The Sunborn (19 page)

“Dis” was the Greek equivalent of Pluto, so the project’s choice of acronyms was entirely appropriate. Their DIS metaprogram was a superstructure above Wiseguy, tasked with integrating results with the whole architecture of their onboard computing. Olympians, keeping their own counsel, for now.

Wiseguy had ceased including Shanna in the interchange most of the time. That would have slowed them down, and Shanna did need sleep now and then. Old One didn’t seem to, so the large zand and Wiseguy exchanged sallies of semantic battle without a break. She didn’t like this, but that’s how advanced systems worked, a century into the computer revolution. Machines didn’t bother slow-mo humans unless necessary.

And Old One, unlike some geniuses Shanna had known on Earth, had tact. When she awoke and came back into the loop, it had abruptly halted its data rate with Wiseguy. Abandoning what must have been for it a heady conversational brew, it deftly brought her up to date. As soon as she began a series of questions, it knew what she wanted to ask.

Yes, it said—her vitamin hypothesis did, after a fashion, fit the facts. The zand suffered from what amounted to nutritional deficiencies. Analogous to Earth species, they needed trace elements for full health and strength, even for survival. The remedy lay, in a sense, close at hand—and in another way frustratingly, tantalizingly far off.

That was why Old One had philosophically resigned itself to die in the next few day-cycles. It had readily volunteered this fact, as though they would understand. After all, weren’t they also from Lightgiver, or at least in its neighborhood? They knew all, yes? Surely they could tell that another wave of Darksiders was coming, this time to bring a tide of death?

Lights often streaked across Pluto’s somber heavens. Some of them pounded into the ice or plunged into the sea as what Old One called skystones. As soon as she heard the translated anthology word—a common translators’ programming trick, nailing terms together as an approximation—Shanna knew whence they came: the cometary Oort cloud. That great gray swarm surrounds the solar system to a depth of a third of a light-year. Inconceivably vast, its inner edge intersects the orbits of Pluto and Neptune. Pluto, nearer the cloud than Earth and shielded by less atmosphere, is far more vulnerable to hammering by meteoric debris.

But something malignant fell from the sky, too, and then roved the surface, killing zand.

Shanna’s mind had skated ahead of even Wiseguy, slapping pieces of the puzzle together. The zand’s life was even more precarious than she had imagined. Only by sheer cosmic accident—or as they would have said, by the mercy of Lightgiver—had a stray comet never pulverized Rendezvous. Or sent a tidal wave to roll over the zand during their breakfasting or at Birthing.

She thought about that in light of Pluto’s long but odd history. Many astronomers thought it had started life as a moon of Uranus, later liberated by some impact or else by the slow tugs of gravity from some other passing body. Somehow the world had gotten free.

Maybe the origin of life here, and evolution, had started then. Maybe. Only by another accident—or miracle; give the zand their nod—had they survived the Oort cloud bombardment—

Hey—
wait.

A lightning hunch, like the ones that had given Shanna a competitive edge during astronaut training, struck her, hard.
Evolve? Who said they evolved here?

The implications of that were too much for now—she brushed them aside. But one thing she suddenly knew. The zand were metal-based life, almost like machines, but driven by a metallic chemistry. Nobody had foreseen such an exotic chemistry, blending metal’s liking for oxygen—like the iron rusts of Mars—and a chilly liquid chemistry of methane. Running low-temperature metabolism demanded rare elements. Churning chemistries had to be fed.

Out there in primordial Chaos and ancient Night, in tiny but sufficient quantities, lay the heavy metals and rare earths the zand needed in their food. They harvested these, Old One said, from the skystones.

But that raised a practical problem. Most skystones fell into the large methane sea, where at sunset they irrecoverably froze. Or else the skystones plowed into the cliffs and shadowy crevasses on the night-side. Into those frigid lands the awake zand never ventured; they slept through the coming of night. But the fallen skystones then sank into the liquefying ice fields at daybreak. The methane sea came from the ices and so consumed all but a tiny fraction of the vital skystones.

She pondered this exotic biology. If a zand was lucky enough to find a skystone at dawn, before the precious stuff sank into the melt—or if it could dive into the shallows, searching for treasure on the frozen shelf… But the chances of that had to be so slender.
They had so little time.

Shanna reluctantly—for such a mass of knowledge remained untapped in that mind!—bid Old One farewell, through Wiseguy. Which even seemed to sense her mood, and said, “There will be other conversations.”
Hope so.

E
ARTHSIDE SENT THEM
a blizzard of questions. Shanna tired of answering them. She had one of the crew, Chow-Lin, do a downlink transmission because he had the old NASA-style jargon down pat. Alphabet soup, with acronyms back-to-back. The message was that they had “contingency strategy worked out” to avoid “any serious danger,” though they were “operating out of” their “planned parameter space.” There was no “incremental creep in risk,” just their “preplanned” (she always wondered what “postplanned” might be) “spectrum of exploratory responses” to a “knowledge-acquisition-driven expedition” here on the “frontier of humanity.” She had always admired the way bureaucracies spontaneously produced leaden prose, blandly sliding from the mouths of people who absolutely believed everything they said.

Then they had an all-crew meeting. Around the table the rest of the crew looked grim, like a support group for hemorrhoid sufferers.

“We don’t understand,” Chow-Lin said. “The zand, the Darksiders—what’s it mean?”

“I want to compliment you on how you handled the public angle.” Shanna had taken management courses and remembered to open with a compliment, especially if one wanted to present people with plans they might very well dislike. “Quite adroit.”

But Chow-Lin wasn’t having any. “We don’t know what’s going on!” Jordin said quietly, “Research is when you don’t know what you’re doing.”

Mary Kay looked askance at her husband. “Or overdoing.”

Shanna asked her, “You think we stayed down there too long?”

Chow-Lin said stolidly, with a heavy-lidded blink, “You were hours over nominal.”

“Hey,” Jordin said, “nominal is just a guess, not an order.”

Chow-Lin was unmoved, lips twisted skeptically. “If you’d had a liftoff failure, there wasn’t time to get you up from the surface before you froze.”

“We made the discovery of the age,” Jordin said, still sounding reasonable but his eyes glinting. “That tends to concentrate the mind.”

Shanna recalled the old Samuel Johnson saying, something like,
Nothing so concentrates the mind like a pending execution.
She stayed silent while Jordin and Chow-Lin traded gibes, with Mary Kay slipping in worried remarks.
Overture…
Then even Uziki, the quiet one, chimed in.
Discord… First Theme.
Shanna recognized the tones, listening for the underlying feeling rather than surface content. They needed to get out their vexations, not about the danger of the first landing at all, but about being left out. Therapy time.

Now for
Second Theme…

“Taking chances isn’t the same as exploration,” Chow-Lin was saying, so she countered, “What were you observing?”

Chow-Lin hesitated only a second, nodded to Uziki, who punched a command into one of the big wall display screens, which was at the moment showing surf breaking on a white beach. It flickered over to a 3-D diagram of the vicinity near Pluto, with Charon shown to the side. “We used radar backtracking of incoming masses, as discussed. There is a steady stream”—the screen showed orange dots curving in from farther out—“coming on nearly straight-falling orbits.” The dots followed yellow trajectory curves, approaching Pluto and slowing.

“Not a free infall, then,” Jordin said.

“No, in fact, there’s considerable slowing on the approach. Then—” The dots entered the thin Plutonian atmosphere, showing flaring trails.

“Aerobraking?” Mary Kay asked doubtfully.

Chow-Lin nodded. “Yeah—artificial as hell. Somebody’s dropping descent packages on the surface, and they’re moving slow enough to survive the impact.”

Mary Kay said, “Deliberately targeted, that’s clear—this stuff isn’t natural.”

Shanna wondered for a moment if she had lost her capacity for surprise.
So much…
She thought silently for a moment as the others discussed details, and then said slowly, “All those incoming arcs—they end on the nightside.”

Uziki said, “Yes, I noticed that, too. For some reason—”

Jordin said, “Even when their aerobraking trajectories wrap all the way around the planet, they end up coming down at night. Damn funny.”

Shanna made her leap. “Those are the Darksiders! The zand call them that because they land when the zand are asleep and most vulnerable.”

Chow-Lin sat back, face impassive. “Ummm, an hypothesis…”

“It can’t be an accident that the incoming prefer to land at night, when they can’t even see the landing zone very well,” Jordin said. “Hey, maybe that’s why we found pieces of them on the beach—some of them hit too hard and break up.”

“Maybe a Darkside landing is tied to the biology,” Mary Kay ventured, looking at Shanna—

Who shrugged. “Could be. Night’s pretty damned cold—even for Pluto. All I know from the Old One translations is that the zand are getting decimated by something called the Darksiders. If they’re to be believed—and why not?—it’s an ongoing genocide.”

Chow-Lin frowned, fidgeting with a pen. “With the strings being pulled by—”

“Something farther out—but what?”

Uziki said to the screen, “Full outview.” The screen scale expanded until Pluto was a small circle, then a dot. The infalling lines in yellow drew together, making a long, slightly curved band. The scale continued to expand but the yellow just kept going, until—“That’s as far as we can track with any resolution.”

“Wow,” Jordin said. “They’re from really far out.”

“No assignable origin,” Chow-Lin said crisply. “But their orbits point back to a big ice body.” On-screen, a tiny dot got labeled: X. “Got it in the low infrared. It’s an incredibly cold place—but warmer than anything else out here, except Pluto.”

“How could anything live there?” Mary Kay asked.

“How can the zand?” Jordin countered. “No question, this is low-temperature chemistry we haven’t a clue about.”

“There’s got to be something more.” Shanna peered off into nowhere. “Pluto’s is an ecology that’s thin, far too sparse. No microbes in the soil—I just ran the chem check and micron-level analysis. Now, that’s just plain impossible. Biology builds up from the basic building blocks. Here there are none. Just a few organisms and a spotty food supply. No pyramid of life, just a few big fauna sitting atop a set of stilts.”

“So…” Now Mary Kay looked both skeptical and puzzled. “We’re missing something.”

“Or else our whole comprehension of biology is wrong. You don’t build up big creatures without a huge investment in processes, chem, metabolism…” Shanna stopped, frustrated, but knowing what to do next.

“Let’s leave it to the biologists Earthside,” Mary Kay said. “We’re explorers, not theory guys.”

“Right, explorers.” Shanna took a deep breath. “So let’s explore. I say we go down there and see what the Darksiders are.”

“Hey, no,” Chow-Lin said automatically. “Another descent so soon? I strongly—”

“We need to get the full story here,” Jordin said. “Not go running home with more questions than answers. We haven’t got a clue what is driving Pluto’s warm-up, and that is our mission.”

This was true, but Chow-Lin’s expression told them that the argument cut no ice with him. He said, “I think we’ve gone off the deep end here.”

Mary Kay, showing some grit in her narrow-eyed expression, said, “We’re at the deep end—the borderland of the solar system. It took a lot of money to put us here, and—”

“You’re going to interfere in an intelligent alien society, don’t you realize that?” Chow-Lin said.

“We already have,” said Uziki, who usually confined herself to computers and the robots. She seldom said anything about nonengineering matters, but Shanna was glad to have her come forward. “They’re part of the problem we came to solve, right? So we have to understand them.”

“We can’t just blunder—”

“Do I hear echoes of the Prime Directive here?” Shanna said, absolutely straight, letting the words do all the work that a sarcastic tone would have. Chow-Lin was a fan of an ancient TV show, one she had watched a few times. She knew just enough to make fun of it.

Chow-Lin said guardedly, “Well, we do have to follow some code.”

“Look,” Jordin said reasonably, “we don’t have protocols from ISA on this. So we’re free to deal with opportunities as they arise.”

“You want to go down there again?” Chow-Lin countered. “It’s dangerous.”

“Yeah, but that’s not the appeal,” Jordin said, only a slight upturn at the corner of his mouth showing that this was ironic.

“We don’t have permission,” Chow-Lin began. “I’ll enter an objection—”

“No, you won’t, mister,” Shanna said mildly. “That’s an order.”

She had carefully chosen the moment to invoke her authority. On long missions crew saw their captain sharing the scut work, doing her clothes in the washer, waking up after a bad night’s sleep—and soon enough, she didn’t look like a voice of authority anymore. But that didn’t mean the mission could do without one. It was a matter of knowing when to remind them, a lesson learned through the decades on Mars and passed on.

Chow-Lin opened his mouth to say something, then slowly closed it. He shook his head for a moment, biting his lip, and Shanna thought she would have to deal with outright insurrection. But no; he looked down, eyes boring into the black tabletop, and said nothing.