The Fifth Civilization: A Novel Read online

  The Fifth Civilization

  A Novel

  By Peter Bingham-Pankratz

  Copyright © 2016 by Peter Bingham-Pankratz

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of the copyright holder.

  Cover art by Danielle Pahlisch

  www.thefifthcivilization.com

  www.peterbp.com

  Table of Contents

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Part II

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Part III

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Acknowledgements

  Part I

  The Chicken and the Egg

  Chapter 1

  As usual, the drunks were singing on the train.

  The occasion was the stroke of midnight and thus the official beginning of the Mid-Millennium. According to the Gregorian calendar accepted by Earth and its colonies, the year was now 2500, and the talking heads on the Earth broadcasts were keen to paint the change as the halfway point between the barbarity of the past and the bliss of the future.

  Nick Roan figured it was as good an excuse as any to drown oneself in liquor. He just wished everyone would do it a little quieter.

  If Roan had his way, he’d be on the Surface celebrating New Year’s, not stuck in orbit. Fate and the Company, though, had other ideas. His freighter, the Dunnock, might have made it back to Earth on the thirtieth of December had it not been for a blowout in the hazard sensors. That had cost him sixteen hours. Then, once the ship arrived at the orbiting Company Entrepot, it had to wait its turn to dock inside the sprawling, crowded station. Another one-hour delay. And lastly, there was the ignominy of undergoing mandatory decontamination to make sure HIV or sick leg or amber fever didn’t sneak its way back from whatever planet you visited. Another three-quarters of an hour gone.

  Sometime around 23:00, Roan was able to clock out and make his way to the Tubes. A network of translucent, cylindrical highways connecting the Company’s structures in low-Earth orbit, the Tubes were the one place Roan could rely on to get a modicum of rest. Lulled by the vibrations of the high-speed shuttle, he found himself drifting off.

  Then the drunks tried to add atmosphere to the ride.

  Roan glared back from under his cap at the inebriated juveniles who’d transferred on from Housing Platform Seven. “I don’t know where they found so much booze in orbit,” he muttered. Sitting next to him was his copilot on the Dunnock, Masao Mori, whose girth was currently taking up two seats in the aisle. “All the housing platforms lock up their alcohol before New Year’s. And the Company doesn’t keep any of the good stuff on their stations. Believe me, I’ve looked for it.”

  Masao snorted. “What they’re drinking isn’t the good stuff,” he said. The copilot didn’t even throw so much as a glance at the kids, so invested was he in a hologame he held in his palm, one that involved rotating a black hole to keep a ball of light from falling in. Roan wished he could have his copilot’s ability to tune out distractions, but a captain who was unaware of his surroundings was usually a bad captain.

  “OK, so they got hold of cheap beer. Could have got it shipped up from the Surface, I suppose. But, Masao, answer me this: where are their parents?”

  “Look, Nick, when we were their age, the public service ads talked about the double dangers of docking and drinking. But I saw on a broadcast that the Trade Minister himself was snapped taking a nip at the controls of his shuttle. And with a woman who was not his wife. So I dunno, maybe morals have changed in the past few decades.” The revelers in back began counting down from ten—to what, exactly, was not immediately clear to Roan, since it was well past zero hundred hours.

  Masao furrowed his brow at his game, consumed with keeping the ball from the black hole. “As for me, I’ve been off the stuff for a while.”

  Roan eyed the wide-waisted man next to him. “I don’t know, Masao, you might want to consider a liquid diet.”

  “I know what you’re implying,” Masao said, and glanced down at his belly. “But why diet when food is so good?”

  That was Masao, not known for agonizing over things—he could give you a sentence when three would do. For that reason, Roan handpicked him to be his copilot five years ago. Friends never worked out in such a position. Roan wanted to keep the few friends he had and didn’t think spending months with them staring into deep space could lead to anything other than bitterness. Better to have someone he didn’t like in the seat next to him.

  In Masao’s hologame, the ball of light spun out of control and popped into the black hole. An X replaced the image: game over. Masao scowled and stuffed the pad into a pocket, evidently done with the thing for now. Maybe playing it had made him annoyed and grumpy, but Roan believed men of Masao’s middle age should not have been up this late. It was funny—five years ago, the copilot’s handsome and toned features made him the pinnacle of Japanese wholesomeness. Now he had a permanent scraggily beard and the sunken, tired eyes of a man defeated. Even his normally-crisp Company uniform was wrinkled and mostly unbuttoned, probably because of the decon process, and Masao’s wool pants were tearing around the thighs.

  The job was not kind to most people.

  In the back, the drunks began counting down again. When they reached one, they cheered. Roan searched the train car to see what they were watching, and noticed a newly-installed broadcast viewer on the ceiling.

  The BV flashed scenes of revelry from the Sea of Tranquility to the Sea of Japan. It had just finished replaying an image from earlier in the day, the lighting of a giant “2500” in Arabic numerals on the moon’s surface. Lunar Electric promised it would be visible on terra firma and cause many maroon-tinted nights. Straight kitsch had become the preferred way to usher in the second pentury, or whatever they were calling the next five hundred years.

  “You know,” Masao said quietly, glancing around at the other passengers, “The crew could’ve used a little ‘thank you’ speech or something. Once we got back to Earth.”

  “Like the one I gave while orbiting Nydaya?”

  “That wasn’t quite a speech. And if you think about it, the time to thank them was right after they successfully got the Dunnock from a bizarre world to a…well, to a slightly less bizarre world. Home. Nick, they deserved a ‘good job’ or something.”

  “Everything went smoothly.”

  “What about the hazard sensors?”
/>   “OK, aside from that. At least we didn’t have an FTL hiccup like that run to Cygni.”

  “Still…”

  “Why didn’t you thank them?”

  “Don’t look at me, you’re Roan-taichou.” The captain.

  Hey, thought Roan, when the fat man’s right, he’s right. Nicholas Roan, pushing forty and currently hiding his own tired features under a Company ball cap, was captain of a Type-B freighter. At times it surprised him: Roan had never been good with groups of people. They tended to be fragmented and illogical, needing constant affirmations of their strengths. The lack of any catastrophe should be indication enough you did your job well! Captains and crew were best left at their respective stations, where they could call on each other if need arose.

  In the real world, Roan found, most problems could be solved just by keeping to your part of the sidewalk.

  Instead, he much preferred the people on the broadcast viewer, the BV, the mush machine: full of life, yet far away. Roan watched as the train’s monitor reviewed scenes of jubilation from Sydney to Tokyo. The latter was Roan’s current residence, and it was now experiencing a lightning storm of red and pink and green. Roan wondered if the city offered free inoculations like the year before, and how many of the poor souls down there knew that they were getting a plasma bath with each burst firework. He and Kel wouldn’t be going to any of those cancer showers.

  “You’re thinking about her,” Masao said, stretching his beard with a grin.

  “What?” Roan realized he’d been staring dead-eyed at the BV.

  “You’re thinking about Kel. Is she going to be at Grand Central?”

  “I hope so.”

  Roan closed his eyes when he heard her name again. Kel, a short name, right to the point. Maybe it stood for Kelly, or something else, or nothing. Roan wasn’t sure and she never called herself anything but those three letters. But those three letters were always on his mind when he went on a Company run. As the Dunnock had departed Earth for Nydaya, Kel had been in the middle of a return journey delivering excavators to Omega II. Once upon a time, the Company had assigned both to the same ship, but now, having both achieved seniority in the Company, they were more likely to hit an asteroid than see each other. Good captains were needed all around.

  How long, exactly, had it been since he’d seen Kel? The second of September, Roan remembered. Practically a millennium.

  Would she see his ship name on the Arrivals terminal and wait for him in the lounge? Maybe immersed in a book, her fingers swiping the pages furiously? Or stretched out and exercising on the polished floors of Grand Central? She would look sharp but tense, as always, but when Roan walked in she would crack a smile. They would talk, catch up, but Roan planned that this time he’d ask that they retreat somewhere more—

  “Marks for the Children’s Fund?”

  Roan turned to see one of the drunken kids in his face. He was perhaps university age, with close-shaven blond hair, a two-day stubble, and a hilly face that suggested it’d smashed more books than it read. As he talked, the smell of bad beer, maybe Taggle, wafted through his silver-capped teeth.

  “Piss off,” Roan said. He wasn’t in the mood to play these games.

  “ ‘Piss off!’ ” Alpha Punk mimicked to his two friends. They laughed, and then continued up the train, asking money from other passengers. All three wore hoods, which would be useful in keeping their heads off security cameras.

  “The next Company men, eh Nick?” Masao said.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised.” Roan tried to focus on the Earthscape out the window. Clouds swirled around the Himalayas near the Islamic Union and India, and if he craned his neck he could see another typhoon dissipating by the Bay of Bengal. Earth’s rotation was slowly bringing his home into view. Since they were almost directly over Japan, it would be a straight shot on the ferry right down to the Surface.

  “Hey, check out this fucker!”

  Roan thought for a moment the comment was addressed to him. When he turned to the source, he saw it was aimed at a Nyden seated toward the exit doors at the front of the car. The three hooded punks, clutching handgrips dangling from a bar, crowded in front of the alien.

  Nydens are not an inconspicuous species. If one were to take a bird’s head—a typical sparrow, for instance—and put it in a vise, the vertically-elongated result could closely approximate their cranial structure. They were said to be descendants of avians, after all. Two small and glossy yellowish eyes were deep set at the front of their face and what might be called a beak protruded below them like a blunt arrowhead. Plumage, usually a cool color, draped their skin and acted as sensors. What clearly separated them from birds was the luminescent bulb, usually teal or yellow, that topped their cranium and displayed the brain matter inside.

  Most Nydens on Earth had the decency to cover the bulb with a hat or hairpiece. Not this one. As the thugs crowded around him, the Nyden’s teal bulb began pulsing in what Roan believed was a sign of panic. The alien’s head darted from each teenage accoster to the other. He was trapped by predators.

  “You! You fucking pigeon!” Alpha Punk barked. “What the fuck you looking at?”

  “Nothing,” the Nyden said. “Please, I’m sorry to bother you.” The being spoke in his best approximation of English, which came out of his voice with a vaguely creaking resonance. To Roan, the wise choice would have been to tell them to shove it, because even as the Nyden turned back to staring out the window, the punks were obviously not in the mood to be ignored.

  “Look at me, pigeon,” said the Alpha Punk. “I asked you what you were looking at.” His toadies laughed, but Alpha Punk’s face was deadly serious. “You interested in us? You sizing us up for food?”

  “No, please, I’m not—”

  The thug feinted a move, as if to strike the alien. The Nyden flinched. His bulb began pulsing quicker, as if it were an excited heartbeat.

  “You think you’re going to eat us, aren’t you?” Alpha Punk spat. This was a common legend among the more ignorant, who often—especially in the years following First Contact—believed the Nydens were responsible for kidnapping and devouring humans. Despite the Nyden’s best attempts to avoid eye contact, he soon had no choice but to lock a stare with his accuser.

  “Just so you know,” continued Alpha Punk, leaning down over the cowering alien, “I don’t taste very good, and I know how to punch.” Another burst of laughter from the two flanking hoods, and Roan noticed other passengers on the shuttle focusing intently on the view out the window. No one wanted to intervene.

  “Should we do something?” Masao whispered, ready to leap out of his seat.

  Roan thought for a second. Then shook his head. “No, it’s never good to be involved in these things.” And you never knew if any of these guys had knives, he thought. He joined every other passenger in staring out the window.

  Frankly, the Nyden was insane to visit Earth during the current political and social climate. Humanity could be defined with one word as it plunged into the second pentury: fearful. People were anxious about jobs and the declining planetary economy, and xenophobia certainly did not calm any nerves. Politicians fanned it and the broadcasts fed it to their viewers. Humans had three species on which to focus their hate, not to mention the colonists, and rumors of an alien invasion were persistent. Roan knew Nydaya was a perfectly peaceful and comfortable world to live on, having just deposited ten microwave arrays on their planet. But there was no reason for a Nyden to strut around Earth unless he was looking for a way to make an easy buck or preach his high-minded peace philosophy. Straying from the sidewalk always causes trouble. Keep to your own planet.

  A slap returned Roan’s attention to the confrontation. The punks were now batting the being’s plumage as he tried to protect his face with the drooping, feathery appendages that served as his arms.

  “Please!” the Nyden squeaked, hopelessly blocking the teen’s harassment. Renowned as peaceful creatures, the Nydens were thus considered the weakest
of the Four Civilizations, the ones easiest to conquer or attack. If confronted by an aggressor, most Nydens passively absorbed their abuse, or used words in lieu of violence. Roan couldn’t see how their species could survive into the next millennium.

  “Gonna take my paycheck, you pigeon? You scavenger?” The Alpha Punk smacked the Nyden across on the left cheek. “You’ve got your own goddamn world for that. This one’s for humans. Understand? We got by just fine before you fuckers.” The hooligan gave him another blow on the right side of the face, and the toady on the left shoved the Nyden’s head. Like a possum playing dead, the alien curled into a fetal position on the seat, his bulb flickering a brilliant teal.

  Through the glass doors linking the cars, Roan noticed a security guard making his way to the altercation. Someone had evidently alerted the transit police. But the officer would be too late to be effective. The view outside abruptly changed from an Earthscape to the crowded interior of Grand Central as the train pulled into its last stop. A cheerful voice on the intercom then asked everyone to disembark in an orderly fashion. The train crawled to a complete halt, and seconds later the doors chimed open.

  “Go back to your own planet, you bastard!” Alpha Punk said, and kicked the bench. The Nyden was still curled up, motionless. All three kids quickly got off and joined the teeming masses in the terminal. Maybe the authorities would go looking for them, and maybe they wouldn’t. Roan and Masao rose and joined the passengers filing off the train.

  “Hell of a New Year for that poor stupid pigeon,” Masao muttered as he passed the cowering alien.

  Roan’s face betrayed neither agreement nor disagreement. It was something that was out of his hands, something that didn’t concern a man with enough anxieties of his own. Soon, the incident both men had witnessed was forgotten in a massive sensory deluge. Kiosks of smokesticks and sugar-coated pops lined the area immediately adjacent to the platforms, waiting to snare hungry travelers. They lured Masao in, but not Roan: he was far too excited to see Kel again.