser-driven sails can give us the stars. But, as with virtually every other propulsion system that might enable the greatest voyages in human history, their sizes will be immense and pose engineering challenges we cannot yet imagine. But what could be more fitting for the future explorers than journeying to the stars using the only other thing in the universe that already makes such trips with regularity—light! Just remember when you are next out stargazing that the light you see from the distant starts has been traveling for years, decades, or even millennia before it touched you—yes, before it gently pushed you—into thinking about taking such a journey yourself.

THE BIG SHIP AND THE WISE OLD OWL Sarah A. Hoyt

Everybody loves a good mystery. In this one, Sarah Hoyt sets us up with a secret hidden within the nursery rhymes preserved for kids on a multigenerational starship. Why, one goes on to wonder, would anyone need to hide information on a starship anyhow?

* * *

Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t been twenty and faced with the oldest problem a girl could have. I was being courted by two men and I didn’t know which I preferred.

Except that courted might be too strong a word, since there was very little about it that was romantic. We’d grown up together, were of similar status and background, and each of us was licensed to enter into a marriage producing two children. Still, I had two men who wished to marry me.

And I didn’t know which one to pick. They’d both been my friends forever and whichever way you looked at it, none of us was going to set the ship on fire, as the saying went. Which was a good thing, since rumor had it that this was what Ciar’s parents had planned to do before they were captured and executed. Not that I knew for sure or that Ciar knew anything about his parents. He’d been born from a surrogate years after they’d died and he’d been brought up in a creche for children who’d been created from stored ova and sperm—to continue the lines of people who’d been executed or died before having children. But there was a rumor about his parents, that they’d been dangerous subversives. I’d always thought it had been used to explain Ciar’s tendency to get into all sorts of trouble.

Ennio, my other suitor, and I had grown up with our parents. Ciar didn’t seem to envy us. And his parents didn’t come up beyond the occasional joke among the three of us.

At twenty Ciar was a linguist and Ennio was a teacher’s assistant second class, with a nice space in the bachelor quarters, and a cozy if unexciting job maintaining and programming the educational computers. Which he was doing right now—the maintaining part—halfway under one of the brightly colored terminals in classroom 3A, for the beginners’ class.

His voice emerged muffled from beneath the terminal—a bulky, padded unit, designed to withstand the clumsy movements of toddlers. “What I want to know,” he said, as his upper body moved, indicating that he’d somehow twisted one arm up inside the machine, “is how much they feed these kids that they can afford to shove half their nutritional allowance—” he paused and grunted—“inside these machines, around the sensi-screens.”

Ciar laughed. He was lying across two of the terminals, staring at the ceiling, his straight black hair falling back from his face with its aquiline nose and sharp blue eyes. His status was about the same as Ennio’s. He worked as a third class linguist. Most of his days were spent deep in the archives of the language department which was translating all the documents we’d brought from Earth into the language we spoke now. Though no one ever said how many generations had passed, it stood to reason there had to be many, since my grandfather’s grandfather had been born aboard. They’d brought aboard, originally, people from many countries. Even though they’d made English the official language, many words and some structure had ported over from the languages of the other people on the ship.

So, the administrators wanted to make sure all our records, all our history and all our scientific knowledge stayed understandable, for when we landed.