Godspeed

by Charles Sheffield

  GODSPEED

  CHARLES SHEFFIELD

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1993 by Charles Sheffield

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  eISBN: 978-1-61824-059-0

  To

  Robert Louis Stevenson and

  Robert Anson Heinlein

  CHAPTER 1

  "Tell it all," Doctor Eileen said. "Just as it happened, before you have time to forget anything."

  "Why?" I didn't want to. For one thing, I didn't know how.

  "Because people will want to read about this, a hundred years from now."

  "But it's . . ." I paused. Boring? It wasn't boring to me, but maybe to other people. . . . "Who will want to read it?"

  "Everyone. It's danger and deception, and daring and death. There isn't a man or woman born who wouldn't want to read it."

  "But why me? I don't know how to describe things. You would do a lot better job."

  Doctor Eileen put her hand on the top of my head and ruffled my hair. I hated it when she did that. If I hadn't been sitting down she couldn't have. "If you mean I could do a smoother, more experienced job, you're right. I could do it better in that way. But you're a lot younger than me, and your memory ought to be ten times as good. Most important, a lot of what I said would be what they call hearsay. That means I heard about it, but I wasn't in the thick of it from start to finish, the way that you were—and only you were. You are the right one, Jay. You have to tell it."

  She left, abandoning me to the recording unit.

  * * *

  A quarter of an hour later she was back. I had got as far as, "My name is Jay Hara." And there I had stuck. My head spun with thoughts of Paddy's Fortune, and Dan and Stan the two-half-man, and Muldoon Spaceport, and the Maze, and Mel Fury, and the Godspeed Drive and Slowdrive. But I couldn't talk about them.

  Doctor Eileen sat down next to me. "Problems?"

  "I don't know how to tell it."

  "Sure you do. Just start anyplace. You see, Jay, you're not building a house, where the foundation needs to go in before the walls, and the walls before the roof. You can start anywhere you want, and go back and fill in where you like, or change whatever sounds wrong. And if there's any place that needs smoothing, I can help with that. But the main thing is to get going. No more excuses. Do it."

  She made it sound easy. To Doctor Eileen, it probably was easy. But I hated the idea that she might come in after I was done, and change what I said, and leave my name on it. So I made her promise that she wouldn't do that, only add here and there if I left out some fact needed to make things clear. And then I began, at the only place that I could imagine beginning.

  * * *

  My name is Jay Hara. I am sixteen years old. My earliest memories are of my mother and Lake Sheelin. Mother would lead me onto the porch of the house, facing out across the lake, and we would watch the winter sun glint off the windblown water, or laugh at the clumsy flying fish skimming across the surface. Some of them finished on the shore, and then in the frying pan. But there were always plenty more.

  The lake was wide and, when I was little, I thought it reached to the edge of the world, but now and then, when the air was calm and unusually clear, there would be a hint of domes and steeples across on a distant shore. And most magical of all, when the sky was darkening towards night and the winds had died to nothing, Mother would sometimes take me outside and say, "Look, Jay. Look there."

  She would point, to where there was nothing to see. After a few minutes a bar of glowing purple would start to rise across the lake and grow taller until it split the sky.

  "You can't see it," Mother would say, as I stared at the topless column. "But there's a ship sitting on top of that." And then she would laugh, and add, "Up, up, and away, to the Forty Worlds. When you grow up, Jay, that's the place for you. You'll be an explorer, the best there ever was."

  By the time that I was nine I had learned a good deal more about exploration, and it seemed to me that it was not nearly as wonderful as Mother painted it. For one thing, I had met some of the explorers. Every month or two, strangers would visit us, wandering in along the dusty road that led from the town of Toltoona, half an hour's walk away along the lake shore. They were always men, all different, and yet in some ways all very similar. I came to recognize the trembling, muscle-weak limbs, or the red, veined faces, or the horrible throat-tearing coughs.

  And these were the famous explorers of the Forty Worlds! I could see how sick they looked, but it seemed that Mother could not. When they arrived, she became a different person. There was nothing like the appearance of one of those wheezing strangers to change her from a strong, self-sufficient woman to someone apparently too delicate to breathe.

  "If you could just help me with this basket," she would say, her hand laid gently on a man's arm. "If you would carry it for me into the house . . ." And she would laugh, mocking her own weakness.

  The man always carried it, although the chore was often far harder work for him than it was for her (or even for me). And once he was in our little living room, Mother blossomed. Her pale face took on a blush of color, her red hair floated free like a glowing crown, and her walk became an easy rolling of hips. In the evening she would go down to the cellar and reappear with a selection of wines, to accompany foods far more elaborate than usual, and Duncan West, Uncle Duncan, who was normally at the house almost every evening, mysteriously vanished.

  Look, I don't want to sound like an idiot, even if no one is ever going to read this. I know now, very well, what that was all about. But I didn't know it then. To me, Uncle Duncan had been a fixture in our house since my earliest days. He was a big, easygoing man, always smiling, and known to me as "Unkadunka," because when I was only a couple of years old I could not pronounce his name. And if, when a stranger appeared, Duncan West disappeared, and came back a few days later when the man was gone . . . well, those were separate facts. I never related them inside my head.

  Stupid? Maybe. But I think most nine-year-olds would have done no better.

  As for me, I just loved it when the strange men came to stay at the house. It was not just the different and exciting food. Part of it was also the change in Mother. She became a laughing girl, full of fun and charm, all flashing eyes and tossing curls. And part of it was the excitement caused by the men, too, for no matter who they were they came to our house filled with tales from beyond the edge of the universe.

  In fact, it was a tall, gaunt man with fiery-red burns all the way from his lower neck, where his shirt ended, to the top of his thinly haired head, who first told me about the Maze.

  "They call the planets the Forty Worlds," he said. We were at the end of a long, leisurely dinner, and between them he and Mother were finishing a second bottle of wine. The newcomer's name was Jimmy Grogan, and although he talked mostly to Mother I suspect that I was his real audience, for I'm sure she had heard it all before. "But that's true only if you count the Maze as one world," he went on. "If you count the Maze at its true numbers, then our system is more like the Four Thousand Worlds, or maybe the Four Million."

  The Maze. Mother's hand was on Grogan's bare upper arm, stroking it where new baby skin was still growing to replace the old scar tissue, but his face stayed worlds away. "There's untold treasure out there," he said, "if only we knew how to find it. I think that's what keeps a man going out, time and again." He sighed, and took a final big swallow of red wine. Suddenly he stare
d directly at me. "Imagine it, Jay. A great jumble of little worlds, more worldlets than you can count, all with nearly the same orbit, so that a ship has to skim and hop and scamper in the cloud of them, never sure from one hour to the next if there's a collision on the way. But if you dare to stay there in the Maze, and if you are lucky enough to hit the right worldlet, you come home to Erin the richest man in the Forty Worlds system. And you never have to work again."

  At that time I was still sorting out in my head the difference between sun and stars and planets and worldlets, so I did not really follow his discussion of the Maze. But one word of his spoke to me loud and clear.

  "Treasure," I said. "You mean—gold?"

  He hardly gave me a glance, before he was turning to mother and laughing that creaking, wheezy laugh. "Gold!" he said. "Now, Molly Hara, you've been filling the boy's head with the old fairy tales. Next it will be leprechauns, and the Pot of Gold at the end of the rainbow."

  He turned back to me. "Rarer than gold, Jay, and a damn sight more precious. There's gold aplenty to be had right here on Erin, but out in the Maze there's every light element in creation, including the ones that we never find here. I know men who've struck lucky on lithium and magnesium and aluminum. And that's only the start of it. There's the treasure of old times, too—some say it's out in the Maze we'll find the Godspeed Drive, the—"

  "Godspeed Drive!" Mother broke in. "Now, Jimmy, and you accuse me of filling his head with fairy tales. Enough of that." She stood up, supporting herself by one hand on Grogan's shoulder and stroking his cheek with the other. "All right, Jay, it's getting late, and you ought to be in bed. Off upstairs with you. Mr. Grogan and I have things to talk about."

  I did not argue. The table was a dreadful jumble of dishes and glasses and bottles, and it was a rare day when I was not made to clear and wash and put away. I would ask about the Godspeed Drive in the morning, when mother was unlikely to be around. After we'd had visitors, she always stayed late abed.

  But as it turned out I couldn't ask Jimmy Grogan anything, for the next morning he was away very early, back around the lake to the spaceport on the other side.

  Soon after midday, Duncan West stuck his broad, smiling face in through the front door. I had learned long ago that it was pointless to ask Unkadunka for information, about Godspeed Drives or anything else to do with the distant past. My questions had to wait.

  CHAPTER 2

  "So far as I know, Jimmy Grogan never came back to our house. He had stayed only that one night, but from my point of view he was an important visitor. He awoke my sense of curiosity. It was after his arrival that I noticed how Uncle Duncan always disappeared when other men came to see Mother, and how he popped up again at the house as soon as they left.

  "And of course, it was from Grogan that I first heard the word that started this whole thing: Godspeed.

  Mother's spacer visitors kept on coming, never more than one man at a time, sometimes a guest every couple of weeks, sometimes no one for half a year. They stayed as little as a night, and as long as a week. As I grew older I became more and more keen to talk to them and ask them about things "out there." But I was thwarted. For when I reached my tenth birthday, Mother, as though deliberately preventing me from asking questions of her guests, sent me off to old Uncle Toby's house in Toltoona whenever a visitor arrived. I was not allowed to return home until the man had gone. "You're growing up, Jay," was all the explanation that mother or Uncle Toby would ever give me.

  Well, over the years I picked up information about space and the Forty Worlds anyway, but it was in such little bits and pieces that I'm often not sure just what I learned when. That doesn't matter, because Doctor Eileen told me I could set things down any way that I wanted to. I'm going to take her at her word, and tell what I knew—or thought I knew—by the time that I was sixteen years old, and Paddy Enderton rolled onto the scene.

  Mother and the house and Lake Sheelin, and the town of Toltoona farther along the shore, had been my childhood world. Then I learned that it was one tiny piece of a great universe. We lived on the western shore of Lake Sheelin, which is long and narrow and extends much farther to the north of us than to the south. A person on foot could start from our home, walk around the southern end of the lake, and in three days reach the spaceport. The same journey by the northern route would take twelve days or more. And a journey around the whole great globe of Erin, if a man or woman could find a way of crossing great seas that would swallow up Lake Sheelin and not even notice it, might take a thousand days.

  It was a shock to me to learn that there were aircraft able to make that round-the-world trip, moving so fast that the sun was always overhead, in a single day.

  And Erin was just the beginning. Our world was one of many that circled our sun, Maveen. Moving outward, we were the sixth of twelve worlds before a great planet, Antrim, swept the space around it clear, to form the Gap. Well beyond Antrim lay the narrow band known as the Maze, where floated worldlets so numerous and chaotic in orbit that they had never been tagged and named. Then came another gas giant, Tyrone, and finally the twenty-four frozen and lifeless bodies of the Outer System completed the Forty Worlds.

  For the spacers out beyond Tyrone seeking the particular light elements that were so rare on Erin, that was all. But once, ten generations ago, there had been the Godspeed Drive. Travel to the far-off stars, and commerce between them, had been an everyday event. Until one day, quite suddenly, no more ships from the stars had arrived in the Maveen system.

  It may sound odd, but having learned so much, my interest was less in the Godspeed Drive than it was in the space travelers who risked their lives on and around the Forty Worlds. The Drive, if it had ever existed, was long-dead history—Mother, when I asked her, denied that there had ever been any such thing; Uncle Duncan and many other people said the same. But the spacers were here, real, undeniable. They were today, they were excitement. I could not have Godspeed. But I could have space.

  When I reached my fifteenth birthday, I was at last allowed to use our little sailboat that sat on the jetty downhill from the house. The rules were simple: I must stay close to shore, I must never venture out in anything but light breezes, and I must never sail after dark.

  If I am going to be as honest as I know how in telling everything that happened, here is a good place to begin. I broke those rules, all three of them. But I did not do it when I was at the house, with Mother there to keep an eye on me.

  When she had a visitor on the way, and I was ready to be packed off to stay with Uncle Toby, I always asked if I could go to Toltoona by water, sailing along close to the shore of Lake Sheelin. Provided that the weather was good, Mother would agree. Then I would be out of her sight for anything from a day to a week, and old Uncle Toby, blurred of vision, hard of hearing, and unsteady on his legs, was happy enough to see me away early in the morning, and back as late as I pleased.

  I gradually learned by trial and error what I could and could not do on the lake. The ideal situation was a strong and steady breeze from the north. That would allow me to sail right across Lake Sheelin without tacking, and come back the same way. I thought that I could be at the eastern shore in two hours and home again, when I chose to come home, in two more. That would give me most of the day to be where I wanted to be: at the Muldoon Spaceport.

  On my first trip across I was too nervous about what I was doing, and too worried about my return, to enter the port itself. I hove to just offshore, ate my lunch, and stared at a baffling complex of buildings. There were scores of them, and I could not guess what they were for. What I most wanted to see, of course, was a launch or a landing, close up, but there was never a sign of one. After an hour and a half of goggling at everything, and pretending to be fishing or busy with my boat whenever anyone came down one of the jetties where the cargo boats were moored, I reluctantly headed back to Toltoona. I arrived at Uncle Toby's house, to his annoyance and mine, with most of the day to kill.

  On my next visit I was mu
ch bolder. With no signs telling me to keep out, I moored my boat at the end of a jetty and went ashore. One of the first things I came to was a board showing a layout of the whole Muldoon Port. It had been placed there for the convenience of people from the lake cargo vessels, but it served me just as well. I stood there until I had a general feeling of where everything was. Then I started walking. The rest of the day was like a dream.

  The great launch circles were my first target. Even from a distance I had seen the sky towers and the communication systems surrounding them. Invisible to me were the open grids beneath their bases, awaiting the surge of energy that would power landings and take-offs. After a few uncertain minutes I moved close to the guarding fence. I watched and waited for a long time, and finally realized what I ought to have deduced from my own experience: The launch activity happened close to sunset. All I would see now were preparations.

  I moved on, to the monster domes of the maintenance shops. I did not dare to go in—there were too many people whose job seemed to be only to watch what others were doing—but I hovered at the hangar doors and thrilled to the sight of the repair men swarming over the bowl-shaped ferry ships, each as big as our house. I stared in fascination at the glittering cushion plates being fixed underneath them. They could be removed after launch and left in high orbit, whenever a ferry ship was needed for use farther off in space. To most people those cushions might seem no more than big round concave dishes, but because I knew their purpose I thought I had never seen anything so beautiful.

  On that visit I hardly noticed the dents and scars and patches and the mended metal seams. It certainly never occurred to me that ships so battered on the outside might be no better within.

  But one of the men near the door finally had his eye on me, and was starting to edge in my direction. I had done nothing wrong, but I felt guilty, and walked away toward one of the huge, metal-roofed rooms that served as combination marketplace and restaurant.