It took only a week to destroy Banner’s little world. Sophie was gone so quickly that he didn’t even get to say goodbye. He returned after a day spent packing and shifting stuff around to find a glowering young marine living next to him. Dude was always banging into things, shaking the stall with loud curses, singing along with the 3Xper music he favored, and farting loudly—when he wasn’t masturbating furiously, slapping the end of his bad thing against the thin wall of the partition.Camus disappeared the same time Sophie did. Banner didn’t know if the cat could survive full gravity on Earth but maybe the French had some way to resolve that problem. He couldn’t message her because it was now treasonous to communicate with anyone belonging to one of the other sides. Maybe he didn’t want to know anyway.
He spent a few days showing bored young soldiers how to polish knobs, change lights, and unplug the head. The International Space Station was literally being taken apart around them as the Russians prepared to move their part into another orbit. One day he was given fifteen minutes to pack his kit and then shipped unceremoniously back to Earth where he was immediately handed his pink slip. Only old Stubbsie stayed behind, muttering under his breath about the new recruits and slinging “shit on a shingle” like the pro that he was.
On the ground Banner drifted forlornly back to his home in Brown County, Indiana where he discovered that he was something of a local hero. He rented a small apartment in the village of Nashville, spending a few weeks collecting unemployment, drinking beer, and catching up with old friends. When he was offered a job teaching at the high school he didn’t say no and soon after started dating a woman he’d known most of his life, Annabeth Crunkle, a sales technician for Barnacle Bill the Realtor’s local office.
ØØØ
Novy Mir moved to an orbit on the other side of the world from the recently renamed ISS—once again called Freedom. The Russians worked doggedly, as was their style, while new alliances were forged on the planet below. Modules were quickly added, scavenged from hangers, museums, and monuments throughout the old USSR. Others were whanged together on the fly from the upper stages of booster rockets. If things occasionally decompressed, or quit working, you improvised, by god! Outer space wasn’t for pansies.
With nowhere else to turn the French joined with the Russians and, surprisingly, the Japanese. The three nations collaborated first on building a moonbase, Tsiolkovsky/jVerne/Itogawa (AKA TjVI or Tj6), taking advantage of the Russian’s share of the Lunar north pole and its hidden reserves of water.
As Europe’s leading expert in controlled ecological life support systems, Sophie Täuber was deeply involved in planning the spaceship from its inception. She routinely flew from Paris to Star City in Russia, then to French Guiana by way of Japan, where she boarded a rocket directly to jVerne, on the Moon. Nearby, in the Russian quarter, the hull of the spaceship was being manufactured. It looked hauntingly like a Soviet-era submarine.
Their conservative Russian partners had rejected her first design, where the cosmonauts would live within a park-like setting. She was forced to confine her efforts to a large bay up front where the plant life would consist mostly of tanks of algae soaking up the crew’s excess carbon dioxide. This biomass would then be pressed into yummy, artificially flavored briquettes, both nutritious and full of fiber. As compensation she was allowed a small, compact garden to supply just enough variety in their diet to prevent them all from going completely bugfuck, as the Americans liked to say.
She had to be careful about using Americanisms like “bugfuck” around her French colleagues, who were highly suspicious of her ties with NASA as it was. In contrast, the Japanese still loved all things American and the Russians just laughed when reminded of their former partners, as they would at the antics of their favorite circus clown, or an ape. In contrast, the French were taking it personally.
She also learned that she was expected to raise chickens and maybe even a few pigs and goats for the crew. She sighed, “The things I’ll do for science.”
ØØØ
Soon after returning to Earth she took a weekend off to drive up to the Vosges Mountains of Alsace.
“Why aren’t you married?” Her mother asked as they stood together in the yard of her uncle’s winery where their clan gathered every year for its reunion. It was a mild afternoon, a fresh breeze playfully blowing at the skirt of her sunny yellow dress, just enough to keep the lads interested. Her shoulders were bare, protected from the sun by the shade of a wide brimmed hat. As they talked she watched the children playing on the lawn around small parental islands.
“My career . . .”
“Your career!” Mama Täuber mocked. “Aren’t there any nice boys in astrology?”
“Astro-aeronautics, Mother. Of course there are. I just haven’t the time right now.”
“I don’t want to die without grandchildren.”
“What about René’s and Charlotte’s children?”
“Ach,” she snorted. “They never visit their grandmother.”
“There’s Charlotte right there,” she hurriedly motioned her sister over. They hugged. The sisters were very similar except that Charlotte’s eyes were lightly colored and her brown hair was long and swept back.
“You looked like you needed rescuing.”
“Mother’s trying to get me married again.”
“Stranger things have happened,” Charlotte laughed, reaching affectionately over to their mother.
In her wake came the twins and her husband André. He had once been Sophie’s lover, in fact she had been the one to introduce him to her sister.
“How’s the outer space thing going?” André asked after a quick hug.
“I can’t say too much about it,” she shrugged apologetically. “The government literally thinks of it as a war.”
André laughed, “Politicians are crazy.”
Sophie nodded agreeably.
ØØØ
The wind was cool and stiff coming off the mountainside as the kids were finishing off their salt water taffy. Sophie pulled her sweater around her shoulders.
“It’s all the darkies’ fault!” Her mother bitterly groaned. They had been arguing for a long time and the older woman was pulling out all stops, like a prune tree at a wholesale auction. “Those Arab bastards! For once we should listen to the Germans.”
“I wouldn’t put it exactly like that,” André cautioned. “After all, we invited them in to do our dirty work, but still . . . they’re different from us.”
“They have their traditions,” agreed Charlotte. “They may be as valid as ours but the two don’t mix.”
“Look at the way they treat their women,” said Mama Täuber. “They think of us as prostitutes!” She spit on the ground with contempt.
Her children looked at one another, wondering what that was all about.
“We’ve been in conflict with them for over a thousand years,” André added, the scent of antiseptic about him. “How many times must they invade us before we put an end to the argument?”
“I can’t believe I’m hearing this,” Sophie gasped.
André shook his head at her naiveté. “No one wants to see it happen this way but once the oil is gone—before they can get any more nuclear bombs—they must be dealt with. Mark my words: it’s Tours all over again, but this time for keeps. It has to be.”
Sophie didn’t know what to say so she said nothing and soon the conversation drifted back to children and old friends and their old friends’ children, but she remained disturbed for a long time after.
ØØØ
The evening sun glowered like the red eye of Osiris over the waters of Lake Monroe as Banner and Annabeth lifted their canoe out of the water, carrying it the short distance to her Toyota Trailseeker. As they secured it to the rack on top Banner had little to say. They had covered a good deal of the east end of the lake, gone into what felt like a hundred inlets, seen a thousand houses, heard several dozen barking dogs, and found a few areas that hadn’t yet been improved by the bulldozers. They’d had sex in the woods in one of them, later finding ticks in a few unlikely places, then swam in the drinking water for 250 thousand people and peed in it, to be frank. Now he was sunburned, a little lightheaded, and needed a beer.
But first they drove to the old ghost town of Elkinsville, depopulated in the previous century by the Army Corps of Engineers while they built the Monroe Reservoir. They parked the ’Seeker by the road and hiked up Browning Hill where several friends had set up shop at the Miller Memorial campgrounds. A cooling breeze whooshed through the trees as they climbed the hill. He hoped it didn’t mean rain. The day’s long slide into evening shadow having just begun.
“Whassup?” Smitty asked as they arrived at the camp. He was sitting on a large worn log with a banjo on his knee.
“Beer,” was all that Banner replied while opening the cooler. “Meadowbrook, Miller, or Footfall Light, m’dear?”
“Footfall.”
“‘Aw-Natch-uh-lee!™’” he said, mimicking the ad.
“Whatever. Where is everybody?”
“They went with Lia to look at the ruins,” Smitty said while giving the banjo a plunk.
“And you . . .”
“I’ve seen ‘em. They don’t look like ruins to me.”
“It’s still weird, though.”
“Yeah, well, maybe.”
“You don’t think the ancient Celts set themselves up a little Stonehenge up here?”
“I don’t think the Celts set up Stonehenge at all.”
“Um,” Banner muttered uncertainly.
“But flying saucers are another matter,” Smitty said standing up. “If we’re going to look for them I’d better take some reinforcements.” He started sticking beer cans in every available pocket.
“Reinforce me, too,” Banner said.
Ten minutes later they had reached the site. Large stone blocks lay like cordwood stacked by a mad hatter. No one knew how they got there but there were plenty of ideas. Some thought the Native-Americans had cut them out of the soil, as a place to honor the Eternal Spirit of the Land, even if that wasn’t exactly their style. Others thought that the formations were natural, first exposed by the glaciers’ retreat. Others believed they were quarried by the first Anglo settlers and then forgotten. And some imagined things stranger still—of a lost tribe of Celts or Vikings or little green men.
In the deepening twilight Banner didn’t care. It seemed mysterious and spiritual and that’s all that mattered. His sudden hug caught Annabeth by surprise. She looked to him questioningly.
ØØØ
It was fiendishly hot as Dr. Christain Monelly moved from chauffeured limousine to air-conditioned building and back again. Since returning from the International Space Station Monelly had been deeply involved in building a coalition out of the debris of the old European Space Agency. It was not an easy task since many of the primary facilities had gone with the French and the Russians. EURO-NOL, the union of the German Cultural Alliance with the Northern League (Scandinavia and the Baltic States), did not even have its own launch facility.
Which is why he was in the Democratic Republic of the Congo dicking with the locals. The equator was the best place of all to launch space vehicles and the Germans had maintained a small launch facility here briefly in the late-1970s before the onset of the great Congo wars devastated the area. Numerous militias and armies still controlled much of the Congo River watershed. He was there to shore up the Congo government without alarming its opposition.
To accomplish this he’d brought along Arne Sak as his Regulator. An Icelander, military expert, and true son of the Vikings Sak was tough, unflinching, and, when necessary, brutal—perfect for Christain’s needs.
Truly it saddened him when he was forced to use violence but he’d learned long ago that it was better to give than to receive. Arne was his gift to anyone who stood in his way.
He met with Sak at dusk in a small construction shack on the spaceport’s south side, amongst piles of material hastily unloaded from the huge oceangoing vessels that docked here 24/7, as the goddamned Americans would say. Christain was alone but Sak traveled with a small entourage that he left sweating outside in the evening heat.
“Arne, what have you got for me?” Sak gratefully took the beer that he offered.
“It’s just as you said,” he replied. “The hardest part is separating the dross from the bullshit, as they said in college.”
“I didn’t know you had cattle in Iceland.”
“We don’t. I went to school in Berkeley.”
“Ah. Plenty of bullshit there!”
“We’ve secured everything here in the Congo estuary,” Arne resumed. “River traffic is being restricted to the far bank. The Fourth Corps is taking care of that and they’ve blown up a few locals to prove we’re serious.”
“And the government?”
“Well, Nzuzi wants to use all his new weaponry but we've convinced him to follow our strategy.”
“And that strategy is? . . .”
“Carrot and stick. We’ll leave his rivals alone as long as they stay up river. There’s going to be fighting, sure, we just need to hold it far enough away from the spaceport to keep our investors from getting nervous. The perimeter is being watched by six different kinds of systems, not to mention mined, electrified, and systematically irradiated. If necessary we can create a dead zone around us to the horizon. But that’s a last resort.”
Christain grunted. “A delicate balance.”
Sak grinned. “Old Nzuzi has plenty of rivals in his own party to keep him occupied, hell, in his own family. We can pull the string on him at any time.”
Christain nodded, satisfied. “Good work.”
“If our business is done . . .” Sak walked over to the door and opened it, letting in a wave of thick, hot air. “Send them in.”
“What’s this?” Christain frowned. After a moment the ebony face of a girl appeared as she hesitantly climbed the steps into the trailer, two more girls following. “Benu kota ya benu,” Sak encouraged them inside.
“What is this, Arne?” Christian watched the young girls shyly clinging to one another as they entered the room. He realized that they were thirteen or fourteen at the oldest.
“It’s hard to find clean girls in this part of the world,” Sak answered matter-of-factly. “The younger you can buy them the better. These girls’ families are Christian, they raised them right. I’ve had them tested every which way and they’re not only clean but possibly virgin.”
Christain looked at him mutely.
“Which one do you want first?” Sak finally asked him laconically.
Christain looked at the three girls for a moment before standing up and walking towards them. “For god’s sake, Arne, they’re terrified. Get them something to drink. Please,” he said beckoning to them. “Sit down.”
“Beu,” Sak motioned. “Beu vwanda ya benu.”
Still holding to one another the girls shyly crossed the room to the couch. Monelly handed them each a soft drink. They giggled as the carbonated bubbles tickled their noses. “That’s better,” said Christain sitting on the edge of the couch, his hand softly touching the nearest girl’s knee.
“What’s this?” he asked, pulling a coin from behind her ear. She reacted with astonishment as he handed it to her, showing off her prize to the others, who laughed excitedly. For the next half-hour he amused them with parlor tricks and other childish games. He even managed to get Sak involved as the diversions became progressively more intimate. Finally he maneuvered them into the back room where the engineers kept a few small hard cots.
“What will happen to the girls?” Christain asked later after they were escorted out.
“We’ll sell them back to their families, at a discount of course,” Sak grimaced without concern. “If they don’t want them Whoretown can always use new girls.”
“You will try their families first?”
“Of course,” Sak answered gravely.
“Yes. Well, I must go now. There’s still work. Thank you for this evening, Commander. I want to meet with you again before I leave.” He hesitated. “Maybe you can delay returning the taller girl, Kath, I think she said her name is . . .”
Sak gave a sort of bow. “I’m sure she would enjoy being our guest for a while longer.”
“Thank you.” With that Monelly entered the soggy night air.
ØØØ
Group Captain Henry Ireton of His Majesty’s Royal Space Force felt like smacking his head against the wall. Sometimes he thought it would be easier to work with the French and Russians or even, God forbid, the Germans, rather than the Americans. Everything he did had to be vetted by seventeen committees and rewritten into a sort of gobbledygook to satisfy NASA and a hundred other agencies, some of them dating back to the Wright Brothers, he was sure of it. Still, they were seeing some progress. The plans for the so-called “Yankee Clipper” were firming up rapidly. Some of the raw material was already being boosted into space.
The project would have been unimaginable ten years before when even nearby Mars had been out of reach. The irony is that they had had the technology for decades but not the political will. Vast amounts of money had been pissed away on war technology with little to show. Modern warfare was ridiculous, either total extermination or indeterminate conflicts that could last decades and cost trillions of dollars and millions of lives. John Kennedy had been right all along. Space was the only substitute for war, a place where nations could compete safely, and where the effort would pay back many times more than all the gold the Spanish had squeezed out of the New World. Essential metals like copper, platinum, zinc, gallium, hafnium, and even elements like helium were severely depleted on Earth. If another source could be found within the solar system—and why not since it was made out of the same stuff as Earth—the race would be on.
It was also a matter of national security. Whatever was inside Charon could change the power balance on Earth forever. God forbid that anyone else got there first.
Inside JPL in Pasadena the plans for the Clipper were coming along nicely. It was hard to believe that they were building a ship large enough to carry twelve people, with room unimaginable to pioneers like Glenn, Armstrong, and Gagarin. Even compared to the ISS it was extravagant. The Americans were throwing their latest technology at it, a lightweight carbon frame, aerogel interior walls, and smart technology everywhere.
Of course the atomic powerplant would be tremendous, with enough power to run a city. It was already under construction at Camp Armstrong near the Moon’s north pole. Its uranium core was being launched in small, nearly indestructible packages, from a floating pad in the Pacific, a place where nary a terrorist, reporter, or protester could reach without having US Navy gunboats up their ass.
It was the ion-drive that would give them the edge, providing them a small but significant acceleration all the way to Uranus’s orbit nearly two billion miles out where they would flip the ship over and begin slowing down again. The engineers were confident in their design; after all, it wouldn’t do to flame out four billion miles from home.
The Germans were said to be working along similar lines but he didn’t see how they could possibly catch up. Their Moon facilities were small and they had no orbital platform. The Russian, French, and Japanese cartel certainly had the expertise to build an ion-drive but was rumored to be taking a more brute force approach. The Chinese—who in the hell knew what the Chinese were up to? They had been an x-factor ever since beating the Americans back to the Moon. Certainly they knew how to make an ion-drive but could they develop one quickly enough?
Well, he didn’t have time to worry about that. His secretary had left another stack of resumes to go through. He had to narrow it down to a hundred or so people who were qualified to go on this mission and then the real whittling would begin. Really, the problem wasn’t skill, they all had skill. The problem was compatibility. Which of them could stand to live for a decade or more in what amounted to a very small jail, closer than family, with no way out if the inmates couldn’t get along?
Each file contained an evaluation from Dr. Ashlee Monelly’s psychology task force broken down to a simple formula. But even these numbers had to fit together like some sociological Humpty Dumpty.
Sipping from a cold cup of coffee he went back to work.
ØØØ
Moon city lights could be seen from Earth, especially showboat towns like jVerne and Oberth. Banner and Annabeth sat gazing upward in the darkness above Browning Hill. Most of their friends were asleep or bumping uglies in their tents. Her head rested on his chest as they pointed out favorite stars and constellations in the sky above them. The flatworm-shaped Milky Way glowed wanly as it crossed the dark sky. Banner absently stroked her hair.
“You miss it, don’t you?”
Banner sighed. “God, I don’t know. It’s so beautiful tonight. The air is clean and there’s a cool breeze. And I got my best girl. In space there usually isn’t much to look at and you can smell a fart for weeks.”
“Sounds like your classroom.”
“Yah . . .” He sighed again. “When I was a kid I read a lot of science fiction.”
“I remember. You were one of the nerds.”
Banner laughed. “Naw, I was never ornery enough.” He sighed, “I always wanted to be out there, somewhere. Now I’ve been out there and the irony . . .”
“A nerdy word.”
“. . . is, is that out there you’re always crowded inside a small room with a bunch of people. There’s not much space in outer space.”
He rested his hand on her chest, above her heart, thumb tickling her chin.
“Hmm,” she smiled like a contented cat, closing her eyes. Banner continued watching the night sky as it moved about his head.
“I love you, sweet girl,” he finally said, but she was asleep.
ØØØ
When the news came Banner almost missed it. He was in the middle of moving from his apartment into Annabeth’s house outside Needmore and the envelope looked like a pre-approved credit card come-on at first. But when he saw the return address his breath caught and he had to sit down, even though there was only the floor left to sit on. It was a simple message, for all it asked of him, and at first he didn’t know what to do. Then he made a telephone call.
Annabeth took his halting explanation calmly, considering what he told her. He didn’t even bother unpacking his boxes, taking them over to his parent’s garage to store. He left her that night.
Sex sad is the sweetest kind.
.
.
More links!
Osiris:
Ancient Egyptian Creation Myth
Osiris And The Golden Pipe (UFO)
The Light of Isis and Osiris
Browning Hill:
Browning Hill Stonehedge2
Wright Brothers:
XKCD
Milky Way:
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