By Christopher Schlegel
Chapter 1
The sky looked tall.
It usually looked tall on Home World. But today it looked especially, perhaps even, impressively tall.
Not at all like the manufactured atmospheres of the Satellite Worlds; there, it seemed the sky was short. So short as to be claustrophobically closing down on your head. Indeed some of the higher mountain ranges on Sat World Six rose above the air straight into the vacuum of space. Very much like islands poking their tip tops above a sea of breathable air, teeming with life, into the much vaster sea: the lifeless, darkness of interplanetary space. There was at one time considerable debate among various scientists as to whether or not this was a satisfactory situation. On one side, it was proposed, there should be as much atmosphere manufactured as possible to insure stable, safe living conditions. On the other side, it was argued the mountain peaks that rose past the atmosphere were ideal launch sites for space vehicles because the burning propellants would not contaminate the precious air.
The debate may rise again with the habitation of future Satellite World, but the debate over what to do with SatSix was over. It had ultimately been closed by the laws of physics: the atmospheric crews discovered that the small planetoid was slowly leaking air off into space. Its gravity was already holding all the air that it could.
Teric Jonsen had just stepped off the morning transit shuttle flight from SatOne to Home World. The other passengers, mostly businesspersons on a tight schedule, hurried down the aisle and onto the terminal walkway. Teric let these people with their stricter agendas pass before she even moved in her seat. When the last of the passengers had passed, she rose casually, retrieved her small suitcase from the fore luggage compartment and strolled into the terminal.
She paused at the first of the enormous windows lining the terminal to have a look at Home World, her first in three years.
The landscape spread before her was gently rolling, thoughtfully crumpled collection of rich greens, deep browns and watery purples. It resembled a comfortable, colorful blanket on a bed that had recently been slept in and not yet made up. Buildings scattered across the landscape of her home city looked like bright little children’s toys left in such a huge bed. The sky was an infinitely distant, watery, but still bright blue with a few small, majestic white billowy clouds looking like mountains of lighter than air cotton. The newly dawned Home Star shone fiercely at a horizontal angle. It’s light reflected off the clean buildings back at her in blinding white, framing the edges of people-made structures; in some places bringing them forward into a hard, dramatic focus. In other places, the light created incredibly sharp bordered, long black shadows.
It was suitably breathtaking.
Teric was one of a handful of administrators for the Med Complexes on all the Sat Worlds. A Med Complex was the ‘head hospital’ on a Satellite World. It was responsible for the upkeep, operation and activity of all the various medical facilities and the health of the inhabitants of the entire planetoid. Her career usually kept her from visiting Home World for months, even years, at a time. The latest developments occurring in her people’s civilization, coupled with her job requirements, had resulted in a three-year absence.
She was thirty-nine years old. Her people had been space flighting for over three hundred years. She had been at her job for twenty years. Her people had been terraforming, atmosphering and habitating Satellite Worlds for two hundred years. Thus, both Teric and her fellow people have had enough time to adapt to traveling around their solar system from one world to the next.
Nevertheless…
On some of the smaller, more distant Sat Worlds the Home Star looked like a tentative outsider. It burned its fierce, white-hot yellows and reds. It made a large portion of the sky a friendly, opulent light blue. But it always seemed as if the horizons were converging on the little circle of life giving light; the edges of the sky melting away into a hard dark purple, then the inky black vacuum of space. Here, on a nearly cloudless Home World morning, a mesmerizing almost painfully bright blue completely drenched the sky. It spread over the sprawling metropolis before Teric’s dark green eyes, all the way to the horizon. The light and sky seemed to cover and caress the landscape like a protector. Or a lover. Teric unconsciously ran her free hand lightly over her small, firm stomach.
As she stood before the cradle of her people’s civilization, this well traveled space flight veteran said quietly to herself, “Three years is a long time.”
• • •
Many years ago a group of people on Home World started complaining that the outward habitation of the solar system, and of course the universe at large, was wrong. The Creator of the Universe had placed them the Home World because that’s where the Creator wanted them to be. Every single accident and mishap occurring in relation to space flight, or off world exploration and habitation, was seen by this faction as due punishment from the Creator.
Finally, this group came upon a solution. Once they had raised enough funds for their own atmosphere manufacturing machinery, they set off for a small planetoid at the edge of the solar system. They took no other technology as they scorned its use as much as possible. This was a justifiable move to them because the Creator had also created this ‘small, humble’ world; and there, they would be able to reside forever, raise their children to be Home World Bounders and, most importantly, not have to live among the ‘arrogant, foolish atheists that the rest of civilization had become. Since they had no desire for contact they weren’t heard from since they left close to a hundred years ago. Until just recently. Their planet was referred to by ‘Outsiders’ (i.e. the rest of the solar system) as SatEleven. It’s founders and inhabitants called it Natura, which was the name for the Creator’s Paradise in the Ancient Texts.
A smaller faction within this group of Home World Bounders was bothered by the obvious contradiction of using the very technology that they were damning to do the very thing they had also damned: habitating a world other than the one on which they were born. This smaller faction refused to leave with the others and managed to obtain a small island in the Great Southern Sea of Home World on which to happily isolate themselves. They wanted absolutely no part of the ‘world’s wicked technological trickery’ and thus, took none of it with them. They wanted to go back to the mythological Creator’s Estate of Pure Nature. A few decades later, a Vaccination Vessel stopped to try to give them the latest in medicinal advances and check on their general health.
Unfortunately, it was too late. Nature, untamed by technology, had already disposed of them.
It had generally been understood that people were Nature’s most physically frail entities. And therefore, most ‘Back to Natura’ environmentalist groups and demagogues had to eventually concede that if one was truly concerned with people’s lives technological progress was to be welcomed and not damned or restricted. Still, it seemed that every thirty or forty years the debate was brought up again as if it was an ‘important new issue’ that had recently reared its head. With every new generation there came into existence new, learning minds; some of which were preyed upon by various irrational groups and persons. It never appeared in the least to bother these people that they were damning the very technology that kept them alive. Even worse: it also did not appear to bother them that they were teaching young minds to start their existence by damning their very means of survival and any possible future.
It was at this tender age that Teric’s young brother, Jehrac, had recently arrived. Apparently, he had a few teachers in his school that were currently advancing non-technology notions. Teric’s mother had communicated her worries about the situation to her several times over he last year. Teric tried to reassure her mother that it was probably just a temporary phase the boy was going through, but it seemed to have only gotten stronger with time. Their father had passed away five years ago in a tragic space flight accident. Being a scientist, he was they parent that usually dealt with this type of issue that a child might raise or have questions about. Mother had tried her best in his absence, but was unable to answer Jehrac’s concerns in a convincing fashion. She pleaded with Teric to ‘Have a talk with your brother before he wound up in some group of fanatics determined to kill themselves in the Southern Sea’.
So, aside from being home for a week of rest and relaxation before taking off for the most important assignment of her career, aside from trying to visit as many family members and friends as possible, aside from catching up with Gorsh, aside from simply enjoying a little time to herself on Home World after being away for so long, she was to council her little brother and save him from himself.
Teric stepped out of the terminal building, onto the sidewalk and into the blinding light and warm, open outside air. Again, she stopped and enjoyed a brief moment for herself. After a reverent sweeping glance she closed her eyes and filled her lungs with a deep breath.
She opened her eyes, hailed an airtaxi and thought to herself, “One week is a short time.”