“You know,” she starts, “when Bernard was alive, towards the end, he wasn’t able to move in the physical world, so Hitoshi rigged up an alternate reality interface for him. I could spend time with him inside of it. Bernard loved to visit Bryce Canyon, and the two of us would sit together in the interface, watching the sunrise.”
“Bernard was exceptional,” James says. “I wish I’d had the chance to spend more time with him.”
“I loved his idealism. He had high hopes for humanity and thought the quest for the stars would bring out the best of us. It’s one of the many reasons I’m proud to be part of this crew. We’ve carried on Bernard’s hopes.”
“We wouldn’t be here without either of you.”
Ananke smiles. “How long do you think we’ll stay on Neso?”
“As long as the crew wants. Nice thing about a twenty-eight year mission is that a couple of weeks doesn’t move the clock much.”
“What do you think of the Stars’ warning about Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think it changes anything for us. They don’t know why they lost contact with their ships, and it seems like they just give up on a system if a ship is lost. If it were us, we’d send a rescue mission. Just differences between how humans and Stars tackle things, I guess. We’ll all talk it over, but I think we can’t pack up and go home based on maybes. Besides, we might find the missing Star ships and be the rescue mission for them. Who knows?”
15:32 - Neso “Secret Cove” Lower Southeast Beach
James and Ava hold hands on their private beach, the shoreline curling around them carving out this little cove that’s out of everyone’s sight. A few minutes ago, they’d recorded a short message for Will, showcasing the Secret Cove. The slate, now, is off.
Ava looks up at James, her eyes kind, as always, and her soft lips part with a gentle smile. A breeze rustles her brown hair, wrapping some of it around her cheek. She ignores it. There’s no ship here, no Stars, no problems to solve, no crew — just the two of them with the whole world to themselves, light-years away from everything. He takes a step in towards her, setting his other hand on her waist. She rubs his thumb with hers, then he’s kissing her, her lips soft and warm against his, her body brushing up against his, and now even their private cove is gone and all that exists is the two of them in this moment. The kiss lingers for a long second before he pulls back slightly, looking her in her eyes. Ava seems like she’s about to say something, but James says, “I love you, Ava.” He pauses. “I’ve wanted to say it for a while now, but I didn’t want the reason to be because I thought we weren’t going to make it through the next day, I wanted it to be because it’s how I felt and couldn’t keep it to myself any longer.”
Ava reaches up and cups his cheek with his hand. “I love you, too, James. I’ve wanted to say it for a while now, too, but didn’t want to rush us.”
James takes a deep breath and exhales. A great weight has been lifted from his chest. It’s funny, he thinks, that he’s faced countless life-and-death situations, but saying those three words to Ava took more courage than he’s ever mustered. Courage isn’t the right word, though. It was more of a willingness to part with something he’d been holding for his entire life.
Ava smiles, motioning towards the giant orange-striped sun dipping into the ocean. “I have to give you a hand, though. You sure know how to pick a place that’ll stick in a gal’s memory.”
18:52 - Neso “High Point” Southeast Plateau
James leads the crew on a hike up the mountain. He’s surprisingly winded, but he’s still acclimating to the oxygen levels here. The summit, fortunately, is just ahead. As he steps past the loose rocks and reaches the top, the panorama of Neso comes into view. Ocean surrounds a third of the landscape, with waves lapping against the shore in rhythmic pulses. Rock formations jut out of the water at multiple locations, some forming the picturesque arches they’ve seen from other locations. The rest of the land is tan cliffs and plateaus awash in Luhman’s orange light. It reminds James a bit of his Joshua Tree hike with Will and Sarah, and it seems strangely fitting that he’s doing it here with the crew.
The rest of the crew arrives behind him, everyone wearing backpacks and some breaking out canteens. James opens his canteen and takes a sip, surveying the sights.
Beckman comes up beside him, looking unfazed by the hike. “Not too bad. I could get used to this.”
“Lots more mountains around here,” James says. “Sky’s the limit.”
“Good deal. Should we break out the chow now?”
Hitoshi joins them, leaning on his knees with his hands. “I’m just going to barf up this lung first.”
“Maybe we’ll give everyone a couple of minutes,” James says. “But you know what we should do is take a group pic for Will.” James unhooks the slate from his backpack. “Okay, everyone, let’s bunch up on me.”
As the crew assembles, James activates his slate’s emitters and Ananke’s hologram appears. He fetches his camera and tosses it up in the air. The camera hovers, framing the group.
Behind them, Luhman 16A is a molten titan suspended over the pristine landscape of humanity’s first future colony. Tau Ceti gleams gold high in the skydome, a beacon awaiting their presence. He’s not sure what adventure awaits there, but he’s with his family, and they’ll be ready.
Author’s Message
Thanks for reading Bernard’s Dream. This is the longest Hayden’s World story to date. James went big — as he always does — creating Earth’s first star fleet. You had a chance to briefly see the other ships and learn of their missions before they all blasted off on their adventures. I’m sure there will be some interesting stories to tell, so stay tuned for shorts featuring the other crews. Of course, James’s mission is just getting started. There’s still Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani to explore, and an eventual trip back to an Earth that’s aged twenty-eight years.
If you just jumped into the series and this was your first exposure to the Silver Stars, you can read about the crew’s first encounters in Erebus, Janus 2, and Bernard’s Promise.
As always, check out “The Science of the Story” on the next page if you’re interested in the real-life inspirations for this story. At the very least, you’ll learn why people who speak Chalcatongo Mixtec can’t ask questions.
Please follow my Amazon author’s page to receive notifications of new releases and join me on Facebook and Twitter. Also, I have a blog where I prattle on about all things sci-fi. Come bask in its nerdy goodness.
Lastly, you may have noticed I’m an indie author. Would you help me out by leaving a rating or review for this story? I don’t have a big advertising budget to help people find my stories, but I do have awesome readers like you.
Thanks again, and keep dreaming big.
The Science of the Story
It is, perhaps, surprising that after two thousand years of humans finding and naming stars, half of our Sun’s closest neighbors were named in 2013. We waited so long to name them because we couldn’t see them, at least not until NASA launched the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) in December 2009. WISE operated from 2009 to 2011, discovering thousands of minor planets and star clusters, taking a nap for two years, then awakening in 2013 as the Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE). If you, like me, were excited to spot Comet C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE) in the summer of 2020, you know who to thank for the heads up. During its time, WISE discovered eight brown dwarf stars within twenty light-years of Earth. On the spectrum of star classifications, brown dwarfs are a notch down from red dwarfs. Unlike main-sequence stars such as our Sun that get their energy from hydrogen fusion, brown dwarfs are not massive enough to fuse hydrogen. The largest brown dwarfs can fuse deuterium or lithium and the smallest can’t fuse anything. Those that can’t fuse get their heat solely from their formation. Because the color and brightness of a star are related to heat, the smallest brown dwarfs are very dim. This is why we couldn’t see
our neighbors until WISE came along.
In 2013, astronomer Kevin Luhman, a researcher at Penn State’s Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds, announced two brown dwarfs located 6.5 light-years from the Sun. He found these in images taken by WISE in 2010 and 2011. The brown dwarfs were given the official designation WISE 1049−5319 and WISE J104915.57−531906.1. Later, Erik E. Mamajek proposed simply calling them Luhman 16, after their discoverer.
Imagine taking thirty Jupiters and squishing them into the size of one Jupiter. This is what Luhman 16 is like. The first star, Luhman 16A, weighs in at 33.5 Jupiters but is only 85% the size of Jupiter. Its cooler partner, Luhman 16B, is 28.6 Jupiters at 104% the size of Jupiter. What’s interesting is that we have evidence of uneven illumination coming from Luhman. Astronomers theorize that these are iron clouds raining molten iron. Star weather.
Although we don’t have any information about Luhman’s planets, one can imagine that if the stars are like Jupiter but more massive, they might have a moon system like Jupiter’s but with larger worlds. Some of Jupiter’s moons are larger than Mercury, so it’s easy to see how you could end up with Mars or Earth-sized worlds around something thirty times as massive as Jupiter.
Worlds in close orbits to their parent star are likely to be tidally locked. Indeed, our own Moon is tidally locked to Earth. To understand tidal locking, find a Weeble Wobble. Weebles were an egg-shaped 1970s toy that could not be knocked over. Their center-of-gravity was at the bottom of the egg, so any attempts to tilt them would result in self-righting by gravity. Similarly, worlds usually aren’t perfect spheres and may have bulging middles. Like Weebles, with enough wobbles these worlds will tend to self-center, resulting in the same spot always pointing down towards what they orbit. Note this doesn’t mean that they no longer rotate. Our Moon still rotates. We don’t notice it because it's always facing us. Imagine you walked in a circle around a friend but kept turning your body so that you were always facing him. You are rotating, but your friend will always be looking at your face. That’s what tidal locking looks like.
One of the consequences of tidal locking is that one side of the planet gets roasted and the other gets frozen. Our weather is driven by temperature differentials on Earth, so a tidally locked world probably has some extreme weather at the transition between furnace and freezer. Worlds can be tidally locked but not always have the same side facing their host. Mercury has a 3:2 resonance, which means it rotates three times for every two trips around the sun. In Bernard’s Dream, Cisseis, Neso, and Ianthe are tidally locked with the same side facing Luhman, but Sao has a 5:2 resonance. Because of this, Sao has day and night cycles that move heat and energy around the planet, creating an environment the Silver Stars find interesting.
Neso’s oxygen, at first, is a bit of a mystery. Earth started with almost no atmosphere. As Earth cooled, volcanic activity spewed methane and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. It wasn’t until photosynthesis evolved that Earth slowly accumulated oxygen. As we search for exoplanets and see the spectrums of worlds, we look for oxygen as a marker for life. Yet, there are ways planets can get oxygen without life. Good old H2O is just two hydrogen atoms bonded with an oxygen atom, and the energy of a sunbeam may be enough to split it. If you’ve ever bought a tube of Titanium White oil paint, you’ve purchased some titanium dioxide, which is the main component of rutile sand. The interesting thing about titanium dioxide is that it is a catalyst for the water/sunbeam split. Take some water, some rutile sand, a bit of sunlight, add some time, and voila, oxygen! You may end up with an atmosphere that has even more oxygen than Earth’s. So why, then, did Earth have to wait for photosynthesis? It’s because Earth drew the short straw for rutile sand. If you collected all the rutile sand on planet Earth, it would be less than two hundred fifty square kilometers. Neso, on the other hand, has endless beaches of the stuff.
Language will be an inevitable barrier whenever we make first contact. Humans speak 6,500 languages. Some have rules that may seem quite alien. For example, Archi, spoken in Russia, has over a million conjugations for a verb. Silbo Gomero is a language of whistles. Xhosa and Taa have clicks for consonants. Piraha has no words for numbers. Tuyuca has a hundred genders. Chalcatongo Mixtec doesn’t have a way to ask yes/no questions. Chinese and Japanese both use the same written characters for words but have entirely different spoken languages, so speakers can communicate clearly in writing but not orally.
In Bernard’s Dream, Willow mentions a few linguistic terms. There are terms for the components of written language and separate terms for spoken language. For spoken language, the smallest meaningful unit of speech is a morpheme. The letter c is not a morpheme because it carries no meaning, but the word cat is a morpheme. The letter s is also a morpheme because it carries the meaning of plurality, as in cats. Individual sounds, such as the c sound in cats, are phonemes. Morphemes are constructed from phonemes. In written language, the counterpart of a phoneme is a grapheme. Graphemes might be one letter, such as the c representing the /k/ sound in cats, or more than one letter, like the ea in leaf representing the /e/ sound. Anyone who has tried to learn English knows the frustration that comes from the ea in leaf being pronounced differently than the ea in bread, and that’s just English. Scale this up to alien languages, and the real fun begins.
At the end of the story, the climax revolves around an engineering problem. A quarter-kilometer ice block is very heavy! The numbers that Hitoshi kicks around are in millions of kilograms. For those that live in the United States, like me, who are used to pounds, one million kilograms is 2.2 million pounds. It’s a little hard to wrap your head around numbers of this magnitude. For example, a fully-loaded 747 is not quite a million pounds. An empty Space Shuttle weighs 165,000 pounds. Its rocket boosters and main tank are just under half a million pounds. Like most rockets, the fuel is the main culprit, weighing twenty times as much as the shuttle and the boosters. Everything adds up to 4.4 million pounds. That’s still half as much as one of the Stars’ blocks of ice. So, you could see why Hitoshi was stressed out about lifting one.
I hope you enjoyed the Science of the Story and the sneak peek at the tidbits I found interesting when writing Bernard’s Dream. Thanks, as always, for getting a little nerdy with me.
The Hayden’s World Series
James Hayden has a dream, and the Riggs test vehicle is going to take him there. But when failure after failure leads to his last chance exploding spectacularly, he must partner with an AI and gamble everything for one last shot at the stars.
43 Seconds includes the bonus short Silver-Side Up, a story about two friends, a silver ship, and a perfect day for a test flight.
Life aboard the Aristarchus isn’t much of an adventure, and Kyan just wants to do his job and get back to his family. When he discovers a mysterious object at the edge of the solar system and an unexpected contact during coms loss, data running turns life-or-death thirteen billion kilometers from home.
Signal Loss includes the bonus short Last Stand, a story where Kyan testifies about the events in Signal Loss, but other agendas are in play.
Jia can’t breathe, her ship is minutes from breaking apart in Uranus’s atmosphere, and the lifepod just burned up. Things aren’t going well. When her injured engineer’s solution sends them plummeting into the icy stratosphere, they find themselves trapped in a life-or-death battle against time, the elements, and unexpected visitors.
In 43 Seconds, James Hayden took us to near-light-speed with the world’s first Riggs ship. Now, construction of the second Riggs ship is nearly complete, and in one month Sarah will take the helm. But growing opposition may shut down the program before she gets her chance. When James’s last-ditch publicity stunt traps him light-days from rescue, Sarah must decide just how far she’s willing to go to save a friend.
In Aero One, Jia nearly lost everything during her encounter with the pirate ship Maya. A year later, she’s trying to restart her life as a freelancer aboard Saturn’s newly-built Cassini Station. But
Cassini has its own secrets. When a chance encounter with a past adversary sets old battles in motion, she must unravel the mystery of Titan’s Shadow before more lives are lost.
In Erebus, James Hayden sacrificed the world’s first near-light-speed Riggs ship to make a remarkable discovery on the icy moon of Janus. Now, amidst mounting concerns about that discovery’s implications, he must assemble a crew to repair his crashed ship and fly it back to Saturn’s Cassini Station. But Janus still has secrets to discover, and the alien probe’s mission may not be finished.
In Janus 2, the crew of Gossamer Goose made disastrous first contact with the Silver Stars, costing them Earth’s first starship. Now, with the Centauri probe revealing a world with a breathable atmosphere and possible life, James Hayden must build the ship capable of taking them to the stars. But the Centauri worlds have their own dangers and mysteries, and not everything they find is what it seems.
In Bernard’s Promise, James Hayden took humanity interstellar, exploring the strange life of the Centauri worlds and finding hints of where the Silver Stars have gone. After returning to an Earth that’s advanced nine time-dilated years, he encounters an emerging technology that will force mankind to either fill the worlds of the solar system or search the stars for new Earths. One man can’t do it alone, and he’ll need a fleet spanning decades if they are to succeed. But the Silver Stars are still out there, and James’s dreams of first contact may die light-years from home.
Bernard's Dream: A Hayden's World Novel (Hayden's World Origins Book 8) Page 28
