The wood walls of the house rattled in a torrent of wind, whipping the fire in the little stove into a tiny inferno. At its peak, when surely the house would have to shatter, the wind stopped, and for the first time in ten days, the house fell silent except for the river's heart beating through the generator below.
The storm had broken.
In the cabin's sudden quiet, Isaac reached for his bible, opened it randomly to read the first verse his eye fell upon. Surely the storm's cessation was a miracle. Surely a message would be at hand. He wrote the verse on a slip of paper, rolled it into a tube, then sealed it inside the Tommy Sticker. By the time he finished, his face felt warm and his toes stopped aching.
* * * *
Sean didn't wake up after the seventh long sleep.
Dr. Singh said, “He knew the dangers when he let himself age. The sleep process is hard. I'm sorry.” She consulted her notes. “Dr. Arnold was a great man. His work on long sleep cellular degradation and preservation was groundbreaking. If we were still on Earth, he surely would receive a Nobel Prize. We should all make it to Zeta Reticuli because of him.” Singh shook her head sympathetically. “I understand you were close.”
Meghan gripped the edge of the examination table. “I saw him yesterday ... before the last sleep I mean. I just saw him.” She felt every minute of her 722 years.
“Me too,” said Singh. “If you need them, I can prescribe antidepressants, but I'd rather not. Drug interaction is difficult to predict.”
Meghan walked the long hall from the infirmary to Sean's apartment. The plastic sheets covered his bed and the desk, coated by a thin layer of dust. Despite automated cleaning mechanisms, dust still fell on surfaces they couldn't reach. She pulled the plastic off his desk and let it fall to the floor. He'd left a notebook and her candleholder in the middle. She turned the cover back carefully. The paper that started the trip seven hundred years ago, even though it was acid free and specially milled to last, had become brittle. Any handwritten notes that were expected to be permanent were written on plastic paper, but Sean had enjoyed the feel of real pages better.
He had written “To Meghan” inside the cover; the rest of the pages were blank.
When she sat on the edge of the bed, the plastic crackled. The candleholder rested on her lap. She wondered, did everyone feel so empty, and what could she do about it? Her fingers pressed against the cool metal. Although remembering the aspen shaking in the valley of her wall display escaped her, she felt connected through the hard shape. How often had this candleholder stuck in a mine wall to light a few feet of rock? Who else had held it? Had it ever been more than just a tool to them? Her fingers traveled from the pointed end, past the coil that held the candle, to the burnished brass tube. For the first time, Meghan really examined the antique as a practical object instead of art. Was that a cap on the end of what she had thought was the handle? She twisted it hard. Nothing. Maybe the antique did have something in it, another connection to Earth. Both Teague and Sean had wondered, now she wanted to know.
A few minutes later she asked the machine shop chief, a stout woman whose name Meghan had never known, “Do you have a way to open it?”
The chief turned it over. She said, “It's brass, I think. From the nineteenth century, you say? I can cut it apart, but it will cause damage.”
“Go ahead.”
The chief handled the cutting tool delicately, sending tiny sparks flurrying as she sliced through the candleholder's end. A coin-sized piece of metal dropped to the floor. Meghan leaned over her shoulder as the chief used a pair of tweezers to pull the rolled up slip of paper from the cavity.
Meghan shivered. “It's almost a thousand years old!”
“There's writing.”
“A message.” Meghan feared the paper would crumble before she could discover what it said.
“What does it mean?” asked the shop chief after they'd carefully unrolled it.
“It's a Bible verse, I think. I think I know.”
Meghan left the puzzled shop chief behind and headed toward hydroponics, already planning new pipes and grow lights. She would have to leave explanations and instructions for the next shift's hydroponic officers.
* * * *
Isaac climbed through the window and up to the surface again, the last of the chair burning in the stove behind him. The air bit just as cruelly, but without the wind behind it, and with the clouds clearing, he didn't feel as cold, although dampness squished in his temporarily warm clothes. If he couldn't find more wood soon, though, the fire would wink out again, and storm or no storm, he would freeze. Holding a short-handled axe, he girded himself for the long hike up the canyon where he might be able to find firewood.
For a moment, he tried to orient himself. Snow transformed the valley, hiding all that had been familiar. The hundreds of tree trunks that marked the land before were deeply covered so the vista before him was smooth, clean, and hypnotic. The Crystal River had almost entirely vanished, revealed only by a narrow crack in the snow from which the water's glassy voice arose.
What surprised him most, though, were the trees that remained. Two weeks earlier, their lowest branches were twenty feet above the ground, the easy to reach ones having been chopped off for wood. Now, though, where the snow drifted, their needles brushed the crystalline surface. He would have no trouble finding fuel. He thought, why that tree there carries enough dead limbs to keep me warm for a month. It felt like a miracle.
He thought about the Bible verse he'd written on the slip of paper. He wasn't sure what it meant, but it had filled him with hope: “Come, let us take our fill of love until the morning: let us solace ourselves with loves. For the goodman is not at home, he is gone a long journey.” A bit from Proverbs.
When spring came, he would take the Tommy Sticker with its message and bury it by the pump house. Somewhere, someone might read it, and it would help. He was sure of it.
* * * *
Meghan kept her eyes closed for a long time after she awoke until, finally, Dr. Singh's familiar voice said, “I know you can hear me. Your vitals don't lie.”
“I'm 822 years old today.” She hadn't moved even a finger yet, but she didn't feel tired like she had the last time. She only felt hopeful.
She waited through Dr. Singh's tests impatiently. “I have to get to work,” Meghan said.
Rushing through the hallways, she barely acknowledged other crewmembers’ greetings. They, too, had work to do. So much of the trip waited before them. So much more space had to be traversed before they could come to a rest.
The first hydroponics lab looked much like she had left it, although she noted the tanks that held the plants steady would need rebuilding on her shift. She passed under one of the spokes, the cathedral-like height earning not a glance. Did her experiment work, she thought. Did the other hydroponics officers follow her direction? She couldn't see far in front of her. The ceiling's downward bulge cut off her view until she was almost there, and then, she saw.
At the end of the row, where normally the plants stopped, her jury-rigged piping led to the new plant tanks. A thick trunk rose from the tank, and as she entered the space below the next spoke, her gaze traveled up the tree's long stretch. Guy wires attached to the vertical space's sides held the tree steady. At the top, new grow fixtures hung suspended from other wires, bathing the aspen in light.
Meghan held her breath. An aspen, under the right conditions, can grow to eighty feet. This one was easily that tall. She walked around the tree. New piping and tanks connected to her original work. Three other trees grew from them. The closest tank came from her coworker twenty-five years down the line, and the tree from that tank nearly matched her own. A smaller tree, only fifty years old, grew from the next tank, and the last tank held the smallest tree, still over thirty feet to its top. The history attached to it showed it had been built twenty-five years ago. Each officer had added a tree to the grove.
Meghan sat on the floor so she could look up with less strain. Eac
h tree's branches touched the next. The room smelled of aspen, a light leafy odor that reminded her of mountains and streams, and an old generator house perched on the edge of a short cliff.
After she'd sat for a while, she realized that air currents in the ship flowed up the spoke. What she heard, finally, was not the ubiquitous mechanical hiss from the ventilation vents. What she heard was the gentle rustle of leaves touching leaves, a sound that she thought she'd long left behind and would never hear again.
Copyright © 2009 James Van Pelt
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* * *
Reader's Department: THE ALTERNATE VIEW: ODDS AND ENDS #4
by Jeffery D. Kooistra
It's been over five years since I did an “Odds and Ends” column (Jan/Feb 2004). What prompted me to write one this time was, for the most part, the rapid pace of change in the real world since I penned several of my columns of the past few years.
Over on the Analog forum, one reader wondered about my Jan/Feb 2009 Alternate View ("Energy Crisis Redux: A Polemic") and whether or not the information there couldn't have been obtained somewhere else. The answer is that of course it could have been obtained somewhere else. The question is whether or not my readers would have done so, and gotten out of it what I wanted them to.
My Alternate View alternate Dr. Cramer frequently writes about breaking news in physics. In almost all cases, except sometimes when he's talking about his own research, the Analog readership could go off and read the original papers themselves. But few readers would even know the papers existed, and even fewer would be able to understand them. What Dr. Cramer brings in his columns is both awareness and interpretation.
I seldom cover topics in physics, except for the “out there” ones that interest me, because Dr. Cramer does it very well in his column and Analog doesn't need both Alternate View columnists to cover the same sort of subject matter. So I, being a gadfly at heart, oftentimes rant on subjects of particular interest to me around deadline time. Yet regardless of topic, I consider each of my columns to be the opening salvo in an exchange with the readership. Sometimes return fire comes by letter to the editor, other times by e-mail, but most often nowadays online at the Analog forum. To be fair to all the readers, I sometimes need to provide some fairly elementary facts in a piece. I leave it to those for whom such information is elementary to either skim over it or just bear with me.
The Jan/Feb column came along when I was paying four dollars a gallon for gasoline. Little did I know that before that column saw print, gasoline would already be on its way down to prices not seen in the States since the 1990s. But falling gasoline prices didn't change the basis of my argument. Even though gasoline was excessively priced because of speculation rather than any real shortage, it doesn't change the fact that we can't keep using it forever. Certainly we don't want to again become unwilling victims to rampant speculation a few years from now. And it is still true that nuclear power is something we already know how to do and can fill the bill for our future energy needs in ways that supposedly greener alternatives never will.
Also before that column went to print, word came from a company called Hyperion (www.hyperionpowergeneration.com) that in about five years they will have available for purchase compact nuclear power plants “about the size of a hot tub” that will produce around 25 megawatts, enough to power 20,000 typical houses. A unit works for five years before it needs to be refueled at the factory, has no moving parts in the core, doesn't use water as a coolant, and cannot go supercritical. You bury it underground and don't see it again until it has to be refurbished. It doesn't pollute. As the company says, think of it as big battery.
Units like these may be a better nuclear solution to the energy crisis than conventional nuclear power plants. Even as currently designed, they can be ganged together to supply power to larger towns and cities. No doubt if business is good, soon units supplying 50, 100, maybe even 500 megawatts will hit the market. This would allow local areas to take command of their own energy needs, perhaps letting them uncouple entirely from the national grid if that's what the local voters want.
Being underground, the units would be essentially weather-impervious. No need to cover the countryside with unsightly solar stations and windmills (which I find every bit as ugly at power towers). No fear of snow and ice and rain and dust and thermal cycling damaging the units as will happen with the current crop of greener alternatives. As far as I'm concerned, these units beat the holy hell out of windmills and solar cells!
* * * *
A few years ago, when NASA put forward its newest grand vision for the future, I asked “Will We Go to the Moon?” (April 2006). I don't think much of what I said in that column is wrong, but I'm convinced now that it's almost all moot. The current collapse of the world economy essentially guarantees that we will not spend money on trips to the Moon anytime soon. Even though we have a new president who ostensibly wants to spend money on “investing in the future,” (which more often than not means spending money on trendy things that all right-thinking people just know will work regardless of whether or not there's any certainty they genuinely will), missions to the Moon are too easy to lampoon as wastes of money.
I have experience from the last time we gave up the Moon. Too many of the public thinks money spent on space projects actually goes into space, as if we loaded up our capsules or shuttles with $50s and $100s and rocketed it off into the deep. That it is spent here and that it goes into developing expertise and training scientists and engineers and all the rest that most Analog readers know so well that they don't recall when they learned it is wasted on a public that considers rank ignorance in such things a source of pride.
A great many Analog readers grew up as self-educating individuals. We didn't wait for teachers to teach us—we were already interested in the world and how it works and the wonders of science, and we went to the library and found books and we learned about these things. If you're my age you grew up reading Asimov's nonfiction books, you watched the Apollo landings in rapt amazement, and looked forward to what the future would bring.
But this experience, shared by so many in the Analog readership, is as alien to the average voter as are little green men. Don't get me wrong—I'm all in favor of the simple wisdom of the common man—most of them understand how the ordinary world really works a heckuva lot better than the average Harvard Ph.D. But space is a special topic, by definition unearthly, and the typical man finds it unfathomable because he has never tried to fathom it and has no interest in trying, either.
Go out and find the man in the street and ask him to draw you a rough sketch of our Solar System, and for over half of them you'll first have to explain to him what the Solar System is. You'll probably have to explain the difference between a star and a planet, too. By the time you've finished doing that, you'll likely decide there is no longer much point in having him sketch the Solar System.
I wrote that Moon column right after the Katrina debacle, when some politicians were suggesting the president was responsible for hurricanes and that NASA could be eliminated to help pay for the clean up. What I said then was that “this acrimonious, short-sighted, partisan, self-serving fault-finding during a crisis is exactly the kind of knee-jerk, counter-productive, self-absorbed, cover-your-ass, anti-survival, behavioral bullshit up with which we can not afford to put if we're ever going to go into space to stay.” Well, what with the financial crisis, now we've got an even bigger mess to clean up than a hurricane. Expect more of the above, squared.
* * * *
In my November 2008 column, “Turnings,” I discussed the book The Fourth Turning by William Strauss and Neil Howe. By way of brief review, let me repeat and requote from one section of that column:
“Strauss and Howe see the US as cycling through four similar turnings, or eras, again and again. It's fair enough to ask why not five or six or three, but the pattern they see fits well with four.
The authors summarize these four kinds of tur
nings starting on page 2 in chapter one:
In fact, at the core of modern history lies this remarkable pattern: Over the past five centuries, Anglo-American society has entered a new era—a new turning—every two decades or so. At the start of each turning, people change how they feel about themselves, the culture, the nation, and the future. Turnings come in cycles of four. Each cycle spans the length of a long human life, roughly eighty to one hundred years, a unit of time the ancients called the saeculum. Together, the four turnings of the saeculum comprise history's seasonal rhythm of growth, maturation, entropy, and destruction:
The First Turning is a High, an upbeat era of strengthening institutions and weakening individualism, when a new civic order implants and the old values regime decays.
The Second Turning is an Awakening, a passionate era of spiritual upheaval, when the civic order comes under attack from a new values regime.
The Third Turning is an Unraveling, a downcast era of strengthening individualism and weakening institutions, when the old civic order decays and the new values regime implants.
The Fourth Turning is a Crisis, a decisive era of secular upheaval, when the values regime propels the replacement of the old civic order with the new one.
Each turning comes with its own identifiable mood. Always, these mood shifts catch people by surprise.
This last point is an important one, the mood shifts coming as a surprise. Linear extrapolations from the recent past into even the near-term future can be far off the mark.”
The authors contend we are finishing out a period of unraveling, and about to enter a Fourth Turning period of crisis. Since the book came out in 1997, if the author's thesis is correct, then that Turning should be upon us.
Analog SFF, June 2009 Page 11