When I awoke from the reality-transit sedative, my body felt like it had been rolled between two sheets of rock. While all the humans inside her were unconscious, Chedi had shifted her body to the Solar System.
Somya lay on a cushioned mat between me and Huy, both of them still asleep. I sat up, stretched, and slightly regretted my decision to eschew the high-oxygen bedroom with my parents. Remarkably, my mother hadn’t objected to my choice to spend the night outside with my friends. She would probably make an I-told-you-so face if I mentioned my aching muscles, so I resolved to keep them to myself.
The trees around us rustled in a gentle breeze, oblivious to my discomfort. Artificial morning light filtered through their leaves and painted the rosebushes with their shadows. What would sunrise be like on Earth? I’d seen it in immersives and pictures, but those couldn’t substitute for the real thing. Birdsong, golden clouds, the deep blue of the sky – I couldn’t wait to experience them for myself.
Somya rolled and mumbled in their sleep. I reached out a hand and rubbed their back gently. They’d always been a restless sleeper. It was why we put them in the middle – so they wouldn’t thrash themselves out of the cot. I figured their nighttime personality gave their negative emotions an outlet. They rarely took anything seriously in their waking hours, so the bad stuff had to express itself somehow.
I fought back the sting of tears as I thought about never seeing my heartsib again. Our families lived on different parts of Earth. After our stay there, we’d reunite for a couple of months on Chedi, and then I’d end up on Meru, while Somya, Huy, and their families would travel to wherever Chedi’s residents decided to go next. With interstellar distances
between us, we could only exchange messages by courier. Reality transits enabled instantaneous travel between stars, but in-system travel was limited by the speed of classical physics. A transit couldn’t occur until a pilot or megaconstruct had passed the edge of the local heliosphere.
That meant weeks or months of delay between courier drops. In the seven years since Somya had come to Chedi, we’d only been apart when they’d gone to Earth with their parents to visit the other family. How would I face the challenges of Meru without them?
Somya mumbled something again and flung an arm over my legs. I placed my hand over theirs. My parents and I would leave for Earth on the first shuttle from Chedi. She usually selected passengers by lottery, but everyone had agreed to give my family priority because we’d lived in exile for so long. I wondered if I could talk my parents into letting
Somya came with us until Somya’s parents arrived. It would take Chedi two hundred and forty days to travel from heliopause – the outer limit of the Solar System – to a point close to Earth and then back out again.
Letting Somya join us would mean we’d get to spend two extra months together.
If only we could spend my entire stay together, we’d have a full eight months. That’s more time than it takes to complete the Anthro Challenge.
The thought jolted me out of the drowsy slump I’d fallen into.
I slow-blinked and thought-retrieved A Journey of Human Power, the book by Rune Edersan. It had detailed information about his route, equipment, and everything else someone would need to know in order to replicate his success. The rules of the Anthro Challenge stated that a human had to circumnavigate the Earth, defined as journeying around the entire planet and crossing its equator at least twice. The start and end points had to be the same, and most importantly, the challenger could only use human-era technology along the way. That meant no assistance from alloys, constructs, or devices that relied on infrastructure maintained by either. That’s what made it so appealing to me.
When Rune had tried it the first time, in 683 AE, he’d spent a lot of days scouting for ways to avoid roads, bridges, and such. He’d also had to find community farms and gardens that only humans tended to – not an easy thing to do in Loka because the alloys had filled ecological gaps with constructs. He had run into unexpected weather delays in the Out of Bounds, where alloys often redirected atmospheric energy in order to keep Loka more livable. After eight months, he’d exhausted himself to the point that he had to quit. On his second attempt, Rune used everything he’d learned the first time and completed the journey in 155 days with less overall effort.
If Somya could come with me to Earth and take the last shuttle back to Chedi, we’d have six months together on the planet. As long as we followed Rune’s successful path, we could finish with almost a month to spare. The odds of convincing our parents to let us attempt it were the longest of long shots, but I had to try.
Excerpted with permission from Loka, SB Divya, Hachette India.
