Dancing with Eternity

by John Patrick Lowrie

  I stopped. It was so illegal to land on Brainard’s Planet that I didn’t even know what they did to you if you were insane enough to try it. They didn’t even really need to enforce it. No one wanted to go there. If traffic control sensed you so much as dropping a probe into the atmosphere ... I didn’t know. Maybe you could get research waivers, or something.

  But I knew what Steel was going to say next.

  “We didn’t have to land.”

  The skyhook. “Traffic control doesn’t know about your little shuttle system.”

  She didn’t smile at me. “No.”

  “They can’t pick it up on their scanners?”

  “I suppose they could if they were looking for anything that even resembled a skyhook, but they aren’t. No one has used them for over fifteen hundred years. You really shook me when you knew what they were. They might as well scan for internal combustion engines, or covered wagons.”

  “They can’t see a tether a thousand klicks long?” I asked.

  “It’s less than a tenth of a meter wide. The farther it is from the ship the faster it moves. It’s basically made of diamond. It’s transparent for all intents and purposes. Transparent to visible light, transparent to radar. If it occasionally happens to occult a star, what will they look for? Where will they look? It doesn’t move like anything they’re looking for.”

  “And they can’t sense what you’re doing through the net?”

  “We’re not on the net.”

  Of course.

  I didn’t know why I was asking all this stuff anyway, the answers were rendered moot by Drake’s condition. He had the plague. Steel had every reason to tell me she hadn’t been to Brainard’s Planet if she had; she had no possible reason to tell me she had been if she hadn’t.

  “But why?” I asked.

  “Why what?”

  “Why the hell was he on Brainard’s Planet to begin with?” I was filling with the surge of anger you get when you see someone hurt by stupidity or negligence. It’s too late to prevent it, so you try to undo it by proving it was too stupid to have happened in the first place.

  Steel didn’t rise to my implied condemnation. She sat quietly for a moment, then picked up her glass again and looked at it. The muscles in her throat worked. I got ready for the lie. Then I decided to preempt it by asking something she might answer.

  “Are we going back there?”

  She looked me in the eye. Sadness, weariness and determination. “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  Another pause. It lengthened until she got up and walked to the window.

  I was oscillating between rage, incredulity and panic. I don’t think I yelled at her, but I might have: “You know what happened to the Brainard expedition. You have to.”

  “Yes.”

  “You know what happened to Elysium after they limped back to it.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “They had to sterilize the whole planet. Five hundred million people. Gone. Just like that. Plants. Animals. Everything.”

  “It was horrible.”

  She wasn’t looking at me. She had her back to me, staring out the window. Golgotha’s mass bulged hugely toward us, getting nearer and nearer.

  “It didn’t stop there,” I drove on, desperate to prove to her and myself that this wasn’t happening. “Paraiso: gone before they figured out what was happening. Cielo: gone. Who knows how many more would have been obliterated if they hadn’t let those planets die in quarantine.”

  “I was alive then. I remember.”

  I didn’t recall standing up, but I was on my feet. “Almost two billion people.” I didn’t know what else to say.

  She turned back to me. She looked at me as though she didn’t want to be separate from me. “You’ve met my crew,” she said.

  “What?” I didn’t know where she was taking me next, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to go.

  “My crew,” she repeated. “You’ve met them, worked with them.”

  “I’ve worked with everyone but Drake.” The anger was still there. “He didn’t seem to be up to doing much.”

  “They’re a good crew,” she continued. “They’re not insane. Or stupid. Or easily duped.”

  I thought about them. Marcus, Yuri, Alice, Archie. None of them were brainwashed or spineless or even particularly easy to get along with. Maybe Jemal. I hadn’t met Tamika yet. “Yeah, okay. I think I see what you’re getting at.”

  “Do you think they would go along with something like this if they didn’t think there was a very good reason for it?”

  “Okay, okay,” I sat down again, “I see your point. But I haven’t heard any ‘very good reason’ yet.” I was still breathing hard.

  She sat down across from me. “You’ve been through a pretty big shock,” she said. She gazed into my eyes for a moment, then covered my hand with hers. Chills ran up my arm. “Do you think you’re ready to listen?” she asked.

  The question was: was I insane or stupid or easily duped? I withdrew my hand from under hers, which caused her hand to drop down on my knee where my hand had been. It didn’t help.

  She sensed my discomfort and pulled away, sitting back in her chair. “Okay,” I croaked, “let’s hear it.”

  She looked at me for a long time. Then, “I am a good person.”

  I looked back at her. “Sometimes that isn’t enough,” I replied.

  She sighed. Then she started again. “The potential pharmaceutical resources contained in an entirely alien biosphere are immense. Almost beyond imagining. Brainard realized this when he first discovered it.”

  “A fat freaking lot of good it did him. Or anyone else.”

  “It’s been over five centuries. We’ve learned a great deal since then.”

  “ ‘A great deal.’ ” I still couldn’t believe I was having this conversation. “Your education doesn’t appear to have helped Drake any.”

  “We tried to plan for every contingency.” She looked at her perfect fingernails. “We’ll do better next time.”

  “What the hell happened?”

  The muscles in her throat worked again. Okay, I thought, here it comes. “His environmental suit failed.”

  “Failed,” I echoed. I was watching her like a man whose life depended on it.

  “Yuri analyzed it in quarantine. The upper gasket in the left knee joint had a microscopic pin hole in it.” There were no joints in the suits we had worn up to the ship, so I assumed she was talking about different ones. I said as much.

  “No, no,” she responded. “Our E-suits are much heavier. Fully armored.”

  “And you’re saying you missed this flaw in Drake’s?”

  “No. His suit integrity was intact when he left the ship.”

  I waited. So did she.

  “What happened?” I was determined to get the whole story out of her, even though I knew, even then, that she’d get me to believe I had it whenever she thought I knew enough.

  “He was involved in an incident with one of the natives.”

  Oh, this was getting better and better. “You mean he was attacked?”

  She ran her finger around the rim of her glass. “I always think it’s a mistake to impart human emotions and motives to the actions of a species we don’t fully understand.”

  “ ‘Don’t fully understand.’ ” Was she nuts? Brainard had been totally unable to establish any kind of contact with them, even though the dominant species seemed to have a complex social structure, something that might have been kind of like an economy, the ability to work with metals, even things that Brainard was convinced were religious artifacts. I remembered something my father had said when I was about fifteen. The last time I’d thought about it was when Brainard had been sending back his first frustrated reports. Eleven hundred years earlier my father had been reading about the SETI program being run at the radio installation on Iapetus, and I’d just wrecked the family rover after he’d told me not to drive it. He said: “How can we expect to be able to communicate with
alien civilizations when we can’t even talk to our own children?” I wondered again what he would have thought of Brainard’s expedition.

  “Well, we understand them a lot better than Brainard did,” Steel said. “You know that both Draco and the Pleiades have had remote sensors in orbit around the planet for the last five hundred years?”

  Every once in a while something would be published on the net when they thought they’d come up with some significant part of the puzzle, but it always turned out to be not very significant. “Yeah, I know,” I said, “Did they actually get something useful?”

  “Some things that turned out to be useful,” she looked me in the eye, “and some that might potentially be revolutionary.”

  I could smell it then. Money. Whatever Steel was after was going to translate into wealth, one way or another. It didn’t make me happy. “You think it’s going to be worth it?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  I wanted to be careful how I phrased what I was going to say next. She had me at a tremendous disadvantage. I was on her ship and I wasn’t on the net. I spoke quietly and slowly. “There is a human being in sick bay right now who at one time had a good shot at living—if not forever, then a very, very long time. No one knows how long.” Swirling bands of Golgotha’s stormy atmosphere slid urgently past the windows behind her. “It doesn’t look like he’s going to do that now.”

  Unexpected tears filled her eyes, but her gaze didn’t waver. “I know,” she said, “We thought we had a safe system. We—we knew how Brainard’s party got infected—”

  “How?” That had been the problem. No one could figure out how the plague had started, how it had spread. Brainard had taken all the usual quarantine precautions; it hadn’t seemed to make any difference. No one even knew what the plague was, except that it was horribly, horribly lethal.

  “It’s not really an infection, the way we think of infections.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “I—let me tell you what we know.” Her countenance wasn’t pleading. I don’t know what it was. Imploring, I guess. “What we think we know,” she amended.

  The south temperate band of Golgotha’s atmosphere filled the windows with creamy whorls and eddies. We were close enough now that individual cloud formations could be seen climbing above darker layers below. Lightning flashed in thunderheads that were torn asunder by titanic winds.

  I listened.

  She stood up again and paced slowly around the room as she spoke, only occasionally making eye contact with me: “We don’t think there’s an actual virus or bacillus involved. There seems to be a substance excreted by certain life forms—I won’t call them animals; we’re not sure how to classify them yet—that they use to communicate with each other, if that’s the right term. It seems to affect communal activity in the colonies, anyway.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, we’re not sure, but their albedo changes right before they move the colonies. They get shinier, like they’re covered with sweat, or slime. It’s difficult to get good data when you have to observe them from orbit.”

  “How do you know they’re communicating?” Storms flashed past till we crossed the terminator into darkness. The lighting on her face changed when we did. Blue electricity flickered and raced across the black face of the gas giant.

  “We’re not certain, but there are definite patterns of interaction that seem to correspond closely to the level of reflectivity on their skin. We assume they’re communicating. But that’s not what’s important.” She paused. “This substance seems to be able to migrate through metals, ceramics, silicates, even many plastics without altering its chemical structure, or if it does alter, it changes back once it’s through. That’s why we think they’re using it as some sort of signaling mechanism. We’ve seen individuals separated by an iron dike appear to ‘talk’ to each other this way. We’re pretty sure it’s this substance that caused the plague.”

  “Why? I mean, how do you know?”

  She turned and looked at me, “Well, for one thing, I’m standing here talking to you.”

  “You’ve been on the surface, too?”

  “All of us have. All except Marcus. He stayed on the ship to operate the skyhook.”

  I felt like I’d just dived into a toxic waste dump. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. “I suppose,” I said, my mouth suddenly dry, “if you were contagious it would already be too late.”

  “If what we think is right, it doesn’t really spread by contagion. It’s not really a disease.”

  “I’m sure that will comfort me as I’m decomposing.”

  She smiled at me. “You’re safe. If we had been wrong, we’d all look like Drake by now. Our E-suits work; we know they do. It’s just that Drake’s suit was compromised.”

  “How was it compromised?” I wasn’t really feeling any better. I could feel my eyes rotting, my skin falling off my tortured flesh.

  Her eyes focused on the past—a sad, unchangeable past. “It was so strange, and it happened so quickly. They’re really magnificent creatures, they move with a ponderous grace that is almost like dancing ... They don’t seem to notice us at all, or they didn’t. It’s so hard; we don’t know what motivates them. Why they do what they do.” A fuzzy, orange arc was spreading out behind her as we approached the dawn. “Drake wasn’t behaving in any way that we thought was threatening. He was just walking along a trail, not on point, not in the rear, just walking along. One of the creatures was grazing to our right, about five meters off. We really didn’t think anything about it. We’d been much closer to them before and they hadn’t reacted at all.” She watched Prime rise over thick, endless tempests. “A—a pseudopod caught Drake’s leg. We didn’t even see it, we just saw him trip and fall down. We didn’t know they could extend them so fast. We didn’t think they did anything fast.” Prime’s light played over her body as it rose. “It wouldn’t let go. We beat on it, tried to pry it loose, anything we could think of. Then, for no apparent reason, it did. It retracted without bothering any of the rest of us. The creature just went on grazing as though nothing had happened.” Boiling turbulence receded: clouds became weather systems became counter-rotating bands of rust and cream.

  “That doesn’t—How did—?” I faltered.

  “We think it was a combination of the torque applied to the knee and a dilute hydrochloric acid that the pseudopod seems to have excreted.” She stared out the window. “We tried to plan for every contingency. We’d just never seen that sort of activity before.”

  “The rest of your suits—” I didn’t want to finish the question.

  “There was some minor erosion on our gloves and forearm plates, nothing too deep. It was the duration of the contact and the tortional stress to the gasket that caused it to fail. Drake’s alarm went off as soon as his suit was holed. We got back up to the ship ... as soon as possible. We hoped we might be able to save him, but he got sick soon after we started to freewheel.”

  “How did you keep it from spreading?” I still felt like it was too late to be asking anything. I couldn’t believe they’d been successful at containing it. No one had before.

  “Once we knew how to make the E-suits, developing quarantine procedures and facilities was relatively easy.” She turned to me and allowed herself a smile, “Relatively.”

  I was at an experiential impasse. I didn’t know what to believe. I was almost certain that she wasn’t telling me everything, and yet Drake was sick and everyone else wasn’t. It wasn’t impossible that Steel had come up with a way to deal with the plague, but on the other hand, why ask me to meet her in her private quarters? Wearing a slinky dressing gown? I just had a feeling that her technique in dealing with the plague wasn’t nearly as sophisticated as her technique in dealing with me.

  “All right,” I said, “We’ve been talking for a while now. Have you come up with a good story to tell me about why you were there in the first place?”

  She smiled at me again. Like she�
��d been caught. And she liked it. It made me feel very powerful, and that made me feel utterly defenseless. She didn’t press her advantage. She didn’t sit down next to me or casually brush up against me or run her fingers through her mane or stretch or any number of things that she could have done. She was very, very good.

  She pinned me in her emerald gaze. “Brainard’s Planet has been under observation for over five centuries,” she said. “We think their life-spans may be longer than that.” She paused to let it sink in.

  I stared into her eyes and tried to put it together. Something ‘revolutionary,’ she had said. Having to do with pharmaceuticals. And long life spans. That would make a whole lot of money.

  What was she driving at? We already had long life spans, unlimited life spans, maybe. We had to re-boot every eighty years or so, but so what? It got the job done. People had tried various ways to lengthen the time between re-boots, and we had, to a certain extent. They’d tried splicing genetic material from long-lived species into the human genome. It hadn’t worked. I said, “So what? Joshua trees have long life-spans, so do Sequoias—”

  “Trees don’t have central nervous systems.”

  I chewed that over for a while. I thought of the possible ramifications. And the ramifications of those ramifications. And the ramifications of those.

  I was beginning to get the picture.

  Chapter 10

  I made my way back to the common room. It was down one deck, in crew quarters. Our meeting had ended with several things unresolved, the main one being whether or not I wanted to continue to be part of this venture. I now understood the need for airtight security. Besides the flagrant illegality of visiting the surface of Brainard’s Planet, there was the matter of patents. How many substances could be mined from the biosphere if Steel really had come up with a workable system for dealing with the plague? Pharmaceuticals and genetic engineering had completely changed the shape of the economy in the first half of the third millennium, had changed the nature of human life from a closed curve to an open-ended arc. What were the possibilities in harvesting a completely independent line of evolution?