"Commander Christina
Vasa reporting..."
"Omygod, Captain,
what's happened to you? You've got to get to sick bay. We lost contact
with you; I can see why: you don't have your communicator. We were about
to go down after you and the expeditionary force, because you were gone
for just over the 25-day limit you had set for us. Are the others waiting
to come up? What's it like down there?"
Christina tried
to answer the barrage of questions, then made her preliminary oral report
to the Command Staff on Constellation, in the absence of Captain Stone,
who was ailing in sick bay. She came close to breaking down again under
the emotional strain of reporting the events of this month on Mesnos. Based
on her report, a preliminary expedition was sent to the new site of New
Terra, and another one was dispatched to Sandstone. They were to meet with
the mayors and with the planet's governor. Supplies, information,
news of family on Earth and the Space Stations, and over a thousand new
settler families, each with its own new housing module, were all to be
sent down as expeditiously as possible. About half the settlers were planning
to go to each city.
Christina was
sent to sick bay, where the medical staff gave her the usual examination,
and then she took a long shower and washed her disgustingly filthy hair.
Sometime later, she asked to see Captain Stone.
"Didn't they
tell you?" asked Dr. Della Città.
"Tell me what,
Giovanna?"
"Captain Stone
had a stroke while you were gone. It was a massive stroke that paralyzed
him totally. We did our best, but I'm afraid... He's dead."
"Oh, no! I
don't know how much more I can take. My entire expeditionary force, my
friends, Boris... Now this... It's too much."
Christina lay
down on a cot and wept, sobbing convulsively. Doctor Della Città
gave her a tranquilizing shot from her medical gun, and soon Christina
fell into a deep sleep. When she awoke, Commander Constantinos was with
Giovanna at her bedside. "Homer! Giovanna! What happened? Where am
I? Oh..." The memory of her return to Constellation, the questions, the
report, the grim news, the overwhelming weight of being the lone survivor,
thoughts of her friends, of her escape from death. She shuddered.
"Do you feel better? Have you actually rested?"
"I feel restored
physically, but so sad. I can't believe all that's happened in such a short
time. At least, the settlers will have somewhere to go, and can become
part of living communities. I was afraid for a while that New Terra was
completely destroyed by the Militia, along with an entire population."
"Christina,"
said Homer, "I know, we all know that you've been through a lot. And I
know that most of the news you've had to tell us and that you've learned
from us has been bad. But we do have some good news to report: the new
settlers are about to disembark, but they want to see you first, to thank
you for what you've done for them.
"What I've
done?"
"It's only
been a couple of days since you returned, ..."
"A couple of
days? I've been out for a couple of days?"
"Yes, and everyone
on board, and probably everyone on Mesnos knows about your adventures and
how you saved the planet from the Militia. The settlers also know about
Lieutenant Smirnoff's vital role in making their safe landing possible."
"What a shame
they can't thank Boris in person for his courageous act. He literally gave
up his life for them. And what a shame they can't thank the Captain for
what he did for them. He got us through meteor showers, a wild electrical
storm in–literally–the middle of nowhere, and had to reroute our trajectory.
They're both gone, now."
"They have
come to thank the Captain. You."
"What?"
"Captain Stone
had in his possession authorization to name you his deputy, which he was
going to do after your expedition. The Staff has named you, for the duration
of this mission, its Captain. We will request a permanent promotion when
we return to Headquarters, in the name of Captain Stone."
Christina looked
first at Homer, then at Giovanna, then back again. They looked dead serious,
despite their warm smiles; this can't be a prank. I know the Captain intended
to recommend me for a promotion, but he must have kept this news as a secret.
She felt a warm surge, gulped, tried to hide her emotions behind a steely,
expressionless face, but her charade lasted at best a few seconds. She
smiled. Her eyes were brightened by teardrops of pride and gratitude.
"I... I...
I have to get dressed and meet the settlers. We have so much to do! And
what do I say? I've never been a Captain before!"
A day for reflection.
The destruction of the Himalayas and the Sermon in the Valley, both celebrated
as holidays by different people. Tomorrow we leave. This second month on
Mesnos is doubly blessed: it's been both peaceful and sunny.
I've now seen
the cities and met the original settlers, by now full-fledged Mesnosians.
The first Mesnosian children are already beginning to grow up. Our new
immigrants are delighted with what they see, have great plans for the future.
Each town has a fully-operational hospital, schools, all the social institutions
needed for our kind of government. I feel good about their future. Still,
I wonder about our enterprise: the colonization of compatible planets where
there is no intelligent life. At least we're not driving off any natives.
And there will have to be contact with Earth, dependence on Earth, at least
until the population is large enough and its economy stable enough to allow
for the establishment of a university. I wonder about how we, or rather
how the Mesnosians will treat this planet, their home.
Evolution works
in mysterious ways. Take Earth and Mesnos as examples. And Paracelsus 2
or any of the other planets with some life, or with a past history of life,
that I've been on. In some ways, they all seem to have started creating
life from a similar base: pools of water, the right organic compounds,
some electrical storms or maybe a seismic event or a meteorite to provide
a burst of energy, and voilà! life! Algae, bacteria, something we
call primitive, but which is almost beyond understanding. They're still
one-celled things, but they must be infinitely more complex than the organic
compounds they sprang from. A few tens or hundreds of millions of years,
once oxygen is plentiful in the atmosphere that these creatures have brought
into existence, these remarkable beings give way to inconceivably more
complex creatures. I've examined some of these so-called primitive one-celled
plants and animals. How beautifully organized they are inside, and how
different one species is from the other! And in every one of these beginnings
on every planet and with every form of life, there must have been different
initial conditions, a different environment, a different set of chance
happenings, that makes them all (despite their similarities) unique. What
was it Dr. Smith, my biology professor, used to say? "If life on Earth
were to revert to some previous age, and it all took off again from there,
everything would be different, and the human race would not have evolved."
It would have taken so little for us not to be here as it is. Maybe
on some other planets we'll meet some of our other possible selves, evolved
so differently. There must be intelligent life somewhere.
It was on Calaban
that I encountered those odd sulfur-based life forms. Some were about the
size of crabs, and seemed to be on top of the food chain. Others looked
like yellowish jellyfish, only living on land. Thousands of them in every
little colony. They appeared to be scavengers, but were the favorite
dish of those crabs. At the bottom of the line, there must have been something
akin to plankton, themselves maybe feeding on the microscopic life forms
that gave rise to the entire biota. Plants? Animals? What were these things?
Under analysis, we found something akin to DNA, but with a structure unlike
anything we'd ever encountered before, although the basic elements were
similar. Could that have happened on Earth? A crushing blow from a passing
meteor of just the right size and at just the right time, and there might
have been a sulfur-based life form (or maybe silicon-based, or nitrogen-based),
or maybe there wouldn't have been any life on Earth at all. Maybe Earth
would have evolved like Venus, before Aphrodite, a hostile environment
for life as we know it. Or maybe life would have evolved differently, somehow.
We never returned there, in any case, to Calaban. It appeared to be incompatible
with our life systems.
On Mesnos,
life has evolved to the level of something like lions or wolves. There
is something like our plant life, the mékis being an example, and
there are animals, warm-blooded like the stots and cold-blooded like the
wolks. There's a food chain. But there are no flowering plants, nothing
that looks like insects, no crustaceans. I don't know what fills their
niche in the food chain, or what the evolutionary history of these creatures
is. Our settlers have introduced Earth crops and some domesticated animals.
They're trying to add Earth to Mesnos. So far they've succeeded, but you
never know what will happen in the long run. A slight new element, an insect,
for instance, might produce an effect truly unimaginable, like the introduction,
back in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, of rabbits to Australia
or muskrats to the Netherlands, or so many species of flora and fauna to
Hawaii. How un-Newtonian! No proportion to the reactions, which were not
equal and opposite! Here, stots and wolks are in decline, but that means
that some other animal populations are exploding. Where will it end? And
it's nice seeing the live oaks and the red maples that have been planted
here, and grass and corn, but how will this affect the native flora? What
will happen when the Earth plants and animals get into the wild, mix in
with, even mate with, the native biota, begin new lines of evolution? There's
a close relationship between the DNA strands of the native life and
ours, after all. I guess we have a right to do
this. Colonization is commonplace in every life system. Ants colonize new
territory, so do beavers. Humans have been doing it for millennia. But
this is our first colonized planet.
The Mesnosians
even began to make a historical museum out of the old factory area. I had
been surprised by the primitive textile machines in the mine shafts, but
it turns out that these machines are not really what the settlers used
to weave clothing: they were trying to recreate some little bit of humanity's
past here on this distant and alien world, even a past they've never known,
to keep alive the memory our humanity's long rise to dominance on our home
planet, even while they're adapting to life on this alien new world.
Mesnos can
be nice, even beautiful, when the monsoon-like rains stop. I encountered
a month of rain, and now a month of blue skies with two suns shining down
on me. There are mountains and valleys, oceans and lakes, deserts and swamps.
Different creatures, all of them exotic but the people have given them
names like Earth animals. Loons. Baboons. Teals. Seals. They don't look
anything like those animals, but they do occupy similar niches in the life
of the planet. They'll have to adapt to people, who hunt some, eat many,
and have domesticated yet others for food. The two suns–the large one up
high and bright, the other, smaller one staying close to the horizon and
distant–are extraordinary, now that I've been able to relax a bit here
and enjoy the place. The golden sunsets of the main sun, on the western
horizon, over the ocean, with the waves breaking in on the shore, while
the other, smaller, sun drops a few degrees down to disappear from the
horizon an hour or so later! The moonless nights full of stars in constellations
so different from those we're familiar with! The weird calls of the creatures
in the mékis and the oaks and maples, the strange smells in a world
without flowers, the rough touch of the skin of the crocs (that seem to
be neither animal nor vegetable, but a bit of both)! How different Nature
is, and yet how similar! Clouds, blue skies, rivers! The ocean, the volcanic-sand
beaches! This planet might become a tourist attraction for the super-rich.
I almost dread the thought of what could happen if that came about.
The two suns
are actually a binary star system, that the inhabitants call Castor and
Pollux, rotating around each other. Mesnos rotates around Castor.
And although it has no moon, the gravitational pull of Pollux, along with
that of Castor, provide enough energy for tidal action, and probably for
at least some of the seismic activity we've noticed here, and that destroyed
the first New Terra. Another tourist attraction: how many people have experienced
the density of the stars here, and two suns to boot?
I've never
seen cities that were more modern, clean and neat. The housing modules
brought from Earth, the new houses built of local stone or of bricks made
from a rich clay, the well-designed transportation systems. I expect that,
given 200 or 300 years, this planet will have millions of people as the
colonists pour in, and that it will be tremendously prosperous. Lots of
metals buried underground, and lots of opportunities for people who are
willing to leave everything and everyone behind, even if not quite forever.
They remind me of those brave settlers on Earth who travelled to unknown
places for whatever purposes, political, religious, economic, social, and
established new homelands for themselves. Even in recent times, the settlers
in the Gobi, on Greenland, in Antarctica are heroes in my book. So are
the Mesnosians.
I hope they
don't destroy the natural beauty of the waterfalls, the mountains, the
lakes, the beaches. There's a waterfall of over 1000 meters near Sandstone,
actually an underground river or a spring bursting out of the mountain
and splashing down on the ground a full kilometer below with a roar you
have to hear to believe and with a mist that fills you with awe. Impressive,
spectacular, especially when seen from a certain angle that produces a
gorgeous rainbow.
And there's
another whole continent to explore! Why not make Pacifica a preserve, as
Atlantica continues to be converted into a new Earth? What a unique opportunity!
We could have done this with Antarctica, but instead we've settled it.
Mines, farms, fishing villages. It's no more exotic than the fertile Gobi
Plain! But here! Well, the inhabitants will have to decide what to do.
And they have plenty of time before the population begins to outgrow the
land.
Will I be around
to see any of that, assuming I'm on some future mission to Mesnos? Two
hundred years sounds like a long time, but yet, when you think of the future,
so many interesting things will happen beyond that span of time. I remember
Stanley Narb, my friend Dr. Stanley Narb, telling me that in a way the
procedure he was about to use on me could be a blessing or a bane, or maybe
both at the same time. Two hundred years! It sounded like such a long time
then, when I was only 28. But now! How right you were, Stanley! I've
already felt the pain of a long life, and I've already felt the great pleasure
it can bring. What happened to you, Stanley? Where did you disappear to?
Are you still alive? If I looked for you and found you, would I have the
courage to ask you to do the unthinkable, to add another 200, even 500
years to my life? And would you do it if you could?
We on Constellation
have our own tasks to perform, new worlds to discover, new frontiers. There
were rumors of really long-distance explorations, transgalactic explorations,
when we were back at Headquarters on Earth. I don't think Constellation-type
craft can do the trick. On the other hand, modifications would not take
too much time or resources to install. But who would go? The ELB, of course;
but ordinary people, with ordinary life spans, would they volunteer?
The Extended
Life Brigade. Stanley Narb's dream! He had the initial experiments performed
on himself. There must be hundreds of us around now, all owing two centuries
of life to him. A two-fold debt: he worked out the procedure, involving
changes in the structure of certain genes; and he performed all the procedures
personally. I must find that man, if only to let him know how grateful
we all are. The discovery of new worlds might not have been possible without
him.
If we do discover
new habitable worlds at the far reaches of the galaxy, or even beyond,
this might be for the settlers (or even the explorers) the end of contact
with Earth, that far out. They might get there, but would they be able
to return? What dangers lurk in those uncharted regions? And if we decide
to risk traveling through worm holes, how do we know where they end up,
or whether we can get back through them? Who would be willing to settle
that far away? We can get to Mesnos in a few months, but how long would
it take to reach the other end of the galaxy? Maybe the Primmies would
be willing to take the risk? Not a bad idea, after all. I like Boris's
idea, a planet just for the Primitivists (not the Militia–that's another
story altogether). There they could be what they want to be, without interference,
without contact with Earth if that's what they want. A world of their own,
on the other side of the galaxy. But would they submit to the use of technology
like this to transport them to their paradise? Sure, they don't really
seem to be opposed to most technology. They function normally in our world,
travel around like us, dress like us. Their primitivism is in their thoughts
and in the way they worship, I guess. I'll make a point of recommending
this to the authorities when I get back home. Maybe even insert it in my
report. Boris would be happy if he knew his idea might receive an audience.
It's getting
dark, I hear Giovanna calling. A last look at the sunset, a last breath
of this astonishingly fresh air. Time to return to reality.
"Thank you very
much for your kindness and hospitality, Governor. The crew and I all have
enjoyed our days of working and relaxing here on Mesnos. Those of us who
can will return someday. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the crew decide
to settle in Mesnos when they retire! But you know how little we control
our schedules in our active life in Space Fleet."
"Once again,
Captain, on behalf of everyone here on Mesnos, I would like to thank
you for all you and your crew have done for us. We are in the process of
erecting a memorial to the valiant soldiers who gave their lives so that
ours would be saved. If only there had been another way... I imagine that
Paradise will always be an elusive dream for us human beings. Elusive,
but worth seeking. Enough philosophizing. Farewell, Christina my friend,
and bon voyage!"
"Au revoir,
Charles. Until we meet again!"
In small groups,
the crew transmatted up to Constellation. Within an hour, Christina
was to give her first command as Captain (however temporary that captaincy
might be). She had never been in command of a large craft before, or responsible
for so many people. She just hoped the flight home would be smooth and
without incident. But she thought she was ready for most emergencies now.
It just seemed so strange to be sitting there giving the commands. This
might be the first time, but she felt confident that it wouldn't be the
last.