Carbide Tipped Pens: Seventeen Tales of Hard Science Fiction

by Ben Bova

  “Yeah, Buddy. Commend me to your lady.” Paris’s voice crackles in Jewel’s ear. She feels his frustrated desire for her own body, his jealousy of Buddy and Nance. This happens between technicians and miners, she’s been told. Which means he can sense her antipathy.

  “I make my exit.” Buddy limps off toward the base, little soaring hops in the low-g. The other miners hoot and whistle.

  Jewel takes a deep breath, refocuses. Jupiter fills most of the sky, the great orange-and-white swirl of it, blue curling under and over like patterns the Celts used to carve in their metals. Gleaming, ever-changing; she could look at this forever.

  Jewel finds that emptiness, the clarity you need. Breathe in, out, in, a slow countdown to a bright hard point of light. Her muscles relax, the plug-in at the base of her neck heats up. Nothing will shake her now, not even cowboy whoops from that madman Tybalt, driving his body so hard his plug-ins scream.

  Europa, she swings around Jupiter clad in her flimsy gauze of an atmosphere. She’s a botoxed and sculpted old girl. Rings and lines appear, fill and sink, a constant erasure of the palimpsest of solar-system history. This moon’s got flex. They’re mining for water. “Mining” means pounding ice: vast, swirling, salty, gritty ice-cream scoops of it. They extract, desalinate, and send back to parched and poisoned Earth vast quantities of cool, sparkling H2O. Every miner is outfitted with “wetsocket” plugins. Not just anyone can do this. You have to be fit, strong, but also possess an obsessive ability to single-mindedly focus on what is ultimately a boring and repetitive task.

  Jewel moves with precision, finding the cleanest seams. It’s as if the water in her body recognizes the precious liquid here and draws it out. Magic.

  Over on the other side of the seam they’re excavating, a Monty team works.

  Jewel senses him. She knows it’s him by the elegance. Not a single unnecessary move. Almost, he dances.

  He’s almost as good as she is.

  It might have been an Earth follower who first put it into words: Rudo and Jewel would be hot together.

  Yes. Yes they would.

  Fan fiction starts cropping up, featuring erotic scenarios between the two miners.

  “What man is that.”

  Paris doesn’t want to tell her. He’s jealous, this one. She needs to watch that, Jewel thinks; he’s getting attached.

  But what is that one’s story? He teaches the stars to burn bright!

  Alone in her room, Jewel touches the soft skin of her forearm to call up a screen.

  There’s something comforting about the Nurse. White background, gentle blue lettering, rounded font. She organizes your comments, pics, videos, and avatar, so that everyone is sort of the same. It’s fun to fuck with her, try for uniqueness. But Jewel is aware of the familiarity. You know your way around the Nurse, so you have a degree of competency, which everyone craves. She connects us all. She is comforting.

  Jewel’s already creeped Rudo, of course.

  She sucks on her finger and flips through. He’s new on Europa, almost as new as she is. Some experience on Luna, but before her time there. That tall, dark, and handsome. She’d remember him.

  Some girl named Rosaline features largely. She’s beautiful, tall, blond, et cetera. Fuck. But when Jewel looks at his friend roster, no Ros. And his status is single.

  Breakup.

  Bad one.

  Bad enough to send him screaming into space, to the most remote mining outpost Earth has, a place where you lose two years of your life in cryo—travel time, yes, a year each way—and the chances of dying on the job are almost thirty percent.

  Jewel clicks on a follower’s link to some fan fiction. Jewel has always garnered more than her fair share of this stuff, given her looks—mostly written by females, interestingly.

  Wow. This follower certainly has imagination. The scenario, involving Jewel, Rudo, and group sex with some hither-to undiscovered intelligent and sensuous life-forms here on Europa, is strangely compelling.

  “In truth, fair Monty, I am too fond.”

  She likes his status (one of those fake-modest posts about his big take today) and updates her own. Hey Rudo. Check out the competition. Her take today exceeded his.

  Too macho?

  She adds a cute animated emoticon.

  She dozes, surfacing now and again to watch as the hits on her status go up and up and up.

  The bar. Of course. There’s nowhere else.

  Jewel shakes off Paris, that bug. Larry gets her a whiskey (“Any more glass-smashing stunts and you’re outta here; I don’t care how pretty you are or how much ice you pump, princess,”) and she waits.

  And waits.

  Is he going to show?

  That status … maybe it was too much.

  She opens a small screen and re-reads her post.

  That emoticon. It’s too girlie, too cute. Maybe he doesn’t like girlie. She closes the screen with her fist.

  Or … is it the goddamn Cap/Monty thing? The Montys are a unified testosterone field; their militia-like training exercises leave bruises. They’re totally unlike the polyamorous polymorphously perverse culture of the Caps. Spartans to the Caps’ Athenians.

  Jewel’s not used to failing when it comes to men.

  She finishes her drink. One more, just one and then she’ll go back to her room.

  He walks in.

  So beautiful. The ice-walls lights gleam on his dark skin, making it almost blue.

  Their eyes lock. He glances down the bar to the Monty end, then back at her. Gives her the tiniest nod.

  Her heart beats faster.

  He walks past. Too close—he almost touches her.

  She knows. He knows.

  Another drink. More glances. The whole bar must sense this budding love.

  There’s no rule. No one can actually stop a Monty from hanging with a Cap. But … despite Prince’s decree of peace … it’s just not done.

  They must be discreet.

  He comes down a bit, she edges up.

  He leans in next to her, orders a beer from Larry.

  Their arms touch.

  Above the bar, in his beautifully carved ice-cavern, Prince surveys his domain.

  He has access, as does anyone on Europa (or Earth for that matter, if they pay to view) to all the camera feeds on the base.

  He also has access to some cameras that no one else knows about.

  Oh, and by the way, he’s got a degree in exobiology.

  And has worked as a glaciologist.

  And is a doctor of music.

  Just saying.

  He lies back on a synthetic-fur covering, ice walls flickering with every color of the rainbow, light playing over his face. He’s not looking at any of the screens that flicker in the air, however. No, Prince is wearing headphones.

  He’s listening.

  There are many difficulties associated with having an affair in a panopticon society, even when it’s a self-imposed panopticon. We made it that way; we like it that way. But you still believe you have secrets. That primitive, private sense of self—a belief that there is a self separate from the avatar-self, your online persona as conveyed by the Nurse—persists.

  The online back-and-forth between Rudo and Jewel continues. They like each other’s statuses, they like pictures. Followers notice, interest grows.

  It is possible that Jewel lets all this go a teeny weeny bit to her head.

  Rudo takes a particular interest in her family, she notes. Her Korean birth parents died from radiation cancers, and white Americans adopted her. Him, he’s Shona and knows it, knows his lineage. It’s so different from how she grew up: in a freckled Anglo-Saxon enclave, with people who purport not to be a tribe, and to be from nowhere, yet at every moment making everyone who is not them feel like strangers.

  His parents died years after the conflict too, also of radiation poisoning. The usual story. She and Rudo are both orphans. Most miners are.

  His interest in her family touches her. There’s somethin
g … old-fashioned about it. Courtly. Stuff like that used to matter, she imagines. Who are you one of? It’s not a question very many people can ask anymore.

  And why would you, when most people die of radiation-related cancers before they reach forty?

  Close Encounter #2 at the Only, face-to-face, real-time, there’s a moment when eyes meet.

  Another brief touch of skin on skin, as if casual. As if it’s a mistake.

  “Today, on the surface.” His eyes are lustrous. “I think I have figured out why the Sun is so small and dim here.”

  The heat builds inside them both.

  “Why.”

  He smiles—O, his smile slays the envious moon!—and shakes his head. “Looking at you, now, I have forgotten.”

  She catches her breath. “Let me stand here until you remember.”

  “I will forget, to have you still stand there, remembering how I love your company.”

  Her heart beats faster. “Rudo. A good name for you. It means love.”

  A pause.

  “How do you know that?”

  A smile curves her lips.

  “I looked it up.”

  Waiting for him to reply seems like infinity. But at last he speaks.

  “The Sun here is so pale, so distant, because she is sick and pale with grief. She cannot compete with your light. Jewel. Your brightness shames the Sun.”

  She stares. No one’s ever said that kind of thing to her before. It’s like poetry. But the bar grows restless, he must walk, they cannot be seen talking.

  To stand by his side feels like home.

  Sometimes, the difference between ecstasy and terror is difficult to discern.

  Some strange things are going on.

  It only happens when Paris is working, connected to Jewel.

  At first he thought it was just that thing: you get a song in your head, an ear-worm. But then he realizes there’s noise. Crackling, like the transmission is struggling. And deep groans, tearing sounds as if glacier-sized chunks of ice are breaking off and drifting, a hundred kilometers down into the deep. And a noise like drilling, amplified, stretched. Also, music. There’s sway and flex, almost imperceptible changes in pitch and tempo, like someone is learning the song, trying to get it right.

  And the songs play all the way through. Then repeat. That’s not how your head does it.

  It’s almost as if it’s coming from outside, and the links are picking it up.

  Sometimes too, Paris hears snatches of conversation. Mostly convos from the bar the night before, repeated over and over, fragments, a private tête-à-tête he didn’t overhear at the time.

  Creepy.

  Paris asks other technicians if they’re picking up extraneous sonic phenomena.

  Nance has, and two or three of the others. Like Paris, they assume it is a glitch in the system, or in their own heads.

  None of their miners have noticed anything.

  He wonders if the Montys have.

  He writes up a report. Reads it. Re-reads it. Deletes it. It makes him sound crazy.

  Which he is beginning to feel he might be. That Jewel, she doesn’t give him a flick of an eyelash. Ten hours linked to someone, breathing with them, feeling every surge and twitch, responsible for their life and death, and you are dead to them. It’s soul-destroying.

  He misses Billy. He used to look forward to the end of each shift, wait for Bill to come in, help him strip off the gear, all sweaty, Paris never cared. Licked Billy’s neck, tasting salt. Ran his fingers around the whorls of Billy’s perfect ears. Lying together afterward, pillow-talk, drifting into sleep. The sex … they could almost read each other’s minds. The technological link was part of that, built that connection.

  It could be that way with Jewel too.

  The song in his head/ear right now is a sad one. Big hit two years ago, just before Paris left Earth for Europa. Sad, sad song.

  Prince is listening.

  He lies back and his hands gesture as if conducting.

  He listens to sounds from deep within the moon, sounds that deep sensors transmit to him. Sounds from the hundred-kilometer-deep ocean that lies just beneath this granite-hard icy crust.

  Someone or something or many someones are singing.

  Or rather, perhaps, the moon is singing.

  He posits: First, there was sound. And the sound was good.

  Then, possibly, something Prince calls “the Europaeans” (a shorthand; he doesn’t really believe there are individual alien beings on this moon, little green aquatic men) began to evolve. Bacteria, perhaps—the sea is warm enough—possibly subsisting on oxygen formed when hydrogen peroxide, found all over Europa’s surface, mixes with the liquid ocean beneath the ice.

  Until now, they would have lived in perfect isolation. There would be little sonic interference save the odd barrage of meteoroids from space, and flexing and eruptions caused by tidal heating (a consequence of Europa’s slightly eccentric orbit and orbital resonance with the other Galilean moons).

  Such a deep and salty ocean is able to hold and carry sound to an extraordinary degree. For, possibly, billions of years, complex sonic structures existed here unmolested, distributing themselves over an astonishing range of frequencies.

  Prince’s first concrete breakthrough stemmed from the moment he was able to detect repeats of Terran sounds. Echoes, sure. But more than that. The sounds were being amplified, repeated, altered.

  The sounds were being creatively investigated.

  It seems to Prince, and his shadowy backers, that Europaean sonic structures are reproducing, entropy-resisting, and self-organizing.

  Life is matter that can reproduce itself and evolve as survival dictates.

  Could sound be a form of life? No, of course not. Unless it is a form of life so alien that we can’t at first recognize it as life. Or, perhaps even plausibly, something along the lines of the Gaia hypothesis: Europa as a single organism maintaining and building itself as a totality.

  Prince listens, he waves his hands, he sinks deeper into the music. Almost … almost … he can almost understand what they are sing—no. What is being sung.

  Close Encounter #3 at the Only. They lean right in, arms and shoulders touching, Caps and Montys be damned. But not looking at each other’s faces. It feels more intimate, somehow, not to.

  Rudo asks Jewel what happened to her adoptive parents.

  She draws spirals on top of the bar. “They died. Two years ago.”

  “Radiation?”

  She nods. The cool green of Washington state; how she misses the turquoise rivers, mountains, the rolling sea, the smell of her mother’s clothes, the soft spot under the beard of her father where a little girl could nestle her head.

  She feels like crying. It must be Rudo. She doesn’t cry, doesn’t think about this.

  “That land is poisoned.”

  “Not the West Coast,” Jewel replies. “It’s supposed to be safe.” Poor bombed Beijing and DC, poor retaliation-bombed North Korea, almost fifty years ago now. She herself carries the seeds inside her, cancers, poisons of fallout. They all do.

  “It’s a good thing it happened,” comes Larry, and Jewel jumps; she’d been lost, forgotten she and Rudo were in the bar.

  “What the fuck,” she asks.

  “The bombing, the war. It’s lucky.”

  “Oh, don’t cheer us up, you insane person.”

  “Imagine,” Larry insists. “If it hadn’t happened, we would have just kept going the way we were.”

  “What’d be wrong with that.”

  Larry smiles. “Look at what we got. Global cooling, mass starvation, extinctions, poisoned water, horror, devastation, and,” he holds up his hand to forestall interruption, “we finally saw the Earth as a delicate thing. Passed global laws about corporate environmental responsibility, cradle-to-grave legislation. Made it too expensive to mine on Earth because corporations were, for the first time, fully responsible for reparations. Developed space-flight and wet-socket mining tech
nologies. Trained you, and you.” He stretches, pushes off from the bar. “And gave you, and you, and me, these wonderful jobs which will lead, after a paltry five years including travel time, to a lifetime of moneyed leisure.”

  “If we survive,” Rudo says without emotion.

  “Oh, I won’t. Not for long.” Larry’s still smiling. “I’m a cancer baby.”

  Jewel and Rudo are silent.

  Jewel clears her throat. “How long do you have.”

  “A year. Maybe.”

  “I am sorry,” Rudo rumbles.

  “Well. You have to die from something, right?”

  Larry begins a move up the bar, then returns. He winks.

  “I like you kids. Don’t ask me why. I just do.”

  And with that, Larry drifts up the bar to serve the massed Montys, who are growing restive.

  Rudo gazes after Larry. “There is something courageous about his self-absorbed nihilism.”

  Jewel longs to talk to Rudo, talk more, tell him … something, she doesn’t know what, anything. But he has to go. They’ve been talking, they’ve been seen, the boys are glaring down the bar.

  Every step he takes away from her makes her feel like her body is stretching and breaking from the inside out.

  Montys and Caps.

  Enemies forever.

  Jewel watches. She watches Rudo working, she creeps him on Nurse, she waits for him downtime, at the bar. Larry notices, Larry smiles, Larry asks.

  “You two done the deed yet?”

  She is shocked. But the place is near-empty, no one has heard.

  She shakes her head.

  “No! That surprises me.”

  “Under other circumstances…”

  “No doubt.”

  “But here.”

  Larry makes a noise of disgust with his lips. “Fucking fake corporate competition. It’s so transparent. Gives them something to swoon over back home, gives you guys something to distract you from the terrible attrition rate up here.”