Point Of No Return: The Evolved, #2

By Richard Quarry

As a generation ship way past its pull date creaks and groans toward the nearest star system that might hold out a chance for survival, the scientifically literate Riggers turn to brain enhancements in a desperate attempt to discover new technologies.

But a colony of evangelical Christians fear the approach of a "Point Of No Return" beyond which God's dominion ends, condemning their souls to eternal damnation.

Two teenagers, a Christian bee-keeper and a budding physicist, strike up a chance friendship that gradually draws them closer together as their worlds turn mad.

Now the Christians demand the ship turn around. And if the Riggers refuse, the evangelicals would rather die on this side of the line — even if they must take the whole habitat with them.

Leaving our star-crossed lovers reaching across an ever-widening gap as both sides escalate toward a final solution.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Devray Publishing
• Release date: Feb 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201886837

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Waxy leaves big as Mirai’s outstretched hands arced from scaly trunks. The overhead spray that mimicked rain had ceased a few minutes before, leaving beads of water clinging to the leaves. Even partially shaded by the foliage overhead, the veined green surfaces sparked tiny prisms in the light of the cylinder’s longitudinal panels.

Yellow, orange, and purple flowers sprouted in clusters among the leaves. The bees which had fled the spray buzzed back, drifting from flower to flower.

This was Mirai’s favorite part of the Sector Three arboretum. Most of her friends found it too close and too humid. Nor did they care for the way the thick-bodied bees kept bumping into them, stingless or not.

Which was part of the attraction. At seventeen Mirai Allan placed a high value on blazing her own trails. She also liked being alone, which for all the habitat’s immensity was hard to do aboard the Stephen Hawking. She even enjoyed the spray, though it dampened her stretchy top and pants, making them bunch up in all the wrong places. By staying to the center of the crushed-rock footpaths she escaped the worst of the artificial drizzle. With water so precious, the gardeners concentrated the sprinklers further back, toward the plants that most needed it.

Mirai exerted her will to avoid flinching when one of the black-and-yellow bees blundered into her. Though she still brushed them away from her face with a little more urgency than her calm and collected self-image might choose.

Really, you’d think the bees would be smarter than to fly right into you. Fat, stingless, and slow, it was fortunate for them that there were no predators aboard the Hawking. They’d just be flying dinners else.

Even the sickly-sweet smell of the flowers didn’t deter Mirai, though her friends made gruesome jokes about what decaying horrors the ignorant farmers who cultivated this area might have hidden amid the thick-clustered ferns.

Mirai Allan was her own woman.

She especially liked the parts where the trail narrowed and leaves long as her forearm met close overhead. Like a living cave. Here you could pretend to enter some part of the forest you’d never seen before, which might hold who knew what mysteries? It was a little-girl sort of thing to do and harder to maintain as the years wore on, but Mirai still clung to that thrill of anticipation. Though vast, after seventeen years the Stephen Hawking didn’t offer much in the way of startling new vistas. Or much new at all.

Nor did it today. After one last short, dark passage, the path left the jungle section and opened into more open forest. Mirai squinted slightly against the brightness of the overheads as the crushed rock of the jungle path faded into a slightly domed, mossy track.

To her left beehives dotted a horseshoe-shaped field. A boy about her own age sat amid them at a wooden bench, assembling a square frame from wooden slats.

Christian, obviously. All the gardeners were. Mirai thought she might have seen him around a time or two, lurking in the woods like the others, shifting quietly around doing whatever gardeners did. Soft-footed and graceful. Or else ominous, depending how on you looked at it.

You didn’t see them sitting out in the open very often. Didn’t often see them close to her own age, either. In the markets sometimes, but not here.

It came to Mirai that in all her life she’d never spoken more than half a dozen words at a time to a Christian. All while buying food or the occasional crafts piece.

Nor did she have much reason to do so now. In fact if the very thought of approaching someone of such alien beliefs hadn’t started butterflies churning in her stomach, she’d have walked on by.

But foreboding was a challenge. And Mirai Allan didn’t shy from challenges; she met them head on.

Head held high, she walked across the mossy grass. The bees swarmed more thickly here among the hives; the boy sat inside a virtual cloud of them. One bumped into her shoulder, another off her cheek. She forced herself not to react. She was ruled by her mind, not by undisciplined emotions.

The boy looked up from his work as she approached. Yes, her age or a little older. But not much. He wore his black hair cut short in the Christian manner; not according to any religious significance she’d ever heard of, but as one more symbol of their opposition to the Riggers, most of whom wore their hair long to drape over the pigtail connectors emerging from the base of their skull.

The look he gave was totally deadpan. Close to animalistic in its absolute lack of communication.

That look and that hair came close to turning her around. But Mirai stiffened her courage with her favorite nostrum of late: imagining herself telling the story in her dorm lounge.

As she came to his bench he pushed back his chair and stood. He was tall, wiry-looking, with corded muscles playing in his neck and forearms. At first Mirai feared that rising to his feet was meant to warn her off, and she stopped several feet away. Then she recalled how Christians clung to a host of archaic and sexist customs, such as the males standing when a woman approached.

What was the point of that? Except maybe to demonstrate they were most often bigger. Pretty much always, in Mirai’s case.

His expression became more guarded. What did he think, she was going to beat him with a stick? What could possibly be threatening about her? She searched for an opening.

Hello.

She tried to sound friendly. Even a touch effervescent, to show herself a woman of high spirits and boundless enthusiasm for life. But her effervescence seemed to have fizzled away.

He nodded noncommittally. Mirai was trying to suppress all the clichés about Christians and their narrow bandwidth, but he wasn’t making it easy for her.

What are you doing? she asked.

He looked down at the bench with all the pieces of wood and a few archaic non-powered tools scattered across it. Some of the slats were joined together in what was clearly intended to be an open-sided box.

Making a beehive. I mean, he corrected himself, the frame for a hive.

How interesting, she said, ignoring his slightly sullen tone. After all, he probably didn’t get to talk to anyone outside his own community very often. Maybe he was afraid the conversation might turn more challenging, and he’d be left mumbling. No one wanted to look a fool. As a teenager, Mirai was acutely aware of that.

Only she was running out of conversational options herself. That’s pretty wood, she said.

He looked down at the slats.

It’s pine, he replied, in a slightly puzzled tone she didn’t understand. Among the Riggers, wood was a scarce commodity. Every plant or tree that could be grown was needed to produce oxygen for the cylinder, whose atmosphere recycling system was being taxed close to its limits.

Or, many were beginning to mutter, a bit beyond.

You didn’t cut down trees just to make them into trinkets.

But the Christians, who generally tended the woods and crops even outside their own Sector, had the use of any tree that died naturally. It was said that within their own Sector they even grew wood for no purpose but for building, because they rejected composites as much as possible, like they rejected everything else about civilization.

Wood for bees, well, maybe there were reasons for that. Pollinators were important. But to waste on that scarred and rickety workbench holding his archaic hand tools? The wood in that bench could be sold for ... well, a good many composite benches, anyway. And have credits left over. And the composite ones would be a lot stronger.

Stubborn people, she thought. Thick and slow-moving as the heavy black-and-yellow bees that weaved and buzzed between them. But she wasn’t ready to give up just yet.

So you’re a bee-keeper?

Some of the time. He considered her, closed his eyes, and when he opened them again produced an heroic oration: It’s my favorite part of the job. I like bees. They’re.... But here his stock of conversation ran dry.

I like honey, she said, not exactly brimming over with witticisms herself.

Do you? His face brightened, like that was really important to him.

Well yes.

Searching for some follow-up, she found nothing but, it’s very nice. If this kept up they’d soon be speaking in grunts and snorts like Neanderthals.

He pursed his lips, deep in thought. His eyes as he appeared to weigh her were golden-brown and bright, with a gleam absent from his conversation. She thought his face plain and workmanlike, with a suggestion of sincerity about it she could not precisely identify. Strong chin, rather nice lips. He might have been good-looking with a touch more animation in his expression. But until the mention of honey came up he’d been holding himself bundled up.

Wait here a minute, would you? he said, having at last arrived at some conclusion. That is, if you don’t mind the bees. Or you could wait by the path. There aren’t so many of them there. It’s the hives that keep them coming and going.

I like bees. Just not quite so many of them.

Do you? That’s great. Ah, I’ll be right back.

He ran toward the far end of the opening, toward a white-painted wooden — of course — shed with a roof so moss-covered she couldn’t tell what it was made of. Deep scars gouged the boards. The door sagged so much she couldn’t imagine how it would ever close.

But she noted how he moved with an easy, natural motion, not like the kids she knew who ran for sport and were often quite good at it but always, she realized now, a bit tense because they always played to win something.

He ducked into the shed and in a moment was back. He handed her a glass jar with an old-fashioned screw-on lid. The Christians made such things. By hand. There certainly wasn’t anything like that anywhere else aboard the Hawking.

Inside the jar was a richly colored golden brown jellyish substance.

Here, he said. Take this. It’s honey. Just ... honey.

Why thank you. How much—

No, no, no, he said, waving his hands. It’s just some I made for myself. But if you like honey, and bees, you really should have it.

He’d grown quite loquacious. Was honey part of some secret Christian cult? There was a somewhat alarming eagerness in his eyes, but nothing that Mirai recognized as a signal he intended to grab onto her or anything.

He simply seemed pleased to share something with her. Which was why she’d approached him in the first place.

She unscrewed the lid. It took all her strength, and she saw him lean forward on the verge of offering his help. But just because some men might be stronger didn’t mean she was weak. So bearing down hard, though the ridges on the lid bit into her palm, she twisted the jar open. He hadn’t brought a spoon or anything else to eat with. Probably didn’t recognize anything beyond her fingers might be necessary.

Mirai hesitated, her instincts rebelling against eating anything that some dust-covered Christian dug out of a rotting shed.

But she would not be a slave to convention. With a feeling of abandon she dipped in her forefinger, scooped out a generous dollop, and as it started to drip down off her finger quickly ducked her head and stuck the finger in her mouth, bearing down with her lips to scrape off the honey as she pulled her hand away.

The sensation was startling. First from violated expectations; she’d expected something almost unpleasantly sweet. She didn’t get that at all. There was an element of sweetness to it, certainly, but subdued. Rich, even earthy, a background rather than the whole experience. The texture had a barely perceptible graininess, and a flavor she identified as wheaten without really having much experience to go on, simply because it was so substantial as to be almost breadlike.

But the word that kept repeating was that same earthy. Not a very natural concept aboard the Hawking, where the dirt was formed from ground-up asteroidal rock thickened and fertilized with chemicals. But an evocative one. A picture of a vanished blue planet, now no more than a legend. An idea of growth, of nourishment, of life where the horizon stretched outward and down, instead of climbing up and turning back in on itself.

Suddenly all these bees buzzing around took on a new meaning. They worked. They labored. They didn’t feed their young on the over-sweet, drippy substance she’d previously known as honey. They fed them this. Food, real food. The bounty of the earth, even here in the vast desert between star systems.

Mirai couldn’t understand why the moment struck her as so meaningful. She’d never before thought it strange that the majority of what she ate differed only in details of processing and organic content from the materials that made up the dwellings and furniture where she lived.

Now she felt she had been cut off from a central part of human experience. That all those jokes about you are what you eat after all bore a tragic component because the corollary was that she, along with everyone else she knew, was artificial. A construct as much as a living, breathing person with free will.

But that didn’t make any sense.

Did it?

Mirai Allan was a most searching seventeen-year-old.

She came back to the here and now. To the taste of honey in her mouth, and the boy waiting eagerly for her judgment.

That, she said, is delicious. More than delicious. It’s ... inspiring.

He smiled broadly. You like it? The honey we sell your people — belatedly he winced at that your people — is sweetened and has all kinds of stuff added. I don’t know exactly what and don’t want to. They tell me that’s what sells. This here, well, I don’t know that I’d have thought to call it inspiring, but....

Their eyes locked together. Experienced a moment of shock. Not in romantic discovery, or even lustful interest. Just recognition of a common experience so rare aboard the cylinder as to be unknown not only to their experience, but anything they’d ever heard from their forebearers.

The boy gulped. But it is, isn’t it? Inspiring, I mean. In its way.

Then all at once they were laughing, both of them, madly, with that glorious teenage conceit that together they had just discovered something that would forever remain known only to them.

CHAPTER 2

A swarm of white-suited figures swam out from the airlock of the Stephen Hawking into the all-reaching night. Light glowed from the reflective patches they wore. Not, as in Earth orbit, light from the Sun; there was no sun for close to two light years in either direction. This light came from swivel turrets mounted on the stationary superstructure, within which the occupied habitat rotated.

Engaging the thrusters worn on their belts, the group climbed one hundred meters out from the cylinder in a curving trajectory, rising above one of the eight thirty-kilometer long struts that enclosed the cylinder’s exoskeleton.

Clearing the arm, Mirai turned an awkward somersault to get her head facing the cylinder. Stars rotated dizzyingly around her. Then, since she’d gotten twisted sideways during her