The Sunborn (24 page)

Hmm.
What does that mean? Jordin? I’m gonna be replaced? And Dad kinda agrees with him?

Even across a billion miles the rumor mill churned away—at light speed.

He rushed on. “I know, the Darksiders are alien and strange and all. But they’re machines, right? Got to be some patent opportunities there. They work in cold and near vacuum. Nobody here can figure out how. Honey, you said there wouldn’t he anything to sell on Pluto, except the story of going there. Not so! You just found it. Or found them—great name, too, the Darksiders. I can see a vid series, just using the title.” She groaned and slapped the pause switch.
I’ll watch the rest later
—
if my blood pressure goes down. Viktor and Julia! The First Couple of Mars! Coming in with a huge shipload of Consortium types, probably ready to strip the landscape. Gee, Dad, I can’t wait.

She was suddenly drained. She closed her eyes and drifted into a dream of electric-blue shapes with giant claws rushing toward her…

L
ATER
, S
HANNA SIGHED
and stretched in the spaceship’s comfortable pilot chair. Again she was watch officer while crew slept. She liked it this way.

Earthside would come through in a few hours with their response to Jordin’s filing. There would be weeks of messages slinging back and forth. Tedious, disheartening, divisive…she could see it coming.

Jordin might prevail. She had to admit, he had a case. She had a lot of respect for Jordin Kare. But ISA didn’t like dissension, especially endangering this high-profile mission billions of kilometers away. Word would leak, and their political stock would take a dive. ISA was the role model for international cooperation; failure would echo around the globe, amped to the max.

But that was hours away, and now she had this last watch to stand by herself. Bliss. There was even coffee.

Time to take stock, girl.

The lander was a wreck, but
Proserpina’s
resources could put it back together. Weeks in the machine shop; do them all a lot of good.

Meanwhile, the sole remaining probe functioned with grace and precision. And so would she.

Proserpina
—Pluto’s bride—had a mother named Ceres, she recalled from the background briefings, a goddess of the growing grain; whence the word “cereal.” The daughter ended up stuck in the Underworld six months out of every year, which she guessed was the way the ancients poetically figured when to get their crops in and when to plant again.

Shanna, as she indirectly helped the zand bring in their harvest, did not want to be similarly mythologized. She wouldn’t communicate directly with the zand, at least not right away. They were going to have a severe enough intellectual revolution as it was, when the impact of that single meeting on the shore sank in. The price of progress is often pain. Let them thank Lightgiver, not the Earth interloper, for this gift from heaven.

Strange, wasn’t it, how human and zand music, religion, and ways of caring so often paralleled each other? Or did that simply show the limitations of DIS and all semantics?

Through her gray fatigue she let her mind idle. Could she introduce into Darksider ethics the revolutionary notion that other sapients, even if less bright than oneself, ought to be treated not as means, but as ends? A huge leap.

The psychologists said humans learned that in childhood, only through tit-for-tat social games. Well, maybe that could work here, too—if there was time. And there wasn’t a lot of time before the big nuke rocket came swarming up here, bringing more opinions…

Speaking of ends and means, Earth’s self-appointed diplomat reflected, she had leverage;
Proserpina
had physical capabilities the Darksiders could not fathom—which she could give or withhold—

Careful there, girl.

“Sleep well,” Shanna said toward the twilight view, where the zand were bedding down. Now the hard part began. Her fingers danced over the probe controls. The little globe bobbled and bowed, then shot toward the Darksiders’ domain, now enjoying its pallid day.

Alone in a world of unrelentingly hostile cold and ominous dark, she was, without noticing it, supremely tired and hugely happy. That this last outpost of the sun had, however improbably, harbored life. That all the smug scientists had been wrong. That this grand mystery was just the beginning of an even deeper one.

She was a biologist, trained in the conventional litany, sure—but she knew when to abandon cherished beliefs. Some guiding hand had stitched together low-temperature chemistry and the tenuous energies of electron flow, knitting here a gossamer, lively web. Who? Why? To some godlike purpose?

Shanna mused about the lives she had blasted to oblivion, so quick in her certainty. Had those dim mechanical forms been truly alive?

Definitions, her grandmother once said, had to be like a fat man’s belt—big enough to cover the subject but elastic enough to allow for change. Out here life clung to the last vestiges of possible chemistry. And she was sure, now, that evolution alone could not have forged such an intricate ecology, with so few species—not even in the 4 billion years Pluto had spun.

The topsoil samples they had brought back had yielded nothing. If Earth or even the dimmed ecology of underground Mars was any guide, life found myriad small species to kindle. Larger forms stood upon a huge, broad pyramid of microbes beneath. Bare stony soil could yield little. Yet the zand, the Darksiders—they were like cartoons of life-forms.

Woven from what?

Those things in the pit were not forged from nature’s relentless mill, for
they did not know anger.

They had not wreaked vengeance on her and Jordin when they had the chance. Instead, they had saved them both.

For a moment Shanna pictured the Darksiders at the opposite extreme, as saints, but that, she knew instinctively, was also wrong.

They were, finally, constructions. Theoretical models. More like robots than organisms, but way ahead of
Proserpina’s
’bots. Not machines, perhaps, but something that stretched the definition of life and probably broke it.

She let her intuition rummage around a bit…
Yes.
The Darksiders were agents of something larger, something feeling its way, something…dispassionate. But what?

Pluto orbited in its elliptical sway at the very verge of that realm where chemical reactions could proceed sluggishly. Beyond here lay a black abyss in which the seemingly fragile bonds between molecules would not crack before the weightless hail of sunlight. They congealed in the unending cold.

In that dark kingdom only electricity could race and flow, to bring motive meaning from the potentials and gravid capacitances, hanging in the vast vacant spaces. There, beneath distant star gleam, gossamer-thin sheets of electrons drifted silently before the subtle tugs of inductances, in vast circuits that light itself could barely span in a full day.

She shook her head, trying to see…

Biologists think in terms of slow, blunt chemistry. Out here there might be instead the rule of electrodynamics, proceedings only a tiny fraction slower than light. Intelligence set free from molecular torpidity could dash across immensities, unchecked by all but the gritty limits of matter’s innate resistance. There the speed of light was the natural speed of events. Of thoughts.

Something had made use of these truths, some brooding intelligence hitherto unsuspected, though the basic laws—of thermodynamics, of electromagnetic fields—had been known to humanity since their discovery in the nineteenth century. Back then the laws had emerged among people seeking to heat and light their shadowy homes. They wanted efficiency. From such practical measures had come fundamental truths. An old term came to her:
electrobiology.
In the early twencen earnest physicians and greedy quacks had sold appliances that meted out small electric shocks, reputed to cure everything that ailed the human body. It hadn’t worked back then, but something way out here was blending electrodynamics and chemistry in the hard cold of Pluto.

For some reason the forces out there had conducted an experiment on this little dab of rock and ice, blending the two sources of animation—chemistry, electricity. Frankenstein’s legacy?

What’s more, the experiment was still young. It looked like a work unfinished, left by giants for a better day, vast and massive but incomplete.

When would the giants return?

The sun took more than six Earth days to circle around Pluto’s frozen globe, bestowing and withdrawing its heat. But something more powerful now drove this warming world. Something invisible.

What had made all this happen
now?
The prospect of Earth’s incursion into this bitterly cold place?

Perhaps the entire experiment was itself a strange form of communication…

And the Old One… How had it learned so much? Superior intelligence? But what had selected for such wit and insight out here? Where was the evolutionary pressure? Or could the pressure come from some hugely larger volume?

No…too much. She had a gut suspicion that centuries ago, when Old One was young, something began a process of subtle tutoring. And before that, a process of deep, cerebral working among that zand’s fore-parents.

Otherwise how could one zand, unaided, have forged so far in explaining their bitter realm? That implied some agency had begun Old One’s education long before humanity even knew the outermost planets existed.

And to what end? Shanna looked outward at the unyielding black and wondered what huge surprises waited there. And how long they would be in coming.

The new big nuke was behind them, coming up fast. If
Proserpina
burned her remaining reserves, she could forge outward into those bleak vast spaces. Keep pace with the bigger nuke approaching from below, surging up along the long sloping gravitational potential…out, ever outward into this space where bodies cold and mysterious circled in slow orbits, very nearly free of the distant sun’s governance. And with some tricky maneuvering,
Proserpina
could find an iceball—maybe Charon—and melt some of that vast icy store for water, for their smaller nuke rocket.

They all could still be a part of this immense voyage.

She peered at the slate-dark world turning below in the vast hard cold. Thinking.
But not if I’m replaced as captain.
She sat bolt upright, fatigue swept away.
Dad! The Great A!
She flipped on the recorder and started talking.

And down among the howling winds, in the gathering gloom of methane snowdrifts now mounding about them, the zand slept on.

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

—Marcel Proust

O
N THE LARGEST SCALE
,
Julia reflected, the solar system was a spheroid cloud of debris. She looked at the big flatscreen display of an iceteroid they were passing, gleaming dully in the dim radiance of the ever-more-distant sun.

The whole vast volume behind their ship, the
High Flyer,
was filigreed with bands and shells of flying shrapnel. Beyond Neptune, big ice fragments coasted in the Kuiper belt. At any moment a pair could smash together, or just clip each other, getting thrown into long ellipses, deep wobbly orbits. And this negligible-looking little blob of primordial gray ice and dust right here could, like the rest of the solar system’s slow leftovers, now and then make a sharp hook by skimming near another piece of scrap and in a few years slam into a blundering planet. Earth’s dinosaur-killer could have come from right around here.

Julia shivered, not from the cold outside. Her pod was toasty-warm, comfy. But the strangeness that lay before them was approaching, and she had no idea of even what it might be. The voyage from Mars had taken months—a miracle, at speeds made possible by their fusion drive—and there had been plenty of time to study, learn…and worry.
Proserpina,
the ISA expedition, was low on supplies and would have to depart soon from Pluto, under their mission plan. But
High Flyer
was bringing enough to sustain them both near Pluto for months more.
High Flyer
was to assist
Proserpina,
particularly with alien translation problems. In transit they had spent much time on the long-wave emissions from beyond Pluto.
High Flyer
would also venture out there, getting data on the bow shock. Those both at ISA and the Consortium were apprehensive about the seat-of-the-pants style of all this,
but Julia and Viktor shrugged them off. They had been living that way on Mars for decades, making do. Viktor still worked on the Marsmat problem in his spare time, and when this adventure was done, they would go back to it. But now they were focused forward.

“Anything new from
Proserpina
?” Viktor hollered from the control room. He could have spoken over comm, but he just leaned back in his chair and called down the gangway. They spent enough time logged into electronics systems as it was. And a husband and wife like to keep in touch in the most basic ways, too.

“Not a peep. They’re not due to report for nearly an hour.”

Nervously she checked the all-sky scan, anyway. Yes—far back there, she could see through their nuclear rocket plume’s virulent blue-white. Pluto glimmering, and
Proserpina’s
signifier overlaid. Two motes swimming in the black.
High Flyer
had completed its delta-V with both Pluto and Charon, looping a figure eight through, to lose velocity. They swung by and turned outward, following the streams of current that
Proserpina
had mapped. Straight out into the vast dark…

“Getting a lot of that odd noise again,” Victor called. “Coming up in the ultralow frequencies.”

“The stuff
Proserpina
picked up?”

“
Da
—stronger as we go out.”

“I thought you said it was just more turbulence from way out at the bow shock.”