Carbide Tipped Pens: Seventeen Tales of Hard Science Fiction

by Ben Bova

  She still looks suspicious.

  “Time for you to go under, princess.”

  She doesn’t trust him, he can tell. But she lies back, sighs.

  God, she’s beautiful.

  Larry’d had a stroke of genius just before being called away. He put not only Rudo’s connection in Tybalt’s pod, but also Jewel’s ring. The affair between Jewel and Rudo was quite the thing on Earth, and everyone will have analyzed every inch of footage. Jewel’s ring has been spotted by followers on Rudo’s finger. There’s even a top-ten song already called, yeah, Jewel’s Ring. Finding it in the cryo-mess, it’ll be natural to assume the mess is Rudo. The Luna technicians might pass over the DNA test for the ruined flesh altogether.

  Paris means to mention this finishing touch to Jewel. As he checks her vitals, he means to tell her about her ring. As he inserts the tubes in her veins that will drain her blood and replace it with cryofluid, he means to tell her. As he gradually brings her temperature down, he means to tell her. Just before he sedates her, he almost tells her.

  Well, it doesn’t matter really, right? I mean, a little thing like that.

  It skitters across the surface of Paris’s consciousness, paired with a slightly nauseous, resentful, excited feeling, almost—if he were to let himself admit it—a vengeful feeling. And Jewel sinks into sleep, and is gone.

  He watches over her, brooding, almost tender, as her face drains of color. He disconnects her, seals her pod. He ferries the three pods to the transport ship.

  “Here you are. Mercury and Tybalt, bodies cryo-preserved. And Rudo, safely in cryo. That murdering bastard.”

  The transport technicians take over.

  Paris watches as the ship is propelled from the base. Its light sail erects; a beautiful sight. It hurtles toward Luna.

  Good-bye, Jewel.

  Strange. He’s still hearing that song.

  Paris is not alone. Isolated in lockdown, every human on Europa hears that song. This is why Larry was called away by Prince: the sonic structures have become undeniable, dominant. Every human on Europa begins singing the last song to be played at the Only. It’s not a particularly good song. But for whatever reason, that’s the song they sing, as if that final blast at the bar has infected the entire moonscape. And not only humans sing. Underneath, above, all around them in the ice in which the base is nestled, the song is amplified. There are groans, and whalelike sonar blasts. Deep, almost too deep for the human ear to hear. Like the horns of heaven, if you believe in heaven, when the gates open at the end of time.

  The ship hurtles through the Solar System. A reflective outer sail refocuses and reflects a beam from great Fresnel lenses of the Mercury Array back onto the mainsail, enabling the ship to travel back toward Luna.

  Jewel lies unmoving, mind wandering through a year of cryo dreams.

  Rudo finds her and thinks she is dead. “Why are you so beautiful? Why are you yet so beautiful?” he cries. “Shall I believe that insubstantial death is amorous, and that the lean abhorred monster keeps you here in the dark to be his paramour?”

  This is followed by some horrible images: a death-figure riddled with worms, pressing down hard on Jewel’s chest, shoving cold fingers inside her mouth, between her legs. She cannot move or breathe.

  Then Rudo comes, takes her in his arms. He thinks she is dead. “Yet so beautiful? Why are you yet so beautiful?”

  Over. And. Over.

  One year later. Luna. A cryo chamber. Three transparent pods.

  A young woman lies in one, unconscious, blood-transfusion tubes connected to her veins.

  Another pod is empty, tubes trailing onto the floor.

  The third is filled with an unholy mess.

  On the floor there’s a bloody trail, leading to the door, which is shut.

  The woman wakes, rolls into a ball like a baby. It generally takes a bit longer for women to come out of cryo—the more muscle mass you have, the faster you come to.

  Her body shudders and tries to vomit, muscles scream. She can’t cry; ducts are dry.

  Why does it hurt so much? It isn’t the warming process—by the time you’re conscious, body-temperature blood has flushed out the cryoprotectant. It’s not ice crystals in your tissue—they’ve figured out how to stop that from happening, a combo of synthetic amphibious and plant glycols, and dimethyl sulphoxide.

  It’s a bit of a mystery. But then, most things are.

  The woman manages to sit up. Blinking, slow painful drag across eyes. Tongue like a piece of dried meat moving over teeth. She rips out her tubes. When her legs start working she’ll stand up.

  Smiling is supposed to bring on painkilling endorphins. The woman tries to smile. Her lips stick to her teeth.

  Cautiously she straightens one leg, the other, flexing muscles. Blinks again and it happens: wetness, a blessed film, the relief of it.

  She manages to stand. Totters to the messy cryopod.

  “Ew,” Jewel—for it is she, of course—says.

  She leans over, a bit sad. Tybs was on her team, after all. He was a nut, but she had time to create some fond feeling for him, back on Europa.

  She freezes.

  There, on what used to be this person’s smallest finger of their left hand, is a ring.

  A Cap ring, a name engraved on it. Jewel.

  Her legs give out. She falls to the floor.

  Obviously, something went horribly wrong and this inside-out cell-death mess is her love. It’s Rudo.

  Larry failed. Or lied to her. She remembers the look in Paris’s eyes as she went under. A gleam.

  She should have known.

  Her limbs may be trembling, but it’s amazing how quickly her mind works.

  The empty pod: Tyb’s body was in that one and they’ve taken it. Someone, then, will be back soon. For her.

  She will not live, without Rudo. A year of deathly cryo-dreams … what kept her going was the belief that she’d find Rudo on Luna and they’d be together, forever.

  Well, that’s not going to happen now.

  She tears through the room and finds a blade.

  A nice, long, pointy blade.

  Jewel has never been so happy to see a dagger.

  She thinks. Remembers her anatomy lessons. Best way to heart … here.

  “Let this be your sheath.”

  Jewel stabs herself.

  It’s hard to stab yourself in the heart. Almost impossible. You can’t slash wildly. You have to—and Jewel does—press the point precisely against yourself, then push. Hard. There’s a lot of resistance; you have to get through the breastplate. Every instinct is to flinch back, away from the pain.

  Most people would inflict a couple of test wounds and then give up. There are lots of less painful ways to kill oneself.

  But Jewel, she’s something else. She goes all the way. She even manages some pretty top-class last words.

  “Rust there,” she says to the blade, “and let me die.”

  It takes a bit of time, and about two pints of blood leak out of her twitching form, but die Jewel does.

  And then, seriously, about five minutes later, Rudo comes pounding through the storeroom door.

  He’d emerged from cryo quickly. And regretfully, out of necessity, killed the cryotechnician, dragged the body out of the room to hide it, and rushed back to be on hand when his love comes to consciousness.

  He sees Jewel’s body on the floor.

  He screams.

  Have you ever heard someone scream like this? Howl from the force of the kind of emotional pain that leaves part of your soul dead?

  It’s a terrible sound. It falls in the Luna cryo-room, trapped in the underground bunker. On some other level, though, some energetic or spiritual or whatever you want to call it level, the scream travels out and out, ripples through space, to the edges of the Solar System and beyond.

  Rudo falls on Jewel.

  Ignoring all first-aid training, he pulls the dagger out of her breast.

  He shakes her body.
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  He hides his face on her bloody chest.

  He goes completely still.

  Rudo takes the knife that he has pulled from Jewel’s formerly perfect breast, and with it, just below the scar from where his online connection was removed, he slits his wrists. And bleeds all over the storeroom floor.

  “Jewel.” He strokes her face. Gets blood on it. Tries to wipe it off. “Why are you yet so fair?”

  He has more time than Jewel did, and comes up with some truly top-notch last words, maybe even unbeatable last words. “I will stay with you, and never from this palace of dim night depart again. Here we will set up our everlasting rest, and shake the yoke of inauspicious stars from this world-wearied flesh.”

  He kisses her.

  “With a kiss, I die.”

  And Rudo slumps onto Jewel’s body, and slowly, peacefully, dies.

  Thus end our lovers. Parting is such sweet sorrow.

  Nurse’s newsfeed registers the discovery, on Luna, of the bodies of two miners, dead, apparently in a suicide pact. Some people remember that these two were Jewel and Rudo, superstar secret lovers back on Europa a year or so ago. But in terms of hits, you really have to go a long way down the feed to find the story and its associated comments.

  The top of the news is the weather. That’s all anybody wants to talk about, that day.

  That, and the latest from Europa. Since we left that moon a year ago, Prince has become a sort of intermediary between the sonic … what to call it? Civilization? on Europa, and the Jiang-Conti corporate alliance.

  Yes, in a typical human-species move, an encounter with aliens has prompted a real fellow-feeling between former rivals. Montys and Caps. Friends forever.

  So far they can’t seem to find any real use for the Europaeans. It’s disappointing.

  All “they” want to do is sing.

  Barkeep Larry, promoted to Prince’s right-hand research man, dies on Europa of his cancer. He tells no one of his role in the tragedy of Rudo and Jewel, and goes quietly, surrounded by friends and tearful former bar customers.

  Paris, in case anyone is wondering, becomes a deejay on Europa, which is now a top party destination for the very rich and very bored.

  As for the mining, Jiang-Conti profits soar.

  The weather? Oh, yes, the weather. The day Jewel and Rudo are found dead on Luna, the sky is overcast, all over Earth. No one can remember anything like it happening before. Sun worshippers complain. Meteorologists are puzzled. Conspiracy theorists posit corporate climate engineering.

  But we know what it is. Love’s end.

  “The Sun for sorrow will not show his head.” Isn’t that something someone said, once, many years ago, before we understood our uncentral place in the universe?

  The Sun for sorrow will not show his head.

  AMBIGUOUS NATURE

  Carl Frederick

  * * *

  For more than half a century a dedicated band of radio astronomers have searched the stars for signals from an intelligent civilization.

  SETI—the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence—has produced little more than frustration. No clearly discernible signals have been detected, and SETI has been denigrated and ridiculed by know-nothing politicians.

  But the universe is vast, and the chance of actually finding another intelligent species is a powerful lure. The chances of making contact with an extraterrestrial intelligence may be small, but the consequences of such a contact would be Earth-shattering.

  Carl Frederick captures the loneliness and frustration involved in such research, as well as the excitement of making, just possibly, the discovery of the ages.

  One note to remember: if the universe is truly infinite, then almost anything is possible.

  * * *

  Looking like the compound eye of a gigantic bug, the two hundred dishes of the Kata Tjuta Large Radio Array observatory probed deep into the cosmos. The twelve-meter-diameter dishes, all listening. Listening hard, scanning the sky at a billion frequencies for signs of intelligence.

  Oblivious they were to the sounds of the desert: the soft calls of the crested pigeons, the noisy chattering of the galahs, and the near-silent susurrus of a Pilbara cobra slithering through the porcupine grass.

  The low humidity and absence of radio frequency interference in the desolate, red center of the Australian continent made for good observing, but for lonely living.

  As the Sun touched the horizon, the cliffs in the distance reflected a glowing copper-red against the rare gathering storm clouds above them.

  Closer, a blur of motion broke the desolation. On a dirt road bounded by the occasional mulga and bloodwood tree, a solitary automobile threw up an orange mist of dust as it pressed onward toward the observatory.

  At the astronomy console of the observatory’s control center, astronomer Albert Griffin stared morosely at the monitor. “I’d hoped,” he said to the only other person in the center, “that with this big, snazzy new array, we’d have found something by now.”

  Ralph (Dingo) Kunmanara laughed. “We’ve only been at it for a couple of months.”

  “Still,” said Albert, “I wonder why I do it. SETI.” He scowled. “Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. It should be called SETIV. Spending Endless Time In Vain.” He swiveled toward Ralph. “For that matter, why do you do it? I mean work as a radio engineer when you’re a first-class quantum physicist.”

  “At uni I got typecast as an experimentalist by doing an experimental thesis.” A flicker of a grimace passed over Ralph’s face, to be replaced by a smile. “Oz has made much progress of late, but it’s still easier for the average Australian to think of an aboriginal as an engineer than as a theoretical physicist.”

  Albert nodded. He was an American and didn’t feel he knew enough to comment.

  “And at any rate,” Ralph went on, “I consider the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence the question of our era.”

  “If we find evidence, you mean.”

  “Too right!”

  Just then, an alert buzz came from the astronomy console.

  Albert spun around to the monitor.

  Ralph laughed. “Don’t get your hopes up. Just another Signal Candidate.”

  “You never know, though.” Albert stared at the monitor which showed a series of dots:

  .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. ..

  He sighed. “Nope.”

  “Not prime numbers?”

  Albert shook his head. It wasn’t the series of prime numbers that the SETI community believed an extraterrestrial would send as a calling card.

  “Another eclipsing pulsar?”

  “Looks like it.” Albert pulled up the online astronomical map and entered the signal’s coordinates. “Star in the field,” he said without enthusiasm. “No notations. Looks like we’ve discovered another one.”

  “I’ll log it.” Ralph made the entry, then idly looked out the window. “Ah. Your ride’s here. And I think your son’s come along too.” He glanced up at the darkening sky. “And it looks like we’re in for a bit of weather.”

  “They’re early.” Albert glanced at the panel clock. “It’ll be an hour yet before another set of astronomers come in to do real astronomy.”

  Ralph turned from the window. “Oh, come on,” he said with a chuckle. “You wouldn’t be doing this if it you didn’t want to.”

  Albert gave a slow nod. “I guess you’re right. I do want to, but I don’t want to want to.”

  Ralph blew out a breath. “Deep stuff, mate. Too deep for me.”

  Albert stood as the door opened and his wife Kimberly stepped in. Along with her came their son Liam, almost eight years old with a mop of rich red hair and a face sprinkled with matching freckles. Kimberly and Liam wore the same style khaki bush shorts and white top as did the astronomers, but hers were cut higher above the knee.

  Ralph rolled to his feet as well.

  Albert and family exchanged greetings. Then Albert said, “You’re early.”
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  “Not early enough, I’m afraid,” said Kimberly. “There’s a storm coming.”

  Albert glanced away at the astronomy console. “I need about another half hour.”

  “We really should leave soon,” said Kimberly. “The weather bureau says it’s a very nasty storm.”

  Albert gave a reassuring laugh. “A nasty storm? Here in the middle of Australia? Can’t be.”

  “The radio says maybe a once in a decade event.” Kimberly glanced out the window. “It’ll go through fast, but it will be ferocious.”

  “Let me finish this last observing run, ’bout another fifteen minutes.”

  As Albert turned his attention to the console, Ralph tousled Liam’s flame-red hair. “Hi, Bluey!”

  “Hi, Dr. Kunmanara.”

  “Hey,” said Ralph in mock annoyance.” I’ve known you ever since you were a little ankle biter. By now, you should know to call me Ralph. Or Dingo. At home, everyone calls me Dingo.”

  Liam laughed. “Hi, Dr. Dingo.”

  A crash of thunder exploded through the control room and Liam darted back to stand beside his mother.

  “Nothing to be afraid about, Liam,” said Albert, turning to look.

  “I’m not afraid,” said Liam, the tremor in his voice giving lie to his assertion.

  Albert turned to Kimberly. “I think we’d better wait out the storm here.”

  Kimberly nodded, her face showing concern. “I think that would be best.” She smiled. “How’s the work going?”

  “Terrible!” Albert smiled as well, but it was forced. “Sometimes I feel this is all futile—hopeless.”

  “But what really bugs me,” Ralph interjected, “is how much the cosmic isolation fanatics rejoice in our lack of success.”

  Albert nodded, sadly. “I must admit I’m beginning to wonder if they might actually be right.”