2020 (13 page)

The Lights

A
S USUAL THE STROBE LIGHTS
were making his eyes water.

He was sitting in the rec pod, fighting off an incipient migraine, watching the free dancing and trying to come to terms with what Miika had done to her hair. That’s when the announcement came over the ship’s intercom. He blinked to adjust to the normal illumination.

“Our long-range probes have registered coherent energy patterns, possible alien forms on the second planet from sun A5848,” Captain Blake was saying, annoyance clipping his words. “Even a transport like us is required to investigate. I regret the delay as much as all you farmers will, and I regret even more . . .”—Blake’s sigh of disgust was an audible rush—“that without regular scientific crew my orders are to put this ship into an orbit around the planet, and to send a shuttle down to investigate with whatever research-certified personnel . . .”

With the word “delay” Jackson’s attention had drifted back to Miika again. She was standing, hip cocked, bouncing slightly to the beat she was keeping in her mind, her shiny bald head swinging from side to side. She had shaved off all of her hair! He had been attracted to her in the first place because of the lush thickness of her tresses, and now they were gone. None of the rest of the women had been affected by the fashion show from Ganymede Colony, the agro planet to which they were being transported, but she’d bought everything on the menu, the silver fingernails, the silver lipstick, the shaved head. Why were beautiful women so shallow? He’d even liked the faint shadow of hair above her upper lip—gone now. If he weren’t too shy and awkward to free dance himself . . .

He was startled by the sound of his own name over the intercom. Everyone in the lounge was looking at him, even Miika, whose eyes had gone wide. The Captain had signed off and now Miika was coming over. Jackson was left with the incomprehensible reverberation of his own name in his head.

“. . . of all people,” Miika said, smiling warmly, putting her hand on his.

“I didn’t hear what Captain Blake was, uh, talking about,” he said shamefacedly. “I don’t, uh . . .”

“They’re sending a team down on a shuttle to that planet they’re getting signals from. You’re fourth man on the landing party. Nobody’s ever been on that planet before. How utterly . . .”

“Me?”

“You’re research-certified,” she said. “You’re about the only one.”

His heart sank. Now here was something else for him to screw up on the voyage. He was a specialist only in plant diseases. He’d never even been in a download suit before. The music was starting up again and the strobe started to flash.

“How supra exciting. Wanna free dance?”

When he stood up Jackson could see the slight slick sheen on her dome, the dizzying invitation in her eyes. She was wearing silver-tinted contacts. He hung his head and rubbed his throbbing temples. “I better go study up on a download suit,” he muttered miserably. “I don’t wanna go down there and die.”

* * *

“Listen,” Captain Blake was saying, scratching the blonde stubble on his chin, “in years of looking, no alien life form bigger or smarter than a dog’s been verified, so let’s not get excited, right? Jackson? I’m talking to you.”

Jackson bounced down in the zero-grav of the shuttle, waving his arms for balance. “Just getting used to the suit, sir. I thought it would be, uh, cumbersome.”

“Well, there’s atmosphere down there, so we’re not using helmets. Just make sure you use the O2 supplements. And leave all but one of those specimen cases behind. We’re not going to stay on the surface a minute longer than the twelve-hour minimum, do you all understand that? I want to get to Ganymede on time and get all those damned farm animals out of my pressurized hold.”

Jackson thought he saw the veterinarian who had been conscripted along with him glower, but the Flight Vane Engineer nodded grimly. Before they cut loose the engineer laid out the data again: the probes had picked up coherent light, patterns which fit the language protocol, multiple moving sources. “So the protocol triggered this looksee,” he said, barely a flicker of interest in his eyes. “You ask me, an’ I told the Captain, we’re gonna find some weather phenom and a bug in the protocol program.”

Just when Jackson thought he had it—his arms one way, his legs another, his trunk in rhythm—if it wasn’t exactly a free dance it might pass for one—Captain Blake slapped the thruster control with the palm of his hand, Jackson’s stomach turned a loop, and he hung on for dear life.

* * *

The plain upon which they had landed was dun-colored, rocky, cut by low arroyos formed by erosion, though it was obvious to Jackson that any water had evaporated off the surface of the planet thousands of years before. The clouds were high, pink, wispy. Jackson sucked on his supplemental oxygen tube contemplatively, gazing at the bleak landscape, the line of red bluffs in the distance, considering how he was going to describe the surface to Miika when he got back.

The Flight Vane Engineer had set up the portable computer on its tripod and was fiddling with the probes distractedly, trying to avoid the wrath of Captain Blake, who paced hands on hips, a dark look on his face. A fat reddish sun hung in the sky.

“I don’t see any coherent light,” Blake muttered. “I told you to put us right in the middle of the set. I don’t see a goddamned thing.”

“That
is
where I put us,” the Flight Vane Engineer said, looking into the steel cone of one of the probes so intently it seemed as if he wanted to crawl inside and hide.

“Well, find something,” Blake said, waving his arms, glaring at the men.

Jackson hurried back to the specimen rack he’d set next to the shuttle and shoveled tiny piles of dust onto the trays. The automatic analyzer signified that the dust was, in fact, ferrous oxide, basalt particulates, carbon particles, a hint of quartz. In summary, it was dust. The carbon was promising but electron micro showed no spores, bacteria, virus. No life.

“I don’t see any trace of animal life,” the vet told Captain Blake after a short hike around the area. “Except maybe for you, ho ho.” He took a swig from a brown unlabeled bottle and politely burped. “Maybe those lights were electrostatic charges in the atmosphere after all.” He leaned back against the starboard landing pontoon, patting it first to make sure that it had cooled, and raised his bottle to his lips again.

“Electrostatic charges. We come all this way to look at the weather,” Captain Blake grumbled. “What the hell are you drinking?”

The veterinarian took the bottle from his lips, held it away from his body and looked at it with a slightly stunned innocence. “I’m, er, sorry, sir. It’s a little home brew from the farmer’s co-op. It’s beer.”

The Flight Vane Engineer looked up from a tangle of wires beneath his tripod. “I hope you’ve got more.”

“As a matter of fact . . .”

Jackson saw the bright flashes first: beyond the bluffs, resolving into narrow beams. They spit out a sequence, like a code, then repeated. There were a dozen of them. For a brief moment they reminded Jackson of the strobe lights which illuminated Miika’s free dancing, then they were gone.

“Good eyes, Jackson,” the vet said, saluting him with a raised bottle.

“We’d better move up there,” the Flight Vane Engineer told the Captain.

“This time put us on the right spot.”

* * *

They had to go through a whole launch rigmarole to get the shuttle up into the bluffs. Jackson watched from the rear port: although the planet seemed to be basically a desert, the bluffs, the ridge-backed mountains beyond, were really very dramatic. They clunked down on a flat spot right where he’d seen the lights, right near the edge, with a dizzying view of the plain. But no sooner had they landed than they saw the lights again, this time from a high plateau in the direction of sunset. Captain Blake quickly took his own fix on the spot, determined the source to be stationary at least while transmitting, and decided they should move again. At the third site there was enough level ground to keep Jackson’s knees from knocking as he hiked around gathering soil samples for his specimen trays. But there was no other evidence that the precise spot was fundamentally any different from the gritty soil a thousand meters away.

“Though I’m, uh, finding more quartz, sir, and some mica. Maybe those lights emanate from mineral harmonics somehow. Say some grav or mag pattern sets up a current.”

The Flight Vane Engineer, tangled up with his wires under the tripod again, knocked over his beer bottle, already empty. “So where’s the complex pattern come from?”

“Could be produced by the crystal structure,” Jackson suggested. The vet toasted his hypothesis by raising his third bottle of beer, and Jackson took a deep, satisfied breath. Between the slightly reduced gravity of the planet, the crisp atmosphere of the plateau, and the exhilarating landscape, he felt terrific. “Or the process could have produced a form of life—I mean the light itself could have evolved into a form of life, it’s possible, and maybe these different geological features . . .”

“You’ve been sucking too much supplemental oxygen,” Captain Blake said. “Look, you’ve got the end of your tube all chewed up.”

“Sir?”

Blake and the others followed the focus of Jackson’s widening eyes, the specimen shovel pointed back toward the plain.

There they were again, brilliant points of light stretching into intense beams, sputtering out a strobe-like sequence of impressive complexity. The Flight Vane Engineer got a probe turned around, and when the lights shut down he took a long pull on another beer, dribbling a bit down his chin because he was keeping his eyes on his computer’s read-out screen.

“Different signal set entirely, Captain,” he said. “But it fits, I’ll be damned, the same language protocol.”

Blake groaned and banged the ship with his fist. He squinted up at the fat red sun, shimmering and huge now that it was so low in the sky. The landscape was turning deep purple, rare shades of scarlet and ochre, the plain striped with almost theatrical shadows. “All right,” Blake said. “We’re staying here through the planet’s night. Right here. Veterinary officer, break out that second case of beer. There’s some bedding under the aft deck.”

“Sir?”

“What now, Jackson?”

“Do you mind if I sleep outside?” Bright stars were already visible rising on the far horizon, opposite the setting sun. “It would be like, um, camping.”

“I don’t care what you do. But I’m telling you all this: unless we turn up something firm, we’re taking the data we have and hauling out of here at sunrise. Let somebody else figure it out. I want to make my schedule. I will make my schedule for transport. Understand?”

The vet passed Jackson an open bottle of beer—a dark malt, and very strong. The first swig alone seemed to give him a headache. He set the bottle down and went to fish out a bedroll.

* * *

Only when the sun had fully set did he realize just how bright the stars were—but of course, he thought, gazing upward into the neon twinkle: thin atmosphere, thousands of near suns. There had been no emanations since the last sighting from the plain, and the rest of the crew had polished off what turned out to be a total of three cases of strong beer. Now, hours later, they slept snoring in the shuttle cabin, and Jackson lay on his back, still looking up—it seemed impossible to him that there wasn’t intelligent life somewhere—rehearsing some casual way in which he could mention to Miika that he had camped out all alone, braving the unknown.

Again he shut his eyes and tried to sleep. He went over the long day in his crowded mind, could feel the weariness deep in his bones, but before long his legs twitched and his eyes came open again. The sight of the vast dome of the heavens above him, lying as he was among the tiny function lights of the probes the Flight Vane Engineer had set out, made him feel suspended in a sea of illuminated jewels. A constellation of blue-white stars directly overhead seemed curiously like the arrays of lights they had seen. They winked rhythmically and reminded him of the strobe lights in the rec pod—and Miika danced into his mind again, her silver shape frozen in time with the music, her breathtaking womancurves, her silver eyes. Miika: the perfect slick dome of her head, her attractively thick lips disfigured by silver lipstick, the marvelous sight of her hips and thighs as she brought her arms back and across, a free-dancing angel.

When he tried to think about something else he could feel every tiny rock he had failed to clear from beneath his bedding. He sat up and clicked on the emergency light he’d brought along, flashing it momentarily on the shuttle to make certain it was still there.

He decided to slip out of his bedroll and walk around. Once he had stretched and taken a few steps in the brisk atmosphere, his body seemed to tingle and he stopped, setting his arms out wide. In the deep blue void beyond, the air seemed charged somehow, slightly incandescent. Who would see him here? Legs this way, arms that way—yes, that was it, more or less. He rocked his head, his trunk, took the steps again, free dancing, the cone of illumination from his flashlight playing over the mountains in a dizzying rhythm. It wasn’t quite right, his rhythm, but he tried, tried again.

Then it was as if the cosmos had exploded, with him at the center.

Jackson was overcome by a brilliance so great he thought for a moment he had been atomized, but no, he could see his feet, his still dancing feet, colors all around him, through him, in him: yellows and reds and greens and blues of such purity and intensity that he would have fallen to his knees overwhelmed had not a new energy filled him as well, an electricity that seemed to penetrate his spine and discharge in each of his nerve cells. It was wonderful! he was feeling, even as he was thinking all colors are contained in white, and the lights screamed all around him. The rhythm he had been trying to find in his head was in the lights now, it was extraordinary. The light, the rhythm, was in his arms too, his legs, his fingers, his toes—it seemed to penetrate into the very cells of his muscles and nerves, he was the dancer and the dance. It was as if new electric blood surged through his heart, and he danced, danced, danced.