by Paul McAuley
He was in a pressure suit, with dry air blowing around his head and headup displays blinking at the bottom of the clear helmet. A black landscape, and stars high above, with something bright pulsing, growing closer. A spaceship! That was important, but he couldn't remember why. He tried to move, and discovered that he was trapped in something like tar that came to his waist. He could feel it clamping around his legs, a terrible pressure that was compromising the heat exchange system of his suit. His legs were freezing cold, but his body was hot, and sweat prickled across his skin, collecting in the folds of the suit's undergarment.
"Don't move," a woman's voice said. "It's like quicksand. It flows under pressure. You'll last a little longer if you keep still. Struggling only makes it more liquid."
Barbara. No, she called herself Avernus now. He had the strangest feeling that someone else was there, too, just out of sight. He tried to look around, but it was terribly hard in the half-buried suit. He had been kidnapped. It was the only explanation. He remembered running from the burning hotel. . . He was suddenly certain that the other members of the trade delegation were dead, and cried out, "Help me!"
Avernus squatted in front of him, moving carefully and slowly in her transparent pressure suit. He just see the outline of her face through the gold film of her helmet's visor. "There are two personalities in there, I think. The dominant one let you back, Ben, so that you would plead with me. But don't plead, Ben. I don't want my last memory of you to be so undignified, and anyway, I won't listen. I won't deny you've been a great help. Elfhame always was a soft target, and you punched just the right buttons, and then you kindly provided the means of getting where I want to go. They'll think I was kidnapped." Avernus turned and pointed up at the sky. "Can you see? That's your transport. Ludmilla is going to reprogramme it."
"Take me with you, Barbara."
"Oh, Ben, Ben. But I'm not going to Earth. I considered it, but when they sent you I knew that there was something wrong. I'm going out, Ben. Further out. Beyond Pluto, in the Kuiper Disk, where are more than fifty thousand objects with a diameter of more than a hundred kilometres, and a billion comet nuclei ten kilometres or so across. And then there's the Oort Cloud, and its billions of comets. The fringes of that mingle with the fringes of Alpha Centauri's cometary cloud. Life spreads. That's its one rule. In ten thousand years my children will reach Alpha Centauri, not by starship, but simply through expansion of their territory."
"That's the way you used to talk when we were married. All that sci-fi you used to read."
"You don't remember it, Ben. Not really. It was fed to you. All my old interviews, my books and articles, all your old movies. They did a quick construction job, and just when you started to find out about it, the other one took over."
"I don't think I'm quite myself. I don't understand what's happening, but perhaps it is something to do with the treatment I had. I told you about that."
"Hush, dear. There was no treatment. That was when they fixed you in the brain of this empty vessel."
She was too close, and she had half-turned to watch the moving point of light grow brighter. He wanted to warn her, but something clamped his lips and he almost swallowed his tongue. He watched as his left hand stealthily unfastened a utility pocket and pulled out a length of glittering wire fine as a spider-thread. Monomolecular diamond. Serrated along its length, except for five centimetres at each end, it could easily cut through pressure suit material and flesh and bone.
He knew then. He knew what he was.
The woman looked at him and said sharply, "What are you doing, Ben?"
And for that moment he was called back, and he made a fist around the thread and plunged it into the black stuff. The spy screamed and reached behind his helmet and dumped all oxygen from his main pack. It hissed for a long time, but the stuff gripping his legs and waist held firm.
"It isn't an anaerobe," Avernus said. She hadn't moved. "It is a vacuum organism. A little oxygen won't hurt it."
Ben Lo found that he could speak. He said, "He wanted to cut off your head."
"I wondered why you were carrying that flask of liquid nitrogen. You were going to take it back and what? Use a bush robot to strip my brain neuron by neuron and read my memories into a computer? How convenient to have a genius captive in a bottle."
"It's me, Barbara. I couldn't let him do that." His left arm was buried up to the elbow.
"Then thank you, Ben. I'm in your debt."
"I'd ask you to take me with you, but I think there's only one hibernation pod in the transport. You won't be able to take your friend, either."
"Well, Ludmilla has her family here. She doesn't want to leave. Or not yet."
"I can't remember that story about Picasso. Maybe you heard it after we – after the divorce."
"You told it me, Ben. When things were good between us, you used to tell stories like that."
"Then I've forgotten."
"It's about an art dealer who buys a canvas in a private deal, that is signed 'Picasso'. This is in France, when Picasso was working in Cannes, and the dealer travels there to find if it is genuine. Picasso is working in his studio. He spares the painting a brief glance and dismisses it as a fake."
"I had a Picasso, once. A bull's head. I remember that, Barbara."
"You thought it was a necessary sign of your wealth. You were photographed beside it several times. I always preferred Georges Braque myself. Do you want to hear the rest of the story?"
"I'm still here."
"Of course you are, as long as I stay out of reach. Well, a few months later our dealer buys another canvas signed by Picasso. Again he travels to the studio; again Picasso spares it no more than a glance, and announces that it is a fake. The dealer protests that this is the very painting he found Picasso working on the first time he visited, but Picasso just shrugs and says, 'I often paint fakes.'"
His breathing was becoming labored. Was there something wrong with the air system? The black stuff was climbing his chest. He could almost see it move, a creeping wave of black devouring him centimetre by centimetre.
The star was very close to the horizon, now.
He said, "I know a story."
"There's no more time for stories, dear. I can release you, if you want. You only have your reserve air in any case."
"No. I want to see you go."
"I'll remember you. I'll tell your story far and wide."
Ben Lo heard the echo of another voice across their link, and the woman in the transparent pressure suit stood and lifted a hand in salute and bounded away.
The spy came back, then, but Ben Lo fought him down. There was nothing he could do, after all. The woman was gone. He said, as if to himself, "I know a story. About a man who lost himself, and found himself again, just in time. Listen. Once upon a time. . ."
Something bright rose above the horizon and dwindled away into the outer darkness.
Reef
Margaret Henderson Wu was riding a proxy by telepresence deep inside Tigris Rift when Dzu Sho summoned her. The others in her crew had given up one by one and only she was left, descending slowly between rosy, smoothly rippled cliffs scarcely a hundred metres apart. These were pavements of the commonest vacuum organism, mosaics made of hundreds of different strains of the same species. Here and there bright red whips stuck out from the pavement; a commensal species that deposited iron sulphate crystals within its integument. The pavement seemed to stretch endlessly below her. No probe or proxy had yet reached the bottom of Tigris Rift, still more than thirty kilometres away. Microscopic flecks of sulphur-iron complexes, sloughed cells and excreted globules of carbon compounds and other volatiles formed a kind of smog or snow, and the vacuum organisms accumulated nodes and intricate lattices of reduced metals that, by some trick of superconductivity, produced a broad band electromagnetic resonance that pulsed like a giant's slow heartbeat.
All this futzed the link between operators and their proxies. One moment Margaret was experiencing the three hundred
twenty degree panorama of the little proxy's microwave radar, the perpetual tug of vacuum on its mantle, the tang of extreme cold, a mere thirty degrees above absolute zero, the complex taste of the vacuum smog (burnt sugar, hot rubber, tar), the minute squirts of hydrogen from the folds of the proxy's puckered nozzle as it maintained its orientation relative to the cliff face during its descent, with its tentacles retracted in a tight ball around the relay piton. The next, she was back in her cradled body in warm blackness, phosphenes floating in her vision and white noise in her ears while the transmitter searched for a viable waveband, locked on and – pow – she was back, falling past rippled pink pavement.
The alarm went off, flashing an array of white stars over the panorama. Her number two, Srin Kerenyi, said in her ear, "You're wanted, boss."
Margaret killed the alarm and the audio feed. She was already a kilometre below the previous bench mark and she wanted to get as deep as possible before she implanted the telemetry relay. She swivelled the proxy on its long axis, increased the amplitude of the microwave radar. Far below were intimations of swells and bumps jutting from the plane of the cliff face, textured mounds like brain coral, randomly orientated chimneys. And something else, clouds of organic matter perhaps –
The alarm again. Srin had overridden the cut-out.
Margaret swore and dove at the cliff, unfurling the proxy's tentacles and jamming the piton into pinkness rough with black papillae, like a giant's tongue quick frozen against the ice. The piton's spikes fired automatically. Recoil sent the little proxy tumbling over its long axis until it reflexively stabilised itself with judicious squirts of gas. The link rastered, came back, cut out completely. Margaret hit the switch that turned the tank into a chair; the mask lifted away from her face.
Srin Kerenyi was standing in front of her. "Dzu Sho wants to talk with you, boss. Right now."
The job had been offered as a sealed contract. Science crews had been informed of the precise nature of their tasks only when the habitat was under way. But it was good basic pay with the promise of fat bonuses on completion: when she had won the survey contract Margaret Henderson Wu had brought with her most of the crew from her previous job, and had nursed a small hope that this would be a change in her family's luck.
The Ganapati was a new habitat founded by an alliance of two of the Commonwealth's oldest patrician families. It was of standard construction, a basaltic asteroid cored by a gigawatt X-ray laser and spun up by vented rock vapour to give 0.2 g on the inner surface of its hollowed interior, factories and big reaction motors dug into the stern. With its AIs rented out for information crunching and its refineries synthesising exotic plastics from cane sugar biomass and gengeneered oil seed rape precursors, the new habitat had enough income to maintain the interest on its construction loan from the Commonwealth Bourse, but not enough to attract new citizens and workers. It was still not completely fitted out, had less than a third of its optimal population.
Its Star Chamber, young and cocky and eager to win independence from their families, had taken a big gamble. They were chasing a legend.
Eighty years ago, an experiment in accelerated evolution of chemoautotrophic vacuum organisms had been set up on a planetoid in the outer edge of the Kuiper Belt. The experiment had been run by a shell company registered on Ganymede but covertly owned by the Democratic Union of China. In those days, companies and governments of Earth had not been allowed to operate in the Kuiper Belt, which had been claimed and ferociously defended by outer system cartels. That hegemony had ended in the Quiet War, but the Quiet War had also destroyed all records of the experiment; even the Democratic Union of China had disappeared, absorbed into the Pacific Community.
There were over fifty thousand objects with diameters greater than a hundred kilometres in the Kuiper Belt, and a billion more much smaller, the plane of their orbits stretching beyond those of Neptune and Pluto. The experimental planetoid, Enki, named for one of the Babylonian gods of creation, had been lost amongst them. It had become a legend, like the Children's Habitat, or the ghost comet, or the pirate ship crewed by the reanimated dead, or the worker's paradise of Fiddler's Green.
And then, forty-five years after the end of the Quiet War, a data miner recovered enough information to reconstruct Enki's eccentric orbit. She sold it to the Ganapati. The habitat bought time on the Uranus deep space telescopic array and confirmed that the planetoid was where it was supposed to be, currently more than seven thousand million kilometres from the Sun.
Nothing more was known. The experiment might have failed almost as soon as it begun, but potentially it might win the Ganapati platinum-rated credit on the Bourse. Margaret and the rest of the science crews would, of course, receive only their fees and bonuses, less deductions for air and food and water taxes, and anything they bought with scrip in the habitat's stores; the indentured workers would not even get that. Like every habitat in the Commonwealth, the Ganapati was structured like an ancient Greek Republic, ruled by share-holding citizens who lived in the landscaped parklands of the inner surface, and run by indentured and contract workers who were housed in the undercroft of malls and barracks tunnelled into the Ganapati's rocky skin.
On the long voyage out, the science crews had been on minimal pay, far lower than that of the unskilled techs who worked the farms and refineries, and the servants who maintained the citizens' households. There were food shortages because so much biomass was being used to make exportable biochemicals; any foodstuffs other than basic rations were expensive, and prices were carefully manipulated by the habitat's Star Chamber. When the Ganapati reached Enki and the contracts of the science crews were activated, food prices had increased accordingly. Techs and household servants suddenly found themselves unable to afford anything other than dole yeast. Resentment bubbled over into skirmishes and knife-fights, and a small riot the White Mice, the undercroft's police, subdued with gas. Margaret had to take time off to bail out several of her crew, had given them an angry lecture about threatening everyone's bonuses.
"We got to defend our honour," one of the men said.
"Don't be a fool," Margaret told him. "The citizens play workers against science crews to keep both sides in their places, and still turn a good profit from increases in food prices. Just be glad you can afford the good stuff now, and keep out of trouble."
"They were calling you names, boss," the man said. "On account you're —"
Margaret stared him down. She was standing on a chair, but even so she was a good head shorter than the gangling outers. She said, "I'll fight my own fights. I always have. Just think of your bonuses and keep quiet. It will be worth it. I promise you."
And it was worth it, because of the discovery of the reef.
At some time in the deep past, Enki had suffered an impact that had remelted it and split it into two big pieces and thousands of fragments. One lone fragment still orbited Enki, a tiny moonlet where the AI that had controlled the experiment had been installed; the others had been drawn together again by their feeble gravity fields, but had cooled before coalescence had been completed, leaving a vast deep chasm, Tigris Rift, at the lumpy equator.
Margaret's crew had discovered that the vacuum organisms had proliferated wildly in the deepest part of the Rift, deriving energy by oxidation of elemental sulphur and ferrous iron, converting carbonaceous material into useful organic chemicals, mining and concentrating metals and nitrogenous compounds. There were crusts and sheets, things like thin scarves folded into fragile vases and chimneys, organ pipe clusters, whips, delicate fretted laces. Some fed on others, one crust slowly overgrowing and devouring another. Others appeared to be parasites, sending complex veins ramifying through the thalli of their victims. Nitrogen-mining organisms formed symbiotic relationships with sulphur oxidisers, trading ammonium and nitrates water for energy, developing warty outgrowths like stromatolites. Some were more than a hundred metres across, surely the largest prokaryotic colonies in the known Solar System.
All this variety –
and after only eighty years of accelerated evolution. Wild beauty won from the cold and the dark. The potential to feed billions. The science crews would get their bonuses, all right; the citizens would become billionaires.
Margaret spent all her spare time investigating the reef by proxy, pushed her crew hard to overcome the problems of penetrating the depths of the Rift. Although she would not admit it even to herself, she had fallen in love with the reef. She would gladly have explored it in person, but as in most habitats the Ganapati's citizens did not like their workers going where they themselves would not.
Clearly, the experiment had far exceeded its parameters, but no one knew why. The AI that had overseen the experiment had shut down thirty years ago. There was still heat in its crude proton beam fission pile, but it had been overgrown by the very organisms it had manipulated.
Its task had been simple. Colonies of a dozen species of slow growing chemoautotrophs had been introduced into a part of the Rift rich with sulphur and ferrous iron. Thousands of random mutations had been induced. Most colonies had died, and those few which had thrived had been sampled, mutated, and reintroduced in a cycle repeated every hundred days.
But the AI had selected only for fast growth, not for adaptive radiation, and the science crews held heated seminars about the possible cause of the unexpected richness of the reef's biota. Very few believed that it was simply a result of accelerated evolution. Many terrestrial bacteria divided every twenty minutes in favourable conditions, and certain species were known to have evolved from being resistant to an antibiotic to becoming obligately dependent upon it as a food source in less than five days, or only three hundred and sixty generations, but that was merely a biochemical adaptation. The fastest division rate of the vacuum organisms in the Rift was less than once a day, and while that still meant more than thirty thousand generations had passed since the reef had been seeded, half a million years in human terms, the evolutionary radiation in the reef was the equivalent of Neanderthal Man evolving to fill every mammalian niche from bats to whales.