Not everything went smoothly, though. One of the patients came in drunk, nearly staggering into the examining room. His left arm was broken. He cursed and swore while Sebai examined him. He insisted that she give him morphine for the pain.
“There’s no need for that,” she assured him firmly. “The fracture is clean, look at the X-ray image. I’ll give you local anesthesia while I fix the arm.”
“It hurts, you bitch!” he wailed, and the string of expletives continued. Sebai, prepared to defend herself and call for help if necessary, waited until he shut up, and then said calmly: “I can either fix your arm, or not. There is no chance I’m giving you morphine, but right now you decide whether I treat you. If you want to keep calling me names, begging for drugs, and threatening me, go away. Your choice.”
He was silent for a while. Then he nodded, and she finished the dressing. “There,” she smiled. “We’ll leave the cast on for three weeks. By then, the fracture should be healed. Please come again in that time. If there are any problems, come sooner. All right?”
“Yeah,” he said and quickly vanished.
It was the last patient. Feven came in after him and greeted her mother.
Later, she asked: “Why were you so nice to that old drunk? Most doctors would immediately refuse to treat him if he behaved like that, and I wouldn’t think less of them. But you spoke to him nicely, and he didn’t even say thank you.”
“Everyone deserves a chance. Kindness is all, my love,” she smiled. “Remember that.”
Little one, Bellugi had called me back then. I have experienced less than 5 percent of her lifespan. At twenty years old, I was one of the youngest people around. Would that be why she chose me out of all the possible candidates?
“You’re unburdened by decades or centuries of experience. Less prone to conventional thinking. You may still be original,” said her assistant, a small gray-haired woman, when I brought up the topic before my departure.
I disagreed but stayed silent. Bellugi must have had her reasons, mustn’t she?
Would I become stereotypical after four centuries? I doubted the people of her age were that. Those who gave up in the meantime, perhaps. But the survivors? Arienti seemed quite adaptable.
Why else would she pick me? And why this me? Erin Taiwo could be many things. Did not hold reservations about change. Bellugi didn’t want me to change; she went along with the petite girl of curious disposition. Didn’t even want me to get better sensory and memory extensions. She seemed a peculiar woman.
Did she have something to do with the departure of Chrysalis? When I looked it up, I couldn’t find anything about this voyage more than a year ago. Had she pulled some strings to make it happen, after she’d come across Arienti’s message? Was I really her only asset aboard, or just one of many?
A mere two hundred passengers. The scientists and the ever-curious. Or both at once. Van Maanen’s Star, an old white dwarf, did not attract colonists.
Ninety-two of the one hundred and sixty stars within the twenty-light-year radius from Sol are red dwarfs. Thirty-nine are brown dwarfs, if you care to call them stars at all. The rest include some giants running out of fuel, a couple of young bright stars, and eight white dwarfs. Out of these eight, only two had seen crewed expeditions.
If you’re lucky, there are remnants from the original star system you can use for resources or colonization. Sometimes even planetary cores survive the red giant phase. Most humans seem quite happy near main sequence stars. But we are many, and some avoid anything you might call normal.
We spent most of the voyage as sleepers. We were effectively ageless, but we could still starve, suffocate, or fall victim to accidents. Chrysalis woke us from our cocoons upon approaching the inner system. Inner, in this case, closer than Mercury orbits the Sun or Turms our Epsilon Eridani. Much farther out, remnants of two ice giants and smaller bodies orbited the slowly cooling star. Here, a world not much smaller than Venus circled its tiny white sun barely a tenth-au away. Its gravity sent debris from the innermost disk on a crash course with the star. It must be quite a sight when some larger chunk of rock fell upon the face of the star. Viewed from the planet’s dayside, the star looked twice the size of the Sun viewed from Earth, or of Epsilon Eridani observed from my homeworld Turms.
There, on the planet known as van Maanan B, were most of the passengers from the first van Maanen mission, or so we were told by our ship. None had left the system in the two decades that elapsed since their arrival. A blink of an eye for some, I supposed. Most of my life for myself, not counting my sleeper years.
We gathered by the transparent hull section the ship had made for us and observed the scenery—barren, rugged but breathtaking—during our own descent into the planet’s orbit. No impact craters to be seen, I noticed. Strange. How young must the surface be, even though its star is so old?
No one spoke aloud. I could feel the excited hum of conversations going on silently, but I cared little to tap into them. None would contain anything important for my own mission.
How many of my shipmates were also Floriana Bellugi’s? I supposed I would find out when it was favorable to her interests.
I was content with playing pawn until I discovered more. Then, just maybe, I would have enough information for my own agenda. But I was still too young and inexperienced compared to the likes of Bellugi and Arienti. I had to get to know them.
Finding Arienti would be the first thing to do.
The day everything changed started as usual. Aster Sebai made her rounds among the inpatients and noted their progress with satisfaction. Her dream of helping people was coming true.
The shouts and cries from the staff common room interrupted her thoughts. She ran there in fear that something had happened.
Something had.
“Look!” Ruth exclaimed and pointed at the TV screen. At first Aster could hardly comprehend the surrounding awe and excitement. Then the news dawned on her.
An interstellar object of possibly alien origin had been captured….
A hoax, some claimed. End of the world, cried others. Beginning of a Nirvana. Alpha and Omega.
After the initial worldwide uproar calmed, news started trickling down. It’s a robotic probe. It may be endowed with some kind of artificial intelligence. Attempts at communication will ensue. It’s talking to us. It designated itself as “Ramakhi.” It’s speaking for organic beings like us….
Sebai tried to wrap her head around it as the updates kept coming during the following weeks and months. This was the world her daughter, and then her grandchildren, would live in. No longer alone.
The same year, before it shut itself down, the Ramakhi messenger gave humanity the gift.
“Almost everyone lives here in Olympus,” the guide gestured to a gleaming domed structure at the substellar point. They had to level hard rugged terrain before they could build here. But who wouldn’t want a permanent perfect view of the star? Not having stood under a sun besides Epsilon Eridani before, I fell in love with the sight of van Maanen in the sky.