Aaron Louie - Muingek

This is a work in progress. Nothing is set in stone. This is not, in the least bit, entertaining. So go away if it bores you. NOTE: Please do not steal this story, the characters, names, or languages I have invented here. That would be wrong.

Dr'ew

Dr'ew was before all things. Before the sun awoke, before the spirits awoke, before light and substance, there was Dr'ew. It was cold and dark. How long it was this way cannot be known. And while Dr'ew, the spirits of frozen emptiness, wandered aimlessly, some were of substance, while others were not. Those that had substance began to pool together, becoming cold and deep. Those that were vaporous and substanceless went far and wide, becoming cold and lonely. In the deeps, the Dr'ew became more and more solid, gaining in deepness, until the greatness of the dark and cold crushed them, one into another. These Dr'ew ceased to become dark and wandering and alone. They had become solid and still. They had become true substance.

And as the substance became more compressed, it began to grow warm from the jostling of matter, one against the other. And when the heat of a million million spirits pressed together became too great to contain, they burst into flame, and the spirits became light. They flew apart at great speed, scattering the flame and the substance into the coldest, darkest realms of the Dr'ew.

And among the burning spirits was Lew. And among the substance was Zhenbailu, Zhulaihu, Imbaleh, and Muingek. And, upon Muingek, Lew placed the three tenets, one each for the spirits of the deep, the solid, and the light, and into this true land the spirits of light placed the true people, the Mulingek.

Cold Sleep

She stood atop the mountain of bodies, holding her breath against the inevitable stench. Renate knew she must do something -- conquer or be conquered. This always happened. She knew what was to come: the wind would carry her away, and the contorted faces would melt into the soil, and clouds would cover the Earth as she flew out amongst the stars. She would feel older than all the rocks and trees, and her limbs would fly apart from her body, luminous and cold.

And then Renate was late for the research committee meeting, and she couldn't find her watch. This desire to find her watch was more dire than her desire for clothing. And she could see her watch, but it was in a room with no door, only a tiny slit in the wooden partition. She knew she could just kick it down, but she also knew it was haunted. Renate had only to say "Bam!" and the ghost would strike her on the head. This always happened.

And then she was in a space ship. It was less cold now, but she still felt that she was somehow late for something. How did she know she was in a space ship? Renate breathed, and the cloud that blew from her mouth hung frozen in the air before her, as if someone had taken a photograph of it and pasted it on clear glass to suspend it before her, smashed into two dimensions. Flat fog. She reached out to touch the cloud, but her arms wouldn't obey, and she desperately wanted to be free of the frozen world because she needed to...

And then Renate was lying on her back in a bright room, surrounded by warmth. The flat cloud had evaporated. She wanted to speak to God, because this was obviously heaven, and how many times had she wanted to tell Him that He was so misguided? She opened her mouth and formed the syllable.

"B..." she croaked. The word would not form, nor would it escape. "Bah..." The desire to speak was overwhelming, and ghost or no, she would risk the wrath of the undead.

"Bam!" Renate finally shouted. Her head fell back, striking against a wall. "Bam!" she said again, with more force. "I've got you now, God!"

Suddenly, a dark shape loomed before her. Renate jerked her limp arms in fear. "God!" She gasped and clenched her teeth. The shadow spoke.

"No, not God, Renate. But close," his voice was familiar, but seemed to come from the depths of a hollow tube, warbling beneath the surface of a pond. "Stop struggling. It'll be a few more hours for you to come out of cold sleep. I've got IV's in your arms -- you don't want to rip them out, do you?"

Cold sleep! Renate's mind began to clear. What was she doing on a space ship? The shadow shuffled about, growing more distant.

Renate shook her head and blinked hard. "Who are you? What's going on?" The shadow stopped. It hovered toward her and sighed.

"Duh, Renate. It's Gregor. You're on the good ship Anellus, headed for Muingek. Your name is Renate Ungala. You're female, as far as I know--" Renate grunted in annoyance.

"Okay, shut up, Gregor!" Her head was beginning to clear. "I know who I am. My brain's not fully awake yet. Being asleep for nine months isn't the healthiest thing for my perspicacity." Gregor chuckled.

"At least you can still say 'perspicacity.' Yeah, I was pretty screwed up for a long time when the computer brought me out. I had been dreaming about all kinds of weird crap. Thought I was being chased by death in my kitchen. It was like some bizarre game." He shuffled back out of sight. "Be right back," he called.

Renate sighed and tried to collect her thoughts. Cold sleep? Anellus? Muingek? The ceiling was clearer now than when she had first opened her eyes, but fine details were still indiscernable. The ceiling was curved and bright, eggshell white, and padded for flying people. And they would be flying, once the ship reached its orbit. Why am I waking from cold sleep? thought Renate. I'm in space, I know that much. But where?

She gritted her teeth and tensed her brow in concentration, but she could only remember Dr. Lindes.

She had been a graduate research assistant for Dr. Josh Lindes at UC Berkeley. After poring over mountains of data for her advisor's research project, she had turned up only two interesting blips in the vast useless silent universe. All the promising planets were silent, had been silent for all time, and would most likely remain silent long after humanity had suffocated itself in its own filth. The life of an astrobiologist, it seemed, was little more than speculation about microscopic fossils, bubbles and tubes in fallen stones that represented the remote possibility that the universe was populated with something that might look somewhat like the most ancient ancestor of an archaeobacterium.

The SETI project, well into its second century of existence, had turned up nothing. Dr. Lindes wanted to proved that they had been looking in the wrong places, but Renate was no longer willing to help him.

"Maybe I should have done Psychology. Or computers. Something more gratifying than THIS," Renate said out loud, slumping forward to rest her head on the desk.

"Then perhaps I can gratify you with a celebratory glass of champagne," came a voice from behind her. Renate sat up and arranged her papers hurriedly.

"I'm sorry, Dr. Lindes," she stuttered, embarrased that he had heard her complaining, "I've got several graphs that are ready to import into your paper. Unfortunately, none of them have anything worthwhile..." Josh Lindes, a middle-aged man with curly white hair and a wry smile, chuckled at Renate's eagerness to please.

"Put the papers down, Renate," he said. Renate stopped and looked over her shoulder at him. He looked tired, standing there with his hand supporting the small of his back, trying to smile through the inevitable collapse of his hopeless career. He always looked tired, always wearing that silly bow tie and spouting off about his bizarre theories about the possibilities of the future. People a two-hundred years ago were always dreaming of the future, and look where it got them. Well, it's the future now, she thought, and nothing's changed. Especially in academia.

"Renate... hello?" Lindes said. He waved his hand in front of her eyes. "Don't you want to know what's behind my back?"

"Your back?" Renate repeated.

"Did I not say champagne?" He chuckled and brought forth two coffee mugs and a bottle. "I actually went through the trouble of having it overnighted here from the old world."

"Of course," said Renate. "I would expect no less of you." She smiled and reached for a mug.

"Ah, but you must wait till you see what I have on my desk. Follow me," he beckoned, backing around the corner to his office, shaking the champagne in front of him. Renate smiled cheerlessly and trudged after him. Dr. Lindes, ever the thespian, was fond of turning every minute progress in their research into an excuse for effluvient celebration. Renate tired quickly of these games, content to wallow in the misery of their situation. When she reached his office door, she found Lindes seated at his desk, surrounded by books, charts, disks, and various knick-knacks, as usual. He leaned back in his chair, hands folded across his belly. He gestured toward his computer display grandly.

"Here, my fine R.A., you will find the answer to all of life's questions -- if you just know where to look," he began in his usual melodramatic manner. "I would like you to be the first to witness this." He tapped the screen, and the usual model of the near galaxy sprang to life. Lindes rotated the model so Sol was in the foreground.

"Now," he said, "what do you see in this map?" Renate sighed and rubbed her eyes.

"I see a bunch of stars. Um, I see HD209458, for one." She took a step closer.

"And why did you pick that one?" Lindes sat forward and zoomed the model in on HD209458.

"Because it's known to have several planets comparable to the size of Earth orbiting a star similar in mass to Sol." Renate was tiring of this game Lindes always played. His fascination with building up suspense was endearing at times, but, after 12 hours of data analysis, her patience was wearing thin.

"Yes!" Lindes cried. "Would you like some champagne?"

"I suppose," said Renate.

"Excellent. But first, you must see this." He tapped `another button and a 3-dimensional frequency graph appeared. Lindes then turned and poured the champagne. He pressed another button and the graph began to oscillate. Then he handed her a mug full of sparkling wine.

"Cheers," he said, tapping his mug against hers.

"What exactly am I looking at?" Renate asked, mesmerized by the pulsating colors.

"HD209458." Lindes said flatly. "I had some satellite time, so I pointed it at our friend here for a good week and-"

"A week!" Renate exclaimed. "I thought that this satellite time was meant for a systematic sweep of several arcsecs!" Oh well, Renate thought, less work for me. Lindes chuckled.

"My colleagues and I had a hunch about this particular system. It's been known for over a hundred years to have planets. We now know of six total. It's only 15 or so light years away, so it's a very likely candidate for SETI's efforts. They managed to get some promising data from that area of the sky, so they contacted me to see if I could pull some strings." Lindes gulped down his champagne and began pouring a second glass. "Hence, voila." Renate sipped her champagne and gazed at the dancing frequency graph.

"So," she said, after a pause, "you're telling me that this is a transmission of some kind from HD209458? How do you know it's not a random blip?" Her advisor's eyes lit up.

"Ah, and so it would seem if we had not pointed a satellite directly at the thing and collected nearly four days worth of data!"

En route to HD209458, Renate was beginning to remember what happened after that night. She managed to finish her thesis amidst the fervor of publishing Dr. Lindes' paper. Then the media found the article. The data was analyzed, decrypted, and translated by every expert in the world, and everything became a busy blur of news reports, symposia, and ceremonies. Eventually, a group of linguists was appointed to decipher the Lindes Transmission and give a full accounting of its contents.

After that, no one called the system HD209458. Its name, according to the senders of the Lindes Transmission, was Lew, and their planet was Muingek.

"Can you tell us, Dr. Ungala, what we are looking at here?" a bespectacled woman with her hair in a tight bun asked, pointing her pencil at the slide before her.

Renate shifted uncomfortably in her chair and cleared her throat. These press conferences were a constant nuisance. It was nearly impossible to publish a paper before the press caught wind of it. She sighed and waved her hand at the screen disaffectedly.

"You're looking at a false-color image of a colony of Muingek soil microbes, magnified to a resolution of approximately .01 microns, which are responsible for the compatible atmosphere on the planet. I've been studying this particular species in conjuction with Muingek scientists for seven years now, and we've concluded that its presence in the most ancient of sedimentary rock on Muingek is evidence of its importance in the evolution of life on that planet. Yes?" She motioned to a reporter whose hand was raised. The reporter peered at the screen and held aloft his notepad.

"Two questions, Dr. Ungala. First, what relationship does this microbe have to life on Earth? And secondly, what is the likelihood that these microbes are ancestors to our own bacteria?" Renate winced as a few of the more knowledgeable members of the audience supressed their laughter.

"Sir, there is no relationship in these microbes whatsoever to life on Earth. Their biochemistry evolved under completely different circumstances, 15 light years away from our own. Their genetic information, if you can call it that, is stored in a truly alien form of molecule, and very few of their cellular processes have analogs on this planet. The likelihood that we evolved from a common ancestor is so remote as to be impossible." She paused and looked across the room full of cameras and reporters. "Now if there are no more questions, I have another meeting to attend." She turned and stepped out of the crowded room.

The press -- and the public by proxy -- could never understand the concept of interstellar distances. The idea of instantaneous exchange of information with an advanced alien species did not necessitate the instantaneous transfer of matter, wormhole or no.

Once back in the safety of her own office, Renate slumped into her chair and switched on the ansible. She tapped out a quick text message to her colleagues on Muingek, updating them on the press conference. Although she had never met any of the scientists on that planet, they could, with little delay, communicate via entangled photons. The Muingek's eagerness to share their knowledge with Terran scientists was heartening.

Much had happened since the initial transmission. The Mulingek had meticulously described their planet, its solar system, its climates, cultures, histories, and technologies in one long four-day data dump. The international team of linguists joined a team of physicists to decipher the full meanings of all the mathematical formulae and engineering diagrams the Muingek had sent.

In the descriptions of their technologies, there were plans for building a wormhole -- a stable rift in space that could orbit the sun and provide a means for nearly instantaneous communications with Muingek. The device was built and put into space just inside the orbit of Venus. A few relay satellites were also put up to keep in constant line of sight with the wormhole, and information soon began to flow. The United States, which had poured the most money into the construction of the wormhole, was allowed to send the first "official" transmission back to Muingek. In eight hours, the government of Mulaonq'eh, the superpower nation of Muingek, had sent a reply.

Renate had kept a constant eye on these proceedings throughout her PhD candidacy. Dr. Lindes frequently delegated his many appearances at media events and colloquia to her, so by the time she obtained her post-doc at NASA, she was already somewhat of a celebrity. Some even referred to the Muingek communique as the Lindes-Ungala Transmission.

Her own research into the xenobiology of Muingek had developed over the years, boosting Renate to the top of her field -- and into areas of expertise few could claim. Renate was somewhat fluent in Mulaonq and was familiar with much of Muingek's history and culture. She had studied intensely the evolutionary biology of the Mulingek, the main sentient species of Muingek. And now there was talk of traveling there. NASA was collaborating with several international space agencies to build a larger wormhole and begin transporting goods -- and people -- through it.

The difficulties in pushing people through a singularity were many, but the engineers of Muingek were old hands at building these monstrosities. There was the problem of radiation. The wormhole needed to be situated a significant distance from the Earth's atmosphere, since the massive amounts of damaging particles that were emitted from the wormhole could knock out satellites across the globe. Then there was the energy required to hold it open, the shielding required for the ship that would pass through it, the cryogenic freezing of the crew and all life forms on board the ship, and so on.

Still swooning from the effects of the thawing process, Renate pushed herself up into a sitting position. Her vision cleared a little, revealing the familiar white padded walls of the ship. Her arms bristled with IV tubes, which snaked up to bags of various fluids, none of which she could recall at this moment.