Second Chance (4 page)

I’d never been in Matt’s personal space before. The walls were bright with photographs of Matt and his wife, and various other trim, muscular people, on mountains, rock walls, trails, and beaches. He must have used his entire paper allowance for the first month on them. Matt himself floated awkwardly in one corner, holding his left bicep firmly with his right hand.

The hand was wet with blood. Small drops of blood floated all around it... blood, and something else. Something black.

“Can you snag me that bottle there?” he said, gesturing with his chin. He was clutching some kind of instrument between his teeth.

I grabbed the indicated bottle from where it floated near the air vent—the place where all dropped items accumulated—and tossed it to Matt. He caught it with his bloody hand and squirted clear liquid onto his bicep, drawing in his breath with a hiss as he did so. A sharp tang of alcohol hit my nostrils.

As Matt daubed away the alcohol with a fabric wipe, I saw that the injured bicep bore the outline of a four-leafed clover, cut into the skin and oozing blood. The whole area was stained black with ink.

“A
tattoo
?” I said. “You can’t be serious.”

“What does it look like?” he replied, and squirted more alcohol onto the cut.

“But...” I’d never understood why anyone would get a tattoo at all, never mind doing it to himself with a sharpened pair of tweezers. “I don’t get it. There’s nobody here to impress.”

He inspected the damaged area with a hand mirror, then started rolling a fabric gauze bandage around his arm. “I didn’t do it to impress anyone. I did it for me. Tear me off some of that tape, would you?” I did as he asked, handing him strips of tape one at a time. “Every tat I had, back on Earth, commemorated a significant experience in my life. This one is to remind me how lucky I am to be here. And to remind me who I am.” He patted a plastic covering sheet onto the bandage; a little blood was already seeping through the fabric.

“And who are you?”

Matt looked me right in the eye. “I’m me. Me, here, now.
Not
the man who had three red and gold koi put on his left bicep in Kauai when he was twenty-three. That man was an astrophysicist, and he probably died at the bottom of some crevasse on Earth forty years ago. But the man with a lucky clover on his bicep is a fucking
astronaut
. This tat helps me remember which of those men I am.”

Matt’s intensity was almost scary. “You’re taking your own death a lot better than I did.”

“Well, for me it’s just theoretical. No one here went to my funeral.”

I looked down. “Unlike me.”

“Buck up, mate. You’ve got a whole new life to screw up.”

I had to grin at that. “Thanks.”

-o0o-

I used the remote to move the pointer on the big monitor. “So here’s Anansi crater, the feature that first gave me the clue. You can see how the two halves appear to have been pulled apart by tectonic activity. But Achebe’s too small and cold to be tectonically active. So what’s up?”

Mari didn’t look up from her omelet. She had barely had a word for me since the day I’d been vived. Tien, too, had been very distant ever since I’d spoiled her solar wind experiment. But the others looked on with varying levels of interest. I’d been keeping to myself for the last week, thrashing out the details on my theory, and they wanted to know what I’d come up with.

I swallowed, then continued. “I’d like you to note how badly hammered the crater is by later impacts. It looks like it’s a million years old. But when I did a gravitic scan for mascons, I found what I think is the original impact body just a few kilometers below the surface. That, and a seismic ring analysis, lead me to conclude that this crater is less than ten thousand years old. Achebe gets a
lot
of impacts.”

My heart, already pounding hard, picked up the pace even further. I’d always been nervous about public speaking, never more so than when introducing a new idea, and in this case I was venturing into entirely new theoretical territory. I put up a slide full of statistics and formulae.

“We don’t yet know exactly how many megatons of rock and ice land on Achebe every year. But based on Matt’s preliminary orbital analyses of the planetesimal disk, I’ve estimated the average impact frequency and the impacting objects’ mass and velocity.” I switched to the next slide, which showed a graph of estimated temperature overlaid with an annotated cross-section of the planet. “Based on these estimates, the total energy added from infall is between ten to the twenty-first and ten to the twenty-third joules per year.” Another slide crammed with data. “That might be just enough to keep the magma layer below the crust liquid, accounting for the otherwise unexplainable crustal movement.”

No one said anything. They were all just looking at me.

This wasn’t the reaction I’d expected. I’d investigated an extremely interesting anomaly and devised a radical new theory to explain it. I’d hoped for acclaim, but had been prepared for an argument. I got... silence.

I managed a wavery grin. “Any questions?”

After another interminable pause, Kyra spoke. “That’s an excellent confirmation of Pederson and Wu. But do you have anything new to add?”

I felt blindsided. “I’m sorry?”

“Pederson and Wu. From Washington University. They published after... after you died, but surely you did a literature search?”

“I... I did, yes, of course I did, but it didn’t turn up those names.” I stared from face to face, in hopes that someone would rescue me from this appalling situation. But Tien just looked exasperated, Bobb refused to meet my eyes, and Nuru was slowly shaking her head. I fumbled with the remote, keyed in a search. “Peterson?”

“Pe
d
erson,” said Kyra. “With a D as in dog.”

There it was, right at the top of the first page of results.
Dynamic analysis of particulate interaction with prolate spheroids
, from the
American Journal of Topology
. It was dated over a year after my last Earth memory. “This is pure mathematics,” I said. “It doesn’t have any relevant keywords.” No wonder it hadn’t turned up in my searches.

“That’s what Pederson and Wu thought,” said Tien. “But the planetology community realized that this thesis, applied to meteorite impacts on Saturn’s moons, could explain why Enceladus is so smooth.”

I scrolled through the results, increasingly frantic. There were several references to the Pederson and Wu paper, but they were all in the pure math realm. “There’s no sign of that connection in the database.” I felt my voice trying to crack, but clutched the remote and kept it under control.

Nuru spoke up. “This was all happening right before final scan. We all knew about it, but it’s possible that none of the papers on the planetology connection were actually published before the database was put to bed.” She gave an apologetic little smile. “I think there was a poster session at the ASPS conference.”

“Poster sessions don’t appear in the conference proceedings...” I began, but it was hopeless. I’d blown it. I should have dug deeper into the literature, should have asked someone else to look at my conclusions, shouldn’t have been so eager to believe I’d discovered something completely new.

I didn’t finish my sentence. I left the remote hanging in the air, left my lunch untouched, left everyone behind me. I needed to be alone for a while.

No one followed.

-o0o-

I pushed myself through the air, not really looking where I was going, glancing painfully off of panels and struts. Eventually I found myself in the airlock off of Epsilon habitation bay, near my personal space. I closed and dogged the inner hatch, then curled up into a ball, clutching my knees. I drifted, trembling.

I could see now that I had never really fit in with the rest of the
Cassiopeia
crew. They were all from academic or government service backgrounds; I was the only one who’d come from industry. I’d put myself through college as a welder, then worked in the space development sector for years before going back for my doctorate at age thirty-one; they were mostly from privileged backgrounds and had been in one branch or another of space science for their entire careers. I was the only black person other than Nuru—and she was the commander, which set her apart. I was the only regular churchgoer in the bunch.

Oh, sure, we had all bonded at first. But from here I could see the cracks that had already been developing in that bond between me and the rest of them by the time of first scan. The two years they’d worked together without me had only deepened those cracks.

I wiped my nose on my sleeve. Okay, so I didn’t fit in. What the heck was I going to do about it?

I might be out of sync on the technologies. I might be out of date on the science. I might be completely out of step with the rest of the crew. But I still had all the real-world skills that had earned me my position as secondary on ship systems: diagnostic, debugging, and repair skills independent of any specific technology.

Even if my relationship with the crew was beyond repair, at least I could fix anything broken in the ship itself. And there was one thing that I already knew was broken: the communication link from Earth.

The malfunction, whatever it was, had not stopped us from continuing our mission. With dozens of sats sending in petabytes of data every day from a whole new solar system, every one of us had more than enough fascinating work to do that the absence of news from Earth was something we could sometimes forget for days at a time. But I’d browsed through the forty-seven years of data we
did
have, and it just made me more curious about what had happened after that.

“I do wonder what’s going on back home, sometimes,” Matt said when I brought up the issue during a coffee break one day. “But even if we did have the latest news, it’d be completely irrelevant to us. I mean, look at this.” He pulled up a page of headlines on the big screen. “Is this ‘Goruba Jost’ a video star, a politician, or a beach resort? What are ‘greeblies’ and why are the ‘woffers’ so upset about them? And this is from just twenty years after we left! The later stuff is even worse.” He took a sip of his coffee. “I guess what I’m saying is, why are you worrying about trivia from Earth when there’s more than a lifetime of fascinating science to do right here?”

Knowing I’d never convince him, I mumbled some excuse and turned away. But he hadn’t changed my mind either... I’d already followed the lives of my nieces and nephews as far as I could, and I wanted to know more about them, their children and grandchildren, the places I’d lived...

Nuru kept reminding us that our primary mission was to gather as much data as possible and send it back as quickly as possible. Only when we had completed the initial system survey and our situation seemed stable, she said, would we have time to spend on distractions like catching up with eighty years of scientific progress back home. But I’d done the best I could toward our primary mission and I’d gotten nowhere with it. Here at least was something I knew I could
do
.

-o0o-

I’d poked at the problem a few times in the two weeks I’d been awake, but hadn’t even been able to determine the cause. Now I threw myself into the investigation full time.

I started with basic hardware diagnostics. I was certain that Bobb would already have run those, but I wanted to establish a firm baseline. And in only a few hours of work, I did determine that the communications hardware was operating properly—at least to the extent it was able to check itself.

But a hardware diagnostic was just the first step—like making sure a non-functioning device was actually plugged in and booted up. The next phase would dig deeper, isolating each component and testing its inputs and outputs separate from the system. I wrote myself a checklist and set to work.

Days went by, then weeks. Each time I thought I’d found the source of the problem, it seemed that something else nearby would fail, requiring me to fix that before I could proceed. With nothing to report, other than that I was spending almost all my time on a side project that Nuru had explicitly told me not to do, I spent less and less time in the common area at dinner, just dashing in, grabbing a bite, and dashing out; finally I stopped attending completely. I spent hours at a time with my head buried in access panels, or staring at technical readouts. Sometimes I went for days without speaking to anyone.

Nobody seemed to be missing me much. Mari, Tien, and even Bobb—who’d become extremely distant, for no reason I could discern—were probably quietly relieved that I wasn’t doing anything to mess up their science or rile up their emotions. Nuru had always given her people a pretty free rein, and probably assumed I was going into more depth on Achebe’s crust; she didn’t pester me for a status report. And Kyra and Matt were busy enough with their own work that they might not even have noticed I wasn’t interacting with them as much as I used to. Or else they, too, were relieved at it.

But no matter how hard I worked, how little sleep I got, how many other malfunctions I worked around, the answer was always the same: Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. It was an engineer’s nightmare—all the pieces worked, but the whole didn’t. The big dish was able to receive signals from our probe satellites, the signal was properly amplified, the amplified signal could be decoded, the decoded signal could be stored. That was under test conditions. But when I put all the pieces together and pointed the dish at Earth? Nothing.

Naturally, I began to worry that it was Earth, not the dish, that was at fault. But with all three modules showing the same sudden cut-off of both natural and artificial signals at different times, that seemed unlikely. A global multiple thermonuclear detonation would have ended with a burst of radio noise; a meteor strike would have been followed by the calls of the survivors, for at least a few hours. And when I reviewed the news channels for the weeks and months before the final recorded transmission in year forty-seven, there was no hint of concern about a disaster of global proportions. I couldn’t imagine anything big enough to take out an entire planet that could strike without any warning at all.