The Engines of Dawn (2 page)

Ben looked off to his right. The hall was otherwise empty. "I don't think anyone on this floor has a pet. At least not a polar bear."

Jeannie Borland hovered behind Ben. "I've seen it before. It belongs to a girl in Cowden Hall."

"What's it doing here?" Ben asked.

Jeannie Borland shrugged.

Enamorati generally were no taller than five feet. But bolstered by their environment suits and with servomechanisms amplifying their shoulders and hips, they often seemed bigger than they actually were, and far more intimidating. The Enamorati were aware of this impression on human beings, and they often sought to avoid making it. This Enamorati seemed all too conscious of his sudden impact upon the young humans and tried to modulate his voice.

"I apologize for the disruption then. Could you help me return it to that person?" he asked of Ms. Borland.

She backed away. "I don't really know who owns it. Ben will help you though." She turned quickly to Ben. "Find me at the Museum Club at twenty-one hundred hours tonight, if… things change."

She edged past Ben, pulling a specter of tobacco behind her. She fairly raced to the nearest transit portal. A second later, she was gone.

The alien, oblivious to the nuances of human speech and social intercourse, hadn't a clue as to what had just passed between Ben and his erstwhile date. Instead, he gave the small animal to Ben. "If you could do this for me, I would be deeply in your debt," the alien said. "I do not wish to be of further discomfort."

Ben gently took the little bear from the alien's spindly arms, brushing the e-suit as he did. Ben thought he could detect a goblin of the air the Avatka breathed, but this, he knew, was impossible. A leak in the alien's e-suit would mean suffocation for the alien and severe nausea, perhaps even death, for any human nearby.

Though the little bear was definitely dead, there were no signs of blood on the animal's pelt. Moreover, no bones seemed crushed or broken. Strangulation did not seem the cause of the animal's passing, either.

For a fleeting moment Ben thought that the Avatka might have been responsible for killing the little bear, but that, too, seemed unlikely. The Enamorati claimed to have ended their species-wide violent stage about ten thousand years ago. They did not kill; they did not steal; they did not even lie. They lived entirely in the shadow of the religious vision of Onesci Lorii and had been doing so for thousands of years.

A yellowish mist swirled inside the alien's helmet. Pale and desiccated, the Enamorati looked like a race of mummified corpses with very sad eyes.

"Okay," Ben told the alien. "I'll do what I can."

"Thank you," the being said. "And should the animal's owner wish to speak with me about this, they may summon me at any time. I am the Avatka Viroo. Summon me directly or consult the
kuulo
first. I am at your disposal."

The frail being walked down the hallway, passing the transmission portal that Jeannie Borland had taken, and stepped into the connecting passageway. The being apparently wanted to walk back to the Enamorati compound rather than be teleported directly. Some Enamorati were odd that way.

Ben looked around. It was 2:00 P.M. on a Friday afternoon and most of Babbitt Hall was deserted-the students elsewhere in the ship. Most would be either in the field house or at the cinemas or in the Museum Club, starting their weekend early. The students who came from deeply religious Ainge families were probably still in their dorms studying. The polygamous Ainge, descendants from a splinter Mormon colony on the Isle of Ainge on Tau Ceti 4, still kept to clean, drug- and stimulant-free living. With any luck, Ben thought, the young woman who owned the bear would be a daughter of the Ainge and would be in her dorm studying with her suite mates before Friday-night services.

Ben stepped over to the wall. He pressed it with his hand and a luminescent menu for the ship's directory appeared. Any wall in any part of the ship had this feature. Ben tapped the wall menu command for FIND. But find who?

He tapped out the letters for the word PETS, then pressed ENTER. Pets were certainly allowed among the students, support staff, and faculty. But they were also registered with the university.

The word PETS appeared with a listing of two dozen kinds of animals as pets kept on board Eos University.

"A horse?" he said. "Someone has
horse
on the ship?" He would have to look up CYNTHIA JENEY later, just to satisfy his curiosity.

But someone did have a bear, so Ben pressed the glowing word BEAR.

The name that appeared on the wall register read: JULIA WAXWING--COWDEN HALL-ROOM 220. Cowden Hall was the exclusively female dorm in Eos University and it was in the next wing over.

Ben toggled the com/pager at his belt and spoke into the pin at his collar. "ShipCom, open. Ben Bennett paging Julia Waxwing, please," he said. As he recalled, the nearby wing of Cowden Hall was filled with young women mostly studying the physical sciences. Whether Julia Waxwing was an undergraduate or a graduate, he didn't know and the wall menu didn't say.

The automated voice from ShipCom's computer said,
"Sorry. There is no response. There is no forward paging. Do you wish to leave a message?"

"No," he said. "Com, close."

At that time of the afternoon, Julia Waxwing could be just about anywhere on the ship. University classes were never held on Fridays, but the labs were open, as was the library. Some professors even held office hours on Fridays.

On the other hand, the fact that there was no forward paging meant that regardless of where she was, Julia Waxwing didn't want to be disturbed.

"Now what?" he wondered aloud. He could just leave the bear in front of her dorm room, where she would find it whenever she got back from wherever she was. But that wouldn't do. Just because he'd had a dismal day didn't mean that he had to make it dismal for someone else.

But he
had
to do something.

To Ben's left, just a few yards away, the transit portal suddenly came alive with bluish light Almost instantly, two figures fell from the portal's assembly ring and came crashing to the floor, sputtering with laughter.

These were friends of his, students he'd bonded with when they met at the beginning of the university's tour three years ago. One was George Clock, a gregarious ash-blond young man who used to be a geography major, specializing in satellite mapping techniques. The other boy was Jim Vees. Vees, a black American, had been an astronomy student until the Ennui-or something-got to him and he dropped out of his studies. He slept a lot, now. These were the Bombardiers. Only Tommy Rosales was missing at the moment.

Since George and Jim had bombed out of their programs, all they seemed to do was play as much as possible. Transit-hopping was one such form of recreation on the ship. Students often transit-hopped in an attempt to get high off the strange euphoric tingle that occurred when a person's molecules were stripped for transport over the ship's network of optical cables, then reassembled again. That's what these two had been doing. Hopping.

Ben stood above the two laughing Bombardiers with the dead bear in his arms. Clock pointed to the animal. "I'll bet this comes with a real
good
story," he said. He hadn't yet seen that the animal was lifeless.

"Believe it or not," Ben said, "an Avatka gave this to me a few moments ago. He found it right here, in front of my door."

"An Avatka? Here in Babbitt Hall?" Clock asked, climbing to his feet.

"Say, that animal looks dead," Jim Vees said. He was slower getting to his feet.

"It is dead," Ben said.

"Did the Avatka kill it?" Vees asked.

"I don't know," Ben said. "He said it was dead when he found it."

"Whose animal is it?" Vees asked, softly caressing its fur.

"It belongs to someone named Julia Waxwing, over in Cowden Hall. She's not answering her com and she's blocked all forward paging. Ever hear of her?"

The two dropouts shrugged and shook their heads.

Clock then said, "You know, she could be in the student commons, in the student media lounge with everybody else."

"Let's transit there," Vees said, always looking for an excuse to transit.

"What's going on at the commons?" Ben asked.

Vees smirked. "President Porter is going to release the contents of the last data bullet we snagged, the one we got right before we jumped into trans-space a couple of weeks ago."

"What's so important about that bullet?" Ben asked.

"Inside sources say that another ship exploded," Clock said. "A really big one this time. The bullet has all the information on it, but the administration's been debating whether to share the fully decompressed data with the rest of us. Maybe they think we'll riot if we get the whole story."

"What ship was it?" Ben asked.

"The
Annette Haven,
outward bound to Ross 154," Clock said. "At least that's the rumor. It's got the Grays worried."

Ben wasn't familiar with the
Annette Haven.
There were so many Engine-driven ships now in service that it was impossible to keep track of them all-freighters, people carriers, cargo vessels of all shapes and sizes, to say nothing of H.C. exploratory craft looking for new worlds to add to the Alley.

However, space travel had always been hazardous and ships every now and then still succumbed to systems failures, or even the unseen microparticle that would core a spaceship in a heartbeat. Disasters in space happened to humans and Enamorati alike.

"Someone at the student newspaper checked the H.C. manifest of ships in our data banks," Clock went on. "The
Haven
was a passenger liner. Big. It could transport at least nine hundred humans at a time. It had an Enamorati crew of twenty. If the Engine blew, there'd be nothing left but a trans-space ripple."

Both the Ainge and the Enamorati happened to believe that trans-space was the actual body of God, and that their duty was to lead pilgrims through it. Most of the H.C. didn't see it that way, but used the Engine-run ships anyway. Trans-space, however, did act like the Old Testament Jehovah and saw fit to remind humans and Enamorati alike of the dangers of space travel. Fiction had made space travel seem effortless, even safe. But the truth was that faster-than-light travel was just as hazardous as slower-than-light travel, and many thousands of lives had been lost in the last two and a half centuries of space travel. Many more would be lost in the future.

"How many Ainge Auditors were on the ship?" Ben asked.

Clock laughed. "The
Haven
probably didn't have more than one or two. It was just a liner."

"Darn the luck," Jim Vees said soberly, his transit high having worn off.
"Our
Auditors should be so lucky."

There was no love lost between Jim Vees and the Ainge. Though Jim had come from Earth, part of his family had converted to the Ainge religion and had spent much of their efforts trying to get the rest of the family to join. The Ainge, because of their relationship to the Enamorati, represented the fastest-growing religion in the H.C. But fifty million followers of Ixion Smith were not enough reason for Jim Vees to check his brain at the door.

"But get this," George Clock continued. "The student newspaper says that one of our archaeology professors had a clone-son on the
Annette Haven.
Somebody famous, but they won't say who. Maybe Porter is going to tell us."

"An archaeology professor?" Ben asked.

"That's what they're saying," Clock affirmed.

Ben stepped back to the wall and called up the student directory once again. He came up with JULIA WAXWING, then asked for any kind of declared MAJOR.

On the screen appeared the word ARCHAEOLOGY.

"Figures," Ben said.

3

Confirmation of the space death of the
Annette Haven
spread quickly through the halls of Eos University. There were no specifics. The data bullet had to travel light-the lighter, the faster. Undoubtedly, when Eos arrived at their next port of call, specifics regarding the passenger manifest and details of the cause of the ship's destruction would be much better known.

To Albert Holcombe, Regents Professor and chair of the archaeology department, the news was particularly devastating. As he had already shared with his colleagues, the clone of his second son, Joshua, a boy named Seth, had been on the
Annette Haven.

Not that progeny mattered much to Albert Holcombe. The human race now numbered around ten billion, and a billion of those were clones, or the clones of clones. But Seth, at least as Holcombe remembered him, seemed to be the only Holcombe to have any life left in him, any
esprit, joie de vivre.
Even when Seth was a youngster on Tau Ceti 4, he would run circles around the fuddy-duddies of the Holcombe camp. It was no surprise to Holcombe when the boy became a StratoCaster, one of the BronzeAngel sky-runners, in fact. Holcombe always glowed with pride, thinking that a member of his family had pursued a disreputable career and actually made something of himself. But now the boy was dead-nothing more than blasted atoms in the indescribable vacuities of trans-space.

Unfortunately, Eos University was more than one hundred light-years from the Sol system at its farthest point on its four-year Alley tour. Holcombe didn't imagine that either Alex Cleddman-Eos's pilot-or any of the Grays would turn the university around just to accommodate his grief. In fact, the first thing that Captain Cleddman had announced at the hastily convened University Council meeting was that the ship would be continuing on its course to its next port of call. Holcombe merely nodded, accepting the grim ways of fate.

Cleddman, sometimes called the Cloudman by the students, was a stocky tree stump of a human being with massive arms, muscular legs, and no neck. He had played Australian-rules football in college, and the rough and tumble of the game had seemingly driven his head into his shoulders by several inches. He stood five feet five, compact and solid like a BennettCorp data bullet.