I
It was the last night of Dante’s life on Earth.
He spent this last night huddled up in the driver’s seat of his small, gray sedan, peering outside the window and observing the most minute details of his mostly uninteresting surroundings. Dante first arrived here a little over two hours ago. This was the place he had chosen to spend these last precious hours of his time on the beautiful little planet we call home. There he sat, unmoved, in a large, empty parking lot. Nothing was particularly noteworthy about the place. The parking lot did not belong to any strip mall, factory, airport, or government institution; it was simply a parking lot. Come to think of it, Dante never found out what purpose this parking lot served. It was close enough to the interstate that one would occasionally hear police sirens or the burdened whir of large semi-trucks. Still, it was far enough from any other civilization that it provided one with a genuine wilderness experience.
Looking out, he noticed that the surrounding woods were mostly comprised of tall, thin, and sparse coniferous trees. These trees, perpetually vertical and perpetually rising, stretched their thin finger-like branches toward the seven heavens, inviting one to consider the depths of the starry night sky.
What had, for many hours, been a snowstorm of massive proportions had only recently slowed down. Dante now scrupulously examined the gentle fall of individual snowflakes dancing in the soft winter breeze. Each little snow-cherub slides down from heaven with the grace of an angelic figure skater. However, every snowflake has its own personal Odyssey, a tale of adventure worthy of being recited by the greatest of poets and directed by the most renowned dramatists. A drop of rain, a speck not much larger than a grain of salt, becomes the most wondrous and intricate of the Creator’s ice sculptures; icicles, frozen lakes, and the complicated patterns on frozen windows cannot compare to the ornate outer garment of the most fearless adventurer of the heavens: the snowflake. The flake’s unhurried journey of pilgrimage begins in the clouds many miles above and ends at its melted death, before your very eyes, upon your crystal windshield. In much the same way, thought Dante, he would himself soon make a pilgrimage upward. Not away from heaven, but toward it.
At that peculiar moment, he began to reminisce about an almost forgotten childhood memory. He remembered his grandfather, a deacon and preacher at a little Baptist chapel in small-town Wisconsin. Most would describe his grandfather as a small, thin, and bony old man not capable of much physical effort due to his advanced Parkinson’s. However, there was something special about the old man. Under his thick white eyebrows were bright blue eyes more piercing than the cold, harsh winds of a Wisconsin winter. Upon his face was a dark scar stretching from his top lip to his left earlobe; the scar was from a shrapnel wound that he had endured during the Final War. After the Final War, and during the rebuilding period, many people retreated to countryside homesteads and lived a simple rural life, no longer caring for much outside of cattle herds, chicken coops, and church. Dante’s grandfather was one of these people. Interestingly, he became quite the pious Puritan after his many traumatic wartime experiences.
“I came face to face with death, son,” he would tell little Dante, his deep voice rumbling like heavy thunder; “and it was there I first learned of God.”
When the hunchbacked little man would go up to the chapel pulpit, he would speak with such authority that little Dante felt as if the roof of the building was about to crumble. Sporadic shouts of “Amen!“, “Hallelujah!“, and “Yes, Lord!” filled the room, creating an atmosphere of awe, unparalleled by anything he has experienced since.
The memory that had just now so casually flooded the meditative mind of Dante as he sat looking out from his car window was a sermon that had marked the boy profoundly. Very few people were in attendance that day, but his grandfather, as if with divine groaning, was giving voice to his last, most pressing, sermon. As he reached the pulpit, he put down his large cowhide King James Bible.
“Matthew chapter four, the first two verses,” he began, ”Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil. And when he had fasted forty days and forty nights, he was afterward an hungred."
Clearing his throat, the old man looked around, observing the gathered attendants, and looking each one in the eyes with compassion.
He continued.
“D’you see here, folks, the great mystery of God’s providence? Before our Saviour began his ministry of healing, saving, and delivering souls,
before he died and was raised,
and before he was brought into glory,
he had to first pass through the wilderness.
There ain’t no Saviour without his wilderness,
there ain’t no Moses without his Egypt
there ain’t no Jonah without his whale,
there ain’t no Hamlet without his ghost,
there ain’t no Ishmael without his Pequod.
Folks, there ain’t no glory if there ain’t no wilderness. The wilderness shapes a man, breaks a man, and builds back stronger. Have you tread through the dry, dark valleys of your wilderness? If not, push forward into the darkness. Notice, our Saviour was taken into the wilderness by the will of God, that is, by his own will. He fasted and prayed by his own will. Now, how much more should we, mortal beings, look to overcome our personal wilderness by pushing through and persevering, ’til we look down on it from the high alpine peaks of divine grace? Brothers and sisters, my whole life’s been a wilderness; a wild one at that. But now... now I look upon glory. The triumph has come, the wilderness has gone. Goodbye, dear friends, goodbye.”
The congregation stared at the old man in a puzzled silence.
Calmly and slowly, he closed his Bible, picked it up, sat down on the front pew, closed his eyes, and left for eternity.
As he remembered this eerie episode from his past, Dante began to mutter something to himself. It had become progressively colder in the car, and he could see his misty breath in the air in front of him. “I am in the wilderness tonight. Tomorrow, I leave for glory.”
Considerable snow had now fallen on his little sedan, making the windshield a blur. He turned on the windshield wipers and they pushed aside the snow, revealing a world still covered in white. He looked up at the stars in the sky.
“Tonight I am in a white world. Tomorrow I will be in a blue one.”
Dante Rolland, an experienced space fleet commander in the post-war era, was chosen by the International Science Committee to be the commander of ship U0847, which would be leaving toward Tundrahar, better known as the “Blue Planet” or the “Greater Tundra” early that following evening. All evidence suggested that Tundrahar was inhabitable, although extremely cold, and it seemed to be the best bet for the next universal colony. Dante and his crew were given three simple commands: to explore, observe, and report everything. They would be returned to Earth as soon as possible when the committee decided that enough data was collected. However, neither the committee nor the crew knew how much data that would amount to and when the crew should expect to return (or whether to expect it at all).
Dante was not leaving much behind on earth. His life, for many years now, had been spent mostly in the dark, speckled expanses of space. He had visited the other four universal colonies carrying both supplies and people aboard his ship. Tundrahar, however, was in a very far and remote corner of the galaxy that no ship had previously ventured into because it was not yet thoroughly mapped out. For this reason, the committee decided to allow a crew of only six people onboard the ship, including the commander. Each of these crew members had a critical role to play in the Tundrahar mission.
Jacques, a French computer and robotics engineer, was tasked with keeping all the ship’s advanced technology working to standard.
Arla, the crew’s communications specialist, was tasked with the writing and transmitting of detailed daily scientific reports from onboard the ship.
Ron, a tall, muscular fellow with many years of experience in piloting, was installed as the ship’s junior commander.
The most significant pieces of data the crew would be tasked with compiling would be the planet’s geographical data. For this, a young digital cartography specialist named Sanya was brought on board. Alongside her, Iain, the chief pilot, would help coordinate the data collection task.
This was Dante’s crew. A small, yet reliable, crew of no more than five shipmates. As Dante lined them up, he took one more pre-launch good look at the people he would spend the next months, years, or possibly eternities with. The committee could not have chosen a better crew, he thought. All of them had a strong, resolute conviction of purpose in their eyes. They stood before him tall and proud, powerfully pronouncing “Aye, Commander!” in sync. He walked up to Ron, with an outstretched arm and the smile of a pleased general on his face.
“Glad to see you here, Ron. Are we ready?” he asked.
“Yes sir,” answered Ron, “we received the go-ahead message from the center about forty minutes ago. It’s about time we began late-stage prep. Do we have your approval?”
Turning to face the rest of his crew, Dante cleared his throat loudly. Then, he responded authoritatively, ordering the crew to begin those final late-stage preparations. “Crew, final embarkment is in T minus two hours. I grant my approval for late-stage preparations. Jacques, send the final system reports to the center. Iain and Ron, initiate pre-launch ship inspection. Arla, please come see me at the mission center. The rest of you, you know what to do; get to work.”
This was not Dante's first time being assigned to a mission together with Arla. In fact, throughout their years of working together, he and Arla had formed a strong bond of companionship.
Naturally an individualist and a skeptic, there were very few people that Dante would trust with his life; Arla was one of them. When first meeting, the two of them realized very quickly that they had similar personalities and interests, and therefore quickly became friends. Like Dante, Arla was quite tall. She had long, thick black hair, an elegant petite nose, and was slightly freckled, like Dante. They had both been fascinated by the depths of space from their childhood, each of them dreaming of one day becoming an astronaut. This was one of their favorite things to discuss when together: childhood. On several missions together, they had practiced their little tradition of gathering the crew together in the main cabin and, going through the circle, asking each crewmate to tell stories from their childhoods. Arla's way of telling childhood stories particularly captivated everybody aboard the ship. Her vocabulary was uniquely Dickensian, and her life was a masterpiece of a Bildungsroman. Of course, her Dickensian style of storytelling was largely owing to how many times she had read David Copperfield, which she carried around with her on every trip; it was her favorite book.
Both Dante and Arla were also interested, often to the dismay of an unsuspecting crew, in the unexplained "Jan-rin" phenomena that had been reported since the Final War. They spent precious hours together discussing these phenomena and using their combined brain power in trying to piece together broken puzzles that often resisted their determined attempts at solving them.
However, their bond was not held together only by loose strings such as common interests. Dante saw himself in Arla and she saw herself in him. Arla's mother had died in a car accident after dropping off little Arla for her first day of kindergarten. Her father, a Chicago businessman, had struggled to find time for her when she was small. So, Arla had spent much of her early childhood with a nanny she called Aunt Jane, and her later youth alone. Dante had, in much the same way, lost a parent at an early age. Every conversation he could remember between his parents was full of disapproving hisses and never-ceasing friction. This perpetual familial conflict had taught Dante to dismiss the theory of "true love" into the realm of fairytales as a child. One evening, his father, once again mad at his mother for some trivial reason, came storming into poor Dante's room. Dante, pretending to be asleep, looked up through the slit between his eyelids at the towering figure of his father, standing in the doorway and huffing heavily as if he were about to go insane. He stood there a while until his breathing slowed. Then, he whispered under his breath, barely audible to the child, "That's it. I'm not coming back here." He turned and left the room at much the same pace he had entered it with. The next morning, he was gone, and Mother sat weeping in a corner. After the incident, Dante's mother often became quite detached from Dante, she would return from work, clean, cook, do the laundry, and then retire to her bed without speaking a word to the child. Many of Dante's childhood years were spent at his Grandparents' cottage in Wisconsin, where his mother would drop him off for weeks on end, just to have him off her mind. Similar to Arla's Aunt Jane, Dante's mother often became nothing more than a housemaid. Their similar, almost shared, childhood experiences were what brought the two together.
Arla now entered the room, walked up to her commander, and shook his hand firmly.
"Commander Rolland, it's a pleasure to see you again," she started, "and it's even more a pleasure to be embarking on this journey with you."
"Oh, please, Arla, call me Dante. We've spoken about this," said Dante, with a sigh.
"The day an astronaut forgets their oath of subordination to their commander is the day they are no longer fit to venture into outer space," interjected Arla emphatically.
"How is your leg?" asked Dante, pointing to her left leg with a concerned look on his face.
"It's alright. Shouldn't be much of a problem in the long run"
"Listen, Arla, I want you to alert me if anything happens to your leg. If it becomes worse, or if it hinders any of your actions, you must let me know."
"It's alright, commander, I just told you it shouldn't be a problem. That should be the least of your worries right now."
"Fine, but don't forget what I told you. Let me know if anything changes," Dante insisted. Then, looking up at the gigantic metal sphere that would carry them into the unfathomable expanses of space, its great spire pointing a hundred feet into the air, he motioned toward it.
"Shall we?"
