I spend a lot of time posting about my writing, but up until now I’ve never posted any of it. Well, I figured it was time to change that and post something from my second unpublished novel, Genesis Earth.
Right now, I’m running it through a fifth draft before I send it to an agent I met at World Fantasy. Here is the prologue, where Michael begins his tale.
Chapter 1
Earth was a ghost that haunted me. She was the single greatest thing that set us space-born apart from the older generation, the five hundred members of the original mission team. Though Heinlein station was the only home I had ever known, I soon learned that Earth, a world I had never seen except in pictures and videos, was where I was truly from.
My parents set the decorative screens in their bedroom to cycle through pictures of old Earth. While they were busy working in the lab, I would often sneak inside and stare at those images for hours. The landscapes and skyscapes they depicted were always so alien to me. Unbroken blue expanse overhead, instead of the grayish space rock of our asteroid. That line between floor and sky known as the ‘horizon.’ Solid ground underfoot, instead of the milky starfield shining up through transparent floors. Trees, plants, and shrubbery growing freely without the aid of hydroponics. Hundreds of human beings walking down wide open-air corridors called ‘roads,’–more people than I’d ever known in my life.
When I was about five years old, I used to ask my mother to bring out her photo album–the one with actual, physical pictures from the old world. I would sit on her lap and stare wide-eyed at the pictures as she explained them to me. That was my uncle, that was my grandmother, those were my cousins: faces from an unreachable world nearly half a light year away and getting further every moment.
One day, sitting on my mother’s lap, I glanced up from the album and saw tears in her eyes. That was the first time I had ever seen my mother cry. It made me feel frightened and unprotected, even in her arms. I never asked her to show me the pictures of Earth again.
Perhaps you’ve found, as I have, that the things that frighten you incite more fascination than the things you love. I trace the beginning of my career as a planetologist to that childhood incident, sitting on my mother’s lap. Years later, when I began my graduate level education, there was never a question in my mind what I would study. I had already chosen.
To me, planetology was never about physics, geology, or chemistry. Those were only the details. It wasn’t even about making a lasting contribution to the science–at least, not when I first started. I studied alien worlds simply to turn the lights on–to dispel the ever-present ghost of Earth that had haunted me from my childhood.
Did it work? Not really. But as I grew, my fascination with Earth grew with me.
Fourteen might seem like a young age to enter one’s chosen field, but you must realize that half the people on Heinlein station were highly trained physicists and engineers. With so many scientists on board, there was no shortage of teachers for those of us who grew up on the station. My parents personally tutored me, and they were two of the most brilliant physicists Earth had ever produced. They were, in fact, the chief scientists over the Mission itself.
The Mission was the closest thing to religion that I ever had. If religious devotion is measured by sacrifices incurred on the basis of unproven belief, I suppose that everyone on the station qualified for sainthood. We had set out from Earth to create mankind’s first wormhole, or prove that it could not be done. For this, my parents had given up everything: family, friends, their homes. Everything. The only safe place for such an experiment was two light years from Earth, and so we spent my entire youth and childhood in transit, not knowing whether the Mission would succeed or fail.
My study of planetology won me a great deal of admiration from the old timers, much to my surprise. Grown-ups who only a few years ago had chastised me for playing hide-and-go-seek in the labs now treated me like someone important. The scientists and engineers routinely asked me what I thought we’d find once we’d opened the wormhole. After all, why would a fourteen year old study about alien worlds if he didn’t expect to visit them someday? They treated me as if I had run some sort of gauntlet or passed a test of tremendous faith. I was one of them, united in the hope of a successful outcome to the great experiment–or, stranger still, I was a role model to them, someone with the faith they struggled so much to keep.
They could not have been more wrong. I didn’t want to explore new planets or set foot on an alien world. The closest I ever came was through the eyepiece of a telescope, and that was the way I wanted it. My studies were purely academic.
When I turned eighteen, we arrived at ground zero. The station became a flurry of nervous energy as we maneuvered into position and set up the hundred trillion kilowatt NOVA generators and focusing mirrors for the graviton beams. With everything spread out across hundreds of cubic kilometers of space, it took us nearly two months before we were ready.
Twenty two years after embarking from Earth, on June 24th, 2143 C.E., the day of the experiment finally arrived. That day forever changed the course of my life.
At the moment of truth, I lay sprawled out on the transparent floor in my room, watching the stars turn beneath me. Large crowds had gathered in other locations to watch, but I preferred to be alone. My father’s voice came over the station-wide radio, giving his moment-by-moment report. Though I was alone, the excitement on the station was so thick could almost taste it.
I hear that it’s common for people on Earth to dream about falling from a great height. I’d never had that dream–the concept of vertigo meant nothing to me. I think I got a taste of it, however, as I watched the wormhole form in the sky.
The starfield began to spread out from a single dark point, the way a film of oil on water separates when it touches a drop of soap. The hole grew surprisingly fast, pushing the stars aside and forming a circle of warped, diffused starlight around its edge. I gasped in fright; the center was pure black, the color of an abyss. As it grew larger, I felt as if it were sucking me in. Soon, however, the hole stabilized, as if it had always been there.
As the station rotated, I discovered that the wormhole had warped the starfield beyond all recognition. I tried to find the constellations I’d known so well, but could only pick out one or two. I felt sad knowing I’d never see any of them again.
The scientists didn’t take much time off to celebrate, but when they did, they went completely wild. Alcohol was everywhere in abundance, from numerous stores and hoards that had been kept for this very occasion. The shiest, most reserved people danced drunk in the hallways, and old enemies who hadn’t talked for years walked up and down the corridors with arms on each others’ shoulders. A spirit of happy, universal friendship swept over the station. People let their guards down, took off their masks, and momentarily forgot any hard hard feelings. It was a glorious time–the end of history.
Eventually, though, the celebration lost steam, the hangovers died down, and we woke up to face the inevitable future. Our robotic probes explored the wormhole and made some basic observations of the other side.
Their findings were frightening enough to sober us all.
Graviton theory told us how to create an artificial wormhole, but it gave us no way to predict where it would open up. We could expect one of three possible outcomes: first, that the wormhole opened to a different location in our present universe; second, that it opened to a different location and different time in our universe; or third, that it opened to an entirely different universe than our own. In every meaningful way, however, we were shooting blind in the dark.
The first observations showed a universe very much like our own, with stars, galaxies, and other nebulae. Just twenty light years away, orbiting a yellow-white main sequence dwarf, the probes discovered a handful of exoplanets. One of them, a terrestrial world, orbited within the star’s habitable zone. An initial spectroscopic survey revealed that the atmosphere of the planet was rich in oxygen and nitrogen–just like Earth.
That was when we detected the signal.
The last probe to return picked up an unnatural high frequency radiation burst, originating from the system with the planet. It lasted only half an hour before dissipating, but was powerful enough to be detectable halfway through the wormhole. No naturally occurring object emitted that kind of signal. The only thing we could compare it to was the radio emissions from a standard NOVA engine–but even then, the signal was more than a hundred times more powerful than anything our technology could produce.
In other words, something strange was out there–something we couldn’t explain. The only way to find out more was to send out a mission to explore the alien star.
As the only qualified planetologist young enough to survive cryofreeze, I was an obvious pick for the mission from the very start. Though I never wanted to go, I couldn’t refuse; if I had, my parents would have killed me. This, they believed, was our moment in history–our moment to make a truly historic contribution to science and humanity. Why wouldn’t I jump at such an opportunity? Of course I would go.
I didn’t become a planetologist to set foot on alien worlds. That was the last thing I ever wanted. After we opened the wormhole, however, what I wanted no longer mattered.
Or so I thought.
