A New Years gift: Flight from the Mother World…
If you’re looking for “Flight from the Mother World,” this is now a teaser. The full novella can be found in my new anthology Pasodobles in a Quantum Stringscape, available as an eBook on Amazon.
During my content editing of Sing a Samba Galactica, released last year, I concluded that the Old Storyteller’s tale of the Rangers’ flight from Mother World took away some of our ET friends’ aura of mystery, made the novel a wee bit too long, and would distract the reader from the main story arc.
The Old Storyteller’s original name was Deep Diver. It turns out she had a very interesting life on Mother World. This is an introduction to the story of how she came to lead the expedition to New Haven. You will get to know the Rangers’ culture better in a very direct fashion—it had some problems. You will also have another encounter with the Tali, albeit indirectly. Please see the anthology to read more.
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Flight from Mother World
Steven M. Moore
Copyright, 2013
This novella cannot be reproduced for any reason without the express consent of the author. It has been serialized and e-published in the author’s blog for the sole enjoyment of his online readers. It is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of characters to persons living or dead, Humans or Rangers, is purely coincidental. Any settings are purely the creation of the author’s imagination, as far as can be determined.
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Excerpt from The Infopedia Galactica, Novo Mondo version, 3527 (base://infopedia.nm/ituip)…
In the articles pertaining to the early history of New Haven, the E-type planet in the 82 Eridani system colonized by both Humans and Rangers, mention is often made of the Rangers’ flight from Mother World to New World (what they called New Haven). Scientists, digging in the ruins of a building they believe to have been the primitive medical center of the first Human settlement called First Landing, recovered a data cube. The files contained therein were in Standard and translated from buzzspeak, the Rangers’ language, so we might question their fidelity. However, they represent the only known record about a terrible time in Ranger history.
Chapter One
Mother World, May 1450
Zero-g is not pleasant, even for a Ranger. However, Deep Diver’s memory of her first experience with weightlessness was more one of embarrassment. It occurred during her first prolonged stay in space.
Sun Basker, the biologist, had invited her to work with him aboard Orbiter One, the first Ranger space station in low orbit around Mother World. He managed to make the story humorous, which was the cause of her embarrassment.
It didn’t matter much that the prolog to his story that evening in the commons at the ring pond also included a long description of her accomplishments as a scientist. While that list was long for someone so young, the rest of the Rangers on board, all seasoned space hands, received more entertainment from the description of her struggles to adapt to zero-g at the station’s center.
Over time, it became clear to her that the whole episode was something of an initiation. Because they were all swimmers, any Ranger handled zero-g better than most Humans, but the space novice was always somewhat disoriented. The main difference was that water had viscosity so there was something to push on. A Ranger’s first reaction to zero-g was to try to swim, and the strong, bold kicks of those powerful hind oar legs usually contributed to a comic scene of futility.
They built the space station in the shape of a huge ring. Like most Ranger construction projects, this one was on a grandiose scale. They established temporary quarters in much smaller units during the construction phase, but the Rangers’ psychological need for larger groups meant that they would soon forget the smaller units and never even give them a name.
The space station was, in fact, the home of a clan. About thirty per cent of the inside part of the ring farthest from the center was under water, “under” locally being the direction away from the hub. The water wound in and around islands in such a manner that a Ranger could swim all the way around the ring without ever having to leave the water. On the islands and in the water they had partially replicated some the typical environment of a Mother World clan.
By signing on to do research with Sun Basker, Deep Diver had become a member of the Orbiter One clan. While many Rangers stayed in their birth clan, scientists, engineers, and technicians tended to move from clan to clan, so Deep Diver did not find this change in life disconcerting. She had already met the clan mother, an old physicist named No Ripples, entwined tentacles with her in the water for long enough to exchange the stories of their lives, and was feeling good about her new work until Sun Basker took her to the hub.
Sun Basker was old. Compared to the shiny black fur of Deep Diver, his lackluster fur had streaks of gold in it, the sign of old age. Some of the limberness of his four grasping tentacles was gone and he occasionally missed a step. Nevertheless, he was still very energetic, at times his mind often racing ahead of what he was saying, forcing him to back up and repeat. He was not known for his patience, but he was known as one of Mother World’s best biologists.
“You have taken our teasing well,” he told her later.
She had swum several times around the ring pond to work out her stress when the old biologist joined her. She swam slowly now, doing graceful figure eights under the water, so as not to leave Sun Basker behind. He was speaking to her in the wet language, so his communication to her actually contained sonic images of the scene at the commons. She thanked him for his observation.
“Tomorrow we will get you started on my research program.”
An image of a tired and hard-working Deep Diver came to her, mood-shaded to indicate he was still joking with her a little.
Ever since she was a hatchling living in the nest of her birth clan, living things and their diversity fascinated her. She would watch the farmers tend the rushes and tubers and dive with the fishers, not to catch anything in particular, but to study the schools of fish and their behavioral patterns.
She was so young at the time that they hadn’t given her a name, but she soon earned one with her deep dives to the bottom of the pond to investigate what lived in the mud on the bottom. Even then, she began to impress her elders with her sharp wit, keen observations, and storytelling abilities. Everyone would assume that she would go into biological research, but none had suspected that she would become famous and important enough to obtain a position on Orbiter One.
While Deep Diver’s star was on the rise, Sun Basker’s was on the wane. Some years ago, he ran a laboratory with more than thirty assistants working with him. Now, although still highly respected, he only had resources for one assistant. The fact that his research program had moved to Orbiter One meant that being his assistant was still a position very much sought after, but many had warned Deep Diver that working with him could not benefit her career. She ignored them, though, trusting her own judgment much more than conjectures made by friends. She paid little attention to what Humans would call the politics of scientific research, preferring to do things she was interested in and ignoring those aspects of research that seemed to be popular at the moment. In this, she found a kindred spirit in Sun Basker.
Sun Basker was less narrowly focused than Deep Diver. He had done some respected research in mathematics and physics (for most Rangers, the two were the same, the experimental side of physics being considered engineering) and pioneered research in applying mathematical models to the population dynamics of species interacting in a similar ecological environment, work that aided immensely not only in preserving some endangered species but also to improving the fish and other sea life that the Rangers took from the seas of Mother World and used as food. Humans would have called these techniques the study of stability properties of coupled stochastic differential equations, that is, differential equations that included noise terms in order to model the random perturbations affecting the populations.
His interests in mathematics and physics also had led him to do important research in acoustics that led to, among other things, sonic amplifiers used by the speech impaired. He was also an accomplished musician, spending much of his spare time developing some ability with the old instruments used by the Rangers for their entertainment. He would go from one thing to another, working on what held his interest for the moment. In this, he and his pupil were very similar, at least considering biological research.
As she became more and more involved in the work of Sun Basker’s project, Deep Diver became less embarrassed with her first zero-g experience and looked back at the stress of her first day as a normal part of her development as a scientist. Sun Basker’s official project on board Orbiter One was a small but important one. While many of the projects on the station were more involved with the exploitation of low gravity for manufacturing purposes, the biologist was working on the effects of near zero-g on living organisms. In particular, as he confided to Deep Diver one day, he wanted to know if a closed ecosystem could survive periods of low gravity in a colony ship, though he admitted that his proposal to the Research Council had said nothing about that.
“You’re living in a futuristic fantasy world,” observed Deep Diver. “We’ve just begun to explore our own solar system and there’s a lot of room still left on Mother World. How can you think about a trip to another star system?”
“Come see some of my projections,” said Sun Basker. “You might call it a hobby of mine. I have generalized some of my work on population dynamics in order to apply it to our own species.”
Deep Diver went over to the old scientist’s workstation. While in general still behind the computer technology that Humans would have some seven hundred years in the future, the I/O used in the Ranger workstations was much more sophisticated than any that Humans would ever build during the next thousand years. The closest thing to it would be the virtual reality achieved in complex data analysis tasks and zookies, the fantasy world games many Humans would enjoy. The I/O interface used the wet language to transfer information to the user. The high data rate obtained would have been too much for any Human.
Deep River studied Sun Basker’s work. They were sharp and precise extrapolations for the future of Mother World and its solar system. Some of it she could not understand because she was not yet familiar with a lot of Sun Basker’s mathematics. However, what she did understand looked perfectly correct. And frightening.
“We will have destroyed our world in five hundred years or less!”
“The five hundred years is fairly conservative. The likelihood function is maximized for about four hundred. Also, note that the projected exploration of our solar system will not save us. It only represents a delay.”
“But surely there are simpler solutions than going to a new planet among the stars and repeating the same mistakes.”
“The easy solution is to change our ways. Let me show you.” Sun Basker spun some dials that changed some of the input parameters to his model and started the calculations again. “You’ll see that if we start cutting back on our birth rate so that we have fewer mouths to feed, we then can stop trading off habitat for food production. That will also help on our power consumption needs, but we will still have to make better use of solar energy. There are many critical variables here. That’s fortunate, because it means there are actually many potential solutions. On the negative side, a lot of them are unstable in the sense that small perturbations of the parameters can send us down the waterway to disaster. That’s due to the noise terms. The Planning Council’s models are very deficient in this respect, so they reach erroneous conclusions.”
Deep Diver was obviously distressed. “Have you communicated this work to the Planning Council or General Council of Clans?”
“I made a discreet inquiry about the effect of such a communication. I’m afraid it would mean the end of my career.”
“How can you live with that?”
“There is always the hope that there will be a more opportune time to present the results. I would not get anywhere by presenting them if no one paid attention to them.”
“We must find the opportune time!”
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