"Do you reckon they'll offer us one of their nice roundhouses to stay in?" asked Joe.
"You're kidding," said Eric. " We don't know anything about this world yet. And there's something odd about them."
"We've only met two properly, out of a population of what, 100 million? It's hardly representative," said Nat.
"Not a hair out of place on any of them," remarked Eric.
Nat sighed, tying back her own crinkly red-brown fronds. "They're amiable, that's good enough for now."
"They do kind of look different somehow," said Shams.
It was true that establishing cordial contact with other earths was important. The crew knew they had been sent on a fledging mission, a taster. Their task was to establish solid diplomatic relations and to impress upon their hosts that they were not a threat. If they managed that, they would stand a chance of finding answers, and if answers could be found so close to earth, bang in the Orion Arm of the galaxy, it could be done again, with a bigger team and more expensive spacecraft that would travel further. Such a spaceship was already in the process of construction and training underway for a meticulously planned mission, and like Elegiac, it would be equipped to flawlessly read the folding lamps of data in the skies, but with greater depth, with an understanding that crowned precision.
Certain scientists hoped to one day crack the universe's code - as they put it - by pooling knowledge, and perhaps even resources with a sufficiently advanced twin earth. It was for the crew to define the map through. A lingering, far-flung hope lacking cognisance of the political realities spanning each globe, no doubt.
The spaceship felt claustrophobic without the folding of space-time, the swift passing of stars and planets and comets outside in streaks of light. As if the fact of Faster Than Light Travel expanded its space. Shams realised she wasn't averse to the idea of staying in a house, even if it were round and made of sun-baked bricks.
"Yeah, human, but sort of different, too," said Joe. He frowned, stabbing at a few buttons on his console. "Shinier. They're tall and kind of gleam. Listen, Elegiac says the southern continent is massively more populated than the north. I reckon there might be a fair few stragglers eking out their existence in the plains. I get the feeling the north is where the rich live."
"What, like earth?" remarked Shams.
The others glanced at her. Had she been even a little younger, she might have shrunk a little. But science took them beyond the inequalities of earth, and they were all friends after so many months together. Maybe the three better friends with each other than her. They were all American, highly educated, and essential to the mission. They had all been through the same rigorous training and selection. And yet maybe she was different. She was the only one who wasn't white, after all. She was a child of immigrants.
Nat had once said that she had an African American grandmother. But looking at her, Shams found there was no way to tell.
"If you want to make any personal calls, now is a good time, EST," said Nat, consulting the console earth clock.
Joe and Eric dutifully trooped off to their cabins. Joe would call his wife and kids, Eric would call his wife only; his two grown children were studying away from home. He'd try them and most likely not get through. Nat would ring her fiancé. She always took longer than the others.
They had already been months on the spaceship. Shams had seen the tears shed at the farewell gathering, and she had heard the wives' promises to wait, the implicit vow to remain faithful, however much time passed on earth. Shams could still see the wives' faces in their earnestness; Joe's pretty wife with blonde hair and blue eyes, Eric's solid-looking wife sporting a short, silvery-grey bob and brown eyes like her husband's. How the men had chosen wives that calmly and easily reflected themselves. She couldn't remember the children. Nat's man had remained stoic and silent whenever anyone other than Nat stood within earshot. Shams could still see his figure: broad-shouldered, black, handsome, short dreads bouncing in all directions from his head. She had been mildly surprised. She wondered if Nat maybe searched for something of herself. Or maybe her fiancé's skin colour was coincidence, if love ever contained coincidence. Whatever it was, it probably fell well within the expansive patterns of semi-coherent chaos.
On earth the temptations spanned the planet, on the spaceship there were none. Shams scrolled through the science news and sipped on some spaceship coffee.
"We have till evening," said Nat.
It was a shorter day on Thetis. The moon loomed closer, spinning the day twenty-two hours long. Personal calls done, the crew analysed maps and trawled through data.
"Claire says some London scientists claim to have found entanglement signals from within Andromeda," said Joe. Claire was his wife. She worked in space-time research and development, and was involved in interpreting the history of the galaxy's earths from data made available, or stolen. Prising information was her thing, Joe had said often enough on the journey from earth. Her team gathered and reconstructed radio waves, mobile communication signals, anything they could trawl from the skies of other earths. The department frequently garnered media attention.
Shams had never said, but she thought the research conducted on alternative earths was sketchier than the global agency let on. Nobody had ever envisaged a need for research on other-earth humans in nearly a century of searching for extraterrestrial intelligence; experts had speculated that intelligent life forms could be based on silicon rather than carbon, reptiles instead of mammals; nobody had thought that the solar system would turn out to be merely one example of a repeating configuration.
So it could only mean, surely, that humans on other earths were as capable of losing communications and broadcast emissions as they were of lying, including by omission. Research into earth's quantum entangled worlds was by nature inexact, and the potential for error high; yet the research and development department frequently transmitted speculation as certainty, ever gleeful at their ability to spy from afar. Shams kept her thoughts to herself during the journey to Thetis, and not only because Claire was Joe's wife. The fact the department had escaped damage to their reputation in the fallout from Joe's previous mission made her hesitate, too. Perhaps nobody else thought as she did.
"No way will they authorise any missions investigating entanglement in Andromeda or any other galaxy yet," said Nat. "With good reason, too. We need success close to home first."
Shams could still remember the first real images from the earth in Centaur, from the first unmanned Faster Than Light Travel flight. The incomprehension, and then the fear.
The plain language of the message those humans had sent.
"Ignoring another galaxy's signals won't help us find answers any quicker, and finding answers is what we want back home." Joe frowned.
"Agreed. I think it makes sense to follow the signals we get," said Eric. He could always deliver an opinion while remaining equanimous. Since landing on Thetis, Joe, by contrast, seemed mildly aggravated, the dissonance of it reverberating as if he physically lurched in their presence, continuously, invisibly.
But then, perhaps he had always been more agitated by the designer issue. No doubt due to his abortive mission to the other earth. It was the same on their earth, Shams mused. Being older, Eric could no doubt remember the discovery of earth in Centaur more clearly than the rest of them - and yet he displayed none of the low-level panic or maniacal exuberance she was able to easily observe in others, especially those from the space community. He probably hailed from a background where a humdrum, measured approach to life was carefully inoculated from the start, sure as a vaccine. And many humans were like Eric. Outside of their sector, she'd heard tell that a good percentage processed the fact of alien contact with other humans on identical earths within identical solar systems by ignoring it completely.
Whatever the case, the use of any kind of quantum entangled technology without authorisation had become a crime across the globe.
"Oh, come on. We can't go flying out everywhere at once. We don't know what there is out there and Nat's right, we need to ensure success with each mission first. We still only have one planet. Oh, and Nat, I've packed as I assume we will be offered a place to stay off-ship."
Nat nodded. "Time to go," she said.
Comments (0)
See all