04. Birth of Flux and Anchor (18 page)

"Attention C-deck passengers," the P.A. called out. "We regret the inconvenience and close quarters imposed, but we have done our best with the materials we have been given. Because you will be using disposable clothing from this point out, we ask you not to change your assigned billet. Our computer has your basic measurements and requirements from your files. This clothing will be delivered to each billet before the wake-up lights come on. Fold and place all old clothing outside your door after changing each day. If the new clothing is wrong or gets excessively soiled or damaged during a day, report to the quartermaster, Deck F, for refit and replacement.

"Also, bedding should be treated the same way but deposited in a separate pile outside the door. New bedding will be delivered. Smoking is not permitted anywhere on Deck C except the lounge.

"Please be considerate of everyone in this difficult transition. Do not talk or make noise or commotions during the designated sleep periods. If you cannot or do not wish to sleep, please go to Deck F. The bridge area and ship's engineering aft are off limits to all personnel at all times unless you are crew with proper identification.

"Thank you for your cooperation. With your help we can make this voyage smooth and pleasant."

Candy chuckled. "Now I know what it's like to be in the army. Well, I guess I can stand it for five or six days."

Toby nodded, then reached into his small personal kit and brought out a pen and a ruled notebook only slightly smaller than the kit itself.

"What's that?" Millie asked, peering down from the top bunk.

"Kind of a last-minute idea of mine," he told the both of them. "I don't know—never kept a diary before in my life. It always seemed silly and a waste. I just thought, well, maybe I'd try one now and then, jot down my feelings of the moment when I thought of it, just as a sort of personal record. Nothing fancy—I'll probably lose it before we even reach the Point. Just something to look back on in my declining years, or maybe for my grandchildren to get an idea of what we did."

He settled back and looked at the first blank page. At the top he wrote, "Toby Haller, Area 4, Anchor L. Begun this 28th Day of March, in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand One Hundred Seventeen."

There. That was pretentious and dramatic enough.

He thought for a moment, then wrote in his usual very bad handwriting, "March 28, 2117: Tally-ho! We're finally on our way! Four bloody years shot to hell on Titan, which once bore a strong resemblance to our little project but now is less kin than Spitsbergen is to Nassau, but now it's going to pay off. At .8 light speed it takes almost no time to get to the Borelli Point, even though it's halfway to the stars."

He studied his prose. Juvenile, he thought, like this whole idea. It was also a lie, at least in tone. He wondered if he would still recall the true feelings of apprehension, even fear, he felt when reading that decades from now.
Well,
he decided,
that's the way I
should
be feeling.

He repressed the urge to write of his true feelings right now. the ship, the people he was presently with, all that. It wasn't that big a book, and he wasn't much of a writer.

Besides, he might brag about making the trip with two women now and again, but he wasn't sure he liked the idea of leaving the implications of that, however, untrue, for his children to read, if he ever had any.

He sighed, and turned to put the book back in its place. It was getting close to lights-out, and he felt oddly very tired, although he'd done almost nothing today. He froze as he found himself watching the beautiful Candy peeling down to her panties and looking all the better for it. He felt himself getting turned on and thought he'd better clear his throat.
Damn
Millie! He wondered what kind of a bribe it might take to get the kid far away for an hour or so in the upcoming days.

Candy looked over at him and grinned, obviously not at all shy about such exposure, and the type that enjoyed being ogled. Whether this extended to action or whether she was just a tease remained to be seen.

He smiled, shrugged, and put his book away, then stripped down to his shorts. That was as far as his own blushes told him he could go, at least tonight.

The precocious Millie had also stripped all the way, and as she sat there, tent down, folding up her clothes, Haller noticed that the kid had a pretty good body as well. He found himself embarrassingly aroused by all this unexpected vision and company, and incredibly frustrated at being unable to make a single move right now. He was a bit put off, though, when Candy did a string of ritualistic isometric exercises. It was clear why she had mentioned the gym on F deck first. Although it wasn't apparent before, she had muscles on her that were bigger and tighter than his. One of the weight-lifter types. It was strictly personal, but to him overly muscled women were as grotesque-looking as overly muscled men. The only difference with the women was that when they were at rest it didn't show like it did on the men. Now, with these exercises, though, it did—in spades.

He was a fairly big man in reasonably good shape, about ninety-five kilos and little fat, but he began to wonder if he wanted to make it with a woman who could probably bench-press
him.

He didn't reflect on it too long, and when the announcement was made for lights-out, he found himself drifting quickly to sleep in spite of the undercurrent of noise.

The disposable clothing proved to actually be a good fit, but somewhat loose, and while there was some support in the clothing, undergarments were clearly not to be provided. It all looked, and felt, like thin white cotton, very soft and comfortable, although it made everyone look like a colony of poor peasants off in some remote subtropical land. Actually, it was a synthetic made of paper products with chemical binders. When done with them, the clothing would be collected, dumped into a processor somewhere, reduced back down to a pastry liquid and sterilized, then reprocessed into the same garment again. It was efficient anyway. The big complaint that Haller had was that the garments did not allow for pockets.

To tell what was whose, the machines that stamped them out had stenciled in thin black ink the wearer's last name, first two initials, and company work ID on the right rear of the seat. Haller complained grumpily that it wouldn't have cost any more to stencil it as a breastplate; as it stood, everyone who wanted to know who others were had to maneuver around and study other folks' asses.

The trip, although short, proved to be interminable. Minutes crawled like hours, and hours seemed like days, because there were so many people and so little to do. Haller, like many other department heads whose people were sure to be aboard, tried to locate and round up those people for meetings, but it proved nearly impossible. While the ship's computers did have everyone, the information was not easy to get at, and there was no real system for contacting others, particularly when they were on other decks with other schedules. Several times he took out his composition book, but found he had nothing really to say.

Any thoughts of romance also vanished. He found he had little really in common with Candy, and the woman had linked up with several male friends in her gym sessions and seemed to be getting whatever she wanted from that quarter. Millie clearly wanted more, and kept coming on to him, but he just didn't feel comfortable with a seventeen-year-old, and he was conscious of his own responsibility. He didn't really have a lot of warm feelings for her parents, who'd obviously had little time for her and let her run free not just now but perhaps for her teen years as a whole, but he wasn't the type to take advantage of that.

The best he did was eventually run into some people from different Landscape Engineering teams, and at least they could pass some time comparing notes and otherwise talking shop. Even so, time dragged. Dragged, yes, but it
did
still flow.

They reached the Borelli Point right on schedule.

"April 2. All sealed up in this damned shell, can't even see the Borelli Point. They have photos of it, looking something like an eclipsed sun, but I sure wish I could have seen it. A thousand shots, no chasers, some bitters, perhaps, and down the hole. Heigh-ho! Wonder what it feels like once you're strapped in that tube and turned into a lot of particles? Find out tomorrow, and so will you, old record book!"

There was a one-day layover where they still had to endure the ship and its conditions, but suddenly it no longer seemed important to anyone. They were at the Point, and the next step was a whole lot bigger than this one.

This Point, the largest ever built in or around the home solar system, was in fact a large Flux Gate in space, the prototype of the seven they had built on their destination. It was, in many ways, an exact duplicate of those seven, even in size, since it was designed to handle the same shaped and designed craft in the same ways. Attached to it in a thick ring was the control center and quarters for the transport and military personnel. It was a large complex, but it could by no means handle half of the numbers of the ship with even the same level of discomfort the ship itself provided. It was more practical to load the Flux vessels directly from the transport.

Haller was right, though, that all should have been given at least one real look at the Gate, which simple didn't photograph properly. It was a perfectly round concave disk, yet black in color, surrounded by the guide lighting and then the circular ring of quarters and technical operations. Although a small amount of Flux was always coming in, for technical reasons, and was used in part to power the station itself as well as its own converters and transport engines, the thing was totally dark. The feed tube, only a few meters across, was in its center, and led off at an angle to the regulating machinery and routing computers. At the end there was, at least to the naked eye, the illusion of looking into a swirling mass of shimmering energy, but it was only an illusion, caused by static discharge produced as a by-product of continually punching and sealing the Point.

Nobody slept much that night, but conversation was at an unusually low level. There was a great deal of introspection, and the atmosphere was thick enough to cut with a knife.

"Attention all personnel," blared the speaker. "Stand by for a shipwide address by the projector director.''

All conversation suddenly stopped throughout the ship's passenger areas. After a few moments, and some inadvertent comments instructing the director on how to broadcast, they heard the voice of Rembrandt van Haas.

"This is your project director," he said needlessly. "Throughout the next several hours we will be loading the transport ships. At this moment large modules are being fed into the cargo areas below the passenger section of the ships, modules containing a billion tons of everything from cows to trees to corn and maize seed. Every ship, every trip, takes more of this with us. These supplies, destined for Gates Four and Six, will be the seed in more ways than one, since they will be the prototypes for all that we will have there. If your favorite food or flower or animal is not there, blame the landscape engineers who designed the ecosystems. They spelled it all out, and determined the kind of place in which you'll eventually live and work."

Thanks a lot,
Haller thought sourly.

"What you will find there now is quite primitive, and everything is in its lease-common-denominator form. Things will be slow at first to develop, and you must have patience. We want the engineers to be right the first time, for they might not get a second chance. In a very real sense you will be pioneers, building a new life in the wilderness, a wilderness so primitive that you must create all that you need and all that you want. Even more than the pioneers of the past, you will have the opportunity to do just that. Most of you, however, will be unprepared for just how primitive things will be at first."

They can't be worse than this bloody ship,
Haller thought, but he knew better, at least intellectually.

"It has been a tightly held secret until now that there have been people on New Eden not just for the past year but for the last four years."

That
caused a real stir.

"People were sent in as soon as the computers said it was possible, even before it was possible to breathe and exist there unaided. Every step of the way has been monitored and measured and checked by an incredibly brave team of Pathfinders, men and women who have sacrificed far more than you for this opportunity. These men and women of the Signals and Logistics commands and of Transportation and Energy are right now the political bosses. They will be there to greet you, to help you, to teach you what you have to know. Listen to them. Until things are established, even a brigadier or a director ignores them at the peril of their lives, not merely their comfort."

Toby tried to imagine it and could not. Four years, three of which would be spent on the surface of a lifeless world, their only company themselves and the machines around them, penned up in little life stations probably far more cramped and crowded than any space station, able to go out only in space suits . . . Van Haas and Cockburn  had gambled heavily in sending them out so early, and he could understand why it was kept such a big secret. If they had been lost, or had died, it might have killed the whole project—if anyone other than the select few had known they were there in the first place.

"Because of the nature of our switching system on New Eden, Gate Four traffic will embark first, then Gate Six. The loading process for passengers might take as much as two hours for this number of people, and this means standing around and being very bored for the period if you are unlucky enough to be loaded in first. Please be patient. The end is in sight, so to speak. It may seem slow, uncomfortable, an affront to your dignity, an assault on your modesty, and a direct attack on your authority and your intellect. Consider, though, what we are about to do. We are about to go into a void outside our own universe and enter again at a predetermined point—but a point whose location in relation to here we do not even have a clue to. The journey, which would take centuries the old way, will take weeks as it is, but to you it will be the blink of an eye. We follow in the footsteps of our ancestors who also braved new lands and even new worlds, but two hours of indignity and boredom are a far smaller price to pay than they did.