CHAPTER 1
February 15, 2101 (Earth calendar)
“How’s the newest addition to the family?” Lorraine (“Rain” to her friends) Gilster asked as she greeted Roy Burbank on the doorstep of the modest, two-story stone house that he and his wife, Chloe, had finished renovating and occupying barely a month before their son, Jeremiah, had been born. Fintidierian houses looked a lot like their counterparts back on Earth; they were both designed for, and occupied by, humans. Human anatomy drives many design decisions and since Fintidierian humans (many called them “Fintis”), and Terrans were the same, so were their housing needs. Nonetheless, Rain continued to be surprised at how similar this strain of humanity was to its distant cousins back on Earth. They’d been separated for tens of thousands of years, but in all that time, they hadn’t diverged all that much. Roy had the look of a tired, but proud, father on his face. Of course, this was another common trait between the two strains of humanity, and since both Roy and Rain were of the same strain—they had voyaged to Proxima Centauri b from Earth together less than a year ago—the cross-cultural similarities of one’s parenthood had not been more than a passing thought.
“He’s healthy. Especially his lungs. That boy can cry. Makes his older sister want to run out of the house screaming herself,” Roy said, a big grin breaking out as he spoke. “It’s good to see you, Rain. Is Mak with you?” he asked, looking past Rain and out into the yard. She and the Samaritan’s chief medical doctor, Dr. Maksim Kopylova, had met aboard ship on the journey from Earth to Proxima Centauri b and married less than a year after arrival. The pair had the approval of everyone who knew them from aboard the ship, not that that mattered to either of them. They were definitely a good match.
“I hope you’re not disappointed, but he had to stay at work this afternoon. A lot of kids are coming down with the sniffles and, well, the locals still prefer to have their precious little darlings seen by the more technologically advanced Terran medical doctor rather than one of their own. I can understand that for serious illnesses, but for the sniffles? Come on. The local doc is a lot more experienced diagnosing the various flavors of the common cold circulating here than an Earth doctor.”
“As we, of all people, should know very well after what we all went through this last year. I’m beginning to think we should rename this world The Planet of the Sick Head. I think we all had one big symbiotic intelligent sinus infection most of the year,” Roy said jokingly while instinctively rubbing the side of his nose as he spoke.
Rain could relate. She and Mak had had many conversations on the topic. The early Proxima b atmospheric analysis the crew of the Samaritan had performed found no major pathogens, but it had surely missed the vicious varieties of the common cold that were circulating. Cold viruses that none of the Terrans’ immune systems had ever before encountered. And encounter them they all did, one cold after the other, at first causing Mak to wonder what he’d missed in the initial survey. Only after realizing that no one was dying from the infections did he calm down and stop second-guessing his initial sampling and analysis. Cold viruses on Earth mutate constantly, infecting and reinfecting people on a regular basis. Here, the Terrans were perfect petri dishes for every variety of virus in circulation among the locals. Fortunately, in the last few months, the number of people catching colds had dropped dramatically as their immune systems adapted. Mankind could now travel between the stars—but had yet to cure the damned common cold.
“Agreed. Fortunately, I’m starting to feel more and more like my old self, and you don’t sound congested at all,” she remarked.
“No, I’m fine. Samari is still sniffly, but I think that’s more because she’s eight years old and would be catching everything that comes along here or back on Earth.”
Rain hesitated, knowing that she was intruding on Roy’s time off. His son, Jeremiah, was only a few weeks old, and Roy had been on leave helping to take care of his wife, daughter, and newborn son on some well-deserved leave. Earth-trained engineers like him were in huge demand on Proxima b as the locals tried to learn every
Earth-modern engineering trick and tool they could. Technologically, the locals were nearly a century behind their Earthly visitors, but they were quickly catching up.
“Rain, I can tell by the way you are fidgeting that you aren’t here on a purely social call,” Roy observed, his grin turning into more of a slight smile. “I would invite you in, but Chloe, Jeremiah, and Samari are all napping and the last thing I want to do is wake them up.”
“Listen, if this is an inconvenient time, I can come back,” Rain responded, starting to back away toward the porch stairs.
“Not at all. But we’ll have to talk out here. Take a seat,” Roy said, motioning to one of the three rocking chairs adorning the small porch. The chairs were made from a local tree, similar to the oak family back on Earth, and were stained with a clear stain that highlighted the tones of the wood. Thanks to the red dwarf star around which Proxima b orbited, to see the tones in a way they were used to seeing, the settlers from Earth had to use full Earth spectrum lights. The dim reddish light from the star around that b orbited, Proxima Centauri, made everything look a little dingy and some colors that the Earth human eye was used to seeing simply weren’t visible except using the lights the crew brought from Earth. Green, for example, looked mostly black when viewed outside on a clear sunny day. Amazingly, most of the local plants, which were genetically similar to those found on Earth, had adapted the photosynthesis cycle to work across a broader spectrum to allow for the fact that Proxima Centauri emitted almost no green light. There was heated debate among the Earth geneticists as to whether these adaptations occurred naturally or were genetically engineered. The latter, of course, opened up a whole host of questions that would have to be addressed.
They sat and Rain took a deep breath.
“I’ve been racking my brain about that radio signal for the better part of an Earth year and I’m no closer now to deciphering it than I was when I first detected it last spring. Without a decryption key, we’ll never be able to know what it says.” Rain was referring to the strong, directional radio signal she had detected shortly after their arrival on Proxima b. A signal that originated in a region of the sky exactly where the ancient hieroglyphics they had found on the Fintidierians’ forbidden continent, Misropos, indicated was the origination or home place of what the Terrans called the Atlanteans. The Atlanteans were apparently a strain of alien visitors, maybe also human, who had ruled Proxima b some fifty thousand years ago, enslaving the local population, before they mysteriously died out. Discovering this had almost resulted in the death of the entire crew of the Samaritan, sent to help the people of Proxima b. But the continent where the ruins were found was a forbidden location under Fintidierian law, something the people of Earth did not know at the time, and they nearly started the first interstellar war by simply going there. The locals thought that whatever killed these ancient people might be a contagion, so they required that everyone who visited there be quarantined for a time upon their return. This also gave
time for the diplomats to smooth things over as best they could. Officer relations were now better, but still a bit strained.
“I’m a hardware guy, not a coder. I would not know a decryption key if it punched me in the face,” Roy declared.
“Yeah, I know. That’s kind of why I’m here. We may not be able to find out what they are saying in the signal, but we can figure out who’s sending it. Or, at least, from where they are sending it. That’s why I need your help,” Rain said. She could feel her own pulse rate increasing. She knew what they had to do, and she needed an ally to convince one of the two ships’ captains to go along with her idea. Roy was the key. Everybody respected and liked him. After all he’d been through on his “accidental” trip to Proxima b, he had made a lot of friends. A lot.
“I don’t understand,” Roy responded. “What can I do?”
“Okay, look. You haven’t had so much advanced math that you’ve forgotten high school trigonometry, have you?” Rain asked with just the hint of a smile. She hoped he hadn’t forgotten, but you never knew…
“I never showed you this?” Roy rolled up his sleeve and pointed to a small tattoo on his right shoulder.
Rain looked closer at it. The tattoo was a red sine-wave pattern with a black line underneath it. Underneath the black line was a blue cosine wave. She studied it briefly and clearly was confused.
“A sine over a cosine?” she asked.
“Yes. That way, I always will have a tan!” Roy laughed triumphantly at the trigonometry joke. He could tell it didn’t take Rain more than a microsecond to understand that tangent equals sine divided by cosine, and she groaned.
“I assume you got that before you were married.”
“I did. And I was quite drunk.”
“I bet you were. But it appears you do recall high school trig.”
“I think I can hold my own with Pythagoras,” Roy retorted, smiling back.
“Great!” Rain directed the conversation back on topic. “When we see a star in the sky, we can tell in what direction it lies, but our radio simply doesn’t have the resolution to tell us from which particular star along our line of sight the signal comes from. There are dozens, if not hundreds, in that one small slice of the sky where the signal originates. The signal is somewhat directional, that’s why no one on Earth ever picked it up. Now, if we were on Earth and the signal had been directed toward us there, then we might have been able to figure it out in the time we’ve had since we first detected it last spring. This is where trigonometry comes in. On Earth, to locate a deep space radiation source, one emitting light, radio, or whatever, and find its distance, astronomers would plot its relative location in the sky at some time of the year,
let’s pick the spring equinox and then again in half a year, at the fall equinox. In six months, the Earth has gone half an orbit around the Sun and the source’s location in the sky has moved, relative to where it was in the spring, by ninety-three million miles times two. By similar triangles and knowing the angle subtended by the star compared to them in the spring and the fall, we can identify sources and calculate their distances out to thirty-two hundred light-years or so. But that’s with Earth orbiting optical telescopes. When we look through the atmosphere, the light gets distorted and smeared out. From the Earth’s surface, using the best ground-based telescopes, we’re limited to three hundred and twenty light-years, give or take. We have the same problem here, only worse. We’re looking at longer wavelength radio waves, which makes it harder still to do from the ground.”
“I see where you are going,” Roy said. “What you want to do is pinpoint the star from which the Atlantean signal originates. Given that this screwy planet’s year is only eleven days long, shouldn’t you already have done that? We’re on the other side of the star having our equinox every five and a half days.”
“That’s exactly the problem. We’re only zero-point-zero-five AU from the star. Five percent of an astronomical unit. That’s not much. Only four-point-six million miles. Multiply by two and you get over nine million miles. Compared to one hundred eighty-six million back home. The base of the triangles we can make here are simply too small for the trigonometry to tell us much of anything. The strength of the signal hardly varies at all over that distance. We need to increase the size of our triangles’ bases. We need to take the measurements in space,” Rain explained. She stopped and looked expectantly at Roy.
“That should be easy enough. Just take the Samaritan or the Emissary out far enough to get a better measurement,” Roy suggested, shrugged his shoulders, and made a palms-up gesture.
“Exactly. And when I asked Captain Crosby, he said we couldn’t risk leaving orbit until we’d worked out some sort of formal treaty with the planetary government about trade policies. I don’t understand what that has to do with taking the ship out of orbit, not the system, for a few weeks to take some measurements. I couldn’t convince him. But I’m hoping you can. He trusts you. And you know as well as I do that this is important.”
“Rain, let’s assume you get what you need, and you figure out where the signal is coming from. It won’t help us decode it. What’s the point, other than intellectual curiosity?” Roy asked.
“I think it is close. It would have to be for the Atlanteans to have come here and kept some sort of communication with home. This isn’t some sort of tachyon beam, this is radio. It’s limited to the speed of light, which means it probably isn’t twenty-five thousand light-years away or what would be the point in keeping up some sort of communication? Sure, for us to talk to Earth takes over four years each way with an actual two-sentence conversation taking nearly nine years. It must be something similar for the Atlanteans or what would be the point?”
“And if they are that close, you want to go there,” Roy noted. It was clearly a statement
, not a question.
“You bet your ass I do,” she declared. “And I’m sure there will be many others from both ships that agree. We have enough people here to keep working on the fertility problem, or whatever it is, while the rest of us go on to see what we can find out about whoever is behind this whole thing.”
“What ‘whole thing’ would that be?” Roy asked.
“How it happens to be that this planet and Earth both have biospheres compatible with Earth-based life and Earth life, with the same DNA. We are no closer to understanding that than we were when we left Earth. If anything, the mystery has gotten deeper.”
“Rain, if I agree to help you, then we need to get one thing perfectly clear: I’m not going. Anywhere. I didn’t want to come here to begin with and for over four years I thought I would never see my wife again, let alone even meet my daughter. And now I’ve got a son. I have no intention of going anywhere near either of those ships when they leave orbit, to the outer parts of the Proxima system to take your measurements, and certainly not on another yearslong trip to another star. The only place that might tempt me is a trip back to Earth and only then if my family were coming too. Nothing is going to separate me from them again,” Roy asserted in a tone that was unmistakably resolute.
“Yes.” Rain smiled. “I realize that, and I would never ask. I need you as an advocate.”
“Well, what you suggest sounds reasonable, so don’t be offended at my next request,” he said.
“Okay,” she replied, her curiosity hard to contain. “Shoot.”
“I’m an engineer. Early in my career, one of my more intimidating bosses had a poster behind his desk quoting W. Edwards Deming, the man largely responsible for Japan’s economic recovery after World War Two. It said, ‘In God we trust; all others bring data.’ I’ll need to see your calculations and make sure that they’re right before I put my neck out.”
“I suspected as much.” Rain’s smile broadened and she replied, “I wouldn’t have it any other way. I’ll send over everything later today.”
A small cry, followed by a much louder one, came from one of the upstairs windows.
“It sounds like Jeremiah is awake. I’d better tend to him. Thanks for coming by,” Roy said as he began to make his way toward the door and back into the house.
“You do that. And tell Chloe that I said hello.”
“Staff meetings. We fly four and a half light-years to explore a new world, forsaking our extended families, friends, and everything else we knew and loved about home and here we are, gathering for yet another damned staff meeting. Who’d have bloody thought?” asked Neil Polkingham, one of the few Brits on either of the two ships and a key member of the biology and fertility team that was still puzzling over the Fintidierians’ fertility crisis. The crisis that prompted the Samaritan and then the Emissary to leave Earth
and travel to Proxima Centauri b.
“Neil, I’ve been to many staff meetings in my life and most of them are complete wastes of time. But I must admit that Nkrumah does a decent job with them. He usually has an agenda and almost always finds ways to end on time,” observed Dr. Chris Sentell. Sentell, a forty-five-year-old biologist, was recruited for the mission to Proxima based on his work at a genetics research firm in Atlanta, where he focused on finding breakthroughs to cure inherited genetic diseases. In addition to his professional commitments, he had a passion for fishing, often spending weekends on Earth by the riverside, enjoying the tranquility and thrill of the sport. Sentell’s speech carried a distinct Southern accent, reflecting his roots and upbringing in the American South.
“I consider them parts of the job. If they get long and off track, well, that’s when I stop paying attention and get myself prepared to return to the lab,” added Dr. Rich Gilliam. Gilliam, like Sentell, was a biologist and before joining the mission served as the chair of the biology department at UCLA. Renowned for his exceptional contributions to the field of biology, he had earned several international prizes that recognized his outstanding achievements.
Gilliam and Sentell had arrived aboard the Emissary not long after the Samaritan had made orbit. They spoke as they made their way down the hall toward the conference room.
Polkingham and the combined biology teams, with what support the locals could provide (extremely limited support, given the knowledge and technology gap between the Terrans and the Fintidierian humans), had been working for months trying to isolate the source of the problem. So far, they’d had no luck. Over the last century, there had been fewer and fewer Fintidierian females born, causing a demographic catastrophe that, unless reversed, meant their extinction in just a few decades. The project lead, Dr. Kieran Nkrumah, chaired the biweekly meetings that brought all the research teams together to discuss their recent results, plans, and problems and viable solutions to the latter. As much as he hated to be pulled from his work, Polkingham grudgingly admitted they were necessary. But that didn’t prevent him from complaining. He rather enjoyed the role of curmudgeon.
The building they were using for the research was the most modern and well-equipped biology lab the Fintidierian city of Gwonura, a municipality of three hundred thousand people near where the Terrans had made planetfall and set up their base camp. Like most Fintidierian buildings, it looked like something you would see in an old 2D movie set in the USA circa 1945 to 1950, with lots of concrete, austere windows, high ceilings, and exterior pillars.
The local equivalent of the community college had been quickly modified to accommodate the specifications provided by the Earth team and, much as Polkingham was loathe to admit—at least publicly—they had done a respectable job. They had much of what was needed in terms of infrastructure, including a sterile room with laminar flow, multiple autoclaves, a plentiful supply of dry ice and liquid nitrogen, and some functional—though rather large, loud, and
clunky—centrifuges. From the Samaritan and the Emissary, they’d brought down the more sophisticated equipment like their microarray scanners, microplate readers, some UV-Vis spectrophotometers, among other things. They brought to the surface their rapid gene sequencers but not their gene splicers. Those remained aboard ship where only the properly trained Terran crew could use them. Advanced gene editing was not something they wanted the locals to learn too much about yet.
Polkingham and his colleagues entered the auditorium-style lecture hall and took their seats near the center right, as was customary. Most everyone else was already in the room, including Nkrumah, who was pacing back and forth in front, seemingly lost in thought. The lights were set to the Earth normal spectrum, as was now the custom when Earthborn and native Fintidierians were intermingled. To the biologists’ amazement, once the Fintidierians were exposed to the full Earth spectrum, they were able to fully see every color those from Earth saw: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet—ROYGBIV. The local humans had the genes to see more colors than should have been possible had they originated on Proxima b. They were so excited that they actually requested to have Earth normal lighting whenever possible.
Polkingham noticed that the native Fintidierian biologists were slowly getting more intermingled with the Terrans and not just keeping to themselves. When they first arrived, getting the groups to not self-segregate was a huge challenge. Then, the ice began to break. At first the Fintidierians seemed to gravitate toward the Asian members of the Terran group, which made some sense. People, at their core, tended to be tribal. And since the Fintidierians were descended from Terrans who were presumably brought to Proxima b from Asia, they naturally found affinity first among those that looked most similar to themselves. Never mind that their genetic ancestors parted ways fifty thousand or so years ago, they were “cousins.” Then the other barriers began to break down both in the biology lab and among the native population. Now they were well on their way to seeing each other as fellow humans, regardless of the planet and ethnic group from which they originated. There were even a few Terran-Fintidierian couples now.
Nkrumah moved to the lectern and loudly cleared his throat, getting everyone’s attention, and waved to them to be seated. The many conversations died down to whispers, then silence. Nkrumah was not a physically imposing figure, quite the opposite. He was rather short, far shorter than the average Terran, closer in overall physical build to the Fintidierans, who also tended to be somewhat smaller in stature than their Terran counterparts. His voice was not one that would instantly garner attention in a crowded room, yet when he spoke, people paid attention. What he lacked in physical stature he made up for many times in his intellectual stature. Many considered him brilliant. And he had walked away from one of the most prestigious universities on Earth to join the expedition to Proxima b. His work curing inherited conditions and diseases in utero had won him a Nobel Prize nomination and the thanks of millions of people around the world who
had their children born without many of the diseases previously passed from generation to generation, including cystic fibrosis, hemophilia, muscular dystrophy, and sickle cell anemia, to name a few. That was why he was here. If the female fertility problem—or the male fertility problem, whichever the case might be—could be corrected in utero, then he could figure out how to do it.
The meeting began with a series of status reports from each of the research subteams, the latest birth statistics from each of the planet’s provinces that showed the male/female conception and birth rates were not getting any better, and finally, the two bits of data that Polkingham had been personally waiting to hear. The first came from Nkrumah himself, in his heavily accented English.
“First, the good news. As you may recall, we have successfully established five fertility clinics, one in each province, where we are performing in vitro implantation of Terran female embryos into Fintidierian women who volunteer for the treatment. The local doctors are fast learners and their success rates are now nearly as high as those back on Earth. Between the two ships, we brought nearly fifty thousand female embryos, and our goal is to get as many of these gestating as quickly as possible. We’ve been tracking the pregnancies of the women who have undergone the implantation, and their pregnancies are proceeding as one would expect of a normal pregnancy, without any higher incidence of rejection, miscarriage, or other prenatal adverse issues. This is excellent news.”
There was a bit of applause, but mostly polite silence. It was good news, but all in the room knew that fifty thousand female births were not enough to solve the immediate problem. Not even close. As the native female population aged, the number of unattached males exploded, with all the negative social consequences that one might expect. The Fintidierians were experiencing increasing crime, truancy, markedly fewer choosing to continue their education beyond the minimum (one of the reasons it was so easy for the biologists to take over the community college facilities), suicide, and an overall sense of despair. They desperately needed to figure out what was causing the problem and fix it. Soon. Or this culture would likely soon descend into chaos and anarchy before it ultimately died out.
Nkrumah cleared his throat again, in what those assembled knew was his custom when he wanted them to be quiet and pay attention. ...
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