Oceanworlds

  Earth decided the rest of the crew needed to know Iman’s last video message, nine days before her death. But such a violation of husband and wife intimacy could only be presented in an abridged transcript form.

  “Hello, my love, it’s your Iman …”

  “… it was on those dark days in Syria, when I had lost everything that mattered, that you took me on a walk holding my hand. With my world shattered, you pointed to the sky and told me ancient stories about a planet right above us called Saturn. It was the first time I could see a future again …”

  “… I felt I had no right to take that away. Trapping you on Earth … it was written in my husband’s destiny all along … I couldn’t but let you go …”

  “… my consolation would be our little miracle, and we got him. But he got sick too. My body poisoned him. He was already terminally ill inside me. ‘It is you alone or none of the two,’ they kept saying. Now you know why they let him go. I wish he will forgive me—I miss him so much. In hindsight, maybe I should have told you the whole truth right after the abortion, yet I was determined to wait for your return before leaving. But my body is finally giving up, I can sense it …”

  “… please talk to me. I need to see that handsome face again. My love. My life.”

  But what got Derya, what he would never be able to forget, was what she said at the end, “And please don’t ever feel guilty. We did what was best with the information we had.”

  35 | Terror On Board

  November 20 2029. Day 888; 288 Days to Saturn

  Sophia kept slipping into slumber over the verbose text as she butted heads with Moby-Dick’s first chapter. Yi lent it to her the previous day with the promise of first-class storytelling about explorers venturing into the unknown, but made no warning of the high walls of old English rowdy prose that stood guarding its entrance.

  She finally broke into evocative ground, “chief among these motives was the overwhelming idea of the great whale himself. Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused all my curiosity. Then the wild and distant seas where he rolled his island bulk,” followed by Ishmael’s confession, “I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas.” She was hooked. “By reason of these things, then, the whaling voyage was welcome; the great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open.”

  Inspired, she felt an urge to experience the mission’s own deep dark sea. She dressed lightly. The clock said 1:23 AM.

  Out of her cabin hatch, save for Shackleton’s bowels, the silence was complete. A single push projected her to the flight deck’s Observation Window. This view of the Milky Way will never get old, she thought. She floated an arm away from the latticed window. Only an inch of glass kept them away from the vacuum of space, which makes the most inhospitable environment on Earth feel like a mother’s womb. And to think those seemingly gregarious dots of light are impossibly far from one another, separated by untold swathes of nothingness. Her hands kept floating up in front of her. I wish I had somewhere to put them.

  She took a deep, long breath; exhaled it all. Every fiber of her body was at rest and her mind was solely focused on the here and now. She toured her senses. Her nose caught the smell of clean underwear. Her forearm hairs swayed to the delicate breeze from the air filters. She remembered that evening’s pleasant bitter taste out of the leaves she plucked a few weeks prior from her green tea plant in her scaled-down, fun-size gardening plot. Her fingertips rubbed against one another, feeling the texture of their whorls and lines. As she untangled the sounds in Shackleton, her left ear picked on a faint variation from her right one. After a few moments of being unable to decipher the disparity, she turned her head. She instinctively covered her mouth to prevent a scream as fear tensed her whole body.

  Sergei was suspended motionless a few feet from her in the shadows. His body was naked, the bulging muscles at rest, like a corpse floating face down on an ocean. His face was in profile, partially illuminated by the cosmos, eyes wide open but immobile. The only hint of life was the slow, brooding breathing.

  Sophia knew she was well within his peripheral vision, but he didn’t acknowledge her presence. Say something! Announce yourself! But a visceral panic constricted her throat. With each passing second, she became more disturbed. Trying to be invisible, she stealthily put her right arm against the window and pushed back. The impulse was minimal, she barely receded a few inches per second.

  She was falling back toward the ship’s central backbone passageway—her eyes remained fixed on his shadow—when the shape started murmuring words in Russian. She tried to speak, say anything, but was incapable.

  Once she felt her back touch the ship’s backbone, the urgency to get out overcame her. She turned and pushed hard, flying back while constantly looking over her shoulder. She failed to open James’ hatch, but the clack sound resonated across the ship. She scurried to open hers, got in, and locked it from the inside.

  She stayed awake in bed, her pulse shaky, waiting for a noise to announce something, anything. The silence was spine-chilling. Only James has an access key to all rooms. Only James has an access key to all rooms. Only James has an access key to all rooms. The mantra calmed her enough to crash asleep at some point later that night.

  36 | Bruce Lee Et Al.

  May 3 2030. Day 1,052; 124 Days to Saturn

  Lunch was over but no one moved. After three years of confinement, the old ways were coming back. Not long before, the refuge from a flickering mood was private space. Nowadays, sociable is chic again, thought Sophia. The spirit permeated everywhere but Sergei’s hatch. That’s all right, Humans versus Humanoid. They were well past the uncomfortable silence phase. It isn’t about talking anymore given that even unformed thoughts can be anticipated; it’s about communion.

  “Anybody know what happened with the Kiwi astronomer’s find? Kind of dropped out of the public eye,” said Sophia.

  Three weeks earlier an amateur astronomer in New Zealand’s Southern Alps was filming Saturn, the sky’s prima donna, when a flash came out of its blurry outline for a few tenths of a second. An asteroid or a comet bombardment? That’s all it took. Within two hours of the unconfirmed sighting, a family stargazing on the slopes of Hawaii’s Mauna Kea volcano claimed to have seen it as well. Within a day, the scheduled observations of major telescopes and radio antennas were tossed aside as the entire astronomical arsenal turned to squint at Saturn. The verification came a few hours later from the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, which photographs the entire sky, producing data equivalent to two Libraries of Congress per day. Its library from the night prior showed that at 5:47 AM Chile time, a flare deformed Saturn’s profile. Its size indicated a massive explosion from one or more large impactors.

  But that’s when it became bewildering. They caught sight of the stone as it broke the window, so to speak, but later on the window appeared intact: Saturn’s atmosphere seemed unblemished. As days went by, astronomers were at a loss to explain what a widely read New York Times editorial titled, “Astronomy Farsightedness: Both a Feat of Foresight and a Vision Disorder” succinctly called “… training and stretching science formidable eyesight past 13.8 billion years to a decillionth of a second after the Big Bang, disregarding in the process the ordinary and everyday as second-rate pursuits. Suddenly required to pay for parking, we look at our wallet and cannot tell a quarter from a nickel, a Benjamin from a Hamilton. Examples abound. Besides Saturn’s bafflingly scarless cloud tops, we’ve mapped each square foot of Mars’ surface, yet barely know what lays under our oceans.”

  The inability to solve Saturn’s meteor impact enigma was aggravated by a history of prescience. On a March night of 1993, a married couple and a friend discovered comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 around Jupiter. Orbital studies soon reconstructed the story: on July 7 1992 the comet defied the gas giant by flying too close and was ripped apart. The prediction? The fragments would be sucked in by the planet by mid-July 1994. With astonishing precision, the multi-day extravaganza s
tarted on July 16 and lasted for a week, twenty-one pieces smashing into Jupiter’s atmosphere and dotting it with Earth-size smudges for months.

  The perplexing cluelessness about Saturn had been extensively rationalized. The blast deep beneath should have forced masses of gas to surge hundreds of miles into the cloud tops. The main thesis was that while such mixing and stirring exposes darker chemistry in Jupiter’s heterogeneous atmosphere, it hardly changes the tonality in Saturn’s more uniform one.

  “No news is good news,” said Yi, while diligently working on his pygmy tree. “Besides, sales of telescopes have skyrocketed. You are more likely to find one on eBay than Amazon. I defer to Earth. Everyone is watching for us.”

  “Did Bruce Lee get a haircut?” said Derya.

  “No, pruning was in November. Problem is he’s deciduous and all messed up with the seasons,” said Yi.

  Bruce Lee was a gnarly miniature elm seemingly a millennium old. A gift from the Beijing Natural History Museum, legend had it that during the Second Opium War a British officer fell in love with a geisha living in Canton. As a symbol of her devotion, she planted an elm seed and trained it through pruning, potting, and wiring. After living together through seven seasons, he deserted her with the promise of coming back. She died of despair waiting for him to return. Nothing like syrupy stories just close enough to warm you, yet not close enough to burn you—even if it’s apocryphal. But the dates match! Dating trees is as simple as removing an old branch and counting the rings. Sophia looked at Bruce Lee in admiration. It was almost two centuries old.

  “What’s the latest with the tardigrades? Did they survive?” asked James.

  “Not one has come back from the dead this time. Couple more days and they will be certified goners,” said Sophia.

  The most important ongoing biological experiment outside Shackleton related to tardigrades, also known as water bears. These were Sophia’s pets and tending to them was one of her favorite pastimes. For anybody who thinks cockroaches are hardy, these are godlike. Cute-looking, plump, eight-legged micro-animals, they have inhabited the Earth for 500 million years—from Antarctica to jungles, Himalayas to sea trenches. Vegetarians and vegans beware, we ingest them regularly, as they call fresh produce, such as lettuce and spinach, home—oh, that’s quite all right! You didn’t know.

  Among their feats was the ability to endure minutes at 1 percent above absolute zero, the lowest temperature in the Universe; resist the crushing pressure at the deepest points of our oceans; go on hunger strike for thirty years; or withstand radiation 1,000 times above levels that are lethal to humans.

  That’s great, you say. Yet how is this peculiar fellow relevant to humans? In a nutshell, by being the most badass species in history. When you’ve barely noticed the Big Five mass extinction events, seen rocks taller than airplanes’ cruising altitude drop from the sky, watched dinosaurs emerge and disappear, found that well over 99 percent of the species that roamed the Earth along with you have gone extinct, it means serious tricks up the sleeve, refined over hundreds of millions of years of life’s formidable trial-and-error technique, evolution.17

  Now Sophia was in the middle of a critical test where tardigrades were lead characters: planetary protection, or how to kill the water bears. Because even with overwhelming support for the mission, there was still heated debate among astrobiologists. Roughly four-fifths supported the exploration of Enceladus’ subsurface ocean, the rest were fanatically against. And they have a fair point, I guess.

  Horror movies fiddle with ‘back contamination,’ the introduction of extraterrestrial organisms to Earth that become invasive species hell-bent on wreaking havoc. This was the reason Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Mike Collins spent twenty-one days in quarantine after returning to Earth. In other words, wipe your feet before coming back inside the house.

  Astrobiologists, on the other hand, were worried about ‘forward contamination.’ From us to you, with love. It won’t be cats or dogs but microbial life, which is notoriously resilient to sterilization. Hence the water bears, the last survivors from Sophia’s microbial Noah’s Ark, sitting right outside Shackleton’s airlock, exposed to the vacuum of space. Monthly checking of colony cultures showed mass decimation over the first months of the mission. After a year, the only survivors were a few anaerobic bacteria, even fewer fungus, and a solid mob of water bears.

  But a few days back, Sophia harvested the handful of remaining tardigrades, immersed them in water, and awaited their resurrection. This time their bodies showed rigor mortis. A couple more days and R.I.P. becomes scientific fact. Their demise would be applauded by those whose curiosity is tempered by the perceived risk of contamination from Waltzy Mole, the torpedo-shaped cryobot that will pierce into Enceladus’ vast underground sea.18

  * * *

  17 There are two water bear traits that are probably essential for our species to develop if we are ever to venture beyond our Solar System as fleshy mortals:

  First is their mastering of cryptobiosis, an extreme version of both science fiction’s favorite plot device—suspended animation—as well as Michael Jackson’s search for immortality through cryonics. When water bears enter this state, they lose 99 percent of their water content and slow metabolism and energy consumption to 0.01 percent of normal. And they later resuscitate just by being in contact with water again. The most obvious obstacle to cryogenic preservation is our inability to remove most of the water from the human body, which has the inconvenient habit of expanding upon freezing, ripping tissue and causing irreparable damage at the cellular level. The topic of human hibernation in space has never died out, it simply hibernates as it waits for a breakthrough.

  Second are their unique, hyper-specialized proteins protecting the genetic code, DNA, from radiation. Cosmic and solar radiation being one of the major challenges for long-term settlements on Mars or anywhere beyond Earth.

  18 “Maybe you’ll get a couple of astrobiology friends back,” said Derya.

  “I’m not sure I want them,” said Sophia. “These people completely misunderstand the alien contamination problem. In my view, the caution with cross-contamination is not about the altruistic goal of allowing possible alien biology to develop unaltered. If you were a fundamentalist about this, all unmanned missions to Mars have been capital sins. Not only is sterilization never guaranteed, but the very process may have created Hulk bacteria resistant to high temperatures and heavy radiation … instead, the broader rationale should be that if and when we find extraterrestrial life, we must be absolutely certain it is independent from Earth’s life. In most cases there shouldn’t be any worries because I think it’s extremely improbable that alien existence happens to use DNA as their book for life. If it doesn’t, then the discovery guarantees the existence of a second, independent genesis of life just in our Solar System … the nightmare scenario is that both life forms share a similar genetic makeup, because then we either share a common origin or we have contaminated that ecosystem and are tagging ‘alien’ to Earthly creatures. And the horrifying part is that we may never know for sure. This case is problematic and very real for unmanned missions to, say, Mars, where years or more likely decades pass between the contamination event by a rover and the new life-hunting mission that does the sampling. But in our case, we are immune to this risk by design: we will sample on the spot and do bioprocessing on board Shack days later.”

  37 | Aerocapture

  August 11 2030. Day 1,152; 24 Days to Saturn

  Yi saw James check the clock—it was fifteen minutes after the appointed time, and all but one of the crew were in Bacchus for their last town hall meeting.

  “Does he know—” Yi nodded to James in confirmation. “Let’s start then.”

  “I can check on him again,” said Yi.

  “Let’s not pressure him,” said James.

  “Pressure him? The Ruski has the highlife of a panda: sleeps, eats, and farts.” Derya got the evil eye from James before continuing, “Let’s cut to the chas
e and talk about the Sergei problem while he’s not here.”

  “That’s okay, but facts first … Sergei is the most suitable—” said James.

  “Was,” interrupted Derya.

  “Sergei continues to be the most suitable pilot and his set of skills make him the best prepared for leading both the Orbit Insertion and the Enceladus expedition. On Earth and in my mind, there’s no debate about that,” said James.

  We are about the most valuable guinea pigs in history, thought Yi. Besides extensive, regular psychological and behavioral testing, each one’s vital signs were monitored 24/7 through implants, being physically plugged into equipment for about half an hour each day, as well as weekly blood samples and quarterly DNA testing. Their data would become foundational for the coming exploration, and later for the transition to permanent habitation of Mars. And Jimmy is right. Against all intuition, in the comparative studies between the two pilots, Sergei scores higher for motor skills and reaction time than James by a fair margin.

  “Sorry, Jimmy, but I strongly disagree,” said Sophia. “I think you have a technically biased view of what constitutes the ‘right stuff.’ The best crew members are those comfortable working alone, at which he excelled, but are also team players who enjoy relating with the rest of the crew during meal and leisure times, at which he has failed repeatedly.”

  “You’re again ignoring the catalyst that sent the man into the pit he’s in,” said James.

  “Then let’s talk on those terms,” said Derya. “Things as they are, not as you want them to be. We have a suicidal or perhaps even homicidal person on board. That’s already really, really bad. But we are also twenty-four days away from Saturn, and our Moses for crossing the Red Sea broke his cane and lost his sanity. We depended on him for the aerocapture. I was paired with him for Enceladus, the core of our entire expedition … but I can’t—no, I won’t—tarnish my resume by becoming the first victim of space cannibalism. What I’m saying to you is that all this, all of us, cannot depend on a psycho gone haywire.”