The Far Grail

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. That may be true, but I wish the same could be said for the myriad worlds that fill that vacuum, because this little green twerp I was assigned for a mission guide screams every time the ground beneath our feet rumbles. On this planet, let’s just say that is too frequently for the comfort of my eardrums, not to mention my nerves. Of course, it doesn’t help that my nerves were in rough shape to begin with.

I, Valkyrie Risinger, normally love the challenge of each mission, the thrill of exploring a new world, its landscape and biota unfamiliar and wondrous. For all the Earth-talk about the universal laws of science, biology works differently on every planet, so you never know what each world will bring: behemoths that make our terrestrial dinosaurs look like toys, tiny creatures whose bioluminescence fills the air around you with living stars, plants that whisper to one another, brushing foliage and trading secrets as they do.

All of that is beautiful, but my favorite part of seeing new worlds is the skyscape. Since the dawn of human history, mankind has turned our eyes star-wards; it is in our nature to look to the heavens and wonder what is beyond. There is great beauty in the night sky on Earth, but on foreign planets, the familiar constellations and the single moon are gone, replaced by the most dazzling vistas in the galaxy. Unlike on Earth, whose cities pour cataracts of light into the atmosphere, the foreign skies are brimming over with billions of visible stars, like diamond-dust flung across the expanse of the heavens. As if that were not enough, strange moons drift across the sky like ships on a black sea, sometimes four or five at a time, all in various phases. Sometimes, it is one moon like on Earth, but some meteorite has struck home, and the once-perfect sphere of light orbits in fragments, drifting along in tandem with one another due to the gravitational pull. Other times, depending on the solar system, you can even see a neighboring planet in such detail that the cloud formations or rings or geographic features are visible. The night sky of foreign planets is the most stunning panorama in the galaxy, and nothing steals your breath in the same way.

There is no time to enjoy that on this mission, though. There is simply too much at stake. Everything is at stake. For that reason alone, it would be nice to have some reassuring companionship on this mission, but those are not the cards I drew; Harley is anything but reassuring. After all of the pop culture cliches, it turns out there really are little green men in space, though I use the term “men” lightly. Harley is a biped, but that’s as far as his resemblance to humans goes. He is from the planet we named Viridian, for the hue of the forest that covers every inch of its surface. Harley has told me the name in his language, but it is too complicated to translate. He is average for his kind, but that does not make him any less strange-looking to my eyes. He is knee-high to me and covered with bluish-green fur that helps him blend into the misty forests on his home world. His furry legs are stubby and bow outwards at his knees, but they are not as shaggy as the rest of his roundish body, which is slightly elongated on the horizontal, so that he looks like a three-dimensional oval, slightly flattened on the top and bottom. He has gangly arms, webbed hands and feet, and a long tail that ends in a puff like a pompom, also covered in finer fur like his other limbs. He has a long mouth that stretches most of the way across his face, the most enormous purple eyes you can imagine, to catch all of the dim light on his forested planet, I suppose, and a mop of extra-thick fur on top of his head that flops over his brow and into his eyes. He looks, more than anything, like something out of one of those last-century Pixar movies.

I guess he would be adorable taken at face value, but all of that screaming and anxiety nullifies any features that might make him endearing. He has a nervous disposition and no spine for danger. So far, he has met every single crisis on our journey by shrieking loudly (consider the size of his mouth) and clinging to my legs, sometimes with all five of his limbs (yes, even the tail). I have lost count of how many times I have hiss-whispered to him to shut up. After all, some dangers require stealth and secrecy, not attention-calling, dead-waking screams. To these admonishments, he always gulps, lets go of my legs…reluctantly… and in that high-pitched, high-strung voice of his says, “S…sorry Val! I know you’re right, but I can’t help it. Back home on Viridian, my people shriek at the first sign of danger to alert the rest of the group. I…I’ll put a lid on it next time. I promise!” He does not. Needless to say, I wish I had a remaining companion with a cooler head, but Harley is what I got.

How did I get into this? What am I doing on the other side of the galaxy with a nervous wreck of a Viridianite as my only backup and the literal fate of the world, maybe all worlds, hanging in the balance? Well, the simple answer is that I joined the U.N. Space Corps out of high school, and my assignments brought me here. The full answer is much more complicated. When I graduated with the class of 2153, all I had was a burning need to get out of the small town where I grew up and see much more than the world. Thanks to the rapid developments in space travel over the last century, I knew that there were worlds out there, and my wanderlust was too much for one planet; I wanted to see them all.

After a rigorous four-year training program, including space pilot licensing, interplanetary diplomacy and linguistics, and survival training for every conceivable ecosystem and atmosphere, I graduated with honors and spent fifteen years traversing the galaxy, first as a ferry pilot for diplomatic missions, and later as a field scout, deployed to more distant and unexplored planets to compile reports on environments and local inhabitants. It was this work that qualified me for the current mission.

In the intervening years, while I was exploring the reaches of the galaxy, Earth itself was spiraling towards disaster. The nations of the world have long acknowledged that we are running out of space and resources as population balloons; with advances in medical technology, the average lifespan is now close to 150 years, and most of that lived in good health. It is wonderful for each individual’s quality of life, but the planet still only has so much space and so many resources. Earth was stressed with a population of 8 billion, and that was over a century ago. We are now climbing from the 15 billion mark, and mankind is running out of time and space. The governments of the world have at least agreed that colonizing an inhabited planet is not the answer. I would like to say that we have learned from our past, but it’s really a practical consideration. We lack the space-trained manpower to launch an offensive against any planet with a thriving population, and the planets not inhabited by intelligent life are empty for a reason; they are inhospitable. Relocation is not feasible. Besides, we don’t have the time.

While the United Nations wrestles with the population crisis, a coalition of rogue states have decreed that the solution is simple: if world leadership cannot ease the pressure on their suffering populations, their nuclear arsenals will suffice to reduce global population back to sustainable levels. Of course, everyone with even a shred of rationality has argued that all this atrocity will accomplish is to blight certain regions and poison farmland, waters, and fisheries that are already stressed, but these rogue states maintain that targeted strikes on some of the world’s largest cities would reduce the population by at least a few billion without impacting large tracts of land. Naturally, none of these proposed targets lie within their borders. If their demands for resource redistribution are not met, they will take matters into their own hands. Clearly, we are dealing with madmen. So far, diplomacy has held off this catastrophe, but it is only a matter of time before they lose patience. Truthfully, it has only been a matter of time since we first realized that the splitting of the atom could be weaponized and gave our species more power than we have the responsibility to handle. To be honest, I am surprised we have lasted this long in the nuclear age. All it takes is one unstable actor, and the world has plenty of those. To think that they also have access to worlds beyond our own is chilling; who’s to say the destruction would truly end with the cities of Earth?

This all may sound like a “local,” that is to say, an Earth problem, and not one to be solved halfway across the galaxy, but amidst all of this desperation, hope came from the unlikeliest of sources: an unknown professor from the Oxford department of Archaeology and Anthropology. When my superior officers informed me that they had received an offer of help from a university of all places, I was skeptical. When I found out it was a professor no older than I am, I started to panic, and when I learned that, instead of an expert in international relations, economics, or heck, even psychology, they were setting up a briefing with one of those Indiana Jones eccentrics who spend their days digging in the dust of long-dead civilizations, I blew my top. Since our goal is to keep our civilization from joining the ranks of the dust-people, I couldn’t possibly imagine what this man had to offer a dying planet. Even now, I still have my doubts.

When Dr. Rexford Thaxton gave his pre-mission briefing, it should have confirmed my opinion that he was only a sheltered, addle-brained, and more than borderline insane academic whose outrageous theories have no bearing on any reality, let alone the stark one now facing the human civilization. After all, we stand on the brink of famine, economic collapse, and nuclear annihilation, and here was a shy professor lecturing a military arm of the United Nations on an outrageous theory about the Holy Grail, of all things. A discovery in the ruins of a forgotten abbey in Cornwall? Some ancient text expounding that the Grail was not the chalice from the Last Supper, as commonly believed? Claiming that it holds the key to the fate of humanity? That after it was discovered in the Middle Ages, it disappeared again, because the mages of Avalon hid it away, not by burying it, but by using all of the magic they could summon to transport it across the galaxy, where it would not fall into the wrong hands? According to Thaxton’s theory, this final act of sorcery was so powerful that it caused Avalon to crumble into oblivion, torn apart by the power of the spell. Hence, the island fell away into myth.

The crowning glory of this absurdity was an outlandish prophecy, contained within the text, that in humanity’s darkest hour, when Earth stood on the edge of ruin, the Grail would be found and all would be saved. The mysterious text was actually discovered about two decades ago. It appears to contain a map to the Grail’s location, and that map points to the skies. Researchers have spent those two decades trying every known navigational method using astronomy, correcting for differences between our current understanding of the night sky and what would have been understood in Medieval Britain, but all to no avail. It was a thunderbolt insight of Thaxton’s that, given our current space-travel capabilities, the map might be taken more literally, not as a navigational tool to find the Grail on Earth, but as a guide across the planets to reach its resting place in the heavens.

I have seen a lot in my years of space exploration, but I have never heard anything so daft in my life. All of this should have confirmed my original opinion that Rex Thaxton was wasting our time, but it didn’t. Mad as he sounded, there was an earnestness and integrity in his bearing, and a tranquil intelligence rather than the mania you would expect. I had expected him to be pompous and arrogant, but he was modest and unassuming, confident in the strength of his research, but not overbearing. If the content of his presentation was ludicrous, his manner convinced me he might be onto our last hope. If nothing else, it was more of an idea than anyone else was offering. Thus far he had my curiosity; when he volunteered to participate in the mission, he earned my respect. It wasn’t until we were hurtling across the galaxy, connecting the dots on his ancient map that we began to become more. We were growing into something as unlikely as it was extraordinary, but that was before I left him to die on an alien world.

Before chaos and darkness reached out their black and turbulent fingers of mischance and laid hold of our mission, we sought an unlikely guide on the planet Viridian. The map that Thaxton’s team discovered in Cornwall was enough to lead us from planet to planet, confirming our navigation as we went, but we needed something more. Once we reached the final planet, finding the Grail’s resting place would still prove challenging, especially given that we weren’t sure exactly what we were searching for. Viridianites, with their enormous eyes, are able to see frequencies of energy that even the most advanced human machines can’t detect. This includes the residue of powerful spells cast long ago, or so we hope.

That is how I came to be on this bleak planet with Harley’s nervous shrieking breaking the eerie silence between quakes. This small world was obviously a realm of glorious volcanism in the recent past. The surface is made of black and fractured stone in broad planes, jagged rises, and cinder-cone peaks so perfectly symmetrical that an Earth-child might have drawn them. The mountains have fallen into stillness for the moment, but noxious steams still rise from vents in the earth, painting the atmosphere in hues of red and charcoal, and the ground trembles beneath our feet with frequent minor quakes. It is these that have Harley on edge, and me as well. His hysterics are not soothing, but I cannot blame him for his unease.

Tonight we rest, and tomorrow we begin our search, guided by Harley’s sharp eyes. I should be sleeping, but instead I find myself reviewing our mission log to date. As is my habit, I began this mission log on the day of Rex’s briefing and documented all phases, from planning through launch, and all that has happened along the way. We have come so far and lost so much, and without Rex’s optimism and quiet certainty, I have to ask myself, “For what?” All we have is a sliver of hope, a tenuous dream that came to us from the voices of a prior age, voices who promised salvation when they could not have possibly foreseen our present peril or the kind of world we would make. Harley will no doubt go on screaming, and I will read through my mission notes to gain what insight I can. Where did we go wrong, and how do I take the next steps? Somewhere in this blighted, dreary landscape, are the volcanic mists concealing the key to peace? To survival? Only the crimson dawn will tell.