If anything, the main engines were strangely disappointing. There was no hell-for-leather hold-on-for-dear-life rattle, no deafening roar, no teeth-chattering shudder running through the craft. Given the four-point harnesses they were all wearing, she’d expected something akin to the thundering rocket launches she’d seen on NASA TV, but the Copernicus was like a Cadillac accelerating slowly and smoothly.
Sitting there, Jasmine felt strangely normal. It was as though she could get up and walk around, as though she could open a door and step into the street outside. Instead of being in orbit around Saturn, she could have been back in the Marshall Space Flight Center in one of the various simulation rooms she visited during her senior year at high school. Jasmine could almost convince herself to get up and walk out. Perhaps the hatch on the wall opened out into one of the lecture halls at the MSFC?
Jasmine was surprised by how her sense of up and down had returned. The constant acceleration felt like gravity. For the first time since she’d awaken on the Copernicus her clothes hung from her. The tingling in her toes disappeared as her slippers rested against the floor.
“Point six and holding,” Mike said to Chuck. “The engines are humming along nicely.”
Chuck unclipped his harness, and spoke into his microphone saying, “We are stable at point-six gee acceleration. You're free to move around. Take care in the artificial gravity. Might not be the same as home, but it's better than Mars.”
“Roger that,” Anastasia replied from the science lab.
“Copy,” Mei said.
Jasmine unlocked her harness buckle and removed the straps from her shoulders. She stood up, feeling as though she was bouncing on a trampoline. With the introduction of constant acceleration at 0.6 times the gravity felt on Earth, the command deck had been transformed. The corridor leading to the medical bay, science lab and engineering opened out like an elevator shaft behind her.
Mike was already descending the rungs of one of the three ladders set around the shaft. Jasmine had noticed the rungs lining the corridor earlier and had assumed they were aesthetic as they held no purpose in free-fall. Now, though, dozens of features she'd overlooked took on new significance. A rail at the rear of the deck was an extended horizontal rung allowing Chuck to reach an overhead compartment. He pulled out a small backpack and followed Mike down the ladder.
Nadir was the only astronaut to remain on the bridge. He had swung a computer station around and down where he could access it easily. He sat on a stool, tapping on a keyboard.
Jasmine went to climb out of the seating area when Jason spoke softly from beside her.
“Don't move too quickly. In point-six it's easy to lose your balance. If you fall, you can still hurt yourself.
“See the carabiners on the waist-strap of your jumpsuit?”
Jasmine hadn't noticed until now, but a small aluminum carabiner hung from either hip of her flight suit.
“Clip those in when you're on the ladder.”
She nodded. Jason was a wealth of information.
“You'll find it's easy to get lightheaded and a little dizzy as your circulatory system isn’t used to fighting any sort of gravity at all. Even in low simulated gravity, blood will pool in your legs, so take your time walking around. Sit when you can.”
“And if I get dizzy?” Jasmine asked.
“Don’t risk fainting. Lie down and get your legs up. Get the blood back to your brain.”
“Thanks.”
Jason didn't respond. Jasmine was glad he knew how utterly unprepared she was for this environment. He made life in space bearable, allowing her to focus on getting answers. As confusing as the alien message was for the other astronauts, it was terrifying for her. Somehow, seeking answers distracted her from her fears.
Jasmine was curious. She wanted to talk to Nadir. She wanted to know why he'd sided so quickly and so decisively with Chuck. She walked around the central shaft and over to him as he focused on the wafer-thin computer screen in front of him.
“Hey, Jazz.”
“Hi,” Jasmine replied. “Are you busy?”
Oh, what a dumb question, she thought. You're a billion miles from Earth. You're in contact with Satan or some damn thing. You've got amnesia and can't remember shit beyond the age of nineteen. There's a bunch of highly specialized astronauts trying to unravel this mystery and get you back to Earth in one piece, and you wonder if they're busy? Stupid is as stupid does!
Nadir just smiled.
“What's bothering you?” he asked.
Jasmine felt as though she were transparent, as though Nadir could see right through her. Nothing was hidden from his sight. Did he know? Had he figured out she wasn't in her right mind? Should she tell him, just as she'd told Jason? Would he understand? Would he believe the extent of her amnesia?
Even to her, the concept of amnesia felt unreal. It was more than simply forgetting things, she was convinced she had never experienced anything like space flight before in her life, and yet she had to be a veteran of several flights to be assigned to a mission of this importance. There had to be scores of people—doctors, engineers, flight directors and senior managers at NASA that believed she was the right person for this mission, but she had never met them. She was nineteen, and a long way from her porch swing.
“I—ah.”
“You're wondering about the message? You're wondering why I was so quick to side with Chuck?”
“Yes,” she replied, pleasantly surprised at how Nadir could articulate what she felt but couldn't express. Nadir swiveled on his chair to face her, gesturing for her to sit on the edge of a nearby console. He was gentle, reminding her of her grandfather.
“History is replete with examples of how we've thought too small,” Nadir began in his soft Indian accent.
Listening to him was somewhat hypnotic. The harsh stereotypes of Indian speech didn't apply to him. If anything, his accent sounded strangely dignified, as though he were royalty.
“We're small, Jazz. We think small. For thousands of years, we were sure Earth was all there was. Earth was big. The heavens were small, but how wrong we were.
“Even after Copernicus and Galileo showed us our place in the solar system, we assumed the universe was still quite small. We thought Earth was an island in an archipelago that could be measured in hundreds, perhaps thousands, maybe millions of other stars and planets. The galaxy, that's all there was. The Milky Way was all we needed. And then Edwin Hubble came along and revealed hundreds of other similar galaxies teeming with billions of other stars and innumerable planets.
“From there the numbers just kept growing. Thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, hundreds of millions, billions, and then hundreds of billions of galaxies. And from what we can tell, our universe itself is just one among potentially billions of others. At every scale, the numbers compound. The numbers we’re dealing with in astronomy are embarrassingly large. They're so stupendous as to be effectively meaningless. Call them what you will. A bazillion. A gazillion.
“You'd think we'd give up counting, but like a child on the seashore playing with the sand, we keep running the fine silica through our fingers in amazement.”
Jasmine could have listened to him all day. Nadir's gravelly voice had a slight rasp, as though each sentence was his last. Each sentence was to be savored.
She could see where he was going.
“And you think we're thinking too small yet again.”
Nadir just smiled.
“It doesn't bother you?” she asked. “The message, I mean.”
“It makes me curious.”
“It scares me,” Jazz confessed.
Looking deep into his dark, intelligent eyes, she wondered if he could tell these were the words of a child. For a second, she thought she'd said too much.
What would he think of her if he knew she had not only lost her memory but had emotionally and mentally reverted to the mindset of a teenager? It wasn't that Jasmine thought she was nineteen again, it was that she had no
recollection of having lived through a single day beyond that point in her life. Those days in Atlanta were so fresh in her mind, like memories from this morning rather than from years gone by.
Would anyone believe her when she said she shouldn't be here? Would they think she was crazy if she told them she was barely nineteen years old? Was she mad? Insane? Maybe she was, she thought. And yet she felt entirely sane. It was the circumstance in which she found herself that was insane. My sweet Satan, no three words had ever terrified her so.
Jasmine was convinced no one would understand her. Mike hadn't. The rest of the crew saw her as a peer. They looked on her outward appearance. They saw her aging body. They must have remembered the years of training they'd had together, and probably a couple of other missions spent working with the old Jazz. They would have remembered everything that eluded her recollection. And it wasn't just the lack of memory that hindered her, it was the lack of maturity, the lack of confidence, the lack of perspective. They’d never believe Jasmine was a scared nineteen year old girl.
Nadir breathed deeply. She could see him considering his response to her statement about being scared.
“We're all afraid, Jazz. If anyone says they're not, they're lying. We're in a flimsy tin can on the far reaches of the solar system. We're so absurdly far from Earth, I would be concerned if someone wasn't afraid.
“There's a million things that could go wrong out here, but we've been trained to deal with every possible scenario, and that's what makes the difference. It's our professionalism that will see us through.”
And yet running into Satan was one scenario no mission planner had ever considered, thought Jasmine. She knew Nadir was right, only in her case, any prior training wasn't applicable. It should have been, but it simply wasn't there in her mind to draw upon. Perhaps that's why she was so acutely aware of their dire predicament. Jasmine was completely unprepared to deal with the challenges that lay ahead, regardless of what they were. Whether they were rudimentary to the other astronauts or entirely novel and new, she was ill-equipped to do anything other than panic.
In some ways, she wasn't keeping her mental state secret from the crew out of deceit so much as that she was playing a role on a stage. She was bluffing, trying to fool herself into believing she could fit in. Perhaps if she could convince the crew, she could convince herself, and if she could convince herself, she could make it through the challenges that lay ahead.
“What do you think it means?” she asked, knowing she needed no more qualification than that. Everyone was thinking about the message. They had to be. There was no escaping it.
“Maybe I'm in denial,” Nadir conceded. “Maybe I'm ignoring the obvious because I don't want to believe it, but I think there must be more to this message than what we've understood.”
Jasmine was silent.
“Doesn't that message strike you as strange?” Nadir asked.
“Everything strikes me as strange,” Jasmine confessed, again wondering if she'd said too much.
Nadir smiled as he replied.
“I mean, think about how deliberate that message was. How it draws upon our deepest fears. How it conjures up such strong cultural reactions.”
He paused for a second before continuing.
“I can't think of anything more alarming. What could this alien entity have said that would have been more frightening than an appeal to collaboration with Satan?
“Angels and devils. Cherubim and demons. These are concepts that have haunted humanity for thousands of years. There's no empirical evidence for them, of course. The very concept of some malignant evil spirit should have been banished with the Dark Ages, and yet here it is in the 21st century—turning up where we least expect it. Weird, huh? It’s like the Spanish Inquisition has been brought back to life.”
“Do you think the alien understands what it's saying?” Jasmine asked.
“That's an interesting question,” Nadir replied, leaning forward in excitement. “You see, these are the types of questions we should be asking. We shouldn't accept this message at face value. We're scientists. We should explore all the possibilities.
“Think about it. What are the odds of another interstellar species having the same belief system as ours? Hell, we don't share the same belief systems on the same planet. We've got Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and more variations on Christianity than you can shake a stick at. No, I think there's something else at play here, Jazz.”
“And you think we should go there?” Jasmine asked. “To Bestla?”
“Yes.”
“What do you think we'll find?”
“I don't know, but I doubt we'll find a fallen angel.”
Jasmine bit her lip. All her fears and apprehensions sounded rather silly when the problem was phrased like that.
“I don't think what we've heard changes anything in regards to our original mission,” Nadir continued. “There's an alien space craft in orbit around one of our gas giants. That is wonderful. It is incredible. Just the discovery alone changes our entire outlook on life, let alone all we are yet to learn. Regardless of any misapprehensions or confusion we have, it's our duty to investigate this craft.”
Jasmine was shaking. She tried to hide the tremor in her hands, making out as though she was cold and rubbing her hands together. Nadir wasn't fooled.
“Don't fear for your life,” the gentle man said. “Fear a lost opportunity.”
“I guess,” Jasmine replied sheepishly. “I mean, if someone had suggested there was something satanic about extraterrestrial beings prior to today, I would have found the notion laughable. It sounds like one of those old Roswell conspiracy theories, or something.”
“That's the spirit,” Nadir replied with warmth in his smile. “We need to keep this interaction in context. Satan is our construct. The Devil is our way of rationalizing evil, not theirs.
“Consider a mass murderer, the most evil men we know of, people like Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffery Dahmer—these guys weren't possessed by some devil spirit when they committed their murders, they weren't mad or insane. They were psychopaths. They knew exactly what they were doing and they loved it. For them, the restraints of civilization didn't exist. They were animals. There was no satanic temptation, no tiny demon sitting on their shoulder telling them what to do. Any voices in their heads were their own.
“You see the problem is us—our perception. We simply cannot conceive how anyone could rape and kill a teenage boy, or strangle a woman and cut her into tiny pieces, and yet that's exactly what these monsters did. For those of us with a sound mind, there has to be something else at work. And so we come up with Satan, Lucifer, the Devil. As if the notion of some external evil spirit excuses them from their villainy. I think they have no such excuse. We should not give them any place to hide.
“We personify evil. We turn evil into a devil, but there's no such creature as Baal or Beelzebub. There's just us. This universe is what we make of it. We have to make this world better in spite of the Dahmers and the Gacys.
“Never forget, these monsters had mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters who loved them, who cried when they went to the electric chair. They grew up just like we did, laughing at the same movies, kicking a soccer ball around in the park and throwing a Frisbee for the family dog. And yet somewhere along the line, the wheels fell off the train. At some point, rage or jealousy, lust or envy got the better of them. They wanted power. They wanted control. They succumbed to their own base desires, not those of some mythical demigod rising out of the fires of Hades.”
“So,” Jasmine asked, her tongue lingering on that first word in her sentence, “What is Bestla?”
“It's not satanic,” Nadir answered in his soft Indian accent. “Not as you think of Satan in the Western world. It cannot be.”
“Why?”
“Because of the assumption that the Western gods are always right. This thing, this alien entity from another star system, it cares not for the religions of the East or the West. I
t cannot, for it has not visited them. How can it know anything about them, let alone choose to side with the dark forces of one or another religion?
“Think about it. Would any of this be an issue if the creature had mentioned Shiva instead of Satan?
“All religions have a destroyer, a harbinger of doom, a darkness set as the antithesis of life, but this is our reckoning, it is our desire to restrain death. A creature from another planet will have no care or regard for our superstitions. We may fear death, but there's no reason to assume an alien species will share our concerns.”
“You're not afraid of dying?” Jasmine asked.
“No one wants to die,” Nadir replied. “But everyone will. For the most part, we ignore our finite existence, pretending there are more important concerns—paying the mortgage, saving for a new car, looking for a new job, but really these are distractions. Nothing compares to the privilege of life and the travesty of death.
“Once you accept that everyone dies, then it matters not that you die but rather what you do with your life. The joy of life is to bring light into the world.”
Jasmine didn’t agree. The expression on her face must have given that much a way, as Nadir clarified his thinking.
“Surely, you must have felt this way before the launch? I have felt this way every time I have strapped myself into a feeble leather chair mounted on top of a thin, sheet-metal cylinder with millions of pounds of thrust roaring from its engines. During those first few minutes, when the rocket is still within the atmosphere and being buffeted by the wind, life seems as fragile as an eggshell. At those moments, life feels as though it is measured in seconds, not decades, and yet were I to die then I'd be at peace, and do you know why?”
Jasmine didn’t like where Nadir was leading his argument, but she let him finish.
“Because my life was not without purpose.”
“I don’t accept that,” Jasmine finally said, surprising herself with her own sense of conviction. “You’re saying life only holds meaning if it’s sacrificed? I can’t buy into a martyrdom complex. Life is its own justification. Life doesn’t need heroic acts to be meaningful.”
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