Chapter 6: Cilla Sulltrone

Six

Cilla Sulltrone

 

Cilla Sulltrone rode a Pentra-646 on her seventh birthday in front of thousands of invited guests at the very brand new Berlin S.E. Field.  It was to be a center for “human lift” that would set the standard for generations to come.  Of course, space elevators had been the means for mankind's reach to space for over two centuries by the time the new Pentra model was unveiled.  And long gone were the days of accidents, deaths, stall-outs and other complications.  But the Pentra made the most efficient use of magnetic propulsion to date, improving on travel time by 48%.  

Most importantly to the region and its citizens, it also played a part in Berlin’s challenge to Sydney for supremacy among Earth cities.  Sydney would remain the capital, but Berlin could command so much more action with the two hundred twenty-five platform, high-speed, sleek space elevator field all connecting to a single, massive transfer complex, linking to hundreds of molkas at once.

As the Pentra Princess, Cilla stood atop the loading platform to one of the new elevators in a dress designed specifically for the event: fashioned of a golden fabric that changed hues as the light hit it in different ways, shimmering with quick bursts, suggesting stars.  Just the sort of thing any girl would thrill to wear on the occasion of her seventh birthday. 

Cilla’s father, Michael, stood beside her, coaxing the people in attendance for greater applause as she waved and smiled.  Others joined them on the raised platform (including the mayor of Berlin, two GLB representatives from the region and a particularly popular footballer) and gazed approvingly at the young lady in a way that suggested, It’s her, folks.  She’s the future and this is a gift for her generation.

The enormous sign positioned above the platform, featuring a single hyphenated word, Sull-Strand, went unseen by Cilla.  Even if she had spotted it, the sign itself wouldn’t have tipped her off as to how little the whole day really had to do with her.  After all, she had seen both names, Sulltrone and Sull-Strand, so often that she didn’t know the latter referred to a company.  She’d always assumed they were interchangeable.

Only when her introduction was complete, however, followed by wordy pronouncements from the various dignitaries did Cilla come to understand that the event was not devoted to her birthday.  She was merely included to dutifully play the role of “cute little girl”, adding another crowd-pleasing dimension. 

Even the space elevator demonstration launch following the speeches to impress people left her disappointed:  they stopped at only two hundred kilometers above ground (reached in just under four minutes), far short of the transfer complex sixty thousand kilometers from the surface of the Earth.

 

V          V          V          V

 

“You know about Haver, right?” Garrity had asked Cilla at a party (to which he wasn’t invited) several weeks before the group excursion with Shepherd.  Garrity, an infrequent acquaintance of Cilla's for years, liked to talk more than she liked to listen, but she made an exception at the mention of Haver.

Of course she’d heard of it.  Nearly everyone on Earth had.  The powers-that-be made sure of the familiarity.  It was one of the few occasions that an open, continuous reference to a world in U-Space found favor with those who controlled messaging.  Haver served as a surefire scare tactic.  A cautionary tale extraordinaire.

Poison was dispensed on Haver, they said, masquerading as pleasure.  Depravity, they said.  Animalistic, demon-driven madness.  A den of subhuman self-indulgence.

            But Cilla knew better than to buy into Earth’s version.  They had a cover story for nearly everything.  If she hadn’t been Michael Sulltrone’s daughter, privy to certain information (snippets coming out in casual conversations between important men during rarefied gatherings at which she was in attendance, just one of the decorations) Cilla likely would have remained as ignorant as most Earthers about matters large and small.

            All she needed for confirmation that the Haver stories were fabricated was the report from Garrity about each of the first two excursions he’d take there with Trewn Shepherd. 

            “It’s a sweet float.  Truly,” Garrity promised.  “Nothing like it.  Plus, they’ve got it regulated.  You can’t possibly get too much gas and go off your head or something.”

            Sure, it was seedy on the face of it.  The vast majority of Earthers would never have considered such a thing.  But it was an experience nevertheless.  And Cilla craved experiences.

 

V          V          V          V

 

            The shuttle that met Shepherd, Garrity, Cilla and the others at the clearing near the deteriorated chalet outside Halliston, carried them back toward town.  They stopped and unloaded at the Advanced Disposal Conglomerate S.E. field.  The two tallest buildings of Halliston were visible over the trees surrounding the compound.

            "We walked all the way out there...just to be brought back here?"  Wells asked.  "We could have walked to this place instead."

            "Wells," Shepherd said, calmly as possible, "I'm going to try to make this clear to you:  There's a reason for the way we do this.  It's not open to debate."

            Chastened, Wells sunk back into the group a little in a manner that was irritatingly childlike.

It had been fourteen years since Cilla was so close to an S.E. field and the three-lift facility before her was no comparison to her seventh birthday experience aside from one recognizable feature:  they were all Pentra-646’s -- nearly an obsolete model everywhere else in the world.  Who could say?  One of them may have even been the very lift that Cilla rode on that birthday years earlier, dismantled and shipped from Berlin once newer equipment was in use.

            Cilla walked with the others through the main gates of ADC, leading into the field devoted to transfer of waste and other “undesirable material” from Earth.  The eyes of laborers on duty (all of whom were from C-Space colonies, with special dispensation to work for ADC) followed the kids, not so much with curiosity as with partially hidden disdain.

            She couldn't help but notice these long gazes.  Garrity caught her eye and shook his head as if to say, "Don't worry about them."  But it was all so new to Cilla.  Her background rarely provided cause to be around the transient labor that Earth needed, as permanent citizens had no interest doing certain jobs.  In order to prevent any non-Earth born individual to take up lifelong residence (even as a performer of physical labor), qualified men and women were granted tours of no greater than five years in length.  It all made sense to Earth leaders and everyone involved in the bargain seemed happy.

In addition to the larger act of defiance Cilla was committing by going on the excursion, what topped it all off perfectly was that she was riding these lifts.  Sure, they were manufactured by Sull-Strand, but they had been purchased secondhand by Noah Shepherd on behalf of ADC and set up within view of Halliston.  Reminders of old models of his company’s lifts irritated Michael Sulltrone.  He only wanted the most advanced examples of his work around to be seen.  If Noah Shepherd couldn’t afford or wouldn’t pay for the modern lifts, Sulltrone reasoned that he didn’t deserve any lift.  Moreover, if Shepherd were allowed to pollute the pure Halliston sky with signs of his waste disposal enterprise, then he was just the sort of scum that should have gone the way of mass migration centuries earlier.  

Nevertheless, Advanced Disposal Conglomerate stood out to many as one of the good, reliable companies.  Earthers acknowledged that the thick-limbed, uneducated laborers engaged by ADC acted just the way they were supposed to.  They behaved.

The undesirable job of eliminating the non-recyclable refuse (which was not always limited to animal byproducts, chemical sludge and various toxic recipes) from the planet needed to be done if Earth was to maintain the pristine state it had reacquired following mass migration.  And now that it could be released in space at a reasonable cost, there was little reason to find cleaner ways to live.

However, the coarse men doing the dirty work and their immediate families enjoyed temporary resident privileges on Earth under a zero tolerance policy.

 

Always be in your assigned compound at the appointed hour.

 

Don’t pass over into non-ADC territory without express permission.

 

Don’t attempt to engage with Earthers unless they initiate contact.

 

In short, don’t forget who you are and how lucky you’ve been.

            While living on Earth was preferable to an existence on one of the colonies (even in a controlled part of space) ADC laborers lived their entire tenure on Earth within the confines of a four square-mile compound, adjacent to the space elevators that were used primarily for transporting garbage into the heavens.  They ate only processed foods (infused with “productivity additives”), were allowed no alcohol and awarded no vacation time.  They worked five to six days a week, depending on the demand and only one child was permitted for each married couple.  Multiple sick days taken, poor work habits and forbidden pregnancies resulted in deportation.

The powers-that-be on Earth and owners of ADC all assumed that this was a good deal for the laborers.  They genuinely believed that the working men and their families were satisfied.

Noah Shepherd warned his two sons to stay away from the workers on the rare occasions when he took them along on trips to the disposal facilities.  Although Noah did have more exposure to the “lucky laborers”, as he called them, than Trewn, he didn’t recognize what his youngest son grasped instinctively at an early age:  These “lucky laborers” were like all members of the human family.  They perpetually yearned for more than what they already had.  He could see it in their eyes from the first time he encountered one of them up close, clear as day and undeniable.

Trewn Shepherd didn’t know at the tender age of thirteen what he could do with this information, but he tucked it away until it became handy.  Ultimately, it allowed for a career in smuggling the spetcher art.  The desire to break free of the bonds of Earth for awhile to sample what the universe had to offer came later, but was directly thanks to the good relations he'd built up with the laborers of his father's company.

ADC laborers were not quick to engage in even the most basic conversation with the son of an owner.  But when some of the less-inhibited of them began to relent, Shepherd easily plied them with fresh meat, cheese, beer and wine.  He bragged to Garrity that sometimes the simplest things could become the most powerful motivators.

Unlike the much busier commercial S.E. fields in Berlin, Buenos Aires and Dans-Metro-Allegro (DMA), Halliston had virtually no scrutiny focused upon it.  Only three elevators in use, a non-descript community and the idea of loads and loads of refuse were enough to keep the regional HSPB from sticking their noses in very often.

The circular base of each of the three elevators in the Halliston field measured two hundred meters in diameter, with each anchored a full kilometer into the ground at four equidistant points around the base.  From the center of this foundation, perfectly spaced magnetic plates twenty meters square rose into the air, puncturing the sky and disappearing from view.  At the top end of the the sequence of plates (some 60,000 kilometers above the Earth’s surface) the docking station in geosynchronous orbit could host up to five vessels at once.

As potentially awe-inspiring as the sight of space elevators could be from a distance (even the meager three in use for ADC) with the glowing tresanium coating on the mag plates that reached upward, seeing them up close tended to have a humbling, worry-making effect on anyone not yet initiated into the collection of those who had been ‘lifted’ aboard one.

Wells, for example, couldn’t hide his anxiety at the enormity of the machinery devoted to sending people into space.  He was about to ride the thing and it scared him shitless.  He slowed almost to a halt, gazing up to the passenger compartment of the Pentra-646, roughly forty meters off the ground.

No time to waste on second-guessing.  Shepherd placed his hand on Wells’s back and urged him forward to keep pace with the others.  His eyes never leaving the gargantuan works before him, Wells resisted the push, angling himself away.

“We have to move, Wells.” Shepherd said firmly. 

“I know these things go up over and over again every single day,” Wells said, giving in slightly to Shepherd’s steering of his body to join the others, “but what would the odds be that something would go wrong on this one?  It’s not one of the newer models.”

“Do you think I’m stupid, Wells?  Do you think I don’t value my own life?  I’m going to get aboard and ride it, just like I’ve done before.”

“Sure, but remember the accident with the lift outside of Buenos Aires?  Maybe seventy people aboard and they never found any of them.”

Shepherd grabbed Wells’s arm with authority, leaning closer. “That was over a decade ago.  One accident in the past seventy-five years and that’s what you think about?  Glad I don’t live in your head.”

Minutes later, the eleven entered the passenger compartment of the space elevator through the airlock/hatch which would ultimately connect to the “Goldie” class molka taking them to Haver. 

            There were twenty-two seats in the area that measured roughly a hundred square meters.  Emergency oxygen tanks, bolted to the center of the compartment, caught the eye of more than one of the first-timers.

            The floor of the compartment was stained with a whole range of substances and the seats into which the eleven would strap themselves were faded and worn.  As the group buckled in, the loading of waste containers into the cargo hold began, visible through a single window.  It didn't take long before the smell permeated the passenger compartment, fouling the air.

            Wells reacted to the oppressive stench, but before he could speak, Shepherd caught sight of the latest complaint about to come to life.

            “Don’t say it, Wells.  Smelling it for ourselves is bad enough.”

            The ultimate solution for the young man was to simply hold his breath as long as possible and when it had to be replaced, exchanging it through his mouth for new oxygen.

            "Wells, don't hold your breath.  It'll make it harder on you when we start up," Garrity said to him.

            "But it makes me sick," Wells replied, trying not to inhale through his nose.  Suddenly, a thought occurred to him:  "Wait.  Why is it a problem when we start up?"

            "You'll see."

            It was twenty minutes later when six ADC laborers entered the compartment taking no notice of Shepherd and his party.  The laborers, bulky and dirty from work, chose seats distanced from the Halliston kids and each took a swig from a bottle passed between them.

            "What are they drinking?" Cilla asked in a whisper.

            "It's something to take the edge off the ride." Shepherd had seen the same ritual in each of his previous trips, but he wasn't comfortable asking the men, nor taking part if they were to offer him a drink.

Sirens began to wail nearby.  Shepherd and Garrity covered their ears and everyone else in the group followed suit.  Despite the intensity of the sounds, the laborers seated on the opposite side of the compartment sat easily, eyes closed and heads back.

            And then, all was quiet.  The platform began to rise -- only fifteen or twenty kilometers per hour -- up to a point one hundred meters off the ground.  As the platform slowed, nearly to a stop, Wells looked around, quizzically, at Shepherd and Garrity.  Before he could say a word, however, the platform shot up into the air, hitting one hundred kilometers per hour and then two hundred in under three seconds.  The acceleration continued past five hundred kilometers per hour to the point when it seemed impossible to go any faster.  And then, all at once, everything became light and peaceful.

            The tear that Wells didn't even know had formed in the corner of his right eye detached itself from his face and floated in front of him, trying to find form as it drifted away.

            It would take just under an hour from that point of weightlessness to complete the lift.  There was the elation of traveling thousands of kilometers an hour while feeling light and free within the confines of the passenger compartment.  The group joked and talked about arrival on Haver, seemingly adjusted to the stench which initially made their surroundings unbearable.  Even Wells got caught up in the spirit of things, laughing at the sight of Garrity spinning one of his gloves around in midair.  They were doing it, something precious few other Earthers would dare attempt and even fewer would have the chance to pursue.

            When the lift finally came to rest, an ADC “Goldie” molka was visible, bathed in light from the docking station.  Its white and blue exterior stood starkly against the endless reach of space beyond it.  Metallic cylindrical “gravity blankets” circled the length of the ship's hull.  Displacement drives, located fore and aft, spun slowly (a cooling process) that indicated the craft had recently arrived from some distant destination.

            Boarding the "Goldie", Shepherd noticed that Wells walked with a bounce in his step and regarded the crew members that he passed with an air of superiority.  The little asshole.  He was ready to cry like a baby at the lift compound and now he was imperious in front of “lesser” men.  It might have been the snarl that appeared on Shepherd's face while watching Wells that caused Cilla to smile at him and shrug, as if to say:  “Some people are just that way.”

            The lounge set aside for the Earth kids was not what they were used to in their own homes (bench seating and collapsible slumber nets), but at least the stench from the lift compartment was gone. 

            There were fourteen hours between the outbound Earthers and Haver, the decadent moth-flame royale, well beyond the protective buffer of C-Space.  A trip that there was no real reason to make.  They had all of Earth open to them.  Shepherd and his companions were making the voyage for one reason:  because they could.