Starborne

To ourselves, though, we are only ourselves, people with some skills and some limitations: neither gods nor brutes. It would not be right for us to see ourselves who sit at the summit of Creation, for we know how far from true that is; and yet no one ever sees himself as a pitiful primitive being, a hapless clumsy precursor of the greater things to come. For us there is always only the present. We are simply the people of the moment, living our only live, doing our best or at least trying to, traveling from somewhere to somewhere aboard this unlikely ship at many multiples of the speed of light, and hoping, whenever we let ourselves indulge in anything as risky as hope, that this voyage of ours will new shaft of light into the pool of darkness and mystery that is the reality of human existence.

The year-captain leaves the lounge and walks a few meters down the main transit corridor to the dropchute that will take him to the lower levels, where Zed Hesper’s planetary-scan operation has its headquarters. He stops off there at least once a day, if only to watch the shifting patterns of simulated stars and planets come and go on Hesper’s great galactic screen. The patterns are abstract and mean very little in astronomical terms to the year-captain — there is no way to achieve a direct view of the normal universe from within the nospace tube, and Hesper must work entirely by means of analogs and equivalents — but even so it reassures him in some obscure way to be reminded that those whose lives are totally confined by the unyielding boundaries of this small vessel sixteen light-years from the world of their birth are nevertheless not completely alone in the cosmos.

Sixteen light-years from home.

Not an easy thing to grasp, even for one trained in the mental disciplines that the year-captain has mastered. He can feel the force of the concept but not the real meaning. He can tell himself, Already we are sixteen kilometers from home, and find that concept easy enough to understand. Already we are sixteen hundred kilometers from home — a little harder, yes, but he can understand that too. What about Already we are sixteen million kilometers from home? That much begins to strain comprehension — a gulf, a gulf, a terrible empty dark gulf of enormous size — but he thinks he is able to wrap his mind about even so great a distance, after a fashion.

Sixteen light-years, though?

How can he explain that to himself?

Somewhere just beyond the tube of nospace through which the ship now travels lies a blazing host of brilliant stars, a wilderness of suns all around them, and he knows that his gray-flecked blond beard will have turned entirely white before the light of those stars glitters in the night sky of distant Earth. Yet only a few months have elapsed since the departure of the expedition. How miraculous it is, he thinks, to have come so far so swiftly.

Even so, there is a greater miracle. An hour after lunch he will ask Noelle to relay a message to Earth, summarizing the day’s findings, such as they are, and he knows that he will have an acknowledgment from Control Central in Brazil before dinner. That seems a greater miracle to him by far.

He emerges from the dropchute and is confronted by the carefully ordered chaos that is the lower deck.

Cluttered passageways snake off in many directions before him. He chooses the third from the left and proceeds aft, crouching a little to keep from banging his forehead on the multitudinous ducts that pass crisscrossingly just above him.

In the year-captain’s mind the starship sometimes appears sleek, narrow, graceful: a gleaming silver bullet streaking across the universe at a velocity that has at this point come to exceed a million kilometers per second. But he knows that the actuality is nothing like that. In fact the ship is not remotely like a bullet at all. No Newtonian forces of action and reaction are driving it, nor does it have the slightest refinement of form. Its outlines are boxy and squat and awkwardly asymmetrical, a huge clunky container even more lopsided and outlandish in shape than the usual sort of spacegoing vessel, with an elaborate spidery superstructure of extensor arms and antennas and observation booms and other excrescent externals that have the appearance of having been tacked on in a purely random way.