New Earth (2 page)

The robot turned away briefly to the row of diagnostic monitors lining one wall of the narrow compartment. When it came back to Jordan’s open capsule it
bore a ceramic cup in one metal hand.

“A stimulant,” it said, “and a lubricant for your throat.”

Tenderly, the robot lifted Jordan’s head with one silicone-skin hand and brought the cup to his lips, like a mother feeding a baby. He grasped the cup with both his trembling hands, grateful for its warmth.

Tea, Jordan realized once he’d taken a sip of the steaming brew. Tea with honey. Stimulant,
lubricant, warmer-upper. Good old tea. He almost laughed.

“Do you feel strong enough to get to your feet?”

Jordan thought it over, then replied, “I can try.”

The robot gently helped him up to a sitting position. Then Jordan swung his bare legs over the edge of the capsule and carefully, tentatively, stood up. He felt a little wobbly, but only a little. Not bad for a fellow who’s a hundred and
thirty-two years old, he thought.

The little cubicle’s walls were bare, off-white. It was hardly big enough to contain Jordan’s cryosleep capsule, a marvel of biotechnology sitting there like an elongated egg that had been cracked open. The life-support equipment and monitors blinked and beeped softly against the opposite wall.

Each member of the expedition had a cubicle of his or her own; the
robots assisted with the reawakening process.

Staying at his side, the robot led Jordan three steps to the closet where his clothes were stored. He pulled the door open and saw himself in the full-length mirror inside the door.

He was a trim, well-built middleweight, standing almost 175 centimeters in his bare feet. Normally he weighed a trifle under seventy-five kilograms, but as he looked
down at his bare body he saw that his long sleep had cost him some weight. The skin of his legs was still puckered from the freezing, but beneath the wrinkles it looked pink, healthy.

His face was slightly thinner than he remembered it, his arched aquiline nose a little more obvious, his cheekbones a bit more prominent, the hollows beneath them more noticeable. He saw that the neat little mustache
he had cultivated so carefully over the years had grayed noticeably; it looked somewhat ragged. I’ll need to attend to that, he thought.

Then, with a shock, he realized that his dark brown hair had turned completely silver.

They didn’t tell us to expect
that,
he said to himself.

Back on Earth he’d often been called elegant, sophisticated. At this moment, farther from Earth than any human being
had ever traveled, he felt shabby, weary, and strangely detached, as if he were watching himself from afar.

Jordan shook his head, trying to force himself to accept where he was and who he was. While cryonic freezing preserved the body, it also tended to degrade the synapses of the brain’s neurons. All the members of the team had downloaded their memories into the ship’s computer before they’d
left Earth and gone into cryosleep.

With deliberate concentration, Jordan tested the upload. He remembered leading the team into the ship’s luxurious interior. He remembered climbing into the sleep capsule, watching it close over him. Childhood memories floated before him: the Christmas he deduced that Father Christmas was really his parents; tussling with his brother Brandon; graduating from
Cambridge; Miriam—he clenched his eyes shut.

Miriam. Her last days, her final agony.

My fault. All my fault. My most grievous fault.

It would have been good to have erased those memories, he thought.

Slowly, carefully, he pulled on cotton briefs, a turtlenecked white shirt, dark blue jeans, and comfortable loafers. Then he studied himself for a moment in the full-length mirror on the back
of the closet’s door, his steel-gray eyes peering intently. You don’t look elegant and sophisticated now, he told himself. You look … bewildered, and more than a little frightened.

Then he realized, “I’m hungry.”

The robot said, “A very normal reaction.” It sounded almost pleased. “The wardroom is less than thirty meters up the passageway, in the direction of the ship’s command center. The dispensers
offer a full selection of food and beverages.”

With a crooked smile, Jordan said, “You sound like an advertising blurb.”

The robot made no reply, but it turned and opened the door to the passageway.

Jordan hesitated at the doorway.

“The wardroom is to the right, Mr. Kell.”

Jordan tried to recall the ship’s layout. The living and working areas were built into the wheel that turned slowly to
give a feeling of gravity. Leaving the robot behind him, he walked carefully along the passageway. Although the floor felt perfectly flat, he could see it curving up and out of sight ahead of him.

The wardroom was empty as he entered it. Of course, he realized. I’m the first to be revived. I’m the team leader.

It was a pleasantly decorated compartment, its walls covered with warm pseudowood
paneling, its ceiling glowing softly. Six small tables were arranged along its russet-tiled floor; they could be pushed together in any pattern the team wanted. At present they were all standing separately, each table big enough to seat four people.

Very comfortable, Jordan thought. Of course, crew comfort was a major goal of the mission designers. This far from home, a few luxuries help to keep
us happy. And sane. Or so the psychotechs decided.

One entire wall of the wardroom was taken up by machines that dispensed food and drink. But Jordan’s attention instantly was drawn to the wall opposite, a floor-to-ceiling display screen.

It showed the planet that the ship was orbiting. A lush green world with deeply blue oceans and fleecy white clouds, brown wrinkles of mountains and broad
swaths of grasslands. Heartbreakingly beautiful.

Jordan marveled at the sight. It really is a New Earth, he thought.

DATA BANK

Even while the massive floods, droughts, and killer storms of the greenhouse climate shift were devastating much of Earth, astronomers were detecting several thousand planets orbiting other stars. Most of these exoplanets were gas giants, bloated spheres of hydrogen and helium, totally unlike Earth. But a few percent of them were small, rocky worlds, more like our own.

One in particular
raised hopes of being really Earthlike: Sirius C. It was almost the same size as Earth, and although its parent star was a fiercely blazing blue-white giant, much larger and hotter than the Sun, the planet’s orbit lay at the “Goldilocks” distance from Sirius where its surface temperature was not too hot, and not too cold for liquid water to exist.

On Earth, liquid water means life. Beneath the
frozen iron sands of Mars, liquid water melting from the permafrost hosts an underground biosphere of microbial life forms. In the ice-covered seas of Jupiter’s major moons, living organisms abound. In the planet-girdling ocean beneath the eternal clouds of giant Jupiter itself, life teems and flourishes.

But Sirius C was a challenge to the scientists. The planet shouldn’t exist, not by all that
they knew of astrophysics. And it couldn’t possibly bear life, Goldilocks notwithstanding, not sandwiched between brilliant Sirius A and its white dwarf star companion, Sirius B. The dwarf had erupted in a series of nova explosions eons ago. The death throes of Sirius B must have sterilized any planets in the vicinity, boiled away any atmosphere or ocean.

But there it was, a rocky, Earth-sized
planet, the
only
planet in the Sirius system, orbiting Sirius A in a nearly perfect circle. Spectroscopic studies showed it had an Earthlike atmosphere—and oceans of liquid water.

Might there be a chance that the planet did harbor some kind of life forms? The astrobiologists worked overtime concocting theories to support the hope that the Earth-sized planet might indeed host an Earth-type biosphere.
The popular media had no such problem. They quickly dubbed Sirius C “New Earth.”

For nearly a full century, while governments and corporations all over the world toiled to alleviate the catastrophic results of the climate change, Earth’s eagerly inquisitive scientists hurled robotic space probes toward Sirius C. Even at the highest thrust that fusion rockets could produce, the probes took decades
to reach their objective, more than eight light-years from Earth. Yet once they arrived at the planet, what they saw confirmed the most cherished hopes of both the scientists and the general public.

Sirius C was indeed a New Earth. The planet bore broad blue seas of water, its continents were richly green with vegetation. There was no sign of intelligent life, no cities or farmlands or roads,
no lights or radio communications, but the planet truly was a New Earth, unpopulated, virginal, beckoning.

Impatient to explore this new world in greater detail, the International Astronautical Authority asked the World Council to fund the human exploration of Sirius C. The Council procrastinated, citing the enormous costs of mitigating the disasters caused by the global climate shift. Then the
lunar nation of Selene stepped forward and offered to build a starship. Shamed into grudging cooperation, the Council reluctantly joined the effort—meagerly.

They named the starship
Gaia,
after the Earth deity who represented the web of life.
Gaia
would travel to Sirius more slowly than the robotic probes, to protect its fragile human cargo. It would take some eighty years for the ship to reach
Sirius C.

Men and women from all around the world volunteered for the mission. They were carefully screened for physical health and mental stability. As one of the examining psychotechnicians put it, “You’d have to be at least a little crazy to throw away eighty years just to get there.”

But the crew of
Gaia
would not age eighty years. They would sleep away the decades of their journey in cryonic
suspension, frozen in liquid nitrogen, as close to death as human bodies can get and still survive.

Gaia
was launched with great fanfare: humankind’s first mission to the stars. The explorers would spend five years mapping the planet in detail, studying its biosphere, and building a base for the backup missions to work from.

By the time the ship arrived in orbit around Sirius C, eighty years
later, only a handful of dedicated scientists back on Earth were still interested in the mission. Most of the human race was struggling to survive the catastrophic second wave of greenhouse flooding, as the ice caps of Greenland and Antarctica melted down. The backup missions had been postponed, again and again, and finally shelved indefinitely by the World Council.

Even the eagerly waiting scientists
saw nothing, heard nothing from the explorers, for it would take more than eight years for messages to travel from Sirius back to Earth.

ALONE

Alone in the wardroom, Jordan poured himself another cup of tea, then sat at one of the tables and stared in fascination at the planet sliding by in the wall screen’s display.

It certainly looks like Earth, he thought. The data bar running along the base of the screen showed that the planet’s atmosphere was astonishingly close to Earth’s: 22 percent oxygen, 76 percent nitrogen, the
remaining 2 percent a smattering of carbon dioxide, water vapor, and inert gases. The biggest difference from Earth was that Sirius C had a much thicker ozone layer high in its atmosphere: not unexpected, since the star Sirius emitted much more ultraviolet light than the Sun.

Jordan shook his head in wonder. It’s like a miracle, he said to himself. Too good to be true. But then he realized that
this was the first planet orbiting another star that human eyes had seen close up. What do we know about exoplanets? Perhaps Earthlike worlds are commonplace.

Enough speculation, he told himself. Get to work. Time to go to the command center and see what the mission controllers have to say to us.

Clasping his half-finished mug of tea in one hand, Jordan went back into the passageway and walked
to the command center. It was a smallish compartment with a horseshoe of six workstation consoles curving around a single high-backed chair whose arms were studded with control buttons. Display screens covered the bulkheads, most of them showing the condition and performance of the ship’s various systems; others offered views of the planet they orbited.

Jordan slipped into the command chair and
frowned briefly at the keypads set into its armrests. He tried to remember which one activated the communications system. The symbols on each pad had always reminded him of children’s sketches. The propulsion system’s symbol was a triangle with wavy lines emanating from it. Life support a heart shape.

Communications was the headset symbol, he recalled. Touching that pad, Jordan called for the
latest message from Earth. He reminded himself that the message he was about to see was sent from Earth more than eight years ago. It takes messages eight point six years to travel from Earth to Sirius.

A woman’s face appeared on the main screen, above the row of consoles. She was a handsome woman, with dark hair pulled tightly back off her face. Strong cheekbones and a fine, straight nose. Her
eyes were large and so deeply brown they looked almost black—and unutterably sorrowful.

“I am Felicia Ionescu, the newly appointed director of the International Astronautical Authority,” she said, in a carefully measured alto register. “This message is being sent to reach you on the day that your ship attains orbit around the planet Sirius C.”

Recorded more than eight years ago, Jordan repeated
to himself.

“I hope that you have all survived the flight to Sirius and that you are well, and ready to begin the exploration of the planet.”

Jordan thought her welcoming message was strangely heavy, bleak. Where’s the congratulations? Where are the clichés about how all of Earth is thrilled that you’ve reached your destination?

“When you departed from Earth,” Ionescu went on, “eighty years
ago, we were recovering from the worldwide flooding caused by the global greenhouse warming.” She took in a breath. “Unfortunately, now—eighty years later—a new wave of flooding has struck, caused by the continued warming of the global climate.”