Something Coming Through

35. A Different Sun

The Shuttle | 18–22 July

Space travel turned out to be as tedious and cramped as a long-haul plane trip. Canned air, microwaved food, close quarters, the nagging low-level fear of some catastrophic accident. A video link to a spyhole camera bolted to a corner of the shipping container gave a view of the outside, but after the container had been loaded onto the shuttle with airy swoops and alarming clangs and shudders there was little to see. A few glimpses of men and forklift trucks moving about stacks of containers tented with orange webbing. A line of small yellow excavators tethered with cables. Three hours passed. Four. The passengers were boarding, Henry said. First the winners of the emigration lottery, then government and UN officials, and finally Michel Charpentier and the other corporate passengers.

Henry, Chloe and Fahad explored the nooks and crannies of their narrow rectangular living quarters. Three couches. Pop-up screens and pull-out keyboards, the forbidding control panel of the toilet. Lockers under the couches contained caches of clothing and microwaveable meals, bags of fruit, pouches of soup. There was a little refrigerator stuffed with bottles of mineral water and fruit juices and yogurt. They ate lunch: cheese and salami, fresh bread and olives. Chloe tried to read, but the sense of the paragraphs and sentences kept slipping away.

At last, the lights began to blink and a calm, friendly woman’s voice told them to prepare for take-off. They strapped themselves into their couches. It reminded Chloe of lying on a hospital stretcher bed when she’d been a kid, waiting for the operation to remove her appendix. The same dread, the same helplessness. The same dry metallic taste in her mouth. And then, without so much as a premonitory tremor, the force of the smooth and steady acceleration of the alien craft began to press down. The voice told them that it would last eight minutes, told them to breathe slowly and steadily and stay as still as possible. As if Chloe had any choice, crushed by a giant’s fist into the couch. She told herself that millions of people had taken the shuttles to the Jackaroo worlds, that it was about as dangerous as riding a lift, tried not to think of the weird forces that were flattening the fabric of space and squeezing the shuttle into space.

She knew the itinerary by heart. Up into orbit, a single loop around the Earth and then the fall to the L5 point in the Moon’s orbit, where the combined gravitational pull of Earth and Moon provided a stable equilibrium point which the bracelet of wormhole mouths orbited. The wormholes were shortcuts through the hidden dimensions of space-time; the usual explanation was to imagine space as a flat piece of paper, draw two dots on it, and fold it so that the dots kissed. They’d fall through one of those dots and emerge from its twin, balanced at the L5 point between Mangala and its star. Twenty thousand light years traversed in a moment outside time. And then they’d fall to Mangala.

Nothing to it.

There was a stomach-swooping interval of free fall as the shuttle swung around the Earth, and then a little weight returned again. The voice, which reminded Chloe of a kindly teacher she’d had in primary school, said that the shuttle was on its way to the wormhole mouth and that it was safe to move around.

This part of the trip took a little less than a day. Fahad spent most of the time on his couch playing video games and occasionally scribbling on his sketch pad. Pictures of the spires as they might once have been, different angles of Michel’s 3D reconstruction of the site as it was now, densely hatched sketches of the black room. He was losing the itch to draw, he said, now that they were going where Ugly Chicken wanted to go.

Henry exercised, using a system of elastic cords, told Chloe and Fahad that if the body stayed fit the mind would follow. He played three games of chess with Chloe and because his only strategy was to force a way up the centre with his most powerful pieces he quickly lost every time, and that was the end of chess.

As they picked over a dinner of various microwaved curries and rice, he revealed that he’d ridden on a shuttle once before, to Yanos. He’d gone out to supervise security at a research camp. ‘Mostly developing ways to keep out the megafauna rather than dealing with rivals and troublesome locals.’

Unlike Mangala, Yanos was tidally locked to its star. One side was mostly desert scorched by permanent sunlight, with a vast permanent rainstorm at the substellar point; the other was a dark ice cap, bordered by a habitable twilight strip where islands of tangled forest were interwoven with skinny seas and marshes. Henry told Chloe and Farad about the sun fixed at one spot at the horizon, the constant gale that blew from light side to dark, lashing through tangled forests. He told them about spin trees that generated electricity from the wind, spike trees that snapped with lightning when the gale strengthened into a storm, the stupid blundering beasts that staggered up from the shallow seas to fight and mate. He told them about the portion of ruined factory that Karyotech Pharma had been exploring, the helical ramps spiralling past subterranean levels that were mostly collapsed or flooded. The weird clockwork critters that infested the place, and the tinkertoys and ghost plastics and other enigmas spawned by half-ruined hives of nanomachinery.

‘I was there for six months when the company had its little financial hiccup and we had to pull out. We’d barely scratched the surface.’

‘So you don’t know much about the world you went to, and you don’t know anything about the world we’re going to,’ Fahad said.

‘Michel and the field agent will take care of that part,’ Henry said. ‘I’m here to take care of you.’

They pulled their privacy curtains around their couches and dialled down the lights and slept. Chloe woke to bright light and the woman’s voice announcing that they were approaching the wormhole. A little later, the voice began to count down from sixty seconds. They lay on their couches and watched the yellow dot of the shuttle creep the last millimetres towards the red dot of the wormhole’s mouth. Chloe reflexively closed her eyes at zero. They had just passed through a circular black mirror a little over a kilometre across, flanged up from weird physics and impossible materials by aliens and embedded in the flat end of a rock sculpted into the shape of an ice-cream cone. Now they were falling across billions of kilometres of vacuum towards Mangala. They had crossed twenty thousand light years in less than an eye-blink, and she had felt nothing.

Fahad and Henry hadn’t felt anything either.

‘So much for the romance of space travel,’ Henry said.

The gravity cut off while the shuttle made a cumbersome manoeuvre, came back again. They were three days from planetfall. Mangala didn’t possess a moon, so the wormhole exit hung at the L5 point sixty degrees behind the planet, where its gravity and the gravity of its star achieved equilibrium — a far greater distance than the Earth — Moon L5 point.

Fahad sat on his couch in spex and gloves, twitching as he slaughtered hordes of pissed-off Elder Culture revenants or whatever.

Henry strained at his bungee cords, flicked impatiently through crime novels. He declared that video games were no preparation for the real thing, showed Fahad and Chloe a selection of unarmed combat moves. Chloe demonstrated a couple of good ones from a self-defence class she’d once taken. Fahad wanted to know why they hadn’t brought any guns.

‘We won’t need them because we aren’t going to get into a fight,’ Henry said. ‘We aren’t going to get into a fight because the bad guys don’t know that we’re coming. That’s our advantage, kid. Surprise. Much better than any gun. If we’re lucky, they won’t even know what they discovered. We can just walk in there and take it.’

‘When we know what it is,’ Chloe said.

‘Don’t worry,’ Fahad said. ‘When I see it, Ugly Chicken will tell me what to do.’

As far as he was concerned Henry and Chloe were working for him now. That was the deal, in exchange for his cooperation.

‘Let the kid think what he wants for now,’ Henry told Chloe. ‘When we hit dirt, he’ll soon learn how things really are.’

Men and their stupid dominance games.

Chloe studied maps of Mangala. The empty land around Site 326, in Idunn’s Valley. Other sites where significant Elder Culture ruins had been uncovered. The capital, Petra, the playa around it, the arcs of low hills that were actually the remnants of the rim of an ancient crater that had been flooded and mostly buried in sediment when Mangala had been warmer and wetter. Craters and hills, salt lakes and tablelands, canyons and rivers running south towards the band of the equatorial sea.

She slept a lot, too, the privacy curtain pulled around her couch. She had complicated dreams and couldn’t remember anything about them when she woke, only a claustrophobic sense of unfocused urgency.

She discovered that it was hard to stay fresh using only wet-wipes and bottled water.

At last, the voice warned them that the shuttle was about to enter orbit around Mangala. They climbed onto their couches and buckled themselves in. Gravity cut off for twenty minutes, then returned, growing relentlessly, pressing down on them.

According to the voice, the shuttle was decelerating, leaving orbit and entering the atmosphere of the planet. The pressure on Chloe’s chest began to ease, decreasing until what seemed to be her normal weight returned. Although Mangala’s gravity was a little over three-quarters that of Earth’s, it felt much stronger after the days in the feather-light pull of the shuttle.

Henry switched on the external camera. Presently, lights flickered on in the vast hold and men and women appeared, moving amongst stacks of shipping containers. Several hours passed, an agony of uncertainty, until at last a big front loader loomed into the camera’s field of view and with a jolt they were lifted up and trundled out into the light of a different sun.