Explorations: Colony (Explorations Volume Four)

by Dennis E. Taylor

  “It’s just not fair!”

  “It isn’t fair that the sun had to sacrifice itself to save us, either.”

  Quinn kicked the driver’s console. Gavin got in front of him, and held up the empty vial. “So your mom gave you something to take with you. Extremophile bacteria.”

  “It’s kind of pointless without tubeworms, crabs, shrimp. But you can’t put those in a suitcase.”

  “No. But you can put a cryostorage unit in a suitcase. So you released these microbes here, contaminating the ocean …”

  “Which already has a power station in it,” Quinn said defiantly. “So it’s already plenty contaminated. And I hope those microbes find lots of yummy hydrogen gas to eat, and have microbe babies, and then maybe there’ll be some life left in the solar system after Earth is dead and we’re all light years away!”

  Gavin sighed. “I should report this to the Transit Authority. But …” The sun was expanding into a red giant. Contamination of Enceladus’ pristine ocean was not a major issue in the scheme of things. “I’m not gonna say anything. Just don’t do it again.”

  Quinn relaxed a fraction. He said, “I would do it again. But that was all the microbes I’ve got.”

  *

  Gavin, in his digs in Transit Camp 13—unlucky 13, the story of his life—took a break from packing to call Earth. It was amazing how much stuff he had accumulated in five years here. Mostly bits and bobs of machinery that he’d be leaving for the next poor schlub to serve as camp manager. But there were also a lot of things he wanted to take, treasures left behind by colonists who had run up against the inflexible mass allowances of the colony ships. Gavin, as management, would have a larger allowance. Still, there was no way he’d be able to take all these lovely objects: Japanese scrolls, Impressionist paintings, a Fabergé egg, a black-figure Athenian vase, the actual Venus of Willendorf figurine—25,000 years old, he hardly dared to handle it—and so much more. People had salvaged these mementoes from museums and private collections. Then they’d had to leave them behind on Enceladus. Souvenirs from a dying planet. He regarded the chaos in despair while he waited for Adelfa to pick up.

  “Yeah, hello?” a frazzled voice said over the drone-based instant comms system.

  Adelfa Torres ran the departure camp in Los Angeles. Gavin often had cause to talk to her, as they were the two ends of a lifeline stretching from Earth to Enceladus. Now, on the screen, her sweet Filipina face looked taut with worry. Reddish light flickered in the windows behind her, as though a crack had already opened up in Earth’s surface. The scientists said that would happen as the sun’s expanding rim got nearer.

  “It’s pandemonium, Gavin,” she said. “Complete pandemonium. Look at this!”

  The picture changed, zoomed in on the windows. Adelfa’s office was at the L.A. spaceport. The departure camp lay within a cordon enforced by FCF troops. Transports waited on the tarmac. People queued to board under pitiless floodlights. All of them wore breathing masks. Further away … Los Angeles was burning. That’s where the reddish light came from.

  “We can’t open the windows or the smoke gets in.” Adelfa backhanded sweat off her upper lip. “It’s so freaking hot.”

  “Adelfa, how many more flights are they gonna be able to launch out of there?”

  “This’ll be the last one. Not that they’re telling me anything, but look at that. The city is on fire. No one can get to the freaking spaceport.”

  “This is the end,” Gavin realized. That’s why his number had come up. He’d had advance warning, if he had only deciphered it. Not just his tenure at Transit Camp 13, but Transit Camp 13 itself, was about to come to an end.

  “No shit, Captain Obvious,” Adelfa said. “Sorry, don’t mean to be harsh. I know you’re a long way away out there. But yeah. The glaciers are melting. So’s the Arctic ice sheet. The only question is if rising sea levels will drown the city before the seas start to boil off. There won’t be anyone left alive by then, anyway.”

  “Are you able to leave the spaceport at all?”

  “Oh sure, I’ve got my hopper. I was thinking of going to have one last look at the redwoods.”

  “Could you do something else for me while you’re up there?”

  “No, Gavin, that’s out of the question …” She grinned. “Of course. What?”

  “If you could stop by the Marine Science Institute in San Francisco.” That was where Quinn’s mother had worked. “Of course, it might be gone by now, but …”

  He explained what he wanted. Adelfa looked intrigued, exhausted, and amused by turns. She rose and looked out of the window again. “OK. It’s gonna take another couple of days to board everyone in this group, so I’ll give it a shot.”

  “Thanks, Adelfa.” Gavin hesitated. “What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “Are you and your staff being evacuated?”

  “They tell me nothing. But if they leave me here, in the middle of this, I am going to file a seven-figure compensation claim.”

  Laughing, they ended the call.

  Gavin went back to his packing.

  He looked at the few things he had put in his suitcases, and the vast amount of stuff still piled around the room, a greatest hits compilation of the world’s museums.

  Then he returned to the comms screen and pinged Jimmy Khan, 25 miles below on the sea floor.

  *

  Two months later, the last fleet of transports from Los Angeles arrived on Enceladus.

  Gavin went out to meet them, as usual.

  He answered the traumatized colonists’ questions.

  “This is Enceladus. It’s the sixth-largest moon of Saturn. But you won’t be staying here long. That’s the Spirit of Endurance up there. It’s leaving for 15 Monocerotis, in the Cone Nebula, in two days. You’ll have just about enough time to shower and grab a bite to eat.” While they were doing that, the transports would be carrying a last load of water from Enceladus up to the Spirit of Endurance.

  Gavin had confirmed that Adelfa Torres was on this flight. He waited impatiently for her to disembark. But before she did, the Transit Authority pinged him. “Steed, the boss wants to see you in his office right now.”

  *

  The boss: Laurence Chang, head of the entire Transit Authority, which had formerly comprised 62 camps and was now down to a handful. On his way to the TA, skimming over the ice in his rover, Gavin passed several shuttered camps. One by one, the clusters of domes had been powered down and abandoned. There was no point taking the domes or other infrastructure. Mass allowances again. Whatever the colonists needed in their new homes, they would build when they got there.

  In the sky, Sol glowed red and paradoxically bright. As it swelled, it had actually gained in luminosity, due to the expansion of its outer layers. A strange new daylight shone on the ice of Enceladus. The TA dome looked freshly painted pink.

  Gavin went into Laurence Chang’s office.

  Quinn was already there.

  “What’s he done now?” Gavin said.

  Chang did not smile. “This juvenile is a resident of your camp, correct?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “He should have boarded the Spirit of Endurance yesterday. When he was missed, we initiated a search. He was discovered hiding in your office, Steed. He said you had given him the access code to get in. What’s the story?”

  Gavin sighed. He cut his eyes to Quinn, hoping to reassure the scared child, and then faced Chang. “Yes sir, I did give him the access code.”

  “Why, for God’s sake?”

  Quinn piped up before Gavin could answer. “I’m not going to 15 Monocerotis! I’m staying here!”

  “No one is staying here,” Chang said, visibly striving for patience. “This is a barren, frozen moon in a dying solar system. We’re all leaving. You’ll like 15 Monocerotis. It has beaches and ski slopes.”

  Gavin said, “Sir, this seems as good a time as any for me to inform you that I am not going to 15 Monocerotis, either. I would
like to tender my resignation from the Transit Authority, effective when Transit Camp 13 is officially shut down.”

  *

  The final transport had fueled up. It was about to boost the last group from the surface of Enceladus to the waiting Spirit of Endurance. Jimmy Khan and his staff waited to board, while a handful of people wrestled a container the size of a house out of the cargo airlock.

  “I appreciate this, Gavin,” Jimmy said. “Still think you’re batshit crazy, but thanks.”

  “Have a margarita on the beach for me.” Gavin had donated his place on the Spirit of Endurance to Jimmy, who would otherwise have been stuck going to a grim little planet in the Coalsack Nebula.

  Jimmy checked to make sure they were speaking on a private channel. “We left the power station in working order. You’ll just have to go down there and switch everything back on.”

  “Will do.”

  “Take a good look at that thermal vent. There’s shit growing on it.”

  “Oh, awesome!” said Quinn, who was standing beside Gavin, sticking close to him out of anxiety that he might yet be shanghaied onto a transport. He needn’t have worried. In the final rush to board the last two ships, Transit Authority procedures had gotten sloppy. Laurence Chang didn’t care anymore, just wanted to be on his way. You wanna stay? Best of luck to you. Gavin had heard that there were handfuls of diehards lurking in the other transit camps, too.

  “OK,” Jimmy said. “Looks like the airlock is free. I’m outta here. Take care, my friend.”

  “You, too.”

  Jimmy and his staff bounded towards the transport. The people with the cargo container crossed paths with them, hauling their burden clear of the launch zone. Gavin and Quinn went to help with the tow cables. The container was on runners, to help it glide over the ice.

  “So I made it to the Marine Science Institute,” Adelfa Torres said.

  “Did you see my mom?” Quinn said.

  Adelfa hesitated. “No, I didn’t,” she said. “I’m very sorry, buddy. But I did find a lot of stuff that she—or someone else—left in the hopes that someone would salvage it.”

  “So I see,” Gavin said. A smile broke over his face. It felt like the first time he’d smiled in years, but he wasn’t sure if it was thanks to the huge cargo container, or to Adelfa.

  “In here,” Adelfa said, “we have tube worms, shrimp, clams, limpets, cephalopods …” She listed off a dozen species of marine life, to delighted yelps of recognition from Quinn.

  “Which of those can we eat?” said Gavin, ever practical.

  “None,” Adelfa said. “But Quinn’s mom also left us a wide variety of fish eggs, which I guess will turn into tuna and sardines and things? But isn’t the ocean down there too cold for them?”

  “It is now,” Quinn said mysteriously.

  The transport took off. Gavin, Quinn, Adelfa, and her staff watched it burn into the sky. The lights of the shipyard had almost all been extinguished. But on the other hand, they could now see the Spirit of Endurance and the Coal Miner orbiting overhead, their hulls reflecting the newly luminous sun.

  “It’s not as dark as I thought it would be out here,” Adelfa said, looking around.

  “No,” Gavin said. “That’s the thing. The bigger the sun gets, the more luminous it will become. We’re going to get more and more light … and more and more heat.”

  “For real. I was promised minus two hundred degrees. My suit’s temperature sensor is saying it’s only minus one hundred.”

  “And it’s going to get even warmer!” Quinn said. “Given the sun’s rate of expansion, within a few years Enceladus will be in the habitable zone. You know what’s going to happen then?” He was too excited to wait for an answer, and supplied it himself. “All this ice is gonna melt!”

  “Great,” Adelfa said, pretending annoyance. “And where will we live?”

  “Over there,” Gavin said. He pointed at the domes of Transit Camp 13. “That’s home. Let’s go.”

  They started to walk, towing the cargo container.

  “It’ll be easy to make the domes seaworthy,” Gavin explained. “They’re just bubbles of air, after all.”

  “And when the seas warm up, we’ll fill the water with fish,” Quinn said. He tucked his glove into Gavin’s. Gavin squeezed the small hand, feeling a twinge of unfamiliar emotion. It was pride. He was damn proud of this kid, who’d started the whole thing. Quinn went on. “Enceladus will become a water world. So will Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons. We could colonize that one, too! The red giant phase of the sun will last for billions of years!”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Adelfa said, a smile in her voice.

  The cargo container was getting harder to tow. The runners seemed to be sticking on the ice. Gavin looked down. “Wait …”

  He had just stepped in a puddle.

  The ice of Enceladus had begun to melt.

  And so had his frozen heart.

  Felix R Savage Biography

  Felix R. Savage writes hard science fiction, space opera, and comedic science fiction. He woke up one day to learn that he was a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author, but he continues to keep a low profile, and never stops watching out for any sign the lizard people have found him.

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  Knowledge at Any Cost

  By Jasper T. Scott

  “This is wrong,” Carson said.

  “Oh, most definitely,” Seth replied, nodding reasonably to his research assistant as he watched the live feeds playing on the monitors in the observation room.

  Each testing room contained a mature, one-month-old Pommy. Pommies were small, round, cuddly white-furred creatures native to Kepler 452b. They had six stubby legs that all but disappeared under their furry bodies, and two big blue eyes that seemed strangely wise and innocent at the same time. A pair of long antennae and two vestigial wings rounded out their appearance, seeming to serve little functional purpose. At first glance Pommies looked cute and cuddly, not smart, and yet they were arguably smarter than humans.

  When the UEF had first set out to colonize Kepler 452b, it had been for no better reason than that the world was predicted to be Earth-like and probably habitable. It was also a kind of challenge, to push the limits of human exploration: Kepler 452b was fourteen hundred light years from Earth, and they’d had to spend almost seventy years in cryo tanks just to get there.

  Given that there were so many habitable planets closer to home, it seemed pointless to reach so far from Earth, but when they’d arrived, what they’d found more than justified all of the time and money that had gone into their mission.

  The predictions about Kepler 452b had proven correct—it was another Earth, complete with a host of alien flora and fauna to catalog. But unlike Earth, the lifeforms on Kepler 452b weren’t locked in an endless struggle of eat or be eaten. There were no carnivores. No predators. All the animals ate fruit. They didn’t even eat the plants! Nothing on Kepler 452b ever died of unnatural causes. It was a veritable Garden of Eden.

  Until humans arrived. They quickly found ways of cooking and eating the various local species of plants and animals. Some of them were exotic and delicious, while others tasted like chicken, and still others were dry and stringy.

  The Pommies fell into the “stringy” category, but what they lacked in culinary potential, they more than made up for with their genetic and intellectual potential. Pommies had extremely short lifespans and large litters, making them ideal candidates for eugenics experiments.

  The lack of struggle in the Pommies’ environment had failed to prepare them for first contact with humans. They were playful, funny creatures with a great sense of humor, but they had yet to develop any kind of civilization beyond that of their primitive, trundling herds. They had managed to develop various languages to communicate amongst themselves, but their intellectual capacity was
otherwise wasted on them.

  Until now. Seth smiled, watching the monitor for the Math Testing Room. The Pommy in that room sat in front of a holoscreen, solving multiple choice math problems by standing on one of five different pressure plates. Each of those plates had a holographic answer floating above it, so all the Pommy had to do was trundle onto the correct plate. When it got an answer right, a juicy piece of fruit would pop out of a feeder to one side of the testing area, but each time the creature got an answer wrong, it was zapped with a painful jolt of electricity. If any of the test subjects picked three wrong answers in a row, that jolt would be lethal.

  We have to have some kind of standards, after all, Seth thought. He looked at one of the other monitors—the Language Testing Room. It showed a Pommy making associations between photographs and written or spoken descriptions of the images. Pommies struggled to produce human vocal sounds, but they could understand human languages just fine.

  A sharp yelp drew Seth’s eyes back to the Math Testing Room as the Pommy there stood on the wrong answer to a calculus problem. It tried a different answer and received an even more painful jolt of electricity. The creature leapt off the plate and withdrew, whimpering and lifting its paws. It then took a few steps back and sat on its haunches, looking up at the problem on the screen and cocking its head from side to side like an inquisitive puppy.

  “I can’t watch,” Seth’s research assistant said, turning away and covering his eyes.

  Carson didn’t have the stomach for this type of research. Seth barely had the stomach for it himself, but it helped to keep the end goal in mind. Practicing eugenics on human populations was both illegal and ultimately unsatisfying, due to the amount of time it took for a human to reach reproductive maturity, but here was a creature with even greater intelligence than a human, that reached reproductive maturity in just one month. Such a species could easily be bred to some kind of perfection—in this case, intellectual perfection. Successive generations of Pommies quickly became smarter and smarter. Ten generations could be bred in a single year, and they had been. This was generation twenty-seven. The smartest Pommies from this generation would be allowed to breed together to create an even smarter batch of test subjects for next month. The hope was that by the time they reached generation X, the Pommies would be able to solve problems that even the smartest minds in humanity couldn’t.