6 Mar 2007

To reach the stars

Posted by joncooper

I happened to be passing by Regina 9 one day while on shore leave and decided to stop in and see my uncle, Richard Claymore. I hadn’t seen him for decades; for the past thirty years I had been stationed in deep space, blazing a path for others to follow. All I had heard in that time was that my uncle had retreated from public life and become something of a recluse.

To be honest, I was a little concerned about him. Since we were the same age we had grown up together, and as children we both dreamed of exploring the outer reaches of the galaxy. As children we talked for hours about the latest discoveries in space and the colonies that were being built on distant planets. We both wanted a part of the action and we worked hard to achieve our dreams: in college my uncle studied terraformation and I majored in faster-than-light propulsion. Neither of us doubted that we would make it, but if I had to guess which of us were more likely to be accepted into the Deep Space Exploration Guild I would have picked my uncle. Even his professors thought he was the brightest student they’d ever seen.

Life, though, didn’t turn out as we had planned. Both of us applied for jobs in the DSEG, but to our great surprise I was accepted and my uncle was not. The DSEG claimed that there weren’t any openings left for terraformation engineers; the trouble they faced was finding the right kind of dead planet, not in bringing that planet to life. To this day I still believe that was just an excuse.

Once I was in deep space I became a busy man and lost touch with everyone back home. My unit stayed far outside the colonized areas; even the nearest trade lanes were hundreds of light-years away. Since we were beyond the range of even deep-space tachyon receivers there was no easy way to send messages back home, and as time went on I got more wrapped up in my work and thought less and less of home.

I still occasionally heard bits of news from other DSEG units I encountered in the field. At first, from what I could tell, my uncle seemed to be in good spirits: he had accepted defeat graciously and spent his energies building a company that manufactured atomic engineering equipment. Over time he built it into an extremely profitable business, but as the years went by he seemed to lose interest in it and eventually turned its day-to-day operations over to someone else.

When I heard that I began to wonder if my uncle was starting to regret his past. Being a part of the DSEG was an amazing experience, and I knew my uncle had longed to be a part of it as much as I had. The DSEG would send my unit to entirely new worlds – worlds that had never before been visited by anyone – and we were responsible for surveying it and preparing for the terraformation process that was required before it could be inhabited. Despite all the advancements we’ve had in the past three centuries terraformation is still a challenging business: it took a century and a fortune to turn a dry, barren planet into a wet, fertile one. There’s so much that has to be done, and it becomes even more time-consuming if we have to move the planet into a different orbit or find a sizeable moon for it. I loved every minute of it, though: we were the first to find new worlds, the first to see them, and the first to live on them while preparing them for the cities that would follow. We would all go down in history and we knew it.

I knew my uncle could have joined us had he played his cards right. In his enthusiasm, though, he had overstepped his bounds: during his job interview with the DSEG he foolishly tried to sell them on a radical new approach to terraforming planets. Spatial mechanics is outside my field, but he said something to the effect that that moving atoms around was a huge waste of time and instead they ought to be tinkering with the mechanics of space. It didn’t make a lot of sense to me and I suspect it didn’t make a lot of sense to them either; his application was turned down, and that was that.

All of these things were in my head when I called my uncle that fateful day and asked him if I could pay him a visit. To my surprise he said he’d love to see me and that I was free to stay as long as I liked. He was greatly disappointed when I said I could only stay for the night, but he still invited me to pay him a visit.

. . . . .

 
So I did. Regina 9 was not a very large well-known planet; it was outside the main flow of business and had a rural, laid-back atmosphere. My uncle had built a beautiful place there deep in the countryside, nestled amidst a sea of rolling green hills. I had never visited it before but I’d seen pictures of it, and it was really something: a large, elegant mansion with old-fashioned pillars, bay windows, and a large front porch. It looked like something taken straight from the Victorian Era and was a refreshing change from the ultra-modern residences that were so common these days.

My uncle was there at the spaceport to pick me up and took me on a delightful ride to his sprawling estate in an old-fashioned propeller-driven plane. There’s nothing quite like flying over the countryside in the spring; there’s a sense of beauty and tranquility that you just can’t get on a high-speed monorail or starship. The entire world seems to be at your feet while you soar lazily through the sky and soak in the beautiful view.

During the two-hour flight we began to catch up on old times. I asked him how everyone was doing and he filled me in on all the latest news. He asked me how life was on the edge of civilization and I told him about the amazing sights I’d seen. He listened with interest and told me he was glad I was enjoying my job.

I noticed that my uncle didn’t say a lot about himself. When I told him that I’d heard he had left his company he replied that he’d had his fill of business and decided it was time to move on and fulfill his dream of exploring new worlds.

He explained what he meant later that night, after we’d arrived home, had dinner, and started to relax. After giving me a tour of his stately residence he showed me his pride and joy: the library. His collection was astonishing: the library was a huge two-story room, decorated in true Victorian fashion and filled with thousands upon thousands of ornate hardback books. These were real books, too, made from genuine paper, and he had more of them than any museum I’d ever seen.

My uncle laughed when he saw my eyes widen and told me that this was his work now. He had been colleting books over the past decade; some he’d written, some he’d purchased, and others he had printed. Still others, he said, were gifts from his friends.

“James,” he said, “there’s nothing like writing a book. When the DSEG goes out and finds a planet it takes them enormous effort to transform it from a barren wasteland into a rich fairyland. They have to wait most of their lives to see their vision come true, and it takes an incredible amount of time, energy, and money to make it happen.

“Writing books allows me to do the same thing that you’re doing, only on a much vaster scale. In a book, I can sit down at my desk and write my own worlds – fantastic places that had never been seen before. I don’t have to wait a century to see my dreams; all it takes is a little bit of time and imagination to create places as gripping as anything you’ve seen out there in space.

“Of course, the size of the world I have in mind will affect how long it takes to write it. Sometimes I can wrap things up in just a week, and sometimes it takes years. There’s one book I started writing ten years ago that I still haven’t finished – and there’s another I wrote in a single day. It’s exciting, James: it is truly a gift from God.”

My uncle invited me to look around, and as I did so I began to see what he meant. It really did take ages to terraform a planet, but with a book you could build fantastic worlds in a matter of months. You could even build places that defied the laws of physics and were still filled with life and adventure. Of course, these places weren’t real, like the worlds I explored; they existed only in the imagination – but for all that they were still amazing places.

While I was looking around my uncle told me that he had some pressing business to attend to and would return in a few hours. I nodded, not really paying him any attention, and continued browsing through the many books stacked on his shelves. My uncle smiled when he saw my fascination with his library and left the room, promising to come back later.

After he left I continued to explore, picking out books from the shelf at random and browsing through them. A small row of books on the other side of the room happened to catch my eye; of all the books in the library they looked phony, somehow. When I went up to them and examined them closely I discovered that they were just book spines glued onto a wooden backing, and a little probing revealed a small panel that, when pressed, opened a short passage leading to another large library.

Grinning at my discovery and still clutching a book I had picked up earlier, I stepped into the passage. The secret door quietly slid shut behind me. My uncle’s childhood love of secret passages must have never left him, I thought; I should have known that he would have something like this in his house. Feeling a bit mischievous I wandered through his hidden library and decided to see what kind of books my uncle had stashed away, hidden from casual observers.

I gently picked one off the shelf and looked it over. This book seemed very old, much older than the ones in the other room; it was obviously hand-made, though finely done, and had some strange, hand-written lettering on the cover in a language I didn’t recognize. I opened the book to the middle and began to flip through the pages, and saw to my surprise that the entire book had been written by hand with real ink. Someone with very fine, flowing handwriting had written pages and pages of text in some alien language. I wondered what it said and had the eerie feeling that I was holding something ancient and irreplaceable.

I turned the book to its first page to see if there was any sort of explanatory note with the book, and saw instead a rectangular panel near the top of the page. As I watched the panel came alive; it looked like amazingly clear videoscreen that offered a looped 30-second tour of a gorgeous planet, filled with tall mountains, soaring evergreens and a beautiful sky. The screen was so good that it made the world look real; you could imagine that it really existed somewhere. I’d never seen anything like it before and thought it was pretty clever: the screen was probably designed as an illustration, to give the reader a visual glimpse of the world contained within the book.

After putting that volume back on the shelf I glanced across the library and saw a worn desk sitting in a corner with a book lying on top of it. Curious, I went over to the desk and examined the book. A quick glance showed that it had no writing on its pages; it was empty save for a black rectangle on the first page. When I spotted the inkwell and pen I surmised that this private library was where my uncle did his writing. The paper was probably some kind of modern electronic paper that could read the ink off the page; once my uncle finished his book the pages could interpret what was written on them and, based on that, generate the 30-second flyby that I had witnessed in the other volume. Not a bad trick; I wondered why I hadn’t seen it before in my wanderings around the galaxy. I set the book back down on his desk.

I settled down in a comfortable chair in the hidden library and began reading the book I had picked up earlier. After a while I began to get a little tired, and before I knew it I had drifted off to sleep.

I don’t know how long I slept in that chair, but late that night something woke me up. When I opened my eyes I saw that the room was quite dark, save for a light shining on the worn desk in the corner. Sitting at the desk was my uncle; he was busy writing in the blank book that was lying on the desk. I watched him scribble away, pausing now and then to dip his pen in ink. He was very intent on his work and so I remained quiet, not wanting to disturb him.

After a few minutes of work – although he could have been writing for hours before I woke up – he closed the book he had been writing in and then opened it to its first page. I saw colors shine onto his face, as if the panel in the front was now active and emitting light. My uncle watched the panel for a while and then smiled. He stood up, yawned, and then picked up a backpack that was lying next to the desk. After placing a few items into it he laid his hand on the panel on the book – and disappeared.

I gasped. What had happened to my uncle? I got out of the chair and walked over to the desk, but by the time I got there the book was gone. I was briefly surprised at its disappearance until I heard a soft click, and then realized it must have lowered itself into a secret cavity inside the desk. I tried to find a way to locate it again, but my search was in vain.
Since it was late and I was tired I went up to my room and went to bed. The next morning I found no sign of my uncle; his butler told me that he had left the night before on an urgent assignment, and that was that. I used his matter transporter to beam back to the spaceport, and from there boarded a starship and went back out into space.

. . . . .

 
That happened three years ago. I haven’t had a chance to go back to see my uncle since then, but my visit has never left my mind. Maybe I was just dreaming when I thought I saw my uncle at that desk, writing. Maybe I just imagined it; I was pretty tired.

What I can’t get out of my head, though, is this: what if it wasn’t just a dream? What if, when my uncle told me he wrote worlds with pen and ink, he meant exactly that? What if the worlds he writes about are not just limited to the imagination, but are actually real?

It’s impossible, of course. No one can build worlds just by writing about them. I’ve wondered, though: what would have happened if I had touched that glowing panel in the book I had picked up?

Next time I’m on shore leave I really should pay my uncle another visit and find out what is really going on. Maybe I’m crazy, and maybe my years in deep space have affected my mind, but – what if my uncle has found a new way to reach the stars?

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