The false Francesca moved her lips, as if she was reading each word aloud. She opened the next file, another poem. Her fingers moved downward on the cursor keys. One poem after the other briefly appeared on the monitor, and then was already overwritten by the next. Francesca smiled, and even in this smile he could see the protozoa that formed her lips.
Martin woke up startled and drenched in sweat. That dream was so crazy, but also so realistic I have to tell Francesca about it right away.
“Those terms…” she said afterward, “did you hear those for the first time?”
“Yes. No. Yesterday, in a different dream,” he said.
“So? I often invent something in a dream.”
“These are so… different. They do not belong to our world, and we do not belong in this one.”
Francesca nodded. “And if they… want to communicate?”
“Not they. It.” He explained to Francesca what he had concluded. “But telepathy, no, that doesn’t exist. That’s what you are alluding to, isn’t it? That is New Age nonsense.”
“No, not telepathy, this helmet here,” she said, pointing at the neuro helmet, “this is no pseudo-scientific claptrap.”
Martin nodded.
“And if this existed at some larger scale? What would be necessary for it?” she asked.
Martin was thinking, and then he approached the AI.
“Watson, I need a profile from the South Pole and 50 kilometers northward, up to a depth of 20 kilometers. Temperature, pressure, all measured or probable phases. Where data is missing, try to measure again as well as you can.”
It took the AI 42 minutes. A diagram of their surroundings with many colorfully shaded areas slowly appeared. After a quarter of an hour, Martin noticed something.
“Take a look at this.” He pointed at the upper part of the ice layer. “Here we have normal ice. Ice Ih, with a Roman numeral, and the ‘h’ stands for hexagonal. Each water molecule connects to four others. The result is a tetrahedron, like a shape made up of triangles. Most of the ice on Earth is frozen in this phase.”
The middle part of the ice layer, which was relatively narrow, had different shading. “This is exciting,” Martin said. “I didn’t pay attention to that during our descent. Here we have a layer of Ice XI. It develops at low temperatures and high pressure. It’s not that rare, and has been found while drilling in the Antarctic. Ice XI has one special feature—it is ferroelectrical.”
Martin zoomed in on this area a bit.
“You can do a lot with ferroelectrical materials. You can think of them as permanent magnets, though they produce an electrical rather than a magnetic field. Or they amplify it.”
He pointed at the neuro helmet.
“This material even possesses a memory. It is pyro- and piezo-electric. This means you can create an electrical field through heat or pressure, or use an electrical field to create heat or pressure, which means generating mechanical work. Imagine that you are superhumanly clever and you have had this tool right in front of you for millions of years. Would you have learned to use it?”
Francesca scratched her ear. “You can bet on it.”
“Our fiber-optic cable ran directly through that area.”
Martin zoomed closer, so that the position of the cable became visible.
“You see, even if the ice layer is moved only slightly sideways, our cable will break.”
“A lot of evidence, I would say,” Francesca commented.
“But no final proof, that’s true. It doesn’t matter, though. I think another question is much more important. What does it want from us? Maybe, more poems by Rilke?”
Francesca looked at him with flashing eyes. “Wrong,” she said. “The crucial question is still, ‘How do we get back home?’”
Age of Questions, Hexahedron
There is:
The knowing and the not-knowing, in continuous increments.
The not-I, a geometric representation of the I. A translation and distortion in several dimensions, yet still related.
The joy of exchange, of knowledge, new knowledge that no age has brought forth until now.
The hope of finding the meaning of the all.
The understanding. They call themselves human, and they recognized the I.
The I that watched the not-all.
The knowledge of solitude, which until now had been impossible.
Thousands of new words and concepts that fill memory assumed to be empty, as it is highly compressed.
The desire to take and to give.
There no longer is:
Standstill.
Solitude.
Boredom.
There no longer will be:
The wrong concepts.
December 23, 2046, Valkyrie
This was the first night he did not shut an eye. Normally, Martin always managed to sleep, even if he knew he might die the next day. Yet when they needed him to go to sleep, it did not work. He had tried last night, again and again. He had attempted to fall asleep by not trying to, but his mind could not be tricked that easily. I have to talk to Francesca—maybe she has an idea. Will you still dream if you are knocked unconscious? Martin did not really want to sleep. I hope I can continue the conversation with the I. Of course, this could all be a trick played by my overwrought imagination, after all the stress. Watson had calculated a 20 percent probability for this explanation. Yet, I will at least have the feeling I can do something.
Tomorrow they would reach the first Tiger Stripe. With some luck they would be in the spaceship by Christmas Eve, or close to it. True, their chances were extremely low. Martin had not even started to work out a solution for a forced march across the ice without enough oxygen. Maybe I should start focusing on that, instead of waiting for a dream?
He turned over on his left side, and then on his right, trying to find the most comfortable position, but his mind was already wandering. Why do we have to fail here, after all the stress and boredom of the last twelve months? We could have just surrendered to the coldness of space, back then when the DFDs wouldn’t start up. On the other hand, Jiaying would not have survived then. This way, at least she will make it home.
The others would wait for a while, even search for them, though he could not imagine how. Yet when it became obvious Valkyrie had run out of oxygen, they would have to accept the sad truth. Mission Control would order them to start the return journey. Jiaying will protest—at least I hope so—but will have to give in. And she will get over it. She is young, and she will be much admired on Earth, even if the mission is not a total success. Maybe NASA would build a monument for Martin, or somebody would set up a scientific award named after him. He was worried about his mother. She has always insisted she would die before me. Once his father, an American radio astronomer, had left her, she started thinking about death. Will she forgive me for leaving before her? Or will she prefer to believe I am alive, as long as my corpse has not yet been found?