Brake

Brake

Poul Anderson, excerpt

Many hours later, using orbital figures modified by further observation, a shuttle-boat from Ganymed came near enough to locate the Thunderbolt on radar. After maneuvering around so much, it didn't have reaction mass enough to match velocities. For about a second it passed so close that Devon's crew, working out on the hull, could see it – as if they were the damned in hell watching one of the elect fly past.

The shuttle-boat radioed for a vessel with fuller tanks. One came. It zeroed in – and decelerated like a startled mustang. The Thunderbolt had already fallen deeper into the enormous Jovian gravity field than the boat's engines could rise. 

The drifting ship vanished from sight, into the great face of the planet. High clouds veiled it from telescopes – clouds of free radicals, such as could not have existed for a moment under humanly endurable conditions. Jupiter is more alien than men can really imagine.

Her orbit on reemergence was not so very much different. But the boats which had almost reached her had been forced to move elsewhere they could not simply hang there, in that intense a field. So the Thunderbolt made another long, lonesome pass. By the time it was over, Ganymede was in the unfavorable position, and Callisto had never been in a good one. Therefore the ship entered Jupiter's atmosphere bor a third time, unattended.

On the next emergence into vacuum, her orbit had shortened and skewed considerably. The rate at which air drag operated was increasing, each plunge went deeper beneath the poison clouds, each swung through dear space took less time. However, there was hope. The Ganymedeans were finally organizing themselves. They computed an excellent estimate of what the fourth free orbit would be and planted well-fueled  boats strategically close at the right times.

Only – the Thunderbolt did not come anywhere near the predicted path.

It was pure bad luck. Devon's crew, working whenever the ship was in a vacuum, had almost cut away the after section. This last plunge into stiffening air resistance finished the job. Forces of drag and reaction, a shape suddenly altered, whipped the Thunderbolt wildly through the stratosphere. She broke free at last, on a drastically different orbit.

But then, it had been unusual good luck which brought the Jovians so close to her in the first place. Probabilities were merely reasserting themselves.

The radio said in a weak, fading voice: :Missed y” gain. Do know if we d'n come near, next time. Your period's getting' very short.”

“Maybe you shouldn't risk it.” Banning sighed. He had hoped for more, but if the gods had decided his ship was to plunge irretrievably into Jupiter, he had to accept the fact.

“We'll be all right, I reckon.” 

Outside, the air roared hollowly. Pressures incomparably greater than those in Earth's deepest oceans waited below.

On his final pass into any approximation of clear space – the stars were already hazed – Banning radioed: “This will be the last message, except for a ten-minute signal on the same band when we come to rest. Assuming we're alive! We've got to save capacitors. It'll be some time before help arrives. When it does, call me. I'll respond if we've survived, and thereafter emit a steady tone by which we can be located. Is that clear?”

A space-boat lost in space. Illustration by Elena.

Spiritual and Philosophical Traditions

Spiritual and Philosophical Traditions

In addition to the theories of physicists, the writings of poets and philosophers (some of which originated before biblical times) have articulated the idea that physical separations are more illusory than real. Buddhist teachings, following from the earlier Vedic tradition of 500 B.C., propose that human desires, judgments, and attachments, which arise from distinctions such as “here and not here,” “now and not now”, are the cause of all the world's suffering.

Aldous Huxley describes the many levels of awareness associated with the “perennial philosophy,” a term for the highest common factor present in all the major wisdom traditions and religions of the world. The first principle of Huxley's perennial philosophy is that consciousness is the fundamental building block of the universe; the world is more like a great thought than a great machine. And human beings can access all of the universe through our own consciousness and our nonlocal mind. This philosophy also maintains that we have a dual nature, both local and nonlocal, both material and nonmaterial. Finally, the perennial philosophy teaches that the purpose of life is to become one with universal, nonlocal, loving consciousness that is available to us. That is, the purpose of life is to become one with God, and then to help others do likewise.

In this worldview, through meditation one experiences increasing unity consciousness as one passes through "the great chain" of physical, biological, mental, spiritual, and etheric levels of awareness. Through meditation, one experiences the insight that one is not a body; one has a body. Even the idea of “one” is eventually given up in favor of the experience of expanded awareness.

The lesson that separation is an illusion has been spelled out by mystics for at least 2,500 years. Hinduism teaches that individual consciousness (Arman) and universal consciousness (Brahman) are one.

Ewin Shrödinger considered this observation to be the most profound statement in all of metaphysics. In the Sutras of Patanjali, written 100 years after the Buddha lived, the great Hindu teacher taught that a “realized” being achieves a state of loving awareness in which “the Seer is established in his own essential and fundamental nature (self-realization).” The view of life in which we are all connected with God, and in which the “Kingdom of God” is within us, waiting to be realized and experienced, is part of both the Jewish and Christian traditions – especially in the Thomas gospel. We learn that the loving source we are seeking is immediately available when we make contact with the great “I am” within each of us.

In Judaism, the local community of spirit is often referred to as HaShem (the word), while in Christianity it is called the Holy Spirit, or Emmanuel (the immanent or indwelling God of all). This view of a community of spirit probably arose from mystics on every sacred tradition, whose meditations led them to have oceanic, mind-to-mind feelings of oneness. These realizations may be fleeting or lasting, spontaneous or the product of religious practice, but they are an enduring feature of human life. (When I write about “realizations,” I am describing a state in which a practitioner has wisdom of who she or he is and he embodied that wisdom; it has become integrated into daily thoughts and activities, We often view “awakening” as a first step toward such realization. Awakening can occur in the blink of an eye...).

(Excerpt from Limitless Mind, a Guide to remote viewing and transformation of consciousness, by Russell Targ, author of Miracles of Mind. New World Library, California, 2004).

Memories from the Future. Photograph by Elena.

The Longest Voyage

The Longest Voyage

By Poul Anderson

At length we saw weeds floating on the sea, birds, towering cloud masses, all the signs of land. Three days later we raised an island. It was an intense green under those calm skies. Surf, still more violent than in our hemisphere, flung against high cliffs, burst in a smother of foam and roared back down again. We coasted carefully, the palomers aloft to seek an approach, the gunners standing by our cannon with lighted matches. For not only were there unknown currents and shoals – familiar hazards – but we had had brushes with canoe-sailing, cannibals in the past. Especially did we fear the eclipses. My lords can visualize how in that hemisphere the sun each day must go behind Tambur. In that longitude the occurrence was about midafternoon and lasted nearly ten minutes. An awesome sight: the primary planet – for so Froad now called it, a planet akin to Diell or Coint, with our own world humbled to a mere satellite thereof! - become a black disk encircled with red, up in a sky suddenly full of stars. A cold wind blew across the sea, and even the breakers seemed hushed. Yet so impudent is the soul of man that we continued about our duties, stopping only for the briefest prayer as the sun disappeared, thinking more about the chance of shipwreck in the gloom than of God's Majesty.

So bright is Tambor that we continued to work our way around the island at night. From sunup to sunup, twelve mortal hours, we kept the Golden Leaper slowly moving. Toward the second noon, Captain Rovie's persistence was rewarded. An opening in the cliffs revealed a long fjord. Swampy shores overgrown with saltwater trees told us that while the tides rose high in that bay, it was not one of those roosts so dreaded by mariners. The wind being against us, we furled sail and lowered the boats, towing in our caravel by the power of oars. This was a vulnerable moment especially since we had perceived a village within the fjord. “Should we not stand out, master, and let them come first to us?" I ventured.

Rovic spat over the rail."I've found it best never to show doubt," said he. “If a canoe fleet should assail us, we”ll give them a whiff of grapeshot and trust to break their nerve. But I think, thus showing ourselves fearless of them from the very first, we're less likely to meet treacherous ambuscade later."

He proved right.

In the course of time, we learned we had come upon the eastern end of a large archipelago. The inhabitants were mighty seafarers, considering that they had only outrigger dugouts to travel in. These, however, were often a hundred feet long. With forty paddles, or with three bast-sailed masts, such a vessel could almost match our best speed, and was more maneuverable. However, the small cargo space limited their range of travel.

Limitless. Photo by Elena.

Operation Afreet

Operation Afreet

Poul Anderson

I was nowhere and nowhen. My very body had departed from me, or I from it. How could I think of infinite eternal dark and cold and emptiness when I had no senses? How could I despair when I was nothing but a point in spacetime?... Not, not even that,f or there was nothing else, nothing to find or love or hate or fear or be related to in any way whatsoever. The dead were less alone than I, for I was all which existed.

This was my despair.

But on the instant, or after a quadrillion years, or both or neither, I came to know otherwise. I was under the regard of the Solipsist. Helpless in unconsciousness, I could but share that egotism to ultimate that it would yield no room even to hope. I swirled in the tides and storms of thoughts too remote, too alien, too vast for me to take in save as I might brokenly hear the polar ocean while it drowned me.

- danger, this one – he and those two – somehow they can be a terrible danger – not now (scornfully) when they merely help complete the ruin of a plan already bungled into week – no, later, when the next plan is ripening, the great one of which this war was naught but an early leaf – something about them warns thinly of danger – could I only scan more clearly into time? - they must be diverted, destroyed, somehow dealt with before their potential has grown – but I cannot originate anything yet – maybe they will be slain by the normal chances of war – if not, I must remember them and try later – now I have too much else to do, saving those seeds I planted in the world – the birds of the enemy fly thick across my fields, hungry crows and eagles to guard them – (with ever wilder hate( my snares shall take you yet birds – and the One Who loosed you!

So huge was the force of that final malevolence that I was cast free.

I opened my eyes. For a while I was aware entirely of the horror. Physical misery rescued me, driving those memories back to where half-forgotten nightmares dwell. The thought flitted by me that shock must have made me briefly delirious.

A natural therianthrope in his beast shape isn't quite as invulnerable as most people believe. Aside from things like silver – biochemical poisons to a metabolism in that semifluid state – damage which stops a vital organ will stop life, amputations are permanent unless a surgeon is near to sew the part back on before its cells die; and so on and so on, no pun intended. We are a hardy sort, however. I'd taken a blow that probably broke my neck. The spinal cord out being totally severed, the damage had healed at standard therio speed.

The trouble was, they'd arrived and used my flash to make me human before the incidental hurts had quite gone away. My head drummed and I retched.

On Imaginary Science. Illustration by Elena.

The Queen of Air and Darkness

The Queen of Air and Darkness

One lightyear is not much as galactic distances go. Your could walk it in about 270 million years, beginning at the middle of the Permian Era, when dinosaurs belonged to the remote future, and continuing to the present day when spaceships cross even greater reaches. But stars in our neighborhood average some nine lightyears apart, and barely one percent of them have planets which are man habitable, and speeds are limited to less than that of radiation. Scant help is given by relativistic time contraction and suspended animation en route. These make the journeys seem short, but history meanwhile does not stop at home.

This voyages from sun to sun will always be few. Colonists will be those who have extremely special reasons for going. They will take along germ plasm for exogenetic cultivation of domestic plants and animals - and of human, in order that population can grow fast enough to escape death through genetic drift. After all, they cannot rely of further immigration. Two or three times a century, a ship may call from some other colony. (Not from Earth. Earth has long ago sunk into alien concerns.) Its place of origin will be an old settlement. The young ones are in no position to build and man interstellar vessels.

Their very survival, let alone their eventual modernization, is in doubt. The founding fathers have had to take what they could get in a universe not especially designed for man.

Consider, for example, Roland. It is among the rare happy find, a world where humans can live, breathe, eat the food, drink the water, walk unclad if they choose, sow their crops, pasture their beasts, dig their mines, erect their homes, raise their children and grandchildren. It is worth crossing these quarters of a light-century in preserve certain dear values and strike new roots into the soil or Roland.

But the star Charlemagne is of type F9, forty percent brighter than Sol, brighter still in the treacherous ultraviolet and wilder still in the wind of charged particles that seethes front it. The planet has an eccentric orbit. In the middle of the short but furious northern summer, which includes periastron, total isolation is more than double what Earth gets; in the depth of the long northern winter, it is barely less than Terrestrial average.

Native life is abundant everywhere. But lacking elaborate machinery, not yet economically possible to construct for more than a few specialists, man can only endure the high latitudes. A ten-degree axial tilt, together with the orbit, means that the northern part of the Arctican continent spend half its year in unbroken sunlessness. Around the South Pole lies an empty ocean. Roland

Other differences from Earth might superficially seem more important. Roland has two moons, small but close, to evoke clashing tides. It rotates once in thirty-two hours, which is endlessly, subtly disturbing to organisms evolved through gigayears of a quicker rhythm. The weather patterns are altogether unterrestrial. The globe is a mere 9500 kilometers in diameter; its surface gravity is 0.42x980 cm/sec2; the sea level air pressure is slightly above one Earth atmosphere. (For actually Earth is the freak, and man exists because a cosmic accident blew away most of the gas that a body its size ought to have kept, as Venus has done).

(By Poul Anderson).

Between horizons of the sky deepened from purple to sable. Both moons were aloft, nearly full, shining frosty on leaves and molten on waters. Illustration by Elena.