Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  Carin said, “But—”

  “Put together some probability figures showing that what happened to the probe is statistically unlikely to destroy the shuttle.”

  “I can’t be positive that—”

  “Of course you can’t be positive. I said ‘probability figures.’ I’ll present them to our tin tyrant.”

  “Serena,” I said gently, “I think it would be a good idea to send down the second probe before we go down in the shuttle.”

  Her black eyes opened very wide. She did that, too, at the moment of orgasm, and it was disconcerting to see it now. “Paul, is this your area?”

  “Carin is the team physicist and I’m chief scientist.”

  It was said quietly, but clearly. I heard the unspoken corollary: And you, Paul Cho, are secondary xenobiologist. Secondary.

  I gave way, “It’s not my area, Serena.”

  “No. Put together the probability figures, Carin.” Serena smiled at her, then at me. “And we’ll use them to make a decision about the second probe.”

  Serena and I lay naked in my narrow bunk. I ran a hand over her smooth, supple thigh. Her long black hair, unbound now from its usual knot, lay over my chest in ropes and coils. I said, “You have the most beautiful skin in the galaxy.”

  She raised herself on one elbow, her breasts swelling beside my chest, her face teasing. “Yes? And by what standard are you measuring? I doubt you’ve seen all the females in the galaxy, let alone all their skin, so your statement is inaccurate. ‘Measurement defines reality,’ you know” It was what Carin often said; Serena had even captured Carin’s fussy, pedantic tone.

  “My statement is not inaccurate,” I said, drawing her closer. “If measurement defines reality, then my measurements define my reality, and you have the most beautiful skin in the galaxy because I define ‘most beautiful’ as you.”

  “Sounds circular to me.”

  “I’ll give you something circular.”

  I knew she liked me like this: masterful. It was a sham, of course; we both knew who was master here. But I would do anything that would make her look at me as she did now, sideways from her glittering dark eyes, the lids heavy with lust. So we made love again, and again I marveled that, against all odds, she had chosen me.

  At the start of the voyage, I had thought it would be Robert McAuliffe. He was so genemod handsome, black hair and blue eyes and a body like a warm Greek statue. I’ve seen those statues, in Athens. I grew up on Terra, one of the teeming and hopeless urban poor who escaped only because I whipped my intelligence day and night like an overworked donkey. I don’t know if Serena knew that this was my first trip into deep space, as well as my one chance to make a name for myself in scientific circles. Certainly McAuliffe knew; he was a thorough, competent captain who checked everything. Whereas Serena-

  Even in my besotted state, I knew Serena wasn’t perfect. Her work in xenobiology was actually not very distinguished, nor very original. She could be sloppy and hasty, and she wasn’t above claiming credit for work built on others’ ideas. But she made amazing presentations, she filled a room with scientific excitement, she could visualize and describe in glowing words the larger picture. Those were the things that secured both reputation and funding. Without Serena, without Serena’s promoting and championing my ideas, this expedition would never have happened.

  And then she had chosen me. Not Captain McAuliffe, nor the dashing shuttle pilot, Vlad Co wen. Me, Paul Cho, who reached only up to her ear and had narrow shoulders, a potbelly, and a presence so thin that people often forgot I was in the room. Yes, she had chosen me for my work, but that was all right, too. I was my work.

  “Yummm,” Serena said, sated and content We lay quiet for several minutes, and then she rose, “I have to get dressed before I fall asleep.”

  “Don’t go. Fall asleep here.”

  But that she would never do even at night, let alone in the middle of the afternoon. She slept alone in her own bunk, always. I watched her dress, the only color in my drab, tiny quarters. Somewhere on the Feynmann there must be V.I.P. cabins, but we scientists were housed as Navy officers, and I had not bothered to hang anything decorative on my gray bulkheads. Nor were there any personal items on my table or bunk. I had left my old personal life behind me on Terra, and I wanted no reminders.

  After Serena left, I was drifting into a post-coital doze when a knock came on my door. Serena changing her mmd? Instantly I was awake again. “Yes?”

  “Paul? Can I see you for a moment?”

  Carin Dziwalski. I pulled on pants and tunic and opened the door.

  “I’m sorry to wake you,” she said, averting her eyes as if I were still naked, “I just wanted to ask you something . . . I’ll wait in the wardroom. Although the captain is there with his—”

  “Come in,” I said. She made me feel as calm and in control as Serena made me fee! the opposite. Watching her perch on the edge of my one chair, I felt sorry for Carin, for any woman who had to exist beside Serena. And yet Carin was a good physicist, with a solid if not stellar reputation. “Is it about the probability figures for the probe?”

  “No. I finished those and I just gave them to Serena. The chance of a second probe being destroyed by lightning, pulse field, gamma-ray flash, or anything else I can think of, based on the data I have, is less than .6 percent. But that’s only based on the data I have, which isn’t much.”

  “It’s enough to justify a second probe, if not the shuttle.” Serena would want the shuttle. But that decision was Captain McAuliffe’s.

  “Yes. But I didn’t come here to ask about the probe or the shuttle.”

  “What, then?”

  She was silent so long that I had a sudden fear that her question might be personal. Even that she might . . . but that was silly. It was true that I had occasionally caught her looking at me in a shyly interested way, but that was at the very start of the expedition. And although I had, months ago, returned those shy gazes, that was before Serena had exploded into my cabin, changing everything.

  When Carin finally did speak, her words startled me. “You know I’m a Christian.”

  I hadn’t. There were so few Christians left, and mostly they kept to two or three colonies, and almost exclusively to themselves. I was surprised that one had chosen to become a physicist. I didn’t know much about Christianity except that they believed in a God who had created the universe, who directed it personally, who had “died” for its sins, and who sorted the good from the bad in some sort of supernatural afterlife. How could a rational physicist believe all that?

  I didn’t know,” I said, when I had to say something. Carin sat twisting her fingers together in her lap.

  “Yes. And I want to ask you something. When you first mapped the point from which panspermic clouds must have drifted, was it before you knew there was even a star system in that piece of space, or after?”

  “Before. I plotted the life distribution, created the drift algorithms, and then checked the star maps. That’s when I found out that there was a G-l here, but no known planets.”

  “And no spectral analysis ever revealed a planet?”

  “No. You know that, Carin. But the planet is small and it didn’t occlude the star enough to show any spectral or gravitational variation.”

  I do know. I did the measurements or, rather, the non-measurements. Although we should have received some data before we did. But what m asking now is if you, personally, did any other measurements of the star or planet at any time, or had any other definitive, non-recorded data about its existence before we arrived.”

  “No, I recorded everything I surveyed. But I knew from the panspermic drift that the planet had to be here. And it is. Why? What’s this about—does it matter what I knew when? I got no answers.”

  “Probably it doesn’t matter.” She tried a wobbly smile. “It’s just a speculation I have. Probably it won’t amount to anything. No data, and without measurements it—”

  Another knock on the door, foll
owed immediately by its bursting open. “Paul! McAuliffe has the probability data, and we’re sending the second probe down right away! if it transmits anything reasonable at all, we’re going downstairs!”

  Serena bounded away. I don’t think she’d even noticed Carin. “ ‘Reasonable,’ ” Carin said, as if trying the word out aloud, as if she’d never heard it before.

  Probes are not very expensive, but no expedition likes to lose one. Serena, particularly, felt it as a personal affront. She’d been enormously frustrated when the first probe failed, as if it had deliberately flouted her command. So I held my breath as we crowded onto the bridge for our second attempt.

  “Set probe for launch,” Captain McAuliffe said.

  “Probe set for launch,” said the helmsman, Serena rolled her eyes. The elaborate military protocol for the Feynmann’s small crew alternately amused and exasperated her.

  “Prepare to launch probe on three.”

  “Prepared to launch on three.”

  “One . . . two . . . three . . . launch probe.”

  “Probe launched. Trajectory on course . . . approaching atmosphere . . . entering atmosphere . . .”

  “There!” Serena interrupted. “It’s sending.”

  The displays lit up with data. Carin’s fingers flew over her hand-held. I leaned forward, interpreting what I could, waiting for her to run the equations that would give us the rest. But instead of atmospheric composition or temperature, Carin said a strange thing, in a strange voice.

  “There. We’ve finally measured it.”

  Serena snorted. “That’s what we came here for, isn’t it?”

  We waited for the probe to clear the cloud cover and send visuals. When it finally did, after what seemed a much longer time than actually elapsed, Serena said, “Well, it could be worse, I suppose.” But not much worse. The disappointment in Serena’s voice was mirrored, I suspected, on my own face. An expedition down to JQ211F was going to be difficult, if McAuliffe allowed his shuttle down at all.

  The images told the story. Speeding toward us was a landscape of fiery lakes, volcanic mountains, rivers of glowing lava. Everything looked black and red. The closer the probe got to landfall, the more daunting the terrain. Burning rocks-I knew without checking that they had to be sulfur-floated on a lake hurtling toward us at enormous speed. I actually saw the helmsman cringe backward. The probe’s rockets fired, slowing it, and the nightmare land approached more slowly, allowing longer but no more reassuring views. Then the probe hit the surface of the water and all images disappeared.

  No one spoke until First Officer Drina Parker said, “A hostile environment, to say the least.”

  “No one is going down there,” the captain said, and Serena turned on him. “This is a scientific expedition of inestimable importance, Captain. Without a landing—”

  No one goes down there,” McAuliffe repeated. “I’m not risking either my shuttle or my crew.”

  Serena’s face distorted. But she had just enough self-control to turn silently and walk off the bridge. I took a step to follow her, then stopped. I wanted to see whatever data we’d gotten. I wanted to console Serena. I wanted—

  “Better let her calm down first, Dr. Cho,” Captain McAuliffe said, and I heard, or thought I heard, satisfaction in his voice. It angered me—we’d come so far and worked so hard to organize this expedition. So much depended on it, especially for me. But, of course, I didn’t show my anger, although my reasons differed from Serena’s.

  Carin said, “Atmosphere predominately CO2, CO, nitrogen, hydrogen chloride, with water vapor present. Surface temperature ninety degrees Celsius. Atmospheric breakdown by percentage—”

  I went after Serena.

  Uncharacteristically, she sat quietly on the edge of her bunk. I had expected storming and screaming. But she sat as if carved from stone, every muscle rigid. As I knelt beside her, her dark eyes focused on my face.

  “You re going to convince him, Paul. Not me—there’s no way he’ll listen to me now. But he might listen to you, if you can just get his respect. Don’t look so . . . so humble when you ask for a meeting. Try to-don’t look like that, for God’s sake, or nobody would respect anything you say!”

  I didn’t know how I had looked. Her anger, turned now on me, hurt. I rose to my feet. “I don’t think I can persuade the captain to let us go down.”

  “But you’ll try? You’ll really try? Fuck it, scientific knowledge shouldn’t be held captive by a third-rate tin soldier!”

  “I don’t think lie’s that,” I said, before I thought. But she didn’t turn on me for contradicting her. Instead she reached for my hand, looking up at me beseechingly from that beautiful face, almost humble. Serena humble . . . I could not have imagined it. In some deep part of my mind, I suspected that she was acting, manipulating me. That was all right. Serena could knead me any way she wished, as long as the touch was hers.

  “You’ll try?” she said again. “You’ll try to convince him? You and Carin?”

  “I’ll try.”

  I decided to wait a day before sitting down with McAuliffe, and I told Serena to stay out of his way for the rest of the afternoon and evening. It felt odd to be giving her orders. But she agreed to stay in her bunk and work with the data that Carin and I fed to her hand-held.

  It was pretty skimpy data. The probe had lasted less than five minutes before hitting that burning lake, and none of our information looked likely to convince McAuliffe to risk his shuttle and pilot. But just after dinner, and for perhaps the first time on this expedition, we caught a break.

  Carin and I sat on the bridge, which was lightly crewed now that we were in orbit. Lieutenant Parker had the conn. The helmsman said, “Ma’am, object drifting thirteen degrees starboard . . . belay that. Not an object, ma’am. It’s a cloud of some kind . . . scanning now.”

  “A cloud?” Lieutenant Parker walked toward the main screen. Carin and I looked up from our data.

  “Yes, ma’am. Registering very small discreet particles . . . enhancing visual . . . there.”

  The screen was idled with a loose, slowly drifting mass of tiny particles, backlit against the reflected light from the planetary clouds below. I said urgently. “Lieutenant, we need to capture a few of those! I think they’re panspermic spores!”

  “Is there a chance they might be toxic?”

  “I doubt it. Rut we’re prepared to examine them in biohazard alpha conditions.” The lieutenant already knew this. She just wanted a documented record of her caution.

  “All right. Mr. Silverstone, deploy robotic arm to sample that cloud.”

  “Deploying robotic arm.”

  Panspermic spores. I could barely wait to tell Serena.

  She and I suited up and squeezed ourselves into the tiny biohazard lab. It had been converted from some other use of ship’s space and consisted of two chambers, the lab itself, and Decontamination. The robotic arm connected directly to the lab from outside the ship, so our samples awaited us in its sealed cache. Even the suits weren’t really necessary; the spores would stay in a sealed chamber, worked on by lasers and tiny nano-robotic fingers that Serena and I directed from the outside. But the suits, like DeCon, represented another layer of military caution.

  My fingers trembled as I took the console controls.

  The back wall of the sealed chamber contained a magnified visual of our prize, which in turn was magnified hugely on a second display in the lab. We had sixty-four tiny particles. I inserted one under the nanoscope and watched the scope adjust itself.

  “A cell wall,” Serena breathed.

  We set to work.

  Two hours later we knew everything possible about our tiny life-giver. It was indeed that: a spore theoretically capable of giving rise to life. A tough, desiccated membrane surrounded a carbon-based string of thirty-two protein-like molecules that were, or could be, precursors to amino acids.

  “There’s enough here for a primitive self-replicator,” Serena said, “At least enough to give rise
to simple metabolic pathways. And formaldehyde! That could lead to adenine.”

  “But there’s no evidence yet that it has, or will.”

  “Oh, Paul, don’t be so stuffy. Look at it! It’s life!”

  Not yet. But I didn’t say any more to discourage her; I was too eager myself.

  The basic problem with natural selection is, has always been, that you must have something to select from. Life’s biggest mystery is its first: How did that first self-replicator arise from the havoc of pre life chemicals? Metabolic pathways are complex, and they do not seem to be reducible. Nothing simpler will work, and life must have developed complicated strings of chemical reactions all at once—seemingly an impossible task in a mess of billions of particles that could interact in billions of different ways. I still didn’t know how that first enormous leap of evolution had happened. But now I was looking at where.

  Our next step was to put the spores into an environment that would encourage them to emerge from dormancy and germinate. Of course, we had no idea what that environment should be.

  Panspermia posits that these spores drifted through the galaxy, landing on many different kinds of planets, germinating and growing on at least some. To do that, they had to be primitive enough—and these were very primitive—to adapt to a variety of conditions. But it was unlikely that all spores could grow in all conditions. What did these need?

  Water, of course. No life had ever been found, anywhere, that didn’t require water. Beyond that, we didn’t know. We set up a variety of growth media in a variety of atmospheres, each sealed within a separate tiny chamber, and varied the wavelengths and intensity of light. Sixty different mini-environments. By the time we were done, I suddenly realized that I was famished, and so tired my knees shook.

  “Serena—it’s ten o’clock.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Ten o’clock in the morning. We’ve been in here fifteen hours.”

  “My God. Really?”

  “Come on out, love. We need to eat and sleep.”