Beyond: Our Future in Space Read Free

ankles. The needle drops down and I feel very little pain when the IV starts to replace my blood with glycerol. As the nitrogen vents open and the lid frosts white, I keep a single thought in view: I exist.

PART IV
    BEYOND
    M ilky white light and enormous weariness. Every part of me aches but I’m immobilized. My finger twitches uncontrollably, as if it belongs to someone else. Slowly, inexorably, I become aware of my arms, my legs, my skin, as if the feeling is being retrieved from the bottom of a deep well.
    My eyes flutter open. The panel just above my head registers my vital signs. In sealed beryllium coffins alongside me, one hundred fellow travelers are also stirring from a sleep close to death. Another panel shows the location of the ark. It’s in a stable orbit around Proxima Centauri B1. Although I push the thought away, it muscles into my head: I am twenty-five trillion miles from home.
    There’s much to do. We’re purposeful and don’t talk much. Everyone is trying not to think about the eighteen stations where, when the lid slid open, it revealed a body that hadn’t revived, one cold to the touch. A second blow came soon after. Telemetry on Ark 3 showed that it passed clear through the Proxima Centauri system. It’s heading for the void of interstellar space. A meteor impact compromised the solar sail and there was no way to apply the brakes. I shudder at the thought.
    Can eighty people start a new world?
    Gradually, camaraderie returns and our spirits lift. We tell jokes at mealtimes and tease each other. We’ve traveled like flotsam for an implausible distance, a thousand times farther than anyone ever has before. I pause in front of the only window on the ark and stare out. The Sun is somewhere in that field of stars, like a buttercup set on velvet, but I can’t find it. No matter what happens next, we can have pride in the achievement and the adventure. But any of us who says they’re not afraid is lying.
    Milky white light again. We’re in the shuttle pod buffeting through the atmosphere to scout out a landing site. From Earth, our new home is a pale dot. Previous remote sensing had showed it’s a living world, its air charged by photosynthesis, but we arrive knowing little about a place where we will live and die. Our mission is a huge, expensive gamble, a step across the void, hoping to find safety on the other side.
    The six of us cast nervous, sidelong glances at each other. The pilot stares intently at the screen. Below us is tortured, vertiginous, and unfamiliar terrain—there’s no reassuring plain or prairie, nothing like a savanna, no endless vista.
    Finally, a glimpse of land through swirling clouds. Deceleration. A jolt. We don our suits and enter the air lock, as excited as children about to explore a secret garden.
    It’s difficult to describe the indescribable. We’ve landed in a verdant valley flanked by steep cliffs. Vines cling to every surface. Water drips from the cliff tops, which are partially obscured by thick clouds. There’s a dense mat of vegetation underfoot. We see many plants but no animals. Everything is strange and off-kilter: gravity is weaker than Earth so I have a spring in my step, but the air is thicker so I fight back a smothering sensation. We all wear scrubber masks to keep the air breathable and filter out microbes that may be hazardous. Instinctively, everyone stays close to the lander.
    Is this a swamp or Shangri-la? Either way, there’s no turning back.
    Working efficiently, we unpack the habitat. At the touch of a button, the memory film made of carbon nanotubes unfolds and inflates into a dome that soars twenty feet above our heads. After installing two air locks, we spend the rest of the day setting up a living space. Over the next week, the rest of the crew will join us on the surface, leaving our ark an empty, orbiting hulk, incapable of any more voyages.
    Overwhelmed, exhilarated, anxious. Emotions war inside me. It seems strange to want to