Farewell, Earth's Bliss

by D.G. Compton

Genres: Science Fiction; Alien Contact; Dystopian; Genetic Engineering

Synopsis

On board an obsolete ship, nine weeks out from home, the latest batch of colonists arrive at their destination. A grim penal settlement in a wilderness worlds away from the homes they will never see again. TASMANIA? BOTANY BAY? No. For this is tomorrow, not yesterday. The dumping ground for social outcasts and political deportees is Mars, barren, unproductive, but invaluable as a convict settlement. What kind of welcome will the twenty-four deportees receive when the reception party from the Settlement reaches their stranded ship? And how will they survive in a primitive environment, an alien system?

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 185

Sample

For the last nine weeks and three days—the duration of the flight to date—Jacob had believed himself to be as good as dead. Nothing. His life ended. Not that he would have claimed, if pressed, that his had been much of a life even before sentence. But if his life had been nothing in those days, how much less than nothing was it now? Accordingly for the last nine weeks and three days he had, in his life that was nothing, done nothing. Nothing at all. Absolutely nothing. Nothing that is except routine. Nothing except his rising at seven, his washing and shaving, his bowel motions, his three meals a day at their appointed times and his retiring at twenty-two thirty.

If asked about his routine he would have said it was all that had kept him sane. If asked about being sane he would have admitted that of course he wasn’t. If asked about not being sane he would have pointed out that at least he hadn’t screamed and broken things. (Which some of them had come down to before the tranquillised food began to take effect). So at least he was saner than many.

He closed the door to the sleeping quarters behind him. Something was happening to him. He seemed to be emerging from the end of a long tunnel. It frightened him. He removed his spectacles and at once the world was gentle and overlapping and blurred. He tried the old game of imagining where he might be.

He had always been able to escape here, where movement was unaccountable and magical, where shapes merged and splintered one into another, where everything came in terms of colour. Reds that blued towards the edges. Greens that got smaller as he stared at them. Smaller and smaller. He might be anywhere. At an ancient fairground. In a yellow and purple forest. Watching brown waves with black boats upon them. He might be anywhere.

But the old trick failed him. His eyes offered him magic, a long shifting perspective of blues and browns and blacks, with an occasional shaft of silver. His other senses offered him truth. The weightlessness. The nine-and-a-half-week-old atmosphere, processed, reprocessed, and re-reprocessed. The murmur like unhappy children of twenty-three other drugged people in a lounge meant for eight The sense of a trap, of a brittle tin shell that was all that kept them recognisable. The trite fear in the crowd of the solitude.

He replaced his glasses and the blurs became people. People sitting. With hardly a movement the whole length of the restful grey lounge with the restful green end wall, and the polished ship’s clock, twenty-four hour. And painted above the door to the forward food store in unsuitably Gothic lettering:

Fifty-seven days hath September,April, June, and November.All the rest have fifty-eight,Save poor February’s fate,Having fifty-three days clear,And fifty-two in each Leap Year.

The verse that had been for nine weeks and three days in some obscure way a comfort to him, was now hardly significant. Nobody on board, had any real idea, how the people up in the settlement would have organised their six-hundred-and-eighty-seven-day year. It was Isaac who had thought up this variation on the traditional date mnemonic. Isaac who had lettered it in black on the end wall of the lounge, and Jacob who had believed in it.

Neither of these men was Jewish. Their names, like those of everyone else on board had been chosen at random from the Bible by the Sentencing Committee. It was intended that they should preserve anonymity and help the new start that deportation was going to give. There was even a Habakuk. The ancient words gave to the flight an apocalyptic splendour it otherwise lacked.

Jacob was frightened. The tunnel was slipping away behind him. He tried to pull it up round him like bed-clothes, but it kept on going. The lights were bright and he felt quite naked. For the first time since the flight began he was going to have to make up his mind what to do. The old ways were not forgotten, but simply no longer possible. Down the gangway to the right Mark looked up from a game of chess and waved to him. He did not wave back. He was involved in the process of making judgements. The forcible feeding he had witnessed—it had been Mark’s idea. So had a lot of other necessary things. He supposed Mark was what they called a born leader. The man with whom Mark was playing chess was Joshua. When he wasn’t too drugged Joshua was the man who drew pictures. Jacob decided he would like to have a look at the pictures some time.

He hesitated by the door. Then he realised that he was available to be stared at and sat down quickly in the first empty seat he found. He had never sat there before. It was one of a pair, and it placed him next to a young woman. He had no identity for her and peered at her sideways, wondering if she had been one of the kickers and screamers. Some of them had actually tried to beat holes in the walls of the space craft. As soon as they had been released from their g-couches they had begun to make all that fuss. He had watched them as part of the general unreality and they had not worried him. Now he could only shudder at the memory.

“Soon be lunchtime,” said the woman.

Nobody spoke to him. He didn’t like being spoken to. He didn’t reply, but struggled to connect the woman’s face with something he remembered. They had all looked so very much the same.

“You’re feeling better,” she said.

She had no right.

“I was afraid you’d never snap out of it.”

Why had she been afraid? She smiled at him. Why was snapping out of things always supposed to be such a good thing?

“I’m Martha,” she said.

She turned to face him more squarely. Convention stirred.

“Jacob,” he said, barely audible.

“That’s cute,” she said. “I guess they made you leave your coat back there on Earth.”

“That’s Joseph.”

“I meant your coat of many colours, honey.”

“I know what you meant. Joseph had the coat. Jacob had the ladder.”

She stared at him.

“You’re feeling much better,” she said.

What was “feeling better”? It was a matter of mental routine, of avoiding the morally false position of ducking out of life. A mental routine that he thought he denied. Yet he was happy to call his three meals respectively breakfast, lunch and supper when they all came under pressure out of plastic containers and were all more or less indistinguishable. A physical routine he understood almost too well—perhaps there was something to be said for a mental routine too.

“That sign,” Martha said, finding something to talk about, “the days in November and all that crap. I saw you reading it.”

Of course he had read it. He always read it. Every time he came into the lounge. Every day for nine and a half weeks.

“I reckon it’s stupid,” she said. “What’ll they want with a calendar anyway? Months and all that—I mean, who the hell cares?”

“Vital,” he said. “Absolutely vital.”

He tried to remember how vital it had been. He wished she didn’t have to be American. He could never avoid remembering how they’d been. He began to explain to her about the notice.

“Shape,” he said. “Wherever you are you need shape. Even a life sentence needs shape. You know,” he said, “… shape.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I see what you mean.”

But she didn’t.

“I get up at seven,” he said. “When do you get up?”

“You know something? I don’t have the faintest idea. Up here, I mean, who cares? When I’m busting for a pee, I reckon.”

Shape. Everybody needed it. He tried again.

“How about going to bed, then?”

Suddenly he saw what her answer would be and that he was wasting his time. He said it for her.

“When you’re tired, I suppose.”

“I’m sorry if I’m a disappointment to you.”

“Nonsense. You’re very lucky.” And he meant it.

She was his first human contact in nine weeks and three days, and he didn’t want to let her go. He who had needed no contacts, he didn’t want to let her go. Yet he could find nothing else to talk about.

“The year up there has 686.98 days,” he said. “Did you know that? With a Leap Year every tenth year there’s still going to be .02 of a day unaccounted for.”

“You got me worried, Jacob. Know that?”

He missed her sarcasm.

“Then of course,” he said, “their day’s slightly longer than ours. Thirty-seven minutes and 22.6 seconds longer. Perhaps we can slow our watches down enough to cope.”

“You’ve got a way with figures, Jacob. What were you in private life then? Teacher, maybe?”

“In private life” … It was a charming phrase, giving the impression that deportation was no more than an extreme form of National Conscription. Nevertheless it froze Jacob’s soul. He’d been nothing. He’d been nothing and had nothing. His climax has been deportation, a move from nothing into nothing. Why did she have to remind him?

She changed the subject. Perhaps she noticed the nothing in his eyes.

“Anyway,” she said, “all this time business, it’s only what they call relative. Our time, their time … I reckon our time is their time. Or if it isn’t it will be just as soon as we bloody get there.”

Another aspect of reality was shown him. There were people who believed that they’d get there. There were people who thought in positive terms, in terms of what would or would not happen, in terms of life and death. Getting there would be such-and-such. Not getting there would be a different such-and-such. He didn’t think so. He stared back down his tunnel in which they were all dead. He suddenly found her conversation eerie and got up and walked away.

From handhold to handhold, sliding his feet, he made his way along to the far end of the lounge. The people he passed were away in the usual non-thought that passed the time better than anything else. He was making for the seat that he realised with a warming of his heart was his seat. It was on its own, where the hull of the space craft began to narrow. Everybody knew it was his seat. He was going to sit in it.

A few feet away from the seat he stopped. There was someone else sitting in it. His eyes moved slowly up from the feet to the head. The man smiled in mock encouragement. Jacob recognised his face as one that had been in all the illustrated papers. He looked up at the big clock—there were forty-seven minutes left till lunch. For that time he had to have somewhere to sit. Somewhere safe. He had to have somewhere to sit. He stood motionless in the gangway, angry, undecided, afraid.

 

Although she had showed it in no way at all, Ruth had been perfectly aware of the little negro as he passed her. Behind her heavy, empty eyes her mind was intensely active. The drugs in everything she ate or drank were put there to control the nausea normally induced by weightlessness. Also to pass the time. This latter effect she fought off continually, so that it touched no more than the surface of her mind, slowing her movements and making the long weeks of physical inactivity acceptable. It imposed no more than a film of passivity, a glaze through which she could observe, and behind which she could retreat to consider. The purpose of her considering was always to relate the present experience to what she remembered of her past and what she expected of her future.

Ruth expected a lot other future. Life was life, unique and exquisite. The exercise of her humanity was precious to her. Even in the Settlement there would be opportunity, there would be pain and pleasure, the expression of her God-given individuality. She had no precise idea of what she was going to. The Commandant back on Earth had been vague—from genuine ignorance, she thought. He had in fact not told any of them anything that they did not already know from the government pamphlet. The Settlement had been established twelve years before, since when more than two hundred people had been sent to it. The living was not easy, the disciplines coming from the rigours of the climate rather than from warders or political advisors of which there were none.

Ruth found the prospect encouraging. A hard life was not necessarily a bad one. And anything would be better than this hellish journey. Conditions wouldn’t be too shocking—obviously inspectors would have been sent out from time to time. She thought a more taxing regimen than anything available on Earth would suit her temperament very well indeed.

There would be work. Sleeping and waking. There would be books. The sun would rise and set. Clouds and some small vegetation. Human companionship. The range of life did not have to be vast for it to be worth living.

Human companionship. What would this group of more than two hundred deportees be like? Certainly not convicts like in Australia all those years ago. A different sort of person altogether. Political offenders mainly, and the disrespecters of corporation property. Plus a sprinkling of sexual deviates and the odd murderer who valued his own personality too much to submit to curative leucotomy. The deportees would be a group of people who had been found inacceptable to a society that they in their turn did not accept. Ruth was one of these. It seemed a thoroughly hopeful basis.

She had observed her twenty-three companions on the flight very carefully. She was careful to draw no conclusions. The conditions under which they had been thrown together were so climactic that little more than crude stress behaviour could be expected. Those who had taken refuge in hysteria were obviously less useful in times of crisis than the others. This however did not make them less interesting at other times, or less valuable socially. Life on the Settlement would be hard, but she doubted if a state of crisis there would be permanent. It seemed to her that people could adjust to any new level and then settle down again.

Any attempt to assess her companions seriously was made even more difficult by their permanently drugged condition. Various of them had fought against this. Hunger strike had been attempted for a short time by a small group some five weeks earlier, but it was a pointless gesture and they soon gave it up. Without the drugs their empty stomachs merely vomited so continually as to be actively anti-social. Now everybody dutifully ate and drank what was provided in the special squeezy containers, and waited, half dead, till they should arrive at their destination.

Isaac sat beside her, nodding in his seat. She was tempted to wake him up just for someone to talk to. Jacob walked past. She saw that he was on his way to his usual seat, and that for the first time on the flight the seat was occupied. She knew the man who was in Jacob’s seat If he was who she thought he was, Jacob couldn’t win. In different ways she felt sorry for them both, Jacob and Simon

 

Mark also had his eye on Jacob. The playing of chess was an enormous mental strain—it was seldom possible to make more than three or four intelligent moves each before complete mental fag-out set in. His opponent, Joshua, had obviously reached this state already. He had “adjusted” almost every piece on the board twice and now had his queen in his hand, committed to move her but without the slightest idea as to where. Mark knew where, but he wasn’t telling.

Early on in the flight Mark had made a small black list. Five people who had been considered to be potential menaces. Jacob with his Wretched little introspections was one of them. The man they had to pretend was called Simon was another. If Mark had not assiduously remembered his own notions of fair play he’d have put Simon out of the refuse hatch weeks ago. As soon as he’d been completely sure who the man was, in fact. In private life, Simon had been known as Thornton Clare.

And now Jacob and he were in direct confrontation. Mark removed his mind from the chess and groped around in it for what should be done.

The time could hardly be worse, or the circumstances of the meeting more unfortunate. It was the last hour before lunch, when people were at their raggiest. The breakfast foods seemed to be more lightly doped than the other—no doubt to give everybody’s innards a chance to get going. Certainly the daily traffic to the bogs reached its peak between ten thirty and eleven. Another thing that worried Mark was. . .