A Stranger in Paradise

by Edward M. Lerner

  The captain nodded. “Right, Higgins. The transmitter is a discontinued Sony-Boeing model. The station doesn’t stock parts for it.”

  “We were unaware of this problem,” Higgins said.

  Jason glowered. “Why would you be? Are you monitoring our messages?”

  Higgins’s smirk faded a bit. “No, no, of course not.”

  Meaning almost certainly that the Syndicate had. Uh-oh, Jason thought. What about the message from Kashmir? Had it been sufficiently secure?

  Jason tried to put that out of his mind. They could do nothing about it now. “A friend from O’Neill Two passes through next week. He’s scrounged a second-hand unit to bring us. Your routine maintenance will have to wait.”

  “Unacceptable,” Higgins snapped. “Have the part sent up on the next shuttle. Under the circumstances, we’ll pay the difference. You have twenty-four hou . . .”

  Long enough. Jason thumped the CANCEL key. The flickering picture-in-picture zoomed to refill the display. “Look, guys.”

  The grainy cross-room view gave way to a blurry closeup of the sampling equipment. The new scene wavered before flipping back to the fly-on-the-wall perspective. The images toggled jerkily.

  “See that power reading? I had to act fast.” Jason typed frantically. “It’s almost drained.” It: the overdue scout.

  “Where’s it been? What’s going on?” Bill demanded.

  Jason kept his eyes on the console. “I’m still working that out. The ’bot must have come out on schedule. The QA port has only reopened the once.”

  Jason paused the image on a dim close-up of the QA probe. “Look how dark the scout’s vision is. The nutrient glop is thicker than anything we’d imagined.”

  “It won’t be just the eyes,” Sherry said. “The glop must be all over the ’bot. Is that why it didn’t reconnect to the comm relay? Gunk on the lasers and photodetectors?”

  Jason nodded. “That’s my guess. Without a link, the ’bot would’ve gone into default mode. That means jigging about randomly, trying to get away from a presumed obstruction.”

  “Fat lot of good that will do,” Bill contributed. “It’s wearing the obstruction.”

  Uh-oh, Jason thought. “Coating the photocells, too. The ’bot’s not recharging.”

  Sherry studied the gauge. “So the random motion is draining the battery—what little juice it has left after an hour swimming in syrup.”

  Jason’s fingers raced over the keyboard. They did not have much time.

  Bill kicked off toward the airlock. “I can’t contribute anything here, and someone has to order a new widget. I’ll downlink from someplace very public and make a great show of it.” The inner hatch sighed shut behind him.

  “Done.” Jason slumped in his chair. “I’ve knocked together a program tweak and downloaded it to the relay. If we’re undeservedly lucky, the intermittent link will stay up long enough to deliver the new subroutines.”

  “Why is the ’bot returning to life now?”

  “Best guess, Sherry? Some of the goop is evaporating. Maybe it’s jiggled some off. If we can’t recharge the ’bot soon, ‘why’ won’t matter. It’s got a long walk ahead.”

  If the little diamond robot never reached a public area of the station for retrieval, everything would have been for naught.

  Jason took Sherry’s hand. “If the new program gets installed, we have a chance. It’ll send the ’bot walking straight up the nearest bulkhead toward a ceiling fixture. Light is trickling into the photocells, just not enough to fully replace the power it’s using. The closer, the better.”

  Sherry squeezed Jason’s hand. “The closer, the better,” she agreed.

  Infrared flashes, insistent but meaningless.

  The gnatbot scout could not localize the source. What signal it received was oddly weak. It could not sense the nutrient residue over its photodetectors, dimming the IR laser signal.

  The little machine kept transmitting in the best-guess direction. The feeble incoming signal implied a distant source, so it boosted power to its comm laser.

  The draining of its battery accelerated.

  Side by side, silently, Jason and Sherry watched the downward crawl of the simulated power gauge. The simulated needle kissed the redline: five percent power remaining. The rate had slowed, but the image still flickered.

  Nails pinched Jason’s hand as the sampling port, glimpsed in flickers, began slowly to swing from sight. The view shifted by thirty degrees, then forty-five. It kept on turning. He did not breathe again until the glacial turn revealed the back wall. Then he checked the power reading. Then he cheered. After a moment’s delay, Sherry joined him.

  The scout ’bot had accepted the new programming. It was headed across the shelf toward the bulkhead for its long climb upward to the light.

  Epilogue

  New hulls grew in three enormous floating microgee vats, soon to join the ten deep-space vessels docked to the Independent Miners orbital station. Cargo lighters, passenger shuttles, orbital utility craft, and space-suited figures jetted everywhere. Tethered bales of nanite-grown diamond struts and panels for the station’s continual expansion floated everywhere. Luna, austere and majestic, was two hundred klicks below, almost close enough to touch.

  And the colonists below were close enough to quickly reach here. Away from Earth’s bureaucracy meant away from the rule of law. No overt action had ever been taken against this station, and perhaps the proximity of the helium-3 mines—and hundreds of independent miners—was only a coincidence.

  And perhaps not.

  But this was not the day for negative thoughts. Jason stood to go meet his visitor, the new CEO of the Syndicate, in the station’s main lounge. He had not quite reached the office door when Barbara Shaw burst in, with Jason’s apologetic-looking deputy trailing after.

  The brisk zzzp-zzzp of Velcro footwear turned Shaw’s grand entrance almost comical. She ignored Jason’s outstretched hand. “Grimaldi, you cannot imagine how I’ve anticipated this day.”

  “I’m sure you’ll tell me. Why don’t we sit down first?”

  She remained standing. “Nice office. Think you can still afford it?”

  From what Jason remembered, this cabin could not hold her old desk. His token nod toward personalizing the office involved a couple liters of paint and some holo art. “Can I?”

  “My accountants predict that you’ll squeak by. That proved to me that my lawyers were not sufficiently . . . motivated. I fired them.”

  Sighing, Jason grabbed two empty drink bulbs from a cabinet. “Coffee?”

  The hospitality made her blink. “Don’t you realize I did my best to ruin you and your precious Independent Miners? You stole Syndicate nanites—somehow—and used them to jumpstart your own corporate empire. It’s taken me five years to establish your piracy, but now I’ve stopped you in your tracks. ”

  He filled both bulbs and handed her one. “Look, Barb”—she bristled at the familiarity—“you haven’t established anything. The Independent Miners settled out of court. True, the Syndicate will get a lump-sum payment now, and royalties on our future ships, but we’ve admitted no wrongdoing.”

  “And the ships that are indistinguishable from half my fleet?”

  Jason gestured at his window, its polarization set high to soften the lunar glare. “Look two docks over. That’s the Madrid, the ship you rode out here. It mates easily with our docking ports and our fueling rigs, and we can service pretty much any part of it. And although it probably galls you, our ships sometimes dock at Syndicate stations. They can refit and repair with parts from your depots. Standardizing on size and shape is simply practical.”

  In her right temple, a blood vessel throbbed. “And there was no significance to the name of your first diamond ship? Do not take me for a fool!”

  “Ah, the Growing Paine. I’ll tell Sherry you appr
eciated her little joke.”

  “The monetary settlement is no joke,” Shaw snapped. “I came to watch you transfer the funds, and I want to see that now. We’re meeting here, Grimaldi, rather than in my office, for one reason. So you can’t pretend that paying up doesn’t hurt.”

  Shaw didn’t get it; maybe she never would.

  “Look outside first, Barbara. Tell me what you see.”

  “A space station, some construction, modern ships—if all, like this office, rather Spartan. Nothing I didn’t see as a station exec. What’s your point, Grimaldi?”

  Twice as many ships were here today as Jason had seen at Syndicate Station Three, but he chose not to quibble. “We’re opening the solar system faster than the Syndicate ever would have—certainly faster than it once chose to. These ships, and more like them, bring us all—Earth, the Luna settlements, the O’Neill colonies, Mars base—far cheaper resources than five years ago. And they’re giving you a bit of honest competition.” (Shaw snorted at “honest.”) “From its last annual statement, I doubt the Syndicate has suffered much from vastly expanded markets.”

  Jason smiled. “And, at least after the fact, every one of our new ships was built under license from the Syndicate.”

  “Under license?” she scoffed. “You once sat in my office and dared me to license our technology. You planned this even then, down to settling out of court. It’s very clear now. Admit it.”

  Jason turned to admire the nearest synthesis vat. “Clear? A new cruiser is growing inside, nanoseeded the day your lawyers and ours reached agreement.

  “We call it the Window Paine.”

  A STRANGER IN PARADISE

  Row upon row of blue-and-green-and-white globes mock me.

  The world below reflects from tumblers and goblets and snifters and flutes, from more types of antique glassware than I can name. Bottles and decanters of amber liquid line other shelves. Seven thousand years is too vintage for my tastes; I’m ignoring my craving for a drink.

  Ama and I first spoke in a place like this—not a derelict starship, but another tavern. Human nature has changed over the millennia, but not in that way.

  No, let me call her Amanda. If those I want to find this memoir do, the old form of the name may be more familiar. My name has no old form; Cameron will do.

  I was alone, my back to the boisterous crowd, when she approached my table. The friends she had come in with were chattering away. Despite pulsing music and her soft tread, I knew she was there well before she spoke.

  “You act like the world is against you.”

  I was new there—there meaning Earth, not only the Academy—and homesick and friendless. I held back my reflexive reply: that the world was. Medicine and training notwithstanding, the gravity was killing me. The answer I gave instead made her laugh.

  I had met the one. Some things you just know.

  Planets are tough on artifacts mere mortals can build. A few thousand years of weathering and erosion destroys and obscures a lot. It wasn’t until we stumbled upon ancient lunar settlements preserved by the vacuum that we realized we—humankind—had been in space before. A whole new science, techno-archeology, was needed to understand. When fragments of data finally began to emerge from the lost civilization’s computers, we were even more amazed.

  The Firsters had burst from the solar system with an armada of slowboats and an excess of enthusiasm. Their ships would, in a few generations’ time, reach nearby stars thought to warm planets with good prospects for human colonization.

  The solsys-wide civilization collapsed before any of those pioneers could possibly have reached their destinations. Archeologists agree that Earth suffered plagues, famine, global warfare, eco-collapse, and socioeconomic implosion. They just cannot agree on cause and effect.

  Millennia later, humanity has recovered, and more, exploring its galactic neighborhood in faster-than-light ships embodying technologies the Firsters never imagined.

  And none of our nearest interstellar neighbors has a human presence.

  If any of the slowboats narrowcast home as instructed about their first landfalls, no one retained the technology to hear. Some ships, perhaps, never reached their destinations. Some planetary settlements, it was eventually discovered, were started and failed. A few asteroid bases were found orbiting nearby stars—all abandoned.

  But those failures were not the end of the story.

  What is known for certain is that some missions traveled far past their intended stars. Were the original destination worlds too inhospitable for the colonization methods of the time? Interstellar space is a big place—did they simply lose their way? Did settlements split, some staying to defend a hard-won beachhead, others ever seeking a better world? All the above occurred, and more than once, the process repeating until the slowboats could voyage no more.

  The Firster generation ships spread humanity thinly across a million cubic light years, in hundreds of tiny enclaves in as many alien environments. Many groups eventually died out. Some continued to eke out a hard-scrabble existence, their memories of Earth warped or nonexistent. Few retained any vestige of civilization.

  For those who survived, there is the Reunification Corps.

  Amanda . . .

  Whenever she entered a room, heads turned, conversation stopped, men smiled reflexively, and libidos engaged. I knew then, and remember now, that she is physically beautiful. Flowing brown hair. Striking blue eyes ever twinkling with warmth and curiosity. A willowy grace.

  And yet beauty is the least of her charms.

  I should get on subject.

  Finding lost colonies is an art. Few records survive to show where the slowboats went, even on their first, usually failed attempts. There are too many stars, even with FTL drive, to search them all. So, while the Reunification Corps employs a multitude of skills and professions, the rarest and most precious talent is the one that makes all the others relevant.

  Mine.

  It’s a peculiar mode of thought, the ability to put one’s self into the mindset of a doomed expedition born of an ancient civilization. To think: I’m here, one of the lucky ones, after generations of travel. To realize: this climate, these perils, a lack of vital resources . . . something makes it too dangerous to stay. Extrapolating from that crushing disappointment, and what little we’ve reconstructed of Firster technology, how they might have reacted to the prospect of moving on. Which of the distant pinpoints of light would seem the most promising? Which would merit entombing myself and generations of my descendants on a slowboat that logic says may not survive another epic voyage but is too complex to replace? Deciding where, with an entire solar system to choose from, the Firsters might have established a base.

  There is no way to capture the process in an algorithm, or exercise it from behind a desk. It takes walking the planets of distant stars, communing with the faint anomalies that just might be the crumbled remains of abandoned settlements.

  Amanda and I became instant friends, and then a sweaty-and-entangled whole bunch more than friends, at Corps Academy. We begged and bargained our way onto the same Corps re-orientation ship, two earnest grads eager to help a world of Firster descendants rejoin a larger humanity scarcely recognizable in their mythos. After three missions together, we decided to get married.

  I couldn’t believe our good fortune that a two-person scout ship mission was available. Starhopping would leave plenty of time for us—it seemed like the perfect honeymoon.

  And then one of those starhops brought us to Paradise.

  Long before sensors spotted the tumbling hulk of the abandoned slowboat, I felt certain the Firsters we were tracking had settled here. From halfway across the solar system, sensors showed the planet was too perfect not to settle.

  Amanda was equally sure any colony had failed. There was no hint of chlorophyll in the orbital scans, nor signs of energy being harnessed. No chloro
phyll means no terrestrial plant life to anchor a human-usable food chain. No energy generation means no bioconversion to change local biota into something terrestrials could eat.

  “Damn. Sorry.” Amanda’s sympathy for the lost colonists was sincere. And misplaced.

  There were people on the planet below. I was as sure of that as I’d been, from star to star to star, which way this slowboat had gone. Call it a hunch.

  “It’s a waste of time.” Amanda had been seated in front of a bio-readout panel. “Humans might as well eat dirt as anything growing down there.”

  The planet we circled, that I still circle, is green almost everywhere not covered by water or polar ice cap. That lushness was one more anomaly, since its orbit was barely within the habitable zone of its K-class sun. While I began the painstaking process of bringing back on-line the slowboat’s ancient, crumbling computers, Amanda, at my insistence, flew down in a lander to check things out.

  We have been apart ever since.

  Any planet you would want to colonize belongs to someone else—the only question is how much of an ecosphere you are willing to displace. That is true, at least, if a breathable atmosphere is a meaningful part of your lifestyle. Oxygen is so chemically reactive that only a planet rich with photosynthesizing life can sustain an oxygen-rich atmosphere.

  From interstellar distances, the only discernable planetary characteristics are orbit, rough size, and atmospheric composition. Evolutionary progress from the single-celled stage until sentients begin to use radios, not that any such have ever been found, is undetectable. Fortunate colonists found bare rock plus oceans full of oxygen-producing algae. Unlucky colonists, at least for those with a sense of bioethics, encountered continents teeming with indigenous life.

  Like Paradise.

  The lander touched down just inside one of the planet’s few desolate regions, on the rocky coast of an inland sea. Amanda could not bring herself to use a more hospitable prospective landing site. A column-of-flame descent into some verdant meadow would have been, she said, like torching a park.