City Without Suns by Wade Andrew Butcher Read Free Book Online

was walking down the same hall as before. 
    “Jay!” I yelled as I knocked on doors.  Finally, in front of me, a door opened with Mr. J standing behind it.
    “Please,” he gestured inviting me to sit.  The cramped room was very similar to mine, with the exception of the curved floor and the single platform for a bed.  I was a little nervous but willing to risk safety in an attempt to make a new ally.
    “How do you know me?” I asked.
    “Many of the originals know you.  I told you. I was a good friend of the General.  But I also knew of you before that.  Your father was famous back on Earth – I knew about his invention of the gravity fabric.  I knew he had a daughter, and David told me about you.”
    “I shouldn’t have boarded.”
    “Maybe not, but I heard the circumstances.  Your father fell out of grace on those Islands and was held prisoner.  It sounded to me like you made the right decision.  This was your ambition anyway, right? In the grand scheme of things, what better sense does it make than to send the best and brightest of our species?  It’s as if a higher power guided you to be here.  I suppose if any of us would have fully understood what was to come, very few of us would have boarded.”
    His words resonated with me.  For a brief moment, the ambition and pride of being on the first manned interstellar space voyage was awakened, but I had to argue, “Let’s suppose for a minute that I do represent the best and brightest, which is really both debatable and irrelevant, but let’s suppose it anyway.  Why do I feel like a neglected zoo animal?  Surely I could be used for something.”
    “No argument from me on that one, Isla.  Look at me too.  But whether you know it or not, you have been used, however not like you wanted.  You hosted children, right?”
    “How do you know that?” I asked.
    “I have eyes and ears in many places here,” Jay said.
    Part of me was intrigued and wanted to know where he had those relationships, but another part of me felt encroached upon by the stranger that knew so much about me.  I suppressed the latter and pondered whether to tell him about my old hopes and dreams.
    “I heard you say when we were here before, God bless you Isla , do you believe in God?”  I asked.
    “Oh, yes, very much so.  And you?” Jay returned the question.
    “I don’t know,” I replied partly ashamed that I did not have a good answer.
    “Well, I don’t think Gambler was conceived and constructed at the hands of men alone.  The effort to build something so massive had no direct benefit for anyone involved.  Talk about delayed gratification – in this case, if it arrives, it will be several generations into the future, and who knows whether the people who end up seeing new worlds will appreciate what was done to get them there.  The sacrifice and collectivism that it took to build this structure were completely against our nature.”
    “I figured it was just social evolution that motivated the people of the world to fund it.  That’s what we were taught growing up.”
                  “Maybe some of that, and admittedly, I was taught many religious beliefs growing up.  I reject some of them, but I cannot escape God’s existence.  I think well-meaning people have misinterpreted what they could not directly see and hear.  There is something there, trying to speak to us, creating those beliefs both correct and erroneous.”
                  I find it hard, now, to recount his words, but they rang true to me and I decided to ask him about an old dream I once had, one that I remembered long after it occurred to me while sleeping long ago.
    “I had a strange dream before I was invited here.  I saw vivid images of my grandfather, encouraging me to go.  What do you think it meant?”  I asked.
                  Jay smiled and said, “God, whoever He is, delivers messages to us in ways we can understand.  Maybe that was what