Alternate Gerrolds (32 page)

“And the last one is in the center of the dig,” I said. I recognized the spider-shaped pattern of the excavation. “Come on!” I was already out the door.

“Call the camp! Tell them!” Hank shouted back to Brock, and followed me down the gangplank at a run. The whale was closer to the dig than the mess-tent, but there were rolling dunes in the way—it’s not easy to run in sand of any kind. Hank made me slow down, lest I exhaust myself. He kept referring to the updated scans on his clipboard, steering us toward the west end of the dig, where the first big ramp had been carved into the shale. “Down there,” he pointed.

I was already calling, “Zakky! Zakky! Where are you?” Off to the left, I could see the first few searchers rolling out of the camp on sandscooters, and then a sledge carrying Mom and Dad. But we were already heading down the ramp. They were still a few minutes away.

At first it was too dark to see anything, but then the whole night lit up—as if a great white star had been switched on above us. It was startling. At first I didn’t understand; we’d already packed most of our fly-beams; but Hank said curtly, “Satellite. False-white laser. Good idea. Somebody was thinking.”

It wasn’t quite as bright as daylight; in fact, it wasn’t even twilight; but it was a hundred times better than the silky darkness. At the bottom of the ramp, there wasn’t much to see. The important stuff had been covered with plastic sheets. Most of the open domes had been sealed. All except one.

Hank and I climbed down into it, peering into the different chambers. One still had an inflatable bed in it. The blankets were rumpled. Okay, that explained that. Zakky hadn’t been down this way. But Hank wouldn’t let me go into any of the tunnels “We have to wait for the others. They’ll have lights.”

I called into each of the passages, “Zakky, want a cookie? Zakky?” We both listened, but there was no reply. “Zakky? Come on, sweety. It’s cookie-time.” Nothing. “That doesn’t mean anything,” I said. “Zakky has selective hearing. If he doesn’t want to hear….”

Hank put his hand on my shoulder. “We’ll find him. The tripod is down that one.”

And then Dr. Blom arrived, scrambling down the steps into the dome,
followed by Dad and then Mom and three of the folks from the closest search teams. Suddenly, there were lights flashing everywhere. I grabbed one and headed into the passage Hank had pointed. “Zakky!”

The passage led into the next dome over. Zakky was sitting on the floor playing with three discarded replicas of the famous unknown
thing
. One of the replicas had been shoved point-first into the sand, and Zakky’s toy tripod was squatting up and down on it. Its three legs fit perfectly into the openings in the sides of the bowl. “Go potty, Fuffy,” Zakky said insistently. “Go potty. Do faw momma.”

Daddy and Hank came scrambling into the dome after me. Then Mom and Dr. Blom. I pointed my light at the tripod and everybody just stared for a moment.

I couldn’t help it. I started laughing. It was too silly. Then Hank started chortling. And then Mom. And Dr. Blom. And finally, Daddy.

“Well, I guess that answers that,” said Dr. Blom. To her phone, she said, “We’ve got him.”

Daddy shook his head. “How are we going to write this up?”

“With a straight face,” said Mom, scooping up Zakky. He cooed at her; she cooed back at him, then turned to Daddy and Dr. Blom. “It’s not everybody who discovers an alien potty chair. You realize, of course, that a potty chair will get you a lot more headlines than a lustral chalice.”

“Yes, there is that,” Dr. Blom agreed.

I cleared my throat. “It’s not a potty chair.”

“But of course it is,” said Daddy. “Look at the way the tripod fits. Look at the way—” He stopped. “Why not?”

“There’s a hole in the point. Whatever the tripod poops into the bowl is supposed to come out the bottom.”

“Well, yes—” said Dr. Blom. “That makes it easier to bury the waste in the sand. It’s a portable toilet.”

“Yes, it’s a toilet,” I agreed. “But it’s not a potty chair. It’s a kitty-box. Sort of.”

They all looked at me. “Huh—?”

I poked Hank. “Tell them.”

“Tell them what?”

“What you haven’t told anyone else yet—that the tripods didn’t build these domes.”

Everybody looked at him.
Oh, really?
Hank looked embarrassed.
“Um, I didn’t want to say anything yet. Because I wanted to be sure. I wanted to run more tests at the university. But, well, yes. Their brains were too small, and their DNA sequences are too short. Too well-ordered. These things weren’t sentient. And in fact, it’s my guess that they weren’t even natural. I think they were genetically designed by the beings who really built these domes. These things…well, they’re just the equivalent of farm animals. Like pigs or chickens.”

Daddy nodded, considering it. “It almost makes sense. This wasn’t a village. It was a farm, and these are a bunch of kennels or coops and storage sheds. The tripods would wander around the crops, eating bugs and insects and little crawling things, whatever. But the horns…?”

Dr. Blom looked annoyed, that same look she always got when Daddy was right. Had she just spent four months excavating a chicken coop? But to her credit, she tried on the idea to see if it fit. “We know that chickens can be designer-trained. We’ve done it ourselves. If you can train chickens to use a toilet, you don’t have to shovel the poop. So why not put out the horns and let them fertilize the field for you.”

Mom chimed in then. “Wait a minute. You’re not going far enough. Remember that jar of seeds you found? It’s part of the process. The farmer puts out horns and scatters seeds in the field. The chickens roam the field, eating the seeds. Some of the seeds get digested, but some don’t; they pass right through the chickens. The chickens poop in the horns, and the seeds get planted in their own personal package of fertilizer. Then the farmer picks up the horns and moves them to the next part of the field and starts again the next day. He’s planted his crop
and
fertilized it.”

They all looked at each other, surprised. It fit. In a bizarre kind of way.

“That’s the only explanation so far that fits all the available facts,” Daddy said slowly.

Dr. Blom held up a hand. “Wait a minute. Not so fast. Answer one question. Why would any rational being deliberately design a
three
-legged chicken?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” I said. They all turned to me, surprised that I even had an opinion. “A three-legged chicken gives you an extra drumstick.” I took Zakky from Mom; his diaper was full. “Yick. Come on, baby. The skywhale is waiting.”

—Janis Ian & Bill Lloyd

 

THE THING ABOUT PUBERTY is that once you’ve done it, you’re stuck. You can’t go back.

It’s like what Voltaire said about learning Russian. He said that you wouldn’t know if learning Russian would be a good thing or not unless you actually learned the language—except that after you learned Russian, would the process of learning it have turned you into a person who believes it’s a good thing? So how could you know? Puberty is like that—I think. It changes you, the way you think and what you think
about. And from what I can tell, it’s a lot harder than Russian. Especially the conjugations.

You can only delay puberty for so long. After that you start to get some permanent physiological effects. But there’s no point in going through puberty when the closest eligible breeding partners are on the other side of the solar system. I didn’t mind being nineteen and unfinished. It was the only life I knew. What I minded was not having a choice. Sometimes I felt like just another asteroid in the belt, tumbling forever around the solar furnace, too far away to be warmed, but still too close to be truly alone. Waiting for someone to grab me and hurl me toward Luna.

See, that’s what Mom and Jill do. They toss comets. Mostly small ones, wrapped so they don’t burn off. There’s not a lot of ice in the belt, only a couple of percentage points, if that; but when you figure there are a couple billion rocks out here, that’s still a few million that are locally useful. Our job is finding them. There’s no shortage of customers for big fat oxygen atoms with a couple of smaller hydrogens attached. Luna and Mercury, in particular, and eventually Venus, when they start cooling her down.

But this was the biggest job we’d ever contracted, and it wasn’t about ice as much as it was about ice-burning. Hundreds of tons per hour. Six hundred and fifty million kilometers of tail, streaming outward from the sun, driven by the ferocious solar wind. Comet Janis. In fifty-two months the spray of ice and dye would appear as a bright red, white and blue streak across the Earth’s summer sky—the Summer Olympics Comet.

Mom and Jill were hammering every number out to the umpteenth decimal place. This was a zero-tolerance nightmare. We had to install triple-triple safeguards on the safeguards. They only wanted a flyby, not a direct hit. That would void the contract, as well as the planet.

The bigger the rock, the farther out you could aim and still make a streak that covers half the sky. The problem with aiming is that comets have minds of their own—all that volatile outgassing pushes them this way and that, and even if you’ve wrapped the rock with reflectors, you still don’t get any kind of precision. But the bigger the rock, the harder it is to wrap it and toss it. And we didn’t have a lot of wiggle room on the timeline.

Janis was big and dark until we lit it up. We unfolded three arrays of LEDs, hit it with a dozen megawatts from ten klicks, and the whole
thing sparkled like the star on top of a Christmas tree. All that dirty ice, thirty kilometers of it, reflecting light every which way—depending on your orientation when you looked out the port, it was a fairy landscape, a shimmering wall or a glimmering ceiling. A trillion tons of sparkly mud, all packed up in nice dense sheets so it wouldn’t come apart.

It was beautiful. And not just because it was pretty to look at, and not just because it meant a couple gazillion serious dollars in the bank either. It was beautiful for another reason.

See, here’s the thing about living in space. Everything is Newtonian. It moves until you stop it or change its direction. So every time you move something, you have to think about where it’s going to go, how fast it’s going to get there and where it will eventually end up. And we’re not just talking about large sparkly rocks, we’re talking about bottles of soda, dirty underwear, big green boogers or even the ship’s cat. Everything moves, bounces and moves some more. And that includes people too. So you learn to think in vectors and trajectories and consequences. Jill calls it “extrapolatory thinking.”

And that’s why the rock was beautiful, because it wasn’t just a rock here and now. It was a rock with a future. Neither Mom nor Jill had said anything yet; they were too busy studying the gravitational ripple charts, but they didn’t have to say anything. It was obvious. We were going to have to ride it in, because if that thing started outgassing, it would push itself off course. Somebody had to be there to create a compensating thrust. Folks on the Big Blue Marble were touchy about extinction-level events.

Finding the right rock is only the
second-
hardest part of comet-tossing. Dirtsiders think the belt is full of rocks, you just go and get one; but most of the rocks are the wrong kind; too much rock, not enough ice—and the average distance between them is fifteen million klicks. And most of them are just dumb rock. Once in a while, you find one that’s rich with nickel or iron, and as useful as that might be, if you’re not looking for nickel or iron right then, it might as well be more dumb rock. But if somebody else is looking for it, you can lease or sell it to them.

So Mom is continually dropping bots. We fab them up in batches. Every time we change our trajectory, Mom opens a window and tosses a dozen paper planes out.

A paper plane doesn’t need speed or sophistication, just brute functionality, so we print the necessary circuitry on sheets of stiff polymer.
(We fab that too.) It’s a simple configuration of multi-sensors, dumbprocessors, lotsa-memory, soft-transmitters, long-batteries, carbonnanotube solar cells, ion-reservoirs and even a few micro-rockets. The printer rolls out the circuitry on a long sheet of polymer, laying down thirty-six to forty-eight layers of material in a single pass. Each side. At a resolution of 3,600
²
dpi, that’s tight enough to make a fairly respectable, self-powered paper robot. Not smart enough to play with its own tautology, but certainly good enough to sniff a passing asteroid.