“I think I'd eventually get used to sitting in tin cans. Hell, it'd take me a hundred years just to watch reruns of all the TV shows I ever saw and reread every book I ever read.”
Ylva said, “In a thousand years, you could master the sum total of human knowledge. Of course, by then there'd be more, but you'd eventually get caught up.”
That's an interesting thing for a computer to assert. Even one incorporating “human CNS tissue.”
I said, “Something else to think about: Where there's a shipwrecked sailor, there's bound to be a wrecked ship. Right?”
Silence, from both of them, then Jenny said, “I wonder what happened to him? Obviously, he wasn't expecting it.”
That expression of intense dismay, wide eyes crying out, “Oh, no!”
Ylva said, “It does seem he was preparing to await rescue.” Robinson Crusoe, all right, rafting salvaged supplies and equipment ashore from the shipwreck. A memory surfaced of an ancient Mad Magazine spoof of the tale, focusing on a single phrase. “To bolster me, I took a cup of rum.” Maybe the Dewars, after all?
Ylva said, “We should take some samples. We can probably figure out how long he's been lying here.”
He? Interesting. I looked at what on a terrestrial quadruped would have been the right spot and was startled to see the alien had marriage tackle not so different from what mine had been, before the drugs took effect. More like a dog's, but still. I had a brief flicker of wondering whether Jenny and Ylva had noticed that right away.
Abruptly, Jenny said, “What'll we do?”
Ylva said, “Regulations say I have to make an immediate report to HQ on Mars and let them take over the investigation. At this point, we're just on guard duty until a laboratory ship arrives. It'll take about a month to get here from Callisto, I think.”
I looked down at her cameo. “You mean they thought of this?”
The little picture smiled, dimples popping out here and there. “No, but it clearly comes under the domain of the ‘important finds’ rule sieve.”
“So you'll make an automatic laser transmission to Mars and...”
Ylva's voice was hushed. “No, Mr. Zed. I'm not really a computer. I'm only trained, not programmed, and those famous Three Laws are just a silly old literary fantasy.”
I felt the willies creep up my spine then, and Jenny whispered something that sounded like “Dear God...” I'd known Ylva had something like free will, but not really believed it until now.
“So...?”
Ylva's calm voice said, “I hate the selfish bastards who did this to me, Mr. Zed. I hate Standard ARM as much as you do, maybe more. Come home now so we can talk in private.”
* * * *
To our surprise, back in the compact lab aboard Anabasis, C14 and gamma ray activation analysis suggested our foxy little alien had only been lying in the dust of Hector for 3.2 million years, give or take a a hundred thousand or so. Back on Earth, back when he got that startled look, then fell down and died, midgety bipeds no smarter than chimps were wandering around northeast Africa, using broken rocks for tools.
I wonder if he foresaw their future.
Would this be a long-inhabited colony world, if those bipeds hadn't been there? Or is that simply absurd human pride talking? Who's to say if Lucy's ilk had more potential than the chimp down the forest trail?
The alien was similar to us in most other ways, too. Cells full of desiccated DNA, six base pairs instead of four, four of them just the same as our codon set, two more besides. A lot of implications in that. Lots of hints about the fragmented proteins we found, too.
Panspermia's as good a theory as any at the biochemical level, maybe better than most, considering this was the first answer we'd gotten once those drilling robots inside Europa turned up a sterile sea of pressurized hot salt water, once it was concluded the fossil-like eoliths on Mars preserved no meaningful information.
All that left were some tantalizing spectral hints from an “earthlike” moon circling a subjovian planet around Delta Pavonis.
Until now.
What to do? What to do?
Oh, worry, worry, worry...
The answer, as obvious as the nose no longer on Ylva's pretty face, was to keep our mouths shut, for a while at least, and look for the wrecked ship we supposed might be here. Or somewhere.
Arguments to be had.
Not necessarily here, you see. Could have been in orbit while he ferried down his supplies and dug his makeshift shelter. By now, it could be anywhere, and, given the presence of Jupiter a third of the way back along the ecliptic plane, it was most likely ejected back into the depths from whence it came, or swallowed up by the sun.
Could even be on Earth, preserved as tektites from an extremely unusual meteor strike. Ylva surprised me by bringing up those goofy old theories about Tunguska. That sum of human knowledge she'd mentioned?
No place to start but right here, and as we moved Anabasis into position, as Ylva tuned up our powerful long-range radar, configuring the antennas for short-range echoes, Jenny said, “They'll notice this, won't they?”
They. Our Lords and Masters on Mars.
Ylva said, “I'm sure they'll detect side-scatter from the radar, but that's not completely out of the ordinary. There's maybe a 20 or 30 percent chance they'll give us a call, want to know what we're doing, since it'll be a little unusual, but they may just assume we think we've found a buried tarball and will wait for us to report a find.”
You have to wonder which part of her is figuring out what. Is that “20 or 30 percent” coming out of the silicon chipset, or out of the “human CNS tissue"? Cold equations, or an understanding of human nature?
Her cameo, now shared between us, neither mine nor Jenny's, was pretty as a china doll.
I superimposed the radar screen over the live-action main window, adjusting for a result that would make the radar info seem like images in clear-as-glass regolith.
We flew into position, sweeping down the long axis of Hector, and the freeze frames filled with data. Nothing much, just a shallow layer of transparent dirt over steely gray rock. Cracks and craters here and there, the occasional crevasse, a few rille-like twists on the flat side. Right there, the shallow pinprick of the alien's cave.
“Well, now...” a whisper from Jenny as a bright reflection came over the limb and moved our way. “Who'd a thunk it?”
When I was a kid, I found that phrase evocative, so much so I made up a complex fantasy about a hillbilly girl named Hooda Thunket, Jed Clampett's bucktooth niece, whose gazintas had been more facile than Jethro's by far.
I focused the live-action window on the reflection, adjusted the contrast and grayscale, then spun up the magnification. Ylva, for her part, slowed the ship and warped its trajectory toward our find.
“Okay,” I said. “It's a ship, buried in the dirt of an asteroid. Not much likelihood of it not being the one we're looking for.”
Ylva said, “It's not much more than half the size of Anabasis.”
“Our alien buddy's not much more than half the size of a human being.”
Jenny said, “I guess this shoots down the idea he came here in his own starship.” Deep regret there.
“You think there was a mother ship, and this is just a scout?”
She looked at me, eyes wide, then gestured at the radar image. “Well...” Quod erat demonstrandum, I suppose.
“Scale means nothing. There are no spacecraft smaller than an AndrewsSpace Model A, but no larger ships any more capable. A Model T can carry a hundred passengers instead of just eight, but it can't go anywhere we can't go.”
“Maybe so.”
I glanced at Ylva's cameo. “Did he bury it deliberately?”
“No way to tell. Three million years is long enough for the regolith to re-sinter.”
Jenny said, “So what do we do now?”
I shrugged. “We've got basic mining equipment on board. Let's go down and dig it up!”
“I meant about HQ.”
Our Lords and Masters on Mars.
Ylva's cameo turned to my Ylva for just a moment, eyes smoldering with hate, and her sultry voice bit off, “Fuck ‘em.”
Dear me.
Jenny said, “Look, we can't hide this forever, sooner or later...”
“Sooner or later, something,” I said. “Look, we lost our jobs with Standard ARM the moment we found the alien and didn't sit tight and scream for mommy.”
Jenny's face had a brief, stricken look. That dead husband. Those living children and grandchildren on Earth. The only thing I had to lose was my pathetic Sleestak life, Ylva far less than that.
Oh, so gently, then, “Won't make matters worse if we go dig it up, Jenny. Let's see what we've got before we decide another thing. Ylva?”
She said, “You two need to get a little rest before we break out the mining gear. We don't want any accidents.”
I rubbed my chin, lizardscales making a less-than-satisfactory substitute for five o'clock shadow. “Um. Maybe some pick-me-up drugs?”
“There's plenty of time, Mr. Zed. Even if a ship left Callisto yesterday, it'll be weeks before it shows up. Hit the sack. I'll get everything ready I can physically manage. That'll take some time.”
I unbuckled from my acceleration station and stretched, floating on high, looking down at see-through Hector, at the ghost of our dead alien's long-dead ship. Good enough.
* * * *
Most people leave the lights on when they sleep, maybe to help with the zero-gee disorientation, maybe to help with the little flashes and sparkles of high-energy particles zipping through your retinas, through the optic lobes of your brain.
I like the dark, and the little blinkies aren't any more annoying than the floaters I had before the antirad drugs cleaned them up. I guess I was in my forties before they started to get bad. By the time I was pushing sixty, I couldn't look up at a bright blue sky without seeing enormous chains of swimming-pool algae arching across the heavens.
Nice thing about space: the sky is black and the floaters are invisible. I noticed that right off on my first flight in 2014. Well, not right off. I was too busy being scared at first, the man who couldn't ride a roller coaster with his eyes open sitting on top of what amounted to a low-ball ICBM, mission control setting several hundred thousand pounds of kerosene on fire right behind his back, but later...
Amazing days.
Lost to me.
All lost.
The rollerblind door to my stateroom whispered open, whispered closed, latched with a click, and a slim dark human shape loomed up, revealing faint light where you'd suppose there was none. It's never really completely dark wherever human machinery lives.
Jenny said, “I can't sleep either.”
Maybe Ylva told her I was awake. Maybe she just guessed. She unzipped my sleeping bag part way, slid in with me, all sandpapery limbs and naked Sleestak body, zipped it shut around us and wriggled around, wrapping me in her arms, pressing her head against the front of my shoulder.
Sleestak, yes. But inside the lizardskin there were still girlbones, calling old, old feelings, old memories back from the dust to which they'd gone. I remembered how much I'd liked the fineness of women's collarbones and ribs, the shape of their pelvic blades, that round knob of bone under their pubic hair...
I never got to see Sarah alive after they put me in prison. When I finally saw her again, she was ashes and a few bits of burned bone in a plain, sealed plastic box. The same god-damned plastic box you get from a vet after they've cremated your dog.
Jenny said, “I miss my husband, you know?”
I murmured something. Nothing much.
She said, “I was looking forward to going home, getting off the drugs, getting back to real life.” As she said it, she rubbed her hand on my sandpaper chest, rough fingers trailing down across my flat and fatless stomach, down to my abdomen, down to my own hard pubic bone, and stopped there, just before her memories could wonder about the missing bits.
Then she said, “What're we going to do?”
You can go home, Jenny dear. Go home, get off the drugs, see in the mirror you're still young enough and pretty enough for a replacement life not so different from the one you lost. I'm sure Ylva's told you about her own lost husband, of his new life with a new woman and new children.
Not what she meant, of course. I said, “Depends on what we find, I guess.”
“Can't we lie? What if we call and tell them we found the ship first, while we were radaring for the tarball? I mean, so long as we don't dig it up, won't they believe us?”
“Jenny, Ylva's never going to let that happen.”
The next whisper was fierce, full of wishes, full of defiance. “Ylva's just a computer. A kind of AI. She can't make that decision!”
I hugged her close, hugged her tight, and said, “I wouldn't count on that being so.”
On cue, Ylva's cameo, my sultry, angry Ylva rather than Jenny's dear, sweet girlfriend, slid up out of the darkness, and said, “If you two aren't going to sleep, then we might as well get busy.”
Yes, ma'am.
I thought about the amazing, wonderful days I'd lost, those days when Willie and me and Sarah and Minnie had borrowed six hundred million dollars, had gone out into the dark between the worlds to find a bright new universe.
Lost and gone forever.
Until this day came.
Amazing days to come.
Brilliant new days.
Found again, at last.
* * * *
Once we got going, it didn't take long at all to dig the damned thing up. Jenny and I got in the lander and undocked, while Ylva opened Anabasis's unpressurized cargo bay doors, just aft of the resource module. The mining and sampling equipment was in an extensible rack, with attachments for the lander RMS end effectors, so we could lift it straight out and get on our way back down to Hector and a bright tick mark Ylva put in our vision fields.
This is the kind of thing that's played out to a bright, imaginative boy a hundred times during his formative years. You find the abandoned ship floating between the stars. Send over the bright, imaginative boy with the quick reflexes, and, lo! It turns out there's someone, something still alive on the derelict.
And thereby, as they say, hangs the tale.
Real space exploration is like working at a hard, dirty, dangerous job. When I was a young man, before cheap computers came along to give me a new life, clean and dry indoors, I'd worked as a sewer worker, as a diesel engine mechanic, as a shipyard machinist, even worked in a foundry that made parts for nuclear reactors. Space exploration is much like that.
Hard and dirty, with plenty of opportunity to get your silly face torn off if you don't watch what you're doing.
It took about half an hour to put a tunnel down through the regolith, whose texture was much like the glassy clinkers I used to find in my grandmother's old coal furnace, another two to break up the overlay and clear it from the starship, black chunks ejected from our grown pit, sailing on low, slow trajectories, landing on a messy pile about a hundred meters away.
After I retracted the digging gear and folded the RMS arms onto the lander hull, Jenny and I stood on the rim, looking down at our dirty little wreck.
She said, “Not much to it.”
“No.” Did I say starship? I guess it was maybe half again the size of an old Soyuz, or like one of the Shenzhou capsules the Chinese had continued to fly until about ten years ago. And that, only because this thing's service module had been somewhat longer.
“I can't imagine,” she said, “anyone crossing interstellar space in this.”
Scoutship? The front end was two cylinders joined by a berthing mechanism, the one in front ending on an obvious docking collar, with dozens of little fingers and latches visible. The service module was smooth and almost featureless, with a few lines here and there I supposed might be access ports.
The rear end of the thing was obviously damaged beyond recognition, a molten-looking lump, ending in a tea
rdrop, as if something had pulled away during the melt. A meter or so forward of the slag were two blisters, made of some translucent stuff.
Ylva's cameo said, “If they had a fast FTL drive, it might be no more than days between solar systems.”
Jenny seemed almost angry then. “Is there something in your core memory says FTL is anything other than flat-out impossible?”
Subdued: “When I was alive, I liked science fiction.”
When you were alive, dear Ylva, you liked interactive TV shows about time travel and star spanning empires and handsome men who fought with swords from the backs of dragons.
I said, “Whatever it was, it's obvious something bad happened to it.”
It was easy to get inside. The forward module side hatch opened at a touch, and what we found was painfully familiar. A horseshoe control panel with many flat, blank panels, a few rows of buttons and glassy bits I took for idiot lights. A couch-like contraption was probably ideal for a four-legged being to lie prone.
I didn't see anything like writing anywhere, but if I had, it would have to say something like, “No user serviceable components inside.”
Not a ship intended to be repaired by its pilot.
Supposed to be reliable.
Consumer goods always use that excuse.
Did you die, little foxface, because your mass-produced singleship was a lemon?
The aft compartment was living quarters. Something like a sleeping bag stuck to one wall, telling me whatever else they had, these people hadn't had artificial gravity. Something very much like our kitchen module. Something like a zero-gee toilet, though with its components separated into two parts, one small, one large, reminding me of what the dead thing's supposed plumbing tackle had been like.
If that's what it was. Could've been his nose, for all we know...
Jenny said, “When I was a kid, I had an uncle who was an interstate long-haul truck driver. He lived much like this.”
The service module was easy to open as well, everything sprung for the convenience of imagined alien technicians, back in some imaginary alien shipyard. Inside? Gizmos. Silvery spheres of one sort or another. Coils and cables and solid bars of metal, all held together by clips and clasps and things that looked an awful lot like the cheap plastic tiewraps they use on the wiring harnesses of cars nowadays.
Asimov's SF, September 2008 Page 4
