a universe none of us ever grew up in. Perceptions were shifted in a subtle, disturbing way. The first travelers weren’t aware of what was happening as they spent solid months in t-space—they just didn’t know. When they came back, their minds were gone, lost in a maze of schizophrenic misperception. Then, for ever-after, they saw blues that were not blue, heard conversations that only happened in their heads, saw into places only they could see.
Espers gained a certain immunity to the effects when they had other espers along to back them—a strength in numbers, as it were, a cushion against madness. They became the explorers of this new realm. The rest of us non-espers had to be content to follow the trails they blazed in great ships where a drugged sleep hid our minds from the dangers of consciousness.
It didn’t help me that I was an astrophysicist. Not only did I have madness to fear; I knew what was waiting for me out there in t-space. Does this sound crazy now? I thought so then, and so I kept those petty fears buried. What’s the point now, what’s the point in hiding these things from myself? It’s not like anyone will ever be able to hold this diary against me.
But just to think...quantum gravity, eleven-dimensional space, black holes...these were only curious theories back in the days when man considered interstellar voyages wistful thinking. Then those same curious theories became reality, thanks to a lot of hard work and foresighted thinking; new words for mankind’s travel vocabulary came into common use—four dimensional space, graviton drives, time and space similarities, and those ubiquitous wormholes. Not that many travelers understand the inherent dangers—did frequent flyers truly understand the never-to-be-quite-overcome dangers of jet flight? Even the Challenger screw-up only put a temporary damper on NASA...
And who cared what happened to the drone crews of the test ships that made those first ship-sized incongruities caused by their engines-and flipped into a virtual void? Astrophysicists like me—I was one of the people who helped turn the theory of interstellar travel via wormholes into a reality, as part of my dissertation, in fact—cared, but we were relatively few in number, and the bulk of our work was not known to the public. All that mattered was that mankind was able to finally use wormholes as a means of getting from here to there with almost as much punctuality and accuracy (depending largely on angular velocity and correct alignment of gravitational vectors) as the airplane travel of my grandparent’s generation.
Only, in their time, the aftermath of an air disaster was something easily discovered, and dealt with, no matter how horrible the remains of the aircraft, no matter how much time it might take to discover the cause of the crash. There was pain, and suffering, but there was also the promise of healing, afterwards.
The shortsighted fools, with their secret drone ships, and “acceptable margin of loss.” If only they had known about the madness waiting for them out there.
Day 113:
Our new home had no name, and, as if in denial of the fact that it was in all probability to be our permanent home, no one bothered to suggest a name for it. Bad enough that the air was thin, high, high altitude thin, and took nearly a month to get used to. Nearly a month wasted while our bodies acclimated enough for us to venture more than ten yards away from the ship without feeling like our lungs were being crushed from within. Well, perhaps the first month wasn’t a total waste; we dug up samples of the soil, picked the available flora, and tested the water. The soil was crumbly and acidic, too much so to support earth plant life without the addition of alkaline fertilizers which just weren’t available to us. But the plant life was carbon based; right-handed sugars, and it didn’t kill the lab rats or reptiles. With boiling, the water was drinkable.
And in that first month, we saw the ’lopes. Jimmie named them; he was the crewmember who initially found them, or was found by them, whichever one chooses to believe.
“Out...out there, in...the trees...dozens...maybe, maybe more,” Jimmie had panted, as we led him into the ship after finding him lying in a gasping, sprawled heap near the hatch. The others clustered around Jimmie, heads bent toward him, shutting me out completely.
He had always struck me as over-excitable, ever since I met him. So, what if there were animals out there? Anyone with guts would have taken the time for a good observation. Disgruntled, I left the ship, walking slowly toward the dense cluster of “trees” twenty meters distant. They never noticed me leaving the ship; damned espers all wrapped up in their own heads. I walked along cautiously, hating Jimmie and Reba and all the other damned espers, feeling like the ultimate rejected too-big-to-be-graceful kid on the playground, the kid too big to even trick or treat anymore, the one shut out of every game, confidence, or clique. I approached the trees, my vision uncertain in the hazy sunset light of the bright umber Class K star which served as our new “sun.”
But ruddy light or not, after a couple of minutes it became apparent that something was moving, just beyond the outcropping of short, meaty-fleshed trees. I made out long shapes, upright forms with thinner, lashing body parts. Tails. Beasts. Skin or short fur dappled in shades of brown, dull orange, and pale tan. Smallish heads, with huge, vaguely feline ears. Light shone through the tips of those ears, turning the skin radiant. Large slanted eyes, with the hint of vertical pupils. Short arms, in proportion to the slender elongated torsos. Thick legs, short femur, with near-human knees, merging into narrow fibula-tibia sections, which met elongated tarsals. Or whatever kind of bones they actually had; that they had bones was apparent, muscles, too. Strong, thick muscles. As I stepped closer, my chest growing tight with nervous tension, I saw the ripple of muscles under their finely furred skin.
The creatures reminded me of begging cats, dancing on their stubby metatarsals. No, meercats, stretching their spindly bodies to catch every ray from the rising sun in the cold desert dawn.
Still, they lacked feline whiskers, and the shape of the arm wasn’t quite cat-like—and they had hands, not paws. Hands! Long metacarpals between carpals and the fingers—and their opposing thumbs were unmistakable.
Not animals then...but not people as I knew them, either. Their lack of clothing may have been intentional, but there was something about these creatures which suggested that even the thought of clothing was alien to them. The things seemed nervous, but only about my presence, not their own light-furred nakedness. I could see the rounded furry sex of the ones I figured to be males, and as I edged closer, peering through the trees, I made out a distinct furlessness and flatness on what had to be the females.
I think it was then that I noticed Penti, the one with the white patch on her tail. Not that she was Penti then, Jimmie didn’t get around to bestowing names on the most distinctive of them until a week or so later—two names for each, an everyday name and a fancy name, plus the name only they knew—he’d read his T. S. Eliot! In retrospect, I suppose it was strange of me to dub the white-patched female and her kind beautiful, considering that I’d just laid eyes upon them only moments earlier, and knew of no standard by which to judge their appearance. But they had an appealing grace, all of them: Pentilope (she of the white daub tail) with her fancy name of Penti-Lope-Lope, little Heidi (known to Eliot and herself as Schmighty-Heidi), and Lucy (Lucy-Goosie). The oldest of the young males became Pere (Pere Ubu). Then there was Alfy (Alf-Alfred Jarry), Mister (Mister-fister), Baby Boy, Wildcat, and Slim....
The creatures’ eyes were canted, with an almost Oriental tilt to them, spaced rather wide apart. Their irises ran from a muddy blend of greenish-tan to more orange hues. Their pupils were small in relation to their eyes; they seemed to float in bright pools of color, not unlike human eyes. That seemed the most shocking part of them, those too-human eyes as a part of a very alien species.
Then I realized that they were looking at me, their stares intense yet somehow blank, unreadable. By that time all of them were becoming agitated, leaning in to rub heads or bump long, flattened noses, all the while making a rumbling, grunting sound, talking could it be? I only half noticed them; my eyes were focused
