Chapter One - Landing
She was there waiting when I landed. I can’t tell you how much that lifted my spirits. I had ditched it all, leaving my old life behind. I was adrift. She was my redeemer, my new start.
We had come into Earth orbit, and before long, we could see them looming. I was the only passenger, so I sat at the front, to let the scene cocoon me.
On that screen, the twin cylinders, rolling in place toward one another, were breathtaking. They are twenty kilometers long and two in diameter. Their size makes them appear to spin slowly, like a mixer in molasses. The sun hits one side of each as they spin, lighting them to blinding brilliance against the gauzy background of Earth. We were nearing their curious armadillo end plating, studded with tiny projections of cams, laser positioners, clamps, and lights.
The habs are built in pairs to counter rotate. That minimizes the corrections needed to keep them turning smoothly. Their size belies their the swiftness of their rotation. They need to spin almost thirty times a minute to generate the feeling of normal earth gravity in space. They were impossibly big, with their polyhydrate concrete shields overlaying their metal shells. They were windowless, so away from the dim illumination of Earth’s reflection, the shadowed halves were almost invisible, an inky shadow dream. The pair I was heading for were Elysium and Utopia. Invented fantastical names, I thought. How wrong I was.
I needed to move away from the Einstein settlement at the North Pole of the Moon, where I had lived and worked for four years. It was too painful to remain there amid the wreckage of a life. They had pulled the chain on the EarthWatch project. I was rendered totally redundant, and it hit hard,. So, I eagerly accepted my sister-in-law’s invitation to move to Elysium. I was anxious, as is any person in transition. It was a leap into the unknown, yet welcome. I was moving not so much to forge a new life as to flee an old one. Yet, certainly, my generous sister-in-law was taking more of a chance on me than I was taking on her. Her losses were much worse than mine, and so was her vulnerability.
I had concentrated on the process of the trip. That calmed me somewhat. I am observer by nature. I attend to details. Focusing on the little things and their workings minimizes my anxieties. And it was easy. There was lots to look at.
When you come into Elysium you have been pre-spun to match the rotation of the cylinder. You swim out the airlock, through the docking connector to the tunnel of microgee at the center of rotation. Then, you see it. You can’t miss the stunning visual - twenty kilometers of landscaped terrain hits your eye. You step onto that elevator. The outer wall of its cabin is all glass. As you descend, the gravity builds and you feel you are going home.
Elysium was built to resemble the Dalmatian Coast of what was Croatia at the time of the Impact. It must have been astoundingly beautiful in the original, because even that copy was mesmerizing. I had never seen so much open air, so much beauty. As you walk out, you are unsteady on your feet from the majesty of it. For me, unused to full gee after living on the Moon for four years, the physical added to the psychological. It shakes you.
On my way to the Moon, they did not trouble me with that sight. Easily understandable. As a subterranean creature surfacing, I would never have left it. Who would? That was paradise. The need to experience beauty like that is built into us from time immemorial. Compared to it, underground, we exist, but we do not live. It computed, then, why some people on Earth were addicts of the mind bath, that sneaky tech from our interstellar friends. What other way were stricken people to live in a world they loved? For its users, everything in their own private world is suited to them. What more seductive addiction could you imagine?
My enforced exile from the world of science had ;more than one reason. They released us because scientists were less dangerous when dispersed. That was one benefit. In our tiny settlement on the Moon, with its interconnected scientists, it was an open secret that there were aliens. It was also widely known that these aliens had sent messages including detailed scientific encyclopedias setting out a science and technology that was well beyond our own. They had reached levels of knowledge we could not understand. It was a treasure trove of discrete factoids, free for the taking.
To a scientist, the knowledge was simplified and excluded the theoretical underpinnings. Almost as if it had been censored to give us the bare minimum. That, to any knowledgeable person, was curious, and suggested caution in response. The UN had been able to shutter the knowledge of the alien Cthaw signals. Yet they could not conceal the disturbing consequences of that knowledge. It was no mystery that basic research had been shut down. Governments, bearing a heavy burden of providing for the amplified needs of their citizens, were delighted to eliminate all that expensive basic research. In contrast to the scientists, the politicians had no misgivings. It’s no violation of security to point that out. It is happening everywhere.
When they relieved me of my duties at EarthWatch on the Moon, they called it rotation, but no one replaced me. I was an astrophysicist. No more of my kind were needed up there. And before they let me leave, I signed a non-disclosure agreement. Not that it will do them any good.
Now we depend for our survival on the kindness of strangers six light years away. They publish their daily issue of EarthWatch collision predictions. That is now our only protection from the possibility of another Impact. Our own EarthWatch lab has been disbanded. Their report is better than ours, and more dependable, they say. Maybe it is – until it isn’t.
There are more negative indicators. Our centuries of radio broadcasting have revealed to them the worst we can do. In my estimate, they have little reason to like us, and no reason to protect us. It is significant that they do not allow reciprocal communication. We remain ignorant of their nature. Does letting our guard down to such partners seem reasonable to you?
I must put that out of my mind. It is not for me to decide any more. That chapter of my life is done. Now, I hope to be a good real estate agent.
My sister-in-law stood in the lounge of the 'airport'. It was styled just like that. No ticket counters, of course. There were black plastic sculptural waiting chairs though, and a small snack counter. They surrounded an open waiting area. Our world beckoned. The displayscreens in the enclosure showed vids of shuttles and Rockships coming in and out, and our fons barked to replicate those announcements.
I was singular in more ways than one. Nobody came from Moon to the Low Earth Orbit colonies. Everyone coming was from Earth. Many thousands were coming up on the same generous terms I had taken from the Moon. When faced with an indefinite future of their monotone, ferret life on Earth, they chose the physical paradise with sun and beaches and quaint architecture.
She didn’t wait, and called to me, her hapless unemployed brother-in-law:
"Oh, Joshua, I am so glad you are finally here! How are you? Thank you for coming to help."
This from a fem whose husband, my brother, had died just two weeks before. She had started a new business, already successful, and ran it solo. She was greeting me, her incommunicative, hermit, brother-in -law. I had neglected her, and only rarely had those verbal wrestling matches with her husband, my newly dead brother. We used the covert language men use to circle the deep sand, carefully skirting the pain. I could easily have reached out in her hour of need, but I was embarrassed. Yet, her greeting was so sweet that it piqued my memory of delinquency. She could easily have hired one of the many immigrants to Elysium, arriving daily, to help run her real estate business rather than me.
Since they had finished Elysium and Utopia seven years previous, people had been flocking to the opportunity of a new life in a place where the skies were not eternally shrouded with toxic yellow gas. What benefit was an anti-social astrophysicist going to be to her real estate business? My skill set didn’t fit, but she took pity on my plight and welcomed me in.
I was immensely grateful for her charity and determined to be of use to her. It wasn't money. They had to give me a pension when they released me. I had been a tenured professor when I had gone up to the Moon. I kept my tenure when I was detached. It was a bonus for my University to have one of its staff doing cutting-edge work in space at no cost to them. When they relieved me of my duties, they still had to pay me until they gave me alternative employment. Fat chance of that! They didn’t need me. The Cthaw textbooks had revealed all about the Universe. They said there was no more need for theoretical science. Why search for answers if you already have all the knowledge you need?
My reply to her was awkward. I was out of practice.
"Oh, you know Miriam, I’m ok. I'm a bachelor. I live alone. This is the only change to my life in years. I'd rather talk about how you are. I am so sorry about Michael. I can give you an excuse for my disappearance and say I didn't appreciate how sick he was. Some of that its true. Nowadays, you assume a cure. Can I say now that I wish I had connected? "
"Thank you Joshua. Nothing would have changed it. He'd been sick for a long time. There are still some kinds of cancer they can't cure. They can keep you going for a long time, though. He's been in clear sight of death’s door for over ten years. It’s all right. It was Michael too. There was nothing to do. Michael was funny that way. His cancer is one of the reasons we never had kids, and why we came away. It wasn't even a shock when he had a crisis. It had happened several times before. This time, unfortunately, he didn't pull through, that's all."
Then she broke my heart.
"I haven't got anyone left, Joshua. Michael told me a lot about the early days with you. I thought we might be able to be brother and sister the way we should have been in those days."
It was obvious from her open display of emotion that she felt deeply. I could see why Michael had loved her so much. Oh, she was beautiful, all right, but she was much more. She had opened up to me so quickly I was breathless with it. Some part of me considered it almost indecent. But, of course, it wasn't that. It was human.
"You know I've never spent enough time with people, Miriam. I will try to deserve being related to you."
She blinked to control her tears: "I can't ask for more. Welcome."
She came over, arms stretched, and hugged me. I smelled the perfume of her. The sweet aroma of woman. Her hair brushed the side of my face and blinded my right eye. I had lived on the depilated Moon for four years. Maybe is was sensory starvation, but I wasn't ready for her hair. Hair didn't need to be banned in LEO. Under low gravity, like on the Moon, hair shed is suspended in the air. It was unhealthy and clogged the environmental systems. So, we had to shave it all off. You get used to seeing people without hair, but you have been raised to think hair is attractive.
I couldn't tell her that that her hair knocked me out, though, could I? She would have thought I had a weird fetish. Maybe I do. But my tenuous hold on the social graces made me keep it buttoned whatever it was.
Here, in normal one gee gravity, they don't have any problem with shed hair and skin any more than they do on Earth. So, everyone walks around with that beautiful adornment and they don't even notice it. I stayed silent. I got my reward. With a queenly sweep of her arm, she turned and stretched it out to usher me into to her world.
It spread out ahead of us. Large bodies of blue water lapped at picturesque shores, and at the other end there were suggestions of small lakes dotting the landscape. The structures indistinct in the distance suggested quaint seaside houses you see in the illustrations. Buildings, many tile-roofed in orange and yellow, lined the shores, alike in variation. Here was a red roof and there, a yellow one. Now mustard colored walls and then, adobe brown. They were laid out in clusters with beaches between them and small boats on the bodies of water. The closer ones seemed to be dropping fishing nets into the water. Others were coming up with gleaming, dancing fish. The sky overhead was filled with puffy white clouds which obscured, but did not hide, the land overhead on the other side of the cylinder. At the center were strings of what looked like little dolls. They must have been people playing games in the zero gravity I knew existed at the axis. And I, fortunate one, was to be living there.
I didn't really hear what Miriam said next. It was something about going home. She said home! Clutching my small yellow bag of personals, I followed her up a dark brown brick road. The ground was warm under my feet. We walked between detached houses of the sort that had not been inhabited on Earth for at least seventy years.
I was one of the majority who felt no discomfort from the vertigo that would afflict some few immigrants despite the pre-testing. It was still slightly disorienting turning off axis. But no worries about that. I knew I would soon get used to spin ‘gravity’.
We seemed to be approaching a village, with shops and little seaside restaurants peopled by laughing customers. Everyone seemed to be having a wonderful time. That, too, cheered me. My mood was lifting. I had a future. Perhaps not one I would have chosen, but one that offered prospects.
