Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  “All pre-launch procedures must be completed first.’

  “Fine. You complete your little procedures. I’ll be in my cabin, and you can—”

  “Wait,” I said. No one heard me, so I said again, louder, “Wait”

  “Yes, Paul?” Serena looked down on me. The edge of her orange robe brushed across my shoulder, searing me like flame.

  “I . . . I want to be the other scientist on the shuttle.”

  Serena’s face locked absolutely blank. It was as if she suddenly didn’t comprehend English. A part of my wildly agitated mind thought: I wish I could say it in New Swahili.

  No, that would be worse.

  “I don’t understand,” Serena said.

  “I want to go down to JQ211F with Carin and send the data back up here to you.”

  Now the blankness on Serena’s face dissolved. I had to look away. “Paul—”

  McAuliffe said, not even troubling to hide his amusement, “Dr. Wambugu?”

  This was my only chance. I had to do it publicly because in private there would be no chance at all I could never stand out against her. “Serena, I spent six years on this data. It’s my lifework and if . . . if anything happens to me down there, you could still present the work better than anyone I know. I want you safe so that you can be the inheritor and presenter of my work!”

  It sounded lame even to me. That it was true, or partially true, made no difference. I did feel a laughable masculine protectiveness toward her—as if I could ever protect someone like Serena! But I also felt an intense, not-to he-denied need to go down myself to the planet, and an unexpected resentment that she stood in the way, and half a dozen other things. I saw that Serena, gazing at me as if at a cockroach, knew everything I felt. It had no effect whatsoever on her decision but, I saw, an apocalyptic effect on her affections. I had betrayed her by even asking.

  “Dr. Dziwalski and I will go downstairs in the shuttle,” she said in a clear, dispassionate tone. “Captain, how soon can we leave?”

  “I’ve already told you—as soon as all pre-landing procedures have been satisfied.”

  “Fine. I’ll be in my quarters.” She prepared to sweep out, but McAuliffe’s words stopped her.

  “Then Lieutenant Vollmueller will examine you there.”

  Serena turned. “Examine me?”

  “Lieutenant Vollmueller is, as you may remember, ship’s physician. Part of pre-landing procedure is a complete physical, Dr. Wambugu. A shuttle ride is not the equivalent of a cruise in space. You’ll be pulling gees. A medical certification must be on file.”

  “I was medically certified at the start of the expedition!”

  “And you’ll be medically certified again,” McAuliffe said. He was the only person I had ever seen dominate Serena, but I was too wretched to be impressed. I had just lost everything. I was not going down on the shuttle, and Serena was going to discard me.

  “Fine. In my quarters,” Serena said, and swept off the bridge. I scrambled to follow her. If I could explain, if I could just touch her while I talked—

  A small hand grasped the bottom hem of my tunic. “Not now,” Carin whispered. “Let her go for now.”

  She was right, of course. But everything in me roiled. My breath pounded in my lungs, I couldn’t get enough air, there was a rushing noise in my ears, and—

  “Just for now,” Carin said, and pulled me again to sit down, while McAuliffe looked on with contempt.

  I tried to see Serena. She wouldn’t talk to me. First she was closeted with Lieutenant Vollmueller, and then I was, impatiently enduring being poked, imaged, and sampled. “Thirty six hours to culture blood and tissue for pathogens,” the doctor said crisply. I barely heard her, merely enduring until I could go to Serena.

  She wouldn’t even open her door, which was locked. She wouldn’t answer a call. I wanted to sit in the corridor outside her quarters and waylay her, but that would have looked too ridiculous even for me. So I waited in the lab, the one place I was sure she would come eventually, in an agony of longing and frustration.

  The thirty-six hours dragged by. Serena did not come. And none of the spores germinated.

  Why not? It made no sense Surely, from sixty varied and carefully chosen growing conditions, one should have proved favorable for germination?

  Part of the time I slept, a fitful dozing on the bare deck that I knew wasn’t the best physical preparation for the trip downstairs. Periodically a sailor brought me food that I didn’t eat. I should have been getting rest, nutrition, briefing. I wanted none of it. I wanted Serena. I wanted the spores to sprout. I wanted—

  “Paul,” Serena said, bending over me, and my arms reached up and closed gratefully around her. But it wasn’t Serena; it was Carin.

  “Paul,” she said, freeing herself, her face mottled with an unbecoming blush. “You have to get up. The captain wants you in the wardroom.”

  “The . . .”

  “The wardroom. Come on, Paul, get up. Here.” She handed me a cup of steaming coffee.

  I staggered to my feet and gulped the hot coffee. Carin produced a comb from somewhere in her tunic and, still blushing, wordlessly ran it through my hair and retied my queue. I nodded gratitude, all the while wondering: Where was Serena?

  “What does McAuliffe want now? Are you going down?” I couldn’t see, even in my exhausted anguish, why that would make McAuliffe summon me. I wasn’t going downstairs.

  “I don’t know what he wants. The spores, have they—”

  “Nothing. All still dormant, or dead. I don’t understand it.”

  I didn’t understand anything.

  “Dead,” Carin repeated, and at her tone I finally broke out of my self-absorption to genuinely look at her. Eyes so bloodshot they resembled lava pools. Face so haggard she looked fifteen years older than she was. Her right hand trembled.

  “Carin—”

  “Let’s go,” she said, and I wasn’t steady enough, or kind enough, to probe further.

  Captain McAuliffe, First Officer Parker, and Gunner’s Mate Telin Eyer waited in the wardroom, all three of them upright as statues on the plush green seats, Eyer was a big, solidly muscled man who looked as if he could take on an entire human division. I suspected that he, too, was genemod, but that not even his official Navy records would say for what. McAuliffe said briskly, “Dr. Cho, you are to prepare for the shuttle trip planet-side.”

  I felt my mouth fall open, and somehow I couldn’t shut it.

  “Dr. Wambugu’s blood tests show an unidentified pathogen, something not in the deebees. It may or may not have resulted from exposure to the spores captured by this ship. Your biologic samples show no such unidentified contamination. Therefore, you will make the trip downstairs and Dr. Wambugu will remain aboard the Feynmann.”

  “Unidentified . . . but Serena wore a biohazard suit! And the lab is shielded! And the spores didn’t even germinate, none of them!”

  I had blurted out that last without thinking. Something shifted behind McAuliffe’s eyes. He was not a biologist, but he was intelligent and well-read; he must know that at least a few of the spores should have shed dormancy. But all he said was, “Military regulations specify that no personnel with any unidentified medical conditions may land on virgin planets. Lieutenant Vollmueller tells me that Dr. Wambugu most likely harbors a harmless retrovirus that has just happened to flare up at the moment. On my ship, however, we follow regs. The shuttle launches at 1100 hours. Are you going to be on it?”

  “Yes,” I said, and a small part of my mind noted that, treacherously and for the first time since I’d met her, I was glad that Serena was not by my side.

  The shuttle screamed uneventfully through the atmosphere and then we were down.

  “Permission to leave ship,” Telin Eyer said to the shuttle pilot, Lieutenant Cowen, and even I felt slightly impatient with this formal military protocol. We were four people, three of them already in s-suits, jammed into an airlock the size of a supply closet and facing a landscape see
mingly empty of life. Yet Cowen kept a laserlike gaze on the displays that monitored the outside, and Gunner’s Mate Telin Eyer carried in his hand and on his suit enough weaponry to blow up a small city. What did the Navy do for first landings on planets with actual predators?

  Not that there wasn’t danger enough outside. But it was not going to respond to either barked orders or technological threats.

  “Permission granted,” Lieutenant Cowen said. And then, with a change of tone, “Good luck, Tel.” I saw then what I had overlooked before: the danger of this mission to more than just Carin and myself. Scientists are no less self-absorbed than anyone else. Maybe more so.

  The inner airlock door slid dosed, the lock depressurized, and the outer door opened. We stepped, our military escort first, onto the surface of the planet that Carin had called “Hell.”

  Cowen had set the shuttle down on the most stable place he could find, a rocky and fairly level plateau ringed with active volcanic mountains. They smoked and belched, their sides glowing with molten lava, or streaked pale yellow with sulfur sprayed during previous eruptions. Through air thick with ash, I could see a small lake a few hundred meters to my left. Chunks of sulfur, some of it burning, floated on the water, undoubtedly releasing fumes of sulfur dioxide. The lake would be noxiously acidic and the air, could I have smelled it, foul and poisonous. Beneath my feet the ground rocked gently: subterranean quake. In the near distance a geyser suddenly erupted, an explosive outcasting of superheated steam where seeping rain water met hot magma below. I he whole scene was lit, through the thick ash, by dim sunlight tinged with sickly red. My suit said the external temperature was ninety-six degrees Celsius

  “Fucking gods,” Eyer breathed into his comm link, and I saw Carin glance at him sharply.

  I said, “We need to spend as little time here as possible, so let’s split up and 113—”

  “No, sir,” Eyer said definitively. “My orders are that this landing party stays together.”

  But don t you see that—all right.” It was not the place or time to argue.

  What place or time was it? More than the probe readings, actually standing on the surface of JQ211F convinced me that this was a young planet. It looked not unlike Terra must have looked once, over three billion years ago. A young planet that had somehow sent out all the spores leading to galactic life everywhere, after slow drifts through space that themselves would have taken a few billion years. It made no sense.

  Carin said, her voice high and strained even through the commlink, “The lake first, Paul?”

  “Yes.”

  We lumbered toward it, Telin Eyer sticking close. To do what? The gun in his hand looked fantastic, ridiculous, in that setting. Then I forgot the gun and everything else in my fascination with the lake. Measurements make realities and different measurements make different realities, Carin the physicist often said. I wanted to make sure we measured the right thing.

  Fortunately, the water’s edge was well defined here, roiling a foot or so below a lip of solid rock. I knelt and filled beakers, each one fitted with internal sensors and made of an alloy more indestructible than even that rock. It would take days to analyze everything in the scalding water, but the preliminary readings, displayed on the beaker’s outer screen, were what I had expected: a high concentration of sulfuric acid. This was hopeful. Many thermophilic microbes can breath or eat sulfur or its compounds, and many of those generate sulfuric acid as a by-product.

  I took scrapings from the side of the rocks under the water level, snatching back my hand when a chunk of burning sulfur floated too close. Everything we did, of course, was transmitted back to the Feynman over cameras mounted on our helmets. Was Serena watching?

  Of course she was.

  Carin was busy with her own instruments. With her head bent over them, I couldn’t see her face. I shouted, over a sudden noise like the clap of thunder, “I want samples from the geyser!”

  She nodded, and the three of us set off toward it. Telin Eyer glanced every few seconds at his suit display. I knew he was looking for any excuse to pull us in, any rise in temperature or change in pressure. For some reason, this gave me a sudden rush of courage so great it almost felt like contempt for his military caution. I said on commlmk, “Eyer, it’s only sulfur. Your body carries over two hundred grams of it and it hasn’t killed you yet!”

  Through his faceplate he gave me the look that this stupid bravado deserved. But my irrational elation continued. We were doing it. We were proving my theory. This planet was the source of all life, and I stood on it, and I had actual samples from it! If this wonderful sense of triumph was merely a rush of adrenaline from fear, or a mental counter reaction to my anguish over Serena, or a predictable response to too little sleep and no food-well, I didn’t want to know it. For that moment, on the surface of Hell, I was invincible, omnipotent, god like.

  We took samples from the geyser, from a pool of stagnant water, from random cracks in the rock. Some bacteria, let alone prebacteria! microbes, can survive on a diet of volcanic ash. We took rocks themselves. And then all three of us got safely back to the shuttle, no one killed or injured, and we took off for the Feynmann as intact as if we’d been on the lush, benign savannahs of a planet like Belsucre, the sweet garden playground of the Orion Arm.

  Moods like that cannot, of course, last long. Mine didn’t survive five minutes aboard ship.

  Serena waited in the corridor when I emerged from DeCon. She didn’t look at me, didn’t even brush the block of air I occupied. I was less than a shadow on the wall. “Serena . . .” I said, then stopped. It was no use. All my stupid, lovesick grief flooded back, swamping me.

  And so we stood there, two people occupying different realities, until Carin emerged from DeCon, clad in her usual gray pants and tunic and drying her dun hair with a towel She had barely stepped into the corridor before Serena said imperiously, “Dr. Dziwalski, you will keep me informed of all results of your data analysis as soon as they occur, rather than waiting until you have them organized.”

  “All right,” Carin said listlessly. I looked at her, puzzled. Whatever had ravaged her before had vanished, leaving this passive, resigned droop. So had her previous state been merely fear, a terror of dying down on the planet? it hadn’t seemed so at the time. And what was she so hopelessly resigned to now?

  I said, “Serena, you and I, not Carin, will be analyzing the microbe samples.”

  Serena didn’t so much as glance in my direction. Desperate, I caught her arm. “At least tell me what the spores have been doing while I was downstairs! Have any germinated?”

  She shook herself free as if shedding a mosquito and said to Carin. All my data is already posted for anyone to look at it.” Then she swept away.

  I think it was that moment, that childish refusal of hers to separate the scientific from the personal, that Serena’s hold on me loosened. But only a tiny bit, practically immeasurable, and I didn’t feel it as relief, standing there in the corridor watching her beautiful back in its orange robe retreat from me for good. All I felt was a burning misery, corrosive as acid.

  Still, Serena and I had to work side by side in the tiny lab. Telin Eyer had, on McAuliffe’s orders, gone EVA and deposited all our samples from the outside of the ship into the lab depository. Now Serena and I, in the biohazard suits that McAuliffe also insisted on, handled the samples robotically. In one sense, the suits were a blessing. I could not touch her.

  The analyzers processed everything: rock scrapings, pool water, lake samples, geyser residue. All the predicted components were present. The water was highly acidic, saturated with an excess of hydrogen ions. The solutions contained elements that might have been by-products of life, including the sulfur granules that chromatium-type bacteria deposit within their cells as left-overs after using hydrogen sulfide as a hydrogen source for photosynthesis. But sulfur granules can form in other ways, as well.

  “What in the—” Serena said, breaking her long silence. She stared at the analyzer
display.

  I stared at mine.

  Nothing in any sample was, or apparently ever had been, alive. We had nothing like bacteria, like viruses, like proto-cells for even the simplest organisms. No polymers or peptides, let alone amino acids or their analogues. Nothing capable of sustaining even the simplest metabolic pathway, and certainly nothing capable of self-replication, in fact, not even anything that could use the energy of sulfur compounds directly to fix carbon dioxide into the building block of life.

  Moreover, what we did have was something completely familiar to any biology undergraduate in any university in the galaxy: organic tar. Gunk. Muck. Crud. As I’d told McAuliffe, for a few hundred years students had been sparking “primordial soups” of chemicals with various types of electromagnetic radiation in the hope of creating life in a beaker. No one had ever done it. All they got was scum exactly like what I stared at now. Dead organic tar, the result of chemicals interacting with each other at random, not in the disciplined ways required for even the simplest living cell.

  I said quietly to Serena, “None of the spores germinated while I was downstairs, did they?”

  Once again she didn’t answer me. But I knew from her silence.

  Inert spores. Organic tar.

  All we had obtained from the planet was death. No, worse than death, which at least posited that something had been alive. This was an absence of life, a failure of the raw components of life to ever take on the direction and order that led to living cells. This was a big nothing, in the place which my life’s work had posited as the source of everything.

  Ashes.

  “It can’t be correct,” I said to Carin. “it doesn’t make sense!”

  “Tell me again,” McAuliffe said. “Explain it so I can understand.”

  I could have done without McAuliffe. I had to talk with Carin, since Serena wouldn’t talk to me. But McAuliffe, unasked, had joined us in the wardroom; he had been talking in a low, serious voice with Carin when I came in. Now he sat there in his sleek uniform in that intimidating room, while I wished him light-years away.