Starburst

15

TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND ASTRONOMICAL UNITS AWAY IT was the birthday for another human being, whose name was Jeron. It was his first. Although he was too small to know it, he was not having a happy infancy.

By the time Jeron was born, in the same, most unusual way as the rest of his cohort, his parents (all of them) had learned of their sentence of death. They did not recover quickly. Although there were times when they seemed able to screen off that knowledge, there were other times when it colored every word and action. Jeron was a fast learner even before he was weaned. He took in attitudes with his mothers' milk, and words with his first spoonful of what he would later learn to call "squacipro." Jeron was a healthy and strong baby, who emerged into the world without that boiled-lobster look of every generation before him. He was also, of course, inordinately intelligent. He was speaking before his first birthday. He responded to words like "eat" and "bed" and "wet?" without knowing that they were words, or that words were a part of language. Since his infant brain was not greatly more competent than a dog's, he learned as a dog might: the words were cues, like a tone of voice or the rattle of a leash. Some words and phrases he took in without processing at all. "Goddam Kneffie" and "Kraut bastard" were stored as single concepts, he heard them so often.

He heard them a lot, in raging tones or despairing, in his first months, because then the terror and the outrage had not yet worn off for his parents. The dollops of baby food Aunt Eve steered past his tiny new teeth were sometimes salted with her tears. She was the one hit hardest, for reasons Jeron would learn as he grew older; and the other parents were tender with her, sometimes, as she was with the babies she cared for. When they remembered, they would stop to soothe her. Even Uncle Will (who was dead) whispered kindly to her, "We can live in the Constitution for a long, long time." He used their birthright English language, and that was another kindness. Most of the grownups spoke English around Eve, pretending that it was for the children's sake rather than hers. It would be a long time before Jeron understood how hurtful all that kindness was.

Eve wiped a clot of baby food off the corner of Jeron's chubby mouth with a fingertip, then pushed the food through his lips and spun the lazy Eve to bring the next baby into reach. By the large brown eyes Eve knew this one was Forina. She smoothed the little girl's tufty black hair before dipping the spoon again into the puree of squash (citrus/protein). "Oh, sure," she muttered, "we can hang on until we run out of something. But what about them}"

Although Uncle Will was kind, or meant to be, Eve and the others had concerns that he was no longer equipped to share. "It will be all right," he whispered, drifting off on one of his unfathomable errands.

Eve spun the wheel to the next child. "Easy for you to say!" she called after him. "You don't have to worry about dying anymore!" She sighed, finished feeding the last child, touched each diaper to make sure none had yet turned damp, and then, for the first time, smiled. "All right, you kids," she said softly. "Now comes the nice part. You're all going to get your presents as soon as I finish singing! Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you . . ."

Although Jeron did not know it, his home changed rapidly all through his first year of life. The Constitution was slowing down, though still moving at nearly 40 percent of the speed of light. Outside—though he rarely saw it, and did not know what he was seeing when he did—the narrow rainbow ring of stars had widened, become less intense, and the circles of blackness fore and aft were shrinking. In each second they traveled a distance ten times as great as the diameter of the Earth they had left behind. In not much over a quarter of an hour they could have plunged from the Earth into the Sun—and might as well have, for all the hope of long-range survival they could realistically entertain.

But they were no longer realists; they had broken through that cage as well as others.

It was not only in its position in space that the starship Constitution was changing. Its appearance changed, too. It no longer looked the same, inside or out, as when it left low-Earth orbit, and it kept on looking different. The ship that had pulled slowly away from its assembly orbiter two thousand and some days before was simple and clean, inside and out. As the Constitution had been put together in space, it did not need to be streamlined. But it was as easy to make it radially symmetrical as not, and moreover the surface/ volume relationship made the roundest shape the cheapest.

So as it first moved under its own power it looked like a football with sections of pipe strapped to its side. By the time it rounded perihelion and used up its gravity gain from the Sun the side boosters were jettisoned. It was plain football, then, all the way out to Pluto's orbit and a long way beyond.

Then the nest-building began, and the alterations to the ship's basic drive, and the accident.

Will Becklund died in that accident, or at least his body did. A great tragedy. Especially to Will. The accident need not have happened if they had all been more skilled, but they were still learning.

By then all of the original crew of the Constitution, or all but sweet, slow Eve, were no longer patient with the clumsy, primitive work of the ship's designers. Restructuring the plasma drive was only one step, although it was the hardest; they had not yet got used to brute-force manipulation of refractory metals. The rest was comparatively easy. Outside the smooth hull shedlike extrusions and willowy towers grew. Jim Barstow opened a glassy seam all down the length of the ship, so that he could watch the starbow more beautifully. Inside, each of the eight astronauts—or of the seven, after Will Becklund passed beyond that sort of concern— shaped himself . a living space, and all of them joined to expand the greeneries and sweeten the common chambers. After Jim Barstow rebuilt the drive it became simple to control the ship's acceleration. Some thrust was useful, so that they would know which way was down; very much thrust was wasted, because they were pushing against relativistic mass increase. They compromised on three-quarters of a G, then on half, then on about a tenth of a gravity for a long time, gentle enough so that walls supported little weight and partitions need not be strong. Their home was not much more than tissue and foil, as easy to change to suit their changing moods as a Japanese dwelling before the firestorms of World War II.

Jeron was lucky. He was not one of the first-born. He was in the third cohort. The infancy of the twenty-one babies in the earlier cohorts was less athletic, but a great deal more chancy, because none of the parents involved really knew what they were doing. By the time Jeron was well and truly toilet-trained, his main task had been decided for him: it was staying out of the way. Or, actually, just staying alive.

What made Jeron's childhood athletic was his spooky Uncle Ski, whose specialty back home had been astrophysics and who now devoted himself to the attainment of satori through child-rearing. Uncle Ski wasn't dead, like Uncle Will Becklund; but he sure was spooky. Aunt Eve was given the physical care of the babies. Uncle Ski took charge of their spiritual growth, which involved a great deal of running and slashing and hiding. Between times, when he was not being taught how to hold a spoon by Aunt Eve or being challenged by one of Uncle Ski's grow-up-quick stratagems, Jeron practiced talking on anyone who would stay still long enough, adult or child.

There were not as many of either to be stayed as one might think. It was a cranky, fretful environment he grew up in. Even the children were quirky; and the adults were mostly terrifying.

They were the only adults Jeron had ever known and he had no basis for comparison, but even his tiny infant mind thought they were bizarre. Aunt Mommy (he had not yet learned to call her Aunt Eve Barstow) was always fussing and fluttering over an unblown nose or a wet sleeping bag, but she was cuddly nice. As she was nearly always lactating, she smelled heavenly of warm milk. The others—well, they fought. Jeron did not understand the word "obsession," but he recognized in each of them an internal drive that nearly blinded them to other concerns. Each one had a burning compulsion to know and to do—his thing, or hers—and when they communicated with each other, or with one of the children, it was nearly always at a high pitch of emotion. They seemed to range between fury and black despair, and were almost always frightening to be around. The only male tiny Jeron felt close to at all was Uncle Will. It was Uncle Will who monitored the displays over his sleeping bag, pretty patterns of bunnies and toddlers displayed on the liquid crystal panels, with simple words to name them enunciated clearly from the speaker under Jeron's swaddling-bag. It was Uncle Will who taught him to distinguish between k's and t's, and to pronounce his final g's. Jeron seldom saw Uncle Will, but then most people never saw him at all. He was a whispering disembodied voice, a shimmering haze like the air over a hot highway, or, when he remembered to make a hologram, an intangible glassy form of light like the outline of a human figure. What he looked like more precisely was a Thom optical catastrophe, but Jeron was not yet two and would not learn catastrophe theory for at least another year. First he had to learn to speak and read, and he did that from Uncle Ghost's bedside displays. They were not electric. They came in ripe fruit colors, banana yellow, peach, apple red, grass green. They were created by some of Uncle Ghost's magic. Jeron didn't know how. It did not occur to him to ask how dead Will Becklund created the pretty pictures for him, or, for that matter, how he had created himself. He took Uncle Ghost as he found him; although he seldom called him that, as the other children did. Jeron did not think of Will Becklund as a ghost, in spite of the fact that Uncle Will Becklund by then had been dead for nearly four years.

The years of the young are very long; it is a relativistic time-dilation effect like accelerating toward the velocity of light. Jeron's years were longer than most. In this third year he already spoke quite well and was beginning to read.

He was a strong young child by then, and quite handsome. Before he was born, in fact almost as soon as he was conceived, his mother had allowed Aunt Flo to select among the paired genes for muscles and blue eyes and quickness.

Eve would not allow any other tampering, such as the addition of genes from other sources, but she saw no objection to improving the luck of the draw, and so Jeron was strong and quick. He was also quite smart, but no special selection was needed for that. All the possible parents on board the Constitution were smart as hell to begin with, or else they wouldn't have been there. He had a full-time job by then, helping Aunt Flo and then Aunt Eve in the painstaking breeding and rearranging in the hydroponics flats. He was more than a helper. There were long periods when he was the only person in charge, alone among the rows of curious growing things, because the aunts were busy elsewhere.

A decision was being made; it was part of the reason why the atmosphere in the ship was growing more and more frantic and upsetting.

Uncle Will took time to explain the decision to the child, rehearsing every word until he was sure Jeron understood. "You know we were all tricked, Jeron," he whispered out of a shadow under the ledge for Jeron's sleeping sack. "We were tricked in a very mean way. We were all sent to a place that does not exist, and we were meant to die there."

"I a'ready know all that, Unca Will," Jeron lisped.

"Ung-kull. Say your L's, Jeron. Well, we are going to that place anyway. And, although there is no place for us to live there, we are going to make a place."

Jeron leaned over the edge of his bunk to peer into the shadow. As he had thought, there was nothing to see down there. Uncle Will had not chosen to make himself visible. "Will that be hard for us to do, Ung-kull Will?" he asked.

"It will be very hard. I am not sure how we can do it. But we don't have any choice."

"All right, Uncle Will," said Jeron, and, half an hour later, when his tutor had quizzed and corrected him until comprehension was complete, he drifted comfortably to sleep. One concept he found hard to grasp: "another" place; what could another place than the Constitution possibly be like? Anything like the stories Aunt Flo told him (which he had taken to be fairy tales) about "home"?

But he was not disturbed. He had known about the treachery of human beings on Earth as long as he had known anything at all. The very primers that Will programmed to teach him his alphabet, glowing gently over his sleeping sack, told the story:

A's for America, that sent us out to die.

B's for all the bastards who did us in the eye.

C's for Centaurus. We'll reach it all the same.

D's for bad old Dieter. He plays a dirty game.

What Jeron did not have was any very realistic picture of Dieter von Knefhausen. Horns and a tail? Scaly or furry? Would he sit on a hill of skulls, farting sulfoxides and belching soot, gnawing a haunch of human child?

So his dreams were often troubled. So are the dreams of all children, everywhere, at all times, as their small subconscious minds try to map the terrors of Hell or the mad onslaught of werewolves or whatever other terrifying fantasy grownups have been feeding them against the tiny wickednesses for which they are sent to bed or deprived of a toy. But when he woke he had his work, and his pets, and his peers, and his parents . . . and the others.

Although Aunt Flo's skills were extreme, she had not succeeded in breeding really satisfactory tame animals. Not real ones. The cottony-downy bunny plants were soft and cuddly, and as good as any Teddy bear for a little kid to sleep with. But they were no better than that. They did not eat, sleep, wet, or move. The place that a kitten might have filled for him if he had been born on Earth was taken by the others. There were times when he drifted off to sleep with another presence beside him, and sometimes when he and the other three children of his cohort sang their lesson songs it seemed that there were five voices raised, or even more, more whispery even than Uncle Ghost, even harder to see. They were not very satisfactory either. So mostly Jeron's companionship was infant human, like himself, or—whatever the original eight had become.

In his third year Jeron was mature enough for more adult responsibilities, so Aunt Ann began teaching him elementary Chinese and Uncle Shef put him to work.

He was not alone. Sheffield Jackman, who no longer was addressed by that name and certainly never by the title "colonel," drafted everybody too weak to resist to his project. He wanted a better telescope. What he really needed was a ten-meter mirror, but he did not have ten years to cast it and cool it and figure it. So he elected to make ten thousand ten-centimeter mirrors instead. The light-gathering capacity would be the same, it was only a matter of so arranging them that each would contribute its share of photons to the same point. Difficult, to be sure. Not impossible, especially as they could stop the thruster for observations and so excuse themselves from the troublesome effects of sagging or twisting. It was necessary, in any case, because Uncle Shef was going to have to locate every object with a magnitude of plus-25 or better through a large section of the heavens, and sort out the ones that moved. He would have to scan more than two hundred astronomical units from the primary Alpha Centauri, and locate everything with a diameter of more than one hundred kilometers; and it was even harder than it seemed. The brightest ones would be easy, but they were not the ones he wanted to find. What was the use of finding a comet core of frozen gases and clathrates when what he needed was structural steel? It was the low-albedo objects that he wanted most, which were by definition the hardest to see.

Intelligence replaced brute force. The ten thousand tiny shells cooled quickly and easily, especially as there was no reason not to cast them of pure aluminum instead of quartz. The first crude sculpting of each took only a week, and then each of the first batches of mirrors was within a millimeter of its figure at all points. But then there was nothing to replace the pads and the rouge and the constant testing with knife edge and beam of light; and that was where Jeron and his cohort and the older kids came in. They had to work under nitrogen, because of the aluminum, their hands inside sealed hoods; they had to use what Aunt Flo had grown for an abrasive, because no jewelers' supply store was nearby; and they had to get it right. At first it took each of them the better part of a week, spoiling half a dozen blanks in the process, to do one mirror. But they learned. They learned enough to do five or six apiece in each day's work, because Uncle Shef made them. Long before the last mirror was in place and collimated Uncle Shef had begun stopping the ship's thrust to begin his primary observations, and by the time they were finished he had mapped more than eighteen hundred chunks of matter.

After each shift Aunt Eve rubbed their sore forearms and hugged their weary bodies, and Uncle Will tried to comfort their fatigued minds. "It's how we're going to make a home," he whispered to Jeron out of the shrouded cherry-fruit vines that grew over his bed. "It will all be worth it, you'll see."

"I never doubted it, Uncle Will," yawned Jeron, rubbing his eyes. "Please, now go talk to some other kid. I want to go to sleep."

And actually, none of the children minded at all; it was a great communal effort, and they were part of it. After Uncle Shef finished his sky map there was even more work, but not quite as satisfying because much of it involved brute force and therefore adult bodies. They helped when they could. The problem was the delta-V forces involved in deceleration. Before deceleration could even start a great deal had to be done—or, rather, undone. Fully three-quarters of the mirrors they had so painfully ground had to be brought back in and remelted and replaced as structural members to strengthen the ship's interior. All of the grownups were fussing and tidying around the ship, lashing things down, stowing things, undoing the careless alterations they had made over the years when the thrusters were working at fractional strength because relativity made further acceleration fairly pointless. The inside was a lot of work, but the kids could help. The outside was worse, and the kids could do nothing there. Most of it fell on Uncle Shef and Uncle Ski and Uncle Jim, who were outside the hull in their EVA suits more often than in, cutting away all the extrusions and annexes that had been tacked on so unconsideringly over the years. Uncle Jim was in charge of that project. He drove the others, muttering and cursing. He drove himself even harder.

What brought him to profanity was the recollection of the jettisoned side boosters and the blown-away sections of the hull from the time they rebuilt the drive. "Chrome steel and magnesium!" he shouted into his suit radio. "And where are we going to get that kind of stuff again?" Every gram his torch severed was cherishingly brought back aboard. He did not trouble to remove every last strut and stub, only the ones that might cause trouble if there were violent decelerations as they rounded Alpha Centauri to slow down. When at last he pronounced the Constitution's hull integral once more he came back to the hydroponics gardens, where Jeron had taken over the grownup chores to relieve adult muscles, and lay a whole day between the bright lemon- smelling squash vines on one side and the vegetable porks on the other, refusing to move.

By the time Jeron was four they were approaching the bright yellow star, now recognizably a sun.

It would be bigger, later, when they took up a proper orbit and began their presumptuous construction project of a permanent home. But already it was bigger than anything Jeron had ever seen. In his short lifetime it had grown immensely.

The spectacle had a terribly high price for Jeron and the other children, for now deceleration began in earnest. There were no more interludes of weightlessness for games and thrills. There was not even the steady slowing thrust they had grown up with; the plasma burned hotter and hotter, and the pressure on everybody increased. The adults hated it, but it was what they had been born to. For the children it was new and terrible. Jeron had weighed ten kilos, more or less; now he weighed twenty, then twenty-five. Half a dozen of the littlest kids fractured bones in one week, and then Aunt Eve began making them drink nasty messes that she said were rich in calcium and they added vomiting to their miseries. One G, then one point two, then one point four, and even the grownups were wheezing and falling down; and then they jockeyed around the immense terrifying star for the final shedding of surplus v; no one's navigation had been quite good enough for that delicate operation, and so there were bursts of two-G and even three-G acceleration that left the babies too weak to whimper and even Jeron blacked out twice.

But then it was over, and Aunt Eve was cuddling the littlest ones and Uncle Ghost trying to reassure the others, and the real work was about to begin.

Alpha Centauri had no proper planets. Perhaps the nearness of its companion had something to do with that fact.

But it did have a girdle or two of rubble where otherwise planets might have formed, and wandering cometary lumps scattered all through nearby space. "We're going to mine them," whispered Uncle Ghost from the shadows behind Jeron's cohort as they peered out into the starry sky. "We're going to show that bastard what we can do!"

"Damn bastard Knefhausen," Jeron responded automatically, wondering what it would be like to be in one place and not to be eternally traveling toward it.

The Constitution was ready for the asteroids long before its orbit was stable. Pinpoint lasers stabbed at every tumbling rock in the asteroid belts. Photon counters trapped and diagnosed the returns. The useful worldlets were indexed and followed, and Uncle Ski cast soft nets of magnetic force that swept the useful objects together into clusters sorted by analysis. Carbonaceous bodies went here, pure iron there, heavy metals in another place. The element abun­dances were not very satisfactory, because they reflected cosmic, not planetary, proportions; Alpha Centauri had never had a planet. That did not matter. There was plenty of mass to waste, and soon Alpha Centauri would.

They did find one small cinder of a planetoid very near the star, but decided moving and cooling it was more than it was worth; the dozen-kilometer-sized bodies were the most useful. When they had finished collecting and sorting them the really hard work began. By then Constitution was locked in a nearly circular orbit one and a half A.U. from the central star, out of the plane of its ecliptic in a path that nibbled at the edges of the first and largest asteroid belt. And they started to build.

It was around this time that young Jeron, having reached that stage of sitting in judgment on adults that on Earth was called adolescence—he was four and a half—realized that his Uncle Shef was going insane.

Of course, with Uncle Shef, how could you tell? Or how could you tell with any of the people on the Constitution, including the kids? What struck Jeron as strange would have seemed baseline normal anywhere in the world they had left behind: Uncle Shef appeared to be lusting after the body of Aunt Ann.

Jeron's knowledge of what was baseline normal was at best sketchy. It was made up of casual remarks and bedtime stories, full of concepts that had no tangible reference to anything around him. Freeways. Singles bars. Expense accounts. Resort hotels. VD. Soap operas. Air raids and guided missiles; school busing and Christmas vacations; mumps; toothaches; runny noses—-none of that ever happened or existed in the world he lived in and, although Uncle Ghost was always willing to explain everything, some things merely got more confusing. In this particular area Jeron was particularly handicapped. He was intellectually quite mature, sexually not at all. What the grownups did with each other he had observed, but why they did it escaped him. Also there was the observed fact that they all made use of each other's bodies quite casually, and why was this sudden interest so uncasual? Jeron watched Aunt Ann at every opportunity to try to unravel the mystery. From comparative analysis of photographs in the tattered old magazines he perceived that she had begun to return to the "pinup" norms—had lost weight after blimping up for several years; had combed and cut her long blond hair after letting it spill ragged.

That sort of change could be quantified and understood well enough; but there were other changes. Aunt Ann had returned to her Chinese period. She had dug out the old toe bones. She cast them, with Shef hovering over her shoulder, whenever the two of them could find a moment from the incessant work of readying the ship for its new destiny; and after they had scanned the bones and looked up the hexagrams and muttered to each other they usually made love. No one else seemed to mind, or even notice. When Jeron mentioned it to Uncle Will the shadowy outlines would flicker for a while in indecision before the whisper would come: "They are not hurting anyone, Jeron, why should they be disturbed?" But even Uncle Ghost had observed that the closer the intimacy between Ann and Shef became the more Shef's cheeks sank and the more furiously he raged at everyone else around. It was Shef who mostly controlled the complex webs of forces that were seeking and tugging at all Alpha Centauri's family of useful rocks, and as the task was only partly physical, he was certainly draining his energies.

So Jeron wondered, and spied on them, not knowing what to expect to see; and when he did see something quite beyond belief he did not know it. Not until he was much older.