Asimov's SF, August 2005

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "You have been modifying her DNA all summer. You almost killed her."

  "It's some problem with the DNA, sure. But I didn't modify it. Where is she?"

  He tried to step around us, but we repositioned ourselves in front of him.

  "Get out of my way, student!"

  "We're not your student. We're human beings with full rights, just like Candace. But then you don't care about that, do you?"

  For a second, I thought that he was going to strike at us, and I felt Strom determine the best defense, the best offense. For a moment, we were a matrix of possibility, a phalanx of potential.

  "Gorgi, you better go."

  It was Mother Redd, standing in the doorway of Candace's room.

  "I just need to see her."

  "No."

  "I was just trying to make her perfect, don't you see?"

  "I see."

  "I have a responsibility to the future,” he said. “We need to become a viable species. We're on the cusp. We're as near extinction as we've ever been, and I have got to save us!"

  "Saving the human race through Candace is not your responsibility,” Mother Redd said.

  "You were responsible for Candace,” we said. “But you failed.” We were suddenly aware of all our responsibilities, to our friends, to ourselves, to our ducks: duties and relationships interwoven.

  Doctor Thomasin looked at me. “I wanted to build something as good as you,” he said.

  "You did."

  He held our look and we smelled his thoughts. After a moment, he nodded, then turned away.

  * * * *

  We saw Candace once after she left the hospital. She came to the farm, and we showed her the duck pod: one hundred and fifty-seven ducks forming a single entity. We told her that we were going to publish a paper, and we wanted her to be coauthor.

  "No thanks. I don't have anything to contribute."

  We nodded, embarrassed. We'd forgotten that she'd lost a huge amount of pod memory with the last genetic modification.

  "What are your plans then?"

  "I'm thinking about medical school. I'll have to start a lot of studies from scratch, but I think I'd like to do that."

  "That sounds good. You'll do well."

  Her interface and Meda hugged, and then she finished packing her stuff. On the air pad, we said another awkward good-bye. We made sure she had our ID so she could write, but I had a feeling that she wasn't going to. I doubted that she wanted to remember this summer at all.

  We watched the air car rise and depart.

  Time to check the ducks.

  It's always time to check the ducks!

  So we did.

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  Copyright © 2005 by Paul Melko.

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  Kath and Quicksilver by Larry Niven & Brenda Cooper

  A Novelette

  Brenda Cooper and Larry Niven have published collaborative fiction in Asimov's and Analog for the past four years. The two authors have also written a novel, Building Harlequin's Moon, which has just been published by Tor Books. Brenda Cooper's solo science fiction and fantasy stories have appeared in Analog, Strange Horizons, Oceans of the Mind, and in several anthologies. Brenda lives in Bellevue, Washington, and serves as the City of Kirkland CIO. Multiple Hugo- and Nebula-award winning author Larry Niven lives in Chatsworth, California, with his wife Marilyn, a cat, Amelia, and a dozen unnamed koi. He has been a published author for forty-one years. Together, he and Brenda, take us on a stunning tour of Mercury and a desperate attempt to save lives.

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  Kathlerian looked out at black rocks and a glowing horizon. They had been dusted with frost when she first arrived at Midnight Dome, seventeen standard years ago. The frost was gone now. “Joplee,” she said, “Let's go out."

  Joplee turned a silvered blue visual sensor toward her. “No."

  "You've never let me outside. You used to tell me it was too cold. It's warm enough now!"

  "Kathlerian, dear, it's too dangerous."

  The sun never rose over Midnight Dome on Mercury. There was no sense of time, and yet everyone was in a frantic hurry. Some were observing the sun while Noonpoint's ancient array of instruments was still in place: last chance before the expanding sun melted or burned them. Most were preparing for departure.

  Kathlerian had nothing to do with solar observations or the exodus. She'd helped tend the Vivarium—farming—but that was shut down now. She missed the jungle section and the animals. Now there was nothing to occupy her time. She had to do something.

  "Joplee, how long has it been since an environment suit failed?"

  "Eleven hundred eighteen standard years,” Joplee said promptly. “Veriority Claust Kerry 7122, on Earth. Quick rescue allowed her to be regenerated. She presently lives at Dub City on—"

  "And the temperature out there lists as benign!"

  "Briefly, Kath. Midnight Dome has been the coldest place on Mercury since Mercury stopped rotating. Ever since the Turnover Period these rocks have been at around ninety degrees absolute, as cold as Pluto and Charon once were. A billion years and more. Even when you first came here at age fourteen, these rocks were below the freezing point of carbon dioxide. In a Mercury year they'll be glowing. In fifty they'll be traces of gas inside the Sun."

  "So it's our last chance!” she said triumphantly.

  "We're already in the outer traces of the Sun's atmosphere. Can you see how rounded the rocks have become?” Joplee superimposed blue pointers on parts of the landscape. “High-velocity gasses would etch away any protection we can build. We might also risk missing our departure window."

  "If I went out, you'd have to come with me."

  "You will not go,” Joplee said. “The Naglfar Marui is nearly ready to load. It's the last evac pod. We must board or be left behind. Find some other form of entertainment, Kathlerian."

  Kath nodded stiffly, turning to face the wall. A swivel stool rose from the floor just behind her feet. At her command the wall dimpled into an alcove and extruded a monitor screen and touchboard. She set to work. Maybe she could get something done this way, if Joplee didn't catch on.

  * * * *

  Eighty or so pink dwarves swarmed past, paying her no attention at all.

  Two augmented humanoids made an alcove, stepped into it, and folded into each other's arms. Kathlerian heard a rapid clicking. For a moment she wished, wistfully, that Jerian would allow her to grow up. She'd been a little girl for thirty-one years: quite long enough, thank you.

  There weren't many people left on Mercury: thirty-four thousand and some. Passersby were rare. Everyone without a physical body had left, the last ten standard months ago.

  A silver egg zipped down the corridor at eighty or ninety KPS and stopped jarringly. Zesh Folty 12 poked her mirror-silvered head through the egg's surface. “Kathlerian 771, the Naglfar Marui will be departing in one hundred hours,” she said.

  "I'll be ready."

  "Kath, it's the absolutely last ship. We're using the last of the antimatter, dear,” her featureless face watching her anxiously, as if Kath really were ten years old.

  Old people could become timid. Zesh dreaded being left behind to broil. It was an obsession. Kath concentrated on her monitor screen until the egg zipped away.

  She was trying to contact Jerian Wale 9000.

  Jerian was Kathlerian's never-seen guardian. She pictured him as thousands of years old, maybe millions. She'd wondered if she might be his specific N-child, a direct descendant. Then again, he seemed to be running the entire human control group, the Bear Clade, tens of millions strong and billions of years old in design. Kath was in the Bear Clade. All she really knew was that Jerian controlled her destiny.

  Jerian didn't want more Bear Clade children. That was why Kathlerian wasn't growing up: he had altered her biochemistry to leave her as a little girl until she completed her pre-college education. And Joplee's mind was a dumbed-down copy of Jerian's, though J
oplee looked more like a skeletal bird of metal and plastic, a forest of appendages and sensors.

  The last order she'd gotten from Jerian was to leave Mercury on the Naglfar Marui.

  Jerian had left Mercury seven years ago to organize the exodus: find places for people, fit them to tasks, a thousand concerns for millions of citizens departing Mercury in such a way as to leave order behind and machinery still running. He'd had time, then, but the exodus had now grown urgent. Getting his attention might be difficult.

  The sun's adolescence was billions of years in the past. Sol was a red giant and still expanding. Mercury was orbiting within the sun's outer envelope and would soon be swallowed. A cautious old entity would be elsewhere! If Jerian Wale had fled to some other world, he'd be minutes away at lightspeed, or hours. Refugees were piling up on Pluto and Charon, more than ten hours distant via lightspeed communication.

  She decided not to wait for a response. Jerian never let her do what she wanted anyway. He usually didn't even answer her. Where was Joplee?

  Just behind her, watching what she did. She summoned up a work in progress, then spoke over her shoulder. “Joplee, would you get me a meal? Midmorning snack. You choose."

  "I will,” Joplee said. He didn't move.

  Kathlerian summoned up a file two years old. It was bulky. She had researched Jerian Wale 9000, and various electronic personalities, and Joplee himself.

  Of Jerian she'd learned little. Then again, the library gave her the same lack of response to questions regarding the AIs who ran various transport systems. That told her Jerian was important, a possible target for paparazzi or terror bards. She'd probed the edges of his data firewall and found enough to awe her.

  Of electronic personalities there was too much information. They were everywhere in the solar system and beyond. In complexity they ran the gamut from a simple sewer system or air travel monitor through Joplee and his kind to the transcendentally intelligent AIs. Their kind couldn't even be counted: they merged and fissioned at will, merging to share information, dividing to perform multiple tasks.

  Joplee wasn't an AI. He was only her nursemaid and guardian. Kathlerian could often talk him around to her viewpoint, but there was a point at which he stopped listening, stopped responding. Maybe his programming wasn't flexible. Maybe the original Jerian was just that way.

  What she'd found about Joplee had set her giggling.

  That was almost a standard year ago. She'd been gaining weight, then. The submind in charge of resource allotment in Midnight Dome had set her on a diet. Tired of the sameness, she'd made a tiny alteration in Joplee's programming.

  How many people would notice that Joplee could no longer choose a meal? He'd loop until Kath chose for him. Now he looped while Kathlerian worked her way into a new program.

  What showed in the wall screen was a complicated three-dimensional shape. It turned, changed, zoomed or shrank as Kathlerian stabbed at it with a virtual cursor.

  "Hello, Kathlerian 771. What are you doing?"

  The voice was cheery, perhaps childish. Kath jumped violently. Her ears curled into tight little knots in a reflex as old ... no, not as old as humankind, but as old as the Bear Clade.

  "Just playing,” she said, and looked around. Nobody. There weren't any other children in Midnight Dome. “Who speaks?"

  "I'm Quicksilver. You are playing with an almost intelligent being. Be careful.” The voice came from her monitor screen, with a second's delay. She found that odd. Electronic intelligences thought almost instantaneously.

  She snapped, “I saved Joplee in memory. What are you, Quicksilver?"

  "Do you know Mercury? The iron core is almost the entire planet. Sol's magnetic fields interact strongly with the core—"

  "I know all that."

  "I was a man once. Widge Hordon of the Vance Clade, plasma physics, pleased to meet you. I let my colleagues record my mind and impose me on Mercury's magnetic field."

  Kathlerian continued her work. She asked, “How do you expect to be evacuated?"

  "I am Mercury. When Mercury goes, I go. Will you keep talking to me, Kathlerian? I'm lonely."

  Kathlerian shuddered at the thought of spending her last few hours on Mercury talking to a doomed entity. “Is that why you're so slow? You're a pattern written into this random ball of dirty iron?"

  "That and the magnetic fields, the flux tube that runs from the sun to Mercury's core."

  "There's something I've got to do,” she said. The changes in Joplee were almost finished.

  * * * *

  When she finished she was ravenous. She turned off the monitor and the wall absorbed it. “Joplee, order me a veg handmeal and a brown shake."

  "Done."

  "Joplee, let's go out."

  "Yes. The nearest airlock is this way.” Markers glowed in the floor. Joplee drifted that way.

  "Are there suits?"

  "No.” Joplee didn't stop.

  "I'll have to be fitted. Guide me to a tailor. Have the meal delivered there.” The floor marks changed. Kathlerian was giddy. This seemed too easy.

  The tailor shop was next to the A4 personal airlock. Nobody was on duty. Her meal arrived while she worked.

  What she wanted was easily ordered, but she was surprised at what emerged. The suit was thick-walled foam, with a feathery spine and a considerable weight of motor. Cooling system, she thought. It was little-girl sized. It fit her like a work mitten: cumbersome, restrictive, cozy.

  She stepped through the lock and out onto Mercury.

  The sky was black. The horizon glared. A crater rim surrounded Midnight Dome. The black rocks had a half-melted look. Low hills crept away from the dome, dark on dark humps rising to meet the edge of a crater. She felt a moment of triumph. She'd beaten Joplee.

  Riding lights flared from a huge lens shape to her right.

  That was the evac pod named Naglfar Marui. It looked half as big as Midnight Dome, with capacity for forty thousand. When formed it had been mostly empty shell. Everyone, even Kath, had had a hand in shaping the interior. The AIs had vetoed some bulky, silly suggestions, but interior space had filled up nonetheless. Kath's quarters would be cramped and spartan. She dreaded spending thirty standard days in this thing.

  Bent rainbow flames stretched from the horizon halfway to the black zenith. The sun itself was still hidden; so what was this wavering glare? Zodiacal light? Unnamed magnetic effects? “Joplee,” she said, and realized for the first time that her nursemaid hadn't followed her.

  "Yes,” said Joplee's voice.

  "Come out,” she said.

  "I am not protected against thermal radiation or magnetic devil knots."

  Another voice spoke: Quicksilver. “Kathlerian, what are you doing?"

  "I didn't call you,” she said.

  Silence.

  "It's my last chance to explore Mercury,” she said. “Wh—?"

  "You can't go anywhere interesting on foot! Design a vehicle."

  What was Quicksilver doing on her talker? But the mystery voice was right; she'd need a vehicle to get anywhere. Besides, unlike Joplee, he wasn't fighting her, and he wasn't mentally crippled. She smiled and went back in.

  * * * *

  Her credit held. The thirty-four thousand entities left behind at Midnight Dome were rich: they commanded the resources of Sol's innermost planet, a treasure built up over billions of years. Kathlerian chafed at the time and cost required to build a vehicle. But she had time, and what did cost matter now?

  She started with a bubble heavily shielded against radiation. She gave it pods to extrude tractor treads, paddles, wheels, mag coils. One protean couch for a small human being and a niche for Joplee. A big airlock. Like her suit, the design grew a feather plume to radiate heat. Power source with a fleck of antimatter in it. The thing grew larger with each of Quicksilver's suggestions. Kitchen box, medical inputs in the couch, and a niche for her bulky EVA suit. Automatic darkening of the bubble wall, with an override. In the image it now looked like a tremendous
old war helmet.

  "Mercury wasn't always like this,” Quicksilver said.

  She had already trusted Quicksilver for help on the ship. He had made some suggestions that improved her safety. Joplee wasn't making suggestions at all, and that, in its way, was scary. She'd succeeded too well. She must constantly remember that she had overwritten Joplee's nursemaid urge.

  Quicksilver said, “When I first came here, the planet was tidally locked in a two-to-three spin ratio. The effective day was twice as long as the year. Over a day you could see the sun grow and shrink and do a weird kind of a loop—"

  "Good enough, Joplee. Build it. Quicksilver, if that crazy orbit was stable—it was stable, wasn't it? What could knock a whole planet off balance?"

  "A magnetic storm in the sun. A chaos effect, unpredictable. We were lucky to get any warning at all. I missed some of what came after. The storm screwed up the flux lines between the sun and Mercury's core. I went into a coma."

  "Mmm."

  "I lost over a million years there. But when the fields settled down, when I rebooted, Mercury was one-to-one stable. One face always to the Sun ... wobbling a little, though. And Earth was resettled, and Mars—"

  "Earth is empty now."

  "There are still research stations on and around Earth. Stations on Venus too."

  The controls were daunting. She rolled the bubble ship out through an extruded airlock. She stowed Joplee in his niche, an egg in a cup, leaving most of his arms free. Under the zodiacal glare she spent a few minutes reviewing the instructions.

  She asked, “Joplee, how long before Naglfar leaves?"

  "Seventy-one hours, Kathlerian."

  "Do a countdown for me. I want to see what I can of Mercury. How far will the mag coils take me?"

  "Fifty to sixty thousand kilometers."

  Several times around Mercury. She could still trust Joplee to protect himself, couldn't she? “Quicksilver, what have I got to see?"

  "Caloris Basin and the Hot Spot, at least, and the Hoplisht Rill. I'll guide you.” A dotted green line superimposed itself on the glaring landscape, stretching over the horizon.