Hey—wait.
A lightning hunch, like the ones that had given Shanna a competitive edge during astronaut training, struck her, hard. Evolve? Who said they evolved here?
The implications of that were too much for now—she brushed them aside. But one thing she suddenly knew. The zand were metal-based life, almost like machines, but driven by a metallic chemistry. Nobody had foreseen such an exotic chemistry, blending metal’s liking for oxygen—like the iron rusts of Mars—and a chilly liquid chemistry of methane. Running low-temperature metabolism demanded rare elements. Churning chemistries had to be fed.
Out there in primordial Chaos and ancient Night, in tiny but sufficient quantities, lay the heavy metals and rare earths the zand needed in their food. They harvested these, Old One said, from the skystones.
But that raised a practical problem. Most skystones fell into the large methane sea, where at sunset they irrecoverably froze. Or else the skystones plowed into the cliffs and shadowy crevasses on the night-side. Into those frigid lands the awake zand never ventured; they slept through the coming of night. But the fallen skystones then sank into the liquefying ice fields at daybreak. The methane sea came from the ices and so consumed all but a tiny fraction of the vital skystones.
She pondered this exotic biology. If a zand was lucky enough to find a skystone at dawn, before the precious stuff sank into the melt—or if it could dive into the shallows, searching for treasure on the frozen shelf… But the chances of that had to be so slender. They had so little time.
Shanna reluctantly—for such a mass of knowledge remained untapped in that mind!—bid Old One farewell, through Wiseguy. Which even seemed to sense her mood, and said, “There will be other conversations.” Hope so.
7.
CRESCENDO
EARTHSIDE SENT THEM a blizzard of questions. Shanna tired of answering them. She had one of the crew, Chow-Lin, do a downlink transmission because he had the old NASA-style jargon down pat. Alphabet soup, with acronyms back-to-back. The message was that they had “contingency strategy worked out” to avoid “any serious danger,” though they were “operating out of” their “planned parameter space.” There was no “incremental creep in risk,” just their “preplanned” (she always wondered what “postplanned” might be) “spectrum of exploratory responses” to a “knowledge-acquisition-driven expedition” here on the “frontier of humanity.” She had always admired the way bureaucracies spontaneously produced leaden prose, blandly sliding from the mouths of people who absolutely believed everything they said.
Then they had an all-crew meeting. Around the table the rest of the crew looked grim, like a support group for hemorrhoid sufferers.
“We don’t understand,” Chow-Lin said. “The zand, the Darksiders—what’s it mean?”
“I want to compliment you on how you handled the public angle.” Shanna had taken management courses and remembered to open with a compliment, especially if one wanted to present people with plans they might very well dislike. “Quite adroit.”
But Chow-Lin wasn’t having any. “We don’t know what’s going on!” Jordin said quietly, “Research is when you don’t know what you’re doing.”
Mary Kay looked askance at her husband. “Or overdoing.”
Shanna asked her, “You think we stayed down there too long?”
Chow-Lin said stolidly, with a heavy-lidded blink, “You were hours over nominal.”
“Hey,” Jordin said, “nominal is just a guess, not an order.”
Chow-Lin was unmoved, lips twisted skeptically. “If you’d had a liftoff failure, there wasn’t time to get you up from the surface before you froze.”
“We made the discovery of the age,” Jordin said, still sounding reasonable but his eyes glinting. “That tends to concentrate the mind.”
Shanna recalled the old Samuel Johnson saying, something like, Nothing so concentrates the mind like a pending execution. She stayed silent while Jordin and Chow-Lin traded gibes, with Mary Kay slipping in worried remarks. Overture… Then even Uziki, the quiet one, chimed in. Discord… First Theme. Shanna recognized the tones, listening for the underlying feeling rather than surface content. They needed to get out their vexations, not about the danger of the first landing at all, but about being left out. Therapy time.
Now for Second Theme…
“Taking chances isn’t the same as exploration,” Chow-Lin was saying, so she countered, “What were you observing?”
Chow-Lin hesitated only a second, nodded to Uziki, who punched a command into one of the big wall display screens, which was at the moment showing surf breaking on a white beach. It flickered over to a 3-D diagram of the vicinity near Pluto, with Charon shown to the side. “We used radar backtracking of incoming masses, as discussed. There is a steady stream”—the screen showed orange dots curving in from farther out—“coming on nearly straight-falling orbits.” The dots followed yellow trajectory curves, approaching Pluto and slowing.
“Not a free infall, then,” Jordin said.
“No, in fact, there’s considerable slowing on the approach. Then—” The dots entered the thin Plutonian atmosphere, showing flaring trails.
“Aerobraking?” Mary Kay asked doubtfully.
Chow-Lin nodded. “Yeah—artificial as hell. Somebody’s dropping descent packages on the surface, and they’re moving slow enough to survive the impact.”
Mary Kay said, “Deliberately targeted, that’s clear—this stuff isn’t natural.”
Shanna wondered for a moment if she had lost her capacity for surprise. So much… She thought silently for a moment as the others discussed details, and then said slowly, “All those incoming arcs—they end on the nightside.”
Uziki said, “Yes, I noticed that, too. For some reason—”
Jordin said, “Even when their aerobraking trajectories wrap all the way around the planet, they end up coming down at night. Damn funny.”
Shanna made her leap. “Those are the Darksiders! The zand call them that because they land when the zand are asleep and most vulnerable.”
Chow-Lin sat back, face impassive. “Ummm, an hypothesis…”
“It can’t be an accident that the incoming prefer to land at night, when they can’t even see the landing zone very well,” Jordin said. “Hey, maybe that’s why we found pieces of them on the beach—some of them hit too hard and break up.”
“Maybe a Darkside landing is tied to the biology,” Mary Kay ventured, looking at Shanna—
Who shrugged. “Could be. Night’s pretty damned cold—even for Pluto. All I know from the Old One translations is that the zand are getting decimated by something called the Darksiders. If they’re to be believed—and why not?—it’s an ongoing genocide.”
Chow-Lin frowned, fidgeting with a pen. “With the strings being pulled by—”
“Something farther out—but what?”
Uziki said to the screen, “Full outview.” The screen scale expanded until Pluto was a small circle, then a dot. The infalling lines in yellow drew together, making a long, slightly curved band. The scale continued to expand but the yellow just kept going, until—“That’s as far as we can track with any resolution.”
“Wow,” Jordin said. “They’re from really far out.”
“No assignable origin,” Chow-Lin said crisply. “But their orbits point back to a big ice body.” On-screen, a tiny dot got labeled: X. “Got it in the low infrared. It’s an incredibly cold place—but warmer than anything else out here, except Pluto.”
“How could anything live there?” Mary Kay asked.
“How can the zand?” Jordin countered. “No question, this is low-temperature chemistry we haven’t a clue about.”
“There’s got to be something more.” Shanna peered off into nowhere. “Pluto’s is an ecology that’s thin, far too sparse. No microbes in the soil—I just ran the chem check and micron-level analysis. Now, that’s just plain impossible. Biology builds up from the basic building blocks. Here there are none. Just a few organi
sms and a spotty food supply. No pyramid of life, just a few big fauna sitting atop a set of stilts.”
“So…” Now Mary Kay looked both skeptical and puzzled. “We’re missing something.”
“Or else our whole comprehension of biology is wrong. You don’t build up big creatures without a huge investment in processes, chem, metabolism…” Shanna stopped, frustrated, but knowing what to do next.
“Let’s leave it to the biologists Earthside,” Mary Kay said. “We’re explorers, not theory guys.”
“Right, explorers.” Shanna took a deep breath. “So let’s explore. I say we go down there and see what the Darksiders are.”
“Hey, no,” Chow-Lin said automatically. “Another descent so soon? I strongly—”
“We need to get the full story here,” Jordin said. “Not go running home with more questions than answers. We haven’t got a clue what is driving Pluto’s warm-up, and that is our mission.”
This was true, but Chow-Lin’s expression told them that the argument cut no ice with him. He said, “I think we’ve gone off the deep end here.”
Mary Kay, showing some grit in her narrow-eyed expression, said, “We’re at the deep end—the borderland of the solar system. It took a lot of money to put us here, and—”
“You’re going to interfere in an intelligent alien society, don’t you realize that?” Chow-Lin said.
“We already have,” said Uziki, who usually confined herself to computers and the robots. She seldom said anything about nonengineering matters, but Shanna was glad to have her come forward. “They’re part of the problem we came to solve, right? So we have to understand them.”
“We can’t just blunder—”
“Do I hear echoes of the Prime Directive here?” Shanna said, absolutely straight, letting the words do all the work that a sarcastic tone would have. Chow-Lin was a fan of an ancient TV show, one she had watched a few times. She knew just enough to make fun of it.
Chow-Lin said guardedly, “Well, we do have to follow some code.”
“Look,” Jordin said reasonably, “we don’t have protocols from ISA on this. So we’re free to deal with opportunities as they arise.”
“You want to go down there again?” Chow-Lin countered. “It’s dangerous.”
“Yeah, but that’s not the appeal,” Jordin said, only a slight upturn at the corner of his mouth showing that this was ironic.
“We don’t have permission,” Chow-Lin began. “I’ll enter an objection—”
“No, you won’t, mister,” Shanna said mildly. “That’s an order.”
She had carefully chosen the moment to invoke her authority. On long missions crew saw their captain sharing the scut work, doing her clothes in the washer, waking up after a bad night’s sleep—and soon enough, she didn’t look like a voice of authority anymore. But that didn’t mean the mission could do without one. It was a matter of knowing when to remind them, a lesson learned through the decades on Mars and passed on.
Chow-Lin opened his mouth to say something, then slowly closed it. He shook his head for a moment, biting his lip, and Shanna thought she would have to deal with outright insurrection. But no; he looked down, eyes boring into the black tabletop, and said nothing.
Into the silence Jordin said casually, “Y’know, we could use a systems modification. For…defense.”
Shanna said, “What?”
“If the Darksiders are bent on taking down the zand, maybe they’ll come after us, too.”
The crew rustled uneasily. Shanna hadn’t thought of this possibility, and she could tell they hadn’t, either. “So how do we…?”
“I’ll modify the chem launch sequence. Cook up a little surprise just in case.”
Chow-Lin said, “That’s entirely uncalled-for. Not only do we interfere with a sentient alien form, we plan an action against it!”
“Technically,” Jordin said, “the Darksiders are probably the second sentient form here.”
This gave Shanna an opening to help firmly defuse the confrontation. “We just don’t know—and that’s why we’re going.”
She ended the meeting, setting another for the next day.
That gave time for the rest of the crew to argue among themselves, of course. Over the next few hours she spoke privately to several of them and massaged the social angles.
The Kares, Jordin and Mary Kay, were resolutely reasonable. They took it upon themselves to make the diplomatic arguments that Shanna could not, without appearing weak. They had discovered so much already, yes. The surface was treacherous, yes. The Darkside even more so. Yes. So why go? Because it was their job, and anyway, the captain said so.
It took two days of talk and one more of fending off Earthside’s alarm. But she went—with Jordin, again. Earthside wanted to use their experience.
Shanna knew very little out here, but one thing she knew for sure: the zand were worth protecting. What was that saying? The fox knows many things, the hedgehog one big thing. Okay, she was a hedgehog.
Darkside beckoned. She was going to become a meteor miner. Crescendo.
8.
DOWN IN THE DARK
ISA PLUTO DAILY SUMMARY
GMT 0940, Thursday, 12 May 2044
All hands on station:
Descent to Pluto Surface
Descent Crew: Axelrod, Kare, J.
State of Ship
Data systems recycle and purge complete
Thermography and ultrasound integrity check completed 0630 on lander by J. Kare; ready to deploy
Consumables 38 percent above nominal usage rate
Power generation rate 99.67 BOL
Uplink rate maximum of IRSC
Orbital parameters within profile
Five-Day Outlook Summary
Tuesday, GMT 0900: Lander profiling and resupply
Wednesday, GMT 1230: Reactor reshipping by robot teams commences—three-day lining tests and monitoring SUBT
Thursday, GMT 10.30: Systems test of optical and infrared sensing
Friday, GMT 1100: Wiseguy update and Earthside UBK
Saturday, GMT 0300: Mechanicals review and monitor reboot
Crew Q&A:
Where to begin, guys?
Quote for the Day: “Details Are Our Business”
The big lander roared as it descended on its steam plume toward Pluto’s nighted surface. They took it cautiously, through step-down orbits, pausing at each one to assess the surface and let the detectors have their feeding time.
Shanna watched somberly, her chair warming her against the seeping cold here in the planet’s shadow. She loved the view this low, skimming. Astronomy’s geometries were the essence of smooth beauties—arcs and ellipses, crescents and circles, orbs round and fat in their perpetual, serene dance. This deep range of pockmarked worlds held steep, chiseled mountains that had endured longer than whole continents on Earth. She was gaining now a sense of the deep reservoir of time sleeping out here.
But perhaps that sleep was over. The astronomers were used to seeing this deep freeze as a tabula rasa, unwritten upon since the solar system’s creation, not as a dynamic realm. But now they knew otherwise.
Their nominal mission was a second sampling of the surface, this time on the nightside. Mission goal: to measure atmospheric changes as night came on, and to search for debris from the mysterious incoming orange packages—the Darksiders, presumably. Or so she had argued to ISA; but, in fact, she was seeking the meaning of this place—how it really worked. Too many things didn’t add up.
“Getting something visible ahead,” Jordin sent on comm.
“I see it—down below the crescent,” she answered.
“Not a reflection of a star, either. Too bright.”
Lights. Brimming yellow dots on the upcoming horizon. Not in the sky; on the ice. A prickly coldness ran through her. In the intense cold below they would have much less time on the surface. ISA didn’t want them to do any EVA unless absolutely necessary.
Shanna wished she had questioned Ol
d One more fully before charging off this way. The fox knows many things… Could the zand tribal epic, of the great raid from Darkside in the distant past, be true?
But there couldn’t, strictly speaking, be any Darksiders. All the planet was exposed to the sun in due course as it rotated. Surely “Darksiders” could come out in the zand’s own territory after nightfall, right? And day-living borers and flappers and the zand could flourish on “Darkside” when it faced the sun.
Confusing. Maybe a huge mistake in Wiseguy’s interpretation. She fretted. Then something like an answer came. As they drove down farther into the night, the reactor in their belly humming and thrusting, a great, sickly greenish yellow arc rose up before her, blotting out stars.
“Wow!” And just maybe she had part of her puzzle.
Ah. Charon was synchronous in its orbit—the fat gray moon hung perpetually above this area. When the twin worlds swung around into sunlight, Charon—so aptly named after the ferryman of Hades—cast a large shadow, eclipsing the tiny sun. Lightgiver would give even less warmth here than on the opposite hemisphere. This side of Pluto was forever unfavored. It would be far chillier. Even at high noon here methane snow would come drifting down. There was a Darkside, after all.
The sun was still four hundred times brighter than moonlight on Earth, she remembered from one of the briefings. Enough to read a newspaper by, but without much atmosphere, all shadows were sharp, hard.
Okay, she thought, listening to Jordin bring them down to the preselected landing zone—not far from the odd lights, she noted. The Darksiders prefer to come in out of the night and land in the coldest portion of the planet. Now think like a biologist.
Life filled its appropriate ecological niches, as Darwin had seen in the Galapagos long ago. One-half of Pluto was home for the zand; the other was the domain of the “Darksiders.”
No, damn it! That wouldn’t work. She did remember some of the astro briefings she’d had, after all. Viewed from Pluto, Charon had only started regularly eclipsing the sun within the past half century. The astro boys had nailed it finally in 2029, when both the satellite’s orbit and the planet’s axis had begun to drift. Big surprise. The orbital mechanics had changed.
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