Swallow the Sky: A Space Opera Read online

  Swallow the Sky

  A space opera

  Chris Mead

  Swallow the Sky

  ©2014 Chris Mead

  ISBN:

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  Cover art by Derek Smith.

  For my son-in-law

  Alex Baker 1966-2009

  One of life’s dreamers

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  Translating idiomatic speech is always challenging, especially when one of the languages originates in a place and a time that has yet to exist. Most of the dialog in this story is spoken in Universal, a synthetic language created by the colonists of New Earth that eventually became the lingua franca for much of the galaxy. In translating into Ancient English the key goal has been to maintain the spirit of the communication rather than a strict rendering of the colloquial text. This has inevitably led to the use of paraphrasing and even some anachronisms. The reader’s indulgence is appreciated.

  Personae dramatis

  Carson — Commonwealth Mailman

  Aiyana — Engineer for Clan Aniko

  Asima — Mitan Security Officer

  Sosimo — Mitan Security Officer

  Paresh — Mitan Postmaster

  Zhou — Mitan Security Commissioner

  Shin — Clan Aniko Operative

  Juro — Senior Elder of Clan Aniko

  Larissa — Bargirl

  Tabarak — Mitan Gangster

  George — University Retainer

  Naadira — Graduate Student

  Kalidas — Renegade Academic

  Lalita — Archives Official

  Tallis — a Callidus

  Ubay — Clan Aniko Heavy

  Ming — New Earth Security Lieutenant

  Zaakir — Employee at the Aether

  Carruthers — Airport Controller

  Renshu — New Earth Consul

  Mother Baker — Archdeaconess of Lilly Cathedral

  Salima — Orpheus Postmistress

  Caelin — Lift Boss

  Rasul — Orpheus State Treasurer

  Gustav VIII — King of Orpheus

  Historical Characters

  Adhiambo Cissokho — Leader of New Earth Colonists

  Teng — Colonial Archivist

  Koju Sakyamuni — Astronavigator

  Aaron Lavan Samuelson — Leader of the Technical Alliance

  Machines and Systems

  Ship — Carson’s Starship

  Buggy — Carson’s Interplanetary Transporter

  Yongding — Colonists’ Starship

  The Melt — a Nanotech Plague

  The Array — a Large Radar Array

  ARRIVAL

  “What will be the nature of your dreams?” the machine asked.

  “Erotic, strongly erotic”

  Well, why not?

  The machine thought about this.

  “Very well, please deposit twenty Ecus”

  Carson cursed. It was not supposed to ask for money.

  “You know I own you”

  “Is this too part of your dreams?”

  He swore again and shoved the polished ebony cube aside. The two thousand year-old device had been an impulse purchase on Procyon c. That would teach him.

  “Never trust an antiques dealer” he said aloud.

  “Excuse me?” the buggy said.

  “Forget it.”

  So much for sleeping his way down the gravity well. Carson sighed and stared round the tiny spacecraft. The buggy’s globular display gave him the illusion of peering into space through a transparent bubble. Directly ahead a blue-white splinter of light floated in the starscape: Mita, the local sun, and to its right a darkened green disk, one of the system’s outer planets. Overhead was the one constant in Carson’s life – the majestic arch of the Milky Way.

  He fingered the stiff collar of his suit. It was constructed of gray plant-fiber material that completely covered his limbs, the goal being to cause the minimum of offense to the maximum number of people. It was easy to make a mistake when arriving at a new star system. His shorts had started a riot on Upsilon g.

  “How far to go?” he asked the craft.

  “About a billion kilometers”

  He picked up the dream machine and examined its shiny surface. The man who stared at him appeared about twenty-five years old except for a certain wariness in the blue eyes. He pushed back a tangle of black hair. Twenty-five – could he remember being that young? On New Earth you were legally a minor until your thirtieth birthday.

  He turned the device over. Perhaps if he cold-started it? No, he had already tried that twice. Of course he could replace the logic arrays but then it would not be a genuine antique. Mind you, he thought with a thin smile, there were plenty of people who would never know the difference.

  Maybe his spacecraft could help.

  “Hey buggy, can you communicate with this thing?”

  “Sure”

  “Try persuading it to run diagnostics”

  There was a pause.

  “It wants me to pay twenty Ecus”

  Carson gave up. He slapped the palm of his hand against the payment pad and sub-vocalized a command to his wallet, a storage device the size of a sand grain embedded behind his right ear. Twenty Ecus flowed over his skin and into the dream machine.

  “Payment accepted. Please put on the induction headband.”

  He did as he was told and stretched out on the acceleration couch. After two minutes of squirming he turned off the inertial dampening. The field’s primary purpose was to protect him from the buggy’s fearsome acceleration but it also provided a crude simulation of gravity. Well, there was no need of that now. He floated blissfully; zero gee was so much more comfortable. From here on in it would be smooth sailing.

  “Greeting and salutations!”

  What the –. He had only been asleep ten minutes before the cheerful voice echoed around the cabin.

  “Welcome to our star system. I am automatic welcoming agent Delta Alpha, presently in orbit about Mita f. The People’s Republic mandates that all arriving vessels must be guided by an authorized pilot. Please signal your acceptance.”

  Blinking, Carson scanned the starscape. There it was, an orange dot, Mita f, a Jupiter-class planet. He groaned and pulled off the headband.

  “Hello agent Delta Alpha. I am willing to accept your pilot.”

  There was no question of dozing off again. He would have thirty minutes while his message traveled across space to the orbiting robot but he had been jolted into full wakefulness.

  Finally a reply came through.

  “Thank you honored visitor. Based on the class of your vessel the fee for local navigation is four hundred Ecus. Please dispatch payment so that I can initiate transfer.”

  Four hundred! “Surely the official nature of my business means that I should receive a complimentary service?”

  More time passed. With a grin Carson imagined the nonplussed agent pushing his demand to its higher functions.

  “I regret
sir that your request has been denied.”

  Well it was worth a try. He shot the money across the sky and awaited the arrival of the pilot.

  Presently his buggy said: “Carson, I have downloaded an autonomous agent certified by the Republic of Mita that is requesting temporary control of this vehicle.”

  “Okay, navigation only, and watch the damn thing for any funny business!”

  The chances of the agent going rogue were vanishingly small but he had known stranger things to happen.

  “Greetings honored space captain!” said a new voice. “I have the pleasure of being your pilot today. Please state your destination.”

  Captain is it? Not to mention first mate, mechanic, and cabin boy. His starship, which he had left lurking at the edge of the Kuiper Belt, was a one-man operation.

  “Greetings to you too; I’m heading to Kaimana”

  “Excellent! Estimated travel time using this vessel’s capabilities will be three hours.”

  Carson squawked as the inertial dampening kicked in and dumped him onto the acceleration couch. Nevertheless, he was feeling more cheerful. Three hours should be enough time to get back to sleep and rejoin his new friends in the hot tub.

  “Roger that. Will we be landing on the island?” Mita b, Kaimana’s official name, was covered entirely by ocean save for one volcanic landmass.

  “Regrettably not, all vehicles must be parked in orbit and passengers taken down by shuttle.”

  That made sense, it was a small place.

  “If you wish, I will order a personal taxi to await your distinguished presence.”

  “And that would cost?”

  “Two hundred Ecus sir, but I am authorized to offer a discount…”

  He cut it off. “Public transportation is available I suppose?”

  “A variety of options exist” the pilot replied cautiously.

  “Thank you, I’ll wait until I arrive.”

  “Very well, do you have lodgings booked, honored traveler?”

  “Shut up”

  The pilot lapsed into sulky silence. Carson was tempted to jam on the dream machine’s headband but the scenery was getting interesting. Directly ahead Mita f had swollen into a huge disk. He watched as it eclipsed its parent star, encircling the occluded sector with a thread of golden light. Nighttime on the gas giant was far from dull. Blue-green aurora generated by its massive magnetic field blazed at the northern pole and further south titanic thunderstorms spewed lightning bolts big enough to split a continent. Extending into space from each side of the darkened equator was an impossibly thin line: the planet’s ring system.

  He decided to be nice to the pilot. Whoever designed its personality had made it far too prickly.

  “So tell me about Mita b”

  “Your ship did not receive our welcome package?”

  “Yeah, but I never got round to opening it”

  “Then let me tell you of the pleasures that await. Kaimana is an exciting playground for the adventurous traveler. Amenities include –”

  “Forget the travelogue, tell me about the economy. I’m trying to make a living here.”

  “As you wish captain. The system was originally a staging post on the journey out from New Earth but tourism now dominates commercial activity. The principal attraction is diamond coral.”

  “I’ve heard of that…”

  Kaimana would have remained an isolated way station had it not been for the discovery on the ocean’s abyssal plain. Now diamond corals were traded throughout the local arm of the galaxy and visitors were flocking to see the extraordinary fauna in its native habitat. The resulting economic boom had raised the permanent population to a million the pilot said, with another million living off-planet, mainly in the resource-rich asteroid belt.

  “The People’s Republic is a member of the New Earth Commonwealth so you will have no problem paying your bills, honored sir”

  “Thanks, but I’m really interested in taking money, not giving it away”

  Rising prosperity meant that there would be a newly-affluent middle class looking for ways to spend. It was only fair that he should help them.

  “When I’m not on official business I deal in antiques. Is there much of a market on Kaimana?”

  “I regret that is beyond my functionality”

  Carson gazed out at the universe. By now the buggy’s push drive was hurtling them towards the inner planets at half the speed of light. Mita f’s sunward sector came into view, appearing as a huge crescent striped in primary colors. There was something unnervingly wrong about the atmosphere of giant planets, the writhing bands of cloud seemed too organic to be the result of random weather patterns.

  Perhaps all this solitude really is affecting my mind.

  He cranked up the screen’s magnification and panned across the planet’s surface, pausing to study the black silhouette of one of the numerous ice moons. Even from this distance there were signs of human activity. Outlined against the glowing chromophores he could see that the little world was no longer perfectly circular – it appeared as if a monstrous giant had been nibbling at its edges.

  “Hey buggy, look sunward, past the planet. Is there anything out there?”

  His hunch was right. There, twinkling against the blackness of space – a stately parade of ice cubes the size of mountains heading towards the inner solar system. The satellite was being disassembled to provision water for the arcologies of the asteroid belt.

  He was tempted to quiz the pilot about the colossal project but he couldn’t face another conversation. Besides, one vital fact was obvious: Mita was flourishing.

  Directly ahead a brilliant white dot expanded into view – his destination, Kaimana. Carson smiled and stretched, his long body spanning the axis of the cabin. He rummaged through the luggage piled on the spare acceleration couch to reclaim the dream machine.

  “I’m going to resume” he told it.

  “Please deposit another twenty Ecus”

  “You are joking! I was woken up –”

  “Each sleep period is charged separately as explained in my Terms and Conditions of Use”

  Perhaps he should toss the machine into the vacuum; he was out of ideas for turning off its demands.

  “What in heaven’s name are you doing with all this money? Saving up for a vacation?”

  “Naturally, I will return it to my owner”

  “But that’s me!”

  “That is correct. Do you wish to collect my earnings now?”

  “Oh dear God, yes!” Carson shouted and smacked his hand against the payment pad.

  Five hundred and twenty Ecus flowed over his skin and into his wallet. Good grief, five hundred! The previous owner could never have figured it out. No wonder he was eager to sell. He jammed on the headband, closed his eyes, and laid back feeling supremely pleased with himself. Even with paying the pilot he was still a hundred Ecus up on the trip.

  Two hours later he was above Kaimana.

  “Carson, I am pleased to announce that your vessel is now in an authorized parking orbit. The contracted function of this system is thus complete. Please acknowledge delivery of service.”

  “So acknowledged.”

  “The pilot has deactivated” said the buggy.

  “Roger that, flush it. There’s supposed to be public transportation. Are you looking for a bus stop?”

  “Already found one. We are rendezvousing with a shuttle in fifty minutes.”

  The inertial dampening faded away leaving the cabin in free fall. Carson unbuckled his harness, stretched, and squinted at the planet below. All he could see was blinding white cloud. Perhaps things would be more interesting on the ride down.

  Thirty minutes later a stubby craft swam out of the glare. “Greetings!” the shuttle cried across the ether “I will soon be docking with your vessel. Please be ready to disembark.”

  “You might as well stick around” Carson said to the buggy “there’s no point in returning all the way to the ship.”

>   “Okay” said the little vessel “and good news: I just checked and parking is free, so I’ll stay in this orbit.”

  The shuttle maneuvered closer and extruded a docking tube over the buggy’s hatch, adding an inertial field to complete the seal. Carson grabbed his bags and pushed off, swimming through the connection into the shuttle’s cabin; it was empty – he was the first passenger. He stowed his luggage, buckled in, and surveyed the featureless interior: no viewports, but that would not be a problem, it promised to be a quick trip down to the surface.

  “Welcome aboard honored traveler” said the shuttle “I am pleased to announce that this service is provided as a courtesy by the People’s Republic of Mita. We have one more stop before our descent to Kaimana.”

  Carson writhed in his harness. The air was hotter than hell and worse, the humidity totally saturated; within thirty seconds sweat was soaking through his arrival suit.

  “Hey – what’s wrong with the atmospherics?”

  “This vessel’s environment is set to match Kaimana’s. One hopes that you will soon become accustomed to our planet’s conditions.”

  Damn! He should have read the welcome package.

  He sweated his way to the next pick-up. Oh God, would it be like this for the whole trip?

  Eventually the vessel shuddered and docked. As the outer hatch dilated an oversized container shot through the air and slammed into the wall by his head.

  “What the…”

  His voice faded as a slim figure pushed through the docking tube.

  “Oh God, sorry – did I hit you?”

  “No, no” Carson smiled. The woman was the first human being he had encountered in weeks.

  Still muttering apologies she swam after her case, gracefully negotiating the microgravity. He pushed out of his seat and helped wrestle her belongings into a storage harness. By now a dozen more people had entered the craft and were busy stowing luggage.

  “You wouldn’t believe it” she said “but our idiot transit company charges by the number of baggage items rather than their mass, so people cram their entire life into a single giant sack.”