They would live to reach it, he had discovered. It was a straightforward enough calculation. They would even have a few weeks – maybe even a few months – to explore when they got there, to search for an ice moon or a captured comet from which to extract the water and gases they so desperately needed.
Yes, they would live at least that long, provided they hit no more gravel on the way, but that was by no means assured. They were travelling much more slowly now, but with the drive trailing behind them in braking mode they were even more vulnerable than before. True, they had tons of mass in the outer hull for radiation shielding, but that wouldn’t stop another meteor strike. And they’d been hit once already . . .
With a deliberate effort, he shook himself out of that train of thought and concentrated on the headband that linked his mind to the ship’s database. He had work to do, as they approached this new star system. They were drawing close enough to catch the first faint planetary spectra in the telescope; soon they would know whether they could find what they had come for. It wasn’t at all certain; a red giant should have baked out its system thoroughly when it first began its expansion. They’d probably find nothing but dry rock, cinders that had once been planets. The odds were long against them, but it had been their only choice. Mary had been right about that, as much as it pained him to admit it.
Mary. He scowled when he thought of her. Mary the thinker, Mary the scientist.
Mary, the reason they were in this mess in the first place.
Mary Hopkins pressed her face down into the tomato plant and inhaled. The tart, pungent, somehow fuzzy aroma of growth overrode – momentarily, anyway – the stink all around her. She smiled, remembering the hours she had spent in her mother’s garden, pulling weeds from between the rows. She had always known when she pulled a tomato by mistake: she’d imagined its intense perfume to be some kind of olfactory death rattle. Every time she smelled it she’d wondered why the plant itself should have a fragrance so distinct from the fruit it bore. Maybe just to be different, she supposed, exhaling softly and inhaling again before raising her face back out of the tank.
The plant looked awful: scrawny and malformed, with its two largest leaves yellowing to uselessness and not a single bud promising to replace them. A lone blossom drooped from a dispirited stem, and even as Mary brushed it carefully with pollen from its neighbor, she wondered if there was any point in doing so. At this rate the plant would be dead before it could produce fruit. She and George and Norm and Ivan would probably be dead by then too, so what did it matter?
Because they might not die, that’s what, and if they didn’t then they would need this scrawny tomato, and more like it, for seed stock to replace what they had lost. The nanofabs could make all the tomatoes they wanted once they got the raw material, but the library’s single template wouldn’t provide the diversity they needed once they got the colony going. Only a healthy population of breeding stock could do that. Mary didn’t believe for a minute that a red giant’s planetary system would hold any kind of recoverable water, but it was just barely possible, and as long as there was any hope at all, she wasn’t going to give up.
She heard footsteps on the stairway. She could tell by their heaviness whose they were, and what kind of a mood he was in, too. She looked up from her tomato as he stepped through the doorway.
“Hello, Norm.”
“Your comparator program doesn’t work,” he said without preamble.
She felt a brief surge of panic. “The comparator? What’s wrong with it?”
“It should be finding planets by now, and it’s not; that’s what’s wrong with it.” Norm stopped about three paces away from her, just close enough so he could look down the front of her shirt as she knelt beside the garden.
Mary counted to about twenty-five, thinking: Of course the program’s at fault, then. It couldn’t be Ivan’s telescope nor George’s command interface; no, if there’s a flaw in the system then it’s Mary’s fault. She said, “Maybe you’re using it wrong.”
“I am not using it wrong. I know how to run a simple program—”
“And I know how to install one. The comparator works. I tested it thoroughly.”
“Then why does it find no planets? There should be at least one gas giant in this system, shouldn’t there?”
Norm’s belligerence forced her to voice the thought she’d been keeping to herself for days. “I don’t know. Should there? There’s no law I know of saying every star’s even got to have planets, much less gas giants. That’s why we came here in the first place, to see what we’d find.”
That wasn’t the answer Norm wanted to hear. He took a step closer, stood over Mary with his hands clenched. “You will test the program for errors. I order it.”
Mary raised up and looked Norm straight in the eye. She knew he hated it when she did that. In his world view a man had to be at least ten centimeters taller than a woman. “Who died and made you captain?” she said, enunciating each word.
He hated that even more. Unclenching his fists, but only because honor forbade hitting a woman, he said, “Debug the program.” Without waiting for an answer, he whirled around and stomped away. Mary heard him kick the door open at the top of the stairs.
Idiot. So ruled by his glands and his ridiculous machismo that he couldn’t even function in the company of a woman. Mary figured the only way he’d been able to reconcile himself to having a female captain on the colony expedition had been to sleep with her, and the moment she died he’d claimed the position for himself. Mary wondered why such a man had been chosen to crew a colony starship, but she knew the answer: guys like Gomez were good at surviving once they got where they were going.
Yeah, but at whose expense?
Mary laughed out loud. “Teresa only slept with you to keep you from mutiny, Norm!” she shouted at the empty corridor.
Ivan McGuire heard the shout all the way down the hall in the nanolab. He shook his head at the silliness of it all. Couldn’t those two understand that their petty feud was only adding to all their problems? Things were tough enough without having interpersonal tension to deal with, too. But then, they had been at each other’s throats even before the accident; there was no reason to expect them to change now. Contrary to popular belief, adversity seldom brought out the best in people.
It would be nice if they could at least agree on the obvious, but that seemed beyond them, too. Inevitable as it was, the decision to stop at the red giant had not been simple to reach. Ivan remembered the argument clearly, with the meticulous, sharpedged detail of a memory implanted while under the mindlink. Of course he hadn’t actually been in anyone else’s mind, but they’d all been linked to the database and some spill-over was inevitable. He’d been aware of George’s amusement at the ridiculous turn his life had so recently taken, of Norm’s grief and anger and fear, of Mary’s deep terror beneath her inevitable bluster; all filtered through his own combination of shock, anger, alarm, and – yes – fear as well.
The degree of linkage was just enough to allow that awareness, but not enough to allow direct mental communication. The mutual awareness allowed them to cut through subterfuge and misunderstanding – most of the time, anyway – but the separation kept them thinking independently. It had long ago been discovered that when communication became too intimate, innovation ceased. Individuals needed to remain individual to gain the advantage of different viewpoints, experiences, and prejudices.
Even with the link, it was like meetings all through human history: the advantage went to the strongest personality. If there was more than one strong personality . . . well, the meetings took longer. Occasionally a better decision even came out of it.
The review of facts had been short. With their mindlinks, everyone had immediate access to the same basic information. As he’d sat at the round table, watching his three sweaty shipmates scratch under their thick headbands, Ivan had suddenly known that the rest of the ship’s repairs could safely be left in the hands of the robots and th
e nanofabrication cells, that the expected lifespan of the biosystem was now less than two years, that even if all four of them went into SloMo they could only extend their time by another six months, that their original destination was still over seven years away – the data had gone on and on, including the information that they were within half a light-year of the red giant star they had intended only to fly past en route to their final destination. That wasn’t so coincidental as it seemed: space is dirtier near stars, so if they were going to be hit, that was the most likely place.
Nor was their being there a coincidence, either. Colony ships always had funding problems, so when the university had approached the mission planners with a proposal to combine a scientific mission with their colony expedition (“Just a fivedegree deviation in course, and with the gravity assist it will only cost you a month’s time”), the mission planners had agreed without hesitation. The ship would make a close flyby through the red giant system, and they would take along a colonistscientist to run the instrumentation.
Mary was that scientist. A graduate student at the university, she’d had the necessary skills to head the project, and she was one of the few who looked at the colony proj ect as an opportunity to start another university rather than as an exile to the frontier.
As their first post-disaster planning session had gotten under way, Ivan had tried to guess what she thought of the project now. He’d known what Norm thought, that Mary was responsible for the disaster, but he’d wondered: Did Mary think that, too? The mindlink was just tenuous enough that he couldn’t tell.
She had been the first to speak of possible alternatives. “We could retarget for the giant,” she’d said.
Norm had jumped on her immediately. “Looking for volatiles near a red giant would be pointless,” he’d said. “Things will be baked out there already.”
“Not necessarily, Norm. Outer planets might survive. Gas giants—”
Norm had let himself slip, then. “Dammit, Mary! You know we can’t get gases out of a deep gravity well.”
His blush had been a thing to behold. What was going through his head at that moment? Ivan had wondered. By the sense of shame seeping through the mindlink, Norm was almost certainly berating himself for swearing at a woman. Such lofty ideals! Ivan wondered if he would indulge in self-flagellation in the privacy of his own quarters. So silly. So much easier to admit one’s faults and learn to live with them.
Mary had hardly noticed the swearing anyway. “Norm, gas giants aren’t the only things in a solar system. Most of them probably will have shriveled after the star expanded anyway. The inner ones won’t be giants any more. Besides, the outer ones may still have icy moons.”
“We’re a dead ship if we can’t think of something better than the red giant,” Norm had insisted stubbornly.
“We’re all ears,” Mary had said then, and God knows, they’d all tried to come up with something better. They’d considered ramscoops to collect interstellar gasses, they’d looked at freezing the colonists down from SloMo to true NoMo to save resources, they’d toyed with drawing straws and dying “like men” (Norm’s idea) so a few could live to the end of the trip, but in the end they’d knocked holes in every argument they’d presented. The numbers for ramscoop size versus gathering ability simply didn’t add up; a frozen body was a dead body and everyone had known that since the early twenty-first century; and the maximum number of sleepers the ship could deliver alive to their original destination without replenishing water and air was far less than the amount needed for a colony.
They were going to have to retarget for the giant. None of them liked the idea; Norm hated it when Mary was right with one of her shots from the hip, and neither Ivan nor George nor even Mary herself liked the idea of looking for water around a red giant. But what else could they do?
We could learn to get along in the process, Ivan thought, but he knew that the odds of that were even less than the odds of finding water.
George Nakamoto was not a nervous man. Serenity and harmony, the virtues cultivated by his Japanese forebears and drummed into him during his upbringing, had taken to that degree. But sardonic cynicism was his substitute for true serenity – just as it was for Westerners. No doubt his grandfather would have blamed such unbalance on his mixed parentage.
But if harmony was the crux of existence, why had his ancestors left Japan in the first place? Or ridden a starship to one of Earth’s first colonies? Same reason he was on this ship, a second-wave colonist himself? If so, then it was closer to boredom than it was to harmony.
Meditation was still a valuable ability, though, even if seldom practised. He took a deep breath, exhaled it slowly, took another –
A knock at the door interrupted him. He sighed in irritation, made a futile attempt to banish that emotion, then said, in resignation, “Come in.”
The knob turned and Mary pushed the door open. “Have you got a minute?” she asked.
George sighed again, his hope of inner peace fading. He waved Mary toward the bunk – the only other place to sit in his room besides at the desk. “What’s on your mind?”
She sat down. “The telescope,” she said. “Norm claims there has to be a bug in the comparator program because it’s not finding any planets. I’ve tested the software over and over, and it’s right. So . . .”
“So it’s got to be the telescope,” George finished for her.
Mary shrugged. “Well, yeah. It’s got to be. Either in the instrument itself or in the interface.”
George felt a vague amusement. “Such a curious position for you to be in, wanting Norm to be right!”
Mary glared at him, but she remained silent.
George grinned at her, although a part of him sneered at himself for indulging in put downs. Even if Mary had come barging in with an accusation, that was no excuse for causing her gratuitous discomfort. Especially in a tiny shipboard environment. He banished his grin and said quietly, trying to take the sting from his earlier mocking, “I understand why you want the results to be wrong. We’re committed to stopping; planets or no. In a few days we’ve got to go into SloMo and wait for the computer to finish the trip for us, and if there’s nothing there we’re out of luck.” He looked at his desktop, bare except for the flatscreen monitor folded into its surface and the headband resting beside it. Without looking up, he said, “Unfortunately, for our peace of mind at any rate, both the telescope and interface are okay. I’ve tested them as thoroughly as you’ve tested your comparator. You can tell Norm that if the system is seeing nothing, then there is nothing there to see.”
Mary stood up. “You’re right, but would you please tell that to Norm, too? He won’t believe it from me, especially since it’s bad news.” She looked straight at him until he turned to face her again.
George reacted differently to that gaze than Norm would. Where Norm saw hostility, he saw pain, and it made him feel even more guilty. He nodded. “Sure, Mary, I’ll do that.”
“Thanks.” She opened the door and stepped out, then stuck her head back inside. “I mean it,” she said, and then she was gone.
The very deep did rot; O Christ!
That ever this should be!
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea.
–Part II, Stanza 10
The deepswimmer had risen too high. A sluggish blimp of flesh, as large as the ancient Terran airship whose form evolution had unconsciously mimicked, it struggled frantically to stop its ascent, to flee back down into the safety of the cold dead deep water. But it was too late. Hunger had driven it higher than usual in its search for microorganisms, well up into the aerated water where the carnivores lived. It could hear their sonar pinging, a crescendoing cacophony as more and more of the swiftkillers detected the lumbering deepswimmer and immediately zeroed in on it.
The swiftkillers slashed by, slicing out ribbons of flesh, greedily snapping after the meat. Severed pieces drifted only seconds before being gulped down in their t
urn. Blood trailed like streamers from the deepswimmer’s wounds, pooling into a fog, shrouding the places where chunks of flesh had been torn out. The cloud was invisible in the lightless water, but it might as well have been luminous, shouting its chemical signals into the water, a windfall of organic matter for the perpetually starved upper ocean.
The great beast thrashed in helpless agony, the cloud of blood growing thicker, the number of swiftkillers – swarming to it like terrestrial moths to a light – ever larger. Now and again one swiftkiller slashed another in passing, and a mini-frenzy would erupt as the other swiftkillers turned on their wounded comrade.
The feast lasted for hours. But at length the frenzy eased, the blood cloud began to thin, and a few engorged swiftkillers began to leave. But before the blood had dispersed too much, scavengefilters swarmed through, armored against the slashing death, greedily straining the blood and shreds of flesh out of the gory water. A latecoming swiftkiller, still hungry and driven to distraction by the smells in the water, attacked one of the filters before instinct could stop it, but its teeth barely scraped the filter’s chitinous armor before the filter discharged its internal battery into the swiftkiller’s body. Suddenly numb, the swiftkiller drifted downward, but only momentarily, until set upon by its companions. No other swiftkillers were so foolish, or so unlucky, as to tangle with the scavengefilters.
And after another hour, there was nothing left even for the filters.
The swiftkillers resumed their restless cruising, ranging all the way from there at the bottom edge of the oxygenated layer of water to the surface tens of kilometers above. Searching, searching, searching for anything that moved, for anything made of something besides water. Bits of falling organic matter, other creatures, dead or living – even small meteorites that managed to survive the trip through the corrosive atmosphere and acidic water – all provided food for the ever-starving denizens of the planet-encompassing ocean.
The Mammoth Book of Extreme Science Fiction Page 25