The Sleeper

Simon Ashton had slept for 5½ million years.

 

He could hardly believe it. The ship wasn’t expected to last anything like that period of time. He should have died millions of years ago. He should have woken up millions of years ago.

 

He was woozy. The wooziness of the longest sleep ever. He staggered over to the monitors and was shocked at what they said.

 

When he was hibernated, he expected to be regenerated a few thousand years later. It was a clever idea. The ship’s computer was set up to identify signs of life on nearby planets. As soon as life was identified a message would be sent to the hibernation unit and Simon would wake up.

 

It had seemed the perfect solution to the problem of the sheer distance between Earth and anywhere else in the universe where life may exist. A number of possible life-bearing planets were identified, the nearest 5,000 light years away, and three more within a 10,000 year course, with another eight planets up to 30,000 light years away. If things went to plan, he’d have been woken up at the first plane, spent a year or so studying its life, sent back reports to Earth, then re-hibernated himself, woken up at the next planet, and so on.

 

Obviously there had been no life on any of the planets that had been identified. The universe was not as plush with life as had been assumed. He had just sped passed them, whizzing through space until he finally found life. It was astonishing his craft had lasted as long as it had, even travelling through a vacuum five million light years must take its toll.

 

He looked through the monitors at the planet below. It hardly seemed to blossom with life, it was a dull, grey husk, no atmosphere was discernible. Still, there could be life inside, a heated pool teaming with microscopic beings. It hardly seemed likely that intelligent life could form or thrive in this atmosphere, but still, his job was to explore, to catalogue any such life as there was and send his findings home.

 

He scanned the monitors. Nothing. Not a trace of life. Maybe on the other side of the planet? He switched the craft to manual override and passed slowly around the world. All the time the scanners showed nothing below. He had been woken up for no reason.

 

And then the monitors changed, a frantic blipping. But there still nothing on the planet below, no signs of life. He followed the readings. There, in the sky just a few miles from his craft, was an identical pod to his. Another astronaut.

 

At first he thought it was another Earth ship, but after analysis it was clear that there were differences in the pod’s construction. This was alien life.

 

He sent a radio message, the pre-prepared greeting that had been put together by the communication specialists at NASA, a greeting and a small package of materials that encapsulated the whole of Earth culture.

 

His monitors showed that a similar signal was being sent by the alien pod.

 

All he could do was wait, while the two sets of computers tried to understand their respective languages and the languages of their inhabitants.

 

He studied the scans. Like his pod, there was just one inhabitant, a single life-form. On Earth scientists had tried to devise a way of sending a ship with more than one inhabitant, as the dangers of one astronaut dying, or just going mad from being alone too long put the entire mission at risk. But any such ship would just be too big, would be too big to launch, would need so much fuel that it would never be capable of the necessary speeds. So they had devised the pod, a small circular craft that could be flung across the universe at close to the speed of light.

 

The fact that the aliens had used an almost identical design for their craft verified the decisions NASA had made.

 

A week after the pods had first encountered each other, that’s a week Earth time, or eleven days in the life of the lifeless planet they were orbiting, the two ships made a connection, he received a visual image from the neighbouring ship. This was history in the making. The first sighting of alien life.

 

The image of the alien astronaut appeared on his screen. A lizard. A green, lizard-like lizard, not the humanoid form you sometimes saw on science fiction films. This was a genuine lizard, when it walked, it walked on four legs. When it spoke, it was with a lizardly rasp that he could barely comprehend, even when it was speaking structurally perfect English. Its hands, if hands was the right word, were clearly designed for climbing, long, grasping fingers. If the image on the screen was life-sized then the lizard was a similar size to Simon, about size feet long, not counting the tail.

 

The lizard rasped, a strange slithery noise. An alien language. An attempt to communicate.

 

When the lizard paused he spoke back. He wittered on, chatting about his mission. He realised that the more he spoke the more material the alien would have to translate. He had the idea of showing images on a screen behind him, pointing at the objects and naming them. Would the alien understand the concept of pointing? On Earth, pointing seemed to be unique to humankind, although bees ‘pointed’ at sources of nectar, albeit with their bottoms. Should he wriggle his arse at the screen just in case? He decided against it.

 

The lizard seemed to understand and within a short time it repeated the trick, a screen illuminating an alien landscape behind her. The alien ‘pointed’ as well, but not with its finger, nor its bottom, but by flicker its long, lizardly tongue at the screen. The views displayed on the screen showed a rocky, hot, dry landscape, with small patches of green life, and small puddles of water. There was little sign of the superpower technology capable of launching a pod into space, and equally few pictures of the aliens themselves. Perhaps they were camera shy.

 

It took a few weeks of these slideshows before the computers managed to translate the respective language. In fact it was the alien computer that got there first, and one day Simon realised there was something familiar about the alien’s rasping. It was speaking English. The computers had to help with the translation, and he read what the lizard was saying, subtitled speech, like the Scottish film Trainspotting had to be subtitled before it could be understood by an American audience.

 

For the raspings of an alien lizard was as incomprehensible and peculiar to the human ear as the Scottish tongue.  

 

Eventually the Earthly computer caught up and Simon was able to make equally poor attempts at the lizard language.

 

And thus the two aliens spoke to each other, learning all they could about the respective pod-dweller’s home, their species, their technology. They were doing their job, what they’d travelled all this way to do. Learning about alien life.

 

Simon discovered that the alien’s name was zzxxssszzzS, which translated as Explorer, not a coincidence, as she was rechristened ahead of her journey. And she was a she, a female of the species, although, Explorer tried to explain, the male/female thing worked differently than Simon seemed to understand it.

 

Technically Explorer wasn’t female. She was hermaphrodite, the ‘males’ of her species serving no useful sexual function, merely assisting in the raising of offspring. Her species gives birth to between fifty and a hundred offspring at once, an exhausting, all-consuming procedure. As a result of which, her species doesn’t become pregnant until there is a steady male presence in the female’s life, someone that will care for the female and her offspring while she recovers from the birth, and help raise the large brood. Becoming pregnant is a complex biological mechanism, but essentially it occurs when the female has become sufficiently bonded with a male.

 

Simon explained his own biological mechanism, in its way as eccentric as her own.

 

“Evolution’s an amazing thing,” Simon had said. Explorer was puzzled by the expression. It turns out that her species had never discovered evolution. No fossils had ever formed on her planet, and the relatively stable climate had meant that her own species, and those that lived around her, had changed little.. They did not breed dogs or pigeons, her race simply assumed that every creature existed now as it had always existed, in some unexplained act of creation.

 

Having formed a basic understanding of each other’s environmental needs, it proved possible for the two to visit each other, with the air and temperature in the visited pod set at a level at which both of them were comfortable.

 

There was just enough room in the pods for the two of them. There was no furniture in the alien pod, Simon squatted on the floor next to sprawled out alien. They spoke to each other, alternating tongues. They had become used to each other’s alien voices and barely needed help translating now, although he needed to concentrate on every word she said.

 

Simon learnt that Explorer had travelled in almost exactly the same way that he had, a single-bodied pod that froze her when she set off and awakened her at the first sign of life. She had travelled for 12 million of her home planet’s years, roughly six million Earth years, which meant that they were it, the only life that existed in a 12 million light year wide stretch of space.

 

Her ship too had not been expected to travel for more than a few thousand years, but for her too, the planets they had anticipated might be life-bearing had turned out barren.

 

Simon sent reports home daily, outlining what he had learnt about the alien, her planet, her biology. Of course it would take the reports five million years or more to reach Earth, which would mean they reached the planet almost exactly 11 million years after he had left, approximately 11 million years later than expected. He wondered whether there would be anyone left alive to read them, whether there was anyone there now, or whether the human race had found some way to extinguish itself while he was sleeping.

 

The two adventurers tried experimenting with each other’s food, but, alien food proved indigestible, their bodies having evolved for a completely different blend of DNA, and every mouthful of food they took they soon vomited out. This had been anticipated by the scientists behind both expeditions, and each pod was filled with more than sufficient food and water to last a lifetime, for wherever they had landed, it was not certain that there would be a supply of drinkable water, let alone anything they could eat.

 

They spent most of every day together. At first they retired to their respective pods to sleep, but after a while, they just collapsed where they were, when they were through with talking for the day.  

 

The amount they learnt about the other’s planet was astonishing, enough to fill thousands of academic journals. In that respect the mission was a total success, when Simon’s reports finally arrived home they would set the academic world alight, assuming there was an academic world left to be set alight.

 

It was over a year before the two became lovers. In retrospect it seems inevitable, they were so close, sleeping side by side every night, spending every day together. They had no rivals for their affections, they were alone, more than five million years from the nearest life.

 

Of course, sex as we know it was impossible, but Explorer would live up to her name, long, protruding fingers and tongue stroking Simon’s erection until his passion exploded. She too seemed to achieve some form of sexual contentment, though Simon never quite understood his role in giving a hermaphrodite sexual pleasure. He just did what she asked of him.

 

They both decided that this was how they would spend the rest of their lives. There was no point either of them going forward, they knew now that the nearest life was five million years’ away and neither of them could trust their ships to take them that far, and the planets they would learn about if they did go forward could be studied here, pod to pod. At least this way the information would reach the home planet ten million years after they left, not twenty. That alone was argument enough for them to stay, regardless of the fact they had become lovers.

 

So this is where they stayed, pods parked side by side, orbiting an empty, dead planet, whose only attraction was the gravity that kept them locked in orbit.

 

Or that is how they would have stayed, until the end of their days, until fate intervened.

 

“I have some news,” Explorer said one day, news itself being a new thing to them.

“News? From where?”

 

“From here.” She pointed to her lizard tummy. “I’m pregnant.”

 

“But you can’t …” he began to say, before comprehending. She was, after all, a hermaphrodite.

 

“I must go,” she said.

 

He knew now enough about her biology to understand the implications of the pregnancy. There wasn’t enough room in the pods for a lizard birth, it was a massive, messy explosion of life. If she stayed to give birth here she would die.

 

But the planet below was inhospitable, there was no safe place to give birth there, even with all the equipment they had with them.

 

There were only two options. His place or her place.

 

“Will you go forward, or back?” he asked.

 

“I will go forward,” she said, confidently. Try to complete my mission. And what about you, will you go forward or back?”

 

It was not the obvious decision you might think, given that they were lovers. For alas, their love was doomed. He could not travel with her. Both ships only had room for one hibernator. They would have to travel separately.

 

But alas, for interstellar travel both ships were only capable of travelling at a set speed, both similar speeds, close to the speed of light, but the lizard’s ship was slightly meaning she would arrived at the Earth approximately 2,000 years before him. By the time he arrived she would be long dead. True, he might find her descendants, but Explorer would be long dead.

 

After a long thought he decided on a course. “I will turn round,” he said, “go back home. Find what I find when I get there. I will re-join my kind, if they haven’t died out. Search for your descendants.”

 

With a few more words of parting, and one last session of inter-species love-making, she set her ship on course towards the Earth. As she sped off she disappeared into the hibernation chamber, from where she would emerge in over 5 million years.

 

Simon too turned his ship towards the Earth and, as it sped away, went to the hibernation chamber for another 5½ million year-long sleep.