“Welcome to Solar Facts, 101!” the instructor said loudly. “This is not the Stellar Data class!’
Doctor Randall looked at the candidates, allowing several seconds of silent anticipation for any of them to ask the obvious question. Nobody spoke.
“Stellar Data is closed until you reach the inner edge of the Oort Cloud!” Dr. Randall explained without being helpful. “Closed, that is, to you!”
The hundred candidates in the amphitheater of the cavern waiting without comment. No rustling of nonexistent papers. No messaging on nonexistent communication devices. All of them were silently and wearily intent upon the instructor.
“Seven times, each Lunar day, I teach Solar Facts!” he continued. “Six hundred of your peers stand where you are, right now, supposing that they will become cartographers, and then most of them plan to RETAKE this same course!”
Dr. Randall paced back and forth a few steps, letting his helmet bounce lightly against his left leg as he paced. He was in full space gear, holding his helmet on a tether with his left hand. Again he stopped and looked at the candidates, taking yet another deep breath.
“This air that is trapped within this sealed cavern has been reprocessed daily, for over one decade!” he shouted lowly, careful not to become hoarse. “It is the same air, used to feed the oxygen farms, used to process bacteria from the excrement and other waste recycling into the food processor plants that keep us alive!
“During the lifetime of this air, several hundred thousand humans, just like you, have come in here, breathed this air, wasted my time, occupied those positions where you are standing, had lofty ideas of their place in creation...” he took a longer breath. “...and went out and DIED!”
Dr. Randall did not stride now. He faced the ranks of candidates standing upon tiered bench areas carved from the moon’s interior. “Your suits stink of their death! It does not all wash out, or get disinfected, or neutralized. Dead people wore those suits...and died in them!
“But you knew that, didn’t you?” he finished the beginning of this hour-long sermon.
“You’re here because you died! At least one time!”
It had been a sobering reality for the first generations of candidates to learn this. Now, it was just more old news. The suits had been resurrected and repaired, renewed, and then dismantled and refitted to start all over again. And again. Death clung to them, as if their purpose was to carry the walking dead until they finally expired.
“I died six times before I graduated. Some say five, others more, but I say six!” the doctor was lecturing those about to die again.
“I am proof!” he snapped. “You can survive and become a success! It’s up to the person coming behind you...not to these clowns, here!”
Finally a stirring occurred in the gathered mass. This was news.
“Why not?” Doctor Randall asked. “Why not these people, who you know?!”
Candidates at this point in training rarely risked looking stupid unless they needed to do that rather than be honestly ignorant. Two of them began to speak, then stopped, and then several more hurried to answer.
YOU ARE READING
Trans Solar, Book 2
Science FictionAn adventure of inhuman descendants. Humans escaped from solar space, leaping into the vast darkness of the Kuiper asteroid belt. They left a beacon behind Neptune to proclaim their success to the inhuman warlords. Titan spaceships halted their bom...
