Searching for Life

Searching for Life

By Josie Mitchell

The clouds swirled over the perfect blue of the seas. The waters were so vast that the continents, whole continents, looked like small islands as the spacecraft continued to rise. Once they were far enough away, the edges of the Earth, though Martha knew that spheres don’t actually have edges, gave way to the void of space. 

Alma, their engineer, joined Martha in the viewing room. “Pretty, right?” Martha couldn’t peel her eyes away from the thick glass window. Amidst the deep, never-ending black of the surroundings, the Earth stood out like the most perfect sapphire. Martha wiped her eyes, wanting to see every moment as the planet morphed into a dot behind them. Behind them? Below them? She gripped one of the handrails tightly. 

“Are you going to miss it?” Alma asked from where she was knocking on one of the walls. She’d already checked that all of the hardware and software, and whatever else engineers dealt with, was properly functioning several times that morning before they’d taken off, but she was already checking again. 

“I didn’t think I would. I’ve been working towards this for so long,” Martha sighed. She’d been studying so hard, working awfully boring teaching positions, building her resume in any way possible, just for this opportunity–a chance to finally have her talents properly recognized. 

“It’s normal to be homesick at first. You’ll adjust in a week or so.” 

Martha didn’t respond. A week – they would be stuck on the ship for seven whole days, floating through absolute nothingness, and that was only the beginning. They could be gone for months, years even, depending on how much luck they had with their technology holding out and how little luck with their findings.

“You’ll be fine,” Alma insisted. 

The last speck of blue was swallowed by the darkness. 

Martha opened her designated cupboard and pulled out one of her books, Similarities in Non-Verbal Communication between Intelligent Species. She liked books with long titles; they gave readers enough specifics to know exactly what they were getting into. She would not sit idle while Alma and Pierre, their navigator, worked. No matter how long it took them, she would not be unprepared when, if, she was finally needed. After all, her role, as she kept reminding herself, would be the most important in the end, even if everyone else was acting like she’d just been brought along as some sort of tourist. 

“Do you really think we’ll find anything?” Martha asked a few minutes later, only ten pages into her book. 

“We might, and we might not, but we have to keep trying, right? That’s what science is about, trying and failing over and over until we learn something.” 

“But what if there isn’t anything to learn? What if humans haven’t found anything else yet because there isn’t more life out here?” 

Alma scoffed.“There has to be.” 

Martha went back to reading, fidgeting with the edges of the pages. 

Three months into the journey, Alma had finished most of her books, and now she was health-heartedly rereading Mammal Sounds. Pierre and Alma were stomping through the viewing room. Alma sighed and put her book down, glancing out the window. They were drifting past a distant nova, Martha had no idea which one, and the pinks and blues shone against the endless, endless void. Pushing off the walls to adjust her position, Martha put her back against the window.

“Pierre! Do you know how many times you’ve sung that same song since we’ve been on this ship?” Alma shouted. 

Pierre smiled at her. “How many?” 

“Too many. Stop singing.” 

Pierre switched to humming. “Just trying to keep up morale.” 

“Finding us a life-supporting planet would be a much better boost to morale,” Martha grumbled. Pierre was a world-renowned astronomer and their navigator, and she’d decided early on that if they didn’t find anything, it must be his fault. 

“Just go back to your books,” he said. 

“I’m bored of my books.” 

“Too bad. You don’t want to forget the details, do you, on the teeny-tiny chance that we’ll actually need you?” 

“If you actually manage to find us a planet, you’ll definitely need me.” Martha picked up Mammal Sounds, glaring at Pierre over the pages. She was important to the mission. She was. 

“Sure,” Pierre snickered. He and Alma shared an amused smile. 

“What, you think whatever life we find will just happen to speak English? I'm our only chance of communicating.” 

“Maybe they’ll speak French. What does it matter?” 

Alma elbowed him. 

“Ugh! Just find us a planet,” Martha whined. 

“And stop humming,” Alma insisted. 

Five months later, Martha had read all of her books at least three times. The edges of the pages were getting crinkled from her death grip on them every time she tried to avoid strangling Pierre. Pierre had several fresh scratches on his face, courtesy of Alma’s long nails when they got into scuffles, and Alma was missing two teeth. 

“Ooh, peanut butter and rice cakes again. How appetizing.” Martha bit unenthusiastically into her rice cake. 

“Delicious, aren’t they?” Pierre had already eaten three and was picking bits of rice out of his ever-growing beard. 

“You can’t seriously be enjoying these.” 

“I enjoy everything about being here. Except for your constant complaining.” 

“You just pretend to like it to be as obnoxious as possible.” Martha seethed. 

Pierre shook his head. “I’m so sorry my happiness annoys you. Some people just aren’t cut out for space. Why would they send us with one person, when we don’t even need–” 

“Pierre!” Alma shouted. She tried to throw part of her rice cake at him, but it simply floated a couple of inches in front of her. He caught it and put it into his mouth. 

Then over a year had passed, according to their clocks, but Martha could hardly care. There were no days in space, no months, no seasons, no change at all besides the occasional, continuously less impressive, view outside the windows. Time was meaningless; everything was meaningless. Every night, after zipping herself into her suffocating, strapped-down sleeping bag, Martha screamed into her pillow until she ran out of breath. 

“Why can’t we just go home? We’re not going to find anything. I miss my bed; I miss my friends,” she complained. 

“Imaginary friends?” Pierre giggled. 

“They’re real!” Martha insisted. They might not be great, but they weren’t imaginary. She wasn’t delusional, no matter how often Pierre liked to suggest otherwise.

Alma slapped Pierre’s arm. “Just leave her alone, Pierre. Martha, we can’t go home until we find something or start running low on supplies. We signed contracts.” 

“How much longer will the supplies last?” Martha asked. 

“Years,” Alma murmured, giving Martha a sympathetic look. 

Martha ripped a chunk of pages out of Non-Verbal Communication between Intelligent Species. Sewing them back in at least gave life an ounce of meaning. Once her book was restored, she spent all her waking hours staring blankly out the windows. They passed through solar systems, more novas, countless asteroids, but Martha’s eyes rarely left the blank, black space. There was no point in really looking. No point in reading. Martha hated space. 

Some time later, Martha was woken by Pierre bellowing the French national anthem at the top of his lungs. She unzipped herself from her sleeping bag, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes. There were still hours until her daily alarm was meant to go off. 

“Pierre!” she yelled. “If we didn’t need you to get home, I would murder you right now.” His head peeked through the door of her sleeping compartment. 

“Murder me now? But I’ve just made your day.” 

“With your terrible singing voice?” 

“No, not with my beautiful singing.” He grinned. “With the greatest scientific discovery ever. Come see.” He disappeared again. 

Martha hurried after him as quickly as the lack of gravity would allow. Alma was already in the viewing room, looking unblinkingly out of their largest window. Martha joined her. They were in the midst of a solar system, with a bright little star visible far to their left. Several planets of varying colors and sizes could be seen in the distance. Right in front of them, taking up more and more of the window as they moved towards it, was a majestic planet. It was relatively small and purple, with a transparent haze swirling over the surface. Their entire view was the purple landscape, low and high points slowly becoming discernable, when Alma gasped, her finger turning white as she pressed it against the glass. 

“Pierre–” she exclaimed. 

“I know, I know,” Pierre chuckled, tapping at the mass of navigation buttons that Martha had never tried to understand. 

Martha stared at the area Alma was pointing to, desperate to understand their excitement. Then she saw it: a small, irregularly shaped spot of blue disturbing the expanse of purple. “Water?” Martha whispered. 

“Water,” Pierre confirmed. “Through the telescope, it’s clearly liquid. And there is more of it in even smaller bodies.” 

“And have you checked for an atmosphere?” Martha had never seen Alma so energetic. Her entire body was pressed against the window now. “Is it similar?” 

“I believe so,” Pierre said, starting up his anthem again. 

Water, a similar atmosphere… Even Martha knew those were the signs they had been looking for, the signs of possible life. 

“Planets like this have been found before,” she said, taking deep breaths. “What makes this the greatest scientific discovery?” 

“The greatest scientific discovery ever. Look through the telescope.” 

Alma went first, and Martha bit at her cuticles impatiently as she waited. Their ship had been equipped with the best telescope currently available, one Alma had helped develop. Alma stared through it for several minutes, not even breathing. Martha tasted blood from her own fingers.

After an obnoxious amount of time, Alma moved away from the telescope and stared wide-eyed at Pierre. Then, she hugged him so enthusiastically that he nearly crashed into his precious buttons. Martha, surprised, eagerly took her spot at the telescope, getting her eye as close to the lens as she could. The telescope was pointed at the edge of the body of water they had already seen which, as Pierre had said, moved in the sloshing, rhythmic way that suggested it was undoubtedly liquid. The land along the edge of the water was grey and seemingly rocky. The further away from the water Martha looked, the more densely the purple, which she assumed must be foliage, was clustered over the ground. 

“We found plants?” she murmured, trying not to sound too disappointed. Extraterrestrial plant life, she knew, was undoubtedly an amazing discovery. It was just absolutely useless in regard to her own goals. 

“Yes, yes, most likely, but that’s not the real discovery! Keep looking,” Pierre said impatiently. 

Martha tried to press even closer to the telescope until it dug into her skin and her eyeball was nearly touching the lens. She could hardly keep her vision focused with how much she was shaking. If they’d found something, if they’d really found something, this moment would change her entire life. Sure, plants were technically alive, but they hardly counted as life. But, if Pierre had managed to find them some sort of fauna, anything that communicated in a way humans could hope to mimic, Martha was confident she would be the first person to ever have a conversation with aliens. Her career would be set; there would be no more teaching brainless university students basic communication skills or spending her weekends on rancid-smelling farms, trying to explain to the livestock that they needed to produce more milk or the farmers would eat them. She would be important; she would be rich. Her life could finally be more than just reading and waiting for something more interesting to happen. 

Martha scanned the purple landscape frantically as Alma and Pierre snickered quietly. What was she missing? Then, amidst the sparse purple clumps near the shore, she saw it. Something was moving. It wasn’t the rhythmic, gentle movement of water or wind. Something was scampering. Something was alive. 

“Life,” she whispered. 

Pierre and Alma cheered behind her. Still staring through the telescope, trying to get a better view of the living beings, Martha realized the ship had stopped. 

“Why aren’t we getting closer?” 

Pierre left the control buttons, he and Alma rejoining Martha at the window. “This is as far as we’ll go. We don’t want to be seen.” 

“What?” Martha gasped, staring at her colleagues. “We’re not going to land?” 

“Of course not,” Alma said, frowning. “Our mission was to find extraterrestrial life, and Pierre will map down the route we took.” 

“That’s not what I was told.” 

Pierre scoffed, “Would you have come if you were told?” 

“Why was I even brought then?” She’d been lied to. She’d been tricked. 

“In case of emergency: if we were seen and attacked, or we were out of supplies, or we crashed trying to get closer. Not that I would ever have crashed.” 

“What’s the point of even finding life if we aren’t going to stay and see it?” Martha wheezed. 

“Other missions will come,” Alma explained, “with ships more easily camouflaged in this specific atmosphere. Hopefully, we’ll have even newer models of this telescope by then too. They’ll bring astronomers, sociologists, zoologists, botanists, and likely more communication experts as well. All of that will be possible because we found this planet.”

“The next missions will land?” Martha asked hopefully. She was one of the best communication experts alive; she could convince the mission leaders to let her go along. She would be the one to solve interspecies communication between humans and extraterrestrial life. 

“Why would they?” Pierre asked. “As soon as one of our ships was even visible, all of their habits would change. Our ship and our bodies could damage their environment beyond repair. Don’t you know that studying life is about observing, not interrupting? The missions will watch from as close as possible without being seen.” 

“But what about meeting them? What about… what about finding out if this planet could sustain human life?” She’d seen people talking about that on the news a lot when she was a kid. Maybe it was something scientists were still concerned about. 

“Do you really think they want to meet us? And again,” Pierre rolled his eyes, “besides being unethical, it would ruin our research. We already have a planet. We get to go home now!”

“But…but…” 

“Ah, France,” Pierre sighed happily. 

Alma went back to fixing one of the light fixtures. 

Martha watched as the planet shrank behind them until the last speck of purple was swallowed by the darkness, slipping away along with her dreams. She tore the pages out of all of her books, scattering them throughout the spacecraft. Her fingers bled, both from her biting and from innumerable paper cuts. 

“Martha, calm down. It’s alright. Won’t you be glad to be back on Earth?” Alma asked gently, taking the first-aid kit out of its cabinet.

“You lied to me!” Martha screeched, throwing a handful of pages at Alma. Alma waved the paper away as it floated around her. “I’m sorry. We only did what we were told. Just let me see your hands.” 

Martha wiped her hands on Alma’s suit. “We’re not going back,” she insisted. 

“That’s not your choice.” Pierre laughed. 

He was already back at the controls, steering them further from the planet until it was a distant speck of purple in the void. Then it was gone. 

Martha fled into her sleeping compartment and strapped herself in. Gripping her pillow with white knuckles, not caring how the blood soaked into the dingy fabric, she pressed her face into it and screamed. She screamed until she was out of breath and didn’t stop even then, screaming silently as her body begged her to breathe. She screamed until the nothingness of space seeped into her brain, until the only thing keeping her limp body from floating aimlessly through the ship were the straps of her sleeping bag. 

On a small purple planet more than a year away from Earth with the most modern aircraft travel technology, two young beings sat stargazing together. As the smaller of the two beings watched, one of the stars, a small white light, seemed to shrink. Then, after it had become just a tiny speck, it blinked out of existence. The being excitedly tapped his friend. She stared at him with her three large eyes, unblinking, and he pushed the image of what he’d just seen through the channel between their minds. She didn’t send any images back; she hadn’t seen it. The smaller being refocused on the meteor shower. 

The cool air brushed over his skin, and the wet vegetation below him was soft. His friend’s gentle breathing calmed him, his eyes closing halfway even as the light of the meteors occasionally passed by them. His friend prodded his eyes open, looking into them and passing an image of the soup she had at home. The disappearing star was quickly forgotten.