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All the impressions which are made on us by Nature are designed to exercise our soul during its term of penitence, to prompt us towards the eternal truths shown beneath a veil, and to lead us to recover what we have lost.
–Louis Claude de Saint-Martin
Earth Date May 28, 2145 CE
It was the color that Dr. Soren felt.
Felt.
Seeing it was one thing. The rocks were black, but veined with opalescent minerals that caught rays of light and twisted them. That light from the distant, dying sun was cold and painted the vista in ten thousand shades of blue, gray, white, and black. Here and there were desperate splashes of faint yellow and red, but these hues were weak and defeated by the oppressive weight of azure, sapphire, and cobalt.
And yet it was how the colors felt that affected him.
That feeling was what pulled him from observation into perception. It was as if he had discovered the exact shade and tone of abandonment. Of a loss so profound that this world stopped dipping into its paintbox and surrendered to the cold blue light.
The last day of the dying universe would look like this, he knew. When all warmth had been leeched away into the void and there was no one left to offer even the token gift of living heat. When the last surviving planets failed and faded, admitting defeat in any struggle to sustain life. When all higher forms were gone and even the durable champions of survival—the fungi and bacteria—could eke no sustenance. This was what would be left.
A place.
A rock in space that offered no shelter, no future, and no hope. Planets whose suns had died without expanding into supernovae and had merely burned themselves out.
Soren stood on the edge of a shelf that was too flat, too orderly to have been formed by any process of nature’s tumult. There was not a ripple or lump or edge—merely flatness. It was a place for him to stand. A place, he knew, that was put here by someone for a moment like this.
A place to witness.
To behold.
To believe that a message was being shared, even if its form was cryptic beyond any chance of his understanding.
And so he stood. He beheld. His space suit—breathing for him—kept the bottomless cold away, providing no need for inward attention, and thus allowed him the full weight of outward observation.
He stood on the shelf and looked out across a gulf of distance to where it stood.
It.
The thing was at least four kilometers away, and yet he could see every detail with clarity.
It rose seven or eight kilometers into the air. Taller than the surrounding mountains, its cyclopean scale was beyond his understanding. How could such a thing ever have been built? No science he knew of could have accomplished it. No builder of his race could have imagined it or yearned to do it. Not even a priest would envision a tribute on this scale.
It was a figure.
Manlike without being precisely human. Naked, kneeling on the shattered slopes of a long-dead volcano. The figure’s back was curved as if in defeat or humility, and it struck Soren how much those two postures were alike. With head bowed, eyes cast downward, and arms raised up and out, the figure turned one empty hand to the sky. The other hand clasped the tapered base of a large vase or jar, the mouth of which was turned down toward the ground. Its stylized lid lay by the giant’s knee.
What was this figure’s meaning? Why did it hold an empty vessel? What contents was that vessel supposed to have held? An offering?
Or was its emptiness the point?
And the figure’s other hand. Its fingers were splayed in—what? Was it supplication? Did it beseech? Was the empty jar symbolic of poverty, or want, or need? If none of these, what did the jar’s emptiness and the other hand’s upturned gesture signify? What boon was being begged? What forgiveness asked? Was this whole statue meant to convey some lost race’s ultimate plea for mercy?
The explorer stood and tried not to impose his inference on the statue.
A name hovered at the edge of his awareness, and he felt a chill inside the warmth of his spacesuit. It was not a label he would have deliberately given this thing. And yet he found himself murmuring it aloud.
“The Shrine of the Penitent.”
Those five words filled his ears and his mind, and he knew that it was the true name of this monument, though knowing it as surely as he did was an impossibility.
“Say again,” came a voice, Captain Croft’s from far away on the space station. “Dr. Soren . . . repeat your message.”
Soren did not immediately reply. The Shrine of the Penitent.
“Why am I here?” Soren murmured.
“Dr. Soren, please say again,” urged Croft. There was concern in the captain’s voice. Fear
too. “You’re breaking up.”
But Soren did not answer him. He took a few small steps, bringing him to the very edge of the shelf.
They can’t see it, he realized. That statue should be filling every screen on the ship, but they can’t see it. If they could, they would not be talking to me. They would be yelling. Screaming. Shouting.
He almost told them that he had found nothing. There was a need in him, very deep and very real, to turn his back and forget what he had seen. There was something deeply terrifying about that statue and what it represented. He was aware that he could not know its meaning, could not consciously understand it. But he feared it. Hated it. Dreaded it.
And it threatened to break his heart.
The crew of the skimmer was waiting for him on the edge of the plane. Soren wanted to turn, to flee this place, to deny its existence and the horrors it whispered of.
He almost ran away.
Almost.
That he did not was a hard decision to make, and he was not then, or afterward, sure that it was the right one. But in light of all that had happened over the last two days, there was no escaping it. The implied truth was brutal, insidious, and cruel.
He nearly spoke a dozen times, and each time his lips formed words, but his lungs gave them no power. Soren closed his eyes and felt the tears on his lashes and then on his cheeks. Despite the suit’s heater, those tears were cold. So very cold.
Finally, he said, “I’ve found something.”
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.
–Albert Einstein
Asphodel Station
In Geostationary Orbit around Jupiter
Base Commander’s Log
Entry dual-dated Earth May 26, 2145 CE / Lost Year 1
We are alive because everything went horribly wrong.
Everything.
God only knows what would have happened if things had gone according to every predictive computer model. Maybe we’d all be safe and celebrating. Maybe we’d all be clouds of dust floating into the pull of Jupiter’s gravity. Who knows? Even my understanding of what “safe” means is warped.
All I know for sure is that we are alive. Most of us. Alive.
For now.
Alive, but so far from home.
Alive, with no way to get home.
Alive, but burdened with the awareness that no one who could rescue us will ever know where to look.
Alive does not mean safe.
No.
No, it damn well does not.
—Delia Trumbo, Station Executive
42 Hours Earlier
“And you’re entirely confident in the safeguards?” asked Dr. Lars Soren.
The project manager, Dr. Kier, turned to him and gave him a long, icy stare. “Of course,” he said, not trying to hide his contempt for the question.
Anton Kier was a tall fair-haired man and he tried to loom over Soren. However, the project director was not physically imposing. His blond hair was thinning, his eyes a watery blue, and, despite his height, he had narrow shoulders, a thin neck, and very little mass to lend weight to his attempt to intimidate.
Soren, even though a few inches shorter, was lean and wiry, although his retro Nehru jacket and comfortably loose trousers bulked his appearance
His thick black untrimmed beard and wild hair were useful obstacles against people reading his expression. A deliberate choice masquerading as academic slovenliness.
“And I’m not sure I grasp why this is of any concern to you,” continued Kier, leaning on the last word and dialing up the wattage of his resentful glare.
Soren failed to wither. He was a professor of great standing and the founder of a new field of theology called cosmic philosophy. Even though Kier could pack him off back to Earth in the next transport, Soren was not worried. He had come to Asphodel Station with a synod of faith leaders from Earth, and—collectively—they were both a diplomatic and public relations challenge. Offending Soren was to offend them, and that would start a chain reaction that could lead to a protest of millions if not billions.
One of that group, Lady Jessica McHugh—an Irish woman and mystic from Galway—stood beside Soren. She was the fifty-eighth person to hold the title of chief priestess of the Church of Shades. For nearly two thousand years that church had hidden from public light, driven to secrecy by various forms of the Inquisition and witchfinders. Many women of that order had been burned at the stake, crushed under rocks, or drowned in rivers while strapped to dipping chairs. The chief priestesses had for centuries been nicknamed “Lady Death,” a nod to the ancient beliefs and practices of necromancy that were part of the Church of Shades.
Lady Death was as unlikely as Dr. Soren to wither from Dr. Kier’s glare.
“He asks a reasonable question, Anton,” said McHugh. Her accent was Irish and her attitude bemused. She was sipping champagne and seemed to find the tension between Soren and Kier mildly entertaining.
“Excuse me,” Kier said crisply, still focused on Soren, “but your field is philosophy, is it not?” Kier leaned on the word in a way that denigrated the term and all that it implied.
Soren merely spread his hands.
“I know you have spent your life collecting degrees,” said Kier. “Theology, philosophy, cultural anthropology, and—psychology, yes?”
Soren offered a slight bow.
Kier’s eyes shifted to McHugh. “And you are high priestess of a death cult.”
“Inelegantly phrased,
but . . . sure. Let’s call it that,” she said.
Kier smiled as if he had scored great points. “I suppose my question is why either of you have doubts? You’re not engineers. Neither of your degrees are in astrophysics, particle physics, or electrical engineering.”
“Are degrees in those disciplines required to ask a reasonable question?” asked Soren mildly.
“How would you even hope to understand the answer?” countered Kier.
There were more than a hundred other people milling about in the observation room, their faces alight with excitement and expectation. A handful belonged to the many civilian departments on Asphodel Station, drinking cocktails and buzzing with chatter. Some were celebrities and media influencers come to partake of a new slice of history. There were officers from the modest military detail, and the senior naval officer, Captain Croft, was among them. He was ostensibly chatting with Lieutenant Thomas Tanaka, who was head of the small Marine Corps detail, though it was obvious Croft was really eavesdropping on the conversation.
McHugh finished her champagne and smiled with elegant condescension. “Tell me, Dr. Kier, does a person need a degree in neuroscience to ask if someone has a headache? Would I need to be an industrial chemist to ask if a new type of garden pesticide would be harmful to my dog?”
“It’s hardly the same thing.”
“It is, actually,” said Soren, taking fresh champagne glasses from a waiter’s tray. He handed one to McHugh and the other to Kier, who paused and then took it.
“How so?” asked Kier in a waspish tone.
“We didn’t ask for any technical explanation,” said McHugh.
Soren said, “We are a few minutes away from launching a test drone to see if your hyperspace conduit will transmit matter in the same way and with the same approximate fidelity as it does with digital media. The resources required for this test will briefly use eighty-six point one eight eight percent of the power for this entire station. The last time something similar was tried, it blew a rather noticeable chunk out of the Moon. The time before that, it turned a twelve-ton military satellite into a cloud of debris. Asphodel was moved this far away from space traffic, settlements on the moons of both Mars and Jupiter, and from the mines on this part of the asteroid belt in case this test causes a misfire of some catastrophic kind so,
So . . . I stand by the reasonableness of my question. I ask again, Doctor, How confident are you in the current versions of the safeguards?”
“He’s right,” agreed McHugh. “And I assure you that we will not require PhDs in any branch of engineering or physics to understand a yes or no.”
Kier glared at them. It was clear he wanted to lash out with something biting, perhaps foul, and certainly reductive and demeaning. That he did not earned him some grudging points from Soren for self-control. Even so, before Kier spoke again he downed his entire glass of champagne.
“Yes,” Kier said flatly.
“That’s comforting,” said McHugh, though there was gentle mockery on her mouth. Soren caught Captain Croft turning away to hide a smile of his own. Tanaka, the Marine officer, did as well.
“What about the animals in the capsule?” asked Soren. “What will happen to them?”
“Oh Lord,” said Kier, “don’t tell me you’re an animal rights activist . . .”
“My question is whether the WarpLine gun, once proven, will be safe for organic life.”
Kier sipped his drink, grunted, and said, “We have done animal testing going back to the last century. Mostly tardigrades and—”
“Tardi-whats?” asked McHugh.
“Tardigrades. Water bears,” said Kier. “Eight-segmented microanimals dating back to the cretaceous period. They were picked because of their endurance. Since one goal of WarpLine is to allow safe travel for people as well as cargo, we wanted to know what stresses would be imposed on living creatures. Tardigrades were picked because they can withstand atmospheric pressures up to twelve hundred g’s. You can dry them out, freeze them, irradiate them, and in each case, it takes a lot to injure or kill them. They were ideal test candidates.”
“And?” prompted McHugh.
“Well,” said Kier a bit uncertainly, “to tell the complete truth, they lost the first three or four hundred they tried to send.”
“Lost?” asked McHugh, jumping at the word.
“Yes. No one’s sure what happened. Most likely they were disintegrated so completely that there was nothing to reassemble.”
“May we assume those scientists were eventually successful?” asked Soren.
“Oh yes,” said Kier. “Beginning in 2076 they were able to successfully send tardigrades from the Earth to a research lab on the Moon. Sure, a few transmissions went astray, but we’ve since completely reconfigured our targeting systems. Since then, they’ve sent many other more complex animals to stations across the settled solar system. And some, in capsules, into deep space, where they were recovered by scout ships. In fact, there have been no test-animal fatalities in more than thirty years.”
“That’s quite a relief,” said Soren. “If I may make a recommendation? I don’t know if you’ve read the news stories and social media posts about this, but this has been a frequent topic of concern for the public. Might be worthwhile for someone in your own PR department to mention three decades of animal safety.”
Kier gave him a waspish look but softened. He nodded. “That’s not a bad suggestion.”
“On the other topic though,” said McHugh. “Just to calm my own nerves . . . if either Captain Croft or Director Trumbo were to give you another, say, three weeks to run more simulations and tests, would you take it?”
“No,” said Kier. His tone was decisive, but as he turned away Soren caught something—a flicker of emotion—in the man’s eyes. Was it doubt? ...
