Chapter 31

“People write books because of injustices.”
—Victoria Matthews, FHHS: A Science Fiction Drama in Eight Acts

THE WALK WITH RACHEL invigorated me so much that I was out the door Monday morning before anyone but Pey was awake.

“What are you doing?” she asked. “Get me the cereal, please.” I paused to retrieve her cereal, bowl, and milk.

“I’m going for a walk. I won’t be gone too long. I just want to walk.”

“Do you want me to come with you in case you fall?”

“Naw. I don’t want to squash you! I’ve got my cellphone and I’ll carry my cane in case I need something to lean on. Okay?”

“KK. Be careful, J.”

I headed out for my stroll. Monday was supposed to be even warmer than Sunday and since it was President’s Day there was no school so I could take my time and try to get a feel for the neighborhood. It had a similar feel to the V1 neighborhood but it was definitely different. It wasn’t just the year and make of the automobiles. It wasn’t just the color of the houses. These weren’t pre-World War II era housing. These were houses that had dishwashers in the kitchen when they were built. They had more electrical outlets than appliances. They had computers and televisions.

They didn’t have phones. Not for the most part. I didn’t know anyone who had a landline.

Most of the houses were unfamiliar but occasionally I would pass one and think, Jim Robertson lived there. Moved away after sixth grade. Or, German shepherd that likes to chase bicycles. Be careful. Mostly, though, they didn’t ring a bell. The streets weren’t laid out on a perfect grid like the prewar neighborhood I grew up in. The names were familiar, but a street V1 knew that cut out of the neighborhood to the main thoroughfare turned out to be a V3 cul-de-sac. It was very confusing and my mind just shorted a lot of it out. I started thinking about my story.

I’d read Maass’s book and loved the idea of character development. I’d started to jot down notes about characters I thought would play an important role. I’d not gotten as far as names. I had names that were more functional than real. Pilot, engineer, captain, doctor. That sort of thing. I had an idea about how they all interacted but would a thousand people on a space ship be enough to populate a new world? And did I really want to write hard science fiction if I was focused on characters? And how could I weave the story of what was happening on earth with what was happening on the colony ship?

For the first time in my life, a character spoke to me.

I was so surprised that I jerked my head around and looked behind me because I thought someone had actually said something. I nearly stepped off a curb, which even though there was no traffic could have injured my weak leg.

“What?” I said aloud.

“If you would be quiet, I could tell you what it was like.” I stood at the corner transfixed by the voice in my head.

“We trained for ten years. Some, much more since the first cadets started training when they started building the geosphere. It took twenty years to construct out of materials mostly mined in the asteroid belt or the moon. They’d been mining the belt for ten years before they started construction. When I was ten years old, the vessel was already visible as a new star, a hundred thousand kilometers from earth. By the time I entered candidate school, it was a moon.”

I was fascinated. I tried to ask a question, but this character was ignoring me. He just wanted to tell his story. I needed to get home and start taking notes.

Of course, before I got home, my phone rang the distinctive trill of Rebeca.

“So, we thought we could all go up to Glenbrook,” Beca said as if I already knew what the first part of the conversation was. “We can bum around the mall for a while and maybe go to a movie. You’ve had two days with Rachel. The rest of us want to have some fun, too!”

“I was ... uh ... planning...”

“You still like us, don’t you, Jacob?” she pleaded.

“Of course I do!”

“You don’t have to pay for anything! Mrs. Long said Joan could pick us all up in the Audi. You can have shotgun. We’ll pay for lunch and a movie and everything. Can you be ready by eleven?”

“I think so. I’m out for a walk and have to get permission from Mom and Dad. I’ll call you in half an hour. Okay?”

“I’ll wait for your call. Please come with us!”

“I will if I can,” I answered. I guess I didn’t sound enthusiastic enough.

“Please?”

“I will,” I said. “I’m on my way home now.”

It was no problem with Mom and Dad. I didn’t even need to do a sales pitch. They expected that I’d do something with my friends on the holiday. Em was already out and Pey was going to spend the day with one of her friends. Neither Mom or Dad had the day off. Businesses didn’t count President’s Day as a holiday. It was just banks, the post office, and schools that were closed. They were almost ready to leave for work when I got home.

I guessed I would have to wait before I started writing down all the stuff Pilot had told me. I called Rebeca back and told her I’d be ready at eleven.

And we had a great time.

None of us were allowed to stay out after we’d had dinner because it was a school night and we were all supposed to get a good night’s sleep. I felt like a king. It was pretty cool to walk around the mall with four pretty girls. I don’t know how they decided who was going to walk with me and hold hands as we went. It seemed like it was a different girl each time we moved from one store to another.

I didn’t feel like I was too much of a burden on the girls as we ate lunch in the food court and dinner at Don Hall’s. I didn’t overdo it when I ordered a big juicy burger and fries. I didn’t even have to pay for my movie ticket but I didn’t get to choose the movie, either. Oh well. Small price to pay, I guess. We didn’t make out much in the theater because the girls were all more interested in some dude I’d never heard of who played the romantic lead in a movie I’d never remember the name of. They did, however, switch places half way through the movie, so instead of Beca and Joan beside me during the first half, I sat between Rachel and Desi in the second half.

I was home by seven and had some Geometry homework I had to finish before bedtime.

20 February 2019

Characters are in my head. It’s getting crowded in there. I’ve been jotting things down as fast as I can. Not a story yet, but history and feelings and a little about talent and the shape of the world they live in. It happens at strange times. I was in the middle of Geometry when a character started talking about what certain phrases would mean to a person who had never heard it before.

Take ‘gravity,’ for instance. What would that mean to someone who had a pre-Newtonian mindset? It might only mean something of extreme importance. One of great gravity. So, if you talked about the earth’s gravity, the listener might assume the earth is in very serious condition. Which it is, but is not the meaning we assign to the word in that context.

And people change the meaning of words, especially in a closed society. My friends and I may say medium rare to describe our favorite doneness of meat. But then we are out one night and see a really hot girl and one of us says, “That bitch is medium rare.” In a few weeks, in our little closed society, medium rare becomes the accepted way of saying a girl is really hot. Which in terms of meat, it’s not. Hot. Of course, my little circle of friends disperses and we don’t have our little code words any longer. We might try to introduce a new circle of friends to the term and it might or might not be adopted. But if our closed circle stayed together ... was forced to stay together ... that term might be standardized and even passed down to future generations who have no concept that once a cool pink center on a cooked piece of meat was considered medium rare.

I think that is how society develops on the geosphere, which I’ve named Athena I. Sometime a thousand years in the future, the denizens might not even know who Athena was and have shortened the name to Thenai. It all depends on what is passed down as a standardized language.

“So, when do we say enough?” I asked. “We’re already falling behind on reviewing the videos. We aren’t grad school students with a research grant. When do we determine that we’ve got enough data to draw conclusions and write a paper?” Beca scowled at me.

“We’ve hardly gotten started,” she said. “Are you punking out already?”

“No,” I said. “And I’m not suggesting that we stop right now. We’ve got ten weeks until the project is due. At what point do we pull the plug and say, ‘Based on X number of weeks observation, these are our conclusions?’ It means how much time are we going to allow for actually writing the report and helping Joan get the animation completed. Which, by the way, I consider a critical component, and we need to figure out how we’re giving her proper credit. And Rachel and Desi, too.” Joan looked at me with puppy-dog eyes as if I’d just patted her on the head. So, I did. “You deserve a bunch of credit for this, hot stuff.”