by Gian Bordin
The second time, Yuen-mong decided to stop that nuisance. In uncompromising tones she said that if their headman did not want to learn, then he needed to be replaced. She again went around them and then they noiselessly sneaked up from behind. Once within easy arrow range, they rose, an arrow ready in their bows, although she had instructed him to shoot only when she gave the order. She did not want any unnecessary killing. She issued her challenging whistle call. The savages immediately jumped up, howling as usual. There was little doubt who their new headman was. He advertised it by wearing Atun’s badly tattered clothing. She did not hesitate, took aim and let fly. The man fell without a sound. Within a second, the next arrow was ready. She shouted a few words in their tongue. "Go and never come back," she explained to him afterward.
Howling, the men fled in disarray, leaving their fallen headman behind. From then on, the savages never ventured near the field again, although he could occasionally see movement on the rock outcrop on top of the hill he had climbed on his first day on Aros.
Finally, the day came when all changes had been made and correct operation of each one checked and rechecked. Each unit was tested separately for proper fuel ignition. They had recharged the batteries chemically since even the shuttle’s built-in solar cells did not operate. They had also converted and tested the air-conditioning system to manual control. Anything that was not essential for the craft’s operation and could be dismantled they had removed. Atun estimated that the shuttle had become at least one quarter lighter, making escape from Aros gravitational forces that much easier. It was a strange mixture of 25th century technology brought back to 19th century mechanics, using stone-age materials.
"Tomorrow we will make our first test flight," she said, while they were eating a late and well-deserved cold dinner.
"You trust yourself to pull it off?" he asked.
"Yes, I do. We will practice various maneuvers some more tonight."
"But it’ll soon be dark and we won’t see the switches anymore."
"We have to be able to do this with our eyes closed, without having to think about it." She smiled at him. "Don’t you trust me?"
"I do, Yuen-mong, I do. I’ve never heard you claim anything that you couldn’t do. I wish I had as much trust in myself."
She graced him with one of those smiles that reached right to the core of his being, touched his arm and said: "If you remain long enough with me, you will one day." Then she chuckled and moved quickly away from him, as if she had guessed that he had great difficulties restraining himself from embracing her.
* * *
Next morning they tested each other operating the switches blindfolded. They rehearsed the simple maneuvers of their first test several times. The aim was only to lift off the ground, turn the shuttle around and put it down again, without using the main engine.
Atun engaged the vertical lift thrusters. After three seconds, the shuttle lifted much faster than he expected before he managed to keep it hovering about ten meters above the ground, and it immediately started to tilt to the left. Yuen-mong reacted instantly. She activated the left roll thruster for a second and the craft righted itself, but overshot to the right. A quick burst of the right thruster corrected that. Next, she engaged the right-turn yaw switch to turn the craft around, noticing that the nose began to dip and corrected that with a quick burst of the up pitch, but by that time the craft had already turned more than 180 degrees and she let it continue, counteracting the movement just before it was looking in the right direction. Atun then moved the craft forward by about a hundred meters to a patch in the field that they had cleared of spear grasses. Again she corrected for roll action. When the craft was close to the landing spot, he brought it to a halt. She gave a tiny thrust to pitch the craft forward so that the main engine was kept well clear from touching the ground first when he put the shuttle down. He became suddenly aware that he must have held in his breath during much of the maneuver and breathed in deeply.
"Wow, we did it, we did it," cried Yuen-mong, releasing her seat restraint and jumping out of her seat, laughing and shaking her raised arms. He got out of his seat too and before he knew it, she had embraced him, holding him close, putting her cheek against his. His heart raced away anew. How he loved that woman!
"This is only a beginning," he said when she released him. "We’re still a long way from actually flying this machine, let alone get it into orbit."
"Oh, you pessimist," she exclaimed, slapping his shoulder lightly. "I will not let that spoil my excitement… Anyway you cannot fool me. I know that you are excited too."
Yes, I am, but maybe for a different reason. She smiled at him, as if she had guessed his thoughts, and he smiled back.
Next, they rehearsed their second maneuver, a short flight. That meant getting the shuttle off the ground with the vertical thrusters, pitch the nose up about 30 degrees and immediately engage the main engine. Again the craft accelerated much faster than Atun had expected and it took him a few seconds to reduce the thrust. Under main engine thrust, the craft was much more stable, and Yuen-mong’s only activity was to turn the craft around in a wide circle. It became more tricky once he cut the main engine and they slowed the craft for landing. They had a close call when it suddenly rolled and pitched at the same time. Once on the ground, it took them a few seconds to recover from that final moment of fright.
When they got out of the craft for fresh air, they saw a large group of savages assembled on the bare hilltop with the rock outcrops.
"I don’t like this," remarked Yuen-mong. "I am sure they still have hearsay knowledge of having come to Aros in a space craft. Some may try to capture the craft. I’d rather not have a blood bath."
"What can we do?"
"We can fly the craft to the top of our rock."
"You cannot be serious!" He searched her eyes and saw mild amusement. "You are serious! … No, Yuen-mong, this is too dangerous. Let’s not risk damaging the craft and ruining everything."
"Leaving it here is putting it at risk also. They might damage something. We would have to stay here and guard it every day… Let’s at least move it closer to our rock. We could land on the large sandy area a bit north of the rock, next to the swamp where I often pick greens, you know?"
It’s crazy! cried his mind. We’re not ready yet. We’ll kill ourselves. He was wringing his hands, shaking his head, avoiding her gaze.
"Atun." She touched his arm. "Look at me." With a great effort he met her eyes. "I trust you… Trust yourself … trust me. We can do it. Come inside. Let’s see what it would involve."
She trusted him… how could he not trust her. She took his hand, and he let himself be pulled inside the shuttle. At that point, he would have granted her anything, even abandon their quest to get off-planet and spend the rest of his life on Aros at her side.
* * *
They talked about the pros and cons and what such a flight would involve for almost an hour, and then rehearsed several times the taking off and landing maneuvers. They agreed that they could abort the flight and return to the comparatively easy landing conditions in the spear grass field. By mid-afternoon they were ready to take off. Again Yuen-mong found that getting the craft into a stable position for the main engine to be fired was tricky, but once airborne, the flight went smoothly. They reached an altitude above the sea she guessed to be higher than the chain of mountains to the east — to fool the savages into thinking they had left Aros — before they banked back to shore and cut the main engine, letting the shuttle float, controlling its path with the thrusters. She could not stop smiling, feeling free like the mighty craw, exhilarated as never before in her life. It was over too fast. Barely five minutes later they set the craft down in the dunes, well away from the water in a cloud of dust, that settled when the lift thrusters were finally cut too.
On their way to the cave, she picked a bunch of fresh swamp spinach. They had not had a cooked meal for three days, and she was keen for a succulent fish soup and some freshly baked s
piced bread. There might even be some fresh sweetberries on the few mature bushes that had survived the storm on their rock.
Back in the cave, she was filled with a sense of home. Every feature was dear to her, reminding her of her childhood with her parents, of growing into a fearless woman after their death. How could she leave all this for an unknown future? A mild panic gripped her, and she tried to shake it off by busying herself with preparing the meal. For the first time, being attentively watched by Atun was unsettling. It was his crashing on Aros that had set all this in motion. No, that’s not true! It only opened the possibility of leaving. It was my choice to grab it and I can still stop it. But she knew she would not. She knew that she wanted to get to her parents’ home world. That wish had always been in her ever since childhood and since Atun’s remark that there was no record of her parents’ mission to Aros — surprising at first — this fact had become ominous. Why had it not been entered into the log of explorations? Was it not obligatory so that future explorations had as much information available as possible? So why had it been suppressed? She needed to find out, either to set her mind at ease that it had only been an oversight or if not to know the reason why they had been sent to their death, and that she could only do by going to Andromatis.
While the soup was cooking, she had the urge to go out to the cave balcony, to savor the view, to store it in its ever-changing variety for ever. She let her eyes roam down the length of the beach — three stripes of different colors, the blue sea, the dark green forest, separated by a strip of almost white sand, turning cream in the late afternoon sun, with the golden ring like a halo over it. In a few days, she would leave, never to see this again. Irresistible tears misted her vision and ran down her cheek.
"Yuen-mong," she heard Atun voice softly, "why are you crying?"
She swept her open hand over the scene. "Because of this. Because it hurts leaving this."
"We don’t have to go… we could stay here. I think I could be happy here with you."
She turned to him. "You are very kind, Atun, but I think we must leave. We don’t really belong here. No humans belong to Aros." She returned to the hearth to finish preparing their meal.
That evening they made plans for the final departure. Atun recalled that the outer edge of the ring was at an altitude of about 35,000 km above the surface of Aros. That edge followed a clockwise orbit of 33 standard hours. The only feasible way to find Vishnu in a reasonable length of time was to go into a counterclockwise orbit a few thousand kilometers above the ring. They should then encounter the ship every sixteen to seventeen hours. After locating it, they would maneuver a U-turn well above the ring, timed such as to rendezvous with it at the next encounter. With only manual propulsion and thruster control that may be tricky and require several attempts. The only serious disadvantage of such a flight trajectory was that they could not take advantage of Aros’ 350-meter-per-second surface velocity and therefore would require a higher escape velocity and consume more fuel. At maximum engine thrust they should be able to reach such an orbit in less than three hours from liftoff. He could not be more accurate for two reasons, both a consequence of having no AI unit to do the calculations. First, they would have to judge a suitable orbit by visual means. Second, the calculations were of such complexity that he could only compute a rough approximation by hand.
Once in orbit above the ring, Atun would attempt to restore the AI unit with the backup cube and, if that failed, get it working at least to the extent of being able to transmit the access codes to open Vishnu’s shuttle airlock. They agreed that if they did not manage to locate the ship and gain access to it within ten Aros days, they would return to the surface. They also discussed the difference between flying in air under the strong gravity of Aros and in airless space once they were beyond its atmosphere.
Yuen-mong thought that it would take them about two weeks to stock the shuttle with the necessary provisions, including precooked meals and fresh water, to last for ten days plus, and moving all things that she wanted to take along, either as souvenirs or to assure survival should they have to return and not be able to land near their rock.
"There is one more difficulty we face, assuming we are successful," Atun began, sounding tentative.
She sensed that he was squirming inside. "Yes."
"To land on or take off from any satellite port or any inhabited world, we need credits, not to speak of renewing our fuel. I may just have enough credits to cover the 30,000 landing fee on Palo, but not enough for Andromatis or to buy any supplies."
"My mother said that she had lots of credits and I have her credit access code. So we should be fine."
"Your mother’s credits may not exist anymore. On Palo, they go to the heirs after twenty standard years, if they’re not claimed by the rightful owners within that time. In some worlds, it only takes ten."
"My parents left Andromatis before I was conceived, which is more than twenty years." She looked at him with amused eyes. "You should have crashed a year earlier, Atun."
He hesitated and then said: "Yuen-mong, this is serious… We could take several kilograms of gold along. Each kilo is worth around 50,000 credits."
"Gold?" That’s why he was squirming. She could not quite suppress an ironic smile, but regretted it immediately when she saw him go crimson. She touched his arm and gave him a genuine smile. "It’s all right, Atun. We can go back to the Goldnugget River."
His relief was visible and his eyes expressed gratitude.
"How much do you suggest we collect?"
"To resupply the ship for another voyage would run to about 200,000 credits. Maybe the equivalent of ten Old Earth kilograms? Do you think it would be possible to find that much?"
"I don’t know. I have difficulties figuring out how much that is… That pile that you collected, how much weight do you think that had?"
He avoided her gaze and replied: "About 250 grams."
"So we would need about 40 times that much. I think we should get that easily. Closer to the mountain, the river has more and that is also in the no-man’s-land between two clans. So we should have no trouble, and there is a bonus. We can spend another day up in the mountains. I would love that. I had so much fun calling the echo. It would be a fitting good-bye to Aros."
8
The evening before their planned departure, Yuen-mong was on top of the rock, waiting for the night hunters. She wanted to greet them one more time and say farewell to her parents’ souls. When Atun asked if he could join her, she said no, that she needed to do this alone, but she invited him to come with her at dawn next morning to say good-bye to the dawn bird.
She left the things they did not take along in the cave at their usual place, as if she were only going away for a few days. On the balcony she cast a last long look south, letting her tears flow freely. She was closing a chapter of her life, a chapter that had cast her into the woman she was. How would that woman cope out there in the Universe where the survival skills of Aros would be of little or no use?
In the shuttle, she wound her father’s pocket watch fully and attached it on the console in front of Atun’s pilot seat. After stowing away the last belongings they brought along, they put on the anti-G suits and suction-cup boots — in contrast to an interplanetary space craft the shuttle had no gravity field. When she wanted to take her seat, Atun held her by the shoulders and said: "Yuen-mong, before we trust our lives to this craft and our skills, I want to tell you that I love you."
It sounded rehearsed, although his voice had a slight tremor.
"I know, Atun. I have known for a long time." She knew that he was hoping for more, but she could not give him that. She was very fond of him, but was that love? So, she came a step closer and said: "Atun, hold me."
He folded his arms around her and she pressed her cheek against his. She liked the smell of his skin, the roughness of his beard. She could sense his elevated heart beat and it felt good. After a while, she disengaged herself and kissed his cheek. Smiling sh
e said: "Captain, crew ready."
After strapping themselves firmly into their seats, they got ready for takeoff. They hovered above ground, directing the craft south-west for a 45-degree approach angle to the ring. When the seconds arm of the watch hit 55, Atun engaged the main engine and set it to full power. Four seconds later, she felt pressed into her seat, as the craft began to move and then rose at a steep angle. As they gained elevation and speed, they turned the shuttle upside down to ease the effect of acceleration on their bodies and to enable them to see Aros through the shuttle windows.
Under full power, the craft was stable, and after the first small corrections for roll Yuen-mong had nothing to do. She relaxed and enjoyed seeing the surface features of the land slowly revealed. This was her world. Would she ever return to it again? To her right she spotted the mountain range where they had spent a night four days ago on their gold search expedition and she realized in what a small area she had lived her life.
The roar of the engine made it impossible to speak without earphones. Atun’s face expressed strained concentration. She could sense his tenseness and tried to catch his eyes. When she succeeded, she smiled at him and had the feeling that he too relaxed a bit.
After exactly six minutes and twenty seconds — she guessed they had gained about 200 km elevation — Atun cut off the engine and they continued their outward-bound journey in silence. At the same time she experienced the sensation of being weightless, that her arms floated at her side. She forced them down and held on to the armrests.
"I think my calculations were correct. We have surpassed exit velocity," he remarked, glancing at her. "So far, so good."
