Chapter 5

2073 a.d.

Journey

Sibilius was excited. The ship was arriving from Earth after once again filling its belly full of dirt, plants, water, grain and farm animals. It had been orbiting out toward Mars for the last seven months.

Thousands of years ago, a disaster had occurred disabling their ship so that it was no longer able to move between stars. The heavy elements necessary to restore their star drive were not available in this solar system. Trapped with the local life forms, their continued existence depended entirely on the whims of an unstable dwarf star and whatever preparations they could make for its inevitable demise.

"We are going to visit our new home," Sibilius announced happily to Béla as he entered the lab.

He seemed to find it perfectly natural that Béla lived here in his laboratory. After all, he had spent the last forty Martian years reconstructing her, and this was also where she'd been brought back to life. Her siblings in their Martian Drone bodies had insisted on personal housing, but Béla was perfectly comfortable sitting around naked in his lab all day. She was almost constantly mind-linked with the Praetor and she was learning a lot.

At night, or rather, during the off-duty period when most of the Deimosians rested, she would go out and fly. There was always a group of admirers there to gawk at her, but she didn't mind. When she radiated love to them, they reinforced it and sent it back to her. They didn't seem to be offended by her nakedness at all, probably because they weren't the same species. Also, some of the locals seemed to think of her as the Regent's pet rather than an intelligent being; but they loved her just the same.

After her evening flying practice, she would quickly fall asleep in the lab and go dream-walk with Jake. At least she did when their sleep times coincided. And she made sure they did as often as she could manage it, sometimes by simply taking a nap in the middle of the day and leaving her body lying on the floor for Sibilius and his assistants to step over and around her like a human would with a pet dog.

"Am I going with you?" Béla asked, completely ready to explore someplace new.

Sibilius looked lovingly at his daughter. "Of course you're coming with me! Do you think I'd leave you behind, child? But, there are a few rules...

"On the ship, you will have to wear clothes," he told her. "You can't go around disrupting crew members who are working by 'flashing' them. You could cause an accident. You don't want accidents in space."

He had picked up the term 'flashing' from her, actually, when she'd used it during a heated discussion about her casual lack of attire.

"Oh my God!" Béla exclaimed, suddenly subdued as she realized... 'Princess' is also a dog's name...

The great ship left Deimos six weeks later after replacing the tired crewmembers with fresh ones and restocking supplies for the journey to Jupiter. It carried, in addition to Béla and her father, about twenty percent of the remaining population of Deimos. That group also included Béla's siblings, in their Martian Drone bodies and her father's projects as they matured into fully grown hybrids for her siblings to inhabit.

It would take two and a half years to orbit out to Jupiter. The reason for that, her father explained when she asked him, was they had a finite amount of fuel left, and it had to last several more centuries, as the technology no longer existed for them to make more. For most of their motion, they depended on the local star's gravitational pull to orbit them to their destination. The return trip would be noticeably faster, dropping back down to the inner planets.

Béla had believed that the ship would be cramped because of all the people coming on this journey, but this thing was truly huge and she found vast spaces where nobody went where she could explore in private and practice her flying.

Using her wings in free fall was a completely different exercise than fighting against the centrifical motion of Demos' spin. This was like flying in the middle of Deimos, in the invisible center of the external forces which constantly acted upon her body. It was also a lot different than the new way of balancing she'd had to learn in order to fly in a straight line along an inverted surface.

Plus, on Deimos, it was easy (and dangerous) to fall into an artificial gravity field. She'd had to learn some fancy, hot maneuvers to compensate for inconsistencies she found inside rapidly spinning Deimos in order to keep from slamming against a structure that, a moment before, had been off in another direction and not in what appeared to be her flight path.

But once on board, Béla found that space travel was extraordinarily dull and it took literally forever to get anywhere. Her enthusiasm for this voyage diminished considerably over the next few months as she found herself with absolutely nothing to do ... nowhere to go ... even Earth was getting harder to reach in her dreams as they drifted farther and farther away from the inner planets.

Sibilius was checking his projects when Béla entered his makeshift lab aboard the giant ship. As usual, she was naked. She was also lonely and depressed.

"You were gone six days, this time," her father admonished her. He looked at her. He could see her ribs under her skin. "You're not taking care of yourself like you should. You're neglecting your body and spending too much time outside of it. You're making it sick, child."

Searching through his cooling system, Béla found a packet of meat her father had been keeping for her. There was enough nutrition in the meat she held in her hand to restore her to her normal condition.

"I don't like space," she said sullenly. "I can't fly here."

She sat down on a table and tore a piece of raw meat off with her teeth. She actually was malnourished. She could tell that by the way her mouth absorbed the congealed blood and fat in the raw meat as she chewed. She wished there were some way to heat the meat up.

"How're your bodies coming?" she asked, trying to be interested in at least something.

Jake was fighting her for some reason. For several nights now, he'd had another girl with him. Béla had spent the time she'd wanted to dream-walk with Jake exploring Albuquerque, instead. On her last visit, two thugs had beaten and raped a young woman and Béla hadn't been able to stop it because she wasn't really there. As the young woman lay on the ground, afterward, she had looked directly at Béla and said, 'Please help me... ' Startled, Béla had leaped back into her body on the great ship.

"The projects are coming along fine. There is less damage to the skin because of the light gravity here," her father said, "and we're actually ahead of schedule for their preparation. The first one should be ready in a few more days."

'Really? That soon? Can I teach her how to fly?'

'No, not right away, ' her father responded to her thoughts. 'She has to learn to walk, first, like you did. But, it will probably take her longer. Not many of your sisters had your drive or ambition when they lived on Earth.'

"Here is something you might appreciate," Sibilius said, switching back to verbal.

He held up a coil of thin wire with a harness on one end. The harness was designed with a collar around the neck and a long strap to go down the back, between the legs and back up to the neck. It fastened at the front and the back of the collar.

As Béla looked at it, her father sent her an image of how to use it.

Strapping one end around a supporting girder, she floated into the air, wearing the harness, backing away until she reached the maximum length of the wire. Then, forming her wings, she beat against the air as vigorously as she wanted to, with no danger of slamming into anything. The perfect form of exercise to keep her body in shape.

Béla happily sent her father an image of her kissing his cheek. Although he was right there, she didn't actually kiss him because she could feel his aversion to raw meat, and, right now, she was pretty much covered with it.