Chapter 36 #3
“Take me up.”
Lyle brought us up through thick clouds. We floated above a flat, grayish plane of featureless clouds. We watched the too-large sun rise like a fireball over the edge of the horizon.
“Was it another meteor, or supervolcano, or something?”
“No. The sun’s output has increased. It’s entering the next stage of its life cycle. As it consumes the last of its hydrogen, it will start fusing helium. It will expand to red giant size. Before that happens, we need to decide where we want to go. We won’t be able to stay on Earth.”
“How long can we stay?”
“Another day. Perhaps two. No more than that.”
“Is there anything left alive?”
“Bacteria, perhaps. Maybe some other particularly hardy life-forms requiring little water.”
We searched, sweeping the globe. Everywhere it was the same: dead and gray and bone-dry.
On the fortieth day, the Earth had become like Venus.
The clouds were banks of yellowish sulfuric acid, and the dense air below was mostly carbon dioxide.
The ground was a nightmarish landscape of jagged, exposed rock.
I had Lyle land us on a plateau, and I had difficulty walking, even with the muscular enhancements.
It was like trying to walk underwater. I had to push against the yellow-brown air.
When a slow wind rose, it was a freight train moving against me.
Lyle had to steady me with force fields anchored into the bedrock.
“How hot is it?”
“Four hundred and sixty-four degrees Celsius,” Lyle said. “Over eight hundred and sixty degrees Fahrenheit.”
“I’d be cooked if you weren’t protecting me.”
“Almost instantly.”
Lightning flared purple and brilliant through the yellow haze overhead.
Another wave of wind slammed into me, rocking me back against the stiffening force fields, the air roaring like a bass drum whose note had been artificially held and extended.
Slicing shards of rock whipped along with the wind, scrapping across the barren landscape.
“This is Hell,” I said.
“Yes,” Lyle said, his voice soft.
“Let’s go.”
We rose, shoving our way upward with simple brute force through the dense air until we broke out of the yellow-brown clouds and into space.
I looked at the boiling globe of the Sun, the fields in front of my eyes darkening to compensate.
It was larger now than it had been the day before, and redder.
“You said before we need to leave Earth?”
“Yes,” Lyle said. “I think we should make for Mars.”
“Will Mars be safe?”
“When we next jump forward, the Sun will have entered its red giant phase. It’ll expand to the current orbit of the Earth and most likely engulf Earth entirely. I can’t compensate for the temperatures present in the Sun’s chromosphere.”
“We’d be fried if we stayed.” I stared at the blazing ball of the Sun floating in the sea of darkness before us.
“Deep-fried. Extra crispy. But Mars should be safe.”
“Can we even make it to Mars in, what, the next eighteen hours?”
“Earth and Mars are currently close to aphelion. It’s about sixty-six million kilometers away. If we start out now, and I propel us at the maximum velocity afforded to us by the Consciousness’s upgrades, we’ll reach Mars in eight and a half hours.”
“Wow, that—that seems really quick.”
“The technology provided by the Consciousness does not, unfortunately, allow us to open wormhole termini, so we can’t travel faster than light.
The energy levels required for wormhole travel are beyond what this suit can channel, even upgraded as it is.
That said, I can now manipulate gravity to create a localized warp in the skein of space-time.
The warp will drag us forward. At maximum energy levels, I can boost us to a hundredth of the speed of light.
It’ll take some time for acceleration and deceleration, which I’ve factored into the travel time quote I provided earlier. ”
I found myself smiling. “Aye, aye, Scotty.”
“This time, I do have the power, Captain.”
“Then make it so, Chief.”
“Aye, aye, Cap’n. Dad, listen. This won’t be comfortable for you. I’ll protect you from the gravitational effects of the acceleration, and the warp field itself will protect us from dust and meteorites, and I can prevent harm coming to you from radiation, of course, but it’ll still be weird.”
“Will I live?”
“Yes.”
“But I won’t if we stay here.”
“No.”
“So, you’re going to do this anyway. No matter what I say.”
“I suppose so.”
“Then let’s get it over with. Punch it, Sulu.”
We turned in space. Then the Earth was gone, behind us as if I’d been shot from a cannon. There was no sound, no rushing wind, not even a sensation of movement apart from the sudden appearance of gravity.
“I adjusted the fields to provide approximately one Earth standard gravitational force,” Lyle said. “Let me know right away if you feel any discomfort.”
“I’ll be sure to do that, bud.”
“I’ll continue accelerating.”
I was aware of space around us tunneling, as if the universe were collapsing into a straw: narrow and rounded and extending into the infinity in front of me.
Stars elongated, streaming into lines, and the lines in front of me turned blue as streaks behind me blurred to red.
I was both queasy and disassociated from the queasiness, as if I was being pulled away from my body and the stomach-churning sensation was happening to someone else.
I closed my eyes but that made the nausea worse, so I opened them and concentrated on breathing.
At some point, I started hallucinating. I didn’t realize it at first. Lyle swam through space next to us—my Lyle, Lyle as a child, all skinny legs and ungainly, flopping movements of his arms, splashing up too much water as he tried so hard to impress Dad by swimming fast. He turned and waved, and I tried to wave back, but my arms were heavy and numb.
He drifted off, and I tried to call out to him, but as soon as the words left my mouth they spun away behind us, ghostly visible impressions of stretching red letters vanishing backward because we were traveling so fast, too fast.
There was a blank time. Then I lay with Amy on the bed of the old cabin: two newlyweds completely taken with one another, laughing at ourselves for being so horny.
Hot breeze swept across my face and waves crashed in the distance as Amy rose next to me, her hair cascading around us, framing our faces.
She licked her lips and asked if I was ready for another round because she wanted to come again before dinner.
I reached up and pulled her down. She kissed me. Whispered in my ear.
Not so long now, Scott.
She fell away, stretched to a red smear across the black, and I was tumbling, streaking through space, a blur of blue fire trailing red sparks that jumped and spat and skittered along bare concrete as my own pistol pressed hard against my forehead.
I looked up and I was a child, crying, gazing at the huge figure of my father.
How can you be my son, his eyes asked. Such a disappointment, the sneer on his lips said.
But then he spoke, and the words weren’t what I remembered, didn’t form the lancing sentence I’d carried with me my entire life like so much heavy luggage.
His tone was gentle, unlike any I’d ever heard from him in life.
Not so long at all, Scott.
“Dad.”
I pulled my eyes up with effort and took a shuddering breath. We were floating in space again, above a reddish-blue ball.
“Dad, we’re here. Mars.”
“Get your ass to Mars.” I coughed as I tried for an Austrian accent.
“I’m sorry, Dad. I know that was hard on you.”
Mars, far below, looked as though it still retained some of the terraforming done to it eons before by the Overmind and the Consciousness and whomever else.
“I’m fine,” I said. “Can you take me down to the surface? I need to walk around.”
The next morning—by my reckoning—we floated in space above Mars and watched the sun, a dime-sized ball of orange in the far distance. When the world—the universe—slipped, I blinked, and the sun was a massive globe of red flame the size of a softball. I glanced back, and Mars was gone. “Where—?”
“Mars is at another point in its orbit,” Lyle said. He sounded contemplative. “We didn’t transit with it to where it is now. As I had expected, its orbit is now approximately thirty percent wider than before, thanks to the reduced mass of the Sun.”
“Look at that thing.” I waved at the red star before us. “It sure looks bigger, not smaller.”
“The sun’s diameter has expanded significantly but it has simultaneously lost almost a third of its mass due to stellar wind. All the planetary orbits shifted outward as a result. It was almost enough to save the Earth.”
“Almost.”
“Yes. I’ve been scanning since we made the transit. The Earth has been consumed. The tidal forces from the sun’s chromosphere counteracted any orbital increase resulting from the sun’s reduction in mass.”
“The Earth’s gone.”
“Yes.”
I floated there, a speck amid unimaginable vastness. “So why didn’t we travel with Mars? When we traveled forward on Mars and on the Moon, we were fine.”
“I don’t know. Previously we’ve always appeared from the transit points at the same location relative to the planet or body we were physically standing on.
It’s possible we’re in the same spot relative to the Sun as we were when we made this latest transit.
The calculations are complex, but I believe, based on stellar movements and the more easily verifiable location of the Sun that this is, in fact, the case. ”
“Great. So next time, we need to keep our feet planted if we want to stay with the planet.”
“Looks like.”