The Year's Best Science Fiction - Thirty-Third Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Had the designers been wrong, there were two disaster recovery plans. One was for us to go into suspension once our explorations were done, and wait decades, or even centuries, for a follow-up expedition. If the moons of Abyss turned out to be interesting, we had the alternative of living out our lives there.

  Mikov and I took the shuttle into the edge of the ring system, trailing a hose with a thermal lance and grapple on the end. This I attached to a chunk of ice about the size of an ocean liner during our first spacewalk. In doing so, I made humanity’s first contact with an extra-solar world.

  “That’s one small gloveprint for a man,” I began.

  “And about two months of your pay docked if you finish that sentence,” said Landi in my earpiece. “Lucky this is not going live to Earth.”

  “Okay, okay, I have touched a star and it is ice,” I said.

  “Once more, this time with a sense of wonder. The taxpayers back home want significant moments, not corny jokes.”

  The thermal lance got to work, melting the ice and sucking the water into the half-mile hose leading to the Javelin’s tanks. It would take several weeks and dozens of spacewalks to collect the millions of tons of reaction mass needed to refill our tanks, but propellant to get home had priority over everything else.

  “Hard work to make an exciting story out of a good outcome, eh Jander?” said Mikov.

  “True, disasters make the best stories,” I replied. “My work is to make sure I have nothing to write about.”

  The term science fiction was coined three hundred years ago, but evolved into what the academics call reactivity literature. How do humans react to the unknown? I write about it as a hobby. More to the point, I had been published. Some selection subcommittee decided that having an author in the crew might be a good idea.

  Although weak, the gravity of the ring fragment had attracted some ice rubble to its surface, and I selected a fist-sized chunk to take back to the shuttle. With our ticket home now more or less secure, the science could begin. The shuttle made the short hop back to the Javelin, and I handed my insulated sample pack to Saral, the biologist, for analysis.

  I was lying on my bunk in the gravity habitat, having a coffee and watching some drama download from Earth when Mikov rushed in.

  “Saral’s discovered cells!” he exclaimed. “The ice is full of bacterial cells.”

  * * *

  This was more significant than, well, nearly anything in recorded history. Life existed beyond the solar system. We had proof.

  “The cells are all dead, of course,” said Saral on a downlink to Earth some hours later. “The three chain molecules that pass for DNA in these things have been trashed by billions of years of cosmic ray exposure. I can get firmer dates from the samples, but that will take longer.”

  “Billions?” asked Landi, playing the role of an interviewer.

  “From my first guess analysis of the rate of cosmic ray impact in deep space compared to the damage to the Tri-DNA, I would stand by billions.”

  “Mikov, can you talk about the astro-geology?”

  “I would only be guessing,” he began.

  Landi killed the microphone.

  “This is a press conference, and I am the press!” she said firmly. “Start guessing.”

  Mikov was rather pedantic by nature, and had very little sense of occasion. He was clearly not happy as the microphone winked back into life, but he took a deep breath and began.

  “I think that at least one of the three moons of Abyss has a subsurface ocean, kept liquid and relatively warm by tidal forces from Abyss and the two other moons.”

  “Like Jupiter’s Europa?”

  “Yes. Billions of years ago an asteroid smashed into that moon and cracked the cover of ice over a subsurface ocean. Water and bacteria reached the surface through these cracks and froze. A later impact smashed some ice with bacteria into space, and some of it eventually reached the ring system.”

  “Ice with biological material from Europa has been found in Jupiter’s ring system,” added Saral.

  This was all fairly dry and factual, even though the subject matter was nothing short of magical. Fan was the flight engineer so his opinion was not very relevant. Landi turned to me.

  “Jander, you know a bit about everything,” she prompted. “Can you pull all this together?”

  In other words, tell the folks back home a good story.

  “The bacteria samples were smashed out by impacts billions of years ago, but the life forms will have continued to evolve,” I said off the top of my head. “Imagine what must have evolved down there by now.

  “Are we looking at possible intelligence?” asked Landi.

  “Could be.”

  “Civilization?”

  “Not as we think of civilization. The locals would be cut off from the universe, and tool making is a definite challenge under water.”

  “Like, fire is out, so no heavy industry?”

  “All true, but biological nanotech is possible. By using fabrication-layering, they could build entire cities. After all, most of the Javelin came from fabrication vats on the moon.”

  “So that’s where we are,” concluded Landi. “We still have weeks of refueling ahead of us here at the edge of the ring system, but we do have a fleet of sensor probes that can be launched at the three moons and put into orbit. They will tell us which moon has the ocean, and the first of those will be launched today.”

  * * *

  Five weeks passed, and in that time our probes showed that all three moons had subsurface oceans. Landi decided to send the shuttle to Limbo, the innermost of the moons. Aboard were Saral and Mikov, with Fan as pilot.

  I have a good memory for facts and figures, that always helps in disasters when computer databases are not always available. I knew that the spacesuit boots of humanity had left first footprints on five thousand seven hundred and three worlds within the solar system. Most of them had been small asteroids and comets, yet the people wearing those boots had always said something profound or significant. Mikov was not inclined to be profound.

  “There’s a lot of ice down here,” he said after stepping off the shuttle onto Limbo.

  Landi was sitting beside me, watching the event on a display in the console room. She put a hand over her eyes.

  “He said that deliberately,” she muttered. “I should have put myself in charge.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “I’m the captain, and this ship is my ship.”

  “No good deed goes unpunished. So who gets first boot on Chasm and Styx?”

  “Fan gets Styx.”

  “And Chasm?”

  “You.”

  This was a surprise. I was not a high profile member of the crew.

  “Why not Saral?”

  “Saral? She’s the biologist. By tradition the pilot gets first footprint. You are a pilot.”

  “I … have no interest in historical moments.”

  “Mikov has had Limbo, and Fan is liable to say something as boring as Mikov. You’re our author, you of all people should get the first footprint.”

  “Many more men than women have made a first footfall, why not—.”

  “Jander, you get Chasm and that’s my last word on it.”

  I dared not say that I owed Saral a favour, so I did not argue. Using our gravitational displacement satellites, we had determined that Limbo had an ocean layer ninety miles beneath its outer shell of ice. The shuttle’s floodlights showed nothing more than shattered ice on the surface as Mikov took the contingency samples and Fan and Saral began to unload the instruments.

  * * *

  Lunch was being eaten on Limbo when I accessed one of the orbital probes. The radar sounding array was showing craters, cracks and melt plains, and it looked very similar to Europa. I switched to the telescope and selected the visible light display. A single point of light stood out against absolute darkness. This was the floodlights of the shuttle, lighting up a tiny circle on the surface of Abyss
. Landi looked across from her console.

  “What are your thoughts at this historic moment, Mr Author?” she asked.

  “I was thinking how mundane historic moments can be. First footfall on a new world, and nobody even raises a sweat.”

  “I was just thinking along the same lines. Is this really why we worked so hard to get here?”

  “Boring is good, excitement can kill,” I said automatically.

  Disaster recovery people always secretly hope they will never have any work, yet authors like a bang and a puff of smoke to make things exciting.

  “So why did you volunteer, Jander—I mean, why really? Not that crap about standing on the edge of the frontier and gazing into the unknown.”

  I hesitated, as if thinking about my answer. I already knew that answer, but an instant reply would have made me seem cynical, and delays always raise the dramatic tension.

  “To see the future, when I get back to Earth.”

  “Really? There are cryogen tanks for that sort of thing. It’s a lot safer than coming all the way out here.”

  “Cryogen is for the rich, and I’m not rich. Now I’ll get to see the future and collect forty-one years of pay. What about you?”

  “I’m here to become famous,” she said with an exaggerated smirk.

  “Really? Just that?”

  “Yes, I really am in it for the fame. How else could a ship’s commander become a celeb? Everybody will want to know us when we get back, we won’t be ignored like the cryogenic time-tourist nobodies who just have themselves frozen for a few decades.”

  “No sense of the wonder of strange new worlds?”

  “Give me a break. Prospecting on comets and ice worlds in the outer solar system is no different to what we’re doing here. We may find a few live bugs, but we did that on Europa.”

  So, her enthusiasm and hype had all been for the cameras. It was a disappointment, but then maybe I was a disappointment to her as well.

  * * *

  Remote sensing with satellites can tell you a lot, but there is no substitute for sounding charges. The explosives had been measured to within a fraction of a gram, and they were designed to be delivered to a precise depth in the ice by a thermal probe, then detonated. Fan and Mikov spent sixty hours sinking ten charges, and anchoring seismographic sensors to filter data out of the reflected shockwaves.

  Meantime Saral worked on new biological material picked up on the surface, and again she got guaranteed headlines when she discovered something like a small jellyfish with tentacles and a nervous system. Her estimate on its age was a hundred million years. More to the point, it was an animal that could pick up things and manipulate them.

  “What do its descendants look like today?” she concluded. “With luck, we may find out.”

  All of this was transmitted to the Javelin, and we passed it along to Earth on Homelink. Thirty-six days into the future, Saral’s discoveries would trigger another media frenzy.

  Strangely enough, I felt isolated and even a little annoyed. I was not quite at the frontier, I was contributing nothing. It was excitement without danger, I was not needed. No disaster meant my primary skill was of no use. As for my writing, how many great works of literature were written about the actual discovery of DNA? The first lunar landing? The first atomic reactor?

  My expectations were low when the time came for the first of the sounding charges to be detonated. Fan followed safety protocols and ascended in the shuttle to orbit Limbo. There was always a possibility that the charges would release major stresses that had built up in the ice. Mikov and Saral suited up and armed their jetpacks, in case they had to hover out of harm’s way if any moonquakes were caused by the soundings.

  “Okay, Limbo, show us what you got,” said Mikov. “Detonating the charges at five second intervals, starting with … Alpha!”

  The shockwaves would take seventeen seconds to reach the ocean layer.

  “Beta.”

  At five seconds, realtime analysis reported ice with healed fissures, but little more.

  “Gamma.”

  Ten seconds into the exercise, and the first of the shockwaves were over halfway to the ocean.

  “Delta.”

  At fifteen seconds plus two and counting the shockwaves were through the ice and into water. The lifesign telemetry from Ground Limbo suddenly flatlined. All that the Javelin was receiving was the carrier wave from the satellite relay network we had set up around Limbo.

  “Javelin to Ground Limbo, Javelin to Ground Limbo,” Landi called in her auto-calm voice. “I have registered an uplink outage. Comm-sats One, Two and Three have positive, repeat positive transponder function. Over.”

  We waited through the light speed delay. There was no reply. Landi made several more attempts at contact.

  “Jander, I’m getting a total outage of bio telemetry from the surface of Limbo,” she reported. “No transmitters on the surface are down, and satellite relays all have positive, repeat positive carrier signal function.”

  “Shuttle to Javelin, what’s going on with Ground Limbo?” Fan called in.

  “Javelin to Shuttle, I have strong signals from Ground Limbo, but no lifesign telemetry.”

  “You mean Mikov and Saral are dead?”

  “Nothing appears to have been damaged, but I read no, repeat no lifesigns.”

  “I request clearance to return to Ground Limbo.”

  “No, Shuttle, that’s definite no!” said Landi, almost shouting into the pickup. “I’ve got a link to the maintenance crawler at Ground Limbo.”

  “Can you patch me the image—” began Fan, then his lifesign telemetry was cut off with a sound like a gunshot.

  “Shuttle, I—what—status, what is your status?” stammered Landi. “Fan! Answer me!”

  This was Landi under pressure, facing the absolute unknown. I called up the monitor screen for the shuttle. Fan’s spacesuit was in the command seat, but nothing was behind the faceplate. A jagged chunk of ice was floating in the cabin.

  “What the hell is that?” demanded Landi.

  “I can display it, but I can’t explain it,” I replied.

  “Taking command of Shuttle,” said Landi, her fingers flickering over the console’s control points.

  Some seconds later the engines of the shuttle fired, and the chunk of ice was slammed against the back of the cabin.

  “I’m betting the ice has the same mass as Fan,” I said.

  “Why?” asked Landi.

  “Look at the Doppler reading on the shuttle. It’s identical to before his lifesigns dropped out, after compensating for the fuel being used. Ice was exchanged for Fan’s body.”

  “How? I don’t understand.”

  “Neither do I, I’m just looking at the instruments. Drop the cabin temperature in the shuttle. Better still, decompress. The ice may tell us something.”

  * * *

  We stayed awake sixteen hours into the next sleep cycle to do our investigations and send our report down Homelink. It would cause consternation when it arrived, but for now it’s just an excuse to get our thoughts in order.

  Within the shuttle was a lump of ice with a mass of one-seventy pounds. It was the same as that of Fan. Analysis showed it to be not much different in composition to that of a comet nucleus. According to one of our robotic probes, that was the same as most ice in the rings girdling Abyss.

  When we finally found time to examine the soundings data, we wished we had looked at it first.

  “Something’s down there,” I said, displaying a cluster of tetrahedral blocks with ragged fractal edges to Landi. “This is floating not far from the ice shell, according to the soundings. It has a very artificial look, and it’s ten miles across.”

  “Volcanic basalt columns on Earth look artificial,” she said, without sounding convinced.

  “Does that thing look natural?”

  Neither of us was in a position to say anything sensible. Nothing in humanity’s science, explorations and experiments covered anything
like this. Another hour of computer enhancement and interpretation gave us higher resolution, but no answers.

  “Give me some conclusions,” said Landi, rubbing her face in her hands. “Tell that wild and florid imagination of yours to get out of bed.”

  She was too steady and sensible to cope with the improbable. As a battle commander, I could think of nobody better to have in charge, but this was not a battle. I was coping by imagining this as a novel, with myself as a character.

  “Something beyond our understanding reacted badly to the sounding explosions,” I said. “That something is in the subsurface ocean of Abyss.”

  “I worked that out for myself.”

  “It plucked our crew out of their spacesuits and took them somewhere.”

  “Where? Under the ice, into Limbo? First contact? Take me to your leader?”

  “No. Ice from the ring system was in the shuttle’s cabin. If you want a wild speculation, I’d say two more chunks of ice with the same mass as two humans were exchanged for Saral and Mikov.”

  “That means there should be two chunks of ice beside their spacesuits. We saw no ice.”

  “I didn’t look. Did you?”

  Landi put the monitor cameras through a panoramic sweep. There were indeed two large pieces of ice lying near the empty spacesuits outside the Ground Limbo habitat.

  “Some sort of mass-exchange teleportation,” said Landi, finally accepting the evidence but not understanding it.

  “Limbo probably gets hit by the odd comet from time to time, like when it passes through the Oort Clouds of other stars,” I said, pushing my imagination so hard that my head felt like it was heating up. “The Limbians seem to sense water and ice rather well. Perhaps they learned to detect ice beyond their world and move it around. The ring system of Abyss is dynamically unstable, so something is maintaining it artificially.”

  “You mean they keep it as a reserve of mass and momentum to deflect bodies on course for Limbo?”

  “Only if those bodies are made of ice.”

  “Then how did it—they—whatever—sense us? Ground Limbo and the shuttle are not made of ice.”