Freefall

by Joshua David Bellin

  Adrian’s dad nodded, his Adam’s apple bobbing as if he’d just swallowed the snake sandwich.

  “Thank you,” Sofie said, inclining her head slightly. “It is said among my people that a time once existed when men and women were much more intimate with the stars than we are now. Oh, we can view them through our telescopes, trap their rays with our instruments, even—as today’s council attests—pursue them through endless space aboard our mighty starships. But I speak of a time when we could not only see the stars but hear them speaking to us. For all our technology, we of the modern world do not listen much to the stars these days. What, then, must it have been like for the people of that time? What must it have been like when the sound the stars make surrounded us always, and we listened, and heard them speaking to us in a language that filled our souls with an aching joy?”

  Chairman Conroy had succeeded in swallowing the snake sandwich, but it appeared he was about to puke it back up. Me, all I could hear was the music of her voice. My throat tightened, and tears sprang to my eyes.

  In Sofie’s words, I heard the sound the stars make.

  “We who dream of traveling beyond the stars would do well to remember that time,” she concluded. “To remember it, and hold it close to our hearts. The void will be less empty, the nights less long, if we will but listen.”

  She bowed her head and was silent. Griff looked away as I wiped the tears that had fallen down my cheeks.

  Chairman Conroy wasted no time getting the proceedings back on track—his track, anyway. Banging his gavel, he spat out the words. “We will now hear the Lowerworld petition for a percentage share of the Otherworld Colonization initiative.”

  The room buzzed. The Lowerworld reps, Sofie included, put their heads together. I watched the screen, waiting with the rest of the world.

  Then Sofie leaned into her microphone and spoke again. “The Lowerworld requests that the Freefall be commissioned to carry the selected representatives of our people to a planet of our own choosing.”

  I sat forward, staring at the screen.

  “We’ve already heard this petition,” Chairman Conroy said crossly. “The Upperworld has expressed its intention to approve a limited joint venture—”

  “You did not listen carefully, Mr. Chairman,” Sofie cut in. “The Lowerworld is not asking to accompany you as a minority partner to the planet of your choosing. We ask to sail in our own starship to a planet of our choosing.”

  “You’re asking”—Chairman Conroy spluttered—“you’re asking to be separated from the Upperworld?”

  “That is correct,” Sofie said.

  “And where do you intend to find this alternative planet?”

  “We have consulted our own astronomers,” she answered. “They assure us that the Earth-like planet Kapteyn b, long dismissed by your calculations as lying beyond gravitational range of the starship Executor, is in fact accessible by the starship Freefall.”

  Chairman Conroy sat back, looking as surprised as you could look when you’d gotten what you wanted but hadn’t gotten it the way you wanted to. He’d been expecting a fight. He’d figured he would win it. Now that he didn’t have to fight, did that mean he’d lost?

  “Let me be perfectly clear about this,” he spoke slowly into his microphone. “The Lowerworld is in complete agreement on this course of action?”

  “We are,” Sofie said.

  “And may I ask why?”

  “We are realists,” she said. “Pragmatists. We in the Lowerworld have always been so. We know that we have won a great gift in these past several months. We know what it has cost the Upperworld to concede to our requests, and we hope in our hearts that the giving of the gift signifies a change in yours.”

  I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen. I felt my own heart changing as I watched her. Changing . . . or breaking.

  “But we know too that the history of distrust between our peoples is long, and not to be altered in a matter of months,” Sofie continued. “Perhaps not to be altered in the course of a hundred lifetimes. The massacre of innocents in the SubCon village proves, if nothing else does, that it is easier to fight injustice than hatred.”

  “The unexplained deaths in the village—” Conroy began, his face furious.

  “Please, Mr. Chairman,” she said politely if wearily. “Let us not waste our precious time debating this sad calamity. The fact remains—we know that in the hearts of many among us, there is distrust of the Upperworld still, and that the same distrust exists in many of your hearts as well. We do not wish to travel into the deepest reaches of space, leaving all behind and risking all that lies ahead, only to become on our new home what we have become on Earth. We wish to claim our own world at last, a world in which there is no longer Upperworld and Lowerworld, but one world, united. We wish we could imagine such a world existing between us. But we no longer believe such a world is possible.”

  The room sat silent. Sofie’s statements always produced noise: cheering, chanting, feet stomping, whistles, jeers. Her latest bombshell produced only the dry rustle of bodies fidgeting, the dead hum of the worldlink.

  “Well, shit,” Griff said. I’d forgotten he was there.

  I stood and walked away from the screen. “Screw her,” I said softly. Then, when Griff raised an eyebrow, I repeated, louder, “Screw her.”

  “Hey, man . . .”

  “I mean it!” I said. “Screw her! I risked my life for her. I played her little game. I could have ended up dead in the goddamn desert. But I believed . . .”

  I was crying. I couldn’t stop. I believed in the world I thought we were building. I believed her when she said her people and mine could live together in peace. I believed it, because if I hadn’t believed it, it would have meant I’d left everything behind, followed her halfway around the globe, for nothing. Not for an ideal. Not for the future. Not for her. For nothing.

  “Screw her,” I said, as the tears streamed down my face. “Just screw her.”

  “It’s not her,” Griff said. “It’s the goddamn Upperworld. They always get what they want.”

  We watched the rest of the council in silence. Watched Sofie, speaking on behalf of the Lowerworld, arrange for a segregated colonization: her people on their planet, our people on ours. Watched as the council members opened a debate on the massive supply snafu this change would initiate, then decided to hold off that discussion until later. We watched as Sofie smiled and bowed to the leaders of the Upperworld, held Chairman Conroy’s hand in both of hers, posed with him for the cheering crowd and the worldlink lenses. We watched her exit the building and stand with her bodyguards outside, the folds of her purple robe draped over one arm, her other hand waving enthusiastically to the crowd. At last, we watched her enter her private helicar and soar away. And I watched my dreams crumble as she vanished like a fallen star into the ashy sky.

  I knew three things then.

  I knew that even though I’d pretended otherwise, I’d always believed, in the depths of my heart, that I would see her again. That a thousand years from now we’d be together. I knew I’d believed that, because now what I believed was gone.

  The second thing I knew was that I would never forgive her for what she’d done.

  And the third was that, no matter what she’d done and no matter where she was, I would never stop loving her just the same.

  Otherworld

  Earth Year 3151

  Night

  We drive to the Executor in style.

  Yes, we drive. Aakash uses his remote to locate a solitary passenger vehicle tucked away in one of the storage areas flanking the main cargo hold, a night-black beauty except for the blue-and-white ExCon logo plastered on its side. It rolls right up to us and opens its doors, giving Ranjit and Zubin time to load an empty pod in case we need to transport Sofie to home base in deepsleep. While Aakash punches our destination into the onboard navigation system and the Freefall extends a ramp to let us out into the night, I search the rear of the vehicle, finding a bundle o
f radiation suits, though not enough for everyone. I slip one over my jumpsuit anyway, since it’s what I left the Executor in, and I don’t want to rouse Conroy’s suspicion. Aakash glares at me when I return to the cockpit, but he doesn’t say anything. For now, he seems willing to work with me. The second he decides I’m a danger to Sofie or the mission, though, that’s the second he puts the finishing touches on what he started back in New York CITI.

  Now that we’re underway, I think he might relent and let me in on the plan, but no such luck. He remains maddeningly close-lipped, especially considering I’m the one who’ll have to carry out most of it. Conroy’s expecting me to return with Adrian, so we can’t approach the ship in numbers without raising all kinds of alarms. Instead, Aakash informs me that we’ll drive to within walking distance, then I’ll hop out alone and make the rest of the trip on foot. In the meantime, he and the others will do—I’m not sure what. And what I’m supposed to do once Conroy figures out I failed to retrieve his son isn’t open for discussion either.

  “You will do what you would have done had you returned to the Executor without us,” Aakash says with a shrug. “Your knowledge of our actions can only put you in jeopardy.”

  “I’ve heard that before,” I mutter.

  He raises an eyebrow.

  “After the worldlink interview,” I say. “I guess you had to keep your actions secret then, too.”

  He shrugs again, maybe remembering the night in Sofie’s helicar and the morning after, maybe not. Either way, not giving a damn.

  “We laid our plans long before you joined us,” he says. “You of the Upperworld should understand what it means to be leery of interference from outsiders.”

  The word “interference” makes me bristle. The word “outsiders” nearly sends me off the deep end. “And if I’m not up for following your orders?”

  “Then it is Sofie’s life that will be jeopardized,” he says. “But you must make your own choices, as you see fit.”

  He’s got me, and he knows it. I grumble some more, but I agree to carry out my part of the plan. Why should I have expected Sofie’s team to keep me any less in the dark here than they did on Earth?

  The vehicle rolls smoothly over rocks and mud pits, its eight enormous wheels and floating suspension designed for scientific exploration on rough terrain. Completely automated. Mist doesn’t bother it, or monsters: Sensors enable it to dodge obstacles in its way. If we weren’t headed where we’re headed, I might be able to sit back and enjoy the ride. As it is, I’m jumpy as hell, and it doesn’t improve my mood when Aakash and the others drop the polyglot and communicate in glances and gestures, shutting me out entirely. I leave the cockpit and spend some more time poking through the supplies on board, finding a small weapons cache. Nothing that does me any good. Rifles and grenade launchers—the kind of ordnance I can’t hide in my suit and can’t approach the ship displaying—along with ion pistols, which will have all the effect of rubber bands against the Executor’s hull. Once I’m within viewing range, I should be able to talk to Conroy through the microphone in my suit, but whether he’ll let me talk my way closer once he sees I’m alone, I highly doubt. More likely, if Griff’s dad has managed to get the Executor’s plasma cannons working, they’ll lock in on me and reduce me to a pile of space dust.

  But it’s too late to turn back. It was too late a thousand years ago.

  When I return from my inspection, I find the majority of our team sprawled in their seats, snoring away. Aakash alone remains upright and awake, staring steadily out a window that shows nothing but night.

  “Any luck with the star mapping?” I ask.

  He shakes his head. I’d hoped that, with all the other things he’s been able to do with his remote, he might be able to coax the vehicle to tell us where in the galaxy we are. But his mind’s focused only on our goal. He’s not anxious about which world we’re on, how we got here, where we’re going to go next. Finding Sofie, freeing her from Conroy, is world enough for him.

  I sit in the copilot’s seat. “How did you meet her? Sumati, I mean.”

  He answers without turning to face me. “I was imprisoned in my youth. Sumati was there as well. But our paths to that place were very different.”

  I wait for him to go on. It’s a long time before he resumes.

  “I had killed a man,” he says, speaking without emotion. “In a street fight over drug money. I will not say he did not deserve to die. But it was a grief to me that my life had ended as surely as his. In the Lowerworld, those whom the corponational tribunals consign to the dungeons do not again see the light of day.”

  In the Upperworld, officially, there is no crime. No deviance. People who commit acts that would have been called crimes disappear, showing up in Lowerworld prisons alongside street thugs and deportees and rebel leaders.

  “Sumati came to my cell,” Aakash continues, his eyes fixed on the night. “She had won over the jailers not by force of arms but by the power of her words, as she would do to all who encountered her in those days. You who saw her in decline, after sickness and disappointment made her long for an end to her body’s suffering, will hardly believe me when I say she lit the dungeon like a thousand suns. When she spoke to me, tears I thought myself too hardened to shed fell from my eyes, and I knew I would follow her anywhere. And when, as it chanced, the intelligence network she had built gave us an opportunity to escape, we took it, and I was at her side until the end finally came.”

  “And what about Sofie?”

  For a long moment he hesitates, and I sense the doubt in his mind. But he answers.

  “She came to us as a girl, friendless and alone,” he says. “She had heard of Sumati’s message, and fled a life of enslavement to seek her out. She became Sumati’s daughter, the child she never had.”

  “And you followed her, too.”

  “It was a very natural thing, to shift my allegiance from mentor to pupil.”

  “But the message never changed.”

  “It cannot change,” he says. “It is timeless, though the vessel that carries it may last only a day.”

  For the first time since I joined him, he looks at me.

  “You do not know, you may never know, the greatness of the girl you have pursued across the stars,” he says. “Sumati’s disciple she may be, but she is greater than her teacher, and her life is a gift to no one man, but to all the world’s people. Let her go, Cameron Newell. Let her become here what she was on Earth, what she must be for all time.”

  I don’t know what to say, can’t meet his sparkling eyes. When I left the Executor in search of Adrian, I told myself I was willing to do anything, to take any risk, for Sofie. Because I loved her. Because I’d be lost without her. Because I couldn’t bear to think of a world, a universe, that no longer rang with the sound of her voice.

  And yet now, as I sit beside this man who has pledged his life to her, I begin to wonder if I would do the same as he’s done. As he’ll still do. I’m prepared to take a life. To give my own too, if it comes to that.

  But will I do it for Sofie? Or for me?

  Aakash looks at me and speaks gently, as if in answer to my unasked questions.

  “The fall into love is deep,” he says. “But the soul’s thirst for freedom is a well without bottom.”

  Then he turns back to the window, and the vehicle that’s taking us to Sofie rolls on through the night.

  Earth, 2151

  Upperworld

  The final two months before launch passed by in a complete blur. I stayed with Griff, but our late-night bull sessions came to an end. He tried to draw me out of my shell, promising to let me in on all the scandalous new revelations about the mission he’d learned in the time since the final council, but I shut him out, wouldn’t listen to a word he said. I knew I was being a jerk. I knew Griff was just being Griff, doing his best to cheer me up with some wacky story he’d picked up from Cons Piracy. But all I could think about was the upcoming launch, which would fling my body into spa
ce while leaving my heart behind.

  Everything came to a dead halt in those months—everything, that is, except the mission. No ColPrep, no worldlink updates, no nothing. It was all one mad scramble to reconfigure and restock the ships before deadline. Whatever Sofie was up to, I couldn’t have found out if I’d tried. Griff said—the one time I paid attention to the words coming out of his mouth—that he’d heard her team was busy with the selection process for their starship, working from a top-secret location. When he told me that, the crazy idea flitted through my mind that I could leave CanAm like I’d done before, track her down, beg or bribe my way onto the Freefall. But I knew that was impossible. I didn’t need Griff to tell me that I was a watched man in the Upperworld. And I didn’t need anyone to remind me that even if I did find my way back to Sofie, she’d send me packing the way she had after the night on her helicar.

  I’d lived divided all my life. I hadn’t known it until I met her. I would have to go on living divided for the rest of my days.

  There was one thing that tormented me, though. One thing I couldn’t get out of my head, and probably the only thing that motivated me to get up in the morning and make my way through each day. It was as crazy as any of my thoughts in those final months, and I knew it wouldn’t change anything. But I longed for the chance anyway.

  I couldn’t get close to her before the launch. Wherever she was, Griff told me the chatter out there was that the Lowerworld base of operations was a heavily guarded fortress, possibly provided by the Upperworld to ensure the safety of the revolutionary leaders. But he also told me, and I clung to this, that the entire population of colonists would be assembled at the same time prior to boarding. The Executor and the Freefall were docked together, at the place they’d been constructed, which was itself top secret, though Griff’s sources said it was probably in the abandoned and half-flooded landmass that had once been known as Greenland. JIPOC wasn’t about to move the ships from there—everyone would be placed in deepsleep together and stored aboard the vessels on-site, right before the gravitational drives engaged and the liftoff occurred. From that point, the starships would exit Earth’s atmosphere and travel most of the solar system side by side, before separating to seek their own destinations. No one would be awake to say good-bye at that final parting. But there was a chance, however slight, that people who wanted to say good-bye would have time to do so before we left Earth.