Zach Hughes - Life Force

"And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so. "

- Genesis 1:24

At one with the soughing wind and the moon-gleaming, ripening grass nuts of the browned plain, the presence drifted, lowered into the soft, murmuring song of summer, falling with a seeding pod as it expelled new life for the rich earth. From afar came the song of a fellow presence, steeped in jungle-moist richness, and a call of wonder from a young one high in the snowed, timberless mountains. All was one, all was contentment.

It rose now on a thermal as the sun-blessed plain gave back to the upper darkness the gift of the day, and the rustling grasses flashed past into a region of thinly treed, rolling ridges- a conversion zone- and as it moved over great distances, there was always the work. A flowering tree emitted a rush of perfume, feeling the brush of the presence, and that unseen one was dusted with minute pollen spores that seemed to drift upon the cooling night wind until, in another rush of perfume, flowers of a like kind were brushed. Ah, to watch the land renew itself and bring forth fruit, that was the wonder, and the work and the reward.

A new sound, the awareness of intrusion, a measurement of molecular movements led its attention high, high, where, in a blaze of red, something falling slowed, steadied, swam with graceful precision through the night sky.

Tinker's Belle came out of transdrive just where Matt Tinker and his trusty Lamda 201 had pointed her, inside the orbital paths of two gas giants and three smallish, frigid planets and less than half an astronomical unit from the astral pathway of the target, detected for its blue tinge from not a few light years away. Belle was singing sweetly. Matt's ears, tuned to her moods after just over two years of seemingly peripatetic but actually well-reasoned wanderings in her, noted and were pleased. Way to hell and gone back toward the periphery, in the old neighborhood where mother Earth spewed out her deluge of humanity, a sour note in Belle's song might or might not have been panic-producing. Out here Matt wanted her to be purr-fect, and she was, odd little systems ticking and humming and the soft flow of air from the vents sweet.

"Hey, Teddy," Matt yelled, "you wanta look before we go in, or are you gonna take all day getting dressed?"

"Coming," said a very nice feminine voice, and there she was in the hatch that separated Belle's bridge from crew's quarters.

"Looks good," Matt said. "Instruments registering fine. Lots of water. Oxygen. No bad stuff so far."

The planet was magnified on Belle's viewer. Tedra Tinker saw the hint of blue seas, the whiteness of clouds. She hadn't spent too much time dressing, since it took only a couple of seconds to slip into her favorite shipboard wear, plain, loose-legged shorts and a frilly little shirt. She had spent some time on her hair. She wore it not quite shoulder-length: in all its auburn glory. And, as always, she had taken time to touch her face with a hint of color, her lashes just enough to enhance the natural impact of her huge, green eyes.

"Let me take her in?" Teddy asked, as she bent to plant a warm pair of lips on Matt's neck.

"Okay," he said, "but no showboating, hear?"

"Coward," she said, seating herself, beginning to punch buttons even before she'd plopped down into the contour chair for which she had modeled, quite bare, when the ship was being customized to its new, two-man crew just over two years ago.

Matt watched closely. In deep space it was hard to screw up when using the transdrive. Space, in spite of its white, pretty glow of stars, was largely an emptiness, and some fine-tuning to Andrew Reznor's engine- the invention which opened the age of interstellar space- had built-in safeguards against a careless pilot programming in a trans that would end up at the core of one of the nuclear furnaces called stars. Inside a solar system, with a few odd planets swimming around and with the possibility of floating scrap left over from the planet forming process, it was a bit more tricky. He nodded as he saw Teddy make the right observations, the right adjustment, the perfect programming, and then he blinked and below, or out there, or up there, depending on how one wanted to think about space, was a beauty of a world, blue and bright, with weather and seas and brown-green land areas.

"Hey," he said, as Belle dived like a bullet toward the planet.

The Reznor transient-drive functioned in two modes, deriving its motive energy from an eerie sub-elementary particle that Andrew Reznor, its discoverer, called the "transque," pronounced with a "k" sound at the end. At sublight speeds the transdrive called for a redefinition of several formerly inviolate laws of physics and the nature of energy and matter. And what it did when it was kicked into FTL mode was a clear aberration that defied all known logic. All laws of physics became void, and parsecs could be covered without measurable loss of time.

Of course, the relatively short distance to be traveled from Belle's point of emergence from subspace or, as Reznor himself said jokingly, Alice's Wonderland to planetary atmosphere did not allow acceleration to that point where Einstein was proven somewhat right, when ship's mass began to increase and time to be altered, but the distance was enough for Belle to gain more speed than Matt liked.

"Teddy, you wanta slow down?" he asked mildly, as the good old Lamda 201 clicked and counted rapidly multiplying molecules of atmosphere.

"Slow it down, Teddy," he said, his voice a bit stronger, as Belle began to transmit through her hull the rush and whine of air.

"Teddy," he yelled, as a mighty sonic boom thundered behind them and he could see the red-yellow glow of heated air through the front ports.

"You're no fun at all," Teddy said, even as she began to slow the ship, and the heat flares started to dim and the hurricane of wind sound outside began to fade.

"Kick in the G.D.," Matt said calmly.

Teddy's long, slim fingers barely moved. The Reznor G.D. rumbled. That was the only trouble with the old man's Gravitational Deflection Planetary Engine. It growled. The sound was in the ship and from the ground it sounded like steady, distant thunder. The G.D. did interesting things with a planet's own force, its gravitational pull, and used that power to soar, dart, hover, land, or orbit within atmosphere. In an emergency the trans could be used, but Belle wasn't stressed for continuous use of that drive in atmosphere.

Belle was flying into the dawn at eighty thousand feet. Sunlight sparkled on her hull, making her a daytime star.

"Wow," Teddy said, as the planet moved slowly underneath, revealing everything that a planet should have- seas, land masses, mountains, rivers, lakes, vegetation. They were too high to see details of the greenery.

"What shall we call it?" Matt asked. He felt fine. It wasn't every day, or every year, or every lifetime that an explorer found a new life-zone planet.

"Do we get to name her?" Teddy asked eagerly, her green eyes wide, making Matt almost forget his excitement at finding a new world.

"We can submit suggestions."

"Beauty," Teddy said.

"We need a name, not a description."

"Can you think of anything better?"

"Just Beauty?"

"As in Beauty and the Beasts," Teddy said.

"That's singular, beast."

"Not in this case," she said.

"Point taken," he said, as he watched a new sea edge into view past a line of snowy, rugged mountains. "But we need to submit more than one suggested name."