The Great Escape Chapter 4, Part 2 of 5

The Great Escape  
Chapter 4, Part 2 of 5  
 
"You understand why we are all interested in Ezra, don't you?" she asked. " Is there something behind the attention we give him other than interest in an exotic visitor from space?"  
 
"Yes, Madam. It's sex."  
 
"Good girl. Tell me more."  
 
"Well, we are all trying to, er, attract him... that is, to make him desire us sexually, even to fall in love with us."  
 
"Quite right, Annela. There is an old Earth word for it that we don't use much: 'seduce.'"  
 
"I understand. We are all trying to 'seduce' Ezra. We all bathed yesterday, and some of us took the long way to the river to parade naked before him. We sit at his feet and ask endless probing questions, hoping for an emotional response. We offer him food from our platters, put on our best clothes, and put flowers in our hair."  
 
Mirselene nonchalantly checked, and her hair was still tied up out of the way. She secreted the small ring of daises she had laced into the grey bun that morning.  
 
"Doubtless we are doing everything wrong by Earth standards," Annela continued, pretending not to notice the petals in her chief's plump hand. "How would a Samothean know what was sexually alluring to an Earthman?"  
 
"I have no fear on that score, Annela," Mirselene said, crumpling the daisies with a smile, "because nature will surely take its course. My question is, what should we do about it?"  
 
"I don't know. Ezra will prefer one or another of us and want her as his bedmate. If she is willing, the matter is settled, and we must respect his decision."  
 
"Hmm." Mirselene self-consciously fiddled with the top button of her tunic. "Annela, I expect more ambition from you regarding your tribe and more insight regarding your sisters."  
 
"What do you mean, Madam?"  
 
"I mean, why can't all the Woodlanders be his bedmates? As you say, we all want to be. Think of the benefit to the tribe. Instead of a child every eight years, purchased from the greedy Cloners at great expense of produce and effort, we could all have children by this time next year - supposing him capable of the deed."  
 
"I am sure Ezra is capable," Annela assured her chief. "I've seen his penis swell. It was what I talked to Parvinder about. But I have to wonder ..."  
 
"Yes, Annela?"  
 
"What if he doesn't want us all? What if he doesn't want any of us?"  
 
"As regards Ezra wanting us all, Annela. ... Well, I've read more than you," Mirselene replied, as someone who spent many months in the Cloner City conceiving and bearing a daughter, where there were dozens of books, including a fictional romance. "I believe it's a man's nature to mate with as many women as possible."  
 
"Mirselene?" Annela was appalled. "Why would he want to?"  
 
Annela knew women from the inside, as it were, and lived in a society of women: she could not see anything so admirable in a woman that a man would ever want to be with more than one, if any at all.  
 
"Are you sure?" Annela asked.  
 
"I think so, but we can ask him."  
 
"How, Madam?"  
 
"How what?"  
 
"How do we ask him? Despite what he's told us, we know little about the sexual morality of Earth. All we know is that his need for privacy is much greater than ours, and his sense of decorum much more pronounced. At the feast last night, he resisted saying anything about sex beyond the social side of marriage and family, and you are keen that we don't offend or discourage him."  
 
"Quite right, hence this conversation."  
 
"You want me to speak to him?"  
 
"Yes, and more."  
 
Annela waited.  
 
"In that romance, I read," Mirselene explained, "an injured man fell in love with his nurse despite already loving another woman. He also fell for his secretary."  
 
"His secretary?"  
 
"A woman who worked for him in an inferior capacity," Mirselene explained, leaving Annela just as bewildered. "Anyway, it all ended happily because, although the man appeared to act dishonorably, he was honest all along."  
 
Annela looked blank.  
 
Instead, impatiently, Mirselene concluded: "The point is that all it took to make the man fall in love with three different women was a pretty face, an elegant figure, and some kindness. You have all those virtues, Annela, very much so."  
 
Despite her excellent sense and twenty-four years, Annela blushed at the compliment.  
 
"You want Ezra to fall in love with me?" she asked.  
 
"I want him to fall in love with us all. I want you to be his guide and take the lead, find out exactly what his views on sex are, and tell me how amenable he will be to the agreement I will put to him."  
 
"What agreement?"  
 
"We are a poor tribe, as you know, and have few children. We have saved eight years for another clone, and if we need to save even more in the future, then we will surely decline and die out, which would be a disaster for Samothea as much as for the Woodlanders. Who else knows about herbs, weaving, or woodcarving like us? But the Cloners cannot see this, though I put it to them many times. They want their luxuries...."  
 
Annela had heard all this before: Mirselene's constant refrain was that her tribe was diminishing while the Cloners were getting rich on Woodlander produce. The exact clones' cost increase affected inter-tribal trade, making the Herders more arrogant and raising the price of everything the Mariners sold.  
 
"But the agreement with Ezra?" Annela prompted.  
 
"The agreement is simple: Ezra mates with us all or with none of us and stays long enough to see that he has impregnated all who can conceive."  
 
Annela thought silently for a minute, then she asked:  
 
"How can we ensure Ezra will keep the agreement if he tires of us and wants to leave?"  
 
"If I am right about male nature, then he won't tire of us so long as we still want him sexually, but even if I am wrong, then nothing is lost, and we will possibly get some children from him. Also, he might be like that man in the story, with a sense of honor that can be appealed to."  
 
"I don't understand, Mirselene, but I will do what you ask. I admit, I would be thrilled if it's true that injured men fall in love with their nurses. I like Ezra."  
 
"Good girl. Maybe all it will take is your pretty face - but don't forget to find out his views on mating with us all."  
 
"All?" asked Annela with a smile.  
 
"Well, not me or anyone else who is too old, of course, but all the tribe older than eighteen who still bleed. If Ezra agrees, then they will be his bedmates in turn."  
 
"And if we don't want to be his bedmates?"  
 
"Come now, Annela, be serious! There is only one man in Samothea, and every woman wants children. Besides, which of us would be so unnatural as to want her tribe to diminish when she could open her legs for Ezra - especially if her chief tells her to do so?"  
 
Annela had her orders and plenty to think about. She went to undress in her hut and visited the river to bathe. She met the pigeon-hunters on her way, returning with a dozen birds.  
 
Wildchild's grin could not have been wider: she had bagged two of the pigeons herself and was convinced she could have bagged more if she had an adult bow to use. The successful hunters also went to the bathing place, and the excitement grew, leading to that night's feast.  
The feast had good humor and appetites, and there were many compliments for the roasted pigeon. Still, a feeling of expectation also subdued the usual boisterous chatter. The Woodlanders were going to tell Ezra their story.  
 
It was night, and the flickering campfire projected merrily dancing shadows onto the surrounding huts. The platters were cleaned up, and though it was still warm, some women went and fetched blankets to wrap themselves up. Pepi fell asleep on her mother's lap, and the commotion died as Mirselene announced it was time to tell Ezra 'The Story of Samothea.  
 
The Story of Samothea' was a chant with a rhythm and a tune that told how the Founders, the three hundred scientists and engineers who first landed on Samothea to finish the terraforming process, became the ancestors of the current population of Samothea. The Herders had a slightly different tradition from the Woodlanders because Wildchild and Tamar stood to perform actions along with the chant. The tune, however, was the same. It began:  
 
"In 2450 of ancestral Earth, the Founders landed on Samothea on day fifty-one. One-hundred and seventy-two men and one-hundred and twenty women came from Earth to build a new world. They filled the oceans with fish and the forests and plains with animals and birds. They made houses and roads, digging and building with sun-powered machines. They traveled long distances in cars and airplanes and talked to one another globally with radios."  
 
"In 2455, on day one-hundred and twenty-nine, the northern star Sothis erupted. We gazed wonderfully as the night sky lit up bright like the day."  
 
"In the year 2455, on day one-hundred and thirty-seven, storms blasted the settlements of Samothea. Every machine stopped working. Hail lashed the forest and plain. Ribbons of light whipped across the night sky. A tidal wave washed our boats up the beach and smothered our houses with sand."  
 
"On day one hundred and seventy, the storms ceased, and calm weather returned, but the rain now came at night and was freezing cold."  
 
Wildchild and Tamar, doing the actions, hugged themselves and shivered.  
 
The chant continued, describing how the Founders and the rest of humanity were cut off from Earth but bravely organized themselves to survive until rescue came or the machines were repaired. But more disasters followed: the women were barren, and the men were sterile.  
 
Ezra pieced together a consistent story. A nearby star, the one the Samotheans named 'Sothis,' seemed swallowed into a black hole, emitting x-rays followed by a harsh solar wind of cosmic particles. The wavefront from the black hole no doubt caused violent storms, auroras, and ice-cold rain. X-rays or solar wind also fried the circuits in every computer, book reader, communicator, car, boat, airplane, tractor, digger, laser drill, and plasma cutter on the planet.  
 
In one day, the Founders were thrown back into the stone age.  
 
Pulses of radiation can interfere with hyperspace pathways. Doubtless, they crippled all the robot scouts sent from Earth to investigate the fate of Samothea. Though much weaker now, the same radiation must have frazzled Ezra's navi-comms system and crippled his hyperspace engines, sending him dangerously close to Samothea in his last hyperspace jump.  
 
Snatches of the chant intruded on Ezra's thoughts. Unable to communicate with their orbiting spaceship or any nearby planet, the Founders devised a plan to survive. They split themselves into six groups, the Tribes, with about fifty members each. They specialized in exploiting particular habitats: sea, plain, river-valley, forest, and mountain, plus a group of scientists in what is now the Cloner City, whose task was to try to save or recreate Earth's technology.  
 
Some Founder couples were already married, and others paired up to have children, but they found they were all sterile. Not only people but every mammal was afflicted. Plants and egg-laying animals (fish, insects, reptiles, birds, and amphibians) could reproduce normally, but all mammals were barren.  
 
The cloning laboratories first set up to populate Samothea with every kind of animal were now employed in cloning only horses, sheep, cattle, and people. They soon found that males could not be cloned. The male engineers were the first and only generation of men on Samothea. It must have been an unbearably sad time for the women of Samothea to see their menfolk die off, leaving them to face the future alone.  
 
Another cause of sadness was that life expectancy plummeted. Under the harsh conditions of Samothea after the catastrophe, the first generation of Earth-born Founders died in their seventies or eighties. The last of the founders died about fifty years ago. Their clones lived only into their fifties and sixties. A clone begins life with the burden of years her mother endured at the time of cloning, so the clone of a twenty-year-old woman will have twenty years cut from the end of her life.  
 
At this point, the silence interrupted Ezra's thoughts. The chant had finished, and Ezra was sorry he had become distracted by his ideas and not listened as closely as he should have to the more recent parts of the story, which told how the different tribes had fared in the last one hundred years. But Ezra was thinking about something else: How could he tell the Woodlanders about the first settlement ship?  
 
The women looked expectantly at Ezra. It was his turn to speak.  
 
"Ladies," he began, "the Story of Samothea is beautiful and moving. I can add some details to the story, but I fear that as sad as the Story of Samothea is, what I will say will be even sadder."  
 
There was murmuring as the women discussed among themselves, and then Mirselene spoke up:  
 
"We Woodlanders are tough people, Ezra; we can bear bad news. Do not fear to tell us everything you know."  
 
Ezra began with his theory about the nearby black hole and the effects of its radiation. He briefly surveyed the complex subject of the life-spans of clones. Then he paused again to order his thoughts and continued:  
 
"Five years after the Founders landed on Samothea, the first settlement ship was sent from Earth. It carried five thousand people. The last anyone ever heard of that settler ship was before it took its final hyperspace jump to Samothea."  
 
There were a few catches of breath and then silence.  
 
"On board the ship were the farmers, builders, teachers, and craftsmen who left Earth with a pioneer's courage, hoping to build a new life beyond the stars. The Settler Company on Earth keeps a list of their names because their property claims are valid for one hundred years.  
 
"They were primarily young singles and couples, but some were families with children. Some were relatives of those Founders who chose to stay on Samothea, even their wives or husbands, bringing children to join their spouses."  
 
"What happened to the ship?" Mirselene asked.  
 
"I don't know," Ezra admitted, "though the same disrupted hyperspace pathways that steered me into a collision course with Samothea probably deflected the settler ship out of its path."  
 
"If they were lucky, they fell straight into a star. They would have felt nothing. If they were unlucky, their ship became stranded somewhere between the stars. Without power, communications or life-support ..."  
 
Ezra trailed off. Death by asphyxiation or freezing in the lonely vacuum of space was too horrible to contemplate. He did not mention a third possibility, that the ship crash-landed on a rocky planet somewhere, even on Samothea itself, and was now a rusting hulk filled with five thousand slowly decaying corpses.  
 
Ezra's words shocked and saddened the women around the campfire. They hugged each other and wept as the enormity of their loss sank in. Their silent tears deeply affected Ezra.  
 
His eyes were moist when he looked up to see Mirselene gathering her dignity, preparing to end the feast.  
 
"Ladies, the night rain is almost on us. As you go to sleep tonight, I hope you will think about the poor settlers (no doubt some of them are our relatives) and regret their passing, but I hope you will not dwell too much on the sadness of their fate. Rather, we should remember their courage and optimism. Every day, we must be strong and brave to survive in our world. We should remember the spirit of those settlers who took a ship to fly across the galaxy, courting unknown dangers and unfortunately succumbing. I feel certain that, if asked, 'Would you have taken the risk anyway?' they would all have replied, 'Yes! The goal is worth the danger!"  
 
The women quietly dispersed to their huts, buoyed up by their chief, but Mirselene kept Ezra back for a minute. When no one was in earshot, she asked him her question.  
 
"If I understand correctly, Ezra, you came from Earth alone and were lucky to find us. But if one lone adventurer can make it, is it not possible that others can too?"  
 
"Yes, it is possible but doubtful."  
 
"But you found your way here; is it so unlikely that others will follow?"  
 
"Yes, it is Mirselene," Ezra replied. "I took the risk because no one had tried for fifty years.  
 
When I do not return and receive no distress call, it will discourage other prospectors. Anyone else who tries to come here has a compelling motive or is an idiot."  
 
Mirselene looked relieved for some reason, which puzzled Ezra. Indeed, the inhabitants of Samothea would want more adventurers to visit in the hope that permanent contact with Earth might be established and the original plan for the planet's settlement would resume.  
 
As he went to bed, Ezra thought about being rescued. He thought of his little sister, Danielle, an astrophysicist in England. The problem of navigating hyperspace pathways disrupted by black holes and exotic matter was bread and butter to her. He got no further than imagining her working on the issue when sleep overcame him. He remained conscious long enough to mumble "good night" to Annela before all went dark.  
 
Back on Earth, Danielle wasn't working on the problem herself, but it was being worked on successfully. One morning a week, she taught a class of select undergraduates on hyperspace navigation at Trinity College, Cambridge. She was proud of the class, especially her top students, Rosa Silverstein and Li Qu Yuan, who always surpassed her expectations.  
 
This week, Danielle asked her students to plot the quickest route from Earth to Samothea through hyperspace. Computers usually did this because it consisted only of massive number-crunching calculations. Still, Danielle wanted her students to return to basics and re-think all the shortcuts they usually allowed the computer to perform. She also tried to reassure herself that Ezra had not taken too great a risk, thinking that five minds were better than one at looking for an anomaly that might turn an otherwise routine hyperspace jump into a fatal disaster.  
 
Three of the five students did the task the hard way, cautiously sending their virtual spaceship on many short jumps through hyperspace, mechanically cross-referencing their computers' results with the star maps and records of actual jumps in the region before re-calculating for the next jump: a tedious, routine, and, for the most part, entirely reliable process. It was indeed what Ezra himself had done.  
 
She did not bother to check these competent but pedestrian results against the star map because if the method was sound, then she could assume the calculations would also be correct.  
 
One of the two-star pupils managed to surprise her, however. Not content with taking baby steps across the galaxy, Rosa Silverstein wrote a nested sequence of programs to navigate through hyperspace to Samothea in a single leap. This was an absurdly dangerous thing to do because, though a spaceship in hyperspace was invulnerable to impacts from matter, the location at which the ship emerged from hyperspace was minutely sensitive to the matter it bypassed on the way.  
 
Rosa's program began with the main calculation and, as soon as an anomaly was encountered, launched a cut-down version to solve the problem quickly and adjust the main program in real-time. Then, if the correcting program met an anomaly, it would split off another, even smaller, correcting algorithm. Meanwhile, the original program might meet a second anomaly, so another sequence of corrections would start, running faster than the original.  
 
Ultimately, a swarm of programs would plot the trajectory, issue corrections, and correct the corrections, each competing to produce the quickest result.  
 
The program had to be run fifty times to produce the final calculation. When the result matched the star map, Rosa's virtual spaceship was only half a light-year out of place.  
 
Danielle was enchanted with her work.  
 
"It's truly brilliant, Rosa!" she declared. "It's a real innovation with only one problem: ... it won't work. You've posited a micro-ship of only one hundred tonnes, but the more massive the ship, the quicker the calculations lose accuracy and need correcting. For a thousand-tonne mass, the system would be bogged down by so many corrections that the ship would arrive, and who knows where precisely? Long before the calculation finished. I guess a hundred-tonne space-ship would have fuel enough to go less than a fiftieth of the way there."  
 
When she concentrated hard or was nervous, Rosa was an earnest girl who hung strands of her dark-brown hair behind her ears. She did so now.  
 
"Is my program useless, then?" she asked.  
 
"I don't know for sure. It has certainly given me something to think about," Danielle replied.  
 
"For example, if it were possible to exchange energy while in hyperspace, then your micro-ship can take on fuel and make course corrections in mid-jump...." Danielle trailed off, frowning as she sat back to think hard.  
 
The class remained silent, waiting. A few minutes later, Danielle emerged from her trance, quickly jotted down a few notes on her computer pad, looked around, and asked:  
 
"Who's next?"  
 
Only Li Qu Yuan was left to present his solution, and he was strangely reticent. He bowed over his computer, whispering commands and moving formulas around with a pen.  
 
"Li?" Danielle prompted him.  
 
The boy looked up, embarrassed. "I'm sorry, Doctor Goldrick, I've not finished," he mumbled.  
 
"Well, that's all right," she said, "we've run out of time anyway. You can send me your work later."  
 
 
 
To be continued