Analog SFF, May 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “He had a number of explanations,” Peter said, not taking his eyes from the view port. “He said that they couldn't risk the entire exobiology team on any given shuttle mission. And he said that by first refusing his offer to be part of the team, I forfeited my right to make the landing to the next in line.”

  “Punishment for insufficient enthusiasm?” Manny suggested.

  “He seemed very ill at ease,” Peter said. “He would not look me in the eye.”

  “Of course not,” Manny said. “It had nothing to do with you and everything to do with who's sharing his bed.”

  Peter sighed. “Missing the expedition isn't the big disappointment. It's Vaclav. I was twelve years old when I read Vaclav Novak and the Caverns of Mars, the story of how he descended into one of those huge lava tubes, survived a tear in his pressure suit, and discovered the Martian archaea. He was my hero, the man I modeled my career after. I wish he were angry with me instead of just ... weak.

  “When I was in school and got depressed, I would go on a road trip. Didn't really matter to where. Just to get away.” He cocked an eye at Manny. “Feel like a road trip?”

  “Uh, sure.”

  * * * *

  Captain Zhen was skeptical. “The Osprey will be used for transport to and from Titan's surface. The Condor will be kept as backup in case the Osprey runs into trouble. Those are the only two craft with landing capability.”

  “We don't need landing capability,” Peter said. “We want to traverse the E-ring and bring back samples. For that purpose a scout ship like the Auk will do fine. It's what it was designed for.”

  “You don't need the Auk,” Zhen said. “Just step outside. We're in the E-ring now.”

  “Technically, yes,” Manny agreed, “but the part in which we are most interested is downslope, centered on the orbit of Enceladus. There are unexplained oxygen spikes, traces of ammonia—”

  “An organic compound,” Zhen observed thoughtfully, “though in this case doubtless produced by inorganic means.”

  “Doubtless,” Peter agreed.

  Zhen rubbed her chin. “I have no pilots to spare.”

  “We don't need a pilot,” Peter said. “Everything about the Auk is so automated that a real pilot would die of boredom. In any event, our intent is just to sweep through to the orbit of Enceladus on an elliptical orbit. Once we get the kick in the right direction, we just coast all the way in and all the way back.”

  Zhen snorted. “I am very surprised you have the time for this sort of sideshow. I was sure you would be part of Novak's Titan expedition.”

  “So was I,” Peter said evenly. “I'm sure he has his reasons.”

  “I'm sure.” Zhen stared at him, then seemed to come to a decision. “I will have Lieutenant Lakhdar do a complete systems check of the Auk. You will submit a mission plan for my review. Then I will make a decision.”

  * * * *

  The E-ring was an anomaly in this arguably strangest of all planets in the Solar System. Its constituents were mostly microscopic and diffuse, more like a smoky haze than the pristine ice shards of the inner rings, mostly because there were some bodies a kilometer wide and a few as large as ten kilometers. Locating these and charting their orbits was part of Captain Zhen's excuse for allowing the expedition.

  Peter and Manny had worked feverishly to prepare the craft in the final hours before launch. Under the watchful eye of Lieutenant Lakhdar, they had jury-rigged a series of externally mounted aerogel pallets to gather ring material for later examination.

  Now the Auk, its superconducting wires extended fore and aft to support the magnetic radiation shield, accelerated down Saturn's gravity well. Titan dwindled above them. Rhea appeared on the starboard side and fled away aft. Dione approached from the port side, close enough that Peter was able to focus the ship telescope on its dazzling ice cliffs.

  Within the crowded confines of the Roc, it was easy to forget the fact that they were farther from humanity than any group of people had even been in all of history. In the Auk, with only Manny for company, the feeling of near isolation weighed in on Peter. He had time to appreciate the irony of his situation. Angee had taken a desperate gamble to get him on this expedition in hopes that it would make his name professionally. Instead, he would be a footnote to the expedition, the xenobiologist who never landed on Titan. And the reason would be, indirectly at least, because he was faithful to Angee.

  “Liar!” an inner voice accused. “The reason is you were so angry with her you had yourself gelded. The question is: Would you have been faithful had it been physically possible for you to be unfaithful?”

  Thinking back on it, Peter decided that there had been something distinctly off-putting about Part's aggressiveness, something that seemed an attempt to mask desperation. “Yeah, I think so.”

  “My friend, you have a pensive look on your face,” Manny said.

  “Thinking how much I miss my fiancee.”

  Manny's laugh lit up the entire cabin. “I regret there is nothing I can do for you in that regard.”

  They received news from the Roc on a regular basis. The Osprey had landed on Titan. Novak publicly announced his belief that Titan's methane was biological in origin, just as he had shown the methane on Mars to be. Peter shook his head. There were good reasons for the consensus view that it was geological in origin. He doubted Novak could repeat past glory, though part of him still hoped he would.

  Whatever the origin of the methane, there was plenty of it. A surprise methane rain turned the plain on which they had landed into a shallow lake. Novak's quick action was credited with saving several members of the expedition, including Andrea Part.

  “The media will love that,” Manny said.

  “But will Andrea ever forgive him for rescuing her?” Peter wondered.

  The Auk crossed the orbit of Tethys while the satellite was invisible behind Saturn. They swung in behind Enceladus, racing the moon into Saturn's shadow. The hard darkness, that had seemed so close you could open the airlock and touch it, suddenly acquired depth. Stars appeared, spreading outward to infinity.

  Sharp, snapping sounds, which sometimes made the hull ring briefly, signaled the impact of microscopic ice flakes.

  “It is like the first time I drove up north in the winter,” Manny said. “Sleet blew out of the sky and pecked at my windshield. I had never seen such a thing.”

  “When I was going to school in Oklahoma,” Peter said, “I would get depressed sometimes, and then I would get in my car, find a long stretch of mostly deserted highway and drive for miles.” It occurred to Peter that he had been depressed on a fairly regular basis back then. Those mood swings had vanished after he met Angee.

  “Anyway, one spring night my drive took me into a mass of the hugest mosquitoes I had ever seen. They coated the windshield, making it impossible to—”

  There was a larger impact, not so much heard as felt through the deck and the chairs into which they were strapped. At the same time, something smashed into the forward view port, smearing its entire area. Cracks spiderwebbed its entire area. Peter held his breath, hoping the transparent sealant between the plates of the view port would fill in the cracks before the cabin's air pressure blew them all into the vacuum.

  * * * *

  The Specimen Examination Room was near the hub of the saucer so items, preferably living, brought up from any of Saturn's moons could be examined in something like their normal gravity. The room could be filled with water or a nitrogen-methane atmosphere or, as now, be kept in vacuum. Because of this, Peter and Manny had to conduct the examination in space suits.

  This was actually the second examination of this specimen. The first, begun minutes after the Auk docked with the Roc, had taken a full eight hours to remove the corpse from the aerogel in which it had embedded itself.

  Most of the room was dark. Spotlights trained on the specimen provided illumination for the work and for the cameras which were recording the examination, as well as relaying it throughout the R
oc, and from there back to Earth.

  The remains resembled a white tent pole that shimmered with iridescence depending on the angle of the light. Wires attached to either end held it motionless, about shoulder high.

  “What we have here is two meters long and about three centimeters wide through most of that length,” Peter said. “Originally, the creature was longer. How much, we cannot say. The posterior end extended beyond the aerogel pallet and was lost.”

  “How can you tell?” a curious soprano voice asked. The earphones made it sound like the woman was right next to him, even though she might have been in the main auditorium, where the examination was being shown on an IMAX-sized screen, or even watching in her own cabin.

  “Excuse me?” Peter said.

  “How can you tell front from rear?” the questioner clarified. “Or even if those concepts have any relevance for a creature like this?”

  “Excellent question,” Manny said. “The honest answer is that we cannot be sure. However, we will show you why we think we know which end is which.”

  “The main body is wrapped in three extremely thin membranes,” Peter said. “We found it almost impossible to unwrap them without tearing. Luckily, Dr. Carreras came up with an alternative.”

  “This is an electron gun,” Manny said, displaying a device that looked like a prop from a cheap SF video. “I put it together in the repair shop to transfer electrons at short range, causing a buildup somewhat larger than the static charge you might get from scuffing across a rug. That is why the supporting wires are not grounded.”

  He pushed the tip of the gun under the edge of a flap and depressed the trigger. For an instant, nothing seemed to happen. Then the edge lifted itself and began to unfold. When it had swung thirty degrees around the main body, Manny found the seam of another wing and began to open it as well. A few minutes later, there were three wings being unwound. Peter worked on the side opposite Manny with his own electron gun. Each wing was roughly triangular. Even with the repulsion of the static charge, they did not extend straight away from the body but rather curved in a way that, to the artistic, might have suggested a breaking wave.

  “As you can see,” Peter said, “each wing has a concave and a convex side. Shine a light on the convex side and you see iridescent whiteness. If you illuminate the concave side, however...”

  Manny directed a flashlight beam at an inner flap. Peter heard murmurs of surprise in his earphones.

  “More than 99 percent reflective,” Manny said. “How much more, we have not been able to determine.”

  “Light sails?”

  Peter recognized Lakhdar's voice. “We don't think so. Even though the whole body is extraordinarily light and we do not know the wings’ actual area—” Peter indicated the torn edges. “—there does not seem to be sufficient surface for an efficient lightsail this far from the Sun. If we can move the lights around...”

  Manny moved a bank of lights in closer and adjusted their angle.

  “If we imagine those lights to be the Sun, we can see how the inner curve of the wings focuses the light along the body. We can deduce the reason for this by examining the interior of the body. To do this as noninvasively as possible, we use ultrasound. Manny, please display some of the images we took earlier.

  “There, you see that in overall structure, the main body is like a thick straw—”

  “—or an intestine that has been pulled straight, which probably gives you a better idea of its function,” Manny said.

  “I don't see a mouth.” That was Jessica Levine, the xenobiologist who had taken Peter's place as Novak's primary assistant on the Titan team.

  “Good observation,” Peter said. “Neither do we. We sampled the interior with a hypodermic and discovered that it contains mostly water. My guess, and it is only that, is that E-ring snow impacts on the wings and is absorbed by them.”

  There were audible gasps, followed by a welter of clamoring voices. Peter grinned at Manny. Even if they received the Nobel Prize, it would never get better than this.

  Levine's voice cut through the confusion. “You are saying these creatures actually live in space? Isn't it much more likely that this one was hurled into the ring from an ice geyser and was already dead when you ran into it?”

  “Well, of course, with only one specimen to examine, we cannot say for sure,” Peter said.

  “And further study is definitely needed,” Manny added, because you must always say that further study is needed if you want to keep the grants coming.

  “But on the basis of the evidence so far, that seems the most likely explanation,” Peter said. “Just consider the reflectivity of the inner wings. They would serve no purpose in a dark ocean under a forty-meter thick blanket of ice. In the ring, however, they appear perfectly adapted to gather sunlight.”

  “Where radiation, if nothing else, would kill them.” Novak's voice. It was the strongest objection. The life he had discovered on Mars had been sheltered in lava tubes and deep caverns.

  “Many, perhaps most, would be killed,” Peter said, choosing his words carefully, “but not necessarily all. For example, deinococcus radiodurans can reconstruct its genome without error even after it has been smashed into thousands of pieces by ionizing radiation. Most research into that bacterium has focused on trying to understand how it can do that. A more interesting question might be: Why has it evolved this way? There are very few spots on Earth where such an ability would provide a competitive advantage, but it is so obviously advantageous to an organism outside a planetary atmosphere that one might be forgiven for wondering if that is where the trait evolved.”

  Everyone seemed to talk at once. Some members of the audience were arguing with themselves more vociferously than with Peter or Manny.

  “Of course, this is only preliminary speculation,” Manny said quickly.

  “Of course,” Peter agreed. “But getting back to this intestinal structure. Earlier today, we sampled its contents with a hypodermic and subjected them to analysis. Most of it is water, as you would expect of a creature grazing on the ice particles of the E-ring. However, we also found significant amounts of ammonia and antifreeze glycoprotein. Together these do more than keep the creature from freezing solid. Our calculations indicate that when two of the wings focus sunlight on the torso, enough heat is produced to vaporize small amounts of water, enough to serve as a propellant.

  “So, though they look vaguely like manta rays, it might be closer to the truth to call them space squids.”

  There were more objections and questions, but there was something halfhearted about them. Peter and Manny were quite open about their own ignorance. Only the examination of more specimens would provide the answers they needed. There might be more expeditions in the Auk, but eventually the Roc would have to leave Titan, which seemed to harbor no life at all, and fall inward until it orbited Enceladus, a moon with such prodigious amounts of life that it could be hurled into the void. Everyone realized this. No one mentioned it.

  The last question of the session came from Captain Zhen. “How long will it take you to understand these creatures?”

  It was a question that took Peter and Manny by surprise. Peter took an intellectual step back in an attempt to gain perspective. “Why, the rest of my life, I suppose.”

  * * * *

  vii.

  July 17, 2062

  They rehearsed that night in Angee's apartment. Jose Candanosa had not been able to get in town until four that afternoon and had come over immediately, meeting Shinichi Kanayama on the way. It was good to have the old group back together. After the tour that had taken her to Tokyo, Paris, and Soweto, Angee would be back in a small club setting, with musicians she knew and who knew her well. Several times, they had only to start the first few bars of a song to know that they were perfectly in sync. After two hours, Angee felt confident that they had the set down for the next night's performance. She went into the kitchen and came back with a platter of sandwiches and pitcher of lemonade.


  Shinichi was standing at the piano, picking his way through an unfamiliar page of music. Two bars in, he frowned, muttered something under his breath, and began again. This time it was noticeable that left hand and right hand were doing distinctly different syncopations, each hand running through a series of quick crescendos.

  “It's not half bad,” Jose said. Angee startled, nearly dropping the lemonade and throwing the sandwiches all over the room. “So that horrified expression must mean that it's your composition, which you do not want to show anyone just yet.”

  Angee nodded, carefully placing platter and pitcher on a table. “It's just something I've been playing with. I thought Peter might like it when he gets back. It started with a dream I had about those creatures he found in the E-ring.”

  Shinichi pulled out another page. His brow glistened. His concentration made Angee think of a gymnast negotiating a particularly tricky routine. Now the chords changed slowly, melting into one another in a weightless, timeless fashion. Jose found the rest of the score. Purely instrumental sections alternated with parts for piano and voice.

  He whistled and shook his head. “Setting T.S. Eliot to music. Heavy stuff.”

  “It's been done before,” Angee said defensively.

  “For poems about cats,” Jose said. “Not the Four Quartets, as far as I know. Who is publishing this?”

  “Well, nobody, I mean, it's just for Peter, and most of my fans wouldn't know what to make of it.”

  “We will publish it anonymously,” Jose declared. “Or under a pseudonym. The Roc trio, perhaps.”

  “It's not for a trio,” Shinichi said seriously. “You want to score this for orchestra, don't you?”

  Angee gave a quick nod. “I'll tell you the whole story as we eat.”

  * * * *

  “...what we've done has been good,” Angee said, a note of defensiveness still in her voice. “We have kept the standards fresh and showcased some new composers that otherwise rarely gets a hearing. But I found myself wanting more. I wanted the feeling I had the first time I heard Gershwin's Preludes, or heard Coltrane transform a simple, sappy tune into something so new and strange that it seemed I was suspended somewhere outside the Solar System. I didn't know anyone who was doing just what I wanted, so I started composing myself. A few bars, then a few pages. I never thought I had the talent to succeed.