A tale from my heritage
17 Sep 2018Just Bear Li
They say that everyone has a story to tell. Mine is not of me, but of where I come from, generations and centuries ago. For what it is worth, here is the tale of Griselda and the Three Bears:Griselda Bear was my four-times great grandmother, born in 3076 in a small settlement in the Dubhe system. She claimed descent from one of the early visionaries of star travel from Old Earth, but the records were long lost, of course.
This account comes from her diary; I read it as a child back in the 3260s, and it has informed my view of the universe ever since.
Among her cousins in the extended Bear family were three brothers: Justinian, Orsino, and Gregorio Li. Just was the eldest; he cultivated a reputation as a daredevil. Orsino was the middle brother; more prudent, perhaps, certainly less flamboyant. He was a big man, with a temper that was rarely seen but formidable when aroused; everyone called him the Bear. Just and the Bear shared an urge to travel far beyond the bounds of their cramped little world. Gregorio, the youngest, was by far the least adventurous, least ambitious.
They all loved Griselda, and she loved them all. If she had had her choice, she would probably have married all three; in the end, she could choose none but Gregorio. He is listed as my direct ancestor, but the marriage took place in 3110, long after my great-great-great grandfather's birth in 3101, and Griselda confided to the diary that she never knew, or wanted to know, which of the brothers was his father. In those strait-laced days, Gregorio and Griselda Li Bear needed to establish "legitimacy" in order to make the move to Arcturus.
As soon as they could, the two older brothers left Dubhe to learn about the new technnologies of hyperspace exploration in the academy at Lave. In 3099 Just left for Lave, returning home in 3100 to visit Griselda. When he returned to Lave, the Bear went with him; neither ever returned to the Ursa Major region.
At the academy, Just pursued his path of reckless swashbuckling. On a wager, he vowed that after graduation he would take just one jump to Riedquat - even more of a rat's nest of smugglers, pirates and brigands then than now - and neither take another hyperspace jump nor upgrade his under-equipped Cobra until he achieved Deadly ranking; in the end, he was Elite before he left that hell-hole. He spent six months playing Coriolis Chicken with the local pirates. He would head straight out from the station with a succulent cargo, armed only with a pulse laser, and wait for them; if ever things got too hot, he would bolt for shelter. After making Deadly, he allowed himself the luxury of a couple of military lasers, and the rest of the progression came rapidly. When he returned to Lave to collect on the bet (he won 20-tons of fossilized tree grubs), he was briefly feted as the latest celebrity; half in jest, half in vanity, from then on he took as his nom de voyage "Just Li Renowned".
The Bear, meanwhile, quietly graduated and started a more conventional trading career. The pair often travelled in convoy, and before long the Bear was given the tongue-in-cheek epithet "Bear Li Known". Like many before him, he took the derogatory nickname upon himself and wore it as a badge of pride. In 3104 he too joined the ranks of the Elite.
That was the year that rumors started to circulate of an experimental ship that had gone "missing", allegedly stolen from the navy. Many pilots went chasing round what then passed for the Bubble on a wild goose chase, though most figured that it was just some government ruse, to hamstring the resources of the Pilot's Federation, or even to thin their ranks. In any case, the word spread that the target had fled "to another galaxy". Ludicrous, of course; we could scarcely even reach the nearest corners of our own. The high-tech stations started to promote something described as a "Galactic Hyperdrive". The kindest interpretation is that it was some early experimental version of the one used by Jaques station in our own time, a long-distance intra-galaxy FSD that would drop you in some other little corner of the Milky Way. Most thought that it would just deposit you on the event horizon of the nearest black hole, or a couple of light milliseconds from a neutron star. When people asked why nobody ever seemed to come back, the vendors just told them that if they kept on going they could eventually get "all the way round". They rarely tried to explain that each hyperdrive was single-use, or how one might acquire another one in the destination systems.
My great-to-the-fifth uncles were taken in. They paid their money, jumped, and were never seen again. Sometimes I used to imagine them jumping their way round Sculptor or the Magellanic Clouds, but that was just my childish fantasy. Maybe they found their rogue ship, but most likely they ended up as a pair of tiny stellar flares not very far away in the Black.
Still, their legacy was to pass the sense of wonder and adventure that Gregorio lacked to the next generation and beyond. I am proud to be named for both of them.