Tag Archives: Cyan

226. Cyan is Not Forgotten

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I’m not complaining, honest.

Publishing is a strange business, and you couldn’t pay me enough to be an editor. Still, I haven’t mentioned Cyan since May ninth, and that is a problem.

I started this website about a year ago in support of Cyan, which had been accepted for publication as an e-book. Not self published, which offers no guarantee of quality, but published by EDGE, Canada’s premier publisher of science fiction, fantasy, and horror.

So what happened? Nothing very terrible, or very unusual. The editor who was handling EDGE-lite, as they call their e-books, decided to work full time elsewhere. I would guess from the vagueness of some emails I received that this decision took a while to make. I don’t know any details, and I wouldn’t give them if I knew. I’m not a fan of gossip. Anyway, the handling of my book has changed to a new editor, and that always leads to delay.

I finally got the word of what had happened in July, from Brian the publisher.

I am writing this on September fifteenth; I have mentioned before that I hate deadlines, so I try to have my posts ready well in advance. I expect word soon on what will happen next, but I can’t wait any longer to comment.

I have followers who have been with me for over a year, and new people who drop in every day. The former have probably been wondering what happened, and the latter have never heard of Cyan. So here goes.

Cyan returns to the style of science fiction in which the restrictions of relativity were exploited as plot elements. It gives a full picture of the exploration and colonization of one planet through the eyes of characters who are somewhat larger than life, in a tone designed to attract the general reader as well as hard core SF fans.

The story begins en route to the Procyon system on board the starship Darwin with her crew of five men and five women, and details their explorations. The planet they discover, Procyon A III – Cyan – stands straight up in orbit, with no inclination and no seasons. It has bands of unvarying temperature, from burning desert at the equator to permanent icecaps. Near 40° latitude is a broad band of eternal springtime.

Just as the explorers are falling in love with Cyan, they discover a group of creatures who have the beginnings of intelligence and culture. For the first time, Man has encountered a truly sub-human species. They call the creatures Cyl. Viki Johanssen, their anthropologist, recommends denying colonization to protect them, but Keir Delacroix, the crew leader on whom the novel focuses, will not endorse her proposal. 

The remainder of the book deals with this conflict and much more.

This is the first part of the summary I sent EDGE; I have chopped the last 342 words to avoid spoilers.

Scattered among the last year of posts are discussions of and excerpts from Cyan. You could go to the tag cloud, but it wouldn’t help much. The earlier posts were not tagged (I was still learning how to do a blog) and many of the later ones bear mention of Cyan without being primarily based on it.

I could bring you an annotated index of Cyan posts, as I did for early posts at 212, or I might recycle them. It all depends on when Cyan is going to be published.

Cyan is not forgotten. Stay tuned.

184. Tail First

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The first manmade object to leave the atmosphere and enter space wasn’t American or Russian. It was German. In 1942, V-2 rockets, first as prototypes, then as weapons, entered space routinely at the top of their high-arching flightpath.

That was the picture of spaceflight that lived in the heads of the kids of my generation. On Saturday morning TV shows, heroic young spacemen went off to save the universe and all their spacecraft looked like V-2 rockets. No wonder; this was pre-George Lucas and special effects were minimal. However, captured German footage provided plenty of shots of V-2s taking off.

These Saturday morning specials also landed upright on their tailfins. (Yeah, you guessed it. They ran the films backward.) On Dec 21, 2015, Elon Musk and SpaceX finally pulled that off in the real world. It makes me wonder what he was watching when he was a kid.

In the early days of serious thinking about space, when WW II was freshly over and the V-2 had shown the way, there seemed to be only two ways to land a spacecraft: either tail-first at a prohibitive cost in fuel, or by flying back in a winged craft. Neither was possible with the technology of the day, but the folks at Edwards Air Base were working on the latter, culminating in the X-15 (see 164. Flight Into Space). Later came the Space Shuttle.

In my novel Cyan, VTOL rocket shuttles are used extensively on Earth, and of course are the basis for landing craft on unexplored worlds. There won’t be any runways when we reach Alpha Centauri.

There is actually has a long history of craft designed to explore tail first landings.

X-13 Ryan Vertijet took off vertically, rolled over to horizontal while the pilot changed to a separate set of controls, carried out its mission in horizontal mode, then, at altitude, transitioned again to vertical mode. The pilot then slowly dropped toward the ground to land. The limitations that make this a technology demonstrator rather than a workable aircraft all become obvious near the ground.

Before takeoff, the Vertijet reached the airfield horizontally, hooked to and riding on a trailer. The trailer then lifted like a drawbridge until the Vertijet was vertical, dangling from a cable that hooked under the Vertijet’s nose. It took off from that position, and then returned to the trailer to land. As it approached the ground, traveling nose skyward, the pilot would slide his craft carefully sideways until the nose of his jet came in contact with a horizontal bamboo pole. Using that as a guide, the pilot then moved his craft toward the trailer until his nosehook came into contact with the cable. Then he cut his power; he had landed by reaching a condition of dangling from the cable, bellied up to the vertical bed of the trailer. The trailer was then lowered to horizontal, Vertijet attached.

Not very practical, but it did work. Only two Verijets were built and only a few operational flights were attempted.

The X-14 was of different configuration, with vanes to deflect its thrust. It took off vertically, but with the plane itself horizontal, in the manner of a modern Harrier.

The Lockheed XFV-1 had the power and the configuration for vertical takeoff and landings, but they never managed to work out the issue of pilot control. No successful vertical takeoffs or landings were made. It flew only conventionally with makeshift landing gear bolted to its belly.

The Convair XFY Pogo took off vertically, transitioned to horizontal, and made vertical landings, but only with great difficulty, and only with extremely experienced pilots. It was impractical, largely because the pilot had to look over his shoulder at the ground during vertical landings.

If we could salvage the rear vision camera from any 2016 sedan and send it back by time machine, any one of these craft would have been successful, but in the fifties the idea of looking at the ground while your eyes were skyward was pure science fiction.

Reaching on the moon would require a vertical descent and landing. They built a special craft to train astronauts for that mission. We’ll look at it tomorrow.

180. Exiled on Stormking

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Every science fiction writer has his own style. Mine is built around stories that take place in the near future, in which I try to imagine what would actually happen. Stories of far flung galactic empires or invasions by advanced life forms are certainly legitimate, and I occasionally like to read them. But I write about what I think is most likely to actually happen.

That calls for choices and the most basic is, will or won’t mankind find a practical, artificial immortality. I can’t think of a more basic divergence in fictional timelines. If we do, then events in A Fond Farewell to Dying and its two sequels strike me as entirely logical, even likely.

If not, then we are likely to go on breeding and increasing in population. We are also likely to explore our tiny corner of the galaxy before anyone perfects a faster than light drive. None of our present technologies would allow that. There are a dozen possibilities under consideration, but I am neither impressed nor interested. As I said in 23. Star Drives, it seems more likely that something out there which no one has thought of yet will slap humanity in the face and completely change physics.

You don’t think so? I suggest that you read some of the history of science. Science usually gets things right, but it seems to chase a whole battalion of wild geese first. In the short run, whatever is believed today is likely to be disproved tomorrow. Clinging too tightly to current doctrine is no way to predict the future.

In Cyan, an off stage character named Lassiter discovers that gravity has an inhibiting effect on the conversion of matter to energy. Do I believe that is so? Of course not. I do believe that we are due for a game changer fully as outré as that sometime in the next fifty years. Set your clock.

Cyan, due out momentarily, sets the stage for the exploration of nearby stars at relativistic speeds. While we are exploring Cyan around Procyon, off stage we learn a little about the planetary resources of Alpha Centauri, Sirius, Epsilon Eridani, Tau Ceti. and Epsilon Indi. Call it world building times six, it is a setup for a series of novels.

The first sequel to Cyan, plotted but not yet written, will be called Stormking or Dreamsinger, probably the latter. Stormking is a planet around Sirius A. Perturbation from Sirius B have given it a Uranian tilt, although paleontological evidence shows that this is a relatively recent phenomenon. The human colony lives in space habitats; they are beltmen from Sol’s asteroid belt who have escaped Earth’s destruction. They chose Sirius because Stormking, the only planet in the sweet spot for human life, if basically uninhabitable.

These refugees traveled to Sirius to avoid planetbounds, but during the crowded, decades long journey they had to embrace either fierceness or civility. The former would have killed them, but choosing the latter weakened their spirit.

They no longer tolerate deviations from the norm, yet they are too civil to institute punishment. What choice remains? They send their deviants into exile on Stormking.

Most of them died. A few lived and had children. By the opening of our story, most of the population of Stormking was born there. They have violated no laws, but their rough natures will not allow them to be repatriated.

Antrim, who has been tagged to act as anthropologist and study these children of outlaws, has just arrived on Stormking. He will learn more than he could ever imagine.

173. BREXIT is Science Fiction

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BREXIT is like science fiction at its finest. You take something that could have gone either way, preferably something unexpected, choose an outcome, and then predict what will come of it. You build your story around your prediction.

In real life, if you do something like that before an event, most people will laugh at your prediction. If you do it after the event, most people will say, “Aw heck, I saw that coming.”

As example of fictional “prediction”, here is a quote from Cyan:

The EuroFeds, smelling a chance to regain the hegemony that they had lost three centuries earlier, sent peace keeping forces to India, only to find dissension breaking out in their own countries as the world spanning financial complex, strained past the breaking point, could no longer deliver food to her people.

Hungry people aren’t kind. Starving people aren’t rational. There were attacks and reprisals, and then France nuked Italy, and the house of cards came tumbling down in an ever expanding nuclear nightmare.

Don’t worry, in the novel that doesn’t happen until 2145. Real world predictions, on the other hand, are looking pretty dicey on the heels of BREXIT.

War in Europe has seemed less and less likely since the middle of the last century, as agreements between European nations have proliferated. There has been a slow movement toward what some commentators called a “United States of Europe”. Many Europeans, including about 48 percent of British voters, saw this as the road to peace and prosperity. Others, including about 52 percent of British voters, saw it as a slow erosion of political freedom and the right to control their own culture.

I can see both sides of the argument. If I were a Brit, I’m not sure which way I would have voted. I am sure that there is a rocky road ahead.

In the long run, we may have seen the beginning of a slippery slope that ultimately unleashes the tensions now held in check by the European Union, leading to wars between member states. It’s too soon to tell, but that outcome wouldn’t be surprising.

The short run is easier to predict. Scotland came within a breath of separating from the rest of Great Britain only two years ago. It was the fear of economic disaster that tipped the scales. Now Britain has set in train that same disaster, while the Scottish section of the country voted overwhelmingly to remain a part of the EU. BREXIT has made Scotland’s near future breakaway almost a certainty.

Northern Ireland has its own set of issues, but being tethered to a dissolving British economy while the Republic of Ireland has EU resources to call upon, will certainly be an addition to Pan-Irish nationalism. Irish reunification, held off for a century by British military force, may yet become a reality.

Even Wales has its separatists. The United Kingdom is a mass of centrifugal forces, with a millennium of resentment among repressed peoples (see tomorrow’s post).

Here is a riddle. What is Great Britain if Scotland, and/or Northern Ireland, and/or Wales leave? Answer: England. Not the same country at all as Great Britain.

Here is a more grim riddle. If Great Britain implodes, who will take its place on the UN Security Council, and wield its veto. England? Scotland, perhaps? And what will Russia and China have to say about the matter?

If it seems that such events can’t happen, I would remind you that the newly united American colonies almost fell apart in the decade between the Declaration of Independence and the coming of the Constitution. And then there was that pesky little bloodbath called the Civil War.

The exit contagion seems to be spreading. France is talking exit; so is Spain. Spain, in particular, should be careful what it asks for. There are massively disruptive forces in that country, with Basque separatists in the north west and a long standing call for a separate Catalan speaking country in the south east.

So now is the time for all would-be science fiction writers to set down the timelines for their own alternate futures. There must be at least a thousand possibilities.

Is anyone taking bets?

158. The Cost of Starflight

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Whatever his faults, Saloman Curran, from the novel Cyan,  is no coward, as he shows at a news conference called when the USNA government tries to shut down the colonization of Cyan because of the high casualty rate associated with cold sleep.

“Chairman Curran,” the reporter asked, “how can you advocate cold sleep, even plan an entire colonization project around it, when it will result in a ten percent mortality rate. That seems more than a little inhumane.”

“A bit cold?” Curran asked. A grudging chuckle greeted his gallows humor. “Your facts are not quite right,” he continued. “That figure of ten percent is inaccurate.”

“You aren’t going to tell us that it is lower. We have that figure from NASA research.”

“Ten percent was the estimated loss for a five year cold sleep. We will be sleeping our people twenty years. We expect a mortality of 19.7 per cent.”

That silenced the room for a moment. Curran went on, “What you are missing is a lesson history has to teach. When the Irish were driven to America by the famine of the mid-nineteenth century, reliable historians estimate that more than twenty percent of them died of disease, starvation, or shipwreck on the way across the Atlantic. When your ancestors crossed the American prairie by covered wagon, they died by the thousands. Indians killed some, but mostly they died as they always had, of cold, hunger, infection from wounds received in their everyday work, and from disease. Influenza, tuberculosis, and a dozen other diseases that no longer exist sapped their strength and killed them wholesale. 

“Settlement of a new land has never been easy. It has never been for the timid. It has been for those whose faith in the future led them to defy the odds.

“And there is more. The Irish who did not leave Ireland, died in even greater numbers. The Americans who did not cross the prairie, faced the same wounds and overwork and diseases, and faced poverty and hunger besides. For all the dangers, the toil, and the hardships faced by the ones who went on ahead, there were as great dangers and greater hardships behind them. They went forth to find a future, but also to leave behind an unacceptable present.

“Look around the USNA. What do you see? Hunger, crowding, and death. What other motivation does a brave man or woman need to risk death, with the odds four to one in his favor?

“No one is being coerced. Every colonist will be a volunteer and we expect a hundred volunteers for every colonist we can take. Maybe a thousand for every one we can take. You may not have that kind of courage. Your viewers may not. If not, they should not apply. But the colonists who go out to settle Cyan will have that kind of courage.

“Will I find enough to accompany me? I will find a million who will cry bitterly that they were not chosen.”

Curran paused to adjust his jacket, with the look of a man overcoming an emotional outburst.

“To come back to your original question,” he continued; “Is cold sleep safe? No, it is not! But I will go to Cyan in cold sleep, and if I die en route, my life will have been well spent.”

157. Heinlein and Harriman

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As a science fiction writer, I have many debts to Robert Heinlein. One of those is for his character D. D. Harriman, who is both the inspiration and antithesis of my character Saloman Curran.

D. D. Harriman first appeared in a short story Requiem published in 1940 and then in its prequel The Man Who Sold the Moon which was published in 1951and won a retro Hugo in 2001. There are two collections of short stories called The Man Who Sold the Moon, each containing both its title novella and Requiem.

The Man Who Sold the Moon

At a point in future history when government sponsored spaceflight has temporarily failed, D. D. Harriman decides to send a rocket to the moon. His motivation is not profit, but the sheer love of exploration. The technical challenges are immense,  but the political and economic difficulties are worse. He overcomes all obstacles, first by entrepreneurial brilliance, and when the odds become overwhelming, by chicanery. There is a cost, beyond money. D. D. Harriman himself can’t take the flight. There is only room for one jockey-sized pilot.

Having proved his ideas by the successful flight, D. D. Harriman expands his business to send fleets of ships and begin a lunar colony. But now his co-owners of his enterprise deem him too valuable to the company, and again he is cheated out of his chance to go to the moon.

Much later, Heinlein retold the story from another perspective in his 1987 novel To Sail Beyond the Sunset.

Requiem

Decades have passed. Spaceflight is well established when an old man befriends a pair of down-and-out spacemen who are selling rocket rides in a decrepit, surplus spacecraft. He talks them into taking him to the moon, without letting the authorities know, and they agree. The flight ends in a crash, and the old man – who is , of course, D. D. Harriman – dies there, happy to have finally achieved his life’s ambition.

*****

The Man Who Sold the Moon is a romp and Requiem is a tear-jerker. The two halves of the story are stronger read together.  Heinlein had an ability to bring sentimentality into his story that was rarely seen in science fiction. It was either brilliant or sappy, depending on the reader’s individual taste. For my taste, it was brilliant.

*****

As I said at the top, Harriman was both inspiration for and antithesis of Saloman Curran in my novel Cyan. 1978, the year Harriman “sold the moon” is not 2106, the year Curran set the Cyan colonization in motion. Writing in the 1940s, Heinlein had confidence in the future. Writing through the last third of the last century, I was less optimistic.

Heinlein never paid much attention to overpopulation. When he talked about it, he showed that he understood its dangers, but he usually ignored it. To me, overpopulation is the central problem of the next century – which may well be our last century, if we don’t solve it.

So Curran is no Harriman, because 2016/2106 is not 1940-51/1978. Harriman was a lovable scalawag who would lie, cheat, and steal to get to the moon. Curran is capable of mass murder on the road to the stars. No one would write a Requiem for Curran.

But Curran is not without courage, as he will show in tomorrow’s post.

145. The Soul of the People

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The Earth to which the Cyan explorers have returned is much changed. What was overpopulated at their departure is much worse at their return. Governments have fallen and been reconstituted. NASA has been replaced by a military space organization.

The one stable thing in this new world is Saloman Curran, the world’s richest and most powerful man. His overriding consistencies are ruthlessness and obsessive dedication to the colonization of other planets. The explorers find themselves on his team and under his power as they plan for Cyan’s colonization.

Even Curran is not omnipotent. He finds himself blackmailed into adding a contingent of colonists from India. When Keir and Gus inspect these new colonists, they are given a new perspective on Curran by the Indian leader.

***

Bannerjee explained, “There was no Saloman Curran to finance our colonization effort. Each colonist had to pay twenty billion rupees for the privilege of going. Each applicant had to pay one billion rupees, non refundable, for the privilege of applying.”

“You mean only your rich could even apply?”

“That is correct.”

Gus shook his head. Bannerjee smiled and said, “I see you don’t know the history of your own country. How do you think Europeans got to America? Do you think ships’ captains just said, ‘Get on board, I’ll be glad to take you?'”

“I never thought about it.”

“To get to America in the early years, one either had to be rich or had to indenture oneself, that is, agree to be what amounted to a slave for a set number of years. Exploration and colonization have never been free.”

Keir said, “We chose our colonists on the basis of what skills they could bring to Cyan.”

“Indeed.  So did we. There are plenty of people who are both rich and skillful.”

They walked on through the camp. It was noisy, brawling, dusty, hot, and exciting.  Keir felt a smile growing on his face with every step. What an addition to Cyan these people would be!

“Kumar,” Gus said, “who is supplying your transportation to Uranus?”

“Gee Craft, Ganymede.”

Keir exchanged a look with Gus.  GCG was a subsidiary of Curran International. “How much per head?”

Bannerjee quoted a price that was three times the going rate.

“You’re getting screwed.  Why not shop around?”

“‘Shopping around’, as you put it, is not permitted. The price of transportation was negotiated as part of the main agreement. So was the price Curran is charging for the ship his people are building for us.”

“That means you are actually helping to finance the USNA expedition.”

“Yes. We are financing a major part of the expedition.”

They were thoughtful as they walked back to the VTOL. Finally, Bannerjee mused, “I wonder what Curran is buying with our money?”

“What do you mean?”

“Your people are not paying for their passage. I assume that means that they are not co-owners of the expedition, as ours are.”

“That is correct. The factory modules are being supplied by CI, so CI will own them. The people going are guaranteed land and subsistence food and clothing for five years.”

“And employment?”

“Well, the farms and factories won’t run themselves.”

“Will it take fifty thousand to run them?” Bannerjee asked.

“Perhaps not.”

“So there will be an excess of labor, and one man will own all the means of production. Does that seem healthy to you?”

Keir did not respond.

“It is said,” Bannerjee added as they were standing at the ramp of the VTOL, “that the man who owns the factory, owns the soul of the people. I would think about that, if I were you.”

143. Class on Cyan

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This is the third post for Teacher Appreciation week.

Until I retired, I called myself a novelist who taught, rather than a teacher who wrote books. It was a bit like a British officer dressing for dinner in his tent while serving in India – not a denial of the moment, but a reminder-to-self that present circumstances were only temporary.

My attitude was not disrespectful. I dedicated my complete energy to teaching for nearly three decades, and counted it an honorable profession. I just had further plans.

Some of the things I learned as a teacher spilled over into my writing. I wrote  a teaching novel (35. Symphony in a Minor Key) and Keir, the lead character in Cyan, took up teaching ecology and survival education to the colonists’ children, walking quite literally in my footsteps.

***

The snow started in the afternoon, first as scattered flakes, but soon clinging to the kaal stalks and frosting the gray-purple bowl of the valley with white.  Will turned to Keir for advice, something he rarely had to do any more.

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Keir replied. “It looks like this snow shower will pass quickly.  We’ll push on a few more kilometers and make camp by the river. When we set up the tents, have them staked carefully. Ramananda said we could expect heavier weather when Procyon sets.”

Will nodded and turned away to organize his troop. Then he touched his throat mike and relayed Keir’s advice to Marci’s group who were coming in from another angle and still out of sight in the forest that rimmed the valley.

Most of Will’s kids were about twelve, and this was their graduation exercise. After two years of laying the groundwork, Keir had convinced the council to devote most of the seventh year of the colony’s school to Cyanian ecology and survival techniques. Keir had taught the first few years, but since they had turned sixteen, Will, Marci, and Sven Aressen had taken over the day to day teaching. Keir remained as mentor, and planned each graduation trip.

A few of these kids had seen snow trickling down onto city streets on Earth when they were six or seven, but none of them, including their young leaders, had ever seen snow falling in a natural environment. They were wide eyed with wonder.

They had taken a cargo skimmer eight hundred kilometers north from Crowley and had come the last hundred kilometers on foot. Except for the brief sweep through the region which Keir and Gus had made three weeks earlier, no one had ever explored this area. That was the essence of the exercise; it was real. The land was new and the dangers were only partially known.

The second party broke out of the trees across the valley. Keir glassed them. Marci Nicholas was waving her arms about, pointing out something, still teaching. She was a natural. Gus stumped along beside her.

Keir turned back to his own group, who had quickly moved ahead of him. Each child carried a massive pack and a fletcher in a holster at his side. Only Will could have handled the recoil of one of the scout’s automatics, but those polymer rocket launchers were recoilless, just as deadly, and only a fraction of the weight.

These children were the cream. Of the four hundred children of their age group, these were the thirty who had passed every test, mental, physical, and moral, that Keir could devise. They had learned everything Keir had to teach them. Cyan’s Olympians. Keir smiled with pride, then hurried so they did not leave him behind.

140. I Have a Bad Feeling

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For the explorers returning to Earth from Cyan, seven and one half years have passed, but that perspective comes from twin journeys at near lightspeed. Twenty-five years have passed on Earth, and there have been changes.

Tasmeen was at the controls; Stephan stood behind her with his toes hooked under her seat.  He said, “Stand by to cut.  Cut!” 

The torch died, weightlessness returned, and the static that had been a soft background accompaniment to their actions became understandable speech.  Sort of.

“Bellig-acq.  Akno ID.  Bellig-acq, hype.”

“Huh?”

Gus said, “I would have expected to understand her better than that, even after twenty-five years.”

Stephan said, “That sounded more like code.”

“Or military jargon.  Roger-wilco kind of stuff.”

The message was repeated, and the tone of voice was more harsh.

“We’re still several light minutes away,” Stephan said. “Those messages were sent when our torch was still burning. Any minute they’ll figure out who we are and we’ll get a message that makes more sense.”

Sure enough, the grating, official voice now said: “Unidentified craft approaching Ganymede, are you the Darwin? If you are, acknowledge and proceed according to agreed flight plan. If you are not the Darwin, identify yourself quickly or we will assume belligerence.” The message repeated.

“Bellig-acq. Akno ID,” Tasmeen mused. “Belligerent acquisition, acknowledge identity?”

Stephan cut the gain and said, “That doesn’t sound very friendly. I wonder what happened to Ganymede Station?” He keyed the mike and spoke into it, “Ganymede Station, this is Darwin returning from Procyon system. Our trajectory is nominal for the approach we agreed upon twenty-five years ago. If you want any changes made, tell us quickly. We don’t have much delta-V to play around with. Are your ready to receive a flash synopsis of what we found?”

Stephan increased the gain again. The voice of Ganymede Station droned on while Stephan’s reply ran past it at the speed of light. Keir looked at the viewscreen, but there was nothing to see but stars. Even the sun was just a fat, bright dot in the sky. 

“Darwin, Darwin. We copy your message. Do not, I repeat, do not make uncoded transmissions.  Utilize protocol 7Y4B. Your old flight plan is fine. We are kicking a freighter out of her berth, but we’ll have a place cleared for you by the time you arrive. Welcome back.”

There was little welcome in the voice that said it.

“Jesus Christ, is that all they have to say?” Angrily, Stephan punched the mike key and said, “Ganymede, I will be glad to utilize protocol 7Y4B or whatever makes you happy, as soon as you tell me what the hell it is. What’s gotten into you people? Go get the NASA site administrator.”

Even as Stephan was speaking, Ganymede Station was replaced by another, more pleasant voice.

“Welcome home, Darwin. You will find the language of this year somewhat different than it was when you left. When the Dog Star returned in 2088, we found that it would be best to train comtechs in the jargon of your departure year, and that is the reason for this tape. I know you’re as full of questions as we are, so I’ll save you a time lag. No, we don’t have FTL drive yet. Relativity falls deeper into disrepute every year but no one has come up with a comprehensive theory to replace it. Yes, Dog Star, Europa, and Magellan have all returned. Dog Star found what would have been an Earth type planet, except that it has a Uranian inclination to the ecliptic. They call it Stormking, for obvious reasons . . .”

The tape cut out and the original voice returned. “Darwin, Darwin. Stand by to copy at flash, protocol 7Y4B.” Tasmeen made the connections. There was a high pitched whine as the flash transmission was fed into the computer. Then the tape resumed where it had been interrupted.

“. . . Europa and Magellan both found prime planets. We’ll fill you in on them later.

“The biggest change you will have to be ready for is that NASA no longer exists . . .”

Again the tape was interrupted by the voice of Ganymede. “Darwin, Darwin, copy this carefully. There is no NASA site administrator. You may continue transmitting in clear, but restrict yourselves to necessary navigational queries and replies. No other transmissions will be responded to.”

“. . . because after the general elections of 2103 the people of North America decided to combine all space efforts into one military organization. You are all now members of the Federated Space Service.”

Tasmeen said, “I have a bad feeling about this.”

138. Alone, and more alone

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In the novel Cyan, due out shortly from EDGE, the starship Darwin carries ten explorers at relativistic speeds to explore the Procyon system.

Ten explorers working eleven light years from Earth. As the only humans on the entire planet Cyan, the death of any one is sure to send shock waves reverberating through the group.

Keir Delacroix, groundside leader of the explorers tried to put this into perspective upon the death of one of his colleagues. You will note a deleted name, to avoid a spoiler.

It seems to me that funerals are for the living, for saying things that we already know, to put life and death in perspective and find some comfort.

“We are alone here. We are more alone than any other humans have ever been. When one of us hurts, we all hurt. When one of us dies, a piece of the whole dies. We must be very careful with one another, because we are all we have.

“We come from an Earth that is overflowing with people. One death there is nothing. Had (***) stayed behind, and died, no one would have noticed. Here, her death puts our whole world out of balance. And that is why we are on Cyan — to find a world where individual lives can be valuable again. At least, that is why I am here. Not as a scientist; not even as an explorer; but as a man searching for a place where humanity can find its soul again.

Death is a hungry beast, seldom satisfied with just one victim. And exploring a new planet is no safe endeavor.

***

When pioneers arrived on the east coast of North America, the forest they faced was vast. It was later said that a squirrel could travel from the Atlantic to the Mississippi without ever having to touch the ground. That forest is no more.

When Heinlein’s pioneers reached the stars, flaming laser axes in hand, they wrought similar destruction. Today’s reader knows better.

I wrote Cyan as an exercise in seeing, not what could happen, but what probably would happen, in near-term stellar exploration. That includes both the pressures for colonization from an overcrowded Earth, and a knowledge of the ecological disasters which need to be avoided.

The explorers on Cyan are careful in their daily actions and in planning for future colonization, but they are not prepared to find a truly half-human species. Viki Johanssen, crew anthropologist, demands that Cyan be placed off limits to colonization for their sake. Keir disagrees, and colonization plans go forward.

Viki is faced with a decision. Being one of so few is a lonely thought, but could she survive being truly alone? What if she stayed behind when the Darwin returned, to study these creatures while they were still pristine, before human colonists came in.

What would you do, if you knew that mankind’s only chance to study this half-human species was at hand, but you would have to become the sole inhabitant of an entire planet, certainly for decades, perhaps forever?

Would you choose to stay behind?