As the group drew nearer to the railing where Zafirah stood, she could see that some of the very youngest ones bore the unmistakable marks of futurity. As these children—scarcely more than toddlers—tossed an oblong airbladder to and fro, Zafirah noticed that they, too, were not only long-limbed, but also had opposable thumbs on their bare feet, a genetic trait that Claudia’s labs had lately made available to Vanguard’s newest parents, along with increased genetic variability—an absolute necessity with such a small breeding population—and enhanced resistance to disease, radiation, and temperature extremes.
A generation of humanity, one that had never lived on Earth, was already becoming uniquely adapted to the [152] high-stress, variable-gravity environment of a spinning asteroid. As always, Zafirah was both chilled and exhilarated by the sight of beings capable of using all their limbs for grasping with equal facility.
She remained certain of only one thing: These children would survive and prosper out here, and would no doubt carry Claudia’s genetic improvements even further in their own progeny, regardless of the scars the rest of the human species had borne since the Eugenics Wars of the previous century. Humanity would continue out here in some form or other, whatever adaptations the random, uncaring universe forced upon them. Even if its light were to be extinguished on Earth, mankind would spread its seed across the deeps of space. Homo sapiens celestis,the children of O’Neill, would survive.
But life aboard Vanguard has to be about more than mere survival,she thought as she watched the children arc and turn in graceful flight. It also has to be about creating a future that’s worth surviving for.
Were the bedtime stories these children heard each night, and the prayers they offered to whatever gods they revered, to be filled with delighted anticipation of the unexplored wonders that the universe held in store for them? Or would they instead be reared on tales of ravening, bloodthirsty tusk-men?
The difference between truly living and merely enduring could very well come down to nothing more than that.
Chapter 13
Saturday. 9 August 2155
Sayyid al-Adnan assumed that the alarm was just another drill. After all, what were the chances of encountering a second alien raider ship during the ninety-seventh official Commemoration of the First Contact Massacre?
Of course, the reason the Dread Event should be memorialized so arbitrarily—once every approximately three-hundred-sixty-five-point-two-five twenty-four-hour intervals—made about as much sense to Sayyid as the bizarre, biped-oriented furniture some of the Oldsters still kept around in the high-grav Museum Levels.
Sayyid grasped the railings with his feet, thrusting his long prehensile tail behind him to provide a counterbalance as he swung himself down the tube—his grandfather had told him that the tube had housed an automated lifting-and-lowering device during the Age of Two-Handedness—toward the asteroid’s outermost high-grav layers.
It was unfortunate that so many of the colony’s key apparatus were still located at such uncomfortably intense grav-levels, but moving them coreward into the spinning asteroid’s null-grav regions would have required the installation of a prohibitive number of power relays. It also would [154] have run the risk of causing mass null-grav wasting among the Citizenry, as well as sealing the People off completely from the Outside, an eventuality that could prove as dangerous as welcoming into the colony more of the Tuskers who had slain the First Director and so many others.
Sayyid recalled his recent Midschool days, when he had heard an audio recording of a very old story—quite a rarity these days, considering how much of the digital library had been lost to radiation exposure during the Passage—that one of the Oldsters had described as a “skiffy.” In the tale, a tribe of People ventured from Earth and voyaged into the infinitude of space inside a vast Ship. Within a few generations, mutineers had tried unsuccessfully to seize control of the great vessel. The descendants of both the legitimate crew and the mutineers were no longer even aware that they dwelled within the giant Ship’s belly. To them, the notion that the extent of the Ship’s interior comprised the totality of the universe was merely common sense.
Fools,Sayyid thought, every time he thought of that ancient skiffy story. To be ignorant is to be vulnerable.
No, the scions of ’Neal had no desire to cut themselves off completely from the universe, whatever undiscovered terrors it held. One had to keep oneself apprised of what was out there, lest the unknown bare its tusks again and resume the lopping off of heads.
Sayyid swung himself down onto the Control Level, where the blaring of the alarm Klaxons was loudest.
“What took you so long?” Graben demanded the moment Sayyid pulled himself laboriously through the Instrument Room hatch. Sayyid hated high-grav.
Graben was older—old enough, at least, not to carry much of the genework that had made null-grav the preferred environment for the newest ’Neal generation to come of age—and Sayyid assumed that this was why he always [155] complained so much about the performance of the Youngsters in his crew. Many of these were still arriving in response to the alarm, literally right behind Sayyid’s tail.
“What’s happening?” Sayyid asked, ignoring Graben’s gruff query. Grinning, he added, “More Tuskers?”
Graben scowled. “Not Tuskers. The bogey doesn’t appear to be a ship this time.”
“What then?” Sayyid asked as he draped his long form across one of the instrument couches and donned his gloves and visor.
“You tell me, boy genius,” Graben said as the virtual display activated, immersing Sayyid in the unknown.
Thanks to the virt, Sayyid was suddenly floating outside in the void. The illusion would have been perfect save for the insistent pull of the asteroid’s spin-generated gravity, which inexorably pushed his body into the unyielding couch. But the velvet depths of trackless space and the bright stellar baubles that punctuated it made the high-grav sensation a manageable annoyance. When he turned his field of vision 180 degrees, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds—a pair of relatively small globular galaxies that lay well beyond the familiar confines of the Milky Way—stared at him like a pair of baleful eyes.
Ahead of him, perhaps pars’x away, or maybe only a few hundred klomters distant, lay a silver, shimmering ripplein space, moving in undulating, sinuous waves. Sayyid could not determine what was producing the effect, nor how it was being illuminated so far out in interstellar space.
“Whatever it is,” Sayyid said, “it seems to be moving fast.” Of course, that was relative. Although Vangarde wasn’t moving at anywhere near relativistic speeds, the Great Rock still retained a fair amount of momentum from the days of the Passage.
Sayyid recalled a story that Great-Grandmother Zafirah had shared with him when he was little. She had spoken of [156] an energetic wave or disturbance of some sort that had swept through the Earth’s solar system more than a century earlier. One of the planet’s space-based telescopes had observed the phenomenon’s unexplained superluminal passage across the plane of the ecliptic. The anomaly had apparently destroyed the Ares IV,the first manned ship bound for Mars.
As a small child, Sayyid had always wondered if the Mars ship had actually somehow survived its encounter with the unexplained on that fateful day. Might Loot Kelly’s little vessel have simply been kicked out among the stars, arriving at some impossibly far destination intact, the way the Vangarde colony had been dislocated a generation later? Because of his own life circumstances, Sayyid could never discount such possibilities out of hand.