by Allan Kaster
My own part in this endeavor was trivially small. I was under no illusions about that. At best, I’d be filling in a few unimportant gaps in our coverage.
What mattered was the symbolism of my journey. By proposing the idea of the capsule, and then volunteering to crew it, I had provided a unifying focus for the crew. Selestat, Atrato and the others had pulled back from the brink. My sacrifice was visible, unarguable. It had inspired cooperation and reconciliation across the divisions. The ship’s destiny remained unchanged, but at least now we had found a purpose, a common dignity.
I felt a quiet contentment. I had done the right thing. We had done the right thing.
A comms squirt came in from the Dandelion.
“Thought you’d appreciate these images of Providence,” Selestat said, after some awkward preliminaries. “We’ve been weeping over them for hours, so it’s only fair to share some of our sorrow. It’s more beautiful than we ever imagined, Goodwoman Marudi. Pristine, untamed—an Eden. It’ll make a lovely world for some other pilgrim.”
“But not us,” I whispered.
He was right. The images were gorgeous, heart-breaking. Azure seas, gold-fringed coasts, green forests, windswept savannahs, diamond-bright mountain-ranges. A world we could have lived on, with little modification. A world that could have been ours.
I swallowed down my sadness. It was wrong to be envious of those who would come after us, those who would actually know the airs of their world, its fragrances and evening moods. Better to do something that would guide their passage, something that would help them. They would be grateful, I was sure. They would build monuments to our generosity.
Something caught my eye.
It was from the capsule’s own sensor summary, nothing to do with the images Selestat had sent.
The capsule had picked up something on the unlit face of Providence. It was on an area of that world which would never be visible from the main ship, one of the blind spots I was supposed to fill in for the sake of completeness.
A thermal signature.
I stared at it, waiting for some transient fault to clear itself. But the signature remained. If anything, it was growing brighter, more distinct against background darkness.
I told the capsule to concentrate its sensors on that area, while it was still in view.
The image sharpened.
The thermal smudge was on a coastal inlet, exactly where we might have chosen to place a settlement. It was a harbor city, with spidering lines radiating out to more distant communities. These too were warming, beginning to glow against darkness. Lava-lines of communication and travel and energy-distribution. Hot moving sparks of vehicles, returning to the sky.
I understood.
They had dimmed their lights, turned off their power, during the period when they would have been at risk of detection, even when they were out of direct sight of the main ship. But now they thought they were safe. They were bringing their city and its surroundings out of dormancy, restarting generators, resuming normal patterns of life.
I felt puzzlement at first.
Then suspicion.
Finally a slow rising fury.
Earth had already got here. By some unguessable means they had come up with something faster than our Inflator Drive. While we were sleeping, they had reached Providence and settled it.
Our efforts were pointless, our noble intentions irrelevant. The people on Providence knew of our existence. They were aware of our survival, aware of our plight, and still they wished to hide their presence from us.
Not because we were a threat to them, or of any larger consequence.
I think we were an embarrassment.
We were like shabby old relatives stumbling out of the night, bringing unwanted gifts and favors. Our existence made them uncomfortable. They wanted us to go away. So they damped their fires, battened their doors, shuttered their windows and kept very, very still, pretending no one was at home.
All of which would have been theirs to know, their secret to hold, their shame to live with, except for one thing.
They had not known of me.
☼ ☼ ☼
So, something of a dilemma.
My fury hasn’t gone away. It boils in me like a hot tide, demanding release. I want to send this news back to the Dandelion, so that they can share in my righteous anger. That would be the proper, dutiful thing. My fellow pilgrims do not deserve to remain in ignorance about this callous, calculated act of deception.
They should learn, and know, and decide in their own time how to communicate the fact of that knowing back to Providence.
What a bitter astonishment it would be for those people on that world, to learn that their cleverness had not been sufficient. To learn that we had seen through their lie, and exposed their shame and furtiveness for what it was.
It would change no part of my fate, and make no ultimate difference to the people on the main ship. But there would be some minor solace for me in the sharing of my discovery, unburdening myself of some fraction of the anger I now carried.
So, yes, I thought long and hard about that.
☼ ☼ ☼
In a corner of the capsule I find a dried petal.
The people on the Dandelion still think that they’ve done a good and noble thing, and I won’t rob them of that. Let them continue thinking that Providence is unsettled, that their observations will wing their way back to a grateful Earth, moved to tears by their selflessness. Let them have the contentment of knowing that their information will pave the way for another expedition, that their kindness will ring down the centuries.
Let them have that.
The only snag is, I don’t trust myself.
I can’t let this knowledge find its way back to them. And even if rescue isn’t feasible—and it probably isn’t—I can’t trust myself not to crack. It would be too easy to send a signal back to the Dandelion. At the moment my resolve feels total, unwavering. I believe I can hold a secret until my last breath.
But what I believe now, and what I’ll feel when the air is guttering out, are two different things.
I’m just human, and the one thing we’re not very good at is taking secrets to the grave.
I flip down the emergency panel over the pressure vent release. I settle my hand on the heavy red lever, ignoring the increasingly strident tones of the automatic warning message. I allow myself one last thought: this is also a sort of kindness, albeit not quite the one I had in mind.
And pull.
Nothing Ever Happens on Oberon
Paul McAuley
OBERON’S TRAFFIC CONTROL spotted the intruder in the last seconds of its approach. Something small and fast, decelerating hard, estimated terminal velocity around three hundred kph. No time to raise its crew, if it was crewed, or pinpoint exactly where it came down—the best-guess landing ellipse covered an area of some two thousand square kilometers on the north side of Egeus Crater, one of the largest on the little pockmarked moon. There was no distress call or beacon, either, but Bai Bahar Minnot, supervisor of a scale-mining operation in Egeus, was aloft in her hopper bare minutes after the alert and soon spotted patches smashed into the endless umbrella-tree forest that covered most of the crater’s floor. A dotted line that led her straight to where the intruder had come to rest.
It sat at the far end of a trough of wrecked trees: a white sphere three meters in diameter, cupped on the deflated puddles of tough airbags that had protected it during its kinetic landing. A lifepod, according to the hopper’s catalogue, an old model built some time before the Quiet War. It had thrown out a web of tethers to anchor itself in Oberon’s vestigial gravity, its systems were powered down, and its hatch was puckered open.
It looked as if the pod’s passenger had survived the crash and climbed out, but there was no sign of any movement around the pod, no one was calling on any channel, and a multispectral scan of the area failed to pick out anything in the infrared background radiated by umbrella trees around the crash site.
Bai sent a quick report to traffic control, said that she was going to set down and take a look. Trying her best to sound cool and matter-of-fact, even though this was the most exciting thing that had ever happened in her young life. She was anxious, too. The pod’s passenger could be badly injured, might need more help than she could provide. Or maybe they were an outlaw, or were in some species of serious trouble—why else would someone crash-land on this no-account backwater moon without broadcasting a distress call?
She picked out a clear spot in the tangle of broken trees, touched down with scarcely a bounce, and was reaching for the helmet of her pressure suit when someone pinged her on the common channel. Lindy Aguilar Garten, from the camp at the North Pole. She’d heard Bai’s report, she said, was on her way to the crash site with a small search and rescue party, would be there inside two hours.
“I’m already on it,” Bai said.
“You’re the daughter of Wen, Egil and Ye, aren’t you? We met at the centenary celebrations last year. You’d just turned seventeen, as I recall.”
“I’m old enough to know what I’m doing.”
“Fixing some machine that’s thrown a glitch is one thing. Confronting a stranger who tried to sneak past traffic control is quite another. Your best option is to stay aloft, do a wide area grid search. If you don’t find anything, you can help us on the ground when we get there.”
“I’m already on the ground,” Bai said.
She remembered that meeting vividly. Tall and slender, dressed in a sheath the exact indigo tint of Uranus’s South Pole, Lindy had just returned from the Saturn system, where she’d spent two years studying biome construction. She hadn’t been much older than Bai—twenty, twenty-one—but she’d seemed impossibly elegant, sophisticated, cosmopolitan. Everything Bai yearned to be. She’d barely glanced at Bai while their parents exchanged a few pleasantries, and now here she was, muscling in, giving Bai instructions and telling her it was for her own damn good.
“If you’re worried about salvage, you can rest easy,” Lindy said. “It’s obvious that you have first claim on the lifepod.”
“I’m worried that its passenger could be hurt, or worse. And right now I’m the only person who can help them,” Bai said, and cut the channel, locked her helmet and cracked the hopper’s bubble canopy, and swung out and down.
The lifepod was empty all right, and when Bai asked her suit to handshake with its mind, hoping to find out where it had come from and who its passenger was, she discovered that it was as dead as a stone. Its systems weren’t powered down, the suit reported. They had been wiped. Purged. Nothing was left but a flicker of charge in its batteries.
Bai circled the pod, fingertip-skimming over and under splintered stems draped with crumpled canopies like fallen black sails, searching for boot prints or some other trace of the passenger, failing to find anything. Nothing moving under trees fringing either side of the smashed clearing, nothing moving anywhere in the absolute quiet stillness of vacuum.
If the pod’s passenger had for whatever reason decided to put some distance between themselves and the crash site, there was only one place within easy walking distance: a refuge that stood on the rim of a secondary crater about ten kilometers northwest. If she had crash-landed in a remote unpopulated area with no resources but a p-suit, Bai thought, and didn’t want to wait around for rescue or maybe didn’t want to be rescued, that was absolutely where she would head.
She knew she should wait for backup, but Lindy’s patronizing tone had got under her skin. And anyway, it was a matter of clan pride to prove that she could find the passenger without the help of any damn Gartens. So she tuned into the refuge’s directional beacon, pulled up a map, and set off.
The silence and stillness seemed deeper under the umbrella trees. Bai was hyperalert as she ankled along, picking her way between interlocking arcs of trees, trying to keep the beacon dead ahead and searching for boot prints in crunchy dust that was everywhere littered with fallen scales, porcelain white toothy triangles the size of her helmet visor. Every so often her insulated boots kicked one at exactly the right angle and it sailed away in a long, low, frictionless arc. Every so often she disturbed a pocket of loose dust that spurted up in a waist-high geyser and settled out so slowly that if she looked around (as she increasingly did, gripped by a growing unease) she saw a diminishing row of ghostly pillars stitched along her path.
The ground rose and fell in low swales; umbrella trees thickened all around. The top layer of a vast factory that was mostly underfoot, extruded by pseudohyphal networks of nanomachines that extracted processed organic material from the rock-hard ice of the forest floor, and mined metals, rare earths and phosphates from the moon’s crust.
The stems of the trees glowed faintly in infrared and their canopies shone more brightly overhead, radiating excess heat into the chill vacuum, and the ground between them was tiger-striped with faint sunlight and pitch-black shadow. Even with her suit’s various enhancements, Bai couldn’t see more than a couple of hundred meters in any direction, but she plodded on, time ticking away, too stubborn and prideful to give up the search.
She was two kilometers from the refuge, and Lindy Garten and her crew were due to arrive in less than thirty minutes, when she was ambushed. Everything happened in a bare second. A sudden flurry of movement off to one side, something flying out from behind the broad stem of a grandmother tree, and the reflexes of Bai’s suit took over before she could react, tangling the attacker in a net a moment before the shock of impact, firing tethers that spun her in a hard stop that rattled her head inside her helmet.
The passenger flew away in the opposite direction, ricocheting off trees in headlong flight. Bai had to walk a long way, following a trail of fresh-fallen scales, before at last she spotted them. They lay unmoving, forced into a fetal ball by the net’s contraction, didn’t reply when Bai identified herself on the common band. Fearing the worst, she knelt and rolled them onto their back, and rocked back on her heels when she saw the emaciated face behind the visor of their helmet, teeth bared in a lipless grin, eyes sunk deep in sockets and taped shut.
☼ ☼ ☼
“I thought she was dead,” Bai told her mother on the flight back to the scale-harvesting camp. “But then I managed to handshake with the clunky interface of her suit and found she was in cold sleep. I guess the pod assembled a suit around her after it crash-landed, and the suit tried to walk her toward the refuge. But its batteries were almost exhausted when I caught up with it, and I think its mind was damaged, too. That could be why it attacked me. It didn’t understand that I’d come to help. So I disabled its motor functions and fed it just enough power to keep its life support going until the hopper arrived, and here we are, free and clear.”
There was a pause, a little under six seconds, while this zipped at light speed from Oberon to Titania, where Bai’s clan and most people in the Uranus system lived, and her mother’s reply zipped back. The two moons were presently on opposite sides of the planet, a million kilometers apart, but there was no escaping Bai’s mother, who’d pinged her as soon as she’d found out about the escapade, and not to shower her with praise and congratulations.
“You didn’t know who was in that lifepod, why it crash-landed where it did,” she said to Bai. “And you went chasing off into the forest without telling anyone what you were doing. What were you thinking? But I suppose you weren’t.”
“I was the first to arrive at the crash site,” Bai said. “What else was I supposed to do?”
Even though she knew that things could have gone very differently if her suit hadn’t been so quick and clever, she was convinced that she’d done the right thing. If she hadn’t found her when she did, the woman’s suit might have run out of power. She might have died.
But as usual Bai’s mother had other ideas, saying, “You should have waited until the Gartens arrived.”
“I didn’t need their help to find her.”
“And I suppose you think that you don’t need
their help now. Even though their camp has better medical facilities.”
Yes, there was definitely a familiar edge to her voice. Bai’s mother, Wen Phoenix Minnot, was seventy-three years old, a clan elder, grand and chilly and remote. Bai was the youngest of her six children, a late addition to the family after Wen married a second husband. Lately, she seemed to be perpetually annoyed by her youngest daughter’s restlessness, which was why Bai had been packed off to supervise the scale-harvesting camp on Oberon. She wanted to live on another world? Here was her chance. A moon much like Titania, but somewhat smaller and with even fewer people. Where she could gain useful experience in field engineering. Where living in a trailer habitat in the middle of nowhere (almost everywhere on Oberon was the middle of nowhere), with only machines for company would make her realize what she was missing, back home. Where nothing ever happened.
Except that now it had.
“They would have taken all the credit,” Bai said. “Like they took the pod.”
“Whoever this woman is, she isn’t a trophy,” Wen said.
“Tell that to Lindy Garten.”
Lindy had told Bai that she’d quote unquote secured the lifepod after it had been abandoned in place. Bai was pretty sure Lindy had ratted her out to her mother, too. The responsible adult fixing the hot-headed kid’s screw-up, scoring points in the perpetual competition between clans for social superiority.
“She did the right thing, and made a full report to the peacers,” Wen said. “While you more or less kidnapped this unfortunate woman.”
“She has a name,” Bai said. “Xtina Groza. At least, that’s the name on her suit ID tag. As for the rest—why she was in that lifepod, why she came here—I guess she can tell me when she wakes up.”
