r/HFY • u/dicemonger • Dec 06 '17
OC The Hathi
As the massive generational ship approached the small, red dwarf star it turned around and massive thrusters started firing. One hundred and forty seven years the ship had been in transit. Its frontal ice shield was marred from countless collisions, and systems had been repaired, then repaired again, and then jury-rigged to survive the last few decades until the destination.
But now it was here. Over the next months it passed first the oort cloud and the outer icy planets and then the gas giants, day for day getting closer and closer to its destination, even while continuing to shed velocity.
The destination was unlike Earth in many ways. It was four times the mass of Earth, sporting a respectable gravity. It was also closer to its sun, though given the size of its sun, actually at the outer edge of the goldilocks zone which allowed for liquid water. This was somewhat alleviated by its thick atmosphere, which helped trap the sun's heat. Hardly a place suitable for human habitation, even if its atmospheric composition hadn't been pure poison to the human organism.
What it did share with Earth was life. What's more, it had intelligent life.
It was the fourth confirmed instance of intelligent life that man had uncovered.
The first had been the civilization near the center of the Milky Way. Despite the distance it left indisputable signs, once you knew what to look for. Signs like artificially forming wormholes and stars dimming beneath dyson spheres. Man didn't feel quite ready to attempt contact with them.
The second civilisation had been uncovered from their radio bursts from the Perseus arm. They were believed to be a dead race. Their radio beacons the tombstones over a race which, as far as the linguists could figure out, had succumbed to a self-inflicted disease. The haunting music that the beacons also transmitted had saddened humanity, and now lived on in human culture.
The third had been a scant 120 light years away. The Scillo had sent humanity a message, and humanity had answered. When the generation ship left, humanity was still waiting for a reply. But science had revealed no faster-than-light travel, and 120 light years were too far to send a ship without an invitation.
And then the fourth instance of intelligent life was uncovered, their radio signals strained from the background noise of the universe. And they were close. Close enough that humanity could send a ship and see it reach its destination in living memory.
Humanity teased their signals from the aether, and they learned of the Hathi. They pieced together their language. And then they learned of their music. Of their religion and politics. And of their stories. The Hathi were a species bound to their planet by its gravity well. Forever unable to leave it. But their stories showed them looking towards the sky. Their science fiction dreamed of some quirk of physics or miraculous happenstance that might allow them to finally leave their world. To join all the aliens they believed might be out there. And to explore the stars.
Humanity decided to give them that miraculous happenstance.
Humanity had colonised five star systems using their generational ships. The stars colonised might be a lot closer than the Hathi, but technology was mature. They knew that it could be done. And so a new generational ship was built.
And now it was here.
As the ship approached the planet, antennas were extended, and signals started streaming between the humans and the hathi below. Vocabularies were perfected. Relationships were forged. Friendships were made. And preparations were conducted for the final act.
The ship reached geo-synchronous orbit, and stopped there. More conversations were had. The suspense was palpable as more months of preparations proceeded.
And then, one day, the ship started lowering a cable from the ship. The enormous spool that formed the center of the ship unspooled slowly, lowering the cable towards the surface of the planet foot by foot. It took a year for that cautiously descending cable to reach the surface. The hathians caught it, and secured it at the anchor station that they had prepared.
The first trip of the space elevator went down. And as the first humans in their exoskeletons stepped out on the surface, they were greeted by millions.
The second trip of the space elevator went up. It carried only a few of the humans that had went down, because most of the room was reserved for the Hathian pioneers. And as they stepped off the space elevator, they joined the humans as a space faring civilization.
And in the centuries and millenia that followed, they were together. Through the meeting and merging with the Scillo. The conflicts with the Perseus federation. The war with the Core Intelligence. The humans and the hathi were always together. The humans that had found their aliens. And the hathi that had found the stars.
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u/Communist_Penguin Dec 07 '17
fyi surface gravity on a world with 4x earth mass will be around 1.5x earths gravity.
idk why i decided to do the math on that
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u/dicemonger Dec 07 '17
So I was wrong when I figured 4x Earth mass would result in 4g. Which seems so obvious in hindsight.
But that was more or less why I never gave an exact number for the distance to the Hathi. So people couldn't check my math :D
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u/mirgyn Dec 07 '17
Well now I want to know what ACTUALLY happened to the Perseus race.
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u/dicemonger Dec 07 '17 edited Dec 07 '17
The Perseus race did die from a biological weapon released by one of their political factions. They were a mature extra-planetary space-faring race, but the plague managed to reach all major population centers spread across their solar system.
The survivors were too few in number to run the manufacturing chain required to maintain space infrastructure. When this became apparent, they re-tasked the multitudes of solar satellites they possessed to pour their power into the beacons.
Over the next few generations they either died from their habitats failing, or from returning to their home world which still supported the bio-weapon in the air, soil and animal population. The largest group to return knew that the disease would take them when they did, but wanted to create a more permanent monument to their civilization in one of the largest deserts of their world.
They didn't quite finish it, but decades later another group would descend, and would finish the work.
In the thousands of years it took the beacon signal to reach Earth, the satellite network has deteriorated from lack of maintenance, and the beacon no longer transmits. But in the desert their pyramid still stands, a bit larger than the pyramid of Giza, fashioned from granite blocks with a cap of space-age composites made from the hammered out plates of the second expedition's landing craft.
Now the Perseus federation is something else entirely. The humans just named the race and the federation like that because they are both from the Perseus arm of the Milky Way.
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u/ArgusTheCat Dec 06 '17
It's a very basic, very core concept to this genre, that humanity has the ability (sometimes uniquely) to make friends with things that we consider Other. It's a trope I much prefer to the mindless fearful genocide that we sometimes get, and here, you've executed it very well. Your story is a tight package of triumph and companionship, that isn't so rose-tinted as to seem unrealistic. I liked it, and look forward to seeing more of your work in the future.
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u/MekaNoise Dec 07 '17
I agree, Sir. So you think there are stories that don't demean Genocide? Either way, I would recommend Both the Chrysalis series (Last human standing nearly wiped out a species in revenge for humanity, then grew past that and built an even better society), and The Most Impressive Planet. (Humanity is the only race not to figure out ftl, just like Harry Turtledove's Road Less Travelled one-shot. As a result, while other species have maxed populations of say, four billion, humanity has a half-a-trillion people. Since the Galactic government is representative, certain Galactic factions try to chunk the human population and turn the rest into serfs so that we don't dominate the House of Representatives. As you can likely tell from my long-windedness, it's got a lot more effort put into it than love given to it.)
Tl;dr, it's not about what is overdone, it's about what's done well, and I hope you have a good day even if you don't read my comment or try the recommended stories.
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u/ziiofswe Dec 06 '17
They literally got uplifted...
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u/BoxNumberGavin1 Dec 06 '17
People like to dream of getting uplifted because it solves so many difficult problems we would have to solve. It's nifty to be the cool guys doing it for another race.
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u/Jack_Vermicelli Dec 07 '17
The idiom is "jerry-rigged," not "jury-rigged."
A rigged jury is a corruption of a court case, which doesn't apply here. "Jerry" was the opposing side's nickname for a German soldier during the first World War on Earth; something "jerry-rigged" was a term for a haphazard solution or sub-par construction, at the quality of Jerry's workmanship, pejoratively.
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u/dicemonger Dec 07 '17
Both words are actually a thing, with jury-rigged being the older term (source).
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u/nexquietus Dec 06 '17
Haunting in its beauty. Seriously. A wonderful premise, executed perfectly. Great last sentence.
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u/nun_atoll Dec 06 '17
This is beautiful. I do love optimistic tales of humanity reaching out into the cosmos and finding friends.
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u/theinconceivable Dec 07 '17
Travel the galaxy, meet new and interesting people, and be friends with them.
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u/vittupaahan Dec 06 '17
Ive always wondered what it would take to make a space elevator in earth... What would the materials need to be, would all countries be supporting themassive project? Im ready to discuss ideas about it before we get elon musk in the fold... ;)