Cobh sounded breathless. “Are you thinking what I'm thinking?”
“It's an egg,” Lvov said. She looked around wildly, at the open pit, the egg, the snowflake patterns. Suddenly she saw the meaning of the scene; it was as if a light had shone up from within Pluto, illuminating her. The “snowflakes” represented life, she intuited; they had dug the burrows, laid these eggs, and now their bodies of water glass lay dormant or dead, on the ancient ice.…
“I'm coming down,” Cobh said sternly. “We're going to have to discuss this. Don't say anything to the Inner System; wait until I get back. This could mean trouble for us, Lvov.”
Lvov placed the egg back in the shattered nest.
She met Cobh at the crash scar. Cobh was shoveling nitrogen and water ice into the life-support modules' raw material hopper. She hooked up her own and Lvov's suits to the modules, recharging the suits' internal systems. Then she began to carve GUTdrive components out of the flitter's hull. The flitter's central Grand Unified Theory chamber was compact, no larger than a basketball, and the rest of the drive was similarly scaled. “I bet I could get this working,” Cobh said. “Although it couldn't take us anywhere.”
Lvov sat on a fragment of the shattered hull. Tentatively, she told Cobh about the web.
Cobh stood with hands on hips, facing Lvov, and Lvov could hear her sucking drink from the nipples in her helmet. “Spiders from Pluto? Give me a break.”
“It's only an analogy,” Lvov said defensively. “I'm an atmospheric specialist, not a biologist.” She tapped the surface of her desk. “It's not spider web. Obviously. But if that substance has anything like the characteristics of true spider silk, it's not impossible.” She read from her desk. “Spider silk has a breaking strain twice that of steel, but thirty times the elasticity. It's a type of liquid crystal. It's used commercially— did you know that?” She fingered the fabric of her suit. “We could be wearing spider silk right now.”
“What about the hole with the lid?”
“There are trapdoor spiders in America. On Earth. I remember, when I was a kid…The spiders make burrows, lined with silk, with hinged lids.”
“Why make burrows on Pluto?”
“I don't know. Maybe the eggs can last out the winter that way. Maybe the creatures, the flakes, only have active life during the perihelion period, when the atmosphere expands and enriches.” She thought that through. “That fits. That's why the Poole people didn't spot anything. The construction team was here close to the last aphelion. Pluto's year is so long that we're still only half-way to the next perihelion—”
“So how do they live?” Cobh snapped. “What do they eat?”
“There must be more to the ecosystem than one species,” Lvov conceded. “The flakes—the spiders—need water glass. But there's little of that on the surface. Maybe there is some biocycle—plants or burrowing animals—which brings ice and glass to the surface, from the interior.”
“That doesn't make sense. The layer of nitrogen over water ice is too deep.”
“Then where do the flakes get their glass?”
“Don't ask me,” Cobh said. “It's your dumb hypothesis. And what about the web? What's the point of that—if it's real?”
Lvov ground to a halt. “I don't know,” she said lamely. Although Pluto/Charon is the only place in the System where you could build a spider web between worlds.
Cobh toyed with a fitting from the drive. “Have you told anyone about this yet? In the Inner System, I mean.”
“No. You said you wanted to talk about that.”
“Right.” Lvov saw Cobh close her eyes; her face was masked by the glimmer of her faceplate. “Listen. Here's what we say. We've seen nothing here. Nothing that couldn't be explained by crystallization effects.”
Lvov was baffled. “What are you talking about? What about the eggs? Why would we lie about this? Besides, we have the desks—records.”
“Data desks can be lost, or wiped, or their contents amended.”
Lvov wished she could see Cobh's face. “Why would we do such a thing?”
“Think it through. Once Earth hears about this, these flake-spiders of yours will be protected. Won't they?”
“Of course. What's bad about that?”
“It's bad for us, Lvov. You've seen what a mess the Poole people made of Charon. If this system is inhabited, a fast GUTship won't be allowed to come for us. It wouldn't be allowed to refuel here. Not if it meant further damage to the native life forms.”
Lvov shrugged. “So we'd have to wait for a slower ship. A liner; one that won't need to take on more reaction mass here.”
Cobh laughed at her. “You don't know much about the economics of GUTship transport, do you? Now that the System is crisscrossed by Poole wormholes, how many liners like that do you think are still running? I've already checked the manifests. There are two liners capable of a round trip to Pluto still in service. One is in dry dock; the other is heading for Saturn—”
“On the other side of the System.”
“Right. There's no way either of those ships could reach us for, I'd say, a year.”
We only have a month's supplies. A bubble of panic gathered in Lvov's stomach.
“Do you get it yet?” Cobh said heavily. “We'll be sacrificed, if there's a chance that our rescue would damage the new ecology, here.”
“No. It wouldn't happen like that.”
Cobh shrugged. “There are precedents.”
She was right, Lvov knew. There were precedents, of new forms of life discovered in corners of the system: from Mercury to the remote Kuiper objects. In every case the territory had been ring-fenced, the local conditions preserved, once life—or even a plausible candidate for life—was recognized.
Cobh said, “Pan-genetic diversity. Pan-environmental management. That's the key to it; the public policy of preserving all the species and habitats of Sol, into the indefinite future. The lives of two humans won't matter a damn against that.”
“What are you suggesting?”
“That we don't tell the Inner System about the flakes.”
Lvov tried to recapture her mood of a few days before: when Pluto hadn't mattered to her, when the crash had been just an inconvenience. Now, suddenly, we're talking about threats to our lives, the destruction of an ecology.
What a dilemma. If I don't tell of the flakes, their ecology may be destroyed during our rescue. But if I do tell, the GUTship won't come for me, and I'll lose my life.
Cobh seemed to be waiting for an answer.
Lvov thought of how Sol light looked over Pluto's ice fields, at dawn.
She decided to stall. “We'll say nothing. For now. But I don't accept either of your options.”
Cobh laughed. “What else is there? The wormhole is destroyed; even this flitter is disabled.”
“We have time. Days, before the GUTship is due to be launched. Let's search for another solution. A win-win.”
Cobh shrugged. She looked suspicious.
She's right to be, Lvov thought, exploring her own decision with surprise. I've every intention of telling the truth later, of diverting the GUTship, if I have to.
I may give up my life for this world.
I think.
In the days that followed, Cobh tinkered with the GUTdrive, and flew up to the Interface to gather more data on the Alcubierre phenomenon.
Lvov roamed the surface of Pluto, with her desk set to full record. She came to love the wreaths of cirrus clouds, the huge, misty moon, the slow, oceanic pulse of the centuries-long year.
Everywhere she found the inert bodies of snowflakes, or evidence of their presence: eggs, lidded burrows. She found no other life forms—or, more likely, she told herself, she wasn't equipped to recognize any others.
She was drawn back to Christy, the sub-Charon point, where the topography was at its most complex and interesting, and where the greatest density of flakes was to be found. It was as if, she thought, the flakes had gathered here, yearning for the huge, ina
ccessible moon above them. But what could the flakes possible want of Charon? What did it mean for them?
Lvov encountered Cobh at the crash scar, recharging her suit's systems from the life support packs. Cobh seemed quiet. She kept her face, hooded by her faceplate, turned from Lvov. Lvov watched her for a while. “You're being evasive,” she said eventually. “Something's changed—something you're not telling me about.”
Cobh made to turn away, but Lvov grabbed her arm. “I think you've found a third option. Haven't you? You've found some other way to resolve this situation, without destroying either us or the flakes.”
Cobh shook off her hand. “Yes. Yes, I think I know a way. But—”
“But what?”
“It's dangerous, damn it. Maybe unworkable. Lethal.” Cobh's hands pulled at each other.
She's scared, Lvov saw. She stepped back from Cobh. Without giving herself time to think about it, she said, “Our deal's off. I'm going to tell the Inner System about the flakes. Right now. So we're going to have to go with your new idea, dangerous or not.”
Cobh studied her face; Cobh seemed to be weighing up Lvov's determination, perhaps even her physical strength. Lvov felt as if she were a data desk being downloaded. The moment stretched, and Lvov felt her breath tighten in her chest. Would she be able to defend herself, physically, if it came to that? And was her own will really so strong?
I have changed, she thought. Pluto has changed me.
At last Cobh looked away. “Send your damn message,” she said.
Before Cobh—or Lvov herself—had a chance to waver, Lvov picked up her desk and sent a message to the inner worlds. She downloaded all the data she had on the flakes: text, images, analyses, her own observations and hypotheses.
“It's done,” she said at last.
“And the GUTship?”
“I'm sure they'll cancel it.” Lvov smiled. “I'm also sure they won't tell us they've done so.”
“So we're left with no choice,” Cobh said angrily.
“Look, I know it's the right thing to do. To preserve the flakes. I just don't want to die, that's all. I hope you're right, Lvov.”
“You haven't told me how we're going to get home.”
Cobh grinned through her faceplate. “Surfing.”
“All right. You're doing fine. Now let go of the scooter.”
Lvov took a deep breath, and kicked the scooter away with both legs; the little device tumbled away, catching the deep light of Sol, and Lvov rolled in reaction.
Cobh reached out and steadied her. “You can't fall,” Cobh said. “You're in orbit. You understand that, don't you?”
“Of course I do,” Lvov grumbled.
The two of them drifted in space, close to the defunct Poole wormhole Interface. The Interface itself was a tetrahedron of electric blue struts, enclosing darkness, its size overwhelming; Lvov felt as if she were floating beside the carcass of some huge, wrecked building.
Pluto and Charon hovered before her like balloons, their surfaces mottled and complex, their forms visibly distorted from the spherical. Their separation was only fourteen of Pluto's diameters. The worlds were strikingly different in hue, with Pluto a blood red, Charon ice blue. That's the difference in surface composition, Lvov thought absently. All that water ice on Charon's surface.
The panorama was stunningly beautiful. Lvov had a sudden, gut-level intuition of the rightness of the various System authorities' rigid pan-environment policies.
Cobh had strapped her data desk to her chest; now she checked the time. “Any moment now. Lvov, you'll be fine. Remember, you'll feel no acceleration, no matter how fast we travel. At the centre of an Alcubierre wave, spacetime is locally flat; you'll still be in free fall. There will be tidal forces, but they will remain small. Just keep your breathing even, and—”
“Shut up, Cobh,” Lvov said tightly. “I know all this.”
Cobh's desk flared with light. “There,” she breathed. “The GUTdrive has fired. Just a few seconds, now.”
A spark of light arced up from Pluto's surface and tracked, in complete silence, under the belly of the parent world. It was the flitter's GUTdrive, salvaged and stabilized by Cobh. The flame was brighter than Sol; Lvov saw its light reflected in Pluto, as if the surface was a great, fractured mirror of ice. Where the flame passed, tongues of nitrogen gas billowed up.
The GUTdrive passed over Christy. Lvov had left her desk there to monitor the flakes, and the image the desk transmitted, displayed in the corner of her faceplate, showed a spark crossing the sky.
Then the GUTdrive veered sharply upward, climbing directly toward Lvov and Cobh at the Interface.
“Cobh, are you sure this is going to work?”
Lvov could hear Cobh's breath rasp, shallow. “Look, Lvov, I know you're scared, but pestering me with dumb-ass questions isn't going to help. Once the drive enters the Interface, it will take only seconds for the instability to set in. Seconds, and then we'll be home. In the Inner System, at any rate. Or…”
“Or what?”
Cobh didn't reply.
Or not, Lvov finished for her. If Cobh has designed this new instability right, the Alcubierre wave will carry us home. If not—
The GUTdrive flame approached, becoming dazzling. Lvov tried to regulate her breathing, to keep her limbs hanging loose—
“Lethe,” Cobh whispered.
“What?” Lvov demanded, alarmed.
“Take a look at Pluto. At Christy.”
Lvov looked into her faceplate.
Where the warmth and light of the GUTdrive had passed, Christy was a ferment. Nitrogen billowed. And, amid the pale fountains, burrows were opening. Lids folded back. Eggs cracked. Infant flakes soared and sailed, with webs and nets of their silk-analogue hauling at the rising air.
Lvov caught glimpses of threads, long, sparkling, trailing down to Pluto—and up toward Charon. Already, Lvov saw, some of the baby flakes had hurtled more than a planetary diameter from the surface, toward the moon.
“It's goose summer,” she said.
“What?”
“When I was a kid…the young spiders spin bits of webs, and climb to the top of grass stalks, and float off on the breeze. Goose summer—‘gossamer.’”
“Right,” Cobh said skeptically. “Well, it looks as if they are making for Charon. They use the evaporation of the atmosphere for lift…Perhaps they follow last year's threads, to the moon. They must fly off every perihelion, rebuilding their web bridge every time. They think the perihelion is here now. The warmth of the drive—it's remarkable. But why go to Charon?”
Lvov couldn't take her eyes off the flakes. “Because of the water,” she said. It all seemed to make sense, now that she saw the flakes in action. “There must be water glass on Charon's surface. The baby flakes use it to build their bodies. They take other nutrients from Pluto's interior, and the glass from Charon…They need the resources of both worlds to survive—”
“Lvov!”
The GUTdrive flared past them, sudden, dazzling, and plunged into the damaged Interface.
Electric-blue light exploded from the Interface, washing over her.
There was a ball of light, unearthly, behind her, and an irregular patch of darkness ahead, like a rip in space. Tidal forces plucked gently at her belly and limbs.
Pluto, Charon, and goose summer disappeared. But the stars, the eternal stars, shone down on her, just as they had during her childhood on Earth. She stared at the stars, trusting, and felt no fear.
Remotely, she heard Cobh whoop, exhilarated.
The tides faded. The darkness before her healed, to reveal the brilliance and warmth of Sol.
A Worm in the Well
GREGORY BENFORD
Greg Benford is the author of the classic SF novel Timescape, as well as a number of other highly regarded works including In the Ocean of Night and Sailing Bright Eternity. He is the finest writer of hard SF from the generation after Larry Niven, and writes, primarily in the tradition of Arthur C. Clarke, of
immense, fertile, awesome astronomical vistas and technological marvels, but with a depth and richness of characterization not achieved by many other SF writers.
“A Worm in the Well” is not typical of his fiction in that it is more in the hard SF problem-solving tradition of Robert A. Heinlein and Paul Anderson than Arthur C. Clarke. Here we have an elegant adventure from Analog, the magazine that upholds the traditions of hard SF.
She was about to get baked, and all because she wouldn't freeze a man.
“Optical,” Claire called. Erma obliged.
The Sun spread around them, a bubbling plain. She had notched the air conditioning cooler but it didn't help much.
Geysers burst in gaudy reds and actinic violets from the yellow-white froth. The solar coronal arch was just peeking over the horizon, like a wedding ring stuck halfway into boiling white mud. A monster, over two thousand kilometers long, sleek and slender and angry crimson.
She turned down the cabin lights. Somewhere she had read that people felt cooler in the dark. The temperature in here was normal but she had started sweating.
Tuning the yellows and reds dimmer on the big screen before her made the white-hot storms look more blue. Maybe that would trick her subconscious, too.
Claire swung her mirror to see the solar coronal arch. Its image was refracted around the rim of the Sun, so she was getting a preview. Her orbit was on the descending slope of a long ellipse, its lowest point calculated to be just at the peak of the arch. So far, the overlay orbit trajectory was exactly on target.
Software didn't bother with the heat, of course; gravitation was cool, serene. Heat was for engineers. And she was just a pilot.
In her immersion-work environment, the touch controls gave her an abstract distance from the real physical surroundings—the plumes of virulent gas, the hammer of photons. She wasn't handling the mirror, of course, but it felt that way. A light, feathery brush, at a crisp, bracing room temperature.
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