Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  But I, damn me for the weakling I am, responded to the uniform and the room and answered him. Even though I suspect he knew all this already.

  “On every planet we’ve surveyed, we’ve found exactly the evolutionary evidence that we expected. But on none of them have we found the answer to how the first functioning, replicating cell first formed. We’ve known for a few hundred years that it took more than just a primordial soup of chemicals and some lightning, but we don’t know what it would take. And positing panspermia doesn’t really help, because panspermia uses spores and spores must be made by functioning cells, and how do you get that first cell?”

  McAuliffe and Carin both looked at me. I knew what they were thinking: God. But I didn’t believe in their God, and they knew I didn’t—or at least Carin knew—so I ignored the look and went on.

  “There are other theories to explain the origin of proto-cells, about a half dozen of them, but none of them have been borne out in experiments. The answers were supposed to be here. But instead of finding answers to the origin of life, we have no life at all.” Not in the planet, not in the spores.

  McAuliffe frowned. “Are you saying that we killed off the life down there? That our presence contaminated it and destroyed these proto-cells?”

  “No. Because if we’d done that, the analyzers would have shown the . . . the corpses. Necro-fragments. Instead, there’s nothing.”

  McAuliffe sat silent a long while, softly drumming his fingers on the rich grain of the huge table. His hands were broad-palmed, strong, with long slim fingers. The nails grew in perfect clear curves, filed bluntly, I stared at his hands, waiting, although I wasn’t sure for what . . .”

  “If I authorized another landing, at a site on the opposite side of the planet from the first, would that help? Give you a different batch of data in case the first site was a freak?”

  “Of course it would help,” I said, a little dazed. Why would McAuliffe do that? I looked from his hands to his face, but it told me nothing He was as impassive as Serena was explosive.

  “Very well,” he said crisply, rising from his chair. “Second shuttle mission as soon as pre-mission requirements are satisfied.”

  I said, disbelieving, “Another physical?”

  “Yes, Dr. Cho. Regulations. Thai’s all.”

  McAuliffe left the wardroom and I turned to Carin. “Why . . . why would he do that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He acted almost as if now he wants life to be down there. As if it matters to him, personally, enough to risk a second shuttle landing when he didn’t even want a first one!”

  “I don’t know,” she repeated dully.

  “Carin, what is it you’re not telling me?”

  “Nothing. A stupid idea. I’m wrong. But, Paul—I don’t want to go down this time.”

  “Don’t want to—”

  “Go down, no The captain can be told that I’ve answered all physical-safety questions on the first landing and therefore met my mission requirements.”

  I didn’t understand. “Carin—why? I mean, why don’t you want to go downstairs?”

  She looked away. Her bottom lip trembled. “I don’t need to. I told you, I’ve answered all my questions.”

  Abruptly she rose and stumbled out, leaving me alone in the wardroom.

  Serena’s blood work came back with her mysterious infection gone, which argued that it had indeed been some sort of harmless retrovirus, gone again into hiding in some organ of her beautiful body. Now Dr. Vollmueller could check off the box that said “No unidentified pathogens,” which was all she cared about. Serena told McAuliffe that she was going downstairs alone, which meant with Telin Eyer but without me, and that she was within her rights as chief scientist to decide that. McAuliffe agreed, expressionless.

  It was Carin who reported all this to me, her subdued listless ness unchanged. “I’m sorry, Paul. Serena is being . . .” She seemed to search for a word that wouldn’t hurt me.

  “Serena is being Serena,” I said, and wasn’t sure my self what I meant by that. “Carin, for God’s sake, eat something.”

  She smiled strangely, although I couldn’t see why. Serena, Carin, Dr. Vollmueller with her meticulous medical protocol . . . I was surrounded by obsessive women.

  It could be argued that in excluding me from the shuttle trip, Serena was merely evening the score: I had gone downstairs once, and she would go down once. My trip was first, and in science being the first person to discover something means a great deal. But I hadn’t really discovered anything. If Serena did so, if she found life on her trip to JQ211F, the resulting scientific reputation would be hers, not mine. She would see to that. She would become the savior of what had looked hopeless, the experimental prover of what had merely been Paul Cho’s hypothetical statistical construct.

  Oh, God, when had we become rivals? I could still feel her body warm in my arms, her full breasts swollen under my hands, the electrical shock of her in my loins. How had we come to this?

  By Serena’s decision. Carin’s words again: “Measurements make reality.” Serena had measured me, and found me wanting, and now she was trying to construct a reality in which I barely even existed.

  “I’m sorry, Paul,” Carin said again, laying her small hand on my shoulder. But I heard as if from a far-off distance, and I couldn’t have said when she took her hand away.

  “Shuttle on the ground, sir,” Vlad Cowen said. “Landing completed and within all parameters.”

  His voice came to us with a half-second lag. The bridge screens glowed with information, both data and visuals. McAuliffe, Carin, and I studied them all intently, while around us the bridge crew, shadowy unheeded ghosts, earned out their duties.

  The shuttle had set down on another stretch of rock, this one farther up the side of a quiescent volcano. There was no magma here; in-flight visuals showed a caldera temporarily cooled, filled with simmering water. But the terrain was much more uneven than on the first landing; and as the shuttle sensors swept around I saw a wild jumble of boulders, rock pools, and minor crevasses. Serena undoubtedly wanted as wide a variety of sampling environments as possible.

  McAuliffe said, “Eyer, restrict all excursions to within a half hour and hundred meters of the shuttle. Return to the shuttle at 1330 hours for immediate take off.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Serena said nothing.

  When she and Eyer left the shuttle, the Feynmann’s displays included transmissions from their suits. I saw almost exactly what Serena saw as she stepped gingerly onto the ground, and in the shaking of the visuals, I felt the slight tremor under her foot. She walked toward the nearest rock pool. Bending, she scraped samples into a beaker and put it in her suit pouch. Telin Eyer walked close behind, scanning full circle, carrying the ridiculous gun.

  She sampled one more rock pool and then started toward a group of boulders.

  “Dr. Wambugu,” Eyer said on his suit’s commlink, “you have reached the limit of permitted exploration.”

  Serena didn’t even answer him, just kept walking toward the boulders.

  “Halt now, Dr. Wambugu.”

  She whirled around so fast that she practically bumped into him. “I’m sampling that outcropping!”

  “You have reached the limit of permitted exploration.”

  “McAuliffe!” Serena yelled. I glanced at the captain. His face registered nothing.

  It seemed to me that I could feel her indecision in my own legs, my own belly. She could walk toward the boulders anyway—what could Eyer do? Shoot her? She wasn’t a sailor under his, or even McAuliffe’s, command. No, Eyer wouldn’t shoot her, but he would physically stop her. I sensed her measuring her chances of resisting his force. She was taller than he, and strong for a woman, but certainly not strong enough. And anyway, who knew what Eyer’s suit contained by way of military gadgets designed to enforce military will?

  Instead, Serena put up her hand and toggled something on her own suit’s complex controls. Immed
iately I could see, through the transmission from Eyer’s suit, that her mouth moved, but I couldn’t hear the words. She was trying to argue him into compliance without the rest of us hearing.

  McAuliffe said, calmly but with an undertone, “Mr. Silverstone, find the frequency to which Dr. Wambugu has toggled suit-to-suit communication and restore it to ship’s channel”

  “Yes, sir.”

  It took a moment. Meanwhile I watched Serena’s mouth move, arguing or wheedling or defying. The visuals on her suit still transmitted, and Eyer’s face wrinkled slightly in what looked like disgust. He started to say something. I thought his lips formed the word “ma’am—”

  Then it all happened at once.

  Eyer’s jaw fell open and his eyes widened to almost perfect circles. His gun jerked upwards. Serena, seeing his face, spun around to peer in the direction he faced. Now there was no way to see her face, but at that moment Silverstone restored the commlink frequency. Serena shouted, “Oh, my God, what is—”

  The rest of her statement was lost in the firing of Telin Eyer’s weapon, waves of deafening sound. The boulders disappeared in a spray of rock and dust. And the ground shook and split, sending the suit transmitters careening wildly, falling, and then disappearing. Through a fog of rock and ash I saw, on the shuttle’s external transmitter, the rock open and Serena and Telin both fall in, just as magma oozed forth in coruscating red and the shuttle lifted off the ground.

  “No!” Carin screamed. “No!”

  I couldn’t scream, couldn’t move, couldn’t think. Serena was gone. Swallowed by the erupting planet. Dead. I had just seen her die.

  Ashes.

  Vlad Cowen brought the shuttle safely back to the Feynmann. McAuliffe pulled us out of orbit immediately after that. Fifteen minutes later he sat in the wardroom like Jehovah in judgment, Carin and I across from him, and demanded answers we didn’t have.

  “What happened down there? You have all the data right there in front of you. What happened?”

  Carin had said nothing since her scream on the bridge. Now she sat absolutely immobile. I, on the other hand, couldn’t stop trembling. It hurt to breathe, to move. Yet neither could I stay still. My hands, my shoulders, my very guts shook.

  McAuliffe repeated, “What happened?”

  Carin finally said, “It’s hard to tell for sure. It’s possible that Mr. Eyer’s weapon gave off sound waves that were enough to destabilize rock that was ready to shift anyway. Or that the impact of the falling rocks from the boulders he pulverized did that. Like an avalanche.” Her voice sounded dead.

  “Eyer fired at something, Dr. Dziwalski. And Dr. Wambugu started to say ‘What is—’ Presumably she, too, saw something. What does the data indicate it was?”

  “The data indicates there was nothing there. And we saw nothing on the camera on Eyer’s helmet.”

  “Nothing? He would not have fired at ‘nothing.’ ”

  “Nonetheless, all the sensory data from both suits and the shuttle indicates nothing, No thermal signature, no electrical field, no change in air pressure, nothing.”

  I looked from one to the other. Something was going on between them that I didn’t understand, didn’t want to understand, something other than a military inquiry. McAuliffe was asking another question, and Carin answering it, than they seemed to be.

  He said, “I repeat, my gunner’s mate was well trained. He would neither have reacted nor fired if there had been nothing there.”

  “There was nothing there.”

  All at once I couldn’t stand any more of this. It was unbearable. I said, fighting to keep at least my voice steady, “It was hot. There was steam coming from the rock pools and maybe the crevasses. Couldn’t Serena”—it hurt, physically, to say her name—“couldn’t Serena and Eyer both have seen some sort of mirage? An optical trick that wouldn’t necessarily transmit digitally?”

  Carin gazed at me bleakly. She knew, and knew that I knew, that there had been no mirage. The atmospheric conditions, the distance between the observers and the boulders—everything was wrong for a mirage. But she, too, had had enough.

  “The atmosphere of that type of planet,” she said carefully, “has not been extensively studied, for obvious reasons. We don’t really know what kind of illusions it might produce.”

  There was a long silence. I realized, with a little shock, that what she had just said was actually true.

  Finally McAuliffe said, “Then this summary inquiry is closed, pending a full official inquiry. Let the record read that Dr. Serena Caroline Wambugu and Gunner’s Mate Telin Zachary Eyer died as the result of unexpected geological activity following unidentified atmospheric conditions. Gunner’s Mate Telin Eyer is hereby officially listed as dying in the line of duty and is recommended for Navy commendation. Dismissed.”

  Carin was the first one out the door. McAuliffe followed briskly. I sat, shaking but curiously unable to rise, in the wardroom I now hated more than any other place in the universe, even the planet where Serena had died. It seemed to me that, paralyzed by anguish, I would never move again. But, of course, like so much else, that was merely an illusion.

  The day after we left orbit, Carin requested to be put into cold sleep for the several months of the trip home. Her work, she said, was done, since this scientific expedition had always been primarily focused on xenobiology and not on physics. Dr. Cho, her formal request stated, could analyze any remaining data without her. Her request was granted.

  There was no remaining data. None of the spores in the lab ever germinated. There would be no chance to obtain more.

  I stayed in my tiny quarters, struggling with my report for the Academy, selfishly having my meals delivered to me. Not that I ate much. Nor did I visit the shower. Mostly I lay on my bunk in a kind of bewildered torpor that had none of a torpor s usual blessed numbness. Sometimes it was as much as I could do to draw a breath.

  Serena was gone.

  The data that had been my life’s work was meaningless.

  Which of these two hurt most? It seemed wrong to rank the death of a human being, a woman I had loved, with the loss of a scientific breakthrough. Except that what had happened on JQ211F had been more than that I knew it in my bones. I just couldn’t make sense of it, and somehow not being able to make sense of it infected my whole self, a mental and emotional gangrene. Science made sense of the universe. That was science’s function. If lit could not do that, then my entire life, including my love for Serena, was rocked to its core.

  Three days later, Carin’s face abruptly appeared on my display screen.

  I bolted upright on my bunk so quickly that I hit my head, Rubbing it ineffectually, I stared at Carin’s image. She wore her usual gray tunic, and her limp hair straggled around her ravaged face.

  “Paul, this is a Priority One, personal, time-delayed transmission. Before I sent it, I wanted to give you some time to analyze your data.”

  Not that I had done that fruitfully.

  “I left you a letter. I reprogrammed my quarters to open with a manual key, which is in the lab, way back on the lowest shelf. The letter is for your eyes only. No record of it exists. It’s not science, it’s . . . it’s what it is.”

  Carin’s image went silent, head bowed. Five seconds . . . ten . . . half a minute. That’s a long time to stare at a motionless image. Then she added something curious.

  “I’m sorry to do this to you, Paul. But I’m compelled to.” The image blanked.

  Slowly I go off my bunk, pulled on pants, and for the first time since Serena died, left my quarters. Barefoot, I padded along the corridor to the lab. I met no one. It’s not that I expected anything from Carin. But I had to go.

  The key was where she said it would be. I walked back to her quarters, unlocked the door, and went in. Dimly I realized that it was the first time I had ever been there. Carin, like Serena, had kept her quarters strictly private. They were identical to mine: bunk, stripped now of all bedclothes, with drawers built in underneath. Table and chai
r. Sonic shower. Display screen on the bulkhead.

  Nonetheless, I might have been in a foreign country.

  Over the table hung a large, plain cross, intricately carved with symbols I didn’t understand. I ran my finger over it; like the wardroom table, it was real wood. Below it sat a sort of shrine: a pot of those blood-red genemod flowers engineered to need little water, which filled the room with a heavy, languid scent. The flowers were flanked by two burning ultra-candles. I’d seen these before. Natural materials with no electronic components, they nonetheless burned slowly, steadily, for weeks. Carin had apparently bolted them to the table. Still, if the ship had accelerated suddenly and flames had been thrown off . . . but there was nothing in the room that would burn, except the letter.

  It lay on the table in front of the flowers. I sat on the bare bunk and opened the envelope, which bore no name. Carin had meant it when she said there was no record of the letter. It was handwritten, in a small, even, dense script that somehow brought Carin before my eyes as the outlandish religious icons had not. There was only one sheet of paper, but it was covered on both sides.

  Dear Paul,

  This is not a consolation letter, nor a love letter, nor a scientific treatise. It’s an act of supreme selfishness, far more selfishness than Serena ever showed you But since I’m never going to see you again, I hope not even glimpse you again, I am compelled to tell you the thoughts in my mind. You’ll reject some of them. So did Robert McAuliffe, although for far different reasons. That’s acceptable. I know that I’m right, and I can’t bear it, and so I’m making you share the burden.

  Your precious theory was not wrong. That’s the first thing. JQ211F was indeed the source of all life in the galaxy. It sent out all the spores of panspermia, and it will send out no more, and I’m going to tell you why. Unfortunately, the explanation-it’s not a hypothesis, for reasons that will become clear as I go on—isn’t going to be of any scientific use to you. It’s unprovable, untestable, and forever unreplicable.