Going Interstellar (2 page)

Les recently completed his first novel,
Back to the Moon
(Baen, 2010), a collaboration with Travis Taylor.

***

The air was thick and putrid.
Peter Goss slogged through knee-deep water with a broken branch in one hand and a machete in the other. The swamp was brightly lit by the reflected light of the two moons hanging low on the horizon. All he could think of was survival. Mosquito-like creatures the size of small birds dove at him constantly, ignoring his wild swatting. Their sting hurt. Beneath the surface he imagined large creatures watching and waiting for him to slip and fall so they could pounce and enjoy a tasty human delicacy for that night’s dinner.

Relentlessly, he moved forward. No distraction would stop him tonight. There, just ahead and across this last bit of waterlogged purgatory, was the tower. Rising out of the swamp at least twenty-five stories, it dominated the horizon and demanded investigation. Made of what looked like stone, which he knew would have been all but impossible given its size, the tower taunted him.

Goss stopped. And listened. He heard only the sounds of the night, the buzzing of the monster-mosquitoes and the distant splashes of other creatures stirring the waters.

He was only a few hundred yards from the tower, a small distance compared to that which he had already covered, but now it seemed distant. His muscles hurt and he was tired.

The swamp ahead looked much like the swamp behind, but looks could be deceiving. Two of his compatriots were now dead because of this place and he was not about to join them. He whacked one of the oversized mosquitoes with the branch, raised his machete, and started forward.

The tower was dark and quiet. Goss intended no harm; he was there to find out what it held, why it was there, and, if possible, who had built it. For on this water world, the tower was the only artificial structure in evidence.

Three weeks ago, Goss and his crewmates had arrived on this planet because their long-range instruments told them that it had an oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere suitable for human life. Though planets seemed to be plentiful everywhere, those with breathable atmospheres and temperate surface conditions were very, very rare. That’s why he and his two colleagues had taken a shuttle from the mothership to investigate.

From space, the world was a brilliant blue that reminded him of Earth. Except that instead of the familiar landforms surrounded by water, the entire planet was covered by water, with only a few islands dotting its seas. It was on one of these islands that they’d spotted the tower, standing alone. It had been a glorious moment, looking down at the structure, the first evidence anywhere that humans were not alone. And of course, still in a state of shock, they’d gone down.

Goss lost the first of his crewmates, Charlie Edward, when he slipped on slick, moss-covered rock, pitched forward, and landed on his head. Not a graceful way to die. It had happened so fast that he hadn’t even had time to throw out his hands. By the time Goss reached him, Charlie was gone.

The other crewmate, Julie Gold, died after her leg was ripped off by an alligator-like creature that had been lying in wait beneath the surface of the water in an area they had mistakenly assumed to be safe enough for a short break. All Goss remembered was the rage that overcame him after seeing his friend writhe in the water, trying to shake off what had attached itself to her right leg. Goss had hurried to her rescue, but the thing had ripped her apart within seconds. He’d brought the machete down on its armored neck again and again until it collapsed.

He’d held Julie in his arms while she bled. And she’d looked at him in the eerie moonlight. “Pete,” she’d said, “what do you think is in the tower?”

They had been her last words.

And he’d gazed across the swamp to where the tower stood. “I’m sorry we ever saw it,” he told her. “Whatever it is, it’s not worth the price.”

He crossed the remaining distance to the tower and the stone-like wall that comprised its base. He was still knee-deep in water when he touched the wall and looked up at the immense structure. The wall was made of a light-colored stone and it might almost have been medieval. Below the waterline the stone was, as one might expect, covered in mildew and moss. Out over the water were the two distinct shadows caused by the twin moons. Every movement Goss made was instantly mirrored by the two shadows off to his side.

That takes some getting used to
.

Seaweed clung to his boots and pant legs. He circled the base of the tower. Part way around he came across a door. And an inscription. He caught his breath. It was raised lettering on a metallic plaque. He pressed his fingertips gently on the characters. Wondered who had been here. What it said. Here we came in search of a new world. And found only a swamp.

He smiled.
Maybe, Martin & Cable, Attorneys at Law.

How long ago had it been?

Would they have welcomed him?

He pulled his hand back and looked at it as if it were the first time he’d ever seen it.

Peter Goss awoke with a start. He was lying on his hibernation bed with his right arm held straight out, up, and in front of him. He was still staring at his hand. For a few moments he drifted back into the swamp and stood before the mysterious tower, and then he was back here, wherever “here” was, again.

He was cold. And he lay naked, partially submerged in what looked and felt like a bathtub filled with raspberry Jell-O. He tilted his head slowly from side to side, as if doing so would dislodge a memory and allow him to remember where he was. These new surroundings looked more and more familiar but he wasn’t yet quite sure why.

He coughed, and raised his head and looked around. This was not the tower. And certainly not the swamp. First of all, the tub in which he found himself was but one of many lined up along the floor. In fact, he saw at least fifteen tubs around him.

And each was occupied. By someone.

By another human being.

A memory was slowly returning.

Hibernation. Sleeping during the journey and being awakened when their new home world was reached.
Now he remembered.

Peter Goss was on board the interstellar colony ship
New Madrid
bound for the Epsilon Eridani star system ten light years from Earth. As in his dream, he was a member of the initial survey team that was to awaken and scout the environment of their new home while the rest of the crew, and the fifteen thousand colonists, were being awakened.

Goss slowly lifted himself to rest on his right elbow. The other people were gone. Part of the dream. Still, he shouldn’t be alone. He wasn’t supposed to be the first to wake up. The ship’s commander, first officer and two medical officers should already be up and about, supervising the awakening of the survey crews to begin their mission. Waking the colonists would come later.

The ship was quiet. The only sound Goss heard was his own breathing and the sloshing of the liquigel in which he found himself. As he pulled his naked form out of the tank, he realized that the liquigel had probably formed the basis for his swamp during the hibernation. Slowly and with great care, Goss sat up and put his feet on the floor. Mindful that he had probably been in suspended animation for perhaps hundreds of years, he wasn’t sure that his muscles and bones would be strong enough to sustain his weight in the simulated fifty percent Earth gravity in which he found himself.

He stood.

To his great relief, he found that the electrostimulation of his muscles and bones had kept them healthy and fully functional throughout his long sleep. Just as the electrostimulation had kept his body functioning, the virtual reality generator had kept his mind from atrophying. His “adventure” on the water world with the tower had been just that. A machine-induced training session to keep his mind functioning through the centuries required to cross the vast interstellar distances between Earth and the intended colony’s destination.

That means Julie and Charlie are not dead!
Thank God.
It was just a simulation.
They were safely asleep onboard the
New Madrid
.

As he struggled to get his bearings, the weight of nearly a thousand years of dreaming came crushing down upon him. In his chosen artificial realities, he selected a succession of planetary exploration missions—all created by the ship’s Artificial Intelligence to help train him for any eventuality he might encounter in the real world. Before awakening, he realized, he must have visited hundreds, if not thousands, of new worlds—all different, and all created by a computer simulation program.

But this was real and it wasn’t as it was supposed to be.
Where was Commander Vasquez? Where were the med techs?
Anything could happen upon revival and it was not protocol for it to happen like this.

He moved to the side of the room and opened his locker. Inside, and as perfectly preserved as he, were his clothes. Thanks to vacuum storage, they looked and felt as fresh as the day he took them off and put them there—so very long ago.

How long have I been asleep? Where are we?
He had more questions than answers.

After cleaning off the gel and getting dressed, he ventured out of the sleep chamber and into the hallway that led to the ship’s control room. He thought that Vasquez must be there, supervising the orbital encounter with Epsilon Eridani Four, the destination world that the telescopes back on Earth had found to contain an atmosphere suitable for Earth-based life.

During the latter half of the twenty-first century, more and more planets had been found orbiting other stars. Not only were they pinpointed and their masses estimated, but large telescopes optimized to look for certain chemical signatures determined that some of the newly found planets had atmospheres, and that at least two of the nearest worlds harbored atmospheres in which humans could live without wearing masks or other protective clothing.

These were “Goldilocks worlds,” so-called because they were neither too hot (like Venus) nor too cold (like Mars); they had atmospheres with enough, but not too much, oxygen; they were “just right” for sustaining life. It was toward the second of these worlds that the
New Madrid
was sent with colonists who would settle there and build a new home for humanity.

Goss had volunteered for the journey. He was fed up with the crowded cities of Earth and found the Moon and Mars colonies, with their cramped below-ground living areas, simply too dark and unforgiving for his tastes. The idea of being a pioneer, of having the chance to build a new world or die trying, was just the sort of challenge for which he had longed his entire life.

Are we there yet? If not, then why was I awakened?
He tried to keep these thoughts at bay as he walked down the long, curved corridor toward the control room.

Midway there, he stopped to look out one of the windows that the engineers had been so loath to include. Dangerous, they’d argued. Maybe so, but the view was worth it. Before him was the majesty of the
New Madrid
; home to thousands of colonists eager for a new beginning. He gazed back along the hull at the central core of the starship, which housed its antimatter power plant and propulsion system as well as many of the supplies they would need once their new home was reached. His eyes drifted out from the core along one of the many half-kilometer-long spokes that supported the habitation ring in which he had spent who knows how many years in hibernation.

Without a decent fixed reference point, it was virtually impossible to discern that the ring was completing one rotation every minute—though he felt the comfortable one-half gravity acceleration caused by the slow spin as he walked through the ship. Humans evolved in a one gravity environment on Earth but scientists had determined that only half that was needed to maintain their health in deep space. And since one can’t tell the difference between acceleration caused by gravity and acceleration caused by spinning, the engineers had found a way to provide the “gravity” people needed to keep them healthy in deep space—spin the ship.

He continued past the window and down the corridor toward the control room. There, he opened the door, expecting to be greeted by Commander Vasquez’s booming voice. Instead, there was only silence and the steady hum of the circulation system keeping the breathable air moving throughout the ship.

The room was empty.

The commander’s chair was vacant as were the duty stations for the ship’s command crew. The room seemed somehow unreal to Goss.
It isn’t supposed to be like this.

He entered, approached the commander’s chair and sat in it, pulling the console on the mechanical arm forward so he could see what it had to say. One word was flashing on the display panel as he pulled it into view.

ALERT

Recalling his training, Goss activated the ship’s Artificial Intelligence by speaking the command phrase, “Command Authorization Substitute Five Zero Three.”

“Five Zero Three recognized,” came the reply from the ship’s speaker system.

Goss was relieved to hear the AI’s voice. Maybe now he could find out what was going on.

The AI was programmed with a voice that sounded, except for its rather stilted diction, completely human. Studies had shown that people reacted more favorably if the computer at least sounded human. Gone were the monotone computer-generated voices that had preceded it.

“Five Zero Three, do you require a status?” asked the AI program, following procedure.

“Yes, please provide our location, navigation history, and overall ship status.”

A holographic projection appeared above the navigation console in the middle of the room. At the center was Sol, the Earth’s star, and around it were the nearest star systems stretching out to a distance of about fifteen light years. As Goss watched, a curving line appeared, slowly being drawn from Sol outward to Epsilon Eridani, their primary destination. But instead of stopping there, the line curved by the star system and toward another—Tau Ceti. Again, it didn’t end there but curved yet again toward another star, Epsilon Indi, and then stopped one quarter of the way toward it.