Persister: Space Funding Crisis I

  Chapter 7

  The garden in the courtyard was a place that invited you to stay. A soft breeze led through damp hedgerows to a small clearing cobbled with small stones laid in concentric circles. At the centre of the courtyard, a blooming peony was picked out by bright sunshine. A wooden bench was set in the shade of one of the giant trees. Arianne sat down and stared up at the slowly swaying leaves sifting the sunlight. It was almost possible to forget about academia. Perhaps, thought Arianne, it would be possible to live in a place like this, to quit this crazy career that dragged you through tides of time and space and have a simple, unbroken life. She could watch the small, dark green vines grow day by day and feel the slow change of the seasons. She could experience the full arc of the sighing branches instead of living in stop-motion.

  Of course, looking above the branches of the tree, Arianne could see the dock at the centre of the hub’s spokes, and beyond that the dark side of the ring. Even here, there was a reminder of the solemn power of CAFCA’s empire. She could make out lights on the dusk edge, a reminder that people were toiling deep into the 36 hour day, fuelling the unrelenting machine. Arianne’s left eye twitched.

  Time to get SynchedIn, thought Arianne. She took out her terminal and logged on. A thin line appeared at the top of the screen, representing her time line. The leftmost part of the line – representing the start of her life – was relatively long and unbroken, with a small gap for when her great-great grandmother had taken her on a visit to Kapteyn’s biology department where she worked. The line continued until her move to Io for university - a gap of 5 years (mainly waiting for admission approval). A little further along, a longer gap in the line represented her field trip to the Gliese system - a tiny pixel for the time actually researching surrounded by a 40 year void. The next section represented her PhD, and Arianne was disappointed in how short it looked compared to how long it had felt. Finally, there was then a huge gulf running almost up to the present. 153 years asleep. As she watched, her line updated. Her past compressed and a few ‘live’ pixels were added to represent her waking up at Io and then a short gap representing the trip to the central hub. Arianne was reminded that she had met Holt over a decade ago, not this morning. Her line ended in a glowing point, marking the present.

  A list of her friends and colleagues appeared on the left of the screen, with a series of blue lines underneath hers. They formed a riot of morse code charting their lives since the last time Arianne had logged on. Most were fairly continuous, with a few patches here and there. The field linguists had more blank space than most. Most of the more senior professors kept regular ‘office’ years, but these were disrupted by the major conferences: Almost everyone’s line stopped at the same time for travel, and then appeared again at the same time for the meetings. Some of the blue lines were just regularly spaced dots - her friends from the physics department who would set up an experiment, then head to the chryochamber while it ran (not before a few nights of heavy drinking, though).

  Halfway down the page, Arianne saw Professor Golden’s line, which ended a little after the start of Arianne’s long sleep. The end was marked with a blue cross - an indication that the Professor would not be waking up again. Scanning down the list, Arianne saw a few other crosses. Not really surprising, given that she had been asleep for at least two regular lifetimes. Some of the crosses ended after a long unbroken line. Perhaps some had got out of academia and led normal lives, thought Arianne. There were a few people she would have liked to see again, and she felt a stinging sense of all the parties they had probably had without her. But there was no deep welling up of emotion. After all, you didn’t get into academia if you couldn’t handle detachment.

  Still, she couldn’t help but feel the vague tingling of hope as she scrolled down the list, looking for Coll. The line appeared and aligned itself with Arianne’s. The bars played cat-and-mouse across the first half of her life, meeting up and diverging around classes and conferences. Both disappeared together and surfaced for her time in Gliese (Coll was only in the next planet over!) before slowly falling out of phase again. Dragging her eyes to the right, Arianne felt her stomach flit into zero G. The blue line continued. Coll was still alive, somewhere, but asleep for now. Perhaps a post doc position had opened up in Gliese? Her finger hovered over the message button, but what would she say? She didn’t even know how long she’d be awake for this time. She was already due to sleep for another few months just to get to a meeting that would tell her what she was supposed to be doing.

  Just underneath Coll’s line, Arianne saw Richard’s. Strange, he’d gone to sleep shortly after she’d seen him on Io. He should have been working on the grant, perhaps something had gone wrong? Apparently, he was not currently online.

  Arianne suddenly remembered the metalic thing that Richard had given her. She reached into her pocket and was half surprised to find it still there. Checking that she was alone, she brought it out into the sunlight.

  It was a flat oblong picece of metal, dark with flecks of lighter shale, and fit easily within her palm. In each corner there was a very small hole, countersunk as if it had been bolted to something. There were scratch marks around one of the holes, and another corner was slightly dented. Removed in haste? Stolen? Arianne wondered why Richard had given her this. She had been expecting it to be some kind of data storage device, but it didn’t appear to be broadcasting, and there was no obvious port, or any interface. Turning it over, Arianne saw some markings carved into it, and realised it was a word.

  “PERSISTER”