Dreams of the Chosen

by Cawell, Brian

  And the needle descends, embedding its point in the frozen flesh of his thigh, while the electronics of the crib begin the process of raising the temperature – gradually and precisely – to the optimum.

  In three hours, a sharp electric shock will start his heart and the pain of awakening will tear at every fibre of his flesh, as muscles cramp and ligaments stretch and synapses fire randomly in the waking cortex, generating spastic convulsions in every limb and organ.

  And half an hour later, as full consciousness returns, he will scream with the agony of it and bite his unfeeling lip, drawing blood. Then his eyes will open and he will realise that he is alive, that it is over. They have arrived.

  ERIN’S STORY

  They can warn you all they like about what to expect, but nothing prepares you for the tearing, mind-numbing agony of coming out of cryo-sleep. It’s a nightmare you want desperately to wake from, but you know you can’t. Because you’re already awake. That’s sort of the point and the irony.

  The first thing I saw, when I opened my eyes finally, was Jordan’s face hanging over me like one of those guardian angels they used to carve on the sides of the ancient medieval graves of Old Earth. I remember seeing them once on an Earth-history edu-sphere.

  Strange tradition that – angels, supernatural minions of an omnipotent God, watching over His creatures, but never really affecting anything. The universal ideal. Something to be emulated and to measure your failure against. Whatever their role was supposed to be, they hadn’t stopped what happened to the Earth, all those years ago. They hadn’t prevented the Separation.

  And now we were here to find out exactly what it was that they had failed to prevent.

  – Erin?

  Jordan’s thought-tone was hesitant and, despite the pain, I felt a warm glow somewhere in the region of my heart.

  – Present. I managed a smile, but a new wave of pain washed over me at that exact moment, so I think it ended up more like a grimace.

  I closed my eyes again. The effort of keeping them open seemed pointless.

  He was holding my hand; rubbing it to improve the circulation. I wanted to tell him that it was hurting, but I couldn’t find the words. So I concentrated on his mind-tone. Not the meaning – he could have been saying anything – just the warmth of his emotion. It was what I craved at that moment more than anything.

  Eight hours later, we were all awake. Twenty-three of us sitting around the long conference table in the common area and Hanni lying on one of the couches nearby.

  I watched him try to control the stream of spittle escaping from the side of his mouth, and fail. It’s a not uncommon side-effect of the cryo-sleep, a temporary paralysis that can affect one or both sides of the body. With Hanni, it affected his entire left side for a couple of days after waking, but even paralysis didn’t curb his enthusiasm.

  – How long before we enter normal space?

  Jordan fielded the question. Hanni wasn’t the only one wondering.

  – About three days. They wanted to give us time to adjust before putting the pressure on. We’ll enter normal space just outside the orbit of Earth’s moon – about 400,000 clicks out. It gives us a bit of room to manoeuvre, in case of anything unexpected.

  – Unexpected? That was Alvy, but it could have been any of us. We don’t know what happened here or what to expect. Whatever happens will be unexpected.

  – Point taken. Look, it gives us the chance to observe things long-range, before we go busting in on something that could do us damage. Remember, they sent a number of drones to Earth when the C-ships stopped coming and none of them even sent a message back, let alone made the return journey. Whatever happened back here, it wasn’t user-friendly and I, for one, would like a chance to check things out before committing myself.

  And so it went.

  At the end of three days, the ship slipped seamlessly out of Ether-Drive and into normal space and when I hit the button to open the forward shield, there she was.

  Old Earth, hanging blue-green in the empty black, surrounded by the strewn diamonds of the Milky Way. The moon was three-quarters eclipsed by the curve of the planet and the sun was behind us, so our view was unobstructed. Clouds littered the atmosphere, distorting the familiar shapes of the continents, but not enough to hide their identities.

  – That’s Asia and Australasia and over on the left is the east coast of Africa. Hanni provided the impromptu commentary, oblivious to the fact that we had all pored over the ancient maps as part of our preparation. But no one tried to stop him. Each one of us reacts in his own way to the kind of emotion that was coursing through us at that moment. Who were we to judge his reaction?

  I sat in the padded acceleration couch, just staring. What else was there to do? All the dreaming and the planning and the sheer hard work, and we were finally within reach. It looked so close.

  – It’s almost half a million clicks away, but you could reach out and touch it, couldn’t you?

  As usual, Jord was in sync.

  – It’s so – blue. That was all I could manage. My poetry had dried up and what I had left was prosaic. Of course it was blue. What else would you expect? Compared to the Earth, Deucalion is one huge desert, but I don’t think it was the beauty of the planet that left me speechless.

  It was the fear.

  Of what we might find there.

  Or might not find . . .

  JORDAN’S STORY

  Before we approached the planet, we sent out a couple of drones, as decoys to test the water. Whatever had affected the ships all those centuries ago had probably long gone, but there was no point in taking unnecessary chances with all our lives.

  A wide spectrum scan of the space for a million clicks around picked up nothing but background static – as you would expect if the planet was uninhabited. No comms, no ether-links. Nothing. Except for a ring of geo-stationary satellites about a hundred clicks above the equator, but they appeared to be dormant. Their internal guidance systems hummed away, maintaining their orbit, but there was no transmission band on either the ether-wave or radio frequencies. No response to comm-tests or even to distress codes.

  Nothing.

  They were like bodies on life support: brain-dead, but still breathing. Not really surprising after all this time. The ops programs would have been stored on casserite cubes, which become unstable without maintenance in less than a century. The AI guidance systems, on the other hand, would be hard-wired into the satellite’s circuitry so they could remain operational for millennia.

  – Notice anything strange about them? The satellites, I mean. Erin’s question echoed what I was feeling, though I couldn’t put a finger on what my subconscious trouble radar had picked up.

  – You’re going to tell me, aren’t you?

  She just nodded.

  – They’re sitting in a ring around the equator. The scan shows a perfect configuration. But—

  – But?

  – Notice anything unusual about the other satellites?

  – What other satellites? There aren’t – Of course! How could I miss it?

  – There’s one perfect ring of geo-stationaries – showing no sign of orbital decay after a thousand years. And not a single other bird anywhere. In any orbit. There should be thousands of the things.

  I stood there, staring at the distant planet, running through a thousand possible scenarios, but none of them made any sense. A satellite didn’t just disappear – unless its power-source malfunctioned or its guidance system got scrambled by a meteor impact, or something equally catastrophic, sneaking past the shields.

  With power from a perpetual anti-matter fusion cell and solar panel generation as back-up, there was no reason why most, if not all the satellites shouldn’t still have been there. Even after ten centuries.

  Even if the population they were supposed to serve had disappeared from the fac
e of the world below.

  – I’m beginning to get an uncomfortable feeling about this, Jord.

  – Erin Mathieu, the Mistress of Understatement.

  Beyond the glass, the Earth turned slowly on its axis, Europe and Africa giving way to the Americas. A huge storm was swirling above what men once called the Caribbean Sea, tracking slowly towards the mainland. A hurricane they called it. I’d seen an old digital report that captured the power of such a wind, coming in off the sea, and it struck me that if anyone still lived down there in its path, after all this time they probably had a different name for it.

  I placed a hand on Erin’s shoulder.

  – Let’s hold until the drones get there. I don’t think we should go any closer until we see what happens.

  The radiation scan of the planet surface when it was completed twenty-four hours later was no more encouraging. Terese summoned us to the bridge, as soon as it came through.

  – There’s radiation hotspots absolutely everywhere. And judging by the rate of decay, they’re pretty much all the same age.

  – A nuclear war? Erin beat me to the question.

  – I don’t think so. Each individual episode’s too localised. Alvy was looking at the read-out screen with its representations of the scan. The red blotches were throbbing near the sites of many of the huge cities of Old Earth.

  Terese reached forward and clicked on the zoom. One of the red-spots sprang into prominence, as she spoke.

  – He’s right. A nuclear attack would air-burst, spreading the fissionable material – and the radiation – over a wider area. If I don’t miss my guess, I’d say we’re looking at a series of almost simultaneous meltdowns planet-wide.

  – Sorry? I don’t think – Meltdowns? Erin expressed the confusion that most of us were feeling.

  – Yes, meltdowns. Look, we’re talking almost a thousand years ago. You’ve read the histories. They’d exhausted all the fossil fuels and the population was too big for renewable energy-sources to cope – not without a major redistribution of resources and wealth, that is, which was never going to happen. They were running nuclear plants from one side of the globe to the other, to keep their cities functioning. Whatever happened down there, it caused nuclear meltdowns across the planet in a majority of the key population centres. The loss of life must have been—

  – But what could cause that kind of catastrophe on such a scale? Erin was still trying to make sense of it all. I mean, they must have had fail-safes. One accident – or two – might be possible, but hundreds?

  – Probably at least a couple of thousand – worldwide.

  – Could anything survive that level of radiation?

  Terese pushed her chair back from the console.

  – It’s perfectly possible. We’re talking about fusion reactors, mostly. The meltdown would remain localised and, by the looks of it, not all the cities were affected. Look at Australasia. She zoomed out a bit, so that the whole continent filled the screen. The south central zone, the central desert and the west have huge areas affected, but along the east coast it’s clean. Either they didn’t have reactors, or someone found a way to shut them down, before they crossed the reaction threshold.

  – Well, if we ever get to set down on the mother-planet, I know where my vote goes. Alvy again. He pointed at a spot on the map in the southeast quadrant of the continent, where no red glowed. ‘Melbourne’, it said. I’d never heard of it, but I don’t think any of us was about to question his choice.

  Erin stood up and stepped back from the console, leaving Terese to fiddle with the controls of the read-out.

  – The drones will arrive in close orbit in about twelve hours, she said. Until then, I think we should all get some sleep. Hanni and Terese, you take the first watch and try to get me more information about these meltdowns – if that’s what they are. If we’re going down there, I want to know exactly what we’re up against. She turned, left the bridge and the others broke ranks and followed.

  Terese hardly even noticed. She was already running scenarios, trying to turn the observations into a credible theory of what might have happened.

  I watched her for a few seconds longer, then I turned and followed Erin too.

  ERIN’S STORY

  At the sound of the knock, I instructed the door to open. I knew who it was. Who else could it be?

  – Come in, Jord.

  He was already halfway through the door.

  – It could be worse, he began, as he entered. We could be looking at the aftermath of a full-scale thermo-nuclear conflict. From what I’ve read, they were just mad enough to attempt to bomb themselves back to the Stone Age, if they thought they could win.

  Something was still bothering me. I started spilling my thoughts in the hope that it would trigger a subconscious connection.

  – What gets me is the scale. I mean— Hell, I wasn’t sure what I meant – what kind of catastrophe spreads across the whole world simultaneously like that? If it was a solar flare, or some kind of natural disaster, surely it would only affect one side of the planet. What happened down there was universal. A solar flare might explain the satellites, but the reactors?

  – Not all the satellites, it seems.

  I knew what he was leading to, but I waited for him to go on.

  – What kind of phenomenon wipes out all the other birds, but leaves a perfect ring around the planet? It has to be—

  – Intentional? I couldn’t help it. Ever since we were kids I’d been finishing his sentences for him.

  – Or at least man-made. Think about it. What do satellites and reactor-generators have in common?

  – A nuclear power-source?

  – Okay. But think laterally. They’d been using the same power-sources virtually unchanged for a couple of hundred years. So why the sudden calamity? What’s the one thing that links all technology on the planet? What’s the one thing that could shut down the whole of Deucalion if it failed?

  He paused expectantly, but I was thinking with a sponge instead of my brain. I like to blame the after-effects of the cryo, but I think I was just being emotional. It’s not every day you see the aftermath of an apocalypse.

  – The ether-net! There isn’t a thing that wasn’t somehow linked to and dependent on the network. If all the computers on the planet failed simultaneously, then everything would have failed. There would be no fail-safes that would protect the reactors – except maybe a very quick-thinking manual override. And without their AI guidance systems, it wouldn’t take long for the satellites’ orbits to become unstable and decay. Imagine the chaos in a big city if the networks went down and the power failed. Then the meltdowns, the food shortages, the riots. The place would literally tear itself apart.

  – And repeat that across the entire planet . . . The thought was involuntary.

  At school, through the images in the data-spheres, we had all relived the turmoil and the anarchy of the Crystal Death on Deucalion. This catastrophe dwarfed even that. At least during the Time of Crystal, the communications were still existent. The power was still on and there was government – of sorts.

  What we were contemplating here was unthinkable.

  Slowly, I controlled the emotion and my brain began to move along the same track as Jordan’s.

  – But the ring of satellites. Why wouldn’t they be affected the same as everything else?

  – I thought about that. Perhaps they were quarantined somehow. Not connected to the rest of the net. A security fail-safe, maybe.

  – Or maybe they were part of the cause.

  Suddenly things slid into place. But it was a place I didn’t want to go. We had been working on the assumption that we were looking at the result of some accident, some natural disaster that had affected the entire system. But what if it was no accident? What if someone had actually planned it?

  I closed my eyes, but the
image of the pulsing red radiation markers returned to the screen of my inner eye and I could feel my blood running cold.

  Expeditionary Ether-Shuttle Cortez

  in Trans-Lunar Orbit

  November 25, 3383ad

  JORDAN

  Jordan sits in the pilot’s acceleration couch, staring out at the mother-planet. It hangs, inscrutable and silent, in the black, like the Sphinx awaiting a solution to her impossible riddle.

  Erin and her mythology. It’s contagious.

  It isn’t officially his watch, but Alvy and Terese have spent the last planetary cycle checking the stats and plotting the extent of the disaster, as far as the long-distance instruments can measure it. He packed them off to sleep an hour or so ago and now he sits in there, watching.

  I know where my vote goes. On an impulse, he pushes the ready button on the armrest of the couch. ‘Melbourne, Australasia.’

  The screen on the console in front of him flickers momentarily, then fills with the last-known statistics on a long-forgotten city.

  Population ten million, area –

  The information swims, as he shifts his gaze back to the observation window, and watches the outline of the continent brown and green against the opal blue of the surrounding sea.

  Ten million.

  How many of them survived and what kind of world did their children inherit? The questions drift off in free-fall, dissolving somewhere in the vast space between the flight deck view-port and the mottled blue-green disc of the ancient planet beyond.

  16

  Nothing

  ‘Fortress de Vries’

  Old Bourne

  November 25, 3383ad

  SHARONNE

  The woman in the bed bears little resemblance to the mother she remembers. From even a year ago. Pain has etched deep lines into her cheeks and the skin has drawn tight across the bones of her face, grey and dry, and old.