The Sunborn (16 page)

T
HE LONG ICE RIDGE
rose out of the sea like a great gray reef. Following its Earthly analogy, it teemed with life. Quilted patches of vivid blue-green and carrot orange spattered its natural pallor. Out of those patches spindly trunks stretched toward the midmorning sun. At their tips crackled bright blue St. Elmo’s fire.

Violet-tinged flying wings swooped lazily in and out among them to feed. Some, already filled, alighted at the shoreline and folded themselves, waiting with their flat heads cocked at angles. The sky, even at Pluto’s midmorning, remained a dark backdrop for the gauzy auroral curtains that bristled with energy. This world had grown its steadily thickening atmosphere only in the last few decades, the astronomers said. The infrared studies showed warming for maybe fifty years. Yet the gathering blanket was still not dense enough to scatter the wan sunlight, so the bowl of sky was a hard black.

Into this slow world came a high roar. Wings flapped away from the noise. A giant filled the sky.

Jordin Kare dropped the lander closer. His lean, hawklike face seemed to be all angles in the cockpit’s red glow. His eyes moved restlessly over the board instruments, the view screens, the joystick he moved through minute adjustments. Shanna’s legs were cramped from the small copilot chair, and she bounced with the rattling boom of atmospheric braking.

Beside her in his acceleration couch Jordin peered forward at the swiftly looming landscape. “How’s that spot?” He jabbed a finger tensely at the approaching horizon.

“Near the sea? Sure. Plenty of life-forms there. Kind of like an African watering hole.” Analogies were all she had to go on here, but there was a resemblance. Their recon scans had showed a ferment all along the shoreline.

Kare brought them down sure and steady above a rocky plateau, their drive running red-hot. Streamers of steam jetted down onto ice hardened like rock by the deep cold.

This was a problem nobody on the mission team, for all their contingency planning, had foreseen. Their deceleration plume was bound to incinerate many of the life-forms in this utterly cold ecosystem. Even after hours the lander might be too hot for any life to approach, not to mention scalding them when nearby ices suddenly boiled away.

Well, nothing to do about it now.

“Fifty meters and holding.” Kare glanced at her. “Okay?”

“Touchdown,” she said, and they thumped down onto the rock. To land on ice would have sunk them hip-deep in fluid, only to then be refrozen rigidly into place. They eagerly watched the plain. Something hurried away at the horizon, which did not look more than a kilometer away.

“Look at those lichen,” she said eagerly. “In so skimpy an energy environment, how can there be so
many
of them?”

“We’re going to be hot for an hour, easy,” Kare said, his calm, careful gaze sweeping the view systematically. Shanna could see what he meant: the lander rested on its drive, and already, pale vapor rose from beneath, curling up past their downview cameras. The nuclear pile would cool in time, but it might sublime away ice beneath them. The engineers had thought of this, so their footpads spread broadly. Hot water could circulate through them, to prevent getting stuck in hardening ice later.

They had thought of a lot of things, but certainly not this dim, exotic landscape. The ship’s computers were taking digital photographs automatically, getting a good map. “I say we take a walk.”

They were live straight to Earthside, and Shanna was glad he had voiced the idea first. The mission engineers had warned them to venture onto the surface only when unavoidable. Come this
far and never feel the crunch of Pluto beneath your boots?
Come,
now.

The cold here was unimaginable, hundreds of degrees below human experience. In orbit they were well insulated, but here the ice would steal heat by conduction. Their suit heaters could cope, the engineers said—the atmosphere was too thin to steal heat quickly—but only if their boots alone actually touched the frigid ground. Sophisticated insulation could only do so much.

Shanna did not like to think about this part. If it failed, her feet would freeze in her boots, then the rest of her. Even for the lander’s heavily insulated shock-absorber legs, they had told her, it would be touch and go beyond a stay of a few hours. Their onboard nuclear thermal generator was already laboring hard to counter the cold she could see creeping in, from their external thermometers. Their craft already creaked and popped from thermal stresses.

Their thermal armor, from the viewpoint of the natives, must seem a bristling, untouchable furnace. Yet already, they could see things scurrying on the plain. Some seemed to be coming closer. Maybe curiosity was indeed a universal trait of living things.

Jordin pointed silently. She picked out a patch of dark blue-gray down by the shore of the methane sea. On their console she brought up the visual magnification. In detail it looked like rough beach shingle. Tidal currents during the twenty-two hours since dawn had dropped some kind of gritty detritus—not just ices, apparently—at the sea’s edge. Nothing seemed to grow on the flat, and—swiveling point of view—the ridge’s knife edge also seemed bare, relatively free of life. “Maybe a walk down to the
beach?” Jordin said. “Turn over a few rocks?”

“Roger.” They were both tiptoeing around the coming moment. With minimal talk they got into their suits.

Skillfully, gingerly—and by prior coin flip—Shanna clumped down the ladder. She almost envied those pioneer astronauts who had first touched the ground on Luna, backed up by a constant stream of advice, or at least comment, from Houston. The Mars landing crew had taken a mutual, four-person single step. Taking a breath, she let go the ladder and thumped down on Pluto. Startlingly, sparks spat between her feet and the ground, jolting her.

“Wow! There must be a
lot
of electricity running around out here,” she said, fervently thanking the designers for all that redundant insulation.

Jordin followed. She watched big blue sparks zap up from the ground to his boots. He jumped and twitched.

“Ow! That smarts,” Jordin said.

Only then did she realize that she had already had her shot at historical pronouncements and had squandered it in her surprise. And her first word—
Wow
—what a profound thought, huh? she asked herself ruefully.

Jordin said solemnly, “We stand at the ramparts of the solar system.”

Well,
she thought,
fair enough.
He had actually remembered his prepared line. He grinned at her and shrugged as well as he could in the bulky suit. Now on to business.

Against the gray ice and rock their lander stood like an H. G. Wells Martian walking machine, splayfooted and ominous. Vapor subliming from beneath it gave a mysterious air.

“Rocks, anyone?” They began gathering some, using long tweezers. Soil samples rattled into the storage bin. She carefully inspected under the rocks, but there was no sign of small life—worm tracks, microbe stains, clues. The soil here was just regolith.

“Let’s take a stroll,” Jordin said.

“Hey, close-up that.” She pointed out toward movement above the sea.

Some triangular shapes moved in the air, flapping. “Birds?”

She could faintly
hear calls, varying up and down in pitch. Repeating the same few notes, too.

Jordin said, “Look in the water—or whatever that chemical is.”

“Methane? Like molasses.” Her eyes widened. On the slick, wrinkled surface, movement. Things were swimming toward them. Just nubs barely visible above the oily surface, they made steady progress toward shore. Each had a small wake behind it.

“Looks like something’s up,” Jordin said.

She followed and saw something odd. “Hey! What’s that?”

A gray arm with a pincer at the end. Gray, lying on the sand. “Looks metallic,” Jordin said.

There were bits and pieces littering the beach. “Fragments,” Shanna said. “Looks like some body, torn apart.”

They saw other parts along the shoreline, most no bigger than ten centimeters. “Funny,” Jordin said. “Might be a machine?”

“Probably a species we haven’t seen yet,” Shanna said. “Gotta get a sample of that.” They scooped up a few pieces, filed it away mentally under Mysteries, and walked on. When they came to a big boulder, Jordin took an experimental leap. He went over it easily, rising to twice his height.

She tried it, too. “Wheeee!” Fun. And good footage for the auto-cams focused on them from the lander.

As they carefully walked down toward the beach, she tried her link to the lander’s wideband receiver. Happily she found that the frequencies first logged by her lost, devoured probe were full of traffic. Confusing, though. Each of the beasts—for she was sure it was them—seemed to be broadcasting on all waves at once. Most of the signals were weak, swamped in background noise that sounded like an old AM radio picking up a nearby high-tension line. One, however, came roaring in like a pop music station. “Ouch!” She slapped on filters and then made the lander’s inductance tuner scan carefully.

That pattern
—
yes!
It had to be. Quickly she compared it with the probe log she’d brought down on her slate. These were the odd cadences and sputters of the very beast whose breakfast snack had been her first evidence of life.

“Listen to this,” she said. Jordin looked startled through his faceplate.

The signal boomed louder, and she turned back the gain. She decided to try the radio direction finder. Jordin did, too, for cross-check. As they stepped apart, moving from some filmy ice onto a brooding brown rock, she felt sparks snapping at her feet. Little jolts managed to get through even the thermal vacuum-layer insulation, prickling her feet.

The vector reading, combined with Jordin’s, startled her. “Why, the thing’s practically on top of us!”

She eyed the landscape. If Pluto’s lords of creation were all swimming in toward this island ridge for lunch, this one might get here first.
Fired up by all those vitamins from the lost probe?
she wondered.

Suddenly excited, Shanna peered out to sea—and there it was. Only a roiling, frothing ripple, like a ship’s bow wave, but arrowing for shore. And others, farther out.

Then it bucked up into view, and she saw its great, segmented tube of a body, with a sheen somewhere between mother-of-pearl and burnished brass. Why, it was
huge.
For the first time it hit her that when they all converged on this spot, it was going to be like sitting smack in a middling-size dinosaur convention.

Too late to back out now. She powered up the small lander transmitter and tuned it to the signal she was receiving from seaward.

With her equipment she could not duplicate the creature’s creative chaos of wavelengths. For its personal identification sign the beast seemed to use a simple continuous pulse pattern, like Morse code. Easy enough to simulate. After a couple of dry-run hand exercises to get with the rhythm of it, Shanna sent the creature a roughly approximate duplicate of its own ID.

She had expected a callback, maybe a more complex message. The result was astonishing. Its internal rocket engine fired a bright orange plume against the sky’s black. It shot straight up in the air, paused, and plunged back. Its splash sent waves rolling up the beach. The farthest tongue of fluid broke against the lander’s most seaward leg. The beast thrashed toward shore, rode a wave in—and stopped. The living cylinder lay there, half in, half out, as if exhausted.

Had she terrified it? Made it panic?

Cautiously Shanna tried the signal again, thinking furiously. It
would
give you quite a turn, she realized, if you’d just gotten as far in your philosophizing as “I think, therefore I am,” and then heard a thin, toneless duplicate of your own voice give back an echo.

She braced herself—and her second signal prompted a long, suspenseful silence. Then, hesitantly—shyly?—the being repeated the call after her.

Shanna let out her breath in a long, shuddering sigh.

She hadn’t realized she was holding it. Then she instructed DIS; the primary computer aboard
Proserpina,
to run the one powerful program Pluto Mission Control had never expected her to have to use: the translator, Wiseguy.

She waited for the program to come up and kept her eyes on the creature. It washed gently in and out with the lapping waves but seemed to pay her no attention. Jordin was busily snapping digitals. He pointed offshore. “Looks like we put a stop to the rest of them.”

Heads bobbed in the sea. Waiting? For what?

In a few moments they might have an answer to questions that had been tossed around endlessly after the Marsmat discoveries. Could all language be translated into logically rigorous sentences, relating to one another in a linear configuration, structures, a system? If so, one could easily program a computer loaded with one language to search for another language’s equivalent structures. Or, as many linguists and anthropologists insisted—particularly in light of the achingly slow progress with the Marsmat—does a truly unknown language forever resist such transformations?

Shanna stood absolutely still. Those minds offshore might make something of a raised hand, a shifting foot. Not all talk was verbal.

She
felt
the strangeness. Forbidding, cold, weird chemistry. Alien tongues could be outlandish not merely in vocabulary and grammatical rules but in their semantic swamps. Mute cultural or even biological premises wove into even the simplest of sentences. Blue skies Earthside lifted the spirits; here a blue gas might be poison. What would life-forms get out of this place? Could even the most inspired programmers, just by symbol manipulation and number crunching, have cracked ancient Egyptian with no Rosetta stone?

Not moving, she sent, “Bring Wiseguy online verbal, now.”

“Copy you,” came word from
Proserpina’s
bridge. Ukizi, from the voice signature.

She heard a delicate pop, and there was the burr of background—Wiseguy waiting for instructions. “Hey, guy,” she said.