Moon Flower (10 page)

In a seat somewhere behind, Roy was foghorning to somebody about the racial clashes that were threatening to break up the fragile Texas Republic, and how they ought to nuke Mexico City before Occidena lost another piece. He was some kind of market surveyor and forecaster, big and fleshy, boorish in manner, and Shearer did his best to avoid him. The night before, in the hotel bar, he had been calling for bets on who would get the first lay with a Cyrenean.

In front of Shearer, Arnold and Karen were engrossed in what looked like an intense debate about something. Arnold was an appraiser and planner of commercial real estate, Karen a financial analyst. It seemed that behind the scenes, schemes were already advanced for meshing Cyrene’s anticipated productivity with the Terran economy and establishing a basis for value exchange. Shearer had found them nominally social and agreeable as was true of most young, upwardly aiming professionals, but in the remote kind of way that stemmed from conforming to expected norms rather than anything real in the way of feelings. They typified the dedicated servants of the system that Shearer abhorred, upon whom its existence depended. What baffled him was not so much that they never questioned, but the apparent inability to conceive that anything
could
be questioned.

The general company was drawn from the younger, relatively more junior elements of those who had attended the various courses and classroom sessions that week. They had also glimpsed and occasionally crossed paths with members of a higher-status contingent who would evidently be traveling to Cyrene too, but none of them were on the bus or the other two buses following behind. They were being flown over from the pad on the Interworld Center roof. Jerri Perlok had mentioned that among them was someone from the Corbel family, who had bankrolled Conrad Metterlin and owned over half of Interworld. She hadn’t said how she knew.

She was sitting a couple of rows ahead on the far side. Through the drive out from San Jose and for most of the way up into the hills she had immersed herself in reading, but set it aside when they came within sight of the launch complex. Now she was upright and alert, her waves of dark, reddish hair prominent above the seat back, moving in short starts as she took in every detail. By nature, Shearer had found, she was the opposite of Arnold and Karen — questioning everything, willing to give unconventional views an equal hearing, and probably incapable of conforming. But he had also noticed that she had the sense not to argue when outnumbered by people who weren’t listening. One of the few truly interesting people that life washed up out of its vast ocean from time to time, he had decided. She had a dog called Nim that she was taking with her to Cyrene. The hotel had found a place for him, and Jerri had brought him out once or twice in the evenings to meet the group. A few of them had seemed mildly disapproving, but Shearer liked dogs. They were intelligent, honest, affectionate, and totally loyal... traits, it often seemed, that had yet to evolve in much of humanity. Or had they existed at one time, and since atrophied?

He hadn’t realized he was staring so obviously until Jeff’s voice teased, “You wish.”

Shearer raised his eyebrows and didn’t try to deny it. “A guy could do worse, Jeff,” he agreed.

Just then, the Interworld agent who was acting as courier for the group cut in over the speaker system. “When we get to the gate, there will be an individual security check. Everybody has to get off the bus. You’ll all need your regular ID, tax clearance certificate, and countersigned embarkation papers.”

Nobody left the country owing money to the government. It wasn’t that the downsized regional governments wielded much real power these days. They functioned as collection agencies for the corporate empires and as caretakers to deal with social unrest and placate — or at least make token gestures toward — the dispossessed victims of the utopian order that everyone was assured now existed.

Jeff snorted and opened a pocket of the briefcase resting on his knee. “Do you think they’ve got this on Cyrene too already,” he grumbled.

“Give ’em time, Jeff,” Shearer answered with a sigh.

Once inside the complex, the inevitable flurry of minor last-minute changes to plan, and the final chores to be attended to allowed few moments for reflection. In what seemed in some ways like detached kind of dream, Shearer found himself being routed through seating areas, corridors, and concrete galleries with windows set high in the walls to a staging hall; then, after a short wait, he was staring with the others out at huge steel gantries rising above a forest of service towers and masts as a shuttle bus took them out to the pad area itself. Disembarking from the bus was followed by more weaving through doors, passages, gates, and stairways, and then they were walking though the connecting ramp into the center section of the shuttle, standing with half its body length below ground level in the launch silo.

They had been issued with numbers directing them to assigned seats on the various decks, which were built cross-hull like the floors of a lighthouse. Once in freefall in wouldn’t matter which way the floors were, and the seats would be useful only for preventing everyone from floating into a tangle. There were ways of controlling one’s attitude and movements in zero-g using the gyroscopic effects of rapid rotary arm movements, but the old hands assured them that the only way to learn them was the hard way. And the same would apply for the first two days or so aboard the
Tacoma
. After that, life for the remainder of the voyage to a point two days out on approach to Cyrene would get easier. A bonus of Heim gravito-electromagnetic interconversion was that once past the “H-point,” where the main drive was engaged, a portion of the output could be bled off and transformed to synthesize normal gravity inside the ship.

Shearer was still too absorbed in the newness of it all to take much notice of who was around him as he settled down into his seat and secured the restraining harness. No sooner had he done so, when of course there came the announcement of a short delay while a laser boost station somewhere downrange in Russia reran a calibration. He sat back resignedly, staring at the screen facing the deck from one side like a miniature theater, currently showing an outside view of umbilicals disconnecting and blast doors being closed in the silo walls below the ship. It was the first chance he’d had to be alone with his thoughts since leaving the hotel that morning.

Everything around him — the masterpiece of engineering that he was sitting in; the concentration of technical ingenuity outside that was about to lift it free from Earth itself; and the awesome machine waiting above, along with all it represented — was a triumph of the human intellect, symbolizing surely as strongly as anything could that there were no limits to what intelligent life could achieve. The Golden Age that mythology created in the past could have been the reality of the future that centuries of visionaries had dreamed would one day be. But somewhere along the way, something had gone wrong. In his earlier years of youthful idealism bolstered by faith that human nature was at heart just, and the better side would ultimately prevail, he had crossed the continent, eager to find and devote himself to the further building of the better life that the recruiting ads and promotional agencies had promised for qualified and talented people. For surely, he had told himself, the part of the world that he had seen until then was the exception, an aberration.... But no, it was the same everywhere; just in different ways.

Shearer was originally from the west side of central Florida, toward the coast, an improbable product of a trailer-park home and dysfunctional family consisting of a violent and alcoholic father, a mother who survived by means of tranquilizers and other recreational chemicals, and a Bible-quoting sister two years older than he, whom he had last heard of fund-raising for a fundamentalist electronic church based in Virginia. He discovered his own escape in the realms of mathematical physics, revealing him to be something of a prodigy even in middle school, and confirming the suspicions of family and neighbors of his distinct inclination toward the “strange.” The fare from the public and even the school’s library had been inadequate for his insatiable appetite, but word of his abilities reached a professor at Gainesville who still believed that education meant being encouraged and shown how to think, not behavioral conditioning measured in grade points. Recognizing Shearer’s talent, he coached him privately at no charge and gave him unrestricted access to his files and bookshelves. Shearer had seemed set for early enrollment into a degree course on a state grant, which would open the way to better things. The rapid breakthroughs into the revolutionary physics being reported from researchers in both the north and south Americas as well as Europe and Asia portended exciting and unlimited prospects. A creatively fulfilling and rewarding personal future seemed assured, despite the black clouds that had been piling up and rumbling in the political sky. And then the Great Breakup happened.

Central Florida became a primary battle zone as Hispanics and Cubans, who by that time formed a majority in the south, extended themselves northward to defend their turf against the black expansion coming the other way from what would become Martina. Amid the exodus of whites who weren’t caught in the crossfire or among those being targeted by both sides, Shearer got away, thanks to arrangements that the professor made for them, on a crowded boat that was ferrying batches of people out of Tampa and across to Texas. The professor himself didn’t make it.

Shortly thereafter, Texas assumed independence and was engulfed by turmoil of its own, which had still not abated. But Shearer was already being drawn by the lure of the western coalition of former states whose secession had precipitated the whole collapse. That was where the new science was consolidating, and where the beginnings of amazing capabilities that would spring from it were already becoming visible. It took him another couple of months, but existing from one day to the next and moving on when an opportunity presented itself, he was finally able to present himself before job interview panels of corporations unheard of ten years previously, whose names were already synonymous with visions of the dazzling future that was to come. At least, that was how the Public Relations imagery portrayed it. The effect on Shearer of meeting the actuality face-to-face was devastating.

Yes, they were eager to employ his kind and quality of talent, and were prepared to pay handsomely — if one was looking for nothing beyond material recompense, conventionally accepted notions of prestige and status, and a ticket into an alienating and ruthless competition among peers to secure more of the same. It seemed that the only measure of human worth was the ability to contribute to the efficacy of creating profits or ever more fearsome weaponry to protect them. It was evident even before the sessions were over that he wouldn’t have accepted an offer on their terms even if they persevered to the point of seeing fit to make him one, after which the disinterest quickly became mutual. As a last resort before ending up a street derelict, he followed up on a lead to Evan Wade, whose name he knew from the scientific literature, and the professor in Florida had commented on favorably. The result had been a place with Wade’s obscure group at Berkeley. True, the work involved a relatively unexplored fringe quantum effect without much promise in the way of immediate tangible return — which was precisely the reason it was unexplored — not the center of mainstream Heim physics that Shearer had dreamed of; but in the way that mattered to him he was free — as free as it seemed possible to get in the kind of society that had come to be, anyway — and still work in advanced physics with any kind of support at all. And that, he supposed resignedly, was about as much as could be hoped for in a world that he was told was shaped by harsh, immutable laws — the work of nature, not humans — that permitted it to be no other way.

“Attention.” An announcement from the cabin speakers broke his reverie. “We’ve received clearance from downrange and are initiating a five-minute countdown. Make sure seat harnesses are secure and any loose objects stowed.”

And now he was moving on once again, this time to another world completely, for how long he didn’t know. Was there some goal at the end of it all that fate had in store for him, he wondered, like fulfillment at the end of the wanderings of one of those heroes of ancient sagas? Or was it simply nature’s way of saying that the world just didn’t have a place for him? If so, it seemed that a lot of people these days were getting the same message.

CHAPTER NINE

The interconversion between electromagnetic and gravitational energy that formed the basis of the Heim drive derived from an immensely strong magnetic field rotating at high speed. However, this didn’t entail any cumbersome mechanical rotation of anything material. As in conventional electric motors, it was the motion of the field that mattered, and this could be accomplished by a suitably phased combination of currents circulating in stationary conductors — which was just as well since the
Tacoma
was comparable in mass to, and in size somewhat larger than, an old-time naval cruiser. But because of the nature of its primary propulsion system, its basic geometry was circular, thus rendering the notions of advanced space machines in the form of “flying saucers” that had permeated the popular literature for a century fortuitously not far from the mark in terms of what was eventually realized. Indeed, there were still some diehard devotees who took this as proof that the claims had been right all along and the “real thing” was still somewhere out there. By far the prevalent view, however, and one of the few consensuses that Shearer was inclined to share in unreservedly, was the opposite, since if Earth’s explosion out from the solar system in recent decades wasn’t enough to make any lurking aliens show themselves openly, the overwhelming likelihood was that there weren’t any. And for what it was worth, experiences so far in the nearby reaches of the galaxy were consistent with that conclusion. None of the sapient races encountered by Terran explorers had proved as advanced as Earth’s technologically, or anywhere close. As a popular aphorism held, “Someone has to be first.” Or as someone in Shearer’s group had put it earlier in the week: “UFOs are real, and they are us.”