Dreams of the Chosen Read online

  The interview had been titled The Children of Icarus, and I guess it summed up a lot of what I’d want to share with anyone seeking what it meant to grow up Deucalian. She began with a statement that has stuck with me since the first time I read it, at the age of seven or eight.

  It seems unthinkable today, but telepathy was once a feared and dangerous ability for anyone to possess on Deucalion.

  Fear of telepathy.

  I remember in school, when the tutor tried to explain to us a world in which people could not Share mind to mind, it made no sense, like an entire race with no sight or no hearing. How could they exist? But they had. For the vast majority of human history, all men had been deaf to the thoughts of others.

  It was a hard concept to get my eight-year-old head around.

  We were Icaran, but it had not always been so, and it was important to remember the fact – especially where we were going.

  Professor De Buiss had spent a lifetime studying what it meant to be a telepath in an intolerant world – and though her account had ended with the Separation, her insights put what we were about to attempt into perspective.

  I guess we had come full-circle.

  The Separation. The reason for our mission.

  Whatever happened back on Earth all those centuries ago was at least as serious as the Crystal Death had been on our world. What else could have caused the Separation?

  It was our job to solve the mystery and explain the past.

  Which didn’t mean I needed Hanni’s endless gushing into my ear. The thing is, there’s a time for enthusiasm and there’s a time for plain old-fashioned hard work. Unfortunately, for some people – Hanni in particular – the distinction has always been a little blurred. Sometimes, working with him is like living with an excitable six-year-old duck-stomping around inside your head.

  Enthusing.

  – . . . a thousand years, he continued. Almost to the day. I mean, don’t you think it’s like an omen? That’s if you believe in omens – which, of course, I don’t. But you have to admit it is a pretty amazing coincidence. Exactly a thousand years since they sent the first warp-shuttle back to Earth from Deucalion, and here we are, preparing to make the first Ether-Jump. I mean—

  And on, and on.

  Hanni loved to discuss history, even when there was serious work to be done.

  Of course, if he didn’t love it, he wouldn’t have been on the crew at all. But it did get under your skin sometimes.

  I dropped the mind-shield a touch and let my impatience leak out. Just enough to tickle his awareness, but not insult him. It was our unspoken agreement and nine times out of ten it worked.

  He smiled at me self-consciously and stopped rambling.

  – I’m doing it again, aren’t I?

  I smiled back.

  – Sorry, Hanni. It’s just—

  – I know, boss. There’s a lot to do.

  Embarrassment tinged his thoughts. I could feel it, though I don’t think it was an intentional leak. Hanni wasn’t rude, just naturally over-emotional. Always had been. It drew no end of polite criticism from the Etiquette tutors, the whole time we were growing up.

  Belatedly, I tried to soften the blow.

  – It’s not like that, Han, really. I mean, if it wasn’t for history, we wouldn’t be making the trip in the first place, would we? The mother-planet. The source of half our culture and all that. Who wouldn’t want to know what happened back there?

  Enough said. It didn’t pay to try too hard – even with Hanni.

  Especially with Hanni, even though he invited it. He was emotional, but definitely not stupid.

  I turned back to the supply terminal and continued the inventory check.

  That night, as I was undressing alone in my cabin, the black fears began to rise again.

  Totally irrational. It was months too late for any of us to back out, without jeopardising the whole mission – and that was the last thing I would ever do. But that didn’t stop the panic attacks.

  Fear isn’t logical. It’s a survival trait, hard-wired into our genes. Fear of the dark. Fear of the unknown. Of failure. The gut-deep certainty some things are totally out of your control – beyond your ability to even comprehend. And that any one of them could snuff you out without warning, in the infinite black cold between the dimensions.

  Or on the surface of a mother-planet about which you know virtually nothing – except that something catastrophic happened there eight hundred years ago. Earth is a riddle. A hanging chord, which has echoed through the subconscious of our people for fifty generations or more. Since the time of the Separation.

  Almost mythological. Our past.

  A long forgotten, half-imagined Dream.

  Every child on Deucalion, Human and Elokoi, knows the Histories – and the Thoughtsongs – and most of the time for most people that is enough. But not for Hanni or Jordan or me – or any of the twenty-four borderline obsessives, who made up the crew of the Expeditionary Ether-Shuttle Cortez.

  Naturally, my father hadn’t wanted me to go.

  From the moment I suggested it, he’d tried to convince me that it was no more than a foolish adventure. That my ‘romantic nature’ was getting the better of me and I wasn’t thinking things through.

  Me, romantic?

  It wasn’t hard to see why he reacted the way he did. I was his only daughter and I knew how he felt about me, but I couldn’t help myself.

  – It’s only two years, I argued unconvincingly. Before you know it, I’ll be back and you’ll be wishing I was out of your hair again.

  He wasn’t about to be charmed out of his opposition. Untried technology, an unknown destination. Lousy odds.

  – Don’t you want to know what happened back there? I went on. Aren’t you even a bit curious?

  He just shook his head.

  – Not if it’s you taking the risks to find out.

  – But if it was someone else’s daughter – or son – it would be okay?

  An easy shot. I regretted it immediately, but too late. The best I could do was to leak a little remorse.

  But he didn’t respond. He stood up and walked towards the window, looking out at the two moons hanging low in the sky. He was upset, Shielding his thoughts from me – something he did only rarely.

  For once, he had no answers.

  I followed the line of his gaze.

  Both moons were full and huge and about as close as they ever came to the planet’s surface.

  How many times had I looked up at them and really seen them?

  Two moons. Eternal opposites, forever linked – to the planet and to each other – by the unbreakable chains of gravity.

  Their cratered faces filled half the night sky, and the reflection from their surfaces lit the skyline of the city like an eerie kind of daylight.

  The ‘hunter’s sky’, the Elokoi call it. Still. Even though they grew beyond the need for hunting centuries ago.

  Pyrrha and Pandora.

  The two sides of human nature. The virtuous and the reckless.

  I just placed a hand gently on my father’s shoulder. No point in trying to break into his thoughts. When he was ready, he would drop the Shield without my prompting.

  Finally, he turned to face me and he was smiling slightly. Not from happiness, exactly, but looking back, I’m sure I caught a fleeting glow of pride fading from his mind, as the Shield dissolved.

  – You’re too much like your mother, Erin. I could never win an argument with her, either. Not if it was important to her. He put his arms around me and drew me close. Just be careful.

  We rarely spoke about it again. By the end of the year, he’d moved Beyond to join my mother, and we were preparing to make the historic Jump.

  Jump technology is as safe as sitting in your favourite chair.

  That was what
they said on the Networks during the build-up to the first expedition. Our expedition.

  But don’t believe all the pre-Jump publicity.

  The technology of the Casian Ether-Jump was brand new and untested under actual operational conditions. We stood a better-than-outside chance of never returning, despite what the tech-wizards from Casia insisted.

  After all, their instructions came long distance, from the safety of the Ether-Jump development labs, fifty light-years away on Casia 3. If it was really as safe as they claimed, they could have waited a couple more years, until their prototype was ready and tested, then arrived in person to demonstrate.

  Instead they warped the blueprints and specs to the Research facility in Al-Baada – where our people were already aware of the finer details of Ether-Warp theory. Al-Baada ran its own prototype tests, then constructed the Cortez.

  But we’d all known the details of the situation when we volunteered, so it was pointless to be feeling what I was feeling, so late in the day.

  You know how it is, when you realise you’re not alone in your head.

  One minute, the fear is closing in like a shadow, cold, but insubstantial. The next, a feeling of warmth grows imperceptibly from somewhere beneath knowing, spreading out in all directions and driving back the dark.

  Jordan, of course. Who else would be on my wavelength – and awake at that time of night?

  – Erin? Need to talk about it?

  – No.

  – Good. I’ll be right over.

  I smiled and slipped my robe on. The door chimed before I could tie the belt.

  ‘Open,’ I said aloud, tightening the waist-tie and watching the door slide into the wall.

  He stood there, leaning with one elbow against the doorframe and staring at me in typical Jordan fashion – no self-consciousness at all.

  And I found myself wishing I had something on under the robe.

  – Having second thoughts?

  – Of course not! Try ‘third thoughts’. ‘Fifth thoughts!’ It’s so damned – stupid, Jord. I don’t even know where it comes from.

  I turned away and studied the vid-picture of my father on the desk, missing his calming influence in my life.

  Jordan placed a soft hand on my shoulder and turned my head gently back to face him. The smile was gone, replaced by the serious expression that few people, apart from me, were ever privileged to see.

  – Nothing stupid about being nervous, Erin. Stupid is not being a bit scared. Just don’t let it take over. That’s when it gets—

  – Dangerous? I never did get out of the habit of finishing his sentences for him. I’d been doing it since we first learnt to talk. He smiled, shaking his head.

  – I was thinking more ‘inconvenient’.

  – Sure you were!

  I sat down on the bunk and he sat beside me.

  – How do you do it? I continued. No one else around here picks up on it. But you always seem to know.

  He shrugged.

  – Sympatica. My mother always said it was my particular gift.

  We sat there quietly for a few moments. That’s the thing about Jordan. He knows exactly when to stay out of my head.

  In the end, I was ready.

  – I keep getting these visions. We arrive, land and find the whole planet empty. A huge barren desert. No life. Nothing. And it scares me, Jord. I mean, we really don’t know what happened. What caused the Separation. What if the whole of Earth is—

  The words ran out. Doubts make you vulnerable and I couldn’t help thinking how few people I’d ever really trusted with emotions this personal. Three, maybe four. And Jordan was the only one still alive.

  He didn’t try to prompt; just held my gaze and waited, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to do.

  Finally, I went on.

  – Do you ever think that maybe we’re just wasting our time? Putting ourselves in danger for no good reason. That maybe – shit, Jord, you’ve read the Histories. They sent probes to Earth, when the shuttles and the C-ships stopped coming. And none of them ever returned. Not even a warp-message. That was over seven hundred years ago. I just, I don’t know.

  He stood up, shaking his head.

  – Nobody does. That’s why we decided to go in the first place. But that doesn’t mean that danger is inevitable.

  We’re just observers, Erin. Explorers. The early settlers didn’t know all that much about Deucalion, but we’re here now because they had the nerve to try. Besides, what’s the worst-case scenario? The whole of Old Earth ends up being nothing but a giant wasteland. Totally lifeless. In which case, we find out what we can, slip back into stasis and come home. Two Real Time years burnt and a mystery solved.

  All the old arguments. I’d used them to counter my father’s concerns in the weeks before he died. And they all made perfect sense.

  But then, so do the arguments for jack-jumping. Until you’re standing up there on the edge of the cliff.

  Placing my cheek against his stomach, I slid my arms around his waist and his strong fingers began massaging the tension from the muscles in my neck.

  We both knew where it was leading, but it was part of the game we played. I didn’t lower the Shield to let him inside, and he pretended that there was nothing going on, but the massage.

  As usual, I was the first to break. I stood and kissed him.

  Not deeply, a gentle touch of my lips on his, but he knew. He smiled and held my eyes with his, as he lifted the light robe from my shoulders.

  And then the Shields were down and we Merged.

  ‘Lights,’ I whispered.

  Jordan and I had grown up together. The same homestead, the same creche, same interests.

  The same death wish.

  Just kidding. But children from the Reaches do share things that city kids might never experience directly, in their safe, sanitised lives.

  Then, when we were – what? Twelve, thirteen maybe – I let Jordan convince me to go exploring in the limestone caves that pepper the coast near Taal-i-Nial. They were only about half an hour’s walk from the compound, but to us, sneaking out there alone was the adventure of a lifetime.

  No other kid in the homestead would have dared even suggest it. But they weren’t Jordan.

  Jordan was different. Alter ego. Soul mate. Thrill-seeker.

  Part-time maniac.

  He always had a way of making life seem that little bit more exciting and dangerous than the safe, predictable existence mapped out for us by our parents.

  Mainly because the things he chose to try usually were exciting. And dangerous.

  He chose a day when our parents were away at an Issues-Council Gathering in Covenant, the central settlement a thousand clicks away. Halli, Jordan’s older sister, was sharing responsibility – and a few biological imperatives – with my brother Josh.

  Once they became otherwise preoccupied, it wasn’t too hard to Shield them out, and sneak away from the homestead – something we never could have managed if our parents were around.

  It was a near-disaster, of course, but not straightaway.

  The caves of Taal-i-Nial are famous for their beauty. Calcite columns, still crystal pools that reflect like mirrors and the wonderful shimmering, iridescent sheen of flow-stone on the walls. We wandered and climbed, holding hands and sharing the overpowering emotion of being inside the womb of something so ancient and untouched.

  It was perfect, until we disturbed a brooding Yorum and found ourselves running and scrambling for our lives.

  The Yorum is a solitary animal for twelve months of every year, herding only in the three months of winter, to mate and forage. Before the arrival of the humans, there were large populations of Yorum throughout the eastern and southern coastal regions, hunted occasionally by the Elokoi, but basically left alone, with few natural enemies except th
e harshness of the landscape itself.

  Expansion of the human settlement, and the transformation of much of the original environment over the first couple of centuries after settlement, reduced their numbers disastrously and the herds dwindled in size.

  Now, of course, you can go years without encountering even one of them.

  But we couldn’t be that lucky.

  This one was a female – which meant that she was bigger and more aggressive than the male, especially as she was defending two calves. She issued her snuffling growl, then charged, head-down. Her compact body was low and her powerful legs drove her forward more quickly than we could possibly run.

  Jordan recovered from the shock first.

  – Quick! he ordered, urgently. Up here!

  He grabbed my arm and dragged me up the slope, out of its path. I could smell the stench of its breath, as it hurtled past and the stiff bristles on the side of its body tore the skin off my calf.

  The pain erupted in my leg and I remember screaming. I stared at the blood in shock.

  Jordan looked at me, then at the enraged animal.

  The Yorum roared her anger, as her feet scrabbled for traction on the loose surface of the cave floor. It provided us with a few precious seconds and I could feel Jordan’s emotion, as he scanned the cave for options.

  He was excited, but in control. There was none of the panic that I could feel rising like acid into my throat.

  – Right, he went on. You’re never going to outrun it with that leg. I’ll have to buy some time. When I tell you, head as fast as you can for the entrance. It can’t chase both of us.

  His Shield was completely down and I could see exactly what he was planning.

  – Oh, now come on, Jord. You can’t—

  – Of course I can, he said. Do you have a better plan? Relax. It’s just mind over matter.

  I didn’t have a better plan. At that moment, I don’t think I could have confidently planned my next breath.

  But Jordan was in control. He took a step down the slope, watching the Yorum, as it began its second charge.

  – Okay, then. On three. One. Two. And three. Go! GO!

  And then I ran, stumbling, struggling from rock to rock along a small natural wall formed by an ancient rockfall.