It is 2065 and Earth continues its downward spiral. It is more polluted, overcrowded and, most of all, more desperate. Then Charley shows up in an alien spaceship and o? ers an escape: a chance for a new life on a new world, in a colony currently unde
Forbearance
A Science Fiction NovelBy C. William OchsenhirtiUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2012 C. William Ochsenhirt
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4697-5568-7 Chapter One
A spaceship orbits Earth, alien and small. Barely 500 meters in length, that constitutes miniscule considering its ability to traverse the wastes of interstellar space with no more concern for such a journey's rigors than a weekend sailor would experience on a casual cruise around the bay. At present it is undetectable, whether by other orbiting vessels, eavesdropping space stations or even by the latest ground based sensor arrays. No matter what form or extent the curiosity that may be directed towards it, it circles wraithlike, cloaked beneath its intent, biding its time.
It is the evening of June 15, 2065, a Monday, 7 pm in the Eastern Time Zone of the United States, evening of what has been a generally pleasant day throughout most of the east coast. New York and Boston endured afternoon showers that snarled the evening commute to a certain extent but not seriously enough to warrant more than a brief mention on the evening news. Washington, D.C. got a little toasty that afternoon, as it was certainly capable of, it being already that time of year when the fortunate few fled the capital's unbearable summertime heat and humidity. That included congress, which was in recess but not the unyielding bureaucracy, which, while never overexerting itself, also never gets to all leave, certainly not at the same time. Further south, Miami was just beginning to awaken from its afternoon languor, already in anticipation of dinner and whatever Latin-flavored entertainment the evening might provide.
All in all, a largely uneventful day, so far.
A human being, a fully privileged member of the genus Homo Sapiens, who goes by the self-applied appellation of "Charley," sits in the command chair in the control room of the spacecraft orbiting Earth, about to change all that. He is trying out opening lines for a short speech he is about to give. What makes that noteworthy, other than the already surprising fact that an ordinary human is in command of an alien spacecraft, is that he is going to broadcast his message to the entire world below, but then labeling him as ordinary is probably doing him a disservice. The message, for good or bad, certainly will be anything but.
Although the message will be transmitted worldwide, propagated throughout every nook and node of the ubiquitous worldwide media net, this ordinary, or not, man named Charley is most concerned about the reaction it will produce in the United States for that is still the most powerful, prosperous and influential country in the world. Besides, he had been born there and felt a lingering twinge of, not patriotism, certainly not that, more nostalgia, an inveterate longing for a time when he was content to be merely dismayed at his government's clumsy heavy-handedness, like that of a careless toddler, not, as at present, concerned with how that incompetent brutishness might translate into action against a perceived, but, in fact, at least not from him, threat from the stars. He gazes at the continent's familiar outline displayed on the forward wall of the command room, easily recognizing Maine and Florida, guessing at the locations of the rest of the eastern states in between, his primary target audience. He catches himself daydreaming about geography, sits upright in the command chair and offers a trial opening line:
"Hello, earthlings. I am Xur of the Kodan Armada. I come in peace, or pieces, whatever. Not entire anyway."
Forgive him, Charley has not quite gotten his focus back. His next two attempts are no better.
"Yo, brothers and sisters. Look to the heavens. Your salvation is at hand," followed by, "Earthlings, lend me your ears. I do not mean that literally. I have already eaten. Blah, blah, blah."
Charley scrunches his face in disgust and frustration. "I don't know Percy, I don't like anything I've come up with. I think I'm having trouble believing we are actually finally doing this. You know what I mean?"
Percy is how Charley addresses the ship. It is not the ship's technical designation and certainly not how the ship refers to itself, simply the name by which Charley chooses to refer to it, a name indicative of his displeasure at having to depend on a sentient, ultra-advanced piece of alien technology to do everything for him from flushing the toilet to transporting him between the stars. Charley does not understand the slightest thing about the technology that surrounds him and upon which his very existence is so totally dependent so he is, therefore, wary of it, if not outright fearful. If, as someone has said, advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, then Charley is not at all certain that Percy does not represent the physical embodiment of the darkest of the black arts. Worse, he knows that the ship is many times smarter than he. His revenge is to give this ultra-advanced example of alien superiority an insulting, demeaning name.
Percy, the so-named, feared intelligence, likewise resents the insult implicit in being referred to as some sort of menial; it quite understands the reference. Even though it has been enjoined by its creators to obey Charley's orders, at least in theory, Percy has always considered itself superior to almost all organic life forms, human beings generally and most particularly the human being named Charley. On such terms are friendships forged.
Charley is a normal enough looking man: slightly more than six feet tall, apparently about thirty years of age with no distinguishing scars, or obvious debilities or deformities. His features are pleasing enough, chiseled would perhaps describe them best, or sculpted, with a strong chin and prominent cheekbones, classically handsome without appearing fey. He has dark brown, wavy hair that currently surrounds his troubled, tension filled face in dishevelment and disarray.
The eyes, though, would draw attention. They are ordinary enough, dark brown with a few flecks of something murkier at the edges of their irises, but they are not the eyes of a typical thirty-something man. They are the eyes of someone else entirely, of the submarine captain who waits for the depth charges to blow, or the polar explorer lost in the featureless wasteland, of every grizzled veteran who knows that no one always wins. His eyes belong in a rocking chair, staring into the past, not to a man in his prime in an orbiting spaceship plunging into the ineffable, unforeseeable future.
Mostly, his eyes are those of someone who would rather be elsewhere, doing anything other than attempting to communicate with an entire planet without scaring its inhabitants half to death.
Percy chooses that moment to answer Charley's rhetorical question, a bad habit it has. "Yet here we are, at that point, the point of introduction. I believe you would call it 'First Contact'. Perhaps something more serious would be appropriate such as 'May I have your attention please. This is a most important message.'"
Charley can't remember any longer whether he started calling the ship Percy because it reminded him of an English butler or if it started talking like an English butler because he began to address it as Percy.
Charley forces himself to focus on the matter at hand, his global net premiere.
Charley acknowledges Percy's suggestion.
"Yeah, first contact, except that I am not the alien here and this is not a clash of cultures. Your idea sounds all right but it's too formal. Let me work on it some more. We've got almost an hour before it's eight o'clock on the east coast so the situation is merely critical, not yet catastrophic."
Percy offers an alternative. "Would it matter if we delayed announcing ourselves for a day or two? No one is aware of our presence at present."
Charley shakes his head twice, first at amazement that Percy could enunciate that last sentence without stumbling over its pronunciation and then again when he realizes his own denial to what Percy has said.
"It matters to me. I want to get this over with. Besides, more time isn't the problem. I'm just having trouble committing to any one particular opening line. I'm over-thinking the problem, I know, and more time isn't going to help that. The curtain is going up. I have to finalize my lines."
Percy leaves Charley in peace. It has enough to occupy its attention even though it currently is hardly stressed or anywhere near its capacity. First, and primarily, it maintains a polar orbit and keeps its life support systems functioning. Additionally, it monitors all transmissions within its province; that is extensive but not taxing, not for a ship as advanced as Percy. Percy is an exploration class starship, designed to detect and intercept all natural and artificial transmissions at any frequency within the entire electro-magnetic spectrum. It understands all Earth languages, at least all those likely to be transmitted, and stores all of the deciphered transmissions in a keyword structured, syntactically variable, multiply-inverted database housed within a mono-molecular storage array with a capacity that far exceeds that of the entire planet below, by many magnitudes. Physically, that defines a volume of about two cubic inches.
Percy has access to the records of thousands of similar encounters with sentient species throughout the galaxy as well as the results of centuries of surveillance of Earth - by other instrumentalities - for contextual comparison. It is supremely experienced and yet thrilled at every new outing. It handles all that complexity with no more effort than a professional juggler might, standing on stilts talking to a small child at his feet who is staring up at him tossing twirling wooden pins. Far less, in fact.
At present Percy is also maintaining its chameleon field, visually blending its five hundred meter length into its environment by the simple expediency of transmitting what its space-side sensors receive through its earth-side emitters and vice versa. An object would have to flat on collide with it before the ship could even be detected. Percy's hull naturally absorbs all electromagnetic frequencies such as radar and is currently absorbing infrared and ultraviolet optical frequencies as well. Its mass of some fifty-five thousand metric tons is totally undetectable. It prides itself on its cleverness.
Charley returns to the control room, having left to prepare himself for his debut. His hair is now marginally more sheveled, and he is wearing a blue v-necked, long sleeve top of some material that appears similar to cotton but isn't. His pants are of a like material in a complementary, delta-fertile, brown hue. Charley sits back down in the command chair and tries his latest attempt at an opening line.
"May I have your attention, please. This is a message of the utmost importance."
Percy bites on the taunt. "That is almost word for word what I said."
Charley smiles. "See, I do listen to you. Actually, I was just testing my voice. You will have to wait for the appropriate time to hear what I have actually chosen to say."
Charley fidgets in his chair, sits as upright as he can, then asks, "Are you ready to interrupt all of the radio and television transmissions, to hack into the world net?"
Percy cycles into action mode, "Ready."
Then Charley pushes his luck. "You won't burn out the receivers with your signal or crash all the computers will you? That would not be an auspicious start."
Percy is having none of it. "Insulting me is not particularly a good idea either, human."
Charley jerks back slightly in his chair, somewhat taken aback by Percy's vehemence. "Sorry, I'm just nervous."
Charley nods that it is time and Percy performs its advanced, alien magic. Every television set in the world, whether turned on or not, suddenly shows an image of a spaceship, a ship shaped like no Earth vessel imaginable. An alien spaceship. Every computer that is a member of a domain that gets out somehow to the world net shows the same image. The ship is, of course, Percy. Even after more than two centuries of science fiction, in the form of mostly badly written books, poorly thought out movies and shabby, shoddy efforts at overly- melodramatic TV series, all imagining uncounted numbers of shapes and designs for spaceships, Percy is still somehow noticeably different, noticeably alien. It has to do with proportionality as well as with shape. It also helps that Percy blends into the nothingness around it, seeming somehow to fade at its boundaries, without anything as crisp and defined as edges. Overall, the image of Percy is akin to an ovoid-shaped prehistoric armadillo girded for battle with unseen adversaries above and below while extending feelers forward and aft, appendages that more properly belong to some entire other species - something aquatic, something tense and alert – something ready to bound off in a moment's notice in a rush of escape. A truly alien object.
For a brief moment, no sound is transmitted. Even radios remain silent. Charley has chosen this as the first image to transmit as he thinks it should be immediately obvious to everyone that this is an alien construct as he likewise believes it does not resemble any spacecraft known to earthlings in the slightest; to simply get their attention. In that brief moment, it occurs to Charley, glancing at the monitor, that Percy looks like a Dr. Moreau created cross between a frog and a giraffe, but that is just Charley. What it looks like to everyone, it is hoped, is an alien spaceship.
Then Charley speaks:
"May I have your attention please. I apologize for the interruption. Your video screens are showing an image of a spaceship that is currently in orbit around Earth. It presently appears, when viewed from the eastern part of the North American continent, to be within the bucket of the big dipper, or the constellation Ursa Major, if you prefer."
The transmitted image then changes to a close-up of Charley seated in his command chair, shown from mid-chest level up, a typical video talking head. He is smiling as sincerely as he can. He looks like a nervous undertaker.
"Hello, my name is Charley. Please do not be alarmed. I am a human being although I have not been on Earth for some time. I have returned to offer some of you an adventure without parallel, a chance at an entirely new life. I will give everyone an opportunity to confirm our presence and to assure themselves that this is not an earthbound hoax. I will return in one-half hour with more information. See you then."
Percy breaks transmission, allowing the world net in all its myriad permutations to temporarily resume its normal operation, if only to facilitate the spreading of the fact of their appearance. Charley lets out a breath like he had been holding it for days. "Well, that's done it. We're committed now."
A different voice answers. "This is what we came for, is it not? We have been working towards this for more than a year. I do not understand your negativity, Charley. This is a wonderful moment, a real step forward."
Charley turns to the doorway of the control room, abashed. He quickly adopts a wholehearted smile as he takes in the sight of her. The woman standing there with the slightly peeved expression on her gorgeous face goes by the name of Clarity of Purpose. She is almost six feet of flawless beauty. Charley always has trouble taking his eyes off her. Her skin is a burnished brown with a glow that is liquid, fresh brewed mocha cut with a swirl of scalded cream. Her hair is blonde, almost white. It shines as though it emits light rather than merely reflecting it, of a hue like the full moon on a crisp autumn night. Her features are astoundingly pleasing but the overall effect is somehow disturbing as their sum seem not to belong together, as though she were a human amalgam, a being made up of a mix of races with a commingling of features that has never existed outside of an illustrator's imagination. This unlikely convergence of disparate details in a single countenance must be the reason for her causing unease as, viewed in her entirety, the overall effect of her is stunning.
Clarity, or Purdy as Charley sometimes refers to her, walks over to Charley, who is slouching, somewhat petulantly now, in his chair. She strokes his left cheek with her hand, one of the ways she demonstrates endearment. She extends the movement, finger combing through his never quite right hair in a vain attempt to improve its tidiness while Charley gently strokes her shoulders and back, each communicating in a way the other well understands. The contact soothes Charley in particular and helps him center himself for what is to come while it also alleviates Clarity of some of her unfocused concern.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Forbearanceby C. William Ochsenhirt Copyright © 2012 by C. William Ochsenhirt. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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