The Sunborn (26 page)

His face showed grudging admiration on the next vid. “Good point; so we have a deal. Oh, and I’m getting interest in having some small zand back here, if the exobiologists can figure out how to manage it. We want them alive, not stuffed. Possible? Nobody knows. I’ll have more details later.”

What a Victorian he’d have made! Zand aren’t European, white, or Christian, ergo they have no rights.
Without seeming to disagree, she’d sent, fingers crossed behind her back, “As they’re sentient, they’ll have to
agree
to go, Daddy dear.” Might as well keep the edge in the dialogue.

She was still waiting for his reply.

A ping from the instrument board snapped her back to the present.

Hey,
concentrate.

One more meter… Out of shadow now. Closer…

Her boards reported weak microwave emissions from the prey, but it remained stark and silent on the snow. But no, not a corpse, she reminded herself. The latest arrival, radar tracked from far beyond Pluto. Better to grab than pieces. Her hands moved in air like a pianist’s.

Move. Close
with it.

The crawler probe clanked forward and stuck out spindly grapples. Grasped.
Gotcha.

She reeled in her catch like a fish—back to the waiting lift vehicle, in slow, deliberate moves. While the probe and its burden were still lifting off for the mother ship,
Proserpina
, the DIS computer ship-mind whirred through a preliminary analysis. Shanna watched the silvery ship rising toward them over the curve of the planet and felt sharp anticipation.

The probe made it back without incident. The crew did maintenance, getting ready to leave orbit. Shanna waited for her chance to see the new catch up close.

The new Darksider was nasty, which to a biologist meant interesting. Those fierce-looking claws—tantalum carbide, hard and tough even in supercold. The structural shell—aluminum/titanium alloy.
(Magnification, please.)
Those looked like mechanical relays of some sort, and they were made of solid mercury? Sure; at these temperatures, why not?

But what was the purpose of those patterns of rare earths? And those curves, seen in projection, looked almost like a conventionalized helix—O
h.

Shanna spoke into her recorder. “Hypothesis: these devices, whatever they are, contain a genetic model. Yeah! A helix, too, recalling DNA. A model of what? Of the ‘ideal’ zand, from a Darksider’s point of view?” Her mind made a large leap. “We already know that these infalls came periodically, from dating the ones we found, centuries old. Chow-Lin did it using isotopes, I dunno how. So—when Pluto arcs out along its steeply elliptical orbit, something hammers it with Darksiders. Been doing it for at least three planetary orbits—that’s nearly a thousand years! Darksiders scan the zands. Those that don’t measure up they squish.”

Guided evolution? Part of the grand experiment on Pluto?

The probe clunked into its housing; she heard it ring. A conveyor rattled, taking its burden down to
Proserpina’s
low-temperature laboratory. Time to get to work.

Appropriate background? Something romantic but reflective, she decided; Schumann’s
Konzerstück.

Supported by mellow French horns, the piano chords rolled out while DIS, now in direct physical contact with the specimen, shifted into high speed. She fancied she could hear it hum.

Views of their catch filled the curved screens around her. Well, well—this beast hadn’t been bent from sheet metal in a machine shop, that was sure. Coldformed, one molecular layer at a time, grown as crystals were. From the Oort clouders’ massive perspective, she guessed, a delicate job of microengineering.

And the chilling thought came: from that same perspective, the injection of those “tools” into the zand culture would be no more a “raid” than the injection of antibiotics into a human bloodstream.

The thing was not dead, instruments said. Maybe shut down by itself, to save power. Or maybe orders from some mysterious Other. With care, and with the help of DIS, she could probably feed a trickle of tailored DC into its superconducting circuitry and bring it back to life. Make it
move,
clash those jagged claws, jump up and down.
(Boogie!
she almost heard Grandma say. Her father, alas, never got that loose.) Possibly attract its makers’ attention that way?

If one of her own hemoglobin molecules tried to get her attention, would she notice?
That
was the relative scale between herself and the hypothetical somber dwellers in the Oort cloud, in the far dark beyond the warm worlds. Yet they had made the rickety zand biosphere, whoever or whatever they were.

They had plenty of room, too. Where the sun’s gravitational grip slackened, countless icy islands swung, taking centuries to complete a single orbit around the dim home star. That archipelago stretched halfway to the next gleaming stars. As infinities went, it would do quite nicely.

They had come seeking the root of a mystery, never anticipating that the answer would be so vast and startling. At the end of the twencen, Pluto’s atmosphere had seemed to start cooling off, as the planet arced outward on its slanting ellipse. Atmospheric specialists predicted it would freeze out somewhere before 2020.

Only it hadn’t. Instead, even as the first probe sped outward, the thin film of chilly nitrogen and methane cloaking Pluto began to warm. Other compounds began spiking their spectral signatures up on the most sensitive Earthbound detectors: water vapor, carbon dioxide, even nitrogen wedded to oxygens.

And as the mission had prepared, a further, ominous puzzle arose: the solar system’s bow shock was moving. This “pause point” is the working front where the sun’s outward wind of particles meets the interstellar plasma. This forms a surface much like the curve made by a ship powering across a lake, seen from above. Before, the nearest this bow shock had gotten to the sun was about one hundred astronomical units, a full hundred times farther than the Earth-sun distance. But now that fluttery front lay only a few AU beyond Pluto, now just a tad beyond 40 AU from the sun.

If the solar wind let that wall of molecular hydrogen behind the shock intrude into the inner solar system, Earth could be destroyed. Even approaching partway in, say into Saturn, would be very dangerous. That seemed unlikely to the specialists, but without an explanation of what was happening beyond Pluto, few found that comforting.

At first Shanna had thought the bow shock issue was pretty nebulous—after all, it was about thin gases, right?—and had to keep reminding herself of an old diagram from the early space program. It showed the solar system plowing through the interstellar spaces, pushing gas and plasma before it like a snowplow. If a voyage from the sun to the nearest star were like a marathon, in reaching Pluto the runner would have gone only fifteen feet. Both Voyagers and Pioneer had passed into the outer realm, genuine interstellar space. But if the solar snowplow weakened—or the pressure of the interstellar gas increased—the boundary would intrude farther in, brushing the planets. One swipe with molecular hydrogen and Earth’s oxygen would combine, making water and a lot of energy. The biosphere would get hot and breathless within days. Even little trickles of hydrogen could hurt a lot.

She often gazed at the old NASA sketch—from back before it joined ISA—of the region they were now exploring. All very clean and scientific. No mention of lethal weather.

And now Pluto held life. Not just chilly slime molds and small crawly creatures, but a few species in all, crowned by the self-aware zand. And her bet was that these in turn were being altered by the sky-stones that fed them…and the Darksiders that bled them.

Earthside scientists now bet that Pluto was driven by energies somehow imported from where the bow shock roiled and frothed in plasma arcs bigger than planets.

DIS said, “Transmission due.”

“Ummm.” She owed it to Earthside, after the grief she’d given them, to at least keep punctually to their radio schedules. A fundamental rule of missions: there was always
some
damn thing interrupting. She told DIS to start trying revival methods on the newly captured machine. It had gone silent shortly after they began talking to it. Chow-Lin and Jordin had spent weeks trying to get the first Darksider—their hitchhiker—to respond, and concluded that it had been ordered (by what?) to shut down. Now she wondered if anything would work on the new one.

She switched on audio and visual and tried to relax in her obliging smart chair. Deep breath—

“This is Astronaut Shanna Axelrod, aboard
Proserpina,
in Pluto orbit.” It still gave her a charge to be able to say that. (And Grandma would have warned her not to get so swellheaded.) They would edit and polish for the whole brimming Earthside audience, of course, as now required by full-disclosure laws. She hoped no laser-link pirates had caught her latest reports. They had started to swoop into the beam and carried off choice nuggets, decrypting them and bootlegging them in time to compete with the cleaned version. Embarrassments galore, unless she kept close to the vest. But who could, all the time?

In the background Schumann sang, and DIS clucked and ruminated, while she talked. Arpeggios rose from sonorous lower octaves. The longer this mission went on, the more she needed music’s sense of human connection, of grand prospects. For that, the romantics were better than even Bach, for her.

“Not much progress on the Darksiders. The ones in the cold lab talk for a bit, then shut down. DIS is working on it, but my guess is they’re unable to run very long without instructions—from where, though?”

She felt a fluttery twinge of unease. Minimal speculation, ISA had ordered. Earthside thought she was moving too fast. She wanted to
know
—and it was
their
lives on the line out here, right?
Easy, now
—
keep your tones proper and level.
Or should she record these little reports and have DIS take out the stress-diagnostic frequencies? Yep, she should consider that. Tomorrow.

“So, zilch. The local Pluto life-forms, the zand especially, I’d love to take the time to study them. But they’re maybe a sideshow, Jordin and I—and the rest of the crew—think. You’re just going to have to rely on our judgment.”

She took a deep breath. Even after years of talking into silence, knowing that her message would take hours to get to its listeners made her uneasy. Humans need conversation, not oration.

Then there was the psychers’ explanation. Reminding her of how far away they were from help? With one exception, yes.

“And, speaking of the zand, I’ve had some second thoughts on what to do about their situation. They’re on the wrong end of a predator-prey dynamic. We can help them, sure, though that goes way beyond our mission profile. And we’re using the Darksider-type strategy! Hiding from sight and occasionally sneaking a meteorite in amongst them might be as bad for them as to have Lady Bountiful descend from the clouds in full view. It could make them completely passive.”

Amateur psychoanalysis, sure, but it made sense even for aliens. Skystones will fall when needed, right? Lightgiver will provide;
they
need do nothing.

“There’s quite enough external control over their fate as it is, with even their genes—if I can use that word imprecisely—messed with by outsiders. I’d like to see the zand stand up on their own feet, even though feet are something they haven’t got.”

Hopeless anthropomorphism:
she could all but hear Dr. Jensen snap out the words.
Hey, it’s a metaphor, guys.

Avoid argument,
Shanna told herself;
you’re
really in charge out here, calling all the shots. Captain! But get some advice first.

“So”—pause for the beat—“I’m having DIS plot us a new course, toward
High Flyer.
I want to link up with them. I know, I know—
Proserpina
wasn’t made to go out into the comet-rich inner disk. But we’ve picked up a lot of easy water here, heating the ice. We had the lander haul some up on the return from recon descents, using our ’bots to do the grunt work. We’re fully fueled. The mysteries of Pluto can’t be solved on the planet alone, and we’ll make a powerful team out there, with
High Flyer
.”

There, it’s said.
Not crazy, no. Hell, Earthside sends a totally new kind of ship out to explore further and wants us to meekly head on home? As the original mission plan called for?

The rest of her crew agreed, of course, but not strongly, and
it was my decision, damn it! Mine alone. Captain.

Proserpina’s
pokey fission nuke drive could only make it far enough to nip at the fusion-burn heels of
High Flyer.
She made herself take a long breath.
We can stay in the game.
“I want you to consider this as an add-on to our mission. Also backup for
High Flyer.
We—”

Clanging. Loud, rasping alarms.

Shanna leaped from the immersion pod, heading for the pilot’s chair. “All hands up!” she sent on comm. A whole row of instrument lights winked red. The hull was overheating.

But how? Panic flailed her. Heating from atmospheric friction? Maybe—were they falling out of orbit into atmosphere?