The Sunborn (9 page)

“—that you both, when you’ve really had time to consider the issue in full, should consider giving up this risky life and—”

Julia gave her a long moment, but nothing more came out. “And?”

“Mr. Axelrod really needs you on the moon.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s a lot safer. And there are a lot of doubts about the whole Lunar Enterprises profile. Having big names in charge—”

“We’re not CEOs. We’re explorers.”

“—will shore up public confidence in that entire arm of the business.”

Julia let a few seconds trickle away. People respond differently under pressure, and—“You just gave away your whole agenda, right?”

Praknor looked suddenly stunned. “Yes. You needed to know. And in a high-stress time like this, you deserve to have all the cards on the table.”

Julia let herself down easily into a chair. “This is some kind of new management technique, right?”

Praknor betrayed a morsel of uncertainty, her lips working. “There’s a big nuke on its way. Axelrod wants you on it on the return trip.”

“What?”

“You wanted to know. The spacecraft just barely made the orbital window to get here.”

“And
we
don’t know?”

“It’s corporate confidential.”

“But not an utter state secret, because you—”

“Mr. Axelrod instructed me to broach—”

“Julia?” Vaquabal was at her elbow.

Julia spun toward him, shoving Praknor away. “How—”

“He is fine. Awake now.”

Julia turned back to Praknor, eyes flashing, breath fuming. “We’re going to goddamn well live forever, y’know.”

Viktor didn’t want to dwell on the accident. “Just another data point,” he said. “Goal is to look for pattern.”

“Um,” she said. He already had a laptop and was fooling around with the magnetic data. She said nothing about Praknor, just sat and let him play. He had lost a fair quantity of blood and taken penetrating wounds at hip, right shoulder, and left side. The suit had absorbed a lot of the blast, and its tight-woven threads stopped the wound from rupturing out into the low pressure. He sat up in the crisp white sheets and shrugged off questions about how he was feeling. The point, he gruffly let her know, was not to feel, but to think.

Julia knew this mood was the best signal he could give her about how he felt. She said softly, “I’ll talk to the mission analysis people—”

“You, we, never believe them,” he said. “They have data, but we were
there.
Big difference.”

“Something went wrong with the capacitor, they’re saying.”

Viktor managed a dry chuckle, hands crinkling the sheets. “Voltage surge came from iron layer.”

“Um. Why?”

“You notice how mat looked?”

She closed her eyes, her method of recalling a scene in the field, learned from long experience. “It…fluoresced.”

“
Da.
What else?”

“Green sparks.”

“
Da.
I check, use physics tables, is right color for simple voltage breakdown in water vapor and carbon dioxide, at low pressure.”

She patted his hand. “You always do the numbers first.”

“Keeps you honest. So, at the pressure we measure, what voltage breaks down that gas?”

“Um, lots.”

“Quantitative, is 640 volts per meter.”

“I’m supposed to be, what? Impressed?”

“I was sending couple volts into seam.”

“No chance the capacitor just failed?”

He shook his head sadly at her ignorance. “Discharge came from seam, not capacitor.”

“So what went wrong?”

“Nothing. Somebody got, maybe, enthusiastic. Somebody trying to get through.”

“To…”

“To answer,
da
.”

The whole Praknor behavior pattern was another matter. Julia could see that the woman had already rubbed a lot of the outpost staff the wrong way. She had already spent a half year in narrow quarters on the way to Mars, and plainly the stresses—despite plenty of Earthside training—had compressed an already overcontrolled personality into strata of anxieties.

Confinement had a way of telescoping relationships and tensions. On Mars, if the staff had had to stay inside for most of the time, it would have become a barking asylum. That was why Earthside carefully studied possible crew members; but the stress of passage to Mars was even worse, and far less easy to project from Earthside simulations. The whirling stellar void visible on interior screens, the looming prospect of aerobraking—knowing that two had failed in the last twenty years, killing the crews—these unsettled the mind. So why had Earthside sent this new-style manager type, whose specialty seemed to be intimidation? Somebody didn’t understand that explorers were not corporate types, so they had risked random personal chemistry—
nitro, meet glycerin,
you’re going to have a blast.

She had a sudden hunch. Praknor had been sent as a special emissary. Axelrod had probably smoothed the way for her, and now Gusev Outpost was paying the price in crew friction.

Another piece of data: Julia checked with Outpost Control, and, indeed, they were pumping extra-big volumes of water up from the ice sheets below Gusev, filling the plastic-lined subsurface reservoirs they had labored for years to install. Mars ran on energy from nuclear thermal units and plenty of water. With those they could do all the chemistry they wanted. It also meant easy refueling for a fast-turnaround nuke.

The incoming nuke was “corporate confidential,” which meant that Axelrod had yet another trick up his sleeve. There were a few more days before it landed, ten klicks away, at the pumping station. So Julia avoided Praknor and worked away in the lab. It could be her last chance to do biology that mattered.

The Stromatolite Empire.

Dreaming, she was standing on mud flats at low tide. Volcanic cones towered over a haze of gray ash, the landscape lit by spurts of hot lava. Streams of lava hissed into a shallow dark sea. Waves whipped by high winds pounded basalt cliffs. Hummocks of basalt stood on the shoreline, glistening when the fitful sun struck them with highlights of crystals. Gray-green life had begun on these mounds, clinging, fighting for nutrients in a violent land. Clouds parted for a moment, and she looked up, expecting to see the moon’s pale face. Instead, a blue-green sparkle danced in the turbulent air. A swollen crescent moon leered at the yellow horizon. Earth.

And maybe Mars, even earlier.

The Stromatolite Empire.

She studied the research summary squirted up from Earth at her request. She had not thought of looking at the data on stromatolites in this way before, but as soon as she did, plenty of researchers were willing to help, so this arrived within hours.

Life on Earth had taken off after an excruciatingly slow start. Though simple cells began within about 400 million years after the planet had cooled off enough to allow it, they took 2.3 billion years to get around to making complex ones—eukaryotes—with machinery in a nucleus. Another 400 million years plodded by before simple seaweeds arrived. Stacking cells together to make more complicated plants was apparently a tough invention, taking 600 million years more. Only when all this was in place, barely 600 million years ago, did the Cambrian explosion of species occur, and complexity took off on its exponential rise.

But by the time all this runaway action started, the plants had flooded Earth’s atmosphere with oxygen, making things tough on the anaerobes. So they had mostly retreated underground, where they still thrived down to depths of several kilometers. Having a blanket of poisonous oxygen over the surface had probably inhibited them. So she thought of looking back, at the microbial communities which had survived through almost all the Earth’s history—stromatolites.

As an undergraduate in Adelaide she took a trip to see what they looked like and was astonished that they seemed to be just like rocks. Irregular, encrusted columns of rock.

For decades now she had seen just such bulging columns of microbial life, deep in the Martian caverns. Forms on both planets used DNA to pass on their genomes, but there were myriad differences. Earthside biologists were still fighting over the implications of this, most of the discussion going right by her at high velocity. She was an author on dozens of papers, arguing both sides of the issue, with titles like “Identity and Evolution of Martian Vent Endosymbiotic Methanogens.” (After the first few, Viktor did not want his name on such tongue-twisting papers and did not even read them anymore.)

Either Mars had sent life’s early kernels to Earth, in shards blasted out by incoming meteorites, or the other way around.

She didn’t care all that much which way the argument would turn out. It was
all
wonderful.

Geologists gauged the growth of modern Earth stromatolites by seeing how much they had covered over old soft drink bottles from the 1920s—about a millimeter a year. The microbial mats were slow, careful, with the gingerly care of the vastly elderly.

And when poisonous oxygen appeared, they had lapsed. Their species numbers fell, but unlike the vast run of all life, they did not die out. Along a few shores and lake beds, the mats still waited patiently, much reduced, in their warm salty ponds, waiting to again dominate the oceans…

She remembered her dream. Stromatolites on Mars? As the thin atmosphere chilled and drained away to space, the microbial colonies had to retreat. Into the soil. But without the competition of the oxy invaders from above, they had not suffered the losses their Earthly brethren had to endure. They could spread in the larger caverns and rock pores the light gravity Mars allowed, find new ways to develop, make a network that now wrapped in labyrinthian caverns through the planet. Perhaps they were not now separate species, but something that Earth had never seen: an integrated organism, based on cooperation, the Martian Way.

Viktor hobbled into the conference room, leaning on Julia, scorning the crutch she offered. The physicist Brad McMullen was waiting for them, the display screens around the room alive with colors. Uchida was working at a keyboard.

“We’re getting plenty of those signals from the Vent R area, sir,” Brad said.

Viktor let go of Julia and spun on his foot, letting the low grav bring him around and into the waiting chair. “No ‘sir.’ Just ‘Viktor.’”

“Uh, well, here—”

The activity map told its own story: low-frequency signals, magnetic pulses really, of large amplitude. The orbital antennas had picked up far more activity after the capacitor accident. It spread over a broad spectral band and was tapering away only gradually.

“Could not be from this solar storm that’s blowing by us?” Viktor asked.

Brad shook his head. “We’re getting surges from that, sure. The storm plasma emits higher harmonics, which can screw up our readings on the ground—but we can filter that out.”

An orbiter had even caught a burst of light from the original vent, Vent A, at the time of the electrical surge at Vent R.

Viktor beamed. “See?” he said to Julia. “The somebody who answered is trying to find us.”

Julia eyed the display suspiciously. “What’s the team at Vent R report?”

Brad said, “Plenty of light coming from the mat. They’ve wormed their way into some pretty big caverns—one bigger than a basketball stadium, Daphne said—and they can see all the way across the thing, just from the mat glow.”

“Damn,” Julia said. “I should
be
there.”

“They send pictures?” Viktor asked, and she knew it was to distract her. Brad nodded and popped some up on the screens. Julia gasped at the brilliant ivory glow, the steepled vastness above, long streamers of mat growth hanging in billowing orange banners, hollows and shadows and flickering luminosities, like a thousand candles lighting a stony cathedral.

“Something wants to talk,” Viktor said with a slow smile. “To do the talk magnetic.”

Praknor skipped the introductory smile this time. “I’ve been instructed to curtail your exterior expeditions.”

Julia had warned Viktor, but still his nostrils flared. “No descents? Preposterous.”

“The corporate Accident Review Board has reviewed your conduct,” Praknor said evenly, looking at Viktor with a remote, steady gaze. “You conducted an unapproved experiment involving high voltages—”

“Couple volts, milliamp currents,” Viktor said.

“—endangering all personnel, and suffering potentially fatal wounds. All without review, or ever a suggestion of prior advisement.”

“Was field experiment.” Viktor leaned forward significantly, clasping his big hands in front of him, eyes narrowing across the table at her. “You have done such?”

“I am a cross-science specialist, and I know procedures must be followed in every hazardous environment. So does the Consortium.”

“Um.” Viktor raised his eyebrows. “Very impressive terms, but is not fieldwork.”

Praknor gave each word weight. “Without. Proper. Procedures.”

“That is nature of field. New things happen.”

“I’m afraid the Consortium views this entire incident as a severe wake-up call. You two are our primary assets. The Consortium cannot allow you to risk yourselves.”

Julia had been holding herself back, but now said as mildly as possible, “Don’t you think that’s up to us?”