The spaceship landed as per the instructions issued from Thetis. The crew dressed appropriately for the occasion, Shams in peace-offering white, the finest pure cotton. Only a few days before, the slowing ship had sped past the solar system's Jupiter, the red spot of its ancient storm in place, the moons of this Jupiter as numerous, Elegiac calculated, as their own. Saturn's rings in this solar system were slightly thinner. That was when Elegiac's continuous stream of observations and updated predictions culminated with the probability of this earth existing in a different continental formation. And she was right.
That made it unique. None of the crew, apart from Joe, had ever visited another earth. They had trained for years, but none had had the privilege. Joe kept quiet about his experience, but Shams knew that it had been an ill-starred mission, planned in haste and executed haphazardly; it remained the source of much controversy at home. She remembered him disappearing for a while from the space fraternity. His wife and he had taken the children travelling for a few months. He told stories about the Tibetan plateau and Amazon rainforests occasionally, failing to realise he repeated himself.
They all repeated themselves. Anecdotes used on earth as hooks to attract, bait and gather others formed the first sheen of self to thin, charm in inverse relation to each retelling. It was one of the reasons why Shams didn't bother much with talking. Stories looped and repeated, winding around the operations area again and again.
At first, no one realised. The other earth, deep in the Centaur Arm of the galaxy, began as a distantly observed, rare celestial object that boasted a class G2 main sequence star and seemingly random quantum entanglement with earth. A small cabal of scientists turned their telescopes towards the source of the quantum signals, bubbling with excitement. They caught glimpses of a gas giant and noted its distinct resemblances to Jupiter, and even this barely warranted a mention in science journals. Still searching for the source of the entanglement signals, they found another gas giant that looked much like Saturn. They predicted the existence of two rocky planets, each approximately double the size of Venus. They were wrong, they came to realise, when instead they observed the effects of Neptune and guess-spied Mars and Venus. Quietly, they discussed amongst themselves, and sure enough, they triangulated upon Mercury. They had to wait for the source of their signals to emerge from behind the star, but they knew. When it did, it was still to their amazement that they found themselves observing another Planet Earth.
Politicians scurried to contain the public reaction and journalists to witness it; both strove to discover as much as they could conceivably comprehend as scientists found their names vaulted into the households of nations across the globe. With funding from the richest entrepreneurs and governments, esoteric and insane ideas for space travel reduced to the least unlikely one, and they set about accelerating the development of an embryonic technology that would utilise Faster Than Light Travel for the transmission of packet data - to enable the transmission of a greeting on behalf of the people of earth.
The technology had been coarsely hammered together, and scientists were never sure of the message's reception.
After that, unmanned spacecraft were sent, part of the first spacecraft experiments in Faster Than Light Travel. The first real images of the twin solar system with an earth bearing telltale signatures of life deep in the Centaur Arm of the galaxy unleashed both festivities and ferocities, with humans dizzy, almost mad on happiness or incomprehension, and then drunk on a Bacchanalian relief, a surrender to nihilism.
When a replica of earth's own solar system was first discovered, Shams had been a child, and she remembered the hushed resonances of adults, the escarpments of conversations rising high, cutting short. Discussions in her mother tongue, and in English. She had been born into a space sector family. From a line of the finest engineers in the world, her father always used to say, although the line only began with his own father, and for her mother, not at all. Her parents had migrated to the United States from northern India at the start of the great space rush. And so she was an engineer.
Shams could still recall the silence of her parents when she drew near, and how somehow she knew the subject ceding to their silence. And yet, their incomprehension, shared with the whole of the human race - as a child, something about it had been briefly, very briefly - delightful. A fact had burst into cognition and for a minuscule period in time, united humanity in one predicament, regardless of the usual divisors, such as skin colour or God. There was a beauty in seeing the religiously observant rattled and the atheists befuddled in common unknowing.
Then astronomers found another quantum entangled earth.
Famed tycoons backed up newly rich programmers who argued that it was evidence for a designer with a penchant for the motif of the solar system; semi-coherent chaos theory suggested otherwise - it was mere coincidence. In semi-coherent chaos, anything could happen. Most events fell within the realm of the possible.
Software engineers worldwide still collaborated with physicists, trying to find the design. Meanwhile, philosophers argued that the theory of semi-coherent chaos and the field of quantum theory - including the near-impossible mathematics of Faster Than Light Travel - having led to the discovery of other earths, proved the anthropomorphic nature of the universe.
Nobody, in short, knew. And that was still true, fifty years later.
Still, within the chaos Shams had found a role to play as a young space engineering graduate, beginning her career more than twenty years before, as the race to find answers turned into a sprint without end. If nothing else, employment still bloomed in the space sector.
Above their heads, the Orion Nebula coiled, wisps of it fading in the morning sky. The moon was still visible in the blue, faint but larger than their own - it orbited closer to this earth, in line with yet another prediction of Elegiac. Thetis, said Shams to herself. Thetis.
The spaceship lay dormant in a hangar high up in the range known as the Hera Mountains. Laurasia's population were a mountain-dwelling people, huddled along the southern edge of the continent, avoiding the harsh winds and tornadoes that blew in from its vast central plains and the tidal waves incurred by its closer moon.
"My God," said Joe. "It's beautiful."
Shams wanted to ask if it was more beautiful than the other earth he had seen, but she refrained. She would, she told herself, one day.
The crew of four gaped over the view.
There were no ice caps on this earth. The climate was driven by giant landmasses, and globe-wrapping oceans. Elegiac had calculated that, as with the formation of their earth's tectonic plates hundreds of millions of years before, when earth had nestled two massive continents called Gondwana and Laurasia, much of Europe was under water.
The air was warm, golden and moist. The spaceship lay in a stone hangar carved deep into the mountains, and the panorama before them pooled in the dark green foliage of bushy, round treetops, sandy mountain peaks, trails of shrubs and herbs pinned with tiny dots of flowers, and round, adobe-like buildings, most looking to be the size of domestic dwellings, although some loomed broad and tall, appearing to be official or industrial. Thin white trails of smoke billowed in the sky. To the north of the mountains lay the plains of Laurasia, apparently empty; to the south of the continent, the Tethys Ocean lapped the cliffs, and to the south of the Tethys Ocean lay Gondwana. Panthalassa met both continents to the east and west, the ocean that hundreds of millions of years ago was as vast a body of water as their own earth had ever seen.
Shams smiled nervously as an official approached them.
"Would be nice to visit Gondwana as well while we're here," said Eric, his voice low, speech without discernible movement of the mouth enabled by his silvery beard. Shams took a quick glance at him. His smart white shirt and expensive pale linen trousers made him look portly, and entirely failed to accentuate any reserves of wisdom or spirituality or whatever it was the space research team had thought the meticulously designed Greeting Clothes could impart by the wearing of them. He looked better in his normal gear, she concluded.
"Wasn't much intel given about it," mumbled Joe. Shams drily observed that he looked better in white, if a little Aryan.
"Ssh," hissed Nat.
"Welcome to Thetis," said the official.
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