by Neil Clarke
Every day, every hour, my excitement intensifies. And our ship plows on.
YEARS IN TRANSIT: 106
COMPUTER LOGS OF OUR RELUCTANT DALAI LAMA, AGE 31
Maintenance preoccupies nearly everyone aboard. In less than a week, our strut-ship will rendezvous with Guge and orbit its oblate sun-locked mass. Then we will make several sequential descents to and returns from “The Land of Snow” aboard our lander, The Yak Butter Express.
Jetsun will serve as shuttle pilot for one of these first excursions and as backup on another. He and others perform daily checks on the vehicle in its hangar harnesses, just as other techs strive to ensure the reliability of every mechanical and human component. Our hopes and anxieties contend. At my urging, the Bodhisattvas of U-Tsang go from place to place assisting in our labors and transmitting positive energy to every bay and to all those at work in them.
Twelve hours after Captain Photrang eased Kalachakra into orbit around Guge, Minister T comes to me to report that Yellow Hat artists in U-Tsang have finished a sand mandala based on a design that they, not I, chose as our most esteemed entry.
Lucinda Gomez, a teen-ager from Amdo Bay, has taken the laurel.
Neddy asked the monks to transport the mandala in its pie-shaped shield to Bhava Park, a commons here in Kham Bay, and they do so. A bird camera in the park transmits the mandala’s image to public screens and to vidped consoles everywhere. Intricate and colorful, it sits on an easel amid a host of tables and happy Kalachakrans. Because we’re celebrating our arrival, I don’t watch on a screen but stand in Bhava Park before the thing itself. Banners and prayer flags abound. I seize Kyipa’s hand and approach the easel. I congratulate the excited Lucinda Gomez and all the artist monks, and also speak to many onlookers, who attend smilingly to my words.
The Yellow Hats chant verses of consecration that affirm their fulfillment of my charge and then extend to everyone the blessings of Hope and Community implicit in the mandala’s labyrinthine central Palace. Kyipa, now almost six, touches the bottom of the encased mandala.
“This is the prettiest,” she says.
She has never before seen a finished mandala in its full artifactual glory.
Then the artist monks start to carry the shield from its easel to a tabletop, there to insert narrow tubes into it and send the mandala’s fixed grains flying with focused blasts of air—to symbolize, as tradition dictates, the primacy of impermanence in our lives. But before they reach the table, I lift my hand.
“We won’t destroy this sand mandala,” I declare, “until we’ve established a viable settlement on Guge.”
And everyone around us in Bhava Park cheers. The monks restore the mandala to its easel, a ton of colored confetti drops from suspended bins above us, music plays, and people sing, dance, eat, laugh, and mingle.
Kyipa, holding her hands up to the drifting paper and plastic flakes, beams at me ecstatically.
In our shuttle-cum-lander, we glide from the belly of Kham Bay toward Gliese 581g, better known to all aboard the Kalachakra as Guge, “The Land of Snow.”
From here, the amiable dwarf star about which Guge swings resembles the yolk of a colossal fried egg, more reddish than yellow-orange, with a misty orange corona about it like the egg’s congealed albumin. I’ve made it sound ugly, but Gliese 581 looks edible to me and quickly trips my hunger to reach the planet below.
As for Guge, it gleams beneath us like an old coin.
In our first week on its surface, we have already built a tent camp in one of the stabilized climate zones of the nearside terminator. Across the tall visible arc of that terminator, the planet shows itself marbled by a bluish and slate-gray crust marked by fingerlike snowfields and glacier sheets.
On the ground, our people call their base camp Lhasa and the rugged territory all about it New Tibet. In response to this naming and to the alacrity with which our fellow Kalachakrans adopted it, Minister Trungpa wept openly.
I find I like the man. Indeed, I go down for my first visit to the surface with his blessing. (Simon, my father, already bivouacs there, to investigate ways to grow barley, winter wheat, and other grains in the thin air and cold temperatures.) Kyipa, of course, remains for now on our orbiting strut-ship—in Neddy’s stateroom, which he now shares openly with the child’s grandmother, Karen Bryn Bonfils. Neddy and Karen Bryn dote on my daughter shamefully.
Our descent to Lhasa won’t take long, but, along with many others in this second wave of pioneers, I deliberately drop into a meditative trance. I focus on a photograph that Neddy gave me after the mandala ceremony at the arrival celebration, and I recall his words as he presented it.
“Soon after you became a teenager, Greta, I started to doubt your commitment to the Dharma and your ability to stick.”
“How tactful of you to wait till now to tell me,” I said, smiling.
“But I never lost a deeper layer of faith. Today, I can say that all my unspoken doubt has burned off like a summer meadow mist.” He gave me the worn photo—not a hardened d-cube—that now engages my attention.
In it, a Tibetan boy of eight or nine faces the viewer with a broad smile. He holds before him, also facing the viewer, a baby girl with rosy cheeks and eyes so familiar that I tear up in consternation and joy. The eyes belong to my predecessor’s infant sister, who didn’t live long after the capturing of this image.
The eyes also belong to Kyipa.
I meditate on this conundrum, richly. Soon, after all, the Yak Butter Express will set down in New Tibet.
Sean McMullen has been a full time author since 2014, but as an after-hours author, he established an international reputation with over a hundred science fiction and fantasy novels and stories. He was runner up for a Hugo Award with his novelette “Eight Miles,” and he has won fifteen other awards and been published in over a dozen languages. His latest collection, Dreams of the Technarion (Reanimus Press, 2017) contains his new history of Australian science fiction, “Outpost of Wonder.” His daughter is the award winning scriptwriter, Catherine S. McMullen.
THE FIREWALL AND THE DOOR
SEAN McMULLEN
Living room news is somehow timeless. Roman slaves once came home and repeated what they had heard in the Forum to their masters. Eighteenth Century families read pamphlets collected in the coffee houses. A century later it was newspapers, then came radio, television, Twitter, t-share, overview and commspeak. Now we have the slightly retro holovista, which is popular because it can be watched as a family—if the family is willing.
Entanglement technology had brought the final frontier as close as the living room. All we had to do was get an uncrewed probe out to whatever was to be explored, and the entangled telepresence established in its computers would provide practically instant communication. Everything was easy. Too easy. People took the wonders for granted until something went spectacularly wrong.
I was in the living room with my family when the Argo made its flyby of the double star Alpha Centauri. My wife was working on her Universal Data Pad, but was looking up at the holovista every so often. My thirteen year old son was sitting with his arms folded tightly, and doing his best to look sullen.
“Don’t see why we’re watching,” Jason muttered. “The Argo’s been trashed by an asteroid.”
“It collided with a speck of dust the size of a bacterium,” I replied.
“Then what’s the fuss about?”
“The Argo was traveling at a tenth of the speed of light when it hit. Huge loads of energy were released.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Very large bang.”
“So it’s trashed.”
“It’s damaged, but still working. This is one of the most significant events in humanity’s history, so we’re going to watch it as a happy family.”
“I’m not happy.”
“Then we’ll just have to watch it as an unhappy family. Now shut up and watch!”
“Try not to be authoritarian with Jason,” said my wife.
/> “Teenagers are pack animals,” I replied. “I’m making sure he knows that he’s not leading this pack.”
“Now, now, dear. Try not to act like a magistrate when you’re at home.”
I knew they would not share my enthusiasm for the Argo. I was a child when the unmanned starship had been launched, and I had followed its progress closely ever since. Inevitably, I had childhood dreams of joining the Argo’s crew, and in theory they were realistic dreams. The members of the crew lived very ordinary lives in California, and operated the spacecraft through entanglement telepresence circuitry at the Mission Control building on Berkeley Campus. My dreams had been shared by hundreds of millions of other children, but there were no vacancies. In the forty-seven years of the mission not one of the crew had died or retired.
The best career opportunities were in law when I had to start making decisions about earning a living. My fascination with technology could not be smothered by four years of legal studies, however, so I specialized in spacecraft accident investigation. The Argo was a spacecraft, and there had been an accident, so I was now following events with informed, professional interest.
The holographic image of Marie Jackson, the Argo’s control-captain, now materialized a few feet in front of us. Beside her was a journalist, who was about a fifth of Jackson’s age.
“Can you tell the viewers a little about the Argo?” the journalist began.
How many thousands of times has she answered that question? I wondered.
“The Argo was built in space, orbiting Saturn,” said Jackson, doing a good job of seeming neither bored nor exasperated. “It was launched in 2200, and spent ten months accelerating to nine percent of lightspeed. It then traveled unpowered for the next forty-seven years. It was meant to loop around the star Centauri A, and use its gravitational field to change direction. It would then travel on for another two hundred years to its next flyby, the red dwarf star Gliese 581.”
“But isn’t the Argo exploring the Centauri stars?”
“Yes, but the Gliese and Centauri systems are in roughly the same direction, so the Argo was meant to explore both. The Centauri stars are the payoff for the people who built the Argo, because it’s arrived in our lifetimes.”
“But now there’s been an accident, and it can’t go any further?”
“There’s been an accident, and it can’t change direction,” said Jackson with her eyes closed. “One does not slow down from a tenth of lightspeed by pressing on a brake pedal.”
Jason was sitting with his mouth open, quite literally drooling at the image of the very pretty journalist.
“Chosen for being decorative,” I observed.
“You’re just saying that because you’re jealous!” exclaimed Jason.
The journalist looked blank as a cue device within her ear briefed her for the next question.
“But this is not the first star you explored,” she said.
“That’s right,” said Jackson. “Eleven months ago we passed within a quarter of a light-year of the red dwarf Proxima Centauri. That’s the nearest star to the sun.”
“But the Argo didn’t actually go there.”
“No, but our telescope did detect flares erupting on Proxima’s surface. The light from those flares is still on its way here, and will not arrive for another three years. That means scientists can do some fascinating experiments that test the laws of physics.”
The journalist looked blank again. Clearly her ideas of what was fascinating did not extend to experiments involving the speed of light. An unseen operator briefed her with the next question.
“So now the Argo is going to fly past a planet?” she asked.
“The Argo released a little probe called Harpy 1 a few weeks ago,” said Jackson, and their images were replaced by a long, sleek cylinder with a cluster of instruments at one end. “This probe will do the flyby of the Centauri system’s only Earth-type planet. That happens in six minutes.”
Society had been changing quickly and radically as the Argo was being built, late in the Twenty-Second Century. The Argo was also called the Centenary Unity Endeavour. It was a huge project spanning all the governments of the Solar System, and symbolizing their ability to work together. It took a decade to complete, was the most powerful machine ever built, and was very, very expensive. Too expensive. Worst of all, it was expendable. By 2200, to be expendable was to be ideologically unsound.
Even when the Argo was finished and being fueled with ice from Saturn’s rings, there were petitions to halt all work on it, and transform the crowning glory of human exploration into a monument to waste prevention. This monument would supposedly remind humanity that it was never too late to stop waste. In spite of unresolved court injunctions, the Argo was nevertheless launched on time. The legality of that was challenged, and some of the litigation continues to this very day.
The average human could reasonably expect to live to a hundred and thirty, so most of the Argo’s builders would still alive for the Centauri flyby, and could see some results from their work. Because there would be no more interstellar missions, this was humanity’s only chance to explore anything outside the solar system.
The mission plan had been for the Argo itself to pass close to Centauri A, and use the star’s gravity as a slingshot to swing around through sixty-seven degrees. It would then travel another eighteen light-years to Gliese 581. This star had six planets, and its flyby would be the spectacular climax of the mission. Of course none of us would live to see that, it was our gift to future generations.
Once the Argo’s nuclear fuel and reaction mass had been spent, a probe the size of a pickup truck detached from the main part of the spacecraft and drew ahead using ion engines until it was traveling just one mile per second faster. There was a substantial risk that the huge nuclear drive and its tanks might hit a scrap of cosmic debris and explode, so it was not safe to be near. The unmanned probe that was the real Argo was thin, tiny and streamlined, and had been built tougher than an armor piercing artillery shell. It had a far better chance of avoiding or surviving any impact.
My wife looked up from her UDP, thought for a moment, then spoke.
“Twenty-First Century economists would have called the Argo really bad value for money,” she said.
She was an economist, at least in the sense that she lectured in economic history at London University. She had no interest in space exploration, but every so often she tried to keep me company by saying something to show that she was paying attention.
“Exploration should be done for its own sake,” I replied.
“But they spent hundreds of trillions of dollars just to streak through two star systems at a tenth of lightspeed. Why bother?”
“True, why bother?” I sighed, maybe too theatrically. “The people who think like you have won. The Argo has become both the first and last starship. Ever.”
She returned her attention to her UDP, embarrassed by being right yet slightly venal.
“Can I go now?” asked Jason.
“No!” I snapped.
“I’ve got swimming training tomorrow.”
“You just want to telepresence with Julia Gould.”
“We’re just good friends!”
“Good, so you can stay and watch the Wells flyby. It’s the real highlight of the evening, and—and when you’re older you will thank me for making you stay.”
Wells had been discovered by Earth-based telescopes long before the Argo was built. It was a rocky planet orbiting Centauri B, slightly smaller than Earth, and right on the outer edge of the star’s habitable zone. It was the only Earth-type planet in the Alpha Centauri system. Because it was a slightly bigger, warmer version of Mars, a Spacebook campaign was begun for it to be named after one of the thousands of science fiction authors who had written novels involving Mars. A hundred years after his death, the author of The War of the Worlds had won this contest.
Control-Captain Jackson and the journalist were replaced by an image of Wells at the ce
nter of our living room’s holovista. It began as a reddish spot, but this quickly became a half-moon shape. Over the course of a few seconds it expanded into a red, green and white disk about a yard across, then it reverted to a half-moon that dwindled back into a red dot as Harpy 1 left it far behind. The encounter had taken all of fifteen seconds.
“Is that all there is?” asked Jason, his arms still folded tightly.
“That was what a human would see,” I replied. “Obviously you’re a human.”
Jason scowled. Like a great many teenagers of thirteen or fourteen, he disliked being a member of the human race and considered my words to be an insult. He was wearing his newly fashionable nerve-servo contact lenses, the kind with cat’s eye pupils. They actually contracted and dilated, and were meant to make him seem like some sort of feline predator. He also had a pair of prosthetic vampire fangs, but that sort of accessory had been fashionable for two hundred years.
“So, er, what else are we supposed to see?” asked my wife, to break the silence.
“That,” I said.
The largest image of Wells had just been projected for us to examine at our leisure. Imagine Mars, slightly larger, slightly warmer and quite a lot wetter, but with no craters. There were streaks and patches of olive green, and tracts of grayish blue that were its small seas. The polar caps were huge, as if an ice age were gripping the planet. There were also cloud systems, but they were thin and stringy.
“A lot of the surface is red desert, but there are areas of green,” some unseen planetary scientist was explaining excitedly. “Spectral analysis already shows it to have chlorophyll, but not quite as we know chlorophyll. The little seas and lakes are obvious, and rivers are visible because of vegetation growing beside them. This is not just an Earth-like planet, it’s another Earth!”
The air pressure was barely that of very high mountains on Earth, but it was enough to support liquid water. Wells seemed to be a planet made up entirely of tundra grasslands, shallow, swampy seas, and icy wilderness. It was the sort of place that would tolerate humans, rather than welcome them.