Thomas Aquinas, Explorer of the galaxy (Thomas Aquinas series)

by Rico, J. Luis

  Chapter Nine

  Tommaso d'Aquino

  The Year 2520

  Tommaso stands on his feet on the cab of the survey craft. The dignity of the moment demands it. The entangled transmitters on his survey craft broadcast his actions and sights and sounds to the rest of the galaxy, as well as the command and control center on the colony ship in orbit.

  The survey craft is a large six wheeled, box-like truck with side mounted engines for lift and stubby retractable wings for flight. The six large wheels appear to be tremendously over inflated inner tubes from a five hundred-year-old rubber tire. The large, rubbery, and odd-shaped tires are excellent on alien terrain, however. They will grab tightly and not lose purchase to almost any type of surface. Here in this arid canyon on this smaller planet of a double system, on the fourth planet from this bright alien sun, the tires are near perfect for the sandy and rocky terrain. Tommaso has spent the last two hours driving to the village. His larger planetary drop ship is landed safely and unnoticed on the other side of the small desert.

  Tommaso exits the survey craft and lands hard, but on his feet, maintaining his balance. The dignity of the moment also demands this. The slight difference in gravity makes Tommaso seem to weigh more than eleven percent more than his normal mass. He holds his arm high and grips his cross firmly. He begins to chant the most famous prayer of his namesake, Saint Thomas Aquinas. The student’s prayer.

  “Creator of all things, the true source of light and wisdom, the origin of all being, graciously let a ray of your light penetrate the darkness of my understanding.

  Take from me the double darkness, in which I have been born, an obscurity of sin and ignorance.”

  “Give me a keen understanding, a retentive memory, and the ability to grasp things correctly and fundamentally.”

  “Grant me the talent of being exact in my explanations and the ability to express myself with thoroughness and charm.”

  The sand is earthlike; however, the color is notably strange.

  “Point out the beginning, direct the progress, and help in the completion.”

  “It’s the sun obviously,” a part of Tommaso’s mind replies. The sun is shifted towards the red end of the spectrum. It is the source of the light here after all.

  “I ask this through Christ our Lord. Amen.”

  Tommaso holds his arm ever higher to better show the cross.

  The group of aliens approaches at a slow pace. The apparent leader of the group points at a slightly smaller, and apparently, younger member and noises are made. This smaller member closes the distance in confident but alien strides. He holds his head high and meets the eyes of the human with his own two eyes.

  The eyes of the alien are slatted and small. One can imagine the harsh light and sand of the world has taken its toll and driven the selection of these aliens towards those that can suffer through the blinding white light and the blowing sand the best. The alien is bipedal. Its forearms are mounted further on the side of the body, nearly on the back, as Tommaso can readily see. This creature, no the man or woman, Tommaso mentally corrects himself. This “Person” below him their modesty. They are wearing garments. He has a shirt and jacket and pants. Well, rather than pants he has something wrapped around his lower extremities. It approximates the same thing as pants. And boots. Very large boots. The alien gives no pause, he continues to climb the slight sand dune that Tommaso is parked upon. Again, it suits the dignity of the moment that Tommaso meets the person half way. He begins to walk down the sand dune. Hand and cross held high.

  When the person reaches a stone’s throw from Tommaso, he stops and stares for a moment. Tommaso stops as well. The cross still held before him.

  The alien smiles. There is no doubt that is a smile. The mouth and teeth are horrible to look upon, but that is a smile! The mouth is lower on his body, under his head. Tommaso begins to laugh. In all of the scenarios he has constructed in his mind over the years about discovering an alien, he never dreamt that the person would smile at him.

  The alien approaches more slowly. When he is an arm’s reach apart, he reaches his arm into his shirt and pulls out a totem on a string. He holds it above his head.

  “It is a cross,” Tommaso speaks out loud. Barely loud enough to be heard by the hundreds of billions of Catholics watching this live on the entangled broadcast.

  “It is a cross!” Tommaso yells at the top of his lungs.

  “It is a cross!” The emotion of the moment threatens to overcome Tommaso.

  Tommaso cries out in delight. “God is great!” he yells into his helmet and laughs. A long loud heartfelt laugh of delight. Catholics all over the known systems delight and scream at the tops of their voices as one. Churches on Sol system, full of the faithful, and homes full of the faithful under faded red suns in distant systems all over the known galaxy scream in delight. Catholics in side space marking time till they exit and re-enter our universe near an alien sun clap and yell their delight and pray their thankfulness. The Pope, in his apartment on Mars, loses his hat jumping up and down in celebration. He declares a miracle and names twenty saints. He further names Tomasso a hero of the Church.

  The alien, and then Tommaso fall to their knees and pray together. Tommaso leading the prayer of Christlikeness. It is translated by the artificial intelligence in his suit and broadcast to the alien from a speaker hung around his neck.

  “Dear Jesus, help me to spread your fragrance everywhere I go;

  Flood my soul with your spirit and life;

  Penetrate and possess my whole being so completely

  That all my life may be only a radiance of yours;

  Shine through me and be so in me

  That everyone with whom I come into contact

  May feel your presence within me.

  Let them look up and see no longer me—but only Jesus. Amen.”

  Thus, did Tommaso meet Azire. Azire and Tommaso were from that moment on inseparable.

  Chapter Ten

  Azire and Nine Steps

  The Nine Steps system. The name is Lecatian translated into English. The Lecatians count nine planets in the night sky of their system. They consider them steps in their mythology. Their religion. Nine steps. The steps to heaven. The steps of a pure and honorable life. The nine large Gas Giants spin and sometimes when the night is clear the stripes and swirls of the Gas Giants’ weather bands on the three nearest Gas Giants are visible to the naked eye. It is a magical sight. It is easy to imagine how these aliens, these people, would incorporate these large beautiful night time bodies into their religion.

  The Lecatians are a deeply religious people. There is only one religion, and it is rooted in deep mysticism. That they revere the cross is a tremendous coincidence. Brother Sebastian back in Sol system believes it is a sign from God; however, he is always looking for mysticism and signs anywhere he can find them.

  The Lecatian home world, being a double planet and the smaller of the two by far, has numerous eclipses. Once in every six days, caused by their larger planet pair completely blocking the systems sun. The frequent eclipses last for almost a full day, so one in every six, nine steps days are spent in complete darkness. During these times of complete darkness, for a full day, the nine planets, the nine Gas Giants in the outer system dominate the night sky.

  The average Lecatian is two meters tall plus or minus five percent. Their mass is one hundred and nine kilos plus or minus ten percent. They are large and imposing. By mass and height, they are larger than men. Tommaso reaches just over two meters and some of the Lecatians tower over him by several centimeters.

  Their planet is arid and dusty and full of static electricity. Everywhere they go, the first wave of Sol system colonists generates static and shock each other continuously. The Lecatians find this incredibly funny. Something in their exoskeleton and its tough leathery covering makes them impermeable to static. They don’t generate it, and they can’t discharge it from the humans either. The off-red colored sand clings to everything i
t touches that the human colonists brought with them. It doesn’t cling to the Lecatians, just the humans and their belongings. It is comical to see a human and Lecatian together. The humans are invariably covered in fine red dirt from head to toe. The Lecatians leathery skin and leather clothing remain remarkably free of the sand.

  The larger planet in the double planet system looms large in the sky, day or night. A giant greenish blue ball in the sky that never changes. The runaway greenhouse effect gases on the planet have made it both unchangeable and unchanging. A smooth and polished looking large blue green ball in the sky, permanently.

  There are no seas or lakes on the surface of Nine Steps. All of the water is trapped in ice beneath the surface or contained in large undersea reservoir lakes full of dirty, brown, fish-like creatures, and large, gray, whale like mammals. A full biological system resides under the ground in these seas. Small plankton, single and multicellular creatures are eaten by large filter feeder fish-like creatures.

  Small fish-like creatures feed on carcasses of the larger feeder filter creatures. Creatures that mimic the development line of sharks and squids and eels and every sort of life variety flourishes in these lakes. Given a chance to rise, life in its amazing complexity has followed a similar path to life on Sol system.

  On the surface, insect like creatures are in abundance. These are the primary part of the Lecatian diet. They cast large nets and capture these creatures by the hundreds and eat them right from the net raw or cooked with their evening meal.

  There is a worm-like creature that mass in the hundreds of kilos as well, they dig their way through the sand moving from underground reservoir to underground reservoir feeding on smaller creatures in the sand and earth. These wormlike creatures are hunted, and they are used to make the leather of the Lecatian clothing. The biota of life is incredible. It easily equals that of Sol system.

  The Lecatians are currently at the same point technologically speaking as the Sol system would have been in the year 1950. They use radio and are beginning to use television. They have some primitive ideas towards sending themselves into space, to chase their nine steps in the sky, but have not developed any of the industry or advanced knowledge that would make space travel possible.

  The first Lecatian to leave the surface of their planet insists on being taken to the end of the system to see what is past the nine steps. Colonists oblige. The multi-month journey is televised live all over the galaxy. The Lecatian leader is an instant celebrity galaxy wide.

  Azire, as the first Lecatian to meet a human, is honored and assumes a position as liaison between the races. Tommaso and he are inseparable. When they are not busy with official liaison duties they are often reading and studying together. Tommaso teaching Azire modern physics and engineering as well as the Catholic faith.

  Azire teaches Tommaso the religion of the Nine Steps. The logic and good will and belief that is needed to advance from one step to the next all the way to nine and salvation.

  The Lecatian culture is rapidly changed to accommodate the new reality of the universe around them, but they do manage to hang on to the core of their religion. This does not come without cost. The first real violence in the Lecatian culture takes place when several priests and lay persons fight each other over strict interpretation of scripture versus the known new reality of the universe around them. A church is burned.

  The Lecatian culture makes its way forward. Rapidly. Great strides. Their religion endures a reformation to accommodate the realities of the universe around them.

  Twelve years after their discovery and ten years after the arrival of man, the first colony ships with Lecatians aboard leaves their home system outward into the void. A crew of several hundred human Catholics and one hundred Lecatians make the leap for the Reade C system 43 light years distant.

  Mankind has found a partner.

  Chapter Eleven

  Everywhere you look

  Once the first intelligent life was found, the lessons learned in their discovery were quickly incorporated into the new and existing searches. The sudden burst of interest in the search for alien intelligence results in hundreds of thousands of new University students all over the galaxy studying the problem and looking into the void from their unique positions far away from Sol system.

  In 2520, the Nine Steps system was discovered and the intelligent Lecatians became our partners in exploration.

  In 2525 the Looper system was discovered with its intelligent Loops. The Loops are flightless birdlike creatures, similar to the early dinosaurs on Sol system. They have a mouth full of teeth in an elongated beak. Their thin leathery skin encloses hollow bones and flightless but very nimble wings with eighteen finger-like appendages on each side of the body. Their rear legs bend into three different directions, from a complex set of joints and ligaments and rigid bones to hold their mass. The Loop creatures, or people, stand over three meters and mass four hundred kilos on average. Though they are intelligent, their culture is very primitive and they are completely unapproachable. They lack the ability to assimilate technological change into their worldview. Their intelligence is narrow and lacks the ability to cope with any change.

  A small group of scientists manages to isolate a small population of Loops and then isolate their young from their village and raise them in a static but high-tech environment that includes modern technology. Even these people, these Loops, raised under very humane and high technology methods in a specialized environment go mad and kill themselves in large numbers. The Pope orders all Catholics off their planet. The Loops, although quite bright, will never be capable of assimilating into modern society.

  In 2526 there is a rash of discovery. Several different solar systems with an advanced intelligence capable of space flight are discovered. The same species of people from Gerrald F have managed to populate seventeen nearby systems within eight light years of their home system. The people are on a near technologic plane with humanity. They have no advanced knowledge of ripples or Hawking radiation, black holes, or faster than light travel. They have used generation ship technology and force of will to reach their nearby stars. They have been using Bussard ramjets as primary propulsion of their generation ships. A technological engineering system skipped by humanity. The people on these systems are symmetrical, that is where their similarity to humanity ends. Tentacles and suction cups replace arms and legs. They are underwater constantly. Apparently, they cannot survive on dry land. Their language is impossible to translate. It depends upon the grasp of various cups on their primary tentacle arms. Artificial intelligence routines run continuously attempting a break through and develop a way to communicate with the aliens with no success.

  The Mormon colony ship that reaches the system first finds an aggressive and dangerous race. The Mormons lose communication almost immediately after arriving in the Gerrald F system. No communications attempts with the aliens were acknowledged. A second set of Colonists from the Mother Catholic Church also lose communication almost immediately after arriving in one of the alien systems.

  Pope Nicholas orders a quarantine of the systems. For the first time in memory, the Catholic Church begins the construction of ships whose purpose is military in nature. The Pope orders the quarantine of these dangerous aliens, he will not suffer any more violence and loss of life. First, dozens of war craft are built then hundreds, then thousands. Millions of Catholics join the newly created Space Corps Military Branch of the Church.

  Researchers and scientists assume an aggressive warlike posture and plan, engineer and build interstellar ships capable of waging war.

  Ships are built and fitted with large high energy lasers systems. Ships are fitted with torpedoes that are high energy kinetic kill space vehicles scaled down in size. High energy Hawking radiation fields are built to project invisible radioactive death far from the ships.

  Ships are fitted with long range Hawking radiation containment field equipment. Enough containment fields to lob a black hole through a nearby shi
p.

  Ancient rail jet technology is adapted for space warfare and kinetic kill applications. Rail guns capable of launching hundreds of thousands of depleted uranium rounds at significant percentages of C and engineered and constructed on these war ships.

  Several Bussard ram jets are constructed and tested to better learn the technology of these aliens. Their use as a weapon of mass destruction is evaluated. Humanity maintains the quarantine and waits.

  In 2538, two intelligent civilizations are discovered. They are apparently descended from a common ancestor. The two systems are four light years separate but connected by a series of eight brown dwarf systems. Life created on one system was somehow seeded to the other through the swapping of comets or other unattached objects traded between systems over millennia.

  Over the next forty years, eleven new intelligent species are found. By 2566, humanity has by and large forgotten the aggressive people of the Gerrald F system. That is the year they came after us.