Slow Train to Arcturus

by Eric Flint

  Or it could be his head spinning. He'd lost a lot of blood.

  Eventually, he realized that it wasn't a pole. It was the line, the cable, that linked the habitats. He was right at the center of the habitat, possibly near a pole. Off to one side of him-that was an elevator! An alien elevator, yes, but still function defined form. The explosion-hole he'd fallen down… someone must have blown out an elevator shaft. Possibly they had filled an elevator with explosives in the shaft, and then exploded it. The stair he'd followed had been a mere standby.

  His mind had been drifting between extreme lucidity and delirium for some time. It was in one of its lucid phases just then. There had to be a reason for the stairs and the lift shaft being right there-and looking at the cable he could see it.

  A door. A door set into the central cable, with the millions of microtubules that surrounded the core in brackets around the door to allow access to it. Well… it would have been a door-if there had been any sign of a handle. And off to the side was a wide passage with a rail set into it. With an odd start Kretz realized that he'd seen one like it before-at the airlock they'd come in by.

  The engineering side of Kretz's mind clicked in. This was for heavy equipment transport. And it had to run between the central cable and airlock. The question was… which airlock? Had he ended up at the wrong end of the habitat? And mostly, what should he do now? He knew that he'd been shot by the aliens. The suit had of course protected him to some extent. But he was badly bruised and still losing blood, and he had a broken arm. He stood, swaying, indecisive. Eventually he set off down the wide corridor. It was not one of the greenhouse ones, and was lit only by small lights on one wall. It curved quite steeply downwards and he found himself desperately hoping that he'd found an unguarded way to the airlock. He had to stop and lean against the wall quite often. But at least he found no more of the murderous aliens. And it brought him out into an antechamber with an airlock.

  A glance at the surrounding water-reservoir was enough to tell him it was the wrong airlock. There was no way that, in his present state, he could make it out and over the equatorial ridge. He doubted if he had the air for such a trip anyway. And-thinking slightly more coherently-he realized that it wouldn't have helped if this had been the airlock by which they'd come in, anyway, right now. His suit-fabric would knit and repair itself, but not in time. He needed a place to hide. Perhaps inside the airlock would do.

  He was about to step forward when he heard alien voices. He turned and fled up the ramp again. In the darkness he felt slightly more secure, just wishing it wasn't all uphill. There were no exits off this tunnel either, which made escape awkward.

  At last he came to the cable. Here were other passage-entrances. He could hide here in one of the dead areas, surely? And then in one of those odd moments of lucidity he had an idea. If he could open that handleless door, he could hide inside the cable. Surely the only reason for it being handleless was to keep the passengers out? It was big enough to hide in. And, if there was a similar door on the far end of the habitat core, well, that should take him to the other down-ramp to the airlock that he wanted to reach.

  All he had to do was to open a handleless alien door, which seemed impossible. But he still had his tools. It was worth trying surely? The thought of a hiding-place where these alien murderers couldn't find him was attractive. The thought that it might just open into a vacuum also occurred. Well. That would kill him. And them.

  He began an electromagnetic probing of the door with a basic electronic workman's remote. It detected the active circuits within easily enough. The question was-could he open it?

  He gambled and used a pulsed signal to interrupt the circuit. It was just the first thing to try…

  And it worked.

  There was no rush of air into a vacuum as the door swung open. Just a puff of old, stale, cold air, at slightly higher pressure. There was perfectly ordinary handle on the inside.

  He stood there, leaning against the thick door, and staring into the blackness inside. A transport tunnel. That's what it had to be. A way of replenishing lost water or air from the stockpiles that were just behind the ramscoop. One stockpile for the entire string of habitats, fed through this tube. Simple. Elegant. Alien. Did he dare crawl into it?

  A wave of giddiness nearly overwhelmed him. And then an alien voice said "I told you those were his tracks. Shoot him before he gets away!" There was an explosion. Water from broken microtubules splashed onto him. As quickly as he could with one good arm, Kretz scrambled up into the tube, and pulled the door closed behind him. It shut with an audible click. And the sound of the alien voices was gone as if cut off with a knife.

  They probably wouldn't have an electronic workman's remote with them, thought Kretz. It was then, to his horror, that he realized that he didn't have his, either. He must have dropped it. That set his hearts racing even faster. If they knew how to use it…

  And then he panicked. The tube was too small for him to stand up in. And crawling with a broken arm hurt. He shuffled and somehow made his way away from that door. He wasn't too worried about where he was going. The crucial direction was… away. Away from aliens with guns.

  It was much later, in the dark, with no sounds of pursuit behind him, that he finally thought of putting his headlight on. When he got to another door… he lay down. It was not sleep really. More like half coma, half delirium. But no one and nothing disturbed him until his thirst did. There was nothing left in his suit tank. He cursed. Lay there and shivered with the tube going around and around. He tugged feebly at the door handle. It opened. It was obviously not intended to be secure from the inside.

  Kretz was reluctant to leave the sanctuary of his refuge. But he knew that he had to drink. Had to. And besides, all Miran were somewhat claustrophobic. Females far more so than males, but no Miran liked confined places that much. It seemed better to let them kill him in the open. He was sure that he was too near death for them to beat anything out of him now.

  Getting out and onto the ground was a difficult process. He hurt himself so badly that he passed out for a while. When he finally managed to stand up, he saw to his horror that the door he'd come through had somehow closed.

  But at least there were no aliens around. To his blurred senses this end of the pipe seemed more verdant. There were certainly no burned-out passages, and the air smelled different. Perhaps they had local air-current circulators. The Miran explorers had barely begun to fathom the engineering of the habitat before the attack. Kretz still found it nearly incomprehensible that the aliens were so cavalier about destroying their own habitat. It was almost as if they did not know, or care, about how fragile an enclosed environment was. Of course a huge, complex one like this had far more self-correcting biofeedback loops than a smaller environment, but still, there had to be a point at which those could not compensate, and then collapse would be swift. The aliens must be pushing that limit, he thought, deriving some savage satisfaction from the idea, as his feet seemed to become more wayward and distant.

  Suddenly, there was a squeal in front of him. A squat, four-footed pink alien peered malevolently at him from the shelter of the bush it had been rooting behind. This side of the habitat was very different. There was soil underfoot, along with plant-cover, even in this, the wide passage with the overhead rail. And there were transverse passages here too.

  The alien was unclothed and rather muddy. It looked at Kretz… and turned and ran. The last he saw of it was its curly tail disappearing around a corner, into a transverse passage. Kretz watched it from a sitting down position and through a haze of pain, because his legs had gone wobbly on him and deposited him on his butt-which, by the feel of it, had started the bleeding again, and had jarred his arm.

  Still: it stirred a kind of hope. There was more than one species of alien. Perhaps they were not all evil. Or perhaps it had just gone to call its friends. Doing his best to hurry, Kretz pressed on downward. But by now his eyes were having trouble focusing. And he kept hearing thin
gs-whether they were real or imaginary-he was not too sure. But he had to hide every time, in case.

  It couldn't be much farther… surely? In his present state every step felt an enormous distance. And everything seemed so confused. Looking around him at the plants laden with heavy pink and green fruit, Kretz realized that he'd somehow lost the passage with the roof-rail and wandered into some side passage.

  He was lost even from the vague hope of a path he'd been keeping to.

  It was a small blow but the final one. He fell into the staked plants, breaking the fragile stems to half-lie, half-sit against the growth matrix-wall full of plants.

  When consciousness came back he was aware of the sound of footsteps. Instinctively he tried to cower back the broken plants. But there was nowhere to hide this time. And he could not get up to run, although he tried. He closed his eyes, as if not by looking at it, it would not see him.

  When he finally opened his eyes, the alien loomed over him. It looked like the alien monsters that had killed his friends and companions and hunted him down, except that it was much bigger.

  There was one other difference, too. Its face was not striped.

  5

  Internal e-memo.

  Re Habitat 37.

  Date: 2120-11-3 Time: 13:53 NMT

  To: Chief Construction (Spacefitting) Officer M. Kabongo

  From: Systems Engineer (Maintenance) W. Ankar

  Mike,

  If they don't want maintenance robots, we can't force them to take them. The micro-bots are in place already and the externals will be here within 24 hours. There are standby 'bots in storage. What they don't see, they won't complain about, and it's not like work and safety people are going to come after us. You know that environmental planning is only giving the 350 year plus habitats a less than 50 percent chance of survival anyway. Their lookout. Their religious convictions.

  Wanda

  As he stumped irritably through his corridors, inspecting the tomatoes that now flourished in the section of drip-irrigators that he'd repaired, Howard Dansson wished that if God indeed had a plan for him, that he'd show him what it was. Howard knew that the thought itself was blasphemy, but he was so angry and frustrated that he took a kind of perverse pleasure in thinking it.

  The brethren do not meddle with mechanical things. God gave us our hands to work with.

  "Oh yes, Brother Galsson, perhaps we should all just starve," muttered Howard savagely, looking at the bountiful crop he was going to produce. If God had made the drip-irrigators then they would have been perfect, not prone to clogging up. And if they were made by God and not intended to be touched by human hands then why did he make them so simple that anyone with half a brain could open them and clean them?

  Deep inside himself knew what someone like Galsson would say to that:

  Idle hands! The devil makes work for those idle hands, puts those thoughts into your head.

  Howard felt guilty in spite of his anger. Some of those thoughts he'd agree with Brother Galsson about. But being twenty-eight and still unmarried did have something to do with it. It wasn't that he was ugly, precisely. Just… different. And, in New Eden, girls' fathers did not find that an attractive feature in a prospective son-in-law.

  Always in trouble with the teachers, for asking too many irreligious questions-and once even for questioning holy writ. With the regional council, for making a barrow. Everyone used them now, but when Howard thought that he'd been so clever to devise the thing, it'd been called a device of Satan. Fortunately, someone had found pictures of the brethren using them on lost Earth before the unbelievers had driven the brethren off to found New Eden, so they could see the fulfillment of God's promise and have a world of their own. So, if they founded it, how could God have made the drip-irrigators?

  And lately he'd found himself in trouble with the Council of Elders. The bucket yoke. It was just so obvious.

  He sighed and bent to remove a growing tip, before continuing with his ruminations. It wasn't that he meant to breach holy writ, or to set people on end. It was just that he thought about things, and then did them without considering what others might think. It was a severe character flaw. But, like finding a man who would bestow his daughter's hand on someone with a reputation for trouble, and who had been given one of the worst holdings in all of New Eden, it was something he hadn't succeeded in changing.

  It wasn't as if he hadn't prayed about both issues. With all his heart and soul, he'd prayed. Repented too. It might have resulted in his growing the best tomatoes in New Eden, but it hadn't changed anything else, he had to admit. And then the next question would come up, and his mind would race off and try to answer it, leading his body into all sorts of trouble, like his flying experiments near the core. He'd only wanted to work out what the wingspan of an angel had to be! Of course it had subsequently occurred to him-though he'd never dared to mention it to anyone-that angel bodies were almost certainly lighter than mortal ones. That realization had come to him while looking at a broken chicken bone.

  He'd really love to do a comparison between bone thicknesses of flying creatures and walking ones…

  As his mind started to steal off down far more interesting corridors than the latest fuss about his water-management-either with the buckets or with clearing the drip-irrigators-something stopped him dead in his tracks. In pure dismay, at first.

  Broken tomato vines will do that to even the most heathenly inventive tomato-farmer. Near-ripe fruit lay scattered around and the dying plant lay on the walkway. Howard bit back a word that would have had Elder Galsson read him out from the altar at Sunday's meeting. It must be pigs. Feral pigs from up in low G! That was one of the reasons no one liked the holdings this close to the polar core. The beasts were dangerous, besides all the damage they could do to a man's crops. But it was unusual that they hadn't eaten the fruit.

  And then he realized that it wasn't pigs-although pigs eating half his crop might just have been better than the thing that was lying against the corridor wall. Howard couldn't have missed it in those shades of purple and orange. That was the color of its clothing, anyway. The creature's humanlike face was a pale golden color.

  And the blood of it was red.

  There was quite a lot of blood, too, on the walkway and on the walls. Howard was about to run, when the thing it opened its eyes. It cowered back against the wall, its lips moving.

  Howard would still have run if it hadn't said "help" quite so weakly. And then it said something else that finally persuaded him that he could not just leave it here in the ruins of his prize Romas: "Peace."

  "Peace be with you too, stranger," Howard managed to croak back.

  After that, he could hardly leave the thing there. Whatever it was, demon or angelic messenger, it was hurt. And it had asked him for help. Howard picked it up in his arms. It was light. The thought occurred to him: As light as an Angel might have to be to fly. But there were no wings.

  At least there was no spiked tail or horns, either.

  He carried the creature home, the strange face warm against his shoulder. Just short of his door he saw two of the younger boys making their way back from the reservoirs. They'd sneaked off to swim, no doubt. He'd done it himself when he was their age. It had seemed worth the chastisement, as he recalled.

  He called them. For a moment, it looked as if the guilty parties might bolt. But the brethren did raise children to be obedient to their elders, even if their hair was still dripping and the elder was someone like Howard. They came, fearful at first and then wide-eyed when they saw his limp burden. He pointed with his head to the smaller of the two boys. "I need you to run to Elder Rooson's home. Tell him I have some… thing which is hurt. I need his counsel. And you-"

  He fixed the freckle-faced larger boy with his stare. "You will go to the healer. To Sister Thirsdaughter. As fast as your legs can carry you."

  6

  The fault with early slowship concepts was simple: When you get there, the place may not be habitable. It may n
ot even be terraformable. Maybe there won't even be a planet: And then one has to start the journey over. Even probes can let you down-arrive on the one habitable spot, or at the only habitable season. With space habitats, the equation changes. Man stops colonizing planets. He colonizes space around suns. There is a life zone and everything he will need from m-asteroids to ice around every star.

  From: Slowtrain: The Stars Within Our Grasp,

  Conquist, A., Mordaunt

  Scientific Press, NY. 2090.

  Howard looked at the creature on his bed, and then covered it gently with an angora-wool blanket. The… person was still breathing, anyway. It didn't seem right to call it a creature. It wore clothes and had the trappings of an intelligent being. Howard looked at it again, a troubled man. He looked at the large Bible open on the stand. He'd searched, and yet found no pleasantly direct, clear advice about what one should do with a clothed creature you found unconscious among your tomato plants.

  There was a knock at his door. He walked across and opened it. He was not really surprised to find not just Elder Rooson, but Brother Galsson, and Sister Thirsdaughter too. It was inevitable that the Elder would bring at least one of his senior councilors with him. It was just as inevitable, now, that the news should spread through all of New Eden like wildfire. Brother Galsson could not have left his home without telling his wife, and Goodwife Galsson was the worst gossip in the entire universe. She could hardly be expected to keep something like this quiet.

  And she could get any story chaotically wrong, too. Look at the affair with Goodwife Sanderson's twins! Somehow she'd turned that event-the greatest excitement in New Eden since the two-headed calf-into "an unnatural child, a visitation of Satan." The midwife had told her the birth was "something special," but refused to say more and of course Goody Galsson had embroidered the snippet of information in the wrong direction entirely.