Diamonds in the Sky (5 page)

She had to do something before then. But what?

Dana was now about the same size as the orbit of Neptune … about eight light-hours tall. Still falling at a speed impossible for any physical object. Still slowing. The chill wind of the Oort cloud had faded away to nothing; she was now near enough to the sun that the spaces between the planets were blown clear by the solar wind. The solar wind itself, nothing more than charged particles, was too tenuous to be felt even by her drug-heightened and computer-stimulated senses.

The ellipses of the solar system continued to swell before her, the orbits of the inner solar system planets now becoming distinct from the sun. The planets themselves were still invisible, not even specks … she was perhaps one light-hour tall now, a bit bigger than the diameter of Mars’s orbit, and even mighty Jupiter was less than a hundredth of one percent of that.

As the inner solar system expanded, she realized that the sun had begun to shift to one side. She was no longer falling directly toward it; she was now falling toward the Earth. She always had been, of course, though the distinction had not been apparent until now. The planet itself, far too small to see, was indicated by a blinking point on the ellipse of its orbit. Dead ahead.

Time passed, as she drifted down through the vast emptiness of the solar system. She seemed to be merely hanging in space now, the stars through which she had plummeted so rapidly now standing completely still, the orbits of the inner planets expanding slowly ahead of her. But she knew she was still moving at a physically impossible speed. She’d shrunk from one light-hour to ten light-minutes tall in less than ten seconds … that meant that she was approaching the Earth at more than three hundred times the speed of light. It still felt like a crawl, with no nearby objects to compare herself to.

Dana could no longer see all of Earth’s orbit at once, and the other inner planets’ orbits were too far to the sides now for her to see without turning her head. Ahead, the blinking point that represented the Earth began to expand into a visible circle, but soon she realized it was not the planet itself but the orbit of the Moon.

Although Dana’s fall was still slowing, the appearance of a visible feature made it seem terribly fast again. The Moon’s orbit grew from invisibility to an ellipse the size of her head in a matter of seconds, rushing toward her like the mouth of an oncoming tunnel as seen from a speeding train. In and around that tunnel mouth she saw many flickering green curves — circles, ellipses, and parabolas representing the orbits of artificial satellites.

One of those was the Sagan space telescope, poised at the L2 point on the far side of the Earth from the Sun, well beyond the Moon. And that was where Jeremy was.

Dana’s heart beat harder at the thought.

Her brain knew this was only a simulation, that Jeremy wasn’t really there. But her heart ached for him.

They’d been apart for so many months, and now … now she was about to die. Her simulated body was going to slam into the solid simulated Earth, far denser and proportionally much bigger than the galaxy that had grazed her leg so painfully. She didn’t know what would happen to her then, but her terrified screaming monkey mind insisted that she would go
splat
, and between the bugs and the drugs she couldn’t be sure she wouldn’t.

The Moon’s orbit was now a skinny ellipse as long as her arm. She must be about five light-seconds tall, and coming in just above the plane of the ecliptic. The Sun was to her left, so Jeremy would be off to her right, on the far side of the Sun from the Earth and about four times farther from Earth than the Moon … just
there
.

And there he was. A tiny, tiny green ellipse, no bigger than her fingertip, represented the Sagan telescope’s station-keeping orbit around the L2 point. She had already nearly passed it.

Desperately she reached out to the speeding ellipse.
I love you, Jeremy
, she thought…

…and her hand struck something hard and cool.

The control panel. When it had flown out of her reach, it must have automatically returned to its default position by her right hand. But it was still invisible, and she hadn’t thought to look for it there.

Heart pounding, Dana ran her clumsy right hand around the panel’s smooth rounded edge, fumbling for the Hide button in the upper right. She found it and pressed it.

The control panel appeared.

Beyond it, the Earth was already the size of a basketball, and growing rapidly. The simulation was cloudless, a photorealistic globe surrounded by the green circles of artificial satellites. She fell toward it, slowing but still moving at killing speed.

The Earth shimmered in her drug-addled vision, huge and bold and powerful. The home of all humankind. So small in the immensity of the universe, yet so immense to her.

As terrified as she was, she was overcome with awe.

She couldn’t wait to tell Jeremy about this…

Jeremy!

Dana slammed the Stop button with her thumb. Immediately she halted her downward plunge.

She hung, gasping, in space. She must be no more than five percent of a light-second tall; the Earth was now a sphere bigger in diameter than her height, its surface just an arm’s length away.

She reached out and touched it. It was cool and smooth and very hard.

Dana leaned against the Earth and sobbed with relief.

* * *

Dana peered anxiously at the people coming off the flight from Florida. There he was! Moving slowly, still unaccustomed to gravity, but she’d never mistake Jeremy’s face.

And she could see it so clearly! Even only twenty days into the experimental treatment, she was already detecting an improvement in her vision.

She ran to Jeremy and embraced him with a shriek of joy. “Did you bring me anything?” she teased.

“Just a head full of stars,” he said, and kissed her. “How about you?”

“Well…” Her headlong plummet through space had, amazingly, taken only five minutes of her HVF time. Once she’d recovered her composure, she’d gone on to complete her researches as planned … in fact, her unexpected side trip had given her some very interesting insights. “Actually, I have some important results to share. But first, I want to share something else…”

Jeremy squawked as she picked him up and spun him around. Then she set him down, and they headed for the exit.

This story follows in the footsteps of the book “Cosmic View” by Kees Boeke (1957) and the films
Cosmic Zoom
by Eva Szasz (1968),
Powers of Ten
by Ray and Charles Eames (1977), and
Cosmic Voyage
by Bayley Silleck (1996).

Like those earlier works, it attempts to give an understanding of the scale of the universe by giving a high-speed guided tour from the largest scale to the smallest. Because this is a short story rather than an art book or a movie, it lacks stunning visuals, but I hope that it offers instead the full range of senses and emotions provided by the reader’s imagination.

If you’d like to take an interactive online version of Dana’s voyage, you can do so here:

http://www.wordwizz.com/pwrsof10.htm

©
David Levine

Follow your inner moonlight; don’t hide the madness.
- Allen Ginsberg

“That’s the most disgusting thing I ever saw.”

“It’s just a pig, Zeke. The biggest one on the planet, according to the sign. 527 kilos.”

“Is that with or without the mud? Yuk.”

“Mud is a perfectly natural environment for a pig,” said Astrid, studying the Planetary Fair sign as it scrolled past. “—or a sow. She’s a female.”

“All the more disgusting.”

How did I wind up with this bozo on my thesis trip?
she thought.
He’s cute and he’s smart, but he knows it and he’s trying too hard to convince me. Why can’t he just relax?

He attempted to put his arm around her waist and steer her away from the pigpen, but she moved his hand away and stayed put.
Too bad you couldn’t afford this trip on your own money. You linked up with him to qualify for a companion fare.

In other words, you sold yourself for money. Now he thinks he’s entitled to collect. Well, deal with it, girl! He can be charming. Maybe I can get him to loosen up. Get his mind off my body.

“Come on,” she said. “I’ll show you the rest of the fair, so you’ll see why Parma is so interesting.”

He made a sour face, but allowed himself to be led outside the pig building into the open air. He took a deep breath, as if to remove the odor from his nose, then gazed up at the open sky. “I’d rather be sitting on the beach with you, smooching by the light of that fabulous moon.”

“Stop acting as if I were one of those twenty-first century floozies. I’ve only known you for two days, and I have no intention of smooching with you. Besides, I came here to study the history and culture of this planet, not to make out with some oversexed rich, spoiled, know-it-all.”

He checked the sleeves of his body suit for invisible lint. “What’s your major, anyway?”

He sure dresses well, but doesn’t even seem to know that his fancy suit repels lint. Maybe that’s because his father’s tailor made it for him.
“Exodus anthropology.”

They approached a booth with distorting mirrors. He stopped to check his image, then changed his suit color to a pale gold. “What the heck is … whatever you said?”

“Better I show you.” They were now passing the protein pavilion, so she invited him to take a seat at one of the outdoor tables. A waitress stopped at their table, and while Zeke was busy peering down her low-cut peasant blouse, Astrid ordered a sample plate along with a bottle of
Cave de Rivesaltes.

“All of the farmers of Parma came here to escape the Pollution. As an exodus anthropologist, my job is to study how their cultures have changed since they left Earth, and for what reasons.”

“Who cares about that?” He cast his gaze around the crowd of other patrons, adjusting his suit to a brilliant crimson. “Looks just like any other backward planet. Look what they’re wearing.”

The waitress arrived with a giant platter holding a loaf of crusty bread surrounded by artfully arranged slices and wedges of cheese. She set down a bottle of deep golden wine, pulled the cork, and offered him a small sample to taste.

Astrid could see Zeke had no idea what he was tasting, but allowed him to accept the wine with a great pretense of sophistication.

Once the waitress was gone and Zeke had stopped watching the sway of her departing hips, Astrid held up a wedge of cheese with a hard, dark brown rind.

“Take this cheese, for example.
Idiazabal
is made from unpasteurized milk that can only come from the
latxa
breed of sheep. On Earth, it could only come from the Basque region of Spain, but when the Pollution destroyed conditions there, the Basque herders sold their land to speculators and took their flocks here, to Parma.”

She held the cheese wedge up to his nose. He sniffed it suspiciously. “Why here?”

“This was the most earthlike planet available. Their cheese has such high market value they can export it and earn enough to maintain their traditional way of life. It’s the same for the specialty products of all the agricultural people who came here.”

She nibbled on the
Idiazabal
, then gave it to him and picked up a chunk of whitish cheese laced with irregular blue veins. “The producers of Stilton, for example, came from England.”

He wrinkled his nose. “It stinks. I can smell it from here. Who would want it?”

“Oh, just millions. They’re willing to pay top prices, because they can’t get real Stilton anywhere else.” She swept her hand over the tray. “It’s the same with all these cheeses. And olives. And onions. And meats. Just about any delicacy that can no longer be produced on Earth.”

He pushed the tray to her side of the table. “But Earth can produce all these things.”

“No, only cheap, inferior, imitations. Here, taste some of this.” She handed him a strip of pink dried meat. He looked at it dubiously, sniffed it, then worried off a small bite.

“Mmm, not bad. What kind of cheese is this?”

“It’s not cheese. It’s
prosciutto
, or Parma ham. Dry-cured, from a pig like Greta.”

He gagged and spit out the half-chewed ham. “From an
animal
?” He rinsed his mouth with a swig of wine, then spit the mouthful on the packed earth floor.

“Of course an animal. Where else would it come from?”

“From a vat, of course.” His face was turning pale green, contrasting with the crimson of his suit.

“This is real
prosciutto
. Originally from central and northern Italy. It brings forty or fifty times the price of that vat imitation—Vam, isn’t it called? That premium allows these farmers to thrive.”

He stood. “Let’s get out of here. I can’t—.” He put his hand over his mouth and bolted for the entrance.

She could see he was about to vomit, but knew he could never admit it. She gave him time to answer nature’s call, paid the bill, and followed him out onto the moon-lit concourse.
He’s got potential, but I’ve got to break through his defenses.

He appeared five minutes later, looking a bit better and acting as if nothing had happened. “I was studying the moon,” he alibied. “I didn’t tell you, but my field is astrophysics—a lot more scientific than—what was it?—exodus archaeology.”

“Anthropology,” she corrected, smiling to herself because she knew he’d made the mistake intentionally. He was about to do some serious ego-building, at her expense, if possible.
Well, maybe I can break it down, and reach him that way.

“Yeah, whatever.” He pointed to the sky. “Let me teach you something that you probably don’t know. See that moon? Do you know why you only see a crescent?”

She stared up at the glowing half-disk. “It’s because different parts of the moon light up at different times.”

He clasped his forehead in mock dismay. “My god, that’s dumb.”