Still, Ignatiev feels old, useless, bitterly unhappy with his one-way trip to a distant star. He has a different frontier to explore, his own inner strength and determination, his own inner desire to feel useful, admired, even loved.
«It’s obvious!» said Vartan Gregorian, standing imperiously before the two others seated on the couch. «I’m the best damned pilot in the history of the human race!»
Planting his fists on his hips, he struck a pose that was nothing less than preening.
Half buried in the lounge’s plush curved couch, Alexander Ignatiev bit back an impulse to laugh in the Armenian’s face. But Nikki Deneuve, sitting next to him, gazed up at Gregorian with shining eyes.
Breaking into a broad grin, Gregorian went on, «This bucket is moving faster than any ship ever built, no? We’ve flown farther from Earth than anybody ever has, true?»
Nikki nodded eagerly as she responded, «Twenty percent of lightspeed and approaching six lightyears.»
«So, I’m the pilot of the fastest, highest-flying ship of all time!» Gregorian exclaimed. «That makes me the best flier in the history of the human race. QED!»
Ignatiev shook his head at the conceited oaf. But he saw that Nikki was captivated by his posturing. Then it struck him. She loves him! And Gregorian is showing off for her.
The ship’s lounge was as relaxing and comfortable as human designers back on Earth could make it. It was arranged in a circular grouping of sumptuously appointed niches, each holding high curved banquettes that could seat up to half a dozen close friends in reasonable privacy.
Ignatiev had left his quarters after suffering still another defeat at the hands of the computerized chess program and snuck down to the lounge in mid-afternoon, hoping to find it empty. He needed a hideaway while the housekeeping robots cleaned his suite. Their busy, buzzing thoroughness drove him to distraction; it was impossible to concentrate on chess or anything else while the machines were dusting, laundering, straightening his rooms, restocking his autokitchen and his bar, making the bed with crisply fresh linens.
So he sought refuge in the lounge, only to find Gregorian and Denueve already there, in a niche beneath a display screen that showed the star fields outside. Once the sight of those stars scattered across the infinite void would have stirred Ignatiev’s heart. But not any more, not since Sonya died.
Sipping at the vodka that the serving robot had poured for him the instant he had stepped into the lounge, thanks to its face recognition program, Ignatiev couldn’t help grousing, «And who says you are the pilot, Vartan? I didn’t see any designation for pilot in the mission’s assignment roster.»
Gregorian was moderately handsome and rather tall, quite slim, with thick dark hair and laugh crinkles at the corners of his dark brown eyes. Ignatiev tended to think of people in terms of chess pieces, and he counted Gregorian as a prancing horse, all style and little substance.
«I am flight systems engineer, no?» Gregorian countered. «My assignment is to monitor the flight control program. That makes me the pilot.»
Nikki, still beaming at him, said, «If you’re the pilot, Vartan, then I must be the navigator.»
«Astrogator,» Ignatiev corrected bluntly.
The daughter of a Quebecoise mother and French Moroccan father, Nicolette Denueve had unfortunately inherited her father’s stocky physique and her mother’s sharp nose. Ignatiev thought her unlovely—and yet there was a charm to her, a gamin-like wide-eyed innocence that beguiled Ignatiev’s crusty old heart. She was a physicist, bright and conscientious, not an engineering monkey like the braggart Gregorian. Thus it was a tragedy that she had been selected for this star mission.
She finally turned away from Gregorian to say to Ignatiev, «It’s good to see you, Dr. Ignatiev. You’ve become something of a hermit these past few months.»
He coughed and muttered, «I’ve been busy on my research.» The truth was he couldn’t bear to be among these youngsters, couldn’t stand the truth that they would one day return to Earth while he would be long dead.
Alexander Alexandrovich Ignatiev, by far the oldest man among the starship’s crew, thought that Nikki could have been the daughter he’d never had. Daughter? he snapped at himself silently. Granddaughter, he corrected. Great-granddaughter, even. He was a dour astrophysicist approaching his hundred and fortieth birthday, his short-cropped hair iron gray but his mind and body still reasonably vigorous and active thanks to rejuvenation therapies. Yet he felt cheated by the way the world worked, bitter about being exiled to this one-way flight to a distant star.
Technically, he was the senior executive of this mission, an honor that he found almost entirely empty. To him, it was like being the principal of a school for very bright, totally wayward children. Each one of them must have been president of their school’s student body, he thought: accustomed to getting their own way and total strangers to discipline. Besides, the actual commander of the ship was the artificial intelligence program run by the ship’s central computer.
If Gregorian is a chessboard knight, Ignatiev mused to himself, then what is Nikki? Not the queen; she’s too young, too uncertain of herself for that. Her assignment to monitor the navigation program was something of a joke: the ship followed a ballistic trajectory, like an arrow shot from Earth. Nothing for a navigator to do except check the ship’s position each day.
Maybe she’s a bishop, Ignatiev mused, if a woman can be a bishop: quiet, self-effacing, possessing hidden depths. And reliable, trustworthy, always staying to the color of the square she started on. She’ll cling to Gregorian, unless he hurts her terribly. That possibility made Ignatiev’s blood simmer.
And me? he asked himself. A pawn, nothing more. But then he thought, maybe I’m a rook, stuck off in a corner of the board, barely noticed by anybody.
«Dr. Ignatiev is correct,» said Gregorian, trying to regain control of the conversation. «The proper term is astrogator.»
«Whatever,» said Nikki, her eyes returning to Gregorian’s handsome young face.
«Young» was a relative term. Gregorian was approaching sixty, although he still had the vigor, the attitudes and demeanor of an obstreperous teenager. Ignatiev thought it would be appropriate if the Armenian’s face were blotched with acne. Youth is wasted on the young, Ignatiev thought. Thanks to life-elongation therapies, average life expectancy among the starship crew was well above two hundred. It had to be.
The scoopship was named Sagan, after some minor twentieth-century astronomer. It was heading for Gliese 581, a red dwarf star slightly more than twenty lightyears from Earth. For Ignatiev, it was a one-way journey. Even with all the life-extension therapies, he would never survive the eighty-year round trip. Gregorian would, of course, and so would Nikki.
Ignatiev brooded over the unfairness of it. By the time the ship returned to Earth, the two of them would be grandparents and Ignatiev would be long dead.
Unfair, he thought as he pushed himself up from the plush banquette and left the lounge without a word to either one of them. The universe is unfair. I don’t deserve this: to die alone, unloved, unrecognized, my life’s work forgotten, all my hopes crushed to dust.
As he reached the lounge’s hatch, he turned his head to see what the two of them were up to. Chatting, smiling, holding hands, all the subverbal signals that lovers send to each other. They had eyes only for one another, and paid absolutely no attention to him.
Just like the rest of the goddamned world, Ignatiev thought.
He had labored all his life in the groves of academe, and what had it gotten him? A membership in the International Academy of Sciences, along with seventeen thousand other anonymous workers. A pension that barely covered his living expenses. Three marriages: two wrecked by divorce and the third—the only one that really mattered—destroyed by that inevitable thief, death.