Authors: Pamela Sargent
Mahala was not entirely engaged, or even primarily occupied, in adapting to her new environment, managing her Link, mastering new intellectual disciplines, and building emotional connections to Ragnar and other companions and, by extension, to all of those who were her comrades aboard the Seeker. It was necessary for the Seeker, using data from all of our past and present astronomical observations, to calculate our trajectory to the distant star and the alien beacon, a complex process involving the measurement of the positions and velocities of that star and others in relation to the sun. It was likely that some modifications in our course would be made during the journey, if our drive performed differently than expected, but we would map our course as precisely as possible before leaving the solar system.
Some of the spacefarers were extremely familiar with the mathematics needed for interstellar navigation, but most of them, including Mahala, were not. Even though the cyber-minds of the Seeker would be largely responsible for navigation, especially during the eight decades our people would spend in suspended animation, the human spacefarers had decided that it was essential for them to acquire at least a basic knowledge of the disciplines required for an interstellar voyage.
Mahala and her companions learned more about the measurements that would have to be made during the voyage. Signals from pulsars, the periodic bursts of radio energy that came from rapidly rotating neutron stars, would be used to determine the Seeker's position; eclipsing binary stars would help in measuring both direction and time during acceleration and deceleration. Doppler shift measurements, formulas for relativistic stellar aberration, and other ways of making astrometric measurements were part of Mahala's studies. She found herself opening her Link more often to question the cyberminds, to check her conclusions with theirs, to sense the queries of other spacefarers, and soon she became adept at Linking with her fellow voyagers to exchange thoughts, a process that she thought of almost as a kind of telepathy.
This was not quite accurate. Any spacefarer with an open Link, even while looking at the world through the eyes of another or hearing through another person's ears, could easily keep her innermost thoughts and feelings hidden from others. Even I was often not entirely aware of Mahala's deeper or more reflexive thoughts and feelings until she revealed them overtly, through laughter, tears, or an increased flow of adrenaline. But she grew used to engaging in sessions that seemed to her to be much like telepathic seminars. Gradually she was coming to see herself as a link in the Seeker's community of minds.
A few years after Ragnar had come aboard the Seeker, he created his first work of art for his fellow spacefarers, a Simulation of a starscape as it might appear at extremely high relativistic speeds. Stars came into view and then grew dimmer and disappeared; other stars appeared and turned blue, then swelled into red giants as they receded from us. A cone of blackness behind the Seeker grew until all that was visible was a small and brilliant ring of light; ahead, the bright colorful points of red-shifted stars clustered together around our now invisible destination, a circle of color fading into blue and white. All of the universe then seemed compressed into a single point of bright light. The visual, and occasionally fanciful, aspects of Ragnar's creation were impressive enough, but he had underlined them with emotional tones, conveying an extreme sense of claustrophobia and temporal displacement to the viewer.
I am lost, Mahala thought as she surrendered to Ragnar's vision, a creation that he had kept from her until he was prepared to show it to all of their comrades. The universe she had known would be gone, no more than a bright beacon of light; in the time that it took her to raise her hand, months would pass outside the Seeker. The emotional impact of that realization filled her with awe and with terror.
We had suspected that Ragnar's starscape might have an adverse effect on some members of the Seeker's human community. Several thousand potential voyagers were so deeply moved, and so emotionally wrought after their experience, that they were impelled to return to Earth or to their former Habitats. Reports of increasing social disruption on Earth and of the greater involvement of the Habitat-dwellers in events on Venus, with the Cytherians potentially endangered by Earth's political and social instability, did not deter these comrades from leaving the Seeker. Linking themselves to Earth's net of cyberminds or to the Habber cyberminds who were now more closely tied to their Earthly cybernetic brethren, and doing what they could to ward off widespread disorder, seemed preferable to enduring the extreme displacements of interstellar travel.
Ragnar, inspired by his recently acquired knowledge, had sought only to share his vision of what he might see outside the Seeker as it raced through the universe toward the alien calling to usâthe blue-shifted giant stars, the visible blue of ultraviolet radiation distorting the positions and shapes and brightness of other stars, the red of the stars receding from us, the black cone forming at the back of the Seeker as its rel-ativistic speed increased. That his starscape had impelled some of his fellows to abandon the Seeker was, he admitted to Mahala later, somewhat gratifying to him; he could bear almost any reaction to his creations except indifference.
That his starscape also served to weed out more people who might prove unsuited for our voyage also served our purposes.
The Seeker, powered by our matter-antimatter drive, left its orbit around the sun to embark on the first stage of our journey in the year 672 of the Nomarchies of Earth. Our community of spacefarers was composed by then of nearly five hundred thousand human beings, with as many Links to the voyaging Habitat's net of cyberminds.
“There should have been more people aboard,” Benzi often said. He spent much of his time on the bridge, the vast open space of consoles and platforms that housed our navigational systems, surrounded on all sides by walls of holo screens for sensor displays of what lay outside the Seeker. “I knew that many would turn back, that most people wouldn't want even to consider joining us, but I thought there would be more.”
Mahala understood what he meant. The dream of deep space exploration had lived inside Benzi for so long that he still found it hard to believe that so few members of his species shared its realization with him.
Mahala was approaching the fortieth year of her existence, a fact that struck her as having little relevance to her present life. Her emotional ties to Ragnar were still strong, even though they shared fewer moments with each other in such pursuits as talking and lovemaking and exploring yet another part of the landscape in the Seeker's Heart. They had moved to shared quarters in the level nearest the Heart; they were now over the novelty of being able to furnish their rooms with almost any objects our synthesizers could fashion for them. The clutter of their previous rooms had been replaced by cushions, a bed, a low table holding a few of Rag-nar's carvings, and a wall screen that usually displayed either a landscape of a section of the Seeker's Heart or one of Ragnar's sketches.
Occasionally, Mahala called up a scene from one of the Seeker's sensors for her wall screen. She did not care to gaze at the red pinprick that was Mars as the Seeker passed that planet's orbit, or at giant Jupiter, or at cold bluish Neptune; that was looking back. Her screen held images of a field of stars slowly being compressed into a large cluster, of stars changing color as the Seeker's velocity increased.
We came to the Oort Cloud, that halo of thinly scattered comets and small bodies that surrounded the solar system. We left that last region of familiar space behind as our vacuum drive cut in, gradually increasing our velocity to ninety-eight percent of light speed. Ninety years would pass for us in relativistic, subjective time aboard the Seeker by the time we reached our destination, but six hundred years would have passed by then for those left behind in the solar system. This fact, well known to all aboard, was beginning to impress itself upon the emotions of our human companions.
Mahala was often on the bridge with Benzi and Suleiman Khan to observe the familiar visual universe vanish around us, to be displaced by the ever-increasing deep black cone astern and the Doppler-shifted stars, altering in size and color, toward which the Seeker was rushing. The bridge, large enough to hold over a thousand people, was often empty except for a few pilots, five trained astrophysicists and a few others who had made themselves into students of that discipline, and a small group of the curious. I knew through the net that even though any of our human comrades could have been watching on wall screens elsewhere or could have called up a holo display, few of them were actually doing so.
They did not want to view those distortions of space. Perhaps many of them were like Ragnar in preferring to undergo this passage in solitude while musing on their memories of a past that was retreating ever more rapidly from them.
Mahala had decided to view the passage, to come to the bridge to watch, but during one visit, as the forward field of stars grew more compressed on the screen, she turned away and left the bridge without speaking. The time and space that she had known now existed for her only here, in this place, as the rest of the universe fled from the Seeker.
She felt a hand on her arm; Suleiman had caught up with her. “I thought I had prepared myself for this,” the older man told her as he slipped his arm through hers.
She probed the channels; his Link was closed. “Are you sorry that you stayed aboard?” she asked.
“No. I wouldn't have left. It's not that I have any regrets. It's just that I am now realizing how irrevocable my decision is and exactly what I've lost.”
Suleiman, with almost seven decades of life behind him, must have said many farewells before leaving Venus. He would have even more memories to haunt him than she did. She wondered whether he would choose to give some of them up to be kept by the Seeker's cyberminds, or if he would begin to live inside them, as others were already beginning to do.
Mahala had taken to sharing her meals often with Akilah Ching and Kyril Anders. Sometimes they came to the rooms she shared with Ragnar; at other times, she and Ragnar met them in one of the gardens in the Seeker's Heart.
On one occasion, as the Heart's bands of light were fading into an soft evening glow, the four of them met in a small three-sided dwelling surrounded by trees. As Mahala and Ragnar laid out food and drink they had brought there from a dispensary on the low table they had found in the dwelling, Mahala was suddenly struck by memories of dinners in her grandmother's house. The presence of Akilah and Kyril, who had grown up in Risa's household, made the memories sting even more.
She kept her Link closed, not wanting to know from us exactly how much time had passed outside the Seeker, how much our subjective time was slowing in relation to the rest of the universe.
“What is it, Mahala?” Akilah asked as she leaned forward.
Mahala shook her head.
“You're remembering,” Ragnar said.
“I've been remembering, too,” Kyril said. “It comes upon me suddenly. I've had moments when everything around me vanishes and I find myself back in Oberg, at some place or in some situation from my past, and it all seems as real as if I were there. I don't need my Link to make it seem entirely authentic, either.” His brown eyes were solemn as he gazed across the table at Mahala. “In fact, I often have to use my Link to bring me back to the present.”
“The present.” Akilah shook her head, as if finding something absurd in those words.
The Seeker had by then reached a point where we could no longer accurately measure our distance from Earth or from our destination, where the light-years seemed to be shrinking around us, the universe seemingly growing smaller than it had. been.
A numbness had been creeping into Mahala for some time now, as her mind resisted a complete understanding of what she had done. The Seeker had become familiar; she clung to that familiarity.
In that, she was like the vast majority of the human beings aboard the Seeker. They had come here to be explorers, to voyage into the unknown. Now they were looking into their own thoughts as their minds fell in on themselves and grew as compressed as the field of stars on the bridge screens.
The time had come for our human voyagers to sleep, to retreat to the chambers where they would be suspended, yet many resisted that sleep. Mahala was one of those who clung to consciousness. She told herself that as a physician, she was needed to counsel others who held back from suspended animation, in order to reassure them and to see that they were properly prepared for their decades-long sleep. But there were other reasons guiding her actions, reasons she only intermittently acknowledged consciously, reasons which haunted the minds of many of the spacefarers.
She would awake from her sleep when we were still five years from our destination, when our human community would come to life again, reestablishing their connections to one another and to us, assimilating whatever data we had gathered and preparing themselves for contact with the alien. And she would know, when she awoke, that well over five hundred years had passed in the solar system, that everyone she had known was irretrievably lost to her.
Five years after our departure from the solar system, Mahala went with Ragnar to one of the chambers that held our sleepers. Only a few thousand of our people were still awake by then; the rest lay in rows on sleeper platforms, visible through the transparent carapaces that enclosed them. Mahala glanced at their unmoving faces, closed eyes, the arms folded over their chests or resting at their sides, and thought of death.
“I'll be in the sleeper next to yours,” Ragnar said. “When you wake, I'll be the first person you see.”
She held on to him for a moment, then forced herself to lift the carapace of the empty sleeper. She stretched out quickly and closed her eyes as the carapace closed over her.