Genesis Earth Read online

  I turned back to Terra.

  “What’s on your mind?” I asked. I couldn’t think of anything else to say to break the silence.

  She turned and gave me a puzzled expression. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, uh, what are you thinking about?” Her defensive tone had caught me off guard. “The mission, leaving the station?”

  “Oh.” She turned her head and stared back out the window on her side. “None of that.”

  “Did you say many goodbyes?”

  “No.”

  “Really?”

  She shrugged and didn’t answer.

  Shows emotional coldness, detachment, or flattened affectivity.

  Once, when we were both young children, one of our teachers had had a heart attack in the middle of class. His name was Evan Andreson—I remember him very well. He was an important scientist and a longtime friend of my family, only about ten years older and fifty pounds heavier than my father. I can still picture the beads of sweat on his forehead as his cheeks turned red and he clutched his chest. The muscles in his hand went tight as he grabbed at the fabric of his shirt, and with a low moan, he fell off his chair and passed out. The girl to my left—I think it might have been Stella, but I can’t remember—screamed, and the boy to my right leaped to his feet and ran to Evan’s side.

  In a few moments, all of us were out of our seats, standing around our teacher or running out the door for help—all of us, that is, except Terra. She stayed sitting at her desk the whole time, her face utterly expressionless.

  At the funeral a few days later, almost the entire station gathered to mourn Evan Andreson’s passing. He had been one of the charter members of the Mission, and everyone knew him well. There was hardly a dry eye in the room, and my parents probably shed more tears than anyone else.

  Terra was there, sitting with her mother. Her parents had already divorced by this time, and her father was probably on the other side of the room, if indeed he was at the funeral at all. Terra’s mother sniffled and cried with everyone else, but Terra’s face was blank and expressionless. The way she glanced around the observation deck, it almost seemed she was bored.

  That incident had made me angry with her—angry, and more than a little creeped out. For the next few years, I’d carefully avoided her.

  “Detaching from the station in five seconds,” the pilot said. “Hang on.”

  A few moments later, we undocked from the station and slowly drifted away. My stomach did some discomforting acrobatics in the weightlessness that ensued. Terra’s short hair waved lazily in the air, as if she were underwater. Technically, anyone with hair longer than two or three inches was supposed to wear a net in zero-gravity areas, but she often disregarded rules like that.

  The maneuvering jets made little puffing noises, and the starfield spun as the ship turned toward the wormhole. Out the forward window, the stars grew increasingly brighter. Terra drew in a breath, and I felt her grow tense as the wall of light gave way to the black, starless void.

  We made a solid fifteen minute engine burn, making me feel as if I were lying on my back. I wished I could look behind as the station disappeared from view, but the shuttle didn’t have any rear windows—only the cold metal walls of the hull.

  Instead, I stared straight ahead. The view of the wormhole gave me the sensation that we were falling into the mouth of a giant drain, large enough to swallow the universe. My heart started beating harder and I gripped my chair a little more firmly.

  “How much longer before we reach the other side?” Terra asked the pilot. She alternated between glancing out the cockpit window and the small porthole to her left.

  “About half an hour,” he said, not looking up from his controls.

  “What will it look like when we pass through?”

  “Spectacular,” said the copilot, turning in his chair to face us. “First, you’ll see a point of light. Then, before you know it, that point explodes into a whole new starfield. It’s the opposite of going into the hole—as we come out, it expands until the wormhole is just a dark spot behind us.”

  “But before then?”

  “Blackness. A tiny point of light behind us, but not much else.”

  Terra nodded, her face unreadable. The engine burn ended and we returned to zero gravity. For a terrifying second, I had the disorienting feeling that gravity had reversed and I was falling up. I kept my calm, though—but Terra gave a short gasp. I glanced at her, but she ignored me, eyes glued once again to the side window.

  The pilot and copilot conferred with each other as the wormhole grew larger. The starfield began to spin around the center of the hole, and the bright rim of condensed starlight grew increasingly brilliant around the edge of the mouth. The sky out my side window was warped beyond recognition. I felt as if we were swimming in a pool full of stars.

  We passed this way for several minutes. The silence in the shuttle began to feel uneasy again. I turned to Terra.

  “Are you worried?” I asked.

  She turned abruptly, as if she had forgotten I was sitting next to her.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, you look a little uneasy—”

  “Don’t talk about it,” she said quickly. “I don’t want to hear it.”

  She turned back to the window. I bit my lip and wished I hadn’t opened my mouth.

  We flew on. The mouth of the wormhole filled the forward view now—a sky of nothing but black. The bright ring of light passed quickly by my window, leaving us drifting in a starless abyss. It was an eerie sight for someone who had grown up with the starfield constantly under his feet.

  I glanced at Terra and saw that she had folded her arms tightly across her chest.

  “We’re about to pass through,” said the copilot. “Watch!”

  We both peered ahead. I saw only blackness—not even space, only black nothingness. Then, a single point of brilliant light expanded like the sparks from a hundred exploding fireworks. I gasped—it was as if we had witnessed the birth of an entire universe from the midst of nothing.

  “Wow,” I said, glancing over at Terra. “Isn’t that beautiful?”

  She shrugged. “I suppose. We still have to get away from the wormhole before we can study it, though.”

  Takes pleasure in few, if any activities.

  Her words made me cringe, and I drew in a sharp breath as I turned back to the window. I didn’t want to think about the fact that we would soon be alone together, on a ship heading for a planet twenty light-years from the nearest human being.

  Twenty light-years from help if she snapped.

  * * * * *

  The station on the other side of the wormhole was an ad hoc outpost, barely more than a hodgepodge of rotating pods strung up along a central docking shaft. That didn’t matter to us, though. What mattered was the ship docked to the station’s end.

  The Icarus was the largest spaceship I’d seen in my life. It was long and narrow, its shape reminiscent of the early space shuttles I’d seen in old photographs from Earth, except with shorter wings and larger engines. Much larger. They took up almost three quarters of the ship’s length, dwarfing the tiny living quarters. Strange to think that something so big had been built for only two people—but then again, without the powerful engines, the Icarus wouldn’t have been able to take us to EB-175 in merely forty years. Instead, the journey would have taken centuries.

  We no sooner passed through the airlock than Terra took charge and sent us flying through the ship inspection.

  “Have you checked all the indicators on the NOVA reactor yet?” she called out impatiently from the engines, barely ten minutes later.

  “I’m getting there,” I called out. Unlike her, I was in no rush. This was the Icarus’s first voyage, and I wanted to be absolutely sure that everything was in perfect order. Of course, I didn’t tell her that.

  Even though it seemed like a huge ship from the outside, the inside was quite cozy, and Terra and I constantly bumped into eac
h other as we ran through our checks. All of the rooms lay along a central corridor that was only a little wider than my shoulders. The main bridge was in the front, followed by the computer mainframe, a steep stairway leading up to the main observatory, followed by the cramped living quarters, storage, cryo chambers, life support systems, NOVA power plant, and NOVA engines at the rear. The engines and power plant alone took up four fifths of the ship’s length, with only a very narrow walkway running down the middle between them.

  Thankfully, the Icarus had her own artificial gravity generators. They were a new and somewhat untested technology, but they cut down significantly on mass since we didn’t have to constantly rotate the living quarters. They also made the ship feel much more comfortable.

  In all other respects, however, the Icarus felt completely unlike home. The spotless, narrow rooms and corridors were nothing like the wide, well worn halls of Heinlein Station. The floor was solid and opaque under my feet—no floor transparencies, no view of the starfield. Only the bridge and the observatory had windows to the outside.

  “We’ll orbit past the launch point in thirty four minutes,” Terra called out as she tested the life support systems. “If we split up and work quickly, we can finish the checks and be ready to launch before then.”

  “Yes,” I said, “but in only two hours, we’ll pass the launch point again. I think we should use that time to double-check everything.”

  “What? What do you mean, ’double-check?’” She appeared in the doorway to the cryo room and glared at me, hands on her hips. “This ship was thoroughly checked out yesterday, before we arrived—twice. Everything passed inspection perfectly. We don’t need to double-check things now, and you know it.”

  Excessive sensitiveness to setbacks and rebuffs.

  “Better to be safe,” I answered. On this issue, I wasn’t willing to budge. She stared me down for a few seconds more before reluctantly conceding.

  “Fine,” she said. “I’m finished with my checks. I suppose you want me to check yours?”

  “Yes. Please.”

  “Alright. Are you finished with the cryo chambers yet?”

  “Not yet. Give me another ten minutes.”

  She groaned. “Have you checked the NOVA reactors?”

  “No,” I said. “You can check them over if you want.”

  “Good.”

  I didn’t like the way Terra was rushing me—it made me nervous that we’d miss something critical and have an accident. Better to ignore that for now, though. I didn’t want to set her off before the mission had even begun.

  * * * * *

  After we’d double- and triple-checked the Icarus’s systems, all we had left to do was wait for the station to orbit into launch position, putting the wormhole behind us. With our checks finished, we made our way to the bridge and sat down on the two chairs provided for us. Terra folded her legs against her chest and stared off at the starfield.

  “The universe on this side looks so much like our own,” I said, more to break the silence than anything else.

  “Yeah,” said Terra. “It does look like we’re in a galactic disk—probably a spiral, judging from those dust bands. Still, it’s hard to tell from the way the wormhole warps the field.”

  I raised an eyebrow. Warped or not, she’d read the stars better than I could have done.

  “Do you think this galaxy is anywhere near our own?”

  “It’s impossible to tell,” she said, letting one of her legs down to the floor. “I’m pretty sure this is our universe, though, and not an alternate one.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  She shrugged. “Just a hunch.”

  We sat in silence for a little while longer.

  “What do you think we’ll find when we get there?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you think we’ll find intelligent life?”

  “Maybe.”

  “If we do, do you think they’ll intercept us before we arrive?”

  I was starting to worry that this was a very real possibility. The Icarus would decelerate for nearly twenty years before we arrived, and the radiation from our engine emissions would be easily detectable to anyone at EB-175c watching the sky. When we woke up from cryo, we might find ourselves surrounded by alien ships, or with the aliens already on board, examining us. Or they might shoot us down, and we’d never wake up at all.

  “I don’t know,” she said in an irritated tone. “How should I?”

  “Are you scared?”

  She gave me a puzzled look. “Are you?”

  I hesitated. “Yeah, a little.”

  She stared at me for a while, then turned back to the window. “I guess everyone’s scared of the unknown. It’s only normal. I’m probably a little scared, too. But I’d rather go on this voyage than be stuck back home for the rest of my life.”

  “Why is that?”

  She turned around, slightly annoyed. “Do you want to spend the rest of your life stuck on that station?”

  “No,” I said automatically. “Of course not.”

  She turned away without saying anything. A few seconds of awkward silence passed by.

  “Who do you miss the most?” I asked, trying to resuscitate the conversation.

  She glanced up at the ceiling. “I don’t know. My friends, I guess.”

  I didn’t ask about her parents. Their divorce had always put a strain on our little community. I’d long ago gotten used to talking around the subject—that’s what everyone tends to do in a tiny, enclosed community. Pretend those tensions don’t exist—at least, not in public.

  “I’m going to miss my mother,” she offered.

  “Me too.”

  “She didn’t want me to come on this mission.”

  That surprised me. “Then why did you decide to come?”

  She shrugged again. “Why did you decide to come?”

  I opened my mouth to answer, but it took a few seconds for the words to come to mind.

  “Well… I’m the only planetologist young enough to survive cryo, so I was the obvious choice.”

  “But why did you personally decide?”

  Without thinking, I fell back on the standard answer.

  “EB-175c is any planetologist’s dream,” I said. “It’s identical to Earth in so many ways. Mass, volume, temperature, atmospheric composition—I would be a fool to pass up a chance to study it. This mission isn’t only going to make my career, it’s going to make history.”

  She stared blankly at me, as if still waiting for my answer.

  “So why did you come?” I asked, throwing the question back at her.

  She turned back to the window and pulled her knees up to her chest. “I didn’t have anything else going for me, I guess.”

  A few minutes passed. The warped starfield continued to pass in front of us. I checked the holoscreen monitor in front of me. Fifteen minutes to launch.

  We still had one more thing to figure out before we started. I’d been waiting for a chance to bring it up naturally as part of the conversation, but it didn’t look like that was going to happen.

  I took a deep breath. “When we go into the cryo chambers, do you want to go in first or last?”

  She hesitated. Had her body gone stiff, or was it just me?

  “It doesn’t matter,” she answered.

  “Would you mind going first?”

  “Okay.”

  One hurdle crossed. The big one, however, was still ahead. My legs went numb.

  “Do you want me to turn off the transparency in your chamber when I thaw you out?”

  She gave me a puzzled look, as if I wasn’t making any sense. My cheeks flushed red.

  “What I mean, is—well, the glass in the chambers is transparent by default, but if you’d rather keep your privacy, we can, ah, set it to opaque—”

  “Oh,” she said, realization spreading across her face.

  Cryofreeze involves stripping naked and entering a small cylindrical cham
ber about the size of a coffin. Because women’s bodies are more susceptible to complications than men’s, it’s standard procedure for the men to thaw out first and oversee the thawing process for the women. Standard procedure, however, had nothing to do with privacy.

  A moment of awkward silence passed. I fidgeted a little and tried not to look her in the face.

  “Don’t worry about it,” she said after what felt like forever. “You’ll need a visual to make sure everything’s alright. It’s just part of the procedure. Weird, maybe, but…” she trailed off, cheeks turning red.

  “Are you sure? If there’s a—”

  “No, it’s fine. Standard procedure.”

  “Right.”

  We didn’t talk much after that. As we pulled out from orbit and launched along our preset course, Terra stood up and walked quietly out the door. I waited half an hour, just to be on the safe side—the last thing I wanted was to catch her undressing. If she was fully unconscious by the time I got to the cryo-chambers, it wouldn’t be so awkward for us both. Just for me.

  By the time the artificial gravity generators went off and the Icarus began its relativistic acceleration, we were both locked in the deathly sleep of cryofreeze.

  Cryothaw

  They say that cryofreeze is the closest thing to death short of actually dying. I believe it.

  First, you strip off your clothes and lower yourself down into the coffin-shaped cryo chamber. The glass seals shut above you, and a cold green mist fills the narrow space, penetrating your naked skin. The mist contains chemicals that freeze your cells properly, so that they don’t crack or break when you thaw out—but it has a nauseous smell to it, and makes you feel sticky. Your skin starts to change from pink to white to light blue, slow enough not to notice right away, but quick enough to catch if you know what to look for.

  As the chemicals continue their work, you start to shiver. Just before the cold becomes unbearable, sleeping gas seeps in through the top valves of the chamber. You pass out, too stiff to peacefully fall asleep. The rapid freezing process—where your heart and lungs cease their natural functions—happens while you’re unconscious.