While Making Other Plans:
Chapter 7

  The landscape was overwhelmingly orange.  There was also a pronounced note of yellow in the sky and just the slightest tinge of blue.  High up above them they could see the sun, their goggles instantaneously darkening when they looked up at it to filter out the harmful brilliance.  Though it appeared reddish, it had a quality which they all recognized; it was the deep orangey red colour which their own stars gave when deep over the horizon at sunset.  A combination of the actually different colour of the star and the different atmosphere it was being filtering through gave it this same quality while high above their heads.  

  The land likewise had a remarkably orange tinge to it as well.  Their initial scans suggested that it was a combination of a high concentration of iron oxide in the regolith combined with the overwhelming orange hue of the atmosphere which gave it that colour.  Kathryn considered that aside from the yellow tone to the atmosphere, superficially it reminded her somewhat of her visit to Mars when her family had visited on vacation to explore the ruins of a lost human outpost with her family.  Not a typical tourist destination of course, but Kathryn and Jaren both found the work of exploration and study so fascinating that they often would continue the work to relax on vacation.

  But the sight of the ocean in the distance really took Kathryn’s breath away; it was something altogether distinct from anything on dry Mars.  It was dark; she hadn’t anticipated that.  With the sky orange instead of blue, and with high concentrations of iron in the water, it had the appearance of a preternaturally dark blue with a strong orange highlight and pronounced green shimmer.

  “I suppose we can’t just call it Mars II like the ship, hunh?” Kathryn asked Jaren.

  “Probably not appropriate, no.” he answered.

  “Maybe just Orange?  No…  Maybe just Epsilon?”

  “Perhaps,” Jaren pretended to consider, “but I think we can do better.”

  “The problem is deciding which culture’s heritage we should draw from?  Mine?  Yours?  Roma?  Earth?  Seems like every great name from Terran mythology has already been used in the Sol System…”

  “I’ve got it,” Clem said, her short cut platinum blonde hair buffeting in the wind as she approached them from behind along with the rest of the disembarking crew, each seeming to appropriately appreciate the moment before finally stepping out onto the surface.  Finally, foregoing the pretense of an environmental suit, Margaret contently strolled down onto the surface as Kathryn smirked at the sight of her.

  “Whatcha got?” Kathryn asked Clem, eager for suggestions.

  “Studying the Earth archives are a bit of a hobby of mine, and while it is true that all of the good ancient Greek names are taken up with bodies in the Sol System, hardly any celestial bodies are named after the prominent figures from the Earth’s early space flight days.  All three of our worlds owe them a great deal of respect and admiration I’d think.”

  “Great point,” Kathryn nodded.  “Who do you have in mind?”

  “One stands out, Yuri Gagarin was the first human to enter space and orbit the planet.  Neil Armstrong was the first to set foot on Luna, but several features of it are already named after him as a result.”

  “Yuri, hunh?” Kathryn asked, liking the sound of it.

  “Bob,” Margaret stated with certainty, planting her feet and confidently resting her fists on her hips.  “We call it planet Bob.”

  The other two women glanced over at her for a moment before both deciding to ignore her.  In response the simulant shrugged and turned to join Patricia with whatever she was preoccupied with herself.  “Well the whole first to set foot on thing certainly seems relevant, but the more I think about it, the more I like the simple ring of ‘Yuri’.”

  “I was going to say the same thing,” Kathryn offered.  “What do you think Jaren?”

  “Seems perfectly fair and appropriate to me,” he answered.  “I imagine we’ll mine a great deal from the early space flight days in naming all of these new bodies if we start out that way.  Now that we have access to that history again, to be honest I find it a rather joyous prospect.”

  “It’s agreed then!” Kathryn beamed.  “Yuri it is.  Hey everybody!  You’re standing on Yuri!” she called out with laughter in her voice.  “What do you think?”

  Some nodded while others shrugged, but nobody protested.

  “Okay, Yuri.”  Kathryn affirmed to herself as she walked over to the shuttle.  Standing beside the ramp she reached inside and unfastened the Star Fleet flag from the wall on which it had been stowed and walked back with it.  “Gather around everybody and all hold onto this; we’ll do it together like before.”  All eight people put their hands on the flag post.  “In the name of Star Fleet,” she said, “and the four noble worlds whose cooperation brought it into existence, I formally claim this planet and name it ‘Yuri’.”

  Together they brought the post down to the ground but it was hard bedrock, and all they accomplished was a ‘tink’ sound as the metal post tapped at it.  They paused, then tried again a couple times more for comedy than any expectation of succeeding on subsequent attempts.  ‘Tink, tink’.  They stared at the ground for several moments in disbelief at the silly ignorance of attempting to drive a flagpole into rock.  It dawned on Kathryn that there would be no soil as they understood it at all on this world where there’d never been any life, only sand and solid rock,

  “Alright,” she conceded with a heavy sigh, “I’ll get the drill…”

   

  Several trip later, when the rest of the crew had all had their chance, Kathryn and Jaren returned for a second time, this time with their daughter Maggie, as well as Margaret and Patricia.  Margaret again forewent an environmental suit, doubly confident after her first visit that her artifice could withstand the toxic atmosphere.  Simulant’s original designs were for them to simulate the harmful effects of things which could harm humans, but disengaging these processes were one of the first augmentations she’d made to her new body.  “Upgrades children, upgrades…” she would often remind them when they noticed such things, and was always noticeably cryptic about exactly what augmentations she’d made.

  After the shuttle landed and the ramp extended, they encouraged Maggie to step out first and watched.  She stepped out cautiously at first, having to concentrate on taking proper steps down the ramp amidst being overwhelming by what she was seeing.

  “Wow it’s so… alien,” she muttered.

  Margaret hopped off the ramp behind her, coming around to stand beside her and put her harm around the girl.  The casual way she did so gave the impression that this was the most ordinary thing a person could possibly do, the least biggest deal in the whole universe.  New planet?  So what, who needs it?

  “There’s no oxygen here,” Margaret lamented.  “What good is a planet you can’t even enjoy a good cigar on?”

  “You may be missing the point here Auntie Molly,” Maggie politely suggested.  Margaret would attack most people for referring to her as her previous incarnation’s name, but allowing those closest to her the privilege was an endearment.   Margaret was not only Maggie’s namesake, but with Margaret being such close friends with her parents, and having always lived on the same station, the old simulant had taken on something of a godmother role in her life.  Her parents were so proper and controlled that Maggie unreservedly relished the more surly and conspicuously unrefined way Margaret had about her.  This frequently gave her parents pause over the kind of influence the old woman was having on their child, but they didn’t wish to interfere with their special relationship.  Besides, Maggie seemed far more amused by Margaret’s rougher edges than she seemed readily inclined to absorb them.  For better or worse Margaret had been the strongest influence pushing Maggie to pursue her artistic inclinations after they’d originally manifested.

  “Enh, shows what you know Sweetheart,” Margaret retorted dismissively.

  Maggie understood as well as anybody who was close to the simulant that the more affection she had for them, the more playfully she would condescendingly dismiss them like this.  It just wasn’t worth the effort for those she didn’t care for.  It was another trait of hers which they didn’t particularly appreciate but could easily tolerate.  It was if she ignored you altogether that one could be assured she harboured some sort of dislike for you.  She was too old to be bothered with anything more effortful, happily explaining any social niceties to be a waste of her time and effort.

  “Its beauty is in its own self,” Jaren offered as he and Kathryn joined them, “not in how we can use it.”

  Margaret turned to him.  “Says the people who want to infect this supposedly perfect world with the mess and chaos of this biology you’re all so proud of?”

  “So it’s both,” Kathryn negotiated with a shrug.  “It’s beautiful as it is, but it could be a different kind of beautiful as well.”

  “Well,” Margaret considered, “better to make a living planet of a dead one than the other way around I suppose.”

  “There’s the spirit,” Jaren offered dead pan with playfully dismissive delivery in return.  “You just remember that you can’t get artificial intelligence without biological intelligence first.”

  “Says you meat bag,” she scoffed.  “Get back to me when you’ve explored the other sextillion star systems out there.  I’ll be waiting.”

  Jaren rolled his eyes and shook his head in amusement.  “I do believe you will. Margaret.  But the rest of us, you know… mortality.”

  “Yeah well,” she dismissed, “as a great philosopher once said over thousand years ago, ‘life’s a bitch and then you die,’ emphasis on the you part.”

  “Excuse me,” Jaren countered, “weren’t you literally on your last leg when we found you?  How much longer do you think you would have lasted down there if we hadn’t rescued you from the dank bowels of that dam?”

  “Enh,” she shrugged.  “Long enough.”

  Jaren gave up.

  “Did you find anything interesting in those tidal pools?” Maggie asked, clearly having done her homework about their research.

  “Not really…” her mother answered with a note of sadness.  “We took samples back from the first trip and they’ve been analyzing them ever since.  There seems to be all sort of complex chemistry both organic and inorganic, but nothing seems to have spontaneously stumbled upon a form which can self-replicate.”

  “You mean that for billions of years…” the girl marvelled, “with all the right ingredients, during all that time there was life on all four of our worlds, the right combination just… what?  Never came up?  Just never happened to happen by chance?”

  “Looks that way yes,” Kathryn answered.  “We can’t find any evidence of any inhibiting factor which would otherwise prevent it.  So what do you think that means?” she asked her daughter.

  “It means…” she considered, mindlessly bringing her finger up to bite her thumb in thought having inherited an affinity for such nervous habits from her mother, but when she bumped into her breathing mask she put her hand back down with a bit of embarrassment.  “It means that either this planet never developing the most basic forms of life is an extremely unlucky planet-“

  “Or lucky,” Margaret interjected, being met with scolding stares from both Kathryn and Jaren.

  Maggie continued, ignoring her.  “Or we’ve just been extremely lucky that three other planets near Earth developed life.”

  “Or multicellular plant life for that matter,” Jaren added, “or even animal life.”

  “Either life developing with good conditions is very rare, or a planet having the right conditions and it not happening is very rare.”

  “That’s what we figure,” Kathryn nodded.

  “So,” the girl paused in thought, “what does that all mean then?” she asked.

  “That we need more data,” her mother answered.  “We need to have a close look at as many other planets with appropriate precursors to get more data points.  Either we’ll find that they tend to have some sort of life or tend to be barren.  It’s the only way we can answer that question.”

  “Hard to imagine what it would have been like when Earth was the only planet anyone knew about that’d ever had life,” she considered distantly as she looked out towards the horizon.  

  Kathryn and Jaren looked at each other, Kathryn figuring from his expression that the thought hadn’t occurred to him either until Maggie had said it.  The girl seemed star struck as she considered the scope of the puzzle, and Kathryn could see the machinery of her mind chewing away at the problem.  She found herself wondering if her experience with the planet and on this mission might awaken a latent passion for discovery in her.  With the parents Maggie had, Kathryn figured it must certainly be buried somewhere deep in her bones.  She’d always hoped it would come out, but always feared more that pushing her towards it would drive her in the opposite direction instead.

  “Admiral?” she heard Felix ask in her ear.  “You need to return to the ship.”

  Instinctively she began motioning for the others to reboard the shuttle before even asking: “Is there a problem?”

  There was an ominous pause that didn’t sit well with her.  “Unknown.” he answered.  “There’s… an anomaly in the outer system.”  He was one to avoid being vague where possible, another sign of a real problem.

  “What kind of anomaly?” she asked.

  “Dammit Kat, if I knew that I would have opened with that!  Just get back here now.”

  The agitated and concern in his voice was likewise quite unusual for him.  “We’re on our way I assure you.  What can you tell me about it?  What readings are instruments giving you?”

  “Just that it’s not natural,” he said, “and that it’s not ours.”

  Kathryn and Jaren stared at each other over the significance of those words as the ramp lifted and sealed itself into the walls so perfectly that the seams became invisible on the wall screens.  In all their travel and explorations, short of the ancient ruins of the cephalopod civilization on Haven which archaeology showed to have had rudimentary electronics technology, there had never been any other hint or whisper of any technology other than their own.  Definitively stating that it was not natural and not theirs, if he was right, could only mean one thing: first contact.  They had all been trained for such an eventuality, but the training had never been taken all that seriously, like perfunctory earthquake drills in a region with no tectonic activity.

  Contact was something they all used to dream about as children, but as they grew into adults and trained experienced officers, their wonder at the possibility fell into the same deep dark recesses of their minds as magic and gods.  Part of their training was also to understand the deep ambiguity of such a detection as well.  It could be omniscient beings finally here to unlock the secret keys to the universe, or the initial scout ship of a malevolent force bent on reshaping every world they saw to their own needs, perhaps intent on turning all of their worlds into something like Yuri with them utterly powerless to do anything about it.  

  There was only one way to find out.  

  “Lifting off now, Felix.  Be there soon,” she said as the shuttle hatch sealed, and she strapped herself in.

  Margaret pulled the cigar she was keeping in her pocket for a special occasion.  The first one she’d been able to successfully roll since starting to grow tobacco plants in Orbital One’s arboretum.

  “First Contact, hunh?” she said around the cigar between her lips as she struck a match and lovingly lit it, dense white smoke billowing up past her face.