Terra utopia, p.5
Terra Utopia, page 5
part #1 of Terra Utopia Series
A world devoid of odour was unnatural. It wasn’t quite alive … or dead. It was something in-between. How could she not have noticed? She sniffed her arm. She still smelled. She recalled the ship still smelled, and her crewmates. It was just this world. Now separated from all those things she noticed it for the first time.
‘Ty?’ she called, but he was gone. ‘Ty!’
The forest was silent, her voice swallowed up by the surrounding trees.
She was alone.
Why are there no animals?
⦿ You should ask yourself this question. Perhaps you do not cherish them as much as you think.
So there’s no wildlife at all?
⦿ There is only what you and your crewmates manifest, through memory and dream.
So they just have to ‘think’ the animals into existence?
⦿ Not at all. This is a world of sense and emotion. Of appetites and desires. The stronger the emotion, the more likely it will manifest.
That’s gonna be a problem.
With Ty gone, fear gripped Lindy momentarily, then she felt guilty for being so childish. She was on a mission, after all. This was why they were here. Then she smelt a familiar odour – caramel. She always smelled caramel when she was afraid. It was both reassuring and alarming, evoking painful memories.
As a child, she had been something of a candy connoisseur, but she was always conscious of putting on weight, something her strict father had drilled into her, so she felt guilty whenever she indulged. It was strange to feel both joy and shame at the same time. Stranger still that those feelings would spontaneously trigger the smell of caramel. It happened with sex too, but she couldn’t blame her father for that one. That moral contradiction came from her mother, which in turn came from her mother. Generations of hand-me-down neuroses, compounding with each new litter of children. If she were to ever have kids, she was determined not to perpetuate the cycle of guilt. And if her kids wanted caramel they could have caramel. And if they got fat then so be it, there’s nothing wrong with being fat. But she knew that wasn’t true. Her father was right. Her mother, not so much. For her, the fear of discovery was forever associated with the smell of caramel.
She took a deep breath of scentless air and shook the memory from her head. The caramel morphed into another familiar smell – stronger, more pungent. It reminded her again of sex and sweets. It was rank and joyous. What was it? She sniffed the air, her nose following the foul aroma. It smelled like rotting fruit mixed with cheesy foot. The stench was real this time, and it sparked fond memories of her time in India, working with a university outreach program to develop crops that would help feed the poor of the nation; of her first love, Ritvik, and of the terrible conditions his family and so many others were forced to endure, and of the paradoxical generosity and selfishness of the people she met that year. It had been one of the toughest years of her young life – a real trial by fire – and also one of the most rewarding. That dreadful smell opened a Pandora’s box of memories for her as she was transported back to that little village in India. She could see the squat hovels with their corrugated iron or woven thatch roofs. The mudbrick walls of muted yellows and greys, or sometimes painted red or with crude murals to add a dash of colour. The tramped dirt streets and village square with clothes hung out to dry on makeshift lines, or simply draped on the low vaulted roofs. The lone cow or goat tied to a tree, whose milk sustained many families. Dusty children chasing each other or kicking a flattened soccer ball around. Bicycles, the main mode of transport to the distant town when getting supplies, and the muted pastel saris of red, yellow and orange worn by the women – some plain, some patterned in a riot of colourful designs. Or the simpler blues and greens most of the men wore. Work clothes for those who could get work. They were dirt poor – literally – and had been for generations. And yet they were happy.
Lindy knew all this rustic charm was partly a front, designed to appeal to this summer’s foreigner students who had turned up trying to help the village out for a couple of months so they could earn extra credits. Students who, when it was all over, would disappear back to their comfortable lives in their climate-controlled domes, with a warm fuzzy memory of the time they helped those poor people in India. To many of the locals it was just a long con, Ritvik told her as much in a rare moment of honesty. Even so, she hoped she had made some small difference in their lives … In his life.
Ahh, Ritvik.
She finally found what was causing the smell. She was not surprised, and yet, was astonished she should find them here. Jackfruits. Giant spiky green bulbous jackfruits. They were native to India and their trees could be quite large, with dozens of fruits the size of one’s head (or bigger) growing from stems that forked off their trunk or thick branches. When she first saw them she thought they looked like giant testicles, and that their name was somehow derived from Jack and the Beanstalk. She later learned it came from the Portuguese Jaca, which in turn was from the Indian chakka pazham. Their scientific name was Artocarpus Heterophyllus. She remembered all this now just from their smell. They were one of the few native fruits that still thrived in southern India.
She had never seen a jackfruit tree this large before, or with fruits quite so enormous. It was astounding.
All her qualms about this new world were forgotten as she ran up to the tree and carefully placed a hand on one of the low hanging fruits. The spiky outer shell was strangely reassuring. Not sharp, but rough and firm. She slid her hand over it, feeling it gently scratch against her palm. It was as big as her torso. Cradling its huge form in one hand she tried to gently lift and judge its weight. It was heavy. She leaned in and sniffed it, drinking in the rancid smell.
Ahh, Ritvik.
She recalled meals with Ritvik and his family. Milk, rice and lentils, and Jackfruit based curries and desserts. Simple but hearty. She had learned the recipes from his mother, Meera, and sometimes helped her prepare the meals. But she hadn’t cooked it since leaving the village. It was a part of her life she had almost forgotten about and which now came flooding back.
Grabbing the giant fruit with both hands she pulled on it gently, testing the stalk and its tension. The outer shell gave her plenty to grab on to, but it was firmly rooted. She pulled harder, trying to break it away from the stem.
It held tight.
She tugged at it again, this time twisting hard against the stalk. The fruit broke free with a dull snap! The stalk whipped up into the air, its load released, as she fell on her ass, the heavy fruit landing on her chest, winding her. She pushed the fruit off onto the ground, where it rolled and stopped against the trunk of an even larger Jackfruit tree.
Lindy jumped to her feet, brushed herself off. She looked up the hill for Ty. It would have been embarrassing if he’d seen that, but he was nowhere in sight. She hoped he was okay, but glad he wasn’t watching, given what she was thinking of doing next.
Lindy could just make out the ship through the rows of trees – no one in sight. The loosed fruit was too heavy to carry. She would have to roll it out of the forest to get it back to the ship. But that wasn’t the plan. She recalled the sweet bubble-gum flavour of the jackfruit pulp, her mouth was salivating just thinking about it. Pulling the blade from the scabbard on her hip, she knelt on the soft earth, held the fruit firmly with one hand as she raised the blade above her head, and with one quick move stabbed down into the hard shell.
––––––––– ⦿ –––––––––
The higher Ty climbed, the steeper the hill and the denser the forest became. Thick yellowy shrubs, saplings and vines blocked his way. The trees became even larger and more diverse with gigantic sequoias, oaks, and a wide variety of eucalypts and others species Ty couldn’t name, all crowded together so tightly they left little room sometimes to pass between them. He found himself having to climb over their giant root systems and squeeze between their massive trunks. Undeterred, he turned these fresh obstacles to his advantage, pulling on branches and vines to gain leverage up the steeply rising incline. Some of his lashings strained under the unexpected weight but managed to hold firm. Others tore free from their roots and were cast aside as Ty pushed on relentlessly up the hill. He was determined to reach the top and see what lay beyond the valley.
Every now and then he spray-painted a yellow marker onto the side of a tree. His breadcrumb trail in case he got lost. A giant tree blocked his path, so he paused to rest and look back on how much ground he’d covered. Lindy was out of sight. In fact, he couldn’t even see the edge of the forest anymore. But he wasn’t concerned.
‘Lindy!’ he called, more out of obligation than any real concern. There was no response. He called again, even louder: ‘COOOOEEEE!’. The call should have echoed but instead was snatched up by the forest as soon as it escaped his mouth, like some giant anechoic chamber.
Oh, well. She’ll be fine, he told himself. As long as she doesn’t wander off too far.
He continued the climb.
After a few more minutes the ground levelled out and he entered a flat clearing, about thirty meters in diameter. Surrounded by gigantic tree trunks, with patches of light streaming down from above, the spot felt like something out a fairy tale. He half expected to find pixies lurking in the bushes or have talking animals with ill-fitting vests pop out and greet him. But the clearing remained eerily quiet.
I’m the first person ever to see this place, he pondered.
Sitting on a thick root Ty paused to catch his breath, thinking he could really use a drink of water right now. He took out the compass just to see what it did. It did nothing. He gave it a shake, maybe it was stuck. Still nothing – no magnetic reaction whatsoever. ‘Well, that’s useless.’ And he packed it away.
He looked about. It was nice here, he thought, though a little too quiet. Maybe it was the lack of birdsong, but it felt like there was more to it than that. He didn’t think on it too hard, though. He was on a mission.
The tree upon whose root he was resting, loomed overhead like the antediluvian ancestor of something one might find on Earth. They were all like this here, a cluster of massive trunks reaching into the firmament. Ty took out his hunting knife and carved into the trunk of his tree: Ty was here. Not the most original marker, but unique for this place. Another first. Then he noticed the words begin to bleed.
This freaked him out a little, but then he saw the ‘blood’ was a thin yellowy sap. A memory flashed of the summer he spent hiking the Sierra Madre ranges in Mexico. One of the locals had shown him how to tap the trees for water – especially the sycamores.
Ty stepped back to check – it was a sycamore. Bigger than any sycamore he’d ever seen, but he recognised the gnarly bark and circular ‘eye’ on the trunk. Searching the ground he found a twig, broke it into a short stick, and whittled one end down to a point. With his knife he then stabbed and sliced into the tree just under the carved words until it made a decent wound. Not too deep, but reasonably wide. He then took the pointy stick and jammed it in the hole. Within seconds a steady stream of sweet sap rolled down the twig and started to drip. Ty positioned himself under the stick and let it drip into his mouth.
It tasted like bitter butterscotch, triggering memories of the glorious ranges and their dense inhospitable forests; the thin mountain air; the mines and deforestation; the Basaseachic Falls; the dark history of drug cartels and turf wars and bodies dumped in garbage bags; the old film, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre; the indigenous peoples whose names he could never pronounce; the coyotes and mountain lions that would roam the towns scavenging for food; the magnificent chaos of Monterrey before it was domed off, eating cabrito in the local cafes; and Isabella of the child-bearing hips who he met in Santiago and spent three glorious nights with.
He stayed perched like this under the drip for a good ten minutes. Not only did he not get sick, he felt surprisingly refreshed. After planting a tin cup under the twig to continue collecting the sap, he continued his climb with new vigour.
On leaving the clearing the ground pitched steeply upward again until he eventually reached the crest of the hill. Here the forest was thinner, revealing a large outcrop of rocks ahead, the peak of this low-lying hill.
It took some time for him to finally reach the rocks, they were further away and much larger than he realised. Though Ty prided himself on his stamina he had to admit this was turning into a real slog, and the energy from ten minutes of sycamore sap was already exhausted.
As he approached the crest of the hill he saw what appeared to be a large cave mouth at the base of the rocks – about five metres wide and eight high. The ground around this was largely rock as well, the forest giving way to a clearing with tufts of lonely grass and a few small white flowers reaching up through cracks in the polished rock floor. Trees still obscured any view beyond the hill, but if he climbed the rock to its peak he would likely get an excellent view.
But it was the cave that drew his attention now. Ty paused in front of the gaping entrance and stared into its black void. It was surprisingly perfect. Not carved or fashioned in any way, but naturally smooth, with high walls and ceiling, and a relatively flat floor with a steady incline down into the heart of the planet. Light spilled into it illuminating the first few metres, but beyond that was a resolute black.
Ty stepped closer. A light breeze brushed past him and whispered into the hollow darkness, as if it were being pulled into the depths and was gently pushing him in with it. It brushed against the walls, softly intoning a low metallic drone from deep within, like some giant musical chamber inviting him to enter.
He loved caves. He loved the mystery of them. The unexpected twists and turns, the narrow passages and giant caverns, tucked away from the rest of the world like some prehistoric bubble. Sometimes a whole ecosystem, ancient and unique would be hiding deep inside, unsullied by human hands or the pollution of the surface.
He had dived most of the more impressive cave systems on Earth. The Eisriesenwelt of Austria, The Blue Grotto of Italy, the Orda in Russia, the Cave of Crystals in Mexico (that same trip he’d learned how to tap a sycamore), and the magnificent Guangxi in China. But his favourite was the Waitomo cave of New Zealand. While this was one of the more tourist accessible caves, and therefore less about diving and spelunking, he had been very taken with the glow worms it was famous for. Almost as much as the rainbow trees he had seen in Taiwan.
By the time Ty had begun his career of cave diving, even the most remote systems on Earth – the ones not sullied by tourism and weekend warriors – had nevertheless been well explored and thoroughly mapped. There was nothing new to be discovered. But here was a cave no one had ever set foot in. Here was a subterranean world waiting to be explored.
He didn’t have the right gear with him. If there were steep drops, unstable sections or water-filled chambers, he was not prepared. And one should never enter a strange cave alone. You needed a team who could all look out for one another. Communications. A base camp. Sonar mapping. First aid.
Ty knew all this perfectly well as he stood at the threshold of this unexplored cave. Then without a moment’s hesitation – he stepped in.
––––––––– ⦿ –––––––––
Serra and Sergei started with the ship’s power supply – a Yatoma reactor.
The FTL drive (the beachball) drew its power from the aether1 in the surrounding space. This would distort the space around the ship, creating a bubble that would – for want of a better term – warp Spacetime and turn a trip of several years into seconds.
But that was the FTL Drive. The rest of the ship was powered by a Yatoma reactor, which relied on aetherium2 for its energy. The underlying principles were the same, but in reverse. Mass to Energy, rather than Energy to Mass. It was like having their own super-fluid sun with almost infinite energy potential at the heart of the ship. A sun they could never observe because of the quantum uncertainty principle and the whole wave-particle duality thing. It was quite literally a large black box with wires coming out of it; featureless, aside from the construction crew signatures scrawled onto its side and a few buttons on top. There was no way to open the box. If one did, one of three things might happen. It could explode in one’s face with the unleashed force of a micro-star; or worse, collapse into a tiny black hole and suck everything around it for 200,000 miles into oblivion; or, nothing at all might happen. But did you really want to take the risk? It was Pandora’s box on aetherium-powered quantum-entangled steroids.
You would think having such a dangerous power source in such a tiny space would be unthinkable, especially after the historical disasters with nuclear energy, which were trivial by comparison. But it was fine, as long you didn’t open the box. And it worked – really well.
It all came from developments in long-term, high-yield magnetic fusion reactors. They discovered, quite by accident, that super-heating deuterium-tritium plasma above 200-million degrees celsius didn’t just cause a sustained fusion reaction but broke the very fabric of nature, producing aetherium as a by-product. They had reverse engineered the raw uncut power of the universe, which could be used to power systems at a Q of 10,000 or more exponentially (Q being the ratio of Energy In for Energy Out). Of course, this was incredibly volatile and blew up the reactor that created it. But it was an important discovery, and despite a few more early disasters, they learned how to contain and harness the aetherium. The Yatoma Reactor (named for the man who pioneered the process) effectively became the energy source of the world within a century of it being discovered (too late to undo the damage of the previous 200 years of fossil fuels though). There were Nobel Prizes all round of course for the initial discoverers and for Matsumo Yatoma himself. It also made interstellar travel possible through the invention of aether-driven FTL drives – sparking the search for a new home planet.
