The Fifth Civilization: A Novel
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Authors: Peter Bingham-Pankratz
The Fifth
Civilization
A Novel
By Peter Bingham-Pankratz
Copyright
© 2016 by Peter Bingham-Pankratz
All
rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of
the copyright holder.
Cover
art by Danielle Pahlisch
www.thefifthcivilization.com
www.peterbp.com
Table of
Contents
The Chicken and the Egg
As usual, the drunks were singing on the train.
The occasion was the stroke of midnight and thus the
official beginning of the Mid-Millennium. According to the Gregorian calendar
accepted by Earth and its colonies, the year was now 2500, and the talking
heads on the Earth broadcasts were keen to paint the change as the halfway
point between the barbarity of the past and the bliss of the future.
Nick Roan figured it was as good an excuse as any to drown
oneself in liquor. He just wished everyone would do it a little quieter.
If Roan had his way, he’d be on the Surface celebrating New
Year’s, not stuck in orbit. Fate and the Company, though, had other ideas. His
freighter, the
Dunnock
, might have
made it back to Earth on the thirtieth of December had it not been for a
blowout in the hazard sensors. That had cost him sixteen hours. Then, once the
ship arrived at the orbiting Company Entrepot, it had to wait its turn to dock
inside the sprawling, crowded station. Another one-hour delay. And lastly,
there was the ignominy of undergoing mandatory decontamination to make sure HIV
or sick leg or amber fever didn’t sneak its way back from whatever planet you
visited. Another three-quarters of an hour gone.
Sometime around 23:00, Roan was able to clock out and make
his way to the Tubes. A network of translucent, cylindrical highways connecting
the Company’s structures in low-Earth orbit, the Tubes were the one place Roan
could rely on to get a modicum of rest. Lulled by the vibrations of the
high-speed shuttle, he found himself drifting off.
Then the drunks tried to add atmosphere to the ride.
Roan glared back from under his cap at the inebriated
juveniles who’d transferred on from Housing Platform Seven. “I don’t know where
they found so much booze in orbit,” he muttered. Sitting next to him was his
copilot on the
Dunnock
, Masao Mori,
whose girth was currently taking up two seats in the aisle. “All the housing
platforms lock up their alcohol before New Year’s. And the Company doesn’t keep
any of the good stuff on their stations. Believe me, I’ve looked for it.”
Masao snorted. “What they’re drinking isn’t the good stuff,”
he said. The copilot didn’t even throw so much as a glance at the kids, so
invested was he in a hologame he held in his palm, one that involved rotating a
black hole to keep a ball of light from falling in. Roan wished he could have
his copilot’s ability to tune out distractions, but a captain who was unaware
of his surroundings was usually a bad captain.
“OK, so they got hold of cheap beer. Could have got it
shipped up from the Surface, I suppose. But, Masao, answer me this: where are
their parents?”
“Look, Nick, when we were their age, the public service ads
talked about the double dangers of docking and drinking. But I saw on a
broadcast that the Trade Minister himself was snapped taking a nip at the
controls of his shuttle. And with a woman who was not his wife. So I dunno,
maybe morals have changed in the past few decades.” The revelers in back began
counting down from ten—to what, exactly, was not immediately clear to
Roan, since it was well past zero hundred hours.
Masao furrowed his brow at his game, consumed with keeping
the ball from the black hole. “As for me, I’ve been off the stuff for a while.”
Roan eyed the wide-waisted man next to him. “I don’t know,
Masao, you might want to consider a liquid diet.”
“I know what you’re implying,” Masao said, and glanced down
at his belly. “But why diet when food is so good?”
That was Masao, not known for agonizing over things—he
could give you a sentence when three would do. For that reason, Roan handpicked
him to be his copilot five years ago. Friends never worked out in such a
position. Roan wanted to keep the few friends he had and didn’t think spending
months with them staring into deep space could lead to anything other than
bitterness. Better to have someone he didn’t like in the seat next to him.
In Masao’s hologame, the ball of light spun out of control
and popped into the black hole. An X replaced the image: game over. Masao
scowled and stuffed the pad into a pocket, evidently done with the thing for
now. Maybe playing it had made him annoyed and grumpy, but Roan believed men of
Masao’s middle age should not have been up this late. It was funny—five
years ago, the copilot’s handsome and toned features made him the pinnacle of
Japanese wholesomeness. Now he had a permanent scraggily beard and the sunken,
tired eyes of a man defeated. Even his normally-crisp Company uniform was
wrinkled and mostly unbuttoned, probably because of the decon process, and
Masao’s wool pants were tearing around the thighs.
The job was not kind to most people.
In the back, the drunks began counting down again. When they
reached one, they cheered. Roan searched the train car to see what they were
watching, and noticed a newly-installed broadcast viewer on the ceiling.
The BV flashed scenes of revelry from the Sea of Tranquility
to the Sea of Japan. It had just finished replaying an image from earlier in
the day, the lighting of a giant “2500” in Arabic numerals on the moon’s
surface. Lunar Electric promised it would be visible on
terra firma
and cause many maroon-tinted nights. Straight kitsch
had become the preferred way to usher in the second pentury, or whatever they
were calling the next five hundred years.
“You know,” Masao said quietly, glancing around at the other
passengers, “The crew could’ve used a little ‘thank you’ speech or something.
Once we got back to Earth.”
“Like the one I
gave while orbiting Nydaya?”
“That wasn’t quite a speech. And if you think about it, the
time to thank them was right after they successfully got the
Dunnock
from a bizarre world to a…well,
to a slightly less bizarre world.
Home
.
Nick, they deserved a ‘good job’ or something.”
“Everything went smoothly.”
“What about the hazard sensors?”
“OK, aside from that. At least we didn’t have an FTL hiccup
like that run to Cygni.”
“Still…”
“Why didn’t
you
thank them?”
“Don’t look at me, you’re
Roan-taichou
.” The captain.
Hey, thought Roan, when the fat man’s right, he’s right.
Nicholas Roan, pushing forty and currently hiding his own tired features under
a Company ball cap, was captain of a Type-B freighter. At times it surprised
him: Roan had never been good with groups of people. They tended to be
fragmented and illogical, needing constant affirmations of their strengths. The
lack of any catastrophe should be indication enough you did your job well!
Captains and crew were best left at their respective stations, where they could
call on each other if need arose.
In the real world, Roan found, most problems could be solved
just by keeping to your part of the sidewalk.
Instead,
he much preferred the people on the broadcast viewer, the BV, the mush machine:
full of life, yet far away. Roan watched as the train’s monitor reviewed scenes
of jubilation from Sydney to Tokyo. The latter was Roan’s current residence,
and it was now experiencing a lightning storm of red and pink and green. Roan
wondered if the city offered free inoculations like the year before, and how
many of the poor souls down there knew that they were getting a plasma bath
with each burst firework. He and Kel wouldn’t be going to any of those cancer
showers.
“You’re thinking about her,” Masao said, stretching his
beard with a grin.
“What?”
Roan
realized he’d been staring dead-eyed at the BV.
“You’re thinking about Kel. Is she going to be at Grand
Central?”
“I hope so.”
Roan closed his eyes when he heard her name again. Kel, a
short name, right to the point. Maybe it stood for Kelly, or something else, or
nothing. Roan wasn’t sure and she never called herself anything but those three
letters. But those three letters were always on his mind when he went on a
Company run. As the
Dunnock
had
departed Earth for Nydaya, Kel had been in the middle of a return journey
delivering excavators to Omega II. Once upon a time, the Company had assigned
both to the same ship, but now, having both achieved seniority in the Company,
they were more likely to hit an asteroid than see each other. Good captains
were needed all around.
How long, exactly, had it been since he’d seen Kel? The
second of September, Roan remembered. Practically a millennium.
Would she see
his ship name on the Arrivals terminal and wait for him in the lounge? Maybe
immersed in a book, her fingers swiping the pages furiously? Or stretched out
and exercising on the polished floors of Grand Central? She would look sharp
but tense, as always, but when Roan walked in she would crack a smile. They
would talk, catch up, but Roan planned that this time he’d ask that they
retreat somewhere more—
“Marks for the Children’s Fund?”
Roan turned to see one of the drunken kids in his face. He
was perhaps university age, with close-shaven blond hair, a two-day stubble,
and a hilly face that suggested it’d smashed more books than it read. As he
talked, the smell of bad beer, maybe Taggle, wafted through his silver-capped
teeth.
“Piss off,” Roan said. He wasn’t in the mood to play these
games.
“ ‘Piss off!’ ” Alpha Punk mimicked to his two friends. They
laughed, and then continued up the train, asking money from other passengers.
All three wore hoods, which would be useful in keeping their heads off security
cameras.
“The next Company men, eh Nick?” Masao said.
“I wouldn’t be surprised.”
Roan tried to focus on the Earthscape
out the window. Clouds swirled around the Himalayas near the Islamic Union and
India, and if he craned his neck he could see another typhoon dissipating by
the Bay of Bengal. Earth’s rotation was slowly bringing his home into view.
Since they were almost directly over Japan, it would be a straight shot on the
ferry right down to the Surface.
“Hey, check out this fucker!”
Roan thought for a moment the comment was addressed to him.
When he turned to the source, he saw it was aimed at a Nyden seated toward the
exit doors at the front of the car. The three hooded punks, clutching handgrips
dangling from a bar, crowded in front of the alien.
Nydens are not an inconspicuous species. If one were to take
a bird’s head—a typical sparrow, for instance—and put it in a vise,
the vertically-elongated result could closely approximate their cranial
structure. They were said to be descendants of avians, after all. Two small and
glossy yellowish eyes were deep set at the front of their face and what might
be called a beak protruded below them like a blunt arrowhead. Plumage, usually
a cool color, draped their skin and acted as sensors. What clearly separated
them from birds was the luminescent bulb, usually teal or yellow, that topped
their cranium and displayed the brain matter inside.
Most Nydens on Earth had the decency to cover the bulb with
a hat or hairpiece. Not this one. As the thugs crowded around him, the Nyden’s
teal bulb began pulsing in what Roan believed was a sign of panic. The alien’s
head darted from each teenage accoster to the other. He was trapped by
predators.
“You! You fucking pigeon!” Alpha Punk barked. “What the fuck
you looking at?”
“Nothing,” the Nyden said. “Please, I’m sorry to bother
you.”
The being spoke in his best
approximation of English, which came out of his voice with a vaguely creaking
resonance. To Roan, the wise choice would have been to tell them to shove it,
because even as the Nyden turned back to staring out the window, the punks were
obviously not in the mood to be ignored.
“Look at me, pigeon,” said the Alpha Punk. “I asked you what
you were looking at.” His toadies laughed, but Alpha Punk’s face was deadly
serious. “You interested in us? You sizing us up for food?”
“No, please, I’m not—”
The thug feinted a move, as if to strike the alien. The
Nyden flinched. His bulb began pulsing quicker, as if it were an excited
heartbeat.
“You think you’re going to eat us, aren’t you?” Alpha Punk
spat. This was a common legend among the more ignorant, who
often—especially in the years following First Contact—believed the
Nydens were responsible for kidnapping and devouring humans. Despite the
Nyden’s best attempts to avoid eye contact, he soon had no choice but to lock a
stare with his accuser.
“Just so you know,” continued Alpha Punk, leaning down over
the cowering alien, “I don’t taste very good, and I know how to punch.” Another
burst of laughter from the two flanking hoods, and Roan noticed other
passengers on the shuttle focusing intently on the view out the window. No one
wanted to intervene.
“Should we do something?” Masao whispered, ready to leap out
of his seat.
Roan thought for a second. Then shook his head. “No, it’s
never good to be involved in these things.” And you never knew if any of these
guys had knives, he thought. He joined every other passenger in staring out the
window.
Frankly, the Nyden was insane to visit Earth during the
current political and social climate. Humanity could be defined with one word
as it plunged into the second pentury:
fearful
.
People were anxious about jobs and the declining planetary economy, and
xenophobia certainly did not calm any nerves. Politicians fanned it and the
broadcasts fed it to their viewers. Humans had three species on which to focus
their hate, not to mention the colonists, and rumors of an alien invasion were
persistent. Roan knew Nydaya was a perfectly peaceful and comfortable world to
live on, having just deposited ten microwave arrays on their planet. But there
was no reason for a Nyden to strut around Earth unless he was looking for a way
to make an easy buck or preach his high-minded peace philosophy. Straying from
the sidewalk always causes trouble. Keep to your own planet.