Launch: Chapter 21

  29 Years Ago…

  

  “It’s not fair.”  Markus declared to Hugh as they sat on the side of a hill on Vancouver’s north shore.  They were overlooking downtown Vancouver, and the sounds of the late evening bustle could be heard even at their distant perch.  It could only be heard in murmurs though; no individual sounds were discernible.   Earlier that day, Markus’ father had died in a de-orbing accident.  A small piece of orbital debris had chipped the ablative ceramic tiles underneath his shuttle just before re-entering the atmosphere, and the ship instantaneously incinerated at some point during their re-entry.

  Accidents like this used to be much more common before space faring nations got together and conducted the Great Orbital Cleanup of the late twenty-first century.  They’d always known it would be impossible to get all of the orbiting debris, but they knew they could get enough to make such events far rarer.  They succeeded in this regard, and similar accidents only occurred once every few years or so now, though they did still occur.  Accidents were infrequent enough, that they were truly shocking when they did happen.

  Most shocked by such accidents were of course those directly involved, and Markus was no exception.   At nineteen, his life had so far been quite sheltered from death, especially from the sudden and unexpected kind.   He was still young and naïve enough to have never known death so intimately before.  He’d been under the perfectly natural, though gravely mistaken illusion, that his father would live forever, much like he figured he himself and everyone he knew would live forever.  As a child he’d been affected by his sister’s death, but he didn’t experience it in so direct and personal way.  No previous experiences in his life had ever compelled him to seriously consider the impermanence of life.  He’d never experienced before how quickly and abruptly it could all change.  Never in his life had there been so dramatic a break between what had been, and what would now be.  Today was the first day of his life without a father.

  “Of course not Markus… it’s not something anybody should ever have to suffer,” Hugh offered.  He also had no personal knowledge of death, but he certainly had an appreciation for how dramatically life could change, like when he woke up to a scientific outlook, or when his parents left on the Mormon G.S.S.   He couldn’t really understand what his friend was going through, but he was there for him, in whatever limited capacity he could be.  The rawness of the emotional experience shared tonight would further cement a lifelong friendship between the two men.  Markus, who found emotional trust so difficult, tonight learned that he could trust Hugh when he was vulnerable.

  He watched as Hugh half-heartedly shuffled around the pebbles and dirt with his feet.  There was something else Markus was coming to understood for the first time as well.  Beyond simply coming to understand loss, he was discovering what made loss itself so terrible.  Everything that he loved about his father was gone, his mind and spirit vanishing as abruptly and unforgivably as his body.  He’d always been a material humanist, but this was the first time his conviction was brought to bear against the full force of reality.

  “I think I get it now Hugh.”

  “Get what?”

  “Faith.  I mean… religion, god, spirituality… all that.”

  “How so?” Hugh cautiously asked.

  “It is so hard… to, to really believe that my father is just gone, that the person I knew and loved is actually… gone, that he really did just…” he looked up into the dark sky, “just incinerate up there…  The idea that any of us could just…”  Markus snapped his fingers as he said “Bam!   No more Dad!  The idea that we’re all so… so transitory!  So illusory!   It just seems so… so implausible that something so… so vital and so animated could just be… just brain!  That it could be just a… just a complex of neurons, that the mind could really be just as impermanent as the body…”  Markus plumbed the depths of this understanding as he looked down at his own hands.

  “Well, yes… but that doesn’t mean that it’s true,” Hugh carefully clarified.  The spontaneous adoption of a religion was as rare as de-orbing accidents were, but the probability of both occurrences always remained non-zero.   Markus was no exception.

  “No, no… of course not.  I’m just saying that I… I think I understand the psychology better.”  Markus noticed that Hugh had turned away and was shaking his head.

  “Your father just died… and you’re already trying to figure out what you can learn from it.  I suppose it’s often when we hurt the most… that we have the clearest opportunities to learn.   Most people don’t have it in them to exploit the opportunity…”  During Hugh’s own time of intense turmoil and conflict a few years earlier, Markus had helped Hugh see what he could learn and how he could grow from it.

  Markus didn’t answer.  Instead he held up his hands and looked through his fingers at the city outstretched before them, and then dropped his hands dejectedly.  It was fully night time now, and the lights of the city were mesmerizing.  Looking out on the city, he thought about how abruptly anyone’s life could be extinguished, without any ultimate cause or according to anyone’s agenda.  He thought about the impermanence of everything, of humanity, and of the Earth itself.

  “That must be why they had to leave… the Mormons I mean,” Markus offered as he turned to look at Hugh.   The Mormon G.S.S. had left several years ago, but the Catholic mission had only been announced a few months ago.   “Their collective delusions simply couldn’t survive the modern information epoch… they’d been slowly dying for generations.  Reality was encroaching on their beliefs… threatening to kill their dead.  All of them who believed in an afterlife… it was really always just an escape from the pain they felt when a loved one died… a way to forever deny the oh so bitter realities of that death… of all death.   They couldn’t ever be saved from their religion, because in their minds only their faith in it saved their loved ones from complete death… it allowing them to stay alive in some perverted way.

  “To break from their delusions… to truly accept mortality, and to really suffer the aching… unrepentant sadness that I feel now… was just too much for them to accept… too much to burden their children with… so they left.  That ship wasn’t just an artificial environment for their biological systems Hugh… it was an artificial environment for their faith as well.  Out there, protected from the world it could survive, unmolested by evidence or heretical facts.  A physically removed and intellectually insulated generational starship… it was the only remaining environment in which mass delusions could persist…”

  Hugh looked at Markus while he gazed out over the city, but he eventually turned to take in the view himself as well.  They sat that way in silence together for some time, each lost in their own thoughts.   Being perfectly comfortable in silence together was a hallmark of their friendship; neither ever felt responsible for keeping the other entertained.   “Do you think they were right to go?” Hugh finally asked, “or just crazy?”

  “Hmmm…”  Markus chewed on this for a moment.  “No… no, not crazy Hugh… just wrong.  In fact I think they were quite rational in their own way, at least… from a certain point of view.  They were just wrong on some basic premises about life, the universe, and everything… and much of what they extrapolated based on those bad premises was wrong in turn.  They’re rational, just… just wrong, and absolutely committed to the wrong things they believe…  I think there’s a little bit of that in all of us; everyone has quiet little lies they tell themselves to hide some truths from themselves...  They were just really committed, to some really big lie…”

  The digression into a subject which fascinated him granted Markus an ever so brief reprieve from his grief.   He had just begun the long intellectual journey which would ultimately lead him to the New Horizon.  That fall he had started his first year of university, and he was finding himself increasingly interested in the mind.   After today, after trying to resolve this sudden confrontation with the impermanence of existence, he would develop a concurrent interest in philosophy, and come to integrate the two in his own unique ways.

  His respite ended, his misery returned again in full force and he began to cry.  Hugh put his arm around his friend’s shoulder.  It was a gesture Markus would ordinarily recoil from, but in his grief he hardly noticed.  They sat together in silence as the lights of the city blinked and twinkled at them, and Markus blinked back at the city through tears.