Not all arkships arrived in Centauri at the same time, my child, nor did they all have the same success starting a settlement. Those who arrived first – those who evolved into what we now call Celestials – were not always the most gracious of hosts. Sometimes they tolerated the humans who came centuries – or millennia – later. Often, they enslaved or exploited us. Other times they ignored us. On very rare occasions, they even seemed to help us.
But though we share a common origin, the Celestials have evolved into something post-human, in-human. They are not allies. They are not our friends. The best policy is to simply avoid them as much as possible. Settle on worlds the Celestials have abandoned or ignored. Planets where fledgling human colonies might be able to thrive and flourish on our own merit.
Yet one can’t help but wonder, on discovering one of these rare, unclaimed worlds: Why is it still empty?
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“I see what’s wrong with it,” Ollie said. “But I don’t see what’s wrong with it.”
Steven gave him an odd look. “Say what?”
“I mean it’s… something’s scrambled in the nuclei of some of the cells. I’d say at random but it’s like… a pattern.”
“I don’t see it. I just see a potato,” Steven said. “Which means this is Ag Sci’s problem and not Gene Tech.”
“Well, the potato’s genes.”
“You know how easy Ag Sci have it on this planet?” Steven was getting into his stride. “I mean, okay, no oxygen yet. Another five generations before our little extremophile bugs put out enough for you to plant your potatoes outside. But eight-tenths Earth gravity. Temperatures like a sunny day in Nebraska. Big flat plains, Ollie. Big flat plains of dust so chock full of hydrocarbons it’s positively soil without the gribblies that’ll eat your potatoes. Just enclose a dome and pump some air in. Alien Mother Nature’s already done the hard work. And you know what? They even break the potatoes! And somehow, it’s our problem then.”
“Just, all broken up inside,” Ollie said wonderingly, looking at the next micrograph of jumbled base pairs. And theoretically in that mess was the genetic code that would grow you a potato but nobody was putting that jigsaw together. “You hear the news from the teratology ward? Lot of people been developing ‘tomas'.
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“Potatoes!” Steven shouted. “I mean, damn me, those are like the quintessential space food, aren’t they? Even some clown that got himself marooned can grow potatoes. You saw that old movie, Ollie? Where the spaceman grows potatoes? What was it…?”
“Spacetato?”
“Spacetato, that’s the one. And here we are with the best planetary cards anyone could ever deal us, and our dumbass Ag Sci boys can’t even…”
Ollie wasn’t listening anymore. Each new image seemed to be boring into his mind. There was more than a pattern in the distribution of damaged potato cells. There was a message. He’d heard it before, just as he fell asleep. A voice at the edge of hearing whispering… terrible things, incredible things.
“Steven,” he said, feeling his teeth vibrate, “Do you hear that?”
Steven was still ranting about the inadequacy of potato farmers.
Ollie made a sound. It was supposed to be a word, but it came out as a guttural buzzing deep in his chest.
“Say what?” Steven asked, broken from his tirade. “Ollie, you just hawked up a… Damn me, man, that looks like half a lung.”
Ollie turned to him, feeling blood all over his chin and strung between his teeth. “I,” he gurgled out, “hear…” And he heard, and he needed to make sure Steven heard, but the sound wouldn’t go in Steven’s ears properly and so he had to make some other entry for it, to let it into the man’s skull. He lunged, feeling his colleague’s throat twist under his fingers, jaws gaping so he could worry away at Steven’s flesh.
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The recording was shocking enough to silence the room. A man turning on his neighbor and savaging him, gone completely and cannibalistically insane without warning. Or apparently without warning. The autopsy – of both men because Ollie had torn Steven’s throat out before anyone could intervene – had shown the fingerprints of the true killer.
Dalina Vael, chief medic, began sliding her findings onto the screens of the assembled ark and civilian leadership.
“A catastrophic breakdown of intracellular structure spread across the body,” she explained. “We’ve seen similar signs before, at earlier stages. Mr. Ollie had several symptoms he wanted checked out, but the damage had avoided his major organs and so he was too far down the list. We never got to him before it got to his brain.
“It what?” someone demanded. “There’s nothing alive out there, even at the microscopic level. And we’ve taken the utmost quarantine precautions anyway. Everything’s screened, irradiated, scanned, sieved… How can there be an it?”
“How do you cure it,” someone else shouted over them.
Doctor Vael just stood there, fiddling with her own screen, mouth twitching.
“Doctor?” the ark captain prompted her. “If it’s a biological agent that’s somehow interacting with our biology, then what have we missed? How do we screen it out.”
“It isn’t a biological agent,” Vael said briskly. “In fact, we took far too long to work out what it was, because that’s what we were looking for. Because we were seeing these low-level symptoms killing the crops, making us sick… and now this. It was what Ollie said that finally put me on the right track. You can just catch it, under Steven’s rambling, "Do you hear that?" he says. And naturally we’ve looked at his ears and there’s no infection. The damage barely touches there, but… one of the geophysics team was complaining about auditory hallucinations. Like a buzz all the time, a kind of vibrational tinnitus. We told him it was nothing. He didn’t believe us. He repurposed a chunk of the earthquake kit. And he was right. It wasn’t nothing. He’s in the ward with acute liver failure right now. But we have his results.”
“It’s some silicate? Some geological microstructure,” someone interrupted her. “Surely there’s nothing so small it’s getting past our filters?”
“Not that,” she said patiently. “It’s… the planet. Not a small thing at all. A very big thing.”
“The planet,” the captain echoed scornfully, “is making people sick?”
“The planet,” she confirmed, “is killing us. And our crops. With its song.”
That, at least, was enough to shut down the chatter for the first time since after they’d seen Ollie’s rampage.
“Let me ask you something,” she said. “Have any of you heard a sound, right at the very edge of your ear. When it’s quiet, at night. When you’re on your own. And you realize it’s always there, just so soft that most of the time it’s drowned out? A whistle or a hum or a buzzing. I have.” And she saw the faces that flinched and the ones that didn’t, and nobody admitted to anything. “If you’re keeping quiet because you don’t want to admit to being sick, then you should know that hearing the sound just means your ears are better for certain frequencies. Everyone’s body is being affected by it. Every living thing we grow here. Every human being.”
“Is it an attack?” someone wanted to know.
“Not even that,” she said, because at least an attack would be comprehensible, something on the human scale. “It’s the planet,” she said helplessly. “Deep geological movement of tectonic plates creating a constant harmonic vibration entirely alien to anything we ever encountered on Earth. It shakes apart our cells from the nucleus out. The patterns Ollie observed reflect the waveforms of the sound. It’s in all of us. We’re all sick with it.”
“How do we keep it out?” the captain demanded.
“We can’t,” she said. “It’s not a germ or a toxin or even radiation. It’s a vibration and it runs through the entire planet. And that means, even though so many other constants are in our favor, we must leave. It’s a death world, and if we stay it’s going to sing us all to death.”
