The Pilots of Borealis

by David Nabhan

  The conversation about Australis petered out and a short silence ensued. Gresling intelligently now decided to change the subject.

  “I’ve read some of your papers. I wish we had time to talk about your ideas.”

  That was a lifetime ago, Rittener thought, and he said so.

  “I was hardly more than a teenager when I wrote those. They were sloppy—and worse—wrong.”

  From the far end of the car there came either a cough or an ill-disguised rebuke. It became apparent which when Clinton saw it was Nerissa who had chosen just this moment to clear her throat. She and Clinton had scrupulously avoided making eye contact during the entire journey. The glance they now exchanged was brief but decidedly unfriendly.

  A smirk crossed the thin lips of the scientist, proof that very little escaped his rigorous attention, and certainly not this obvious and frosty snub. Gresling couldn’t agree though, and stuck to his guns. “That’s nonsense. Many great things are only accomplished in youth. Jaager here is an excellent example. You know about Jaager, of course?”

  Jaager had made a mark of his own already: he was the youngest pilot on Borealis and was clearly very happy to set this straight.

  “I’m a genuine pilot, officially inscribed. I’m young but experienced; I’ve been flying since I was three.” Rittener hadn’t even uttered his first word by his third birthday, but declined to make the comparison.

  A young woman had come from the far end of the shuttle car to join the conversation. “I’m the late starter,” she said. She looked very much like Jaager—same sandy blonde hair, both sharing big, prominent eyes. His were blue and intelligent-looking, spaced slightly wider, hers a delicate shade of light green, the color surrounded by a sea of pearl white. Jaager made the introduction.

  “This is my sister, Darda. Her first flight was at six; that’s what she means.”

  She was holding a plate of steaming, blue-green mush. The ghastly reek came in front of it like clouds of tear gas announcing truncheon-swinging riot police.

  “If my family is going to indoctrinate you,” she granted, “at least we can see you’re fed properly.”

  This was infamous Borelian “flux.” She offered the ill-smelling pottage to Clinton with some pomp. “Blue-green flux is my favorite. Have you ever had it?” Her big eyes pretended to say that she hoped he hadn’t. She didn’t wait, though, knowing Rittener couldn’t have ever tasted flux. No one but a Borelian could have. Her grandfather’s disquieting grimace cued Rittener that if Darda were a late-starter she might be making up for it now like most Borelian balls of fire who had earned wings.

  “Don’t believe them, by the way, when they tell you the first pioneers existed on it. That’s pure fiction.” She leaned in closer as if she and Rittener were sharing a secret. “Even in Settlement Times they grew crops using pathetic forerunners of Goldilocks. No one ate well in those primitive days but they sure didn’t dine on flux exclusively either.” She shrugged her shoulders to accentuate the apocryphal. “Yet even the Old City Museum is happy to play along. The restaurant there serves thirty-three varieties. Can you believe it?”

  Rufinus was squirming on his cushion.

  Before Rittener could critique it she had to make sure of something else. “That’s not from the canteen. That’s home-made; that’s real flux.” She actually winked at Clinton. “Go on, take a bite.”

  If the Goldilocks Array was built to heat and light Borealis, there was another tremendous benefit. It also converted the regolith out from the Dome to the Shadow Line boundary near the edges of the crater walls into a verdant Eden. To go past the Shadow Line was the same as to go over the lip into the direct sunlight, certain death if unprotected. But, from the circumference of the Shadow Line to the periphery of the Dome, a circular, transparent dextrite lid was erected, suspended on steel struts. This let the ceaseless and tempered reflected sunlight through, kept out the vacuum of space, and held in the carbon dioxide–rich micro-atmosphere. Fruits, vegetables, grains, herbs, spices, and other flora of every conceivable type thrived below in a fantastic version of the Late Carboniferous period of Old Earth, the carbon dioxide levels only restrained by what the bees could tolerate. The bounty this green carpet gave forth was more than sufficient for Borealis, along with blessing the city with tons of clean oxygen and soaking up the exhaled breaths of thousands to convert to sugars.

  The “Garden” was also exemplary of yet another wedge driven between the peoples of the Inner. The culture of death was on Earth and Terra, not here in peaceful, vivacious Borealis. No animal had been butchered legally on the Moon since Settlement Times and they meant to keep it that way. It was a tangible and sanguine proof that they—and not the other cultures of the Inner—that they were the enlightened entities into which humanity had been meant to evolve. Borelian cuisine was actually then quite delicious and particularly healthy, excepting flux. That was an acquired taste.

  Rufinus fidgeted and groused, muttering something about the South Pole. “Oh, enough of that, Grandfather. Clinton Rittener isn’t going to Australis. Let him enjoy his flux in peace.”

  There was silence all around. Everyone’s eyes watched Clinton Rittener take his first heaping spoonful of the fibrous, gelatinous pap. It was Borealis’ comfort food and he managed to get it down.

  “Well?” Darda asked, big eyes wide open. “The taste?” She gave him a knowing smile. “Awful, isn’t it?”

  The young pilot let Rittener off the hook, boldly taking her seat right next to him, wiping away the remnants of the horrid paste from his lips with a crisp linen serviette.

  “Flux wasn’t born of necessity, Clinton Rittener, but rather of other purely human attributes: boredom, curiosity, the need for diversion. That tells much about us. Settlers had asked themselves if it were possible to produce ‘indigenous’ lunar food, something that could be grown nowhere else but on the Moon—creating the hardiest, genetically engineered plant mutants, putting the monster hybrids into the face of the scorching Sun.”

  She folded the napkin and put it in her lap.

  “They never imagined for a minute that it couldn’t be done, Clinton Rittener. And that’s been the history of Borealis ever since. So I’ll answer for you. Flux tastes like perseverance. It’s the flavor of resolution.”

  She said the next as if intimating that not all of Rittener’s teachers on Borealis should be of her grandfather’s generation.

  “I don’t know how much helium-3 is on the South Pole,” she said, “but we all know you’re provisional and no one should have to pass through citizenship initiation without some support. I’ll be happy to help if there’s anything you want to ask or need explained.” Darda stood and with a final flourish curtseyed and made an end, “Said the mouse to the lion.” Rufinus cleared his throat, and not surreptitiously, so loudly the viewing panel almost vibrated.

  It was such a candid and guileless offer, and it made a real impression on Rittener. Jaager was a little uncomfortable about the suggestion and tried to smooth it over. “Clinton Rittener has probably been briefed by highly capable cultural attachés where he comes from, Darda. While you’re teaching him something I’ll be showing Grandfather where to find h-3 on Australis.”

  Before anyone could laugh it off or defend it, a voice, again from the far end of the car, interrupted and changed the conversation altogether.

  “And where is that? Where does Clinton Rittener come from?” It was Nerissa’s. “Earth? Is that where you’re from?” There were a score of pilots and their relations and friends in the car with connections beyond the Moon. By the time she finished the last of her words they were delivered in crystal clear silence, as if the vacuum outside had slipped in and quashed every other conversation.

  He set down the plate of flux. “I am from Earth.”

  “I see. From the Asian Alliance or the European Union?”

  “I held dual citizenship.”

  “How unusual,” she said thoughtfully. “But I thought Mars claimed you?” she follo
wed up hard and fast.

  “I learned to fly on Mars.”

  “Really?” A look of puzzlement came over her face. “But I thought you flew on Titan?”

  “There, too,” Rittener answered.

  “Oh, that makes it clear.” She smiled and put the sweetest nectar on the derision. “Of course there aren’t too many first-class pilots on the Asteroid Belt, but your name is not unknown there either, is it?” Before he could answer she added another “but I thought,” like a mantra. “But I thought you were the commander of a Terran warship sent to terrorize the people out there?”

  “The Borelian authorities have asked me to refrain from making any comments about the Terran Ring,” he parried. “I’m trying to accede to their wishes.”

  “The Asian Alliance, European Union, Mars, Titan, and yes, let’s not exclude the Terran Ring,” she ran off the names counting with fingers as visual aids for the listeners. There was no need to say out loud her implication.

  “And now it’s our turn. You arrive here at a moment of great decision too. How fortunate for Borealis.”

  A seemingly interminable silence reigned until Darda broke the spell. Maybe Rittener could use her help after all with Borelian customs. “That’s sarcasm. We Borelians are said to be very skilled at its use.”

  She was being a little sarcastic herself, so said her rascal’s smile.

  TARTARUS HAD BEEN CAPPED decades ago, sealed with a slab of the strongest concrete anywhere, stronger even than the dome of the Pantheon that had been hardening for millennia. A seam holding a vein of excellent pyroclastic ashes and silica had been pulled from the tube itself to create the lid. The interior was then flooded with a mixture of nitrogen and oxygen, in the same proportions as under the Dome or on Earth, drawn from the regolith scraped from the sides and processed. The Moon is almost half oxygen by weight, so that and quite a number of gases and volatiles were obtained from Tartarus. The scrapes and gouges in its sides were converted to habitats. They spiraled down the walls of the lava cylinder. Numerous side tubes branched off from main, ready-made tendrils to other resources, not a few of them filled to the brim with great amounts of carbon dioxide, ready to be pumped to the surface when lunar night fell. The bone-shattering chill was used to convert the CO2 to dry ice; cubes of frozen carbon dioxide were shipped all over the Moon from Tartarus.

  The pilots came to Tartarus at Syzygy for something else though. The festival was one of the spokes in the wheel that carted piloting culture forward on Borealis. At the bottom of Tartarus lay the greatest of all lunar treasures: water. It was in liquid form, having long since melted due to the ambient temperatures humans brought with them. A section of it had been portioned and converted into a monumental sauna, named Styx, harkening to the mythical underworld river. It was fantasized that some natural yet inexplicable radioactivity deep at the bottom of this lunar pit was heating the spa. That was complete invention, of course, since heat from fusion reactors in abundance was the source. But this was an exotic pool and it required a hidden caché.

  The sauna was reserved for pilots and pilots only. Their guild had long ago disbursed an enormous sum to the state for the right to develop it and annually paid an obscene stipend for its continued use. The race down the throat of Tartarus ended here, at Styx, and what transpired then no one knew—save the pilots themselves.

  THERE WERE FEW EASIER ways to kill oneself. None of the flyers seemed to give that a second thought as waves of pilots spiraled into the mouth of Tartarus. Immediately the shaft took a ninety-degree turn, straight down. The torrent turned and followed that vertical path like bats headed into a cavern. Clinton had flown like this before and used the thought to give him confidence before the race. On Mars this was the only way to fly. But Martian corridors, cut by engineers and as straight as lasers, unfortunately didn’t prepare him for this. The rock sides of the tube came at the pilots with extreme and killing speed as they followed its twisting and turning course into the Moon’s depths. It was no surprise when the accident occurred.

  Darda’s wing brushed the wall, seemingly barely glancing. But her speed and momentum were deceptive. Her body was twirled like a splinter cast off from a saw mill. She slammed into the other side of the tube and was knocked cold. Rittener was behind her and saw it happen. His first thought was to wonder if she’d been killed. His second was to realize that she was in the worst of straits. Bouncing off the sides, her lifeless form caromed into an ancillary tube that channeled off. This one had been worked and was plumb, falling straight down into a dark abyss. At its bottom, tons of carbon dioxide were being liberated by an oversize regolith converter. The heavy gas piled up on itself, pushing all the air out of the void until it reached the main tube. Darda was falling to her death, being suffocated in a cylindrical reservoir of millions of cubic feet of pure carbon dioxide.

  Her brother didn’t vacillate for an instant, veering off wildly and following her into the tunnel, almost killing himself also but missing the rock, only grazing his wingtips as he entered the carbon trap. Jaager soon found himself at a terrible place. He couldn’t hold his breath for another instant, and yet was still far above his sister. He’d have to either watch her die as he gave up and turned back or continue on to perish with her. His agony was brief though. Borealis’ newest citizen—provisional—the one he’d only just shook hands with hours ago, sped past him. He was not in extremis. In fact, the look on his face was an expression Jaager would live his entire life without seeing again. It was a pilot flying in full and complete yanta. Rittener spent only a microsecond to throw his head back, signaling to Jaager to turn around and that he’d answer for his sister. He couldn’t verbalize it because Rittener wasn’t breathing. Nor was his heart beating like any normal human, nor was his adrenaline, serotonin, or other hormones at any level within standard ranges. Most importantly, Rittener wasn’t thinking like any other human either, save those very, very few, those unapproachable masters in the Great Outer beyond Titan, from whom he’d learned this death-defying skill. That’s what made him the very uniquely dangerous man that he was. “Dying this way, if you ever should fail, is thought to be most pleasant,” they impressed upon him. “Have no fear of it.”

  His mind kicked into an unknown, untested, final gear. There was no way to describe how Titanian pilots did it, but he was more or less in the throes of multiple and intense conversations—with himself—crowding out the normal terrors and substituting with outrageous demands for both mind and body. One dialogue was with the mathematician in him, and it was gauging the slight difference in flying in the thicker carbon dioxide, comparing the calculus of Darda’s slowed descent with the resistance it gave to his approach to her. His mind ran through the equations faster than a quantum computer because they weren’t solved, they were felt. The final sum looked impossible; it looked like death. This was an old and powerful acquaintance of Rittener’s though. He’d greeted it many times and fully welcomed it now as an old comrade who’d always relented in the end. All the inner conversations and organ manipulations came together, with the flood of reflection and will coalescing into a single mega-thought, as if a great and hitherto unseen escape were now at hand. He simply wouldn’t breathe and yet live. He’d breathe when he got back to the top. He pumped his wings and went deeper into the now darkening cavern, past the point of no return, no matter that he willed that he would.

  THAT EVENING, BATHING IN the waters of Styx, every single pilot of Borealis, one after the other, friend or foe, supporter or detractor, came to think of him differently.

  Including Nerissa. Her words about terrorizing civilians at Valerian-3 had cut deeply and he had to put that right. What they said to each other though, their exact words, were known only to them, exchanged in one of the last veiled places in the universe, in the stygian depths of Earth’s now powerful satellite, excluded even from the eyes and ears of the System itself.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  WOE TO THE VANQUISHED

  PEERLESS’ TRANSIT FROM THE T
erran Ring to the Asteroid Belt was an uneventful but tense journey. Rittener had set the deadly serious tone. Yeshenko’s venomous complaints, after his release from the brig, fell on deaf ears. No crewman wanted any part of it and quickly found another duty station that immediately required attention. Peerless hurtled past the orbit of Mars in radio silence, ignoring hails from the few stray ships they crossed in this lonely quadrant of space. There was some sense in the trajectory the Archonate chose which gave the spy net on Mars a wide berth, foregoing to avail the ship of the gravity boost the planet might have provided. Rittener had to assume ears in the Asteroid Belt would have heard he was coming though. If he should somehow arrive unexpectedly that would be so much the better. As the first few chunks of debris swept past the Peerless when she entered the fringes of the Belt, Rittener ordered the crew into combat status. Only three slept at a time, six hours off, eighteen hours on. G-suits were worn all twenty-four hours, even to bed. The ship’s fusion reactor was on and hot, braking the Peerless, sending out a furious plume of effluvium in front of her, composed of the disintegrated remains of appropriate-sized chunks of flotsam she had picked up along the way.

  At morning second bell Rittener wolfed down two protein squares in the galley and made for the bridge. The Peerless would be entering the approach to Valerian-3 shortly. In his left hand he had some spare protein squares, in his right he carried a sleep casquette. The helmet blocked sound and light to the point of sensory deprivation, depending on the setting. With all the exigencies which soon were to present themselves, he’d be catching his few winks at the captain’s swivel from here on in. Catching sight of himself in one of the monitors as he trudged down the corridor, favoring his right biosynthetic foot a little, which acted up from time to time depending on the gravity, he looked tired. “You look like Hell,” he said to himself.