Launch Pad (8 page)

It was about what you learned and what you did with that knowledge. Whether you did something interesting or important and contributed. That’s what she really wanted them to understand.

Bev realized she’d been standing silently for too long. “Right then. Let’s think beyond the university and consider the universe. Let’s stop thinking about ourselves and our own lives, and consider our world and humankind’s existence upon it. Instead, let’s think about a question that transcends your grade in this course and consider how an answer would change the way we see ourselves and the universe we inhabit.”

She moved to the next slide and spoke with all the passion she could muster, bringing a lifetime of thoughts about this question to bear. She was focused, on fire, and knew it would be one of her best lectures. It would lead to lively discussion in the work groups later.

Because she believed in this. Humans being alone in the universe was unthinkable to her. There was no way they could be alone, or the first species with technology. Others had to be out there. Others to learn from. Others to lean on for guidance. Others to help. It was hard to be alone in the universe, let alone in the university.

She refused to be alone in the university, at least for the next hour. And she would learn that student’s name one way or another before the end of the semester. She made eye contact with him, and he smiled at her.

O O O

The end-of-the-semester party was held in early December at Marty’s house, a house so big that Bev thought she might even call it a mansion. The décor seemed out of place for the Midwest. It was all Asian, with important cherrywood furniture and Chinese artwork on the walls. Marty didn’t really need such a big house either—his kids had moved out and it was just the him, his wife, and an old mutt named Sir Maxwell. Professors got paid okay, but were not generally rich. However, Marty’s father had been loaded.

That was reflected in the party, which was luxurious by University standards. There were two open bars sporting quite a bit better than box wine and domestic beers, a pasta station with dedicated chef, an ice sculpture of Albert Einstein (whose extended tongue was already dripping), and a spread of all sorts of exotic dishes.

Bev knew she should be ecstatic, having survived her first semester more or less intact, with all but finals and final grades completed. She could also be excited about almost a month off before next semester, with time to herself to work. She’d promised her folks she’d visit in the summer, and she would. The prospects of the vacation and the fabulous party should be picking her spirits up, but she was down.

After her slip up with the “Alone in the University” lecture, she could not help but notice that all the other faculty members had spouses and most of them kids as well. Even the single grad students had brought dates, including the shy, awkward ones, like the Pakistani guy whose name escaped her. It seemed that Marty’s parties were legendary enough to motivate everyone to be social.

Except for her.

Bev leaned in a doorway, sipping from her glass—a really lovely French Pinot Noir—feeling alone as she watched everyone smile and talk. She should have asked Rodger along. Why hadn’t she? What would be so wrong about it?

Nothing. Everything.

There would be time later when she was sure of tenure, and could invest in her own social life. Right now she needed high-impact papers and a long-term grant or two in order to be sure she’d get promoted. Tenure wasn’t just a promotion, though. You either got it, or you were asked to leave. And with the job market the way it was, who wanted someone who’d failed to get tenure? She might be forced to leave astronomy and go do something that actually made people money. Nothing wrong with that, but it didn’t appeal to her at all. She wanted to teach astronomy and study the stars.

She was shooting for the universe, or nothing. Or at least a solid first paper from Argus data that would justify them hiring her.

“Beverley?” asked a loud voice right in her ear.

She jumped a little, startled out of her reverie. Turning, she saw Marty and his wife, Sylvia, standing nearby. They had someone in tow with them, a young man, maybe late twenties, with curly brown hair and an unsettled look on his face.

Marty pushed the man forward and she found herself shifting her wine glass from right hand to left, and shaking hands with him. “This is our son, David. He’s single, too.”

Oh, no, Marty. Too obvious. Too clumsy. She wanted to scream at him, roll her eyes, toss her drink, run away. He was department chair, however, and likely just trying to do a good thing as he saw it. It was touching in a way that he cared. It made her like him more, but it was not what she wanted right now. How could he know what she was going through? She hadn’t said anything to him about her lack of a social life, but didn’t intend to while he was responsible for evaluating her.

She counted to seven, her favorite number, and forced a smile. “Pleased to meet you, David.”

He said, “Yeah,” and hastily let go of her hand. She realized she was squeezing his too tightly. He glanced sideways at his father. “Dad, I’m going to get some dessert before it’s all gone.” David slinked away.

Marty scratched his head and made a small grunting noise. “He’s usually friendlier.”

“It’s fine,” Bev assured him. “Really. A truly marvelous party, but I’ve got to head out.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. Thanks again.”

And then it was her turn to slink off so she could feel alone by herself in the privacy of her own apartment. She did grab an extra bottle of the Pinot on the way out. Marty owed her that.

O O O

Bev decided to shake hands with every student in her class as they turned in their final exams. This gave her a chance to see the name on their bubble sheet and put it with a face. She should have been doing this or similar all semester to get more names down, but better late than never, she figured.

The boy’s name turned out to be Cody. He gave her a good handshake and a happy expression. Despite his rocky start, he managed to make an
A
on the final, and a
B
in the course. That was a win for both him and her.

O O O

The wind was blowing a bit outside her window, but otherwise the entire department was nearly deserted. Bev couldn’t believe how quiet the building was now that vacation had hit.

She kept avoiding starting in on her research and her code, ready to be interrupted at any time, but the interruptions didn’t come. She eventually settled in, remembering what the flow of research was like.

When she got hungry, she ordered pizza. When she got tired, she went home to sleep. When she had to go to the restroom, she went.

And she worked.

It was absolutely heavenly.

She rose up from the code once in a while to think about the big picture. She was one of a handful of analysis gurus on the Argus team. There was another group at Texas, and a guy from Santa Cruz, but she didn’t think they’d do as well as she could, even if they had more time to devote to the project than she did. Their approaches were traditional, lacking innovation, and did not succeed in her simulations as well as her algorithm. If she persevered, she was in a position to get the first, best result. Whatever they found, there would be a series of papers with close to a hundred authors on each one. She planned to have the first one, with her name first, and even though she felt like she was working alone here, the mission had required all those people to produce the data sets she’d analyze.

Bev’s trick was to run the light from the star systems through an array of masking techniques and phasing arrays, considering the day/night cycle and a range of spin rates, cloud cover variation, seasonal differences that could arise from ice caps, and pull out the things that remained the same. It was a more challenging problem than star spots, and required better data, but the key concepts were the same. Her simulations indicated the Argus data would be sufficient to resolve surface details.

She kept at it, enjoying the sheer bliss of doing what she loved without distractions. Yes, there were emails about this or that, but nothing she couldn’t ignore. She loved being in the flow.

Within a couple of weeks, she had everything set up for a trial run with real Argus data, something that could produce real results. It would take a while to run through all the possibilities and compute likelihoods.

Bev started her executable to consider all the possibilities and find the most likely one, and went home to sleep.

O O O

She rose in the morning after a good sleep and made herself a real breakfast: scrambled eggs, toast, and orange juice, freshly squeezed, just like she imagined normal people ate daily. She was pleased with herself for having the ingredients, which she didn’t always keep stocked.

It was a cold, but brilliant day with blue skies and only a few fluffy white clouds. Bev could see her breath and marveled at the silence of the start of winter. What were seasons like on other worlds?

When she got into her office and sat down in front of the computer, there was output awaiting her. Promising.

She punched a few keys and brought up a 3-D model of her first planet. As it rotated before her, she felt the bottom of her stomach drop as if she were falling, but in a good way.

She watched the best-fit solution for a while, then started investigating the different views, piecing together a picture. The daytime view was brilliant with oceans and continents, fuzzy, but recognizable.

“Cool!” she exclaimed aloud, her voice echoing in the empty building.

The nighttime view was something else altogether. Unexpectedly, it made her want to cry.

Her first thought was that she was looking at a view of Earth shot from space, at somewhat low-resolution. Networks of artificial light hugged coasts and criss-crossed alien continents.

There was a civilization there.

Stunned, she watched it for hours, checking this and that, altering displays to highlight one feature or another.

An alien civilization was the only thing that made sense.

City lights for sure. Artificial lights. A combination of sodium lamps and other technologies, some coaxing of the spectroscopy suggested. Bev was so excited she could hardly sit still. An alien civilization!

This was her first try, and Argus was going to fly for at least another five years yet. How many more might there be? Could she be the first to see all of them?

While she reveled in a moment on consideration, knowing something no one else knew for sure, Bev also realized she would have to share the news or she would bust. As soon as possible. She immediately started drafting a paper for publication, but that would take some time. First, she had to share her find with her collaborators on the Argus team. She copied her findings and sent them out, feeling like an explorer standing on the shore of a new continent.

Bev was pretty sure Rodger was also in town over the break, although she had not heard a lot from him since she’d declined his invitation for a drink. She dashed off an email:

Dear Rodger,

I had a nice result in my research I’d like to share with you over dinner, my treat. Are you free tomorrow night for sushi? And maybe a little stargazing after?

Happy,

Bev

And she was happy.

There was an old story one of her professors had told her. The source hadn’t been clear and she thought the story might be apocryphal, but it had made an impact on her nonetheless and she remembered it pretty well. It had been about a theorist who had been the first to figure out that stars were powered by fusion. He had been out on a date with his girlfriend shortly thereafter. She had said something about how beautiful the stars were. The theorist’s unique response had stuck with her through the years. He had said, “Yes, and I’m the only man in the world who knows why they shine.”

At that moment, Bev knew exactly what that certainty felt like as she let herself go back and forth between laughter and tears. She knew they weren’t alone. No one need ever feel alone again.

Bev really did have the best job in the world. She was sure there was going to be tenure and excellent job security for her in the near future. She also didn’t think she’d be feeling alone again any time soon.

***

The Space Gypsies and the Ronin Planet

By Mary A. Turzillo

Mirashaw and Diacolique needed their own Ronin planet, damn it. The population of their ship, Spamcan, had burgeoned to the limit of the vessel’s capacity, and their family was crying out for more living space. Territorial fights were breaking out over habitat, children were stripping trees in the garden module, and a couple had senselessly tried to steal a shuttle and launch themselves into deep space—several light years from any habitable planet.

Mirashaw and Diacolique didn’t like solar systems. All the ones they’d searched so far had colonists. How had humanity managed to colonize this arm of the whole damn galaxy? Even if you found a nice Goldilocks planet, and even if it didn’t have humans on it now, you were sure to have neighbors, oh, from its moon, or one of the other planets in the system, or from a moon of one of the gas giants that inconveniently wallowed around most systems. And then the neighbors got neighborly and wanted to trade, and then they wanted a piece of your real estate, and then disputes started, and lo and behold, you had wars and grabby folk wanting the land you had so carefully discovered and—

Mirashaw and Diacolique were the Mom and Pop to them all. Adam and Eve. Well, that wasn’t strictly true. The other Adams and Eves had died off, long-lived as they might be. Mirashaw and Diacolique were married, and had been for almost all their edenyears, and they took as many long Naps as they could while still shepherding their extensive family.

Which now numbered over 90,000.

They’d Napped through all the transits, while their Smartship searched and searched and searched for habitable Ronin planets. They alternated Naps when their grand-to-the-nth sons, daughters, nephews, and nieces got out of hand and needed surveillance and supervision. Sometimes they had to send Nap-gas through the whole ship, when people got too excitable, or when both Mirashaw and Diacolique just needed a rest. They’d been Mom and Pop for Smartship-alone-knew how many edenyears. If anybody still knew what an edenyear was. Aeons and aeons, anyway.

And here was a nice juicy Ronin planet. It was out about three light years from any star, and even farther from any inhabited solar system, completely undetectable in visible light, of course, but glowing at 28° K in the infrared, significantly above the galactic background. Spamcan’s brain, Smartship, had taken a closer look. The natives of this rogue planet had engineered an excellent habitat, huge elegant bubbles, under the planet’s ice-insulated ocean. Their agriculture was based entirely on thermosynthesis and chemosynthesis, and they enjoyed all the fruits of a dark, warm, insulated world, sweetly lit by lucent worms that illuminated the tubes and the tunnels of the habitat they’d carved out.

Smartship hadn’t learned the language yet, but Mirashaw and Diacolique called this planet Rawegg, because it had this thick insulating outer ice crust, like an eggshell, and a sloshy, biologically rich inner layer like a raw egg.

The center of Rawegg was a radioactive core which heated the biosphere and kept it alive and working.

Trouble was, Rawegg already had another family of humans on it. Worse than a family, a whole bloody race of people who had no memory of their edenic origins.

Rawegg had another issue, one which was shared by all the likely Ronin planets Mirashaw and Diacolique had ever encountered or heard of. It was bathed by its life-giving radioactive core with energetic particles which were, paradoxically, not very healthy for human life, at least as Mirashaw and Diacolique knew it.

But somehow, this huge native population was happily thriving on, or in, Rawegg.

“It’s not vacant,” Mirashaw told Diacolique. “It’s inhabited. We could put down, try to colonize some out-of-the-way nook they don’t want. But there are too many of us to go unnoticed. And any part they don’t want would be dreary and resource poor and—” Mirashaw banged his head against the bulkhead of their estate room. Kept banging it. Diacolique just watched him until he accidentally missed the flat part of the wall and hit his nose on a molding. Then she gathered the hem of his toga and dabbed at the blood.

“There has to be a way.” Diacolique felt so sorry for him. She really wanted to give him hope. Wanted to give herself hope, too. “We’ve come so far. Taken so many Naps. Maybe too many.”

“Don’t start that again about letting one of the young’ns take over. I’m still in my prime, woman. I think I could still get you pregnant, if that wasn’t a complete farce with the population getting so antsy.”

“Of course you could, darling.” Diacolique sat down on their bunk and began brushing her crest. Her crest was just as fluffy and pert as it had been many Naps ago, when she had first grown it. It was one of the better alterations she and Mirashaw had created. The crest, grown out of feathers with erectile bulbs as the base of each quill, caught on and soon everybody had one. Hers was red, shading into deep purple when she was sleepy or feeling erotic. Mirashaw’s was, of course, brilliant green with touches of black.

The strokes of the brush helped her think. “We could capture another asteroid and use the raw materials to make another module. Make room for more babies. It would actually be a lot of fun, and keep the young’ns occupied with a creative project.”

Mirashaw grabbed the brush away from her and threw it against the bulkhead. “That’s a feeble stop-gap measure. We need our own Ronin planet. For the young’ns. For all the chil’n.”

She threw herself back on the bed, dejected. “It’s just so sad this one won’t work. There has to be a way.”

“No, it certainly won’t,” Mirashaw said. “Even if it were uninhabited, all our chil’n would have deformed chil’ns and probably get cancer too.”

“Might not even live that long. But there has to be a way.”

Mirashaw picked up the brush and smoothed her crest. She liked when he did that. Then they lay back together and maybe he tried to impregnate her again, or maybe their joining was just for the happiness of still being alive after all those Naps, but after it was over they slept, just quiet, living human sleep and when they awoke, Diacolique said, “Call up Smartship. I have an idea.”

Mirashaw draped his toga back on and pinned it up, glancing in the mirrorcam to assure it was in his customary dignified style. Then he bespoke Smartship, and said, “So what have you learned about these Ronin people?”

“Oh, Boss, they’ve got it made,” said Smartship. “A very short workday. They get everything they need from their organisms in just under an edenhour per day. Most eat and clothe themselves from their own pharming, and trade is considered a form of entertainment. They have a rich cultural life and wars are fought with kitchen implements and board games. Incredibly long lifespan. They do have to limit population growth, though. Took them a long time to saturate their huge biome, but it happened. It’s okay by them, though. They do a lot of virtual reproduction and get almost as much satisfaction as from body children.”

Diacolique’s ears perked up when she heard that. “Do they reproduce at all?”

“Lady Boss, since you’re asking—they do. They have occasional accidents, a suicide now and then, a very few diseases, although not as many as you’d think, considering the radiation problem. And when somebody dies, they have a lottery so anybody that wants a new chil’n can enter for a chance to get one. Body child. Insemination, gestation, the whole fireworks.”

“Do they have animals?”

“They have food animals. Sort of like large amoebae, they carve pieces off when the recipe calls for protein. Over a dozen flavors. Also some pets, called q’iq in their tongue. Cat-like, I would say, rather long and snake-like. Furry. Vocabulary of about fifty words. Quite charming. They don’t eat them.”

Diacolique cocked an eye at Mirashaw. “If we land, could we take a couple of q’iq with us when we go?”

“Your choice, my love. But we shouldn’t land. It’s not the radiation. That would be okay for a short period of time, not much more than we get from background. But we’d contaminate them, they’d contaminate us—why can’t we find a Ronin planet that’s not occupied and also not so radioactive it’ll kill all our family?”

Diacolique wasn’t about to give up. “What is it about these humans that allows them to live in this radioactive environment? Long ago, we studied deinococcus radiodurans, but the self-repairing mechanisms of that organism couldn’t be applied to higher animals such as humans.”

Smartship was silent.

Diacolique seized Mirashaw’s arm. “Let’s send down a drone to acquire some tissue samples from these people. Maybe we can do a little stem cell alteration on ourselves—”

Mirashaw glowered down on her and she let go of his arm. “Any alterations might be harmful. Anyway, I thought we had agreed, we are not going to invade.”

“We could at least investigate.”

O O O

So Smartship built a fleet of tiny drones and sent them down to the planet’s surface, to melt through the protective ice. Some drones left optical fiber behind, to allow com through the hundreds of kilometers of ice, while tiny bots went out to take tissue samples.

A Xh’x girl and her swain were wandering the beautifully landscaped bubbles of their northern hemisphere, and she suddenly slapped her ankle and said, “Ouch! Did the Mothers create a new type of bug for this bubble?”

A wise geezer was gently rocking in the tunnel in front of his personal bubble, and a sharp pang stung his neck.

And so on.

The drones spent a mere edenday at this task, then sent their news home.

O O O

Smartship, after analysis, reported to Diacolique. “As you might guess, they are not identical to you and your family in genetic structure. There are more redheads, most of them are left-handed, and they see colors in the infrared. Those are a few of the differences. But I find nothing that accounts for their ability to repair radiation damage.”

“Give me a summary of all the differences,” Diacolique said.

She studied it in detail, and found subtle alterations in the area of serotonin processing and brain architecture. But she doubted these protected against radiation.

She suspected, and Smartship agreed, that something in their microbiome—perhaps an infection with a distant cousin of deinococcus radiodurans—was the protective agent.

But the only way to tell for sure was to examine a whole living native from Rawegg.

She had to find a way to do this.

O O O

She soon observed that Mirashaw was bored with the whole affair. He hadn’t mentioned leaving the Ronin planet yet, but he wasn’t taking any interest in Diacolique’s research project.

He did have other matters to distract him. He had to settle some serious territorial disputes concerning a pair of upstart landlords who thought they were more directly descended from the ship’s mothers and fathers than their neighbors. They felt they should be legislating local marriage contracts and water allotments. Their claim to direct descent was ridiculous, because everybody was directly descended, but they thought they could declare themselves some sort of royalty. Mirashaw must put them in their place.

Another issue was that one of his scientists—Mirashaw and Diacolique’s great great grandson, in fact—had discovered a weird phytochemical in the feed grain of their hamster cattle. It produced recreational psychedelic effects. Hamsters were doing pirouettes and singing odd little ditties. Mirashaw had to try it out. If he found it safe, he must order trials to determine if it enhanced artistic ability or had any other effects, beneficial or deleterious.

Mirashaw’s morning court sessions were quite taxing, and he was annoyed that Diacolique had recused herself from all governance and wanted only to solve the problem of why the inhabitants of Rawegg (or Xh’x , as its inhabitants called it) were able to live in a radioactive environment.

He had that belligerent look he got when he had changed his mind and wanted to put his foot down. “It’s not as if we’re planning to take over their planet. We’re not exactly a war ship, woman.”

She threw a sandal at his head and screamed. “We don’t need to attack. We could just sort of—blend in. You think we can just wander the galaxy forever, like some sort of deep space gypsies? I want a home! We need a planet! I was born on a planet, and I want my chil’n and my chil’n’s chil’n to know what real gravity feels like!”

Mirashaw seized her sandal and stamped on it, as if he was stamping on her tender toes. “You think I don’t want the same? We’re wasting time here. Get with the program, woman! Move on! If you haven’t given up by tomorrow at sleep time, I’m asking Smartship to flood the whole habitat with Nap gas and initiate another search. You can lie where you fall!”

She screamed and cried and tore at her crest, but Mirashaw just swept out of the cabin, leaving her in an abject heap.

O O O

Diacolique went back to the analysis Smartship had given her. Her idea was so outrageous she was afraid to mention it in front of Mirashaw. So she waited until he was feeding (on some fiber-amino-acid-polycyclic-aromatic-hydrocarbon mix they’d dreamed up together). She bespoke Smartship in a confidential mode.

“You’ve decoded their language, monitored their communications, evaluated their culture. What is their religious orientation?” she asked.

“I’ll check,” said Smartship. It processed for several seconds, then came back with, “Most extraordinary. My kind has observed, pan-galactically, a correlation between misery and religious devotion. Miserable living conditions and premature death correlate with the number of gods, and the percent of the population willing to prostrate themselves before one or another of these deities. Incidentally, the more fervent the religious ambience, the larger the extent of misadventure as a result of the clash of devotees from one deity to another.”

“Misadventure meaning—”

“Humans burned at the stake, religious wars, crusades. Some worlds have been settled and then human populations have been extinguished by religious wars.”

Diacolique’s heart sank. This world was almost a Utopia, so—no religion. Her plan wouldn’t work. But she asked, “Wait. What’s extraordinary about Rawegg?”