NAAN (The Rabanians Book 1)

NAAN

Dan Haronian

Edited by Thaddaeus Moody

Copyrights © 2012 by Dan Haronian

All rights reserved.

No part of this book shall be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise – without written permission from the author.

In memory of my father, Nathanael

It was a very odd feeling.  Everything was taller: the desk, the chairs even the stairs. It was as if in one instant he had fallen into a world meant for tall people. Even his strides were shorter than he remembered. His brain had yet to adjust itself to the new him. As he walked along the lower deck of the shuttle he felt as if he were walking the wrong direction on a moving platform.

Doctor Afgena Tarki knew it was all just temporary. He was about to leave Paraday for good. It would be a long journey, but when he reached his new home on the other side of the galaxy his reduced dimensions would make sense.

The elevator took him up to the main deck. The crew was still finalizing the preparations for departure. The shuttle’s journey would be much longer than his own. Roughly two hundred years Galaxy Standard Time (GST) after its launch its voyage would end in a crash.

The Doctor walked towards the narrow stairs to the left of the control deck.  His short steps made him waddle like a duck. He used the railing to pull himself up the stairs to the upper room. The crew had taken to calling it the “vault". A large Flyeye suddenly burst through the entrance and the Doctor almost lost his balance. It screeched like an electric saw as its wings rubbed briefly against the wall.  The Flyeye was surprised as well. It balanced itself, then turned and hovered in front of the Doctor’s face. Abruptly it retreated and the eye that stood out from its upper housing zoomed in. The Doctor heard the small control motors humming inside.

"Yes, it's me," he said looking at the eye. He assumed the person in the control room was trying to figure out if he was seeing correctly. The Flyeye scanned him from top to bottom then zipped away across the main bridge and out through the shuttle’s upper door.

Doctor Tarki knew he would witness many things in the coming hundreds of years. The evolution of the Flyeye would be one of them. They would progress from small spheres that tended to crash into walls, to Flyeyes with deadly gas chambers beneath their wings, and even some with enough electrical charge to stun anyone who dared to confront them. In the end they would be smart, autonomous devices the size of a child’s fist.

The “vault” was large and spacious. It could have been larger if not for its thick walls and unique support structure.  Since there was really no way to predict the force of the impact when the shuttle eventually crashed into the remote planet of Naan, the engineers had prepared for the worst.

Around him technicians leaned over their terminals. The equipment was the best Paraday had to offer and the terminals were state of the art.  Doctor Tarki had insisted.

"We don't know who will be there to welcome the shuttle," he’d explained. When there were further objections from the bureaucrats he lost his temper. "They may be as smart as me or as dumb as you!" he roared.

His colleagues had been filled with envy by the government’s huge investment in this project. In fact they’d wanted him dead. After his dream was granted virtually unlimited funding however, the Doctor had been forgiven.  After all they didn't know what he knew. 

"Doctor Tarki," he heard a surprised voice from behind him.

“Sitrus,” he called back, “How is it coming?”

“What has happened to you?” asked Sitrus. “Have you shrunk in the laundry or what?”

The Doctor threw up his hands. 

“I was upgraded,” he said. “They shrunk everything but my head. They must have known they couldn’t squeeze such a big brain into a smaller head.”

“Yes,” said Sitrus, but the smile on his face faltered and became astonishment.

“But why?” he asked.

“Ahh, something related to surviving the long journey,” lied the Doctor. ”You know crossing the galaxy is not so simple. Smaller bodies have a higher survival rate.”

“Hah, I see!” said Sitrus, not really understanding. He leaned his head back and appraised the Doctor’s new appearance. “On this body your head looks like a large balloon.”

“Yes, I suppose it does,” said the Doctor with a smile. He looked around. “So, how are things progressing here?”

“We are almost done. The books are already loaded, and we went over the password several times. Everything is working fine.”

“The question is will it work hundreds of years from now?” said the Doctor.

“I believe it will be fine, but it all depends on whether the shuttle crashes according to the engineers plan. The approach angle is critical if the sponge structure is to absorb the impact.

The Doctor smiled. He knew all that. The entire lower part of the shuttle would be sacrificed to make sure the upper deck, a few internal cavities, and the “vault” would survive. It had worked well in the simulations. The engineers had joked that this would be the most delayed confirmation of a simulation ever attempted. Not many understood the joke.

“Anyway, it’s not as if I’ll be around to stand trial if it doesn’t work,” said Sitrus watching the Doctor’s pensive face. 

He looked down at the doctor’s body. Tarki started to move his hands back and forth as if he was studying their properties.

“But
you
will be there,” continued Sitrus. 

“Yes,” said the Doctor and sighed. He dropped his hands, “I only hope all of the effort and the waiting will be worth it.”

“Me too. I still I don't really understand why you are doing this. It looks like a huge investment in nothing. Please forgive me for being honest.”

“That's okay,” said the Doctor.

“You are leaving today,” said Sitrus.

“Yes, in few hours.”

“It will be interesting to see what’s left of our masterpiece after the crash. I wonder what they will think of her then. We broke more than a few records here you know? It’s the most advanced shuttle ever built.”

“Yes, I know. You have gone above and beyond my friend,” said the Doctor.
If all goes well
, he added to himself. 

He gazed at the thirty-six lenses arranged in a square in the center of the ceiling. He’d fought hard to place them there. In the end he had won out against resistance that crossed multiple domains. The lenses had created many engineering problems, but they were necessary. Doctor Tarki hoped he hadn’t pushed the engineers too far. 

He walked over to one of the terminals and looked at the graphics on the wall in front of him for a few seconds before he entered the password.

"Yes, everything is working," he mumbled when the terminal woke up.

He thought he understood the meaning of the password. Even so he hoped he would not need to intervene so early in the operation. He didn't think it would be a tragedy if he had to step in to help them once or twice, but if he had to take a larger role the whole thing would be meaningless. One should never try too hard to fulfill a dream.

Two hundred and ten years later, GST.

My name is Sosi. I was lying beside a tin shack, at Seragon City airport.  My two brothers were with me. The three of us were catching our breath and looking toward the port. Daio, the eldest, was massaging the palms of his hands trying to restore the blood flow. Sweat dripped from his short dark beard.  He was heavier and more muscular than me. Still I was surprised by how fast he’d moved through the obstacles of the last hour. My other brother, Dug, lay on the ground spread-eagle, his chest was moving up and down rapidly. In many ways he was the smartest of us, but his other attributes stood in his way. He never took risks. If it wasn't for Daio we would still have been poor and homeless. Dug was as tall as I was, taller than Daio, but his height had been his undoing during our escape.

Flyeyes passed by several times but none noticed us. I had never been in an airport before. I wasn’t sure about my brothers, but I was certain they had never been that close to the field itself. Silent hovercrafts and shuttles surrounded us.

An hour before, we’d been in jail. My brothers didn't understand how we’d gotten to the field or why we’d been arrested in the first place. They couldn’t deny we’d broken the law, but the crimes they thought we’d been prosecuted for didn't warrant the sentence the government had planned for us. I knew though. I knew it all. I was the one who’d gotten out of there and I was the reason someone wanted us dead.

Dug was two years younger than Daio. I was the youngest by five years. Our father had left us soon after I was born and our mother had died when I was only ten. Orphans living alone were rare in the city of Taglam. There were many poor people, but orphaned children were immediately transferred into government custody. Brothers and sisters were usually separated after a short acclimation period. Young children were put up for adoption. Older kids were sent to remote cities to be educated.

This was not our way.  Daio knew the situation we were in and did all he could to avoid it. If he’d known about the trouble I would create for us maybe he would have thought otherwise. Dug, on the other hand, would have been happy to get rid of me. When he was angry at me he would often remind me how our father left after I was born. He made sure to emphasize how it had broken our mother’s heart. He told me that it was what had killed her in the end. That she had given up. I knew he was wrong. Our mother had been depressed and pushed to her limits, but it was an incurable disease that killed her. Dug always argued that she could have beaten the disease if our father had stayed and for that he blamed me. I still thought Dug was very smart but he was smart about things that didn’t concern me. I was his obsession.

After our mother’s death we fled our hometown of Taglam, near the capital of Seragon. With the little money left to us by our mother we rented a small apartment in a poor suburban neighborhood of Seragon City. Daio started looking for a job immediately. He was seventeen years old then. At that age most teenagers were in school learning a useful skill. Daio had no time for that. He’d left school several years earlier and started helping our mother support the family. He was forced to fill the role of our missing father and for this I would always be in debt to him even in the hard days to come.

Our unique living situation meant there was no school or tradition of studying in our family. Daio worked as an apprentice in a nearby hovercraft shop. Dug joined him a short while later. They worked there for a few years until their boss was caught for scrambling information.  None of us knew back then what scrambling was, but we understood that in a civilized world it was regarded as a serious offense. Scramblers were as reviled as rapists or murderers. But this was only true in a civilized world, not in the backyard of Seragon.

The first time Daio saw an acceleration box was in the garage where he worked. The boxes were hardware that could be added to a terminal to allow information scrambling. Hard-core scramblers took pride in their work and therefore painted their illicit creations yellow.  Merchants had different aspirations and many boxes were repainted to hide their purpose. The Yellow Police made it their business to find these boxes and expose their true color.

Daio was in the back, when they walked his boss out. He was walking over to the box, just to see what all the fuss was about, when suddenly someone hurried back in to collect it. Daio fled the scene and never came back. Years later he realized how close he’d come to finding himself in jail just from being there.

Daio might have been the father of our family, but he was young. Despite his heavy responsibility he couldn't ignore his curiosity about the box. For curiosity to become something more one needs a talent and Daio had that as well.  When it came to scrambling this was even truer. Bad scramblers didn't live long.