Earthward: Hard Science Fiction (Proxima Logfiles Book 7), page 1
PROXIMA LOGFILES 7: EARTHWARD
Hard Science Fiction
BRANDON Q. MORRIS
Contents
Earthward
Author's Note
A Guided Tour of Earth for Aliens
Glossary of Acronyms
Metric to English Conversions
Earthward
March 5, 2302 – ENP Station
Takumi held his finger over the button.
“Wait a minute,” Carrie said.
Saturn was pushing itself farther into the picture. Once again the planet made a particularly wild impression. A new storm was forming at the equator. “You didn’t sleep well, did you? Did one of your moons annoy you again?” Takumi liked to talk to the ‘Ringed Planet.’ There wasn’t much to do at the station.
“Now,” Carrie said.
Takumi took a moment to switch mental focus. Then he pressed the button. The light from the distant sun passed through the material of the ring system at a perfect angle, allowing the spectrograph to take good pictures to document the slow decay of the system. It had been the subject of Carrie’s doctoral thesis, but Takumi felt his own degree was being underutilized during this mission. He had long since evaluated today’s three interviews that he always conducted directly after getting up.
The first spectrograms built up on the screen. Carrie’s task was more complicated than his. She had to correlate the measurement data with the moons’ motion data and combine it all with magnetic field measurements to ultimately determine whether the rings would last another 50—or 50 million—years. That was how she’d explained it to him.
Carrie looked pleased. A subtle smile curled her mouth, though she was clearly compressing her lips to contain it. That was not unusual. Carrie was the most content person he knew. How did one reach such a state at the age of 30? Takumi was four years older and far from content. He had to be careful not to make her the subject of his research, because as a psychologist, his assignment was to study the dreams that kept haunting people who were near this moon of Saturn. In his sleep last night, for example, he’d met a giant bear who wanted to discuss the meaning of life with him.
Of course, everyone knew the source of these dreams: the being at the depths of the Enceladus Ocean. But the great powers had agreed not to inform the public of the being’s existence—yes, they’d said, primitive life had been found in the icy waters beneath the 50-kilometers-thick crust of ice, and that was why the icy moon had been declared a forbidden zone. After the first illegal visits were made, UNESCO set up the permanently manned Enceladus Station. Takumi, Carrie, and Igor were officially rangers who monitored the Enceladus Nature Park on behalf of the UN organization.
“It’s looking very nice,” Carrie commented.
Takumi looked at the curves on the screen. He was a psychologist, so the lines on the screen didn’t tell him much. But the one on the bottom left looked different. He tapped on it. “That’s out of the ordinary,” he said.
Carrie enlarged the curve so that it filled the screen. “You’re right,” she said. “That’s very interesting.”
“What makes it so different?”
“Well, what we’re seeing here is mostly reflected sunlight, so it has the known spectrum of the sun, but it’s been altered by the reflective material. So we can determine the exact structure of the rings. But what we see here,” she pointed to a line on the edge of the graph, “is out of sync. It’s not part of the solar spectrum, so it’s not reflected light.”
“Then what is it? Is there something glowing in the middle of the rings?”
“We would have seen that. The line is also very narrow, and it’s well into the ultraviolet range.”
“Laser light?”
“That’s right, Tak. It’s so narrow-banded, it can only be the result of laser modulation.”
“But who’s firing UV lasers?”
“I suspect this is part of a spacecraft’s navigation system, comparable to a radar. Someone is trying to approach the moon under cover of the rings.”
“We’ve got company,” Takumi said, tapping a welcome tune on the edge of the screen. The visitors weren’t coming for coffee, but it was a welcome change.
“Don’t get too excited,” Carrie said. “Visitors always mean stress. We should let Igor know.”
She was no longer smiling.
It took them a few minutes to pull Igor in. The small station in the icy moon’s orbit had an extendable-retractable cabin wherein one passenger at a time could be swung through space like a passenger on a chain-carousel ride at a carnival. This way, each crew member could enjoy artificial gravity for eight hours a day to suffer less from bone loss. The capsule glided in or out on a 20-meter-long tube, which also supplied it with electricity and air. Opposite it was a counterweight that could be adjusted to the mass of the passenger so that the system ran smoothly and did not cause the control center to vibrate.
Takumi hated the hours in the gravity pod, especially because his daily routine was clocked so slavishly. Whether he was having a friendly chat with Igor or playing cards with Carrie, he had to go to the ‘prison cell’ when his capsule time came. Perhaps another reason he had a hard time with it was because it meant he had to rely upon others to enable him to leave the pod. It had windows, but no airlock to the outside.
“That’s great!” said Igor after Carrie told him about the upcoming visit.
Carrie shook her head. “I’m telling you, boys, this is trouble.”
Since when had Carrie become such a pessimist? It was going to be their first visit during the nine-month shift, but she acted like she already knew what to expect.
“We can handle them,” Igor said. “I never dared hope I’d get to test the railgun even once, now that I’ve had the chance to install it.”
The previous shift had also confronted an unauthorized visitor and had been surprised by his weaponry. Everything had turned out well, but that was why the ENP station now had a weapon with decent firepower.
“So what now?” asked Takumi. “Do we wait until they get here?”
“Of course not,” Carrie replied. “I’ll inform the CapCom. The visit won’t happen for a few more hours, so there’s plenty of time to await instructions from Earth.”
“Then I’ll check on the gun now,” Igor said.
From a psychological standpoint, Igor was a little too excited about the gun, but Takumi couldn’t bring himself to take the responsibility away from him. As the ship’s psychologist, he would be entitled to do so, but that would significantly worsen the overall mood—and then he might have to operate the railgun himself.
No, Igor was capable of pulling himself together at a crucial moment. Takumi knew his record very well. Igor was the one with the most excitable nature among them, but he would never let himself get carried away.
The station was shaped like a slender Coke can. Takumi floated to the aft end, where the fast cruiser, with the latest generation of DFDs, was docked and waiting to take them to Saturn’s orbit four months hence. Tak stopped two meters from the airlock, anchored his feet in a strap on the floor, and pushed the button that controlled the curtain. Behind him, a flexible plastic fabric automatically transected the entire station, from top and bottom and side to side. It looked elegant—like the shutter of a camera, irising down to a hole, and then gently closing tight. It went dark around him at the same time, but only for a moment, until his eyes adjusted to the light from outside.
Before him lay a glittering jewel. The icy surface of Enceladus sparkled more beautifully than ever. He pulled his feet from their moorings and pushed off gently, spinning on his axis. His gaze left the moon, wandering through the blackness until he encountered the foothills of the rings, which from his perspective looked like bright, perfectly straight lines slicing across space. They led his eye to Saturn, the mighty gas planet. A shiver still ran down his spine every time he realized how powerful those storms were.
The area in the back was the station’s quiet zone. Takumi had come up with the concept himself. The bigger feat, however, had been getting the budget for it. Tak had initially envisioned a glass ring, but it proved to be unaffordable. But then he had come across a deceptively real projection in a museum. Now, 23 cleverly distributed lasers drew the image of the universe as captured by cameras on the hull of the station, which had proved a much less expensive way to achieve the purpose. The construction had the additional advantage of being able to project the illusion of South Sea beaches or Martian deserts—it was only powerless against the omnipresent weightlessness.
Takumi pressed the sound button directly above the one that operated the curtain. An ethereal chirping filled the room. Takumi closed his eyes. The chirps had a structure that became quite apparent after listening for a while. He pressed on his earlobe, activating the micro-speaker implanted in his ear canal. This way he no longer disturbed the others, even when he turned up the volume by sliding his finger along the edge of his earlobe as if turning a dial.
The chirping now filled his entire body. Takumi opened his eyes again. Above him was infinity until Saturn slid into view. Tak was now the center of his world. Everything revolved around him, and the melody of the world became clearer. The length of its vibrations corresponded to the breaks between the rings. He suddenly realized the program that generated the music looked for different parameters each time it sought to build its
He fell asleep, and yet he was still there. It was one of those lucid dreams he hated so much because, even though he knew he was dreaming, he couldn’t wake himself up. These dreams were very unusual, and this had never happened to him on Earth. That he was dreaming, there was plenty of evidence. The chirping had given way to the murmur of life support. No one responded when he called out. Takumi deliberately kept his body still. Once during such a dream, he had floated forward into the cockpit only to find he was alone. Takumi told himself to take slow, deep breaths. The dream would end as it had begun.
But he was wrong this time. He woke up because his head hit the wall. Takumi grabbed a handhold and hung on tight. His body must have moved in his sleep, and then he realized why. A vibration went through the wall about every 30 seconds. What was going on here? Takumi opened the curtain and pulled himself forward into the cockpit.
It was Igor’s fault. He was strapped in a seat in front of a screen showing the surface of Enceladus. Small fountains of steam rose up from the surface. Every 30 seconds, Igor was pressing a trigger. It must be the recoil from the railgun that was shaking the station. The ammunition the railgun fired was tiny but enormously speedy, and the law of conservation of momentum must be obeyed.
“What are you doing?” asked Takumi.
“I’m keeping the contact fissure clear,” Igor replied.
“Keep it up,” Carrie said.
Igor pressed the trigger again. “How is it?” he asked.
Takumi floated over to Carrie. She was operating the spectrograph and analyzing the plumes of steam that appeared after Igor’s shots. The screen showed a confusing array of graphs.
“It looks good,” Carrie said. “All the readings are a little below normal. It’s probably in a passive phase right now.”
The distribution of substances in the Enceladus Ocean allowed conclusions to be drawn about the state of the being that filled it. Takumi had never been down there, but he always imagined a god-like figure waiting for them at the bottom of the ocean, in the middle of the ‘Forest of Columns.’ That was how the famous explorer, Marchenko, had once described it.
In fact, the creature filled the entire ocean. It was the ocean, and at the same time, it was so much more than that. That was why he’d immediately said yes when he was offered a psychologist position on an ENP crew.
“Where did you come from?” Carrie asked.
“Me? From the quiet room,” Takumi replied.
“We called you.”
“Oh, sorry, I didn’t hear you.”
“Another one of those dreams?” asked Igor.
Takumi nodded. He’d told both of them about the dreams.
“Maybe you should get yourself checked out,” Igor said, “not that it’s anything serious.”
“Medically, you’re not going to find anything,” Tak said. “It’s our friend down there.”
“Igor’s right. It seems to be going through a passive phase right now,” Carrie said.
“What do we know about the being? Just because the concentration of some substance in the water near the contact fissure is low, we deduce some phases from it?”
“No, Tak, we already know some things. The phases change every thirty-two point nine hours, which happens to be the duration of Enceladus’ orbit around Saturn. And they’re accompanied by changes in the magnetic field oscillation. The entity affects the ice phases in the crust.”
“You’re right, of course. But you have to admit we’re a long way from any understanding. We’ve been researching it for two centuries now, but no one has ever been able to have a conversation with Hydra.”
“I don’t think that will ever happen, either,” Carrie said, shaking her head. Her long hair flew out in all directions in the zero gravity. “It’s just, too... alien for us. That’s why we have to interpret the dreams.”
“CapCom to B1, thank you for reporting,” announced Vijay, their new CapCom since Anna had gone on maternity leave two months ago.
“Finally,” Igor said, “Mission Control took its time again.”
“Shh,” Carrie admonished him.
“... thorough consultation, we have reached the conclusion to leave the decision on necessary measures completely with you. A landing by the alien forces must be prevented at all costs.”
“And what about the railgun?” asked Igor.
“Shh,” Carrie said.
Vijay, of course, couldn’t hear what they were saying here—or not for another 80 minutes.
“... there is authorization from the UN space agency to enforce the mandate by force of arms if necessary. That is, of course, if there is no other way.”
“Ah, that’s good,” Igor said, “so we’ll be spared what happened to our predecessors.”
“I hope so,” Carrie said. “It’s not like we know the visitors haven’t upgraded, too.”
“I don’t think they’re armed,” Takumi said. “After all, they seem to be going for an unnoticed approach more than anything else. That tells me they want to avoid direct confrontation.”
“Surely it’s some of those pseudo-religious weirdos again who want to be as close to their god as possible,” Igor said.
The Enceladus being had been given the role of savior by some terrestrial sects. Normally its followers did not have the financial means to equip an expedition to Saturn. Takumi was therefore thinking more of companies from the private sector who were hoping for advances in science from the being. Supposedly it completely understood the workings of the universe. How ridiculous! It probably didn’t even aspire to that.
“Now I didn’t hear what else Vijay said,” Carrie complained, pushing a few buttons.
“...if there is no other way,” could be heard from the loudspeaker. “Off the record, I’m supposed to tell you to please not let your intervention cost lives. We can’t have headlines like that. There’s already enough criticism of the hardline stance against commercial exploitation of Enceladus.”
Takumi sighed. If it had been left to certain governments and companies, the creature down there would probably have been bottled long ago.
Bright Night 3, 4056 – Majestic Draght
Eve leaned her head back so that the shower’s warm jet hit her forehead. The water was so hot that it hurt, but she needed it now. She turned until the water had rinsed all the suds out of her hair. Eve wiped the water from her face, opened her eyes, and stepped through the glass door onto the white shower rug, dripping wet. A warm towel waited over the edge of the sink. She rubbed her hair with it first, then toweled off her body.
She stood naked in front of the mirror and looked at herself. She had grown visibly older. Eve propped herself with her hands on the edge of the sink and leaned forward to get a better look at her face. She saw creases on her forehead and wrinkles around her eyes and, when she bent down, her breasts sagged more than they used to. She felt 25, but her body told a different tale.
How old was she, really? It was hard to say. Measured linearly, she’d lived no more than 35 years. But in between she’d spent long periods in cryosleep, which apparently also stressed the body. Well, she still looked pretty good for a 200-year-old. That was how old she’d be now if she’d spent her entire life on Earth.
She examined the pile of clean clothes Marchenko had laid out for her: undershirt, underpants, socks, a thin sweater, light cloth pants—all she needed on board. Everything would change on Earth, but she was not thinking about that today. Marchenko had promised them a surprise. Still, she took her time with brushing her teeth, plucking or shaving hairs where she found them distracting, combing and blow-drying thoroughly.
She shivered, but that was good because it dispelled the leaden tiredness so typical of the period after cryosleep. Eve took one last look at her naked body. When she squared her shoulders, her breasts lifted. She was okay with it as it was.
Eve dressed and left the bathroom.
