Time m-1

by Stephen Baxter

  Maura leaned over to Emma. “Representatives get to edit the Congressional Record. Witnesses don’t, unfortunately.”

  “Do you really believe it is responsible to try to gain public support for your highly dubious activities by whipping up hys teria over nonsense about the end of the world and messages from the future?”

  But now Rutter from Illinois was leaning forward. “Will thlady yield on that? If you’ll yield for a moment I have something to ask.”

  Howell glared at him, realizing her attack was being dissipated.

  Rutter was a corpulent, sweating man with an anachronistic bow tie. To Emma he looked as if he hadn’t been out of Washington in twenty years. “I was interested in what you had to say, Colonel Malenfant,” he said. “Most of us don’t see any ethical problems in your links with organizations like Eschatology. Somebody has to think about the future constructively, after all. I think it’s refreshing to have a proposal like yours in which there is a subtext, as you might call it, beyond the practical. If you can go to the stars, bring home a profit and something… well, something spiritual, I think that’s to be applauded.”

  “Thank you, Representative,”

  “Tell me this, Colonel. Do you think your mission to Cruithne, if successful, will help us find God?”

  Malenfant took a deep breath. “Mr. Rutter, if we find everything we hope to find on Cruithne, then yes, I believe we will come closer to God.”

  Emma turned to Maura Della, and rolled her eyes. Good grief,

  Malenfant.

  There were follow-up questions from Howell, among others. But that, as far as Emma could tell, was that.

  Maura was grinning. “He had them eating out of his hand.”

  “All but Representative Howell.”

  “The question he planted with Rutter put a stop to her.”

  Emma goggled. “Replanted it?”

  “Oh, of course he did. Come on, Emma; it was too obvious, if anything.”

  Emma shook her head. “You know, I shouldn’t be shocked any more by anything Malenfant does. But I have to tell you he is not a Christian, and he does not believe in God.”

  Maura pursed her lips. “Lies told to Congress, shock. Look, Emma, this is America. Every so often you have to push the God button.”

  “So he won.”

  “I think so. For now, anyhow.”

  Representative Howell, the engineer from Pennsylvania who had argued for rationalism, pushed between them with a muttered apology. Howell looked distressed, frustrated, confused.

  Malenfant, when he emerged, was disgustingly smug. “To

  Cruithne,” he said.

  Maura Della:

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Dan began, “welcome to JPL. Today, June eighteenth, 2011, a U.S. spacecraft piloted by a genetically enhanced cephalopod is due to rendezvous and dock with near-Earth object designated 3753, or 1986TO, called Cruithne, a three-mile-diameter C-type asteroid. We should be getting images from a remote firefly camera shortly, and a feed from the Nautilus herself…” He stood in a forest of microphones, a glare of TV lights. Behind him a huge softscreen was draped across the wall like a tapestry. It showed a mass of incomprehensible graphic and digital updates.

  As Dan lectured his slightly restive audience, Maura allowed her attention to drift.

  JPL, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, had turned out to look like a small hospital, squashed into a cramped and smoggy Pasadena-suburb site dominated by the green shoulders of the San Gabriel Mountains. A central mall adorned with a fountain stretched from the gate into the main working area of the laboratory. And on the south side she had found the von Karman auditorium, the scene of triumphant news conferences and other public events going back to NASA’s glory days, when JPL had sent probes to almost every planet in the Solar System.

  Absently she listened to the talk around her, a lot of chatter about long-gone times when spirits were high, everybody seemed to be young, and there was a well-defined enemy to beat.

  Heady days. All gone now.

  Well, today the big old auditorium was crowded again, almost like the old days, mission managers and scientists and politicians and a few aging sci fi writers, all crammed in among the softscreen terminals.

  Just as NASA had declared that Malenfant’s BOB design was a criminal joke that could never fly until it had flown, so its experts had declared that Bootstrap’s cephalopod-based asteroid expedition was irresponsible and absurd — until it had survived out in deep space, and, more important, had started to gather

  some approving public attention.

  And so, as Sheena 5 neared Cruithne, here everybody was,

  basking in reflected cephalopod glory.

  As they waited for the rendezvous, Dan launched stiffly into a

  formal presentation on the technical aspects of the spacecraft.

  “The membrane that is the core of the ship’s design is based on technology Bootstrap developed for undersea methane-extraction operations. As far as the biosphere itself is concerned, efficiency is the key. Phytoplankton, one of the most efficient life-forms known, can convert seventy-eight percent of available nitrogen into protein. The simplicity of the algae — no stems, leaves, roots, or flowers — makes them almost ideal crop plants, one hundred percent foodstuff. Of course the system is not perfect — it’s not completely closed, and imperfectly buffered. But it’s still more robust, in terms of operational reliability, than any long-duration mechanical equivalent we can send up. And a hell of a lot cheaper. I have the figures that—” What about the problems, Dan ?

  He looked uncomfortable. “Sheena has had to spend more time acting as the keystone predator than we expected.”

  Say what?

  “Culling pathological species that get out of hand. And you have to understand that the system is inherently unstable. We have to manage it, consciously. Or rather Sheena does. We have to replace leaked gases, regulate the temperature, control the hydrological cycle and trace contaminants…”

  And so on. What Ystebo didn’t say, what Maura knew from private briefings, was that this could be a very near thing. It’s so fragile, Maura thought. She imagined the tiny droplet of water containing Sheena drifting in the immensity of interplanetary space, like a bit of sea foam tossed into the air by a wave, never to rejoin the ocean.

  What about Sheena herself?

  At that question, Dan seemed to falter.

  Maura knew that Sheena had been refusing to participate in her “medical briefings,” or to interface with the remote diagnostics that Dan used to monitor her health. Not that Dan, or anybody else, knew why she was refusing to cooperate. Maura tried to read the emotions in Dan’s bearded, fat-creased face.

  “You understand I can only speak to her once a day, when the spacecraft is above the horizon at Goldstone. She is in LOS — loss of signal — for fifteen hours a day.”

  How do you feel about the fact that she’s not coming home?

  Again Dan blustered. “Actually the simplification of the mission goals has worked benefits throughout the profile. The cost of the return — the mass penalty of return leg propellant and comestibles and the aerobrake heat shield — multiplied through the whole mission mass statement.”

  Yeah, but it’s become a one-way trip for your squid. The Cala-mari Express.

  Uncomfortable laughter.

  Dan was squirming. “Bootstrap has plans to deal with the ethical contingencies.”

  Technocrat bullshit, Maura thought; whoever coached this poor sap did a bad job. But she pitied Dan, nonetheless. He was probably the only person on the planet who truly cared about Sheena 5 — as opposed to the sentimental onlookers on TV and on the Net — and here he was, having to defend her being sentenced to death, alone in space.

  And now, at last, an image came through on the big wall-mounted softscreen. Pictures from space. A hush spread over the hall.

  It took Maura some seconds to figure out what she was seeing.

  It was an asteroid.

  I
t was misshapen and almost black, the craters and cracks of its dusty surface picked out by unvarying sunlight, a potato left too long on the barbecue. And a spacecraft of rippling gold was approaching, dwarfed by the giant rock.

  There was applause, whooping. Way to go, Dan! Right down U.S. One.

  Dan fumbled at a touchpad, and a new image came up on the softscreen: Sheena 5, a Caribbean reef squid, drifting in blue-gold shadows, live from Nautilus. Eerily, her head was hidden by a metal mask that trailed wires back to a mass of machinery.

  Then the cephalopod pulled back, leaving the metal mask dangling in the water, and she began an elaborate dance. It was enchanting: her chromatophore organs pulsed with colors and shapes, black and orange and aquamarine and ocher, and her tentacles and arms flashed as she arced, twirled, and pirouetted through the tank. She was very obviously producing signals: one, even two a second, signals that flowed into each other, varying remarkably in their intensity.

  Can you interpret what she s saying, Dan?

  Hesitantly he began to translate.

  “Stop and watch me. Stop and watch me. You have to understand her language elements are based on those she inherited from the cephalopod shoals. This is a signal she might use to distract prey, or even a predator.

  “Now this is what we call the pied pattern. Court me. Court me. She’s asking for admiration. She’s proud. Asteroid. Come near. Come near. Another mating signal. It’s as if she’s luring the asteroid. Star shoal all around. No danger, no danger. Literally, no predators. But she means that her navigation has been a success, that the systems are working nominally. Stop and watch me. Court me. . .”

  His posture was stiff as he stared at the screen, the separation from his dancing friend a tangible, painful thing.

  The audience was silent, Maura noted absently: stunned by this shard of cheap emotion.

  The digital displays told her the moment of rendezvous was near. The remote firefly-camera images returned to the soft-screen, a stop-start sequence updated every few seconds. The gold spark tracked across the blackened surface.

  Sheena 5:

  The asteroid was big now, covering almost half of the sky.

  She could see the asteroid’s surface, as if she were drifting over Caribbean sand flats. It was dull and dark. But its polarization was rich. She was searching for the shading and twinkling that meant frozen water. Here was a patch where the twisting of the light was muddy and random, and Dan had taught her that meant bare metal. Here the light was strongly polarized, and the surface was probably coated with thick, sticky dust. It seemed wonderful to Sheena that she could clearly see, just by looking at the sparkling, twisting light, what this strange deep-space fish was made of.

  There. It looked like a hole in the surface, and it had a shallow, sloping floor that sparkled and gleamed with the look of water.

  Sheena touched her waldoes, and the ship hovered above the depression.

  She knew it would take a long time for Dan to learn of her success. She trembled with anticipation.

  Gripping the circular support with her arms, Sheena inserted her two long tentacles into the smooth, flexible sheaths, and touched the central pad with her beak.

  Two three-hundred-foot cables, aping the motion of her tentacles, began to unwind from the hull of Nautilus. Sheena extended her tentacles, and small puffs of gas from the pads at the cable ends sent them stretching toward the asteroid. She allowed the cables to droop to their limits, then flashed down to the ship’s software.

  She sensed the cables touch the bottom, touch the asteroid. Contact.

  She flexed her suction cups to grip the surface. Slowly she contracted her tentacles, drawing herself down until she could see the smallest details of the asteroid, even her ship’s small shadow.

  She had practiced this maneuver in deep space, over and over. It was probably the most important task she would ever have to complete, after all; if she failed at this one thing, the mission itself would fail.

  Finally she felt a gentle pressure wave pulse through the water and through her own body, letting her know that she had come to rest.

  The asteroid, this great black whale of space, was her prey, and she, the hunter, had captured it.

  Pride surged, chromatophores pulsing over her body.

  Gabriel Marcus

  Some minor planets, of course, already have roles in astrology. Since these worlds weren’t known to the ancients, their roles are the subject of modern interpretation and some debate.

  So it is proving with Cruithne.

  Perhaps we can take some guidance from the derivation of the name. The Cruithne was the old Irish name for the Pictish people. In the twelfth-century Irish document “List of Pictish Kings,” Cruithne is given as the eponymous ancestor of the Pictish people, and it was his seven sons who gave their names to the divisions of the Pict kingdom in Scotland.

  But the Cruithne was also used by the Irish to describe a group of aboriginal people living in Ireland before the coming of the Gaels. They seem to have been at one time the predominant power in Ulster.

  A further blurring of the name’s meaning comes from the fact that some early writers claim that Pictish lineage was traditionally taken from the mother’s line, not the father’s. So perhaps Cruithne — if such an individual existed at all — was not a man, but a woman.

  As far as its astronomical properties go, Cruithne is again an unusual world.

  Perhaps uniquely among astrological subjects, it wanders far from the plane of the ecliptic and far from the traditional Houses; in fact at times it can be seen, by telescope, above (or beneath) Earth’s poles. And yet it is intimately linked to Earth; we know that its peculiar “horseshoe” orbit is dominated by Earth’s gravity.

  And, of course, the most direct link of all has now been established, as the squid, Sheena, has become the first Earth creature since the Apollo astronauts to reach another world.

  Cruithne: mother-father, person, and people — linked to Earth by spidery webs of influence and life. Little wonder that this tiny, remote, ambiguous world is causing such a stir in astrological circles.

  It is of course true, but irrelevant, that the name Cruithne was a late choice among the Australian astronomers who named the minor planet. An earlier suggestion was an irreverent nickname for one of their number, the Chunder Wonder. We can be grateful — if not surprised — that destiny guided the correct choice.

  Sheena 5:

  She could not leave her water habitat; yet she was able to explore.

  Small firefly robots set off from the habitat, picking their way carefully over the surface of the asteroid. Each robot was laden with miniature instruments, as exquisite as coral, all beyond her understanding.

  But the fireflies were under her control.

  She used the waldo, the glovelike device into which she could slip her long prehensile arms and so control the delicate motions of each firefly. Cameras mounted in the carapace of the firefly brought her a view through her laser eyecup of what the firefly was seeing, as if she were swimming alongside it. The gravity was so low that a careless movement would have sent the little metal devices spinning away from the surface, to be lost forever. So the limbs of the fireflies carried hooks and suction devices to ensure that at every moment they were anchored to the thin re-golith. And, with delicacy and care, she was able to ensure the fireflies avoided ravines and deep craters, and so were never in danger.

  Her fireflies scuttled hundreds of yards from the slumped membrane of Nautilus.

  Sheena thought all this was remarkable.

  She had come to awareness in a universe that was three-dimensional and infinite. Slowly she had come to understand that the ocean she inhabited was part of the skin of a giant sphere. She had seen that ocean-world from outside, seen it diminish to a pale dot of light.

  And now she had come to a world that was so small she felt she could enclose its curve in her outstretched arms, and her eyes picked out the starry universe through which this little world
swam. Entranced, munching absently on the krill the currents brought to her beak, she watched the new world — her world — unfold.

  Her world. She had not expected to feel like this, so triumphant. Her weariness, her edgy isolation, were forgotten now. She pulsed with pride, her chromatophores prickling.

  And she knew, at last, she was ready.

  Emma Stoney:

  Mission control for the Nautilus was not what Emma had come to expect from cliche images of Houston — the rows of gleaming terminals, the neat ranks of young, bespectacled engineers sweating through their neat shirts as the astronauts ran into yet another crisis in orbit. That was the manned space program. This was rather different. The JPL flight operations room was cluttered, cramped, the decor very dated. There were big mass storage units and immense filing cabinets, some of them open to reveal yellowing files, mounds of paper. Everything looked stale, aging.

  Dan had a cubicle to himself. He had a softscreen draped over his lap, and he wore a virtual-reality helmet that fitted tightly over his head, like a swimming cap, hiding his eyes behind rubber pads. There was kipple everywhere: pictures of the Nautilus leaving orbit, shots of the ship splashing against the rock, pinups of Sheena 5 herself, and a lot of the usual techie junk, toy spaceships and plastic aliens and soda cans and candy wrappers and movie posters.

  Dan turned to them and smiled. It was disconcerting, with his eyes concealed. “Yo, Malenfant, Emma. Welcome to the geeko-sphere.” Maybe, for him, they were floating against coal-black Cruithne. But she noticed he seemed to be able to work his softscreen, despite its awkward draping over his lap, without glancing down. “You want coffee, or soda? There’s a Shit machine—”

  “Just give me some news, Dan,” Malenfant said. “As good as possible.” His voice sounded tight with stress.

  Dan pushed his VR hood off his face. His eyes were reddened and sore, and the mask had left white marks across his forehead and cheeks. “Pay dirt,” he said. “The carbonaceous ore contains hydrogen, nitrogen, methane, carbon monoxide and dioxide, sulfur dioxide, ammonia—”