Magic Dirt: The Best of Sean Williams (10 page)

( ... blindingly bright green ... )

JAKE: Impact!

(Blackout.)

~ * ~

In the wake of the encounter with the flying saucer, a vague sort of panic reigned. Of all the footage faithfully recorded by the security scanners, there was only one salvageable line:

ANDRE: Where the fuck has it
gone?

And, as no one at the time could provide a suitable answer, I was forced to archive it.

My first thought, to maintain the dramatic impetus, was to cut immediately to the debriefing session, held in the Captain’s quarters eight hours after the event. People had calmed down a little by then, and were able to make a little more sense.

But, after much shuffling and re-editing, this eventually became the episode’s opening scene:

Gabe chaired the meeting, naturally. His haggard face was a mask of tired determination. He hadn’t slept for over thirty-six hours. None of us had.

‘OK, folks. I guess we need to work out what the hell happened. Anyone want to suggest where we start?’

‘Something
did
happen, I presume?’ Andre was taking the easy way out: evading the problem by questioning its very existence. ‘It wasn’t just an hallucination?’

‘No.’ Freedom was adamant. ‘It’s all there on file, if you want to check. The bogey appeared, flew towards us under an acceleration beyond the capacity of human engineering and then disappeared on impact.’

‘The “bogey”?’ Myrion looked amused, although the half-smile was twisted by her usual bitterness. Her psych file spoke of deep traumas, buried beneath conditioning. She was one of the few truly complex characters in the drama of the
Wandering Jew,
and one for whom I had great plans. Plainly attractive, with shoulder-length white hair, she was an interesting contrast to Freedom, with whom she was usually at loggerheads. ‘I thought you said it was a “flying saucer”?’

‘Whatever. Does it matter what we call it?’

‘No.’ Gabe stepped in to forestall an argument. ‘Either will be fine. And I think we can assume it was of alien origin. The pertinent question, as I see it, is: what was the purpose of its behaviour?’

‘Why did it try to ram us?’ added Jake.

STEVE: ‘How does it work?’

SARA: ‘What do they want from us?’

FREEDOM: ‘Where did it come from?’

ANDRE: ‘Where has it gone?’

ME: ‘And how do we report it?’

Gabe shrugged. ‘That’s why we’re here, Alek. We need to think this through. It vanished without trace when it should have hit us head-on, and we haven’t seen it since. Whoever they were, they didn’t bother to tell us what the hell they were doing, so all we can do is guess.’

‘Maybe it was some sort of defence mechanism,’ suggested Andre. ‘Warning us away.’

‘From what?’

‘I don’t know. Could there be life on the inner planet?’

‘Unlikely’ Freedom’s voice was firm. ‘A civilisation which could build a ship like that would surely leave some trace behind. We didn’t even pick up heat-sources. Just old lava and the odd fissure.’

‘The Jovian worlds?’

‘Again, unlikely.’

‘I guess we’ll find out soon enough,’ said Sara. ‘We’ll be passing them in a week or so.’

‘Will we?’ Gabe studied us closely. ‘One of the things I wanted to discuss was the status of the mission. Should we abandon this system and skip to the next, or keep going as planned?’

‘Abandon the system?’ Freedom was outraged. ‘We’re on the brink of what might be the greatest discovery we’ll ever make! The quest for alien life is one of the mission’s primary directives!’

‘Unless it places the mission itself in jeopardy,’ reminded Andre.

‘They didn’t hurt us, did they? Whoever they are and whatever they want, I think they’ve demonstrated quite adequately that we’re at their mercy. And yet we still live. I don’t think they’re hostile, just ... cautious.’

‘Funny way to show it.’

‘Of course. You don’t expect them to behave like humans, do you?’

This triggered a thought in my own head, but I bit my lip to keep it in. Had their behaviour really been unhuman?

‘I myself would like to keep going as planned,’ said Gabe, ‘but I’ll hear any arguments to the contrary before filing the order. Now’s the time to speak, if you want to.’

Silence greeted this announcement. Andre was clearly nervous behind his blunt aggression, but he kept quiet. The only other member of the panel who might have spoken against the Captain was Sara, but she too said nothing. I could tell by the way she fidgeted that she was ashamed of her own fear.

Gabe waited for a minute, drumming his fingers on the desk, until it became obvious that no one was going to speak.

‘I guess it’s settled, then. If nothing untoward happens on the next flyby - and I want us on full alert for that - then we’ll proceed as normal. But if anybody comes up with something we haven’t thought of, no matter how ridiculous, I want to hear it. Absolutely anything could be important.’

We all mumbled our assent. I crossed my fingers behind my back, where the cameras couldn’t see the gesture.

‘So, folks, I suggest we get some rest. It’s been a long, hard day. I declare this emergency council closed and wish you all pleasant dreams. Good night.’

~ * ~

The second flyby was uneventful. Our alien friend refused to reveal itself, if it was still around. We shifted orbit closer to the primary without mishap, then migrated out to the gas giants, where we refuelled. Three weeks later, the
Jew
was ready for crossover. All that remained was the sending of the Mu Boötis report.

Communication with Earth was restricted to small, bullet-shaped lozenges fired through hyperspace to Sol System, where they arrived two days later. The energy required to send the tiny capsules on their way limited the despatches to one per system, at the conclusion of each survey. Thus, every one counted. There would be no chance to send a postscript until the next month; it had to be perfect first time.

And that was where I came in. It was my responsibility to collate all the data into a coherent report. I collected logs from the department heads, rewrote the mass of technical data into readable English and prepared an overall mission log. This process, with the help of AIs, took no more than a couple of days, and was very dull work.

The position of Communications Officer was therefore only part-time. I doubled as Morale Officer (another thankless job) between reports. It took me months to work out how to combine the two tasks and thereby make life a lot more interesting than it had been.

Alpha Boötis (otherwise known as Arcturus, fourth-brightest star in the Northern sky) was our third stop, thirty-six light years from Earth. This much-anticipated system unfortunately proved to be fairly bland, as did the following four: Gamma Serpens, Sigma Boötis, Yale 5634 and Tau Boötis. I knew the folks back home would be hoping for more than the odd boring gas giant and the usual spectral data. So, in an attempt to enliven the report from Yale 5634, rechristened McCormack’s Star upon our arrival, I included footage of the day-to-day activities of the senior crew. Instead of sterile, scripted speeches from the department heads, we had real-life interactions, a close-knit community of people at work and play aboard the
Jew.
By editing the recordings, I managed to create a feeling of continuity, even though the half-hour of footage was composed of snippets recorded weeks apart.

I showed the crew the final cut before despatching it, explaining that High Command would be interested to see how we performed as a unit, instead of as individuals. The dramatised footage would convey the reality far better than any Morale Report. If I had taken any remarks out of context, then that was simply to give the half-hour a feeling of completeness, by hinting at plots and sub-plots that may not really have existed.

‘The Adventures of the
Wandering Jew,
Episode One,’ said Jake, ‘certainly has a better ring to it than “USSN
Rosenberg
Routine Survey Report: Yale 5634, 21.08.26.”‘

‘Exactly’ I beamed confidently. ‘Fun, isn’t it?’

‘But where will it end?’ protested Andre, perhaps prophetically. ‘Are we becoming
Star Trek,
or
Lost in Space?’

There were a few other grumbles, mainly about privacy, but my innovation was ultimately approved by Gabe. The report was sent.

For the next report, from Tau Boötis (58 ly), I took the exercise one step further by actively encouraging the senior crew to improvise. I suggested possible situations and outcomes that might be entertaining for the folks back home, as well as ‘fun’ for ourselves. Already I’d had the idea that this communal exercise might be employed as a means of catharsis. Half the trouble with surviving as a community in a closed environment is the lack of a pressure-valve. Most of my time as Morale Officer was spent bleeding-off dangerously charged situations - onto myself, more often than not. I hoped that, by turning the
Wandering Jew
reports into a soap opera, I might be able to take the strain off myself as well as the rest of the crew.

For instance: If Andre Passant’s sullen manner rubbed Myrion Hemmelling the wrong way, why not have them act out a confrontation? This clumsy psychodrama was amongst the first sub-plots I attempted.

And it worked. Everyone became involved, if a little reluctantly in some cases. It was a game to be enjoyed when actively participating in it, or to be discussed (for and against) when not. I received suggestions from many people regarding possible outcomes. Pretty soon I was handing out rough scripts and engineering vital exchanges. Our everyday work continued - studying, collating, surviving - but now we had a game to keep our minds amused as well.

Then, two systems later, something happened that changed shipboard life forever.

The
Wandering Jew
wasn’t the only ship on the deep-space exploration program; there were nineteen others, each with fifty systems to explore before returning to Earth. Although many of us cursed the five-year confinement, we all acknowledged that the arrangement was the best available. It was far more efficient to send one ship to explore fifty systems than to send fifty each to one system and back. Sure, with
fifty
ships the thousand systems could have been covered in less than half the time, but at more than twice the cost.

Omicron Boötis (75 ly) was our ninth system. Observations from Earth orbit had suggested the existence of a large solar family and we were therefore anticipating a great deal of work. We blipped out of hyperspace on the system’s rim, wary of comets, and took stock of our surroundings.

Sure enough, O-Boötis was
big.
Fifteen planets, two asteroid belts and an extensive cometary cloud crowded the cool orange giant. Gabe took us in on a wide polar orbit, high above the ecliptic, and Freedom went to work.

And that’s when we spotted it: a reply capsule from Earth. Only the third we had received in nearly a year. Personal messages from families (none of us had a spouse back on Earth, but there were always relatives who wanted to keep in touch), fresh instructions from High Command, news of earthbound politics and sports, the latest fads ... We waited impatiently for the
Jew’s
unmanned drone to collect it and bring it back for perusal.

The news, however, was not all good.

Of our nineteen sister-ships, three had suffered cataclysmic disasters; one had despatched a garbled message about an asteroid strike before also disappearing; and a further seven had returned to Earth, abandoning their missions for a variety of reasons (including illness, discontent, psychological maladjustment and outright mutiny). Of the remaining nine ships, six seemed to be developing similar problems, and two of these were so far behind schedule that their itineraries had been cut back to thirty systems.

Which left only three fully operational missions, including the
Wandering Jew.

The news was sobering, to say the least.

There was also a ‘private and confidential’ note addressed to me personally from Robin Blanchard, General Secretary of High Command, counter-signed by the President of the Solar Tribunal, Valerie McCormack herself. I opened it nervously, fully expecting it to be a terse order to get back to work, to stop wasting the crew’s time on trivial matters. It meant the end of the soap, I just knew it.

But it wasn’t. Quite the opposite, in fact.

High Command requested that we continue the unorthodox reports -
demanded
that we do so, and in no uncertain terms. In the face of the other failures, they needed a successful mission to show the public, presented in a way that would guarantee the comprehension of the lowest common denominator. The Adventures of the
Wandering Jew
were, simply, good PR. And the possibility that the whole exercise had helped the psychological stability of the ship as a whole was not lost on them.

So that’s how I became the honorary ‘Soap Operator’, and how the Adventures of the
Wandering Jew
began in earnest...

~ * ~

EPISODE 4: OMICRON BOÖTIS

SYNOPSIS:

This, the ninth port of call for the spaceship
Wandering Jew,
tests the mettle of the crew. In the face of bad news from Earth, morale becomes a serious concern. While the extensive (and therefore demanding) O-Boötis system is explored, charted and studied, the narrator, Alek Maas, follows the ongoing hopes and aspirations of the crew.