Outward Borne (5 page)

Excited and almost fearful, MaxNi
started to look through the pictures taken shortly before the
balloon fell. One image had a deep purple band spread along the
eastern edge of ObLa. That band transformed into a deep red streak,
and then a much brighter orange patch grew in picture after
picture. The camera was not far above the clouds at that time.
Light could be seen shining through pristine white layers that were
separated by deep glowing crevasses whose bottoms were lost in
shadow. The eastern horizon continued to brighten as he went on and
then an intensely lighted sphere suddenly appeared. It was too
bright to record even with the highly attenuated camera. The
emergence of the star, for that is what it was, corresponded to
increases in temperature on the balloon. MaxNi had found the source
of the light of day. Not a lighted patch of mist, as most thought,
but a bright hot sphere that moved across the sky, day after
day.

For the million years that they
had existed, all on ObLa knew that it was the one and only world in
existence. There was no sign of, and no belief in, any place that
they could not lean forward and sink their mitts into. The familiar
fog and clouds circumscribed all that was known and all that was
knowable. Now he, MaxNi MaxRo, alone among all who lived and all
who had ever lived, knew of a universe of other worlds. Numb with
wonder he turned off his screen and left his office to walk beneath
the unseen stars.

A week later, MaxNi rose to
present the mission’s findings. The government officials that were
responsible for the Center for ObLa Weather had been invited. Most
of them knew that MaxNi MaxRo had been conducting high altitude
balloon flights, and they held some hope that his talk would be
more interesting than the usual COW drivel.

MaxNi was ushered into the main
conference room where a large chart of the light meter data had
been printed up and stuck to the wall. He started with an
explanation of the mission and its goal to study weather patterns
and the composition of high altitude gases. This only succeeded in
igniting the audience’s apprehension. They feared another wasted
evening, but their interest was retrieved when MaxNi showed them
the puzzling data obtained at the highest altitudes. Very high
light levels had shown up in the middle of the night, and as the
light-of-day was predicted to begin, a patch of light appeared that
was so intense that it burned out the sensitive instruments. There
was a buzz that might have been taken for excitement, except for
the fact that these were Senior Government Officials, who would
never admit to that emotion, but when MaxNi told them that the
flight had been equipped with a directionally controlled camera,
they actually leaned forward in anticipation. Everyone likes a good
puzzle. Maybe the balloon had reached the wall of light
itself.

MaxNi knew his audience and his
data. He would show the pictures of space, rather than drone on
about the technical information that had been gathered from the
flight. That could wait. He put up three pictures of the white
spots and explained how they determined that these were images of
some light emitting objects rather than artifacts. He then stepped
back from the stage and let the remaining pictures appear one after
another. A murmur spread through in the room as people speculated
over the meaning of these specks of light, but the buzz stopped
suddenly when the first image of a large, partially lit sphere
appeared. MaxNi showed the second sphere then pointed out how, in
different images, they appeared to have moved across the background
of spots.

Some people became upset and
shouted at MaxNi to stop. They claimed that what were seeing was
not true, that it was dangerous, but perhaps they feared that it
was real and dangerous for being so. MaxNi did not respond, but
again stepped back to show the first sunrise ever seen on ObLa. The
camera had moved around while taking these pictures and when viewed
that way spectacular, but quite confusing. He showed these images
again, but this time the source of light remained in the center of
the screen. The rise of the sun over the slightly curved horizon
unfolded like a magnificent, luminous flower. There was no more
talk. The sense of wonder and transformation captured
everyone.

MaxNi briefly rose to explain how
the appearance of the sun was accompanied by a rise in temperature,
but by then he held no one’s attention. The images were now of thin
white streaks composed of the highest ice crystals and down toward
the billowing heights of soft bright white cloud layers with their
deep purple shadows leading to an even more intricate depths and
shapes. The pictures ended abruptly when the balloon fine skin was
breached and the camera fell toward ObLa.

From beneath its thick opaque layers and
ever-present mist, the dark and featureless ObLa had been shown to
be a beautiful dynamic mass. Many were overcome with emotion and
pride that they had never before experienced. Some rose and left
the room, much as MaxNi had, to move into a new world that had
changed in wondrous ways from only moments before.

The world was changing in other
ways for MaxNi. In this new land, he was days away from being
ObLa’s most famous scientist, and the dumpy old COW would become a
shrine and tourist haunt. The world beyond ObLa became larger than
MaxNi and the COW could manage. Within weeks, a consortium of
cities was formed to explore the universe. MaxNi became a public
figure and a source of information for other agencies that intended
to move beyond the limited technology that the Center could
assemble.

The data and images from MaxNi’s
famous flight were made available to every ObLaDa who wished to see
it. Which was just about everybody, so when MaxNi finally had some
time free from his fame to consider the motion and spatial
relationships between ObLa and its moons and sun, he was one of
hundreds who were tackling the same problem. The consensus opinion
was that the light emitting bodies, the sun and all of the stars
were distant and stationary and that the two reflective bodies were
close and in motion. Most agreed that the moons circled ObLa,
although the data was so limited that only the crudest estimate
could be made of their orbits.

This awoke an old memory and MaxNi
went back to his work with RaLak LemTer on the Fickle Flow of
Filim. They had determined the cycles of the three forces that
matched the micro tides in Head and Foot lakes, and MaxNi wanted to
see if these might correspond to the luminous bodies that he had
found. Indeed they did. Old RaLak had used his data to predict the
orbits of the three bodies, assuming there were such things. MaxNi
reprinted RaLak's little paper with an addendum showing how well
the orbits that RaLak predicted matched the movement of the newly
discovered sun and moons. Indeed, they were the most accurate then
available.

Six months later, the Space
Exploration Agency launched a new balloon that remained aloft for
weeks and confirmed everything. The fact that someone could gaze at
the water flowing through the Filim channel and describe the
motions of the unseen sun and moons through the heavens raised
RaLak and MaxNi to the rank of legend and assured that ancient YoLa
MeSom had all the conversation that her front porch could
bear.

Chapter 5 The New
Universe

The discovery of the universe, the
existence of stars, planets, moons, and of endless distances had a
profound and enduring effect on ObLaDa society. That ancient,
scientifically sophisticated civilization had evolved with no
history, belief, or mythology of an extended universe, and no
concept of that a world might exist beyond the surface of ObLa.
Even the simple fact that the sky could be clear, or that distant
objects could be seen, was contrary to all experience. Facing the
incontestable imposition of an entire universe onto their
collective consciousness, the ObLaDas responded by developing an
obsession with space exploration and travel that would change the
future of the galaxy.

The certainty that they existed
among a countless number of other stars struck at the emotional
core of the population. It inevitably led to the formation of
planet-wide consortia to develop new technologies needed for more
telling astronomical observations and for the eventual exploration
of space. This was no easy task on a perpetually cloud covered
planet. The balloons that were used in the early discoveries were
an especially poor platform for astronomy. They would not stay in
one place, and the Das had never been good flyers. Fixed wing
planes never took off, so to speak. Flight meant immediate entry
into fog, rapid disorientation, loss of any sense of direction, and
an ever-present threat of an overly abrupt return to solid ground,
or with forty percent statistical probability, to wet muck. The
ObLaDas had never dreamt of flying amongst the clouds and soaring
with the birds as we have done, since you could touch the clouds by
standing upright and there were no birds.

On the other hand, the
mathematically gifted Das had advanced theoretical physics far into
the heights. They understood that satellites were the only feasible
platform for the exploration of space. While the ObLaDas had a
marvelous understanding of materials and could fabricate almost
anything, they had no large industrial base. The population was
distributed among the many small villages and towns that were
scattered across the land. One place was much like another. The
necessary dispersal of effort between innumerable small
laboratories and factories made the development of large rockets
and exploration technologies inefficient, but it was just the type
of cooperative effort that made the ObLaDas feel good about
themselves.

The ObLaDas’ conquest of space
started with nothing and had a long way to go. Progress was ever
slow on ObLa. Nevertheless, their program advanced at a steady
pace. Their early satellites were small short-lived things, limited
by weak rockets launched from drones that flew high into the thick
atmosphere. But they progressed, decade-by-decade,
century-by-century, to place proper platforms into high orbit and
begin the serious exploration of outer space. And popular it was,
too!

Keeping up with the new images,
discoveries and theories of the universe was far and away the
favorite hobby on ObLa. Every village and town had its society of
space enthusiasts who were directly connected into the latest
findings, all freely distributed from the telescopes, space probes,
and radio antennae. They collected the reports and theories from
the space research centers and compared these to their own ideas
and proposals, not always favorably. They looked forward to the
launch of the large radio telescope array that was to be used for
deep space exploration and construction of a radio wavelength map
of the Universe. The most important contribution from this large
array, ironically, was that it replaced a smaller space-based radio
telescope that, after some debate, was devoted to a full-time
search for artificial radio transmissions within the
galaxy.

Everyone she knew believed that
NorHan NorBa had the most interesting job on the planet. NorHan did
little to correct the impression. For forty years, the old radio
telescope had panned across the galaxy measuring the intensity of
radio transmissions from the vicinity of main line stars. For the
past twelve of those years, NorHan NorBa was the chief
communications technician in the Space Exploration Institute’s. She
was there to monitor the incoming interstellar communications from
distant civilizations whenever they occurred. They had not yet
occurred, however, so her job consisted of running system
performance checks.

This was quite all right with
NorHan as she lived her life at home. Home being one of twelve
buildings within a city block in Tometsur, the third largest city
on ObLa. All of these buildings faced inward toward one another in
the center of the block forming the home for an almost communal
group of thirty-eight people. The children were raised in common,
but for NorHan, this meant her own two children plus four to six
others were usually trouping through her little place succumbing to
her natural attraction and the sense of comfort that surrounded
her. The children loved her and she was happy with that. She was
not given much else to do. She liked her job well enough, but
mostly she liked it because it did not disrupt the rest of her
life.

That suddenly changed. Late one
night a faint but stronger than expected signal was detected from
the vicinity of XK-47, a star located on the edge of the galactic
core, about one hundred and twenty light years distant. This was no
beacon into space announcing the presence of a living planet, but a
more-or-less continuous signal that had greater amplitude and was
less dispersed than background static. It was not much, but it met
many of the pre-established event requirements defined by the
Institute and thus it detection triggered a flag on the signal
monitoring computer system, no alarms or get-out-of-bed-quick
message, only a note stating that an unusual finding had been
detected. The message was added to a file that no one was there to
notice. The telescope moved on to the next designated
star.

Four hours later, NorHan arrived
at work, fresh from a three-day vacation. She was a bit late that
day, but when she arrived, NorHan squatted before her computer to
check the night's activity. The notice for a Suspect Intercept was
highlighted and flashing when she opened her data record file. She
assumed it was a malfunction, of course, that always were. She
double-checked all her control data and it all looked good, that is
to say normal. Reference stars were where they were supposed to be,
the antenna pointed in the right direction, everything worked and
so the data seemed to be real.