Neptune Crossing (The Chaos Chronicles)

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.

NEPTUNE CROSSING

Copyright © 1994 by Jeffrey A. Carver

Afterword copyright © 2010 by Jeffrey A. Carver

A Starstream Publications Ebook

Discover other ebooks by Jeffrey A. Carver at

http://www.starrigger.net/ebooks.htm
/

Published in paper by Tor Books (Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.)

Edited by James Frenkel for Tor Books

First paper edition: April 1994

Chaos image created with Chaoscope (
http://www.chaoscope.org/
)

*****

Books by Jeffrey A. Carver

Seas of Ernathe

Star Rigger's Way

Panglor

The Infinity Link

The Rapture Effect

Roger Zelazny's Alien Speedway: Clypsis

From a Changeling Star

Down the Stream of Stars

Dragons in the Stars

Dragon Rigger

Eternity's End

Battlestar Galactica: the Miniseries

The Chaos Chronicles

Neptune Crossing

Strange Attractors

The Infinite Sea

Sunborn

The Reefs of Time*

 *forthcoming

*****

Dedication

For Julia Dakota Carver...
there's a galaxy waiting for you out there.

*****

Acknowledgments

FOR SCIENTIFIC AND technical advice concerning Triton, I gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Dr. Robert H. Brown of NASA's Jet Propulsion laboratory, as well as JPL's public information office. I am, of course, grateful for the Voyager 2 spacecraft itself, which sent back so many fine photos of my distant subject. I would also like to acknowledge the editors and contributors to
The Planetary Report
,
Science News
, and
Ad Astra
, who provided inspiration and information in ways too numerous to list. Finally, I must acknowledge James Gleick's book,
Chaos
, which is a wonderful introduction to the strange and fascinating science of chaos and Charles Carver, who first showed it to me.

Many thanks to Amy Stout and Jim Frenkel, sharp editors and good friends, and my stalwart agent Richard Curtis, who helped steer this project to publication despite some difficult and unexpected complications. And special thanks to Tom Doherty, who gave me a vote of confidence when it was needed most.

And need I say it? The writing group, as always; and most of all, my family, for giving me reason and sanity for writing the book in the first place. Thanks.

*******

Chaos . . .

  . . . (L.
chaos
< Gk. vast chasm, abyss, void) n. 1.
Common usage
. Disorder; infinite formlessness. 2.
Human science
. Seemingly disordered or turbulent systems from which hidden order may emerge. Consequences arising from sensitive dependence on initial conditions may be unpredictable, even theoretically. 3.
Alien science
. Energetic potential for growth and development in the Universal Order, which may be amplified by selective intervention in highly complex and apparently disordered systems, esp. living systems.

*

Prelude

Awakening in Deep Time

The cavern was cold, even in the slow energy flux of the translator's alien mechanisms. The quarx did not
feel
the near-absolute-zero cold, but was aware of it, as it awakened to the silence of a still world. Its first impression was not of place but of time, vast corridors of time through which it had floated in an almost coffinlike existence.

What did millions of years mean when one was asleep, when one's life process was held like a cup of electrons in the hands of an angel? What did the passage of time mean—except that once more, all the mortal lives it had known were gone?

The awakening was difficult and confusing. There was so much to remember...and so much more to learn. The quarx's translator had anticipated its confusion and was ready with information and explanations—not too much at once, but enough. They were in the planetary system of a yellow sun, though at such a remove that the sun was a mere fleck of light in the sky. But there were other planets, closer to the sun; and there was life there, venturing outward.

The quarx and its translator watched, and listened, with growing interest. There was much to know, but always with the mission to be considered. The mission. The quarx trusted that the translator knew what the mission
was
. The quarx, who had known the translator for millions of years, still did not entirely understand the mind of the thing...or the minds of its creators. It might have understood those things once; but much of what the quarx had once known, it had forgotten. How many worlds had it visited, how many suns, how many life-forms? It didn't know, couldn't remember.

But it knew enough to trust. It was the translator that swept the skies with its tendrils of awareness, the translator that computed the almost infinitely complex algorithms of chaos...the translator that recalled in its deepest memories just what it was they had been sent here to do.

*

Footsteps! Visitors! It had been only a short wait—no time at all, compared to the eons that had passed before. The translator had seen to it that remnants of the moon's past had convected upward to its icy surface, where traces might be noticed. Once the visitors were nearby, the quarx and its translator kept their hushed silence, but began searching...for the right individual, for one who would be willing to sacrifice everything for the sake of the mission.

The mission. The quarx already felt a sense of urgency. The computations were proceeding, but not yet complete. But it knew that lives were at stake—as ever—more lives than it could count. And it knew that its own life—as ever—was expendable.

And it knew that it could not act alone.

There were few enough candidates with the right combination of qualities—the right
potential
. But they needed just one. And soon. They had grown accustomed to the glacial slowness of geologic time, but things were about to change drastically; things were about to happen with lightning speed...

*

One individual came into sharper focus. The more the quarx and its translator watched this one, the more hopeful they became. Here was one who
knew
the presence of others in his mind, who felt at home with the tidal movement of dataflow and the slow seep of intermingled consciousnesses. This one had recently
lost
that presence, and suffered for the loss.

He was drawing near now—unwittingly near. There might be no better opportunity to try. He was in a period of disruptive suffering; but perhaps that would help—make it easier to draw him in, like an animal into a snare.

*

Sometimes the quarx wished that it didn't always have to happen this way.

Chapter 1

Triton Survey

John Bandicut couldn't have said exactly what made him drive his buggy past the invisible STOP HERE line, east of navpoint Wendy. It was almost as if the stately blue crescent of Neptune, overhead, were beckoning him onward, a deity calling him toward some mystical assignation among the rills and ravines of Triton. It was almost as if he had no choice.

That was lunacy, of course. Bandicut took the rover across into the unsurveyed sector because he was half out of his mind with silence-fugue. Though he was still perfectly capable of operating the equipment, he was hallucinating intermittently; and in some small corner of his mind he was aware that there was no way he should be out on the Triton surface risking his life, or for that matter the company's equipment. Now, Bandicut cared about company equipment the way he cared about cockroaches; but where his own life was concerned, he generally—in more lucid moments—had a pretty strong survival instinct.

But with each passing second, a little more of that lucidity was being swept away by the silence-fugue, by the terrible emptiness that was devouring the inside of his head. It was not that there wasn't plenty of information pouring through his senses: a clear view of the Triton landscape through his visor, occasional comm chatter in his helmet, the metallic stink of recycled air in his nostrils, the taste of bile in his throat, the bouncing of the buggy under his seat. But
inside
, deep in his thoughts, there lurked a dark, echoing, reverberating silence. This was the worst he had ever had the fugue; it felt as if some outside power were sucking his mind dry of even the
memory
of the flow and chatter and swarm of the neuro, stretching the inner silence as taut as a wire. He felt as if there were a black hole in his skull, and the only way to escape its awful hold was to flee physically across the Triton landscape.

He twitched the joystick and steered the rover down a shallow ravine, racing away from the sector that he was supposed to be detail-mapping. It was not a visibly hazardous direction; he was not looking for danger but for escape. He should have known, of course, that he was escaping nothing; but he wasn't thinking, he was just responding—to a desperate siren call in his mind, in the awful silence, a call to drive his buggy toward the planet Neptune, floating before him.

In time, he became aware of the exo-op calling him. The voice clanged in his headset like a hammer striking a metal pole. "UNIT ECHO, UNIT ECHO—DO YOU COPY? UNIT ECHO, BASE CAMP—WHAT IS YOUR PRESENT LOCATION? ECHO—
BANDICUT, ARE YOU THERE? FOR CHRISSAKE, ANSWER—
"

He reached for the comm control, as if to respond. Then he watched his hand turn the volume down to inaudibility. Now why had he done that? The thought and the question were carried away on the waves of emptiness and silence. He was riding on a tide, and there was no denying its mastery now. He nudged the joystick over and steered around a hump of ice and kept on rolling.

Neptune hung huge and majestic in the sky, her crescent a great blue scythe, her presence unsoftened by the tenuous nitrogen and methane atmosphere of Triton. Forget the old guy with the trident; this planet was a lady, seductive in her blue gown, beckoning him on. As he peered up at her through the scratches in his visor, he couldn't help reflecting how much more real she seemed in person than in the telepresence holos—more real, yet more remote. He had his light-augment turned off, so she appeared dim, ghostly, almost watery in the dark sky. The sun, not quite overhead, was little more than a bright star, viewed here from the edge of the solar system.

The Triton surface was a grayish-orangish brown, a frozen composite of nitrogen and methane ice and oxides barely illumined by the pale sunlight. This moon of Neptune was a buckled and broken place, ravaged by time, by impact, by gravity. It was impossible to gaze across Triton's face without wondering what stories were hidden in its history, what beings had once walked its surface, eons in the past. Beings
had
, of course; that was why humans were here with their mining encampment now. But as for who or what they had been, that remained a matter for speculation...and imagination.

John Bandicut's imagination was indeed racing now, as he nudged the joystick for another burst of power. With a disconnected part of his mind he recognized the approaching peak of the fugue; visions of aliens danced just beyond reach, their voices garbled and faint as they tried to communicate with him, tried to cross over that impregnable boundary of the missing neurolink. It was hopeless, of course; he was in silence, cut off from the datanet forever.

The buggy crested a rise and jerked over a ridged surface before nosing downward again into a low, narrow valley. He eased back on the power and coasted bumpily down the slope of the frozen terrain, almost relieved by the physical sensation. Off to his left, a soft dark plume rose into the thin air. It was a cryogeyser, dirty ice vapors erupting from beneath the surface, to be gently carried along by the thin Triton winds. Bandicut felt himself fixated on the eruption; it was an explosion of alien data, swept away by the winds before it could be drawn into the net. Madness: he knew it was all madness, but there was no stopping it. The alien datastorm hissed like static in the center of his mind, defying interpretation.

He felt a sickening lurch, followed by a floating sensation, then a thump back down in the seat of his pants. He blinked rapidly and pulled the power off. Too late. The lurch was a shifting of the ice beneath his buggy, and he knew he was already caught: he could feel one or more wheels mushing into a sinkhole. The underframe shuddered as it ground into the pebbly ice. He flicked the joystick into reverse, and the two right wheels chewed uselessly into snowy dust while the left two bit and slewed the buggy around. He was only digging the right side in even deeper.