“I am entirely serious,” Sho said.
Enki had rotated to show that the notch was the beginning of a groove. The groove elongated as the worldlet rotated further. Tigris Rift. Its edges ramified in complex fractal branchings.
“I’m going where the proxies fell,” Margaret said. “I’m still working for you.”
“You sabotaged the proxies. That’s why they couldn’t fully penetrate the Rift.”
“That’s why I’m going—”
“Excuse me,” the suit said, “but I register a small energy flux.”
“Just a tickle from the ranging sight,” Sho said. “Turn back now, Dr. Wu.”
“I intend to come back.”
It was a struggle to stay calm. Margaret thought that Sho’s threat was no more than empty air. The laser’s AI would not allow it to be used against human targets, and she was certain that Sho couldn’t override it. And even if he could, he wouldn’t dare kill her in full view of the science crews. Sho was bluffing. He had to be.
The radio silence stretched. Then Sho said, “You’re planning to commit a final act of sabotage. Don’t think you can get away with it. I’m sending someone after you.”
Margaret was dizzy with relief. Anyone chasing her would be using the same kind of transit platform. She had at least thirty minutes head start.
Another voice said, “Don’t think this will make you a hero.”
Opie Kindred. Of course. The man never could delegate. He was on the same trajectory, several hundred kilometers behind but gaining slowly.
“Tell me what you found,” she said. “Then we can finish this race before it begins.”
Opie Kindred switched off his radio.
“If you had not brought along all this gear,” her suit grumbled, “we could outdistance him.”
“I think we’ll need it soon. We’ll just have to be smarter than him.”
Margaret studied the schematics of the poison-spraying mechanism—it was beautifully simple, but vulnerable—while Tigris Rift swelled beneath her, a jumble of knife-edge chevron ridges. Enki was so small and the Rift so wide that the walls had fallen beneath the horizon. She was steering toward the Rift’s center when the suit apologized and said that there was another priority override.
It was the Ganapati’s lawyer. She warned Margaret that this was being entered into sealed court records, and then formally revoked her contract and read a complaint about her seditious conduct.
“You’re a contracted worker just like me,” Margaret said. “We take orders, but we both have codes of professional ethics, too. For the record, that’s why I’m here. The reef is a unique organism. I cannot allow it to be destroyed.”
Dzu Sho came onto the channel and said, “Off the record, don’t think about being picked up.”
The lawyer switched channels. “He does not mean it,” she said. “He would be in violation of the distress statutes.” Pause. “Good luck, Dr. Wu.”
Then there was only the carrier wave.
Margaret wished that this made her feel better. Plenty of contract workers who went against the direct orders of their employers had disappeared, or been killed in industrial accidents. The fire of the mass meeting had evaporated long before the suit had assembled itself around her, and now she felt colder and lonelier than ever.
She fell, the platform shuddering now and then as it adjusted its trim. Opie Kindred’s platform was a bright spark moving sideways across the drifts of stars above. Directly below was a vast flow of nitrogen ice with a black river winding through it. The center of the Rift, a cleft two kilometers long and fifty kilometers deep. The reef.
She fell toward it.
She had left the radio channel open. Suddenly, Opie Kindred said, “Stop now and it will be over.”
“Tell me what you know.”
No answer.
She said, “You don’t have to follow me, Opie. This is my risk. I don’t ask you to share it.”
“You won’t take this away from me.”
“Is citizenship really worth this, Opie?”
No reply.
The suit’s proximity alarms began to ping and beep. She turned them off one by one, and told the suit to be quiet when it complained.
“I am only trying to help,” it said. “You should reduce your velocity. The target is very narrow.”
“I’ve been here before,” Margaret said.
But only by proxy. The ice field rushed up at her. Its smooth flows humped over one another, pitted everywhere with tiny craters. She glimpsed black splashes where vacuum organisms had colonized a stress ridge. Then an edge flashed past; walls unraveled on either side.
She was in the reef.
The vacuum organisms were everywhere: flat plates jutting from the walls; vases and delicate fans and fretworks; huge blotches smooth as ice or dissected by cracks. In the light cast by the platform’s lamps, they did not possess the vibrant primary colors of the proxy link, but were every shade of gray and black, streaked here and there with muddy reds. Complex fans ramified far back inside the milky nitrogen ice, following veins of carbonaceous compounds.
Far above, stars were framed by the edges of the cleft. One star was falling toward her: Opie Kindred. Margaret switched on the suit’s radar, and immediately it began to ping. The suit shouted a warning, but before Margaret could look around the pings dopplered together.
Proxies.
They shot up toward her, tentacles writhing from the black, streamlined helmets of their mantles. Most of them missed, jagging erratically as they squirted bursts of hydrogen to kill their velocity. Two collided in a slow flurry of tentacles.
Margaret laughed. None of her crew would fight against her, and Sho was relying upon inexperienced operators.
The biggest proxy, three meters long, swooped past. The crystalline gleam of its sensor array reflected the lights of the platform. It decelerated, spun on its axis, and dove back toward her.
Margaret barely had time to pull out the weapon she had brought with her. It was a welding pistol, rigged on a long rod with a yoked wire around the trigger. She thrust it up like the torch of the Statue of Liberty just before the proxy struck her.
The suit’s gauntlet, elbow joint and shoulder piece stiffened under the heavy impact, saving Margaret from broken bones, but the collision knocked the transit platform sideways. It plunged through reef growths. Like glass, they had tremendous rigidity but very little lateral strength. Fans and lattices broke away, peppering Margaret and the proxy with shards. It was like falling through a series of chandeliers. Margaret couldn’t close her fingers in the stiffened gauntlet. She stood tethered to the platform with her arm and the rod raised straight up and the black proxy wrapped around them. The proxy’s tentacles lashed her visor with slow, purposeful slaps.
Margaret knew that it would take only a few moments before the tentacles’ carbon-fiber proteins could unlink; then it would be able to reach the life-support pack on her back.
She shouted at the suit, ordering it to relax the gauntlet’s fingers. The proxy was contracting around her rigid arm as it stretched toward the life-support pack. When the gauntlet went limp, pressure snapped her fingers closed. Her forefinger popped free of the knuckle. She yelled with pain. And the wire rigged to the welding pistol’s trigger pulled taut.
Inside the proxy’s mantle, a focused beam of electrons boiled off the pistol’s filament. The pistol, designed to work only in high vacuum, began to arc almost immediately, but the electron beam had already heated the integument and muscle of the proxy to more than 400°C. Vapor expanded explosively. The proxy shot away, propelled by the gases of its own dissolution.
Opie was still gaining on Margaret. Gritting her teeth against the pain of her dislocated finger, she dumped the broken welding gear. It only slowly floated away above her, for it still had the same velocity as she did.
A proxy swirled in beside her with shocking suddenness. For a moment, she gazed into its faceted sensor array, and then dots of luminescenc
e skittered across its smooth black mantle, forming letters.
Much luck, boss. SK.
Srin Kerenyi. Margaret waved with her good hand. The proxy scooted away, rising at a shallow angle toward Opie’s descending star.
A few seconds later the cleft filled with the unmistakable flash of laser light.
The radar trace of Srin’s proxy disappeared.
Shit. Opie Kindred was armed. If he got close enough he could kill her.
Margaret risked a quick burn of the transit platform’s motor to increase her rate of fall. It roared at her back for twenty seconds; when it cut out her pressure suit warned her that she had insufficient fuel for full deceleration.
“I know what I’m doing,” Margaret told it.
The complex forms of the reef dwindled past. Then there were only huge patches of black staining the nitrogen ice walls. Margaret passed her previous record depth, and still she fell. It was like free fall; the negligible gravity of Enki did not cause any appreciable acceleration.
Opie Kindred gained on her by increments.
In vacuum, the lights of the transit platform threw abrupt pools of light onto the endlessly unraveling walls. Slowly, the pools of light elongated into glowing tunnels filled with sparkling motes. The exfoliations and gases and organic molecules were growing denser. And, impossibly, the temperature was rising, one degree with every five hundred meters. Far below, between the narrowing perspective of the walls, structures were beginning to resolve from the blackness.
The suit reminded her that she should begin the platform’s deceleration burn. Margaret checked Opie’s velocity and said she would wait.
“I have no desire to end as a crumpled tube filled with strawberry jam,” the suit said. It projected a countdown on her visor and refused to switch it off.
Margaret kept one eye on Opie’s velocity, the other on the blur of reducing numbers. The numbers passed zero. The suit screamed obscenities in her ears, but she waited a beat more before firing the platform’s motor.
The platform slammed into her boots. Sharp pain in her ankles and knees. The suit stiffened as the harness dug into her shoulders and waist.
Opie Kindred’s platform flashed past. He had waited until after she had decelerated before making his move. Margaret slapped the release buckle of the platform’s harness and fired the piton gun into the nitrogen ice wall. It was enough to slow her so that she could catch hold of a crevice and swing up into it. Her dislocated finger hurt like hell.
The temperature was a stifling eighty-seven degrees above absolute zero. The atmospheric pressure was just registering—a mix of hydrogen and carbon monoxide and hydrogen sulphide. Barely enough in the whole of the bottom of the cleft to pack into a small box at the pressure of Earth’s atmosphere at sea level, but the rate of production must be tremendous to compensate for loss into the colder vacuum above.
Margaret leaned out of the crevice. Below, it widened into a chimney between humped pressure flows of nitrogen ice sloping down to the floor of the cleft. The slopes and the floor were packed with a wild proliferation of growths. Not only the familiar vases and sheets and laces, but great branching structures like crystal trees, lumpy plates raised on stout stalks, tangles of black wire hundreds of meters across, clusters of frothy globes, and much more.
There was no sign of Opie Kindred, but tethered above the growths were the balloons of his spraying mechanism. Each was a dozen meters across, crinkled, flaccid. They were fifty degrees hotter than their surroundings, would have to grow hotter still before the metabolic inhibitor was completely volatilized inside them. When that happened, small explosive devices would puncture them, and the metabolic inhibitor would be sucked into the vacuum of the cleft like smoke up a chimney.
Margaret consulted the schematics and started to climb down the crevice, light as a dream, steering herself with the fingers of her left hand. The switching relays that controlled the balloons’ heaters were manually controlled because of telemetry interference from the reef’s vacuum smog and the broadband electromagnetic resonance. The crash shelter where they were located was about two kilometers away, a slab of orange foamed plastic in the center of a desolation of abandoned equipment and broken and half-melted vacuum organism colonies.
The crevice widened. Margaret landed between drifts of what looked like giant soap bubbles that grew at its bottom.
And Opie Kindred’s platform rose up between two of the half-inflated balloons.
Margaret dropped onto her belly behind a line of bubbles that grew along a smooth ridge of ice. She opened a radio channel. It was filled with a wash of static and a wailing modulation, but through the noise she heard Opie’s voice faintly calling her name.
He was a hundred meters away and more or less at her level, turning in a slow circle. He couldn’t locate her amidst the radio noise and the ambient temperature was higher than the skin of her pressure suit, so she had no infrared image.
She began to crawl along the smooth ridge. The walls of the bubbles were whitely opaque, but she could see shapes curled within them. Like embryos inside eggs.
“Everything is ready, Margaret,” Opie Kindred’s voice said in her helmet. “I’m going to find you, and then I’m going to sterilize this place. There are things here you know nothing about. Horribly dangerous things. Who are you working for? Tell me that and I’ll let you live.”
A thread of red light waved out from the platform and a chunk of nitrogen ice cracked off explosively. Margaret felt it through the tips of her gloves.
“I can cut my way through to you,” Opie Kindred said, “wherever you are hiding.”
Margaret watched the platform slowly revolve. Tried to guess if she could reach the shelter while he was looking the other way. All she had to do was bound down the ridge and cross a kilometer of bare, crinkled nitrogen ice without being fried by Opie’s laser. Still crouching, she lifted onto the tips of her fingers and toes, like a sprinter on the block. He was turning, turning. She took three deep breaths to clear her head—and something crashed into the ice cliff high above! It spun out in a spray of shards, hit the slope below and spun through toppling clusters of tall black chimneys. For a moment, Margaret was paralyzed with astonishment. Then she remembered the welding gear. It had finally caught up with her.
Opie Kindred’s platform slewed around and a red thread waved across the face of the cliff. A slab of ice thundered outward. Margaret bounded away, taking giant leaps and trying to look behind her at the same time.
The slab spun on its axis, shedding huge shards, and smashed into the cluster of the bubbles where she had been crouching just moments before. The ice shook like a living thing under her feet and threw her head over heels.
She stopped herself by firing the piton gun into the ground. She was on her back, looking up at the top of the ridge, where bubbles vented a dense mix of gas and oily organics before bursting in an irregular cannonade. Hundreds of slim black shapes shot away. Some smashed into the walls of the cleft and stuck there, but many more vanished into its maw.
A chain reaction had started. Bubbles were bursting open up and down the length of the cleft.
A cluster popped under Opie Kindred’s platform and he vanished in a roil of vapor. The crevice shook. Nitrogen ice boiled into a dense fog. A wind got up for a few minutes. Margaret clung to the piton until it was over.
Opie Kindred had drifted down less than a hundred meters away. The thing which had smashed the visor of his helmet was still lodged there. It was slim and black, with a hard, shiny exoskeleton. The broken bodies of others settled among smashed vacuum organism colonies, glistening like beetles in the light of Margaret’s suit. They were like tiny, tentacle-less proxies, their swollen mantles cased in something like keratin. Some had split open, revealing ridged reaction chambers and complex matrices of black threads.
“Gametes,” Margaret said, seized by a sudden wild intuition. “Little rocketships full of DNA.”
The suit asked if she was all right.
She giggled. “The parasite turns everything into its own self. Even proxies!”
“I believe that I have located Dr. Kindred’s platform,” the suit said. “I suggest that you refrain from vigorous exercise, Maggie. Your oxygen supply is limited. What are you doing?”
She was heading toward the crash shelter. “I’m going to switch off the balloon heaters. They won’t be needed.”
After she shut down the heaters, Margaret lashed one of the dead creatures to the transit platform. She shot up between the walls of the cleft, and at last rose into the range of the relay transmitters. Her radio came alive, a dozen channels blinking for attention. Arn was on one, and she told him what had happened.
“Sho wanted to light out of here,” Arn said, “but stronger heads prevailed. Come home, Margaret.”
“Did you see them? Did you, Arn?”
“Some hit the Ganapati.” He laughed. “Even the Star Chamber can’t deny what happened.”
Margaret rose up above the ice fields and continued to rise until the curve of the worldlet’s horizon became visible, and then the walls of Tigris Rift. The Ganapati was a faint star bracketed between them. She called up deep radar, and saw, beyond the Ganapati’s strong signal, thousands of faint traces falling away into deep space.
A random scatter of genetic packages. How many would survive to strike new worldlets and give rise to new reefs?
Enough, she thought. The reef evolved in saltatory jumps. She had just witnessed its next revolution.
Given time, it would fill the Kuiper Belt.
EXCHANGE RATE
Hal Clement
Hal Clement (the pen name of Harry Clement Stubbs [born 1922]) is one of the writers whose works P. Schuyler Miller coined the term hard SF to describe. Miller said in 1957, “The ultimate in present-day science fiction is being written by Hal Clement.” Clement’s early novels—Needle (1950), Iceworld (1953), Mission of Gravity (1954), Close to Critical (1964)—near!y all appeared previously as serials in John W. Campbell’s Astounding. His short fiction is collected in Natives of Space (1965), Small Changes (1969), Best of Hal Clement (1979), and Intuit (1987). In recent years, NESFA Press of the New England Science Fiction Association has begun releasing omnibus volumes of his novels and stories under the series title of The Essential Hal Clement. Clement recently resumed writing novels, publishing Half Life, concerning a trip to the moons of Saturn to investigate the biochemistry pre-life conditions for the purpose of saving Earth, in 1999. He has a new novel forthcoming.
The Hard SF Renaissance Page 89