Peripheral Visions: Hope in Hell

Peripheral Visions: They coalesce in the soft blur of darkest shadows and take shape in the corner of your eye. But you won't see them coming... until it's too late.

Hope in Hell

The shelter was prefabricated, but two of the engineers – Himanshu and Ronit – had added a few features to that made it seem more like a permanent structure. The window in the survey lab was one touch; the panes were high-tensile glass, but the wooden sill gave it a gentler, less spartan touch.

Aaloka leaned her head against the window and stared out at the nighttime. The stars were different than they were in the skies of Earth; thousands were visible, as opposed to the night skies over Delhi or even her childhood home in the Rajasthani desert, where smoky air and light pollution obscured the constellations.

The prefab only had a few rooms. The idea wasn't that it should be a residence so much as a center for field operations. The ship had better, more fully integrated lab facilities, but the thinking was that a facility like this – on the planet's ground, permeable to its atmosphere, bathed in the rays of its sun – would be less likely to miss anything that might be toxic to human colonists.

That's why we're here, Aaloka thought, studying the barely-there line of the horizon, rocky black hills cutting a profile into the dusting of stars in the black sky. To see if this world, this last chance, will be the salvation of the human race.

Someone came into the room and stood behind her. Aaloka assumed it would be Sahima; she knew for sure a moment later as arms encircled her and a warm body pressed into her from behind, hot breath on her neck and then soft lips.

The two of them stood silently, looking out the window, enjoying the perfection of a still night on an unspoiled world.

Aaloka hated to ruin the moment with talk of science or duty, but they had a choice to make – and dawn wasn't that far away.

"Final testing?" Aaloka asked.

She felt her wife sigh. "Yes," Sahima said softly into her ear. "All tests done. If there's anything in this planet harmful to human life, we have yet to discover it."

That wasn't out of the question, of course; it had happened before that colonies had seemingly thrived for years, until a new planet suddenly showed a crueler, more deadly side. Thalia Colony had failed after half a decade because an indigenous life form – a tunneling, long-dormant life form – had suddenly awakened and risen from the soil. Judging from the brief, panicked transmissions Thalia Colony had sent out, that world was suddenly besieged with millions of locust-like insects, their hard shells metallic and iridescent. The scientists on Earth, analyzing the transmissions sent by the doomed colony, theorized that they were similar to cicadas... only deadly. The transmission, short and chaotic as it had been, had shown clearly enough what the ravenous "locusts" did to the colony and its people: Clouds of the creatures swept through, countless living bullets that slew human residents and hammered equipment into ruin.

Other worlds had harbored lethal hazards that were less hidden but, in some ways, just as subtle. Blagodat had lacked a strong magnetic field or ozone, so that its surface was scoured with UV light from the system's two suns and cosmic rays from the galaxy beyond. All the same, optimistic colonists sought to make a go of it there. The last of them had died less than six years after the mission had made planetfall, riddled with cancer, leaving no progeny behind. They were victims of their own delusions, ignoring the facts at their peril; they also had no choice. Colony ships weren't designed for two-way trips.

Less overtly hostile worlds like Onaat, Barrat, and Skiru had seemed inviting, with surface conditions similar to Earth's, but, as with Thalia, such habitable worlds didn't wait for life to arrive from elsewhere; native forms, from microbes to fungi to carnivorous predators, had a way of rejecting human presence.

With the millions of Earthlike planets thought to exist in the galaxy, only a few had fallen within reach of humanity's still-elementary interstellar craft. One after the next, those rare, promising places – prospective new worlds for a race that had damaged their own home planet beyond redemption and was now on the brink of dying out – had turned out not to be the garden world humanity yearned for. On Vrisat the problem was a local mineral, present in water, air, and soil, that rendered crops devoid of nutrients; the harvests were good, but the colonists starved to death all the same. Similarly, toxic minerals and metals on Durnea had wreaked unexpected havoc on human bodies, rendering the inhabitants sterile – there was no second generation of colonists there. On Milagro, initial surveys missed the presence of exotic proteins called prions; the oversight wasn't recognized until the colonists there began to suffer irreparable organ damage. Those who didn't die of kidney or liver failure went mad as the prions chewed holes in their brains.

Those were only some of the stories of failure and death, but they summarized the general trends. There had been eighty-three colony missions over the past two and a half centuries.

And there had been eighty-three failures.

And now: The eighty-fourth. Aaloka and her colonists were on Narak, which had been named for the Hindi world meaning "Hell" – a superstitious gesture, since so many new worlds given hopeful names like Eden, New Spring, and Rachat, the French word for "redemption," had proven to be anything but. It was stupid and superstitious, but the reverse-psychology ploy of naming the world for what the human colonists hoped it wasn't seemed to have coaxed the gods into delivering the long-sought prize of a planet that was truly ideal for human habitation.

At least, that was what it looked like so far. But Aaloka needed certainty, both for the choice she needed to make come dawn and the message she would send back to Earth.

"How sure are we about our readings and our lab results?" Aaloka asked.

"I'm highly confident we haven't missed anything," Sahima told her. "Of course, we can never be entirely certain, can we? There could be some hidden variable that we won't recognize for years, maybe even centuries. Some environmental factor; some dormant native form of life... maybe even an instability in one of the suns that only flares up every thousand years, or an asteroid in a long orbit destined to crash into the planet..."

"I'm not asking about cosmic catastrophes, or risks that might only appear after millennia. What do we need to know about this planet right now? Is there anything that will kill colonists here and now? Either us, or future arrivals?"

"We haven't found anything of concern for the short term. The planet is as close to primaeval, unspoiled Earth as we've ever found. Closer, in fact: A good balance of nitrogen and oxygen, without the large amounts of methane or ammonia that they found on other candidate planets like Innlausn."

"Before they realized that Innlausn's water was full of crystals that bind with salt and kill anyone who drinks it," Aaloka said. "Or that the planet was too volcanically and seismically active for cities to remain standing more than a couple of years. And that was the best match we've ever had... until now." She sighed.

"Are you still having doubts?" Sahima asked.

"Of course I am."

"The people of Earth need some good news. Something hopeful."

"Earth," Aaloka sighed. "The perfect home for us, our only perfect home."

"Until now, hopefully," Sahima put in.

Aaloka didn't second the hopeful thought. "If any planet should be named 'Hell...' " she said softly, bitter regret in her voice. "And the thing is, we did it to ourselves. Or rather, our ancestors did it to us."

"Don't," Sahima said.

"But it's true," Aaloka said. "And there's no reason to think that humanity has learned any lessons. The moment we transmit our findings back to Earth, they'll send ships. Not just India; every nation. They'll launch all the ships they've readied. They'll convert ships not meant for a fifty-four light year journey. They'll use cold storage technology, generation ships, time dilation... by now, who knows? They might even have faster-than-light travel; they might have been able to make the lepton drive work, or come up with some other technology. But fast or slow, they will come, and when they get here..." A sudden sob interrupted her.

"Shhh," Sahima urged softly, pressing her cheek to Aaloka's neck.

"But we can't ignore the truth of it," Aaloka said, her voice strained. "Our species is a weed... or a plague. You can imagine it, can't you? They'll show up here, they'll stake claims, and then the chest-beating and territorial skirmishes will start. This is a pristine planet – good air, good water, usable soil. But it's poor in minerals. We won't learn to live within our means; we'll poison and plunder this world, just like we did to Earth, chasing after whatever mineral wealth we can get hold of. Fighting will break out over resources, just as it did back on Earth. Rival nationalities, rival religions, 'patriotic' efforts to swell the numbers of different groups. The planet we've found here... this innocent place... it will be overrun. Murdered. A second home world, a second chance... we'll throw it away, waste everything we've been given, just like we did before."

"It will take centuries for that to happen," Sahima said.

"That's a reason to let people come here and run wild? It's okay to consign this planet to absolute ruin because it will happen in slow motion? Why come all this way only to repeat history? Why bother, if all we're going to do is bring the same madness here?"

"People can evolve."

"Not that quickly," Aaloka said. "And who do you think it will be that's coming here? The tired? The poor? The 'huddled masses yearning to be free?' Of course it won't. Those people will all be left back on Earth to die. The people coming here will be the ones who can afford it: The wealthy. The ruthless. A self-selection of the most selfish specimens humanity has to offer."

"It's not for us to make these judgments," Sahima said. "Our mission is very simple: Determine if this planet can support human life, and then report back."

"Even setting aside the moral part of the equation, how likely are our tests to have been comprehensive enough? No matter how many scans we run or chemical assays we perform, we can't promise that this is the perfect replacement for the planet we evolved on. After billions of years of adaptation, how do we think we're simply going to show up here and slot into its ecology? Even if we were saints, instead of the brutal animals we are, how can we believe that any of this is ours to take, that we have the right?"

"Maybe it's not about right or wrong," Sahima said.

"Isn't it? It would be one thing if our delusions about 'improving' other planets had a grain of sense or truth. But what do we have to offer the universe, Sahima? And it's not even as though we were truly deluded by our self-justifications; they're simply bandages we wrap around our own eyes to take the sting of conscience away. If we truly never understood how we were obliterating ourselves, then why did we devote so many of our remaining resources to building interstellar ships and sending them out into space?"

They both sighed in unison. They'd spoken these words before – not all at once like this, but over time, their doubts slowly crystallizing into words that they had exchanged haltingly as the ship made its way across space. Arrival on Narak had accelerated that process of doubt; when the planet suddenly became a place instead of a hope, a wish, or a nebulous concept, their way of thinking about it had changed.

"Look at it out there," Aaloka said. "A whole planet, beautiful in its own right, fine as it is... happy without us. A planet with deserts, oceans. And life – life that evolved here; life that belongs here. Not intelligent life – not yet. Not ever, once we start mining and farming and fishing and... and polluting. If we had never come, what beings would have evolved in a million, in ten million years? Beings who would call this world home, and be perfectly suited to it because they had come from it... the way we came from the Earth?"

"The imperatives of evolution and selfish genes being what they are, there's no reason to think whatever intelligence might arise here wouldn't destroy this planet the same way we destroyed Earth," Sahima pointed out.

"But it's their planet," Aaloka said. "Theirs to destroy, or... or, maybe not. How can we say? We don't belong here; we're stealing the future of... of..." Her voice choked off and she put a hand to her eyes.

"In theory," Sahima said. "But the development of intelligent life is far from assured."

"Maybe intelligence is the problem," Aaloka sighed. "A way for the very worst of all possibilities to come to fruition. And worse, to metastasize throughout the universe... Do you know there used to be a bird called the cuckoo, back on Earth? Its survival strategy was to throw the eggs of other birds out of the other birds' nests and substitute its own eggs. The cuckoo went extinct along with almost every other wild animal, thanks to us, but do you suppose it wiped out other bird species thanks to its selfishness? Are we nothing but... but..."

"Cosmic cuckoos?" Sahima asked gently, and there was something in her voice that – horrible as the thought was – made them both laugh for a moment.

But the moment was brief. "This is not our home," Aaloka said. "Maybe the universe is so vast, the distances between worlds so great, for the express purpose of keeping us where we belong. Maybe there's a moral message to the nature of space: Anyplace we go in the universe, we will be invaders."

"Aaloka, my love... don't do this to yourself."

"I am mission commander. I'm the one who has to send the message. I'm the one who will speak the treacherous words that bring ravenous, reckless human beings to this rare, perfect planet."

"Or," Sahima said, "you're the one who will falsify the reports, and warn them of diseases, planetary instability, a lack of water or other necessary resources. They don't even have to believe you; if you only sow doubt, they will avoid coming here. Too many colonies have failed already. The politics around colonization are too volatile. One negative word, and they will build us a monument, call us heroes, and send their ships to the next likely candidate system."

"Yes, or they might follow up with another mission here just to be sure, and then declare war on us for betraying them," Aaloka said. "What would you do? They would think we seized this world for ourselves, abandoning them, consigning them to die. And they might even be right."

"And that touches on another point: We're here," Sahima said. "We can't go back. This planet will host humans from now on. But maybe we don't have to destroyers of worlds. Maybe we can learn to treat our new home kindly."

"Can we?"

Sahima held her closer. "We can learn," she said.

"Yes. Create a utopia today. Choose wisely – for now. And in a few hundred years? Remember how democracies failed on Earth? A couple of centuries of idealism, and then... the same script. Greed. Corruption. Manipulation of the masses by the ruthless and the privileged. Inequality, oppression, death, upheaval... the mindless, witless repetition of our animal genes, our blood-soaked history."

"Have you lost all hope for our species?"

"Yes," Aaloka laughed – a hopeless laugh. "Yes, because to be any better than we are would mean becoming a new species, and can you imagine humanity ever allowing that to happen?"

Sahmia was quiet, still holding her.

"And – this may be the worst thing of all – lying to Earth would mean breaking our oaths. I hate liars. But telling the truth... I didn't really expect to find a new world so well suited for us, the second chance our politicians have promised for so long. I expected to die out here, more than fifty light years from home, but at least die doing something to give hope to the future. Not sitting back on Earth as the temperatures rose and the wars continued... but doing something, anything still worthy of our best selves. But here we are, on a world that almost seems tailor-made for us. We've succeeded! Can we really be the ones who deny a new life to so many miserable souls? Even if they will only bring that misery here, turn a fresh chance into the same rote failure?"

Sahima said nothing for a long moment. A faint glow was starting to lighten the sky, though the horizon's undulating shape – curving with hills – remained black, and crisply delineated.

"The mission crew will want to be here for your transmission," Sahima said. "Some of them have your same concerns. Most of them are too stupidly happy to be here, on a virgin world with fresh air and good water, to think about the long-range consequences of a positive report. But all of them trust you. And whatever you decide... all of them will go along with it."

Of course they would. Humans were good at falling in line when they had a strong leader. But how would Aaloka lead? She knew she had to decide soon.... in the space of seven breaths, as the old saying went. Time was growing short, and it was a terrifying responsibility to be the one to determine what the future would hold for this new world.

"Do you suppose," Aaloka said, "that other mission commanders had these thoughts? Do you suppose that maybe one or two of those other colony worlds were actually habitable after all? The stories of prions... the conspiracy theorists on Earth insist they were nothing but false messaging so the colonists wouldn't have to share a bountiful new planet."

"Maybe," Sahima said. "I even hope so... hope that there are colony worlds where people are happy, where the threat of an invasion from Earth has faded and they are free to make their own future."

"And yet, the betrayal of all those others back on Earth," Aaloka said, now arguing the other side of the dilemma. "Even if we suffer no consequences from Earth itself, we will still carry the sin of the lie, and of the deprivation of our families, our colleagues..."

"Their descendants, at this point," Sahima said. "Remember how much time passed back on Earth during those few shipboard years."

"Yes, the result of time dilation," Aaloka said. "Our new, sophisticated ship was the best they had when we launched, almost ninety years ago in subjective time. We could cross more than fifty light years in less than a century! And yet it will still take fifty-four years for our message to reach Earth, whatever that message will be." Aaloka leaned her forehead against he cool glass of the window. "Maybe it's too late," she whispered. "Maybe we're safe from having to make a decision with no right path. Maybe everyone on Earth is dead by now."

More silence, though it rang with their shared thoughts and fears.

"We're here anyway," Sahima offered. "Clever humans, ruthless humans, dreamers and killers. We're here with all our promise, all our menace. Can bringing others make a difference at this point?"

"Yes," Aaloka said. Then: "No." Then: "I just don't know."

"Decide, my love," Sahima said. "History is in your hands, but you in turn are in the hands of the gods. They will guide you. Listen to them. Listen deeply into the quiet. Listen deeply into yourself. They will tell you what you need to do. You will know the answer. Trust it; trust the gods; trust yourself." She kissed Aaloka once more and then slipped away. Still watching the world through the window, Aaloka heard her leave the room.

Aaloka couldn't help but be warmed by her wife's faith, both in the gods and in her. The problem was, though she was sentimentally devoted to her family's traditional gods, Aaloka was also a rational person. If the gods existed outside of human psychology – if they were anything more than the human mind looking into its own reflection for answers, and finding a pantheon of shimmering images – they were surely beyond a person's ability to understand. Did they take a hand in human affairs?

Aaloka thought again of the very nature of the universe: Its vastness like a warning, or a guarantee... or a quarantine, to keep all the experiments in intelligent life safely squared away in their own places...

Then she thought about human ingenuity in finding the hidden codes that detailed and unlocked the universe and all its possibilities. The elegance and revelation of mathematics, the powerful gospel of physics, the blinding clarity of science, all of it numinous with the divine – and yet, ultimately suited to exploitation and violence as any other tool of human greed.

Maybe they did belong here. Maybe no species was expected to reach maturity on only one world. Maybe humanity's true potential lay in some far future, with bodies and civilizations and planets themselves the stepping stones to some unimaginable destiny...

But the universe, in its fathomless age and vast scale, might also have been designed for billion-year projects. Could throwing open the door to humanity back on Earth... humanity suffering for its sins, unless it had succumbed to them... actually be the correct and moral choice? Even though humans would sweep in like the locusts of Thalia, devouring and destroying everything in their path?

In a cosmos so full of potential, who could say what was right or necessary? Yet, that was her job right now; her job in its most exacting summary...

Decide, Aaloka thought, the word echoing in her mind, watching as the sky grew light and color bled into the landscape's details with the rising of the suns.

Decide

Soon, one sun was over the horizon. The other would follow in a couple of hours. The sky was a bright teal color. The black rocks of the distant hills were speckled with brilliant hues of green and yellow and scarlet. Life adorned their gorgeous planet, and they were only guests here. Would they be god and gracious guests? Or would they be the sort of invaders humans had been all throughout their history?

Aaloka sighed, sought stillness in her troubled mind, searched her heart, and knew that she'd already chosen for herself... and for all the rest of humanity.

Right of wrong, that was, after all, why she was here.

Next week we visit a very different set of alternatives as a man named Leon comes face to face with himself... and the past choices that have brought both of him to the moment when he's got a gun to his own head...