Let's Start Again

You and your companions are passengers on the Anastasia. It isn’t a cruise liner; it doesn’t offer much in the way of entertainment or comfort, it’s just a functional means of getting you to your destination and frankly you’ll be glad to see the back of it. During the first few weeks, when everything was new, it was thrilling: the sky was wonderful and the sight of the Earth receding day by day until it was a bright point indistinguishable from the stars, poignant. You’d composed a poem about it. So had several others. These days you keep the curtains of your cabin closed and try to catch up on your reading. You know it’s irrational to use curtains, apart from the stars it’s profoundly dark outside, but you can’t rid yourself of the fear that one day you’ll glance up to find somebody or something looking in.

In the evening you join your companions in the bar. For some, the next evening begins as soon as they wake up from the last, but you like to keep regular hours. The crew are rarely seen. They are probably stoking the boilers or mending the nets or whatever it is a ship’s crew do on a voyage. The captain and senior officers look in occasionally. The captain introduced himself jokingly as Bluebeard when you boarded. His real name is Oates. You hope it isn’t an omen. At least it isn’t Bligh or Ahab.

To pass the time until dinner you join your friends at the usual table. Faber was a fellow don, whereas Tallis is a relatively new acquaintance. He is an authority on Renaissance music and has spent the past year transcribing the best pieces from his collection by hand into a form suitable for bringing to his new home. You admire his skill with a pen and wish you had learned to write. Your college offers a degree in it so there’s no real excuse, but it takes at least a year of constant practice to reach even a basic level of fluency and you’ve never had the time. You can draw letter shapes, of course, if you have a screen of text to remind you, but the results are not aesthetically pleasing and it’s an impossibly slow and laborious process. Your prize possession is an ancient mechanical typewriter. It requires a lot of pressure to operate, your doctor warned you it will injure your joints in the long run, and it makes marks on rare and expensive paper rather than displaying it on a screen, but it’s close enough to a real keyboard to give you a written voice. Pioneers have to make sacrifices.

At dinner you often sit with Trevithick, the ship’s navigator. You find him strangely compelling and by far the best company of any of the ship’s officers. For a scientist he is surprisingly cultured. He is surprised that you are surprised, and also surprised that you think he’s a scientist. In spite of his degree in astrophysics, he thinks he’s a navigator. It’s all the same to you, all those computers and symbols and maths and stuff. Why split hairs?

Trevithick is astonished by your complete lack of interest in the works of God. You think he means churches and bibles until he points out that these are the works of Man. You tell him that science drains the mystery from life. He asks if surgery drains the mystery from people: whether the inevitable consequence of a career in medicine is to view your friends as mere bags of guts? You can’t think of a good answer, although you’re sure there must be one.

In your cabin you look for your copy of the planetary survey until you remember you’ve lent it to Trevithick. He might as well keep it since you’ll have nothing to view it on once you arrive. You’ve only read the summary, of course: who could be expected to understand all those charts, tables and diagrams in the main document? From the photographs your new home looks glorious and you are disappointed not to be able to examine them yet again.

In their absence you daydream. You and your fellow pioneers are celebrating the construction of the new concert hall. You decide to put on a show. What should it be? Pygmalion, perhaps? They’ll be expecting Shaw but you’ll give them Rousseau. It’s more difficult for a modern audience but in the end far more rewarding, being truer to the mythology. That is to say, closer in the literal sense, but … and your mind wanders off into those familiar and comfortable contemplations that have occupied so much of your professional life at Oxford.

Six weeks out from Earth the ship’s officers are preparing to make the jump that will bring you into the vicinity of your new home. You join the queue for the telescope for one last look at the Earth. Somehow it seems more real through a telescope than on the ship’s viewing screens. The screens make you think of science documentaries and, for all you know, the pictures might have been downloaded from the internet or created by CGI. There’s not much room for trickery in a telescope: you see what’s really there. Earth looks very small and insignificant. You can’t make out any detail, it’s just a tiny blob and you have only the crew’s word for it that it really is the Earth at all. Conversation is subdued. Even in the company of friends and colleagues you suddenly feel as lonely and homesick as when you left for the first time to attend Oxford as a student. You think of revising your poem but there will be plenty of time for typing after you arrive.

Tevithick invites you to the bridge to witness the jump. You wonder whether you’ve been accorded this privilege by virtue of being leader of the group or whether Trevithick too is feeling the bonds of friendship. The officers are preoccupied, busy with tasks you can only guess the purpose of. You soak up the atmosphere without bothering with the detail. There’s an air of tension but everybody seems to know their jobs and there is little talking. The jump itself is so low key you almost miss it. There are no streams of light, no vibration, no strange sensations, no getting squashed into your seat by acceleration. All that happens is that one pattern of stars is suddenly replaced by another. You feel relieved but a little disappointed.

Afterwards, Trevithick tells you that the jump is the only really dangerous part of the journey. For local traffic travelling a few tens of light years from Earth it is by now a routine matter but for long jumps there is a still, even today, a small but significant chance of missing your target and getting hopelessly lost. You’re glad he didn’t say anything beforehand.

Now there is excitement in the air. Around the telescope people talk about their hopes and dreams for a new life and return again and again to gaze at their fresh, unspoiled world. The image gets larger and more detailed by the day. You think about the things you’re escaping from: the way science has ruined the Earth, the pollution, the food riots, the empty triviality of popular culture, the constant stream of spam that interrupts you at every moment by every technological means available. You marvel that children accept it all as normal and somehow seem to steer a path through it without sustaining visible damage. They deal with all the new gadgets as if they were as natural as sunlight; they embrace the spam that tells them what cool things they need to own if they are to be successful and popular. To you they are creatures stranger than any space alien. You are too old to adapt. You have no desire to adapt. You suspect that you and your fellow settlers are the real aliens so it’s only fitting that you should live on a different planet.

Trevithick shares your concerns about the state of the Earth, it’s why he chooses to be away from it for so much of the time, but he is strangely quiet when you tell him of your hopes and dreams for your new life. You envision a world where literature and the arts can flourish, where intellect rules, where you can be among like-minded people without constant reminders that the Earth belongs to the coarse, the crude and the ignorant. When pressed, Trevithick agrees that your vision has merit, but you can tell he has doubts, although he is reluctant to say what they are.

There will be things from your old life that you’ll miss, of course. Easy access to books for one thing. When you assembled your library of printed works you were shocked by the amount of space a mere ten thousand volumes took up, to say nothing of its impact on your weight allowance for the flight. How will you ever find the one you want to refer to? How will you know where in the book to find the passage you need? Do you have to search every page? How will you extract the passage without copy and paste? How will you duplicate it and circulate it to others? You’ll have a lot of new skills to learn, but the pre-technological people managed it and so will you.

In weak moments you think it would have been better to compromise and import some machinery and modern devices, but for one thing how would you power them? Manufacturing ethanol in sufficient quantities to use as a fuel would be a full-scale industrial process. Any small amounts of ethanol you make you’ll want to drink: people do love their drugs. Solar energy would power some gadgets at the expense of cluttering your new home with ugly fields of panels, constant reminders of the worst aspects of Earth. Wind power would be ruled out for the same reason. There’d be arguments about who got power for what, and in any case gadgets had a limited life so you’d only be delaying the inevitable. And how would you dispose of them afterwards? Did you want to bury toxic waste in the virgin soil of your new home? And once you’d compromised in one area, where would it end? No, far better to make a fresh start.

You haven’t seen Trevithick for a while but one evening, a week out from disembarkation, he sits down at your table in the bar. You’re surprised: ethanol is not his drug of choice and you’ve never seen him drink before. There’s something on his mind but he just sits quietly until Faber and Tallis retire. Then he asks how well prepared you are. You laugh, you can’t help yourself. Is that what’s worrying him? You tell him you’ve spent the past five years interviewing prospective settlers, being vetted by government agencies, making grant applications, attending courses in craft skills, buying provisions. In the ship’s cargo bays there are prefabricated buildings and furniture and enough dry food to see you through the first year. There are some very rare animals, even a pair of cows obtained at great expense from a zoo, to begin a farm. There are seeds, tools and implements, clothing, everything you could possibly need. The musical instruments (including two grand pianos), dance costumes, books and art materials are all part of people’s personal allowances. Maybe he thinks these are all you’ve brought?

To lighten the mood you tell him about a demonstration of a replica twentieth century cooking machine you witnessed as part of your application for a licence to use fire. You’ve dined out on the story for the past two years but this time it falls flat. Trevithick waits patiently for you to finish but doesn’t show any interest. He asks if you know how many new colonies succeed. All of them, surely? He tells you it’s less than one in ten. You protest that if so few succeed, the returning colonists would tell their stories and everybody would know about it. He says that, by success, he means that only in a tenth of all colonies is anybody still alive when they are visited after the five year settlement period. Dead or alive, nobody ever comes back. You don’t believe him. It must be a joke. But he knows the score, he works on the transport ships, and you can see from his face that he is serious.

You try to explain to him that this planet is as close to perfection as anything you could imagine, that even if you’d had it built to your own specifications you could hardly have done a better job. He asks whether you’ve read the survey. You tell him you’ve read the summary and looked at the photographs. He tells you that pretty scenery is meaningless, it’s a luxury for societies that no longer depend directly on their natural surroundings for survival. Hunter-gatherers see no romance in fields and forests, it’s their place of work, their office block. You tell him that hunter-gatherers only work a few hours a day. He responds that that’s for people who have learned from infancy how to hunt and what to gather. It’s for those who have the skills, and a thousand years of orally transmitted experience to draw on. Just because children can be taught to write and primitive people can be taught to hunt doesn’t mean that either is a trivial skill. They take as much effort and dedication as learning calculus or Latin.

He is scathing about your pianos, pictures and books. What’s the value of a Rembrandt without an art market to put a price on it? No picture, whatever its provenance, will comfort you after a day of exhausting labour. Without the magic of money you’ll need the power of superstition and ritual. The art appropriate to your new life is a carved totem pole, a cave painting, a feather head-dress. What’s the relevance of a ballet in a field when you can’t go home afterwards to discuss the daring setting? When fields are all there are? Far better to perform a dance that will aid your hunting or please your ancestors. By this time both of you are angry. You storm off to your cabin.

You are dreaming. You have a new theory about the ancient world and its monstrous stone calendars. They are the work of early settlers on Earth, counting the months and years to a rescue that would never come. You present your paper to the Learned Society. They applaud politely. You bow and your ragged, threadbare trousers split. Your unshaven audience doesn’t notice. They rise and shuffle silently away to resume their mud plonks and stick waving and other vital duties. You are alone, wishing only that you could start all over again.