“My sister!” blurted Rigg.
“She lives with your mother,” said Father.
“My mother’s alive? What is her name? Where does she live?”
“Nox will tell you.”
Nox? The woman who kept the rooming house they sometimes stayed in? When Rigg was very young he had thought Nox might be his mother, but he long since gave up that notion. Now it seems she was in Father’s confidence and Rigg was not. “You tell me! Why did you make me think my mother was dead? And a sister—why was this a secret? Why haven’t I ever seen my mother?”
There was no answer.
“I’m sorry. I know I said I wouldn’t argue, but you never told me, I was shocked, I couldn’t help it. I’m sorry. Tell me what else you think I should know.”
There was no answer.
“Oh, Father!” cried Rigg. “Speak to me one more time! Don’t punish me like this! Talk to me!”
There was no answer.
Rigg thought things through the way he knew Father would expect him to. Finally he said what he knew Father would want him to say.
“I don’t know if you’re punishing me with silence or if you’re already dead. I made a vow not to look and I’ll keep it. So I’m going to leave and obey your instructions. If you’re not dead, and you have anything else to say to me, say it now, speak now, please speak now.” He had to stop because if Father wasn’t dead he didn’t want him to hear that Rigg was crying.
Please, he said silently as he wept.
“I love you, Father,” said Rigg. “I will miss you forever. I know I will.”
If that didn’t provoke Father into speech, nothing ever would.
There was no answer.
Rigg turned resolutely and walked back, retracing his own bright path among the trees and underbrush, along the deer path, back to the last spot where he had seen his father alive.
CHAPTER 2
Upsheer
Ram Odin was raised to be a starship pilot. It was his father who adopted the Norse god of the sky as their surname, and it was his father who made sure Ram was absolutely prepared to go into astronaut training two years before the normal time.
Every bit of surplus wealth on Earth had been used to build humanity’s first interstellar colony ships; it took forty years. Under the shadow of moondust that still blocked out more than a third of the sun’s rays from the surface of Earth, the sense of urgency flagged very little, despite the human ability to get used to anything.
Everyone understood how close the human race had come to extinction when the comet swept past Earth and gouged its way into the near face of the moon. Even now, there was no certainty that the Moon’s orbit would restabilize; astronomers were almost evenly divided among those who thought it would sooner or later collide with Earth, and those who thought a new equilibrium would be achieved.
So all who had survived the first terrible years of worldwide cold and famine dedicated themselves to building two identical ships. One would crawl out into space at ten percent of lightspeed, with generation after generation of future colonists living, growing old, and dying inside its closed ecosystem.
The other ship, Ram’s ship, would travel seven years away from the solar system and then make a daring leap into theoretical physics.
Either spacetime could be made to fold, skipping ninety lightyears and putting the colony ship only seven years away from the earthlike planet that was its destination, or the ship would obliterate itself in the attempt . . . or nothing would happen at all, and it would crawl on for nine
hundred more years before reaching its new world.
The colonists on Ram’s ship slept their way toward the foldpoint. If all went well, they would remain asleep through the fold and not be wakened until they neared their destination. If nothing happened at all, they would be wakened to begin farming the vast interior, starting the thirty-five generations that the colony must survive until arrival.
Ram alone would remain awake the entire time.
Seven years with only the expendables for company. Once engineered to do work that might kill an irreplaceable human being, the expendables had now been so vastly improved that they could outlive and outwork any human. They also cost far more to make than it cost to train a human to do even a small part of their work.
Still, they were not human. They could not be allowed to make life-and-death decisions while all the humans were asleep. Yet they were such a good simulation of human life that Ram would never be lonely.