Chapter One

Damn it! E really does equal MC2!
- Dr. Norman Allsworthy, U of Mars, 3579CE

I Am Born

A great Earth novelist once wrote:"To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o'clock at night." So I too am forced to take for granted that certain facts about my early years are hidden from my direct knowledge and will remain so forever. I must depend upon the processor records and what others have said. On the score of my childhood, I have little to report, for I was destined for the Ocean of Space and voyaging from age six years onward. So there are many experiences another child might tell you about themselves that I will not possess in my inventory of memory, that warehouse of experience which defines ourselves to ourselves.

I will, however, relate a long life spent voyaging among the many stars of this Galaxy, known to Humans as The Milky Way. As a child I did not know what the name referred to, since I had never seen mammalian milk which had not been processed and sanitized, rendering the liquid a pale straw color, the color of blood plasma, not at all like the brilliant gleaming silver-white highway in space, filled with stars, and many of those stars accompanied by planets, and some of those planets containing rare and valuable goods or materials or services.

To go to Space was to commit one's life to the voyage, like the French fur-traders of old North America. Yes, I know my History, for the Law of Chantilly, where I was born, is strict concerning education, in order to prevent the loss of our Humanity, as has occurred in some other Colonies, despite their claims to the contrary. Although the dissolution of the Empire occurred a thousand PSY (Planetary Standard Years) ago, Earth is still our Home World for us Chantillians. As natives of Earth we are and always will be Human. The fact that Earth's current situation renders it nearly uninhabitable to a Chantillian is irrelevant.

Now I am retired, and health allows me only these few hours at the terminal of my processor. Relating the stories of my many voyages among the stars and planets distracts me from the pain that necessarily accompanies the star-sickness. Even though I knew it was inevitable I would contract it after a hundred star-years of sailing, I continued for another four hundred years.

(The reader keeping in mind that space-years are not equal to Planetary Standard Years. Depending on your reference point, a single space-year could equal several thousand years on any given planet. Such is the price of space-sailing.)

Call it greed, call it denial, call it reckless disregard for my life...I care not what you choose to call it. I spent my life according to my own choosing, at least, according to my own possibilities in a Universe which does not offer all choices to all beings. After all, it is not my fault that Einstein was right and the increasing mass of an object as it approaches the speed of light prohibits translation to post-light speed. I didn't make the laws of physics, I only lived by them.

So, in short, I was born Ishmael O'Connor penDragon, son of Isis O'Connor penIsrael and Arestese Indria penDragon, or so the genetic processor files say, in the Common Era Year 10908.678. I came into the world in the conventional way, that is, the technicians opened my culture vessel when the fetus that was I became able to survive independently in normal interior atmosphere. I do not recall the moment. The trauma of taking that first breath of raw oxygen, carbon dioxide and trace gases has erased that memory. In any event, only scraps of images remain of those first two or three years. My earliest memory is pedaling an exercise machine while a vid showing interstellar views played on my visor. I recall particularly the glowing reds and blues of the Crab Nebulae. Of course, as a child I did not know the images I was seeing were processor-rendered. I recall the deep disappointment of seeing the real thing with normal vision from a viewport in a space-cruiser.

The House of Dragon (pen meaning 'child of') has been one of the Great Traders since our origins on Earth itself, although that is a long time ago, and the data files are mostly unreadable by today's processors; the storage devices themselves inaccessible to us, based as they are on technologies too old to use with today's bio-quantum disseminated processor systems. Nevertheless, our documented history goes back to before the founding of the Chantilly Colony by charter from the Board of Directors and Chief Executive Office, and that is 3500 PSY ago. When the Corporation for Space Development merged into the Earth-Space Directorate in 7897.422CE, the House of Dragon and other Founding Houses petitioned for self-rule, which was granted without demurrer on 7899.598CE. Since that time, our world has been run according to the Founding Contract, as amended.

Since a space-sailor must be trained and educated for that career from an early age, all I experienced while housed in the children's creche was designed to prepare me for that life. Of course, we played the usual creche games, and I imagine my childhood was little different from the reader's, so why detail those events that occur to every child: loss and gain; winning and losing; esteem and shame; courage and cowardice; disappointment and achievement. I cannot claim to have been an exceptional student, nor was I among the plasma-streamers bringing down the class average. At the age of sixteen, I graduated as spacer-designate class A, entitled to ship on small, inter-system, nuclear-electric/solar-generator schooners without the big solar wind and cosmic energy-current sails of the big trans-system galleons and ships-of-the-line, ships capable of ten-percent light speed and thus generally called 'tenners'. Within fourteen Chantillian days I was ordered to report to the Odysseus.