Authors: Wade Andrew Butcher
City Without Suns (21 page)
The new generation of people multiplied over a hundred more years. The next and final destination was within their grasp, but the fragility of their upbringing left few qualified for the task. They had only bits and pieces of a history that seemed mythological, stitched together from nonsensical books and old transmission logs.
Chapter 45
45 Days Remaining…
Breccan held the necklace he had been guarding for two years. The key on it had been passed down to him from the primary pilot, who had since disappeared mysteriously without explanation. Before that, it had been transferred an uncertain number of times in their unrecorded history. Breccan was nineteen Earth years old when he received it and became the Keyholder.
Since that time, he had killed three people who tried to steal the key from his neck. The first did not mean harm, although he was a sizeable man, but testing Breccan’s quiet rage was a dire mistake. Although the death was accidental, the deterring blow was intentional, and there was no retaliation attempted by the meager inhabitants who saw.
The second time involved an apprentice pilot, and on that occasion, the finality of the inflicted trauma was delivered to the defiant understudy on purpose. The three remaining, the only potential future pilots in their population of ninety-eight, argued among themselves in private whether their former colleague got what he deserved.
The third time had just occurred. He awoke to feel someone reaching for the necklace in the darkness of his private quarters. Before the thief could speak, Breccan awoke in a start and grabbed the arm reaching for the trinket around his neck. He struck hard with his other hand. The spiked rings around his fingers tore flesh and blood dripped onto his hand. It was over in a second, but then he became fully aware of his surroundings and realized the possibility...
No!
Breccan touched the sensor by his bed to illuminate the room. The lights shined on the would-be burglar with a deep gash in her neck. Her eyes were opened wide in shock as she fell to the floor. He sat up to see the young woman was not a mere wanderer, but his companion Rose, caught in an unexplained act of betrayal and forevermore unable to explain her misdeed.
He cried as he fell to his knees at her side, holding his hands in front of him and looking at them in disbelief through the tears. He wished desperately for a way to reverse what he had done. Breccan looked at Rose for two hours before rising to his feet. The burden of the key had become more than he could tolerate.
Wanting to be rid of the key, he gripped the chain with both hands and ripped it away from his neck. It was such a strange thing, and its cost was too great. The ship depended on the intricate turnings of the key, which could only be performed by one of their kind.
The malice in his heart, the intermittent hatred, tormented him at unpredictable intervals. In that moment, it had melted into pure sorrow. The determination, focus, and benevolence innate in his character that led to his classification in the first tier were all dormant. In his disheveled state, he stumbled into the corridor, where the Keeper monitoring their section observed his exit. Before Breccan’s time, the invertebrates were named Keepers, multi-legged dodecapi engineered by humans from a different era who were oblivious to the possibility that the creatures might assume domain over Neptune. The one outside his room rested in the crease between the floor and the wall. Its flesh was relaxed and its arms extended parallel to the wall as if it was trying to be courteous and not block passage.
As tier-one, Breccan was entitled to Keeper protection along with the nine others in his section, including his sister Nova. Breccan turned to her room and then decided against it. He would not reveal the shame of what he had done to Nova, the kindest and most beautiful person he knew, his most loved friend. To fall out of her good graces would be more than he could bear. She already resented his stern demeanor, but she knew him better than anyone, and his true nature was not lost on her. He had grown up ahead of her with the same parents. Foster parents were a limited resource and were only assigned to the ones perceived as the most important.
Breccan motioned to the lone Keeper, who approached the Keyholder slowly. The expression of servitude was implied by the smooth and slow movements of the swift and agile beast, although their agility was greater in weightless sections of the ship. Even though they had no translating device available to communicate with each other, the large one took the cue and entered. The Keeper dragged the body back through the narrow opening. Rose’s arms hung down revealing the three unconcealable burn scars on the back of each hand, the markings inflicted on her for classification. The Keeper disappeared with the dead tier-three clone in tow.
Even if the assault had occurred on another tier-one, there would be no punishment for the one who held the keychain. The Keepers would never investigate the cause of death in this case. The outward appearance to all others would be that Rose had gone missing, Breccan thought, not unlike some of the several other unexplained disappearances. He wondered whether there was someone else that understood the others the way he understood this one, and the possibility of a killer on board entered his thoughts. Was there someone behind the vanishing of the previous pilot? The notion seemed more likely to him in that moment.
Breccan set out to shed the cursed trinket he had worn for too long. There were three trained candidates to receive it next, but their voyage was supposed to reach its conclusion before that would happen. Breccan was expected to be the final pilot, unless he died unexpectedly within the short time remaining. His resignation would be surprising, and most likely unaccepted, but he was determined to be relieved of the burden. He was tired of the looks, the misplaced resentment, and the lack of appreciation from the masses. He dedicated his life to serve and deliver them to a place where they could thrive indefinitely. At least that had always been his hope, and it still was, but he was determined that somebody else would have to assume the role of primary pilot, the Keyholder.
In his grieving state, it did not matter to him that the scheduled ignition was imminent and that the enduring members of his race depended on him. That sentiment had been the most important concern his entire life, but the shock that Rose had died at his hands overshadowed all his past desires and aspirations. The passion that had led him to protect the people onboard was gone from his deflated and exhausted soul. There were definitely ones he considered unworthy, some of whom he wanted to hurt. He was weary from having to think about them.
…
After a ten-minute walk, Breccan pulled himself through the opening uncovered by the automatic door and entered the bridge. He covered his nerves completely and held his thoughts and concerns to himself. The secret of what he had done would remain his own. He did not want to be there, but the urgency of the tasks at hand demanded his presence.
The four Keepers with arms extending in every direction were floating in the cavernous room. Breccan was weightless in that area of the ship. The narrow platform walkways in the middle were of no particular use to him while the bridge was shielded from the mid-ship gravity stones. The comfort and convenience of those Keepers, called Pilots, was a priority over that of any human, even the Keyholder. They kept the bridge weightless to allow their flesh to expand unencumbered, giving them a size almost double what it was otherwise under typical weight. Drifting along a path leading to an unused corner, Breccan was halted by one of them with its arm extending out like a crane. He was gathered and placed in front of the control panel.
The panel consisted of an immersive display and a keyboard comprised of buttons far too small to be pressed precisely by the large protruding limbs of the Pilots. Breccan’s job on the bridge was one that he had trained for all of his life. Understanding the navigational intelligence of Neptune had become his expertise, and it was a role he used to enjoy and relish. Small course corrections were required about every month. Some of those corrections were planned a year in advance, but some of them required reacting to a new observation at only a day’s notice. Alongside constant monitoring of their projected path by the Pilots, Breccan would daily ensure the ship was adhering to the intended course.
The bridge was an interior room and did not have windows that provided direct visibility of their surroundings. Instead, the entire room was enclosed by a panoramic display reflecting the view from the exterior cameras positioned at every angle on the ship exterior. The picture was stitched together to make the bridge appear to its inhabitants that they were floating in space.
There was no need of a floor, other than the walkways used when the ship was under gravity. The spherical space was weightless. Every angle up, down and across revealed what would have been seen if looking through the walls into the expanse of the surrounding universe. The control panels were braced on beams that extended from the curved walls, and there were seats upon which the human pilots could be strapped as they performed their function, a job that was originally designed by humans and intended for them alone.
In the center of the bridge, a bright hologram illuminated the surrounding area. It was a visual model of the wide area of planets and stars around them. The hologram expanded and contracted under the control of the Pilots as needed to view the near and far levels of detail surrounding Neptune. Within the optical model, Neptune could be seen as a blue dot among a predominately yellow and orange cluster of known celestial bodies. Their destination, planet Gamma, normally appeared within the model as a bright red dot to make it conspicuous among other lights within the model.
The model was magnified and the malformed hologram of the destination planet shined in the middle of the bridge. After looking at it, Breccan inserted the key into a slot. He twisted it in a timed sequential pattern that would allow the main engine to be activated, a pattern that only a human could perform on the small object, a safeguard devised by the original developers of the ship to ensure a human would remain in control among the intelligent creatures of another species. Breccan waited. The Sirens sounded in the distance, the ones he had heard only once before as a little boy, calling out to everyone that a main engine thrust was coming soon. In one instant, they could explode like a star, but Breccan was not worried. Now that the key was in place, the Pilots could fire the engines without him, and afterwards somebody else could take control of the keychain that he no longer wanted.
Without the normal required permission, Breccan abandoned his post leaving the key in the slot. He unfastened and kicked toward the door. He traversed the corridor back to his room trying to get his mind around what he would do next. The Pilots asked him questions but he ignored them. The key was abandoned. It would pass to the secondary pilot, Ace, whenever he made his way to the bridge. Breccan would be interrogated for sure, but he still was unwilling to be the Keyholder any longer.
He returned and stared at the ceiling in his room where he had accidently murdered Rose. The void outside his window suddenly exploded with light and thunderous noise. The main engine was lit, and Breccan was pressed against his bunk at double his own weight until the gravity stones were adjusted. He did not get up to look at the display of power from the massive thruster and instead lay still until he eventually fell asleep not knowing if he would ever wake again. He had awoken as the Keyholder, and he had fallen asleep as an anonymous member of the tier-one group having stripped himself of the envied and prestigious status. It was a self-administered punishment for a crime he vowed never to disclose, a crime he could escape only as the former Keyholder.
Chapter 46
42 Days Remaining…
The light burned brightly outside, slowing Neptune’s momentum for the approach. Nova had not seen her brother Breccan for more than three days and assumed he was on the bridge with much to do for the projected landing. When she walked out into the hall to check on Breccan and Rose, the corridor was vacant. Even the Keepers were gone. The protection they provided had wavered with such little time remaining until landing.
Nova understood why Breccan was busy, but not Rose. She was missing. There had always been an element of jealousy Nova felt toward Rose. Her brother Breccan’s affection toward the tier-three woman stirred feelings that Nova did not care to disclose or discuss. She kept them to herself. Nonetheless, she worried about Rose and wondered where she had gone.
There was screaming in the distance growing louder. Nova retreated back into her quarters to wait for her brother to arrive. The voices drew near as she locked her door and sat in complete silence to disguise her presence. They were neither fighting nor looking for her. They were celebrating at the top of their lungs, in a manner that she did not understand, with foolishness that made no sense. The people outside her room were throwing things with no regard for the order instilled by the Keepers. The Keepers had reigned for as long as she had been alive, probably before. Their enforcement had stopped, and the people from the tier-two and tier-three sections were meandering freely.
It was the second night in a row that the gatherings were becoming more boisterous. All were counting the days until the landing, although few realized the difficulty involved in delivering them to that place and time. There was still work to be done, but those outside Nova’s door would not be called upon for any of it. Probably none of them could even explain why they wanted to land. They rejoiced in the only significant event that would occur in their lifetimes. They were bored and suddenly unchecked by the Keepers that had restrained them and raised them like pets. The news that their oppressors no longer patrolled their section of the ship had spread.
Nova was scared of the unruly others without Breccan around. During her sheltered existence, she had rarely been around large crowds without supervision. She knew about human cruelty and also knew she could not match it or protect against it. She knew about her history and collected both stories told and memories untold. The number of generations on Neptune had been forgotten, but she knew the legend of her origin, cloned from the matriarch from Earth, and Nova inherited the human mistrust that stemmed from Isla’s experience.
Despite that mistrust, people had never been a problem for Nova in the past. Her brother Breccan was a dominant tier-one clone. Before that, her foster father was there to deflect any misbehavior directed toward her.
But not on that night. Breccan had abandoned his room, and her father was long deceased. She sat alone in the formerly dark room, illuminated from the outside by the expellant dispelled by the main engine. In her inward-facing room, she would be visible from any onlookers on the other side of the toroidal ship shaped like a ring, which made her nervous. She wanted to hide until Breccan could come back.
Nova covered herself with the linens and stilled herself until she became drowsy. She drifted to sleep despite the roaring hum of the engine. Eventually, it was the only sound and the celebrating people were gone. Hours passed as she slipped deeper and deeper into a dream world.
She was lost in a dream as her imagination carried her into a place she had never seen before. The unconscious thoughts in her mind presented a backdrop of a baby ward as she emerged from a tunnel, an unusual passage not typical of a normal hallway. Only two babies occupied the large nursery containing what must have been a hundred beds designed for infants. She walked to the middle of the room and looked down on one of the sleeping babies. It was an unusual sight to which she was not accustomed in her reality, where babies were rare and precious beings kept in seclusion. They symbolized the hope and survival of their kind, a concept that was not taken for granted among their people or the Keepers.
The life of a baby was a great celebration, and even to those who tended to be unemotional, the young lives were valuable, essential, and practical assets. The corollary to this sentiment was the angst felt at the death of an infant, a symbol of not just of failure but the fear and strong possibility of extinction. The baby in her dream began to age before her eyes at an apparent rate of a couple of years every second until it resembled a miniature old man with wrinkles in its skin and thin gray hair on its head. The child clutched his tiny hands to his chest, gasped, and fell motionless. The seconds in Nova’s restless sleep turned to centuries, and the flesh on the child decayed exposing the skeleton underneath, which seemingly smiled at Nova with its uncovered teeth as if to mock her and whatever hopes for the future she had.
Nova was crying in her bed, but she remained in a deep sleep. She was a prisoner, stuck in between a trance and a coma. The dream continued with her standing over the beautiful human baby that had metamorphosed into a soulless ghoul. The brightly lit nursery grew dim. Two bats materialized seemingly from nowhere and were flying around the room, which eroded in Nova’s sleeping mind from a well-constructed hospital room into a mossy cave. A third bat conjured itself in front of her eyes and lit on the edge of the dead infant’s small crib. The winged creature with a near-human expression peered into Nova’s face and began to speak.
“Quasar, the survival of your kind depends on it. Put together instructions for your future generations.”
“I’m not Quasar,” Nova argued in her own mind, but the creature was not influenced by anything she said.
In her dream, Nova turned back to the entrance and crawled through the tunnel. At the end of the tunnel there was a grate, which she removed. Nova passed through a ventilation duct into a space that was the unmistakable and vivid image of her bedroom. At that point, her eyes opened to find similar images, and she looked up at the air duct in the ceiling above. She could see the cold metal easily through the shadows under the ceiling.
She remembered every detail of the dream. It was not the first of its kind. Almost every night, she was haunted with a mix of memories and fantasies, a conglomeration of thoughts derived from her own experiences and those of her ancestors. Her composition was replicated from Quasar’s descendants, and with it came a genetic memory containing fragments of knowledge and glimpses of things she had never seen. She was a tier-one clone, watched closely and protected, possessing gifts that could not be reinvented. Those times and capabilities had passed. The best of the remaining genetic engineering experts on Neptune could only clone without engineering any unique modifications, and nobody knew the identity of the ones doing that work. The Keepers had many secrets.
Still reflecting on her dream, Nova stared at the grate covering the opening in the high ceiling and wondered why she would have imagined a passageway behind it. Instead of allowing the scattered latent memories of generations of clones to drive her insane, the dream gave her an idea. There might be ways to sneak out of their sections. Attempting such an escape would not be worth the risk. The Keepers had rules. Nearly certain punishment for the unquantifiable gain of looking at a different confined space did not seem like a good gamble to Nova, even though it was tempting to seek the strange destination of her dream.
The bad dreams were becoming more frequent. At sixteen Earth years old, she simultaneously wished for the past and the future, anything but the present. She hoped for a new future life, in which she would be allowed to marry and have children in the new world. In the new world she imagined, she could look up and see a sky. She could travel freely without Keepers overlooking. Even still, she would not have minded repeating her younger years if it was possible, when her dreams were pleasant and she had lucid visions of old Earth. It seemed like a paradise. Her memories inherited from Isla, the original stowaway on a ship that seemed like a myth, were more than a passed-down tale to Nova. She could see them. She could see the sunshine glistening on the oceans of Earth and feel the crisp coolness of the water on her skin as she swam. She could see the Bishop Islands standing alone in a sea of blue water. The legend of Isla, the first
dark-looker
and the last one known to give birth to the mythical breathers of nitrogen gas, was something she knew to be true. She
knew
it with certainty.
Over time, her thoughts grew darker and more sinister in every aspect, and the transition did not come solely from her own experiences. Although resilient to the torment that developed within her mind, Nova felt her limits were being tested. The blue skies in her thoughts and dreams changed to a dingy yellow. The dolphins in her dreams that swam by her side changed to sea creatures resembling a smaller version of the Keepers. It was there on those Islands, she knew, that it all began. The spaceship Neptune, the genesis of the Keepers discovered by Eva and Quasar as Dawdlers on Beta, and the very characteristics that distinguished her from the other humans were formulated back in that place long ago.
The truth of her memories resonated in her beliefs. Religion was neither practiced nor condoned by anyone that she knew. But her unwavering faith came from somewhere. She believed that the source of her faith was the same unseen force that brought her to that time and place, the same one that delivered Neptune light years away from Earth against all odds while generations of her kind came and went. She believed it was more than a mysterious force. It was an intentional consciousness that could hear her, and it had the ability to guide and comfort her. She spoke hoping to be heard. Without the conversations she had with it, the circumstances would have surely driven her completely mad.
Soon the voyage would be over. The planet Gamma was approaching. Although the plan for hundreds of years had been to land on a new home, there were other outcomes that might occur, a finite number of them. They might land successfully on a dead world. They might crash to their death. Nova was willing to accept all of these uncertain fates, except one. They might miss. They might miss their target and continue hurtling through the cold vacuum of space for years until their pointless demise. That was one possibility that plagued her, but she was trying to be optimistic. She longed for the landing. The same faith, the one that compelled her to pray, also led her to believe that they would soon be standing on Gamma and breathing fresh air.
Nova was going to barely escape artificial insemination. She was not of age. She was relieved that she would not have to endure that task, but being alone was beginning to make Nova nervous. With the coming landing, habits had been broken, and chaos was overtaking any rigidity they had in their previous schedules. She wanted to find her brother.