Майкл Бишоп - The Final Frontier - Stories of Exploring Space, Colonizing the Universe, and First Contact

It’s going to be the greatest symphony anyone has ever composed,” said Jurriaan. “Our best work. Something we’ll be remembered for in the next millennia. A frail melody comprised of ice and dust, of distance and cold. It will be our masterpiece.”

Chiara listened absently and closed her eyes. Jurriaan had never touched ice, seen dust, been able to imagine real-world distances or experienced cold. Everything he had was his music. And he was one of the best; at least among organic minds.

Sometimes she felt sorry for him.

And sometimes she envied him.

She imagined the world waiting for them, strange, freezing, lonely and beautiful, and a moment came when she could not envy Jurriaan his gift—or his curse—at all. She checked with Orpheus how long the rest of the journey would last. The answer was prompt.

In three days, we will approach Sedna .

Chiara decided to dream for the rest of the voyage.

Her dreams were filled with images, sounds, tastes, smells and emotions. Especially emotions. She felt the inner Oort cloud before she had even stepped outside the ship. Orpheus slowly fed her with some of the gathered data and her unique brain made a fantastical dream of nearly all of it.

When Chiara woke up, she knew that they were orbiting Sedna and sending down probes. Orpheus had taken care of it, partly from the ship’s own initiative, partly because of Manuel. The Thinker of their mission was still unconscious, but actively communicating with Orpheus through his interface.

She connected to the data stream from the first probe which had already landed and recorded everything. Sedna… We are the first here at least since the last perihelion more than eleven thousand years ago. It feels like an overwhelming gap—and yet so close!

It almost filled her eyes with tears. Chiara was the Aesthete of their group by the Jovian Consortium standards. Feeling, sensing and imagining things was her job—as well as it was Manuel’s job to primarily go through hard data, connect the dots, think everything through, even the compositions, the results of their combined effort—and Jurriaan’s job to focus on nothing but the music.

She sent a mental note to Manuel. When can we go to the surface?

The response was immediate. When I conclude it’s safe .

Safe is bad. It’s stripped of fear, awe, even of most of the curiosity! I need them to work properly, they’re essential. Let me go there first.

All right , he replied.

Chiara smiled a little. She learned to use logic to persuade Manuel long ago—and most of the times she was successful.

As she was dressing in the protective suit, a memory of a similar moment some years ago came to her and sent a shiver through her body. It was on Io and she stayed on the surface far too long even for her highly augmented body to withstand. When it became clear that she’d need a new one because of the amount of received radiation, she decided to give that one at least an interesting death—and she let it boil and melt near one of the volcanoes. Although her new brain was a slightly inadequate copy of the last one, thanks to the implants she remembered the pain—and then nothing, just a curious observation of the suit and her body slowly disintegrating—as if it happened to this very body.

She didn’t intend to do anything like that here. No; here she perceived a cold and fragile beauty. There should be no pain associated to it, no horror. Fear, maybe. Awe, definitely yes. Standing there on the icy surface, the Sun a mere bright star, darkness everywhere—she ought to feel awe.

Chiara felt she had a good chance of being the first human being who ever stood on Sedna. The dwarf planet was nearing its perihelion now, still almost a hundred astronomical units from the Sun, and there were no reports of any expeditions before them during the recent period.

When the lander touched the surface of Sedna, she stayed inside for a little while, getting used to the alien landscape around her. It had a strange sense of tranquility to it. Chiara was used to the icy moons of the Jovian system which she called home, but this landscape was far smoother than what she knew from there. It was also darker—and an odd shade of brown-red.

She turned off the lander’s lights and stepped outside through the airlock, into the darkness.

It wasn’t a complete darkness. But the Sun was not currently visible from this side of the dwarf planet and it felt like being lonelier, further away than ever before. She was able to see the disc of the galaxy clearer than from anywhere else she had been.

She knelt and slowly touched the surface with one of her suit’s haptic gloves.

We’ve found something, Chiara , suddenly Manuel’s voice resonated in her head. See for yourself .

He sent her a mental image of a couple of objects not deep beneath the icy surface found by one of the numerous little probes. The biggest one resembled a ship. A small, stumpy, ancient-looking ship, unmistakably of a human origin. They were not the first.

But these must have come here a very long time ago.

And a few miles further and far beneath it, another shape was discovered by their sensors. A bigger, stranger shape.

Probably from much, much longer ago than the first one…

It took less than an hour to drill through the ice to the first ship. Getting inside it then was a matter of minutes.

Chiara saw the two bodies as the probes approached them. Both dead—but almost intact. One male, one female. The probes suggested the small chambers they found them inside were probably designed for cryosleep. They must have been prepared for the procedure or already frozen when they died.

The ship was long dead too but that didn’t constitute much of a problem for the probes. They quickly repaired the computers and what was left of the data.

They found the ship’s logs and sent it to the crew of Orpheus even before others had time to drill deep enough to reach the other object.

Chiara was back aboard at the time they opened the file and heard the voice of the long gone woman.

I think I don’t have much time left. I have no means of getting from here in time. But I know that there will be others who come here to explore. I hope you find this. I’m telling our story for you .

Ten days ago, I discovered something… —wait, let me start from the beginning .

“How is it going, love?”

Theodora smiled while unscrewing another panel on the probe. “Good. Suppose we could use this one tomorrow on the last picked site. I’ve got just one more bug to repair.”

She was wearing a thin suit, protecting her in the vacuum and cold of the storage chamber, very flexible and quite comfortable compared to EVA suits. Despite that, she’d prefer to be outside the ship, walking on the surface of Triton which Kittiwake had been orbiting for more than two years now.

Kittiwake was a small ship, but sufficient for sustaining two people aboard even for a couple of decades if necessary. Provided enough hydrogen, easily extractable practically everywhere, its bimodal MITEE could function for half a century without any serious problems. If one element failed, it still had many others and could push the ship forward with a good specific impulse and a decent thrust while also providing the electrical energy needed by the ship.

Now the mission on Triton was nearing its end. Theodora didn’t know whether to be happy and relieved that she and her husband would finally return to Earth, after so many years of isolation, or sad that she wouldn’t ever see this remarkable place again.