The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 24

by Gardner Dozois

  “So you turned to me.”

  “The last resort,” said Bill Dzik with disgust in his voice.

  “We tried your colleagues,” Miriam said. “They all said no.”

  “Well, that’s typical of that bunch of prigs.”

  Harry, always a diplomat, smiled at me. “So we’re having to bend a few pettifogging rules, but you have to see the vision, man, you have to see the greater good. And it’s a chance for you to return to Titan, Jovik. Think of it as an opportunity.”

  “The question is, what’s in it for me? You know I’ve come close to the editing suites before. Why should I take the risk of helping you now?”

  “Because,” Harry said, “if you don’t you’ll certainly face a reboot.” So now we came to the dirty stuff. Harry took over; he was clearly the key operator in this little cabal, with the other engineer types uncomfortably out of their depth. “We know about your sideline.”

  With a sinking feeling I asked, “What sideline?”

  And he used his Virtual display to show me. There went one of my doctored probes arrowing into Titan’s thick air, a silver needle that stood out against the murky organic backdrop, supposedly on a routine monitoring mission but in fact with a quite different objective.

  There are pockets of liquid water to be found just under Titan’s surface, frozen-over crater lakes, kept warm for a few thousand years by the residual heat of the impacts that created them. My probe now shot straight through the icy carapace of one of those crater lakes, and into the liquid water beneath. Harry fast-forwarded, and we watched the probe’s ascent module push its way out of the lake and up into the air, on its way to my colleagues’ base on Enceladus.

  “You’re sampling the subsurface life from the lakes,” Harry said sternly. “And selling the results.”

  I shrugged; there was no point denying it. “I guess you know the background. The creatures down there are related to Earth life, but very distantly. Different numbers of amino acids, or something – I don’t know. The tiniest samples are gold dust to the biochemists, a whole new toolkit for designer drugs and genetic manipulation . . .” I had one get-out. “You’ll have trouble proving this. By now there won’t be a trace of our probes left on the surface.” Which was true; one of the many ill-understood aspects of Titan was that probes sent down to its surface quickly failed and disappeared, perhaps as a result of some kind of geological resurfacing.

  Harry treated that with the contempt it deserved. “We have full records. Images. Samples of the material you stole from Titan. Even a sworn statement by one of your partners.”

  I flared at that, “Who?” But, of course, it didn’t matter.

  Harry said sweetly. “The point is the sheer illegality – and committed by you, a curator, whose job is precisely to guard against such things. If this gets to your bosses, it will be the editing suite for you, my friend.”

  “So that’s it. Blackmail.” I did my best to inject some moralistic contempt into my voice. And it worked; Michael, Miriam, Bill wouldn’t meet my eyes.

  But it didn’t wash with Harry. “Not the word I’d use. But that’s pretty much it, yes. So what’s it to be? Are you with us? Will you lead us to Titan?”

  I wasn’t about to give in yet. I got to my feet suddenly; to my gratification they all flinched back. “At least let me think about it. You haven’t even offered me that coffee.”

  Michael glanced at Harry, who pointed at a dispenser on a stand near my couch. “Use that one.”

  There were other dispensers in the cabin; why that particular one? I filed away the question and walked over to the dispenser. At a command it produced a mug of what smelled like coffee. I sipped it gratefully and took a step across the floor towards the transparent dome.

  “Hold it,” Michael snapped.

  “I just want to take in the view.”

  Miriam said, “OK, but don’t touch anything. Follow that yellow path.”

  I grinned at her. “Don’t touch anything? What am I, contagious?” I wasn’t sure what was going on, but probing away at these little mysteries had to help. “Please. Walk with me. Show me what you mean.”

  Miriam hesitated for a heartbeat. Then, with an expression of deep distaste, she got to her feet. She was taller than I was, and lithe, strong-looking.

  We walked together across the lifedome, a half-sphere a hundred metres wide. Couches, control panels, and data entry and retrieval ports were clustered around the geometric centre of the dome; the rest of the transparent floor area was divided up by shoulder-high partitions into lab areas, a galley, a gym, a sleeping area, and shower. The layout looked obsessively plain and functional to me. This was the vessel of a man who lived for work, and only that; if this was Michael Poole’s ship it was a bleak portrait.

  We reached the curving hull. Glancing down I could see the ship’s spine, a complex column a couple of kilometres long leading to the lode of asteroid ice used for reaction mass by the GUTdrive module within. And all around us wormhole Interfaces drifted like snowflakes, while intraSystem traffic passed endlessly through the great gateways.

  “All this is a manifestation of your lover’s vision,” I said to Miriam, who stood by me.

  “Michael’s not my lover,” she shot back, irritated. The electric-blue light of the exotic matter frames shone on her cheekbones.

  “I don’t even know your name,” I said.

  “Berg,” she said reluctantly. “Miriam Berg.”

  “Believe it or not, I’m not a criminal. I’m no hero, and I don’t pretend to be. I just want to get through my life, and have a little fun on the way. I shouldn’t be here, and nor should you.” Deliberately I reached for her shoulder. A bit of physical contact might break through that reserve.

  But my fingers passed through her shoulder, breaking up into a mist of pixels until they were clear of her flesh, and then reformed. I felt only a distant ache in my head.

  I stared at Miriam Berg. “What have you done to me?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said gravely.

  I sat on my couch once more – my couch, a Virtual projection like me, the only one in the dome I wouldn’t have fallen through, and sipped a coffee from my Virtual dispenser, the only one that I could touch.

  It was, predictably, Harry Poole’s scheme. “Just in case the arm-twisting over the sample-stealing from Titan wasn’t enough.”

  “I’m a Virtual copy,” I said.

  “Strictly speaking, an identity backup . . .”

  I had heard of identity backups, but could never afford one myself, nor indeed fancied it much. Before undertaking some hazardous jaunt you could download a copy of yourself into a secure memory store. If you were severely injured or even killed, the backup could be loaded into a restored body, or a vat-grown cloned copy, or allowed to live on in some Virtual environment. You would lose the memories you had acquired after the backup was made, but that was better than non-existence . . . That was the theory. In my opinion it was an indulgence of the rich; you saw backup Virtuals appearing like ghosts at the funerals of their originals, distastefully lapping up the sentiment.

  And besides the backup could never be you, the you who had died; only a copy could live on. That was the idea that started to terrify me now. I am no fool, and imaginative to a fault.

  Harry watched me taking this in.

  I could barely ask the question: “What about me? The original. Did I die?”

  “No,” Harry said. “The real you is in the hold, suspended. We took the backup after you were already unconscious.”

  So that explained the ache at the back of my neck: that was where they had jacked into my nervous system. I got up and paced around. “And if I refuse to help? You’re a pack of crooks and hypocrites, but I can’t believe you’re deliberate killers.”

  Michael would have answered, but Harry held up his hand, unperturbed. “Look, it needn’t be that way. If you agree to work with us, you, the Virtual you, will be loaded back into the prime version. You’ll have full mem
ories of the whole episode.”

  “But I won’t be me.” I felt rage building up in me. “I mean, the copy sitting here. I won’t exist any more – any more than I existed a couple of hours ago, when you activated me.” That was another strange and terrifying thought. “I will have to die! And that’s even if I cooperate. Great deal you’re offering. Well, into Lethe with you. If you’re going to kill me anyway I’ll find a way to hurt you. I’ll get into your systems like a virus. You can’t control me.”

  “But I can.” Harry clicked his fingers.

  And in an instant everything changed. The four of them had gathered by Harry’s couch, the furthest from me. I had been standing; now I was sitting. And beyond the curved wall of the transparent dome, I saw that we had drifted into Earth’s night.

  “How long?” I whispered.

  “Twenty minutes,” Harry said carelessly. “Of course I can control you. You have an off switch. So which is it to be? Permanent extinction for all your copies, or survival as a trace memory in your host?” His grin hardened, and his young-old face was cold.

  So the Hermit Crab wheeled in space, seeking out the wormhole Interface that led to Saturn. And I, or rather he who had briefly believed he was me, submitted to a downloading back into his primary, myself.

  He, the identity copy, died to save my life. I salute him.

  IV

  Wormhole

  Released from my cell of suspended animation, embittered, angry, I chose to be alone. I walked to the very rim of the lifedome, where the transparent carapace met the solid floor. Looking down I could see the flaring of superheated, ionised steam pouring from the GUTdrive nozzles. The engine, as you would expect, was one of Poole’s own designs. “GUT” stands for “Grand Unified Theory,” the system which describes the fundamental forces of nature as aspects of a single superforce. This is creation physics. Thus men like Michael Poole use the energies which once drove the expansion of the universe itself for the triviality of pushing forward their steam rockets.

  Soon the Hermit Crab drove us into the mouth of the wormhole that led to the Saturn system. We flew lifedome-first at the wormhole Interface, so it was as if the electric-blue tetrahedral frame came down on us from the zenith. It was quite beautiful, a sculpture of light. Those electric blue struts were beams of exotic matter, a manifestation of a kind of antigravity field that kept this throat in space and time from collapsing. Every so often you would see the glimmer of a triangular face, a sheen of golden light filtering through from Saturn’s dim halls.

  The frame bore down, widening in my view, and fell around us, obscuring the view of Earth and Earthport. Now I was looking up into a kind of tunnel, picked out by flaring of sheets of light. This was a flaw in spacetime itself; the flashing I saw was the resolution of that tremendous strain into exotic particles and radiations. The ship thrust deeper into the wormhole. Fragments of blue-white light swam from a vanishing point directly above my head and swarmed down the spacetime walls. There was a genuine sensation of speed, of limitless, uncontrollable velocity. The ship shuddered and banged, the lifedome creaked like a tin shack, and I thought I could hear that elderly GUTdrive screaming with the strain. I gripped a rail and tried not to cower.

  The passage was at least mercifully short. Amid a shower of exotic particles we ascended out of another electric-blue Interface – and I found myself back in the Saturn system, for the first time in years.

  I could see immediately that we were close to the orbit of Titan about its primary, for the planet itself, suspended in the scuffed sky of the lifedome, was about the size I remembered it: a flattened globe a good bit larger than the Moon seen from Earth. Other moons hung around their primary, points of light. The sun was off to the right, with its close cluster of inner planets, so Saturn was half-full. Saturn’s only attractive feature, the rings, were invisible, for Titan’s orbit is in the same equatorial plane as the ring system and the rings are edge-on. But the shadow of the rings cast by the sun lay across the planet’s face, sharp and unexpected.

  There was nothing romantic in the view, nothing beautiful about it, not to me. The light was flat and pale. Saturn is about ten times as far from the sun as Earth is, and the sun is reduced to an eerie pinpoint, its radiance only a hundredth of that at Earth. Saturn is misty and murky, an autumnal place. And you never forgot that you were so far from home that a human hand, held out at arm’s length towards the sun, could have covered all of the orbit of Earth.

  The Crab swung about and Titan itself was revealed, a globe choked by murky brown cloud from pole to pole, even more dismal and uninviting than its primary. Evidently Michael Poole had placed his wormhole Interface close to the moon in anticipation that Titan would someday serve his purposes.

  Titan was looming larger, swelling visibly. Our destination was obvious.

  Harry Poole took charge. He had us put on heavy, thick-layered exosuits of a kind I’d never seen before. We sat on our couches like fat pupae; my suit was so thick my legs wouldn’t bend properly.

  “Here’s the deal,” Harry said, evidently for my benefit. “The Crab came out of the wormhole barrelling straight for Titan. That way we hope to get you down there before any of the automated surveillance systems up here can spot us, or anyhow do anything about it. In a while the Crab will brake into orbit around Titan. But before then you four in the gondola will be thrown straight into an entry.” He snapped his fingers, and a hatch opened up in the floor beneath us to reveal the interior of another craft, mated to the base of the lifedome. It was like a cave, brightly lit and with its walls crusted with data displays.

  I said, “Thrown straight in, Harry? And what about you?”

  He smiled with that young-old face. “I will be waiting for you in orbit. Somebody has to stay behind to bail you out, in case.”

  “This ‘gondola’ looks small for the four of us.”

  Harry said, “Well, weight has been a consideration. You’ll mass no more than a tonne, all up.” He handed me a data slate. “Now this is where you come in, Jovik. I want you to send a covering message to the control base on Enceladus.”

  I stared at the slate. “Saying what, exactly?”

  Harry said, “The entry profile is designed to mimic an unmanned mission. For instance you’re going in hard – high deceleration. I want you to make yourselves look that way in the telemetry – like just another unmanned probe, going in for a bit of science, or a curacy inspection, or whatever it is you bureaucrat types do. Attach the appropriate permissions. I’m quite sure you’re capable of that.”

  I was sure of it too. I opened the slate with a wave of my hand, quickly mocked up a suitable profile, let Harry’s systems check that I hadn’t smuggled in any cries for help, and squirted it over to Enceladus. Then I handed the slate back. “There. Done. You’re masked from the curacy. I’ve done what you want.” I waved at the looming face of Titan. “So you can spare me from that, can’t you?”

  “We discussed that,” said Michael Poole, with just a hint of regret in his voice. “We decided to take you along as a fall-back, Jovik, in case of a challenge. Having you aboard will make the mission look more plausible; you can give us a bit more cover.”

  I snorted. “They’ll see through that.”

  Miriam shrugged. “It’s worth it if it buys us a bit more time.”

  Bill Dzik stared at me, hard. “Just don’t get any ideas, desk jockey. I’ll have my eye on you all the way down and all the way back.”

  “And listen,” Harry said, leaning forward. “If this works out, Jovik, you’ll be rewarded. We’ll see to that. We’ll be able to afford it, after all.” He grinned that youthful grin. “And just think. You will be one of the first humans to walk on Titan! So you see, you’ve every incentive to cooperate, haven’t you?” He checked a clock on his data slate. “We’re close to the release checkpoint. Down you go, team.”

  They all sneered at that word and at the cheerful tone of the man who was staying behind. But we filed dutifully enough through the
hatch and down into that cave of instrumentation, Miriam first, then me, with Bill Dzik at my back. Michael Poole was last in; I saw him embrace his father, stiffly, evidently not a gesture they were used to. In the “gondola,” our four couches sat in a row, so close that my knees touched Miriam’s and Dzik’s when we were all crammed in there in our suits. The hull was all around us, close enough for me to have reached out and touched it in every direction, a close-fitting shell. Poole pulled the hatch closed, and I heard a hum and whir as the independent systems of this gondola came on line. There was a rattle of latches, and then a kind of sideways shove that made my stomach churn. We were already cut loose of the Crab, and were falling free, and rotating.

  Poole touched a panel above his head, and the hull turned transparent. It was as if we four in our couches were suspended in space, surrounded by glowing instrument panels, and blocky masses that must be the GUT engine, life support, supplies. Above me the Crab slid across the face of Saturn, GUTdrive flaring, and below me the orange face of Titan loomed large.

  I whimpered. I have never pretended to be brave.

  Miriam Berg handed me a transparent bubble-helmet. “Lethe, put this on before you puke.”

  I pulled the helmet over my head; it snuggled into the suit neck and made its own lock.

  Bill Dzik was evidently enjoying my discomfort. “You feel safer in the suit, right? Well, the entry is the most dangerous time. But you’d better hope we get through the atmosphere’s outer layers before the hull breaches, Emry. These outfits aren’t designed to work as pressure suits.”

  “Then what?”

  “Heat control,” Michael Poole said, a bit more sympathetic. “Titan’s air pressure is fifty per cent higher than Earth’s, at the surface. But that cold, thick air just sucks away your heat. Listen up, Emry. The gondola’s small, but it has a pretty robust power supply – a GUT engine, in fact. You’re going to need that power to keep warm. Away from the gondola your suit will protect you, there are power cells built into the fabric. But you won’t last more than a few hours away from the gondola. Got that?”