A muscle worked on the side of Ennio’s face. “I know. But if we don’t do it, Ciar will die.”
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.
So let me tell you about the Great Regatta of 2237, because the press had it wrong, as usual, and when was the last time the self-appointed pundits ever knew anything except what other self-appointed pundits were thinking?
The public had grown increasingly weary of races on Earth’s oceans. After all, the oceans were so …well …limiting. Lift your gaze, the reasoning went, and there’s a whole universe up there, and it’s a lot bigger than an ocean. Okay, we couldn’t reach most of it, couldn’t even visit Alpha Centauri during one lifetime, let alone make the return flight. But we could reach just about any place in the solar system, and even if the distances weren’t measured in parsecs, they stirred the imagination the way mere miles and fathoms no longer could.
There were six ships entered in the race. Five were sleek, bullet-shaped vessels, powered by fission or fusion—and then there was the Argo, the only ship in the Regatta that made its way through the void by the use of solar sails.
The course was mapped out by the most sophisticated computers: they would start from orbit—four of the ships had been built in space and would die having never touched down on a planetary surface—and each ship would have to pass within a thousand miles of four buoys that would register their passage. The designers didn’t want to chance losing a ship due to a gas giant’s gravity, so while they put one buoy in orbit around Mars, the other three would be in position not around Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus, but rather their moons: Ganymede, Titan, and Umbriel.
May 1 was a special day in many cultures—not for the reasons it once was, at least not in most countries—and it was decided that the race would begin at exactly twelve o’clock noon, Greenwich Mean Time, on that date.
The ships could choose any course they wanted, which was meaningful since their goals were in constant motion. Once the race began, they were not permitted to communicate with each other, even to warn of dangers such as ion storms or meteor showers. And finally, if a ship touched down on any solid surface—planet, moon, asteroid, anything—for any reason, it would be disqualified.
It was the Argo that caught the public’s fancy, partially because solar sails seemed somehow romantic, conjuring up visions of the sailing ships of yore, and partially because of the captain. His name—and no one except the public believed it could possibly be his real one—was FarTrekker Jones, with the capital T right in the middle of it, and they couldn’t have been more taken by a name if he’d chosen Odysseus or Horatio Hornblower.
He shared the Argo with two others, a co-pilot and a navigator—he didn’t trust navigational computers, though of course the ship had one—and the three of them were a hard-bitten lot. No one knew what had driven them to space (I almost said “driven them to sea”), and they weren’t much for giving interviews—but the people loved them anyway, and if no one knew anything much about them, why, that just lent a little romantic mystery to the race.
They lined the six ships up in orbit, each about five miles from the next, and suddenly they were off and running, or probably I should say off and flying. The Silver Streak jumped out to a quick lead, followed by the Galaxy Roamer. The Argo wasn’t exactly left at the gate—for one thing, they didn’t have a starting gate—but it was soon bringing up the rear.