The Wizard from Earth

by S. J. Ryan

  Matt first entered the changing booth and stripped from his street clothes into a jumpsuit. They let you choose the color, the last choice he would officially get to make on his journey. He chose light blue.

  Dressed in his light blue jumpsuit and freshly-printed moccasins, he exited the changing booth and the pod prep team helped him climb into the pod. They strapped him in, administered a sedative, and pointed hoses which filled the pod interior with thick, greenish bioprocess suspension gel (aka 'biogel'). Matt thought he would have a drowning-reaction panic when the biogel lapped over his face and permeated into his lungs, as had happened in training, but the sedative had kicked in and all was well.

  Electronic tentacles wafted from the pod interior walls and penetrated into the micro-orifices of Matt's suit and then into his skin. Ivan greeted the pod AI, which declined his offer to be of assistance as it integrated Matt's biological systems with its internal electronics. For the time being, Matt was no longer Matt but rather a composite being of himself and the pod. It had to be that way, for the rigors of interstellar travel were too great for a frail human body to experience on its own.

  The sedative made everything seem warmer and fuzzier, and the biogel commenced slowing his metabolism down to near-stasis and the pod AI initiated its brainwave regulation routines, and Matt was about to drift into his long star sleep – but then he had a thought.

  His vocal cords unusable, Matt subvocaled, "Ivan, can you keep me conscious during the flight?"

  "I can revive you to a semiconscious state," Ivan replied. "But only momentarily and it is likely to be uncomfortable. Also, it is not recommended due to unknown psychological factors."

  "I know, but I want to experience this." After all, he thought, unknown psychological factors are what make life worth living. He wasn't sure if his father had said that, but then he had to admit now and then that his father said wise things.

  He stared with drooping eyes through the foggy gel as the prep team gave him a collective thumbs up and lowered and sealed the coverplate into place.

  "Can you . . . also . . . patch . . . outside . . . telemetry."

  Ivan correctly interpreted Matt's slurring words. A virtual screen popped up in Matt's vision, seeming to hover in front of his eyes but with clarity unimpeded by the mistiness of the gel. The screen patched into the prep room camera. Technicians were milling about, connecting to the pod and then disconnecting them. Matt drifted in and out of consciousness.

  He'd had dreams that were more vivid. Certainly he'd had dreams that were more interesting.

  As the gel affected his time sense, Matt saw the technicians begin to dart back and forth frenetically. A fork lift hurled toward the pod and then raced outside to a launch pad. The view switched to a launch pad camera and the shuttle countdown ticked away as if minutes were seconds. A flash of light and smoke, and the shuttle that contained the pod that contained Matt was a speck in the Kansas sky. Ivan smoothly transitioned external camera views from ground to shuttle hull. Matt watched the sky turn from blue to black and the Earth become a shrinking blue and white ball.

  Matt was certain he was in a state of awareness the whole time, but it should have taken hours for the shuttle and interorbital transports to deliver him to the L-5 pod launch station in trailing lunar orbit, yet it only seemed like a few more seconds. It should have taken hours to attach the pod to all the square kilometers of its magnetic sail but that seemed to take no time at all.

  Ivan switched from camera views to Mission Control graphics. The schematic showed the proton cannon array focusing beams on the magnetic sail. The view wasn't to scale, of course. In reality, even the building-sized cannons and city-sized sails were specks compared to the distances separating them.

  It all seemed so natural now, so obvious, but Matt remembered back to when he was very young, and had thought that interstellar travel was accomplished with starships with star drives that moved faster than light, just like in the old-fashioned science fiction movies. In reality, after almost two centuries of whole-hearted trying, human physics still couldn't break the light barrier. Even to reach a fraction of the speed of light required enormous expenditures of time and energy. Enter proton beam propulsion: a humongous infrastructure that remained in place to push a tiny payload to the stars.

  "Proton Cannon Array Number One reports that it is charging," Ivan said. "Pod navigation systems report magnetic sail is receiving proton stream. Acceleration .001 gee. Acceleration .002 gee . . . . "

  From thousands of kilometers away, the cannons in the array were firing their proton beams at the pod's magnetic sail. The protons bounced off the sail's magnetic field, pushing the sail and hence the pod out of Earth orbit and toward interstellar space.

  Matt was about to tell Ivan not to bother counting all the milligees, but then it seemed no time at all had passed and Ivan was saying, "Acceleration at 2.0 standard gee, acceleration stabilized."

  Once more, Matt drifted in and out of consciousness. Seconds passed, yet the pod chronometer insisted they were days. Proton Cannon Array Number One, in orbit around Earth, handed Matt off to Array Two, a hundred million kilometers away and well off the solar ecliptic. Array Two handed to Array Three, then . . . Matt lost count. And then there were no more arrays, and the pressure of the beam declined to negligible, and the Distance To Sol reading increased by a few billion kilometers every time his attention drifted.

  In his state of quasi-sleep, Matt mused that being pushed by a proton beam was such a strange way to travel between stars. But then, he reflected, it was not that much different than having water-floating ships pushed by wind against sails, and humans had traveled that way for millennia. The only difference now was that they were providing their own 'wind.'

  Oh, another difference, he thought. Sails used to be a few square meters of woven fabric, while his sail was square kilometers of ultrathin carbonoflex conductive composite bearing a repulsive electrical charge. But other than that, same thing. Except for . . . Matt lost interest in enumerating the few other things.

  Sails. Wind. Beams. Seas. Space. The thoughts dissolved into images. Matt's last clear thought as he drifted into years of dreams was that his mother had asked that he wave as he passed Pluto. But that too had only been a joke, as Pluto was in an entirely different direction from his course. Nonetheless, he tried to raise his arm. Then he forgot why. Then he slipped into oblivion.

  Relativistic time dilation at .1c is negligible to human senses. The compression of time that Matt experienced was entirely due instead to the subjective, quasi-hallucinatory effects of the biogel upon his nervous system. Ivan of course was immune and kept track of the time exactly, even adjusting for the all-but-insignificant relativistic effect, while Matt drifted in and out of dreams across the empty light years.

  The primary purpose of biogel nanotechnology was to keep Matt's body suspended from the effects of time, and so even his dreaming was sparse.

  His most vivid dream was that he arrived on Tian. He dreamed there was a banquet to celebrate his arrival and his father and mother and elephants were there. He played checkers with Random, levitating mountains as game pieces. Synethesia, silvery and trailing broken wires, floated from the sky and laughed as she spray painted Matt's body with spots of blue, red, and yellow. And Ivan was there too, telling him to wake up.

  "Matt, please wake up. Matt, please wake up! MATT, PLEASE WAKE UP!"

  “Huh . . . what . . . uh . . . are we there yet?”

  "We are within the Centauri Oort Cloud at this time. However, a meteoroid impact has destroyed sixty-eight point nine percent of the magsail. Therefore we cannot magnetically brake sufficiently for capture into the Alpha Centauri system."

  Matt gazed semi-consciously at the situational schematic that Ivan was projecting in the center of his field of vision. There was the pod, there was the sail. The navigation inset showed that they were inside the Centauri Oort Cloud, which cosmically speaking was part of the Centauri System.

  Oh, he tho
ught groggily. So it's forty years later. That was fast.

  “So, uh, why are you telling me this?” Please, he thought, just let me sleep a little more . . . .

  “Matt, I do not think you are fully grasping the seriousness of the situation. Please review the graphic that I have provided.”

  Matt had no choice, as Ivan made the graphic visible even with eyes shut. So he looked, and details seeped through his brain. Okay. Okay. The sail was damaged, perforated by passage through a cloud of cosmic dust so fine that it apparently, improbable as it seemed, had not been mapped by astrographers in either Sol or Alpha Systems.

  The sail was still capable of deceleration, but the velocity profile indicated the pod would not brake sufficiently for retrieval by the robot tugs in the Alpha Centauri System.

  “So we can't get to Tian now,” he said.

  “Yes,” Ivan replied.

  It almost seemed a relief. Now he could go back to sleep and not be interrupted again. But no, he drowsily thought. Should try to stay alive. Do something . . . but what?

  Struggling against the biogel-induced stupor, Matt remembered this same scenario from one of his Colonization classes. Yeah, the instructor told the class, now and then sails and pods get damaged by micrometeorite impact. It's a risk. Star travel is relatively safe, but we have lost people.

  Now I'm one of them, Matt thought.

  Amassing fragments of consciousness, Matt swam deeper into his memories of that same classroom lecture to discern what would happen next. Something the instructor said, about passing through the AC System, then through the other side of the Centauri Oort, then into the almost pure vacuum of interstellar space, and then hurling through the depths of interstellar space forever. The class instructor had tried to be positive about that.

  In the unlikely event that this should happen to you, we'll do all we can to rescue you. Maybe someday we'll send a robot probe to catch up with you and bring you back. Maybe someday we'll be able to violate the laws of physics and travel faster than light and catch up with you that way. Maybe you'll pass by a star inhabited by intelligent extraterrestrials with a star-faring civilization of their own, and we'll let them know you're coming and they'll catch you and toss you back . . . or keep you as a pet . . . or something.

  Matt remembered the whole class breaking into laughter. Not so funny now.

  “So,” he said. “Is there something we can do?”

  “I'm sorry, you're slurring your subvocalization too much. Could you please repeat?”

  “Is. Something. We. Can. Do?”

  “We can wait for rescue. I have no other options. I revived you in the hopes that you would.”

  “Would what?”

  “Have other options.”

  “Oh.”

  Think, Matt told himself. Ivan woke you because you're the human, you're the creative one who is supposed to come up with crazy ideas that just might work. Because that's what humans do.

  Matt remembered his lessons from Creativity Class. First Step to Creative Idea: gather information.

  “How . . . bad . . . is sail . . . damaged?”

  “Damage is at sixty-eight point nine percent.”

  “I mean . . . what does that mean?”

  “We cannot decelerate fast enough before leaving Alpha Centauri System behind.”

  “Okay, but so . . . sail is still okay to decelerate.”

  Ivan paused. “I perceive the direction of your inquiry. You wish to know whether it would be possible to deflect our course to an alternate star system and utilize the Oort Cloud at that destination to decelerate completely.”

  Matt wasn't sure that was what he had been getting at, but said, “Okay.”

  Ivan paused. “There are several thousand star systems with potentially habitable planets that are targetable for such a maneuver.”

  “Okay. Let's choose one.”

  “The nearest one is Delta Pavonis.”

  “Okay. Go there.”

  Many years later, Matt would review Ivan's recording of their conversation and marvel at how quickly he had made such a fateful decision. But at the time he wasn't thinking clearly, and there wasn't anything to think about anyway. There really had been no choice.

  Ivan promptly replied, “Understood. Interfacing with pod AI, requesting navigation change . . . approved. Matt, I should inform you that telescopic and probe surveys indicate that there is no life in the Delta Pavonis System. It is highly unlikely that our pod will be retrieved upon arrival. It is also unlikely that it will ever be retrieved.”

  Matt was as far from lucidity as a conscious mind could be when he retorted, “We'll see.”

  And then, dreamlessly, forty years became four hundred, and more.

  5.

  The guards at the main gate of the imperial palace had seen Archimedes before, and his paperwork stating that he was there at the invitation of the emperor was in order, but still they insisted on patting his robes and examining his walking staff. Archimedes went along placidly until a guard contemplated the old man's long white beard.

  Archimedes knew better than to make sarcastic remarks to swords even when sheathed, so he said flatly, "I don't have a dagger in there. And so help me if you yank even a single hair, I shall inform the Emperor of your discourtesy."

  The guard handed back the walking staff, disturbed neither by its triggers nor scent of gunpowder.

  The captain of the guard recited the millennia-old mantra, "Just doing our job."

  Archimedes had a good idea that such harassment wasn't in their job description and an even better idea who had put them up to it. But he only sighed.

  A pair of guards escorted him through the garden, past statues, fountains, hedges, ponds, bridges, and shrines. For several minutes they ascended marble stairs and wandered through tapestried corridors. Finally, Archimedes pointed. "It's that way."

  "How would you know?" the guard demanded.

  "I designed the damned place."

  The guard glared, but Archimedes glared back, and ultimately it was the guard who backed down, apparently gaining an inkling that his charge was not just another client groveling for the Emperor's favor.

  At the top of a staircase, yet another set of guards inspected the seal on the sheaf of imperial documents that Archimedes bore. Alone, Archimedes was allowed entry onto the veranda overlooking a southern exposure of city and sea. Amid ivy columns, wearing plain but purple robes, Niku Hadron, the balding Emperor of Rome, sat on a couch before a small table and peeled an orange with fumbling fingers.

  At the sight of his oldest friend, the Emperor's scowl of concentration gave way to a broad smile. He arose and shook hands. "Ah, Archie. Thanks for coming on short notice."

  "I made haste under the assumption you'll give me a free breakfast."

  "On the menu is your favorite, the blandest porridge in all the empire." Hadron rang a small bell.

  It was a fine morning as they sat and the sun of Ne'arth shone brightly upon the palace and its gardens and orchards, the hillside cityscape of the marbled mansions of the best families in Rome, and to the west the Bay of Rome dotted with sailing ships for commerce and galleys for war.

  The gleam of sunlight from the metalwork of the shore battlements reminded Archimedes, "I need to inspect those catapults this month."

  "Bah, forget that. Rome hasn't an enemy with even a fifth our naval strength. Want this?"

  Archimedes eyed the orange slice clutched in the Emperor's dripping fingers and shuddered. "Did you wash your hands?"

  Hadron laughed. "Ah, I forgot your superstition. Invisibly tiny demons crawling over every piece of food."

  "Not all food, just food that is unwashed or is handled by unwashed hands. And they're not demons, they're called germs and they're more like tiny animals. And it's not a superstition. It's science."

  "Archaic Science, you mean. Gleaned from ancient scrolls heavily sprinkled with fantastical nonsense about gods who live in the heavenly realm of Aereoth. Didn't you yourself teach me
that true science is based on observation and not tradition?"

  "I've seen germs with the aid of the microscope I have built based on the ancient texts. If you'd like me to demonstrate sometime – "

  Hadron laughed again. "Another day, friend. I have another matter I wish you to address." His expression sobered as he set down the orange. "What do you know about the strange comet that our sailors report has been spotted in the southern seas?"

  "Well, I saw it myself when I voyaged past the equator last year just to view it. It's a natural phenomenon, and a rather disappointing one at that. It was also my understanding that it hasn't been visible recently for months."

  "And how do you define a comet?"

  Archimedes shifted in his seat. Yes, the comet had looked different than any comet he had seen before, lacking any significant tail. But it had the orbital trajectory of a comet and had the right head size for a comet, so it had to have been one.

  "Heavens, Niku, didn't you learn anything for all that money your father paid me to tutor you? I explained thoroughly that a comet is just a mountain of rock and ice adrift in space."

  "I understand, Archie. But haven't comets been associated in the past with portents?"

  "You mean such as the comet that filled the sky when Emperor Malevian died?"

  "Yes. That sort of thing."

  "There was also a comet thirty-three years later that was even brighter, but nothing happened then, so everyone forgets that it ever was. See here, Haddie. You've never been superstitious before."

  "I'm not now, either, but – "

  A servant girl arrived. She placed a wooden spoon and steaming bowl of porridge before Archimedes, bowed and departed from sight. Archimedes made a show of stirring the porridge, all the while sniffing.

  Hadron tilted his head toward the rail. "What do you see there in the city below, Archie?"

  "Too much facade and not enough foundation. Why, what am I supposed to see?"

  "I see people, thousands of people, and I try to see into their minds as well, and that's why I rule over them. Now, this is what I observe about their minds. The people of Rome pride themselves as the most factual and practical in the world, but pry deeper and you find the ancient myths still hold sway. Such as the one about the Star Child who rides a chariot upon a comet."