Starborne

In fact Heinz is right, they all agree: the world they had left behind them was essentially already dead — the human world, that is — even though some hundreds of millions of people were still moving about upon the face of it. It had passed successfully through all the convulsions of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the myriad acute crises of demography and nationalistic fervor and environmental decay, and had moved on into an era so stable and happy that its condition seemed indistinguishable from death, for what has ceased to grow and change has ceased to carry out the most important functions of life. Earth now was the home of a steadily dwindling population of healthy, wealthy, cautious, utterly civilized people, living the easy life in an easy society supported by automated devices of every sort. All their problems had been solved except the biggest one of all, which was that the solutions had become the problems and the trend-lines of everything were curving downward toward inevitable extinction. No one had expected that, really: that the end of striving and strife would in effect mean the end of life. But that was how it was working out. The last sputtering spark of Earth’s vitality was here, carried aboard the Wotan, sailing farther out and out and out into the galactic gulfs with each tick of the clock.

An enormous irony, yes. A cosmic giggle. The world, free now of war and lesser conflicts, of inequalities, of disease, of shortages, was drifting downward on an apparently irreversible spiraling course. There was a lot of bland unexcited cocktail-party talk of the end of the human race within five or six hundred years, a notion with which hardly anybody seemed to care to disagree, and such talk was enough to make most people pause and contemplate matters of ultimate destiny for — oh, a good ten or fifteen minutes at a time.

The explosive population growth of the early industrial era had been curbed so successfully that virtually no children were being born at all. Even though the human life span now routinely exceeded a century, there was no region of the world where population was not steadily declining, because childbirth had become so uncommon that the replacement level was not being maintained. The world had become one vast pleasant suburb of well-to-do elderly childless folks.

Everyone was aware of the problem, of course; but everyone was eager for someone else to do something about it. The calm, mature, comfortable, emotionally stable people of the era had, as a general rule, very little interest in bearing or rearing children themselves, and such experiments in having children artificially generated and communally raised as had been carried out had not met with manifest success.

What the human race appeared to be doing, though no one said anything about it out loud, was to be politely allowing itself to die out. Most people thought that that was very sad. But what, if anything, was anybody supposed to do about it?

The Wotan was one answer to that question. A movement arose — it was the most interesting thing that had happened on Earth in two hundred years — aimed at founding a second Earth on some distant planet. Several dozen of the best and brightest of Earth’s younger generation — men and women in their thirties and forties, mainly — would be sent out aboard an interstellar starship to locate and settle a world of some other star. The hope was that amid the challenges of life on an untamed primitive world the colonists and their starborn progeny would recapture the drive and energy that once had been defining characteristics of the human race, and thus bring about a rebirth of the human spirit — which, perhaps, could be recycled back to the mother world five hundred or a thousand years hence.

Perhaps.

Translating the hypothesis into reality required some work, but there were still enough people willing to tackle the job. The starship had to be designed and built and tested. Done and done and done. A crew of suitably fearless and adventuresome people had to be assembled. It was. The voyage had to be undertaken. And so it came to pass. A habitable world needed to be located. Scanning instruments were even now at work.

And then, if some reasonably appropriate world did indeed turn up, a successful colony must be founded there, and somehow made to sustain itself, however difficult and hostile an environment the colonists might find themselves in—

Yes. The Big If.

You promised to teach me how to play,” Noelle says, pouting a little. They are once again in the ship’s lounge, one of the two centers of daily social life aboard the Wotan, the other being the baths. Four games are under way, the usual players: Elliot and Sylvia, Roy and Paco, David and Heinz, Michael and Bruce.