He got up suddenly and hurried down the hillside. He passed the elevator kiosk at the crossroads just as Jane and Alice Sanger emerged from the engineering level below the countryside, where their father worked in climate control. They usually visited him after school.
“Hi, Max!” the twins called out together, and smiled the same broad smile as he went by them. Sometimes one of them would call out “Hi,” and the other “Max,” and they also liked to finish each other’s math problems.
“Hello,” he called back nervously, hurrying on; he didn’t feel like talking to anyone just now.
He turned up the path to his house and stopped, as if seeing it for the first time. His father had once told him that single-level structures of its kind were common in vacation spots on Earth. They were temporary dwellings, with minimal insulation and security, and were usually made of wood or ceramic materials. The habitat’s perfect weather and enclosed, gardenlike conditions were made to order for such houses. Camp houses, his mother had called them. Trembling, he imagined his house empty, the hollow deserted and dark. His home had always been
intended
to be temporary. His whole world was temporary, and would expire like a school term—but no one would ever come back. Everyone was looking forward to the end.
“What’s the matter?” Joe Sorby asked in a tone of mild concern.
Max stared down at his dinner, knowing that his father would never understand.
“Well, what is it?” Joe asked again.
“Nothing,” Max replied, looking up.
His father smiled at him as if they were about to share a secret, then shifted his stocky body in the chair.
“You’ve seemed sad for some time,” his mother said gently. Max looked into her large brown eyes, so much like his own that he often felt he could read her thoughts.
Joe scowled. “Oh, come on, talking won’t hurt.”
How could his parents understand? They had grown up with millions of people around them. They were going back to places they knew. Even Rosalie, who had been born on Bernal One, the large habitat in the orbit of Earth’s Moon, was used to many thousands of people, and she had visited Earth and the Moon.
Max had no idea if any of the other kids felt as he did behind their show of looking forward to coming home, of visiting all the places and things they had read about, seen in films, videos, and holos, or been told about by their parents. Some of them had to be faking, but he wasn’t close enough to any of them to know how they felt about most things. Even Muhammad Bekhter, still often mistaken for his best friend, was only someone he had studied and cycled with a few times. Max had never tried to be a real friend, and Muhammad had naturally started spending more time with others. Max couldn’t believe that some of them weren’t upset by the fact that their home would soon be taken away from them.
Not that there was really any way for him to find out. If he admitted his own fears to someone else, he might only end up with the others mocking him, and with even more assurances from his parents and other adults that everything would be just fine.
“Max,” his mother said in a firm but still kindly voice, “tell us what’s wrong. We’ll try to understand.”
They meant well, but they wouldn’t understand. The ship-habitat had been built for a purpose that was now almost achieved, and soon it would be time to do something else. They would say he was being backward and selfish, unreasonably attached to something no one should have this much feeling about.
“I know it shouldn’t bother me,” he said finally. “We’ve all been looking forward to the return.” He paused suddenly, his throat dry, and said bitterly, “But not me. You all came from there.…”
Joe was looking at him intently. “I had no idea you felt this way.”
“It’s not fair!” Max blurted out. “I never had any say in it.” He took a long sip of water, unable to go on.
“I understand,” Rosalie said. “You grew up here, and now it’s going to be taken away.”
Max nodded, feeling ashamed.
Joe sighed. “I see you’ve thought about this, but it’s really nothing to get upset about. Back on Earth, kids who grew up in small towns were often afraid of moving to big cities.”
Max took a deep breath. “Then why’d they have to?”
“Lots of reasons. Their parents had to relocate for work, or the kids had to go to school in a big city. Sometimes they ran away to the big city because they hated their small towns.”
“I’m sure you’ll like a bigger world,” Rosalie added, “when you see what it’s like.”
Max swallowed and was silent. Great. They had it all backwards.
“We’re just a small town, really,” his mother said. “Don’t you see that it would be wrong for you not to ever know anything else?”
“I suppose so,” Max replied.
His parents were silent.
“We’ll never come back here again,” he added in a breaking voice.
“Who knows?” Joe said, leaning forward and patting him on the shoulder. “Maybe they’ll use this place to go somewhere else. We’ve shown that it’s pretty safe to live in. They’ll refit it with better collision shielding, so it can get closer to light speed, and new people will move in and take it out again.”
“You don’t really think so,” Max said, imagining strangers sitting at this table.
Joe shrugged. “It’s possible.”
“We’ll never see this house again,” Max added.
His mother smiled. “You know we can’t decide any of these things. Did you think we’d live here forever?”
“Look, son,” Joe said firmly, “we have no say in what will happen to this habitat after we return it, and there’s no reason we should. The plan was to take it out and come back. We’ll make new lives. One thing will end and another begin. I think you understand that. It will happen to you several times in the long life you’ll live.”
Max was silent, knowing they were right, but his feelings rebelled.
“Hey,” Joe said suddenly, “we should be at the community center. The Sun’s close enough now to show up bright, and the broadcasts will probably start getting through our interference tonight.”
“I don’t feel like it tonight,” Max answered.
“Come on,” his father said. “Everyone else is probably over there by now.”
“There’s so much that’s happened since we’ve been gone,” Rosalie said excitedly. “We’ll have to work hard to take it all in. I mean, we know generally what’s been going on, but it’s like learning history—we’ll know what happened, but never as if we’d lived it. We can’t get back the time we lost. I feel apprehensive about coming back, but for different reasons than yours, Max.”
“Just think, son,” Joe said. “You’ll be going from this small world to a much larger one. A whole Sunspace of worlds.”
“But it’s not right that we should lose our home, Dad.”
“You’re looking at it all wrong,” Joe said impatiently, and Max knew his parents were thinking that he’d forget how he felt as soon as new things came along to distract him. “You can’t hang onto your first home forever.”
“We’re late,” Rosalie said, getting up from the table.
He would never forget, Max promised himself.
They got on their bikes and pedaled toward the sunplate, Max on his racer, Joe and Rosalie on their two-seater, with Joe in the back. The light dimmed toward what his parents called moonlight. He pushed on ahead, making his best speed, feeling guilty that he couldn’t share his parents’ eagerness. He glanced at his father and saw the look of a stranger who might become angry.
The roads and walkways were empty. Almost everyone would already be at the center, anticipating that direct contact with Earth would come today. When the sunplate was only a few hundred meters away, it towered over the nearby landscape.
Max pulled up to the Community Center’s bike rack. His parents caught up and parked their bike next to his, Together they walked into the ramp tunnel under the sunplate and came up into the amphitheater.
“We’re the last ones in,” Joe said as they entered the two-hundred-meter-diameter spherical space cut in the forward section of the asteroid. The lower half of the sphere cradled two thousand seats, but more than five hundred were now empty because almost that many people had chosen to stay behind in the new habitat at Centauri. The great center space was already aglow as Max and his parents took seats at the end of the top row in the first section. The center space was for projecting plays, educational programs, operas, ballets, old films, videos and holos from Earth, as well as for display of information during Town Meetings. The much smaller chamber of the Control Bridge was just above the Community Center.
The glow in the great space meant that the forward view was picking up the countless collisions with gas and dust in the deflecting shield’s field as the habitat slowed from two-thirds of light speed.
They were in Earth’s outer Sunspace now, perhaps already inside the orbit of Pluto. Transmissions from Earth would be coming in at any moment. Some news of the last thirty-six years had reached the habitat during the years at Centauri, but clear reception of radio signals was difficult during acceleration and deceleration.
The view cleared, and stars shone in the great hollow. A map grid flashed on, marking Earth’s Sun. Not very impressive for the center of a complex civilization, Max thought as he looked at the yellow star. Earth, home to ten billion people, was a world of great cities and thousands of smaller communities, of oceans, rivers, mountains, plains, deserts, takes, polar caps, hurricanes, tidal waves, dust storms, and long-dead civilizations. Luna, Earth’s moon, a great industrial and scientific center, was home to nearly two million people. L-4 and L-5, positions in the Moon’s orbit, were stable locations for a growing armada of space habitats. Among them was Bernal One, the large sphere where Max’s mother had been born and raised, and where his father had gone to college.
Second from the Sun was Venus, which was being studied in preparation for terraforming—a process that might make the hot, cloudy planet another Earth in a century or two. Close in around the Sun was Mercury. Its asteroid habitats were home to a thriving community of miners. Joe and Rosalie had helped build the first habitat there before they joined the Interstellar Project.
Outward from Earth was the Martian colony, with its great spaceports at Deimos and Phobos, the planet’s two moons. Nearly three million people lived in large agricultural domes on the desert that was being reclaimed along the old natural waterways. One day Mars would be terraformed into a world of forests, rivers, takes and seas. The old dream of fully occupying the three planets of the solar system’s temperate zone would be fulfilled.
Beyond Mars, habitats orbited Jupiter and Saturn. Max’s habitat had been built around Saturn’s moon, Titan. Mobile habitats had explored the outer solar system right into the Oort Cloud of cometary material, so it had been a natural step to send a habitat out to the nearest star.
Nothing of this great Sunspace civilization showed from Pluto’s orbit. All his life Max had been learning about it, studying its works, seeing holos of its locales; but it had never been as real to him as the house in which he lived, or the paths he walked in the green hollow; not even as real as the worlds of Centauri.
“WELCOME HOME!” a male voice boomed from the starry space, startling Max. His mother gave him a look of concern. He felt anxious, but he smiled at her and tried to look interested. She patted his left hand, and suddenly he wished that Earth and its Sunspace civilization would disappear.
“ARE YOU RECEIVING US? THIS IS TITAN DOCKS. DO YOU NEED ANY ASSISTANCE? WE CAN SEND TUGS OUT TO MEET YOU.”
“No help of any kind is required,” Linda ten Eyck answered at the communications console. “We will arrive in eighty-nine days.”
As Navigator and Life Support Systems Specialist, Linda was the closest thing the habitat had to a captain. Joe had once joked that it would take two dozen experts jammed into one body to make a captain. A team working through an artificial intelligence was more efficient. But even though Linda was part of that team, she tended to assume more responsibility than the others. She loved her job. Some people said that she would be lost without it.
Max noticed Emil and Lucinda sitting in the first row with their father, Jake LeStrange, just below the platform on which their mother stood. Lucinda, Max realized, had let him off easy today. A month ago he had been standing around awkwardly at a party, trying to strike up a conversation with a few of the other boys, when Lucinda arrived with Emil, entering the room as if she were doing everyone a favor by coming. She had smiled and walked toward him. “I wasn’t smiling at you,” she had said before he could say hello, moving away with Arthur Cheney. Everyone had laughed at his mistake, although Emil had given him an unexpected look of sympathy. Humiliated, Max had left. “You should have stayed,” his mother had told him. “They would have forgotten the whole thing in a few minutes.”
Lucinda and Emil argued a lot with each other, and with anyone else who would let them. They sometimes berated Max because he hadn’t yet chosen a field of study. Physics was their big choice. Emil was sometimes fun to talk to, but he would shut up and become another person when his sister showed up. She was Max’s age, only a year and a half older than Emil, but she bossed her brother around. Max had once told him not to trail around after her so much. “Don’t ever listen to him,” Max heard her tell Emil. “He’s asleep every afternoon. You’d think the son of a maintenance engineer would be more practical.” Max had known then that she had seen him lying down by the waterfall. Lucinda would consider that a total waste of time, a sign of laziness and lack of ambition. No one would ever catch Lucinda idling away part of the day when she might have been studying or doing something constructive.
“YOU ARE NOW RECEIVING A SUMMARY OF MAJOR EVENTS FROM THE LAST THIRTY-SIX-YEARS,” the booming voice continued, “CONTINUING FROM THE TRANSMISSION THAT WAS BEAMED TO COINCIDE WITH YOUR ARRIVAL AT CENTAURI.”
“We are receiving,” Linda replied, sitting down before the console. “Exploration of Centauri A, B, and C was completed productively, and the new habitat established. One hundred four children were born before our arrival at Alpha Centauri, and these are all returning with us. One hundred sixteen were born after the new habitat became livable, and they have remained at Centauri. We’ve had sixty-four deaths, three of them from accidents. Otherwise our community is healthy and thriving.…”