To Conquer Time

Excerpt from A Cosmology Primer, Prof. Emmy Amelia Xu, University of California Press, 2053:

Memory-capture technology has done the most of any invention in helping us cosmologists speak to the layperson about time and be understood. People are now familiar with the concept of reliving a memory, convinced it only lasted an instant, and finding that an evening has passed. They’re comfortable with the idea of time being contained in their experience of it, and are thus not confused when we talk of the universe’s time being contained in its evolution. Just as people stopped asking “But why do the Australians not fall off the Earth?” so too will they soon stop asking, “But what was before the Big Bang?”

When, months ago, NASA sent Vandana gorgeous high-res sims of colony-ship Argo, she’d opened them on her communications mesh with a pang in her heart. It stayed as she walked past the twenty-foot-high tanks of algae that would be 3D-printed with flavours to make food; explored the vast living quarters of various sizes for everyone from singles to families; tried out, in the numerous recreation lounges, the furniture and games that worked in both gravity and zero-gravity; and stood for ages in the observatory that ringed the perimeter and housed the control room.

Argo was huge for one person floating alone through the vessel but it was just the right size to be a home, a village, for the two hundred crew that, beginning in just a few minutes, would sail it through deep space for thirty-one years of its time (thirty-four of Earth’s) at a speed of 0.4087c towards the most viable Earth-alternate as yet found, terrestrial exoplanet Wolf 1061c, 13.8 light-years away.

In its hold, it would carry three thousand in medical sleep: a physically inert but mentally active state, in which each sleeping astronaut would be fed a thirty-year education in every single human field of study, ensuring they’d be prepared to take on the challenges of visiting a new planet.

Akshara was going to be one of them.

Vandana looked up at its ghostly outlines docked at the far end of the space elevator at Vandenburg Air Force Base . . . and wished she hadn’t. The ethereal shape of the ship outlined in the blue sky clutched at her heart in a way even the crystal-clear sims hadn’t.

Cheers, applause. Three thousand and two hundred astronauts emerged into the waiting area for one last goodbye. Vandana’s mem-recorder sang to life at the base of her skull. For the very last mem she would have of Akshara, she’d used a brand-new card turned up to full resolution: she couldn’t, wouldn’t, miss a thing.

“Mom!” Six-foot-tall Akshara detached herself from the mass of orange-clad figures, made her way up, and pulled the much-smaller Vandana into a tight hug.

When she let go, Vandana raised her palms to the smiling cheeks, taking in all of the lines and contours that recorded the determination with which her daughter had pursued this objective and the triumph with which she’d attained it, the face that was about to be lost to her. Forever.

“Ready?” asked Vandana: absurd, inadequate question.

Akshara looked up at the ship, her eyes eager and longing. “I am,” she said: absurd, inadequate answer.

Then she turned to Vandana. Her voice grew soft, her face concerned. “Are you sure you’re okay, Amma? It’s not too late. I’ll probably be fired from NASA, but I can bail even now.”

Akshara only called her Amma when she was feeling extra, extra affectionate. And she had asked her this very same question approximately a million times in the seven years since the call had come. Vandana choked down the tightness in her throat and brought a lightness to her voice.

“And have a jobless adult child on my hands? No, thank you!”

Akshara laughed, her unique clear gurgle.

“Bye, Amma,” she said. Akshara bent down for one last hug, a kiss on Vandana’s head, and then she was gone.

When Akshara was three, she’d cried out from a nightmare. Vandana had gone into her room, held her until she stopped sobbing.

“I hate the dark, Amma,” Akshara said. “I don’t want to sleep alone.”

And Vandana explained how everything existed in the dark; how even Earth was a spaceship careening through the deep, glorious blackness of space. They looked at pictures of stars and accretion discs, galaxies and nebulae, clusters and super-bubbles: the real universe.

Akshara listened wide-eyed, asked for more. And more Vandana provided: how the universe had been a single point, then exploded outwards; how dust becomes stars and then dust again; how stars were atom-factories, how they’d created everything Akshara knew, even the atoms in her own body.

Elated that her daughter lapped it all up as eagerly as she herself had once done, Vandana found an artist to paint on Akshara’s ceiling a faithful reproduction of one of NASA’s images of the Crab Nebula.

They’d stayed up very late the night the painting was finished and Akshara never again complained about the dark.

Vandana returned home to her Oakland flat. It had been two years since Akshara had moved out but it had still, always, remained hers, available whenever she needed rest and pampering and a return to childhood. Now she would never again talk, laugh, hiccup, within these walls. For the first time, her absence lay like a heavy shroud upon the flat: a weight upon every second, every quantum of space.

Twenty-three years ago, having a child had upended not just Vandana’s life, but time itself. What had been so reliable, so steady, became like a slightly-damp firework trapped in a box: with every milestone, tantrum, night-waking, last-minute homework completion, night-before-exam panic, broken heart, top grade, sports win, school dance, exploded horizon, it spluttered and ricocheted, and even when it settled for a bit, you could never be quite sure that it had spent itself. The present was the present, all-consuming, until she looked away a moment and then it evaporated into the past. Futures had been upon her before she’d grasped fully at their coming. Pasts she had barely paid attention to came back upon her to exact their due.

But it had all had meaning. Gobs of it, like fat stars in a globular cluster.

Now time was linear again ... and entirely beside the point. How was it to be endured? Hours and days and weeks and months and years of emptiness.

In her closet, Vandana ejected the mem card and plopped it into a carved wooden box with a Teflon-coated interior, which carried the memories of Akshara’s entire life, completing the collection.

Back in the living room, she sank into the sofa, her head in her hands. What was she going to do?

Oh, her life would go on. She’d go to work, to team outings; meet her friends, her family. But none of it would mean anything.

“Help!” she groaned aloud into her hands, the empty flat, the universe. “Someone help!”

And the AI therapist activated.

Separation was hard for astronaut-families and NASA always ensured that everyone had emergency help. Vandana hadn’t given it a second thought, certainly hadn’t meant to attract its attention.

<<Welcome, Vandana. Our records show you might be looking for help managing emotions over the departure of your daughter, Akshara. Is this correct?>>

Sure, she found herself replying, a bite in her voice. If you can call facing down a meaningless life “managing emotion”.

<<Why do you find your life meaningless?>>

Oh, I don’t know, maybe because the one thing that has brought me joy on the face of this planet has now left it? Do you think that could be it?

<<Does your work not bring you joy?>>

No.

<<Your social life?>>

No.

<<Hobbies?>>

No.

Vandana felt suddenly bad for it. She elaborated, I mean, all of it is okay, I suppose. But I have had joy, true, transcendent, uplifting joy. Where am I supposed to find it now? You couldn’t 3D-print it for me from algae, could you?

<<A lovely joke, Vandana, thank you for that.>> She chuckled, amused with its unruffled politeness. It went on without pause. <<Why do you suppose nothing in your life now is joyous?>>

Her heart suddenly cold, Vandana closed the AI interface, fingers trembling.

<<Just so you know, I’m still here. Even if I can’t help you, I suggest a human therapist or even a support gr—>>

She found the root process and killed it. The impudence of the thing.

She got up to get herself a glass of water. Why did she suppose, indeed. What did it know of the human condition, anyway, awful thing?

Her hands still trembling, she filled a glass and downed the water, her throat parched and dry like never before. Back on the sofa, the coldness and trembling didn’t stop.

Ought she listen to the damned thing? Should she go find herself a therapist?

Abruptly, she thought of stellar fusion. How it held a star up, giving it energy and structure and shape. And how, when it failed, there was only collapse, sometimes into a black hole.

Perhaps therapy wouldn’t be undue.

Vandana chose a support group, reasoning that the therapist’s attention would be divided, and so easier to take. The half-dozen people, all mourning the loss of a child, were instantly recognisable in the coffee-shop. The co-ordinator, Manuel, gave Vandana a welcoming smile as she took her seat, nursing an iced latte.

When it was her turn, she said, “My daughter left aboard the Argo.” Several pairs of eyes looked at her and she groaned to herself. This was not divided attention.

“So, you’re here to grieve your daughter’s heroism?” said a man who’d lost a daughter to cancer, incredulous.

“No, you see, I have no one now, no one important anyway, and she’s in medical sleep and—”

“And the next news of her you’ll get is in forty-eight years,” said Manuel, sympathetically, giving the man a Look. “That’s hard. Tell us more.”

But she couldn’t. She couldn’t speak. All these people would never, ever, hear back from their children. Even if Vandana didn’t live to see it, at least Akshara was going to have an excellent life. She was going to do such fantastic things. Vandana suppressed a sob. If only she could skip the next forty-eight years. There might be joy then.

There was nothing she could say to these people, nothing she could hear from them. Better spare them, spare herself. She picked up her handbag and beat a hasty retreat.

Vandana sat nervously across from the therapist—human, woman, glasses pushed up on nose—in a pleasant, sunny office with plants and two carefully-chosen paintings. What if this one couldn’t help, either?

“It seems,” said the therapist, “that you have lost the one person closest to you in heart and intellect.”

On a couch next to a small side table that carried a box of tissues and a glass of water, Vandana considered this, nodded.

“Although, her knowledge of space is an expert’s. Mine is only that of an enthusiastic hobbyist.”

“Did you ever think of becoming an astronaut yourself?”

Vandana laughed at the thought of that long-ago dream. “When I was growing up in Chennai, the Indian Space Research Organisation, ISRO, put out a call for astronauts to settle Mars. With all the optimism of youth, I answered, aced the theoretical exams . . . and spectacularly failed the physical ones.” She paused a moment. “Akshara’s father played cricket for a national-league team.”

“An athlete, then. Where is he now?”

Vandana shrugged. “Our marriage lasted all of two years. It seems a lifetime ago. And literally is half a world away—I moved to Oakland after the divorce.”

“Does he know he has a daughter?”

She nodded. “Although he also has two children by his second wife, so he doesn’t exactly care.”

“And you never remarried?”

“Good heavens, no. My marriage taught me that I hate people.”

“And yet you had a child.”

She shuddered. “Against all good sense.” But even misanthropes get lonely. “The first three years were such hell. Joyous, but also hell. And then—” Vandana stopped, a painful lump in her throat.

And then, because of a nightmare, Akshara had discovered the universe. Answering her questions, showing her its wonders, had been the most perfect joy. The more eagerly Vandana responded, the more Akshara demanded. Vandana bought her books and videos over the communications mesh and she would take it all in, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, for hours on end.

“We grew together. Sh-she was so like me but also so much better. She decided she wanted to be an astronaut at five!”

The therapist sat back, nodded. “I’m sorry you’re going through this, Vandana. The two great loves of your life have each other. And you’re left behind, pining.”

“What do you mean? What second great love?”

“The universe you longed to explore.”

When Vandana was seven and learnt in school that:

if she zoomed out from everything around her—the school buildings, the grounds, the trees, the sky—she’d see them all on a sphere spinning around an axis;

and that if she zoomed out from there, she’d see the sphere itself swing around a star;

and if she went still wider, she’d see millions more such stars in the Milky Way;

and if she added galaxy upon galaxy, again and again, billions of times, she would finally have scaled the universe, her mind bloomed open:

she came newly, differently, alive;

she found in the larger universe not just a passion, an obsession, a perspective, a refuge—

but also an identity, a home, a goal.

When her parents yelled at her for a wet towel on the floor or low marks on a test, she could escape into reading about the swirling dust in the Horsehead Nebula.

When her mother pushed her to spend time with others of her age, she let the majesty of globular clusters in the Andromeda Galaxy carry her away.

When her physical education teacher gave her an earful about not being able to lob a volleyball over a net, she turned to a galaxy collision in Sagittarius to fill her heart.

And when she failed ISRO’s test, she categorically put away all her books and posters and dreams, locked them away, tight, not daring to let any out again.

Vandana had had no idea how the therapist had seen through her but she’d ended up sitting on the couch for several minutes, not talking, fat tears falling over her cheeks.

“It’s my body,” she’d choked out, finally. “Why must I have one? I’d so much rather be a disembodied consciousness pervading through the universe, why can’t I?”

She sounded like a whiny teenager, not the fifty-six-year-old woman she was, but the therapist only clucked in sympathy.

“That would be perfect for you, wouldn’t it? But under the circumstances ... I think you’ll have to learn to let go.”

Let go? As well let go of the very breath that kept her alive. More sobs wracked her. When they subsided, Vandana knew that the therapist was right. As impossible as it seemed, it was the healthy, the only, thing to do.

“I’m here,” the therapist had said. “I’ll guide you through this. And the first step—acknowledgement—may be difficult but will also be enjoyable: go home and sink yourself into the joy your two loves bring you.”

And that was how Vandana found herself lying on the bed in the Crab Nebula room, her communications mesh turned off, her mem suit on, the box of mems by her side.

She watched through Akshara’s first year : the dead-of-night feedings; the clutching of rattles; the standing and face-planting; the first solid meals that ended with mashed food all over the face; the resting of her own eyes for just a minute, only to wake up an hour later at Akshara’s cry.

When that card ran out, she popped in another one.

And then another. And another, until she came to the one where she’d taken Akshara to see the scale-model of the Solar System first built early the previous century in the Nevada desert. As the tiny spots of light moved far in the distance, around a bigger, unmoving ball, and Akshara grasped the true vastness and emptiness of space, Vandana prayed her child would realise every single one of her dreams.

Vandana turned off the mems, her heart full and hurting. When she’d made that wish, she hadn’t expected those dreams to leave her so permanently behind.

It was dark outside. Above her, the bejewelled filaments of the Crab glinted in reflected light. Supernovae, such as the one that had produced the Crab Nebula, were thought of as the death-throes of a star ... but what if the star was simply a supernova in cocoon? Was the nebula any less magnificent than the star had been?

The mems had taken a long time and she’d only gone through perhaps a tenth. But where was the hurry? She closed her eyes. There was time for a nap before dinner.

Akshara was a star, speeding through the galaxy. Then she was running lightly across the filaments of the Crab, which was Vandana herself, post supernova. There was the therapist, her face spanning the stars, telling her to let go. And Vandana didn’t know how, didn’t want to.

“Vandana!” Somebody was shaking her, calling out her name. “Are you alive? Are you okay?”

She opened her eyes and looked into the broad, concerned face of her boss Jasmine, a policewoman behind her.

“You haven’t been into work for three days! I tried messaging you but there was no answer, not even a read receipt . . .” Jasmine trailed away as she realised Vandana was just fine, sitting up in fact.

“Three days?” said Vandana, her voice gravelly. “That’s impossible. I only started the mems a couple of hours ago and then I dozed off for a bit.” She reached behind her head and turned her mesh on.

It was three days later.

She hadn’t eaten, hadn’t gone to the bathroom, hadn’t had water; it was as if time itself had stopped for her, for her body.

When had time run so fast? While she was watching the mems? While she was asleep? She couldn’t tell.

And . . . she had dreamt, absurd dreams, wonderful dreams.

And then, like the cylinders of a telescope clacking into place to show its subject in perfect focus, the way forward became completely clear. She laughed out loud.

Vandana stood by the sleep-pod, one hand resting on it, grinning uncontrollably up at the Crab Nebula painting above her.

For all that time had dragged before she came to her conclusion, it moved briskly afterwards.

It had taken a lot of convincing but NASA had succumbed and let her be a test subject for ongoing medical-sleep research.

She sold the Oakland flat, first having the Crab carefully disassembled and re-assembled at the new facility. She bought a mega-storage to be connected to her sleep-pod and transferred all the contents of the mem-cards to it, along with several astronomy textbooks and a subscription to various astronomy journals.

Then she went back to Chennai for a last visit. It was the first time in years that she’d seen her family; she left convinced they wouldn’t miss her.

Forty-eight years was a long time. Anything could happen; she might not make it to the first message.

But that was a risk the astronauts were taking, too. Not to mention everybody else on Earth.

Her grin still strong, she entered the pod.