Music of the Spheres (2 page)

When not in his quarters, Alex wore his hydraulic braces.
Using fluid dynamics, biomechatronics and environmental pressure sensors, the
braces were able to compensate for any external factors, such as walking on an
incline or stairs, or—if he were back on Earth—snow or rain. They provided him with
a more natural gait. From a distance, most people would not be able to tell he
wore orthotics. Not that it made any difference: Alex looked pale and sickly;
his hair was thin and stringy, and his bones continued to atrophy no matter how
many vitamin shots the medical staff administered.

All the researchers and corporate administrators treated
Alex like a child. Even Ellen Yarrow looked at him as if he were something she discovered
in a Petri dish. Although his body appeared to be that of a sixteen-year-old
boy, according to his birth record, he was twenty-five; legally an adult. During
the eight or so years when his body had been in a quantized state, he had not
aged physically.

Once the assistants secured him in the leg supports, Alex
pulled on his loose-fitting trousers and fastened them at his waist.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Kenny returning, and
steeled himself for a confrontation.

Kenny watched as Alex finished dressing.

The physicist finally said, “Look, I don’t want us to be
enemies. I want you to trust me. I just want what’s best for everyone.”

Alex scoffed.

Kenny threw up a hand. “Fine. I want what’s best for me, but
that can only lead to helping you. So please, can’t we start the dialogue over
again?”

“If you truly want to help yourself,” Alex said, “then
you’ll listen when I tell you that what you are doing right now is irrelevant—and
quite possibly counterproductive.”

Shaking his head, Kenny asked, “How can the study of the
most advanced technology in the universe be irrelevant?”

Kenny often spoke as if he were in a lecture hall.

Alex sighed. “That’s not what I’m saying. It is the most
important thing in the world. We need to master it before—”

“Before what?”

Alex shook his head. “First, you need to understand the
basics of Kinemet. And we don’t even know how to stabilize it. We need to focus
on how Kinemet affects people, not how to build a better quantum drive. Everyone
keeps looking at the power of Kinemet as if it’s just the key to light-speed travel.”

“But it is!”

Alex shook his head. “Yes, it can be a trigger for
quantizing matter into light and powering a properly equipped vehicle at near
light speeds. But that’s only the most rudimentary of its properties.”

“What are you talking about?” Kenny scanned his notes, but Alex
knew none of his predecessors had written anything about this.

Normally, he wouldn’t try to explain himself. However, of
all the researchers sent up to CS3, Alex had a feeling that Kenny’s mind might
be open to new possibilities.

Alex said, “It can do so much more than just be a fuel for light-speed
travel.”

Voice low, ears alert, Kenny asked, “Such as…?”

Alex pointed to himself. “Human chrysalis, for one. Though
we’ve failed miserably in that regard. And then there’s the Grace.”

Kenny stared at Alex as if he were speaking another
language.

He blinked. “The grace of what?”

Alex cursed himself and said, “Nothing. Sorry, I’m just too
tired to think straight. I have to go to my quarters.”

4

Interim Report :

Health Status :

Alex Manez :

From:
Dr. Naryan Amma, Ph.D., CS3
Medical Chief of Staff

To:
Canada Corp. Health Services,
Dept. of Nutritional and Metabolic Diseases.

Diagnosis:
The subject, Alex
Manez, displays symptoms indicative of massive vitamin deficiency, particularly
D and C, though all levels of those vitamins are with normal ranges.

Despite bombardment of multivitamins
and a diet of citrus and dairy products, Alex Manez suffers from continued hair
loss, chronic insomnia, pale skin and osteoporosis.

There is indication of onset muscle
degeneration, and I expect other symptoms to become prevalent as his condition worsens.

While his mental acuity remains in the
top percentile, his emotional state has become volatile, and he is prone to
depression and anxiety.

Treatment:
All attempts to
correct the subject’s condition have failed to reverse or even stall his
deterioration. Physical exercise exacerbates his pain, multivitamin injections
and supplements show no effect, and growth hormones only serve to cause
gastrointestinal distress and may lead to kidney and liver failure.

Prognosis:
Alex Manez has no
more than six months to live.

5

Houston
Interplanetary Spaceport :

Texas :

USA, Inc. :

It had been
over ten years since Justine Turner had seen a sunrise or sunset, since she’d
looked upon the face of another person with her own eyes, and since she had
even been able to look at herself in a mirror.

She’d gone blind at the edge of Sol System. While she did
not regret the events that brought her to that point—and would not trade those
experiences for her sight—she found some days more difficult than others,
especially in the beginning.

One of the toughest transitions was the loss of her command
status. She wanted nothing more than to captain a ship again; to breathe the
stale cabin air of a control center; read digital displays and make decisions
that would take her vessel out into the vast reaches of space.

The months she had spent on the journey back from Pluto had
been the hardest, when she was completely cut off from all sight.

When she got home, she underwent optilink surgery to allow
her brain to interpret electrical pulses from an optical-neural translation sensor,
which she clipped to the bridge of her nose.

Still, she had struggled with the most basic of daily
chores: cooking, dressing and personal grooming to name a few. She had hired an
assistant to help her the first year home, but that only reminded her how
helpless she was.

Holoslate interfaces were based off haptic technology. It
was a perfect match for those who used Braille. After learning the system,
Justine was able to read any eBook, manual, or meshmail with the built-in
Braille application as easily as a sighted person.

But adjusting to a world where she was blind wasn’t the
worst part; it was the boredom. She’d had nothing to do.

So once she’d mastered the optical sensor technology, she
had pleaded with the officials at NASA to reassign her to the active duty roster.

When they offered her an instructor’s position, she jumped
at the chance, knowing it was most likely the closest she would ever come again
to being in command, or tasting the exhilaration of space flight.

There was a second reason she had so eagerly accepted an
instructor’s position. The feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment in
passing her knowledge on to the young trainees was something she had come to
love.

She would never have a child of her own. Biologically, it
was still a possibility—there were women much older than her who had
children—but at this stage in her life, and with her own personal challenges,
she just couldn’t see herself making that decision. By the time he or she was a
teenager, Justine would be in her late sixties, and she couldn’t imagine that
she would have enough energy to keep up.

The closest she had ever come to having a child was during
those short few months aboard the
Quanta
with Alex Manez. It had given
her a fleeting taste of motherhood, and for the first time her life, she had
understood the power of that instinct. To care for and impart her experiences
to those who would follow in her footsteps gave her as much of a sense of
completeness as she could ever have wanted.

The years she spent as a flight instructor were some of the
best in the last decade.

Now, however, that was all behind her.

In the past two years, NASA and USA, Inc. had suffered a
great many setbacks—not to mention the loss of many lives on the
Quanta
experiments.
That had resulted in the sale of Quantum Resources to Canada Corp. and the
shoe-boxing of the entire Kinemet program. There were far too many problems
here on Earth to spend any more money on interstellar exploration; or at least,
that was the reason the directors at USA, Inc. had given for their decision to
sell.

Many of NASA’s independent contractors had been released
from their contracts, and even many regular staff members had been offered
severance packages and early retirement.

They had offered Justine a very generous sum, enough that
she could easily have weathered the troubled financial times in relative
comfort for many years to come. She had taken the settlement, and wondered what
to do with the rest of her life. For a time, she thought about returning to the
Lowell Observatory and completing her studies there, but the call of space was
too great for her to simply retire.

With her background, she managed to secure a position with
Lunar Lines Ltd., who ran their space liners between Houston Spaceport and Luna
Base, as a public relations hostess.

It was a one-week round trip, and Justine worked two flights
on, one flight off. The position was much more than being an attendant or a
tour guide; she was also responsible for the comfort and general safety of the
passengers, as well as their peace of mind. While travel to Luna Station and
the various space stations orbiting Earth was becoming more frequent, only a
fraction of the population had ever undertaken the trip, and for many of those
who took a liner it was the first time. They were understandably nervous flying
into the void of space.

That morning was the beginning of another of Justine’s rotations,
and she always looked forward to this leg of the trip for more than just the
chance to be in space.

At the Earth-Moon Lagrange 4 point was Canada Station Three,
among the Kordylewski clouds. Lunar Lines always had a one-day stopover there
before heading to their ultimate destination, and it was Justine’s only chance
to see Alex Manez.

She worried about him; he seemed to become more pale and
sickly every time she visited him. The last time she had stopped there, over
two weeks before, he had been significantly more tired than usual and had cut
their visit short.

This time around, she hoped to get a word in with someone in
charge of the Quantum Resources labs, and find out what they were doing to help
him. And if she didn’t get satisfaction from them, she would just have to call
in a few more favors.

The apartment’s home-unit computer system sounded a chime on
the main holoslate, indicating there was a vehicle in her driveway.

“Identify,” she said out loud.

Hucs informed her.
Number 3419; the driver’s name is Tomas Salenko, four-year taxi license holder.>

“Oh, he’s early. Thank you. I’ll be a just another minute.”

Justine hurried back to her bedroom and approached the bed.
Resting on the sheets were her two travel bags and a specially developed harness.

The optical recognition scanner on her optilink fed her
brain rudimentary spatial data. It allowed her to navigate between one room and
the next, and even gave her the ability to discern the difference between a
fork and a spoon. It didn’t have the capability to show her color, texture or
patterns. She could detect the frame of a painting hung on a wall, but she had
no way of telling whether it was a blank canvas or a Van Gogh.

Meeting people was just as challenging. It was as if she
were face blind. Until someone spoke, Justine had extreme difficulty telling
one moving biped from another, unless they had very distinct physical traits.

Optimedia Labs, the company she had originally purchased her
optilink through, was also the company who had invented the Virtual Tourist.

A few months back, they had released the next generation in
recognition software. Intended for the digital mock-reality entertainment
industry, the Personal Environmental Recording Suit—PERSuit, as it was
trademarked—was a step up from their Virtual Tourist Camera.

It recorded and interpreted over ten million coded shapes,
sounds, smells, colors and textures. Thousands of micro-sensors in the fabric
of the harness constantly scanned all audio, video and olfactory data within range.

Contestants on game shows or adventure shows would wear the PERSuit
while participating, and then viewers could download those episodes into their
septaphonic masks and experience those events for themselves, as if they were
there in the contestant’s place.

While the downloads were relatively inexpensive, the harness
itself was pricey, and getting the techs to integrate the PERSuit sensors with
her optilink required signed affidavits that she would not sue in the event of
a sensory overload. Combining her body’s natural senses with the artificial sensors
was not recommended by any of the company’s medical staff.

The result was more than she had hoped for, and while she
wore the specifically tailored harness, it was as if she had her sight back.
There was a major drawback to the garment.

Within a few days of wearing it, Justine began to feel the
effect that the company had feared: extended exposure caused her to develop
severe migraines. She couldn’t wear the harness for more than twelve hours in a
day before the pain became unbearable—her mind just couldn’t process the
enormous amounts of data.

Through experimentation, Justine had also found that if she
wore the harness four days in a row, the headaches would start as well.

As a compromise, she never wore the harness at home—she had
memorized every nook and cranny in her apartment and didn’t need it anyway—and
she rarely wore it in public.

For the most part, she wore it when she was working. In her
newest vocation as a liner hostess, being able to identify passengers by sight
was a valuable ability—especially since the majority of those passengers were country-corporate
decision makers, department heads for various science and tech companies, and influential
members of the media.

Folding the harness carefully, she packed it in one of her
travel bags and headed out to catch her taxi to the spaceport.

∞

Houston Spaceport was bustling with activity. As the taxi
pulled up the long stretch of road to the main entry gates, Justine could sense
many human forms gathered on the grassy hills in front of the twenty-foot-high
fence. While her optilink sensor picked up that the protestors held signs, she
could not read any of the slogans written on them; she could, however, hear
their angry shouts when she opened the window a crack.

“Feed the people—not your greed!”

“Space is a waste!”

“We need jobs on Earth, too!”

“God gave us Eden; only those who are unworthy seek to leave
the garden!”

It was nearly impossible to explain to such protestors that
space exploration had opened avenues to new technologies and conveniences which
they themselves used on a daily basis. Mining the asteroid belts did provide
jobs as the raw materials were shipped back to Earth for processing; it also
saved the Earth’s natural resources.

There were protestors at nearly every facility in the
country that promoted science and technology. If someone suffered a job loss
for whatever reason, they often didn’t care to look closely at the actual
cause; it was easier to point the finger at the nearest target. In the past few
years, it was the space industry. Nearly gutting the NASA program was not enough;
they wanted to ground all space exploration.

There were also outcries from many of the world’s religions,
which had started from the day Justine and her crew had discovered the
Dis
Pater
on Pluto. Many thought it blasphemous to consider that humans weren’t
a unique and divine species. To entertain the notion that there were thousands
of alien races among the stars was sacrilege.

Some pundits theorized the only reason there hadn’t been a full-out
religious revolution was because of the failure of Alex’s mission. He had come
back without any evidence of alien contact; that, to the religious extremists,
was proof that the entire affair had been a hoax, and humankind’s status as the
sole intelligence in the universe was secure.

Over the past year, the crowds of protesters had gradually
dwindled, and their rants had not held the vehemence they once carried.

Security, however, remained tight. Once the taxi arrived at
the main entrance, it was scanned before any of its occupants were allowed to
exit the vehicle. The taxi was quickly cleared of any harmful substances, such
as explosives, weapons, or contraband. Justine got out, gathered her bags, and headed
for the main building.

The automatic doors parted for her as she entered the
spaceport, but when she stepped in, her way was blocked by a tall, thin figure
whose back was to her.

Many first time visitors to the port were intimidated by the
size and scope of the main terminal, which also doubled as a kind of museum of
space flight. Large reproductions—most life-sized—of NASA’s various rockets,
shuttles and other craft from its long history were displayed throughout the
interior of the large building. Crowds of tourists came just to look at the scale
models, even if they didn’t have tickets for an outbound flight.

Justine assumed the man in her way was simply taken aback by
the scope of the space terminal.

“Excuse me,” she said politely.

The visitor turned, and though Justine could not make out
his features, what struck her as odd was that he wore glasses. With current
technological levels, they could correct nearly everything short of blindness.
It was rare to see someone still wearing spectacles. When he spoke, there was a
hint of a foreign accent that Justine couldn’t quite place.

“My apologies, ma’am. I am not sure where I need to go.”

Justine, who had been in the port a hundred times, said,
“Are you here for a tour or a flight?”

“Flight.”

“Check-in is right over there.” She pointed to a bank of
kiosks to their left. “Then you’ll have to go through security.”

“Thank you,” the man said with a slight nod, and then he
headed off.

Justine had no need to check in. She went straight to the security
gates and said good morning to the ever-watchful guard. She had to remove her optilink
so that he could perform a retinal scan. There was a gentle chime as the
computer confirmed her identity, and then a second chime indicating she had a
personal message.