Forbidden World

by Ted White, David Bischoff

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Humorous Fantasy

Synopsis

An ideal agrarian community run by women and ruled by love and harmony. A city-state that mirrored history's most famous utopian vision. a society aglow with the wit and style that only Regency England had briefly achieved. All were real, all were flourishing. All were waiting to astound and entrap four space voyagers from Earth who had violated all odds by landing on this unknown planet.

Release date: June 24, 2013

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 221

Sample

The ship came out of macro-space into nothing but trouble. A ten-gram whisper of superconductive metal had inexplicably crystallized, and the control unit had shot an erratic directive to the power-core. Emergency controls had taken over then and kicked the ship out into ordinary space. Twenty nanoseconds later the power module was on a divergent course of its own, and the ship had already begun to break up.

Vana, Elton, Aaron, and Chaimon knew nothing of this. Sealed neatly in their individual entropic chambers, they slept the Sleep of the Long Moment that was intended to carry them across the stars as colonists to a new world. They were supercargo, transshipped in one of two thousand identical modules, each carrying its freight of four young, intelligent, physically fit, unmarried would-be colonists. The ship itself consisted of these two thousand modules plus the dozen that provided for the needs of the crew, the power, and the control center.

The ship had been bumped out of macro-space because it could not maintain speed without the power module, and without speed could not keep itself in that alternative to ordinary space where the speed of light was no longer a limiting factor. The ship broke up into its component modules, for without power it was a derelict, but each module could on its own become an individually powered lifeship. Each module’s four inhabitants would go on sleeping the Sleep of the Long Moment, unknowing, uncaring, until the time when that particular module surfaced upon a planet its detectors showed to have a humanly livable environment and a spacefaring technology. Each module carried an inertial speed of just under light-speed, imparted to it by the original mother ship, Each module could maintain this speed indefinitely, and would until such a planet was sighted and the course suitably altered to reach it. Each module took a separate, unique tangent to the ship’s original course. They scattered in all directions, some—hopefully—to find a haven of safety.

The sleeping inhabitants of the lifeship modules—the “freight”—were lucky. They chanced survival. The ship’s crew were not. Caught as they were in those brief semiseconds after the alarm sounded, most of the crew found their narrow passageways dividing into the dark night of space. A few, in the self-sealing control and crew-quarters modules, would be spared an instant death. They, instead, would live out the remainder of their lives in the immense void of ordinary space, waiting and hoping that somehow they might happen across a suitable planet for landing within their meager lifetimes. The journey of a single day in macro-space is one of centuries in ordinary space. Those crewmen envied their brothers who had not been within a module when the ship had emerged into ordinary space.

Vana, Elton, Aaron, and Chaimon were in Module 770. Crewman Dyker was in the passageway formed by one side of Module 770, in tandem with Module 771. Crewman Dyker was considered a rare item by his brothers, because he always followed the Code. The Code said to wear your spacegear when out in the passageways and not safely within a module. Crewman Dyker, alone of all the crew routinely patrolling the passageways, was wearing his spacegear. For that reason he outlived the others by forty hours.

The instant the signal came through, his gear responded. His helmet erected itself and closed him within a self-sufficient environment. His hand, at that moment on one of the handbraces of Module 770, automatically locked into place. He was aware of a jerk that wrenched at his sanity, and then that he was clinging to the side of a minuscule capsule in the black enormity of space. Staring wildly around him, he saw the pinpricks of light that were the other modules scattering out to lose themselves among the stars. He pulled himself up against the lifeship module, and felt his suit clamp itself magnetically against its side. He had no idea of what had happened, and no way of knowing. He knew only that an emergency had occurred, that the ship had broken up into its component modules in response to that emergency, and that he, Crewman Dyker, was the only member of the crew who had been prepared to survive that emergency because he had always and without exception followed the Code.

Of course, the Code could not prepare him for what was to happen next.

The lifeship, responding to favorable data, had gone into a long, parabolic orbit which would swing it close by the third planet of the local star system. Because of its original position on the periphery of the starship, it alone had been flung into this immediate star system while the other modules overshot it and passed heedlessly by.

The lifeship made its calculations while still light-hours out, and began expending its available power on deceleration. It did not have a great deal of margin to play with; it made use of the gravity wells of the two most convenient of the outer frozen giants in the system to slow itself. For Crewman Dyker, the experience was very close to that of his worst nightmares. Crewman Dyker was an unimaginative man as a rule; it must be said of him that he rarely dreamed vivid dreams, and his imagination had come into play only rarely, in his worst nightmares.

He survived the sudden swelling of the two methane-banded disks to planets that filled his sky by the simple expedient of screwing his eyes tight shut, and somehow neither he nor the lifeship fell into either one.

But when the lifeship made its first dip into the banshee scream of the third planet’s molecule-thin upper atmosphere, he realized his mistake. He was on the outside of the module. And this time they were going down.

Crewman Dyker was not given to many brave acts, nor was his last one brave. Trembling, he triggered the release of the locking mechanisms which had held him against the lifeship’s side and began to grope for the next handhold forward. His only thought was to get inside. His last moment of awareness was that in which he was swept free of the module by the impact of hydrogen atoms at several thousands of kilometers an hour. Hands outstretched in reflexive supplication, he fell back behind the ship.

Soon afterward, he was a brightly glowing cinder.

Aaron woke to the sounds of an argument.

He listened for a few moments without moving, trying to make sense out of it. The voices were strangely distant. All he could get from it was that two men were cursing each other. It didn’t seem quite the right omen for the colonizing of a new world.

“Are you all right?” a female’s voice asked in his ear.

He started at the sound, opened his eyes, and saw a woman’s face peering closely into his. Not a pretty face, certainly, but striking after its own fashion. He fitted face to name, summoning vestigial memories from before the single dream of the Sleep of the Long Moment The girl with the tight helmet of short straight hair, bright brass like an ancient battle helmet: Vana. He moistened his lips with his tongue. “Yes,” he said.

The sharp planes of her face reshaped themselves, softening.

“That’s good,” she said. “You had me worried. You took so long, coming out.”

“I was listening,” he said. It seemed an adequate explanation, to him.

“I’m surprised they signed you on,” she said. “A little guy like you.”

He sat up, feeling the chamber’s hydrobed flow under him.

“I have my talents,” he said. “They’ll be able to use me.”

“Not right now,” she contradicted. “Not for now.”

He took stock of their surroundings then: the tight, cramped quarters of the module, their four entropic chambers—long bunklike cylinders surrounded by the life-support equipment—Vana sitting on the open lip of the chamber opposite. He could still hear the voices of two men rising and falling in anger, but the module was otherwise empty. Then he took in the open door of the bulkhead, the door they’d sealed on lift-off somewhere long ago and far away, open now and aslant with thick yellow sunshine. He took a deep breath and then another, savoring the rich air and the subtle smells of growth and life that existed somewhere not far beyond that door. He grinned.

“We’re here, huh?” he said, passing over Vana’s cryptic statement for the nonce.

“No,” she said. “We’re not.”

And then she explained to him what little the lifeship module’s instruments could tell them: the approximate location of the star system in which they’d made planetfall, and their approximate position on the world it had picked for them.

“We’re on the main continent of the southern hemisphere,” she said, “and not more than two thousand kilometers from where we should be. According to the instruments, radiation indicating operative space-drive power-cores exists almost two thousand kilometers due east of here.”

“Two thousand kilometers …” he said. He looked up at her sharply. “A bad landing window, I take it.”

She gave the rest to him then: the fact that the starship had been verging on the system when it broke up; that none of the other lifeship modules had been favorably situated by trajectory to take advantage of it. What she didn’t have to tell him, because he apprehended it quite readily, was the simple fact that so abrupt a deceleration from near light-speed was enormously power consuming, and they were lucky to have been landed safely at all.

When she was finished, she added, “I must say you’ve taken it more calmly than I expected.”

He shrugged. “I’ve gotten used to taking what life deals me. So we’re on the wrong planet. So we’re alive and in good health, I take it.”

“We are alive,” Vana said.

Aaron’s gaze strayed again to the heavy sunlight at the door. “The other two?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Chaimon—the tall, thin one?—did not take the news well. Elton took him out into the air. They’ve been having some sort of argument ever since.”

Aaron nodded. “I see.” He stretched his arms and yawned. “I’ve had enough of these crowded quarters myself. Let’s join them.”

The lifeship module rested in a gentle meadow shelved against the wooded slope of a low mountain. The sky was the color of old glass, a queer translucence across which low clouds of dirty yellow moved slowly. The sun was a heavy disk of bright copper at least twice the apparent diameter of Sol viewed from Earth. Its light, filtered through the sky, reminded Aaron of ancient manuscripts and dusty rooms. The thought was followed by a stab of nostalgia, which deepened into a pang of homesickness. But I knew I’d never be going back, he told himself sternly.

Perhaps it was only a trick of the light, but the grass and the trees beyond had a reddish cast when he didn’t look directly at them. Downslope, the land plunged sharply, and far below a landscape spread out toward the hazy horizon, dotted with random patterns of forest and grassland. A winding ribbon of gray caught and bounced back the burnished sunlight at one point in its course. It seemed a totally desolate place, subtly alien and unpleasant. Aaron shook himself. There are people here, somewhere. All we have to do is find them. It seemed an impossible task. He turned his mind to the more immediate problem.

“No,” the tall, thin man with the long dark hair was saying. “Why should I?”

“Look, Chaimon,” Vana said, her voice soothing. “You were tested and found fit to be a colonist. Surely you can rise to meet this situation.”

“Too abstract,” Elton said.

Elton was of average height but unaverage thickness: He resembled a barrel, his head settled almost directly upon his massive shoulders and topped by rusty hair worn in the current fad for ringlets. Give him a toga … Aaron thought fleetingly.

“Look, Chaimon, it really doesn’t matter what you expected, what you wanted. You’re here, got it? You want to survive, you want to see your Ellanie again, you got to get over this fit of yours. Kicking the ground won’t change things. We’re here now, and that’s it.”

Elton filled Aaron in. Chaimon had made an agreement with a girl in one of the other modules. They’d met during the testing and, despite rules, they’d formed some sort of relationship. From Chaimon’s point of view it had been a simple arrangement: When they reached Frederick 201, the world they were to colonize, the two of them would “discover” each other again, form a legal alliance, and happily live out their days as noble pioneers together.

Now that could never happen. Chaimon’s beloved Ellanie was in another module—there was no telling which one—and almost certainly destined to survive, if she and her module survived at all, in another lifetime. The odds that he would ever see her again were too slim to be rationally considered.

Chaimon was not being rational about it, but he appeared to accept the odds. They had brought him to the edge of despair, where he know hovered, awaiting only the final push.

The four of them were two thousand kilometers from this planet’s sole spaceport, and an unknown distance from any other populated areas. They had only the life-stores of the module—intended for use for only a brief duration—and their wits to fall back upon. If the four of them pulled together, they might make it. If they fell apart now, they probably would not. Thus the immediate problem: help Chaimon back from the edge and organize them all into a viable group. Aaron sighed. Well, that was his job.

“Chaimon,” he said, kneeling beside the man.

Chaimon sat feeing down the slope, legs loosely sprawled in the grass before him, his eyes locked glassily upon the horizon. Elton combined a shrug and a grunt eloquently, and turned away. Vana hovered behind them, nervously.

“Chaimon,” Aaron repeated quietly, “do you know who I am?”

Chaimon spoke grudgingly. “You’re Aaron.”

“You remember me?”

“From the Testing Center? Yes.”

“That’s good.”

He’d been afraid, when Chaimon had stopped his emotional outburst against fate and his companions and had flopped in sullen silence on the grass, that the man was withdrawing from the entire unpleasant situation. He reminded himself that Chaimon had been tested, and must have greater shock resiliency than that.

“Tell me, Chaimon, when did you meet Ellanie?”

Chaimon turned his head then, to fix Aaron with his flat dull gaze. “Are you an official?” he asked.

“Would it matter?” Aaron countered. “Here?”

Chaimon returned his stare to the horizon. “No,” he said. “I guess not.”

“Tell me about Ellanie, how you met her,” Aaron suggested.

Behind him, he heard Vana choke back a sharp word. He wished she’d follow Elton’s example and go somewhere else. He knew what she was thinking—that he was a fool to keep harping upon the girl—and he could only hope she would keep such thought to herself.

“I met her …” Chaimon said, stumblingly, “in the rec area, the first night.… We played a game of bocci. She won.”

“Did she?” said Aaron. “And you continued to see each other during the free periods?”

“Yes.”

“How many nights?”

Chaimon made an impatient movement with his shoulders. “Every night.”

“For the duration of the testing program, then,” Aaron said. “How many nights was that?”

“All of them,” Chaimon returned, shortly.

“Yes,” Aaron said, still gently, “I see. From the first night of testing until you were put into the Sleep of the Long Moment and transshipped. How many nights, Chaimon?”

Chaimon turned his head again and his eyes seemed troubled, as though the realization of what Aaron meant was lurking somewhere not far behind them.

“Seven … seven nights,” he said slowly.

“Seven nights,” Aaron said in agreement “A lifetime can occur in seven nights. Was it that way for you?”

Chaimon did not reply.

“How many hours each night were you able to spend together?”

Chaimon remained silent until Aaron was about to speak again. Then he began speaking in a very low voice, so that Aaron had to lean forward to catch his words:

“An hour or two. Three at the most.”

“You did not find much privacy, I should guess.”

“No. None.”

“You didn’t sleep together?”

Chaimon’s pale skin reddened. “No. I told you—we had no privacy.”

“But you did enjoy that special bliss that comes to two people in love …” Aaron probed. “That bliss that creates its own zone of … special privacy?”

Chaimon did not answer.

“You pledged to meet on Frederick 201 and marry?”

Again, no answer. The flush had not gone away, but had deepened, traveling down Chaimon’s neck.

“What was her module number, do you recall?” Aaron asked.

“I don’t remember.”

“You did know it, though?”

“I don’t … she didn’t … give it … to me.”

“But you were two young people in love!” Aaron protested.

Chaimon hung his head.

Aaron leaned out and put his hand under Chaimon’s chin, lifting the thin man’s head and turning it until their eyes met and locked.

“A sad deceit, Chaimon,” he said. “Why prolong it?”

Chaimon’s eyes dropped. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Of course you do, my friend. But it means nothing here. You do not need it. You can face up openly. We are all comrades in disaster. Come, now—tell me the truth.”

Aaron had let his hand fall and Chaimon’s face turned away once more.

“Shall I tell you, then?” Aaron said softly. When the other remained silent, he did so: “You met the girl—that I believe. You spent your evenings with her—that also is true, is it not? Yes. But you made no pledges to one another. You never spoke of it, in fact. But perhaps you dreamed of it?”

Chaimon shuddered, a deep convulsion that traveled his whole body.

“Yes,” he said. “I dreamed of her in the Sleep of the Long Moment. I fell in love with her then.”

“Ahhh, I see,” Aaron said.

And he did. He had thought the man was acting out a fantasy on his disappointment over a lost opportunity. He had made the assumption that Chaimon had projected his anticipated wooing of the girl into a postdated fact—that Chaimon grieved, in fact, because he had lost his chance to pursue her. It made a more acceptable tragedy to have won and lost her than never to have won her at all.

But there was also the matter of the Sleep of the Long Moment No one had yet isolated the responsible factor—perhaps the chemicals injected into the sleeper; perhaps a metabolic reaction to the state of hibernation with its attendant slowdown of the body functions—but a sleeper knew only a single moment, a single episode of dream, between the moment he was put to sleep and the moment he awoke. The length of time he spent suspended in the Sleep of the Long Moment did not seem to matter; the subjective length of the dream was always the same and seemed to fill the entire length of the sleep. It was Aaron’s private opinion that the dream occurred only in a few flash moments at the beginning of the sleep, before that part of the brain suspended its operations, perhaps to be restimulated as the sleeper returned to normal wakefulness. But he’d formed that opinion before he had himself slept the Sleep of the Long Moment; now he was less certain.

The dream of a sleeper was unlike most dreams a man might know. This too was a recognized but unexplained fact: the dream was of unusual intensity and concerned itself with that emotional aspect of his life most important to the sleeper. Indeed, there had been abuse of the Sleep of the Long Moment when this was first discovered—illicit places set up to provide dreams to sleepers who came to receive their injections and go into the Sleep for a single day, waking at the end of that day to return to their normal lives. As a vice which offered easy escape, it seemed ideal. The only drawback was discovered after the illicit Sleep Parlors had been in operation for several years: the frequent slowing and restoring of a human metabolism worked directly counter to the purpose for which the sleep had originally been invented—it induced rapid aging. A man might safely use the sleep as often as once a year, but addicts who used it daily were far more common. After only a few months or a year, their young lives were largely spent. And yet they returned for another opportunity to dream …

If Chaimon had dreamed of the girl he had met, that alone might have been enough, Aaron reckoned, to send him into a frenzy when he awoke to find himsel. . .