Second Chance (3 page)

At the moment I was looking at a surface feature that looked like a huge, ancient impact crater pulled into two separate half-circles by the motion of two plates of Achebe’s crust—something never seen on any body so small and cold in Sol system. I was hoping that a stereo view would help convince me I was really seeing evidence of tectonic motion, and not just a pair of semicircular rilles that happened to look like the halves of one battered crater. But the two images in the stereoscope had been taken too far apart, and the attempt just gave me a headache.

I pushed away the stereoscope and called up an orbital chart on the monitor.
Cassie
was in an elliptical solar orbit at an angle to the plane of the ecliptic, an orbit that avoided most of the system’s dense and dangerous cloud of planetesimals while still taking us in naked-eye observational range of many of the system’s most interesting bodies every fifteen years or so. At the moment we were almost 800 light-seconds away from Achebe, and getting farther away every day, but two of the dozens of probe satellites that
Cassiopeia
had scattered throughout the system over the last fourteen years were in orbit around it. And, according to the chart, one of them was in almost exactly the right place. I used my stylus to direct it to take a high-resolution stereo pair in IR and visible light, then moved onto another phase of the analysis while waiting for my images to arrive.

Ten minutes later I got something, but it wasn’t what I’d expected. Tien shot out of the port from Gamma work bay, diving right at me and looking like she was ready to spit nails. “What were you
thinking?
” she said, jerking to a halt with one hand on a panel edge.

“What?”

“You just turned Sat Fourteen around to point at the damn planet. I was in the middle of a system-wide solar wind analysis that needed simultaneous data from all the sats. I’m going to have to set up the whole thing again! You’ve cost me
days
of work!”

So that had been the meaning of that cryptic confirmation message. Focused on my task, I’d just tapped OK as I did on so many other such messages. “I... I’m sorry. I didn’t know...”

“Why the
hell
didn’t you check the chromo first?”

“The what?” The word was vaguely familiar, but with all the new concepts the crew had thrown at me in the last few days I couldn’t keep them all straight.

“The fucking
chromo
!” She pulled herself in front of me and keyed my monitor to a new display. Hundreds of tiny colored squares filled the screen, shimmering and shifting about like the crowd at a soccer game. She pointed at a wide band of light teal that spread across the lower part of the screen, with one orange square vibrating in the middle of it. “See? There’s Sat Fourteen, right in the middle of my pattern.”

“I... I see, but I don’t understand. I’ve never seen this display before.”

“You... you’ve...
ooh!
” She squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head with an inarticulate noise of irritation. “Kay kay. Hue is topic, luminance is importance, saturation is relevance. Proximity indicates correlation, of course. Jitter is freshness, jump is urgency. Use the help if you get lost.” She pointed to a tiny question mark in one corner. “If you have any questions, ask Bobb. But until you can learn how to avoid stepping on other people’s work, I’d suggest you leave the damn sats alone! Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a solar wind analysis to set up. Again!”

And she dove through the port back to Gamma.

After Tien left, I just hung there for a moment, clutching my stylus and clenching my teeth. How
dare
she just barge in, rip me a new one, bury me under incomprehensible jargon, and storm out? It wasn’t my fault I’d died. I hadn’t asked to be vived without proper training. I was trying as hard as I could to catch up, and I’d asked the crew to cut me some slack. If this was the consideration I got... well, then, to heck with her.

On the other hand, I
had
messed up. I should have realized that a satellite was a shared resource, and found out how to check that no one else was using it. I should have read and understood the confirmation message before tapping OK. But I hadn’t, and now I’d made an enemy.

I considered following Tien and asking her forgiveness, but the vehemence with which she’d departed made me think that it might be better to wait a while, until she calmed down. In the meantime, I decided to learn about this “chromo” thing so I didn’t make any more stupid mistakes.

I stared at the jittering, dancing array of squares for a while longer, feeling foolish and angry with myself, then tapped the question mark—the only thing Tien had mentioned that made any sense at all.

A chromo, it turned out, was a shared-source software tool for visualization of dynamic information. The
Cassiopeia
crew hadn’t started using them until some time after my last memory. But, according to the local history log, once they’d started the team had gotten into the tool in a big way, and used it to coordinate all their activities. Several members of the team—including, most disquietingly, myself—had even developed new software features and contributed them to the chromo-using community. The satellite information chromo Tien had showed me was just one of a dozen in the ship’s computers.

I could see how useful chromos could be—the information density of that twitchy screen was enormous. I could also see that, unless you had started from the beginning and learned the system bit by bit as it grew in complexity, the learning curve would be extremely steep.

There was a tutorial. I started in on it.

-o0o-

We had one meal a day together, in Gamma habitation bay; we called it “dinner” although it was breakfast for some, a midnight snack for others. This was our time to share findings as well as food.

Tien had put some amazingly beautiful photographs of Balzac’s ring system up on the big monitor. As the slide show advanced, she pointed out the delicate structure of the G ring, peculiar waves in the H ring, a shimmering rainbow of ice crystals in the B ring. Balzac’s rings were even bigger than Saturn’s, relative to the size of their primary, and their peculiarities hinted at answers to longstanding questions about the formation and maintenance of Saturn’s rings—answers that would never have been forthcoming from study of only a single solar system—and raised more questions, even more intriguing than the answers. Ideas and speculations ricocheted around the habitation bay like lasers, with Nuru finishing Kyra’s sentences and Mari pointing out interesting implications of Tien’s latest theory.

At one point Matt’s hand brushed against Tien’s, and a significant look passed between them. I wondered if they were sleeping together.

Sex was permitted by the mission profile. All the women were on birth control, of course, implanted before vival. We’d been offered sex-drive suppressants as well, but after reviewing the side effects we’d agreed as a group that no matter how young and lithe our cloned bodies might be, our minds were those of mature adults and we could deal with the close quarters without chemical assistance. It was another decision that had seemed to make sense when I was making it for my clone.

Despite the lively technical discussion, Kyra was looking sad and pensive. “I wonder what Mkebe Osarenogowu would think of all this?” she asked, naming one of the most prominent astrophysicists back home... or at least, one who had been prominent at the time we’d left. He was almost certainly dead by now.

“Or
anyone
on Earth,” Tien added, reminding us all that we still had not re-established contact. Faces fell all around the table.

Bobb looked both sheepish and angry. “I’m sorry, guys,” he said, shaking his head. “I’ve been giving the problem as much attention as I can, but every time I think I’m getting close to a solution it seems that something else breaks.”

Nuru broke the melancholy silence that followed by taking the remote and advancing to the next image. “What’s that feature there?” she asked Tien, pointing out a thread-thin wavy ring in the otherwise-empty gap between D and E rings. Tien started to explain, getting more and more excited about the possibilities, but Kyra had a different theory, and soon a lively scientific debate erupted.

Tien waved her spring roll at the monitor to emphasize some point. Kyra grabbed at the remote to zoom in on the gap, but Matt was more interested in another part of the image and refused to hand it over. The two of them mock-tussled briefly over the remote, until Matt neatly slipped it out of Kyra’s grasp and flipped it behind his back to Nuru. But Mari snagged the remote from the air, and used it to back up to a previous image she’d wanted to examine in more detail. “Otcha otcha!” said Bobb, and everyone laughed.

Everyone but me. I found their doubled slang pointless and childish. Usually I could puzzle it out—“otcha otcha” was “gotcha”, just as “kay kay” was “okay” and “ojer ojer” was “hold your horses”—but it didn’t seem worth the effort. I sighed to myself and took another swallow of my tomato soup. It was too salty. When it was my turn to cook I’d show them how much better it could be with less salt and more herbs.

And then I noticed what I was thinking. “Them.” How had this happened? When did I start thinking of my crewmates as “them”?

It had been so different six months ago... six months ago in my memories, that is; six months before first scan, which turned out to be my last. That was when the crew had taken its first meal together, right after the press conference where our selection had been announced to the world. The President had been there, and representatives of all the other countries participating in the project, and we were all in our finest formal clothing, but even as the tuxedoed waiters brought out the fish course on chilled china with the White House seal we couldn’t help peering at each other and grinning our fool heads off.

We’d made it!

That dinner was the culmination of a selection process that had taken almost three years. This was the first crew of astronauts ever to be selected entirely on the basis of experience and intellect rather than physical fitness, and tens of thousands of scientists worldwide who’d never before considered themselves astronaut material had applied. The chosen seven who’d emerged from that process ranged in age from forty-eight to eighty-three, and many were fat or frail, but that didn’t matter—after two and a half years of intensive training together, we would return to our previous lives, sending copies of our memories and skills to Tau Ceti in fresh young bodies.

On that evening the seven of us might as well have been one person. Despite our different ages, backgrounds, and races, we were all intensely committed to science, showed great mental agility and world-class expertise in two or more fields, and were prepared to commit the next two and a half years of our lives to the
Cassiopeia
mission. Not to mention we’d all survived the same gantlet of tests, interviews, and simulations. As each of us faced the same questions from the reporters and politicians, we gave similar modest answers, but we saw in each other’s eyes the same triumphant gleam. And when, after the formalities had concluded, we withdrew to our hotel, we stayed up talking and laughing until nearly dawn, too amazed at our good fortune to sleep. The next day we’d flown to Dallas to begin our training.

It had all started out so well. But the rest of the crew had been through two more years of training than I had... two years to build up skills and tools and slang that tied them together into a single functioning unit. A unit that didn’t include me.

Fine. It wasn’t my fault, and it wasn’t really their fault either. I would just have to make the best of it—to try to fit in as best I could.

-o0o-

I continued to study the planet Achebe, delving into the mystery of its tectonic activity. New satellite photos—this time properly scheduled via the chromo—confirmed that the thing I’d thought was an ancient crater torn apart by crustal drift really was what it seemed to be. But scans for radioactivity turned up negative, and there were no nearby large bodies to produce heat by tidal squeezing. So what was the source of the energy that kept the mantle fluid enough for the tectonic movement I’d seen?

I stretched in the air and stuck my stylus back in its holder. Maybe a short break would refresh my mind. I shoved myself away from my work station, turned in the air, and grabbed a strut to propel myself to the habitation bay.

I floated through the habitation bay’s central space and into the airlock in the “floor,” swinging the hatch shut behind me as required by protocol. Being just one door away from vacuum made it all feel more real, somehow; it put me more in touch with the fact that I was really in space.

But that wasn’t the main reason I liked it there.

The window in the center of the outer hatch was round, twenty centimeters in diameter—I could easily span it with one hand—and already slightly scratched and smeared with fingerprints. And the view was nothing special, to be honest... spectacular ringed Balzac was farther from our current location than Saturn was from Earth at closest approach, the other planets even farther away. In fact, I couldn’t see anything through the window but a few bright dots, and those only if I pressed my face to the window and shielded my eyes with my hands. I didn’t know which of those dots were planets; I hadn’t tried to correlate the view with the orbital charts. But the sun whose rays warmed my skin through that window was not the Sun—it was Tau Ceti.

I was one of only seven human beings ever to bathe in the light of another star.

I floated there for a while, the window’s plastic cold against my forehead, soaking in that alien sunlight. But then my reverie was interrupted by a muffled curse. It was followed by another curse, this one loud enough to be clearly audible through the plastic of the inner airlock door.

Curious, I returned to the habitation bay, where I saw light leaking around the door to Matt’s room. That door was also the source of a continuing muttering and scuffling sound. “Are you okay in there?” I called.

Matt’s voice was curiously muffled. “Actually, I’d appreciate it if you’d give me a hand...”