The Pilots of Borealis

by David Nabhan

  The wealthiest on Borealis, people were at first surprised to learn, were members of the Artists’ Guild. A certified master could command a wage from Borealis’ glitterati that even Croesus himself might have had trouble paying. Borelians were so rich though that there wasn’t much else on which to spend their credits. Even after the mind-boggling flood of imports from all over the Solar System were paid for, the surplus wealth had no place else to go. The State started it all—decorating all the public buildings, every square foot of them, with stunning bas-reliefs carved into the exterior facades. Private citizens were quickly infected and now it was the rarest domicile that wasn’t faced with the most breathtaking murals and facades. The most affluent residents fashioned theirs in pure gold, silver, copper, or platinum, and gave them color with bucket loads of green emeralds, red rubies, blue sapphires, orange topazes, white opals. The motifs were scenes from every terrestrial mythology, watershed events in history, reproductions of the marvels of the Solar System—and anything else one could imagine, or couldn’t imagine. Each domicile fit cheek to jowl with the next, creating a series of spectacularly decorated toruses built into the Core, stacked one atop another, all the way up to Epsilon. It was a fantasy city gone mad with wealth and addicted to public beauty, around which the racing pilots were to circle in the air, with the idea that this paradise—in Adem Sulcus’ words—required angels of its own.

  WHEN NERISSA EMERGED ONTO the Observation Deck an immediate roar from tens of thousands of Borelians went up, a cry so loud and powerful that it reverberated off the Dome that encased the city. She was helped to strap on oversized and unwieldy wings, and then stepped onto the launch pad and gave the citizens her hallmark pose, with wings outstretched and her face fixed with the iconic, aloof look of Borelian superiority. No one in the Solar System could mistake her; she looked like no other flyer in history. Nerissa certainly seemed almost totally nude—barefoot and wearing nothing save the most diaphanous lycraplastique brief and top; it was said to weigh less than a lunar gram. Her hair was as thick and black as the image of the Roman goddess of the Moon, Diana, on Borealis’ Great Seal. It was tightly twisted into an ebony braid that fell almost to the small of her back. As she stood on the podium displaying her wingspan, every contour of her impossibly muscled body strained for the audience of hundreds of billions. As stunning as she was—malachite green eyes, chiseled patrician face, taut muscles that rippled from her lower abdomen to her rib cage—even the most lascivious would be struck first with just a plain and unavoidable admiration for her classic beauty. Journalists had long since ceased to ask if she felt ashamed to fly so scantily clad.

  “We have a different view of the human body,” she had so often curtly answered in the past, “much different than the pornography-addicted degeneracy of the Terran Ring.”

  This was an historic insult meant to sting. One of the pistons that powered the development of the Terran Ring was the economics of sex tourism in its first century. The never-before-experienced allure of lovemaking in weightlessness was in fact just a footnote in history. Borelians, however, never allowed an opportunity to pass without reminding Terrans about it.

  She could have been mistaken for a statue, standing so erect and motionless at the highest point above the city, her skin the same rich color of flawless beige alabaster, like smooth wheat porcelain. Such a complexion was common for residents of the lunar colony, for Borealis had been built almost precisely on the Moon’s North Pole, quite near to the immense stores of ice which had lain frozen for eons at the bottom of deep craters, in perpetual shadow and cold. The city itself never saw the direct Sun, for it too had been built around a thick cone of lunar regolith, thrusting up from the floor of a perfectly situated crater and surrounded on all sides by natural sun shields. Reflected light though, incessant but mild, bathed the city unremittingly, and gave Borelians a beautiful skin texture and tone found only here. The “dayglow” gave life to everything on Borealis and suffused its residents with a healthy yet seductive beauty. That, and the feeble lunar gravity that permitted limbs much longer, more lithe and lissome than on weighty Earth, made Borelian athletes into tall, supple greyhounds. And Nerissa, the image of Borelian beauty, didn’t have a gram of weight in the wrong place. Visitors walking the streets of Borealis were taken aback by the fact that hardly a single overweight citizen was to be seen, the entire population having long since put food and carnal desires far down the list of their priorities. And, although it wasn’t actually against the law to eat meat, no one could remember the last time anyone had done it. It was considered a thoroughly disgusting habit, a hallmark of the aboriginal culture that had been thankfully left behind for the “cannibal” hoi polloi on fetid Earth, or of the sensate “gluttons” on the Terran Ring.

  Clinton Rittener was on the pad next to her, and he’d told himself this luck of the draw meant nothing and that he wasn’t going to give her a first, much less second look. He simply couldn’t restrain himself though. And with her being so close, the glances hadn’t any hope but becoming stares. In a moment of weakness he turned to her and spoke.

  “I’d like to wish you . . .” That’s all he got out. She turned so quickly and fixed him with such a cold, deadly stare that the “good luck” caught in his throat. It stunned him, stealing his words and leaving him with just the look they were sharing, she also refusing to take her eyes off him. He could see now that her hair had raven tufts and faint streaks running through it; it wasn’t as jet black as he had first thought.

  She arched her eyebrows as she calmly spoke, a firm composure that stoically restrained what quite honestly could almost seem to be identified as a roiling hatred.

  “You’re Clinton . . . Rittener, aren’t you?” She paused between names, letting him know in no uncertain terms what disdain she felt for a supposed Borelian who sported an Earth name. She shook her head slightly as if wondering to herself under what confused cloud this man must live. She didn’t wait for a response.

  “What are you doing here, anyway?” she blurted out. She nodded at the throngs who now stood silently watching the encounter. “You’re not part of us. Why are you even here?” She sniffed her delicate nose up at him in a way that told him she smelled the grease of Earth on him and was revolted by it.

  “So what sort of game are you playing?”

  CLINTON RITTENER HAD BEEN accused of many things in his forty-two years, but playing games had never been one of the charges. In fact, in this new age of a quarter of a trillion humans crowding out most opportunity for individual accomplishment, he was considered far and wide to be perhaps one of humanity’s last best chances for personal heroism. The list of men respected on Earth and admired also in Borealis was a very, very short one. The Borelians didn’t hand out honorary citizenship to just anyone; in fact, the last time it had happened was more than a decade ago. There had been almost unanimous support for it, but that was before all the saber-rattling. And many, like Nerissa, would obviously be pleased to see it revoked. That wouldn’t be easy though, for in all the Inner Solar System, there was just one Clinton Rittener.

  “What are you playing at?” Nerissa rudely asked him again just before the match began.

  “Verba competitorem verum non volant, facta sua manent,” he told her. Rittener waited just the right amount of time. “That’s Horace or Virgil, I’m not sure which. It means ‘A master gamesman’s words don’t fly, but rather his deeds remain.’ Good flying, Nerissa.” That closed the conversation. Even she had to appreciate the quick cleverness of the double entendre; “good flying” was the standard polite salute to fellow pilots prior to a match.

  Now, just moments before the contest would start, Rittener set to preparing himself, trying to concentrate on his breathing and stretching, but the panorama before him made that next to impossible. If a view of the Terran Ring was the iconic image of humanity, Borealis from the top of the Epsilon Level presented a good case for a very close second.

  This was a fine day for flying too, Cli
nton thought absently, but then was reminded of the irony that, just like in Heaven, there existed nothing but fine days on Borealis and not even darkness in the city that put the image of the deity of the night on their seals, a place of perpetual springtime. Hundreds of stupendous mirrors ringed the Traskett Crater, beaming sunlight to the floor below. The mirrors’ degree of curvature, placement, and height had been carefully calculated to both catch the maximum sunlight throughout the year and refract the concentrated rays into widened and weakened beams that bathed beneficent light over great swaths on the crater floor. It was well-named: the Goldilocks Array. It should naturally be a couple hundred degrees below zero on the Traskett floor, and a couple hundred degrees above zero Fahrenheit over the lip of the crater in the direct sunlight. Inside the Dome though, thanks to Goldilocks, everything was “just right.” Not all the mirrors could be used all the time owing to Luna’s dance with her celestial partners, Sun and Earth. But with gradual and automated re-focusing, thanks to the Moon’s polar phenomenon of constant sunlight at least at some nearby horizon, there was never-ending dayglow in abundance, causing “night-hungry” Borelians to complain of it from time to time. Nighttime was required though for the lush cornucopia of plants in the Garden that ringed the periphery of the Dome, flourishing under a transparent lid infused with a photochromatic substrate that darkened every twelve hours.

  Making his final preparations, taking an extended series of long, deep, rhythmic breaths, Rittener filled his lungs with the cast-off oxygen from both the tailings of crushed and vaporized lunar regolith and the exhalations of the millions of plants and trees in the Garden. It definitely didn’t taste like air on Earth. But it was thick—dense enough to fly in, especially in one sixth the gravity of Earth.

  Beyond that last green circumference, outside the Dome, lay the rest of the Moon—the “Field.” It was the piston at the center of the engine that was Borealis. The tracts adjacent to the Traskett Crater had been exploited from the very first stage of primitive human colonization, pushing out prodigious quantities of helium-3. Nothing goes on forever though, and it was no secret that these fields, along with others even further out from Borealis, had long since approached the end of their productive life. Earth and Terra were much more anxious about this than the Borelians themselves who mined and exported it. There were other fields to be tapped, they’d answer calmly. Granted, the best potential sites were the equatorial fields some fifteen hundred miles away. Undaunted by the distance, Borealis was making preparations to plant her flag and her robotic regolith skimmers into this virgin territory and stubbornly maintained that the current pinch in supply need not precipitate a crisis in the future, as long as the correct steps were taken now. Terra and Earth were just as convinced that the opposite were true and that the helium-3 shortfall was more than just the current state of affairs, that it was the opening chapter of an endemic problem that everyone in the Solar System had been dreading, and from which too many eyes had looked away for too long.

  Every voice in Borealis was shouting encouragement to the tense pilots. Rittener could hear a good number of brave ones screaming, “Good flying, Clinton Rittener!” These plucky citizens cheered him, regardless that the Alliances on Earth didn’t support Borealis’ contention that the new fields were being opened as quickly as possible. But then the politics of helium-3, the great question of the day, painted quite a few things in grey. And now there were a number of those areas that were threatening to turn blood red. Who did own the Moon, anyway? Certainly, no one refused to recognize Borealis’ sovereignty and control of areas already developed and mined. But where was it written that she owned the whole Moon? She had soaked up incalculable wealth from all quadrants of the Solar System for centuries, but must such greed and self-interest extend forever?

  RITTENER HAD THE CORNER of his eye on his Terran rival, two pads to his left. Demetrius Sehene was stretching and breathing too. But he wasn’t directing a single furtive glance at the competition. He was the odds on favorite to win the match and one look at him told why. His Bulgarian father was the gold-medalist champion wrestler of the Inner Solar System Games XXXII. The seed hadn’t fallen far. He was tall, superbly built, and as solid as spent uranium. This formidable clay was molded by the features he inherited from his Tutsi mother, along with also taking her family’s name. Long-tendoned, quick-firing musculature had been fine tuned and tempered by intense training. His tawny skin and Abyssinian nose caused people to remark that he looked like the old Ethiopian emperor, Haile Selassie. Demetrius liked that and played it up. His fans referred to him just as “The Emperor”; the moniker fit perfectly.

  World-class piloting required a body like Demitrius’. Every amateur who visited Borealis tried doing it though and anyone in decent health and shape could keep it up for a while. The beginners’ platforms were fairly safe, although if one were clumsy enough to make a determined attempt it was possible to break one’s neck, even at these tame heights. Piloting was basically a struggle against one’s own body, a marathon work-out session that pushed the flyer to the point of complete exhaustion. While that point came at a different place for every pilot, the math however was the same for all. To effect flight on the Moon one had to continuously flap long, broad wings with the force equal to one tenth body weight as measured on Earth. A two-hundred-pound man, for example, doing “flys” in a gymnasium on Earth with twenty-pound dumbbells, could fly on the Moon. All he need do is put down the weights and strap on the wings to practice the “fair sport.” Anyone could do it—children, women, men; the competition was fair because the bigger you were the harder you had to push to keep your weight aloft. Accomplished fliers though were easily recognized by the hallmark shared by all: admirably developed, V-shaped torsos topped by massive shoulders and arms.

  It was inevitable that Terrans should come to overthrow the Borelians as the dominant force in the sport. They were stronger—how else to put it? The first match lost to them came as a shock to Borealis nonetheless. When it started to happen regularly the shock turned to dismay. Piloting was so characteristically Borelian, and here the Terrans had commandeered yet another piece of their culture. The Borelians were no push-overs, though. Watching a trained Borelian pilot was wondrous indeed. Their tall, lithe, lean form was made for the sport. What the light gravity took from their strength it reimbursed by permitting longer limbs that changed the calculus of leverage in their favor. Their other advantage was disputed by the Terrans, but it was fact: Borelians were better pilots. They grew up flying and were such agile, daring, practiced athletes that they gave Terra’s best a hotly contested run for their money every time they met.

  A COLOSSAL HOLOGRAPHIC TORUS switched on. It fit snugly into the upper reaches of the Dome, a concentric virtual racetrack, its imaginary center the spire atop the Epsilon Observation Deck. Each pilot wore ankle bands that remained within the volume of the virtual doughnut and a collar that likewise would immediately disqualify the wearer should he fly too high or too low. The wings were tipped with similar sensors—wings, one might point out, of the lightest material ever constructed. Most were fashioned with arcane genres of carbon fibers, but there were many trade secrets connected to the manufacture of the best wings.

  The translucent aerodrome turned yellow; the pilots took their marks. The cries went up again, even stronger this time, final encouragement for the pilots. “Good flying, Clinton Rittener!” He always professed that he flew for himself alone, that he represented no one but himself. But his skin-tight, blue and red piloting leotard, the colors of the European Union, said otherwise. The old planet below might be in shambles but here was one son of Earth at least not quite ready to say die. The cheers made him glad that he’d decided to sport these colors; that was his last thought before the torus turned light green.

  The pilots leaped into the air en masse and flew at top speed toward the gossamer ring. There was little room for maneuver at this point of the race; most pilots just clenched their teeth and literally beat their w
ay through with their wings. There were some vague rules in piloting, but not at the start, not really. During the “scrum” no judge ever threw a flag. It was pure aerial combat and almost anything went. Some pounded a path through to the goal of the torus, others spiraled out either injured or with damaged wings, still others didn’t make it within the confines of the holographic racetrack in time. Rittener didn’t try anything tricky and flew straight at the closest sector of the floating halo. So did many other pilots. Converging vectors resulted in a number of “tangles” settled in the air as birds of prey would resolve them, with kicks and buffeting wings.

  Nerissa wasn’t among them. She opted for a daring stratagem, flying at a recklessly wide angle, trying to intersect the torus far down the course. While her competitors were making a straight bee-line for the track, Nerissa would have to traverse the much longer hypotenuse she’d chosen for her bearing—but in the same time. Demetrius had taken an angle too but nothing that audacious. Already the torus was blinking on and off at an alarming rate. By the time Nerissa’s wing tips passed the virtual boundary it was flashing like a strobe light. Then it switched suddenly to a dark green. Any pilots’ sensors outside the safe boundary instantly lit up red. They were out. Nerissa had made it with but a second or two to spare and her gambling short cut put her far ahead of the pack. Fearless confidence in her amazing speed was matched by graceful agility which had her hugging the extreme inside of the ethereal race course—“in the groove.” But Demetrius was hard on her heels, coming up fast at a gentle angle of intersection, beating the air like a winged demon fleeing Hell. Just before the two vectors crossed, Nerissa banked out of the groove and heeled into Demetrius’ path. It was a first-class impact. Surprised cries rippled through the crowd looking up breathlessly. Now a real “tangle” ensued, with each pilot trying to maintain speed while blocking the other, and desperately attempting to force their competitor to dip wings outside of the safe boundary. This was nasty flying.