Forbidden the Stars (11 page)

“Thanks, Calbert.”

“Boss, we’ve got six months to analyze the data. Why don’t you catch a few more hours sleep; you look like you’re dead on your feet.”

“I agree,” Alliras said, nodding to Calbert. “We all could use a few hours to rest, and freshen up.”

Thomas suggested, “Why don’t we all meet back here at one? While we wait for the rendezvous, and see whether young Mr. Manez has survived his travails, we can discuss a plan of action. There’s a hell of a lot of work for us in the next few months, and I want to get a jump start on it, make sure we’re all on the same wave length.”

Shaking hands, they dispersed.

Michael turned to Calbert. “I’m ordering you to take your own advice. Stand down. You and Ray both. I’ll see both of you in seven hours. I’m going to head home and grab a shower.”

*

As Michael exited Operations and took a conveyor tube down to the parking lot where a limo was waiting to take him home, all that had transpired suddenly caught up to him, hitting him like a tidal wave.

There were others out there…somewhere. They had left more than a calling card; they had left a possible means of contact, like the recording on the Voyager II probe sent out in the late nineteen-seventies by NASA. Humankind was about to embark on a mission to take them into the Interstellar Age.

And Michael Sanderson was going to be a pioneer of the next stage of the evolution of humankind.

Instead of feeling elated and proud, Michael felt inadequate to the task. Frightened. Small.

He thought of Alex Manez, the first light speed traveler. Had he survived the experience? His parents hadn’t; they had become the first victims of Element X.

Was Alex alive?

Michael hoped so.

__________

Pluto Orbit :

Orcus 1
:

Macklin’s Rock;

The tomb was complete
; darkness impenetrable, forever. He was a living corpse in a coffin of the unknown; his brain had ceased all higher functions in defense of the impossible data that had bombarded his senses. It was all too much.

Breathing was an effort. It was increasingly more difficult with each passing millennium.

Or was that, each passing minute?

Alex slowly came to realize that he was losing oxygen in the security receptacle. There was no light for him to read the monitors; the devices themselves were not operating.

“Hucs?” he called out. “Hucs?”

Only silence answered him.

Memory was the core of a spider web; Alex was on the outer thread. He followed the silken strands, careful not to fall off into the bottomless depths of insanity.

Something had hit the asteroid. His parents had been outside, on the surface.

“Mom! Dad!” he called out weakly, not expecting them to answer. “Help!”

He tried to move his head, but there was something stopping him; he remembered, the security receptacle encased his head in protective foam, leaving just enough room for him to breathe.

Moving his hand, he drew it up and tried to rip the solidified foam from his head, but it was too hard. He had to activate Hucs; the computer must have gone off-line. Flicking his hand over the control switches brought no results. The power must have shorted.

Feeling around for the manual override, a panic set in, causing his heart to trip-hammer in his chest. The override, when he found it, produced no effect either. The entire TAHU was dysfunctional.

A scream welled in his throat, his brain rebelling against the claustrophobia that was constricting him. Out in the vastness of empty space, he was trapped, immobile.

Images swarmed through his mind. Voices. He heard voices.

Some time had passed between when the unknown quantity impacted Macklin’s Rock, and when Alex regained consciousness. How much time?

There had been those voices. Calling to him. He had refused the summons, but not because of any conscious decision on his part; he had not been ready.

Ready for what?

He closed his eyes, even though that did not change his view, and thought hard, concentrated. There was the sense of a lightness in his memories. Lightness, or light, or… He didn’t know. The universe was laid open for him like an annotated atlas. Time-space had no meaning in that light.

No. That wasn’t right. Time had meaning; space had meaning; but past the light—yes!—
past
the light, time-space had no meaning.
Past
the light.

Past.

Future.

There were no such things. He rejected them.

No, something rejected them for him.

Because he was not ready.

Ready for what?

He was beginning to feel dizzy from lack of oxygen. The override did not produce any electricity in the TAHU, although it should under any normal circumstances. Unless whatever hit them had disconnected the solar connectors from the TAHU’s battery core.

He had to restore power, or he would die. He recalled the emergency procedures drilled into him before his parents and he undertook the journey to Macklin’s Rock. In the event of an accident, the security receptacle was supposed to have enough life support to sustain him for eighteen hours; more than enough time for rescue to arrive from the Mining Orbiter.

He didn’t know how long he had been out, but if the oxygen level was any indication, then he didn’t have much longer to go. Perhaps eight or ten hours.

There was a sudden thought-flash in his mind. The power of it overwhelmed him.

He remembered:

Sol was laid out in his mind in its entirety, like a map on a table, or the 3D hologram of the solar system in the space museum back home on CS-3.

A chorus of voices, like angels, like devils, began to sing. It was a haunting-melody, a riveting accompaniment to the images that presented themselves in his mind.

He remembered an image of Jupiter, the massive gas giant with the large red spot, coming toward him at incredible speed. It had been in his field of vision for less than a second, growing larger from a small dot to something that covered his entire field of view, and then racing past him, out of sight. The intensity of the song dimmed. Like voices buzzing in the background. The rumble of a crowded hall on Canada Station Three.

The song grew stronger, more intense.

Empty space for more than a half an hour. As the song crescendoed, he saw Saturn, its rings of gas particles forming a perfect halo around its equator. It performed the same second-long appearance as its gaseous brother, Jupiter. The music echoed like the memory of a dream dancing just past consciousness.

Another hour or so, and he had the sense that he was crossing the orbit of Uranus, though the smaller gas giant was nowhere to be seen. The song played on.

Ninety minutes later, he was certain he was in the path of the smallest of the gas giants, Neptune, and his course abruptly veered twenty degrees above the ecliptic. A little over an hour later, and more than five hours after Macklin’s Rock initially reacted, Pluto and its cousin, Charon, burst into view like a giant net, catching him between their orbits. The song took a change in timbre and tone. It was the denouement of the symphony.

Now, the images and song had disappeared, but he had the lingering impression of two small planets on either side of him.

The entire thought-flash was more like a dream than reality, but now, every time he closed his eyes, he was certain that he could see beyond the bounds of the security receptacle, beyond the TAHU, and beyond the asteroid.

For some unexplainable reason, he was over five billion kilometers away from the sun.

Panic set in, and he concentrated on keeping his eyes opened. The
blink
came on suddenly, and he could sense something approaching Macklin’s Rock.

It was a space ship. A different song told him so.

He must be delusional. His mind was playing tricks on him. Pluto was nowhere near where he was—which was the asteroid belt, of course. Wasn’t it? And the ship coming toward him was obviously the rescue pod, for, what ship would be out so far from Earth? The only mission Alex had heard of was the
Orcus 1
.

He remembered reading a podcast. There was a mission currently on Pluto.

Mentally shaking his head, since he could not do so physically, he decided he was just imaging things. Most likely, Macklin’s Rock had suffered a collision with another asteroid and the resulting impact and subsequent lack of oxygen was making Alex delusional.

A loud, echoing noise filtered through the TAHU, and after a moment, Alex identified it as a fission laser cutting through the top face of the TAHU. The rescue mission from the Orbiter.

Someone was going to save him.

Salivating, trying to moisten his dry throat, Alex called out, “I’m in here!” as soon as he heard the laser cease to cut, and the grinding sounds of polymer ripping as the rescuers opened the TAHU.

It was then that Alex realized that once all the air escaped the TAHU, sounds could not travel in the emptiness of space. The security receptacle itself served as a soundproof encasement. Without a digital septaphonic booster, the rescuers would not know where he was until they stumbled upon him.

Alex closed his eyes…

…and could
see
in his mind’s eye the suitshielded figures of two people drifting down through the opening of the TAHU to the floor of the main room, the soft beams of their palmlights traveling over the confines of the room, searching for survivors. The song was back in his head, dim, as if he had turned down the volume. His internal vision extended just a few dozen meters outside his security receptacle, rather than millions of kilometers.

Panicked because of the images he should not be able to see, he forced his eyes open. A
blink
brought him a flashing image, quickly fading, of things he should not see. It was like a radar blip. He grunted in surprise at the image. Four more
blinks
produced the same effect.

With repetition, he became more used to the unusual perception, even though his heart raced with the implications. He did not think he could ever get used to the song, however. It was like the babble of a hundred people speaking foreign languages, and there was an imperative message hidden behind the unearthly lyrics.

The next time he
blinked,
he consciously tried to expand the range of his mental perception. He found that he saw not only the figures quickly approaches personal cubicle, but the ship which had landed on the surface of Macklin’s Rock. In his periphery, he could see the images of Pluto and Charon far off on either side of the asteroid. The song peaked again, urging him, warning him, cajoling him.

Another
blink
and he pushed his range to the limit; he could not see, but he could
sense
all the other planets in the solar system, the sun, the Earth, and even the larger bodies in the asteroid belt. The song overwhelmed him, made him so dizzy he wanted to vomit, but he somehow controlled himself.

“What’s happening to me?” he said to himself. “I must be completely crazy.”

The next
blink,
he tried to see past the solar system, thinking he might as well enjoy the sensational perception while he could. Once he was rescued, and he got some oxygen, he was certain his normal senses would return to him, and he would discover that he had been in the asteroid belt all along.

To his mild surprise, he could not see past the outer orbit of Pluto. There was something blocking his view; some kind of electromagnetic field that imposed a limit on his perception. If he could strain his ears and pick out a few words of that song, the explanation would come to him.

He shook his head. Then, his mind adapting quickly to the new—though obviously delusional—perception, he tried to shrink his field of vision as far as he could. Quickly, he discovered that he could consciously turn it off. A
blink
produced the same blankness of view as with his eyes open inside the protective foam.

No song.

A movement in the security receptacle turned his mind from his experiments. The rescuers opened the receptacle, and, with their much stronger hands, ripped the foam from him.

His first sight as the foam fell away from his eyes was the play of a light, sharp and intense. After so long in the dark, he saw spots dancing in front of him until his eyes became used to the light.

Someone pressed a suitshield helmet over his head, and the warm rush of oxygen sent him into a faint. He breathed deeply a few times and felt the dizziness fade.

Sounds filtered into him from the septaphonics.

“Alex? Alex? Are you all right? Can you hear me?” It was a woman’s voice.

Alex nodded. “Yes,” he replied, though his words came out in a squeak.

His throat was parched. Sticking his tongue out, he touched a plastic nipple inside the helmet, which extended into his mouth. He sucked an ounce of water from it, and opened his mouth to let the nipple retract.

“I’m all right,” he said. “Are you the rescue team from the Mining Orbiter?” But he knew they were not before they confirmed it.

The two figures turned to look at one another. Finally, the woman addressed him again.

“I’m sorry, Alex, but no. My name is Captain Justine Turner, from the
Orcus 1
. We were on a mission to Pluto when we discovered your TAHU entering the orbit of the planet.”

Alex closed his eyes again.

Blinked
out
.

Pluto and Charon were still there, ten thousand kilometers away on either side. The familiar theme of the dark planet pounded in his ears, a musical score a million times more intense than Gustav Holst’s masterpiece, The Planets. Holst had never written a score for Pluto, since no one had known of the dark planet’s existence until a few years after the composer’s death. But no one, however ingenious, could ever have produced a symphonic spectacular such as the one in Alex’s head when he
blinked out
.

It was real.

And it came to him then, the reality of his situation.