12
It’s easy for an experience to beat your expectations when you have no idea what to expect, which was the case for me at Rigel Station. That’s not its official name; it was Galactic Union Transit Depot 03A. That’s translated into English; its name in Galactic common language is even more of a mouthful. Official bureaucratese is apparently a universal plague.
The Emissaries had called Rigel a “blue supergiant” star, and they weren’t kidding. It dominated the black sky like an enormous zillion-watt lightbulb, even at the far edge of the system it was bright enough to wash out the light from background stars. From our perspective it was about the size of a basketball at arm’s length; when Sven explained we were farther away from it than Pluto is from our Sun, I finally had some sense of its incredible size.
“Was it always this big?” I remembered the tale of their home planet’s star burning out to become a similar giant.
Bjorn was seated beside me again in the control room. “No, but it has been in this phase since before the founding of the Union. It is near the end of its life cycle, but it is difficult to predict when its terminal phase will begin.”
“Terminal phase” sounded ominous. “What happens then?”
“A star of this class will eventually exhaust its remaining fuel and collapse in on itself from its own mass. Rigel has enough mass to explode in a supernova, and eventually leave its core as a black hole.”
I knew what those were, and I didn’t want to be anywhere near one. “And you guys put a station near it?”
“This was one of our first transit depots; at the time this location was near the center of the Union. Our member systems have grown to the point where this is no longer the case. In time it will have to be either moved, or evacuated.”
“Seems like it’d be a good idea to get on with that now.”
Bjorn appeared distressed, which I hadn’t seen in him before. “It is more complicated than you imagine. Remember, Rigel is eight hundred sixty light-years from your home system, so how it appears in your sky is as it was nearly a millennium earlier. This is another reason why our trajectories have to be cleared in advance using the entanglement network; it is otherwise impossible for us to know the actual condition of any destination based on our local time reference.”
Once again, he was making my brain hurt. “If the Union waits too long to clear the station, Rigel could blow up tomorrow and there’d be no way to warn anyone headed this way.”
“That is one of many reasons why interstellar navigation is complicated. Many residents of 3A have elected to move on their own rather than wait for the Union to act. You will find the station to be sparsely populated.”
It sounded like a typical government operation. Some facts of life were constant, advanced civilization or no. “Is that why you brought me here—to ease me into this Union of yours?”
“Correct. There are transit depots closer to Earth, but they are rather crowded. We believed it best to take ‘baby steps,’ as you might say.”
I’d have done the same in their shoes, but it didn’t make me any more comfortable being this close to a star that could blow up at any time.
“There is no need to worry,” Bjorn said, sensing my growing anxiety. “While we cannot precisely when a star will become a supernova, the signs of an imminent event are quite well understood. You are in no danger here.”
No danger. I suppose whatever happened to me would happen to them as well, assuming they were going to remain my guides into this new world. “Are you staying with me through all this?” I didn’t want to be thrown into the deep end to figure out how to swim.
“Of course. We will remain with you until you are comfortably able to make your own way.”
“Good.” I hadn’t made my way through life on Earth by having someone else hold my hand, but in this case it was fine with me.
Rigel’s brilliant glow filled the control room, like an industrial spotlight hung in the window. Sven dimmed the holographic viewscreen, stepping it down until we could see our destination.
The station lay straight ahead, steadily growing larger as we approached. It looked simple at first, a collection of long cylinders arranged in a circle around a central hub, like spokes on a bicycle wheel or teeth on a gear. As we drew closer, rings of light from individual windows appeared at irregular intervals. It was a city floating in space, with each building anchored to that common hub. We were aiming for its center, where a ship similar to ours looked to be pulling away. The spacecraft was dwarfed by the structure it was leaving.
I stood up for a closer view and pointed at the station. “How big is this place? How many live here?”
“3A is somewhat less than six kilometers’ diameter. It has a maximum capacity of a quarter-million beings, depending on the species. Some require less individual space than others. The depot currently hosts fewer than a hundred thousand.”
A hundred thousand didn’t sound sparsely populated at all, but if it was designed to house over twice that many then I guessed living space wasn’t going to be a problem. “How long will we be here?”
“Entry processing will not take long, but we won’t depart for the capital until tomorrow. We have arranged for overnight quarters.”
“I won’t have my medic training here, then?”
“Oh no. That will be at an education center at Medical Corps headquarters. Your time here is strictly for entrance processing and acquaintance with our culture. Once you have become reasonably acclimated, we will continue on to our capital.”
That sounded annoyingly bureaucratic. “Who decides if I’ve been ‘reasonably acclimated’?”
“Ultimately that is up to you. However, it will largely depend on how well the translation implants adapt to your native language. Once you can converse, you will find it much easier to adapt. The more willing you are to engage, the faster the process.”
“I’m ready to get on with it. It won’t take me long.”
Bjorn arched one of his silvery blond, near-translucent eyebrows. “I would caution you to not be so certain. The culture shock for a being with no previous exposure to so many of what you call ‘alien’ races can be daunting, particularly for your kind. We have seen individuals become so isolated that assimilation becomes impossible. It will be best if you start with ‘small bites,’ as you might say.”
How different were our native languages, anyway? And he’d dropped another hint that I might not be the first human in the Union. Would it help if I sought any others out? It was a question for another time, after getting whatever passed for an entry visa.
Everything had happened so fast, so unexpectedly, that I’d been living in the moment. The most time I’d had to ponder anything had been spent familiarizing myself with the different Union species, and I hadn’t thought enough about what it would mean to live among them. To treat them when nobody else could.
Attitude adjustment is crucial if you’re going to carry your weight in emergency medicine, whether you’re an ER doc, a medic, or the poor sap who has to clean up after us. You have to separate your personal interests from the task at hand, and remember that whoever you’re treating is probably having the worst day of their life. It was some comfort that I’d already seen a couple of Grays in that condition and it hadn’t fazed me.
Or had it? I was in the middle of treating one, then all of a sudden I wasn’t. One minute I was there, the next I was in my bed at home with vague memories of responding to a plane crash.
Of course one of the Emissaries had zapped my brain, but something about that troubled me. “Why did you wipe my memory at the crash scene? Was it to keep me from going public?” Not that I would have. The media would’ve painted me as one more country bumpkin yammering about little green men.
“In part,” Bjorn said hesitantly. I could see he was processing my sudden realization. “While our protocols require that we remain undetected by the local population, we also must protect any individuals who might stumble upon us.”
“By that, you mean protect us from ourselves,” I guessed. “You were worried I might have a psychotic break.”
“That is always a concern during first-contact situations. In your case, it had begun as a traumatic event and only threatened to become worse. We could sense this immediately.”
“Wait . . . you were the one who wiped my memory?”
“Of course. The crew aboard the survey craft was in no condition to do so. We had begun our descent from orbit after the first transmission from their emergency beacon. We arrived shortly after you. If you had passed by a few minutes later, there would have been nothing for you to see.”
“The ‘cloaking device’ thing.” Another sci-fi trope, but there was no denying they all seemed to fit perfectly. And once again, an Emissary had snuck up on me. I didn’t know if I could ever fully adapt to their tendency to appear out of nowhere, which only added to my defensiveness. “You also took me out of play while I was working an accident scene. What happened to the crew?”
Bjorn drew his lips tight. “Sadly, they all died of their injuries.” I think he could read my simmering anger—maybe if they’d let me do my job, those guys might still be alive. “You must trust me that there was nothing you could do, even if you’d had a better grasp of their physiology. Their craft’s inertial dampeners experienced an anomaly. Some races can withstand this better than others, but above a certain acceleration it is always fatal.”
It wasn’t the fall that killed you, it was the sudden stop at the end. I thought about the pilot I’d seen slumped over his control panel. “The Emissary was already dead, wasn’t he?”
“He was. The Reticulans you encountered survived somewhat longer, but in the end their internal injuries were too severe.”
“Would you have been able to do anything for them, or is your race one of those that is afraid to treat others?”
“We are not,” Bjorn said, holding his hand to his chest, “though it is not our specialty.”
“What did you do with them?”
“Their remains are aboard this ship, preserved in our cargo hold until they can be returned to their home worlds.”
So the Union at least respected their dead in a manner similar to us. That said a lot about their culture, but I didn’t like thinking about what had led to that crash. It was obvious from the name that “inertial dampeners” protected us from being squashed like bugs on a windshield. “How often does that kind of accident happen?”
“Rarely. There has only been one other incident on an Earth survey mission, many decades earlier. It was not long after your second world war.”
I furrowed my eyebrows. He’d just dropped a big hint and was waiting for me to pick it up. “You’re kidding . . . Roswell?”
“Precisely. The incident resulted in significant trauma among the humans who found the crash site. There were no Emissaries assigned to the mission; an oversight which we have since corrected.”
I don’t know why it was so surprising; my presence here should’ve led me to reevaluate every crackpot flying saucer story in existence. I wish I’d paid more attention to them now, it might’ve left me better prepared for what followed.