The Cool Green Sea
The retro force
pushed Allie deep into his seat. He looked out the porthole and watched as the
icy and rocky moon grew larger in the eerie blue light of
“Those are the ice
fields,” his Dad said. ”There must be a few billion cubic meters of hydrogen
slush. All we have to do is watch the 'droids process it and then it’s Triton
Station for good. No more of these backwater armpits. I promise.”
The engines roared as
they throttled up for landing. “What happened to the last operator Dad?” Allie already
knew. Usually a contract ran for two and a half standard years. To pick up a
six month contract only meant one thing.
“Some kind of
accident”, his Dad said. ”He left the company holding the bag for six months of
his contract. That’s why they are paying me at double the standard rate and I
was guaranteed the Administrator slot at Triton.”
The shuttle thumped
down on the landing pad of the fuel-harvesting complex— a massive array of
buildings, tanks, cracking towers and hundreds of miles of pipes, all run by a
single engineer. The entire complex was automated, but occasionally something
would happen that would surprise even the computers and require skilled hands
to correct. A lot of people wanted to be operators; it looked like fun to sit
on your ass and watch vids or write the great galactic novel. It only took a
month or two for the novelty to wear off. Six months and people were screaming.
By nine months, many were suicidal.
The company tried
using family units, and they did last a while longer. Finally they began to
psychologically screen applicants. The few found suitable for such long term
isolation could become very rich.
The pad elevator
slowly lowered the shuttle into the hanger— a large cavern of dark finished
metal illuminated by red blackout lights— and came to rest. The outer door slid
closed and airlock seals hissed shut. Suddenly white fluorescent lights
illuminated the hanger making it look like a huge, dirty garage. The shuttle
pilot came out of the cockpit with an abrasively cheery attitude and a
clipboard under his arm.
“Welcome to IX, folks
he said. “Beautiful scenery and beach front lots available. I need for you to
initial the transfer papers and we’re all done.”
It was difficult for
Allie to leave the comfort of the shuttle. He took one last look and walked out
into the dirty hanger. It amazed Allie that hangers could get so dirty, until
he realized that every time the damn things depressurized, carbon dust got
sucked inside. The microscopic dust picked up static charges and clung so
tightly to almost any surface that it was nearly impossible to dislodge. After
hundreds of opening cycles, the pristine white hangers became permanently
dingy.
Dammit, Allie
thought. Why had Dad let the company talk
him into another contract? After his Mom’s accidental death on their last
assignment— there were a lot of accidents at these remote stations— the damned
company should have cut them some slack. He knew deep down that it was his
Dad’s choice to take the contract.
Allie and his Dad
picked up their family cargo pod and walked through the dingy hanger to their
quarters. They were halfway there when they heard the shuttles engines spool up
for launch. On his way to his quarters, he felt as much as heard the shuttle
taking off back to civilization. It only served to remind him that a real life
was a long way away. Over the last six years he had only seen twelve different
faces. Eight of those were at transfer stations.
His room wasn’t bad.
It was big, carved out of the iron-silicate crust of the little moon. The bare
rock had been polished and buffed so the metallic crystalline structures
glittered and sparkled in the light. There was a nice gel double bed, a big
video screen, study and workstation.
There was a big
bookcase but none of the titles jumped out at him. Books were a ridiculous
waste of mass and bulk. The Literature of
England, The Catcher In the Rye, Norse Mythology, Plato, the Holy Bible, Wisdom
of the East, Great Western Thought, quite a collection. Allie didn’t care
one way or the other. He had six months to kill. He pulled Norse Mythology down and tossed it on the bed.
“Courtesy of the
former management.” Allie spun around, startled. It was his father of course
but any sound seemed to offend the silence.
“Sorry I startled you
son. I’ve got some equipment repairs to make out on the collectors. Could you
keep an eye on the control room?”
“Yeah, sure Dad.
Watch your seals.” His Dad gave him thumbs up on his way out of the room.
Allie wasn’t the
greatest of conversationalists. He threw his bags in the closet for later. He
was pleased to have something useful to do so he went off to find the control
room.
On the way the
corridors seemed dirty and forbidding. All of these deep space industrial
complexes seemed like dark labyrinths with no end in sight. Just lonely groping
in the eerie twilight of the red caged bulbs that lit the corridors.
The control room
seemed to be a fairy kingdom of flashing lights and video monitors. On one of
the monitors he saw his Dad half inside an access panel busily keeping the
company’s machinery running. On another, a bulk hydrogen sled was being loaded
for its long trip sunward.
Since the gravity of
IX was very weak, the mass driver could send the fully loaded pallet on its way
at a blistering .1 C. Having no organic crew, little things like inertia and
acceleration was not a consideration. The big interstellar ships operating out
of Titan would be topping off their bunkers in just a few weeks.
Allie sat and
daydreamed about worlds those ships would visit like Iota Sephi-IV, land of the
green sun. HD 32267, an oceanic paradise world of warm salty breezes and
beautiful sea birds. Scorpius 3116, a world so close to the event horizon of a
black hole that time itself was dilated.
There was a small
book sitting on the console. He picked it up and thumbed through it pages:
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree:
Where Alph the secret river ran
Through caverns measureless to
man
Down to a sunless sea.
“A sunless sea.” The thought
seemed to make the star lit darkness of the outer solar system seem even
heavier. The monitor directly in front of him endlessly scanned the hydrogen
sea. Slowly and wistfully the liquefied gas gently swayed as a poison wind of
methane caressed its surface. His mind wandered to a planet that he had never
seen before and an ocean that he had never felt. He remembered the sound of surf crashing on
the
He shook the notion.
The sea that he longed for was 32 astronomical units sun ward. The tiny sun
showed up like a yellow gem on a jeweler’s velvet. Down there, somewhere, were
6 billion people. What he wouldn’t do for the company of just one of them. He
sat dreading six months of dark loneliness, far away from the warmth and cheer
of that friendly sun.
“Damnit!” He yelled,
“I am so fucking bored and lonely!”
The silence returned indifferent
to his anguish.
Then something caught
his eye. A color that wasn’t supposed to be there. He wheeled his chair over to
the auxiliary power console. Just underneath the keyboard was a small reseal able
baggie with a fine deep cobalt blue powder.
Holy shit
he thought. Is this what I think it is?
He walked over to the
communications panel and keyed the mike, “Hey Dad, you still need for me to
ride shotgun for you up here?”
There was a pause.
“Not really Allie. Just keep an open comm circuit while I’m outside OK?”
“Sure Dad. Will do.
I’m going down to the lab for a bit. I’ve got some chemistry homework to do.”
“Roger that. You
always get an A.”
“Always.”
Allie clipped a comm
unit to his belt and went down the corridor. There was always a fully equipped lab
in a Company mining facility. It was too cheap an investment for the
possibility of astronomical returns for the Company to overlook.
He fired up the
equipment and ran a calibration test on the mass spectrometer. Then he ran an
organic calibration just to be sure. He took a very small sample of the blue
dust and put it in a test module and slid it into the sample tray. He started
the program to identify the compound.
The mass spectrometer
ran a Xenon laser through the test material. The excited molecules absorbed the
energy and released photons at very discrete wavelengths. Slowly the spectra of
the unknown substance began to assemble on the computer display. A matching
program began analysis of the spectral profile checking it against a huge
database of known compounds.
The answer came
flashing on the screen: Di-methyl Pyruvic Acetate! Only the most powerful
hallucinogenic drug in 180 known star systems.
Jackpot. Allie had
just found enough DPA to trip for months. He pocketed the baggie grinning at
the possibilities. Maybe this contract wasn’t going to be as boring as he
thought.
It was an
ordinary day like any other. Allie was doing his school-work, his Dad was
running a six month inspection rotation on the number four harvester array and
his Mom was watching the Control Room. She got a red light on the master board
indicating that the main sensor junction for harvester array number two had
failed.
It was an easy fix
but it was a repair that had to be carried out immediately. Without those
sensors, the system was blind and couldn’t properly regulate the temperature
and pressures inside the collection pipes. If the liquid hydrogen froze in
those pipes, the pressure could build up and cause the pipes to rupture and
create months of difficult repairs.
Allies Mom was no
shrinking violet. She was more than capable so she didn’t even think twice. She
got a spare junction box out of storage, suited up and went outside to make the
repair.
She was nearly
finished when the blow out happened. The explosion was a bad one creating
thousands of shards of shrapnel and chunks of hydrogen ice. Allies Mom was eviscerated.
Allie was first to
arrive on the scene hoping against hope that she was all right. She looked OK
until he turned her around. When her suit was pierced, she exploded from the
inside out. Her eyes were bulged out of her horrified face, a mask of pain and
gore, quick frozen by deep cold.
Allie screamed,
“Nooooo!”
He sat bolt upright
in a cold sweat. The nightmares were getting worse. He got out of bed and went
to his bath room. He ran water over his face to fight the nausea but he still
puked.
Allie took some water
into his mouth to rinse the taste of bile out of his mouth. With shaking hands
he went into the medicine cabinet and took two Company approved tranquilizers.
He told himself there
was nothing I could do for
the ten-thousandth time as he lay back down in bed to try to get back to sleep.
Several days
later while his father was tied up for a long while fixing a flow problem in
one of the collector arrays, Allie sat in the observation lounge. The
glass-domed room offered a spectacular view of the roiling, stormy surface of
Allie opened the
baggie, dampened his index finger, dipped it in the cobalt blue powder and
tasted the seeds of madness. It didn’t take long for the drug to take effect. A
rich variety of colors assaulted his senses from all sides. An almost orgasmic
rush of pleasure overloaded his senses. His mind gained speed and seemed to
think faster and on different wavelengths than he had ever explored.
After ten minutes of
euphoria, Allie opened his eyes and saw his reflection in the dome. He hadn’t
really seen too many other people to compare himself with to know whether or
not he was handsome. His typically Swedish features were tempered by growing up
a Belter. Allie hated being skinny but he would turn 17 in just a few weeks.
His Dad told him that there was plenty of time to fatten him up.
Belter: that’s what normal people called the crazies that
worked out here. The low G gravity made Belter tall and very slim for the most
part. His profile, his intense steely blue eyes, his light ash blond hair would
be considered a gift by anyone on earth but there was no one here to appreciate
them.
Sure, he had
communicated with kids his own age over the distance learning net. A couple of
girls had even told him that they though he was cute but they were so far away
that Allie even wondered if they were real. Sometimes he would touch their time-delayed
faces on the video monitor and dream of what it would be like to touch them.
For a moment the
vision of a lovely woman appeared and caressed his face. Was this his mother or
some one else?
His father’s image
invaded his trance. “Get away you bastard. You brought Mom and me out here to
this hellhole. It killed her. Now it’s killing me. All you want is your God
damned credits.” He lashed out at the vision and it was gone.
Why had he reacted so
violently to his father? How long had he felt that way? He wondered what other
things he might discover about himself with his inhibitions destroyed by the
blue powder and his subconscious running riot.
He sat there taking
in the starscape when he heard a voice, “You are not the first to come here nor
will you be the last. This moon is as old as the universe. It was here before
your sun and will be here after it is gone.”
“Who are you?” Allie
whispered.
“Look at it.”
“What is it?”
“Is it dangerous?”
“Who is there?” Allie asked, completely at ease.
“We are the spirit of
what once was”, the first voice said. “We came, we built, and we departed as
will all people.”
“We can feel your
sadness. Don’t despair. You are never alone here. Our race left our works, our
hopes and our dreams an eon of eons ago in the face of an exploding sun. This
place is merely a fragment of the debris.”
Music filled his
perception; like singing but different somehow. The colors vibrated in a
soundless ballet akin to music but very different. The tones were thoughts, the
thoughts were energy.
Then there was
nothing but bright white light. He looked around and saw nothing: no walls, no
floor, no ceiling. It seemed as if he was suspended in space.
“You, Allie Svenson,
now stand before us accused a heinous crime”, a deep voice boomed. “You belong
to a race that kills its own kin, rapes entire worlds and exists only to feed
its own greed. Your blindness is only exceeded by your ignorance and
shortsightedness. You poison your own world, now you spread your filth to new
worlds. You are charged with humanity. How do you plead?”
Allie shuddered. He
felt ashamed and covered his face.
“How do you plead?”
the voice demanded.
“Guilty.” Voices murmured.
The spectral judge
pounded his gavel. “Do you offer any defense naked ape, for all the worlds that
you plunder and peoples that you rape?
We know why you hide your face. It is a shameful thing, the human race.”
Allie stood and
composed himself. “If you want me to defend the human race, I won’t do it. I
hardly know it. I don’t even know what it is beyond the pall of my own
experience. Humanity is sometimes good, sometimes bad. Sometimes beautiful,
sometimes bestial. It is the beautiful that I remember and long for.”
Again there was
murmuring, “How can you be lonely for the race that hung Christ on a cross?
Especially here where the spirit of this world that once was is still strong?”
“But sir, I can’t see
it”, Allie stuttered.
“Open your eyes!” the
spectral judge commanded.
Suddenly, hundreds of
beings appeared around him. Beautiful beings, humanoids of all descriptions.
Allie fell to his knees, the weight of it too much to bear. One of the beings
extended his hand in friendship. Filled with emotion, Allie embraced it,
unabashedly, joyously, enraptured to be near another thinking, living entity.
Again the court began to murmur.
The being put its
hand on Allie’s forehead and their minds became one. Memories and visions of
distant stars flooded his consciousness. Lovers and friends, enemies and
rivals: faces painted themselves like a gallery of some mad artist work: a
trance within a vision, a vision within a trip. Somewhere in the beings mind he
touched something that lay dormant in his on mind: madness. The shock of it
broke the trance. The being faced the court.
“This one is
beautiful”, he said. “Freely he gives his love and freely he receives it. He is
more than human. I feel his pain and sense his need for healing. “
The judge hammered
his gavel. “Allie Svenson, I find you not guilty of humanity. You may enter our
realm at any time and be welcomed. However, I find your race guilty and
sentence it to a lonely, groping existence until the day of its final judgment.
Allie awoke
exhausted. He had heard that DPA trips were wild but this was something beyond
any expectation. What had happened? Was it the drug or something more? For days
he puzzled over the question. He felt different somehow; not so alone, not
quite so isolated. His dad even commented on the improvement in his mood.
In the days to come, Allie
often put on a pressure suit and went out onto the surface looking for traces
of the ancients. He searched far into the rocky highlands, along jagged ridges
and deep into the caves.
His searches were
fruitless until one day while straining to get up a high ridge; his body
chemistry triggered a flashback. He found a flat, safe place to sit out his
trip.
Allie closed his eyes
and when he opened them there were two bright suns in the sky. He saw the
landscape of the dead world transform before his eyes. Trees and grass covered
the surrounding hills. Birds sang and children played in the golden light of
the twin suns.
One of the blue
skinned humanoids came and sat beside him. He spoke with a voice that Allie
could only hear in his mind, “This is how it once was human. All traces of it
have been wiped away by the supernova that destroyed our world. Only spirit
remains.”
Allie trembled and
felt great pain at the thought of all those gentle, peaceful people being wiped
from the universe. “Why..” Allie stammered. “If there is order and purpose in
the universe, why did this race have to die?”
“Things of this
nature I can not answer”, the spirit said. “I am only a shadow of what once
was. If you seek meaning in the universe, don’t. There is neither justice nor
order. There is only what was, what is and what will be.
They sat there on
that ledge, boy and spirit, and watched as one of the twin suns collapsed and
exploded. The death of a race: unknown and unmourned.
The next day
Allie tasted the drug and put on a pressure suit. He went down to the flats
where the cold lifeless
There are a lot of
people on the beach today he thought as he waded off into the surf.