The starchild compact, p.27
The Starchild Compact, page 27
A final stop in orbit around Earth, a final trip to the surface, a final farewell to friends and colleagues they would never see again – and the small band of star farers departed for the Arc, and their eventual journey home.
#
As Carmen finished her tale, the crew members lounged around in contemplative silence. "You realize the implications?" Jon asked to no one in particular. He consulted his link and then added, "If their craft can reach a Lorentz Factor of twenty-two-thousand – for you non-physics types, that's ninety-nine-point-nine followed by six nines percent of light-speed – then a half-million years for Earth would last only some eleven years and change for the Founders. That means…" he paused to look at each crew member in turn, "that we have a measurable probability of meeting these guys." He let his words hang…
"What are the odds?" Ginger asked to nobody in particular. "To have the timelines intersect at this particular point, it has to be astronomical…virtually zero."
"Not necessarily," Chen immediately interjected. "Look at it this way: If I were part of that crew, I guess I would want to know what was happening back here…" His voice trailed off. "But how do you do that? Their hyper-vee propulsion involves physical translation…limited to…"
Ari piped in, "Even if they were to arrange a rendezvous with a robot craft, at best they still can only know the status quo for time in years past equal to twice the distance traveled in light years." He scratched his head contemplatively. "No way, Chen…you simply can't get that information."
"That's right," Demitri said. "If you want to know, you go."
"You decide now that you want to know," Noel added, "and if you are a thousand light years distant, you'll find out what is happening about a thousand years from now."
"So, unless they developed superluminal communication, which Carmen didn't mention in her tale," Ginger said in turn, "it's the luck of the draw."
"So, if we meet them," Jon said, "we are very, very lucky." He paused. "What an amazing thing that would be."
"Wait," Chen said. "We're missing a significant point." He paused, in thought. "Say the Founders return from Ectaris – about a thousand years plus whatever time they spent there – and decide not to hang around, but to hop in and out of Earth history. How difficult would it be to go out and back, say for an Earth interval of ten-thousand years…?" He consulted his link. "Using Jon's Lorentz Factor, they would be gone for about a hundred-sixty-three days ship time." Chen's Asian eyes started twinkling as he got into his subject. "Say one thing leads to another, and they arrive here about nineteen-seventy or so. Obviously, there's nothing happening, but they detect insipient space travel. So, what do they do? How about, they go out and back ten light years…that's about a half-hour using Jon's Lorentz Factor. It's nineteen-eighty…and nothing's happening yet. So they keep doing this, and in just a few hours ship time we're building El-four. And then…we're here." He looked around the group. "Jon, isn't that what you would do? So long as they don't overshoot, they can fine tune their hops to get here right about now."
#
Saeed listened to the back-and-forth banter, barely comprehending. He still was trying to assimilate star faring folk who spoke an advanced form of Hebrew. Nothing in the Qur'an even remotely hinted at something like this.
Allah most merciful, he prayed silently, help me understand. Guide me to my destiny. Keep me on Your holy path. Keep Jihad alive in my heart. Send me a sign that releases me from my oath to the Captain. Show me a way to carry out Your plan for this evil place.
And then it struck him like a bolt of lightning. He was here, right now, under oath, restrained from taking action so that he would be present and ready to act after the Founders arrived – at the exact moment of Allah's choosing. It was an astonishing revelation. Saeed took a deep breath, and letting it out slowly, relaxed.
#
Ari watched Saeed surreptitiously as the crew members discussed Carmen's story. He saw the worry that emanated from Saeed's entire being, and tensed himself to take action, should it become necessary. Then, as the little stowaway slowly exhaled, Ari upped his alert scale. He had seen this same thing too many times in the past to let it simply go unnoticed. Saeed, he decided, was getting ready to continue his Jihad.
First Interlude
In the Arc Command Center, Eber relaxed in a well-padded chair fixed to the deck with his back to a control console. Gathered around him was the rest of his team. His father, Shem, was stocky with swarthy, weathered skin, nearly black eyes, and curly dark hair, and appeared to be in his early fifties. His mother, Persia, was at least a decade younger than Shem, slight of build with high cheek bones and delicate facial features framed by a mane of long, glossy black hair. Her eyes were a deep dark brown. His grandfather, Noah, had close-cropped white hair, and his piercing blue eyes and wrinkled face gave witness to his seventy-five well lived years. His grandmother, Vesta, an accomplished surgeon, looked impossibly young for her sixty-eight years. Her classical face was without wrinkles, although her golden hair showed a few streaks of gray. Her svelte body appeared to carry virtually no excess fat. Her hazel eyes flashed flecks of green when she smiled and when she was angry. Three of Eber's four brothers, Asshur, Aram, and Arpachshad, were like peas in a pod. Born in quick succession several years after Eber, they mirrored their father, and were often mistaken for each other. His youngest brother, Lud, had inherited some of his mother's and grandmother's features. He was slight of build, with lighter hair, and had his grandfather's blue eyes. Like his grandmother, he was a skilled physician.
The five brothers had chosen their wives well. Eber's wife, Azurad, was a beauty among beauties. It is said that sons often marry younger versions of their mothers, and Azurad was a younger Persia in nearly every respect. Side-by-side, they looked like sisters, although Azurad's youth was apparent upon closer examination, which was a constant annoyance to Persia. Azurad followed in Vesta's footsteps to become a physician, but her focus was more toward research. Asshur's wife, Ishtar, came from a radically different family line. She was taller than Asshur by a head, her skin was almost transparently pale, her long golden tresses, that reached her waist when she let her hair down, framed deep green eyes and an oval face that would have graced the covers of magazines under different circumstances. To Asshur's great satisfaction, she absolutely doted on him. Sari, wife to Aram, was the smallest of the women, barely reaching to Ishtar's bosom. She, too, had very pale skin, but her hair was jet black like her mother-in-law's, and her eyes looked like dark coals set into her transparent skin. She displayed high cheekbones like the others, except for Ishtar. Aram could nearly wrap his hands around her waist, it was so tiny. Like Ishtar, Arpachshad's wife, Rasu'eja, stood taller than her mate, but she looked like an athletic version of Azurad. Her skin had a deep copper-bronze tone, her muscles were lithe and firm, and her compact breasts sat high on her torso. It was said that in combat she could best any two normal men, but none of Eber's crew had ever issued a challenge. Finally, Lud's wife, Shakbah, was fair haired like Ishtar, but wore her golden tresses piled high atop her crown, was of average height, had the classic facial structure of the other women, and viewed the world through large, round, nearly purple, dark blue eyes.
"So we're of a mind?" Eber asked, letting his gaze pass over each of the thirteen people arrayed before him. He had assumed leadership of the group during the previous year while the final elements of the space-born population transferred planetside. His father could easily have continued as head of the clan, but Eber's technical understanding of the new hyper-V system far surpassed Shem's, and Shem had expressed an increasing desire to settle planetside with Persia.
"I know you've all heard it, but I'm going to say it again." Eber addressed the group, but his eyes shifted between his grandfather and grandmother. "Once we clear the immediate vicinity of the Arc and the ringed planet, we'll activate the hyper-vee function. In a fraction of a second, we'll accelerate to within a hair of light-speed. About eight days and three hours later by our subjective time we'll arrive in the Ectaris system, having transited the five-hundred light year distance that the Arc took four-hundred years subjective time to cross." He smiled at his grandparents and then winked at his father. "Five-hundred years will have passed back here."
"I'm still processing all that," Vesta said, patting her husband's hand. "Our ancestors left Ectaris some four-hundred years ago Arc time, and that entire five-hundred light year trip actually took six-hundred-forty years for an outside observer. Does this mean they stripped off two-hundred-forty years?" She sighed. "Now it takes just over a week." Noah squeezed her hand while Eber nodded and grinned broadly.
"Perhaps a better way to look at it," Eber said, "is that if they had sent a radio signal to Earth when they left, the Arc would have arrived one-hundred-forty years after the radio signal, but the Arc would have aged only four-hundred years. Is that any clearer?"
"Right…clear as mud!"
"They left sixteen generations ago," Noah said. "Well, for you and me," he smiled at Vesta, "we better call it fourteen." A general chuckle passed around the group.
Once an engineer, always an engineer, Eber said soundlessly as he collected his thoughts. "One last time," he said, "and then I'll let it go." He leaned forward in his chair. "When we return, over one-thousand years will have passed. We can say with certainty that everyone we know will be gone, irretrievably, forever lost to time. Each passing minute under hyper-vee is a piece of time that cannot be recalled. We stay together, or we drift apart in time." He looked at Ishtar. "If you remain planetside while Asshur makes this trip, you'll be a shadow from forty generations past when he returns, not the beautiful, statuesque goddess you are now." He paused briefly. "You will live the rest of your life without Asshur."
Ishtar's deep green eyes grew big and round, and she looked lovingly at her man. "I guess that puts things into perspective," Asshur said, just before Ishtar leaned over him with a kiss.
"Okay, then. We're going to see what the nova did to Ectaris."
#
Over the next several hours, Eber and his crew scanned the monitors that oversaw the many population centers that dotted the Arc's interior. Throughout the artificial world loudspeakers broadcast a repeating message, warning any left-behind-residents, that they had one last chance to be transported planetside. When there was no response after five hours, Eber concluded that if there were any left-behinds, they didn't want to be discovered.
The fourteen clan members spent most of their remaining time working from the operations control center shutting down non-essential systems or putting them into long-term stand-by. Shem put the climate control systems into hibernation, so that they would keep the Arc ecology running, but at a vastly slowed rate. He could see no reason to consume resources unnecessarily during their thousand-year absence.
By day's end, the Arc interior had assumed a hushed stance that seemed eerily out-of-place to the fourteen for whom the Arc interior was the only world they had ever known. Eber stood on the meadow outside the control complex, and watched the light fade for the last time. As darkness fell, he felt an overwhelming melancholy that threatened to bring him to tears. The upper reaches of the massive columns that held up the sky were the last things to disappear, and then darkness surrounded him. It felt thick, like viscous silicon, and Eber shook his head to rid himself of the sensation.
Eber requested formal reports from each clan member, and recorded the session for posterity. Part of him thought this moment could be pivotal, and he wanted it on the record. Several minutes later, the entire crew assembled at the launch column. With the floaters now inactive, they moved on foot across the intervening distance – individual light globes accompanied them, bathing them with soft radiance.
With everyone present, with all fourteen clan members standing easily near the massive column, Eber fingered a small instrument on his wrist. The outline of a large rectangular opening appeared on the column's surface, and then the entire curved rectangle backed into the column several centimeters, and slid upwards into the cylinder wall. As the opening grew, the interior, which had been dark when the opening first began to retract, gradually lighted until it was brilliantly illuminated. A circular object occupied about half the floor of the fifty-meter-wide column interior. It appeared to be like two flattened hemispheres pressed together, balanced on five appendages that extended from the bottom half. It was black, but not in the ordinary sense. It was black, because it absorbed every photon that struck it. It almost looked like a shaped hole in the air, a mirror of the mini-black hole at its core, instead of an object sitting on the deck.
Azurad gasped at the sight. She had been deeply involved in wrapping up her current research project, and simply had not taken the time to examine the craft her husband and his brothers had constructed. "What do you call her?" she asked to no one in particular.
A look of astonishment crossed Eber's face. "Call her?" he said. "I guess we never got around to that." Eber looked at the faces around him. "How about…"
"You built it – we get to name it," Vesta interjected, indicating herself and the other women. "How about it, girls?"
They went into a huddle.
Eber watched the women with patronizing amusement as they discussed the various possibilities, knowing full well that their combined education and abilities actually exceeded the men's. Following a surprisingly short time, Vesta looked up and announced, "This hyper-vee spacecraft is nothing short of a chariot of fire, and so we christen her Merkavah."
" Merkavah it is," Eber said with a grin, wondering inside how he could have missed something so important as the ship's name.
The other men nodded their approval, and that was that.
Eber fingered his controller again, and a portion of the top section slid back, revealing a lighted interior that contrasted sharply with the door outline. A ramp extended from the opening toward the group. Eber gestured to Vesta and Noah, who walked up the ramp together, followed by the others in no particular order.
The ramp led into a control chamber that was clearly set up for dual controls – two places with clear access to duplicate sets of controls and screen-like devices that served as monitors for the various external sensors. At that moment they showed the illuminated interior of the column absent the craft, as if it were not sitting on the floor. Another, smaller display showed the immediate surrounds outside the column. The fourteen people took their assigned places; Eber took the left control chair, and Asshur took the other. Because the hyper-V system acted on every molecule within its field, there was no need for anyone to strap down, or in any other way to take any particular precaution.
Eber checked his personnel monitor; it indicated fourteen souls. He nodded at Asshur who touched a panel display, and the view shifted, showing a bird's-eye view of Merkavah inside the cylinder. The ramp was retracting and the cylinder door was closing.
"We've got a green board," Asshur announced. Eber nodded at him again, and he commenced evacuating the cylinder.
To facilitate rapid evacuation, large storage chambers had been constructed in the overhead substrate alongside the cylinder. They were maintained in an evacuated state, so that the air in the cylinder could be dumped into the chambers, making rapid evacuation of the remaining air possible. The whole process took about five minutes. Five kilometers overhead, a cover slid aside, exposing the cylinder interior to the hard vacuum of space. The remaining air puffed out in a crystalline cloud, and settled to the surface. Inside Merkavah, Eber activated his controls, and the craft lifted, and commenced an accelerating rise up the cylinder. From inside, the only indications that they were moving were the shifting images on the monitors. Merkavah shot out of the cylinder so fast, that had there been anyone present to observe the exiting spacecraft, that person would have seen nothing at all. Eber set the controls to move the craft at right angles to the plane of the ecliptic, so that it rapidly rose out and away from the immediate gravitational influence of the nearby ringed planet.
Eber had practiced this maneuver dozens of times in the simulator, but this was the first time he had done it for real. Their calculations had indicated that shifting the hyper-V system into near light-speed too close to a significant planetary or stellar mass produced unpredictable results, and could even damage the craft. Since the quickest way to reduce the overall gravity field was to climb vertically out of the ecliptic, Eber had written this maneuver into the still developing standard operating procedures for system craft. There actually was an ideal vector that was optimal for each specific launch circumstance in any solar system, but the dynamics for working this out were so complex, that it was easier simply to power out of the ecliptic at the highest safe velocity until the instruments indicated that it was safe to shift to near light-speed.
The process of setting the spacecraft course as it accelerated to its terminal velocity was simplicity itself. The astrogation sector of the onboard Resident Computer maintained the craft's position with respect to the G2V yellow dwarf that dominated this solar system. It knew the relative position of the destination star, and backed up this knowledge with an optical sight that linked into the computer guidance sector. When it determined that the parameters for safe acceleration had been reached, it locked in the appropriate vector and simultaneously activated the hyper-V system. Within a fraction of a second, Merkavah and its occupants were moving at 99.9 followed by six nines percent of light-speed. The Resident set the course to bring the craft high above the ecliptic in the Ectaris system. At preprogrammed intervals throughout the flight, the Resident dropped the craft's speed to near zero for several moments to determine the presence of any nearby large masses, following which it modified the course to give any such masses a wide berth. Dust, particles, and gas that lay in the craft's path were swept away by the hyper-V field like floating objects in the path of a fast moving ship are swept aside by the ship's bow-wake.
Eber turned to his passengers – his family. "Okay, folks, you've got eight days and four hours to do whatever you planned to do during this trip. We're going to exit hyper-vee at the minus-one-hour-point long enough to establish an ideal final vector, and then we'll power down to the ecliptic as close as possible to Ectaris." He yawned and stretched. "I'm taking a short nap." He shut his eyes, and shortly was snoring softly.
