Going Interstellar (collection)

What else is there to say? It went as planned. Well, almost as planned. Yes, the guards that had been assigned to Ciar’s cell were floating above us, completely unable to guard anything. Yes, opening his cell—with a cutting tool around the lock—was easy.

The hard part was keeping Ciar and Ennio moving properly in null-g till we could reach the capsule that took us to the chamber of the Wise Old Owl and, this time, beyond it, to the lifeboats.

The lifeboat—and why was it called that? It’s not like exiting to space would have saved anyone—was more comfortable than any of our lodgings, and had enough food for four people for two months.

And the planet turned out to have food of a sort. The bodies of water contained algae. A strange fish that looked like a jelly fish had a high speed collision with a salmon. Apparently they weren’t even really fish at all, but something between a plant and an animal, which has kept our scientists baffled so far, and will probably keep them so for many years to come.

But they were edible enough to keep us alive. Us and those who came after us.

We’ve used Earth food plants to colonize the land and start our farms.

It’s been thirty years since we landed and I’ve almost forgotten the stomach-churning fear of falling upward. I can look up at the deep blue night sky and feel nothing but wonder at how far we’ve come.

Thirty years later, I realize how lucky we were. We found the computer just in time to stop confusion and rioting and to know we’d arrived. If we’d not found the computer, the administration could have said the loss of gravity was a temporary malfunction. Only astrogators would have known we were orbiting a star, and, depending on how the computer records had been changed, they might have thought it was a different star. They could have been forbidden from asking further questions. We could have been prisoners in the ship for generations.

Perhaps forever.

Oh, some people still remain in the ship, orbiting the world. But living in the world is so much more rewarding, so much more free, that most everyone has come down, little by little. The young first, and those with some spirit of adventure. Which of course, had been squelched during the generations of living in a closed system, but apparently not entirely bred out.

My children would never know how to live in that close and regimented society. They’ve fanned out over the world, planted the land, grown animals, lived by their labor and answered to no man.

I did marry. Which of them? Can’t you guess?

Last year I had my first grandchild and I sing it to sleep with the songs that will tell them where we came from—so that if everything else is lost they’ll still know we came here from another world and that there will be other humans out there when their world is developed enough to send ships to other stars. I don’t doubt they will. All animals have a biological imperative to expand or die. And humans have been expanding their territory since they came down from the trees in a semi-tropical area of a little world now very far from us. We’ll continue expanding, beyond Alpha Centauri, beyond the Milky Way, on and on forever, until our species is so widespread no single calamity can render us extinct; till the fruits and knowledge of a thousand worlds make every single human freer and happier and wealthier than we can even dream.

So I’ll sing my grandchildren to sleep as I sang my children to sleep: to stories of our once and future voyages.

The big ship sails in the vacuum, oh.

SIREN SONG Mike Resnick

If we actually achieve a serious space flight capability, it’s likely we will spend a long time in the Solar System before anybody actually makes for the high country. With experience, propulsion systems will improve, as will life support. What is now little more than a dream may one day become no more than a sporting event, a race, perhaps, through the Saturnian rings. Will this type of casual event signal that we are ready to move on? Perhaps. A better indicator, however, might arrive when we reach a point at which space travel begins to develop its own mythology.

Mike Resnick has won five Hugos and been nominated a record thirty-five times.

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