The Night Sea Journey
Stephen
B. Kagan
Fly,
dotard, fly! With thy wise dreams and fables of the sky.
Homer
When I died they wrapped me
in a radiation shielded cryo-suit, stuck me in a sarcophagus like pod and shot
me off into space. I must have looked a lot like a mummy wrapped in tinfoil.
While my last request was to become a silver skinned sentinel of the spaceways,
they had instead done their best and made me into a mummy. Unlike the mummies
of old I wasn't planning on ending up on display in a museum or being turned
into pigment and used for portraiture by some stupid alien Rosetti.
When I was alive I was never an
impulsive man so I chose my target carefully before my last gasp and entered
into the light. I had never travelled much before, happily burdened most of
my life with the responsibilities of work and family, so I at least wanted to
travel when I was dead. And though I kept my nose to the ground, my eyes and
mind were always looking beyond the white sliver of the moon high in the
noonday sky or the vast spill of stars at night and the soft glow of the
setting sun like honey on the across the horizon. And so after my mortality got
the best of me, they pulled my sorry withered ass up one of the space
elevators, towed me out of orbit as flotsam on some asteroid mining expedition,
took aim and shot me off toward Tau Sagittarii, 122 light years or so from
Earth. Rough estimate was that it would take me about 850,000 years to get to
my destination. I wasn't in a rush; I was dead after all.
Now, there could have been better
targets than that with the potpourri of Earth-like worlds littered throughout
the galaxy but I guess I wanted to make a point. I half expected that human
technology would accelerate enough to allow them to pick me up and revive me in
a hundred years or so but that never happened. I'm not sure what transpired
back on that old wet ball, probably science and technology got dragged back
down into the dark ages by some narrow minded theocracy or conservative
political ideology.
The first
time I woke up Rilke had it right; I did not know if I was a falcon, or a
storm, or a great song. Vague recollections of deep Cambrian dreams in caverns
measureless to man washed upon the shore of myself but faded quietly into the
oblivion of the modern mind. Were they merely artifacts of a dying and
waking brain or were they various incarnations along the way? Sadly, I suppose
I will never know. When I finally came to I found I was in a large dimly lit
room filled with swathes of cool mist inhabited by a pair of tall humanoids
with bird like heads and feathered garments. They peered at me with sharp clear
eyes and an unwavering gaze. They removed a scroll from my hands, looked over
it carefully then set it aside.
I watched
serenely as they stripped the frozen desiccated flesh from the loom of my
bones, spun out my DNA and wove new organs and tissues that they knit back onto
my cleaned and radiant skeleton. While I watched, a soft quiet buzzing filled
my skull and not only did my eyesight become sharper but old forgotten memories
from my childhood burst into awareness with greater clarity. I remembered the
excitement of chasing after an ice cream truck on a sweaty summer day with a
gaggle of friends by my side as it crawled up the street through the cool shadows
of chestnut and maples. The street was pocked with small oozing bubbles of tar,
the air was wrinkled with heat and cicada buzzed like thousands of little
electric saws in the tree tops.
By the time they
reconnected my head, the multitude of memories settled from a storm into a
simmer and I understood things now with greater clarity including the language
these creatures spoke. They said they had picked me up in transit and after
examining me decided the honorable thing to do was assist me along my way. They
were enroute to establishing trade with a rather xenophobic species in another
solar system and could not afford to bring me along or delay their mission. I
thanked them deeply though it grieved me to lose this opportunity to explore
their civilization. They disassembled my pod, transformed it into smart dust
and reused the material to build an actual cryogenic chamber with a basic
propulsion system. They gave me back the scroll they had found in my hands and
I smiled when I saw it. The picture and hieroglyphs were drawn in my older
daughter's unmistakable refined style. It showed a scene where Ra, the falcon
headed god was riding a boat through the land of the dead. The aliens waited
until I was ready then lulled me carefully into a deep cryo-sleep and sent me
along my way.
The second time I awakened I was in
a small room, brightly lit in some places but mottled in shadows.
Despite my previous awakening from the dead I could not remember who I was. All
I knew were the stories of old and I could not recall if I was Odysseus cast
adrift, but now stranded upon an island or the wandering Gilgamesh now in the
house of Siduri, the goddess of the vine. A crowd of small gnomish creatures
gathered around me and poked me gently with long prehensile hands and luminous
fingers. Their eyes were large and gray and the creatures moved like awkward
children though I could not tell their age. Their thin lipped mouths moved
though their voices said nothing remotely like any language I had ever heard.
My joints ached, my throat was dry and I desperately wanted a drink. After they
did a full scan of my body they did indeed bring me a squat cylinder of a clear
but softly fermented liquid with a soft berry taste.
They took great interest in
exploring my body and doing various scans with small pieces of equipment shaped
simply like softly glowing displays. After a while I was finally able to sit up
and look around. They showed me a chart of the galaxy with the path I had taken
and a clear You Are Here symbol. Near as I could tell, I was most of the way
toward my destination though I had no idea how many thousands of years had
passed. It took some time for them to scan my brain and process my language
before they could adjust their translators. They had brought me to their home
world but before they could let me out into their atmosphere they needed to
make some adjustments with my permission. I agreed and was able to watch as
they removed my rebuilt organs and replaced them with synthetic
ones that glowed with a warm golden light. When they sealed me up it was
strange to no longer feel my heart beating quietly or my lungs rise and fall
within my chest. Instead I felt a vibrant hum as though I was constantly on the
edge of discovery.
Their home world turned out to be a
new one that they were in the process of terraforming. Giant
creatures ambled through the barren rocky landscape consuming stone and
releasing gas and nutrient rich soil. Carefully designed bacteria and nanites
were busy munching upon and reworking the bonds of atmospheric molecules. The
oceans were already full of a plethora of eukryotes and trillions of nanites
balancing and adjusting the chemistry. Under large domes where my hosts lived,
vegetation grew in jungles amidst small urban centers. The transformation of
the planet was happening at an extraordinary pace and it would take decades
rather than centuries.
In the quiet of the night after
leaving my hosts for the privacy of my own thoughts I decided I needed to move
on. This was their task, their world, not my own. As a species they had little
sense of privacy, their food was bitter and they smelled funny. Now that I was
alive again and had a means to travel the stars I decided there was no reason
to linger. They had studied me with great interest especially when they found
the changes to my body from my previous encounter. Conversely, I had studied
them and enjoyed having my feet upon the ground again for a while. The hunger
to explore was a fire in me now and I discovered that I had no interest in
settling down. The galaxy was a vast network of cultures and intelligence with
wonders yet undiscovered. How could I justify settling down when there was so
much more out there to explore?
They expanded my cryo-pod and
installed a guidance system with maps of all the known inhabited planets and
those likely to harbor life. They brought me back to space, we said goodbye, I
was lulled back to sleep and shot toward my original destination. There must
have been some molecular drift because now my awareness was loosely sustained,
glacial as it was. I dreamed vast slow dreams with little plot or direction.
How long I was in space before I was picked up again I had no idea.
Of the
next encounter I have only vague recollections and they were not kind. The room
was dark and shadowed, lit by dying embers. They were creatures of some
forgotten lore and their eyes were dark as ravens. I was analyzed like an inert
specimen, an artifact. They did not respond to any of my attempts of
communication and treated me like an odd fish dragged exhausted onto a boat,
it's gills pulsing as it gasped for breath. I was worried that I was going to
be dissected and eaten before I could figure out what to do. Mostly paralyzed,
I could still move my hands and started flashing my fingers in sequences of
primes until they glanced at me and at one other before continuing on as
before. I gave them the finger and wished it could traverse the gulf. Eventually they put me "back into the
chamber turning, all my soul within me burning" and as I lay there in
muted terror and began to slumber I wished that we could have been better
strangers and I prayed that I would see them nevermore. Again I dreamed,
meandering through dark forbidden landscapes and finding rooms behind doors I
had never seen before.
When I finally woke again I was in a
vast undefined space though there was a sense of enclosure, of nearby
boundaries though none could be seen. A diffuse light filled the space with no
clear shape or direction and a soft resonant sound that resembled the long slow
drone of temple bells came from everywhere at once. Distant tones
rose and fell like voices in plainsong and far off I heard what sounded like
the deep pulse of a great engine and other strange mechanisms. In the hours
when I lay in a mythic mind on the edge of slumber while looking out at the
world, I could not remember if my ship was named Pequod, the reed barque of Ra
or the nameless boat of Charon.
Thin
strands of vibrating energy appeared around me, pulsing and shimmering as they
rapidly exchanged a staccato of rhythmic sounds too fast and complex for me to
understand. I tried to communicate but my words were like dull stones that fell
to the floor and vanished. The strands of energy moved around me in a dance and
one outstretched a thin resonating filament to my face. Muscles throughout my
body stiffened and twisted uncontrollably and a sense of revelation came upon
me. A rapid succession of soundscapes and resonant forms flooded through my
enhanced but all too primitive brain. Silence enfolded me as the filament moved
away from my head and disappeared. I tried to put together something
comprehensive from the flood of information that had passed through me but it
was impossible. I longed to understand but my mind was just too small.
A memory from the distant past came
unbidden from when I was somehow more human though less complete than I was
now. I recalled being an infant on a dance floor at a wedding, a jumbled forest
of legs moving around me to a melody I could not comprehend. I wanted to participate
but it was too much for me, I was just too damn small and I couldn't understand
the chaos of how the people moved around me.
The vibrating strands of energy
pulsed and rapidly exchanged complex polyrhythms like an ancient piece
of African drumming underscored by the long rich tones of a viola and then
there was silence. I had the impression they were waiting for me, waiting for
an answer. All I could do was re-iterate that I wanted to understand. Silence
ensued and all but one of them disappeared. It spoke slowly to me in the
pleasant and reassuring voice of a cello. I slept for a while, a deep dreamless
sleep and when I awakened something had shifted in my awareness that was
difficult to comprehend. I felt as though I was standing or floating beside
myself. Somehow my consciousness had split and was in two places at once. One
was enmeshed in nerves and flesh, the other floated in a serene space nearby.
They had somehow entangled my consciousness and separated my selves by a small
distance, but for me there was no distance. Instead of two of me there was only
one, but with two sets of eyes. It was dizzying at first, as though I was
learning to see straight with crossed eyes.
They took my body and bathed it in
deep resonant sounds of complex harmonies and wrapped me in folds of magnetic
fields. I sang the body electric as agonizing pain momentarily
ripped through my nerves and soon there was only one of me watching with a
curious sense of detachment. They disassembled my body, separated the elements and
recompiled them from the bottom up, molecule by smart molecule. They built me a
body laced with webs of conductive nano circuitry then transferred and melded
my consciousness within and I was whole again.
My capacity had grown beyond
anything I had previously imagined was possible. My entire history and portions
of the history and knowledge of each species I had encountered including my own
were embedded within me. They always were but I could not read the code until
now. Each species I had encountered had given me far more than I had known and
I had become something more than a simple explorer.
My new friends, whom I had seen
before as vibrant strings of energy were now clearly complex
beings of resonant energy. I understood that they had evolved beyond the need
for organic and were now something more akin to resonant patterns of
information. They brought me to their home world and what was once a viable
planet had been transformed into a vast branched arcology that resembled what
could loosely described as a tree of souls. It turned out that I had finally
reached my intended destination, the source of the interstellar signal that
Earth had received all those millennia ago. These beings were in the process of
engineering the destruction of the second sun that was destabilizing their
binary system. It was spectacular to watch as the star ejected a vast quantity
of solar energy that they captured while the star cooled rapidly and collapsed
in a controlled demolition, first into a white then a black dwarf.
I cannot say how long this took
according to my primitive old standards of time since all of my biological cues
were gone and my time sense had evolved to match that of my companions. All I
can say is that after many turnings, the longing in me to explore the cosmos
welled up within me again. I no longer needed to sleep and had plenty to occupy
my mind though I could now live for long spans of deep undisturbed peace
without the need for thought or boredom. My friends used the materials of my
old cryopod mixed with matter they had mined from the black sun and built me a
ship with which I could travel the stars. It had an advanced propulsion system
but it worked on principles of bending spacetime to travel vast distances
nearly instantaneously.
A few of my new friends decided to
join me in my continued exploration of the galaxy. There was so much yet
undiscovered and unknown. Eventually I wanted to find my way back to Earth to
see what had become of my old stomping grounds and share with them what I had
found. For now, though there were so many inhabited worlds out there to see,
who knows where we would end up next. I now had an exact replica of the scroll
my daughter had made from the Egyptian Book of the Dead
inscribed into the molecular structure of which I was composed. It said:
"Hail, thou who goest round
about heaven, thou pilot of the world, thou beautiful rudder of the western
heaven."
