Resurrection (4 page)

He moved to the sleepboxes and looked in through the thick plastic at his older brother and crewmate Enon. The two of them woke by turns, twice a year. Six months ago it had been Enon who was awake, checking on the ship and on the sleeping form of Adaiz.

Adaiz was concerned with Enon’s pallor as he watched his sleeping body within the box. His skin had become a dull gray, no longer reflective at all. He wondered about the long-term health effects of this journey on both of them. Certainly so many years spent in deepsleep were not beneficial. But it did not matter. The mission was their duty, and they were honored to carry it out, whatever the personal cost. Their own lives amounted to little. Their physical bodies and the decades of this mission were merely the passing of dust in space. There would be other lifetimes.

Ahead of them, in the cold blackness of space, the Plaguer ship was barreling on toward its destination, and they were following. It would be only a few more years until they both arrived.

In a few hours Adaiz would return to his own sleepbox. Now, however, it was time to clear his mind and reaffirm his place in the scheme of the universe. He sat on the floor and crossed his legs.

From a pocket in his trousers, he pulled out a small book with a braided leather cover and filament-thin pages written upon in calligraphy. This was his copy of the Katalla-Oman, the Lucien book of self-knowledge. The Katalla-Oman had been handed down to their race in the distant past, it was said, by Omani himself, the god of wisdom and unity.

Adaiz gently flipped it open and read aloud his favorite chant. He had known it by heart since childhood, but the feel of the book in his hands and the timbre of his voice when he was reading aloud were pleasing.

I, Adaiz-Ari, of Warrior Clan and Clan Providence

 

Am awareness

 

Am light

 

Am a point of knowing

 

With closed eyes, I can yet see

Apart from body

Apart from the asteroids which are my home

Apart from sun and stars

 

The universe exists

It surrounds me

It passes through me

But still I am

 

Awareness

 

Light

 

A point of knowing

 

As he spoke the final words, he could feel their meaning. His body faded. The ship faded. He could feel himself as a point of awareness. Time did not matter; space did not matter. The whole of the universe was his. He existed. He knew. He was.

One Year Ago

Harris Edward DeLacy III, or “Eddie,” as he was known to everyone except lawyers, was doing sun salutations on a yoga mat in his bedroom. He relished the feeling of his muscles as he exercised. He worked hard to keep himself lean and strong with yoga, jogging, and occasional classes in martial arts. It was the only thing he worked hard at. It was the middle of the afternoon in Los Angeles, and there was bright sunlight streaming in from outside.

He could hear Callen in the bathroom, just getting out of the shower.

“Where are the extra towels?” she called, her voice carrying through the closed bathroom door.

Eddie was holding downward dog, the final position of the exercise. “In the cupboard under the sink!” he called back.

He held the position for five breaths, then came out of the stretch and sat down on the mat. Callen appeared with a towel wrapped around her. They had spent an hour together in bed, and she always took a shower after making love. Eddie would soon shower too, but for the moment, he was savoring the feeling of his body after being with her. She slept with him so little these days. It was no longer like it had been in college, or even in high school, when they had drawn each other into brief, passionate affairs between other relationships. Eddie was afraid that she was finally outgrowing him.

“Come here,” he said, taking her hand.

She complied willingly, settling into his lap and kissing him. He kissed her back for longer than she was expecting. She put her hands on his shoulders and withdrew from him.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“What does it look like?”

“I have to go, Eddie.” She stood up and started collecting her clothes. “We really should stop doing this.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s too easy to fall back into being together.” She was pulling on her underwear. She was quite pretty. Though her body was perpetually ten pounds overweight, the weight did not look bad on her; it added to the curves of her chest and waist. Eddie had always loved her body and loved making love to her. “We both know we’re not going to spend the rest of our lives together.”

“We do?” But he knew it was true.

Eddie’s father, Harris Edward DeLacy, Jr., was the chief executive of Bannon-DeLacy, the aerospace firm founded in 1912 by Harris Edward DeLacy, Sr., precient engineer and businessman. Callen was Callen St. John, whose father was the chairman of Bannon-DeLacy. She and Eddie had grown up together, had shared each other’s amazement that the families they had been born into were so different from the ones they would have imagined for themselves.

She pulled on her jeans and her shirt and looked around for her socks.

“They’re on the chair,” he said, smiling because she always forgot where she left her clothes.

She didn’t move to get them. Instead, she came back over to him and took a seat on the mat. “I do love you, Eddie.”

“I love you too. You know that.”

“Yeah.” She slid her arms over his shoulders. “But it’s not
that
kind of love, is it? You could be my brother.”

He hugged her and shifted her body so she was lying down across his legs. She looked up at him. He had shaved that morning, and his face was smooth. He had brown hair that was slightly curly, and it was unkempt just now, as it often was. He was good looking, but she knew that he was careless about such things. He said, “Then I think what we did this afternoon is illegal in most states.”

“You know what I mean. We’re thirty-two now. I have to figure out what I’m doing with my life.”

“You’re outgrowing me,” he said quietly, running a hand through her hair.

“Maybe,” she agreed. She took hold of his chin between her thumb and forefinger and lightly shook his face. “It’s just…I can never find the center of you, you know?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I have that problem too.”

She used his arm to pull herself up to a sitting position. “I really have to go. I have a meeting in twenty minutes.” She worked for an advertising agency. Her brilliance as a writer went into ad campaigns to sell cars and soft drinks and feminine hygiene products. But she didn’t seem to mind. She didn’t need the money, but enjoyed her job and enjoyed Los Angeles. He admired that without understanding it.

He watched her get up and put her socks and shoes on. “Okay,” he said, after a long pause.

“Okay, what?”

He put his hands on the mat behind him and leaned back into them. “Just okay.”

She smiled at him, understanding. It was okay with him that she didn’t want to sleep with him anymore. He was still her friend and would always be her friend. She nodded.

“I think I’ll go back to Egypt,” he said after a few moments. He said it just as though he were proposing a trip down the block to get a cup of coffee. It was his way. Everything was casual.

“Did your father reinstate your allowance?” she asked with a hint of mischievousness.

“I don’t have to depend on him,” Eddie said with mock pride. “My mother takes pity on me from time to time. Behind his back, she sends me money when she worries I might be starving. If she won’t pay for a trip, I could always sell my car.”

“Right. Who needs a car in LA, anyway?”

He smiled at this, but he was already daydreaming about his trip. “I’ve always thought the center of me was somewhere over there.”

“If there is a center of you.” She was dressed now. She came over and kissed him on the forehead.

“That’s all I get?” he said petulantly.

She patted him affectionately on the cheek. “Might as well start now.” She glanced at her watch. “Good-bye, Eddie. Love you.”

“Me too.”

She walked out of the room, and a moment later, he heard the front door open and shut behind her. Then there was the engine of her car as it pulled out of his driveway and slowly faded away.

He sat where he was for a few moments; then he moved onto his knees and started his yoga routine again. He was thinking of Egypt.

2607 BC
Year 0 of Kinley Earth Survey

In my vision I saw a storm-wind coming from the north, a vast cloud with flashes of fire and brilliant light about it; and within was a radiance like brass, glowing in the heart of the flames.

 

—Ezekiel 1:4

 

The Engineer walked the brightly lit catwalk that encircled the engine room below. He could look from this raised height down into the central control space for the ship’s great drives. Down there were eight stations, each one manned at this moment, for the ship was preparing to shift phases.

He carried an opaque clipboard propped between his chest and hand. He was marking on it with a stylus. This catwalk was one of the observation points on his comprehensive checklist. He wore a one-piece uniform of white material, with a name tag on the breast which read simply “Engineer.” It had been their pact, on embarking, to give up the names of their old life and take new ones for this historic trip. Thus, each member of the crew was called by whatever job he or she did.

On his chest, next to his name, was a stylized representation of the ship’s famous engine. The Engineer loved that picture.

Below were his junior engineers, each doing their own checklists to ensure their areas of supervision were in perfect operating order. The Second Engineer, or “Second,” as he was known, was busy disassembling a set of flow pipes. The Engineer watched Second’s actions and smiled. The man was good.

He made a full circuit of the catwalk and then stepped over the side, into a heavy air chute that floated him down to the main floor. Here he examined the work in more detail. He stood over Second as the man carefully catalogued the state of each piece he removed, then set them down into neat rows of crystalline parts on a sticky pad on the floor behind him, safely waiting to be reassembled.

“How’s it going, Second?” the Engineer asked.

The man looked up only after noting down the piece in his hand and ensuring it was secured on the floor pad. “Very well, sir,” the man replied. “Slight wear on a few parts, but well within our projections. You’ll have my report within the hour.”

“Excellent.” He moved to the Third Engineer, and then the Regulator and the Powerhouse Controller, and the other four men. All reported the status of their areas. The Engineer made the proper notations on his clipboard, then launched himself back up onto the catwalk. From there, he moved to a sealed doorway, recognizable because it was more translucent than the creamy-white walls surrounding it. He touched the door with his palm and it retracted, the seams forming around the edges as it separated, then noiselessly slid aside. He stepped into the corridor beyond, and the door melted back into place behind him.

He wore thin boots, which made very little noise, even while walking over the slip-proof ridged surface of the hallway. He loved the silence of his tread. It allowed him to listen only to the ship. The noises of the ship itself were faint, but the Engineer’s ear was tuned to every nuance. There was a steady hum, just below audible range, a hum he could feel in his teeth and bones. It was not jarring, only soothing. There was no rhythm to it, for its hum was too consistent. It was the sound, the Engineer thought, of pure power.

The ship was called the
Champion
, and she was his child. He did not invent the principles of her engine drives, that leap of engineering known as the Eschless Funnel. No, that incredible feat had been accomplished by another, by a man named Eschless, who had lived two generations before the Engineer’s birth. But Eschless had only written the theory of such an engine. Not until now, not until this ship, had man ever put the theory into true application.

Before Eschless, the Kinley had believed that nothing could move faster than particles of light. Indeed, it had been proved again and again, over centuries, that it was not possible to accelerate an object to light speed. Yet, Eschless, like a few men before him in the history of their race, had unwound what was known, unraveled the universe, then tied it up again in a new shape. Of course, the beauty of it was that the shape was not new at all. It was the old shape, the shape the universe had always had, but none before Eschless had ever been able to see it that way.

And now, mere decades later, the Engineer was walking the corridors of the first Eschless Funnel ship, a ship he had designed and built. The secret lay in the probability drives, which sat at the ship’s core. There was no more difficult field of mathematics to master than probabilities at the quantum level. It was a chaotic realm, where nothing was stationary and you could never know the specifics of anything with total precision. But that did not matter, it turned out. You did not have to know the exact location of an electron at a particular moment, nor its energy, nor its speed. You only had to know that all of these things fluctuated wildly and could be anywhere within an almost infinite range of numbers at any one time.

Such fluctuations could lead individual particles to hold vast amounts of energy for brief periods. Under ordinary circumstances, this energy was quickly relinquished, but this did not take away from the fact that, for a moment, the vast amount of energy was there.

This had been understood for centuries. But not until Eschless had anyone found a way to directly stimulate subatomic particles to high-energy states. Eschless’s breakthrough was this: You excited the particles in a small region of space into achieving, simultaneously, quantum fluctuations toward the highest levels of energy. You then stole this energy and directed it—to an engine. Thus, you reaped the moments of highest energy and let the universe itself worry about keeping the energy balance sheets in order. Behind this engine, as it moved through space, was a permanent eruption of new particles, forced into existence by the huge energy deficit left in the ship’s wake. The new particles were “brought to life” to counteract the actions of the ship’s drive. The engine that accomplished this was called the Eschless Funnel. It stimulated the fluctuations, funneled away the highest moments of energy, and then moved along its way.

That was where things got tricky, because the amount of energy created by such a system turned out to be nearly infinite, and infinity was an odd thing. When you built a ship based on the Eschless Funnel, it had a theoretically infinite capacity for motion. The universe, however, did not allow for infinites. So the ship, technically, was not moving through space in the classic fashion. It was moving in a parallel stream, the stream of the infinite, where traditional physical barriers did not apply. This stream was still within the physical universe, but it was like a small enclave, with a different government and different statutes. The speeds they could reach in this stream, while not infinite, were far greater than the speed of light.

All of this knowledge had gone into the
Champion
, the first such ship to carry people. The
Champion
was operating perfectly. They had been traveling at super light speeds for three months. They were now close to their point of arrival, and the Engineer was preparing the
Champion
to shift phases and move back into the normal stream of space, back through the light barrier into relatively slow speeds.

The Engineer ducked down a side passage, which led at a downward slope to the machine room. The hum of the engines was louder here. Around him on all sides, just beyond the walls, were the guts of the ship’s drive, the complicated city of coils and pipes and crystalline throughways, all working in harmony.

My ship is the naughty child who steals the cream off the top of the milk
, the Engineer thought,
taking the very best for herself
. He couldn’t have been more proud.

He emerged into the machine room. This room was like a great switchboard. Here many of the systems met and made energy exchanges. This was the transfer hub between the raw energy that propelled the engines and the tamer energy that was directed to various internal areas of the ship.

The man who tended this area was called the Mechanic, and he stood in front of the bank of readouts and manual override switches, which were arrayed along the far wall of the room. The Mechanic had the gray skin and hair of Herrod’s eastern provinces.

“Hello, Mechanic,” the Engineer said as he moved into the room.

“Hello, sir,” the Mechanic replied, not glancing at him, but keeping his eyes fixed on the readouts.

“Is your checklist complete?”

“Yes, sir. Here.”

The Engineer examined the Mechanic’s list, which clearly displayed that every item in the machine room had been carefully examined and tested. “Excellent,” he said, a bit surprised the man had finished so quickly. He walked over to the bank of switches and began a spot check. It was just a matter of protocol, but after a few minutes, he found something wrong. A set of valve switches were tight, indicating lack of use. He quickly checked the automated computer log and discovered that these switches had not been cycled for nearly three weeks. Any standard check would require cycling them several times to ensure they were functioning correctly.

“Mechanic, you marked these switches as complete. But they haven’t been examined for weeks.”

“Sir, I’m sure I did examine them. The fault must be with the computer.”

“Mechanic, there is no fault with the computer. How could there be?” The Engineer was feeling bewildered. Why would this man falsely claim to have examined something when he hadn’t? The safety of the entire crew depended on everything working perfectly. Was it merely laziness?

“Sir, I’m sure the switches are in working order.”

“That’s hardly the point, Mechanic.” The Engineer unclipped a portable communicator from his belt and called into the engine room. “Engine Supervisor,” he said into the device, “I need you in the machine room. You’re going to walk the Mechanic through his checklist from beginning to end.”

“Sir, that’s hardly—”

“Mechanic, wait here for the Engine Supervisor to arrive. I’ve got the rest of the ship to examine.”

The Captain sat in a chair in his private ward room, scanning through the Engineer’s reports.

The Engineer was leaning against the opposite wall, looking perturbed. His clipboard hung down by his side, clipped to his belt.

“Captain, he’s just sloppy,” the Engineer said.

“I’m sure it wasn’t intentional,” the Captain replied, his face still turned to his lap, where the reports were spread out, leaving the Engineer with a view of his short blond hair. That hair and his blue eyes had been famous back home. The Captain had earned the right to his current position after being decorated by the Combined Leaders of Herrod for establishing a self-sufficient scientific base in the asteroid belt around Herrod. He had been the perfect choice to head this historic mission, the first manned mission in an Eschless Funnel ship, the first interstellar voyage. They were heading for a planet called Earth, which was eight light-years distant from Herrod.

The Kinley had been studying their neighboring stars for a few generations. Their closest neighbor star was home to a planet named Rheat, on which they had discovered a race of tall, silver creatures called Lucien. The Lucien were, at the time the Kinley’s probe arrived in orbit around their planet, engaged in all-out clan warfare. Considering them a dangerous race, the Kinley had left their probe in orbit to keep an eye on them but had decided emphatically against a manned trip to Rheat.

Instead, Herrod had sent small unmanned observation ships to Earth, the next-closest livable planet. To the amazement of the Kinley, they had discovered that Earth was home to humans. From pictures brought back by their probes, it appeared the Earth humans were nearly identical to the Kinley. This seemed to indicate that there had been a great, galaxy-wide seeding of the human race at some distant point in history. It was only natural to want to examine these humans and the cultures they had developed. They had immediately begun plans for a manned mission to Earth.

The crew of the
Champion
were scientists for the most part, and their goal was simply to study this new planet and its life-forms. It was a peaceful mission, and they planned for more to follow within four years. It was hoped that Earth would enable scientists of all disciplines to learn more about Herrod by comparing it to a similar planet.

“It doesn’t matter if it was intentional or not, Captain,” the Engineer said. “The Mechanic’s job is vital to the ship. Sloppiness can be fatal. He did a better job when the mission first started, but lately—”

“Aren’t you blowing this a little out of proportion? It was a few switches. And as you said, they were in working order, even if he hadn’t tested them.”

“Captain, I don’t want him on post.”

The Captain could see that the Engineer was seriously annoyed. That was not good. The Engineer was possibly the single most valuable member of the crew, aside from the Captain himself. The Captain had recruited him for this mission because he was considered by many to be the most brilliant living scientist on Herrod. Aside from his understanding of the Eschless Funnel and related physics, he held over two hundred patents on other scientific techniques. The Engineer was a wealthy man back home, but he had been excited enough to cast his lot with this mission, even bringing along his wife, a renowned doctor.

The Captain knew the Mechanic had a way of irritating people, and he frequently found himself smoothing over such difficulties. The Mechanic was not a bad man, however, merely hard to deal with sometimes.

“He’s been with me for years, Engineer. I’ll talk to him. Don’t worry. I’ll make sure he understands and is more careful.”

It was sometime later that the Captain called the Mechanic to his ward room.

The man showed up within minutes, his gray face looking tired, his coveralls smeared here and there with grease.