“I feel a little sick,” she'd said.
I'd said, “It'll pass,” and held my tongue about the rest of it. She had eyes. She could see what I'd become.
When I was young, I used to imagine myself in a ship like this, even though there was no hope they would ever come to be, back then, imagine myself with a willing female crewmate, all alone among the flying mountains, with nothing to do for months on end but make love.
I guess if I looked up “irony” in the dictionary, this might be an example they'd show.
* * * *
A few hours later, the rule sieve chimed for our attention, Ylva calling us to acceleration stations. The pulsed nuclear engine throbbed behind us for a minute or so, faint white light flickering outside the live-action window, bringing us alongside Fore-Trojan Asteroid 624 Hector. You wouldn't exactly call it an orbit, though Hector had enough gravity for it, more like station keeping, Anabasis fifty kilometers out.
Hector's one of the largest bodies caught out here in Jupiter's L4 region, a substantial black football in the freeze frames, 300 by 150 kilometers, ill lit by the faraway sun. Time to fly, Jenny said, and it only took a few minutes to suit up, the two of us changed from Sleestak to skinnyish versions of Gort, another forgotten star.
I always liked flying landers, the only real piloting I get to do. Ylva flies Anabasis, and all I do is hold the controls in case there's an “incident.” Whatever that might be.
The landers themselves are new-minted antiques, each one a carbon-composite sphere, seats, controls, and life support on the inside, little rocket engines, fuel tanks, equipment pods and jointed remote manipulator systems on the outside, like something out of history.
I had a moment of clear memory, flying Fafnir, my original SpaceX Dragon on that first thrilling expedition to a nameless near-earth asteroid, me, Willie, Sarah, Minnie...
I looked out through the imaginary faceplate of my helmet, scanning the lander's freeze frames, looked at engineering data hanging in airy columns to left and right, then down at little cameos of sexpot Ylva and Sleestak Jenny below my chin.
“Good to go,” I said.
Ylva waved, and said, “Hurry home!”
Jenny's lizardface was still, nothing for her to do as a passenger but wait to be delivered to the jobsite.
I unberthed from Anabasis using one of the RMS arms, released the minidextre's gripping hand, stuttered the thrusters and savored the sight of my spaceship growing smaller as we backed away.
One of the things I always loved about these fission drive vessels is how much they look like spaceships, from the pointed nose of the command module, past the big triangular radiator vanes surrounding the fuel tanks and reactor vessel, to the stumpy muzzle of the engine unit aft.
Spaceship. My ship, however much it belongs to Standard ARM, my company no more.
Mr. Zed's a new man, fit for a brave new world, that other man, with that other name, dead and gone.
I twisted the rotational hand controller and turned away from Anabasis, toward Hector and a sky full of stars.
* * * *
It took about twenty minutes to cross the gap, asteroid growing from an irregular lump of dusty bituminous coal to a strange looking world, like a craterous bit fractured off the moon, to a vasty something, walling off half the universe as we slid toward the limb and beyond. It seemed brighter the closer we got, though I knew it was just an illusion of accumulated light. As usual, the seeming was more real than the being.
Odd. Distinct sides. One part almost craggy, really like those flying mountains imagined by pre-space writers, another part flatter, with rolling hills like the ones you see on some parts of the Moon.
I said, “Am I imagining things, or is the smooth side a little darker than the rest?”
Jenny, focused on her instruments, said, “Albedo's not quite subjective, but ... yeah. It is. Supposedly, Hector and 1404 Ajax used to be the same body. That'd mean the smooth side's been exposed to the solar wind a lot longer than the rough. I guess we'll find out, since we're supposed to go there next.”
I knew from the mission briefing Ajax was a lot smaller than Hector, maybe ninety kilometers across. That's still enormous as asteroids go. I'd had high hopes for these things, back when Willie and me founded Standard ARM, and we'd been planning on coming out here as soon as we took delivery on that very first Model A.
I'd been in prison for about a month when the delivery came, stunned at what was happening, angry I hadn't been allowed to go to Willie's funeral, and the new owners of Standard decided Mars was where they wanted to go first.
Jenny ticked a couple of bright markers on the image of Hector's ragged side, and said, “Let's set down here and here, first, then we'll try a couple of sites on the smooth face.”
“You see anything?” Meaning potential abiogenic tar sites, what we'd been sent to find.
She said, “Nah. But we have to start somewhere.”
I nodded, knowing my cameo would be nodding inside her helmet, took the controls and started a phasing burn, headed for Site One. Felt my heart speed up, too. Most asteroids, it's more like docking at a space station. This would be a little bit like landing on the Moon, flat ground approaching, dust rising around you...
Made me wonder for the millionth time how Neil Armstrong had felt, doing it for the first time. He never really said.
* * * *
By the time we got to our third touchdown site, it was beginning to look like Hector was a bust. There was plenty of CHON, but none of it tidally processed into “space tar,” what we'd found on a few anomalous NEOs and one minor Piazzi Belt asteroid. There'd been signs something had happened at our two roughside sample sites, but whatever it was, it wasn't the abiogenic fossil-fuel equivalent that formed the basis of Standard ARM's entire business plan.
My damned business plan!
Geez, wouldn't that've been funny! I would've gone broke out here in the early 2020s, and what's happened since then, the opening surge of my long-imagined space-faring civilization, would never have happened. What would we have seen, Project Constellation in all its glory? Four guys living for a few years in a tin shack at the south pole of the Moon? Boots and flags on Mars by 2038? Maybe. If we were damned lucky.
Jenny'd said, “Whatever happened here ended when Ajax went its own way, some millions of years ago.”
“Think we'll find the oil there?”
“Doubt it.”
Now, on the smooth side, I watched her bob away toward the first sample site she'd picked, a lampblack smear halfway up the side of the nearest hill, less than a hundred meters away, spacesuit festooned with the Medusa-locks of her gear, so much more compact than what we'd had to work with in 2016. Only thirty years ago? Christ, when I was thirty, I thought I was getting so old...
There was just enough gravity here you could pretend to stand, just like on a real world. So long as you didn't move, you'd settle onto your feet, and it looked like a real world, too. Maybe even Earth, nighttime in the Kalahari or something. Nah. Too much life there. Rub al-Khali, maybe? Overhead, the stars glimmered, most of them just on the edge of vision, that vague shimmer not from atmospheric distortion but from my eyes trying to resolve things just a tiny fraction of a magnitude too dim.
Ylva's cameo whispered, “I can turn up the light amplification on your CCD sensors.”
I shook my head. “Let's leave it. If I could, I'd take off my helmet and see it for real.”
From the edge of the black smear, Jenny and her cameo snickered, “Hey, that'd be fun!”
The horizon seemed farther away than it should've as well, probably because this side of Hector was kind of flat. Here were sloping hills and valleys, over there a long, sinuous rille-like formation, kind of what you see on some of the larger asteroids. Vesta. A little bit on Ceres. By the time Dawn reached those two, Willie and me were putting together our flight hardware, getting ready to go.
Christ, I'm so used to it now I hardly remember that first thrill at all! Reme
mber how scared I was, when the Falcon 9's engines lit and the hold down arms let go? Easy to forget it was all being done by a man who got cramps in his bowels when he had to drive his pickup truck over a highway bridge ... hmmm.
I wonder what the heck that is?
Dark splotch halfway up a tall hill maybe four hundred meters away, just opposite where Jenny was settled in to her work. I tongued one of the control nodes below my chin, loading a telescopic frame in the middle of my imaginary faceplate, and whispered, “Six-ex.”
The splotch got bigger, and seemed to develop a sort of 3D effect.
“Ylva?”
Her cameo murmured, “It's a hole.”
“Fifty-ex.” The splotch filled the frame and became impenetrable. “Twenty-ex?” Still nothing, though that brought the hole's rounded edges in sight.
Ylva said, “I'll turn up the amp on the frame.”
“Okay.”
The black turned a sort of swarmy, grainy gray, with a suggestion of vague shapes inside.
“We need to get closer.”
“Right.” I said, “Jen? I'm going over to have a look at that little crater over there, up on the next hill.”
Absorbed in work, her abstracted voice said, “Have fun. Don't get lost. I'll be another ... fifteen minutes or so.”
On my first attempt at a lunar bunnyhop, I went on too high a trajectory, and as I came back down, Ylva said, “Lean forward. You'll need to swim like an iguana here.”
As I began crawling along the surface, heading uphill, a little voice in the back of my head, some voice from the remote past perhaps, called out, Hey! This is fun!
* * * *
Once we got well up onto the hill, I was able to start bunnyhopping again, gravity helping with stability, though we were still tilted well forward and I had to look out through the top of my helmet to see the mysterious hole. We? Ylva's not here in the spacesuit with me, she's fifty klicks away in ... Oh, hell. If it was good enough for Lindbergh...
Being outside in a spacesuit is what makes it seem real. Oh, sure, you can have zero-gee in a space station, but how's that different from going on a really long parabolic airplane ride? Same thing with a tin can on the Moon, on Mars, on Callisto? All right, so you're a little light on your feet, but otherwise, it's no better than being in a submarine.
This, now ... Even though I'd done it a thousand times, I still felt the thrill, that little boy from the 1950s screaming, Oh, my God! I'm on another planet! Drifting on the dusty gray Moon, Earth so blue and little in a dead black sky. On the rough and rusty plains of Mars, pink sky all around the horizon, turning darker and darker as you looked straight up. Callisto, dark dirt looking not at all like ice, up in the stygian sky, fat orange Jupiter with his all-seeing pink eye.
I'd even done a few EVAs in low-earth orbit, back in the early days, when we had to do some orbital assembly work on our expeditionary craft, and it scared the crap out of me every darn time. Looking out the window of an airliner, you don't see you're suspended over an abyss, and out the porthole of a spaceship, it seems unreal in just the same way. I wasn't prepared for what it felt like to open that airlock door for the first time, start to float on out and...
No. Wait. If I go out there, I'll fall!
All the long, long way down, a hundred miles and more, to go splash in the deep blue sea...
I remember Willie snickering, “You damn fool! How the hell could we fall? We're in orbit!”
He didn't believe the Feds would come for our company, right in broad daylight, either, much less put his lights out forever. Jesus, how he'd love to be here with me now!
The hole, when I got to it, was littler than I expected, no more than two meters across, barely big enough for Gort-suited me to pass through upright. Not a crater, either. More like a tunnel. Pitch damn dark inside.
Ylva's cameo said, “Best turn on the helmet lights.”
“Right.” I tongued the proper activespot and told the suit how many lumens I wanted.
“Hey! It is a tunnel!”
Ylva said, “Not a lava tube, that's for sure.”
I stepped inside and shined my lights upward at the roof. Fractured rock and long grooves. Snorted through my nose, and said, “Almost like toolmarks.”
Down one wall, more of the same. “You know, we're going to have to get Jenny up here. I never learned enough geology from either my dad or Minnie Gilooly to guess what would make a formation like this.”
Jenny's cameo, voice maybe a little exasperated, said, “It'll be at least another half hour. I need to put the samples away before I do anything else.”
“No hurry.”
“Easy for you to say, lazy bum.”
I laughed. “Space pilots are a special breed.”
When I looked down, the floor was flat, as if someone expected to be walking on it. Walking in pretty high gee, in fact, and...
Ylva said, “Let me get some magnification set up for you. Those scuffmarks are a little indistinct.”
“Sure.”
There was a trail of them, starting a meter or so in from the entrance, about where the infalling ecliptic dust would start to peter out. Kind of stripy scuffmarks, I guess, in two rows, heading back into the darkness. I lifted my head, following them on back a ways ... and felt the air turn to jelly in my throat.
Felt a hard pang in my heart, almost painful, like it stopped for a moment, spasmed, and then resumed beating at a much faster rate.
I grunted, “Um?”
Clever. Oh, so clever.
“Ylva?”
Her cameo, voice absurdly calm, said, “I see it, Mr. Zed. Recording now.”
It was shiny, somewhat translucent to my lights, crumpled on the floor in a suggestive sprawl, and there was a dark shape inside, even more suggestive, the vague shape of a ... well.
Breathing through my mouth, trying to make my heart slow down a bit, I wondered just who could have gotten here first? Standard ARM or OPEL? I'd know about that. The Chinese? Fishing. Fishing for a reasonable explanation. Old man, you know what this is.
Ylva said, “That's not a known spacesuit design.”
“No. Who makes spacesuits out of cellophane?” Who makes anything out of cellophane these days, other than Easter basket shrouds?
I took two, three, four steps toward it, the shape inside becoming more distinct as tighter light fell on it and through that clear integument. “Oh... !”
I had to stop, felt myself getting the shakes, bad shakes, the first sign of a panic attack, the sort of thing I hadn't had since prison.
Ylva said, “I can give you a sedative, if necessary.”
Opened my mouth wide to let as much air in as possible, controlling my flow rate. Don't hyperventilate, jackass. Don't faint. “Ah ... no. Just adjust my CO2 upward a little bit.”
“Done.”
“I'm not imagining this, right?”
“No, Mr. Zed.”
Saying my name to keep me focused. Good idea.
I said, “Jenny?”
Her cameo brightened below my chin, Sleestak eyes frightened, voice tight: “On my way.”
The thing in the cellophane spacesuit was long and thin. It had brown fur, six legs, a fox's face, and skinny arms where its ears should have been.
Its eyes were open, mammalian enough I could read a frozen expression of sharp dismay.
* * * *
It was somehow comforting when Jenny's wan shadow loomed in the tunnel entrance, when she shuffled in to stand beside me, looking down on a dead alien, sprawled in the otherworldly dust. Alien. I felt myself savoring an obsolete word come suddenly back to life. More and more over the past fifty years, alien had come to mean little more than foreigner, with a flavor of “illegal alien” to give it spice. When I was a kid, though...
Outer Limits. Twilight Zone. Flying Saucers. Invaders from Mars.
Hell, even that TV show, where the blotchy-headed Slags off the crashed slaveship stood in for Mexican migrant workers...
Jenny whisp
ered an irreligious “Jesus Christ.” Then she looked up from the corpse, shining her light toward the back of the tunnel. It opened up a bit wider, further in, and there were boxes and crates, pieces of inscrutable hardware, rolls of stuff like cable, neatly folded piles of varicolored cellophane, stacked all around the walls.
A couple of meters from me was a thing like a turn of the century computer carrel, with something that looked a lot like an old laptop computer on it, insulated wires running to a little antenna not unlike a satellite dish. I swallowed, and said, “That would be the ‘phone home’ bit, I guess.”
Jenny said, “Huh?”
Ylva said, “They made an all-new version of that in 2024, Mr. Zed. It was the first big hit to come out of your Dramaturge software package.”
“Oh.” By then, of course, I'd been put away.
Jenny shuffled forward into the rear chamber, looking, touching, shining her helmet lights this way and that. She said, “This stuff sort of looks like it'd unfold into an inflatable airlock.”
“Big enough to fill the entrance?”
Her cameo shrugged.
“I suppose the stuff in those things that look like Dewars could be some kind of glue...” Or alien air, alien water, alien booze, alien whatever.
Useless speculation, of course. It's the sort of thing I'd always liked to do, theorize on sparse evidence. It's where ideas come from, and it's how I'd realized there might be something like petroleum inside asteroids made of CHON.
She was looking at the supposed carrel now, reaching out to touch the dish antenna, and said, “I guess if you could make an interstellar crossing, whatever technology made that possible would support something like interstellar radio.”
Who's theorizing now?
Ylva said, “Are you assuming they have FTL?”
“How else...”
I said, “Think about it. If the antirad drugs make it possible for us to live some equivalent of forever, don't we have the time to do damn-all ... whatever?”
“You'd sit in a tin can for a thousand years or more?”
Asimov's SF, September 2008 Page 3
