Gradient by Anders Cahill

Author:Anders Cahill
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: We Are Not Our Names

We didn’t leave our living quarters at all that day. It was her last day on Forsara before the ceremony and her departure, and all we wanted was to be together. We swapped training stories. We looked at old photos and mocaps, laughing at our younger selves. She listened as I tried to make sense of what happened on Lin Den, holding my hand when I faltered on the painful parts.

And we talked for hours about the implications of her appointment. The first leg of the journey would go quickly. Their frontier ship would jump from Appollion to Tasches, the starhub closest to the Hadeth system, near the base of the Cthlonian arm of the galaxy. From Tasches, they would enter a stretch of several months of quiet routines, preparing themselves for coldsleep as the ship accelerated to near-light, each of the seven members of the crew navigating the psychological solitude of a small group of people living in close quarters, until they passed into the imperceptible moment, into the compressed corridors of relativistic velocity.

In that moment, time would curve and fold, and they would face their past and their possible futures in a fever dream of passage where time could not be reckoned by a human mind. Then, in the next imperceptible moment, their shipheart would wake them from coldsleep, and they would be there, at the edge of a newly discovered solar system, pioneers at the ever-growing boundary of the Fellowship.

Over six hundred years would pass here on Forsara while they traveled the corridors of near-light. In that time, the Fellowship would begin building the network of starhubs that would ultimately connect Forsara to this new world, eventually allowing us to travel to that sector of the galaxy in months when it once took more than half a millennium. The starhub construction project would take many centuries, but with the full will of the Fellowship behind it, it could be done.

By the time this new branch of the starnet was approximately seventy percent complete, the second ship was projected to arrive. By using the starhubs completed so far, that ship could jump much closer, to a new hub that would be built around a massive star called Dromedar. From there, the crew would travel two hundred twenty-three years at near-light to Eaiph, only a third of the original journey.

By then Saiara and her team would have already been gone from Forsara for almost a millennium. And, if they had survived the journey across space, that means they would have been on the planet for over four hundred years. Who knows what kind of world would be waiting when the second ship arrived? And, if Saiara was still alive, who knows what kind of woman she would become?

When we made love that night, she tasted of salt and rosewater. I drank her in, moving my hands and lips across her body. It was a desperate, gentle, bittersweet coupling. As we drifted off to sleep, I pictured her surrounded by descendants, the first generations of people born on Eaiph.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.