Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

’We pharaohs
have been discussing destinations,’ she said. ’Obviously the targets
had to be chosen before we reached Jupiter; we needed to plan for our
angles of emergence from Jupiter’s gravity well. The Coalition is
vindictive and determined, and it has faster-than-light ships. It
will soon overtake us - but space is big, and five silent-running
generation starships will be hard to spot. Even so it’s obviously
best to separate, to give them five targets to chase, not just
one.
    ’So we have five destinations. And ours,’ she said, smiling, ’is
the most unique of all.’
    She listed the other Ships’ targets, star systems scattered
through the disc of the Galaxy - none closer than five hundred light
years. ’All well within the Ships’ design parameters,’ she said, ’and
perhaps far enough to be safe. But we are going further.’
    She overlaid the image of the shining Ships with a ruddy,
shapeless mass of mist. ’This is the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy,’ she
said. ’Twenty-four thousand light years from Sol. It is the closest
of the satellite galaxies - but it is beyond the main Galaxy itself,
surely far outside the Coalition’s grasp for the foreseeable
future.’
    Rusel heard gasps throughout the amphitheatre. To sail beyond the
Galaxy?…
    Andres held her hands up to quell the muttering. ’Of course such a
journey is far in excess of what we planned. No generation starship
has ever challenged such distances before, let alone achieved them.’
She stared around at them, fists on hips. ’But if we can manage a
thousand years of flight, we can manage ten, or fifty - why not? We
are strong, we are just as determined as the Coalition and its drones
- more so, for we know we are in the right.’
    Rusel wasn’t used to questioning the pharaohs’ decisions, but he
found himself wondering at the arrogance of the handful of pharaohs
to make such decisions on behalf of their crew - not to mention the
generations yet unborn.
    There was no serious protest. Perhaps it was all simply beyond the
imagination. Diluc muttered, ’Can’t say it makes much difference. A
thousand years or ten thousand, I’ll be dead in a century, and I
won’t see the end…’
    Andres restored the images of the Ships. Jupiter was expanding
rapidly now, and the other Ships were swarming closer.
    Andres said, ’We have discussed names for our vessels. On such an
epic voyage numbers won’t do. Every Ship must have a name! We have
named our Ship-homes for great thinkers, and great vessels of the
past.’ She stabbed her finger around the Virtual image. ’Tsiolkovsky.
Great Northern. Aldiss. Vanguard.’ She looked at her crew. ’And as
for us, only one name is possible. Like an earlier band of pilgrims,
we are fleeing intolerance and tyranny; we sail into the dark and the
unknown, carrying the hopes of an age. We are Mayflower.’
    You didn’t study history on Port Sol. Nobody knew what she was
talking about.
    At the moment of closest approach Jupiter’s golden-brown
cloudscape bellied over the upturned faces of the watching crew, and
the Ships poured through Jupiter’s gravity well. Even now the rule of
silence wasn’t violated, and the five Ships parted without so much as
a farewell message.
    From now on, wherever this invisible road in the sky took her, the
second Mayflower was alone.

 
III
     
     
    As the days stretched to weeks, and the weeks to months, Rusel
continued to throw himself into work - and there was plenty of it for
everybody.
    The challenges of running a generation starship were familiar to
the crew to some extent, as the colonists of Port Sol had long
experience in ecosynthesis, in constructing and sustaining closed
artificial environments. But on Port Sol they had had external
resources to draw on, the ice, rock and organic chemistry of the ice
moon itself. The Ship was now cut off from the outside universe.
    So the cycles of air, water and solids would have to be maintained
with something close to a hundred per cent efficiency. The sealing of
the Ship against leakages was vital, and so nano-machines laboured to
knit together the hull. The control of trace contaminants and pests
would have to be ferociously tight: more swarms of nano-bots were
sent scurrying in pursuit of flakes of hair and skin.
    Not only that, the Ship’s design had been hastily thrown together,
and the vessel wasn’t even completed on launch. The construction had
been a hurried project anyhow, and the shaving-off of those