SpaceCorp (40 page)
Authors: Ejner Fulsang
I’ve been up here twenty-eight years now and surprisingly, I do not miss Earth. Sea levels are ten meters above the 2010 reference datum. Equatorial land that is not submerged is all desert. Melting permafrost has released millions of tonnes of methane, a worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide except it doesn’t persist in the atmosphere as long. War and pestilence have stabilized human population at ten billion. Fossil fuels are mostly run out although there are a few die hard regions that keep hauling up coal and natural gas. We have most of the uranium stored up here where nobody can get at it but us. Call us stingy but I’d rather see us use it for fuel than them use it for bombs.
* * *
Before Logan passed he gave me three little astronauts to bounce on my knee. Roxanne, my eldest, is a molecular biologist. She will be leaving on the
SIS John Carter
bound for Mars. Sophie and Logan Jr. will help me see her off. Roxanne’s role will be to supervise my other little family of ‘astronauts,’ a troupe of twenty-four genetically modified chimpanzees. This trip is their big test. Assuming they pass, we will begin human genetic modifications as soon as they return.
These chimps were developed from wild types,
Pan troglodyte
. But after all the DNA mods, they are no longer able to breed with their forebears, hence, they are a new species,
Pan astra
, or as we call them, stellar chimps. Stellar chimps are model primates whose genes will be used to create space-adapted humans. Unlike their wild counterparts, these chimps are more docile having had the aggressive genes that they shared with
Homo sapiens
removed. Aggressive behavior could wreck a mission to a nearby star. We identified the aggressive genes by DNA comparisons with
Pan troglodyte’s
more passive cousins,
Pan paniscus
, aka the bonobo or pygmy chimp. And before you start snickering, yes, we anticipate that our modified humans will be just as inclined as bonobos to settle their differences with fucking instead of fighting.
Further genetic modifications normalized gender differences to where adults of both genders averaged 25 kg mass and less than 100 cm standing height. Interstellar humans don’t need to be muscle-bound giants—they eat too damn much, and robots do most of the heavy lifting on a space station anyway. Digestive tracts were pretty robust in the chimps already, but we still managed to bump them up to ‘hyena’ standards. You never know what you’ll have to survive on if, say, the hydroponics system goes out in the middle of an interstellar voyage. Stellars can get along fine on carrion though I have not noticed them to like it much.
Population control is critical on an interstellar voyage. Stellars are not capable of reproduction from normal acts of sex. We accomplished that by reducing luteinizing hormone or LH production in both males and females to the point where females seldom ovulate and males only produced enough testosterone for general muscle tone. Odds of a pregnancy occurring from a single act of sex are calculated at less than a million to one. When crew replacement is necessary, LH production can be increased with small doses of gonadotropin-releasing hormone or GnRH.
But our most important modification was the inclusion of the radiation damage repair capabilities of
Deinococcus radiodurans
. Stellars are near bullet proof when it comes to radiation resistance. More accurately, their cells can sustain radiation dosages that would be lethal to humans within days, but the stellar’s repair mechanisms are so robust the chimps are back in the pink within twelve hours.
I had wanted to call them arduans from
per ardua ad astra
, ‘through adversity to the stars.’ Just because you inserted a new gene in a strand of DNA was no guarantee it would express in the living cell. And working all the bugs out of their DNA was a lot of plain damn hard work! In the end, I bowed to the team’s preferences, and the new species became stellar chimps. My proudest achievement was that we did it all with tissue samples. Not a single live chimp was harmed in the process. All 24 of them—the entire troupe—were born healthy and viable.
And I’m proud of them, the way any mother would be proud of her kids. I can never go to the stars. Neither can my human kids go to the stars. But because of these chimps, my kids’ kids will be able to go to the stars.
* * *
The
SIS John Carter
is the first of SpaceCorp’s Interplanetary Spaceships. She bears a few similarities to the classic space stations that continue to patrol around LEO. Her rotating torus ring—still the easiest solution to artificial gravity—is only a half a kilometer in diameter. That’s more for mass reduction than anything else. And her external walls aren’t nearly as thick since we don’t have the space debris problem up here at Cisluna. She produces a full g at the outer hull with a 1.89 RPM spin rate—a half RPM faster than a standard space station, but surprisingly easy to get used to. Her ring’s longitudinal thickness is the same 250 meters, but the radial thickness is only 100 meters. The hub is the main reason. Cylinder-shaped, 500 meters long and a hundred meters in diameter, it houses the vast stores of LH
2
propellant for the nuclear thermal rockets or NTRs. The NTRs—four forward and four aft—are the same standard design as went on all
Einstein
-class space stations—250 kN each for a million newtons of thrust forward or aft. But at a quarter of the wet mass of the
Einstein
, the
John Carter
can scoot.
The Mars mission is simple—flags & footprints, plus a lot of 30-meter core samples collected from various locations around the planet. Out and back in 90 days to keep radiation exposure to a minimum. The
John Carter
will spend two weeks orbiting Mars while the four 2-man Mars Descent/Ascent Vehicles or MDAVs drop down to the surface. Previous robotic missions failed to find microbial life, although they did convince us Mars was safe enough for a human visit, albeit with a lengthy quarantine at the return. For this reason the
SSS Jonas Salk
back at Cisluna has been rigged as a Level 4 bio-hazard facility where the returning Mars teams can ensure that their specimens are free from ‘Andromeda’ plagues. Only after they are declared completely safe, will the samples be sent to other stations where their evaluation can be continued with a myriad of specialized instruments too weighty and complex for the
John Carter
. The four Mars teams—two members each—are specialists in molecular and cellular biology with research specialties in origin of life and genetic adaptation strategies for extreme environments.
* * *
I fought like hell for a berth on the
John Carter
. Almost got one too until Captain Thornton played dirty pool. “Okay, Monica, you want a ride that badly, you can have it. You can take Roxanne’s place, but
you
have to tell her she has to stay home.” I do not like Captain Thornton. He is not a nice man. So Roxanne is going to Mars and I’m staying behind. Fuck.
The
John Carter
will have two other ‘passengers’ who are very special to me. Hank Larsen, original captain of the
Von Braun
, and the key executive of SpaceCorp responsible for the decision to move SpaceCorp to Cisluna, and Logan. Most of their remains had been recycled per Cisluna policy, but their families were each allotted a small sealed vial of ashes. The
John Carter
would be carrying one vial of Hank’s and one of Logan’s ashes for interment on the Martian surface. Each vial also has a thin gold strip identifying the contents.
Robin Whittaker, leader of Mars Descent Team One, was entrusted with Logan’s ashes. “Any place special?” she asked me.
“Someplace with a view,” I told her. “He always liked sunsets. You don’t get them up here.”
Monica Carvalho
Principal Investigator
H. galacticus
Project
A
BOUT THE
A
UTHOR
Mr. Fulsang is an accomplished author with two critically acclaimed speculative fiction novels and a prize-winning short story under his belt. Although he is passionate about good scifi, he has always felt that he was not space-savvy enough to write a true ‘hard’ science fiction novel. Not anymore—working as a NASA tech writer from 2007 to 2014 has changed that. He spent that time helping world-class scientists and engineers craft proposals for space missions and getting a unique education in the bargain. The topical areas have included manned Mars missions using nuclear thermal rockets, searching for microbial life under the Martian regolith, extremophiles as analogs for life in high radiation planetary environments, interstellar space travel, asteroids as both hazards and resources, and a good deal of spare time in such arcane fields as quantum entanglement and beamed core antimatter drives. He has become so obsessively conversant in these subjects that he is no longer invited to his friends’ parties. Hopefully you will enjoy reading the Galactican Series as much as he enjoyed researching it.
A
LSO BY
E
JNER
F
ULSANG
FINALIST – 2006 Florida First Coast Writers’ Festival
“Sometimes I send some suggested corrections to entrants so the final manuscript is as clean as possible, but your writing is so clean that I would only be quibbling about commas here and there.”
—Howard Denson, Judge, Florida First Coast Writer’s Festival
EDITOR’S PICK – June 2004 Online Writing Workshop for SF/F/H
“There is a lot to like in this short chapter [four], which goes down as smooth as
pricy bourbon but still has a wonderful bite.”
—James Patrick Kelly, Hugo Award Winner,
Think Like a Dinosaur
“
A Knavish Piece of Work
will satisfy anyone who studies human nature under fire. From specials on the History Channel to articles in military magazines, we see a special reverence for the fallen comrades. Fulsang’s book pays homage to his close friend, Richard Van de Geer, the last man to die in the Vietnam War. In addition, since it’s human nature to imagine conversations ten or fifteen years later after the deaths of loved ones, the book conjures up a Twilight Zone twist that takes friends into parallel worlds, where wicked bureaucrats are forced into their special Circles of Hell.”
—Howard Denson, Judge, Florida First Coast Writer’s Festival