Web Published Fiction
Writer's Call
Posterity
by Lynda Williams
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A few words about Lynda WIlliams
Lynda Willimas is a Project Leader, Center for Teaching and Learning;
an Instructor, Computing Literacy at the University of Northern B.C.
and writes the Practical Theory Column (Applied Computing Advice) at http://ctl.unbc.ca/ptheory/index.html
With her co-writer Dr. Allison Sinclair she has created the Okal Rel Universe. Take a look at http://www.okalrel.org/
or visit her at her website at http://ctl.unbc.ca/ljw/ to see what else she's up to.
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Prosperity
The sensoramic opera ran 48 minutes. For at least half of that time every judge forgot his own career, abandoned loved ones and the colony's dwindling power stores. That was a mighty gift. But it was full blown sensoramic opera. There was no way it would compress to less than 20 minutes of payload even using Rudolph's protocol.
When it was over all 12 judges had the same, selfish thought.
If they sent the opera this year, how much would be left for their own year's output?
For two minutes no one stirred.
Then Julia Wong got up.
Eleven pairs of eyes fixed on her.
"I'm going to see Rudolph," she said.
"Oh, yes, of course Lieutenant!" said Fernando Torres. He was the oldest of them. A thespian. He called her 'lieutenant' as an endearment now. Once it had been a curse, as if her military rank could be blamed for the tour getting stranded on a barren rock.
"Take Ralph our best love," said Sumaya, solid as a black Buddha in her fading sari.
All eleven artists babbled the same sentiments, then fell to heaping Sumaya with praises.
Art was so like child's play, thought Julia, and artists so like children.
She could not feel it as powerfully as the world class performers and creators stranded by a cosmic mishap, here, with her and Ralph for all these years. Sometimes she envied them.
Her sole challenge was to pack a year's observations into two minute's worth of compressed data. The right to even that much had to be argued repeatedly, and she recorded far more than she ever included, culling according to what future superiors reviewing her life's work might find valuable. She thought of it as an experiment. "Isolate a group of productive adults on a nameless moon with 30 years worth of food and energy and see what happens."
If nothing else it was a thorough test of the World Astronomy and Space Agency's deep space survival habitat. It's designers, she felt, would be proud of it. Certainly she had come to admire them.
To improve her selection for that precious two minutes of broadcast space in each year's output, she'd become an expert on stranded populations. She had even researched and defended a PhD thesis using the colony's library. Those had been good years. Years in which she felt as if she was really one of them. A creative person. Four of the artists even studied along with her, at considerable cost to their own endeavors, in order to improve the chances for her thesis being taken seriously. It went with an attached recommendation for posthumous recognition. Torres, who acted as Julia's advisor, included a carefully argued case for judgment by contemporary standards rather than those which might prevail when it arrived, centuries after they'd died here, stranded.
At the time it had seemed so important. She'd wept when she thanked him.
Today it all seemed like occupational therapy.
Rudolph's approaching death oppressed her with the burden of being the last living crew member.
Three crew had survived the landing.
Nima was the medic. She wanted a baby. The artists dealt with the request on an equal footing with their own productions. If a baby could have been reduced to a signal, Nima's passion might have moved them to sacrifice. But to raise a child in purgatory? A doomed child, whose very existence must inhibited the creeping growth of each year's payload? They said, 'no'.
Nima killed herself by lethal injection.
After so many years Julia thought she had forgiven her. That was before Rudolph got cancer.
Rudolph was their astrometrics and communications expert. It was Rudolph who hit on the idea of beaming a bit of their souls back to Earth, once a year, despite the cost in energy, and Rudolph who invented the compression algorithm that made it possible to send even more for the same price in energy. It was Rudolph who had been her CO, and her lover.
The WASA habitat seemed alien to her without him playing devil's advocate with the artists in the gathering room, kibitzing over culinary antics in the kitchen or teaching martial arts in the tiny, heroic gymnasium.
Rudolph was living in sick-bay since the pain got bad. They were short of drugs. He relied on biofeedback pain suppression, staying in touch by watching on a monitor. The artists had voted to allow him that. Julia resented the fact that they voted at all about something so petty, but so crucial.
Rudolph was propped up staring at the debate in the gathering room. Torres had already proposed expansion of this year's payload. Rudolph's hand, large and confident before the cancer, hovered before the figures on the screen, barely touching them with trembling caresses. He had always opposed increases in the payload. Some thought he was unwilling to shorten his own life for others' art. Julia had never believed that. She'd lived with him during the years he devoted to the new compression protocol for the rich data of the holistic arts. Terminal cancer had heightened his sensitivity to payload bloat, which was also inconsistent with a selfish motive. He was going to die long before the 'lights went out'.
"Hi," said Julia, sitting down by his bedside without invitation. "Bored?"
The lines in his face were not boredom's. They were not the familiar tell-tales of pain and age either. He was agitated. Frightened perhaps. That seemed so unnecessary and cruel.
"Julia," he blinked. His eyes were red-rimmed in pasty flesh, his illness a foul conqueror as vile and mindless as the atmosphere which blocked their view of the eternal stars.
His science had taught them to see through the clouds to the stars again. His knowledge and his astrologic logs.
Without him, Julia felt suddenly, they'd all be lost again.
"Julia," he said again in exactly the same tone, "you must stop them. Stop them increasing the payload."
"It's their choice," she said. "Our choice," she added to be just. They had invented, among so much else, their own form of government in which she played her part.
"You don't understand," he moaned. She took his hand down from the screen to prevent more finger marks. Even cleaning fluid was carefully husbanded, and after 20 years her chary instincts were unconscious.
He mumbled, "No, no."
"I do understand," she insisted. "You've explained it often. We've all studied the science behind your arguments."
"The drain shortens your lives! It bleeds the habitat's energy store!"
"Rudolph," her eyes filled with tears at his need to repeat the one fact they all awoke knowing, carried through the day and dreamed about.
His eyes stared in terrible, stabbing panic.
"I've got tell you." He pawed her hand. "I've got to tell someone."
"You have told us everything we need to know, Rudolph." She sought to ease his delirium, terrified that he was closer to death than she had thought. "We know enough to keep up your work when you're gone, including adjusting the annual transmission payload -- up or down. We'll be able to keep working."
"What for?"
She leaned back, setting his hand down. This pathetic, whining shell, was not her Rudolph, but he had been. For that she still had to love him.
"We are doing it," Julia told him, sounding, to herself, like a mother dispelling boggy men for a toddler, "for posterity. So that all we've achieved will be found, and affect others. We are doing it to give our experience back to Earth."
His face crumpled.
"Posterity is your gift, Rudolph!" she impressed on him. "Do not punish yourself if we value it so highly we are prepared to sacrifice some portion of our lives to it. We ought to have 10 years left. We have 8.5. What does it matter? Most of us will still see 60. And if not, if in the end, it is only 6 years, so be it. Better even one year, if in it we were so productive we were willing to pay with our lives for it."
"Yes, yes, and I saw that," he mumbled. "Hope first -- of rescue -- then a purpose. But Julia -- "
His innocence frightened her. Had he forgotten that she knew all this? Was he failing that fast?
"Julia -- " He lifted a trembling hand. "A coherent energy beacon's not a simple radio signal. It consumes! Like this cancer. In great gulps. For a damned lie!"
"It may not reach Earth," she summoned patience, "but it has a chance. Each payload has its chance. The chance we give it at our lives peril."
"No," he broke down, weeping. "No, no."
"Rudolph -- "
She didn't notice that the figures on his view screen were gathered around their own, watching now instead of being watched. The med-expert must have notified them of Rudolph's failing status. It ran mute in the sick bay, but Julia knew enough to read disaster on its console.
"Please Rudolph," she urged, "don't get excited. Your heart -- "
"I can't die -- " He clutched at her. "I can't die the only one who knows!"
She wished she'd done her PhD in medicine. Nothing on the console made it clear he ought to be delirious. Where was Rhonda? She was the one who'd taken medicine for her duty study. Where was Torres. She could use his steady hand. They ought to be here! Surely they were not simply going to watch from the gathering room?
Rudolph pulled her down, heaving himself up, his wasted body brittle. "I don't know where we are! Julia. I never did. I made it up!"
"Lieutenant?" Torres' rich, cultured voice intruded.
They all came in, filling the little room up. Rhonda, pushed through to the med console. "It's bad!" she exclaimed. "Should I make it easy for him?"
"Wait!" Julia seized Rudolph's wide, skeletal shoulders. "What do you mean you don't know where we are? Are you delirious? Tell me, damn you!"
He blubbered, begging their forgiveness. "I never knew. I fudged the data. Planted star maps."
Hans, the graphics programmer, cried out, "No! I learned enough to know! I ran -- I re-wrote -- the resolution algorithms. We know where Earth is and we're beaming our data back!"
Torres stilled further outbursts with a raised hand. Rudolph's breath rattled.
"Lieutenant?" Torres asked, sounding like a little boy, lost.
Julia stood up. She felt cold. She looked down at the dying man she thought she knew. Her voice was flat. "Hans would get the right answers, of course, if Rudolph reverse engineered the data in advance." She turned around. "Years ago I told Hans he could use Earth constellations out of library sources as the basis of a learning exercise. The goal was to interpolate changed perspective from known star positions and velocities at a fixed point in space and time -- Earth's. The data concerned was paltry and incomplete compared to Rudolph's navigational stores. It might have been enough though."
Rhonda said, remembering, "The system crash!"
In 20 years they had had one system failure. It happened at the same time Julia began teaching Hans astrological measurements. Nothing was lost except a section of general interest library storage which -- everyone was relieved to learn -- was more than duplicated by Rudolph's astrological logs. At least, at the time, that's what they had thought.
Julia's lips compressed. "Rudolph wiped out the genuine reference data."
"But his compression algorithm?" an artist blurted out in fresh alarm.
Julia said, "That's real enough."
Hans seconded her with a nod.
What did it matter?
Rudolph's heart went into fibrillation. She watched him die, holding his hand. It took a long time. Behind her Hans and Rhonda were arguing in mathematical jargon while others tried to stuff in questions, seeking reassurance.
Of what?
All they were discussing was the damned compression algorithm.
Julia pulled Rudolph's hand from hers and stood up.
"Don't you realize that it doesn't matter?" she lashed out.
"Of course it matters!" Hans denied her. "Everything we've sent out since -- "
"Sent where!" Julia fired back. "We've been spewing our lives out. Bleeding ourselves cold. To warm the stars!"
Finally, she earned the stunned silence owed.
People noticed Rudolph had died. At least, he never would speak or move again. The med-expert was still registering organs shutting down.
Rhonda turned the console off.
"Not ... literally," murmured their youngest member, who was barely forty, and deferred to always as the one with the most to lose each time they upped the payload.
"She means it figuratively, of course," he was reassured by Hans. "We've been hurling our costly coherent energy beacon into unknown space, in a direction that is most likely random. That's the literal truth."
"You just don't get it, do you?" Julia snapped. She wanted to thrust their faces into the universe's terrible nothing and make them understand how much nothing there really was.
Sumaya came forward and closed Rudolph's staring eyes.
"Thank you," she said, to his corpse. "For twenty good years. And the concert I have just performed."
"What good is that to him now!" Julia struck the shoulder of the stately, middle-aged black woman, hating her for doing what she should have done.
Sumaya's eyes widened in shock.
Julia was seized at once from all around. She struggled until she was released into Torres's arms. He held her, the rest of them pressed very close. She sobbed.
"We always knew," Torres spoke over her shoulder as she clung, "that there was no guarantee of reception."
"We just thought the odds were better," said Rhonda.
"The beacon is coherent for a thousand light years," another self-possessed voice announced.
"WASA may continue to explore. That should expand the odds."
A couple of people were crying. It reassured Julia. She was not alone. She would take up Rudolph's battle. She would argue against them choking their lives off for a phantom hope; make them understand what was meant by "astronomical".
Pushing away from Torres' chest, she said, "I should have said -- something -- to Rudolph."
"Yes," he said. "I know. That's hard. But maybe he waited this long because he didn't want to know what we might say to him."
The artists were arguing about whether they should vary the direction of transmission each year, while those with greater technical knowledge explained the cumulative aspect of a coherent transmission protocol, and the dissenters recovered enough to hotly call them fools for wanting to carry on with any sort of transmission.
An idea thrust against Julia's fall into depression.
"Wait!" she wiped tears, saliva and a runny nose across her face with the back of a dry, aging hand. "We should give up on what we've already sent, put the power into a simple distress call, and start cannibalizing the library stores for the redundancy to improve the odds of data recovery after a millennium -- or however long it is before we're found."
Someone else suggested they should plan for discovery by aliens.
"First," Torres cut across the debate springing up. "We see to Rudolph."
In the silence this reminder of a death demanded, Sumaya spoke up. "I wish," she said, "to make the work I have not yet named, his requiem."
Julia remembered the opera, and was swept away momentarily by something greater than herself and all their sorrows. Distress calls could not hold a candle to that. She looked at Rudolph's body. What had Sumaya said? 'Thank you.' For a lie. 'Thank you, for twenty good years and the concert I have just performed.'
Julia felt her chest fill with grief and pride. She turned to Sumaya. "Yes," she said, knowing now how she would cope. "Yes. And we shall broadcast it! To all the stupid, empty universe, in triumph!"
© 2001 Lynda Williams
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