A Stitch In Space Read online

  A Stitch In Space

  Christopher Lansdown

  A STITCH IN SPACE

  By Christopher Lansdown

  Published by Silver Empire

  https://silverempire.org/

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018, Christopher Lansdown

  Cover art copyright 2013 Christopher Lansdown, painted by Daniel Tyka

  Concept art copyright 2013 Daniel Tyka, reprinted under license

  All rights reserved.

  This book is dedicated to Fr. John Rushofsky, the most interesting priest I’ve known; and to Jesus Christ, the great high priest, and the most interesting man who ever lived.

  Preface

  It turns out that one of the rules I live by is when a close atheist friend asks me to write a story about a priest in space, I do. I hadn’t realized it until my friend suggested the theme, and I was surprised by how much more specific this moral principle is than the others I try to live my life by.

  The premise of this book makes the story unavoidably religious, in that people have a tendency to talk to priests and priests have a tendency to talk about their faith. In America, discussion of religion must always be apologized for because we have such a rich history of religious bullies trying to hector people into conversion. Indeed, telling others how to live their lives is almost our national pastime. In that spirit I do apologize for this book being so overtly religious: I’m not trying to give anybody orders about what to believe or how to live their life. But the point of a novel is to explore the truth in ways we can’t in ordinary life, either because we lack the opportunity or because doing so would be a terrible idea, and truth is more important even than good manners. If my merely stating my convictions causes another man to wilt, I will give him my sympathy and my prayers, but I cannot in good conscience give him my silence.

  For the setting, I am more drawn to 1950s style science fiction, which tries to be more realistic, than to modern science fiction, which tends almost towards fantasy, and so this book is set far enough into the future for common-place space travel to be plausible with recognizable technology. This far remove into the future also enables me to posit a reunification of Christendom, with the Catholic and Orthodox churches re-uniting. Fr. Xris’s Greek name and knowledge of Latin is meant in part to symbolize this synthesis. This is also the reason for the coincidence of Fr. Xris’s name and my own: Xristoferos, or Christopher, is the only Greek name I know of which would feel natural to the American tongue. This reunification may represent wishful thinking; still, stranger things have happened than men doing what they’re supposed to.

  Chapter 1

  “I want my flying car.”

  “Excuse me?” Father Xris asked. The short, spiky-haired blond woman sitting next to him had broken a long silence and he wasn’t sure that he had heard her correctly. It was June in the year 2462, and though they were now on an inexpensive commercial rocket flight to a space station orbiting around the earth, and the technology that would have made flying cars possible had existed for over 200 years, they had never been invented. Or, more precisely, they had never been put into commercial production. A few one-off prototypes had been made by people hoping to start an industry, but only three had ever been sold to non-family members.

  “I want my flying car,” she reiterated.

  Father Xris gave her a quizzical look, hoping for an explanation.

  “I was watching this ancient movie the other day,” she said, “made in 1990 or something like that, and set in 2341, and everyone drove flying cars. That’s more than 100 years ago, so where’s my flying car?”

  She laughed. If pressed, she would have admitted that it wasn’t a great joke, but she wanted to talk with the dark-haired priest, dressed in the clerical black cassock which to this day is still often imitated by action movie heroes, and she couldn’t think of anything better.

  The man sitting on the other side of her looked up from his book.

  “I know what you mean,” he said. “I follow this blog which is all about old concepts of what the future would be like. It’s sometimes amazing to see how wrong they were. And sometimes it’s a pity that they were wrong.”

  “It’s a pity that they were wrong about the flying cars,” the woman said.

  “They would be kind of cool,” Father Xris said. “But I don’t think that they’d be very practical.”

  “That’s what killed them off,” the man said. “They’re not as good a car as a car, they’re not as good a helicopter as a helicopter, and they’re not as good an airplane as an airplane. I mean, if you want to have fun in the air, get a glider. If not, why not get something which is good at flying?”

  “I think that the idea of the flying car was really before the self-driving car, wasn’t it?” Fr. Xris said. “The idea was that you could just fly over traffic jams? I wonder if intelligent cars killed flying cars?”

  “It was also before they made cars aerodynamic,” the man interjected. “Back around the turn of the millennium, cars were these big bricks that couldn’t go very fast. Granted, on the roads of the time it would have been suicidal to go more than about 100 miles an hour anyway, but with the amount of air friction the things had, you’d have burnt less fuel in a bonfire than try to go at a decent speed.”

  “That’s true,” Father Xris said. “The early days of cars were quite slow, which could easily have made people desperate for workarounds.”

  Until the 2060s, it was common for people to drive cars manually, rather than relying on computer control, though the shift to self-driving cars did not immediately result in speed limit increases, as the cost of fuel was still prohibitive. It did, however, set the stage for higher speeds when cars became equipped in the late 2090s with movable fairings that gave them the low friction of airplane designs when moving quickly, but stowed away for low-speed maneuverability. The final piece of the puzzle that allowed cars to move at modern speeds was the Great Road Project (which spanned much of the first half of the twenty-second century), which retrofitted roads to standard grades and turn radii that supported truly high speed travel. It was also in the Great Road Project that the first ducted roads were built. To people living at the turn of the millennium, the idea of average highway speeds of 200 miles per hour would have sounded like a pipe dream. Ducted roads which allowed 270mph travel or low-pressure tube roads averaging 360mph would have sounded like pure science fiction.

  “Actually,” the woman said, “I think that the flying cars were more about freedom than speed. A flying car meant that you could go anywhere you wanted.”

  “The problem,” the man said, “is that physics gets in your way. A flying car is basically a helicopter with tiny blades concealed in the body—or, I guess, jets, but that’s even more ridiculous from a fuel efficiency standpoint—and at that point, why not just use a helicopter? I mean, even if you can’t afford to own one, they’re cheap enough to rent. And because they’re so much more fuel efficient, you get more freedom from the greater range.”

  “I suppose that’s true,” the woman said, “but somehow flying cars are just cooler.”

  “Purely fictional things often
are,” Father Xris said. “When something exists only in our imagination, it doesn’t have any of the downsides that real things do. We don’t even have to have real reactions to them—the same thing applies to feelings, after all. If you met a flying car in real life, you’d probably be disappointed because it didn’t make you feel like how you imagined you’d feel. We can imagine ourselves feeling anything or everything, but our actual feelings are constrained by what we experience. We can imagine ourselves being blissfully happy, but whatever is making us happy, the things that make us unhappy don’t magically disappear, and though novelty is powerful enough to blot them out of our memory, it’s short-lived. Nothing has the capacity to overwhelm us forever.”

  “That’s outside my field,” the man said, returning to his book.

  The woman was quiet too. Fr. Xris (correctly) guessed his comment had hit too close to home, so he let her sit quietly. He had been a priest for less than ten years, but that was more than sufficient time to teach him that if a person needed to talk, only very subtle encouragement would be needed. In nine cases out of ten, all that was necessary was a little time and space.

  In this case, a few minutes of silence was all it took.

  “I wonder if Xanadu really will be better than Texas,” she said.

  “I imagine that depends on which qualities you’re considering,” Fr. Xris answered.

  “Well,” she said, “Frank won’t be there, which means it will have to be better.”

  “Frank is a former boyfriend?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  “Surely you’re making this trip for other reasons too?” he asked. Six months in deep space is a long way to go to get away from a boyfriend.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Everything seems so... claustrophobic, here. Or I guess now I should say, ‘on Earth’. Everyone knows their place and nothing really seems worth doing. We keep doing things just because we’re supposed to.”

  Father Xris nodded.

  “I’m not trying to talk you out of moving to Xanadu,” he said, “but if you can’t see the point in anything you were doing on earth, that will still be true in the frontier. Things may be simpler or more obviously related to survival there, but if you don’t know why you were existing when it was easy, it won’t become clearer when it’s hard, you’ll just have less time to think about it.”

  “I suppose that you’re right,” she said. “But isn’t it sometimes better not to have so much time to think?”

  He didn’t answer for a minute.

  “It’s best to know enough that thinking isn’t unpleasant,” he said. “But to answer your question, I don’t think the right thing to do with suffering is to run away from it. I don’t mean that suffering is good. I just mean that if you’re unhappy, you should defeat the cause of that unhappiness, not do your best to ignore it.

  “Which isn’t to say that change of scenery isn’t a good idea. Sometimes places carry such big loads of habit and baggage that we can’t think there no matter how hard we try. I don’t mean to say that you shouldn’t go to Xanadu—I wouldn’t presume to tell you something like that, anyway. I just believe in being realistic.”

  “Fair enough,” she said.

  “So what are you hoping to find in Xanadu?” he asked.

  She described her ambition to start a horse ranch and breed horses. Father Xris had little experience of horses, having grown up in a city, and listened with interest to her descriptions of how horses can be kept in pastures and letting them grow long coats for winter and other outdoorsy things which he had only read allusions to in books.

  “By the way,” she said, “My name is Hannah.”

  “Fr. Xristopheros Guerin,” the priest replied. “Most people call me Father Xris.”

  They shook hands, and Hannah had a surprisingly firm grip. She was a little more muscular than the standard diet and hormone pills produced on their own, suggesting that she was used to working with her body. She noticed that Fr. Xris also had unusually strong hands.

  * * *

  Before long, the space plane they were riding reached orbital velocities and docked with HEO7, a large spaceport which served both cargo and passenger ships.

  Father Xris made his way over to the cargo section of the station, as he was making the trip to Xanadu in one of the spare berths in a deep space cargo ship. It wasn’t the most comfortable way to make the trip, but it was one third the cost of taking a passenger ship and safer than being cryogenically frozen and shipped as cargo. (It was more likely than not that you would be revived without brain damage, but no one had yet found a way to make the thawing process completely reliable for multicellular organisms other than goldfish.)

  He was surprised to see the woman from the space plane, Hannah, waiting at the same cargo bay that he was going to.

  “Hello again!” he said cheerfully.

  “Hello!” she said. “So you’re going on the cheap too?”

  “I am indeed,” Father Xris said. “The money for a passenger ship could do a lot more good among the poor than I would get out of it.”

  She accepted that without comment.

  “Is the Hopeful here yet?” he asked.

  “She is,” the woman replied, and pointed to the window where the Hopeful was visible.

  “She’s enormous!” Fr. Xris exclaimed after looking. And indeed she was. When making long, difficult trips, size is efficiency, and the deep space cargo ships of which the Hopeful was one were truly enormous. She was over a kilometer long and nearly 150 meters in diameter. As all deep space ships were, she was covered in highly reflective ablative armor, but unlike passenger ships, she didn’t broadcast any decoration graphics to pretty her up, giving her only the rugged sort of beauty that truly utilitarian objects have.

  A Chinese man walked up, clearly having been looking for the dock which they were now at. “Is this the dock for the Hopeful?” he asked, more out of politeness than as a real question since he could not have missed the sign above the personnel dock door.

  “It is,” Hannah answered, “though I haven’t seen any of the crew yet.”

  “We’re early,” Father Xris said.

  “I think that this might be one of the crew now,” Hannah said, pointing to someone who was leading a cargo train of (comparatively) small containers, pulled by a single transport tractor, towards the cargo doors. He seemed to notice the group, and came over while the main door was opening.

  “Hi,” he said, “you guys the passengers?”

  He asked it like it wasn’t merely a formality.

  “We are,” Hannah said. “Don’t you see our IDs?”

  “I’m not the one scheduled to meet you. I’m security,” he said in explanation, “Kari is in charge of personnel.”

  “You weren’t all given our IDs?” she asked. Normally for any sort of transportation, all of the people working on it would be given the full list of passengers’ IDs. (By this time no one used hand-held smartphones and smartglasses any more; implanted computers which used blood sugar and oxygen for power had been ubiquitous for some time, and so by now society had adapted to everyone reliably broadcasting their unique ID.)

  He shrugged. “We’re not a passenger ship. It’s really only Kari’s job to know who you are.”

  The way this sounded seemed to occur to him and he softened his tone a bit.

  “I don’t mean to be unfriendly,” he said. “I’ll see you around the ship often enough, and be glad for the company. It’s just that we tend to operate on a need-to-know basis when we’re in port. It makes everyone’s life easier. My name’s Biff, by the way.”

  Introductions were made all round, and they learned that the Chinese man’s name was Xiao.

  The cargo doors were completely open by this point and the robot who was driving the cargo train must have asked for permission to proceed, as Biff replied to him, “Permission granted.”

  Watching professionals communicate with a robot was often a confusing experience. They tended to configur
e the robots to send text messages rather than talking out loud, but though there were cybernetic interfaces to directly overlay displays onto the optic and auditory nerves, it’s not possible to talk to the robot without making sound. The result was something like watching a private phone conversation. You could guess what the other person was saying, sometimes.

  Before the cargo train had made its way entirely within the cargo airlock, Fr. Xris noticed several headless terminator robots in standby position on the towing vehicle.

  “Worried about encountering trouble in the station?” Father Xris asked with some surprise.

  Biff followed Fr. Xris’s eyes to the robots.

  “I’m just paranoid,” he said. “There haven’t been any fights over cargo at this space station in over six months.”

  He watched the cargo train enter the airlock, and then turned once the airlock had mostly closed.

  “Well, pardon me,” he said, “I need to go report to the captain and get this stuff stowed. See you on the ship!”

  He gave a wave and walked through the personnel entrance which opened as he approached it and shut immediately behind him.

  The small group which had assembled waited for the Kari who was supposed to meet them. As they waited, they heard the faint sound of air rushing through an opening. It startled Hannah, who asked, “what was that?”

  Xiao answered. “The cargo airlock. They do not make the cargo sections of ships airtight on container ships like these. It would add too much weight, and it does not make a difference to the robots who do the loading and unloading.”

  “How much of the ship is pressurized?” Hannah asked.

  “Most likely, twenty or thirty meters in the middle,” Xiao replied.

  “All the way through? I mean, from the inside to the outside?” Hannah asked with a little trepidation in her voice. She hadn’t thought too much about what the traveling conditions would be like when she saw the price on the booking site.