Solar Twins

by Jason F Crockett

  “Why do we have to label everything and categorize everything?” Gaston said out loud, but more to himself than to anybody else.

  The conversation continued unabated throughout the rest of the day but stayed civil. These issues would have to be addressed as a local government was established. It was one thing for technology to revert back to the Iron Age, but quite another for the philosophies to revert back with it.

  They wandered south along the ridge until it intersected the main mountain range. What had been easy going suddenly became difficult and dangerous. Caleb took the lead and they began to pick their way towards the top. They couldn’t see the pass any longer and had to trust that Nick’s compass reading skills were accurate. They spent the night in a cleft in the side of the mountain. It was three meters deep and looked like a large boulder had been pried out by some gigantic hand. Gaston built the fire at the entrance of the opening and they kept it small. The higher they traveled up the slopes the more the wind whipped around them. As evening came on, they were all exhausted from the uncustomary hike and fell asleep as soon as they had eaten.

  Caleb was still somewhat nervous after all the sounds he had heard the night before. Twice he started awake at some noise in the dark. He rose promptly each time and put more wood on the fire. It took him a long time to get back to sleep. Once after stoking the fire, he sat with his back to it facing out across the plains. Clouds scuttled across the sky in dark patches. The neighboring planet hung low in the Northern sky. It now filled a quarter of the sky. He could clearly see great cloud formations crawling their way across the planet. He marveled at the light and shadow slowly marching its way around its sphere.

  “Now that’s something you don’t see every day,” he thought. “Well, maybe now we will, but nowhere else.” There was a shadow from Magellan falling across the other planet. It was almost like a partial eclipse. It became more evident the further the light marched around. Part of that planet would not even see the light of day. At least at this time of year, it wouldn’t. He sat there marveling at his discovery for the better part of an hour before he stoked the fire again and went to sleep. What an interesting new place they lived in.

  His discovery of the shadowed eclipse that Magellan cast on its twin planet made for some lively discussion as they continued the climb the next day.

  “You know,” said Nick at an ebb in the conversation, “someday soon we’ll be having special holidays based on stuff like this.”

  “That’s possible,” said Nicole, “but we’ll have to wait until our science guys get a hold of what the calendar year looks like, and that could take a few years.”

  “I think I could declare a holiday and everybody would jump on it,” said Gaston. “We could always let the science guys figure out how often it recurs later. We can’t keep schedule by the Earth’s calendar while we are here. The days and months aren’t even the same lengths so there’s not going to be an easy way for us to keep track.”

  “We’ve got to keep Christmas and Easter though,” said Nicole.

  “Those are Earthly religious holidays,” said Nick. “Why would we want to carry all those trappings here with us?”

  “Non-religious folks celebrate those too,” she countered. “Not everybody believes in the birth of a Messiah or his death and resurrection for that matter. I mean lots of people just like getting presents and searching for colorful Easter eggs.”

  Before the debate could get heated, Gaston spoke up. “I think that we will just have to let existing holidays flourish or die on their own. It won’t take long, and Magellan will have its own culture complete with holidays and religious symbolism. I think the first holiday we should declare should be a day of celebration for when we landed and possibly, depending on what happened with the F.L.E.N. COMET, the same day would also be a remembrance for those aboard the COMET that lost their lives.”

  “We could call it ‘Landing’ or ‘Discovery’,” suggested Caleb.

  “How about ‘The Day of the COMET’?” asked Nicole.

  “I like yours, Nicole,” said Gaston. “Keep thinking guys and don’t forget your ideas. I’ll have a vote done when we get back.”

  They covered less ground as they climbed higher and higher. It became less humid and didn’t feel as hot, but they were all sunburned and sore by the time they made camp again that night. The pass seemed hardly nearer even after the full-days hike. It had been up one hill and down another all day. They had almost turned back but decided they had come too far to turn back now.

  They hiked steadily and fell into the routine of just putting one foot in front of the other. It was Gaston that called them to a halt finally when Caleb’s feet, which he had been following, were no longer easily visible. “Guys, we had better set up camp pretty soon, it’s getting dark and fast!”

  They stopped to take stock of the situation. “I can’t believe I didn’t notice sooner!” Nicole exclaimed. “There’s no way we’re going to find someplace to hole up as dark as it is already.”

  “It’s because we’re in the mountains now,” Nick said. “I remember reading something about that somewhere along the way. It said something about the mountains cutting off the direct sunlight and said that it reduces the time span that you have usable light after sunset.”

  “Well, whatever the reason, we at least need somewhere we can set up tents,” Gaston said. He removed his cold torch from his backpack and shouldered it again before taking the lead. They had been switching back and forth most of the day. There wasn’t any good place to set up a single tent much less a couple of them. He topped a rise, but it was too rocky to put a tent there. He shone his light down the side of the ridge. It dropped maybe three meters before climbing up the mountain in front of him. “How about down there?” he asked as he braced himself against the wind that was surging up the mountainside.

  “There is no way that we can set up tents down there. The wind would blow us away, too,” Caleb said.

  Gaston slid sideways down the incline. “The wind is blowing a little less down here. We’ll just have to sleep under the stars and pray it doesn’t rain.”

  “Oh, if my mother could see me now,” Nicole exclaimed as she slid to a halt next to Gaston. “I consider myself to be an adventurous person but climbing a mountain and stopping in the dark in a hollow on the side of the cliff and sleeping out in the open under stars light-years away from planet earth, why that’s almost too much.”

  “Just think, Nicole, you will go down in the Annals of Magellan history and if you write it right, you could be famous. Everyone will want to name their children after Nicole Aspin, the great galaxy explorer. You’ll be…”

  Nicole whirled around and hit Nick. “You know what I… Don’t you even. Ugh!”

  He didn’t stop at that but needled her further. “Others though will warn their children when they’re bad. ‘You’d better watch out! If you don’t watch your temper you will wind up like that Nicole Aspin. Angry about everything, no sense of humor and all alone until…”

  “That’s enough you two!” Gaston exclaimed. “Make peace and settle down. It’s dark and there’s nowhere to go so let’s not start anything that will cause hard feelings.”

  “Oh, I’ll make ‘pieces’ all right,” muttered Nicole as she threw her pack on the ground.

  “I was just jesting,” said Nick approaching Nicole.

  “Fine, whatever,” she replied and promptly ignored him as if he wasn’t there. He threw up his hands and started getting himself ready for the long night ahead.

  They ate a cold supper before settling in for the night. There wasn’t any room to set up tents, so they just set their sleeping bags close to one another and pulled a tarp over to help keep the dew off. It was the most miserable night they had experienced yet and none of them got more than a couple of hours of sleep. Nicole felt like she had all the sharp rocks and she just couldn’t get comfortable. Gaston was in the middle and both Caleb and Nick kept rolling on top of him. Nick felt like he ha
d somehow ended up sleeping with his head downhill. Caleb found himself on the very edge of the tarp and by the time he woke up from what hardly passed as sleep, he was soaking wet, cold, and in no better temper than any of the rest of them.

  Gaston could see that they were in for a rocky day as soon as they began to untangle themselves from their cold and wet sleeping quarters.

  “Nicole, lead on again before we have time to tear out each other’s throats. It will save us all kinds of anguish, I’m sure,” Gaston said.

  “After a night like last night, I’m not leaving without eating breakfast,” she countered.

  “I agree with the Captain,” Caleb said. “We can eat as we walk. I’m cold, we’ve got no fire, and moving around will warm us up.”

  “Come on Nicole,” Nick said, “let’s get away from this hole in the ground. If we make good time we can make it over to the other side today.”

  Nicole scrambled up the side of the hill and screamed. When she ran out of breath, she gasped and screamed until she collapsed.

  Nick motioned for Gaston and Caleb to hang back and he picked his way up to the top next to Nicole. He squatted down next to Nicole and looked quietly out over the steadily rising mountain in front of them. “Nicole, I’m sorry. I…I didn’t mean anything by it, but I know I wasn’t being sensitive to you. You know I…”

  “Sometimes you just don’t stop to think before you speak,” she said. She wiped the tears off her cheeks as she glanced up at him. “Last night was one of the worst night sleeps that I’ve ever had. The least you could do is let me be in peace instead of torturing me.”

  “I was just trying to lighten the mood. We could all use some humor at a time like this.”

  “Listen, it’s early in the morning and I hate waking up to people intruding on me. Not only that,” she continued, “you expect me to skip my morning coffee, a good breakfast, and you want me to laugh about a joke made at my expense and be happy about eating while I’m hiking up a mountain. Sometimes you are just a jerk and you don’t think.

  “Well,” Nick cut in, “like I said, I’m sorry. You’re right, I wasn’t thinking. It was a long night and it’s going to be a long day. Take a moment to collect yourself. I’ll go talk to the guys and then we can be on our way. Are you going to be okay?”

  “Yeah, give me some space. Just leave me alone for a bit.”

  “Thanks, Nick,” Gaston said as he slid down to them. “Is she going to be O.K.?”

  “Yes, we need to give her some space, but she’ll be fine.”

  Ten ticks later they were on their way. The vegetation or rather the lack of it seemed to mirror the way they all felt. It was the quietest day they had had yet. The higher they rose, the thinner the vegetation became. Soon, the only growth was a dark green moss that thrived in the shadowed areas and some scraggly bushes that were probably supposed to be trees. Nicole no longer tried to catalog the growth. It was all she could do just to keep hiking.

  Not long after they broke for lunch, they came to the split in the mountain that formed a pass through to the other side of the range. A brisk wind whistled through from the south side bringing a cool mist with it.

  Eager to see the southern side of the range, they hurried their steps. The pass was remarkably wide and relatively flat. They picked their way carefully over two landslides of a loose shale rock. Though the sun still lit the east face of the pass, they walked in the shadow of the west face and felt no warmth from the afternoon sun. Rather, the mist seemed to cling to them as they walked, and with each step, their surroundings darkened.

  Nicole was bitterly disappointed when she finally stepped out of the protective arms of the pass and found that she could see very little. The mist and fog twisted and turned in the brisk wind funneling up the side of the mountain into the pass.

  “Well, that’s not exactly what I was expecting,” said Gaston.

  “No, it’s like two different worlds,” Caleb agreed.

  “Yes, sunny on the north and this pea soup on the south,” added Nick.

  “It’s going to be hard to tell direction in this,” said Nicole.

  “I’m not too concerned with direction right now,” said Gaston. “We just need to go downhill from here. But I was hoping to get a good clear view of the valley. We may have even been able to see the Outpost.”

  They all gathered around Gaston as he pulled out a chart of the valley. “Here, hold that side, Nick. It will get all wet if I set it down on the rocks.”

  Nick held the corners and twisted his head, so he could see the upside-down writing.

  “So, this is where they should be right?” Caleb asked, indicating an area that had a circle drawn around a series of low hills to the far eastern side of the valley.

  “Yes,” said Gaston, “and right here is somewhere close to where we are right now. We should be able to follow this ridge from here and it will point us in the right direction. We will just need to make sure we keep left here or we’ll end up too far to the west. I think I’ll take lead for a while since it’s all downhill from here.”

  Nicole spoke up showing the first spark towards being back to herself all day long. “I’d like to get some samples on the way down to compare with samples from the Magellan valley.”

  “That’s fine, just say when and we’ll stop or help.” Gaston packed the chart away and started down the incline. It was hard to tell if they were making good time or not because they could see no more than the immediate area around them and the all-pervasive thick white fog that covered everything.

  They made several stops at Nicole’s request as she gathered bits of gray moss, orange fungi, grass and a variety of bugs that became more abundant as they descended. That whole day and the next became a wet, white blur as each hour slipped into the next with no noticeable change in the environment. The fog began to clear finally as they set up camp the second day after crossing the pass, a whole 15 days after they had first set out from Windfall.

  They gathered all the small dead branches they could before it was too dark to see.

  “Oh, this is nice!” Nicole said as she warmed her hands by the small fire. They were all seated around the fire on their parkas turned inside-out. It was the only thing resembling dry that was anywhere in sight.

  Gaston tugged off his boots and wet socks revealing his prune-looking toes. “It’s a good thing it’s finally clearing up. A little wetter and our clothes would rot right off us and our extremities would be fungus ridden.”

  “It feels that way, doesn’t it?” said Caleb. He was sitting with his back against a rock looking back towards the mountain. “You know, now that that fog and misty rain is past I can just see the other planet over the top of the mountain.”

  The others turned to look. “We’ve made good time,” Nick said turning back apparently uninterested in the large bluish planet that capped the mountain ridge. “I bet we’ll be able to see the Outpost tomorrow if it stays clear like this. We may even see some night fires if we’re lucky.”

  Gaston stood and stretched. “I don’t see anything yet and I’m getting tired. I’ll see you all tomorrow at first light,” he said as he climbed into his sleeping bag. They slowly climbed into their bags. Nicole was the last one in and was the only one that saw the winking white light just barely visible to the southeast across the valley. It was gone so quickly she decided it was nothing and went to sleep.

  The next day around mid-morning, the sun glinted off something in the distance bringing them to an immediate halt. “What do you see, Nick?” Caleb asked while Nick scanned the area with his binoculars.

  “I think…I think it’s the shuttle. But I thought we’d see all their tents and houses there too, but I don’t see anything else around it. What could that mean?”

  “Here, give me the binoculars, Nick,” Gaston said. Nick passed them over but continued to stare off into the distance towards where the glare had been.

  “You’re right,” Gaston said. Concern laced his voice. “There’s nothi
ng else out there. There should be something. There is no way they would have chosen to stay on the shuttle that long. Hold on, I don’t see houses, but I do think I see some plots or patches of farmland. That’s a good sign. Come on let’s go. We’ve got a definite heading now.”

  “Cool your jets, Captain,” Nicole said. “Give Caleb and me a chance to look too.” He passed the binoculars over.

  “O.K., but hurry. How long do you think it will take us to get there? How far do you think that is, Nick?”

  “There’s no way to tell, Gaston. If we could fly, we’d be there in 30 ticks. But we can’t. That could take us a few more days to get there. We can see for kilometers and kilometers up here. That could still be a week out depending on the terrain.”

  “Na. No, there’s no way.”

  “I’m telling you, Gaston, that’s going to take us a long time to hike on foot. It could be a good four hundred kilometers away. If it was on a road in a straight line from here and we hiked eight hours a day steady with no stops, we’d make it in a week if it were that far away. There are just too many variables to give you a good timeline.”

  “Just be thankful we can see it from up here and can pick out some landmarks to keep us going in the right direction once we are down in the valley. Otherwise, we’d be zigzagging back and forth just to find it.” Caleb grinned as he took the binoculars from Nicole and handed them back to Nick.

  “Let’s go,” Nicole said. “We’ll just head for those two hills that look like a V. That ought to get us close enough, and they ought to be high enough to be visible even in the valley.”

  “I think we could follow the river the whole way in too,” Nick added mapping it out in his head. “That’s almost exactly southeast from here.” They set off walking again.