Extract from
The Visitors
by Steve Pemberton
The phenomenon known as a shooting star made an appearance in the planet's
sky. This was nothing unusual. A comet had disintegrated near to the planet
a few orbits previously, and so shooting stars were a familiar sight in
the night sky. The trail that this one left was shorter and brighter and
remained visible for longer than most, but the small number of the planet's
inhabitants who happened to be looking at that part of the sky at the time
did not remark on it.
"To our distant ancestors," recited the Instructor of the Young, "the
invention of spaceflight must have seemed a cruel joke. At last they were
free of the planet that had held them prisoners for so many aeons. But
the other planets in their star system were too inhospitable to allow them
to live there. Other stars had planets—but they were so far away that,
were an individual to attempt to journey to one of them, he would be dead
long before he reached his destination."
The Instructor paused, as the text indicated he
should, to allow that point time to sink into the minds of his pupils.
"At tremendous cost," he resumed, "they had succeeded in expanding the
boundaries of their prison by the merest fraction. To expand the boundaries
far enough to bring even the nearest star within reach was, it seemed to
our ancestors, as impossible as reaching their own moon had been a century
previously."
"Some hoped, against all reason, that their greatest
scientists might yet be proven wrong, and that the velocity of light would
be found not to be an absolute limit. Yes," he said, departing briefly
from his text for the benefit of Jo-aster, the youngest pupil, whose opinion
was that the ancients, and indeed the Instructor, knew nothing that was
worth knowing, "that fact of physics was known even then."
"This perhaps represents the last remnant of that
dangerous attitude to the universe, which says that it exists for our benefit,
or at least that we are free to do with it as we will, and that whenever
there is a gap between what we desire and what the universe permits or
provides, it is the universe that should change, not our desires. It is
not certain when the problem of interstellar travel was finally solved.
What is certain is that the self-centred attitude which then beset
our species delayed the solution for several centuries."
"That is the end of today's history period." He
closed the text. "Your assignment for the next history period is to research
methods that our ancestors proposed for travelling between the stars. You
are to write a level two summary of one such method, for presentation to
the class. Pay particular attention to why the method would not have worked,
had it ever been attempted." All six of his pupils were fidgeting, waiting
for his permission to leave the instruction room. It was understandable.
He could still remember received his instruction in this room. His
desk had been the now-empty one to the left of Jo-aster. On days like these,
he had been just as eager to leave. "Now," he said to them, leaning forward
on his desk, as some of the stiffness and formality of the text left him,
"as it's lunchtime I'm sure you'll all want to watch the new planet passing
underneath the ship. It should be visible for the next..." he consulted
his timepiece "forty-one minutes, from Observation Window Four, but please
don't be tempted to miss lunch for it. Remember it's team games afterwards."
Standing near the back of the bridge, Captain Asaraph looked at the
hologram in front of him. It showed a real-time view of the planet that
was now rolling along beneath his ship. The scale of one to one million
made the globe a little over eight metres across—too large for any serious
work, but useful if you just wanted something to watch while there was
nothing else to do. The side of the hologram that faced him showed weather
patterns, but the other side showed only the bare surface of the planet,
synthesised out of data from the last geographical survey.
Usually, Asaraph could have instructed the hologram
generator to fill in the far side with data from weather satellites, but
this planet had none. At least, it had none now. The ship had been denied
its usual geostationary orbit by the huge amount of junk in that region.
Thousands upon thousands of objects, from tiny signal repeaters all the
way up to a substantial part of a space station, nearly a kilometre across.
Their sensors had reported that none of it appeared to be working. Some
of the debris was almost intact, but most of it was damaged—some by energy
or impact weapons, but more by collisions.
Therefore, Asaraph had decided to put the ship into
an orbit three thousand kilometres below geostationary, so as not to endanger
shuttles on their journeys between the ship and the planet. A ship this
size would scarely notice a collision with most of the objects in geostationary,
but such a collision would probably destroy a shuttle. Click
here for a picture of the ship (57K JPEG) The fact that the debris
was widely spaced and slow-moving, and that the shuttles bristled with
sensors that could see a pinhead at a hundred kilometres, had not occurred
to Asaraph when he made the decision. For a shuttle, travelling through
the debris field constituted an avoidable risk, and a man did not become
captain of a ship like this one by taking avoidable risks.
All the same, the lower-than-usual orbit irritated
him. From where he was standing, the hologram showed what he would see
if he looked at the real planet from the ship, and so it was slowly rotating.
In a geostationary orbit, of course, it would have been motionless. The
cloud cover tended to mask the movement, but it was undeniably there.
Around the rim of the planet were twenty or thirty
numbers, graphs and symbols, which gave various kinds of information about
the planet. A simple trick with the hologram generator ensured that they
were always visible, whatever angle you looked at the hologram from. Asaraph
made an effort to memorise the less esoteric ones: mean diameter 8,112
kilometres, period of rotation 32.4 standard hours, period of orbit 1.41
standard years, mean atmospheric pressure at mean sea level 841 millbars,
surface gravity 0.84g, atmospheric composition... well, it was breathable
without filters, which was all anyone needed to worry about. The Chief
Medical Officer assured him that the concentrations of the four poisonous
gases that their spectrographs had identified were all well below the levels
known to be harmful, which meant that no-one would have to remember to
check their immunisation patches while they were on the planet. That said,
the oxygen partial pressure gave Asaraph cause for concern. It was 126
millibars, a mere fifteen percent of the atmosphere. Most of the crew were
accustomed to 200 or more, so they would need breathing masks if they were
not to become exhausted by just walking around.
But none of this data could tell him what he really
needed to know. The nearly-silent humming of a door behind him announced
the arrival of someone whom Asaraph hoped would have the answers.
He turned to face Tret, the ship's Records Officer
and Instructor of the Young. The two jobs did not belong together, but
no-one else was anywhere near as good as Tret at either of them. Tret paused
about twelve paces away from Asaraph and bowed slightly. "Good morning,
Captain," he said. It had taken Asaraph two decades to persuade Tret that
it was acceptable to speak before being spoken to.
"Good morning, Tret," Asaraph replied. One of his
ambitions for the next few decades was to persuade Tret to call him by
his name. "What have you discovered about the planet beneath us?" He gestured
towards the hologram.
"Its last recorded name, as near as I can pronounce
it," Tret answered, "was Tekoomé. It was settled in the Seventh
Exodus, about eighteen thousand years ago. Until recently, it was quite
a pleasant place, as planets go. The technology level was six, and the
civilisation level seven point five." It would doubtless have distressed
the planet's inhabitants to know that Tret had just summed up everything
that they were, and ever had been, in two numbers. But the ship's crew
wanted just one thing from this planet, or any planet, and all that the
techlev and civlev really reflected was their estimate of the chances that
they would get it.
"Until recently," said Asaraph.
"Yes. Between the last two visits, seven hundred
and fifty and five hundred years ago, the technology and civilisation levels
plummeted to between zero point five and one point five. At times, and
in places, they may actually have touched zero."
Asaraph raised an eyebrow. A level of zero meant
that the thing being measured was non-existant. There, it was hard to distinguish
people from animals. If a planet as a whole dropped to techlev and civlev
zero for any length of time, it was unlikely ever to rise above it again.
"A lucky escape, then." A moment later, he added: "Perhaps. What went wrong?"
"That is not completely clear," said Tret. Asaraph
knew that Tret would say that of anything that he had not seen with his
own eyes. "The conclusion of the last visitors was that there had been
a prolonged and bitter civil war, which finished perhaps six hundred years
ago. They were unable to discover much more than that. Indeed, the ground
team barely escaped with their lives."
"It is likely, then," said Asaraph, "that this planet
is no longer aware of the Agreement." It was somewhere between a statement
and a question.
"The report did not mention that, Captain, but it
would seem to be almost certain."
"Then," said the Captain, "we have a duty to bring
them back into the Agreement."
"Always provided," Tret replied uneasily, "that
it is safe to do so." He spoke uneasily because he did not like to point
out flaws or omissions in statements that the Captain made. Long experience,
though, had taught Asaraph that when Tret expressed reservations about
something, he was usually right.
"Do you believe it is safe?" asked Asaraph thoughtfully.
Tret made no reply.
"Well?"
"Captain," said Tret awkwardly, "you ask for a conclusion
based on largely incomplete data."
"I know," said Asaraph. "The only way to find out
whether it is safe is to send a ground team. If any of them get injured
or—" he almost stumbled over the word "—killed, then it isn't safe. But
what is your opinion? We have known each other long enough for me to be
sure that I can trust your judgement."
"Thank you, Captain," replied Tret, nodding slightly.
"We have detected low-power radio transmissions from several points on
the surface, and we have observed slow-moving air and sea vessels. These
are consistent with an average technology level of between three and four.
History teaches us that, after a planet has suffered a catastrophe such
as that which Tekoomé appears to have undergone, the planet as a
whole is unlikely to rise above technology level two unless it is mostly
peaceful."
"But these disasters are not exactly common, are
they?" asked the Captain.
"No. To my certain knowledge, in the whole of the
settled galaxy, there have been twelve such disasters in the last fifteen
thousand years."
The End (so far)
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© Steve Pemberton 1998.
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