Which Art In Hope (Spooner Federation Saga Book 1) Read online

  Which Art In Hope:

  A novel of the far future

  Francis W. Porretto

  Copyright (C) 2009 Francis W. Porretto

  Cover art by Donna Casey (http://DigitalDonna.Com)

  Prologue

  A Dream Of Freedom was a ship that had once been a world.

  It first entered the Solar System in 2117, moving at ninety-three miles per second, at a slight angle to the solar ecliptic. It was a near-perfect sphere with a diameter of twenty-one miles. It had a nickel-iron surface, but showed a considerable luminosity in the gamma-ray portion of the spectrum. Its trajectory would bring it to a perigee of one hundred forty million miles, about two years after its first sighting.

  The International Astrophysical Congress assigned it the identifier X3J11 and immediately dispatched grant petitions to the world's one hundred eighty States. All one hundred eighty petitions were rejected; the war with the Spooner Federation was entering its final phase, and all resources had to be husbanded toward that end.

  The IAC continued to watch the object. As it approached, the great orbiting telescopes gradually made out more details of its composition and structure. Numerous cavity radiators became apparent in the gamma-ray images. Anomalies in its trajectory as it passed the outer gas giants caused the watchers to ponder its density. Shortly before X3J11 passed the orbit of Jupiter, the watchers could tell that the interstellar wanderer was honeycombed.

  The United Nations' combined forces had pushed Spoonerite resistance back to upper Yukon. The Spoonerites dug in for a last stand above the Arctic Circle, and the States massed their forces for the blow that would put an end to Spoonerism on Earth.

  Supreme Commander Ewan MacDonnell planned for a three-pronged strike, two land forces and an enormous amphibious group. There were ample forces available, though the supply lines were a chore to maintain, especially in view of the underenthused participation of the Russians. His staff labored for three months, calculating the affair to a nicety, allowing for an overkill factor of three and permitting no conceivable routes of egress from the killing zone. The two hundred ten thousand Spoonerites in MacDonnell's sights would have nowhere to run.

  The word went out quietly to all commanders, down to the battalion level: Spoonerite surrenders should not be deemed trustworthy. The taking of prisoners was strongly discouraged.

  X3J11 approached perigee. The watchers of the IAC were electrified by what they saw. The spectra from the planetoid's cavity radiators indicated an immense core of nuclear fuels. Millions of tons of something dearer than pitchblende or carnotite resided at the center of the worldlet.

  IAC petitioned the States again, and belatedly received their respectful attention. Funds flowed into the watch group. Government representatives and advisors were attached to the effort. Spacecraft that had gone unused for more than a century were pulled out of mothballs, and a frenzied effort to recommission them began.

  MacDonnell's meticulously planned triple assault began exactly on schedule. For a full day's advance, it encountered no resistance at all. For the first few miles, he and his troops assumed that the Spoonerites had run out of fuel, or ammunition, or hope. When the advance guard first came upon abandoned Spoonerite emplacements, well stocked with shot and fuel, they began to wonder.

  The wonder culminated in a pillar of fire seen on United Nations broadcasts by more than three billion people. It was followed by another, and another, and another.

  Maddened beyond all restraint, the UN forces slew and spared not. The inner core of resistance around the Spoonerites' makeshift spaceport was incredibly tough, but before the massed military power of all the States of the world, it had to fall. The victors eventually counted nearly two hundred seven thousand Spoonerite corpses within the Arctic redoubt. The Secretary-General proclaimed the viciously immoral ideology of Spoonerism to have been extinguished for all time.

  Statists say things like that.

  ***

  About eight months later, the IAC's watch group reported that X3J11 had more than three thousand new residents. The world had known the Spoonerites to be both tough and smart. Given their circumstances, they were as well prepared as any expedition into the unknown could be. They were better motivated than any group of human beings had ever been.

  Geotechnicians disconnected three honeycombs from the intricate maze that permeated the worldlet, and made them airtight. Hydroponicists worked in a frenzy to establish the colonies of greenery that would provide breathing air and nutrition. Engineers transferred the power plants of the four exile ships to the rock and connected them to generators that would provide heat and electrical power. Geologists traced the patterns of radiation to find the lode of uranium at the worldlet's core. One special group went to work on a huge fission reactor that would power a steerable battery of gigawatt pulse lasers.

  Twelve days after touchdown, there was a thin but breathable atmosphere in the tunnels, the power had been stabilized, and the computer network had been laid. Sensors and servomechanisms were dotted about the inhabited passages to monitor environmental conditions and to regulate the flows of fluids through the various conduits.

  Of the three thousand twenty-three men and women who had escaped the slaughter in the Arctic Circle, eighty-seven died in the furious construction of a human habitat on X3J11. Their bodies were stacked in an unpressurized chamber near where the main recyclers would soon be.

  When the all-clear was announced, two thousand nine hundred thirty-six men and women removed the helmets of their pressure suits as one, and tasted the air of their new home.

  No one knows how it started, or where. No one called for it, or tried to organize it. Stories would be told about it for centuries. One man fell to his knees, a few others followed his example, and the rest soon after. The buzz of twelve days' frantic struggle for life fell silent as the last remnant of the Spooner Federation gave tearful thanks to the fallen for the sacrifices that had bought the survivors their lives and freedom.

  ***

  The States capable of spaceflight were not about to leave X3J11 to the Spoonerites. Within a month after the Battle of the Yukon, four nations launched armed expeditions to take the planetoid from them.

  The Spoonerites were unsurprised, and ready.

  They hailed each approaching craft while it was still millions of miles away, announced their unwillingness to receive visitors, and described the giant lasers that they could use to enforce their will. The first of the statist expeditionary forces was not convinced, and entered a boarding orbit.

  When the warship had come within a light-second of the worldlet, one grim-eyed Spoonerite nodded to another, a switch was thrown, and the lasers pulsed. The slug of coherent light boiled away the apex of the ship in an instant. Two hundred soldiers died of vacuum exposure a few seconds later.

  The Spoonerites announced the first ship's demise to the other three, and beseeched them to turn back. One was undeterred, and tried for a hyperbolic approach that would permit it to reconnoiter the worldlet at close range without committing to a landfall. It, too, was destroyed.

  The remaining two warships turned and made for Earth. Upon their arrival, the commanders of both were arrested and jailed. Within weeks, both had been convicted of treason and executed. However, there were no more expeditions to X3J11. The people of Earth ceased to think of the exiles, and returned to their usual business of starvation, black marketeering, and mutual oppression. It was what they knew best, after all.

  ***

  On X3J11, when the two remaining warships altered course for Earth, work immediately began to convert the defense emplacement into a
propulsion system. Ion drives were built and harnessed to the huge fission reactor. A massive slurrying system was constructed and linked to the drives. Engineers and astrophysicists worked in tandem to determine a list of potential destinations, given the available fuel, the available reaction mass, and X3J11's probable inability to sustain life for a prolonged interval.

  The prospects were poor. The Solar System resides in a galactic backwater, where there are few stars with planetary systems. Worse, X3J11, for all its riches of fuel, possessed only enough mass to accelerate to five percent of the speed of light, and to decelerate from it -- once.

  A G2 white dwarf at a distance of twenty-six light years stood out among the candidate destinations. Observation hinted at a complex system of planetary masses in orbit around it. The star's similarity to Sol suggested that one of these might have a human-compatible biosphere. Nothing else within the cone of possible trajectories looked nearly as good.

  The alternative to an interstellar journey with a crapshoot ending was to reassemble the exile ships and make for Mars, a world with too little air and too little energy, and to hope that the States of Earth never thought of the red planet as a potential source of new slaves.

  The three thousand exiles did their best to make X3J11 habitable for the long term. It wasn't easy. They had fifty trillion tons of nickel and iron, and nearly a hundred million tons of uranium ore far richer than any ever found on Earth, but of air, water and organics, little beyond what they'd brought with them. They would lead a constricted, marginal, sense-deprived life until they'd found a new world. Their astrophysicists told them it would be like that for a minimum of five hundred forty-four years.

  They looked at the bleak interstellar journey, then at one another, and told themselves they could do it.

  The engines were fired. X3J11 was rechristened A Dream Of Freedom.

  ***

  When the Spoonerites reached the outer marches of their target system, their circumstances were bleak indeed. A Dream Of Freedom had used more than eighty percent of its mass for reaction. The ship's complement was down to fewer than eighteen hundred souls. The systems crafted to sustain life and conserve its necessary ingredients, ingenious as they were, tottered at the edge of collapse. If this system had no niche for the Spoonerites, they were doomed.

  A blue-green world, third from the star, beckoned them forward. They maneuvered into one of the planet's Lagrange points and studied it.

  Its motion about the primary was not detectably precessive. Its axis of rotation was at a gentle seven degrees to the plumb of the ecliptic. Its atmosphere was comparable to Earth's. Its crustal composition was unusually high in antimony and copper, but otherwise looked much like Earth's. A single, world-girdling ocean separated the two principal continents, both of which were in the planet's temperate zones. There were abundant flora, but no detectable fauna.

  From space, it appeared to be a gift from a God in which none of them believed.

  Part One: As it is in Heaven

  Chapter 1

  It began with a fight over a girl.

  Armand Morelon gaped at the rage that burned in Ellis Michalski's eyes. "What's your problem?"

  "I've been seeing her for two years. Where do you get off, horning in?" Ellis's normally pale face was swollen and blotched with red.

  "Hey, take it easy. Vicki and I are just friends." Armand sensed that the exchange had stepped permanently across the borders of politeness. The rest of Victoria Peterson's circle of admirers was listening to the two of them with alarming attention.

  "Oh yeah?" the senior shouted. "What about last night?"

  The big junior shrugged. "So she came to dinner at Morelon House. Don't you ever visit your friends for dinner?"

  "So I paged her comm frequency from twenty hundred till well after midnight, and no one picked up the mike!"

  Victoria stood listening to the developing altercation with an obscene look of gratification, obviously happy to be the subject of contention. Their classmates crowded around in steadily increasing numbers.

  Armand sensed the rising danger. "Look, Ellis, Vicki left our place at twenty-three. I didn't take her home, so I'm not going to answer for her movements." He looked over at Victoria, hoping for a contribution, but she said nothing. "Maybe her mom turned off the radio to get a little quiet." He shrugged again and began to walk away.

  Ellis snarled and leaped at him, fists flailing.

  Armand slipped to the right. Ellis careened past him and plowed into a group of onlookers. Two of them went down with him. The enraged boy jerked himself upright and repeated his charge, and Armand sideslipped away from him again.

  Hoots of derision arose from the crowd around them. Most were directed at Armand, for failing to stand and fight. Ellis took them as encouragement. He pursued the younger but larger Armand around the schoolyard, as determined to force an exchange of blows as Armand was to avoid one. The more times Armand eluded him, the larger the crowd of spectators, the louder their catcalls grew, and the angrier and more determined to batter him Ellis became.

  Armand could see portions of Ellis's anatomy glowing, in a color for which he had no name.

  Spots the size of a walnut in several places on Ellis's torso emitted a strange, dull radiance. Armand could not help watching them. Now and again they appeared to pulse or flex.

  Not knowing what he was doing or how, Armand reached out to his pursuer. With an organ he could not see nor describe but that was his to command, he spread coolness over those glowing points. In seconds they had faded and disappeared. Ellis was standing motionless and bewildered, looking down at his own body as if he were surprised to find himself in it.

  The crowd that had pursued them fell silent. When it was clear that no blows would be struck, it broke up into smaller knots of conversation, all of which gradually drifted away. Presently only Ellis, Armand, and Victoria remained.

  Ellis mumbled something inaudible to Armand, shrugged sheepishly at Victoria, and departed.

  "Why did he stop like that?" Victoria said.

  Armand glared at the young woman. He could feel his color rising. "Why did he start, Vicki? What the hell did you say to him?"

  "Nothing -- I just -- oh, forget it, you don't care anyway." She turned to flounce off in a trademarked Victoria Peterson huff. Armand's hand shot out and closed around her wrist. A flicker of fear passed over Victoria's face.

  "I don't care? Because I wouldn't hit him, or let him hit me?"

  She drew herself up haughtily. "I suppose I'm not worth it?"

  Armand released the young woman's wrist and looked her up and down. Victoria was a senior, and easily the prettiest girl in the school: tall and slender, grey-eyed and auburn-haired. She was one of the brightest as well. Universally popular with both her classmates and teachers, she was normally surrounded by a thick ring of admirers and acolytes. Ellis had been prominent and specially favored among them. The introverted, barely social Armand, a year her junior, would never have dreamed of admittance to her circle, until she sought him out. He'd never thought to ask why.

  "That's right," he said. "You're not."

  Victoria's mouth flew open. The recess bell rang. Armand turned away and made for the school doors.

  Chapter 2

  Gallatin University invites all undergraduate and graduate students to participate in its annual psi screening. You are encouraged to take part even if you've been negatively rated in previous years. This year's registration meeting will be held in the Genet Social Sciences Center main auditorium on Randsday, December 29, at 09:00. Please bring writing materials.

  Armand read the modest announcement in the Gallatin Herald with a mixture of excitement and frustration. He'd planned to head home for the end-of-year festivities, but he'd been waiting all semester to take part in the screening, and wasn't about to miss it.

  Wonder what I can tell Mom and Grandpere Alain.

  His mother hadn't wanted him to leave home at all. If it hadn't been for the unexpected
full scholarship, she might not have permitted it.

  Charisse will be pissed, too.

  He ran his thumb across the envelopes stacked in his desk organizer. His younger sister, still a junior in high school, wrote him nearly every day. His hometown friends might think it the hugest possible joke, but then, they'd have loved to have the dark-eyed, black-haired young beauty write to them. Any of them she so much as glanced at would start to stammer. After her one visit to the Gallatin campus, several of his classmates would have dropped out just for the chance to date her.

  I can't miss this. I've wanted to know too long and too badly. If they can't tell me what I am, I'll probably never know.

  "Chuck?"

  Etienne Feigner looked up from his book on the Objectivist - Fabulist controversy. "Hm?"

  "Are you going for the psi screening?"

  "Nope. Going home for year's end." The big sophomore's eyes darted back to his reading.

  "Did you go for it last year?" Armand twisted around in his desk chair to face his roommate.

  "Yup. All the freshmen do. I scored random. You're going, aren't you?"

  "Well, yeah, if I can figure out a good excuse for not going home."

  Feigner grinned. "Tell them you've been named to the Hope Judiciary."

  "Come on! What did you tell your folks last year?"

  "I didn't have to tell them anything. They only live four miles away, remember? Besides," the sophomore sat up on his bed, tossed his book aside and stretched, his huge shoulders crackling audibly, "last year they started it at the beginning of the semester."

  "Hmph." Mom's not going to like it. Well, maybe next year. "I wish...oh, never mind."

  "Hey, you can go home after the registration session, you know. The second one won't be for two weeks after, at least."

  "Oh! Great. Got a train schedule for Randsday?"

  "Nope."

  "Well, somebody on the floor must have one." Armand rose from his desk and headed to the door. He stopped with his hand on the knob. "Chuck? Do they make a big deal out of it if you turn up psi?"