by J. P. Landau
Sophia rolled her eyes, “You saw him twice, D. Hardly a compadre.”
“And we really hit it off. I got this email from him about a month ago—”
“Four months ago. You read it to the whole crew. And it was rather businessy, regarding his rocket company. I detected zero bromance. I call that an acquaintance at best.”
“It’s Jeffrey-goddamn-Bezos. You think his friends get to toast marshmallows with him over weekends? Anyway, the bloke envisions millions of people living and working in space, mining asteroids and doing heavy industries, sending finished products down to Earth, which would be restricted to residential and service industries. Good concept, but abstract, intangible … meet Juju.” After he programmed the telescope, its motor drive burred as it turned to locate and track the asteroid. He pushed himself away and clumsily grabbed a roof handrail. Sophia flew nimbly to the telescope, swiftly resting her right eye against the eyepiece.
“It looks like a badly lit black-and-white picture of a banana,” said Sophia.
“With three lentils by the waist in a failed attempt at high art. But what it lacks in craft it compensates for in lavish girth and size. A banana-shaped metallic asteroid seventy miles long, orbited by three moons.”
Over the last weeks Derya had been spotting and cataloging new asteroids, the vast majority of which called the belt home. But three days back, the optical and infrared spectroscopy data sent to Earth came back loaded with exclamation marks: Juju. “Juju is extremely dense, containing huge quantities of pure metals, probably covering the entire periodic table. Raw materials needing no smelting, almost ready to use, amounting to a scale far larger than all the metal ever mined on Earth. And the moons are altogether different, made of ice and carbon. Vast amounts of fuel from breaking water into hydrogen and oxygen. For all this I’m pretty sure I’ll be seeing some Bezos correspondence come this way—my way.” Even mainstream media was daydreaming of a huge city-foundry a century forward, dedicated to churning out anything from computer chips to interstellar spaceships.
“It’s a white Christmas back home,” said James, Sophia and Derya turning their heads to him as he came in from the ship’s central backbone passageway. “Shall we do some snowy comet stuff?” Sophia was delighted to see him and it showed. “The pang of conscience got me out of bed, Tweety—she goes by Belinda.”
“I told you,” said Derya looking at Sophia. “Here’s the man-boy that loves soaring stones and snowballs.”
“Hardly, but there’s this one particular comet that has stalked my dreams for years. In a way, it’s the thing that brought us all here,” said James.
“You mentioned it’s mostly gone,” said Sophia.
“Less of a nighttime regular, yes, but it leaves an extensive vapor trail here,” said James, touching his forehead. The other two seemed to be waiting for more, so he continued, “I think comets, not asteroids, are the biggest death-from-above danger to our planet.” While asteroids are grouped together in stable, well-behaved, predictable orbits; long-period comets—those taking over two centuries to complete a lap around the Sun—are the ancient lone pilgrims awoken from the outer reaches of our Solar System, either the Kuiper Belt just beyond the orbit of Pluto, or the vast, mysterious, faraway Oort cloud that may extend halfway to the nearest star. “They fall into the Sun at enormous speeds before being catapulted back out. And during that time, they move up to three times faster than asteroids.”
“Considering energy is the square of speed, that’s nine times as deadly,” said Derya.
“Plus they tend to be bigger,” James continued, “and they fall so fast the warning may come two years before impact, at most. They’re made of ice that evaporates as they approach the inner Solar System, forming those grand tails blowing away from the Sun like wind socks. The flares of gas around the comet forming the tail are random and act as little thrusters, altering the trajectory and making it very hard to estimate its path.”
“And yet,” said Derya, “water on Earth most likely came by way of comets.”
Small ones, several feet in diameter, ring the bell about once a year. The nasty ones, half a mile in size or more, pay us a visit every half a million years or so. They likely seeded the Earth with the ingredients needed for life to emerge, and some day one of them may decide to claim life back.
“Can we look at Halley’s Comet?” asked Sophia, detecting a rapid deterioration of her hard-earned Christmas spirit. Derya obliged and the telescope moved and locked into a new position. “Am I doing something wrong?” Sophia asked. “I see nothing.”
“Imagine a middle-size city, say Munich—can you picture it?” said Derya.
“Sure,” said Sophia.
“Halley is roughly Munich’s size. It’s a short-period comet that visits Earth every 74-79 years, last time in 1986. Now it’s beyond the orbit of Neptune, the furthest planet in the Solar System. It’s travelled so far that the Sun can’t gas it anymore. It’s a Munich immersed in a decades-long blackout, tailless and cloaked in black. This instrument’s incredible, but you’re asking the equivalent of seeing the atom with a high-school microscope. Now you ask, how can it be we can see galaxies 50 million light-years away yet we can’t see a comet five light-hours from here? The answer boils down to size. That’s why you can seldom see a fly across your garden yet you easily see the Moon—did you know Halley was observed and recorded hundreds or maybe even thousands of years before Christ by Babylonians and Chinese astronomers, yet the name comes from the one person who recognized them as reappearances of the same object in 1705? This ‘Juju’ naming by the International Astronomical Union is bullshit. This is my discovery, and I get to choose the name. It is henceforth baptized Comet Terzi.”
“Isn’t it a bit self-aggrandizing?” asked Sophia.
“Losers call it vanity, winners call it rightful pride,” said Derya.
31 | Thinning Communication
March 4 2028. Day 262; 2.5 Years to Saturn
“Do you know the level of responsibility for providing inspiring content to hundreds of millions of followers?”
“I wouldn’t know, Derya, I have 2 billion,” said Yi.
“Feed them well, we go dark next week,” James reminded them.
The laser communication was overstretched. The connection dropped for minutes at a time now and the latency was becoming disruptive.
When half an hour later they were all having breakfast, James repeated, “The next few days are intentionally light on tasks so everyone has enough time to wrap things up. Videos with loved ones, interviews with the press, now’s the time.” This milestone had long been dreaded but because the mission was pushing the technology a great deal forward, the exact date when laser communication became unfeasible was just a conservative estimate that reality had prolonged for weeks. Not anymore. “The physics of radio communication is unforgiving. Our data transfer will drop to about 2 percent of today’s. Sophia?”
“The allotted data limit for non-work communication will be a group quota. You go over, you steal from everybody else. Don’t ever do that, don’t be that guy. Daily portion is 10 MB per person each way. Use it wisely—that’s twice the complete works of Shakespeare in text, or twenty minutes of audio, or fifteen seconds of HD video.”
It was nighttime. From the cabin wall hung a black-and-white photograph of a log raft barely above the waterline, a bulging sail pushing the final stretch of the 4,300-mile journey, topped by proud Norwegian flags and carrying four mostly shirtless men hypnotized by the shoreline after losing sight of it for 101 days. The fabled 1947 Kon-Tiki expedition that proved Polynesia could have been colonized by people from South America.
Under it, a motionless Yi hung in mid-air. His hands were symmetrically in front, semi-closed and separated in between by the distance of an open book, which levitated a few inches above. Without gravity there was no head falling and jerking, making the droopy-eyes-to-asleep transition imperceptible every time. His body was dormant but the brain was firing, attested
by the rapid eyelid movement.
At 10:15 PM, the cabin started rotating. Circling clockwise, one of the walls inched closer. When the contact happened, he jolted back to consciousness. His mind was disoriented and he felt the caustic taste of terror in his mouth. It’s a dream, it’s just a dream. Right before waking up he had the suspicion of inhabiting a dream. Now I know I’m not. Here there was no finger-snapping escapism like back on Earth. We are trapped inside a fragile tin can in the immensity of space. A thin-walled spaceship surrounded by millions of miles of nothingness. He tried breathing to calm down, but this time it did not work. Analyze the dream. Rationalize it—I open my eyes and see nothing. Not darkness, but complete pitch-blackness. My other senses try to compensate: I notice the rubbing of my spacesuit, the panting misting up the visor, my sweaty hands. I perceive I’m floating in space but there’s no sense of depth or distance. I’m in the middle of a cosmic void, those vast spaces barren of galaxies, one of the loneliest places in the Universe. The closest atoms past the small atmosphere between my head and the visor reflecting my grimaced, petrified face are in some far away galaxy, tens of millions of light-years from me. The light from the trillion stars inside it too faint for my eyes to detect. In desperation I manage to find the helmet lights and turn them on, but they are instantly swallowed by the empty space, ghost lights robbed of their beams. I’m sightless without being blind. My reflex screaming inside the fishbowl merely rings the brain. I need to die, please let me die!
The panic began to metastasize. Like on other occasions he tried containment by meditation, but this time it was pervasive and much stronger. He flew to Demeter like a freediver holding on to the last molecules of oxygen. He entered the Z-shaped maze of lush greenery with eyes closed. Breathed in the humidity, the smell of wet soil, of peppermint, and tomatoes. Ran his hands over the stems of vegetables, rubbed his fingers against the leaves. Caught the soft current of air-grazing plants against one another. Moving from memory, he stopped by his gardening plot, the size of a shoebox. He caressed the single flower of Margaret Atwood, his second-generation soybean plant. Then measured the germinating Liu Cixin, a third-generation chickpea, and discovered a new developing leaf. Then his fingers climbed the stem of Douglas Adams, a mature pea plant, dislodged one of its three pods, opened it, and slid the peas into his mouth. He was wholly in the moment and felt surrounded and protected by these other life forms from the plant kingdom. Only then did he open his eyes, and was startled to see Derya a few feet away, unaware of his presence. He was facing away from Yi and had headphones on.
Yi tapped Derya’s shoulder and after a jerk and a swarm of German expletives, they asked each other about their mutual impromptu visit to Demeter.
“Similar,” said Derya. “We couldn’t decelerate in Saturn.” Yi knew the chance of missing Saturn’s gravity claws was remote, but if it were to happen and Shackleton went past the gas giant, the consequences may justify Derya’s night terrors. With no gravity field or enough fuel to turn around, in weeks Saturn would shrink into a dot in the rearview mirror. And with five years of supplies, death would slowly strangle them. They’d continue subsisting under the agonizing burden of knowing their expiration date. There wouldn’t be more planetary extravaganza for a very, very long time. At their current speed, Alpha Centauri stood 80,000 years away, but this, the closest star system, was in the opposite direction. The tapestry of stars would appear perfectly static for tens of thousands of years. A spaceship of ghosts moving until the end of time. On this occasion Yi played out the scenario in omniscient point of view instead of getting thrown inside the nightmare. One thing is clear: the crew consensus is that dreams have become particularly vivid as of late.
“What are you listening to?” asked Yi. Derya took off his headphones and put them on Yi’s head. He immediately became immersed in the deep underwater ambience of the ocean, hearing the mass of water, the bubbling, and the enchanting reverberations of sea giants singing to other whales hundreds of miles away. Even city-dwellers like Derya have become hooked on—no, make it clinically addicted to—regularly listening to nature. Not songs, not voices, but the unassuming simplicity of an owl meditating at nighttime, of rain and wind gusts over a larch forest, of crickets under a thunderstorm.
“We haven’t even broken Valery Polyakov’s record of 438 days aboard Mir space station,” said Derya.
Shackleton had been using the dish antenna for mission critical communication for weeks. The laser barely worked anymore: idle most of the time and busy corrupting data when not. But turning it off carried a significance that weighed on everyone.
The crew floated by Bacchus’ Observation Window.
The lasers operated in the near-infrared part of the spectrum, invisible to the human eye. But they could picture them nonetheless. Two beams of light, sender and receiver, disappearing into infinity as they pointed to a bluish dot.
“This is the invisible boundary,” said James.
“After which isolation becomes extreme,” said Derya.
Yi announced, “Laser communication with Earth going off in three, two, one—laser off.”
A feeling of emptiness and sadness began to permeate, unexpectedly put on hold by music coming out of Bacchus’ speakers:
I see trees of green, red roses too
I see them bloom, for me and you
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world …
32 | Everyday Life II
September 24 2028. Day 466; 1.9 Years to Saturn
The tongue goes from licking her left ear to her nape, as a large hand grabs her red dress between her breasts and pulls down hard, ripping it open. It then climbs back to the bridge of her bra and takes out a breast with a hard nipple. She feels a second hand raising her skirt and pushing down her panties. Somebody gets right behind her. In darkness, all other senses become hypersensitive. Her mind is racing, dizzy with the feeling of being possessed, aware of her inability to stop it. In seconds she’s naked except for her bra, hanging uselessly mid-waist—
A metallic, insistent ringing stole her from the dream. Sophia picked the culprit up in frustrated anger and threw it against the wall. The spongy alarm clock jumped back and, seemingly in pure provocation, hit her in the chest. Hopefully the purring and moaning was purely mental too, Sophia thought. The raging lust still overpowering, she attempted half successfully to go back to sleep, but failed to trigger the sensation-drenched space porn.
The imposed celibacy elicited strange sexual, almost animal, impulses. But with a four to one male ratio, this is the one thing I can’t talk about. Maybe the future of space travel was dependent on, as Apollo 11’s Mike Collins once quipped, “a cadre of eunuchs.” The thought of her crewmates masturbating was disgusting, but she wondered how the others were faring. She tried to keep the image out of her mind, but it developed anyway. And Jimmy? He must do it too—is it always Belinda, though? Is it always one-to-one? Has he ever done it with me in mind—ENOUGH!
At breakfast that morning, Sophia saw the last toilet user fly into Bacchus, clearly enraged.
“I want to crush skulls,” Derya said. “What’s the matter with you people? I’m fixing my urinal funnel and, goddammit, a foreign body enters my nose. You know what it was? Do you know what it was? A floating turd. Somebody else’s doo-doo entered my nostril.” Sophia barely contained herself, but a jumbo laugh escaped Yi. “Do not provoke me, Shaolin,” said Derya threateningly. James burst out laughing too.
Using a toilet in gravity’s absence required a broad palette of skills. Each person had a private urinal funnel, which needed to be attached to a hose inside the toilet each time. Then, the body needed to squat over the toilet seat using the leg restraints. Here’s where the proper way—explained step by step on the wall in front—was sometimes betrayed by the temptation to speed the process up. The right way made sure there was good seal between buttocks and seat, as the toilet worked like a vacuum cleaner, sucking liquid and solids through the funnel past the hose into the waste ta
nk for water recycling later on.
“It wasn’t a sole survivor,” said Derya. “When I looked around, I saw other fecal flies meandering about.” All of a sudden nobody found it funny anymore.
“Who was it?” demanded Sergei.
“There’s shite orbiting the bloody loo. Whoever did it needs to go grab ’em now,” said Derya.
“Whoever did it, or suspects he/she may have done it, or wants to serve the greater good, will clean it up during the next couple of hours. No witnesses, no reputational loss,” said James. Good luck with that, thought Sophia. Everyone will spy for the felon. James probably arrived to the same conclusion, because he sighed and said, “I’ll volunteer for morale and harmony—but only this one time.”
“I really, really wonder how today’s reek is even possible,” said Derya. “We’re all eating the same food. Chemistry should even out the five assholes’ stench—unless …” He propelled himself to the roof and moved like an elderly Spider-Man to one of the cabinets. “Aha! I knew it. Listen all, Sino-kleptomaniac keeps playing mind games. The large bag of Ghirardelli chocolates is missing.”
“I hid it. From you,” said Yi.
“In your stomach, I presume. Which explains today’s Delhi belly, you filthy nitwit,” said Derya.
“Guys, come on. Chill out,” said James.
“Jimmy, you’re officially exempt from the clean-up,” said Derya.
“It wasn’t me! And I hid it to prevent temptation,” said Yi.