Read The Engines of Dawn Online
Authors: Paul Cook
Tags: #Science Fiction; American, #Science Fiction, #General, #High Tech, #Fiction
The Engines of Dawn
THE ENGINES OF DAWN
PAUL COOK
—For Tom Smith
and the best years of our lives
at Northern Arizona University 1968-1972
"Solitudinum factunt et pacem appellant."
—Tacitus,
speaking through a British chieftain regarding the Pax Romana
Table of Contents
1
Twenty-seven-year-old Benjamin Bennett rolled over in his dormitory bed in the middle of the interstellar night thoroughly disgusted with himself. His Bombardier friends had often taunted him about his relationships with various members of the female population at Eos University. "One-Minute Bennett," they called him. No relationship he had ever seemed to last long enough to be memorable, let alone meaningful. Maybe they were right.
"It's not you," Ben told his date, throwing his left arm across his eyes, sunken in despair. "At least I don't
think
it's you. Ix! Who knows what it is?"
"Well, it's something," his date, Jeannie Borland, said.
Ms. Borland was a twenty-five-year-old, platinum blond graduate student in atmospheric chemistry whom Ben had met about a month earlier when Eos University had made its last planetfall. He and his dorm mates-Eos dropouts called the Bombardiers-had gone kiting in the incredibly blue skies of Ala Tule 4 while the other students of the spacegoing university went about their various field trips down on the planet's surface. Ben had met Ms. Borland when he and the Bombardiers rested their wings in the AtChem gondola, lofting in the thermals of a placid mountain range. Ben thought he'd pursue her more aggressively when the university returned to its circuit through the known stars of the Sagittarius Alley.
And
this
was what happened.
Young men might reach their sexual peak at the age of nineteen or so, but it rarely tapered off so quickly. Moreover, Ben was in the best physical condition he had ever known. Though only five feet, ten inches tall, he was broad-shouldered and muscled enough to have won several wrestling scholarships when he was an undergraduate back on Earth. He worked out almost daily and theoretically
should
have been able to rise to the task.
In the semidarkness of the room, Jeannie Borland's illicit cigarette glowed dully. Her unaugmented breasts had that still-youthful pear shape to them, and her deliciously long legs should have inspired him to do
something.
But they didn't.
He sat up, sweeping his long black hair back into a ponytail, which he banded swiftly.
"Maybe it's the Ennui," Borland said, blowing a ghost of smoke to the ceiling.
"
I
think they put saltpeter in the food," Ben said.
Borland tapped an ash to the ashtray on Ben's nightstand. "Saltpeter? What's that?"
"Something they used to put in food to keep horny young boys from … getting frisky. Back in the old days."
"I don't believe it," Borland said. "That's barbaric. No one would do that here. Not on Eos."
"The Grays would," Ben remarked. "And they've got the Ainge behind them. After all, we can't have Mom and Dad worrying that Sally and Suzie will come home pregnant."
"No chance of that," Borland said listlessly, the tobacco calming her.
Ben eased out of bed, stepping into the gelatinous puddle his clothing made on the floor. Its response circuits activated at the familiar signature of his feet and his rugby jersey and shorts began flowing up his legs. When they found themselves back in their default configurations, they solidified. Ben's jersey said: RUGBY PLAYERS EAT THEIR DEAD. But only, Ben thought, if their testosterone levels were high. He moved his uncooperative "boys" around to help his underwear settle in.
"Look, this is the first time this has happened to me," Ben said. "You've got to believe me."
"Mmm," Borland said, tugging at her cigarette.
Actually, it had already happened-two weeks ago, with Christine Jensen, a biology student, and two days later, with Lisa Holdaway, an urban-dynamics sociology major who had been a student in one of the science classes he taught.
"It's the Ennui," Ms. Borland said with certainty.
She sat up and crashed out her cigarette. Sensing that the heat had gone out of the cigarette, the nightstand swallowed the ashtray. The room, meanwhile, quickly cleared the air.
Ben thought about the so-called Ennui, said to plague the spread of humanity across the stars. "That's a fairy tale. It's natural for civilization to slow down as it moves out among the stars. The Alley's a big place and we've only been traveling it for two hundred years."
"The pace of life in the Alley
has
slowed down," Borland said, stepping away from the bed. "They've got statistics and actuarial charts that prove it."
Ben refused to believe that the fabled Ennui was responsible for anything, let alone the apparent lack of technological advancements in the last two hundred years. It most certainly was
not
responsible for his temporary impotence. If, indeed, that's what it was.
Ms. Borland stepped into her clothing puddle and Ben watched as her panties and bra slithered to their default configurations. He swallowed hopelessly.
When humans left the confines of the Sol system, in 2098 C.E., to colonize nearby star systems, the sky seemed to be the proverbial limit for scientific advancements of all kinds. Peace had been secured on Earth; the Human Community formed. Faster-than-light technology was around the corner, and there was even the real possibility of medical science extending the life of the average human indefinitely. But sometime early in the twenty-third century, either just before or just after the Enamorati appeared, technological and cultural advancements seemed to lose steam; there seemed to be fewer of them.
But then the Enamorati appeared, and savants everywhere forgot about the Ennui.
Humans had known that alien civilizations had existed since the early twenty-first century, when undecipherable signals came from a civilization in the Magellanic Clouds. These were quite accidental transmissions from a culture, now probably extinct, that was more than 200,000 light-years away. A few years later, a series of small, very intense gamma-ray explosions near Beta Lyra were picked up. Some were patterned, intense, and directional, as if weapons were being used. This was the so-called Beta Lyra Space War, but at 12,000 light-years the H.C. was a mere bystander. When the Enamorati arrived, humans suddenly found themselves involved in very real space travel with very real alien allies.
The Enamorati were a spacegoing culture from a world located 2,300 light-years toward the galactic center of the Milky Way Galaxy, deep inside the Sagittarius Alley. The Enamorati were missionaries from a culture whose planet had been destroyed in an unimaginable ecological disaster. The name "Enamorati" was the Italian equivalent of the attitude the aliens doctrinally shared toward all beings, sentient or otherwise, whom they happened to meet in their travels. The Enamorati had no interference clause, no Prime Directive that kept them out of planetary affairs not their own. Theirs was a mission of a religious bent, obliging them to offer the Human Community two things that it needed desperately: the location of habitable worlds
and
the transportation it took to get them there in a reasonable amount of time.
If the Enamorati had something like a Prime Directive, it came in the form of their staunch refusal to give humans the technical details of their giant Onesci Engines. The mathematics that led to the development of their FTL technology had been given to them ten thousand years ago by their greatest Avatar, a physicist named Onesci Lorii. Humans could use the Onesci Engines as freely as they wished, but they had to allow the Enamorati to handle the technology. This was a matter of deep seriousness for the Enamorati, and humans had to respect it if they wanted to ply the spaces between the stars.
Ben checked the time. "It isn't even fourteen hundred yet. Want to see what's going on in the student commons? Catch an Experience? They're showing
Mayberry Agonistes
tonight. Andy and Barney against the aliens?"
The romantic mood, however, had dissipated along with Ms. Borland's cigarette smoke.
"I don't think so, Ben," Jeannie Borland said, adjusting the chevrons of her collar. "Maybe some other time."
"They say it's the greatest science-fiction movie ever made," Ben said. "Wild Bill Kelso and George Reeves as Superman?"
"Sorry, Ben," Borland said.
At that moment, a gentle knocking came at the door to Ben's room.
"Are you expecting someone?" Borland asked, checking to see if her clothing had cohered properly.
For a moment Ben thought that his room's AI circuits had smelled Jeannie Borland's cigarettes and subsequently tattled to campus security. Tobacco was making a comeback on some of the worlds of the H.C., particularly among young people eager to leave their youth behind and to experience the world of mature grown-ups. Someone unaligned with the Grays-the university administration-or the Ainge religious faction on board the ship had apparently smuggled several different brands of cigarettes onto Eos a few planet stops ago and was now selling them to just about anyone who would buy them. They weren't quite illegal, but their use was definitely frowned upon.
"Not really," Ben said. "Stand back. Open," he then commanded the door.
"Oh!" Jeannie Borland said, gasping.
Standing in the doorway was an Enamorati. He stood there in his gray-green environment suit and had a sad expression on his face-routine for an Enamorati.
This Enamorati was different, however, for cradled in his frail, birdlike arms was the body of a little white polar bear.
"Please forgive me," the being said in slightly inflected English from inside his mist-filled helmet. "I found your pet. It was right here before your door. I am so sorry."
This just wasn't Ben's day.
2
Eos University had a contingent of about a hundred Enamorati- all castes, their mates and progeny included. But beyond the often-seen Kuulo Kuumottoomaa-
kuulo
meant "steward" in their language-the other Enamorati usually remained in their chambers at the aft end of the four-thousand-foot-long ship, where they tended their enormous Engine. The lone Enamorati who stood before Ben's door, however, was not of the Kuulo caste. He was an Avatka, an engineer. And this engineer had a dead bear in his arms.
"It's not mine," Ben said to the Avatka. "I don't have a pet. Sorry."
The Avatka seemed puzzled, but there was no direct way to confirm this from the being's expressionless face. "Forgive me. I assumed that it was yours. It was lying before your door."
