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  STAR QUEST

  By

  STUART J. BYRNE

  A Renaissance E Books publication

  ISBN 1-58873-865-5

  All rights reserved

  Copyright 2006 Stuart J. Byrne

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission.

  For information:

  [email protected]

  PageTurner Editions/A Futures-Past Classic

  DEDICATION

  TO

  GENE RODDENBERRY

  SORRY IT TOOK SO LONG, GENE!

  ABOUT THIS BOOK

  The genesis and raison d'etre of Star Quest encompasses a story in itself – due largely to its own self-generating "genes." I only planted a seed, but it was an alien acorn that produced a rather extragalactic tree. Although written several decades ago, it has not remained dormant because of inadequate craftsmanship. I do recall that in the Roaring Fifties I was selling an average of 40,000 words per month rather consistently, so in my vintage years why should my intended "Meisterwerk" lack writing quality? It has remained unpublished because, to the standard publishing house – it was alien, in fact anathema.

  In the traditional publishing doctrine, it has been virtually sacrilegious to mix genres. Moreover, the anathema part was to introduce actual thought in the process of entertainment. Having written science fiction and fantasy only separately in the past (Byrne versus Bloodstone), the thought-variant scope of Star Quest required not only a brazen mixture of both genres but the addition of the occult and metaphysical, as well. Heretofore, all mainstream avenues have been closed to such epiphany-like adventures, but now that we have crossed a millennial threshold there is a dawning trend toward breaking the old molds, and therefore I take this occasion to propose what might well be called the Millennial genre. Star Quest could fit nowhere else.

  The seed of the Star Quest idea evolved from an old question that has been sacred to the hearts of the von Daenikens and Velikovskys and all ancient-astronaut and SETI devotees the world over. Simply stated, if time and the universe are so infinite, why is homo sapiens of lost little Earth so unique? Why haven't advanced intelligences paid a visit to us primitives? Some devotees declare that this has happened in remote antiquity, and such philosophy has formed its own venerable school.

  The Star Quest focus is more fundamental, scientifically speaking. Although accepted authority can properly assume, for lack of concrete evidence, that alien visitations have never happened, at the same time modern cosmologists are discovering strong indications that the universe may well be teeming with life, which must include forms of advanced intelligence. On this basis, the question becomes quite specific: what prevents an interchange of cosmic cultures, which in all other kingdoms of nature would seem to be a natural and logical process? Of course where the SETI method of radio messaging or listening is concerned, as depicted in the motion picture, Contact, starring Jodie Foster, no self-respecting super-intelligence would be likely to fool with taking 100,000 years to say hello. Rather, what is central to the question is the feasibility (here or anywhere) of a space vehicle capable of surpassing the speed of light. If the barrier to trans-light velocities is valid, that might explain why our welcome mat has never known a visitor.

  Where the magical steeds of fiction and fantasy enter, the translight barrier question leads more fascinatingly to why? Does Nature have a reason for this limitation? At this point, the self-expanding theme of Star Quest ignites. Does Nature have a "chastity belt" against the cross-contamination of cultures? If man is a contaminant, what would happen if he crossed the great trans-C barrier? With that idea, we can pull out all stops, and away we go into anything universes or anywhere worlds. All of which opens ever-widening potentials.

  The question of decontamination arises. If this is a key to returning through the Barrier, what is the space-lost traveler's recourse? Thought-variant: if an infant is innocent, so must be any humanity or non-humanity in its infancy. Such innocents do not have trans-light spaceships, but might adult races and species find new transformation in turning to old wisdoms that were once given to young races and then long forgotten? So in a near mythological pristine world, the impact of our so-called sophisticated culture would inevitably lead to contaminations – until some members of the expedition were "educated" by – ??? I'm jumping the gun. It's your read.

  I intended Star Quest to be a three-hour hard-ticket blockbuster motion picture such as might be worthy of a Lucas or Spielberg, but the patronizing tyranny of big studio story departments is still unassailable. They want to see the book first. It is recommended that you envision this story as it might be on the big screen, because its trans-galactic scope and spectacle cannot be entirely transmitted with words.

  Long ago at a writer's banquet in Beverly Hills when the first pilot of Star Trek was being unveiled, Gene Roddenberry said kind words to me: "Stu, I'd stand in the rain for one of your stories."

  My subsequent duties in the aerospace world intervened against such a potential for me, but long years later, now that Gene has been space-borne (his ashes were orbited) – I can say fondly in spirit, "Gene, here's that story!"

  THE FIRST CYCLE

  "Then Maitluccan (the Sky Dragon) was turned in flight by Ramor, and the Star Sons came down through Mayu-Miyu (Mother of Rain) to Dyota, there on the shores of Lankara. This was the First Cycle."

  –Stanza 20, Vol. 10 – The Lahayana

  CHAPTER I

  Something was wrong with the dream. The entire seascape was a double illusion this time. His ideation center accepted the cool white sand and lazy surf as a restful substitute for the high-tension reality he experienced normally. His sensory apparatus responded easily to the induced environmental elements of sun warmth and sea breezes. The girl's hand in his was sweetly tangible in all dimensions of contact perception – slender and soft yet urgently alive with a female strength of friendly communion. As they ran along the far-sweeping deserted strand together beneath a blue, storybook sky, everything seemed as it should be.

  But it wasn't.

  A subliminal awareness of intrusion tugged at him intermittently. Like a bird of ill omen, a shadow of warning pursued him. Out of the corner of his eye he caught an occasional flicker of dissolution like flaws in a video strip flashing by. It brought an urgency to hurry the dream, to absorb its content before it should end, which now he knew it would and all too abruptly.

  So he countered the distraction of hovering disaster by concentrating on intended impressions. Laughing and puffing, the two of them finally came to a halt. The bikini-clad young woman tossed her copious red hair over her shoulder in a typically feminine gesture. Their hands were still clasped together.

  "Ready for a swim?"

  "Not now, Kitty, but that was a good run. I needed that."

  "Among other things."

  Her smile was coquettish, and this, too, troubled him. It was unprogrammed. Suddenly, the entire scene flickered briefly like film hitting a torn sprocket track. She apparently failed to notice the phenomenon, so he knew it was happening only in his own reality, not hers.

  "Danny, is something wrong?" Her wide blue eyes searched his face in innocent concern.

  He shrugged it off and led her to their picnic paraphernalia: towels, cooler chest, pillows, backrests, and portable vid. As they sprawled out on the beach blanket he supported himself on one elbow, studying her. He read in her facial and body language that she was wary of his tension, but she was still ready to be coquettish at any opportunity. This was a new game-play he had not seen her exhibit before. It was suddenly important to figure it out.

  She ran a playful finger across his chest. "I know, baby. I know," she almost whispered. A mischievous dimple punctuated her smile. "It's why you're
here with me now."

  He continued to study her with a clinical intensity. He had often questioned the wisdom of starship psychologists who recommended Kitty's type for dream therapy. She was of the child-minded groups who had no comprehension of the global vectors of motivation. She was a beautiful and complacent playtoy, devoid of challenge. How could he be both holiest and kind?

  "Kitty, a few generations ago you would have been recycled – mentally, that is." He saw her brows arch querulously. "You're one of the escapist crowd who take their trips by machine-induced hypnophoria."

  "Look who's talking about machines! You know what this is as well as I do."

  "No," he said swiftly. "Tell me about it."

  The universe flickered as if light-strobed or distorted by high-frequency interference. Again he noted that she seemed unaware of it. Or if she was, her female playfulness was a much too clever camouflage.

  "It's all a dream trip, sweetie. You and I were taped before you took off into space."

  She leaned her gorgeous head against his shoulder. "All this is to get you off the flips. You star jocks go into the deepies when you stare too long at nothing, way out here in the great big No Deposit-No Return." She sat up and smiled wistfully at him. "Spacemen do need their emotional outlets." With a sigh and a shrug, she opened her hands and spread out her arms, offering her charms. "So this is it, Danny Troy, all in three-D!"

  He rose to his feet and pulled her up with him. "For God's sake, Kitty, your programming's wrong! You're not supposed to–"

  She closed his lips with a gentle finger. "You're spinning, baby. Let's shift gears."

  A deep, muffled explosion staggered the scene like a cosmic earthquake. In a moment, the impression was gone.

  "Now how about our swim?" she said prettily.

  He struggled to collect himself, deliberately dismissing the peripheral intrusions– "Okay, Kitty." He smiled, taking her hand. "I guess that's what we're here for. I'm supposed to be soaking up the R and R."

  As they moved toward the water, however, everything started to come apart. There was the bullish bleating of an alert horn. Turning to him, Kitty blurred, cleared, and blurred again. He squinted at something in the reeling sky. It was a red alarm light, blinking on and off in cadence with the horn. A sky voice boomed, "Emergency! Emergency!"

  He staggered back from the girl, shaking his head in confusion. She reached toward him desperately.

  "Danny, don't go!"

  Her exquisite image broke into dispersing blocks of light and color as in a crashed video program. The alert horn dominated his senses, and the dream dissolved into living crisis.

  There was only the bare room now except for his receptor chair and the HP console. An emergency monitor flashed red on the opposite wall. A filtered voice competed in volume with the frantic alert horn.

  "Disaster mode two! All hands to stations! Explosion and fire in level H, section seven. Repeat: disaster mode two!"

  Danny disconnected hastily. The 3-D holophonics turned off. He removed his receptor helmet, extracted his personal CD cartridge, and ran from the simulator chamber. The explosion was only partially on his mind as he shouldered his way past other men in the companionways, oblivious to their shouts of recognition and alarm. As second officer and assistant engineer, he knew he'd be needed urgently.

  Vaguely, the bigger picture haunted him as he moved toward level H. Something probed under the surface of his uncomplicated nature – questions he had never seriously considered until lately, or else he had subconsciously avoided them. He was aware of a growing sense of futility. There were repeated flashes of strange intuitions.

  Kitty Keene was a light romance of the past before he had left Earth. Spacemen needed their emotional outlets on a starship. So he had chosen her to be taped for the 3-D holographic simulator. Her image had been as real as life itself and was always augmented by interactive programming.

  Now the question hit him: was everything as artificial as the hollow phonies, the people, the world manifesto, the endless star quests? What were they here for? They were two years out, lost in immensity, short on fuel – and now another disaster.

  "Christ!" he muttered, but even that sounded hollow.

  He fought the hydrogen fire along with anyone else who was handy or who could crowd in effectively in the narrow passageways under the portside exchangers. The capacity dampers couldn't field out the superheated combustion from the tank explosions. The men had to move in with hand CO2 guns and portable foamers.

  As he fought his way along and shouted directions or advice, he was aware of something vaguely different about himself. What was it? In the din and clamor of shouting, mixed with the crackle of flames, the hissing of burning insulation, and the monotonous bleat of the emergency horns, he sensed it. Down here in a cluttered small inferno where sweating bodies struggled through eye-stinging smoke and the brownish stench of isoplast cable sheathing, he seemed to have two brains: one for the hands-on, do-it-now world before him, and one for a kind of separate unreality. He saw and recognized the men around him, all of them as familiar as brothers after these years of close confinement and sharing the long translight star probe into Infinity. But somehow a new dimension had been added.

  "God knows what those hydrogen blasts did to the life support!" somebody yelled close to his ear.

  He glanced swiftly to his right and saw the tall frame and broad Irish face of Fitz. Fitzjames Gogarty was their shipboard cynic and master mechanic.

  "Any more explosions down here and the heat exchangers could rip wide open!" shouted Foxy, the round-faced stubble-haired blond runt to his left. "That would be the sign-off, kiddies. The pile could blow!" Homer Fox, electrician's mate and instrument man, was the local mime and self-appointed jester. "That would take care of our poker chits," he said in his high-pitched voice, "but it would play hell with the mail to Mother!"

  The latter remark was fairly morbid since Mother was the space word for home. At their appalling distance from Earth, even a beamed signal at the speed of light might take a thousand years, or forever.

  "Shut up, Foxy!" said the major, who was close behind them. "Move your butts, men. Let the roborg through!" First Officer Adolphus Pike was sometimes referred to as "Adolf" with obvious double entendre, but never in hearing range.

  As the eight-foot cyborg monstrosity rumbled past him on its tractor pods, Danny noticed his double-think tendency more than ever. Why did he seem to dissect everything and have to think twice about it? He thought of Fitz and his wiseacre cynicism, of Foxy and his over sick puns. And there was Adolf's lantern-jawed, moody egression, which was a kind of defense, but for what? Danny had never analyzed his companions before like this. Why now of all times? Was he getting a case of the flips? He stared at the mighty roborg as it moved forward and ripped out the bulkhead frame and brought the gas bombs into play. This creature, too, he was dissecting mentally, wondering about the lost identity of the poor terminal bastard who had once had his brains transferred into the semirobotic contraption. He was a voiceless half-life now, desensitized and emotionless, a Pavlov dog responding to silent bells. What were they all here for? Was it all a masquerade?

  "Danny!" shouted Fitz, pushing him hard.

  A gas bomb shot a splinter of superheated flame at him and it pierced his thermo jacket. His left arm and shoulder shot spangles of pain into his head. He reeled back while still double-thinking. It's nothing but futility! Why didn't they all give up?

  Wound or no wound, this wasn't Danny Troy.

  Nor was it normal for him to have the kind of dreams he'd been experiencing lately. While momentarily stunned by the shock of pain, one of the strange hallucinations came again ... a darkness and a vision of multi-planed dimensions ... globes of blinding light ... geometric lines reaching infinitely across black gulfs to galaxies writhing in the throes of creation.

  * * * *

  In sick bay he noted the presence of someone he wanted to see, especially now: Dr. Frederica Sachs, a medipsychi
atrist, known in steerage as "hot Sachs Freddie." "Steerage" merely expressed an unwritten distinction between regular spacemen and members of Project Administration in a society that had created a global commune but had not forgotten the pecking order. As for the "hot socks" reference it was an oblique compliment to Freddie's sleek blue leotards and her really terrific legs, but as to her personality it was a gross hyperbole. As Fitz described her, she was a tight-laced virgin of the Ms (for masochistic) class who acted as if the male of the species were anything but phallic. Often under her amber-eyed scrutiny he had felt like a clinical object on a microscope slide. "The gal most likely," Foxy once said, "to never be Queen of the Pits!"

  When the medi-techs moved him into the main ward of the clinic, he saw her slim brunet figure at the far end of the room. She was bending over Jerry Fontaine whose forehead was being bandaged. Apparently she was doing therapy because there was some agitated conversation going on. Usually quiet-natured and withdrawn, Jerry was in a fit of anguish, clutching at her as he talked. This was not as surprising to Danny as the fact that Jerry was here among the wounded. A biochemist and exobiologist was the last person he would expect to be on the maintenance deck where the explosion had occurred.

  Just now the girl was the main thing on Danny's mind. He was troubled about his own mental condition. There had been almost a dozen cases of space insanity by now, most of them occurring in the past few months. If he was coming down with the flips, she'd be the one to ask for advice about it. He'd seen some bad things happen. Things could get worse.

  The place was crowded and slightly out of control. The meddies and patients were moving back and forth. Off-duty personnel were blocking the aisles and discussing the emergency, all of which was complicated by frequent P.A. announcements. One message from Flight Command kept coming through every three minutes on the autotape. All officers and project chiefs were to convene in the staff room at 18:00, two hours hence, wounded or not if ambulatory.

  The message signature was Lyshenko's. Commander Alex Lyshenko was always there with the schedules and the imperatives. He was a typical New World symbol of an ordered society, boots and all. Way out here at the end of their astral cords from Mother Earth, however, he was a dependable pillar of balance for them. The Skipper's swarthy Tatar face was the only map most of them had, psychologically speaking – a map that said there still might be a way home.