LIGHT YEARS FROM HOME Read online

  I stalled to quell my anxiety. What could be important enough to delay their leaving for an evening of adult entertainment? Certainly not any birthday present, as I had already scoured their bedroom for a hidden treasure.

  Dad beckoned me to the couch alongside my mother where she slouched fingering her pearls and sipping her beverage. He cleared his throat. “Families residing on the fortieth floors of all ten buildings have been selected for an expedition within a new environment currently being developed in the extreme tangle.”

  Yikes and double yikes. Mother’s prediction might have merit, but the extreme tangle? No human ever ventures down that far. Yet, I conjured a vision of Tarzan and Jane, or possibly Adam and Eve, creating a new society. Albert and me?

  Dad seemed serious, not like the time he reprimanded me for lying naked with Albert out on our balcony. We had been gazing at the twinkling stars as they began to appear in the darkening sky. Mother demanded an explanation. Albert misunderstood her intention and described how the Milky Way creeping across the night sky proved that we, not the stars, were moving. She sent him scurrying back home like a monkey clinging to vines and branches across the space between our balconies. She directed me to my father’s office where he had been crunching numbers. I had never seen my mother become so riled over nudity. Optional swim wear in and around our rooftop community pool had been a common practice. However, Dad considered my behavior normal for a curious adolescent, and he mumbled his usual complaint that I should have been a boy.

  Did he regret fathering a girl, or had there been a mix up of XY chromosomes at the Stork? Later that night, when my parents hailed a robot-cab to the gravity free zone above our building, I broke into our family’s genealogy database. Not only did I validate my gender, but I also traced Mother’s and my DNA back to July 1, 2137, an interesting date as it coincided with the sighting of Halley’s Comet from Earth. I wanted to learn more, but I had already exceeded my data parameter for which I could be reprimanded. I hadn’t realized his computer would log my research, and I made up my first fib ever. I told Dad that my specialty had been increased to include genealogy. I doubt he believed me, but he had no authority to question my instructional program.

  Caught between Dad’s rambling about courage to confront the challenge and Mother’s nodding between sips, I faked horror. “How will our lives be different from our present environment?”

  He sighed and drew in his breath like when he attempted to blow out all hundred candles on his birthday cake, a major violation of the Realm’s ban on fire. “The harsh reality of our situation will deny children the comfort found in myths such as Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and God.”

  “That serious?” I mocked.

  In tune with my sarcasm, he shook his head and sighed. “Now that you’re a teenager, I’m quite sure you’ve already dismissed them as mere fantasy.”

  He omitted the Twentieth Century myth of storks delivering babies, as it had since become reality. Sort of. It probably amused an early technician to refer to our human incubator as the Stork. The term stuck but the myth died. I discovered it while perusing the myriads of Twentieth Century radio and television signals still rebounding across space. The naiveté of those people who believed such nonsense astounded me.

  Albert and I concluded that God does exist, but I kept our revelation from my parents. Propagating religious beliefs could get us into serious trouble with the Realm. Tomorrow, when fully clothed to please my mother, Albert and I will discuss how our moving to a new habitat will interfere with our plan. I glanced toward his apartment and gasped. Both balconies had vanished! When Dad told Mother they were getting much too close, I assumed he meant Albert and me, not our buildings.

  I panicked. Where will we consummate our experiment? We formed a pact to deposit his sperm inside my uterus as soon as we completed puberty. What if Mother discovers I’ve reached sexual maturity before Albert can perform his part? When Mom caught us staring at the stars, we had just given up exciting his testicles to produce sperm.

  I slid from the couch to the floor and demanded, “Why can’t we stay here?” I folded my arms and lowered my bottom lip, a pout that worked with Dad but irritated Mother.

  My father scanned the room and settled his gaze on the miniature paper umbrella clinging to the rim of my mother’s cocktail glass. He slid the olive off the stem and opened the umbrella’s canopy. Touching the tip of each rib protruding from the paper covering, he said, “These represent the forty-story towers inside the perimeter of our habitat.” He squeezed the canopy nearly shut, the paper bulging between the ribs. “A thousand years ago families . . .,” he touched each rib and counted ten . . ., “dwelt in enclosures strung close together like . . .,” he glanced toward the couch . . ., “your mother’s pearls.”

  He waved the umbrella through the air, and it opened as he rotated the stem between thumb and finger. “Continual acceleration and moderate spinning created limited gravity, enough to support biological life forms.” He glanced toward my mother. “Humans, animals, and plants,” as if she needed an explanation.

  What could have been an insult directed at her limited resources reminded me of our individual need-to-know data. His primary program had been limited to agronomy, while my mother’s . . .?

  He stopped moving the umbrella but kept it twirling. “When we reached acceleration of one-thousandth the speed of light, rotation became the single source of gravity. Our sun no longer needed to be tethered but hovers at zero gravity at the center of our sphere.”

  A thousand years and six trillion miles from Earth, yet Dad still referred to the energy orb in the center of our habitat as the sun. Never a red and purple sunset like in the cowboy movies, because the lighted portion visible along the habitable perimeter merely fades rather than sets. Only the tangle on either side receives direct round-the-clock energy.

  With his pen he drew a circle on top of the umbrella a tenth of the distance from the outer tips to the center. “Our buildings have presently risen to this line, our maximum allowable level of diminished gravity and intense solar rays. Even the tangle must be trimmed to this level, or the sun could ignite it and destroy everything. A thousand people would either burn to death or suffocate from lack of oxygen.”

  He tapped each rib where it intersected his circle. “If our buildings were allowed to grow beyond this point, they would encroach upon each other, blocking energy to the orchards between them.”

  “Buildings grow?” I snorted. “Like your fruit trees?”

  He nodded, his expression serious. “At that diminished level of gravity, our bone and muscle structure would atrophy beyond what we’ve already experienced. You and your mother would be especially susceptible since you’ve lived at or near our present level all your lives.”

  He spun the umbrella like a top. “We exist inside the rim of a wheel enclosed in a bubble.” The umbrella parachuted to the couch, and my mother replaced it in her glass.

  Wheel? I winced at Dad’s Twentieth Century reference. I countered with one of his harvesting terms, as if our buildings actually were plants. “Can’t we lop off the top floor and move into the expanding lower apartments?”

  He responded, but his gaze followed my mother as she teetered out of the room. “Our buildings have reached three maximum dimensions. All expansion must cease.”

  My brain seemed to burst as I tried to cross-reference his explanation with my acquired data. When the need-to-know arises, the information will be available to you. My virtual-tutor might as well have added and not before. The weight of information brought droplets of sweat trickling down my back, and I stood to shake loose my robe, wishing I were back in my bathtub.

  Dad continued as if required by some stage direction, and he added another visual to illustrate his point. He stood, cupped an energy field with his hands, and formed the hologram of a transparent sphere with a tiny speck of light in the center.

  He said, “In the beginning, our sun was much smaller and glowed day and night
to create sufficient energy for survival.”

  He traced what could have been the sphere’s equator. “Ten families dwelt along this narrow band, and vegetation filled the remaining inner surface of the entire habitat, orchards in residual fields of gravity near and around the buildings, and tangle elsewhere. Fed by the sun’s energy, the growth of extreme tangle pressured our entire habitat to expand, and our population increased accordingly.”

  The hologram began to spin, and I leaned back as its size increased. Attached to the inner rim of the wheel, a row of ten teeth-like structures emerged to simulate buildings. As they grew wider and taller, vines as thick as tree trunks crawled along their outer walls.

  He traced his finger along the lower levels of each building shaded in blue. “An aquifer has filled to the level of each tenth floor, rendering those units uninhabitable except for marine life. This trough of water is continually purified and held in place by the sphere’s rotation.”

  Tiny red lights blinked atop each building. “Any structures taller than forty floors would present too little gravity and too much radiation for human habitation. Of the nearly mile-wide diameter, humans are restricted to the upper thirty floors of a ring of ten pyramid shaped buildings four hundred square feet at the base. A jungle of vegetation covers the sphere’s remaining surface area, and the massive space between us and the sun contains atmospheric pressure similar to Earth’s at sea level.”

  I tried to reconcile Albert’s theory of the star’s movement across our sky with Dad’s description of our habitat totally enclosed in tangle. How are we able to see stars? A question for Albert or his engineer father. I needed to probe as much as possible from my father’s data to share with my friend.

  “How does our sun maintain its energy?”

  Dad breathed a deep sigh, as if he had just weathered a storm. “It just does, I imagine.” He beckoned to my mother who had been standing in the doorway and pulled the three of us into an embrace, the weight of his arms heavy. He said, “Our family has outgrown its habitat. We will represent our ancestors with courage and discipline.” His voice relaxed following his memorized presentation, his warm breath pleasant on my neck.

  “Are we related to everyone in our building?” I had never bothered to dwell on that possibility or asked about it.

  “Sort of.”

  “Sort of?” I slid from his embrace, and he dropped his hands to his side.

  “A man applying for marriage must be mated with someone within a range of three levels because of their similar gravity exposure.” He flashed a glance toward my mother. “Martha and I needed a special dispensation, because her family resided twice that many floors above my family. As a result of the differences in our body densities, sexual intercourse is restricted to the gravity free space overhead.”

  Mother nudged him and he blushed. This was Saturday night! No wonder she appeared eager.

  Dad puffed up his chest. “My body developed additional size and strength to hazard the extremities of gravity a few levels into the tangle, if just for a short time.”

  Mother’s expression brightened. “When a couple qualifies to have a child, the woman’s genes are screened to preserve a lineage back to one of the first ten families.”

  I should have guessed her specialty from her assigned duties as a technician at the Stork.

  She continued. “It's like having ancestors who aren't dead but inaccessible by virtue of living in different environments. Of course, we also have many deceased ancestors.” Her voice faded and she touched her forehead, breast and each shoulder, a gesture I had never seen before.

  “No one has ever lived beyond two-hundred years.” Dad put his arm back around her. She winced but clutched his fingers resting on her shoulder. “You and your mother reach back across a millennium.” He focused on me and added, “And continue with increased mental capabilities to compensate for your reduced body strength. That's why your mother’s intelligence exceeds mine.”

  I would have thought the opposite, but memories of my headaches while visiting at lower level jarred my attention. Have I a frail body but an advanced brain? I would have preferred the opposite, considering what Albert and I intended. A jolt of realization rocked my complacency. What were Albert's programmed capabilities he'd been unwilling to share? Why was his family recently given the top floor of the building adjacent to ours? Why are ten families privileged to have apartments with windows? And why do we have to leave our habitat?

  A leak of information broke loose from my stored memory much like when, as a child, I released a tiny squirt of urine to put off going to the bathroom.

  Children with developing skeletal structures are encouraged to play and attend school at one or two lower levels from their family’s residence but are restricted from going higher. Adults are able to venture down four or five floors before the increased gravity threatens their acquired skeletal structure, and they are permitted to float in gravity free space each morning and evening, when the energy orb is dimmed to reduce sunburn. Socialization occurs in the gravity-free clubs and gyms, but sexual activity is limited to motels and brothels after the lighted portion of the sun is reduced visually to the brilliance of Earth’s moon surrounded by a simulated Milky Way.

  My question about star’s movement had been answered. Each evening streams of robot-cabs transport adults to an area free from gravity as well as from their inhibitions. My parents, too, every Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday. Sundays, they mostly slept.

  The strobe from a passing patrol cast a beam around and between our buildings. Dad glanced out the window and said, “I see the droids have already detached our balconies. In the next few months they'll be removing the entire top floors.”

  I squinted as the beam splashed across Albert’s window. He stood naked touching his genitals. He mouthed the words, “They work.”

  Later while Mother primped in her bedroom, my father and I sat at the kitchen table nibbling on cookies and sipping juice. A robot-cab descended to the roof of the adjacent building opposite Albert’s, and we watched through the window as a couple entered. The cab lifted and disappeared from view.

  Dad commented, “Tom and Helen are off to fun in the sky.”

  “I know what goes on up there, Dad.”

  He blushed. “Adult entertainment isn’t just sex. Your mother and I . . .”

  “I know, Dad. Different body densities.” I skirted the issue. “Why don’t they have a child?”

  “Who?”

  “Our neighbors.”

  “They’re waiting for permission.”

  “All the other couples on our level have a child.”

  “All those children are younger than you. Bob and Helen will be next. They’re not too old to raise a child—still in their sixties, I believe.”

  Mother peered in and said, “I’m ready, Max.” She threw me a kiss and headed across the front room to our lift. Dad bussed my cheek and followed.

  I waited a few minutes and then entered my parents’ bedroom to prepare for Albert’s and my tryst. Sitting at Mother’s dressing table, I applied red lipstick, brushed on rouge, and dabbed perfume behind each ear. My budding nipples made an impression through the soft sheen of her evening gown, but no cleavage. Stretching a width of adhesive tape from one armpit to the other, I gathered loose skin across my chest and created a crevice. A small metal trinket shaped like the letter “t” dangled from a chain around my neck, a piece of Mother’s jewelry I had never seen before. I wondered if she even remembered owning it. Letters forming an inscription were so badly worn that I couldn’t make out the words.

  I glanced toward the window hoping to attract Albert’s attention. A gnarl of leafy branches, their growth no longer hindered by our balconies, partially obstructed my view. A humming bird, its beak powdered with pollen, prodded its head into and an array of petals on a flower about to burst into a full bloom. The image created a longing, and I yearned to have Albert enter my body.

  I slid the doors open, brushed leav
es aside, and came face-to-face with Albert, his eyes wide saucers. He stood naked and pointed to his crotch. “I did it again!”

  “Get dressed,” I yelled back. “We have to go to a motel.” I wasn’t sure why, but it seemed proper. I took the lift to our roof, hailed a robot-chair rather than a cab, and directed it to Albert’s building. By the time he emerged, the meter had charged my account a double fare.

  Restraining a giggle, I complemented my lover-to-be on his appearance. His father’s dinner jacket draped to his knees, and the cuffs on his pants covered shoes that flopped when he stepped up and sat beside me.

  The sensation as we lifted felt much like riding the elevator between floors, but when it stopped Albert and I continued to rise. We had neglected to use the seat belts. Our vehicle looped over us as we tumbled and caught us rumps first back onto the seat. We clung to the armrests and were instructed to let go when the chair came to a stop. It slowly lowered or we rose, I couldn’t tell which, and we drifted toward a scattering of revelers. Mostly as couples, they clustered around a portal to what appeared to go nowhere. The first pair crossed a threshold and disappeared inside a balloon as it inflated. It broke away and joined a parade of floating orbs that scattered like black pearls from a broken necklace.

  We got in line ignoring curious stares, some expressing annoyance with children who dared to participate in adult entertainment. However, a rite of confirmation determined one’s status, not one’s chronological age. When individuals reach sexual maturity, and with their parents’ and tutors’ approval, they participate in a series of steps that include counseling, harvesting of sperm or eggs for posterity, and body alterations. Sterilization is so Twentieth Century. As of earlier today, Albert qualified, although neither of us had been approved.

  The crowd seemed to dissipate into nowhere. People, usually in pairs, stepped across the invisible threshold, and occasionally parties of fifteen to twenty filed into a unit that enlarged to accommodate the size of the group.