everything from engineering and philosophy to medicine and fine arts. With as many tutors and counselors at the Academy as students, we had plenty of help. Expectations were high and there was a gentle but persistent pressure to excel. The staff was aloof, no doubt instructed not to form emotional bonds with us. Some of them were psychologists and psychiatrists who were clinical and often cold in their detachment.
I remember my dreams from that time.
Large shapes moving around in the darkness. An unrelenting pressure in my chest. A door sliding up, an inch from my face, like the lid of a coffin. A window, and beyond it, nothing, an absolute void. The images were both inchoate and sharply real. I would always wake with a start and sit up, bathed in sweat, my breathing fast and shallow.
On my mother’s last visit before I left the Academy, a few months after I turned seventeen, she told me how my father died. I never knew the details when I was young, and information at the Academy was tightly controlled. He was on his second tour of a mining station on Phobos. His crew was deep in a shaft looking for inclusions of platinum and iridium. Miscommunication with the surface crew caused them to set off a charge nearby. Sofa-sized slabs of rock were ejected from the face of the shaft. At the center of a small asteroid there’s no gravity, so no way to be crushed by falling rock as on Earth.
But Newton’s laws have their own implacable logic. A large rock hit him squarely in the chest and carried him to the opposite wall, where its momentum was transmitted into his body, crushing and killing him instantly.
That’s probably part of why I was chosen. My father was a space rat and my sister an accomplished pilot; I had space in my genes. But at the Academy there were many kids with no predisposition to technical subjects; their parents were musicians or artists or diplomats. No two of us were alike. We seemed to form, as intended, a miniature world.
At my graduation, my mother and my sister were in the auditorium, and they grinned ear to ear when I waved to them. Later, as we shared a meal in the dining hall overlooking the lake, I flashed back to the way my mother’s voice had sounded a decade earlier. Her excitement and fear had morphed into quiet pride tinged with sadness.
After graduation, we had two weeks to pack up and say our farewells. Visits and video chats were unlimited. I remember that it was emotionally exhausting to spend so much time with my family. Many of the other students felt the same way. We were young adults and had grown up without them, with only each other for sustenance. I felt relieved when the time came to travel to the launch site, though that relief was followed swiftly by a wave of guilt.
The time had come to learn what it meant to be a Pilgrim.
To be an emissary of Earth in the late twenty-first century. To be in a small group chosen for a unique experiment. The experiment was designed by sober scientists and engineers but it had the trappings of madness. We were human seedlings, charged with taking root in a new world.
PART II
PRESENT
W heel rats. That’s what Josefina calls those who never spend time in the Hub. Then we laugh. She’s my best friend; I love her mischievous smile and seditious sense of humor. Too many Pilgrims are aloof or self-important; they know we’re specially chosen and elite and they often act that way. A few have a messianic streak I find a little scary.
Floating in the Hub, the Earth is a blue-and-white bauble nestled in black velvet. It’s cozy and womblike. The Hub is the only zero-g place in the station; all the living and working quarters are around the rim of the wheel, spun to two-thirds g, which avoids the worst problems of bone loss and physiological adjustment. There are no real windows in the rim, since they would reveal the vertigo-inducing view of the Earth wheeling by every thirty seconds. Large panels set into the walls are programmed to display
I remember my dreams from that time.
Large shapes moving around in the darkness. An unrelenting pressure in my chest. A door sliding up, an inch from my face, like the lid of a coffin. A window, and beyond it, nothing, an absolute void. The images were both inchoate and sharply real. I would always wake with a start and sit up, bathed in sweat, my breathing fast and shallow.
On my mother’s last visit before I left the Academy, a few months after I turned seventeen, she told me how my father died. I never knew the details when I was young, and information at the Academy was tightly controlled. He was on his second tour of a mining station on Phobos. His crew was deep in a shaft looking for inclusions of platinum and iridium. Miscommunication with the surface crew caused them to set off a charge nearby. Sofa-sized slabs of rock were ejected from the face of the shaft. At the center of a small asteroid there’s no gravity, so no way to be crushed by falling rock as on Earth.
But Newton’s laws have their own implacable logic. A large rock hit him squarely in the chest and carried him to the opposite wall, where its momentum was transmitted into his body, crushing and killing him instantly.
That’s probably part of why I was chosen. My father was a space rat and my sister an accomplished pilot; I had space in my genes. But at the Academy there were many kids with no predisposition to technical subjects; their parents were musicians or artists or diplomats. No two of us were alike. We seemed to form, as intended, a miniature world.
At my graduation, my mother and my sister were in the auditorium, and they grinned ear to ear when I waved to them. Later, as we shared a meal in the dining hall overlooking the lake, I flashed back to the way my mother’s voice had sounded a decade earlier. Her excitement and fear had morphed into quiet pride tinged with sadness.
After graduation, we had two weeks to pack up and say our farewells. Visits and video chats were unlimited. I remember that it was emotionally exhausting to spend so much time with my family. Many of the other students felt the same way. We were young adults and had grown up without them, with only each other for sustenance. I felt relieved when the time came to travel to the launch site, though that relief was followed swiftly by a wave of guilt.
The time had come to learn what it meant to be a Pilgrim.
To be an emissary of Earth in the late twenty-first century. To be in a small group chosen for a unique experiment. The experiment was designed by sober scientists and engineers but it had the trappings of madness. We were human seedlings, charged with taking root in a new world.
PART II
PRESENT
W heel rats. That’s what Josefina calls those who never spend time in the Hub. Then we laugh. She’s my best friend; I love her mischievous smile and seditious sense of humor. Too many Pilgrims are aloof or self-important; they know we’re specially chosen and elite and they often act that way. A few have a messianic streak I find a little scary.
Floating in the Hub, the Earth is a blue-and-white bauble nestled in black velvet. It’s cozy and womblike. The Hub is the only zero-g place in the station; all the living and working quarters are around the rim of the wheel, spun to two-thirds g, which avoids the worst problems of bone loss and physiological adjustment. There are no real windows in the rim, since they would reveal the vertigo-inducing view of the Earth wheeling by every thirty seconds. Large panels set into the walls are programmed to display
Similar Books
