This week, I conclude my three-part reflection on Dante’s Divine Comedy with the Paradiso.
—
Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
This week’s edition of the Wednesday Blog is dedicated to Micah Holmes.
This week, I conclude my three-part reflection on Dante’s Divine Comedy with the Paradiso.
I’ve long wondered about the nature of the heavens, both scientifically through my passion for astronomy, and theologically drawing from my Catholic education and faith. In the Spring of 2011, I staged a one-act play of my own writing called The Swansong of the King which I wrote in the spirit of the scene in John Boorman’s 1981 film Excalibur where Merlin’s ghost appears to Arthur in a circle of standing stones to reassure him before his great final battle at which he would surely die. I wrote Merlin lines that told the story I’d imagined of the soul’s voyage to Paradise, an island amid a deep blue sea where in a valley in the middle surrounded by lush forests, there stands a city of white stone houses and public edifices. Each house is a garden in its own right, looking like an ancient Roman atrium more than anything else, and when the soul arrives, they find the people they always loved waiting for them there for one last great party.
My vision of Heaven draws from other sources than Dante’s; his is the child of a medieval Italian world with deep and still living Roman roots, while mine has in equal amounts classical and Celtic antecedents, the island in essence being the Irish Tír na nÓg, the Land of Eternal Youth. There’s also a bit of Tolkien in there, with the speech that Gandalf gives to Pippin during the Battle of Minis Tirith in The Return of the King that was so wonderfully acted out by Sir Ian McKellen in the film adaptation. Yet upon reading Dante’s cantica of his travels from the summit of Mount Purgatory to the ultimate light at the apex of all Creation, I can understand where he was coming from even if I found my understanding of his verse fading in and out at times.
Early in the Paradiso, Dante writes in Canto 5 about acknowledging one’s mistakes, in Beatrice’s words “Better for him if he had said: ‘I’m wrong,’ / than to do worse doing it.”[1] So, the vision I’ve held onto since childhood of Paradise may well be lacking, while it makes sense in my understanding I could still very well be wrong in my assessments, and in that I would be joyous to be proven wrong so for that would mean that this affirms one of the greatest truths that I believe in: that there is always more out there for us to learn.
All things that we know exist within creation, Beatrice describes in Canto 7 how all things “come to decay and last no time at all,” on Earth, yet in them something greater can be seen. In Paradise, Dante meets many saints and holy men and women. There too, he lives out the genealogist’s dream by speaking to one of his ancestors, Cacciaguida (c. 1098 – c. 1148), a knight who left Florence to join the Second Crusade during which he was knighted by Emperor Conrad III (r. 1138–1152). When asked who he was, the knight responds to Dante, “My branch and leaf (in whom I was well pleased, / waiting until you came) I was your root.”[2] Yet when Dante asks the question I’ve long wished I could ask my own ancestors from whom I inherited my family name, “Tell me my earliest, my dearest growth / who were your own progenitors? Also, / what years were marked for you as boy and youth?”[3] Cacciaguida replies that his ancestors lived in Florence as did he and Dante, concluding “that’s all you need to hear of my great sires.”[4] Among my own Kane ancestors––the name is variably spelled Keane, Kane and Caine in English but consistently as Ó Catháin in our native Irish––the unbroken recorded link only reaches as far back as my great-grandfather’s great-grandfather who is identified in Griffith’s Land Evaluation in the 1840s as Thady Caine. I’ve surmised that he was likely born at the earliest in the 1790s. The memories of these people who in worldly affairs had little impact yet still existed as a part of our history deserve to be remembered as we still exist as a part of their legacy.
As Beatrice leads Dante higher and higher through the celestial spheres, he notices how her laughter and joy evokes the spirit of their surroundings. In Canto 18, Dante writes that upon turning to Beatrice he:
One passage, in Canto 19 that struck me as needing particular note concerned the salvation of those who are born outside of Christendom and live good and worthy lives. In Dante’s verse:
Here, I feel that Dante is asking about the salvation of his first guide through these three realms, Virgil, who is condemned to eternity in the First Circle of Hell for the fact that he was born and died just too early to have encountered Christianity. It’s a question that I certainly have, having known many people who do not practice this faith yet have lived good and true lives. I don’t have an answer here, like many questions of faith this is something that remains a mystery to me, for I can see both sides of this question. What I can do is hope in love, which Dante writes is the purest and truest emotion evoked from God’s Essence:
In that essence of love, Dante sees Beatrice slowly immerse herself into the orbit of God, beginning in Canto 21 and continuing through to the end of the Paradiso in Canto 33. In the first of these two canti, Beatrice warns Dante that he is not ready to see her in her full beauty enhanced by the presence of God:
“’If I were to smile,’
so she began, ‘you would become what once
Semele was, when she was turned to ash.
For if my beauty (which, as you have seen,
burns yet more brightly as it climbs the stair
that carries us through this eternal hall)
were not now tempered, it would shine so clear
that all within your mortal power would be
a sprig, as this flash struck, shaken by thunder.”[8]
Here Dante drew from the classical inheritance, evoking the story of Semele, daughter of Cadmus of Thebes, the founder of Tyre, who was one of Jupiter’s lovers and was tricked by the jealous Juno to ask to see Jupiter in his full majesty only to be reduced to ash by seeing him.[9] I’m reminded as well of the Irish legend of the return of Oisín to Ireland after spending 200 years in Tír na nÓg with his wife Niamh only to turn to ash when he fell onto mortal soil again, but not before having a long discussion of faith with a certain Christian missionary named Patrick. In both Dante’s use of the myth of Semele and this clear Christianization of the death of Oisín, the one ancient hero who by all druidic accounts still lived in the Irish Paradiso of Tír na nÓg, the new faith could incorporate the old worlds into which its light flooded over the last two millennia.
At long last though, Dante is able to see the “sacred light” in its purest form, and to look again at the face of Beatrice illuminated by this light as one of the righteous. Later again in Canto 21, he proclaims with the exuberance of the Magnificat:
Dante can see the truth of Paradise because of the caritas, the charity, “on high that makes us serve / so readily the wisdom of the spheres.”[11] This light overwhelms Dante, even then. This is something that I fully can relate to, having felt much the same throughout my life yet magnified in recent months. In the first lines of Canto 22, the poet writes:
Even in this moment when Dante ought not to be afraid, he still felt that most human of instinct at beholding something otherworldly and so beyond what he had seen before then. The immensity of Paradise alone would make anyone of us cower in fear. These verses more than any other spoke to me directly, as something that I could see myself doing in Dante’s place. It reminds me of Moses’s first reaction to realizing whose voice spoke to him from the burning bush:
“I am the God of your father, he continued, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.”[13]
This, dear Reader, is a human experience of the Divine, of something greater than ourselves. I’ve long pondered how best to express my own beliefs concerning these questions, how best to refer to God. Dante sees God as a light emanating from the core of all things, and in my best effort at understanding the inherent paradox of God, for nearly a decade now I’ve come to think of a Divine Essence, as the best metaphysical expression of the Tetragrammaton which in its best English translation is rendered I am that Am. The Latin infinitive of the copula verb is essere, and this is the root of the noun essentia, so it seems prudent to me to write then of this Divine Essence, even if that Essence may seem impersonal. That’s where the three persons in one of the Trinity comes into my own faith.
At the end of Canto 22, Beatrice offers one of her last encouragements to Dante, the man who had loved her since first he saw her when they were children:
Dante here has a moment to look down on the Earth, on his home, what the great humanist astrophysicist Carl Sagan called the Pale Blue Dot and admire just “how small and cheap it seemed.”[15] I admire how Dante is able to imagine the Earth in one view, to see our entire planet as one common body made up of many separate parts.
Dante’s Paradiso concludes the three cantiche of his Divine Comedy, one of the great works of epic poetry in the western canon. It offers many things to many people; to my medievalist friends it is a window into the cosmology and theology of an Italian at the dawn of the fourteenth century. I would add here my own question of how different this Commedià would be had it been written just a few decades later when the Black Death swept across Europe in the 1340s? To the believer today, it evokes a vision of the afterlife in all its nuance and promises what might become of us once our lives have ended and our souls are weighed for their actions and deeds while living. I see both of these visions in the Commedià and also a poet, someone with whom I share the vocation to craft stories and enrich the human experience with our words, trying to make sense of his own life in exile far from his beloved Florence.
Reading this work has enriched my experience of Dante and reawakened some of that spirit of imagination and faith which I’ve long sheltered from the harsh winds and tempests of these recent verses that I’ve written in the last few years of my life. As much as I look forward to that great garden party in my vision of Tír na nÓg, Dante’s celestial spheres leave me with a warm sense of hope for something better to come.
Last week, I wrote my thoughts on the first cantica of Dante’s Divine Comedy. This week then, the second part, the Purgatorio.
All quotations from the Divine Comedy come from Robin Kirkpatrick’s English translation published in the 2012 Penguin edition.
—
Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
Last week, I wrote my thoughts on the first cantica of Dante’s Divine Comedy. This week then, the second part, the Purgatorio.
The sentiment of purgatory isn’t a good one, it’s a place where you don’t want to end up yet often find yourself stuck for longer periods of time. I often have dreams about needing to get somewhere or to do something or find something and getting stuck in an eternal loop of steps along the way and never actually reaching that goal. There are many different ways I could interpret those dreams of mine, yet in this instance I think they may be my subconscious imagination of purgatory.
Dante’s Purgatorio is an early depiction of this concept, though Jacques Le Goff (1924–2014), the French annaliste medieval historian wrote in the second appendix to his book The Birth of Purgatory that “the noun purgatorium was added to the vocabulary alongside the adjective purgatories.” In the next paragraph, Le Goff dated this addition to the decade between 1170 and 1180.[1] The concept itself is affirmed by the Catholic Church as doctrine today based on an interpretation of three verses from Chapter 12 of the Second Book of Maccabees, in which the author described how Judas Maccabaeus (d. 160 BCE) “exhorted the people to keep themselves free from sin, for they had seen with their own eyes what had happened because of the sin of those who had fallen.”[2] The footnote there in the New American Bible acknowledges that this passage “is the earliest statement of the doctrine that prayers and sacrifices for the dead are efficacious” and that “this belief is similar to, but not quite the same as, the Catholic doctrine of purgatory.” Dante’s depiction of purgatory fits well into this model, though he does write often of souls asking him to pray for them, as prayers for those in purgatory will speed their cleansing that they may enter Paradise again.
In this light, Dante’s purgatory is optimistic and hopeful. Sure, he encounters people who continue to suffer as they did in life from their own actions. In Canto 12, an angel proclaims to the poet and Virgil his guide, using Robin Kirkpatrick’s translation, “O human nature! You are born to fly! / Why fail and fall at, merely, puffs of wind?”[3] The cleansing path that the souls in this realm take requires tremendous effort and faith both in one’s abilities to surmount that path, and the reward for those efforts. Dante remarks later in Canto 12, “How different from the thoroughfares of Hell / are those through which we passed. For here with songs / we enter, there with fierce lamentations.”[4] The dead who walk the paths of purgatory then are working toward something, they know that they will learn in their paths the way into Paradise, it just may take a while.
The Purgatorio is remarkable for how it contrasts with the far more popular Inferno. Again, Dante stops and talks to everyone, and again nearly everyone he encounters is an Italian like him, someone with whom he can relate. He finds his fellow Tuscans among the crowds and makes his own birth well known by speaking Tuscan along his way. In several instances the souls he meets remark on the fact that he must be a Tuscan by his way of speaking, even if they themselves are Lombards, Latins, or from elsewhere.
I found it fascinating to see him encounter the ruling elite of Europe, the kings and popes who work off their sins. In one instance he sees Henry III of England (r. 1216–1272), one of my favorite medieval English kings, who had a pretty unfortunate and quite long reign. Dante places him among several other failed rulers, including Rudolf I of Germany (r. 1273–1291), Ottokar II of Bohemia (r. 1253–1278), Philip III of France (r. 1270–1285), Henry the Fat of Navarre (r. 1270–1274), Charles I of Naples (r. 1266–1285), and Peter III of Aragon (r. 1276–1285).[5] In Canto 20, Dante meets Hugh Capet (r. 987–996) who succeeded the last of the Carolingians as King of the Franks and founded the great medieval French royal dynasty which still exists as the Royal Family of Spain today. Capet sees his old life as something distant from himself:
“I was, down there, called Hugh Capet once.
From me were born those Louis and Philippes
by whom in these new days our France is ruled.
I was from Paris, and a butcher’s son.
And when the line of ancient kings died out ––
All gone, save only one who wears a monk’ dark cowl ––
In this world which he devised, Dante created tangible settings where the soul is cleansed after its life and before its final entry into Paradise. Dante himself climbed high until by the time he reached Canto 15, the suffering and toil of purgatory cleansed his own soul, so that in place of any other emotion “caritas burns brighter.”[7] The distinction in Latin between caritas and amor is something that I remember being discussed at length in my undergraduate theology classes at Rockhurst. These Latin terms are in turn translations of the Greek originals ἀγάπηand ερως, which I’ve come to understand as a distinction between charity and romance. The higher Dante and the penitents climbed up Mount Purgatory, the purer their souls became so that the affection they felt for their fellows and for all things was less a love that desired something of each other rather than a love that wished only to exist in communion with each other. In my fraternal order, the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH), our motto of “Friendship, Unity, and Christian Charity” speaks to this vision of love as charitable, unifying, and amicable. Purgatory was intended to replace fear and “penitential tears” with charitable love:
“If love, though, seeking for the utmost sphere,
should ever wrench your longings to the skies,
such fears would have no place within your breast.
For, there, the more we can speak of ‘ours’,
the more each one possesses of the good.
and, in that cloister, caritas burns brighter.”[8]
In purgatory, the penitents seek to cleanse themselves, and to cleanse the world in time as well. In Canto 16, the medieval Italian courtier Marco Lombardo remarked to Dante that societal corruption stems from the government:
The hopes then of the penitent are that not only will they enter the Gates of Paradise but that all those who they left behind on the Earth will also join them and God among the heavenly spheres in their own time. Marco Lombardo remarked to Dante that “of better nature and of greater power / you are free subjects. And you have a mind / that planets cannot rule and stars concern.” In this, Marco reminds Dante that the key to Paradise is accepting one’s responsibility for one’s actions and life and being honest and free about one’s mistakes. Dante experiences this at the end of the Purgatorio, when he at last arrived in the Garden of Eden, located at the top of Mount Purgatory. There, he encounters his beloved Beatrice, the love of his life who sent the poet Virgil from the first circle of Hell (Limbo) to guide Dante to this point where he will at last be reunited with her.
Yet when Beatrice sees Dante standing there in the garden, she admonishes him for his sins and faults when she was alive and afterwards. She challenges him to be better, and to give up the last of his fear and worry, he had not come to her in the usual way after his own death. Beatrice challenged Dante, silencing him with sharp words that he did not expect of her:
“Respond to me. Your wretched memories
Have not been struck through yet by Lethe’s stream.”[10]
To advance further, and to be with his beloved again, Dante needed to forgo his feelings of fear and worry, remorse and sorrow, and instead embrace the moment in which he was living, standing there in her sight and hearing her voice.
“And yet –– so you may bear the proper shame
your error brings and, hearing, once again,
the siren call you may show greater strength ––
put to one side the seed that nurtures tears.”[11]
Beatrice is the first one in the entire Purgatorio who calls Dante by his name, the first to properly recognize him for who he is, more than just the wandering Tuscan poet or the Italian. I’ve often thought about how I would reveal characters’ names in my stories. I like to slowly peel away the layers of fog surrounding a narrative and let the audience discover the characters’ names in a more natural fashion. In a story I’ve begun to write, a sort of cleansing purgatory for the main character, his name is not uttered until after he has passed through these great circles of repentance in his own wandering way home.The Purgatorio concludes in a very mystical fashion, heralding the beginning of the Paradiso that follows. The symbols of the heavens abound, as Dante leaves fatherly Virgil behind to return to his own circle and follows instead his muse Beatrice toward the highest heights anyone in this cosmos can hope to achieve. That then, is where we will continue next week.
[1] Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 362.
A while ago, I began reading Dante’s Divine Comedy. So, over the next three weeks I will be writing my own reflections on each of its three parts. This week then, I begin with the Inferno.
Three years ago marked the 700th anniversary of the death of the great Italian poet Dante Alighieri, the author of the Divine Comedy, whose Tuscan dialect is widely regarded as foundational for the modern standardized Italian language taught today. I will write at length about language standardization in the future, if I haven’t already, yet today, dear Reader, I wish to address his Commedià itself. Around the time of his great anniversary, the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (CEMERS) at my university held a variety of lectures concerning Dante. In one such instance, I became critically self-aware of the fact that I was likely one of the few people in the room who had not read the work.
I finally got around to reading the Commedià in the last month when a new two-part documentary on the life of Dante aired on PBS. I realized then that even though I hadn’t read his magnum opus, I still knew a great deal about it because of how closely tied it is to my Catholic culture. The concepts of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven as I grew up understanding them have clear support from Dante’s vision of these three realms. Yet like Dante, my own vision of these three is just as drawn from far older classical and biblical sources. He recognized the importance of connecting the beliefs of his own age with those that they replaced.
This is a point I made in conversation with a friend and fellow historian: Dante was a man of his own time. In his moment, it is fitting to see the great classical heroes, philosophers, and poets resting on the outer most layers of the Inferno because they had no introduction to God during their lives. Even more unsettling is his placement of the Prophet Muhammad within the eighth circle’s ninth bolgia as one of the “Sowers of discord.” Again, this fits in Dante’s own time and place, living at the same time as the Crusaders lost Acre in 1291, nine years before when the Commedià is set.
The Inferno is proof of four great truths which I wish to discuss in the remainder of this week’s post. The first of these is that faith often requires trust in more tangible things that one can see and touch and most importantly imagine. This past weekend on Trinity Sunday, I was moved by how my pastor––Fr. Jim Caime, SJ––described his relationship with the Trinity in his own prayer life. I believe in the Trinity, though what draws me towards that belief at this moment in my life is an appreciation for the mystery of the Trinity. It’s funny there, I appreciate the mystery of the most important doctrines of the faith yet when it comes to things that are more tradition than anything else, my faith is still built on a foundation that is strikingly tangible in its nature. At times I’ve thought that superstition might stick with me more because it’s something that is more tangible and everyday than some of the more metaphysical elements of my Catholic faith. Faith needs to be lived in “to live, thrive, and survive” in the words of the great Elwood Blues.
Second, I’m not a fan of iconoclasm. Culture is built by individuals yet adopted by communities. We live in a present moment which is layered upon the past. In those layers we can see bygone moments, years, decades, generations, centuries, millennia, and ages when our past thought something they made was worth cherishing even for a moment. Everything from the eternal grace of the great monuments of human endeavor, and our striving for greater truths is just as central to these ringed layers that form our culture as are the passing fads that come and go year by year. An article I read over the weekend in New York Magazine‘s style outlet The Cut about the millennial aesthetic that has defined the tastes of my generation in the last decade asked if “the tyranny of terrazzo” will ever end. The article concludes with a foreboding of the dominance of bright yellow among the style choices of our successors, Generation Z. I for one felt a similar sense of dread the last time I went clothes shopping at Target only to discover everything in the menswear section was geared to younger generations than my own. I continue to shop at Macy’s when I’ve gotten a nice paycheck and Costco when my parents are around with their membership.
If you’ll pardon that digression, the iconoclastic spirit would burn down the terrazzo of my generation’s invention and inspiration and would replace the soft hues with new and reactive bright colors. It would respond to decades of slow burning negotiation and working within the status quo with a fierce clamor to fight and resist even if the odds aren’t in your favor that your resistance will do you any good in the long run. I’ve been there and found that sort of thinking didn’t accomplish much and so settled for Dr. Franklin’s approach to change, make friends with as many people as possible and nudge them to do things you think important. In this light, my vote tends to be cast for more moderate candidates than my own views, and I’ll freely admit my own views on issues have changed with my own changing sense of frustration and irritation towards others whose voices are perhaps projected louder than necessary through social media.
So, I appreciate how Dante kept the voices and spirit of the pre-Christian past alive in his Inferno, that he was guided by the great poet Virgil, whose Aeneid I became quite familiar with in my senior year Latin IV class (Grātiās tibi agō, Bob Weinstein). It never seemed strange to my faith that the old faiths of Europe or any other religions could also exist within our understanding of Heaven, Hell, and all the rest. Again, Dante was a man of his time and his place, so to fit in the great heroes of Ancient Greece and Rome into his vision of the afterlife is only natural. Iconoclasm only harms us and our posterity by robbing all of us of the riches of our past and the finest parts of the great human inheritance. The iconoclast’s tradition to destroy what came before will only lead to their own destruction in turn by their posterity. Third, as powerful some may be in life it is the writers who will preserve their memories for eternity. Chaucer and Dante both preserved the memories of their enemies in a way that has led to the survival of those men’s names. Yet their names are not spoken kindly, so the world would do well to heed the power of the pen. They can live long beyond their memory ought to have otherwise. While more ancient stories began and lived for generations told orally and remembered from that recitation, we now in our learned state require things be written if they are to be remembered. In Shakespeare’s words, written for the Scottish King to utter upon news of his wife’s death:
The writer helps human memory survive long after each generation is gone. Before our carbon dating or genetic coding of the remains of beings now dead, writing remains the original technology by which we recorded our nature and taught our learning, and dare I say our wisdom, to those who come after us.
Fourth, I admired how Dante cast himself as both observer and listener to the plight of the damned. In every circle he chose to stop and ask the souls he encountered their names and to tell him about their lives and why they were where they ended up. This more than anything else is a model we ought to emulate, as I’ve written before here, we ought to listen to each other more. I believe this would solve a fair number of the problems we face in our lives. Pope Francis’s message from the balcony after his election eleven years ago echoed this sentiment when he simply asked that we pray for him as he began this new ministry in his life. This is something that I want to get better at; I am so used to my own solitary company that I often have to consciously remind myself to make smaller gestures of gratitude toward the people around me.
Dante often offered to speak to the loved ones of those who he recognized on his journey through Hell or to pray for their souls. Yet where I saw the greatest pity was at the bottom circle when he beheld the three great traitors of his world being devoured by the heads of the Devil: Judas Iscariot, Brutus, and Cassius. After reading this Canto, I wondered if the Inferno were to be written by an American who might be our three great traitors? Yet here my own beliefs divert from Dante’s, as I find it distasteful to say with any authority what the spirituality of anyone else might be.
I recently finished listening to the most recent Star Was anthology book From a Certain Point of View: Return of the Jedi which is a collection of stories told from the perspectives of minor characters who appear in the film in question. One of the last stories was the main one I was looking forward to the most. It was from the eyes of Anakin Skywalker after his redemption from 23 years living under his evil alter ego as Darth Vader. What struck me here was that despite everything Anakin did in his life, the Force and his best friend Obi-Wan Kenobi, whose force ghost beckoned him into the next life, forgave him. I don’t claim to have any authority over whether one person or another ended their life in one state or another because of the power of forgiveness. Forgiveness is a deep expression of love that we ought to express and inhabit more. Forgiveness it isn’t something that necessarily came naturally. Most of the bullies I faced in my childhood got a silent response from me later in life. I’m not proud of how I’ve reacted to certain people and situations in a way that echoes my own fear and anger, because I know I can do better. Fear isolates us from love, after all.
As I continue reading, I’m eager to see how Dante grapples with forgiveness and with the love that fuels it. I for one am eager to climb from the depths of Hell alongside Dante and Virgil onto the slopes of Mount Purgatory, a cantica which I expect I might allow myself to read in my usual pre-bedtime hour. I chose to spare my dreams of the Inferno, figuring I give myself enough nightmares of my own invention as it is.
Next week then, I will write to you about the Purgatorio and Dante’s climb towards the climax of his literary life.
Last week, I returned to Chicago, this time on a business trip to attend a conference, and on the way took time to slow things down and enjoy the lived experience.
—
Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
Last week, I returned to Chicago, this time on a business trip to attend a conference, and on the way took time to slow things down and enjoy the lived experience.
On Wednesday last week I boarded Amtrak’s Southwest Chief at Kansas City Union Station bound for Chicago. This visit to the metropolis of my birth was less for family affairs and instead for business. I spoke on Friday at the Renaissance Society of America’s conference at the Palmer House Hotel about how toucans were seen by sixteenth-century French merchants as economic commodities first and foremost. It was an unusual topic, but one that fluttered enough feathers in the organizers to earn me a travel grant from the RSA and a matching grant from my own History Department back in Binghamton to cover about half of my overall expenses for the trip.
In recent months, as I’ve had this trip and all the other ones planned in 2024 in mind, I’ve found myself growing evermore tired of being in constant contact with people near and far. Our technology allows us to make wonders, and to inspire ourselves to newer and greater heights with those wonders, yet I’ve found myself asking more lately how much we really ought to rely entirely on our technology? Every so often throughout the year I will find myself with a physical book, whether a paperback or a hardcover, that seems appealing, and I’ll stop and read. I used to read constantly.
When I was in elementary school my grandparents gave me their 1979 World Book Encyclopedia set that had gone through several moves with them over the years. That year, feeling the effects of insomnia for the first time that I can remember in my life, I often stayed up late in my room reading these encyclopedia volumes. My parents eventually gave that set away, admittedly now the knowledge contained in them is 45 years out of date, it still showed Jimmy Carter as the sitting President, yet I remain forever grateful for that gift in all its thousands of pages. I can still remember the smell of those books in particular, and the charming and sometimes funny black-and-white pictures they contained.
Later, when I was in middle school I read several large and complex books in a row, including Thomas Kinsella’s translation of the Táin Bó Cúailnge, an Irish epic set 2,000 years ago, and Frank Delaney’s book Ireland: A Novel, which my Dad bought for me at a Hudson’s in O’Hare on the way back from another trip up to Chicago to see family during my eighth grade year. Perhaps the last of these memories of endless hours reading for fun was in preparation for the release of the last Harry Potter book, the Deathly Hallows, when I read the other 6 books in 3 days.
All of this changed when I started high school. I chose St. James Academy for two main reasons: they offered Latin as a foreign language, and they offered MacBooks for all of their students. With easier internet access than ever before and the creation of YouTube around that time, I found myself hooked reading more things online and watching videos. Today, I’m often more likely to open YouTube on my computer during some downtime than I am to pull up a book on my phone. I’ve gone through waves of enjoying reading books on my phone here and there, yet these are again just waves.
I spoke to my friend, Carmelita Bahamonde, who I’ve known now for over a decade since we met as undergraduates at Rockhurst University. She gives up her social media accounts every year for Lent, and now during Holy Week is nearing the end of that technological fast for its 2024 occurrence.
Seán: “I worry that because it’s how I connect with so many people professionally, and cousins in Europe and across the United States, that it’ll minimize how much I’m in touch with them.”
Carmelita: “Yeah, I do, and I do take time off during Lent, yet I take it further, so the longest I’ve gone was to the end of June and start of July. It’s hard to keep that up.”
Seán: “June or July! That’s a long time to keep that up.”
Carmelita: “Yeah, the first time I did it I think I made it through May, and I came back for my Masters, and I decided this was something to come back for.”
So, when I saw that I could afford to purchase roundtrip sleeper tickets on the Southwest Chief for this trip, I jumped at the opportunity to not only enjoy the best that Amtrak’s western services have to offer, but to also enjoy 7 hours of disconnection from my technology. I spent those 7 hours reading Megan Kate Nelson’s book Saving Yellowstone about the first federal expeditions to the Yellowstone Basin, the building of the Northern Pacific Railroad, the decline of the Lakota’s autonomy, and the foundation of Yellowstone National Park. I brought two other books, three magazines, and all the books downloaded on my phone with me on this trip, figuring I’d have a fair bit of time to read. (On the return trip, rather than reading the materials I brought with me I ended up reading a book I bought in Chicago at the Field Museum’s bookstore by Jay Kirk called Kingdom Under Glass: A Tale of Obsession, Adventure, and One Man’s Quest to Preserve the World’s Great Animalsabout Carl Akelely, the first Taxidermist-in-Chief at the Field Museum. I’m going off script here to say how wonderful it is.)
Seán: “And, I know people who have very full and happy and lovely lives and they’re not on social media, so it’s not necessary to be on it. Yet, it seems that’s how people connect nowadays, right?”
Carmelita: “Yeah, though I only post happy, lovely things, even when I’m at my lowest. So, I always see that so and so is travelling, and man I’m falling behind this year. Yet I wonder how much over time they’ve been doing this year that they can do that?”
Beyond even disconnecting to read, I feel a pull towards stepping back a bit from my complete adoption of all of this technology. I see myself looking more at the screens before me than at the world around me. A friend recently pointed me toward a book which considers that the decline in recreational bowling leagues in this country can be tied to an overall decline in a communal spirit and a deconstruction of our bonds of trust, which have contributed to the current sense of mass isolation, fear, and mistrust which have contributed in turn toward our present political paradigm. I haven’t read this book yet, to be clear, yet I see how the premise works. I love coming to conferences like the RSA to experience the community that these events foster. There are people here who I met last Fall at the Sixteenth Century Society Conference in Baltimore or last March at the 2023 RSA in Puerto Rico. I’ve had the opportunity to tell people here how much I appreciate their work, and to talk a bit about my own, to hear the affirmations that I so often miss in my daily life about the actual research I do.
Carmelita: “Yeah, you have both positives and negatives, you get to connect with family and peers who are far away, yet you also can lose yourself in our technology.”
We could certainly meet remotely using our technology to foster connections, yet those bonds would be far less strong than they are now that we’ve met and know some more about each other. Our technology allows us to instantaneously talk with people whole continents and oceans away, even to the astronauts orbiting our planet on the International Space Station. It has allowed us to even communicate with our furthest satellites that have reached far beyond where any human has gone before. Yet those connections are proxies for the real, physical connections we inherently desire by our basic evolutionary biology. I have trouble sometimes overcoming my own shyness in public settings, I certainly felt that at certain points on this trip, at times I’ve found conferences unbearable because I don’t feel up to talking to people I don’t already know, even when I’ve read and enjoyed their work. I do feel I would be more comfortable in these situations if I were less technologically connected and more connected to the human.
Seán: “What are some alternatives to social media that you’ve found useful?”
Carmelita: “I still have [Facebook] Messenger on my phone, so I use that to stay in touch with people. I sent a message this year to my friend in the Netherlands to say ‘Hey, just to let you know I’m taking my yearly break from social media,’ and she said ‘hey, no problem,’ and she’ll continuously text me and send me things, and my parents will show me things on social media if they’re really necessary. The people who, like you, really want to stay in touch will do so, and I really appreciate that.”
Seán: “It speaks to Robin Dunbar, who’s a primatologist and sociologist, who wrote about this idea called Dunbar’s number where there’s this maximum number that a human can have in their social circles, and I think it really speaks to that culling of that number. I’ve probably got 1700 friends on Facebook, and excluding family which is 30-40 people, there might be 10 people who I stay in touch with, and you’re one of them.”
Carmelita: “Yeah, and you are too. And I’ve actually had people reach out to me in the past and say ‘Hey, I haven’t seen anything from you, are you actually alive?’ and I’ll reply, ‘Hey, yeah I’m actually kind of better!'” (laughs)
My roomette on the Southwest Chief on the way up to Chicago.
I admire my friends and family who can give up some of this technology for extended periods of time. There are things to appreciate about the connectedness our technology provides to be sure, I appreciate seeing the social media posts of those who I care most deeply about, yet within that outer circle there are the few who I see on a daily basis, and I wonder how much I really pay attention to them, or them to me, with these screens in front of us all the time?
It strikes me that more often than not, when I’m mindlessly scrolling through YouTube on a given evening at home, I’m often finding the same music as I had the evening before, listening to the same songs or variations of those songs over and over again. Those songs evoke certain emotions for me, emotions tied to dreams and memories both. Yet I ought to really be focused on the people around me, for as much as our creations may have achieved a sense of immortality with their technological life spans far outpacing our own, those whom I love will only be with me for so long.
Carmelita: “It feels like if you didn’t post it, it didn’t happen; and so last year I went on a family trip, and at the end of the year I didn’t have any pictures and it feels like it didn’t happen, so that’s why I appreciate my social media. Yet like you said earlier today, you don’t have to post everything.”
There ought to be a balance between connection and relief, between all our noise and the silence, which is an acquired taste to be sure, yet is beautiful in its own way. I appreciate the assistance that my technology can provide in my work; it is far easier to do my research using PDF copies of these sixteenth-century books than having to rely on quickly written notes made during a rare research trip to a distant library. When I did my first research trip as an undergrad in 2013 to the Library of Congress, I actually took handwritten notes of the books I read. I quickly realized it was far more efficient to take notes by computer, to type things out at 70 words per minute than to write them by hand in my elegant if at times slow cursive script. This has meant that in the 11 years since I’ve found myself writing by hand less and less, even perhaps risking the loss of the art of penmanship, and calligraphy (if I may be bold to call it that).
Seán: “What’s the underlying purpose of posting? Is it self-gratification, is it to say ‘look what I did!’ is it say ‘look at how cool I am,’ or something like that? I always try to think of the underlying reasons for what I do.”
Carmelita: “I once had a friend who asked me why I post everything, and I said ‘well, I wanted to post pictures of this trip,’ and I think it’s a good way to show what I’m doing to more distant family who I haven’t seen in twenty years. I do sometimes wonder, ‘is this for showing off?’ I don’t like to post things that are show-offy. Several years ago, I got a promotion at work and I wanted to post about it but I sat on it for a while and ended up deleting it because I can’t brag, and so it is a double-edged sword, because you don’t want to brag but you should at the same time. It comes down to perspective: who do you want to know about your successes? Graduating from my Masters, I wanted everyone to know, ‘hey, look I worked my butt off!’ but a trip to Disney isn’t something for everyone to see.”
Let me close with this: I could have all the efficiency in the world with my computer and smart watch and smart phone and voice-activation software in my car and my headphones that connect wirelessly to my other devices so I can talk and take notes on my phone at the same time. I can learn so much from watching all the videos anyone has ever made on a subject and imagine wonders I might never otherwise consider with the invention of film, television, and the videos we upload to the internet. Yet none of it is as rewarding or as joyous as seeing a friend smile, and feeling the warmth of our interaction in that one specific moment in which we are living. Perhaps we need a little more of our human nature in our lives after all.
Seán: “Let me ask you one final question and then we’ll get back to lunch here, this meatball sandwich is giving me a look: do you think technology makes us more or less human? If you think about how we originally evolved in our nature as humans, as Homo sapiens, as wise people, as learned people, and yet do our creations diminish our base humanity if we’re too focused on them?”
Carmelita: “I think it depends on what you post on social media and if you’re fake about them. We talk about influencers who post amazing photos but are broke because of it, then it’s not worth it. Social media allows us to stay connected, and that’s a wonderful thing. So, as long as you’re being true to yourself then that’s the key.”
Seán: “Excellent, I like the connection between philosophy and real life there.”
This week, in honor of Bloomsday, how reading Joyce helped prepare me for my doctorate.
—
Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
Last Friday was the annual commemoration of Bloomsday. 16 June 1904 was the date when all of the action in James Joyce’s 1922 episodic novel Ulysses takes place. Bloomsday is named for the main character, the sometimes hapless Leopold Bloom who fits perfectly into the wider scope of Irish main characters who may want things to go one way but often find their life taking ever weirder and sometimes darker turns. It reminds me of An Béal Bocht.
I’ll fully admit, I’ve never read Ulysses through the entire way before. I’ve seen the stage adaptation that they used to put on that the Irish Center of Kansas City a handful of times and have participated here and there in the day-long reading of Ulysses at the same cultural center, but to date I’ve never actually sat down and tried to read this work from cover to cover. For one thing, Ulysses evades expectations of literary formalities and standards. For another, a fair bit of the text really only makes sense when read aloud. And finally, because of several scenes it was banned here in the United States for a while, a nod to the puritan roots of our American culture.
So, on Friday I went over to Rainy Day Books, the finest local bookstore I’ve stepped foot in, located just across the border in Fairway, Kansas, to buy a copy of Ulysses for myself. My goal on Friday was to record an Instagram reel of me reading my favorite passage from the novel, a scene with an ever increasingly ridiculous list of foreign dignitaries attending the Ascot Gold Cup, which took place on the same day as the story at large. Yet, the eccentricity of Ulysses befuddled me enough that I ended up choosing a different passage from Part II’s Episode 12, “Cyclops” in which an ancient hero wearing a leather belt adorned with the portraits of a series of Irish heroes is described. Again, this series of Irish heroes steadily becomes more ridiculous as it goes on. As a matter of fact, I’ll read this passage for you now:
Joyce’s Ulysses makes far more sense when read aloud than if read silently, a style of reading that was pioneered in the 5th century CE by none other than St. Augustine of Hippo no less. It’s a far older style of literature that way, something which gives it an air of antiquity that I for one appreciate a great deal. This is also something that I find regular among my primary sources for my dissertation, books which were written for a very different audience who lived 450 years ago in France. In my case, I often find reading those aloud gives me the greatest clarity of what they’re actually trying to say. My translation of André Thevet’s 1557 book The Singularities of France Antarctique is one such book that is best read in full voice, and I have a feeling when I go through and edit my translation that I’ll have to soften some of the eccentricities of my initial interpretation of Thevet’s text, or at least that’s what I’ve been finding as I incorporate it into my dissertation.I find Joyce’s writing daunting, a proper challenge, yet still something that is immensely relatable to my own way of thinking about writing. I love his fluid use of adjectives to describe his characters, they bring even the most marginal of figures to life in a way that echoes down the last century to the present moment. Now, 119 years after Leopold Bloom’s eventful day in Dublin, and 101 years after Joyce’s first edition was published in one volume under the title of Ulysses, there’s a connection to that story which continues to live on for me.
Season 2 Finale: This week, the conclusion of "Ghosts in the Wind" as Dr. Olivia Stephens and her team make a groundbreaking discovery on Mars.
—
Click here to support the "Wednesday Blog": https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
The Peregrine spent the two hour flight out to the source abuzz with active anticipation. The crew of four knew how much was riding on the results of this journey. Olivia kept her eyes on the monitor that showed their distance from the source, worried that everything she’d staked her career on was about to go up in a great cloud of dust like the carbon traces she’d chased all the way from Earth. “Still, something’s out there,” she kept thinking, “Something’s out there.”
“We’re approaching the source,” Anneli announced to the crew, “Prepare for landing.”
Every urge in her body wanted to make Olivia jump from her seat and go stand behind Anneli as they landed but she knew that wasn’t safe for any of them. Instead, she stayed in her place and buckled up. This time they boarded the Peregrine in their E.V. suits and as they approached the landing coordinates they merely needed to lock and seal their helmets. All four dutifully did so after one last lecture from Lieutenant Commander Quillen about how this mission would be closely watched by every allied space agency back on Earth and so needed to be conducted in the best manner possible. Olivia looked across the way at her fellow scientists Dr. Rosalind O’Brien the chemist and sometimes geologist, and Dr. Viola Penelope, M.D., whose medical knowledge was backed up by enough biology expertise to keep all the Elysians occupying the base alive and well enough to complete their missions and return home to Earth when their time came. Both were as determined as Olivia to see this mission through, whatever the outcome, and if possible, to prove conclusively that there had once been life on Mars.
Anneli and Jo sat at the front of the shuttle, the Finn at the helm and the American in the co-pilot’s seat monitoring the shuttle’s engines and structural integrity. The Martian weather had begun to change again, ever fickle as it was, to which end neither they nor the meteorologists in Elysium or back on Earth could determine yet. Jo earned a scolding stare from Quillen when she quipped that the forecast of “it could either be the biggest dust storm we’ve ever experienced or nothing at all,” was “just like our daily forecast in Kansas City.” Durante laughed at that, as did Viola, Jim, Anneli, and Olivia. The engineer’s shrugging can-do attitude was what Olivia appreciated most about her. Jo McGonigle knew weird things could happen at any moment that would throw a mission right off track, but she was ready for whatever nature, humanity, or technology threw at her.
Olivia soon felt the landing gears descend and make contact with the ground below. “Elysium, this is Peregrine, we have landed at the source of the dust storm. Proceeding to disembark and collect further samples,” Anneli said into her radio.
“Peregrine, this is Elysium, you are cleared to egress,” came the call back from base.
“Jim’s voice” Olivia thought.
Olivia and the team unbuckled themselves and stood from their seats, making their clumsy way to the rear of the shuttle where a ramp lowered that led them out to the surface. Olivia led the way as usual, after all she was in command of this mission. Anneli was the most qualified security officer, but she also was needed to fly the Peregrine back to base if anything happened to them. So, Olivia was the one who led them outside.
The first thing she noticed was the haze that glowed over the sunshine, blocking some of the light that would’ve been helpful in closely analyzing anything on the surface that matched the carbon traces they were looking for. Rosalind and Viola shortly followed Olivia down the ramp, while Jo and Anneli stayed aboard, monitoring the on-board sensors and keeping things ready for launch should any of that ever-considered trouble arise. Olivia pulled out her tablet and began following the carbon sensor forward and to the left, turning to pass the shuttle until the three scientists were visible to Anneli and Jo from the forward windows. They continued walking for another 200 meters until the sensor stopped calling for forward motion.
Olivia & Rosalind walking on the surface in Terra Cimmeria.
Olivia took in a deep breath and looked down at the rocks below her. There wasn’t too much sand that she was slowed down by it, it wasn’t as though she were walking on a beach, the sand covering her feet. Instead, she found just enough that she began to try to move some away as she took steps about. The sensor in her tablet clearly showed the carbon was right below her. She turned to Rosalind, “Do you have the brush?”
“Yes,” came the reply over their comms. Rosalind was carrying a bag of tools. She set it on the ground half-a-meter away from Olivia and pulled out a paleontologist’s brush, “Here it is, Olivia.”
“Thanks,” she replied, taking the brush in her gloved left hand, and letting herself kneel down onto the ground, a challenging task in her E.V. suit, yet something she’d practiced enough times in Houston, on the Moon, and here on Mars that it wasn’t as much of a challenge as she still expected it to be. Olivia began brushing around where the carbon sensor was beeping and began to see more of the dust move.
“Are you seeing anything?” Viola asked, leaning to get a better look.
“Careful, you’re blocking my light,” Olivia replied. Viola stepped away and around, so she wasn’t eclipsing the Sun.
“There’s something there,” Rosalind peered from the side opposite Viola, on her knees as well next to Olivia.
Olivia kept brushing away as the rockface began to reveal itself further and further. At first, she thought she saw the impression of some ancient water or water ice reveal itself with a spindly impression, but that later gave way to something more defined, for there wasn’t just one spindle but several that kept growing in number. “They’re connected together!” she shouted through the comms, “Look at this! There’s some sort of a central core to it!” She seemed to have uncovered the entirety of the rock’s surface and saw what looked like something, though frankly she wasn’t sure what she was seeing yet at all. “What would you call it, Viola?” Olivia asked.
“Well, it looks like a complex structure, um, those could be the branches or spines of a plant, or they could be the limbs of an animal coming off of its main body, like some sort of arthropod.”
The fossil
“What do you think, Rosalind?”
“I’ve never seen anything like it, I just don’t know what it could be.”
“Olivia, you better get your samples and pictures as quickly as you can, that haze is a dust storm after all. This whole place is going to be flooded soon,” Jo said over the comms from the Peregrine.
“How long do we have?” Olivia asked.
“An hour at best before it hits us, but that’s as long as the wind doesn’t pick up any further to the east.”
“Got it, we’ll get what we need and be out of here,” Olivia said. She turned to Rosalind and Viola, “Okay, can we get an etching of this?”
“Not in this wind,” Rosalind replied.
Olivia turned to the northeast and noticed the wind was picking the dust up more than it had just a minute before. If she couldn’t get an etching to study, then she’d have to get a few pictures. She pulled out her camera and began snapping, but no sooner had she extracted the device then the dust began to get into the camera and damage its gears. She knew she should’ve left this camera back in the lab, but it was a gift from her father, a hobbyist with old analog film cameras. She thought he’d be so proud to know the first photograph of an alien lifeform was taken with his camera. She put it back in its bag and turned to Rosalind, “Give me a shovel, we’re taking this fossil with us.”
“Understood, Doctor.” Rosalind turned back to the bag and grabbed the shovel out of it, unfolding it and letting some of the dust fall away from it as she did so. She handed the shovel to Olivia who set it on the ground next to her and began to brush away more dust to reveal any seams that might show her where this fossil finished, and the other rocks began. She just noticed a crack when Anneli’s voice sounded over the comm, “I need to start the engines if we’re going to keep them dust free enough to take off.”
“Understood, we’ll be back on board in just a minute,” Olivia said as she began to work at that crack with the shovel. The fossil began to slowly pry away from the other rocks and Olivia removed the shovel from one side turning it towards the far side of the fossil, trying her best to force it free. It began to move, but the cracks started to creep closer to the thing encased inside of it, too close for anyone’s liking. “Go back to the first side and see if you can get underneath it,” Rosalind hurriedly suggested. Olivia obliged, returning to the first side. She was able to get the lip of the shovel underneath the rock and slowly, gently, over what seemed to everyone involved on the ground and in the Peregrine to be well over an hour yet what was merely five minutes free the fossil from the rockface.
Olivia held the fossil up in the Martian air, gently placing her gloved hands beneath it. She turned to Viola, “place the bag around my hands.” Viola obliged with a carefully handled thick plastic bag, which was then placed into a rectangular box big enough for the fossil to fit into. “Okay, Peregrine, we’re coming back in,” Olivia said, as she held the fossil gently ahead of her, “like a pizza box” she thought, catching herself laughing.
“What’s so funny?” Viola asked walking beside her.
“We put the first evidence of Martian life into a glorified carry-out box,” Olivia replied. The three scientists stopped at the foot of the Peregrine‘s ramp and laughed, looking at each other.
Viola put her hand on Olivia’s arm and leaned in with her belly laugh before Rosalind shouted, “No, stop! You could damage it!”
Viola stood upright, looking down at the box in Olivia’s hands, “Sorry,” she said, looking up into Rosalind’s eyes, a big smile on her face, “Let’s get this thing back to base.”
They ascended the ramp, which quickly closed behind them. Olivia took her seat first, “Viola, could you buckle me up? I’m not putting this box down until we get back to the lab.”
“You’ve got it,” came the reply as Viola gently moved the seat belts around Olivia’s outstretched arms and buckled her in. She returned to her seat across the shuttle and sat, buckling herself next to Rosalind who was already ready to go. “Alright, Anneli, get us out of here!”
“Elysium, this is the Peregrine, we’re ready for launch and on our way back,” Anneli called out over the comms.
“Get in the air now, Captain, you’re almost out of time, that wind is really picking up out there!” Jim shouted over the comms.
Anneli engaged the vertical thrusters, and the Peregrine took flight, turning in a gentle but assertive arc and heading back towards Elysium.
“Can we outrun the storm?” Olivia asked.
“At our usual speed, no,” Jo said, “but I’ve got our fuel efficiency up to 105%, which should get us into the shuttle bay just in time before the storm hits Elysium.”
The Peregrine raced ahead, far and fast, making the return trip 30 minutes quicker than usual and landing into Shuttle Bay 1 with a minute to spare before the dust hit the bay doors that closed as soon as the Peregrine was clear.
Olivia waited for the pressurization light to turn green and she nodded to Viola whose hands went to the locks on her helmet, “No, I need to get this to the lab, just unbuckle me.” Olivia commanded, a rare order from her that Viola followed without question. Now released, Olivia ran out of the Peregrine, her crew following after her and towards the shuttle bay doors where Durante, Quillen, and Jim were waiting. “Move, move!” Olivia shouted, running straight for the doors which glided open upon sensing her presence. The command crew stood aside as she passed, still in her E.V. suit. “Follow me to the science lab!” she shouted as she turned left and headed around the circle quicker than she’d ever moved before in that suit. Some residents were in the corridor as she passed, quickly moving out of the way to let the sudden appearance of the suited astrobiologist through. She turned left at her lab’s door and ran in, setting the box down on the center table and stepping back, unlocking, and removing her helmet, gloves, and then reaching back to press the button that would unzip the rest of her suit. It fell to her feet revealing her jumpsuit as Durante, Quillen, Jim, Anneli, Jo, Viola, and Rosalind entered the room together, the Peregrine crew out of breath for their own E.V. suit run. “Lock the door behind you, Rosalind,” Olivia gave one more command, she hoped it’d be her last of the day. The lock sounded.
Olivia’s Lab
“Okay, Doctor, what’ve you got?” Durante asked.
“Something.”
“Something?” Quillen asked, eyebrow raised.
“Yeah, something,” Olivia said, taking the lid from the box and pulling the bag out of it, placing it gently on the desk. “I’m just not sure what that something is yet.”
Durante looked down at the fossil that lay on the desk, the soft light glowing from underneath the opaque surface gave the fossil a sort of sanitized feel, like something brought in from out in the open for the first time. “Do you have pictures of it where you found it?” he asked.
“Yes, I need to get them developed, but I got a few,” Olivia replied.
“Developed?” Jim asked.
“Yeah, I decided to take my Dad’s old camera out there with me, take some film pictures of it.”
“Did you use flash?” Jo asked.
“Of course not, that would’ve damaged the fossil.”
“So, it’s a fossil, then?” Quillen puzzled over it, a look of genuine curiosity crossing her face.
“It seems to be one. I need to do more work on it. Can we talk about this with command in the morning?” Olivia asked, “There will be silence from this lab to everyone from here until I’ve got your go-ahead.”
“You do your research, figure out what this is in two hours. I want an answer by 14:00. You got back fast enough we might be able to send something back to Earth about this once the storm passes,” Durante said, “Good luck!” he turned, taking one last look at the fossil, and heading out the door.
Quillen followed, but Jim held back for another moment staring down at the fossil before him. “You did it, Olivia, you found the proof!” he looked up at her, eyes watery, a glowing smile on his face.
“Thanks, Jim,” she was still shocked at the moment she found herself in and so couldn’t say more. He turned and left, letting the door close behind him.
Silence filled the room as Anneli, Jo, Rosalind, and Viola walked up to the table from each side and looked down at it. “Things were moving so fast down there on the surface it feels like we haven’t been introduced yet,” Viola said.
“Well, before it really introduces itself, we need to figure out what it is,” Rosalind replied.
“Any initial thoughts?” Olivia asked.
“Well, let’s get a digital photo of it and put that into a search engine, see what comes up,” Jo suggested.
Olivia turned to her fallen E.V. suit and pulled the tablet out of its pocket, aiming it above the fossil and snapping a photo of the rock below. “Running a search on the image now,” she announced. Several suggestions came up, but one seemed closest to this in the fossil record, “has anyone ever heard of Hallucigenia?” she asked.
“That’s a sort of worm from the Cambrian Period, right?”
“The what?” Jo asked.
“The Cambrian Period was the first period of the current eon in Earth’s geologic history. I think it started around 530 million years ago and ended 485 million years ago,” Olivia replied.
“Close, it started 538 million years ago,” Rosalind corrected.
“Thanks,” Olivia nodded to her colleague.
“So, you’re saying this fossil resembles that Hallucigenia that existed on Earth over 400 million years ago?” Viola asked.
“Yes, though I doubt it’s necessarily related, after all life on Earth had 4 billion years to evolve after planetary formation. Life on Mars would’ve already been well and truly extinct by then. The Martian Noachian Period corresponds to Earth’s Hadean and Archean Eons, which ended 1.9 billion years before the Cambrian Period began,” Rosalind explained.
“So, not only is this the first alien life ever discovered,” Olivia began, “it’s also the oldest lifeform ever discovered.”
“What have we done?” Viola asked.
“We’ve changed how we understand the very nature of life itself,” Anneli said, looking down at the fossil, “there are so many things we don’t know that could still be out there.”
“We need to go back out there, to search further, see what more we can find!” Olivia shot back, the excitement was all-consuming. She hurried over to her E.V. suit on the floor and took the camera case from its belt, pulling out her father’s old film camera from within and raising it to her eye, opening the shutter and snapping a photograph of the fossil.
Jo looked up at Olivia who stood there staring at the fossil, camera absent mindedly being fiddled with in her hands, “You got it, the photo. That could be the one on the front page of every newspaper, every television station, every news site on Earth.”
“I, I don’t know what to say, what to do,” Olivia stammered, she felt her confidence drain away, “could it really be possible? Is this really an alien?” She looked down at her feet, “what do we need to do to confirm that this fossil is real, Dr. O’Brien?”
“If we can date the carbon molecules then that’ll be a start, but radiocarbon dating has rarely been used on fossils that predate the end of the Cretaceous 66 million years ago, so I don’t know if it’d work.”
“What else?” Olivia asked sharply. When no answer came, she added, “We need options to prove that this is a genuine Martian fossil.”
Rosalind spoke up again, “Well, Martian geology is dated using impact crater density, so what we can say for sure is the area where we found this fossil, Terra Cimmeria, has more impact craters than other areas. There’ve been geological charts of Mars that show that area’s rocks are definitely Noachian in origin for almost eighty years now, so we have proof that the rocks in that area date to the Noachian.”
“I think we need to go back out there and find another fossil to confirm this theory.”
“That dust storm will have covered the entire source area in meters of debris by the time it’s safe to go back out there,” Viola sighed.
“Then we need to try radiometric dating, though we don’t have that equipment here at Elysium,” Rosalind offered with some reluctance.
“So, in order to prove it we need to contact people on the outside, but in order to get clearance to contact people on the outside we need definitive proof first,” Olivia said, tapping her left index finger to her lips, her thumb and middle fingers resting on her chin as she paced about the lab. “Rosalind, what can you do in your own lab here at Elysium?”
“I can try radiocarbon dating a small piece of the rock around the fossil, though I don’t know what we’ll find. Most carbon is hard to date after the lifeform has been deceased for around 60,000 years.”
“Do it, go get your tools and collect your sample. We need something more to show to command at 14:00.”
“I’ll go get that drill now,” Rosalind replied, turning, and running out the lab door. Her own lab was two doors down still in the Science Section, but she nevertheless felt a strong sense of urgency, after all everyone’s careers hung on this discovery. Collecting a dental drill that she used on rocks she returned to the fossil and began working, taking a small sliver of the rock edge off, and letting it fall into a vial that Olivia had provided. The extraction done she turned back to the corridor and returned to her lab, extracting the sample with a pair of tweezers, and putting it onto a petri dish, into which she released several drops of a liquid scintillator which combined with the carbon to convert it to benzene, drawing out the carbon-14 from the sample which she could then attempt to date.
After an hour Rosalind returned to Olivia’s lab. Jo was looking at some of Olivia’s equipment, no doubt trying to increase its efficiency and range, while Anneli sat by the door, unsure of how she, their pilot, could help. Rosalind and Olivia were sitting at her desk analyzing pictures and negatives they’d taken of the fossil intently. Rosalind announced her presence by clearing her throat, then saying “I’m sorry, the carbon is too old to date using radiocarbon dating.”
Olivia turned from the monitor and looked at the fossil from across the room, the weariness of the whole experience showed on her face. “Okay, if that’s what we have to do then let’s go to Command and tell them.” She rose and walked over to the door. “Rosalind, Viola, could you come with me?” The scientists obliged, Viola joined Olivia and Rosalind at the door. Olivia turned to Anneli and Jo, “The rest of you, please stay here with the fossil. Let no one but us into this room, understood?”
“Understood,” Anneli said, finding a purpose for her at this stage in the mission. She would guard the fossil, the only known evidence of life from another planet from the rest of Elysium Base until Olivia returned with a decision about its next steps.
Olivia walked with Rosalind and Viola into the Command Console and approached Quillen, “We have results we need to share with Commander Durante.”
“You’re thirty minutes early,” Quillen replied, looking Olivia in the eye. The two women were the same height and shared a common determination to see their missions through.
“It’s urgent, Commander,” Olivia said with all the strength her tired voice could muster.
Quillen turned, waving them forward, “This way.” She led the trio into Durante’s office where he sat reading something on his monitor that made him frown.
Durante looked up, leaning forward in anticipation, “Dr. Stephens, what have you found?”
“Commander, the fossil is too old to be accurately dated with the equipment that Dr. O’Brien has here at Elysium, but based on the geological dating of the surrounding area where it was found in Terra Cimmeria, we argue that it is in fact a Noachian fossil and is at least 3.7 billion years old.”
“That’s something at least then,” Durante replied, leaning back in his seat. “Dr. O’Brien, your radiocarbon dating didn’t work?”
“No, sir. Radiocarbon dating is less accurate if a sample is more than 60,000 years old. The time scale is off the charts, this fossil is too old to be dated using that method. However, radiometric dating will be more accurate, and is far more likely to confirm the age of the fossil. If it is Noachian then it could be contemporaneous with the earliest known life yet found on Earth, which dates to the Archean Eon, but those are microorganisms that are dwarfed by the complexity of this fossil.”
“So, Martian life was more evolved than Earth life?” Quillen asked.
“Is that genuine curiosity I’m hearing, Quillen?” Durante asked, looking up at where she stood to his right.
“Skeptical curiosity. Martian geological chronology isn’t as defined as Earth’s. We still just don’t know enough about how old the rocks on this planet are, thanks to this same problem that O’Brien is bringing up.”
“Then what do you want to do about this fossil, Dr. Stephens?”
“Sir, we need to take it back to Earth to have it radiometrically dated. It can stay in an allied government lab under tight security. We don’t have to announce why one of my team is going home early, whoever it is will have a sudden need to return––”
“They’re too ill to remain on Mars, perhaps?” Viola suggested.
“Yes, and they need to return for better medical care. The work on the fossil will take whoever goes back out of the public eye for long enough to recover before the news breaks back home.”
“Finally, you’re thinking less like a scientist and more like a strategist, Stephens,” Durante said, leaning further back in his chair and putting his hands behind his head. “Alright, it’s your fossil, so you’re the one going home. The Australians are going back in four months. I’ll alert Jack Collins, their mission commander, that you’re coming along for the ride.”
“Jo will be on that flight too,” Olivia said, smiling at the thought of getting a ride home with her friend from Opportunity III.
“Jo?” Durante asked, “Oh, yes McGonigle, the JPL Engineer. Yeah, that works out pretty nicely, doesn’t it.”
“It’s settled then,” Quillen said, “I’ll adjust your mission parameters and put you on the Endeavour heading home.”
“Thank you, Commander. This discovery means the world to me,” Olivia smiled meekly, her energy restored however slightly by the commander’s decision to let her return to Earth with the fossil.
“Go to your team, Doctor,” Durante said gently, “And give them a well-earned rest. In the meantime, we need to keep that fossil in your lab with limited access. I’ll have McGonigle install added security measures so only your team will have badge access to the lab. No one goes in or out without your approval, and that includes command staff.”
“Thank you, sir,” Olivia replied, nodding, and turning to walk out of the Command Console. Jim was standing at his station, waiting expectantly to hear what she had to say. She turned to him as she walked past and whispered, “I’m taking it home.”
~
That evening in their quarters Olivia lay back in her bunk while Viola, Rosalind, and Jo chatted away about everything they’d discovered. By this point word of the fossil had spread throughout the base, no secret was safe in a place so small as Elysium anyway, that Commander Durante had to make an announcement over the P.A. system to everyone there that Olivia’s lab would only be accessible to her team, and everyone else was to stay clear of it. He posted several security officers in four shifts outside her lab, day & night. She’d get used to the idea of having a guard standing outside. Still, she found herself drifting off to sleep, the stress and weariness of it all had worn her down more than usual. It really had been a long day. Yet one thing that Viola said from across the way in her bunk caught her attention just enough for her to open her eyes and listen, “Olivia’s going to be famous though, I mean we all are, but she’s the one who came all this way to look for it, who tracked it down, and who found it. The first alien life we’ve ever known! When she announces the results, she’ll be on TV, in books, the whole nine yards!”
“Maybe,” Olivia said, pulling back her bunk’s curtain just enough to see Viola’s face, “But at the end of the day I’m still just a scientist. I don’t care for the fame, hell, I don’t even think I want it. I came here to prove a theory, and so far, it’s still just a theory. Who knows whether we’ll be able to radiometrically date it. No one’s ever tried that on a Martian rock before.”
“It’s still a new frontier, Olivia. Something to be proud of.”
Olivia thought of her brother’s kids, going to school telling their friends that their aunt the astronaut had actually found an alien on Mars. Well, a dead alien, but an alien, nonetheless. She smiled, closed her eyes, and drifted off to a much earned sleep. The rocky ground of Terra Cimmeria filled her imagination, and she saw it begin to turn back in time, to fill with liquid water, until she herself was submerged beneath the waves. Then there before her the fossil broke free of the rock into which its remains had been encased billions of years before and began to swim about in the waters of this its prehistoric ocean home. She had found it, had traced a ghost on the wind and found its grave on this rocky planet six months from home.
This week, the story continues as Dr. Olivia Stephens settles down on Mars with her colleagues at Elysium Base, making new friends and continuing her search for evidence of past Martian life.
—
Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
All images included in this story were produced using DALL-E 2, an Open AI service.
Act 3
“Hi Mom, Dad, Seb, I’m on Mars!” Olivia said to the camera in her new office in the science lab of Elysium Base. She had set herself up with a base computer as soon as she cleared the initial arrival medical scans and began recording a message home. By now the half an hour communication lag had passed and surely her parents as well as everyone else on Earth would’ve had the chance to see the images of their landing and to hear her own celebratory cry over the comms. Olivia blushed thinking about it, “Neil Armstrong had his ‘It’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind’ when he first set foot on the Moon almost 90 years ago, and now Dr. Olivia Stephens, Canada’s leading astrobiologist greets Mars with a chipper ‘I made it!'”
Olivia looked at the monitor and imagined her parents receiving the message, their faces glowing with joy. “Mars is quite a different place,” she continued, turning to look out the window of the science lab. The vista was filled with a clear sky and red soil as far as the eye could see. In the distance Elysium Mons rose majestically over the plains surrounding it. “You should see the big mountain here,” Olivia said to the monitor, “Elysium Mons is bigger than anything we’ve got on Earth by a long shot. There are something things about being out here that you just can’t believe until you’ve arrived, and seeing a 12,600 meter tall volcano is one of them. Imagine it on Earth, it would dwarf Mount Everest, and yet it’s just outside my office!”
The monitor chimed at her, her personal calendar reminding her of an appointment she had with the base commander. “I need to go,” she said, looking hurriedly at the screen, “I love you all so much! And I can’t wait to see you here on the screen soon. Bye!” she ended the recording and sent it out, beginning its half-hour journey through Space back to Earth, where it would be picked up and forwarded onto her parents in Toronto. She looked at the digital clock on her desk, it was just after noon there at Elysium Base and just after 13:30 back in Toronto. She hoped she wouldn’t confuse her own local EPT for Elysium Planitia Time with her native EST for Eastern Standard Time for however long she ended up staying there on Mars.
She was due in the command center for an arrival briefing, scheduled to start then at exactly noon local time, meaning she was late for her first assignment on Mars. “Great!” she thought, moving away from her desk and rushing to the lab door. Elysium Base was one of a newer generation of Martian bases that had such refinements as automatic sliding doors, like the ones all of its residents had known from science fiction, so it was a tad disconcerting for Olivia at first getting used to not having to open the door she was passing through, yet so far she hadn’t run into a less cooperative one. The corridor beyond the lab was angled slightly, connecting the disparate labs, offices, mess halls, and quarters throughout the modular base. Each piece of Elysium Base had been brought separately from Earth, and while most of it was 3-D printed there on site, several pieces retained older building styles that saw their components brought piece by piece from Earth and reassembled here on Mars. She figured that command wouldn’t be too difficult to find, after all it was in the center of Elysium, an octagonal structure that had been the first to appear on the Martian surface twenty years before. Still, she knew she had to walk a ways around the exterior ring corridor before she’d reach a tube that would take her in towards command.
Each module she passed had its own particular function. Beyond her own astrobiology lab were laboratories devoted to geology, climatology, chemistry, and stellar cartography. The science section was then on the outside of Elysium, along the northeastern quadrant of the base with imposing vistas of Elysium Mons out their windows. The location of Elysium Base was chosen in the late 2020s and early 2030s because it had been the landing site of the earlier InSight Rover that arrived on Mars on 26 November 2018 and thus NASA knew what to expect of the local geography and environment. Walking along the interior tube made of metal with glass windows she could see the other portions of the base proceed closer and closer together until they all converged on the panopticon that was the Command Console. At her arrival there were forty people living and working at Elysium Base, each from a four-person crew that had launched from Earth at some point in the last five years. With the arrival of Olivia’s Opportunity III the European crew of Metis Vwould be returning home. Olivia had read through the schedule of her first day on planet, this briefing would serve as the base commander’s welcome to Jim, Anneli, Jo, and her, and that evening’s dinner would mark the farewell of the Metis V crew, commanded by Isabella de Orellana, the Spanish astronaut who made history by being one of the first to take a crew in a Mars buggy around Elysium Mons and into Utopia Planitia looking for a way to easily mine into the surface to reach that region’s underground ice. Reaching the command module’s doors she stopped herself from striding through as she had every other doorway, this being the command module after all. Instead, she pressed the button next to the door that sounded a chime.
“Somebody’s ringing the bell,” she could hear an incredulous voice say from behind the door. It opened and an officer from the command staff stood there with an eyebrow raised at the situation. “Can I help you?”
“I’m Dr. Stephens, here for the command briefing,” Olivia said somewhat sheepishly, realizing she didn’t need to ask permission to enter.
“You’re the new scientist from Opportunity III, right?”
“Yes.”
“This way,” the officer turned and began walking back into the central operations ring, a series of stations surrounding a central table that had a digital map of Mars on it. Olivia caught the snickering glances of the command crew surrounding her, at their stations, all bemused at the idea that she thought she needed to ask permission to enter, something no one with scheduled permission ever did. “Your crew is meeting with Commander Durante in his office,” the officer gestured towards the glass-walled room on the far side of the command console, slightly elevated from the rest of the module. “You might want to chime here though,” she laughed, watching as Olivia cautiously approached the commander’s office where she could see Jim, Anneli, and Jo sitting with a gray haired man behind a desk. The commander looked up, caught Olivia’s eye, and gestured for her to enter.
“You must be Dr. Olivia Stephens!” he burst with joy, standing to greet her as she entered through the sliding doors, “Welcome to Elysium Base. Please, take a seat, we were just getting to know each other a little better.”
Commander Nick Durante
“Olivia,” Jim said, looking towards the new arrival as she took her seat next to Jo, “let me introduce Nick Durante of NASA, the current Commander of Elysium Base.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Olivia said, nodding as she sat, smiling with relief at the warm welcome.
“I heard about your work on microbes in water ice, promising stuff,” Commander Durante said taking his seat again while turned toward Olivia.
“My colleagues back on Earth think they might have a breakthrough in that area soon.”
“So now you’re moving from water ice to dust, you really think there might be something out there?” he asked, his hands raised, fingers forming a triangle. His index fingers rose to meet his upper lip.
“I’m not sure what I’ll find if anything, Commander, but I guarantee you I won’t give up until I’ve exhausted all of my options.”
“Well, you’ve got three years here to try every trick you can think of.” Durante turned from Olivia to Jim who sat furthest to the left, “Jim, you’ll be taking over for me next year once my mission is over, I’m not sure what I think about a Space Force man taking over from a sailor like me, but I want to have you here in the command console learning the ropes of running this base. Captain Korhonen will shadow my security chief, Lieutenant Barras, until his tour out here is up in a year.”
“Understood,” Anneli replied.
“I think I can do this job,” Jim looked around Durante’s office, “about as well as any Navy man can.”
Durante laughed, “Yeah. Now, as for our engineer, Ms. McGonigle, your mission is likely going to be shorter than anyone else’s from Opportunity III. You’re here to repair the Odyssey Rover, get it back up and running, perhaps even improve its efficiency, and that’s it. Any suggestions you have for the improvement of this base would also be welcome, just say the word. You’re the first rover engineer we’ve had up here, which is honestly surprising.”
Colonel Jim King
“I’m honored, Commander, to be here and ready to work,” Jo said, beaming with excitement.
“Have you worked in a spacesuit before?” Durante asked.
“I ran some drills back at JPL and at Johnson when we did our orientation,” Jo replied. Olivia remembered that orientation, Jo did a fair job maneuvering in her bulky spacesuit, though she still found it difficult to lay down on her back and crawl under the rover safely without someone standing there to help her down, let alone get back up again afterwards. “But it’ll be different here with the Martian gravity,” she continued confidently, “so I want to run a few more drills before I get to work to make sure I can fix the rover with minimal assistance.”
“Good on you,” Durante smiled, “but remember no one goes beyond the base’s walls alone. We don’t need any one person going missing out there without any trace of where they’ve gone. Their footprints could well disappear with that wind, as Dr. Stephens here knows all too well, so even if you alone fix Odyssey, you’ll have another engineer there with you to help.”
“Okay,” Jo replied feeling somewhat bruised, “but I need to review the person who’s going out with me, see if they can do the job.”
“You have a week to review the other engineers’ records, but you’re going out there next Friday,” Durante looked at his monitor, “the 28th.”
“Understood,” Jo affirmed, “I’ll be ready.”
“Alright, well, you have your missions to complete. Good luck, and please don’t hesitate to call if you need to. I’ll probably see you in the mess,” Durante ended the briefing, rising from his chair with the four sitting on the opposite side of his desk. They turned and filed out the sliding doors and into the command console’s central room again.
“Colonel King,” the officer who led Olivia into command approached the four, “I’m Lieutenant Commander Quillen, Commander Durante’s executive officer, if you’ll follow me, I’ll take you to your station. Same goes for you, Captain Korhonen.”
Lieutenant Commander Quillen
The two followed Quillen as she led them around the command console. Olivia noticed Anneli stopping at a station occupied by a dark-haired man wearing French and European flags on his shoulder, Lieutenant Barras, before Jim found his place at Quillen’s station at the center table overseeing the operations of the entire base.
“I think that just leaves us,” Jo said meekly, standing beside Olivia outside Durante’s office door. “Have you been to your quarters yet?”
“No, I went straight to my lab to send a message home.”
“Come on, I’ll show you where we’re sleeping,” Jo said, leading Olivia out a door adjacent to the one she entered through. They left command and walked down a corridor that extended at a 45 degree angle out from the one that led to the science section. “Crew quarters are located along the northern perimeter of the base. They’ve got us as neighbors. I think your bunk is below mine.”
“Sounds good,” Olivia replied, “I was worried I’d have to get to know an entirely new neighbor after six months.”
Jo laughed, “It’s interesting being here now. With all the changes coming to the Mars programs and Elysium Base I hear they’re considering offering crew quarters that are proper rooms, not just bunks along the corridor.”
Olivia knew about the bunks; it’d be like her time on the Moon. If there was anything she really missed while she was up there it was the privacy of her own room. She had that here, but in her lab rather than in her bunk, but at least she had a place where she could get away from everyone else. “So, with Jim & Anneli staying behind does this mean that Opportunity III‘s mission is over? After all, it got us here.”
Jo looked into Olivia’s eyes, “I guess so. We can still wear our Opportunity III patches on the station, but I’m going back with the Australians in six months, so I suppose we’re just Elysians now.”
“Elysians, what a fine field we’re in here. Do you think Achilles would approve?”
“I mean, what better place for a great warrior than on Mars?” Jo offered.
“It’s no garden of paradise, that’s for sure.”
They left the arterial corridor and entered the perimeter corridor, turning right and finding a series of bunks built into the walls of the passage, two levels on each side. The names of the occupants could be found by each bunk. “They were ready for us when we got here,” Jo said, leading Olivia two-thirds of the way down the corridor to a set of bunks that seemed less lived in than the others. “Here we are!”
Olivia looked at the bottom bunk and saw her name, “Olivia Stephens, Ph.D., C.S.A.” written on a sign next to it. Above it was Jo’s bunk, labeled “Josephine McGonigle, M.S., J.P.L.” She looked across the corridor for their neighbors and saw two unfamiliar names “Viola Penelope, M.D., N.A.S.A” in the top bunk and “Rosalind O’Brien, Ph.D., E.S.A.” in the lower bunk. Out of the top a voice suddenly called out, “Jo McGonigle, is that you?!”
Jo and Olivia turned to see a rosy face beaming with joy poking out from the drawn curtains of the bunk. “Viola!”
Viola rose from her bunk still in her pajamas and the two friends hugged.
“Viola, this is my friend Dr. Olivia Stephens from Toronto, we arrived together this morning on the Opportunity.”
“Dr. Stephens, I’ve heard so much about you,” Viola said, offering her new friend a hug.
“Please, call me Olivia,” was the surprised reply, “um, how do you two know each other?”
Dr. Viola Penelope, M.D.
Jo laughed, “We went to high school together back in Kansas City. I left home for engineering and Viola stayed home and went to med school.
“What kind of medicine do you practice?” Olivia asked.
“Back home I’m a family physician, but up here I’m the local doctor for every cut, scrape, or depressurization that I get called upon for.”
“Good for you, that’s quite the task,” Olivia was impressed at Viola’s duties.
“Thanks, what an opportunity though, to spend a few years out here on Mars!” Viola segued, “I hear you’re out here looking at that dust storm. Something about broken down fossilized carbon fragments?”
“That’s the theory, if I follow the dust storm back to its source, I’ll be able to find where the carbon came from and possibly then evidence of what it came from too.”
“Or who,” Viola added, letting the awkward silence spread between the three of them standing there in the corridor.
“I can’t guarantee anything,” Olivia replied cautiously. She didn’t want to get her hopes up, let alone anyone else’s hopes up either.
“Well, I’m excited no matter what you and your team find,” Viola replied, turning to look back at her bunk. “I’m needed in sickbay in 30 minutes, thought I’d get a nap in after lunch. It’s good to see you again Jo, I want to hear everything you have about home. Good to meet you, Olivia, let’s talk some more!” Viola turned, drew a pair of boots out of the shelf that pulled out from beneath her bunk, pulled them up over her feet and made her way along the corridor away from where Olivia & Jo had come toward sickbay.
“She’s nice,” Olivia said, smiling at Jo.
“One of my best friends back home,” Jo replied, “I love what I do but it’s people like Viola who I miss the most moving away to California.”
“Well, you’ve got six months to catch up with her.”
Jo pushed herself up into her bunk, its sterile features needed a bit of work to feel like home to her, which meant logging into the bunk’s monitor and pulling up Odyssey‘s designs. “She never stops working” Olivia thought, though that reminded her she needed to meet the rest of the science team.
“Thanks for showing me here, Jo,” Olivia began, “I should be getting back to my lab. I need to brief the science team on our mission.”
Jo waived from her bunk, “see you in the mess for dinner later, 18:00!”
Olivia turned and started down the curved corridor past the arterial tube that she’d taken to the bunks from command and towards the science section once again. Like Jo she was there to do a job, and while she didn’t want to get anyone’s hopes up, she was sure she’d find something out there amid all that dust.
~
Act 4
“So, you want to take a shuttle,” Quillen repeated back what Olivia had requested.
“Yes, it’ll be the easiest and safest way to follow the dust trail back to its source. It’s all the way out in Terra Cimmeria over 1,000 km away.”
“The shuttles are for security and medical uses only, your science team will need to follow it on land with a buggy,” Quillen’s air of authority sounded the end of discussion.
“Who do you want on this team again?” Durante asked.
“Dr. Penelope, Captain Korhonen, and Jo McGonigle.”
“A proper Ride of the Valkyries,” Jim used the same joke he’d made countless times on board the Opportunity.
“Why those three?” Quillen asked, clearly bemused at Olivia’s entire mission.
“Dr. Penelope is familiar with the DNA sequences of carbon-based life. I want her to test any samples we collect with her tablet. Captain Korhonen will be able to protect us should we encounter any trouble, and McGonigle is the best engineer we have here. Her mission is done, the Odyssey rover is not only back up and running but is operating at 150% of its efficiency standards set when it left Earth. She’ll be helpful in this buggy if we need to improvise a way to get back.”
“Good, you can have all three, if they agree to come along. Dr. Reed will take over for Dr. Penelope in her absence.”
“Thank you, Commander.”
“Get your team back in one piece, and if you have to camp out there overnight be sure to radio back where you are and how far you think you are from the source of that dust storm.”
“Understood, sir.”
“Good, then go get your team ready.”
Olivia left Durante’s office with a spring in her step. Instead of making her usual b-line out of the command console towards the science section she went around the bend to where Anneli stood at her station, “Captain, could I have a moment? she asked.
“What do you need, Doctor?”
“I’m looking for a security officer to come with me on my wild dust chase. Care to come along?”
Anneli smiled, and leaning in muttered, “Sounds more fun that standing around this console all day.”
“Glad to hear it. Meet me in my lab at 19:00 tonight.”
Olivia left command through the tube that led to the bunks, walking past all the rows as she’d done for the last month to where Jo and Viola sat together on their opposite bunks, Viola’s legs dangling down so that her heels rested against the top of Dr. O’Brien’s bunk while Jo sat cross-legged.
“So?!” Viola asked, “are we going?”
“Yes, and Anneli is coming along.”
“In a shuttle?” Jo asked, nigh begging.
“No, in a buggy, Lieutenant Commander Quillen wouldn’t part with one of the shuttles for scientific purposes.
“Even when those scientific purposes could be the discovery of past life on Mars!”
“Even then. They’re for medical and security purposes only.”
“Hang on a minute,” Viola said. She went to her monitor and called Durante.
The Commander’s face soon appeared in the screen. “How can I help you, Doctor?”
“Nick, are you serious about us not using a shuttle?”
“That’s Lieutenant Commander Quillen’s decision.”
“And not only does Lieutenant Commander Quillen report to you but I say this is a good medical use of a shuttle.”
“Explain.”
“It’s preventative medicine. Should one of us be injured or worse out there, we’ll have our pressurized shuttle to retreat to, and it’ll be far quicker for us to return to the base in any case.”
“Good point, Doctor. Alright, tell Dr. Stephens that you can have your shuttle. Take the Peregrine. You leave at 07:00 tomorrow.”
“Thanks, Nick. I owe you one.”
“And don’t you forget it!” he winked, ending the communication.
Viola turned from the monitor in Olivia’s science lab towards her colleagues, “Alright, let’s go see what’s out there.”
“Lead the way, Viola, you know this place better than I do,” Olivia replied, making her way to the door which slid open to let the four out into the corridor and onto their expedition.
They walked in the opposite direction from the bunks, toward the southern side of Elysium’s rounded outer corridors where the shuttle bays had been built. Pieces of Elysium had been constructed with 3-D printers, a more efficient method of construction that had been theorized as possible decades before but only really proven practical on Mars. After passing 115 degrees around the outer ring, they arrived at Shuttle Bay 1 where the Peregrine sat waiting. It had been on standby, one of the regulations of the Elysium Treaty that governed the operations of the base stipulated that at least one shuttlecraft needed to be ready to launch at any moment in case of accident or emergency.
The Peregrine
“Can I help you?” the officer in charge of the shuttle bay asked, approaching the crew as they entered through the sliding doors.
“We’re here to take the Peregrine out on a mission, per Commander Durante’s orders,” Viola announced.
“There are no launches scheduled,” the officer said, looking at his tablet to confirm.
“The commander just issued the orders a few minutes ago, perhaps you should check with him,” Anneli added, encouragingly yet forcefully.
The officer turned back to his monitor and called the Command Console. He stood there waiting for a few moments before Commander Durante’s face appeared on the screen.
“How can I help you, Lieutenant Zollmann?” the Commander asked.
“I have Captain Korhonen, Drs. Penelope & Stephens, and Ms. McGonigle here saying they have orders to take the Peregrine out on a mission. There’s nothing on the schedule, sir.”
“That’s right, Lieutenant, I just added it to the schedule. Last minute change of mission plan. Is the Peregrineready for launch?”
“Yes, sir. It’s on standby now.”
“Good, then tell the crew that they are cleared to board and launch,” Durante commanded.
“Understood, sir,” Zollmann said as the transmission ended. He turned to the crew waiting expectantly, “Well, it seems you are cleared for launch. Have a safe flight.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant,” Olivia said, as Anneli led Jo and Viola onboard. Olivia followed, taking one last look around the shuttle bay.
“Find your seats and strap in, this could be a bumpy ride,” Anneli said, taking the helm.
Olivia saw Jo and Viola were already seated and buckled, ready to go in the parallel seats that ran along the sides of the Peregrine facing each other. Olivia took a seat next to Jo facing Viola. “All ready to go whenever you are, Anneli,” she shouted up to the helm.
“Understood,” came the reply before Anneli activated the radio, “Shuttle Bay 1, this is the Peregrine, we are ready for launch.”
“Opening the bay doors,” came Zollmann’s voice over the radio.
A claxon sounded in the shuttle bay as it depressurized with the opening of the overhead shuttle bay doors. This was one of the first such shuttle bays built for vertical take-off and landing, and likely the way things would go in the future.
Anneli slowly began to lift the Peregrine off the bay floor and let it rise out into the Martian air where the wind sounded on the bulkheads surrounding the crew. She then engaged the forward engines and set off, looping around Elysium Base once to head in a southwesterly direction while Olivia checked her own data which was providing coordinate information to the helm directly for navigation controls.
They flew further from Elysium than they could have gone in a day by buggy, following the ghostly trail of a dust storm that blew across Elysium Planitia a full Earth year ago. After two hours of flight Olivia noticed changes in the chemical signatures the Peregrine’s sensors were reading. “I think we found it,” she said, waking up Viola who had dozed off and rousing Jo from her own study of the shuttle’s schematics. “Carbon traces in the rocks ahead. 550 km further to the south. Do you see that on your readings, Anneli?”
The Finn looked down at the monitor built into the helm controls, “I see it, Doctor. That looks promising, I’ll begin descent now, we can get a closer look.”
Olivia felt the shuttle begin to turn its nose downward, toward the red hue of the Martian surface again. Flying over it at 5,000 feet, just high enough to get a good view of the surface yet low enough to be able to track the chemical traces with her sensors, Olivia was reminded of her childhood flights in her cousin’s propeller plane over the Golden Horseshoe and as far north as Lake Simcoe. There, unlike the higher altitudes flown by commercial jets, there was far more influence from the weather to be felt.
“How close can you land to the traces?” Olivia asked.
“I can get us right on top of them, if you’d like,” Anneli said, aligning the craft downward as she spoke.
“100 meters will do nicely,” Olivia said, “Once we land, everyone needs to suit up, E.V. suits out there, got it?”
“Understood,” Viola replied.
“Can do,” was Jo’s answer.
“Yes,” said Anneli.
“Good. Anneli, what’s our ETA?”
Olivia felt the craft gently touch down on the ground.
“Now,” came the reply.
Olivia looked around; Viola was quieting a subtle laugh. “Alright, let’s suit up,” Olivia commanded.
The four of them moved quickly to the lockers in the back of the shuttle, and donned their extra vehicular suits that would protect them from any solar radiation and the lack of oxygen outside, sealing their helmets which activated the internal oxygen flow, and after ten minutes they were descending the ramp from the shuttle and walked out under the Martian sunshine. It was colder than Olivia expected, colder than it looked. Still, she didn’t waste long but began walking forward southeast following the traces in the sand as her scanner kept beeping louder and with ever more frequency until at last it transformed into a steady pitch.
Olivia looked down as best she could in her suit, which had a big collar keeping many of her life-support systems functioning. There were impressions in the rock at her feet, she held her tablet up to them and had the sensors read the carbon molecules in the rock. “Carbon,” she whispered.
~
“All the evidence points to it being the remains of a fossilized carbon-based life form!” Olivia shouted, exasperated at what had now become a two hour debriefing upon her return.
“You don’t need to raise your voice with us, Dr. Stephens,” Durante said, coolly.
Jim and Lieutenant Commander Quillen sat on either side of the base commander as he questioned the returning science team leader. She had looked to Jim, the one of these three she’d known the longest, for some sign of compassion but he seemed shocked into silence by what she’d said she’d found in the rocks near the origin of the dust storm. Evidence of past Martian life.
“Any claim like this needs verification, you can’t just go telling people outside of this base what you found out there without peer review,” Quillen chided sternly, “and yet that’s exactly what you did as soon as the Peregrine returned. Do you realize what headlines are running rampant back on Earth right now?! ‘Little Green Men found in Martian dust!’It’s the last thing we need.”
“Commander,” Durante said, quieting his executive officer. “She’s right, Doctor. You should have waited to have a second expert confirm your findings before sending any transmission home about them.”
Olivia was incensed, “but how am I going to keep funding my mission up here, how am I going to convince the allied space agencies to send another astrobiologist out here if I’m not able to tell them what I’ve found? All I did was send a message back to my lab in Toronto telling them that I’d made progress.”
“You shouldn’t have said anything,” Quillen’s words were icy cold.
Olivia felt betrayed. Only a few hours had passed since Durante had gladly granted them access to the Peregrine rather than follow Quillen’s suggestion that they take a buggy all the way out there. It had likely saved their lives when they went further out by air than they could’ve returned by land before nightfall. She turned to Jim, “Colonel, Jim, what do you think?”
Jim raised his eyes towards Olivia, she saw tears in them, “I’m sorry, Olivia, but this time they’re right. You should’ve waited.”
“So, what does this mean for my mission? For Elysium Base?”
“It means hearings back on Earth, Congressional hearings in Washington, parliamentary investigations in Brussels, London, Ottawa, Canberra, and Tokyo. It means the next time Elysium’s budget needs to be renewed by each national government that some will see us as nothing more than alien hunters looking for the next tabloid story,” Quillen shot back.
“And what if my claims are proven true?”
“Then they will be explained in the best possible way for the most people to understand the facts of the matter back on Earth. We want to avoid the discredit you could face for making wild unproven claims. Would you agree with a paper published in your field yet in a non-peer-reviewed journal?” Durante asked.
Olivia’s cheeks burnt red in embarrassment, “No. I would do my best to confirm the results.”
“And that’s all we ask of you, Dr. Stephens,” Durante sighed.
“I understand, but trust me, I only sent the message to fellow professionals who have the discretion that you expect. They wouldn’t leak it, they just wouldn’t!”
Quillen took a tablet from Durante’s desk and handed it over to Olivia. Not a word was spoken, yet the screen said all. It was a social media thread, from an account that looked like it came from someone who worked at the university where Olivia’s team was based:
“Evidence found of extinct Martians in fossil record! I’ve seen it fresh from Mars!
$10 million and I’ll let the media publish these pictures!”
“Do you know who that is?” Durante asked. Olivia scrolled up to the top of the social media feed and saw the username Toronto Alien Hunter. She recognized it immediately, knew who it was, and how single-minded the poster was about finding proof that aliens had once existed.
“Yes, I do. And so does my team back in Toronto. Let me talk to them,” she headed off another protest from Quillen, “with your supervision if you’d prefer. And in the meantime, maybe I can have Dr. O’Brien run a preliminary analysis of the carbon samples we brought back. She’s a chemist, and sure, astrobiology isn’t her specialty, but she’ll be able to compare these carbon traces to ones found in terrestrial fossils.”
“That’ll work,” Jim said, “I think it’s a fair option, Commanders.”
“Alright, but after this one transmission to your people in Toronto I need complete radio silence from you until we have proof either way. Understood?” Durante commanded.
“Yes, Commander.”
Olivia set up the connection back to Earth there in Durante’s office with the base commander, Quillen, and Jim looking from off camera.
“Hi, Andy, there’s been a situation involving the Toronto Alien Hunter, you know who I mean. He saw my last message telling you I had found possible evidence of past Martian life forms in some carbon traces at the source of the dust storm out here and he’s started posting about it on social media. I need you to talk to him, get him to take those posts down. Find a way to get him on our side this time, okay? It’s imperative that we get this fixed before the message spreads too widely beyond his conspiracy circles.” She looked over at Durante, “In order to manage the messaging I need to focus on confirming my results with some of the other scientists out here. Do what you can to double-check my claim based off the last message I sent, whether it makes sense. I’m pretty sure of it, but for something this important I want to be more than just pretty sure. I’ll be in touch soon, I hope.”
She ended the recording and sent it out. The 16 minute journey it would take to Earth meant there was still 16 minutes of more possible damage from the post, any replies to it, or any other posts one of her more confrontational students will have made since then.
“So, this Andy knows who the Toronto Alien Hunter is?” Jim asked.
“Yes.”
“And you won’t tell us who he is because…?” Quillen questioned.
“Frankly, Commander, because he’s a young man who has a lot of wild ideas about the universe but he’s brilliant and has a lot of potential. If possible, I want him to realize what trouble he’s in without provoking him into thinking anyone’s after him and making things even worse.”
Durante nodded, “Your compassion is laudable, Doctor. But if he doesn’t back down, we and our superiors will need to know who he is. In the meantime, if we need to, we can request that your government or the site he posted these claims on, shuts down his access to his account.”
“I don’t want to censor him, no matter how outlandish the things he’s saying may be,” Olivia protested.
“So, what do you think it might be? How sure are you of your findings?” Jim asked.
“I saw what I saw, there were traces of fossils out there.”
“At the end of the rainbow?” Durante asked, a slight smile coming to his lips.
“You could say that,” Olivia shot a brisk laugh.
“Ghosts in the wind,” Jim said, staring off into the distance.
“What’s that, Colonel?” Durante asked.
“That’s what Olivia’s found, the remnants of life, long gone life. And she was brought there by the dust that was blown off of them, fossils worn down by centuries of strong winds that blew particles away so far that in her lab on Earth, Olivia and her team took notice, like a message sent from well beyond.”
“Were they floral or faunal?” Durante asked.
“It’s too soon to tell. I need to examine the photos I took more closely in my lab first,” Olivia said, her hands fidgeting with impatience.
“I think we’ve kept the good doctor long enough, eh Colonel?” Durante asked.
“No harm was intended; no foul should be awarded.”
“Commander, what do you think?”
Quillen looked sternly straight into Olivia’s eyes, “If you’re wrong then I want you to go back out there and double check the fossils themselves. Bring them back even. If you’re right, however, then everything will have changed. Everything back to Genesis. So, you’d damn well better be sure before you even so much as say anything to anyone not assigned to your team.”
“In that case, then do you mind reassigning Dr. O’Brien to my team?” Olivia asked Durante and Quillen.
“Yes, she’ll work with you until you have a verifiable result, but we need her working on her own mission as well as soon as you’re able to let her go.”
“Understood,” Olivia said. She wanted to get up and leave Durante’s office, but after the lecture she’d just had from the base commander and in particular his second-in-command she didn’t feel like she could budge and risk any further ire.
Durante recognized this, offering a curt “Dismissed,” to which Olivia rose, turned, and walked straight out of command and down the tube that led to the science section. When she opened the door to her lab, she found four people waiting in there, images strewn across the monitor in the top of the central table. She felt like crying but instead strode in and said to every last one of them at once, Anneli, Jo, Viola, and her bunk neighbor Dr. Rosalind O’Brien, “okay, let’s get to work.”
The Crew of the MSS Peregrine
Dr. Olivia Stephens, Ph.D.Engineer Jo McGonigle, M.S.Dr. Viola Penelope, M.D.Dr. Rosalind O’Brien, Ph.D.Captain Anneli Korhonen
“I’ve tested the samples further,” Viola began, walking to the table at the center of the lab, “and they are conclusively carbon traces that we found.”
“So, it’s the right material,” Olivia replied, “how can we improve the efficiency of our microscope?”
“Well, what we’ve got here in Elysium is the best you’ll find anywhere,” Jo said. “Sorry to disappoint,” she added seeing the surprise on the three faces facing her.
“We could take a shuttle back out there and spend more time at the source,” Anneli suggested. “Commander Durante will be more readily able to justify letting us take a shuttle this time with the reputation of the whole Elysium program in the balance here.”
“What do you think?” Olivia asked Viola.
The doctor thought about it, “I think Durante is less opposed to any of this than Quillen is. She’s the one we have to really look out for.”
“Okay, so it’s 21:30 now, let’s call Durante again, see if we can get permission to take the Peregrine out in the morning,” Olivia said, walking to her desk where she activated her monitor and began a call to Durante’s office.
The screen was soon filled by the commander’s image, he clearly had just returned to his desk on his way out the door to take this call. “Any progress, Doctor?” he asked wearily.
“Commander, we’ve done all we can with the few samples we were able to retrieve today. We have the coordinates of the source and with your permission can take the Peregrine back out there in the morning at sunrise to collect better samples.”
“Be ready to go at 07:00, good night, Doctor.” The transmission ended as quickly as it began.
“This had better work,” Jo said, looking at the group.
“I have a feeling it will,” Olivia replied, turning to her team. “Alright, we have 9.5 hours until we leave, so Anneli and Jo, I want you out there in the shuttle bay working on improving the Peregrine‘s sensors and seeing what you can do to increase the range and scope of any equipment we can take out on the ground with us.”
“Understood,” Anneli replied.
“Can do,” Jo responded.
“Be sure to give yourselves time to sleep, okay. Anneli, you’ll have the helm, so I need you alert tomorrow. Return to quarters no later than 23:30, understood?”
“Yes, Doctor.”
“Good,” she said, watching the officer and engineer leave the lab. Olivia turned to Viola and Rosalind, “Now, can you stay here with me for a few hours, I want to work out what it is we’ll do once we get to the source.”
“Sure, are you thinking of collecting more chemical traces?” Viola asked.
“I think we need to collect whatever we can, even whole rocks if needs be.”
“I’m not foremost a geologist, more a chemist,” Rosalind began, “but I’ll do what I can out there. Are you thinking we’ll be bringing back fossils?”
“I don’t know how to describe what we’ll find out there,” Olivia pondered aloud. She looked Rosalind in the eye, “honestly, this is a new frontier in science.”
This week I'm beginning the three part Season 2 finale titled "Ghosts in the Wind" which follows the astrobiologist Dr. Olivia Stephens in the year 2055 as she tracks down traces of past life on Mars.
Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
All of the images used in this story were generated by Open AI’s DALL-E 2 software. For more information see: https://openai.com/product/dall-e-2.
Olivia had always preferred to read over watching TV or movies, her whole life a book worm, yet here on board the Opportunity she found reading wove itself the smoothest into the routines aboard and the constant hum of all the computers and machinery that were central to their mission. Opportunity had made the six month outbound voyage three times now, yet each trip was a daunting challenge, the crew all settled their affairs before boarding in case they never returned. Olivia had a tearful goodbye with her parents and siblings the day she entered quarantine to prepare for the mission. It was a moment which had rested in her memory for the last four months as they continued ever further from home into the dark unknown.
Opportunity III was a mere relief mission, bringing new astronauts to replace the crew already stationed at Elysium Base, ending their three year mission out on Mars, the furthest of all human outposts in the Solar System. Still, every flight of Opportunity brought the same jitters for while the spacecraft had shuttled astronauts back and forth between Earth and Mars, the allied astronaut corps still had new astronauts allocated to the Mars missions. There were some prerequisites, among which they had to have served a shift at the Shackleton Crater Station on the Moon in the Artemis program, and they had to undergo extensive psychological screenings to ensure they would survive the four years in total they would spend away with Opportunity III. Olivia went to the Moon with Artemis XVI in 2052, a mission that seemed odd to some, considering her specialties in astrobiology and anthropology, yet she proved her merit in the station greenhouse and as a regular contributor to several Space related publications back on Earth with her “Life in the Cosmos” column. That same column was expected to continue throughout Opportunity‘s voyage, and while Olivia was on Mars, yet at this moment her own voyage was far from her mind.
Reading allowed Olivia to forget her troubles in the present if only for a short while. She could imagine herself living in the stories she read, interacting with the characters, living in the places, and experiencing all these stories had to offer firsthand. She especially loved stories about exploration, from the great races to the South Pole of 150 years before to the biographies of mountaineers like Sir Edmund Hilary and the Artemis II astronauts who preceded her own first lunar mission 28 years previously. Whereas her crewmates had brought along playing cards, small musical instruments, and drives filled with movies to pass the voyage, Olivia brought a veritable library on her tablet, a near-endless supply of books. In the first four months she had already made it through seven stories, mostly comedies by Douglas Adams, an old favorite in her family, yet she was unlikely to run out of things to read anytime soon with hundreds more titles stored on her tablet.
She’d grown a bit tired of the comedy though, and turned to a far older book, written 500 years before by another explorer who ventured out from home into the dark unknown of the Atlantic far to the south in Brazil. He was a cosmographer, a sort of anthropologist, biologist, and geographer all wrapped into one, the kind of interdisciplinary skills that would be useful on a mission to Mars where your survival depended on your ability to think fast and outside the box when all the protocols failed. Olivia was fascinated by these older stories; they were written at a time of change when visions of monsters on the edge of the map slowly gave way to a realization of the true diversity of life on Earth. There had been a resurgence of interest in this particular book, the Singularites of France Antarctique by André Thevet since its translation into English twenty years previously, fueling renewed interest in Thevet and France’s attempt at colonizing Brazil in 1555 among English-speaking readers that had previously only been so vibrant in Brazil and France where memory of Thevet’s books had survived. He had many ideas that to Olivia seemed bizarre, such as the idea of giants dwelling in Patagonia, yet she could see the potential in Thevet’s words about the variety of life in Brazil. He had seen a world unlike his own where he observed so many curious things which would redefine life, just as Olivia hoped to do on Mars. Martian life had likely died out millions if not billions of years ago, but she still hoped to be the one to find more evidence of it than just chemical traces of carbon and hydrogen in the Martian rocks. While Thevet devoted his book to a study of the local Tupinambá in Brazil, Olivia had so far used her column to write about life among the small crew heading to Mars.
The mission commander was an American Space Force veteran, Colonel Jim King, who had made the move from active military service to the Astronaut Corps after the last war and had in the last decade served on four Artemis missions and on Opportunity II five years previously. Colonel King was the figure of the old Astronaut corps from the Apollo era, strong jawed, crew cut blond hair, reaching 6 feet tall, with a resolve instilled in him from his cadet days at the Academy in Colorado Springs. Olivia knew some of his service during the war, that he flew missions over hostile territory and engaged in fire on several occasions. Much of his service had been limited to protecting air convoys over the Pacific between Guam and the American forward bases to the northeast. Alongside Jim was his executive officer, a Finnish astronaut named Anneli Korhonen, herself a veteran of the war as well, albeit in the European front where she served as a captain in the Finnish Army with NATO’s forces. Anneli was about 5 ft 6 in tall, strong, with blond hair that had begun to show signs of white. During their prelaunch orientations and training on Earth she quickly became known for her determination and steely resolve to complete her mission, yet always with a deep-rooted passion for serving others. Anneli could be equally stern but had a dry sense of humor, and often enjoyed talking with Olivia about her science and what she hoped to find on Mars. Their other Mission Specialist officer was a younger astronaut, too young to have served like Jim and Anneli, named Jo McGonigle. An American like Jim, Jo came into the astronaut corps after having proven herself in NASA’s robotics division at JPL in Pasadena. She had moved to JPL straight out of her undergraduate years, having earned top place in her class with a B.S. in Engineering at Cal Tech and earned her M.S. while working on the latest Mars rover, Odyssey, that had been sent to the red planet aboard Opportunity II yet had run into trouble with a dust storm in Utopia Planitia that, like the Opportunity rover before it, had covered its solar panels with a film of dust and drained its batteries until it could no longer move. Some quick thinking by Jo caught the attention of the NASA Astronaut Office and she was offered a seat on Opportunity III to work on Odyssey there on the Martian surface. The four person crew was rounded out by Olivia, the mission’s scientist. Before they left Earth several reporters at their last press conference asked Jim what he thought about commanding a mission made up of him and three women, “would it be a flight of the Valkyries?” the newspaper man asked.
The Odyssey Rover
Jim chuckled, “It will be a mission to explore with three of the most capable people alive today, and I’m honored to serve alongside them.”
Olivia wasn’t as sure about Jim before that moment, like Jo she wasn’t a veteran, she was a schoolchild during the war, she remembered the fear that her parents radiated, no matter how hard they tried to conceal it for the sake of her brother and her. She grew up knowing war, just as her parents had after 9/11, and her grandparents had during the Cold War. She thought back through her family history one Christmas after dinner with the whole big family and it occurred to her that every generation as far back as she knew had experienced war in some way or another. That was one of the reasons why she was resolved to study astrobiology and anthropology, she wanted to find ways to use science to bring people together, to stop the fighting just long enough for enemies to think of each other as humans. The allies who signed the Artemis Accords in the 2020s at the start of the new generation of lunar exploration closely mirrored the allied countries who fought side-by-side in the last war, and whose common experiences had brought them closer together than ever before. In her lifetime Olivia had seen greater movement toward a global sense of human identity than ever thought possible. Her own country was among the smaller ones in population, yet Canada proved decisive in the Arctic front, protecting the Americas from attacks by air and sea, building a missile defense network that brought Canada onto some much-needed equal footing with the Americans militarily. The kids in her school would gossip and wonder aloud about possible bombers coming over the North Pole to hit the gleaming towers of Toronto, but she always felt safe there. That safety gave her the chance to explore questions that intrigued her about life, space, and human nature. When she was 18, she earned a full scholarship to study biology at the University of Toronto where she stayed for much of the rest of the decade, earning her B.S. and M.S. there, along with a B.S. in Evolutionary Anthropology. While working on her Master’s, she undertook an exhilarating internship at the Royal Ontario Museum in their Natural History Department, and was even offered a full-time position there while she worked on her Ph.D.
It was at this moment that the Canadian Space Agency first contacted her. They were looking for scientists with biology backgrounds who would want to look for evidence of past life on Mars. Olivia had mused about becoming an astronaut like every other schoolkid had since the days of Yuri Gagarin’s first flight, yet that childhood dream hadn’t developed the same way as her interests in terrestrial life. She would need to apply to join the Canadian astronaut corps, complete her Ph.D. in Biology, which if accepted into the program the CSA would willingly fund, and then undergo her astronaut training with her American counterparts in Houston. Olivia took the weekend and began working on her application the following Monday. After a lengthy application process, several interviews, including a board of review, she was accepted into the Canadian Astronaut Corps Class of 2042 as a Science Officer, and given orders to report to Houston for further astronaut training.
The Launch of Opportunity III
By the time she boarded Opportunity III in December 2054 on Launch Pad 39A at NASA’s famed Kennedy Space Center in Florida she had become one of Canada’s more experienced astronauts. Her service aboard Artemis XVI, working to prove a theory that life could exist in microbial form in zero-gravity environments like on the surfaces of comets, had made headlines on Earth, and made her a minor celebrity in Canada. So, the announcement in 2053 that she would be assigned to the crew of Opportunity III was met with a series of talk shows, awards, and honorary doctorates across her home country. More would come, she was warned, when she returned from Mars, especially if she became the one to confirm evidence of past life on the red planet.
Olivia always admired the way that Thevet talked about the diversity of life he encountered that was known around the Atlantic World in his day. His ideas were based on older visions of life and diversity born out of the eyewitness observations of naturalists going back to the days of Aristotle and Pliny in antiquity. Thevet had a way, no matter how outdated it was, of capturing the wonder of experiencing finding unknown life for the first time. The proof that there were things out there still to discover was all the motivation Olivia needed to buckle herself into her seat on the Opportunity and be launched with the power of a pair of next generation SLS rockets out of the atmosphere and beyond Earth orbit on her six month voyage to Mars. Thevet traveled to Brazil in 1555 onboard an old wooden ship powered with sails by the wind. The Opportunity was largely driven by its engines, yet a pair of solar sails inspired by the Planetary Society’s Light Sail 2 mission of the 2020s also helped propel the Opportunity starship on its voyage, carried by the power of the solar winds. She marveled at this technology, which was expertly managed and maintained by Jo at her engineering station. The sails had to be kept at just the right degree of exposure to the Sun to work, and needed monitoring for space debris to ensure they would not get torn or picked apart by the untold numbers of microscopic particles floating about in Space, pieces of comets and asteroids broken apart in collisions or by the gravitational pull of the planets and their moons. Thevet and his fellow Frenchmen had to be ready not only for natural dangers in the open Atlantic and along the European, African, and South American coasts, but for Portuguese ships who patrolled the South Atlantic waters between their colonies in Brazil, East Africa, and India. Luckily for Olivia and her crewmates, they would not need to worry about attack from a hostile vessel on their own voyage, “unless someone is out there who doesn’t want us going to Mars,” Jim joked on one occasion, so in at least one aspect her own voyage had remained safer, and by all accounts more uneventful, than Thevet’s had been.
She saw something of a common link between herself and the cosmographer, a bond that stretched across five centuries between explorers venturing out into what was only recently explored territory for the both of them in their own time. They weren’t the first to arrive on their respective alien shores, yet even on these later voyages in the first generations of travel between worlds a certain amount of danger was ever present. During Artemis XVI she proved that water ice frozen in zero gravity had the potential to hold microbial life, so finding the fossilized remains of some ancient Martian seemed possible, though Olivia didn’t want to get her hopes up with the whims of luck. There was some evidence of water ice on the Martian surface, the many probes and rovers that’d been sent from Earth to investigate Mars had been sending data about that ice back for decades, yet Olivia would be the first astrobiologist to set foot on the Martian surface. They had a mere month left until their arrival when she could set to work.
Shackleton Crater
Five months aboard the Opportunity had given her ample time to comb through all the rover data collected since Sojourner, the first of the rovers, arrived in the Chryse Planitia in July 1997. With 58 years of information available to her, Olivia had done her homework and began her survey of Martian water ice, with a particular focus on the later rovers, Curiosity, Opportunity, and Perseverance. In the 15 years since Opportunity I first brought humans to the Martian surface and established a base on Elysium Planitia, a broad equatorial plane where the InSight rover landed in 2018. It was a region that once had the geological activity necessary to facilitate life, the plain was dominated by Elysium Mons, a 41,000 foot tall volcano, the third highest peak on Mars. The Alliance’s leaders chose Elysium Planitia as their Martian base of operations figuring that its recent geological activity (as recent as 50,000 years ago) could make it a strong candidate for terraforming in the distant future.
The Elysium Base had stood firm against all odds for 15 years, and its latest crew was ready for their five year rotation on the planet to be at an end. Olivia worried that she wouldn’t be able to stand living on Mars for a full five years. It was a very long time to be away from home, from her family. She chose to keep her lakefront condo near Sunnyside Beach, her brother’s family could use it while she was away, and it gave her somewhere to think about going home to when she became tired of living in the Elysium Base. Resupply missions to Elysium arrived every 18 months from Earth, a new spacecraft launching from either NASA’s Kennedy Space Center or ESA’s Guiana Space Center carrying new crews to Mars every two and a half years. This meant there was always a new crew overlap, so NASA’s Opportunity crews were not alone up there, instead joined by ESA’s Metis crews. When Olivia and the Opportunity III crew were going into quarantine at Kennedy there were reports that the Australians and Japanese were interesting in adding their own series of joint missions to Elysium’s resupply schedule alongside their individual missions, meaning the base which normally could house up to 20 astronauts would need to be expanded to meet the needs of new missions arriving every year rather than every two and a half years as it stood.
A voice came from the engineering station of Opportunity, “Dr. Stephens,” Olivia turned at hearing her family name, “can you come up here and take a look at these readings?”
“Sure,” she took a hold of one of the hand bars that were strategically placed along the length of Opportunity‘s central corridor, propelling herself in zero gravity forwards to where Jo sat at her station on duty occupied with some atmospheric readings they’d taken a few weeks before of Mars following the dust storm that drained Odyssey‘s batteries. Olivia reached engineering with only a few passing breaths and found Jo gazing intently at a screen on which appeared a three dimensional image of the Martian surface and atmosphere around Elysium Planitia. “What’d you find?” Olivia asked, peering over Jo’s shoulder.
Jo turned away from her monitor, “The rover appears to have kicked up some dust from the surface that has traces of carbon in it, which leads me to wonder if this could be evidence that something once lived down there.”
“Can you tell by the wind speed and direction where the dust came from? How far it might’ve traveled across the surface?” Olivia asked, recognizing an opportunity to realize her own mission.
“Well, windspeeds of at least 18 to 22 meters per second are needed for these dust storms to form, and this was a doozy, so I’d guess we’re looking at winds around 25 m/s that got kicked up by and funneled around Elysium Mons, so honestly it could’ve come from anywhere.”
Jo McGonigle
Olivia sighed. On Earth she would be able to follow well-tracked weather patterns to see where dust originated. In North America, the continent she was the most familiar with, summer winds came from the southwest and winter ones from the northwest. The one wild card out there were the lake effect weather patterns that made winters snowier in her part of the continent around Lake Ontario. Yet on Mars the climate was still only just being explored and understood, and not enough data existed to use these same models to make sense of where this dust originated. Yet if she could track it, somehow, someway, then she might be able to follow the breadcrumbs to the rocks where it originated, and if those rocks had traces of carbon in them then it was possible there could be fossils.
“Do we have any satellite data from the Mars orbiters on that storm?” Olivia asked, looking Jo in the eye hoping the engineer might be able to surprise her yet again with some ingenious work-around.
Jo turned back to her monitor and ran a search on Mars satellites for six months previously, the storm was first recorded in the mission control centers on Earth in October last year. “One of India’s Mars Orbiter satellites was in orbit over Elysium Planitia at the time of the storm’s impact,” Jo replied.
The Indian Space Agency was not a part of the alliance, yet they also had stayed out of the big confrontations between the various allied space agencies and their rivals, preferring to let those organizations open a clear path for India to become a viable third power in the latest round of the Space Race.
“What do you say we give Houston a call?” Olivia said.
“It wouldn’t hurt, the Indians have nothing to lose in helping us,” Jo replied, locking her monitor and moving out of her station. Olivia let her pass, and Jo floated forward toward the helm where Jim and Anneli sat, the mission commander and his executive officer at their posts. Jim was operating the helm when they arrived, while Anneli did her duty of making sure nothing went awry until her own duty shift at the helm began in five hours.
Jo reached the helm first, turned to their commander asking “Jim, can we add an item to our next transmission back to Houston?”
“What’s on your mind?” he asked, turning to see both the engineer and science officers at his door.
“We think we might have a way to trace the origins of that dust storm that hit Elysium Planitia in last October, but the only satellite that saw it was Mangalyaan-4,” Jo replied in her usual earnestness.
“So, we need Houston to request the data and possible video from the Indians,” Olivia continued, “If we can trace the origin of that storm then we might be able to find the source of those carbon traces in the dust–”
“Which might lead to evidence of past life,” Anneli finished Olivia’s thought. “It’s a reasonable request, I imagine the Indians would be okay with that.”
Jim turned to his monitor, “I’ll add it to the list. Our next transmission window is at the end of my shift here in five hours. We’ll see what Houston can do.”
“Thanks, Jim,” Olivia said, smiling as she turned back toward her own science station near the rear of the craft.
“On the Moon you chased ice, and on Mars it sounds like you’ll be chasing dust,” Jo said as the pair floated back to their stations. “If they ever send you out any further maybe they’ll have you chasing shadows or ghosts on the Jovian moons.”
Olivia laughed, “That’s Space for you, you never know what you’re going to find.”
Olivia left Jo at engineering and soon found her way back into her own station. Her science station was small, as was engineering. It consisted of a monitor hoisted onto the bulkhead, a microscope, and a keyboard to control it all. Until some engineer could figure out how to create artificial gravity there was little reason to try to bring desk chairs let alone desks on board a starship like the Opportunity, the occupant and anything else left on that desk or in that chair would just float away.
Olivia went back to her own monitor, pulling up what little data she had on the dust storm already. Most of it was collected by the Emirati Hope orbiter and NASA’s MAVEN orbiter, the two oldest spacecraft still in operation over Mars and uploaded to the computers aboard Opportunity while they were still on the launchpad in Florida. She could see this storm was not as violent as some had been, it hadn’t ensnared the whole planet for one thing, but it did enough damage regionally around Elysium Planitia that even the Elysium base on the far side of Elysium Mons went into lockdown, its crew relocating to their bunkers carved deep into the Martian rock. The NASA reports talked about winds rising out of the north and driving dust up onto the Nepenthes Mensae, burying areas of exposed rock that had previously been considered possible locations where a geologist currently stationed at Elysium named Dr. Rosalind O’Brien might be able to study a wide range of Martian strata, yet now those rock layers were buried under meters of dust and soil. She met Dr. O’Brien once at a SETI conference in 2050 held in the Bavarian mountain town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, where the geologist presented a paper arguing that further study of Martian strata could prove greater nuance in the accepted geological chronology of the planet, that there was more of a nuance to the early few million years of the current Amazonian Period, named after the Amazonis Planitia located to the west of Elysium Base.
There was another month of space travel ahead for Olivia and the other three members of the Opportunity III mission, another month of staring at outdated sensor data, hoping the Indian Space Agency would grant their request of data from Mangalyaan-4, and wondering about what five years of life on Mars would truly be like for her.
Act 2
The final month seemed to take far longer to pass, yet with each day the red hue of Mars grew larger and larger in the Opportunity‘s forward windows until at last it dominated the horizon. Jim directed the spacecraft into a low orbit that would three days after their arrival over Mars position them just rightly to begin their descent to the surface. There had been some considerations among the NASA engineers to hold Opportunity III for another year until a new prototype landing shuttle could be loaded onto the ship but there remained too many issues. As it stood, the Opportunity would need to successfully descend through the Martian atmosphere to the surface and then upon its return mission ascend back up through the atmosphere and into orbit to begin its long voyage home to Earth. Olivia was told of the dangers of landing the spacecraft on the surface and that if she wanted to, the CSA would happily hold her ticket to Mars for the next mission, likely the next Metis mission to be launched from French Guiana, that would use shuttles for all atmospheric flying and keep the spacecraft in orbit, but she was too eager to take to Space at the earliest moment. Her return trip would use the new shuttle system, by that time in two years the Opportunity would never leave Space, the remainder of its services would be conducted in orbit of either Earth, Mars, or the Moon where it would be refueled, restocked, and where its crew would come aboard. The allied space agencies were even in the early stages of discussing orbital space docks like Olivia had come to know in science fiction, “but surely,” she thought “those are decades away.”
For the first few orbits she found it hard to focus on her work for she was drawn to the port windows that looked out over Mars. She had lived in Earth orbit on the space station and briefly stayed in lunar orbit on Gateway Station, but looking down at Mars was a wonder to behold for how alien the planet seemed below her. Sitting down at dinner with Jim, Anneli, and Jo at the end of their first day in orbit Jim called her out on it, “aren’t you supposed to be packing for the trip down?”
Olivia blushed, “Sorry, Colonel, I mean Jim,” she stumbled over her words, “I just can’t help but look down there at all that red, all that dust.”
“You’ll be there for two years,” Anneli said, “take more time to look out into the blackness of Space, that’s what you’ll end up missing. You have years of the red planet ahead of you.”
“If you’re going to miss anything,” Jim had stopped eating and stared out towards the bulkhead behind Olivia, “it’s the blue and green of Earth. You don’t really realize just how beautiful home is until you’ve seen it from above. I remember my first time flying over the Bahamas on my way to Puerto Rico, seeing all that blue and those stretches of sand they call islands in the middle of the Caribbean. Gorgeous!” Jo laughed, smiling at the thought of the warm blue waters of the Caribbean. Jim continued, “You don’t realize it until you’re gone how much you miss home. I think that’s really why you’re entranced by Mars down there, Dr. Stephens,” he winked at her prior formality, “it’s because subconsciously you think of Earth as the poster child of planets, it’s the one you expect to see out your window in orbit. But here instead of all that blue and green with deep white clouds all you see is red and occasional white ice gleaming on the surface. If Earth is the poster child of a planet, then Mars is our most cherished example of an alien world, familiar yes but foreign still.”
Olivia leaned back in her chair, catching her tear of baguette that threatened to float away through the mess, “I guess I do miss home.”
“We all do,” Jim sighed, “it’s one of those things we all feel but rarely talk about. For some it’s just too painful to admit how much they miss home.”
Anneli nodded, “there’s nothing quite like being there with my family, hearing the tram bells rolling down the streets of Helsinki.”
“Even stoic Anneli misses home” Olivia thought, she could swear she hadn’t seen as much as an emotion on the Finn’s face before now, but there she was brow furrowed, imagining herself walking along the boulevards of her Nordic hometown.
“What about you, Jo?” Jim asked, turning to his right to look at the youngest member of their crew.
Jo’s eyes betrayed what she’d been feeling all along, “I love being out here, I love the work, but it’s different for me. I left home almost 20 years ago to go to school, to become an engineer at Cal Tech and to work for JPL. There are a handful of other Kansas Citians who work there, but not many. Normally, I’d see my family maybe twice or three times a year at Christmas and Easter, and maybe for 4th of July but that’s about it. I followed my passion but left a part of my heart behind.”
Olivia was taken aback hearing that from Jo. She knew Jo back on Earth before they were assigned to Opportunity III from different NASA-JPL events. Jo was the one who tinkered with any sort of computers or machinery. She became well known for her practicality in every aspect of her life, she kept her hair short so it wouldn’t get stuck in any of the computers, gadgets, or other machinery that she worked with. Jim had done his commander’s duty by inspecting Opportunity on the launchpad in Florida before they took off but was happily one-upped by the meticulous and eternally curious Jo who was already halfway through examining the ship atop its SLS rocket when Jim arrived for his inspection. Olivia and Anneli were there with Jim, pre-flight inspections were something they both heard Jim liked his crews to do with him, and Olivia could swear she saw a grin on Jim’s face that could only be described as pride in Jo’s attention to detail and to the crew’s safety. To Olivia then, Jo was the model hard worker, unflinching in her attention to duty, and passionate about the things she’d designed and built. So, hearing that Jo was homesick, even on the ground in the labs and workshops at JPL in Pasadena was a surprise. She came from a big Irish Catholic family, that much Olivia knew, after all the few McGonigles she knew in Toronto were very proud of their origins in Derry, so she imagined Jo’s family was probably from around there too, though how many generations removed Jo was from Ireland Olivia wasn’t sure.
Despite her tears Jo showed a toughness in her eyes that only bonded her with her crewmates even more. They’d been together now for nearly eight months, two on Earth at Johnson and Kennedy Space Centers preparing for their mission and the long six months there on their long way out to Mars. Now that the red glow of the planet’s surface shone in their windows and on all their monitors and screens, they each let their guard down, these four knew each other better now than nearly anyone else alive knew them after all the time they’d spent together in this isolation.
Jim broke the silence, announcing “we’re scheduled to descend into orbit tomorrow. This’ll be Opportunity‘s third time going down to the Martian surface. I think she’ll hold up; she hasn’t failed us yet. Be prepared for a delay in case of any bad weather on the surface. We have enough fuel remaining here to maintain our present orbit for another two days if we have to but trust me it’ll be better for all of us if we land on schedule and stretch our legs in Elysium Base.”
“We all know the backup plan,” Anneli said, finishing her own meal.
Jim looked at Olivia and Jo who both nodded in agreement. “Good,” he said, setting his hands down on the table with finality, “then let’s get some sleep. Be sure to have your things packed and ready to disembark one hour before we enter the descent stage. I don’t want anything floating about that could rediscover gravity floating over the wrong buttons on each of our stations as we descend.
“Understood,” Olivia said nodding.
“Well, good night then. Sleep well, it’s going to be one hell of a day tomorrow.”
The four turned away from the table and floated to their respective bunks. Jim and Anneli slept in a pair of forward bunkbeds near the helm while Jo and Olivia took a pair closer to their own stations near the middle of Opportunity‘s long cylindrical hull. As they had every night for the past six months Jo and Olivia took turns in the midships lavatory with Olivia taking to her bunk first. She laid her head back on her pillow, the same old pillow she’d used now since leaving Earth. She’d grown so used to the texture and smell of it and the sleeping bag she used, as well as the straps that kept it from floating away mid-sleep that she felt a pang of sorrow at leaving them. “That’s not right, you’re an explorer Olivia, you should be excited for the new adventure down there, a new bed even!” she thought. As her eyes closed, she found herself imagining home, her condo looking out over Lake Ontario, her family gathered around celebrating her nephew Georgie’s birthday party. “Georgie’s turning three soon,” she thought, “I need to record a video outside on the surface for him” to send home. Tears came to her eyes as she thought of yet another birthday she’d miss all for Mars.
The next morning came fast, Olivia awoke to her alarm thinking she’d only just closed her eyes maybe a half hour ago to discover it’d been seven long hours, seven hours like every other night’s sleep she’d had on the Opportunity. She pulled the curtains of her bunk back and saw Jo was already up, floating horizontally above the floor tinkering behind a wall panel with some wiring. “Morning,” Olivia said groggily.
“Morning,” Jo waived a hand that held some tool in it that Olivia couldn’t make out at her. Jo was a kind and gentle person, but when she was in the zone, she never really noticed others around her; her work was all-consuming.
Olivia unstrapped her sleeping bag, rolling her legs out of her bunk in the bag and letting it drop to the floor below. She caught it in her left hand and placed it up onto her bunk, buckling the strap over it to keep it from floating away. She caught her reflection in the lavatory mirror, the door just ajar ahead of her. Her hair was a mess, bedhead, she learned, was still a thing even in the zero gravity of Space. Pushing herself into the lavatory she opened the metal cabinet behind the mirror and took her plastic hair brush out, doing her best to get a handle on her locks so she could put them up into a ponytail as she so often had done during this voyage. Zero gravity made water float rather than settle, making hair washing a tremendous challenge that even the finest engineers and scientists had yet to solve. She’d once heard Jo mutter something from the lavatory about gravity plating and figured if anyone could solve the problem of generating artificial gravity without building a massive rotating space station like Sir Arthur Clarke’s Clavius Base in 2001: A Space Odysseyor Gerard K. O’Neill’s The High Frontier then it’d be Jo McGonigle and the JPL team she’d certainly lead after her successful mission to repair the Odyssey rover.
Feeling ready to move on with the morning, Olivia floated into the mess and took yet another dehydrated packet out of the breakfast compartment, settling down to some cereal. “You know, I hear they have real food in Elysium,” Jim said, sitting at the table legs crossed reading something on his tablet. Olivia laughed at the sight, “You look like my dad reading the Star at the breakfast table.”
Jim looked up at her and his momentary uncertainty melted into a beaming, laughing smile. “I met your dad at Johnson, right?”
“Yeah, my parents came down from Toronto to see me before we went into quarantine.”
Jim remembered the couple in their late sixties, hair grayed, faces beaming with pride at their daughter’s accomplishments. “You know how proud they are of you, right?” he asked, lowering his tablet ever more slightly.
Olivia smiled, “Yeah, they want me to send them a message as soon as we’re able to walk on the surface of all those red rocks. Dad joked, as he does, that it’ll be just like the Garden of the Gods only without a breathable atmosphere.”
“Just like it, indeed,” Anneli entered the mess from behind Jim, taking a seat next to the colonel. “I just heard from Elysium, they say ‘clear skies and an empty space for us to park on Landing Pad Charlie.”
“Good to hear,” Jim replied in a tone that was both formal and hopeful, “so maybe we won’t have to orbit for another night after all.”
“What time are we entering descent again?” Olivia asked.
“10:42 if all goes to plan, but that depends on if we’re ready. What’s Jo working on now?”
“I’m not sure,” Olivia said, “she’s behind one of the wall panels midship by our bunks. I’ll go ask her, you enjoy your paper,” Olivia smiled at Jim and turned pushing off the walls of the mess and out the door into the hallway back toward where Jo still floated above the deck at midships. She seemed to be near the end of her tinkering based on how many tools were now strapped to various parts of her belt. “Is everything okay with the circuits here?” Olivia asked.
Jo looked up, smiling, “oh yeah, everything’s fine here. I just had an idea of how we could boost our communications signal enough to use Opportunity as a relay for signals coming from Elysium back to Earth to clear up some of the pixelation they’ve been getting down on Mars.”
Olivia thought more about it now and remembered seeing that some of the communications lines ran through the bulkhead at midships, which made sense considering the engineering and science stations were the ones that needed the greatest bandwidth to send and receive transmissions from Earth, the Moon, Mars, and all the orbital stations they’d been in communication with. On some of the earlier Mars missions that the Allies sent they’d included a communications security officer whose job was in part to defend the ship from any potential threats that the old adversaries from the war had left in Earth and lunar orbit and on the Moon, as well as to keep all external communications encrypted while decrypting potential rival transmissions when Earth’s superpowers were still racing to be first to establish bases on Mars. The Allies: Australia, Canada, the European Union, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States made it there first and now twenty years after the war ended their Elysium Base remained the only human outpost on Mars. Still, in those early days of crewed Martian exploration in the 2030s the allied space agencies were directed by their governments to protect their communications from interception at all costs.
The rest of the morning went quickly, Olivia finished packing up her station, putting all of her equipment and personal belongings into their places in her bags before the call came back from Jim, “suit up, we’re preparing for the descent.”
Olivia hadn’t put her spacesuit on over her flight suit in a good while, possibly since they’d left Earth orbit, but she still remembered the drill. She and Jo climbed into the backs of their suits, zipping each other up before putting on their helmets and sealing them. Both wore mobile oxygen tanks that were spread across their backs that could provide up to 10 hours of breathable air, enough to get them onto the surface and into the oxygenated internal atmosphere of Elysium Base. Olivia felt the excitement rise in her, the moment reminding her of descending through clouds towards a new country she’d never visited before. She followed Jo up to the seats just behind the helm and strapped herself in, ready for what was sure to be a memorable descent.
In order to enter the Martian atmosphere and safely land on the surface Opportunity would need to angle itself with the helm facing upward toward the sky and its engines downward. Landing struts would protrude from the bottom of the spacecraft’s cylinder hull and take the force of the landing. It was a system that’d been in use for forty years at this point, since just before the start of the Artemis program, but it was practical for the technology they were still using. The shuttlecraft in development would be able to land like the old Space Shuttles of the late twentieth century facing forward on wheels or skis like airplanes do on Earth, though Jo had mentioned one design that allowed for vertical takeoff and landing that would make the whole process even easier than ever imagined outside of the dreams of science fiction writers.
“Opportunity to Elysium, we are ready to begin our descent,” Jim said over the comms.
There was a short pause. “Elysium to Opportunity, we read you. You are cleared for descent. See you soon!”
Jim turned to Anneli, “Okay, Captain, begin the rotation sequence.”
Anneli flipped several switches and pressed several buttons on the monitor in front of her, “rotation sequence underway. 3 minutes to descent positioning.”
“Good. Jo, Olivia, you two keep an eye on our telemetry, make sure our fuel and heat levels stay within safety parameters.”
“Understood,” the pair sitting behind the helm said in unison. Olivia wanted to look over at Jo, but she knew she had a job to do, a job that if done carelessly could cost the four of them their lives.
Olivia felt Opportunity turn on its axis and watched as the Martian surface rotated in the helm’s windows before disappearing from view. Anneli called the moment, “rotation sequence complete. Switching to descent thrusters.”
Olivia felt a jolt as the ship began to move backwards, or rather downwards. Mars still remained out of view, Anneli and Jim were controlling the trajectory of the ship with their monitors only. She was glad she was sitting where she was with Jo, not up front. Sure, she’d trained to pilot the Opportunity, should its commander and helmswoman be incapacitated, but she had hoped that moment would never come, especially during the descent stage into a planetary atmosphere.
“How’re you two doing back there?” Jim called over the comms.
“All systems are nominal,” was Jo’s reply.
Jim shook his head, a chuckle sounded over the comms “Olivia?”
“I’m okay, but I’ve just got one question.”
“What’s that, doc?” Jim replied.
“When will Mars be in view again?” Olivia shouted back over the sound of the engines behind her.
Jim laughed, “It takes some getting used to, falling like we are into a planetary atmosphere without being able to see where we’re going. What do you think, Captain?”
Anneli looked at her monitor, “We should be able to see the outer atmosphere pass by the helm in 30 seconds.”
Olivia counted down the seconds in her head, “one and two and three and,” as she was taught in the Scouts as a kid. Back then it was to measure more mundane things like the amount of time it took to run from one cabin to another up at Haliburton Camp, but now it was all she had to find some comfort in the moment of falling down to the Martian surface backwards without being able to see where she was going.
“twenty-six and twenty-seven and twenty-eight and twenty-nine and thirty, oh!” she caught her breath in her throat, coughing, as the heat began to build up behind her, rising along the hull as the glow of the Martian atmosphere came into view, by which point they were descending through the carbon dioxide rich layers toward the surface. Olivia looked down at her monitor and saw readings from the hull thermometers, things were looking normal, if 1377 degrees Celsius felt anything but normal to her. She tracked their distance from Landing Pad C in the upper left corner of the monitor, they fast approached the 230 km mark at the upper edge of the Thermosphere, where the temperature readings hit a chilly -98.15 degrees Celsius or 175 degrees Kelvin, the two units of temperature that Opportunity’s computers displayed.
“We’re close to terminal velocity,” Anneli called.
“Hold on!” Jim shouted as Olivia looked down to see that they’d reached the Mesosphere about 100 km above the surface. “Elysium, we’re getting closer, get ready for us.”
“Roger,” the Elysium mission controller called back.
Olivia began to feel more at ease as she saw the red dust of the Martian surface reflect off of the planet’s atmosphere, it did remind her of the American West, but more of the desert rocks in Utah than the Garden of the Gods in Colorado.
“Entering the Troposphere,” Anneli announced, “prepare for landing.”
Olivia stole a glance over at Jo who had a strange mix of terror and joy on her face, their eyes locked for a moment before they returned to their monitors.
Anneli’s voice returned over the comm, “Impact in ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one.” Olivia felt the landing struts meet their mark on Landing Pad C. “Colonel, we have landed.”
Jim leaned his head back, a clear sigh of relief fogging up his helmet visor for a moment. “Elysium Base, this is Colonel James King, Commanding Officer of Opportunity III, requesting permission to come aboard.”
“Permission granted, Colonel. Welcome to Mars!”
Olivia felt herself speaking before she realized it, “21 May 2055, I’ve made it!”
It hung over the streets and steeples of Kansas City like a great dark cloud, the many neighborhoods and suburbs looking up at it in awe. It had been said by some that the airship Phaeton was over a mile from bow to stern, but many could not believe such a craft could ever take to flight. And yet here it was, towering over nearly half a million pairs of eager eyes, who looked up at her underside with a mix of fear and wonder. All were running out into the streets to behold the sight, businessmen and artists, cabbies peering from within their charges and clergy praying to their God at such a magnificent sight. There were scholars and vagabonds, sportsmen and aviators, soldiers, sailors, and marines on leave, politicians and pensioners, inmates and the invalid all looking upward at the great edifice in the sky. From 33rd to 54th, the city was clouded by the shadow of Phaeton, the greatest wonder ever built by human hands.
Out of his home on 55th near Main, still in his slippers ran Noël Felix, a lecturer on transportation and public efficacy at the University of Kansas City. He was in awe of the sight that rose high above his home, the great sign of humanity’s technological achievements, which only a decade prior had been considered too fantastical to even be allocated probability within the modern imagination. “He’s done it!” cried Noël, “Captain Daedalus’ ship flies!” It was certainly an amazing start to a quiet Lenten Friday.
Alongside the lecturer, out in 55th Street, the many residents of the neighborhood clamoured and shouted praises to the world-renowned Captain Daedalus. It was said that he was the first person to land on both poles without stopping to refuel, the first to bring much needed humanitarian aid to the people of North Korea, the first to arrive on the summit of Mount Everest from above rather than below. Daedalus was by far the most renowned figure of his time.
~
There was a certain air about him, he did seem both kind and boastful, but not to much more than a degree expected of a man who was the conqueror of the last great terrestrial trials facing an adventurer. He had been welcomed with fabulous balls and galas in every city he visited. No less of a welcome would he receive upon arriving in the Paris of the Plains, whose artistry and musicianship were renowned throughout the world. In the great hall of the Performing Arts Centre, a great ball was held in Daedalus’ honor in the evening of 31 March 2012, the Saturday following his arrival. All the great figures of the Metro were invited, the rich and famous along with those of high moral and social regard as well.
Nöel had spent the greater part of the day allocating a good evening suit for the occasion, for he was not often accustomed to wearing black tie. He arrived in the Arts Centre to hear some light chamber music being played by the house orchestra; largely at this point it was Mozart and Haydn. Upon arrival he was presented to the mayor, Edward Johnson, who had personally invited all of the guests. “Welcome, Mr. Felix,” he said, shaking the lecturer’s hand, “I trust your father is well?”
“He is,” replied Noël with a polite smile, “he sends his regards to you and your wife.”
“That’s very good of him,” said Mayor Johnson as he turned to converse with Walter Gregson, the famed industrialist and philanthropist. Noël gave a slight bow to the mayor and then turned and walked about the great hall. He was dazzled by the beautiful brilliance of the hall, its amazing use of glass, steel, and marble to allow for light to flood through its great open chasm that stood between the theatre that was home to the opera and ballet, and the concert hall that was home to the orchestra.
He began to walk up the stair that led to the mezzanine level of the concert hall, observing the beautiful blue shades that surrounded him. It felt as though he were walking on an aquatic azure cloud, which rang with the beauty of the music from the hall below. The swirling sounds of the strings and woodwinds mesmerized Noël, and he leaned against the wall, his breath becoming the chief function of his body, as he let the music consume his senses. The very nature of the sounds that flooded into his metaphysical soul through the all-too physical existence of the ear were enough to make even the hardest of hearts relish in the exuberance and beauty of this nearly angelic artistry.
Noël had always loved Mozart, but his life had taken him far from his youthful aspirations of soaring high above the mundane in a realm of celestial beauty, far down to laboring over improving the roads and railways of America, forming what he hoped would be a better infrastructure for posterity. And yet, despite his career bearing him amongst those who are all too fond of cynical pessimism, he retained some degree of his youthful optimistic imagination, a trait which had earned great accolades for the once time pianist turned civil engineer.
Suddenly, the music picked up, a trumpet sounded in one of the higher galleries that led to the highest levels of the theatre. All eyes turned towards the grand staircase that led up to the hall from the foyer below. Noël rushed to the edge of the balcony on which he stood, peering down as a figure robed in finery processed up the stair to Mayor Johnson, whose smile beamed all the way up to where Noël watched.
His heart pounded with excitement, as he rushed down the stair to the hall, pushing his way through the mob, to the head of the stair where the adventurer stood. Though he recognized the sounds of many voices about him, he understood not any verbal expression that erupted from his fellow Kansas Citians. His eyes were on the place where stood the subject of an entire world’s admiration.
The Mayor caught sight of Noël, and called to him, allowing for many members of society to steadily push the little lecturer forward, many out of a deep desire to be in his position, others simply euphoric at that historic moment in their city’s history. All seemed like a daze to Noël, like a lifetime of impressionistic fog covering his eyes, the sounds of the applause and personalities about him muffled, the music slowed, yet his own heartbeat taking center stage in this symphony of the present moment. The light about him seemed to dim as well, as he moved ever forward, to the one whom he admired most. His every thought bent on little more than his plausible reactions to the introduction that was certainly coming closer with every step.
Suddenly he was at the top of the stair, standing next to the Mayor looking headlong into his idol’s eyes. “Noël Felix, may I present Captain Amelia Daedelus.”
Noël was amazed: before him stood Daedelus, not the wizened man that he had long thought, but a beautiful woman, with the steely determination of any great name from the history of humanity. He bowed low, “Captain,” being the only word his tongue could emit.
“Mr. Felix,” she replied, with a fine mezzo-soprano voice, “it is an honor to meet you.” As she walked forward into the throng, she turned to look once more at Noël, whose face by this point was a fine shade of red. She winked, then turned and walked on.
I’ve always been someone who has a hard time focusing on the world around me in the immediate aftermath of leaving a cinema. The story played out before my eyes in rich and large visual colors and resounding about my ears in the surround sound systems used in modern cinemas is entrapping and beguiling to say the least. Every film I have ever gone to see, that I can remember, has been met by this same internal thought process as soon as the picture ends and I wander back out into the lobby. I imagine myself in the story, in its settings, walking and talking with its characters. I guess I’ve always been a bit of a day dreamer.
I’ve also been a storyteller for much of my life. Much of those energies that were once spent inventing fabulous fables of remote realities and fantasies in my youth are now often spent trying to think through my professional writing, both here at The Wednesday Blog and in my research. Still, I do like to daydream from time to time. I find it helps me focus on the good things in life. Those dreams are less extraordinary than they used to be, they are populated less by characters from the books and films I enjoy than by my own hopes for the future, however domestic and ordinary those hopes may be.
In recent months as I’ve allowed more of the dolor of our times creep into my thoughts, I’ve found my ability to daydream has become less and less pronounced. Maybe that’s what C. S. Lewis meant in The Last Battle when he said that of all the Pevensie children, the only one not to return to Narnia in its last days was Susan because she had grown up and didn’t believe in those stories anymore. Yet this fading ability to daydream has left me somewhat bereft. I find I’m less able to write when I can’t imagine a happy future. I’m less able to tell the stories I know both recent and quite ancient when I can’t imagine my own near and distant future. So, I hold onto that need for dreams, and do my best to keep that fire of my imagination alive despite the troubles of our time and the worries seemingly inherent in adulthood.
Over the last few weeks since I returned to Binghamton, I decided to watch a series of films that I loved as a child but hadn’t seen in full for at least a decade. Yet now with the extended editions of The Lord of the Ringson HBO Max I figured it’d be fun to see them again, and not only to remember them as I knew them years ago, but to relive those stories as an adult with everything that I know now guiding my eyes and ears through that modern epic. I often like to think of these sorts of stories that I enjoy, whether they be Tolkien’s legendarium or the near future of Star Trek, along the same general continuum of time and thought. Yet I quickly found myself asking the question, “how can these stories of a far distant past fit into what I know of the world and its origins?” The rational thinker in me posed a fundamental question about suspending disbelief.
So, how do I rationalize these stories of some ancient primordial past just before the dawn of human memory when we weren’t the only such people to walk this Earth? That after all is the setting of The Lord of the Rings, a time long lost when the Earth was young. There are plenty of old stories that tell of an age when humans lived alongside more supernatural creatures, whether they be the monsters and demigods of Greek mythology or the Tuatha Dé Dannán of the distant Irish mythic past. Tolkien set his stories in this same vein, they are a modern recreation of those old myths, those old epics & sagas that he loved so much. And those stories come from a different world than our own, one where the long history of the Earth cannot be explained by evolution or science, but where all things are created through divine music, described in the opening of Tolkien’s Silmarillion.
I for one do feel that there’s still a way to balance the old stories with the new. Our modern narrative for the creation of the Universe, of which the creation of the Earth and all life upon it is but a small verse, is yet another one of these stories. Yet among all the stories our modern one, our new one, is grounded in an understanding of the rational roots of Creation; it sings less of God and angels, supernatural spirits guiding the world into being, and more of Creation urging itself into existence through the very energy that burns at the heart of all things. I still think there’s room for these old stories in our new one, there’s room for us to acknowledge and embrace ancient interpretations of how we came to be in that we are richer for knowing what our ancestors thought and believed.
Tolkien’s stories are beautiful in their own way. They echo the great myths and sagas of the myriad cultures of Europe. They remind me of the Penguin translations of the old Irish myths that I read as a boy and could recite from memory today. Suspending disbelief allows us to let ourselves go from our lives, even for a few moments, and experience something incredible that we otherwise would not.
As The Return of the King finished on the evening of Labor Day, I found myself wondering what different characters from the Star Trek series would think of The Lord of the Rings and its characters. What would Spock make of the elves and their similar anatomy to his own Vulcans? What would Worf make of the fierce warriors of Rohan steeped in their honor charging to certain death before the walls of Minis Tirith? What can I learn from these two different yet similar stories of people trying to make their world a better place? I think the answer lies in the question. I’m drawn to stories such as The Lord of the Rings and Star Trek because they offer hope even in the darkest of times. The Hobbits prove that even the smallest among us can save the world, and Star Trek offers us today a vision of a better tomorrow that may still come. And if I need to suspend disbelief, if I need to shake the scales of my worldly cynicism from my eyes in order to see those two hopeful lights in the darkest night, then it’s worth doing.
Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane 