Star rogue, p.2
Star Rogue, page 2
The sea, to my left hand, was a gray, choppy mirror, bright and burnished by the sun. I am very proud of my sea. And of my sun, for that matter. When you consider that, in the beginning, Home was just a raw hunk of naked airless rock, you can imagine what a bitch it was to terraform. It’s only about 500 kilometers in diameter, which makes it smaller than Outpost, or Way Station, or Ceres back in the Sol system. Being so small meant the engineers had to build everything in special: an artificial gravity field set at Earth norm, a tailor-made atmosphere, a complete ecology—the works, as we used to say. It was quite a job. You should see the engines that make my tides, for instance.
Or take my sun. We couldn’t very well transpose a body of stellar mass into paraspace, not at 42 cpu’s per metric slug, we couldn’t. To say nothing of a real sun; think of the problems of compensating for the difference in energy levels!
So I settled for a closed energy field, locked it around the asteroid and worked out a sort of Phoenix effect that makes the outer shell fluoresce way up in the visual octaves. It sheds a respectable amount of light, and you can get a sunburn if you stay outside all day, working with your japon off and torso bare. But it’s not enough to heat Home, of course. For that, we planted fusion engines in the core; for that, and to power the gravity field. The whole job cost a fortune (a half dozen fortunes, really) but, damn it all, I wanted me a sun! Or a reasonable facsimile, at least.
After we had scared all the seagulls and stretched our legs a little, we headed for the house. It’s up in the valley above the seashore with the hills behind it and the woods beyond. Since there’s only me, not counting the dogs and Sultan, most of Home is woods and fields. My sea is really only a big lake. But it is salt water, and it does have tides.
I built the house myself. With a little robotic assistance, of course. I built it just the way I wanted it, long and low and rambling, all redwood logs and rough fieldstone and a real slate roof. The living room, as we used to call it, has hand-hewn exposed beams in the ceiling and a fieldstone fireplace so big you can sit in it. A lot of the house is built underground—lab facilities, vaults, files, stores and the workshops, to say nothing of the main thedomin installation. Only the living area is above ground. Wanderer’s hangar is in the back. It looks like a big red barn, and it is, as he shares it with Sultan.
When we came up into the yard the dogs came out to welcome us, tails wagging and tongues lolling. My big St. Bernard and one of the little dachshunds had started out that morning with Sultan and I but the house knew better and turned them back at the pasture gate. Now both dachsies danced around Sultan yapping hysterically. My big boy woofed in his deep voice and wagged his huge plume of a tail. Even the puppies came toddling out from their favorite napping-place under the wild rose bushes to see what was going on. They got underfoot, as is the way with puppies, but Sultan stepped carefully through them with delicate, precise steps bending low to watch his footing. The yapping dachsies were beneath his dignity to notice but he gave the pups a curious sniff and licked one from stumpy nose to small tail as he went through the crowd.
As I climbed out of the saddle, the house cleared its throat and said: “There has been a call from Monitor R-2. Received and recorded at 10:19.”
I stood there holding on to the saddle horn and felt a tingle go chasing itself up and down my spine. As I said before, it had been a good century since the last time I’d had a call. The monitors are set to make a direct call only in case something big comes up. Something like invasion, war, revolution, the assassination of a regnant Imperator, the collapse of a dynasty or the energy-death of the universe. So this must be a big one.
I told the house okay but, urgent call or no urgent call, I had my obligation to Sultan to take care of first. I took him into the barn he shares with Wanderer unsaddled him, rubbed him down, gave him mashed bran and fresh water and told him he was a good fella. Then I went in and listened to the playback. The dogs followed me in, all except the pups, who had fallen asleep under the rose bushes again. I listened to the playback. Twice.
It was serious. Or it might be serious. It was, at any rate, damn odd. Odd enough for the monitor to make the decision to place a direct call to Home. Most routine monthly reports from my monitor system are received by the house thedomin, which digests them and gives me a printed rundown. Rarely is there anything so urgent as to demand my immediate attention. After all, I retired a century and a half ago and I mean to stay retired. I like to keep in touch with what’s going on but I leave it up to Citadel to handle emergencies. I wondered if Citadel knew about this one. …
I mulled it over while the house made my lunch and I used the ’fresher. Then I stretched out in the big pneumo in the living room, wolfed down my lunch and whittled away at a large brandy. I was still thinking about it when the snifter was empty.
The message that had caused all this trouble was a deleocast from Monitor R-2. The R-prefix denoted it as one of the Rim series but I had frankly forgotten just what the Rim series had been established for in the first place. The house refreshed my memory on this.
I do not mean to give the impression that I am absent-minded. Just—practical. You see, when you’ve lived as long as I have, you accumulate quite a load of memories and some of them are superfluous.
Let me illustrate this with an example drawn from ancient history. I remember an old “movie”—an obsolete artform, a sort of recorded visual drama. It was a comedy about a stodgy scholar with a phenomenal memory of encyclopedic dimensions. He decided to cash in on his skill by appearing on a “quiz show”—an organized competition with large monetary prizes given for the best memory which used to be conducted as a species of entertainment, so-called. He was about to walk away with a fortune when they stopped him cold with the final query. They had asked him the one question he could not answer—to recite his social security number! We would call it his Citizen’s Code today, but the principle remains the same. Even way back then, every citizen walked around with long strings of identifying numerals attached to his name and who could be bothered storing all that data?
It’s like that with an ordinary lifetime’s load of casual memory accumulation. Live long enough, and you end up with a real shortage of storage space.
So you see, an immortal has his problems, too.
I can’t be bothered remembering such routine data, so I let the house file it away for me. This is not to say I have a bad memory, because I have a superb information-storage-and-retrieval system up there in the mnemonic lattice of my cerebral cortex; an immortal has to develop a well-organized memory or go blooey from sheer cumulative overload. But the house has a better brain than even I do, so I let it take care of the routine details.
Of course, a thedomin isn’t really much like a human brain but the comparison is close enough. The kind of A-prime thedomin that runs my house and my cruiser is an artificial intelligence capable of handling a virtually infinite number of information-bits simultaneously. “Infinite” may be too strong a term but the house thedomin can actually store on tap for instant recall something like 10020 data-bits. Now that’s what I call a filing system! And if its capacities are not quite “infinite,” they’re certainly close enough to make the difference negligible.
The thedomin is a great tool. It has freed half the race from routine work and liberated the human intelligence for more important tasks. A thedomin’s great-great-great grandad about two thousand times removed was an old-fashioned IBM computer, but the equivalence is brutally unfair. It bears about the same relation to a primitive computer as Chernikov does to a caveman.
But I am digressing all over space … I never played with autobiography before, and I’m not at all sure why I am yakking away at it now, since I plan to make damn sure no one will ever hear this cassette.
Anyway, the house informed me that I set up the Rim series to conduct long-term studies of fluctuations in the galactic magnetic field. This was back over two centuries ago, when I was planning to retire. At the time I was in the middle of a research program on paramagnetic wave patterns. Like the five hundred-or-so other monitor stations I set up around the galaxy—my private, personal watchdog system—the Rim series consisted of thedomin-controlled secret research satellites powered with “eternity” ion-exchange batteries, shielded from chance discovery by light-baffles, tucked away in asdarproof vacuoles, and locked in neutrino-retaining bentspace fields. They are going to run forever unless commanded to self-destruct.
Now, it seems that Monitor R-2 is positioned in the fringe of the outermost of the Range Stars. The 300-odd stars in the Range group lie at the further extremity of the middle arm of our galactic spiral, which still retains its old, prespace-travel appellation of Carina-Cygnus. The Range Stars, which to this day are sparsely populated, mostly rural agricultural or “suburban” planetary systems, are the end, the jumping-off place. There’s nothing beyond them, nothing at all, but the black and empty sea of intergalactic space … all the way to our two nearest neighbors, the Magellanic Clouds. The lonely Range Stars wink and glitter at the galactic Rim like outpost beacons on the shore of a dark, unknown, and unsailed sea.
Since concluding my study of paramagnetics I hadn’t paid any attention to the R-series monitor reports. Most of my monitors perform simple tasks like charting the rise and fall of Chernikov radiation, take periodic mu/lambda particle counts, and graph out novae data. More than half the monitors in my private information-gathering system listen in to newscasts, digest the data and feed the digest to Home on deleo tightbeam.
But a thedomin, even an “idiot-level” thedomin like my Rim series of monitors, is intelligent enough to be able to make value judgments on the data they collect, process and forward. And R-2 figured its data was important enough for a direct call to the boss. I wondered. It just might be right… .
For the rest of the day I just puttered around. I have eight or nine study projects going on currently. At the moment I am mastering spoken Sanskrit, learning to read the Sirius II petroglyphs at sight, boning up on the last decade’s accomplishments in plenum mechanics, rereading the Silver poets, and trying to invent an absolutely unbreakable code, i.e., a synthetic language with a working vocabulary of 10,000 words coined at pure random. And, among other things, I am playing with this experiment in autobiography. If I don’t get bored with it, I may turn out a full set of memoirs, of which this cassette would be about #74.
Does this hobby program sound self-contradictory, considering what I was saying just a moment ago about not wanting to clutter up my mnemonic lattice with superfluous memories? If so, I’m sorry, but I have as much right to be inconsistent as you do.
The thing is this: while an immortal does tend to eliminate the tiresome chore of remembering routine data, he also soon learns that he has to keep his mind supple and flexible or it ossifies into habit-patterns which turn out to be detrimental in the long run. What I mean is—boredom sets in, and that can be deadly. Now an immortal is far more prone to boredom than a short-lifer. You may find Henggren’s Moons of Saturn enthralling and inexhaustible but take it from me, the 500,000th time you play that particular neosymphony it has nothing left of itself to reveal to you. And if your musical tastes are limited to the Third Imperium neosymphonic school of composers alone, you have reached a dead-end as far as music is concerned.
An immortal’s life is filled with dead-ends. Best you learn to avoid them by a continuing program of exploring new interests. The mind is very much like a muscle in many ways. Keep it occupied with new and different exercises, and you keep it limber and supple, alive and healthy. Keep using it in the same old ways, and it atrophies in the long run.
But here I am digressing again!
So, anyway, I played and puttered the rest of the day away, but I’m afraid my heart just wasn’t in it—which is another way of saying my mind was elsewhere. To be exact, it was out there on the Rim wondering just what the hell that enigmatic report from monitor R-2 really implied.
A little later on, the house whipped up a superb dinner, and, over coffee (yes, real coffee: like the house, the beverage is extinct, except here on Home) and liqueurs, I listened with only half an ear to some recorded verse—my nightly canto of Radelix’s Morgantyr Epic. I went to bed early.
But not to sleep.
That message kept going through the empty space between my ears—which I laughingly call my brain. What did it mean? What could it mean? How important was it? How important might it be?
I must have tossed and turned, trying to get to sleep. Because the dogs sensed something was wrong. The big St. Bernard, who sleeps at the left side of the bed, stood up, whined deep in his throat and laid his huge paw gently on my arm questioningly. I rubbed my fingers through the thick ruff of fur on his neck and told him that he was a good boy and that it was all right and to go to sleep now. He lay down with a heavy sigh and slept. His mind was at rest. But mine was not. I couldn’t turn it off.
Here was the reason why.
The galaxy’s magnetic field fluctuates according to a complex rhythm for reasons of its own. But R-2 for the past six months had been taking readings on an enormous disturbance in the field. The center of this disturbance was cruising along the Rim in a certain direction and at a fixed speed.
What was causing it?
According to the magnetigraphs, it was an object of almost stellar—certainly planetary—mass. A ship of any conceivable size, even an armada, would not register a fraction of that mass.
Now, it could be a rogue star. A wanderer from the far places. Rogue stars, rogue planets, bodies dislodged somehow from their accustomed coigns and orbits—although as rare as scales on a Pterian, had been known for a good ten thousand years.
But the house had already cross-referenced its memory of recent astrophysical news. A rogue star wandering the Rim would have made the news, for the occurrence was unusual. No such news had been announced on the deleocasts in the past six months—in the past year, for that matter.
A dark star? A burn-out cinder, wandering from the Beyond? Perhaps. Such a body would not necessarily have shown up on visual sightings or on photogramic sightings, although asdar surveys would have spotted it without trouble.
Maybe. Just maybe.
But what was keeping me from sleep was another memory-bit. This was the twenty-seventh year of the Empery of Kermian XIX of the House of the Tre-gephontanes, or A.D. 7-177 if you prefer the Old Style. The Eighth Imperium. In the four thousand one hundred and fourteen years since The Divine Arion founded the House of Baracheus, vast portions of the first galaxy had been explored, colonized, civilized and tamed.
We were almost ready to take the Big Jump—the mightiest voyage across space ever attempted—the history-making first venture into a neighboring galaxy. And the nearest of our neighbors in galactic space were the Greater and the Lesser Magellanic Clouds. For a century or more Imperial scientists had studied the problems entailed in such a colossal attempt. For to open up another galaxy, even a small one like the G.M.C., is colossal. Think of the man-power needed for such a project. Think of the varieties of manpower—hundreds of sciences were involved. You would need pilots, galactographers, linguists, communications experts, engineers, planetographers, telepathicists, diplomats, government representatives, diovonicists, doctors, naval personnel, tacticians, biologists, ecologists, and just about every other kind of ologist you could think of.
The preliminary survey personnel, in fact, has been estimated—conservatively—at two hundred million specialists.
Now, no one ship, no one fleet, can be expected to carry so many people so far for so long a trip. So the Imperium (with a few carefully timed and placed nudges from Citadel) came up with the answer, eventually. Such a ship does in fact exist that can carry 200,000,000 people through space—not just for a century but for millennia. In fact, we have a lot of ships around that can do it.
They are called … planets.
In other words, stock up an Earth-type planet with two hundred million specialists dislodge the planet and its sun from orbit and aim them at the shores of the Magellanics. In time, they’ll get there intact they or their children.
For the past twenty years they’ve been doing intensive study of the problems of launching and maintaining a “mobile planet system,” as the deleocasters have labelled it. One of the Range Stars will be picked—several have volunteered. It may be Segemon or Cavalaris or Ordovoy. And in another twenty years they may be ready to do it, and the Big Jump will be launched.
So … isn’t it a peculiar coincidence that something of planetary or even stellar mass is drifting around the fringes of the galaxy right now … drifting just beyond the outermost of the Range Stars themselves?
It makes you stop and think, doesn’t it?
Like—maybe the Magellanics have beaten us to it?
That’s what was keeping me awake. And I had a hunch I wouldn’t be getting much sleep until I found out just What was cruising the shores of space out there.
Or just Who.
TWO
So, bright and early the next morning I set out on another little trip. But not on horseback, this time. I went out to the barn, “woke up” Wanderer, gave him a set of coordinates to chew over, and told him to get ready.
I had come to a decision there in what somebody—obviously another sufferer-from-insomnia—had once very aptly called “the stilly watches of the night.” Namely, that I was going to have to check on this one myself.
Oh, sure, I had retired all right. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t take a little vacation cruise once in a while. I could leave Home to take care of itself. The house was perfectly capable of watching over the dogs, seeing they got fed on time, keeping them out of mischief and out of fights, or even giving them a little medical attention if they did get into fights—anything up to and including major surgery. And the house could feed and water and even exercise Sultan, too. There was nothing keeping me here if I wanted to go.
