Lightspeed: Year One
Page 57
I close by offering up a variation of the words my father gave at yesterday’s first assembly of Bo: my conviction that the Bo’s death happened in the name of science, as a consensual act to that end alone, and that if any among the Bo in attendance grieved the loss of their companion, rest assured they could not even begin to approach the grief my father had felt at the time of its passing and every moment since, having sacrificed so much of himself, his mortality, and all claims to happiness therein to those same scientific ideals, only to see his greatest work destroyed in the sunset of his life. (I have to backtrack here alone, to explain the term “sunset,” and then to emphasize how the term’s very strangeness among the Bo only furthers my point about the sanctity of life to a human being.)
The verdict comes back in four days, taking another full day to be delivered, during which time I fall asleep regularly in the courtroom, while my Bo ducks out on occasion to provide us with food and drink. Twice I linger by the waste receptacles, nauseated by the poorness of my sleep, stalling my return to that ceaseless chatter of spectator Bo as long as I can, clamping my hands to my ears in an effort to recall the sound of pure silence: A fairy tale I hold deep in my heart. I have my white noise buds on their highest settings by the end of it all, and still the Bo-speak trickles through, my ears damnably attuned by then to the chorus of them against all odds, all internal appeals for sanity, and peace.
Finally, the summation arrives: guilty, but pardoned. I close my eyes and sink in my seat. My father is silent, unmoving beside me. I fall asleep again, the whole of my body tingling and drained, and when I wake anew he is gone: The gathering space, empty, save for one Bo with a dark cast over its left eye, waiting patiently off to one side.
“Can I go home now?” I hear the words come out in a croak and think only, to hell with convention and prudence: Let the Bo’s anger pour out. But to my great surprise, the Bo hesitates, parting its long, thin mouth in turn, and with clear effort musters a mere three words in response:
“It is done.”
It is not, of course, done. Captain Sedgwick greets me grimly when my shuttle docks in the dark cavern of his ship. He knows nothing of my father’s verdict save the language of my body, and my body is tired and defeated. We speak scarcely at all before the inevitable unraveling of tensions between us, my blissfully dry berth turned doubly warm-blooded for a spell. Only after, in the darkness, which I find at last I am learning to bear, do I allow myself to think through all of my lingering doubts.
That my father was experimenting with regression was apparent, but so too, it seemed to me, were the aims of his work. Perhaps the Bo at large could not see what I had seen—the discordant number of digits on the dead Bo’s shriveled body, the unusual nature of its legs, its head, and its chest. But my father had also said the Bo sought out companion songs when regressing. Could the Bo have missed that, too? Had none of them wondered who had been this Bo’s singer as it regrew?
In the long, dark night that followed the trial, my thoughts had grown wilder still: Perhaps saying the names did not sustain the universe, but what if the ritual of it could sustain even one creature, one Bo at a time? And if those songs changed—if the singer changed—what of the Bo in regression? Could it take on other forms through the right song alone? These might all have been the idle, fool thoughts of a non-scientist, an outsider—easily pondered, that is, and just as easily let go—if it hadn’t been for the last conversation I had on Bo.
I knew it would also be the last time I saw my father, that conversation in the last wake cycle before the shuttle arrived to take me home. My father was back in the laboratory by then, dusting the rank and file of his reclaimed research shelves, when I entered for one last look around. The dead Bo, I quickly noted, was now gone.
“I’ve buried it,” my father said. “In case you’re wondering. The Bo don’t care, don’t mind what happens to the flesh.”
“Do you mean that?” I said. “It?”
My father paused in his cleaning to look at me. “What else would I mean?”
My heart was pounding at his scrutiny, and I knew then that the anger I felt for him, the coarse utilitarianism of his first and only attempt to contact me—to use me as a tool of his own, meticulous construction and then cast aside again—had to be coloring my view of things. No human could be so cruel, I told myself—so cold. Everyone, I had almost convinced myself, had a soft spot somewhere. Even my Bo had been kindly, in its way, by the end.
“Her,” I said at last. “That’s what you were doing, wasn’t it? Turning the Bo into something else, something not just for science, but for you. Thirty years alone out here. Thirty years—”
“I was not alone.” The terseness in my father’s voice sings out my only victory—meager, and for me already fraught with remorse. I do not say the words that follow in my head: But now you are, aren’t you?
Some losses are caverns. His, I realize at long last, are active mines.
Our breath has fogged up the tiny porthole in my L-ship berth, blotting out the farthest stars, and home. Captain Sedgwick sits on the edge of the bunk, finding his boots, hitching up his uniform to his hips but no further, not yet. I rest my hand on the small of his browned and hairy back, studying my fingers in a glimmer of starlight, as just days ago I had studied the dead Bo’s—all five digits not quite squid-like, but still strong enough, pliant enough, to hold something fierce in its grip and never let go.
GOSSAMER
Stephen Baxter
The flitter bucked.
Lvov looked up from her data desk, startled. Beyond the flitter’s translucent hull, the wormhole was flooded with sheets of blue-white light which raced towards and past the flitter, giving Lvov the impression of huge, uncontrolled speed.
“We’ve got a problem,” Cobh said. The pilot bent over her own data desk, a frown creasing her thin face.
Lvov had been listening to her data desk’s synthesized murmur on temperature inversion layers in nitrogen atmospheres; now she tapped the desk to shut it off. The flitter was a transparent tube, deceptively warm and comfortable. Impossibly fragile. Astronauts have problems in space, she thought. But not me. I’m no hero; I’m only a researcher. Lvov was twenty-eight years old; she had no plans to die—and certainly not during a routine four-hour hop through a Poole wormhole that had been human-rated for eighty years.
She clung to her desk, her knuckles whitening, wondering if she ought to feel scared.
Cobh sighed and pushed her data desk away; it floated before her. “Close up your suit and buckle up.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Our speed through the wormhole has increased.” Cobh pulled her own restraint harness around her. “We’ll reach the terminus in another minute—”
“What? But we should have been travelling for another half-hour.”
Cobh looked irritated. “I know that. I think the Interface has become unstable. The wormhole is buckling.”
“What does that mean? Are we in danger?”
Cobh checked the integrity of Lvov’s pressure suit, then pulled her data desk to her. Cobh was a Caucasian, strong-faced, a native of Mars, perhaps fifty years old. “Well, we can’t turn back. One way or the other it’ll be over in a few more seconds—hold tight—”
Now Lvov could see the Interface itself, the terminus of the wormhole: The Interface was a blue-white tetrahedron, an angular cage that exploded at her from infinity.
Glowing struts swept over the flitter.
The craft hurtled out of the collapsing wormhole. Light founted around the fleeing craft, as stressed spacetime yielded in a gush of heavy particles.
Lvov glimpsed stars, wheeling.
Cobh dragged the flitter sideways, away from the energy fount—
There was a lurch, a discontinuity in the scene beyond the hull. Suddenly a planet loomed before them.
“Lethe,” Cobh said. “Where did that come from? I’ll have to take her down—we’re too close—”
Lvov saw a flat
, complex landscape, grey-crimson in the light of a swollen moon. The scene was dimly lit, and it rocked wildly as the flitter tumbled. And, stretching between world and moon, she saw—
No. It was impossible.
The vision was gone, receded into darkness.
“Here it comes,” Cobh yelled.
Foam erupted, filling the flitter. The foam pushed into Lvov’s ears, mouth and eyes; she was blinded, but she found she could breathe.
She heard a collision, a grinding that lasted seconds, and she imagined the flitter ploughing its way into the surface of the planet. She felt a hard lurch, a rebound.
The flitter came to rest.
A synthesized voice emitted blurred safety instructions. There was a ticking as the hull cooled.
In the sudden stillness, still blinded by foam, Lvov tried to recapture what she had seen. Spider-web. It was a web, stretching from the planet to its moon.
“Welcome to Pluto.” Cobh’s voice was breathless, ironic.
Lvov stood on the surface of Pluto.
The suit’s insulation was good, but enough heat leaked to send nitrogen clouds hissing around her footsteps, and where she walked she burned craters in the ice. Gravity was only a few per cent of gee, and Lvov, Earth-born, felt as if she might blow away.
There were clouds above her, wispy cirrus: aerosol clusters suspended in an atmosphere of nitrogen and methane. The clouds occluded bone-white stars. From here, Sol and the moon, Charon, were hidden by the planet’s bulk, and it was dark, dark on dark, the damaged landscape visible only as a sketch in starlight.
The flitter had dug a trench a mile long and fifty yards deep in this world’s antique surface, so Lvov was at the bottom of a valley walled by nitrogen ice. Cobh was hauling equipment out of the crumpled-up wreck of the flitter: scooters, data desks, life-support boxes, Lvov’s equipment. Most of the stuff had been robust enough to survive the impact, Lvov saw, but not her own equipment.
Maybe a geologist could have crawled around with nothing more than a hammer and a set of sample bags. But Lvov was an atmospheric scientist. What was she going to achieve here without her equipment?
Her fear was fading now, to be replaced by irritation, impatience. She was five light hours from Sol; already she was missing the online nets. She kicked at the ice. She was stuck here; she couldn’t talk to anyone, and there wasn’t even the processing power to generate a Virtual environment.
Cobh finished wrestling with the wreckage. She was breathing hard. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s get out of this ditch and take a look around.” She showed Lvov how to work a scooter. It was a simple platform, its inert-gas jets controlled by twists of raised handles.
Side by side, Cobh and Lvov rose out of the crash scar.
Pluto ice was a rich crimson laced with organic purple. Lvov made out patterns, dimly, on the surface of the ice; they were like bas-relief, discs the size of dinner plates, with the intricate complexity of snowflakes.
Lvov landed clumsily on the rim of the crash scar, the scooter’s blunt prow crunching into surface ice, and she was grateful for the low gravity. The weight and heat of the scooters quickly obliterated the ice patterns.
“We’ve come down near the equator,” Cobh said. “The albedo is higher at the south pole: a cap of methane ice there, I’m told.”
“Yes.”
Cobh pointed to a bright blue spark, high in the sky. “That’s the wormhole Interface, where we emerged: Fifty thousand miles away.”
Lvov squinted at constellations unchanged from those she’d grown up with on Earth. “Are we stranded?”
Cobh said, with reasonable patience, “For the time being. The flitter is wrecked, and the wormhole has collapsed; we’re going to have to go back to Jupiter the long way round.”
Three billion miles . . . “Ten hours ago I was asleep in a hotel room on Io. And now this. What a mess.”
Cobh laughed. “I’ve already sent off messages to the inner System. They’ll be received in about five hours. A one-way GUTship will be sent to retrieve us. It will refuel here, with Charon ice—”
“How long?”
“It depends on the readiness of a ship. Say ten days to prepare, then a ten-day flight out here—”
“Twenty days?”
“We’re in no danger. We’ve supplies for a month. Although we’re going to have to live in these suits.”
“Lethe. This trip was supposed to last seventy-two hours.”
“Well,” Cobh said testily, “you’ll have to call and cancel your appointments, won’t you? All we have to do is wait here; we’re not going to be comfortable, but we’re safe enough.”
“Do you know what happened to the wormhole?”
Cobh shrugged. She stared up at the distant blue spark. “As far as I know nothing like this has happened before. I think the Interface itself became unstable, and that fed back into the throat . . . But I don’t know how we fell to Pluto so quickly. That doesn’t make sense.”
“How so?”
“Our trajectory was spacelike. Superluminal.” She glanced at Lvov obliquely, as if embarrassed. “For a moment there, we appeared to be travelling faster than light.”
“Through normal space? That’s impossible.”
“Of course it is.” Cobh reached up to scratch her cheek, but her gloved fingers rattled against her faceplate. “I think I’ll go up to the Interface and take a look around there.”
Cobh showed Lvov how to access the life support boxes. Then she strapped her data desk to her back, climbed aboard her scooter, and lifted off the planet’s surface, heading for the Interface. Lvov watched her dwindle.
Lvov’s isolation closed in. She was alone, the only human on the surface of Pluto.
A reply from the inner System came within twelve hours of the crash. A GUTship was being sent from Jupiter. It would take thirteen days to refit the ship, followed by an eight-day flight to Pluto, then more delay for taking on fresh reaction mass at Charon. Lvov chafed at the timescale, restless.
There was other mail: Concerned notes from Lvov’s family, a testy demand for updates from her research supervisor, and for Cobh, orders from her employer to mark as much of the flitter wreck as she could for salvage and analysis. Cobh’s ship was a commercial wormhole transit vessel, hired by Oxford—Lvov’s university—for this trip. Now, it seemed, a complex battle over liability would be joined between Oxford, Cobh’s firm, and the insurance companies.
Lvov, five light-hours from home, found it difficult to respond to the mail asynchronously. She felt as if she had been cut out of the online mind of humanity. In the end she drafted replies to her family, and deleted the rest of the messages.
She checked her research equipment again, but it really was unusable. She tried to sleep. The suit was uncomfortable, claustrophobic. She was restless, bored, a little scared.
She began a systematic survey of the surface, taking her scooter on widening spiral sweeps around the crash scar.
The landscape was surprisingly complex, a starlit sculpture of feathery ridges and fine ravines. She kept a few hundred feet above the surface; whenever she flew too low her heat evoked billowing vapour from fragile nitrogen ice, obliterating ancient features, and she experienced obscure guilt.
She found more of the snowflake-like features, generally in little clusters of eight or ten.
Pluto, like its moon-twin Charon, was a ball of rock clad by thick mantles of water ice and nitrogen ice and laced with methane, ammonia and organic compounds. It was like a big, stable comet nucleus; it barely deserved the status of “planet.” There were moons bigger than Pluto.
There had been only a handful of visitors in the eighty years since the building of the Poole wormhole. None of them had troubled to walk the surfaces of Pluto or Charon. The wormhole, Lvov realised, hadn’t been built as a commercial proposition, but as a sort of stunt: the link which connected, at last, all of the System’s planets to the rapid-transit hub at Jupiter.
She tired of her plodding surv
ey. She made sure she could locate the crash scar, lifted the scooter to a mile above the surface, and flew towards the south polar cap.
Cobh called from the Interface. “I think I’m figuring out what happened here—that superluminal effect I talked about. Lvov, have you heard of an Alcubierre wave?” She dumped images to Lvov’s desk—portraits of the wormhole Interface, various graphics.
“No.” Lvov ignored the input and concentrated on flying the scooter. “Cobh, why should a wormhole become unstable? Hundreds of wormhole rapid transits are made every day, all across the System.”
“A wormhole is a flaw in space. It’s inherently unstable anyway. The throat and mouths are kept open by active feedback loops involving threads of exotic matter. That’s matter with a negative energy density, a sort of antigravity which—”
“But this wormhole went wrong.”
“Maybe the tuning wasn’t perfect. The presence of the flitter’s mass in the throat was enough to send the wormhole over the edge. If the wormhole had been more heavily used, the instability might have been detected earlier, and fixed . . . ”
Over the grey-white pole, Lvov flew through banks of aerosol mist; Cobh’s voice whispered to her, remote, without meaning.
Sunrise on Pluto:
Sol was a point of light, low on Lvov’s unfolding horizon, wreathed in the complex strata of a cirrus cloud. The Sun was a thousand times fainter than from Earth, but brighter than any planet in Earth’s sky.
The inner System was a puddle of light around Sol, an oblique disc small enough for Lvov to cover with the palm of her hand. It was a disc that contained almost all of man’s hundreds of billions. Sol brought no heat to her raised hand, but she saw faint shadows, cast by the sun on her faceplate.