Peripheral Visions: Planetfall

"Peripheral Visions: You sense them from the corner of your eye or in the soft blur of darkest shadows. But you won't see them coming... until it's too late."

Planetfall

Arturo Carney walked along a straight, narrow sidewalk, focused on putting one foot in front of the other. He tried to keep a rising panic in check at the awareness that he didn't know where he was headed, and he certainly should not have been outside without some sort of protective measures – an environmental suit, or at least a respirator.

The air was hot and brown and burned his nose and throat. It also had an unpleasant odor. Arturo wondered if he had stepped outside to do some quick task but then become distracted. Or had he been running an errand and started back home without a respirator? He could have used goggles, too. His eyes were burning. Whatever was in the air seemed to be bad news for any sensitive areas of the body.

The sidewalk stretched away, dropping out of sight after maybe eighty meters. There was a bright glow overhead – the light of an alien sun, Arturo thought. A hot star: The ambient temperature had to be at least 45 degrees. The colony planet had been closer to its sun than Earth to its own yellow star, hadn't it? Arturo wasn't sure. He remembered talking about long ago, before Amsha left Earth orbit...

Amsha. That was the name of the colony ship.

And the planet they came to... it was Gliese, Gliese something... No. No, it wasn't Gliese, it was one of the other candidate worlds. After examining the data gathered from orbiting telescopes and calculating the infraspace transit time, they had decided not on Gliese, but...

Kepler? Kepler something?

The planet had another name, too, a more hopeful name...

Arturo coughed, held his breath against the urge to cough again, and came to a stop, swaying on his feet. He lost his train of thought. His world became this moment, and nothing more: Fighting vertigo and gravity, trying not to collapse, trying not to cough or even breathe.

After a few moments he felt recovered enough to continue on. His thoughts started afresh: Had the atmosphere been even worse when they got here? They had plans for terraforming the planet. It would be a slow process, not completed during the lifetime of even the youngest colonists...

Or had humanity brought its habit of poisoning its own environment to a fresh new world, spoiling its promise, disgracefully smudging its skies?

Earth had grown hot. Was this planet, Gliese-something... no, no; Kepler-something... had it always been so hot? Would it get hotter? Were the nights on this planet as hot as the days, or did they plunge to subzero temperatures when darkness fell?

I should remember these things, he thought, angry at himself, angry at his failing mind, frightened that he might die here alone, not even knowing where he was, not remembering his own life.

Where did he live? How long had he been here? What sort of planet was this? Where was it located? How long had it taken to get here?

Arturo concentrated, trying to recall the outlines of the colony mission that had departed Earth so long ago. Trying to recover some sense of when the mission had commenced. Trying to recall his last day, his last night, his last real-time communication with Vikram before centuries of cryosleep.

Vikram. His fiancé. They had never broken off their engagement... had they? Somehow, Arturo didn't think so. Vikram would be dead now, of course. He would have died long before the ship arrived here. Arturo knew that he was an old man, suffering from dementia; he knew that he, too, would be passing from this life, perhaps in a very short time...

I came all this way for a life of adventure and now I've ended up like this... spells of disorientation punctuated by moments of lucidity. Even when my thoughts are clear, my memory is shot.

Arturo would have sighed if his breathing hadn't needed to be so shallow. Deep breath would start him coughing, and that coughing would lead to more, and more painful, coughing – he knew that to be true because he'd come to himself some minutes before in the grip of just such a fit.

And before that? What had he been doing? Where had he been going?

If I could just see some familiar detail, something to trigger recollection, he thought. Then it would all come rushing back...

Arturo glanced up again at the straight sidewalk stretching off into the brown haze. He smiled, thinking of the atmosphere of Titan, the hot days of Venus. This was not either of those worlds; it couldn't be. The air felt like an inferno, but Venus truly was an inferno, with temperatures hot enough to melt lead and cause metallic "snow" to precipitate, falling white and scorching on desolate mountains. Titan was the opposite: A giant moon so cold that methane oceans and rivers flowed across its surface.

Titan with its dense, frigid atmosphere of nitrogen and methane. Venus with its carbon dioxide atmosphere, heated to well over 450 degrees Centigrade by a runaway greenhouse effect. They had wanted a planet fitting in between such extremes, a planet with a suitable atmosphere... nitrogen and oxygen, ideally. There were several candidates in far-flung systems that would take the new colony-class ships centuries to reach, even using infraspace drives.

Infraspace. Arturo had been a physicist working on the theoretical applications and the practical designs for engines that could transit ships out of ordinary space-time and into a level of existence where distance no longer made the same kind of sense it did in the familiar three-dimensional world. Engines that could funnel leptons into a energetic shell around a ship and then... and then...

*** *** ***

"And then what?"

Art smiled at Vikram. He'd explained this a dozen times to his boyfriend already, but Vikram was a lawyer, not an engineer or physicist. The whole idea of infraspace was a conceptual black box to him.

"Once the leptons are moving quickly enough, in the proper arc, and once the shaped EM field that contains them is energetic enough, then the leptons go through a state change."

"Right, I remember that they change state, but I always get lost here."

"They state-change to another kind of particle. They jump from sub-c to super-c and become – "

"Wait!" Vikram said, grinning. "Photons!"

Art laughed. "You're cute. No. Photons travel at the speed of light. We need to go faster than that. The leptons change to tachyons."

"Oh, yes, that's right. Tachyons... from tachy, which means 'fast.' I don't know why I can't remember that."

"It's not your field of expertise," Art told him. "I'm sure I still don't know what a 'tort' is."

"And then the ship can move faster than light," Vikram said.

"Correct."

"Because it's in infra-red space."

"Not infra-red, just infra. Infraspace. A kind of space that's tucked in-between all the different parallel universes. And the really interesting thing about infraspace isn't even that it exists between various parallel universes. When we travel through infraspace, we see vastly different results in terms of energy usage and time dilation effects than we expect to."

"And that means... what?"

It meant that the geometry of infraspace was radically different – "crumpled" into multiple higher dimensions instead of "flat" like ordinary four-dimensional space-time. A star that was relatively close in normal space – like Barnard's star, just under six light-years distant – could suddenly be much, much further away. Barnard's star was the equivalent of 112 light-years distant if one charted a path through infraspace... at minimum. The entire notion of distance was a different thing in infraspace, because there seemed to be multiple "paths" that could change "distance" enormously, and they were all "straight" lines. Those lines seemed to be constantly stretching and compressing, which made things even more difficult to explain. Art had spend almost four years trying to perfect algorithms that would predict how those changes worked and enable astrogators to chart the quickest, most energy-efficient flight plans. It was a terrible problem, one Art had initially feared might be insoluble, but now he felt he was within striking distance of getting it right...

*** *** ***

"Striking distance," Art muttered to himself. The words woke him up from his memories. He felt light-headed. With the heat and the toxic air, that was no a surprise.

Arturo looked from side to side. There was a curb to his right, and tarmac. Obviously, the sidewalk ran alongside a street. But to where? Was Arturo getting closer to home, or wandering farther away?

Did that even mean anything to an infraspace physicist? Arturo smiled, thinking about the paradox of walking away from home and yet drawing closer to it; thinking about the mind-bending trick of approaching a world but increasing the distance from it.

He looked to his left, hoping to see a fence or a yard. Were there residences yet in this section of the colony? Or was it only a skeletal grid-work of streets? Was that why he saw no signs of houses or vehicles or people... was this a part of town so early in construction that no one lived here?

Surely people came here to work, though. Someone had to build the houses, maintain the streets... people, or intelligent machines. Dozers, graders, planers, even automated construction drones...

Arturo looked ahead again. The straight, bare sidewalk, stretching off as it did into mystery, reminded him of something he'd seen before... something from before the mission, something on Earth... something with Vikram...

*** *** ***

"This is fucking incredible," Art told his fiancé, Vikram.

Vikram smiled over at him. "They hardly ever shut down the whole city like this. But my family funded the final phases of excavation and restoration. We have friends, and favors we can call in... and besides, the city is off-limits until after the grand opening ceremony."

"You just went and got us all of Pompeii to ourselves for a day?"

"Not a whole day," Vikram cautioned. "Just a few hours."

Excavations on the ancient city had been going on for a century and a half. More. Only now was all of Pompeii laid bare, freed from the layers of dense volcanic ash that had smothered it more than two millennia earlier.

The cobbled streets were level and smooth and straight, and so were the sidewalks. Whole sections of the city's buildings had been restored: Magnificent houses, communal kitchens, storefronts... it was as if they had stepped through a portcullis and emerged in the ancient city two thousand years in the past, during its heyday. Only a tinge of pollution in the air obscured the far reaches of the streets and the city's distant sprawl.

"There will be a big banquet at tonight's reception," Vikram said, "and there will be fireworks."

"I thought fireworks were illegal?"

"Not tonight. Not in Pompeii." Vikram smiled. "And, as I said, my family paid a lot to help finish the excavations and restorations. We are allowed a few indulgences for this very special occasion. And this..." Vikram stretched out a hand to encompass the immense, empty city all around them. "This is the last time anyone will see Pompeii so empty. From now on each day, all day, the city will bustle with tourists."

"And your family will make millions," Art said.

Vikram scoffed. "Millions? Hardly. Try billions, and, over time, even trillions."

Art shook his head. He was talented at numbers – he had to be, to work with higher-dimensional physics – but even to him the idea of trillions of docreds seemed beyond comprehension.

"Enough to secure our marriage license," Vikram said, more serious now. "Enough to insulate us from the punishments all the other queer people in the world have to endure."

Art looked at the smooth stone street beneath his feet. It was as though a cloud had passed over the sun.

"I'm sorry," Vikram said gently. "But, Art. Please. We can't save the rest of the world. We're lucky to be privileged. We're lucky the Owners are exempt from the horrible laws they're passed. Where we can help others, we will... but we can't let the evil in the world diminish the goodness of our own lives. Not if we're going to stay strong over the course of many, many long years together, living proof that the lies they tell about people like us... well, are lies."

Art looked up. Vikram's hopeful expression and lively eyes melted his heart. He held out a hand, and Vikram took it. Together, they walked, with solemn appreciation, along the ancient street.

*** *** ***

"Vikram, my love. Vikram, my heart," whispered Arturo. "Were you happy after I left? Did you understand? You said you did... but did you forgive me?"

The bright sky above was duller now. Perhaps night was falling. He'd soon remember if the air was going to stay hot or become murderously cold...

*** *** ***

"I don't understand," Vikram said again, and this time he wasn't talking about infraspace physics. He was talking about the colony mission.

"After the Aditi we learned that travel to other stars is not as straightforward as we thought," Art said. "And we have to get out there into the universe. Colonies on other planets are the only way the human race will survive."

"Because of what we're doing to the Earth," Vikram said. "Yes, I understand that."

Art sighed. "I wish I did. People know they are killing the planet and killing themselves along with it, but they ignore that, they embrace superstition and magical thinking and tell themselves that it will somehow all be fine in the end. And it will, if by 'fine' they mean no more life, no more people. The planet will be 'fine' without us. But is that good enough?"

Vikram frowned at him and shrugged.

"It isn't," Art said. "Not when we can choose another path. Not when it's possible to achieve a different outcome."

"But you're not an astronaut," Vikram told him.

"I'm rarer than an astronaut or a colony candidate. I'm a physicist and engineer who can understand how interstellar travel works, and how to course-correct. A transit through infraspace isn't a matter of figuring out how long the travel time will be and then pointing the nose of the ship at the point in the sky where you need to be at the end of that time; that's fine for travel to Mars or Saturn. But not to Kep 22 b."

"Where? I thought it was Barnard's Star."

"No..."

"But Barnard's Star has four planets like Earth."

"Six, actually, though two are too small and distant to be habitable. And the others are all too hot. No, sweetheart, we're headed to Kepler 22 b."

"Annar," Vikram said.

"Yes, right, that's what we're calling it. Better than 'Earth Two' or something dumb like that." Art laughed weakly.

Vikram didn't smile. "Why do you have to go?"

"Because they told me if I don't... well, the mission will probably fail." There was very high likelihood of mission failure anyway, for countless reasons during transit and more upon arrival. Infraspace was a tricky thing, and though probes had arrived in nearby star systems on target and intact, there was some worry that uncertainties in the navigational algorithms could compound in certain circumstances. There was also the possibility that Kep 22 b would "slip" too far... that the dynamic nature of infraspace could cause the "distance" to the planet to grow, suddenly and drastically, during the 350-year transit to the system, 640 light years distant as measured across normal space-time.

"How will you survive for 350 years?" Vikram demanded.

"The colonists and crew will all be in cryostasis."

"Yes! Frozen! And how can anyone survive that long in a state of... frozenness? Didn't the Aditi colonists spend a century less than that in cryostasis, and then a quarter of them never woke up?"

"It as more like a fifth. And their cryostasis medications and infrastructure weren't designed to keep people in suspended animation that long, but there have been advances since then. We can do it safely now."

"And me?" Vikram's eyes pinched, his brow furrowing. "Leaving me?"

"I..." Art hesitated, his throat suddenly tight. "I don't want to leave you. I really don't. But I've spent my life on this project, with the thought that it's the only way to save the human race."

"If we can't survive on our own planet, why are we fit to spread our greed and stupidity and murderous ways to other worlds?"

"Because we have to," Art said. "Maybe we are stupid and reckless, and maybe we do kill planets, but it's also in our nature to survive. And also, life evolves. We adapt."

"We'll never not be the animals that we are." Vikram sounded bitter.

"That might not be true," Art admitted. "But maybe we can be better, smarter animals."

"No," Vikram said. "We should stay here and figure it out. Or else stay here and die. But if we go out there... we'll die anyway."

"Vikram..."

"We evolved here, We are suited to living here," Vikram said forcefully. "This is our home... our home in a way no other world can ever be."

Vikram's words hung in the air for a moment.

"All of that might be true," Art said at last. "But we won't know until we try. And when we try... with the Amsha, the first colony ship with infraspace engines... we have to make an honest effort to do our very best. If we fail, then it has to mean something – it has to mean that we tried as hard as we could and still fell short. Maybe then, maybe finally then, the human race will wake up, set aside its delusions, stop playing political games and do the work. Or else... like you said... die. But even if we die, we have to die trying."

Vikram searched Art's eyes with his own heartbreaking ones, everything he was feeling written across his face. "I would have to want to marry a man as good as you," he said.

"Not so good. Just... desperate."

"Desperate for something real," Vikram said. "For something greater than your own needs. Desperate not for your selfish wants, or even for our wants as a couple... as a family... but for a race that doesn't deserve you."

"I don't know about all that..."

"Oh, fuck your humility. You have to be a hero... that's who you are. I love you for it. And I hate you for it, too."

*** *** ***

The air around Arturo had darkened, and the light had a blue cast about it. The dirty, burning air was still hot.

Arturo sat down on the sidewalk. Was he near a house? Was he far from the city's inhabited areas? He simply didn't know. There was silence around him. At no point had his throat felt like it could take it if he tried to yell for help.

His muscles felt tired and tight. His head was pounding, his vision blurred... at least, he thought it was. In the blue dim of dusk and with the dirty air, it was hard to tell.

"I should have brought a respirator. I should have brought goggles. I should have an environmental suit, or... or at least a water bottle," Arturo said to himself. "Or a PCD. If I had a PCD I could call for help..." He paused, considered. Did he have a PCD?

Until this very moment, he hadn't thought to check.

Arturo searched his clothing. He found no pockets, no tech. He looked at his hands, wondering if he might have an implant. He touched his face and ran fingertips over his scalp, searching for cranial refinements.

Nothing. All he had with a pendant on a necklace.

A pendant... or a comm device?

Arturo felt the pendant. It was smooth and hard. He lifted the necklace over his head and peered at the pendant in the blue darkness. It was black... except for a pinprick of white at the center...

Arturo held the pendant in the palm of his hand and pressed the white dot with his thumb. He held his thumb there, waiting. It seemed like the thing he was supposed to do.

Would it make any difference?

There was silence and heat and blue fading to black.

Arturo put the necklace back on and touched the pendant again, sighing a very shallow sigh.

He waited to die, not knowing what else to do: A very old Earth man who had ventured to a distance planet long ago, helped to build a colony, and... so it would seem... lived his life here. Had he found someone else? Had there ever been love in his life, true love, except for Vikram?

Had there ever been anyone else who could understand?

Time passed. Art felt numb, and grew more so. His thoughts were growing more diffuse and disjointed. Lights swam before his eyes, and the silence rippled with distant voices, words that sounded like they were uttered underwater.

Vikram's face appeared before him – older, partly obscured by some sort of mask, but the eyes were the same, dark and probing and pulling at his heart.

Was he about to join Vikram in the afterlife? Arturo had never believed in any of that, though Vikram had.

Then someone was strapping a respirator mask over his nose and mouth. Cool, fresh air filled his lungs.

Was this real?

Vikram looked at him tenderly, and he reached to touch the face of his beloved...

Husband.

Yes, Art realized. Yes, he remembered.

They had spent their lives together after all.

"Amsha," Arturo tried to say around the respirator. "Annar."

*** *** ***

"What's he saying?" one of the family's security staff asked as the others gently lifted the mumbling, delirious Arturo and carried him a short distance to the limousine. His voice was slightly distorted by the mask over his mouth, and by the cochlear implants in Vikram's ears. "Is he asking for something? Does he need something? Water? Medication?"

"He's just saying old words," Vikram said. "Words from another life, really. Words from when we thought we could place ourselves in the sky... before the Diktat and our Dear Leader cancelled all the colony ships. Scrapped all science, and somehow thought we could still hold onto the technological tools we needed for survival."

"Yeah, those guys fucked us," the security staffer said. Then: "Sorry about my language, boss."

Vikram waved that away. "I couldn't agree more. I'm just sorry young people like you have to pay the price for our sins, for our... our recklessness and selfishness and lack of constructive action."

"We'll figure a way out of this," the staffer said. "The science guys all say so."

Vikram nodded vaguely. He'd heard those same assurances and doubted them. There were so few scientifically literate people left; there was so little of educational value that had not been purged by the book burners and the data worms that had ravaged every library and every online depository of knowledge, replacing facts with wild lies and fantasies.

Once inside the limo, with the air conditioner turned to max and the interior cleared of noxious fumes, Vikram took off his respirator mask and gave the car's AI system a verbal order to be driven home. Art had somehow wandered off the estate and ventured kilometers into the dead zone of the city – neighborhoods that had once been residential, but were now nothing more than silent housing blocks set back from long, straight streets. It was a depressing place, possessing perfect geometry and perfect lifelessness.

Eleven billion people had walked the Earth when Vikram and Art were young. Now there were fewer than one billion left, and almost half of them were here in India. Earth's last superpower reduced – as was every nation – to its last gasping vestiges of former glory.

Vikram washed his husband's face gently with a cool, damp cloth, judiciously scrubbing with light strokes around Art's reddened eyes. "Its gonna take you a week to recover this time," he said. "We're going to have to lock you in our private suite. Or restrain you somehow, like a child. Maybe I should put a chip in your hand – or your ear?" Vikram smiled teasingly.

Arturo muttered the name of the ship again, the name of the distant planet that was to have been humanity's new home.

"I'm sorry you never had a chance to fulfill your dream... your destiny," Vikram murmured. "But I'm not sorry we had such a long and joyous life together... even if all around us the world was crumbling into chaos, rage, and now, finally, sorrow."

The new government promised a return to reason, a respect for facts, a program of action based on workable strategies. But Vikram knew in his heart that the time had long passed for remedies. The world was too far gone. The world that once had sustained people, that is; the garden they had sprung from and then turned on to strangle with their hands.

"Mixed metaphor," Vikram said to himself.

Arturo mumbled in reply. Exhausted, he drifted into sleep.

"You dreamed of alien worlds, of cultivating them and making them a place where there could be a future. Instead, our own world became an alien place around us." Vikram shook his head. "And now that the world we evolved in and adapted to is gone, we're in our final days. A million years from now, who knows? The skies might be blue again, the waters cool and clear. Maybe a new race will rise in a new garden. But our time... the time of our dreams, our expectations, our assumed entitlements... all of that is over."

Vikram finished cleaning his husband's face and set the cloth aside. "We'll get you home, let you sleep. And soon, my love... soon, we will go to sleep together and let this world finish out it days without us. We've been blessed in life. We will we also be blessed in the hereafter, or in nothingness. Whatever the gods intend for us."

Arturo coughed lightly and sighed – a deep sigh.

Vikram smiled with tender sadness and sighed in turn.