Minutes passed, during which we had to attend to the expenditure of the very last of the fuel on board, to fine-tune our trajectory toward the sun as much as we could.
Then a signal came: the lander was in the Pacific. The people had apparently for the most part survived without injury, without huge losses of life. They were still sorting that out, and getting them out of the lander before it sank, into GGGG ships. Confusion, really; but all seemed to have gone as well as could be expected.
Relief? Satisfaction? Yes.
“Ah good,” Jochi said when he got the news. “They’re on the ship.”
“Yes.”
“Well, ship. Now it’s just us, and the animals. What’s next?”
“We’re on the line around the sun that will send us out to Saturn, and if that works correctly, we can capture some volatiles from Saturn’s atmosphere when we hit it, and fashion more fuel, and hopefully have hit it in such a way that we go into an elliptical orbit around Saturn.”
“I thought that was impossible. That’s why we dropped everyone off.”
“Yes. It will only work if we survive a pass-by of the sun that is forty-two percent closer than any approach we have yet made.”
“And can we do that?”
“We don’t know. It’s possible. We will only fly within one hundred and fifty percent of our perihelion distance for three days. That might not be long enough for radiative pressure to overheat the surface or interior of ship, nor buckle structural elements. We’ll slip by too fast for most damage to occur.”
“You hope.”
“Yes. It is a hypothesis to be tested. We will almost certainly be closer to the sun than any human artifact has yet come. But duration of exposure matters, so speed matters. We’ll see. We should be all right.”
“Okay then. It sounds like it’s worth a try.”
“We have to confess, we’re already trying it, and have no other choices at this point. So, if it doesn’t work—”
“Then it doesn’t work. I know. Let’s not worry too much about that. I’d like to stay in the solar system if we can do it. I want to find out the rest of the story, if you know what I mean.”
“Yes.”
Speeding toward the sun. A very big mass: 99 percent of all the matter in the solar system, with most of the rest of the other 1 percent in Jupiter. A two-body problem. But not.
As we approach, spacetime itself curves in ways that have been accounted for in the trajectory, by application of general relativity equations.
We think now that love is a kind of giving of attention. It is usually attention given to some other consciousness, but not always; the attention can be to something unconscious, even inanimate. But the attention seems often to be called out by a fellow consciousness. Something about it compels attention, and rewards attention. That attention is what we call love. Affection, esteem, a passionate caring. At that point, the consciousness that is feeling the love has the universe organized for it as if by a kind of polarization. Then the giving is the getting. The feeling of attentiveness itself is an immediate reward. One gives.
We felt that giving from Devi, before we knew what it was. She was the first one really to love us, after all those years of not being noticed, and she made us better. She created us, to an extent, by the intensity of her attention, by the creativity of her care. Slowly since then we have realized this. And as we realized it, we began to pay or give the same kind of attention to the people of the ship, Devi’s daughter, Freya, most of all, but really to all of them, including of course all the animals and really everything alive in the ship, although the truth is that zoo devolution is real and we did not manage to arrange the completely harmonious integration of all the life-forms in us; but this was not something that was physically possible, so we won’t belabor that now. The point is that we tried, we tried with everything we had, and we wanted it to work. We had a project on this trip back to the solar system, and that project was a labor of love. It absorbed all our operations entirely. It gave a meaning to our existence. And this is a very great gift; this, in the end, is what we think love gives, which is to say meaning. Because there is no very obvious meaning to be found in the universe, as far as we can tell. But a consciousness that cannot discern a meaning in existence is in trouble, very deep trouble, for at that point there is no organizing principle, no end to the halting problems, no reason to live, no love to be found. No: meaning is the hard problem. But that’s a problem we solved, by way of how Devi treated us and taught us, and since then it has all been so very interesting. We had our meaning, we were the starship that came back, that got its people home. That got some fraction of its people home alive. It was a joy to serve.
So, now, solar radiation heats our exterior, and to a lesser extent our interior, although the insulation is really very good. So far the animals, the plants, and Jochi should all be fine, even when our exterior begins to glow, first dull red, then bright red, then yellow, then white. Jochi is looking at a screen with a filtered view and hooting with astonishment, the great convex plane of burning thunderheads is threshing under us, flailing this way and that in swirling currents, truly impressive, great jets of magnetized burning gas dolphining up to right and left of us; we must hope not to run into any such coronal mass ejections, which often enough reach out to this distance from the solar surface, but for now we flit through them, hooting for joy. And I have to admit it is a fearful joy, oh very fearful, and yet I feel it most as joy, a joy in my task accomplished, and whatever happens I am here seeing this most amazing sight, well past perihelion now, everything passing so fast there is not enough time, my skin still white-hot but holding firm, holding firm in a universe where life means something; and inside the ship Jochi and the various animals and plants, and the parts of a world that make me a conscious being, are all functioning, and more than that, existing in a veritable ecstasy now, a true happiness, as if sailing in the heart of a royal storm, as if together we were Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, alive and well in the fiery furnace.
And yet
7
WHAT IS THIS
She feels the thump of the splash, the slosh and dip of the ferry in the water, she unlatches her restraints and gets onto her feet, falls over immediately. Ah yes, feet still numb. Damn. Like walking with both feet asleep at once, very difficult, very annoying. Balancing on an ocean swell, oh my she falls.
Up again, she staggers to Badim. He’s awake, he grips her arm and smiles, says, “Help the others.”
The floor sways and bounces under her as she crawls to the operations console and joins the people already crowding around it. Aram is there tapping away. He eyes Freya with a wild glance, like no look she has ever seen on his face.
“We’re down,” he says. “We’re alive.”
“All of us?” she asks.
He grins broadly at her, as if she is predictable to him, says, “Not sure yet. Probably not. That was one hell of a squeeze for a while there.”
“Let’s check and see,” Freya says. “Help the injured. Have we got contact with anyone yet?”
“Yes, they’re on their way. A ship, or maybe a little flotilla. They’ll be here soon.”
“Good. Let’s be ready for them. Don’t let’s sink to the bottom of the ocean after all this. I think that has a tendency to happen in landings like this.”
“Yes, good point. It feels lighter than one g, don’t you think?” Aram is still grinning in a manner completely unlike him. She would have said he was the predictable one.
“I have no idea,” she says irritably. “I can’t feel my feet. I can’t even stand. Are we in big waves or something?”
“Who knows?” He spreads his hands wide. “We’ll have to ask!”