Approaching Omega Read online

  * * * *

  Approaching Omega

  By Eric Brown

  Scanned & Proofed By MadMaxAU

  * * * *

  Prelude

  Latimer was awoken early by a blood-red sunrise, all the more beautiful for being the last on Earth he would ever witness. He slipped quickly from the bed, leaving Caroline asleep, showered and dressed and moved through the dome to the lounge.

  He stood beneath the transparent arc of the wall and stared out across the greensward to the shimmering sea and the rising sun. It was as if the planet had conspired to produce a magnificent valedictory symbol, all the more poignant for being one of the few things of beauty in a slowly dying world.

  He was lucky, he told himself; he was one of only five thousand human beings selected to leave the planet, push out to the stars, initiate Homo Sapiens’ next stage of evolution light years away from where it all started. He had known for almost ten years now that he would be leaving, but it was as if before now the knowledge had been intellectual, an abstraction he found hard to believe: this morning, the morning of his last day on his home planet, it came to him in a dizzy rush that everything he experienced in the next few hours, he would never experience again. His last awakening on Earth; his last appreciation of a Vancouver sunrise; his last breakfast with Caroline.

  And later, at noon, he would have to attend the farewell event, and see his father, and his sister and her kids, for the very last time.

  How do you say goodbye to loved ones when you know - and they know - that you will never meet again?

  He pushed the thought to the back of his mind and touched the sensor pad on the holo-set.

  He sat on the padded seat beneath the curve of the dome and watched the newscast. A reporter stood in the centre of the dome, as seemingly solid as himself, surrounded by an image of some war-torn African state. He killed the volume, so that she was miming silently to herself. He flipped channels. A reporter strolled along a desiccated river-bed, his mute, earnest gestures an eloquent testament to humankind’s folly. Yet another channel showed a packed hospital ward in some South American country, beds full of the victims of the latest super-plague.

  Latimer closed his eyes and not for the first time experienced, alongside the relief that he was leaving all this behind, a powerful wave of guilt.

  He was leaving the world to choke on its own effluent. How long might civilisation last, at the butt end of the twenty-first century? How many more millions would die over the course of the next few years, while he lay in cold sleep, oblivious to everything? He had said farewell to friends and acquaintances, and that had been difficult enough - not so much facing the fact that he would never see these good people again, but having to recognise in their eyes, in their subtle body language, the very real, if unstated, resentment that he was escaping. That had been hard. He’d felt as though he were consigning these people to death sentences. He knew this was absurd, but at the same time he realised that when he first awoke, to maintain the ship fifteen hundred years into the voyage, his family and everyone else he knew - in fact everyone now alive on Earth - would be long dead.

  Thank Christ, he thought, he would have Caroline.

  He was about to kill the holo-set when the story changed: no longer scenes of food riots in Milan, but a sweeping aerial shot of a sloping greensward dotted with domes beside a small shuttle port: the Omega Corporation headquarters here in Vancouver.

  The camera dropped to a reporter standing on a stretch of grass with the ocean in the background. Latimer had the odd experience of being able to see, in the middle-ground behind the woman, the dew-drop hemisphere of his own dome.

  He turned up the sound. The woman was saying: “... historic day for planet Earth. In less than six hours, the four-person maintenance crew and the last of the colonists of the starshipDauntless will leave from this port and dock with the ship in orbit around planet Earth. According to the schedule, just five hours after this, theDauntless will blast off for the stars. I have with me Mission Controller Sabine Courvier. Sabine, what are your feelings at this precise moment...?”

  The shot pulled back to show the petite, black-suited Omega Corporation executive. Latimer killed the sound before Courvier could respond with bland platitudes of her own.

  The interview was soon over, replaced with orbital views of the Dauntless, its bull-nosed front-end trailing an attenuated superstructure upon which the five great cold sleep hangars were arranged like the spots on a die.

  The scene changed again, cutting to the protestors encamped by the side of the road leading to the Omega Corporation’s HQ.

  Latimer upped the sound.

  A reporter stood before a barrier, behind which a crowd of anti-colonisation demonstrators waved banners and chanted.

  “As you can hear,” the reporter shouted above the noise, “the anti-col lobby are making their protests heard here today. With me is Gerald Proxmire, spokesman for Earth First, one of the many protest groups opposed to the colonisation of the stars. Mr Proxmire, what is your main objection to the Dauntless mission?”

  “Quite apart from the many billions spent on this quite reckless and privileged jaunt to the stars,” Proxmire began, “billions which could have been spent on improving the lot of those of us who will remain on Earth -”

  Latimer cut the broadcast and sat in the silence of the dome.

  He’d heard their arguments many times before, of course, and dismissed them as specious: the bleatings of the envious who wished that they too could begin a new life among the stars. If the authorities had listened to the nay-sayers down the ages, opposed to every scientific and technological innovation, then humankind would still be living in caves.

  He dismissed the small voice at the back of his mind which whispered that, perhaps, the funds could have been spent on improving things on the ravaged planet they were leaving.

  He felt a soft touch on the back of his neck. “You’re miles away, Ted.”

  He smiled up at Caroline, and felt a stomach-turning surge of affection for the woman who had been his wife for the past two years.

  “Let’s eat,” she said in her soft, English tones.

  He followed her out to the patio, where Omega staff had already set the table for breakfast.

  It had been her voice, that cut-glass pronunciation and elegantly precise diction, that had been one of the many things that had attracted him to Caroline when they’d first met during routine training five years earlier.

  She was small, fair, winsomely lovely. A strange combination of her obvious knowledge and learning, and her diffidence, had tugged at something within him.

  Her specialisms were history - she had lectured at Cambridge before applying for the mission - and genetics: two disciplines seemingly poles apart, but which, she had argued, were inextricably linked, one encompassing the past and the other spanning not only ages long gone but all the times to come.

  They had joked, in the early days of their relationship, that their love would last for centuries - and that had been before the final colonist selection had been made. Seven thousand men and women had trained for the mission, but only five thousand had made the final cut. He’d often asked himself what he would have done if Caroline had been rejected.

  He would have resigned his commission, foregone the stars, and made a life on Earth with Caroline Stewart.

  But now their love really would span centuries, millennia even.

  They drank orange juice and ate croissants in the warming sunlight.

  At one point she reached across the table and touched his hand. “Real yet?”

  He smiled. “It won’t be until we board the Dauntless, and maybe not even then. Maybe when I wake up in fifteen hundred years, for the first maintenance shift
... maybe then it’ll hit me what I’ve done.” He grinned. “I’ll miss you.”

  Caroline laughed. “We haven’t been apart for more than a day before now.”

  “How will I survive fifteen centuries!”

  She squeezed his fingers. “Only ... what, subjectively? A few days for every fifteen hundred years, with estimated landfall within twenty thousand years ... That’s only a parting of a few weeks, real-time.”

  “Maybe I’ll survive, then,” he smiled.

  The previous night they had watched the sun set - their very last sunset - and then watched the stars come out, and they had pointed at that section of the heavens into which they would be flying. Caroline identified the constellations of Canes Venatici and Ursa Major, and carolled the names of the beautiful stars: Alioth, Merak and Dubhe, any of which might harbour suitable, Earth-like planets.

  Now Caroline said: “When we do find a planet, Ted, beautiful and unspoilt, we’ll start a family, okay? I want a daughter.” She was silent for a time, then said, in a soft voice: “We’re so incredibly lucky. Sometimes I can’t bring myself to believe what’s happening to us.”

  His reply was interrupted by the chime of his communicator. He undipped it from his belt. “Latimer,” he said, annoyed at having his free time invaded.

  An unfamiliar man’s face stared out of the screen at him. “Mr Latimer. You don’t know me. I work over at the Omega receiving station at Toronto-”

  “How can I help you?”

  The man looked nervous, Latimer noticed. “I think you need to know that Omega have been keeping things back from the crew, the colonists-”

  “What?” He wondered if some anti-colony nut had managed to get his code.

  Caroline was watching him, a worried frown distorting her features.

  “The probes,” the man went on hurriedly. “Omega said they ceased functioning at around eight years into their journey. Wear and tear, Omega claimed.”

  “Just who are you?” Latimer said.

  “They were lying. The probes didn’t degrade naturally, of wear and tear. The Hansen-Spirek coils-”

  The connection ceased. The screen filled with snow and static.

  Latimer looked across at Caroline and replaced his com-set on the table.

  “What do you think he meant?” she asked.

  “Beats me. Earth First propaganda?”

  Over the course of the previous ten years, the Omega Corporation had sent out four unmanned probes on the approximate course the Dauntless was due to take. They had travelled at eighty-five percent of the speed of light, the maximum attainable, and passed the Centauri star system without detecting suitable planets. A couple of months ago telemetry had failed, but Omega scientists had shown a marked reluctance to explain the failings.

  His com chimed again.

  “Part two,” he said grimly.

  He snatched up his com. “Yes?”

  Sabine Courvier looked out at him. “Ted, we just intercepted that call.”

  “What was he on about?” Latimer asked.

  “We assume he was a protestor, Ted. I don’t know how he managed to get your code.”

  “What he said about the-” Latimer began.

  Courvier smiled. “He’s trying to scare you. The latest, desperate tactics of the Earth First mob. They’ve contacted other crew with stories of systems failures in the Hanson-Spirek coils. All spurious, of course.”

  “I know that, Sabine.”

  “Okay, I’ll let you get on with your breakfast. See you at twelve.” She cut the connection.

  Latimer laid the com aside and smiled across at Caroline. “Where were we?” he said.

  She laughed. “I was saying how lucky we are,” Caroline murmured. She shivered, despite the sunlight. “I really can’t imagine remaining on Earth,” she went on. “Is it any wonder that jealous people have tried to sabotage the mission?”

  They finished breakfast and prepared themselves for the ordeal of leave-taking at noon.

  * * * *

  The reception hall was a huge geodesic on the foreshore, with a view over the ocean and, off to the left, the three shuttles that would whisk the last of the colonists off to the Dauntless.

  By the time Latimer and Caroline arrived, a little after noon, perhaps a hundred people were standing around the dome in small groups, holding wine glasses and chatting selfconsciously.

  These were friends and family of the maintenance crew and colonists; Latimer made out Jenny Li, the tiny Korean medic, talking animatedly with her mother, father and awe-stricken younger sister. Friday Emecheta, the Nigerian computer expert, loomed over his wizened mother, while Serena Renfrew, the New Zealander biologist, hugged her weeping sisters and tried to hold back her own tears.

  Caroline was fortunate, Latimer thought, in having no close family to say goodbye to today.

  He noticed Jenny Li glance over at Emecheta, who pointedly ignored her. Their long-running affair had just ended - or rather, Emecheta had ended it. The atmosphere at maintenance team briefings for the past few weeks had been cryogenic, to say the least.

  As team leader, Latimer would have to keep a keen eye on Li and Emecheta during the mission. As if he didn’t have enough to occupy his thoughts right now!

  Then he saw his father and sister, Sam, with her two boys. They were sitting at a table by the curving wall of the dome, the six year-old twins zooming models of the Dauntless over the table-top.

  His father, eighty now, stood as Latimer and Caroline approached. There was a second of awkwardness as both men, caught between a lifetime’s abjuration of intimacy, and the enormity of the moment, considered whether a hug or a handshake would be in order.

  They shook hands. He kissed his sister, hugged the kids.

  The conversation was stilted.

  “All set?” his father joked. “Bags packed?”

  “Now you make sure you look after Ted out there,” Sam said to Caroline.

  They were saved the embarrassment of further platitudes when Sabine Courvier called for silence and made a short speech along the lines of: We ‘re all gathered here today to say our farewells to the men and women who are taking humanity to the stars ...

  Latimer shut out the drone, stared into his drink and wished he were out of here and on the shuttle.

  Courvier wound down her speech and circulated. A minute later she breezed up to the Latimer’s table, introduced herself to the others with false brio and dazzling smiles, and murmured to Latimer: “A quick word, Ted.”

  He stepped from the table, and Courvier said: “We’ve apprehended the Earth First saboteur. He got a job at reception over in Dallas, which is how he came by your code. I hope the bastard didn’t give you the jitters.”

  “He began to say something about the Hansen-Spirek coils.”

  “Earth First scare tactics, Ted.”

  Latimer held her gaze. “It would help if Omega came out with the reason why the probes failed.”

  Courvier hesitated, then said: “We discovered a bug in the telemetry system here on Earth. We’ve sorted it out.”

  “So you’ll be able to send us the promised message?” he asked.

  When his team awoke for the first maintenance shift, in fifteen hundred years from now, they would be beyond telemetry communication with Earth. But the Omega Corporation would have sent one last message to the Dauntless and her crew, thirty years from now, Earth-time. That would be their final link with home. After that, they would be on their own.

  Courvier smiled. “Don’t worry, we’ll bring you up to date on how things are back home.” She paused. “So ... everything AOK?”

  Latimer said: “I’m fine. So’s Caroline. We can’t wait to be away.”

  Courvier nodded, held out a hand and looked into his eyes. “Farewell, Ted. Good luck.”

  She hugged Caroline, and across the dome the big double doors slid open on to the apron of the port. The assembly within the dome made their slow way into the sunlight.

  Latimer felt a tight
ness within his chest.

  A barrier, patrolled by armed Omega Corps guards, demarcated the point beyond which civilians were not allowed.

  Latimer turned to his sister, took her in his arms. “Bye, Sam. I love you.” He kissed the kids.

  Sam grabbed him again, hugged him tight. “You don’t know how much I wish I was coming along with you, Ted!”

  He felt something like grief fill his chest as he made out the note of envy in her words.

  He turned to his father. This time, they did hug.

  “So long, Ted. I can’t say how proud I am, son.” When Latimer pulled away, he saw tears coursing down his father’s grey and shrunken cheeks.