The Falling Bird. Виктор Иванович Зуев
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René Descartes
The administration responsible for finding promising new ways of discovering edible vegetation on distant planets that could prolong human life hastily assembled a covert division tasked with launching a spacecraft mission into the Canes Venatici constellation. Their reports suggested that that area contained a faintly visible planet on which the first cosmonauts to explore its surface discovered an undying moss-like plant which, when eat continuously, made one immortal.
The Center for Elementary Rationing and Productive Labor on New Exoplanets in the Solar System was located one level below, at the end of the hall behind the fire escape. Hardly anyone ever stopped by there, as all their methods for preparing and distributing material goods, produce and other items of value had long become obsolete due to new developments and rapidly changing priorities in era of explosive development in interplanetary travel, And also due to the fact that long-haul flights paid quite well. Yet none of the executives wanted to admit this, habitually employing a whole department of twenty five experienced senior female staffers consisting mainly of close and distant relatives of the top brass.
Their job was to calculate the requisite amount of food, extra clothing, everyday goods and money for colonists on the next newly discovered planet, referring to manuals approved many decades ago and doing their best to follow those to the letter. These manuals spelled out the number of bureaucrats, guards, supply agents, merchants, regular workers, agitators, and, above all, the leaders dedicated to their people. In order to provide for this core group of people required to sustain productive life on a new exoplanet, the Center would calculate the spaceship capacity needed to carry all the necessary supplies – food, air, water and other essential resources that would be required during the long interplanetary journey, right down to toilet paper.
The spacecraft, easily exceeding the speed of light, would biannually be shipped out to one of the explored planets orbiting the star Proxima Centauri, named Abba, which takes almost a whole year of travel time. Upon arrival, everyone on board would disembark and begin collecting the moss in the underground caves and deep hollows of that planet. Sparse reddish thin lichen-like build-ups grow on the rocks in the caves – one millimeter every ten years – and the workers dispatched to the planet would scrape them off, package and store on the spacecraft to be sent back to Earth. Harvesting of the lichen would continue until all of the ship’s storage modules specially designed to carry it under certain temperature and humidity conditions were completely full – usually this process would take up to a month and a half. After that, the surviving and homesick members of the crew (after undergoing a strict filtration) would return to Earth along with the valuable cargo.
The thing is that this lichen was needed on Earth as a reliable and tested medicine to prolong the lives of honored and notable people threefold. However, this method of extracting and delivering of the lichen to Earth was extremely expensive and took a long time, plus its existence on Abba was very scarce. And sometimes on the transit back home, the miners of that valuable cargo would eat some of it themselves to prolong their own lives, despite a strict law forbidding mere mortals from doing so under penalty of death. The first offenders had been dealt with precisely that way – upon returning to Earth they had been summarily executed by firing squad to set an example for others.
And these prohibition violators were caught quite easily: those who consumed several grams of that valuable lichen would develop a persistent and lingering garlicky breath, like all governing and elite citizens of Earth who partook in the ambrosia made from the lichen. The odor could be temporarily masked with strong aromatic substances or by eating plenty of fatty foods, but as soon as the unpleasant smell was no longer covered up by these methods, the garlicky breath would come back to the super-centenarians. And since this persistent smell was practically impossible to get rid of, people began to identify the elite super-centenarians by their distinctive stench. And not just that – by mandated laws for the people, the stink gradually began to be viewed as an aura of pomp and wealth. Naturally, regular Earth folk were not supposed to smell this way, so a whole series of regulations and decrees were passed prohibiting people from growing and eating garlic and its byproducts, so that their breath would not be confused of that of the governing elite.
As a result, workers and crews who had come back from the off-world lichen mining missions were easily probed during quarantine; anyone who was detected with the garlic breath was detained and executed. However, it was noticed later that within the prison cells where the ambrosia eaters had been kept, various insects (cockroaches, caterpillars, fleas) and other bloodsuckers would thrive for a long time even though the spaces were empty and had been disinfected multiple times after the criminals had been executed.
After pathologists had carefully investigated this strange phenomenon occurring in the prison cells where felons convicted for illegally consuming ambrosia were kept, the following was discovered: while condemned individuals were imprisoned and awaiting execution – which could go on for weeks – the insects living in the same space would actively inhale the air exhaled by the prisoners and thus prolonged their lives manifold, consequently developing an immunity to all toxins.
Earlier, scientists and political strategists had frequently noticed that after contact between the leaders and their electorate, the latter were imbued with extra energy having inhaled the garlicky exhaust from the mouths of the dignitaries, and could work for free for a while if fed simple peasant foods. And thus a question was raised: what was the point of executing the convicts right away if they could still be of use to the law-abiding populace of Earth?
The brass hats made the right call. They began placing convicts in specially built barracks with a powerful exhaust ventilation, and next to them compact health care centers were being built, equipped with the powerful system sucking in the garlicky air coming from those barracks; these became health resorts where the honored laborers working for the good of the motherland could enjoy rest and relaxation and so that worthy working classes could too taste – or rather, inhale – the elite garlic aroma in order to lessen the divide between the rich and the poor and, if possible, to prolong length of service of the able-bodied, rank-worshipping flock.
However, the surplus of the lichen brought from Abba kept depleting all the time. Whether because its reserves found in the planet’s hollows and caves were getting exhausted or theft of ambrosia had become more creative. At the same time, the number of the relatives of Earth’s elite kept growing exponentially due to increase in life expectancy and, accordingly, more numerous offspring. It became necessary to either cull the list of those worthy to receive ambrosia – something the public servants would resist with all their might, culminating in all-out brawls amongst one another – or to increase punitive measures against those caught embezzling the longevity elixir on the spacecrafts returning with the valuable cargo – that was extremely undesirable.
Over the last few years it was getting harder and harder, even for large material rewards, to recruit those willing to fly to space for two to three years to collect the lichen that leaders were dependent on to prolong their life. Rumors began to circulate among the people that after returning from space all surviving recruits were placed under quarantine in special barracks where they were half-starved and forced to strenuously expel the ambrosia-rich air (that they had accumulated from the planet’s atmosphere or from the moss they ate) until they were dying from exhaustion and starvation.
Yet, ambrosia stockpiles were quickly running out, and already less notable officials had to visit the health center to breathe in the therapeutic air exhaled by not only those condemned to death but also all quarantined miners – they were in short supply as well due to high mortality rates. The authorities had no choice but to add a regular fly spray into the air conditioning system in the visitors’ rooms to at least mask the fact that the garlic smell was no longer noticeable. Still, it seemed there was no solution to this insurmountable problem and the ambrosia shortage kept growing like a snowball rolling down a hillside, but a lucky strike saved the day.
The Earth’s brass hats were continuously dispatching spacecrafts with geologists and botanists on board for outer space reconnaissance missions in order to search for similar planets where the wonder lichen grew, but for a long time their efforts proved fruitless. Until