REAP 23

by J J Perry

  In the fourth millennium after the asteroid, the world was evenly and well populated. Science and art had thrived. The seas continued to rise as the ice age was long past and the temperature of the planet had continued to rise. Bahama, once a flourishing state, was almost completely under water, consisting only of islands as it had been in the ancient past. Hurricanes destroyed or breached its dikes repeatedly until the country had surrendered to the change.

  The planet had returned to a climate that existed for the twelve thousand years between ice ages. Since REAP, continents had drifted one kilometer, some more and some less. From space, the gross appearance had changed little, but from the ground level, the coastlines and other areas were hardly recognizable.

  Through a litany of evolutionary forces including plagues and cold, humans were a little different than they had been ten thousand years earlier. The average height had dropped ten centimeters to about 160. Some had developed more body hair particularly over the neck, shoulders, and upper back, where heat loss was maximal. Those who were so endowed flaunted and groomed their mane as sign of great beauty. Others had implants or other genetic manipulations to resemble the beautiful. Images of pre- and post-ice age humans showed a subtle difference in facial features. Noses were often a bit longer but flatter. Ears were smaller. Head sizes were proportionally larger, having not decreased with the loss of height.

  Fossil fuels were no longer pumped from the ground. Sunlight could be converted to usable energy with an efficiency that approached 90 percent with a few technologies. Liquid and gas fuels remained the mainstay for mobile engines. Transportation for both short and long journeys was accomplished using a grid and chains of cars together for parts of a trip and then breaking up and forming new collectives that had different origins but similar destinations all coordinated by a system that merged local and global needs and schedules with minimal disruption to the riders. Space travel within the solar system was commonplace for industry but rarely for entertainment. It was from this world that contact with REAP missions was attempted.

  14.1

  3947 AA

  A short, myopic, young woman browsed the archives of the library of Yucatan Regional University from a cramped desk in her messy apartment nearby. Smudged pale walls, worn asphalt tiles, beaten corners, and nicks and grooves in the writing surface hinted of generations of students living in poverty attending the old school, which itself had but few aged buildings, being replenished on a continual basis by grants, taxes, and donations.

  “Think I just found the topic of my dissertation!” Porliche Pang Brewthon erupted, putting both arms above her large orbital head in triumph. Her small mouth grinned, full of square off-white teeth. Her face was dominated by large, at least for her size, glasses with dark-brown square frames.

  “What did you say?” Bhat Brewthon asked his mate. Like his wife, he was Mayan in appearance, brown skin, round head, and a shock of black hair. His eyes were hazel, not the typical brown. Both were just short of plump.

  “My dissertation. I found an intriguing story from 1803, one that involves religion and space. You could help me with it.”

  He joined her at the meter-wide curved screen and looked. He played with her coffee-brown hair as he read.

  “You’re jiggling my glasses, sweetie.”

  “Sorry. What are you looking at?”

  “When I was looking at historical events that had a religious theme, I found a series of articles about people from a sect that discovered an eight-thousand-year-old archeological site. They claimed that there was a message from an expedition sent to some other planet. The planet, they say, is enough like ours that humans could live there.”

  “Sweet. Where was this site?”

  “In France.”

  “Where in the hell is France?”

  “It’s a state or maybe a territory in Atlantic.”

  “So you think there’s a dissertation in this?”

  “I need to do more reading. I think I’ll run this past my professor and see if the topic will do for my project. It looks like some of this was suppressed by the governments at the time, so there’s probably a lot of material hidden. It will be a ton of fun to search.”

  Porliche stood up, stretched, and turned to Bhat. “I’m so excited!” She threw her glasses, clattering on the wooden workspace, and threw her arms around his neck. “It involves astronomy that you can help with.” She stood on her toes and gave him a peck on the lips. “And religious history, my major, a perfect combination.” She jumped up and straddled him, looking him hungrily in the eye, threw her head back, hair almost touching the floor and squealed, “I’m soooooo excited!” She pulled up and kissed him hard. “Take me to heaven.” He was more than happy to comply. They had been married less than a year, and the newlywed thrill was still strong.

  The next day, she returned exhilarated to their apartment with a tentative thumbs-up from her advisor. Bhat was at work. She sat at her computer for eight hours with music vibrating the empty spaces as she collected more articles, almost ignoring Bhat when he came home from the Plik Observatory. Progress was slow, as information was hard to find. She sat at the terminal for days, leaving only for a couple of classes and basic necessities. At the end of two weeks, she had collected data that included documents that went back ten thousand years. Most of what she copied into her computer had not been viewed in over a thousand years as far as she could tell. She found some writings by Kirik Gwolono, a professor at Saharia University over two thousand years earlier, who had rediscovered information about manned space flights and sought to find the headquarter building in the frozen wastelands. His wife began the Reaper religion. In truth, it didn’t start with her; she simply revived her version of it. Professor Gwolono’s papers were replete with references, most of which she could not find. She sent an inquiry to the University of Borigine on the north coast of Australia and found that they maintained some references peculiar to their university as proprietary information and not available except to people on site and for a fee.

  That obstacle was a devastating disappointment compounded by problems extracting information from the Bunker. It was now a state park, a protected historical site combined with some other science relics. It had few visitors and held little interest for tourists and others. It, too, had a small archive that contained information available only to people on site and, of course, for a substantial fee.

  The travel costs and fees to access the closed intranets were both far out of reach of Porliche and well beyond what was available in grant money. Her paper would not meet the criteria for a dissertation without data that existed but was not provided. Without a lot of money, it appeared she had wasted weeks of work. She felt defeated and plodded slowly down to the beach where she walked in the depth of discouragement. It was so close and yet so far out of reach. Her heart ached.

  That weekend, Bhat’s parents had invited the young couple for dinner. They lived on a hill looking out over the Caribbean in a spacious house on a large lot surrounded by native Zen-inspired xeriscape. Porticos and sparse interior walls allowed the sea breezes to freshen the home. The four of them sat in a dining room that was open to the east and that had an aqua-colored pool with a disappearing edge that framed the seascape and beach below.

  “Bhat tells me that you have a theme for your thesis and that you have been working day and night on it,” said Mr. Thaut Brewthon, the wealthy owner of a waste recycling business. He looked much like his son except for thinning hair with silvery streaks. He dressed in expensive leisure clothes, powder blue and imported from the land to the north named Texica.

  “Had,” she corrected. “It was the absolute perfect topic for a dissertation from texts thousands of years old.”

  “The topic is religion?”

  “There was a religion based on travelers from here to other solar systems.”

  “It sounds like pilgrims,” said Minnae Brewtho
n, the very thin mother-in-law. She had a long rectangular head, pale skin, and blue eyes, unlike most of her neighbors and her family. Her fingers were knurled and knotted, her back bowed, her breathing raspy. She hated physicians, and without them, her condition was as it was.

  “How quaint,” Thaut replied.

  “Go ahead, my dear,” Minnae wheezed.

  “About ten thousand years ago, missions were sent to twenty-five places thought to be compatible with life. They were to signal back if the planet was suitable.”

  “Oh my! I had no idea they could travel in space that long ago,” Minnae exclaimed.

  “They could and did. As the ice age approached the base facility, a religion developed around the base, specifically the bunker where the signal from the ships would be received. The place was eventually covered in ice for thousands of years. The knowledge of the missions was buried as well. Around two thousand years ago, as the ice sheet receded, a form of this religion sprung up again. Believers found this place and found, or at least claimed to find, a signal that indicated one good, habitable planet. They claimed there were three others that were not perfect but possibly compatible with repopulation. I find the whole thing fascinating.”

  “That is interesting, but I thought your interests were in religion,” stated Thaut.

  “My interest is in history and how religious people have altered it because of things they do motivated by their beliefs.”

  “I take it that these original space travelers were motivated by religion then,” Thaut offered.

  “I don’t know yet, but I doubt it. I may not be able to find out. There are some texts that are unavailable except to visitors on site in France and Borigine. There is no money to fund a trip of that length or pay for the rights to see the information I need.”

  “Where in the hell is France?”

  “It’s in Atlantica,” Bhat said flatly. “That’s a name from antiquity, like Greece.”

  “The locals still use it,” Porliche added.

  Music started up gradually. Then a soft voice indicated that dinner was ready. The automated kitchen was in the process of completing the meal. The first course sat on the table. The topic of conversation turned until hours later as Bhat and Porliche were standing at the door, leaving.

  “Just one more thing before you leave,” Thaut said. “How important is it to look at those documents in Borigine and in Prance, or what-the-hell it’s called, in Atlantica?”

  “France. My paper is dead without them,” Porliche said. “I’m looking for funding to travel, but that seems to be unlikely at this point. I’ve already started looking for a different topic.”

  “I would be pleased to fund your trip, if you mention me in your book.” Thaut held a pipe in his hand and stood comfortably in his affluence, the floor-length blue robe, and Moroccan leather slippers. Minnae stood smiling behind him, the likely instigator of the most generous offer. Her kyphoscoliotic humped back made her a full head shorter than her husband, about the height of a twelve-year-old girl in Yucatan. She wore tight clothes to emphasize her small frame and utter lack of fat. She wiped her hands with a towel for no reason. The kitchen automation did all the cleaning.

  All Porliche could do was grunt in breathy glottal stops and look between Thaut and Bhat for several seconds. “You don’t have to do that,” she finally blurted out.

  “I know. And I wouldn’t do it if it promoted some religion. That, however, does not seem to be your goal, and I like the idea. I would love to help you out.” He puffed thoughtfully, squirting jets of smoke as he did. “I bet I can make it tax deductible if I make it a donation to the university.”

  Porliche threw her arms around the burly man. “Thank you. Thank you so very, very much.”

  14.2

  Three weeks later, in the evening, she was traveling in the first-class cabin for the trip to Preben, the major city in Saharia, to be followed by another supersonic flight to Australia. She had arranged four days at the University of Borigine. It was not terribly far from an ancient town named Darwin, a name still familiar after so many thousands of years. She took subsonic rail from the terminal, seventy kilometers away, to get her to the university minutes later.

  It was noon and hot, the sun almost directly overhead, fierce in its heat. She was tired after half a day of travel and wanted to rest. She checked in at a new on-campus high-rise and dropped her bag in her room on the fifty-seventh floor. Rather than sleep, she left in search of the archival access section of the library.

  The campus sprawled for miles, it seemed. Buildings of all ages were here. Some looked hundreds of years old to her. The library was fairly new and gleamed as it loomed high among other tall buildings. The campus, in addition to being large and tall, was crammed with students and others. Spreading banyans and other trees provided a canopy over most of her route. It took longer to walk the one-half kilometer to the library than it took to come seventy kilometers from the terminal. She was sweating when she entered the building, wishing she had found a cooler route.

  Archival access was near the top of the building. Porliche smiled inside, expecting it to be in the fourth level of the basement. She was the only person left on the elevator when it stopped on the eighty-first floor. She presented her credentials, including her funding card, which were verified within a few seconds. She got a temporary ID and computer access codes. She was then allowed to roam where she wished. Most of the computer bays were vacant. She took one, did a fingerprint sign-in, and attached her drive to the computer. After the computer scanned the drive for viruses, she began looking for the Gwolono references she needed. Each was a restricted access requiring a fingerprint sign-in and a fee deducted from the funding card. These documents were mostly scanned papers at extremely high resolution with microscopic accuracy and full color. She was allowed to acquire only one verified copy of each that were encoded such that if unauthorized copies were found, she could be readily identified as the source. Cha-ching. She stored the needed information on her drive.

  After a few hours, she could not keep her eyes open. It was middle of the night according to her circadian rhythms. She had enough to review back in her room. She made the walk through a hotter but less congested campus back to her place and crashed fully clothed on the bed.

  What seemed like a few minutes later, repetitive knocking at her door gradually awakened her. Looking at the time, it was early evening, three hours since she fell asleep. The knocking persisted, so she opened the door. There stood a tall woman who extended her hand as she spoke.

  “Hi. I’m Nin, a professor of religious history. Is this an inconvenient time to talk?”

  Nin was dressed like so many others at this university. She wore a one-piece, skintight, dark-blue suit that looped around her neck, leaving her shoulders and arms bare, and extended to her upper thighs. It appeared that undergarments were optional in Australia. Her hair was straight and light blond with a mane that extended down her neck and onto her back. It was a trait, Porliche knew, that began naturally in the brief ice age. Many liked the look and the practicality and underwent genetic engineering so their offspring would have the advantage of more warmth and style. Nin, whose hair was long enough to reach below her waist, extended an ID badge with her holographic photo and name.

  “I’m really tired. What’s this about?”

  “It’s about the documents you researched today.”

  “I had permission.”

  “It’s not about that. I would like to talk about the reasons you are looking at Gwolono materials and references, that’s all. Let me buy you dinner. You must be hungry as well as tired.”

  “Give me a minute. Come in.”

  A few minutes later, they were on the top floor of the hotel in an informal restaurant. Nin shook her head as she sat so as not to sit on her longest stands of mane. They each ordered a glass of Australian Bordeaux wine.

  “Y
ou have come a long way,” Nin said, “to work on your dissertation. That’s admirable. So your interest is not religious?”

  “You look young to be a professor,” she said, adjusting her glasses.

  “Clean living or chemistry, you’re wondering. I’m over forty, unfortunately. What’s your theme?”

  “In general, it is in how religious events alter history.”

  “Big topic. Religion has shaped history as much or more than has knowledge. Gwolono and his followers had a negligible effect on world history, but it had some effects on Saharia. It was a brief and tiny movement, lasting a few hundred years.”

  “But the notion, the possibility, that mankind found a planet like ours where we could live as we do here would be a sentinel historical event.”

  “I agree. It would be if it happened. It was never verified.”

  “I am not certain about that. What I suspect is that no credence was given to these people who found the Bunker. They were branded as religious zealots by both the Saharian and Atlantican governments and dismissed, possibly as a way of continuing the shaky peace agreement between them.”

  The restaurant was half empty and quiet. Porliche’s voice carried, and several diners turned. Both of them noticed and scooted their chairs closer together.

  “A conspiracy? You think the people in power suppressed this information?” Nin whispered, and the heads around them turned away.

  “They were politicians and, almost by definition, corrupt.”

  “You are a historian.” Nin smiled at her own joke.

  “I don’t know if there was a cover-up, and that’s not my main interest.”

  “It would be mine,” Nin interrupted.

  “I think there may be a way to figure out whether any messages were received on these instruments.”

  “How?”

  “Bhat, my husband and a scientist of sorts,”—she exaggerated slightly—“thinks it strange that no memory card or chip recorded the signal. There might be some obscure declassified reference to that in the information here or in Atlanticus.”