“That’s the story I’m going to tell all the Earthworms I meet. Wish me luck.”
14
THE AMATEUR
BY THE END OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY THERE WERE very few sciences in which an amateur could hope to make important discoveries—but astronomy, as it always had been, remained one of them.
True, no amateur—however affluent—could hope to match the equipment routinely used by the great observatories on Earth, the Moon, and in orbit. But the professionals specialized in narrow fields of study, and the Universe is so enormous that they could never look at more than a tiny fraction of it at one time. There was plenty left over for energetic and knowledgeable enthusiasts to explore: you did not have to own a very big telescope to find something that no one else had ever seen, if you knew how to set about it.
Dr. Angus Millar’s duties as registrar at Port Lowell Medical Center were not exactly demanding; unlike terrestrial colonists, settlers on Mars had no new and exotic diseases to contend with, and most of a doctor’s work involved dealing with accidents. It was true that some peculiar bone defects had turned up in the second and third generations, doubtless owing to the low gravity; but the medical establishment was confident that it would be able to deal with them before they became serious.
Thanks to his ample spare time, Dr. Millar was one of the few amateur astronomers on Mars. Over the years he had built a series of reflectors—grinding, polishing, and silvering the mirrors by techniques that thousands of devoted telescope-makers had perfected over a period of centuries.
At first he had spent much time observing the planet Earth, despite the amused comments of his friends. “Why bother?” they had asked. “It’s really quite well explored—it’s even supposed to harbor intelligent life-forms.”
But they became silent when Millar showed them the beautiful blue crescent hanging there in space, with the smaller but identically phased Moon hovering beside it. All of history, except for the last few moments, lay there in the field of the telescope. However far it traveled out into the Universe, the human species could never wholly break its bonds to the home planet.
However, the critics had a point: Earth was not a very rewarding subject for observation. Much of it was usually covered with clouds, and when it was at its closest, only the nightside was turned toward Mars, so that all natural features were invisible. A century earlier, the “dark side” of Earth had been anything but that, as megawatts of electricity were thrown wastefully into the sky. Though a more energy-conscious society had put a stop to the worst abuses, most cities of any size could still be easily detected as glowing islands of light.
Dr. Millar wished he could have been around on Earth Date 10 November 2084 to observe that rare and beautiful phenomenon—the transit of Earth across the face of the sun. It had looked like a small, perfectly circular sunspot as it moved slowly across the solar disc, but at the midpoint of its passage a brilliant star had blazed at its center. Batteries of lasers on the dark side of Earth were greeting the Red Planet in the midnight sky that was now Mankind’s second home. All of Mars had watched, and the event was still recalled in tones of reverent awe.
There was another date in the past, however, for which Dr. Millar felt a particular affinity, owing to a perfectly trivial coincidence of no interest to anyone but himself. One of the largest craters on Mars had been named after another amateur astronomer, who happened to share his birth date—two centuries earlier.
As soon as good photographs of the planet started coming back from the first space probes, finding names for all the thousands of new formations became a major problem. Some choices were obvious—famous astronomers, scientists, and explorers such as Copernicus, Kepler, Columbus, Newton, Darwin, Einstein. Next came authors who had been associated with the planet—Wells, Burroughs, Weinbaum, Heinlein, Bradbury. And then a miscellaneous list of obscure terrestrial places and individuals, some having only the most tenuous connection with Mars.
The new inhabitants of the planet were not always happy with the place names bequeathed to them, which they had to use in their everyday lives. Who or what on Earth—let alone on Mars—were Dank, Dia-Cau, Eil, Gagra, Kagul, Suit, Tiwi, Waspam, Yat?
The Revisionists were always agitating for more appropriate—and more euphonious—names and most people agreed with them. So a standing committee was set up to deal with this problem, even though it was hardly the most pressing one affecting human survival on Mars. As everybody knew that he had plenty of spare time, and was interested in astronomy, it was inevitable that Dr. Millar was co-opted.
“Why,” he was asked one day, “should one of the biggest craters on Mars be named Molesworth? It’s one hundred seventy-five kilometers across! Who the hell was Molesworth?”
After some research, and several expensive spacefaxes to Earth, Millar was able to answer this question. Percy B. Molesworth was an English railway engineer and amateur astronomer who made and published many drawings of Mars at the beginning of the Twentieth Century. Most of his observations were made from the equatorial island of Ceylon, where he died in 1908 at the young age of forty-one.
Dr. Millar was impressed; Molesworth must have loved Mars, and deserved his crater. The fact that they had the same birthday in the Terran calendar gave him an illogical feeling of kinship, and he would sometimes look Earthward through his own telescope to find the island where Molesworth had passed much of his short life. As the Indian Ocean was usually cloudy, he found it only once, but that was an unforgettable experience. He wondered what the young Englishman would have thought had he known that human eyes would one day look down on his home from Mars.
The doctor won his battle to save Molesworth—indeed, there was no serious opposition when he stated his case—but it changed his own attitude toward what had been merely an absorbing hobby. Perhaps he, too, could make a discovery that would carry his name down the centuries.
He was to succeed far better than he dared hope.
Though he had been a boy at the time, Dr. Millar had never forgotten the spectacular return of Halley’s Comet in 2061; doubtless that had something to do with his next move. Many comets—including some of the most famous—had been discovered by amateurs, who had thus secured immortality by writing their names on the heavens. Back on Earth a few centuries ago, the recipe for success had been simple: a good (but not particularly large) telescope, clear skies, an intimate knowledge of the night sky, patience—and a fair amount of luck.
Dr. Millar started with several major advantages over his terrestrial precursors. He always had clear skies, and despite the best efforts of the terraformers, they would remain that way for the next few generations. Because of its greater distance from the sun, Mars was also a slightly better observing platform than Earth. But most important of all, the search could be largely automated. It was no longer necessary to memorize star fields, as some of the old-timers had done, so that you could instantly recognize an intruder.
Photography had long ago made that approach obsolete. It was only necessary to take two exposures, a few hours apart, and then to compare them, to see if anything had moved. Although this could be done at leisure, sitting comfortably indoors and not shivering in the cold night, it was still extremely tedious. The young Clyde Tombaugh, back in the 1930s, had scanned literally millions of star images before discovering Pluto.
The photographic approach had lasted for more than a century before being replaced by electronics. A sensitive television camera could scan the sky, store the resultant star image, then go back and look again later. In a few seconds a computer program could do what had taken Clyde Tombaugh months—ignore all the stationary objects, and “flag” anything that had moved.
It was not really as simple as that. A naive program would rediscover hundreds of known asteroids and satellites, not to mention thousands of pieces of man-made space junk. All these had to be checked against catalogues, but this, too, could be done automatically. Anything that survived this filtering process was likely to
be—interesting.
The auto-search hardware and its programs was not particularly expensive, but like many nonessential, high-tech items, it was not available on Mars. So Dr. Millar had to wait several months before one of Earth’s scientific supply companies could ship it to him—only to find, as was so often the case, that one essential component was faulty. After an acrimonious exchange of spacefaxes, the problem was sorted out. Luckily, the doctor did not have to wait for the next mail boat; when the supplier had reluctantly disgorged circuit details, the local experts were able to get the system operating.
It worked perfectly. The very next night Dr. Millar was delighted to discover Deimos, fifteen Comsats, two ferries in transit, and the incoming flight from the Moon. Of course, he had scanned only a small portion of the sky: even out around Mars space was getting crowded. No wonder he had been offered a rather good price on the equipment; it would be virtually useless beneath the clouds of space junk now orbiting Earth.
During the course of the next year, the doctor discovered two new asteroids, less than a hundred meters across, and attempted to name them Miranda and Lorna, after his wife and daughter. The Interplanetary Astronomical Union accepted the latter, but pointed out that Miranda was a famous satellite of Uranus. Dr. Millar, of course, knew this just as well as the IAU, but he thought it worth a try in the interest of domestic harmony. They finally settled for Mira; no one was likely to confuse a hundred-meter asteroid with a giant red star.
Despite several false alarms, he found nothing new for another year, and was about ready to give up, when the program reported an anomaly. It had observed an object that seemed to be moving—but so slowly that it could not be certain, within the limits of error. It suggested making another observation, after a longer interval of time, to settle the matter one way or the other.
Dr. Millar looked at the tiny spot of light; it could have been a faint star, but the catalogues showed nothing in this position. To his disappointment, here was no trace of the fuzzy halo that would indicate a comet. Just another damned asteroid, he thought; hardly worth bothering to go after. However, Miranda would soon give him a brand-new daughter: it would be nice to have a birthday present for her….
It was an asteroid, just beyond the orbit of Jupiter. Dr. Millar set the computer to calculate its approximate orbit, and was surprised to find that Myrna—as he decided to call it—came quite close to Earth. That made it slightly more interesting.
He was never able to get the name recognized. Before the IAU could approve it, additional observations had given a much more accurate orbit.
And then only one name was possible: Kali, the goddess of destruction.
When Dr. Millar discovered Kali, it was already heading sunward—and Earthward—at an unprecedented velocity. Although the matter was now of somewhat academic importance, everyone wanted to know why SPACEGUARD, with all its resources, had been beaten by an amateur observer on Mars using largely home-built equipment.
The answer, as is usual in such cases, was a combination of bad luck and the well-known cussedness of inanimate objects.
Kali was extremely faint for its size, being one of the darkest asteroids ever discovered. Obviously it belonged to the carbonaceous class: its surface was—almost literally—soot. And for the last few years the stellar background across which it had moved had been one of the most crowded parts of the Milky Way. As seen from the SPACEGUARD observatories, it had been lost in a blaze of stars.
Dr. Millar, from his viewpoint on Mars, had been lucky. He had deliberately pointed his telescope at one of the less densely packed regions of the sky—and Kali happened to be there. A few weeks earlier or later, and he would have missed it.
Needless to say, during the resulting inquiry SPACEGUARD rechecked its terabytes of observations. When you know that something is there, it is much easier to find it.
Kali had been recorded three times, but the signal had been near the threshold of noise and so had failed to trigger the automatic search program.
Many people were thankful for the oversight; they felt that discovering Kali earlier would merely have prolonged the agony.
PART III
15
THE PROPHET
“Isn’t it time you admitted, John, that Jesus must have been an ordinary man, like Mohammed (Peace be upon him)? We know something that the writers of the Gospels didn’t, though it seems perfectly obvious when you think about it—a virgin birth could produce only a female—never a male. Of course, the Holy Ghost might have contrived a second miracle. Perhaps I’m biased, but I feel that would have been—well, showing off. Even in bad taste.”
—PROPHET FATIMA MAGDELENE (SECOND DIALOGUE WITH POPE JOHN PAUL XXV, ED. FR. MERVYN FERNANDO, SJ, 2029)
CHRISLAM WAS NOT YET OFFICIALLY A HUNDRED YEARS OLD, though its origins went back another two decades to the oil war of 1990. One of the unexpected results of that disastrous miscalculation was that large numbers of American servicemen and women had, for the first time in their lives, direct contact with Islam—and were deeply impressed. They realized that many of their prejudices, such as the popular images of mad mullahs brandishing the Koran in one hand and a submachine gun in the other, were ludicrous oversimplifications. And they were astonished to discover the advances that the Islamic world had made in astronomy and mathematics during the Dark Ages in Europe—a thousand years before the United States was born.
Delighted at this opportunity of obtaining new converts, the Saudi authorities had set up information centers at the main Desert Storm military bases to provide Islamic teaching and explanations of the Koran. By the time the Gulf War was over, some thousands of Americans had acquired a new religion. Most of them—apparently ignorant of the atrocities perpetrated upon their ancestors by the Arab slave-traders—were African-Americans, but substantial numbers were white.
Technical Sergeant Ruby Goldenberg was not merely white; she was the daughter of a rabbi and had never seen anything more exotic than Disneyland before being posted to King Faisal Base, Dhahran. Although she was well versed in both Judaism and Christianity, Islam was a new world to her; she was fascinated by its serious-minded concern for fundamental issues as well as its long-standing though now badly eroded tradition of tolerance. She particularly admired its wholehearted respect for those two prophets of different faiths—Moses and Jesus. However, with her “liberated” Western outlook, she had strong reservations about the position of women in the more conservative Muslim states.
Sergeant Goldenberg was much too busy servicing the electronics of ground-to-air missiles to become heavily involved in religious affairs until Desert Storm had blown itself out, but the seed had been planted. As soon as she returned to the United States she used her veteran’s educational entitlement to enroll in one of the few Islam-oriented colleges—a move that involved not only a fight with the Pentagon bureaucracy but a break with her own family. After only two semesters she gave a further demonstration of independence by getting herself expelled.
The facts behind this undoubtedly decisive event have never been fully established. The Prophet’s hagiographers claim that she was victimized by her instructors, who were unable to answer her penetrating critiques of the Koran. Neutral historians gave a more down-to-earth explanation: she had an affair with a fellow student, and left as soon as her pregnancy was obvious.
There may be truth in both versions. The Prophet never disowned the young man who claimed to be her son, nor did she make any serious attempt to conceal later involvements with lovers of both genders. Indeed, a relaxed attitude to sexual matters, almost approaching that of Hinduism, was one of the most striking differences between Chrislam and its parent religions. It certainly contributed to its popularity: nothing could have been a greater contrast to the puritanism of Islam and the sexual pathology of Christianity, which poisoned the lives of billions and culminated in the perversion of celibacy.
After her expulsion from college, Ruby Goldenberg virtually disappeared for more than twenty ye
ars. Tibetan monasteries, Catholic orders, and a host of other claimants later advanced proofs of hospitality, none of which stood up to investigation. Nor is there any proof that she spent time on the Moon; it would have been easy to trace her in the relatively small lunar population. All that is certain is that the Prophet Fatima Magdelene appeared on the world scene in 2015.
Christianity and Islam had been accurately described as religions of the book. Chrislam, their offspring and intended successor, was based upon a technology of immeasurably greater power.
It was the first religion of the byte.
16
PARADISE CIRCUIT
EVERY AGE HAS ITS CHARACTERISTIC LANGUAGE FULL OF words that would have been meaningless a century earlier, and many of which are forgotten a century later. Some are generated by art, sport, fashion, or politics; but most are the products of science and technology—including, of course, war.
The sailors who plied the world’s oceans for millennia had a complex—and to landlubbers, incomprehensible—vocabulary of names and commands that allowed them to control the rigging on which their lives depended. When the automobile began to spread across the continents at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, dozens of strange new words came into use, and old ones were given new meanings. A Victorian hansom-cab driver would have been completely baffled by gearshift, clutch, ignition, windshield, differential, spark plug, carburetor—words his grandson would use effortlessly in everyday life. And he in his turn would be equally at a loss with radio tube, antenna, wave band, tuner, frequency….
The electronic age, and particularly the advent of computers, spawned neologisms at an explosive rate. Microchip, hard disc, laser, CD Rom, VCR, tape cassette, megabyte, software—these words would have been utterly meaningless before the mid-Twentieth Century. And as the millennium approached, something still stranger—indeed paradoxical—began to appear in the vocabulary of information processing: Virtual Reality.