The Sunspacers Trilogy

by George Zebrowski

  “Jake isn’t what you think he is,” she had said. “He’s a brilliant astrophysics student. A bit older than us, but he got a late start. He works to pay for school. His math has appeared in the journals.” I didn’t like the way she had rolled her eyes.

  Morey was in a hurry to leave as the class ended. “Are you coming?”

  I motioned for him to go without me. We were being polite to each other, but it wasn’t the same. I didn’t like the idea that anyone might know more about me than I did.

  I saw Rosalie Allport coming up the aisle as the hall emptied. On impulse, I stood up and approached her.

  “Hello, I’m Joe Sorby.”

  She stopped and smiled. “Yes, I know, you’re in my other classes also.”

  “Could we go out sometime? I’ve wanted to ask.”

  She grimaced. “There’s just no time. I have to study and help out in my father’s bookstore in town. Sorry.”

  “Can I come see you there?”

  “I can’t stop you, but I’ll still be busy.”

  She went past me, leaving me alone in the empty hall.

  I went back to the dorm and sat at my desk, determined to study.

  The phone rang.

  I opened the line. “Hello, son,” Dad’s face said after the delay.

  “Oh, hello.” The screen flickered.

  “You’re probably very busy, but I wanted to ask if you’re coming home for intersession.”

  “Sure!” Suddenly I wanted to escape for a little while into my earlier life, where I had not doubted the future, just to get back my sense of direction. Then I saw the pained took on Dad’s face. “What’s wrong?”

  I waited.

  “It’s just that I’m taking a leave of absence from work. Everything’s going into storage and I’m moving out of the apartment. I’m not sure where I’ll be, so I called to tell you not to come.”

  “I’ll visit Mom, then.” One, two, three.

  “Uh, actually she’s looking for work herself and won’t have time.”

  “Oh. When will you have a new address?” The thought of never seeing that apartment again made me feel panicky. I was being eased out on my own, and it felt spooky.

  “Don’t know. I’ll be traveling.”

  “Will you see Mom?”

  “I’m sure going to try, son.”

  My room would no longer be there. “But where will you live when you come back to work?” It would all belong to someone else.

  “The institute will find me a smaller place, if that’s what I need then.”

  “I understand,” I said softly, my stomach drifting around inside me as the seconds dragged on.

  “Can you stay there during the break?”

  “Sure, no problem.” I wanted to tell him that it would be a big hassle, just to see what he would do.

  “You’re sure, Joe?”

  I nodded.

  He looked relieved finally. “I have to remind myself how fast you’re growing up and can take care of yourself.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said, and waited. He hadn’t meant to be cruel, asking me if I planned to come home, just thoughtless maybe. I felt angry and miserable.

  “I’d better sign off and let you work.”

  For what? The past was gone and my future was ready to crumble. I was nowhere.

  “So long,” I managed to say, waiting for him to hang up.

  The screen winked off. My face stared back at me from the shiny surface. I looked away, drained. My bed looked inviting.

  I lay down and let the cotton into my brain, hoping that I would collapse into a small black hole and disappear.

  The Sun was hot on my back, and my arms were tiring as I swam toward the rock. The noise of the crowd on the crescent of white beach behind me was muted by the surf.

  Foam washed over the green seaweed clinging to the stone. The girl sat up and looked at me as I stood up awkwardly on the jagged rocks. I climbed up and sat down next to her.

  She smiled. Her breasts were full, her hips round over a bright-blue bikini; drops of water and grains of sand shared the tangle of her black hair. I smelled beer on her breath.

  She stirred as if from a trance, stood up, and dived into the sea, just missing the sharp rocks. I admired her tanned muscles as she pulled toward shore, her long hair floating behind her.

  A stocky man waded in and pulled her free of the breakers. She held his arm as they climbed a high dune.

  I cried out to her and opened my eyes to the ceiling.

  I’d had the dream a few times after the meeting on the rock, but that had been when I was fourteen; yet here it was again, as haunting and full of loss as ever. Would things have been different with Marisa, or if my parents had been happier? Or would the problems have been the same, but with different details?

  I still had half the afternoon, so I hiked across the campus toward town. I stopped midway on the bridge and gazed down into the river. A lonely, faceless shape stared up at me from over a shadow railing.

  The river curved down gently from the lake. Ducks congregated in the shallows, looking for food. A slight breeze made me shiver. I went across and entered Riverbend.

  Three good-sized towns sit inside Bernal. Riverbend is the closest to the university, so named because the stream bends here as it comes out of the lake. Windy is near the south pole; in spite of its name, the air currents there are very mild. Skytown is directly opposite Riverbend across the sphere, so they’re actually up in each other’s skies. Riverbend is a large circle of comfortably spaced modular buildings, mostly one and two floors. Streets are laid out in tangents, making a pattern of multicolored structures and white-paved ways. Skytown is a big triangle, Windy a square. Riverbend looks like circles and squares within each other.

  A trolley passed me as I came off the bridge and walked by the Sunspace Hotel. A few guests were lounging in chairs by the river. I wondered if any of these men and women were part of the delicate negotiations about Mercury, which had just begun at the hotel.

  I went by the First Bank of Bernal, a small one-floor box of glass and brick that housed the credit terminals, and continued up Main Street, past the drugstore, a clothes outlet, and a deli. Arthur’s Hart, a bar and sandwich shop, stood on the next corner, next to the only bookstore on Bernal.

  I whirled through the archaic revolving door and stopped just inside a giant cube with book-covered walls. There was a catwalk halfway up to the ceiling. Ladders and footstools waited conveniently, but I saw no customers.

  I looked up and saw Rosalie coming around the cat walk.

  “Are all these books real?” I asked.

  She leaned over the rail and smiled. “What are you doing here?”

  I shrugged. “Come to see you, I guess.”

  She frowned and started down the ladder. I watched her, noticing again how pretty she was. She stepped down gracefully and turned to face me. I wanted to kiss her.

  She seemed embarrassed by my attention. I looked around at the books.

  “Most of them are copies,” she said impatiently, “but we can fax any volume in any language ever published.”

  “Ever?”

  “If Earth has copies in memory storage, with a plan of the original binding, or if someone somewhere has an actual copy we can examine. At the beginning, you must have a physical copy to reproduce. Searching out books that were not stored is quite a job.”

  “I can dial up anything really important on my screen.”

  She knew I was baiting her, but she remained serious. “A lot of people still want the actual book, especially an exact copy of the original edition, which may no longer exist. You’d be surprised how few books have survived from the last two centuries. We can even reproduce the antique smell of the original volume.”

  “How’s that?”

  “We call up the pages, run them on the same kind of paper and bind downstairs, as many as needed. Printing is nothing, the style of printing and binding everything. And our copies last forever. No acid
yellowing or crumbling of paper.”

  “You do it by hand?”

  “Of course not. But the machines do need programming for accuracy, and that takes a good eye.”

  “You don’t sell many,” I said.

  “More than you might guess. But they’re too much to store, so many people have brought books back when they couldn’t keep them. They make good display. We do have steady customers. Some people really hook on collecting, once they realize that they can have almost anything.”

  “That’s dumb. How many times will a book be opened after it’s been read? You can always get it again from a memory bank. It’s more efficient.”

  She shrugged. “You don’t understand collecting. There’s a man in Windy who had us run off a set of Ace Double Science Fiction paperbacks from the middle of the last century. He won’t stop until he has all science fiction to 2001.”

  “Want to have a late lunch?” I asked politely.

  She smiled. “I go to Arthur’s next door.” I was staring into her clear brown eyes. She seemed bustier than I remembered. She was wearing a sheer white blouse and gray slacks. The skin on her neck seemed very soft.

  “Well, are we going?” she asked.

  Arthur’s Hart was empty, except for two older people down at the far end of the bar. We sat down at a corner table.

  “Two beers and ham clubs,” Rosalie said as the bartender noticed us. “Is that okay, Joe?”

  I nodded and she punched in the order on the bright call board in the center of the table. “You like the store?” she asked.

  “It’s great,” I said.

  “Dad’s hobby, really, but he doesn’t get much time from his job as biblioprogrammer at the university, so I try to help. He locates books through the terminal links with Earth. He’s always looking for books to redo for his idea of an ultimate library—the most important books from every age. He doesn’t think there should be more than about a thousand volumes. He’s always weeding and replacing.”

  “I’d rather read than own books.”

  The roller brought our food. We removed the plates, and it scooted away. I swallowed some beer and took a bite of sandwich.

  “Dad once took a trip to Earth to buy a few actual first editions. He says if there’s ever a war on Earth, computer memories might be wiped, so there should be physical libraries somewhere, as a hedge.”

  “We’ll never have wars again,” I said.

  “I’m not so sure.”

  “Earth is too well off.”

  “Natural disasters can threaten memory banks. Some physical books will always survive.” She glanced at the timer over the bar. “Can we have news?” she called. The bartender nodded.

  The wall at the end of the long room grew hazy. A holo of New York appeared.

  “My hometown,” I said pompously, hating my voice.

  “Really?” She smiled.

  The caster appeared against the skyline. “Good afternoon. I’m Keith Lamas in New York. With thirty lives lost in the newest quakes on Mercury, the miners have called a strike, cutting off all heavy-metal boosts to Earth Orbit until a date is set for the construction of an orbital habitat around Mercury. The surface of the planet, they claim, is too dangerous for them and their families, and will become even more hazardous if mining operations are expanded in efforts to tap the planet’s metal-rich core with nuclear explosives …”

  “Couldn’t they build their own?” I asked. “They have the energy and resources to build a thousand habitats.”

  “It’s not that easy, Joe.” She seemed disappointed by my comment, as if she wanted to like me but I had made it harder. “They don’t have the time or the work force of specialists to do it quickly enough, without waiting a decade to move in. The habitat would have been ready by now if Earth had kept its promise back when.”

  “How many people would it take?”

  “To do it quickly—maybe five thousand skilled workers and tons of machinery. I’d volunteer.”

  “The Asteroid Belt has repeated its support for Mercury’s demands,” Lamas continued, with a shot of Mercury and the Sun at his back, “even as negotiations have broken down at L-5. The other Sunspace Settlements are expected to follow suit.…”

  “That’s us,” Rosalie said.

  “Earth won’t go to war,” I said.

  She laughed. “Earth is too dependent.” She sipped her beer. “It will have to give in if Mars, Luna, the Asteroids, and the Sunspace Settlements all support Mercury.”

  I didn’t like accepting Earth as the villain, even though it probably deserved it. So I took the other side, just to see what Rosalie would say. “What can they do?” I asked. “Go to war? Everyone would lose.”

  She touched my hand, as if I were a hopeless dunce. “Joe, the truth is that Earth takes a lot from the rest of the Solar System and doesn’t keep its promises. Not because it’s entirely mean, but because it’s easier. Earth doesn’t want to know how people live elsewhere, as long as it doesn’t have to tear up its own environment, as long as it gets its metals, electronics, power, from the satellite grid—especially the biotechnology that keeps the old politicians alive. The off-planet death rates are incredible for an age when people can theoretically live forever.”

  “People die on Earth too,” I said feebly. “You can’t blame every accident on Earth.”

  She bit her lower lip and stared at me. “Accidents are one thing. Sunspacers are willing to take risks, but not to throw away their lives!”

  I’d never seen people get hurt or die. It bothered me that it was happening somewhere, needlessly, while others gained by it. People on Earth lived decent lives because of what the Sunspacers had accomplished. If the sky frontier had not been opened, Earth might now be living a double life—islands of prosperity would exist in a sea of famine and human die-off. What kind of people would be living on the islands of prosperity? I had grown up believing that such things no longer happened. I’d heard about it, but always with the idea that it was about to be taken care of. But the open wounds were still with us, and I felt my anger getting ready to break out.

  “But what can we do about it?” I asked, echoing Morey.

  The news was ending:

  “…and the last slugs of refined ores will reach Earth orbit in three months. There will be no more if the miners stop the flow. This is Keith—”

  The bartender turned off the holo.

  We finished our lunch uneasily.

  What can Bernal do?” I asked.

  I could see that she wanted to answer me carefully. “The town councils will support the miners, of course, but we can do much more—refusing to service the powerstat beamers in Near Earth Orbit, for one thing, or to run the ore tugs that guide the slugs coming in from Merk, so even the ore still on the way would be useless to Earth. The thirty communities of L-4 and 5 are a whole country. Space travel would stop without us. Earth would be quarantined. We could seize any ship coming up into Earth Orbit. Earth will give in for the biotechnology alone. Its whole medical system depends on substances manufactured in zero-g. A lot of powerful lives would end, just when they thought they might live forever.”

  “It would be murderous to cut off a world like that,” I said.

  “Murderous! Look at Earth’s history of killing. Millions of species died out before 2000. A good portion of the planet was returning to desert by then. The planet is still heating up from all the atmospheric pollution. Do you know how many people died of starvation, how many failed to reach their normal body weight and intelligence for lack of food?”

  “You don’t like Earth much,” I said.

  She stared at me without blinking. “That’s not the point, Joe. Earth is still doing it. Those miners have been asking for a decent place to live for more than twenty years now.”

  “I know.”

  “Keep it down,” the bartender said.

  “Itwas promised,” she continued more softly. “The Sunspacers saved Earth’s ass at the turn of the century—with ener
gy, the industrial work that couldn’t be done on the planet, with resources and medicines. And do you know what people still think? Thatthey did it, and that convicts don’t deserve better anyway.”

  “Well, we’re all human beings …” I was about to say from Earth. “So what’s holding things up?”

  “Our reps are still a minority on Earth, but UN Earth Authority will approve the Mercury project, no matter what it costs, or risk a major break between Earth and offworlders.”

  “Didn’t sound like it on the news.”

  “The threat of the strike will push things right. Haven’t you seen the holos of Mercury, the conditions in those underground hovels? Where have you been?”

  “I’ve seen them. But what can I do personally?”

  “Do you really want to know?”

  We were silent.

  “I know what’s right,” I said finally, not wanting to seem uncaring.

  “Sorry, Joe, I didn’t mean to shout.”

  We got up and walked over to the register, where she punched in her payment. “This is on me,” she said.

  We came outside. “I’ve got to get back to the store,” she said. Her eyes searched my face for a moment.

  “Can I call you sometime?” I asked. She touched my face gently. “Sure.” Then she turned and went into the bookstore.

  The river was turning a deeper blue as I walked back across the bridge. I felt that I was exactly what Rosalie had taken me to be—an overprotected kid from Earth, an only child let loose reluctantly by a jealous planet. I tried not to think as I looked around in the fading light, surprised again by my own existence. I was a traveler with no memory, newly arrived in a world where everyone seemed to know more than I did. No wonder I didn’t know what I wanted. I was growing up, moving from past to future, so how could I be expected to see ahead? I was still too close to the beginning.

  Bernal’s inlay of greenery darkened. Lights blinked on in buildings and shot down roadways as I hurried back to the dorm. It seemed that the worlds could solve their problems, if they wanted to; and so would I, once I decided what was important to me. Adults are degenerated children, Morey liked to say. Spooked by fear and doubt, they lose the imaginative flexibility of their youth and freeze up, hanging on to what they have, unable to decide new things. Was that happening to me, before I’d had a chance to grow up?