by Ron Collins
After a moment, space began to clear around him.
“Shut the hell up,” an echoing voice said.
“Get away from him,” another whispered. “He’ll make us all sick.”
Which was ridiculous.
CF isn’t contagious, and he didn’t even have an actual cold at the time. But fear is what fear does, and he found no lack of irony in the fact that since so many illnesses had been cured most people could go years without meeting anyone who was really sick. When they did, it was not unusual for them to get upset.
“Of course they would be afraid,” his mother said when he was a kid. “You can’t understand what you haven’t seen.” And on his better days, Casmir could even understand why people would be afraid of him. Hell, he was afraid of himself some days. This, however, was not one of his better days.
The lecture continued, but by the time he was hacking uncontrollably, the pack of students around him were in a panic.
“Why did they let the idiot in?”
“Go choke in the vacuum.”
“Get the hell out of school.”
Only Ellyn stepped forward to help him gather his shit up, lead him out the door, and help him to the medical center, where she stayed until the nurse came to get him.
“When can we talk again?” he said as she was preparing to leave.
She smiled with her perfectly white teeth and her perfectly smooth skin. He remembered she smelled like a flower.
“You can come to our next meeting,” she said. “I’ll send you the details.”
Opening the message later, he saw the meeting was an open mic discussion focused on Lunar water rights and how they would set precedence for use on Europa—a topic he knew nothing about, but that suddenly held more interest than he could express.
He went and watched her work.
It was obvious Ellyn was brilliant in every way a person can be brilliant. She was tall, strong, breathtaking to the eyes, sharp-witted, and kind. She spoke her mind without being caustic, and she held to her positions even under wilting fire. Her politics were a strange goulash of socialism, capitalism, and a kind of moralism extracted from both pop culture and the more fervent religions of the Solar System. “Take the time to know you’re right,” she said, “then go ahead.”
It was obvious that her core was the individual.
Her focus was you.
And when she thought something was right, you couldn’t budge her.
It was also obvious that she was way out of his league.
Like everyone else on campus, though, that didn’t stop him from falling completely in love with her.
THE BIRTHDAY STORY (PART 3)
“I need a pair of shelves,” Casmir said to Preeti Indihari, pressing the dataskin to her assignment reader.
She stood behind a rickety table and clicked her gaze to a control button to mark him off a list she was maintaining. “Glad to see you could make it,” she said. The radiation shield on her faceplate was engaged, but her dark eyes and rounded cheeks were still visible inside her helmet.
Like Jess, Preeti was a junior. The two of them would be leaders next year. They were good, but neither were anything like Ellyn.
She went to a pile and brought a pair of shelves forward. They were simple enough devices: padded, cylindrical things that strapped around his thighs, each about fifteen centimeters long with built-in platforms cast into each outer side. Every “block” would wear them to provide footholds to other blocks, who would then act as subsequent blocks for those in higher rows.
“Be strong,” she said.
“Are you climbing today?” he replied.
“D22.” The white of her teeth flashed behind her faceplate.
“You’ll be a long way up and to my right.”
“Another reason I want you to be strong.”
Casmir chuckled and clamped the shelves onto his thighs, pulling a pair of straps until the shelves were tight enough to hold but not so tight as to constrict blood flow.
Across the field to the east, the mountainous ridges of the Sinus Iridium extension and the Caucasus peaks cut sharp, white-tipped paths against the black horizon. Venus hung low in the sky, but otherwise Earthlight dimmed the star pattern to the point that the dome above was almost pure black. Four temporary structures were built along the edge of the park—each with hundreds of participants mingling around them, students who were chatting in the public bands, almost certainly getting themselves all spun up about whatever issue was bothering them the most. The Martian ambassador’s proposal to block a low-cost waypoint station on Phobos was the most popular bluster of the day.
Casmir didn’t want to ruin things, though, so he kept off the public bands and just walked to his place on the mat. Focus, he thought. Today was about reversing the Contraction—turning back the page on the process by which all Earth governments, and then by definition most of the Solar System governments, gathered themselves up into a single entity.
The United Government wasn’t even trying to hide the fact that they were a corporate shell now, a small group of political elites, bought and paid for by a big group of corporate elites, who controlled everything in the civilized Solar System.
It wasn’t right.
Striding along, he felt the hair on the back of his neck bristle up.
People were literally starving, and no one cared because there was no cash flow in it to care. Casmir needed to be sure that the statement came out loud and strong. Yes, he thought. That’s what I want to be pissed off about today.
A lot of planning had gone into this.
Reporters had been tipped off. News crews covered the lead-up to the protest and were now set up to give what Perigee called “Max-E,” or Maximum Exposure. This was going to be huge. The number of protesters who turned out was amazing. Excitement was palpable.
He took his spot on the mat.
The safety pad—an air-filled buffer that would catch Perigee’s fall—was already laid down. It was two meters tall and filled with gas from the cylinders the organizers had brought in. The compressor had been his idea. It saved transporting a huge air mattress on a skimmer, which would have been a pain in the ass. The pad was positioned at what would be the center of a forty-two-row pyramid, but it was on a rudimentary pair of rails that made the target area adjustable out to fifty-five rows.
They were going for a record, no reason to skimp on optimism.
Adrenaline made his hands shake. He took a deep breath and marveled at the sense of freedom he got from the simple feeling of a pair of clear lungs. He could actually hear his heart beating.
The kickoff signal came as a green flash across his faceplate.
Basher Kline stood at E1, Frederic Proust at F1.
Casmir levered himself up, then straightened.
“I’m go for build,” he said, with more professionalism than needed.
When the next row was in place, he braced his hands against the waists of the blocks above him.
“You good, Caz?” Basher said.
“I’m good,” he replied. “Frederic?”
“I’m good,” Frederic said.
The cycle was be repeated every sixty seconds. Always think safety. It was drilled into the group at every planning meeting.
The physics of the human pyramid said that it was possible to do as many as sixty rows before the angular momentum of the moon’s rotation made the process unstable, but only if the members at the center were rock solid. No one had ever managed more than thirty-five rows before.
The pyramid grew out and to the right as the build continued.
Ten rows. Fifteen. Twenty.
Casmir sucked on water and tried to both relax and stay strong at the same time. His legs strained as the weight grew. The Lunar gravity helped, but mass was mass. Like compound interest, it all added up. His quads burned. Sweat poured over his body. Per the process, he rested his arms by releasing the block on his left for ten seconds, then the block on his right—giving each teammate a
quick double squeeze to warn them before doing so.
A blue light flashed in his faceplate to remind him he represented the disenfranchised.
He opened his assigned frequency and spoke.
“I stand for people who cannot stand for themselves,” he broadcast. “I stand for people who are not allowed to succeed.”
Forty-five minutes into the build, the pyramid reached the previously magic number of thirty-five rows.
A record.
They had done it.
Rejoicing filled the public channel.
Then Ellyn appeared.
She rode on a platform pulled by a skimmer, holding onto a rail like a water-skier as the machine paraded her around. Her golden pressure suit was as blocky as any other pressure suit in existence, yet somehow still managed to cling to her in ways that made her photogenic. The skimmer edged around the group, finally stopping to let her salute them all as the pyramid continued to build.
He felt big then. He felt powerful. A tear ran down his cheek.
There was nothing his people could not accomplish.
The brine of his sweat tasted sharp as he stood at the base of the record-breaking pyramid. He took in the powdered gray regolith marked with thousands of footsteps, and he absorbed the black sky behind the ramshackle shelters his fellow students had built. A sense of the future came over him that was too much.
As Ellyn stepped off of the platform, Casmir opened the channel and said his chant for the disenfranchised again.
In many ways, Ellyn Parker was the most important person in his life. She had changed who he was, made him into someone who saw possibilities rather than barriers. Watching her leave the skimmer, he imagined the news reports about her tomorrow. She was the beautiful one, speaking out against the United Government and its ugly Contraction with a total lack of fear.
In just a few moments, Ellyn would climb to the top row and make her statement. Then she would let herself fall gracefully to the surface where the air mattress would catch her. Even under the moon’s gravity, a fall from that kind of height could wind up all sorts of bad. But that wouldn’t happen today because they had it planned out, and because Ellyn Parker was here leading them. She wouldn’t let them fail. Then the pyramid would break itself down, and the partying would begin.
“You good?” It was Basher again.
His legs ached now. Sweat was pooling in the joints of his suit and he felt the calcium grind of pressure on his knees. But Casmir knew he could stay like this forever if he needed to.
“I’m good,” he replied.
“I’m good,” Frederic added, his voice straining, too.
Perigee stood at the base of the pyramid and spoke into the public channel.
“With this tower of compassion, we ask our fellow human beings to wake up! Be aware of what the system is doing to us! As I climb across the backs of the broken and disabled who cannot fend for themselves, and as I tread upon the disenfranchised, the poor, the working class who are struggling to find the simple freedoms that only those at the top of the pyramid can give, we in Universe Three say that no group of people can control us if we do not wish to be controlled. To our fellow humans, we say stand up! Climb us! Be one with us!”
With that Perigee lowered her visor and began a climb she did blind in order to represent the nature of leadership. She rose steadily, using deliberate motions that gave the pyramid time to progress farther right and farther upward.
The private channel called out Ellyn’s progress.
“V5 shoulder firm,” a voice called.
“U6 thigh confirmed,” another followed.
“V6 shoulder good.”
The build was forty rows and still growing. He wanted to see the video, but knew that no picture would be better than what he was imagining—the pyramid, tall and majestic in the sunlight, glimmering with an almost prismatic spectrum of reflected pressure suits that looked like a gossamer shark fin as it rose up from an ocean of regolith.
The temporary shelters ahead of him looked vacant and lonely now.
The tables stood silent sentry. A few unused sets of shelves lay in a scattered pile next to the makeshift storage bin.
At first they were just three silver dots on the horizon.
Clippers, small spacecraft with antigrav hover engines configured for Lunar operations, were running at high speed and coming straight for Chang Park. Casmir’s initial thought was that they were journalists. He was so sure of this he clicked the private channel to report the story was going extra-Lunar.
Then it struck him.
Other than the safety center, the grounds were completely empty.
The reporters had left. Without a word, the news channels had retreated. There would be no video. No recording. Truth hit him like a cold shower from inside his skin. These clippers were not journalists. As the three craft came closer, Casmir saw they were official vehicles, sharp-edged and solid, Engagement class clippers that cut through space like shivs.
All of them carried the UG flag.
The first clipper hit the center of the formation about two-thirds of the way up, scattering bodies all directions and causing a warping ripple in the pyramid. The second hit about a third of the way up. The third circled as blocks fell, watching the execution of the mission and almost certainly capturing the events for a report—or at least ready to capture a report if the mission had not been carried out as ordered.
The public channel erupted with screaming voices and calls for help.
Parts of the formation that hadn’t been attacked began to disband, blocks sliding down each other’s backs in a panicked cascade, bodies tumbling down, hands whipping back and forth in vain attempts to halt their falls.
Oblivious to their calls, the two clippers turned and made another pass.
PROLOGUE
UGIS Everguard
Ship Local Date: May 7, 2204
Ship Local Time: 1200 Hours
4.3 light years away from the Solar System, three waves of highly sophisticated pods flew into the outer reaches of Alpha Centauri A’s corona. Their motors drove themselves down through its solar atmosphere, injecting themselves into the heat of its chromosphere and continuing deeper, rushing toward the true core of the star to find the fusing mass of helium and hydrogen that formed its life. Laminated layers of bioactive composite and nanointelligent titanium that had been designed to withstand the six-million-degree core worked together to shed heat.
Four pods came in the first wave.
Four more in the second.
Only three in the third.
The scientists who built them had created models of the star using information gleaned from their own sun. It was a G2-type star, rotating in twenty-two days rather than Sol’s twenty-five. It was bigger than Sol, but only by a little. It had higher metal content, a factor that caused the scientists to make several changes to the bioactive components of the heat shield. They made assumptions about density, gravity, and the impact of rotational velocity and the angular momentum of the material that sluiced inside the star. They made learned estimates about the surface pressure that material would put on the outer shells of the pods, and about the thermal gradient the pods would pass through as they made their way to the star’s radiative zone and into the core itself.
One of the pods failed upon entry into the corona.
The rest found their designated moment, communicated with each other through quantum-linked connections, and engaged the last lines of their coded mission.
Wormhole actuators engaged.
Energy flowed, hydrogen fusing to helium.
Dimensions twisted. Mathematics screamed. The pods themselves disintegrated to instant ash, adding their atomic makeup to Alpha Centauri A’s metalicity while, inside the star, the compressed fabric of time and space tore itself apart with an explosion that would show up as a single pulse of brightness that passed through the Solar System’s astronomical instruments nearly four and a half years later.
When it was
over, the star was quiet.
Alpha Centauri A had a new feature—a jump gate buried deep inside.
For all the sophistication it took to build it, the gate was simplistic in its stature now, a “multi-gate” as the scientists called it, a simple connection that could be linked to by any other device that knew the quantum key of its creation.
To the people who created it, however, the issues around it were more complex.
It was a multi-gate, yes.
But it was a multi-gate that could change at least two worlds, and maybe more.
On Space Clippers, and Messages From Deep Space
CHAPTER 1
Perigee Hill: Mars Colony Divide
Local Solar Date: February 12, 2206
Local Solar Time: 0845 Hours
The rover-sled lurched over the Martian landscape as Casmir’s daughter brought it to an abrupt halt.
“Nice job,” he said. “Tomorrow maybe we assign you to the bot drivers.”
“Sorry,” Deidra replied, her cheeks coloring with embarrassment for the rough stop.
The vehicle was a simple two-seater with a storage compartment for expeditions, something easy for her to start with. Its motor wound down and the vehicle bounced to the ground amid a cloud of orange dust. Outside, the rising sun was strong enough to cut through the butterscotchy clouds and cast a black shadow over the hill ahead of them.
“Come on,” she said.
“Slow down,” Casmir said. “The UG will be watching.”
“Let them,” she said. “I look good today.”
He glared. Thirteen years old, he thought.
Casmir flicked his visor down and toggled its optical control to lock the seal. The sled’s environmental controllers registered its containment and let Deidra open the cockpit doors. She was on the surface before Casmir said he was ready to go.
He gave a hard cough that sounded like a damned earthquake inside his suit. His daughter, like his two sons, was a miracle for someone like him. He understood that more and more as the years passed. CF robbed a person of their strength. When he was sick, he couldn’t breathe and he had pains that were impossible to describe. It also robbed men of their ability to reproduce—usually, anyway. When they decided to have children, he had done all the testing, and worked with the genetic doctors to guard against him passing the gene sequence that caused his version of the disease, but nothing was guaranteed yet. Like most men with CF, he had other issues, too. His doctors had harvested his sperm, and they had made babies the remote way. Not particularly sexy, he supposed, but watching his daughter bounce over the Martian surface made him happy he lived at a time when such practices were there for him.