A quote: “A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it.” ~~ Jean de La Fontaine
This is a repeat as I’m on vacation. A story I enjoyed writing and I hope inspires you, too.
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One hundred years of waking up in his own Keep and Noah was still disoriented by planetside sounds.
Noah’s life had been destined to be lived only aboard Ship. He knew it soon after decanting when Ship explained there would be several more Noahes before Ship’s destination. And as long-lived as he was genetically altered to be, he was still a biological unit, not immortal.
Then Rogue Time forced them to drop out of their journey, cut all ansible communication, and find an alternative world for the cryo-lives they carried.
A tapping at the door and Grace’s head popped in. “Grandfather, there is a great gathering for you. Do not disappoint.”
Noah waved his hand, “Old woman, I will be there, if only to have my journey give me peace from your nagging.”
She laughed hard, but it held sadness, too.
And that edge of sadness also gripped the crowd that held pennants and flowers as he mounted his horse, packhorses in tow. He turned and waved as he passed through the gates, his other hand inside his robes holding tight a small ansible.
Ship was hidden halfway ‘round the world. After 100 years, would she wake when he called?
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Now, it’s your turn.
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.featured image, cropped, Adobe Stock standard license
Realizing we were looking at an ancient galactic map was our big breakthrough. Now we had the slow slog of figuring out how to translate the Old Galactic notation into something we could use to actually locate the system where the treasure planet was supposed to be.
A galaxy isn’t a platter spinning on a hub. It’s a system of systems, each having its own orbit around the giant black hole human astronomers called Sagittarius A*. Each star’s orbit has its own eccentricity and its inclination against the galactic plane.
So we had to identify where it would be in that orbit now — which meant determining the frame of reference for the massive body of data in our treasure map. Even the spectrographic data would have to be adjusted for 300 million years of stellar aging.
A sick thought came to mind. For all we knew, the treasure planet’s primary could’ve gone off the main sequence in that time and devoured everything we sought.
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