The Year's Best Science Fiction--Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  But the sea never fascinated my mother the way it did everyone else. She only cared for the ice.

  The ice spoke to her. She loved the cores she pulled from it. Here a dusting of dark material that possibly came from an asteroid strike, and on another layer a slight change in color that indicated a change in chemical composition. She couldn’t wait to get it back to the lab and see what had happened in that place, back then.

  She loved the ice and it killed her. It killed all of them, and then we were trapped and there was horror of the return I dare not remember. Therapy and meds forever keep me almost safe for moments, but then I drift and I can’t quite understand with the clarity I have when I forego the chemical equilibrium. So I try to keep away from memories of the ice. Aunt Olga in Moscow has never been kind about it, but she is not the one who wakes up screaming from dreams about the long trip home, the pressure of navigation and celestial mechanics on the shoulders of a thirteen-year-old because almost all the grownups had died.

  I read my mother’s memoire on the way out. She had given it to me, me alone, not my brother or my father. And even though I had known that she was Tatyana Kolninskaya’s daughter, that she had lived for more than two years on Europa and that it had formed her and destroyed her together, I had never really thought of her as a young girl living in that environment. I had only wanted to see her as a mother, as my mother. I didn’t want to have to recognize her as a person apart from my need for her.

  But then, I had asked far more of her and I knew it. And I was curious to know what Romulus Base, and the great Tatyana Kolninskaya, had been like.

  Tatyana Kolninskaya did foundational work on the preconditions for life on other planets, which had been a fundamental question for science. Kolninskaya, like many others, believed Europa the most likely body to host that life. Warm seas lurked under that ice, seas and oceans both, heated by friction.

  According to the reports they sent back, they had discovered at least virus fragments of DNA. Not quite full animals, which was disappointing, but viruses could survive even hard vacuum. Had they come from asteroids or comets? Or were they the result of some previous contamination?

  But the samples never made it back and until our mission no one had been able to corroborate the finding. We were going to sample and survey and see if they had made a mistake. We knew there was a possibility of contamination from their trip, or even possibly earlier unmanned vehicles, but our PI had worked out a program to compare the DNA so that we’d be able to tell if some virus had hitched a ride and flourished here. Or confirm, finally, whether there was, in fact, life in the oceans beneath the ice.

  I was always sure she loved the ice more than she loved me, but she was so happy at Romulus. She sang with me in the evening when she got in. All us kids got a skewed education. Surrounded by scientists and engineers in a narrow range of specialties, we did learn a fair bit about planetary geology and evolutionary biology, a smattering of useful mathematics, and how to play the clarinet. We all did speak four mission languages (Russian, English, Mandarin, and Spanish) and, while we had no inkling of human history we had a firm grasp of the politics of getting grants (which I later realized mapped onto all human history with painful accuracy).

  We were horrifically deficient in history, literature, and art when we took the required standardized tests when we finally returned to Earth, but they made allowances.

  We were celebrities of a sort, the Romulus children, the Romulus survivors. I was thirteen when I was placed with the rest in an elite Planetary Educational Foundation Center under yet another grant for the children of explorers.

  There we learned that our greatest deficiency was table manners. We had none. My mother’s sister’s family in Moscow, who took me in for those first holidays after our return, was aghast at my inability to behave like a civilized person. They did not make any allowance for the trauma, and when I started screaming the morning we woke to an ice covered world, they returned me posthaste to the Center. I was never invited to return, and I have never seen them again, not even when I have visited Moscow as an adult.

  The other Romulus orphans had had much the same experiences, except Jessica who had gone to LA where there was no ice. But she shrieked and dove under the dining table whenever jets flew by or trucks rumbled on the street, and so her family reacted just like all the rest. So the nine of us, who had lived together on the ice, bonded even more firmly. The small, cramped spaces with too many people crowded us all at first. The food tasted wrong. We wore little clothing, and that all disposable. And the place was dangerous in all the wrong ways.

  We could breathe the air and walk out without a suit. We wouldn’t freeze or asphyxiate or die in explosive decompression (which made up many of our scary childhood stories,) but we dared not speak to people we didn’t know.

  At least all the children had made it home. One of the two grownups who had survived and returned with us, flown the ship that I had navigated, never left a supervised facility again.

  * * *

  “Mom’s doing serious math,” my big brother Sergei said when I got home to make the announcement.

  Bad news. That meant she was off her meds. Which meant do not tell her anything important and most of all do not ever mention Europa. Just the word once set her off in a fit where she threw dishes out the window of our Park Slope brownstone, where they hit the sidewalk and Mrs. Coombs was walking Tyrus and she told the entire neighborhood that Irene Taylor was off her head. Again.

  I was only ten at the time and still in school in the neighborhood and the other kids looked at me like I was some kind of freak show. As usual, I went to live with my grandma when Mom went crazy.

  I have a perfectly good grandmother who is nothing like Tatyana Kolninskaya. Grandma Fritzie bakes the best chocolate chip cookies ever, is five foot ten and African American. She’s a family physician on the Mayor’s staff specializing in children’s services, and she works with domestic abuse victims on Thursday nights. Grandpa George is a dentist. He disapproves of cookies on principle and always tried to get us to eat apples instead. I don’t need to tell you how well that went.

  Tatyana Kolninskaya was a name in a textbook until I became advanced enough that I read her original work. And yeah, it was that brilliant. Really that brilliant. Of all the Romulus team, she was the one who made the conceptual leaps about the possibilities for Europa.

  But I never felt any particular connection with her. I knew the history and I couldn’t avoid my mother’s neuroses, but Kolninskaya had been dead for decades before I was born. No one looking at coffee-with-an-extra-cream skin and nappy haired me would ever guess I was half blond Russian. And I kind of like to keep it that way.

  I’m just plain Anna Taylor and if anyone makes the connection to my Dad, well, okay. Dad insisted that they give me Kolninskaya as a middle name but I don’t acknowledge it. No K on my degrees anywhere. No one has made any big deal that Paul Taylor is married to Irina Maslova, who is the daughter of Tatyana Kolninskaya. Mom has gone by Irene Taylor ever since they married when she was a grad student, and all her degrees and publications and awards are under that sanitized, anglicized name. As if changing her name could erase the Irina who had lived through Romulus Station and navigated that ship back to Earth when she was just a kid.

  Grandma Fritzie did not want me to go. “Honey, you’ll be gone how long? It’ll be years, and dark, and it’s dangerous. I remember when Romulus Station was lost in the ice. And think of the malnutrition. That’s why your mother is so tiny. They didn’t have any decent food out there on Europa. All those Romulus children grew up undersized. What if you get pregnant and you have some tiny undernourished baby?”

  I shrugged. “Mama isn’t the only person in the world under five ten.” Grandma Fritzie and I are the shortest people in the family, excepting Mama, who is barely five-two. “And I’m not getting pregnant. After Romulus children aren’t allowed on exploratory expeditions anymore, and I’m not ready for that yet anyway—”
>
  “And they were all so sick, too,” Grandma Fritzie interrupted me. “Everyone who returned from Romulus came back with some nasty bug and most of them were hospitalized.”

  “They would have been hospitalized when they returned anyway,” I pointed out. “Didn’t the doctors say it was just food that had turned?”

  Grandma Fritzie shook her head. “I was practicing medicine at the time and I remember the papers. No, it was some crazy bug that spread through half of Germany before we could isolate it and make a vaccine. Nothing like anyone had ever seen.”

  I shrugged. The events had nothing to do with each other or with me. They had some food that turned on board the Rosemary Yalow, and something mutated in the population. Happens all the time.

  “We’re not staying. We’re just doing a prelim survey to confirm the findings from Romulus, and it’s a job and I’ll get a ton of papers out of it. We just need a few samples to bring back. They didn’t bring anything back, you know, so no one could verify their results.”

  “I’ll bet there’s some boy going,” Grandpa George said. “I hope it’s that nice one that we met last Thanksgiving.”

  “Richard. Yeah. But even without the two body problem this was the best opportunity for me. I mean, no matter what we find, there’s so much to discover that there are going to be a zillion journal articles and I’ve got to publish my ass off to get myself a nice academic—”

  “Language, young lady.”

  “Sorry, Grandma.”

  “But she can’t tell Mom,” Sergei interrupted. “Mom’s doing serious math.” Which is why we were all huddled in Grandma and Grandpa’s huge living room in Grand Army Plaza instead of Park Slope, even with Sergei visiting from Paris with his French wife and their new French baby.

  “Honey, I don’t know how she’d tell your mother even if Irene were taking her meds and then some,” Grandma Fritzie said. “I’m not even sure that I approve.”

  “I certainly don’t, that’s for sure. I don’t approve of any grandchild of mine leaving this planet,” Grandpa George said. “I don’t see why you can’t get a perfectly good job right here on Earth at a nice safe university. Humans belong on Earth, not traipsing around the solar system getting themselves killed or starved or abandoned on ice.”

  I sighed. They knew perfectly well that I had to do fieldwork. I love fieldwork. That’s why I fell in love with geology, actually. How can I explain it? Everyone else except Mom is into things to do with people. Even Sergei, the bad boy, went off to Paris and became a chef. Though maybe after my announcement I’ll be the bad one and Sergei, with his new daughter and new restaurant, will have joined the ranks of respectability.

  Only Mom really understands that things that have nothing to do with people can be just—fascinating. All by themselves.

  I did not become a geologist because of my famous grandmother. I became a geologist because when I was ten we went to Hawaii and I saw a volcano erupt. It was all very proper, in a helicopter over Volcano National Park, but I had never seen anything ever so thrilling or so beautiful.

  I became obsessed by volcanoes. I read about them, watched them, studied them constantly. When other tween girls had pictures of teen dream movie stars or boy bands up in their rooms, I had pictures of exploding mountains and lava floes. I became a volcanologist.

  Then the Europa project appeared. I fell in love with the possibilities. And I understood Tatyana Kolninskaya, understood what had driven her off Earth and onto the ice.

  The project manager had been one of her graduate students, but hadn’t qualified for the Europa mission because he had a heart condition. He hadn’t realized that I was her granddaughter and I keep it that way. Just Anna Taylor from Brooklyn, you know. Forget that K. Doesn’t stand for anything. But he quivered with excitement when he talked about the waters of Europa, about the seas trapped in the ice, separate from the oceans beneath them, and the friction that kept them warm. With explosive plumes very much like volcanoes—one of which had destroyed most of the Romulus team.

  There may be volcanoes beneath Europa. They wanted a volcanologist who could study the ice plumes and the tides, and also possibly locate volcanic vents.

  I’d done my dissertation on underwater vents on Ganymede, Europa, and Enceladus. Volcanoes presage life. Life needs heat, and heat can come from the planet’s core or star, or tidal friction as with Europa, or any combination. But unique life forms have evolved around oceanic volcanic vents on Earth. If it happened on Earth it could happen elsewhere.

  I was hooked, and I was hired. My dissertation had been grounded in the observations we had from flybys and robot landers, but the Romulus material had more depth. How could I pass up the opportunity to go there myself? Richard was much less important than Europa, but it made the family feel better if they could excuse my incomprehensible choice.

  “I want to go. I need the publications and this could make my career. It’s not my fault my mother is crazy.”

  “No, it’s not your fault. But we don’t have to like it just the same,” Grandpa George said, and Grandma Fritzie nodded in agreement.

  Sergei ignored me, but then he was in the kitchen preparing something intricate. I set the table, which at least gave me something to do. The starched linen cloth so old it was wearing thin in places, the fine china with the gold scroll pattern along the edges that Grandma Fritzie had gotten from her grandma, and the heavy silver that had come from Grandpa George’s family connected me with my own history. The serving spoon engraved with the elaborate B for “Browne” that had been Grandpa’s great-grandmother’s in Syracuse, she had been a nurse and had been a little girl during school desegregation. I’d grown up on the stories of Great-great-grandmother Browne being bussed to a white school district and how grown women had screamed nasty words at her and thrown eggs. But that hadn’t bothered her so much as the kids in her class who wouldn’t ever pick her for the dodgeball team. And she was always in the last reading group, every single year, although she tested at a ninth grade reading level in fourth grade.

  I hoped she would have been proud of me, and I felt her courage as I laid the heavy serving spoon on the table. I love my family. I love my work. I never wanted to hurt anyone, ever. But no matter what, I was going.

  I wondered, for the first time, whether Tatyana Kolninskaya had faced resistance as well, whether my Great-Aunt Olga and their parents had been afraid and tried to talk her out of it. Mama had said that Aunt Olga had been elegant and stern and disapproving. But Tatyana was taking along a child, my mother. I, at least, was going alone.

  * * *

  Ice. So many many colors of ice. And so abnormally flat, as well. Europa is the flattest body in the solar system. I was standing on a great body of water. More water was frozen right here on the surface of Europa than existed in all the oceans of Earth.

  And I was here. Standing. On. Europa.

  Like my mother and my grandmother before me. They too, had seen the colors of Jupiter with its rings above the horizon and the endless smooth ice. As I looked at the gas giant above it didn’t seem so strange, suddenly, the ice and stranger in the sky. I felt as if my mother were with me, as if I saw it through her eyes as well as my own. And Tatyana Kolninskaya was there too, watching. Silliness, I knew, but this was a place they had known and now I had come, the third generation.

  We had set down ninety minutes previously and gone through a meticulous systems check before we suited up and started hauling equipment from the outer hatches. We would use the lander as our indoor base—we’d already been sleeping there and had our few personal items comfortably stowed.

  More importantly, it had an efficiently designed lab that we could access from outside, including an airlock with a built-in laser spectrometer, scanning electron microscopes, and of course the requisite scales and regulation spectrometers so that we could run all the basics without contamination. But we had to haul the larger equipment out to the sites, drill out cores, and survey in situ.

  The l
ander had all the equipment bays easily accessible from the outside, so that we had to lift and carry as little as possible. After five months in zero G, even with all the mandatory exercise, we were weak. I was not looking forward to dragging all that apparatus anywhere, even if it was just to the power sledge.

  I only weight a hair over twenty-one pounds on Europa. After five months in space, it felt like a ton. Our equipment, fortunately, only weighed about six hundred pounds on Europa, and there were six of us to haul it out and secure it to the sledge. Back home it would have been a joke.

  We’d trained for the physical challenges of the mission. We’d worn the bulky suits in saline tanks and practiced securing the power pack ties to the sledge frames and getting the drill tripods set up, but nothing could simulate what happens to the body after five months of zero G. We all worked out on the trip out here and geologists are a pretty fit crowd to start with. Even I, the city kid, was an avid camper and thought nothing beat a white water canoe trip or an afternoon of snowshoeing for a great time. When we ran the drills back home I never broke a sweat. Now I was breathing hard just getting the panels detached.

  By the time we set up and returned to the lander I felt like I’d been run over by a tanker. The only reason I peeled out of that cumbersome, overstuffed suit was that I thought maybe I would hurt less without the constant pressure of the tubing across my aching shoulders and the steel rings restricting my movements. My teammates looked every bit as exhausted as I felt. None of us were good for one more step, not even Richard, who had been an alternate on the US men’s Olympic speed skating team once upon a time.

  “Anyone want dinner?” So Min asked, but I was too tired to eat. All I wanted was to fall asleep, and I barely made it to my bag before I did.

  The first week went by in a blur of agony and exhaustion punctuated by awful food. Grandma Fritzie was right, there was nothing good to eat out here. Not that I noticed; I was too tired to pay attention to anything except the fact that my shoulders felt like they were tearing apart and my legs were constantly sore. And we all stank. The recirculated air in the lander smelled of unwashed bodies. We showered for a timed five minutes in lukewarm water on a three-day rotation and used dry shampoo on our hair. Whoever had masterminded supplies had probably thought scientists wear white lab coats and sit at benches all day. But drilling ice cores at minus one sixty C while wearing a suit is not exactly sitting in front of a screen eating Doritos and wearing a tee shirt. No, we knew the real reason was because water is heavy and hard to haul, and drinking takes precedence over bathing. But still, yuck.