Approaching Omega

Approaching Omega

Eric Brown

Published by infinity plus at Smashwords

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© Eric Brown 2005, 2011

Cover © Dominic Harman

 Smashwords Edition, Licence Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, mechanical, electronic, or otherwise, without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder.

The moral right of Eric Brown to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

The print edition of Approaching Omega was published by Telos in 2005.

Also by Eric Brown

Novels

The Kings of Eternity

Guardians of the Phoenix

Cosmopath

Xenopath

Necropath

Kéthani

Helix

New York Dreams

New York Blues

New York Nights

Penumbra

Engineman

Meridian Days

Novellas

Gilbert and Edgar on Mars

Starship Fall

Revenge

Starship Summer

The Extraordinary Voyage of Jules Verne

Approaching Omega

A Writer's Life

Collections

The Angels of Life and Death

Threshold Shift

The Fall of Tartarus

Deep Future

Parallax View (with Keith Brooke)

Blue Shifting

The Time-Lapsed Man

As Editor

The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (with Mike Ashley)

Contents

Approaching Omega

About the author

About the cover artist

Advertising feature: more from infinity plus

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 that knowledge had been intellectual, an abstraction that he found hard to believe: this morning, the morning of his last day on his homeplanet, 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 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 some war-torn Nigerian 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 all this behind, 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 by the time of his first awakening, to maintain the ship fifteen hundred years into the voyage, his family and friends and acquaintances — in fact everyone now alive on Earth — would be long dead.

Thank Christ 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 that six hours, the four-person maintenance crew and the last of the colonists of the starship Dauntless will leave from this port and dock with the ship in orbit around planet Earth. According to the schedule, just five hours after this, the Dauntless 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 petit, 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 dots on a die.

The scene changed again, cut 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 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, 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