Compete (20 page)

A dark-brown skinned girl with long African locks raises her hand. “So are you saying that the only reason we are being
rescued
is that we can survive this journey? Oh sweet Jesus! Is that why you wouldn’t take adults or babies? All those other people left behind on Earth?”

“Yes,” says the Atlantean, keeping his face impassive. “That is mostly correct.”

The dorm quarters are suddenly filled with noisy tumult. Everyone’s talking all at once.

The Atlantean raises his hands for silence.

“How come none of this was said back on Earth?” a boy cries out. “Those people had the right to know!”

“Yeah, not to mention, so did we!” another boy yells. “We should’ve been told that this is an unsafe option!”

“
Be quiet, all of you!”
The Atlantean officer raises his voice and it rolls through the room like a peal of thunder. He’s using a
power voice
, it occurs to me—because as soon as he speaks, the dorm goes silent, as though everyone’s been mildly stunned. So, this is a form of crowd control. My mind is racing as I stand and listen.

“Knowing this—would it really have made a difference as far as your ultimate choices?” the Atlantean officer continues. “You were given the opportunity to be rescued. All of you gladly and wisely took it. And as for your loved ones on Earth who did not Qualify due to age—would it have been kinder for them to know they were doomed outright? That they could not even
hope
to step aboard our ark-ships? In my opinion—and the opinion of the Atlantis Central Agency—the less painful information was disseminated, the better for everyone, your loved ones included.”

As the Atlantean speaks, my mind races with another horrible realization. My parents! Oh, God! If this is true then Mom and Dad would not be able to survive the trip to Atlantis anyway, even if I could somehow smuggle them on board!

No!
No!

I do not accept this.

I stand shaking, clenching white-knuckled fingers against my uniform shirt, while wave after cold wave washes over me, filling my insides. . . .

But then, in the middle of all this numbness, a bright thought comes.

What about my Pilot Training Instructor Mithrat Okoi? Compared to the other Atlantean officers and crew who are all teens our age, he’s ancient! He has to be way over the safe age for interstellar flight, and yet he’s on this ship!

And, for that matter, what about the only other “old” Atlantean I know, the Fleet Commander himself? Yes, he seems younger than Instructor Okoi. But still, Manakteon Resoi has to be at least twice as old as any of the other Atlanteans in the Fleet!

So, how is it that
they
are allowed to be here?

I frown, thinking. . . . And I resolve to grab and “interrogate” the one friendly and reliable source of knowledge, as soon as I can find him—Gennio Rukkat.

T
he sex-and-health talk goes on for about five more minutes. The Atlantean officer concludes by telling us about the location of the nearest medical facilities on this deck, and that we all have to see a doctor as soon as possible for a physical exam and hormonal evaluation.

It will be used to determine our personal physical condition—not only in regards to birth control for family planning, but to regulate hormone levels for those of us who might require hormonal treatments for other medical conditions, and for overall balancing.

Apparently our physiology must be checked, and then some of us might have to be variously medicated and tweaked just to keep our bodies safe from the stress of interstellar space and the dreaded Jump six months from now. In short—hormonal balance is something they are going to keep track of very carefully, for all of us, male and female, for as long as we are on this trip.

“Don’t worry, for the majority of you there will be no treatment necessary,” the Atlantean adds. “But for some of you, yes, minor adjustments will be needed to survive the trip in good health.”

Suddenly the androgynous, now familiar machine voice comes from the walls of the ship around us.

“
Thirty minutes warning. Approaching Saturn orbital perihelion,”
the ship computer announces, cutting off the Atlantean officer’s final words.

“All right, we are pretty much done here, so you are all free to go,” he says. “According to our flight trajectory calculations, Saturn is going to be visible, so you might want to attend this final planetary fly-by. Also—this is probably the last opportunity you will have to see Earth with the naked eye. Once we are beyond Saturn, Earth is much too small to observe without magnification unless you have extraordinary eyesight. Go, take that final look.”

At his words, the room gets noisy again.

My chest feels a painful twinge. So I race, together with most of the dorm, to the observation deck.

Everyone wants to say that final goodbye to Earth.

Chapter Eleven

S
aturn’s a big draw, but I’m guessing it’s mostly the notion of a final glimpse of Earth that brings everyone to the outside windows.

There are so many people on the ICS-2 Observation Deck this time that it’s elbow-room only. Once again, the fly-by pass will only be seen from one side of the ship, so everyone has converged here.

I push my way inward, jostled by other teens, hearing the din of many languages all around me, smelling sweaty humanity.

In this messy crowd, there’s no one I know, and I wonder momentarily if Blayne has made it here with his hoverboard. I scan the vicinity, but if Blayne’s here, there’s no sign of him. Seriously, there’s got to be thousands of people on this ship, and it feels like they all crammed onto this one deck.

I think of my siblings, Gracie and Gordie, probably also crammed in a similar observation deck on their own ark-ship, and elsewhere in the Fleet, Laronda, Dawn, Hasmik, Logan. . 
.
 
.

I wish Gennio was here.

“How close will we be when we pass Saturn? Anyone know?” a skinny dark boy asks behind me.

“No idea,” the girl immediately next to me says. “I hope we at least get to see the Rings. I mean Jupiter was a big ’ole let down. Or should I say a teeny tiny one.”

“At least we got to see Jupiter at all,” I say, as I crane my neck to look over the crowd at the large windows and the blackness of space beyond. There are hardly any stars visible, only rich darkness.

“Okay, that bright thing on the left, what is it?” a boy says. And now that everyone notices, voices rise in amazement.

“
Nyet, ne mozhet bitz—neuzheli eto sontse?”

“
¡Sí, creo que esto es el Sol!”

“Is that the Sun? No way! That’s tiny!”

And as we point and stare at the far left of the panorama, there’s only one solitary star-sized object, but extraordinarily bright, and it has to be the Sun.

Wow. . . .

The Sun. It has grown so unbelievably remote. . . . All that’s left of the familiar orange fire disk is now smaller than the head of a pin. . . . But it’s still powerful enough to cause retinal damage, even at this distance, if we stare at it directly without the shielding filter on the windows.

“What about Earth? Can anyone see it?”

“
Now entering Saturn orbital perihelion,”
the ship’s computer says.

Instantly the crowd goes silent.

And then we see it.

It starts as a tiny point of light in the general center of the window panorama, and it grows in split seconds to immense proportions, filling up all the observation windows with faded yellow pallor, like a balloon being blown up—and oh, the Rings! They are huge! Great oval fixtures spanning the whole cosmic vista outside unfurl like great wings, all in a
split second
. . . .

Saturn is hurtling directly at us! Or we are crashing into it!

There’s not even time to blink!

People on the observation deck scream, because suddenly we are being swallowed by Saturn’s immense albedo. There is no more black space outside,
only Saturn
, casting the grand illusion of a universe of soft pallor and light, and the Rings are overwhelming . . . and oh lord, did I just see one of its many moons briefly silhouetted against the Rings? Atlas? Titan?

There is no time for the mind to acknowledge or correctly process anything that’s suddenly visible out there, because it’s all happening too crazy-fast. . . .

We fall, we crash . . . we plummet into mist pallor.

And we emerge on the other side, having seen none of it really, none of the faint field of ice particles born of moon geyser plumes that comprise the Ring
through
which we just passed—probably the most visually prominent outer A Ring or the Cassini Division between Rings A and B, or maybe it’s the B Ring?

And just like that, it’s all gone.

“
Now leaving Saturn orbital aphelion,”
the computer says.

And once again, there is only blackness, the dark void. And there’s the Sun again, a pin of angry blinding light.

“Oh, f— me . . .” comes someone’s voice in the general silence. “That was—just wild! How fast
are
we going?”

“
¡Madre de Dios, sálvanos!”

“I don’t know, but I just crapped my pants!”

People start giggling and cussing and chattering, in various languages, which seems to be the normal human reaction to stress and to anything kind of mind-blowing. And then someone points to an area of space slightly below the Sun and off to the right.

“Look! That tiny bluish thing—is that
Earth?
”

Once again we grow silent as we strain our eyes and stare at something that’s not quite a star.

“Wow . . .” a boy says behind me. “It’s the Pale Blue Dot. It’s almost that size now, isn’t it? That’s our home! Damn. . . .”

And as he says it, I remember the world-famous old photograph taken fifty-seven years ago by the Voyager One space probe leaving Earth. It turned around and took a final picture of Earth, and our planet was the size of a pixel captured in a fractured ray of sunlight, to paraphrase the classic astronomer Carl Sagan.

This is what it looked like.

But wait, no!
I recall.
No, it did not—not quite.

The original “Pale Blue Dot” was photographed somewhere about six billion kilometers away from Earth, beyond the orbit of Pluto.

This, our present location, is similar the other Pale Blue Dot photo—actually the third-ever selfie taken of our planet—and this one’s the Cassini spacecraft version, taken twenty-three years later by NASA scientist Carolyn Porco who wanted to improve on the original. That famous stunning mosaic of images taken from the shadow of Saturn, with the grand panorama of the Rings and the tiny dot of Earth, is called “The Day the Earth Smiled.”

And that’s what Earth looks like, right effing now—from just over a billion kilometers away.

Except, today no one is smiling there.

I
t’s close to 10:00 PM, and the crowds on the observation deck have thinned out. All barracks and dorms adhere to the 10:00 PM lights out, so most people want to get back in time for bed after a very long first official day as Civilians and Cadets.

A few, such as myself, linger, gazing into the dark cosmic panorama outside the ship’s array of floor-to-ceiling windows.

I stand and breathe and look. Moments float away in silence.

As an Aide to the CCO, unassigned to any standard shipboard group, I don’t really have to be anywhere. I have no lights-out in my small private cabin—the lights go on and off based on my activity level.

It occurs to me, how strange my personal situation is, compared to the others on board this ship. In some ways I am even more
isolated
and lonely than I imagined I would be. At least during Qualification I was a Candidate like the others. But now, I’m somewhere in the surreal halfway position between being an Earth refugee and an Atlantean crewmember.

Neither here nor there. An aimless nobody, out of place.

I don’t belong.

The strange depressive thoughts haunt me. At the same time my mind is numb with the new awareness of the nil chances that my parents have for rescue.

I don’t know how much time passes, as I stand, staring out at the black cosmos outside. Fifteen minutes at least, maybe half an hour. In some ways it’s calming to stare at the void. . . . Stare and think.

The illumination of the observation deck is soft and low, a kind of permanent twilight. The floor plasma lights supply just enough light to move around safely. I suppose it’s intentional, to allow those who choose to be here to meditate upon the view of the universe.

At some point, I am pretty much alone for real. No one else is here on this portion of the deck; everyone has gone to bed. An occasional Atlantean crewmember on duty passes the corridor, but that’s it.