Paradise Reclaimed

by Raymond Harris

  And it was clear David was infatuated.

  “I’m very pleased to meet you. I’m a bit of a fan. I mean, who isn’t? David told me he was working on some new songs with someone, but I had no idea.”

  “Nuku is an accomplished coloratura in her own right,” said David.

  She demurred. “Oh, I’m a bit rusty.”

  “No, no, you’ll be fine. Maxim and I are working on a duet that requires a coloratura.”

  Maxim smiled with a polite patience that indicated he was well used to being recognised and feted. “I heard you went native and have been living wild in the jungle. How exotic,” Maxim said, taking her by the arm. “You will tell us all about it?” He was flirting with her, which had always been part of his charm, even as a boy – the sexual confidence of someone who could almost have anyone he wanted, whenever he wanted, who had mixed with the best and brightest.

  Miriam took her other arm. “Are you thirsty Nuks?” We have some vintage boo wine from the Terton valley.”

  “Sounds delicious,” she said as they walked her inside, where she immediately and almost instinctively undid her sarong and tossed it onto a chair, glad to be free of it.

  It was as she remembered: an open-plan living, dining and kitchen area of local stone and exquisitely carved, ornate wooden beams and matching furniture, with a two hundred degree view over the island and the southern coast stretching into the distance.

  “Is this new Mims?” she asked Miriam pointing to a large glazed ceramic pot.

  “Yes, by David’s sister, she’s become quite the potter, quite sought after now. And we bought a Tang, painted on his last polar expedition.” She pointed to the wall at the far end and a large neo-impressionist canvas of the twin full moons at sunset over the Atung Astri ice fields: a study in pinks, mauves and delicate blues.

  “Good taste as always.”

  “Isn’t it gorgeous,” added Maxim.

  “And there’s something else, although it’s invisible,” interrupted David, eager to share his news.

  “A new toy?” she teased as Miriam handed her a glass of purple wine, which she sipped immediately, relishing the subtle flavours. “Yum,” she said to Miriam.

  “Yes, a good year. We went up there a few months ago, visited a few vintners, came back with a few cases of purples, oranges and yellows…”

  “We made a breakthrough with the music algorithm in the central AI. We’ve been testing it the last few days. It can respond to real time voice commands and adjust to any given lead instrument. Listen,” he said as he addressed the room. “First violin, Biochetti’s fugue, number seven.”

  And out of thin air she heard the melancholic strains of the violin. Of course she understood the basic physics. The AI generated the sound via a complex synthesising algorithm and transmitted it through the void to this exact spacetime location where it projected sound waves. Many homes subscribed.

  “D minor, animato,” he commanded like a conductor and the music changed immediately, shifting up a key and picking up pace. “String section,” he said and suddenly a full string section began to play. “Relocate,” he said pointing to his left, his guardian noting the gesture and communicating this to the AI, which shifted the spacetime projection to the new location.

  “Wow, that is something,” said Nuku.

  “Listen to this,” added Maxim nodding to David.

  “Follow Maxim,” he ordered the AI.

  Maxim smiled broadly. “After the first bar add choral accompaniment.” And then he sang. She thought she knew the tune but the AI recognised it immediately and at the right time added the choir. She noticed that Maxim had started to slow the tempo and the choir kept pace, then he changed key and it adjusted again, immediately. She remained silent, enjoying watching Maxim sing. He stopped and the choir stopped.

  “It doesn’t quite capture a live performance and it has limited improvisation ability. It struggles with some modern jazz forms,” said David.

  “It never will,” added Maxim. “As much as you might hope, AI still can’t grasp human creativity. It doesn’t have soul.”

  “No,” sighed David moving toward Maxim and kissing him on the mouth. “It doesn’t understand beauty. It can only imitate.”

  Maxim responded to the kiss.

  “It’s still impressive though, the real time adjustment, that’s a new level of complexity,” she said as she realised the kiss had aroused her.

  The rest of the afternoon was spent sipping wine, playing music and talking. After a few drinks Nuku was coaxed to try a duet. Her throat wasn’t properly exercised but she did a fair job, surprising herself with her memory for music.

  As the sun was setting Miriam brought out the food, her specialty: four fungi pizza with timbu herb and tasty cheese made from the sap of the carple tree; and a spicy seafood pizza sprinkled with dried sea grass, all served with a side salad of wild greens and tangy zinger pods, washed down with a sparkling yellow boo fruit wine.

  After dinner they took turns freshening up for the night ahead by showering, toileting and cleaning out their system with an herb infused enema. When she came out feeling fully refreshed David was already setting out the mildly hallucinogenic buzz shroom served with a sweet sorbet. As they waited for the effects to kick in she entertained them with vids from her field trip displayed on the large screen.

  Gradually the mood shifted. It was Miriam who made the first move, sitting beside Nuku and kissing her.

  It was a delicious night of sex. They tried every combination with every sensation heightened by the buzz. Maxim proved to be as much an artist in bed as he was with music. There was certainly something about him and his cock was certainly a magnificent instrument.

  In the early hours of the morning she woke, satiated but restless. She peeled herself from under Miriam’s arm and wandered out onto the patio, picking up a shawl to hold off the chill. The sea was alive with bioluminous krill brought in by the tides. Eros was in full view waxing at three quarters, the thin blue glow of its atmosphere just faintly visible. It was larger than Psyche and almost double the size of old Earth’s moon (although not as dense and therefore without the same mass and gravity) and much brighter as the sun reflected off its icy surface. If you were lucky you might see a volcanic eruption with a plume shooting out, backlit by the sun. It was rare but she had been lucky when she was a child. She had been lying on her back on the veranda at home unable to sleep, staring up at the night sky when she saw a small ripple of red and then a plume of lava and plasma shoot out. Most of it would be pulled back to Eros’s surface by its gravity but some of it would fall on Eden as shooting stars. When Psyche eclipsed Eros, its small orb passing between Eden and Eros, the combined gravitational pull caused massive tides on Eden and excited multiple eruptions on Eros. People would say Eros was ejaculating because Psyche had touched him. They also said that when a boy first ejaculated Psyche had been ‘eclipsed’by Psyche and girls loved to play a game called Psyche’s eclipse by teasing boys and getting them to ejaculate (they had to try and hold back – a way for them to learn control). She had been six when she had her first success with an older cousin. She had been very pleased with herself because she had been quite good at it, unafraid to use whatever tricks she could.

  The reminiscing was making her feel slightly melancholic. She knew without a doubt that she would soon be leaving Eden, perhaps never to return. It made her realise just how special it was. As the first explorers had quickly found out the universe could be a hostile place and Eden was perhaps a unique paradise, a place where humanity had actualised a living paradise rather than to merely hope to enter one after they had died. There couldn’t be too many planets out there as benign.

  23

  Akash

  The problem was not so much the jump itself. He was confident they had the physics right. It was now a matter of mundane logistics: what equipment to take given the limited space, what experiments to undertake, and following that, who to send. After much debate they agree
d to send an initial team of four: a geologist and three biologists (a microbiologist, a botanist and a zoologist). Of course there was the question of potential biohazards and contamination from both the planet and from Earth. They couldn’t assume anything was safe, especially in regard to bacteria or viruses. And how long should they be on the surface: a week, a month?

  After a stalemate he made an executive decision. The team would go for a week to answer two major questions. If these were answered in the positive they would send a larger expedition. Was there a food source and was there anything that could kill them? These were not simple questions. To test for food they would need a reasonable amount of time to search and collect samples. It could not be assumed that humans could digest anything found on the planet. The second was the most critical question and the team knew they were effectively the canary in the mine. If they could not answer these questions in a week, then it was unlikely they ever could, given that they would land in a place ideal for both water and food. In fact the sooner they answered the questions the better.

  The team also had to be experienced in fieldwork and have considerable outdoor survival skills. Fortunately they had already planned for such an inevitability and through his extensive network of charities, scholarships and side-projects he was able to find plenty of potential candidates. The only problem was that most of them were completely unaware of the real work of Shunyata and therefore had to pass Aviva’s stringent security check. They could not be compromised in any way.

  The first person selected was Dr Marta Engelstad, a Norwegian biologist and champion cross-country skier, twenty-three years old and single. Next was Dr Axel Kohler, a German geologist/hydrologist and part-time mountaineer, aged thirty-five and also single. The third was Dr Anthony Yuan, an Anglo-Chinese microbiologist, a specialist in jungle fieldwork in the Amazon and Borneo, aged twenty-six and recently divorced. The fourth was Dr Yasmin Setiawan, twenty-five, an Indonesian Australian zoologist and experienced bushwalker, separated. They were flown to Bhutan and in a small meeting room decorated with a large thangka of a fierce dakini; they were asked to sign confidentiality agreements and informed of the real work of Shunyata. At the end of the day and in a state of excited shock, they all agreed without hesitation, although it had not really sunk in that they would be the first humans to set foot on an alien world.

  It took a further three months for them to prepare. They argued over the required experiments and equipment, they configured and reconfigured the interior of the capsule; they underwent a rigorous training regime to build their fitness for the increased gravity; they engaged in intense conversations with Akash and the other physicists as they tried to grasp the mind-bending paradoxes of void physics, unable to quite grasp that reality was in fact a multi-dimensional projection; and their moods swung from hypermanic exhilaration to almost crippling fear, each knowing that they might very well die far, far from home. But perhaps the most difficult thing to accept was that this momentous adventure had to be kept a secret. Even after Aviva had fully briefed them on the political situation on Earth, a romantic hope that this could be used for the benefit of all humanity still remained. They reluctantly accepted the need for secrecy when Aviva reminded them of the real motive for Columbus’s journey to the Americas – to enrich the Spanish aristocracy.

  “The harsh truth is, and we’ve gamed this, if we make this public, a whole host of powerful players will want this new planet solely to enrich and empower themselves. It will trigger a war. The model for this is European colonial expansion, which triggered a sequence of conflicts between the English, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch for resources and territory, most instigated on behalf of mercantile corporations such as the British and Dutch East India Companies. Nothing has changed. We cannot allow humanity to colonise other planets in the same way, most especially if we happen to encounter a sentient species. Believe me when I say there are those that would again enslave such a species and rob their planet of resources.”

  Finally they had come close to agreement, except for one last, nagging controversy: whether or not to take guns to both defend themselves and kill specimens for study. Both the men, Axel and Tony supported taking hunting rifles. Yasmin was completely opposed saying that they should have minimum impact on the planet and should not kill even to defend themselves, whilst Marta argued that shooting a rifle was often enough to scare an animal away.

  “You don’t go on a tourist Safari in Africa without a gun,” she reminded them. “We don’t know what we’ll find.”

  A compromise was reached. They would take two hunting rifles and two flare guns, both to be used strictly for defensive purposes. There would be no hunting.

  Finally the day came. In many ways it was anti-climatic. There was no ceremony, they had no uniform - instead they dressed in sensible hiking gear. The capsule itself looked drab: a sphere made of a dense ceramic material with the interior a mess of tightly packed instrumentation and supplies. Someone joked that they needed a bean free diet because one fart would stink the whole capsule out. It was far from looking like any of the glamorous starships depicted in sci-fi movies, yet despite this, they couldn’t help but call it “Starship Enterprise.”

  It was snowing the night they were to depart and bitter winds swept down from the Himalayas. They were driven from the monastery to a small industrial park on the outskirts of Thimpu. The capsule sat unpretentiously on an ordinary concrete surface outside a bland industrial shed amongst pallets and water storage tanks: all designed as a form of camouflage. There were no floodlights and only a skeleton support team. Everyone else was back at the control centre built under the monastery. They ran from the van to the waiting capsule to avoid the cold and strapped themselves in. After a twenty-minute countdown and final systems check, the capsule lifted quietly into the night sky, the dark hull rendering it invisible within a minute. It took half an hour for them to reach the right altitude. They had a moment to experience weightlessness and look at the blue orb of the Earth before they jumped a distance of four hundred and thirty odd light years. They stopped breathing as they watched a strange sun rise over the horizon of GT 1098f.

  “This deserves some sort of historic comment don’t you think?” said Axel.

  “What, like, one small step for man…” suggested Yasmin.

  “We boldly go where no man has…” suggested Anthony.

  “Person, there are two women here,” Marta reminded them.

  They were interrupted by the intercom. “Earth here, you okay? We have pictures of the planet. You didn’t implode did you? Your guts aren’t splattered all over the place are they?”

  They laughed nervously. “No, all present and intact,” said Marta.

  “Well, any famous words for the historical record?” asked control.

  “Yeah, it’s fucking awesome.”

  This relieved the tension and they went through the final checks as the daylight zone revealed a green and blue planet with Earth-like cloud patterns, including a small tropical cyclone in the northern hemisphere. When the checks were completed they descended slowly to a predetermined location in the southern subtropical zone on the coast of the largest continent.

  “It’s going to be a fine day with a maximum of twenty-six degrees Celsius, light winds and light cloud cover,” said Yasmin as she read her screen. They watched mesmerised as the capsule’s AI guided the craft gently to the base of a mountain range and a wide, serpentine river making its way across a broad plain slipped under them. Finally they nestled in a field in a small valley surrounded by forest.

  “Okay, remember the protocol guys, headgear on at all times, emergency masks,” said control. “I know we’ve gone over this many times. Our main concern is an allergic reaction. You will also experience a little dizziness as a result of more oxygen and a greater surface pressure, but you should adjust within half an hour. Keep a close watch for any strange symptoms, anything at all.”

  “Confirmed,” said Marta as they adjusted the headwear
containing two cameras, one forward, one rear, as well as mikes and infrared recording devices. “Okay, everyone’s clear to go.”

  “Confirmed. Good luck guys. You are cleared to open the hatch.”

  There was a hiss and then an inrush of air as the pressures equalised. They held their breaths. It was Yasmin who took the first, tentative gasp.

  “It’s sweet. I don’t know, like wet cinnamon or something. It certainly doesn’t smell like Earth.”

  They all took a breath and sighed with relief.

  “Well, I’m not dead yet,” laughed Axel.

  It was Marta who was closest to the hatch. She climbed over equipment strapped to the floor and poked her head out. “It’s beautiful guys, green like the Alps of Switzerland.” She grabbed the handles of the ladder and eased herself down the metal steps. The first thing she did was jump. “Hey, it’s not as bad as I thought. I can’t really tell the difference.”

  “Wait until you’ve been walking all day,” said Axel as he joined her.

  She bent down to take a close look at the ground. “It’s not exactly grass, more like a moss: sphagnopsida, andreaeobryum…” She pulled some and rubbed it between her fingers to smell it. “The ground is moist, good humus.”

  “There’s time for that,” said Anthony, taking on a slightly officious tone to offset an overwhelming sense of awe.