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

by Gardner Dozois

  My mother had grown up here? Been a child here? I could barely imagine surviving more than our three weeks of data collection. My grandmother and mother had lived here for twenty-seven months, and would have stayed much longer. I could not imagine how someone could be a child here, how to play and run in suits, how to get away from the grownups in the cramped quarters of Romulus Base. And yet my mother had written about it in her memoire as if it had been normal. I suppose for her it had.

  In that thin atmosphere and low gravity, we could almost fly and our games always involved long jumps and chases. We were not heavily supervised as the adults went about their work, so we learned to take care of the suits ourselves.

  The day of the accident Victor and Madison had lab time, and so were in charge of watching us. We kids had a kind of pact with Victor and Madison. They were two of the younger expedition members and not parents themselves, so they didn’t have the same fears for us as the other adults. Like all children, we wanted independence and to be away from the eyes of grownups. Victor and Madison were both willing to be very lenient so long a we gave them the quiet they desired to concentrate on their work.

  In the second week things began to change. We broke into teams and I had lab time as well as fieldwork. For several shifts a week I did stare at a screen as the sensors processed samples we’d retrieved. My body had adjusted to the hard work and the minor gravity and I was no longer so utterly spent. I could pay attention to the ice formations and the view of Jupiter overhead.

  Ice.

  I am a volcanologist, but first I am a geologist and the ice on Europa holds such promise, teases with such secrets. Under all that ice burns a hot core, heated by constant friction of the tide as it is pulled by Jupiter. Some astronomers have conjectured that Jupiter is a proto-star, a dwarf that, had it developed fully, would have been a binary for our Sun. Instead it remained a gaseous smudge above us, duller than the surface of this moon. Though to be fair, Europa has the highest albedo in the system.

  And deep in its heart, at the bottom of those liquid oceans under the ice are volcanoes. Very probably in those oceans is some form of primitive life as well, though the narrow band of atmosphere would not support much on the surface.

  We drilled. We took measurements. We compared them with the Romulus readings and found that they agreed. The only uncertainty was—had we brought it ourselves?

  The partial DNA we found in what we thought was a virus matched a set of readings that Romulus Base had recorded and sent back. It was rare and it seemed to be distributed far more densely in the area close to where Romulus had been located.

  “So is it spontaneous, or did it come with the first mission?” Michael Liang asked over what passed for our seventeenth dinner on site. Michael, being the top evolutionary biologist and one of the mission PIs, was in charge of the gooey stuff. Like looking for life.

  “I don’t know how Romulus could have contaminated the environment,” Ilsa Grieg answered. “They kept strict protocols on containment of all biological material, including waste from meals—”

  “If you call that swill biological,” I muttered.

  “As I said, they kept strict protocols,” Grieg was not about to be interrupted by a mere post-doc.

  “They were killed in an ice plume. That means dead bodies,” I interrupted again, the image so much more clear in my mind now that I knew the ice. The flat, brilliant surface reflected a billion shades of white and red rust trapped in the upper layers. Sometimes the rust lay on top, as if a comet had dusted the surface with cinnamon, and we’d run spectroscopy on every sample we could lay gloves on and I could tell them half the specific comets that had left deposits. Had the bodies truly been captured by the Jovian gravitational field, or had they been ripped apart and some pieces pulled back to the surface of Europa?

  “Those bodies were encased in suits,” Grieg said. “They should not have been breeched, even in an ice plume.”

  “Suits can be breeched,” Liang said. “And those bodies were thrown out of Europa’s gravity by the plume. But it’s possible that some debris from the accident came back down. All the surfaces of the lander and our equipment were blasted with radiation, but it’s still possible some virus survived. Contamination has always been a consideration. Back in the old days, they deliberately crashed a probe into Jupiter rather than take the chance it would crash here and contaminate any possible life on Europa. But that was before we started getting more robust readings and had to come in and take samples … and the samples pass the protocol that compares them to known sequences.”

  “And our sterile precautions are much improved,” Grieg had to get in her point. “We are far more advanced about such things now. Between the radiation sterilization and the other precautions we should no longer be a danger. The tests show that even dropped into a full volcano the suits remain intact.”

  “And I am Marie of Romania,” I muttered under my breath. Richard shook his head at me.

  “So what have you found?” Richard changed the subject.

  Liang smiled. “We’ve confirmed the virus. The rest is—speculative. But promising. Very promising. Tests so far appear to confirm that this is not contamination.”

  “So we did it. We found extra Terrestrial life. Proof that life exists on places other than Earth. It’s here, around us, in this ocean,” Richard said like a prayer in the stillness of the tiny lander common space.

  We didn’t jump up and down, congratulate each other, yell, break out champagne. We didn’t have champagne. And this was bigger than a boisterous celebration, this was momentous, this was awe.

  Had Romulus hung on this moment too? Had my grandmother known this indrawn breath of the last of the old knowledge before the new universe broke around us? We are not and never have been alone. We had confirmed life on Europa.

  “Viruses can survive the almost anything,” Liang said as if this were a perfectly normal conversation. “Anna, we need to find that volcanic vent you proved in the mathematical models, we need to find real warmth to see if there are native animals here and make sure they are not contaminated by the earlier mission. We have to go on the assumption that we can screen for contaminated material. We’ve only got four days left and a lot of work to do.”

  So we turned things over to Group Two. Since Europa keeps the same face toward Jupiter, we had light to work and had split into groups to maximize the time. Also to minimize the use of resources, like sleeping bags and heaters. I was in Group One and should be going off shift, but I was too excited to sleep, so I went back to my charts, looking for seismic activity to see if I could identify any possible volcanic activity in our survey region. Not that I hadn’t run the data before, but this time I tightened the grid and used the ice plume indicators. I was not convinced that the ice plumes had anything to do with subsurface volcanic activity. Richard and I had spent the first week here, when we weren’t drilling or sleeping, looking for ice plumes and what created them. I considered this a safety issue as well as scientifically interesting. My grandmother had died because they had been taken unaware. But the more I looked the more I was convinced that the plumes were the result of interaction between the weak magnetic field of Europa and the strong one of Jupiter which creates some very strange phenomena.

  In any event, I started a much finer search from the vibration receptors we had placed at the collection sites. The next morning, over something that the supplies had labeled coffee, but resembled that dearly missed beverage only in color and some degree of bitter kick, I showed Michael and Richard what I’d done. “If we can set up a deep heat sensor here, maybe in a few hours even we can have some idea whether it would be worth drilling.” I indicated a spot deep in a crevasse. I’d specifically looked at crevasse areas to minimize the drilling—hard, heavy work with sixty-five klicks of ice to go through before you hit liquid water. And the heat vent would be far below that.

  “You didn’t sleep all night, did you?” Liang looked at me like my advisor used to when I’d
made a particularly stupid mistake.

  I shrugged. “It was interesting. I couldn’t sleep.”

  He grunted. Richard crossed his eyes at me. “Hit the bag. We’ll probably go place the sensor, but you’re not doing anything until you get some sleep.”

  He was right. I was seriously sleep-deprived and not making the best decisions, which meant I argued that I had to go with them to position the sensors. He wasn’t even a geologist and Richard wasn’t a volcanologist and I ended up spilling imitation coffee all over my pants, which didn’t make my case any stronger. But I’m stubborn, and when I’m tired I’m worse, and Liang was a decent PI so he figured it was easier to give in than to fight. We were only placing a sensor. Besides, who would go with Richard? Liang? Or Grieg, who wasn’t a geologist either? Richard couldn’t go alone.

  This was not heavy work, but rules were that no one went out on the surface alone. No one, never, not for any reason. I’d never thought about the rule because all my previous forays had been drilling, or placing sensor arrays, which took as many able bodies in the field as we could muster. This though? This weighed less than one pound under Europa gravity and I knew exactly where it went, and I was cranky from being up my whole sleep cycle. We took the scooter, since the site was nearly ninety klicks off. I tried to set the coordinates for the area but my hands were clumsy from exhaustion and too much caffeine. I’d say I could do the sequence in my sleep, but I was just about doing that and it wasn’t working. Finally Richard took the navigator from me and keyed the sequence while I suited up.

  The scooter has barely room for two adults and a sample kit. The sensor rode on top of the sample case and the rope ladder secured below as we skimmed over the slick surface. Like flying, my mother had said, and she was right. At this velocity, if I just added a light hop I would be sailing overhead—almost like paragliding but without the sail since Europa’s atmosphere wouldn’t support us. But velocity and muscle would still make for quite a ride.

  And then we were at the crevasse. We unloaded the rope ladder and secured it to the edge and started down. I hoped it would be long enough. We’d used it to explore several of the crevasses before, though it hadn’t reached close to bottom on some others and we’d lowered equipment deep into them and waited to get readings back from deep inside. What made those deep grooves that laced the surface of the Moon? That was Richard’s question and he could talk about the crevasses endlessly. Richard strapped the sensor on his back after a brief argument (I insisted that it was my equipment, he insisted that I was too tired. I tried to take it but my hands were jittery and I lost the argument right there).

  Climbing into the depths is like climbing back into time. Or it would be on Earth, where we know that ice has formed in layers. On Europa? Kolninskaya’s main theory states that it is not, that all the ice formed at once. Certainly it appears that way, without the striation that one sees on Earth. Cloudy white-gray with hints of blue and reddish brown, lots of reddish brown that always made me think of cinnamon sprinkled over and swirled through.

  We don’t know what made the crevasses on the surface. Before Kolninskaya, geologists debated whether they had been caused by liquid ocean responding to tidal forces, or earthquakes, or even volcanic activity. Kolninskaya settled that one—the readings made it clear that the lines followed the moving magnetic field of the moon. The rust is iron and the salt water beneath the surface responds as Europa moves in and out of Jupiter’s powerful magnetic field. Ice shifts and cracks appear

  Richard has studied the patterns of the surface crazing, hoping to identify older and younger stress lines and trace the action across the surface. Only now I saw the red as blood frozen from debris. Or perhaps the red of a rag of suit.

  Climbing down is harder than climbing up. I don’t like looking down into what looks like forever, even when I weigh less than thirty pounds. The thin polymer struts that make up the rungs of the ladder don’t look like they can support the massive boots, though of course they do quite well even under full Earth gravity. But on Earth I only wear hiking boots to set sensors. On Earth I can feel the rope with my hands, I can feel the breeze, I can smell the air and enjoy the warmth of the sunlight.

  The joy and wonder of an alien environment is balanced by the hard truth that you can’t get out of it. There is no warmth, nowhere to run, none of the comforts of home. I still felt awe every time my sterile glove touched Europa ice, but I knew that when it came time to leave, I would be more than ready to go. Twenty-seven months? How had they remained even a little sane?

  “You coming?”

  I shook myself from my reverie and continued down. We only had a kilometer of ladder. Who knew how deep the crevasse went? But I was fortunate this time and we let out only three quarters of the ladder before we hit the bottom.

  Richard stepped carefully, aware that the ice was not even. He used a probe before taking any step to judge the solidity and texture beneath. Romulus teams had gone down into several crevasses, but we had done only sensor readings for the survey. From the previous mission we knew the bottoms of these cracks did not follow the pattern above, but that the ice itself could be broken and even soft. In a few areas Romulus Team had found sections that appeared to be near the consistency of slush on the surface. That had been the most exciting finding of all, surface water, proving the existence of at least one of the lakes earlier scientists had theorized. But with the destruction of Romulus Base and the emergency evacuation, no samples had returned for us to study. One of our first mission objectives had been to head to those coordinates and pick up samples of the slush, both to analyze in our own lab and to take home for others to study.

  I followed in Richard’s footsteps since he had the probe. We only needed to go a few steps to find a good stable platform to anchor the sensor. Even working with the thick gloves, between the two of us it was easy going. Though the temperature plummeted this deep, we were not blinded by the surface albedo. And then we started the long climb back.

  We were perhaps two thirds of the way up—far enough at least that I could see the brilliant light of the surface—when the shriek of the alarm tore through me. “Suit breech, suit breech,” it cycled through in the mechanical voice.

  My suit had torn and might be leaking, but the only possibility was to keep climbing. The suits have multiple redundancies built in for every system. A mere outer breech would not endanger us, certainly not until we were able to reach the scooter. There would be supplies there to patch it up until we got back to the lander.

  “Alarm noted,” I told the system to shut off the racket.

  “You get that?” Richard asked once my ears stopped ringing.

  “Yeah.”

  “It’ll hold. Keep climbing.”

  Climb. Just climb. Hand, hand, boot, boot. Look up, never down. Redundant systems. The suit is not depressurizing. There is plenty of air. I’m fine. Richard is fine. We’ll get back to base. Just climb.

  My mind shut down so that I saw only the next rung and then the next. I refused to think about anything else, though the ghost of Kolninskaya crept through. I could hear her in my mind. Yes, child, one at a time. Slowly. The suit will hold. You will come home. I will not let you die.

  The fear froze like the ice around me. Cold, unfeeling, I felt distant from my body, and it seemed as if something helped me up.

  And then I was over the top and Richard had his thick glove down to offer me a hand up. I stood on the brilliant white ice crusted with cinnamon rust.

  My suit had a snag near the left elbow. There was duct tape on the scooter. Dear old duct tape, good for everything, everywhere. Even on Europa. Richard tore off large swathes of it and ran it around the outer layer of my suit. “You’re good to go,” he said.

  When we got back to the lander and peeled out of the suits, I took mine into the common space and started to pick off the silver gray tape.

  “I wouldn’t look,” Richard said.

  I had to look. The tape stuck fast and it took more wor
k than I anticipated to tease the stuff off, but I was trained to be patient. Anyone who has had to use a paintbrush to dust down layers of sediment knows that slow and steady eventually gets you there.

  At minus two hundred thirty Celsius, ice is magnificently solid. Shorn apart, it is crystal sharp, like obsidian. The suit held well enough, though, with the duct tape. Which only proves that duct tape is one of the great forces of the universe.

  Which also proved that the suit is not impregnable.

  Not that it mattered in terms of contamination, I reminded myself. The third layer had closed. Nothing had gotten in or out. As for the Romulus Team’s deaths, eyewitness accounts and sensor recordings agree that the bodies in the ice plume were jetted away from the surface and Europa’s weak gravitational field. They had plummeted toward Jupiter and had most likely burned on entry to the gas giant’s atmosphere.

  I wondered again if my mother had seen them. The witnesses who testified later were the two adults who had been observing the party. The children—well, Victor and Madison hadn’t paid too much attention to them that day. My mother said that those two had generally tried to shirk any teaching responsibilities. She didn’t mind—when they did give lessons they were neither interesting enough nor rigorous enough to interest her. She preferred lessons with the more senior team members, who often forgot these were not even university students. Mama had managed to convince Professor Chiang to teach her naïve set theory before she had started high school.