City Without Suns (2 page)

Chapter 2

Isla listened to the sound of approaching footsteps.  The clamoring on the other side of the door came at a quick tempo from what seemed like more than just one person.  She obstructed the way out, not wanting her son and only companion to expose himself to danger.  Her instincts compelled her to check the lock, instincts gained not from her younger years on Earth, but from more than two decades spent on the spaceship Gambler.  She pressed her hands flat against the surface and brought her head closer to hear.

“Just like last night,” Isla said quietly.

“Let’s hope not,” her son Eon replied.  He was a fully-grown young man, capable of quelling mild confrontations, but he did not attempt to move his mother aside. 

Isla bit her lip.  One of the enduring original voyagers with formerly high aspirations, she raised a fist in frustration, but then she stopped to suppress the urge to strike the wall of her tight quarters with the blunt side of her palm.  She would not risk revealing to the wanderers that her sleeping compartment was one of the few occupied rooms among the many thousand vacant ones.  She preferred to stay silent and unnoticed as much as possible during the hours designated for rest when the patrols were sparse.  After long years in space, many people residing in the lower levels had become devoid of values.  Isla did not trust them, and even more, she did not want her son to encounter one of the reckless ones.

The footsteps passed.  Eon turned with a step and a jump, retiring to the top bunk with an agile move to avoid hitting his head on the low ceiling.  The combination of his youth and his belief that everything was normal allowed him to quickly relax and expel a deep breath.  Born on Gambler, he had never known a different life.

Isla reluctantly turned to the lower bed, where the hours and days slowly assembled the antiquity of her existence.  She stepped around the small window in the floor, behind which countless stars provided the only light in the perimeter room of the massive spinning cylinder.  She sat on the bed and peered through the window.  It was time to sleep, again, but there was no rest to be had. 

The passing time forced her to play games in her head, for her mind would do something to occupy itself whether voluntary or not.  On this night she was an unwilling participant in her own tired and repetitive thoughts.  She memorized the star pattern trying to detect changes from one viewing to the next.  Weary of that pointless activity she had carried out countless times, she fell to her back and stared at the dark platform above her where Eon rested.  She replayed memories from her past life and watched them like a movie.

Isla’s thoughts were suddenly interrupted. People approached in the hallway outside the door, again, but she had no way of knowing if they were the same ones.  Both inside and outside the room, the lights were off as usual during the hours of artificial night.  This time, the unknown drifters came from the direction of the makeshift prison in a section down the corridor.  Isla wondered who they were, whether she knew them, and whether they were one of the many individuals who had lost their way, not caring whether they live or die. 

Isla listened again as the steps approached from the frequently-breached detention area.  They passed the door, and there was a clatter of bodies hitting the corridor walls.  There was some yelling followed by more banging on the walls.  Isla would have never fathomed unlocking the door, but when she heard a baby’s cry, she leapt from her bed and released the lock. 

She slid the door open.  Possessing eyesight to see in the dark what others could not, Isla saw a man holding an infant close to his chest with one arm, and with the other arm trying to hold off another man.  The child was shaken during the skirmish, and the resulting squeals sent chills through her body and down her spine. 

Before she could step out to assist the small child, the main engine was engaged unexpectedly in the distance.  The reaction created thrust that pulled her to the wall next to the open doorway.  

She watched the struggling men tumbling backward through the corridor still fighting over the infant.  The noise of its screams ceased, and the rattling of the bodies against the corridor walls dissipated as they fell out of sight.  Tears bit at Isla’s eyes.  She stood speechless and numb when Eon awoke to the main engine thrust.

He was blissfully oblivious to his mother’s tears behind the darkness and to the strangers there moments prior.  Without a word, he maneuvered himself to adjust one side of the bunk to be lower than the other.  It was a trick he figured out on his own: angling the bed perpendicular to the direction of the modified gravity when the main engine was lit. 

Eon was unaware of many things, including the circumstances of prior years, when everyone onboard would have warning of the scheduled thrust.  Those in charge no longer cared for personal comforts of the commoners, who endured occasional shifts in the direction of the artificial gravity.  His memory was unacquainted with the way things were supposed to be. 

Isla wanted to keep it that way for him, at least as long as she could.  She waited as he went back to sleep, and she sat against the wall watching the faint glow of the distant plasma expellant through the transparency in the floor.  Eclipsed by the bottom of the ship, the engine’s byproduct was barely noticeable as it propelled them forward.  She wanted to leave the door open to let some of the warmer air into the room, but she kicked it closed for fear of more wanderers. 

With her knees curled up into her chest, Isla pondered what she had seen and what to do. She decided not to report the incident, knowing it would have been a futile effort more likely to bring harm to herself than justice to the perpetrators. 

The engine burn lasted a few minutes, after which Isla remained next to the door crying.  Her vision of objects in pitch-black surroundings was supposed to be a gift, instilled long ago by her designers in her genetic composition before she was born, but on that night her ability to see was a curse she could have done without.  She sat for an hour, then two, as if paralyzed.  She fell asleep there on the floor until a sound startled her.

Had she dreamed the knock on the door?  She thought of Salazar, because he was the only one in twenty years who had done that.  Only after confirming who it was did she release the lock. 

The tall man stood there in his uniform that symbolized his position within the Commander’s patrol.  His was different.  Salazar wore a large cape.  He could get away with it, because after all, the garment could be viewed as a useful tool for keeping warm in cold parts of the ship.  Isla knew, however, its purpose was primarily to conceal the deformity of his large back, the result of the mutation engineered in him back home.

“Salazar,” she whispered.  Isla took his hand and pulled him inside.

“Islander,” the officer replied.  He brought his other hand to his mouth, kissed it, and pressed it gently on Isla’s cheek. 

“I haven’t seen you for at least three months.  Where have you been?” Isla inquired with a tone of more concern than demand.  She spoke in a soft voice while Eon stirred and opened his eyes to see the guest.  Unsurprised, he rolled over and shut them again.

“Sorry, friend.  My loyalty to Leonidas is hard to explain.”

“What is he even doing?  The people have gotten out of control.”

“The ship is too big for us to cover…” Salazar paused and shrugged his shoulders, unable to find a better explanation.

“We need productive jobs,” she spoke and looked to where Eon rested.  “but…hey, can we go for a walk?  I want to get out of here for a minute.  And I can’t do it at this hour without an escort.”

“Okay, but you lead the way.  I had to feel my way down here.  It’s dark.”

Isla took his hand again and led him into the hallway, a place she would only feel comfortable at that hour with Salazar’s company.  Although at ease with him, she turned toward the upper levels where wanderers would be less likely to appear.  She led Salazar by the hand on a slow stroll with no destination in mind, wanting only to talk freely, still feeling protective of the topics discussed around Eon even at his age.

“Your vision is amazing.  I can’t see a thing,” said Salazar.

“I can see clear as day, but it’s nothing compared to the abilities they gave you back home on the Islands.”

“Yeah, abilities of no use here.”

“Don’t tell me about abilities with no use,” Isla replied referring to the infectious bacteria that permeated her lungs.  The organisms inside her were created to allow her to breathe air that a normal human could not, but she could not reveal that secret for fear she would become an object of experimentation, and the wrong experiment could suffocate her.

“I know.  We weren’t supposed to be here,” Salazar lamented.

Isla assured him, “I don’t want to hear any more about that.  Not after all this time.  We had to flee the Islands.  I’d do it again if we had to.  I’ll always be grateful to you for getting us out of there, no matter what happens.  Besides, that was a long time ago.”

“I had to get you out of there, but I didn’t have to lead you to be a stowaway on Gambler,” Salazar argued expressing guilt.

“You didn’t.  The General did that.  A lot of good it did him – his rewards for loving me one time were a fatal infection and an unplanned son who would never know him and never find a role on Gambler.”

“You would think the General’s son would have a place…”

“No.  We’re not going to let anyone know.  People are cruel.  Leonidas would probably kill him for fear that the crew might make him some kind of king like it was an inherited birthright.”

“You know, they might try to kill him anyway.  And you.  Extermination.  The only way I can protect you is to hide you…”

“We might as well be dead, no better than any of the other wanderers in that case.  No access to rations if we’re not part of the census.”

“But in danger of extermination if you are.”

“I don’t really care about myself at this point.  I want Eon to have a job.”

“I care.”

“I know if there was anything you could do, you would have done it already.”

Salazar bowed his head to the ground as they walked.  “Yes, I would,” he whispered.

They walked hand-in-hand back and forth not encroaching past level nine.  Isla saw the patrols in the distance monitoring the passage of the main corridor, sealing the commoners in the lower levels by blocking the main arteries of the ship.  They squinted into the darkness toward the sounds Isla and Salazar were making.  Their weapons were uncovered and accessible on their belts.  While accompanied by Salazar, Isla was fine, but there was nowhere for Isla to go to change her circumstances.  The previous Commander, long deceased, was the only one to ever offer her a role, one fit for a stowaway that did not train along with the other volunteers.  She wouldn’t leave Eon anyway.  They returned to the room.

“I’ll come back,” Salazar promised.

“Don’t wait so long next time.  I miss you,” Isla said as she blew him a kiss and shut the door. 

A noise she had not heard for twenty years played a subtle tone.  Isla thought it was a mere ringing in her ear before realizing an incoming transmission was alerting her from the console at the foot of the bed.  She quizzically moved in front of the screen to see something unexpected.  As she read, her heart thumped audibly in her ears over the silence.  Then she reached the bottom to discover the author, her father back on Earth.  She immediately crafted a reply to the short note, which was seemingly written with little hope she would get it.

Part 2

New Transmissions

Chapter 3

September 8, 2829             

Dad,

              A transmission from you after all this time? The transceivers have been inoperable for twenty years, and before that you were silent.  The long blackout period deprived us the link we had to our old home, one of very few comforts available onboard Gambler.  I hope this note makes it back to you.

In recent years there has been little change.  I will write often if you can receive our transmissions.  It will give me something to do, a way to make sense of all the lost time, even though much I have to tell is unpleasant.  The hope that you are listening is more inspiration than I have had in a long time.  I have been here for more than two decades, which seems surreal, more time than I was alive on Earth.  The measurement of a decade is different now.  It used to be that three hundred sixty-five days and nights constituted a year, and ten years was a decade, but now there is no more day and night.  Time simply passes with nothing but stars against the vacuous backdrop of space visible from a small number of windows. The mechanical clocks on Gambler are the only devices available for keeping time. 

According to the clocks, today is a week after the twenty-third anniversary of the launch.  There was neither celebration nor acknowledgment.  I don’t even know our relative speed or incurred time dilation compared to Earth time.  Maybe even more time has passed for you, but here it has been twenty-three years, and I am not sure I will live to see another.  I am forty-one years old, a relatively young age back home, but I feel elderly.  It seems strange to even think of home, something that used to be a tangible place that now seems like a vague and distant concept.

Much of my time is spent in a small living quarters.  Imagine a dormitory room at the university where you teach, or a bedroom in a submarine from the Islands, except smaller, like a prison cell.  I am writing in a narrow space at the foot of the beds behind the door. Thankfully, there is still a functional communication endpoint here.  At night, the period of time that we artificially label with all the lights out, I normally sleep in the same place I have been the entire voyage on the bottom bunk in this room.  It is such a small place on such a large vessel, eight kilometers from end to end and two kilometers in diameter.  Of course, the unusable bottom two kilometers contain the engine full of dense matter, but that still leaves an area far larger than needed to house the number of inhabitants.  They certainly left plenty of room for population growth, but I see little chance of that happening.

Much of what has occurred seems like a distant dream. I departed so abruptly that I now feel like I have had two different lives.  You know almost everything about my first.  In theory, much of what has happened here would be archived, but I have no idea how to make retrievals, which is somewhat ironic since I am equipped with a direct line to the ship logs and transceivers.  Our old friend the General gave me a role as a historian, but that position has been dysfunctional for a long time.

Gambler is not the noble place it once was.  When General Mason was Commander, there was a vibrant atmosphere.  The blackout period started right after his death.  Little has been the same since.  Life was challenging enough here when everything was functioning well.  For the first three years, people were working together.  I often wonder if the deterioration would have occurred anyway with the passage of time, or if it is correlated with Leonidas Verga as Commander.  I would say that crime is rampant, but there is no longer a distinction between what is legal and what is not, what is right and wrong. 

How have I ended up more than two light years from everything I know and love? A veritable prisoner in this pit of despair. The food shortage had brought us to new lows.  Although it is a punishable crime, cannibalism is prevalent, and the lower levels are not monitored closely by the patrols that prohibit passage beyond level nine.  Gambler could house a number of people approaching that of moderately large cities back on Earth, yet we collectively struggle to deal with a population of only about two thousand that does not even begin to approach its capacity. 

              Sending.  I will write more later. – Love, Isla