Asimov's SF, July 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

Yes, he was worried.

  Absolutely, Simon wished Jackie had stayed with him after her sudden change of careers. Saturn's major moons had quality universities, and even noble, haughty Stanford offered virtual classes to anyone with money. Why not accept a longer, safer path to her degree? Time wasn't in short supply, Simon had argued. And by staying where they were, Jackie would have remained immune to the hazards of so many close-packed souls.

  The transmission continued. “I'm sure you know this,” Jackie said. “I've probably told you this before. But did you realize there isn't one working telescope on the entire campus? We have a facility forty kilometers above us, perched on the conservatory roof, but it's filled with museum pieces and curious tourists.” She was thrilled, her flexible mouth giving each word an accent that was purely hers. “Stanford's telescopes—my telescopes—are everywhere but on the bright busy Earth. Luna and the Jovian Trojans, and there's a beautiful new mirror that just came on line in Neptune's Lagrange. And because I'm here, that's my mirror. It's my best eye. Think of the honor! If I was at home with you, I'd be little more than a technician pointing these machines at targets that only the true Stanford students would be allowed to see."

  Yes, she made the right decision. Simon had always known it, though these little mental exercises helped convince him again.

  What a silly little ape he was.

  "But I didn't tell you this incredible news,” Jackie said in conclusion. “I just found out. Long, long ago, Stanford had a mascot, and it was a bird! Can you imagine the odds?"

  Simon froze the image and kissed the lips. Then he filed the transmission in places guaranteed to be safe for an eternity, and feeling weepy, he went on with his comfortably busy day.

  Even orbiting Saturn, where space was cheap and food easy to come by, people were acquiring small modern bodies. Simon hadn't been this tiny since he was one year old. These new metabolisms were efficient and reliable, and where the human mind would eventually decay, cortexes made of crystalline proteins were denser and far sturdier, thoughts washing through them quickly enough to double an atum's natural talents and increase his memory twenty-fold.

  But every atum underwent similar transformations, which meant that when it came to his professional life, remarkably little had changed. Simon and his colleagues had kept their old ranks and ratings, only with greater responsibilities and larger workloads. A significant medical investment had changed very little. “Treading water,” he dubbed his job—a weak play on words, since what he did was manage the nutrient flows in the newborn sea. But really, he had no compelling reason to complain, and in any given year, he didn't waste more than a moment or two wondering what other course his life might have run, if only.

  He was a quietly happy soul.

  And despite few promotions or pay increases, his work had challenges as well as moments of total, child-like joy.

  Pieces of Iapetus now belonged to Luna and Venus. But those decades of throwing water ice and hydrocarbons sunward were finished. The original mining camps had evolved into cities. Multitudes lived on Titan and Rhea and the other moons, and nobody was in the mood to share their wealth. Luna would remain a damp stony sponge, while Venus was a clean dry world, its ecology being redesigned to endure the boundless drought, its citizens more machine than meat. No matter how stupid or stubborn recent governments had been, the mathematics were brutally simple: From this point forward, it would be easier to terraform each world where it already danced, just as it was far cheaper to ship extra humans and other sentients out to these empty new homes.

  Light washed through the new Iapetus, and the water was warm and salted, and the neutral-buoyant reefs were magnificent structures of calcium and silica wrapped around bubbles of hydrogen gas. The ancient moon had been melted, from its crust to the core, and great pumps were churning up that single round ocean, producing carefully designed currents meant to keep every liter oxygenated and illuminated by the submerged suns. Trillions of watts of power made the little world glow from within. Larger than the oceans of the original Earth, but without the dark cold depths where life had to putter and save itself on hopes of a scrap of food, his home would eventually become jammed with coral forests and bubble cities and fish suitable for a garden, lovely and delicious to any tongue.

  Nutrients were Simon's boring, absolutely essential expertise. When he wasn't dreaming of Jackie, he would dream about the day's conversations with sensors and AI watchers, the home-mind and various colleagues scattered across other, more highbrow departments. Only a tiny fraction of moon was settled. A few floating cities on the surface, and there was an industrial complex digesting and dispersing the tiny core of stone and metal impurities. But what this atum needed to do, at least in his tiny realm, was create a cycle of nutrients that would ignore disruptions and random shifts in current, leaving all of the water as bright and clear as the finest tidal pool on some long-vanished earthly beach.

  Because she was interested, Simon ended his days with updates to his lover. Every evening, as the nearest sun began to dim, he would craft a little message laid down on cool, bloodless data. But because he was nervous, he inevitably confessed that he was thinking of her constantly and that he loved her, his face and tone saying what he didn't allow from his words: That he was scared to lose her to some student of promise, or worse, a professor of certified genius who would sweep his darling bird off to realms far more exotic than his beautiful but quite tiny pond.

  * * * *

  The message began with news from Earth. With a quick joyful voice, Jackie talked about classes and the lab that she was teaching solo— “I'm so terrified, and the students love it when I shake"—and she twice mentioned rumors about a mild plague tearing through some of the coastal algae farms. “There's talk about shortfalls,” she admitted. “Since they run their ecosystem with minimal reserves, shortages are inevitable. Too many citizens, plus all those others who slipped in unnoticed.” Then guessing he would be frightened, she added, “Oh, it isn't serious. Everybody's just going to have to go a mouthful or two short at dinner. And Stanford has its own emergency supplies, so it's nothing. Nothing at all.” Then she grinned with her lovely toothless mouth, and showing nothing but delight, she announced, “I have something to show you, darling. By the way."

  And with that, her face froze and her voice stopped long enough that Simon began troubleshooting his equipment.

  But she moved again, speaking with a quiet, conspiratorial tone. “Nobody sees me, darling. ‘Nobody’ meaning everybody else. You didn't know my little secret, but I seeded our home-mind with some elaborate security protocols. Not as good as some, but strong enough to keep away prying eyes."

  "Prying at what?” he muttered.

  Jackie's message was enormous, and it included interactive functions. The program heard him, and with Jackie's voice it said, “Soon enough, darling. You'll see. But let me show you a few other marvels first. All right?"

  He nodded happily, a sense of adventure lending the moment its fresh, welcome edge.

  Jackie continued. “You've seen these places. But I can't remember when, and the new mirrors are so much more powerful. I'm including portraits of five hundred thousand worlds, each one supporting life."

  Except for their clarity, the pictures were familiar. Life was a relatively common trick performed by the galaxy. Sophisticated, Earth-like biospheres did happen on occasion, but not often and not where they were expected to arise. By and large, the normal shape of life was tiny and bacterial. Mars and Venus, the Europan seas and the vivid clouds of Jupiter were typical examples. By contrast, multicellular life was an exceptionally frail experiment. Asteroid impacts and supernovae and the distant collisions of neutron stars happened with an appalling frequency, annihilating everything with a head and tail. Only the slow-living slime at the bottom of a deep sea would survive, or the patient cold bug ten kilometers beneath some poisoned landscape. At the end of the Permian, the Earth itself barely escaped that fate. But even accounting for those gran
d disasters, the Earth-equivalents proved a thousand times too scarce. Jackie's once-young professors had a puzzle to play with, and their answer was as sobering as anything born from science.

  Now and again, interstellar clouds and doomed suns would fall into the galaxy's core. If the inflow were large enough, the massive black hole responded with a kind of blazing horror that effectively ended fancy life almost everywhere. Since the Cambrian, the galaxy had detonated at least three times, and the fortunate Earth had survived only because it was swimming inside dense clouds of dust and gas—a worthy conservatory that was light-years deep, built by the gods of Whim and Caprice.

  Simon wandered through the transmission, glancing at a few hundred random planets. Then he asked his home-mind to pull out the most exceptional. Within those broad parameters, he found several dozen images of cloudy spheres orbiting suns within a hundred light-years of his comfortable chair. When he came across the closest world, Jackie returned.

  "Alpha Centauri B's largest world,” she said in her most teacherly voice. “The planet that some mentally impoverished soul named New Earth, back when all we knew was that it had liquid water and a living atmosphere."

  Simon had never been so close to that alien body. The image was that clear, that astonishing. Simon felt as if he was floating in low orbit above a shallow black sea. Microbes accounted for the dark water—multitudes of tiny relentless organisms that ate sunlight and spat out just enough oxygen to be noticed by astronomers centuries ago. But the tectonics of New Earth were radically different than those back home, and for a host of reasons, the alien atmosphere could never support a flame, much less a vibrant ecosystem.

  "To date,” Jackie continued, “our full survey has found nine million and forty thousand living worlds. That number and these images won't be made public for another few months. We're not done, and we expect several million more. But to date, Simon . . . as of this moment . . . only eighteen planets show unmistakable signs of multicellular life and intelligence. Of course we might be missing something small. But after this long, with these incredible tools and nothing closer to us than eight thousand light-years’ distance . . . well, darling, it makes a curious mind wonder if intelligence is a cosmic fluke, or worse, God's best joke. . . ."

  "I hope not,” he muttered.

  Jackie nodded in agreement. “Now for my fine surprise,” she went on. “One tiny portion of the sky is off-limits. Did you know that? The Powers-That-Be have rules. Nobody but them can look along one exceptionally narrow line. And we didn't look, at least not intentionally. Except there was an accident last week, and supposedly nothing was seen and of course we recorded nothing. But I thought you'd appreciate a glimpse of what nothing looks like, provided you keep this in a very safe place."

  Against the stars, a tiny glow was visible—like a comet, but burning hotter than the surface of any sun.

  "It's Hektor,” Jackie reported. “Dr. McKall is still out there, still charging forward. Another ten thousand years, and your old colleague will finally get where he's going."

  * * * *

  Simon was discussing salt contents with an irritable sensor on the far side of the moon, and then his home-mind interrupted. “There has been an incident,” it reported. “On Earth, and specifically, on the campus—"

  "Jackie?"

  "I know nothing about her,” the voice admitted. “Stanford and the surrounding area are temporarily out of reach. A riot is in progress. There's still a good deal of fighting. I can't offer useful insights."

  "A riot?” he asked incredulously.

  "Yes."

  "But why?"

  "There was a story, only a rumor.” The mind was designed to show sorrow, but in tidy amounts. And no outrage, which was why it stated flatly, “According to the rumor, the Stanford community was holding back foodstuffs, and approximately one million citizens organized a flash-protest that mutated into violence, and the civil authorities reacted with perhaps too much force—"

  "What about Jackie?"

  "I have lists of the dead and injured, sir. The tallies are being constantly updated. Eighty-three are confirmed dead, with perhaps another hundred to be found. But I will tell you when I find her, wherever I find her."

  Simon refused to worry. The odds of disaster falling on one eager graduate student were remote. Tens of thousands attended that big old school, and no, letting his mind turn crazy was a waste of time. That was the conviction that he managed to hold on to for eight minutes of determined, rapidly forgotten work. Then he cut off the sensor in mid-sentence, and to his house he said, “Any word, contact me."

  "Of course, sir."

  His home—Jackie's home, and his—was the only building on a tiny green island of buoyant coral floating on the moon's surface. What seemed critical at that moment was to escape, separating himself from whatever reminded him of her. Alone, he jetted above the oil-restrained surface of the sea, scaring up birds and rainbow bats. Then he docked at a web-tower and boarded an elevator that quietly asked for a destination.

  "Up,” he snapped. “Just up."

  The Iapetus roof was much more elaborate than those covering the inner worlds. It was blacker than any space, and it was dense and durable, and if civilization vanished today, it would likely survive intact until the Sun was a cooling white ember. That durability was essential. Simon rode the elevator past the final ceiling, emerging on the moon's night side but with dawn slowly approaching. He stopped the elevator before it reached the overhead port. Then he gazed at the Sun's emergence—a tiny fierce fleck of nuclear fire that was dwarfed by a thousand lasers pointed at this one modest moon of Saturn.

  A coalition of ice-belt nations had joined forces. Mercury, long considered too expensive to terraform, had been purchased and partly destroyed, doctored rock and iron fashioned into a fleet of enormous orbiting solar collectors that collected energy that was pumped into beams of light that could have destroyed ships and cities and even whole worlds. Could but never would, what with their elaborate programming and too many safeguards to count. But it was the Sun's focused power that slammed into the tough black conservatory, and it was the conservatory that captured and channeled this resource into the artificial suns that made Iapetus glow to its core. This was a cheaper, sweeter solution than building and maintaining fleets of fusion reactors. Every photon was absorbed, and as a result, life had warm bright happy water—a place where he wanted to live forever.

  Jackie had always enjoyed this part of the ascent; that's why Simon stopped here now. Stopped and waited, knowing that she was alive and well, but wasn't it the right thing to do, worrying as he did?

  The situation on Earth was always chaotic.

  He understood that Jackie had friends and colleagues to help before she could send word his way, and she might not be able to do that for a long time, considering the riot and the normal censorship demanded by the Powers-That-Be.

  No, he wasn't sick with worry.

  Then the home-mind called out, “Sir."

  Its voice was tinged with sorrow.

  More than anything else, what surprised Simon was how quickly he severed all contact with the universe. Before another word was offered, his small sharp mind had made its decision and cut the channel to his home-mind, never bothering to tell it of his intentions.

  If Simon knew nothing, then Jackie was alive; and that would remain true for as long as he could endure the cold boundless space about him and the sound of his breathing coming again and again in deep, useless gasps.

  * * * *

  Makemake

  "Sir, please. Please. What generosity may I offer you? I have marvelous teas, strong and sweet, or weak and sublime."

  "Something sublime."

  "And once again, sir, I apologize for any intrusion. For your time and sacrifices, I will be eternally grateful."

  Simon nodded and smiled blandly, asking nothing of his host. The Suricata were bright social entities famous for rituals and reflexive politeness. Answers would come soon enough,
and knowing these people, he was certain that he wouldn't much like what he was about to learn.

  The tea was served cold in tiny ceremonial bowls.

  "You continue to do marvelous work for us, sir."

  "And I hear praising words about you,” Simon replied. “Wiser minds than I say that our mob has never enjoyed a more efficient or responsible security chief."

  The narrow face seemed pleased. But the chief's four hands gripped his bowl too firmly, long black nails scraping against the white bone china.

  Simon finished his drink and set it aside.

  The chief did the same, and then with a portentous tone said, “Perhaps you heard about the refugee transport that arrived yesterday. Of course you have, who hasn't? Eleven hundred and nine survivors, each one a victim of this monstrous war, and all now quarantined at the usual site."

  One hundred kilometers above their heads stood a roughly camouflaged, utterly filthy ice dome—the same jail-like dumping site where Simon had lived for his first three months after his arrival.

  "My problem,” the chief began. Then the bright black eyes smiled, and he said, “Our problem,” as a less than subtle reminder of everyone's civic responsibilities. “More than one thousand sentient entities wish to find shelter with us, but before that can happen, we must learn everything about these individuals. The political climate might be improving, but tempers and grudges remain in full force. Our neutrality is maintained at a great cost—"

  "Who is our problem?"

  Simon's interruption pleased the chief. At least he sighed with what seemed like relief, watching a creature twice his size and older than anyone else on this world. “We have found a war criminal,” the chief admitted. “A much-sought individual, and I believe a colleague of yours from long ago. According to reliable accounts, she was complicit in the Martian genocide, a consultant in two slaughters on the Earth, and her role in the Ganymede struggles has been rigorously documented."

  "We're discussing Naomi?"

  Embarrassed, the little face dipped until the rope-like body lay on the carpeted floor. “One of her names, yes. She attempted to hide her identity, but what was a clever and thorough disguise the day she left Titan has become old and obvious.” The Suricata were lovely creatures, their dense fur softer than sable, warming fats and fantastic metabolism keeping them comfortable inside their icy tunnels. The chief stood again, hands fidgeting with readers and switches while his tail made a quick gesture, alerting his guest to the importance of his next words. “We are quite certain. This is the infamous Naomi. We find ourselves holding perhaps the most notorious atum still at large."