The Lost Worlds of Cronus

by Colin Kapp

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

Synopsis

Mercury Shell, Venus Shell, Earth, Mars, Asteroid, Jupiter, Saturn. Each shell concentric, studded with artificial planets, each planet embedded in its shell, spinning like a ball-bearing. The whole Zeus-created in the service of Man but now beyond his control. Now mathematics and space physics, converging, suggested another shell, its existence hidden from Man. A shell of utter darkness, cold and silence where only extreme mutants could survive. To find that shell, the three were journeying again: Maq Ancor, Master Assassin, Magician Cherry and Sine Anura, Mistress of the Erotic. Together, daring the all-seeing, all-sensing hostility of Zeus.

Release date: December 21, 2012

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 170

Sample

BY MARCH the situation had become critical for the Children of the Spectrum. The stresses caused by the horrific overcrowding in all the major cities had developed into a mass neurosis, and civilisation on the Jupiter shell was seemingly near collapse. Crime was epidemic, suicides and murders were occurring at an unprecedented rate, and almost any inflammatory or emotive occurrence could trigger a spontaneous riot. Even Mikh, the ‘shadowy messiah’, when addressing a revival meeting of a mere five hundred thousand in the Lipiant Stadium, found himself the unwilling originator of a battle between the faithful and the unconvinced which became a gory bloodbath. For no reason in any way associated with the message of peace and hope which he had brought, the vast bowl of the stadium had become a cauldron of fear and frenzy, in which the members of the congregation had reacted according to the hysterical mode of the times and had fought each other with irrational bitterness and anger.

The blaze of the riot in the stadium, however, had not remained confined to its location. It spread out into the streets and tunnels of the Lipiant mega-conurbation, crossed the shadowy political and social demarcation lines, and sparked a running battle which lasted ten days and in which over three thousand people died. Unwilling to take action against one of the most passivating of the social influences, the civil authorities were nonetheless forced to move. The ‘shadowy messiah’ was forbidden ever again to preach in public, and the Children of the Spectrum were advised to maintain a low profile for fear of catalysing even more serious riots. This was the kiss of death for the Spectral Church, but Mikh was forced to agree. As a humanitarian, his mission to spread the word of the Holy Spectrum could not be reconciled with three thousand deaths laid directly at his door.

‘Humanity,’ he said sadly to Mea afterwards, ‘has gone insane.’

‘You can’t blame yourself, Messiah,’ she said. ‘Human beings were never designed to live so closely together. Everyone needs solitude and a little chance for reflection. But here we live like rats, too many in a cage. All of us are too easily infected by the fears and emotions of those who jostle at our sides.’

‘I fear you’re right, little rainbow Mea. As I understand it, the Solarian universe was designed around an average headcount of ten thousand people to the square mile. Yet Jupiter shell probably has twice this as an average, and major cities such as Lipiant exceed it by many times. But I don’t know the answer to it. Since the emigration program slowed down, we have had far too many people competing for far too little space. Mankind is choking itself to death.’

‘What will you do now, Messiah?’

‘I think that as I can’t minister here any longer, I will do what I always promised myself to do one day – take that one final pilgrimage in search of Heaven.’

‘Into space?’ Mea’s face was darkened by puzzlement.

‘Why not? Our patron, Cadren Shilden, has offered me an exospheric ship, and his daughter Tseina presses me to let her be my pilot.’

‘But nobody really knows what lies out in space.’

‘They tell that our shell of Jupiter is surrounded by an even greater shell called Saturn. If Heaven is located anywhere, it must be there. Shilden reckons his ship could reach it in a year.’

‘But exospheric ships were not designed to go into space, nor can they carry fuel for a year.’

‘They were designed to run so high above the shell that the atmosphere is nearly a vacuum, and space itself is not that different. As for fuel, once the ship reaches a sufficient velocity and escapes from the gravity of the Jupiter shell, the engines can be switched off. The craft will then coast to its destination, reserving a little power for landing.’

‘But such a risk!’

Mikh’s calm and mature face crinkled into a soft, comprehending smile.

‘Far less of a risk than if I should walk into the central square of Lipiant today and attempt to spread the word. So what have I to lose? And even in Heaven I might still find those who will listen to me.’

‘If you are going, Messiah, then I am coming too.’

‘You think you are with child, little rainbow Mea.’

‘What good is it to bear a child in a place where there are already too many people? And my husband would come too.’

‘If you are serious, it could be arranged. With Tseina Shilden, that would make the four of us, which is all the craft could carry, allowing for the necessity to take provisions for at least a year.’

‘Then we may come?’

‘If your husband agrees, you may. But whilst you talk with him, remember this: we merely go in search of Heaven – nothing guarantees that we shall find it.’

The incredible voyage seemed ill-fated from the start. The Osian had been built as an exospheric liner with a nominal range of a million miles, and formerly did service ferrying up to fifty passengers on parts of the three thousand million miles of the Jupiter shell’s equatorial route. It was the oldest of Cadren Shilden’s exospheric fleet, and its engines had become so inefficient over the passing years that even under Tseina Shilden’s skilled hands they used an uncomfortable amount of their total fuel just achieving escape velocity and building up the necessary speed for their space passage. Furthermore, in its conversion from an exospheric craft to a space-going vessel, insufficient experience had been available to set an optimum design for its new role. The hydroponic garden, which occupied all of the former passenger accommodation, and which was intended to provide supplementary food as well as reinforcing the recycled atmosphere, soon became infected with a fungoid blight which reduced its usefulness for both purposes.

Nor had the crew fully reckoned with the psychological effects of prolonged spaceflight. Having been brought up under the bright orbiting luminary proto-stars which lit and nurtured the face of the Jupiter shell, they had imagined that all space itself was bright. When they had risen above the level of the luminary belt, and encountered the utter darkness of Cronus-space, however, the Children of the Spectrum were smitten with a great depression at the thought of the long months ahead completely deprived of the illumination which gave their cause its most obvious expression.

They had discounted even boredom, reckoning that prayer and instruction at the feet of their beloved ‘shadowy messiah’ would be sufficient to fill their time; but after two months of dark and virtually silent flight in an atmosphere becoming increasingly foul and starved of oxygen, even Mikh became bad tempered and morose and given to having hallucinations. The others began to avoid each other’s company lest in a sudden flare of tempers they betrayed their growing lack of faith both in their master and their mission.

Tseina Shilden became the most withdrawn of all. As an exospheric pilot, she alone had known of the near impossibility of making such a trip, and had come solely out of a sense of duty to Mikh and in response to entreaties by her father, who had donated the craft believing he was serving some purpose pre-ordained in Heaven. If Tseina had any hope for their survival it stemmed only from her belief that Mikh could call on miracles; and as she daily monitored the slow fall in the available oxygen level and saw the progress of the blight in the hydroponic garden, she began to know with a dreadful certainty that only a miracle could save them. The next great shell of Solaria was supposed to be that of Saturn, four hundred million miles distant and a years’ flight at their present velocity. Tseina’s oxygen figures told her quite positively that after a mere six months of flight they would all be dead.

After five months of travelling, the others knew the fact as well as Tseina, from the increasing lethargy of their bodies and the increasing frequency of the frightful dreams and visions. Although they attempted to interpret these with religious understanding, they were not fundamentally deceived: they knew they were dying, and that the great pilgrimage to Heaven was woefully ill-conceived.

Yet the miracle happened. The Osian’s long-range radar began to pick up indications of some great space mass where no great mass could conceivably be. From the uniformity of the radar reflections Tseina judged it could be nothing less than one of the great concentric shells of the Solarian universe, but it was impossible that this could be the Saturn shell, which was thought to be at least twice the distance away. Yet here, now becoming clear on the screens and only thirty-two million miles distant, was an object the size of a shell yet so unknown that even the wildest theorists had not predicted its existence.

Despite their tribulations with the atmosphere, their spirits rose immensely, and for the next three weeks they daily gathered before the screen and watched the index markers counting down the miles. But there was still an element of uncertainty. The dark mass they were approaching had no lights, no luminaries, no sign that it was anything other than the inside wall of a bare and hollow ball, devoid of features and devoid of life. Only in one spot could any difference be discerned, and this, at first a pin-prick which grew to become an ‘eye’, was the most marvellous sight they could ever remember seeing. It could be nothing but an aperture leading to one of the legendary ‘cageworlds’ set into the thickness of the shell itself, and the leakage of heat and radiation from the mouth of the aperture told its own glad story – the cageworld had luminaries, and where there were luminaries there were prospects for life.

As they came within scanner range of the inside face of the great shell it became increasingly obvious that it was truly featureless and sterile, and only in the volcano-like outcropping of the aperture leading to the cageworld was there evidence of even a hint of an atmosphere. There was no question of choice about their destination: they had to go through the aperture and land on the cageworld – and hope. Mikh’s prayers that they were coming into Heaven were pious and unnecessary; they were all prepared to settle for something less than celestial perfection if they could make a safe landing and breathe real air again and walk under the rays of a benevolent luminary. The search for Heaven had changed into a search for continued life, and the basic human desire for survival overwhelmed their more spiritual thoughts.

It took all of Tseina’s skills to bring the craft down safely through the aperture to the cageworld’s surface. The cageworld was separated from the shell by an interspace about a thousand miles across, which was racked with great turbulences and pressure differences which seized the Osian and flung it violently out of control. Perilously short of fuel, and fighting the disaster which threatened to rob them of survival at so late a stage, she valiantly brought the craft down into the stratosphere where the turbulence was less, but only at the expense of overheating the hull by the friction of too fast an entry into the denser atmosphere. Indeed, she was fortunate to be able to retain enough of the control surfaces to be able to make the final atmospheric touch-down, and as they landed much of the weakened metal crumbled and became useless. It was certain that the Osian would never rise again.

Fearfully, they sampled the air, and found it thin but deliciously breatheable. Then they looked out of the now crazed and clouded ports, and were smitten with a great and dreadful awe as they saw the alien and barbarously primeval place to which they had so strangely come. And it was here that Mea’s first child was born, and several others later. In fact, with the passing of much time, all human life on this lost world of Cronus was ultimately descended from Mea and her husband and Tseina Shilden and the one they called the shadowy messiah.

ALONGSIDE AJKAVIT University on Mars shell stood the Centre for Solarian Studies, an impressive building of a shape and form which proclaimed the very high regard with which its services were held. Students even from the farside of the Mars shell often travelled four hundred million miles to study there, on journeys which despite the swiftness of exospheric flight could easily take a year to complete. The reason for this degree of dedication was easy to understand: the Centre for Solarian Studies at Ajkavit was absolutely unique.

In the vast foyer, in the centre of a slowly ascending spiral ramp, stood one mighty model depicting all that was known and much that was thought about the structure of the Solarian universe. Centrally in the display a minute but brilliant orb represented the central sun, and this was entirely surrounded by a transparent sphere to indicate the innermost gravitational shell of the universe, the Mercury shell. Concentric about this and growing larger in succession were the shells of Venus, Earth and Mars, which ended the sequence of knowledge and led by means of carefully coloured representation to the areas of speculation – the successively larger spheres of the Asteroid, Jupiter and Saturn shells. Then the presentation grew entirely tentative. Was there a Uranus shell? An even larger one called the Neptune shell? Or even a Pluto shell, the most mind-staggeringly massive of them all? Or was Solaria indeed infinite? Nobody knew, but many were determined to find out, and that was a great part of the reason why the Centre existed, and the fascination for its studies.

If one walked up the ramp and carefully observed the model, there were further details of interest to be seen. Firstly, around the equatorial circumference of the great shells a number of smaller spheres had been inserted completely within the thickness of the material from which the globes were made and communicating with the faces only by a small hole in a projection on each surface. These smaller spheres represented the ‘caged’ worlds which had been established in orbit presumably to facilitate the construction of the shells themselves. Six cageworlds were recorded for the Mercury shell, eleven for Venus, sixteen for the Earth shell, and twenty-four for Mars. For the larger shells the numbers of cageworlds were not detailed, because there was no way anyone born on the Mars shell could know accurately anything about the great shells which lay around them, and the Centre for Solarian Studies was very strict about separating facts from fantasies.

The finest feature of the model, massive though it was, was reserved for those with very good eyesight. This was a system of micron-fine gold wires spreading outwards mainly from the inner shells and passing without deflection through the larger ones. These wires represented the ‘spoke-ways’, the fantastic trans-space system by which Zeus, the mammoth computing complex which had built the Solarian universe, regulated its arrangement and conveyed the excess population of the race of man still growing at a nearly exponential rate. In reality these ‘wires’ were vast, hollow tubular force fields which locked the whole Solarian universe together, and through which thundered tirelessly the spoke-shuttles carrying Zeus’ essential supplies and conveying emigrants ever outwards to where new living space was still being constructed somewhere on the outer shells.

On the particular day in question, Niklas Boxa, a senior tutor at the Centre and one of the men responsible for the design of the Solarian model, had been saying farewell to an important colleague at the adjacent exospheric landing pad, and as he returned via the ascending ramp he chanced to glance at the model from an unusual angle. Because of his intimate knowledge of its design he noticed what he thought to be a discrepancy in the placing of the wires representing the spoke-ways, and paused to review his knowledge of that part of the system. Then shaking his head, he continued on towards his office. In the corridor above he nearly knocked at the door of his professor, then thought better of it, and continued towards the computer room instead.

Twenty minutes later, breathless with running and bearing a sheaf of computer print-outs, he was again at the door of Professor Soo, and the way was already open to him in response to his urgent communicator message.

‘Are you sure?’ asked the professor, trying to calm him.

‘Absolutely. The computer agrees exactly with the model. The spoke we call TC 16 starts here on the Mars shell and is projected out as far as the Saturn shell. But it can’t ever reach the Saturn shell, because if it did it would precisely intersect the ZN 129 spoke – and that’s impossible!’

‘We don’t know it’s impossible, Niklas,’ said Soo thoughtfully. ‘But in our experience it would certainly be unique. What alternative explanations do you have?’

‘I think the TC 16 spoke was never intended to go through to the Saturn shell. I think it stops somewhere between the Jupiter and the Saturn shells.’

‘There’s no point in Zeus building an Exis spoke which doesn’t go anywhere.’ Soo examined the print-outs and diagrams carefully. ‘And I doubt that such a logical entity as Zeus would make so wasteful a mistake.’

‘It needn’t be a mistake if …’

‘If what, Niklas?’

‘If there was – or had been intended to be – another shell between the Jupiter and Saturn shells.’

Professor Soo sat down and looked thoughtful for a moment.

‘We mustn’t jump to conclusions on such slight evidence, but the possibility can’t be ruled out. Perhaps we can get an idea by checking the traffic characteristics of the TC 16 spoke.’

‘I already have,’ said Boxa. ‘And here’s the oddity. Despite the pressures of the emigration traffic on spokes running through or rising from Mars shell, TC 16 alone has no listing as an emigration centre. I doubt if it’s ever seen an emigrant.’

‘Then it could be purely a service spoke.’

‘Rising from Mars shell? All the service spokes rise from the Solarian hub. What is there on the surface of th. . .