Midway: Chapter 22

   “They are literally our future you know…,” Johannes remarked as he sat on a park bench with his daughter Kirana and her husband Seth.   Zarif and Setia were playing in and around the arboretum playground with several other young children while the three adults watched on from a nearby bench.  “Our lives have been so privileged being on this ship, so… well pampered really, compared to the hardships they’ll face.”

  “It almost seems cruel, to burden them with such responsibility, to force them into something that is so far beyond any challenges they could possibly foresee or understand,” Seth considered.  “But no more so than it was for any of us to live our whole lives on the ship… I envy their challenges after having to face mine though.  The prospect of landing on an alien world and resolving to tame it is so… exciting!!” 

  “And romantic I think,” his wife Kirana added.  She took very much after her mother’s Indonesian appearance; she had the same somewhat flat but narrow face, as well as her wide nose and angular chin.   At forty five years old, she already had some grey hairs interspersed with her otherwise full head of long black hair, and she wondered how many years it would be before she’d gone entirely grey.

  Kirana had a quiet confidence about her.  She was aware of the influence she had as the daughter of the patriarch, but she was likewise aware that she didn’t come from the family of a principle mission founder like Dhika or Anaru did.  She knew that her family’s privilege would someday be revoked so she never took it for granted or overplayed it.

  Like her father, she had a genuine reverence for the ship and its mission but unlike her father, on some level she’d also always felt the validity of the opposing arguments as well.  She was the sort to accept the dogma of the mission on its face, while being aware on some deeper level that it was just that, dogma and propaganda.  She had some vague skepticism about the wisdom of the mission as a whole and the real need for it as opposed to it being the mother of all vanity projects, but she paid little attention to these feelings either.   In essence, she was perfectly aware of the arguments for and against the mission, as well as their strengths and weaknesses.  To her though, it was all so… academic; it had no bearing on her life whether circumstances well beyond her control were justified or not.  Rightly or wrongly, she was here.  This was her life.  She tried to make the best of it.

  Her husband Seth was a West Asian man who looked very typically Arab, with dark brown hair and eyes.  His skin was a light tan colour but when standing beside his darker brown skinned wife who had just a touch of yellow to her skin tone, he often appeared much lighter than he otherwise would have by contrast.  Seth had an air about him that was rather grandfatherly, even though he was only forty.  He was the perennial family man, and loved being a husband and father more than anyone else on the ship.  It was clear to see for anyone who watched him with his wife or with any children.  

  “I mean romantic in the classical sense of course,” Kirana continued.   “I envision a very visceral, very experientially rich life for those who land and try to carve out an existence.   I imagine it will be at once awe-inspiring and terrifying.”

  “I agree…,” Johannes replied upon reflection.  “To watch the Legacy Recordings, it’s quite clear that everyone who embarked on this mission in the first place really wished that they could also be the ones to land in the end, and to personally be the ones attempting to tame their final frontier.”

  “Yes,” added Seth, “but they were also all just that sort of people.  Our little oasis of humanity has in the intervening years spread out in behavioural potentials.  Over time… over generations, we are resetting the natural human behavioural spectrum.  Certainly we still have those with a passion for adventure like the original crew, but we’re also developing… well, Neil for example.”  He deliberately excluded the far worse behaviours of suicide and murder.

  “I agree.  I think it took a very special kind of people to launch in the first place and that every successive generation here, more and more brings back all of the other kinds of people that existed on Earth,” Johannes offered.  “There are people like Neil, but there are also people like Tycho and Alissa who just seem to’ve had a much harder time in general adapting to life in the void, though fortunately they both seem to be doing much better these days…  I think as time goes by we’ll be faced with more and more people on the ship who never would’ve chosen to leave Earth in the first place I’m afraid.”

  “Too true,” Seth agreed, to which Kirana nodded her agreement

  “The children of Zarif and Setia will be in their forties or fifties upon arrival,” Kirana observed, “and most with small children of their own…   Even they will be forced to share in the hardship.  They won’t have any choice at all, is that really fair?” she asked.

  “Fair?  What’s fair Kirana?  How much does anyone really control their lives?”   Seth chuckled before running off to play with Zarif and Setia in the playground. 

  Johannes pointed after him.  “He’s right, you know.  Fair or not, is that not the lot we’re all cast with when we’re born, whether on Earth… or on New Horizon, or even on Haven?  What about those who will be born on Haven and have no idea about the ship or Earth.  Who has ever been born without their own particular challenges and existential handicaps?  Everyone has their own unique burdens to bear in life…”

  He stood and gestured an invitation for his daughter to walk with him, an offer to which she acquiesced.  Together they walked off in silence for a bit, and down one of the isolated and private pathways of the forest.  The arboretum was a temperate rainforest designed by Kim In-Su one of the four principle mission founders, and was based on the coastal temperate rainforests of western North America and his native Korean homeland.  

  Overall, the ship’s habitat ring was half a kilometer wide, two hundred meter deep, and twenty-four meters high with eight floors.  The arboretum occupied a full third of its total volume, and was the essential lung of the ship.  It breathed in the carbon dioxide the crew expelled, and breathed out the oxygen which the crew needed to live.  Even out here, ten light-years away from any star or planet, the ancient and hallowed symbiosis between plant and animal was preserved, cherished, and exploited. 

  “You know,” he reflected as he ran his hands along the tips of the ferns along the side of the path which proliferated under the branches of the trees, “from what I understand, this forest of ours is nothing like actual nature back on Earth, or for that matter what we’ll find on Haven.  From what I can gather from the records, this place is actually remarkably sterile.  The soil is infused with only purposefully specific and engineered bacteria, and there are only the few specific and engineered insects we need for pollination and organic recycling.”

  “Oh yes Dad, definitely.”  Kirana’s tertiary training was in ecology, and she was currently the second lead on the team taking care of the arboretum.  “From what I’ve studied, on Haven there’s also a good chance that they’ll have to deal with large predators and herds of large prey animals, the specific sizes of which we have no way to tell in advance.  Fact is, they’ll encounter forms of animal life never before encountered by any humans.  For all we know they might encounter large and terrifying lizard type beasts reminiscent of the ancient dinosaurs, or large predators more like big cats… not to mention the possibility of poisonous insects or snakes, or for that matter whatever completely alien forms of animal we can’t even imagine...  Oh, and the disease!!  Lest we forget about that problem!”

  “Would we really have to worry about things like poisonous animals or native disease?” Johannes asked.  “I mean, wouldn’t we have a sufficiently different biological foundation, coming from an altogether different planet?  Wouldn’t that protect us from such things?”  

  The sky started rapidly cycling through summer day and transparency, with a view of the central part of the ship and the more distant opposite side of the habitat ring, then the sky again, and then back and forth.   Transparent, blue sky, transparent, blue sky… the two chuckled at each other as it stopped.  It was an unavoidable novelty for youth of a certain age which developed soon after being implanted with their Brainchip.  It was harmless enough, but it was sure irritating, which was probably why adolescents enjoyed doing it so much.  At a fork in the trail, Johannes gestured towards the right path and Kirana obliged.

  “With regards to the biological differences Dad, we really don’t have any way to make that determination before we actually get there.   And you know, human biologists have only ever had the chance to study life on Earth, which in cosmological terms is only one data point.  We’ve never had the chance to study any life at all which is of a non-terrestrial origin.   The biology of Haven may be the same as Earth; they may both even originate from a common origin.  Or, it could be absolutely alien and beyond our ability to imagine at all ahead of time.   Yes we know from spectrographic analysis that some process on Haven is perpetually putting free oxygen into the atmosphere, and yes the only natural mechanism we know of that can do that is photosynthesis, but that can only tell us so much though. Beyond that…”

  “Talk about the unknown…,” Johannes remarked.

  “Indeed… in fact, that’s why I love reading reports from the very first deep ocean explorers so much.  They were stunned at how alien the life right there in the deep ocean of their own planet seemed, down where no light had ever penetrated… and that was just a very different environment on Earth.  Those things only seemed alien to them by comparison, and even they were beyond imagination based on what they knew, even though it was based on exactly the same biogenetic substructure.  Zarif and Setia and their children, and their children will get to find out what life on Haven will look like and just how truly alien it is.  What they find could be based on similar genetics, or it could be something we could never’ve imagined until they see it… I really envy them that.”

  “I can only imagine…” Johannes uttered, as he tried to imagine.

  “Me too… my intellectual predecessors had an entire world to study ever deeper and deeper, and my progenitors will have the biology of a whole new virgin world to explore, but I…” she looked around her at the arboretum, and what was to her, the sad and obvious artificiality of it all.  “All I have… is this,” she lamented with a wave of her hand.

   

  “So I hear you mated with Dhika the other night…”

  “How do you know about that?”   Tycho was embarrassed.  He had no need to be, it was just his way.

  “Dhika told me,” Captain Tynes answered with a mischievous smile, and pushed himself up to the next handhold.

  Tycho rolled his eyes and sighed, “Of course she did…” he replied, shaking his head as he followed his friend up to the next position.

  “Hey there, I’m not criticising…  Actually I’m impressed, she’s really something!  A lot of people would be jealous.  Besides, you’d have to be crazy to resist the advances of a woman like that right?”  What Anaru didn’t know, is that Tycho had been resisting Dhika’s advances for years and that he’d only now given in to them.   He might have been the only appropriate male on the ship who would have ever resisted.  What Tycho didn’t know, was anything about the long standing sexual relationship between his two closest friends.  

  Tycho sometimes liked to imagine that his resistance had driven Dhika a little crazy.  She was perfectly aware of how widely desired she was by all the other men on the ship and although in her youth she had done some dabbling in the other boys, for a long time now she hadn’t been known to get involved with anyone.  All Tycho knew is that her advances towards him had become less and less frequent and she had become more and more satisfied and accepting of their friendship as it was.  He thought she had just accepted that she couldn’t have the only thing she wanted.   Tycho clearly understood neither people nor sexuality.  

  ‘Another mystery of humans,’ thought Tycho as he pulled himself up another half meter, ‘why do they only ever seem to want what they can’t have?’   The two were climbing the simulated mountain side located to one end of the space which the arboretum occupied.   About the same time, Johannes and his daughter Kirana were on their walk in the forest somewhere beneath them, but from where they were neither of the two pairs could see the other.  The rock face had been built a little over 50 years ago, largely out of boredom but also out of an understanding of the importance of regular physical exercise, and the psychological need for a variety of ways in which to go about getting it.

  “The sex wasn’t a problem you know, that was… well that was something else,” Tycho chuckled.  His previous virginity was something he was reluctant to share at the best of times, even in the most intimate of friendships like the one he had with Anaru.  He didn’t know if the captain would feel the same way about him, but Tycho considered him to be his best and closest male friend.  “If it was just sex,” he continued “then that would be one thing, but I know that she wants more from me.  She hasn’t said anything of course, no doubt she knows how quickly it would scare me off, but I know that she wants to couple with me, that she wants the chance to start a family with me,” Tycho admitted glumly.

  “You seem pretty sure of that Tycho, even without her having said anything like that?”

  “Fair point,” he conceded.  “In fact, I haven’t heard her talk about having a family at all in quite some time, have you?”

  “No I have not.” Anaru answered as he swung over to another gripping point.  “I get the impression though, that she now feels she has to but only out of a sense of duty to the ship.  She doesn’t seem very excited about the idea.”

  “She could couple with any eligible man on the ship…” Tycho remarked as he followed Anaru’s movements up the mountain.

  “And a lot of men onboard would jump at the opportunity.” Anaru added.

  Tycho worked at mirroring Tynes’s previous position and method of achieving it.  “You tell me,” he grunted as he swung over, “you still seem to have zero interest in coupling.  Why haven’t you ever gotten married and had kids?”

  “Well, the idea isn’t that bad a one to me… I just never felt too comfortable with the idea of a leash.  Truth is I just know myself well enough to understand that if I were to commit to one woman I would probably just wind up betraying that trust and commitment.  It just doesn’t seem fair to whomever I might commit to, so… I don’t!”  He tested an unfamiliar foothold, and it gave way, the piece of artificial granite falling seemingly at an angle due to the rotational nature of the artificial gravity.  It finally landed some ways away on the forest floor below, finally making a faint sound as it hit.  “Watch that one, Tycho…”  As Tycho and Anaru ascended the wall, they experienced slightly less gravity as they approached the top.  The total variation of gravity in the ship’s habitat ring was sleight overall, but noticeable if paid attention to, especially while scaling the entire extent of the variation as they were.

  “Besides, I get by quite well just having sex with the single women on the ship, we both enjoy ourselves, nobody gets hurt, and nobody needs to be deprived of the company and intimacy that we all crave and need…  No I don’t have a wife, but I certainly have several close female friends on board, some I’m intimate with… some I’m not, and that serves me just fine.  Them too it seems…”  Anaru could only assume that Tycho understood, and had had several such relationships himself, but of course he was mistaken.  Tycho was five years younger than Anaru and had been likewise unattached his whole life.  Anaru simply didn’t know Tycho well enough to distinguish a complete absence of a sex life, from a healthy discretion about one.

  “You still feel that way?  I mean, you’re thirty-six now… any temptations to change it up and think about starting a family of your own?  Or do you think you’re the bachelor for life type?”

  “You know… I really don’t know,” he admitted both to Tycho and himself as he scanned for his final handhold.  “I have to admit that I find myself more and more tempted as the years pass, but… well, I’m certainly not there YET!!”  He exclaimed excitedly as he pushed himself up with his right foot, finally reaching the top and banging with his hand the bell hanging from the ceiling, making his victory official.