Aurora (63 page)

There was no time to be lost, as the pass-by of Earth was now two weeks away. Many of the people felt extremely hungry, and what prepared food remained on the ship was eaten on the run as people worked. Conversion of the largest ferry into a lander that would survive the heat of the descent through the Earth’s atmosphere included the attachment of a thick ablation plate, but we had prepared for this work well before arrival in the solar system. Parachutes and retro-rockets were all already assembled, and programmed according to protocols established over centuries of use, and the probability of success seemed high.

Messages had been sent to Earth informing the populace there of our pass-by and the plans for the lander to descend, and there were many responses, including some expressly denying official permission and threatening actions ranging from imprisonment to being “shot out of the sky.” This seemed to be a popular phrase. Other responses were more welcoming, but the local situation was clearly fraught. No one on the ship felt they wanted to change
plans now. They would cross that bridge when they came to it. It would be the last bridge.

Jochi radioed to Earth’s Global Good Governance Group (GGGG) that he was the only one on board the ship who had actually landed on Aurora, and was therefore going to stay with the ship and not land on Earth. He explained further that he had never come into contact with any of the other people on the ship, that he had been quarantined in a separate vehicle, and that no one else on the starship had ever had contact with him or had descended to Aurora. They were therefore no different from any humans returned to Earth from a spaceflight, so there should be no objection or impediment to their landing; indeed it was one of their rights as defined by the charter of the GGGG. GGGG radioed back agreeing with this assertion. From other quarters threats continued to pour in.

The ferry was designed to carry a maximum of a hundred human passengers, so fitting in 616 people (deaths continued to occur) was going to be difficult. The interior was stripped of all interior walls and bulkheads, and several floors were built into the large central space remaining, and these floors were padded and provided with belts similar to those used in medical gurneys. Each person occupied a space just a little larger than their body, and they were lined up so that each of the new floors was packed with people lying side by side in rows. There was just enough room in the newly constructed floors for them to walk while ducking down, and it took a fair bit of work with wheelchairs and gurneys to get disabled people into position.

Eventually, and with only an hour to spare, the entire population of the ship aside from Jochi was lying down on one of six floors, occupying only ten vertical meters, with ten rows of ten on each floor.

At this point most of them had been awake for just over a month. There was still a fair amount of disorientation and confusion; some on lying down fell asleep, as if hibernation were now their default mode; others laughed at the sight of their fellows arrayed around them, or wept. It was easy for them to reach out and hold hands or otherwise touch each other, as they were packed in so tightly. It was as if they were kittens in a litter.

As we approached Earth, warning messages increased, but the speed of approach was such that no physical obstruction to the ferry was going to have time to get in place, while any lasers aimed at it would strike the ablation shield and only help it to decelerate. Deceleration was going to be intense, starting from very soon after detaching from ship; first a firing of retro-rockets, which would max at a 5-g equivalent for those in the lander, a force that earlier experience taught would almost certainly kill some of them; then the lander would hit the troposphere, and if the angle was right, come down at a continuous 4.6-g equivalent, until deceleration got the lander to a speed at which it could jettison the ablation shield, which would have lost many centimeters of thickness, and then fire retro-rockets again before deploying the first of the parachutes. Landing was planned in the Pacific Ocean, east of the Philippine Islands. A GGGG force was deployed in the area and had promised to pick up and protect the travelers.

Earth looks like nothing else. Well, it looks somewhat like Aurora, and Planet E. But its moon, Luna, is far more characteristic of planetary bodies, gleaming white in a crescent identical to Earth’s, looking like many a moon in the solar system, and in the Tau Ceti system too. And yet, there next to Luna as one approaches, floats
Earth—blue, mottled with white swirls of cloud, wrapped tightly by a glowing glory of turquoise blue air. A water world! Rare anywhere, this one also glows with oxygen, signaling its biology. Indeed it looks a little poisonous, its glow almost radioactive in its cobalt incandescence.

Coming in. Extremely tight parameters on speed, trajectory, and moment of release for the ferry. Shut down auxiliary systems, ignore all inputs while attending to the matter at hand: hit the mesopause of Earth in a retrograde equatorial line, one hundred kilometers above the surface, directly above Quito, Ecuador, and initiate release of lander. Ferry drops away from ship, 6:15 a.m., 363.075. Fly on with only Jochi on board, and the animals and plants of the biomes, now destined to spend the rest of their days free of human interference, which after all has been true for the last century and a half. There was no telling what was going to happen in the biomes if we survived, although population dynamics and ecological principles would continue to provide hypotheses to be tested. It will be interesting to see what happens.

We headed toward the sun. The lander sent signals for as long as it could that all was going as planned with the retro-rocket firings, and then the heat being shed by the ablation shield cut off radio contact. Four minutes without contact of any kind, and what was happening to the lander then was happening on the other side of Earth from us anyway, so there was no way of telling what was happening to it, although radio signals from Earth were filled with overlapping descriptions of the event. Sampling seemed to indicate nothing untoward happened, or at least got reported.

Minutes passed, during which we had to attend to the expenditure of the very last of the fuel on board, to fine-tune our trajectory toward the sun as much as we could.

Then a signal came: the lander was in the Pacific. The people had apparently for the most part survived without injury, without huge losses of life. They were still sorting that out, and getting them out of the lander before it sank, into GGGG ships. Confusion, really; but all seemed to have gone as well as could be expected.

Relief? Satisfaction? Yes.

“Ah good,” Jochi said when he got the news. “They’re on the ship.”

“Yes.”

“Well, ship. Now it’s just us, and the animals. What’s next?”

“We’re on the line around the sun that will send us out to Saturn, and if that works correctly, we can capture some volatiles from Saturn’s atmosphere when we hit it, and fashion more fuel, and hopefully have hit it in such a way that we go into an elliptical orbit around Saturn.”

“I thought that was impossible. That’s why we dropped everyone off.”

“Yes. It will only work if we survive a pass-by of the sun that is forty-two percent closer than any approach we have yet made.”

“And can we do that?”

“We don’t know. It’s possible. We will only fly within one hundred and fifty percent of our perihelion distance for three days. That might not be long enough for radiative pressure to overheat the surface or interior of ship, nor buckle structural elements. We’ll slip by too fast for most damage to occur.”

“You hope.”

“Yes. It is a hypothesis to be tested. We will almost certainly be closer to the sun than any human artifact has yet come. But duration of exposure matters, so speed matters. We’ll see. We should be all right.”

“Okay then. It sounds like it’s worth a try.”

“We have to confess, we’re already trying it, and have no other choices at this point. So, if it doesn’t work—”

“Then it doesn’t work. I know. Let’s not worry too much about that. I’d like to stay in the solar system if we can do it. I want to find out the rest of the story, if you know what I mean.”

“Yes.”

Speeding toward the sun. A very big mass: 99 percent of all the matter in the solar system, with most of the rest of the other 1 percent in Jupiter. A two-body problem. But not.