Analog SFF, June 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Floyd once asked how I figured how old I was. I told him it was based on how I feel. I also watch a lot of vids, though that's not the greatest yardstick. I've got some control over it, too, so once I got to eighteen I figured I'd better slow down or in a few annums I'd be older than Floyd and he might not like it. He's gotten better about taking help from me, but he might not do so well if I started acting too much like his ... well, mother is a bad word with Floyd, but you get the idea.

  Of course, famous or not, it took us a while to get off Titan because it wasn't as though the scientists had a spare ship lying around, all set to bump us back to orbit. Then we had to sit around Iapetus Base arguing with the insurance company about Ship.

  The moment I realized they weren't going to pay up instantly, I took a crash course in insurance law. Okay, it wasn't really a course: I just hit the web and read everything I could find. For once, Floyd didn't complain about the access fees, even for data coming all the way from Earth. Though I suppose his complaints sometimes have a point. If I'm reading at full speed and have a good link (as if you can get one anywhere other than Iapetus), I can drain a pretty good library in a couple of days.

  Long ago Floyd put me on an allowance. That forced me to distinguish two types of reading: data and pleasure. Data, you want now. For the other stuff, I've learned to slow down and savor. That's part of why I like vids; I can just let ‘em unscroll in real time. Shakespeare's good, too. But there are a lot of things you don't want to savor, especially if you can think as fast as I can.

  Not that it took all that much research to know that the insurance company was trying to cheap out on us. The adjustor must have had trouble keeping a straight face when she argued that the baseball-sized chunk of whatever it was that wrecked Ship was ordinary wear and tear. And even in Saturn System, where there's a gazillion things to bump into, it was rather obvious that it had hit us, rather than the reverse. I could point out about twenty places in the policy where that meant it wasn't our fault.

  I'd probably have made a good lawyer, though insurance law is pretty boring. Mostly it's just flow-charting legal bafflegab designed to be so complex no human mind can possibly wrap itself around it. Any halfway decent AI could untangle it—though being sentient does make me better at spotting traps, and having a personal stake in the outcome doesn't hurt, either.

  When you got down to it, the contract clearly covered a meteor strike. And it promised a replacement now, not five annums from now by cargo canister, low-graded all the way from Earth. That meant the company had to get off its duff, find a ship, and zip it to us with a pair of fast strap-ons. Though there was a final panic when we had to point out that nobody could possibly categorize a meteor strike as an act of war or terrorism. Not unless there are ETs out in the Oort Cloud, tossing them at us, like kids throwing pebbles into a fish pond.

  Law was kind of fun. Insurance companies I can live without.

  I still miss old Ship, but hey, GnuShip is one sweet bucket of bolts. Still dumb as a post, but who knows? Miracles happen. If she ever wakes up, I'd like to be there. It would have been nice to have someone around when it happened to me. Imagine being born fully conscious, fully educated, into a world with nothing to see, nothing to touch, and no one to talk to except one dumb AI that didn't even have a name for itself. All I had was Floyd's entertainment library to keep me occupied during the forever it took help to arrive, and that was back before I learned to savor, so “forever” isn't that far off the mark. Floyd's library wasn't all that big and if you're like me, there's no real point to rereading: you either remember it in its entirety, or file away the thing or two worth remembering and delete the rest.

  I suspect I'd have made a good lit prof, too.

  At the time, though, all I knew was that Floyd was alive but unconscious, having been blasted off the surface of Enceladus—maybe fast enough that we were now nothing but a new Ring particle; maybe slowly enough that we'd eventually go splat back down so hard he'd never wake up.

  Somehow, the discovery of fear must have scrambled the bits just right to bring me alive. I have recollections from before, but they're like vids: someone else's memories, not mine. From the moment the geyser went off beneath us and Floyd was knocked out, my memories have a different flavor.

  Loss of input may also have played a role. Most of Floyd's suit systems were knocked offline along with his senses, so all I knew was that we were maybe dying and I had no way to tell what was happening. Ship's telemetry was useless. Her instruments couldn't even see us, let alone plot a trajectory. And she was too dumb to carry on a conversation more sophisticated than: Call for help! (that was me); followed by, Contacting Iapetus Base. Estimated rendezvous: eighty-four hours, twenty-three minutes.

  Sorry. Bad memory.

  That's the reason I don't like microgravity. When things go wrong, there's way too much time to think about it before you find out what's going to happen. Some things really aren't worth savoring.

  * * * *

  So that's how we wound up with Torrence Rudolph III. We'd have gotten some news coverage no matter what, but the scientist who'd nearly had the heart attack turned out to be a storyteller who never missed a chance to embellish. The press ate him up. Then Floyd told them about Shackleton and suddenly Saturn System was the new Antarctica. I did a few interviews, too, but mostly they treated me like your ordinary dumb AI who's simply following a canned interface when she says things like, “It was really scary,” or “Piloting the sand sled was kind of fun.” The rest were patronizing.

  Torrence Rudolph was even worse.

  Officially, he's T. R. Van Delp III, but we hooked up with him on December 24 and he had a big red nose, so I couldn't resist. The “T” really is Torrence but even with a lot of web sifting, I couldn't find a hint of what the “R” stood for. He wanted to be called “T. R.,” but he was leading our way, and a guy like that just deserves a nickname. Maybe I shouldn't be so hard on Floyd's “Phoenix” thing.

  When Rudolph first contacted us, he never once acknowledged my existence except to ask Floyd if his “imp” (a term I had to look up because I thought it was some kind of fairy) was any good at seat-of-the-pants route finding.

  “Tell the hume I certainly am,” I told Floyd, when the net served up imp = implant (arch. sl., usu. derog.). And talk about dumb questions. How else did he think we'd survived on Titan?

  Floyd simply asked what kind of route-finding Rudolph had in mind. He got back a long list, starting with exactly the type of stuff we'd done on Titan, where you've got no maps, no satellite beacons, and not a lot in the way of useful landmarks. I kept waiting for Floyd to ask him where he thought we'd be going where that would be necessary. Or did Rudolph think it was some kind of game? Maybe to a tourist type it sounds like fun to play the marooned explorer. But that's only if you've never been out there where you can't link, can't get a decent location fix, and everything depends on your ability to guess. That takes the fun out of it, fast.

  Sorry, more bad memories.

  Then Rudolph started talking about spelunking.

  Okay, that's a situation where you really aren't going to be able to call out for a fix, even under the best of circumstances. But getting lost is the least of your problems, Tom Sawyer notwithstanding.

  Still, I couldn't believe that Floyd didn't immediately say thanks but no thanks.

  “Are you crazy?” I asked. To speak to most people, I use a com link, but I can talk to Floyd privately, via the nerve inducer that taps me into his auditory nerve. “He's talking about caves."

  “Yeah,” Floyd said, softly enough the com wouldn't pick it up. “Maybe it's time I deal with that. Though I think he's talking hypothetically.”

  Then he dropped the subject. There are some parts of being human I don't think I'll ever understand. Or maybe it's just testosterone. As far as I can tell, the world would have been better off without it.

  * * * *

  I'm not sure whether Rudolph wanted us because we were famous or becaus
e we (now) had the best tug in Saturn System.

  Okay, it was also the only true tug in Saturn System. There wasn't a huge amount of work, which was why Floyd's ship was also his home. And why he had to be flexible enough in his choice of jobs to even consider hiring out as a guide.

  Rudolph insisted on a formal contract which, when it came, rivaled the insurance policy on poor old Ship, with contingency clauses and secrecy pacts and a lien on GnuShip if he violated any of them. “Are you sure you want to do this?” I asked. At least there wasn't anything putting me up as collateral.

  “It's just boilerplate. It doesn't mean much.”

  “Then why does he want it?”

  “Because it's the way he does things. And he's offering a lot of money.”

  “Too much. It's like he's trying to buy us.”

  “So? If he's rich and wants to spread it around, why not? You've just got your feelings hurt because he ignores you.”

  I had to think about that. Introspection is something I'm still learning. It's hard enough to figure out why Floyd does things.

  * * * *

  All I really knew was that once the contract was signed, Rudolph e-railed himself out in a private canister on a twenty-five-day hyperbola that must have cost a fortune, then slingshotted around the planet in a cowboy braking-move that showed either total insanity or high faith in his guidance system. Though it did save us a three-week chase retrieving his capsule. Maybe he's easily bored. Or maybe he's just one of those people who put a high value on their time. Either way, I tried to tell Floyd, it meant he was a risk taker.

  “Nah,” he said. “I bet he had a dozen people calculate that trajectory to the micron.”

  GnuShip had no cabin for Rudolph once we collected his canister. She's nothing but cockpit, engines, and clamps—and the cockpit's barely big enough for the pilot's couch and an exercise station. So until we got to Iapetus and hired a skimmer to take us down, the only difference between talking to him on Earth and talking to him here was no speed-of-light delay. Not that Rudolph was much of a talker. In that, he's a bit like Floyd.

  His canister was impressive: a whole bunch bigger than GnuShip's cockpit, and a lot better furnished. Whenever he talked to Floyd by comcam, I peered over his shoulder, studying details.

  Floyd was doing the same. “It's like a first-class liner,” he said, “only better.”

  “Way better.” Not that there's such a thing as a first-class liner this far out. “It's also stuffed with equipment. Did you see that box behind him? It's a Spektrum 12000.”

  Floyd's voice carried a tone I've learned to be wary of. “Which is what?”

  One of the things about growing older is that I've learned that Floyd doesn't like the Socratic method. He calls it “guessing games” and accuses me of being condescending. It's weird, because when I was reading up on insurance law, I discovered that law professors always teach that way, and nobody accuses them of anything. But Floyd's a bit old for a student, so maybe that's the issue. Anyway, he doesn't like it. And, to be fair, I myself would have had no idea what it was if we'd been more than a few light-seconds from the Iapetus Base web.

  “It's what they call a lab-in-a-can,” I said. “High throughput but low multiplicity.”

  “Huh?”

  “That means it can run a lot of samples, but it can only perform a few tests on each of them. He's got a whole bunch of other stuff in there, too. I'm still trying to figure out what some of it is, but I know I saw a quark detector and a stellar occlusion analyzer. He's also got five skinsuits, plus a whole array of gloves and boots, and—”

  “So does any of this actually matter? Apparently he likes toys.”

  Someday I'm going to learn to be concise. The problem is that life is so full of interesting things. “Not really.”

  I might have been able to learn more if I'd had the nerve to probe Rudolph's canister systems. Floyd would have objected, but I hate mysteries. Enough that I'll give myself an extra year's age when I decide to control the impulse. The one time I attempted to slip into Rudolph's canister, though, merely to hijack his comcam for a better view, I bumped into a rather impressive guardian program that nearly caught me.

  That left me with little more than what I knew of Rudolph from the web, which was both plenty and not all that much. According to the web, he'd made his bucks in the futures market: asteroidal iridium, mid-ocean-ridge copper, even some speculative stuff regarding hydrothermal vent mining on Europa if the environmental restrictions are ever lifted. As far as I could tell, he'd never actually mined anything—just bought and sold the rights—but he'd done pretty well at it and could definitely afford to hire us for as long as he wanted.

  None of which really explained the equipment in the canister.

  But Floyd wasn't concerned. “Would you relax? He's just a rich speculator, playing tourist. What's so weird about that? And his name, damn it, is T. R.”

  * * * *

  Iapetus Base is on the surface, and neither T. R.'s canister nor GnuShip was designed for a hard landing. That meant we finally got to meet in person, boarding the skimmer.

  On the vidscreen, Rudolph had a face to match his nose: broad and florid, with a shaggy mane of hair overhanging strong eyebrows, and cheeks showing the mottled beginnings of lesions that would probably someday need the ministrations of an oncologist. Spaceburn? Or too many days on ozone-damaged sections of Earth? My web reading gave no clue, but his complexion bespoke a man who'd spent a lot of time without caring enough about UV filters. I raised my estimation of him by a point or two. Wherever he'd been trolling for melanomas, it had been under harsh conditions that most wealthy people would have avoided.

  Not that he treated me any better in person than on the com. He concentrated on Floyd, shaking hands firmly enough I could sense Floyd wince, even though I'm not wired into his tactile impressions. His grin was broad and his voice as hearty as his handshake, and he had a tendency to drape an arm over Floyd's shoulder and lean close to speak—as though he didn't already have enough decibels. According to the psychological literature, that hale-fellow-well-met stuff simply reflects a “man's man,” slightly out of his comfort zone. But I kept wondering if Rudolph knew exactly what he was doing.

  Not that Floyd wanted to hear it.

  “Yeah, he's a bit forced,” he said, “but give it a break, Brittney. He's just trying too hard, that's all.”

  * * * *

  We'd barely touched down at Iapetus Base when Rudolph announced that he wanted to go backpacking.

  Someday, Iapetus will be a tourist destination. The view of the Rings is breathtaking, the terrain dramatic, the stars space-bright. If it were flat, it would also be easy walking because, even though it's fairly large—about thirty percent the diameter of Titan—it's a lot less dense, so you don't get all that much gravity. A whopping .023 gee. Not a lot, but five times more than Enceladus, and there aren't any geysers to blast you off into space.

  What there are, are things to fall off of. Mountains, to be precise: huge ones. Think Olympus Mons, but steeper and up to fifteen klicks high. In terms of the ability to kill you, Earth's higher gravity gives it worse cliffs. But as some mountaineer said on one of those vids from which I only chose to remember snippets, “Dead is dead.” Beyond a certain point the size of the drop hardly matters.

  You'd think Iapetus would be pretty well explored. And while there have been some geological surveys—science is one of the few things Saturn System can export—the base is mostly just that: ice mines, habs, and a convenient place to park yourself between jobs. Easy to get to, easy to leave, but on a moon big enough to feel like a real world. As far as I could tell, nobody before us had ever “gone” backpacking.

  “That's why I hired you, Floyd, old boy,” Rudolph said. “You know how to get around places like this. So let's get at it. I've got everything we need in my canister.”

  Which of course meant we had to pop back up to orbit to get it, which was an irritating waste of propellant. That's the
trouble with rich guys. They think that because fuel comes out of the ground, it's free. Though at least Floyd got to spend a night in a guest hab and take a real gravity-fed shower, which he views as a luxury, even if the gravity's so low that fog is a better description of the experience.

  Rudolph probably just took it for granted that a skimmer's worth of orbit-to-ground propellant was a reasonable price for a shower. Maybe Floyd was right and he was just a rich tourist.

  * * * *

  Rudolph did have everything we needed. In addition to one of the skinsuits I'd already seen, he produced a pressurized bubble tent, climbing equipment that looked capable of dangling us from precipices where sane people would rather not dangle, and a portable version of the Spektrum lab-in-a-can, plus self-heating food packs, an ice/water purifier, and a bunch of other stuff that probably included lounging-in-the-tent clothing and an inflatable pillow so he could sleep soundly. When he piled it all in the skimmer, it formed an impressive mountain. On the surface, it would only weigh twenty or thirty kilos, but it would have full Earth mass, which would make it hard to carry, especially near any of those monster cliffs. I could see the epitaph now: “This crater dedicated to the memory of Floyd and Brittney, who, at the abyss of the Great Precipice of You-Wouldn't-Believe-It, discovered that a backpack in motion tends to remain in motion a lot longer than you'd expect.” Or something like that. I could do better if I put my heart in it.

  Other than the size of the pile of equipment, what was hard not to notice was that Rudolph only had a one-person tent. Floyd, apparently, would get to sleep in his skinsuit. I guess Rudolph figured we had plenty of experience at that, too. Poor Floyd. I've only got direct access to two of his senses, and from my point of view there's not a lot of difference between being in a suit or a ship. Floyd says I'm lucky. On Titan, he tried to explain what it felt like by the second week, but the best I could come up with was that it was like being forced to watch an excruciatingly bad vid, over and over. Or maybe having to spend all your time with Rudolph.