The Year's Best SF 12 # 1994

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  And, of course, vice versa.

  * * *

  Less than halfway to the gas giant Jawbreaker (named for its bands of umber, licorice, and cherry, as well as for the fact that it has more than twice the mass of Jupiter), an astronomy group met with Odenwald in the observatory. This group (as Thich Ngoc Bao told me later that same evening) consisted of Nita Sistrunk, Indira Seschachari, Pete Ohanessian, and Bao himself.

  Actually, after putting Dean to bed in our cubicle on the mezzanine level, I hitched a lift to the observatory for some private time to unwind and found Bao slumped in a swivel chair in a consultation bay not far from the ABVT. The door to this bay stood open, and, upon sighting Bao, who had made himself uncharacteristically scarce for the past seventy-two hours, I slipped in and greeted him.

  “Hey.”

  Bao jumped as if I’d popped an eye-eye in front of him. Recognizing me, he composed himself and gave me a wan grin. His skin looked sallow, drum-tight.

  “Doctor,” I said, “what’s up?”

  “The jig,” said Bao. “Old American expression. The game is over. Our hopes are dashed. Or, at least, a hefty plenty of them.”

  I sat down in a swiveler across from Bao, in front of an HD screen as big as a door. “We’re surfing different wavelengths, friend o’ mine.”

  “Tonight,” Bao said, “our group presented to Odenwald the radio, spectrographic, and visual evidence that New Home may not be habitable to human beings.”

  My gut corkscrewed around itself. “Come again.”

  “We did so—Indira, Nita, Pete, and I—as if discussing mutation rates in fruit flies. Very professionally. As if our findings had only hypothetical significance to our arkmates and the people on Zwicky. In truth, we all felt blown away, Abel—nuked, one could say.”

  I leaned forward. “Bao, are you violating confidentiality telling me this?”

  “I hardly think so. Tomorrow morning, the news will have spread all over both ships.”

  “Then go ahead. Tell me.”

  Bao rocked back, resting his ankle on his knee. “All right. Nita showed Odenwald a series of photographs—computer amplified and enhanced—revealing New Home as an ugly-looking marble, a hard little sphere rotating under drifting rinds of reddish-brown dust and ejecta. The water we discovered by spectrographic analysis while outside the Barricado lay hidden under enmantling dust. Odenwald stared at us—his magi, so to speak—as if we’d led Herod right to him.”

  “Ejecta?” I said. “What’s going on? Volcanic activity? A worldwide dust storm?”

  “Odenwald asked the same question, and Nita said, ‘The dust storm’s real enough, but Bao worries more about its causes.’

  “‘What do you think’s happened?’ Odenwald asked me.

  “I told him that not long ago—possibly just before we drew within the orbit of the fifth planet—an asteroidal object the size of Mexico City burned through New Home’s atmosphere and impacted with the surface. The stratospheric blizzard wrapping the planet derives from material crater-blasted upward by this nomadic body’s impact.

  “Odenwald turned over one of Nita’s lovely gloomy photos, as if its other side would nullify my words. When it didn’t, he thoughtfully replaced it in its sequence.

  “‘What does this mean for us?’ he asked. ‘As refugees in search of a livable world?’

  “‘Nothing good,’ Pete Ohanessian said.

  “‘Itemize, please,’ Odenwald insisted.”

  Nita reached over and touched his wrist—trying, you see, to console him. Meanwhile, though, she told him that infrared absorption spectroscopy would give us the best look at current conditions on the planet.

  “‘Dr. Seschachari has the results,’ she said. ‘Indira?’”

  Here, Indira had showed him a slide. So Bao punched a button, and the very slide in question flashed up on the HD screen behind me. When I swung about in my chair to look at it, an arrow jumped onto the screen over New Home’s latest IR absorption spectrum.

  Bao resumed his story:

  “Indira said, ‘This slide compares data taken on the trip out with more recently obtained info. This peak at around ten microns’”—the arrow landed on it—“‘is carbon dioxide, and you can see from the corresponding peak here’”—the arrow bounced again—“‘that the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide content has risen dramatically as a result of the collision. We hypothesize that the vaporization of a lot of carbonate rock—namely, limestone—from the asteroid strike triggered the jump in CO2. You can also add to that the CO2 produced by the combustion of biomass—grasses, trees, who knows what else?—in the resulting firestorm. But even more alarming is that the levels of carbon dioxide continue to rise.’

  “‘Why?’ Odenwald demanded.”

  Indira told him she’d get back to that and noted that the second peak on the spectrum represented the absorption from the NO molecule, nitric oxide. Bao, quoting Dr. Seschachari, said that fumes from nitric oxide present two real problems for would-be colonists. First, the acid has a bite. Only idiots would try to land with it contaminating the ecosphere. Second, and even worse, the nitric acid has apparently begun to release even more carbon dioxide from New Home’s limestone. To get an idea of the process, think of sodium carbonate—ordinary baking soda—in a bath of vinegar, fizzing away.

  “Cripes, Bao, you’ve got to be kidding.”

  “I wish.” He got up and began to pace. “Pete Ohanessian took over from Indira and told Odenwald that the most efficient natural mechanism for removing CO2 from a world’s atmosphere is probably photosynthesis. Unfortunately, Abel, we think the asteroid strike and the firestorm have wiped out all but about five percent of New Home’s vegetation. God, or Fate, has smashed the thermostat on that planet. When New Home comes out of its Ice Age—below-freezing temperatures everywhere, all a result of the dust cloud shrouding it—Pete thinks the planet could fall victim to the runaway greenhouse effect.”

  In this scenario, Bao told me, atmospheric CO2 provokes warming via standard greenhouse action. Carbon dioxide levels in cold water drop with added temperature, even more CO2 outgasses as CO2 once dissolved in polar oceans comes out of solution. Hence, even faster warming. As temperatures keep going up, the seas begin to evaporate, and H2O is a more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2. Water and carbon dioxide working together slow the escape of infrared energy into space. The hotter New Home grows, the more water vapor in its atmosphere: a steady ramping up of the greenhouse effect. Many thick blanketlike layers swaddle the planet, letting solar heat in but trapping the heat generated below. Eventually, New Home’s equatorial seas start to boil.

  “New Home seems to be something of a misnomer,” I said.

  Bao chuckled mirthlessly. “Well, perhaps not. We’ve done some very careful modeling to establish how close the planet is to the edge of Epsilon Eridani’s habitable zone. It does lie on the inward edge of the zone, but at sufficient distance from Eppie to avoid a complete greenhouse runaway.”

  “Won’t things ever get back to normal?”

  “What’s normal?” Bao said. “But, of course, that’s what Odenwald wanted to know. Pete told him that a counterbalancing geological process could reverse the situation.” Bao grinned a dare at me. “Any idea what it is, Dr. Gwiazda?”

  The question took me off guard. “Weathering?”

  “You’re the geology man. I’m asking you.”

  “Weathering,” I said more forcefully.

  “Care to explain it?”

  “Spectroscopy implies New Home’s mantle consists of calcium and magnesium silicates, right?”

  “I guess so. Pete, at least, concurs.”

  “Then the planet’s atmospheric CO2 will react slowly with these silicates to make calcium and magnesium carbonate. The process speeds up in hot, damp air, binding carbon dioxide into the planet’s limestone. Temperatures drop. With this cooling, water vapor precipitates out. The greenhouse effect decreases, along with the temperature. In the end, New Home returns to ‘normal.’ H
ow long will it take? I don’t know. My specialty is soils. And we still don’t know the percentage of anorthitic rock in New Home’s exposed crust.”

  Bao smiled. “Maybe you should have briefed Odenwald too.”

  “What time-scale estimate did Pete offer?”

  “He hemmed and hawed. I don’t blame him. We lack solid values for anorthitic rock and the rate of vulcanism.”

  “Come on, Bao.”

  “A century or so. For sure, less than two hundred years. Maybe as few as fifty.”

  Hearing this, I thought first of Dean, now asleep in Lily’s care. Such news would crush him. Lily, too. It was crushing me, like sixteen tons of granite on my chest. Had we traveled more than a century to reach a world that would accept us as colonists only after we had stewed in our bioracks another one hundred years?

  “Yes,” Bao said. “New Home’s something of a misnomer.” He punched a button on the arm of his chair and the speakers next to the HD screen activated. A recorded discussion garbled past on fast-forward. Bao stopped it. “After Pete talked, some of my colleagues got silly. Listen.”

  Nita: “Dead End might be a better name.”

  Indira: “Or Crater Quake.”

  Pete: “Or Pot Hole. Or Acid Bath.”

  Nita: “Gloomandoom!”

  Indira: “Bitter Pill! Or maybe—”

  Bao: “That’s enough!”

  Odenwald: “Easy, Bao—I was about to propose an irreverent name of my own.”

  Bao: “Sir, the purpose of this session is to brief you, not to divert ourselves.”

  Odenwald: “Maybe we should divert Annie to another planet in this system.”

  Nita: “Which? Jelly Belly? Red Hot?”

  Pete: “The gravity on Jawbreaker would crush us. We’d do as well to set down on Eppie herself.”

  Nita: “Or as ill.”

  Bao: “We should continue to New Home. First-hand studies of the environmental aftermath of an asteroid strike this large are virtually nonexistent. We should follow up.”

  Indira: “But for whose sake?”

  Odenwald: “You all have your work. I have mine. And my first duty is to break the news.”

  Nita: “You’ll break hearts as well.”

  Pete: “A better time might be—”

  Odenwald: “Traveling at nearly a million klicks per hour, there’s no time like the present.”

  * * *

  Bao halted the recording.

  “Nita was right,” I said. “The news has broken my heart. And it’s sure to break others.”

  Bao toasted me with an imaginary shot glass, then slugged back its imaginary contents.

  * * *

  Lily broke the bad tidings to Dean. She insisted on her prerogative in this. In his self-appointed role as goduncle, Kaz tagged along.

  We took Dean to a glade in the atrium, a stand of sycamores bonsai’d artfully near a waterfall encased in a sort of panpipe of clear plastic. In this secluded place, the falling water, pump-driven and -recirculated, made its tremulous woodwind and brook music.

  Kaz lifted Dean to a notch in one of the sycamores and then tactfully wandered away. Lily took up a post beside Dean, to catch him if he slipped, while I sat on a bench masquerading as a ledge on the face of our miniature cascade.

  Finches warbled, and, not far away, another party murmured among themselves, their talk a faint counterpoint to the water noise and the nonstop background hum.

  “DeBoy, I have to tell you a very unpleasant thing,” Lily began. “New Home won’t be our new home, after all.” She told him about our discovery of the recent asteroid strike and its meaning for everyone aboard our remaining ships—namely, either a frustrating wait until environmental conditions improved on Eppie’s second planet or another long interstellar journey to another solar system with potential for settlement, most likely the Tau Ceti system.

  None of this seemed to impress Dean. He sat in the dwarf sycamore gazing upward, and all around, for a glimpse of one of the finches.

  “Do you understand me?” Lily asked. “We’ve come all this way, DeBoy, and New Home may be denied us.”

  “Yessum.” Dean gave her a grudging, shifty-eyed nod.

  “It’s all right to feel sad. It’s even all right to cry.”

  Our ingrate son kept rubbernecking for birds.

  “Dean!”

  So quickly did Dean’s gaze snap back to Lily that he had to grab a limb. “I like id here,” he said. “Now thad evvybody’s ub … up … I like id jes fine.”

  Almost against my will, I guffawed.

  Lily shot me an I’m-going-to-kill-you glare that modulated, almost against her will, into a defeated grin.

  Whereupon Hiller Nevels, a botanist named Gulnara Golovin, and Milo Pask, a habitat engineer, came strolling toward us, arguing or at least expostulating among themselves. Golovin had her hand consolingly on Pask’s arm, and none of the three seemed at all aware of our own family group, not even when Kaz trudged back into the clearing and halted in some puzzlement at the sight of them.

  “… won’t get over it!” Pask was saying. “To travel over a century and learn on your final approach that a stupid rock from the sky has turned the planet of your dreams into a gas chamber! Why did I come? I’m supposed to build habitat geodesics, water and sewer systems. Now, I can’t. I’ve come all this way for no reason!”

  Golovin said, “You can’t do your job now, that’s all this setback means. Wait for the dust and the acid rain to settle out. A kind of normality will return to New Home. What’s another year—even two—given all our years in transit? Milo, from the very beginning we knew we were living with a deferred ambition.”

  “Besides,” said Hiller, “we had no guarantee any planet out here would prove a cozy place to camp.”

  Pask brushed Golovin’s hand from his arm and rounded on Hiller. “Maybe not when we set out. But the closer we got to Eppie and the more that thick-headed gook and his star-gazing cronies learned, the more flowery they got about how New Home was Shangri-La and how grandly the place would welcome us. We hadn’t come all this way just to rot in our bioracks. So they told us. The incompetent buggers!”

  “Except for the asteroid strike, I think they appraised New Home accurately,” Golovin said. “I don’t see how you can hold them responsible for an act of God.”

  “We can’t even hold God responsible for an act of God!” Pask raged. “So I’m scapegoating Thich and his sickening ilk. Do you mind?”

  “Irrationality doesn’t become you, Milo,” Golovin scolded. “Stop it.”

  “No. But I become it, don’t I?” Finally catching sight of Dean, Pask strode over with a weird glimmer in his eyes. “Who could have predicted this turn of events? This kid? Yeah, the kid. Annie’s resident … gnomic gnome.”

  Lily said, “Lay off, Milo.”

  Pask reddened as if she’d disparaged either his engineering skills or his virility, not simply rebuked him for bullying a child.

  “What’re the odds?” he asked. “What’re the odds that New Home would take a lousy asteroid hit during our expedition’s final approach?”

  “I have no idea,” Lily said.

  “Well, I’ll tell you. Statistically, Dr. Aliosi-Stark, the chances are something like a trillion to one. A trillion to buggering one!”

  “I don’t think so,” Lily said.

  “You don’t, do you?”

  “Given the event itself, I’d say that, statistically, the chances are one hundred percent.”

  Now Pask looked at Lily as if she’d slapped him. His face crumpled. Without attempting to mitigate or hide the fact, he began to cry. Dean followed suit. I took Dean out of the tree and held him. Lily hugged Pask.

  “I want to leap into the same swallowing blackness everyone on Chandrasekhar leapt into,” Pask said.

  “You should talk to someone,” Lily told him.

  “I’ve talked to Hiller and Gulnara,” Pask said. “Now I’m talking to you. Talk doesn’t heal, it just turns into more
of itself.” Regaining a degree of control, he wiped his eyes and reset his twisted features.

  Seeing Pask calm himself, Dean quieted.

  “That may be,” I said. “But you should still sit down for a while with Etsuko Endo. Soon.”

  Pask wouldn’t commit to this, but Golovin agreed to contact Etsuko on his behalf. Then she and Hiller led him out of the glade, and out of the atrium, in search of someone to dismantle his dread.

  Kaz took Dean from me, and Dean leaned his head on Kaz’s shoulder. “I like it here,” Dean said.

  Whether he meant this nook of the atrium or life in general aboard the ark, I had no idea.

  * * *

  New Home—or Acid Bath, or Dead End, or Bitter Pill, as the more mordant of our expedition’s surviving members insist on calling the world—has no moon. Not long ago, Annie Jump and Fritz Zwicky took up orbits about ten thousand kilometers out, orbits that bestow on them—in the minds of our astronomy specialists and a few of our anonymous dreamers—exactly that status.

  The two great ships, their own wheels rotating, turn about New Home like diamond-lit satellites, Annie Jump half a klick farther out—higher—than Fritz Zwicky but otherwise in rough parallel with its sibling. If any sentient species lives on the world below, and if roiling dust didn’t veil the night sky from the ground, the sight of our two staggered wheels turning overhead would surely prompt stillness and then awe among their unknowable kind.

  Aboard Annie, I imagine myself swinging in the gondola of a Ferris wheel on a lofty New Home peak, gazing into the night at this manmade binary cluster. In fact, I go on to imagine myself imagining myself as a passenger on one of our glittering rings. Lost in this double fantasy, I prefer the image of myself in New Home’s transfigured sky: Orion orating in the heavens, not some mute Sherpa in the Himalayas.

  I want to blaze, not to slog and grapple. Given my choice, I want to god-fashion myself in fire—even if the attempt slays me, even if no one but the greedy homunculus in my own breast hears my Promethean cri de coeur.

  * * *

  At 0800 hours tomorrow—measuring time by Greenwich mean time, as we still do aboard Annie—we will boost away from New Home and park ourselves nearer her sun, to begin the refueling process that will eventually take us to Tau Ceti.