Dancing with Eternity

by John Patrick Lowrie

  Would any of it be useful at all? There was no way to know without going in and getting samples. All of the things Brainard had collected had been lost in the plague.

  But what if something useful was found? I thought about what Steel had implied: sentient beings on Brainard’s Planet had central nervous systems that lasted centuries, not decades. Could their genetic material be spliced with ours? Did they have genetic material? Did they have cells? I wanted to find out.

  But if we could use what we found there, if we could extend the useful life of a human brain to more than five centuries, what would that mean? I thought of Matessa and the rest of the residents of Kindu, and all the people everywhere that had to go in and out of the trades to be able to afford re-booting. What if they only had to ’boot every half-millennium instead of every six to ten decades? They’d have five centuries to save up for the operation instead of less than one.

  They wouldn’t have to go into the trades anymore.

  How would the people at Planetary Tectonics feel about that? And Interstellar Biosphere and Relativity/SimulComm and all the rest of the corps? Their labor pool would evaporate.

  VENGEANCE! rang in my head with a surge of adrenaline that made me pause at the hatch into the common room. I needed to be careful. I’d stumbled into something that might change the future of humanity as profoundly as re-booting had. It could shift the balance of power from the suits to the workers in a way that no one I knew had anticipated, even in their wildest extrapolations.

  This could get really ugly.

  I needed to remember that it had nothing to do with the loss of my wife. She’d been gone for over a millennium. Steel didn’t know how that had gone down. It wasn’t why she was on this mission. She had her own motivations— maybe humanitarian, maybe profit oriented, I didn’t know— but it had nothing to do with me.

  In my heart, though, it had everything to do with the dull ache of loss and self-doubt and recrimination that I had lived with for all these centuries. I needed to be very careful. I needed to check things out very thoroughly. I needed more information.

  In order to get it I needed to get back on the net. Or at least onto Steel’s system. I had to do that anyway. Steel had sent me down to find Archie and get connected so I could plug into the engine after we re-fueled. Archie was sitting at a table in the common room.

  “Say, Archie.” She looked up at me. Her features were clean and sculpted. Her eyes were large, dark, and incredibly tired. I thought: She’s losing a patient. How long had it been since anyone had lost a patient? Her loss gave her a profound beauty. I almost didn’t speak, but then I did. “Steel wants you to connect me. Do you have time to do that now?” I asked.

  “Sure,” she said. She looked into a mug of something, tea, maybe, that was in her hand, put it down on the table, then pushed back her chair. “We’ll have to go back up to medical.”

  “Uh, you can finish your drink,” I said.

  “What makes you think so?” She got up and walked toward the hatch. I followed her, looking for something to say.

  What I found was, “I’m sorry about Drake—”

  “We all are.” The tube hatch opened in front of her and she stepped in. I stepped in after her. “Medical,” she said, and the lift began to rise. Two decks up we stepped out and started down the corridor, the same corridor I’d helped carry Drake down earlier.

  We turned into the medical interface booth and I started to get nervous. I didn’t want to see Drake again. Even though I believed Steel’s quarantine methods worked, believed that the rest of the crew were confident they worked, in my gut I could feel the ferocity of the disease. No one who was alive then, who hadn’t zeroed out since then, felt anything but horror about the plague. To be this close to it was like being naked in a swarm of angry bees. I tried to get smaller, to give the disease less of a target.

  To my relief Archie had turned off the main lights in the medical bay. The dim red glow of the night watch lamps was all that drifted through the observation window. They reminded me how tired I was. Even though we’d left Vesper a few hours after dawn we’d been up more than an entire shift.

  Archie stopped and checked on her patient, noting the readouts on her board and then looking through the glass. Almost against my will I followed her gaze into the medical bay. Drake’s pod was backlit, soft red refracted through plastic, forming a stygian halo around his silent form. His silhouette was blurry, as though the inner surface of his pod were coated with something translucent. I asked Archie about it.

  “That’s it,” she said. “As far as we’ve been able to tell, that’s what causes the plague.”

  A pointless fight-or-flight adrenaline rush raced up my thighs. “All that got in through one tiny pinhole?”

  She made a small adjustment to something, perhaps his pain medication. “No,” she said. She walked over to the net socket—I thought of it as the net socket although it only plugged in to Steel’s system. It was the standard recliner; all of the important parts were in the headrest.

  “No?” I asked.

  “Have a seat,” she said. I did. She gently pressed my head back into the headrest and turned to another control panel and readout. She called up a scan of my brain on the screen. I couldn’t see the bio-chip at the base of my medulla— it was far too small—but I was sure she could. She knew what to look for. “We don’t know too much about the stuff yet. It’s—” she glanced over at me, “very dangerous.” She looked back at the screen and zoomed in on my brain stem. “We can contain it now, but we haven’t developed a whole lot of tools to handle it.”

  “Steel told me it migrates right through most things.”

  “Mm.” She’d tapped into the bio-chip, and a full readout appeared in a box on the screen. “You were last updated January 4, 3895?”

  “That’s right,” I said, “On Scarpus.”

  “Mm. Just over a century ago.” She touched the control panel in a couple of places. “We’ll give you some new stuff. I’m sure Steel would want you to have it.” She touched the board once more and the electric zing! you get when you patch back in ran through my nervous system. For a second or two different digital matrices were superimposed over my view of the room, then my eyesight went back to normal. “That’s it,” she said as she turned back to me. “I think I’ll hit the sack.” She waited for me to precede her out of the booth.

  She was an absolute font of information. I wondered if she and Steel had gone to the same school, or if this was simply the way all doctors behaved. I decided to press a little further. “If all that goop didn’t get in through the pin hole, where did it come from?”

  “You want theories?” she asked. “All right, I’ll give you theories. Just be sure to come back in a few decades and I’ll give you some different theories.”

  I laughed. “I guess anything is better than nothing. I just, you know, if I’m going to be around this stuff, I’d like to know, um, anything ...”

  “Yes, I know what you mean.” We stepped into the lift. “Crew quarters.” We started to descend. “My best guess is that it contains at least a hundred and perhaps as many as five hundred different enzymes. One of those enzymes allows it to pass through our cell membranes. When it does, it seems to head directly for the cell’s lysosomes, where the cell stores many of its own enzymes. I’m not at all sure what happens next, but the end result is that the cell’s enzymes are altered to mimic the enzymes in the invading substance. Somewhere along about then the cell’s membrane falls apart, like someone poured acid on a balloon, and the cell explodes. Well, not explodes, really. It just loses its integrity and dies. But before it does it becomes a factory for the new enzymes, making enough to attack many more cells.”

  “Wow,” I said. The lift door opened and we walked out into the corridor. “You’ve seen all this? I mean, you’ve looked at it under a microscope or something?” We stopped outside the door to her quarters. She turned to me.

  “No. It’s a theory. If I could get the
stuff to stay on a slide long enough to look at it through a microscope without it migrating through the slide and the microscope and destroying me and everybody else, I would. We’ll figure out a way to do it, but the engineering is going to be tricky.” She opened her door. “What I know is: whenever this stuff comes into contact with biomass from a terrestrial ecosystem—that means us—tissue starts to degrade rapidly. As more tissue is destroyed more of this stuff shows up, even if the tissue has been isolated in a container that the stuff can’t migrate through.” She leaned against the door jamb. “But ‘stuff’ is such an unscientific word, don’t you think? I much prefer words like ‘enzyme’ and ‘lysosome.’ When I make up a scientific theory I hardly ever use the word ‘stuff.’ Polysyllables obfuscate a preponderant ignorance with so much more style and panache.”

  I smiled at her. Then I thought of something else. “How did you ever learn how to contain it?”

  “Trial and error. We kept sending little samples of biomass down to the surface in containers made in various ways. Eventually we started to get results.”

  “What was it that worked?” I asked.

  “You’d have to talk to Yuri about that,” she said. “It has to do with super-long chain polymers and grids of half-micron thick silver wires and random, non-repeating frequencies of alternating current. But he’s the genius who put it together. I wouldn’t presume to try to explain it.”

  “Well, thanks for telling me what you know.”

  “Any time,” she smiled back. “And now, unless you’re going to offer me some really excellent conversation or some really excellent sex, I think I’ll go log off for a while.”

  I laughed. “Yeah, sounds like a good idea.” I didn’t know if she was serious or not, but I still hadn’t recovered from Matessa, I had designs on the Captain, and I had work to do. As she turned away, I said, “Um, one more thing ...”

  She turned back. “Yes?”

  I tried to look through those dark wells of gritty weariness that masked and revealed her. “Do you know what Steel is trying to do on Brainard’s Planet?”

  She took a moment to answer. “I know what she has done.”

  Hmm. What did I want to ask her? Do you think she’s utterly insane? No. Do you think we have a chance of living through this? I didn’t really want to ask that either. How about: Do you think I’m a fool for being as attracted to her as I am? If she knew the answer to that one I probably didn’t want to hear it. Then, out of nowhere:

  “Was Drake a friend of yours?” Even though he was technically still with us, he’d certainly lost his perspective.

  She seemed to consider the language I had used, parsing the sentence for clues to my real meaning. “A friend,” she said, and I couldn’t tell if she was confirming or merely echoing, tasting the words to see if they were true.

  “It must be ...” I started. There were no words. Maybe there never had been, even centuries ago when people had talked about these things. “Do you think ...” Was this what I wanted to ask? “Do you think ...” Protocol closed my throat.

  “What?” She examined me. “Do I think it was a good idea to go to Brainard’s Planet?”

  Something like that. “Yes,” I said.

  It took her a little while to weigh her duty to Steel, to her profession, to a person she’d just met. “At this particular point in time—” She examined her hands, hands that were very capable but ultimately limited. “I wish it hadn’t cost so much.”

  The Lightdancer drove in toward Prime as I made my way to my quarters. I walked down the curving corridor reproving myself for not screwing up my testosterone level and responding to Archie’s implied request. I still wasn’t sure if she’d been serious, but she certainly could have used the distraction. Realities are fine, but there’s nothing like the awkward spontaneity of sticking your elbow in someone’s ribs while looking for an erogenous zone to take your mind off your troubles.

  I stopped by the common room to pick up a sandwich and something to drink, then retired to my new digs. Nowhere near as posh as Steel’s suite, nor as large, but clean and functional. It gave me pause to think that it had probably been Drake’s before mine, but if I was going to worry about the risk of infection, or whatever it was that the plague did to you, I might as well have jumped off the ship right then. If it had been Drake’s cabin someone had done me the courtesy of removing his personal effects.

  My bunk was equipped with a system interface and I was anxious to get started. I wasn’t sure how long I was going to be able to work because, though the net couldn’t use you unless you were asleep, you had to be awake to use it.

  I raised the bunk to semi-sitting position, took a crisp chomp of sprouts and rye, and logged on. The universe opened before me. My cabin faded to a peripheral glimmer and my mind filled with the multi-dimensional matrix of the main library. Steel’s system was very nice; I wondered how many drones she had on it. I saw the net gate and it made me think about bulleting Sheila, just to let her know what had happened to me, but I was stymied immediately. Security. I could request information off the net but I couldn’t send data in any other format. It made perfect sense—I just hadn’t thought about it—but it reminded me of my status or lack thereof.

  So, down to work. I called up Brainard’s Planet, chose my favorite voice for the interface, and laid back while it talked to me. There was quite a bit for a globe that had only been visited once (officially). Astronomic and geophysical data: It orbited a G-type star, a little brighter than the sun, some twelve hundred light years farther out from the galactic center than the earth was. Seen from Earth, it resided in Cancer. It orbited a little farther out from its star than Earth did, about a hundred eighty thousand klicks, fourth of eleven major planets in its system. It was a double planet, even more so than the earth-moon system. Its companion was almost half its size. It was larger than earth, had a diameter of over fifteen thousand klicks, gravity almost two standard gees, atmospheric pressure at the surface over four times what it was on earth. Flying would be easy there. Reducing atmosphere very similar to earth’s: nitrogen, oxygen, various trace gasses. You could breathe it if you didn’t mind getting the plague. Inclination to its orbit was negligible, less than a degree, and its orbit was almost circular. It didn’t have seasons.

  If it had been a dry world it would have resembled Mars in one way: the northern and southern hemispheres were divided roughly at the equator by a large drop in elevation. Whereas on Mars the highlands were in the south, here they were in the north, and the southern hemisphere was mostly ocean. There were a few minor island chains, but basically Brainard’s Planet was one big continent on top and one big puddle on the bottom.

  This was interesting. There was a Reality taken from orbit, filed thirty-two years ago by “40. Jahrhunderts Stahl Wirklichkeit, AG.” Arty name. They must have made it a couple of years before they left, before Drake’s infirmity caused them to be out of touch for three decades. I called it up. Like most Realities, you could travel around in it through any of the original viewpoints of the omnicorder, plus an enhanced matrix of extrapolated viewpoints. In effect, I could wander around in orbit looking straight down for a map-like view or pan in any direction to see things more obliquely. I could zoom in and achieve an effect like walking around on the planet, but there would be holes in the data, particularly if I got into a complex texture like a forest or something. Anything not visible to the omnicorder from its orbital path was, of course, not available to the data bank. You had the option of asking the program to fill in any missing pieces with fractal-generated images, but I didn’t use it. I wanted to see what was there, not some figment of an equation’s imagination.

  I disabled the tactile inputs. The omnicorder had been in weightlessness, but I was in a nice, comfy bunk under acceleration, so why get nauseated? I wasn’t going to be able to touch anything on the surface, anyway.

  It was funny. I wasn’t actually going to be there, I was just entering a Reality of the place, and yet I still felt
my skin crawl. Brainard’s Planet was simply terrifying.

  I held my breath and engaged the program.

  There it was, floating benignly in space. A half-and-half, blue-and-brown marble swathed in dazzling white swirls and streaks of clouds. It didn’t particularly look like the doom planet; it was just a planet. Because of the density of the atmosphere, the temperature gradient toward the poles was very mild, almost non-existent. There were no ice caps. Still, most of the land-based biota were confined to a broad band in the lower latitudes. The farther you got from the southern ocean the more arid the land became until, about halfway to the pole, it was lifeless desert.

  I watched it rotate for a while, then I zoomed in on the northern tropics. The band of life resolved from a dark greenish brown smudge to a multi-hued carpet. It was easy to see the colonies. Intricate structures of multi-storied chambers and passages, knotted and intertwined like a plate of pasta. As I moved in closer I could see the creatures moving ponderously along the thoroughfares, looking more than anything like giant beige walruses or slugs with sort of crab-shaped carapaces on their backs. It was impossible to tell which end was the front, unless you assumed it was the one pointed in the direction they were moving. They wandered slowly until they suddenly jumped back to their original positions as the omnicorder passed out of range and the program looped back to the beginning of the data.

  I moved out into the countryside. Rolling fields or forests of lazily waving lavender and pink tubules. Sea anemones writ large, I thought. It was hard to tell scale. There was nothing familiar to compare anything to. I wandered around. Rivers, hills, some impressive mountain ranges—how do you study a whole planet? I could have spent centuries, but I wanted a different kind of information.

  I backed out and called up Brainard’s expedition. There were the five Realities Brainard took on the trip, his personal log, and then it branched out into different subjects: the plague, xenobiology, Elysium, et cetera. I called up the fifth Reality, the one he made on his final trip to the surface, his last attempt to communicate with them: