The Sunborn (30 page)

Shanna felt her defensive walls come up. “Not stumbled—more like ferreted out,” she shot back. “Some people thought I was just imagining the whole thing, that I was faking the data, even.”

“To be sure. The early criticism was unwarranted, but that’s often what you’ll get from Earthside. A lot of second-guessing and tall-poppy cutting.”

“Huh? I don’t get it.” Shanna looked perplexed.

“Aussie slang. Grow into a tall poppy, people slice you off, whittle you down to size. Put another way, the Greeks felt their gods punished excessive hubris. It’s the same thing.”

“Oh, I see. Hm. Never thought of it that way.”

“It helps not to take the automatic criticism personally. Save that for the important objections. The trick is to tell them apart.”

Shanna felt some of her anger ebbing away. In her defense against coming across as a hero-worshiper she’d forgotten that Julia had endured decades of scrutiny and bad-mouthing. Julia pressed on. “But we’re moving beyond the zand, now, to contact with the movers and shakers out here—that’s the main event. And if I may offer a bit of advice on the zand, you have to get over pretty fast your claim of exclusivity. You don’t own the zand just because you discovered them. Hundreds of scientists Earthside are now reworking their research agendas to focus on the ecology of Pluto. No, make that thousands. Not to mention all the ink that will be wasted by the ‘What does it all mean?’ crowd.”

“You want to have a crack at them?” Shanna resented the rebuke.

“Look.” Julia sat back, shaking her head. “We can’t start out like this, with a fight. We cooperate out here or we die.”

Shanna nodded, thinking furiously for a way around this woman, to hold her own. Go
crying to Earthside? Not again. Try to marginalize her in future? Hard to do, on another ship. Okay, put that aside for now, but keep looking for an advantage.
“Okay.”

“I know Axel—sorry, your father—spoke with you about our taking some Darksiders back with us.”

“Hey, ‘Axelrod’ is fine. I didn’t see him much as a child.” She made a wry face. “Yeah, I know he wants them. I even agreed to deliver some, if we can.” She felt suddenly drained.
Time to end this conversation.

Julia sat, unmoving. Shanna made herself smile slightly.
Bad beginning. She looks tired. My turn to try to lighten this up.
“Hey, my father thinks we’re both bad girls.”

Julia made a small, thin smile. “We are, no doubt. Maybe we’re both a bit, how to say, heavy-handed? One thing you learn as captain is that there are very few problems that can’t be helped by orders ending with ‘or die.’”

Shanna sighed. “I discovered that myself. My crew is irritated with me.”

Julia studied her. “You’ve been on duty too long. You’re worn down.”

Shanna’s eyes flashed. “Uh-uh. I and my crew
are as fit for service as anybody.”

“I’m sure,” Julia said stiffly, getting up. “Look, you and I haven’t exactly hit it off—”

“I’ll say!”

“—but let’s keep it to ourselves.”

“Right. Professional.” She cocked a wry smile. “I guess this day was a total waste of makeup.”

This made Julia smile faintly, grudgingly. “It wasn’t wasted on my crew, believe me. The guys have had only two women to look at for a year, me and Veronique.”

“Same on
Proserpina,
me and Mary Kay, only it’s been years.”

“Not easy, working in tight quarters. The hormones get going.”

“Sure do, and not just among the men.”

“Ha!—I’ll say. Luckily I have Viktor.”

“Yes, a husband. I neglected that point before shipping out.”

Julia smiled without mirth. “You may not know this ancient history, but our being married was a, shall we say, ‘condition of employment.’ Marry or be replaced.”

“Huh? That’s Victorian.”

“They felt that an unmarried woman couldn’t go into space for years with three men.”

“Who? The Consortium?”

“No, Axelrod—your father.”

Shanna opened her mouth, closed it. The silence stretched. Julia said softly, “Luckily it’s worked out terrifically. We made it alone on Mars for two years without killing each other.”

Shanna just stared.

Julia looked tentative, half turned, then looked back. “A piece of advice…”

“In dealing with the men?”

“Yes, and not just for the men.” A thin smile. “Always keep your words soft and sweet, just in case you have to eat them.”

J
ULIA WAS GLAD
to see them go.

She had thought that she would be very glad to see fresh faces, but they wore out their welcome in a day.

Maybe she was getting too old for this spacer stuff. Or maybe her diplomatic skills were wearing thin. Had that been behind the trouble with Praknor? Anyway, the Shanna woman was abrasive, self-obsessed, smug—and those were her good points. Julia suspected that in a pinch the woman might also be careless, the one sin reality never forgave.

The first hour had told the tale. Of course, they had more techy discussions, crews getting to know each other, all aware of the collaboration to come. But the edgy distance between herself and Shanna had been an undercurrent beneath every moment. Everybody felt it, but thank God, didn’t talk about it. Until they were gone.

“You need rest,” Viktor said flatly when the lock clanged down.

“Yes, sir, Cap’n, sir.”

“Really.”

“Point taken. That Shanna really wore me out. The way she tosses her hair back, showing off—
arrggh!
That’s always irked me. Worse than dealing with that Praknor—hey, think it’s a generational thing?”

“Hope not. Am not ready to be ‘old fuddy-duddy generation.’”

She looked at Viktor appraisingly. “I’d choose your old fuddy-duddy over any young guy.”

“According to Praknor, many women Earthside agree with you.”

“Ah, the sperm king!” She laughed and collapsed into a lounger. The logistics and tech issues had dominated everything, as one would expect of astronauts. But somehow all the time she was seeing their ship anew, through the others’ eyes. They thought it wonderful, ornate, opulent compared with their fission-driven craft. Fat cats of
High Flyer.
Well, fair enough—fusion had come available at just the right time to make
High Flyer
a whole step up, and it showed. A great way to sail into the abyss, indeed.

High Flyer’s
designers hadn’t much consulted any of the future crew about interior design—it had all been done on the hustle—so it reflected Earthside’s latest notions. Appliances and even furniture looked as though they had grown there—ductile, rounded, even drippy as if recently melted. The style was called blobjects, and this look made them seem organic, natural.

But, in fact, they were the opposite, stuffed with smart chips that processed data without letup. If a crew member was carrying a virus—no medcheck caught all of them—
High Flyer
wanted to know it. If you had fallen asleep in the common room and were about to miss your watch, the room noticed and
High Flyer
beeped you awake. Even in the stringy little microgravity “beds” at the axis for low-grav sleep, they could mommy you to death, if you let them.

Like many of Earthside’s cities, the “smart ship” embraced its inhabitants, keeping tabs and worrying over health, safety, supply and demand of air, moisture, heat, power, the works. She had found it weirdly claustrophobic at first and for weeks did not sleep well, feeling that some thing was watching. Then as they flew at great speed into cold, dark spaces with no humanizing glimmer of promising light,
High Flyer
seemed to become warm, comforting, restful. Home. Which was the idea of her designers all along.

“The Vid Kids hauled off their stuff,” Veronique reported briskly. She was trim but managed to have an Earth Mother persona, a real trick in the astronaut corps. She was the crew comic, too, hearty when all the rest were withdrawn. Valuable beyond measure, on a long mission.

Viktor nodded. They had labeled the
Proserpina
crew with that name because they had anxiously asked for the latest vids the
High Flyer
might have brought—indeed, it was a big part of the “mail” they’d asked for from Earthside.

“Maybe they don’t like their own company too much by now,” Viktor said with a wry eyebrow lifted.

“How long have they been gone?” Veronique asked.

“Two years, five months,” Julia supplied. “Time wears out the best of friends. Be grateful we’re riding a fusion torch, not a fission one.”

“They also tried out the smart-ship functions,” Veronique said, stabbing at the air irritably. “One of them I found ordering a martini from ship’s stores!”

“I know, I came in after you stormed out,” Julia said wanly. “And ship was delivering, too. I never thought to ask before.”

Veronique said sharply, “You should’ve protested! Hospitality is one thing, but—”

“Yes, is waste of ship time and resources,” Viktor said mildly. “But is diplomacy here, too.”

Veronique wasn’t buying this, Julia could tell. She was a brilliant all-round type, good at six different skill sets, but a bit wearing when she got on a cause. Viktor started speaking in his mild, calming manner, and she left that job to the resident expert. Julia needed to get away from them all.
Far away.

Decades of Mars duty had taught her to create her own privacy. Nothing like cramped quarters to concentrate the mind! She had learned to disappear within herself, walling out sounds and smells and vibrations, to create a still, silent space where she could live, rest, think. In the continual noise of the hab she had learned
to
hear well, diagnosing the ship’s vibrations. But just as well, she knew how to listen carefully, or to deliberately not hear. An essential skill, taking years of daily practice to master.

Living in space created rituals and customs, even taboos, to keep buffers between people. This extended even to language, allowing her to politely avoid any question she didn’t want to answer.

So she had insisted on this cabin artfully crafted of paper walls and tatami mats and small, delicate decorations. Simplicity made it easy to stay within her mass limit. And illusion helped. If it was high-resolution enough, even knowing that a view was phony did not rob it of its effect.

She sat cross-legged.

Watching a sunset on a personal wall screen was perfect for this. Listening to the interior rain—the fall of vapor sheets on each wall, images playing on their thin surfaces—brought delicate splashes into her concentration…and the present vanished.

The simple thatched hut sat on thick hardwood pylons above a sweep of immaculate white sand. Maples surrounded it, and she approached it on stepping-stones so perfectly set in the moss that they seemed to have grown there. On the veranda were sitting cushions, for seldom would anyone want to sit inside, in the single room of hewn beams and rustic screens. This ceremonial teahouse was for tea and thought alone.

All hers for now. She shared it only with Hiroshi Okada, and he was on ’bot duty. Crew needed their retreats, and Julia had in the long decades on Mars come to understand well the Japanese cultural way of dealing with an ever-pressing crowd you had to get along with. Getting away was the only strategy. She and Hiroshi had pooled their allotted ship space in this way.

She rose and entered the massless retreat she had fashioned herself—the essentials of a classic garden: stone, water, bridge, pavilion. They all hung in the spaces of her own private place. Only visual, but still telling, restful.

It was a cylindrical volume of falling mists, each a thin translucent sheet that descended in the light air as holographic projections played on its surface. A few feet away the pleasant moisture tingled in the nose, and the images framed the room into the Harmonies Garden of Wu Xi, a classic spiritual retreat. Cinnamon camphor trees perfumed the air. A tinkling waterfall splashed on worn stones. She sat in lotus position on a tatami mat and watched the cascading stream leap over convoluted limestone. The walls had curious cylindrical holes that had been worked by flows millions of years ago.

Stone.

Water.

Bridge.

Pavilion.

Until her next watch.

Three days later, the bare nugget sun now lost in the glare of their blaring fusion torch, she sat with Viktor and Veronique and tried to make sense of their new discoveries.

Veronique played them the complex waveforms, souped up from their original very low, infrasound frequencies around ten kilohertz, into the audible. It was the strangest symphony anyone had ever heard.

At times the haunting low notes were like the beating of a giant heart, or of great booming waves crashing with aching slowness upon a crystal beach, playing the ceramic sand like a resonating instrument. Julia felt the notes with her whole body, recalling a time when she had stood in a French cathedral and heard Bach played on the massive pipe organ that sent resounding through the holy stone box wavelengths longer than the human body, so the ear could not pick them up at all, but her entire body vibrated in sympathy. It was a feeling like being shaken by something invisible. It conveyed grandeur in a way beyond words.

And now the thing that made this strange symphony was tolling like an immense bell that itself enclosed an entire cathedral, and used it for the slow, swinging clapper.

Into her mind came the memory of a whale she had sighted offshore Sydney, breaching fully into the summer air. The long shape had burst nearly free of the sea, flukes turning lazily in the sharp sunlight. She had bought many recordings of their songs. Even if they had simple messages, she found them haunting.

Sitting back, she tried to envision what would radiate waves tens of kilometers long. To such creatures, humans might be as inconsequential as the lice that pestered the skin of a blue whale. The longest wavelengths
High Flyer
had detected (barely) were truly gigantic, up to a million times longer than those that ushered in classical radio astronomy. A century ago the center of the galaxy was detected by an amateur astronomer, Grote Reber, using a backyard dish strung from ordinary household wires on a wooden frame. He used wavelengths as big as a human. What could humans glimpse in wavelengths a million times larger?