“We’re back in the plane,” the astronaut announced without preamble. “Lemme talk to Vijay.”
“Vijay!” Stacy shouted in a voice that shattered the sleepy silence. “Jamie!” she added.
Running footsteps padded through the shadows, bare or stockinged feet against the plastic flooring. Vijay, the physician, slipped into a chair beside Dezhurova, her jet-black eyes wide open and alert. Jamie and Tracy Hall raced in, bleary-eyed, and stood behind the two women.
“This is Vijay,” she said. “What’s your condition?”
In the display screen they could see only the two men’s helmets and shoulders. Their faces were masked by the heavily tinted visors. But Rodriguez’s voice sounded steady, firm.
“I’m OK. Banged up a little, but that’s nothing. I purged Mitsuo’s suit and plugged him into the plane’s emergency air supply. But he’s still out of it.”
“How long ago did you do that?” Vijay asked, her dark face rigid with tension.
“Fifteen – sixteen minutes ago.”
“And you’re just calling in now?” Dezhurova demanded.
“I had to fix his battery pack,” Rodriguez answered, unruffled by her tone. “It got disconnected when he was knocked down –”
“Knocked down?” Jamie blurted.
“Yeah. That’s when he hurt his ankle.”
“How badly is he hurt?” Vijay asked.
“It’s sprained, at least. Maybe a break.”
“He couldn’t break a bone inside the suit,” Jamie muttered. “Not with all that protection.”
“Anyway,” Rodriguez resumed, “his suit wasn’t getting any power. I figured that getting his suit powered up was the second most important thing to do. Pumping fresh air into him was the first.”
“And calling in, the third,” Dezhurova said, much more mildly.
“Right,” said Rodriguez.
“I’m getting his readouts,” Vijay said, studying the medical diagnostic screen.
“Yeah, his suit’s OK now that the battery’s reconnected.”
“Is his LCG working?” Vijay asked.
“Should be,” Rodriguez said. “Wait one . . .”
They saw the astronaut lean over and touch his helmet to the unconscious Fuchida’s shoulder.
“Yep,” he announced, after a moment. “I can hear the pump chugging. Water oughtta be circulating through his longjohns just fine.”
“That should bring his temperature down,” Vijay muttered, half to herself. “The problem is, he might be in shock from overheating.”
“What do I do about that?” Rodriguez asked.
The physician shook her head. “Not much you can do, mate. Especially with the two of you sealed into your suits.”
For a long moment they were all silent. Vijay stared at the medical screen. Fuchida’s temperature was coming down. Heart rate slowing nicely. Breathing almost normal. He should be –
The biologist coughed and stirred. “What happened?” he asked weakly.
All four of the people at the comm centre broke into grins. None of them could see Rodriguez’s face behind his visor, but they heard the relief in his voice:
“Naw, Mitsuo; you’re supposed to ask, ‘Where am I?’ ”
The biologist sat up straighter. “Is Tracy there?”
“Don’t worry about –”
“I’m right here, Mitsuo,” said Tracy Hall, leaning in between Dezhurova and Vijay Shektar. “What is it?”
“Siderophiles!” Fuchida exclaimed. “Iron-eating bacteria live in the caldera.”
“Did you get samples?”
“Yes, of course.”
Jamie stepped back as the two biologists chattered together. Fuchida nearly gets himself killed, but what’s important to him is finding a new kind of organism. With an inward smile, Jamie admitted, maybe he’s right.
Jamie awoke the instant the dome’s lighting turned up to daytime level. He pushed back the thin sheet that covered him and got to his feet. After the long night they had all put in, he should have felt tired, drained. Yet he was awake, alert, eager to start the day.
Quickly he stepped to his desk and booted up his laptop, then opened the communications channel to Rodriguez and Fuchida. With a glance at the desktop clock he saw that it was six-thirty-three. He hesitated for only a moment, though, then put through a call to the two men at Olympus Mons.
As he suspected, they were both awake. Jamie’s laptop screen showed the two of them side-by-side in the plane’s cockpit.
“Good morning,” he said. “Did you sleep well?”
“Extremely well,” said Fuchida.
“This cockpit looked like the best hotel suite in the world when we got into it last night,” Rodriguez said.
Jamie nodded. “Yeah, I guess it did.”
Rodriguez gave a crisp, terse morning report. Fuchida happily praised the astronaut for purging his suit of the foul air and fixing the electrical connection that had worked loose in his backpack.
“My suit fans are buzzing faithfully,” he said. “But I’m afraid I won’t be able to do much useful work on my bad ankle.”
They had discussed the ankle injury the previous night, once Fuchida had regained consciousness. Vijay guessed that it was a sprain, but wanted to get the biologist back to the dome as quickly as possible for an X-ray.
Jamie had decided to let Rodriguez carry out as much of their planned work as he could, alone, before returning. Their schedule called for another half day on the mountaintop, then a takeoff in the early afternoon for the flight back to dome. They should land at the base well before sunset.
“I’ll be happy to take off this suit,” Fuchida confessed.
“We’re not gonna smell so good when we do,” Rodriguez added.
Jamie found himself peering hard at the small screen of his laptop, trying to see past their visors. Impossible, of course. But they both sounded cheerful enough. The fears and dangers of the previous night were gone, daylight and the relative safety of the plane brightened their outlook.
Rodriguez said, “We’ve decided that I’m going back down inside the caldera and properly implant the beacon we left on the ledge there.”
“So we can get good data from it,” Fuchida added, as if he were afraid Jamie would countermand his decision.
Jamie asked, “Do you really think you should try that?”
“Oughtta be simple enough,” Rodriguez said easily, “long as we don’t go near that damned lava tube again.”
“That’s the imperial ‘we’,” Fuchida explained. “I’m staying here in the plane, I’m afraid.”
“Is there enough sunlight where you want to plant the beacon?” Jamie asked.
He sensed the biologist nodding inside his helmet. “Oh yes, the ledge receives a few hours of sunlight each day.”
“So we’ll get data from inside the caldera,” Rodriguez prompted.
“Not very far inside,” Fuchida added, “but it will better than no data at all.”
“You’re really set on doing this?”
“Yes,” they both said. Jamie could feel their determination. It was their little victory over Olympus Mons, their way of telling themselves that they were not afraid of the giant volcano.
“OK, then,” Jamie said. “But be careful, now.”
“We’re always careful,” said Fuchida.
“Most of the time,” Rodriguez added, with a laugh.
BORDER GUARDS
Greg Egan
Poised as we are on the brink of the new century, looking back at the century that’s just drawn to an end, it’s obvious that Australian writer Greg Egan was one of the Big New Names to emerge in SF in the 1990s, and is probably one of the most significant talents to enter the field in the last several decades. Already one of the most widely known of all Australian genre writers, Egan may well be the best new “hard-science” writer to enter the field since Greg Bear, and is still growing in range, power, and sophistication. In the last few years, he has become a frequent c
ontributor to Interzone and Asimov’s Science Fiction, and has made sales as well to Pulphouse, Analog, Aurealis, Eidolon, and elsewhere; many of his stories have also appeared in various “Best of the Year” series, and he was on the Hugo Final Ballot in 1995 for his story “Cocoon”, which won the Ditmar Award and the Asimov’s Readers Award. In 1999, he won the Hugo Award for his novella “Oceanic”. His first novel, Quarantine, appeared in 1992, to wide critical acclaim, and was followed by a second novel in 1994, Permutation City, which won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. His other books include the novels Distress and Diaspora, and three collections of his short fiction, Axiomatic, Luminous, and Our Lady of Chernobyl. His most recent book is a major new novel, Teranesia. His stories have appeared in eight previous Annual Collections. He has a web site at http://www.netspace.net.au/~gregegan/.
Here he takes us deep into the far-future, for a complex and brilliantly imagined study of old loyalties and new possibilities.
IN THE EARLY AFTERNOON of his fourth day out of sadness, Jamil was wandering home from the gardens at the centre of Noether when he heard shouts from the playing field behind the library. On the spur of the moment, without even asking the city what game was in progress, he decided to join in.
As he rounded the corner and the field came into view, it was clear from the movements of the players that they were in the middle of a quantum soccer match. At Jamil’s request, the city painted the wave function of the hypothetical ball across his vision, and tweaked him to recognize the players as the members of two teams without changing their appearance at all. Maria had once told him that she always chose a literal perception of colour-coded clothing instead; she had no desire to use pathways that had evolved for the sake of sorting people into those you defended and those you slaughtered. But almost everything that had been bequeathed to them was stained with blood, and to Jamil it seemed a far sweeter victory to adapt the worst relics to his own ends than to discard them as irretrievably tainted.
The wave function appeared as a vivid auroral light, a quicksilver plasma bright enough to be distinct in the afternoon sunlight, yet unable to dazzle the eye or conceal the players running through it. Bands of colour representing the complex phase of the wave swept across the field, parting to wash over separate rising lobes of probability before hitting the boundary and bouncing back again, inverted. The match was being played by the oldest, simplest rules: semi-classical, non-relativistic. The ball was confined to the field by an infinitely high barrier, so there was no question of it tunnelling out, leaking away as the match progressed. The players were treated classically: their movements pumped energy into the wave, enabling transitions from the game’s opening state – with the ball spread thinly across the entire field – into the range of higher-energy modes needed to localize it. But localization was fleeting. There was no point forming a nice sharp wave packet in the middle of the field in the hope of kicking it around like a classical object. You had to shape the wave in such a way that all of its modes – cycling at different frequencies, travelling with different velocities – would come into phase with each other, for a fraction of a second, within the goal itself. Achieving that was a matter of energy levels, and timing.
Jamil had noticed that one team was under-strength. The umpire would be skewing the field’s potential to keep the match fair; but a new participant would be especially welcome for the sake of restoring symmetry. He watched the faces of the players, most of them old friends. They were frowning with concentration, but breaking now and then into smiles of delight at their small successes, or their opponents’ ingenuity.
He was badly out of practice, but if he turned out to be dead weight he could always withdraw. And if he misjudged his skills, and lost the match with his incompetence? No one would care. The score was nil all; he could wait for a goal, but that might be an hour or more in coming. Jamil communed with the umpire, and discovered that the players had decided in advance to allow new entries at any time.
Before he could change his mind, he announced himself. The wave froze, and he ran onto the field. People nodded greetings, mostly making no fuss, though Ezequiel shouted, “Welcome back!” Jamil suddenly felt fragile again; though he’d ended his long seclusion four days before, it was well within his power, still, to be dismayed by everything the game would involve. His recovery felt like a finely balanced optical illusion, a figure and ground that could change roles in an instant, a solid cube that could evert into a hollow.
The umpire guided him to his allotted starting position, opposite a woman he hadn’t seen before. He offered her a formal bow, and she returned the gesture. This was no time for introductions, but he asked the city if she’d published a name. She had: Margit.
The umpire counted down in their heads. Jamil tensed, regretting his impulsiveness. For seven years he’d been dead to the world. After four days back, what was he good for? His muscles were incapable of atrophy, his reflexes could never be dulled, but he’d chosen to live with an unconstrained will, and at any moment his wavering resolve could desert him.
The umpire said, “Play.” The frozen light around Jamil came to life, and he sprang into motion.
Each player was responsible for a set of modes, particular harmonics of the wave that were theirs to fill, guard, or deplete as necessary. Jamil’s twelve modes cycled at between 1,000 and 1,250 milliHertz. The rules of the game endowed his body with a small, fixed potential energy, which repelled the ball slightly and allowed different modes to push and pull on each other through him, but if he stayed in one spot as the modes cycled, every influence he exerted would eventually be replaced by its opposite, and the effect would simply cancel itself out.
To drive the wave from one mode to another, you needed to move, and to drive it efficiently you needed to exploit the way the modes fell in and out of phase with each other: to take from a 1,000 milliHertz mode and give to a 1,250, you had to act in synch with the quarterHertz beat between them. It was like pushing a child’s swing at its natural frequency, but rather than setting a single child in motion, you were standing between two swings and acting more as an intermediary: trying to time your interventions in such a way as to speed up one child at the other’s expense. The way you pushed on the wave at a given time and place was out of your hands completely, but by changing location in just the right way you could gain control over the interaction. Every pair of modes had a spatial beat between them – like the moiré pattern formed by two sheets of woven fabric held up to the light together, shifting from transparent to opaque as the gaps between the threads fell in and out of alignment. Slicing through this cyclic landscape offered the perfect means to match the accompanying chronological beat.
Jamil sprinted across the field at a speed and angle calculated to drive two favourable transitions at once. He’d gauged the current spectrum of the wave instinctively, watching from the sidelines, and he knew which of the modes in his charge would contribute to a goal and which would detract from the probability. As he cut through the shimmering bands of colour, the umpire gave him tactile feedback to supplement his visual estimates and calculations, allowing him to sense the difference between a cyclic tug, a to and fro that came to nothing, and the gentle but persistent force that meant he was successfully riding the beat.
Chusok called out to him urgently, “Take, take! Two-ten!” Everyone’s spectral territory overlapped with someone else’s, and you needed to pass amplitude from player to player as well as trying to manage it within your own range. Two-ten – a harmonic with two peaks across the width of the field and ten along its length, cycling at 1,160 milliHertz – was filling up as Chusok drove unwanted amplitude from various lower-energy modes into it. It was Jamil’s role to empty it, putting the amplitude somewhere useful. Any mode with an even number of peaks across the field was unfavourable for scoring, because it had a node – a zero point between the peaks – smack in the middle of both goals.
Jamil acknowledged the request with a hand signal and shifted his traject
ory. It was almost a decade since he’d last played the game, but he still knew the intricate web of possibilities by heart: he could drain the two-ten harmonic into the three-ten, five-two and five-six modes – all with “good parity”, peaks along the centre-line – in a single action.
As he pounded across the grass, carefully judging the correct angle by sight, increasing his speed until he felt the destructive beats give way to a steady force like a constant breeze, he suddenly recalled a time – centuries before, in another city – when he’d played with one team, week after week, for 40 years. Faces and voices swam in his head. Hashim, Jamil’s 98th child, and Hashim’s granddaughter Laila had played beside him. But he’d burnt his house and moved on, and when that era touched him at all now it was like an unexpected gift. The scent of the grass, the shouts of the players, the soles of his feet striking the ground, resonated with every other moment he’d spent the same way, bridging the centuries, binding his life together. He never truly felt the scale of it when he sought it out deliberately; it was always small things, tightly focused moments like this, that burst the horizon of his everyday concerns and confronted him with the astonishing vista.
The two-ten mode was draining faster than he’d expected; the seesawing centre-line dip in the wave was vanishing before his eyes. He looked around, and saw Margit performing an elaborate Lissajous manoeuvre, smoothly orchestrating a dozen transitions at once. Jamil froze and watched her, admiring her virtuosity while he tried to decide what to do next. There was no point competing with her when she was doing such a good job of completing the task Chusok had set him.
Margit was his opponent, but they were both aiming for exactly the same kind of spectrum. The symmetry of the field meant that any scoring wave would work equally well for either side – but only one team could be the first to reap the benefit, the first to have more than half the wave’s probability packed into their goal. So the two teams were obliged to cooperate at first, and it was only as the wave took shape from their combined efforts that it gradually became apparent which side would gain by sculpting it to perfection as rapidly as possible, and which would gain by spoiling it for the first chance, then honing it for the rebound.
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