Starborne

Yet because of the Wotan’s incredible speed and the serenity of its movements — the ship is carrying him without friction through the vast empty cloak of nospace at a pace already four times greater than that of light and increasing with every passing moment — the year-captain persists in thinking of it as he does, an imaginary projectile, sleek, narrow, graceful. There is a rightness to that which transcends mere literal sense. He knows better, but he is unable to shake that streamlined image from his mind, even though he is familiar with the true shape of the vessel inside and out. If nothing else, his routine movements through the labyrinthine interior of the starship each day provide constant and unending contradiction of his fanciful mental picture of it.

The tangled lower levels of the ship are particularly challenging to traverse. The congested corridors, cluttered with a host of storage domes and recycling coils and all manner of other utility ducts, twist and turn every few meters with the abrupt lunatic intricacy of a topological puzzle. But the year-captain is accustomed to moving through them, and in any case he is a man of extraordinary grace of movement, precise and fastidious of step. His outward physical poise reflects the deep strain of asceticism that is an innate part of his character. He is untroubled by the obstacles of these corridors — to him they have no serious existence, they are barely obstacles at all.

Lightfootedly he makes his way past a dangling maze of thrumming conduits and scrambles over a long series of swelling shallow mounds. These are the cargo nodules. In sheltered chambers beneath this level lies all the precious furniture of their journey: mediq machines, bone banks, data bubbles, pre-read vapor chips, wildlife domestication plaques, excavator arcs, soil samplers, gene replacement kits, matrix jacks, hydrocarbon converters, climate nodes and other planetary-engineering equipment, artificial intelligences, molecular replicators, heavy-machinery templates, and all the rest of their world-building storehouse. Below all that, on the deepest level of all, is the zygote bank, ten thousand fertilized ova tucked away snugly in permafreeze spansules, and enough additional sperm and unfertilized ova to maintain significant genetic diversity as the succeeding generations of the colony unfold.

He reaches a Y-shaped fork, where the passageway abruptly widens and takes the abrupt left turn into Hesper’s little room. A blare of colored light confronts him, blue and green and dazzling incandescent red. Things blink and flash in comic excess. Hesper’s screen is the center of the universe, toward which everything flows: from every corner of the firmament data comes streaming in torrents, and somehow it all is captured and reconstituted into visual form here. But only Hesper can understand it. Possibly not even he, the year-captain sometimes thinks.

The air in Hesper’s room is warm and close, dense, moist jungle air. Hesper likes heat and always keeps humidity turned to the max. He is a small black-skinned man, with thin, perpetually compressed lips and a startling angular beak of a nose, who comes from some island on the far side of India. The sun must be very strong there; the fair-skinned year-captain imagines that he would find himself baked down to the bone in a minute, if ever he were to set foot in that land. Is it a place like that toward which all of Hesper’s zealous scanning is bent, one with a sun of such ferocity?

“Look here, year-captain,” Hesper says immediately. “Four new prospects!”

He taps the screen, here, here, here, here. Hesper is an eternal optimist. For him the galaxy brims and overflows with habitable worlds.

“How many does that make? Fifty? A hundred?”

“Sixty-one, within a sphere a hundred and thirty light-years across. Plausible suns, probable planetary configurations.” Hesper’s voice is light, high-pitched, inflected in a singsongy way. “Of course, I’m not yet ready to recommend an inspection of any one of them.”

The year-captain nods. “Of course.”

“But it won’t be long, year-captain! It won’t be long, I promise you that!”

The year-captain offers Hesper a perfunctory smile. One of these days, he knows, Hesper actually will find a planet or two that will be worth taking a look at — it’s an article of faith for everyone on board that there must be such a world somewhere — but he understands that Hesper’s early enthusiasms are just that, enthusiasms. Hesper is a quick man with a hypothesis. No matter: the voyage has just begun, really. The year-captain doesn’t expect to be greeted here with any real discoveries, not yet. He simply wants to stare at the screen.