The Sunborn (22 page)

Now, as it listened to its fellow zand sing chorus after triumphant chorus of the Hymn of Birthing, the eldest of the tribe began to understand why the strangers had been reluctant to part with this stunning information. The strong, simple faith the zand had in Lightgiver, as the knowing, caring Awakener and Nourisher of all life, had carried them since time immemorial through hunger and storms. Through the attacks of flappers and borers. Through the gathering sad and bitter disappointments of dwindling Birthings. And through much else, for cycle after hard, weary cycle.

With the new knowledge just gained of their World, they might yet prevail. But Old One decided it would not, at this critical time, share with the others a further revelation that must surely make them falter and despair. Most of the motive essence that sustained them, the strangers had hinted, did not come from Lightgiver at all.

The strangers had acted very much like followers of Lightgiver’s Way. They had given, freely and without question. They had shared sadness and joy. And they had descended from the black sky, for the zand’s sake. They had risked life and in their sluggish way sallied off to Darkside.

Old One did not expect the strangers to return from Darkside, of course. Much imponderable evil lurked there. Even those of Lightgiver could surely not master it.

S
HANNA WOKE
.

She hadn’t expected to. And none of the kinds of afterlife she had ever idly visualized included lying naked in a warm nutrient bath.

She let her mind drift…wishing for more sleep… Then the green, acrid, medicinal-sharp fluid drained out beneath her. She sat up. Not a mark on her; not even, so far as she could tell by feel, a facial scratch suffered in the crash. And internally she felt fine. Ravenous but great.
Proserpina’s
life-support program was passing a test nobody on Pluto Project had ever imagined…

Then memory returned. Somehow Jordin had gotten her away from the Darksiders, had kept her alive. “Jordin!”

He came in softly, carefully. “You’ve had a big day.”

“How long was I out?”

“I’d say ’bout seven hours. Mary Kay sedated you so you wouldn’t feel the work done on your skin.” He frowned, and his lips were set in a firm, give-nothing-away cast she recognized. Withholding something for later, yes.

“Freezer burn?” She tried to sit up and look but was still groggy.

“You mean frostbite.”

“That was a joke, Jordin.”

He didn’t smile. “We had to peel you some. Mary Kay did it, not me.”

“Ummm, yeah, privacy…” But her mind was racing now. “The Darksiders?”

“They helped, kinda. I was knocked out, and they resealed some of the joints.”

“They
what?
”

“Some kind of vacuum welding, I guess. As soon as I could get oriented, I lifted us off.”

“You were injured!”

“Ship operations helped. Mary Kay told me how to use the suit built-in injector, got some stimulant I can’t pronounce into me. Everybody helped. We had a little trouble with the pumps. One shut down, dunno why. I’m taking it apart now. Looks like a frozen-up valve, is all.”

“But you made it! Wow!”

“Thought you’d appreciate getting back into a bath.” His askew smile was the Jordin she knew so well—never brag, just do the job. But he was hiding something, too.

“They
repaired
things?”

“Sure looks like. Vacuum welding… They’re smart.”

“Yeah. Everybody out here seems to be.”

“Uh, I’ve got to get back to work.”

Jordin left, blushing a bit. Still with the funny set to his lips. She let herself laze about a bit, trying to read Jordin’s mood, then roused herself. Time
for rebirth.
She was stiff, and her joints ached. As she stood to climb out of the tank, a triumphant wave of elation surged through her and pushed all other thoughts and pains aside.
Hooray! I’m alive!

She set the adjoining shower cubicle for a full, vigorous needle spray and stepped inside. She took it happily, until the water recycler blinked to warn her that she was overusing. Then she let a gush of cold water pour down on her for several seconds before shutting it off. Rather than activate the air-dryer, she stepped out, tingling, and wrapped herself in a huge bath towel.

Now you should get some soup into you,
her grandmother would have said now. So she did.

The chatter with crew was warming, too. She programmed the autochef for one of its most elaborate meals; the ingredients, recipe, and computer routine had been a farewell gift from France, of all places. Preparation burbled happily and she snuggled herself into a fresh coverall. Some astronauts and cosmonauts she had known, when not actually working, adjusted temperature and humidity controls and floated around in their cabins nude. Shanna, however, wore clothes every ship day for much the same reason British colonial officers in the old days, even in the steaming tropics, donned full formal dress for dinner each evening—a connection with civilization. And if crew found out she was doing nudie floats…

The autochef chimed; first course served. Shanna turned up the audio and put on the Brahms
German Requiem,
which, despite its sometimes lugubrious lyrics, seemed to her actually one of the most joyous, life-affirming works ever composed. Crew sat and ate and tolerated her taste, knowing she didn’t want to talk. They all had unspoken protocols.

“Here on earth we have no lasting abode,” she sang, thinking of the Darksiders. She had just killed a lot of them, and yet they had saved her life. And if the zand legends could be trusted, they viciously attacked the zand in the long Plutonian years. And she and Jordin had seen them with a dead zand. She was certain that only her crude bomb had stopped them from doing it again. How to judge?

Or was there something deeper happening here? She brought this up around the dinner table, all crew present except the watch officer, Uziki. Shanna was American, so she opened with that. “Would an alien outsider judge America’s performance by My Lai and Wounded Knee or by Lincoln and Jefferson?”

That got them started. Mary Kay said, “Aren’t we getting anthropomorphic here? What kind of consciousness—what kind of ethics—operates with a circulatory system running on liquid nitrogen?”

Chow-Lin twisted his lips skeptically. “Or did we get into something we don’t have a remote chance of understanding?”

Jordin said, “We sure won’t unless we try.”

Shanna let the talk run. She had given the orders, and the others weren’t too happy with playing spear-carriers. Fair enough. But democracy was a luxury out here. “There wasn’t time for a long discussion,” she said. “Somebody had to act, if we were going to keep talking to the zand.”

Mary Kay said, “Looks from the IR like the Darksiders did pull back after you lifted off. No more feelers out to encircle that zand community.”

“Um.” Chow-Lin looked melancholy, staring off into the distance. “Make a wasteland and call it a peace.”

Shanna wanted to bark back, “Enough of this nonsense! It’s done, so we live with it”—but she held her tongue.

Mary Kay said soberly, “We looked at what happened at the, uh, attack site, after you left. Toward local noon, zand came into where you blasted the Darksiders. They…ate the remains.”

Shanna gaped, openmouthed. “They feed on…”

“Looks like,” Mary Kay said. “Tore the body parts down, ingested them somehow.”

Chow-Lin said, “Remember those parts you and Jordin saw on the beach?”

Jordin snapped his fingers. “Darksider parts!”

Shanna was awed. Here was a predator-prey relationship, of a weird kind. Maybe, maybe… Darksiders had the edge in the night, but zand could digest the Darksiders during the day. Overall, the Old One said, the Darksiders were winning. “Speaking as a biologist,” she said, “this is making some sense…but…”

She and Jordin gazed at each other, eyes wide. “Current-driven…” he said.

“Biosphere,” she finished.

Jordin blurted, “Enhance the chem reactions with current. Speed up all the enzymes and protein folding…”

“To make a chemical biosphere run as though it was a lot warmer,” she finished.

Mary Kay frowned. “Why? Because whatever built the Pluto biosphere knew lots more about electricity than it did about warm chemistry?”

The whole crew stared at each other. “Sounds good,” Chow-Lin said.

Shanna sat back.
Wow. Can that be it?
They needed to know more, sure, but she was captain, after all. She should let the research angle rest, get down to business, check out status reports—and then her eyes widened. “Hey, did anybody go down the checklist for the lander?”

Mary Kay said ruefully, “We were kinda in a hurry.”

“Worried about us, sure,” Jordin the peacemaker murmured, coming out of his distracted gaze. Something still irking him.

A suspicion clicked in Shanna’s mind. She said nothing, just jumped up and was first to reach the departure bay. They searched the lander, which was going to need a lot of blowtorch-level work. The alien patch-up had been hasty but remarkably firm and tight. “This wasn’t done any way I can figure,” Jordin said, running a gamma-ray probe over the seam, which looked like brown, melted ice cream. “Must be low-temperature metal bonding or something.”

“Spread out all over it and check every crevice,” Shanna said tersely. For
what?
She had no idea.

Shanna worked methodically, letting Brahms follow her in her ear patch. Internal systems running okay. Then the external check, looking in every cranny, the underside, wiring boxes, thrusters, and—

There it was. A neat oval hole, cut all through the crumpled number four landing leg. Rimmed by an equally neat patch of a dull reddish material.

“Red?” Mary Kay said. “Never seen that on the surface.”

“Only two centimeters across.” Jordin took a sample. “Big enough for a clawhold. Maybe somebody hitchhiked aboard?”

They stared at each other. “So it’s…onboard?” Shanna mentally kicked herself for not doing this right away. She had been lolling about in a goddamn medicinal bath.
Captains don’t pamper themselves!

The breach was near the lander leg’s chunky top swivel joint, which was sitting a mere meter from a bulkhead that cradled
Proserpina’s
life-support tanks. (My
God, do they know our ship blueprints, too?)
Between the bulkhead and cryo tank compartment the ceramo-carbon deck was scratched and scored, as if something had dragged a heavy machine through. Or
a machine dragged itself.
A faint tang of—
ammonia? What chemistry worked in them?
—hung in the air.

“Spread out through the whole ship,” she said. “We’ve got to find this whatever-it-is.”
Darksider. Houseguest.

They scattered. She raced hand over hand up one level, to the main ship computer console. An all-systems check gave her nothing. A light winked at her imperiously from one of the monitors.
Input for you from DIS, Shanna. Read me!
The music ended. Shanna looked at the chronometer: 1700 GMT; nearing the end of the mission’s nominal day, but who was counting anymore? Two microwave schedules missed; Earthside must be frantic. She could not yet face playing back whatever worried, subtly reproachful messages they meanwhile might have sent to her.

“Mary Kay! Call Earthside, tell them what’s up.” Ah, the pleasures of delegating. Time to do some hard looking.

“It’s in the cargo bay,” Jordin said tightly over comm.

She had been fruitlessly searching for over ten minutes now and saw immediately that he had done the right thing: look where people weren’t, usually. The Darksider was smart. And…why?

“Let’s circle it,” she sent to all crew, and started down to the cargo level.

It was there, all right, somehow running at a temperature it could never have evolved for. But then, machines don’t evolve…

A boxy metal thing, with odd burned-metal spikes, like an angry kitchen appliance. It lifted a shiny, lopsided black claw toward them as they converged. Threatening? No—a scramble of microwave noise came from it, hissed into her ear processor. Talking.

DIS sent,
It says there is someone who wishes to communicate.

“And who might that be?” she said aloud. Heads turned, eyes questioned. The whole crew was here, surrounding the thing.

If it exploded, good-bye to the expedition. She gestured for most of them to leave. The Darksider did not move when they did, but she could see glinting quartzlike sensors on each side of it.

I am unsure.
It
speaks very similarly to the zand.
I
believe they are linked in some fundamental way.

“Ummm. Even though they’re blood enemies? Why’s it here?”

To
make us listen. To help with
the…converse.

“With…?”

Those who made this world, it says.

“And who’s that?”

Something
…
big.

The feed cut out.

“T
HEY ARE UTTERLY STRANGE
.”
Shanna’s voice resonated in the crowded, hushed hall. Axelrod sat at a desk in a capsule above the auditorium where the gaggle of reporters sat, buzzing. He puffed on a cigar, and his very own filter system sucked in the smoke so as not to offend the entire rest of the moon. He relished the pleasure and privilege.

His daughter was sending without any visual feed. Probably because she was looking ragged, judging from the high, tight notes in her voice.

The reporters caught her anxiety as well. Their eyes narrowed.

“Even good ol’ DIS is having a hard time making sense out of them, but we’ve figured one thing out at least. The Darksiders are not native to Pluto at all. They didn’t evolve a biology that could go with this planet’s chemistry. Instead, I think, they shifted Charon’s orbit—in order to make Pluto’s daytime under the satellite’s shadow more comfortable for them.”

A rustling of startled disbelief. The briefing room on the moon was overheated and bleak beneath the hard ceramic light, and the crowd of reporters and the snubbed snouts of the media feeds focused on the stage, where Axelrod stood and listened with the rest of them, his face furrowed with doubt and a skating anxiety. Shanna’s tones slid through the hushed silence of the room, subdued, distant, coming from billions of kilometers into the long, far dark.