It's my last day for a weekend post, and once again all I have is another Space Guys post, this time pretty much odds and ends. And yes, spoiler, I'm recycling the Space Nazis scenario from my Exotroopers (anti) series. As usual, the table of contents is at the end.
As the Janus left the asteroid belt behind, Jason finally proposed to Alek. The crew was gathered in the captain’s cabin in hopes of a glimpse of Jupiter. To that end, Donald set up a telescope in line with the porthole beyond the captain’s cabin. It was not a stable view, thanks to the rotation of the ring, but they could see the giant planet when the wing-like extensions of the Mission Fuselage were not in the way. The captain took the first look through the telescope, as the ring reached the bottom of its rotation, and gave his rumbling laugh of approval. As the others gathered to look through the telescope, Jason knelt and fumbled through his overprepared speech. Alek let him get halfway through before she cut in. “You want to marry me, no?” she said.
“Of course,” Jason
answered.
“Why?” she said.
“Be… because I love you,”
he said. “I… I want to make you happy.”
“Yes,” she said, shifting
to her flat lecture voice. “But why do you want to marry me? What is in it for
you?”
“Well, you… you make me
happy.”
She made a point of pondering. “Good enough,” she said. “I accept.”
“Speaking of,” Donald
chimed in. He abruptly kissed Anastasia. “The captain married us last night!”
Alek looked incredulously at Anastasia. She blushed but held her head up,
ignoring critical stares from Vasily and Jackie and a bemused gaze from Moxon.
In the company of their friends, Jason had learned that his best defense was to show that he was far from uneducated, joining in discussions of everything from astronomy to engineering to languages. Moxon in particular regularly quizzed him on geography, and rarely caught him in an error. Jason, for his part, was most interested in a subject called mathematical linguistics, apparently developed by Tanya and Mehmet, who could be found together often enough that there was speculation if they were involved. For their part, the odd pair listened respectfully when he told them one of the “story” problems from his education, this one set in the lands of Arabia, called the Scroll of Solomon.
“So, there was a Sultan called Saladin,” Jason said by way of introduction. “He was a powerful king and a great warrior, but what he valued most was wisdom. So he collected books from every land and in every language, and he paid hundreds of scribes to translate them in his own tongue. Then one day, someone brought him a scroll that wasn’t like any other. It was very, very old, with words written in gold and beautiful pictures. The scholar who brought it said that it had belonged to King Solomon, and he got it from a holy man who said that it was a gift from an angel. The problem was, nobody could read the letters, or find any script like them. So Saladin had his scribes give every letter a number, based on how often they found it in the scroll. Then they rewrote it as numbers, and what they found was one long, beautiful equation.”
Mehmet had considered for
a few moments. “Interesting,” he said. “I’m sure it is based on a real text. A
smuggler brought it out of Italy, as I recall, only about a hundred years ago.
At any rate, the story was clearly created by someone who understood the basic
principles of statistical linguistics. It would not work, of course, but for an
illustration, it is sound.”
“So how does it work?” Jason asked. “Do you just treat languages like a code to crack?”
“No,” Mehmet continued smoothly. “Cryptography is about communication with a function that would be obvious if it were unencrypted. What we learn from it is that language and mathematics are not fundamentally different. All information has a mathematical component. By extension, no language can be so different from any other that certain things cannot be learned by statistical analyses. If an archeologist 6,000 years from now had no knowledge of English, they could still figure out that `e’ and `a’ were the most common letters and `an’ and `the’ were among the most common words.”
“What if someone tried to fool you?” Jason continued. “Suppose they just made up a bunch of symbols and chose which one to put together with a spinning wheel. From there, they could put together words and put them on the same wheel, only a few words could be repeated. How would you know there wasn’t something there?”
“It has been tried,” Mehmet said. “In the occult fields, it is fairly common. What we have learned is that the human mind is not equipped to understand randomness. We can look at momentary patterns of water vapor or the positions of stars thousands of kilometers away, and think we see shapes and order. But thousands of us could walk past a series of pits in the rock for decades before one figured out that they once held the support beams of a temple. In practice, we are even worse at producing the random than we are at recognizing it. Without a fully automated system, our conscious and unconscious minds will always contaminate the results?”
Jason glanced in Jax’s
direction. “Suppose we found something out there?” he said. “Something that
wasn’t built by any human?”
For just a moment, Mehmet
and Tanya gave each other a glance that made him wonder if they knew something
he didn’t. But the former merely shrugged. “We will only know if and when we
see it,” he said. “Even so, I would wager that we could figure out their math.”
Jason also spent time learning about their destination. Almost all of it came from a single image, taken from a distance of over 4 billion kilometers. The established authority was Professor Futura. When he first presented the image, Jason immediately pointed to a bright white spot on the blue-gray orb. “What’s that?” he said.
Futura had smiled. “That is the main reason we are out here,” he said. “It has been called simply the Anomaly, which is really a routine practice. What we know is that it originated as a meteor impact crater. In those terms, it is large but not exceptional, perhaps half the size of Hellas Basin, though much larger in proportion to the planetary body. What is unusual is that the interior is a completely different climate system from the paramoon as a whole. It is much warmer, enough that the initial survey classified it as volcanic in origin. It also has a greatly different atmosphere. Spectroscopic data show gaseous nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide, in quantities comparable to Gaian atmosphere. Most remarkably, there is a high volume of water, the source of the cloud layer. The data was inconclusive whether this is actual water vapor or suspended ice crystals, but either implies an Earth-like precipitation cycle. Unfortunately, the same cloud layer prevented direct observation of the crater interior. Our main objective is to survey the anomaly.”
“What
about the paramoon?” Alek said. “The reports say it has nearly the same gravity
as Gaia. How is that possible? How do you really know?”
Futura smiled again, more subtly. “We were able to infer certain things either from the paramoon or from its evident effects on the orbits of other moons,” he said. “Its gravity implies that it contains a core of very dense material. It is believed that it was captured by the gaseous planet in the relatively recent past. The real question has been how recent. Many moons and planetoids have been discovered within the Atomic Era, but every paramoon of comparable size was discovered before the Great Wars. Some have gone so far as to speculate that its capture only happened since space exploration began.”
“Then
can it really be colonized?” Jason said.
“We
don’t know,” Futura said. For a moment, Jason wondered if he knew something he
would not tell. He did not notice that Alek had met the professor’s gaze and
shaken her head.
Regular communications continued to and from Gaia and Mars. Every week, each crew member was allowed to record and receive at least one personal communication, and given the choice whether to listen in private. Jason and Alek were with Jax when he played a message from his wife. The morena kept a level tone and a calm expression as she explained that she was expecting their first child, and that it would be a son. Jason turned to his friend sternly as the message ended. “We knew,” Jax said. “It wouldn’t have mattered. You know how it is. Most of the time, that doesn’t work out anyway. This was once in a lifetime.”
Alek
true closer, looking very sad. “I have seen figures,” she said. “The
miscarriage rate is very high. Do you think… he will make it?”
Jason
shrugged. “Usually, if something goes wrong, it would have by now,” he said.
“It’s the same on the Motherworld, really.”
“What
about Dr. Cahill?” Jason said with a scowl.
“She knows,” Jax said. “It’s not like that, anyway. We talk, we take care of each other. Jill knew it might happen. I told her she could do whatever she has to.”
“Then
what does Dr. Cahill say?” Alek said.
“She
says she’s glad I have someone back home,” Jax said. “She’s told me about her
husband, and her son. I know all about that. They had problems before she came
out here, not the way people think. It doesn’t matter.” The conversation
trailed off then. But the next time Dr. Cahill came to the cabin, she left
quickly, with tears in her eyes.
Then a time came when Jason lay with Alek, her face-down beneath him, half-listening to a documentary. “For seven years, the War had raged in the lands between the great oceans,” a narrator intoned. “But the final battle would come more than a year after its end, in the one place the War had never touched. It is the shores of Pantagonia, and young Professor Futura is leading the charge against the last stronghold of the leader of the Final Reich, Heinz Himmelman.”
Jason looked up in interest. Of course, he had seen the footage before: The desolate cliffs; the scrambling commandos; the lumbering Landkreuzer; the mass of rockets and fuel tanks it supported; and atop it all, a spade-shaped craft not unlike the Pegasus payloader. The narrator explained how Heinz Himmelmann had recruited or captured the greatest minds of the world for his special projects, starting with an electronic brain that proved that the Reich could not win the war. How he had diverted thousands of prisoners and laborers, billions of marks and countless tons of material for the greatest project of all. “His workers labored night and day, some in fear, some in devotion, some in the hope of some greater good,” the narrator continued. Jason felt Alek stir beneath him. “The sum of their efforts was the Tottenkarte, the first spacecraft capable of reaching into interplanetary space.”
The screen showed the craft rising into the sky. “It launched into the heavens, carrying Himmelmann and the greatest minds of the Reich. No other craft could pursue it, nor rise high enough to intercept it. The armies of the world could only watch as it rose to the edge of space… and vanished.”
“My grandfather worked on that ship,” Alek said. “Great grandfather, actually. We all just call him Grandfather. A lot of people think he was on it. But probably no. They only ever said that because nobody never found him. I spent a long time trying to find out what I could. I talked to people who would not have talked if they knew. They all said they did not know. I could tell it was true.”
“What
do you think happened?” Jason asked.
Alek shook her head at that. “It is not like people think,” she said. “They never really had a chance. There was too much they did not know, too much they could not do. The only question should have been where they came down. But they never did. We should have seen it, we would have. People were watching, everywhere. Nobody saw nothing, never.”
She settled on her back, staring upward. “I feel like I know him, better than my own mother and father,” she said. “I understand him. I understand what it was like to be him. I am the only one left like him. You know, with the supergenius. There were a few others in our family who had it. But it skips around, like red hair. An uncle here, a cousin there, maybe one of my aunts. My mother and her father, not even a little. That is why I am here at all. The rest… all gone.”
She turned her head to
meet Jason’s gaze. “I might be the last one, even if we have children,” she
said. “I can’t, you know, until we get back. To come at all, I had to let a
doctor do something, something only another doctor could undo. We all did. If
we get back, you will still be a farmboy. I know, you are very smart; you will
still never be like me. But it is okay. I like you the way you are. If it has
to be a farmboy’s son with you or a girl like me with someone else, I would
call it a fair trade.”
She put her arms around him. “There are things you do not know,” she said. “Do not worry, you will. Some, you may not like. I still like you.” She rolled down a partition. “Now show me again, what it is the farm girls do…”
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