Noriama: Chapter 21
The medical station on the Croatoan was, as Victoria had said so many years ago, cramped. At its best, it meant that Victoria was always within arms reach of all her tools, and no time was ever wasted looking for a vital instrument.
Nevertheless, there was no escaping the fact that there was really only enough room for a single medical bed, and just enough room for a single person to walk around it.
Sughouri was lying on that bed now, staring at nothing at all.
They talked every day, sharing thoughts and feelings and experiences. Sometimes Victoria was excited, marveling at what it had been like. Other times she was like a cautious parent, warning Sughouri against thinking to fast, or feeling to hard on herself.
They had taken Sughouri apart, neurosis by neurosis. They talked about how hard it was to live in a military family. They talked about having friends torn away, and how no satisfactory reason was ever given, because what answer could be satisfactory? They talked about how her parents never explained their sudden absences, how their clearance didn’t extend to family members, especially children.
They talked about twenty years of never knowing how, why, or in some darker moments if her parents had died. How not knowing had been the worst nightmare she had ever experienced.
Then they put her back together again, and she honestly didn’t know if she felt any different. As far as Victoria was concerned, that was a good thing.
To Sughouri, it felt like she was no more than a machine. A complicated one to be sure, but how she felt, how she thought, who she was could be changed completely with a steady regimen of drugs, scans, semi-invasive procedures, and multiple sessions of carefully guided conversation.
She was being reprogrammed. Fixed. She was almost grateful for it.
The sound of a clearing throat pulled Sughouri from her thoughts. She looked up to see Kristiana holding onto the ladder, the deep-space equivalent of leaning in the doorway.
They stared at each other for a moment. Sughouri could tell Kristiana wanted to say something, but didn’t know how to start. If Sughouri was feeling better she would have leapt in to save the day, bringing her social energy to bear on the shy Netter, dragging her into a conversation not of her own making.
Now, she just waited.
Finally, Kristiana cleared her throat again. “Leaping dust.”
Sughouri looked up. “What?”
“They call it leaping dust. When dust gets electrically charged, either through static or a powerful magnetic field, it can be effected by sunlight. On the moon, eddies of dust sometimes jump between the sunlit and shaded regions of craters, or along the terminator line. The sunlight knocks electrons to the shaded side, and this makes the shaded regions negatively charged compared to the sunlit regions, which creates a dipole. With no atmosphere to provide friction, the dust swings back and forth like a pendulum.”
Sughouri didn’t say anything. Kristiana shifted on the ladder.
“Usually it only affects a small amount of dust. Little things like solar wind and an uneven surface weaken the electric field, so it only lasts for a brief period before becoming incapable of maintaining itself. It’s like a weather event.”
“It was the whole sky,” Sughouri closed her eyes at the memory. “I saw rocks as big as the Croatoan”.
“I…can’t say anything’s impossible,” Kristiana said. “But the magnetic field couldn’t have been strong enough to lift solid rock. It was probably clumps of lighter dust…or an optical illusion.”
Sughouri shook her head, and didn’t say anything.
“It might have looked thicker or wider than it actually was. You —” She stopped.
“I was running low on oxygen, my eyes were damaged from the gravity, and I was ‘in an altered mental state’,” Sughouri answered for her.
After a moment Kristiana took a step into the room, and then stopped. “May I sit down?”
“You can try,” Sughouri nodded, sitting up to let Kristiana share her seat. “Bed’s cramped as shit.”
Kristiana smiled as she drifted to the cushion. After a moment she took a deep breath, pressing against Sughouri’s shoulder as she did. “For the past few months, I have been suffering under intense physical pain. It’s a byproduct of my Netter surgery. I usually keep it under control with medication, but while we were above Noriama, I never took my pills.”
Another moment of silence passed.
“The thing is, I don’t know why I didn’t take them. They don’t dull my senses and the pain made everything harder. My reaction time was…” her jaw tightened. “When I thought we’d lost you because I had been so…stubborn…so foolish…”
“Wolf came for me.”
Kristiana looked up.
“I left Churji behind,” Sughouri said. “I was ready to die, ready to be pulled up into the dust and dirt of Proxima, and Wolf drove Churji after me.” She looked into Kristiana’s eyes. “Why did it do that?”
Kristiana nodded. “Zuri checked the logs. Wolf performed a location scan, and didn’t know where it was. It didn’t recognize the tunnel as Noriama, it didn’t know what to do, so it asked for instructions. It wasn’t connected to the Croatoan, so it looked for another signal, and it found your suit.”
“I thought it had deactivated in the fall,” Sughouri looked away again. “The thing is, I don’t think I would be alive if I hadn’t thought it was trying to save me…If I hadn’t wanted to save it. I was so alone.”
Kristiana took Sughouri’s hand. For a moment they looked at each other.
“I think I’ve been losing my connection with humanity. With humans. I don’t know if its because I thought I deserved it, or…I don’t have answers, but…”
Sughouri squeezed back, moving her other hand to grip Kristiana’s knee.
“I help you how I can,” she said. “I won’t let go. When we get back home. I won’t let go.”
They hugged then, drawing each other closer and gripping tightly. With all their strength they held each other against the dark and star-filled emptiness of the universe.
“Mind if I join you?” Victoria climbed down the ladder to Zuri’s side.
Zuri shrugged.
The bottom storage room was the furthest down — if down was the right word — that they could be in the Croatoan. Sitting on the ground, beneath their legs was the heartbeat of the Croatoan, the large fusion reactor that had been keeping them alive for over twenty years.
“You’ve been spending a lot of time down here,” Victoria said, not bothering to give voice to her words.
Zuri nodded.
“What do you think about what Sughouri says she saw?” Victoria asked after a long pause.
Zuri shrugged.
“With all the time we’ve spent in the Croatoan,” Victoria continued, “our eyes are pretty badly damaged. We’re all going to need powerful glasses. When we get back, I mean. Or surgery.”
Zuri finally moved her hands. “You think she didn’t see what she thinks she saw?”
“She couldn’t have,” Victoria nodded. “I don’t mean the ground wasn’t flying overhead, I mean she couldn’t have seen it clearly.”
“None of us can see clearly,” Zuri said.
Victoria rested her head against the wall. Had they been back on earth, they would have been staring at clouds, feeling the grass on the back of their knees. Blowing dandelions into the wind before the rains came. That was a perfectly human thing to do, wasn’t it?
“Do you mind if I ask you something,” Victoria asked. “Not as a doctor, but…as just another person?”
Zuri nodded.
“Do you ever talk to your wife?”
Zuri took a deep breath and nodded. “Regularly.”
Victoria didn’t answer. She had learned how to handle Zuri.
Sure enough, after another minute, Zuri began to sign again. “They all tell me to move on, to let her go, but it’s not just her I’d be giving up. Have you heard about ‘Couples memory?’ when you’re with someone for a long time, you learn how they think, and more importantly, what they remember. It’s like the right and left brain: if you lose it when you’re young, your other half takes over all the jobs of the other side…but if you’re older, you lose large portions of your mind. When Chaniya died…she was a part of me, and when she left, so did who I was.”
Victoria knew the condition. She had always thought it beautiful. Two separate beings being joined as one through a shared life.
“Did we fail?”
Victoria shot Zuri a glance. “What do you mean?”
“Kristiana, she sent the message that the mission was a failure. But was it? We’re transmitting half of Noriama’s database home as we go. Red’s still piecing together bits of data and code. That’s not nothing, is it?”
“No,” Victoria shrugged. “It’s not nothing. It’s also not what they wanted us to find.”
“What do you think they wanted us to find?”
“Bodies,” Victoria answered. “Residue. Wreckage. We humans are drawn to failure, it’s a survival technique. If we see catastrophe, we have to watch so we know what works and what doesn’t. Noriama’s mistakes will tell us how to do it better next time, or tell us why we can never do it again. Earth wants facts to make the hard decisions for them.”
Zuri shook her head after a moment; “We shouldn’t have come to Noriama. I mean the four of us. Our team. This isn’t our story, or our responsibility. What communications were there? What was ever said? Earth and Proxima were never connected. What use is a conversation with a four year delay? A fifty year commute?”
“So we should have left them to die on their own?” Victoria interrupted. “Even if we didn’t share postcards, we shared a common humanity. We could have learned more about who we were as a species through our connection to them. They could have taught us.”
“No, they were too far away. Do you remember what you said about aliens? Way back when we were first rotating the Croatoan? You said if viruses or bacteria had evolved on Proxima b, that was technically alien life. But bacteria came from earth on the KAP, didn’t it? And they wouldn’t have stopped evolving once they reached Noriama.”
“Very true.”
“So at what point does the bacteria the colonists brought with them become alien bacteria? How different does it have to be?” She paused. “At what point did the colonists stop being Earthlings?”
“You think the Noriamans weren’t human anymore?”
“What it means to be human is a question we still don’t know the answer to.” Zuri smiled. “You know, for centuries we’ve searched for life on other planets, and we haven’t found anything. It seems to me that if there is life elsewhere in the universe, we’ll have to put it there. Why shouldn’t it be us?”
Victoria didn’t answer. What was there to say? There was something horrifying in the idea that they were all alone in the infinite void. Another part of her thought it beautiful.
Perhaps it wasn’t their story. Perhaps after the KAP launched from Earth into space, they should have ignored it completely, let them all live on their own terms, find their own way in the universe. Maybe the humanity needed to outweigh the science, the politics, the industry involved.
Then, Zuri spoke: “I read a short story once, long ago, I don’t remember the name…It was in school, I think. About how the human race finally dies out. In the far future, we’ve explored to the end of the universe. We discovered how everything works, the truth of creation, all of it, but there was one frontier we haven’t crossed. Death. We were still blind as to what lies on the other side of mortality. So we sent a scout. And when they don’t come back, we send a rescue party. Then when they don’t come back, we send another. And another. Until the entire human race was finally wiped out once and for all.”
Victoria thought for a moment, and then asked: “What do you think it means?”
“For humanity? I don’t know. For the author, I think they were trying to say that we’ve been chasing ghosts this whole time. It’s all we’ve ever done. We have to know. And if we don’t, we will destroy ourselves rather than accept that there are some things we can simply never know for sure.”
Victoria looked back up the ladder through the ship. Perhaps it was all just a lie to hide the truth, that the Earth was isolated from the rest of the galaxy. They were trapped by an impossible frontier, as the ocean had trapped the stone-age tribes, as the sky had trapped the bronze-age societies, as the solar-system had trapped the pre-industrial civilizations, now humanity had found its one impassable frontier.
Humanity would never leave. They couldn’t. Even if their machines could, they never would. When the sun finally exploded, humanity would be gone with it.
“I was thinking about names.” Victoria said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean as far as we know, we are the only people who have ever set foot on Proxima b and lived to tell about it. If there isn’t a record, we get to name the planet.”
“What are you thinking?”
“One keeps popping into my head. Ado.”
“Where does that come from?”
“Islam. Lot’s wife. Maybe its a good idea not to look back. We see our mistakes that way.”
“Looking back is how we learn from our mistakes.”
“It’s also how we’re consumed by them. What do you think would be a good name?”
“I don’t know.” Zuri paused. “I think it’ll be a different name for everyone.”
Ivan Fyodorov stared at the computer screen in front of him. It was blank.
“Sir?” a voice from his intercom.
“Yes?”
“Antje Seidel is here to see you.”
Ivan sighed to himself, a self-indulgent admission that he was just about finished with the old woman. Soon, she’d be gone, back to her retirement on the English Isles, and he’d be back in the URC, answering questions and being the world’s star witness for the next three to four years.
“Send her in.”
She was lucky, he thought as he closed his computer screen. She was just a consultant. No one would care that the old Representative of the EU had been involved. He had documented everything, and she probably had too, if she was smart. In the end, no one would care what she had seen or done. It would all fall on his shoulders.
The door opened, and the familiar iron face peeked around the door-frame.
“Mr. Fyodorov,” she whisked a shawl around her arms as she stepped through the door. “I hope you aren’t doing anything foolish.”
“Me?” Ivan smiled. “Not at all. What possible foolish thing could I do?”
“Your job, of course,” Antje sat down. “There is nothing more foolish than that. You look absolutely terrible. You should get some rest.”
Ivan rubbed his forehead. Antje was right, but he couldn’t go home just yet. “You’re still up, aren’t you? Would you like a drink?”
“No, thank you,” Antje waved her hand. “I keep late nights. I also don’t have an entire secret mission to oversee.”
Ivan looked back at his desk. For all the paperwork that lined it, he had been expecting more. There was an analysis of the Hamēstagān message: it was indeed paint, applied to the wall with a brush three centimeters thinner than mission standard. A detailed study of the recovered alcohol’s molecular structure. A report on the corrupted Noriaman database, and what lay in the direction the Noriama Station’s telescope was pointed.
The data-stream hadn’t changed its encryption for weeks. The people who tired were already calling it the final iteration of Zuri’s Code. The people who could never let anything go were pouring their attention into data fragments and following discarded theories and dead-ends that had long since proven useless, certain that there was more to discover.
Ivan stood from his desk and walked to his cabinet, producing and pouring a bottle of brandy. “What am I overseeing? There’s nothing to do. I have teams of engineers and researchers pouring over every piece of data the Croatoan has sent us, and we still know nothing.”
“That’s not true.”
Ivan took a breath. He was used to Antje’s exacting language. “Yes. We know many things are not true, but we are no closer to what is. We know that the Noriamans encrypted their computer with an advanced algorithm, the sort we might use for military and espionage operations, and then shut down the colony. Why? We know someone painted a message on a wall. What does it mean? We know someone was wounded severely, and bled onto the floor before something was dragged in the direction of a locked lounge, which was filled weapons and no ammunition. A whole section is missing. Why?”
“Why is the only question we can never answer,” Antje smiled. “My mother said that to me, once. Only God knows for sure.”
Ivan blinked. “I didn’t know you were religious.”
Antje chortled at Ivan’s surprise. “Not in any way you’d recognize, but I know I am but a tiny woman when compared to the universe. Do you not feel the same?”
How could he not? He had never before had to experience the discordant nature of astronomical distance. For Ivan, a long time involved flights across the globe. He was used to phone conversations with negligible delays. He had been in meetings and worked on projects with people in multiple countries at once.
Ivan grumbled, rubbing his tired eyes. “I sometimes wonder if we were wrong to send people at all.”
“Do you?” Antje’s eyes widened before she nodded in understanding. “You are having hindsight.”
Ivan blinked. “Yes, that’s what I mean. I’m second-guessing —”
Antje interrupted him with a wave of her hand. “No, no. Forgive me. It is something very German. The phrase came into use after the food-riots. To ‘have hindsight.’ It is very easy thing to forget who you were in the past; what it felt like, and what you knew. When we look at the past, we know of the future, and so we forget what we didn’t know.”
Ivan cocked his head in thought. “We thought Noriama could still be alive.”
“And if you had sent a ship full of robots and an AI controller, what would they have done? You needed flexibility, judgment, and independence. Even now — twenty-five years after the Croatoan launched — our AI is average, at best, at such things.”
“What I mean is,” Ivan dropped his hands, “I know that every scan of the freighter confirms there are likely no life-forms aboard, but if the freighter is somehow really full of colonists, or even if it isn’t…”
“Yes,” Antje’s smile was not un-kind. “There is a very real possibility that the Croatoan was a complete waste of time.”
Ivan frowned, and leaned back in his chair. He wasn’t expecting such a blunt answer, but he was grateful for it.
“But what else were you going to do?” Antje asked, breaking him out of his resignation. “It’s the possibility, Ivan. That’s why we do it. That’s why we roll the dice, because who knows? It might come up sixes.”
“You are right, of course,” Ivan sighed, leaning back in his chair. “Even so, we’re going to have a hell of a time convincing the URC that our team of four didn’t miss anything that an AI would have noticed.”
“Perhaps,” Antje shrugged.
“A thousand little clues, nothing fitting together…I’m not a religious person, everything is so separate, so distant…It’s like there’s something toying with us, leading us on, pretending there’s an answer at the end of it all, but there really isn’t. I feel like, in the end, we’ll be no wiser than we started. Is failure inevitable? Are there too many unforeseen variables, too many easy ways to fail for us to ever succeed? And if we did succeed, would we get what we expect?”
Antje frowned for only a moment before standing from her chair and plucking her cane from her side. “I’m afraid I’m far from the right person to answer that. What I do know is you are tired, and no matter how important you think your duties are, there is no good to come from working yourself to exhaustion.”
“Can I ask you something?” Ivan pointed with his glass. “About the KAP, was bringing the world together really the point? I read up on some of the early drafts of the KAP petitions to the URC. There was a lot of insistence on the KAP’s part that the time to act was now, because the world was coming together, healing, a new sense of global unity. But in fact, there are a few sociological papers that came out after the launch that suggest that the KAP may have helped sow divisions between the different regions and cultures. Without KAP, the world could be better off than it is now.”
“Is the world so bad?” Antje smirked. “I’ve lived for a century and a half, and I don’t remember most of it. But I do remember one thing; There was a time when the world was falling apart at the seams. Now, things are still falling apart at the seams. I wonder, with a hundred years of experience, if life is simply everything always falling apart at the seams, and struggling to keep it together.”
Ivan swallowed another sip. “Now that is very German. Do you know, I met the other day with a representative from the Northern Americas…you’ve heard of the SAU?”
“Ivan, I have heard every goddamned fucking acronym in the world, and they all don’t mean a thing to me anymore.”
Ivan laughed. “The Stateless Americas Union. They’re the Northern Americas version of South American anarchism. They’ve made some significant political gains in the past few years, and do you know what she said to me?”
“What?”
“She said that the mark of a failed state is permanent crises. Crises are how governments justify their existence, because without a crisis, there is no need for government. She might say that it is bureaucrats and politicians who live from crisis to crisis, and refuse to provide simple and effective solutions to problems the same way we might refuse to stop breathing or eating.”
“Hmm.” Antje smiled. “Michael would have been very interested to speak with her, I’m sure.”
Ivan was about to ask who was Michael, when her distant and wistful expression reminded him of her old friend, the man who had dreamed that one day humanity would survive itself.
With some regret, he roused her from her memories. “Thank you for stopping by, but I really should get back to this final report.”
“I respectfully disagree.”
Ivan looked up. “Oh?”
Antje pulled a face, shifting in her chair. “I may be an old woman, but I think telling anyone about what happened here is a terribly bad idea.”
“Ha!” Ivan laughed before he saw her sincere face. “You mean a cover-up? Never mind the ethical issues, I’m not sure what you think I can do. Even if I wanted to, how could I? All the logs are backed up, there were many people involved, everything is…transparent.”
“What you can do, is what all wise folk do when the stakes are so high. Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing at all. Release no statement, file no report. Turn off your screen, and join me for a drink.”
Ivan stared at the glass in his hand. “I did ask you if —”
“Not your swill,” Antje smirked. “I mean real scotch. From Scotland. There is a bar in town I visit regularly. I think its time you joined me.”
Ivan blinked at the old woman’s offer. “I…yes, I’d like to join you. I’m afraid I will still have to file a report. There are a lot of URC members who are very insistent on learning the facts of this mission.”
“They don’t want the facts,” Antje shook her head. “They simply want an epilogue. If you must file a report, then the facts are these. Almost a century ago, a brilliant team of devoted people worked together to do something that had never been done before. We sent a colony of humans into space, to colonize a new planet. Are the colonists well? Are they dead? Are they even human anymore? We do not know, because that is not the right question.”
“And what, may I ask, is the right question?”
“Was it worth it?”
Ivan thought for a moment. “There are many people who would say that depends entirely on what we got out of it.”
“Such a bureaucratic view,” Antje shrugged. “No, Ivan. The most important things we get out of things like this are the ephemeral. The impermanent. The things that take time and care and effort. I think if Humanity ever lands on another planet outside our solar system again, it cannot be because of what we get out of it, materially. It will be because we wish to embrace our humanity. Or transcend it.”
Ivan took another drink as he walked back around his desk. The blank screen stared at him. “Perhaps you are right.”
“Perhaps,” Antje agreed. “In any case, if you file that report, I promise you, everyone in the URC will be perfectly happy to sweep this entire situation under the rug for the foreseeable future.”
Ivan stared at his screen. Was that the end if it all? Would Noriama become an embarrassing taboo? Would all the hard work of thousands of women and men become nothing but a rumor, or a legend like Atlantis?
“I don’t know if I can do that,” he said.
“No one does,” Antje nodded. “But, I do know that no matter the URC’s rules and regulations, you won’t be arrested if you don’t write this report right now.”
Ivan looked at Antje. She was almost one hundred and forty-two years old. He wouldn’t be surprised if she made it to one hundred and fifty. They had been working together for over fifteen years, now, off and on. He admired her wit, her keen mind, and her matter-of-fact sensibility, but in all of those years, he had never expected to be grateful for her company.
“No,” he smiled. “I will not.”
Setting his glass aside — he really did enjoy it, in spite of Antje’s insistence that it was swill — he walked to the coat-rack in the corner, and pulled on his thick jacket. It was raining, after all, as it always did these days. Once his hat was firmly on his head, he walked over to Antje’s chair, and held out his hand.
She took it with a smile, and allowed him to help her out of her chair.