The Sunborn (15 page)

To cover his confusion, he looked out of the window at the hot July afternoon. Huge shadowy thunderheads were crawling across the sky. All that thick, moist atmosphere out there… One g made him feel heavy and out of sorts—maybe he was spending too much time off-planet. Or maybe coming back was the problem.

She broke into his reverie. “It’s everything to me. It’s what I’ve always wanted to do. I’ve just
got
to go.” He heard a familiar urgency in her voice.
Only child…
never gave her enough time…maybe now
I
can make up for it.

“Dad? It’s not like I’m not qualified; you know I am.”

His mind had drifted from the coming storm outside to the old one inside him. Still, he resisted the impulse to make up for past sins. “What makes you think I can pick the crew? It’s an ISA mission, after all.”

She laughed. “Yeah, and who bankrolls ISA? The Consortium.”

“An oversimplification. The ISA money is from the big nations.”

“Who come hat in hand—”

“We just got the jump on space technologies, that’s all—so we license them to ISA.”

“Look, Dad, everyone knows there would be no International Space Agency without you. You can’t play coy with me.” She flashed her engaging, wry smile. The
power children have over you…
“You’re not testifying here, y’know.”

“It’s too dangerous. There are huge unknowns. Let someone else go.”

“You sent people to Mars almost twenty years ago; it was even riskier then.”

“They were all trained NASA astronauts—”

She jumped in. “And there was a $10 billion Mars Prize to win.”

“Do you think I risked their lives for the money?”

“Do you think I’m not as qualified as a NASA astronaut?”

“You’re not an astronaut until you’ve been through NASA training,” he said quietly, “no matter how good a pilot you are.”

It was an old argument between them. Axelrod had beaten NASA to Mars, but he’d always been careful to use their resources whenever possible.
Borrow
from the best.

Their astronaut training, for example. He hired only government-trained astronauts for Consortium missions. None of the orbital pilots from the little companies. Then the privatization of space that followed the initial Mars landing led to new ways of training pilots. NASA’s way was to train people on the ground, then send them into space. As soon as there was ready private access to space, off-planet rocket jockeys could be trained in orbit directly. Better than ground training, yes. Shanna was one of these; a veteran of three years of orbital flights and moon trips. Under an assumed last name she’d worked her way through training and landed a job with Flights to the Stars, delivering tourists and cargo to orbital hotels and moon resorts. It was an old division—like the merchant marine and the navy.

She was visibly trying to keep calm. “The ISA has announced an open competition for the crew; it’s not just for ’nauts.”

“And you’re going to enter,” he said mildly to cover his inner confusions.

“Rumor is the Consortium gets to choose one of the crew.”

“Rumor is rarely accurate. We’ve agreed to underwrite one.”

She plunged forward, eyes big. “I want you to pick me.”

“Do you think I’d risk my own flesh and blood—”

“Especially one you ignored for years—”

“I had a business to run, damn it.” He slammed his fist on the desk. “You were well looked after. I made sure of that.”

“Dad.” There was a tremor in her voice he’d never heard before. Eyes watery. “I’ve never asked you for favors; never traded on your name. But this is so important I… I need to load the dice.” She looked directly at him.

“Why do you want to do this? Seems to me you have an interesting life as it is.”

“The Pluto mission is a great adventure! My job is just”—a shrug—“spacebus techy, medical.”

“You’ve never even been to Mars. Go there for adventure! I’ll be glad to make that happen for you.”

“Other people are doing Mars. I want to go where no one has ever been.”

Axelrod’s mind was racing down nervous hallways.
If I don’t help her, will she forgive me? What if I turn her down and she makes it on her own? Can I make sure she doesn’t get chosen?
He shook his head.
She has such passion for this, how could I? Such idealism
—
wait a minute…

“If you’re the Consortium’s representative, you’ll have to act like it,” he said slowly.

“Meaning?”

“Being a private enterprise, we need to turn a profit whenever possible.”

“So?”

“So if you work for us, part of your duties will be to look for possible revenue-generating opportunities.”

Shanna looked blank. “You mean—like stuff to sell?”

“We’ll want exclusive media rights from you, for one.”

“What is there to sell on Pluto?” she sputtered.

“For one thing, the experience. Everyone loves to watch other people in danger from the comfort of their living room sofa. Viktor and Julia have lived under the eye of the vidcams for twenty years. Are you willing to do that?”

“I g-guess so.” A pause. “Does the camera follow them everywhere?”

“In the shared rooms, sure. In the contract. Not in their cabins, though.”

“Still…” She blinked, as if she had not thought about this part. Just a kid, really…“It must be hell.”

“It’s what you want?”

The self-doubt blew away with a sigh. “Yes. Yes.”

He did what had always worked at crisis points: just let himself follow his guy instinct. Even when it was his daughter. “I’ll have a contract drawn up.”

Her eyes widened, and he knew suddenly that she had not really thought she would win. She rushed around the desk and hugged him, then ran out the door. “You’ll never regret this! I promise,” she called behind her.

Much later, as he was staring moodily out the window, he recalled one of his mother’s sayings: “If you love them, let them go.”
Thanks, Mom.

The Pluto Mission Control auditorium was jammed. Newsies, bureaucrats, some lunar tourists who’d managed to get in from the big luxury hotel nearby—
Fly the Great Lunar Cavern!
—and even a scattering of scientists. All noisy, chattering. A fair fraction of the lunar population seemed to have wedged itself in. Axelrod took a deep breath and stepped out.

Applause spattered across the tiered seats as Axelrod came in from stage rear, with an apprehensive Swain a few steps to the rear. Behind them an enhanced image of Pluto as
Proserpina
had seen it from a million kilometers out filled the large screen.

Showtime!
Axelrod thought. He hated these and loved them at the same time. Nobody without a streak of showmanship ever got to run a big-time business. Even in its darkest days, with an accountant type as administrator, NASA had put the best possible face on the shuttle-space station debacle.

He acknowledged the applause with a short wave of the hand. The cheers were for Shanna, he knew, not for him. He stepped into the chalk-marked area staked out for the holocamera focus. Uncomfortably he became aware of the unseen eyes of Earth’s billions a light-second and a half away.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he began, “we have exciting news from Pluto tonight. At 10:30 this morning, GMT—which is also our local time here at Moonbase One—we received Astronaut Shanna’s latest report. Tonight she speaks to us again, and this time you are going to hear her in person. She’s well over 6 billion kilometers away from us. That’s 3.6 billion miles for those of you who go in for nostalgia.”

This line got a ripple of light laughter in the hall, a good sign. He made himself smile. “And it won’t be in supersound. But I think we all want to hear what she has to say.” His eye caught the second hand of the big wall clock, closing in on a digital readout coming up on 2100, another (and expensive) concession to nostalgia. Timing his last words to end one second before the hour, he said, “All right, Shanna, come in.”

The words the young astronaut had spoken from Pluto orbit hours before came booming in, overamplified, immediately covering them in a dry wash of static.

Damn
solar flares
, Axelrod thought, becoming once again the electronics professional.
Why’d the sun have to get so wild just now? The scientists say it’s just part of the long solar cycle, but it’s coming on top of all the crackle and fizz from near Pluto.
This interference was yet another sign that the bow wave of the solar system was getting pressed back, already close to Pluto’s orbit. Understanding this was the second major motivation for going to Pluto. Could such distant events be significant? Or even dangerous?

As the interference continued, people stirred restlessly in their seats. Yet the room filled with suspense, for whatever words they could get would be from farther than any human had ever spoken. A voice, if not from the infinite, at least pretty damned close. Though there had been other reports, this one came after the first surface landing.

The distortion stopped, the hiss faded. The first word from Shanna that came in loud and clear at Moonbase One and on Earth was, “Life! I’m sure of it!”

The woman’s fresh, youthful voice exulted. The audience stirred. “I matched every molecular combination in the library memory against it. The Kares both checked me, but they wanted me to make the call, so here I am again, stayin’ up late, swillin’ coffee, on the phone, callin’ home.”

Axelrod smiled. The homey touch always worked, clear across the solar system.

“The
only
compound that even came close was chlorophyll
b.
So these are not only plants, they’re photosynthetic ones. Back when Pluto was considered more interesting”—she didn’t try to keep an edge of sarcasm out of her voice—“some hackers at JPL worked out a series of biochemical reactions that theoretically could work here. It turns out they
do.
But!—they’re not powered by Pluto’s distant sun. It’s nine hundred times weaker than our sunlight here. There’s not nearly enough energy in it.”

The crowd stirred. This connected directly to the central riddle. Why was Pluto so warm, just lately? And what did this have to do with the data from the Voyager probes, which showed that the interstellar gas and plasma were intruding farther into the solar system?

Shanna talked right through the buzz. “The plants combine ammonia ice with carbon dioxide ice and get free hydrogen, carbon, and nitric acid. Presto! Then the nitric acid and the carbon recombine, releasing more free hydrogen plus CO
₂
and nitrogen—and that’s where the animals come in!”

Her voice lilted on “animals,” and the word sent another murmur through the crowd.

“They’re methanogens—eaters of methane. You have methanogenic microorganisms on Earth, kilometers down. Since the Mars-mat discovery we’ve learned plenty about them. They branched off from our chemical forefathers about 3.5 billion years ago. Then they got pushed off to the ecological edge of things—chemical also-rans. Here they’re the main show. They recombine the hydrogen and CO
₂
released by the plants into free oxygen and methane. They store some of the hydrogen in their bodies, and then they can inflate themselves—hydrogen balloons! I watched two of them floating above the sea that way, apparently just passing the time of day.”

Axelrod smiled. Nobody, not even that idiot press secretary, could believe Shanna was making
this
up. He had depended on the timbre of her voice. The others had ventured their explanations before the pictures came in. To prove her case, a big glossy picture of two spherical blobs came on the screen. It was at high resolution, and the two hovered over a red lapping background, half shrouded in pink mist. They bobbed and turned in vagrant winds.

The room went absolutely silent. Shanna did not.

“They also store the oxygen, near as I can tell. And they can combine it with hydrogen, like old-fashioned rocket fuel. I saw one of them escape a predator of some kind by gracefully jetting up through the air, while its exhaust froze behind it and fell into the sea.”

“Really, now!” snorted the woman science reporter from the
New York Times.
Axelrod hoped that gibe hadn’t gone out on the air to Earth. He would have shot her a frown, but he was still on-camera. Instead, smile, damn you, smile. Like it was some mild joke.

With uncanny premonition Shanna’s tone turned a shade argumentative. “Yes, a predator. This is evidently a complete, balanced planetary ecology. But I don’t think the one that got my first rover was just a beast. From the readings I was able to get before the rover hull dissolved, I think nitric acid ate it. Those low bushes produce nitric acid and the animals don’t.”

Puzzled frowns in the audience. Science reporters they might be, but high school chemistry was going a bit too deep for most.

“So the creature that ate the rover was using a plant process, see? Not necessary for its own metabolism. Using it to melt my probe, pry it apart—that’s awfully close to tool-using. There’s not only life on Pluto—there’s
intelligent
life!”

Shanna went right on, her springy tone rolling over the shocked faces in the auditorium. “That’s what we’ve been able to learn by remote observation. Now, obviously, we have to go down there. I’m the captain and the biologist. My job, the way I figure it. By the time you hear these words”—Shanna’s voice rose in almost childlike delight—“we’ll be on my way to Pluto!”

The rows of blank looks would have been funny if Axelrod hadn’t felt exactly the same.

“I’ve discussed this with the rest of the crew. Let’s say the vote was, um, divided. So as captain I took the responsibility. After all, it’s my risk and my field of study. I’m going down, with Jordin as pilot.” Her voice softened. “Finally…good-bye, gang. And especially, good-bye to my dad. He always said nothing could really do more than slow down an Axelrod, and I’m proving him right again. Bye, Dad!”

After that, from distant Plutonian space came only a whispering hiss.

As soon as the cameras went off, Hilge growled, “You didn’t give her permission to do that!”

Nobody could hear her rough whisper in the growing hubbub.

Axelrod grinned. “And I didn’t say she couldn’t.”