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

On the ground, our people call their base camp Lhasa and the rugged territory all about it New Tibet. In response to this naming and to the alacrity with which our fellow Kalachakrans adopted it, Minister Trungpa wept openly.

I find I like the man. Indeed, I go down for my first visit to the surface with his blessing. (Simon, my father, already bivouacs there, to investigate ways to grow barley, winter wheat, and other grains in the thin air and cold temperatures.) Kyipa, of course, remains for now on our orbiting strut-ship—in Neddy’s stateroom, which he now shares openly with the child’s grandmother, Karen Bryn Bonfils. Neddy and Karen Bryn dote on my daughter shamefully.

Our descent to Lhasa won’t take long, but, along with many others in this second wave of pioneers, I deliberately drop into a meditative trance. I focus on a photograph that Neddy gave me after the mandala ceremony at the arrival celebration, and I recall his words as he presented it.

“Soon after you became a teenager, Greta, I started to doubt your commitment to the Dharma and your ability to stick.”

“How tactful of you to wait till now to tell me,” I said, smiling.

“But I never lost a deeper layer of faith. Today, I can say that all my unspoken doubt has burned off like a summer meadow mist.” He gave me the worn photo—not a hardened d-cube—that now engages my attention.

In it, a Tibetan boy of eight or nine faces the viewer with a broad smile. He holds before him, also facing the viewer, a baby girl with rosy cheeks and eyes so familiar that I tear up in consternation and joy. The eyes belong to my predecessor’s infant sister, who didn’t live long after the capturing of this image.

The eyes also belong to Kyipa.

I meditate on this conundrum, richly. Soon, after all, the Yak Butter Express will set down in New Tibet.

Sean McMullen has been a full time author since 2014, but as an after-hours author, he established an international reputation with over a hundred science fiction and fantasy novels and stories. He was runner up for a Hugo Award with his novelette “Eight Miles,” and he has won fifteen other awards and been published in over a dozen languages. His latest collection, Dreams of the Technarion (Reanimus Press, 2017) contains his new history of Australian science fiction, “Outpost of Wonder.” His daughter is the award winning scriptwriter, Catherine S. McMullen.

Living room news is somehow timeless. Roman slaves once came home and repeated what they had heard in the Forum to their masters. Eighteenth Century families read pamphlets collected in the coffee houses. A century later it was newspapers, then came radio, television, Twitter, t-share, overview and commspeak. Now we have the slightly retro holovista, which is popular because it can be watched as a family—if the family is willing.

Entanglement technology had brought the final frontier as close as the living room. All we had to do was get an uncrewed probe out to whatever was to be explored, and the entangled telepresence established in its computers would provide practically instant communication. Everything was easy. Too easy. People took the wonders for granted until something went spectacularly wrong.

I was in the living room with my family when the Argo made its flyby of the double star Alpha Centauri. My wife was working on her Universal Data Pad, but was looking up at the holovista every so often. My thirteen year old son was sitting with his arms folded tightly, and doing his best to look sullen.

“Don’t see why we’re watching,” Jason muttered. “The Argo’s been trashed by an asteroid.”

“It collided with a speck of dust the size of a bacterium,” I replied.

“Then what’s the fuss about?”

“The Argo was traveling at a tenth of the speed of light when it hit. Huge loads of energy were released.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Very large bang.”

“So it’s trashed.”

“It’s damaged, but still working. This is one of the most significant events in humanity’s history, so we’re going to watch it as a happy family.”

“I’m not happy.”

“Then we’ll just have to watch it as an unhappy family. Now shut up and watch!”

“Try not to be authoritarian with Jason,” said my wife.

“Teenagers are pack animals,” I replied. “I’m making sure he knows that he’s not leading this pack.”

“Now, now, dear. Try not to act like a magistrate when you’re at home.”

I knew they would not share my enthusiasm for the Argo. I was a child when the unmanned starship had been launched, and I had followed its progress closely ever since. Inevitably, I had childhood dreams of joining the Argo’s crew, and in theory they were realistic dreams. The members of the crew lived very ordinary lives in California, and operated the spacecraft through entanglement telepresence circuitry at the Mission Control building on Berkeley Campus. My dreams had been shared by hundreds of millions of other children, but there were no vacancies. In the forty-seven years of the mission not one of the crew had died or retired.

The best career opportunities were in law when I had to start making decisions about earning a living. My fascination with technology could not be smothered by four years of legal studies, however, so I specialized in spacecraft accident investigation. The Argo was a spacecraft, and there had been an accident, so I was now following events with informed, professional interest.

The holographic image of Marie Jackson, the Argo’s control-captain, now materialized a few feet in front of us. Beside her was a journalist, who was about a fifth of Jackson’s age.

“Can you tell the viewers a little about the Argo?” the journalist began.

How many thousands of times has she answered that question? I wondered .

“The Argo was built in space, orbiting Saturn,” said Jackson, doing a good job of seeming neither bored nor exasperated. “It was launched in 2200, and spent ten months accelerating to nine percent of lightspeed. It then traveled unpowered for the next forty-seven years. It was meant to loop around the star Centauri A, and use its gravitational field to change direction. It would then travel on for another two hundred years to its next flyby, the red dwarf star Gliese 581.”

“But isn’t the Argo exploring the Centauri stars?”

“Yes, but the Gliese and Centauri systems are in roughly the same direction, so the Argo was meant to explore both. The Centauri stars are the payoff for the people who built the Argo, because it’s arrived in our lifetimes.”

“But now there’s been an accident, and it can’t go any further?”

“There’s been an accident, and it can’t change direction,” said Jackson with her eyes closed. “One does not slow down from a tenth of lightspeed by pressing on a brake pedal.”

Jason was sitting with his mouth open, quite literally drooling at the image of the very pretty journalist.

“Chosen for being decorative,” I observed.

“You’re just saying that because you’re jealous!” exclaimed Jason.

The journalist looked blank as a cue device within her ear briefed her for the next question.

“But this is not the first star you explored,” she said.

“That’s right,” said Jackson. “Eleven months ago we passed within a quarter of a light-year of the red dwarf Proxima Centauri. That’s the nearest star to the sun.”

“But the Argo didn’t actually go there.”

“No, but our telescope did detect flares erupting on Proxima’s surface. The light from those flares is still on its way here, and will not arrive for another three years. That means scientists can do some fascinating experiments that test the laws of physics.”