Ad Astra (15 page)

"Yeah. You're pretty smart for a kid." Gayle grinned at the mocking reference to Greg's relative youth. "Those reasons are just an excuse. They don't want to change. Anything."

Jane stared at the pilot. "Like Carl told us. Stability is the primary virtue, the primary imperative, in the society of the Terra. Actually setting up a colony on that world would change everything, wouldn't it?"

"Oh, yeah. People who didn't like Mayor-for-Life Magetry could actually go somewhere else and set up their own town. The Rules wouldn't have to be Rules anymore." Gayle raised her hands as if grasping at invisible controls. "I could fly. Across a world. See new things. Let my kids fly, too, instead of endlessly training so their descendents could someday fly."

Greg remembered the air rushing past the shuttle's hull, the wild ride to the surface. "I can understand that."

"But it's more than that. Moving down onto that world means leaving this controlled, man-made little world of ours. We'd have to deal with lots of stuff that we can't control. Like weather, just to give one example. That's a big change for us, too."

"Our ancestors did that. So can we. Why are you telling us this?"

"Because I don't want to put up with it and I don't know what to do! I've been living on this ship too long. My brain's almost hardwired. You guys can still think for yourselves, right?"

"How long have we got to think of something?"

"Twenty hours. That's how long it's supposed to take to get the course calculated and the main drives ready to propel the ship toward the secondary objective. Magerty and the others know some people will be unhappy with leaving here. They plan on announcing the decision just before they light off the drives so there's no time for anyone to do anything."

"The secondary objective." An alternate world in an alternate solar system. "It'll take the ship more generations to get there. We'd never see a planet again, would we?'

"No."

"And when the ship finally reaches that secondary world, whoever's in charge then, Magerty the Sixth or Seventh or Tenth or whatever, will decide that's unsuitable, too, won't they? And try to head for some tertiary world."

"I'd bet on that, yeah."

"Just try to keep things the same. Until the ship breaks too bad to fix and our descendents die in the middle of nowhere." Greg found himself laughing, then noticed the expressions on the faces of the others. "It's so damned ironic. Our ancestors set this up. They wanted an extremely stable social environment. Nobody rocking the boat, nobody trying to change things, and all so their descendents could someday reach another world and establish a colony. But they forgot that their stable social system might backfire at the critical point. Why should a system built on stability want to change things? Especially when the ship they built is so predictable and comfortable compared to the conditions we'll encounter on the planet? They worked so hard to make sure it'd succeed that they set this colonization attempt up to fail."

"We follow the Rules," Gayle pointed out. "Our ancestors could have set a Rule that we had to land on the planet. No options."

"But what if the planet really had been some hell-hole? Then Magerty and all his supporters might be shoving us into the landers regardless of what the surveys found." Greg looked toward Jane. "We've got to do something."

"Something? What kind of something?" Jane waved around to indicate the rest of the ship. "We can't take over. The security force won't back us, and a majority of the people on board will either support Magerty or refuse to oppose him. Even a lot of the younger adults. Most people don't want to rock the boat. We don't have to take a poll. You
know
that's true."

"Yeah. I do. I'd guess anywhere from one quarter to one third of the people on the Terra would feel like we do and be willing to do something to actually oppose leaving." Greg looked away, his gaze focusing on a forlorn piece of equipment, broken beyond repair, perhaps doomed to sit in this room as long as the Terra existed. Just like the human inhabitants of the ship. Something he'd said earlier tugged at his mind. The landers. "Then we have to leave."

"Leave? Just accept Magerty's decision and sit while the Terra heads for another star system?"

"No. I mean we have to leave. Leave the ship."

"What?" Jane took a moment to let the thought sink in. "How?"

"The landers. We all got taught about them in school. The flight and landing sequences are automated. Each one's got a bunch of supplies and equipment on board. And they'll each carry a hundred people down, right? We just take a few."

"A few? How many do you think will go with us?"

"I don't know. And we have less than twenty hours to somehow collect a group of people who feel like we do without letting anybody know we're breaking the Rules."

Gayle shook her head. "That's not your only challenge. You can't just waltz onto the colony landers. There's interlocks and alarms and system passwords. Those need to be bypassed or isolated. The landers can be warmed up in about an hour's time if they're like the shuttles, but you need to keep the ship's control room from knowing you're doing that."

"What about the people we're leaving?" Jane asked. "If we take the landers, what happens to them?"

Gayle shrugged. "They'll be fine. There's enough landers to take down almost the entire population, and each of them has an assortment of redundant colonizing gear on board. They're one-way transport, remember? Only the shuttles were designed for multiple ground-to-space flights."

"Are we also taking one of the shuttles?"

"Damn right we are. That's mine."

Jane checked her watch. "Twenty hours. There's no way you and I and the few other people we can trust can sound out literally hundreds of other people to see who wants to go."

"We don't have to ask everybody -."

"We have to ask a lot of them! I don't want to leave someone who really wants to go. And we'll need every person we can get. We'll need them for their skills, and their ability to do manual labor, and just for simple genetic diversity. Right?"

Greg bit his lip. "There's only one way to do this. We handle it like a propagating message. I sound out two people, who each sound out two people, and so on."

Gayle frowned. "That's very risky. If the wrong person hears, we can be stopped."

"What else can we do? Besides, one virtue of life on the Terra is we
know
our neighbors. Look, we'll use a password. Nobody gets the password until whoever sounds them out is sure they're with us. Up to that point, the discussion can just be written off as discontent and Magerty will think that'll be undercut when the Terra leaves, right? But anyone we're sure of will get the password and be told that when they get it they need to head for the landers."

"So what's the password?"

Greg hesitated, thinking of how they'd be violating the Rules which had governed their entire lives, and leaving the controlled comfort of the Terra for a future of uncertainty and toil on the planet beneath them. "'Forbidden fruit.' That'll be the password that we're leaving."

#

The elder standing watch at the hull systems panel glanced down at Greg. "You found that problem, yet?"

"Almost."

"I hadn't noticed anything wrong."

"It showed up during a remote diagnostic." Greg tried to keep his voice calm, almost bored. "Maybe it was just an intermittent thing, or a false reading, but the Rules say you have to follow-up. Even if it is the middle of the night and I should be asleep with most everybody else."

"That's right. It's good to see you kids taking the Rules seriously."

Greg offered the watch stander a hopefully sincere-looking smile, then continued the careful job of bypassing the alert systems which would otherwise provide warning the landers were being accessed and powered up. A final connection, a final check, and he nodded with real satisfaction. "That's got it."

The elder was already losing interest. "Everything's okay, now?"

"Just how it needs to be." Greg left the area, trying to suppress a wild grin, then checked the time. Three hours. He'd already bypassed the secondary watch panel, as well as the panel in the main control room where an unacknowledged alert would eventually present itself. He headed for the lander access area.

"Jane? How's it going?"

His friend twitched wildly at the question, then glared at him. "Greg Tyre, do me the favor of not sneaking up on me!"

"Sorry. I've finished the alert bypasses."

"Great." She raised her data unit and punched in a command. "I've sent out the password. People should start showing up real soon. Gayle's already got people here ready to start warming the landers. Nobody asked what you were doing?"

"A couple of people. I gave them a remote problem detection story and they didn't question it."

Gayle Trey and a couple of others came to join them. "Why should they? Nobody makes waves on the Terra. Nobody breaks the Rules. Not if they know what's good for them and don't want to be shunned by their neighbors."

A short woman standing beside the pilot and dressed in the deep blue of the security forces smiled tightly. "And they'd usually get caught, because their neighbors would tell. Don't worry. I'm an old friend of Gayle's, and I'm on your side. I've seen how the Terra's society works from the enforcement side. I don't like it. I want my kids to have freedom."

Jane nodded. "Did you rig the surveillance systems for this area?"

"Yes. They're showing an endless loop of the last hour's recorded activity instead of actually monitoring the area. And since that hour included absolutely no activity, everything will look fine to my soon-to-be former co-workers."

Greg exhaled heavily, staring at the security woman. "I never thought of that. I guess we're lucky you're coming along."

Another smile. "I suppose so. You'll need cops on the surface, too, I expect."

A large man pushed his way forward. "Hopefully not." He glared around. "In case anybody cares, I've severed the control lines running from all remote locations to this area. Even if they find out what we're doing, they won't be able to stop us at the last minute by powering down the landers or something." Another glare. "I'm tired of people telling me what to do." The man turned and made his toward a lander entry bay.

Greg glanced at Jane and spoke softly so his voice wouldn't carry. "Did you see the look in that guy's eyes when he said he was tired of people telling him what to do?"

"Yeah. I guess freedom from conformity may have its downside in terms of some people."

People began arriving in the lander area, in small groups for the most part, including families urged on by one or both parents. All moved furtively, constantly glancing around. Gayle greeted a few, exchanging thumbs-up gestures. "More pilots. Good people to have," she advised Greg.

"I bet. I noticed a family resemblance."

"I told you my kids would get to fly."

"Have you noticed the ages of these people?"

"You mean the mix of elders and youth? Sure. There's more younger ones, but not everybody gets beaten into conformity by age." She eyed the stream of arrivals, biting her lower lip. "There's a lot. Has anybody been keeping count?"

Jane rubbed her forehead and consulted her data unit. "I've counted five landers filled and ready to go."

"Huh. And there's at least a couple of hundred more lining up. Looks like we might get up to a quarter of Terra's people. Cool."

Greg shook his head, staring at the people jostling into the access area. "Won't security see these people? I mean, they've got to be noticing all the traffic through the corridors."

"Depends if they're awake and watching or not. My friend the cop says they usually watch movies on this shift because nothing ever happens. And why should they expect anything different to happen tonight?"

"What if somebody told the wrong person?"

"If that'd happened, security'd already be here, right?"

"Or they'd be massing just out of sight."

The pilot shrugged. "If they charge, we slam the hatches and bolt. Too bad for those still outside, but I've no intention of letting the social programs people work me over."

"I can't blame you." Greg grimaced. "Social programs. There's somebody I forgot to tell."

Gayle checked her watch. "You've got maybe forty-five minutes before we're scheduled to go. But we might have to go earlier."

"I know. But I can't leave a friend."

Greg ran, along corridors which grew steadily more familiar, until he reached Carl's room. He hung on the buzzer until Carl, blinking sleep from his eyes, opened to door. "Carl. The town council decided to leave this planet and head for the secondary objective. We're bolting the Terra. Taking some landers. Come on."

Carl stared back at him. "You're not serious. Are you?"

"Yes! Come on. We're leaving soon."

"Wait a minute. Who's 'we'? How many people are you talking about?"

"I don't know exactly. Hundreds. Come on. This is our only chance for freedom, for change."

"Greg, if the council made the decision to leave, then they represent the entire populace. We have to respect that. We have to work together. No individual can put their wishes ahead of the group's, ahead of everyone else on the Terra."

Greg reached for Carl's arm. "Drop the social program cant, for heaven's sake. Let's go."

Carl's own hand came up and grabbed onto Greg's. "No. Let's go inside. Security has to know. It's for the best of everyone. Really."

"Let go of me!" Greg yanked back against Carl's grip, realizing as he did so that getting free would require a big fight, one certain to attract the attention of the security cameras monitoring this area. "Carl -."

"Greg, you can't do this."

A lifetime of resentment suddenly surged to the surface. "Don't tell me I can't make my own decisions, you son of a bitch!"