The screen showed her face once more. She looked miserable. “I will work to my utmost to get the World Council to fund backup missions, eventually. But, for the present, you twelve members of the Gaia mission are alone in your exploration of Sirius C. I wish you well.”
And her image winked off.
The News from Earth
For long moments Jordan sat in the command chair, shocked beyond words. He could feel his heart thudding beneath his ribs, his stomach roiling.
Alone, he thought.
At last he pulled himself to his feet. Very well, then, he told himself. Alone. We have everything we need for a five-year stay at Sirius C. We’ll do the best we can with what we’ve got and then we’ll go home.
Yes, he thought. Now to break the cheery news to the rest of the team.
As resolutely as he could manage, Jordan marched back to the wardroom. Only one other person was there: Mitchell Thornberry, the roboticist, standing before the wall-screen display of New Earth.
“Hello, Mitchell.”
Thornberry turned to face Jordan, a wide smile breaking across his fleshy face. “Top o’ the morning to ya.”
He was a solidly built man from the University of Dublin, just about Jordan’s own height but thicker, heavier in the torso and limbs. His jowly face almost always displayed a quizzical little smile, as though the ways of his fellow humans amused him slightly. Or puzzled him.
Thornberry was wearing a loudly patterned open-necked shirt hanging over rumpled trousers. He looked as if he’d just come in from an afternoon picnic.
“And a very pleasant good morning to you, sir,” said Jordan. And he thought, I’ll wait until they’re all here, the whole team together. No sense breaking the news eleven separate times.
“Well, we made it,” Thornberry said, jabbing a finger toward the wall screen.
“It’s uncanny, isn’t it?” Jordan said. “It could be Earth’s twin.”
Thornberry shrugged. “It is what it is.” Heading toward the dispensing machines, he added, “I’ll let the scientists argue about how the planet could be so Earthlike. Me, all I’ve got to do is set up a working base down there on the surface and tend to me robots.”
Pecking at the food dispensers, Thornberry pulled out a thick sandwich of beef cultured from the biovats, and a tall glass of chilled fruit juice.
“They should have packed some beer aboard for us,” he grumbled as he brought his tray to the table where Jordan was sitting.
“No alcoholic beverages,” Jordan reminded him. “The health and safety experts agreed on that.”
“Ahhh,” Thornberry growled. “A bunch of pissant academics with water in their veins.”
Jordan smiled at the Irishman. Then he remembered that he too was hungry. He went to the dispensers and selected a salad from the ship’s hydroponics garden. Then he returned to his cooling tea and sat down beside Thornberry.
“Wasn’t your hair darker?” Thornberry asked, his thick brows knitting.
“It was,” said Jordan, unconsciously fingering his mustache.
“Do you feel all right?”
“Yes. Fairly normal,” Jordan replied as he sat down next to Thornberry. “A little shaky. I wonder how effective the memory uploading really is.”
“Good enough,” Thornberry said. “I can remember what we had for dinner the night before we left. And the Guinness that went with it.” Then he sank his teeth into his sandwich.
“And you?” Jordan asked. “How do you feel?”
Thornberry swallowed before answering, “All right, more or less. Cold. Deep inside, I feel cold. I don’t know that I’ll ever feel warm again.”
“Psychosomatic, I imagine.”
“Oh? And who made you a psychotechnician?”
That stung. Of the dozen men and women on the ship, Jordan alone was neither a scientist nor an engineer. He was merely the head of the mission.
As brightly as he could manage, Jordan changed the subject. “The artificial gravity system seems to be working fine, after all these years.”
Thornberry shrugged. “It’s just a big Ferris wheel. Nothing exotic about it.”
“No, I suppose not.”
“Here we are!”
Turning, Jordan saw his younger brother, Brandon, entering the wardroom, together with Elyse Rudaki, the Iranian astrophysicist.
Brandon looked like an improved edition of Jordan: younger, taller, handsomer. Brandon’s nose was thinner, nobler, his eyes a shade lighter. When he smiled he could light up a room. Like Jordan, he wore a turtleneck shirt and comfortable denim jeans.
Elyse looked like royalty: tall, slim, elegant, her sculpted face unsmiling, utterly serious. Her complexion was light, almost pale, a stunning contrast to her thick, lustrous dark hair, which she had piled high on her head, making her look even taller, more regal. Although she was wearing a casual blouse of light blue atop darker slacks, Jordan pictured her in a glittering red and gold sari.
But he thought she seemed somewhat uncertain of herself, as if slightly disoriented from drugs or drink. The upload, Jordan told himself. It’s not perfect. Then he thought, Perhaps she’s frightened. We’re a long way from home. Or perhaps you’re just projecting your own fears.
Getting to his feet again, Jordan smiled as he held out a chair for her. “Welcome to Sirius C, Elyse.”
Before she could reply, Brandon gasped, “My god, Jordy, your hair’s turned totally white!”
Forcing a smile, Jordan replied, “I prefer to think of it as silver. Rather becoming, don’t you think?”
“I guess so,” Brandon said uncertainly. “Are you … do you feel okay?”
“I feel fine,” Jordan assured him.
Still looking doubtful, Brandon turned toward the wall display and called to the voice-recognition system, “Display screen, show us news broadcasts from Earth.”
“No, wait…”
“Don’t get huffy with me, Jordy. We can look at the planet any time. I want to see what’s happening back home, don’t you?”
With a resigned nod, Jordan replied, “I suppose so.”
Elyse still stood beside him while Jordan held her chair. The wall screen broke into a dozen separate pictures. The IAA is beaming news and entertainment vids to us, Jordan remembered. It’s all automatic, preprogrammed. And it’s all eight years old.
The screens showed cities that looked unfamiliar to Jordan, women dressed in strange styles, newscasters wearing what looked like uniforms, sports matches that looked superficially like football and cricket and even tennis, but not quite right. Distorted. Changed.
Where’s the flooding and disasters Ionescu showed me? Jordan wondered. Then he realized that newscasts and entertainment vids carefully avoided such unpleasantries.
“Palm trees in Boston?” Brandon marveled.
Elyse said, “The fashions are very revealing.”
“Must be summertime,” said Thornberry.
“Everywhere?”
“Eighty years have passed on Earth,” Jordan pointed out. “Everything is slightly different. It’s not the same world that we left behind us.”
Thornberry wiped his mouth with his napkin and commented, “That’s the way things were back home some eight years ago. It’s taken eight and a half years for those signals to get from Earth to here.”
“Eight point six years,” Jordan murmured.
“Ah, who’s counting?” Thornberry wisecracked.
But Brandon did not smile. “Look at them. Going about their lives perfectly normally.”
“There doesn’t seem to be any war,” said Elyse, her voice hushed, subdued. “No violence.”