Look Upon My Works, Ye Mighty, and Hope

Out in the far reaches of the Perseus Arm—far at least from Sol's perspective, all the way across the Orion bridge—the Survey-Freighter UTVS Sagan emerged from the mouth of a dark-energy tendril and braced for immediate wellskip.

"Shit," said the captain, to herself and under her breath. She didn't say anything to the crew. They knew their business. The chrome of her long polished fingers shone star's-blood-red under the hazard lighting as she gripped the arms of her suspensor couch. The hum of the reactor turned to a scream as it worked to feed the antigrav envelope that would bounce its ship off the system's gravity well like a small rock careening over still waters.

Albeit over the course of a few standard hours rather than a few seconds. The Sagan was moving very fast, and even the intertial-mitigation effects of her envelope couldn't shrug off such titanic forces without a lot of time to bleed off the energy.

A few standard hours, but the first few seconds were always the worst, before the systems had a chance to adjust to the as-yet-not-fully predictable currents of the darkweb stretching out between the universe's gravity wells. The captain closed her eyes, and breathed, and felt the suspensor couch slam her right, left, torque and yaw, twisting and turning her stomach and head.

She got past it, that first rough stretch, just like she always did, and let out a sigh, and settled into surrender for the slower-shifting g-forces of the next three hours.

Status? she sent over the command room channel. No one attempted verbal communication during a wellskip unless something had gone well and truly wrong with someone's mental interface or all three of the ship's redundant networks. Breathing was effort enough without having to work words into it.

Ummm, came the reply, and that scared her more than any number of damage reports ever could. She double-checked the sender. Lieutenant-Commander Haskins, normally precise and unflappable. Professional, just like all the crew. She couldn't imagine what might make him...

Working on it, said Data Chief Chandrasekhar. We're still not quite sure where we are.

Endpoint was off?

Yes. Ma'am—

How far off?

That's just it, we don't know.

Ah.

The captain sat in her chair and thought for a few moments that seemed to stretch across the web between the stars. Then her training recovered, and the questions came, one by one.

Do we know what system we're in?

No.

Do we know for sure we're not in the target system? 100% this is not Seven Hunahpu?

Still running star chart analysis, Ma'am, but the stellar spectroscopy makes it almost certain. And...one moment...found enough of the planets to be sure. Not Seven Hunahpu.

She grimaced as the suspensor couch swung and pushed hard at a left-downward angle.

How long until we have a good guess what system this is?

An hour to never, I'm afraid. We were already pretty far out in uncharted territory when we snagged the tendril, and rogue branches like the one we must have been dumped into can get very very long.

The captain shivered. Rogue tendrils. Always a chance you'd end up so far off course you wouldn't get home before supplies ran out, if that's even what happened to all the lost ships. Plenty never got found even decades later. Models got better all the time, and so did the systems that ran them, so lost ships were becoming less common. But still.

How much good data did we get during the shunt?

Enough to make our chances of getting back through to exact-origin pretty high, and our chances of being able to get back somewhere easily navigable as close to certain as our models can give.

Okay. So we're lost, but not stranded.

Affirmative, ma'am.

A moment of network silence as she pondered that.

What data do we have now on the planets?

Looking over that now. And...one moment, ma'am, and...oh

Chandrasekhar?

There's a planet in the Goldilocks zone. All we have so far is orbit and mass and some preliminary spectroscopy, but...that's enough to be exciting. Liquid water. Probably temperate zones. Maybe .94g surface gravity, it'd be like walking on Earth with just a little spring in your step. Ahh...we'd need to get closer to tell more, like axial tilt and rotation period. Wouldn't be too much of a course correction. Permission to approach?

It only took her half a second to decide, but she waited almost a minute before she replied. Had to at least give the impression of really weighing the decision with something this potentially momentous. But really, what else could they do? A possibly habitable planet, what would be the fourth ever found if it did turn out to be worth colonizing. Of course she was going to give permission. They'd start investigating possible risks too, but those almost didn't matter. They'd change how, not whether, the approach would be made.

Permission granted, she sent, and made only the barest effort to keep the excitement from forming too bright an aura around her words. Set sensor focus and computational priority. We'll look for a way home afterward.

She breathed. One more thing to ask.

Any signals coming from the planet? Signs of anything...artificial?

A pause. Strange.

No ma'am. Nothing unexpected across the electromagnetic spectrum. But...we are catching hints of metallics in the planetary orbit. Could be something natural, shattered metal asteroid maybe, though I've never heard of one forming this kind of pattern.

Another pause before he continued.

Or, could be...

He trailed off. Captain Ching Lozada spoke aloud to the crew for the first time since the Sagan's emergence into the system.

"Could be Contact. Could be the very first."

~

The UTVS Sagan approached the unknown system's fourth planet with a reasonable measure of caution, dropping survey buoys at regular intervals. Her crew kept their silence, apart from the measured click, click, click-click-click-click of the captain's metallic fingers against the armrests of her suspensor-chair.

The reactor continued its cry of protest, damped down now as the ship's power needs dropped to more sensible levels, surfing smoothly across the space-time curvature of the gravity well.

"Okay. Good news and...bad news. I think," said Data Chief Chandrasekhar. Not the most professional way to preface a report, the captain thought, but this was an extraordinary moment.

"Go ahead."

"The objects in orbit are definitely artificial satellites. Or...they were."

The captain just raised her eyebrows.

"They're all inert, so far as we can tell. No signals, no power. Degraded, often eccentric orbits. Lots of debris no one's bothered to clean up. And we're getting nothing off the surface, no comms, no air traffic, no movement on the surface of the seas."

Lieutenant-Commander Haskins shifted forward in his suspensor-couch. "Maybe they just have especially efficient comms that don't leak out into space? Underground transport networks? Who knows?" He took in a deep breath. "Crazy that we're talking about a 'they' at all, this is...this is a Hell of a thing."

"Almost anything's a possibility," Chandrasekhar said, and paused, cocking her head as though listening. Which she essentially was, though the data-stream was rather more in-depth than simple sound. "The satellites, though, I'm trying to come up with some scenario where they're like that on purpose, and so far I've got nothing. Neither do any of my team, or the Heuristic Intelligences."

The captain let out a deep breath. "At least there's no sign of any possible threat, either." Though that's a source of stress all on its own, in a situation like this, she didn't say. Almost better to have something concrete to worry about. And then again, that could be dangerous as well, focusing on the known while the unknown could by definition be anywhere, doing anything. But this line of thought was going past reasonable caution into fear territory, and she reigned it in.

"ETA?" Haskins asked. He could see that number in his own datastream, just like everyone else in the command group, but humans were still humans and most questions dipped well below the surface.

"About twenty-five hours. We got lucky and came into the system relatively close. If we'd been on the far side of the star we'd be looking at a week of travel time." Chandrasekhar smiled, and looked to the captain, who nodded.

"I know everyone's pumped full of adrenaline, but that's not sustainable over more than a standard day. I want the crew to start taking meal and sleep shifts immediately. Everyone should be fed, rested, and as relaxed as possible by the time we near planetary orbit. Medbay, see that everyone does get at least eight of hours of sleep, induced if necessary. This has been exciting, and I know it's going to be again, but we have jobs to do in the meantime and readiness is one of them."

The one hundred humans of the UTVS Sagan composed themselves as best they could and went about their business. The stars remained static in the viewports, at least to the human eye, a cold bewildering reminder that the distances traversed by their ship's astonishing speed were utterly insignificant in the grander galactic spread. The planet, though, grew larger and larger, a brand-new pale blue dot, expanding into view.

"Still no sign of artificial activity," Data Chief Chandrasekhar announced, "but we're able to see more of the surface now, and there's plenty evidence of past activity. What look like old road networks, urban centers. Large-scale structures along parts of the coasts, what we're guessing might be flood barriers. Probable solar power installations. At first we were surprised at how much reflection we got off those, thought they'd be covered with dirt and dust, but the winds are fierce down there."

"Hot climate?" the captain asked.

"Yes...and no. Unbearably hot at the equator, but with far-reaching polar vortexes coming down off the ice caps. Which are larger than Earth's, but still pretty small. That's why we think the coastal structures are flood barriers."

"Damn," the captain said. "Do we think there are intact ecosystems?" She'd always hoped to see one of those before she died, it was part of the reason she'd joined the Surveyor Fleet in the first place. Old nature documentaries were wonderful things, of course, as were days off spent in biodomes. But to walk out in the open on a living world, not some terraform-in-progress but an honest-to-God ancient biosphere, to look around and see life in every direction, that was the dream.

Chandrasekhar pursed her lips. "Not pristine by any means. But yes. Probably. We have to make a lot of assumptions with these guesses, there's just so much we don't know. And to be honest, ma'am, a lot of my team, including myself, is a bit overwhelmed. These are the first signs of multicellular extra-Solar life ever encountered. Almost any one of our assumptions could be very very wrong."

The captain gave an internal sigh, and tried her best not to let any disappointment show on her face. It was irrational to be very disappointed, anyway, this was more than she had any real right to hope for. "So we think that whoever lived here pulled an Earth, just...maybe not as bad."

"I'm sorry, ma'am, but we just can't say that for sure yet. And 'lived' may not be the right word, it may not be a past-tense thing at all. It's possible that the civilization that presumably built everything we're seeing down there is gone, but until we have a lot more information it's just as possible that they're not. We'll see."

But they didn't, at least not by the time the Sagan swung into orbit around the planet the crew had begun to refer to as "Rogueflower," because of the way they had found it—and out of a hundred hopes.

"Still no sure sign of sapient survivors?" the captain asked as she boarded the landing shuttle.

Chandrasekhar shook her head. "No, ma'am, but we are seeing what appear to be patches of what we think may be recovered ecosystems. Patches of vegetation, though it's purple, possibly an adaptation to differences in the spectrum of sunlight. Atmospheric mixture in those areas also seem to point to photosynthesis. Reduced C02, increased oxygen. Just like Earth. Extraordinary."

Just like Earth biodomes and its handful of managed outdoor gardens, anyway, the captain thought. "Okay. What percentage satellite coverage are we at?"

"Eighty-four percent of non-polar surface, ma'am."

"Good enough. Are any of these possible recovered ecosystems adjacent to urban centers?"

A brief pause. "Yes, ma'am. Actually, at least half of them are."

"Find the nearest one in a still-temperate zone with no current extreme weather events." She closed her eyes for a bare moment, wondering, imagining, bracing. "We're going down."

They went.

~

"My God," Chandrasekhar said. Her hands, one grey carbon-composite, one dark brown flesh, were still poised above her projected keyboard—the captain had ordered all mental interfaces taken offline for the trip down as a precaution.

"What? Oh. Oh wow," Haskins said, following her gaze out the thick diamond window. The view didn't show anything they didn't already know, but knowing was one thing and seeing was another. And not just seeing, but seeing in person, even if it was through a thick layer of fabricated carbon. Because of course they'd all seen this sort of thing before, in old pictures and videos and simulated-presence recreations.

But this was something different. This was something, after they landed, that they'd be able to reach out and touch. In theory, at least; in practice, they'd all be in sealed expedition suits, and anyone not on the actual Bio-Survey Team wouldn't be permitted to interact with anything living more than was necessary to move through the environment. So no touching after all. But still, it would be there, real and living.

The captain leaned over to get a better viewing angle, and allowed a small sweet shudder to bloom its way up her spine. A real, honest-to-all-gods forest. Almost a jungle. Look at that canopy.

It was purple, and some of the leaves must have subtly different shapes to the ones in the dozens of documentaries she'd obsessed over the past eleven decades of her life, because the way it all swayed and rippled in the heavy winds was mesmerizing in an alien sort of way. And sure, of course it was, and sure, she'd set foot on a couple hundred other worlds that were just as "alien" but they'd all been either barren or seeded with Terran life, nothing like this. Just nothing like this at all.

"We're nearing the edge of the vegetation, ma'am," the pilot said over the the audiocomm. "Landing site still looks good on approach."

"Unless we get new information from the scouting drones, we'll continue with that course," the captain replied. She let out a small internal sigh. "We'll be investigating the urban area first." No matter how desperately I want to walk through that forest right away. I've seen a hundred cities, feels like even an alien city, even an alien city that's the first a human has ever set eyes on, it's just not quite on the same level as a forest, a real forest.

"Data Chief, do we have any updated estimates on the age of that vegetation?"

Chandrasekhar pulled herself away from the window and tapped at her keyboard, then tilted her head back and forth as she considered the display projection. "Yes, ma'am, but they're not very good estimates. We know nothing about growth rates, life cycles, anything other than guesses to use in even a half-assed model. But we do think it's not recently-planted, probably at least a century old, just based off what we can observe about biodiversity and samples the advance drones have cored out of the forest floor."

The captain took in a deep breath, and nodded, once. They were skimming low over the canopy, now; she could see individual leaves, broad and living, such a vibrant violet color it seemed to hum a low rich tune at the back of the eye.

"We're coming up to the landing site," the pilot said, and there it was, a broad plaza right at the edge of the forest. Some sort of statue or monument stood in the center, and the shuttle came down between it and the outskirts of what looked at first glance to be a very dense city. Dense, and...

...and sad. The first word to mind was "creepy," all those crumbling buildings, the strange proportions, the emptiness, the silence, the way it was halfway to becoming a forest or jungle itself, because it wasn't fully silent, not quite, unfamiliar creatures here and there on the outskirts, barely seen, just on the edges of hearing. But no, it may still be a frightening place, but the overwhelming feeling was sad. Regret. Mourning. Utter, irretrievable loss.

Or maybe not.

"Ma'am," Chandrasekhar said as they stepped out of the shuttle together, with the forward security team and their various drones already spread out ahead of them, "we're getting a signal."

The captain stopped, remembered herself, stepped forward to make room for Haskins and the rest of the away team to disembark behind her.

"A signal?"

Chandrasekhar nodded, holding her watch display up so they both could see. "It's repeating, it's clearly a spoken language, it didn't start until we set down, and most importantly, it's directional."

"How narrow?"

"Extremely. We don't think it's a security thing, though, it's more a way of saying, 'Listen up, this is for you, this is for you specifically."

"Pre-recorded?"

The Data Chief paused, frowned at the display. "Well, yes, and maybe. Yes, as in its repeating, and the repeat is exact, so it is recorded. But how recently? It could be six minutes ago, it could be a century."

"Respond, but..." the captain took just a half-moment to think, "do it in written form. Global English, binary, single-byte characters. Nice and easy, give them a chance to start decoding things. Have the Heuristic Intelligences we brought along been able to make any headway?"

"No, ma'am. The repeated sample is too short."

The captain looked out over the ruined city. "I know I said we didn't want drones out over the urban center so to avoid presenting as any kind of threat, but I've changed my mind. Have them comb the area for symbols, words, letters, anything that seems to have meaning attached. I don't think we should try starting with auditory language, that's too slow. Beginnings are delicate things. We need to establish meaningful communication as soon as possible."

It was a long, tense wait while the drones were deployed and the data came back and was analyzed and the captain resisted the impulse to bite her nails which was something she hadn't done in well over a century. And also she hadn't had fingernails in a very long time so the impulse was absurd but she kept all that well-contained in the echoing portions of her brain while she asked for updates and kept herself from giving orders just for the sake of doing something which would be much worse than attempting to bite her nonexistent nails.

She began to think this might go on forever. But the moment finally came.

"We think we have enough lexical certainty to begin attempting communication," Chandrasekhar said. "A couple of the xenobiologists wanted to be the ones to start the conversation, as it were, and I suppose I don't blame them for trying. But you're the captain, ma'am." She tapped her watch, and the captain felt the haptic pulse in her fingers that meant she was text-input-ready.

And there was the blinking cursor in front of her, like something out of an ancient ancient movie, but that's exactly the way she had wanted it, single byte single character, simple as possible.

> Hello.

A long pause. A short string of strange characters, and then the translation.

: Hello. Who are you?

Hell of a question, really, people spent their whole lives trying to answer that one. But never mind all that right now, or at least, never mind some of it. Because what mattered right now was that this was live. This was a living creature, or something close to it, a non-Terran intelligence.

> My name is Ching Lozada. I am the leader of this expedition.

Another pause, but of course that was to be expected, for all sorts of reasons. This may not be a conversation of many words, but it would not be short either.

: Hello, Ching Lozada. We are The People*

*Translation of rough-phonetic-estimation: Hmm-pah.

> Am I speaking to a group, or a spokesperson?

: Group. Seven of us on this committee.

> You are here in this city? We have seen no sign of you.

A bit risky, to sound like they were looking for their alien interlocutors, could come off as threatening, but the captain also thought it was slightly absurd to pretend they would not be looking.

: No. Far underground. We walk the surface only to tend, and only rarely. We apologize for the state of our world. We are ashamed.

The captain allowed herself a bitter laugh.

> We will not be the ones to condemn you. Our homeworld is in far worse condition. You look like you are on the way to recovery.

She could feel Haskins' raised eyebrows at this bit of information given, but the captain did not want to start this first meeting with lies or unnecessary paranoia. Such a delicate thing, the push and pull and swirl of risks and rewards and the unknown.

: This is why you have come here?

Well, shit. Now maybe they thought the humans had come to take their world away. Well, if their history was anything like Earth's, it wasn't exactly an unreasonable fear.

> No. We are explorers. We have colony worlds already. We wish for peaceful contact and exchange.

: We do not understand. Surely you have colonists/settlers with you?

> No. Our crew contains fewer than fifty individuals. Our ship is small.

Again, that tight blind dance of the unknown and the dire and the enticing.

: You sent less than fifty all this way?

> We came upon your world by accident.

: Still we do not understand. How is this possible? We knew the sea-of-stars well, before we had to retreat underground. The distance to any that might possibly hold life would be immense. Your travel must have been many dozen-dozen of years. Many many.

Danger, honesty, delicacy.

> No. Our trip took only a few dozen of your days.

: Impossible. Speed-of-light is speed-of-light. Nothing moves faster.

> You are correct. We did not move faster than lightspeed. We took shortcuts.

A very long pause this time.

: We are astonished. If what you say is true, we are very very amazed. We dare to hope that you might share some of this with us. We did not think it possible. We would have escaped, if we could have.

The captain looked over at the forest, the one whose floor she wanted so badly to walk.

> You would have escaped, but instead you learned to regrow, to repair. We learned how to escape, and then we did, and our homeworld is still our greatest sadness as a species.

: You have learned to travel the stars, but not how to regrow?

> Not yet. Not well enough. It was easier to leave. To rebuild elsewhere. But perhaps...

: Yes. Perhaps we can help each other.

"Ma'am," Chandrasekhar said softly by her ear. "You should know that we've translated the inscription on that monument we set down next to. It says, roughly 'Look upon what we have done, hope upon our redemption.'"

"And on the pedestal these words appear," the captain said, "'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!' Nothing beside remains."

"But plenty beside remains here," Chandrasekhar said.

"Yes," the captain said, "and more than remains. Grows. Maybe thrives again." She returned her attention to the blinking cursor, and typed.

> No, not perhaps. I am sure that we can. We look forward to meeting you, eye-to-eye. We look forward to sharing, people to People. But more than that, I myself look forward to standing under the leaves of your forests. I would be the first of our kind to do this in many, many years.

: It is good. We look forward to walking among the stars.

The captain shook her head. This could not be happening, not right now, not to her, not be happening and also be real. But it was, and she held back a tear, savored it for later.

> Thank you for the hope you have offered. We will give all we can in return.