Frederik Pohl - Furthest Star - 1

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Frederik Pohl

& Jack Williamson

Farthest star

The saga of Cuckoo

Pan Books London and Sydney

First published in Great Britain 1976 by Pan Books Ltd,

Cavaye Place, London SW10 9PO

ISBN 0 330 24639 9

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

Cox & Wyman Ltd, London, Reading and Fakenham

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out

or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in

which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent

purchaser

Part 1 Doomship

The place was called Sun One. It had begun as an asteroid, circling a young blue-white

giant in the great dense cloud called the Orion Nebula. Over centuries it had been built

upon, sheathed and tunnelled; and what it had become was the closest thing there was

to a central headquarters of the loose association of intelligent races in the Galaxy that

had made contact with one another.

In one of the inner shells two members of a very junior race were meeting. They came

from Earth. They loved each other. They were young. They planned to marry. All these

things made them curiosities to the races which possessed personal curiosity, and they

were widely watched, heard or sensed as they came towards each other. They didn't

mind. Ben Charles Pertin saw the girl and launched himself in a shallow three-percent

gravity dive over the heads of a thing like a dragon, a creature composed mostly of a

single great blue eye and a couple of scurrying collective creatures from one of the core

stars. 'Sorry,' he cried down at them, caught the laughing girl's hand and stopped hard

beside her.

“Ouch,” she said, releasing a holdfast with her other hand. “I'd appreciate a little less

enthusiasm next time.”

He kissed her and took her arm. “It's part of the image,” he said cheerfully. “You know

what the chief of delegation says. Make them know we're here. Earth may be the newest

planet in the association but it isn't going to be the least important. We have a duty to

Earth to make ourselves known throughout the Galaxy, and a duty to the Galaxy to

contribute our strength and our know-how.”

“I think,” said the girl, “that if you're going to talk like that you'd better buy me a drink.”

At this shell of Sun One the curvature of the spherical surface they walked on was

noticeably sharp. They found it was easier to leap than to stroll. To travel arm in arm,

which is how Ben Charles Pertin chose to walk with his girl, required practice and a lot of

discomfort - not only to them but to the other sentients in the concourse. Pertin and Zara

shifted grips, so that each had an arm around the other's waist; then Pertin caught the

holdfast webbing with his free hand and partly tugged, partly kicked them into the air.

They shot past the dragonlike creature, narrowly missed a steelwork vertical strut,

touched down again next to something that looked like a soft-bodied beetle with three

dozen legs and were in sight of the little refreshment plat-form they liked.

Pertin said “Hi!” to a thing like a green bat as it flapped by.

It hissed something shrill that his personal translator repeated into his ear as, “I recognize

your identity, Ben Charles Pertin.” The girl nodded, too, although all members of that

particular race, which was called the T'Worlie, looked alike to her, and in any event the

T'Worlies did not have the custom of nodding since they had no more neck than bats.

As they waited for traffic to clear, the girlsaid, “How did your meeting go?”

“About as usual. Things are all fouled up on the probe.” He was watching a tumbling

box-like robot that was coming towards them on a tangent, correcting its course with

methodical jets of steam from the faces of its cubical body; but the tone of his voice made

the girl look at him sharply.

“What is it, Ben?”

He gave her a caught-in-the-cookie-jar smile. “I'll tell you about it when we sit down.”

“You’ll tell me now.”

“Well—” He hesitated, then cried, “All right, we can make it now!” But the girl wrapped

her fingers around the webbing of the holdfast.

“Ben!”

He relaxed and looked at her. He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t have to.

“Ben! Not again!”

He said defensively, “I have to, Zara. The other one’s dying.

There’s nobody from Earth on the probe now to represent us.

So I agreed to carry the ball.”

He looked appraisingly at the traffic of aliens, then back at her; then he looked at her

with a sudden shock of surprise. The girl looked as if she had come very close to crying.

“Oh, Zara,” he said, half-touched and half-annoyed. “What are you making a big thing

about? It’s nothing we haven’t done before.”

“I know," she said, and blinked hard. “It’s only - well, it’s sort of silly. But I hate the idea of

your dying out there while we’re on our honeymoon.”

Pertin found that he was blinking himself; he was touched. He patted the girl’s hand and

said seriously, “Honey, one of the traits I like best in you is that you’re not afraid to be

sentimental at the right time. Don’t knock it. I love you for it. Now Let’s go get that drink.”

The little cafe was nearly empty. That was one of the things they liked about it. It had

actual waiters, purchased people. They didn’t have much personality to display, but they

were actually human, genetically speaking. Pertin and his fiancee enjoyed ordering in

their rudimentary Italian - not their own language, to be sure, but at least a human

language, and one for which they did not need the Pmal translators.

Pertin pulled his feet up, crossed them in the air and settled gently on to his chair. They

looked about while waiting for their drinks to be brought. Pertin had been on Sun One for

more than two years now, the girl for several months. Even so, familiarity had not dulled

their interest in the place where they were stationed or in the work they did there. The girl

was a news- writer, broadcasting to Earth every week on the stereo stage.

Pertin was an engineer. His job on Sun One didn’t involve much engineering. It did

involve an interesting mixture of skills. He functioned partly as a sort of legalized spy and

partly as a goodwill ambassador from Earth to the rest of the universe.

The mere fact that a job like this existed was still secretly thrilling to Ben Charles Pertin.

He was not yet thirty. Even so, he was old enough to remember the time when the

human race thought it was alone in the Galaxy.

Space travel itself was not new. The old “nations” had put up their chemical rockets and

sent them chugging to Venus, Mars and the Moon in his grandfather’s time. They had

looked for life, and come up empty every time. Nuclear probes a generation later

investigated the outer planets, the satellites and even the asteroids, with the same result.

No life. By the time Ben was twelve years old, the juice had run out of space travel.

There were still a lot of on-going projects, such as the close-orbiting satellites that

photomapped the Earth and relayed TV programmes from Rangoon to Rochester and

back. An occasional plodding probe was sent out to sample a comet’s gases or measure

the solar flux. And of course there was always the Farside base on the Moon, where

radio astronomy had retreated when the world’s communications systems had ruined

reception for every ground-based dish. But no excitement was generated by any of that.

There was not even any interest. If some pollster had sampled the Earth’s billions with a

question like, “Do you think intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe?”, he would

have been likely to receive as a general response, “Don’t know; don’t care.”

Then came Contact.

It happened just as Ben Pertin was turning thirteen. Something had been found on Pluto.

An artifact, half-buried under Pluto’s mirror of ice. The Earth suddenly looked outward

again. The stereo stages were full of it: the first fumbling attempts to patch it together, the

first daring experiment at putting power through it. Everybody talked about it. Ben and his

parents watched the glowing figures on their stage, enthralled. Their evening meals grew

cold because they forgot to eat. In school, the kids made the discovery the main subject

of every class.

And when the ancient communicator came to life and the first alien face peered out of its

screen and looked into the face of a human from Earth, the world went mad.

"I don’t want to hear any more of that cockamamie Earthman’s Burden talk,” said Zara

Doy, “I heard too much of it when I was a kid. I don’t want you going out to die. Stay here

with me.”

Pertin said fondly, “You’re sweet, Zara. But this is important. The situation on the probe

is exploding; the beings are fighting. They”re dying uselessly. I can’t back out just for

some sentimental ideas of—”

“Sentimental be damned! Look. When we get married I want you right in bed with me, all

of you. I don’t want to be thinking about part of you dying way off in nowhere!”

“I’ll be with you, honey. All of me.”

“You know what I mean,” she said angrily.

He hesitated. The last thing he wanted was to quarrel with his fiancee two days before

they were to get married - and less than two days before he kept his promise to go to the

probe ship. He rubbed his troth ring and said, “Zara, I have to go to the probe.”

First, I said I would; and the boss has passed the word to all the other top brass on Sun

One. Second, it’s important. It’s not "Earthman’s Burden", It’s simple logic. We’re new

and pretty far behind, compared to the Scorpians or the methane crowd or the T’Worlie.

But look what We’ve done already. We have Earth people on every major planet, working

in every big project taking part in everything that’s happening. The others are getting

used to us. They consult us now. If I back out, who else is there to go? Earth won’t be

represented—”

“I don’t care.”

“It’s not as if I haven’t done it before—”

“The other time you went we weren’t going to be married,’the girl responded fiercely.

“All right, that’s true. Now I owe you something. But I owe our planet something too.

We’re just beginning to contribute our share of leadership in the Galaxy, Zara. I mean,

look at that waiter! Half the purchased people around are human beings, now. When the

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FrederikPohl&JackWilliamsonFartheststarThesagaofCuckooPanBooksLondonandSydneyFirstpublishedinGreatBritain1976byPanBooksLtd,CavayePlace,LondonSW109PO©FrederikPohlandJackWilliamson1975ISBN0330246399PrintedandboundinGreatBritainbyCox&WymanLtd,London,ReadingandFakenhamThisbookissoldsubjecttothecondition...

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