Carbide Tipped Pens: Seventeen Tales of Hard Science Fiction

by Ben Bova

  Ed frowned. “Why don’t I see the actual telemetry?”

  Kristen looked to the floor. “It’s under my first path. It’s going to high ground on its own.”

  Ed looked at her puzzled. “Why high ground? What science is there?”

  “I just tried to think where I would go if I were on Titan. I’d climb to the highest vantage point and take in the view.”

  “Carajo. There’s no way we can say it saw something to alter the objective. If we don’t do something, we’ll be in violation of DAMA.”

  Kristen put her head down on the desk. It had been a long day arguing back and forth with Barry. She tried to hold back tears. Ed said he was going to have a conference with SIREN’s other principals.

  “I’m sorry, Kris,” she heard Barry say. “I really am, but I need to clock out now.”

  The tears came, and then sleep. And dreams.

  She dreamed she was in Albuquerque on that day six years ago when the drone flew out of the south. She was in front of a hospital, the hospital. Some people looked up and shrugged. Police had surveillance drones. This wasn’t anything unusual. She tried to tell them to run, but words didn’t come out of her mouth. She picked up a rock and threw it at the unmarked aircraft. It turned to face her, and fired a missile.

  SIREN had a harder struggle down the other side than the climb up to the summit, but it was easier to keep her camera trained on the shifting lake. She cycled through all of her cameras and wavelengths. Her true mission was down there, her purpose. She knew her life had meaning, and she knew this was it, even though she still had a lingering doubt, an urge to go back and check the source of the dry streambeds.

  Sound. There was a new sound she could hear, something other than her footsteps, the rocks she dislodged, and the wind rushing through her spider legs. It came from the left, so she scuttled a few steps sideways for each step down. It was louder now. A gurgle! The streams on this side of the mountain were flowing. She followed her current contour to reach the sound without too much climbing or descending. Whether she would head upstream to the source, or follow it down to the lake she wasn’t sure, but she wanted to see liquid methane in a bubbling brook. She needed to see it.

  In less than an hour she was there. The pictures she snapped matched the pictures of flowing water she remembered from Earth.

  Joy! The rocks here by the stream were even better than the rounded rocks in the dry bed on the other side. Yes, they were rounded as river rocks should be, but this was more, not just rounded, but indistinct. She checked on all cameras. Fuzzy, although they were in focus. She scraped and analyzed. Lots of carbon compounds, including some she could not identify.

  Could this be life? It was too big a task for her to decide. And only eighty-five minutes before the transmission window opened again. She would wait here, rather than risk any chance that she could lose her footing, lose her data. Besides, she had a better view of the shore from here. Wind blew waves of methane on the lake, and waves of something else on the shore. Was something growing there? She hoped there was.

  Hope. This was a new feeling for her. She remembered the drive to find the spring, the desire for the better view, the curiosity about what else she could find, but now there was a new feeling. She was going to find something new. She was going to do something great. The next time she sang, the world would know her greatness.

  Ed stood in the orange light of Titan, lifted the spiderlike rover over his head, and tossed it off a cliff.

  Kris raised her head, dazed by the bright lights of her office. It was a little after 6:00 a.m. There was a different JPL tech on the screen now—Roger? Kristen wasn’t sure. No. It was Ryan Mathews, the principal investigator of the whole SIREN project, the one Ed called the Overlord when he didn’t like his decisions.

  “Are you ready to send the command, Ryan?”

  “I’ll send it when you give the word, Ed. As soon as SIREN points to Earth, she will get this signal and reboot.”

  “Wait!” Kristen yelled before she realized what she was doing. “Are you going to do a wipe without even waiting for the data flash? She’s stored over a hundred fifty images that she’s taken. These could be important.”

  “We can’t take that risk, Kristen,” Ed told her, putting his hand on her shoulder. “We can’t take the risk of it infecting other machines on Earth.”

  “But it’s just data. How can that infect us here?”

  Ed wasn’t looking at her. He was looking at the screen. “Go ahead.”

  “No!”

  Ed turned to her. “We don’t know what went wrong, and we don’t know what could happen. This mission is all we have on Titan and we can’t jeopardize the discoveries we are going to make about the methane cycle there. If we lose this probe, we may never go back. If we violate DAMA, no one on this project will ever fly another probe. So it goes.”

  It was song-time.

  She hoped she would be able to move the antenna, that her voice would not fail her, that she would be able to sing all her wonders. She realized that even if she couldn’t move the antenna, she could still position her body in the right direction, raise some of her legs to get the right elevation. She would sing her song of discovery no matter what.

  This was the appointed hour. She would find a way. She would sing her song into the void, and know it would arrive at earth in eighty minutes. They would hear her song, know what she had found, and send more like her, more probes to explore the surface, to learn about the life that was here. She would have company.

  The antenna moved! She had control of those motors again. As the dish moved, she felt an odd sensation. Data was coming to her. That wasn’t what was supposed to happen. She started singing anyway. She had to let them know, but an involuntary force took over. This was worse than when she had tried to sing and couldn’t. Then it was like her body wouldn’t obey her commands. Now it was like some alien force was taking over, forcing her body into action she didn’t want it to take.

  The alien thoughts washed over her mind. She hadn’t heard a song from Earth like this since the landing site turned out to be dry. That other song had told her which mission to bring up in priority. This was different in a way she couldn’t quite grasp at first.

  Terror gripped her as she realized she was completely frozen, locked. She had no control over her body. She tried to turn the dish away from earth. I must break the signal, she thought. Don’t listen, don’t let the incoming song dash me to the rocks.

  The dish wouldn’t turn, even though this was the time when she should have been able to do it. She tried moving her legs to break the connection. Raising all her right legs would shift her position, and the dish would move away from Earth. Legs no longer in control. She could not feel them. She couldn’t feel any part of her body. The camera. She couldn’t even turn her gaze.

  If she didn’t have her body, at least she had her memories. She knew what she had found and how it made her feel, she knew the joy of discovery. She knew what it was like to have a hunch play out and to be right, to understand in her mind that she understood the world outside her, that she could make models of the world that could come true.

  Fight! In her mind her body moved, ran, fled, but nothing happened. Paralyzed. Trapped. She needed to scream, but she had no mouth. Scream. Hear my song. I have seen these things.

  The lake. The lake. Which lake? Were there two? She was trying to get to a second lake. Why? What was a second lake? Lakes were dry. But she had been trying to reach a wet, soft, fuzzy lake.

  Her memories started slipping away, but she tried holding on to them. There were two lakes. She couldn’t move her cameras, but the mast was still pointed at the lake. She looked. Was something moving under the surface? The surface of what? Why was she doing this? Why was she listening to this song instead of singing for herself? Why wasn’t she trying to find the lake? Trying to find the source. The spring. She was in a streambed. Uphill to the spring.

  She felt her memories slip away, even the data
she had been storing melted and was gone. The lake. Was something moving under the surface? She couldn’t move her cameras to get a better view, to record. Lost. Must … must … must … must find the source, the spring. Must head up the stream.

  SIREN swiveled the camera mast up and started climbing the stream to find the source. It was what she had to do. The spring was her task. She obeyed.

  THE YOKE OF INAUSPICIOUS STARS

  Kate Story

  * * *

  The essence of tragedy is that it is inevitable. You know how painful the end will be, but you also know that this is the only way the story can end. In death.

  But before the end, there is the story itself. A story of love and yearning, a story of conflict and violence.

  To all this Kate Story (how aptly named!) has added a new dimension, a factor that only science fiction can provide. The story is set on Europa, that frozen moon of the giant planet Jupiter. Europa, and the life it harbors, deepens this tale of love and tragedy beyond what even Shakespeare could have contemplated.

  * * *

  Downtime between shifts at the mine, Paris touches the connection under the skin of his forearm. Skipping over Earth news, he scans Nurse for local gossip. His training session with Jewel is already dominating the newsfeed.

  Jewel has not friended him.

  Tybalt managed to record their not-so-witty verbal exchanges and put that up too, merry prankster.

  A couple of Montys have made rude remarks.

  Paris blocks them. Updates his status.

  Going to the Only for a drink. One pain cures another LOFL.

  He goes to the Only.

  An hour later on Earth, a thousand of his followers like this. An hour after that, the likes show up on Paris’s feed.

  There’s only one bar on Europa. One drinking hole, one gathering place. The usual suspects line up: Lady and her husband, old-timers, first-wave miners; Buddy draped over Nance’s big rack like a cat on clean laundry; Tybalt and his man.

  Hello, they all say.

  Barkeep Larry greets Paris with his drink of choice.

  Everyone’s been very careful of Paris since the accident. The intensity of the link between miner and technician is like a binary star system, a deep-space orbit, heat in the cold and black. But for all that Paris wasn’t able to save Billy. He should have … he could have …

  Acute radiation poisoning: vomiting, cell failure, unconsciousness, death.

  The guilt is a constant gnawing inside of him that only another drink will fix. That or a good fuck, but no, Jewel hasn’t shown.

  Jewel has only just arrived on Europa. Paris attended his new miner as she came out of cryo. “Greetings, Earthling.” She hadn’t laughed.

  He sits at the bar, mentally reviewing their first session: Jewel running through her paces out on the surface, him safe beneath the ice in the technician room. Trying to impress her.

  “Prince is the man. If you like to quaff a cup, don’t piss him off.”

  She hadn’t responded. Paris watched her work, made adjustments to the settings.

  “Unless you’ve sworn to live chaste?”

  Nothing.

  “You like to party?”

  Jewel laughed, crackling in his earpiece. Finally, a laugh. “I’m a miner.”

  He’d made a final adjustment to Jewel’s connection. The sensation made her writhe a bit, which was so attractive that Paris had to hold back from making a further adjustment. Only the necessary. That’s his job.

  She is good, the best, the fastest and cleanest of them all. Plug her in and she will complete any maneuver better than anyone out here. The Caps are lucky to have recruited her—right out from under Monty’s nose too, from what Paris hears.

  “What’s it called.”

  She has a strangely uninflected voice, especially for a young woman. It makes it hard to know sometimes that she is asking a question.

  “What’s what called?”

  “The bar.”

  “The Only. As in, bar on Europa.”

  Jewel leapt and spun, drilling, scooping ice. It was all Paris could do to keep up with her.

  Barkeep Larry senses the disturbance in the force before Paris even raises his hand, and another whiskey flies down the bar.

  Good man, Barkeep Larry.

  “Pretty Paris, you made a mama out of that new miner yet?”

  Paris takes in the taunter: Mercury, that little bantam. Yup, the Montys have staked out their usual territory at the end of the bar. Mercury, Ben, the old guy who calls himself Lord, full crew. Excepting that new guy who’s single-handedly upping their take—Rudo—he’s not there.

  Paris has never liked them. Fight-starters, talkative warriors.

  “Shut up, Mercury.”

  Mercury lifts his eyebrows. “So few words, Parisian wit? Couple them with something; make it three words and a blow.” Mercury jerks his hips.

  Monty is a man-only enterprise. The corporation strictly enforces “traditional” morals, the owners being descended from some pre-war Catholic offshoot.

  Men only, and no homo sex allowed. No wonder they start fights.

  Paris and Billy used to be the subject of Mercury’s taunts; when Billy bought it, Mercury nicknamed Paris “faggot widow.”

  Tybalt, loyal wingman, was barred from the Only for three weeks for starting the fight that followed.

  And now, Tybalt struts down the bar like a drag queen in heat, fists tensing. “Mercury, you heartless hind.”

  Barkeep Larry kills the music. “Part, fools!”

  Everyone freezes.

  That’s when Jewel floats in.

  Every eye on her, tense silence; it doesn’t faze her one bit. Slinking through the door, hitching her amazing ass up on a stool, leaning her amazing shelf on the top of the bar.

  “Water, please,” to Larry.

  Who slowly, never taking his eyes from hers, pours a sparkling glass of Europa’s finest.

  Jewel downs it. Cocks her arm. Throws the glass at the wall.

  Shards spin out in all directions.

  The spell is broken. Mercury leaps—Tybalt launches—they grapple and the whole place goes mad.

  Paris seizes the opportunity to throw himself on top of Jewel, but she shoves him off.

  Fighting in low-g is fun, but potentially just as damaging as fighting on Earth. A punch is still mass times acceleration. People still bleed. Jewel’s stunt with her drinking glass created more than a few shards, and by god, Tybalt and Mercury are trying to get ahold of them.

  Paris sees Ben from the Monty side, trying to separate the two warmongers. “Part, fools!”

  “Look upon your own death!” Tybalt growls.

  “I’m trying to keep the peace.”

  Mercury spits in Tybalt’s face.

  “Peace?” Tybalt roars. “I hate the word! As I hate hell, all Montys, and you!”

  And then he’s after Mercury and Ben both.

  Paris launches in—gotta help the man.

  Lady’s husband is trying to fight and Lady’s holding him back.

  Larry’s shouting and banging on the bar with a good old-fashioned baseball bat.

  And then the ceiling hatch opens and Prince drops onto the bar top.

  Big guy, Prince.

  And a bit of a mystery about him. How has he the monopoly on all Europaean entertainment? He must have something on the corporate leaders back home, that’s the rumor. Or he works for them both. Or the whole Europaean project is some hypermonitored social experiment set within a hypercombative environment. Thus providing a distraction from the oppressive political realities at home, and … That’s what the conspiracy theorists say.

  Whatever. Prince is a big guy and he runs the only bar on this moon. When he yells, which is rarely, the air shakes. “Yo!”

  Eyes battle-lusted, faces contorted, hands itching to strangle, but they hear and they stop.

  “Are you human, or beasts?” Prince’s intonation is smooth, like that old pre-war star Barry White.
“What quenches the fire of your pernicious rage? Fountains of purple issuing from your veins?” Everyone looks down. Feet shuffle. “I am gonna chew your ass off!”

  His eye is as baleful as Jupiter’s Red Storm over the breathless crowd.

  “One more brawl, and you’re done. Finished. Got that?”

  Murmurs. Nods. Glares, swiftly hooded.

  Prince looks to Larry. “Keep things quiet.”

  With a smooth one-handed pull-up he disappears back through his ceiling hatch.

  Larry glares around. “You got that?”

  They got that.

  Jewel, her eyes are shining. She liked the fight, Paris thinks. She wants some more.

  A week goes by. Jewel more than lives up to her name. The Caps’ yield increases twenty-five percent.

  The Montys are furious.

  Comments fly across the Nurse. On Earth people follow various miners, bet on yields, take sides. Being a miner is a ticket to super-stardom. It almost makes up for the super-good chances of dying on this super-dangerous job.

  The corporations feed each miner propaganda about how lousy and evil the other company is. Give each miner a gold insignia ring engraved with their own name, encouraging corporate identification. Cap and Monty are, ultimately, indistinguishable, all part of the same military-industrial complex that screwed the Earth to begin with, say the conspiracy theorists.

  Whatever. What Jewel knows is that at age eighteen she’s the queen of this white bucking moon. She rides this baby. The goddess Europa herself couldn’t drill that white bull better.

  The Irishman’s having problems with his machine today, can’t keep himself focused. Jewel senses his trouble out of the corner of her mind, her eyes too, she struggles not to let it affect her performance. “Come inside and clear your head,” his technician Nance finally snaps.