“Everybody ready for beams off?” Daphne called. She waited the full minute called for in the protocol. Then: “Switch off!”
All around them a pale ivory radiance seeped through the dark. Tapestries of dim gray luminosity. Julia knew the enzyme, something like Earth’s luciferase, an energy-requiring reaction she had done in a test tube during molecular bio lab, a few thousand years ago. She recalled as a girl watching in awe “glowworms”—really fly larvae—hanging in long strands in New Zealand caves, luring insect prey.
The mat grew ever larger and thicker on the rock walls as they went lower. Mat species covered most of the tube walls now, gray and brown and black, with occasional bursts of orange and blue. They stacked thickly on every available out-jut, then worked up the verticals.
Just ahead, thin sheets of mat hung like drapes. Wisps of mist stirred when they passed by. Unlike scuba gear, their suits did not vent exhaled gases, so they could not poison this colony of oxygen-haters. In the first explorations she and the others had done just that.
They reached a branching point and elected to go horizontally into the widest opening. Their beams cast moving shadows, deepening the sense of mystery. Within minutes they found orange spires, moist and slick. Beyond that were corkscrew formations of pale white that stuck out into the upwelling gases and captured the richness. More pale, thin membranes, flapping like slow-motion flags. The bigger ones were hinged to spread before the billowing vapor gale. Traceries of vapor showed the flow, probably still driven by their opening the diaphragm.
A few steps more and they were in a murky vault that stretched beyond view. As Daphne’s lamp swept around, vapors reflected back its glare. Perhaps fifty meters above, mat sheets hung from the ceiling of a vast cavern. Under their beams this grotto came alive with shimmering luminescence: burnt oranges, dapplings of vermilion, splashes of turquoise. A long silence.
“H-how big is this?” Daphne whispered.
Viktor said, “Can’t see the walls.”
Julia looked down, careful of her footing. “Or the floor, through this vapor.”
“Beams off in one minute,” Daphne called.
All around, a complex seethe of radiance. Julia knew that on Earth, mats of bacteria luminesced when they got thick enough. Quorum sensing, a technical term. A way for the bacteria to take roll. A lot of Earthside biologists thought that explained this phenomenon. But they had never stood in shadowy vaults like this—the thirteenth such large cavern found in over twenty years of exploration. To see the rich, textured ripples of luminosity that slowly worked across the ceiling and down the walls was to stand in the presence of mystery.
Another silence. Julia and Viktor knew this moment well, had experienced it in the company of many other crews who came and went through the decades.
Again Julia felt the churn of somber, slow luminosities stretching into the foggy darkness beyond their lamps’ ability to penetrate. There was a sense of silent vitality in the ponderous ferment of vapor and light, a language beyond knowing. As a field biologist she had learned to trust her feel for a place, and this hollow of light far beneath a dry world had an essence she had for decades tried to grasp, not with human ideas, but by opening herself to the experience.
They snapped out of it. She let the others work, keeping to the side. Sample taking, vids to shoot, measurements of distance and density and pressure; the usual. There was an advantage to standing apart and watching the humans grub about at the bottom of the vast grotto, their lights spiking here and there like fingers probing. At least they didn’t talk much.
A movement in the ceiling caught her eye. Pale tan strands came lacing through the mat, stretching like tendons. They made a mass that tilted and worked. Tubular stalks slid, fibers forked into layers, shaping, shaping. An outline seemed to bud up, shimmering and moist.
Julia’s heart thumped. Again. A palpable sense of struggle, of concentration into this one focus…
The others saw it. They froze. “My… God,” Daphne whispered. “I’ve read your accounts, seen the pictures, but…”
Julia had not seen the mat do this for several years. On the second descent of their first expedition the mat had made the same human outline, after two people had died of oxygen loss while exploring Vent A. She knew what to expect but found she was holding her breath. And here came that old prickly feeling again, washing over her skin.
Two rough protrusions sprouted at the top. At its base two more protrusions, slabs of dark mass extruding with aching effort into thicker tubes. At least three meters long, in all. And from the upper sides, above the two thickening tubes that now jutted from each side, a third blob, crusted as thick as tree bark, pulling itself out.
Viktor said it. “Human shape.”
No mistake. The mat was responding, as it had before, to their entry. No one had died on a descent since that first strange incident, so the intent could not be malicious.
Daphne said softly, “It’s so big…?”
To Julia her voice sounded dry. “It’s the mat’s impression of us.”
“How can it see us?” a crewman asked.
“It must sense enough to work out our outlines.”
“Eyes?” he asked.
“The glowing is common,” Julia said. “From surface webbed tissues, fed chemically by the substrate.” She was sure they knew this from the scientific literature, but it was something else to actually see it, deep in a gloomy cavern. They could be asking questions for the same reasons people talk in haunted houses. “Apparently it communicates through its chambers with light. How far, we don’t know.”
There was more talk, but she just looked at the slow-moving mass. Parts of the mat looked somewhat like giant tube worms, such as those found deep in undersea vents on Earth. But there the analogy ended. The old questions rose in her, still unanswered. Sentience? Of some kind. Enough to control its environment.
But sentience implied some kind of selection pressure. She and Viktor had proposed that rationing the meager water resources could drive selection, and predictably, dozens of papers had criticized that. But did it have intelligence? Whole symposia had been devoted to just that issue. Julia had stopped accepting invitations to deliver interplanetary keynote addresses to those.
Viktor said, “We are thousand kilometers from other vents. Yet it knows to do this.”
Daphne said, “And right away.”
Julia aimed her own microcam at the shape and carefully swept the area to take it all in. Was the mat glow stronger around the form? “This looks about the same as the other manifestations. It’ll probably stay here until we leave, as before.”
“The entire planet is connected?” Daphne asked. “How?”
“With these glows?” Viktor answered, not moving, just watching the shape. “Or chemical signals? Or—notice those seams of iron in the walls? Conducts electricity pretty well.”
One of the crewmen asked, “Was this what it was like when it…killed those two?”
Viktor said, “Was, yes. We never knew what happened, and has not happened again. Maybe was holding them, feeling all over them. Had covered some of their suits. Maybe to find out what they were. Anybody’s guess.”
Julia said, “Enough. Time to get back to sampling.” Then she sent a private comm to Viktor. “What was that about the iron?”
He came closer, so she could see his grin. “You told me way back, in your minilectures, ’member? First sign of life in fossil record was iron oxides, locking up the oxy that the first life breathed out.”
“So those layers—” She waved a gloved hand at the bloodred seams that ringed the cavern, and which the mat species conspicuously did not cover. “You think they’re evidence of the early origin of life here?”
“A side issue. I think like engineer. Occurs to me, how to send information from Vent A to here? Chemicals, hard to send so far. Glow—like relay stations through thousand kilometers of caves? Hard. No. But wait—” Viktor’s eyebrows lifted. “Layers of iron conduct electri
city. Send signals through them, you have global network built into planet.”
She blinked. “You never mentioned this before.”
“Never thought of it before—until just now.”
“Um. If the geologists work on it—”
“No need geologists. Already have the magnetic data, right? I showed you. Something funny about this vent, right in middle—yes, look.”
She followed his pointing finger. The Marsmat definitely clumped close to the seams, without covering them. And the mat was thicker here than she had seen in any vent so far. “How’s this explain your data? Big, long-pulse electromagnetic waves?”
Viktor shrugged—visibly, despite the suit. “Not sure. When don’t know, do experiment.”
“Huh? What?”
“We pulsed the pressure flaps, to open. Use same capacitor on those iron layers”—he gestured enthusiastically—“see what happens.”
“Uh, now?” Descents were elaborately planned nowadays, and this had not been discussed.
“We have oxy. Others, crew, are doing routine work. Let’s.”
She eyed him skeptically. She loved this guy, but he was sometimes crazed. He gave her the big, broad grin, and she laughed. Maybe he was just being male; testosterone seemed to drive guys onward.
They got it rigged surprisingly quickly. Viktor was never happier than when he was tinkering, trying something new. Come to think of it, so was she. They attached long black shielded leads to two nearby strata, only a few meters away. Viktor drilled short holes into the stone and sank stub contacts into them. She suspected he had thought of this experiment before, else why bring just the right gear? But let it go. The red bands were of some basaltic iron-oxide-rich layers, probably over 3 billion years old—or so said one of the team, the geo guy.
Following protocol, Julia alerted Gusev about what they were trying. Gusev objected right away and pointed out that none of this had even been discussed in preplanning meetings. She told them they were going to do it, anyway. The Gusev operations officer—the OO, whose always-seeing-trouble motto was “oh-oh”—started sputtering.
Viktor called out on their comm line that ran up the monofilament to the winch. Reception was good, another vast improvement over the relay system in the first expedition. He went through Expedition Control and alerted the satellite superintendent to focus their orbiting arrays on the vent area. Those had originally picked up the odd low-frequency emissions during a routine orbital scan of the whole planet. Again objections. “Now Gusev acts like Earthside,” Viktor said, grimacing.
Julia nodded, having fun. “Everything in triplicate.” More like playing hooky from school than research, yes.
Viktor told them to just do it. Then he turned the capacitor system voltage to the max. Daphne asked why. “Big losses in strata, resistive load, have to overcome. Prob’ly won’t work. Get nothing. Still—” and he closed the switch.
No drama. Some sparking for a second at the lower connection, then nothing but the hum of the electromotor discharge. Viktor kept it on for ten seconds, off for five, on for ten, then started a more complex pattern.
“What’s the point of this pulse pattern?” Julia asked.
“Just trying things.”
“You really hadn’t thought of this before, had you?”
He grinned, lines crinkling deeply around his eyes. “You always say I’m tinkerer. So I do.”
He kept this up for minutes, watching the pulser readouts intently, and they got a heads-up call from the OO. Julia was off checking on the team, and when she came back over to his “experiment,” Viktor said, “Orbital low-frequency antenna is picking up emission. From here.”
Julia felt a thrill, plus confusion. “Why? What’s going on?”
“Stimulate a system maybe.”
Julia frowned. “Some sort of—what?”
A team member said over comm, “How about some kind of induced resonance?”
Julia had no idea what that meant. Viktor said carefully, “More likely, somebody answering.”
It took a moment for her to get her head around the idea. Viktor started switching the settings on the pulser. “I’ll run a sequence, move around the parameter space,” he muttered to her. She could not keep up with his moving hands, the readings for volts and amps. “System has high inductance.”
“Which means?”
“Responds slowly. So I go to longer pulses, see what high voltage gets us.”
He held the pulser to thirty-second sine waves. Minutes passed. The OO called through: higher emissions from the satellite antenna, also now in thirty-second waves. “Is echoing,” Viktor said triumphantly.
“What’s echoing?” Julia asked. “Do you think the mat has some capacity to—”
Crackling came from the stub contacts. Julia looked toward them and saw some vapor steaming out from the rock. “What?”
Viktor quickly turned down both volts and amps. “Funny. We are not putting much power through—”
The crackling got louder. Sparks at the contacts.
“Breakdown voltage?” Viktor asked, staring at the vapor now boiling from the contacts. “Our pulser, we’re not near that level. Must be coming in.”
Julia heard a humming from the capacitor. Green sparks jumped out from the iron seam. “What’s—” Then it exploded.
5.
THE STROMATOLITE EMPIRE
BRINGING VIKTOR UP had taken forever, like hours ticking in the back of her mind. Julia had lost it once, shouting at them, pulling at his harness to get it right, trying to be everywhere at once. Literally—she ran up beside him on the monofilament, holding on to the yoke and hanging beside him to see that the pressure seals on his wounds did not come off or start to leak.
Early on, she had popped one of her emergency pills, called blue devils by the crew. Hers were custom-designed and kicked in within a minute. She ordered the rest of the team to follow suit and was surprised to find that they already had. Way ahead of me…
It was hard treating injuries inside a suit. The only thing to do was to apply pressure wraps around it and seal off the fluid seepage through the woven skinsuit. Still, blood oozed through. Somehow. She spent the whole ascent tending to him, getting them around rocky obstructions, calling to Gusev for help when his shoulder wound opened and started spattering blood onto her visor.
It sprayed from the pressure differential, not because he was suddenly blowing an artery. She learned that only minutes later, of course—no help when the blood spattered on her visor and helmet and she could not see much, then smeared it trying to clear her field of view…and she panicked. Flat out panicked, no apologies, just plain losing it in the middle of a dark vertical cavern with only her to look after him.
He was unconscious, thank God, and could not hear her frantic panting, her spitting-mad swearing. She had clicked off her comm, anyway, out of pure carelessness, a clumsy amateur error.
Only her training saved her, and maybe him. She moved quickly. Halfway up, leveraging him around a tricky turn, she realized that she was calm again. And though she was fretting below the surface, on top she was alert, quick, crisp. The blue devil at work. But even it couldn’t stop her from worrying.
The trouble with doing in-suit medical was you couldn’t see more than the patient’s face, or the wound, couldn’t do any diagnostics much beyond blood pressure and pulse rate—which were visible on the suit backpack readout. Plus you were fighting the damned vacuum all the way. Slapping biomed patches on, and then self-sealants, was just about all anyone could do.
As they came over the lip of the vent, residual moisture on their suits froze to rime and fell as a dusting of snow. The flakes fumed away within seconds, but Julia lost her hold on Viktor and he spun out over the mouth and groaned. She cursed herself and let the others secure him. She felt exhausted, heart hammering. They got Viktor into the rover at last.
They split up into the four who would remain to finish the descent research and the four who would fly Viktor back. Vaqu
abal knew plenty more medical than Julia, so he did most of the work on Viktor, right after liftoff.
Three wounds, all bloody, seeping. Blood pressure low, unconscious, heart rate rapid, and Viktor’s eyes jerked alarmingly behind his eyelids. Vaquabal moved with assurance. Julia handed him things from med-stores and did not have nearly enough to do, so she fidgeted and checked the med display screens, most of them unintelligible. Just before they landed, Vaquabal said, “He’s stable. I will do the surgery.”
“It’s necessary?”
“We must dig out bits of shredded suit and capacitor.”
“How far in?”
“Not far, I think.” Suddenly he beamed. “He is in no real danger now, you know.”
She made herself take a long breath. “No, I didn’t.”
Despite Vaquabal, the operation took a long time, and, worse, he would not allow her in the surgery. There were qualified nurses, after all, he argued. And she was tired and needed to lie down. All this was doubtless true, but none of such advice could she seem to make use of. Instead, she paced and her mind spun and she could not even make any conversation longer than a few sentences.
Earthside sent probing questions. Julia had gotten used to having minor incidents blown up into media fodder, but this was real and she wasn’t having any, thank you. The time delay was tens of minutes in this part of the orbital cycle, a season when Julia and Viktor avoided talking with Earth at all. One never quite got over the need to get some response back. And the solar storm was blowing gouts of plasma, flooding some of their links with static. The sun was going through rough weather, spewing out big, noisy torrents.
Julia sent terse messages to Viktor’s relatives, none of them close any longer, and hers as well. Then Axelrod got on the big screen.
“What was he doing?” Axelrod asked after the usual extending of concern.
“Sending pulsed electrical currents into an iron seam,” she began, and tried to explain, but she was not in the mood.
The Sunborn Page 6
