2
Delta Pavonis wasn’t the closest trauma center, but it was the closest one staffed by Reticulan doctors. I’d been here once or twice, and the Grays’ efficiency never failed to impress. The place ran like clockwork, better than the most locked-on Level 1 center on Earth. It helped that the staff were all reading each other’s minds.
There was a team waiting for us as we pulled into the hangar bay, and they jumped into action as soon as the air pressure equalized. Orderlies took the antigrav gurney and we followed, relaying everything we’d done to the attending physician along the way.
“Patient is approximately 22 Reticulan years old. Transducer scans showed multiple radial fractures with dislocations along the spinal column, cerebral edema, and internal bleeding. He was in torpor when we found him, and we administered type IV sedatives at 30 milligrams per hour after he regained consciousness.”
The doc was listening as he studied the history on his crystal. He looked up in surprise; his already large eyes growing even more so. He pointed an elegant finger at the slate as we followed his orderlies into the ER.
Is this location correct? Gaia BH1?
“Yes. We had to tow his ship out of the accretion disk before we could get to him.”
Then he was fortunate that you were in the vicinity. The extreme gravity was pulling him apart. I am surprised his ship held together.
“It didn’t for long. He woke up in time to warn us that his reactor containment was about to fail.”
The Reticulan doc looked up. Ah. He sensed your presence then, enough to stir himself back to consciousness. You were indeed fortunate.
And with that, he turned and left for the ER. I gave Karrak a shrug and turned back to our transport; it had to be cleaned and sterilized before the last leg of our trip back to the capital.
We worked through our cleanup routine in silence. It wasn’t until we had the sterilizing boom in place that I allowed myself to start asking the obvious questions.
“What the hell was he doing there in the first place?” It was the sort of thing you asked after a particularly hard run, the kind where some poor schmuck had gotten himself into a terrible situation that should have been avoidable. Think of an upper-class kid getting knifed in an inner-city slum, or the middle-aged nobody who can’t for the life of him explain how that shot glass got stuck up his ass. Backwards. You know they were up to something no good, but you don’t waste time thinking about it until after the dust has settled.
“I have been wondering that myself,” Karrak said as he took a seat at a small table in the back of the hangar bay. Behind him, the sterilizing boom was bathing the inside of our ship in ultraviolet light. Needa was poking around its exterior, going through her normal preflight routine. She was being more meticulous than usual, opening inspection panels and measuring tolerances along every seam.
“The only vessels known to have intentionally operated so close to a black hole have been for scientific exploration,” he said after a long pause. “Their intent was to better understand the environment and assess any threats to navigation. Of those expeditions, none of them dared venture into the accretion disk. They left that task to expendable probes.”
“I’m guessing that’s because it’s too dangerous? Stray too far and you cross the point of no return.”
“Precisely so.” His high brow furrowed again; he’d become just as troubled as I was now that we had time to think about it. “It is an energetic radiation environment, which as you saw taxes a vessel’s shields. As you also saw, the gravity gradients become quite extreme as you approach the event horizon. That truly is the ‘point of no return,’ as you said. Nothing can escape that. Nothing.”
I unwrapped a sandwich I’d taken from our food synthesizer right before this latest adventure. It’d been sitting in a drawer ever since, until we’d started the decon routine. I tossed the bread aside and picked at the innards, a mostly faithful interpretation of pastrami and Swiss cheese. The nutrisynths had gotten pretty good at mimicking human cuisine during my time here, but for all of the GU’s high tech, no one had yet figured out how to keep bread from going stale. “That brings us back to my original question,” I said around a mouthful of synthetic pastrami. “What was he doing there?”
Karrak rubbed his sharp chin and stared into the distance. “A navigation error seems the most likely explanation. It is uncommon, but it happens. ‘Human error,’ as you would say.”
“Humans, maybe. Give us the keys to one of those saucers and we’d be like teenagers on a joy ride.” I tilted my head at Needa, who was waist-deep in an inspection port. “Your kind is nothing if not disciplined.”
He turned to follow my gaze. “Quite.”
“You’re being awfully cagey. Something about this is bothering you, too.”
Karrak leaned forward. “Very well. You noticed the bulge along the saucer’s aft quarter?”
“Kind of hard to tell which ends were forward and aft, but yeah. That was unusual?”
“Most unusual. I’d hoped we’d have more time to ascertain what it might be. Though my understanding of such matters is superficial, I suspect it was an experimental drive.”
Needa, of course, had been telepathically listening to us. As do I. If we had been able to isolate its energy signature, we could have known for certain. Be that as it may, there is other evidence to support your suspicion.
Karrak looked intrigued. “What might that be?” He kept vocalizing for my benefit. Being caught in the middle of a telepathic conversation could get confusing for an Earthling.
Needa continued working, her feet dangling from an open panel. The failure of the saucer’s containment field was telling. Emissions were inconsistent with a matter/antimatter reaction, and the explosive yield was greater than one would expect from the reaction mass for a vehicle of that size. It was, however, consistent with an uncontrolled release of zero point energy.
I shuddered against the same chill that had shook me when first staring down that black hole: Zero point. The mysterious, almost limitless energy contained in the subatomic bonds of, well, everything. Enough that releasing a measuring cup’s worth could boil oceans. It was the uncontrolled release of zero point energy which had destroyed the dwarf planet Tanaan a few years ago. That was shortly after I’d first joined the Med Corps, and the entire Union was still reeling from the loss of its largest Element 115 refinery.
Karrak rested his chin in one hand. “An interesting possibility. And troubling.”
I chewed on the remnants of my sandwich, trying to push the memories of Tanaan out of my mind. “Still doesn’t explain why he was in the danger zone of a black hole.”
The final leg back to the capital had only taken a few hours by our reckoning. According to the master “Galactic Union Reference” time on our data crystals, we’d taken twice that long. What had been a three-day run for us had been almost a week for everyone back at the barn, a lot longer than my back-of-the-envelope estimate.
I stowed my vacuum suit in a locker along the back wall of the ambulance hangar and turned to Karrak, who was doing the same nearby. Behind us, the relief crew was pre-flighting our transport before taking it over for their shift. Needa was having an extended conversation with the new pilot, a hextapod who seemed none too happy with her news, judging by his normally pink hue turning to orange. He waved a tentacle at the medics, signaling them to not waste their time. Our ship would be down for extended inspections.
“Six days?” I wondered. “How fast were we going, anyway?”
“It’s not just velocity, though there is that. You’ll recall that gravity has a similar effect on relative time. The stronger the gravitational potential—”
“The more it stretches the space around it.” I sighed, thinking of our patient. His injuries were an in-your-face testament, a metaphor for the disconnect I was feeling, the sense that my reality was being distorted beyond recognition. Before my recruitment into the Union, I’d been vaguely aware of the notion that space and time were an inseparable continuum, the structural foundation of the universe. A long-forgotten professor had touched on it in an even longer-forgotten physics class in college. It had never sunk in because it didn’t impact my life, but living and working here had demonstrated the truth of it better than any lecture could have.
“Quite.” Karrak placed a hand on my shoulder. “You have been with us for several annums, yet you still hold fast to your instinctual misunderstanding of time. If you’re going to continue, you must learn to let that go.”
I conceded his point with an indifferent grunt. I was living among beings who had spent their lives flying between the stars. They’d grown up accustomed to the counterintuitive effects of relativity playing out in their everyday lives, whereas I’d spent almost thirty years confined to Earth without having to adjust for anything more complicated than jet lag.
By my reference I’d been here for five years, “annums” in Union lingo. Every run I’d been on had taken me farther from home, and in more ways than just distance. What Karrak didn’t know was that I’d recently begun figuring out the time dilation from each run, tallying up my real separation from the world I’d left behind.
The math is surprisingly simple. Comprehending the results is a different matter.
My apartment in the capital overlooked the gardens of an immense biodome, which is to say the view wasn’t bad. The gardens had been cultivated to resemble the Emissaries’ home world, which had long ago been scorched by the death of its star. They shared the dome with the Gliesans, a race of meter-long insectoids who spent most of their time burrowing beneath the surface to create spectacular underground cities. They were the Union’s de facto civil engineering corps, and had crafted much of the ringworld that served as the capital city.
They’d also spent a little time in my place. Most of the standard-issue blank walls had been replaced with intricately carved ceramic in arches and organic swirls that flowed gracefully from room to room. They’d insisted on doing this after I’d rescued a few of their clan from a tunnel collapse during my early days as a Union medic. It’s doubtful that I’ll ever shake being the go-to for confined space work, especially now that the Gliesans ask for me specifically if one of theirs needs help down there. Which is ironic, because the first time I saw them they scared the living shit out of me.
I did manage to keep one corner of my place mostly human. My bedroom was appointed with farmhouse-style furniture of synthetic wood that looked like it could’ve come from home. That had been a friendly gesture from Bjorn, the Emissary who’d first brought me here. He’d even managed to create an old-fashioned Afghan which was draped across the foot of my bed. “Bjorn” wasn’t his real name, but the phonetics were close enough and it matched his somewhat Scandinavian appearance. If you’ve ever wondered where all of the gods from Norse mythology came from, there’s a funny story behind that. Let’s just say Bjorn and the other Emissaries don’t like being reminded of it.
I kicked off my boots and settled into a comfy chair with a cup of hot chamomile from the nutrisynth, too tired to shuck off my neon green medic jumpsuit. Union clothing tended to be close-fitting but still comfortable enough that it was easy to forget to change after a shift, except for the times I came home covered in alien goo. That’s when everything would go into the sterilizing bin.
Bjorn had also reproduced some favorite books for me, drawing from the GU’s vast archive collected over centuries of observing humans in secret. The best part was that these were actual books, not just files uploaded to my crystal. He knew I liked my pens and paper, and managed to keep me well supplied with those as well. There wasn’t much they couldn’t create from scratch here.
It was all very nice, homey and well-intentioned. But when juxtaposed against the hyper-advanced civilization I now lived in, it only highlighted a gnawing sense of disconnection.
I picked up Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small out of the stack on my side table. I’d devoured it in high school after making the decision to study veterinary medicine. It had been something of a family business which I’d broken with halfway through getting my DVM. I’d learned the hard way that farm country had plenty of vets; what it didn’t have enough of were first responders.
Out here I was straddling both worlds. With some exceedingly rare exceptions, every call I’d ever responded to had been for patients who were so foreign as to be closer to animals than humans. The difference was they could tell me what was wrong with them, thanks to the translation implant in my head.
Idly paging through this freshly produced copy of an old favorite, its stories all seemed very quaint now. What if Herriot had been able to talk to the animals he’d tended to? Maybe I should’ve asked Bjorn to print me a copy of Dr. Dolittle. It felt more appropriate.
Unable to focus, I tossed the memoir aside and picked up one of the worn notebooks I’d brought from home out of habit. I’d started using it for taking notes in my Med Corps training, but over time it had turned into a personal journal. I didn’t write in it much, wanting to save its pages for really important stuff.
Its back pages held my “time sheet,” where I added up the time dilation from each run relative to Earth. I’d done the math so often by now that I had the factors memorized. For example, at 0.6 c (that is, 60 percent of light speed) the dilation factor was 1.25. That meant for every hour spent at that velocity, an hour and fifteen minutes passed at home. It doesn’t sound like a big deal until you see how quickly it adds up when our normal intra-system velocity is 0.6. This is because even though the gravity drive folds space to shorten distances, we still have to go pretty fast to cover it.
That’s just for the short trips. When we have to crank up the drive for an interstellar run, past 0.7 c, the math goes nuts. And for the last year or so, interstellar had been my job. I’d been assigned to long-haul transport, moving critical patients around between star systems. It was like air ambulance work, using starships instead of private jets, and the time dilation effects had really begun to pile up.
I worked through the last few days’ travels. It was a rough estimate, especially with whatever the hell that black hole had done to us. As of today, Earth was a good eighteen years ahead of where it had been when I’d left.
Who knew what might have happened in that time? I occasionally found reports from Union survey expeditions, but for the most part they’d been keeping Earth at arm’s length. It made me wonder if that meant things back home had gotten better, or worse. Had we finally gotten over our smartphone addictions and returned to reality, or had they been replaced with brain implants that turned the human race into internet-addled zombies? Had we baked the planet with CO2? Or for that matter, had we finally stumbled our way into World War III?
A surprise waited for me after adding up the difference between Earth’s calendar and mine. Though nothing as dramatic as my musings about global conflagrations, it still packed an emotional wallop:
Today was my birthday.
My parents had always made a big deal of that, which happens when you’re an only child. Even into adulthood, Mom had always made a special dinner while Dad would handle the decorating and presents. I still wore the wristwatch from my last birthday with them, even though its timekeeping was a bad joke when the Union standard day was over thirty hours long. The smart thing would’ve been to set the watch in a drawer and forget about it, but I couldn’t bring myself to cut that last tie. My inability to let go had left me with a constant reminder of how time was slipping away, of the growing gulf between this life and the one I’d left behind.
Leaving had come so easily once Mom and Dad were gone. I’d been alone with no decent romantic prospects, a lot of that due to being in a demanding job that had turned into a dead end. I’d been able to ignore that last bit by just living from one day to the next, focusing on each run as they came. Live like that for too long and the years can get away from you. Time keeps moving ahead while you’re standing still and the next thing you know, you’re middle aged and changing directions is suddenly much harder.
Start zipping around the galaxy at a sizeable fraction of light speed, and the years really get away from you.
Running away had been easy. Figuring out what came next wasn’t. I’d spent almost as much time here as in the firehouse back home. Was this going to become a dead end, too?
My job here was important, in more ways than one. Besides being one of a handful of medics who could treat beings outside of their own species, I had another, rarely stated purpose in the Union: Guinea Pig. Lab rat. Control patient.
They were using me as a proxy for the whole human race, seeing how well I functioned in GU civilization. I was told it was a prerequisite for establishing formal contact. If that sounds like a lot to put on one girl’s shoulders, that’s because it is.
Thing is, I’d welcomed the challenge and feel like the evidence shows I’d lived up to it. The GU had accorded me legal residency, with full citizenship coming after Earth joined the Union. Problem was, no one knew when that might be. If any GU bigwigs did they weren’t letting me in on it, but if it was the same old Earth as the one I’d known then we wouldn’t be getting invitations any time soon.
While eighteen years may not have been much on the Union’s timeline, it was a lot for me.
If I were to go back now, I might at least recognize the place. If I stayed another five years, at this rate it’d be like disappearing in the 1940’s and coming back in the 2000’s. By then I’d be just as much of an alien among my own race as I was here.
Against my better judgment, I picked up my data crystal. “Clara, show me a listing of civil transports by destination.” As my Union hosts had seen fit to grace my cybernetic personal assistant with a vaguely Midwestern accent, I’d named her accordingly. Over time, she’d adopted my inflections and idioms to the point where she sounded like a suburban mom at a school bake sale.
“You really want to do this again?” She also had cultivated a suburban mom’s nosiness.
“Not really, but do it anyway.”
Clara heaved a synthetic, exasperated sigh. “Hang on, just a sec.”
Of course it took barely a second before a holographic projection of transport schedules floated in the air before me. I wondered if tablets on Earth could do that by now.
Checking transport routes was a bad habit I’d started of late, being curious as to what might be headed in the general direction of Earth. It was an exercise in futility, but I couldn’t help myself. If one was in the vicinity, I might be able to convince the ship’s master to take me the rest of the way on a shuttle. Even in the egalitarian Union, you could do just about anything for the right price.
Finding the right price was the hard part. The 115 shortage had played hell with the civilian transport economy. If you needed more than what was rationed, the price went up sharply. Black market supplies were dicey because you couldn’t know what kinds of quality controls had been applied. Base 115 was wildly unstable, so the isotopes used for gravity drives had to be precisely manufactured. Any impurities could cause a ship to go kaboom as soon as the drive was powered up. That had happened a few times, so nobody touched the black market stuff anymore without first tracing its provenance. That usually resulted in “stolen,” and the penalties were severe enough that no one in their right mind would risk it.
I scrolled through the few transport routes with destinations near Earth, and was disappointed as usual. The closest was Tau Ceti, which was still a good twelve light years from home. Even if I could’ve afforded that (spoiler alert: I couldn’t), the extra cost to charter a shuttle home was way out of reach.
Hitching a ride on one of the Earthbound survey expeditions wouldn’t be in the cards, either. Nearly all of that work was being done by drones, and had been for some time. There were crewed motherships running the surveys nearby, but “nearby” was relative. With all of the new human activity in Earth orbit, the Union had been forced to pull farther back to avoid detection, all the way to the outer solar system. Even cloaked, they wouldn’t risk getting near Earth without a very good reason, and taking my skinny ass back to Indiana wasn’t one of them.
“You’ve been doing this a lot lately, Mel. What’s so special about this place? There are a lot of nice planets in the Union.”
“They’re not home, Clara.” And I’d still be the only human, no matter where I settled.
“That’s still a difficult concept for me.”
“It’s because you’re a talking slab of glass.” Maybe that wasn’t fair, but I wasn’t feeling especially chatty.
Clara could read my moods almost as well as a Gray or Emissary. “Sorry, didn’t mean to pry.” Did I mention she could act like my mother?
“Don’t worry about it. Sorry I was short with you. I need some space to think.”
Clara turned herself off with a chirp. I sighed and reached out for the hologram to “grab” it, making a fist and sending it back to the crystal. Another exercise in futility. Not the first, and it wouldn’t be the last. For better or for worse, I wasn’t going anywhere except on a Med Corps transport.
I rested my chin in my hands and stewed. What was this need that wouldn’t stop pulling at me? Clara had a point, much as I didn’t want to hear it. I was surrounded by good people (okay, not really “people” but work with me), in a challenging job I could’ve never imagined, and I’d been welcomed into an advanced civilization that provided for all of my needs. What’s not to like about that?
Was it as simple as humans craving other humans, not just intelligent talking animals? Imagine Jane Goodall living among the chimpanzees, except they’re way more advanced than her and she’s the one being studied. I guess that would make it more like Planet of the Apes, but without the shock collars and human slavery. That wasn’t really fair, and maybe even a little species-ist, but there was no denying how I felt. Sometimes it came from the opposite direction: Union citizens that treated me as an outsider. I was one of only two humans in the Union, and the other guy had not exactly made a good name for himself.
Bjorn and a few others I worked with knew better, and they’d become true friends. As if to remind me of that, the crystal began blinking for my attention. It was my friend Chonk, asking if I was free to come down to the Thuban sector. Thubans are intimidating, a race of seven-foot-tall reptilian badasses, and many of them were among my best friends here. Go figure that a scrawny farm girl would find her tribe with a warrior race. Then again, soldiers and first responders were generally cut from the same cloth on Earth, so perhaps some things are universal.
I reflexively checked my old watch and did the math. I had most of a full thirty-two hour Union day until my next shift, which was plenty of time to catch the tube over to their dome and enjoy a few drinks. I changed into a T-shirt and a pair of shorts and headed for the lifts.