Gold rush, p.34
Gold Rush, page 34
Even though it’s well out of reach, Dice holds out his hand, reaching for the creature, wanting to touch it, hoping to feel its skin glide beneath his gloved fingertips. The alien whale is the size of several buses joined end to end and sails past a few feet beyond the surface of the black alien vessel at a leisurely pace. He can’t reach the creature, but seeing his gloved hand outstretched toward it, allows him to gain some perspective.
As the creature rises, its underside becomes visible. For lack of a better term, eight short, stubby legs dangle beneath the leviathan, but what use does such an airborne animal have for legs as thick as those of an elephant? It’s only once the animal has risen that Dice can see properly beneath the behemoth. What he thought of as legs are more akin to the muscular trunk of an elephant. From their flexible appearance, it’s clear they lack any rigid bones. They have vast openings where the sole of a foot would be. If he squints, he can see a shimmer in the air beneath each of them. Whatever this creature consumes, it’s clear its body acts as a flotation bladder similar to those of fish, and it exchanges gases, expelling them beneath itself, driving it on through the air.
“Beautiful.”
“There’s a beauty to all of nature,” his father says, walking up beside him.
“How? I mean, this is so quick.”
“We seeded Venus with what would equate to autotrophic algae on your world.” He holds out his hand, but there’s nothing in it. “They’re too small to be seen, but they’re T-shaped, with the top crossmember forming a wing that’s caught on the lightest breeze. They swarm through the air like dandelion seeds in an updraft.”
“And from the smallest to the biggest,” Dice says, watching as the alien whale continues to rise in the air, pushing with the fluke of its broad tail as it banks and changes direction.
“The biggest thrive on the smallest.”
“And you?”
“We ride the thermals.”
“You?” Dice asks, knowing that he’s seeing a human representation standing in for the alien and wondering what they look like.
“Jump.”
“Jump?”
“Run and jump. Don’t worry. I won’t let you fall.”
“Run?” Dice asks, nodding in answer to himself as he builds his courage.
“The faster, the better. Trust me.”
“I do,” Dice says.
Dice knows his own mind. He can’t hesitate. His feet start moving. His boots clomp on the mirrored surface. He knows if he stops and thinks about things for too long, he’ll chicken out. Chickening out, though, is a misnomer. The fear of falling has kept hominids alive ever since they lost their ability to swing through the trees. From an evolutionary perspective, their confidence was lost when the Hominoidea split from the Old World monkeys roughly fifteen million years ago, long before the homo genus split from gorillas and chimps. The fear of falling is primal, being baked into the human mind. Even as a qualified parachute jumper, Dice still has to push beyond that fear.
His boots pound on the mirror. His father runs with him, keeping pace beside him, looking straight ahead. As they reach the end of the alien vessel, the curved hull falls away. With each step, the angle increases. Within seconds, Dice has gone from running on the flat upper mirror to running face-first down an ever-increasing slope. It strikes his mind that there’s no way to back out. Even if he could bring himself to a halt, he’d fall. Dice pumps his legs, pushing harder until the hull disappears beneath his boots entirely.
Clouds open out before him. He spreads his arms, falling face-first toward the dark, dense, seething clouds tens of thousands of feet below him.
Claws grab him from behind. They close around his shoulders and upper arm without piercing his suit, dragging him on and raising him up. They squeeze his arms, but no tighter than a climbing harness. Dice looks up, but the rim of his helmet prevents him from seeing the creature that has grabbed him. Looking out to the sides, long, leathery wings dip in and out of view. The animal banks, rising in height before sweeping down toward the alien spacecraft, giving Dice his first good look at the structure. The upper deck is smooth and polished. The sides, though, have what appear to be windows with support braces between them. There are at least six decks. A slight shimmer beneath the vessel suggests the presence of exhaust. Some kind of engine powers it, pushing it along as it floats among the clouds.
His Dragon capsule looks small, being positioned roughly in the middle of the deck.
The alien creature holding him rushes in toward the deck, curling over it. One of the wings dips. Its reflection gives him a sense of depth, revealing a separation of barely a meter. With the skill of an Olympic ice skater competing for gold, he’s drawn along the hull, clearing the surface by barely a foot. It’s intentional. The alien is allowing him to see its reflection. Broad wings span easily forty feet. A streamlined body, not unlike that of a pterodactyl, glides through the air. Its mouth resembles that of a pelican, with a vast, sagging bag tucked in beneath its chin. Lights glisten along its body. It’s not until it lands on the black mirrored surface that Dice realizes these are mechanical augmentations.
The flying creature flares its wings, turning them up and coming to a halt just inches above the surface. Dice is placed gently on his boots. With a single beat of its massive wings, the creature swivels and turns to land opposite him. Dice feels a burst of wind wash over him as it settles. To his surprise, its wings fold around its body with each tip reaching the far shoulder.
An alien springs from the back of the flying creature. At a guess, it’s seven feet in height with four thin legs supporting an oval-shaped torso covered in black fur. The alien has two thin arms. Eyes protrude from its head, which is no surprise from an evolutionary perspective, as even on Earth, sight is inextricably linked with the brain to reduce an animal’s reaction time. Instead of fingers, three claws converge on a single point at the end of each arm. Like a gorilla, its fur parts to reveal the black skin of a face with creases and ribbed shapes surrounding thin lips. Lights run around the alien’s waist, but it’s clear these are some kind of integrated electronic implant. At a guess, Dice figures this provides the alien with the means of communicating with and controlling the flying creature.
An arm reaches for Dice with claws extended.
“I’m Auk-Mul.”
Dice reaches out his gloved hand and shakes, saying, “And I’m impressed.”
Auk-Mul grins.
Dice gets the impression that, rather than the end, this is the start of something new.
Epilogue
A year after the impact of Comet Yakov and First Contact with the newly arrived Venusians, Jill walks into the back of a church in lower Manhattan feeling nervous. Helicopters circle overhead. The pipe organ playing inside struggles to compete with the thumping of their rotors. An usher holds the thick wooden door open. He’s dressed in a black suit with a starched white shirt and a black tie. He averts his eyes, looking down at her feet as she walks up the old, worn, concrete stairs. Jill holds the front of her dress high, not wanting to step on the hem. A corsage of red roses slips around her wrist. Instead of facing upward, they lean down, but she doesn’t mind. Nothing can go wrong today. Well, lots of little things have gone wrong, but she decides nothing can ruin the day for her.
Heads turn as she walks in. From behind a white lace veil, Jill sees strangers staring back at her. Weddings are supposed to be for friends and family, but that was never going to be the case with billionaire-cum-multimillionaire-cum-billionaire again, Aaron Swagger. By himself, he’d never draw the President of the United States to his wedding, let alone dignitaries from Europe and Asia, including King William, but the presence of NASA astronaut Dice Newman and his fiancée Suzanne O’Lannon drew Ambassador Auk-Mul to the wedding. As part of the cultural exchange between Earth and Venus, he was fascinated by the idea of marriage. His height and his golden spacesuit make him difficult to miss. He’s been given an aisle seat and turns to watch as she enters.
Aaron is standing at the front of the church with Father Dominic Ramos. Thousands of brilliant red roses adorn the sanctuary. The scent is magnificent.
Jill’s father walks alongside her, measuring his steps in time with the music. On reaching the front of the church, Jill turns just as she did in rehearsal, which Auk-Mul insisted on attending. Her father lifts her veil and takes his seat next to her mother.
Father Ramos reaches out, taking both her hand and Aaron’s in an unscripted act of love. His face beams with kindness. He smiles at each of them and speaks under his breath so only they can hear.
“Nervous?”
“Excited,” Aaron replies.
“Me, too,” Jill says.
“I’ve got to say, I’m nervous. I’ve never had an audience like this before.”
“I don’t think anyone has,” Jill says, smiling.
After joking with them, he lets their hands go and takes an ornate leather-bound Bible from a polished copper stand set to one side and clutches it to his chest as he addresses the congregation.
“Dearest friends, loved ones, presidents, kings, queens, dignitaries and ambassadors, I invite you to witness the love, devotion and commitment of Aaron Augustus Swagger and Jillian Loi Yakov as they join themselves in this most sacred bond.”
Jill hears everything that’s said, and yet she doesn’t. She’s aware of the audience, and yet she’s not. She speaks her lines, reciting her vows and yet for her the ceremony is a dream.
Once the rings are exchanged, Father Ramos says, “You may kiss the bride.”
Aaron draws her close. She steps up to him, resting her hands on his chest. Their lips linger. The crowd claps. They turn. The congregation is on its feet, cheering. Confetti floats through the air, falling around them.
Like the others, Auk-Mul is standing. He’s clapping his gloved claws even though Jill doubts it is customary for him. And she sees something in him she never expected. For thousands of years, humans have drawn arbitrary distinctions between themselves: male/female, rich/poor, dark-skinned/light, European or Asian, Christian, Muslim or Hindu, straight or gay, upper class or working, tall or short. And all of these distinctions—absolutely all of them—are utterly meaningless. And now, an alien from another star system walks on Earth—an alien. Someone who genuinely is utterly different from Homo sapiens, and yet he’s not. Auk-Mul thinks, reasons, and cares just like anyone else. Physically, he’s unquestionably different, and yet he’s similar. Jill wonders if this is what humanity needs from First Contact, not an understanding of dark energy or a theory of everything, but the awareness that consciousness is universal and precious. She smiles at Auk-Mul and reaches a laced-gloved hand toward him as she walks arm in arm with Aaron down the aisle, greeting various dignitaries as newlyweds.
Auk-Mul straightens the corsage on her arm.
“Thank you,” she says. “For everything.”
Afterword
Thank you for supporting independent science fiction.
Reaching new readers is insanely difficult for obscure indie authors like me. Between ebook piracy, AI churning out novels, and the chaos of global politics, my book sales have declined roughly 50% in the last year, with my last four novels failing to find an audience. If you’ve enjoyed this story, please take the time to rate it and leave a review online. Your opinion counts. Your review will help others decide whether they should pick up this novel.
Tell your friends about Gold Rush and encourage them to pick up a copy of this quirky story. Your support for this novel is what makes the next story possible.
Here’s some of the background behind key points in this novel.
The Importance of Science
Why is science important? Because it provides a rigorous means of removing our natural biases and prejudices from our decisions. We’re human. We’re selfish. We’re brimming with pride. We react rather than think. We don’t like change. Our instinctive response to being challenged is to be defensive. It sounds strange, but the biggest fight any of us will ever face is against our own impulses. We love to argue. We’re not built for calm, rational discussions. And that’s why we need science. We need something outside ourselves that is objective. And that’s what science does. Science gives us an independent yardstick against which we can measure ideas.
What is the difference between science and religion? Or science and politics? Or science and our own pride and ego? Nothing, really. We all make claims. Science does too. The difference lies in testing those claims. Science is impartial. It’s repeatable. It doesn’t matter how angry or passionate I am about vaccines or a flat/round Earth, you can use science to test my claims. Science isn’t perfect. It’s simply the only system we’ve ever devised that demands we’re honest with our claims. Science is important because it aligns our ideas with reality and allows us to recognize when we’re wrong.
Four blind men describing an elephant
The Rig Veda is a collection of Hindu texts written in Sanskrit, dating back to around 1500 BCE (around the same time as the writing of the Book of Genesis). One of its parables is discussed in this novel and describes four blind men discovering an elephant in a forest. Each of them attempts to describe what they’ve found. Examining the trunk, one thinks he’s discovered a python-like creature. Another fixates on what feels like pillars of leather, being the elephant’s legs. Another gets whipped by the tail. While yet another is fascinated by the smooth, curved stones protruding from near the creature’s mouth. The men discuss their findings and conclusions, but they can’t agree on what they’ve found.
The parable of the four blind men is a thought-experiment that’s three and a half thousand years old and still relevant today. Rather than bickering and arguing, thinking someone’s lying, the four men need to work together to understand what they’ve found.
Science is like four blind men describing reality, probing the secrets of the universe with telescopes and subatomic colliders as they try to understand the cosmos, but they can’t agree on what they see. Somewhere beyond the tusks of Relativity and the muscular trunk of quantum mechanics, there’s an elephant waiting to be discovered.
This analogy resonates deeply in our modern world. In politics, people often oversimplify what they see as the cause of society’s problems: there are too many immigrants, or they’re here illegally, or it’s billionaires who are to blame, or it’s the patriarchy, or it’s corruption that’s at fault, or it’s Big Pharma, or socialism that’s destroying society, or capitalism. We’re obsessing over the large toenails and big padded feet and failing to describe the elephant itself. Rather than arguing over cause and effect, we need to look at the broader picture and understand how these elements relate to each other.
Mars or Venus
Although this novel is about Venus, I love Mars. I’ve even written a novel about the challenges of life on Mars. I have no doubt there will be boots on Mars within the next decade, although whose boots remains to be seen. Mars, though, is not and will never be Earth II.
Despite the claims of prominent spaceflight proponents, there are a number of reasons why Mars will never replace Earth—absolutely never. First, Mars has no magnetic field, so it gets bombarded by solar winds and cosmic radiation, which strip away the atmosphere and make it hazardous to live on the surface. Second, the gravity on Mars is so low that even if we were to terraform the planet over thousands of years and come up with a way to shield the surface from harsh radiation, it would still lose its atmosphere to space at an alarming rate.
Mars is more than twice the size of the Moon, but it is still roughly half the size of Earth, being much closer to the Moon in size. Consider the following comparison…
Diameter
(km)
Mass
(1024kg)
Gravity
(m/s2)
Earth
12,756
5.97
9.8
Venus
12,104
4.87
8.9
Mars
6,792
0.64
3.7
Moon
3,475
0.07
1.6
Mars may be half the diameter of Earth, but it has 1/3rd the gravity and barely 1/10th the mass. When compared side by side, the difference is obvious.
Venus is Earth’s twin—Earth’s evil twin, with astonishingly similar physical characteristics, and yet it is an utter hellscape. In the grand scope of colonizing the solar system, though, it is a better candidate than Mars.
As hostile as Venus is, it has the distinct advantage of being the only place in the solar system where the temperature, air pressure and gravity are close to those found on Earth. Not only is that convenient and comfortable, it’s also essential to maintaining good health. And that makes Venus the wild card of the solar system. Most of the problems of surviving beyond the confines of Earth are found on Venus.
Mars is the darling of many science fiction stories and a serious scientific target in the search for evidence of ancient extraterrestrial microbial life. The sweeping desert vistas and rolling sand dunes on Mars may look similar to the American West, but the reality is that Mars is nothing like Earth.
Mars is physically far smaller than Earth, having 1/10th the mass of our world and, as such, has less than half Earth’s gravity and no magnetic field. Venus, in comparison, comes in at 8/10ths the mass of Earth. In other words, there is eight times the mass of Mars on Venus.
Like Venus, Mars is a planet of extremes, but the Martian extremes are not as obvious. As discussed in this novel, you can stand on the equator of Mars in summer, and your feet will be a balmy 75°F or 25°C while your head will be literally freezing at 32°F or 0 °C. That’s an astonishing temperature gradient occurring within six feet! At night, the temperature at the equator will plunge to −148°F or -100°C, which is as cold as the Argus Dome on the Eastern Antarctic Plateau. At the Martian poles, it’s worse, with temperatures plummeting to −193°F or -125°C, which is cold enough to freeze carbon dioxide and only just above the freezing point of nitrogen.
