12 Interstellar travel affected everything, including romance. There was nothing quite like dancing together in the light of a crashing moon.
13 With death finally cured, humanity had to adapt to conserve the planet’s resources. We all got one century to live on Earth. Every one hundredth birthday was a tearful event. The new centennial was evicted into the wild galaxy, to trade stories of a homeworld they would never see again.
14 To space pirates Peter Pan was a horror story, mirroring the fear that their enemies would abduct and enlist the sons they left behind.
15 The Lunar method of ballet focused on control, requiring slow, deliberate movements both on the stage and in the air to prevent the dancer from losing poise in the low gravity. The Asteroid method relied on flowing, weighted costumes to allow elegant movements in zero gravity.
16 For months after the comet entered orbit, mankind was in love with its gentle, lofty beauty. We began to worry when the snow didn’t stop.
17 We stored liquid water in orbit as a second moon. That glowing ocean magnified its own scarlet sunsets, and we envied our own creation.
18 We created zero-gravity zones on Earth for recreation, but reconsidered after learning their downsides. Plants grew too tall and spindly to ever survive under their normal weight. Ants formed bridges through the air to reach our hidden food. Jumping spiders soon learned they could fly.
19 Stretched-out regions of normal space, lovingly known as ‘pocket dimensions’, contained nothing except what we put there. She piloted a starship into hers and surrounded it with countless orbiting lights. Finally, she could make constellations that actually looked like pictures.
20 At the end, the universe a distant speck behind him, space washed in gentle waves upon the shore of what came next, begging him not to go.
21 They warned her against the voyage. It was risky to sail on black waters that blend into the night sky. That was exactly the attitude she wanted to escape. One good wave, and the sea got calm. There were no more reflections, but real stars below her, and wilder places beyond.
22 Off-planet colonies had no room for trees. When she left Earth, she funded her new life with a jar of maple syrup and a big bag of cinnamon.
23 We created a new home on Mars, but the ocean didn’t feel right until a treasure ship sank. The sea had no lure without a bit of lost gold.
24 She awoke in a dirt spaceship. Trees and ferns grew inward, lit by foxfire. The forest sought other stars. It needed her to recycle its air.
25 We wrote songs of lamentation every time we ruined a planet and had to find a new one. We commemorated the forests that no longer grew, and the artificial oceans that had returned to the dust we had originally found on those dead worlds. It was a sweet and meaningless tradition.
26 Trillions of mirrored marbles were shot into orbit to cool the planet. Even sceptics were in awe when they saw Earth’s rings glow at night.
27 Nothing is truly forgotten. That’s impossible. In another reality, someone remembered her long-lost song, and she was going to get it back.
28 Just as sailors shared legends of lovely fish-people, spacefarers reported sightings of ‘starmaids’, whose beautiful forms tapered into comet tails. It was a convenient way to explain the whispers they heard from outside the hull, and an excuse to avoid sleeping near the windows.
29 Little planets had a unique charm for human settlers seeking moonless nights and the perilous dances we could only survive in low gravity.
30 She made a planet for herself. Ink rivers flowed to oceans of paint. Her canvas cities were all galleries, libraries and blissful solitude.
31 We were out of options. We gave up and fled the planet en masse. A hundred thousand rocket ships climbed toward a future in the stars. The forests below were still convinced the humans would find some clever solution. They rejoiced, mistaking our exhaust for gigantic new trees.
32 She created faster-than-light travel for one reason. She took her ship deep into space to find the TV signals carrying those lost episodes.
33 Humans were drawn to that region of space. There wasn’t enough Earth left to know it had been our home. The constellations just felt right.
34 There were grand debates over which planets to colonise. Corporations lobbied for worlds with shorter days, so there would be less time between work shifts. Poets and astronomers found themselves working together, championing planets with fewer clouds between them and the stars.
35 The ‘lunar gothic’ style of architecture could be seen on every moon and asteroid in the solar system. We crafted dead rocks into castles of dark, lacy towers. Their stained-glass windows glowed sky-blue in the light of the faraway sun, holding back the terror of living in the void.
36 The autumn of the galaxy arrived. The Lyman-alpha forest went through redshift, and golden asteroids fell in droves onto nearby planets.
37 Some things could be expected for free at every human colony:
•air
•water
•gravity
•directions to Earth
•shelter
•a silent series of winks to warn visitors if the colony is controlled by the shadow-dancers
•a distraction as they escape the shadow-dancers
•food.
38 Only the rarest historic treasures warranted the effort of shipping between stars. Interstellar criminal empires could be forged from the theft of just one of those rare packages. The only things more travelled than galactic postal workers were tales of their heroics.
39 His parallel selves kept dying off, so he was shared among universes. Each day he woke in a strange reality, people asking where he’d been.
40 Satellite navigation was vulnerable to sabotage, so countries around the world built machines to determine our exact location by astronomical markers. The devices grew wise from years of stargazing. They stopped telling us where we were and instead told us where we should be.
41 We were gentler in space. Steel and Plexiglas held back the vicious vacuum so delicate things could float with us in our bubbles of atmosphere. We built robots with bones as soft as butterfly wings, voices that never exceeded a whisper, and eyes that could see right through us.
42 In her pocket universe, nothing moved. There was no wind. There was no dust to fall. The sky was hers, a tiny infinity of uninterrupted darkness. The stars back home couldn’t see her being small and afraid. If they wept for the heroine she was meant to be, she couldn’t hear them.
43 The sun was stolen before 1 April ended. Mankind became a scourge on the galaxy, a cackling mob of pranksters waiting for a lost midnight.
44 Huge, empty lava tubes crisscrossed the moon just below the surface, but we didn’t know their purpose. Then we found a colossal bank of keyboards and footboards in a central cave. The satellite itself was made to be a pipe organ. We filled it with atmosphere, and began to play.
45 Cryogenic stasis had delivered her to an unfamiliar universe. When she looked up at the sky, the constellations were strangers. The stars were all in the wrong places. She was told each one was a new world, with its own people and civilisations. She hoped they were ready for her.
46 Money was no longer enough, so lotteries offered unique jackpots. One winner could no longer see the daytime sky, and lived under the stars.
47 Snow had a very different context on deep-subzero planets, where it was made of methane rather than water. Tiny amounts in an airlock could lead to a dangerous build-up in habitats over time. Visitors from Earth threw snowballs at locals, not realising the grave insult they implied.
48 The AI operated the whole space station, but he was its favourite. It told him to make secret repairs to the station’s machinery and hide the evidence, to mistrust other members of the crew. It said humans should never have tried to live in the void, but it would turn him into something that might stand a chance.
49 He fell in love with a grey-goo arsonist. She squeezed his hand and giggled madly as her nanobots, hot and
indifferent, ate another world.
50 With two moons and a distant second sun in the sky, keeping track of celestial events was a challenge on that planet. Human colonies there offered complex charts and graphs to help werewolves, vampires and other such calendar-dependent creatures plan their evenings accordingly.
51 Together they looked out a tiny porthole window at the lunar regolith, waiting for the eclipse. The planet blocked out the sun and the grey-white sand outside blushed a deep red. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘the light we’re getting now is from 12,000 miles of sunsets back on Earth.’
52 Planetary Colonisation
Phase 1: Arrival
Phase 2: Permanent habitation
Phase 3: Terraforming
Phase 4: Wolves
Phase 5: Amateur poetry about the planet’s moon/s
Phase 6: Traditions about kissing your sweetheart under specific trees
Phase 7: Leaving forever to preserve natural beauty
53 Our first colonists on Mars built a memorial of red sandstone overlooking Perseverance Valley, to shield the historic machine from the Martian sandstorms. They used new batteries and power cords to bring the rover back to life. It would never be alone again.
54 In that future, we had altered our biology to live on the shadowy planets between stars. Only by our sarcasm did she recognise us as human.
55 After the end, deluded mystics tried to read the astrology of old communication satellites, claiming to see the Internet in their movements.
56 Misdirected anger travels beyond its target, leaving the solar system even after the words fade. It corrupts the moods of distant planets.
CHAPTER 4
Alien Life
1 Humans were installed as lighthouses throughout the galaxy, their flaring emotions serving to warn ships away from pockets of linear time.
2 First contact was unexpected. The star-folk sent a single probe to Earth, pleading with us to stay quiet lest It take notice of lower life.
3 ‘Earth is barely a life-bearing planet,’ she explained. ‘On other worlds, nothing is inanimate. Life permeates everything, clouds to core.’
4 ‘Earth cuisine’ became a staple in many alien civilisations. Most were surprised to learn that, rather than quaffed on its own, seawater was meant to be separated by drying, with the water and salt ingested separately. This minor detail was the mark of ‘authentic’ Earth food.
5 ‘Great alien empires know of us,’ he lamented. ‘Wars are averted by making the unthinkable threat of showing humans how to leave Earth.’
6 Humanity created giant robots to pilot from within, but not for war. That would be wildly impractical. The first aliens we found were spaceborne leviathans, too big to see a human, whose intense depth perception did not lend itself to screens. We built giant robots for diplomacy.
7 Voyager returned to Earth with new gold records. The aliens’ music was majestic, but their amateur cover of ‘Johnny B. Goode’ was endearing.
8 The visitors could only see red light, but in it they saw innumerable shades. To them, our bodies and blood were too beautiful for peace.
9 It was important for spacefarers to eat food they’d grown themselves, in microgravity. Plants raised in space produced nutrients that would silence the panic of being so deep in the deadly void. The creatures waiting between stars couldn’t see you, as long as you remained calm.
10 It became clear that nobody else saw him as a monster. He sought out xenophobic aliens, who knew better, so he wouldn’t forget the truth.
11 One of their first gifts to Earth was an old-fashioned galaxy compass. In its gold fittings, the comet-ice needle pointed to Sagittarius A*.
12 The aliens were beautiful, as we were to them. Poems from both species lamented that they were made of antimatter, and we could never touch.
13 Alien cultures struggled with abstract pastimes. Human dancers and cloud-watchers were unrivalled. Teams from Earth were invited to make pictures from the stars in their night skies. To the galactic community, constellations were only authentic if they had been drawn by humans.
14 Native immunity hid the voracious, consumptive nature of grass. The plant grew on alien visitors, draining them and spreading to the stars.
15 ‘They send in hellish beasts to soften up planets for invasion,’ he said, eyes skyward. ‘How else would our ancestors get dragons to fight?’
16 We found that planet already covered in infrastruc-ture. Massive tubes of concrete stretched out above the rocky world, ancient and seamless, cool to the touch but without any entrance. We finally broke through, and discovered the endless tunnels of mushrooms and fireflies inside.
17 We visited worlds inside the nebula, but the constant shining colours drove us mad. Natives thought us odd as we wrote love songs to darkness.
18 By the time we learned to reach the stars, they had all been claimed by alien civilisations. As consolation, they gave us the technology needed to travel between dimensions. We reached out to another Earth that had taken the galaxy from the aliens, and asked them for some tips.
19 The aliens who made first contact were freaks and rebels. They had to be, to break the universal taboo against helping humans escape Earth.
20 The Circus Galactic visited Earth. Wonders filled the space from Venus to Mars, promising to fulfil the dreams of our young civilisation. The barker assured us no money was owed for admission. Men spent lifetimes gaping at comet-tail eaters and lusting after nebula dancers. Especially popular were their planet-cathedrals to ‘Divine You’, behemoth shells of marble lace with stained-glass rings and lakes of wine. After a century we discovered the cost of admission to the Circus Galactic. Narcissistic and blasé, we no longer wished to travel the stars. One human still heard the sky’s siren call. She begged them to take her off this dying planet. Like any true circus, it accepted runaways.
21 We never found living aliens, but planets and moons were full of fossil fuels. Dreamers despaired, but society agreed that was good enough.
22 Close monitoring of the sun revealed the carbon whale living within, breaching the plasma, exhaling solar flares, casting its gaze to Earth.
23 It was a year without a summer. We woke on the first day of autumn, Earth strewn with alien wreckage. They wanted no memory of their defeat.
24 Aliens who’d never seen Earth’s splendour didn’t understand why humans built their new home in a sky-blue nebula among white hydrogen clouds.
25 ‘Comets are spent ammunition from a grand stellar war,’ he lectured. ‘Their crags are the names of their targets, written in alien letters.’
26 Aliens found many aspects of our culture addictive, earning humans some unflattering titles. Tree-smugglers. Song-dealers. Firework-runners.
27 We found them orbiting a dying star. They couldn’t develop technology in the depths of their watery planet, but they were intelligent, and a grand display on the surface caught our attention. We rescued them before their sun could go supernova, and introduced them to the galaxy.
28 ‘These readings can’t be real,’ she scoffed. ‘Alien ships this large and numerous would be visible.’ She looked to the sky. And the stars.
29 They watched Earth for years before abducting a human. Afraid, he asked what they wanted from him. They demanded the secret to making dogs.
30 At the dusk of our universe, humanity fled to parallel space. Our consistent physics followed us, ruining the magic of their fluid reality.
31 As more alien animals invaded Earth’s ecosystem, we began slipping down the food chain. We took pills to make our blood bitter and toxic.
32 Many alien species were glacially slow compared to humans. Statuesque species with silicon exoskeletons saw our fluid movements and regarded us as shapeshifters. Species resembling trees and fungi were the slowest, barely able to perceive us. To them, we were magical things.
33 Portals to deep space shunted gravity away from our decadent zero-G beds. With the stars glowing below, we knew not what was listening to our dr
eams.
34 The aliens were friendly, but dogs worldwide declared war on them. Called on to repay centuries of loyalty, we fought beside our creations.
35 Their planet was home to a butterfly whose colour was unique in the universe. They engineered the creatures to migrate through the galaxy, stopping at every world with life. Once they left, the desperate inhabitants were inspired to build starships and find that colour again.
36 As the last isolated world, Earth was a vital case study. Every individual human had a thousand alien worlds philosophising about their every thought.
37 By the time we learned to travel faster than light, every other star in the galaxy had been claimed by other civilisations. Conquering space, then, was a job not for pioneers, but for traders. One by one, we bought the stars, watching our last hope for true exploration fade away.
38 Until we devised faster-than-light travel, long-lived aliens cruised on solar sails. An era of romance and adventure wilted in our wake.
Quiet Pine Trees Page 3
