Pegasus in Space Read online

  Other titles by Anne McCaffrey

  published by Ballantine Books

  Decision at Doona

  Dinosaur Planet

  Dinosaur Planet Survivors

  Get Off the Unicorn

  The Lady

  Pegasus in Flight

  Restoree

  The Ship Who Sang

  To Ride Pegasus

  Nimisha’s Ship

  THE CRYSTAL SINGER BOOKS

  Crystal Singer

  Killashandra

  Crystal Line

  THE DRAGONRIDERS OF PERN® BOOKS

  Dragonflight

  Dragonquest

  The White Dragon

  Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern

  Nerilka’s Story

  Dragonsdawn

  The Renegades of Pern

  All the Weyrs of Pern

  The Chronicles of Pern: First Fall

  The Dolphins of Pern

  Dragonseye

  The MasterHarper of Pern

  By Anne McCaffrey and Elizabeth Ann Scarborough

  Powers That Be

  Power Lines

  Power Play

  With Jody Lynn Nye

  The Dragonlover’s Guide to Pern

  Edited by Anne McCaffrey

  Alchemy and Academe

  A Del Rey® Book

  Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group

  Copyright © 2000 by Anne McCaffrey

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Del Rey is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  www.randomhouse.com/delrey/

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  McCaffrey, Anne.

  Pegasus in space/Anne McCaffrey.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  “A Del Rey book.”

  I. Title.

  PS3563.A255 P45 2000

  813′.54—dc21 99-053225

  eISBN: 978-0-345-44308-3

  v3.1_r1

  This book is respectfully dedicated to

  Christopher Reeve

  With the devout hope that he realizes his ambition—to

  stand on his own two feet once again in 2002!

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Foremost on my list of thank-yous for this novel is Dr. Steven Beard of the UK Astronomy Technological Center, Royal Observatory in Edinburgh. I asked for help and he gave me such a large measure of valuable information that I had more than enough for this part of the Pegasus universe. Not only is he a marvelous punster but also a dedicated researcher, leading me to many previously unexplored paths of stargazing and suggesting useful Web sites where my basic reference texts were out of date. He patiently went over drafts and consequently the relevant characters are well informed. I would like to thank Elizabeth Kerner, author of Song in the Silence, for introducing me to Dr. Beard.

  Dr. Brian Kane of the Lowell Observatory Web site also responded to my specific queries, for which I am indeed grateful.

  Mark Finkelstein, D.O., F.A.O.C.R., of the Du Pont Hospital for Children, dropped by Dragonhold for tea one afternoon with his friend, Michael Zeik, offered his assistance, and found me taking him up on his kind offer.

  Dr. Donald L. Henninger of J.S.C. NASA was somewhat surprised by my phone call asking him to confirm some specific information on CELSS—Controlled Environment Life Support Systems. He gave me what I needed to know and for that I am indebted to him. I hadn’t realized so much had changed from what we s-f writers used to use in hydroponic gardens on spaceships and stations.

  Books on Bangladesh, its geography, culture, and language, published in Australia, were accessed from Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. The names will be different from those current in many American-printed atlases, especially as the major rivers change their beds and names to whatever the local people choose. I am deeply indebted for the help of Dr. S. Farid Ahmed from Dhaka, currently Registrar in the Borders Hospital, for his assistance; he has prevented me from making several glaring misrepresentations.

  My son, Todd McCaffrey, came forward magnificently with suggestions and solutions for the Limo (Lunar Insertion Moon Orbit) scenes and Jenna Scott McCaffrey read with her copy editor’s eyes on the text. So have my daughter, Georgeanne Kennedy, and Richard Woods, Lea Day, and Mary Jean Holmes.

  I am happy to acknowledge the continued assistance and support of Shelly Shapiro, my editor at Del Rey, Diane Pearson, my editor at Transworld-Corgi, and Martha Trachtenberg, the copy editor who joggled my short-term memory about names and relationships.

  One other point: since the genesis of the Pegasus books (and indeed the Rowan/Tower and Hive series) is the short story I wrote back in 1959, I have been constrained to keep to the people and places mentioned so long ago. Forty years later, we understand science and ourselves more clearly and in greater detail. I have kept to the original premises and places in “The Lady in the Tower” while moving along with such advances as possible and extrapolating as seemed logical.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  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

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Epilogue: Fourteen Years Later

  Historical Notes

  A man’s reach should exceed his grasp

  Or what’s a heaven for?

  ROBERT BROWNING (1855)

  1

  As Peter Reidinger was teleporting in gestalt with the huge Jerhattan Power Station to bring the kinetics down from Padrugoi Space Station to Dhaka, an exhausted group of men and women were trying to reach the shelter of the nearest shomiti. With the bundles they had snatched from their homes before escaping the breached levees, they staggered to higher ground along the muddy banks of the Jamuna River. They had to scramble to bridge the gaps in the levee mounds that, in places, were sliding into the Jamuna’s torrent. Despite Herculean efforts by the government and the local administrators in the Rajshahi Division, the levees had not supplied the longed-for protection to those living along its banks.

  Anger at the “authorities” consumed Zahid Idris Miah and sustained him as he slogged at the head of the group from his bari, flashing the long-life light ahead of him. In the gloom of this monsoon, the tool at least kept them from slithering into places where the Jamuna had chewed ravines into the levee bank in its rush to the sea. He devoutly mumbled prayers to Iswah that this tool was truly a “long-life” torch. He half expected it to fade out now, when it was most needed, like so many other items that came to his small bari south of Sirjganj as Rajshahi Division tried to—what was the ingraji word?—“upgrade” him and the other jute farmers.

  They should have kept a close watch on the levees in this storm. They should have worked more diligently to reinforce the collecting lakes along the Jamuna River. They had promised to do so, to keep more of Bangladesh from sliding beneath the Bay. He vaguely knew that a great new engineering process that had kept some city in Italia from drowning had been adapted to keep the Bay of Bengal from inundating the coastal regions near the mouth of the Padma. Much land had been lost
along the seacoast in spite of the efforts of many, very gifted engineers. The once inland city of Khulna was now protected by the great Dike, which had been erected three decades ago. Barisal City was also ringed south and east by the Ocean Dikes, invented by yet other westerners who had been determined to keep their land from drowning. Those islands that had once dotted the Bay of Bengal: Bhola, Hatiya, and Sondwip—where the Meghna River flowed into the Bay—had been inundated and the people saved only by the massive efforts of the World Relief Organization.

  He had heard that the islands of Kutubdia and Maheskhali, near Cox’s Bazar were also gone, and the tip of Chittagong. As Zahid had never been farther from his bari than Sirājganj, these places might as well have been in Great India or Meriki. What had happened to those who had helped before? Had they, like so many others, deserted the Bangla in their hours of need? He wiped the sudden spurt of wind-driven rain from his face. Were they tired of rescuing poor Bangladeshi? He wasn’t surprised; who cared, but Iswah, what happened to the poor? The wind smacked at his lean, work-honed frame again and he slid on the mud, the light briefly aimed to his right.

  Was that debris now bobbing along on the swift flowing current the plants he had struggled so to keep watered during the dry season? There was always too much of everything—Iswah be praised, he added quickly—when it wasn’t needed. The Jamuna had irrigated his fields but this was overdoing it.

  “Where be those who aid? Curses be on their names and every generation of them!” Zahid roared above the wind, waving about both hands, making the torchlight stab about the darkness.

  Behind him, Jamila wailed, berating her husband. “Do not wave our light about so! How am I seeing where to put my feet? If it falls from your hand, how will we be seeing where dry land is?” She had hiked up her sari, its sodden, muddy hem banging against her thin calves. He had already reprimanded her several times for her immodesty.

  “Hush, woman. Rafiq and Rahim have torches. Watch your sari that you do not tempt Ayud Bondha.” To emphasize his displeasure in her demeanor, he lengthened his stride, sweeping the ray of light in front of him to see where he was going. This disgruntled him more, for it might appear to her that he was heeding her complaint.

  “How far to go now, Zahid?” Salma, Ayud Bondha’s young wife, cried in ragged gasps. She had to shout above the wind noise. She was many months pregnant with her firstborn, and clumsy. Ayud was half carrying her, both of them slipping about in the thick mud.

  Zahid didn’t like Salma. As a young girl, she had been chosen from her village to go to the school to learn to read and write and do sums. Because of that, she did not efface herself, as a proper woman should, speaking out often in the shomiti with unseemly disregard of custom. Ayud Bondha always indulged her, smiling and doing nothing to discipline her, as a husband should.

  “We will be seeing shomiti lights soon,” Zahid said and sent his beam ahead of them, squinting to see any glimmer from their destination. Shomiti were still built on heavy concrete pillars, thanks be to Iswah, so their shelter remained above the flooded lands. There would be light cylinders—also of the long-life variety—hung on the corners of the covered veranda to show refugees their way through the day’s darkness, wind, and rain.

  “Aiyeee!” screamed his wife, sliding her length in the mud, face down. The fall both amused and irritated Zahid. Sputtering curses, he caught hold of her arm with his free hand, the arc of the light he held going every which way again. Ayud Bondha grasped her other flailing arm and, between them, they managed to lift her out of the mud. Solicitously, Salma used the long end of her already sodden sari to clear Jamila’s mud-smeared face while she gasped for breath and spat out the grit in her mouth.

  “Aiyeee!” Jamila screamed again, wildly pointing at the rushing water. “Something in the river!” She grabbed her husband’s hand with her muddied ones and steadied the broad beam of the flashlight on what she had glimpsed when his beam was erratically flashing about.

  “Nothing alive,” Zahid retorted, trying to wrest control of the torch from her.

  “I see something, too,” Salma said, and Zahid snarled under his breath. That was all he needed. Her to side with the thin stick who was his wife.

  “There is something,”Ayud agreed, and by then the rest of their group had caught up to them.

  Rafiq and Rahim added their lights to his reluctant one and even he had to admit that there was something, a small child perhaps, clinging to the fork of two branches. Zahid was stunned. A tree of such size had to have floated down all the way from the Terai region. Even as he watched, he saw movement, a wide-open mouth in a white face, probably calling for help. Suddenly, the current of the Jamuna whimsically pushed the tree closer to the levee.

  “Joldi!” cried Salma, pushing at Zahid. “Sahajyo! Quick! Help!”

  “Ki kore? How?” Zahid demanded, one hand gesturing his helplessness while, with the other, he stubbornly followed the slowly spinning mass with his light.

  “Dig your feet in!” Rahim cried, leaping forward. “We make a chain. Grab my hand, Rafiq. You, too, Jabbar, Khaliq. Make a chain. Zahid, light us.”

  Rahim barely got a firm grip on Rafiq’s hand before Zahid pushed Jabbar and Khaliq into place, making himself the end of the human rescue line. He was as heavy as Rahim and could be the anchor despite the slippery mud. His wife wailed and moaned that surely they would not be in time, that they would all fall in the water and drown, and then what would become of them? Then Salma grabbed the light from Zahid’s hand as he was pulled forward, closer to the edge of the levee. Frantically he dug his heels into the slippery soil, determined to stop his forward movement. Khaliq also dug his feet in. Then Rahim, living up to his name of “mighty soldier,” caught hold of the nearest branch of the tree fork and hauled it closer. He stretched the human chain to its full length as he made his first grab at the child. It let out a shriek that could be heard above the wind’s screech and lay limp across the bole. Rahim made a second grab and got a firm grip on one leg.

  “Tana!” cried Rahim, struggling to shift his balance back to the levee.

  Pull the others did, Jabbar going down on his knees in the mud to keep from sliding further. As Rahim teetered backward, Khaliq dropped Jabbar’s hand and rushed to grab Rahim’s shirt to draw him and his burden to the relative safety of the higher bank. Salma focused the light on the tree that, its passenger now safely ashore, was caught by an eddy and swirled away.

  “Light, woman!” Zahid shouted, angrily snatching it back and shining it on the child.

  Rain slanted down on the unconscious face and the open mouth. Suddenly Rahim jerked the tattered shirt down, glancing warily at Jamila who had bent to examine the human flotsam.

  “A girl child,” she said. Then she saw and touched the limp left arm that dangled at an unnatural angle. “Broken.”

  “Give Iswah thanks for preserving the child,” murmured Zahid.

  “Did I do that?” asked Rahim, panting from his exertions and reaching out to the injured limb.

  “Iswah knows,” Jamila said with pious absolution. “Young bones heal easily.”

  “You were holding the other arm, Rahim Ali,” Salma said, flinging a sodden braid over her shoulder.

  “How could you see?” Zahid demanded.

  “I was holding the light,” she replied, but now Ayud Bondha tapped her shoulder in tacit reprimand. “I did see,” she said defensively. Then she fumbled in the bundle she had over her shoulder and brought out a smoothed stick, wood oiled by long usage in cooking. “Jamila, this for a splint. Tie with this.” Dragging the end of a piece of fabric out, she gnawed a cut in the hem and then, with a strong gesture, tore off the end. She handed the strip and the utensil to Jamila.

  With the experienced deftness of those accustomed to dealing with minor injuries, Jamila and Rahim straightened the thin arm against the smooth wooden stirrer and deftly wound the makeshift bandage around it. The fabric was already sodden from the persistent rain but it would hold the tiny limb
to the splint.

  “Joldi! Joldi! Be quick,” Zahid said, irritated by the holdup. He flashed his light toward the Jamuna and everyone could see that the water had risen against the levee in the short time since the child had been rescued.

  Jamila cradled the child in one arm and, with a toss of her head at the scowling Zahid, started off again. Zahid, imperiously waving his light, took a few running steps to take up his forward position.

  “Ami neta,” he said in a fierce tone. “I am leading.”

  They had gone no more than fifteen paces when he saw the bobbing of lights coming toward them.

  “Are you all right?” someone shouted.

  “HA!” Zahid yelled back, cupping his free hand to his mouth.

  “We were seeing you stop,” the someone said as half a dozen men came into the beam of his torch.

  “We are all right but our women are tired,” Zahid called back. He did not wish to explain that, at great peril to their lives, they had rescued only a girl child. The saving of a boy would have been worth bragging about.

  “We have saved an injured child,” Salma shouted.

  Then the contingent from the shomiti converged on them and assisted the weary travelers the rest of the way up the slight but muddy incline to the welcome shelter of the community center. The greedy waters of the Jamuna were still below the levee on this stretch, not yet washing at the sturdy columns that held up the building.

  Salma had gone to school in this shomiti so she called out to one of the Teachers in the largest room where a huge pot was simmering on a brazier.

  “Rupoti Apa,” she cried, and the woman looked up from stirring the rice mixture. “We found a child.”

  “A girl child,” Zahid said.

  “We are all precious to Iswah,” the Shikkhika said, giving Zahid a mildly reproving glance as she rose and came forward to see the limp figure Jamila held out.

  “With a broken arm. Is the daktar here?” Jamila asked.

  Shaking her head, Rupoti Apa peered at the limp body, noting the splinted arm, the many scratches and bruises, and a skin wrinkled from long immersion. “He is not here. The child is not too badly hurt. Bring her and yourself, Salma, to the fire and be warm. Jamila, take bowls. We have rice and fish to eat. Hot and good.” She waved toward the stack of rough pottery bowls on the far side of the brazier.