Analog SFF, June 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “Yes.” I took the banana, peeled it down a bit farther, and handed it back to her. She hooked her long hair behind one ear, a gesture I adored, and I put one hand on her cheek for a moment and smiled. “They're using those bacteria and animals to help ecoform a moon with volcanic seas. They didn't have animals like that of their own.”

  “Why not? Did they kill them?”

  “No. No honey. Just, their home is what we call volcanically inactive.”

  She nodded uncertainly.

  I continued, “So our animals are going to help prepare for later when their own animals will be put on that moon.”

  “But why did we kill all our animals?”

  “We didn't kill them all.” I waved at the window, as if you could see lots of animals out there now, in our empty little yard.

  “Why did we kill lots of ‘em?”

  “Finish your banana,” I told her.

  “But why?” She took a bite and then handed me the peel.

  What could I say to explain the sixth great extinction? Because we didn't care? Because we are evil?

  “I don't know,” I whispered.

  “We shouldn't'a,” she mumbled through a full mouth.

  “No, we shouldn't have.”

  * * * *

  I stewed through the rest of the staff meeting. I couldn't concentrate on Ryan's summary and the presentations that followed. I was confused. The images of the Greete formation did seem to indicate matryoshk mining, but none of my other data was consistent with that. And I was angry that the captain had intentionally humiliated me. When the captain announced the meeting was adjourned, Kweupe leaned toward me.

  “Don't let that get you down,” she whispered in solidarity.

  I nodded in thanks.

  She frowned in thought. “But you need to...” She hesitated, and then decided not to finish the thought. “Come see me in engineering, when you can.”

  “Okay.”

  I sat while the others left, until the captain and I were alone together. He floated as rigid as wood, at a slight angle from the floor since he was too tall for the low ceiling, waiting for me to speak. Stretched across his chest, his shirt seemed ready to burst. I unbuckled my seatbelt, pushed toward him, and oriented in line with him.

  “That was uncalled for. You set me up to look bad. You asked me all those questions, when you'd withheld data from your chief scientist.”

  He furrowed his brow in exaggerated concern. “Doctor, I'm sorry you feel that way. You did have access to the same data we did....”

  “But I was looking at the atmospheric data, as you instructed.”

  “Maybe you weren't looking for anything that contradicted your expectations.”

  To this I didn't know how to begin to respond. “Wha—you think—”

  “Understand, Doctor, I appreciate your special concern about the Greete and other Galactics. But the U.N. gave us a mission and I have to see it gets done, no matter how interested I personally might be in your concerns.”

  “But things are changing all around us, and the U.N. isn't here to consider the facts as we discover them.”

  The captain nodded with big, exaggerated movements. “I see your point, I see your point. But, you know, there might be some people on board that feel just the opposite way about things here. They might look at the Greete and say, who are they to tell us about what they claim the rules are?” He spread his hands. “Can you see their point?”

  “No. That has nothing to do with the fact that we have to live with these civilizations, and so we must—”

  But the captain continued right over me. “If we start changing the mission out here, how are we going to determine what changes should be made? Really, that's not up to us. The U.N. gave us clear instructions.”

  “But it is up to you.”

  “That's right, that's right. And I'm telling you that I decide to finish the U.N. mission as the U.N. laid it out for us.”

  “But we have to worry about whether the Galactics—”

  “Well, I'll be honest, Doctor. I don't appreciate this doubt that settles in regarding the Galactics. As if we humans are always making mistakes. I think that's just not good for the morale of the crew. Or the human race. Don't you agree?”

  “We made mistakes,” I said, speaking more quietly. “The human race made mistakes. That's a fact. We don't want to keep making them.”

  He nodded again and smiled, showing his teeth. His eyes, however, were cold. “That's one perspective. And I thank you for bringing it to my attention.”

  I stared at him, my mouth open. Once he started thanking me, I was sure he was no longer listening. I had asked at least a dozen times, during the trip from Earth, whether I could work with Tarkos to prepare a message to the Greete, and the captain had thanked me profusely each time—but he never gave Tarkos permission and he never allowed a senior staff meeting agenda to include discussion of a message.

  And now here we floated, with the captain towering over me, two meters of determination, refusing to submit to doubt. This was the human order, before First Contact: inertia plowing through caution.

  “We must try not to make the same mistakes,” I whispered.

  “Thank you for your perspective, Doctor. And if you have any evidence that we're making a mistake, I promise you that I'll consider it and if you make your case, I'll do everything in my power to fix it. How does that sound? Good? Meanwhile, Doctor, work on using your great talents to help us get the job done. Thank you.”

  Then he left me there, my face burning red with anger. And with doubt.

  * * * *

  “Why didn't you do anything?” Christina asked me one night during dinner. She held her fork in one hand and stabbed moodily at a potato on her plate. Her eyes shifted from me to her plate and back to me.

  By the time Christina was thirteen, she had tuned the smartpaint of her bedroom to full color images of the galaxy's greatest cities. Neelee-ornor, with its white spires threading the canopy of the galaxy's largest trees, beside a space elevator strung with flowering vines so that it rose like a yellow column into space. Kirt, the ocean city capital of the Kirtpau, with vast, glowing spiral structures of solid diamond, reaching for the distant sunlight or gyring down into abysmal depths, obscured everywhere by schools of luminescent fishlike creatures of every conceivable color, swimming through dense sea jungles. Jerriat, the floating city of the Hmmnarout, where, like hanging gardens, the living floranets drooped from metropolis balloons down into the thick atmosphere of their gas giant, swarmed everywhere with four-winged flying lizards.

  On television, gray-haired men mocked Galactic Civilization, the alien values, the indifference to humanity and Earth. Elections were won by politicians who spoke of “human pride.” School boards faced weekly fights over when our textbooks would return to “balanced teaching” of the glories of terrestrial accomplishment. But some of the young of Earth, who felt absolved of our guilty past by the accident of being born after First Contact, were developing their own understanding.

  “Why didn't you do anything?” Christina repeated. She pressed her lips together into a frown.

  “What do you mean? About what?” But I knew.

  “About everything. Why did you collaborate?” She flashed a look at me, then stabbed the potato hard, splitting it.

  “Collaborate? I didn't ‘collaborate.’ I was a Green. There were only a few Greens in America then. We were rare. I spent all my spare time—”

  “But what did you do?" She interrupted.

  Jean frowned at this. “Your father spent a lot of time working on these issues. Time he could have spent doing corporate consulting instead, for real money. God knows we could have used it. And I helped when I could, too, after you went to school.”

  “Okay, but what did you do about everything?” Christina repeated, emboldened, straightening a little.

  I explained haltingly about my many years of volunteer work for NGOs. “But everyone resisted us,” I concluded. “We we
re committed to nonviolent change, and the electorate just ignored us. But I helped negotiate industry agreements to reduce pollution, to preserve habitats....”

  “It didn't help, did it?”

  “There was a lot of ... debate about what kind of damage was occurring, and then debates about how the agreements should be enforced. We didn't have the power to stop that, to make things go faster, to go fast enough.”

  She sighed and pulled a string of hair behind her ear. The gesture had lately been preceded always with a sigh, imbued with impatience for me, for Earth, for humanity. As if she meant to pull all those impediments behind herself.

  I had a sudden confusing flash of a conversation years before, with me at a lunch table chastising my parents for their impossible complacency. This image prodded me into a sudden impatience. “What did you want us to do?” I demanded of Christina. Had my father asked that of me?

  “I don't know. Something. Shut down the companies and governments that were destroying everything. Go to jail. Refuse to live like that. Anything.”

  She speared and split another piece of the disintegrating potato.

  Christina asked The Question many more times over the next year. I gave her a different answer, a new evasion, each time.

  “But,” she doggedly concluded, having always the last word. “You didn't really do anything.”

  * * * *

  Still shaking and hot faced, I retreated to the quarters that I shared with three other crewmembers. It was a small cabin, and my hair brushed the lights if I stood, but I pushed back and forth off the walls, like a fish in a small tank, floating side to side. My roommates were at their stations, so I had some solitude. And I could work here, with virtching, just as well as on the bridge or in the engineering hold.

  I wasted half an hour pointlessly reviewing what I should have said, mumbling aloud, waving my hands. A ridiculous figure. I finally pulled my virtching glasses on and opened my desktop. The probes were still transmitting good data. I reviewed the visuals. Some small and pale objects circled the Greete ships. I ordered some close-ups while I went over the atmospheric data. There was no doubt: the methane count was slightly lower than we had found before, and oxygen was up. And there were still no chemical symptoms of matryoshk mining.

  The new pictures came back. The small figures were long, cylindrical shapes, pale green, with broad vanes along the sides, and one end spotted with dark circles. These were Greete—naked in the outer atmosphere! I quickly ordered more close-ups. One showed a glint of sunlight before one Greete, revealing that they wore on the front large clear covers of some kind. A breathing mask, most likely.

  The Greete homeworld is a methane giant, where the Greete float in the highest cloud bands on the natural hydrogen sacks in their bodies. The conditions are similar to those in the Twilight Edge of Purgatorio, but with a few important differences: for the Greete, Purgatorio is too heavy, gets too much UV radiation, is too warm, and the atmosphere is thin, with too little helium and not enough CO2. Yet here they were, moving in the atmosphere—going native.

  I needed to know several things immediately. More on Greete biology. More on the air flow figures for the North Pole of the Twilight Edge. More on matryoshka carbon pools. I grabbed the ship network icon and dug out the Kirtpau Encyclopedia. I opened the files on the Greete. After an hour of reading, I had formed a clear theory of what was happening.

  “All drop crew, prepare for drop!” the intercom sounded. Then the drop preparation alarm chimed twice. They were preparing the deployment of the air factories, scheduled for our next pass over the North Pole. I looked at the clock. There were only two hours left.

  I sprung out the door and pulled myself as quickly as I could toward engineering. I had to halt the drop.

  * * * *

  “So you're going to go?” Christina asked me one evening as I drove her to a practice session for the National Scholastic Bowl. She was fourteen, and her junior varsity team was preparing for the state competition. The topic of the competition was to be Galactic history. She considered it her strong point.

  I had just gotten the call from the U.N. the day before. Jean and I had stayed up late, debating the pros and cons, but we knew in the end that we would agree that I should accept. The only thing left was to tell Christina.

  Christina's hair was up, and it made her look older, almost severe. A single strand fell down over one cheek, and before I could stop myself I reached over and hooked it behind her ear. She frowned and pulled away.

  I put my hand back on the steering wheel. We still had the same electric car, small but dependable. Perhaps like me, I thought in my more sentimental moments. “Right. There was wrangling at the U.N.—the U.S. wants an American lead scientist, since they're trying to control the mission. The compromise was to send a Green with international connections. But honestly, I'm the best person for the job. They need a scientist with experience running large teams and big projects. And they need a biochemist that understands how fluid volumes of high-complexity carbon structures behave under pressure. There are only three of us who've worked on that, and I'm the most well-rounded, having published also on atmospherics of gas giants—”

  Christina turned back to the window, tuning out the technical details.

  “Anyway,” I concluded, trying to recover her attention. “I'll go into space. Another world! Purgatorio!” I didn't talk yet about how long. Launch was a year away and I felt that the painful questions could wait.

  “What for? We can't terraform it.”

  “But there is matryoshka carbon there. Billions and billions of tons of it, down in the lower atmosphere. The U.N. wants to start a mining operation to pull it up. We can use it in our AI program.” This was an essential part of humanity's plan to climb to galactic wealth. Having no trustworthiness in the Galactic economy, we turned to developing technology commodities with the resources we could get. Nanotech AI was the primary investment gamble we had chosen. We had discovered that, because of the labor-intensive demands of fostering artificial intelligences, AI manufacture was the sweatshop work of the galaxy.

  “And what about the Greete?”

  I jerked my head to the side to look at her. “Who told you about the Greete?” I had been instructed not to speak of them. I assumed their presence on Purgatorio was secret.

  "Znet."

  “You read Znet?" I was surprised. I had no idea that she read political web sites.

  She shrugged. After a minute she said, “They're already there, right?”

  “Yeah. They're there. But they don't own the world, and they're not ecoforming the planet, and there is plenty of matryoshka carbon, so we expect no conflict.” These were the justifications I had been told.

  She thought about that for a while. “So we're not going to make anything there, or stay, or do anything with the Galactics there now. We're just going to squeeze in next to them and take this stuff and bring it back here? No long-term project. No real increase in—” And she used the translation of the Galactic term for wealth and trustworthiness. “—lifewealth.”

  “Well, there'll be a permanent base there, at the North Pole, where the atmosphere is stable. We'll bring air factories, so we can stay as long as we want. And big blimps to make a kind of floating town. But, I'll be back soon, and, yes, we're going to bring the matryoshka carbon back. But we're going to make something with it, right?”

  She stole a look at me, frowning, as if to say that we both knew that was not the point. Then she turned and said to the window, “I understand we need the matryoshk.” I was surprised again: she knew the slang term for the carbon. “But we should negotiate with the Greete, tell them what we want to do and find some way to build something there with them. We should prove we can...”

  She didn't finish the thought. We drove the rest of the way in silence. When I pulled up in front of her school, a dreary overcrowded building stuffed with a resentful mix of suburban kids from old local families and the children of newly bereft refugees from
some drowning coast or other, I asked, “So, can I help out tonight—I mean, with the practice? You know Galactic history is my hobby.”

  “No!” She answered too quickly. “Uh, no thanks. See ya, Dad.” She snapped off her seatbelt, hurried out of the car, and pushed the door closed behind her back, already running. I watched her race into the school and leave me behind.

  * * * *

  In Engineering, a crowd worked in hushed, intent voices as Kweupe calmly but hurriedly gave out orders, occasionally pausing to run a hand over her head while she thought. The captain floated nearby, silently watching.

  “We have to stop the deployment!” I shouted as I dropped through the ceiling hatch.

  The captain looked up at me, his expression a mixture of surprise and anger. “What?”

  “We have to delay the drop. I've discovered what the Greete are doing.” I managed to get a grip on the floor and to turn myself slowly over to align with Kweupe and the captain.

  “The Greete are attempting to colonize.”

  “Maybe this is not the time—” the captain started.

  “They come from a Jovian gas giant. They have an amazing metabolism, a mixture of methane and photosynthesis metabolisms. They probably evolved from symbionts—”

  “Doctor,” the captain said firmly. “Our schedule is tight right now; the drop window is closing. Maybe after the pod is secure you can tell us more about these Galactic wonders.” But Kweupe and a few of the other engineers had turned from their work and were listening carefully to me.

  “Just give me one minute! They breathe methane and CO2. Their bodies use the methane with oxygen to make CO2 and water and heat. Then they photosynthesize with the water and the CO2 they made, plus some extra CO2 they breathe, and make sugar and oxygen. The oxygen feeds the methane process, but they also exhale some of it.” I added in a rush, “There are efficient oxygen breathers in their home planet's atmosphere, and—”