It was still only marginally habitable, which was why we were leaving.
I wondered at the time we read the papers, saw the unfolding story on the ColorCom: what had these people fled to take such a chance? What horrors had they willingly traded for the parched nubbin they named Vespucci? I sincerely did not want to know. Neither did anybody else. It was new worlds we looked for, a future for ourselves, for our children.
Generations of desperate hard figuring, plus a leg-up from what had been rediscovered amidst buried shards, orbital trash, propelled
Asperance
starward on a newer principle, one that made us feel we had won a certain measure of superiority over our unlucky forebears. Her quarter-meter-diameter hollow core was a paragravitic “antenna” spinning out a field rendering everything within her billowing plastic folds inertialess, no longer subject to the normal laws of accelerated mass.
Asperance
would not try to evade the speed limit, as folk-tales held that those before us had been “punished” for doing; she would remain in normal space, to ignore the theoretical speed limit altogether.
Half of that capability had been achieved by the time I was born. We Vespuccians—in this case meaning the citizens of the single most advanced nation-state that had ultimately forced their country’s name upon an reluctant entire planet—were old hands at navigating the local system, pushed by photon sails kilometers in width, but merely a single molecule thick. We had explored a dozen lifeless, hopeless balls of baked or frozen rock, often taking months or years to travel a few astronomical units, discovering nothing for their effort in the end.
A sun-system, a planet, a nation-state, all known as Vespucci. It betrayed, I thought even as a little child, a certain narrowness of perspective. It was not the sort of insight I could talk about, even with Eleva. By the time of Consolidation, there were even those who wanted to rename our capital city, Volta Mellis, Vespucci. It was easy to understand: our options were as limited as the imaginations of our geographers.
Not particularly coincidentally.
Asperance
might make all the difference. We had learned our ancestors’ physics from the textbooks they had unwittingly left us. The sails of our ship were meant to billow before the interstellar tachyon winds, faster than light itself. She could traverse local distances in seconds. Two light years to the nearest star—a little over ten trillion kilometers—would require something under nine weeks.
-4-
Grimly, we hung on.
Daily, we forced down our inedible rations. Dully, we exerted our bodies against elastic cradles to prevent the void from devouring our bones. Under those merciless, cold pin-points of light, we slept only fitfully. Scarcely ever crawling from the racks to which we had been assigned, each of us tried to forget—or at least not to remind one another—that we would have to find some haven in which to survive the two years it would take for our puny signals to carry home the news of whatever we had found. Eventually we might even be followed by other vessels like
Asperance,
even possibly get back home someday ourselves.
Home.
Eleva.
If.
So, the officers played CC games, watched our meager stock of entertainment tapes until the brown oxide wore off the plastic. I chorded the button-fretted mandolar, wondering what was to become of us, seeing pale blue eyes, coppery hair, the delicate red bow of a mouth, where they had no right to be, against the ebon canopy of space.
Sixty-two days after our departure, we orbited a promisingly cloud-swirled marble hanging before its overwhelming primary. It was green down there, vastly greener than Vespucci, even to the naked eye, heartbreakingly blessed with water, so inviting it stirred primordial caution deep within a company accustomed to less charitable handling by nature. Yet, with a little finagling, perhaps, this paradise was—ours.
We were prepared to pay.
Asperance
shut down her inertialess field generator, to shed her filmy wings in free-fall. We eighteen Starmen huddled together in half a dozen tough, spherical lifeshells of carbon filamentized polyresin that she had carried at her stern. During the all-but-endless journey to this place, they had been our only refuge from the pale, frozen stars.
Or from one another.
Now, under the blinding blue-white brilliance of a foreign star, Sca’s thick mantle of atmosphere began to abrade their skins, filling their bottoms with human sweat. Each armored lander became shrouded, isolated from the other five within its own tortured curtain of ionization. We cowered inside, isolated equally, despite the inhuman crowding, each man alone with his thoughts, his fears. Our homeworld, niggardly as it may have been, was out of touch, lost to us perhaps forever.
-5-
The Baron, as heavily-scarred by some nameless infection as the merest of his vassals, enjoyed a complete ignorance of the geography of his own planet. He refused to believe the “superstitious nonsense” I managed to communicate to him: that we were from that bright light in the sky, right there, where I am pointing. We were all invaders, he decided, foreign vandals, common brigands, breakers of his benevolent peace.
He wanted to hang us.
The Bishop, through a live-in delegation at the Baron’s castle, was all too ready to believe, naming us sorcerers, non-human demons, unnatural purveyors of some weird (but, it appeared, not very potent) magic.
He wanted to burn us.
The Bailiff, a squat, evil-eyed old ruffian with a short axe in his belt, did not much appreciate being caught between two absolute powers. I recognized his type immediately: a retired head-trooper, the kind of battered career non-com who has seen it all, done most of it himself, a little of it twice, but still does not believe a word of it.
He was very enthusiastic about my daily interrogation, however. That did not call for divided loyalties, no sir, not at all. He soon discovered my shattered instep, along with the fact that I screamed quite satisfactorily when he ordered it twisted, grinding the broken bone-ends together. Given such “incentives”, I found learning a new language ridiculously easy. Scavian seemed to follow familiar rules, varied from my own Vespuccian more in pronunciation than vocabulary. I began to wonder whether Sca might be the hell-hole my ancestors had fled. Yet how could these savages have constructed even the absurdly unreliable star-drives we had discovered abandoned in orbit above Vespucci?
I became a lot more fluent—also less curious—when they began displaying tongs, pincers, obscenely-shaped irons thrust into buckets of glowing coals. For the most part, however, the Bailiff preferred simply having my foot exercised. It was much less expensive than good charcoal.
I told them everything I knew, plus plenty I did not know I knew. I remember at one point offering pathetically to go back home to find out more. None of this seems very real, somehow, although many of the scars, inside or out, I will carry to the end of my days. I passed out frequently during those sessions. With no memory of the intervening period of relief, I would often wake the next day to find some poxy minion wrenching my ruined foot again. Eleva’s eyes, her smile, began elude me, abandoning me when I needed their recollection to sustain me.
Naturally, most of what I had to tell the Scavians did not make sense. Even sane, physically whole, how do you explain air-power or overlapping fields of machinegun fire to some primitive in knitted iron underwear whose notion of leading-edge martial arts is to poke at his enemies with a metal-shod stick? At last they gave up, dragging me away until some agreement could be arrived at about what to do with us. The Bailiff personally saw me bolted into a hole in the dungeon wall.
The Lieutenant had remained completely unconscious during the eternity—perhaps a week—that I had been put to question. That had not stopped them torturing him. The forms must be followed, after all.
They had not invented locks on Sca. The door, a crudely-hammered meter square of iron sheet, was fastened at its hinge-like hasps with soft metal rivets a centimeter in diameter, quite beyond reach of the palm-sized grating in its center, or the slopping-slot below. These were the castle’s lower-class accommodations, at the literal bottom of the heap. Down here, the walls dripped constantly, when they were not frozen solid, with seepage from the luxury dungeons high above us. We were fed occasionally. Someone came to replace the torches in the passageway.
I estimated three weeks’ passage by making small tears in the edge of my flight jacket every time I awoke to the drip, drip, drip of the polluted stone around me. Very rapidly I became too weak to keep such a calendar, except that my uniform jacket obliged by getting easier to tear.
Twenty-two rips in the rotted fabric later, the Hooded People came.
Farewell to Eleva
The heavy woven synthetic restrainers cut painfully where they rode across my midsection. It was hardly noticable after the grandly hollow send-off we had received, or the crushing four-gee eternity from the desiccated surface of our native Vespucci up to stationary orbit.
Nighttime reigned in this position. To the right, several kilometers away, the new space station lay, still under construction, a wild hodge-podge of beams, containers fastened to the hull of the ancient colonial ship which had brought our ancestors here. Between the interstices in the new construction, she could still be seen, a micrometeorite-pitted dull metal sphere, dozens of meters in diameter, dead, cold, empty for fifteen hundred years—until lately rediscovered by her creators’ children.
Already copies of her fusion powerplant were being installed in Vespuccian cities all over the planet.
Reflexively, I smoothed the creases from the trousers of my special, fancy, useless uniform. Tailored just for this occasion, they were a violent shade of lavender to photograph well on CC, tricked out with silver braid, a deep maroon stripe running down the pants leg, a short, waist-length jacket which kept riding up, exposing the place where the shirt crept continuously out of the beltless waistband of the trousers. The knee-length silver boots were clumsy, would have to be jettisoned for weight’s sake before the
Asperance
shipped out.
At least I sat unburdened, as were the rest, with the awkward matching pistol belt. As the sole enlisted man among the crew, I was not entitled to carry a sidearm, merely charged with keeping them all in good repair, making sure the officers did not shoot themselves in the foot before I could stow the ordnance aboard-ship. I carried my mandolar in its collapsible fabric case; it used up every gram of my personal freight-allowance—luckily I do not grow beard enough to need a razor desperately—but I counted on the mandolar to keep me sane during nine weeks’ endless voyage.
I shifted the safety-straps once more, trying vainly for comfort, peered forward to the end of the long, cylindrical transfer-canister where they were showing the festivities on a large ColorCom screen. At least they were interrupting the blaring military bands, the posturing politicians, long enough to give us a clear view, for the first time, of the
Asperance
where she lay a few klicks off the new space station. She looked like nothing else in Vespuccian history, not like any kind of vehicle at all—certainly not like this stubby, heavy-winged orbiter which had flung itself down a long, long runway earlier this morning, into the purple sky from the port just outside the capital, Volta Mellis.
From some vantage-point, probably another shuttle, we could even see ourselves approaching the starclipper, the shuttle’s bay doors opened already, exposing the tube which temporarily, uncomfortably, housed seventeen officers, along with their single, general-purpose flunky.
No, the
Asperance
resembled a huge antenna of some kind, A single long, extruded titanium mast no larger in diameter than a big man’s thigh, crossed perpendicularly at intervals with complex, tightly-guyed spars. At her forward end were the shackles for her photon sails, kilometers-wide umbrellas she would unfurl to catch the solar winds which would sweep us to our destination. Aft, she bulged with a half dozen multipurpose spheres, heavily armored for the landing, stuffed full of consumable supplies for the voyage.
The entire fragile assemblage resembled a child’s toy. Draped from end to end in tough, loose, transparent plastic tenting, at the end of every cross-spar, there clung either a skeletal one-man seating-rack, or cluster of instrumentation.
The
Asperance
gleamed dully in the reflected light of the sun, her titanium core housing the inertia-canceling field-coils, the re-entry spheres concealing the field-generator/power-plant. Thirty meters long, not counting her sails, she would prove far more uncomfortable than the shuttle we now occupied.
Four more exactly like her were under construction. We could see the torches flaring, the spacesuited figures swarming over them off to our left.
Asperance
was the first completed. If something went wrong with her, something which came to light—perhaps fatally—during our “shakedown cruise”, it would be too late to make significant changes. The design—along with the four other ships—would have to be scrapped. Something else newer, undoubtedly more expensive, would have to be undertaken, all over again.
The freshly-conquered provinces, the ordinary citizens who had conquered them, would groan a little more under the increased weight of taxation. Perhaps another division or so of peacekeepers would have to be sent to quiet the groaning.