Cameron remained wiry and lean by the grace of good genetics, as far as his colleague could tell, and not by much motivation on Cameron's part. No major bone strengthening or replacement procedures, nor heart or any other organ or muscle replacements. He was fond of reminding Zhdanov that it was all due to his natural vitality.
“Sure, I’ll give you some time to take it in.” Zhdanov added after a moment. “But we have to hurry. Dawe has called everyone to show up in person in the Communications Center.”
Sergei Zhdanov was only thirty-two years old; however, what Zhdanov lacked in experience, he compensated for by bringing talent, energy, enthusiasm, and dedication to his job. Still, many of Cameron's colleagues had considered Zhdanov too young to become a senior member of the UESRC, the United Earth Scientific Research Center.
In personality Zhdanov was what one might almost call a naturally noble man, by choice and by nature: he possessed fair judgment and great mental discernment, though he had little inclination towards making verbal criticisms. However, this integrity of spirit which gleamed through his eyes was often mistaken for upbeat enthusiasm or taken to be the effect of an overabundance of alcohol by those who did not know him well.
Around the UESRC, Zhdanov was becoming better known for his distinctive appearance than his many talents; he was a tall man with a natural grace and a purposeful stride and with short, curling brown hair the color of dry autumn leaves. His youthful features offset a peculiar thoughtfulness in his deep-set, dark eyes.
“I can’t believe what’s happening,” Zhdanov said. “This is unexpected—and I don’t know what to do or say to anyone,” Zhdanov said, thinking out loud. He saw his face reflected in a glass beaker at the lab table and suppressed the usual urge to smile. His lightly freckled nose was rather flat at the base of his forehead but ended in a slight uptilt, and his cheekbones were set rather far apart, making his jaw seem to come to an abrupt point. His small, lobeless ears lay relatively flat against his skull and accented his heart-shaped face. On the whole, his expression was intelligent, composed, competent, but somewhat unapproachable; fortunately, his uneven smile always restored friendliness to his features, and Zhdanov often smiled.
Right now, though, Zhdanov wasn't smiling.
“Yes, yes, sure, I know,” Cameron said, straining to suppress racing thoughts. The object he'd been tracking, moving at near the speed of light—was after all, a spaceship!??
Just as he had suspected. The object emitting radio wave transmissions had appeared while he had been gathering data on a luminous nebula. It had suddenly distorted the nebula with gravitational waves. He had attempted to calculate its rate of speed, with no luck. Not enough radio wave emissions. Something had blocked the signals as the object traveled away from the region—interstellar dust, dark absorption nebulae, or a black hole—he had no idea.
Well, so what? he thought. The Gamma Ray Observatory on space station Gabriel and Flux Collector Base on the moon received and relayed thousands of unusual signals every day. Then almost a year later, another object emitting waves following nearly the same vector as the first entered the Milky Way, just above the zone of avoidance near the galactic plane, where a high concentration of interstellar dust obstructed the view of the galaxies behind it.
The vector it followed was almost the same as the object he had formed and lost a year before.
Gut-clenching fear kept Cameron from sleeping for days. The UFO could have been anything, but Cameron always expected the worst—it was his job. The most recently emitted waves supported the calculation of a blue shift. It was approaching the Earth.
More complex tracking equipment was brought in, and someone instructed signal readings to be relayed from Gabriel's giant bolometer. A few hours later, and—
A spaceship. Shake me, Cameron thought. Shake me hard.
"I don't know if you heard Dawe or not, but it's in the solar system already. Current estimates give us only eight hours before it passes near Earth air-space."
"Where?" Cameron asked hoarsely, his mouth forming the superficial question for him, while underneath, all the while, the core of himself was paralyzed.
"Don't know yet. If it hits us, we're wiped out. We'll have to shoot it down before it makes a terrestrial impact. But right now it's on a course that will sling it by us. I hope to God it's not coming here. For us."
Cameron remained silent.
"We should go now. Once we get to the Command Center, they'll be asking what we need to set up for contact, observation, or exploration, if the object continues to decelerate."
"Ok." Cameron straightened his back and turned around, gazing at his partner languidly through tired eyes.
Zhdanov, meanwhile, was hurriedly collecting his electronic notepad from under the table; finally, with a grin of successfully assumed self-composure, he took a few jaunty steps toward the door and waited for the elevation device to run the lift to their floor. Intoxication had possessed Zhdanov.
Why was it that the unknown was exciting to the young but frightened the old? Cameron wondered. Because the young didn't know any better, he told himself.
"Let's get this show on the road, then." Cameron muttered again and headed for the door where Zhdanov stood waiting, his white labcoat flapping with the force of his sudden speed.
* * * * *
As morning broke over the UESRC, an inter-cranial alert siren blared from the communications center, transmitted to all of the staff who had communication microchips in their brains. The UESRC was not only a secluded scientific observatory, nestled in the agrarian or "rural" zone northeast of Utopia City but also the Space Exploration Division’s main training facility and the Space Exploration Division's main training ground. The inter-cranial alert siren frequently sounded during disaster drills. However, the technical staff of the observatory were not often subjected to it.
“Damn thing makes too much noise!” Cameron clicked off his inner ear communicator to extinguish the piercing noise. He felt certain he would have to endure enough of the siren when he reached the Communications Center itself, until someone had the good sense to turn the infernal transmitter off.
“I can’t stop my wriststrap from scrambling,” Zhdanov said in irritation, as the communications system on his wriststrap malfunctioned from a system-wide overload of communication. “I’ll just turn the communications off.” And he interfaced with the wriststrap to turn it off.
Cameron and Zhdanov passed several windows in refreshing silence before taking the transport down into the underground section of the observatory. Cameron looked out at the rural zone as he walked, half-wishing he could just turn around and go back.
“I feel like my body is turning to lead,” he thought. He felt terrible, and would no doubt be seeking medical attention within the end of the day.
As expected, the sun had risen a little earlier than it had the day before, and living creatures in the nearby rural zone were waking to the crisp air of a spring morning, identical to so many other spring mornings that had come and gone.
Cameron sighed. I would gladly trade this morning with one of those others. Nonetheless, he had never seen a more beautiful sunrise. Outside, the eastern sun had just tipped over the distant mountain peaks and nearby forest and had begun to climb into the powder blue sky above the eastern Quebec province, illuminating streaks of rose-colored clouds; then suddenly the view was cut off by the automatic silver doors of the elevation shaft.
“Give me a status update,” said Cameron to his video wriststrap, which hadn’t malfunctioned.
“No change since your last interface.” The system beamed information to the microchip in his brain.
Meanwhile, the elevation unit activated and let out a low whine that increased, then decreased in pitch; Cameron found himself distracted as they waited to reach the appropriate level.
How strange it suddenly seemed to Cameron that Earth's living creatures remained
eternally insensitive to any events that took place outside her fragile globe. He found himself wondering about a day so many millions of years ago, when a giant asteroid had crashed to Earth and obliterated the dinosaurs.
Had that morning dawned as fair? he wondered, letting a little pessimistic sentiment into his thoughts. At the moment, he, an artificially enhanced super-human, envied the wildlife their ignorance.
On Earth, only humankind had the ability to predict events that might affect the planet's future, but the Earth had been too busy regulating her own affairs to give a thought to an extraterrestrial encounter; in fact, the human race was not at all prepared for one. To be fair to the human race, they had been preoccupied with redressing the global ecological disaster they had caused—no small feat—but admittedly, they had been well clear of the end of The Crisis Years for the past three hundred years. The simple fact was that the human race had just assumed, wrongly, that it would be the first to initiate contacts with other worlds.
“I heard your update,” Zhdanov suddenly said. “But we’ll get a better status report when we arrive at the Communications Center.”
Cameron nodded, still lost in thought.
Cameron had always wondered why technologists presumed it to be that we would be the first to make contact with another world. Even some of his own colleagues tended to cling to traditional conceptions of how the universe operated until overwhelming evidence forced them to accept the truth of new theories. They were creatures of habit and did not let go of cherished notions without a struggle. Cameron could be as stubborn as any of them when it came to certain things, but more often than not, he was at the fore to embrace new, and unorthodox, ideas.
“I’ll give this thing another try and see where Knightwood is now.” Zhdanov said suddenly.
“Ok,” Cameron said.
Many scientists thought that because the Earth had not received any radio signals indicating the existence of any alien species, much less one more advanced than Earth, that no higher civilization could have developed anywhere in the universe. This premise was that if an alien intelligence did exist, it must be at the same level of advancement as the Earth or slightly behind, since no evidence of an intergalactic civilization could be interpreted from any signals or black hole energy mining.
Cameron was laughing now. Cameron had always found such logic anything but logical. The reality was that the evidence might simply not have had time to reach the Earth yet; any signals from far off civilizations could remain undetected for millions of years as the signals traveled through space. An intergalactic civilization could even have flourished and died without disturbing the small group of galaxies that held the Milky Way, one small needle in a universal haystack.
“Now they’re re-considering!” Cameron laughed out loud.
“Knightwood is in the Communications Center,” said Zhdanov with a smile.
“What are you laughing about?” asked Zhdanov.
“Nothing,” said Cameron a little self-consciously. He was still thinking to himself.
Yes, there were even more arguments for the possibility that the Earth was not alone. Had some alien civilizations ended millions of years before life on Earth began, the evidence would have been lost, unseen by human observers. The human race simply would not have known about them. After all, human technology had only a brief history of barely more than a thousand years, not even a blink in the eye of the universe. Some alien culture out there might well have thought that no life could exist on the Earth from the brief period in which human culture had thrived! The signals from Earth had only traveled a thousand light-years, not even out of the Milky Way!
But you never could argue with the idiots, thought Cameron.
This debate had now been permanently and irrevocably resolved with this arrival of an alien ship in the solar system. Apparently, at least to Cameron’s mind, someone or some thing had finally noticed the development of the human race. There had been no forewarning of the alien ship’s coming, but there could be no denying the impact it would leave.
“Almost there, thank God,” said Zhdanov, fidgeting with his sleeve.
Chapter Two
The spaceship Selesta began to decelerate now that she was passing the planetoid Pluto and its twin planetoid Charon, but Ornenkai had no intention of stopping there. He was well aware that, once his only living passenger, the girl Selerael, had been released from her suspension capsule, she would not be able to withstand the harmful effects of traveling at near light-speed, if indeed she was as human as she appeared; that left him little time to prepare the child’s awakening from suspended animation sleep.
When the ship passed the eighth planet of the Kiel system, in one of the ship's many laboratories, the domed, bubble-like covering of a dormant suspended animation capsule finally popped open, dispelling hazy blue vapors that hissed like vipers as the liquid within met the atmosphere.
The tiny child inside blinked her eyes open almost ruefully, unaware of the presence of the ships' computer entity Ornenkai surrounding her, watching her. There was a genuine panic in her movement; after a confused moment, she yawned, then swung her legs around the edge of the capsule and hopped down, one hand still clutching the side. She moved like a wild animal of inordinate power at first, then calmed to something that resembled an observer’s expected notions of a little girl.
Her head throbbed painfully. The mist that clouded her eyes had been the source of the panic, the fear, the confusion. Her infant mind was unable to comprehend the blindness; she understood instinctively that there had always been sight before. Then an image formed in the child’s mind's eye, an image of a woman obscured by a bright light; the woman’s eyes brimmed with tears.
It was the last thing she had seen before being placed into suspended animation, the image of her mother.
When the image faded, this time it was the little girl who cried with tears of anguish. Reduced to a skinny, fragile mass of arms and legs that seemed to crumple beneath her. She sat on the cold floor in helpless blindness for several moments. The one memory she had been able to recall had left her; now there was only mist and the strange world that held her, an uncertain world whose objects she could feel around her, though to her they were only obstacles.
In a moment, she got to her feet again, overpowered by the need to find someone, to seek out something in this strange world that would respond to her presence. Her mind held the definite keen thought of a predator, and even at that tender age, it meant business. Her innocence was her weapon, a cloak of superficial fragility that at times became real.
The moment she began to wander, there was no going back. She would never again find the room where she had awakened; it had melded into the great space and never-ending maze of cruel, sharp objects that surrounded her.
She bumped into the wall around a few corners, walking until her short, bruised legs grew tired. Ornenkai watched in concern when Selerael fell and would not move. For a long time she sat huddled on the floor, until finally, dissatisfied with defeat, she clambered to her feet.
When at last, perhaps an hour later, her sight began to return, the colors awed her. Faint forms leaped out at her from the fog around her eyes, but now she was bold. The visible world could not frighten her as the blindness had. At last the invisible shapes had form. It was she who had come to them, not they who had followed her.
Selerael reveled in her own movement now, in watching the perspectives change the images as she passed by them. Now exploration fully occupied her thoughts. She had not yet remembered that she was alone.
Selerael was tiring again by the time that she had found her way to a dark, cavernous hold. She stopped, afraid for a moment that the blindness would return if she ventured into the dark. Then light illuminated from the hold above, encouraging her forward, and she was no longer afraid.
Arranged in identical rows and columns, shining space fig
hters gleamed as if to celebrate her awakening, each with a different animal icon on its prow. Just above her head, a rectangular protrusion hung from the inner wall in open space. The command post which had been used to help guide space fighters coming in at high speeds and to check the status and number of the returning craft meant no more to her than the fighters. Equally, she had no way of knowing that this meant that there was an airlock and exit hatch nearby.
After a while, she sat down for the last time, surrendering to exhaustion and still unsure of where to go. Somehow she sensed that here was another maze she would have to find her way through. She just didn’t have the energy to try to make her way through it. But a moment later, a rumbling sound beneath the floor sent vibrations through her.
Then the world tilted, sending her skidding across the floor.
* * * * *
Meanwhile, in the UESRC, plotting data of the alien vessel's current position were pouring in from Gabriel, the recon satellites, and the moon, Mars, and Titan bases. Dr. Cameron spared a brief moment thinking about the space stations and colonies as he conferred with Knightwood and Zhdanov. Millions of people lived in them; they were humanity's furthest outposts, the first to be in the path of any vessel coming from space, but completely defenseless, except for their anti-asteroid missiles and a few industrial lasers.
Cameron’s only consolation was that the government had built and maintained the space colonies, and that meant hope. Not only would the government keep order throughout any crisis—but if this alien space vessel left the Earth unharmed, the government could swiftly approve a tracking program to trace its continuing path.
In truth, Cameron reflected, it was a good thing that the space stations and colonies had been created by the government and not by the few private companies left on Earth. Of course, the government could also cut corners—durable materials were expensive but vital to those living in such a hostile environment, where but a simple hull leak could suffocate thousands—but luckily so far, it hadn't.
A few minutes later, Knightwood, Cameron, and Zhdanov, three heads of the five main research teams at the UESRC from the biochemistry, astrochemistry, and chemistry departments, were conjecturing hypotheses as to the ship's origins as estimates of its arrival point and time were confirmed.