The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 13

by Gardner Dozois

  Now, of course, the cargo should be different.

  The husbands, when voice contact had been lost, had been worried and planned to take the geodesic route rather than follow the mapped track of the Jellyseal, but they were still on the night side less than a thousand kilometres from Nest when they turned back.

  The temblors from the shifting fault grew less intense as they moved away from it. This might be due to increasing distance or to actual quieting down of the disturbance. There was plenty of seismic equipment at Nest, and the quakes had probably been detected there; but until a far more extensive network could be set up there would be no way to pick particular ones out of the continuous rumblings and quiverings originating throughout the huge world’s crust and mantle.

  Neither driver thought of blaming other Nesters for failing to warn them about the obstacle just passed. Satellite mapping through charged clouds was difficult, and anyone away from the base was on his own – or on their own; no vehicles went out with less than two crew members, and no one went out walking. Suits which would let a human being take a step in seventeen atmospheres pressure and over seven Earth gravities, even though Nest had been built in a region of human-tolerable temperature, were not available anywhere.

  Techniques had been planned for transferring people from a crippled vehicle to a rescue machine, but so far these had not been tested in genuine emergencies. Also they depended on the cripple’s not being too badly bent out of shape. Doors had to open . . .

  The Quarterback had to slow down after an hour or so, as the rain increased. The drops were not staying on the ground, but boiling off as soon as they struck; the resulting mist, rather than the rain itself, was blocking vision. The black, blowing flakes had vanished, whether as a result of blocked vision or because they were washed to the ground could only be guessed. What was falling was anyone’s guess, too; presumably fluorine compounds, but emphatically not water. Hydrogen was far scarcer on this world than on Mars or even Mercury.

  Dominic made one of his thoughtful weather analyses as the rain slowed them.

  “There’s a high ridge back of us and to the right, remember? Surface wind seems to be towards the day side as usual, so the air is being pushed up and cooling adiabatically as it reaches the hills. Something’s condensing out, maybe oxides of sulfur or fluorides of sulfur or silicon. We ought to get out of it in a few kilos.”

  The prediction, especially the phrase “as usual”, took Erni’s mind off his worries for a moment. This world’s weather was quite literally chaotic; the word “climate” meant nothing.

  “How much’ll you bet?”

  Nic glanced over at his partner, thankful that his own face was invisible. “Well-l-l –” He let his voice trail off.

  “Come on. You’re not going to cut off my best source of income, are you?”

  “You should work for a living, but all right. Fifty says we’re in clear air in – oh, twenty kilos.”

  “You’re on. Check the odometer.” Yucca zeroed one of the wheel counters. Quarterback had been off the tracks since leaving the quake site. “Not that one, friend. It’s centre right, not a driver, off the ground a lot of the time, and you know it.” Still glad that his face couldn’t be seen, the prophet activated a driving-wheel meter.

  Erni rather pointedly made sure it was actually counting, his divided attention almost at once giving Dominic a chance to distract him even further.

  “Watch it. Boulder.” The runabout swerved rather more than was really necessary, grazing an asparagus-like growth three or four metres high and knocking it over before Icewall steadied. Neither looked at the other this time, but the driver did not slow down. Yucca decided that no more needed to be done for a while to stop his friend from worrying. After all, he himself couldn’t help wondering why there had no been word from Jellyseal. Ben’s explanation had been plausible, but still . . .

  They were still in rain, though quite probably a different sort – Nic could have been partly right – an hour later. The odometer had been stopped and, after a coin had passed from Nic’s possession to Erni’s, rezeroed. There had been two or three more reports from Nest; the errant tank was still travelling, more or less in the expected direction, but still no word had come from its occupants.

  “I wonder what they’re bringing back,” Dominic ventured after a long silence. “The natives didn’t get very specific about what they could trade, though they seemed to want the hydrogen badly enough.”

  “According to Tricia,” Erni amended. “Desire’s a pretty abstract concept too, you know.”

  “They repeated the request enough times and enough different ways so even she was pretty sure. And you can see why scientists here want the stuff.” Icewall merely nodded at the obvious.

  Beings on Halfbaked at all versed in the physical sciences would presumably have detected Element One in the spectrum of their sun, looked for it on the planet, probably learning a lot of chemistry in the process, and possibly found the traces accumulated in the crust by eight billion years or so of stellar wind. The urge for enough to do macroscopic research would have matched that of the discoverers of helium and plutonium on Earth, not to mention the seekers for coronium before spectroscopic theory matured. The human explorers on Halfbaked had understood and sympathized. They had designed and grown the paraffin tanker some humorist with a background in historical trivia had named the Jellyseal, loaded it with high molecular weight hydrocarbons from the brown dwarf thirty-odd astronomical units out from 51 Pegasi, and sent it to the apparent source of the native transmissions. Communication was still vague, but there seemed a reasonable hope that something of use to human knowledge would come back. Attendant risks to human health and life were taken for granted and accepted.

  Except, to some extent and for the time being, by the spouses of the Jellyseal’s drivers.

  The two men drove, ate, and slept in turn. They felt their way through rain and fog – or maybe it was dust – held their breaths as they threaded narrow valleys where falling rocks could not possibly have been avoided, enjoyed an occasional glimpse of still unfamiliar constellations, speculated aloud about an occasional unusually large blowing object, felt the Quarterback tremble in gales which came and ceased with no apparent pattern (though Dominic still tried, usually adding to Erni’s cash reserves), asked without result whether there had been word from their wives, listened to the constant exchange of messages with the natives which were slowly expanding a mutually useful scientific vocabulary, and drew steadily closer to Nest.

  The word about the tanker’s motions remained encouraging; it appeared to be under intelligent control. The best evidence appeared when the Quarterback was about an hour out from the base. It took the form of a report from Senatsu Ito Yoshihashi which was not, at first glance, encouraging.

  “The girls are headed for trouble, I’m afraid,” she said thoughtfully to Ben.

  “How?”

  “The path they took out has changed, about a hundred kilometres ahead of where they are now. What was a fairly narrow valley – a couple of kilos wide – seems to have been blocked up by something. It’s filling with some sort of liquid, as well as I can interpret the images. At least, its surface is now remarkably level and higher than before, and if it were freezing I’d expect crystals to do something to the reflection somewhere along the spectrum.”

  “Can’t they travel on it anyway?” Cloud was tying Quarterback into the communication link as he spoke. “The tanker should float on any liquid I can imagine at dayside temperature, and the tracks would drive it after a fashion.”

  “It’s the ‘after a fashion’ part that bothers me,” the observer/mapper replied. “I think, though I’m not at all sure, that the stuff is spilling out the darkside – Hotsouth – end of the valley; and whether it’s a real liquid-fall or just rapids, I’m doubtful anything human-grown can hold together in either.”

  “They’ll see the lake or whatever it is and at least know better than to go boating,” was Erni’s surpr
isingly optimistic response.

  “But what can they do if they want to take another path?” asked Dominic. “Would the maps they started with be any help? Especially the way the topography changes? Wouldn’t they just wind up wandering around in a maze? I’d hate to have tried this trip without your guiding us.”

  “I suggest,” responded Ben slowly, “that Sen recheck their general area as thoroughly and quickly as she can. Then she can work out as good an alternate path as possible, and we’ll send it to the girls. They’re not transmitting, but we don’t know they’re not receiving.”

  “Why didn’t we call them and ask them to stop, or travel in a circle, or something like that a long time ago?” asked Erni. He carefully avoided sounding critical, since he had to include himself in the list of people who hadn’t thought of this.

  “Ask Pete. I’m not a psychologist,” Ben replied. “Sen, what sort of topo information do you have for that area?”

  “Pretty good, both current and from the original route pix. Give me a few minutes to match images and check for changes.”

  Even Erni remained silent until the mapper’s voice resumed. She did stay within the few minutes.

  “All right. Thirty kilos ahead of where they are now, they should turn thirty degrees to the right. Another ten kilos will take them into a valley narrow enough to be scary; they should wait, if they feel any temblors, until things seem to quiet down, and then get through as fast as possible. I can’t resolve the area well enough to guess how fast that would be. Once through they can slow down if they want – there’ll be no risk of rockfalls for a while. Seventy more kilos will take them past the lake, and they can slant to the left as convenient. That will bring them back to the original path sooner or later. They can check whether there’s a river in it now. I’d like to know; I’ve seen plenty of what looked like little lakes, plus the big one at the native transmission site, but nothing that looked like flowing water – it wouldn’t be water, you know what I mean – so far. Got it?”

  Ben had been making a sketch map as Sen spoke. He used a polymer sheet and an electric stylus, rather than pencil and paper, since the Nest was also under seven-plus gees and its personnel had the same need of flotation as the drivers. Most of the personnel referred to their rest-and-recreation periods in the orbiting station farther out from the star as “drying-out” sessions, although much of the time in them was spent in baths. Recycling equipment is never quite perfect.

  “I think so.” Cloud held his product in front of the pickup – his station was more than a hundred metres from Senatsu’s – for her to check.

  “Close as I can put it,” she agreed. “See if you can get it through to the girls.”

  Nic and his companion lacked the visual connection, but listened with critical interest as the word went out. Ben didn’t have to include them in his transmission net, but it never occurred to him not to. Both drivers looked at each other and nodded slowly as the first message ended; the mental picture they got from it matched the one they had formed from Senatsu’s words. They didn’t actually stop listening as Ben set a record of his words repeating again and again to the relay/observation satellites, but most of their attention went back to the Quarterback as they resumed travel. They were now only an hour or so from Nest, but that was no reason to ease up on caution. They could die just as easily and completely at or inside the station’s entry lock as anywhere else on the world.

  Fallen rock areas. Risk-of-falling-rock regions. Puddles to be avoided – the liquid could easily be something that would freeze on wheels or in tracks if the temperature dropped a Kelvin or two. It could even be a subcooled liquid waiting to freeze on contact; such things did occur, and there was no way to tell just by looking. Stands of organisms which could be smashed through, but which would also produce liquid. Some of these were quite tall; Erni had never visited Earth and was not reminded of Saguaro Reserve, but most worlds with life have xerophytes. Usually the biggest growths were widely enough spaced to avoid easily, but some of the others grew in nearly solid mats.

  The men had often driven over the present area, and both noticed that some fairly tall specimens seemed now to cluster along the outward path they had crushed a day or so earlier. Possibly these used the remains of other organisms as nourishment. If so, they grew fast.

  Nothing corresponding to animal life ever showed itself, and many seriously doubted its presence; but some of the “plants” showed stumps where trunks, branches, or twigs had obviously been severed, though the detached fragments could seldom be seen. Tendrils would still be lashing, as though their owners had been disturbed by something moments before the Quarterback passed.

  Some of the Nest personnel were beginning to suspect that the number of plantlike growths and patches within ten or fifteen kilometres of the station was increasing as the days passed, but no one had yet made a careful study of the possibility. It might be interesting, but was not yet obviously important.

  Quartermaster was in a relatively open space when Ben’s voice caused Erni to cut drive reflexively.

  “They’re turning, she thinks.” The lack of nouns bothered neither driver; they didn’t even bother to ask, “Which way?” They simply floated at their stations and listened. The oxygen monitor in Quarterback recorded a sharp drop in breathing rate, but not for long enough to cause it to report an emergency. Cloud would probably not have been bothered by such an alarm anyway; unlike the monitor, he was human.

  Senatsu improvised quickly. The atmosphere was fairly clear around her target at the moment, and she was able to set up an interferometric tie between the tanker’s reflector and a nearby bright spot – a stationary one, she hoped. This let her measure the relative motions of the two within a few centimetres per second. It took less than half a minute to show that Jellyseal’s direction of motion was changing, and another minute and a half established that the machine had straightened out on a new course thirty degrees to the right of the earlier one.

  Coincidences do happen, but human minds tend to doubt even the real ones. For the first time in many hours, Quarterback’s drivers really relaxed. The remaining distance back to Nest was covered calmly and happily, though neither man remembered later much of the conversation which passed. With anyone.

  The reception lock had been readied for them, its water pumped into a standby tank, and the doors opened as they approached. Dominic eased the runabout inside and powered down as the door sealed. The two waited while water flowed back, pushing the local air which had entered with them out through the roof vents, and was tested. As usual, more time was needed to neutralize the sulfuric and sulfurous acids and to precipitate and filter out the fluorides formed when the air had met the liquid, but at last they could open their own outer seal, check their personal breathing kits, and swim to one of the personnel locks occupying two walls of the “garage”. Erni pointedly allowed Dominic to precede him into the main part of the structure, though the latter was not entirely happy at receiving attention due to age. Fifteen years out of fifty wasn’t that much of a difference, and he was the taller and stronger of the two.

  Of course, it was a relief to know the youngster had stopped worrying enough to be polite.

  Jellyseal had been about a month – more parochially, seven years – on its way to the native city, or settlement, or camp, or whatever it might be. By the end of the first day after the return of the no-longer-anxious husbands, it seemed likely that about as long would be needed for its return. Perhaps, Senatsu remarked hesitantly, a little bit less. “They’re making slightly better time right now than they did going out, but they’re still on the sun side, and will be for days yet. They can see better, after all. When they get to the real terminator we can find out how much they have to slow down. They’ll be easier for me to see in the dark, too.”

  This remark was no surprise to her listeners. The tanker of course carried corner reflectors for the microwave beams from the satellites, and with less reflected sunlight, and thermal and biological
emission from the planet’s surface the contrast between vehicle and surroundings would be a lot better. All this except the greater plant emission on the day side had been discovered, and much of it predicted, long before. Nic and Erni, together as usual and just returned from a test drive, simply nodded at Senatsu’s report, and went on about their routine work.

  Much of this involved the preparation of the second tanker, already being called Candlegrease. Most of the staff were from colony worlds where conditions were still fairly primitive, and in any case human educators had had the importance of detailed history knowledge forced on them after the species began to scatter. Candles had no more disappeared from humanity’s cultural memory than had cooking – including making jelly.

  It had occurred to several people that towing a paraffin tank as a trailer might involve less trouble in a number of ways, and possibly even be safer for the crew, than driving one as a tank truck. It was taken for granted that another load of hydrocarbons would go to the natives, even though no one yet knew what value the material now coming back might turn out to have. There was a natural sympathy for the needs of researchers, and at the very least whatever it was couldn’t help but supply information about the natives themselves. Jellyseal’s slow approach was being watched with interest by everyone, not just the waiting husbands.

  Nearly all the laboured communication with the native city dealt with science; most of the linguistic progress that had been made so far had come from computer correlation between human vehicle motions, which the natives seemed able to observe even at great distances, and radiation emitted and received from the observing satellites. Discussions tended to consist of comments about orbital perturbations and precessions and their connection with the planet’s internal structure. Computers at Nest were gradually building a detailed map of Halfbaked’s inner density distribution and, more slowly, a chart of its mantle currents. Not surprisingly for a planet a hundred and seventy-seven times Earth’s mass, almost five times its radius, and over seven times its surface gravity, plate tectonics was occurring at what the planetary physicists considered meteorological speed; and the plates themselves were state- or city- rather than continent-size. This made travel interesting and mapmaking an ongoing process. Since the establishment of Nest, one couple who had arrived as meteorologists had shifted over to crustal dynamics and been welcomed. They had been rather glad to make the change, though a little embarrassed at flinching from a challenge. Halfbaked’s atmosphere had a dozen major components, mainly but not only fluorides and oxides of sulfur and silicon, varying in completely chaotic fashion in relative amounts with time and location and ready to change phase with small variations in temperature, pressure, input from the sun, and each other’s concentration.