by Greg Remy
“Wow,” said Darious. Zoe handed him the fragment, which he took up with great care and great zeal. “Zoe, this is an amazing find.”
“So,” she said, “any idea how we pulled it out of thin air, or in our case, complete lack of air?”
“No. None at all.” He sniffed the piece and then gently brushed it with his fingers. “I have never held anything from Earth-1.”
Zoe looked at him. “By all means, keep it Darious. I hereby declare you ‘Keeper of the Relic.’” She bowed to him. Darious smiled from the inside and a happy chirp escaped his lips, making him blush.
Zoe laughed. “Alright then. I’m glad we both agree.” She turned back to the computer’s analysis. “Hey look at this.” She expanded the internal molecular analysis. “It’s very, very slight, but these numbers don’t match up with what the materials should be.”
Darious, now holding the piece of the ship as if it were certainly his baby, read through the analysis. “You are right. But… how?”
“It’s like it has been ever-so-slightly altered at the micro level...,” Zoe said, rubbing her chin. “...or something.” She expanded the results further, which in turn equally expanded the confused look on her face. “The ionic bonding is off. No wait...” She expanded the fundamentals of the results further. “The molecules themselves are off-angle. What the hell!?” She stood up and grabbed the piece from Darious. “What are you and where did you come from!?”
She tried shaking a response from it, but the relic maintained its stubborn pose.
Zoe sighed and looked over at Darious. “It’s cool. Everything is cool.” She handed it back and he took it up with open arms as she slumped in her seat. “That’s as far as the analysis can go. We need help on this Darious. This is beyond me.”
He stuck out his tongue as a sudden obscure thought seized his reasoning that the sense of taste must not be left out in the analysis of the mysterious Earth object, but he sucked it back in, thinking better of the taste-test at the last moment. He then absorbed Zoe’s last statement. “I suppose you have someone in mind?”
“I have seen artifacts from Earth-1 before, at my ol’ university. I know a professor there that may be of help. Anyhow, if he can’t, then no one can. Care to check out my old stomping grounds?” Darious merely nodded in the affirmative. The thought of a new crowd in a foreign place made him uneasy. However, he knew it must be necessary. “Professor Timonay Kring was my main mentor during my graduate studies. A great man. You’ll like him. No worries, he has an open mind with people like us.” She wiggled her finger at herself and Darious, smiling and, in doing so, eased the wrinkles on his brow. “And,” she stated positively, “it’s a college university. Everyone there is an oddball!! Trust me. Some people are... well you’ll see.”
Darious chuckled. “I would be glad to join you, Zoe.”
“Wonderful!” said Zoe. “So, who’s gonna clean up? Nose goes!” With a finger on her nose, and the other hand pointing to Darious, Zoe laughed as he stared at her perplexed.
Chapter 30
Syzygy
They arrived at Newton-Maize Sector University several days later. As the ship came down toward one of the institution’s landing pads, Zoe quickly noticed much had changed since she had last been there. For one thing, they had added a lot more blue sculptures. Those soi-disant artists, she thought sardonically. Her craft descended comfortably and smoothly under her control. There was just the slightest jostle as it touched ground.
“Welcome,” said Zoe, patting Darious on the shoulder as she left her seat to prepare a bag. She shortly returned from the central chamber and saw Darious peering out of the window. “Don’t worry,” she said. “The air is most certainly breathable out there.”
He turned and looked flatly at her. “That is not what I am apprehensive about.”
Darious took the sweater from on top of his chair and pulled it over his shirt. Zoe carefully packed the triangular piece from Origin-X and put a couple knickknacks in the bag’s pockets. Throwing the strap over her shoulder, she looked over at Darious.
“You ready, Mister?”
He nodded. Zoe opened the port and lowered the gangway to the ground.
The pair was greeted by the brilliant irradiance of a noon sun with wistful clouds high above. Zoe shielded her eyes until they adjusted. A mid-summer’s breeze of warm air tickled her skin and she took in a deep breath, smelling the keen scent of fresh cut grass along with other familiar smells. She stood and looked out, watching for a moment as two black birds passed overhead, fluttering together, and chirping all the while.
Zoe and Darious made their way past the small planetary parking lot and onto the main stone walkway, which served to guide students from their transitory households to their classrooms.
“They call this the ‘Interstellar Mall,’” she said.
Darious lowered his hood as a group of students passed by. Zoe stopped and took him gently by the arms. “Darious. It’s okay.” She lifted up his hood and placed it at his shoulders. She stared deep into his eyes. “Trust me.” Zoe could see the trepidation that had been driven into him for years and couldn’t help but take his hand and give it a squeeze. They began to walk together. “Plus,” added Zoe, “it’s way too nice of a day to be all covered up.”
They made their way past many numbered buildings, most of which were speciously constructed with the personality of adobe, giving the university a nice earthen compliment to the deep blues of the sky and lush greens of the flora. Grassy areas filled the gaps around and between buildings. Pristinely trimmed bushes and flowerbeds were present on both sides of the Mall. Their little blossoms guided the explorers’ steps. Zoe had many fond memories here. No singular one encompassed her thoughts; it was their compilation which made her feel lighter than air: evenings of laughter with co-students, one-on-ones with professors discussing fractal mathematics, and all those little adventures and misadventures sprouting from adolescent behavior.
“Darious,” Zoe said demurely. She thought for a moment he hadn’t heard her.
“Yes, Zoe?”
“Thank you for coming with me.”
She gave his hand another squeeze. As they continued their stroll with a soft current aiding their movement, a student rounded out from the entrance of an oncoming building, using his back to prop open the door while his hands and eyes worked a tablet. His turning motion became a brisk walk up the Mall. As he was about to pass by, he happened to glance up and made eye contact with Darious. Zoe felt Darious’ intertwined hand jump.
“Hello there!” said the student and shot a hand forward to Darious.
Zoe and the clone stopped, the latter in more of a frozen state then an actual amiable pause. She nudged Darious with her shoulder.
“Oh!” said Darious in a most urgent manner and shook the student’s hand. “Hello to you sir.” The student nodded once, as if to a longstanding friend, and continued up the pathway, once more enthralled in his tablet. As Zoe and Darious resumed their walk, Darious turned to her and gave an impressed look.
“Ha! Oh, Darius, you’re too much. You know, the campus sure is pretty empty today. It must be the weekend. Or perhaps summer break. I always liked how college campuses aim to retain the traditions of classic inspiration.”
Zoe let go of his hand and began marching ahead half-singing, half-chanting, “School’s. Out for. Summer! School’s. Out for-ever!” She circled back around, looping Darious’ arm with hers and gamboled with him at her side. She bumped him with her hips, continuing her happy melodies.
The pair soon came upon a group of students in their mid-twenties. Each of their eyes widened momentarily upon seeing Darious, but smiles quickly followed. They each shook his hand in turn and he graciously wished each a ‘good day.’ Zoe whistled her song and soon, Darious was swinging his arm in time with hers and the two walked with a skip in their steps to the soundless beat.
“Make a left here,” said Zoe, pointing with Darious’ hand in her own. They rounded a conc
rete side-path, with several equally-spaced buildings and a planetarium. “This is where I spent most of my graduate studies.” Darious looked all around him. “Just up ahead is where I first studied thermodynamic tensor flow. They have a superconducting maser spectroscope in there.” Darious gave her a blank look. “Trust me, it’s awesome. Oh, and right over there,” Zoe pointed to their right, “is where they do zero-point metrology. Also, very cool.”
The pair walked on, past lecture halls and buildings of never more than a couple floors tall, with the smell of redolent flowers under a hot sun filling their noses. Every so often they would pass by people, each always very courteous to Darious. His stride elongated, and his shoulders seemed to broaden. If Zoe didn’t know any better, she’d say he was strutting. The things he could accomplish. she thought.
“Up ahead and to the left,” Zoe said. “That’s where Professor Kring has his office—or had. I hope he’s still here. You know, in the years I attended Newton-Maize I never saw him stray from that building. It’s like he lived there. I’ve never seen a man love his work more.”
As they were entering into the grey building, with many satellite dishes peeking over its roof, a man came out from the double glass doors wearing all black leather and having a purple mohawk nearing half a meter long.
“Good day,” said Zoe as he held the door open for them. “Love the hair.”
He ginned, revealing silver teeth. “Hello.” Upon seeing Darious his smile broadened, followed by a more enthusiastic ‘hello.’
“Hello sir,” said Darious taking the door from him. “Thank you.”
Inside, they were greeted by refreshing air conditioning.
“It’s a hot one today,” said Zoe.
They stood, centered in the great corridor with staircases on either side, curving around the hall to the second floor and then double-backing to a third floor beyond view. Darious did several complete turns, taking it all in.
“Yup. This is the astrophysics building.”
All at once, three sets of doors to their left opened and students began flooding out into the corridor.
“Excuse me. Oh, excuse me,” said Darious as students hastened by. Zoe could hear numerous ‘hello’s’ and saw hand after hand extended out to him. “Oh, man,” she giggled to herself, “he’s never gonna wanna leave.” The crowd soon passed, and the hallway was once more barren, save for a few stragglers.
“Well,” said Zoe, “I guess summer courses are in session. Let’s go up to the second floor. Professor Kring always lectured in one of the rooms there near his lab.”
Zoe guided Darious up the broad steps and through the long corridor. There were portraits of faculty along both walls, though overall, the hallway seemed a bit worn, as if it could use a nice face-lift; just how Zoe remembered it.
“Let’s see, Room 204... 205... ah, 206.”
She opened the door just a crack and they both poked their heads in. Zoe and Darious beheld a great auditorium, with rows and rows of seats leading downward to a central stage with white-boards covering its three oblique walls, each filled with blue-ink pictograms and formulas. Zoe could tell, just from the writing, this was an introductory class on spaceflight. She noted the rudimentary propulsion formulas and drawings of gravity slingshot assists. The amphitheater was about a quarter full of students evenly distributed and all writing furiously, attempting to keep up with the professor at its focal point.
“As topsails collapsed to rockets,” he lectured through a microphone, “humanity sought new tools to aid in their renewed exploration. But with such distance between worlds, new science had to be adopted. Misunderstood superluminal motions from quasar jets had instigated scientific debate in the 1970’s, which was renewed with sincere interest after the first microton telescope was constructed in the 2080’s. By ‘superluminal,’ I mean, of course, faster-than-light travel.
“The fundamental superluminal theory, later to become the first of the Grand Unified Laws, was first mathematically proven by Dr. Elborus Fischer, who in 2142 was the first to work out the long-held conjecture that space is indeed non-linear for all dimensions and for the first time, all aspects of reality had a base formula for its causality. An experiment was quickly created to test his theory.”
The professor opened a digital picture on the board directly behind him which showed an array of low structures on Earth-1 soil, each a multiplex of antennae and mirrors. He pressed a button on his podium, changing the image to a birds-eye view of all the buildings, now clearly arranged in a great circle with woodlands and a small-town crossing through the experiment.
The professor continued, “In accordance with the prerequisite conditions from Fischer’s ecumenical theory, superluminal and subluminal light wave transmittance and absorption were observed. By this experiment, and many more following it, superluminality came to be widely accepted by the scientists of the time. They found that indeed natural light waves have a non-linear velocity, especially noticeable at very low and very high energy frames of reference. This became even more apparent with communication breakthroughs—enabling near-instantaneous communications along any vector— the advancement of fusion energy and new space construction media some forty years later. Physical crafts were, for the first time, able to travel many times the speed of light. Thus, a modification was necessary for the common light-year, the previous standard form of distance measure. As such, floating-parsecs were to become the standard, as is now.” He took a side step from the podium and surveyed his class. “Whilst traveling abroad on a ship of today, onboard virtual controllers, by method of probability algorithms, set up ‘floating’ points,” the professor enunciated the term, Zoe figured to help his students absorb this root meaning, as most had probably never thought twice about the term, “on opposite sides of the ship and quantify length by method of parallax within a universally singular frame of reference. Understand, though the method for distance quantification via parallax had been utilized by centuries past, it was erroneously based on the flawed light-year. Ergo, it was quickly and irrevocably replaced by the floating-parallax-arcsecond. After the light-year, the floating-parsec became the…”
“Hey Darious,” Zoe whispered, “Why don’t you sit in on this?” She urged him forward to the closest seat. “I will check back after I’m done.” He accepted and sat, leaning forward and instantly engrossed by the lecture. Zoe noiselessly closed the door and continued on her way.
Down the hall and through a passage to the left, she was soon upon the lab spaces of Professor Kring. Looking through the glass walls connecting the lab area to the corridor, Zoe quickly spotted him with his back turned to her, in a bronzed overcoat and hunched over whatever experiment must have caught his fancy this day. She swung a door open without saying anything, quietly winding her way around lab tables while being mindful of the backpack slung over her shoulder. She was now just behind the Professor and leaned over to get a glimpse of what it was he was peeking at through the monocular microscope. Zoe could see a small metallic crystalline object, probably some allotrope of bismuth.
“Mind handing me a pipette of oxy-propylene?” asked the Professor in deferential tone. His gaze still had not strayed from the eyepiece, so Zoe, not wishing to disturb his work, looked around for the syringe. She spotted a stand containing several of them and took up the one called for. She then handed it to him and he pressed the clear liquid onto the sample. After a few moments, Professor Kring let out a disappointed huff and set the pipette down.
“What’s up, Doc?” said Zoe.
He suddenly straightened up and looked at her, a broad smile lifting his face.
“Zoe, my dear! How are you?” He gave her a tight hug and then looked at his hands. “Pardon me. Let me wash this oxidizer off and I will be with you.”
He quickly departed into the adjoining washroom. Zoe took up a circular seat and spun around, looking at the laboratory. Equipment of all sorts filled every table and half-opened metal cabinets along every wall showed even more
experimental apparatuses. It was like the lab of a mad scientist; however, the white color scheme and décor gave the room a pure quality. Good science happened here. Perhaps sometimes redundant, but nonetheless, the Professor was a decent, dedicated man. Zoe had always respected him. From early on, they had clicked. He had been the one to sponsor her graduate studies and when she confided to him that she had learnt all she wanted and would be departing for the next stage of her life, he had wholeheartedly supported her.
Professor Kring came back momentarily, drying off his hands on his lab coat. “How have you been?”
“Great Professor. How are you?”
“Doing well. I’ve recently picked up a grant to further my research on negative-fermi particles. I’m also now teaching electrochemical courses. Well, I start next semester.”
“Oh?” said Zoe surprised. “No more quantum harmonics?”
He smiled. “Not as much these days. They don’t make these students like they used too. Now, if I had a room full of pupils like yourself, I could really do something.” He gave Zoe a genial look. “I remember when you first came here; even then your perspicacity of harmonics was amazing. Of all my students, you were one of the brightest, one of the youngest too.”
Zoe blushed. “Oh ya! That reminds me, remember your position on Tuned Spatial Rings and the debates with Dr. Ginsberg?”
“Oh yes,” responded Professor Kring. “Did you know he retired last year? Anyhow, despite my best efforts, Spatial Rings are still unproven; hypothesized for nearly a century now and never experimentally verified. I was never able to do it. They have the potential to make shipping and traveling across the galaxy nearly free and at speeds unheard of. Imagine: many of these tuned plasma rings lined up like highways and connecting planets across the galaxy, from which a ship or container could be jettisoned through and in hours, not days or weeks, reach its destination. Some people still don’t think it’s possible. Neophytes. We had a proof-of-concept once built here, as I’m sure you remember, but it never worked. Perhaps I should resume my efforts after I finish this work, although I feel Spatial Rings’ elusive nature will forever keep them contained to paper. What of them?”