The starchild compact, p.26
The Starchild Compact, page 26
"This is impossible!" Ari said. "They're equating that symbol with the Hebrew aleph. And look at the similarity between the symbols."
"Document this," Jon said.
"Already doing it," Elke answered, as she pushed a second key at random.
The two squares moved up a bit on the display, and a second pair appeared, the right containing another symbol, and the left containing beth, the second letter in the Hebrew alphabet.
"I'll be damned," Ari said, and walked to the second console, and pushed a key.
This time, two columns of squares appeared with symbols in the right column, and the Hebrew numbers from one to twelve in the left column. "Double damned!" he added as the columns appeared. "It's the Hebrew numbers." He traced the strange symbol for the number one with his right finger, and then traced the Hebrew number. "They have a déjà vu-like familiarity, almost as if I had known them long ago. This is about as weird as it gets…" His voice trailed off as the display in front of Elke filled right to left with columns containing the entire Hebrew alphabet with matching alien symbols.
"Elke," Ari said, knowing his voice was filled with wonder, "log these charts into your link, and set up an automatic translation into the English alphabet. It's obvious we're going to have a language lesson shortly, so follow that up with a growing lexicon."
Elke nodded her understanding and proceeded to set it up. "I'll put it on the general link. As soon as we have sufficient info, if you point your scanner at any text, you'll get the best English transliteration possible."
Ari grinned, wondering why he had given Elke any instructions. She really had been along for the ride until now. He glanced at Carmen, who smiled and said, "I will refine Elke's lexicon to give us the necessary language nuances…and…" she looked expectantly at Ari, "we may be needing your Hebrew language skills to make this work properly."
It is true, Ari thought, the Hebrew alphabet is no coincidence.
#
Their understanding of this language progressed rapidly. To Carmen's astonishment, the language seemed to bear a relationship to Hebrew similar to that between Latin and modern Italian. Ari supplied necessary pronunciation clues, so that by the end of the day, Carmen and Ari were able to carry on simple dialog.
Everyone else relied on Elke's lexicon program, which she had modified to accept verbal input. To Carmen, however, the wonder lay in the language itself. Unlike the progression from Latin to Italian, this language was significantly more sophisticated than Hebrew. At every turn, the complexity they experienced grew exponentially. Within a few hours, Carmen and Ari could discuss complex technology in the new language, while the rest of the crew could quickly translate back and forth using their links.
At some point, Carmen found herself at the third console, rapidly increasing her vocabulary when the display shifted from what she thought of as the learning mode to a display filled with text. Although her fluency was still marginal, she found that the text utilized what she knew, and she could understand the material before her. For several hours, Carmen remained before the console deep in study. The strange world around her disappeared, replaced by Ectaris, the world that had nurtured the civilization of a people she had begun to think of as the Founders. She only looked up when Jon gently touched her shoulder.
"What has grabbed your attention so completely?" Jon asked her.
Carmen turned to look at Jon. "Gather everyone around," she said softly, her dark eyes glowing with moisture. "I have a story to tell you all."
#
Sunlight from their yellow dwarf star took ten minutes to reach their world, Ectaris, at 1.1 Earth masses, with an average density of 5.52. Land covered 35% of the surface, clumped into two significant masses in the temperate northern and southern hemispheres. A twenty-five degree axis tilt produced four distinct seasons during their 376-day year.
They were a great civilization, a thriving people. Ectaris was a teeming world, overflowing with advanced engineering, sophisticated technology, transportation marvels, inspirational art and music. They had survived 50,000 years of growth, war, disease, famine, and finally peace and prosperity. They were a space faring civilization, spread throughout their solar system. They had recently colonized the fourth planet, a rocky, dry twin of their own world, and were extracting raw materials for their ever expanding needs from the vast band of rocky material that circled their sun between the fourth planet and the giant gas ball that was next in line.
Their sun was a stable main-sequence variable G2V star. But it was older than Sol, with a slightly greater variability. The planet's inhabitants learned to accommodate the cyclical global climate changes brought about by this variability. Indeed, it became a significant factor in spurring the rise of their civilization. They learned, first as tribes, and later as a worldwide population, to plan for, and then to hunker down and survive the glaciations that were an inevitable part of their global climate pattern.
Far-seeing members of this interplanetary civilization began to cast an eye to the vast gulf between the stars, and to the worlds beyond. They began to make plans for an eventual journey, a casting off from their solar system into the unknown void. It seemed obvious to these forward-looking scientists that any future interstellar propulsion system would require a stable, nearly inexhaustible power source. In anticipation of this they undertook a vigorous research project into the properties of anti-matter and black holes. They discovered previously unknown relationships between the two, and eventually were able to create and control mini-black holes that produced anti-matter particles in a completely controlled fashion. They had their power source.
During this period, one group of scientists continued to look inward, toward their own star, and made a disquieting discovery. The variability of their G2V sun was increasing rapidly by astronomical measure. Their detailed models began to form a disturbing picture of the next several solar cycles. Over several years of intense investigation, these researchers determined that the variability of their sun would become destructive within 400 years. They checked and rechecked their figures, making certain they were not just dealing with an artifact of their models.
Finally, with near certainty, these scientists determined that 400 years hence Ectaris would become uninhabitable. They kept this knowledge close, revealing what they knew only to several colleagues who could corroborate their figures, and perhaps even approach the problem from a different angle. They and their colleagues continued to study the problem, examining it from every possible perspective. Over the next year or so, it became increasingly clear that they were dealing with more than an increase in solar variability. They discovered fundamental changes in the composition of their star. They began to get hints that their star might be in the first stages of a movement off the main sequence. This dawning realization quickly matured into a new understanding.
The following week, the scientists announced to the entire solar system that in 400 years, plus or minus 40, the sun that had nurtured their civilization for 50,000 years of recorded history would nova.
Following the announcement there was system-wide shock and some initial panic. Then the proud people of this world and the solar system they had populated determined to take the long view: They had four centuries. They decided to focus and solve the problem.
When their sun went nova, it would destroy everything in its path: planets, moons, asteroids, and comets. The nova would leave behind only charred cinders where once proud worlds orbited. People, life, their products – all gone. There was no way to shelter their worlds from the coming nova. Its destructive power would be absolute. The only solution was to leave, go elsewhere, sufficiently distant to ensure their survival.
So these people chose to build a moving world – a very large starship – a self-contained Arc that would hold their entire population, and keep them alive for however long it would take to cross the interstellar abyss to another suitable solar system. Ectaris astronomers cast their collective vision outward, looking for a suitable destination. Ectaris physicists and engineers turned their efforts to developing a workable star-drive. Ectaris life-scientists focused on creating a self-contained ecosystem that would remain viable and sustain their population for the duration of the journey, no matter how long. This was a staggering project – to build a self-contained world, one sufficiently large to contain the entire population of a solar system teeming with people, sufficiently complex to create a living environment where they could grow their food, process their waste, and continue to live essentially normal lives, generation after generation after generation. The concept was almost beyond imagining – yet survival absolutely depended on it.
They had 400 years to make it happen.
Within decades, the astronomers had identified several possible destinations, deciphering the vanishingly faint indicators that told them about the destination sun and its surrounding planets. By the end of the first century, they had narrowed it down to several candidates, and finally to one fairly young main sequence variable G2V yellow dwarf. It lay 500 light years further out from the galactic center than their own sun. Its variability was somewhat less than their own star, but that was a good thing.
At about the same time, the Ectaris physicists who were working on the mini-black hole/anti-matter project identified previously undiscovered – although suspected – properties of matter that gave them the key to an interstellar propulsion system. The relativistic hyperdrive they called the hypervelocity or hyper-V drive was powered by a mini-black hole located at the center of the Arc. The drive itself consisted of a massive tube-like ring that contained circulating charged particles moving at nearly light-speed around the planetary-sized spherical starship. This loop acted on the fabric of the universe itself, stealing a small amount of momentum from the expanding space-time continuum. Relative to the universe, the energy they took was infinitesimal, but for the starship, it was sufficient to propel it and everything it contained to a respectable percentage of light-speed. Since the hyper-V drive was non-reactive, it acted upon everything within its field – every molecule, every atom was uniformly accelerated. An unexpected byproduct of the drive was a completely controllable artificial gravity system that the engineers perfected by the one-and-a-half-century mark.
By this time, the Arc as a whole was coming into its own. The space-faring elements of Ectaris had earlier located a nearly spherical solid-rock asteroid some 1,500 kilometers in diameter that they moved into orbit around Ectaris. For nearly a half-century, engineers and technicians of all flavors had worked ceaselessly, transforming the solid rock into habitable space.
A specialized team of engineers drilled 750 kilometers down to the core of the asteroid, where they vaporized several cubic kilometers of rock using thermonuclear explosives combined with the controlled release of anti-matter. With infinite care, using specially designed robots, they installed a mini-black hole and the equipment that would sustain it. An integral part of the installation was a self-replicating system that would monitor, repair, and sustain this critical power source indefinitely into the future.
Five kilometers below the rocky surface, robots removed over thirteen million cubic kilometers of rock to create a layer of living space supported by massive columns. This task alone required over 500,000 machines, each vaporizing 10,000 cubic meters of rock every day for over seventy-five years. Just below the surface other machines created vast hexagon-shaped hollowed-out spaces that housed machinery, equipment, and stores that would be required over the centuries of travel that lay ahead. Scattered over the surface, another gang of robots sank fifty-meter wide shafts at several of the hexagon triple-junctions to access the hollowed-out living space five kilometers below. Other robot teams constructed the hyper-V drive ring that towered nearly twenty kilometers above the rocky surface and passed completely around the Arc. Seen from sufficiently far away, the vast hexagons seemed to abut one another, so that the Arc began to look like a gigantic walnut-shaped Bucky-ball with the hyper-V ring defining the junction of the walnut-halves.
For three hundred years the teeming peoples of Ectaris had one consuming focus – complete the Arc before their sun went nova. The next fifty years saw the entire population of Ectaris, their moon, the fourth planet Dameter, the populated asteroids, and virtually every living soul, transfer their lives into the Arc. They brought aboard the broad spectrum of animal species that populated their worlds, the plants and all the other countless living things, large and small.
The billions settled in, and began to make the Arc their home – for that is what it would be for the rest of their lives, and those of the following generations for 500 years as their vast starship traveled outward toward the galactic rim at nearly three-quarter light-speed.
Now, fast-forward to a more recent time in our own solar system, but still long, long ago – about 150,000 years.
From out of interstellar space a strange craft appeared. It was large, huge by any normal standard – planetary in size, some 1,448 kilometers in diameter. It found at least one planet in this solar system that could easily support life, a planet uninhabited by intelligent beings, although there was plenty of evidence for a thriving biosphere.
The star folk parked their spacecraft in a safe orbit around the beautiful gas giant with distinctive rings, and sent exploratory teams to the new world. The new world was teeming with plant and animal life. Its underlying DNA, while dissimilar to their own, was not entirely incompatible. They discovered that some plants were edible, although they lacked critical trace nutrients and certain protein chains. The abundant game was edible as well, but difficult to assimilate – yet, they had taken 300 years to build their ship, and five hundred years to cross the gulf between the stars. They could be patient while their scientists modified the new world's biology at the molecular level. For the next several weeks star folk biologists created large batches of a virus-like molecule that they shipped to the new world, where high-altitude, high-speed aircraft sprayed the substance over virtually every square centimeter of the planet.
Life on the Arc went on while the molecule entered Earth's ecosystem, found its way into the cell nuclei of countless eukaryotes and into the protoplasm of an even larger number of bacteria and archaea. Slowly, year-by-year, decade-by-decade, the molecule attached itself to the DNA structure of every organism it encountered, modifying each so that it was virtually completely compatible with the star folk DNA. It took several star-folk generations for the modifications to spread throughout the native plant and animal populations, and throughout the bacteria and archaea domains, to complete the transformation. The star folk were a patient people – for the most part; but the journey from Ectaris was behind them, and many became impatient to settle their new home, to leave the Arc. And so, over a period of years following the initial molecular spraying, the star folk slowly left the only home they had ever known, and spread across the new world. Eventually, virtually the entire population of the starship had left for Earth. In an astonishingly short time, the star folk – the new Earthmen – spread across the entire planet, establishing cities connected by highways, airports, sea ways, and vast lines of communication. They dug in and turned to with a vigor that spoke volumes about their determination to make the best of their new home. And it became home in every sense. A new generation was born that only knew of the mighty starship from stories told by their parents, and from books and recordings available to them.
The star folk biologists had intended for Earth's ecosystem transformation to be fully completed before the star folk settled planetside. When they realized that early settlement was inevitable, they yielded, and joined the planetside migration, but what they didn't know – what nobody knew – was that the incomplete transformation had developed a problem. It was something deep inside the modified DNA structure that completely escaped the biologists' notice, something that lingered, replicated itself, and began to spread throughout Earth's population, both old and new.
Science had not stopped during the centuries of travel from the Ectaris system and the decades since they had arrived at Saturn. By the time the starship arrived at Saturn, Ectaris physicists had refined both the hyper-V drive and its black-hole power source so that they could be installed in a very much smaller craft that was capable of rapidly accelerating to speeds approaching light-speed itself. This made it possible, at least in principle, for a crew to return to Ectaris to investigate personally the aftermath of the nova.
After several decades of development, the hyper-V ship took an unexpected shape – looking somewhat like the popular flying disks their children used for play. As with the Arc, the smaller ship's rim contained a circulating ring of charged particles moving at nearly light-speed. Unlike the Arc, which maxed out at about 78% of light speed, this hyper-V drive could propel itself and everything it contained almost instantly to near light-speed – or to any slower velocity, right down to the pace of a couple strolling in the park.
Eventually, the Arc was nearly empty of people. Only, fourteen family members remained, linked by blood and intense scientific curiosity. They intended to go home – to whatever remained of their place of origin. They knew they would forever lose touch with their friends on Earth as the laws of relativity inexorably separated their timelines. Nevertheless, they hoped to maintain contact with successive generations back on Earth, so that when they returned at a far future date, the descendants of Earth's new inhabitants would be waiting for them – anticipating their arrival. Their race had already proved that it could take the long view. This was just a continuation.
These fourteen star folk visited Earth several times, but never stayed for very long, certainly not long enough to assimilate the spontaneously modified DNA that was, by then, working its insidious way throughout Earth's new inhabitants.
