Verisimilitude
Verisimilitude? Yes, the appearance of truth - the quality of seeming to be true. That’s what it means, and it’s got a nice ring to it. My editor had doubts, but once she found out what the word meant she realized it went with the story perfectly. The story centres around exoarchaeologist Jerard Pauli, who leaves earth to study something a little more exotic than our Earth bound archaeologists get to sink their teeth into. This came out in May 2008, and is published by Eternal Press. It’s available from all good ebook stores, and is 15,000 words.
http://www.fictionwise.com/ebooks/eBook67675.htm
Cover Design by Graeme S. Houston
© Photographers: Lorenzo Puricelli | Mary Lane | Graeme S. Houston
Agency: Dreamstime.com
Here’s an excerpt from Verisimilitude to whet your appetite:
Chapter One
An appointmentA chill wind gushed through the open balcony. Jerard Pauli shivered and closed the patio doors which led out to his roof terrace, wondering if he wouldn’t be better moving back to Brazil. The carnivals, the friendly people, the weather; there was much to draw him back. As he pondered this a husky female voice broke through his thoughts.
“Boss, you have a call.”
“Thanks Maria, I’ll take it now,” he told his user-agent. The flat panel in the wall faded from a virtual aquarium through black and into the image of a smartly dressed man in his late fifties.
“Professor Pauli, I’m Bernard Russell, thank you for applying for the job we have on offer. We would like to take you through to the next stage in the interview. A meeting with myself, here at our virtual campus,” said the man.
Pauli regarded this for a moment before answering.
“Professor Russell, I would be delighted to accept your invitation. When would be suitable?”
“Now.”
Pauli nodded. The man disappeared from view and the aquarium returned. Pauli sat himself down on his chair, placed the virtual reality halo on his head, pulled on the fingerless gloves he would use to navigate and switched from the real into the virtual.
Around him his office appeared; walls, furnishings, doors and windows, all speeding up and arranging themselves.“Would you like me to accompany you boss?” Maria asked him.
“No need, just punch me through.”
The scene fell away, Belgium fell away, Earth fell away, spun like a desktop globe and shot back up towards him. The U.S. and then Washington rushed up to meet him, and suddenly an office formed around him. He and Bernard Russell shook virtual hands.
“Forgive me for rushing this along, but we are in a desperate hurry to get things moving. Let me be frank with you. You meet all of our academic criteria. However as you know, few exoarchaeologists have any real, non-terrageiongate, fieldwork. Whether we hire you or not will depend on your assessment of this virtual mock-up, of the site. Since you have already signed the necessary releases, we can get moving.”
Russell gestured his hand and the walls of the office fell away to reveal a haunting scene before them. Clouds hovered above slipping in elegant strips through the atmosphere; wisps and puffs of white, streaks of green, slithers of white, all tumbling in and out of a sky of both blue and turquoise, wherein both colours were mixing together as uncomfortably as oil and water.
Below them the same haunting scene unfurled, layers and layers of clouds, descending deeper and bluer, down into hazy depths – impossible depths.
Pauli gasped, the structure across from him was something else! It floated, held aloft by an unknown force, drifting between the cloud banks; a castle atop a floating rock.“Well Professor Pauli, what do you think?”
“What do I think? I think you pulled this off a gaming server.”
Russell laughed then.
“We get that a lot.”
Pauli looked. Its towers rose up and ended in bulbous roofs or sharp spires. Grass and vines had already reclaimed much of the structure, some of the structure had collapsed, some of the walls and one of the towers, but only in one small area, less than five percent of the rest. There were streams and rivers and little cotton ball clouds hanging above.
“From just what you can see now, we would like your professional opinion – your best guess. How that fits in with our data will determine whether you get this job or not.”
Pauli grinned.
“So you want me to explain a floating castle in scientific terms?”
“You could say that.”
The scene shifted and they were taken slowly around on a preconfigured flyby.
“No problem. Judging by what I can see, our structure here is in the upper atmosphere of a gas giant. This gas giant will have a mass of at least fourteen times that of Earth, probably more. The bigger the better in fact since it will have more resources and produce more energy. Our extraterrestrial civilisation would likely have opted big. The gas giant will have a rapidly spinning core of heavier elements and due to the dynamo effect will be producing very strong magnetic fields.
“The plants you see there, which cover this structure, indicate that we are rather close to this system’s star, inside the comfortable zone. For that same reason the upper atmosphere is likely to be composed of mainly hydrogen, and the colour you see in the atmosphere indicates methane. Without a look at the star I can’t guess how close exactly. I would also hazard a guess that this system only contains a few small rocky planets, this gas giant, and maybe another gas giant. Gravity at this height is going to be quite nice, somewhere near earth gravity.
“Our ancient extraterrestrial architects sliced an asteroid in half, equipped it with some mechanism to keep it aloft, and dropped it into this planet’s upper atmosphere to create habitable surface area. It draws all the energy it would ever need from the planet’s magnetic field, and that probably supplies the energy to keep it aloft. I cannot even begin to speculate how. I guess you’ll need to hire a cutting edge physicist as well. The structure must have a field around it to hold in the atmosphere required to maintain life, which is very different from the atmosphere of this gas giant. And the habitat will need shielding from radiation, which will likely to be very strong.
“The structure itself is fifty kilometres across. Most of it will be inundated with plant life, possibly some animals, and I would guess that there’s a good deal of flat, undeveloped land in there which was once used as farm land. There is at least one other structure like this, possibly more. The beings who created this originated from a small rocky planet similar to Earth. By the point they created this structure, they had been in space a long time; enough to realise the full potential of gas giants using a very simple methodology. That opened to them hundreds of times more living space, more energy, and more resources, than the small rocks a young civilisation such as us hold so dear.”
Russell held up his hands. “Okay, that’s enough Professor. Can you leave tonight?”
– Excerpt from Versimilitude : Chapter One
– © Graeme S. Houston, 2007 | All Rights Reserved
