Dream Chronicles Of Water Full.epub
Vita Strait
At first I knew nothing about it. When the flivver came, I was climbing the flanks of the Sicilian plateau, in the great valley a recent ice age had made of the Mediterranean Sea I had once known. I and five other newly awakened Sleepers had come to camp and tramp through this wonder while we acclimated to the times.
We were a motley assortment from various eras, though none was older than I. We had just finished a visit to the once-sunken ruins of Atlantis, and were hiking out on a forest trail under the evening glow of the ring-city high overhead. In the middle latitudes, night was now a pale thing. Nearer the equator, there was little to distinguish it from day, so glorious was the lightribbon in the sky.
Not that night could ever be the same as it had been when my grandfather was a child, even if every work of man were removed. For ever since the twenty-second century there had been the Shards, casting colors out where once there had been but galaxies and stars.
No wonder no one had objected to the banishment of night from Earthsurface. Humanity out on the smallbodies might have to look upon the Shards, but Earthdwellers had no particular desire to gaze out upon those unpleasant reminders.
I had expected to go on my rebirthtrek unbothered. So it was with amazement, that evening on the forestflank of Sicily, that I saw a creamy-colored Sol-Gov flivver drop out of a bank of lacy clouds and drift toward the campsite, where my group of timecast wanderers had settled to doze and aimlessly gossip about the events of the day.
The beige teardrop opened, and out stepped a tall woman. She possessed a type of statuesque, austere beauty that had not been in fashion on Earth during any of my last four lives. Clearly she had never indulged in biosculpting.
We found out months ago, just after you thawed. Worldcomp still said that we had to give you a year of wakeup, but I came the instant it was over. We have waited long enough, Joshua. Moishe Bok is taking out every deepspacer nowalive.
Of recent weeks, as I wandered, I had pondered what profession I would pursue in this life. But joy of joys, it never occurred to me I would be a deepspacer again! I would wear the uniform once more, and fartravel to the stars!
The project was under a total news blackout. The Sol-Gov psychists were of the opinion that the race could not stand another disappointment. They feared an epidemic of greatdepression, and a few of them even tried to stop us from mounting the expedition.
By the time Alice and I arrived at Charon, the others had almost finished recommissioning the ship we were to take. I had hoped we would be using the Robert Rodgers, or Ponce de Leon, two ships I had once commanded. But they had chosen instead to use the old Pelenor. She would be big enough for the purposes we had in mind, without being unwieldy.
When my grandfather was a boy, Charon had been a site of similar activity. Thousands of excited men and women had clustered around an asteroid ship half the size of the little moon itself, taking aboard a virtual ark of hopeful would-be colonists, their animals, and their goods.
Ten thousand waityears later, I looked out at the mammoth Yards of Charon as we passed overhead. Rank on serried rank of starships lay berthed below. Over the millennia, thousands had been built, from generation ships and hiberna-barges to ram-shippers and greatstrutted wormhole-divers.
When she collided with the crystalsphere, it bowed outward with her over a span of lightminutes. Seeker had time for a frantic lasercast back to Earth. They only knew that something strange was happening. Something had begun tearing them apart, even as the fabric of space itself seemed to rend!
Nobody ever found the wreckage of Seeker. Perhaps she was vaporized. Almost half the human race died in the battle against the comets, and by the time the planets were safe again, centuries later, Seeker was long gone.
The Sol-Gov tugs had finished loading the colonists aboard, and were departing. The ten thousand corpsicles would require little tending during our mission, so we dozen deepspacers would be free to explore. But if the goodstar did, indeed, shine onto an accessible goodworld, we would awaken the men and women from frozensleep and deliver them to their new home.
No doubt the Worldcomps chose well these sleepers to be potential colonists. Still, we were under orders that none of them should be awakened unless a colony was possible. Perhaps this trip would turn out to be just another disappointment, in which case the corpsicles were never to know that they had been on a journey twenty thousand parsecs and back.
In my time, there were four ways known to cheat Einstein, and two ways to flat-out fool him. On our journey, Pelenor used all of them. Our route was circuitous, from wormhole to quantumpoint to collapsar. By the time we arrived, I wondered how the deepprobe had ever gotten so far, let alone back, with its news.
On the way, we passed close to at least two hundred goodstars, glowing hotyellow, stable, and solitary. In every case, there were signs of planets circling round. Several times we swept by close enough to catch glimpses, in our superscopes, of bright blue waterworlds, circling invitingly like temptresses, forever out of reach.
In the old days, we would have mapped these places, excitedly standing off just outside of the dangerzone, studying the Earth-like worlds with our instruments. We would have charted them carefully, against the day when mankind finally learned how to do on purpose what Seeker had accomplished in ignorance.
Long ago, we had reached one conclusion. If goodstars without crystalspheres were rare, and dreamt of by a frustrated mankind, the same might hold for some other star-traveling race. If some other people had managed to break out of its shell, and now wandered about, like us, in search of another open goodstar, what would such a race think, upon detecting our ship?
I shrugged. We would find out soon. My duty was done the moment I flicked the arming switch and took hold of our deadman autodestruct. In the hours that passed, I watched the developments carefully, but could not help deepremembering.
The great lunar-based cameras tracked planets around nearby yellow suns. There were telltale traces of life even in those faint twenty-first-century spectra. Philosophers case nervous calculations to show that the galaxies must teem with living worlds.
No alien colonists ever came to Earth during all that time. We knew that for certain, for if they had, the very garbage they buried would have changed the history of life on our planet. A single leaky latrine would have filled the oceans with superior lifeforms that would have overwhelmed our crude little ancestors.
Two billion years without being colonized . . . and then the silent emptiness of the radioways . . . the philosophers of the twenty-first century called it the Great Silence. They hoped the starships would find the answer.
During the ensuing CometWar, we had little time for philosophical musings. I was born into that battle, and spent my first hundred years in harsh screaming littleships, blasting and herding iceballs that, left alone, would have fallen upon and crushed our fragile worlds.
That might have been logical. But mankind went a little crazy when Earthmother was threatened. Belters herded cities of millions into the paths of hurling iceballs, just to save a heavy world they had only known from books and a faint blue-twinkle in the blackness. The psychists took a long time to understand why. At the time it seemed like some sort of divine madness.
We had all had such hopes . . . though those who remembered Seeker had worried quietly. Humanity seemed about to breathe free, at last! We were going to spread our eggs to other baskets, and be safe for the first time. No more would we have to fear overpopulation, crowding, or stagnation.
It took centuries even to learn how to detect the deathzones! How, we asked. How could the universe be so perverse? Was it all some great practical joke? What were these monstrous barriers that defied all the physics we knew, and kept us away from the beautiful littleworlds we so desired?
The entire crew breathed a reliefsigh when Captain Bok ordered me to put the safeties back on. I finally let go of my deadman switch and got up. The tension seeped away into a chain of shivers, and Alice had to hold me until I could stand again on my own.
During those first centuries after the crystal crisis, some men and women still thought it would be possible to live among the stars. Belters mostly, they claimed aloud that planets were nasty, heavy places anyway. So who needed them?
Pelenor was hardly up to the task of exploring this system by herself. We spent a year recovering and modifying several of the ancient ships we found drifting over our planet, so that teams could spread out, investigating every farcorner of this system.
By our second anniversary, a hundred biologists were quickscampering over the surface of Quest. They gene scanned the local flora and fauna excitedly, and already were modifying Earthplants to fit into the ecosystem without causing imbalance. Soon they would start on animals from our genetanks.
Engineers exploring the smallbodies excitedly declared that they could get the lifemachines left behind by the prior race to work. There was room for a billion colonists out there, straight from the start.
But the archeologists were the ones whose report we awaited most anxiously. Between my ferrying runs, they were the ones I helped. I joined them in the dusty ruins of Oldcity, at the edge of Longvalley, putting together piles of artifacts to be catalogued and slowly analyzed.
Still, one got used to their faces after staring at their statues and pictures long enough. I even began to perceive subtle facial cues, and delicate, sensitive nuances of expression. When the language was cracked, we learned their race name and some of their story.
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