The sailcraft folded in its mag-web brake and deployed ‘scopes as it swanned into a high orbit around the cloudy world, 1.63 Earth masses. Its burgundy star glowered down on cloud decks thick as pancakes in the morning.
Rachel licked her lips. Here was the tasty truth, a world for the unwrapping. Smart and sure, the white metal bird blew itself into full plumage. Its inflatable beryllium sails shone in ruddy daylight, hollow-body banners just tens of nanometers thick, the body swelled by low-pressure hydrogen. These it used to steer into lower orbit, scanning the orbit space for satellites—and finding none.
The overseer Artilect inserted—correlates with the spectral strength of water, with strong water absorption lines as seen in clear-atmosphere planets, with the weakest features suggesting clouds and hazes—and she cut it off.
Now the main show: a self-guided human artifact plunging into a fresh solar system, embodying her: a hairless biped, so noble in reason, so infinite in faculties, heir to all creation—and an animal trapped in a box, really, just lying in a pod and sensing inputs that had flown on wings of electromagnetic song across the light years.
This world she dubbed, to herself, Windworn. For such it was. A thick atmosphere ripe with oxygen, smothered in good ol’ nitrogen, yet beset with methane, too—clearly a world-air out of chemical balance. Good!—life.
Pearly cloud decks prevented much down-seeing. The Artilect aboard the craft had elected to deploy its one great immersion resource: the balloon.
The smart aero package fell away on its own braking wings and soon enough, slammed through the cottony clouds, its brake shell burning away— and into a realm of thick, filmy air. Blithe spirit, bird thou never wert—blazing through alien skies as a buzzing firework.
The balloon popped into a white teardrop, lighter than this sluggish air and with its heater able to stay buoyant. Ten kilometers below the land opened, solemn dark green and cloud-shrouded.
The first clear glimpse below was of big smooth whitecap ocean waves that crashed like armies against the rearing snow-white mountains guarding the continents. I should have called it Rawworld, she thought.
Below the balloon she watched alien vistas unfurl—big broad brown rivers, lakes, crags. The vegetation was gray and black, not green. Just as the astrobio people had said: around small red stars, plants needed to harvest all the ruddy glow. So they evolved to take in all the spectrum, with little to fear from the small slice of ultraviolet, since it was weak.
She watched the land and air carefully as the balloon skated tens of kilometers above, its cameras panning to take it all in. She did a close-up of the data feed, saw small birds flapping below—and roads.
She froze the image. Small dots that might be vehicles. Yes—she watched them crawl along. They went to—caves. Entrances to large hills that had slits of windows in their slopes, rank upon rank of them, orderly, horizontal … all the way to the summit.
Hills upon hills, marching to the distant horizon. Hills of grassland, hills of rumpled brown rectangular stone, hills with great clefts sharpening their edges. Artificial hills.
Hailstones rattled on the balloon. Microphones recorded long shrills, the trembling of tin in sheets, snapping steel strands. Harsh, brittle rings. Distant bellows, perhaps from the barrel-chested six-footed ambulating creatures far below in their herds of many. Once the hail cleared, the balloon could see things the size of houses burrowing into moist soil, after something. Yawning herbivore throngs looked up at the balloon, showing great rows of rounded molars. Forests, animals, birds—all moved before the surging winds.
The balloon acoustic microphones caught a huge manta ray-like thing conning Fwap fwap fwap fwap across the roiling sky, somehow navigating through. She thought, Crazy thing, looks like it escaped from a cartoon on video, with its long lazy strokes and manic grin that she saw was a scissor smile sporting long teeth … on a bird.
Then—black.
END OF CRAFT REPORT # 3069
a flat statement told her.
An interstellar spacecraft moving at a hundred kilometers per second does not have accidents; accidents have it. The craft turns into a blur of tumbling fragments inside a second.
She let herself drift up from the immersed state—slowly, letting the alien landscapes seep from her mind. It was over. She knew going in that the mission had snapped off, never heard from again. The balloon, its gossamer thin carbon nanotube and graphene covered in conductive metal skin, the super-lightweight rectenna—all gone. Something had blocked their transmissions—accident, intervention? No one knew. The mission report ended in a blank wall.
But she had needed to feel it. She knew full well this encounter lived only in thick bricks of data, info-dense and rigid. The lived experience was real, just turned into 0s and 1s, bringing across light years their stuttering enlightenments to the SETI Library. Still, it mattered as an abrupt lesson in how hard interstellar exploration through sailcraft was, and how sudden the deaths of such adventurers.
When she climbed from the pod she ached all over, stretched, wheezed. Yet she had done no true exercise, except in her mind.
She was late for her appointment, but she paused to look up through the crystal dome at good ol’ Earth, a multicolored crescent marble in the Lunar sky.
All but the last few centuries of human history had played out there. Throughout that history men and women had filled in the dark unknowns with imagination. So expeditions crossed oceans and high vacuum until new lands came into view—in just a few thousand years. Go back that far and you would see Sumerian ziggurats whose star maps cartooned the sky with imagined constellations and traced destinies through star-based prognostications. Someday a robotic follow-up probe might fall again toward the red star she had just seen, to become the Schliemann of this alien Troy.
That might happen; there were so many stars to reach out and see, and more candidates by the day. Now
