Meridien K - Chapter 28: The Endless Tower

I had worked on a few doomed projects. The typical undergrad fuck-all pursuits of cold fusion and perpetual motion, anything, really, to solve the energy crisis and once-and-for-all end The Petroleum Age. Theoretical lightspeed travel. Cutting holes in spacetime or warping its immaterial fabric. Idealism followed by disappointment came with the territory. That decisive moment of failure sneaks up on you and makes you realize all those late nights in the lab or observatory or on a fucking-freezing roof were for nothing, that you're chasing invisible dragons. You try to fight it, keep going, even though that nagging feeling falls like fog, that you're wasting the night, every night, all that time that'll come back to you when you're old and dying, wishing you had that time for something else, anything else, spent with other people, maybe; maybe even your disintegrating family, maybe doing something like learning Russian or how to cook or how to tie nautical knots.

             

That moment was much delayed on Red. The surroundings made it impossible to think that anything we did was folly. Ben and I accepted the grim possibility that we were simply laying groundwork, that once we died someone else would take our place. A few half-joked, half-real Death Pacts that we would destroy all our work before we kicked it, just because, well, Fuck It, let the next in line start from scratch, same as we did, back when we were fifteen-year-old rogues pointedly-questioning tenured profs.

             

We built another shack up above the dustline, cleaner clearer air but too high up the sloping mountainside for the Rover until we built a road proper. When we brought up mattresses it was a given that we'd eventually move in there and, like old times, sleep under our desks. From our new roost we saw Colonel Tibbits pick around our old shelter, probably wanting to claim the scrap material to use for whatever kingdom he was building by the old M1 crash, its shards almost fully dismantled and cleared, a few more bodies pulled out for our redgrave cemetery.

             

Intihar huffed it up the hillside to bring us supplies and fresh news and gossip every week. We were rarely heard from and we rarely went down. We were the Men of the Mountains, as Martian as the dragon sky.

             

"Soap, shampoo, microwaveable chow, trash bags, and your precious fruit, Dr. Meridien. You guys need some razors? Those beards are looking fierce."

             

"You see a rank on this collar?" said Ben, pulling on his crewneck white T. "Fuck that. Beards are noble. Besides, every time I get rid of one I can't stop stroking my chin even though there's nothing there. And if everyone thinks we're scary mountainmen, the beards will scare them faster."

             

A laugh from Intihar, one of the few guys we both liked and trusted, and he took off down the mountain on a rickety bicycle to take orders from Lord Tibbits.

             

Typical workday, up there with a bandana over my nose and mouth since the wind was, for whatever reason, blowing up, blowing all that red all over everything, having to wipe my eyepiece every five seconds. Cold one second, hot the next, wearing a ratty hooded sweat-stained sweatshirt I kept putting on and pulling off. Goggles in my pocket but wiping my red, teary eyes with dirty hands instead, blinking away what I could, rubbing in the rest. Punching in coords on the worn-down keypad on the side of the gear base of the telescope, the whir of the corrections, filtering out the daytime and staring up into a black sky, maybe getting lucky and seeing a faraway star. But usually pure black. It was like the lens cap was perpetually on.

             

"Hey Ben, what're the XYZs of that brown dwarf you found?"

             

No response. I turned and Ben's scope was pointed down at the airstrip.

             

"There goes the neighborhood," he said.

             

I indulged him and watched. In a cleared square was a structure that looked far more semi-permanent than our pauper's Settlement. The walls were timber and enlistees were putting up glareproof metal siding. It was about as big as an auto-body garage. Another Reg rested a plywood board against the front, where there was an open counter. He spraypainted "PX" onto it from a milspec stencil.

             

"Glad to see the kids finally put up a lemonade stand," said Ben.

             

"Fuck," I let slip from my parted lips, not quite sure it if was my own thought or just Ben invading my head.

             

"Dominoes," he said, letting me fill in the rest.

             

Eighteen months on Red and already he seemed sick of it; sick of the bloat and the bullshit and the politicking, not sick of the Mission, our Mission on top of it. I was starting to feel that way, too, and I increasingly would when they started construction on what would become their permanent Base. Transporting terrestrial civilization one Lego at a time, faster than we could keep up the terraformation. Some of the guys from M2 still wore their surface suits without fail, day in, day out. They probably used the ghastly self-cleaning module when they hooked themselves up to a hose, which basically simulated a carwash inside the suit, emptying the diaper and spraying antibacterial water all over the place, leaving them wet for a day depending on the severity of the sunlight.

             

"Hey John."

             

Waiting for M3 to come with animals and vehicles. The fantasy gaining traction as a reality; an inevitability. Driving BMWs on fresh asphalt. Hang-gliding off the mountains and soaring above the deep deep trenches. A few decades later, maybe doing the same under a blue sky, heading home to a suburban subdivision, identical starter houses, only different by mailbox number. More women coming over. And kids. A hospital so men could fuck their wives or their girlfriends and have a baby. A grocery store with carts with that seat in front for kids and purses. Banal talk radio on the commute to work, down freeways lined with sound barriers and giant pines peeking above the tops. Traffic jams and gridlock and carpool lanes.

             

Trying to clear out the cobwebs of those Benthoughts that had a bad habit of worming into my ears.

             

"John, you have to check this out."

             

I was facing the opposite direction, out at the vast expanse of Frontier we'd never, ever tame. But Ben was right. I knew he was right. I always knew. While he knew it as an omen, I had to wait to see it before that stomach-pit feeling sank in. Mars wasn't ours anymore. It belonged to earth.

             

"JOHN."

             

"What?"

             

Ben wasn't looking down at the construction. His scope was pointed up and he waved me over with as much urgency as a thirdbase coach windmilling for the runner to sprint for home. I came over. Ben grabbed me and shoved me toward the secondary viewer.

             

"You're gonna miss it," he said.

             

"Miss what?"

             

I put my eye to the foam eyepiece. That familiar blackness.

             

"And I'm looking for…?"

             

"Look harder, jackass."

             

"Zoom in."

             

"If I zoom you won't be able to see it. Look. That bright spot. And then that other right next to it."

             

"You found a star. Congratulations."

             

"Keeping looking."

             

The second bright spot shimmered. But not the normal shimmer of an eye trick or some weird ether. And the initial bright spot stayed locked; didn't give the telltale wobble of a mass giant fucking with its gravity.

             

"Whoa."

             

"Whoa is right."

             

"The fuck is that?"

             

"Way too big for an asteroid. And look, that star to the right is tracking left and look! Now! Now! That spot is moving across that star in the background. It's a backlit planet."

             

"Jesus. Is this vis spec?"

             

Ben either didn't know or kept going and, "I kicked it to the machine using the Equation. We'll get a read-out on the spectra. Mass of the star and the planet. Or planetoid. It could be small. But, shit, this isn't Jovian-sized."

             

"What's the distance?"

             

"Hold on. Let me check the bounce. Should be through."

             

Ben rushed off to the shack and ripped perforated paper spitting out of the printer.

             

"Two hundred light years. Or… uh…" and a necessary beard-scratch, "two-hundred million. Fuckin' zeroes… But man… it's blueshifting like a motherfucker. So much for dark energy."

             

"Impossible. No prospects are that close. We went through the whole damned book of logged extrasolars. Could be gone. And fuck-all if it's like that Gliese bullshit. That was a waste of two semesters."

             

"Or we might just be seeing this for the first time," Ben said.

             

"In that case, it's too far. It's dead light. Especially if it's two-hundred million out and not two hundred."

             

Ben went back to the scope, leaned in and scrolled through the near-vis spectrum. His mouth perpetually agape, a squint to his off-lens eye like he was engaged in casual voyeurism.

             

"Since when are you the optimist?" I asked.

             

"Since Mars became a pile of shit with too much dust, terraformation that was fucked up in the first place, and mil guys trying to muscle us around."

             

We stepped back. That orb in the sky wasn't going anywhere if it hadn't Gone already. Ben was smiling.

             

"That it's, right there. Call it. Write it down. Meridienkraid. Finally."

             

Flashback to sophomore year. Ben getting his parents' house in order when his dad moved and I was out a lab partner and co-author for a final project. We couldn't coordinate scope time or lab slots so I wrote a paper on a theoretical extrasolar planet and gave Ben the head byline. We called it Meridienkraid, if only because Kraidmeridien didn't have the same offkilter lyricism. The paper - devoid of any hard science, endless pages of raw speculation like I had missed the day on The Scientific Method - got a C-minus and almost cost us our scholarships.

             

And then up above the dust, up above Planet Mars, there it was, somewhere far past plain perception. I looked up at the ruddy sky, its stone face betraying the possibility of anything else out there.

             

"And here I thought we were going to have to move to, shit, Europa or Ganymede or something," said Ben. "I'm not living on any fuckin' moon."

             

We stood there a while, in sheer disbelief at the staggering odds of anything. I felt it was like geometric limit: An equation that curves down along the X-axis and goes on forever about to touch zero, but it never touches zero. Or it's like a huge lottery jackpot when everyone buys a ticket and some television dumbass says your odds of winning are about the same as not buying a ticket at all; but if you don't have a ticket, you can't win at all. There's Zero, and there's Almost Zero.

             

And down below, no one had any idea what we had seen. They were mere figures in the dust; players in a game that had no rules except survival.

(Chapter 29 coming Friday, January 20, 2012.)