Another World Read online

  A shudder coursed through the floor, shaking Merritt’s bones. The four elderly tourists giggled with delight as glasses rattled and clinked on tabletops.

  As the Halcyon approached the Rip, its top and bottom edges disappeared from the screen, filling the wall with a gray haze.

  Merritt was mesmerized by the sight, unable to blink.

  The lamps in the lounge dimmed. Merritt stood slowly, reverently, his face dancing with purple-green light, as the Halcyon entered the Rip.

  The universe slipped away.

  On the screen in the lounge, all of the stars moved slowly into the distance, pulled toward a single point in the void. They converged on that spot and amassed into a spinning white sphere the apparent size of a golf ball.

  Streaks of light shot past the screen, heading for the sphere, which sucked in the light, and grew.

  It filled the screen from ceiling to floor, gorged on light, then seemed to implode upon itself in a microsecond, plunging the lounge into darkness.

  A spinning dot, like a distant quasar, flickered where the sphere had vanished.

  Something emerged.

  It appeared as an expanding circle of light, shaped like the rings of Saturn, growing from the tiny dot to all points on the horizon.

  The passengers in the lounge gasped as the ring slammed into the side of the ship, causing the wall screen to blind them with a flash of solid white.

  Merritt’s stomach lurched sideways. He looked down at his feet, but he wasn’t moving. Amidst exclamations of shock and excitement, his feet lifted off the floor as the lounge lost gravity.

  He drifted several inches to the side, then gently landed on the floor.

  The image on the screen exploded in a panoply of electric colors, shooting out in lightning-edged bands from a central point, around which they danced furiously. The central point on the screen, the point where the bands of light converged, expanded until it appeared as if the Halcyon were zooming through the inside of an infinite rectangular box, its walls aglow with thick lanes of varying color, vanishing toward the blinding horizon.

  The screen went dark as if it suddenly lost power, and Merritt stood there, blinking in the darkness, his eyes filled with tears.

  STARLINER HALCYON

  When scientists on Earth first detected a quantum anomaly in the Perseus spiral arm of humanity’s own galaxy, ten-thousand light years seemed like an awfully big distance to cover.

  There was no small amount of waffling in the academic community about the nature of the anomaly from the start, causing more university lunch-room brawls than any subject since The Big Bang.

  Yet, over time, one thing became clear: the anomaly emitted a unique quantum signature which, when recreated in a vacuum at the University of Massachusetts, flooded the laboratory with enough radiation that the entire science wing was deemed uninhabitable for the next thousand years.

  The chemical makeup of that radiation matched expectations for the area surrounding the Perseus Anomaly.

  In the brief moments before the laboratory vacuum was purged, the two distant points in space were linked.

  This had been achieved by bombardment of a small mass — in this case, a tennis ball — with supercharged particles emitting the same quantum signature as the Perseus Anomaly.

  Clearly, the next step was to recreate the experiment in space…but where to find the mass? Hoisting the vast islands of garbage from Earth’s oceans into space was improbable and impractical. The moon was too close to home, and housed nearly a million souls besides.

  What were the eager scientists to do?

  Along came Ceres.

  The largest asteroid in the belt boasted a diameter of just under six-hundred miles and orbited the sun between Mars and Jupiter. It would also, the scientists excitedly pointed out, be in the perfect position for quantum bombardment in four years — the estimated time it would take for them to build a machine capable of delivering the supercharged particles.

  The rest is history.

  The scientists built their machine. Ceres was obliterated, leaving behind the Rip —a static tear in the fabric of our solar system which burrows through space to a point in the Perseus spiral arm ten-thousand light years away.

  The journey to Galena from Earth takes six months, provided you have a ship that can handle the Rip’s intense gauntlet of radiation.

  The Halcyon had seen a lot in its ninety years of service.

  Eight journeys through the Rip, countless dinner cruises around Earth in between, not to mention the punishing early years hauling construction materials to the twin cities on the moon as well as to the mining colony on Mars.

  If any ship had earned the right to be decommissioned before it imploded from overuse, it was the Halcyon.

  Yet still it held together; still it suffered the impossible pressures of the Rip and the concentrated bombardment of radiation.

  The tip of its nose entered the Rip, and vanished.

  The first of two expected pulses rippled across the Halcyon’s exterior hull, warping the conjoined plates of its outermost shell in a wave that traveled down its length to the stern before being absorbed by the three modified bell housings of the hybrid antimatter engines.

  More of the ship vanished into the flat surface that was the mouth of the Rip. Though massive in its own right, the Halcyon looked like a sewing needle disappearing into a 300-mile-tall shimmering disc.

  When most of the ship had passed beyond the threshold, its nose emerged from the gray fog on the other side, half a mile away.

  The second pulse traveled down the length of its hull, briefly separating the sleeve of outer plates from the rest of the shell.

  Deep inside the vessel, the lattice network of deflector panels thrummed furiously as they tilted in unison to face the Rip’s edge, repulsing radiation that hadn’t been absorbed by the ship’s outer layers.

  Panel Y-27 vibrated like a struck tuning fork.

  It rattled in its setting, banging against its connecting joints and disrupting its neighbors like a child shaking a chain-link fence.

  One corner exploded, jetting particulate into zero gravity and ripping the panel free of the lattice. It spun in place amidst a cloud of its own material, then caught the magnetic field generated by the network of panels and rode it like a surfboard, gaining speed as it zoomed over the lattice, heading for the back of the vast chamber.

  The lattice curved to follow the innermost shell of the passenger section. Panel Y-27 broke free of the magnetic field and blasted through the next hull like a torpedo.

  WILLIAMS

  On the bridge, the captain stared at a small blinking light on one of the many screens encircling the room. The light indicated a radiation leak in the hull surrounding the passenger section.

  He tapped a series of commands into the control screen on the arm of his chair, forcing the system to verify the anomaly.

  The screen beeped, and the warning light blinked off.

  Williams sighed and settled back into his cushioned chair. He was growing weary of false alarms. The ship’s computer seemed to be riddled with them recently, forcing him to send the crew on wild goose chases for problems which turned out to be nothing.

  He watched the viewscreen as the tail-end of the Halcyon emerged from the far side of the Rip. The engines were out, but that always happened during a passage. A welcoming vibration gently shook his chair, then gradually dissipated, as they kicked back on.

  It did not escape notice that, as the Halcyon passed through the Rip, there were a few moments when a good portion of the vessel was unaccounted for. The ship also reemerged half a mile from where it entered, which made for quite the puzzle — one no scientist on Earth had been able to solve.

  Every year or so a new research paper would emerge from the world of academia, professing to have cracked it, yet was inevitably proved untrue by jealous peers.

  Some said the ship passed through another dimension to arrive in the neighborhood of Galena. Others said it
was torn apart at the molecular level, transported to another spiral arm of the galaxy, then reassembled along with everyone inside.

  The captain shrugged off the disturbing thought and resumed his vigilant watch, happier to remain firmly rooted in reality than to ponder such mysteries.

  Leave that to the scientists, he thought, and leave this ship to me.

  PART TWO

  BEYOND THE RIP

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  MERRITT

  Soyflower grew in tall stalks, like corn. Each stalk produced multiple flowers each harvest — white blooms with thick, fleshy petals radiating from a sticky, bright red pistil. A rigid, brown tassel hung limp from the top of the thick stalk, growing longer as the season progressed. Broad green leaves with the texture of sandpaper hugged the stalk, browning and peeling as the plant aged to be replaced by fresh growth.

  Merritt leaned in close to one of the white blooms and sniffed gently.

  Dirt and mushrooms, he thought, sniffing again. Maybe manure?

  The experience was less than pleasant. He frowned at the thought of an entire field of blooming soyflower. The scent would be overpowering.

  A single, dim safety lamp glowed in the dark recesses of the converted gymnasium’s high ceiling. It cast the long shadows of soyflower stalks across black soil.

  Merritt stood in his designated square patch of soil, admiring the dozen or so chest-high stalks he had managed to coax from their seed pods. All the farmers had managed to grow at least half a dozen stalks of their own, though some were noticeably healthier than others.

  Uda required each of them to formulate their own seeding and irrigation patterns. The bulbs in the halogen lamps hanging from the ceiling had been switched out for ones that approximated the light of Phobis, Galena’s star.

  Merritt walked to Gavin’s patch of soil and had to push aside a broad, scratchy leaf as he entered a dense stand of soyflower stalks. Even though the boy was in a hypergel tank, his crop still thrived. Gavin’s soyflower stalks a head taller than the rest, with thicker stalks that produced nearly twice as many blooms.

  Uda had revealed the reason for this was two-fold. One reason was because the irrigation trenches Gavin had dug with one of his small fingers channeled just the right amount of water to the seeds. The rest of the farmers were sending too much water to the base of the stalks, sogging the roots and stunting their growth. They would still produce under similar circumstances on Galena, said Uda, but the harvest yield would be considerably less.

  Gavin had also packed the soil atop his seeds much more loosely than the other farmers. Soyflower rooted quickly, but the roots were initially weak. If they couldn’t push through Galena’s thick soil, they wouldn’t form the root ball necessary for efficient growth.

  Merritt smiled to himself as he rubbed a finger over the scratchy surface of a stalk leaf. He had been licked by a cat once, as a child, and he vividly remembered the shudder its sandpaper tongue had sent through his small body.

  The door to the gymnasium banged open, startling him. The halogen lamps flicked on, and someone walked briskly across the room, their boots loud on the hard floor.

  Merritt pushed his way out of the dense stand of soyflower stalks to find Uda with her back to him, kneeling down beside one of the harrows she had built for the farmers.

  This improvised version was little more than a square piece of chain-link fencing attached to a narrow beam. Sharp tines protruded from one side of the fence, used to break up soil clods and cover seeds after planting. Two chains were attached to the beam so the contraption could be pulled by a farmer.

  “I thought someone else was in here,” said Uda. “The air smelled different.”

  Merritt sniffed the arm of his coveralls. He thought he didn’t smell particularly worse than usual.

  Uda smiled as she stood up. “That’s not what I meant. I was just checking on some things before heading to stasis.”

  She wore a white T-shirt and faded jeans, along with her perennial hiking boots. Her curly brown hair was down for once, spilling over her shoulders.

  “What about the class?” asked Merritt.

  “I’ve taught you what I know. The rest is up to you and the other colonists.”

  “Don’t you want to see Galena?”

  She hesitated, then said, “I would prefer to sleep now and wake up back home, in Earth orbit.”

  “It’s okay that I’m in here?”

  “As long as you’re not poisoning the other farmers’ crops.” She walked over and stood next to him, at the edge of the small field. “It’s remarkable that they’re still standing, isn’t it?” she asked, nodding toward the stalks.

  “Why wouldn’t they be?” asked Merritt.

  She regarded the plants dreamily.

  “When a ship passes through the Rip…plants feel it. At the heart of this vessel, past all the protective shielding, they feel the radiation. That’s why all the ones in the atrium are dead. Except for the palms. Those are fake.”

  “I haven’t had the chance to ask how you know sign language,” he said.

  “I haven’t exactly given you the opportunity,” she replied. “Two hours a week for classes is about twenty hours too little.” She flashed a brief, melancholy smile. “Leaves no room for chit-chat. But to answer your question, I teach sign language to parents all over the world.”

  “How do you know so much about farming?”

  “That would be courtesy of my other job. I evaluate genetically modified crops in other nations and offer what help I can to sustain their food supply.”

  “How’s it looking out there, in the wide world?”

  Uda hesitated a long time, then said, “Grim.”

  She rubbed a thick soyflower petal between her thumb and forefinger, then turned toward Merritt. “I was rude to you when we first met, and I never apologized.”

  “No time for chit-chat, like you said.”

  “That’s not it,” she admitted. “When I first saw your boy, it forced me to really think about where you’re taking him. It’s no place for families. Not yet. What we really know about Galena could fit on a single sheet of paper, yet there are volumes to be written.”

  “Why are you doing this if you don’t think we should go?”

  “Because you’d go anyway. And if not you, then someone else. I do what I can to prepare you for what lies ahead, but Galena is not what people think.” She peeled a dying leaf from a soyflower stalk and held it up to the light, casting a shadow over her face. “It is as powerful and dangerous as the ocean on our own planet, yet taken for granted just as much. A forty foot wave off the coast of South America looks beautiful from a distance, but for the fisherman in a wooden boat at its peak, that wave means death.” She dropped the leaf and pushed it into the soil with her boot. “To think you could swim the tide after your boat shatters beneath you is hubris of a mythical kind…yet many still try. It’s much the same with colonists. Take childbirth, for example. They think suddenly their reproductive systems will work differently on Galena than they do on Earth. They think it’s the planet’s fault the birthrate is so low. So they pack their bags with false hope and buy a ticket for another world. I’ve seen it before.”

  “Where?”

  Uda opened her mouth to speak, then quickly shut it with an embarrassed smile. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Sometimes I talk too much.”

  She began slowly walking the perimeter of the small field, inspecting the stalks.

  “When did your son lose his speech?” she asked.

  “When he was two,” Merritt answered, walking at her side. “He was just figuring it out and it was taken away.”

  “Meningitis?”

  He nodded.

  “Tell me about him.”

  Merritt looked at her, surprised.

  “If you’d like,” she added.

  Uda stopped to prune two wilting flowers from a stalk before they walked on.

  “Gavin started babbling like crazy at twelve months,” said Mer
ritt, a faint smile touching his lips as he remembered. “I thought he’d speak nonsense forever, but at twenty months he started blurting out full sentences.” He chuckled, caught up in the memory. “My wife and I used to joke that—”

  He cut off suddenly as if he’d been struck, his excitement vanishing in a flash. Merritt swallowed hard and looked down at his trembling hands. He balled them into fists and stuffed them into the pockets of his coveralls.

  “Sometimes I wish I never would have heard his sweet little voice,” he admitted quietly. “Maybe that would have been better. I know that sounds horrible.”

  “Actually,” said Uda, “you’d be surprised how often parents say that.”

  Merritt shook his head slowly. “It was just so…perfect,” he whispered.

  “So now you go to Galena to give him a better life. Merritt, look at me.” He looked into her eyes, and she said, “I hope you find it.”

  His wristpad beeped under the left sleeve of his coveralls.

  “Alder, it’s Willef,” said a muffled, gravelly voice. “Meet me up topside. Time to have words with the captain.”

  “What does he mean by topside?” asked Uda.

  “It’s what he calls the officer’s quarters.” Merritt looked at Gavin’s crop of soyflower stalks. “Do I need to do anything to those since Gavin’s done with the class?” he asked.

  Uda shook her head. “Just let them grow.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  MERRITT

  The small leather pouch bounced against Merritt’s chest under his shirt as he and Willef walked down the long, white hallway leading to the bridge. He unconsciously gave it a squeeze, and tugged on it to feel the cord dig comfortingly into the back of his neck.

  “Worst part of my job,” Willef grumbled next to him.

  He scowled up at the bright lights in the ceiling, squinting and blinking like a hibernating animal seeing the sun for the first time all season.

  “A man’s a fool if he deals with fools,” he spouted.