Spacer Tales: The Explorer

Exploration Corps officer Amil Talen has just got back from a two year expedition, telling tales of strange new life forms. But just what is it lurking at the bottom of that cave?

Kluskey’s bar was busy with spacers and their kids enjoying a family event.  At these times Kluskey’s only served foamy cornbeer and soft drinks, along with protaburgers and Tam Kluskey’s famous ice cream mountain.   The dance floor had been set to bounce-grav, with a bunch of kids there shrieking and laughing as the gravity alternately flipped them into the air and bounced them back again.  Everyone was having fun, with Tam himself chatting with customers as they got their orders from the automated bar.

 

Then the Excorps’ officer strolled in and everyone went nuts.  The Exploration Corps were the superstars of the spacer community, as famous as movie or sports stars.   They would have recognised this man the moment they saw him even without the blue Excorps’ uniform and the Astrover mission badge on his arm.  This was Lt Amil Talen, recently returned from a two year expedition.  He had the stocky build, chestnut-brown skin and dark silky hair of a native Neuwaldian, with chocolate-warm eyes and a wide, friendly smile.  He had been Wobbly on the Astrover expedition �" an Excorps term for an officer going on their first deep space exploration -  and was now back on Neuwald for a few months’ leave.  The fact that the local media had not get got tired of chasing him for interviews was apparent from the glare of camera lights and howls of frustration as the journalists were prevented from following him into the bar, but Amil was entirely at ease with it and just laughed as the people inside yelled with excitement at his arrival.

‘Hey, Tam.’  He acknowledged the cheers of the crowd with a friendly grin, but came straight over to the bar with an outstretched hand, greeting the owner of Neuwald’s most popular spacer hangout.

 

‘Good to see you, Amil.’  Tam grinned back.  Tall and shaggy haired, Tam Kluskey seemed to be behind the bar pretty much all of the time, apparently surviving on bar food and catching naps when things were quiet.   ‘Cornbeer?’  Tam drew a glass himself, overriding the automatic systems, and laughed again as at least thirty spacers were waving credits at him, trying to pay for Amil’s drink.  No member of Excorps would ever have to pay for their own beer in any spacer bar.  They could fill swimming pools with the amount that people tried to buy them.  ‘On the house!’  Tam told the crowd, and they accepted that, though several of them immediately asked the explorer if he wanted anything to eat. 

 

‘No, no thanks.’  Amil gave Tam a nod of thanks as he took the glass of creamy cornbeer and tasted it appreciatively. ‘I’ve got a dinner thing to go to.’  He explained, gesturing at his uniform as the offers to buy him a meal began to escalate.  Amil might be home on leave, but it was expected that he would give interviews and attend social events.  There were, after all, less than a hundred members of Excorps on active service, most of them by definition far out in uncharted space, so when any of them did return to their homeworlds there would be a lot of dinners held in their honour, invitations to lunch with the System President and so on.   ‘Can’t stay long, just called in for a beer and to pick up the goss.’  Said Amil, which made the spacers laugh because right now he and the Astrover expedition were the gossip. 

The Astrover had crossed the Gulf, the enormous gap between spiral arms of the galaxy, and had been exploring uncharted space.  They had discovered four new living worlds, with the most advanced life form on any of them a six legged amphibian which hooted and whistled.  There was already a clamour from the spacers asking him to tell them about it, with the nearest of them patting the surface of the bar encouragingly.

 

Amil hopped up to sit on the bar, laughing again at the roar which went up from the spacers at this indication that he was willing to tell them a story.   The crowd was already gathering around, shushing one another.  Kids were pushing through to stand at the front, looking up at the explorer with eager, excited faces.  Most of these kids were growing up on freighters, spending weeks at a time out in deep space.  Some of them had even been born on starships, spacebrats to the bone.  Even the youngest kid there, a chubby four year old with ice cream round his mouth, could have named every member of the Astrover expedition and the four living biosphere worlds they had discovered.

 

‘Okay, okay!’  Amil quietened everyone down with a lifted hand, and as an expectant silence fell, went on, ‘I’ll tell you about Camilvald.’   Some of the children cheered but others hushed them quickly, everyone listening with keen interest as the explorer took a sip of his cornbeer and began his story.

‘It was the third biosphere we surveyed.  The first two were slimeworlds, with nothing of interest.’  The spacers nodded understanding.  Most of the worlds which registered as having a living biosphere on long-range scanning turned out on closer inspection to be covered in various kinds of algae.  Spacers called them slimeworlds, only visiting them if they were desperate for some time off the ship.  A few hours of shoreleave on a cold, stinking, slime-encrusted planet could really make you appreciate the comforts aboard ship.

 

‘As we came up to XJ-379 we could see it had a much richer biosphere.’  Amil said.  ‘Though no indications of any kind of technology or civilisation.  So we put probes into orbit and after four days of scanning found nothing but primitive fauna, the go was given for atmospheric and ground sampling.  We spent eleven days doing that using ROPs.’ 

 

The Remote Operated Probes that Excorps used were entirely sterile, designed to protect both the environments of the worlds they were surveying and the crew of the ship as they brought samples back for analysis.  Nobody knew, after all, what kind of deadly pathogens might be found on unknown worlds.

 

‘Finally, it was decided that it was safe for us to go groundside.’  Amil’s face showed the excitement he’d felt when that decision was made.  Strictly speaking it wasn’t necessary for explorers to set foot on the worlds they were surveying, since ROPs could collect all the data and samples needed, but no world was really considered properly ‘discovered’ till humans had actually set foot on it.  In a tradition as old as space travel itself, the first explorers setting foot on a newly discovered world were allowed to name it.

 

‘So, we went down.’  Amil told them.   ‘Five of us �" Chucky Elvorth in command, Dal T as pilot and environmental officer, Cinthy Jahala as medic and safety officer, Pullo Giscard as biologist, and me.  Me being Wobbly, of course, I came along at the back with the trolley, bringing all the gear.’

 

He paused, remembering, a look of wonder on his face.

 

‘I’d been dreaming of that moment all my life.’  He said.   ‘I was ten years old when I decided I wanted to be an explorer.’  He looked at the kids, seeing that several of them were nodding or saying, ‘Yes, me too!’   Many kids, even groundhogs who’d never been further into space than a bus ride within their own star system, went through a phase of wanting to become explorers one day.

 

‘It takes a lot of work.’  Amil warned.  ‘Doing the right courses in high school and college and jumping through all the hoops you need to in order to join the Fleet, graduating as an officer and getting all the shipboard experience and other qualifications that Excorps want before they’ll even consider you.  I was with the Fleet for six years and had to get qualifications in physics, exo-environmental studies and archaeology before I even applied to Excorps.  Then I spent two more years training with them and another year working at a base before I was selected for the Astrover expedition.

 

‘It was an incredible experience.  We were eight months out, by then, well past Beyond and deep in Forever.’ 

 

The kids beamed at that, recognising the reference to a very famous book, ‘Past Beyond to Forever’, written by explorer for kids about what it was like to go beyond the limits of human explored space into infinity.  ‘I’d stood on eleven new worlds, nine of them lifeless and two slimeworlds.’  Amil smiled again at the memory.  ‘Even slimeworlds and dead rocks are amazing when you know you’re the first people ever to stand on them.  But for all of us, of course, short of the golden prize of making first contact with intelligent life, what we dream of is walking on alien worlds, seeing strange new life forms no human eyes have ever seen before.  And there we were, stepping out onto this weird, beautiful alien world.’

 

They had all seen the pictures, naturally, with extensive footage released by Excorps along with a lot of scientific data.  Camilvald was a light gravity world with a high proportion of water.  Hot, humid and often stormy, it had evolved high growing plants which tended to be thin and flexible, bending in the wind.  The site where the Astrover team had landed had been on the shore where a vast forest bordered a shallow ocean.  The forest mostly looked like gigantic cress, with thin pale stems supporting an umbrella of leaves right at the top.  On the forest floor, colourful moulds added splashes of orange and luminous green.  Hundreds of different species of bugs had been discovered, the largest of them a crab-like critter, several centimetres across, which grazed on the orange mould.

 

‘It was Cinthy’s turn to pick a name.’  Amil explained.  ‘And she chose ‘Camilvald’, Camille’s World, naming it after her niece.  We had a little ceremony doing that, then got down to exploring and picking names for the critters we saw.  The rule is you can only give it a name if you see it with your own eyes.’

 

‘Were you naming critters, too?’  One of the kids interrupted, wide eyed with amazement at meeting someone who had actually discovered and named new species.

 

‘Sure!’  Amil laughed at that.  ‘The Wobbly gets to do a lot of that.  The others have already been on expeditions, see, and named lots of stuff, but it’s all new to you so they often let the Wobbly do that kind of thing.  I named lots of stuff on Camilvald.  My favourite was the shufflebum bug.  I called it that because it shuffled its rear end in the soil as it went along.  It wasn’t me who named the xamphy, though, no.  Naming the top critter, top of the food chain, is the mission commander’s privilege.

 

‘The xamphies are amazing.  They live on the shoreline, eating seaweed.  We landed close to a beach where there were hundreds of them, eating seaweed which had been washed up by the tide.  Camilvald has two big moons; big and complicated tides.  Anyway, we were able to go right in amongst the xamphies.  They took no notice of us at all.  Never having seen anything like people before, they just didn’t recognise us as any kind of threat.  They hoot and whistle to each other all the time. A beach full of them sounds like a really bad orchestra trying to tune up.  They stand about knee high when they’re up on all six legs, and most of the time they waddle along lifting all the legs on one side, then on the other.  If they’re being threatened by another xamphy, though, they kind of throw themselves sideways and tuck all their legs in and roll away fast.  Sometimes that knocks other xamphies over or seeing another xamphy rolling at them makes them throw themselves into a roll, so if one of them does it you get a whole load of them rolling madly over the beach.   We stood there just watching them, you know?  With the rain coming down and the cress-trees waving like gigantic grass, seeing things that no humans have ever seen before, and it was just one of the best times of my life.’

There were appreciative murmurs from the spacers, there with the explorer in their imaginations, but one of the older kids, a boy of twelve or so, was looking at Amil suspiciously.

‘Is that really all that you found?’ He asked, with heavy significance on the ‘all’.  It was a common conspiracy theory amongst groundsiders that Excorps covered up the discovery of worlds with intelligent life, for fear of causing panic.  The discovery of Marfik, sixteen hundred years before, had unleashed a terror on the galaxy which humanity outside the borders of the mighty League was still suffering from.  Even now, humanity’s relationship with the genetically engineered and entirely peaceful people of Quarus was, while officially admitted to, being kept very low key.  Quarians were not permitted to enter human space, and only spacers knew much about them.

 

The difference between groundsiders and spacers, however, was that while groundsiders suspected government cover-up of contact with other species and called it conspiracy theory, spacers knew for a fact that it was true.   Not all spacer yarns about alien encounters were made up.

 

Amil grinned.

 

‘If I told you,’ he joked, ‘the LIA would shoot you, and me, and anyone else we might have told.’

 

That got a laugh �" the League Intelligence Agency could not prevent spacers from talking to one another, finding things out that the authorities were trying to keep secret and passing them along as their ships met out in space.  They couldn’t even stop them telling stories about things they’d heard about in spacer hangouts like Kluskey’s.  All they could do was try to manage the situation by asking spacers not to tell those stories to the general public, and by spacers themselves having such a reputation for spinning tall tales that any story they told would not be believed.

 

‘Come on!’  The boy insisted, not at all impressed by the explorer dodging his question.  ‘What did you find that they’re not letting the media know about?’

 

Amil considered for a moment, and grinned.

 

‘Well…’  He said, lowering his tone to confidential level, and as the audience leaned in closer, told them, ‘There was one thing.  Not on Camilvald, but Agantor, the slimeworld we’d surveyed before that.  I didn’t say anything because this is, you know, top secret.’  He looked meaningfully round at them, and saw amusement on most faces, while the kids and the credulous looked awed. 

 

‘When we surveyed Agantor,’ the explorer said, ‘there was this weird cave near the equator  which had a stream of gas pouring out of it.  Our first thought was that it was some kind of geological vent, but the gas analysis made no sense.  It was mostly methane but with nitrogen, hydrogen and sulphides, not matching any geologic process on record.  We couldn’t make any sense of it with probes so we went in to investigate.  There was this pale green gas flowing out of the cave and spreading out into a cloud.  It was warm, too, much warmer than the atmosphere.  We had to go down into the cave to find out what it was. 

 

‘It was huge, inside, with long tunnels and caverns.  Pitch black, with a yellow algae growing from the walls and the roof, hanging like wet slimy curtains.  Water was dripping everywhere, and all the time this warm green mist was flowing over us.  On and on we went, deeper and deeper.  My heart was thumping as we could see that we were coming up on something enormous and warm, so big it was filling a cavern.  We had no idea what we were going to find.  We were all on our toes, nobody talking much, creeping on and down into the dark.  And then…’  Amil paused, leaning forward and lowering his tone even further, glancing around as if checking for journalists or LIA agents.  ‘And then…’

 

‘What?’  Several of the kids demanded, one girl grabbing Amil’s knee, holding her breath with fearful thrill.

 

‘We found it.’  Amil’s tone was deeply impressive, and had the kids agog.

 

‘What?’

 

‘What was it?’

 

‘Was it an alien?’

 

‘You mustn’t tell anyone.’  Amil cautioned.  ‘This is strictly between us, right?’  Reassured on that point, with many of the kids crossing their hearts and promising not to tell, he leaned forward again and told them, ‘The thing that was making the gas flow out of the cave, the thing that was down there, deep in the dark, was…’  A pause to build up the suspense, ‘was…’

 

‘What?  What?’  The kids clamoured.

 

‘A space dragon,’  Amil told them.  ‘which had just farted.’

 

As the hangout exploded with laughter, Tam Kluskey leaned on the bar with a contented chuckle. 

 

You could always, he thought, rely on an explorer for an entertaining yarn.

Reviews

[Weaver]

3 of the 4 sentences in your opening paragraph follow a 'this happened with that' pattern. You may want to vary the sentences a bit more.
comma after "strolled in"
"returned from a two year expedition" - "two-year"
You've got a dash showing up as a double quote after "Wobbly on the Astrover expedition" - This if a formatting glitch caused by having smart quotes and em-dashes turned on in Microsoft Word (and maybe other programs); it can be prevented by turning those off, or just fixed by editing once the writing is posted here.
"media had not get got tired"- "had not yet gotten tired"?
"Tall and shaggy haired" - "shaggy-haired"
"thirty spacers were waving credits" - "waved credits at him" (I'm not allergic to passive voice, but it just doesn't work there.)
comma, not period, after "dinner thing to go to" and don't capitalize "he explained"
comma after "return to their homeworlds"
comma, not period, after "pick up the goss" and don't capitalize "said Amil"
"six legged amphibian" - "six-legged"
"chubby four year old" - "four-year-old"
comma after "children cheered"
comma after "came up to XJ-379"
comma, not period, after "richer biosphere"
comma after "probes into orbit"
comma after "Strictly speaking"
comma, nor period, after "we went down"
dash turned to double quote after "Five of us"
comma, nor period, after "all my life" and don't capitalize "he said"
comma, not period, after "a lot of work"
"well past Beyond and deep in Forever" - I really like this expression.
Book titles are usually italicized, not put inside quotes.
"written by explorer for kids" - dropped word?
"human explored space"- "human-explored"
comma, not period, after "pick a name"
don't capitalize "one of the kids interrupted" (it's the dialogue tag, not a new sentence)
comma after "all new to you"
comma, not semicolon, after "two big moons"
comma after "waddle along"
comma after "knocks other xamphies over"
comma after "one of them does it"
don't capitalize "he asked" after "all you found?"
"The difference between groundsiders and spacers, however, was that while groundsiders suspected government cover-up of contact with other species and called it conspiracy theory, spacers knew for a fact that it was true." - funny and interesting
dash turned to double quote after "That got a laugh"
don't capitalize "the boy insisted"
comma after "Well..." and don't capitalize "he said"
comma after "sense of it with probes"
don't capitalize "several of the kids demanded"
comma, not period, after "tell anyone"
comma, not period, after "'A space dragon,' Amil told them."
This is a fun story, and I can see it also being the "frame story" for a whole collection of spacer tales shared there at Kluskey's.

[Stuart Crook]

I really enjoyed this. I'm guessing from your website that you're writing for a younger audience, in which case the only small criticism I might have -- the amount of background exposition breaking the flow of the narrative -- makes sense, and the conversational tone of the narrator's voice helps minimise this.

[pia Z]

Fun! I love the whole spacer idea you've come up with - futuristic club kids! Watch the run-on sentences. It might be nice to actually see the story Amil recounts in real time, rather than simply through his eyes. :)