Galaxy's Edge Magazine: Issue 1 March 2013
Page 3
“You’re all set,” said the computer. “You can get up now.”
The thick glass cover over my coffin slid aside, and I used the padded handles to hoist myself out of its black porcelain frame. For most of the journey, the ship had been coasting in zero gravity, but now that it was decelerating, there was a gentle push downward. Still, it was nowhere near a full g, and I was grateful for that. It would be a day or two before I would be truly steady on my feet.
My module was shielded from the others by a partition, which I’d covered with photos of people I’d left behind: my parents, Helena’s parents, my real sister, her two sons. My clothes had waited patiently for me for twelve hundred years; I rather suspected they were now hopelessly out of style. But I got dressed—I’d been naked in the cryochamber, of course—and at last I stepped out from behind the partition, just in time to see Ling emerging from behind the wall that shielded her cryocoffin.
“’Morning,” I said, trying to sound blasé.
Ling, wearing a blue and gray jumpsuit, smiled broadly. “Good morning.”
We moved into the center of the room, and hugged, friends delighted to have shared an adventure together. Then we immediately headed out toward the bridge, half-walking, half-floating, in the reduced gravity.
“How’d you sleep?” asked Ling.
It wasn’t a frivolous question. Prior to our mission, the longest anyone had spent in cryofreeze was five years, on a voyage to Saturn; the Pioneer Spirit was Earth’s first starship.
“Fine,” I said. “You?”
“Okay,” replied Ling. But then she stopped moving, and briefly touched my forearm. “Did you—did you dream?”
Brain activity slowed to a virtual halt in cryofreeze, but several members of the crew of Cronus—the Saturn mission—had claimed to have had brief dreams, lasting perhaps two or three subjective minutes, spread over five years. Over the span that the Pioneer Spirit had been traveling, there would have been time for many hours of dreaming.
I shook my head. “No. What about you?”
Ling nodded. “Yes. I dreamt about the strait of Gibraltar. Ever been there?”
“No.”
“It’s Spain’s southernmost boundary, of course. You can see across the strait from Europe to northern Africa, and there were Neandertal settlements on the Spanish side.” Ling’s Ph.D. was in anthropology. “But they never made it across the strait. They could clearly see that there was more land—another continent!—only thirteen kilometers away. A strong swimmer can make it, and with any sort of raft or boat, it was eminently doable. But Neandertals never journeyed to the other side; as far as we can tell, they never even tried.”
“And you dreamt—?”
“I dreamt I was part of a Neandertal community there, a teenage girl, I guess. And I was trying to convince the others that we should go across the strait, go see the new land. But I couldn’t; they weren’t interested. There was plenty of food and shelter where we were. Finally, I headed out on my own, trying to swim it. The water was cold and the waves were high, and half the time I couldn’t get any air to breathe, but I swam and I swam, and then…”
“Yes?”
She shrugged a little. “And then I woke up.”
I smiled at her. “Well, this time we’re going to make it. We’re going to make it for sure.”
We came to the bridge door, which opened automatically to admit us, although it squeaked something fierce while doing so; its lubricants must have dried up over the last twelve centuries. The room was rectangular with a double row of angled consoles facing a large screen, which currently was off.
“Distance to Soror?” I asked into the air.
The computer’s voice replied. “1.2 million kilometers.”
I nodded. About three times the distance between Earth and its moon. “Screen on, view ahead.”
“Overrides are in place,” said the computer.
Ling smiled at me. “You’re jumping the gun, partner.”
I was embarrassed. The Pioneer Spirit was decelerating toward Soror; the ship’s fusion exhaust was facing in the direction of travel. The optical scanners would be burned out by the glare if their shutters were opened. “Computer, turn off the fusion motors.”
“Powering down,” said the artificial voice.
“Visual as soon as you’re able,” I said.
The gravity bled away as the ship’s engines stopped firing. Ling held on to one of the handles attached to the top of the console nearest her; I was still a little groggy from the suspended animation, and just floated freely in the room. After about two minutes, the screen came on. Tau Ceti was in the exact center, a baseball-sized yellow disk. And the four planets were clearly visible, ranging from pea-sized to as big as a grape.
“Magnify on Soror,” I said.
One of the peas became a billiard ball, although Tau Ceti grew hardly at all.
“More,” said Ling.
The planet grew to softball size. It was showing as a wide crescent, perhaps a third of the disk illuminated from this angle. And—thankfully, fantastically—Soror was everything we’d dreamed it would be: a giant polished marble, with swirls of white cloud, and a vast, blue ocean, and—
Part of a continent was visible, emerging out of the darkness. And it was green, apparently covered with vegetation.
We hugged again, squeezing each other tightly. No one had been sure when we’d left Earth; Soror could have been barren. The Pioneer Spirit was ready regardless: in its cargo holds was everything we needed to survive even on an airless world. But we’d hoped and prayed that Soror would be, well—just like this: a true sister, another Earth, another home.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” said Ling.
I felt my eyes tearing. It was beautiful, breathtaking, stunning. The vast ocean, the cottony clouds, the verdant land, and—
“Oh, my God,” I said, softly. “Oh, my God.”
“What?” said Ling.
“Don’t you see?” I asked. “Look!”
Ling narrowed her eyes and moved closer to the screen. “What?”
“On the dark side,” I said.
She looked again. “Oh…” she said. There were faint lights sprinkled across the darkness; hard to see, but definitely there. “Could it be volcanism?” asked Ling. Maybe Soror wasn’t so perfect after all.
“Computer,” I said, “spectral analysis of the light sources on the planet’s dark side.”
“Predominantly incandescent lighting, color temperature 5600 kelvin.”
I exhaled and looked at Ling. They weren’t volcanoes. They were cities.
Soror, the world we’d spent twelve centuries traveling to, the world we’d intended to colonize, the world that had been dead silent when examined by radio telescopes, was already inhabited.
The Pioneer Spirit was a colonization ship; it wasn’t intended as a diplomatic vessel. When it had left Earth, it had seemed important to get at least some humans off the mother world. Two small-scale nuclear wars—Nuke I and Nuke II, as the media had dubbed them—had already been fought, one in southern Asia, the other in South America. It appeared to be only a matter of time before Nuke III, and that one might be the big one.
SETI had detected nothing from Tau Ceti, at least not by 2051. But Earth itself had only been broadcasting for a century and a half at that point; Tau Ceti might have had a thriving civilization then that hadn’t yet started using radio. But now it was twelve hundred years later. Who knew how advanced the Tau Cetians might be?
I looked at Ling, then back at the screen. “What should we do?”
Ling tilted her head to one side. “I’m not sure. On the one hand, I’d love to meet them, whoever they are. But…”
“But they might not want to meet us,” I said. “They might think we’re invaders, and—”
“And we’ve got forty-eight other colonists to think about,” said Ling. “For all we know, we’re the last surviving humans.”
I frowned. “Well, that’s easy enough
to determine. Computer, swing the radio telescope toward Sol system. See if you can pick anything up that might be artificial.”
“Just a sec,” said the female voice. A few moments later, a cacophony filled the room: static and snatches of voices and bits of music and sequences of tones, overlapping and jumbled, fading in and out. I heard what sounded like English—although strangely inflected—and maybe Arabic and Mandarin and…
“We’re not the last survivors,” I said, smiling. “There’s still life on Earth—or, at least, there was 11.9 years ago, when those signals started out.”
Ling exhaled. “I’m glad we didn’t blow ourselves up,” she said. “Now, I guess we should find out what we’re dealing with at Tau Ceti. Computer, swing the dish to face Soror, and again scan for artificial signals.”
“Doing so.” There was silence for most of a minute, then a blast of static, and a few bars of music, and clicks and bleeps, and voices, speaking in Mandarin and English and—
“No,” said Ling. “I said face the dish the other way. I want to hear what’s coming from Soror.”
The computer actually sounded miffed. “The dish is facing toward Soror,” it said.
I looked at Ling, realization dawning. At the time we’d left Earth, we’d been so worried that humanity was about to snuff itself out, we hadn’t really stopped to consider what would happen if that didn’t occur. But with twelve hundred years, faster spaceships would doubtless have been developed. While the colonists aboard the Pioneer Spirit had slept, some dreaming at an indolent pace, other ships had zipped past them, arriving at Tau Ceti decades, if not centuries, earlier—long enough ago that they’d already built human cities on Soror.
“Damn it,” I said. “God damn it.” I shook my head, staring at the screen. The tortoise was supposed to win, not the hare.
“What do we do now?” asked Ling.
I sighed. “I suppose we should contact them.”
“We—ah, we might be from the wrong side.”
I grinned. “Well, we can’t both be from the wrong side. Besides, you heard the radio: Mandarin and English. Anyway, I can’t imagine that anyone cares about a war more than a thousand years in the past, and—”
“Excuse me,” said the ship’s computer. “Incoming audio message.”
I looked at Ling. She frowned, surprised. “Put it on,” I said.
“Pioneer Spirit, welcome! This is Jod Bokket, manager of the Derluntin space station, in orbit around Soror. Is there anyone awake on board?” It was a man’s voice, with an accent unlike anything I’d ever heard before.
Ling looked at me, to see if I was going to object, then she spoke up. “Computer, send a reply.” The computer bleeped to signal that the channel was open. “This is Dr. Ling Woo, co-captain of the Pioneer Spirit. Two of us have revived; there are forty-eight more still in cryofreeze.”
“Well, look,” said Bokket’s voice, “it’ll be days at the rate you’re going before you get here. How about if we send a ship to bring you two to Derluntin? We can have someone there to pick you up in about an hour.”
“They really like to rub it in, don’t they?” I grumbled.
“What was that?” said Bokket. “We couldn’t quite make it out.”
Ling and I consulted with facial expressions, then agreed. “Sure,” said Ling. “We’ll be waiting.”
“Not for long,” said Bokket, and the speaker went dead.
Bokket himself came to collect us. His spherical ship was tiny compared with ours, but it seemed to have about the same amount of habitable interior space; would the ignominies ever cease? Docking adapters had changed a lot in a thousand years, and he wasn’t able to get an airtight seal, so we had to transfer over to his ship in space suits. Once aboard, I was pleased to see we were still floating freely; it would have been too much if they’d had artificial gravity.
Bokket seemed a nice fellow—about my age, early thirties. Of course, maybe people looked youthful forever now; who knew how old he might actually be? I couldn’t really identify his ethnicity, either; he seemed to be rather a blend of traits. But he certainly was taken with Ling—his eyes popped out when she took off her helmet, revealing her heart-shaped face and long, black hair.
“Hello,” he said, smiling broadly.
Ling smiled back. “Hello. I’m Ling Woo, and this is Toby MacGregor, my co-captain.”
“Greetings,” I said, sticking out my hand.
Bokket looked at it, clearly not knowing precisely what to do. He extended his hand in a mirroring of my gesture, but didn’t touch me. I closed the gap and clasped his hand. He seemed surprised, but pleased.
“We’ll take you back to the station first,” he said. “Forgive us, but, well—you can’t go down to the planet’s surface yet; you’ll have to be quarantined. We’ve eliminated a lot of diseases, of course, since your time, and so we don’t vaccinate for them anymore. I’m willing to take the risk, but…”
I nodded. “That’s fine.”
He tipped his head slightly, as if he were preoccupied for a moment, then: “I’ve told the ship to take us back to Derluntin station. It’s in a polar orbit, about 200 kilometers above Soror; you’ll get some beautiful views of the planet, anyway.” He was grinning from ear to ear. “It’s wonderful to meet you people,” he said. “Like a page out of history.”
“If you knew about us,” I asked, after we’d settled in for the journey to the station, “why didn’t you pick us up earlier?”
Bokket cleared his throat. “We didn’t know about you.”
“But you called us by name: Pioneer Spirit.”
“Well, it is painted in letters three meters high across your hull. Our asteroid-watch system detected you. A lot of information from your time has been lost—I guess there was a lot of political upheaval then, no?—but we knew Earth had experimented with sleeper ships in the twenty-first century.”
We were getting close to the space station; it was a giant ring, spinning to simulate gravity. It might have taken us over a thousand years to do it, but humanity was finally building space stations the way God had always intended them to be.
And floating next to the space station was a beautiful spaceship, with a spindle-shaped silver hull and two sets of mutually perpendicular emerald-green delta wings. “It’s gorgeous,” I said.
Bokket nodded.
“How does it land, though? Tail-down?”
“It doesn’t land; it’s a starship.”
“Yes, but—”
“We use shuttles to go between it and the ground.”
“But if it can’t land,” asked Ling, “why is it streamlined? Just for esthetics?”
Bokket laughed, but it was a polite laugh. “It’s streamlined because it needs to be. There’s substantial length-contraction when flying at just below the speed of light; that means that the interstellar medium seems much denser. Although there’s only one baryon per cubic centimeter, they form what seems to be an appreciable atmosphere if you’re going fast enough.”
“And your ships are that fast?” asked Ling.
Bokket smiled. “Yes. They’re that fast.”
Ling shook her head. “We were crazy,” she said. “Crazy to undertake our journey.” She looked briefly at Bokket, but couldn’t meet his eyes. She turned her gaze down toward the floor. “You must think we’re incredibly foolish.”
Bokket’s eyes widened. He seemed at a loss for what to say. He looked at me, spreading his arms, as if appealing to me for support. But I just exhaled, letting air—and disappointment—vent from my body.
“You’re wrong,” said Bokket, at last. “You couldn’t be more wrong. We honor you.” He paused, waiting for Ling to look up again. She did, her eyebrows lifted questioningly. “If we have come farther than you,” said Bokket, “or have gone faster than you, it’s because we had your work to build on. Humans are here now because it’s easy for us to be here, because you and others blazed the trails.” He looked at me, then at Ling. “If we see farther,” he said, �
�it’s because we stand on the shoulders of giants.”
Later that day, Ling, Bokket, and I were walking along the gently curving floor of Derluntin station. We were confined to a limited part of one section; they’d let us down to the planet’s surface in another ten days, Bokket had said.
“There’s nothing for us here,” said Ling, hands in her pockets. “We’re freaks, anachronisms. Like somebody from the T’ang Dynasty showing up in our world.”
“Soror is wealthy,” said Bokket. “We can certainly support you and your passengers.”
“They are not passengers,” I snapped. “They are colonists. They are explorers.”
Bokket nodded. “I’m sorry. You’re right, of course. But look—we really are delighted that you’re here. I’ve been keeping the media away; the quarantine lets me do that. But they will go absolutely dingo when you come down to the planet. It’s like having Neil Armstrong or Tamiko Hiroshige show up at your door.”
“Tamiko who?” asked Ling.
“Sorry. After your time. She was the first person to disembark at Alpha Centauri.”
“The first,” I repeated; I guess I wasn’t doing a good job of hiding my bitterness. “That’s the honor—that’s the achievement. Being the first. Nobody remembers the name of the second person on the moon.”
“Edwin Eugene Aldrin, Jr.,” said Bokket. “Known as ‘Buzz.’”
“Fine, okay,” I said. “You remember, but most people don’t.”
“I didn’t remember it; I accessed it.” He tapped his temple. “Direct link to the planetary web; everybody has one.”
Ling exhaled; the gulf was vast. “Regardless,” she said, “we are not pioneers; we’re just also-rans. We may have set out before you did, but you got here before us.”
“Well, my ancestors did,” said Bokket. “I’m sixth-generation Sororian.”
“Sixth generation?” I said. “How long has the colony been here?”
“We’re not a colony anymore; we’re an independent world. But the ship that got here first left Earth in 2107. Of course, my ancestors didn’t immigrate until much later.”