Read Further: Beyond the Threshold Online
Authors: Chris Roberson
Further: Beyond the Threshold
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright © 2012 by MonkeyBrain, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Image © Algol, 2012. Used under license from
Shutterstock.com
Image © Marcel Clemens, 2012. Used under license from
Shutterstock.com
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by 47North
P.O. Box 400818
Las Vegas, NV 89140
ISBN-13: 9781612182438
ISBN-10: 1612182437
When I woke up, surrounded by talking dog-people, it was clear we’d strayed pretty far from the mission parameters.
The rest of the crew had gone down a few weeks out from Earth, when
Wayfarer One
passed Neptune’s orbit, but I’d opted to stay awake almost until we reached the sun’s heliopause. As I arranged myself in the narrow sleeper coffin, the hibernation gasses gradually slowing my body’s processes to a near halt, I closed my eyes, knowing that when I opened them, four decades and 4.3 light-years later, it would be to look at a sight no humans before us had ever seen.
Wayfarer One
’s automated systems were programmed to wake us a few weeks out from Alpha Centauri B as the engines fired and the ship began to decelerate. According to the mission specs, by the time the ship’s velocity slowed to zero we would be within visual range of our destination, a tiny Earth-like planet known only by a registry number that might one day be a new home for humanity. I was born a century after an asteroid toppled the most powerful nation on Earth, and knew all too well how vulnerable our planet was to another such disaster. A larger strike could well mean the extinction of life as we knew it. Establishing a toehold on another world would only serve to increase humanity’s chances of surviving into the distant future, but first we had to find a world capable of supporting life.
That was the mission my colleagues and I had accepted. We knew it would mean sacrificing anything like a normal life, as our friends and relatives would age and die back on Earth while we traveled between the stars, but it was a sacrifice we were willing to make. We would be carrying life into lifeless space, the first humans to reach another star.
It came as something of a surprise, then, when I opened my eyes and looked up to see a trio of space suit–wearing dogs standing over me, their tongues hanging out as they barked enthusiastically.
More surprising still, they seemed to be barking at me in English…
PART ONE
My father was always a fan of science fiction books and movies, a taste no doubt inherited from my grandfather, so when I was growing up I was exposed to a lot of it as a matter of course. Whenever a new edition of one of his favorite movies was released, Dad would insist that my brother and I drop whatever we were doing and join him in the family room. Watching the restored cut of
Star Wars
or a new scan of
Forbidden Planet
was to him a kind of communal activity that brought the family together. My mother, usually at the lab and occupied with her research, was naturally exempt from attending, but no excuse was sufficient to get my brother or me off the hook. It was only later that I realized that, when he himself had been growing up, watching these sorts of movies had been nearly the only common ground my father and his own father had shared, and in his own way he was trying to ensure a sort of continuity with his own sons, cementing our relationship with him. As a callow kid, though, I’d only known that my father was forever interrupting me when I’d rather be reading my
Earth Force Z
manga or watching the latest episode of
The Adventures of Space Man
, so while I myself had inherited a taste for the fantastic visions of science fiction, I resented the obligation.
One of the movies we watched again and again was
Planet of the Apes
. I loved it when I was young, and must have enjoyed it a dozen times before my brother finally ruined it for me. LJ, who was four years younger than me, couldn’t have been much older than seven or eight when he paused the playback just at the moment when Charlton Heston’s character, Taylor, wounded and incapable of speech, scratches out a message in the sand to his ape captors—“I CAN WRITE”—quickly erased by the manipulative Dr. Zaius, played by Maurice Evans.