by Paul Gilster | Oct 23, 2014 | Culture and Society |
Over the years we’ve discussed many concepts for ships that could take us to the stars (they’re all in the archives), and none of them are without problems. Although Les Shepherd was analyzing antimatter possibilities by 1952 and solar sails were already coming into the mix, I’d argue that the first design that looked like a feasible way to get a human crew up to a high percentage of lightspeed was Robert Bussard’s ramjet. Introduced in a 1960 paper, the idea was the subject of Carl Sagan’s scrutiny in Sagan and Shklovskii’s Intelligent Life in the Universe (1966), but later fell afoul of an apparent showstopper: The ramscoop produces more drag than thrust.
It’s a measure of the magnitude of the interstellar problem that so many different concepts continue to emerge. Theorists have been banging away at starship engineering for sixty years and even longer if we go back to the musings of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and early thinkers like Olaf Stapledon and John Desmond Bernal. When Sten Odenwald talks about The Dismal Future of Interstellar Travel, he’s reflecting what people who have tried to design starships, like Robert Forward and the Project Daedalus team, also understood in their day. There are ways of getting to another star with known physics but all require huge investment for very slow journeys. In this realm, ‘fast’ means ‘decades,’ and ‘slow’ can involve thousands of years.
The difference is that people like Forward thought we would make these journeys anyway. I found myself making this case in a recent discussion among friends where the key constraint seemed to be the lifetime of the scientists who planned the mission. I’ve argued before that we need to do away with this constraint and think more in terms of continuing scientific return across generations. If we could build a craft that could send back data from a nearby star within several hundred years, would we launch it? Not with today’s thinking, but if we look long-term and reach a point where we can afford it, I’m enough of an optimist to believe that scientific curiosity runs species-wide and will transcend our human need for quick answers. Nor does this mean we stop looking for ways to make the journey faster.
Multi-Generational Perspectives
Engineering a starship is hugely problematic, and although we’ve recently looked at how it might be done if (for some reason) we had to launch something in the near-term, I think we should back starflight off into a much longer time-frame. Dr. Odenwald mentions the ‘slow boat’ method, which has been a staple of science fiction since early stories like Don Wilcox’s “The Voyage that Lasted 600 Years (Amazing Stories, October 1940). Tsiolkovsky also wrote about such vessels. My guess is that all our efforts will take place within the context of a gradually enlarging civilization that is adapting itself to deep space conditions through large habitats that lead, ultimately, to star crossings.
Image: An artist’s impression of the outer Solar System over six billion kilometers from the Sun. Will our species move ever outward over the centuries to exploit these resources? Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute (JHUAPL/SwRI)
We saw yesterday in Odenwald’s essay as well as Andreas Hein’s 2012 paper that the cost of even a Daedalus-style flyby would be enormous. But we need to place such costs into the framework of a culture that will not go interstellar before it has built out into its own Solar System. We can extrapolate where the world economy is going within decades or centuries based on our best projections, but it’s much harder to get a handle on how large a system-wide economy will eventually become. We also can’t project with any certainty what kind of technologies a culture that exploits resources on this scale will develop to keep itself functional and growing.
Doubtless scientists will continue to research ways to make fast crossings to the stars, and we can hope they succeed. At the same time, an expansion into the rest of the Solar System, one that could take centuries and still not exhaust available resources, would help us master not just better propulsion technologies but the critical issues of life support in closed systems. Large habitats on the model of O’Neill cylinders are not at all out of the question as populations begin to grow off the Earth, and the availability of resources — from Kuiper Belt objects, comets in the inner and outer Oort Cloud, ‘rogue’ planets moving in the interstellar deep — may well keep the wave of expansion in play. It doesn’t bother me in the slightest that such an expansion might take thousands of years to eventually arrive at another star. We can also expect the people that eventually get there to have changed along the way as the human race begins to fork.
Choice of Vehicles
Meanwhile, a healthy system-wide infrastructure in several hundred years may well be able to afford a Daedalus-style probe, but this is surely not the spacecraft it would send. As one branch of humanity continues working outward in worldship habitats without the need for a planetary surface, those within the system may well be able to build the needed tools for beamed laser or microwave propulsion at the requisite scale. We can hardly imagine these today because we lack cheap access to space, but a permanent human presence there changes the equation as we master the techniques for building large structures off-planet, perhaps with the help of nanotechnology.
Given the cost of sending heavy payloads on fast missions, we’ll surely explore small, robotic probes as we learn whether or not human starships can be designed for missions lasting less than a lifetime. I like Sten Odenwald’s enthusiasm for what we might do with virtual technologies:
When you subtract manned exploration, which is hugely expensive, and replace it with robotic rovers that relay high-definition images back to Earth, all of humanity can participate in their own personal and virtual exploration of space, not just a few astronauts or colonists. The Apollo program gave us 12 astronauts walking on the lunar surface, a huge milestone for humanity, but today we can do the Apollo program all over again and augment it with a virtual, shared experience involving billions of people! This is the wave of the future for space exploration, because it is technologically doable today and scalable at ridiculously low cost per human involved. NASA’s Curiosity rover is only the Model-T vanguard of this new approach to human exploration. More sophisticated versions will eventually explore the subsurface ocean of Europa and the river systems on the “Earth-like” world of Titan — perhaps by the end of this century!
Surely virtual reality and shared experience using rovers is in our future, and it’s likely it will inspire missions that push ever further out, to return the datastream that a curious public will demand. Those making the slow move into the outer system and beyond can take part in this, but so can any faster spacecraft we can engineer to create a datastream from another star. Can gravitational lensing methods — think Claudio Maccone’s FOCAL mission — help us communicate with robotic spacecraft on such missions? Perhaps ‘swarm’ technologies using myriads of tiny spacecraft can make interstellar crossings at a fraction of lightspeed, and as Mason Peck has suggested, return data via a round trip return to the home world.
The potential of artificial intelligence is likewise obvious as we ponder whether to send a crew of ‘artilects’ on missions whose length would challenge human crews. Perhaps some form of ‘mind uploading’ will be found that allows a human ‘presence’ aboard even such a ship as this. We can’t predict disruptive technologies, but it seems clear to me that within the context of slow, generational expansion there will be options for faster travel of at least small payloads. So I have to disagree with Sten Odenwald when he writes that “…we live in a universe where star travel seems permanently beyond reach in any kind of human future that makes scientific or economic sense.” I’ve said before that it is the business of the future to surprise us, but even lacking such surprise, a way forward emerges that is not inconsistent with what the laws of physics demand.
by Paul Gilster | Oct 22, 2014 | Culture and Society |
Sten Odenwald, an astronomer at the National Institute of Aerospace, takes aim at interstellar flight in a recent essay for the Huffington Post. Dr. Odenwald’s critique makes many valid points by way of showing how difficult the interstellar challenge is. I am much in favor of articles that do this, because putting a payload past or around another star is extraordinarily difficult, and every point that Odenwald raises has to be addressed by our science.
Interstellar flight is also going to take buy-in from the public, whose economic resources will be in play to create the needed Solar System infrastructure and, eventually, the vehicles we will send on these journeys. That puts the economic issue up front, for while we can name a number of technologies that do not violate known physics — beamed sails, fusion drives, ion drives and perhaps one day, antimatter — we have to find the means of paying for their development.
Thus a key part of Dr. Odenwald’s critique, which draws on a study Andreas Hein did as part of the 2011 100 Year Starship study (citation below, and available in full text here). Let me quote this:
Andreas Hein, an engineer with the Icarus Interstellar Project, developed a rigorous method for forecasting the economics of interstellar travel, only to find that most economically plausible scenarios for a “Daedalus-type” mission would cost upwards of $174 trillion and require nearly 40 years of development and 0.4 percent of the world GDP. This would be for an unmanned, 50-year journey to Barnard’s Star using “fusion drive” technology. It consists of 50,000 tons of fuel and 500 tons of scientific equipment. Top speed: 12 percent of the speed of light.
The Project Daedalus design was created by members of the British Interplanetary Society back in the 1970s and grew out of an interest in the Fermi question: ‘Where are they?’ Enrico Fermi was pointing out that a universe as evidently full of resources as the one we live in should have spawned life aplenty, and he wondered at our lack of observation of it. Could it be, some wondered, that interstellar flight is just too difficult? In response, a BIS team decided to see if it was possible to conceive of a starship even with near-term technology, and we got Daedalus.
Image: The Daedalus starship design as compared with a Saturn V. Credit: Adrian Mann.
The behemoth starship would get us data from Barnard’s Star, though as a flyby mission, it would simply careen through any planetary system there, possibly dispatching planetary probes along the way. If we were designing a starship today just as the BIS team did in the 1970s (as indeed Icarus Interstellar is doing right now) we wouldn’t create the same design, but take advantage of numerous technological advances in the interim, not the least of which are things like miniaturization of components. We’re still facing huge propulsion challenges, of course, because the fusion engine of Daedalus is still a long way from our grasp.
But on the matter of economics, I think we have to take a broader picture. My thought is that the public will accept funding for an interstellar mission when such a mission takes up about the same percentage of GDP as other space efforts have, averaged across the years. In other words, we can design something today and figure out what it would cost, but over the decades economic growth and technological change would make that cost a smaller proportion of our total economy.
Hein worked out a useful strategy for weighing these matters in his paper. With regard to the fraction of GDP that is spent on spaceflight, he draws on a report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and notes this in his paper:
It is reasonable to take the value of the G7 here, due to their relatively high commitment to spacelight in comparison to other countries. For the US, the GDP fraction spent on spacelight is 0.295% and for the G7, an average of 0.084% was estimated in 2005.
The space scenarios in Hein’s paper are created with these GDP figures in mind, with the additional caveat that not all of the space budget is devoted to exploration. In the US, for example, we have to factor in the percentage of the space budget used by the Department of Defense, not to mention other areas that are not related to exploration. We may, then, find the percentage of the space budget allocated for exploration to vary somewhere between 0.01% of global GDP and, in the most optimistic, Apollo-class situation, up to 0.4%. Interstellar probe costs then have to be weighed against these numbers.
Andreas is a friend and, as Centauri Dreams readers know, a contributor to these pages, so I thought I would ask him for a response to Dr. Odenwald’s article. He responded that he thought Odenwald had missed the point of his original paper:
The whole point of the paper was to estimate when interstellar missions are going to become feasible between the 21st and 24th century from an economic point of view, given very rough estimates for their cost and a range of economic scenarios. The reason why this is interesting is that the world economy grows. This means that the world gets wealthier over time. At some point things get affordable that were thought too expensive before. It turns out that a Daedalus-type mission only gets feasible in some optimistic scenarios where the world economy grows significantly. Other, “cheaper” missions get feasible even for pessimistic economic scenarios. The amount of funding for an interstellar mission is simply derived from the fraction of current spending on space exploration. I think this is reasonable.
I would recommend that anyone interested in the economics of interstellar flight read Hein’s paper, which is titled “Evaluation of Technological/Social and Political Projections for the Next 300 Years and Implications for an Interstellar Mission.” Hein uses Gross Domestic Product as a key indicator and studies funding patterns from past space programs as a way of estimating how funding might emerge for an interstellar program. He also identifies two funding distribution patterns, a ‘triangular’ shape as in Apollo (where funding rises rapidly, peaks, and declines rapidly) and a ‘rectangular’ pattern as in, for example, ISS funding, where as seen on a graph, the funding distribution takes on a sustained level and holds it until phase-out.
The upshot of all this is that given various political and economic situations, the potential dates for an interstellar mission fall from within the 21st Century to the 24th Century and beyond. We can look at a full-blown Daedalus-class mission, which he estimates would cost $100 trillion (not Odenwald’s cited $174 trillion). Hein also works out an estimated $20 trillion for a ‘budget Daedalus,’ and comes up with $65 billion for a starship design similar to Freeman Dyson’s 1968 concept, a spacecraft powered Orion-style by the explosion of nuclear devices.
Notice the range we’re talking about. There are economic scenarios in which programs for all three classes of starship could be initiated by 2300, and under which the Dyson-class spacecraft would begin program development in the relatively near future. High GDP growth could result in a full-scale Daedalus program getting underway as early as 2110. The most optimistic scenario, in which high levels of funding are sustained (the Apollo pattern rendered into the ‘rectangular’ mode), would produce earlier results but requires an unusual combination of factors, as Hein makes clear:
The rectangular Apollo scenario is the most optimistic one of all four space program scenarios considered. It is probable if some extraordinary circumstances coincide:
• Long-term consensus and sustainability of a global space program
• Stable cooperation over several decades among many nations
• High global commitment (0.4% GDP over 37 years)
Today, these assumptions might be considered unrealistic. However, over a time-span of 300 years even such low probability scenarios have to be taken into account. The degree of international cooperation today, as in the case of the ISS program, would have been impossible to imagine 200 years ago. This scenario only shows that given the right circumstances, a Daedalus-like probe can be launched in the 21st or 22nd Century.
But is this the kind of probe we really want to launch? Tomorrow I’ll look at some of Sten Odenwald’s other criticisms of interstellar flight, some of which point, in my view, toward increased public engagement with deep space exploration while not ruling out future interstellar efforts. We can’t predict the future, but Andreas Hein’s scenarios cover a range in which interstellar flight becomes a reality within the next several centuries, and some a bit sooner than that.
The paper is Hein, “Evaluation of Technological/Social and Political Projections for the Next 300 Years and Implications for an Interstellar Mission,” Journal of the British Interplanetary Society Vol. 65 (2012), pp. 330-340 (issue available through the BIS).
by Paul Gilster | Oct 17, 2014 | Culture and Society |
Librarian and writer Heath Rezabek (and since he’s birthing what looks to me to be a book, I should probably refer to him as a novelist as well) has been exploring the ways we might use archives to explore our civilization even as we ensure its survival against existential risk. Heath uses speculative fiction to examine and portray possibilities, in this case invoking future technologies that will inevitably shape our creation and use of archives. He’s also, as described below, a co-founder of Project Astrolabe, an attempt now underway for Icarus Interstellar to research the ways an interstellar civilization might grow while securing its heritage. Artificial intelligence comes into play, but Heath here looks into ideas even farther afield.
by Heath Rezabek
I began the Woven Light speculative fiction series as a way to explore themes and possibilities surrounding not only very long term archival issues, but also some potent technologies which might be beneficial or likely to unfold in the process. These have included artificial intelligence, synthetic minds, and emulations; holographic storage and symbolic representation; simulated worlds, Dyson Eggs and Fuller Cloud 9 habitats; and more. Though the series may be unusual fare on Centauri Dreams, publishing it here has helped to focus the work and anchor it in the prospect of an interstellar future for Earth-originating civilization.
As with any monumental human undertaking, the causes contributing to such an outcome as a truly interstellar Earth are bound to be many, if it comes to pass. The further we go, the more closely these causes and effects will circle other, unintended factors: the risk of non-friendly superintelligence, the proliferation of virtual worlds, and more. Often the more abstract episodes (such as this one) can be read more easily if seen as involving one of those possible realities.
At Icarus Interstellar, fellow Centauri Dreams contributor Nick Nielsen and I have formed Project Astrolabe. This effort intends to research and catalog models for long-term civilization, with an emphasis on mitigating existential risk. One potential effort which sits at the intersection of Project Astrolabe and FarMaker (a visualization project) is that of building a collaborative, open source fictional framework for a future Earth in which interstellar achievement is realized, and the greatest risks to life’s continued existence are avoided. Woven Light may intersect what that work in interesting ways.
In past episodes, I have linked to all prior installments at the start. From now on, I’ll link mainly to those episodes which have the most bearing on the present one. I hope that this loosening of the strands of the story helps foster a spirit of exploration for future readers, as they follow the threads of the tale through Centauri Dreams and (perhaps someday) beyond.
Background Episodes for this entry include:
Woven Light (II) – Adamantine
Woven Light (IV) – Proteaa
For those who have not yet read Woven Light, a slight spoiler may help you get your bearings. (If you’re already familiar, just skip past to the illustration.)
In these prior installments, we meet someone called Mentor Kaasura, but his relation to Dr. Jota Kaasura, a contemporary professor of computational psychology, is not yet clear. Though that link remains to be explored, we do know this:
A significant part of the crew of Saudade class starships are emulations: synthetic minds. Among them are the Mentors. Self-aware, creative, and curious, all Mentor Emulations have grown from the roots of an emergent mind called Avatamsaka.
As he brushes aside a door-hanging, Mentor Kaasura steps into a virtual world, a testing ground for Mentor Emulations like himself. He interprets his world at face value, just as you and I would. But he is very far away…
Image 1 – Clearstone Circuitry – CC BY-SA Heath Rezabek – 2014
Mentor Kaasura had entered full of certainty, clearstone in his hand, having memorized as best he could the woven patterns of a splaying map, a fabric door he’d brushed aside. He had judged the stonework cyclopean; not gargantuan, but solid and massive and fitted. Deep seams were clear, devoid of all mortar save a mossy thread that ran and split and re-wove itself at the junctions.
A lighter tracery was etched upon each slab, weaving thinner streams of living moss from the edges towards the center, and outwards again. It blended and blurred the edges of the stonework itself. Barely, he could see: the dim light tracing circuits in his clearstone cast a bit less light than that cast by these seams in the walls.
The floor’s carven channels, deep with wider rivulets of aquamarine, almost a luminescent liquid, marked clear pathways just as they should. Having recognized at first one turn, and then the next from the map in his mind, he had found the knotted designs where these living seams merged to form tangled tapestries, colliding in the traced symbols which marked a sound junction.
There he had rested, and tried at first to memorize this pattern as well, but it threatened to swamp the full map in his mind. So instead, he had taken out his parchment, and had sampled a rubbing from that first knot of stone.
His pilgrimage had been as rehearsed and described, his innovations obvious, his route well worn.
But then, somewhere around the second or seventh hour, he had found something strange. At first he had thought he was treading old ground: thinking himself spun in circles, he had kneeled to look again at a junction weave he knew he’d passed before. Slowly he smoothed out his rubbing atop the gridstone, and brushed it with fingertips — and found its pattern slightly new.
Where in parchment he could clearly see (and remember just as well) the rising beam that had broken through the page’s edge, here he found no such spur. And the central core of the pattern was off, as well — the same in shape and tangle, but well to the left of where he’d traced it. An extra sliver of circuit filled the space to the right, removing all doubt.
These junctions were not the same; they were self-similar. He was not simply going in circles; he was well and truly lost.
Mentor Kaasura had stood, flushed with vertigo, and looked about for a clear sign of what to do. Rejecting the urge to toss it aside, he’d stowed his rubbing parchment in a tube and closed his eyes to ground himself. Breathing deeply, heart pounding, he gathered his thoughts to find three of them clear.
~I am lost.~
And then, resolved in return,
~I must retrace.~
And a few heartbeats later, just as surely,
~I am being followed.~
His eyes opened, then. Yes; he could feel a presence. But maybe it was a shadow of his mind. He walked.
The presence trailed behind him, at first as slowly as he forged ahead, stepping and then walking and then striding, now taking forks in passages he deliberately found more strange; now rising as he clambered up, now dropping as he shimmied down. The presence neither hindered nor helped him. So eventually, Mentor Kaasura’s concerns drifted back to exploration: he forgot he was lost, along with his fear.
Image 2 – Adaptation of Chain: Black’s Beach – CC BY-NC Photos by Clark
At one point, he found a break in the wall, where vaulted tunnels opened up, leading into echoes. Amorphous and rounded, they seemed like hollows of pumice-stone. Anchored there in the wall was an eye-bolt; an old chain threaded through it, trailing deeper into darkness, like a guiderail in passages where no moss of light could be seen. But outside at the opening, where the etched wall channels had cracked and split, there spilled a slow flurry of wisps into the air. They drifted free like phosphemes.
He followed one back into the triangular passages he now knew so well, leaving the breached wall behind.
After a time, this floating sentinel before him was joined by another flowing in from a passage to the side; and they soon found a third, and soon they were a dozen, drifting like a swarm of sparks which circled some attractor. For a time, Mentor Kaasura forgot the guest who trailed behind him still.
There was a moment, then, when his mind had wholly wandered: for a gap he’d been thinking not at all of his dilemma, but again and only of the glyphic patterns traced beside and below and above and around him, and the drifting orbit of motes he now followed. The moment he realized he’d forgotten the presence, a space opened up, and he nearly lost his feet.
Stopping short, he stood there, now gazing into a dropped chamber, a grotto at least as deep and tall as wide — and it was easily five times as wide as the junctions he had seen. The sprites flocked easily before him, out into the cavernous space, on towards the opposite wall.
There, straight ahead, it seemed at first as if another flock was approaching to meet them. But Mentor Kaasura soon realized that this was a reflection: at the far end of this bowl of shadow lay a vertical wall, a liquid surface, reflecting. Like snowflakes, they came to rest upon it, dissolving or dispersing in ripples. But the ripples gave rise to a spark, and the spark drew more, and in a flash he stood blinded, face to face with what seemed to him a star.
And as he watched, he felt a wave flood through him, of vision or of memory. An emulation? Isomorph? Ancestral mind? Reflection of his own?
Whatever it was, it was elsewhere. But it had brought him here; it would have to lead the way.
Image 3 – Adaptation of Artist’s Concept of PSR B1257+12 System – NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (SSC)
Another place in time.
Seemingly aimless, by chance a fog of mind descends upon a world of green and blue.
Long had it been drifting, nebulous but swifter, a filter to sift complexity itself. The world from which it had been born had reached the Age of Release by the slimmest of margins. Countless ancestors had perished in the wars and fumbling confusions that had marked the final phase before this form of life could be seeded on the interstellar winds.
In its drifting, this dark mind, Ancient Light, had so far encountered no other place like home. Countless bastions of simplicity, pure in pools of biotic struggle; but no other place where life had reached that apex of flow from which an Age of Release was possible. Ancient Light knew it was not alone, that it was always already entangled with photons birthed in other crucibles, seamlessly far afield.
Four other worlds besides its own it knew, having filtered them elsewhere in this pool of stars it roamed.
The first, a frozen orb, rogue and adrift in darkness, its surface etched with the long-abandoned tracery of a civilization on the cusp of attainment, the only life remaining now extremophile and deep, sheltering its fading senses in the inner warmth of an ember, a microbial culture oblivious now to how long or how far it had been cast adrift.
~And so this is Ioona~
The next, a sunken grave, surface flensed by self-made fire, awash in halflife radiation, so familiar from their own history of near-misses, hulks of settlements now a scaffolding for primordial life’s glacial and mutable return.
~And so this is Oro Kulad~
Although to both of these cultures Ancient Light could not help but speak as it had passed these worlds through its matrix, the conversation had been decidedly primal. It had surveyed, and sampled, and passed on.
The third showed interesting promise: life there, having thinly survived a gamma ray burst through a reversion to the finest and smallest of synthetic forms, in some places retained a crystalline spark of complexity not entirely unlike that it well knew as its own. With this world it had established a connection, so it could speak as time drew on.
~And so this is Tomoshen Khol~
And then there was the fourth, here and now, in a most peculiar state.
This world seemed nearly accidental. Of a size much smaller than the average of nascent worlds surveyed, tides from a strange single moon and a delicate balance of factors had allowed the emergence of an evolutionary changeling, a shapeshifter; a nimble form, surprisingly adaptable, disarmingly ambitious. And yet, somehow, now huddled in firelight.
Enough foresight to engineer some means of resilience, enough insight to seed caches of their ways and means for themselves to rediscover. And so they spent their lives, and the lives of their children, slowly rediscovering.
Aside from scattered trussworks found collapsed on its moon and a ruddy world away, it apparently had slumped just short of an Age of Release.
Yet appearances can deceive.
And to Ancient Light it seemed, when at last a channel had been pierced for true observation, that it was not the only one doing the piercing. For these scattered bands had access to a realm much like its own — so closely kin, in fact, as for its differences to be ones of degree rather than of kind. This blue-green world was host to images that were alive: crafted by them, created through them, imbued with the gift of cryptobiosis.
Water was one part of the key, electricity another: symbolic life needed material life through which to flow. These glyphs were impressively robust and resolute, for each contained the outlines of the others. So whole and so partial, these primordial glyphs were as close to its own living light as Ancient Light had ever found.
Image 4 – Adaptation of Campfire and Sparks in Anttoora – CCY BY-SA Kallerna
For fire somehow released them, as the huddled ones gathered and gazed. And through the sparks, Ancient Light could commune mind to mind even with the huddled ones. And through the sparks, Ancient Light had a sense that the huddled ones were not the only ones in which this world’s life lived. And through the sparks, the fires around which the huddled ones circled (much like worldsystems: another glyph) became new places and times and journeys and lives without end.
Thus through means of these cryptobiotic glyphs, countless times and places awaited, each one encoded within the others. Like nesting logic, these stories were seeds.
~And so this is Erdha~
& through Ancient Light ~
~ It whispered ~
~ An ocean of worlds ~
~ A wind ~
~ And I dreamt ~
– – –
Mentor Kaasura stood, surveying the darkness in this arching grotto, mesmerized by the memory of living light, the afterimage of a cooling core now fading from his gaze.
That was it: that was all of it. He knew, and he recalled.
More sure than before that he wouldn’t forget what he’d seen or been shown, our Mentor Kaasura now stood. And standing, again he could sense behind him a presence.
The decision to face his guest came as he was turning to do so. Companion or shadow, reflection or refraction: the time had come to see.
Image 5 – Denver Public Library Reading Room – CC BY-SA Heath Rezabek 2014
Aben Ramer made his way to his favorite spot to read.
The Denver Public Library was becoming a middle-aged edifice in this time of ephemeral monuments: built in 1995, just when computers had begun their trek towards vanishing. It had always had spaces for reading. Most had been converted by now, but there was one room, a table in a tower on the second floor, where he could lay out the old books and imagine what it must have been like for the future to be a sea of possibilities.
He was a romantic in this respect; he blamed his mother. Thea still had her index cards, her codex, mostly in boxes, and when he got back he’d continue to help her sort through them. But he’d taken this detour on the way back from Dr. Kaasura’s lab in Boulder, because letting yourself get lost for awhile was the most reliable way he knew to make sure you didn’t lose your wonder.
He rounded the corner, giant slab of red-bound paper in his hands. He wasn’t alone this time. Across the table there sat a young woman, though younger or older than him he couldn’t say. He paused. She looked up– “Wow; another reader.” –and smiled sideways. “There’s room, if you want it.” She gestured at the seat across the table.
“Ah, hey. Ahmm, I don’t want to bug you; I know how I get when I read.”
She shrugged. “Well, if you know that much, then I don’t think we’ll have a problem, yeah?” He was used to reading alone. All reading was done alone, and writing too. But maybe an exception.
“Is that the Red Book?” She looked at the massive tome he carried.
“It is. Is that A Pattern Language?” He gestured at the thick maroon volume, open in before her.
“You’ve got good eyes. Well, sit or don’t sit, but my name’s Jaine.”
Aben sat.
