The front of the chamber he entered was a wall that sloped gently upward. Trajan touched a panel and the wall vanished, revealing a viewport that spanned the width of the chamber. 14,000 kilometers below, Eden turned gently and he could sea beer-colored oceans lapping on burgundy shores, forests of green so dark black paled by comparison. Across the planet’s Farside, he saw flashes of lightning in boiling clouds. Further away was the bright yellow disc of the fat and ringed gas giant planet Eden orbited.
He kept his hand on the pad. “Pegasus, is Republic’s primary visible from our current position in space?”
“Affirmative.”
“Center, magnify, and enhance.”
A light blue oval appeared on the viewport as the view changed from literal to computer-generated. The starfield shifted, a pale point of light took center stage, expanded and resolved into two bright stars of roughly the same size.
That was home. The computer told him it was 117.4 light years away, that 13 years had passed on Republic since he had left.
Thirteen years, he thought. Slightly longer than the time he had been alive. It meant all of his friends had grown up, and possibly had even begun families. The thought made him feel alone, and very, very sad.
While they had become adults, he had remained a child. He was out here, more than a light-century away from his home, a small bacterium in the belly of one ship, one ship of a fleet of nine that was trying to connect the human worlds that hung in space. The Ministry of Information had never tired of describing the Odyssey Project as the highest achievement of Republic culture, but Trajan had never wanted to be a part of this. No one had asked him. No one had given him the choice of opting for a more mediocre existence. He remembered the last day he had spent on Republic. He had awakened early, and left the family’s apartments in Jacet Tower before sunrise. (Not that he had ever seen the sun rise, in the perpetual gloom of the City of Alexander.) He had made his way down to the network of interconnecting tubes, called, for reasons lost to Antiquity, ‘the Habitrail,’ that connected the towers. He had taken a MagLev to the city’s western edge, where buildings were newer, and housed a less influential class of people.
His thought had been to hide out here, for as long as it took, until... the thought in his ten-year-old mind had been a little unclear on this. He didn’t really believe they would leave without him, but he had vaguely thought maybe, when they eventually found him, it would prove to them how much he didn’t want to leave his home. Then, he might have been left to live with his Aunt Cordelia, the only one in the family who had seemed to care. Part of his mind didn’t think they would find him. He thought he could be on his own for days. One small boy in a city of tens of millions. He thought he could hide for days, and maybe they, as they fretted and worried over him, would come to understand how strongly he felt about not going on the Odyssey mission.
That was the day he learned about identity Slivers, which every citizen born on Republic had implanted at the back of the jaw. They found him, his mother and father, as he sat in the midst of a grove of living trees in a warehouse sector.
The MagLev ride back to Jacet Tower had been mostly silent. Programmed rain began to fall, drizzling across the windows. He had deliberately turned away from his parents, toward the rain.
Trajan, his mother had said to him . Trajan, we know this isn’t easy for you, but we love you. We can not bear the thouight of leaving you behind.
He felt his mother’s mind reaching into his, and, for the first time ever, he pushed her out. My thoughts to myself.
His mother had smiled, in that infuriating way of hers, and said, “You blocked me. How wonderful! I was almost fourteen before I could block my parents.”
In response, he had pounded against the viewport of the MagLev, as he punched against the viewport now, which made his hand hurt and caused no damage to the viewport. His hand continued to throb, but he was still one hundred light years from home, and his friends had all grown up without him.
He shifted the weight of the pack on his back and turned away from the viewport. This forward section was fairly large, and he had a choice of no fewer than four egresses. He had selected his in advance. It was the furthest right, and it led down. He walked to the hatch, opened it, and felt a chilly blast of air. These levels were kept colder than the top levels. No reason to generate excess heat beyond the needs to keep the machines operating. He closed the top of his jacket a bit more tightly.
He passed a row of squat, stainless steel columns containing junction boxes for Pegasus forward sensors, and several large holds containing spares for the sensors, the phalanx guns, and the other instruments of the ship’s foremost section. He found he was already getting hungry.
Pegasus – The Executive Commander’s Study
The doors slid apart, and Eddie walked into Goneril Lear’s office. She sat behind a large desk consisting of a slab of blond marble perched on a semi-circle of silvery metal. It looked antique but was probably just a replica of something that had been in her family for generations. She gestured toward one of the brutally minimalist chairs arrayed before the desk.
“Have a seat, Technician Roebuck. This will not take long.”
Eddie sat down. Her tone of voice was pleasant enough, and yet his heart was shivering, as though his blood had suddenly turned cold.
She handed him a datapad. “This is a report from Technical Chief Cisco. According to him, you have not reported for your previous eight duty-shifts. Is this correct.”
“Za, I quit.”
“That is what he informs me.” She set down the datapad and looked directly into his eyes.
“Normally, we require ten duty-shifts notice before leaving a section, and the approval of the section chief before the transfer is official.”
“I didn’t transfer. I quit.”
She nodded. “So, you say. I usually would not involve myself with a personnel issue at your level, but these circumstances are somewhat exceptional. I have been put upon to determine an appropriate disciplinary exercise for you, but I will leave that up to your section chief. What I do need to know is what new function you are going to be trained to fill. You have not signed up for a retraining program.”
“I’m not going to be retrained. I quit. I didn’t just quit the flight deck, I quit the whole mission. I’m done. You can’t make me go to work ... and you can not let me starve.”
Lear looked at him expressionlessly for a moment, then nodded. “That is true, we can not force you to work, and we can not let you starve.” Her left hand moved onto another pad of her computer. “The only alternative we are allowed is to send you back to Sapphire.”
Eddie was stunned. This was not what he had expected at all. “You’re kidding.”
“We will not let you starve, but we can not have you consuming this ship’s finite resources either. Everyone must contribute, Technician Roebuck. The only exceptions are minor children and the immediate families of key personnel.”
Eddie paused. “Haven’t eight years passed on Sapphire since we left?”
“Closer to thirteen... but that does not matter. You see, Sapphire is about 117 light years from Eden. Since, we would have to send you through normal space, the best we could do is perhaps half light speed. In which case, you would be back home in approximately two-hundred thirty four years.”
“I’ll be dead by then ... probably.” He was in panic now. “You expect me to be alone in space for two hundred and thirty years?”
“Two hundred and thirty-four, but you would be traveling relativistically. It would seem more like ninety years to you.”
“Ninety years?”
“I said it would seem like ninety years... but you won’t notice the time at all.”
“Why not?”
“You’ll be in cryonic suspension.”
Eddie’s jaw dropped.
She continued. “Your body will be cryonically frozen and placed into an escape pod. The pod will be launched out of the ship at about one-ha
lf light speed and directed to Sapphire. When it approaches the Outer System, a beacon will activate. We will task an automech to maintain your suspension system until you reach your homeworld. There shouldn’t be any kind of space debris between here and there, but just in case, your pod will be able to maneuver evasively should any object large enough to cause damage be encountered.”
She leaned over her desk and smiled. “Your odds of survival should be about 99.97%, which, if you must know the truth, is much better odds than our AI model gave the rest of us of surviving this expedition.”
Eddie found himself unable to speak, and gripped with a kind of terror he had not felt since he was ten years old, awaiting punishment after he and Barnes Asahi had given the dog several tankards of ale to see what dogs did when they got drunk. “I... You can’t...”
Lear looked at him. “I can’t what, Technician Roebuck? If you are about to say, I can not let discipline and morale on this ship be compromised by one unhappy technician, then you are correct. If you were about to say I can’t freeze you and send you home, you are wrong indeed. If you wish to avoid that circumstance, I suggest you begin retraining for a new function. Your file says you enjoy food and drink. Perhaps one of the food vendors will offer to apprentice you.”
There were a few seconds of silence. “You may get up now.” Lear said finally. Stunned as he was, lifting himself out of the chair was like lifting a bag of potatoes … lead potatoes. He left a thin trace of perspiration on the back. One thought, animal-like in its intensity, fastened itself to his consciousness. I have to get to the door before she can do anything else.
“By the way, technician,” Lear went on. “Until you do present a retraining plan, you will be restricted to water and chow, and your recreation privileges are revoked.”
Pegasus – The UnderDecks
Trajan had traveled downward fourteen decks and was about 900 meters from where his walk had begun. He was preparing to bed down inside a storage locker filled with various fabrics, raw materials for the artifactories that produced clothing. He rested with his back against a bulkhead, waiting for sleep to come, ignoring the first faint calls of hunger, and working things out in his mind. He reached into his backpack and withdrew his copy of The Life and Teachings of Vesta.
Trajan knew that one measure of a successful Passage was to find The One Answer, i.e., the Single Greatest Truth of Vesta’s Teachings. Supposedly, there was Only One Answer, but The Answer Was Different For Everyone. The Passage was intended to resolve the paradox through the discovery of a unifying truth. This truth was supposed to be zealously kept from both non-Iestans and children who had not yet completed their Passage. However, young adolescents were not known for their ability to keep secrets. Trajan had heard of several different truths that older boys had discovered in their passage. No one had ever been told he was wrong. Trajan had therefore concluded that whatever truth one chose from the life of Vesta became one’s personal truth, one’s One Answer. Therefore, The Passage was merely a ceremony, a meaningless exercise that was primarily for the benefit of his parents. Nevertheless, feeling he might as well observe the ritual, he turned on the book and chose a random chapter.
The Three Ways of Explaining the Universe
There have historically been three ways of explaining the universe. 1.
God creates the Universe, from the Universe comes Life
2.
The Universe creates God and from God comes Life
3.
The Universe creates Life, and from Life, comes God
The first is the traditional view. God is the All-Powerful Supreme Being, who creates the Universe and all things in it. Life is made in His image, and answers to His judgment. All people are his children, and enjoy the dignity of having been brought into substance by a Perfect Being.
The second is the view of the New Age religions. The Universe existed before God, and God evolved within the universe, perhaps taking the form of highly advanced extraterrestrial beings who brought life to this planet, or simply as an intrinsic and intangible linkage between all living things. God is a being who is unknowable, beyond our capacity to contemplate.
The third is the path of Non-belief. The universe was an accident of physics. Life arose out of the random interaction of organic chemical, and then imagined God as a way of explaining its own existence. Life is an accident of Creation, not its purpose.
This was from the Prelude to Meditation 42, one of his least favorite meditations. He stared at the words, not really reading them. Every night for the almost thirteen years of his life, his mother or father had read from the book of Vesta to him, and he knew all of it, more or less. He did not feel like contemplating Vesta’s discourse on the nature of God just now. It was his own nature that pre-occupied him.
He wondered what he was going to do with his life. He was sure his mother would ask him at the end of the journey. If he told her he didn’t know, she would smile and say that he still had all his life ahead of him and he should take his time. By the way, have you thought about command training?
Command Core. There did seem to be a certain inevitability about that. He certainly had no interest in becoming a botanist. With his mother’s guidance, he was assured of an easy track through the ranks. This would be a long journey and someday, years and years from now, he might be standing in PC-1, making big, important decisions as his mother did. This, at least, would have been no different if they had never left Republic. He might not have joined the military, but he would have gone on to positions of progressively higher responsibility in any Ministry he chose. His family would have seen to it. Which Ministry would have been his choice. He could have picked any of them, and it would not matter. Aye, the future was easy. It had always been easy, and so it would always be. He only wondered what the rest of his life would be like.
With those thoughts in his head, he fell asleep.
Pegasus – Launch Bay Four
“Pegasus Flight Control hailing Terrain Survey Mission one-six, do you confirm launch ready?”
“Flight Control, this is Tango-Sierra One Six alpha, confirm launch ready,” Flt. Lt. Matthew Driver answered.
“Flight Control, Tango-Sierra One-Six beta confirms also,” said the other pilot.
“Pegasus Flight Control releases Tango Sierra One-Six Alpha and Beta for launch on command. Your window is forty-five seconds.”
Matthew stared down the launch tunnel. The canopy of the Shriek in which he was strapped allowed him nearly 360 degrees of vision along almost any axis. The pilot of a shriek was seated on a kind of saddle, like a motorcycle, which in turn was mounted on a tri-axial something or other that allowed him to pivot into whatever position maximized maneuvering and battle-effectiveness.
The Shrieks were even more neurally-integrated than the Aves. Wrapped around Matthew’s face, like a growth of plastic cancer from his ears to his chin and up over his eyes, was a neural control interface that gave him direct mind-control of the ship. He only had to think about what he wanted the ship to do, for example, “Launch!”
The Shriek fired down the launch tunnel and catapulted out of the front of the ship, A split second later, the other Shriek followed. The two ships, with their shining metal and blue-black wings resembled nothing so much as space-going butterflies. They soared around the south pole of Eden’s mother-planet, picking up speed through the use of an ancient maneuver known as a “gravitational slingshot.” This would be a routine mission to map the second moon of the fourth planet in the system.
“Tango Sierra One Six Alpha reports escape velocity achieved,” Driver reported.
“Pegasus Flight Control Acknowledges.”
“Tango Sierra Matthew One-Six en route to ----10 223 Equuleus IV II at .21 c”
“Pegasus Flight Control Acknowledges. Godspeed Lt Driver.”
“Acknowledged.”
“Godspeed Lt. Change”
“Acknowledged.”
Eden, Pegasus, and the yellow-range globe both orbit
ted disappeared rapidly behind them. Matthew mentally instructed the Shriek to switch its comsystem from linking to Pegasus to linking to Eliza Jane Change’s ship. “Now, can I ask you why wanted to join me, Lt. Why-do-we-need-manned-probes-doesn’t-this-ship-have-a-full-sensor-array?” He hoped his teasing sounded gentle.
“I had to get away from the ship for a while,” her voice answered, without humor.
“Why?”
“Just pray to your God that no one ever puts you in command of that ship.”
“Not much chance of that. Flight Core isn’t exactly command track.”
“You’re better off staying away from that track.”
“Why the sudden disillusion with command?”
There was a long, thoughtful pause before she answered. “Commanding the ship is not the difficult part. The second officers are very competent and run their sectors efficiently. There are three landing parties on the planet and at least two survey missions underway at any time, but none of them have encountered any major crises... yet.”
“So, what’s bothering you, then?”
“Every single minute, someone is demanding a decision. Fifty times every duty shift, Executive Commander Lear checks in to second-guess your decisions. And the worst part is, even when my watch is finished, I’m still in command. People try to take advantage. That’s why I had to get off the ship. I needed some time to myself.”
“How do they take advantage of you?”
A pause. “I don’t want to think about it right now. I’ll tell you after the flight.”
Matthew scanned his instrument displays. “We’ll reach Four-Beta in about two hours. If you change your mind between now and then, well, I’m here to listen for you.”
A heavy sigh wafted over his sound system. “That won’t be necessary. I’m de-activating internal gravity... Oh, yeah. That feels much better. Mmmmm.”
Worlds Apart 02 Edenworld Page 10