Then, falling silent, with sudden calm deliberation he rolled over and reached for the drawer handle on his night-stand, pulled it open and removed a notebook, lay back, rolled over again groping for a pen found one behind the lamp, dusty, rolled the dust on the sheets near the dried fluid stains thinking them similar in color and meaning and hoisted himself onto the pillows. Opened the notebook to a fresh page; the last entry two years before. Dry empty pages dry empty years in which he had written nothing.
+Don’t even think don’t wonder just go this is the urge just go.
He began to write:
The gnawing in my head. This is where it began. It ended in blood and carved flesh, but it began with a chewing, a dream, a realization of my inadequacy.
Africa empty show me Mother the way of your New land. You have made a desert of bone sand where Once your children danced Will the lighter peoples of Earth Enjoy your broad thighs, now that your children are Weak and fewer? Will you cast a new mantle of sleeping sickness Whites only To shelter your firstborn? On foreign shores, your far-flung have labored to Become white wear suits Learn white money Sprung from your ground, they walk above the ground Feet never touch any ground They do not know any center They are the black white men This your far-flung son I am a black White man Weep for me my mother As I weep for you I cannot love.
16
AXIS (Biologic Band 4)> Roger, I believe I am seeing structures. This is exciting, is it not? The coins have entered B-2’s atmosphere and fallen. I could write a poem about their voyage. Two thirds have survived and are returning enormous amounts of data. They are seeing great green sand deserts and wide lands covered with foliage like grass seas. This is a green planet as we thought; grass and sand and two deep broad green seas, one in the northern hemisphere, and one in the south. There is one small blue sea at the northern pole. All the seas, my coins tell me, are fertile with microorganisms. The land does not appear to have any large life forms; there are no signs of animal life on the land yet there is sufficient oxygen in the atmosphere to support such life. Perhaps all animal forms exist in the seas, or the oxygen cycle differs from Earth’s. Of course, it is always possible that large insect colonies exist underground. At any rate, there is life here. (Judgment algorithm check affirmed.)
There are seasons of a kind here, generated by B-2’s axial tilt of nine degrees. They are gentle seasons, apparently, and there is nothing like Earth’s winter or summer; the difference seems to be that between spring and fall.
Roger, here perhaps is my most significant observation. On land, my scattered coins see weathered towers arranged in circles. These circles measure from a few hundred meters to ten kilometers in diameter. The towers are up to a hundred meters high, flattened ovals or circular in cross section, with the cylindrical towers seeming to predominate in the smaller circles. The circles or rings are seldom more than two or three hundred kilometers from the edge of one of the seas, and broad lines resembling roads or pathways reach from the shores to the formations.
With my long range telescopic cameras I confirm these observations from a quarter of a million kilometers. My coins report no signs of living or moving things in these circles or on the linear pathways.
The mobile observers launched yesterday are decelerating now in preparation for aerobraking and will be landing in five hours ten minutes. I expect reports from them within twenty eight hours. I have directed five to come down on land masses, two in the grasslands and three near separate tower circles; and of the three fluid capable mobile observers I have dispersed one to the polar landlocked sea, the only ocean not green but blue, one to the equatorial sea like a circumferential river, and one to the southern sea, largest in area of them all. (Burst 5.6 picoseconds)
LitVid 21/1 A Net (David Shine): “AXIS has confirmed discovery of the first life beyond Earth! Wake up, historians, this is a signal moment in the history of the human race: we are not alone! And as if this were not enough, AXIS reports the possibility of intelligent life, or some form of life capable of building tall towers in circular formations. Australia North Cape promises that low-resolution pictures of the planet and what AXIS is—or rather, was—seeing will be available later today, and we’ll bring them to you as soon as they are released…
“Who can help but feel a moment of glowing pride? AXIS, perhaps the most expensive achievement in exploration of all time, has paid us back in full. Today we have learned that there is life elsewhere in the universe. Will our own existence ever be the same? And as if for lagniappe, AXIS informs us that it may have discovered the remains of cities. We will provide complete coverage of all revelations from North Cape and expert analysts around the globe as we receive them.
“LitVid 21 is not given to hyperbole. We try to put a different spin on what we report, to change vectors and aim for the truth beyond what mere facts present, but today we are flabbergasted into uniformity with other vidnet casts. AXIS has found what might be cities on another world, a green world, B-2, the second planet of Alpha Centauri B. Throughout time, humans have wondered whether we are alone, whether we would have the entire universe to ourselves. For most of our history, except for a few visionaries, we thought travel in space was unlikely, and travel to the distant stars seemed beyond impossibility, raw fantasy. Yet our technological progress and our innate urge to explore ever outward compelled us to travel to the moon and planets. We found them empty of life.
“Our space telescopes confirmed the existence of planets much larger than Earth around distant stars; we could not know whether any Earth sized planets existed, but our instincts told us they did, and in 2017, five nations, headed by the young technological giant China, decided to build the first interstellar probe. Reluctantly, the United States was persuaded to join, making six, and contributed its own considerable expertise in space to the project. Built in orbit around the Earth using the largest Chinese orbital platform Golden Dawn as a base, AXIS, the Automated explorer of Interstellar Space, came to life…In a manner of speaking.
“Roger Atkins, a senior executive at Mind Design Inc and the head designer of AXIS’s intelligence systems, put together a combined bioelectronic thinker with capabilities far beyond a single human individual, yet without self-awareness. As Atkins said in 2035, five years into his part of the project:”
(Vid interview playback, Atkins short and stout with feathery thinning brown hair, wearing a black skinform) “We do not want to send an artificial human out there. AXIS’s thinker will do a better job than a human would; it will be designed especially for its job. But we will not neglect the poetry aspect, nor will AXIS be blind and incapable of opinion. After all, one cycle of communication with AXIS will take more than eight and a half years by the time it reaches its goal; it’s going to be very alone out there, and it’s going to have to think and make important decisions by itself. It will have to make judgments heretofore reserved for human beings.
“We’ve also designed it with a built in and very strong desire to communicate with others, besides its builders; AXIS will be social in a unique new way. It will want to meet and communicate with strange new intelligences, should there be any.”
David Shine: “Right now, it looks as if AXIS will have its chance…In brief, our scientists have made a simulacrum of a human being, better than human but not fully human—a challenge for philosophers—and sent it on its fifteen year journey to Alpha Centauri. Those decades of effort and travel have returned a discovery that may change the way we think of ourselves, of life, of all that is important.