by Allen Steele
For the next six days, the sat tracked Na as it fell toward Earth, its microwave beam continuously pressing the rock while toasting its surface. Comstock followed it from a safe distance, its crew carefully keeping out of the beam’s path while constantly monitoring Na’s position, watchful for any significant changes in trajectory or surface appearance. And meanwhile, back home …
Back home, we did what we’d always done. We waited. This time, though, it was for a different reason. For the first time, Galactique was all but forgotten. The fate of our little lost starship was the furthest thing from our minds.
None of us slept well during those days. We took shifts in the MC, but more often than not, there were two or three people in the MC. There was a certain fascination with the screen displaying Na’s position. It never seemed to change, but we watched it constantly, hoping for the moment the asteroid would deviate from the dotted line of its projected course. Sometimes there were periods when Mom and Dad would both be there. At first, they said little to each other, but as the hours became days and the days stretched into a week, they gradually began to talk a little more.
Early one evening after dinner, I stepped out of the house for a little fresh air. The sun was just beginning to go down, and the crickets and tree frogs were commencing their nocturnal symphony. I’d only strolled as far as the driveway, though, when voices came to me from the side of the yard. Looking around, I saw my mother and father sitting together on a bench beneath a maple tree overlooking the hillside. What they were talking about, I didn’t know, but the conversation was relaxed, not angry … and then, unexpectedly, I heard something I thought I’d never hear again.
I heard my mother laugh.
I didn’t say anything but instead quietly turned around and walked back into the house. Next morning, though, I had my own conversation with Dad. I won’t bore you with the details, but we had a long talk that cleared the air about a lot of things, and when it was over, I put my arms around him and gave him a long hug, and there were tears on both of our faces when we finally stepped apart.
We were a family again.
Late that afternoon, Jensen rushed into the house, where everyone else was beginning to gather for dinner. He’d just received word from Comstock that they had spotted a large gaseous plume jetting from Na’s surface, on the side of the asteroid facing them and perpendicular to Earth. Everyone dropped what they were doing and rushed back to the observatory, where we crowded around the console and studied the real-time images from the mining ship. Nearly all the pictures were remote and fuzzy; nonetheless, something that looked like a geyser was streaming outward from Na. Comstock’s mass spectrometer identified it as water vapor with traces of carbon; apparently, the beam had found a subsurface ice deposit and, over the course of the last several days, heated it to the point where it finally burst through the surface as a steam jet.
And then, even as we watched in awe, Na began to move from its projected course.
Here’s what everyone knows: combined with the steady pressure of the beam itself, the jet caused Na to slip the necessary few degrees from its fatal trajectory until, three weeks later, it sailed harmlessly past Earth. It came close, all right—130,000 miles, a little less than half the distance to the Moon—but just far enough away that it wasn’t captured by our gravity well and pulled in. Observatories and backyard astronomers in the Pacific caught telescopic pictures of a bright spot of light that slid across the predawn sky far above the ocean, but within less than a minute, Na was gone.
But Dad stayed.
16
And so did Robert and I.
There was no reason for us to remain together on Juniper Ridge, really. Grandpa was getting up in years, but now that my father had returned, he and my mother could continue monitoring the instruments in hopes that Galactique might one day resume contact. Yet I didn’t want to leave my parents alone while they were still mending their relationship, and since the Galactique Project was now receiving generous funds from DARPA, I didn’t necessarily have to go back to teaching.
So Robert and I sold our house in Leverett and moved to Crofton, where we took up residence in the cottage. I took a new job with the state as an online tutor, and we built a studio for Robert, where he could continue sculpting—he moved from holos to old-fashioned ceramic pottery and became pretty good at that—and time passed as it always did in the Berkshires: slowly and gracefully, the seasons marking the accumulating years.
In this way, we quietly entered the twenty-second century. There had once been a time when all I’d wanted to do was leave this place. If Na had taught me one thing, though, it was the same lesson others had learned. Our lives are short, our friends and family are precious, and sometimes it’s okay to stay in one place if that’s where you find your life’s true purpose. Mine was on Juniper Ridge. I understood that now, and I no longer minded.
My son Julian was born a couple of years later. Again, a midwife delivered him at home … indeed, the very same one who’d helped Mom bring me into the world thirty-two years earlier. Mom, Dad, Robert, and Joni were with me, and Joni had to catch Robert when he nearly fainted, but this time, no one went down to the Kick Inn and got drunk.
In fact, never again did I see my father take a drink of anything stronger than coffee or iced tea. He remained sober ever since. And not long after he and Mom started sleeping in the same bed again, my mother surprised us all by saying, ever so casually one Saturday morning over breakfast, that she’d like to go into Pittsfield and do a little shopping. It was the first time she’d been off the mountain in many years, and from what I could tell, she enjoyed every minute of her return to the world.
Grandpa remained with us long enough to see Julian take his first steps, and then late one afternoon, he took a nap and rejoined Grandma. His grave is on the hillside not far from the observatory, and every once in a while, I’ll go down there, freshen up the roses on his stone, and have a little talk with him.
And we finally heard from Galactique again.
I’d just come home from driving Julian and Joni’s daughter Kate to middle school—from the day my son was born, I was determined that he’d grow up with other kids, even if Robert and I had to take him ourselves every day—when Robert rushed out of the studio and grabbed me in his arms. He was still whirling me around and laughing his head off when Mom came out of the observatory. She was smiling as she told me the news: she’d just received a message from Galactique informing us that there had been minor accident with the communications laser but that it was fixed and the ship was still on course for Gliese 667C-e.
I only wished that Grandpa could have been there, yet he’d died still believing that Galactique’s silence was only temporary and we’d eventually hear from it again. Faith is a great thing. The trick is keeping it.
Dad sent a brief message acknowledging the signal, yet we knew that it wouldn’t be received until the ship had reached its destination. Indeed, that was the last transmission from Juniper Ridge; there was no point in any further communiqués from us.
Yet Galactique continued to send us regular updates of its condition. Over the next twenty years or so, we received word of what it was doing as it closed in on Eos. A couple of months after Mom passed away, Dad and I were in the MC when we learned that Galactique reached Gliese 667C. The AI had jettisoned its beamsail and had deployed its magnetic brake and was now guiding the ship for a close flyby of the star so that it could capture its solar wind and commence the braking maneuver in preparation for orbital rendezvous with Eos. Julian was on his honeymoon, but he was happy to hear the news.
Dad left us again ten months later, this time for a place where no one could follow. Robert and I were now alone on Juniper Ridge, although Julian and his wife Clarice would occasionally come to visit us. I’d just read a letter from him, telling me that I’d soon become a grandmother, when Robert walked into the room. He was carrying a printout, and from the grin on his face, I knew at once that it was the message from Ga
lactique I’d been expecting.
“It made it, didn’t it?” I asked.
“Uh-huh. Right on schedule. And there’s this too.”
He handed the message to me. It was short:
SANJAY HAS WOKEN UP, AND HE SAYS HELLO.
Robert rested his hands on the back of my chair and leaned over my shoulder. “Who is Sanjay?” he asked.
“Someone my father told me about,” I replied, “a long time ago.”
INTERLUDE
Arrival
Galactique reached the end of its journey as a seed falling from the stars.
As it entered the outermost limits of the heliosphere surrounding Gliese 667C, the starship jettisoned the enormous beamsail that had served as its primary means of propulsion. The sail—riddled with micrometeorite holes, its once-silver outer surface blotched by radiation a cancerous shade of gray—fell away like an enormous portobello mushroom. The AI controlling the vessel observed its disappearance with no sense of loss. It was a component that had served its purpose well but was no longer needed and thus could be discarded.
It’s important to know this about Galactique’s AI: it was not a human intelligence. It had no emotions. It did not possess a sense of wonder. It did not even reckon the passing of time the same way its creators did. This nameless, voiceless, but nonetheless cognitive machine was a quantum computer more technologically advanced than any other AI built on Earth at the same time, but a human would have had more in common with a bumblebee than this cold automaton. It observed, analyzed, and made decisions in a purely logical manner, obeying conditions and precepts programmed into its memory core by the people who’d created it. At the same time, though, it was capable of independent thought, reaching conclusions and acting upon them of its own volition.
Therefore, as it entered the solar system that had been its destination for over half a century, Galactique was no longer a mere vessel but instead an intelligent being. But it wasn’t born of flesh and blood, and this was both its strength and its vulnerability.
Once the sail was gone, the ship fired its midsection maneuvering thrusters and performed a 180-degree turn that put its aft end in the direction of travel. Once this was done, a small, drum-shaped module located at the sail’s base sprang open, and a coiled metallic hoop unfolded. Attached by a network of cables, the magnetic sail gradually expanded to several times its original size; once it was fully deployed, an electromagnetic charge was introduced to the hoop. This formed a magnet bubble around the ship that captured and deflected Gliese 667C’s solar wind, thus causing a braking effect.
Slowly yet inexorably, Galactique began to decelerate from its .5c cruise speed. As it did so, the AI repeatedly fired its thrusters, making minute course changes so that the ship entered the system on a proper heading. It did not head straight for its target world, though, but instead vectored toward the outermost planet, Gliese 667C-g, otherwise known as Gaea. By the time it reached the immense rocky world, Galactique had shed most of its interstellar velocity. It jettisoned the magnetic sail and, at the lander’s aft end, inflated a large ballute heat shield. It then performed an intricate aerobraking maneuver that used the ballute to reduce its speed even further against Gaea’s dense methane atmosphere.
Galactique slingshot around Gaea and emerged from the other side. Its two-step deceleration procedure successfully accomplished, it continued to approach Gliese 667C’s family of planets in a slower and more sedate fashion.
As it continued its journey into the system, the ship raised its sensory antenna and commenced a careful survey of the remaining seven planets, confirming and updating the information learned about them by astronomers on Earth. By human standards, the Gliese 667C system was uninhabitable. The outermost of a triad of three class-M stars in the Scorpius constellation, the star the International Astronomical Union had decided to name Calliope—the two companion stars had been christened Aether and Bacchae—was only one-third the size of Earth’s sun and considerably cooler as a result. Indeed, even though it was called a red dwarf, its proper color was more a pale orange, like that of a stoplight that needed to be replaced. Moreover, the orbits of all seven of its planets were less than 60 percent of an astronomical unit, the average distance of Earth from its sun, and most of them were less than .22 AUs from their primary, putting them closer to Calliope than Mercury was from Sol.
However, the similarities ended there. Because Calliope was much smaller than Sol, its habitable zone was closer to the sun, as well. Thus, while Gaea’s closest neighbor, Demeter, also lay beyond the habitable zone, the two inmost planets—Gliese 667C-b and 667C-h, or Bona Dea and Hestia—were too hot to sustain liquid water on their surfaces. From long-range instruments raised from their bays in its service module, Galactique determined that Bona Dea, located a mere .05 AU from its sun, was a molten world of active volcanoes much like Io, while Hestia, just .08 AU away, was little more than a small, burned-out cinder.
Galactique dismissed them as unworthy of further attention and focused on the three planets within Calliope’s foreshortened habitable zone.
Gliese 667C-c and 667C-f, Chronus and Faunus, were located at distances of .12 AU and .15 AU, respectively. Both were so-called superearths, terrestrial planets larger and more massive than Earth and therefore having higher surface gravities. In addition, Chronus was still much too warm, and since it was rotation-locked as well, with one hemisphere perpetually facing Calliope, its carbon-dioxide atmosphere was too tenuous to sustain life. Faunus wasn’t much better. It, too, was rotation-locked, and while its far side was just cool enough to be livable, its surface gravity would have crushed any human who tried to make it home. Galactique took their measure and rejected them without a second thought.
But Eos … Eos was something else entirely.
Gliese 667C-e had always been a controversial destination for the Galactique Project. Indeed, shortly after the discovery of Calliope’s planetary system in the early twenty-first century, the very existence of the fifth planet had been disputed, considered by some to be a mistake made in the optical interferometry methods used to spot it. Yet further observations by advanced orbital telescopes confirmed that Eos was really there, and in time, it went to the top of the list of likely candidates for human colonization.
As Galactique approached Eos, it made a closer observation of the planet. Occupying a semielliptical orbit at the outer edge of Calliope’s habitable zone, the planet had a diameter of 10,533 miles, making it approximately one-third larger than Earth, and a surface gravity of 1.5 g, half again higher than Earth’s. The planet was not rotation locked but turned on its axis every twenty-six hours, with Eos itself making a full revolution around Calliope every sixty-two days. So while the planet’s slight orbital eccentricity allowed for a regular change of seasons, those seasons were incredibly short—only fifteen and a quarter days each for winter, spring, summer, and autumn.
Eos possessed a thin atmosphere chiefly composed of carbon dioxide. Nonetheless, there was enough oxygen and hydrogen present to allow liquid water to form and produce broad, shallow oceans and seas across most of its surface, with its poles surrounded by glacial regions. Since the planet had no moons, there were no lunar tides. However, the proximity of its neighboring planets meant that the sea levels rose and fell ever so slightly when Faunus and Demeter rose above the horizon. There were no obvious signs of life, though, let alone habitation. There were few indications of photosynthesis; the atmospheric carbon dioxide was probably the result of volcanic activity. That was a good thing; everything was predicated upon the discovery of an unoccupied world.
Geographically, Eos bore some resemblance to Earth. Its dry land was mainly comprised of large continents, with smaller islands and archipelagos scattered here and there. An abundance of volcanoes both active and dormant, along mountain chains and rift valleys, hinted at a geologically unstable past in which tectonic shifts had carved up the landmasses while the oceans were being formed. The global climate was most temperate at the
equator; even as Galactique made its preliminary survey, it tentatively identified a coastal region of a major continent just south of the equator, along with a small chain of islands just offshore, as being a likely target for colonization.
Remote observation could only reveal so much. Before Galactique left Earth, mission planners knew that the mission’s final make-or-break point would be when the ship reached its final destination. And so, as Galactique fired its thrusters for its primary approach to Eos, it entered the phase in which it would decide whether the efforts of its creators and their descendants had been a colossal waste of time.
Once again, Galactique made a long, shallow dive through the planetary atmosphere, using the heat shield to brake itself. From the ground on the night side, the arriving starship appeared as a fireball streaking across the dark sky. Firing its lateral thrusters, Galactique emerged from the atmosphere and assumed geosynchronous orbit above the planet’s equator.
Then it went to work.
A small port in the module housing the biopods opened, and a small probe was jettisoned. The probe fell into the atmosphere, and shortly after entry, it discarded its outer aeroshell and deployed its parachute. The probe drifted to a soft landing near the region Galactique had tentatively selected as the primary site for colonization, where it immediately opened the half dozen panels protecting its instrument array.
For a very long while—time was unimportant to Galactique, so it paid almost no attention to measuring its passage—the probe sampled the atmosphere, dug soil from the ground and analyzed its composition, and studied the chemistry of this world. It quickly determined that the DNA of its organic molecules was left-handed, which was crucial to the future habitability of Eos. If their chirality had been right-handed, it would have immediately doomed any attempt to transplant Earth life to this planet, for even the simplest of plants would have been poisoned by the Eosian soil. So this was a fortunate outcome.