Worlds Apart 02 Edenworld

by James Wittenbach

  Trajan’s vision became clearer. He could see the man standing before him, a tall lean figure, dressed in a black jumpsuit not unlike what Guilder crew wore on the inter-stellar long-ships. A black mask covered his face, only a space for his mouth and the bottom of his chin.

  Trajan tried to lunge for the man, but as he did his left arm jerked him back so violently he almost felt like it was going to be ripped from its socket. He looked down to see that nearly half of his forearm was encased in a gray plastic sleeve of some kind.

  “Proximity restraint,” the man explained. “Standard issue for the ship’s Watch, although rarely used in the peaceable kingdom that is the Pathfinder Ship Pegasus. In this case, it is set to hold you within one meter of that post.” He indicated a structural support that ran across the center of the bulkhead. “I bet that arm is really throbbing now.”

  That was the truth. Pain throbbed through Trajan’s arm in time with each beat of his pulse. The idea that this was part of the Passage ritual was rapidly receding. Trajan had never heard of anything like this happening to anyone else in the course of their passages.

  “There’s water within reach, a blanket if you get cold. I would have left you some food, but you’re on a fast if I recall the ritual properly.”

  Trajan pulled the arm away from the bulkhead, slowly this time. He could feel the force-field increasing gradually, holding him to the wall. He turned to his captor. “Let me out of here.”

  The man shook his head. “Not now. Let me assure you, I have much better ways to use my time than tying up spoiled brats, and much better company to spend it with as well. The sooner I am rid of you, the better, I have every intention of returning to you your freedom, but only in exchange for my own.”

  His captor had no noticeable pattern of speech, no distinctly Sapphirean or Republicker accent. Was he a member of the crew? Was he someone who knew the family, and knew about his intended route of Passage. “Let me go. I have to complete my Passage. People will be looking for me.”

  “That is true, but they won’t find you. They haven’t found me, and I’ve been down here quite a long time.”

  Could it be true? There had always been rumors of stowaways on board Pegasus. His mother had always dismissed the rumors as the height of foolishness. The ship was equipped with extensive sensor webs to detect any unwanted presence. Besides, a stowaway would have no access to food or water.

  “Who are you?” Trajan asked, his voice not quaking, but barely so.

  “A non-egocentric question. We have made progress already. All you need to know is that I am someone who needs something that you have, that you take for granted, something you may not even want, but something essential to my existence.”

  Trajan’s response was not a plea, but a surly concession. “Whatever it is, you can have it. Just let me go.”

  “If only it were so simple. I know you would give me what I want, if only to save your sorry young life. Unfortunately, you don’t have the power to give me what I need.”

  “Then why have you…?” Trajan stumbled over the end. Why did you bring me here? Why did you abduct me? What are you going to do with me? It came out a senseless garble.

  “Because when our two paths happened to cross … preparation met opportunity. We’re going to work a very simple exchange. I am going to send word to your mother, the most powerful woman on this ship, that if she wishes to see her son again, she will provide me with what I want.”

  Trajan looked at him in disbelief.

  “I comprehend that expression,” said the man. “Part of you is wondering who… what kind of man would make such a brazen proposal. The other of part of you is wondering how your mother will respond. Her duty will not allow her to give in to my demands, and she will probably turn the full strength of this ship’s security forces against me, both the regulars and the secret forces that live down here, in the UnderDecks, among my people. She need not respond today, nor tomorrow, nor the day after. I know these UnderDecks well, and I have been here a long time. I could drag this game out a very long time.”

  “What do you want?” Trajan sounded to sound strong, but it came out almost as a whine, and he was surprised at that, startled to find out how afraid he really was.

  “I want no more than I deserve, and nothing that isn’t possessed by thousands of people on this ship. I want my freedom, nothing more, and nothing less.”

  My people… secret forces … my freedom … to which I am entitled. This man was absolutely serious, and dubiously sane, and the contrast of his tone to his rhetoric was making Trajan’s bones twitch with apprehension.

  “Let me go,” Trajan said, pleading now.

  “Don’t be afraid. I have no reason to harm you, but there are many means at my disposal to make sure a very long time passes before anyone from the topside sees you again.”

  The light in the cell extinguished on some onseen signal from the man and Trajan found himself in sudden and complete darkness. “I have to go away for a while. While you wait for me to return, perhaps you can derive some spiritual benefit from this exercise. Think hard about the difference between you want your friends to remember you and the way they actually will. You may wish to reconsider how you have been living your life until now.”

  Trajan tried to move slowly away from the support beam, but the proximity cuff kept him from moving more than a meter in any direction.

  “You won’t be going anywhere, not with that restraint. Screaming for help would also be a waste of time. This chamber is thoroughly soundproofed, not to mention isolated. There’s no one around to hear you, and they couldn’t hear you if there were.”

  The man was suddenly outlined in the dim light of a passageway as a hatch opened behind him. “I shall be back soon. Pray nothing happens to me. I am the only one on this entire ship who even knows where you are.”

  Chapter Ten

  Eden – The Farside

  A crackle of sonic lighting shivered across the wings and fuselage of the Aves Kate and Neville, disintegrating another coating of ice and snow as the long night of Eden’s darker side grew deeper and colder. From inside, Tactical Cmdr. Redfire checked a temperature reading and saw that the temperature outside was now 57 degrees below zero. Although the interior of the ship was warm, and the outside accustomed to the cold-as-cold-can-get temperatures of deep space, Redfire could not help but shiver.

  “Any ponds nearby?” he asked Winter, who was curled up on one of the couches like an angora cat. “Maybe we can get in a little four-on-four hockey action before sun-up?”

  “What is this ‘hockey?’ of which you speak?”

  “It’s a game we play on my world. It’s played on frozen ice, with two teams, some long-handled sticks, and a small disk. We play it in the cold season on my planet.”

  “Oh, I thought it might be a form of sex.”

  Redfire paused. “Well, there are some who think all sport is a metaphor for...”

  “I was making a joke, Tactical Commander Redfire.” She smiled at him and he was suddenly reminded, to his embarrassment, of the one simple fact of biology that, although never scientifically proven, had enabled the human race to survive and flourish: Men get progressively dumber as their sexual arousal increases.

  She graciously picked up the slack for him. “How cold does it get on your world?”

  “Not as cold as this. One of our continents... our second-largest land-mass, lies in an arctic region of the planet. There are settlements along the coastline, and some plants and animals live there naturally, but most of the interior is permanently covered with ice and glaciers. It’s called Boreala.”

  “Boreala?” she repeated slowly.

  “An ancient Earth-word. We think it means ‘the northern land.’”

  “Is that where you come from... the northern land?”

  “Neg, I grew up in one of the temperate zones, near a settlement called ‘Grandfield.’ It’s a part of Graceland – a Territory in our planet’s largest continent, called Alp
ha.”

  “Strange names. Alpha. Boreala. What do they mean?”

  “Alpha is the first letter of our alphabet. When the planet was first mapped, they designated the four land masses by their size. Alpha was the largest, then Beta, Gamma, and Delta. Beta became Boreala, Gamma became Carpentaria, and Delta kept its name. Alpha was so big, it was divided further into the Territories of Arcadia, Graceland, Panrovia, Jutland, and Oz, but the whole continent is still called Alpha.”

  “Oz, I like the sound of that. What does it mean. What does it mean?”

  Redfire shook his head. “No one knows for sure. It might have been named for some place on Earth, or it might have been someone’s name. It might have been a mis-interpretation of a map coordinate … like O-2.”

  “What is Graceland like?”

  “Graceland produces most of our world’s food crops. That’s how most of the land surrounding Grandfield is used. In every direction, for hundreds of kilometers, there’s nothing but field after field of grains and vegetables, and orchards filled with fruit trees.”

  “... but you had no slaves to assist in the harvest,” she interrupted. “How did you harvest the food?”

  “We mainly used auto-mechs, with humans over-seeing them.”

  “Auto-mechs?”

  “Machines designed to replace human effort ... ‘robots’ is another word I have heard describing them.”

  Winter was not interested in the automechs. Redfire sat on the couch next to her and pulled up a large datapad. “Download imagery. Grandfield settlement, Graceland Province, Alpha continent, Sapphire. Late September.”

  An image appeared. There was Grandfield, in the center, a semi-circle of white, tan and gold buildings marking the city center. Houses and shops gave way to suburbs and finally to farms. The fields stretched off into the horizon, blazing gold and amber as their crops reach the peak of ripeness.

  Winter was almost cooing. “It does look not like so bad a place to live.”

  “It was good in a lot of ways... but not very exciting.”

  She pointed to a circular design near the center of one of the fields, where the crop had been pressed in. “What does this design signify? A prayer to a Harvest Goddess?”

  Redfire had to examine the pad and magnify the spot to see what she meant. When he did, a memory of something he had once known as commonplace, so common, he had never thought about it before, but had not thought about in years, came rushing back to his head.

  “I remember those. Sometimes the ships... the shuttles and trainers, from the Defense Academy would fly overhead, and swoop too close to the ground. When they did, their gravity engines created strange designs in the middle of our fields. Usually circles and shapes. You could not see them well walking in them; they had to be seen from the sky to be appreciated. The agriculturists hated them, because it destroyed a part of the crop, but when I was a kid, I thought they were mysterious and beautiful.”

  “You did not belong there,” she said suddenly, with a voice of revelation. Redfire considered this. “I guess you could think of it that way. If I had stayed in Grandfield, I could not have become what I wanted to be ... an artist... an explorer.”

  “A liberator,” she reminded him.

  “That was not what I intended to become... not in a literal sense.”

  “Was it hard for you to leave this place?” she waved the pad near to his face.

  “A little... I missed my family.”

  She shook her head. “Was it hard for you? Did they try to stop you? Did they try and keep you in your place?”

  It took Redfire a moment to change gears, to figure out what she meant. For her, leaving had not been a matter of taking the next MagLev train to New Cleveland and moving into a residence hall with a freshling roommate who was a modern dance student who seldom showered but insisted on bathing her breasts in the light of the full moons. He did not have to sneak away from Grandfield in the dead of night with armed men and hounds on his tail.

  “Did you have to make the Crossing, or were you born in Sanctuary?” he asked her.

  “I made the Crossing. The Scion’s chasers were with us from the moment we set out. We were a party of nineteen, and only eleven made it to the sea. We were beaten back twice by storms, and once our boat overturned. We lost three more by the time we reached the Far Shore, and by the time we reached he Interior, there were only five of us.”

  Her eyes had grown sad. Redfire found himself saying, “It must have taken a lot of courage to leave behind your home and come to this harsh place.” His mouth must have been on auto-pilot, as he ought to have known better than to say something so vacuous. She pounced toward him, and he jumped back reflectively. “If I held a knife to your throat and you pushed it away, would that also be courage?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. A Marine, lounging in the back of the ship spared Redfire a glance to make sure he was in no real danger, than returned to the holo-active entertainment matrix he was playing.

  “It was almost a long time ago, when I had half my years. I lived in one of the Middle Prefectures, and my lord was a grower of sickle-seed and ryazan.”

  She could tell by his expression he did not know what those things were. “They are plants that we make into an intoxicating beverage, we flavor it with apples, corn, or blood.”

  “Animal blood?”

  “If the hunt was good. There was a great revolt among the slaves in the Prefecture, led by an outsider whom the Scion called ‘Cain.’ He convinced the slaves to rebel, armed them. They set fires to their lords’ houses and burned their crops. Stupid, when you think about it. The slaves would have starved if there was no food. Still, they managed to destroy nearly half of the holdings in the Prefecture, and the lords and masters were frightened. They used every man and every weapon they could to put down the rebellion.”

  “They must have succeeded,” Redfire said.

  She shook her head. “They did not. Seizing opportunity amidst chaos, the three bordering prefectures invaded and conquered all of the lands the slaves had held… more than half of Prefecture Sato. They simply put everyone to death, lord, master, and slave alike. Cain was captured by the Scion Chosun. They hung him and his followers by their arms in the Courtyard of his Third Palace, cut holes in the sides of their bodies and drew out their organs one by one, intestines, kidneys, bladder, liver, stomach and fed them to dogs. It is said Cain himself had two hearts, and two livers.

  “My lord’s estate had survived the slave rebellion, but, now he found himself bordered on two sides by hostile forces, and part of a weakened Prefecture that could not protect him. He was a weak man, besides, unstable and alone. He could not bear the thought of capture, and he was too cowardly to put up a fight he knew he would lose. He drowned himself in one of the distilling tanks.”

  “And you were free?”

  “Slaves may be slaves, but slaves are not all stupid. If our own Scion’s forces came, they would assume we had drowned our lord in the course of the rebellion. We would suffer the same fate as Cain and his followers. If the invading forces came we would be captured, possibly put to death. No one wanted to wait and see which fate awaited us.

  “It was raining the night we set out… and cold. The wind cut through us like the teeth of an animal, but it was also a blessing. The rain hid our scent from the chasers, and the cold kept everyone else inside. Later, there was fog, and by the time it had lifted, we were far from our holding, and moving through lands where the slaves had burned everything. The forces from the other prefectures were spread too thin to capture us.”

  Redfire reached to the panel next to her, and called up a map of the planet’s surface. “Can you show me where you were?”

  She indicated one of the larger continents of the northern hemisphere. “If I recall properly, Sato Prefecture lay along this river, bounded by the hills of Chosun.”

  “That is a very long trek.” Redfire traced it across the planet to their current location. Three thousand kilometers and cha
nge, easily.

  “The Crossing was hard. We followed the slave route, taking shelter where we found it, eating what the land provided.”

  “Is that the way most slaves make their way to the Farside?”

  “The weather is less extreme in the Polar Regions, so that is where most slaves attempt to make their escapes.” Her finger traced a line from the northernmost island-continent through a chain of islands to the coves and fjords of the Farside hemisphere. “Our guides meet them here at one of the outposts and lead them into the interior.”

  “And for their reward, they get to eke a life on the knife’s edge of survival.”

  “For a few of us, it is preferable. Don’t think our lives are without joy. We celebrate our liberation with every rising sun.”

  “Does anyone every try to take you back?”

  “We are safe here, in the interior. These storms may make our lives very difficult, but they also protect us. If slaves are taken back to their prefectures, they must be put to death. It is not worth the expense. However, recaptured slaves can be sold to new masters, in other parts of the Dayside.”

  Neither or them spoke for a moment. Redfire felt a need to say something, to break the silence. Again, his mouth was ahead of him, working on its own. “I admire you.”

  Winter put her hand on top of his, and it was very very warm. He could feel her blood pulsing through it. So powerful. So strong. Charged, as though magnetic. “

  He looked into her eyes and for a second, he thought he saw a flash at the back of them, the way cat’s eyes glow in the dark.

  A thought intruded into his mind, like a visitor who enters the house without knocking, lays on the couch and drinks all the beer. The thought was of his skin touching hers, her warmth spreading to him, and the two of them wrapped in furs, entwined on the floor. He shook it off.

  Flight Lieutenant Ironhorse stood at the bottom of the command deck lift, expressionless, and wondering when Redfire would get around to mentioning his wife. Eden – The Dayside