StarChild opening pages

Technical Dawn

Gaia Mission Date: 2101

Adam’s eyes snapped open, startled from sleep. He expected to see the river, but instead stared up at the familiar smooth yellow plastic of his bunks curved privacy shield. He breathed in deeply and sighed. Earth dream.

He’d been floating in the air above a river with a boat on it. The boat came closer and closer, carried by a strong current down a river with whirlpools and small, white-capped waves. On the boat he could see that there were two boys his age. They were lying on their backs, looking at the blue, cloudless sky and talking. As he floated above them out of reach they laughed as their boat went right under him and continued down the river,. He called out to them at first quietly, and then screaming, desperate to get their attention, though he didn’t know why. They didn’t hear him, the boat floating away into the distance.

Recalling the dream he buried his face in his pillow. Why did he keep dreaming about Earth? He was further away from that blue planet of rivers, oceans, wind and sunlight than any human had ever been. Tomorrow they’d be .0073 light years further into interstellar space.

Adam rolled over in his bunk, opened his space port and peered out at the star field. As he did every technical dawn, he tried to identify fifty cosmic objects by name before Gaia’s gradual roll pulled them out of view. Straight ahead was Sol, the yellowish home star; to the far right was Anteres a barely visible red dot; the blurry patch beside it was Andromeda, not a star but an entire galaxy of them.

Too easy. On Earth, people could identify stars by the constellations they formed, like the Big Dipper. That was a lot easier. Here in deep space, traveling at half light speed, the position of stars was always changing. You had to know your stars. How bright, what color, their positions in relationship to one another. The boy in the bunk knew the local Milky Way star field better than anyone else on Gaia. His mother just laughed when he challenged her to a star ID contest.

You’ve got a star map for brains, she’d say rubbing his dark mop of hair. On his best day, he’d identified 427 cosmic objects by name without using the Star Map. Galaxies, double star systems, cosmic clouds, star clusters and dwarf galaxies. They were the geography of his backyard.

This felt strange this morning. He rubbed his thumb over his fish fossil, the black rock surface smooth and oily from years of touch. Maybe it was the dream. He thought about going to tell his mother. Don’t, his gut sense told him. She’d put it into one of her psychological assessment reports. When younger, he’d looked forward to confiding his thoughts and feelings to her. Now in these psychological debriefings he was evasive, answering more often than not with just ‘yes’ or ‘no’ – to his mother’s obvious frustration. They were his thoughts and feelings, not something he wanted beamed back to Earth to be shared with the Gaia mission planners. Strangers. Lately he wasn’t sure he trusted them. Mulling over these thoughts he pushed the star portal shut with a snap, and in so doing pushed the dream and any other feelings from his head. He could look after himself. He wasn’t in real danger. They were just feelings and thoughts.

He opened his bunk’s privacy shield, stood up and stretched his arms, pressing his palms against the habitats ceiling.

“HAL: Good morning,” he said.

Good morning, Adam replied the quantum computer’s deep voice from the hab’s speaker. Happy birthday.

Yes, today was his 12th birthday. That was the one clear fact about him. Adam wasn’t sure who, or even what, he was. His parents told him not to worry. He was from Earth, a human being, just like them. Easy for them to say. The problem was he’d never been on Earth. He was Starchild One.