Analog SFF, June 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “The probe arm is stuck,” I said. I tried a routine of different motions and none of them worked. I switched on the ventral camera view and found what I expected: a vane of black forming behind the arm. We'd picked up enough of the self-replicating carbon structures in taking a sample that they were growing now in the turbulence behind the arm and had filled all its joints. Wait a couple days, and this shuttle would be encrusted just like the Greete ship.

  “You must go outside,” Gurk said. “And attach the cable yourself.”

  “It's pretty windy out there,” I whispered.

  “Yes. But you sink like a corpse.”

  “Thanks, Gurk.”

  “I acknowledge your gratitude.”

  I wasn't happy about the prospect, but I had to let Gurk control the shuttle through his implants. I was wearing an armored suit, but slowly upped the pressure inside it about as much as I could safely bear. The pressure outside the shuttle stood at almost 100 e-atmospheres; any pressure I added to the interior of my suit would ease the stress on the armor.

  I squeezed under Gurk to press up the ventral airlock door. The loon growled in protest as Gurk shifted back against it. I climbed down, locked the door, and started the cycle.

  Blinking in the glaring light of the airlock, I secured a belay line to my suit, and then attached a second safety line. I didn't want to take any chances. I felt the armored suit press in on me as the pressure equalized. Then the door fell open onto dirty gray clouds of carbon and helium a thousand times as deep as any sea of Earth.

  Gurk maneuvered the shuttle over the Greete vessel, and before I could let my hesitation take over and freeze me with fear, I jumped. The belay line let me down slowly, and the ship started to drift away. The matryoshk hissed against my visor as it pelted my helmet like sand.

  “Gurk, I'm outside. Dropping toward the ship. Please keep our relative position steady.”

  “Your tomb of a shuttle, unfit for deflated plague victims, is impossible to control properly!” But with a jerk he swung me back over the ship, and in a moment my feet set down on the top.

  The coating of Matryoshka carbon crunched as I settled my weight. I got on all fours, loosened up my two lines so that I wouldn't be pulled away when the shuttle inevitably drifted back, and crawled toward the place where specs showed a mooring hook lay. I found it quickly: a bit of metal revealed a small hatch that stuck up into the wind, making it inhospitable to the matryoshk self-replicator. I hammered at it with an armored fist, and the thin layer of black behind the hinge cracked. I pulled the door open, exposing a ring.

  “I've freed it! I've cleared the loop!” I radioed back. “Bring the probe arm back and pay out line.”

  The shuttle shifted side to side but bobbed closer as the probe arm dropped the line. After a few attempts I was able to snatch the cable and snap the hook onto the Greete ship.

  “We've got a lock,” I called. The tow line snapped taut as wind whistled against the cable. I backed away on all fours and then stood, holding my safety line. Still logged into the shuttle's systems, I sent the command to start the winch. I was slowly lifted toward the shuttle, which wobbled tightly now in the air against its anchor to the Greete ship.

  “You're inflating the lift zeppelin,” I observed to Gurk. It swelled visibly in the dim gray sky above.

  “Yes.”

  He should have waited until I climbed back in, but I stifled my complaint. Instead, I asked, “Are we rising?”

  “No.”

  Ouch. Not a good sign. But then I was lifted up into the airlock. Once on the border step, feet above the door, I slapped the close switch.

  Nothing happened. I pulled up diagnostic pages in my suit displays while I hit the button again. The motor was good. The door was frozen shut.

  “The zeppelin is at maximum inflation,” Gurk radioed, the flat voice of the translator bot sounding coldly dissatisfied. “We have insufficient lift. We are not rising fast enough to compensate for the accruing carbon.”

  “We have another problem here,” I told him. “The exterior door to the airlock is frozen. Some of this self-replicating carbon must have drifted back from the probe arm and got into the door hinges.”

  There was a moment of silence as we both thought through our options. With the airlock door open, I couldn't go into the shuttle without flooding it, and Gurk could not take this pressure.

  Again, I felt this all didn't make sense. How could this self-replicator be so aggressive, but be something we'd not encountered before?

  Before I could speculate about that, Gurk radioed, “I am going to fire the engines.”

  “Whoa!” I shouted. “Whoa, no way!”

  The lift blimp was our kludge to make a water-world-dweller's shuttle suitable for travel on a gas giant. To ascend to the floating city, we were supposed to use the blimp to get height, then deflate it and reel it in while the shuttle dropped, only to kick the engines when the zeppelin was packed away.

  “Gurk, this is a Kirtpau ship. We attached the lift zeppelin ourselves. It can't handle that kind of turbulence. The main engines have a lot of thrust—the zeppelin will be shredded, it might get caught in the tow line and then we'd go into a spin and drag your friends with us.”

  “We have no other option. The ships will sink.”

  “Just give us a minute to think this through.”

  “We do not have time.”

  That's when it hit me. “That's right! It's too fast! Gurk, listen, listen. We've always known that self-replicating structures were possible in Matryoshka carbon. We've made a few in laboratory conditions. Of course they would naturally occur down there in the billions of tons of it swirling around.”

  Gurk responded, “Attach yourself firmly, primitive.”

  Damn. I reeled in the belay and safety lines, still linked to my belt, so that they held me tightly against the wall between the winches. “Gurk, one second. Listen. Why isn't the whole matryoshk layer one solid self-replicating structure? Why not?”

  “Starting ignition sequence.”

  “Gurk! It must be because there is, well, call it competition. Other competing structures. And structures that take apart what has already started to self-assemble. Like antibodies, or viruses. There must be, well, a weird kind of ecosystem down there. Otherwise, no matter how unlikely it is, structures like this would have long ago populated the whole Matryoshka carbon layer.”

  “Are you secure, hu-man?”

  “Gurk, we have to dive. Into the thick matryoshk. We have to dive into the competition. Let these patterns meet their predators.”

  “Firing engines.”

  “No!” I shouted. I put my hands out and grabbed for the virtual dashboard. I killed Gurk's command, and quickly locked him out of controls.

  “Hu-man!” he shouted. But I cut the radio. I pushed the shuttle out front by tilting us nose down with the maneuvering thrusters, and started the retrieval sequence for the lift zeppelin, deflating and pulling it in.

  We dove toward the deep black, dragging the Greete ship behind us.

  I realized with horror that my fingers were resisting. The self-replicator had gotten into the cracks of my armor. If it grew worse, I'd lose my ability to control the ship. I might be betting everything on my hypothesis: if I lost control we'd dive till we were crushed.

  “Gurk,” I shouted, opening a one-way message. “Tell your friends to compress their ship, so that they can drop. It's the only way to keep control of our dive. They have no choice.” I closed the channel.

  I screamed all the way down. No reason not to: I wasn't transmitting.

  In a minute, my fingers froze. The elbows of my suit started to grow stiff. Then a black wall of dark carbon burst up through the open hatch and hit me like a wave of water, smacking me against the wall. In-suit displays showed we'd dropped into the dense layer of matryoshk. The shuttle was listing dangerously. We were dead lucky that it was a lifting body: they're hard to turn, and they right themselves instantly if they do flip. Any other s
tructure would've been in a hopeless tumble.

  I managed to smack the airlock door panic button. As far as I could tell, nothing was happening. I was immersed in black, a roar ripping at me that sounded like I was lying under a train back home in Turkey. I hit the hatch switch again and again.

  After an eternity that really was—I later looked over the logs—seven minutes, the roaring grew quieter, diminishing and becoming higher and higher in pitch, until it fell into silence.

  I began to see a dim glow from the interior lights of the airlock. The airlock was cycling, pumping out the carbon and gas mix and pumping in the yellow-clear mix of helium and other gases that Gurk breathed. The outer door had closed! I could see my hands: I held them up, and with a grunting effort closed my fists. My fingers were free.

  Now the hard question. I was proved right—maybe. But how long should we stay down here to clean off the Greete ship? There was no way to know.

  But I did have this: we'd had insufficient lift to rise before, but only just barely insufficient. A few minutes down here might have been enough. We might be able to leave now. Assuming I could deploy the lift zeppelin in this carbon...

  The shuttle lurched so violently my head knocked against the interior of my helmet.

  “What was that?” I shouted. We jerked again. Then again. I checked the flight diagnostics. Our tail was kicking up, making us dive, before we straightened with a snap. I could never deploy the zeppelin or even fire the engines with the shuttle lurching like that.

  But why would a lifting body keep digging in with its nose?

  Ah. The tow line to the Greete ship. They must be ascending. Tipping our tail as the line pulled up behind us.

  The matryoshk had probably fallen off the Greete ship not a particle at a time, as I had expected, but in sheets.

  I sent the command to blow the tow cable. In seconds our shuttle straightened as it settled belly first into its dive for the depths. The door below me creaked: the pressure was rising.

  I fired the engines.

  * * * *

  It was hard as hell to steer the shuttle virtually, roped to a wall in an airlock, and with my gloves still a bit stiff, but I got us a kilometer above the matryoshk layer and circling. We didn't have enough fuel to keep that up long, but I didn't want to deploy the lift zeppelin again if I didn't have to.

  When the flight felt smooth, I released my belay and safety lines and pushed the hatch up.

  Gurk looked real unhappy. He was deflated even more than I'd seen him before, his bright yellow sides were streaked with bilious green bands, and his gold eyes were rimmed with red. He slapped my armored suit ineffectually with his tentacles.

  I turned my suit radio back on and found Gurk was screaming a long and bitter chain of insults. “Worthless plunging vomit, falling urine bolus, plummeting lump of feces, sinking abortion, dropping loon carcass...

  “I love you too, Gurk,” I mumbled. Not over the radio, of course.

  Gurk's loon lay like a lumpy sack in one corner. It sighed miserably.

  “Any word?” I radioed. My black-stained suit left smears of matryoshk on the arm rests as I strapped into my seat. I turned up the radar.

  “You don't speak words, sinking turd!”

  Sinking this, sinking that—when was Gurk going to realize I wasn't ashamed that my species evolved on a world with a surface?

  But it mattered that Gurk was mad. If the other ship didn't come up soon I would be blamed—and surely be the source of a real disaster in intergalactic relations.

  “I mean, any radio signal from the ship?”

  “The dead don't radio!”

  But just in time to belie this denunciation, the radar pinged. Something was rising up, a kilometer east of us. I eased off the engines and glided us down. In a few moments we had a visual. We sailed past the Greete ship, yellow now, free of matryoshk, and ascending.

  “We rise for the cold star sky,” came a crackling radio signal.

  “Your friends are poets,” I said.

  “I won't forget that you tried to kill them!” Gurk shouted, his tentacles rigid with anger.

  * * *

  When we landed on the floating city, a Greete floated out over the bay floor and waited by the back of the shuttle. The Greete's shriveled and brown skin revealed a great age. This was almost certainly one of Gurk's superiors.

  I swung the doors open. Gurk's loon flopped down onto the deck, looking sickly. Gurk slowly shimmied out, inflating as he did so. Gurk and the brown Greete faced each other. I climbed down and stood nearby. We four were alone in this bay; the Greete ship that we had rescued had pulled into a different dock.

  I realized they were talking directly, in sound. I fumbled at my suit controls, turning my suit mikes up and reloading the Greete audio translator program.

  “...but how did you know to bring the ship down into the black carbon?” the superior asked.

  “It was a reasonable hypothesis,” Gurk answered. “Given that there are no large-scale areas of self-replicating carbon structures there.”

  “Excellent. Was the human helpful?”

  “They are rude and ignorant. But useful because they drop like dead meat. This one was able to sink down and latch a cable to the other ship. But I see no reason to reward them with more trust.”

  The superior turned toward me and switched to radio. “Human representative, thank you for bringing us a vessel that we could use, built by the admirable Kirtpau. You may leave now.”

  And then it floated out of the room. Gurk followed awkwardly, bouncing off the floor as he struggled still to inflate to neutral buoyancy.

  Wonderful: Gurk was going to claim sole credit for the rescue and bad mouth humanity in the process. It wasn't the disaster I feared when we were waiting for the Greete ship to rise out of the matryoshk, but it was no victory. We humans just couldn't get a break in this gossip-driven galaxy.

  “Just you and me, old friend,” I told the loon, over speaker.

  “Yuch!” the loon protested. It listed to the side and tried to rise into the air, but couldn't. After bouncing off the floor a few times, it contracted—

  —and spat out a remora probe.

  The galactic snoop robot hit the deck hard and lay there. After a moment it shuddered and rose from the floor. It turned and faced me, as if taking its close-up—then smoothly, like a bird gliding, it took off. It circled me twice, circled our shuttle twice, and shot out of the open flight doors into Purgatorio's sky.

  I fell down on the floor, the armor plates on my ass ringing off the flight deck. I laughed till I cried. The loon had swallowed the remora probe that it had chased outside just before we took off. That probe would have recorded every radio transmission we made down there, along with the shuttle's network transmissions of status and events and all the ambient sounds on board. Soon, anyone in the galaxy who cared to know what really happened atop the matryoshk would be able to make a full and accurate reconstruction.

  I would have kissed the loon if I could have pulled my helmet off without choking. I settled for patting it.

  “Thanks, buddy.”

  “Buddy buddy buddy,” it whistled, as it shot off, happy now to be free of its indigestible load.

  I climbed into the shuttle, closed the doors tight, and began pumping out the methane and helium. I was going to get out of this filthy suit and breathe some real air as soon as I finished my decompression.

  I radioed our mothership as I pushed out into the Purgatorio clouds.

  “This is Tarkos.”

  “We have you, Tarkos. Report.”

  “Mission accomplished. Good news all around. I'm leaving the Greete city. Heading for the cold star sky.”

  Copyright © 2009 Craig DeLancey

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  * * *

  Reader's Department: IN TIMES TO COME

  Our July/August “double” issue features two big stories. The cover is for “Seed of Revolution,” the latest and possibly the best of Daniel
Hatch's series about Chamal, the world where evolution works very differently than it does on Earth. (No, it doesn't matter if you haven't read the earlier stories; in fact, you may get a clearer understanding of Chamal's bizarre biology from this story than from any of its predecessors.) The differences necessarily color the way its inhabitants look at everything, so when they're exposed to human ways and ideas, conflict is inevitable, peculiar, and lively.

  No less deserving of “lead” status is Barry B. Longyear's two-part serial, Turning the Grain. It's a time-travel story, but with several differences from the usual. Few writers have fully grasped just how far back our prehistory goes, and how much could have been hidden back there. So what if you found evidence of a startling advanced culture existing much earlier than it should have, and you had a chance to visit? The usual cautions about changing history don't apply because this culture was nipped in the bud by a natural disaster, so nothing the visitor does will matter, right? Well, yes, but remember that both visitor and the people-before-their-time are people, and people are clever and complex....

  We'll also take advantage of the extra space in the double issue to offer not one but two fact articles, quite different but both by authors having unique personal connections to their subject matter: one on the Large Hadron Collider and one on Alzheimer's disease. The versatile Michael Carroll shares “Musings from the First Generation” wherein he remembers growing up at the dawn of the Space Age. And we'll have a wide variety of other fiction by authors including John G. Hemry, Tom Ligon, Scott William Carter, and Don D'Ammassa.

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  * * *

  Short Story: ATTACK OF THE GRUB-EATERS

  by Richard A. Lovett

  Much of history has depended on teamwork, but changing technologies bring new ways to cooperate.

  Forum: Lawns and Gardens

  Thread: Help needed!!!!

  User: Garden Warrior

  I've got moles.

  User: dermatolojest

  Don't worry unless they start to grow weird lumps. [Link: Seven Deadly Warning Signs of Cancer]