The Odri Genealogy



Steven M. Moore

Copyright, 2007





1. Out of the Nexus

Odri e’Mon Ruspi e’Fom was descended from a long line of explorers. His people had been explorers for some four hundred million years. While not the oldest galactic race to explore beyond their own solar system, they were among the oldest surviving ones.
He returned home through the Nexus. He felt the little ripple through his innards which often left him with indigestion in at least one of his two stomachs if he did it too soon after eating.
His ancestry immediately confronted him. Most of that long line of explorers was stored in computer memory units that defined the very essence of his semi-organic house and kept it running smoothly and automatically. They usually did it unobtrusively. This time he had been gone for about three thousand years, so they were more demanding of his attention. They didn’t like to be left alone that long.
Yet there were voices missing from the chorus that any house guest would immediately notice.
For example, missing was a complete version of Odri e’Mon Ruspi e’Sas, the dearly departed relative whose essence was never recovered from that one ill-fated mission. Although he had made a copy before he left, the copy lacked all those last experiences….


2. Near Saturn, 226 Million Years Ago

Ship was going out of phase. Odri knew it, even though he was no engineer. He felt it in one of his two stomachs, the top one, where his most recent meal resided. There was nothing he could do about it. Ship would try to bring itself back into phase the best it could and probably would not even consult with Odri or the other two. In a sense, Ship was the fourth crew member and right now it was very busy.
Odri was in charge of the mission, a fact that the others riding in Ship sometimes forgot in their complaining and whining. He was the organizer, the leader, even though physically he was not as imposing as the other three. He was short, barely coming to the largest passenger’s knees. Six of his people’s eight legs had stayed legs in the long evolutionary trip from the seas of their native planet to the emptiness between the stars. The other two had become arms with four fingers and two opposable thumbs on each hand. These were the hands of the ship builders.
Ship was also a product of a long evolution. It had evolved out of the first semi-organic AI constructs that had carried Odri’s people to the stars. For millennia they had shared a parallel and nearly symbiotic technological evolution, each dependent on the other, each complementing the other. It was not a surprise to the others, then, that neither Ship nor Odri felt any fear.
If we could see the future, we would do nothing at all, for danger is everywhere.
Ship and he both lived to explore, to be in space.
The other two, Phumon and Badja, had almost fainted from fear, a fact that mercifully had stopped their complaining. Phumon, the tall and egotistical poet, was sprawled in his couch in another room, not in the least embarrassed by the pink dribble that had trickled down his ashen chin to soil his royal white robes. He had never wanted to go on this quest, but Odri had been insistent, since the ghostly gray-skinned bard to the Royal House of Oskajen possessed a part of the so-called healing code dispersed among the inessential genetic information in what served his species as junk DNA. His people were mostly peaceful traders, but trading was also exploration. They had just begun to expand beyond their home solar system when Odri’s people had discovered them.
Badja, on the other hand, was an astronomer. He was a composite intelligence of many small, furry, six-legged animals, which individually were quite stupid but possessed an awesome intellect when telepathically linked. To do this they had to maintain themselves in a large ball approximately one hundred strong, clutching tightly to each other’s fur. Mobility was quite complicated and their movement together seemed more akin to that of a giant, furry microbe. Normally the whole was greater than the sum of its parts, but at the moment the telepathic links were hardly functioning. The colony was in distress, so Badja was practically catatonic. He also held one of the healing codes in his collective brand of junk DNA.
The quantum dephasing caused tremors in the artificial space-time continuum created by Ship’s superstring drive. Ship knew it was in danger of catastrophically popping out into a universe very different from the one they knew and loved. There were rumors that some ships had done that and yet managed to return, but theoretically they could pop into a space-time continuum where, for example, Planck’s constant had a value where a hydrogen atom would not even be stable. Faster-than-light travel was based on controlling quaternion probability phases across multiple quantum realities as much as it was classical superstring geometry. The FTL part was an illusion, a consequence of the fact that a pair of points in one universe that were separated by lightyears were congruent to a pair in another universe that were very close together.
To Ship’s credit, the dephasing was unavoidable. The mathematical problem it was trying to solve had no solution. They were approaching an anomaly in the space-time continuum that theory predicted existed only on a set of total probability measure zero, but existed nonetheless. The fractal nature of the solutions to the quaternion field equations was a fact of life. Dimensions were no longer integers but real numbers.
One instant Ship and friends were in superstring neverland. The next they were surrounded by solid rock. Odri was surprised. He rubbed his upper stomach and belched.
“We’re not dead,” he informed the others, then felt stupid for stating the obvious.
“You soon will be,” said Ship.
“Why so?” asked Phumon.
“Using ordinary seismic probing, I have determined that we are just below the surface of a small moon. On a grander scale, my gravitational wave detector tells me that we are close to a rather large planet, probably a gas giant. Badja, please check me on all that at your leisure. If I am correct, we are trapped. You will live as long as your air lasts, which is not long, since our rocky prison has somehow damaged my main CO2 scrubber. On the other hand, I can tolerate an unbalanced atmosphere, so I could live for some hundreds of millions of years, but my sentience will gradually wither away.”
“We will die of suffocation and you will die of dementia. Why did we come on this trip?” Phumon was nearly hysterical.
“Because I ordered you to come,” said Odri. “You may blame me all you want, but have you forgotten our mission?” Odri left unsaid the fact that the Royal House of Oskajen was considerably in debt to the shipbuilders, not an unusual state of affairs for new galactic citizens.
“We are just spares anyway,” whined Badja. “Others with the healing codes have gone ahead, and we don’t even have the datasets, just the keys. We’ve always been expendable, the backup team. Now you will have to face that, to recognize finally how true that is. They must do it all now anyway. I am sure they will do a good job. I’ve been sure of that all along. There was no need for a backup team. And what do we get in place of making our names live on in the history of space exploration? Nothing, since we only have the time left to prepare ourselves to meet our gods.”
Silence was the immediate response to Badja’s complaints. Odri collected his thoughts and prepared himself to launch into a long-winded and scolding lecture, but Ship interrupted.
“Before tending to your religious needs, may I suggest that you all download your life matrices into my memory? At least your most recent thoughts and memories as well as your genetic information will be on file if anyone ever finds me.” Ship, ever practical, had decided upon a course of action that would at least save the knowledge about their mission as well as the program data stored in their genetic makeup. “It will take quite a few hours for each one of you, but there should be time before air begins to run out. I suggest you go first, Badja, since you can link directly with me without drugs. Then Phumon, then Odri.”
“An excellent suggestion,” said Odri. The other two silently agreed in the manner of their people. It was their only choice to at least partially beat death.


3. Dreams

Since he was tired, Odri’s first desire after arriving home was to catch up on sleep. Like most sentients, he had dreams. Some of the dreams were coupled into the dreams of his ancestors as they would relive parts of their lives together. It was a personal way to stay in touch with his heritage. This time he dreamed with another Odri who was a botanist….


4. On Earth, 64 Million Years Ago

The rain forest was over and beyond what Odri expected from his survey of the planet from space. According to the records, only about 1.5 million years ago mighty beasts had ruled the raw wilderness here, making it dangerous for any visitor from off planet. Even now, as he walked through the forest, collecting a few more plant specimens, he felt small and threatened.
From space he had been impressed by the mountains to the west of his present location. They towered over 3000 meters above the sea levels of the great gulf to the south and the long arm of the northern ocean that extended into the continent. Precipitation for the rain forest came from humid winds that lost their moisture as they ascended the slopes of those mountains. It had been a likely place to look for new and interesting plants when he had first seen it several decades ago. It had lived up to its promise.
He now felt he was friends with the several types of conifers and ferns and many species of broad-leaved flowering trees. The leaves were large, averaging more than 60 square centimeters on the mature plants. Without even having to measure it, Odri had easily estimated that the average rainfall per planetary year in the forest was 225 cm. A large percentage of the plant species had smooth-edged leaves which also indicated that the rain forest had an average temperature of some 22 degrees centigrade, an estimated average quite close to that observed during his stay here.
The beauty and the diversity of the forest did little, however, to reduce his fear. He always felt that way. Here he was an intruder. He was a trespasser on this primitive world, a spoiler of its innocence in a way, measuring, taking notes, comparing related species – all the work of a scientist curious about the many forms of life on this and other planets, but an intruder all the same. It made him always step gingerly through the forest, fearful of squashing the smallest bug or breaking a budding branch. He was experiencing the sweet mystery of life. Throughout the cosmos it was a precious thing. For Odri it was almost a spiritual communion.
The shipbuilders, as his people called themselves, visited the planet quite frequently, relatively speaking, recording the various stages in the planet’s evolution where life was in a riotous turmoil as old species died and new ones took their place at a breathtaking pace. It was often not the case in the rest of the galaxy. Most solar systems were not amenable to life. In their development out of the debris that circled the parent star, gas giants were often formed, sweeping up everything. Although this planet’s solar system possessed several gas giants, they were all far enough from the primary to leave room for smaller planets. Three of these were in the critical zone where life could grab a tenuous foothold, but only the one he was on was nearly perfect for its development.
Such planets were not uncommon. Again, all was relative. Out of the millions of solar systems in the galaxy, such planets were not statistically significant, but there were still thousands and thousands of them. Moreover, life seemed to be more vibrant here, revolting against the cold cubic parsecs of nothingness that filled most of the known universe. One life form seemed to climb over others on its ways to dominance, only to be subdued by another stronger and more adaptable one. Odri and his fellows knew that such places inevitably produced sentient beings and there was some small probability that these would reach the stars themselves. Consequently, even though the cosmic neighborhood of this planet’s star was far away from the more traveled routes, it held a strange attraction for scientists like himself.
As much as he would like to, though, he couldn’t stay any longer. He had been going to and from his ship in his small shuttle now for many planetary revolutions about its sun. It was time to return home for a while. Maybe to find another wife and have a few more children, like the last time.
As was the custom, Odri had one last duty to perform. He had already picked out a spot, a small cave in a hillside that was partially hidden by a rockslide. He soon found it again and brought out a small device from the kit on his back. The microwave beacon would transmit a low level spread spectrum code that would tell any other shipbuilder landing here in the future that he, Odri e’ Mon Junji e’ Sas, had been to this planet. If the future explorer knew how, he could then access the memory in the accompanying memory cubes and discover what he had found. The device contained a power pack that was guaranteed to last for about ten million years, although he had never known one to fail.
With that done, Odri took his leave of what one day would be known as the state of Colorado. His shuttle lifted off close to where I-25 would pass near the town of Castle Rock.


5. Wake-up Call

Odri stirred and was suddenly awake.
“You must listen to my story,” declared Odri e’Mon Junji e’Bom, one of the more vocal ancestors.
“All right, tell me your story. I have probably heard it before so it will bore me and I will go to sleep again. You were a scientist, I believe.”
“Much more of a scientist than any of you,” the irascible Odri declared.
This piqued the live Odri’s curiosity.
“I don’t believe I’ve heard your story, then.”
“I actually have many stories. This one will entertain you.”
The live Odri’s eyes began to close….


6. The Black Hole, Five Million Years in Earth’s Past

The shipbuilders had always been afraid of the black holes at galaxy center. For them, fear is always an enemy to be faced and vanquished, so they sponsored many scientiific expeditions to galaxy center. The irascible ancestor led the fifty-seventh. It was the most frightening event in his life, but he would do it all over again if given the chance.
In those days before the Nexus and at those distances even the subjective time in other spaces becomes tedious. Finally their ship returned to normal space still far from the nearest black hole. It masses many thousands of suns and warps space. There is no way to make the superstring drives work close to it.
To speed up the approach to the black hole, Odri had designed a special ram scoop that collected the hot plasma that swirled and eddied about it even at those distances. The material, mostly ionized hydrogen, was fusioned in order to make a miniature sun that they rode in on. It was an old design that had been popular once but by now was generally considered outmoded, inefficient, and unsafe.
They were into day thirty-seven of the approach when Odri began to feel the tides. The gravity gradient was beginning to be noticeable. On day forty-three they stopped, not daring to get any closer.
“Odri, we are ready to begin the experiments.”
This was Jadi, the chief scientist. He was too young for his job, in Odri’s opinion, but quite competent. They had a lengthy list of tasks before them, so Odri understood Jadi’s impatience to begin.
“Jadi, what do you make of this?” Odri asked, pointing to an instrument readout. “It is as if Ship wants to jump into some other universe.”
Jadi sat down at the console. He shook his head, perplexed.
“No one has come this close to either of the black holes before, Odri. Perhaps we should back off a little.”
That they did, but not very far. Both Jadi and he wanted the experiments to succeed where others had failed. Ship itself was a novel design, one that would be used in future expeditions, Odri was sure. Besides the extra drive, it had special tide-resistant walls. Odri had altered the genetic structure of the hull skin to make it more pliable, not less. In addition, Jadi and his fellow scientists had come up with several new instruments and software algorithms that were stored in Ship’s memory. They felt they were ready for the black hole.
However, none of them had anticipated the gravitational storms. It was as if the black hole was taking aim at them, pelting them with swirling vortices of space-time disturbances. No one had observed them before and Odri was sure the theoreticians would be busy for years trying to figure them out, although he overheard one of Jadi’s people mumble something about entangled quantum realities.
The first storms were tolerable and Ship took them in stride, yet they all suffered greatly. Odri had never felt so bad in his life. It was as if different parts of him were going in an up or down elevator, all at the same time, and sideways as well. All through this they were able to record new and exciting data using the new instruments. Odri was very pleased with himself, as the expedition would be known far and wide as a new trendsetter.
Odri should have learned by then not to count success too early. The first indication of a major storm was when Jadi’s face contorted in pain. One of the crew reached for him and Odri heard her arms snap. He immediately rolled into a ball, as he had told all the crew to do. The ones who didn’t remember the instructions died. Odri blacked out.
Odri supposed that Ship went into one of his nobler emergency subroutines. Before its larger superstructure was split into many pieces, the drive system pulsed one last time, giving the tiny tear drop that now contained mostly corpses a huge impulse away from the black hole.
Those who survived spent several weeks of anguish wondering if that impulse had been enough to escape or whether they would eventually slow and fall back into the black hole. They were adrift with food, water, and air, but they were blind to all external phenomena. They would only know that they were moving back towards the black hole when the tides and storms began again.
Finally, after five thousand plus years, they were rescued. The survivors became briefly famous since the data they brought back was invaluable. When Odri thought of brilliant Jadi and the others that were lost, he wondered if it was worth it. But he would do it again.


7. The Night Music

We should have passed into oblivion eons ago.
Most of the shipbuilders were bored, talking to their dead more than to the living. There was nothing more to be learned about the natural sciences like physics and chemistry. Even the biological sciences were dull, made so because the seemingly infinite variety of biological organisms in the universe merely enumerated permutations of basic codes and building blocks that were well known.
What was left to study were the grand moments in the unfolding history of this universe, the psychology of the heroic individuals and their societies when galactic civilizations came into conflict. That wasn’t often and was not exciting enough for some of Odri’s companions. They sought escape far into the Nexus.
Odri rolled out of bed and walked over to one side of the spartan room. He sat down to play his zwarfoon. The traditional instrument was devilishly hard to play with its multiple sets of metallic strings and complicated sounding boards. He had learned it millennia ago on a dare, and was universally recognized now as the best player of the instrument.
He lived on a dark planet that swirled in and out of multiple space-times close to the galaxy’s center. In a real sense, the Nexus was his home. He had chosen this world for its rugged beauty. Although a poisonous atmosphere existed beyond the shield that protected his family compound, both the living and the dead, this world provided him a never-ending variety of scenery. He was anticipating an enjoyable and relaxing evening with music to soothe the ears and a magnificent aurora borealis to soothe the eyes.
In their language they were still called the shipbuilders, since the word was much more complex and contained the meaning of an entire phrase like “clever ones who make beautiful and complicated things with their hands.”
No lack of racial egotism there.
Most of his people did not even know the origins of their name for themselves. When they learned it, they would often dismiss its importance, preferring to think their distant ancestors were just ignorant about their place in the universe.
The Nexus was a relatively recent discovery for them, only three million years old. Although its existence was known long before and many had worked on the problem of directly accessing it, the ancestor who had discovered how to negotiate its various quantum realities had been the sole survivor of a terrible accident with an FTL ship. Justly so, her discovery almost immediately made all their FTL ships obsolete, once they learned how to better control their passage through it.
Odri wasn’t naïve enough to think that they had actually explored it completely, if such a concept even had meaning.
Occasionally Odri’s people had encountered others in the Nexus, some even from distant galaxies. But that wasn’t often. Their home universe was a big place and wandering in and out of various universes was not as simple as strolling to the refreshment robot to ask for a drink, which is what Odri did, savoring the pink, bubbling liquid with its pleasant taste and just enough alcohol to give him a buzz. He curled up again on the mat and staring out the bubble window that wrapped around one entire corner of his house.
Yes, it was no wonder that the Nexus was nearly empty. Danger lurked everywhere, especially for the ingenuous.
Why so many of his people just disappeared into it puzzled him. Many never left. Yet he was itching to be on his way again. In a few hundred years maybe he’d visit that planet Odri e’ Mon Junji e’ Sas had talked about.

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