Michael McCollum - Maker 2 - Procyion Promise.pdf

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PROCYON’S PROMISE
A Novel By
Michael McCollum
Sci Fi - Arizona, Inc.
Third Millennium Publishing
An Online Cooperative of Writers and Resources
PROLOGUE: THE MAKERS
PROLOGUE
The Makers had never heard of Homo sapiens Terra , nor would they have been particularly impressed
if they had. By their standards, mankind had little to brag about. The Makers’ cities were old when
Australopithecus first ventured out onto the plains of Africa. By the time Homo erectus was lord of the
Earth, they had touched each of the twelve planets that circled their KO sun.
Individually, Makers were long lived, industrious, and generally content. Their population was stabilized
at an easily supported fifty billion and war was an ancient nightmare not discussed in polite company. So,
when the Makers came to the limits of their stellar system, it was with a sense of adventure that they
prepared to venture out into the great blackness beyond.
The first ships to leave the Maker sun were ‘slowboats’, huge vessels that took a lifetime to visit the
nearer stars. After three dozen such ventures, the Makers found they had made two important
discoveries. The first was that life is pervasive throughout the universe. Nearly every stellar system
studied had a planet in the temperate zone where water is liquid. Such worlds were found to be teeming
with life. More exciting to the Maker scientists, on twelve percent of the worlds visited, evolutionary
pressures had led to the development of intelligence. Two were the homes of civilizations nearly as
advanced as the Makers’ own.
The second great intellectual discovery was the realization that the Galaxy is a very large place, much too
large to be explored by slowboat. In a spirit of curiosity more than anything else, the Makers set out to
circumvent the one thing that retarded their progress. They began searching for a means to exceed the
speed of light A million years of scientific endeavor had taught them that the first step in any new project
is to develop a rational theory of the phenomenon to be studied. The Makers, being who they were, did
not stop when they had one theory of how faster-than-light might be achieved.
They developed two.
Each was supported by an impressive body of experimental evidence and astronomical observation.
Each should have resulted in the development of an FTL drive. Yet, every effort for a hundred thousand
years ended in failure.
 
There is a limit to the quantity of resources any civilization can divert to satisfy an itch of its curiosity
bump. The FTL program had long since passed the point of economic viability. Yet, the effort continued
apace. For while the Makers were mounting their assault on the light barrier, they found a more
compelling reason than mere curiosity to break free of their prison.
Their stellar system was beginning to run lowon the raw materials Maker civilization needed to sustain
itself.
The first signs were barely noticeable, even to the economists who kept careful watch over such things.
Eventually curves could be projected far enough into the future to foretell a time when civilization must
inevitably collapse of resource starvation. To avert catastrophe the Makers would have to obtain an
infusion of new resources, either by importing raw materials from nearby stars or else transplanting their
civilization to virgin territory.
Unfortunately, both options required a working faster-than-light drive.
The frustrated scientists redoubled their efforts. It was not until another hundred millennia had passed that
a Maker philosopher began to wonder if they were asking the right questions. The Great Thinker had
dedicated his life to the study of the years immediately following the slowboats’ return from the stars. He
noted that Maker science had taken great intuitive leaps in those years. The old records told of many
cases where the combined knowledge of two races had led to discoveries unsuspected by either.
His questions were as fundamental as they were simple: “Could it be that our concepts of how FTL may
be achieved are wrong? Is the failure to break the light barrier simply a matter of having missed the
obvious? If so, might not some other civilization have avoided our error and found the true path to FTL?”
Once the questions were asked, they could not be ignored. A program was immediately begun to
provide an answer. At first, it was a minor adjunct to the FTL research project. But as answers kept
coming up negative, as each promising avenue of approach turned out to be a dead end, the program to
PROBE the knowledge of alien civilizations grew.
By the time humanity discovered agriculture, it was all the program there was.
PART I: HOMECOMING
CHAPTER 1
Henning’s Roost was renowned throughout the solar system. Its reputation stretched from the
intermittently molten plains of Mercury to the helium lakes of Pluto, from the upper reaches of the Jovian
atmosphere to the subterranean settlements burrowed deeply into the red surface of Mars’ dusty plains.
Wherever men and women worked at hard or dangerous jobs, wherever boredom and terror were
normal components of life, The Roost was a standard subject of conversation.
Henning’s was a pleasure satellite, the largest ever built. Its owners had placed it in solar orbit ten million
kilometers in front of Earth. There was a story told of a spaceman who had arrived at The Roost with a
year’s accumulated pay in his pocket, stayed ten days, left flat broke, and pronounced himself well
satisfied. It was a testimonial to the diversions provided by Henning ’s management that the story was
 
widely accepted as completely reasonable. Besides which, it was true.
Be that as it may, Chryse Haller was bored.
Chryse had arrived at The Roost two weeks earlier for her first vacation in three years. She had plunged
immediately into the social whirl, sampling most of the diversions that were not ultimately harmful to one’s
health. She had played chemin de fir , blackjack, poker, roulette, and seven-card stapo on the gaming
decks. Later, she had enlisted as a centurion in a Roman Legion on the Sensie-Gamer deck and slogged
for two days through the damp chill of a simulated Gaul. Her first battle convinced her that the difference
between ancient warfare and a modern butcher shop is mostly a matter of attitude, and she began to cast
around for new diversions.
She turned to the most traditional sport of all, availing herself of the large pool of male companionship -
both professional and tourist - that The Roost had to offer. The previous evening she had attended the
nightly Bacchanal on Beta Deck. That had been a mistake She would become involved with a handsome
young man whose only goal was to please her. Yet, in spite of the soft lights, the rich smell of incense,
and the warm glow of two drinks within her; she found herself losing interest with each passing moment.
She had ended up watching simulated clouds scud across a simulated sky. Afterwards, she made her
excuses and left early.
There was no doubt about it. Lotus eating was definitely beginning to pall.
Playing with a fruit bowl, Chryse now sat alone in a breakfast nook pondering the curious emotional state
into which she had fallen. Her reflection stared dully back at her from the polished depths of the table.
The image was that of a woman in her early thirties, blonde, with shoulder length hair that framed a wide,
honest face. The eyes were set wide apart above high cheekbones, a nose that seemed a trifle small, and
a mouth just then twisted into a slight scowl. The eyes were brown in the simulated mahogany of the
table, but green in actuality.
“Tenth-stellar for your thoughts.”
Chryse looked up to find Roland Scott standing over her. Roland had been a member of her section in
the Gaul campaign. They had mustered out together and she had taken him as a lover that same night. He
had been good for her psyche and they had spent three glorious days together before she suffered the
minor disappointment of discovering that he was a Roost employee.
“Hello, Roland.”
“Why so glum?” he asked.
“Just a little tired, I guess.”
“Anything I can do to help?”
She shook her head. “I’m afraid there’s no cure for what ails me. You may have a seat if you like,
though.”
He quickly slid into the opposite side of the booth. “Maybe it would help to talk about it.”
She smiled wanly at him, recognizing his automatic response to a professional challenge. Still, Roland
really cared. He was paid to care. Of course, that was part of the problem.
“It’s this place,” she said, glumly.
 
“What about it?”
“It depresses me.”
His face acquired a look of surprise. “The Big Boss isn’t going to like hearing that. He has put billions
into The Roost . No one is supposed to be unhappy here, least of all Chryse Lawrence Haller.”
“You weren’t listening. I didn’t say I was unhappy. I said I was depressed. Different emotion entirely.”
“If you say so.”
“Look around you, Roland. What do you see?”
“What am I supposed to see?”
“Have you ever looked closely at your clientele?”
He made a show of scanning the restaurant. “Okay, I’ve looked.”
“You’ve got a good cross-section of humanity here. Both sexes, all shapes and sizes, every color. Yet, in
spite of our differences, we all have something in common.”
“Sure,” Roland said, nodding. “You’re all richer than anyone has a right to be. If you weren’t, you could
never afford us.”
“True,” Chryse said. “I hadn’t thought of that. Hmmm, that makes things even worse!”
“How so?”
“Can’t you see it? All your clients are compulsive personalities.”
“Aren’t you being a bit hard on yourself and the other guests?”
“If anything, I’m not being hard enough. We’re all on holiday, yet each of us is so desperate for diversion
that we play ourselves into exhaustion.”
“Considering the cost,” Roland said, “can you blame anyone?”
“I suppose that explains a few cases. But take old Joshua Voichek over there,” she said, gesturing
toward a spry centenarian seated at a breakfast nook halfway across the compartment. “After my father,
he’s probably the richest man in the system. He could spend a lifetime in The Roost without making a
dent in his fortune. Yet, he wears himself out as quickly as the salesman who saves a dozen years to
come here.”
“Your theory, Madame Psychotherapist?” he asked, trying to lighten the mood.
“We’re bored with life. The sense of adventure has gone out of us. There aren’t any frontiers left. No one
climbs Mount Everest anymore.”
Roland chuckled. “Why should they? If you want to reach the Everest Summit Hotel, you board an
airtram in Nepal. They leave every half hour.”
“Exactly! Where can you go in the solar system where you won’t find someone else’s boot prints?”
Roland shrugged, but did not answer.
 
“Know what I think? I think the human race is suffering from claustrophobia. We’ve learned the awful
truth that there are limits beyond which we cannot go, so we invent places like this to help us forget.”
“Isn’t that quite a lot to blame on an overpriced whorehouse?”
She looked at him sharply, suddenly aware of the undercurrent of anger in his voice. “A trained
entertainment specialist isn’t a whore, Roland.”
He raised one eyebrow quizzically. “Perhaps you can explain the difference to me sometime.”
“I didn’t mean to insult you. Put it down to overwork. Forgive me?”
“You don’t need my forgiveness. You can have me fired anytime you feel like it.”
“I guess I deserved that,” she said. She let her gaze slip from his angry face and move to the viewscreen
at the end of the small restaurant. The view was from a remote camera somewhere out on the hull. It
showed a jumble of I-beams, pressure spheres, and hull plates framed by the black of space. “Let’s
change the subject before we have an argument. I have been staring at that thing all morning. What is it?”
He turned to follow her gaze. “Just an old worker dormitory used during The Roost’s construction. It’s
abandoned now, of course.”
“I would think the owners would keep local space clear of all such hazards to navigation. Wouldn’t be
very good publicity for a shipload of tourists to run into that heap on approach.”
He shook his head. “It isn’t as ramshackle as it appears. Look closely. See the thruster cluster jutting out
near the airlock? There are twenty more scattered over the hull. That hulk and a half dozen others are
slaved to the Roost ’s central computer.”
“Sounds like a lot of trouble to go to for a junkyard,” Chryse said.
“It’s part of the service. The hulks make good destinations for clients with a yen to explore the mysteries
of space.”
“The what?”
He laughed, his pique suddenly forgotten. “Haven’t you ever skin dived on a sunken ship?”
She shook her head.
“How about going up to Zeta Deck then? They have a near perfect simulation of the Esmeralda there.
That was a Spanish galleon that sunk off Key West in the Sixteenth Century. They took sixty million
stellars worth of treasure out of her back in the thirties.”
Chryse shook her head. “I’m tired of simulated adventure.”
He smiled, turning on the boyish charm. “That’s the reason for the hulks. They are the real thing. We
could check out two vacsuits at North Pole Terminus and make a day long picnic of it if you like.”
She shook her head. The idea of exploring a twenty-year-old work barge did not appeal to her, but
Roland’s suggestion had tweaked a stray memory. There was something in solar orbit she would very
much like to explore.
“Do they rent ships at North Terminus, as well?”
 

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