Forbidden the Stars (2 page)

Back home on Canada Station Three, the SF holovid rentals showed Sol System’s asteroid belt to be a crowded ring of rocks and debris circling the sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. In the vids, the asteroid belt was usually home to refugees from a Terran global government gone bad, or for expatriates who had to hide from military sweepers trying to weed out the deserters; the ever-present danger of an asteroid collision kept the drama high in these pot-boiler stories.

The truth was a little different. From Macklin’s Rock, looking out the view ports of the TAHU, Alex could not see any other asteroid without the aid of a telescope. If there were any danger of collision, Hucs’ proximity sensors would alarm the TAHU inhabitants an hour in advance, then fire a deflecting shot with a laser. Rarely did a particle get through the computer defenses. It was all quite boring.

The sun was nothing more than a tiny glowing marble, giving as little light to the inhabitants of the belt as could be seen on a foggy day in London, England, but without the romantic atmosphere of that old city.

The other planets in the system were nothing more than tiny specks through a telescope. Earth, at its closest approach to Macklin’s Rock, was over a thousand times farther than the moon from the Earth. It seemed like a greater isolation than all that to a ten-year old without any friends close at hand.

Even Jupiter, more than eleven times the diameter of Earth, was nothing more than a tiny, steady star that could be seen from Macklin’s Rock by the naked eye for three-and-a-half months every two years; the rest of the time, it was obscured through normal telescopes by the glare of the omnipresent sun.

Hucs could filter the image out; enhance it to a magnification of 200 times to give it the apparent size of Luna as seen from Earth. Alex had seen more than his share of reproductions of all the system’s planets through telescopes; it was no different from the belt.

Standing on the surface of Macklin’s Rock and looking in all directions, one could get the impression of living on a desolate, dark, deserted island floating through the solar system.

It was all quite boring to Alex; all too mundane.

Not that Alex was lacking in chores. There were lessons to be integrated, and a biosyn analysis he had to make up from the day before when he had played hooky from the lessons given by Hucs, the Home-Unit Computer System; instead, opting to play the latest version of “Nova Pirates” he had downloaded from the Thai Multimedia Society.

But by and large, Alex was bored.

He sent audio-visual EPS messages to his friends on Canada Station Three, one of the dozens of the various country corporations’ inhabited orbitals positioned at the Lagrange point behind Earth’s orbit, trailing after their home world like goslings after Mother Goose.

The communication EPSes were more out of duty and obligation than desire; news of home made him miss it all that much more. The seven-minute delay between transmissions made for lengthy but shallow dialogue, even on the chat pages.

Alex watched his mother prepping for her excursion.

“Mom, can’t you stay home today?” he asked.

Alex’s mother turned from pulling on her bio-eco suitshield and gave her son a gentle smile.

“I’m sorry, Alex, but we’ve got to verify the new readings. Hucs reported an anomaly in the elemental percentage readout of the Nelson II at site 14. If it is what we are looking for, we can be off this asteroid within the week and leave it to Canada Corp.’s miners. Won’t you like going home to CS-3 and playing with your friends again?”

“Yeah,” Alex said reluctantly. “But that’s too long. Hucs is boring. All he wants to do is teach me Fulman algorithms and astral stellography. I want to interface with a real face, you know?”

“I know, Alex,” said his father as he stepped into the communal area from the airlock, having finished re-checking the pressure gauges and atmospheric capacitors.

Gabriel Manez was shorter than his wife, his skin a permanent tan in contrast to her pale white flesh, his hair jet black where Margaret’s was blonde. Alex had inherited his father’s Mayan looks.

His was the voice of authority.

“Just remember that you agreed that it would be best to come with us on this dig. You had the choice to remain on CS-3; the company would have assigned an
Andy
to chaperone you.”

“Yeah. Maybe next time I think I will stay home, if it’s all right; it’s boring up here.” The Manez’s went on at least one survey every year. The previous years, Alex had stayed on the station, but this year he had not wanted to be separated from his parents. Considering his current predicament, he regretted his decision.

His father smiled. “Well, you can put in a tight beam to some of your friends after your lessons. I think we can afford the real-time charges. And we just might be home sooner than you think.”

Gabriel turned to his wife. “Especially if those readings are accurate, Mags. This could be the find we’ve been looking for. The bonus the Corp. offers on new strikes will be enough for us to retire on; we can buy a share in the Floating Isle Station like we dreamed.”

She playfully batted at him, ignoring his enthusiasm. “You know I hate that name: Mags,” she scolded her husband, mock annoyance on her face as she initiated the vacuum seal on her suit torso. “Gabe!” she said to him, purposely making a face.

He shot her a dirty look right back. “All right . Margaret.”

“Thank you, Gabriel.”

“I prefer, ‘love of my life.’ “

“And I much prefer…” Margaret leaned over before her husband pulled on his artificial atmospheric replicator helmet and kissed him soundly on the lips.

“Yuch!” Alex declared and wandered over to the Digital Mock-Reality hologram screen on the prefab wall opposite the console desk, and set the thought-link patch over his temples.

Using Hucs for the EPS engine, since he did not have a bus generator like the one in their apartment on Canada Station Three, he logged in to the global operating system of the EarthMesh and waited the seven minutes for his personal settings to manifest and his modified cyberscape to be uploaded.

“This thing takes so long!” he said, even as he once again congratulated himself for his inventiveness in design.

His personal cyberscape was based on one of his favorite novels, Homer’s The Odyssey. He called it Odysscape.

As Odysseus, he had to sail his ship to different lands to access the various programs, utilities and games in his cyberscape. He would change the cyberscape whenever he read a novel that took his fancy, basing his desktop on his latest favorite. Previous desktops included worlds from Lewis Carrol, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Robert E. Howard.

“It takes me forever just to boot the system,” he complained, though he had no choice in using the EarthMesh virtual drive. Hucs’ LAN did not allocate even a quarter of the memory needed for Alex to run Odysscape. The drives were dedicated to the technical aspects of his parent’s work and for the bio systems of the TAHU.

On the Odysscape casement, the tall Greek figure of Odysseus stood on the shore of Calypso’s Island, making a raft to try to sail home to Ithaca. The casement showed Hermes, messenger of the gods, floating in the sky off to one corner after just delivering his message to Calypso, telling her that she should let Odysseus free. That signaled the startup of his desktop.

The CGI character was laboriously slow in binding the logs of his raft together, and Alex harrumphed with impatience. Hucs’ P-Generator just was not powerful enough.

“Don’t forget, it takes a little while for the Electronic Pulse Signal to reach Earth and bounce back. We haven’t quite mastered faster-than-light…yet,” Gabriel joked, and pulled on his helmet. Alex’s mother pulled on her own helmet, and each checked the other’s suit for seal breeches, passing a vacuity loss detector over the seams and bodice of their suits. The contained ecosystem computer signaled that their suits were leak-free and surface-ready.

His mother’s voice came over the septaphonic speakers in the TAHU, losing little of its tone in the digital translation.

“We’ll see you in ten hours, Alex. You be good, and do your homework. Hucs will report to us if you don’t.”

The warning came after the lecture of the night before, and Alex dropped his chin to his chest, looking abashed.

“I know, I know!” he replied. The moment they had returned from work and asked for a report on Alex’s activities, HUQS informed them he had spent six hours playing Nova Pirates instead of concentrating at his studies. Hucs was nothing if not deadly accurate in his recital.

“Hucs is a tattle-tale,” he declared sullenly.

“No,” Alex’s mother corrected. “A tattle-tale is someone who tells on someone just to get them in trouble. Hucs reports to us for your own good, Alex. It’s his program.”

“I know, I know.” But the timbre of his voice suggested he found the whole idea unfair in any event.

“We’ll see you soon, Alex. Be good.”

“I will.”

Alex’s parents stepped through the airlock. With a deep, audible click, the door sealed shut. The vacuum notification light glowed on the control panel to the right of the door at eye level as a chime sounded to indicate pressure equalization was beginning.

There was a low humming sound as the pumps sucked the air out of the lock, and the gravity replicator magnetics slowly dropped its gain, matching the negligible Gees on the asteroid’s surface.

His parents performed a few light exercises to get their muscles used to the near-zero gravity, and their own relative body weights of less than a gram.

Erected under the surface of the asteroid, the TAHU provided ideal protection for a survey team. The Construction-Engineering team had used pulse charges to create an artificial cavity ten meters into the surface, forming a rectangular box fifteen meters on a side, and four meters in height. AI mechbots constructed the TAHU itself.

With two personal cubicles, a communal area, lavatory, dining cubicle, computer laboratory, and airlock, it was the perfect size for a two-person survey team. If the surveyors were a couple, a third person, such as an offspring, could be attached to the mission, and not put any real strain on the TAHU resources.

There was enough food for six months, and solar wind particle converters kept the batteries charged to full.

They built a gravity convection magneto into the floor of the TAHU, magnifying the asteroids natural magnetic field inside the construct by a factor of 85.91, enough to simulate near-Earth gravity. The energy requirements were enormous, but the Sun, four hundred gigs away, provided an unlimited source of energy.

Constructed on the surface of the asteroid, the ATV bay held the ATV itself, as well as a small two-person floater in case of emergency. The floater had enough power to escape the gravity of any celestial object smaller than Luna, after which it would emit an alert beacon.

Each personal cubicle inside the TAHU held a security receptacle, which converted to a one-person floater. Safety first.

Alex turned to the DMR.

“Hucs,” he said aloud, even though the computer would follow every command he thought at it. “Bring up a VR casement for ATV camera: ATV interface.”

For the moment, he ignored his Odysscape, preferring to use Hucs’ much faster CPU engine for the local task. He shut down his link with the EarthMesh. After all, he was supposed to be working on his biosyn. Hucs had enough lesson plans uploaded into his Vdrive to last another month.

A connection with EarthMesh was not needed, but Alex felt better knowing that contact with Canada Station Three or Earth was seven minutes away.

Hucs spoke:

Alex picked up the optics but waited before pressing them over his eye cavities.

The interface camera on the dash of the ATV powered up. It would make a visual and audio log of his parent’s progress to each of the Nelson II sites, recording their reports and theories, failures and finds, and automatically EPS it to Canada Corp.’s mainframes in Ottawa on Earth.

The DMR casement in front of Alex showed a 2D image of the camera’s current field of vision. Alex slipped on the ocular cap of the thought-link patch, pressing the cup-shaped caps to his eyes as they form-fitted themselves to the contours of his eye cavity.

Abruptly, he saw everything in the ATV bay from the dashboard, as if he were there, sitting on the hood.

Approaching the ATV, his parents were guiding themselves by a system of guy wires attached to the ATV and the bay. With the minimalistic gravity of the asteroid, a strong jump could send a person flying off the asteroid and into space.

The ATV itself used a version of the gravitational magnetos, combined with a reversed polarity magneto to repel itself against the asteroid’s surface so that it could float two meters above the surface.

His parents both strapped themselves into their seats inside the vehicle and fired the power cells before his mother saw the green camera light indicating “image-transmit” as well as “image-record.”

“Hello, Alex,” she said, smiling through the transparent faceplate of the helmet, guessing correctly that it was he who had slaved his VR to the camera. The clear septaphonic voice came over the TAHU speakers.

“Hi, Mom.”

“What is it, Son?” Gabriel asked after a moment, fastening his seat restrictors.

“I don’t know. I just wanted to let you know that I miss you.”

“We miss you, too. Love you, Alex.”

“I love you, too.” He wasn’t yet too old to say that; at least, not in private. If they were back on Canada Station Three, he might feel uncomfortable about telling his parents he loved them in front of his friends.

“All right, then get your lessons completed this morning, pass that biosyn test…and when we get back, maybe you can show me just exactly how that ‘Nova Pirates’ game works,” his father said to him, his grin filling the width of the helmet’s face plate.

“Alright!” Alex exclaimed, suddenly excited. “See you later, Dad!”

He disconnected the VR link with a thought, and turned his attention to the review of the biosyn material that Hucs had presented in a secondary DMR casement whose borders were flashing an urgent red.