The starchild compact, p.28
The Starchild Compact, page 28
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Upon awaking sometime later, Eber spent most of his time at the console taking in whatever visual details of the trip the Resident was able to supply. Although he attempted to determine the exact moments of the brief stops, it turned out to be impossible, since there simply were no physical cues. He contented himself with learning as much as possible about the inner workings of his starship, his chariot of fire, his Merkavah – yes…he liked that name.
Eber's thought process returned several times to the time shift they would experience upon their return to Earth, and as he thought more on this, he began to develop a plan for the future. Since they would obviously have nothing in common with the star-folk descendants when they returned, why not spend the rest of their lives exploring the vast universe in which they lived? The Arc was built to last virtually forever, so they could always return from time to time, look in on the far distant star-folk descendants, perhaps even grab some of their advanced technology, and then take off again for parts unknown. They could stay together as a family and watch their race become whatever intelligent, advance-technology races become.
Eber shared his thoughts with Asshur, and during the following days they discussed the ramifications. From time to time, one or the other of the rest joined their conversations, but for the most part, it was Eber and Asshur who plotted the future together.
As the third hour of day nine passed, a soft chime awakened Eber from his nap in the console chair. He checked the time and turned as Asshur sat down in the chair beside him. "Hey…ready to do this?"
Together, they studied the display before them. It showed their sun, with twelve rings indicating the planetary paths for its twelve planets, four rocky planets and eight gas giants. A glowing dot on each ring indicated the Resident's best estimate of each planet's position. Because they had no actual starting position for the elements in the equation, and because of the individual motion of every element in the whole dynamic system, there was no practical way to determine each planet's actual position. The Resident would bring them to the ideal location above the ecliptic to power down to their home world, Ectaris, based upon its best estimate of the individual elements. The stop at minus one hour served to refine the estimate, and to give the humans the possibility to override the decision.
"Looks good to me," Asshur said, after checking several numbers on a monitor between them.
"I agree," Eber said, and gave the Resident permission to proceed.
There was no perceptible difference inside the spacecraft, but the display before Eber and Asshur began to shift noticeably. Eber adjusted the display to show their calculated position from near the ecliptic and normal to their plane of approach. The rest of the crew had gathered behind them to observe the approach.
"Oh, look, there's Ectaris," Ishtar said, tossing her waist-length golden tresses as she placed her hands on Asshur's shoulders and squeezed gently.
"Actually," Asshur said back, "we don't know it's there. That's just the Resident's best guess. We're still about a light-year out, with no way to receive real-time information."
"I knew that," Ishtar retorted, with a bit of a pout. Sarai giggled and squeezed her hand, looking up at the golden goddess towering above her.
"I thought the same thing," she said. "It's hard to believe we're already here."
Vesta concurred, and everyone nodded. "The whole thing seems bizarre," she said. "To have come so far so fast…" Her voice trailed off as the Resident updated the display to reflect its latest estimates, and each of the planets jumped to a new location. Ectaris now lay on the other side of the sun from its earlier position.
Eber glanced at the number display to his right. "These positions are about ninety-six percent accurate," he said.
Merkavah came out of hyper-V at the minus one minute mark, hovering about three light hours above the Resident's best calculated position for Ectaris.
#
"Let's see what's really out there," Eber said, adjusting a couple of controls.
The screen before them filled with a ruined landscape, seen from directly above, barren and lifeless. Barren hardly described it. The surface was scoured rock, not smooth like a ball, but smoothly rounded, with no sharp protrusions, gently sloping granite hills, but no mountains.
"What's that?" Azurad asked, pointing to a craggy break in the surface.
"Looks like a big crack to me," Asshur said, adjusting the controls to zoom in to the feature. "Deep, too," he added as the image filled the screen.
"Over there…look!" Ishtar leaned over Asshur, pointing at a glowing feature at the far edge of the screen. "That looks like magma outpouring, don't you think?"
"At least a million arouras," Eber said, referring to a surface measure of one-hundred cubits square, roughly the equivalent of three-quarters of a football or soccer field, where a cubit is about two-thirds of a meter.
"There's no softening of the limb," Aram pointed out, slipping his arm around Sarai. "Atmosphere's gone…" His voice trailed off. "It's dead, it's really dead…there's nothing left."
The small group watched solemnly as Eber brought their craft closer to Ectaris with short, high-speed jumps, until he instructed the Resident to put them into a polar orbit at an altitude of about a hundred kilometers. He queried, and the Resident informed the group that Ectaris' rotation was virtually unchanged. As the ruined planet turned below them, they could see no sign of the two great continental landmasses or the vast ocean basins that had surrounded them. They saw nothing but raw rock, low hills, huge cracks, and fields of molten lava.
They scanned the radio frequency spectrum, but heard nothing except background static. Asshur instructed the Resident to record the planet's surface. "For the folks back home," he told the others.
#
Several hours later they had collected everything they needed. The gloom that permeated the fourteen travelers was palpable. Vesta could not shake off the sense of foreboding she had felt ever since they established orbit around Ectaris. She approached Eber and slipped her arm around his waist, giving him a gentle squeeze. "Grandson mine," she said, "do you think Dameter fared any better?"
"It's over three times the distance," he told her. "It's possible."
The others had turned toward Vesta and Eber as they talked. "We've come this far," Shem said. "Might as well check it out."
"It was colonized, wasn't it?" Rasu'eja said, looking around at the others.
Lud nodded. The colonization of the fourth planet, Dameter, had been a research project of his in college. He knew more about Dameter than anyone else in the group – at least as it was before the nova. While Eber set up the transit to Dameter, Lud told the others about the first few years after the initial landing.
"There were two schools of thought," he told them. "One group wanted to set up a base on the moon, and use that as a launch point for Dameter and points beyond. The others advocated a direct Ectaris-to-Dameter mission, and that is what they eventually did. After several exploratory unmanned missions, they launched the first of five missions designed to set up an automated base station that would form the nucleus of the first human exploration. These were followed by a team of eight explorers who spent the next three years establishing their presence on Dameter."
Lud went on to describe the development of a human presence on Dameter. It had a breathable atmosphere, although it was much colder and more arid than Ectaris. Nevertheless, within ten years several thousand people called Dameter their home, and by the time of the exodus, Dameter boasted a population of several million. Even the broad asteroid belt beyond Dameter was being actively mined for raw materials, Lud told them, and several human settlements were thriving among the asteroids.
As Lud was winding up his tale, Eber announced that they were approaching Dameter. "It's kind of hard to get used to," he told them with a grin, "high-speed interplanetary passage." He instructed the Resident to put them in another polar orbit. "I could get used to this."
#
Dameter from space was just beginning to show signs of human presence when they had to leave. It had no oceans and was mostly barren. Now, however, it was indistinguishable from Ectaris. It displayed bare rock scoured clean of every bit of topsoil, mountain ranges gone, lots of tectonic activity, and no atmosphere.
Eber trained his sensors outward toward the asteroid belt, but found nothing. The expanding nova apparently had vaporized all but the largest asteroids. The Resident estimated that it would take several weeks of intense searching to find even one of those, if they could be found at all with the equipment Merkavah had onboard.
After several hours of recording Dameter's surface, Shakbah expressed what was on everybody's mind: "Let's pack it up and go home!
Chapter 27
The education process did not stop with Carmen's story. Every time a crew member sat before one of the screens it would ask several questions that seemed designed to identify the individual at the console, and to determine that person's expertise. Within a short period, the system began to feed skill-specific information to each of the nine crew members whom the system recognized the moment each sat before the console. Jon believed the system was using visual images from a hidden camera, but no one had been able to find the lenses.
As the day progressed, Jon became increasingly concerned that they had not been able to communicate with Houston. He beckoned Demitri to the side. "I want you to take your team back to Base Camp and bring Houston up-to-date."
"Sure, but how do we do that? I don't think we have any idea in what direction or how far Base Camp is. It could be a problem, no?" Demitri grinned at Jon.
Ari joined them, and Jon told him his plans. "I have an idea," Ari said. He stepped to the nearest console, currently occupied by Chen, and asked him to give up his place for a bit. Ari sat down and entered some words.
Jon and Demitri scanned them with their links: "How do we operate the floaters – the floating transportation cars?"
The screen filled with characters and what appeared to be a short list. Ari translated. It was a set of instructions that would enable use of the floaters by all the crew members, using simple voice commands. The system was set up to use what they now called Founder-Speak, and although it might have been possible to convert it to English, Jon thought it better not to interfere with such a fundamental operation. Each crew member had a working link translator that was capable of translating an English order into Founder-Speak, and then to speak the order.
Demitri got his people ready to depart. "Wear your suits," he told them, "but carry your helmets." He looked at Ginger, who was still sitting at one of the consoles. "Are you joining us, Girl?" he asked, grinning at her.
"I'll be right out – just need to finish this."
Jon joined them as they passed through the locks into the still brilliantly lit main shaft chamber where the floater waited patiently. "If you are able," Jon told Demitri, "lay optical thread on your way back. That way we can stay in touch, and you can even hook me up with Houston."
Just then, Ginger called Jon on their local net. "Hold up, Jon, I think I've cracked their communication system." Jon and Demitri looked at each other with delighted grins.
"We're on our way back in," Jon told Ginger.
#
Ginger felt a bit giddy as she tapped at her console. It had been so simple. All she did was ask a question just like Ari had done. "How can we communicate wirelessly with each other?" she had asked, and the system told her.
By the time the others returned, Ginger had entered the necessary communication parameters, and that was it. She found herself looking at a holoimage of Base Camp, and was able to manipulate the cameras just as if she were using her thread-connected controls.
Ginger explained to Jon and the others what she had done. In hindsight, asking the question was obvious, but she took a certain satisfaction in having asked before Demitri and team actually left. "I'll set you up for a burst transmission to Houston," she told Jon. "Do you want the complete record since the last transmission?"
"Yah, but I will record an introduction…try to put all this into context."
#
Rod Zakes leaned back in thought following Jon's final words: "I know there is a lot happening back there, Rod. You guys are dealing with things you never dreamed would be an issue. And now this… The Hebrew Connection is cast-in-concrete solid. I have no idea what that connection might be, but remember that these guys are technologically light years ahead of us. There can be no doubt that they arrived here, in our solar system, one-hundred-fifty-thousand or so years ago. Are we their descendants? Hell…I don't know! If we are, what happened to their advanced technology? A hundred-fifty-thousand years is a very long time.
"Right now, I'm very glad I don't have your job."
Rod closed his eyes. How do you explain this? he asked himself. How do you get from a star-faring civilization numbering perhaps in the tens of billions, to scattered Neolithic cultures that we know existed here on Earth seven or eight thousand years ago?
This matter had moved way above his pay grade he decided as he placed a call to the White House. Fifteen minutes later Rod boarded a helicopter at the Jonson Space Center Heliport, and shortly thereafter he leaned back in the comfortable seat of a NASA Rockwell business jet, headed for Washington, DC.
#
The Ayatollah looked up sharply after reading the report just handed to him by a robed advisor. "Zakes is flying to Washington?"
"He is, Honorable One." The advisor bowed deeply. "We believe NASA has received a new transmission from Iapetus."
"Believe? What does it contain?" the Ayatollah demanded, his voice rising a pitch.
"We do not know, Sahib…" Terror lurked just below the surface of the advisor's voice. "We are trying…"
"Find out!" the Ayatollah thundered, "Or I will have your head!"
The advisor backed away rapidly, bowing low as he escaped through a door.
#
The bland official announcement of the latest transmission from Iapetus offered no hint of the paradigm-changing Hebrew connection. Rod listened in amazement as the official White House spokesperson blandly explained that there had been a temporary communications malfunction, but that the international team under the able leadership of Captain Jon Stock had corrected the problem, and things were back to normal, or at least as normal as one could expect under the circumstances.
The Russian announcement that followed within a few minutes managed to give Demitri credit for fixing the problem. The Canadians, the Israelis, and the Germans reflected the White House lead, and so did the Australians, except they mentioned Ginger's role as Communications Officer. The French added some material from an earlier report that gave Michele center stage, and India managed to give credit to both Jon and Demitri, with a nod to the Caliphate. China announced the transmission, noting that the Chinese presence had brought about the solution. The Ayatollah sent a diplomatic demand for immediate information on the status of Saeed, and in the streets of Teheran a carefully orchestrated demonstration condemned the infidels' presence on Iapetus.
Americans and Canadians exchanged high-fives on city sidewalks, Israelis nodded sagely at one another, Germans exchanged Prosits!, the French clinked wine glasses, the Russians tossed back an extra vodka or three, and the Chinese dragon-danced through the streets of cities, towns and villages. Hindis danced in the streets of New Delhi and Mumbai, and died by the hundreds when the Tamil National Liberation Army triggered another two car bombs. Muslims in Jammu and Kashmir poured into the streets, celebrating the Hindi deaths. Muslims in Jakarta, seeing the holovision images of demonstrations in Teheran, rioted in sympathy, burning Jon Stokes in effigy, and beheading four Christians for good measure. Worldwide Raëlians, seeming to know something no one else was aware of, held candle-light vigils at the Jonson Space Center, ESA Paris headquarters, and outside their slab-sided churches everywhere.
Has the world gone mad? Rod questioned as the worldwide updates streamed into his Com Center. What will happen when they learn the truth?
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Demitri and his team returned to the Com Center, as Jon had started to think of it, with their floater jammed with everything they had left at Base Camp. Before he let them set up camp, Jon returned inside and queried the left-most console: "Show us suitable living quarters."
He was rewarded with an image of a four-sided pyramid-shaped building about five kilometers distant, consisting of individual cubical units. The units were stacked so that each layer was set back, creating a flat area in front of each unit that was the top of the unit below. The pyramid was twenty-units high, with forty units along each base, and strangely reminiscent of South American pyramids Jon had seen in holograms, and even the pyramids of Ancient Egypt. The dwellings themselves consisted of any number of vertical and horizontal interlocking units, with at least one or more units forming the front of each dwelling. Jon could see that this was a very efficient and compact way to house a large number of families, while giving them a relatively uncluttered, non-crowded environment. Jon could not help but think of it as an orderly, pyramid-shaped stack of blocks.
The system told Jon that each Stack housed approximately 10,000 families, and that they included shopping centers, recreation and entertainment facilities, and virtually everything else a community needed to live and prosper. The Arc contained about a million such stacks, not all identical, but varying in design and theme.
They were welcome, the system told Jon, to use as many units as they needed.
"What do you think?" Jon asked Demitri. "Our links will give us full communication with the Com Center, and we can make ourselves more comfortable as we set the stage for further exploration."
