Racing the Comet | Douglas Thompson
Everyone remembers the day they looked up and saw the second sun in our sky. Our astronomers had warned us, shown us that star whose glow was growing, but somehow nobody expected the last minute spurt. Even the ones like me, the scientists, who had been studying it for 18 months, drawing up plans, considering our options, it caught us by surprise, the double sunrise.
I remember I was out on the high plains with my brother that day, racing wrathbeasts, while my wife Gildyhaen stayed at home nursing our eggs. We often went racing before dawn like that, to avoid the heat of the day, knowing our steeds’ hearts and lungs could perform better, and they could feast on sleeping pricklebacks when the games were over.
But when we saw the dual suns, I felt sick, and unlike my brother (who knew nothing of the secret scientific project I had been working on) I understood what they meant, and what we would therefore have to do. Doctor Striltaeron had been right, and his near-lightspeed rocket would be the only hope for the people of the world. But hope alas, for only a minority, a chosen few, a mere six hundred, selected by lottery.
Of course, since I am talking to you now at all, we know that I won one of those tickets, that I was spared. Or was I? Am I lucky to be where I am now, in a living nightmare prison, a parody of the world I once lived in? Or were the lucky ones really those who stayed behind and perished in the
world which burned up when that fireball hit?
Doctor Striltaeron’s rocket took off the following week, just before the fireball hit home. Only one of Gildyhaen’s eggs had hatched by then and we had to leave the rest with her father…. she was distraught. But we were surviving, I reminded her, there would be a future, we would be the future hope of the world, the one chance that life might ultimately survive the great calamity.
The doctor’s calculations seemed unassailable. We accelerated and accelerated as he planned, and watched our world grow small behind us, with tearful eyes. Relativity, he called it, the theory that space and time formed one fabric, governed by the speed of light, and that the faster we got and the closer we got to the speed of light: the more we would leap into the future. The Doctor’s round-trip was meticulously planned, the trajectory mathematical. It took us fifty years of travelling, more than the lifespan of several of the beasts we had left behind on our world (the less intelligent ones) to come back around through space and arrive again at our beloved planet.
We slowed as we approached and everyone was in awe. Gildyhaen wept on my shoulder, but our children only blinked wide-eyed. They had no memory or conception of our home planet, having been born in space, except Xalrthren of course, but he had only been a day old the day we stepped aboard the rocket. Doctor Striltaeron himself had died in space, but we had a machine record of his brain which we could talk to, keeping all his knowledge accessible to us. Striltaeron’s formulas, reiterated by the machine, insisted that ten thousand years had passed on our home planet, while we sped through space. But the more we orbited out world and examined what we could see through the drifting clouds, the more we doubted the accuracy of these calculations. The shape of the continents, their locations relative to each other, their coastlines and outlines, all seemed impossibly different, as if a much vaster span of time had taken place. We got our geologists and geographers to muse on this, to postulate and recalculate, but their answers seemed so preposterous that even they could not believe them.
We decided to land, to send a small advance party of ten of us down through the atmosphere to examine our estranged home world at closer quarters. What we found down there astounded all of us. All the enormous fauna of our beloved planet had been replaced by tiny timid creatures, and lord over all of these were pink and wiry beings in colourful clothes. Our world had grown cold. These creatures hid in elaborate shelters and sped around in metal shells, defying the weather. They intercepted us and attacked us, terrified of us, calling us monsters, appalled by our size and our appearance. The few of us who survived their initial attacks, they quarantined and imprisoned and hid from view, afraid that their populace at large would find out about us and be overcome with terror, descend into panic.
I missed Gildyhaen so much, but I did my best not to reveal her existence, nor of that of any of my fellows, still orbiting the planet up in space. I tried and tried to communicate with the pink creatures, our captors, and in the end myself and the mission biologist succeeded and tried to reason with them. We told them at length about our history and technology and how we had got there, in short: that their world was our world, and that we must share it. But they did not believe us, or did not want to, or did not understand.
In the end, I persuaded them to take us in secret, under guard, to one of their museums at night, while the populace at large slept, so that we could demonstrate a point to them. In this museum they had recreated the skeletons of our wrathbeasts and pricklebacks and countless other of the lost species of our beloved lost world. “We are they”, I said, struggling but eventually succeeding in their peculiar language of squeaks and mewls “these beasts were our brethren, we tamed them and herded them, we shared this world with them long ago, before you ever came along, before the fireball filled our sky and the world ended”.
“No, no…. that won’t do at all!” –One of their most learned scholars strode forward and gawped up at us, “That is pure lies and fantasy. If you had existed back then, we would have found traces of you, casts of bones like these!”
“But why?”-I countered. “Where did you find these?”
“On river beds, where animals lay down to die or were drowned or overcome”.
“We buried or burned our dead” I explained, “Just as I now have learned that you do too. But better still, we ran away from danger, to hilltops, to die hero’s deaths, we did not lie down and die on riverbeds like stupid herbivores”.
“Alas, alas…” their genius muttered, as if he wanted to be helpful but was constrained by the formalities of his role. “No bone casts, no existence. I’m sorry, but you simply aren’t here, because you can’t be. You don’t exist”.
And so, my beloved Gildyhaen, some days I wish that foul blind little creature was right, and that I did not exist, but I’m afraid that I still do. And each night when the stars come out, I watch them from my prison bars and whisper my hope up to that little brighter light that flashes by, the orbiting station, where I know that you and my dear brethren wait and watch, longing for my return. Do not despair. I believe, from what I can see, that we live much longer than these smooth pink people with their little hands and small ideas. They will perish soon enough. The moon that rises every night it still our moon. At least that hasn’t changed in all these millennia. It guards our world, their world, my world, the same world. And it remembers.
I remember I was out on the high plains with my brother that day, racing wrathbeasts, while my wife Gildyhaen stayed at home nursing our eggs. We often went racing before dawn like that, to avoid the heat of the day, knowing our steeds’ hearts and lungs could perform better, and they could feast on sleeping pricklebacks when the games were over.
But when we saw the dual suns, I felt sick, and unlike my brother (who knew nothing of the secret scientific project I had been working on) I understood what they meant, and what we would therefore have to do. Doctor Striltaeron had been right, and his near-lightspeed rocket would be the only hope for the people of the world. But hope alas, for only a minority, a chosen few, a mere six hundred, selected by lottery.
Of course, since I am talking to you now at all, we know that I won one of those tickets, that I was spared. Or was I? Am I lucky to be where I am now, in a living nightmare prison, a parody of the world I once lived in? Or were the lucky ones really those who stayed behind and perished in the
world which burned up when that fireball hit?
Doctor Striltaeron’s rocket took off the following week, just before the fireball hit home. Only one of Gildyhaen’s eggs had hatched by then and we had to leave the rest with her father…. she was distraught. But we were surviving, I reminded her, there would be a future, we would be the future hope of the world, the one chance that life might ultimately survive the great calamity.
The doctor’s calculations seemed unassailable. We accelerated and accelerated as he planned, and watched our world grow small behind us, with tearful eyes. Relativity, he called it, the theory that space and time formed one fabric, governed by the speed of light, and that the faster we got and the closer we got to the speed of light: the more we would leap into the future. The Doctor’s round-trip was meticulously planned, the trajectory mathematical. It took us fifty years of travelling, more than the lifespan of several of the beasts we had left behind on our world (the less intelligent ones) to come back around through space and arrive again at our beloved planet.
We slowed as we approached and everyone was in awe. Gildyhaen wept on my shoulder, but our children only blinked wide-eyed. They had no memory or conception of our home planet, having been born in space, except Xalrthren of course, but he had only been a day old the day we stepped aboard the rocket. Doctor Striltaeron himself had died in space, but we had a machine record of his brain which we could talk to, keeping all his knowledge accessible to us. Striltaeron’s formulas, reiterated by the machine, insisted that ten thousand years had passed on our home planet, while we sped through space. But the more we orbited out world and examined what we could see through the drifting clouds, the more we doubted the accuracy of these calculations. The shape of the continents, their locations relative to each other, their coastlines and outlines, all seemed impossibly different, as if a much vaster span of time had taken place. We got our geologists and geographers to muse on this, to postulate and recalculate, but their answers seemed so preposterous that even they could not believe them.
We decided to land, to send a small advance party of ten of us down through the atmosphere to examine our estranged home world at closer quarters. What we found down there astounded all of us. All the enormous fauna of our beloved planet had been replaced by tiny timid creatures, and lord over all of these were pink and wiry beings in colourful clothes. Our world had grown cold. These creatures hid in elaborate shelters and sped around in metal shells, defying the weather. They intercepted us and attacked us, terrified of us, calling us monsters, appalled by our size and our appearance. The few of us who survived their initial attacks, they quarantined and imprisoned and hid from view, afraid that their populace at large would find out about us and be overcome with terror, descend into panic.
I missed Gildyhaen so much, but I did my best not to reveal her existence, nor of that of any of my fellows, still orbiting the planet up in space. I tried and tried to communicate with the pink creatures, our captors, and in the end myself and the mission biologist succeeded and tried to reason with them. We told them at length about our history and technology and how we had got there, in short: that their world was our world, and that we must share it. But they did not believe us, or did not want to, or did not understand.
In the end, I persuaded them to take us in secret, under guard, to one of their museums at night, while the populace at large slept, so that we could demonstrate a point to them. In this museum they had recreated the skeletons of our wrathbeasts and pricklebacks and countless other of the lost species of our beloved lost world. “We are they”, I said, struggling but eventually succeeding in their peculiar language of squeaks and mewls “these beasts were our brethren, we tamed them and herded them, we shared this world with them long ago, before you ever came along, before the fireball filled our sky and the world ended”.
“No, no…. that won’t do at all!” –One of their most learned scholars strode forward and gawped up at us, “That is pure lies and fantasy. If you had existed back then, we would have found traces of you, casts of bones like these!”
“But why?”-I countered. “Where did you find these?”
“On river beds, where animals lay down to die or were drowned or overcome”.
“We buried or burned our dead” I explained, “Just as I now have learned that you do too. But better still, we ran away from danger, to hilltops, to die hero’s deaths, we did not lie down and die on riverbeds like stupid herbivores”.
“Alas, alas…” their genius muttered, as if he wanted to be helpful but was constrained by the formalities of his role. “No bone casts, no existence. I’m sorry, but you simply aren’t here, because you can’t be. You don’t exist”.
And so, my beloved Gildyhaen, some days I wish that foul blind little creature was right, and that I did not exist, but I’m afraid that I still do. And each night when the stars come out, I watch them from my prison bars and whisper my hope up to that little brighter light that flashes by, the orbiting station, where I know that you and my dear brethren wait and watch, longing for my return. Do not despair. I believe, from what I can see, that we live much longer than these smooth pink people with their little hands and small ideas. They will perish soon enough. The moon that rises every night it still our moon. At least that hasn’t changed in all these millennia. It guards our world, their world, my world, the same world. And it remembers.