Voyagers III - Star Brothers (6 page)

Despite famine and war and agonizing plagues the highest ethic of this race was the sanctity of life. There was no allowable way for the species to deliberately control its numbers, and as its technology and medical skills grew, billions of babies were born each year to parents who procreated in the blind faith that procreation was the ultimate goal of life.

The planet-girdling society became schizophrenic, rewarding fruitful parents with honors and blessings on the one hand, while tacitly condoning genocidal wars and mass murders on the other. Laws prohibited birth control while exacting the death penalty for minor theft. Scientists produced medical miracles for prolonging life and nerve poisons that could wipe out a city overnight.

The entire species was insane. Yet it continued to grow, continued to enlarge its numbers, spread across the surface of its world like a crawling, writhing cancer until it covered even the barren wastelands with cities bursting with overcrowded buildings where murder was as commonplace as birth.

And then the planet itself exacted its revenge. The air became poisonous, the oceans too fouled to support life. Glaciers crept down from the mountains to cover the land in glittering sterile ice. Life ended. The planet waited for eons before the first faint stirrings of protoplasm could begin again in a sea that had at last cleansed itself of the last traces of those who had come before.

Stoner shuddered in the darkness. He knew that the world he had just seen was real; it existed somewhere out among the starry deeps. His star brother had been there.

“Jo, we’re in a race against time. We’ve got to learn how to control our population growth. Sooner or later somebody’s going to stumble onto the technology that the starship carried, discover it independently. The biochips are only the first step in that direction. Somebody’s going to move on into nanotechnology, you know they will. If we haven’t curbed our population growth by then…”

Jo leaned back on the pillows without replying.

“If we fail, the human race dies. Not tomorrow. Not even in the next decade or two. But we’ll kill ourselves off eventually and that will be the end of humanity.”

Jo said to herself, Maybe we’d be better off dead. Most of the human race is despicable scum. What difference does it make if we survive or disappear?

But she did not voice the thought.

Turning on his side to face her, Stoner urged, “We’re close, Jo. Very close. It’s all coming to a climax. The biochips are the big test. If we can absorb that technology, use it to help the human race instead of harm it, then we’ll be ready for the final step.”

Even though his face was shadowed in darkness, Jo could feel the intensity of purpose blazing in him. She wondered if the
we
he spoke of referred to her, or to the others.

She tried to see his eyes in the moonlit shadows, tried to peer into his soul. Keith had worked so hard since being revived, since coming back to life after being on the alien star ship. Like a man possessed, like a saint or a holy man who saw a vision beyond what ordinary human eyes could see.

“It’s almost finished,” he repeated, in a whisper that held regret as well as anticipation. “All the threads are coming together, the task is almost complete.”

“Almost,” Jo echoed.

BANGKOK

SHE was in such excruciating pain. It was necessary to sedate her so heavily that her labor stopped altogether. The delivery team performed a caesarian section, something they had done countless times before. But once they had exposed the baby the surgical nurse gagged and slumped to the floor. The two assistants stared as if unable to turn away.

The baby was already dead, and the mother died minutes later.

Now Dr. Sarit Damrong paced nervously along the roof of the hospital, the cigarette in his shaking fingers making a small coal-red glow in the predawn darkness.

The baby had been a bloody, pulpy mess, already half eaten from within. The mother also; her abdominal cavity was an oozing hollow of half-digested organs. It was the agony of having her innards eaten alive that had racked the poor woman, not the pain of labor.

The woman had been one of the millions of lower class workers who lived on barges in the
khlongs
, the canals that crisscrossed Bangkok. Dr. Damrong had immediately performed an autopsy, right there in the delivery room, and sent scraps of tissue samples to the university laboratory for analysis.

Now he stood at the parapet at the roof’s edge, leaning heavily on his thin arms and staring out at the tower of the Temple of the Dawn, across the river, as it caught the first rays of the golden sunlight.

The first time he had seen a patient with her innards eaten away, a month earlier, he had been curious. It reminded him of something from one of his biology classes, years ago, about a certain species of spider that laid its eggs inside the paralyzed body of a living wasp. When the eggs hatched, the baby spiders ate their way through their host to enter the world.

How grisly, he had thought as a student. Now he had seen three such cases. And these were human beings, mothers dying in the attempt to give birth, destroyed from within.

Dr. Damrong watched the sunlight slowly extend across the teeming city. Cooking fires rose from the canals and the crowded houses and apartment blocks. He could hardly see the curving river, there were so many barges clustered on it. Another day was starting. The darkness of the night had been dispersed.

But still his hands trembled. Three women eaten away from within their own wombs. As if the fetuses within them had turned to murderous acid.

For the first time since he had been a child, Dr. Damrong felt afraid.

“HAPPY BIRTHDAY!”

Stoner tried his best to look surprised, but everyone knew he wasn’t, and he knew that they knew.

But it did not matter.

That morning Jo had begged him to stay up in his office, on the top floor of the spacious stucco house, as far away from the pool and patio as could be. Stoner spent the hours there speaking with people in Brazil and India and Thailand on the videophone. He read a few reports and tried to ignore the cars and limos that pulled up to the front door and discharged men, women, and children laden with brightly-wrapped packages.

Household robots buzzed and bumped up and down the front steps repeatedly, discreetly scanning each new arrival for weapons as they accepted suitcases and garment bags.

No matter how hard Stoner tried to concentrate on his reading, a part of his mind reached out inquisitively to sense the people arriving. That’s my son Douglas, he said to his star brother, with his wife and children. And later, Claude Appert, flown all the way from Paris. Then he recognized his daughter Eleanor and her new husband, whom he had not yet met. His grandchildren were teenagers now, and trying their best to be quiet and secretive. Stoner smiled to himself and went back to his reading.

The world’s fundamental problem was the result of cultural lag. Stoner had decided that fifteen years earlier, but here in his hands was a detailed academic study by a team of researchers from half a dozen universities that came to the same inescapable conclusion—in ten thousand turgid words and computer-generated graphs.

In a world where modern medicine had reduced the age-old agony of infant mortality to negligible proportions, many cultures still drove their people to have large families. The poorer the people, the more children they begat. The higher a nation’s birthrate, the poorer the nation became. There were almost ten billion people living on Earth. Too many of them were hungry, diseased, and ignorant. And with the ability to select the sex of their babies, too many lagging cultures produced an overabundance of males, far too many for the available jobs in their economies. It had been this overabundance of young men, boiling with testosterone, that had led to wars and terrorism in the past several decades.

Most of the world’s experts knew the answer to this problem: Lower your birthrate, they said to the poor, and you will become richer. Balance your male/female ratio. For nearly a century this gospel had been preached to the poor. To little avail. More babies and still more babies—half a million each day—threatened to drown the world in a pool of starving humanity.

Even with the best of intentions, good-hearted but short-sighted people made the problem worse. Feed the starving poor. Give money to help the famine-stricken people of the Third World. The people of the rich industrialized nations opened their hearts and their pocketbooks, and the starving poor survived long enough to produce a new generation of starving poor, even larger than the last. The cycle seemed endless. Yet what could an honest person do when others were dying for lack of food?

Hard-headed analysts pointed out that giving food to the starving without forcing them to control their birthrate was only making the problem worse, accelerating the cycle of poverty and starvation that was threatening to drown the world. Force birth control on them, said these experts. Make the poor control themselves. That led to cries of genocide and the angry blind flailings of terrorism, the one weapon that the poor could use against the rich to satisfy their furious seething hatreds, their sense of injustice, the frustrations that made them feel powerless.

Stoner’s approach was the opposite. Instead of preaching to the poor he worked to make them richer. Instead of demanding that they lower their birthrate, he worked—through Jo, through Vanguard Industries, through the International Investment Agency, Cliff Baker, Nkona, Varahamihara, de Sagres, anyone else he could find—to increase the wealth of the world’s poorest. Raise their standards of living and they will lower their birthrates: that was his gospel.

And it was working. Slowly, at first, but more and more clearly Stoner saw that it could work, it would work. If he were not stopped first. If he did not run out of time.

His greatest fear was that some bright young researcher would hit upon the central idea that would extend human lifetimes indefinitely. The technology that the starship had carried could allow humans to live for centuries, perhaps much longer. If that technology were turned loose in the world before people learned how to control their numbers, human population would start soaring out of control. Strangely, perversely, Keith Stoner—a man of science all his life—dreaded the thought that science would discover the real secret of the starship, the hidden knowledge of his star brother.

At last Jo appeared at his doorway, looking fresh and bright in a sleeveless miniskirted sheath of Mediterranean tangerine. Their fourteen-year-old daughter Cathy stood beside her, a flowered Hawaiian shirt several sizes too big for her slim frame thrown over her bathing suit. She was trying to appear cool and nonchalant, but Stoner could see the excitement bubbling in her.

“Are you in the mood for some lunch?” Jo asked casually.

He looked up from the report he had been reading. “Lunch? I’m not really hungry yet.”

“Come on, Daddy!” Cathy yelped. “Have lunch with us!”

“Now?” he asked, grinning.

“Now,” both women said in unison.

Stoner closed the report and laid it on his desk top, then went with them down the stairs and out to the patio by the swimming pool. Several large round tables had been set out beneath the gently rustling palm trees. He could see no one, but sensed the crowd huddling in the dining room, behind the drapes that were never drawn at this time of the early afternoon.

“Are we eating out here?” he asked.

“HAPPY BIRTHDAY!” roared out two dozen voices as the glass lanai doors of the dining room slid open.

They poured out and surrounded Stoner, shook his hand and pounded his back. Stoner laughed and greeted each one of the guests while his ten-year-old son, Richard, took up the official chore of accepting the gifts they had brought and stacking them up neatly on the long table beneath the big azalea bush in the corner of the patio.

The guests were mainly family, Stoner’s son and daughter from his earlier life, Jo’s only brother and three sisters, and their various children. A few trusted members of Vanguard Industries’ headquarters staff, from the nearby city of Hilo.

Stoner was happy to see the offspring of his first marriage. Deep within him he wanted the opportunity to try to settle their relationships, square their accounts. Almost as if he were afraid he would never see them again.

He felt a puzzled tendril of thought tickling at the back of his mind. Why should I be afraid? he wondered. His star brother wondered, too.

His son Douglas came up to shake his hand, warily, almost like a stranger. Doug was well into his forties now, but the wound that had opened between them when Stoner had left his first wife, a lifetime ago, had never completely healed.

“I’m glad you could make it, Doug,” he said to his son.

“I wouldn’t have missed it for anything,” said Douglas. “A free vacation in Hawaii for me and my whole family? Who could turn that down?”

Douglas had grown to middle age. His blond hair was thinning, his eyes had lost much of their youthful fire. He had two sons of his own nearing twenty, but the bitterness was still there. Stoner saw it in his eyes, heard it in the tone of his voice. Douglas no longer fought with his father, no longer refused to see him. But the anger seethed just below the surface. And Douglas pointedly avoided Stoner’s younger children, the offspring of his marriage to Jo.

Eleanor was friendlier, more relaxed. She had remarried a genetic surgeon in Christchurch after the death of her first husband, but they had divorced after two years. Now, a dozen years later she had a new husband and seemed at peace with the world. And with her father. Stoner felt immensely grateful for that.

Stoner embraced Elly and her teenaged daughter, shook hands with her son and her new husband, a cargo specialist for Pacific Commerce’s space transport division. He was startled to sense that Elly’s daughter was pregnant. I’ll be a great-grandfather in seven or eight months, he told himself. It seemed strange; he did not feel old enough to be a great-grandfather. I wonder if Elly knows? I’ll have to talk with the girl later on.

Aside from Elly and Doug, the only one among the guests milling around the swimming pool whom Keith had known back in his earlier life, before he had spent eighteen years in frozen suspension, was Claude Appert.

The Frenchman was as dapper as ever despite his seventy-two years. Pure white hair and trim little mustache, jaunty double-breasted blazer of navy blue, pearl gray slacks, Appert was the very picture of the perfectly-dressed Parisian.

“Claude, you’re looking very well.”

“Not so well as you,
mon ami
. You seem ageless.”

“I’m a year younger than you.”

Appert laughed. “But you cheated! You spent eighteen years sleeping and not aging one minute!”

Stoner shrugged like a Parisian.

“Still,” Appert said, looking closely at Stoner’s face, “you do not seem any older than you did when you first recovered from the freezing. Shave off that black beard of yours and you would look no more than thirty-five or forty.”

“How are you getting along?” Stoner changed the subject.

“The same as always. It is lonely without Nicole, but there are any number of handsome widows who invite me to dinner.”

“Paris is still Paris, then.”

“Ah yes. The one thing that remains constant in this world of change.”

“Things are changing rapidly, aren’t they, Claude? And for the better, I think.”

“But yes! Even the government of France has agreed to stop exporting armaments. And there was hardly a peep of protest from the industrialists.
That
is how good the economy is, these days.”

Surveying the assembled guests, Stoner realized that one man was missing: Kirill Markov. He hasn’t been in good health, Stoner knew, but Kir would have come no matter what. Unless something really has hit him. Better ask Jo about him.

He went through the motions of the party, and soon found that he was actually enjoying himself. There were tensions, of course, especially with Doug and Elly’s daughter Susan. But it was good to see his two families in the same place, good to see an old and dear friend like Claude, even if Nicole had died. Life goes on, he told his star brother. Life belongs to the living, his star brother replied.

The presence in his mind seemed to enjoy the party, as well. The rituals of the birthday cake were especially fascinating. As he bent to blow out the candles, for a flash of an instant Stoner’s inner vision saw a parallel ritual on the world of his star brother’s birth, where all fifty members of his creche celebrated the day of their awakening every ten years, coming together to unite physically no matter where their individual lives had taken them.

But the vision passed in the flicker of an eye and he was back on the patio by the swimming pool, beneath gently swaying palm trees under a blue Hawaiian sky, surrounded by friends and colleagues and—Stoner looked up sharply from the smoke of the blown-out candles. There was an enemy here. A traitor. A spy.

All his senses tingled with alarm.

Certainly not Doug, no matter how deeply his bitterness ran. No one in the family. Elly’s new husband? Stoner looked at the man with fresh interest, but he turned away immediately to speak to one of the other guests.

One of Jo’s people? That would be more logical. And much more dangerous. Perhaps it was corporate secrets he was after. It was definitely a man, that much Stoner sensed. But which man?

The sense of danger slowly faded. Although Stoner stayed taut-nerved and wary for the rest of the party, he could learn no more. Maybe I’m getting paranoid in my old age, he thought. How much could a corporate spy find out at a birthday party? But that’s not the real problem, he knew. There’s a spy in Jo’s inner staff. I’ll have to warn her about it.

He pulled his granddaughter Susan to one corner of the patio and, still keeping an eye on the crowd of guests eating birthday cake and drinking champagne, he let her tell him about her boyfriend and how much in love they were and how afraid she was to tell her mother.

“He’s Japanese,” Susan confessed, struggling to hold back tears. “He wants to marry me and take me to Osaka, where he lives.” Susan looked very much like her mother: chestnut hair, round face so young, so vulnerable. With a pang, Stoner recalled that he had never spent a day with his own daughter when she had been a troubled teenager.

“How did you meet him?” Stoner asked.

“At the university in Sydney.”

“He’s a freshman too?”

“Yes.”

“And do you expect your parents to keep on supporting you once you’ve married him?”

With a shake of her head, “We’ll take turns working. One of us will work for a year while the other goes to classes. It’ll take longer for us to get our degrees that way, but we’ll manage.”

“And the baby?”

The tears threatened to overflow. But Susan kept her voice level as she answered, “We’ve talked about it and we’ve decided to abort it. Neither one of us is ready for parenthood yet.”

Stoner felt a sigh go through him. Deep inside his mind the alien presence there felt an immeasurable sadness at the thought of deliberately ending a life. Life is so rare, so precious! But Stoner replied silently, Not on this planet. Despite our best teachings, human life is still held cheap. Jo was right: it’s the most abundant thing we have.

Yet all he said to his granddaughter was, “Why did you allow yourself to get pregnant, in the first place?”

“We didn’t
plan
to! It just happened. You were young once, weren’t you?”

Despite himself, he laughed. “A thousand years ago, it seems.”

Still wary of the danger that he had sensed, Stoner went with Susan and pulled her mother away from the crowd. With him standing between the two women, Susan told her mother about the man she wanted to marry.