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CHAPTER 39

December 25, 2094 (Earth timeline)

July 24, 2092 (Ship timeline)

approximately 2.122 light-years from Earth

2.122 light-years from Proxima

Enrico Vulpetti groaned. It wasn’t exactly a painful groan, more of a “I’m waking up from a deep, deep sleep and don’t want to wake up” groan. He was, in fact, waking up from a very deep sleep. He was also cold. In his half-awake state, he couldn’t figure out why he was so cold. Where are the blankets? Who pulled off all the blankets? He couldn’t quite figure out where he was or why he was having such trouble waking up. He had been dreaming, but for the life of him he couldn’t remember about what. It hadn’t been a nightmare, that he was sure. Maybe something about horses? The memory wouldn’t come.

Then he remembered. He was aboard the Samaritan bound for Proxima Centauri b. He was probably waking up from the cryosleep and the reason he groaned was probably because his muscles were sore from having only chemical and electrical stimulation for weeks. Or was it months? Years? Hopefully, this was the wakeup he’d requested before going into cryosleep. His excitement level jumped at the thought. His throat was dry, as were his sinuses. As he tried to move, he became aware of the catheter and biobags attached to his lower body. He was trying to remember if he were the one who was supposed to remove them or if someone else would help him.

Slowly, his level of consciousness rose, along with his mobility. Finally, he felt hands on his legs and the sensation of the catheter being removed. He opened his eyes and was greeted by none other than Captain Crosby.

“Welcome to the land of the awake, Enrico. How do you feel?” Crosby asked.

“Sore. And my throat is parched. May I have some water?” he asked.

“Absolutely. Let’s just get you out of the cryobed and then you can have whatever you want to eat and drink,” said Crosby as he extended a hand to help Enrico out of the bed and onto his feet. “How you feeling?”

“You just asked me that,” Enrico replied. The captain had just asked him, right? Was he still dreaming? No, Enrico was pretty certain he was awake.

“Yes, I did. But we have to ask.” Crosby laughed. “Everyone always responds the same way even though we have been trained on how this goes. So, here goes the next one. Are you awake or are you dreaming?”

“Yes, I get it. I am awake,” Enrico replied.

“Good. You know, I’ve always wondered how we really know the answer to that one.”

“Right. Uh, where are we, Captain? Is this it? Did you wake me up for the starbow? Or did I draw the random straw for a shift? Or are we at Proxima?”

“We’re not at Proxima, but I’m extremely pleased to report that we are still on course,” Crosby told him. “As you requested, we woke you up to see the starbow.”

Enrico didn’t understand the last comment. Why wouldn’t we be on course? But he was pleased to learn that they were. He hadn’t given a single thought to the possibility that they might not be. He looked around the cryosleep chamber and saw that his was one of six beds now open. Everyone else was still asleep, but he also knew that from protocol everyone would be awakened over the next few days for medical checks and for some actual time out of the beds. For now, all he wanted to do was get out of this room and into some other part of the ship with living, breathing, awake people. The sight of all those bodies being asleep was, for some reason, more disconcerting now than when he entered cryosleep. They’d all soon be awake.

Enrico was just a little unsteady on his feet, which wasn’t surprising given that he probably hadn’t stood up in years. He was a little surprised that he was able to stand at all. He knew the electrostim technology used to keep the bodies in shape while asleep had been used many, many times, but this was his first time to experience it. And, like most human beings, something wasn’t real until he had lived it. He moved, with Crosby’s help, to the small changing room into which he had put on the tunic he was now wearing just before he entered cryosleep. By the time he reached the changing room, he was steady enough to wave off Crosby’s help.

“I’ll see you in the mess hall after you change. You’re the last to wake up today and if you are as ravenous as me, then you will probably consume twice our normal rations,” Crosby said.

“I’m starving,” Enrico agreed.

Enrico removed the tunic and put on his blue one-piece body suit. Affectionately called onesies by the crew, the easy-to-clean outfits were worn by everyone while in space. The only differences between each person’s onesie, other than their size, were the colors. Each of them had been provided red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet onesies, the colors of the rainbow, that each could wear at their own discretion. It wasn’t much variety, but it was better than it would have been had each crew member worn the same color as everyone else, day after day.

He didn’t have any trouble walking out of the changing room and rather enjoyed exercising his leg muscles for real as he climbed the ladder to the mess hall. He entered the room and saw his five colleagues gathered around one table, each with a bottle of water and a steaming plate of hot food.

“Merry Christmas!” said all five in unison as Enrico approached the table.

“Christmas?” he asked.

“Today’s December twenty-fifth—Earth time. It’s July twenty-fourth here on the ship. It’s up to you, I guess, which day you want it to be,” Bob Roca told him as he shoveled a heaping spoonful of rice into his mouth. “Better eat now while we have gravity. We have the planned cycle-down of the drive in a few hours and then will reverse the ship’s orientation.”

“So, we’re at max velocity?” asked Enrico. “How fast did we reach?”

“Yep. Looks like we’re somewhere around point eight five c, or thereabouts Earth relative. We’ll cruise here for a few more hours and then the ship will turn around and begin decelerating,” Ming Zhao explained, spooning another helping of the hot meal before him. “Everything aboard looks good and is working as it should, thank God.”

“When can we see the starbow?” asked Enrico.

“We’re all set up to display the view from the front camera whenever we want. We were so hungry from being asleep we decided to wait until after we’d had some food,” Zhao said.

“That’s fine with me. I’ll get my meal and be right back.”

As Enrico went to the food locker and picked out his dinner to microwave, he overheard someone at the table ask if there was any news from Earth. He hurried to not miss too much of the update.

“Not much, really. The AI logged all the personal messages and queued them up in everyone’s inboxes. There’s a new UN director general, and Chinese president, and some major cyclone hit Japan last year, causing a boatload of damage. Fortunately, Yoko’s extended family is okay,” Roca said.

“And then there’s the priority dispatch,” said Crosby as he entered the room with Dr. Kopylova.

“May I ask what that is about?” Dr. Maggie Oliveira-Santos asked. She was the ship’s linguist and probably the world’s expert on the Proximan language. They were lucky to get her as part of the crew. Not many would sacrifice such a promising career. At forty-five, Maggie Oliveira-Santos could have had an appointment at any major world university to teach and study the Proximan language, and she’d chosen instead to go to converse with the Proximans in person.

“I don’t know,” Crosby said. “The instructions were to read it only when we enter the Proximan system and before we make orbit; not before. That’s pretty unusual.”

“And you are really going to wait? There’s nothing they can do if you read it early,” Roca said around a mouthful. The look on his face gave away his true feelings—no one doubted that had the message come to him, he would have read it as soon as it arrived.

“I’m going to wait. They have their reasons and I’ll explain them when I can. If I can,” Crosby added.

“Well, let’s not worry about that until we have to. Turn on the forward viewer. Let’s see what we woke up to see,” Enrico said eagerly as he rejoined the group with his rehydrated ham, green beans, and sweet potato dinner.

The primary mess hall viewscreen was curved, covering a full 130 degrees, nearly a half circle. With cameras located all around the exterior of the ship, they could set the center of the screen at any point and see a large fraction of the starfield. For now, the center of the screen was set for the direction they were moving, and the view was not what they saw when they departed Earth. Instead of a fairly uniform field of stars covering the entire view, they instead saw a cluster of stars near the center with noticeably fewer toward the right and left edges. The starbow.

“Okay, when Enrico told me about this, he got me excited and it certainly looks cool, but what am I looking at?” asked Maggie, staring at the viewscreen.

“It’s called the relativistic starbow, but it’s not what the name implies. When relativity was first proposed, some calculations showed that there would be a shifting of starlight, creating a multicolor rainbow effect. The name stuck but what we’re actually seeing is much different. Because we’re traveling at about eighty-five percent the speed of light, the light coming from stars in front of us is blue-shifted to higher energies, and since our eyes are more sensitive to blue light than longer wavelength red light, the stars in front of us appear brighter and the ones at the side or behind us are not as bright,” Yoko explained.

“Remember that when Einstein was around, their version of quantum mechanics said that light can be described as both a particle and a wave. We don’t use that version of quantum theory any longer but it was or is like a Newtonian version of modern theory. I’ve just explained what happens to the photon as a wave. Now, thinking as Einstein would have, of photons as particles traveling with a finite velocity, c. When the Samaritan moves, the photons get a velocity component added in the opposite direction to the spaceship movement. That makes them seem to come from a direction closer to our forward direction, even though they’re not. Now, if we were moving really fast, say over ninety-nine percent the speed of light, all the stars from every direction would appear to be in front of us and take up no more than ten percent of the sky,” she continued.

“So not only is time passing slower for us, we are actually seeing the universe in an altered state due to our velocity. Reality is pretty strange,” Enrico said and all the while continued staring at the viewscreen.

“That’s an understatement,” Crosby said, as he also stared at the screen.

“It’s probably the most spectacular Christmas sky since the first one. You know, that Star of Bethlehem and all that.” Maggie laughed.



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