The Sunspacers Trilogy (3 page)
“I’m not hungry.”
“I’ll make lunch,” Dad said as he got to his feet. I sympathized with him for a moment. Why should he bother listening to me, or facing up to anything, when in two weeks we would all be apart?
Clouds covered the sun in the window, and we became shadows in the pale daylight. Mom followed Dad into the kitchenette. I watched them going through old, familiar motions, and remembered those times when I had felt warm and secure, knowing that little would change for a long time to come, and maybe never. Those bright, endless afternoons seemed far away now. An awful fear rushed through me. In a few years Mom and Dad would only be people who had once been parents. Would we like each other as adults? There was no way to know, so I tried hard not to care, and pushed the problem away.
Mom swore as she dropped something. I heard Dad take a deep breath. “Eva …” he started to say.
“Don’t begin, John,” she shot back. There was a long silence, as if they were standing perfectly still. “Joe!” Mom called to me. “We’ll have lunch in here on the counter.”
The sun came out and filled the room with light. I got up, realizing that not much would have been different even if they had come to graduation. I would still have wanted to get away. Their problems were not about to disappear overnight, and my being around wouldn’t help much.
“Joe?” Mom called again.
“Coming,” I managed to say. Maybe we all needed to lose each other for a while.
Going
“Are you very sure?” Mom asked me.
“I’m sure,” I answered without looking at her. It was almost time for me to go. I knew that they were relieved about my going, but it made them feel guilty, so they were repeating their old questions to make themselves feel better. I had gotten my way because they were too wrapped up in their problems to worry about me. If they had tried to force me to go to college while I lived at home, I would have complained against them under the Youth Rights Act of 2004.
“It’s what he wants,” Dad said as firmly as he could, more to settle Mom down than to support me.
And you’ll be stuck with however it turns out
. He didn’t say it out loud, but it was there in the tone of his voice.
We wandered toward the door. Mom held her hands together and tried to smile. “Are you sure the scholarship will cover everything?”
She knew it would, so why was she asking again? I had to admit that it couldn’t just be guilt. She cared about me, as much as she could, I realized. “He’s had expert help in the choice and planning,” Dad said, standing there, hands deep in his loose pants.
Mom looked at him, then at me, unable to speak.
“Just a kid,” Dad muttered. “Sitting on my arm only yesterday.”
The lump in my throat surprised me as I picked up my small bag.
“All set with your trunk?” Dad asked in a quavering voice.
“Three days ago,” I croaked. “You were here when they took it away.”
He gave a strained laugh. “Right.”
Mom sniffled, ready to cry.
“Well, good luck, son,” Dad said loudly and held out his hand. It was no time to think or make judgments. I shook it and tried to smile, then gave Mom a long kiss on her wet cheek. Slowly I turned away.
It took forever for the door to slide open.
I walked down the hall to the open elevator, stepped inside, and turned around to look back. Dad had his arm around Mom, and suddenly I wished very hard that they would solve their problems and stay together.
“Sure you don’t want us to come to the airport with you?” Mom called out.
I shook my head. They waved as the door closed, and I dropped toward the street, feeling lost and alone, disliking myself for being so soft as I held back tears.
Thoughts of Marisa distracted me as the subway shot through the boost tube. I had liked her loops of the old Grant Wood landscapes—the leaves fluttering on the trees, the grasses waving, the sun shining into farmhouse windows, the clouds moving in over the horizon like the black soles of a giant’s shoes, the rain and lightning flashes. She could create her own animations, good enough to display in shows, not just for covering walls and windows in apartments. Maybe there was a good art school in Hawaii.
Local stations flashed by in the darkness. I tried not to think. “You imagine that you’ve swallowed every mind around you,” Dad had once said, “but there’s a lot you don’t know.” I had felt angry that he should be critical of me for wanting to know things.
“Maybe not all,” I had replied, “but much more than you.” He had looked at me with his dark brown eyes, and I couldn’t tell whether he was going to laugh or cry. I felt guilty thinking about it. It seemed now that I had expected him to know everything, and had been disappointed when I found out otherwise. I should have told him how excited I was about the things I was learning; and he should have taken more of an interest in what I was doing, shown more appreciation, something he had never done. I realized now that he felt bad about it, that he knew his chance to have been a better father was gone, but it was too late.
Memory is a bridge to the past, and to the future. Each of my earlier selves had been looking forward to me, pushing me across that bridge as I worked to do what they had only dreamed; but I had to build each section of the bridge as I went, just to have a place to go. What worried me was that I couldn’t see myself on the other side. Maybe no one could do that, because the bridge was everything, and we all betray our past selves.
Who was I looking forward to being? Suddenly I knew what I was afraid of: I would be making my own mistakes now. Mom and Dad had made quite a few. Who was I to think that I would do better? But I had to do better, I told myself. It was a pact I had made with my earlier selves. I would never forget anything, and that would make the difference.
Then it hit me again that I was leaving
everything
, my parents, New York, Earth. Nothing would be the same again.
The boost train glided into Kennedy-Air and slowed to a stop. I sat there for a minute, getting a grip on my fears and doubts.
Morey boarded the shuttle from New York to Brazil’s Equatorial Spaceport and marched down the aisle to where I sat, about halfway in.
He sat down roughly, nudging me with his elbow, but I was glad to have a friend going with me.
“I’m happy that’s over,” he said. “My parents wanted to come down to the spaceport with me. I had to talk them out of it. They came down here, though. Sorry I’m late.”
“That’s okay, you made it.”
We fastened our seat belts and watched the small screens on the backs of the seats in front of us. The shuttle began to move. Towers, hangars, the hotels and swirling walkways of Kennedy-Air rushed by as endless routine.
We went up, climbing until the sky turned deep blue. A hundred and ten kilometers up, the craft turned off its engines and glided south. I’d been on air shuttles before, but the moment of engine shut-off always took my breath away.
Stars burned in the purple-black over Africa as we whispered toward the equator, and the curving horizon made me feel the smallness of the planet. I was used to thinking of New York State as a suburb of New York City, but at this altitude a shuttle could reach Cairo, or any city on the globe, within an hour; you had to leave the planet to go anywhere far. Soon now, I realized, I would get a taste of
real
distance for the first time—from here to the Moon’s orbit; and yet that was a local run compared to interplanetary distances—to Mars or Mercury, for example.
I touched a control on my armrest and called up a view of deep space. People lived out in that black sky—on the Moon, Mercury, Mars, in the Asteroid Belt, and on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn; two million in the Bernal Clusters alone, more in the O’Neill Cylinders of Sun Orbit, not to mention the ten thousand dock workers of the asteroid hollow in High Earth Orbit, where the giant artificial caves served as berths for the massive interplanetary ships.
I dreamed of faraway worlds with strange skies. Domed cities on Mars and Venus, underground bases on Titan and Pluto, people looking outward to the nearer stars—to the triple system of Alpha Centauri, only four light years away. I raced across the wispy clouds below, out running the shuttle to Earth’s edge, where I gazed out into the starry blaze of the galaxy and forgot all my doubts.
Deep space. Sunspace was just a backyard compared with what lay out there. Yet I could blot out a million suns with my hand. The thought of going out there, of becoming even a small part of humanity’s Sunspace Settlements, sent a happy chill up my back, and I was no longer afraid.
What appealed to me most was that the rest of the solar system had not been
given
to humankind; people like me had gone out there to build and transform worlds for themselves. It seemed right to be able to do that, so much more human and creative than to be handed a world at birth by nature.
“What is it?” Morey asked.
“Just thinking. Neat, isn’t it?”
“It’s very beautiful,” he said softly.
Clouds floated up and covered our screens; then the shuttle fell through into sunlight, and the sight of the world below filled me with wonder.
Blue-green jungle covered Earth. We were in the final approach glide to Clarke Equatorial Spaceport.
“Take it easy,” Morey said. “We haven’t even left the planet yet.” But I could tell that he was also excited.
The big screen at the front of the aisle flashed:
JUNE 29, 2056, 2:02 P.M.
ETA: 2: 10 P.M.
Morey and I tightened our seat belts. The screens showed the spaceport ahead—square after square of cleared land covered with buildings, hangars, roads and walkways, and spacecraft crouching on launch pads. Earth’s spin being fastest here on the equator—sixteen hundred kilometers per hour—it was most economical to use that extra push to throw vehicles into orbit.
Almost every kind of launch system had been tried here, from complex stage rockets belching chemical propellant to track catapults to laser-fed and atomic rockets; various versions of these systems were still operational. There had even been a plan to run a cable elevator from an island out in the South Atlantic to an asteroid satellite in High Earth Orbit. That would have been awesome—a bridge disappearing into the sky—but the scheme had been abandoned for various technical, political, and safety reasons, even though it might have been successful if enough people had persisted.
The new gravitic catapult had come along in time to make most other systems obsolete. I was eager to see it in action. Maybe our flight was going to use it, I thought excitedly.
We were very low now. I tensed as the craft touched the runway and the feeling of free fall faded from my stomach. The shuttle slowed, but slow was still very fast; the ship covered several miles before coming to a halt.
“We’re here,” Morey said. He seemed a bit shaky as he unclipped his belt and stood up.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Upset stomach. It’s going away.”
I got up, and again I realized that we had come to a place that sent people through the sky into the blackness beyond Earth. The thought struck me in the most stupidly obvious way, and I teetered on the edge between excitement and fear as I followed Morey to the exit and out into a long tunnel.
At the end of the passage we put our cards into the passport check and pressed our palms down on the scan. Our cards popped back; we took them and went out into the waiting area, and it seemed to me suddenly that my whole previous life lay a hundred years or more behind me. I was free forever of the things I had worried about yesterday.
The sun and countryside were visible through the massive dome of the waiting area. Temperatures outside were probably over forty centigrade. The rain forest pressed in around the spaceport, and I thought of it as a sleeping thing that dreamed its animals, insects, flowers, and greenery; but it could not have dreamed the spaceport; we had done that ourselves, and I wondered if the forest were jealous.
Hundreds of people filled the great floor of the terminal, waiting to depart for all parts of Sunspace. Some stood by their luggage. Many were well dressed; others looked poorer. I noticed a group dressed in gray uniforms with red arm bands.
“Convicts,” Morey said. “Probably shipping out for the mining towns of the Belt.”
I stared at their glum faces. One young woman gave me a loutish look. Earth had turned against them. It was a sure way of making certain that a criminal would not repeat his crime anywhere near where he was sentenced.
“They’ll probably never come back,” Morey said softly.
“It’s sad.”
“Happens all the time,” Morey replied.
A muffled roar startled me. I looked up and saw a ship cross the Sun’s face, rising on vertical turbojets. Its nuclear pulse engine would ignite in the upper atmosphere and push the vessel away from Earth with a steady acceleration. The reality of it rushed through me like a jolt of electricity. Such ships and their larger cousins crossed the trillion-kilometer whirlpool of sun and planets in a few weeks. And the new gravity launchers would hurl them off the planet even more economically.
A 3-D sign flashed in my eyes:
ORBITAL TOURS!
SIGN NOW!
I blinked nervously and saw a holo of Earth from Low Orbit; then one from High Orbit. Elephants and human shapes tumbled through the void. Power satellites beamed energy down through the atmosphere, serviced by stubby robots and toy figures in spacesuits.
BECOME A SUNSPACER!
HIGH PAY AND A SCENIC PLACE TO LIVE!
PLUMBERS, ELECTRICIANS, VEHICLE AND
STRUCTURAL MAINTENANCE SKILLS NEEDED!
TEACHERS WELCOME!
APPRENTICE APPLICATIONS AVAILABLE
FOR ALL JOBS!
To many people Clarke Station was probably just another travel terminal, even though people were going home to Marsport, to the Moon, or to places that had only coordinates in space for an address; but for me it was all new suddenly, as if it had begun yesterday morning. Maybe I was taking my mind off the big change in my life, but I didn’t care; our solar civilization was big and growing bigger, and I was going out to see its true size. I wanted to cheer. There were millions of people out there, and they thought of themselves as being from space in the same way I thought of New York City as home. And somewhere in the terminal there was probably a Sunspacer who was coming to Earth to study, and feeling just as excited as I was to be leaving.