Starship Century by Gregory Benford

Author:Gregory Benford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: science, space travel, starship, hard sci fi, anthology science fiction, fiction about space, starship symposium
Publisher: Gregory Benford

Sara seemed undisturbed. “We’re packed for a long boost. I’ve got our vital memorabilia in a carry case. Clothes, meds, the rest.”

Harold watched the two women get the staff moving—hustle, bustle, rustle. He didn’t regret growing older, it was a privilege denied to many. But he had trouble grasping the unspoken assumptions behind these new societies. Boundaries got redrawn at the point of a sword, and the legal frame followed. When he was growing up the paradigm had been with liberty and justice for all—but now on a world stage jammed with swarming masses in desperate need, it seemed to be three hots and a cot and whatever you got.

“You were right, back decades ago,” Lin said in passing. “Going for high-efficiency boost. And building that development complex out in the asteroids, where bot teams could do the assembly.”

“Bots don’t blab,” Sara said.

Harold smiled and nodded. “This is going to be more fun than retirement to a prison.”

2105

Harold had started letting people call him Harry, now that he was over 100.

They pushed him into the ship on a zero-grav gurney. It was massive with med devices and monitors, all wrapped around a lean though not frail body.

Sara smiled beside him “Are we going first class?”

“The only class. It’s just us.”

“Crew?”

“They bail out at Neptune. After that, bots.”

“You planned it that way? From the first?”

“This was a worst-case option. The bots can do human coldsleep tending in flight. Our genomes and specs are already run in a lot of simulations and some lab trials.” He shrugged. “Best I could do.”

In the run-up preps he had rejected a mix of genes derived from naked moles and eagles to improve his hearing and vision. He also shook off, with an irritated snort, suggestions that for a trifling sum he could have his multiracial brown skin suffused with the fashionable golden scarlet. He had scrawled across the memo, As is!

“My, these look more like coffins than I’d like,” was Sara’s only remark when the immersion team helped them try on the big blue sleeves for the Sleep Crucibles. Harold’s LongSleep company had tested for decades the induced-sleep pods he and Sara would use. With hydrogen sulfide bleed-ins and low temperatures, long cruise ships had been carrying slumbering passengers to the outer solar system for over a decade. This would be a logical but untried extension of those, by an order of magnitude.

The entire solar system media maze was now intent on Harold’s “quixotic indulgence” but he had left all that behind. Some of it was amusing, though. Already crackpots were baying that Harold’s fast probe would announce our presence to unknown alien bullies, who would come steaming in to trounce us. Their detailed explanations of why were useful diagnostics of the crackpot’s problems, often amusing. The most common was that aliens with the right ontological bias would read out the state of our technology, our vulnerabilities, and deepest secrets. Then they would come for our riches.

“Maybe the Redstar carnivores will eat us,” Harold mused.

“They’ll have to catch us first,” Sara said lightly.

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