by Allen Steele
I used to think cults like Heaven’s Gate were kind of funny, in a macabre sort of way. I don’t any more.
SET THE CONTROLS FOR THE HEART OF THE SUN
I’m sorry, Matt. I screwed up.
That was the final transmission from the Jove Zephyr before it plunged into the Sun. It came as a text message sent via maser, the freighter’s last viable means of communication; voice contact with home was no longer possible, since radio signals were scrambled by the magnetosphere. Twenty-seven hours later, telescopes aboard Evening Star in orbit above Venus spotted a brief, tiny flare as the beamship entered the photosphere and was vaporized.
No one thought that anyone aboard was still alive by then, so this last message came as a surprise. Never mind the temperature; the ship’s hull couldn’t have shielded the passengers from the Sun’s intense radiation for very long. So it went without saying that everyone on the freighter was doomed even if they’d turned the ship around…which they hadn’t wanted to, until it was too late.
There were a few sick jokes when that last message was made public, but most people didn’t find it funny at all; mass suicide is seldom a source of humor. What puzzled nearly everyone was its meaning. Who was Matt, and why did some poor, doomed soul aboard the beamship find it necessary to apologize to him? That question was asked again and again, but no definite answer ever came. As with so many things about the Jove Zephyr disaster, it was a mystery wrapped in tragedy.
I know the answer. I’m Matt Garris, and the person who sent the message was Terry Koenig, my best friend. And, yes, I know what he meant. He’d screwed up, all right…and the mistakes he’d made took him on a journey to the Sun.
Terry and I met in the seventh grade. His family had just moved to Beverly, Tennessee, from Cleveland, so he was an unfamiliar face in my classroom when everyone came back from summer vacation. Before the end of the week, he was already in his first fight, when some kid tried to beat his lunch voucher out of him. He would have succeeded, too, if I hadn’t stepped in. I was pretty good with my fists, and I’ve never liked bullies, so I gave the kid the bloody nose he wanted to give new guy, and that’s how we became friends.
It soon became obvious that Terry was the smartest kid in school. He sauntered through his classes with effortless ease. Every test received a perfect score, his homework was always completed on time, his projects inevitably made everyone else’s look lame. It was like that all the way through high school, with Terry pulling down A’s in everything (predictably, the only exception was phys ed; he got a flat F there). I might have been jealous were it not for the fact that there’s an advantage to having the class brain as a best friend. I’m no dummy, but I don’t think I would’ve have passed algebra or physics if he hadn’t helped me cram for the finals. Math was always a problem for me, but Terry could juggle complex equations the way other kids played video games.
By the time we reached our senior year, it was apparent that he wasn’t merely a good student, but in fact possessed an intelligence that bordered on genius. Being the school wizard had its costs, though. Beverly High was dominated by jocks and know-nothings, while Terry was a walking stereotype: tall, skinny, near-sighted, and socially inept. I often played the role of bodyguard, warding off the idiots who’d try to knock off his i-lenses or throw his pad into the toilet.
Truth was, Terry could be his own worst enemy. Like many highly intelligent people, he wasn’t very good at the messy business of living. Casual conversation wasn’t easy for him—he took things too seriously, and he’d never learned to laugh at himself—and relations with girls was hopeless, but I don’t think he really minded; he didn’t like talking to people who couldn’t keep up with his train of thought, and sex was an unwanted distraction. So it’s no wonder that he was picked on so much. It wasn’t just that he wasn’t normal; fact was, he was downright alien.
All the same, even his enemies grudgingly acknowledged that Terry was destined for greatness. He’d never be a farmer or sell insurance or drive a truck, or have any sort of mundane life. He was going places, and everyone knew it. But I was the only guy who knew what he wanted to do.
Terry wanted to go out into space.
At long last, the human race was leaving Earth. The commercial space industry had finally developed the ways and means to launch payloads cheap, and now the solar system was being opened as a vast and profitable new frontier. Powersats were providing electricity to half the countries on Earth, lunar mining stations had become small towns, and Mars was being colonized. There were even remote outposts in the asteroid belt and the jovian moons. Now the challenge was to build spacecraft which would be faster and more efficient; fusion engines were good, and laser propulsion even better, but—as always—everyone was looking for the next big thing.
That’s where Terry set his sights. His ambitions weren’t terrestrial at all. He wanted the stars themselves. So it was no surprise that, when everyone else in school was making plans for community colleges or state universities, his application went to MIT. He got in, of course. MIT wanted him so badly, in fact, they offered a scholarship. Naturally, he accepted; his father was a shift supervisor at a local factory, his mother an elementary school teacher. They didn’t have a lot of money, but Terry was their great hope, so if he wanted to leave home and go to school in New England, they weren’t about to stand in his way.
So while I went off to Middle Tennessee State University, Terry set sail for Cambridge, Massachusetts. We promised each other that we’d stay in touch, and we did…that is, until things began to go bad for him.
During his first semester at MIT, Terry emailed me as regularly as he could. There were often long silences, but I knew why: his coursework was intensive, and there were times when he was simply too busy to drop me a line. Nonetheless we did our best to keep up with each other, and although he often griped about how much work was being piled on him, I could tell that he was happy to be in a place where his intelligence was respected. And when I saw him back home during Christmas break, he was the same brilliant, awkward guy I’d always known.
During his second semester, though, a random accident changed everything. Terry was walking from one side of campus to another, and was about to cross Mass Ave when he was almost run over by a public tram. In his typical absent-minded fashion, Terry nearly stepped off the curb and onto the tram line without looking. He probably would’ve died right there in the street had he not heard a voice: watch out! He stopped at once, and an instant later the tram rushed by, so close that he felt it brush against the front of his parka. Yet when he looked around to thank the person who’d warned him, he saw that he was alone on the sidewalk.
Someone else might have dismissed this as one of life’s little mysteries, perhaps an act of his subconscious mind, but Terry didn’t. He’d never been religious or had any mystical beliefs, but this strange little incident disturbed his world-view. He’d always been wound a little too tight, and all of a sudden, the rational, cause-and-effect universe he’d always accepted as a given was no longer quite the same. He began to wonder if there was something out there—if not God, then at least a presence, intangible yet omnipresent—that occasionally manifested itself in subtle ways. It was a startling notion, this particular line of thought, and after awhile it began to obsess him.
Until then, his teachers considered Terry to something of a prodigy, a student whose gifts were unusual even for MIT. As the winter semester went along, though, his grades began to slide, his work becoming haphazard and careless. He started skipping classes, sometimes failing to show up for weeks on end. Warnings were given and ignored; classmates became concerned, but Terry rejected their attempts to help him. He told me in his email that he’d begun to suspect that he’d spent his life on a treadmill, pursing goals that now seemed materialistic and empty. After all these years, Terry was questioning the meaning of his existence in a fundamental and very frightening way.
One afternoon, during a lecture, Terry got up and left. He simply walked
out of the hall, leaving his pad and t-book on his desk. Everyone assumed that he’d simply gone to the restroom, but he never came back. When his roommate returned to the dorm, he discovered that Terry’s dresser drawers were open, his duffel bag missing. Everything else was left behind, including Terry’s campus ID; it lay on his bed, purposely discarded.
With that, Terry Koenig abandoned his former life and disappeared.
Terry crashed on a couch in a friend’s off-campus apartment for a couple of days, then left the Boston area entirely. It wasn’t until his parents got a phone call from the Dean of Students office that they found he’d dropped out of MIT. By then, Terry had cleaned out his bank account and ditched his wristphone somewhere…probably the Charles River, because its GPS signal ended on the Longfellow Bridge.
He told no one where he was going, yet he didn’t completely vanish. Over the next three years, I occasionally heard from him. Now and then, I’d find a postcard in my college mailbox, or receive email sent from a public computer. They came from places as near as Chattanooga or as distant as Vancouver; just a few words, telling me that he’d gotten a temp job as a busboy or a convenience store clerk, or that he was living in a flea-bag motel or a homeless shelter.
At one point he was in a commune in Vermont, cohabitating with a number of other spiritual seekers. He got a girlfriend while he was there; he sent me her picture, a doe-eyed teenager with unwashed hair. Another email attachment was a video: shaky, unfocused images of pale November sunlight filtering through bare tree branches, narrated by Terry’s rambling, hollow voice: Time is dying, and autumn is the face of entropy. He must have been high when he did this, and that alone was disturbing; the old Terry loathed drugs.
No address or job lasted very long; he’d eventually move on, still searching for something he couldn’t quite define. He never responded to any of the letters or emails I sent him, so I don’t know if he even got them, let alone pay attention to my pleas for him to come home and get help.
This went on for awhile, and then I didn’t hear from him again for nearly two years. By then I’d graduated from college, gotten a job in advertising, and had pretty much written off Terry as a high school friend who’d gone off the deep end. I had almost forgotten him entirely when I received a handwritten letter from him. That was when I discovered what had happened.
Terry had joined the Heliotropic Congregation.
Before the Jove Zephyr tragedy, few people had heard of them. Which isn’t a surprise; fringe cults often don’t make themselves visible until they manifest their weirdness in some public way. I can only speculate how Terry met them; it’s possible that he might have first heard about the Congregation while living on the commune. In any case, sometime in the last couple of years he’d become a member.
The Congregation was the creation of Dr. Hermann Sneed, a former NASA astrophysicist who’d lost his job when the space agency was dismantled. Somewhere along the line, Dr. Sneed also lost his mind; he became a practitioner of “outsider science”—in this instance, a system of beliefs that merged loony-tunes mysticism with crackpot pseudoscience—and had formed an organization to foster his theories.
According to Dr. Sneed, the galaxy was inhabited by an unseen super-race which existed long before humankind. These extraterrestrials, which he called the Heliotropes, possessed technology so advanced that they’d practically become gods. No longer dependent upon corporeal bodies, the Heliotropes had sent their transcendental spirits into the cosmos, where they searched for worlds where lesser races had begun to evolve. Because the Heliotropes relied on solar energy, they took up residence near stars, hence their name…which, incidentally, has little to do with its dictionary definition.
Because the Heliotropes were benign, they were interested in helping emergent races achieve higher states of existence. Yet the Heliotropes did so in subtle and unseen ways; they preferred to operate in secret, unobtrusively guiding individuals whom they considered to be crucial for the survival of their kind. So someone could be serving an alien master plan without even being aware of it; what might seem to be coincidence or happenstance could, in fact, be the hidden hand of the Heliotropes.
This was total mind-rot, of course, yet there is a kind of person who, for one reason or another, is willing to accept even outright lunacy so long as it sounds possible. It’s arguable whether Sneed believed his own nonsense. He demanded that his followers surrender all their possessions to the Congregation and give him their unswerving devotion, so it’s possible that money and power may have been his only true objectives. As other charlatans before him have learned, there’s a lot of money to be made from preying upon lost, confused people.
Like Terry.
In his letter, he told me that he was living in the Congregation’s “spiritual retreat” in South Dakota, where he was assisting Dr. Sneed in his efforts to make contact with the Heliotropes. I’m happy, he said. With my teacher’s help, I’ve found the spiritual clarity that I’ve been searching for all these years. He now understood that what happened on Mass Ave was the act of an omniscient force looking out for him, and that he was destined for a role in some great cosmic plan.
As soon as I received the letter, I got in touch with Terry’s father. His mother had died a year ago, and although his dad was disturbed to learn what had become of his son, nonetheless he was glad to hear that he was still alive. Terry had invited me to visit him, so we decided to fly to South Dakota and see if we could convince him to leave the cult and come home.
The Congregation’s spiritual retreat was a four-acre compound about forty miles west of Pierre, a collection of rusting trailer homes and prefab sheds surrounded by a barb-wire fence; a sixty-foot radio antenna rose from the center of the camp. Terry met us at the gate along with two other cult members. He was almost unrecognizable; even skinnier than he’d been before, his hair was cut close to the scalp while he’d grown a beard that extended hallway to his chest. Like his escorts, he wore shapeless white pajamas and sandals. Eyeglasses had replaced his i-lenses, and he’d apparently never acquired a new wristphone.
Terry wouldn’t let us come any closer than the gate, and we were only able to speak to him for about fifteen minutes before the other cultists ushered him away. By then, it was obvious that he now belonged to the cult, body and soul. All Terry wanted to talk about was how wonderful his life had become now that he was with “his family” and that we need not worry about him. The eerie, empty smile on his face never disappeared, not even when his father told him that his mother had passed away. His dad was still trying to persuade him to leave the compound, if only for a few minutes, when someone began to pound a drum from somewhere within the circle of trailers. Terry told us that he had to go—it was time for their mid-day communion, whatever that was—but before he left, I managed to get him to promise that he’d stay in touch, no matter what.
On the way back to the airport, his father and I discussed the possibility of hiring someone to abduct Terry and deprogram him. I think we would have done it, too, if we’d had the chance. We didn’t know that we’d never see him again; the next time I heard from Terry, he was aboard the Jove Zephyr.
However, he kept his promise.
When ConSpace formed a partnership with the Pax Astra to establish helium-3 mining operations in Jupiter’s upper atmosphere, the company built two interplanetary freighters to travel back and forth between Earth and Callisto Station. Next to the He3 aerostats themselves, this was the most expensive part of the operation. The Tycho Brahe and the Medici Explorer were immense vessels, each one hundred and eighty feet in length and powered by gas-core nuclear engines; a round trip typically took seventeen months.
At first, this seemed to be an efficient means of getting Jovian He3 to the tokamaks of Earth, but events conspired to make this otherwise. After the Tycho Brahe was lost in the asteroid belt, the Medici Explorer became the sole means of cargo transport between Earth and Jupiter. Then political revolution in the Pax Astra resulted in its democratic
government being overthrown and a corrupt monarchy rising in its place; one of Queen Macedonia’s first acts was the annulment of previous contracts with Earth-based corporations, including ConSpace. And finally, the Pax started making claims to Callisto Station, and threatened to intercept and board the Medici Explorer if it came near Jupiter again.
ConSpace originally intended to build two more Brahe-class freighters as the Explorer’s sister ships. Clearly, a faster vessel was needed to make the Jupiter run unmolested. In recent years, the company had been experimenting with laser propulsion. A pilot program to send beamships between the Moon and the near-Earth asteroid 2010 TK7 had been successful, so it was decided that a new class of freighters would replace the older nuclear spacecraft.
The Jove Zephyr was the first of its kind. One hundred and fifty feet long, with a dry mass of five metric kilotons, its principal means of propulsion was a parachute-like solar sail three thousand feet in diameter, suspended by carbon-filament cables from the outrigger spars of the freighter’s Y-shaped hull.
The initial idea was to use laser projectors on the lunar farside to send the beamship straight to Jupiter, but then it was realized that these lasers would be much more powerful if their solar collectors were closer to the Sun. So a large powersat was established in a Lagrange-point orbit near Venus. The flight plan called for the Zephyr to depart from Earth orbit, deploy its sail, then orient it at such an angle that the solar wind would carry the vessel on a transfer trajectory to Venus. This would be the longest part of the trip, taking nearly six months to complete, but once the Zephyr reached Venus, it would slingshot around the planet, intercept the powersat’s beam, then be sent on a high-velocity trip to Jupiter. Once the ship left Venus, the transit time to Callisto would be less than six weeks, assuming a launch window during planetary conjunctions between Earth, Venus, and Jupiter.