NaNoWriMo 2014, Day Thirteen

Day Thirteen — as in, the day after Day Twelve, which should have been the day after Day Eleven, but you wouldn’t know it from here.

A stupid error, a typo, not the end of the world, but it is a good indication of how NaNoWriMo can push you to the edge if you’re already busy and stressed for time and then have to somehow find time to write every day. Sleep is often a casualty. While it’s macho and cool and attitudinal to say things like, “Plenty of time to sleep when I’m dead!” or “Sleep is for the weak and sickly!” the fact is, if you’re not a twenty-four-year-old Navy SEAL, going from seven or eight hours of sleep a night to five or six hours a night, every night for a month, is grueling.

Earlier this evening, the eyes were really heavy, the chair was comfortable, and that lying little voice was saying, “Just a little nap, you’ll feel so much better. Just until 9, right?” But as you’re nodding off and your head is bobbing like one of those glass ducks that keeps dipping into the water, you realize that “just until 9” probably means either 9 AM tomorrow morning or 9PM tomorrow night.

That’s not going to get it done. It’s a marathon. This might not be “THE wall” that you hit, but it’s definitely “A wall.”

A very important time to remember what it’s like running that last 2+ kilometers of the marathon, the finish line ahead of you, and the clock ticking…

Then you get your butt out of the comfy chair (“They NEVER expect the Spanish Inquisition!”) and in front of the computer and you write some more. Maybe not 3,000 words, 1,700 words, or even 1,000 words. But you write.

While I normally put in a lot of  internal links to previous, related posts here, I won’t be doing that for what I hope will be this year’s thirty NaNoWriMo posts. If you have jumped into or stumbled onto this story in mid-adventure, there are plenty of other ways to navigate around the site to find previous installments. Actually doing so is left as an exercise to the student.

CHAPTER SIX (continued)

On the way toward Saturn six months earlier, the observation area had been the most popular area on the ship. When they left Ceres it had faded to just another pinpoint in just a few days. Heading uphill away from the sun it was dark and lovely, a dark sky that no one on Earth had ever dreamed of. Not even the night sky of Farside Station on the moon could compare to this.

But ultimately, it was just stars. Billions of crystal clear pinpoints right down to the limits of resolution for the human eye, some showing a touch of color, some smoky smudges trying to resolve themselves into ghostly nebulae – but stars.

Then one of them began to get brighter, a little bit more each day, before resolving into a lopsided blob accompanied by a few other bright points of light that moved near the bright blob. As Saturn grew, and grew, and grew, the view from the blister on the rocky outer skin of Cronus was breathtaking.

But like its bigger brother Jupiter, Saturn held onto some incredible forces in her magnetic fields and radiation belts. An order of magnitude less than the killing power of Jupiter, Saturn had plenty of areas that dictated the building of Cronus out of a small asteroid, the thick, rocky shell and stores of water acting as a shield to protect the crew inside.

Once Cronus had started orbiting Saturn deep inside the system of moons, all access to the observation area had ended. On the original flight plan it would have stayed that way until Cronus left to return to Ceres. But the original flight plan had been scrapped.

With the swing out past Titan and near Enceladus, Cronus was away from the worst of Saturn’s radiation belts. There were occasional outbursts as plasma streams from coronal mass ejections interacted with Saturn’s magnetic field at the magnetopause. However, with care, the observation areas could be used safely.

Alsby, Tanaka, and Doctor Anderson worked out a system which allowed small groups to go out for an hour at a time. As if they were going swimming in dangerous waters, a buddy system was set up. Radiation exposures were closely monitored.

The view of Saturn was worth the small risk. Appearing over ten times as large as the Moon seen from the Earth, the banded yellow disk of Saturn surrounded by her broad, glittering rings was indescribable to anyone who hadn’t seen it with their own eyes.

Cronus had launched the Titan probes from a point over half a million kilometers from the cold, smoggy planet, but that was still close enough for the enigmatic moon to be clearly seen as the ship looped outward toward Iapetus. The other larger moons could be clearly seen as small disks or crescents near the rings, while some of the dozens of tiny moons could be spotted as moving pinpoints.

Drifting in the bubble of windows, one foot loosely hooked through an anchor loop, Alsby soaked up the view. It was often hard for her to express why she wanted to be out here doing this and why she had fought so hard to get command of Cronus and the Saturn Exploration Mission. She was not a poet or an artist, but this view, this unparalleled splendor – it was a major factor in what drove her. She liked being out on the edge of the known.

Her “bubble buddy”, Doctor Anderson, floated next to her, intently scanning the rings with a large pair of binoculars. Alsby didn’t know what she was looking for. Finally Anderson pulled them away from her eyes and attached them to a sticky patch on the back wall.

“You had something you wanted to talk about, Doctor?” Alsby asked quietly, breaking the silence.

“Couldn’t we just be here to enjoy our allotted R&R time? Does there have to be an ulterior motive?”

“There doesn’t have to be. But I’ll bet there is, right?”

Anderson signed. “Fine, yes, there is. Am I really that transparent?”

“Subtlety is not your strong suit, but it serves you well in your position, so don’t worry about it, Cheryl. What did you need?”

“I just wanted to put a bug in your ear about some minor rumblings in the crew. Not everyone’s thrilled to be looking at six or more years out here instead of three.”

“I don’t blame them,” Alsby said, “but they all knew that it was a contingency, and it was possible long before we ever had any of these problems on Earth. The cause of our need to stay blindsided us, but not the existence of a Plan B.”

“No, and what I’m seeing and hearing is minor, nothing to get too worried about, but I thought you should know.”

“I know there are confidentiality issues, but can you give me any hints? Better yet, do you have any suggestions on how to make the situation better?”

“I think the biggest thing you could do would be to take a look on the regulations regarding advanced personal relationships.”

Alsby snorted. “All of this is about Ben and Betty? They found twin cabins down by engineering a month after we headed out and everyone this side of the asteroid belt knows what’s going on down there.”

“It’s more than that. You’re right, Ben and Betty are a cute couple and their discreet disregard for those particular regulations is the worst kept secret on the ship. But you also have more and more people who are bending the rules a little bit more every day. The situation has changed; perhaps the regs should be changed as well.”

“Changed how? You know there’s a reason that those regs are there. We’re forty-nine people trapped in a can stuck inside a rock for three years. The last thing we need is a couple breaking up in an ugly way, or some third wheel deciding they’re not happy being the one who’s not happy.”

“But you just said it yourself, Susan. We’re not stuck here for three years, we’re stuck here for at least six. Maybe nine. Maybe find that to keep things running a few people have to stay here until the next ship comes. It was one thing for everyone to figure they could cope for three years by using dedication to the mission and some masturbation on the side. Now some people are thinking a little differently.

“We can’t just chuck those rules out, Cheryl, you know that. We don’t get to pick and choose the regulations we like.”

“So said the woman who has Todd and SaSEM plotting trajectories and laying out building plans, plans which Ceres isn’t supposed to know about just yet.”

“Guilty!” laughed Alsby. “So rules may be adjusted as deemed necessary, especially on a ship two billion kilometers from the nearest human settlement. It sounds like you’ve given this some thought, so spill it. What’s your suggestion?”

“Trust your crew. They’re the best of the best, all highly motivated, all focused on the mission goals. They’re also all human and under enough pressure to make diamonds. Work with them to figure out what can work and what still has to be out of bounds. Set up definite expectations of what is expected and what is forbidden when inevitably someone breaks up and they still have to work together.”

“What you’re suggesting really has us heading off into uncharted territory, Cheryl. I don’t know that any crew has ever done this. It might be for a good reason.”

“I don’t know that any crew has ever faced these kinds of circumstances, at least, not a crew this big. You’ve said that we have to take risks to change our exploration schedule, go to places we weren’t expected to go, and now build a station from scratch somewhere out here? If the situation is drastic and warrants those technological and engineering risks, then it might also warrant the social risks.”

“I’ll take that under serious consideration, Doctor. I think you may be right, but we’ll need to take these changes as carefully as we have the schedule and planning changes.”

“Thanks, Susan. I’ll be ready to work with you on this, to do whatever you need. The crew’s health is my job and I think this is now going to be critical to keeping them sane. We’re not just crew any more, we’re more like pioneers or settlers, like it or not.”

A chime sounded. “Our time here’s up,” said Alsby. “By the way, who is it that you’re bending the regulations with, Cheryl?”

Anderson looked at Alsby, surprised, but not bothering to deny the accusation. “I guess I really am that transparent. It’s Mark, from Life Support. Sorry, I guess I’m only human as well.”

“Not to worry, we’ll see what can be done to make some adjustments before everyone starts talking about you and Mark the way they talk about Ben and Betty. Plus, you’re not nearly so alliterative as a couple as they are.”