Bogdan said, “So, how is old Earth doing four hundred years on?”
The sparkle seemed to leave Captain Suzette’s eyes. “Ah, Cadet Kodiak, the news hasn’t been good for a long time now. Our dear mother planet has suffered terribly since our launch, especially during the Second Phage War of 2184. Earth has been poisoned so extensively that nothing can live on its surface. Humans must live deep underground, or on Mars, the moons of Jupiter, or a number of orbital habplats. There are actually more people alive aboard the Garden Charter and our sister Oships than in all of Sol System combined. It would appear that we launched none too soon. We’re very, very lucky we had the wisdom to make the choices that we did.”
“But aren’t you afraid the Heliostream beam will fail without Earth?”
“Not really,” said the captain. “Heliostream is robotically controlled. We might have suffered if it had failed a century ago, but by now a beam failure would add less than ten years to our travel time. You see, we’ve almost reached the beam-off point.”
She waved her lovely hand, and the grand display switched to a view of open space and millions of stars. A broad arc connected two stars. Half of the arc glowed green, half red, and between them was a narrow colorless gap.
“When Heliostream cuts the beam in two years, we’ll travel by inertia for about seventy-five years, as represented by the gap there. The ship will use its fusion reactors for power during that time. We’ll lose gravity here in the lattice frame, though the occupied hab drums will begin to rotate and generate their own gravity.”
“But, but—” Bogdan said, questions piling up in his mind.
“Oh, I know what you’re going to ask,” the captain said. “Everyone does. If we’re the first ones out here, where does the braking beam come from? Right?”
That wasn’t it, but Bogdan nodded his head anyway. “And what do you mean, occupied hab drums? I thought your passengers were corpsicles.”
“I see you’re a thinker, and I like that in my officers. First, the beam. In the year 2136, a year before our own launch, the Garden Earth Consortium sent a flotilla of advance ships ahead of us. They were small, robotically controlled, and had chemical/fusion boosters. They were capable of acceleration speeds greater than a human could withstand. Most of them have already reached Ursae Majoris fifty years ago. They immediately scouted our destination planet to confirm its suitability for terrestrial life. By the way, Planet 2013LS has exceeded our most optimistic projections. We have stunning pictures, if you’d care to view them.
“We already have confirmation that some of the advance ships have made successful planetfall and are now constructing an energy, transportation, and habitation infrastructure on the planet in preparation for our arrival in about four hundred seventy-five years. By the time we enter orbit, there’ll be modern, fully functional cities waiting for us to inhabit them. The remaining advance ships are building solar harvesters (or in this case—ursine harvesters) to generate our braking particle beam.”
The Oship model returned, and four of the hab drums were highlighted. “As to your second question, no, not everyone is frozen. Our passengers have the option of spending an average of two hundred years of the voyage in a quickened state if they like. We can have up to twenty percent of our population active at any time. Currently, there are 93,545 persons occupying those four drums. That one has a town with a population of 62,000, while the others contain twenty-nine smaller settlements and thousands of rural homesites.”
A young officer approached them bearing a slate for the captain. He smiled at Bogdan and nodded. The captain studied the slate a moment and said, “Cadet Kodiak, I must attend to business. Perhaps you’d like to continue our tour with Lieutenant Perez?”
“Yes, ma’am, I would.”
“In that case, Lieutenant, show Cadet Kodiak anything he’d care to see, and Cadet Kodiak—welcome aboard!” She saluted him, and when he snapped to return the salute, he noticed that he, too, was wearing a cool uniform.
“I bet you’ll want to see our combat training course,” the young officer said, leading Bogdan to a companionway, “or the officers’ club. Or maybe our private nude beach.”
TOO SOON, BOGDAN’S bead car split off and rolled into Library Station, and the boy was roused from his reverie. As his car rolled to a stop on the platform, he stuck his Kodiak patch—brown-yellow-white—to the shoulder of his jumpsuit and, with an oppressive sense of loss, rejoined reality. No sooner had he decarred and started across the platform than a man stepped on his foot. Bogdan howled in pain and surprise, while the man merely inspected the sole of his shoe. Satisfied, the man looked down at Bogdan and said, “What’s your problem?”
“You feckin’ stepped on my foot!” Bogdan said. “That’s my problem!”
The man pursed his lips and said, “It’s not my fault you choose to be so small.”
“I’m not so small you can’t see me!”
The man shrugged and turned to go, though not without first reaching down to rub Bogdan’s head. Bogdan swatted his hand away and screamed, “You practically run me over, and then you want a rub? Are you crazy?”
The man strolled away without another word. Bogdan limped toward the exit. It felt like his toe was broken. A transit bee dropped down to him and said, “Myr Kodiak, do you require medical attention?”
“No!” Bogdan said without stopping. “But that asshole over there should be arrested for assault!”
“Our records show the mishap clearly to be an accident. However, if you require medical attention, be informed that this CPT station maintains a fully stocked crisis intervention booth and makes it available at reduced cost to ticketed travelers. In addition to a clinic class autodoc, we offer crisis counseling. Perhaps you’d like counseling for your recent experience.”
Tears welled in Bogdan’s eyes, and he savagely wiped them away. He ignored the bee and left the station. Outside, the evening air was warm. Hollyholos did not troll his neighborhood since no one could afford to interact with them. There were few kiosks and fewer sidewalk emitters. At the station exit, however, was the nightly bumbazaar, a line of homeless people trying to peddle a sad collection of worn-out junk. One old woman sat on a stool next to an antique bathroom scale. A handlettered sign taped over the scale said, “Yer Wait—UDC 1/7.” A millionth of a yoodie to step on a broken scale. She looked up at Bogdan hopefully, but he despised her and her poverty.
Despite his throbbing toe, Bogdan began to jog home, shouting out, “Desist! Desist!” to the bees as he went.
WHEN BOGDAN TURNED the corner onto Howe Street, he noticed two Tobblers engaged in unusual behavior on the sidewalk in front of the Kodiak building. One Tobbler was hunched over something on the ground, and the other was peering over his shoulder. The air around them was thick with curious bees. Bogdan’s own curiosity got the better of him, and he went over to see what was happening.
“Hello, young Kodiak,” the crouching Tobbler groaned as he straightened up.
“Hello, Houseer Dieter,” Bogdan replied. “What’s up?”
“What’s down you should ask,” said the houseer.
The other Tobbler, whose name was Troy, was carefully pouring a viscous liquid from a foil pouch into a crack in the sidewalk. He didn’t even glance at Bogdan. He was a boy, a real boy, not a retroboy. The dozen years that he had been walking the earth were all the years he could claim. Technically, Bogdan wasn’t a retroboy either, but an arrested boy because he had stopped his maturation before reaching adolescence, but that fact didn’t seem to draw the boys any closer together.