The Luminous Citadel of New Atlantis

An Odd Taco Tuesday snippet

This is the start of something much larger, probably sword and planet flavored, for both Taco Tuesday (which are always romantic, even if this one doesn’t make it past the first sight) and Odd Prompts. I used a spare prompt this week from MOTE, with “Follow that Squirrel!”

“You’ll be two hundred lightyears from the next city.” The familiar voice was annoying, but affectionate. Wilt stifled his sigh. His mother had sharp ears for that kind of thing, while being unable to hear him clearly state others. 

“Yes, mother.” She didn’t want to hear anything else. They had already argued it over and over. 

“How are you going to get supplies?” 

Wilt straightened out of the cubic meter of space he was allotted, which he was carefully filling with his worldly goods. It wasn’t that he expected to never return, it was more that he didn’t want to. 

“I will be in stasis for the trip out there,” He explained for the last time, keeping his voice patient and soothing as much as he could. “And the artifact is, itself, a very diverse biosphere with the capacity to produce much of the expedition’s food.” 

Admittedly, he’d only been told that himself, he hadn’t seen it. Still, he had no reason to doubt the word of Dr. Sooma. And he was going, no matter what his mother said. It was the opportunity of a lifetime. 

“This is ridiculous,” she sniffed. “I’ll never see you again!” And with that, she burst into tears. The first half-dozen times it had affected Wilt, but now it just made him skirt carefully around her so she couldn’t clutch at him, to get the last stack of his packages that would go into his crate. She was still keening softly when he closed it up, sealing it with his thumbprint. Biometrics wouldn’t keep out a determined thief, but his mother hadn’t yet figured out how to force them. He also triggered the tab they had let him know would signal for the carrier to come collect the crate. 

“Mother.” He stood carefully just outside of arm’s-reach from her. “I have to leave now.” 

He didn’t. He was due to board the HTS Thani in the morning. He was willing to pay for a sleep pod out of his meagre allowance to avoid continuing this scene any further. 

“Oh!” She threw her hands in the air. “I shall die alone, in a gutter, with my son dead on some strange alien planet!” 

Which fate sounded good to Wilt at that moment. “I will send messages when I can.” He promised stiffly. He would, in text, without giving her a way to send videos. 

“Go, go,” She shooed him away, turning her back to him. “I can bear life no longer.” 

A flicker of unease touched Wilt. How far would she take her dramatics? He pulled his handpad out and pulled up his aunt’s contact. A quick message while his mother was facing away sent, he slipped it back into his pocket. 

“I’ll stay until Aunt Hani comes.” He told her. “I’ll make tea.” 

“Hani? Why would Hani come here?” 

“Because I asked her to. So you won’t be alone in this time of grief.” Wilt bit his lip. He hadn’t meant to mock her. He moved towards the kitchen, to put the kettle on. 

She followed him into the kitchen. “Hani is always so helpful.” 

“Yes, mother.” Wilt got out two mugs, then the lemon and sugar. He felt a little bad about dragging his poor aunt into this. The kettle whistled, and he poured water over her tea. “Oh. I need to put more water in.” 

“I’ll do that.” She whisked it out of his hands, acting like there hadn’t been a tearful scene just moments before. 

The doorcamera screen blinked on, and Wilt saw that his aunt had made record time. “I’ll let Aunt Hani in.” 

He scurried out of the kitchen. 

Hani stepped in and looked up at him. “You’re leaving so soon?” 

“Please don’t start,” Wilt begged softly. “She... I didn’t like the way she was talking, and I must go, you know that.” 

“I do.” She reached out her hands and he took them, giving them a gentle squeeze. “You need to live your life and have some adventure.” 

“It’s a little unfair that you never had that.” Wilt was ashamed he’d only just thought of it. 

“I’ve had my moments. Come, let’s get you out the door quietly.” 

They walked into the kitchen together. 

“I have tea on, Hani.” His mother greeted her with a smile. “So nice of you to come!” 

“Mother.” Wilt leaned over and gave her a kiss on the powdery cheek. “I’m off. I’ll message you tomorrow.” 

“I want to know when you get there safe,” she answered as though he were only going to a friend’s house for the night. 

With a grateful look at his aunt, who had laughter crinkles round the corners of her eyes, Wilt fled. 

***

“The Luminous Citadel of New Atlantis,” Dr. Sooma breathed, leaning very close to a viewport. 

Wilt looked over his shoulder at the improbably-named artifact. It certainly wasn’t luminous on the outside. It looked like a small rocky moon, cratered by impacts of millenia of space debris from what had once been a planet a few hundred thousand kilometers away. Some catastrophic event had destroyed large parts of it, and what was left threw out loose boulders the size of mountains into the cloud of ice and dusts which stretched beyond this, one of its moons. 

There should have been, by the calculations and spectral analysis from light-years away, a planet in the habitable zone with an atmosphere. Scientists had come here, after the invention of the Minkowski Distortion Engine made space travel cheap, and stasis made it easy, to see what had happened. There was a fear deep in the human psyche that they would somehow do this to their own planets through some machination of mankind. 

What they had found, instead, was the Luminous Citadel. Which was so improbable that there were still those who said it didn’t exist. Wilt could feel his heart beating faster at the idea that he would soon be inside it. 

“We don’t know how they made it, you know.” Dr. Sooma could almost have been reading his mind. “We don’t even know where the entrance is. We bored our own crude hole, and had precautions not been taken, might have destroyed it through our curiosity.” 

Wilt remembered reading about the initial attempts to explore the inexplicably hollow moon, which they could detect using sensors, but not penetrate. 

“You were here, sir?” He prompted. 

“Yes, and at about the same status as you, young Frobisher.” Dr. Sooma smiled at him over the half-moon glasses he wore. “Mostly to watch and wonder, but also to take meticulous notes.” 

Wilt ducked his head in acknowledgement of his duties. 

“Dr. Carter had the authority, and he decided we would work in some comfort, and carefully, so a pressurized habitat dome was erected over the bore site. Imagine our surprise when we broke through and into an atmosphere.” 

Wilt thought about it. “What about contamination?” 

“Quite right,” Dr. Sooma nodded. “We worried about that, once the ramifications of what had been found were fully understood, but it was also too late to stuff the genie back into the bottle even if we had wanted to do so.” He checked the time. “We should get to the shuttle, wouldn’t do to miss our ride!” 

Wilt dutifully followed his mentor. They were joined by the rest of the team once they had reached the vast bay where the shuttles were docked. Ship crewmen were busily packing familiar cubic crates into a shuttle, while another was evidently their ride to the surface of the Luminous Citadel. Hamud greeted them with a cheerful wave, then pointed at some larger crates which were lined up beside the cargo shuttle. 

“Doctor, these are your instruments,” He began, and Dr. Sooma veered off to follow him towards them. 

Wilt decided that he wasn’t needed, as they didn’t so much as look back at him. He joined the other two grad students instead. 

“Pretty rotten,” Scilla was saying to Chet. “I mean, when you have your dissertation turned in and everything.” 

“I don’t mind.” Chet shrugged. “I will find out when I get back, anyway, and in the meantime I wasn’t going to turn down a chance to study the Citadel.” 

“What about you?” Scilla turned to Wilt, startling him. She rarely spoke to him outside of vague politenesses. 

“I didn’t catch the first part, so I can’t say.” He answered her. 

Chet chuckled. “Status of doctorate, she means. Hers is riding on the book she means to write from this. Mine is a shoo-in, or at least it should be.” 

“Oh, I also have high hopes for the Citadel.” Wilt paused. “I don’t know of another place to study an enclosed ecosystem like this one, and it could be...” 

“Something mankind can use to inhabit the uninhabitable,” Scilla interrupted him, but she was smiling and nodding, so he didn’t mind. “Me, I will look at the engineering of how they did it. Between us, and Chet here looking at the hydrodynamics,” She reached out and poked Chet in the chest, but gently, “We can figure it all out.” 

“Perhaps not all,” Wilt hedged her confidence with his own doubts. “Still, though, it’s exciting to know it has been done.” 

“Reverse-engineering is always easier.” Chet agreed. 

Dr. Sooma returned to them. “Are we ready?” 

“Yes,” Scilla said for the group. “Can we board?” 

“I think yes,” Dr. Sooma looked up the short ladder. “Ah, the crew is aboard, we can.” 

***

Wilt’s first look at the Citadel was a bit disappointing. The inside of the habitat dome was dusty rocks. They had suited up for the short walk from shuttle to the dome, then passed through the slow airlock cycle before carefully removing the suits to hang them in dull grey lockers that showed the wear and tear of years. 

“Salvage,” Dr. Sooma said cheerfully, patting the door of his suit locker as he closed it. “Like most of the rest of what we have here. It’s expensive enough to fund an expedition to the Luminous Citadel, getting all the necessary bits and pieces would have been prohibitive. Still, there were ways.” 

Wilt decided he didn’t want to know more about those ways. 

“What about the dome?” Scilla asked, looking up. 

No one had bothered with walls inside it. Not with the Citadel just below their feet. 

“Oh, it was emergency supplies on the exploration ship.” Dr. Sooma explained cheerfully. “In case of a marooning, or such.” 

Once they were all ready, Dr. Sooma led them to the ladder that dropped down into a dark hole. “Hamud will help me down, but you young people should be able to manage.” 

“Don’t you want us to wait for you?” Wilt asked. 

“No, no, the lock can only cycle one at a time. Faster if you get that started.” 

The three students looked at one another. Wilt shrugged. “I’ll go.” 

His heart racing, he turned and put his feet down on the rungs, then slowly and somewhat awkwardly in the light gravity, descended. As he passed the level of their boots, he heard Dr. Sooma telling them, “Wait five minutes, that’s how long the cycle takes.” 

Suddenly, Wilt wondered why, if the Citadel had atmosphere, they still used an airlock between it and the dome above. By the time his feet touched a rocky floor, and he found himself at the bottom of a shaft looking at a passive glow panel which dimly lit a small airlock of a very vintage manufacture, he had decided it was to secure the Citadel if debris holed the dome, a very real possibility given the space was relatively full of it. Their ship had been very anxious to drop the team and leave the area, at any rate. 

He looked at the panel, relieved to find it familiar, checked that his satchel was still securely over his shoulder, and started the cycle. The door popped open, and he stepped in cautiously as the chamber lit up. 

After the longest five minutes of his life, the door he was facing, not the one he had come in, popped open. Wilt pushed it gently open far enough he could step out, into the Citadel. 

He stood there for a long time, he was never sure just how long, but long enough that Scilla’s voice came scratchily through the intercom. 

“Wilt? Can you close the door?” 

Her annoyance and concern came through clearly even if the transmission wasn’t good. 

Wilt pushed it shut firmly behind him and took a few steps forward. He couldn’t go far. The ground here was broken, and seemed to be... he wasn’t going to fall forward, into the center of the huge sphere, but for a moment of vertigo he thought it might be possible. He hadn’t expected trees. He hadn’t expected enormous trees, with gnarled trunks, interspersed with rocky crags and arches of stone which looked like they should fall at any moment. It was so green! 

The door opened behind him, and he could hear Scilla’s indrawn breath clearly. 

“Oh. Oh my,” She whispered. 

Wilt didn’t answer. He heard her close the door. 

“This is why Dr. Sooma didn’t show us pictures?” 

Wilt nodded. “I guess?” 

“I had no idea. I couldn’t have dreamed it up.” She came up beside him, then grabbed for his arm. “Wow!” 

He was standing at the very edge of a sheer cliff. 

“Gravity,” He gestured. “Gravity isn’t quite right. You feel it?” 

“Um.” She let go of his arm carefully and took a step backward away from the edge. “It’s not the same as the surface, in the dome.” 

“No.” Wilt leaned forward. Behind him, he heard Scilla squeak, and the door open again. 

She rushed back towards Chet, who was emerging with the same awestruck expression Wilt was sure he’d worn. Wilt, having satisfied his curiosity for the gravity wave coming up the cliff face, and with the intention of testing it further, stepped back from the brink and looked around again, focusing on the ground where they were gathering. 

There were acorns, or something very like them, which he picked up and took back towards the cliff. Behind him, Scilla was speaking in a soft voice to Chet, while clinging to her sweetheart. 

Wilt dropped an acorn. It floated. He tossed one out, and as it arced gently past the first one, it suddenly shot upwards, Wilt following it’s path, and disappeared into the tree canopy that was... well, the way Wilt would have put it was that it was on the wall slightly above him. The inner curvature of the moon was much tighter than he thought the outer was. Thick walls, he realized. Likely for safety. Made sense, if this was a refuge hollowed out during or after the planetary catastrophe. 

He threw a third acorn, whipping it with all his strength. It flew past the first, banked upwards, then reached an indeterminate point several meters away and started to fall. Fascinated, Wilt watched it until it, too, vanished into the tree canopy below and slightly away. The whole thing was an enigma. He turned to see if Dr. Sooma had joined them yet. 

“I can’t go near that edge again.” Scilla was telling Chet. “I don’t know why you are this way.” 

“There’s a gravitational artifact,” Wilt pointed out. “I don’t think you could fall, unless you jumped really hard.” 

“Humans are bigger than whatever you were throwing.” Scilla looked around. “Where is Dr. Sooma?” 

An acorn came hurtling from the nearby tree and hit Wilt on the head. “Ow!” He reached up to rub the spot through his hair, looking towards where it had come from. “Hey! Who’s that?” 

“What?” Both Chet and Scilla looked up in alarm at his actions. 

“Someone threw an acorn at me,” Wilt started to scramble up the slope the airlock had been burrowed into. 

“A squirrel?” Chet asked, following more slowly. Scilla stayed by the door. 

“I...” Wilt saw motion. “No. That’s no squirrel.” 

“It can’t be a squirrel,” Scilla called up to them. “This isn’t Terran!” 

“Follow that squirrel!” Wilt laughed, “it’s not a squirrel, it’s a girl!” 

Chet yelped as he slipped, and Wilt jumped forward, up onto the broad branch where the girl had been hiding. “Hey!” 

“Come back,” Wilt called. “Who are you?” 

The girl paused for a second, her arm around the trunk of a tree, her cheek against it, and looked back at him. He could see the plume of red hair, much like the squirrel’s tail, and then she let go of the tree and took a running leap into midair, her garments fluttering around her. 

Wilt threw himself after her, and behind him, heard Scilla scream.