Chapter 17

Feynman - 3754 C.E.

Jaden was in love with the wrong woman. By rights the one he loved the most should be Michelle, but it wasn't his long term partner whose mere presence shortened his breath and excited his heart however much he wished otherwise.

Instead, the chief object of his lust was Svetlana.

This was an utterly futile love, of course Not only did he not have the courage to confess the strength of his feelings to the exquisite freckled woman whose slender legs and sinuous neck his eyes followed guiltily whenever she walked by. Nor was it merely because she was already answered for. His love was most doomed because it was women and not men that Svetlana loved. Was there no Saturnian woman who broke the lesbian mould?

Jaden had been foolish enough to hint that he was attracted to the slender Saturnian, but what annoyed Michelle wasn't so much his eyes should wander but that they should be drawn to a white woman.

"What could possibly be the appeal of such sickly pale skin?"she retorted indignantly. "What's wrong with black women?"

Although Jaden knew that it was wrong to discriminate on the grounds of skin-colour, he understood Michelle's concerns. In a Solar System where ethnic identity had been irreparably compromised over the centuries, there were now as few naturally black people as there were purely white. It was only by virtue of their respective ancestors' marital prejudices that either Jaden or Michelle had retained any degree of ethnic purity. Of course, skin colour wasn't determined by birth alone. People could decide for themselves what skin pigmentation to adopt and these included very unnatural choices such as green, blue, orange and even striped or spotted.

Jaden and Michelle were clasped together in coital embrace, Jaden's penis deep inside his partner and their skin streaming with mutual perspiration, so it was easy for Michelle to dismiss her lover's tactlessness as the loosening of sexual fantasies that accompanied lovemaking.

As there were so few people stationed on the Feynman Space Observatory Jaden was in Svetlana's company on virtually every day. In fact, he often had to work with her. They were all professional astronomers, so there was much they could discuss. Jaden's tour of duty on Feynman was his first not on the surface of Triton, the moon where Michelle and he had been born. Svetlana and her wife had previously been stationed in an observatory around Saturn where they'd been studying the planet's rings and its swirling helium clouds.

Jaden was astonished when Svetlana casually mentioned that she'd been married for over twenty years. Jaden calculated that she was old enough to be his mother, although such was the quality of regenerative surgery that it wasn't at all obvious that she was any older than Jaden's twenty-five years. Her relative seniority in years didn't diminish her beauty although Jaden now felt even more gauche in her presence. She treated the dark-skinned Neptunian kindly although his lovelorn glances almost certainly betrayed how besotted he was.

The Feynman was one of the most distant observatories in the Solar System. It wasn't the most distant, of course. Several observatories were stationed beyond the Kuiper Belt and some beyond even the Oort Cloud. The space observatory furthest from the sun was also the most distant permanent settlement in the entire Solar System, well beyond the heliopause and nearly half a light year from Earth. It was every astronomer's ambition to be stationed there although Jaden knew, as did everyone else, that its isolation was so extreme that no-one ever chose to renew their tour of duty. Feynman was one of very few observatories not in the Solar System's ecliptic plane. It was two light weeks from the nearest planet or Kuiper Belt Object. Not many observatories on the ecliptic could boast that degree of isolation.

There was very little economic or scientific justification for the Feynman's existence when it was built in the thirtieth century. The construction had been punitively expense as the building materials all had to be transported a truly immense distance. It was more a statement of power by the Union of Democratic Planets which, at the time, was one of the two main economic and political unions in the Solar System. It was a demonstration of how far its sphere of influence exceeded that of the competing Solar Nations which in those days represented the most Solar System's democratic and capitalist economies, including most of those on Earth. The Union of Democratic Planets, on the other hand, represented political systems that on the whole weren't even remotely democratic. Several revolutions and civil wars later, the space observatory was now firmly under the aegis of the Interplanetary Union. Few expected that the discovery of the Anomaly in the thirty-sixth century might propel the Feynman to the status of the most significant observatory in the entire Solar System. However, this was an honour that would only remain until the construction of another space observatory, the Hawking, a further light week distant from the ecliptic plane. The Feynman had been assigned the highly classified mission of observing the Anomaly and the progress of the Space Ship Intrepid. The observatory was circled by a small flotilla of battle cruisers that would fly to the Intrepid's aid if needed. It was only prudent that a mission of such colossal expense and political significance should have some kind of military backup.

Jaden was on observation duty for only a few hours a week. The rest of his time was occupied in trying to interpret the huge mass of data that was constantly being gathered by the observatory's automated systems. Every day the newly discovered exoplanets from the outer regions of the galaxy was catalogued. Every day several hundred new stars in distant galaxies were added to the billions already known. The observable universe was so vast that it simply wasn't possible to complete the task of identifying, cataloguing and analysing all the objects it contained. Jaden's expertise would only really be required if a phenomenon was identified that couldn't be automatically classified. This might be when its status was so ambiguous that an expert had to determine whether it was a planet, a brown dwarf or some other cosmic object.

Inevitably, what most arrested the astronomers' attention were the Anomaly and the associated strange apparitions being monitored by the space observatory's thousands of radio, electromagnetic and gravitational telescopes. In itself, the Anomaly was weird enough. Telescopes that could analyse a grain of sand on Mars or a meteorite over Jupiter still couldn't properly view the Anomaly. It radiated no light. It exerted no gravitational distortion. It interacted hardly at all with the stream of neutrinos or photons that passed by it. It was more a visible absence of matter, baryonic or otherwise, than something explicable or concrete.

And then, just as exciting because of their bizarre nature and their utter unpredictability, were the thousands of odd apparitions that occurred every day but in their greatest number within less than a light day of the Anomaly. Just what were they? Could what was observed really be a space ship that travelled for no more than ten seconds and boasted military insignia that couldn't be matched to any nation within the Solar System? Was it really a swarm of bird-like wraiths that fluttered and swooped in airless space for as long as twenty seconds before they too vanished? What was the bipedal figure in a space suit that hovered in the vacuum of remote space before it too vanished leaving not even a gravitational ripple in the cosmos? And did the flashes and explosions that took place spontaneously and briefly so close to the Anomaly really leave no trace other than the stream of photons that were intercepted by the Feynman before they sped onwards to the space observatories two light weeks closer to the Solar System's ecliptic?

Jaden had seen some of these apparitions. They alarmed and fascinated him, but he was frustrated that he was prohibited from telling anyone other than his fellow astronomers of what he'd seen, not quite with his own eyes, but very nearly so through the Feynman's powerful telescopes.

The Interplanetary Union's powers didn't extend to being able to halt the pulse of photons on their journey to the Solar System's many amateur observatories and research institutes, but they could at least disguise the worrying extent of these observations. The mountain of news stories that was gathered and disseminated every day on these exotic astronomical phenomena was easily obscured by the greater volume of stories of warfare, political intrigue, human interest and celebrity that mostly clogged up the Solar System's media coverage.

"I swear it was some kind of a dinosaur," Svetlana remarked the next time Jaden shared a duty roster with her. "It wasn't one of those big ones, like a sauropod or stegosaur. It was human size and covered with a gorgeous feather coat that was all golden and yellow. It was only there for ten seconds and looked alarmed in a sort of intelligent way—not like a scared rabbit but more like a human. It had a peculiarly expressive face."

"Where did you see this dinosaur?" wondered Jaden, whose mind was still distracted by the memory of seeing Svetlana kiss her wife, Rika, just before they parted at the viewing chamber's door. Rika was as bald and hairless as Svetlana, but she was peculiarly thin and had a flattened oriental face. With their lips and bosoms pressed together, Jaden felt a wholly inappropriate swelling in his crotch that Michelle aroused far less readily. He would do anything to swap places with Rika—even if it meant a change of gender—for the opportunity to share the pleasures of Svetlana's freckled small breasted body: preferably unclothed and expressing the same desire that she showed her wife.

"I saw it, too," remarked Ali, a tall ivory-skinned Uranian whose tight-fitting clothes were stretched to the limits by the exaggerated contours of his muscular body. Jaden was slightly ill at ease as Ali was at least as homosexual as Svetlana and he didn't want to give the man the wrong impression. "Beautiful it was. Where do you think it came from? If it came from another star I'd love to go there. The only aliens I've ever seen were smaller than a speck of dust."

"We don't know where these weird things come from," said Vanity, the fourth and final astronomer on their watch. "If they're aliens, why don't they hang around longer? I think they come from a parallel universe."

"Pah!" said Svetlana, who was the most sceptical. "I think it's all just a kind of mirage. They're just images that kind of bounce back to Earth from a hundred million years ago. I go along with the theory that the Anomaly is nothing more than a kind of mirror that focuses reflections back to the Solar System from far out in space."

"How does that work?" wondered Ali.

"I don't know," admitted Svetlana airily. "But it's more plausible than some of the other theories going round. Space and time is curved and maybe images are brought together by some unknown kind of dark matter and radiate out again from the Anomaly. My guess is that some time in the future we'll discover that space is littered with these phenomena and all they do is relay distant images."