The Sails of Tau Ceti (19 page)

He moved the joystick control inset into the arm of his chair and caused the view to expand until it centered on
Starhopper
. The lines the Phelan had attached to his ship’s booster were too small to be visible against the background of space. Still, their presence meant that the attitude control jets no longer burped every few minutes to match velocities with the slowly decelerating starship.
Starhopper
now dangled like a fish on a hook at the end of several thousand kilometers of fishing line.

“A marvelous ship you have here, Faslorn,” he said as he continued his video tour. Garth panned across the body of the starship and zoomed in on the control line anchor sphere. The sphere was a porcupine shape with a thousand lines streaming away from it. Each line was encased in a surrealistic violet sheath of plasma glow.

“Look at them glow!” Garth exclaimed. This was nothing like episodes of St. Elmo’s fire he had experienced on approach. It was as though the Phelan were concentrating the plasma field intentionally around the control lines. No wonder they stood out so starkly on radar!

“The control lines are superconductors,” Faslorn explained. “We are siphoning electrons off the light sail through them. The electrical field naturally attracts the free protons in the plasma wind.”

“I think that you’d eventually run out of electrons.”

Faslorn laughed. “You would be wrong, Captain. At this distance from the sun, one hydrogen atom in five is naturally ionized. As we sweep past, free electrons are attracted by the sail’s positive charge. They rain down continuously on the reverse side and must be extracted continuously. We use them to operate the ionization laser.”

“We wondered about that on our approach. Tell me more…”

#

The lift was empty except for Tory and Maratel. Maratel had guided her through a maze of corridors to reach a different lift from the one that had delivered them to the banquet. The cylinder end cap was honeycombed with corridors and living space. Tory was just beginning to realize how big a volume the shell of the starship enclosed.

“Are you all right?” Maratel asked when the gravity increased to twice Mars normal.

Tory’s answer was a trifle unsteady. “So far, so good.” Coriolus forces were doing strange things to her balance.

The door opened into a real, honest-to-God forest. Tory blinked as Maratel ushered her outside to stand on a stone paved path that disappeared beneath a canopy of vegetation. The plants were like nothing she had seen on Mars, nor any of the terrestrial flora she had studied in school. Phelan trees were globular in shape, thrusting their limbs out radially from a central point near the ground. At the end of each limb, a single hexagonal leaf fitted in with those around it to produce a hemisphere of unbroken green. The effect was the same as if someone had exploded a bomb in a pile of leaves a few milliseconds earlier.

The path led directly into a tunnel cut through the globe of a tree. It took a moment for Tory’s eyes to adjust to the gloom within. She was surprised to discover more than one pair of eyes looking back at her. The eyes belonged to several small six legged animals that otherwise resembled spider monkeys.

Tory pointed at one small beast. “The exobiologists on Earth will tear their hair out when they see this. They have proved beyond a doubt that evolution will always reduce the number of legs on an animal to four.”

Maratel laughed. “Our own animal specialists can prove just as easily the benefits of having six. It will be interesting to see which rule the next inhabited planet we discover follows.”

“They’d probably have five.”

“Perhaps all numbers are possible, and chance alone determines the path of evolution on each world.”

“You may be right,” Tory replied as she watched one little animal that seemed fascinated by her. “Are they intelligent?”

“No more than one of your own monkeys at home. In fact, we have named them
hexamonkeys
in Standard.”

“Are all Phelan life forms hexapods?”

“Many of them are. Some lower animals — the equivalent to terrestrial insects — have eight and twelve legs. We have one genus with no legs at all. They resemble terrestrial snakes, but occupy a different ecological niche.”

“You’ll have to point one out to me. I have never seen a snake. The one in the Olympus zoo died before I was old enough to remember trips to the zoo.”

Maratel led her slowly along the path. They came out of the globe tree to find themselves in warm, orange tinted tube light. There were numerous flowers bordering the walk. Some were strange indeed, but others were almost familiar. Tory commented on one flower that could have passed for a rose in poor light.

“The resemblance is coincidental,” her guide assured her. “Internally, the
ardt
is quite different from any terrestrial plant.”

“An
ardt
by any other name would smell as sweet?”

“William Shakespeare!” Maratel said, laughing. “
Romeo and Juliet
, I believe.”

“I’m impressed.”

Maratel gestured toward the flower. “Go ahead and smell it.”

Tory did so and was nearly overcome with the odor of rancid bacon.”

“Whew!”

“The different biochemistry Faslorn mentioned to you.”

“I guess so.”

They walked slowly for two hundred meters, by which time beads of sweat had begun to pop out on Tory’s forehead. Maratel noticed and directed her to a bench beside the pathway. This, too, must be for her benefit, she realized. The proportions were all wrong for the short Phelan legs.

As Tory caught her breath, she tilted her head back and gazed upward at the leading end cap. She gasped as her eyes tried to make sense out of the apparent cliff that towered over them. From this vantage point, the end cap seemed solid rock, with thousands of concentric circles of windows rising into the sky until they disappeared in the glare of the sun tube.

There were even plants growing from out of the rocks, and wet rivulets still streaming down the base from last night’s rainstorm. Tory spent several minutes trying to find the level where their apartments were located.

“Are you rested?” Maratel finally asked.

Tory nodded. “Let’s proceed.”

“I thought you might like to see our young at play.”

“Very much. How many youngsters are there aboard ship?”

“A few thousand at any given time. The Phelan adolescence is approximately the same length as human. Naturally, we are very careful to match our birth rate to our death rate.”

“Are you taking me to a school?”

“Of sorts. We require our young to spend some period of their lives living in the habitat so that they can know what life on a planet is like.”

“Like a scout camp?”

“Again, of sorts.”

The two of them walked a hundred meters along the stone path, crossing a Japanese style bridge over a stream. The path passed through a hedgerow of some yellow-brown plant. On the other side was one of six pointed villages filled with beehive buildings that Tory had spied from above.

Like human children, Phelan youths were smaller versions of their parents, and seemed as naturally curious as any other young animal. As soon as Maratel and Tory entered the school village, they found themselves at the center of a chattering circle. Small hands reached out to pluck at Tory’s clothes and hair until Maratel said something in their native language. The tactile investigations ceased, but no one lost interest.

Tory’s gaze lit on a very small child standing directly in front of her. He (or she) was barely a half-meter tall. She sought permission with her eyes from Maratel, and then knelt down to pat the baby. She was rewarded by a low humming noise.

“That means that she likes it,” Maratel reported.

“How old?”

“About three of your years. Standard years, not Martian.”

“Isn’t that a little young to be separated from her parents?”

“We raise our children communally. The human nuclear family is alien to us, although we have, of course, experimented with it.”

“With what success?” Tory asked, getting to her feet.

“Varying. I’m afraid that some of your social forms are not applicable to our species.”

“I’d like to learn more.”

“You shall, beginning tomorrow. Today we are just … how do you say it? … sightseeing.”

“Sightseeing is correct,” Tory agreed. She made note of the first instance she had ever seen of a Phelan grasping for a word.

“Do you wish to continue the tour or go back and lie down?”

“Lead on. I will have sore muscles tomorrow for sure. Still, that’s a small price to pay.”

“Very well. There is a farm just beyond that next stand of trees. I thought you might like to see how we grow our food.”

“I’m right behind you.”

CHAPTER 14

The next few weeks were busy ones for all concerned. As they had promised, the Phelan set about educating their human visitors. As befitted an enterprise centuries in the planning, progress was rapid. Indeed, Tory would not have believed it possible to absorb so much information so quickly without the aid of her implant.

The briefings began with an overview of Phelan history. Like humans, the Phelan were descended from a race of hunter-gatherers. They had discovered agriculture somewhat earlier than humanity. As on Earth, farming had led to irrigation, cities, and the complex social structure both require. Thus had both species begun their long climbs toward technological civilization.

Yet, the similarities between Phelan and human were misleading. A world is a large and wondrous place. The tapestry of Phela’s history had been woven every bit as intricately as had that of Earth. Just as human culture was sufficiently broad to encompass Aztec and Roman, Viking and Sioux, Han and Zulu; so, too, had Phela seen the rise and fall of civilizations. Nor were the Phelan themselves a monolithic people. They, too, had their share of saints, sinners, heroes, villains, yeomen, and rogues over the centuries. Like humans, civilization had not so much tamed them as taught them the necessity of cooperating with one another.

Yet, there were general observations that could be made about the Phelan. They appeared somewhat more rational and less emotional than
Homo sapiens
. Their history was less punctuated with wars and strife. As a result, they had progressed somewhat faster up the ladder of civilization. Not that the early Phelan had been pacifists. The few wars they had fought had been ferocious affairs, with the victory going to the survivors rather than the winners.

The Phelan had put their wars behind them soon after they developed space flight. The first Phelan spaceship had lifted off in 1625 by human reckoning, and by the time of the American Revolution, they had colonized much of the Tau Ceti system. It had seemed that the future would be an unbroken stream of progress, with the Phelan scientists eyeing the vast blackness that lay beyond their own small star.

Then had come several years of anomalous weather. The reason for the change had not been difficult to discover. Tau Ceti’s output of radiant energy had begun to shift erratically. The swings were not large — indeed, they were difficult to detect at all. Still, they violated every known theory of how a main sequence star ought to behave. It had taken several years before the astronomers realized that the surface oscillations were a symptom of a much deeper problem within the star. For reasons the astronomers could not explain, the core had started to convert greater quantities of helium to carbon than was normal for a star in the hydrogen-burning phase of life. The excess energy turned the core unstable, and if some way to stabilize it could not be found, the oscillations would slowly build until Tau Ceti went nova.

A small being named Delwin was their instructor in Phelan history. When Delwin reached the moment when astronomers realized that their world was doomed, however, Faslorn took over the recounting. For, as Faslorn explained with sorrow in his voice, what had followed had been an era of shame. The news had caused the rational, peaceful Phelan to go berserk! A culture that had successfully avoided war for half a thousand years had dissolved into uncounted warring factions, each attempting to gain control of the resources needed to build the evacuation craft needed to flee the destruction of their star.

The war had been fought for nearly twenty years. When it was over, much of the home planet and the colony worlds lay in ruins, and the victors discovered that much of what they needed to escape had been destroyed in the fighting. In the end, when the surface oscillations of the star had grown so great as to make Phela practically uninhabitable, only four escape ships had been built. Into each of these, the Phela had placed a carefully chosen crew of 100,000. The ships had departed after many solemn ceremonies, to position themselves where the nova that would propel them toward their varied destinations.

Four ships had ridden the nova shockwave toward four different stars, leaving billions of dead behind them.

#

“They seemed so rational for most of their history,” Tory said. “Why do you suppose they fell apart so completely?”

She and the other humans were gathered around the dinner table in the common room in their quarters. They were alone for once. This did not mean they were not being monitored. All of them took it for granted that the Phelan watched them continuously.

The meal had been excellent. The mood was solid after a full day of watching scenes of chaos. The Phelan called it the Time of Troubles.

Eli Guttieriz put down his cup and reached for the last dinner roll. The Phelan cuisine was beginning to show in the linguist’s pudgy cheeks and expanding waistline. Tory had noticed her own shipsuits were getting tight in various places. Eli looked up from buttering his roll.

“We probably would have done the same if we’d discovered Sol about to nova.”

“But it was so senseless! If they’d just cooperated, they might have saved millions.”

Guttieriz shrugged. “Which would have still been an insignificant percentage of the total population.”

“Aren’t you the heartless one, Eli!” Kit chastised.