Starborne

“Redemption, then,” says the year-captain distantly. “Rebirth. The new world rising on the ashes of the old.”

He isn’t sure. Some details of his grandmother’s stories have faded in his mind, after all these many years. But it must be so, the rebirth. It is that way in every myth, no matter what land it may come from: the world is destroyed so that it may be brought forth new and fresh. There would be no point to these tales, otherwise. Not if the Twilight of the Gods is followed simply by unending empty night. That way all of life would be reduced to the experience of any one mortal individual: we are each of us born into flesh and we live, well or not well as the case may be, and then we die, goodbye, and that’s that for us, everything over. But that is only the individual case. New lives are being engendered even as ours is passing from us: an eternal cycle of rebirth and return. We end, yes, but the world of mortals goes on, death succeeded always by more life. So it must be with whole planets too. Sooner or later they may die, but new worlds are born from the dead husk of the old, and thus it all continues, world without end, always a new dawn beyond the darkness in which yesterday perished. There must never be a total and final end: never. Never.

“You know,” Heinz says cheerfully — Heinz is always cheerful — “for us the world has already come to an end, really. Because we will never see it again. It is already becoming mythical for us. It was a dying world even before we left it, wasn’t it? And now, so far as we’re concerned, it’s dead, and we are its rebirth. We, and all the ova and sperm sitting in cold storage down there in our tanks.”

“If,” says Paco. “Don’t forget the Big If.”

Heinz laughs. “There is no If. The sky is full of worlds, and we will find some. One good one is all we need.”

In fact Heinz is right, they all agree: the world they had left behind them was essentially already dead — the human world, that is — even though some hundreds of millions of people were still moving about upon the face of it. It had passed successfully through all the convulsions of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the myriad acute crises of demography and nationalistic fervor and environmental decay, and had moved on into an era so stable and happy that its condition seemed indistinguishable from death, for what has ceased to grow and change has ceased to carry out the most important functions of life. Earth now was the home of a steadily dwindling population of healthy, wealthy, cautious, utterly civilized people, living the easy life in an easy society supported by automated devices of every sort. All their problems had been solved except the biggest one of all, which was that the solutions had become the problems and the trend-lines of everything were curving downward toward inevitable extinction. No one had expected that, really: that the end of striving and strife would in effect mean the end of life. But that was how it was working out. The last sputtering spark of Earth’s vitality was here, carried aboard the Wotan, sailing farther out and out and out into the galactic gulfs with each tick of the clock.

An enormous irony, yes. A cosmic giggle. The world, free now of war and lesser conflicts, of inequalities, of disease, of shortages, was drifting downward on an apparently irreversible spiraling course. There was a lot of bland unexcited cocktail-party talk of the end of the human race within five or six hundred years, a notion with which hardly anybody seemed to care to disagree, and such talk was enough to make most people pause and contemplate matters of ultimate destiny for — oh, a good ten or fifteen minutes at a time.

The explosive population growth of the early industrial era had been curbed so successfully that virtually no children were being born at all. Even though the human life span now routinely exceeded a century, there was no region of the world where population was not steadily declining, because childbirth had become so uncommon that the replacement level was not being maintained. The world had become one vast pleasant suburb of well-to-do elderly childless folks.

Everyone was aware of the problem, of course; but everyone was eager for someone else to do something about it. The calm, mature, comfortable, emotionally stable people of the era had, as a general rule, very little interest in bearing or rearing children themselves, and such experiments in having children artificially generated and communally raised as had been carried out had not met with manifest success.

What the human race appeared to be doing, though no one said anything about it out loud, was to be politely allowing itself to die out. Most people thought that that was very sad. But what, if anything, was anybody supposed to do about it?

The Wotan was one answer to that question. A movement arose — it was the most interesting thing that had happened on Earth in two hundred years — aimed at founding a second Earth on some distant planet. Several dozen of the best and brightest of Earth’s younger generation — men and women in their thirties and forties, mainly — would be sent out aboard an interstellar starship to locate and settle a world of some other star. The hope was that amid the challenges of life on an untamed primitive world the colonists and their starborn progeny would recapture the drive and energy that once had been defining characteristics of the human race, and thus bring about a rebirth of the human spirit — which, perhaps, could be recycled back to the mother world five hundred or a thousand years hence.

Perhaps.

Translating the hypothesis into reality required some work, but there were still enough people willing to tackle the job. The starship had to be designed and built and tested. Done and done and done. A crew of suitably fearless and adventuresome people had to be assembled. It was. The voyage had to be undertaken. And so it came to pass. A habitable world needed to be located. Sca

And then, if some reasonably appropriate world did indeed turn up, a successful colony must be founded there, and somehow made to sustain itself, however difficult and hostile an environment the colonists might find themselves in—

Yes. The Big If.

You promised to teach me how to play,” Noelle says, pouting a little. They are once again in the ship’s lounge, one of the two centers of daily social life aboard the Wotan, the other being the baths. Four games are under way, the usual players: Elliot and Sylvia, Roy and Paco, David and Heinz, Michael and Bruce.

The year-captain is fascinated by that sudden pout of Noelle’s: such a little-girl gesture, so charming, so human. In the past few days she and he have passed through the small bit of tension that had so unexpectedly sprung up between them, and are working well together again. He gives the messages to her to transmit, she sends them to Earth, and back from her sister at the far end of the mental transmission line swiftly come the potted replies, the usual cheery stuff, predigested news, politics, sports, the planetary weather, word of doings in the arts and sciences, special greetings for this member of the expedition or that one, expressions of general good wishes — everything light, shallow, amiable, more or less what you would expect the benign stodgy people of Earth to be sending their absconding sons and daughters. And so it will go, the year-captain assumes, as long as the contact between Noelle and Yvo

“Teach me, year-captain,” she prods. “I really do want to know how to play the game. And I know I can learn it. Have faith in me.”