It was there. “Police record, Planet Ciencia: Theft of platinum from mining ship, case dismissed due to insufficient evidence to convict.”
Terry’s head swam. It wasn’t possible—Laesara would not have given him such a record. She had been sympathetic, had done only what was necessary to keep him from leaving the solar system. It had been made plain that no starship would ever be accessible; why bar him from the sky entirely?
Saying no more, he left the ship and stumbled dizzily back to the hotel, where he managed to reach his room and, in stunned misery, collapse on the bed. He had paid in advance for a second night, which was fortunate because he did not think he could summon the will to leave or even to walk to the lobby. He did not see how he could keep on functioning.
It was worse than before he’d believed he could fly again. At first, the shock of losing everything had virtually paralyzed him; he had done what survival required from mere instinct. He had not let himself think what would happen in the days and years to come. But now, he’d had a plan to salvage at least a little of his former life, to do something that would be tolerable, even though it could in no way compensate for what he could not hope to regain. It was like what he’d read of torture: if the victim was given relief from extreme torment and then faced with a repetition of what he’d been led to believe he’d escaped, he was more likely to crack than if the pressure had been continuous.
Why, why had the Elders done this to him? It served no purpose; it was sheer cruelty, and he had not thought them cruel, unfair though he believed their original decision to be. And he was helpless against it. He was barred not merely from flying, but from labor in the asteroid mines. He would never rise above the lowering overcast that hid even the sun.
The thoughts he had so far kept at bay now overwhelmed him. Promise, his pride in being captain, a position he’d believed would continue for years . . . Maclairn, where he had been happy, where he’d had real contact with people, where friends would soon be mourning him . . . and Kathryn. His grief over separation from Kathryn would not lessen, he knew; from now on he would be only half a person, cut off from the merging of mind and body that had transformed him from the isolated, unfulfilled youth he once had been into a man capable of commitment. His love for her would remain central to him, and because it would, whatever life he might make for himself on Ciencia would be empty. What use was there in even trying to move ahead?
His tears for Kathryn finally came, overwhelming him as he had known they would. Alone in the small, bare hotel room, he clutched the rough-textured bedcover and sobbed uncontrollably until at last he fell into nightmare-ridden sleep.
~ 50 ~
The next day Terry rode the bus back to the city, checked his smartphone for rentals, and chose the cheapest one on the list. It was a mere cubicle with a bed, shower, toilet, and a few small cooking appliances; as it faced a well, there was no view of any kind from its window. Since he was used to living aboard ships with staterooms no larger, this didn’t bother him, and he would not have cared in any case. He dumped his pack on the bed and went out to buy some clothes appropriate for job hunting, spending as little as possible on them.
Never before had he applied for a job—there was no work for teens on Earth and he had entered the Fleet Academy the week after graduating from school. So he was not sure just how to go about it. He looked at job listings, picked the address closest to his room, and held his breath while the receptionist examined his ID, fearing that that his false criminal record might bar him other work as well as from space. As the case had been dismissed and programmers with advanced skills were in demand, it was ignored; he was given an interview, followed by an aptitude test. Programming languages didn’t vary from world to world and Terry was familiar with the current ones, so once his test results had been checked he was hired on the spot. It was work far below his skill level—mere coding—but he was told he would have opportunity to advance.
Advancement was the last thing on his mind, insofar as there was anything on it at all. Days went by one by one; he did not bother to take note of them. He got up and dressed like an automaton, relying on the smartphone to tell him when he woke if it was a weekend. At work, he concentrated on the job he was given and was glad for the routine nature of it; it meant he did not have to think. He didn’t notice the purpose of the computer programs he worked on. They were unrelated to financial accounting—with a theft charge against him, he would obviously not be entrusted with anything like that—and the data they manipulated was meaningless to him.
He paid little attention to his surroundings; the city held nothing of interest to him and its gray roof of sky made it perpetually bleak, so that he was glad to get back to the tiny room that at least approximated the shipboard accommodations he was used to. Nor did he notice the people he encountered, other than to observe that except for those naturally dark-skinned, they were as pallid a white as his own skin had been made—the result of having lived their entire lives without exposure to the sun.
During the evenings, when it was too early for the oblivion of sleep, he read. He had always spent a good deal of his spare time exploring the Net and had read widely on many subjects; now he investigated Ciencia’s history and found that it was indeed a world focused on science. Considering that it got input from offplanet only through the strictly-controlled government ansible, it was remarkably advanced in all technical fields, especially biochemistry. He also noticed that the Net was as heavily censored in other respects as Laesara had said it was. He could find no trace of any reference to religion, spirituality, metaphysics, or mythology, except by scholars who dismissed them as ancient superstitions or cited them as the cause of war and persecution on Earth. Fantasy, too, was banned. And of course there was no information about “pseudo-sciences” such as parapsychology. People born here, he realized, would never have heard of such concepts.
He did not read fiction. Fantasy novels didn’t exist; science fiction, which he had formerly enjoyed, dealt with space and alien worlds, which he couldn’t bear to be reminded of; mainstream fiction included love stories, which he couldn’t endure either since he would never again be able to love. This would have been true even if he were not faithful to Kathryn, he realized; having once experienced full union with a telepathic partner, no telepath could find a lesser form of sex satisfying.
His telepathic ability had not diminished, although there was no one on Ciencia to connect with. Sometimes he was aware that he might sense feelings, but because he was shutting out all feelings including his own, he did not perceive them consciously. Unconscious telepathy was presumably operative here as elsewhere, and Terry recalled that the collective unconscious did not extend from world to world. That, he assumed, was why people tolerated the suppression of all non-scientific ideas. They didn’t draw them from the collective unconscious as they did on Earth because no such ideas had been absorbed into it in the first place. The founders had all been people who weren’t inclined to metaphorical thought.
The weather on Ciencia remained uniformly gloomy. Sometimes it snowed; sometimes it didn’t. The snow melted quickly from the main streets of the city, which had radiant heat cables under the pavement. It was possible to walk to work without the heavy boots he had arrived in, and Terry reluctantly purchased a pair of shoes. By now he had been paid for six weeks of work and had plenty of credits banked; he was not sure what he was saving them for. But his instinct was not to spend any more than he had to.
Terry did not often think of Maclairn; he generally managed to repress all recollection of it. Then one morning he awoke with questions pushing their way into his head. What had they done about the next trip to Earth? The observers had to be taken home and the next mentor couple placed; they couldn’t have abandoned the plan on account of his presumed death. Yet there had been no one aboard Shepard who could pilot a jump ship except senior officers needed where they were. The captain who’d retired was on Maclairn, but Captain Vargas had said a civilian couldn’t be
placed in command over Fleet officers. Had they appointed Drew captain even though he wasn’t a pilot and used the civilian just to calculate the jumps? There wouldn’t have been a spare stateroom; they’d have needed a female captain so that Kathryn could continue to share. They might have sent Shepard’s XO, Dorene Hastings. Or had Kathryn even gone on the next trip? She’d been grief-stricken, and she was pregnant—maybe she had sent the passengers without an escort and asked her aunt to bring out the next group. . . . Oh, God, Terry thought. It wasn’t his job to worry about it anymore, yet here he was speculating about the trip as if he were still captain. As if he could someday be captain again, when that was never going to happen.
Of course Kathryn had gone to Earth! She’d have gone as soon as she could get there, because she wouldn’t have given up hope that he was not dead. She would reason that if he had been captured, not killed, by an intruding ship, he might have escaped on Earth or some other world—and if he had, he would contact Arthur Bramfield. A man as prominent as her grandfather could be reached from anywhere in the galaxy.
And he still could be, Terry thought in despair. If he were free he wouldn’t need to find a way to reach Maclairn; he could merely get in touch with Arthur, and his physical alteration wouldn’t matter because they shared memories through which he could identify himself. The Elders hadn’t known that. They had believed no one but Maclairnans would accept his claims. To be sure, the physical changes would be hard to explain. But Arthur would give him the benefit of the doubt, and send him home.
Terry choked back tears as he came fully awake. He had been dreaming; that was why such a fantastic scenario as this had emerged in his mind. There was no way to reach Arthur Bramfield because there was no possibility of reaching a starship. Laesara said no starships ever came to Ciencia except smugglers.
Smugglers! Terry sat straight up in bed, his heart pounding. Why had he not thought before about the smugglers’ ships? They would hide, of course, from the asteroid miners; they would probably orbit far from Ciencia itself, maybe even around some other planet in the system. Their shuttles would have to land secretly. Where? Would they unload their cargo, take it to the city themselves, or would there be an arrangement for accomplices to pick it up? What were they smuggling, anyway?
That was a puzzle. He knew little about smugglers apart from the fact that Fleet arrested them when possible; but he had always assumed that they smuggled goods into colonies to avoid the tax on imports, or in the case of minerals, the League tax on prospectors’ finds. Unscrupulous Fleet explorers smuggled because legally, what they found on uninhabited planets belonged to Fleet. But there would be no point in smuggling anything to Ciencia, where production of high-tech goods was thriving and which had a surplus of asteroid miners who could get minerals more cheaply by digging than by paying smugglers for them.
He was looking at it backwards, he realized suddenly. Starships would not be bringing illicit cargo to Ciencia—they were smuggling it out, circumventing the ban on starship traffic, and then smuggling it into other colonies where it was heavily taxed, or perhaps even selling it legally. Why then couldn’t they smuggle a person out?
Perhaps the Elders had thought it wouldn’t be worth their while—certainly he could never accumulate enough money to pay for passage. But Arthur Bramfield would pay ransom, just as he would have paid the pirates. It would be sufficiently high to justify any risk a smuggler might incur. . . .
Except that he had no proof that he was related to Bramfield, and no way to contact the smugglers in any case.
As to the proof, all he’d have to do would be convince them to carry a message, and Arthur would pay in advance, for Kathryn’s sake if for no other reason. Contacting them, and getting to a place where their shuttle could pick him up, would be considerably more difficult. But surely, in time, it could be done. It was something to aim for, and so far he hadn’t had an aim. It made all the difference. Now, with grounds for hope, he could begin to live again.
~ 51 ~
Newly interested in the future and tired of reading long texts on a smartphone, Terry invested in a tablet computer. He had had it for only a few days when he made a major discovery.
The reader software, like that on all tablets, allowed words and phrases to be highlighted for reminders. He wasn’t in the habit of doing this, as he was a fast reader and kept the ideas that really mattered to him in memory; it wasn’t as if he were studying for exams. But he did try out all the features of any device he owned, and so when in an ebook on Earth’s history he came across a statement referring in a thought-provoking way to the alleged “nonsense” that had once distracted people from science, he highlighted it—and was suddenly transported to a new screen.
An easter egg! The term was familiar to any programmer, though its origin was lost in the mist of antiquity. He had created some himself in the past, both as a legitimate software developer and as a hacker. The idea was to hide a joke or a picture or a special feature in such a way as to be found by those “in the know” and to surprise anyone else who stumbled upon it by highlighting, clicking or touching some specific content on a screen. Most were intended for innocent entertainment. But in this case, the text that came up was highly illegal on Ciencia and the programmer, if caught, would undoubtedly be subject to arrest.
It contained an excerpt from the classic fantasy novel Fellowship of the Ring.
Fascinated, Terry began highlighting key words on the new page, which brought up other pages filled with forbidden ideas. You had to experiment and get the highlighting just right, sometimes only part of a phrase, other times including adjacent words; and certain combinations would cause a whole chapter to appear. It wasn’t something anyone could do accidentally. And of course, the sentence that had originally led him into it would not be highlighted by a person who wasn’t attracted by the idea it expressed.
So the censored database wasn’t totally censored after all—or rather, material had been added to it after the censoring was done.
He was glad. It had always seemed hard to believe that a world could eliminate all ideas that were deemed unscientific. It was contrary to human nature. Belief in the spiritual and mystical was too universal to be stamped out. So was the enjoyment of myth and fantasy. And it was wrong to suppress knowledge of any kind. He hadn’t given much thought to that while uninterested in what was going on around him, but it was contrary to the basic goal of Maclairn, the full development of human potential—the cause he had pledged to support.
How were people managing to get around it? It was one thing to insert the easter eggs; rebels could certainly do that, and they could spread information about how to find them by word of mouth. But where had they obtained the texts? Some might have been written on Ciencia, but others were familiar to him—works that had existed for centuries on Earth. If these had been deleted from the knowledgebase by Ciencia’s founders, and had not been brought via their personal smartphones and other devices—which according to local history had been checked for contraband—then how had they gotten back in?
Nobody had ever been allowed to immigrate. No information was received except via the government’s ansible, which was tightly controlled; scientific reports and news were released only after clearance by the censors. These restrictions had existed for generations, and there was no way they could have been bypassed—except one. Smugglers. Smugglers must have been bringing literature from their starships when they picked up cargo to be smuggled out. And that meant somebody on Ciencia must have been willing to pay for it.
If this was still going on, then people other than mere profit-seekers must be in contact with the smugglers.
From then on he spent his free hours pursuing the clues scattered throughout the Net and found illegally-added material to be plentiful, though far from comprehensive in terms of what he knew from reading elsewhere. Terry picked a text that already contained some and inserted an easter egg of his own—his long hacking experience made it easy to find the necessary to
ols hidden on the Net and to locate a backdoor. Then he carefully erased all traces of his activity from the tablet’s memory, took it back to the store, and exchanged it for the most powerful model available. If he was going to learn who was behind the illicit expansion of the knowledgebase, he would need to use all his computer skills.
It soon became apparent that quite a few people were involved, most of them only as readers. It was like the samizdat system that had existed centuries ago on Earth, whereby dissidents in totalitarian nations had circulated hand-written copies of forbidden texts. There were routes through the maze of surreptitious links through which participants communicated with each other, commenting obliquely on what others had said. Cautiously, Terry began to do this, hoping to uncover some clue as to the source of the material but aware that he would not be trusted with such information until he had posted enough remarks to incriminate him if he was caught.
Ciencia’s Net had no link to the outside apart from the government ansible; reception from ships was not fed into it. If some of these texts were coming from smugglers, they had to be physically carried on an electronic device of some kind, or perhaps a mere chip. That meant a shuttle had to bring it down and turn it over to a courier. But he had yet to figure out where the smugglers’ shuttles landed. There had been sporadic landings at the spaceport all the time he’d been there; it didn’t seem it would ever be deserted enough for an unidentified ship to pick up a load and lift off again without being noticed, even supposing that it got past the local satellite sensor ring. And it couldn’t—the government police were continuously on the alert and would intercept any ship that approached without authorization.
Then one evening, shortly after he posted a comment on the theories of twentieth-century psychoanalyst Carl Jung—whose works were on the forbidden list—there was a knock at his door. Terry had never before had a visitor; he knew no one on Ciencia except his co-workers, who were interested in little beyond sports scores and with whom, as with his Titan crewmates in the old days, he was not inclined to socialize. He was sure he had never met this man, who was middle-aged but fit and handsome, with silver-streaked dark hair. Nevertheless, he felt immediately that he was to be trusted.
The Rising Flame: Box Set: Defender of the Flame + Herald of the Flame Page 31