Steve Alten - Vostok

The leader shook his head, unsure. “Avi, I sent a transport to collect your family. Your senior wife, Lehanna, claims you soul searched for a future incarnate before you were arrested. She says you failed and that there are no future Charonian incarnates out there to connect with. This suggests our mission will also fail.”

“Things happen for a reason, Zaphenath. Even the Miketz serves a purpose, one we cannot see. Prison gave me time to reflect. Among the thousands of probabilities that will end in the death of our people, I believe I have found the means to set one alternate reality into motion, one that could alter our species’ fate. And the implications of our actions are incredible.”

At my request, our transport was diverted to Charon’s City of the Sciences, the place where I had been assigned to live and train two years after my birth .

Every child born on Charon since the time of the Great Uprising was required to be submitted for G.A.T. — Genetic Aptitude Testing — within two solar years of conception. DNA and brain chemicals determined where each offspring would be raised and educated. Only the children of the Council were exempted, a ruling which virtually assured our militaristic rulers to be among the least educated populace inhabiting the planet .

We landed in the Biological District, where the regent’s top exobiologist, Dr. Kabir Parker, had been summoned to his lab for our meeting. I had studied under Kabir until I’d had a near-death experience during my pre-pubescent years. Upon recovering from the drowning incident, my psyche had changed, my logical mind evolving into one that was more intuitive. When my studies faltered, my G.A.T. was retested, the results sending my education into a free fall .

There is no place in an autocratic society for a free thinker, especially one who claims he can communicate with the dead .

Zaphenath Paneah and I listened while Kabir lectured us on how life first evolved on Charon. “It began over 400 million solar orbits ago with chemiosmosis, a process in which the chemical adenosine triphosphate was broken down and re-formed to release energy. Biological evidence indicates the first living organisms on Charon were not self-replicating molecules, but a byproduct of a chemical combination that contained the instructions for processing energy and replicating. Incredibly, the enzymes required for this specific metabolism were not found on our planet; they were delivered by meteorites. Ribose, adenine, and cytosine were the key ingredients lined inside these space rocks, which most likely metabolized into bacteria after coalescing in hot, acidic pools of liquid that contained phosphorus chemicals.”

“Kabir, in order to save our people, we need to seed the ingredients of Charon’s life matrix on another world. Just for argument’s sake, let’s say you could package this biological soup aboard a conventional rocket and crashland it. Which planet or moon in our solar system represents the best candidate for life to take hold and develop as it has on Charon?”

“At present? The answer is none.”

“I realize that. But what about in the future or distant future?”

Communicating with his control console via thought wave, the exobiologist powered on a holographic map of our star system revealing our sun, orbited by four inner worlds and four outer, the divide separated by an asteroid belt .

“The two innermost planets, Nekudim and Akudim, are far too close to the sun for life to ever evolve. The outlying gas giants beyond Charon aren’t suitable either. That leaves Berudim.”

The hologram zoomed in on the third planet from the sun. Charon’s neighbor was a hostile world, its surface obscured behind a dense layer of gray atmospheric clouds. “If we’re speaking strictly in terms of a planetary lifetime, then Berudim would be my choice. Although its atmosphere is presently toxic to life as we know it, our probes indicate that the cloud cover obscuring the planet’s surface contains massive layers of moisture and that it is in fact raining on Berudim. Water, as you know, is a necessary ingredient for life on Charon. Berudim’s atmosphere is in flux, and probability models suggest a breathable air in approximately ten to fifteen million years. What I also like about Berudim is that it’s twice the size of Charon, with a much larger magnetosphere to protect it from the solar wind.”

Zaphenath Paneah turned to me. “The magnetosphere is an issue the Council has hidden from the masses since the revolution. It has been steadily eroding for centuries. Another fifty to seventy years and we’ll have no atmosphere. No atmosphere means no air and no greenhouse effect to maintain temperature stability. With or without the Miketz, Charon is destined to become a cold, desolate world.”

Kabir never liked being interrupted while he was in mid-gust. “Listen to me, Avi Socha. We can engage in hypotheticals between now and doomsday, but there’s a difference between seeding the ingredients of life on Berudim and expecting it to one day become an intelligent race of beings. Evolution has its own catalysts — asteroid strikes, ice ages, runaway genetic mutations. Duplicating an abiotic process to produce RNA or RNA precursors that result in a species suitable to communicate with is a one in a million shot.”

“One in a million is better than no chance at all,” Zaphenath Paneah said. “Kabir, how many probes are available to launch to Berudim?”

Kabir used his thought waves to review the institute’s inventory of space drones. “Seventy-two vessels still remain under the institute’s control. As fate would have it, the journey can be completed in six days, because the two planets are rapidly approaching their maximum perihelic opposition, the closest they’ve been since life first took hold on Charon. Before you go congratulating yourself, Avi Socha, you should know that this isn’t just a coincidence. Berudim is actually the cause of the Miketz. The third planet’s gravitational pull on Charon is what is increasing the pressure in the calderas. Sometime before the maximum perihelic orbit is achieved, Charon’s magma pockets will erupt, unless we take the necessary course of action.”

Kabir’s tone caused the back of my skull to tingle. “What does that mean? Zaphenath, what is he referring to?”

The rebel leader was not happy with his scientist’s lack of discretion. “It’s a course of action that has been proposed. When the Council discovered that Berudim’s gravitational pull was causing the calderic pressure increases, they instructed the Science Institute to develop a means of destroying it. Our scientists succeeded where theirs failed.”

Zaphenath Paneah focused his thought waves on the hologram of Berudim until three drones were positioned around the planet. “The device is called a scalar weapon. Unlike conventional electromagnetic waves that propagate outward in ripples through our physical dimension, scalar waves travel through space longitudinally in the higher dimensions. When fired simultaneously from drones orbiting Berudim, the scalar waves shall cause every molecule on the planet to broil at a temperature hotter than the sun, vaporizing everything into plasma. Berudim’s atmosphere will expand until it explodes, the entire event lasting less than a second.”