Janet Edwards - Earth Flight

Every Wallam-Crane day, all the vid channels showed the footage of the first portal experiment. Every Flight day, they ran a sequence about the first manned interstellar flight by drop portal. Thankfully, we’d missed most of the incomprehensible scientific bit about how the transmitting portal does all the work, and the instant when the drop portal dust ring simultaneously exists at both transmission and reception point, stabilizing its own incoming signal.

‘… together with power issues mean this is limited to dust particles. When a link is established between two normal portals, it can be held open indefinitely, but a drop portal establishes for a maximum of 5.13 seconds before the ephemeral receiving dust ring dissipates,’ said the commentator.

Fian and I went to join the queue at the food dispensers and I frowned gloomily at the available menu. The panic over the alien probe had disrupted their regular service and restock, so we’d run out of most meal options. I settled for a glass of Fizzup, a plate of toasted wafers, and some reconstituted Karanth jelly. There was plenty of Karanth jelly left because of the rumour that eating it made your baby Handicapped.

No one understood what caused a baby to be Handicapped, so norms had a lot of these nardle superstitions about it. Researchers were always claiming to be on the verge of a major breakthrough, but they hadn’t achieved anything since they first established the basic facts of the triple ten. There is a one in ten risk of a baby being born Handicapped if both parents are Handicapped themselves. One in a hundred if one parent is Handicapped. One in a thousand if neither parent is.

Fian and I carried our trays across to sit with the other three members of class dig team 1 at our regular table. Krath greeted us with an exaggerated weary sigh.

‘It’s not fair making us work on a holiday. Playdon’s a slave driver.’

Lecturer Playdon turned his head to call across the room. ‘I’m a slave driver with perfectly good hearing, and Flight day isn’t a holiday on Earth.’

Krath gave an embarrassed groan and looked at me. ‘I thought Flight day was a holiday everywhere.’

Amalie leant across to hit him on the back of the head. Krath was one of the big group of students from Asgard, who’d chosen a course run by their home university, while Amalie was from a planet in frontier Epsilon sector. I wasn’t sure exactly what was going on between them. Krath was definitely chasing after Amalie, but she seemed more interested in teaching him common sense than having a romantic relationship with him.

Krath sighed. ‘What did I do wrong this time?’

‘Think about it, nardle brain,’ said Amalie. ‘Most of the population of Earth is Handicapped and can’t portal to other planets.’

‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘Wallam-Crane day is a holiday here, because he invented the portal and we can at least portal around Earth. We don’t really celebrate it though, because that was the first step towards interstellar portals a century later. Flight day was the start of Exodus century, everyone pouring off world to new planets and leaving Earth to fall apart, so we just try to ignore it.’

I glanced over my shoulder at the vid. The commentator was talking about the S.T.A.R. – Simultaneous Transmission And Reception – series of automated probes, while the screen was showing an image of a curiously shaped ship in Earth orbit.

Dalmora gave me a sympathetic look. She was the only Alphan in the class, the daughter of the famous Ventrak Rostha who made the History of Humanity vid series, and I’d resented her at first sight. With her waist-long black hair adorned with flickering lights, and her lovely dark face delicately highlighted with makeup, I’d expected her to be a selfish, spoilt aristocrat. Instead, I’d discovered she was one of the kindest, most compassionate people I’d ever met.

‘Would you like the vid turned off, Jarra?’ she asked.

I shook my head. ‘I’ve seen it dozens of times before so it doesn’t bother me.’

I munched on my toasted wafers, keeping my back to the wall vid, but of course I could still hear it. They’d finally got to the interesting bit, so the odious commentator stopped talking over the ancient soundtrack. The calm female voice of the mission controller was calling for final confirmations from the various teams. I knew every word of this by heart, and the sound of all the different voices as they spoke the archaic accented version of Language from almost half a millennium ago.

‘Countdown is holding at sixty seconds. Final checks. Drop portal focus?’

‘Drop portal focusing confirmed at 98.73 per cent of optimal.’

‘Telemetry?’

‘Telemetry is green.’

‘Power?’

‘Power is green.’

‘My board is showing clear greens,’ said the mission controller. ‘Mission Control to Earth Flight, are you ready for this?’

‘Earth Flight to Mission Control,’ responded Major Kerr. ‘I’ve been ready for this all my life. Let’s do it.’

‘Prepare to pick up countdown at sixty seconds and initiate power build on my mark,’ said the mission controller. ‘Mark!’

As the countdown started, I gave in and turned to watch the wall vid. The image on the screen showed the view through the front window of the Earth Flight ship, the blackness of space contrasting with the blue and white curve of Earth below.

‘Thirty-five. Committing to auto power spike sequence … Now!’ The mission controller’s voice and the background chatter stopped. They were on auto sequence now. Nothing could stop the power spike building and firing the primitive drop portal, so they could only count down the seconds and hope nothing went wrong. Of the thirty automated probes in the S.T.A.R. series, twenty-four had made it to their destinations, but six had exploded when the power spikes went unstable.

Everyone had stopped eating now, and was watching the wall vid in silence. There was something about this vid sequence that compelled you to watch it even though you already knew exactly what happened.

‘Five seconds,’ said the voice of the mission controller. ‘Four. Three. Earth Flight, take us to the stars!’

The image went totally black as the drop portal fired. There was an agonizing delay, with the sound of increasingly tense voices as Mission Control waited for contact from the tiny comms portal on board Earth Flight. Finally, there was a white flash that broke up into multi-coloured jagged lines. Those formed together for an instant, dissolved again into randomness, then stabilized.

It was a grainy picture now, from the days before they’d invented two-way comms portal twinning or message streaming. The scene it showed was almost identical to the earlier one, but the continents on the blue and white planet were a different shape.

‘Earth Flight to Mission Control,’ said the breathless voice of Major Kerr. ‘Drop portal from Earth successfully completed. The comms portal established after only three mill of fine-tuning. I hope you’re getting visual as well as audio feeds, because this is the most beautiful sight I’ve ever seen.’

There was an audible sigh from around the hall, as everyone released the breath they’d been holding, and the class started eating and talking again. The vid sequence still had a few minutes to run, but no one was interested in Major Kerr’s spacewalk to detach the portal sections attached to the outside of his ship and assemble them. No one cared about how that created the first standard portal link between Earth and another star system, or the other ships that portalled in through it. No one wanted to hear how Major Kerr’s first description of the new world led to it being named Adonis. They only cared about the symbolic moment when Earth Flight took humanity to the stars.