PROLOG: My lousy high school job
Okay, so I wasn’t doing much with my weekends anyway. So I needed some extra cash to pay the damages to the garage (long story). But the last thing I wanted to do at 0600 on a Saturday morning was wipe table at Haravie’s.
It’s not a bad place. A small restaurant at the edge of Startown, it was once part of this big chain of diners that stretched from here all the way to Earth but I think our Haravie’s is the last one standing. The customers are mostly old codgers. Guys in their early 50’s (very few women) who come to meet with friends and talk about their gall bladder troubles and drink coffee. Yes coffee, we still serve it and sell it by the pot!
I repeat this is NOT what I want to do with my life! Dam it, I am 17 and I need to get ready for my future. A future that involves writing and travel and really sleek babes. Don’t get me wrong, I can do the work at Haravie’s it’s not hard or anything. It’s just not the place for a guy like me.
Anyway, I am slinging the coffee on Saturday morning and I see this guy. He looks maybe 80, which defiantly makes him the oldest dude in the place. I have seen him before. He always wears that same synth-lether jacket with the star map printed on the back and some kind of brass badge pinned on the front. Sometimes he wears a blue cap with the Imperial Starlines logo on the front. He never meets with anybody and he always comes and goes alone.
Business was slow and I was bored. So I started talking to the guy. Just chitchat I guess. He said his name was Jupiter, which I thought was a weird name, Jupiter O’Riley. I asked if he was here to get away from Mrs. O’Riley for a while.
“Kid,” he said, “I have known a lot of women in my time. Unfortunately every last one of ‘em turned out to be straight crazy. I dated ‘em, I slept with ‘em, I crossed space with ‘em, but I never married any of ‘em and I have no regrets on that score. Believe me son, a crazy woman will suck the life out of you faster than a malfunctioning air-lock and your better off without either one.”
“Crazy? I asked, “How do you mean ‘crazy’?” And then he started telling me the biggest set of lies I have ever herd. But since business was slow I just sat down at his table and listened. I even tried some coffee (my Gods how do people drink this narsh?).
CHAPTER ONE: Crazy Eva
Jupiter said he was from Dayton Ohio, a small city in the middle of what used to be the United States of North America. He was in his freshman year of college studying electronics when he met a woman named Eva LaGrand. She was a senior and majored in world religions.
Eva was dark haired, fair skinned and sort of short. Jupiter described her as having the body of a female athlete with ample mass to fill out her bra. She was into all things metaphysical and was an artist as well. To young Jup’ she was a fantasy given form and it must have been much more than lust because he talked most fondly of long nights spent on her couch sipping tea and just talking about things with her.
Jup’ was only about 20 at the time and had come from very boring beginnings (like me I guess). His folks held regular jobs, lived in a regular neighborhood, never argued, never yelled and never laughed. He had graduated his high school and gone to the nearest university just because it was the nearest and he did not know what else to do. He studied electronics not for love of circuits but because he figured he could get a decent job doing it someday. In contrast Eva was the weirdest and most wonderful thing in his life, and Jupiter O’Riley was hers to command.
She seemed to genuinely like Jup’ for the nerdy kid he was and seemed surprised at everything he considered normal. Like showing up on time for a date or paying for dinner. He treated her with respect and made no advances waiting until she was ready, or asked him…or something. She did not talk about her past much. She once said she believed only in the present and the future. Jupiter very much wanted to be a part of her future.
Eva was into something called the “Bright Day”. It was a movement of meditation weirdoes who believed that the world (I guess he meant Earth) was soon to end in a horrible tumult. However, they believed that a bright new day was just around the corner; that is for those who survived the apocalypse. It was led by an American Indian (whatever that is) named Ernest Cunningbow and he was organized and energetic.
Then old Jupiter started talking about sleeper ships and I just had to stop him.
“Sleeper ships? Who the hell uses sleeper ships anymore?”
“Kid, they were the newest thing when I was your age.”
I swear I should have seen this coming. I knew he had to be lying. Hyper-drive had been around for over 100 years and long before that people had abandoned sleeper ships. The idea that you could use cryo’ tubes to preserve the passengers and crew of a sub-light ship for a journey that could take decades was never practical and few people were crazy enough to try it even ‘back in the day’.
“Mister, just when were you my age?” I asked the man who looked 80. Without batting an eye he looked and me and gave a direct answer to my direct question. I remember he was smiling as he said it.
“2075, that’s right kid, I am 293 years old. And sometimes I feel every minute of it.”
“Waite a minute even with a sleeper voyage that’s still nuts! I don’t know. How long did most of those trips last, 50 years or something?” I was trying to remember History class and wishing I had gotten something better than a C+.
“Well the voyage of the Bright Day took a bit longer but it wasn’t the only time I spent in cryo’. Then there were a few other…happenings that tended to stretch me out a bit. But you asked how I meant by crazy women and I mean to stay on the subject.”
Jupiter was introduced to Cunningbow at a party or something. He said the man was friendly, smart and made everybody in the room feel welcome and special. I have met people like that I suppose. The captain of our debating team is one and my mom’s preacher at church tries very hard to be one too (bad breath…terrible). Cunningbow it seems was way ahead of either of them and he had about two hundred motivated followers looking forward to the “New Day’ when everybody would be free to live as the universe intended. Unfortunately these 200 or so people had very few technical skills.
Jupiter knew something about electronics (an ‘A’ student in fact) and he seemed genuinely interested in what Cunningbow had to say. The fact that he was also head over heals in love with the movements 3rd Secretary for Spiritual Growth also seemed good news to Cunningbow who praised Jup’ for his good taste in women and his advanced spiritual enlightenment for one so young. Cunningbow was about 40.
At that time Sleeper ships were no longer something only governments could afford. Advances in aerospace teck and a general downturn in the space industry made them cheaper than ever before and all sorts of private groups were purchasing them. Long-range sensors discovered distant Earthlike planets and courses were plotted by adventurous/crazy idealist who hoped to make a new utopian world out of one of those distant glimmers in the scanner screens.
All this group’s members had to do was give Cunningbow their every worldly position and pass a physical to get the insurance company to approve and the voyage was assured…mostly. The preparations took months and every member of the group was given study material on the new planet and encouraged to learn skills useful to the endeavor. There were classes offered by the government for free and Jupiter took as many as he could.
He also moved in to an apartment with Eva and was by now as deep into the relationship as a man could get. She was always happy to see him come home from his classes, or from the part time job he worked (Baskin Robbins?) and would get up from the cushions where she and her friends had been meditating to give him a warm hug. He was in love and described as absolute heaven every moment with her whether spent awake or asleep.
Finally the day came when they all reported to the hospital to be anestitised and then loaded like freight onto the sleeper ship U.S.C.S Bright Day. Everybody was scared, a few did not show up at all, but Cunningbow was there to greet every one of them with a warm smile and an encouraging word. Jupiter held Eva’s hand while she was anestitised and placed in stasis and then took his turn as a pretty nurse pushed a needle into his arm. And that was the last time he saw Earth for the next few hundred years.
And then he woke up. |
