In Ageless Days

"In Ageless Days" is included as prelude No. 4 in *The Juno Contingency (novel).*

## Teaser

The all-female passengers of a generation ship uncover minute but strange disturbances to their static environment.

## Plot

### 1. The Number of Years

Xensa is a teenage passenger on an O'Neill cylinder generation ship. In the 20 km–long, 5 km–diameter hold, the passengers are an all-female society that live a bucolic existence in the forest environs. Xensa lives with her mother, who, now that Xensa has reached 16, says that she will join the Order. Xensa is suspicious of the religious order that makes up most of the population of the generation ship, but she agrees to accompany her mother.

The sisters of the Order induct Xensa's mother as a novitiate, assigning her work to clean and maintain the convent. Those who serve the ship faithfully are rewarded with eternal life, as, for every day that they work in the ship's cause, their bodies are prevented from aging. Many of the nuns of the Order are now centuries old, yet their bodies are frozen at the age they were when they entered service. The head of the Order is the Mater Magnifica, who founded it 850 years ago.

After a few days Xensa's mother says she is already feeling healthier from her labors. Her mother has a sister serving as her mentor, and Xensa pesters the sister with disrespectful questions, embarrassing her mother. But the Sister is serene and recounts for Xensa the founding of the Order. Early in their ship's voyage, the male–female society it was seeded with was overcome with violence in the Strife. The Mater worked with the ship's computer, called Goddess, to found this all-female society instead so as to bring about peace and stability. Goddess rewarded them by granting eternal life to all sisters who follow the Mater. Now most of the cylinder's 16,000 inhabitants are members of the Order, and they believe that one day all of them—including Xensa—will join.

Later Xensa and her mother are exploring the convent. They find the Pit of Heretics, a deep depression overgrown with vines at the back of the convent, where legend says apostates were sent for punishment. Unexpectedly they run into the Mater Magnifica and her entourage. Her mother genuflects, but Xensa refuses. She even dares to ask the Mater how long it will be until the ship reaches its destination.

The Mater repeats Order doctrine that the passengers once knew this number of years, but it drove them mad, causing the Strife. The price of peace was for humans to forget the number of years—all but for the Mater herself, who carries this burden for everyone. Now, whether it is one thousand, ten thousand, or even a hundred thousand years left on their journey, the duty of all is the same. The ideal of the Order is to bring about the era of "Ageless Days" when none shall age, all shall forget the passage of time, and even the memory that the ship is on a voyage will be erased. Once that perfection is achieved, the rest of the journey will pass in an instant.

Xensa returns to her childhood home, now alone. She meets with her girlfriend, Shimi, and expresses her disappointment at both their mothers having joined the Order. She is also terrified by the "cult's" vision of endless sameness and boredom. Shimi reasons that, even if everyone's fate is to join the Order, they can still set out and explore first. She and Shimi depart to travel the cylinder's surface.

### 2. The Homesteaders

Xensa and Shimi spend years traversing the cylinder. The travel to its end caps and Xensa combs every step of their 16 km circumference. She looks for ways out and any sign that there is something beyond the cylinder. They climb the 2.5 km–tall maintenance stairways that rise up to the solar filaments running down the cylinder's center, providing its day–night cycle. Xensa contemplates jumping and flying off from one of these peaks, but Shimi advises her that, even though they won't "fall" all the way, they would still hit the cylinder wall at the bottom, which is moving at a fatal 200 m/s.

Xensa and Shimi visit the homesteaders who live scattered around the cylinder, those who haven't joined the Order. They are all still aging and will eventually grow old and die, but Goddess allows some to reproduce by visiting scattered medical facilities (as long as the population doesn't exceed the cylinder's carrying capacity). The facilities can make women become pregnant with a clone of themselves via parthenogenesis, or with a child mixed with another woman's DNA. Xensa and Shimi discuss Shimi eventually carrying a child made from both of them.

Xensa gets to know an elderly homesteader named Faith who lives in a hermitage with many family heirlooms. She shows Xensa charcoal drawings made by her forebears. Most show the interior of the cylinder, but some show metal corridors, observation decks, male humans, and the stars. Xensa asks if these scenes were imaginary, but Faith insists that they were real, and that her ancestress was drawing parts of the ship that one could visit before the Strife. But as part of the Mater's peace, all passengers lost access to these parts of the ship, lest they be driven mad again by the voyage.

Faith is ailing and invites Xensa and Shimi to set up in her homestead and inherit it after she's gone, as Goddess never allowed her to reproduce herself. One day she takes Xensa out to her lake to show her a mystery. She shows Xensa the calcium line that traces the exact edge of the lake, which hasn't changed in all her life. But lately Faith has noticed that the edge of the water has moved by less than a millimeter. Xensa cannot discern the difference, but Faith insists that the lake has been disturbed somehow.

They care for Faith till she passes away, burying her in her favorite spot along the shore.

### 3. The Audience

A few years later, Shimi has given birth to a daughter made by combining hers and Xensa's DNA. They work the land and tend wildlife. Xensa is watching a herd of deer run through their valley and notices that their patterns have changed. Before the deer always slept in the same place, but now they appear to migrate and sleep in different places around the cylinder. Shimi also observes that sometimes the crops grow a little bit faster or slower on certain days than on others. They go back through Faith's record but can't find any clues as to what's affecting the farmland.

Xensa visits another homesteader for advice, who agrees that something is off in the valley. She shows Xensa a collection of ancient science books she has, and Xensa borrows them to pour over and try to find an explanation. Xensa gets sidetracked learning about the history of the ship. Its engines were supposed to fire for several centuries to bring them up to their cruising speed, then the ship was to coast for some unknown amount of time. Xensa wonders how the passengers could have lived with the cylinder under constant acceleration, but she finds that the engines only provided 0.01 g acceleration laterally. That meant gravity was only "tilted" by 1%, which was small enough that it was unnoticeable.

Xensa visits more homesteaders and finds other anomalies, the first that many remember in their lifetimes. Xensa collects her evidence and returns to the main convent, asking for an audience with the Mater Magnifica. She is made to wait several days first, during which she visits her mother. She is dismayed to find her mother disinterested in both her return and in the birth of her child, absorbed only in Order doctrine.

Once Xensa is finally granted an audience with the Mater Magnifica, she shares news of the anomalies the homesteaders are experiencing. She suggests there might be some technical fault with the cylinder, and she asks the Mater to investigate. The Mater assures her that she communicates with Goddess regularly, who would alert her to any malfunctions. Xensa asks if Goddess isn't capable of malfunctioning herself, which affronts the nuns as sacrilege, but the Mater laughs this off and dismisses Xensa.

### 4. The Endless Apostrophe

Xensa returns to Shimi very suspicious of the Mater Magnifica. Xensa continues investigating, and goes back through Faith's family heirlooms. She finds a journal written by a woman who was a first-generation passenger, who describes daily life aboard, and how everyone was able to speak to the "AI" that ran it. Xensa suspects that this AI is the one they now know as "Goddess," though Goddess speaks to no one but the Mater. Sensa realizes that the Mater is the single point of failure for the entire ship.

At night, Xensa begins to earnestly pray out loud to Goddess, asking her to speak to Xensa as she once did to all of her people. After weeks of being ignored, she tells Shimi she is going on a religious quest to reconnect with Goddess.

Xensa travels the cylinder again, all the while talking out loud to Goddess. She shares her quest with the other homesteaders and asks them to pray as she does for Goddess to reconnect and intervene on their behalf. Xensa retraces the edges of the cylinder's caps, asking Goddess if there is a secret code or sign that lets only the worthy escape.

After several fruitless months, she climbs back up one of the 2.5 km stairways to the solar filaments. She sits and meditates under it for three days in the weak gravity, becoming severely dehydrated under the intense light. She starts to hallucinate and is driven mad by the idea that she is trapped in this capsule and that Goddess will never speak to her. She climbs over the stairway's railing and threatens to throw herself off unless Goddess speaks. When she hears nothing, she lets go.

Xensa floats in the air as she shoots off on a gentle tangent towards the cylinder wall, where she will eventually die. Her hallucinations deepen until she has a sudden insight. She realizes that all the strange phenomena are not coming from a problem internal to the ship, but one external to it. The only possible explanation is that they have already arrived at their destination.

*Read the conclusion "5. The Millennium Vines" on Amazon.*