Iterations

by Robert J. Sawyer

  The Blue Planet

  The round door to the office in the underground city irised open. “Teltor! Teltor!”

  The director of the space-sciences hive swung her eyestalks to look wearily at Dostan, her excitable assistant. “What is it?”

  “Another space probe has been detected coming from the third planet.”

  “Again?” said Teltor, agitated. She spread her four exoskeletal arms. “But it’s only been a hundred days or so since their last probe.”

  “Exactly. Which means this one must have been launched before we dealt with that one.”

  Teltor’s eyestalks drooped as she relaxed. The presence of this new probe didn’t mean the people on the blue planet had ignored the message. Still…

  “Is this one a lander, or just another orbiter?”

  “It has a streamlined component,” said Dostan. “Presumably it plans to pass through the atmosphere and come to the surface.”

  “Where?”

  “The south pole, it looks like.”

  “And you’re sure there’s no life on board?”

  “I’m sure.”

  Teltor flexed her triple-fingered hands in resignation. “All right,” she said. “Power up the neutralization projector; we’ll shut this probe off, too.”

  That night, Teltor took her young daughter, Delp, up to the surface. The sky overhead was black—almost as black as the interior of the tunnels leading up from the buried city. Both tiny moons were out, but their wan glow did little to obscure the countless stars.

  Teltor held one of her daughter’s four hands. No one could come to the surface during the day; the ultraviolet radiation from the sun was deadly. But Teltor was an astronomer—and that was a hard job to do if you always stayed underground.

  Young Delp’s eyestalks swung left and right, trying to take in all the magnificence overhead. But, after a few moments, both stalks converged on the bright blue star near the horizon.

  “What’s that, Mama?” she asked.

  “A lot of people call it the evening star,” said Teltor, “but it’s really another planet. We’re the fourth planet from the sun, and that one’s the third.”

  “A whole other planet?” said Delp, her mandible clicking in incredulity.

  “That’s right, dear.”

  “Are there any people there?”

  “Yes, indeed.”

  “How do you know?”

  “They’ve been sending space probes here for years.”

  “But they haven’t come here in person?”

  Teltor moved her lower arms in negation. “No,” she said sadly, “they haven’t.”

  “Well, then, why don’t we go see them?”

  “We can’t, dear. The third planet has a surface gravity almost three times as strong as ours. Our exoskeletons would crack open there.” Teltor looked at the blue beacon. “No, I’m afraid the only way we’ll ever meet is if they come to us.”

  “Dr. Goldin! Dr. Goldin!”

  The NASA administrator stopped on the way to his car. Another journalist, no doubt. “Yes?” he said guardedly.

  “Dr. Goldin, this is the latest in a series of failed missions to Mars. Doesn’t that prove that your so-called ‘faster, better, cheaper’ approach to space exploration isn’t working?”

  Goldin bristled. “I wouldn’t say that.”

  “But surely if we had human beings on the scene, they could deal with the unexpected, no?”

  Teltor still thought of Delp as her baby, but she was growing up fast; indeed, she’d already shed her carapace twice.

  Fortunately, though, Delp still shared her mother’s fascination with the glories of the night sky. And so, as often as she could, Teltor would take Delp up to the surface. Delp could name many of the constellations now—the zigzag, the giant scoop, the square—and was good at picking out planets, including the glaringly bright fifth one.

  But her favorite, always, was planet three.

  “Mom,” said Delp—she no longer called her “Mama”—“there’s intelligent life here, and there’s also intelligent life on our nearest neighbor, the blue planet, right?”

  Teltor moved her eyestalks in affirmation.

  Delp spread her four arms, as if trying to encompass all of the heavens. “Well, if there’s life on two planets so close together, doesn’t that mean the universe must be teeming with other civilizations?”

  Teltor dilated her spiracles in gentle laughter. “There’s no native life on the third planet.”

  “But you said they’d been sending probes here—”

  “Yes, they have. But the life there couldn’t have originated on that world.”

  “Why?”

  “Do you know why the third planet is blue?”

  “It’s mostly covered with liquid water, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right,” said Teltor. “And it’s probably been that way since shortly after the solar system formed.”

  “So? Our world used to have water on its surface, too.”

  “Yes, but the bodies of water here never had any great depth. Studies suggest, though, that the water on the third planet is, and always has been, many biltads deep.”

  “So?”

  Teltor loved her daughter’s curiosity. “So early in our solar system’s history, both the blue planet and our world would have been constantly pelted by large meteors and comets—the debris left over from the solar system’s formation. And if a meteor hits land or a shallow body of water, heat from the impact might raise temperatures for a short time. But if it hits deep water, the heat would be retained, raising the planet’s temperature for dozens or even grosses of years. A stable environment suitable for the origin of life would have existed here eons before it would have on the third planet. I’m sure life only arose once in this solar system—and that it happened here.”

  “But—but how would life get from here to the blue planet?”

  “That world has prodigious gravity, remember? Calculations show that a respectable fraction of all the material that has ever been knocked off our world by impacts would eventually get swept up by the blue planet, falling as meteors there. And, of course, many forms of microbes can survive the long periods of freezing that would occur during a voyage through space.”

  Delp regarded the blue point of light, her eyestalks quavering with wonder. “So the third planet is really a colony of this world?”

  “That’s right. All those who live there now are the children of this planet.”

  Rosalind Lee was giving her first press conference since being named the new administrator of NASA. “It’s been five years since we lost the Mars Climate Orbiter and the Mars Polar Lander,” she said. “And, even more significantly, it’s been thirty-five years—over a third of a century!—since Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. We should follow that giant leap with an even higher jump. For whatever reason, many of the unmanned probes we’ve sent to Mars have failed. It’s time some people went there to find out why.”

  The door to Teltor’s office irised open. “Teltor!”

  “Yes, Dostan?”

  “Another ship has been detected coming from the blue planet—and it’s huge!”

  Teltor’s eyestalks flexed in surprise. It had been years since the last one. Still, if the inhabitants of planet three had understood the message—had understood that we didn’t want them dumping mechanical junk on our world, didn’t want them sending robot probes, but rather would only welcome them in person—it would indeed have taken years to prepare for the journey. “Are there signs of life aboard?”

  “Yes! Yes, indeed!”

  “Track its approach carefully,” said Teltor. “I want to be there when it lands.”

  The Bradbury had touched down beside Olympus Mons during the middle of the Martian day. The seven members of the international crew planted flags in the red sand and explored on foot until the sun set.

  The astronauts were about to go to sleep; Earth had set, too, so no messages could be sent to Mission Contro
l until it rose again. But, incredibly, one of the crew spotted something moving out on the planet’s surface.

  It was—

  No. No, it couldn’t be. It couldn’t.

  But it was. A spindly, insectoid figure, perhaps a meter high, coming toward the lander.

  A Martian.

  The figure stood by one of the Bradbury’s articulated metal legs, next to the access ladder. It gestured repeatedly with four segmented arms, seemingly asking for someone to come out.

  And, at last, the Bradbury’s captain did.

  It would be months before the humans learned to understand the Martian language, but everything the exoskeletal being said into the thin air was recorded, of course. “Gitanda hatabk,” were the first words spoken to the travelers from Earth.

  At the time, no human knew what Teltor meant, but nonetheless the words were absolutely appropriate. “Welcome home,” the Martian had said.

  Wiping Out

  Author’s Introduction

  The commission for this story came with a deadline only eight weeks away. I was swamped with other projects, including co-hosting a two-hour TV documentary for Discovery Channel Canada, but I agreed to the assignment anyway.

  The editors wanted space opera, a subgenre of SF with clear-cut heroes and villains, and lots of shoot-’em-up action; Star Wars is space opera. I dislike the way that subgenre so often glorifies war, and found it difficult to come up with an idea.

  Then, on January 2, 2000—just one week before the deadline for this story—the documentary I’d been working on aired, and I had a few friends over to watch it on TV with my wife and me. The program was called Inventing the Future: 2000 Years of Discovery; half of it was devoted to my predictions for the next millennium, and the other half was a retrospective of the seminal inventions of the last one thousand years, including the atomic bomb. Afterwards, one of my friends, Sally Tomasevic, noted that, “You can’t put the genie back in the bottle.” That comment inspired me, and I dived into writing this story the next morning.

  Wiping Out

  They say flashbacks are normal. Five hundred years ago, soldiers who’d come home from Vietnam experienced them for the rest of their lives. Gulf War vets, Colombian War vets, Utopia Planitia vets—they all relived their battle experiences, over and over again.

  And now I was reliving mine, too.

  But this would be different, thank God. Oh, I would indeed relive it all, in precise detail, but it would only happen just this once.

  And for that, I was grateful.

  In war, you’re always taught to hate the enemy—and we had been at war my whole life. As a boy, I’d played with action figures. My favorite was Rod Roderick, Trisystems Interstellar Guard. He was the perfect twenty-fifth-century male specimen: tall, muscular, with coffee-colored skin; brown, almond-shaped eyes; and straight brown hair cropped short. Now that I was a Star Guard myself, I don’t think I looked quite so dashing, but I was still proud to wear the teal-and-black uniform.

  I’d had an Altairian action figure, too: dark green, naked—like the animal it was—with horns on its head, spikes down its back, and teeth that stuck out even when its great gash of a mouth was sealed. Back then, I’d thought it was a male—I’d always referred to is as “he”—but now, of course, I knew that there were three Altairian sexes, and none of them corresponded precisely to our two.

  But, regardless of the appropriate pronoun, I hated that toy Altairian—just as I hated every member of its evil species.

  The Altairian action figure could explode, its six limbs and forked tail flying out of its body (little sensors in the toy making sure they never headed toward my eyes, of course). My Rod Roderick action figure frequently blew up the Altairian, aiming his blaster right at the center of the thing’s torso, at that hideous concavity where its heart should have been, and opening fire.

  And now I was going to open fire on real Altairians. Not with a blaster sidearm—there was no one-on-one combat in a real interstellar war—but with something far more devastating.

  I still had my Rod Roderick action figure; it sat on the dresser in my cabin here, aboard the Pteranodon. But the Altairian figure was long gone—when I was fifteen, I’d decided to really blow it up, using explosives I’d concocted with a chemistry set. I’d watched in giddy wonder as it burst into a thousand plastic shards.

  The Pteranodon was one of a trio of Star Guard vessels now approaching Altair III: the others were the Quetzalcoatlus and the Rhamphorhynchus. Each had a bridge shaped like an arrowhead, with the captain—me in the Pteranodon’s case—at the center of the wide base, and two rows of consoles converging at a point in front. But, of course, you couldn’t see the walls; the consoles floated freely in an all-encompassing exterior hologram.

  “We’re about to cross the orbit of their innermost moon,” said Kalsi, my navigator. “The Alties should detect us soon.”

  I steepled my fingers in front of my face and stared at the planet, which was showing a gibbous phase. The harsh white light from its sun reflected off the wide oceans. The planet was more like Earth than any I’d ever seen; even Tau Ceti IV looks less similar. Of course, TC4 had had no intelligent life when we got to it; only dumb brutes. But Altair III did indeed have intelligent lifeforms: it was perhaps unfortunate that first contact, light-years from here, had gone so badly, all those decades ago. We never knew who had fired first—our survey ship, the Harmony, or their vessel, whatever it had been named. But, regardless, both ships were wrecked in the encounter, both crews killed, bloated bodies tumbling against the night—human ones and Altairians, too. When the rescue ships arrived, those emerald-dark corpses were our first glimpse of the toothy face of the enemy.

  When we encountered Altairians again, they said we’d started it. And, of course, we said they’d started it. Attempts had been made by both sides to halt the conflict, but it had continued to escalate. And now—

  Now, victory was at hand. That was the only thing I could think about today.

  The captains of the Rhamphorhynchus and Quetzalcoatlus were both good soldiers, too, but only one of our names would be immortalized by history—the one of us who actually got through the defenses surrounding the Altairian homeworld, and—

  And that one was going to be me, Ambrose Donner, Star Guard. A thousand years from now, nay, ten thousand years hence, humans would know who their savior had been. They would—

  “Incoming ships,” said Kalsi. “Three—no, four—Nidichar-class attack cruisers.”

  I didn’t have to look where Kalsi was pointing; the holographic sphere instantly changed orientation, the ships appearing directly in front of me. “Force screens to maximum,” I said.

  “Done,” said Nguyen, my tactical officer.

  In addition to my six bridge officers, I could see two other faces: small holograms floating in front of me. One was Heidi Davinski, captain of the Quetzalcoatlus; the other, Peter Chin, captain of the Rhamphorhynchus. “I’ll take the nearest ship,” Heidi said.

  Peter looked like he was going to object; his ship was closer to the nearest Nidichar than Heidi’s was. But then he seemed to realize the same thing I did: there would be plenty to go around. Heidi had lost her husband Craig in an Altairian attack on Epsilon Indi II; she was itching for a kill.

  The Quetzalcoatlus surged ahead. All three of our ships had the same design: a lens-shaped central hull with three spherical engine pods spaced evenly around the perimeter. But the holoprojector colorized the visual display for each one to make it easy for us to tell them apart: Heidi’s ship appeared bright red.

  “The Q is powering up its TPC,” said Nguyen. I smiled, remembering the day I blew up my Altairian toy. Normally, a tachyon-pulse cannon was only used during hyperspace battles; it would be overkill in orbital maneuvering. Our Heidi really wanted to make her point.

  Seconds later, a black circle appeared directly in front of me: the explosion of the first Nidichar had been so bright, the scanners had censored the information rather than bl
ind my crew.

  Like Peter Chin, I had been content to let Heidi have the first kill; that was no big deal. But it was time the Pteranodon got in the game.

  “I’ll take the ship at 124 by 17,” I said to the other two captains. “Peter, why don’t—”

  Suddenly my ship rocked. I pitched forward slightly in my chair, the restraining straps holding me in place.

  “Direct hit amidships—minimal damage,” said Champlain, my ship-status officer, turning to face me. “Apparently they can now shield their torpedoes against our sensors.”

  Peter Chin aboard the Rhamphorhynchus smiled. “I guess we’re not the only ones with some new technology.”

  I ignored him and spoke to Nguyen. “Make them pay for it.”

  The closer ship was presumably the one that had fired the torpedo. Nguyen let loose a blast from our main laser; it took a tenth of a second to reach the alien ship, but when it did, that ship cracked in two under the onslaught, a cloud of expelled atmosphere spilling out into space. A lucky shot; it shouldn’t have been that easy. Still: “Two down,” I said, “two to go.”

  “’Afraid not, Ambrose,” said the Heidi hologram. “We’ve picked up a flotilla of additional Altairian singleships leaving the outer moon and heading this way. We’re reading a hundred and twelve distinct sublight-thruster signatures.”

  I nodded at my colleagues. “Let’s teach them what it means to mess with the Trisystems Interstellar Guard.”

  The Rhamphorhynchus and the Quetzalcoatlus headed off to meet the incoming flotilla. Meanwhile, I had the Pteranodon fly directly toward the two remaining Nidichars, much bigger than the singleships the others were going up against. The nearer of the Nidichars grew bigger and bigger in our holographic display. I smiled as the details resolved themselves. Nidichar-class vessels were a common Altairian type, consisting of three tubular bodies, parallel to each other, linked by connecting struts. Two of the tubes were engine pods; the third was the habitat module. On the Nidichars I’d seen before, it was easy to distinguish the living quarters from the other two. But this one had the habitat disguised to look just like another propulsion unit. Earlier in the war, the Star Guard had made a habit of shooting out the engine pods, humanely leaving the crew compartment intact. I guess with this latest subterfuge, the Alties thought we’d be reluctant to disable their ships at all.