Diamonds in the Sky

by Mike Brotherton, Ed.

  She fell into the strand of clusters, galaxies flashing by on either side. Each galaxy was now hubcap-sized … she must have shrunk to only a million light-years tall. The galaxies were beautiful and terrible, shimmering glowing confections, spirals and disks and strange elongated commas. Most had a thick bulge in the center, a dense conglomeration of stars … the heat of the nearby ones felt like a burning road flare, and their gravity tugged at her stomach as she fell past. A barred spiral galaxy smashed itself to bits against her invisible leg as she passed, feeling like a hot buzz-saw of stars on her calf. She cried out from the pain. Another galaxy, this one an irregular elliptical giant almost half as big as she was, came rushing up at her and she curled up in terror, but it just missed her.

  What if the galactic core, with its super-massive black hole, had hit her? Could she die in the simulation? There were supposed to be safeguards … but the HVF was no ordinary sim, and between software bugs and experimental drugs she might be beyond its parameters.

  She looked around, fighting down nausea as her invisible, simulated head spun. After that last near-miss she seemed to have fallen into another empty area, this time a space between galaxies within a galaxy cluster. Based on how large that last galaxy had been, she must be about a hundred thousand light-years tall now, and the average distance between galaxies in a cluster was a few million light-years. She might be safe.

  But as she looked down, she realized she was not safe. She was falling toward the center of the simulation, and that center was Earth. The spiraling disk of the Milky Way, Earth’s home galaxy, grew and grew before her, looming with broad flat inevitability. It was like driving at full speed into a solid wall of headlights.

  Dana’s headlong rush seemed to slow as the Milky Way expanded to fill her view and more, spiral arms resolving themselves into broad rivers of individual stars, but she was still going to hit it hard. She angled herself forward, held her arms ahead of her like a diver, and held her breath.

  The galaxy had grown to about a hundred times as wide as her height, so she was perhaps a thousand light-years tall, when she smacked into one spiral arm. Stars and nebulae and interstellar gas battered her extended arms and face, but by now she was moving slowly enough that the blow was more like a sudden hailstorm than slamming into a wall. She gasped from the rough, scouring impact, but she didn’t think she’d broken anything.

  Stunned, she fell into the galaxy as though it were a mighty ocean. The shock of her body passing through the interstellar medium made new stars spring into life, crackling like popcorn on her leading edges.

  She was still shrinking. The hail of stars rapidly thinned to a hot drizzle. Soon she was mostly falling between them, with only the occasional searing impact. She must be about ten light-years tall now; the stars were about as far apart as the length of her leg. Each individual star was too small to be anything other than a blazing-hot bright point.

  She fell through near-emptiness for a long time before one star began to distinguish itself from the rest, directly ahead, as she knew it must. The Earth’s sun.

  How much longer could this game go on? Would she slam into the Earth, her body breaking open from the impact? Or would she keep going, deeper and deeper, vanishing into subatomic space?

  No. She knew that her dataset didn’t include anything smaller than a satellite.

  Unless her drug-addled brain kept going without data, making up smaller and smaller particles while her body gibbered in some mental hospital…

  A stiff, gritty breeze began to push at her, chilling her skin and making her blink. She was falling through the Oort cloud, the thin sphere of cold gas and chunks of ice that surrounded the sun out to a distance of two light-years … twice her own current height.

  The Oort surrounded her for a long time, as she shrank from a light-year to a light-month in height, her progress continuing to slow. Even at only one light-month tall she was still a hundred times bigger than the orbit of Neptune, the outermost of the true planets. There was an awful lot of mostly empty space in the solar system.

  She was a comet now, falling inward from the Oort. Would she leave a tail behind herself as she approached the sun?

  The solar system itself began to come into view before her now, the orbit of Neptune a skinny blue ellipse no longer than the palm of her hand. The ellipse only existed in the simulation, of course; the planet itself was far, far too small to be seen. Smaller ellipses just visible within Neptune’s orbit were the orbits of Uranus, Saturn, and Jupiter; Earth’s orbit was indistinguishable from the sun at this scale. She continued to decelerate, though still moving at an apparent speed that would certainly kill her if she slammed into a solid object with her physical body. And she was heading right for Earth.

  She had to do something before then. But what?

  Dana was now about the same size as the orbit of Neptune … about eight light-hours tall. Still falling at a speed impossible for any physical object. Still slowing. The chill wind of the Oort cloud had faded away to nothing; she was now near enough to the sun that the spaces between the planets were blown clear by the solar wind. The solar wind itself, nothing more than charged particles, was too tenuous to be felt even by her drug-heightened and computer-stimulated senses.

  The ellipses of the solar system continued to swell before her, the orbits of the inner solar system planets now becoming distinct from the sun. The planets themselves were still invisible, not even specks … she was perhaps one light-hour tall now, a bit bigger than the diameter of Mars’s orbit, and even mighty Jupiter was less than a hundredth of one percent of that.

  As the inner solar system expanded, she realized that the sun had begun to shift to one side. She was no longer falling directly toward it; she was now falling toward the Earth. She always had been, of course, though the distinction had not been apparent until now. The planet itself, far too small to see, was indicated by a blinking point on the ellipse of its orbit. Dead ahead.

  Time passed, as she drifted down through the vast emptiness of the solar system. She seemed to be merely hanging in space now, the stars through which she had plummeted so rapidly now standing completely still, the orbits of the inner planets expanding slowly ahead of her. But she knew she was still moving at a physically impossible speed. She’d shrunk from one light-hour to ten light-minutes tall in less than ten seconds … that meant that she was approaching the Earth at more than three hundred times the speed of light. It still felt like a crawl, with no nearby objects to compare herself to.

  Dana could no longer see all of Earth’s orbit at once, and the other inner planets’ orbits were too far to the sides now for her to see without turning her head. Ahead, the blinking point that represented the Earth began to expand into a visible circle, but soon she realized it was not the planet itself but the orbit of the Moon.

  Although Dana’s fall was still slowing, the appearance of a visible feature made it seem terribly fast again. The Moon’s orbit grew from invisibility to an ellipse the size of her head in a matter of seconds, rushing toward her like the mouth of an oncoming tunnel as seen from a speeding train. In and around that tunnel mouth she saw many flickering green curves — circles, ellipses, and parabolas representing the orbits of artificial satellites.

  One of those was the Sagan space telescope, poised at the L2 point on the far side of the Earth from the Sun, well beyond the Moon. And that was where Jeremy was.

  Dana’s heart beat harder at the thought.

  Her brain knew this was only a simulation, that Jeremy wasn’t really there. But her heart ached for him.

  They’d been apart for so many months, and now … now she was about to die. Her simulated body was going to slam into the solid simulated Earth, far denser and proportionally much bigger than the galaxy that had grazed her leg so painfully. She didn’t know what would happen to her then, but her terrified screaming monkey mind insisted that she would go splat, and between the bugs and the drugs she couldn’t be sure she wouldn’t.

  Th
e Moon’s orbit was now a skinny ellipse as long as her arm. She must be about five light-seconds tall, and coming in just above the plane of the ecliptic. The Sun was to her left, so Jeremy would be off to her right, on the far side of the Sun from the Earth and about four times farther from Earth than the Moon … just there.

  And there he was. A tiny, tiny green ellipse, no bigger than her fingertip, represented the Sagan telescope’s station-keeping orbit around the L2 point. She had already nearly passed it.

  Desperately she reached out to the speeding ellipse. I love you, Jeremy, she thought…

  …and her hand struck something hard and cool.

  The control panel. When it had flown out of her reach, it must have automatically returned to its default position by her right hand. But it was still invisible, and she hadn’t thought to look for it there.

  Heart pounding, Dana ran her clumsy right hand around the panel’s smooth rounded edge, fumbling for the Hide button in the upper right. She found it and pressed it.

  The control panel appeared.

  Beyond it, the Earth was already the size of a basketball, and growing rapidly. The simulation was cloudless, a photorealistic globe surrounded by the green circles of artificial satellites. She fell toward it, slowing but still moving at killing speed.

  The Earth shimmered in her drug-addled vision, huge and bold and powerful. The home of all humankind. So small in the immensity of the universe, yet so immense to her.

  As terrified as she was, she was overcome with awe.

  She couldn’t wait to tell Jeremy about this…

  Jeremy!

  Dana slammed the Stop button with her thumb. Immediately she halted her downward plunge.

  She hung, gasping, in space. She must be no more than five percent of a light-second tall; the Earth was now a sphere bigger in diameter than her height, its surface just an arm’s length away.

  She reached out and touched it. It was cool and smooth and very hard.

  Dana leaned against the Earth and sobbed with relief.

  * * *

  Dana peered anxiously at the people coming off the flight from Florida. There he was! Moving slowly, still unaccustomed to gravity, but she’d never mistake Jeremy’s face.

  And she could see it so clearly! Even only twenty days into the experimental treatment, she was already detecting an improvement in her vision.

  She ran to Jeremy and embraced him with a shriek of joy. “Did you bring me anything?” she teased.

  “Just a head full of stars,” he said, and kissed her. “How about you?”

  “Well…” Her headlong plummet through space had, amazingly, taken only five minutes of her HVF time. Once she’d recovered her composure, she’d gone on to complete her researches as planned … in fact, her unexpected side trip had given her some very interesting insights. “Actually, I have some important results to share. But first, I want to share something else…”

  Jeremy squawked as she picked him up and spun him around. Then she set him down, and they headed for the exit.

  Afterword:

  This story follows in the footsteps of the book “Cosmic View” by Kees Boeke (1957) and the films Cosmic Zoom by Eva Szasz (1968), Powers of Ten by Ray and Charles Eames (1977), and Cosmic Voyage by Bayley Silleck (1996).

  Like those earlier works, it attempts to give an understanding of the scale of the universe by giving a high-speed guided tour from the largest scale to the smallest. Because this is a short story rather than an art book or a movie, it lacks stunning visuals, but I hope that it offers instead the full range of senses and emotions provided by the reader’s imagination.

  If you’d like to take an interactive online version of Dana’s voyage, you can do so here:

  http://www.wordwizz.com/pwrsof10.htm

  © David Levine

  The Moon is a Harsh Pig

  by Gerald M. Weinberg

  Follow your inner moonlight; don’t hide the madness.

  - Allen Ginsberg

  “That’s the most disgusting thing I ever saw.”

  “It’s just a pig, Zeke. The biggest one on the planet, according to the sign. 527 kilos.”

  “Is that with or without the mud? Yuk.”

  “Mud is a perfectly natural environment for a pig,” said Astrid, studying the Planetary Fair sign as it scrolled past. “—or a sow. She’s a female.”

  “All the more disgusting.”

  How did I wind up with this bozo on my thesis trip? she thought. He’s cute and he’s smart, but he knows it and he’s trying too hard to convince me. Why can’t he just relax?

  He attempted to put his arm around her waist and steer her away from the pigpen, but she moved his hand away and stayed put. Too bad you couldn’t afford this trip on your own money. You linked up with him to qualify for a companion fare.

  In other words, you sold yourself for money. Now he thinks he’s entitled to collect. Well, deal with it, girl! He can be charming. Maybe I can get him to loosen up. Get his mind off my body.

  “Come on,” she said. “I’ll show you the rest of the fair, so you’ll see why Parma is so interesting.”

  He made a sour face, but allowed himself to be led outside the pig building into the open air. He took a deep breath, as if to remove the odor from his nose, then gazed up at the open sky. “I’d rather be sitting on the beach with you, smooching by the light of that fabulous moon.”

  “Stop acting as if I were one of those twenty-first century floozies. I’ve only known you for two days, and I have no intention of smooching with you. Besides, I came here to study the history and culture of this planet, not to make out with some oversexed rich, spoiled, know-it-all.”

  He checked the sleeves of his body suit for invisible lint. “What’s your major, anyway?”

  He sure dresses well, but doesn’t even seem to know that his fancy suit repels lint. Maybe that’s because his father’s tailor made it for him. “Exodus anthropology.”

  They approached a booth with distorting mirrors. He stopped to check his image, then changed his suit color to a pale gold. “What the heck is … whatever you said?”

  “Better I show you.” They were now passing the protein pavilion, so she invited him to take a seat at one of the outdoor tables. A waitress stopped at their table, and while Zeke was busy peering down her low-cut peasant blouse, Astrid ordered a sample plate along with a bottle of Cave de Rivesaltes.

  “All of the farmers of Parma came here to escape the Pollution. As an exodus anthropologist, my job is to study how their cultures have changed since they left Earth, and for what reasons.”

  “Who cares about that?” He cast his gaze around the crowd of other patrons, adjusting his suit to a brilliant crimson. “Looks just like any other backward planet. Look what they’re wearing.”

  The waitress arrived with a giant platter holding a loaf of crusty bread surrounded by artfully arranged slices and wedges of cheese. She set down a bottle of deep golden wine, pulled the cork, and offered him a small sample to taste.

  Astrid could see Zeke had no idea what he was tasting, but allowed him to accept the wine with a great pretense of sophistication.

  Once the waitress was gone and Zeke had stopped watching the sway of her departing hips, Astrid held up a wedge of cheese with a hard, dark brown rind.

  “Take this cheese, for example. Idiazabal is made from unpasteurized milk that can only come from the latxa breed of sheep. On Earth, it could only come from the Basque region of Spain, but when the Pollution destroyed conditions there, the Basque herders sold their land to speculators and took their flocks here, to Parma.”

  She held the cheese wedge up to his nose. He sniffed it suspiciously. “Why here?”

  “This was the most earthlike planet available. Their cheese has such high market value they can export it and earn enough to maintain their traditional way of life. It’s the same for the specialty products of all the agricultural people who came here.”

  She nibbled on the Idiazabal, then ga
ve it to him and picked up a chunk of whitish cheese laced with irregular blue veins. “The producers of Stilton, for example, came from England.”

  He wrinkled his nose. “It stinks. I can smell it from here. Who would want it?”

  “Oh, just millions. They’re willing to pay top prices, because they can’t get real Stilton anywhere else.” She swept her hand over the tray. “It’s the same with all these cheeses. And olives. And onions. And meats. Just about any delicacy that can no longer be produced on Earth.”

  He pushed the tray to her side of the table. “But Earth can produce all these things.”