Read Starborne for Free Online Page B

flesh and we live, well or not well as the case may be, and then we die, goodbye, and that ’ s that for us, everything over. But that is only the individual case. New lives are being engendered even as ours is passing from us: an e ternal cycle of rebirth and return. We end, yes, but the world of mortals goes on, death succeeded always by more life. So it must be with whole planets, too. Sooner or later they may die, but new worlds are born from the dead husk of the old, and thus it all continues, world without end, always a new dawn beyond the darkness in which yesterday perished. There must never be a total and final end: never. Never.
    “ You know,” Heinz says cheerfully — Heinz is always cheerful —“ for us the world has already come to a n end, really. Because we will never see it again. It is already becoming mythical for us. It was a dying world even before we left it, wasn ’ t it? And now, so far as we ’ re concerned, it ’ s dead, and we are its rebirth. We, and all the ova and sperm sitting in cold storage down there in our tanks.”
    “ If,” says Paco. “ Don ’ t forget the Big If.”
    Heinz laughs. “ There is no If. The sky is full of worlds, and we will find some. One good one is all we need.”
    ***
    In fact Heinz is right, they all agree: the world they had left behind them was essentially already dead — the human world, that is — even though some hundreds of millions of people were still moving about upon the face of it. It had passed successfully through all the convu l sions of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the myriad acute crises of demography and nationalistic fervor and environmental decay, and had moved on into an era so stable and happy that its condition seemed indistinguishable from death, for what has ceased to grow and change has ceased t o carry out the most important functions of life. Earth now was the home of a steadily dwindling population of healthy, wealthy, cautious, utterly civilized people, living the easy life in an easy society supported by automated devices of every sort. All t heir problems had been solved except the biggest one of all, which was that the solutions had become the problems and the trend-lines of everything were curving downward toward inevitable extinction. No one had expected that, rea l ly: that the end of strivi ng and strife would in effect mean the end of life. But that was how it was working out. The last sputtering spark of Earth ’ s vitality was here, carried aboard the Wotan , sailing farther out and out and out into the galactic gulfs with each tick of the clo ck.
    An enormous irony, yes. A cosmic giggle. The world, free now of war and lesser conflicts, of inequalities, of disease, of shortages, was drifting downward on an apparently irreversible spiraling course. There was a lot of bland unexcited cocktail-party talk of the end of the human race within five or six hundred years, a notion with which hardly an y body seemed to care to disagree, and such talk was enough to make most people pause and contemplate matters of ultimate destiny for — oh, a good ten or fifteen minutes at a time.
    The explosive population growth of the early industrial era had been curbed so successfully that virtually no children were being born at all. Even though the human lifespan now routinely exceeded a century, there was no region of the w orld where population was not steadily d e clining, because childbirth had become so uncommon that the replac e ment level was not being maintained. The world had become one vast pleasant suburb of well-to-do elderly childless folks.
    Everyone was aware of the problem, of course; but everyone was eager for someone else to do something about it. The calm, mature, comfortable, emotionally stable people of the era had, as a general rule, very little interest in bearing or rearing children themselves, and such experiments in having children artificially generated and communally raised as had been carried