CollisionWithParadise (6 page)

She lay on her belly on the shower floor for some moments, fingers still inside and coaxing out a remnant pulse, like the aftershock of an earthquake, and letting her sobbing breaths return to normal. Water pummeled her back like the kneading hands of a cruel lover.

Without her wanting it there, her mind wandered back to Trip’s interview last year. What really
had
happened to the Prometheus IV and its predecessors? The explosion that had killed Dan and his crew remained shrouded in mystery to this day. And, although she hadn’t expressed concern in her interview last year, she was beginning to feel the edge of anxiousness now, particularly in light of the Zac II incident and Cheryl’s disclosure about Zac II’s misjudgment. If that wasn’t enough cause for concern, they were nearing the location where Dan’s crew had met their demise…

Genevieve rose to her feet and, pulling her hair back from her face with her hands, stepped out of the shower stall into the blow dryer stall. As jets of warm air buffeted her, she ran her hands briskly along her body and hair and critically assessed her statuesque figure in the mirrored walls surrounding her. Too tall, she’d thought many a time
—
she was as tall as Dan, and wondered if that had ever bothered him. She was incredibly fit and her slim body remained youthful and taut like an athlete’s, though perhaps a little more rounded out at the hips now. Her medium-sized breasts were firm and she still had a flat belly. Her butt didn’t sag, either. It was nicely rounded, something Dan had always delighted in. He was a bum and legman. He’d spent many hours caressing the rounded cheeks of her buttocks, following the crease, then down her long slender legs. They were the legs of a dancer, he used to say, slim but tightly muscled from her frequent runs and cycles. Genevieve let her eyes stray to the reflection of her own gaze. She knew she was considered attractive. Wild chestnut hair framed her still youthful, only slightly creased face. She considered her green eyes too far apart and her mouth and lips too large. That never seemed to bother Dan. She knew he adored and revered her physical beauty. Early in their relationship she’d often caught him staring at her with that dazed look of wonder and admiration. It used to embarrass her and she used to wish he’d stop…until he did. She never made a big fuss about looking attractive. Despite that, many men had made advances on her, particularly once Dan had gone.

As soon as she was dry, Genevieve made her way back toward the nursery in silence, deciding to conduct her own quiet investigation. Without Zac’s help.

She passed her own hibe chamber and entered her non-hibe bunk room, located adjacent to the nursery. It was small but equipped with all she required and desired, a bunk bed where she could rest when she got tired during non-hibe, a dresser, desk, personal computer. And privacy. This was the only room where Zac had no camera. Genevieve fished out a charcoal grey tank top from her dresser and threw it on. Then she sat bare bottomed at her computer and set to work.

Taking in a deep breath to give herself strength, Genevieve flexed her fingers and began the keystrokes to access the Zeta Corp files on the Eos missions. The Prometheus II, led by Captain James Evans, was the first mission to Eos back in 2127. That was two years after making initial contact with Eos and its diplomats. At a time when Earth was suffering more than ever from environmental degradation and resource limitations, the Eosians seemed to co-exist with the ecosystems of their planet without any observable technology and flourish. They lived longer, suffered little disease, and appeared very content as a people. So, their signal to Earth that momentous day had appeared like a gift from God.

After perusing several files, Genevieve settled on the Captain’s personal mission files. His mission statement read
complete diplomatic ties, sharing of information, and acquisition of data particularly on their unique technologies and abilities to maintain a level VI technological civilization with next to no known technology and no environmental cost, fulfill Project DAWN.

What was DAWN? Genevieve hastily keyed in the project and was mystified. Every file pertaining to DAWN was classified CONFIDENTIAL. Only Class AA NASA personnel and the mission commander had access to any DAWN files. Why hadn’t she run across this before? Genevieve hastily checked the Vega I mission and found virtually the same mission statement and reference to the DAWN Project. When she checked her late husband’s mission, she found the same reference in his personal files.

Genevieve blew out a long breath and leaned back in the chair. She raked back her thick mop of hair, tucking it behind her ears, and stretched her head as far back as she could. Although she was the ship’s captain, Genevieve wasn’t in charge of the mission. Her mission files contained no reference to a DAWN project. She wondered if Bragg had them in his. Did his mission include directives she had no knowledge of?

Genevieve hastily ran a comb through her hair then returned, dressed only in her grey top, to the control room. The holo camera only captured her from the bust up, so there was no need to cover up totally, and she truly did hate wearing clothes. She settled on the chair, feeling its cool surface on her naked butt, and proceeded with her messages to Jim and Cheryl. Both messages were rather formal. She indicated that all was well and there was absolutely no concern. Not quite what she felt. Then with reluctance she sent her programming files on Zac’s personality to Cheryl.

Duty done, she decided to learn more about Eos and its people.

Eos was a lush planet of multi-colored forests, rivers and oceans and immense mountains. It lay in the Pleiades, an open star cluster about four hundred light years away, in the constellation Taurus. The planet was quite similar to Earth in size and gravitational pull. It was situated close to a small yellow dwarf main sequence star, much like Earth’s own sun. But unlike Earth, which was tilted on its axis as it orbited the sun, Eos did not experience seasons. It experienced a fairly constant climate that fluctuated only from wet to wetter. With an average temperature of 26˚C and average relative humidity of 80%, Eos was steamy.

Ecological research using the vids provided by the Eosians had estimated that eighty percent of the planet was covered in dense rainforest that most closely resembled the complex mesophyll vine forest of Earth’s tropical lowlands. The diverse Eosian forest ecosystem was a very wet multi-storied jungle, with buttressed emergent trees up to fifty meters high, tangles of woody vines or lianas, and epiphytes.

The Eosian jungles were dominated by purples and greens, provided by the principal tree, whose profusion of deep purple flowers and green-lilac leaves washed the Eos forest in a mosaic of noble colour. The Eosian sky glowed in warm shades of pink and lavender, a quality imparted by the unique dust particles that made up its upper atmosphere and further out circled it in spectacular rings of ice and debris.

Genevieve was fascinated by the incredible set of rings that orbited Eos. Like the other terrestrial planets of her solar system, Earth had long since lost the rings that once apparently circled it. They would have dispersed or been pulverized within 10,000 years of their formation. Genevieve remembered the first vids that the Eosians sent of their planet with its beautiful rings. Spanning a distance of over 500,000 kilometres from the planet’s surface to its outer fringes, yet less than a tenth of a kilometre wide, the total mass of Eos’s rings amounted to that of a medium-sized moon, presumably the source of the rings origin.

As she reviewed the vids of Eos, Genevieve was struck once more by the paradise-like quality of the planet’s rich and bountiful ecosystems and its wonderfully content people. It was a bit like how she’d envisioned Eden would be.

The planet had been named Eos after the Roman goddess of the dawn. The planet’s real name was unpronounceable, as was their entire language. The Eosians used their tongues in strange ways to create a cacophony of lyrical percussion-like sounds. There didn’t seem to be any rules to their language, either. It appeared to evolve daily. How the Eosians kept up with this strange evolution, and why, was not known. In the fifteen years that Earth had been communicating with the Eosians, no one on Earth had been able to crack that one. Luckily, the Eosians, being so adaptable in their own changing language, quickly learned Earth’s most prevalent language, English.

Genevieve thought the Eosians an attractive species, as she appraised their spokesman, Azaes, speaking in the vid. Apart from his mauve skin colour, Azaes’s humanoid features were so similar to
Homo sapiens
that leading anthropologist and geneticist, Chuck Fairweather, was prompted to suggest a common ancestry between humans and Eosians that might provide critical insight to the origin of the universe itself. This enraged most religious leaders and generated controversy to the present day. Of course the Eosians weren’t about to send Earth samples of their DNA, so Fairweather never proved his theory. There were observable differences between Eosians and humans, though they were rather trivial. Besides his unique skin pigments there was a total lack of hair on Azaes’s entire body
—
at least, what she could see. And the enhanced size of his hands and feet, which threatened to make him look a little goofy. Somehow, and to his credit, it didn’t. While Azaes was easily taller than the average human, his large extremities seemed to promise, without delivering, an even larger size, as though he was a remnant of a giant being. Genevieve suddenly grinned through the side of her mouth. Were
all
his extremities exaggerated?

As she studied Azaes in one of his ten Eosian vids to Earth, Genevieve had to concede that Trip had spoken rightfully about them being condescending and secretive. But, to give the Eosians the benefit of the doubt, this impression was derived through humanity’s sole interaction with one Eosian: Azaes. What if it was just Azaes who was an asshole?

She remembered when Azaes first made contact with Earth. His communication on world-wide vid via some yet-to-be-determined means had stirred the world with promises not only of other sentient life in the universe, but of sharing a wealth of new knowledge, the promise of a renaissance of innovation and prosperity for humanity, already feeling the strain on its resources and ecological health of its present technological path. Azaes had come with news of a world that flourished without any observable technology and a people who lived much longer and healthier than humans. While humans busied themselves with thoughts of how to exploit Azaes’s world, no one thought to ask why he’d communicated with Earth in the first place.

Absently stroking her lips with her fingers, Genevieve ran the original vid several times, first listening to his stirring speech, then studying the background and then the alien himself. She still remembered that momentous first greeting fifteen years earlier when Azaes’s purple face became an instant icon to humanity. She’d watched it alone on her televid at home, after having just returned from the Horologii system. Dan had still been away, conducting experiments on Jupiter, and she’d wished he was there with her to witness a significant page in Earth’s history.

“I am Azaes,” said the attractive Eosian, standing in front of an intriguing background of towering dark blue crystals that glinted inside a glass-like building. He wore a deep purple robe that was provocatively open, displaying his muscular and hairless chest. “I’m spokesperson for the peoples of Eos, a small planet in the system you call the Pleiades. I bring tidings of peace and prosperity in cooperation with humanity. I bear gifts of knowledge far superior to yours: the ability to quell disease, poverty, pollution, even death as you know it. Yes, the gift of eternity. We will share these wonderful things with you when you are ready to receive them.” Then came the bludgeon. “You are not ready yet. You still wield hostilities and wage war upon one another
—
you covet power and greedily lust after your neighbour’s treasures. Your disrespect for your environment is testimony to your disrespect for yourselves.” He straightened and tried a smile. It looked more like a grimace, and probably was, Genevieve considered
—
it was probably hard for him to smile. “Every week for ten weeks at this same time, I will provide you with a little of what may come.” And, as he’d solemnly promised, he reappeared ten times with amazing footage of his planet and his fellow Eosians, who even though they looked like naked savages living in huts, had conquered disease, age, wants such as food and space. Then, as stunningly as he’d appeared on the worldwide vids, Azaes disappeared, his initial two-minute speech stirring more calamity than a year’s worth of war.

Genevieve leaned back and absently ran her hand through her hair, appraising Azaes more closely. Aside from his supercilious manner, Azaes might have looked attractive if he smiled, which he didn’t. This one quality, observed and discussed by many others, might have been the single most important factor in how people interpreted his speech. Most agreed that he represented a species that clearly saw itself superior to humankind, and most people came to the logical conclusion that the Eosians wished to dominate. As quickly as excitement arose at the initial contact, suspicion and fear superseded it in a wave of anti-alien hysteria that far surpassed any luddite movement then in vogue. It would take years to eventually mollify the hysteria caused by Azaes’s threatening intellectual arrogance, and anti-alien feelings would remain, for the most part, among the masses. It didn’t help that Azaes, for what he did show, refused to divulge important things about his people and planet until humanity, according to him, was ready. In the meantime, scientists and politicians began to focus less on the mutual cooperation he’d hinted at in his first speech and more on finding some way to acquire the coveted Eosian knowledge on their own. Their dogged persistence in this one pursuit was the reason she was here now, despite no formal invitation from the Eosians and the suspicious failure of any space vessel to reach Eos in one piece.