The fouchian’s tendrils flexed and became a bright pink. A sure sign of anger, Sarrie knew. Yet the artificial voice remained crisp and worthy. “We know the world’s age and mass, and Ejy himself made these estimates, all based on long experience—”
“A volcanic pulse,” Navren interrupted. “But more likely, residual heat after a major impact.” He launched into a thorough analysis, intuition sprinkled over a technical mastery that astonished Sarrie. If it was an impact, she learned, then it was recent—in the last million years—and it had happened where the ice was smoother than a newborn’s cheek.
When the impromptu lecture ended, a cold silence held sway.
Every team member should be grateful for expert advice. Yet only Ejy seemed genuinely pleased. His old-human face smiled and smiled, even as his first officer remarked, “No one can make such a quick analysis. I think our distinguished colleague accessed these files before you gave him permission, Artisan Ejy.”
It was a serious breach of the rules, if true. Knowledge, in all its glorious colors, belonged to their masters.
But Ejy chose to ignore any offense. “The boy is eager. I see no crime.” Black eyes glanced at both fouchian officers. “This is a training mission, children. A simple world is being given to us to share, and let’s not forget our purpose. Our unity. Please.”
Navren grinned openly, winking at the two young women behind him.
Again, Ejy said, “Children.”
He meant humans and he meant fouchians, and Sarrie didn’t need to be a Voice to understand the intent of that one potent word.
* * *
It had been centuries since the Web had had so many worlds to investigate; very few organics could recall such adventures, and none of them were human. In honor of their mission, the humans held a traditional ceremony, but it turned into a static, formal, and desperately dull affair. It took a party to cure the dullness. With strong drink in her belly, the mission’s Voice decided to join Navren, complimenting him for being right about the new world’s heat flow. Tiny probes had landed recently, sending home evidence of a genuine ocean, deep and warm and exactly where he had predicted it to be.
Compliments made Navren smile. But he wasn’t prompted to compliment her in turn, his gaze saying, “Of course I was right. Why wouldn’t I be?”
Sober, Sarrie would have seen the soul inside the arrogance. But the drunken Voice persisted, confessing excitement, hoping aloud that she could help their mission, if not as a Voice, then at least as a willing worker.
“Forget worrying,” was Navren’s advice. “This is a useless little mission. It’s nothing.”
She winced, then remarked, “That seems harsh.”
“We’re visiting a snowball,” he countered. “A big fancy snowball. This team’s real work doesn’t begin until we slide past the fourth solar system.” His narrow brown face showed disgust. “And we’ll be old people before we reach its most promising world—”
“What world? How do you know?”
“I had early access to our mission files. Remember?”
“You’ve studied what’s coming?”
“Maybe yes, maybe no.” A big wink, then he said, “Our best prospect is Earth-like. Warm and green. Radio-dead, but even light-years away, it shows evidence of agriculture—”
Sarrie clapped her hands over her ears, in reflex. “‘Knowledge too soon is the same as poison,’” she quoted from the Artisan code. And their mission wasn’t useless, either.
Navren shrugged, then effortlessly changed subjects.
“You know,” he remarked in a casual, self-satisfied way, “you and I won’t sleep together. You’re wasting your hope trying to seduce me.”
Surprise became a fumbling anger. Sarrie muttered, “I was never thinking—”
“Oh, yes, you were,” Navren insisted. “You and Lilké talk about me, wondering who’s to screw me first.”
Astonishing, infuriating words.
And true, but only to a degree. Idle chatter, in passing, and she wouldn’t let him entertain the remote possibility…!
“You’re too conventional for my tastes,” Navren continued.
“You don’t know me,” she growled.
“Of course I do. I read those novels of yours.” He shook his head and squinted, telling her, “The second novel was your best.”
“You didn’t read it.”
“In that silly language of yours, yes.”
She felt lightheaded.
“Besides,” he claimed, “every Voice is the same essential creature. Human or fouchian, or whatever. Voices have an exact job, and like it or not, the Artisans build you along very precise lines.”
Sarrie took a deep, useless breath.
“On the other hand, I have twenty-three untried genes inside me. I require things to be fresh. New.” Emotions that no Voice could have read passed through his face, the eyes flaring. The insufferable man announced, “I think your friend—Lilké, is it?—is more to my taste.”
Looking across the green paddock, Sarrie found her parents speaking to Lilké, no doubt wishing her well, and begging her to please watch after “our little Sarrie.”
“Tell her what I said,” Navren purred. “Tell her to come visit me.”
She had enough, cursing him in fouchian and storming off. But later, when Sarrie calmed enough to laugh at the boorish idiot, she told Lilké exactly what he had said. Voices were natural mimics and entertainers, but her lovely friend didn’t laugh at the appropriate moments, or even speak, her deep brown-black eyes looking elsewhere, trying to find Navren among all the young, blessed geniuses.
* * *
Their scout ship was built on ancient, proven principles—blunt and swift, fuel tanks and engines dwarfing the tiny crew quarters. With supplies and extra-heavy equipment, there was no room left for elbows, much less comfort. Humans had to spend most of the eleven-month voyage in cold-sleep. Only the fouchian officers and Ejy remained awake, immune to the claustrophobia.
Ten days out from the new world, the sleepers were warmed, then reawakened.
They gorged on breakfasts rich with fat and antioxidants. Then the scientists and engineers were sent to organize their laboratories and calibrate delicate instruments. Lilké found little problems that evaded easy answers. Tests supplied by Ejy? Perhaps, although not likely. Either way, Sarrie helped where possible, then simply tried to stay out of the way. By early evening, she was starving again, teetering close to exhaustion. Yet she felt like a traitor when she excused herself, making amends by promising, “I’ll get our cabin in order. Come to bed soon. You need rest too.”
True enough, but her friend didn’t arrive by midnight. Bundled up in bed, Sarrie plunged into her first dreams in nearly a year—intricate dreams of being alien, of meeting a human Voice who sang of some faraway Heaven. Waking, she smiled, then realized it was three in the morning and Lilké was missing … and of course Sarrie dressed and went to the genetics lab, trembling with worry until she saw that the lab was dark, and sealed, and she finally thought to ask the ship’s computer about Lilké’s whereabouts.
The computer gave a cabin number. Navren’s cabin.
In the morning, after a string of nightmares, Sarrie saw her best friend sitting with Navren in the tiny galley. What she already knew became a concrete truth, as inescapable as physical law. Despite a fierce hunger, she couldn’t eat near them; the next few days were spent hiding in her cabin, pretending to work at Ejy’s unsolvable simulation. As always, the xenophobic aliens destroyed the Web. Nothing she did seemed to mollify them. Yet it didn’t matter anymore. Nothing mattered except for Sarrie’s black mood, and she clung to it for as long as her nature and Ejy allowed.
The Artisan hadn’t spoken twice to the Voice since she had risen from cold-sleep. She had barely wondered why. But within a few hours of their landing, he came to her cabin dressed as the old man, and he asked if she would please join him for a little stroll.
They went to the astronomical lab, empty now despite important w
ork on hand. Empty by command? she wondered. The main screen was filled with their nameless world—a pale white ball, cold and nearly featureless. It seemed incapable of holding Sarrie’s attention. She forced herself to appear interested. “Have we learned anything new?” she inquired, knowing that learning was as inevitable on this ship as breathing was.
“We’ve learned much,” the ancient Artisan replied. “But most of it is trivial. Nuggets and details only.”
The worthwhile discoveries were waiting for the humans to find them. As it was intended to be, she told herself.
A strong false hand gripped her shoulder, squeezing hard.
Sarrie refused to talk about the lovers in the nearby cabin. Instead, with a tone of fearful confession, she whispered, “I want to have a great life.”
“You will,” her companion replied, without hesitation.
“I want you, you and the other Artisans … to talk about me for a million years.”
The gripping hand relaxed, almost lifting.
No voice said, “We will,” or even, “Perhaps we will.” Because it wasn’t possible, of course. What single organic deserved such fame?
Without looking at Ejy, she said, “Thank you.”
“For what, may I ask?”
“Your help. Your patience.” She paused, forcing herself not to cry. “Thank you for making me into the best Voice that I can possibly be.”
“You cannot be anything else,” he assured, laughing gently. Fouchians had an insult. “Posturing-on-another’s-mound-of-soil.” She thought of it until Ejy, affecting a tone of concern, asked her:
“What are you thinking, child?”
She looked at the false face, crystal eyes cool and black—more alien than any other eyes on the Web—and she confessed, “I feel closer to you than to my own species.”
A soft, soft laugh.
Then the hand squeezed until her shoulder ached, and the Artisan said, “Exactly as it should be, sweet Voice. As it always is.…”
FOUR
The ship set down on a plain of water ice—hard as granite, smooth as sleep, and relentlessly, numbingly cold. Tradition and practicality called for an unessential crew member to be first to the surface. Ejy gave Sarrie the honor. She donned her heavily insulated lifesuit, gave a general thumbs-up, then with a musical hum of motorized limbs strode into the main airlock, waiting to descend onto the ice.
“For the Artisans, parents to all,” she announced, “I claim this lovely bleak place.”
Violence had created the ice. Yet Navren seemed unsure which natural process to blame. Comet impacts or vulcanism? Perhaps some combination of both, he decided, and he built elaborate simulations involving rains of comets piercing the crust, allowing plastic rock to rise to within a very few kilometers of where they stood now.
Steady chill winds had polished the ice ever since. Disturbing that crystalline perfection felt sacrilegious, but Lilké wanted deep samples, unmarred by cosmic radiation. Navren helped her erect a portable drilling rig. Their first fist-sized sample, brought up after just a few minutes’ work, was sprinkled with treasure: A few dozen tiny, tiny fossils frozen where they had died, swimming in an ocean melted for a moment after a hundred-million-year winter.
Scarce, as expected, and uncomplicated, the fossils resembled bacteria in basic ways. Lilké isolated their naked DNA, patching gaps and decoding the naked genetics. Then in a long aquarium filling half of her lab—a cold, lightless, and pressurized little ocean—she conjured the aliens out of amino acids and lipids, watching as they began to slowly thrive.
Despite this world’s poverty, life had persisted. Lilké’s bugs were pragmatically sluggish, powered by anaerobic chemistries, and judging by their numbers in the ice, they were scarce. She and Navren warned the others that beneath the ice, even in the ocean’s secret gardens, life would be scarce. Yet these creatures were survivors and admirable because of it, existing for several billion years—outliving suns, worlds, and even their own pitiful earth.
Ejy called a general meeting, then asked humans and fouchians to find some means to cut their way to the mysterious sea.
Navren proposed using nuclear charges, hammering their way through two kilometers of ice in an afternoon. But more conservative souls won out. The ship’s potent reactors would pump heat into the icecap, sculpting a deep hole, and the superheated vapor would be thrown high overhead, freezing almost immediately, then falling. For the first time in eons, this world would enjoy a good long peaceful snow.
Sarrie was suddenly desperate to feel involved. But the hardware, fat pumps and redundant backup power systems and such, had been proven on thousands of similar worlds, and her help took the form of sitting inside a prefabricated hut near the borehole, watching for mechanical problems only a little more likely than another comet impact. To someone groomed for intellectual adventure, boredom was a shock. Sarrie stared out at the enormous geyser, feeling its roar more than she could hear it in the near-vacuum … and a secret portion of her fearing that nothing more interesting than this would ever happen in her life.
The twisted necklace of suns set during her duty time. The temperature would plummet another fraction of a degree, the sense of eternal night growing worse. On her second day, Sarrie was considering tears when the Milky Way rose behind her—a majestic fog of suns, never more lovely, lending color and depth to the man-made geyser, but the geyser’s magnificence all its own.
Sarrie composed a poem in the next few hours, then dedicated it to Lilké and posted it in the galley. But her friend was taking her meals in the lab, studying her bugs twenty hours a day before indulging in private fun with her gruesome boyfriend. It was Ejy who praised the poem first, applauding her imagery and the message. Only then did the fouchians and other humans read it, seemingly appreciating it. But Navren, of all people, offered no opinions. Sarrie was eating a late dinner when he read it, and she braced herself for some terse, biting critique. Surely he would browbeat her for not understanding the physics of expanding gases and phase changes. But no, the gruesome boyfriend seemed to nod respectfully, even as the author sat nearby, sipping juice, pretending to be blind.
That next morning, Sarrie was walking toward her post. The borehole was several kilometers from the ship. The thin winds had fallen off while she had slept, icy snow falling silently on her. She was navigating in a darker-than-night gloom, using her suit’s instruments to keep on course, and suddenly, without warning, a dark monstrous blob appeared before her.
A low liquid moan came from Sarrie.
It was some kind of alien, obviously. Her eyes refused to find anything familiar about it. She took a few steps backward, then paused, one hand lifting instinctively, ready to ward off any blows; and finally, at the last instant, she remembered that she was a Voice, for goodness sake. And in a thin whisper, she told the alien, “Hello,” in many languages, hoping against hope to be understood.
“Hello,” the monster replied, smiling behind his crystal faceplate.
She knew him. The bulky body was a lifesuit, and she finally saw the identification symbol on the helmet—the familiar silhouette of a human—then the sharp, self-assured face.
“Navren?” she sputtered.
But he said nothing else—an uncharacteristic moment—handing her a small pad and making sure that she had a firm grip. Then he walked on past, the blizzard swallowing him without sound, without fuss, his wide bootprints beginning to fill with icy grains. Perhaps he hadn’t been here at all.
Sarrie reached the hut without further incident, relieving an extremely bored expert in alien neurology.
Alone and unwatched, she woke Navren’s pad. It contained nothing but a long poem about another geyser on a different world. A warm, blue-green world, she realized. Judging by the star-rich sky, it was somewhere deep in the Milky Way. No author was named, but clues led to obvious conclusions: The poem had been written by a human Voice. Moreover, its rhythms and imagery were nearly identical to the poem displayed back in the galley. The s
ame symbols, even. The geyser linked life and the stars, emotion and purpose, organics and the blessed Artisans. On and on, point by point. It was obvious—Sarrie’s soul had written both versions. But what disturbed her most was that this earlier work, without question, was better than yesterday’s effort. Not to mention superior to everything else that she had written in her current life.
Read once, the mysterious poem vanished from the pad, leaving no trace except in Sarrie’s mind.
When the neurologist arrived at the appointed time, relieving her, Sarrie went straight to Navren.
Before she could speak, he told her, “I gave you nothing. And if you say otherwise, I’ll be extremely disappointed.”
He was working on some kind of device, possibly of his own design. The machine shop was cluttered and loud, and save for the two of them, it was empty. Yet for some reason, Sarrie found herself glancing over her shoulder.
“I expected more from you, Sarrie.” The man plugged components into components, telling her, “The good Voice sees the universe through another’s eyes. Am I right? Well, look at my eyes. Look! Tell me what I see!”
She hated the man.
“Leave me,” he growled. “Get out of here. I’m working!”
She hated him and wouldn’t do what he asked. In revenge, Sarrie refused him the simple gift of her understanding.
* * *
They reached the living sea exactly on schedule.
A quick celebration culminated with the Artisan blessing his organics for their good work. The precious water rose almost two kilometers on its own, then was grabbed by powerful pumps and insulated pipes, filling both an empty fuel tank and Lilké’s pressurized aquarium. The celebrants filed through the lab for a symbolic quick glance. One of the fouchians, pulling his bulk down the narrow aisle, claimed to see a momentary phosphorescence. “Too much to drink,” was Lilké’s verdict—a glib dismissal of a colleague whose physiology couldn’t survive ethanol. Then the nonessential organics herded themselves into the hallway, standing three-deep, talking too loudly as the geneticist tried to ignore them, starting to make the obvious and routine first tests.
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection Page 71