The Sunspacers Trilogy

by George Zebrowski

  “Are you hurt?” she asked as he looked up at her with a dirty face.

  “No,” he said. “I should have realized that a small place like this would have a noticeable coriolis effect.”

  “Didn’t they warn you that if you jump you might not come down where you planned?” she asked sternly.

  “Yeah, they did,” he said, getting up and brushing dirt from his jeans.

  She was looking at his face, but he avoided her eyes.

  “Hello,” she said awkwardly.

  He looked at her finally. “Hello. I guess you distracted me. I’ve made that jump before with perfect counterbalance.” He smelled sweaty and his hands were dirty. “Dr. Shastri got me this job,” he went on. “It’s not anything like yours, but I like it well enough, and there may be other opportunities.”

  “I’m not doing much,” she said softly, feeling a bit guilty.

  “But you will.”

  She smiled. He smiled back.

  “Come see me later?” she asked, feeling strange.

  He nodded. “Sure, soon as they let me free for the day. I’d better get back, or I won’t have a place to live.” He turned away and climbed the ladder carefully.

  Lissa started back toward her quarters, cutting across the tall grass instead of following the road. Once she looked back and saw Alek watching her from the roof. She waved, and he waved back. His barracks complex seemed to be at the top of a rise now, due to the inward curve of the asteroid.

  Suddenly she had the feeling that she was being managed by Dr. Shastri. Alek was here to keep her happy, so that she would study and work. She wondered if that meant that Dr. Shastri thought little of Alek, and anyone else might have done just as well, as long as she was interested in him.

  Alek was still looking at her. Neither of them had moved. He held up his hands in a questioning gesture. She waved again and turned away.

  That evening, as she waited for Alek to come by, she sat at her desk worrying again about what Dr. Shastri expected of her. Because if he had gone to so much trouble to keep her happy, then he must be expecting something special, she told herself. The possibility of accomplishment excited and depressed her at the same time.

  There was a knock on her door.

  “Come in,” she said as faint laughter exploded from one of the nearby rooms, reminding her again that the sound insulation was not perfect in these barracks. It sounded like Susan again.

  The panel slid aside after a moment. Alek came in, closing the door behind him. As he turned to face her, she noticed he had washed and put on fresh coveralls.

  He smiled. “Hello, Lissa,” he said shyly, almost as if he were afraid of her.

  She turned her chair and sat back as he went over and sat down on the corner of her bunk.

  “So how have you been?” he asked.

  “Okay, I guess. You sent no messages.”

  “I know.” He looked at her. “Lissa, what is it? Aren’t you glad to see me?”

  “You signed up for this only because of me, didn’t you?” She suddenly wanted him to say yes, and another part of her wanted him to say no.

  “Well, not entirely. They needed craftsman trainees, and if I was willing, Dr. Shastri said, then I would be preferable to candidates from outside the Institute.”

  Lissa’s pulse quickened in disbelief. “Don’t you see?” she demanded. “He let you come because of me!”

  “I thought of that, but who cares? Ican do the work, Lissa. Don’t you want me here?”

  She shook her head. “It’s not that … It’s, well, I think it lowers you. You should be doing something else.”

  He took a deep breath and stared at the floor. “Like what? Working for my father’s firm? I don’t know why this is a problem for you. I accepted Dr. Shastri’s offer, not you. I like what I’m doing. Besides, there’s a chance—”

  “Do you, really?” She looked at him with surprise.

  He stood up suddenly. “You know, I may have misjudged you. You’re just a snob, that’s all.” There was a bitter, sarcastic tone in his voice that made her afraid of him. She looked up at him and shook her head in denial, opening her mouth to say no and that she loved him, but her throat tightened and she couldn’t. “I guess we just didn’t know each other very well,” he said sadly.

  “No,” she managed to say as she stood up.

  “Oh, yes,” he replied firmly. “I’m here for myself. The pay is very good, the experience is interesting, and I’m looking forward to what I can learn, no matter how small my contribution. So you go about your business and I’ll go about mine.”

  “Alek,” she started to say as he went to the door, opened it, and was gone. She stood there, unable to go after him, unable to feel what she thought she should feel. Maybe it was better to be free of him, she thought coldly as the faint sound of laughter crept again through the walls.

  It seemed strange to her, in the following weeks, that she was able to continue with her studies so easily and with so much interest. The fact that Alek was nearby, and probably doing what he wanted, quieted her doubts and enabled her to work. She continued her routine degree work and tried to keep up with the progress of the tachyon engineers and the signal deciphers. Much of what was going on was still beyond her technical skills, but Augie broke it down into simple English: The transmitter was far from being ready, and the decipherers were now putting major effort into extracting pictures from the alien signal. Pictures were probably the sign language of interstellar communication, and might one day make it possible to build up a common language with the alien senders. But the number of pictures that were being fished out of the signal were few and far between. The one clear series, suggesting danger from the Oort Cloud, seemed to be the only real information that the senders cared to have understood.

  As she followed the work of the advanced teams that were working on the signal and the transmitter, Lissa began to understand how minor a part of the expedition were the students. She could witness what was going on, learning what she could as a supplement to her basic studies, but her own work lay in the future. Charles Darwin had voyaged on theBeagle , studying the life of Earth; but his real work had come much later. No great honor would have been attached to his presence on the ship if he had not organized his experience after his return to England. By giving them this experience, Dr. Shastri was betting on the future work of his students. But breaking through to a vision of her own individual work seemed as elusive as deciphering the full meaning of the dancing signal.

  Occasionally, she saw Alek from a distance, walking with a crew on its way to a job somewhere on the inner surface. Once she saw him in the hallway of her barracks, checking an electrical line, but he didn’t see her as she ducked into Susan’s room. She woke up one night saying his name aloud, thinking that he was beside her.

  The spinning asteroid moved outward, ever outward, a rock hurled away from the Sun. The matter-antimatter reactor worked efficiently, providing the immense flow of power needed for the negative-g pusher. Lissa found herself looking outward mentally, to the darkness of outer Sunspace.

  “You don’t ever mention him,” Susan said to her one day as they ate lunch in the cafeteria on the engineering level.

  “There’s nothing to say,” Lissa answered, sipping a glass of milk.

  Susan smiled. “Well, you may not know it, but you’re making up your mind about him all over again, way down deep, where you can’t just decide anything you want.”

  “Is that what I’m doing?” Lissa said vaguely. “I don’t think I care anymore. I fell hard on Earth, but I’ve recovered. I see things clearly now.”

  “Don’t take too long,” Susan said, looking more serious. “I liked him a lot myself.”

  “Thanks, but it won’t work,” Lissa replied. “I know you’re too busy right now.

  “Don’t be so sure.”

  They were silent for a moment.

  “What’s your problem?” Susan asked finally. “You seem to object to Alek’s being he
re.”

  “It’s not that,” Lissa replied. “It’s just that it all seemed settled in my mind. Alek would be on Earth, and I might or might not ever see him again. But now I have to come to terms with my feelings about him all over again.”

  “And you don’t want to decide?”

  “Not now.”

  “Don’t you think you’re being self-centered about it? People aren’t toys that will wait for you on a shelf. And you can’t always have ideal conditions in which to make important decisions.”

  Susan was right, Lissa realized. “Then what should I do?”

  Susan smiled. “Nothing. Let it happen as it will. Alek is here because he wants to do the work, and so are you. Don’t feel you have to decide anything.”

  “You don’t think that would be cowardly?” Lissa asked.

  “No. You’ll both have time to really think about your feelings. It might be a very good thing.”

  “Thanks, Susan. You’re a good friend.”

  Lissa woke up. The night glow of the sun plate was faint in her window. For a moment she imagined that she could feel the asteroid’s ever-increasing velocity. Something was waiting in the outer solar system …

  She got out of bed, opened her window, and looked out into the stillness of the hollow. A faint breeze stirred the grassy interior. She sat down in the window and gazed toward the moon plate, wondering about herself.

  Dr. Shastri wanted something from her, and so did Alek. What did she want from herself? A moment of uncaring passed through her, and she realized with a chill that others might do whatever work could be her own. Alek probably wasn’t interested in her anymore. She hadn’t seen him in weeks.

  She should never have let him invade her mind. How had it happened? He had simply become part of her before she knew it. How could she have known? Being a human being meant not being able to know everything about one’s inner self or that of another. It was hard to accept that her mind was not all-powerful over her feelings and desires.

  She closed her eyes. The breeze made her shiver, and she knew that she would have to face what lay within her, as well as what waited for humankind in the dark beyond Pluto.

  But not right now, a part of her whispered,not right now, later …

  From where she sat in the window, the small world was motionless in a night of its own making; but viewed from outside, she was pressed to the inner surface of a spinning world, which turned on an axis of light. Nothing ever seemed to be what it was.I’m changing into someone else , she thought,losing whatI was, and no one can give me back myself …

  She opened her eyes and saw that the light plate was beginning to brighten toward dawn.

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  16

  Dr. Shastri walked into the small auditorium and looked around at the assembly of students and observers. The now-familiar alien signal continued its strange dance on the screen.

  “How does he stay so calm-looking?” Susan whispered to Lissa.

  Dr. Shastri glanced up at the signal. “We’ve learned so little from it.” He sighed and stuck his hands in his jacket pockets, managing to look boyish despite his age. “However, we’ve now located the exact source of the signal.” He smiled. “We’re crossing the orbit of Pluto right now, and our acceleration is up to ten g’s.” He smiled again. “I still find that remarkable. A conventional acceleration that high could crush us, but with our negative-g drive it’s identical to free-fall, while spin gives us the illusion of slightly less than one g.” He shook his head. “I only wish that our four shuttles were large enough to carry negative-g generators. It will be more cumbersome exploring in them, but we can’t have everything.”

  The screen flickered behind him. Starfields appeared, overlaid by a coordinate grid. One small square began to flash red.

  “That’s where it is,” Dr. Shastri said, “over seven times the distance of Pluto from the Sun. We can’t see it because it’s a dark body, but we’ll be there in less than a month.”

  The starfields drew Lissa, lifting her out of herself, away from the problems caused by people. The fact was brought home to her again that something was speaking to humanity from the darkness, that a small part of humanity was speeding outward to the source at millions of kilometers per hour, and that she was part of the adventure of reaching out …

  “I’m still sorry to report,” Dr. Shastri continued, “that the tachyon receiver-transmitter is not yet working, and we can’t say when we’ll have the bugs out of it.” He looked around at the people in the chamber. “I’m hoping that a few more of you will visit our various projects as a supplement to your studies. We could use some extra help, and I think it would be good to poke your noses into the work of our older researchers. You might see something they don’t.” He smiled again. “That is my hope, at least. Too many of you have kept to your routine studies and minor duties. Break free a bit—don’t be afraid.”

  Lissa kept very busy during the next month. When she wasn’t alone, she was visiting the tachyon installation, or the negative-g drive control area, or just watching the alien signal doing its endless cosmic dance. She learned a lot of advanced mathematics. It took her into another kind of universe, and into another part of her mind. Math quantified the universe into a system of fine limits, in which the unknown was encircled by known quantities, thus forcing the unknown to reveal itself. There was no unknown that did not leave a trail, somewhere, and could not in principle be unmasked by experiment and reasoning.

  She surveyed what was known about the outer solar system, the region beginning at 40 times the distance of Earth from the Sun and ending at some 10,000 times that distance. This volume of space was filled with millions of asteroids and bodies as large as Earth—all moving with great slowness around the Sun. Beyond this region, 30,000 to 50,000 astronomical units from the Sun, lay the cometary halo, the fabulous Opik-Oort Cloud, made up of ice and frozen gas—a great barrier reef before the ocean of interstellar space. From the inner solar system the Cloud was as invisible as a swarm of bees a million kilometers away, but the Centauri starship had confirmed the halo’s existence on its way out of the solar system.

  The asteroid wasn’t going out quite that far, but it could, and much more. This run was as much a test for the negative-g drive as it was an investigation of the source of the alien signal.

  Lissa also read many of the great works in the humanities from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—the novels in which the human heart struggled with itself, with restrictive social systems, and with other hearts. These works tuned her feelings and made her see clearly where thought alone could not. Her two favorites were Rudyard Kipling’sKim and Elizabeth Bowen’sThe Death of the Heart.

  There were evenings of music. Many of the scientists and researchers were musicians, and they got together regularly to give concerts and recitals of chamber music. Lissa would sit in her window, listening to great chords sounding through the green hollow. The grand symphonic sound structures of Gustav Mahler and Ralph Vaughan Williams were great favorites, but Dr. Shastri complained that more modern works were being ignored.

  Sometimes Lissa went to the concerts and sat on the grass with Susan, noticing the couples and hoping vaguely to see Alek. But he was never there, and the moment when she would have been glad to see him always passed. She wondered if she liked him better as someone she had left behind on Earth, a person to dream about but not have to deal with. I must be a very selfish person, she told herself in critical moments.

  One day she saw Dr. Shastri outside the tachyon receiver control room, and decided to ask him a question.

  “Doctor, I haven’t seen Alek Calder anywhere for some time. Do you know where he’s working now?” She took a deep breath as she waited for his reply.

  Dr. Shastri smiled. “Of course. He’s moved to the engineering level. He’s training with the shuttle pilots. I’m told he’s quite good at it.”

  “What?” Lissa asked, surprised by the information and by her sudden twinge of
jealousy.

  “Yes, it’s what he wanted from the start. He’ll probably be going out to chart the source of the alien signal if he checks out in time. I’m told he’s one of the best. He flew airplanes back home. We’re lucky to have him.”

  “Thank you,” she said turning away, feeling confused as she headed toward the elevator that would take her up into the hollow.

  Alek would get to go outside. He would explore, with only a suit and shuttle between him and the unknown. So this was what he had been planning all along!

  She turned suddenly and ran back down the hall after Dr. Shastri.

  “Oh, Doctor,” she said breathlessly as she caught up with him.

  “Yes?” he asked as he turned to face her again.

  “Will any of the rest of us get to go out and examine the source of the alien signal?”

  “You wish to go?” he said impatiently, cocking one eyebrow.

  She nodded. “Very much. Do you think it will be possible?”

  He smiled. “I don’t see why not, assuming we don’t find it inaccessible or dangerous.” He was looking at her intently, as if he’d lived her life and countless others, and knew the motives behind all requests.

  “Thank you, Doctor,” Lissa said, feeling much better.

  “You will excuse me,” he said abruptly, “but I have an appointment.”

  She nodded and turned away. As she walked down the long passageway, it seemed to her that she had become another person.What are you worried about,she asked her stranger self,that Alek Calder will beat you out of something? You’re only a minor member of this expedition, a student, she told herself,and you’re not likely to awe anyone with a major breakthrough. So what are you afraid of?

  The stranger within did not reply. Lissa stopped, knowing that her feelings were irrational. None of this was real. Alek couldn’t be a threat; he was only doing what interested him. She should be proud of him. He might even be the pilot who would take her to the site of the alien transmitter.