One is a Question
Day 1: Target Acquired
Excerpt from the Personal Journal of Rio J. Park
What a day. It’s bedtime now – you remember that Mission Command ran tests with real people and decided that having us all on the same shift was better for ship morale than trying to do rotations with only three crew. Fatimah has made it quite clear that there is to be no all-nighters except for real emergencies. I suspect she was talking mostly to herself. She’s been sitting in the obv-pod – that’s the “southern” space shuttle to you nosy historians, the S.S. Unity – almost since the last piece of cake was eaten. All during debrief her eyes kept moving to the window. Sad dark eyes.
She was fine during training, but now I wonder if it was really wise of Command to let her come.
But why am I talking about interpersonal things when so much else has happened? We jumped, just as smoothly as sailing, and the computer says we have only ended up off course by an order of ten thousand or so. It’s a good thing we weren’t planning on going back by engine! I’m curious if Mars will be able to figure out what happened, but mostly I’m just excited the system detection part worked and it didn’t jut dump us in empty space. There are planets here! Ten of them. Real, alien planets. Not that there is any signs at all of alien life, no artificial waves are being emitted by any of them, but the planets are still very much alien. The solar system revolves around a high mass star, still very blue which means young and – but no, I’ve already written my reports, this is my personal journal.
Leave it say that I requested permission to go out in the clod-pod (that’s the east shuttle, the S. S. Community. Which, still bothers me. Community and unity are too much alike. Unity is literally part of the word community. I understand why using brotherhood was out – that would have been nicely ironic, with a crew of all women – but surely they could have named it Family, or Empathy, or something?) At any rate, Fatimah had the good sense to ban pod usage until a jumpgate is laid and communications are re-established with Mission Command. So instead we are navigating to mid system, where there seems to be a conveniently empty belt of space in which to lay the jump gate. Preliminary analysis says we should be able to establish it in a stable solar orbit, which should make jumping in and out of it extremely easy. But it’s going to make for a rather long year.
Ah, I feel like a teenager. I’m much too excited for sleep!
“Folded up their tents,
and quietly slipped away”
That line just passed through my head. I think I will slip this journal back under my pillow and dig out my book of poems.