Noriama: Chapter 20
How long had Sughouri wandered? Years. Only seconds. Her heart ached, her limbs burned. She was dying, crushed by the intense weight of Proxima b. Her mind wasn’t working properly anymore. She was dreaming while awake, whispering to ghosts and crying out to absent friends.
She was in the mine. She knew she was. The tunnel kept going, and if she kept walking, she would soon come to the same door that connected to the refinery. She would see empty hoppers and pickaxes, and then she would be halfway there.
When she thought of it, she checked her watch.
It had been ten minutes since she fell.
Sughouri crawled in the dirt, taking pictures as she moved. She wasn’t even looking where she pointed her camera. It was like a reflex, apologizing when you sneezed. It was like praying, making the same hand movements again and again. It was faith. Faith that any of it mattered.
She checked her watch again. It had been two minutes since she fell.
The darkness pealed away, only to close behind her as she moved. She wouldn’t die in the mines of Proxima. She couldn’t. If she believed such a thing possible, she would die. She had to believe in her survival, or else.
The tunnel widened. Sughouri looked.
They stood like sentinels, their flat bodies and wide tracks still and covered in dust. Some had shovels, others had drills. Some had grinding teeth, and others had large hoppers on their backs.
They sat like angels, absent heads bowed in prayer, all in a line as she passed. They were statues in a chapel, riflemen at a military funeral. They watched her pass as she crawled, still and silent. They had been arranged, or perhaps arranged themselves.
In the light over her LEDs, Sughouri could see at the far end of the tunnel, a steep incline. It rose from the dirt towards the surface of Proxima b. Bemused curiosity drove her onward, and she crawled past the still statues. When she reached the base of the incline, she could see up further than she expected. It was a rockslide, or some other sedimentary erosion. It was rough and crumbled, not smooth like the walls she had passed. The mine may have once been closed off, but now there was a path, a tunnel upward.
On instinct, she turned off her LEDs.
Sure enough, once her eyes adjusted, she could see the faint glimmer of light from the tunnel above. It was too dim to be unnatural; it had to have been starlight, or the wisps of Proxima Centauri as it’s glow crept across the terminator.
Far above her, the light beckoned, a promise of an ending that wasn’t buried in the darkness beneath Proxima b. There was something else above her. She could see it. She could climb the incline and be the first person to see Proxima b with her own eyes. Touch the surface, like a real living thing, not huddling in the sterile tomb of Noriama.
She knew it was foolish. Suicide, even. Every second wasted was a second that brought Sughouri closer to suffocation. She had limited oxygen, barely enough to get back to the Hut if she were on top of Churji. With the poor nexus overturned so far behind her — how far behind her? — she had even less time to spare.
But this had been a suicide mission from the start. All four of them. They all knew it. They all wanted it. The moment the Croatoan had left Earth, they had already been dead, as far as Earth was concerned. Oh, their reports had flown back to earth on the backs of bright red lasers, but there was no reply. There wouldn’t be. Their last report wouldn’t arrive on Earth for another four years. They’d be on their way home by then. Or dead.
What was the difference?
Four years. Astrophysicists measured distance in time. She was four years away from Earth. No seconds at all from Churji, so back to meters. Call it…fifty?
Two seconds away from the Croatoan, that’s pretty close; but two hundred thousand kilometers is pretty far. Depending on the scale, the rest of the team was right next door, or impossibly distant.
What was there to measure distances further away? Polaris, the north star, the star that guided explorers and pilgrims and colonists centuries ago was 434 light years away. Four hundred years. The light that shone from Polaris had begun its journey when Sughouri’s fifteenth- or sixteenth-great grandmother had just been born.
What had happened in those sixteen generations? If someone had sent a message from Polaris, what would it matter now? Four hundred years ago, the Earth hadn’t even developed flight, much less space travel. It would be a missive from the ancients, no better than a curio fit for a museum of antiquity. Messages from those long dead.
How long away did you need to be before you were dead, even if your heart was still beating?
Somewhere, far away, she was already dead. Given time, everyone on Earth was dead. The rest of her team was dead. Only one thing was alive, and that was here and now. Above her, a glint of corpse-light dragged Sughouri upwards, as she gripped the thick rocks with her gloved hands.
At last she reached the jagged opening, and looked out over the surface of Proxima B.
Far overhead, a flowing ocean of sand and dust danced away in the sky, curving off towards the horizon. It was a blizzard of earth, a sheet of dirt and stone mixed with flickering lights of the distant stars. It was like looking into the eye of a storm, and seeing the wind given form.
Dark and gray, the ground stretched away to the distance, further than she had ever seen before. As far as she could see, the land was carved in two, a blanket and mattress, both above and below. The still and stable ground sat patiently while the rolling dust leaped overhead, a school of leaping fish, of breaching whales, a flock of soaring and wheeling birds calling out in the airless sky.
Sughouri could not look away. She watched as Proxima danced for her, a river of dust curving over the sky.
Victoria looked over the official report. It made no mention of the ceiling of dirt sailing over Sughouri’s head. It didn’t detail how Kristiana’s unwillingness to take her medication may have impacted her reaction time. It said nothing about their discovery of Zuri’s espionage.
Instead, it explained in great detail how Sughouri managed to connect Churji to her suit’s computer and pilot the drone out of the cave and onto the surface of Proxima b. From there, she steered the drone towards the elevator, broadcasting an emergency alert until she got close enough to the elevator’s relay system to re-establish contact with the team.
The report then detailed the efforts of Zuri, who had worked faster than she ever had before, to break the elevator’s safety protocols just enough to start the Hut moving. Once it reached ground level, she re-engaged the breaking locks, holding the elevator in place just long enough for Sughouri to bypass the airlock and get inside with seconds to spare before she ran out of oxygen entirely.
The report made no reference to the recorded communications between Sughouri and the team, nor their content.
It was just a thing that happened. That’s all it was. A series of actions and reactions all assembled together like a recipe, so the people on Earth would know what had happened four years ago on Proxima b. A bottle of booze. A message scrawled on the wall.
Sughouri, poor thing, was on her way back to the Croatoan. Her body had been ravaged by the prolonged exposure to earth-like gravity after so long in sub-g space. Was any of it permanent? They wouldn’t know for sure until Victoria could give her a complete physical. For her part, Victoria wasn’t particularly hopeful.
“We can’t leave,” Sughouri’s voice was raw. “We still don’t know what happened to the colonists.”
“We’ll never know for sure,” Zuri answered. “I ruined half the database, one black box missing, the other broken, there are no bodies, no records, nothing.”
“There are at least half the rooms of Noriama we still haven’t explored,” Sughouri protested. “A room by room search is still possible. We can’t not try.”
Victoria glanced at Kristiana and Zuri. She could see in their faces that the idea didn’t appeal to them the way it might have months ago.
“Sughouri,” Victoria said, “You’ve been through an incredibly straining ordeal. I’m concerned that you’re still in shock. I think we should wait until you’re up here, let me give you a full physical, recover a bit, and then we can make a final decision.”
“More waiting?” Kristiana asked. “And what do we do in the meantime? Noriama’s computer has been peeled apart, the station is lying dead in space, there are no bodies, no journals, nothing.”
“There is still a lot we could do,” Zuri said. “We can go back over some of our work. We’re assuming a lot.”
“Such as?”
“Basic things, like composition of materials,” Zuri answered. “We assumed that Noriama used the same base layout as was established in the KAP mission plan. We were wrong. We are currently assuming that the materials they used to build Noriama are also those used in the KAP mission plan. We could be wrong there too. It might be worthwhile to go back over everything in the KAP and test each variable.”
“That would take years,” Kristiana said. “And what would it give us? Are we asking questions that have useful answers? Everything we’ve discovered has only given us more questions. I don’t think there’s anything more to be found.”
“We can’t leave without some answers,” Zuri protested. “If we leave without knowing something its as good as killing them all over again.”
“Good,” Kristiana muttered. “Maybe then people would give up this absurd colonizing idea.”
“What are you talking about?” Sughouri asked. “Noriama wasn’t absurd, it was brilliant endeavor.”
Kristiana scoffed. “It was stupid. This whole project was always stupid. It would never have worked.”
“What makes you think they couldn’t have survived, made this a home? Humanity has survived impossible odds before, and even the most physically and emotionally traumatizing events can be endured and overcome. How is surviving on Proxima any different?”
“You seem to think that the moment the colonists touched down on this planet they stopped being human.”
“Why not? Do you honestly think we can never surpass our inner beasts?”
“Not by wishing hard, no. There will always be little mistakes that pile up until everything falls apart.”
“Not if they stayed together! And they had to; fifty years in the KAP rockets; they must have bonded together, because they’d never have made it this far if they hadn’t!”
“Then where did they go?”
It was the question of all questions. If they could learn anything, even the smallest fact about where the colonists were now, they might be able to ascertain why. And from there, a whole raft of answers were within reach. All it would take is time.
They had time. All the time they needed. Time to pick through every speck of dust and leftover crumb of Noriama, all in the hopes of finding something that would finally make a connection for them.
So they could understand the Noriamans. Who they were. What they did. How they lived and died.
So they wouldn’t be alone. Victoria’s hands began to rub each other. That was all they had ever been doing, she knew. They had been using Noriama as a convenient excuse.
“Why are we here?” She asked.
They didn’t answer her. They knew she knew what they would say.
“Why did they send us,” she continued. “Why do they need to know. Why do we need to know?”
She was just so tired.
She had been tired long before General Coli had approached her on Earth and asked her to join the team. She had felt stretched, like skin over a drum. When she tried to rest, all she could see were the faces.
Thousands of faces. The terrified faces of the poor souls who plummeted to their deaths in the aftershocks of the Tehran earthquake, reaching out to her as they fell — but they were not the first, nor the last.
Dead faces of people she couldn’t save. Living faces of friends she had hurt, or who had simply faded away. Faces of strangers who shouted at her in the street, or ignored her as they passed her by.
Every face a person.
There were hundreds of them, all back on Earth. Here, in the cold cocoon of the Croatoan, there were only three. Two hundred thousand kilometers below was a fourth. Did anyone else exist? If they did, what could the four of them do that would impact their lives in any meaningful manner? Were they already ghosts to the Earth? Were they already dead?
Sughouri was quiet. Her voice had been so calm, and her readings so stable, Victoria couldn’t help but wonder if the medication was still affecting Sughouri’s thinking. It couldn’t have been, of course, her medical report proved the chemicals were long out of her system, but still, there was something unearthly about her, a disembodied voice from a dead planet. It was like she imagined talking to Wolf or Lemon would be like. Simple statements of fact and awareness. Like she was seeing things unfiltered through human eyes. Safe, surrounded by danger, waiting for someone outside of the wreckage to pull them out, to bring them home.
Kristiana had her eyes closed. She looked calmer than Victoria could ever remember seeing her. When they thought Sughouri was lost, she had taken her pain medication, for the first time since the Croatoan reached orbit, according to the medical report. She had to be thinking more clearly than she had been for years, free of the constant pain that she had been so certain made her who she was. The pain drifting away, smothered in darkness; knowing that the pain would return.
Zuri was rubbing her forehead, staring at her screen. She could have been looking at readings from the surface, from Noriama, or maybe even salvaged data from the colony’s database. Maybe she wasn’t looking outward, but inward; thinking about her own insecurities and unknowns. Maybe she was lost in her own responsibilities. Maybe she was finally asking the questions that had plagued Victoria for years: why she did the things that she did? Why had she always thought the answers were just there, barely out of reach? Slipping through her fingers as they vanished into the depths.
Victoria took a deep breath, and broke the silence.
“I don’t know what we’re all looking for, but we won’t find it here.”
Antje Seidel had taken the day off.
If anyone had cared to ask a hundred-plus-year old woman why she decided to call it a ‘day off’ when she had retired long ago, she wouldn’t have bothered to answer. Why did anyone do anything? After a century on Earth, she felt she had earned the right to do things without having reasons.
So, instead of walking to her car and giving it the order to drive to the EUSAA Control Station, she started off her morning with a walk. Even though she was older than a hundred years old, she could get around fairly comfortably, if slower than she would have liked.
After a walk that took her down to the small river only a quarter-mile from her room, she called for her car and sat by the river, throwing stones until her phone alerted her to its arrival.
Her car drove her to the closest town, where she had breakfast at a small cafe she had never been to. It was tiny, barely big enough for two tables inside, and only one table outside. As luck would have it, she stepped out of her car just as the young man and woman stood up from the outside table, leaving their dishes behind. Antje set herself down and waited patiently for the wait-staff to clean the table and take her order.
After a simple meal of egg and jam on toast, Antje picked a direction and started walking, resolved not to stop until she found something interesting.
The first interesting thing she found was an art boutique. Hanging on the walls were paintings were from three different artists — a joint viewing, the manager had called it. Apparently the three artists had gone to school together and learned under the same teachers while focusing on completely different styles.
Antje studied each painting with care, noting their various differences and flourishes. One artist painted on large canvases and had a fascination with expanses of color that took up half the painting. One was obviously aiming for photographic accuracy, painting people and objects with exacting care, though with a casual attitude towards color that gave everything a garish look. The last was enamored with faces and impressionism, creating tiny canvases of eyes, noses, ears, and mouths, each painted with horrific lack of detail.
Antje stared longest at the three paintings that were the centerpiece of the exhibit. A man, sitting at a table, his arm resting against his chin. All three artists had painted the same model, perspective shifted slightly so Anjte could picture them easily, all lined up like singers on a stage, painting the model as he sat, staring and smiling into space. Their respective styles painting a perfect representation of the differences they shared between themselves.
Antje left after a pleasant, if somewhat banal conversation with another viewer. They had been drawn to the broad colors of the first artist, but didn’t much care for the other two.
She window-shopped downtown for another hour before stopping in at another sidewalk cafe to grab a small something for lunch. She settled on a cup of over-salted minestrone soup, and paid for another man’s meal when he realized he had ordered without checking his ration-card to see if he could afford it.
After lunch, she returned to her car and just drove. She turned off the automated navigator and followed the road out of town, up and down the gentle rolling hillside, spotted with automated farms and wind-farms. Back home she’d lived next to a solar farm, but here there simply wasn’t enough sunlight throughout the year to make it worth the space, nor enough wind to build giant windmills to suck up the wind like thirsty elephants.
No, here the natural energy resource was rain. Rain that was collected in large reservoirs and funneled through massive turbines. Hydro-electricity wasn’t as glamorous or efficient as solar or wind power, but in some places it was all there was. Some places in the world still had to make do.
When the clock on her dashboard read 4:34, she turned the automated navigator back on, and rode back to her room.
It was a lovely little bungalow, specially designed to house visiting dignitaries to the EUSAA. It was more than Antje was used to; even as Representative to the URC, she never made much money. The URC was designed that way. You weren’t supposed to become a representative for the money or prestige. The bureaucracy was strong enough that you didn’t even have any real power, either. No, you joined the URC for one reason and one reason only: you saw the complex machine that was the Earth, in all its unpleasant glory, and wanted to help.
She cooked dinner for herself that night. She rarely did so these days, but every once in a while she felt the urge; mostly for little celebrations that didn’t matter to anyone but herself. She carved up some mushrooms and fried them in oil along with an onion and garlic. She sprinkled them over thin spaghetti with her remaining dairy ration of cheese, alongside an open bottle of wine.
Halfway through her second glass, an alert beeped from her phone. An urgent message from Ivan Fyodorov.
She didn’t look at it. Instead, she sat down in the only comfortable chair in the lounge and flipped through the news programs. It was important to stay informed — not so much about what was happening in the word, but how the world was reacting to what happened. Antje may have been retired from the URC, but she was unwilling to retire from the world.
All the same, after a hundred years she was hardly surprised by anything, anymore. Changes happened so quickly now, that there was hardly time to get used to anything. Abnormal had become the new normal.
She turned off the world, and turned on her music. An eclectic mix — natural for someone who had lived through multiple decades — consisting of styles across eras and regional boarders. Music she had found during her youth, her education, her first jobs, her first loves, her disappointments, her joys…For a full hour, she sat and listened, traveling down her history, surprise recollections hidden behind every chord.
When her third glass was finished, she went back to the table and opened Ivan’s message. It was a single line, with no preamble.
Final transmission not encoded. They’re coming home. No answers. Mission failure.
Antje closed the email and set the phone down gingerly on the table. For a moment she stood there, alone in the darkened bungalow, as homey and welcoming as a hotel room. Then, she moved to the kitchen. Once her wine glass was refilled, she moved to her bedroom and opened her closet door. With one hand she shoved her clothing aside until she found the one dress she had yet to wear; it was a formal dress, black and sparkling. She hadn’t known when she would wear it, if there would be any functions or galas or formal occasions, but she loved the dress. She may be a hundred years old, but in that dress she looked like each of those years had been years of purpose and meaning. The dignity and power that came with a century of life was embodied in that dress; simple, elegant, commanding…
Her shoulders hurt as she pulled the dress over her head. Her body wouldn’t last forever; it was hurting more and more these days. Especially when she kept moving like she had today. Pain always came with movement, the question was when and how much. The more she moved, the more she would pay for it later.
But she couldn’t just sit still. She refused to stay home and wait. There was a whole world out there, and even if it hurt, she would continue to make her way in it.
When the dress was situated over her gnarled frame, she selected her favorite earrings, and a necklace her husband had bought her years before he died. It was rows of silver chain, fixed with several large gemstones of different colors. When it was sitting right around her neck, the polished stones created a perfect representation of the solar system; sun, planets, even the asteroid belt. A few bracelets later, she threw on a speckled shawl and picked up her glass and returned to the lounge.
Dragging the comfortable chair outside was harder than she expected — the chair was heavier than it looked — but it was worth it to sit in the chair and stare up at the stars, while she slowly and methodically finished the bottle of wine.
When the wine was finished, she didn’t go back inside. She stared up at the stars, breathing deeply in the night air, letting her eyes slowly close, a dark curtain eating up the stars one by one.