The Sunspacers Trilogy

by George Zebrowski

  Mike drove straight down the center and pulled into Barracks A. The place seemed deserted.

  “We’ve just put this group up,” he explained. “Another team will be coming in by end of next week, just before we get going.”

  “What are your specialties?” Lissa asked.

  “Oh, I do physics and chemistry.”

  “He helped design the tachyon receiver,” Dr. Shastri said. “And he contributed a lot to the negative-g propulsion system that is going to move us to the outer solar system.”

  Mike smiled at Lissa. “Neither gadget has proven itself yet, so don’t be too impressed.”

  “We won’t, for now,” Susan said.

  “Your rooms are over in that building,” he said after a moment.

  “We get rooms?” Susan asked.

  “Well, small ones. These are luxury barracks. The pecking order around here goes up from maintenance engineer to student apprentice to big brains. So you’re in the middle.”

  Dr. Shastri chuckled. “We have to go, Mike. Therefore, young ladies, please go inside and get settled.”

  Lissa took her shoulder bag and got out of the vehicle. Susan followed her, and together they walked up to the barracks, climbed three steps, and went in through the open door. Susan turned and watched Mike drive away with Dr. Shastri.

  “He’s very cute,” she said, “but with my luck he already has someone.”

  “Don’t be in such a rush, Lissa said, thinking of Alek as she went down the hallway. Her name was on the third door in.

  “See you later!” Susan called.

  Lissa slid the door open and stepped inside. The room was cube shaped with a large window. There were a bunk, desk, built-in closet, and small bath-toilet behind another sliding door. Everything was made out of light-and dark brown ceramic, suggesting wood but hard to the touch.

  She dropped her bag down on the bunk and opened the large window, wondering whether she would need the overhead light during the day in such a sunny room. She took a deep breath, grateful for the freshness after the confinement of Harry Lipsky’s tug.

  She sat down at the desk and touched her palm to the ID plate. The upright screen lit up:

  WELCOME, LISSA. DO YOU STILL WISH TO USE WORD DISPLAY, OR WOULD YOU NOW PREFER A VOICE?

  —AUGIE

  She laughed. Of course, Augie could be transferred quite easily. She typed:

  DISPLAY WORDS WILL STILL BE FINE. I’M GLAD YOU’RE HERE, AUGIE.

  THANKS.

  On the second day after their arrival, Dr. Shastri took Lissa and Susan on a tour of the engineering and research level. This was a maze of tunnels, low ceilinged rooms, meeting rooms, and control areas below the green land. Here the main work of the scientific community was conducted. The open space of the hollow, with its sky and greenery, was the living area and the place to get away from the high-pressure environment of work. The green hollow made it psychologically possible for the asteroid’s community to exist so far away from the homes of its members. Whenever the controlled work environments grew tiresome and constricting, one could travel inward to daylight and grass.

  Lissa saw the preparations going on for the asteroid’s departure, and she was impressed by the seriousness of the scientific and technical workers. This was no longer merely a listening project for the study of a curious alien communication. The fate of all Sunspace might one day depend on decisions that were now being made. As Dr. Shastri showed them around, Lissa became increasingly committed to being there.

  “This is the control room for the tachyon detector,” Dr. Shastri said as they came into a large theater filled with screens, measuring equipment, and seats for observers. A thrill passed through Lissa as she imagined what would one day happen here. “You saw the core container on the outside when we docked,” Dr. Shastri continued. “That container holds a small black hole in a powerful magnetic field. If a tachyon particle enters and is captured by the black hole, the entire field will jiggle, and the event will register on various detectors. We also throw some waste material into the hole, and that generates some usable electricity. Not much yet, but it works in principle. We still depend on our matter-antimatter reactor, the backup inertial fusion container, and solar collectors for most of what we need.”

  “When will the detector be ready?” Lissa asked.

  “Long after we’re on our way, I’m afraid. We’re having problems with spurious signals. Mike says it’s a matter of setting our instruments to register only tachyon reception. That’s easier said than done, because we must be able to predict the kind of ripple we can expect when a tachyon collides with our mini-black hole.”

  Later, Dr. Shastri showed them the control area for the negative-gravity generator. “We’ve been using negative-g catapults to launch ships from planetary surfaces for some two decades now, but this will be the first time a continuous negative-g force will be used to push an object of this size. It works in smaller prototype vehicles, but the power requirement is still massive. Of course, we’ll still have our torch engines as a backup, in case something goes wrong. We can’t take any chance of getting stranded out there.”

  “But an asteroid this size can carry enough simple fusion-power generating capacity to feed the negative-g pusher,” Lissa said.

  “True. And torchships are as good as we need to get around the solar system at this point in history. But the negative-g pusher is so elegant. It creates no problem for centrifugal spin, so we’ll have unperturbed g spin to walk around in and forward motion without the g-force limitations that a human body places on a torchship.” Dr. Shastri’s eyes sparkled. “Mike says a hundred-g equivalent will be possible, and we won’t feel it—assuming, of course, that we can generate the power needed to run the pusher.”

  “We’ll get where we want to go fast,” Lissa said. “And we’ll need it.”

  Dr. Shastri looked at her appreciatively. “It’s taken decades to build up this facility, and it will have many uses. We may have to go out as far as a hundred astronomical units beyond the orbit of Pluto to find the source of the signal. But we’ll be very comfortable, and safe.”

  “It occurs to me,” Susan said as Mike came into the control area, “that this asteroid could take us out to the nearer stars in reasonable relativistic time—”

  “Dr. Shastri,” Mike interrupted, “the last cargo ship is on its way from Mars. All the final personnel are aboard. I thought you’d like to know. They’ll be here tomorrow.”

  “Good, good,” Dr. Shastri replied. “It’s all coming together at last.” Lissa watched as he turned back to Susan. “The nearer stars, you were saying. Of course, of course, why not? That day will come.”

  That evening, a few minutes after she had fallen asleep, Lissa awoke suddenly, realizing that when the asteroid left its Sun orbit she would be moving even farther away from Alek than she had expected. It might be years before she saw him again, if ever. He would meet someone else, or she would; the older feelings would fade, and she would wonder what she had ever seen in him. She knew that could happen by how easily she had put him out of her mind during the journey out here; and she had forgotten him completely during Dr. Shastri’s guided tour.

  No, she thought as she got up to write Alek a letter. It might have to be read by others and would take some time to reach him, but it would confirm how she felt one more time.

  |Go to Table of Contents |

  14

  A siren wailed in the hollow.

  Lissa got up from her studies and went outside. Susan was sitting on the barracks stairs. Windows opened throughout the complex of twelve buildings, and faces peered out. Many of the off-duty maintenance workers and engineers were out in the fields, standing and sitting down as they waited.

  “This is it, I think,” Susan said.

  An amplified male voice spoke:

  “WE ARE ABOUT TO PUT INTO DRIVE. PLEASE FIND A SECURE PLACE IN CASE SOMETHING GOES WRONG

  “Nothing will go wrong,” Susan said. “The physics is per
fect.”

  Lissa sat down and closed her hand around the edge of the ceramic stair. The sun at the far end of the worldlet flickered slightly, but there was no other sign of anything happening. If the drive worked perfectly, there would be nothing to feel.

  “WE ARE MOVING!” the voice boomed. Lissa tensed. There was no going back now. There were a few cheers from the windows. Lissa looked at Susan and smiled.

  “Well,” her friend said, “we have a lot of studying to do before we get where we’re going, and the whole idea is to have fresh, trained minds to interpret whatever we find.” She got up and went inside, Windows closed, and the groups of people out in the tall grass began to break up. Everyone had pretty much expected the drive to work.

  Lissa sat and looked at the landscape. The lack of any trees in the tall grass made it seem as if someone had peeled off some prairie and pasted it around the inside of the hollow like a rug. There was no wildlife, except for some earthworms. More would be done with the hollow’s ecology someday, but for now it was only a camping place for people who worked under the land. Suddenly, the barracks and dirt roads looked shabby to her. It was all comfortable enough, but it was not Bernal One, with its sophisticated urban elegance, or Earth, with its awesome beauty and haunting sense of history.

  Her father’s last screen letter had told her that the experience of this journey would teach her a lot; but he didn’t know what was really going on, or that all humanity might be in danger.I’m just slightly homesick , she told herself.

  “It is a dangerous journey,” Dr. Shastri had said when she had asked him about possible dangers to the asteroid. “But our advantage is that we’re housed in a large structure, and that with its new drive we can make the trip quickly.”

  “What if the drive fails?”

  “We have the torch cluster as backup, and we could even build a mass driver track if we had to. Those two methods would get us back to inner Sunspace very slowly, but we would get back. We’ve taken a lot of trouble to be able to carry so many trained people such a distance and back in such comfort. We want them to have no worries except their work. I don’t think we’ll have much to worry about with our equipment. It’s the unknown, the things no one can foresee, that may pose dangers.”

  She had known everything Dr. Shastri would say. For much of the journey she would have nothing to do but continue with her studies and familiarize herself with theories about the structure of the outer solar system. The asteroid could stay out there indefinitely, she told herself, for years if it had to. There wasn’t much to worry about. Dr. Shastri had stressed the importance of the students to the expedition. Their minds would provide the least-conditioned reactions to the alien artifacts that might be found, and their fresh approaches might make all the difference. Their entire scientific careers would be shaped by what they did on this expedition.

  Lissa and Susan had attended various meetings and listened to older teams discussing the problems that might be encountered. There were only four other students on the asteroid, two boys and two girls, but Lissa and Susan rarely saw them, since they lived in one of the overhead barracks complexes. Their own building housed a dozen physicists, men and women who got up early and came back very late. Occasionally one of the women would say hello, but most of the time Lissa and Susan were left alone.

  Lissa took a deep breath and looked around at her new, still unformed world, feeling sympathy for its in-between condition. But there had been a time, she reminded herself, when Bernal One had been a complete blank on its inner surface, long before she had been born, before her father had arrived there. Everything begins shapeless and unaware, but already there was a sun here, greenery, and fresh air; and it was the same with her—she was already something, trembling on the edges of becoming more, despite her unhappy restlessness.

  Maybe a walk would help. She could circle the inner world in less than two hours. She got up and went down the dirt road toward the watercolor sun. But after a few minutes she began to think again about why Dr. Shastri had chosen her for the expedition. All her ideas to date had been put forward by other people. What did it matter that she had been thinking along similar lines? What did Dr. Shastri expect her to accomplish? She told herself again that he was thinking of the future, that older researchers had once been young, but she still felt unconvinced. Dr. Shastri didn’t know for sure what she might be able to do, and she didn’t know either. Maybe it would be nothing at all, and she would disappoint everyone as well as herself.

  The dusty road in front of her seemed to run straight into the sun. The light was warm on her face, but unlike that of the real Sun, it would not burn her skin or eyes; it was a tamed sun, a light plate, for human use only. She quickened her pace, feeling the gritty dirt crunch under her boots. She looked around, telling herself that she was lucky to be here, that there was no reason at all to feel lost and alone, not even Alek’s absence. Everything mattered and nothing mattered. He had put a spell on her, made her sick inside, and it was getting worse after she had thought it had gone away. Alek’s parting words had helped for a while only, and now she hovered on the edge of dismay. He should have been here, walking beside her, smiling and being himself, squeezing her shoulders, joking and brushing her cheeks with his lips… he should have been here!

  She felt ashamed. There was something terribly wrong with the whole idea of love. It got in its own way, bringing pain and even greater obstacles. Human beings got together to be happy, to bring in the next generation and guide it to maturity because they themselves couldn’t live forever; but it seemed too complicated, too roundabout, to feel love and pleasure, to be rewarded and denied, to dream of other things and then be stricken with needs that were just waiting to spoil everything…

  She looked at the timer on her wrist and saw that she had been walking for nearly an hour. She kept on and came to a high metal fence, where she stopped and looked out over the canyon at this end of the world. The sun plate stood on the other side, doing its job without a thought of pain or doubt.

  She turned right and walked along the fence, running her palm across the metal weave. Listening to her own thoughts had made her jumpy, and the walk had not calmed her down.

  The road veered away from the fence and headed back across the length of the asteroid toward another block of barracks. She realized that she was walking toward a complex that would be at a right angle to her own barracks; but as long as her feet stayed on the ground and her head pointed toward the empty space, the land directly ahead would seem level, curving away left and right, and closing above her head. And this worldlet, she reminded herself, was moving toward the outer solar system, slowly building up an awesome velocity. The asteroid’s path would resemble a very flat parabola, tending toward a straight line; and somewhere beyond the Orbit of Pluto, the worldlet might slip into a wide orbit around a dark body, a dead world of planetary size, and the search for the source of the alien signal would reach its final moments…

  Ahead, among the buildings she was approaching, people were still doing some construction, molding ceramic materials into building components and fitting them together. She stopped and looked around the hollow. Barracks clusters now stood in every quadrant. The group she was approaching was the last to be completed; it would house the most recent arrivals, They had come in the last hours before the drive had been switched on, and had gone immediately to prepare their quarters.

  She drew closer, wondering if Alek thought about her as often as she did about him. Maybe he had already forgotten her.I’m so green , she thought suddenly. It didn’t seem right when viewed from the outside, but it felt right from the inside no matter what she told herself; deep down, her feelings for Alek seemed strong and immovable. He was alive inside her. Images of him changed and spoke to her. She listened and watched within herself, tingling at times, yearning, reaching out toward him. It seemed that she might be able to steal into his mind and surprise him; but she always fell back into herself, dismayed by the distance between them.


  Power tools hummed as she came along the road. Buildings in various stages of completion stood at her left and right. Men and women in helmets and goggles were heating sections together with white-hot probes.

  Did growing up mean becoming emotionally dependent on a person who had once been a stranger? She had needed her parents, but they had chosen to have her; parents had to raise their kids, make them strong enough to go on their own. But Alek was someone she had found, a stranger who now held her feelings by long strings, pulling her toward him all the time despite what he had said; and part of her was glad the strings were there, attached to the mushy, weak parts of her that she didn’t understand…

  She stopped and watched the construction. There was a worker kneeling on the roof of one barrack. He wore no shirt. She took a few steps closer. He stood up. The sweat glistened on him as he turned around, and she saw that it was Alek.

  |Go to Table of Contents |

  15

  Lissa’s feelings raced.

  He hadn’t noticed her yet. She probably looked very different in her blue coveralls and boots. She wanted to shout to him, but held back. What was he doing here? If he had taken the work to be with her, then why hadn’t he come to see her upon arrival? He might have called or sent a message easily. Suddenly she had the feeling that he might be embarrassed by her seeing him like this.

  Slowly, she turned away, hoping that he wouldn’t see her.

  “Lissa!” he shouted before she had gone ten paces.

  She stopped, confused by her own feelings and the tone of his voice. He sounded harsh, and suddenly she didn’t want to see him, but she turned around in time to watch him leap down from the roof of the single story structure. He landed unsteadily on his feet, then fell on his hands in front of her.