Slow Life

by Michael Swanwick

  "Good girl. I know how tired you must be."

  "Take a break from the voice-posts," Consuelo suggested, "and check out the results we're getting from the robofish. It's giving us some really interesting stuff."

  So she did. And for a time it distracted her, just as they'd hoped. There was a lot more ethane and propane than their models had predicted, and surprisingly less methane. The mix of fractions was nothing like what she'd expected. She had learned just enough chemistry to guess at some of the implications of the data being generated, but not enough to put it all together. Still tugging at the ropes in the sequence uploaded by the engineers in Toronto, she scrolled up the chart of hydrocarbons dissolved in the lake.

  Solute: Solute mole fraction

  Ethyne: 4.0 x 10-4

  Propyne: 4.4 x 10-5

  1,3-Butadiyne: 7.7 x 10-7

  Carbon Dioxide: 0.1 x 10-5

  Methanenitrile: 5.7 x 10-6

  But after a while, the experience of working hard and getting nowhere, combined with the tedium of floating farther and farther out over the featureless sea, began to drag on her. The columns of figures grew meaningless, then indistinct.

  Propanenitrile: 6.0 x 10^-5

  Propenenitrile: 9.9 x 10^-6

  Propynenitrile: 5.3 x 10^-6

  Hardly noticing she was doing so, she fell asleep.

  * * *

  She was in a lightless building, climbing flight after flight of stairs. There were other people with her, also climbing. They jostled against her as she ran up the stairs, flowing upward, passing her, not talking.

  It was getting colder.

  She had a distant memory of being in the furnace room down below. It was hot there, swelteringly so. Much cooler where she was now. Almost too cool. With every step she took, it got a little cooler still. She found herself slowing down. Now it was definitely too cold. Unpleasantly so. Her leg muscles ached. The air seemed to be thickening around her as well. She could barely move now.

  This was, she realized, the natural consequence of moving away from the furnace. The higher up she got, the less heat there was to be had, and the less energy to be turned into motion. It all made perfect sense to her somehow.

  Step. Pause.

  Step. Longer pause.

  Stop.

  The people around her had slowed to a stop as well. A breeze colder than ice touched her, and without surprise, she knew that they had reached the top of the stairs and were standing upon the building's roof. It was as dark without as it had been within. She stared upward and saw nothing.

  "Horizons. Absolutely baffling," somebody murmured beside her.

  "Not once you get used to them," she replied.

  "Up and down -- are these hierarchic values?"

  "They don't have to be."

  "Motion. What a delightful concept."

  "We like it."

  "So you _are_ me?"

  "No. I mean, I don't think so."

  "Why?"

  She was struggling to find an answer to this, when somebody gasped. High up in the starless, featureless sky, a light bloomed. The crowd around her rustled with unspoken fear. Brighter, the light grew. Brighter still. She could feel heat radiating from it, slight but definite, like the rumor of a distant sun. Everyone about her was frozen with horror. More terrifying than a light where none was possible was the presence of heat. It simply could not be. And yet it was.

  She, along with the others, waited and watched for ... something. She could not say what. The light shifted slowly in the sky. It was small, intense, ugly.

  Then the light _screamed._

  * * *

  She woke up.

  "Wow," she said. "I just had the weirdest dream."

  "Did you?" Alan said casually.

  "Yeah. There was this light in the sky. It was like a nuclear bomb or something. I mean, it didn't look anything like a nuclear bomb, but it was terrifying the way a nuclear bomb would be. Everybody was staring at it. We couldn't move. And then..." She shook her head. "I lost it. I'm sorry. It was so just so strange. I can't put it into words."

  "Never mind that," Consuelo said cheerily. "We're getting some great readings down below the surface. Fractional polymers, long-chain hydrocarbons ... fabulous stuff. You really should try to stay awake to catch some of this."

  She was fully awake now, and not feeling too happy about it. "I guess that means that nobody's come up with any good ideas yet on how I might get down."

  "Uh ... what do you mean?"

  "Because if they had, you wouldn't be so goddamned upbeat, would you?"

  "_Some_body woke up on the wrong side of the bed," Alan said. "Please remember that there are certain words we don't use in public."

  "I'm sorry," Consuelo said. "I was just trying to -- "

  " -- distract me. Okay, fine. What the hey. I can play along." Lizzie pulled herself together. "So your findings mean ... what? Life?"

  "I keep telling you guys. It's too early to make that kind of determination. What we've got so far are just some very, very interesting readings."

  "Tell her the big news," Alan said.

  "Brace yourself. We've got a real ocean! Not this tiny little two-hundred-by-fifty-miles glorified lake we've been calling a sea, but a genuine ocean! Sonar readings show that what we see is just an evaporation pan atop a thirty- kilometer-thick cap of ice. The real ocean lies underneath, two hundred kilometers deep."

  "Jesus." Lizzie caught herself. "I mean, gee whiz. Is there any way of getting the robofish down into it?"

  "How do you think we got the depth readings? It's headed down there right now. There's a chimney through the ice right at the center of the visible sea. That's what replenishes the surface liquid. And directly under the hole, there's -- guess what? -- volcanic vents!"

  "So does that mean...?"

  "If you use the L-word again," Consuelo said, "I'll spit."

  Lizzie grinned. _That_ was the Consuelo Hong she knew. "What about the tidal data? I thought the lack of orbital perturbation ruled out a significant ocean entirely."

  "Well, Toronto thinks..."

  At first, Lizzie was able to follow the reasoning of the planetary geologists back in Toronto. Then it got harder. Then it became a drone. As she drifted off into sleep, she had time enough to be peevishly aware that she really shouldn't be dropping off to sleep all the time like this. She oughtn't to be so tired. She...

  She found herself in the drowned city again. She still couldn't see anything, but she knew it was a city because she could hear the sound of rioters smashing store windows. Their voices swelled into howling screams and receded into angry mutters, like a violent surf washing through the streets. She began to edge away backwards.

  Somebody spoke into her ear.

  "Why did you do this to us?"

  "I didn't do anything to you."

  "You brought us knowledge."

  "What knowledge?"

  "You said you were not us."

  "Well, I'm not."

  "You should never have told us that."

  "You wanted me to lie?"

  Horrified confusion. "Falsehood. What a distressing idea."

  The smashing noises were getting louder. Somebody was splintering a door with an axe. Explosions. Breaking glass. She heard wild laughter. Shrieks. "We've got to get out of here."

  "Why did you send the messenger?"

  "What messenger?"

  "The star! The star! The star!"

  "Which star?"

  "There are two stars?"

  "There are billions of stars."

  "No more! Please! Stop! No more!"

  * * *

  She was awake.

  _"Hello, yes, I appreciate that the young lady is in extreme danger, but I really don't think she should have used the Lord's name in vain."_

  "Greene," Lizzie said, "do we really have to put up with this?"

  "Well, considering how many billions of public-sector dollars it took to bring us here ... yes. Yes, we do. I can even think of a
few backup astronauts who would say that a little upbeat web-posting was a pretty small price to pay for the privilege."

  "Oh, barf."

  "I'm switching to a private channel," Alan said calmly. The background radiation changed subtly. A faint, granular crackling that faded away when she tried to focus on it. In a controlled, angry voice Alan said, "O'Brien, just what the hell is going on with you?"

  "Look, I'm sorry, I apologize, I'm a little excited about something. How long was I out? Where's Consuelo? I'm going to say the L-word. And the I-word as well. We have life. Intelligent life!"

  "It's been a few hours. Consuelo is sleeping. O'Brien, I hate to say this, but you're not sounding at all rational."

  "There's a perfectly logical reason for that. Okay, it's a little strange, and maybe it won't sound perfectly logical to you initially, but ... look, I've been having sequential dreams. I think they're significant. Let me tell you about them."

  And she did so. At length.

  When she was done, there was a long silence. Finally, Alan said, "Lizzie, think. Why would something like that communicate to you in your dreams? Does that make any sense?"

  "I think it's the only way it can. I think it's how it communicates among itself. It doesn't move -- motion is an alien and delightful concept to it -- and it wasn't aware that its component parts were capable of individualization. That sounds like some kind of broadcast thought to me. Like some kind of wireless distributed network."

  "You know the medical kit in your suit? I want you to open it up. Feel around for the bottle that's braille-coded twenty-seven, okay?"

  "Alan, I do _not_ need an antipsychotic!"

  "I'm not saying you need it. But wouldn't you be happier knowing you had it in you?" This was Alan at his smoothest. Butter wouldn't melt in his mouth. "Don't you think that would help us accept what you're saying?"

  "Oh, all right!" She drew in an arm from the suit's arm, felt around for the med kit, and drew out a pill, taking every step by the regs, checking the coding four times before she put it in her mouth and once more (each pill was individually braille-coded as well) before she swallowed it. "Now will you listen to me? I'm quite serious about this." She yawned. "I really do think that..." She yawned again. "That...

  "Oh, piffle."

  Once more into the breach, dear friends, she thought, and plunged deep, deep into the sea of darkness. This time, though, she felt she had a handle on it. The city was drowned because it existed at the bottom of a lightless ocean. It was alive, and it fed off of volcanic heat. That was why it considered up and down hierarchic values. Up was colder, slower, less alive. Down was hotter, faster, more filled with thought. The city/entity was a collective life- form, like a Portuguese man-of-war or a massively hyperlinked expert network. It communicated within itself by some form of electromagnetism. Call it mental radio. It communicated with her that same way.

  "I think I understand you now."

  "Don't understand -- run!"

  Somebody impatiently seized her elbow and hurried her along. Faster she went, and faster. She couldn't see a thing. It was like running down a lightless tunnel a hundred miles underground at midnight. Glass crunched underfoot. The ground was uneven and sometimes she stumbled. Whenever she did, her unseen companion yanked her up again.

  "Why are you so slow?"

  "I didn't know I was."

  "Believe me, you are."

  "Why are we running?"

  "We are being pursued." They turned suddenly, into a side passage, and were jolting over rubbled ground. Sirens wailed. Things collapsed. Mobs surged.

  "Well, you've certainly got the motion thing down pat."

  Impatiently. "It's only a metaphor. You don't think this is a _real_ city, do you? Why are you so dim? Why are you so difficult to communicate with? Why are you so slow?"

  "I didn't know I was."

  Vast irony. "Believe me, you are."

  "What can I do?"

  "Run!"

  * * *

  Whooping and laughter. At first, Lizzie confused it with the sounds of mad destruction in her dream. Then she recognized the voices as belonging to Alan and Consuelo. "How long was I out?" she asked.

  "You were out?"

  "No more than a minute or two," Alan said. "It's not important. Check out the visual the robofish just gave us."

  Consuelo squirted the image to Lizzie.

  Lizzie gasped. "Oh! Oh, my."

  It was beautiful. Beautiful in the way that the great European cathedrals were, and yet at the same time undeniably organic. The structure was tall and slender, and fluted and buttressed and absolutely ravishing. It had grown about a volcanic vent, with openings near the bottom to let sea water in, and then followed the rising heat upward. Occasional channels led outward and then looped back into the main body again. It loomed higher than seemed possible (but it _was_ underwater, of course, and on a low-gravity world at that), a complexly layered congeries of tubes like church-organ pipes, or deep-sea worms lovingly intertwined.

  It had the elegance of design that only a living organism can have.

  "Okay," Lizzie said. "Consuelo. You've got to admit that -- "

  "I'll go as far as 'complex prebiotic chemistry.' Anything more than that is going to have to wait for more definite readings." Cautious as her words were, Consuelo's voice rang with triumph. It said, clearer than words, that she could happily die then and there, a satisfied xenochemist.

  Alan, almost equally elated, said, "Watch what happens when we intensify the image."

  The structure shifted from gray to a muted rainbow of pastels, rose bleeding into coral, sunrise yellow into winter-ice blue. It was breathtaking.

  "Wow." For an instant, even her own death seemed unimportant. Relatively unimportant, anyway.

  So thinking, she cycled back again into sleep. And fell down into the darkness, into the noisy clamor of her mind.

  * * *

  It was hellish. The city was gone, replaced by a matrix of noise: hammerings, clatterings, sudden crashes. She started forward and walked into an upright steel pipe. Staggering back, she stumbled into another. An engine started up somewhere nearby, and gigantic gears meshed noisily, grinding something that gave off a metal shriek. The floor shook underfoot. Lizzie decided it was wisest to stay put.

  * * *

  A familiar presence, permeated with despair. "Why did you do this to me?"

  "What have I done?"

  "I used to be everything."

  Something nearby began pounding like a pile-driver. It was giving her a headache. She had to shout to be heard over its din. "You're still something!"

  Quietly. "I'm nothing."

  "That's ... not true! You're ... here! You exist! That's ... something!"

  A world-encompassing sadness. "False comfort. What a pointless thing to offer."

  She was conscious again.

  * * *

  Consuelo was saying something. "...isn't going to like it."

  "The spiritual wellness professionals back home all agree that this is the best possible course of action for her."

  "Oh, please!"

  Alan had to be the most anal-retentive person Lizzie knew. Consuelo was definitely the most phlegmatic. Things had to be running pretty tense for both of them to be bickering like this. "Um ... guys?" Lizzie said. "I'm awake."

  There was a moment's silence, not unlike those her parents had shared when she was little and she'd wandered into one of their arguments. Then Consuelo said, a little too brightly, "Hey, it's good to have you back," and Alan said, "NAFTASA wants you to speak with someone. Hold on. I've got a recording of her first transmission cued up and ready for you."

  A woman's voice came online. _"This is Dr. Alma Rosenblum. Elizabeth, I'd like to talk with you about how you're feeling. I appreciate that the time delay between Earth and Titan is going to make our conversation a little awkward at first, but I'm confident that the two of us can work through it."_

  "What kind of crap is this?" Lizzie said angrily.
"Who is this woman?"

  "NAFTASA thought it would help if you -- "

  "She's a grief counselor, isn't she?"

  "Technically, she's a transition therapist." Alan said.

  "Look, I don't buy into any of that touchy-feely Newage" -- she deliberately mispronounced the word to rhyme with sewage -- "stuff. Anyway, what's the hurry? You guys haven't given up on me, have you?"

  "Uh..."

  "You've been asleep for hours," Consuelo said. "We've done a little weather modeling in your absence. Maybe we should share it with you."

  She squirted the info to Lizzie's suit, and Lizzie scrolled it up on her visor. A primitive simulation showed the evaporation lake beneath her with an overlay of liquid temperatures. It was only a few degrees warmer than the air above it, but that was enough to create a massive updraft from the lake's center. An overlay of tiny blue arrows showed the direction of local microcurrents of air coming together to form a spiraling shaft that rose over two kilometers above the surface before breaking and spilling westward.

  A new overlay put a small blinking light 800 meters above the lake surface. That represented her. Tiny red arrows showed her projected drift.

  According to this, she would go around and around in a circle over the lake for approximately forever. Her ballooning rig wasn't designed to go high enough for the winds to blow her back over the land. Her suit wasn't designed to float. Even if she managed to bring herself down for a gentle landing, once she hit the lake she was going to sink like a stone. She wouldn't drown. But she wouldn't make it to shore either.

  Which meant that she was going to die.

  Involuntarily, tears welled up in Lizzie's eyes. She tried to blink them away, as angry at the humiliation of crying at a time like this as she was at the stupidity of her death itself. "Damn it, don't let me die like _this!_ Not from my own incompetence, for pity's sake!"

  "Nobody's said anything about incompetence," Alan began soothingly.

  In that instant, the follow-up message from Dr. Alma Rosenblum arrived from Earth. _"Yes, I'm a grief counselor, Elizabeth. You're facing an emotionally significant milestone in your life, and it's important that you understand and embrace it. That's my job. To help you comprehend the significance and necessity and -- yes -- even the beauty of death."_