Starborne by Robert Silverberg Read Free Book Online

out had not met with manifest success.
    What the human race appeared to be doing, though no one said an y thing about it out loud, was to be p olitely allowing itself to die out. Most people thought that that was very sad. But what, if anything, was an y body supposed to do about it?
    The Wotan was one answer to that question. A movement arose — it was the most interesting thing that had happened on E arth in two hu n dred years — aimed at founding a second Earth on some distant planet. Several dozen of the best and brightest of Earth ’ s younger gener a tion — men and women in their thirties and forties, mainly — would be sent out aboard an interstellar starship t o locate and settle a world of some other star. The hope was that amid the challenges of life on an u n tamed primitive world the colonists and their starborn progeny would recapture the drive and energy that once had been defining characteri s tics of the hum an race, and thus bring about a rebirth of the human spi r it — which, perhaps, could be recycled back to the mother world five hundred or a thousand years hence.
    Perhaps.
    Translating the hypothesis into reality required some work, but there were still enough people willing to tackle the job. The starship had to be designed and built and tested. Done and done and done. A crew of sui t ably fearless and adventuresome people had to be assembled. It was. The voyage had to be undertaken. And so it came to pass. A hab itable world needed to be located. Scanning instruments were even now at work.
    And then, if some reasonably appropriate world did indeed turn up, a successful colony must be founded there, and somehow made to sustain itself, however difficult and hostile a n environment the colonists might find themselves in —
    Yes. The Big If.
    ***
    “ You promised to teach me how to play,” Noelle says, pouting a li t tle. They are once again in the ship ’ s lounge, one of the two centers of daily social life aboard the Wotan , the ot her being the baths. Four games are under way, the usual players: Elliot and Sylvia, Roy and Paco, David and Heinz, Michael and Bruce.
    The year-captain is fascinated by that sudden pout of Noelle ’ s: such a little-girl gesture, so charming, so human. In the past few days she and he have passed through the small bit of tension that had so unexpectedly sprung up between them, and are working well together again. He gives the messages to her to transmit, she sends them to Earth, and back from her sister at the far end of the mental transmission line swiftly come the potted replies, the usual cheery stuff, predigested news, politics, sports, the planetary weather, word of doings in the arts and sciences, special greetings for this member of the expedition or tha t one, expressions of general good wishes — everything light, shallow, amiable, more or less what you would expect the benign stodgy people of Earth to be sending their absconding sons and daughters. And so it will go, the year-captain assumes, as long as th e contact between Noelle and Yvonne holds. Of course someday the sisters will no longer be available for these tran s missions, and real-time contact between Earth and its colony in the stars will be severed when that happens, but that is not a problem he nee ds to deal with today, or, indeed, at all.
    “ Teach me, year-captain,” she prods. “ I really do want to know how to play the game. And I know I can learn it. Have faith in me.”
    “ All right,” he says. The game may prove valuable to her, a relaxing pastime, a ti mely distraction. She leads such a cloistered life, more so even than the rest of them, moving in complete tranquility through her chaste existence, intimate with no one but her sister Yvonne, sixteen light-years away and receding into greater distances a l l the time.
    He leads her toward the gaming tables. Noelle bridles only an instant as his hand touches her elbow, and then she relaxes with an obvious e f fort, allowing him