Worlds Apart 02 Edenworld Read online

  Worlds Apart Book Two:

  EdenWorld

  Have Fun, Don’t Die

  Copyright © 2002, 2006 James G. Wittenbach

  www.worlds-apart.net

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Wittenbach, James

  Worlds Apart Book 01: Meridian

  I. Title

  ISBN 0-0-9763384-0-8

  Chapter One

  With a blast of terrifying quantum energy, the Pathfinder Ship Pegasus tore open the curtains of normal space and time, and shot through the tattered barrier between normal and abnormal space at half the speed of light. She retracted her hyperspace sails and surged forward on waves of artificial gravity, a ship of beauty and dreams. The great shield of her foredeck cut through the interstellar void like a sword-blade, her primary hull stretched out behind in a swan-like body topped by a pair of elegant command towers. She dazzled with lights that outshone the stars, at least the ones that were very far away, speeding through the cold ocean of space, parting waves of gravity with the grace and purpose of an ancient sailing vessel,

  Her crew is ready and eager to undertake this, their second mission, to the world called Eden which, if the ancient star maps hold true, should lie in the system of the bright yellow star a few light days from her point of transition. Their last mission did not go all that well. The planet was called Meridian. In the long absence of contact between it and the other human worlds that, 3,000 years ago, had formed the Galactic Commonwealth, Meridian had fallen under the thrall of alien conquest. Alien viruses, transmitted through space, had been manipulating the planet’s environment, culture, and inhabitants into a replica (it was theorized) of the world on which they had orginated – Remote control colonization. Conquer worlds without ever leaving home!

  Defeating the aliens had resulted in the loss of five of her crew. A culture more accustomed to violence may have called these acceptable losses among a crew of 7000. Except that Sapphire and Republic, the former human colonies that had combined their resources to construct Pegasus, had not experienced the taking of a human life in a random act of violence in hundreds of years. The violent loss weighed heavily on the hearts of the crew, like the first corruption of childhood innocence, or a lover’s first betrayal.

  For some members of the crew, the scars were not merely psychological. Pegasus – Hospital Four, Deck 24, Section 72:10

  Daisy Reagan peered deeply into the cool gray eyes of Exceutive Commander Goneril Lear. The doctor’s squint made deep furrows in a face already colored and wrinkled like dried caramel. Finally, she snorted, and put the optometric instruments away.

  “Report, doctor,” Lear asked in the “warm honey over biscuits” voice she used when addressing people she couldn’t order.

  “Ye ain’t been doin’ yer healin’ med’tations, have ye?” Reagan said, speaking in the Hilljane dialect of Sapphire’s Graceland province.

  “I’ve been...” Lear hesitated. “I have tried, but my schedule makes it very difficult...”

  Daisy Reagan clucked her tongue. She was very nearly 160 years old, far beyond the age at which most Sapphireans retired to a monasteries in Arcadia to spend their final years putting their spiritual affairs in order. Instead, she had joined the Odyssey project and ascended to the position of Chief Physician on the virtue of knowing more about staying alive than anyone else.

  “If ye’d’a done them, ye’d be back normal right now. Yer visual acu’ty ain’t more than 30%. Y’ain’t been doin’ yer med’tations, and ye’v’e got dependant on yer arty-visions.” She indicated the electronic eyeglasses that had been serving as Exec. Commander Lear’s eyes in the aftermath of the executive officer’s having looked directly into an anti-matter explosion in the closing moments of the Battle of Meridian.

  “With all due respect, dear Physician…”

  Daisy Reagan cut her off. “As a duly empowered Physician of the Pathfinder Ship Pegasus, I hereby relieve of command until sitch time as yer optickle nevres have completely r’gen’rated.”

  “That is unacceptable, We’re just three days from making orbit.”

  “And you’re about two days away from never having normal vision again. This ship is big enough to take care of itself and the crew doesn’t needja. But if you don’t fix yer eyes, you’ll never watch those young’uns of yers grow up normal-like.” She placed her palm on the data pad. “So, recorded and logged.”

  “Doctor,” the honey and biscuits voice had returned. “Suppose I were to return to duty provisionally. I promise to perform the healing mediation and exercises. If my visual acuity isn’t up to 50% by my next examination...”

  “Ah really don’t know why ah bother tryin’ tuh explain this sometimes,” Daisy sighed.

  “You don’t understand, missy. Ah’m sayin’ this ain’t no suggestion and you ain’t got no choice. You take off from duty or you never see normal-like ag’in.”

  Fitness Center – Deck 29, Section 79:L20

  Tactical Commander Phil Redfire traversed the empty walkway between his quarters and the Fitness Center. Earlier, he had been informed that Exec. Cmdr. Lear had been removed from duty and this news accounted for most of his good mood. Had he known the specifics of the tongue lashing Dr. Reagan had given the ship’s Exec, he would have been in an even better mood.

  Upon entering, he saw that the Fitness Center was occupied by one other, Captain William Keeler, the shipmaster. A decade earlier, they had been student and professor at the University of Sapphire at New Cleveland, the planet’s most distinguished institution of higher learning. Keeler had been a professor of history, and Redfire had been an artist. His Master of Fine Arts degree was in pyrokinetic art, creativity expressed through explosions and fire. He lived according to the rule that “Even beautiful things can be made interesting if they are destroyed creatively enough.” Before his selection to the Odyssey Project, he had made his living traveling around Sapphire, blowing up buildings, starting fires, and causing avalanches — all in ways that made profound artistic statements about how cool it was when things were blown-up, burned, and buried in snow.

  He came upon Keeler in the midst of some kind of martial arts workout involving a quarterstaff. “Trying to lose a few kilos, Captain.”

  Keeler grimaced. The Holiday Sequence had transpired during the twenty days Pegasus.

  “That, my friend, is why Ramadan follows Christmas; so we can fast off the weight we gained.”

  The Captain paused to wipe his forehead with a towel. His bangs had grown unfashionably long, but even coated in perspiration, he looked no less distinguished than a man of his learning and pedigree should. The Captain went to an effort to make sure his uniform always looked a little rumpled and his hair always looked a little unkempt, and in the beginning, that had been enough to fool people. Try as he might, though, people were beginning to suspect that below the surface was a man of some discipline who understood important things and even genuinely believed in some of them.

  Redfire was of a tall and lean-but-muscular build, and wore his red hair cut close to the scalp for ease of maintenance. He gave a nod to Keeler and crossed to the kinetic free-weight rack at the back of the room. He selected a pair of ten-kilo weights, and began throwing weights in the air and catching them, using the discipline of kinetic weightlifting, while Keeler grunted and thrust his pole behind him.

  When the Captain had exerted himse
lf sufficiently, he crossed the room and watched his tactical officer. Kinetic weightlifting was not a widely practiced form of exercise. Although good for bulding mass, form, and balance, it was also dangerous, and could be a great source of shock to the body if the weights were not caught correctly. Redfire, however, caught his weights in the precise motion of capture he was supposed to.

  “Do you ever worry about one of those landing on your head.” Keeler asked. Redfire caught a dumb bell with flowing arch of his back and swept it below him, then turned. “Back in 7284, I was in New Sapporo making an ice sculpture. A forty-kilo icicle fell from someone else’s sculpture and hit me as I turned up to see it, entering my cranium just above my left eye. A large portion of my skull had to be replaced with a ceramic composite, and cloned material had to be placed into my brain. I was in the hospital for the next eight months.”

  “That explains a lot.”

  “Za, I used to be a little crazy. I tend to think it mellowed me out.”

  “No kidding.”

  “For real.” He laid down his weights. “Your quarterstaff regime is quite unique.”

  Keeler shrugged. “I just make it up as I go along.”

  Redfire didn’t buy it. “Unless I miss my guess, your routine is based on the pole-fighting techniques of the Warrior-Monks of the Panrovian Order of Sumac.”

  “Older than that,” Keeler answered. “Much, much older than that.”

  “May I see your staff?”

  “Only if you buy me dinner first,” but Keeler handed him the stick nonetheless. He carried it with him at all times, but did not appear to have any difficulty walking that would require its use. Redfire had been eager to examine it more closely for some time. Redfire took Keeler’s walking stick and for the first time examined the patterns of alien runes with which it was encrusted. He ran his hands along them, feeling the patterns they imparted into the — wood? metal? ceramic? he could not tell, but a brush with his fingers sent a little thrill of electricity through his body. The suspicions he had been harboring since his first days on board were confirmed. It was no walking stick. “Is this what I think it is Captain?”

  “Only if you are thinking it is a Thean Battle Staff. One of nine presented to my forebear, Eccentrica, née Louisa Keeler, at the end of the Thean Siege, circa 4842 to 4863 A.S, a relic of Pre-Silence Civilization, an actual alien artifact. Only three of these are known to have survived, one in the Keeler Estate in New Cleveland, one in the Sapphire Planetary Archival Museum in Corvallis, and, this one, which is the historical legacy of the Chancellor of the University of Sapphire at New Cleveland.... or should I say... was.”

  Redfire waved the stick slightly and it nearly flew from his hand as the mass of one tip seem to increase dramatically even as he swung it. “Whoa....”

  “Please be careful with that,” Keeler said gently. “If you swing it hard enough, it could punch a hole through every deck between here and the inner hull.”

  “How does it work?”

  Keeler shrugged. “We know it manipulates gravity, but we’ve lost at least three of them when technologists tried to break them apart to figure out how they work. In the process, we also lost three teams of technologists and a big chunk of New Tenochtitlàn.”

  “An amazing piece of work,” Redfire concluded. “I wonder if the Theans are still out there, some where. I wonder why they never came back,”

  “The Thean Siege was always one of my favorite courses to teach,” Keeler said. “Over the centuries, the story has become so encrusted with legend and symbolism, it gives a lot of material. It’s also one of the few occasions our entire planet faced an external threat, and it is, in my opinion, the one point in history where we came closest to losing the philosophy of individual freedom that makes our way of life so unique.”

  “Some people think the Theans had a legitimate claim to the planet. They had established a colony thousands of years before humans arrived.”

  Keeler shook his head. “Nonsense. There were three bodies of opinion at the time. One was that if the Theans had established a colony, it had clearly failed and now it was humanity’s turn. Another was that the Theans only wanted the minerals of the Carpentarian continent, which was the only continent they had not stripped bare of minerals during their previous colonial effort. The third was that the Theans were lying through their baleen ridges in order to stake a claim on a planet they wanted.”

  “Which version do you think was the case?”

  “I don’t think it matters. What matters was that Sapphire at the time had a human population of nearly 400,000 and a Thean population of zero.”

  “Some people have said over the centuries that the Thean objectives were actually Commonwealth propaganda. The Theans were a dying race, and they wanted to inhabit our colonies in order to survive.”

  “I’ve heard those theories,” Keeler said. “Revisionism is an academic exercise I try to avoid. The Thean siege was nearly three thousand years ago. How can we possibly know what the truth was?”

  “And the part about Eccentrica Keeler averting the way through art?”

  “Is probably true,” Keeler said. “I know, it’s the most fantastic element of the whole story. Here you have, on the one side, the Thean siege ships trying to cut off the planet from human contact, preparing to wipe out every settlement. The Commonwealth Fleet on the other side. Ready to fire should the Theans try anything. On the planet, everyone terrified, not knowing if they’re going to live or die. Calls for Martial Law in the Meeting House. Talk of Secession. Panic in some of the larger settlements. It was a perilous time.

  “Then, Eccentrica invites the Thean leadership down for negotiations. At this time, New Cleveland is just a small Artist’s Colony with a weird University. No one takes it very seriously. She shows the Theans how artists have protrayed them, and how cinemists have portrayed the forthcoming battle and invasion. They hear songs. They hear poetry. The Theans asked her, in their collective way of speaking. ‘What is all this? You betray your battle plans to us?’”

  “Not,” said Eccentrica. “These are works of art, of fiction?”

  “What is art of fiction?” They ask her.

  “Art is when you take an object or an idea, and try to make a representation of it through the use of another medium, like paint or sculpture or song. Fiction is when you describe events that have not actually taken place.”

  “And you use this art-of-fiction to train your warriors and your people to defend against us?”

  “Not.”

  “Then what is its purpose?”

  “Art is how we express through ourselves the spirit of God, of the Creator,” she answered them.

  “By creating things out of our imagination, we express that part of ourselves that

  “So, it serves a religio-spiritual function?”

  “Not strictly,” she told them, by this time the Theans were getting frustrated. “But creation is what validates human existence. We exist to create. We need to express that spirit inside of us that makes us want to create, and that is what art is for, to manifest that spirit of creation.”

  “All of which is completely new to them because the Theans had no concept of art.” Keeler took a deep breath. “When Eccentrica showed them how things could be represented in a non-literal way, they were, as the ancients used to say, flabber-gasted. I imagine it took days to explain, but when it did, the Theans were beside themselves. We had shown them something that they had not conceived themselves. And we had shared it freely? How could they possibly make war on us now?”

  Redfire smiled. Art as a weapon. What a concept.

  Keeler gently removed the walking stick/battle staff from his tactical officer’s hands.

  “Shortly thereafter, the Theans departed, taking with them the gifts of art Eccentrica had presented them, and leaving behind these battle staffs. We never heard from them again.”

  System 10 223 Equuleus – Space

  Pegasus’s underside carried a vast array of sensor
s and instruments for detecting, surveying and mapping its celestial environs. It had already deduced the 10 223 Equuleus was a single star system with four planets, all of them gas giants with well-developed ring systems. It was in the process of surveying the moons of those planets for suitable environments for humans, as well as sweeping through the electromagnetic spectrum for indications of carrier-wave transmission or power generation that would indicate the level of civilization. There was supposed to be a colony called “Eden” in this system. Its existence as referenced in several of the records recovered from the City of Testament on Republic. Testament had been rendered radioactive and uninhabitable during Republic’s Wars of Unification (which Sapphire called the “City Wars”) and so some of its records of the Colonial Era had been preserved, whereas the rest of Republic had been purged of almost every legacy of the colonial era during the New Renewal Movement (APR 5890-5924) and successive movements in which the colonial past was widely believed to be either an impediment to progress, or symbolic of a legacy of beliefs no longer fashionable in the circles of powers that controlled Republic. The hatches on the front of Pegasus’s bow opened and released three furious bullets toward 10 223 Equuleus II, the second planet, which was found to have at least one habitable moon. These were unmanned survey-probes, dart-shaped craft, with three huge tail fins, a long slender fuselage containing their small ion engines, and an instrument package at the front. Most of their acceleration came from the electromagnetic railguns that ran the length of Pegasus, that accelerated them to nearly half the speed of light. They closed in a moon of the second planet; a worldlet which had given off tantalizing indications — a reducing atmosphere, surface temperature near the triple point of water, and interesting electromagnetic emissions.

  Hangar Bay 19, Section Minus 4, Section 96:R50

  Matthew Driver stood alone in the landing bay, bathed in the blue light of the ultraviolet sterilization bath his ship was undergoing. His ship was an Aves-class Excursion Vehicle, combination transport shuttle, defensive fighter, and science platform, and he would never think of himself as alone so long as Prudence was in the room. When the light faded out, he approached his ship and gently touched the underside of her forward cabin. Her fuselage was gleaming clean, and was slightly warm to the touch.