The Sunspacers Trilogy

by George Zebrowski

  “I know,” he replied, holding her close, “I know.”

  |Go to Table of Contents |

  Book 3

  Behind the Stars

  1

  What calm composure will defend

  Your rock; when tides you’ve never seen

  Assault the sands of what-has-been

  And from your island’s tallest tree

  You watch advance What-is-to-be?

  The tidal wave devours the shore;

  There are no islands anymore.

  —Edna St. Vincent Millay

  Max treasured the afternoons that he had always had to himself until dinner time; but the extra hour of school set aside for discussing his habitat’s arrival in Earth’s Sunspace had cut short the best part of his days, making him more resentful of going back, even though he had known all his life that the return was inevitable.

  In less than three months, the once distant future would become a new present that would change his life forever, probably for the worse. Maybe something was really wrong with him, since all his classmates seemed to be looking forward to the great event, apparently unaware that anything was going to be taken from them. Was it his problem, or everyone else’s? It was bad either way.

  Elaine Jonney came into the room. Max blacked his holoscreen and looked up as the display frame retracted into his desk. A middle-aged woman with short black hair, Tutor Jonney had soft brown eyes that gave her a friendly look, but she was a demanding teacher.

  “With arrival now only three months away,” she began, “all of us in the teaching unit are confident that we’ve been able to prepare you adequately for the return. We hope that our preparations of the last year will help make the return a rewarding experience for all of you.”

  Max couldn’t imagine Elaine Jonney ever being anything but confident, but he did not dislike her. Most of the time he could forget about her and listen to what she was teaching.

  “I want to emphasize again,” she continued, “that the tapes, films, and holos of Earth that you all grew up with cannot completely prepare you for the openness of a planet. The sky, oceans, deserts, rivers, mountains, canyons, and weather will be strange and wonderful, maybe even a bit distressing. Some of you might remember what the surface of a planet is like from our years of exploration in the Centauri system, but Earth is an inhabited world of cities and towns, with billions of people.”

  Max found that part of it hard to take—that there were so many people. He glanced around at his classmates. Lucinda ten Eyck always looked attentive when the return was being discussed, even when she was playing with her long red hair. Emil LeStrange, her chubby younger brother, nodded to himself from time to time. The Sanger twins, Jane and Alice, just smiled. Muhammad Bekhter seemed to have a questioning look on his light brown face. Max was determined not to reveal his own feelings until he understood them better, and maybe not even then.

  He raised his hand as the tutor finished speaking.

  “Yes, Max?”

  “Will it really be that distressing?”

  “The surface of a planet is very open. Having grown up inside the hollow of this habitat, you’ll be getting used to living on the outside of a world, with only atmosphere above you.”

  “Is that all you meant?” Max asked.

  “Even though the surface of a planet curves the other way,” she continued, “it will seem flat and endless, and that might be disturbing.”

  Max had stepped into enough virtual holos to know that the land on Earth would not rise up and around, and that there would be a distant horizon, and experiencing these sensations had not bothered him then.

  “Max?”

  He nodded. “I guess that was it.”

  “Maybe Max has agoraphobia,” Lucinda murmured. Max tensed. Emil shook back his long, sandy hair and chuckled, obviously enjoying his sister’s comment.

  “I’m sure he has nothing of the kind,” Elaine Jonney said. “He’s just naturally apprehensive and is willing to admit it. Fear of open places is very rare, but any kind of change can be disorienting at first.”

  Maybe that was all it was,Max thought, trying to stay calm.

  Muhammad grinned at him. The twins stared at him as if he had suddenly become someone else. Lucinda crossed her long, bare legs. Her green eyes mocked him.

  He looked back at the tutor. She seemed to be expecting him to respond.

  “What is it, Max?” she asked finally.

  “Nothing—I was just curious,” he said uncomfortably, avoiding her eyes. Everyone was probably convinced that he hadsomething. “Earth will be great,” he said suddenly. “I can’t wait to get there.”

  There was a long silence.

  “Max, see me after school,” Elaine Jonney said with a look of concern.

  “Now, Max,” Elaine Jonney said when the classroom was empty, “tell me what this is all about.”

  He looked into her eyes and wondered if he should say anything.

  “I know it’s not agoraphobia,” she said.

  “It’s nothing.”

  “I know you better than that.”

  “Look, all I did was ask a question,” Max said, “and Lucinda didn’t miss her chance to get in a dig. It isn’t as if it hasn’t happened before.”

  “That’s true, but you seemed more disturbed by it this time. Are you sure that—”

  “Those two think they’re better than everyone.” That much was partly true. Emil and Lucinda were conceited, and he had never known them to be friendly to anyone. Sarcasm seemed to be their primary means of communication, from what he could tell. “Maybe,” he continued, “it’s just finally getting to me. I’m glad I won’t have to put up with it much longer.”

  “Why do you think they act that way, Max?”

  Max shrugged and sat back in his chair. “Maybe because their mother is Navigator.”

  Elaine Jonney sighed. “And that’s all there is to this?”

  Max hesitated, then said, “And you keep using words like distressing and disturbing at least twice a week.”

  “And that bothers you?”

  Max nodded. “It’s as if you expect us all to be bothered, no matter what you say.”

  “You’re deliberately misunderstanding,” she said with a look of exasperation. “Okay, Max, you can go.”

  Outside, in the great hollow of the habitat, Max ran along the path through the trees and came to the waterfall on the asteroid core’s inner equator. He lay down on the soft grass by the stream and felt the warmth of the distant sunplate on his face. The time until dinner had always been his to do with as he pleased, and he still had most of it, but he no longer felt the pleasure of escape.

  He closed his eyes and put his hand into the cool water. After what seemed only a few minutes, his wrist ID timer beeped five o’clock. He opened his eyes, leaned over and sipped some water, then lay back and gazed at the countryside overhead. The inner carpet of the asteroid hollow swirled down into the bright sunplate two kilometers away at his left, and into the rocky area the same distance to his right. He imagined that he felt his world turning, pressing him down into the grass, even though he knew that the only major sign of the voyaging habitat’s spin was his feeling of weight.

  “Hey, Max.”

  He looked up, annoyed at having his solitude disturbed. Muhammad walked toward him and squatted by the stream. “You really can’t wait to get there, can you?” the dark-haired boy asked.

  Max was puzzled at first, then remembered what he had said in class about how Earth would be great. “Sure,” he replied. “Everybody is excited. Aren’t you?”

  “Well, yeah.” Muhammad grinned. “My father’s got a whole itinerary worked out—first Paris, then Damascus, and he wants to visit all the relatives in Tashkent. It’ll be great—all those cities and people. It has to be more interesting than here, right?”

  “Sure—it’ll be terrific.”

  “I guess I’ll miss this place, but it’s time to see something different.” Muhammad sou
nded a little tense, as if he were trying to convince himself about Earth’s wonders, but maybe Max was only imagining that.

  “Look, I still have some studying to catch up on.” Max got up, his time alone by the stream lost; he felt angry at Muhammad for taking it from him. “Have to go.” He hurried away, heading down to the library in the circle of trees below the falls.

  He liked the saucer-shaped building that housed the library. There were no doors, only open entrances and exits. He went inside, found an empty terminal and sat down. The library’s memory fascinated him because he could demand an answer to any question, not just to material from class discussions.

  He liked to study alone; class discussions too often seemed faked. It was too easy to ask questions or give answers just to make a show of having something to say. Lucinda often used the discussions to take apart another student’s response, even when all she really had to do was answer a question, while Muhammad, who was smart, often held himself back in arguments, as if being everyone’s pal was more important than making his point. Max preferred to find things out for himself, by asking real questions in private.

  He liked to invent questions that couldn’t be answered easily by the library’s memory. The Artificial Intelligence would hunt for the answer in its banks, and find that there wasn’t enough there to make a reply, which would force it to describe an area of ignorance, or to construct an uninformative, general answer that would be unintentionally funny.

  It wasn’t the library’s fault. Most of its knowledge was over twenty years old, and additions made during the habitat’s voyage to Alpha Centauri could not equal the work done in that time by the millions of researchers in the home Sunspace, working in thousands of fields, using even more advanced Artificial Intelligences. “They’re way ahead of us,” Max’s father had told him. “Just think of all the new things we’ll learn when we get back!”

  Max did not turn on the display, but sat staring into the dark frame, feeling that everything was about to be taken away from him. He got up from the terminal and wandered to the center of the saucer, determined to keep to the routine that he enjoyed. There he sat down in one of the observation chambers and put on a helmet.

  Suddenly he was floating among the stars. The ones ahead were shifted into redness as the habitat collided head-on with their light, compressing the waves into the shorter lengths that were red to the human eye. The light catching up with the habitat was stretched into long, ultraviolet frequencies. He watched the hues vary, wondering at the vastness of the universe and the strangeness of being alive, of being himself rather than someone else. He might have been a star or a planet instead of something that wondered about itself.

  When Max came out into the golden light of late afternoon, a pedal glider was moving down the long, zero-gravity axis of the hollow, the space around which the habitat turned to give the inner surface and levels below a centrifugal gravity.

  This was the only home he had ever known. It was carrying fifteen hundred and seven people back to what the adults called home, to the star called the Sun, to the family of planets and habitats of which Earth was the parent. Arrival time was now only two months away, and there was nothing he could do to change the scheduled return to the civilization that had launched his world across the 4.3 light-years to Alpha Centauri. The return would complete a great adventure, his parents had always told him.

  Maybe it was the idea of there being so many billions of people on Earth, the Moon, Mars, and elsewhere in Sunspace that made him unhappy about leaving the habitat. Humankind was much larger than the portion he had grown up with. There were only a hundred and four kids in the returning habitat. On Earth there would be people he had never met, and would never meet. He had seen many people in the library holos, and had listened to their lectures and watched their behavior in old films, but he had never quite believed that so many people could all be different from one another. With thousands of millions, too many would be alike. It seemed strange and unnecessary to have so many, nearly twenty billion throughout Earth’s Sunspace.

  “Should we have raised children?” he had once overheard his mother say. “I sometimes wonder. You know what some are saying—that we’ve brought up a bunch of self-centered kids without a lot of social skills who won’t ever fit in back home.”

  “I’ve heard it, Rosalie,” his father had answered. “Those people are the ones who didn’t have kids.”

  “Maybe we were selfish, Joe,” she had continued, “telling ourselves that having children would make our journey more normal. We wouldn’t feel so alone as a community all these years. I worry that we had these children for ourselves only. What if we’ve spoiled them for any kind of life back home?”

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” Joe had said.

  “Max has never known anything but this protected world,” Rosalie had objected.

  “He’ll learn and adapt, I’m sure.”

  Max went down the library path and strolled between the tall maple trees until he came out on the road that led up the habitat to his house. The sunplate was warm on his back as he walked toward the rocky forward end of the world. After a few minutes he slowed his pace, still feeling resentful. His parents had always talked of “going home”; but they had lived there, so abandoning the habitat could never mean as much to them. He imagined it in orbit around a crowded Earth, empty and waiting to be torn apart, or used for some other purpose. Everything he had known would be gone, and the Earth would swallow him.

  A chill passed through him as he turned around and gazed at the beauty of the sunplate and green hollow, then closed his eyes and felt every part of the habitat within himself. The original asteroid had been five kilometers long. Its open space, four kilometers long and two across, had been cut out of the core. Just outside the hollow there was an engineering level, and beyond that hundreds of meters of rock and nickel-iron protected the inner world from the dangers of space. Rotation gave the inner surfaces nearly one Earth gravity. It wasn’t the same as gravity on a planet, where the large mass exerted its own pull; centrifugal gravity was the same action that held water down at the bottom of a bucket spinning at the end of a line. There were dangers in walking around on a surface where your head pointed toward the center of the world and the stars were outside, under your feet, and if you jumped too high you might not come down where you wanted; but he was used to it, and felt pride in understanding his world.

  He left the road and climbed the grassy hillside. Halfway up he lay down on his back and gazed up at the land two kilometers overhead. It was always a wonder to him that this peaceful scene of green countryside, roads, paths, and houses was moving through space at a speed that he understood but could not imagine. The vast power output of the matter-antimatter reactors went into the null-gravity field, whose gentle but continuous push made it possible for his habitat to attain the high fraction of light speed needed to reach the nearer stars in a reasonable time, and to do so in relative safety and comfort. Earth was readying other habitats to voyage to still farther stars. Slowly, humankind would spread outward into this spiral arm of the galaxy.

  Max did not remember the arrival at Alpha Centauri. He had been born just as exploration of that system was beginning, and his earliest memory was of Centauri A, the yellow sun of the triple star system, and its fourth planet, where for the first time he had seen oceans and green continents, all on theoutside of a world so much larger than his own. The sight from space had frightened him at first.

  His parents had taken him on a field trip with some of the other children, so they would see something of the alien system before departure. “They should have a memory of this place,” his mother had said. Max remembered the colors of the three suns. Rocky moons circled the dead worlds of the small red sun. The dim white sun seemed lonely. Centauri A resembled Earth’s Sun, his father had told him.

  Lucian “Lucky” Russell, a planetary specialist, had piloted the shuttle, and had given a lecture about its systems at the end of the two-week
trip. By the time Max was seven years old, a new habitat was being built in high orbit around Centauri A-4. Five hundred people had settled inside the second hollow. It would explore and carry on research in the Centauri system while the first habitat went home.

  The trip from Earth had taken nearly ten years. Allowing seven years for exploration at Centauri, time for acceleration, deceleration and maneuvering, and another decade for the return, some twenty-seven years had passed since the habitat left Earth’s Sunspace. Joe Sorby and Rosalie Allport, Max’s parents, were twenty-seven years older, but their friends back home had aged nearly thirty-six years, because at two-thirds of light speed, time on the habitat passed more slowly than it did for people on Earth.

  “We’ll try for a higher velocity on the way back,” his father had told him. “We’ll get back sooner, from our point of view, but even more time will have passed on Earth.” Max had not understood all this too well at age seven, but at sixteen Einstein’s Time Contraction Theory was no longer a mystery; it seemed only natural that fast-moving clocks ran slower in comparison to clocks left behind. This was true not only of mechanical clocks, but also of biological clocks like his body. The habitat’s return would be quicker at eighty percent of light speed, but the price would be arrival farther in Earth’s future, so the final decision had been to return at two-thirds of light speed, not only to avoid the psychological problems of a larger dislocation in time, but also to save wear and tear on the habitat from high-speed collisions with interstellar gas and dust. At speeds closer to that of light, even the smallest particle would strike the habitat with enormous force, so even more energy would be needed for the deflection shield.

  Max didn’t care if he arrived farther in Earth’s future; he had nothing to lose, since he had never seen Earth and knew no one there. People who had been the same age as his parents would now be older. That was interesting, but for him the only thing that mattered was that he would lose his home and have to face a strange new world. The people of the habitat would disperse to places on Earth, the Moon and Mars, to other habitats, going wherever their work took them.