by Bova, Ben
28 DECEMBER 2095: NIGHTFALL
Pancho and Wanamaker strolled slowly through the shadows along the winding path down by the lake. The habitat’s broad circle of solar windows was slowly closing for the night. The effect was like a long twilight shading off into the darkness of night. Up the gentle rise, Pancho could see the low white-walled buildings of Athens.
“Smell the flowers,” Wanamaker said, taking in a deep breath. “The air’s like perfume.” Even speaking softly, his voice had a rough, almost abrasive edge to it.
“You’re getting to be a real romantic, Jake,” she said, smiling at him.
“Always have been,” he replied. “Only, there weren’t many flowers to smell in a submarine or a spacecraft.”
Pancho nodded. “I guess.”
“Not even in Selene,” he added.
“’Cept for Martin Humphries’s mansion, down on the bottom level. But that’s gone now.”
Wanamaker nodded. Then, pointing overhead, he said, “Look at the lights up there. They look like constellations.”
They both knew the lights were from other villages and roadways. Yet in the darkness of the encroaching night Pancho had to admit they did seem to form shapes. She made out something that looked sort of like a lopsided spider. And maybe a tulip.
He slid his strong arm around her waist and she leaned against him. But then the rational side of her mind spoke up.
“The human brain wants to make patterns,” Pancho said. “Part of our makeup. I remember back when I was chairman of the board at Astro, I’d sit in meetings and see patterns in the grain of the board room’s paneling.”
“Must’ve been really interesting meetings,” Wanamaker said, chuckling softly.
“Meetings of the b-o-r-e-d,” she spelled. “Some were worse’n others.”
“You know what I wonder about,” he said, still holding her as they walked unhurriedly along the path.
“What?”
“We’re ten times farther from the Sun than the Earth is, yet when the solar windows are open the daylight in here is as bright as on Earth. The mirrors outside must be built to focus the sunlight, concentrate it.”
“You can ask Holly about that.”
“Or call up the habitat schematics when we get back to our place.”
So much for the romantic, Pancho thought.
“Whatcha you think of Holly’s boy toy?” she asked.
“Tavalera? He seems like a nice enough kid. Not much of a conversationalist, though.”
“He’s working with Kris in the nanotech lab. I’ll have to ask her about him.”
“Being the protective big sister?”
Pancho felt her face warp into a frown. “I know Holly’s all grown up and livin’ her own life, but still …”
“Still, you want to talk to Dr. Cardenas.”
“Won’t hurt.”
They walked along slowly in silence for a while, passing the lamps spaced evenly along the edge of the bricked path. Pancho stared at the lights overhead, content to let Wanamaker steer her with a gentle pressure on her waist. That’s land up there, she reminded herself. Not sky. This whole place is just a big hunk of machinery, made to look and feel and even smell like Earth. Except that we’re inside it, not on the surface.
“Pancho?” Wanamaker asked softly.
“Yeah?”
“What about your life? What are your plans?”
She knew he meant “our lives.” She knew he wanted to be with her; at least she hoped he did. She found herself wondering if she’d want to be with him on a permanent basis.
“Damfino, Jake. For the first time in my life I got no responsibilities and enough money to do whatever the hell I feel like doin’, pretty much. And for the first time in my life I really don’t know which way I want to go.”
He replied with a nod.
“One thing’s for sure, though,” Pancho heard herself say.
“What’s that?”
“Wherever I go, I want you right there with me.”
He wrapped his other arm around her and kissed her soundly on the lips, while she realized that she truly meant what she’d said. Jeeps, she thought as she kissed him back, I really love this guy.
They started climbing the easy slope of the path, the office buildings and garden apartments of Athens on either side of the bricked street. In the shadows Pancho heard Wanamaker chuckling softly.
“What’s funny?” she asked.
“Oh, I was just thinking about your staying here on a permanent basis.”
“And that’s funny?”
“Not funny, really. But I can see you taking over this habitat. By the time they hold their next elections you’ll be running for the top slot. You’ll be chief administrator in a few months.”
The idea left a sour taste in her mouth. “I’m not runnin’ for any office,” she said firmly. “I spent enough years behind a desk tellin’ people what to do.” Then she added mischievously, “The only person I want to boss around is a certain retired admiral.”
Wanamaker made a little bow. “Hearkening and obedience, O queen of my heart.”
Pancho grabbed him by both ears and kissed him again. Damn hard not to love this lug, she thought.
Timoshenko sat alone in his apartment and pondered the events of his day. Aaronson had been more than willing to hand off the responsibilities for exterior maintenance, as Timoshenko had expected. The man isn’t a drone, he told himself, not exactly. But he’s quite content to get rid of the responsibility and let it fall on my shoulders. After all, if there’s any real, physical danger to this orbiting sewer pipe it will come from outside.
He sat at the desk in his living room and called up the schematics for the superconducting radiation shield. The hair-thin wires of the superconductors carried enough electrical energy to light up St. Petersburg and Moscow combined. And maybe Minsk and Kiev, in the bargain, he told himself. A lot of energy. A lot of power.
The superconductors generated a magnetic field that enveloped the habitat’s outer shell. Just as Earth’s magnetosphere protects the planet from bombardment by energetic subatomic particles from the Sun and deep space, so did the habitat’s little magnetosphere protect the interior from the lethal levels of radiation outside. Timoshenko knew if that magnetic field failed, people inside the habitat would start dying right away. The habitat’s structure will shield us to some degree, he thought, but not enough to keep us all from frying.
As he called up numbers and traced failure-node scenarios, Timoshenko realized that if one of those slender superconducting wires was snapped by the impact of a meteor, the electrical energy it was carrying would suddenly be discharged into the habitat’s outer shell. It would be like a bomb! All that energy suddenly dumped into the metal could blow a hole right through the shell.
Of course that would be only the outer shell. There were all the habitat’s plumbing and hydraulics and electrical power systems in between the outer shell and the inner, where everyone lived. And the inner shell was landscaped with dirt and rocks formed into rolling hills and gentle swales. But, Timoshenko thought, if the outer shell is penetrated, if an explosion blasts it open, it’ll blow away some of the hydraulic systems with it. It could start a cascade of failures that will destroy the whole habitat within days, maybe hours.
The superconducting wires were armored, of course, and he saw bypass circuits in the schematics, but he wasn’t certain that they could switch the electrical current quickly enough to avoid an explosive failure.
Nodding to himself, he thought that this was his first order of business: Inspect those superconductors and their armor, then run tests to make certain that those bypass circuits could handle a sudden, catastrophic surge of energy. Otherwise, he thought, we’re all in deep shit.
He rubbed his eyes wearily and decided to start the inspection routine first thing in the morning. The habitat was equipped with camera-bearing robotic maintenance vehicles that trundled along the outer shell all the time. No need for me to
go outside, he told himself. Unless the robots find a trouble spot.
As he began to prepare himself for bed, Timoshenko thought about sending another message to Katrina. Tell her the good news about my promotion. Let her know I’m doing all right.
He picked up his toothbrush and looked at himself in the mirror over the bathroom sink.
“Don’t you dare call her, you idiot,” he growled to his stubble-jawed image. “Leave her alone. Don’t give her the idea that she might come out here and join you. One of you sent into exile is enough.”
Besides, he thought, as he started brushing his teeth, if you have to do much work outside there’s a damned good chance that you’ll get yourself killed. In fact, that might be the best thing that could happen to you. And to Katrina.
29 DECEMBER 2095: TITAN ALPHA
If a machine could feel pain, Titan Alpha would be in agony. A maelstrom of commands was bombarding its communications program, commands that it could not execute because they all conflicted with the primary restriction. Worse than that, Alpha’s sensors were accumulating data that according to the normal protocols, should be routed to the uplink antenna. But that too was prohibited by the primary restriction.
So Alpha inched along, its massive treads sinking through the thin ground cover of methane slush and grinding the ice beneath, leaving a double trail of cleat marks that were as alien to this smog-shrouded world as an invasion of Martian war machines would be on Earth.
For hundreds of billions of nanoseconds Alpha’s master program searched its logic tree for a way out of this dilemma. Impossible to comply with commands. Impossible to uplink sensor data. The master program ran through all its protocols, all its inhibitory directives, all its subroutines and sub-subroutines. At last it came to a decision.
Deactivate downlink antennas.
Deactivate tracking beacon.
Deactivate telemetry uplink.
Maintain sensor inputs.
Store sensor inputs.
Change course forty-five degrees.
Maintain forward speed.
The cacophony of commands flooding its downlink antennas disappeared. The antennas went silent. Unhindered now by the contradictions between the incoming commands and its primary restriction, Titan Alpha trundled slowly across the icy landscape, gathering data in peace.
The digital clock next to the bed read 09:24 but Urbain was still in bed, trying to get back to sleep after a long frustrating night of watching Habib struggle to find a fault in Alpha’s programming. The man found nothing. Of course, Urbain thought. How could he? There is nothing wrong with the programming; no errors, no mistakes. Whatever is wrong with Alpha is a physical defect, perhaps a design flaw.
Jeanmarie was tiptoeing in the kitchen, trying to make as little noise as possible while preparing breakfast. Urbain kept his eyes closed, but he could hear an occasional clang of a skillet or the ping of the microwave even through the bedroom door that Jeanmarie had shut so quietly.
He ignored the phone when it buzzed, heard Jeanmarie’s voice answering it although he could not make out her words.
Then the bedroom door slid open and Urbain knew he was not to get any more sleep.
“It’s the control center,” she said, her voice low. “They say it’s urgent.”
Urbain sat up in bed, made a sigh to show that he was being put upon, and told the phone to make the connection. “Voice only,” he added sternly.
“Dr. Urbain?” Sure enough, it was the voice of one of the young women on his engineering staff.
“I am indisposed,” he said. “What is so important that you interrupt my rest?”
“It …” The woman’s voice quavered slightly. “It’s turned off its tracking beacon.”
“Turned off … ?”
“And the telemetry. It’s gone invisible, sir. We can’t track it. We don’t know where it is or where it’s heading.”
Strangely, Urbain felt neither anger nor fear. Instead, a form of admiration welled up inside him. Alpha is striking out on her own, he told himself. My creation is behaving in ways we never suspected she could perform.
But his admiration was short-lived. Alpha must be found, he thought. I can’t have her wandering blindly about the surface of Titan. It’s too dangerous. She might destroy herself.
He saw Jeanmarie standing at the bedroom doorway, watching him, both hands on her lips, eyes wide, waiting for him to explode.
Instead, he said with icy calm to the blank phone screen, “I will be down to the center in ten minutes. Please have the entire staff present. We must find our wandering creature. And quickly.”
Nadia Wunderly knew it was pointless to try to get Urbain’s attention, let alone his help.
“He’s all wrapped up on that landing vehicle of his,” she said morosely to Kris Cardenas.
Wunderly had come to the nanotech lab to get Cardenas’s help again. She followed a few paces behind as Cardenas went about her work, moving from the bulky gray metal tubing of the magnetic resonance force microscope to the boxlike assembly apparatus sitting atop one of the lab’s benches. Off in the far corner of the lab Raoul Tavalera sat at a console, intently staring at its display screen, pointedly ignoring the two women to show them he wasn’t listening to their conversation.
Despite her intense need for Cardenas’s assistance, or maybe because of it, Wunderly found herself mentally comparing herself to the other woman. Kris is so beautiful, Wunderly thought. Even in a lab smock she looks young and vital. No wonder Manny tossed me aside and went for her. Wunderly didn’t need a mirror to convince herself that she was a short, dumpy woman with a bad hair job, dressed in a dark brown blouse and slacks to hide her thickset figure. But I’m getting better, she told herself. I’m slimming down and I’ve got a date for New Year’s Eve and I’m down another five hundred grams this morning. She could almost feel the nanomachines inside her body chewing away the fat, slimming and strengthening her figure.
None of that matters, she told herself, even though she knew that it did. It mattered a lot. To her.
As Cardenas adjusted knobs on the assembly box’s control plate, she said, “Urbain doesn’t care about the rings, Nadia. You know that. Especially not now. Not with his machine gone silent on him.”
“It’s worse than that,” Wunderly said to her back.
Cardenas glanced over her shoulder. “Oh?”
“The probe has taken off. On its own. It started moving late yesterday and this morning they lost its tracking beacon.”
That made Cardenas turn around to face her. “You mean they don’t know where it is?”
Nodding, Wunderly replied, “It’s gone off on its own and they can’t find it.”
“Urbain must be going nuts.”
Unable to suppress a vengeful grin, Wunderly said, “They’re all going crazy.”
Cardenas went to the three-legged stool by the counter and perched on it. “He asked me if I could work up a set of nanos to build a new receiving antenna for the machine.”
“He’ll have to find it before anybody can fix it,” Wunderly said, still grinning.
“Ouch,” Cardenas said. Then, “So what can I do for you, Nadia?”
Wunderly detected the slight emphasis on you. She liked Kris, even though Manny Gaeta had left her to take up with Cardenas. Maybe it’s true love between them, after all, she thought. I should be so lucky.
“I need to get Manny to go into the rings again,” she said, trying to keep her voice even, trying not to let Kris see how much this meant to her.
Cardenas’s cornflower blue eyes snapped. “The first time damn near killed him.”
“I know, but we’re prepared better now. We understand about the ring creatures. We can protect Manny against them.”
“Nadia, if you understood the ring creatures that well you wouldn’t need Manny to go back, would you?”
“I need samples,” Wunderly answered sharply. “I need to get some of those bugs into a lab where we can study them. Most of the big d
ecision makers in the ICU don’t even believe they exist! They don’t believe there are living creatures in Saturn’s rings.”
“Couldn’t you send in a robot probe for the sampling mission?” Cardenas asked.
Feeling impatience simmering inside her, Wunderly replied, “And how do I get a robot probe built? How can I even get one of the standard probes modified for sampling when Urbain won’t even talk to me?”
“I see.”
“Manny could do it,” Wunderly urged. “He’s got his suit. I can get Timoshenko or one of the other engineers to ferry him out to the rings on one of the transfer rockets.”
“Manny had a team of technicians to run the suit. He wasn’t a one-man show.”
“And they’ve left the habitat, I know,” Wunderly admitted. “Gone back to Earth.”
Cardenas spread her hands in a gesture of helplessness. “So there we are, Nadia. Manny can’t help you, I’m afraid.”
Wunderly bit back the reply she wanted to make: Of course you won’t let him help me. You’re too afraid he might get hurt. Or killed.
Instead she merely said, “I understand,” her voice low, her head drooping.
“I’m sorry, Nadia. I wish there were something I could do.”
“I understand,” Wunderly repeated. She turned and walked swiftly to the door, leaving the lab before her anger burst out and she said things she’d regret later.
As Wunderly closed the door behind her, Cardenas was surprised to find herself thinking, Does she want to get Manny killed? Is she angry with him for leaving her? Maybe unconsciously, Cardenas decided. She couldn’t believe Wunderly would deliberately want to hurt Manny or anyone else.
Tavalera sauntered over to her, his long horsy face looking glum as usual. “You know, I could work with Manny on that suit of his. I could be his technician.”
“No you couldn’t!” Cardenas snapped. “Manny’s not getting into that Frankenstein outfit of his ever again!”
Tavalera looked shocked at the vehemence of her reply. Cardenas felt shocked herself.