Ellipsis Between Worlds, Chapter 2
/I posted Chapter 1 of this novel last month just to see if folks might be interested in reading it in serial form, and some people really enjoyed it. One reader gave me some excellent suggestions that are already shaping where the novel goes from here (shout-out to author Steve Daval), and my girlfriend Sandra is making sure I continue to write it, so I’ll keep posting chapters and taking your suggestions. I know it’s hitting a little close to home, but I hope that will help readers relate rather than being a turn-off.
Ellipsis Between Worlds
Chapter 2
Back when Albert had given up his tenure track teaching position at Oberlin in Ohio and moved to Chicago to take a somewhat menial construction job, he’d marveled at the design of The Enceladus. Of course the sheer size of the ship had taken his breath away, just as it did for everyone. Even from the surface of Earth, it was visible in its berth in orbit, a ghostly white balloon in the sky at the end of its space elevator thread. But the more he learned about it, the more impressed he was. Because they’d known it would take fifty years to build, and because they expected technology to improve dramatically during that time, they’d focused on simplicity. It’s exterior hull looked almost like a globe. But the engine, which was not nearly the diameter of the ship itself, was a core that hung suspended between the poles of the orb, creating indentations at those poles, the rear pole sinking in to the main exhaust port that would launch the ship to Saturn’s moon, the front pole of the ship sinking into the exhaust port that would deccelerate the ship on the second half of its journey. Most of the globe was hollow, the people living in the ten storey thick skin of the balloon, the wildlife living under the artificial sky thirty stories further in, and then a vast nothingness, not even filled with oxygen, between that artificial sky and the core. Most impressive, once Albert learned about it, was the way the ship had been designed to be built; all in prefabricated interlocking pieces that could be made on Earth and then lifted up the space elevator and simply set in place. Much as ancient wooden maritime ships were designed to use the pressure of the water to push the pieces of wood together to remain water-tight, once The Enceladus was pressurized, the force attempting to suck that air into space pulled all the pieces of the ship into place so perfectly they kept the air in. Of course, back when he’d been working at loading those prefabricated pieces onto the space elevator, the ship had lacked its most magical ingredient. In the last months before the launch, they’d used the space elevator to pump trillions (he’d read it was nearly a quadrillion) gallons of water from the Great Lakes up to the ship where it was carefully applied to form a perfectly clear bubble of ice fifty feet thick around the whole ship. (In fact, they’d even covered the exhaust ports of the main engine, then drilled in to make the openings for the exhaust. That was easier.) The ice served as a shield against solar radiation, a protection against any micrometeoroid that would hit the ship with the force of a bullet, a source of oxygen, and a source of fuel for the hyper-efficient hydrogen engine. Sure, they had the solar sail behind them for extra juice and protection, but they had more than enough fuel to make the journey ten times over in the shield itself. It was this kind of beautiful simplicity Albert admired about the ship.
Here’s what he hated: Elevators. In the ten stories that made up the space in which everyone worked and lived, people had to take elevators up to the floor just beneath the wildlife area. Then they had to board a maglev train to the right place, then get off and take another elevator down to where they were going. Back before the quarantine, there had been frequent lines at these elevators that wasted everyone’s time. Now, when most of the crew were remanded to their cabins, the elevators were easily accessible even though only one person could be in one at a time in order to prevent the spread of the infection. But that meant, on his first day out of his cramped cabin in weeks, Albert walked down an empty hallway and got into an even smaller room by himself. Then he got out of the small room and climbed into a compartment of a maglev train, essentially another small, windowless room, and shot under the surface of the wildlife floor to a station where he got into a second elevator, another small, windowless room. He’d just traded isolation for more isolation.
But this elevator was headed in a direction he’d never traveled before. Instead of going down to some spot in the crew’s working or living areas, this elevator was going up. Actually, up and down were relative. It was going further in, away from the hull that was the focus of the ship’s artificial gravity, towards the core where there would be none. And while those other trips “down” were, at most, ten stories, this one would be ten times as long. If the elevator had windows, he would have spent the first moments rocketing through the wildlife area, watching the green plains populated by herds of grazing animals, the rolling hills, and the the bodies of water of different sizes, elevations/depths, and selenities with all their teaming fish. Birds in flight would have passed below him, mostly, though many soared as high as the artificial sky and could have flown much higher on Earth. Most of the ship’s food was produced in facilities below, but there were farms growing some kinds of produce under the artificial sky, and he would have recognized the rows of corn shrinking beneath him, turning into simple golden squares.
And then, quite suddenly, he would have been terrified if the elevator had windows. Because when it passed through the artificial sky, it entered a space unlike anything except in the heart of the other four great ships rocketing off to their destinations. Above him (what felt like “above” due to the artificial gravity) was the core, and beneath him there was the spherical back side of the artificial sky, but in between was nothing, a huge emptiness punctuated only by the thin spokes of the various elevators and pointed in to the core. The light of a few stars might have peaked in from the front of the ship, around the control deck and through the clear ice shield at the front of the ship, and similarly from the space around the exhaust port at the stern, but most of the light would have been blocked by the hull, and there was no reason to illuminate the core. It was the largest, emptiest, darkest space ever created by human beings, possibly the largest cave in the universe, and only a few techs doing maintenance checks on the outside of the core would ever have seen it. It was not designed to be seen. It was the empty body cavity of the ship, and the ship’s heart floated far, far from its ribs.
As Albert raced toward that heart, the same maglev technology that moved the trains side to side now pushed and pulled the elevator up/down/in, and he could feel the gravity dissipate. There was no sensation of spinning any more than a person feels the Earth’s rotation around its axis, or around the sun, or around the center of the galaxy, spiral inside spiral inside spiral. But as he neared the core, the centrifugal force of the spin lost its grip on his body, and he began to bounce off his chair and against his seatbelt for longer and longer periods despite the elevator’s smooth movement. Just flexing his butt muscles sent him floating off his seat and into the belt, and he entertained himself by seeing how long he could make himself bounce with the minimum amount of force. It felt childish, but he was completely alone inside the elevator, and, he reasoned, childish glee was a reason to engage in an activity, any activity, not a reason to avoid it.
When the elevator arrived, he reached down and pushed the buttons on the tops of his shoes. In most respects they looked like tennis shoes he would have worn back on Earth, but they had a button near the toe, at the end of the laces, and when pressed it lit up a soft green to let the wearer know the shoes were working. Pressing one’s feet down into the floor activated the magnets in the soles, and lifting one’s foot pressed the sensors in the inside roof of the shoes, deactivating the magnets. This made it possible to walk along the ground without giving any thought to the lack of gravity, and it let the muscles of the ankles orient the body 90 degrees from the floor. The position of the magnets in the sole, and the way they came online and when turned off, made for a remarkably natural stride, and Albert took off his seatbelt and walked out into the hall without thinking of the shoes.
The first room on the other side of the elevator looked like an airlock and might have been able to serve as one, but currently it was being used to make sure none of the virus made it into the ships core area. He walked to the center of the room, stopped, and held his arms straight out. He knew the drill, though he wasn’t looking forward to it. A red warning light flashed, reminding him to close his eyes tightly, and a digital bell sound gave out a slow note that incresed in volume. At its peak, Albert felt the cold mist of the disinfectant, then the heat of the flash of UV light that evaporated the moisture on his skin away. Too much of this would leave his skin dry and cracking. Hell, too much of it would probably give him all kinds of crazy cancer, he thought. But he understood why they were doing it. And it was no guerantee; if he’d picked up the virus and it was already inside his system, he could bring it into the core area. They must have high confidence through their contact tracing that he not only didn’t have it yet, but also hadn’t passed through any area on his way to the elevator where an infected person had been since that route’s last deep cleaning.
The door on the other side of the little room opened automatically, and Albert stepped through into a hallway. He needed his phone to give him directions down to the office where he would have his interview, and he didn’t cross paths with anyone else as he made two lefts and three rights until he found the door marked with a simple number 47 on the door. Inside, he found a bare room, a cube with an empty desk standing between two chairs. He sat in a chair facing the far wall and waited. His anxiety built in the silence, and he fought the urge to pull out his phone. He didn’t want his first impression on a prospective employer to be found staring at the screen in his hand. But when the door finally opened less than two minutes later, he started at the sound and turned in his chair like a frightened animal, then had to compose his face before the interviewer entered.
Just when he was feeling controlled, the man came in. Upside-down. The doorway didn’t rise quite to what Albert perceived as the ceiling, so the man had to step over a bit of the frame, but he did that as naturally as a submarine sailor used to walking into doors with raised door jambs. The man had short brown hair, a clean-shaven face, a thin build and long neck, bad posture. Because he was standing on Albert’s ceiling, his hunching was even more disconcerting. He walked across the room, dodging the desk just as he might if he’d been on Albert’s floor, only his head passed next to the desk. Then, in the corner, he turned his body at the ankles, maintaining his curved spine, then walked down what Albert perceived as the wall, then rose up to Albert’s orientation. He pulled out the chair and sat, but he still didn’t look at Albert’s face.
“I’m Dr. Bradley Norton. Always ‘Bradley,’ never ‘Brad.’ I don’t like the name ‘Brad.’”
“Nice to meet you, Dr. Norton,” Albert said.
“Yes, that is better than ‘Bradley,’” the man said, still staring at a corner of the room over Albert’s left shoulder. “And you are Dr. Albert White. It’s nice to meet you. I won’t shake your hand, for obvious reasons. I should mention that I’m not a medical doctor. I’m a Ph.D., like you. Multiple, in fact. But the hard sciences. Mathematics. Physics. Engineering. I do not do well with people or anything involving people. That’s why you are here. I entered the room in the way that I did because I have been told that it’s a power move. But I am not supposed to tell you it’s a power move or it loses its power. And that’s okay. I don’t want to make you uncomfortable.”
And then he sat in silence.
“Alright,” Albert said, and couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“It’s interesting that your name is ‘White’ even though you are not white, Dr. White.” Dr. Norton did not smile as he said this. Albert couldn’t figure out if it was a joke.
“No. One of my ancestors was a slave who was owned by a man who was named White, and he had to take his master’s name. There has been lots of racial mixing in my family’s history, including white people, but, to my knowledge, there has never been a white person named White in the family.”
“Yes. That is interesting. Not technically ironic, but interesting. One interesting thing about me is that I have autism. That’s why I am uncomfortable with eye contact, although I understand many people who do not have autism are also uncomfortable with eye contact. It is also why I frequently say things that make people uncomfortable. I have learned to be very up front about this. That will be especially important for our conversation today because I am going to say things that will probably make you very uncomfortable.”
Then Dr. Norton stared in silence again.
“Alright. I appreciate that.”
“Good. I am not a Vulcan. I do have feelings, and I’m sorry this will be uncomfortable. Dr. White, how many people are there in the solar system at present?”
Albert blinked. “Um, well, Earth’s population peaked at around 9 billion and has been going down, so, somewhere between 7 and 8 billion?”
“That may still technically be correct, though I highly doubt it. But we need to stop thinking in that way. We need to start thinking that the entire population of the solar system is under ten million people, and they are all on this ship. That is almost certainly not true yet, but it will probably be true soon.”
Now it was Albert’s turn to stare in silence, though he gaped directly at Dr. Norton. “I don’t … I don’t understand.”
“No, you wouldn’t. You shouldn’t, in fact. That’s by design. There are very few people who understand this completely. Perhaps only a few thousand aboard this ship. Though, a few thousand used to be point zero zero zero zero zero zero zero two five percent of the universe’s human population, and I’m asking you imagine it as point zero zero zero two, so ‘small’ is relative. Here is what that small number of people understand, and what you must understand in order to do the job I’m asking you to do.
“A little over one hundred years ago, shortly after the outbreak of the Corona virus, a group of people at very high levels of government had the forethought to examine the way people immediately returned to behaviors that were destroying the global climate, and they realized this would be unsustainable. Furthermore, they realized they could not change people’s behaviors, even the behaviors of their own governments, in time to prevent the Earth from becoming inhospitable to human life. So they went to their governments and proposed to provide a Plan B. Actually, a Plan B, C, D, E, and F. They suggested building the ship we are on now, and they told them we needed this option just in case global warming got out of control, or in case of an asteroid strike against the Earth, or in case of another pandemic just like they’d all recently survived. Even these arguments would have been unpersuasive, but when these forward thinkers pointed out that all the other continents were going to have their own ships, each group of governments signed onto the plan for fear of being the odd person out.
“They designed the ships to hold vast numbers of people. Ten million each. But I think you can imagine what would have happened if they had said that only those fifty million people would be leaving Earth. They would have been dismissed as alarmists, or, worse, they would have had to decide which people lived and died in the face of a massive public uproar. Instead, they got to decide from the volunteers quietly over time. They announced the journeys and let people apply. They made it clear that we did not know, and still do not know, which of the five ships will be able to create a sustainable colony. Maybe they all will, but that’s unlikely. Maybe none of them will. That’s slightly more likely, unfortunately. People, knowing they were going on what may prove to be a suicide mission, were very reluctant to sign up. As the conditions on Earth worsened, more and more people decided to take the risk, but it was still a small enough percentage of the population that we avoided an Escape from Saigon scenario. You are a history professor. Do you understand that reference?”
Albert nodded. The Vietnam War wasn’t his area of specialization, but he’d seen the pictures of people hanging off the last American helicopters as the capital of South Vietnam fell to the North.
Dr. Norton held out his hands, palms up, his first gesticulation in his whole speech. “This ship isn’t even full to capacity. There are 9,438,426 people on board. There were more when we took off, before the epidemic, but not the full complement of ten million. Some babies have also been born, and some people have died for reasons not related to the virus. But you get my point. We weren’t even full. People on Earth decided to take their chances, most believing they would have to live out their lives underground after the ships took off. They thought that was a much safer alternative than a suicide mission to a remote planet or moon. And we mostly let them think that. We didn’t try to completely prevent the truth from getting out. That would have been impossible. 10,000 people can’t keep a secret. But by letting it just be a rumor and not an official pronouncement, we allowed it to be drowned out by other rumors. There are always conspiracy theories that some people will believe and others won’t. We just withheld some of the evidence that might have elevated one theory to the top for people concerned about evidence.”
Albert swallowed. “What evidence did you withhold?”
“The real numbers in our modeling. When the original group designed the five ships, they sold them as Plan B, C, D, E, and F. What they didn’t say was that the construction of the ships themselves, the mining, the moving of the parts using gasoline, the extraction of the water for the shields; all these things made the global warming worse. Much worse. Much faster. Having these Plan Bs meant there was no longer a Plan A. It’s possible some people will learn how to survive under Earth’s surface until the planet heals, but I find that very unlikely. In fact, since we drained the water for the ice shields, it’s more probable they are all already dead.”
Albert fell back against the back of his chair, a movement that took some intentionality in zero gravity. “Holy shit.”
“Yes, I understand this is a very hard thing for you to hear. I have just told you that many people you know, probably many of the people you care about, are dead. It would be most polite for me to give you some time to process this information. I understand the grieving process takes most people some time, often years, though there is quite a bit of variation. Unfortunately, we don’t have that luxury. If you need to take years to process this grief, you will not be able to do the job I need you to do. Are you ready to learn about the job? I can give you a few minutes of silence, but then we have to move on. Because, if the 9,438,426 people on board this ship are the only people still alive in the solar system, we have a problem that must be solved or it will mean the end of the human race. Would you like five minutes of silence first?”