Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  His heart shriveled.

  The windows of the farmhouse glowed. When Erik Cormer opened the door, McAllister gasped, a deep eruption from a pit of relief. Erik, an old man twenty years ago, looked much older now, bent, walking with a cane. But he was the steadier of the two.

  “Matt?”

  “It’s me.” The most inadequate statement he’d ever made.

  Erik’s brain, if not his body, remained supple. He sat Matt at the kitchen table, gave him a whiskey, listened to his story, told his own. The kitchen hadn’t changed in twenty years, or forty, although the green-and-white sprigged wallpaper had faded. But so much else was different.

  Erik’s grandson Luke ran the farm now, skipping the generation that had left farm life for Sacramento and L.A. Luke still used Matt’s first agripatent, the irrigation system tested right here, when California had grown 40% of the nation’s fruit, vegetables, and nuts. Before the bees, the pollinators, had died of Colony Collapse Syndrome and hand-pollination had sent the price of cucumbers soaring. The almond market crashed almost completely. Tomatoes, peppers, so much more—all affected.

  “Now the market’s better than ever,” Erik finished, “and I’ve got three fields of organic cukes. Drink up, Matt.”

  Despair had turned the whiskey nauseating, the kitchen gray. McAllister opened his briefcase and pulled out his prototype, so successfully demonstrated to the eager Japanese manufacturer two days ago.

  Twenty years ago.

  Erik picked up the little drone. An inch and a half square, coated with bristles and a patented gel, it transferred pollen from male to female plants under remote control by a human operator. Erik’s fingers, twisted with arthritis and tough-skinned as Matt’s shoes, handled the artificial pollinator with respect, with sorrow.

  Matt said, “When did they cure Colony Collapse? And how?”

  “They didn’t. Bees are gone. Big economic and ecological upheavals. A lot of farmers tried robo-pollination, like your device. Too expensive, too labor intensive, too slow. The whole Valley suffered. I almost lost the farm.” Erik’s eyes darkened, remembering.

  “Then an XPRIZE team came up with tiny pollinating robots that nobody operates. FCOs—fast, cheap, and out of control. They swarm continuously all over plants, moving pollen, and biodegrade after a month or so. Flimsy things, partly paper, partly m-silk. Run on sunlight.”

  “M-silk?”

  “Metal silk.” Erik, knowing how hard this was for McAllister, didn’t look directly at him. “You must have seen it at the airport. They make fences out of it. Tougher than steel, thin as spider webs.”

  “I saw it.” McAllister picked up his prototype and put it back in his briefcase. Useless. He was twenty years too late.

  “Look, Matt, you’re all in. Go on up to Penny’s old room and sleep. We’ll talk more in the morning.”

  McAllister couldn’t sleep. At 3:00 a.m. he crept out of the dark house to the edge of a cucumber field, the grass dewy under his bare feet, the sweet night air silvered by moonlight. Somewhere an owl hooted.

  He picked a cuke off the vine and held it on his palm.

  The crop was flourishing, as he was not. He had no market for his prototype, no home, no money. Nothing, except what charity Erik might choose to give him. He, like the FCOs, was now cheap and without control, although not, apparently, fast enough.

  Only . . . hadn’t that been his exact position twenty-five years ago, when he’d met Erik? Orphaned, poor, untried. He and the old man had worked day and night on the irrigation project, celebrating every incremental gain, open to each fresh possibility. They’d had such fun.

  So what was different now?

  McAllister raised his eyes to the farmhouse roof, gleaming in the moonlight. Would that work, using lichen-thingies to raise reflected sunlight and help cool the climate? Would any of it work, the solar and wind farms he’d seen from the bus? Who knew? No one. The whole effort might fail, like anything that substituted experimentation for control.

  His own inventions had never failed, not once.

  The owl flapped its wings and rose, silhouetted against the moon, escaping gravity.

  Still—he had been a fast learner. All of agribusiness had been new to him once, and he had learned. He could propose a partnership with Luke, figure out what niches needed to be filled, offer his marketing skills. He still had those. TVs went holo, rooftops went green, fences became nearly invisible. Things could change, or be made to change. People, too?

  McAllister bit into the cucumber. Not quite ripe, and anyway, he didn’t like the taste of cucumber. Never had. He spit it out and strode, barefoot and suddenly lighter on the cool grass, to the farmhouse.

  Maybe he would even call Sean and Carrie.

  CANOE

  Here’s another story by Nancy Kress, whose “Dear Sarah” appears elsewhere in this anthology—a suspenseful race against time in which the crew of an exploratory starship undertakes the largest-scale rescue mission in history.

  “There it is,” Seth says quietly—too quietly for something so momentous. After this, there will never again be a very first approach to an alien star system by humans. The four of us are human, and we often treat Reuben like one, although personally I have my doubts about Peter.

  Personal history has no place in this occasion.

  Luhman 16 is just barely visible on the bridge screen. We are still pretty far from the star system, but nobody wants to miss the first visual, even though it is hardly inspiring. Two brown dwarfs, looking like tiny smudges in space. The primary, Luhman A, is spectral class L 7.5, solar mass .05, temperature 1350 Kelvin, covered by silicon/oxygen clouds. Luhman B has a partial cloud cover and observable stellar weather. The two stars, three AU apart, orbit their common center of mass every 24.3 years.

  None of that matters.

  What matters is that this system has planets, six of them. Two, small and cold and dead, orbit Luhman B. Three orbit the primary, close in and almost certainly dead. One gas giant, which back in the unimaginable past failed to gain enough mass to ignite into a tertiary, orbits both. Terran measurements estimated it at three times the mass of Jupiter; Reuben’s data now says it’s closer to two point six. Its period is eight months. It has sixteen moons. Its orbit is more circular than it should be, which suggests that at some point, a collision with something else changed its orbit. It is officially designated as LuhmanAB6, but we on the U.S.S. Kepler have dubbed it Canoe.

  Knock knock?

  Who’s there?

  Canoe.

  Canoe who?

  Canoe survive this trip?

  We got silly after emerging from the Yi Point, mostly from relief that we emerged at all. The William Herschel is the first manned test of the Yi drive, and we four are lab rats. When relief turned to silliness and eventually to boredom, things were said and done that should not have been, things that can’t be undone because even though entangled sections of space cannot be severed, human relationships can be.

  “Rachel, Peter, Soledad—I’m so glad to be here with you guys,” Seth says, and there are actually tears in his eyes. We manage to smile at him, although we are embarrassed. On the conventionally powered flight here from the Yi Point, Seth grew more emotional. Long periods of claustrophobia affect people differently, despite all the pre-flight psychological testing, all the inventive ways to keep us occupied, all the careful planning. Seth has become more emotional, Soledad more briskly efficient, Peter and I . . . well. I should have picked Seth when, against orders, I stopped taking the libido suppressors. I didn’t pick Seth. But despite what Peter and I have done and said to each other, we are still professionals and both of us are excited by Luhman 16.

  “I’m glad to be here, too,” I say. Then we get to work.

  * * *

  Just overnight Reuben has gathered an additional mountain of data, and we frantically analyze the AI’s analyses. Reuben delivers meticulous measurements and number-crunching; it can’t do interpretation.

  “Fucking
Christ,” Soledad says, and we all look up from our work stations. Soledad, who somehow says Mass all by herself every “Sunday,” usually curses only mildly, and in Spanish.

  “What?” Peter says. And then more sharply, when she doesn’t answer, “What is it?”

  “The planet. It’s going rogue.”

  We all leap up and gather around her screen, even though we could just as easily call up the data on our own screens. They don’t convey much to me, ship’s physician and biologist, but I know what “rogue” means. Canoe’s orbit is breaking loose from Luhman AB. Maybe there was another collision, maybe it’s just a slow decay of the gravitational ties that held it so long, so far out. Whatever the reason, Canoe is moving from its star system, drifting off into space, a planet without a home.

  “Change of plan,” says Soledad, reverting from analyst to captain. “We visit the inner planets later, Canoe first. Before it gets away. Peter, I need course changes.”

  He nods, returns to his console, and begins working with Reuben. Seth says softly, “Going rogue. Sailing off alone into the unknown dark.”

  Peter, his back to me, shifts his shoulders slightly. Seth has spoken from romantic ignorance; he can’t know about my and Peter’s vicious fight, doesn’t realize what he is inadvertently echoing.

  I return to scanning spectrographic data from Canoe, looking for pre-organics. We don’t expect to find life anywhere in Luhman AB; we are here because it is so close, astronomically speaking, to Earth: six point five light years, and 36,000 years ago, only five light years. We are here because Joseph Yi invented the Yi Drive, which uses the entanglement of certain sections of the substrate underlying space, and this is one of them. We are here to see what another star system is like. We are here because this is what humans do.

  * * *

  Thousands of years ago, my people sailed off into an unknown sea. They set out from Polynesia in multi-hulled outrigger canoes, crossing thousands of miles of open ocean to reach as far as Hawaii, Easter Island, and New Zealand. The greatest premodern sailors in the world, they navigated by star and sun sightings, bird migration, current patterns, cloud formations—all lore passed down through generations in song. I sang the bastard versions of these songs when I was growing up on American Samoa. I am the bastard result of this heritage: Rachel Tuitama, born of a Samoan chief and an American U.N. worker.

  There are only three choices in American Samoa, even for the daughter of a matai: work for the fisheries, work for the government, or get out. For decades we have had a higher rate of U.S. Army enlistment than any American state. Also the greatest number of NFL players, but that route wasn’t exactly available to me. Twenty years ago I joined up. I am well educated, superb at what I do, strong if not beautiful, very intelligent. I deserve to be here with Soledad Luisa Perez, Seth Wang, Peter Stackhouse Cameron III. And I am Polynesian, willing to set out into unknown space, out of touch with my homeland, on a barely tested ship for a basically unknown destination.

  * * *

  The Herschel inches toward Canoe. The gas giant grows brighter and brighter in the sky, and we’re kept busy with the new data gathered by ship’s sensors and organized by Reuben. When we finally get close enough for telescopic visuals of the moons, the four of us again gather around Soledad’s screen, the largest, as if it were a fireplace in the Arctic.

  “Look at that,” Seth says. “What’s the albedo?”

  Soledad says, “Point eight nine. Ice fields.”

  All at once a plume shoots out from the moon. It is beautiful: a soaring high streak of white. Seth actually gasps. “Cryovolcanic activity! Launch a probe!”

  Soledad nods; she is not the sort of captain to object to what someone else could construe as an order from a subordinate. This is just Seth, wildly enthusiastic. My heart starts a slow thud in my chest. An icy crust could, conceivably, indicate an ocean beneath, as was true of Europa and Enceladus in the solar system. Both moons had disappointed; the oceans held no life, not even microbial. But that didn’t mean the same will be true of Canoe 6. The odds are against it, but still . . .

  The Herschel carries a limited number of fly-by probes, two controlled-crash landers, and one precious nuclear-powered cryobot. Only the probes are retrievable, and there is no chance of humans landing on Canoe 6—too much radiation. But the probes are directable by Reuben, and my chest swells as Soledad gives the AI directions to fly through a plume if possible, and to capture not only data but a sample of whatever the under-ice volcanoes are ejecting. The first is easy, the second will need a lot of luck.

  Everybody is antsy until the first data comes back from the probe. Seth suggests card games; nobody else is interested. Peter and I avoid each other as much as possible. If Soledad notices, she doesn’t comment. Patience, beauty, tact, formidable self-control harnessing an even more formidable intelligence—I want to be Soledad Perez.

  My father would scorn such a thought. “You are a daughter of Nafanua,” he always said when I misbehaved. I heard that from the time I could understand words at all. Only later did I learn that Nafanua was a goddess of war.

  Data streams in. Canoe 6’s diameter is 500 miles, about a quarter as big as Terra’s moon, with a high enough density to suggest a strong percentage of silicates and iron. Its surface temperature reaches an astonishingly warm −50° Celsius. Magnetometer readings show a thin atmosphere of ionized water vapor. Camera images, which we pour over, give close-ups of areas of smooth ice, areas of domed craters, and degraded fractures.

  Peter says, “There’s an ocean under that ice.”

  “We can’t be sure,” Soledad says.

  “Yes, we can!” Seth chokes out. He is practically hyperventilating. “Look at the libration measurements—that entire icy crust is detached from the moon’s core!”

  Peter says, “Those degraded craters and fractures indicate a lot of resurfacing. That ice has partially melted and refrozen countless times. There is geological activity going on under there—maybe even an equivalent to plate tectonics.”

  They start a long technical discussion. Seth is mission engineer but knows a lot of physics. The three of them toss directions at Reuben that involve equations. I cannot follow most of this, so I wait quietly until I can ask the most important question. “Do you think that ocean could be warm enough to sustain life? Maybe near thermal vents on the sea floor?”

  Peter says, “Depends. If the tidal flexing from Canoe 3 is great enough—maybe.”

  Seth says, “If it’s aided by enough libration—wobble in the axis of rotation, Rachel—”

  I know what libration is, but I don’t interrupt him.

  “—and maybe by resonance with another moon on the other side of the planet, to excite Canoe 6’s orbital eccentricity.”

  Pete says, “Throw in past radioactivity and maybe some core melting, creating magma chambers that give rise to thermal vents and drive geological activity—”

  “If the core is porous enough for water to flow through it, picking up heat—”

  “Yes!” Peter says. They go on, driving each other into greater and greater enthusiasm, until Soledad stops it.

  “We won’t know anything for sure until and unless we get more information from a cryovolcanic plume.”

  She’s right, but my heart goes on thumping anyway. I am mission astrobiologist. It would be great to have a job to go with that job description. Just a few lousy microbes. It would justify everything.

  * * *

  How do you justify the volcanic heat of anger? If Soledad had overheard Peter and me fighting, I would never have any sort of job anywhere again.

  The sex was not very good. It was not even complete, perhaps because libido suppressants are so individual, taking longer to leave one person’s system than another.

  “I’m sorry,” Peter said.

  “It’s okay.”

  “It’s not okay. Please don’t say it is when it’s not.”

  If I had left it at that, we might have been all right. You try to hav
e the last word, my father always said. That is not good in a woman. As a child, this baffled and scared me—how could I be the daughter of Nafanua and also as obedient as he wanted? As a teenager, his words enraged me. They still do.

  “I was attempting,” I said to Peter, “to console you.”

  “I don’t need consolation!”

  “Fine. You just—” I stopped myself.

  He did not. “I just what?”

  “Nothing.”

  “God, you look so smug. I just should accept failure?”

  I shrugged. “If that’s what you want to call it.”

  “Your face called it that.”

  But it was his face that tipped us over the edge. I have seen that look before, many times, before I saw it on Peter Stackhouse Cameron III: outrage at being judged by someone considered inferior. I said, “My face calls things by their true names.”

  “Really? And what is the ‘true name’ for what just happened here? This wasn’t my failure. If you hadn’t wheedled me into sex I wasn’t interested in, or if you were more appealing, I might have responded more!”

  Fury took me then. “More appealing? You mean ‘more white’?”

  “I didn’t say that. Don’t put words in my mouth.”

  “Nothing else about me was happy there.”

  It escalated from there. All the boredom of a long flight in cramped quarters, all the unadmitted uncertainty about this expedition, all the buried histories of both of us, so carefully compensated for during the mission selection process, rose in a boiling mass. Two boiling masses. Before it was done, both of us, intelligent people, had located and lacerated the other’s most vulnerable point.

  “You are only on the Herschel because of your daddy’s WASPy political connections and your photogenic surface. You’re all surface—never produced a single physics paper of note, depend on Soledad to guide your analyses, can’t even keep it up in bed!”

  “I can with someone who didn’t look like . . . like . . .”