Carbide Tipped Pens

by Ben Bova

  She resurrected the Solar System inside a null-heart computer, putting things where they stood four billion years ago. Here was the newborn Earth and an authentic Mars, the most likely Venus and the rest of the marquee characters, along with many more asteroids than existed today. Her model was unique, but not in large, overwrought ways. The worlds were laced with small assumptions that she never intended to defend. This was her game, she assumed. This was meant to be easy grant money while she pushed ahead with her doctorate. And because this wasn’t her primary job, she let the scenario play out more than once, never hunting for the bugs, watching nothing work out as intended, and every time with the same ludicrous results.

  There was a husband in the picture, an aeronautical engineer who kept hoping for a child or two, if their lives went well enough. He wasn’t the most observant beast when it came to emotions, but one night, glancing at his wife, he realized that he had never seen that expression before. Was she scared? Was she angry? Maybe work was a problem, but he feared some kind of trouble with their little family.

  “What is so wrong?” he whispered.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  She never was much of a liar.

  The young man tried waiting her out, and he tried coaxing. Neither strategy worked well. Only when she was ready did his wife explain, “These simulations keep giving odd results, the same results, and they want me to fix my mistakes.”

  “Who wants to fix this?”

  “Crypsis does.”

  “Oh,” he said. “This is your planet game.”

  She often called it a game, but now she bristled at the cavalier label. “Yes. That’s what I’m talking about. The four-billion-year model.”

  “All right, darling,” he said, attempting to project calmness.

  “Mars,” she said. “I always guessed Mars would be the problem. It’s small and cools early, so you have to assume that its life forms would gain early toeholds everywhere.”

  The wise course was to say nothing, which is what he did.

  She continued, saying, “I’ve always encouraged Earth and Mars and Venus to produce multiple life forms. Dozens, even hundreds of discrete biologies would emerge when the crusts cooled and water condensed. Each biology would align to local chemistries and temperatures. And on every world, everything eats the alien neighbors as well as every tasty cousin. The only winners are metabolically isolated, and only then if there was ample space and a long timeline.”

  The husband considered touching her hand. She had beautiful hands.

  But she pulled away as soon as he tried.

  “Two billion years,” she said, “and everything looks fabulously reasonable.” She folded the hand in her lap. “My model does offer a reason why we won’t find homemade biologies on the Earth. Our DNA and amino acids are too efficient, too invasive. Our metabolisms have adapted to every available niche, which doesn’t leave enough room for others.”

  “Like in hot springs,” he said.

  “No, our ancestors were born in the scalding places,” she told him. “For them, adapting meant getting accustomed to cold temperatures, eating everything else down to supercooled saltwater.”

  “That’s at two billion years?”

  “Yes.” A distracted nod. “And then the scenario turns bat-shit bizarre.”

  Her husband’s days were spent building rockets inside computers. He was very comfortable talking about models and their limitations.

  Aiming to be helpful, he said, “Perhaps you had too many variables.”

  Her mouth tightened.

  Sensing trouble, he reminded her, “I am trying to help you.”

  “I know.”

  “What kind of collapse is it?”

  “There isn’t any collapse.”

  “After two billion years, I mean.”

  “I said, the scenario doesn’t collapse.”

  “Oh?”

  “It remains stable all the way to the present,” she said.

  “How many runs have you made?”

  He imagined five. Five highly complicated simulations seemed like a healthy sampling.

  But she said, “Nineteen. And the twentieth is running now.”

  Quietly, with feeling, the engineer said, “Wow.”

  There were many reasons to be emotional. But her temper abandoned her. She shrank a little, humility tempering her voice as her shoulders slumped, as she confessed to him, “Each time, there is the same nonsense.”

  Tweaks might fix five bad runs. But nineteen was a brutal number.

  It took courage to ask, “What exactly goes wrong?”

  “Venus.”

  “Venus?”

  “Venus is ridiculous,” she said.

  “Ridiculous,” he repeated.

  “For starters, the planet is smaller and quicker to cool. That’s why its ocean forms two hundred million years before Earth’s ocean does. But Venus has more sunlight and more warmth everywhere, and according to my simulation, regardless what kind of life takes hold, evolution is quick and fierce.”

  There was talk about a Brazilian probe to Venus. That wasn’t his department, but he rather liked the subject.

  “That doesn’t sound unreasonable,” he said. “Venus gets life, but then it becomes an oven … when? One billion years ago, wasn’t it?”

  “Or earlier,” she said. “Or maybe life survived another couple hundred million years. But that’s the general timeline. And do you know what? Life might still be surviving there. The Russian Venera probes found bacteria-sized bodies at the altitude where Earth pressures and temperatures reign. Of course there isn’t much water left, just sulfuric acid. And that’s one reason why Crypsis has been chasing Venusians in acid baths across our world.”

  The idea sounded familiar, or maybe he wanted to think so.

  “People assume that Venus dies before life gets complicated,” she said. “But in my nineteen simulations, without exception, Venus gets its free oxygen early on. Plus there’s the added sunlight, the hotter climate. Photosynthesis brings an explosion of multicellular life. Our sister world could have been rich, probably for a billion years, right up until the sun grew too hot and shoved it over the brink.”

  Her husband made another bid for the hand.

  She let him take it.

  Encouraged, he said, “That is fascinating.”

  She squeezed his fingers. “The Earth has enjoyed a little more than half a billion years of evolution. Venus had a billion years. And in my scenario, without exception, the Venusians have plenty of time to leap into space.”

  “Leap how?”

  She tugged at his ring finger, bringing pain. “With rockets. Rockets like yours. You see, that’s one of my basic assumptions. Where everybody else hunts for microbes, I invite intelligence and high technologies. But I already told you about that. Remember?”

  “How long ago?” he asked.

  “It was a couple months back,” she snapped. “We were at dinner with your colleagues—”

  “No,” he interrupted. “I’m asking, when does Venus launch its rockets?”

  “One billion, three hundred million years ago.”

  “OK,” he said guardedly.

  “Venusians explore the Solar System. Nineteen simulations, nineteen different organic lines in charge. But always the same result. In less than a thousand years, they launch their ships and build computers before reaching some kind of Singularity event. After that, they migrate into deep space, and their world dies, and all that happens before the first trilobite scampers over the floor of our cold sea.”

  Trying to sound sympathetic, he said, “Well, I can see your problem.”

  She pinched the back of his hand.

  He flinched but refused to let go.

  “No, you don’t,” she said. “You don’t understand.”

  “Explain it to me,” he muttered.

  “My model doesn’t collapse,” she said, and with a tug, she retrieved her hand. “It doesn’t collapse because it’s strong,
and it’s strong because it sits somewhere close to the truth.”

  She was crying and not crying, and she was sad as well as elated.

  Quietly, guardedly, he said, “You’re right. I don’t understand.”

  “Crypsis is looking at this problem backward,” she said.

  He blinked, not daring to talk.

  “We are the novelties,” she said.

  Then her head dipped and her hands covered her face as she added, “You and I are the cryptic bugs, and we’re hiding under the most forgotten rock.”

  * * *

  The morning wind brings smoke. A thousand days of history ride in that smoke. Soot from distant cities swirls with pieces of the nearby jungle and scorched ground from every continent, and each careful breath contains tiny black embers that were once happy human meat.

  The young woman stands on top of a rubble pile, her head poking through the old floor, gazing at the world that surrounds their sanctuary. She is as alert as possible, but being bored and hungry, she suffers lapses. Nothing moves in the smoky gloom. Her mind has no choice but to wander. One of the recurring lessons of these last thousand days is that the apocalypse resembles one long, very desperate vacation. Once your basic needs are met, or if you’re hiding inside a hole waiting for better skies, you will find yourself surrounded by nothing except time and endless opportunity to think about whatever you want to think about.

  Moments like these, she often conjures up her dead parents.

  Her father always wanted children, but even he understood the risks. Reproduction was a gamble, but his world was unstable and was growing a little more dangerous by the year. Yet because they were scientific souls, her parents also respected their deep ignorance about all matters. Who knew? Maybe the general chaos would diminish. Maybe some hoped-for technology or political movement would emerge, saving this brutalized planet. Because nobody can ever be fully informed, a daughter was born, and her parents spent the next twenty years apologizing to her for her circumstances.

  Three times in her life, the girl was sent away from home because home might be incinerated.

  But none of those wars became real.

  As it happened, their daughter was enjoying a weekend with a boyfriend when the worst occurred. The Northern League decided that a plasma bolt from the sky would end a stubborn diplomatic stalemate, and true enough, the stalemate was finished, leading to a ten-day inferno. The parents died when San Paulo died, and it wasn’t long before the boyfriend was dead too. And a thousand days later, the woman stands on a stack of broken concrete, her head raised into the chilled darkness of what should be a warm tropical dawn. She thinks about the past. She thinks about nothing. Then her mind drifts into sleep and out of sleep again, and when nothing changes, her head dips, and that is when she hears Them:

  From somewhere below, past the reach of hands and eyes, creatures are moving with a minimum of noise.

  Monsters, she assumes.

  The gun is in its holster, and then it is in her hand. She has no memory of grabbing the stock and trigger.

  And in another moment, one of the monsters reveals himself, stepping from the darkness with a rifle in both hands. He stares at the hilltop, measuring the little variations in the darkness and seeing nothing, and then looking over a shoulder, he tells another monster, “Nothing here.”

  But he doesn’t quite trust that verdict, so he steps closer before pausing again, saying, “Nope, nothing here.”

  From below, out of sight, a second monster says, “Shut the fuck up.”

  With a big voice, the first monster says, “No, you shut the fuck up.”

  “You.”

  “No, you.”

  And here is the enduring lesson left behind by otherwise ignorant parents: a thousand times, they told their daughter that the only monsters in this world were the human variety.

  * * *

  In the end, the graduate student let thirty-nine simulations play to the same hard fast conclusion, and then she published her results.

  Scientific epiphanies deserved more notoriety. But there were reasons to quietly applaud her efforts and then deny her every success. Her simulation, her game, was full of conjectures and debatable points, and however admiring her colleagues might be, they didn’t have the guts to embrace any vision with magic at its end. Because that’s what she predicted in her paper. She claimed that Venus had to be the first home of intelligence, and intelligence, she felt, would always evolve to some greater state, and in private and during the public speeches that followed, she would openly speculate about the shapes and talents that godlike beings would want to acquire. And when asked where to look for the aliens, she always pointed in a random direction, saying, “Everywhere.”

  She was forty-three when her sweet girl was born.

  Her child had just turned seven when the Venusian mission—the last great adventure for the human species—brought back samples acquired from the high acid clouds. What was thought to be airborne bacteria proved to be exactly that: an acid-rich survivor of some lost ocean. But a physics experiment was what surprised everyone, including the woman who halfway predicted this sort of thing. Physicists were hunting for a new kind of matter—a subtle, sneaky material that wasn’t quite dark and wasn’t entirely baryonic either. Dubbed rune-matter, it was exceptionally rare on the Earth, but on and inside Venus it was astonishingly common. Samples were collected with a specially designed sieve and bottled inside a charged graphene flask. But instead of being tiny particles, the rune-matter came bacterial in size and bigger. And after several years of intensive study, it was determined that what they had caught was just as alive, or more so, than the acid bugs riding the high clouds.

  In the strictest sense, these were not the predicted Venusians.

  Mother and Father along with an army of researchers spent their remaining lives studying barely visible organisms. Successes were few and huge. The “runes” absorbed almost no energy, yet needing little, they thrived. Exotic techniques produced more of their material, and the creatures consumed the gifts and grew until a thousand graphene bottles were filled with viable cultures. And in the end, after debates and votes and a few noisy defections, the remaining group decided that these organisms were survivors like the acid bugs. They were the left-behind remnants of a second Venusian creation, and everything about Mother’s model of Venusian life was accurate, save for the specifics.

  Nobody knew where the Venusians resided today, and the mystery wouldn’t be solved.

  In every awful way, the Earth itself was turning to shit.

  One last time, sorry parents apologized to their grown child. They said they were idiots to put her in this awful place. Then, as Father shook hands with the doomed boyfriend, the white-haired mother took her daughter into a back room. There was gift to bestow. Mother was waiting for the girl’s birthday but that wouldn’t be for months, and maybe the gift had no value at all, yet she should take it anyway and hold on to it.

  Really, who knew what tomorrow would bring?

  * * *

  The monsters walk past their refuge, noticing nothing. Armed raiders, lost soldiers, madmen. The possibilities are numerous and grim, and in the end, the truth has no importance. What matters is that luscious sense of peace left in their wake. This is the long vacation at the end of humankind, and the woman finds herself with moments where she feels safe enough to do exactly as she wants.

  “Stay below,” she whispers to the others.

  They reply with one meaningful tap, concrete against concrete. Other than that, nothing needs to be said.

  “Every hill ends with sky.”

  Her father—the old rocket builder—used to say those words. He took a hopeful message from the phrase, implying that every climb ends with a good vantage point. And that’s what she thinks as she slips forward, out of the basement and across the black ash brought to this high ground here by every wind.

  And she kneels.

  Against her hip is a bottle made of graphene, sealed
by every reliable means and charged by her body’s motions. Nobody else knows what she carries. She doubts anyone in her group would understand the concepts or her devotion to what has lost any sense of symbol. This is deadweight, however slight. But she is prepared to surrender quite a lot before this treasure is left behind, and that includes every person hiding inside that miserable basement.

  Separated from her body, the confining charge begins to fail.

  There is a logic in play, though mostly this is magic, contrived and deeply unreliable, and she would admit as much to anyone, if she ever mentioned it.

  “Let a few runes leak free every so often,” her mother told her. “It probably won’t do any good, but it won’t harm anything either.”

  “But why bother?” the young woman asked. “What am I hoping for?”

  “Humans have so much trouble seeing what is strange,” Mother said. “But we shouldn’t assume that super beings built from new forms of matter would be any less blind. So let some of the bugs fall free. Every so often, just a few.”

  “But why?”

  The old woman set the bottle aside, grasping her daughter’s hands with both of hers. “Because maybe a Venusian will be swimming past.”

  “Oh,” the girl said. “I’m giving them something to notice.”

  “And after that, maybe it will notice you, and maybe it will save you somehow. Out of kindness, or curiosity, or because saving my daughter would cost that god so very little.”

  Magic.

  All of this was nothing but hope and wild magic.

  Yet she remained on her knees, in the ashes, waving the enchantment with all of her might while thinking how magic has always lived for darkness, and everything was dark, and really, on a day like this, what better thing could she possibly have to do…?

  SHE JUST LOOKS THAT WAY

  Eric Choi

  * * *

  “I don’t know what she sees in him.”