Search for the Sun

by Colin Kapp

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Hard Science Fiction

Synopsis

1st NEL 1982 edition 1st printing paperback, vg++ In stock shipped from our UK warehouse

Release date: January 1, 1982

Publisher: NEL

Print pages: 200

Sample

AS HE moved towards the broad concourse of Hyper-Travel Terminal 211-80-D, many eyes turned in his direction. No one knew him, but many were subconsciously impressed by his physique, by the ease of his movements, and by his engaging ugliness. Had the vast hall been quieter, they might have noticed something even more exceptional about Maq Ancor: he walked as silently as a cat.

Though youthful, his strong face was puckered with a thousand tiny lines, each seeming to reflect an aspect of some considerable intellect. These same lines bestowed on his features an almost animal quality, which, coupled with the mane of red hair which flared over the collar of his cloak, had earned him a legendary nickname. His friends and his enemies – and he had plenty of both – were wont to call him ‘the Lion’. In this they overpraised an extinct beast, for Maq Ancor was more deadly than any creature which had ever lived.

His progress through the various barriers of officialdom was relatively swift. The cost of travelling two hundred and twenty million miles by exospheric liner was a sum more than most men could earn in a lifetime, and therefore traffic on his own flight had been relatively light. People who could afford to make such a journey were normally those with vast resources. The Lion was an exception. His resources were only his skills and his weapons. As an unfrocked master assassin with a staggering price on his head, he was not only unemployed, but dangerously unemployable. Or so he had thought.

His ticket to this destination had arrived together with a set of forged identity documents and other items, and more money than he could have earned in ten years. Its donor was so anonymous that Maq had undertaken the journey nearly a quarter of the way round Mars shell without ever knowing the identity of his patron. His only clue was a pass-book to every item in the Solarian Circus currently playing in the region two-eleven eighty.

At the control barrier his identity documents were submitted to the Identifile scanner for verification. Ancor waited for the completion of the process with every outward sign of calm: inwardly, however, he was poised like an animal ready to spring. The documents were forgeries of such perfection that it was difficult to believe they had not been minted by the Solarian Identifile complex itself. But should they fail to pass the computerised scrutiny, Maq was fully prepared to shoot his way out of the terminal.

Shortly the documents came back sealed in the red wrapper of acceptance, and Ancor allowed himself to relax a little. The guards and officials round him never knew how close they had been to sudden death. The examining officer cleared all the paperwork with an air of finality, and appeared to be about to make comment on the high level of armaments carried by one who otherwise had virtually no luggage. Something he read in the lion-face of this formidable visitor, however, made him change his mind, and he opened the barrier instead.

Ancor’s route out of the multi-mode travel complex now led him across the main floor of the vast concourse, and here he found it relatively crowded. Long queues were threading towards the vast Spoke-shuttle installation, and there was no eager expectation on the travellers’ faces. This was a compulsory emigration centre, and the passenger shuttles only ever went one way – outwards. In order to relieve the crushing pressures caused by an ever increasing population even on a landmass as unimaginably large as that of the Mars shell, it was necessary continuously to siphon off a proportion of the people and divert them ever away to where new worlds and new shells were still being created by terraforming. In these wan and tearful queues were those for whom this principle had become the nightmare of reality.

The whole thing was arranged with scrupulous fairness by a computerised lottery which chose those who must emigrate, and which was far beyond any possibility of being manipulated. But the sense of fairness was not reflected in the faces of those torn from their friends and families. Fate – or rather Zeus, the population control computer complex – had dealt their lives a massive blow which most of them seemed to equate with a sentence of death rather than the opportunity for a new and freer life.

The journey would cost them nothing, but it was strictly a one-way ticket. The emigrants’ unwillingness to participate was emphasised by the presence of armed guards, who patiently marshalled the frightened and sad-eyed queues, but the imperative necessity for such an operation was underscored by the cybernetic man-seeker engines, controlled directly by Zeus, which patrolled unobtrusively in the background yet were completely deadly in the face of any overt dissension or revolt.

Maq’s face hardened as ten thousand envious eyes watched him walking freely away from the terminal. He had taken his own chance in the lottery, and received an irrevocable exemption. None the less he could appreciate the sense of helpless despair in those being herded towards the vast metal maw of the shuttle loading bay. In front of them lay a future they could neither anticipate nor imagine. He wondered suddenly if he was any more sure about what the future held for himself.

By coincidence and at roughly the same time but far overhead, another man was also bound for the Solarian Circus, and was finding his own brand of difficulties about the route. Below him now, Cherry could plainly see the massive sprawl of the circus – mile upon mile of promenade garlanded with necklaces of coloured lights, and with the great opal orbs of the exhibition halls scattered like pearls in a box of brilliant jewels. To the north of the glittering complex, a ring of bright markers outlined the limits of the landing pads, and beckoned his descending craft towards its appointed bay. The very clarity of the scene made Cherry suddenly suspicious. The last time the Solarian Circus had made touchdown he had successfully deceived his rival holo-illusionist, Castor, into attempting to land in a reservoir. Was it now that the trick was being returned ?

Having played on this same area of Fed-region two-eleven eighty before, details of the area’s navigation beacons were still in Cherry’s flight computer. He called them forth to obtain co-ordinates with which to compare his apparent position, and found the actual location of the circus was nearly two hundred miles to the east. This meant that the grand display beneath him, so convincing from the air, was nothing but a stretch of mudflats and the sea.

Cherry hastily checked his descent and keyed a new heading. The change in the engine note brought his assistant, Carli, out from her cabin to investigate.

‘What the hell you fooling at, Cherry? Tez and I have fifty tonnes of projection equipment to unload before we make bed tonight.’

‘You’d need a submarine rather than a hover-pallet if you tried unloading down there.’ Cherry directed her attention to the bright panorama. ‘That’s a full ten fathoms of very muddy water.’

‘That?’ She gazed incredulously at the detailed circus scene. Even the little jaunting cars which plied the two hundred square miles of the circus complex could be seen in motion along the promenades; and as they watched, the folds of the great fabric of the 3-D Danse Palace were beginning their reluctant assumption of shape.

‘One of Castor’s scabby terrain holograms.’ Cherry’s voice was scathing. ‘Wouldn’t fool an infant.’

‘Well, it would have fooled me,’ said Carli, unabashed.

Tez, Cherry’s projectionist, came up out of the hold to join them. The view brought him a note of admiration.

‘That’s quite some illusion, Cherry! Luminance balance a bit weak, and some phase-banding from cross-interference between projectors – but what a scale!’

‘There’s no technique there we haven’t already used to better effect,’ said Cherry disgustedly. ‘He’s just done it bigger, that’s all.’

Carli sniffed. ‘Don’t recall you ever producing a two-hundred square mile projection, Cherry. Two hundred square yards is about your limit.’

‘It’s the quality not the size which counts, you disbelieving hag! Castor knows it. The rest of Mars shell knows it. So why the hell don’t you know it?’

‘Because I know you for the crummy fake you really are.’ Carli ducked the set of navigation indices which Cherry hurled at her, then returned in a more serious mood. ‘Tell you another thing, Cherry. If you and Castor don’t quit fooling with holo-illusions in public places, someone’s going to get hurt.’

WITH A true sense of drama, Cherry always chose to give his presentation dressed in a plain white toga and operating from a simple dais in the centre of a bubble hall of neutral grey. This circular arrangement considerably complicated the projection methods, but having mastered his techniques through the years, Cherry knew his presentation was considerably in advance of those of his rivals. Even Carli’s introduction was deliberately restrained, and calculated to give the impression that this was to be a very ordinary illusion show. Cherry maintained that such understatements heightened the contrast between his own technical achievements and the works of those like Castor who promised miracles yet produced only the mundane.

As Cherry made his entrance to a modest electronic fanfare he was already studying his audience, quickly identifying several minor illusionists who would be trying to crib points of technique. The majority of the seats were filled with patrons merely hungry for excitement and who had probably hesitated between his own show and the Mind Daunting Passions of the Twelve Foot Amazons on the one side and The Ice Maidens Cometh on the other.

There was only one figure Cherry could not place. This was one who, incredibly, being fully two-thirds life-support machine and only one-third man, had entered on precise and silent wheels to rest between the most expensive ‘inner circle’ seats with a couple of members of a bodyguard or retinue on each side. Despite the man’s fantastic disability, his intelligent brow, strong jawline and shattering gaze hinted at some daunting superiority, and the engineering of his body-carriage proclaimed him to be one of vastly more than average wealth. Whoever the fellow was, it was mainly towards him that Cherry directed his bow.

‘Friends … tonight I take you on a fantastic journey – a journey reaching through to the innermost secrets of the Solarian universe, to visit regions beyond the range of human experience. Imagine, if you will, that the circle which forms the floor of this hall is an observation platform – a vessel uniquely mobile in all possible dimensions. It is to be our vehicle for a trip through domains so fantastic that even reality is superseded.’

With a dramatic gesture he pointed his wand at Carli. A great spark flared, and before the astonished eyes of his audience the still-smiling girl became the centre of a great pillar of fire so faithfully projected that it was difficult not to flinch away from the assumed heat. Somewhere a woman screamed as Carli, at the centre of the twisting flame, seemed to melt and begin to drip away like an overheated effigy of wax. Then the flames leaped hungrily higher towards the roof and appeared to ignite the grey translucence of the dome. The cold conflagration ran swiftly across the roof and down the walls to create the illusion that the whole bubble-hall had been consumed by fire, leaving a greatly impressed audience convinced that they were looking straight out at the sparkling panorama of the surrounding Solarian Circus.

To quieten the mild panic which his dramatic opening had evoked, Cherry’s voice came calmly from the dais.

‘Lo, I, Cherry, bring you illusions more real than reality itself!’

All that visibly remained of the original hall was the circle of white concrete on which the seats were arranged. Now even this appeared to free itself from the ground; and the circus lights, the bustling promenades, and the great exhibition halls fell below in an illusion of swift ascent. Soon the white tablet of the floor adopted an apparently meteoric pace and was heading through the atmosphere, bound for the vacuum of Aster-space.

Swiftly the amazed viewers found themselves high above the surface of Mars shell, soon passing through the great belt of orbiting nuclear-reactor proto-stars called luminaries which heated and lit the surface of the shell, passing one so close that everyone in the audience flinched, imagining that they were about to be fried by its fiery breath. Then the tablet slowed and for a moment appeared poised and immobile, then with a delicious sense of impending disaster, it began to fall back towards the surface of the shell from which it had risen.

Fear of the apparently impending crash sent a little shiver of anticipation through the audience. Many of them sat with clenched fists as they experienced all the visual sensations of hurtling groundward at several thousand miles an hour. There was barely time to resolve the details of the crowded townships beneath before they had ‘crashed’ into the shell itself and were enjoying a welcome period of dark relief before experiencing the sudden returning swoop of light as they broke through the several thousand miles thickness of the Mars shell. Then they zoomed, mazed with vertigo, away from the crowded complexes of the shell’s inner surface and up into Aries-space, headed for the ‘centre’ of the universe.

In all this it must be admitted that the form of these latter images was drawn mainly from Cherry’s imagination, and that the illustrations were a careful selection of holoscenes captured in other places and at other times. The effect, however, was as convincing as human ingenuity could devise, having regard for the almost total lack of information as to what the centre of the Solarian universe might actually be like.

They traversed Aries-space at a truly heart-stopping pace, flinging themselves into the luminary belt with complete abandon, and were soon descending towards the Earth shell at a velocity which defied belief. Another period of quiet darkness as the Earth shell was penetrated, coupled with the exquisite tension of not knowing precisely when the penetration would be complete. So, with a shock more welcome for its unexpectedness, they soared away from the inner regions of the Earth shell and climbed breathlessly across Terraven-space, headed for the Venus shell.

A similar pattern was repeated for the Venus shell, but now the tension in the audience was visibly rising. Beyond the Venus shell was Hermes-space, leading, so it was said, to the shell and cageworlds of Mercury orbit. Beyond the Mercury shell lay … what? Cherry’s scenario painted a great black singularity, a remorseless maw which sucked into its terrifyingly voracious trap anything careless enough to enter its domain – including sightseers on a holo-trip. And what lay beyond the singularity? As they were all to be seemingly drawn into this hole to end all holes, Cherry was gratified to hear even some of the male members of the audience begin to whimper.

His descriptive monologue faltered in full flood when he thought his eyes detected at the back of the hall a fleeting silhouette alarmingly like his rival, Castor. Having meticulously built his climax, however, Cherry dared not break the tension by signalling his alarm to Tez in the projection room. With considerable presence of mind the holo-illusionist forced his voice to retain its tone of rising crescendo, yet the quaver which rose in his throat was not entirely the product of the illusion that the tablet of the floor on which they rode was irrevocably trapped by the gravitational attraction of a voracious singularity.

So realistic was the accompanying projection that he knew every member of his audience was mentally bracing himself for the moment when the great radiationless event horizon was breached and they discovered what was contained in the forbidden regions beyond. Knowing Castor’s potential for dressing his spite in theatrical garb, Cherry, too, was pierced by a broad shaft of apprehension at the thought of what might happen when the great black orb seemingly swallowed them alive.

Seconds later he found out. As the wave of perfect blackness engulfed them, so a great cyclone draught of freezing air blasted through the interior of the bubble-hall, chilling them all dramatically. At the same instant the power supply failed, and whereas the projectors should now have been picking up with hologram images of Cherry’s idea of ‘otherspace’, the darkness remained absolute.

Nor was this all: from the sensation in his eardrums which caused him to swallow frantically, Cherry decided that the cold air injection was being made at a pressure far above that of the atmosphere. Had he intended to introduce physical effects to heighten the illusion, Cherry could scarcely have achieved it more realistically. The trouble was, he had not designed the situation, nor was it under his control.

A woman began to scream with hysteria, seeding an infectious panic which swelled alarmingly as the members of the audience, convinced that something was dramatically out of hand, began to fight their way through the darkness to find the exits. Sweating with apprehension even in the chill atmosphere, Cherry knew their worst moments were still to come. The doors of the bubble-hall opened inwards and had been carefully counterbalanced against normal air pressure. With the rapidly rising pressure inside the hall, there was little chance of the doors being opened without the use of crowbars. Cherry also knew and feared how the impasse would be resolved.

He clung desperately to his lecture console, fighting off the dark melee whenever it pressed too close, and waiting for the final blow from the hand of Nemesis. Then it happened: the great bubble-hall, its fabric stressed beyond all reasonable endurance, burst with a sound like the unwinding of the universe. The sudden fall in air pressure was acutely painful to the ears, but it was a pain made welcome by the sudden influx of circus lights as the fabric dome flared open and fell on the startled crowds on t. . .