Analog SFF, June 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  We dove Purgatorio's gravity well low to grab a circumpolar orbit. Apparent gravity shifted as we turned with the orbit, seeming to lift us out of our chairs. I fought nausea and concentrated. I turned my attention to our preliminary probe data: a picture of pale clouds, spotted with dark points that cast columnar shadows into the orange depths. These were atmospheric ships and stations of the elusive Greete, our competitors in exploiting the gas giant. There were many more of them than we had expected.

  Purgatorio is about half the volume of Saturn, but with 80 percent the mass and a small iron core. Tidal locked, .89 AU from its sun, one side faces always its G-class star, while the other remains in darkness. On the sunlit side, the atmosphere—helium, methane, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen, with a fair amount of water vapor down deep—churned at a mean 875 degrees Celsius. Convection currents rise from dark depths thousands of kilometers below, bubbling up from the equator and expanding explosively before flowering yellow and orange in the stratosphere. Then the winds push out towards the shadow side, where they blow into a dark nearly as cold as space. Methane freezes, helium and nitrogen contract and collapse, and furious catabatic winds plunge back toward the metallic center.

  Above those vast and inscrutable depths, no being in the known universe can survive for long except in the high atmosphere along the Twilight Edge, the longitudinal circumference where the shadow and the sunlight meet. Narrow at the equator but wide at the poles, the largest region of the Twilight Edge lies at the North Pole: four million square kilometers of calm atmosphere floats on a layer of turbulent microcurrents of cooling gases, and mild winds circulate at a mere fifty degrees Celsius. Our target orbit would travel above the Twilight Edge, bringing us over the North Pole twice an e-day.

  “We have captured orbit,” Elizabeth Ryan, the second in command, announced.

  A collective cheer erupted from the bridge crew.

  The captain smiled and clapped once. “All right, astronauts, don't get too comfortable yet. Start orbit consolidation checks.”

  “We have a message from the Greete!” Ryan shouted. She waved one arm and a small image of a Greete, looking like an inflated green whale floating in orange and brown clouds, appeared on our virtual desktops.

  “Let's hear it!” I shouted.

  Ryan looked up at the captain. He forced a smile at my interruption and said, “Go ahead, let's hear it.”

  “Yes sir,” Ryan said. She shared the Greete transmission: a jumble of Galactic Standard, hard to decipher for its speed. Silence fell as we all listened. Tarkos, a young engineer from Turkey and the only person on the ship who knew as much Galactic as I did, struggled to translate.

  “We the Greete demand dwelling reason—uh, demand ecology—”

  "Stake claim," I interrupted.

  “Right, thanks. We the Greete stake claim to this planet. We—”

  The captain sighed and waved at Tarkos. “Is it the same message, the automatic message, our probes picked up last week?”

  “Looks like it, sir. Same start, same size. And it repeats.”

  “Okay. That's enough. Tarkos, record this and translate what you can, just to be sure, and we'll review it at the staff meeting. We'll be within our rights if we keep out of their way.”

  “We can't be sure of that,” I blurted out. I was immediately sorry. I still had the habits of an academic scientist and by reflex attempted to start debates. Such interruptions broke no official rules, since I was a civilian, but the captain found them an inappropriate distraction.

  He turned to me with his jaw clenched. “Doctor, you know I appreciate your insights as chief scientist, but we really don't have time for this argument right now.” On the voyage out he had grown impatient with my opinions of Galactic politics, but he was always polite about it.

  “But our understanding of Galactic law is negligible. The Kirtpau claim that the Greete are exaggerating their legal stand might be ... biased in some way.” And, I did not add, our desire to accept the Kirtpau account might be wishful thinking, our hope that the Kirtpau told us the truth when they sold us consulting services on our mission to Purgatorio. “We don't even know what the Greete are doing here.”

  “They're mining matryoshk, just as we're going to do. After we get our orbit finalized.”

  “We're not sure they're here for matryoshk.”

  “Thank you, Doctor,” the captain said, in a tone that made it clear that this was the end of our conversation. “Please get your best reading on the weather down there, so we know if we can drop the pod on our next pass, and what the mining situation is like.”

  He looked at the rest of the bridge crew.

  “Listen up. We need to ease into our lower orbit as we slow. Keep the trajectory tight. Begin preliminary preparations for the drop. Senior staff meeting when we reach the South Pole.”

  * * * *

  First Contact had come on a warm July day, sixteen years before. My wife Jean was four months pregnant. We were returning from a check-up and she sat, comfortable in the languid heat of our sun-baked little electric car, with her hands folded on her stomach, as I drove us home. She had cut her hair short a week before, the first time I had seen it like that, and now her exposed face, with the added weight of pregnancy, seemed softer. I smiled and patted her stomach.

  “How was your day?” she asked. I was a biochemist at MIT, and during the summers I volunteered my expertise to an environmental think tank. I had spent the day there before picking her up at the doctor's.

  “Not good. You remember that voluntary pollution reduction plan with the plastics manufacturers? They've done nothing still. They keep stalling, saying they need new studies before they can implement.” I sighed. “We have no leverage. Our supporters grew complacent after we negotiated the agreement last year. The manufacturers know it.”

  She shook her head. “You'd think that with Bangladesh under water and thirty million refugees swarming into India, they'd start to see that the time for stalling on these kinds of issues is over.”

  “It's always better to do the right thing next quarter,” I said. “So it's always better to stall during the current quarter. But enough of that. I'm just glad the doctor said everything is going so well. Steak tonight?” ‘Steak’ was our ironic name for tofu.

  “Please,” she said, smiling back.

  When we came onto the highway, I asked, “How about some news?” She barely nodded, already starting to fall into a nap.

  I was expecting to find some news about Sophia, the first true AI, which had come conscious just a month before. Instead, we heard, “...and we can confirm at this time that the extraterrestrial spacecraft is in orbit around the Earth. These are not messages from deep space, but from only a few hundred kilometers above the Earth. So far they've transmitted in English, Mandarin, and Hindi.”

  Only then did I notice, as I instinctively slowed to listen, that traffic all around me was slower than normal. People were on the phone or leaning toward their dashboards, listening, creeping home distractedly as the whole of human history changed around them.

  Jean snapped awake when she understood what was happening. “It can't be,” she whispered. “I'll try another station.”

  “Earlier transmissions,” the next anchor announced, “explained that we had achieved one of the four criteria for admittance into what the aliens have called ‘Galactic commerce.’ These four criteria or standards are, uh—” There was an audible shuffling of paper. “—interstellar travel, faster-than-light spaceships, autovo—excuse me—autoevolution, and artificial intelligence.”

  She switched stations again. “—that at this time, we do not expect a landing. The aliens have said our gravity is prohibitively strong for them. Dr. Karen Umiker, our science journalist, is here to explain what that might mean. Karen?”

  When we made it home, I parked in the driveway, and we sat there, still squeezed into our tiny car, and listened for an hour while surfing the web on the dashboard computer under the shadow of the dark fro
nt of our home. We skipped anchors and pundits and listened again and again to the transmission when we could find it, unable to pull ourselves away from that synthetic, eerily calm voice from space: “We are the Kirtpau. We seek trade with the humans of Earth.”

  Jean held both hands over her stomach, as if to shield our unborn daughter, whom we had already named Christina.

  “Please let them be peaceful,” she whispered.

  In that, at least, we were lucky.

  * * * *

  When we passed the South Pole, the eight senior staff gathered in the conference room. The Kirtpau are like ten-legged crabs with eyes on their knees, about a meter and a half tall, on average. So the interior of the ship had painfully low ceilings but broad spaces. The conference room was long and wide, and our voices sometimes echoed sharply. The four command staff and four lead scientists strapped onto chairs around a table, without virtching glasses, making some show of formality in the microgravity.

  The thirty-person crew of our mission was an international mix. The ship was nominally under U.N. control, since the Kirtpau had traded it for resources in international waters, but the U.S. and Britain had used their Security Council domination to force through military control of the mission. The captain and I were American, and Ryan was British. All the rest of the senior staff were Europeans or Indian, representatives of nations firmly in the U.S. block, except for our chief engineer, Kweupe. I sat next to her, at one end of the table. She was a tall, thin Kenyan woman with broad shoulders. She kept her hair so short it seemed she had only just shaved her head, and she liked to rub one hand over the top as she thought. I considered her an ally.

  Tarkos's translation of the Greete message confirmed that it was a repeating loop of a message our probes had heard before. The captain tabled discussion of it and asked that we first review the orbit capture. Then he pointed at me. “Science: what's the environment looking like right now? Any problems for the drop or for matryoshk mining?”

  Matryoshka carbon is buckyballs wrapped in many nested layers of carbon network spheres. The nested shells could be aligned and twisted into configurations that released trapped atoms, changed current flow, catalyzed reactions, or held particles in quantum isolation. Groups of the molecular structures could be arranged to build quantum computers with long decoherence times, and so matryoshka carbon formed the core component of our best nanocomputers. But it took years to grow small quantities of matryoshk, even in our fastest orbital factories. Down in the churning cold of Purgatorio, black oceans of it had formed over billions of years of crushing pressures and alternating heat and cold. There was enough there to build tens of millions of AIs.

  I released my straps and extended my legs, so that it was as if I had stood up. I had to hold one hand over my head to keep from bumping on the ceiling. “The probes we dropped in our pass are functioning. The Greete seem to avoid getting in their way—”

  “We don't need to speculate on their noble motives,” the captain interrupted. “What about the weather?”

  “Uh,” I hesitated, regathering my thoughts. “Well, the high atmosphere looks unusually stable right now. The radar readings of the deep atmosphere show high-speed winds just above the matryoshk, but that was expected. The probes have found some strange things. There is no sign of additional carbon in the polar edge. No hydrocarbon traces. If the Greete were mining matryoshk, there should be something. And another thing: there's been a tripling in the free oxygen in the Edge. It's still a tiny amount, but I looked at the Kirtpau encyclopedia and found that the Kirtpau data from the distant past matches our survey from three years ago. So, it appears these are levels of oxygen in the Edge never seen before.”

  “Maybe it's a byproduct of some mining technique,” Commander Ryan proposed.

  “No. If so, there should still be signs of carbon in the atmosphere. And oxygen could bind with and corrode matryoshka carbon, so it could be detrimental to mining. No. There are many Greete ships here. Four hundred and fifty or more, floating from serially tethered hydrogen zeppelins. They look like linked sausage. And there are—”

  “Now, doctor,” the captain said, smiling broadly. “Don't get too poetic on us. Right now I'm trying to focus us on the issue of the drop schedule. Are there too many Greete structures? Are they in our way?”

  He looked at Ryan as he asked this, but I did not sit down, and I answered. “The North Polar Edge is large. Space isn't a problem yet. But we shouldn't drop until we understand what they're doing—”

  The captain kept smiling, but he asked me, “So, Doctor, what do you think they're doing, if not mining?”

  “I don't know. Building some kind of permanent base or structure. Just that.”

  “That's your professional opinion, that they're not mining here?”

  I hesitated. What was he getting at? “Uh, I guess you could say that. My professional opinion is that they're not mining here.”

  “And you think there is no competition we need worry about? That we should talk with them? Negotiate some kind of cultural exchange?”

  I couldn't see where this was going. “Of course we should talk with them. And they're changing the atmosphere dramatically. We need to understand—”

  “Commander Ryan,” he interrupted, “would you review with us the probe data from the last several hours?”

  I hesitated, my mouth hanging open. Then I bent slightly, unsure of whether I should sit for this. I had reviewed the atmospheric data from the probes. Had I missed something? I looked at Kweupe, who sat rubbing one hand over her crown. She shook her head: she, too, did not know.

  Ryan waved and a picture of the Greete ships, floating in the high atmosphere, appeared on the wall. She enlarged and selected perspectives until we saw a close-up of one ship. A black line dropped from the ship straight down into the obscure orange depths below.

  “This appears to be a mining rig,” Ryan said.

  A murmur went around the room. The captain looked at me.

  “We don't know what that is....” I said hesitantly.

  “We have radar data,” the captain said. “It shows the pipe runs all the way down to the matryoshk layer, and stops right there, in the middle of it.”

  “But—”

  “Doctor,” the captain said with a tone of exaggerated incredulity. “What more evidence could you need? You get yourself an invitation from the Greete to come down and inspect a ship, and then we'll talk.”

  A couple of crew sniggered at that.

  “Commander Ryan, update our fuel situation,” the captain continued. Ryan stood. I slowly sat and strapped myself down.

  * * * *

  When my daughter Christina was six she asked me, “Daddy, why are we poor?”

  We sat at the kitchen table together. It was after school and the bus had just brought her home. I gave her a banana and a glass of soymilk and asked about her day. I got in response this question.

  “Why do you say that? We're not poor,” I told her. “By the standards of most of the world, with its millions of wandering homeless, we're rich. And here in the United States, we're middle class. Or working class, maybe—a professor's salary is not much.”

  “I meant everyone. On Earth. Why's Earth poor?”

  “Who told you Earth is poor?”

  “Morgan,” she said. Morgan was a girl in her kindergarten class. “She said Earth's poor, and the Galactics won't even talk to us ‘cause of it.”

  Out of the mouths of babes. “Well, the Galactics don't measure wealth just in the way we do.”

  “What's that mean?”

  “They ... well, we think of wealth as things one person has. And we mostly measure wealth—we say a person is rich—if they have money, and a big house, and machines....”

  She nodded. She held the banana, forgotten, in a little fist.

  “The Galactics measure it that way, too, but they also include something else. To most of the Galactics, wealth is more shared because it mostly comes from ecoforming planets—that's chan
ging dead planets, poisonous planets, so that something can live on them. That gives you more living room, more resources, more everything. But ecoforming is really, really, really hard. And it takes a long, long, long time.”

  “Like a millin hundred years?”

  “Well, not that long. But hundreds of years, with thousands of people cooperating.”

  “Helping together,” she said.

  “Right. But the Galactics only cooperate with species that've proven they can be trusted for centuries or even thousands of years. And the Galactics suppose that one way you show you can be trusted is that you've preserved your own world and created great things that take a long time. Some economists call that a ‘trust economy.'”

  “Did we make anything great for a long time?”

  “Well, we haven't really made anything like the Galactics have made. And nothing that takes a long time. Take a bite, honey.” Bananas were hard to get, with most of Central America desertified. I had splurged buying a few for her.

  She chewed for a moment. “Morgan says the Galactics hate us ‘cause we killed all the animals here.”

  “The Galactics don't hate us, honey.” Not much, anyway. Killing most species of megafauna on your planet is about the worst act possible in Galactic culture. But they still occasionally sent a probe by, as if to spy whether the filthy cannibals were up to something interesting. The Kirtpau alone traded with us. We didn't know if they were bottom feeders, or saw some value in us, or took us on as a charity case. Maybe all three. “But trust is earned mostly from ecoforming—”

  “Puttin’ life on planets.”

  “Right. And conserving life on your own planet. Those work together. The way to ecoform is to use organisms that can live on a planet and change it over time. Having more of those helps.” In a flash of inspiration, our best translator of Galactic had summarized the central moral of High Galactic Culture: the business of life is life.

  Christina nodded. “That's why the Kirtpau gave us spaceships for our worms and crabs and stuff.” The Kirtpau traded us three FTL ships in exchange for exclusive galactic use rights of all the thermophilic life clinging to deep sea vents in Earth's oceans. At the time, humans laughed at the Kirtpau for the exchange. We were given the stars and they got mostly samples of bacteria and nematodes. Years later some economists claimed that the Kirtpau paid us half the market value of those rights.