Chapter 1
Pressing the white glowing button that had ‘light speed’ written on its head, Jyothi shrugged in disbelief. The dashboard was attached to a giant monochrome screen where presently a red tab blinked ominously. If the readings were to be believed, she was travelling at light speed. She unbuckled her seat belt. The tight brown straps loosened around her shoulders; as they rolled over the abrasive arm rests, sound of flaying followed by that of flesh tearing apart. She approached the glass façade that overlooked the cantilevered nose of the space ship. Around her, the horizon was mottled with glazing stars, big and small.
It can’t be. Jyothi whisked out the manual and sifting through the pages, found the page on light speed. She ran her manicured finger over the lines; with the book resting on her left hand closed before her bosom, she skirted around the ship’s vitals. She found nothing wrong in the settings. But how can it be. If the ship was indeed travelling at light speed, then it was only conceivable to assume that the ship should swim through the scintillating cosmos with a whirr and purr that would leave the heavenly objects behind. But instead of zooming past the stars, she was presented with a sight of absolute stability.
At the end of the instructions, on the light speed page, there was a note typed in bold letters. It read ‘Travelling at light speed can be tricky. Astronauts are advised to steer through this level only as a last recourse.’ About 6 pages and a half were filled with cautionary tales. Jyothi flipped the pages in a hurry like a scorpion on seabed scampering for algae in winter. Then, just as the scorpion notices an oasis of green life in the salty blue desert around it, Jyothi found a page that was folded like an equilateral triangle with its sides pinched into the tuck between pages. She unfolded it to reveal two lines that angered her to the point that she tore the page, screwed it into a ball and tossed it into the bin in the corner.
The lines read ‘at light speed, time drops to a nought.’
Jyothi stamped her feet like a little girl would. With closed fists, she dragged herself out of the cockpit, and through the narrow staircase, into the bunker. Seated with her stiff back against the grilled leather chair, she locked her hands behind her. Her fingers felt the familiar touch of the exposed timber on the back of the chair. Chipping away the timber, she slipped out of the felt boots, and raised her slim legs to rest them on the roof of her reading table. Soft drone of the ship lulled her into sleep and she wandered in the shallow depths of her dream.
When she woke up, the feeling of loneliness had recurred. She scurried about the ship until the feeling subsided. Inside the cockpit, collapsing into the chair before the dashboard, she peered once again at the red tab that was blinking. After fiddling with controls, turning the ‘light speed’ button on and off, she wondered if she should retreat into the library.
Half an hour later, Jyothi had buried herself into a book on space-time. Between readings, she would lend her head to the wall before her and gaze vacuously at nothing in particular. The shelves were stacked with leather spines of journals and manuals that sloped against each other from one end to another. Quickly replacing the book between the two books that formed a V slanting away from each other, she noticed the words ‘star gazing’ on the spine of one of the books.
After two hours, the rows of wide parallel mouths gaped at her with leather teeth and brown paper girt, as she replaced the book on star gazing. Apparently, light from distant stars will never reach a space ship travelling at light speed, for the ship would have left before light from the stars reached the ship. Therefore, the horizon mottled with stars appeared immobile. But this defied common sense. Nonetheless, who was she to complain? Back in the cockpit, she primed the auto pilot.
She stood back and rolled her eyes over the dashboard before closing her fist on the auto pilot lever and dragging it all the way down. A slow crackle, like a ripple, jolted the ship. The metal body creaked as a cooing sound neared her from the tail of the ship. As it approached her, the sound intensified like a wave on the beach. The shock wave broke on the shores of the cockpit, left a dent on the thick convex roof and broke the glass panels to her right.
With the machine in auto pilot mode Jyothi returned to her bunker. Pulling her hair loose form the plait, she propped her head on the pillow and gazed at the metallic roof. Since the time of her voyage, she has aged considerably. Despite the vociferously guarded notion that an astronaut at light speed never ages, she did. She was about twelve when the voyage began. It was the year 2246. Her father, an astronaut, had perfected the art of time travel. Since the year 2200, research had spawned variants of time travel techniques but they all had one or the other flaws. Dogs and chimps were torn to shreds in the earlier space ships. Then in the summer of 2231, the government of India privatised time travel. The idea attracted several billionaires, but the sad tales of flayed chimps’ skin in laboratories from earlier experiments dissuaded anyone from hoisting themselves up.
Jyothi’s mother was a researcher in the field of time travel. After the privatisation, she quit her job at the Centre for Future Technologies and opened a boutique store in Secunderabad. Here, she met the fashionably dressed astronaut. Their marriage was unlike any other marriages of the day. They were both atheists and shared an aversion for petty social conventions. They registered their marriage formally at the local Registrar’s office; received friends and guests on the following Sunday in a banquet hall that was turned into a science museum. That was their idea of a reception; guests were each offered a souvenir, gold plated Einstein that fitted into one’s palm.
Growing up, Jyothi was exposed to science incessantly. Her father read her stories of cosmos at bedtime; mother shared the distilled research reports with the daughter. Jyothi’s curiosity drew her into the world of libraries and museums. At the age of nine, she was no longer happy sitting with her knees folded before her in the corner of her father’s library. In the summer of 2244, she summoned her parents, firmly stood her ground and declared that she wished to quit school, stay home and become an astronaut like her father. After some deliberation, the parents acquiesced. Space travel was privatised and it was no longer a faint fairy tale dream for the family.
Jyothi’s father was confident of finding a way to keep the turbulence of space travel under control. The family had taken the gamble; they sold off their property, and placed an order for a custom designed space ship. Two years later, when the ship arrived at their doorstep, Jyothi’s father had become the nation’s hero. Last year, with her contacts at the Centre for Future Technologies, Jyothi’s mother had acquired a license for using the advanced facilities of the laboratory. There, both mother and father worked for over three months to perfect the invention. “It is like clipping the wings of a giant mythological eagle” he said in his acceptance speech at the awards ceremony later that year.
In 2246, amidst much fanfare, in their custom designed space ship, the family left to invade cosmos. Initially, the ride was rickety. They had experienced trouble with the ship’s exterior buckling under the imploding force of light speed. Both the parents worked tirelessly while Jyothi made her mother’s library her home. It was strange and bizarre in the beginning; their food consisted of one vitamin capsule a day. By the time she ran thru three quarters of all the books in the library, the ship was primed to scuttle the floor of cosmos at light speed.
Jyothi was least excited about the idea when her mother sat her up and told her “you shall rest in hibernation for some time.” Jyothi nodded to indicate her reticence; her plaited pigtails flew about her and rested on the shoulders as her mother clasped the nodding head between her palms. “The ship is designed to convert light from the surroundings into oxygen. But it will suffice only two inhabitants at a time. When we cruise into light speed, the ship will use up all its energy to maintain the speed and its vitals.” For the whole day, Jyothi avoided to make any eye contact with her parents. By midnight, it was decided and Jyothi’s mother buckled her up tightly as her father looked away. Jyothi managed to purse her lips throughout the time, but when it was time to close the lid, she relented and whimpered under her breath. Her father slipped his right hand into the trouser pockets and dragged a gold plated Einstein outside. He unclasped Jyothi’s tight fist and folded it back with Einstein in her soft pink grip.
Chapter 2
Presently, it was only the second week since she stepped out of the hibernation chamber. Her face was speckled and wrinkled. It hurt her knees when she walked; her spine was inflamed and sent a sting that travelled along the length when she leaned forward. She had aged considerably but was still wearing the blue midi that her mother had put on her when she buckled her up tightly at the time of hibernation. Pinching the pleats of the midi, Jyothi ran her conscience along the threads of her memory coils. But the effort went in vain. It bothered her that she had grown into an amnesiac old hag; she no longer remembered the times of her youth. Last night, she manufactured a vision of her youth; she turning round and round on her heal till the midi billowed around her glistening youthful shins.
There was a note written and pinned on the door behind the cockpit. In it, Jyothi’s parents pointed her curious mind to the daily action reporting manual that was locked in a chamber under the cot that she slept on as a child. The case was filled with 35 logbooks each indicating a year on the ship. The first two logbooks were familiar to Jyothi. Back in the days before hibernation, she had managed to sneak up on her mother when she sat with the book spread open before her every night. With her slender arms clasped around her mother’s neck, Jyothi read thru the contents. Now, between the flipping of pages, Jyothi paused and sobbed when she noticed a pen stroke that ran diagonally along the paper. It all came back to her; the night before her hibernation, Jyothi’s mother sat with the logbook as she did every other night. But when she pressed the nib of the pen, down on the paper, words failed her. It was at this moment that Jyothi startled her mother by flinging herself down on her mother’s back with no warning. That had caused the pen stroke along the paper’s diagonal.
She now recollected the memory of her pointing a spelling mistake. Her mother praised Jyothi as the little dame beamed with pride; mother struck off the word, drew a hat between the adjoining words and spelt it correctly over the hat. The new word stood testimony to her childhood memory. Presently, between the two lines, stood the word that triggered tears in Jyothi’s eyes and a torrent of memory showered on the roof of her mind.
By the time she read thru half of the logbooks, it became increasingly clear that her parents had cruised thru the cosmos at light speed with no difficulty at all. One thing that bothered her father was the fact that at light speed, the occupants of the ship still aged. Theoretically, they should not. In practice however, the occupants of space ship aged. Their days were dull, bleak and arduously repetitive. Nothing dramatic ever happened and the duo seemed to grow weary and they longed for excitement. The last great drama that kept the occupants of the ship busy was their cruising into oblivion. The promising work of father’s turbulence had side-effects; the space-time position tracking system had collapsed and the ship wandered off into space as the occupants wore a worried cosmic abysmal look. Jyothi was kept ignorant about this event. It had occurred two months before she was hibernated. Perhaps her parents realised the end; they had nowhere to go. How long can one wander in the bewildering directionless cosmos?
In the 30th logbook, Jyothi found the brief escapades of her mother from the daily routines; she had written poetry for the first time. Then it became frequent and by the 34th logbook, the pages were filled with anything but recordings of the ship’s vitals. At times, she was euphoric, and at times deeply melancholic. Jyothi could read no further than the pages filled with her parents quarrelling about nothing in particular. Father had grown abusive and dreadfully uncooperative. He frequently switched the ship’s mode between light speed and manual. He hysterically pursued to track the positioning; he wanted to go back to earth. Nothing mattered anymore. Then in the 35th logbook, on the second page, the misery ended. Her father had fixed the positioning system, tracked earth, and the eighty year old couple alighted on the planet. Here the logs petered into blank pages.
Jyothi printed out the reports from the positioning system. It pointed to a fleeting manoeuvre on earth and spiked away from there. She magnified the graph along the point in time where the ship landed on earth, and still could not determine the coordinates. She rummaged through the print outs until something caught her eye. On the footer of each printout was a line that read ‘ship coordinates’. She rolled her eyes over the papers onto the panel. A button on the bottom right hand corner had ‘earth coordinates’ printed on it.
Jyothi pressed the button, and the puckered up disobedient graph now stretched across, until the dimensions grew to exactly 120,316 times the original. What looked like a fleeting unsubstantial time on the ship turned out to be a very long time on planet earth. Jyothi quickly turned her attention to the monitor that recorded the weight aboard ship’s hull. Sifting through the logs, she found out that her eighty year old parents never returned to the ship. Now, she lent her attention to the records on auto pilot. Here, her quest ended. The ship was primed to take off in auto pilot mode only 1 earth year post its arrival on planet earth. It continued to cruise thru the cosmos at light speed since then. When Jyothi’s hibernation ended, she found it in that pre-set auto pilot mode.
That night, back in the bunker, Jyothi tried to organise her thoughts. It became clear that her parents stepped out of the ship when it landed on planet earth and never returned. But what did the number 120,316 mean?
When a ship travels at light speed, theoretically, time shrinks to a nought on the ship. In reality though, on Jyothi’s ship, time had not come to a nought. In fact, she has aged. And the 35 log books only meant that she had put on 35 years since the time of hibernation. The graph stretched across by 120,316 times; it could only mean that a year on the ship equalled a preposterous 120, 316 earth years. Technically, earth, wherever it was, was about 4 million years old when her parents landed on it.
Chapter 3
Jyothi recovered the coordinates of planet earth from the positioning system and steered towards it. As she approached earth, about a quarter of light year away, she switched the mode back to manual and petered the engine down from light speed to a manageable manual speed.
Two days later, Jyothi’s ship neared the obscure corner of the universe. She searched the horizon for the faint glimmer of the blue planet. All around her was a sea of darkness with not a stir. A bewildered astronaut, Jyothi, sensed the ominous air around her; save for the occasional glimpse of a pulsating star to her left, space around her was disturbingly calm. It was as though the space around her was experiencing the brief hush before the onset of a violent cosmic storm.
In the eerie stillness, Jyothi sat before the ship’s main computer and ran thermal imagery tests. With the aid of the earth coordinates and the thermal imagery scans, she slowly steered her ship close to earth. It was as though she was approaching a shadow so vast that she can’t escape it. Finally, she spotted earth. The planet was reeling with dark; the past glory of bluish tinge had escaped the planet and before her was the ashen dust cloud smeared planet.
The landing was jittery; the dense ash clouds pattering on the ship’s hull, smoke billowing out of what looked like lunar craters, and islands of igneous deposits greeted Jyothi. ‘4 million years of progress’ Jyothi thought, as she buckled up in the space gear and alighted on planet earth. Something had happened here; earth was no longer in its orbit. Perhaps, a cosmic vehicle such as an asteroid had deflected earth out of its orbit. Perhaps, sun was deflated from the monstrous red giant it was, to a pulsating lone star.
Sound of approaching steps, beating of hoofs and dry cough of a creature issued form the shadows behind a pool of slime. Jyothi had brought along with her, the electric torch that discharged a voltage sufficient enough to freeze a hundred ton mammal. The attack was sudden and in a flash, she aimed her torch at the creature that closed on her like a bat in the night.
It was a human. An adult woman; the anatomy however, was debilitating. Her finger nails were long and ragged; toes curled like a bird’s; her teeth were gritted with flesh of a corpse that she must have fed on recently. ‘The most astonishing adaptation’ Jyothi thought, until she noticed that the woman’s eyes were sealed. Only features of cavities in the skull remained, eye lids closed tight and skin homogenously spread over the eyes.
This was no place for an old woman to be. Humans had lived in the dark for so long that they merely adapted into bat like mammals. But where was she to go? Her parents were dead, the planet dead and the ship dented.
Jyothi aimed the torch at her neck. The metal tongs of the torch clasped her neck like a creature’s antennae. She gathered the pleats of her midi in her fists. Blue sparks issued between the tongs, and the astronaut teetered and collapsed.
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