Chapter Six:

Star Stepper was the first space craft in Syriahs’ history to be built by the Academy and the Government together.

It took three years – the time being extended as different bureaucracies and disparate Legislators fought for their agendas, including the resources to build it, who would be its passengers and where it would go.

Animal rights activists howled at what had happened to previous crews. Before the first year was over, the remaining rodents from Menagerie’s second mission all had popular names and followings, not to mention trust funds for their medical care. While no one wanted to send humans into space yet (and there were thousands of volunteers), sending animals was going to start resistance to the effort, and there were activists militant enough to actually attack the Academy facilities.

In order to overcome this, cloning technology was applied to a species of primate considered similar to humans. The man-made, new species was engineered with an intelligence sufficient to maintain breathing and other autonomous functions, but not to feel, to reason or to react to the outside world. This ‘bug in a body’ provided the anatomical answers that Star Stepper was designed to record, without actually doing the suffering that the rodents went through.

After this, other parts of society, now fully aware of this new effort to enable space travel, pondered the possibility of other life on other planets, how it would react to their intrusion, and how to handle any encounters.

While engineers fretted stylus-in-hand over scholarly boards and pads, theoreticians argued into the night over what might or might not offend, how to handle more sophisticated (and less sophisticated) species, and even whether they had the right to try.

Syriahs’ only Hebel family, Viniker and Maree, transferred from their simple apartment to a compound with security guards, for their own safety. Immediately after doing so, their apartment was fire-bombed by a party of ‘Save Syriahs’ radicals who believed that any intrusion into space would result in retaliations that they could never fathom and certainly never defend from.

While Syriahs’ one continent hadn’t seen war for hundreds of years, its police force was adept at keeping order, and a homogenous people made for quick justice. While ‘Save Syriahs’ was squelched, other groups sprang up to take their place.

Now in a wheel-chair, propelled by a toned-down version of Viniker’s EM Drive, Maglen laid his hand on the side of the 100-foot-long craft, shining gold under both suns. It measured thirty feet wide, a flat base with an adjustable floor set on an oblong stabilization deck like any fliver. As the craft moved forward, the deck would adjust itself in its well to provide Syriahs-like gravity.

To accomplish this, the ship was nearly as tall as it was wide, and bullet-shaped.

Star Stepper’s skin didn’t burn Maglen’s hand, because all of the energy that struck it was, where possible, absorbed into the ship’s batteries. This was accomplished by a derivation of their receptor array, converted into a paint-on coating laid over the exterior of the ship.

Under this lay a thick coating of their bon-tube technology, both inside and outside of a toughened metal hull. Within that, a walkway for several robots to tend beds containing their cloned crew, all equipped with facilities for their care. Twenty strong, they would determine if humans could survive the act of space flight.

Star Stepper stood on four retractable legs, with an array of EM cones beneath it for lift-off and landing back on Syriahs. Behind it, their improved RF drive would propel their ship through space, goaded on if needed by their improved particle cannon, now a permanent fixture replacing the outdated telescope they’d used before. Along its front, an array of EM cones to serve as its deflector array, to ward off the space dust that would otherwise slowly tear the ship apart.

“It’s beautiful,” the old man commented.

Maree laid a hand on his shoulder, standing next to him. Her middle had begun to swell with her first child. Apparently, she’d found some way to distract the enigmatic Viniker from his studies, at least long enough to guarantee that her ‘house’ wasn’t of one generation.

“The next one will be named after you,” she informed him.

He smiled without looking up at her. “That’s for the dead,” he informed her. “I’m not dead yet.”

Close, he thought, but not yet. No one lived forever.

“We’ll change the tradition,” she informed him. “That what Viniker and I do, you know. Who wants to have a ship named after him, if he’s not alive to see it?”

They certainly did have a knack for changing tradition, Maglen admitted to himself. The people of Syriahs had become complacent without even knowing it. Living their lives, making little discoveries, verifying what they already knew, life here had become ‘something to do.’

Now there were heated debates, arguments, passion. Given a choice, Maglen would take the assaults and the wildness over the passivity of his last 100 years.

The dead never argued about anything.

An alarm sounded. Maree took the handles on the back of his wheel chair and started to roll him a safe distance away from the craft, as what was now called ‘Planetary Control’ took over the launch.

Maglen shook his head. There was no ‘unsafe distance.’ He could be laying naked under the craft when it took off and walk away unscathed.

If he could still walk, that was.

They joined a crowd of watchers on the other side of a perimeter enforced by grey-cloaked police in dark blue jump suits. These men and women, wearing black goggles and communications helmet, walked back and forth along a bright yellow rope on polyurethane stands, batons in hand, staring back the curious, the notorious and the enraged.

Here and there was a sign declaring some perceived outrage. In other places, protesters chanted for these experiments to stop, or to continue, depending on their positions on the matter.

This all took place on a wide, flat field outside of the buildings of the Academy, in view of the Viniker building, where a giant, digital timer counted down to launch.

Maglen could see that and the craft. As the bulk of the crowd counted down the final 20 seconds, the old Professor heard the scrape of the ball bearings as they started to turn around their EM cones.

That had been done by hand, years ago. Now it was a completely automated, completely contained system. For a moment, Maglen remembered being on a stage with a terrified young man, as they failed at first to shoot a rudimentary cone into the stratosphere. He laughed to himself – a dead battery. They just picked up another one, and completed the experiment, to the amazement of a new generation.

“Three! Two! One!” the crowd chanted, and then, like a great cannon shell, Star Stepper rose humming into the atmosphere, to the delight or anguish of those watching.

Viniker should have been there, but he was in Planetary Control, monitoring what didn’t need to be monitored. He’d been no different when he was younger. Much as what was growing in Maree’s body, this project was ‘Viniker’s baby,’ and now it had learned to fend for itself.

Letting go of a baby when it grows up is hard because, in your mind, it’s still a baby.

Star Stepper ascended into space and then out of its solar system, goaded on by shots from the particle cannon that fed it, and the solar storms that tried to kill it.

For the first month, the particle cannon was on almost constantly, powered by a dedicated fusion reactor restored from when those had first been abandoned for planetary poles. At that point it exceeded light speed and the cannon was shut off – it was pointless to fire energy at a target moving away faster than the speed of light.

Where Menagerie couldn’t communicate at greater than light speed, Star Stepper faced away from Syriahs and didn’t have this problem. During that first month, it experimented with bouncing signal from different planetary objects and with combining their signal with natural phenomena moving slower than or at the speed of light.

As it moved past the threshold of light speed, while it couldn’t receive instructions, it sent back a plethora of data. The first thing the Professors and their staff noted was that the time stamps were now wrong.

“Time is constant,” Ambergee argued, at their conference table in the Viniker building. Other Professors, as well as representatives of the government, argued with her. Maree shook her head.

“Time is relative to perceived mass and speed,” she argued. “Where we’ve sidestepped the problem of increasing inertial mass is compensated by injecting energy into the enclosed environment, energy is in fact added, and that turns time relative to the speed of light into a variable, whether you like it or not.”

“So,” Grellin argued, sitting next to her, “as we transcend the speed of light, time slows for those moving within the object, but not for those of us who perceive it.”

Herren smiled and took her head in hands. “You’re giving me a head-ache,” she said.

She’d been reinstated at the Academy for her contributions to their shielding – the first Professor in over three hundred years to return from retirement.

Now she had embraced quantum physics and these new discoveries.

Credig Acuff was more skeptical. He leaned back in his overstuffed chair, brought here from the Administrative building or copied exactly from the one he had there, no one knew. “So you’re telling me that we can have two speeds for time, at the same instance, one inside of Star Stepper, and one for the rest of the universe.”

“In this case, we have to,” Grellin said.

Maree pointed to her data. “You have your evidence,” she said. “Ignore it at your peril.”

Viniker watched all of this quietly. Maree had changed since he’d met her – the beautiful girl fighting for her position among males had become the lioness who tolerated the males in the pride. She knew their uses, but she didn’t defer to them.

That was how she’d changed his life. He’d be a father soon. He owned a rather large estate. He cared about how he looked and how others saw him.

He looked forward to her kisses, her touch. He sometimes simply needed to hear her voice.

The man of science had slipped into a coma, and this new Viniker had emerged.

“This’ll benefit yer future travelers, that’s a’sure,” Enigmat, the Professor from the south, informed them all. Enigmat’s cheery disposition had gotten them through a lot of the arguments with bureaucrats whose goal seemed almost to run counter to the success of the project.

“Because they won’t see the trip as taking as long, as we will see it,” Grellin postulated.

Maree nodded in agreement. “Fewer supplies,” she said. “Then a smaller ship.”

Others were nodding.

“How fast is she going now?” Credig asked Maree.

Viniker leaned forward and said, “1.2 times the speed of light.

“That’s slower than I would have guessed,” he continued, “and also means that there are periods when Star Stepper doesn’t accelerate. That means that we’ve seen weightlessness before we’re ready for it.”

“We should bring the craft back, then,” Legislator Prem said, perking up. He sat to Credig’s left at these meetings, with an equally opulent chair. “This is a variation –“

Viniker shook his head. “How do we give it the order?” he asked. “If we sent it now, the signal would chase Star Stepper until she turned around and headed back. If we were lucky, it would be ignored. If not, the guidance system might send the ship further into space.”

Prem seemed upset by the news. “So what we have is another unguided missile,” he said.

“Nah,” Enigmat countered, “we have an already guided craft – we guided ‘et. Don’t hate the poor girl for doin’ whut she’s been told!”

A few of the Professors grinned – even Prem couldn’t remain too upset.

“It’s a year-long trip,” Viniker said. “It’s going to take a year. Even when she’s on her way home, we don’t want to speed her up, because then it’s going to be that much harder to slow her down.”

“Jest enjoy th’ ride!” Enigmat grinned.

Star Stepper took amazing pictures of asteroids, comets, and even worlds that no one had ever seen. Without an atmosphere or the light of three suns to peer through, she could catch high-resolution images that the rest could only dream of.

Her passengers lay strapped to beds, whether weightless or under acceleration. They consumed nutrition through one set of tubes and passed it through another, barely aware of what was going on. A kaleidoscope of colors on a monitor before each occupied what was left of their genetically atrophied minds.

Robots hummed up and down aisles in the vast quiet, doing their simple jobs over and over. All of this was reported back to Syriahs in stream after stream of data. When what it considered to be six months had passed, it engaged its batteries to power its RF drive, and it executed a perfect ‘U’ in the cold depths of space. Unfortunately, at that point in time, it dropped below the speed of light, both so that it wouldn’t tear itself apart from the stress of the turn, and so that it could accept outside instructions, if those were necessary.

The guidance computer efficiently communicated with the directional computer. The directional computer calculated their position based on relative spacial guide posts, and then communicated that to the communication center, requesting instructions.

It continued on at sub-light speed, waiting for a command as it had been programmed to do. Unfortunately, that command came with a time stamp, and that time stamp made no sense.

More than a year had passed, and yet it had only progressed in time a few months.

Its programmers had never anticipated this problem, and then had included no way to reconcile it. Guidance, as well, seemed to be unable to rectify its position, as the markers its navigational computer needed to locate itself weren’t where they were supposed to be.

Within Star Stepper, the robot that had been recycled from Menagerie calculated the time difference and immediately corrected for what it perceived to be the under-feeding of the clones in its care, killing all of them. With no clones to care for, it attempted to pick up the load of the other three care robots by ordering them all to give up three patients. None of them had corresponding programming to allow this, but did have instructions to protect their charges. That software, created as a concept by a programmer who never meant to commit it to the main system, spurred the three robots to attack and destroy the Menagerie robot as an intruder, and then reported back to Syriahs that the ship had been boarded.

The concept that the ship was under attack was transmitted to the control computer, where its AI or artificial intelligence decided that, with no weapons of its own, the best defense was to run away, and did. The AI directed Star Stepper into the worst solar storm it could find, absorbed enough energy to increase past light speed, and then calculated the best guess that it could to get to a point between where it was, and where Syriahs should be.

The rapid acceleration threw the remains of the destroyed robot into a control unit that cut off food for a third of the remaining clones. Fortunately, that eventuality, equipment failure, was within the parameters of the remaining robots, and they set about repairing the destroyed control unit.

All of this was broadcast back to Planetary Control at Syriahs, bouncing it off of the nearest celestial bodies it could find. While this remodulated the signal, it did so in a predictable pattern which would allow most of its intelligence to survive. For this reason, at light speed, the message was repeated a dozen times.

It didn’t matter to Star Stepper that it would beat the message home.