Analog SFF, July-August 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  I looked at the attendant. The glasses identified him as “Lane Woo, flight attendant, Cislunar Transportation Service."

  “Thank you, Mr. Woo. This will take some getting used to."

  He nodded with a smile and went about his business as I went about mine. The glasses led me to an elevator down to the 0.1 gee level, through a long park-like transit lounge to the shuttle gate. In a few minutes, a runabout whisked me off to the starship.

  Up close, the Admiral Byrd was impressively weird. It had a hundred-meter-wide crown of six 120-meter-long icicles that were evenly spaced. At the wide end of each icicle was a ten-meter-radius sphere, which housed the habitable parts of the starship. This entire arrangement rotated majestically. From my point of view, the icicles occasionally eclipsed each other, separated, and eclipsed each other again, making me think of the blades on wool shears.

  As I got closer, I could see that the band of the crown that joined them all was thick enough for people to pass through. Closer still, I saw the forward ring sitting about a quarter of the way between the bases and the tips of the icicles. Thin “legs” slanted in and forward to attach this smaller ring to the rest of the ship. That forward ring was a magnetic choke that would increase the ship's ability to reflect the ions that would push it along—the design actually dated back to the twentieth century, though not realized until the twenty-second. It also helped deflect charged debris in front of the ship. It is one thing to study the history of such things, or see them on some video display, and entirely a different thing to see them with one's own eyes. I was awestruck. This was a real starship and I was going to ride on it.

  The runabout set down on the inside of the small ring in a complicated maneuver, which its AI handled flawlessly, leaving me with about a tenth of a gee of spin gravity. I wondered if that maneuver could even be attempted manually.

  Dock and seal were quickly announced, and the smart glasses guided me down a long, sloping corridor that ran inside one of the choke ring supports to the passageway in the main ring and something approaching lunar gravity. From there they conducted me into the middle of Sphere One, a living roomlike common area surrounded by doors to private quarters and a fireman's pole in the center leading to decks above and below. I had barely begun to wonder which door was mine when one to my left opened unbidden. An AI somewhere was responsible, of course.

  The cabin was tiny; a fold-down bunk two meters long took up the entire outboard side. A well-disguised lavatory sat to the right of the door at the foot of the bed, and a small desk and chair sat to the left of the door at its head. I checked to see if my personal stores had been stowed, and they had—as part of the shield mass. Included was a precious case of my native island whisky, Talisker. I pursed my lips and set aside my thirst for the nonce.

  “Hello, Dr. Macready. Rumor is I'm in charge of this zoo."

  I turned. Outside my door was our expedition commander, George P. Weaver, a tall man with close-cropped steel gray hair. By his biography, he was a horseman, a Texan, with Ph.D.s in animal husbandry and systems management. He still had vestiges of a Texas accent, but this was well smoothed toward an aerospace standard English that sounded not too unlike the Canadian of the Toronto region. He offered me the callused hand of a sincere physical hobbyist, with a correspondingly firm grip.

  “Glad to meet you, sir,” I replied, wondering what he'd think of my rather unsmoothed Scots accent, “and there'll be no need for the ‘doctor’ so far from the classroom. It's Bruce."

  He gave me a long look as if judging whether he was ready to be on a first-name basis.

  “Right, Macready ... uh, Bruce ... Brad Adams arranged for you to have this stateroom."

  “Aye."

  “Will you be riding out the acceleration with us?"

  Others had described that experience well enough for me. “No, I'll be in cold sleep unless something noteworthy happens. Project management's arranged for me to be woken up in that event."

  Weaver raised an eyebrow. “Project management will soon be a long, long way away. We'll have ninety-six scientists with us who want to study the Epsilon Eridani system in detail. They're in cold storage and will stay there until we're ready for them."

  “I hope my arrangement meets with your approval, then,” I added.

  His face remained impassive.

  “Ah, once I've sorted myself, I hoped to ask Dr. Davra about the finer points of what the robotic minions at Epsilon Eridani can do on their own and what might require our direction.” Davra, a comely lass, was the chief roboticist.

  He looked at me a bit, then nodded as if making a judgment. “I see you've homed in on the central issue already. The short answer is, their programming can't anticipate everything. That's why Doc Zhau sent us."

  Dr. Zhau and Weaver had a history that went back several decades, and when Zhau had wanted someone he could completely rely on to ensure the Epsilon Eridani impactor went on time, he'd picked Weaver, as he'd told me over a whisky at our interview.

  “Bad luck on Davra, though. She's on ice already.” Weaver smiled and gave me a wink. “So you do your research, heed that data, and plan for contingencies. Those are survival traits out here."

  I took that as high praise. “Thank you, sir."

  “We'll have you on ice tomorrow and you'll wake up in the space colony being built to house us at Epsilon Eridani. So settle in and make your calls today."

  I did so, but before turning in, I poked around the ship a bit. If things went according to plan, this would likely be the last I'd see of it.

  * * * *

  Chapter 2

  Aboard the Admiral Byrd,

  in route to the Epsilon Eridani System,

  9 November, 2272

  I woke to a low-pitched thrum and a slight metallic taste in my mouth, presumably a legacy of my cold sleep experience. Otherwise, I might have had an afternoon nap. Our trip to Epsilon Eridani should be over, and I should be in some kind of house or apartment in the great rugby-ball-shaped habitat that the robots had been building for us, along with about a hundred other freshly thawed people. Every second or so, I heard a distant hollow thump—a construction device of some sort, perhaps. I was not entirely motionless, but the accelerations were slight; had I not been on a mattress, I doubt I'd have felt anything.

  I lifted my head and opened my eyes. The light level was quite low, but enough for me to see that I was still in my stateroom aboard the Admiral Byrd.

  "Admiral? Why am I not in the habitat? Haven't we made it to Epsilon Eridani?"

  Do you hear me satisfactorily?

  “Aye, but not in my ears! What have ye done to me?"

  You've been given an implant. It's a necessary safety item aboard a starship. In a few days, you'll be able to communicate subvocally on the local net, but for now, continue to talk; this lets your chip learn the impulse patterns of the nerves to your vocal cords.

  I had just been getting used to the glasses! I blinked hard, shook my head, and stretched to wake myself. Something had happened! I could complain about the surgery later.

  You have a message from Dr. Weaver.

  “Aye?"

  Weaver's voice sounded in my head. A very violent and entirely unpredicted collision in the Epsilon Eridani system has increased the amount of meteoric debris in the system by three or four orders of magnitude, two orders of magnitude more than the array-building system had been designed to withstand. We will be meeting in the Sphere Three Park at 1400 to discuss the situation and make plans.

  “Well!” They must have known this for some time, I thought. So much for my arrangement. “Let's see what's out there. Forward view."

  I saw a glowing Medusa—a black disk surrounded by curling wavy streams of light. It took me a few seconds to register what I saw with what I knew.

  “We're in the shadow of this habitat?"

  Yes, the Admiral answered. The outward end of the shell has been covered—that is the black disk. I can amplify it if you like, but it is smooth and f
eatureless at this magnification.

  “Never mind. All those streams?"

  Those are comets. There are 973 of them in your field of view.

  “They're all heading right into the star?"

  That is mostly perspective, the AI answered. Only 311 have perihelia within the photosphere. All but fifteen of those are actually ammonia-saturated slag balls from our mining and solar power station construction operations.

  The Admiral's comments not withstanding, I was in awe of this picture, of all this cosmic debris falling toward the star, and feeling not a little uneasy. How did the artificial intelligences building the array cope with this? What plans should we make? Was the project itself in jeopardy? I got myself up to speed as much as I could.

  Then it was time to go to the Sphere Three Park. Getting there was no problem: the hollow main ring led through the center of each sphere. A woman by the name of Jill Davenport, head of biology, soon followed me on the pole and assured me this was the way.

  As I came up the pole I was greeted by a shapely lass wearing a glossy purple shipsuit that looked as if it had been painted on her body. It had a white shoulder-to-hip band, broken by a triangle of well-tanned skin nearly down to her navel.

  “Hello, Dr. Macready."

  “Dr. Davra, I presume?"

  She smiled and motioned to a spot on the grass. “We're about ready to start."

  I nodded, sat down on the grass like everyone else and looked up at displays of comets and collisions spread all over the dome.

  “Damn it, Emma,” Weaver said at length, “how'd this happen?"

  Emma Lewis, our astrophysicist, stood up so she could see everyone. She reminded me of my kindergarten teacher so many years ago, save for a London accent. She was dressed, much as I was, in plain walking shorts and a loose pullover tunic that gave little hint of any figure.

  “Bad luck, isn't it? The big collision followed a bolometric luminosity spike of almost twelve percent—a huge flare by solar standards—that occurred the year we left. This flare increased cometary activity, causing more random nongravitational accelerations. That caused changes in previously settled orbits, increasing collision rates which increase debris, which increase the number of collisions, and so on. It's a feedback process—exponential as long as a reservoir of material exists; and the giant planet Loki's eccentric orbit continually stirs things up. But a collision that big might not have happened for tens of thousands of years. Instead, it happened now."

  “So, what do you think we should do about it?” Weaver asked.

  “Study it for now,” Lewis answered, somewhat hesitantly. “Something is going on we don't quite understand. We'll come up with a better solution when we do."

  “Meanwhile, we're losing ground,” Davra complained. “Simulations show the response of the AI systems is to divert power array production to beam drivers, up to the point where that's all that's being made. Without replacement array panels and any new arrays, we'll be falling behind. We'll need to do some creative thinking."

  She was answered by a tall, angular, light-skinned man with a shock of dark boyish hair falling on his forehead. After a moment's cobweb-cleaning in the cold-sleep-dusty cells of my memory, I recognized Dr. Daggert Dickson, an engineer, expert in propulsion systems.

  “The AIs won't? I thought these systems were fairly creative,” he said.

  “We constrained their creativity,” Davra responded. “We didn't want them thinking up new purposes in a thirty-year management control loop...."

  “Oh, of course not,” Dickson agreed. “If we don't watch out they might invent sex...."

  “Humpf,” Weaver interjected. “Well, our starship isn't under any such constraints ... on creativity that is. Admiral, do you have any ideas?"

  “The current system is already at an optimum factory-array production balance. It would lose ground under any change in allocation of manufacturing effort. Therefore, to complete the project with the planned performance margins, the current system will need to be changed.

  “There are three things being produced: factories, array panels, and beam drivers. One change would be to add something else to the system. That additional thing would need to attenuate the debris flux. One could build spacecraft to find and divert collision fragments before they come into range of the impact-protection systems of the arrays. This would enable the array system to grow again, but not fast enough. However, you asked for ideas, not solutions."

  Dickson chuckled. “Thanks, Admiral." He turned to Lewis and frowned. “Look, the composition of the collision debris appears to be mainly S—and C-type asteroidal material, right?"

  “Carbonaceous chondrites. True."

  “Okay. They're rocks, like the raw material we're using for manufacturing. Admiral, what if we collect that, instead of going after more inner-belt asteroids? That takes more propulsion, but we'd be able to put less effort into mining and get kind of a two-fer."

  “That was a good idea, Dr. Dickson,” the ship said.

  I frowned. AIs are programmed to praise humans because it makes them seem more human themselves. However, in practice, I've always found the effect a bit cloying.

  Lewis sighed. “Of course it was, Admiral. And so was yours. I liked that."

  “Why don't you ask him what he's doing tonight?” Dickson quipped.

  Everyone laughed except Lewis, who simply pursed her lips and waited for it to stop.

  Weaver held up a hand. “Okay, Davra and Dagger, can you get together and polish this off? Give us a look tomorrow morning?"

  Lewis looked as if she wanted to say something, but held off when Weaver turned to her.

  “And now,” Weaver said, “for those who haven't met him yet, I'd like to introduce our captive historian, Dr. Bruce Macready, late of Broadford College, Isle of Skye, in Scotland."

  Davra sat up and looked right at me and smiled so come hither she might have been a sophomore in danger of flunking a course she needed very, very badly. I'm not sure what my facial response looked like to her, but, so help me, she giggled. I took it to be a friendly giggle.

  Lewis also looked my way, expressionless except for a slightly raised eyebrow.

  Dickson shrugged and said, “Hi, Bruce, call me Dagger."

  “Greetings, everyone."

  And that was that. We all stood up and chatted with each other for a while. Whether by chance, natural reticence, or intent, Emma Lewis was the last to greet me, and by the time we'd exchanged pleasantries, the others had left.

  I suddenly realized I was ravenously hungry. “Cold sleep, apparently, gives one an appetite. I thought I'd head to the canteen. Would you like to join me, Dr. Lewis? You could explain again to me just what's happening in the Epsilon Eridani system."

  She looked at me as if I'd said something exceedingly strange, but then said, “I don't know that I'll be able to take you much beyond the background material you've already studied, but...” She shrugged and gave me a slight smile. “I'm hungry, too."

  Once our canteen sandwiches were devoured, she asked what had been bothering me.

  “A great amount of planning has gone into this. So much so that a problem of this magnitude seems inconceivable."

  Lewis nodded very seriously. “The system has been studied, modeled, and monitored for over two hundred years, with increasing accuracy over time. What happened was unprecedented. I suppose we have to remind ourselves that two hundred years is a near-infinitesimal part of the life of a star. But that doesn't make me feel much better."

  “Oh, it would appear to be a serious matter, but I dinna think it one for which you should bear any particular blame just for being an astrophysicist."

  She shook her head. “You don't understand. I led the modeling team. It was my call, my assurances..."

  Och! So it did weigh heavy on her. I am not sure how to explain what I did next, other than that Davra's display had put me in the mood. Davra herself seemed clearly untouchable to me. Those subtle things that sort us males from alpha
to zed had made clear to me from my wee years that women like Davra belong only to the alpha sort. To assume she was other than untouchable would only invite heartache. But Lewis was more like another professor, of similar disposition to my own, I thought. And she seemed clearly unspoken for and in need of some friendship. So I had motive and opportunity. Alas, I had also the means.

  “In that case, bonnie lass, you'll be needing a wee bit of fortification. Now, have you ever tasted the whisky of my native isle? It is called Talisker, and I have brought a supply with me."

  “Whisky? I'll have a bit of wine now and then, but..."

  “It is only technically whisky. Really one consumes it as a liquor, or a cordial. There's a touch of sherry to it, some say, and a thickness and a sweetness that will put you in mind of no whisky you have ever tasted before. You really must try some."

  She gave me a wan smile. “Dr. Macready..."

  “Bruce,” I said.

  “Bruce,” she echoed, “Call me Emma. I'm 123 years old. Been around the block, haven't I?"

  The way she said it, I didn't believe a word of it. “Then come along, lass, will you?"

  She laughed a bit. “Oh, why not?"

  She followed me out of the canteen. “How did you happen to come on this expedition?"

  “I knew someone on the project and I asked. To my surprise, I seem to have been the only one to have this idea.” We'd reached my stateroom and its door glided open at my approach. I gestured for her to precede me, then put a scene of Loch Ness on the wall across from the bed, a sunny day in late October full of autumn color.

  Emma sighed. “So whatever errors I make, whatever consequences my mistakes have, you'll be there to record it for all eternity."

  They dinna send idiots out to the stars. “Now, lass, I'm a fair man. Besides, for such inquisitions there would always be the official logs. My job as project historian is to make what all happens comprehensible to the general reader. I'll not be passing negative judgments on people just because they're people."

  She simply looked at my view of Loch Ness. “You mentioned some local libation?"