The greatest splendor hung above us, a glorious wheel of shining metal and solar panels reflecting the most golden of sunlight, drawing in warmth and energy for the secure home within. An easy ascent, with both lateral and anterior thrusters, would take me there, to the home of my finest of creatures, Lynn. There her robes would melt over the steel floor panels as snow bathes a calm and frosty field. From the moment I saw her from behind a corner in Florence, I followed this vision to her most marvelous of interplanetary housing stations. There together we would live, with her sky-rooms, gravity filters, and massive text-file libraries.
A sudden jolt from the posterior engine room. I rushed to the ship security panel and heard the buzzing of a warning light. Something had struck the posterior hold and cameras on the rear thrusters indicated that a sharp piece of debris, perhaps ejected from one of the cruisers that shuttle between Jupiter and Mars, had struck my ship. With this, another collision. This time a small rock to my port thruster. I quickly grabbed the controls of the ship and turned swiftly down and to the right, hoping that most of the debris would be caught in this same planar orbit.
Glancing longingly out of the window just above my control station, I watched the glimmering space station rise upwards in my perception, one rock and then another piece of metal obstructing my view of her. A slow grinding came from the rear entrance portal of my ship and I could see on the screen that another small cruiser was docking. Cables quickly established a fast communication link to the control room of the adjoining spacecraft.
“Please identify yourself,” I spoke hurriedly into the microphone. “I need some identification before I can open my entrance portal.”
How a greater harbinger of circular vision could have come to my aide than he at that moment I cannot tell. He that helped to bring us out of the limits of ancient philosophy to the realm of expanded human imagination. “You must take another road,” came his reply, and my portal opened to allow Dante to enter.
“The rocks and debris are not going to let you gain that orbit the way you’re going, my friend,” he smiled and shook my hand. Walking to my control panels, he commented on how full an array my ship possessed and then stared for a moment at the various scanners positioned all over the exterior and interior of the ship. Pressing a few buttons, the image of Lynn’s space station came up and he pointed. “You can’t achieve that orbit from here. Besides, if you did you wouldn’t have enough fuel to catch up with her path along that orbit.”
“But I timed my approach perfectly!” I exclaimed. “I was going to rise right on target, by my calculations.”
“Your number crunching was good. But a bit of debris got in your way. Can’t get there from here now.”
“How did you know to come to--”
“She with the flowing robes above sent an alert signal through Plato to me for your guidance, and if I follow her instructions at the moment of her command, it is already too late to do proper service to one so fine.”
My mind was comforted and I sat beside Dante. He smiled again at me and patted me on the shoulder of my suit, which -- I now allowed my mind to wander -- seemed to be fitting more and more tightly each passing season. There is no up and down in space travel, so we usually refer to the plane of the planets in this solar system as the ground, or zero plane.
“We need to go down to get around and beyond all the clutter up there,” Dante began typing into the autopilot program. “We should watch our course steadily. You already took some damage upstairs.”
“Do you think it will be a problem? Can we make it?” I bought this ship with my scarce earnings just out of the Academy.
“Sure. We just need some fuel and a few repairs. I think after a stop at a repair station, we can easily make it as far as Io.”
“Io?!” I was stunned. Dante planned on taking me down to the lowest dregs of the solar system. “We can’t!” Io was the refuge -- or, rather, the punishment -- for those who had committed crimes to civilization and to humanity.
“This is the only way up. Besides, I have been to those parts, in the days when our first missions out that far were envisioned by Alistair.” That was a long, long time ago. “It was a challenge, but no challenge is unconquerable. Just stay with what you believe, think hard, think wisely, and Io is a place where you can expose your mind -- expand your mind -- to a lot, open you to the context of your life.”
Expose me to robbery, I thought inside, but my gratitude for such guidance forbade my protests. I sat back and watched Dante manipulate my main computer. His ship had been secured to mine for interplanetary travel at the speeds required to make the distance manageable.
How regrettably I looked through my upper window at Lynn’s station hurling away into the distance. Its fading form was a drop in my spirits, and I think Dante saw my eager expression wane as the glorious wheel faded into a dot of reflected light. “Of things unknown to you will you learn,” he calmly spoke, adjusting the controls. “Keep your eyes open and your mind alert, for challenge can then become gain.”
I nodded and followed his motions along the computer consoles. The depths of interplanetary space are divided into designated zones. Certain routes are for cruisers, public or private, while other expanses of three dimensional space on an orbit are reserved for a registered station or other orbiting outpost. Dante knew that the ship would need some repairs before we could continue on the journey to a full fuel intake on Io, which we could already see ahead.
“Get on the communication console and clear us for a landing on that mobile port over there,” he pointed to a distant orbiting module on our screens. These were placed in fixed orbits at a prescribed distance from each other. There we would be able to fix the minor damage and move on. Dante looked at my slothful figure as I slouched in the large chair. “Get up, friend,” he nudged me. “Nothing comes of this sitting around. You do want to make the journey, no?”
“Not all the way to Io,” I tensely replied, angered that I hadn’t seen the space debris approaching on time.
“The long road must sometimes be taken. Don’t fault yourself for the past. Now move.”
I felt ashamed at my languor in the presence of my author’s active assistance and walked to a small room to the rear of the main console room, where a series of communication devices offered all sorts of radiowave options. I went to work at contacting the station at the coordinates which Dante read off to me. The module seemed somewhat busy, but the operator reluctantly cleared my ship for docking.
These close ties between ships are delicate, but Dante’s steering maneuvers were both calmly selected and on target. We gave our identification through the portal and were allowed to enter the repair station while suited specialists went to work both inside and in the outer airless space. Their tethers extended for over an earth-mile, allowing free motion to float around the spacecraft, examining every external panel for dents and ruptures and then repairing and replacing parts. Some of the more sophisticated repair stations had complete inner holds where workers could operate on the ships in simulated gravity without suits.
Dante and I strolled down the main corridor toward the office of the station captain. “Got a nice piece of work out there,” she grinned. “What hit ya? Debris or rock?”
“Both,” I muttered, still upset about the accident. It would cost me both time and Union Credits. “Came out of nowhere, I mean, I don’t think they showed up on my --”
“Sure they did. You missed it,” Dante popped in. “You can admit an error to the captain.”
“Yup, you can. Those things must have been pretty big. Of course it was on your monitors. Don’t worry ‘bout it -- people do that stuff all the time.” The captain was calm and smiling. She should be, I thought. This kind of nonsense pays her salary. She turned a monitor in our faces.“You guys have to fill out this information, show me your I-P badges, and then you can grab a chow down the corridor on your
right.” Dante filled in the forms quickly and we sauntered down the hall for a drink of water, straight from the mines on Mars equator. Sweet and cold.
The captain walked in and sat down next to us. On an orbit, no piloting is really needed unless an emergency arises, and with all her workers occupied, there was little for her to do. “Where you guys headed?”
“We need fuel,” I explained, before Dante could inform her that I hadn’t loaded enough for a long voyage. “Io seems to be the spot.”
“Oh, so you haven’t heard the news. There've been gas explosions off Jupiter, bad scene. Communications and landing have been rough over there. The cruiser debris that hit your ship was probably from the Army units sent out from Earth.”
“We need fuel,” Dante informed her calmly, not seeming to worry about the ugly scene we were headed into. These small gas flare-ups are generally short but nasty, with folks getting launched out of the solar system plane and becoming lost before rescue can locate them. “We have to go that way.”
“I can’t stop you, buddy, and you’re right, that’s the only place you can get to from here on the amount of fuel you have in those tanks. You had an extra one, should have loaded up on Mars.”
Dante looked at me. Again, he was right. “Well,” he smirked, “there is much to be learned on this voyage.” After the captain left, Dante sat back and looked at me. “People have been through those gas flares before, I’ve been through them through their accounts. We just have to keep that experience in mind, trust in our own abilities, and watch everything very closely.”
“I hope you’re right.”
“Do you think that Lynn would have sent a signal from her station on high for me to aid you if I were not the proper guide when you were lost in that field of debris? Stay with me, follow my guidance, and all will be well.”
I did trust in him and it was that trust alone that got me back aboard my ship. We dis-docked from the repair station and set a direct course for Io, still in our visual monitors. With our full thrusters on, the journey would take little time, but our fuel would be entirely spent, prohibiting any destination other than the rough terrain of Jupiter’s moon.
“From what I have read of previous voyages to Jupiter in gas storms, we need to approach the far side of the moon, and then land at a shallow angle.” Dante set the controls and autopilot. “I question some of the old methods, really,” he continued, “but I know how to forge a new course.”
The great sage was a fine pilot, I knew, and my trust blew my fear to the far corners of the Jupiter orbit perimeter. “Yeah, we can do it,” I said assuredly, while watching a large gas jet spurt out from Jupiter’s Big Red Storm. Scientists from the Mars colony recently did a study on predicting these Jupiter gas flare-ups, but I don’t remember that they saw this one coming. Always something unexplained, I guess. I mentioned this to Dante. He did not reply, just worked at the controls. The gas flares were something to see. Bright bursts of blue, green, red, all the colors, with the sun’s rays glinting and sparkling over each tiny particle. Especially exciting was to see a collision of gas particles with Jupiter’s ring, a crash of light into light.
More disconcerting, however, were the flames that rebounded off the Ionian terrain when a gas jet extended out that far. These ruptures of particles off the moon reminded me that we would very shortly be in -- or hopefully just within visual distance of -- those flares. A communication signal came in and flashed on the console. At Dante’s command, I rushed back into the rear console room.
“Attention private cruiser,” came a garbled voice. “This is Army patrol 529HGF3. This area is a hazard zone. You’re heading right into it.” I could see up ahead a series of tiny specks floating about, coming into view. Their shiny hulls glistened in both the light of the distant sun and the gas flames, sparkling on their sloping curves through space. Army engineers and rescue personnel. “We advise you to change course to a vector at least 50˚ deviant from your own.”
Dante appeared behind me and took the microphone. “We need fuel,” he informed the Army radio operator. “Our approach to Io must continue. Do not block our passage.”
The Army operator replied in the affirmative and our course continued. The cruisers cleared a path for our entry. Their striking frames loomed on port and starboard, with laser weapons gleaming on both anterior and posterior surfaces. A landing clearance was ordered and received. Scarcely beginning our approach, a wide gas burst flamed out from the planet and Dante shoved the stick forward, deactivating autopilot and plunging the craft straight downward. As he struggled to pull us back onto course for the moon, another flame erupted and he pulled us up and sharply to the right, the simulated gravity on the ship pushing us hard into our seats. Just as I stood to run toward him to help, the ship shook violently and I fell face-forward toward the floor. Before the collision of my cranium into the steel panels, our gravity filter died and I floated sharply up into the air. My stomach jolted with nausea and I tried to hold back my previous snack, I cried out to Dante.
“What happened?! What’s going --”
He, now floating over the main computer, replied with slight agitation, “That flare sizzled the posterior side on my turn. I think a bunch of circuits were fried.”
I could hear voices coming from the communications console as the Army cruisers checked in to see if we were all right. I floated back toward the controls and activated all Army public frequencies, straining to reach the controls. One of the cruisers had been hit badly and rescue modules were pulling the crew to safety outside of the range of the gas flares -- or so they hoped. The signals were garbled so I could hear only bits of their screams back and forth.
Dante had pulled us back onto a more circular approach to the far side of the moon (not from our perspective, rather, the planet’s). Ducking away from gas bursts which struck from all angles at the ship, we began to feel the gravity of the moon tugging us into its realm. The terrain rushed up beneath us quickly as Dante tried to make a striking approach toward the moon’s surface. The radio signals from the Army cruisers died away and I saw their tiny forms darting back and forth on long arching curves to avoid the gas flares while directing private cruiser traffic past this side of the enormous planet.
“I see no landing station on this side,” I muttered, looking frantically through a map computer.
“Neither do I,” he frowned. He pondered while steering us down below the horizon to avoid the flares. My ship cruised over the dark moon, the engines softly humming as the rudder-thrusters jolted us lightly up and down to avoid rocks and small floating stones. A pile of rubble up ahead smoldered inside an oxygen net which looked to be recently constructed.
As Dante turned a sharp right to miss a crashed ship, a rush of pressure from beneath stimulated an enormous thrust of heat in the cabin. “Can’t feel the controls,” Dante shouted.
We spun three times over the rocky terrain until sliding to a halt, fortunately on our posterior. The moon's gravity pulled us to the floor and we lifted our battered bodies to stand. I shook my head, looking around as the lights flickered.
“What hit us?” I helped Dante to his feet, angrily staring into his eyes. Looking out the side window, I saw the now distant oxygen net in flames. If there were any survivors there, they had better have been wearing oxygen suits.
“There’s a market not too many earth miles from here,” Dante pointed straight ahead. “We need to drive out there and get some fuel.”
“My ship!” I spun around, feeling the heat still baking the cabin.
“You feel how hot it is in here?” He now seemed angry. “This moon rotates too much more and we’ll be a gas-blown stir-fry. You and you your ship. I have a speed rover on my ship above. Get your oxygen net.”
I followed. He messed my ship up pretty nicely, I was sure, but the sage of such vision, of whose journey in the dark wood I read so profoundl
y, still garnered respect and trust. I grabbed my suit from a locker and tugged its heavy frame up and into Dante’s ship.
His was an older version of my craft, although his speeder was a work of transportation art. “She’s a beauty,” I muttered. The silver frame glistened under fluorescent lights in a small rear hold, which looked like it had been added onto the ship. With both forward and rear lateral thrusters -- beta-thrusters! -- this thing could probably turn on a single unit of Union Credit. Small posterior jets would take the contraption on short flights over rough or gassy terrain, at least in weak gravity systems. I walked all around as Dante adjusted a few knobs to get her ready for the ride. A sign in back read ‘I don’t even brake for Minos.’
“Get your suit on, friend. Time to go.” I activated my private oxygen net and with the main ship sealed off, the rear door opened into a plank. We descended backward on the ramp as far as possible and then hovered to the ground. Dante looked at me and smiled from within his helmet. “No problem,” he assured me. As we shot out around the ship, I could see that the damage was worse than I had thought or felt before. Massive dents pockmarked the hull and whole patches of steel were tarnished by the gas flares. There were certainly damaged circuits.
As we raced along the Ionian terrain, Dante planned out our task ahead. “We won’t have time to repair your ship. Sorry about that. Also, the repair shops around here are kind of rough. Leave your craft in there and you might never see it again.” He smiled and patted me on the shoulder.
The Ionian surface was very uneven and we bumped along at greater and greater speeds as Dante pushed the thrusters to their maximum potential. The threat of gas flares still distant over the horizon worried him. Army ground units were stationed along the stretch of marked road to the main station facility. More would be inside, surely on alert for a potential revolt of these scoundrels if the natural conditions on the moon became much worse. We received clearance for a parking port from an angry woman at the radio controls.
As we waited for the docking doors to open, Dante tapped in agitation on the steering wheel. “Shouldn’t take this long,” he muttered. “Keep close to me when we’re in there. Those goons are capable of anything. They all belong on the poles of Pluto.” Rough judgement, but then again, he had been here.
We got out and removed our heavy suits. Dante was right. These folks were rough. The attendants who came out to watch the speeder wore tattered suits and were negligently unshaven, smoking some nasty and gaseous weed from Venus. Dante put some coins in their hands. “You better up this with a speeder like that,” one of the men sneered with a puff of smoke into Dante’s face. He paid them more to watch his craft and cautioned them that the thrusters were protected by an alarm. The chap laughed. I don’t know what he meant and Dante shrugged his shoulders as we entered the station.
Concentric circular hallways surrounded a central control station, which had just recently been taken over by Army operators. The station attendants seemed angry and nervous with the troops around, but I was glad to see the glimmering weapons at the ready to keep order.
The smell was noxious. What with the fuel transports leaving from here and the repairs of large craft on the other side -- not to mention a general body odor of the like I hadn’t smelled since laser-joust practice at the Academy. The excellent nature of medical and dental care, as well as hygiene, on Earth and on most space stations hadn’t reached this Ionian outpost. Here were assigned those workers who had misbehaved, instigated riot or mutiny on other stations or on Earth, or were just plain criminals. Their suits were generally of old issue and badly stained by grease and fuel. They stared at us walking down the halls in our flowing robes and I could hear them remarking in a squeaky dialect that we were “ripe for sonic harvesting.” I held my purse close to my belt, as did Dante.
We came in the fourth circle to a shop which sold fuel containers for small craft, such as mine. Dante drove a hard bargain with the small man behind the counter. I never knew that one who thought he had seen such beauty could really be so rough on the tongue. The man stood his ground pretty nicely, I must say, but I think I got a deal that was fair, at least for this frontier outpost.
Grabbing hold of the two straps on the massive radiation-sealed container of fuel, we lugged our load out and back into the corridors, circling slowly around as workers offered to take a few Union Credits to give us a hand. Dante informed me that we would have no money by the time we reached our ship if we talked with these off-duty workers. I felt better with the Army guards watching our progress.
The speeder was still there and Dante actually smiled at the attendants who stood by it, polishing some of the valves as we entered the parking dock, sticking their hands out, palms up. As we pressed coins into their palms, they replaced small thrusters and tools. Thank you very much.
With their help, we loaded the enormous container into the rear compartment of the speeder and with a glance at the placement of the sun, our suits back on, we darted out of the hold and raced back toward our isolated ships.
The moon was turning and the flares came closer and closer. I turned on the radio and heard reports of accidents on the other side of the rock as Dante pushed the thrusters to the max. His speeder would be out of fuel by the time we reached my ship, but his purpose was to give me every assistance before returning to his place.
The sunlight betrayed the large and very noticeable dents on the fuselage of my craft. We had really done a handsome job on the poor girl. I shook my head and Dante looked at me. “Are you dissatisfied with my guidance,” he seemed to honestly wonder.
“Uh. . .no, of course not.” How could I not say that? It just seemed that his vision was betraying more shadow than light. And yet I was and am grateful beyond words for his guidance and the direction he lent in so many ways. The enkuclios paidaia, the artes liberales.
Dante jolted the speeder up into the air and quickly into the rear hold of his ship. He was out in a flash. Activating a robot arm from the outside, we stood in the open hold with our oxygen nets on, watching my craft’s computer pull the enormous fuel container into its energy storage compartment. The massive robot arm had cost a large amount over the regular price of the ship, but boy, what a convenience. I’m glad the salesman at Paris convinced me.
“You get the fuel loaded and running,” Dante yelled to me through his mask. “I’m going inside to prepare for the launch.” He rushed inside, past the air-lock, leaving me outside to direct the robot arm at its work. The fusion container had to be carefully opened, the tubes connecting the compartment to the thrusters and main engines replaced and secured, and the container closed again. We had only about 45 Earth minutes, as far as Dante could tell.
“Get in here!” Dante shouted over the short-distance radio. “We have a problem.” I slapped my thigh in frustration. What was Lynn going to think we were up to? I pulled myself up and to the air lock, pressing the entry code to enter my ship. As I hastily pulled my oxygen net off, I could hear Dante working with the panels up front. I walked in.
“The targeting computer is out.” He was upset. The same system used to target weapons systems was now used for small private ships to target lift-off trajectories. The computer -- when working -- was supposed to send us up off the moon at a trajectory that would intersect Lynn’s ship on its orbit, as determined by a massive satellite above the plane of the solar system which continuously broadcast the location of all ships in the system. To access a particular ship’s location, I had to have a code for that ship -- unless I was the Army, which could access the coordinates of any ship. In other words, you couldn’t really get lost. But if we took off on the wrong trajectory without the computer calculating our appropriate velocity, we could get hopelessly off course very quickly. Its circuits had been among those wrecked by the gas flare, it seemed. The coordinates of Lynn’s ship, however, were still on the screen.
Only about 37 minutes to go. Dante sat dumbfounded before the computer. Just as my hope of rising to a greater vision was failing, there was the sound of thrusters pulling a craft to a halt next to us, the unknown pilot connecting his ship to ours for flight, but finding no open portal through which to enter. Instead, he came out of his ship’s air lock in an oxygen net, walking toward my human-entry docking station. Funny, I didn’t even ask for identification before opening my portal for the stranger.
Dante looked with fierce suspicion at Galileo. “Lynn sent me along when she realized that perhaps a more rational approach was needed.” Dante shook his head but said nothing as Galileo sat by the calculating computer, which had a few mathematical programs.
“This is not exactly the traditional way,” Dante frowned and chuckled.
Galileo turned to him. “You want to get out of here before this moon turns too much, don’t you?” Galileo was gruff and silent, but seemed to know what he was doing. He calculated the trajectory and speed manually, working against the clock as the outside temperature rose steadily.
He manipulated equations on the screen, graphing our course on both a three-dimensional coordinate axis and on a simulation of the moon and Jupiter. He had to take into account our velocity and acceleration, the pull of the moon’s and planet’s gravitational fields, and those of all bodies we would pass. The coordinates of Lynn’s ship made this all possible.
With scarcely six minutes left before the moon’s rotation on its axis brought us directly under the gas flares, Galileo turned around. Dante and I had been sitting in the main control chairs. We had said nothing. Dante was silent and sullen.
“We are ready,” Galileo informed us. “Ready the launch thrusters while I enter this program into the main autopilot computers. We have only . . . 2 and a half minutes.” Dante and I began pushing buttons on the consoles, checking all the launch systems and readying them quickly.
“Should I leave, go back to my ship?” Dante asked Galileo firmly. I could sense hesitation in his voice.
“No,” Galileo replied, “we can take you along. It is good to remember what our past teachers have taught us.”
“Very well.” With the thrusters ready, Galileo gave the signal to start the main engines. The autopilot took over with 30 seconds left to lift-off.
Dante patted me on the shoulder as our rockets hurled our three ships into the air. He smiled weakly, but the confidence he gave me was still of immense value. “You have taken me far,” I told him.
“Not all the way.”
“No, but thank you. I will never forget.”
Galileo watched our coordinates rapidly changing on the screen, numbers flying by as we ascended and accelerated out of the moon’s orbit onto a rapid trajectory away from Jupiter’s system. “Are we secure?” Galileo inquired. I checked all the main system consoles and replied in the affirmative. “We’ll increase speed then.”
I have never before been so exhilarated by the beta-thrusters. We were away from that terrible place and racing on our course, covering distances immense in little time, ready to face challenges we couldn’t face before. Galileo adjusted our course appropriately to avoid interplanetary debris. I could still see Army cruisers headed for Io, but they were far off and not of concern to us now.
Galileo had had to reconfigure my targeting computers manually. The circuits would have to be fixed, but this would work for now. The clock counted downward toward our expected rendezvous with Lynn’s station. With the aid of a telescope I had mounted on the anterior starboard deck, I could make out her station in the distance. The glorious wheel was still but a dot in the sky, but as our paths intersected and our perceptions drew inward on each other, it grew into focus. Dazzling. The sun reflected off the solar panels as the central wheel spun in unison with its orbit.
Our approach, under Galileo’s guidance, was smooth and direct. I basked in the glow of the light reflecting off the wheel and entering through the window above my main console. It was a beauty that spun us inward. We were quickly cleared for docking by an assistant on board the station and docked at an open port on Dante’s ship. We walked through it and into the station. The walls and floors glimmered brightly.
Lynn approached and silently took me by the hand. She led me along the circular corridors, with Galileo following behind and then Dante. Our forms were reflected in the mirrors.
the egg