His mother was seldom away from his bedside, usually working on a report on her data-pad.
Our assessment is that the other humans who visited this world will return in the next twenty-to-forty years. It is imperative that a Phase II ship be in orbit to assess them for possible contact, or for tactical and strategic evaluation.
Dr. Reagan came in, making her rounds. “The boy still asleep?”
“Still,” Lear reported.
Dr. Reagan passed her hand over his body, a vital signs sensor attached to her palm. “This Odyssey mission has been something of a curse on yer fambly,” said she. “Seems every time we leave orbit, one of ya’s is in my infirmary.”
She held an instrument up to Lear’s eyes. “Visual Acu’ty 100 %. Congratulations, I can certify you for duty again.”
Doctor Reagan took a seat next to the Executive Commander, reflecting that, if only Commander Lear had bothered to learn to read a Bio-metric read-out, she would have seen by her son’s Alpha-wave profile he was awake and listening to them. “So under yer religious beliefs, he’s a man now.”
“Under secular law, the age of majority is still 16, so, for the next three years, he’s still my boy.”
“Bovine Excrement. No matter how old he gets, he will still be yer boy.”
“That is true, that is very true. In some ways, he is to be treated as an adult, expected to be responsible for his own actions, he is expected to begin choosing a first prerogative, develop a personal code of honor, choose a profession. He’ll probably want to move through the command program. I started in the Logistics Directorate, and I think my son would be quote good at that. He is very good at planning things.”
“Flight Core,” came a weak voice. Goneril Lear jumped up.
“Trajan… Trajan… are you awake?” Goneril asked, sounding, for the first time on Old Doc Reagan’s memory, like a real person, a concerned parent.
His voice was hoarse and delicate, emerging from a dry throat through parched lips. The last thing Trajan remembered before awakening in the Recovery Suite was the strong, reassuring grip of a man in a Flight Core uniform. “May I have some water please?”
His mother took the flask from beside his bed and held it to his lips. He drank too much at first and it choked him. “Easy, son.”
He coughed and sputtered, sending fresh needles of pain through his back and abdomen. He winced. “It’s all right,” his mother comforted, then turned to the doctor. “Can you suppress his pain receptors.”
“He’s a man now, does he want his receptors s’pressed?”
“I don’t want any anesthetic. I’ll handle the pain on my own,” Trajan insisted, surprising his mother as much as anyone. “And I have decided to join Flight Core.”
Lear decided not to argue. It was enough to have her son back, and she was certain she could persuade him to undertake a more promising career path later. “Very well.”
Trajan lay back in his bed. He studied his surroundings. “I’m cold.”
His mother warmed the blanket an additional five degrees. He huddled beneath it.
“Dimmer lights,” he said, and the lighting level dropped. He closed his eyes nevertheless.
“You should rest,” said Lear gently.
“Did they catch the man who kidnapped me?” Trajan demanded.
“Kidnapped you?” Lear asked.
“The man in the UnderDecks who kidnapped me. He was tall, thin. He had a beard on his face. He wore all black. He tied me up and said he was going to exchange me to you for something. I don’t remember what it was.”
Lear became very alarmed. “Did he hurt you?”
“He didn’t hurt me. He just kept me in this little chamber in the UnderDecks. He took my identity Sliver.”
“Your identity Sliver.”
“He took it out of my …” his hand felt the back of his jaw, where a healing bandage was affixed.
His mother extended her hand to him, unrolled her fingers, and revealed the Sliver lying on her palm. “You mean this Sliver? It was lying on the canopy of the spacecraft you landed on. Apparently, you cut your jaw open on impact, and jarred it loose.”
Trajan shook his head, which brought freshets of new ache to slosh around his brain.
“Son, don’t,” Lear cautioned gently.
“There was a man, mother… He took me and he held me and he cut out my identity Sliver. A woman came and set me free and I ran as hard and as far as I could. I tried to call you, but the comm-system wouldn’t let me in. I had to climb all the way up to Deck… Deck minus Eight. Then, there were these two men in black suits… and an automech. They tried to catch me, too, and I had to swim through a water-processing channel to get away from them. I almost drowned.”
Lear took her son’s hand in a comforting tone of voice. “Son, you’ve been through a harrowing journey, and suffered a severe cranial injury. Your thoughts may be unclear. You may be confusing things that happened with dreams… nightmares…”
“There was a man… mother. There was a man who captured me and stole my pack and my Sliver.”
“Your pack was found in the UnderDecks at the bottom of an access shaft. We think you got lost and dropped it while you were climbing.”
“I did not drop my pack, it was taken from me.”
“Trajan, if it will make you feel better, I will have security sweep the UnderDecks for unauthorized personnel. Remember when I used to check under your bed for monsters?”
Trajan’s anger was making his head pound. “It happened mother. It wasn’t a dream. It happened!”
She was quiet for a time. Then, she said, “Rest, Trajan. We will search the UnderDecks from bow to stern, from Deck 1 to Deck minus 212. For now, you rest, and in time, this will all seem like a bad dream.”
Goneril Lear took his hand, and he felt warm metal pressing into his palm. He drew away and held it. Without looking, he knew what it was, the golden circle, one of the symbols of the Iestan faith.
“The circle symbolizes the universe,” she told him. “God is at the center of the circle. All of our lives is a Passage, and in death, we will pass into the circle. However much we learn in life is what we take into the circle with us. The more we bring with us, the closer we are to God at the center.”
So had he been told since he was an infant. He found the words comforting once again, and his eyes closed, and he drifted far away into sleep again.
Trajan Lear claims while he was in the UnderDecks, he encountered strange people, one of whom took him hostage, one of whom set him free, and some of whom chased him into a water conduit. Lear pretends she doesn’t believe him. She should know better. Pegasus – The UnderDecks
A tall, thin man with a pinched face and hair as gray as the old and patched utility coveralls he wore ran through a narrow passageway on Deck –133. On either side of him were food-processing artificatories, churning out vegetables for the ship’s stores. He was stumbling, almost out of breath. The chase had gone on across six decks, and through sixty-four separate sections of the ship, and it was almost over. He turned behind to see if his pursuer was still behind him, and saw no one. When he turned again, he saw a black-suited Centurion standing at the end of the passageway. He raised his hand as if in greeting, and displayed a silver and blue palm-discharger.
“Neg, neg,” the stowaway cried out just as a ribbon of light lashed out at him. He fell to the deck, unconscious and stunned.
His pursuer walked casually the length of the deck behind him. “Well, done, Tyro-Centurion Tiberius.”
Tiberius bent over the fallen man. “Looks like someone from the construction crew. Simple stowaway. I wish we were catching more Isolationists. How many does this make?”
“Thirty-three,” Centurion Lycius answered. “Probably the last, for now. We’ll be breaking orbit in a few hours. No more launches after that.”
Tiberius picked the man up and slung him over his shoulder. He was easy to carry. “We should have done this a long time ago.”
From a cramped crawlspace on top of the food processors, Hunter, and the pale woman, watched, grimly as the two Centurions made their way toward the freezers. The Centurions, sometimes in the disguise and company of regular ship’s security and Marines, had been sweeping the UnderDecks for days. Security and Marines found no one, the Centurions made sure of that. The Centurions, however, had been capturing people, putting them into stasis. Some would be launched back to the homeworlds under the guise of a ship’s weapons test. Others would have to wait until opportunity afforded their departure. Pegasus was scheduled to make several re-supply rendezvous, the first coming up in three years. It was likely this ‘cargo’ would be off-loaded then.
He reached for the woman’s hand and held it. She squeezed it back, warmly. She had betrayed him, it was true, but she was the closest thing to a companion he had down here, and in the UnderDecks, you took what comforts were offered.
By only capturing the one’s dumb, careless, or weak enough to allow their own capture, the Centurions, he thought, were making his life much harder, as well as their own. He had counted on being the smartest man in the UnderDecks to get by. By getting rid of the easy ones, the Notorium was raising the curve. Only the wiliest, and the most fanatical, would be left now. The UnderDecks were about to become far more dangerous. Dr. Bihari is adopting the boy Alpha Landing Team recovered from the planet. He has already begun neuro-regenerative therapy and is progressing slowly, but gradually. Within two years, he should be functioning at a normal mental capacity for a human of his age. His assimilation into our society is expected to take longer. She is taking a leave from Medical Core to devote herself to his recovery full-time. I understand she intends to name him Sanjay, after her brother.
Pegasus – Hospital Four
In suite adjacent to that occupied by Trajan Lear, Medical Technician Bihari and Marine Nellen Dallas were sitting up in bed, each with her husband beside her.
“Ex. Commander Lear is nominating me for the Silver Medallion of sacrifice,” Dallas said, referring to the award given by the Republic Ministry of Defense to Marines who were wounded in service.
“Seems odd to get a medal for not getting out of the way in time,” Bihari teased, gently, and they all knew it was so.
“Too bad there’s no medal for being attacked by a flying rat,” Dallas answered.
“Captain Keeler tells me there is. The Shell of Vantra, an ancient crest dating back to the 2nd Crusade,” said Bihari’s husband. Captain Keeler, after awakening, had visited both of them on a daily basis.
“It’s too bad you missed the exequies for Goodyear and Hastings,” Nellen Dallas’s husband said. “The captain gave a moving speech. There were almost as many people in attendance, or observing, as there were at Meridian.”
Dallas asked a question many on the ship had been posing. “Was Eden better or word than Meridian?”
Bihari considered the question carefully. “I will always remember the savagery of this world’s people. Without it, this might have been a world of wonders. Also, I will always remember it as the place where I met the boy who would be my son.”
She gestured toward an empty bed. Sanjay’s mental rehabilitation required long periods in an enrichment chamber, where reconstruction cells were delivered to precise points in his brain and nourished by a rich flow of chemicals. Every hour in the enrichment chamber required four hours of rehabilitative therapy, to teach the new cells to work. It would take as long as two years to bring him to the level of Sapphirean and Republicker twelve year olds. This would be Bihari’s full-time occupation during that time.
As we healed our wounded and mourned our fallen, we also began to analyze the data the planet yielded to us. We tried to understand how the world worked, both geo-physically and culturally. Yesterday, Captain Keeler and his senior staff signed off the final report on this little world.
Pegasus – Conference Suite – Deck 101
Science Officer Morgan, standing before a holo-graphic cutaway model of the Eden planetoid, wrapped up his presentation on the report Geo-physical Survey would be submitting to Odyssey Project Directorate.
“From the tectonic seams through each level of strata we encountered, we concluded that the core of the Eden planetoid was constructed elsewhere and moved into an orbital position around its major planet. The surface features were added on top of this core and mantle through another process of laying down strata. The whole process probably took no more than sixty to one-hundred years.”
“Thank you, lieutenant.” Keeler said. The cat on his right had periodically pawed and clawed at him to keep him from nodding off. He was thinking to himself that if he ever needed to build a planet, the information would come in handy.
The geo-physicists left, and were replaced by philosophers and culturalists, people Keeler understood, if not actually liked, better. They filled the chairs around the horseshoe shaped table. Specialist Historian Brandywine, formerly of the University of Greater Carpentaria on Sapphire, delivered the final report. Brandywine was an imposing, gray-haired woman whose expertise in cultural reconstruction nearly equaled the captain’s.
“What you have before you is less a final report than a catalog of our observations,” she said as each one on the panel activated their copies of the report. Most of them had been keeping up with each draft version as it had been generated. “Data is abundant, but insight is rare. Our technicians scrubbed the ‘Temple of the Z’batsu’ from one end to the other with every scanning device we had available, not the least of which, human eyes. Barely a scrap of technology in it, apart from the tactile walls.
“The Temple of the Z’Batsu was probably a reception point for those newly arrived on the planet. We suspect that what the Alpha Landing accessed was a type of service entrance. The refrain in the background intended to provide instructions to personnel greeting them; a repeating theme of how to behave toward visitors.”
A model of the temple was projected in the middle of the table. Brandywine walked into it.
“We believe this was the main entrance hall.” She indicated a large open area under the forward dome. “Lavishly decorated with statuary depicting most of the exotic life-forms they were creating, including a lot we didn’t see. Some were no more than walking sex organs. The surrounding halls contained planetary maps, utility areas, and so forth.”
She zoomed in on the walls. “The tactile calligraphy on the walls of the main hall has a background message, too. Would you like to feel it?”
The assembled men and women put their fingertips gently on the neuro-link interface. The message was loud and clear, practically beaten into the brain.
“Have a good time … all the time.”
“What do we make of this? This world where genetics were employed to make humans into monsters, and where fairy-tale villages were constructed instead of real-towns?”
Brandywine picked up a wand, a kind of remote control. The Temple vanished, and in its place, they saw a team of eight Aves fixing graviton beams on a large plate impacted into the side of an icy moon. “This final clue fits all the pieces together.”
It had taken days of lasering, melting, and tractor-beaming to pull the massive slab of gold and corundum from the surface of the frozen moon. At one point, it had been pulled exactly three meters from the surface, only to collapse again because someone had under-calculated the strength of the graviton beam. Change had been right. Olivetti was a twitch.
“Current Theory is that this object was intended either to orbit EdenWorld, or to be embedded on the moon Miyoki, which closely tracks Eden’s orbit and whose face is always visible on the DaySide of the planet. It never made it. The people in charge of delivering must have been embarrassed when it ended up upside-down on the wrong moon.”
When it was finally pulled free, and turned over to read the legend that had been inscribed in enormous, solid gold letters, kilometers high and wide, somewhat smashed by the impact with the surface. They were in an ancient language, so Brandywine imposed a t
ranslation window over them.
Welcome to
EdenWorld Equuleus
A Product of the
Disney-Asia World Concern
Have a Good Time All the Time
There was a smaller legend at the bottom.
Visit Our Other Amazing and Perfect Recreational Planets:
EdenWorld Orionus
EdenWord Centauri
EdenWorld Draconis
EdenWorld Cygni
EdenWorld Leonis
EdenWorld Perseus
EdenWorld Aquila
EdenWorld Ceti
EdenWorld Tucana
And Coming Soon
EdenWorld Pegasi!
She concluded. “This EdenWorld and the others, were constructed as great, planetary scale playgrounds. This planet was built to be one great entertainment complex. There were a number of Eden colonies. They were all specially designed for optimal climate and beauty. They were intended to be a kind of resort, or retreat or...”
“Theme parks,” Keeler interrupted. “Huge theme parks on a planetary scale. Like someone locked the gates on Bachannal Island? and everyone trapped inside were left to fend for themselves.”
Someone else put in. “Did you know they were going to build a ring around the planet and run some kind of ultra-high-speed mag-lev rail around it?”
“An orbital roller-coaster,” said Keeler. “That would have been kwazappy.”
“So, it’s possible that all the Eden colonies were built by the same consortium,” said Brandywine.
“I’d say, likely rather than possible,” Keeler replied.
Brandywine said. “All the extraordinary creatures they created were supposed to be the entertainment, instead, they became the ringmasters.”
“The non-viable life forms probably died out,” someone suggested, perhaps, thinking of the walking sex organs.
A thin and fussy man who had been assistant director of a minor department of the Ministry of Culture on Republic spoke up next. “What I don’t understand is, the entire culture of that world was based on power. Those who had power were the masters. Those without any power – ordinary humans – were slaves.”
Worlds Apart 02 Edenworld Page 34
