Beyond the Sun

by Bryan Thomas Schmidt

  The next morning, I told Jill and John: “I’m staying.”

  Later that day, I scribbled out two letters. The first was to the space corps, asking them to put through my retirement papers, effective immediately. I did this not without sorrow, but without any regrets.

  The second was to Zoe:

  Dear Zoe,

  Each night I look up at the stars and remember the time when you were just a young girl and we stargazed together. You pointed to Sirius, and I told you that if you looked carefully, you might still see me up there. “Don’t be silly, Grandpa,” you said, “You’re here!

  When I gaze up at the stars now, I imagine that I can see you, wandering around up there, raising your family, living your life as you have chosen to do. I wish I could be up there with you, but my place is here now. I wanted you to know, however, that you were right. A person can be in two places at once. For as surely as I see you voyaging to distant stars, I also feel you in my heart every day.

  By the time you read this, I’ll be long gone. But maybe I’ll linger in your heart as you have in mine.

  All my love,

  Your Grandfather

  There’s a switch inside my head over which I once had complete control. Flip it off and my emotions would wink out like a light cut off from its power source. Flip it on and all of those cares and worries snapped instantly back in place.

  Now that switch is broken. Try as I might I can’t switch it off.

  Thank goodness for that.

  Someone has to go and prepare planets for colonist’s arrival. In some cases, this will consist of advance teams of volunteers or government officials, in others, perhaps laborers will be recruited. In the case of our next story, those laborers are prisoners working off their hard time. The service in the brick fields is far better than other options, however. Unless, of course, one of your fellow inmates wants even more . . .

  THE BRICKS OF ETA CASSIOPEIAE

  BRAD R. TORGERSEN

  I checked the primitive gauge on the kiln. The gauge’s needle hovered steadily in the red.

  “Still too hot,” I said over my shoulder. “Gotta wait another day.”

  “That’s nice,” said my fellow inmate, Godfrey. “So what do we do until then?”

  “You dig,” came the reply from Ivarsen, our lone guard. Like the rest of us, he wore a broad-brimmed sun hat and wraparound sunglasses to protect against Eta Cassiopeiae’s blinding rays. Unlike the rest of us, his shorts and shirt were khaki—instead of prisoner orange—and he had a holster on his hip holding a high-power pistol.

  In the two planetary years since I’d been assigned to Ivarsen’s care, I’d never seen him draw that gun. But with how Godfrey had been acting since his arrival one week ago, I wondered if even Ivarsen’s patience had limits.

  Godfrey vented his unhappiness in four-lettered fashion.

  “Kid,” I said, “How in the world did you ever make this detail?”

  “I’ve got a winning personality,” Godfrey said, grinning.

  I shook my head at him, disbelieving.

  Lisa Phaan, our only female inmate, gave me a knowing glance. She didn’t think much of the kid, either.

  “Prisoner Ladouceur and Prisoner Godfrey on the shovels,” Ivarsen said. “Prisoner Phaan on the dumper. Wait here while I drive it around.”

  Our guard turned and walked away into the white glare of mid day, the broken and rocky landscape shimmering behind him.

  Godfrey leaned close to me and said, “Why don’t we just snuff him?”

  I turned and looked at the huge-bodied youth, my eyebrows raised.

  “And do what? It’s two hundred kilometers to anywhere. The sun will kill you before you get thirty. Besides, Ivarsen has a chip in his body that monitors his vitals and stays in constant contact with a Corrections satellite. All the guards at these remote projects have one. If his vitals stop, the satellite gets alerted. Then the cavalry comes.”

  “Bull,” Godfrey said.

  “You really want to find out?”

  The kid kept looking at our guard while Ivarsen receded into the heat.

  “Look,” I said, “is it really that bad? Time served here counts triple what it counts on The Island. They feed us and give us shelter. We’re not at the mercy of the elements. Why ruin it?”

  Godfrey turned and looked at me, hands balling. “Screw you,” he said, and walked away.

  I shook my head, wondering if I’d ever been that incomprehensibly belligerent when I was in my twenties. Then I went over to slap shut the ceramic door that covered the kiln’s thermometer.

  As indigenous brick kilns went, ours was pretty standard: a four-meter-cubed box constructed from cut-rock slabs. It sat on the eroded central peak of a shallow crater whose expanse had been populated with automated mirrors. Currently, those mirrors aimed skyward. But when we put a batch of bricks into the kiln, and the computer angled all those mirrors towards the small hill at their center, the kiln lit up like a bug under a magnifying glass.

  Depending on the season and the weather, the kiln could take a full day to fire up—and the days on Eta Cassiopeiae’s fifth planet were very long, especially at this latitude.

  In the meantime, there was always more clay. And the new settlements along the polar coast always needed more bricks. In a world with no large flora and relatively little accessible iron, what else was there to build with?

  The supply niche would have been filled commercially, if the prison system hadn’t gotten there first. The work was arduous and filthy—the kind of soul-mending stuff reformists had been foisting on the incarcerated for many centuries, going all the way back to Earth.

  On Eta Cassiopeiae Five, nobody in their right mind wanted to be this close to the equator, so the colonial government farmed the work out to Corrections. Thus everyone was kept happy—even us cons.

  It sure beat the crap out of The Island, where there were no rules and it was literally every man for himself. I’d lasted just long enough to decide that The Island was a slow death sentence, then made an appeal to a Corrections Magistrate on one of their random, heavily-armed inspection tours Corrections occasionally made. They’d liked me, so I’d been given the chance to go to work.

  And work I’d done. Happily. Eagerly. With a full stomach and boots on my feet, and no fear that the gangs were going to roll me up in the middle of the night and poke holes in me. Or worse.

  A mechanized grumble broke me out of my reverie.

  I turned to watch as the dumper came rolling down the dusty main lane between the mirrors. The huge truck ran on a hydrogen fuel cell and was our primary means of transport; vital to weekly operations.

  Wet clay, extracted from the hills two kilometers to the east, had to be moved via dumper to the forming pit. Once formed and dried, the “green” bricks were put on ceramic pallets which again went into the back of the truck for movement to the kiln. Fired and cooled, those bricks remained on pallets until they were moved to the staging area to await pickup by monthly roadtrains headed north. Empty pallets came back from the settlements on roadtrains headed south, to be filled again. And so forth.

  Nobody was allowed to drive the dumper except Ivarsen, who kept the truck’s coded keycard on his person at all times.

  When the truck came to a halt, Ivarsen leaned out and yelled, “Everybody in back!”

  We trooped to the ladder on the side and climbed up and over, then down into the extra-large bed where two single-person shovels sat. They were called shovels because the hydraulic arm on the front of each unit was attached to a large scoop designed to dig hundred-kilo hunks of clay out of the ground.

  There was nothing to say while we rode out of the crater and started on the packed-earth highway to the eastern hills. We just gazed out the back of the bed, the tires kicking up a column of dust, each of us enjoying the movement of air which partially alleviated the ever-present heat.

  Once we arrived at the dig, Lisa climbed up on top of the cab while Godfrey and I slid into the buc
ket seats on our respective shovels. Ivarsen used controls in the cab to lower the aft lip of the dumper’s bed to the dirt, and then Godfrey and I caterpillared out and attacked the scarred hillside.

  Clay is not the same thing as mud. I’d learned that my first month on the job. You had to look for the phyllosilicate deposits, then clear off the top layers of worthless dirt and pry out the heavier stuff underneath. It came in various stages of plasticity, depending on how much moisture a given dig retained between thunderstorms, and we could hydrate it using a cistern back at the forming pit.

  A familiar, pungent odor filled my nose as my shovel’s scoop bit into the ground. I worked the scoop’s hydraulic controls until a decent hunk had been pulled free, then motored back to the dumper and threw my load in. I did this two more times and stopped to watch Godfrey struggle for his first shovelful.

  It was his third time, and the kid still didn’t get it. He was punching his scoop into the hillside like a jackhammer, knocking crumbled clay loose until it threatened to engulf the front of his machine.

  I motored up to him and yelled over the whine of the hydraulics, “Finesse, man! Gradual and steady! Push in slow, lift out slow.”

  “I’m trying!” He yelled back. “Tractor’s a piece of effin’ crap!”

  I wanted to tell him it wasn’t the machine that was a piece of crap, then thought better of it.

  “Here,” I said over the noise of both engines, “watch me.”

  Godfrey backed off while I drove up and eased my scoop into the beige-gray mass. The load pulled free with relative ease, I spun my shovel on the axis of its treads and moved away to let the kid continue.

  His next few attempts were almost competent.

  I sighed and kept working, the day wearing imperceptibly on while we filled the dumper with clay. Lisa used controls on the top of the dumper’s cab to operate the dumper’s claw arm, re-arranging our shovelfuls as the need arose, and ultimately picking up and depositing each shovel back into the bed once we had enough clay to take back to the forming pit.

  Ivarsen watched us the whole time, standing off from the dig by about ten meters, hands on his hips. His head didn’t move, but I always had the impression his eyes were constantly sweeping from behind his sunglasses, like radar.

  Once we’d secured the shovels and the dumper’s claw arm, we climbed back into the bed and Ivarsen went back to the cab. The drive to the forming pit was as silent as the drive from the kiln, and I idly scratched dirt out of my hair, thinking again about my imminent parole. The government of Eta Cassiopeiae Five was finally going to make me a citizen again. It was odd to think I’d spent my entire thirties locked up—the bitter wage of a mistake I’d long since learned to regret.

  I wondered what kind of life I could now make for myself, beyond firing brick. With my legal file as checkered as it was, my options were limited. Maybe I could talk to the asteroid miners again? They always needed help. Could I get a felony waiver?

  Such thoughts continued to occupy me until we arrived at the forming pit.

  Lisa plucked the shovels from the bed before Ivarsen up-ended the entire thing into the slaking ditch. There the clay was allowed to bathe in rainwater from the nearby cistern. Each of us took a turn under the spout before we left; the closest thing we had to a shower.

  Again Ivarsen watched us from a distance, never moving except to take a tug off the canteen normally slung across his shoulder.

  Afternoon wore on into evening, and EC5’s three small moons—captured asteroids, really—rose into the sky. Looking up at them, I imagined the miners and engineers working all day and all night, all planetary year long, turning those moons into way stations for the big colonial ships that would bring more people from Earth, once EC5’s biosphere had been sufficiently beefed up. Two, maybe three more human generations. Someday EC5 would be a garden.

  But not yet.

  We drove back to our hooches in silence. Hungry and exhausted.

  Dinner was the usual: pre-sealed trays of farm-grown meat and veggies—yielded from genetically tweaked crops and livestock, on account of EC5’s not-quite-Earth-normal soil and mineral content. Eventually there would be genetically-engineered forests in the hills and mountains surrounding the farms, and men would build with wood again.

  Until then, the world needed bricks, which meant the world needed us.

  With night fully upon us, Ivarsen activated the electric fence cordoning off the prisoner hooches from the guard hooch. Like most nights, I found the familiar hum from the fence’s transformer to be oddly soothing.

  I faded into oblivion.

  *

  Morning came.

  This time the kiln was sufficiently cool. Needle in the green.

  Lisa used the dumper’s claw arm to lever the kiln’s huge door out of the way—like the angel rolling aside the stone at the crypt of Jesus—and we all walked in to inspect our work. Even Ivarsen seemed to take genuine pleasure in seeing the finished bricks all lined up neatly on their stacked ceramic pallets, ready to be sent north and laid into homes, shops, offices, apartments, and everything else that needed building.

  Lisa and I showed Godfrey how to check for cracks and damaged bricks, which we’d separate from the rest when we used a shovel—now modified with a fork on its arm—to lift each pallet from the kiln and place it carefully near the dumper.

  The kid just grunted, saying, “Whatever,” and began examining the kiln’s contents. He did it with the enthusiasm of a six-year-old being made to eat asparagus.

  Lisa followed me out of the kiln while I went to get my canteen. Constant hydration was an ever-present necessity this far south.

  “Ev,” Lisa said as she leaned close to me, “I’m so sick of getting stuck with these morons.”

  “Yeah. Must be slim pickings these days. Pretty soon Corrections might have to start drafting civilians for the brick brigades.”

  Ivarsen, who had been getting out of the dumper’s cab, laughed mightily. “That’ll be the day! Imagine how much they’d have to pay union workers to come out here and do what you guys do for free.”

  “You’re union,” I said, with sarcasm.

  “Damn right,” Ivarsen replied, thumping his chest with a fist.

  We shared a smile between the three of us. Then came a sudden yelp from the kiln, followed by the sound of a pallet collapsing and bricks tumbling.

  “Lord . . .” Lisa said, rolling her eyes.

  We hurried back through the kiln entrance to find Godfrey hopping up and down on one leg while he held the other foot. Obscenities peeled from his lips.

  Lisa, Ivarsen, and I almost fell over—it was that funny.

  “Stop laughing,” Godfrey fumed.

  “Kid,” I said, “One man’s pain is another man’s pleasure.”

  Godfrey grimaced sourly as he prepared to give me a verbal broadside, but then he stopped.

  All the pallets were rattling violently.

  “What the—?”

  A booming rumble shuddered through the floor of the kiln.

  “Quake!” Ivarsen yelled.

  Really? I’d not been through one of those since I’d been a boy.

  What happened next was a slow blur.

  Stacked columns of pallets swayed like hula dancers.

  Lisa was screaming and trying to get to the door, only she kept having her feet knocked out from under her.

  One of the columns tilted too far, and collapsed against the side of the kiln. Then another.

  Godfrey managed to keep his feet, his mouth hanging open and his eyes gone stupidly wide. The column next to him started to give—this time, towards the middle of the kiln.

  Ivarsen’s reaction was so fast I didn’t even realize what had happened until both he and Godfrey were on the floor, sliding out of the path of the collapsing bricks.

  One of the walls popped thunderously, and a new crack split wide from floor to ceiling, shining a shaft of light crossways to that which already flooded in from the main door.
<
br />   Two more columns of bricks went down.

  And then . . . silence.

  Lisa and I were coughing spastically on the dust that had filled the kiln. I discovered I’d been sitting on my butt the entire time. Heaps of whole and broken bricks were everywhere, and I got to my feet to move around to where I thought I’d last seen Ivarsen and the kid.

  I got there just in time to see Godfrey crown Ivarsen with a brick the size of my forearm. Our guard crumpled.

  “What in the name of—” I said.

  But the kid moved quickly, snatching the pistol out of Ivarsen’s holster and pointing it at me while he used his free hand to explore the pockets of Ivarsen’s shorts.

  Lisa froze when she came around the corner and saw what was happening.

  “You stupid idiot,” I said to Godfrey. “Ivarsen saved your life.”

  “Ladouceur, you and Phaan get against the wall.”

  Lisa and I didn’t move until Godfrey thumbed the pistol’s safety and pulled the hammer back. Then we raised our hands and backed into the shadows as Godfrey came away with the keycard for the dumper.

  “You won’t make it,” Lisa said deadpan. “The chip is already sending its alarm to the satellite.”

  Godfrey scoffed. “Pig ‘aint dead. Just knocked out.”

  I looked at Ivarsen’s still form, and thought I saw thick, dark fluid running from the back of his head where Godfrey had hit him.

  “If he dies,” I said, “then we’re dead too.”

  “You, maybe,” Godfrey replied. “I’m out of here.”

  “Where are you going to go, kid? There’s no native forage on this land mass. And they can track the movement of the dumper. You’ll be—”

  “Shut up, Ladouceur. Maybe you like being a slave. Not me. I’d rather take my chances.”

  Finally, the rage that had been rising in me, boiled over.

  “Damn you, I was getting paroled!”