Welcome aboard the Brahma!
Now a century out from Earth and en route to HD 133600, a remarkably Sun-like star and planetary system in the constellation of Virgo, the Brahma is the last, desperate, crowning achievement of human civilization and engineering. A massive three-hundred-kilometer long modular mega-ship, a gigantic ark in space consisting of two hundred and sixteen separate habitat pods, each the size of a small city, at launch Brahma carried two million passengers and crew, along with everything their descendants would need to build new lives on the worlds of HD 133600.
For the Brahma is a generation ship: all the original passengers and crew who left the Earth a century ago are long since dead. Everyone now on board was born on the ship; most will probably die on it. If their mission succeeds, their children or grandchildren will live to see the light of HD 133600.
Right now, the Brahma seems to be on-course and everything appears to be working as designed. The ship is cruising serenely at just slightly below c, a tribute to the engineers and craftspeople who designed and built her a century before. Many on board pray daily that the ship contains the best of humanity, and not the sorts of politicians, criminals, cultists, crazies, and dishonest leadership their ancestors thought they’d left behind…
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Episode 9: “The Birdman of Alcatraz” • by Pete Wood
Yasmine studied the prisoner. With his slicked back hair and meticulously groomed mustache, he resembled a salesman, not a scientist. She must be a damned fool to go into a prison pod. And an even bigger fool for bringing Ximena, a twenty-year-old girl who had never been on the main ship, much less another of the two hundred bio pods until a couple of weeks ago.
The prisoner leaned back in the rocking chair on his front porch and took another sip of coffee. “Tell me why you’re here again.”
Yasmine put her coffee down and looked at the rolling meadows of Alcatraz, the prison pod. It sure didn’t look like a prison. But then again, its five thousand inmates couldn’t leave and if they acted up, the Brahma, could snap the tether and send them careening into space.
“We’ve lost a pod,” Yasmine said. “You’re a scientist.”
“I’m a prisoner.” He got up and refilled his coffee before topping off Yasmine’s cup. Ximena, the prodigy Yasmine had rescued from a theocratic pod that wanted to execute her, rocked gently and focused on the birds in the fountain.
“You’re Charles Fremont, former head of the research facility at Northern University. Don’t play games with me.” How desperate had she become to find Gail? Sure, Admin had been dragging its feet for days, but had she really sunk so low as to depend on a criminal for help? She didn’t even know what he had done to be here.
Fremont let out a dry little laugh. “Why does Admin care about one little pod? They have a couple of hundred more.”
“They don’t care about the damned pod,” Yasmine snapped. “But I do.”
Fremont added cream to his coffee. He held out the pitcher to Yasmine. She declined. He sat down again. “Let this be a cautionary tale. Don’t piss off Admin.”
Yasmine did not have clearance to know what Fremont had done, but she believed getting on Admin’s bad side could be enough to face imprisonment for the rest of your life. Administration ran everything on the three-hundred-kilometer-long ship and didn’t like trouble from passengers. She hoped they didn’t see her little foray into the prison as trouble. “My partner’s on the pod. We can’t reach it. We can’t track it.”
“It’s not even leaving a tachyon trail,” Ximena said without taking her eyes off the black squawking birds. They might be starlings or crows. Pests either way.
“Really?” Fremont said, seeming interested in the conversation for the first time. Deep space exploration had not been possible until the tachyon drive had been created more than two hundred years earlier, but engineers had not been able to come up with clean exhaust or a velocity greater than ninety percent light speed.
Yasmine resisted the urge to roll her eyes. She hadn’t had much patience the last few weeks. “Yeah, really. We’re not making this up.”
“And how exactly did you lose this pod?”
“Separatists. They jettisoned the Iowa pod.”
“Separatists?” Fremont snorted. “It was probably Admin. Nothing like a scapegoat to help you get even more power.”
Yasmine’s voice rose. She didn’t need conspiracy theories. She had strong-armed her way into a prominent role in the search for the first pod that had left the ship in a hundred years. A pod with her girlfriend on board and she feared she was losing time. “Why the hell would Admin shoot off one of their own pods?”
“Why would they imprison a professor for suggesting that the ship should already have reached its destination?”
More games. “Could we please talk about locating the Iowa pod?” Yasmine asked.
Fremont turned to Ximena. “What do you know about tachyons?”
¤
Yasmine’s head spun from the conversation Fremont and Ximena had had on the ninety-minute long walk to Fremont’s research. They discussed tachyons and communications and the feasibility of faster than light drive—something that hadn’t been developed when the now-burnt-to-a-cinder Earth had launched the Brahma more than a hundred years ago. She had no idea what any of it meant, but she hoped she had started assembling the core of a team that could find the Iowa. She trusted Ximena. For all she knew Fremont had been making everything up as he went along.
Fremont had rigged up a little lab with begged and borrowed equipment at the edge of the prison. Its lone window looked out into deep space. Yasmine doubted the lab remained hidden from Admin. They probably didn’t feel threatened by his research as long as whatever he found didn’t leave the prison.
Ximena stared out the window.
“Careful, Ximena,” Yasmine said. “We’re moving and the engine field distorts things. You’ll throw up if you look too long.” Or go crazy. Most pods had shuttered windows decades ago because the images outside could be impossible to grasp.
Ximena kept staring.
“See any birds?” Fremont asked.
“Birds?” Ximena asked.
“They’re damned near impossible to see without these.” He handed her a pair of silver goggles. “They’re not really birds, but then again, Orion doesn’t really have a belt, does he?”
Ximena said nothing for a few seconds and then exclaimed “I see one. Like somebody splotched some paint. It does look like a cartoon bird, sort of. It’s…it’s gone.” She turned from the window. “What are they?”
Fremont shrugged. “I have no idea. Near as I can figure they started about fifteen years ago.”
“What does this have to do with the Iowa?” Yasmine asked.
“If I can detect the birds, I can find whatever trail the Iowa pod’s leaving. It’s leaving something. Look at it this way. If the Brahma leaves a pond of tachyon debris,” Fremont said. “These birds leave an ocean.”
¤
The next couple of hours Yasmine drank coffee and tried to understand Fremont’s research. He fine-tuned his equipment so that they could search for the Iowa. He and Ximena took turns wearing the goggles that interfaced with the mainframe.
All Yasmine knew was that they saw plenty of birds. No sign of the Iowa, but space was pretty damned big.
The door to the lab flung open. Three armed security officers and Yasmine’s boss entered.
Yasmine jumped up. “Director.”
“I think you two have seen quite enough,” Director Melnik said. “Yasmine, Ximena, you come with me. Access to Alcatraz is over. Of course, if you really want to spend a lot more time here.”
Yasmine let that comment hang in the air.
“The professor is setting you up,” Melnik continued after a few moments. “Next thing you know you’ll be smuggling in cocaine or Green Pulsars. And Fremont will probably convince you it was your idea,” Melnik said.
Fremont denied nothing.
¤
Ximena and Yasmine sat at a booth at Hazel’s Diner and shared a piping hot mincemeat Kringle. The six-hour debriefing had been exhausting. The upshot had been that Yasmine had gotten a severe reprimand and her access to Alcatraz had been cut off for the indefinite future.
What the hell was Admin so scared of? She wondered if Fremont’s prison record, shown briefly to her by Melnik, could even be accurate. A con artist? Somebody who had bilked hundreds out of life savings with promises of investments in impossible technologies. He hardly seemed the type. Then again, if he were a con artist, who could tell?
“I could have found the Iowa if they’d given me time,” Ximena said.
Admin said that everything Fremont had shown had been an elaborate ruse. Computer generated data and images.
Yasmine sighed. She couldn’t tell a wet-behind-her-ears kid what she knew, what she’d been told anyway. “My boss says we can’t trust Fremont’s equipment.”
Ximena blinked. “The hell we can’t.”
“Well, we can’t go back to Alcatraz.”
Ximena took forkful of Kringle. “I think I know what the birds are.”
“Look, Ximena, don’t you think it’s strange that nobody else sees the birds except Fremont?”
“I dunno,” Ximena said. “You said nobody looks out windows.”
“Yeah, but…” Yasmine didn’t want to argue but she couldn’t get past Fremont fitting the conman profile. Act hostile at first. Make the mark beg you to help them. Give complicated explanations that are hard to follow. Talk to the naïve person, not the one with the good bullshit detector.
If he was a conman, could this all really be about drugs?
“The birds are ships,” Ximena said.
Yasmine patted Ximena’s hand. “Look, Sweetie, you can’t believe everything—"
“They’re ships.”
“Did Fremont tell you that?”
“No.”
“Then how do you know?”
“I know when I’m being lied to. People have been lying to me my whole life. Fremont didn’t make up everything. I can trust science. They left trails and some of their routes were not natural.”
Yasmine didn’t know if Ximena had been hoodwinked or not. “Ships?”
Ximena nodded.
“Whose ships?”
“I don’t know.” Ximena bit a chunk of Kringle dripping with frosting.
Yasmine didn’t know if she wanted the birds to be ships or not.
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For the past two years Pete has been in the process of evolving into a fiction editor, God help him, first with The Pete Wood Challenge, then with Dawn of Time, then with The Odin Chronicles, and now with Tales from the Brahma, a shared world saga that features the creative work of Roxana Arama, Gustavo Bondoni, Carol Scheina, Patricia Miller, Jason Burnham, and of course, Pete Wood. We suspect that Pete’s real love is theater, though, as evidenced by his short movie, Quantum Doughnut — which you can stream, if you follow the foregoing link.
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