The Fallow Orbits, Chapter 1 Episode 2
An offer and a farewell
Thousands of tiny pinpricks of light were emerging from behind the rose, peach, and amber radiance of the predawn sky. They were only visible when the sun was just below the horizon, immediately after sunset and just before dawn. They were like stars, but somehow steadier. In tonight's sky they made fan shapes, almost like spokes radiating away from the still-invisible sun. Its light would shortly overwhelm them.
Nathan knew they weren't angels, though he hadn't learned that until he was ten. For centuries the Congregation had taught that these elusive sparks were the souls of ascended saints and angels, watching over humanity. They called them the Dawn Angels. If you lived an exemplary enough life, following every rule and command of the Congregation, you might join that celestial choir.
One beautiful sunset evening, he'd commented on this to Tanaer, and his brother scoffed. "Come with me," Tanaer commanded, and he'd taken Nathan to the roof, where Father's latest toy sat within a newly built copper dome. It was a telescope.
"Look," said Tanaer, and Nathan had aimed the telescope at the cloud of angels. After some fiddling with the knobs, one of them swam into focus.
"It's... an eye?" Almost edge-on, a delicately traced white oval wavered against the indigo sky. In its center was a tiny white dot, like a glowing pupil.
"Not an eye, stupid. A ring. They're all rings. If you get the angle just right, you can see clouds and seas on their insides."
"Clouds? Seas? But then they're not angels? Or saints? They're..."
"Worlds, little brother. Uncountable numbers of them. Those are where the exiles come from. They're the worlds we're starting to explore."
Did the girl know what the Dawn Angels really were? Knowing the conservatism of these streets, he somehow doubted it.
A sudden knock at the door jolted him; he almost tripped over the corner of the cot.
"Hello?"
A mature woman's voice said, "Are you Nathaneal Osman Demirci?" She spoke in Tradelang, not the local tongue.
Somehow it seemed perfectly apt to say, "What's it to ya?"
"I believe these are yours."
Beyond the bars, candlelight showed the unmistakable seal at the corner of his diploma. Nathan leaped to his feet.
"Where did you get those?"
"Found them scattered around a street near here. They stuck out... Can I come in?"
He laughed. "Maybe. I don't have the key, though."
There was a short pause, then the lock clicked and the door swept open. A tall, forbidding woman stepped into the room.
Her gray hair was cropped in a crew cut, which made a severe frame for a face with high cheekbones and a hawk nose. Her lips were thin, almost cruel, but everything was dominated by her wide-set, piercing eyes. She wore the black uniform of a spaceship captain. Nathan had seen one or two, from the far end of the table or ballroom during Father's parties. Human spacecraft were still rare, at least in the Mediterranean; South America was entirely free of the Congregation and it was said hundreds landed and took off from Brazil and Peru every day. So, he was sophisticated enough to have seen a captain or two, but at the sight of the uniform, all he could say was, "Umm..."
She held out the street-stained sheaf of educational proofs he'd dropped on his way up the wall. "These are yours."
"You know they are, because to get in here you'll have had to run a gauntlet of men who're waiting for me to come out. Am I right?"
She shrugged. "They're there. So you are," she pursed her lips, folding back a sheet, "a nuclear engineer, a mechanical engineer, and have secondary degrees in mathematics and... astronomy?"
He glanced ruefully at the arrow slit. "Yes. For all the good that'll do me."
He gravely took the papers from her. She crossed her arms and cocked her head, appraising him.
"I have need of an engineer," she said suddenly. "Mine had an... unfortunate accident."
"Have need of a... You need an engineer."
"I just said that, yes."
"But you're a captain. I mean, of a space ship."
"Have you been drinking?"
"No, it's just that—I never studied for—I mean, I hoped one day I could go into space. I just never planned on it I mean I didn't study for it, we did take elementary astrogation and I understand the principles of the engines but I never got to work on one—"
"You never studied nuclear engines?"
"Not... officially." He'd just devoured every manual and theoretical paper he'd been able to find in the University's library. "But I know the relationship between the required Teslas of magnetic force and nuclear reaction you can coax out of a Rodriguez fission fragment rocket..."
"Fine, you're hired."
"I'm—what?"
"You're sure you haven't been drinking?"
The cogs and wheels of Nathan's mind lined up and he stood a little straighter. "Ma'am, I just saw my whole family slaughtered and my home burned to the ground. I'm not... at my best."
She pursed her lips again. "Fair enough. I'm Captain Barad of the Straker. Hire on with me and I can get you clear of that mob. But we have to leave today. We have to leave now."
Nathan didn't hesitate. "All right."
"Good. Come." She marched out into the hall, flicking on a powerful electric torch that lit the space. The inner sanctum of the Temple of the Jinn was a much smaller, more tawdry space than he'd imagined, more like the back runs of a laundry than a holy place.
Nathan stopped. "Wait. I'll come with you, on one condition."
Barad looked annoyed. "What now?"
"Bring one more." He rapped on the door he'd sensed but not seen before. "Kedi! Do you want to get out of here?"
"Wh-what?"
"No," said Barad. "I am not a charity, nor am I a hotel. I am not taking on freeloaders."
Nathan knew he was seconds away from being cast back into his cell and losing his one chance at freedom. He had nothing—but he was the heir of the House of Demirci; he was all that was left to uphold the family's honor and history.
"She comes," he said. "Or I stay."
Barad glared at him, but then after a moment she shrugged angrily and turned away. "All right, whoever the strumpet is, she can travel as cargo, but I'm kicking her off at our next stop. That's all."
"Deal." Nathan turned the latch and swung open the Balcony Cat's door. "Come on quick," he said. "A lady is saving our lives."
Dawn light drew the square outside the Temple of the Jinn in shades of mauve and pink, with deep wells of purple shadow. Men stood in these shadows, heads close together. Some were gesturing at the temple doors; as Captain Barad stepped into golden sunlight, then Nathaneal, all those half-visible heads swiveled to look at Nathan. Nathan heard a growl rise from the mob.
He stopped at the sight, but then a small pair of hands planted themselves against his back and pushed. "If we're getting out of here," declared the girl, "then get out!"
They were going to get torn limb from limb for sure, he thought, but the crowd was hanging back, staying in the shadows. Nathan blinked, and finally noticed the detail that had somehow been too close, and too big, for him to notice. It was an armored car, of a type he'd never seen before—painted brilliant white with a registration number on the side, tiny slit windows, and a turret. That turret was currently pointed at the crowd, and Nathan recognized the weapon mounted on it. It was a microwave pain ray capable of incapacitating the whole square with one strafing shot.
"Get in," Barad said unnecessarily. Nathan climbed the lowered steps and went to sit on a bench. Finally visible, the balcony cat perched on the bench across from his. She seemed a little older than her voice had suggested, but not by much. Her black hair looked like it had been hacked into its current bob using garden shears. She wore a faded blue shift, black leggings with runs in them, and makeshift shoes made entirely of industrial tape. Her face was sunburnt and her mouth turned down. Her eyes blazed even more intensely than Barad's.
"What?" she demanded.
"Nothing." Nathan mustn't look much better. He'd been wearing informal evening clothes when the violence broke out, and much of it was now torn and sweat-stained. He had no idea what his hair was doing.
Barad stepped in and slammed the hatch. "Get us moving!" she commanded someone in the forward cabin. The vehicle lurched into motion.
The kedi's eyes were darting around like an agitated bird's. "This is a planetary rover," she said. "I seen pictures. Where are we going?"
"To space," said Barad blandly. She was holding a ceiling strap and consulting a clipboard.
The girl became very still. Her eyes turned to Nathan, a look in them that said, you're only telling me this now?
"We can let you out somewhere when we escape the mob," he said. "If you've got someone here who needs you..."
The kedi shook her head violently. "There's nothing for me here. It's just... there'll be even less for me up there."
"You don't know that," said Barad. She had lowered the clipboard, as though she'd just realized the girl was there.
The rover—if that was what this was—accelerated hard, swerved violently left, then right, and accelerated again. Barad swayed with its motion, seemingly unconcerned.
After a few minutes the motion settled down. They were moving fast, and Nathan thought he knew where. He looked through one of the narrow windows and glimpsed the forest of vast fretwork towers and cranes that was Yenikapi—historic portlands, used since ancient times, expanded with artificial land by the Moderns, and now the site of Europe's first official spaceship landing field.
Security was much tighter around Yenikapi. They were halted at a checkpoint, boarded, and inspected. The port police took no interest in Nathan or the balcony cat; they were after contraband. Barad gave them the run of the vehicle, though when they went to the driver's compartment one swore in shock and surprise and they piled out again, ashen-faced. They concluded their check quickly after that, and the rover was waved through.
Barad left the door open as they trundled across concrete and rails, past stacks of ancient shipping containers that had long ago rusted into the Modern age's version of pyramids. Nathan and the kedi poked their heads out, gaping at the sheer scale of the launch towers and the ships. A klaxon suddenly blatted, its call taken up all across the portland. Nathan saw men dropping their tools and running for small concrete bunkers that he now realized were everywhere.
"Better close that," said Barad drily. Nathan hauled on the door, and just as it thumped shut a shatter of yellow-white light pierced all the windows, the road seemed to shudder and moments later the rover rocked as if it had been punched by a Jinn. The light was replaced by silvery darkness as a torrent of steam poured past. It gradually settled as their driver continued on, and after a couple of minutes Barad said, "You can open it again."
Nathan did, letting a great hiccup of hot moist air into the rover. He had little time to look around at ground level because the rover quickly parked itself on a broad steel platform that turned out to be an elevator. The whole rover was being winched into the sky.
Barad stepped past him and down onto the platform. There was no railing but she seemed unconcerned. "Come," she said, waving imperiously. "You're not going to get a better look at the Straker."
Remembering that he'd climbed a whole building last night didn't help with Nathan's anxiety; he clung tightly to the rover as he went to join her. For a moment he was mesmerized by the sight of the ancient towers of the city, which he felt sure he would never see again. Then he looked up.
Straker sat atop a hundred-meter-tall reusable booster. The ship was a simple finned cylinder whose basic shape had been drawn by daydreaming schoolchildren for centuries. About halfway up its fire-mottled steel hull, a big cargo door yawned open, waiting to receive the rover. Above that, he could see windows.
Straker was too heavy to lift itself to orbit; it used simple chemical rockets to land and take off from places like Mars. In space, it would use some sort of fusion or fission drive. Nathan had studied these, but never expected to actually work on one.
They followed the rover as it drove into the ship's hold. Then, as the elevator platform began to descend and the hold's clamshell doors swung shut, the balcony cat screamed.
"—Monster!" She leaped out of the rover and ran to hide behind some strapped-down boxes. A moment later, something stepped out of the rover and stretched luxuriantly. "Glad to be out of that hell-hole," it said in a voice like a congested steam kettle. "How do you humans handle all that moisture? Wait, don't tell me."
"Nathan, meet Ydes," said Barad. "Our biologist."
The lizard-like humanoid's head split into a yawn so vast it could have swallowed a whole pig's head. His jaws snapped back together with an audible click, and their ends curled up slightly. He blinked giant yellow eyes at Nathan. "Pleased to meet you. Don't do what our last engineer did."
"Which is?"
"Classified," said Barad. "Show them around but make it quick. We leave in half an hour."
Ydes wore a crewman's gray overalls; what was visible of him was scaled, like a crocodile. "Well met, small object," he called, "I scare all the human children. But see, I rate them according to how long it takes them to realize I'm not going to eat them. Right now, you're trending a Four."
"It's okay," Nathan said. "Ydes is a Zathcan." He was trying to sound nonchalant, though he'd never met an exile either.
The girl popped up. "Is a four bad?"
"It is, though not nearly as bad as a six. Or an eight."
She came around the boxes and gave him a frank appraisal. "Those are bigger than four, right?"
"Um, yes..." Ydes' eyes widened even further. He looked to Nathan.
"Her life was in danger. Bringing her's the price of my passage."
"Oh, you think you struck a bargain, do you?" Ydes stared at the girl, who stared back. Then he said, "Small object! Do you have a name?"
"She won't tell it to me."
The Zathcan squinted at her. "Names are powerful things. They are the version of you that goes where you cannot. I respect you guarding yours. But you have to proclaim who you are some time, or else others will take charge of that version."
The girl blinked in surprise.
"This is the hold," Ydes continued. "Live cargo goes behind that door, perishables that can't handle exposure to hard vacuum behind that one. The rest gets stacked and tied down, side to side and crisscrossed. Here, help me with the car."
The rocket was no more than ten meters across. The now-parked rover took up all the space not already devoted to the live and perishable cargoes, and the boxes. Nathan helped Ydes clamp the rover's axles firmly to the deck, then stretched nylon-wrapped cables around it, tightening these until they twanged like violin strings. "Come on," said Ydes when he was satisfied. He led them to a gangway opposite the cargo doors.
On the next level up a narrow hallway led to a small hexagonal chamber at the center of the ship. There were doors in each facet of the hexagon except the open corridor. At the very center, a ladder led to the next level.
"This is for passengers, or extra cargo," said Ydes as he began to climb.
"Are there any?" asked the kedi. She seemed to have completely gotten over her initial panic. Nathan himself was still struggling to not stare at Ydes.
"Passengers? No." They stepped off the ladder onto the next floor, a duplicate of the one below minus the gangway corridor. "Crew cabins and the toilet," said Ydes. "Galley above us, then life support, the workshop and medbay level, and the bridge. Above that is Barad's territory. You don't go there.
"How many crew?" The kedi pushed against a door. "Six?"
"So you can count."
"You mean we each get our own room?"
"Only people with names get to be crew."
"Oh." She turned back to the ladder.
"Nobody's said she's not crew," said Nathan. "And if she were a passenger, you'd give her one of the cabins below us."
"They're jammed to the ceiling with boxes. Easier to put her here. We have a spare." He rapped on one of the doors. "Alma, have you got the keys?"
There was a sound like tumbling furniture, then a pause. The door opened to reveal a wild-eyed woman with wayward black hair, dressed in loose coveralls. "Ydes! I'm calculating our trajectory!" She brandished a slide rule. "You know what happens if I get it wrong by a hundredth of a decimal point!"
"I have complete confidence in you," purred Ydes. "But we don't want liftoff to turn our new... crew... into paste on the floor. If you would be so kind...?"
Alma swore and, while unleashing a tirade about interruptions and important work, ransacked her dark chamber until she found a brass key ring. "How many? Two? What about Canso's? He had stuff in it."
The kedi looked around. "Canso?"
Nathan leaned in and whispered, "Engineer I'm replacing. Something happened to him. I vote we ask don't ask until later, once we're free and clear."
The girl tapped her temple. "That's thinking." Nathan noticed that her scrawny arms were festooned with tattoos, mostly crude symbols: circles with X's through them, crosses and triangles, Greek letters. He recognized tags of several street gangs he'd been warned about.
Alma slammed the door in Ydes's face. He turned smoothly to the balcony cat and handed her a simple metal key. "You might be crew, some day," he said. "For now, consider yourself cargo."
"Do I get fed?"
Ydes thought about this for far too long. "Yes. You get fed."
"Great!" She unlocked her door and stepped in. "Saints and sinners! This is huge! It's all mine?"
Ydes showed his teeth. He handed Nathan another key and Nathan opened his own door. He was faced with a small chamber in the awkward shape of a pie slice with its tip cut off (where the door was). The crust-end was a curve of outside wall with a cot; at least it had a porthole above the bunk. Aside from storage lockers and a desk with a chair that was fixed to the floor, it was empty.
"Five cabins, one toilet and shower chamber," said Ydes. Just then Captain Barad's voice came through the intercom next to the door.
"Strap in, everyone. We're next in the queue, launch in ten minutes."
The kedi's voice crackled from the speaker. "Who are we strapping?"
Barad sighed. "Ydes, could you show our freeloader how to prepare for liftoff, please? I presume Demirci can figure out how to set his bed to launch configuration?"
Nathan quickly surveyed the various ties and wheels that collectively would put him in a slightly elevated slant, with his knees supported. "Yes, Ma'am." His heart was starting to pound as it dawned on him what was actually happening.
He got himself properly arranged and immobilized on the bed. The moment he stopped moving, the world began spinning around him, as if they had already taken off and were careering through space. He barely noticed when the count-down reached zero; and though the roar of liftoff was the loudest thing he had ever heard, and the shaking of takeoff threatened to debone him, it all passed his consciousness as something distant and unreal. He didn't really notice anything until the engines cut out and suddenly he had the intense feeling of falling.
The captain was saying something, but Nathan stared at the ceiling, paralyzed by the realization that he had just left everything behind—not only his family and colleagues, his city and country, and not just his whole world. He'd abandoned his very self, as though he'd dropped his name while climbing to orbit, and spent the past minutes of noise and shaking watching it flutter into the shadows of the past.
Next week: The Mist of Worlds