Ten Directions

by Samuel Winburn

  There was a long moment before Aurora understood what was said, and a longer one where everyone turned to watch her carefully.

  “Sorry Chandra, spaced out I guess.”

  It was the wrong choice of words.

  “Just tired, that’s all,” Aurora waved off the concerned looks.

  After a pause that lasted too long, the argument resumed its flow around familiar contours, although Aurora lacked the concentration to follow much. She keyed in on important bits. One way or the other, August Bridges was going to bring many others to Mars. Not enough to make any difference to life on Earth, not in any way that would change Mars as a planet, but enough of the wrong sort of people that quarantine protocols would fail. That enough bacteria from the Earth would invade, seeking out any survivable niche and pushing out of the way any surviving indigenous Martian microbes, was inevitable. An imperceptible genocide launched into motion by predictable carelessness, which would finish off the Natives of this planet more surely than the crashing comets of the terraformers wet dreams. Before anyone even found them, they would be gone. Stopping this catastrophe from happening was the main reason behind her prolonged outings and faking her mental health to squeeze one more mission day out of Chandra.

  “I don’t find this amateur political speculation useful at all,” Phillipa reasserted herself. “Politics are not your problem.”

  What other source of problems was there?

  “In any case, I think what Aurora really needs to know here is that these developments have implications for the Australian mission.” The tone was self-satisfied.

  Aurora looked blearily to Terry for confirmation.

  “Yeah Ror. With the Yanks offside, the PM’s put us up for the chop with the next budget. Him and all you Sandies mob down Perth-side even managed to push it through the Tropo Sys up in Queensland, useless yobs that we are.”

  Terry reported the facts glumly, and even her colorful way of saying them failed to take the edge off.

  The air thickened again around Aurora’s chest. Her hands clenched on her chair against the feeling that she was being picked up in a rushing flood out into the night. The force of the current was pulling her apart. She shrugged away from Julia so that the feeling would not be passed on. Julia leaned to close the gap, lightly grasping Aurora’s arm like a nearly drowned child, as if the slightest movement would send her drifting off in the current. Aurora sucked in the resulting wave of fear and tried not to let it show.

  Phillipa brightened as she cut to the chase. “So, Aurora, now we all know that there is still some interesting science left in the Life question. I do recognize that. However, resources are limited and, with this kind of pressure, well, we will need to keep the focus on the strategic priorities of our mission, no matter what fun it must assuredly be to go gallivanting about the planet in search of hypothetical bugs.”

  They were cutting her off. They didn’t want to even know what was out there because then they might have to care. Because then they couldn’t bulldoze Mars, which was an insane dream to begin with, unless August Bridges’ luck improved with the aliens. Aurora didn’t even want to think where that might lead.

  An inverted whirlpool, screwing upward into the sky, dissolving the stars and emptying space of light. Her limbs rapidly melting into the whirlpool, Wheatbelt Wallaby pushed off towards the eye of the tempest. Great tremors gripped the land, her body, as a circle of sky pulled back overhead. As she reached the center of the gyre the currents cancelled each other, and she drifted soundlessly upwards into the dark.

  More words.

  “Strategic priorities Pip?” Pip. Priorities. “Like Aurora said, Terry. There are expanding markets.” Said. Terry. Expanding. “Yeah darl, a lot to sell us Martians.” Us. Martians.” Yanks are falling over themselves to swap some peanut butter for a jar of Vegemite. Whatta ya say Alice?” Say. Falling over. “Fifty years on Mars and we’re all they’ve got to show for it.” Fifty years. All show. “Terry, you can be as cynical as you like, but people have invested a lot of money to pay for you to fix lorries on another planet.” Money. Another planet.

  As Aurora’s body slumped into the vacuum left by her departing thoughts, Julia lost her tenuous grip and slipped towards the floor. The motion as Chandra ducked in to catch Julia momentarily brought Aurora’s attention back. Chandra looked into her eyes with concern, “Aurora, you do not look so well.”

  “No. Nothing. I’m tired that’s all.”

  “Yeah, we’ll give it a rest Ror. Sorry to hit you with all the bullshit straight up.”

  Thanks. Terry. Good. Night. Somehow, more mechanically than intentionally, Aurora found her way back to her bunkroom. She leaned on the doorframe to catch her balance. In her neuroview an idle thought had switched on the news when she meant to power it off. She was about to give the annoying stream of babble the flick, but paused on her recognition of an unwelcome and familiar face.

  August Bridges, king idiot of the universe, going off on his latest bright idea for the masses. She’d met him once, as unlikely as that seemed. The Aussie Mars mission had been trucked up from Antarctica to Tokyo when the Japanese unexpectedly handed over their mission spots to them. Mirtopik Com had just bought into MASO and there was a press event on.

  Aurora remembered not making any sense of what he was going on about up there on the stage but noticing that he still managed to make an impression. If nothing else, the man had charisma.

  Then for some reason she never could figure other than that she was trying to keep her head down and that he was an old school charmer who felt compelled to make everyone’s business his own, he had chatted her up during the after drinks. He was a good-looking bloke who could draw people out, and soon she was telling him about her mission. The end of the conversation was the only thing that had stuck with her.

  “That’s very important work you’re doing. If we don’t document Martian bacteria, we won’t be able to preserve some before the bacteria we bring over during settlement overwhelms it.”

  “Maybe that would be a good argument for slowing things down,” she’d suggested, realizing at the same time she had knocked him back.

  He’d looked at her sympathetically, as if this was the most profound thing he’d ever heard.

  “Exactly. My worry is that after the aliens tell us how to make space travel cheap, Mars will be the main place people will want to go. That’s why we have to work together to open things up the right way.”

  She couldn’t figure out if that last bit was a line, but she’d felt somewhat invaded.

  What he’d said had, over the years, added urgency to her work, as if she were the only one working to protect billions of years of unique evolution. Up to a point Aurora had played with a fiction that he might be an ace up her sleeve, that her feminine wiles - that was a stretch - might have bought her extra time. Until now, when it was clear as glass he had no such honorable intentions.

  She was being screwed and it almost seemed personal. Everything she had worked for. It was too much. The breakdown in front of Chandra, Julia, and everything she’d worked for going out the window. What was the point? It was getting hard to breathe, more so than was ordinary with the rationed air pressure. Aurora needed to talk to someone. Someone who couldn’t dob her in to Chandra, or who wasn’t already sick of the politics, or worse, like Pip and Terry, who thrived on it. Dad was dead and was never good at listening when he wasn’t.

  That left the least pretentious person she knew, who listened so well that it felt like she’d known him for lifetimes, who always told her to never give up. Through her neurovisor Aurora thought up a link to Kalsang, even though it took eight hours for the message to reach him out at Neptune and she couldn’t pretend it was a conversation. Even though he rarely replied, when he did it was always to the point and lovely. How Kalsang managed out there doing solitary on the edge of nowhere was beyond her reckoning. She was sure he must take some solace in her messages, in playing the role of her diary. She couldn’t imagin
e the monk taking much badly.

  Aurora let loose a rant. One word pulled behind the other like they were tied by string, by her passion. She was aware that some of what she said might be thought beautiful. The reasons she had come to Mars. What the desolate and rarefied country had come to mean to her. The stories that the place held, perhaps under the silent witness of life. Of the privilege she felt trying to give voice to the sole survivors of a once vibrant planet. What was at stake? Billions of years of evolution hanging in the balance, and it wasn’t worth the bother. What was the rush? Mars would always be here. Wasn’t it their duty to preserve the most interesting bits of it?

  When it had all drained out of her, for a moment Aurora almost felt better. God she was tired. Then, as she dwelt numbly on the newsfeed still hanging in her neuroview, August's face reminded her of someone else. Her Dad telling Mum some new wild fancy to explain why they’d all soon be pulling up stumps once again to follow him on some mad trip. She felt the ghost of that stab of guilt, secretly looking forward to the adventure that Mum and Jesse dreaded. When the strain of it all finally broke the marriage, Aurora blamed herself for encouraging him. But it was just Dad being a dickhead, same as her now, nearing 40 and chasing microbes across Mars without a shred of family to hold her back.

  August’s talking head disappeared as Aurora extracted her neurovisor and stumbled into her bunk. August Bridges, desperately selling the universe to the world when it was all too big for one man to handle. As much as she resented him for this, for a tired moment she almost felt sorry for him.

  Aurora’s mind reclined, not on the softness of her pillow, but into the empty spaces and still sands of Mars. But even as she settled down into this comfortable obscurity, she was kept awake by a troublesome feeling that she was being watched. As if billions of eyes had somehow made their way across the great void of the solar system to find her hiding place and were peering in on her. Aurora turned and stretched and yawned and rolled over and turned and turned. The eyes would not take the hint and remained, scrutinizing the molecules of her motions, calculating their sum by equations that left little room for emptiness or for freedom.

  This was how it was going to be, Aurora thought. Fine then. She turned over once more, cradled her head in her hands, and wept. As Phobos dropped like a spent flare over the horizon, Aurora’s tears trailed off into a dreamless sleep.

  Chapter 4 - Kalsang

  Light loses the race against the expansion of the universe, resulting in the daily withering away at the edges of the knowable into an impossibly distant past, until nothing remains but the fizz of iron dissolving into itself and the phantom echoes of memory. Reality is information, the symphony of existence. Whatever is beyond knowing no longer exists - thus life cries out for recognition across the void.

  A string of pearls nests in orbit around a lapis lazuli planet, glimmering in the pale light of a brilliant star, threaded in an invisible, parabolic net of radio waves that converges on a coral pink moon. As the pearls rotate in obedient synchrony with the moon, the invisible strands vibrate to a billion frequencies overlain - a celestial harp. Beautiful voices sing within this marvellous instrument. The birth and deaths of stars and galaxies and of the creation, the music of the spheres, the gentle lapping waves of cosmic radiation echoing through the Milky Way.

  Every now and again a fleeting whisper of something else enters the net - a momentary challenge to the universal unravelling. A spike in complexity - a proclamation of identity standing out against the selfless void. Here we are, we have lived, we have died, you should know, please acknowledge. And finally, after a long journey of centuries and eons, at last someone is listening. A patient ear waits, comparing each new vibration in the net against the cacophony of the cosmos, waiting for the infinite improbabilities to collapse into an actuality, another member of the neighborhood, the new kid on the block. But the ear is deaf to meaning. It is mechanical. It has no heart, and so it passes the message on to someone who does.

  * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

  On Kalsang’s world Neptune was rising.

  Slowly the fine lines emanating from the corners of twin golden eyelids parted. The universe abruptly encountered two wide, dark orbs and slowly sank into a deep pool of consciousness. A broad grin spread at an imperceptible rate across a previously solemn face. A young man extended his hand from maroon robes and selected a pungent, rough looking piece of granitic cheese from a bowl, tossed it casually a few times into the air, rolled it mindfully in the palm of his hand, and popped it into his mouth.

  Crunch, crackle, and crunch.

  Kalsang’s neurovisor issued an electric hum and vibrated off the edge of the ledge where it had been carefully placed. Behind the ledge, beyond the clear buckeyball insulated portal it was snowing, a light dust of pink nitrogen and methane ice, falling lightly against the carbon alloy walls of a small half sphere resting snugly in the middle of that absolute nowhere that was Neptune’s moon, Triton.

  This was how it was today and how it had been for a seemingly unending sequence of days since Kalsang had first arrived on this distant, dim world.

  Crack, crunch, crunch.

  Kalsang's smile grew wider as he reflected on the rough hands of Amala, his mother, in a felt tent in the mountains of western Tibet five planets away, who had somehow rolled her heart and love into this jaw-breaking ball of cheese delivered as an offering to her son who now resided in a land further from her imagination than death.

  Crunch, crunch.

  Finished.

  In this way his mother's love transcended the lonely distance more efficiently and directly than the radio waves he was charged with monitoring.

  Kalsang Jampa, full time Buddhist monk and part time radio telescope operator responsible for picking up the phone whenever ET called. That was his job description. Nearly a year had passed since his posting to the Mirtopik Neptune Extra-terrestrial Listening Array Triton Station, travelling twice again as far away from the Earth than any human had managed, to a place so cold that his unprotected flesh would freeze into stone. There was no point dwelling on that though, since really, he was just where he was, and dead was dead no matter how it happened and any fame that might have attached to his name through the feat was meaningless in that context. Anyway, the peace this reality enforced was something he cherished.

  His neurovisor buzzed again, which reminded him that the cost of his seclusion, and for the generous endowment by Mirtopik Com to many monasteries and charities, was for him to perform certain duties a few times a year. It took some effort to shift his concentration from his meditation and to bring those duties back to mind.

  Scattered through light years of inter-meshing gears of interstellar gas, most alien radio broadcasts managed to converge in the radio telescope he was manning for the space of a few hours - a brief debut in which entire civilizations announced their existence and presented their message.

  Reconnecting was problematic. Given the strength of most radio transmissions, it could be decades before chance alignments in the heavens produced a clean signal again. This interstellar “twinkling” effect was like the bending of radio signals in the ionosphere experienced historically by short wave radio operators at the dawn of radio communications. Reception time was short, transmissions episodic, and decisions had to be made on a much shorter time frame than was allowed by the eight hours round trip required for light to travel from Neptune to the Earth and back.

  For these reasons the telescope had to be manned and it was Kalsang’s honor to be the first monk assigned to the new station. In a year he would leave to trade places with one of the other monks on Europa, and from there rotate back to Earth. That was a long time away.

  Having shifted his attention to the task, he carefully picked up the neurovisor, holding it above his forehead while the groping spider-silk tendrils at the device’s base felt their way through the nano-pores in his skull and into his brain. Once the neurovisor was in place he focused his imagination into it
and the air around him suddenly sprang to life with a whirl of images and symbols. He surveyed the day’s catch.

  “Ai, so many today.”

  The transmission field looked like the contents of a kaleidoscope caught in a whirlwind. The other transmissions he had processed before were much smaller than this one, and not as clear. Someone out there wanted to make an impression.

  Kalsang noted a promising diagram dancing in the air just above head height as he turned around. He focused his eyes on the desk before him and the diagram followed his thoughts down from the surrounding constellations and hovered at a comfortable viewing distance. He swivelled his attention back and forth drawing a collection of other images down into his reading range.

  One diagram was the most telling - two circular objects floating in space near two planets, a tube of twisted space-time connecting them, and small ships travelling through a tunnel between worlds.

  “How good. This is exactly the sort of thing they are looking for.”

  Kalsang turned and ordered a search of the relevant frequencies. He worked for a while cataloguing the remaining images. Some revealed the beings who had sent the transmissions. They were very strange beings, tall and slender, so many heads, which was something he had not seen before in the other alien transmissions, and many tentacles like an octopus but with the tips of the many arms branching out into tentacle fingers. They looked frog-like in their expression, with wide eyes, and seemed to live mostly underwater. They were, by any standard, the strangest looking creatures he had ever seen, but their faces expressed familiar emotions and Kalsang felt himself immediately drawn to them, almost as if they were old friends. How odd.

  The signal went dead. While he waited for the connection to re-establish Kalsang resumed his latest project. He turned carefully around in the pantry that doubled as his kitchen, library, altar, bedroom, toilet, office, dining room, and gym.

  The robust smell of roasting barley joined the constant juniper and sandalwood incense that filled every crevice of his compact abode. The smell originated from a pile of whole barley, which Kalsang had poured onto a pan lain over the hot plate built into his desk.