But The Stars

by Peter Cawdron

  Dante’s tired of fighting. She feels as though the stars are speaking to her, only she’s not sure she really wants to know what they’re saying. She’s content. Dante was lost on the Acheron. Now, for the first time, she’s among friends, not crew mates. She finally feels as though she belongs.

  “What are you thinking?” Mags asks softly, following Dante’s eyes as she stares at the dome, wanting to understand what she’s looking at.

  Reluctantly, Dante says, “Nothing.”

  Even though she’s lost among the stars, Dante has finally found peace. She may not have vanquished a bloodthirsty alien with a ray gun or saved an entire planet from conquest, but she found herself. Standing on South Beach all those years ago, in what feels like another lifetime, something was missing. There was a longing, a hunger. The stars which were once so mysterious and cryptic have given up their secret. Life isn’t an accident, it’s the most complex state of matter within the universe. The birth and death of numerous stars has given her life and that is a privilege beyond compare.

  For once, Dante feels complete. One day, her life will end, but the stars will continue for billions of years to come.

  The End

  Afterword

  As always, thank you for taking a chance on independent science fiction. Without your support and enthusiasm, novels like this simply aren’t possible, so I deeply appreciate your interest in my writing. Please leave a review online. Your opinion of this book counts far more than mine and will help other readers decide whether it’s worth their time.

  What for you has been a linear journey over the past few hours has for me been like traversing a maze over the course of several months.

  Writing is a matter of judgment. I’m constantly considering and reconsidering what to say and when, what to trim or omit, how to express an idea so as to build tension in a character as they pass through a chapter, a paragraph, a sentence and even a single word. Placement is everything. Pacing is akin to the rhythm of music, building to a crescendo. Characters need room to breathe. As you can tell, I thoroughly enjoy the challenge. I hope you do too.

  But the Stars is based on a quote from Dante Alighieri’s 14th century poem The Divine Comedy.

  But the stars that marked our starting fall away.

  We must go deeper into greater pain,

  for it is not permitted that we stay.

  The starship Acheron is named after one of the rivers crossed by Dante and Virgil as they descend into hell within the Inferno, which is the first act of this epic poem, while later in But the Stars, the name for the starship Empyrean comes from the third act, Paradiso. By the way, the Acheron is also the official name of the planet LV426 from James Cameron’s Aliens.

  But the Stars has an interesting backstory. Internationally renowned science fiction author Hugh Howey has spent the last few years sailing around the world in his catamaran. While he was in Brisbane, we caught up and he introduced my family to the board game Secret Hitler, which pits players against each other using subterfuge. My teenaged daughters loved it. Before long we were inviting friends around and battling wits with Hugh. On one particular afternoon, we played ten games straight. By the time the sun set, no one knew quite who they could trust. One game seemed to blur into the next and we laughed at just how devious we could be one moment, how saintly the next. It was a lot of fun. I wrote But the Stars as a way of bottling up that tension to share it with you.

  The calculations involving time dilation in this novel are courtesy of E=MC2 Explained, while the rate required for a sense of artificial gravity to arise on the Acheron is based on Theodore Hall’s spin calculator.

  When it comes to interstellar travel, science fiction has leaned heavily on warp drives and hyperspace. From the Millennium Falcon to the Starship Enterprise, we all love seeing spacecraft race along faster than the speed of light, with the stars appearing as little more than snowflakes caught in the headlights. Although this makes for spectacular movie visuals, nothing can move faster than the speed of light—and with good reason. The speed of light is a misnomer. It’s the speed of electromagnetic radiation, or if you prefer to dispense with the gobbledegook, the speed of reality. You see, light is the result of electrons absorbing and releasing energy as they dance around the nucleus of an atom. Before your eyes glaze over, remember, that’s all we really are—a bunch of atoms. If you sit still in a bath, can you move faster than the waves you’re about to make when you reach for the soap? Same.

  Besides—in yet another case of science is stranger than fiction—the irony of warp drives and hyperspace is there’s no need to go faster than light. As mind bending as it may seem, just getting close to the speed of light causes time dilation and length contraction. The result is, even at subluminal speeds, you can get from one star to another in less time than it takes light to travel the same distance! Sounds counterintuitive, but time and space are malleable. From the perspective of someone watching from afar, the journey would take longer, but for you in your spaceship, just getting close to the speed of light allows you to get to your destination quicker than light speed itself. Strange but true.

  As an example, But the Stars is set around the fictional star WISE 5571 at a distance of 88 light years from Earth, but it takes the crew less than 25 years to get there in their hyper-sleep chambers because they’re moving at 96% of the speed of light. To anyone watching from Earth, the journey took just over 90 years to complete.

  When Dante is confronted on the Barton, she notes that she’s been in hyper-sleep for three years, but later in the story, it’s noted there aren’t any ships within ten light years of the Acheron. Although this may seem like a mistake it’s actually another example of time dilation and length contraction. For Dante, three years would have passed as she traveled at 96% of the speed of light, even though physically her spacecraft covered a distance of ten light years.

  As you can see, things get complicated close to the speed of light, but hypothetically, if you could travel at 99% of the speed of light, you’d cover that entire distance in just over a decade. Crank up the dilithium crystals to 99.99% and the entire 88 lightyear journey could be covered in just over one year! At 99.999999% (still just under the speed of light) it would take barely six weeks!

  Even though we can accelerate individual particles to 99.999999% of the speed of light in the Large Hadron Collider deep below the lush green pastures of Switzerland, such speeds will probably never be possible by a spacecraft. Not only would it take an inordinate amount of energy to accelerate an entire spacecraft that fast, space isn’t empty. Space is awash with radiation. Collisions with photons, cosmic rays and the wisps of dust that permeate space would cause any such craft to glow hotter than the surface of the sun. Hitting something as small as a pebble would unleash explosions on par with tactical nuclear weapons. Go fast enough, and even the astonishingly cold background radiation left over from the Big Bang will get as hot as the surface of the sun. For practical reasons like this I kept the speed of the Acheron at 96% of the speed of light.

  Science is often far stranger and wilder than science fiction. Although the binary star in this story is fictional, it’s based on SDSS J010657.39–100003.3—which is a binary dwarf pair with masses of 17% and 43% of our Sun respectively. These two stars orbit each other at a distance roughly half that of the Earth and Moon, spinning at close to half a million miles an hour, completing an orbit every 37 minutes! In roughly,30-40 million years, they’ll collide, but they won’t go supernova. Instead, they’ll combine to form a single star much like our sun.

  From the surface of our fictional world P4, such a binary star system would appear as a single point of light much like the Sun, only dimmer, and would appear to pulsate slightly every half hour.

  Some other points that might interest you from this novel are that, during World War II, the British really did wine and dine captured German generals, coaxing secrets out of them. As remarkable as Alan Turing’s work was in breaking the enigma code, an astonishin
g amount of Allied intelligence came from giving German generals a billiards table, a glass of brandy, and bugging the room. Some of the earliest evidence for the sheer scale of war crimes being committed against the Jewish diaspora in Europe came from these discussions. Information gathered in this manner allowed the British to bomb several top secret V2 rocket sites before the Nazis could unleash their full terror on London.

  Some readers may have noticed a reference to the star Betelgeuse having gone supernova in this book. It’s currently a red supergiant in the constellation of Orion, but it’s variable behavior suggests it’s reaching the end of its life and will soon go nova. With soon being any time in the next hundred thousand years. As it’s roughly 600 light years away, there’s no danger to Earth, but it sure will be spectacular when it blows and will be visible during the daytime. At night, it’ll probably cast shadows similar to those of a full moon for several weeks.

  The constellations are an example of pareidolia, a psychological phenomenon that has us seeing faces and familiar objects in abstract patterns, like Jesus in a burnt slice of toast. When it comes to the constellations, this has played out over thousands of years across dozens of different cultures. There’s no rhyme or reason behind the shapes we see in the stars. Is Usra Major the Big Dipper or the Great Bear? It’s neither. Like faces in a cloud or familiar shapes in the bark of a tree, our ancestors settled on these arbitrary designs. Even among humanity, there’s no agreement on the constellations. The aborigines of Australia have the oldest culture on Earth, but we ignore their interpretation of Orion as two brothers fishing in a canoe and go with the Greek hunter instead.

  In practice, various cultures used the appearance of the constellations in the night sky as a celestial calendar, informing them of the coming seasons, but they’re nothing more than an illusion. Our insistence on constellations would undoubtably confuse any alien culture we come across as the constellations are a random assortment of stars.

  One of the more fascinating points I came across while researching this story is the medical procedure hemispherectomy, where the brain is cleaved in two. Although this is a rare procedure today, fifty years ago it was the only way to treat acute epilepsy. Surgeons would open the skull and cut the brain in half, leaving both sides fully functional and alive, but unable to communicate with each other.

  The most startling aspect of this procedure, though, is what happened to a person’s conscious awareness. It was easy enough for doctors, scientists and researchers to determine that the different halves of a patient’s brain acted independently and saw/heard different things, but how was it possible for a person with a split brain to act on that information? Who was acting out? As speech is located on the left side of the brain, talking to patients only allowed interaction with one half of the brain. Much to the surprise of researchers (and this finding is still somewhat controversial), they found that some of these people had two different conscious personalities. One person had become two in a single body.

  The most startling example of this I could find was where neurologist Vilayanur Subramanian Ramachandran asked a patient whether they believed in God. One half said, ‘Yes,’ the other said, ‘No.’ Oh, and neither half knew what the other had answered, so these answers were derived entirely independently.

  How is this possible? As I touch on in the novel, it comes down to redefining what it means to be you or me. We think of ourselves as single entities even though we’re composite creatures made up of trillions of different cells, forming dozens of entirely separate organs and limbs that combine to become a single body. In the same way, the brain, with its 86 billion neurons is comprised of different modules that combine to become one. Split it in half and it becomes two. As strange and counterintuitive as this seems, it goes a long way toward helping us unravel the mystery of what it means to be conscious. Biology really is the weirdest science.

  The closing paragraphs of this novel touch on the concept of abiogenesis, or the mechanism by which life first arose on Earth. Dante summarizes what’s known as the statistics of self-replication. In essence, this particular concept considers the complexity of self-replicating life as a highly efficient means of allowing energy to dissipate.

  Energy excites—that’s just what it does. Life can be seen as a physical means of redistributing the energy pouring in from a nearby star, allowing matter to absorb and contain far more energy than would ordinarily be possible with simple inorganic matter.

  How does this work? The DNA within a single cell can contain hundreds of billions of atoms chemically bound together in intricate chains, making them remarkably efficient as energy-sinks/energy-stores. As each cell is self-replicating, the ability to distribute energy elsewhere is immense. Worlds with life are far more efficient at dissipating energy than lifeless worlds, meaning they are surprisingly harmonious with the laws of physics.

  From what we understand, there’s a fine balance of temperatures and pressures at which these complex molecular chains can form, so not every world can sustain life, but this theory suggests life will arise naturally given the right circumstances, as life is the optimal way to redistribute energy—and physics loves efficiency.

  I find this concept fascinating and look forward to scientists identifying Earth-like exoplanets so the idea can be tested and refined further.

  As remarkable as life is, a mere three atomic elements make up an astonishing 93% of our bodies. Imagine three containers filled with pure hydrogen, oxygen and carbon. It takes 3.8 billion years of evolutionary adaptation to turn that into you. If we add another three elements—nitrogen, calcium and phosphorus we’ve accounted for 99% of you, me and every other living thing on this planet! Life is the triumph of the interplay between matter and energy!

  The composition of our bodies is made up of recycled atoms. Some elements recycle faster than others. Oxygen, carbon dioxide and hydrogen get caught in atmospheric cycles so that at any one time, there’s a reasonably good chance you’re breathing some of the same molecules as Shakespeare or drinking a few molecules of water once enjoyed by the Roman emperor Caesar. Strange but true.

  Once again, thank you for taking a chance on independent science fiction. Novels like this live and die based on the passion of readers like you so I appreciate your support. Please leave a review online and tell a friend what you thought of this story. Your reaction to But the Stars will help others decide whether it is worth reading.

  When leaving a review, please avoid spoilers.

  But the Stars is ambiguous about the fate of its characters in the same way Inception was—and with good reason. It’s an anti-pattern. Far from the Hollywood clichés we’re all so used to, any encounter with a hostile extraterrestrial species is liable to be horribly one-sided. Imagine an African lion fighting a Great White shark. The vast disparity between them means the outcome is going to depend on where the battle occurs rather than their respective strengths, their intelligence or the intensity of their will. No amount of Bruce Willis bravado, Will Smith irreverence or suave comments from the lips of Jeff Goldblum is going to swing the balance when it comes to taking on hostile extraterrestrials.

  Did Dante escape? Or is she still trapped? I don’t know. That’s up to you to decide as the reader—and I love that it’s your choice. All stories are a mere glimpse into a fictional universe, just a tiny slither of that particular world. Regardless of whether it’s The Hunger Games, Wool, Divergence or But the Stars, what happens next is open to your imagination. That’s the beauty of fiction.

  I’d like to thank Ellen Campbell and David Jaffe for their assistance editing this novel, along with a fantastic team of beta-readers including LuAnn Miller, Petr Melechin, Bruce Simmons, John Larisch , Chris Fried, Seamus Colgan and Rob Engel.

  If you’re interested in reading more of my work, you can find my books on Amazon. With over twenty published novels covering vastly different subjects such as Sherlock Holmes, vampires and zombies, I have a wide variety of stories in my back catalog. In light of th
is, I thought it would be helpful if I put together a dedicated science fiction series under the banner First Contact that examine the prospect of meeting intelligent extraterrestrials. There are over a dozen different novels on this subject alone. Although they don’t share the same characters, they do share a unique glimpse into how first contact might unfold.

  You can catch me on social media on Facebook and Twitter and occasionally on Instagram.

  All the best,

  Peter Cawdron

  Brisbane, Australia

  2020