1
It was just after 2.00am , Thursday, September 30, 2123. Lloyd lay awake in the tent next to Eva listening to the intermittent whistles of the gusting westerly breeze outside.
The crescent moon shone just enough light to imbue the gore-tex tent surrounding him with a subtle iridescent glow. He mused at how it looked alive as it ruffled and distorted with the gusts. Embedded within the sound of wind, he could discern the sounds of rustling leaves and even the familiar lapping of chop against Mecca’s hull. In the stronger gusts he heard the occasional clank of the halyard against the mast.
He couldn’t sleep. His mind wrestled with bizarre thoughts of an uncertain future.
He felt an overwhelming responsibility for the survival of his wife and two friends. He allowed these thoughts and feelings to surface at night when everyone was asleep because he couldn’t afford that luxury in the day. In the day he needed to be calm and jovial, and full of inspiring confidence, for them.
Within the tent, things almost felt normal. Everything was familiar. Neither the interior nor the exterior sounds gave any hint to the bizarre reality.
‘Dali would have loved this,’ he thought. ‘How can we be one hundred years in the future? How can everything be gone, dead, replaced by a story of a comet? How can that be?
And how does an old university friend from forty ruddy years ago pop up out of a confounded UFO? … Out of the blue. … Give me a break!’
Suddenly, a smidgen of doubt crept into his tortured mind.
‘Maybe none of it is true. Maybe what is outside this tent has nothing to do with the construct in my mind. Maybe it’s all a memory of some kind of wacky dream.’
He sat up and unzipped the opening of the tent. He stuck his head out and took a look. ‘Oh no!’ he exclaimed, shocked. It woke up Eva. She looked at him from her pillow and asked,
‘What are you doing, darling?’
‘I’m checking if everything is still real, scrumptious.’
‘Oh, how indomitable of you. I’m positively certain that I would prefer not to know.’
Outside the tent, just at the edge of the beach, glowing metallic-gold like two silent Chinese lanterns, were two almond-shaped discs that were magically levitating about a
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foot off the wind-chopped surface of the bay. Beyond them was Mecca, beautifully rendered out of the background blackness by the moonlight and the glow of the spaceships.
‘We are either not hallucinating, love of my life, or we are still hallucinating.’
‘That is positively outré, my treasure. Now come back to bed before you cause the universe to roll up like a blind, sprout wings and fly off to Kookamunga.’
‘Capital idea, joy of my joys.’
2
Later that morning, they all sat around a campfire in the middle of all the tents on the grassy clearing just above the beach of Watson’s Bay. There was Lloyd and Eva, Alex and Sophia, Adam and Ambriel, and their son, Ben. They finished off the walnut cake for breakfast and washed it down with copious amounts of coffee. They all smoked Mana.
Talk eventually turned to the future.
‘We are establishing a settlement in Noosa,’ said Ambriel. ‘It will not be very large, mainly our family and close friends.’
‘Why Noosa?’ Lloyd asked. ‘Why not Sydney Harbour?’
‘Because of our penchant for surfing, Lloyd, and Noosa is like a jewel of a surfing place. Have you been there?’
‘Yes, we’ve been there on a number of occasions,’ answered Eva. ‘Our visits to Noosa were always associated with our love for driving our Aston Martin.’
‘Oh yes,’ Lloyd sighed, ‘we loved that Aston.’
‘It had a tan-leather interior, you know, and we had matching luggage to go with it,’
Eva added. ‘Regrettably, it has all dematerialized to Kansas,’ she sighed.
‘We still have Mecca,’ said Lloyd in an optimistic voice.
‘And a good thing that you do,’ said Ben cheerfully. ‘Could you sail her up to Noosa do you think?’
‘I imagine so, Ben, although we were never the live-aboard, cruising types. We tended to prefer going away for a week or two, usually timing our passage with the prevailing winds.’
‘We love the downwind run,’ said Eva.
‘Who doesn’t?’ said Lloyd. ‘I have charts of the whole east coast so I think we should be OK despite the fact that there would be no lighthouses or radio beacons.’
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‘I could guide you through any tricky sections with my ship,’ Ben suggested. ‘I could be a lighthouse for you.’
‘As could I,’ added Ambriel.
‘Yes, we could keep an eye on you,’ said Adam.
‘That would certainly help,’ said Lloyd, ‘although I think that I’ll need to break out the sextant and brush up on my celestial navigation.’
‘So, you are coming up to Noosa to see us then?’
The Mecca crew all smiled at each other because suddenly they had a plan, a good plan. Lloyd turned to Ambriel and confidently declared,
‘I believe we are sailing up to Noosa, Ambriel. I believe we are.’
3
As the Noosa trio was preparing to make their departure from Watson’s Bay, Adam had a word with Lloyd about an idea he had.
‘I have an idea, Lloyd,’ he said. ‘I believe that you have a rudimentary understanding of how my lev-pack works. May I assume that?’
‘Very rudimentary,’ replied Lloyd.
‘It’s a gravity sail. Well, imagine something like that clamped to the back of your boat, pushing it around.’
Lloyd’s eyes lit up at the suggestion of quantum-leap technology being applied to his precious timber sloop. Tempering his excitement, he replied,
‘That would certainly help with the blasted northeasters we are forced to endure this time of year.’
‘Oh, mate,’ Adam replied in a frustrated tone, ‘the mongrel northeasters drive us nuts in Noosa as well. They’re worst from now till January. The southeast trades kick in after about February. That’s when the points start to really fire, for surfing.’
‘I see,’ said Lloyd.
Adam pressed on with his idea.
‘A simple device, like my friend Zeke tends to design, would suffice, I imagine.’
‘It would only need to push the sloop up to her natural hull speed, which is around six knots. It doesn’t take much energy to push her to that as she is very sleek.’
‘Maybe, before we take off, you and I ought to take some measurements at the stern, and maybe choose some points of attachment. I could take these to Zeke and he could make up a contraption for you.’
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‘Where is Zeke, exactly?’ Lloyd asked.
‘Er, he’s on Rama, in, er, Andromeda.’
‘The galaxy?’ Lloyd exclaimed with his voice breaking into falsetto, a rare thing for him.
‘Yup,’ Adam answered smugly. ‘It only takes us an hour to fly there. Barely enough time to get through an album.’
‘Andromeda is supposed to be two-million light years away,’ Lloyd said completely discombobulated.
‘Give or take,’ Adam replied being a little too smart for his own good. Ben overheard him and broke up in hysterical laughter. He came over.
‘You must excuse my father, Lloyd. I wish you could have seen how completely spun out he was when he first experienced Andromeda.’
‘But, one hour?’ Lloyd repeated.
Ben explained, ‘We fly at the speed of a graviton particle, which is the speed of light squared. It is, kind of, our speed limit, our natural hull speed if you like.’
‘The speed of light squared is supposed to be pure energy,’ said Lloyd.
Ben looked deeply into Lloyd’s eyes and put him into a momentary trance, saying,
‘Are we not pure energy already? And what is gravity?’
The mind expansion Lloyd experienced in that nanosecond is impossible to put into words. Adam interjected,
‘Ben, don’t go freaking people out.’
‘Sorry, father. Are you OK, Lloyd?’
Lloyd replied somewhat vaguely, almost like talking to himself,
‘Er, I’m fine, I think. I got this thing about waves becoming matter within perception.
Er, like through the senses. I just got this thing …’
Adam, who understood a little bit about how telepaths conveyed new concepts to non-telepaths, steered the conversation back to working on the idea of having a gravity sail made for Mecca.
‘We should choose some attachment points and take some measurements of the stern of your boat, Lloyd, don’t you think? We could then make some sketches and I could pass them on to Zeke when I see him next, which should be very soon no doubt.’
‘I can take us out to Mecca in the dinghy,’ Lloyd suggested, restoring his focus. ‘I must say, this certainly is an extremely exciting development.’
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‘We haven’t even scratched the surface, Lloyd,’ Adam replied, feeling surprised at himself and at how much he already felt part of the new, post-apocalyptic reality.
They motored out in the dinghy and once onboard Lloyd retrieved a pad, a pencil and a measuring tape. They chose the transom as the main support for the gravity sail and the pushpit for secondary attachments. Lloyd, who was quite an artist in his own right, drew up an almost photographic rendition of Mecca’s stern. To that he added carefully-measured dimensions. When he was finished, he gave the drawing to Adam, saying,
‘I hope this will do.’
Adam looked at the drawing and replied, amazed,
‘Holy cow, Lloyd, this looks like a da Vinci. We might have to get it framed.’
Both men laughed heartily.
‘It’s hardly a da Vinci, Adam. You know, I find it difficult to convey to you how exciting all this is for me. I cannot wait to sail my boat with the power of gravity. I certainly hope that your friend, er …’
‘Zeke.’
‘Yes, I certainly hope that Zeke doesn’t mind building the, er …’
‘Gravity sail.’
‘Certainly, er, I hope that he doesn’t mind building it for me.’
Adam smiled and said,
‘He won’t mind, Lloyd. He is a total enthusiast. He lives for these projects. I wouldn’t be surprised if he asks to come out for a sail with you.’
‘Well, you better tell him that he’s very welcome to do that anytime he likes.’
As Ben, Adam and Ambriel prepared to fly back to Noosa, Ben reassured Lloyd that he would return within a couple of days to help with his navigation.
4
They watched in awe as the two intergalactic cruisers rose silently in unison to about a thousand feet. From there they saw them shoot northwards like shells out of a cannon, except there was not a decibel of sound. Eva remembered a conversation she had with Ambriel.
‘Ambriel reminded me of something before she left,’ she said. Alex, Lloyd and Sophia looked at her. ‘She told me that the Mana we had smoked and eaten with the cake has extended our life spans to something like 150 years. She then said that we may expect to
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live for at least 700 years if we continue to smoke it. I believe that I shocked her a little when I told her that we knew the days of our death.’
‘Good for you, darling. I’ll wager our house that even they don’t know that.’
‘Big of you wagering the house,’ Alex laughed.
‘I’ve already forgotten my death date and please don’t anyone remind me,’ said Sophia.
‘It leaves me wondering what we will do with so much time,’ said Eva.
‘Yes, especially considering that there are no more shoe sales,’ added Sophia.
Everyone chuckled. Lloyd looked up into the sky and assessed the weather.
‘There are no weather reports we can refer to anymore,’ he said studiously. ‘All we have to go by is what we can see and our sum total of experience. Noosa is a long sail and there are long stretches devoid of shelter. The most hazardous situation for us would be an easterly gale pushing us against a lee shore. There are thousands of shipwrecks along the east coast of Australia that have succumbed to such conditions. Without weather forecasts we could become sitting ducks out there, so we’ll need to be careful.’
‘We have lived on this coast all our lives,’ said Eva, ‘and that should help.’
‘Certainly, certainly, but those east coast lows can spin up literally overnight, with virtually no warning.’
Alex and Sophia, who were not sailors, were actually unable to comprehend the horror of what Lloyd and Eva were discussing. Lloyd took note of the wind direction.
‘It’s blowing from the northwest. If it sticks there and starts to swing west, we’ll get a southerly change by tomorrow. That is what we want.’
That statement engendered a general buzz of excitement. Lloyd continued,
‘The first day of the southerly is usually way too strong, way too wild. The idea is to be ready and as soon as it settles a tad, we weigh anchor and head north. I imagine that our first stop will probably be Pittwater, or maybe Port Stephens, if the southerly hangs in for a couple of days. We’ll know that it is waning when it starts turning east. That will be when we will need to seek shelter from the days of northeasters to follow. We will wait there for the next southerly. I’ve got to look at the charts.’
‘I’ll come with you,’ said Alex.
‘We’ll catch lunch while you boys do that,’ said Eva.
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5
They had to wait three days for the southerly blow to settle enough for them to be able to set sail from Sydney Harbour. As they were in no particular hurry, they decided to spend the first night sheltered behind the Palm Beach headland in Pittwater. It was Sunday afternoon, October 3, 2123.
They dropped anchor just off the westerly-facing beach and took the dinghy ashore.
They set two tents for the expected overnight stay. The girls took a bucket and knives and went hunting for oysters and muscles, while the boys collected firewood and made a campfire. They brought ashore the cooking-ingredients hamper, which contained items such as flour, olive oil, salt, pepper, powdered milk, herbs and such. They also brought two bottles of wine, a jar of pickles, a jar of olives, a chopping board, some utensils and a large, flat skillet.
Alex and Lloyd marveled, as they stood on the beach, at how the golden reflection on the water perfectly linked the setting Sun with their campfire.
‘Like the Olympic flame being lit by the Sun,’ said Lloyd.
‘And here come the goddesses,’ said Alex looking up the beach at the girls returning from their oyster hunt. Later, after the girls returned and they all settled down around the fire, Eva pointed at the brimming bucket and said,
‘I’m not sure how we are going to eat all these oysters.’
‘Life is meant to be a struggle, darling,’ Lloyd quipped holding up the wine bottles.
‘Red or white?’ he asked.
It was Sophia’s idea to make Lebanese flat bread.
‘It is ridiculously easy to make,’ she said, ‘with only a minute or two of kneading and no requirement for yeast.’
The bread was soft and pliable and perfect for using as a wrap, stuffed with whatever took one’s fancy. It was also a great make-ahead recipe as the dough kept well for around three days.
They all finally settled down and sat around the fire and admired the magical afterglow of the sunset.
‘Oh, wow,’ exclaimed Alex, ‘look at the Moon.’
Everyone turned around and gasped at the beauty of the near-full Moon rising.
‘We’ll have good light tonight,’ said Lloyd.
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After they finished their meals, they sat together warming themselves around the fire and sipped their wine. October nights could still be quite cool in that part of the world.
There were natural pauses in their conversation during which they slid into introspective reflections of their predicament. Occasionally someone would blurt out something completely unrelated to the discussion.
‘We are so alone,’ Eva sighed.
Everyone threw in their two-bits worth after a comment like that.
‘Yes, everyone is exceedingly defunct,’ said Alex.
‘Defunct?’ Lloyd chuckled.
‘Not everyone,’ said Sophia.
‘At least there won’t be any competition for the oysters,’ remarked Eva.
‘Oh yes,’ said Alex, ‘I’d hate to be fighting off a ruddy rabble for the ruddy oysters.’
Everyone looked at Alex then burst out in total hilarity. They hadn’t laughed so hard for weeks. When they settled down a bit, Lloyd held up an empty bottle and asked,
‘Who’s for another one?’
‘Certainly, we need to drink to the ruddy defunct,’ said Eva holding up her glass. She said it with a tone of melancholy, which everyone recognised as a reference to her two sons who died either nine days or one hundred years before, depending on how one wished to look at it. She picked her spirits up again, though, and announced, ‘Another bottle for the beloved, ruddy defunct.’
Lloyd and Alex putted out to Mecca and brought back another bottle of Grange.
6
They were up and about at the earliest sign of easterly light, well before dawn. The moon shone with exceptional intensity. It cast its crystalline reflection across Pittwater as it hung lazily above the western horizon. The light of the moon was sufficient for them to see as they packed up and loaded everything into the dinghy. The plan was to leave early and have breakfast on board Mecca.
Just as they were about to weigh anchor, just before the sun cracked the horizon, Sophia spotted a bright star shining intensely in the northern sky.
‘Oh my God, look at that!’ she exclaimed. ‘Is that Jupiter?’
Everyone became distracted from their task and looked at the star.
‘It’s moving,’ said Alex.
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‘It might be Ben,’ said Lloyd. He thought for a moment then added excitedly, ‘It might be Ben and Adam with the gravity sail for Mecca.’
‘Surely not so soon,’ said Eva. ‘Those things can’t be easy to make and they would have to bring it over from … er … I can’t believe that I’m saying this, the Andromeda Galaxy.’
They watched in awe as the star smoothly descended in a graceful arc and glided silently across the bay, dimming its light into a soft glow as it did so, and came to a silently-hovering stop right next to the sleek sloop.
It levitated about a foot above the water, in perfect silence, thirty feet, or so, to the west of them.
They observed as a panel opened in the upper hull. They became completely astonished as they witnessed the crew of the intergalactic cruiser levitate, one by one, out of the hatch, float across the water and gently land on the foredeck of the anchored sloop.
There is not so much space on a Compass 28 so they had to land quite close together.
There were three of them. Two wore lev-packs while one of them wore a levitating suit, its surface appearing like silver fish scales. The boat crew recognised Adam and Ben, but not the third man who looked ‘decidedly scruffy’. Everyone smiled and it was Alex who spoke first. He looked at the levitating ship and quipped,
‘Did you remember to put her in park, Ben?’
Everyone laughed. Ben scratched his head and pulled a screwed-up, funny face and replied,
‘Come to think of it …’
Everyone laughed again. The next few minutes were spent introducing everyone to Zeke, who, when he heard about it, got all excited about adapting a gravity sail for Mecca and insisted on coming along for the test sail.
‘Looks like we’ll be delaying our departure this morning,’ said Lloyd.
‘Coffee everyone?’ Eva offered.
Everyone looked at her and smiled. As the girls disappeared into the cabin to make coffee for everyone, the men had a chat about a variety of topics ending up focussing on the gravity sail for the boat. After coffee, Ben flew back to the spaceship and returned carrying a hemp duffel bag containing the gravity sail. Zeke had the honour of removing it from the bag.
‘It’s so small,’ Lloyd commented surprised.
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‘It’s actually just a sail from a lev-pack,’ Zeke replied. ‘It’ll give the boat more than enough push. I just modified the backplate to fit the back of the boat accordin to your drawins.’
It only took them a few minutes to attach the gravity sail to the stern of the sloop using special Velcro-like straps.
7
The gravity sail design, which was originally conjured up by Zeke for the purpose of a flying backpack and was now slightly modified for the boat, was genius simplicity itself.
The actual principle behind its function was a closely-guarded secret, only held by a few families across many galaxies.
There was much speculation about how a material, usually a metal, gained the property of allowing gravitons to pass through it more freely in one direction compared to all other directions, like a one-way mirror that allows photons through it in one direction and reflects them in the other.
Although no one could prove anything, and absolutely no one had managed to fabricate the magic material through their own ingenuity, except for the families afore mentioned, theories abounded.
The latest, and most popular, theory suggested that gravitons, which were so small that they were like light shining on photons, and which travelled at the speed of light squared in all directions equally, and which were electronically neutral, were somehow given a slight charge as they passed through an electron cloud of an atom that resonated at a precise fractal frequency of the graviton itself. It was theorised that the way the vibration frequency of the electron cloud was made non-symmetrical was by the discovery of a material where the arrangement of protons in the nucleus was somehow stabilised in an asymmetrical configuration, thus inducing the asymmetry to the electron cloud of the atom. The problem was that this asymmetry was so slight that it was impossible to detect through observation.
It was further theorised that the potential power of the graviton field was so great that it only required immeasurably small asymmetry to achieve useable vectors of directional force. Black holes were the best example of the potential power of the ubiquitous graviton field. The reason this power was generally indiscernible was because it was in perfect balance with all vectors of force cancelling each other out.
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The understanding on Rama was that the force of gravity was the most powerful physical force in the universe. There was no other physical force greater than it. It was also understood that the gravitational force was the fundamental force underlying the strong and weak nuclear forces.
Thus, by applying a temporary, immeasurable charge to gravitons travelling along only one axis through an atom, this caused a slight imbalance in the graviton field and induced a vector of force, a push, in one direction. This push remained constant and stable because the material, which was a metal with imperceptibly asymmetrical atoms, was stable.
But all this was theory. No one knew for sure and they sure as hell lacked the knowledge to actually manufacture a gravity sail, which was, and is still, the biggest secret in the universe.
In terms of design, the understanding on Rama was that the best design was always a one-piece design, and the best invention was one that erased the steps to its creation.
And that is what the gravity sail was. One piece and no possible way of reverse engineering it. A small number of families possessed the knowledge. The Sailsmiths were one. Albion and Ambriel were their children. Ben was the son of Ambriel, and Zeke was like his uncle and best friend. Adam was Ambriel’s husband and Ben’s dad. They were in the juice and, for them, everything was possible.
The gravity sail that Zeke designed for levitation, and modified for the boat, was actually comprised of two gravity sails acting on each other from opposite directions.
They thus neutralised each other when angled exactly 180 degrees relative to each other.
Each individual sail was an eight-inch-per-side, multi-triangular spaceframe design, for strength, made from a metal that looked like stainless steel. Each triangle had a natural gravitational push, towards one apex, of 412 kilograms. Thus, the two sails combined, when pointed in the same direction in parallel, had a potential of 824 kg of push on the stern of the boat. This was more than enough to sail the sloop at her natural hull speed, which was six knots, and more.
After the gravity sail was fitted to Mecca’s stern, they decided to postpone their departure for Queensland. Lloyd was so excited about the ‘new mod’ to his boat that all he wanted to do was test it around the sheltered waters of Pittwater.
After ‘fanging around’ the bay for an hour, or so, they ‘dropped the pick’ next to the intergalactic cruiser, in the same spot they spent the previous night. The girls made more
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coffee for everyone and it was decided that Adam, Ben and Zeke would stay on board for lunch. After the coffee, the girls took the dinghy and a bucket and went searching for seafood. The men stayed on the boat and chinwagged.
The conversation ranged far and wide. Lloyd and Alex were very interested in Rama.
‘What is it like?’ they asked.
‘In many parts one would be hard pressed to know they weren’t on Earth,’ answered Ben, ‘if one discounted the twin suns and moons.’
‘The people keep to emselves an live simple,’ added Zeke. ‘They power their own houses with free energy an make things to trade. Everybody specialises at somethin.
There’s markets, but there ain’t no shops or money on Rama. They just fly wherever they need to go to trade for stuff. There’s shops and stuff on other planets, though. There ain’t even words for fence an road in the Raman language, which they tell me sounds somethin like Latin.’
‘Huh,’ said Lloyd in a tone both surprised and mesmerised. ‘And you can fly to other galaxies?’
‘Yes, Lloyd, at the speed of light squared.’
‘Wow,’ exclaimed Alex shaking his head.
‘Something you will be able to do soon as well,’ Ben added.
‘You know …’ said Sophia kind of studiously in her own fashion. Everyone looked at her and smiled. ‘That gravity thing-me-bob on the back of Mecca looks like a butterfly the way it opens and closes its wings like that.’
…….
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