1

The big day had finally arrived…the day of their first flights…! A complicated order of precedence been worked out by the Nurses, based on seniority and competence, and all other Mission business had been cancelled for the day. The six able-bodied children had all undertaken flying lessons in a simulation programme devised by the nursemaids…and Marta, backed-up by Jorge had persuaded Six Gee to allow them each to take temporary control of the aircraft during their initial flight. Mission AI would be in charge for take-off and landing, ‘though…
The feeling of excitement was almost physical. As the aircraft could only take two passengers, so each of the new children was to be accompanied by an able-bodied companion. The good news for Marta was that she would be flying with Jorge…the downside was that she would be third on the list…! As the eldest children, Su-Ying and Raj would fly first, Su-ying partnered by Han, and then Raj with Rai…
The white machine glinted in Alph’s light… Han gave a thumbs up through the canopy as a steadily rising whine came from the craft’s engines. Su-ying looked apprehensive but kept her attention fixed on the boy sitting beside her. The draught from the craft’s four propellers swept dust past the waiting children…the machine seemed to quiver as if hesitating, before suddenly lifting off and dwindling rapidly into the sky… The other children cheered…
Then it was largely a question of waiting, as the aircraft was too far away to be seen clearly from where they were standing, a flat area on the far side of the Dome from the main airlock. The gleaming white machine had been waiting for them when they’d all trooped out at 0900. Han had explained that the there was a large door in this section of the Dome, used by the big machines to leave and re-enter the Hangar space. A lift brought them to the surface, and in the case of the flying machine, a small autonomic tractor had towed it to the takeoff and landing site…
Marta looked around as there was nothing much else to do, Jorge was with her, and looked cold…and tense, this being only the third time he’d left the security of the Dome. On the other occasions he’d stayed in the rova while Out. It occurred to her that in their eagerness to make up for the long incarceration of Jorge, Su-ying, and Raj, the Nurses were pushing them perhaps faster than they wanted to go… She took Jorge’s hand and gave it a reassuring squeeze…he looked up gratefully, but was too preoccupied to speak…
Just over fifteen minutes later Han’s flight was over. Han looked elated, Su-ying, quite frankly, terrified, and had to be helped from the craft. Raj coped much better, and after his flight with Rai, emerged grinning from ear to ear… Then it was their turn…
The first problem was getting Jorge into the thing. Raj had some limited use of his legs, and had, with help, been able to climb into the cockpit. Jorge piloted his chair as close as possible to the hatch, but after that there was nothing else but to lift him. Marta tried by herself, and even ‘though Jorge (who was surprisingly light), had held her around the neck, she’d been unable to get him into the seat and Sal had had to come and help.
Nurse Six Gee, rather unhelpfully, had said at this point that Mission AI had re-commissioned one the Dome’s subterranean manufacturing facilities, and was in the process of building a second aircraft…and this one would be adapted to take Jorge and Raj in their powered chairs…
Finally, they were both strapped in, and all was ready…

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The sudden acceleration squashed him down into his seat…his location system, devised for him by Mission AI, was suddenly useless! He could sense the dimensions of the cockpit, and Marta’s presence beside him… But beyond this…nothing! His other senses, already hypersensitive, seemed to have become even more acute…! He could hear the rushing of the air outside, this sound seemed to have a different quality, informing him that all around was void… Above the thin whine of the engines and the steady throb of the props, he could hear Marta’s breathing and the small noises as she shifted in her seat… His nose picked out the still-new smell of plastic in the recently fitted cockpit, and the scent the girl had started wearing… But it was his sense of balance that threatened to betray him…! He was used to the certainties of his chair, his bed, the Dome…and the unyielding surface of the planet… This had all been replaced by an appalling feeling that he could draw on no previous experience to describe…it was like being on the edge of a precipice…or falling forever! Sweat started on his forehead, and he could feel his last meal on the point of returning,
“Are you alright…?”

---

She had made sure that Jorge was secure before giving the thumbs-up signal to those outside (and confirming her readiness to Nurse Gee via her interface!). The thin whine of the motors climbed steadily and the propellers began to throb. The vehicle quivered as if unsure (or maybe eager), before suddenly lifting off… Marta gasped as she seemed to leave her stomach behind… A quick glance at Jorge, who had tensed at the sudden acceleration, but didn’t seem on the verge of panic. The ground shrank with shocking rapidity, her friends were now ant-like and the Dome itself dwindled… The surface of the planet took on a map-like quality, all detail evened out… Looking out of the canopy she could see both of the Carl Sagan craters, and further off the nearby range of mountains, until now beyond reach… She noticed the four propellers in their housings steadily angling from vertical to horizontal, and a change in the note of the engines indicated a corresponding change in the vehicle’s operating mode. Rather than being supported by the rotors, they were now using the craft’s aerofoil surfaces for lift…they were now really flying…
She checked the altitude on her ‘face, they’d just passed 4000 metres, the planet was now spread out beneath them…wispy clouds, rare on A5 were visible to the left,
‘Or, off to port!’ thought the girl who was always a stickler for the correct terminology, ‘time to take the controls…!’
Glancing at Jorge, she suddenly became very concerned. The boy had become absolutely rigid, and had gone a deathly pale,
“Are you alright…?”
“I’ll be OK!” gasped the boy, “it just takes getting used to…it would help if we just flew at the same level for a while…”
“I think we’re levelling out anyway…” said Marta, “I remember Nurse Gee saying that 4,500 metres is the normal ceiling for the aircraft…”
“That’s fine by me…! Could you describe what you can see…?”
‘Rats….! There goes my solo flight experience…’ thought Marta ruefully,
“OK, the planet appears very flat…sort of spread out like the surface of a table…” she hesitated, again the problem of how to describe what she saw to Jorge became apparent, ‘don’t be silly, he knows what flat is…!’ she chided herself,
“I can’t see the Dome, I’m not sure if that’s because it’s behind us, or because it’s too far away… I can see both craters, Carl Sagan minor, where we were surrounded by the crusties, and Carl Sagan major, which is further off… In front of us is the nearest range of mountains, which we’ve provisionally named the Isaac Asimov range…”
She prattled on in this vein for several minutes, and it appeared to help, Jorge’s colour had returned to normal, and he even managed a thin smile… Her ‘face interrupted her, it was Six Gee,
Your time is almost up, my dears, and I notice that you haven’t taken control of the aircraft…
“It’s Nurse Gee…!” she told Jorge, “saying it’s nearly time to come back….I’ll need to speak to her…!”
She spoke into her throat mic,
“I haven’t taken the controls because Jorge wasn’t feeling well…and it helped that we were flying on a fixed course…”
I quite understand, my dear, but we will have to turn the aircraft, now…
“Is it alright if I do that….?” she asked eagerly, “I’ll check with Jorge first….”
The boy cut in,
“It’s alright, Marta! I know you want to fly the ‘plane…I’ll be OK…”
“If you are both in agreement, I will hand over control to you on my mark, in ten seconds….”
The countdown clock appeared in front of her…she grasped the controls and visualised her last simulation…
Mark….! said Nurse Gee, the controls suddenly felt heavy…!
Turning the tiller angled both the props and the control surfaces, the aircraft banked sharply,
‘Too much!’ she thought, ‘Back off slowly…’
“Sorry…!” she said aloud. Jorge, she noticed, had turned white again. Nurse Gee’s voice came, now over the radio,
“That’s it, Marta dear, nice and steadily….I’ll warn you when you’re coming up on the right heading…but remember your lessons, you need to come out of the turn nice and gently…”
She willed herself to relax, and managed to come out of the turn fairly smoothly and roughly on the right heading. The craft then corrected her course slightly as Mission AI took control again. Gee spoke once more,
“Do you want to start the descent yourself…?”
Marta looked at Jorge, who managed a weak smile and a thumbs-up,
“Please…!” she confirmed,
“OK, handing over control in five seconds, on my mark…!”
Again the sensation of resuming control as the tiller suddenly became heavy and the girl could feel the craft reacting to the wind,
“OK, move the tiller forward…gently…! Try and keep the craft level using the artificial horizon…”
This, helpfully, had popped up in front of her eyes as Gee spoke. The real horizon rose before them as the craft started to descend,
“How are we doing…?” she asked breezily, but a sharp tang in the air indicated that not all was well…
Several minutes of steady descent and they could see the Dome once more, Nurse Gee cut in again,
“We are now going to take control again, Marta…! We’ll have you down in no time…”

---

Jorge was clearly distressed once they arrived back on the ground. Marta, Sal, and Rai this time, all helped him from the cockpit. She had been doing her best to ignore the pungent aroma in the cockpit, but she caught a sidelong glimpse of a spreading dark patch on the material covering Jorge’s groin. Once he was back in his chair, the boy signalled one of the junior nursemaids and was immediately hustled away back into the Dome. The other children did their best not to look, but were quickly distracted by preparations for the next flight… One of the nursemaids surreptitiously nipped in to wipe down Jorge’s seat, and the canopy was left open while Jorja and Priya prepared for their flight…
Marta had wanted to go with Jorge, but he had hardly looked at her once out of the cockpit, and was gone before she could work up the resolve to speak to him. She hung back, unwilling to join the others… A blast of air signalled the start of Priya and Jorja’s flight! Sal went last of all and took his flight alone. Then it was the trudge back to the airlock…

2

Marta didn’t see Jorge at all the next day. She tried calling him on her interface but he refused to answer. In desperation she called Six Gee,
“Gee, I’ve been trying to call Jorge and he won’t answer me… Is he OK…?”
“My dear, Jorge found the whole experience of flying very demanding…! We were reluctant to allow him to fly initially, especially so early on in his…‘familiarisation’ with the world outside the Dome…! But he insisted that he be able to fly with the rest of you, and we didn’t want to disappoint him…”
Marta remembered now how they’d talked about this and how keen Jorge had been that they all fly,
“But, he is OK…?”
“Physically yes, but psychologically he has been affected by the experience… And he is not alone! Su-ying found the whole experience very trying, and does not want to repeat it soon… You also have to remember that Jorge is blind, he told me that as soon as he left the ground he felt completely lost and disoriented…his senses were suddenly not able to provide him with information about the world around him, and he couldn’t cope with that…”
“…but, I want to help him…! I want to see that he is alright…!”
Gee paused, before saying,
“My dear, he is also embarrassed…he lost control of his bladder and became incontinent…in front of you, the person he most wants to impress…and he is having trouble coping with that… That is why he doesn’t want to see you at the moment…”
She was silenced by this for a while, Nurse Gee waited, knowing from experience that the girl would say more,
“But, if he doesn’t want to see me…tell him I’m thinking about him…that I want him to get better….and it doesn’t matter about what happened… And…and tell him I love him very much…!”
She hadn’t intended to say that last bit…but it all just came out in a rush,
“I will, my dear…now you need to get on with your job. Jorge will come to you, just give him time…”
The next two days were a new variation on adolescent hell. She tried to bury herself in her work… Her analysis of the data collected from Carl Sagan minor on past climate change on A5 was beginning to yield some surprising results, and she was working with Priya on a new series of experiments to run with the pseudo-crustaceans…but she couldn’t keep her mind on her work… Her resolve was undermined completely when she overheard a catty remark by Jorja. Marta was approaching the door to the common room and could make out Jorja’s voice. Steeling herself to enter, she could now clearly hear what the girl was saying,
“…at least my boyfriend’s got legs and doesn’t piss himself every five minutes…”
She froze in the act of entering the room, she could just see Jorja’s back, and over her shoulder, Priya’s face. Priya looked very unhappy… Marta could feel herself flushing, and hoping against hope that she hadn’t been seen, turned on her heel and went back the way she came. It was too early to go her bunk, so she headed back to the climatology lab and sat behind her work station, hoping all the while that nobody would come in…
She’d never really hated Jorja before, disliked and feared her yes, but hated no…! In fact, Marta didn’t feel hate towards anyone, not even the Mission Planners who’d stranded her here… But that was then…she now loathed Jorja with every fibre of her being,
‘How dare she…!’ she kept thinking over and over again, ‘How dare she…!’
Eventually, she regained her composure…she mirrored the screen in front of her and checked her reflection. She looked a mess…but that was easily fixed. But what to do about Jorge…and about Jorja! That was the problem…!
In the three weeks since ‘reunification’ (as she had started to think of it), Marta had spent every possible moment with Jorge. They’d only gone out on Mission together once, and he’d had stayed in rova one while she had collected core samples for her climatology research…but all their free time had been spent together! Jorge had talked about his work as a mathematician. He was currently doing calculations of mind boggling complexity in an effort to explain the peculiar celestial mechanics of the system… Marta listened but found it hard to follow some of the more arcane mathematical concepts,
‘Mathematicians defer only to God,’ she remembered reading.
But mainly he talked about his loneliness before the two groups were united. As a blind child he had found it difficult to relate to Su-ying and Raj, and had retreated into intellectual pursuits and abstractions, and this isolated him still further. Su-ying’s learning difficulty was mild in comparison to Raj’s, but even she had found it impossible to relate to, or even comprehend, much of what he said. In consequence he said less and less… His main companions were the nursemaids, and Marta was heartened to learn that his mentor had, like her, been Six Gee…
Marta shared her own feelings of loneliness and isolation…the feeling that she had always to be better, and more responsible than the others, the hostility and scorn she had always sensed from Rai and Jorja, and the shunning she’d had to endure following the experiment with the crusty, ‘Harvey’,
“You don’t know what it feels like to finally have someone I can really talk to…” she had said on one occasion. But, of course, Jorge did understand, because it was precisely what he was feeling…
But then there was the whole question of what a relationship (because theirs was clearly now more than a mere friendship), actually entailed… They’d kissed and held each other but felt unwilling…and lacked the understanding to go further. The nursemaids had always made it clear that eventually they would pair up and would need to become parents…but had always stressed that this was long way off…when they were older, when they were grown up… In the meantime they were encouraged to be children, albeit children with adult responsibilities as members of the Mission crew. Marta suspected that Rai and Jorja had experimented, but this was mainly through things that Priya had let slip…and in any case their whole lives were under surveillance by Mission AI, who would be bound to intervene if they felt any of the children were getting ahead of themselves…
But she couldn’t help thinking ‘what would a real relationship be like?’, and after Jorja’s comment asking herself, ‘would it even be possible?’
Marta felt she was like a bird on Earth, trembling on the edge of the nest…unwilling (or maybe unable) to take that leap into the unknown…her very own fear of flying…

---

Jorge finally contacted her the next day,
“I’ve missed you,” was what he said, “please, forgive me…!”
“What’s there to forgive…” she’d replied, “….can I come and see you….?”
“Come ‘round after Mission…!”
The day couldn’t go quickly enough. The Mission with Han had been novel, installing yet another ground station was routine, but this time they’d flown there…the location was on the very edge of the coverage provided by existing stations…and Han, who’d clocked up more solo flying hours than any of them, stood ready to take the controls if Mission AI’s signal suddenly failed. This location, in the foothills of the Asimov range, was well outside of what they could reach by rova in a day…and by installing this one they could fly further next time…
But the work was dull and routine, and she tired of Han’s perpetual prattle about flying, and the big machines…in fact, she’d decided she had preferred it when he hardly spoke…
Still, flying meant they were back by mid afternoon…
Marta hit the door signal, having run all the way once she’d escaped from Han… Jorge unusually was lying on his bed…she drank in the sight of him. Lying down, his true height became apparent. If he’d been able to stand Jorge would have been nearly two metres tall, and would have looked down on Marta, who was tall, herself…! His skin was the same coffee colour as hers, and his long nose, and narrow face topped by tightly curled hair worn short gave him the appearance (to her eyes) of a Greek god…she adored him,
“I thought we might go out…” he said,
“Can I kiss you, first…” was Marta’s reply. Jorge raised the back of his bed in readiness,
“That was nice…!” she said,
“Could you help me into my chair…?”
She stood aside while he summoned his powered chair, and then assisted by taking his legs while the boy lifted his torso onto the seat,
“Thanks,” he said, “it’s much easier if someone helps…”
“Where shall we go…?” asked Marta,
“I thought, the Garden…!”
So the Garden it was…
Alph was fairly low in the sky when they emerged from the elevator, its slanting rays casting long shadows in among the plants. Marta had decided not to mention the events of three days previously, so they talked of other things while they wandered among the fruit trees, surrounded by brightly coloured butterflies,
“…sometimes the things we have to do here can be quite hard…!” Jorge said after a long silence, “…I wanted to fly in that ‘plane…I really did…but when I actually got there, I found that my body didn’t…”
“But, you did fly…” he grimaced but Marta pressed on, “…and the next time it will be better, you’ll know what to expect, and you’ll learn how to cope…”
She took his hand,
“Flying is not the only scary thing that we’ll have to learn how to do…but we will, we will learn…!”
Marta had now stopped in front of a particular tree… A large ripe green fruit hung at eye level… Grasping it she took a bite before handing it to Jorge…The boy held it for a while and looked steadily back at her…before taking a bite himself…

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Chapter 8. Pandora’s Box >>