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| panda-like calm through fiction | |||||||||
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Bastard Universe
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I kick myself every morning when I wake up and realize I’m in the Tatooine system; back in the 1980s George Lucas put Carrie Fischer in that gold bikini and gave an entire generation of astronomers a boner for space. I guess I can’t fault them too bad- as unmanned space exploration took off, and optic technology improved, astronomers had like a billion different galaxies to name- so its not surprising they eventually cribbed from sci-fi.
Tatooine is one of the systems near to the heart of existence, about as close to the crucible of the big bang as man’s ever gotten- some, myself included, suspected it’s the centermost system. Of course, this planet, Tatooine VII, was inhabited before I got here. Couple of “indigenous” species (I put that into quotes since indigenous just means they’ve been here longer than ten generations, which in the history of the universe is about as significant as the time it takes me to prepare a freeze-dried burrito), and a single human settlement. T7’s human inhabitants are pretty much like other frontier explorers, who scraped together just enough credit to afford the one-way trip, but not enough for the kinds of tech or supplies you’d need to start a new civilization (which really only the megacorporations can afford these days)- think of them as modern-day Thoreaus, living in their simplified and idealized stone age. T7’s a little better off than most; its main settlement is Themiscyra, a lesbian commune, and they even have an actual medical doctor and not just a witch doctor (on Annares 4, their “shaman” wanted to cure my rash from poison oak by superheating a magnet and duct-taping it to my scrotum). T7 is classed as subhabitable, which in government speak means its close enough to Earth that you can walk around without a helmet- but it’s probably going to cut your life expectancy. Substantially. But in the meantime I’m surrounded by women with a different standard of dress and just the right amount of gravity to make them “buoyant;” though sometimes it’s enough to remind me how deserted this place is: water water everywhere, and not a drop to drink. T7 is about as close to the system’s star as a man can get, which for my purposes is just fine. Stars make for lousy witnesses. They burn hot enough that nothing evidentiary survives: chemical bonds disintegrate and molecules separate out into their constituent elements. Most stars are born in molecular clouds, concentrations of hydrogen and helium- if you’d prefer an analogy from biology, it’s their primordial muck. Stars are formed when gravitational instability causes these elements to pool, and this increased density creates gravity that pulls more and more matter into the cloud until it reaches sufficient density to collapse. Gravitational energy is released as heat from the moving atoms until reaching hydrostatic equilibrium, where gravity is roughly equal to the pressure gradient force, which is what tries to spread out pressure evenly (it’s why spilled milk spreads out flat and thin); this causes the formation of a spherical solar embryo, a protostar. The fetal star continues to consume matter until it begins fusing hydrogen at its core- and the star is born. But it all started somewhere, right? Gravitational instability requires massive amounts of energy- the kind of energy that’s only ever created by the detonation of supernovae or the collision of galaxies. Supernovae are stars- so the first start couldn’t have been created from one, which leaves collision. But it doesn’t necessarily have to be galaxies, just a collision releasing tremendous amounts of energy. Which brings me here, half a desert away from the only people on this planet (who told me when they saw me leaving this morning that they had planned a mud wrestling tournament that I would miss; I imagine they lie to me frequently because they’re amused at my situation, and not that I’m researching from the Penthouse Letters planet)- a planet years upon years of travel from our home system. But I’m here because, if my calculations are right, and that’s probably a big if but even if I’m off by a little, for the first time in over a century, the planets are going to be in alignment. Not just any alignment, but the alignment, their initial positions during creation (technically fractions of a second after the initial bang, but still during that moment). That’s why I’m standing here, in the middle of nowhere, with special lenses, so that I can stare up at the sky, into and past the Tatooine sun. I check the clock, and it’s nearly a half-hour beforehand, and I know by now I should be seeing something, and I’m about to think maybe I’ve been wrong when I see a shadow on T4- and realize it’s no shadow at all, but a groove, formed in the crust of the planet when it was still a molten blob moments after it was made, but the rift isn’t natural, or geographic. There are shapes, images. The fingerprints of something bigger. Stephen Hawking got it wrong when he said god wasn’t a part of the big bang (okay, so he said a god wasn’t necessary, but the gist is there). Now before you switch off your brain and assume that I’m a Bible thumper who doesn’t like people challenging my religious identity, listen. It made sense at the time, and Hawking was mostly just following Occam’s Razor, which basically says that all other things being equal, the more likely answer to a question is the answer which contains the fewest assumptions (if there is an all knowing god and if he existed before anything else and if he was powerful enough to create matter- likely out of energy- you can see the chain of assumptions that go into the intelligent design hypothesis). But for a while now, we’ve called the beginning of everything the big bang, without ever realizing the euphemism we’d created. But from here I can see the first planets, in the galaxy at the heart of the universe, created one after another. Burned into their surfaces are the moments of that procreative act, the universe’s first porno carved into the skin of worlds, an erotic flipbook splayed across the sky, proof of the existence of one god, at least, and his receptive lover. I’ve spent more time than I’d like to admit, more time than a man should have, really, if you count the decades spent in suspended animation for the trip here, just to see this place, just to find what I’m seeing. I’ll leave it to the deists and the atheists to fight over whether this was god and whether they survived their act of creation. But I think I’ll spend the next bit staring at the sky and wondering what that moment was like, and of course, documenting it as best I can. And after that I’ve been invited to Themiscyra for a kegger. Just because a man can’t drink the ocean, doesn’t mean he shouldn’t go for a swim. |
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