Geeta had a party with the ship’s crew, sharing the treats she’d brought back, and talking about her day. We were all charmed, as we always were the night before the company extracted her memories. We got to see who Geeta might be if she could have held on to her experiences. We all loved the woman she would never become.
Later, the cakes gone and souvenirs distributed amongst the crew, to be hidden any time Geeta came near—though she always got to keep any clothes and accessories she bought—I escorted Geeta back to her cabin. She went into the changing alcove while I spystopped. I found a new active camera and managed to remotely access its feed while my back was to it. Geeta fluttered back into the cabin in her exercise clothes, talked about her adventures, then started her nightly routine. Three repetitions in, I created a loop and sent the camera into nontime. As soon as I gave Geeta the all-clear, she rushed to me.
She saw my expression and sighed, two steps before she would have collided with me.
“They were fake,” I said.
“The rubies?”
“I went to three pawn shops and they all told me the same thing. Decent fakes, not spectacular. Worth no more than glass. Didn’t get enough to even contact anyone who might have disguised the real memods. I traded what I got for the rubies for a couple disguised bootlegs, the lava walk on Placeholder and the plunge valley on Paradise. I need to test them. Maybe they won’t be infected.” I had tried a couple of bootlegs of Geeta’s memods without testing them, back when I was younger and stupider. They were dirt cheap but still amazing, though they suffered from copy fatigue. Often the bootleggers placed compulsions in them that took money, time, and effort to eradicate. I still had the urge to gamble every time I passed an Ergo machine.
“Fake,” Geeta repeated. She wandered to her jewelry drawer, stared down at her treasures, and shut the drawer, her shoulders drooping. Then, angry, she stepped back into place and resumed her exercises. I unlooped the spy camera and we went through her night-of-a-collection-day routine, which included a shower for Geeta and a furniture keying for me: I had to shape the bed so it would do the extraction during the night.
Washed free of every trace of Tice, Geeta let me help her into the bed, fasten the restraints, and plug in her head. “Kiss me,” she said. “I want two kisses in a day. I never had that experience before, did I?”
I kissed her long and deep, kissing the woman we were killing. This kiss wouldn’t make it into the memods; her return to the ship was always cut out. We had done the Tice Ending Shot at sunset on a mountain where cool wind touched us with feathered fingers; it would be spliced onto the end of each of Geeta’s Tice memods.
Geeta would not remember the kiss, but I would, the taste of her sorrow and desperation mixed with the last sweet tang of willowcake. She often kissed me last thing after a mission; I had a collection of these moments in my memory, moments that sometimes deceived me into thinking we were closer than we were.
Her lips relaxed, and I straightened out of the kiss, looked down into her tear-wet eyes.
“Good night, Geeta,” I said softly.
“Good night, Itzal.” She closed her eyes. I set the bed on COLLECT and touched off the lights as I left the room.
In my own much smaller and sparer cabin, I checked for spies. I had never found one; what I did away from Geeta didn’t concern the GreaTimes people, as long as it was legal and not going to impair my care for her.
I put the Hallen memod in the recycle slot and took out the memod I had bought with the ruby money, what I hadn’t put away. I had bought the horse people, the one she’d asked me for. It was a memod she’d made before I was part of her staff. I had read the sales copy on all of them, wanting to know who she had been as much as she did. This was one of the better ones; all the reviews said so.
I set the new memod in my receptor and settled down to emp.
Geeta walked down a ramp into a sky seething with dawn clouds and the tracks of skitterbirds. The air smelled of damp and green, and morning animals called, a random concert with notes that sometimes clashed and sometimes harmonized. In Geeta’s mind, it was all beautiful. The air was cool; Geeta felt it as a pleasurable hug from a chilly friend.
Three horses galloped up the soft-surfaced road and stopped just in front of her, breathing grass-scented breath, musky warmth pouring off them. She laughed and went to hug one, even though the culture memod said people weren’t allowed to do that. How amazing to have your arms around so much huge intelligent warmth; the texture of damp hair against your cheek, the solid muscles shifting against your chest. The smell of the horse’s sweat, salty and musky, stirred Geeta awake on several levels.
“Miss,” said the horse, “Miss, I don’t know you.”
She released him and stepped back. “Oh! I’m sorry. Please forgive me. You don’t know me yet, but I hope you will.” He watched her with one large dark eye, as intricate and beautiful a glistening eye as I had ever seen, with a depth in it that might lead to mystery. I fell in love with the horse. I knew Geeta smiled up at him, because I saw his response: charmed, his head nodding a little, even as his companions laughed at him.
I settled deeper into being Geeta, finding a home that wasn’t really mine but felt like mine. Geeta was home everywhere she went, and when I was emping her, I felt that way, too.
I didn’t know if I would ever share this with her.
A Preliminary Assessment of the Drake Equation, Being an Excerpt from the Memoirs of Star Captain Y.-T. Lee
Vernor Vinge
Vernor Vinge (vrinimi.org) lives in San Diego, California. He is the author of many SF stories and novels from the 1960s to the present, including, most prominently, A Fire upon the Deep (1992), a novel that helped create the hard SF renaissance of the 1990s, and its prequel, A Deepness in the Sky (1999). His most recent novel is the hard SF novel Rainbows End (2006). He is among the most popular and influential living hard SF writers.
“A Preliminary Assessment of the Drake Equation, Being an Excerpt from the Memoirs of Star Captain Y.-T. Lee” appeared in Gateways. In a way that reminds us a little of Terry Bisson’s novel, Voyage to the Red Planet—future interstellar exploration is financed by the media. Real science and media fakery happen all at the same time. Here, the captain of the title has discovered a barely habitable planet the media conglomerate has renamed Paradise. Is there life on Paradise?
At the time of its discovery, Lee’s World was the most earthlike exoplanet known. If you are old and naïve, you might think that the second expedition would consist of a fleet of ships, with staff and vehicles to thoroughly explore the place. Alas, even back in ’66, that was not practical. The Advanced Projects Agency had too much else to survey. APA paid me and my starship the Frederik Pohl to make a return trip, but they eked out the funding with some media-based research folks. And they insisted on renaming the planet. Lee’s World became “Paradise.”
Ah, the “Voyage to Paradise”. That should have given me warning. Over the years, I’ve had some good experiences with APA (in particular, see chapters 4 and 7), but that name change was a gross misrepresentation. The planet is in the general class of Brin worlds—about the only type of water world that can maintain exposed oceans for a geologically long period of time. Those oceans are extraordinarily deep, almost like an upper layer of mantle, but with no land surface—except in the case of Lee’s World, where some kind of core asymmetry forced an unstable supermountain above sea level.
More important than the name change, APA gave the mission’s science staff way too much independence. When you are on a starship in the depths of space, there has to be just one boss. If you want to survive, that boss better be someone who knows what she’s doing. I have a long-term policy (dating from this very mission as a matter of fact): scientists must be sworn members of the crew. Even a science officer can cause a universe of harm (see chapter 8), but at least I have some control.
In fact, there were some truly excellent scientists on my “Voyage to Paradise,” in partic
ular Dae Park. Most legitimate scholars consider Park’s discovery as making this expedition the most important of the first twenty years of the interstellar age. On the other hand, several of my so-called scientist passengers were journalists in shallow disguise—and Ron Ohara turned out to be something worse.
We landed near the equator, on the east coast of the world’s single landmass, an island almost one hundred kilometers across. It was just after local sunrise. That was the decision of Trevor Dhatri, our webshow producer—excuse me, I mean our mission documentarian. Anyway, I’m sure you’ve seen the video. It is damn impressive, even if a bit misleading. I brought the Frederik Pohl in from the ocean, along a gentle descent that showed miles and miles of sandy beaches, bordered with rows of glorious surf. The shadows were deep enough that the little details such as the absence of cities and plant life were not noticeable. In fact, the human eye has this magical ability to take straight lines and shadows and extrapolate them into street plans, forested hills, and colors that aren’t really there. Blued by distance, mountains loomed, clouds skirting along the central peaks, and there was a hint of snow on the heights.
I have to admit, the video is a masterpiece. It could be showing a virginal Big Island of Hawaii. In fact, there are no trick effects in these images. They are simply Lee’s World shown in its best possible light. The beach temperatures were indeed Riviera mild, and there really was scattered snow high in the far mountains. Of course, this artfully ignored the minor differences such as the fact that half the world—all the mid- and high latitudes—was encased in ice, and the fact that there was essentially no free oxygen in the atmosphere. Hey, I’m not being sarcastic; those aren’t the big differences.
Fortunately my passengers were not as ignorant of the big differences as the presumed webshow audience. Within an hour of our landing, the geologists were out in the hills, following up on what their probes had reported. Within another hour, Dae Park had her submersible and deep samplers cruising toward the oldest accessible sea floor.
My crew and I had our own agenda. Coming in, my systems chief had been monitoring the seismo probes. Now that we were grounded, we were stuck for a minimum of eight hours before we could boost out. Crew was quietly working at a breakneck speed to get everything ready in case we had to retrieve our passengers and scram.
I did my best to look bored, but once Trevor had taken his media focus off my command deck, I had a serious chat with my systems chief. “Can we get out of here by landing plus eight—and will we need to?”
Jim Russell looked up from his displays. “Yes to the first question, assuming Park and Ohara”—both of whom had insisted on crewing their submersibles—“obey the excursion guidelines. As for the second question . . .” He glanced at the seismic time series scrolling past on his central display. “Well, the problem is that we don’t yet have a baseline to make predictions with, but my models predict a seismically stable period lasting at least forty hours.”
“This is seismically stable, eh?” I was an army brat. I’ve lived everywhere on Earth from Ankara to Yangon. I was in Turkey after the quake of ’47. For weeks, the aftershocks were rattling us. That was nothing compared to this place. The deck beneath our feet had been quivering constantly since we landed.
Jim gave a smile. “Actually, Captain, if we go for more than an hour or two without any perceptible shaking, it would be a very bad sign.”
“Um. Thank you so much.” But at least that was something definite to watch for.
“I always try to look at the bright side, Captain. You’re the one who’s paid to worry. And your job could be harder.” He waved at a view of the outside. It showed Trevor Dhatri hassling crew and scientists to create the most photogenic base camp possible. Now I saw why our sponsors had paid for state-of-the-art O2 gear. The transparent gadgets barely covered the nose and mouth. Jim continued, “Dhatri is playing the paradise angle as hard as he can. If he ever gets tired of that, I bet he’ll go for the high drama of explorers racing the clock to escape destruction.”
I nodded. In fact, it was something I had considered. “I welcome the lack of attention. On the other hand, I don’t want our passengers to get too relaxed. If those subs go beyond the excursion limits, all our diligence is for nothing.” It was a delicate balance.
I grabbed one of the toylike oxy masks and went outside. Damn. This was stupid. And dangerous. Explorers on a new world should wear closed suits, with proper-size O2 tanks. But everybody in our glorious base camp was wandering around in shirtsleeves, some in T-shirts and shorts. And barefoot!
I moseyed around the area, discreetly making sure that my crewfolk were aware of the situation and dressed at least sensibly enough to survive a bad fall.
“Hey, Captain Lee! Over here!” It was Trevor Dhatri, waving to me from a little promontory above the camp. I walk up to his position, all the while trying to think what to say that would make him cautious without exciting his melodramatic instincts. “How do you like our view of Paradise, Captain?” Trevor waved at the view. Yes, it was spectacular. We were looking down upon a vast jumble of fallen rock, and beyond that the beach. From this angle it looked like some resort back home. Turn just a little bit, and you could see my starship and the busy scientists. I debated warning him about the perils of the view. That talus looked fresh.
“Isn’t the base camp splendid, Captain?”
“Hm. Looks cool, Trevor. But I thought the big deal of this expedition was the Search for Life.” I waved at his bare feet. “Shouldn’t your people be more worried about contaminating the real estate?”
“Oh, you mean like the Mars scandal?” Trevor laughed. “No. Near the landing site, it’s impossible to avoid contamination. And from the Mars experience, we know there will be low-level global contamination in a matter of years. We’re concentrating all our clean efforts on the first sampling of likely spots. For instance, the exterior gear on the submersibles is fully sterile. I daresay you won’t find even inorganic contamination.” He shrugged. “Later landings, even later runs on this expedition—they’ll all be suspect.” He turned, looked out to sea. “That’s why today is so important, Captain Lee. I don’t know what Park or Ohara may bring back, but it should be immune to the complaints that mucked up Mars.”
Yeah, so besides their well-known rivalry, Park and Ohara had reason to take chances right out of the starting gate. I glanced at the range traces that Jim Russell was sending me. “I notice Park’s submersible is more than sixteen kilometers down, Trevor.”
“Sure. I’ve got a suite of cameras inside it. Don’t worry, those boats are rated to twenty kilometers. Dae Park has this theory that fossil evidence will be near the big drop-off.”
“Just so she doesn’t exceed our excursion agreement.”
“Not to worry, Ma’am. Of the two, Dae is the rule-follower—and you’ll notice that Ron Ohara is still very close to the beach, barely at scuba depth.” His gaze hung for a moment, perhaps watching what his cameras were showing from Ohara’s dive. “There’ll be some important discovery today. I can feel it.”
Ha. So while I obsessed about ship, crew, and scientists, Dhatri obsessed on his next big scoop. I messaged Jim Russell to ride herd on the ocean adventurers—and then I let our “mission documentarian” guide me back to the center to the base camp. That was okay. I don’t like standing ten meters from a cliff where magnitude seven earthquakes happen every few days.
Back in the camp, I began to see what Dhatri was up to. Of course, it wasn’t science and in fact he wasn’t doing much with the exploration angle. Dhatri was actually making a case for colonizing the damn place. No wonder he kept calling it “paradise.” All this was sufficiently boggling that I let him lead me this way and that, showing off the crusty starship captain working with scientists and crew. My main attention was on the range traces from the submersibles. Besides which, Trevor’s video work was really confusing, just little unconnected bits and gobs, all set pieces. It was quite unlike most web videos from my childhood. Aft
er a while I realized I was seeing the wave of the future. Trevor Dhatri was a kind of pioneer; he realized that in coming years, the most important videos would never be live. Even the shortest interstellar flights take hours. On this expedition, the Frederik Pohl was almost four days out from our home base in Illinois. Dhatri could sew all this mishmash into whatever he chose—and not lose a bit of journalism’s precious immediacy.
I was still outside when a siren whooped up, blasting across the encampment. I got to my system chief while the noise was still ramping up. “What in hell is that?”
Jim’s voice came back: “It’s not ours, Captain. It’s . . . yeah, it’s some kind of alarm the scientists set up.”
Dhatri seemed to have more precise information. He had dropped his current interview when the siren blared. Now he was scanning his cameras around the camp, capturing the reaction of crew and scientists. His words were an excited blather: “Yes. Yes! We don’t know yet what it is, but the first substantive discovery of this expedition has been made.” He turned toward me. “Captain Lee is clearly as surprised as we all are.”
Yes. Speechless.
I let him chivvy me toward where the scientists were congregating.
Trevor was telling me, “I gave all the away teams hot buttons—you know, linked to our show’s Big News feed. That siren is the max level of newsworthiness.” His voice was still excited, but less manic than a moment before. He grinned mischievously. “Damn, I love this asynchronous journalism! If I botch up, I can always recover before it goes online.” As we got close to the others and the fixed displays, he reverted to something like his official breathlessness. His cameras shifted from faces to displays and then back to faces. “So what do we have?”
Year’s Best SF 16 Page 8