“What do you mean?”
Her brow furrowed. “Let me check some things. I’ll see what I can find out.”
I didn’t know what she was talking about, but I said, “Okay.”
“Do you think you can go back to sleep now?”
I nodded.
“Good,” she said, and lay back down. “This gravity wipes me out.”
Chapter 34
We came in tight and hot, our neutron plume preceding us, blowing a hole in the corona of the star that gave life to Brainard’s Planet. The two research satellites orbiting there—Draco’s and The Pleiades’—were focused down, not out, constantly scanning the world’s surface for any hints that might unlock the mysteries of the biosphere. Still, just in case they were glancing our way, we slid close past the stellar surface and into a trajectory that would keep us between the sun and the planet so the fire of our exhaust would be swallowed up in the fire of the star. High-energy gravitons would give us away immediately so we throttled the torch itself back to just two gees, eliminating the need to use the Musahdi filter or the graviton impellers at all. We rode the neutron stream, decelerating all the way through the system, past the three inner planets and into low orbit.
Draco and The Pleiades could have made it a lot harder on us, but bureaucratic intransigence had trumped common sense. They could have divided up the chores of studying Brainard’s Planet and put their respective probes in completely different orbits, but, of course, they both wanted to study the same things. The major colonies were in a particular area that was in daylight at a particular time, so both nations had put their probes in the same polar orbit, the one following the other by a few hundred klicks. This made it easy for us: we simply inserted a half-orbit behind them, always keeping the bulk of the world between us and prying eyes.
But to move around on the surface, we needed a disguise. This was why Steel had made a reality of Brainard’s Planet the last time they were here. Some of the slugs’ colonies had moved since then so our first task was to re-record the entire planet. This took more than a week in orbit, but as soon as we were finished Yuri hacked into the two research satellites and started feeding our version of reality into them. Someday some dusty exobiologist might notice the substitution, but we would be long gone by then.
We each visited Archie in the medical bay, Drake’s penultimate resting place. A lot of changes had been made. Yuri had managed to design a lot of new equipment that we hoped would let us analyze samples of the Brainardite slime, the ‘plants’ and perhaps even samples of tissue taken from the slugs. But that wasn’t why Archie had sent for us. When your body is in real trouble you don’t have time to think about getting on the net and uploading, it’s done automatically. Since we weren’t on the net, if even one of us did a comprehensive memory dump onto Steel’s system, it would overload, causing it to crash. So she needed to disable our upload reflex. This made sense, but was one more reminder that we would be on our own on Brainard’s Planet.
At the end of the final work shift, before our descent to the surface, Steel gave us a somewhat stilted motivational speech in the control room; then she and Daimler bid us goodnight and retreated to her quarters. It made me sad, and angry. If there was ever a night when we all should have been together that was it, but she couldn’t afford it. We were the only human beings within light years, cut off from the net, unable to communicate with anyone but ourselves. Beyond the thin skin of our starship there were literally quadrillions of kilometers of cold vacuum before you got to the first human-occupied planet. But as alone and lonely as we were, it wasn’t lonely enough for her. It seemed that John Cheatham’s death had taken something from her so profound that she couldn’t overcome it. She had been betrayed by mortality and she wasn’t going to trust anything anymore, not even her crew. In some ways, not even Alice. It wasn’t that nothing but the quest mattered to her anymore; it was more that nothing else even existed. We were no longer people to her so much as we were imponderables— parameters of the problem that couldn’t be quantified or extrapolated. Maybe she was just terrified of losing us the way she had lost Drake, the way she’d lost her son, her husband. I don’t know. Whatever it was, she left us to ourselves.
Nothing remained to be done. Everything was ready. We were left to float through the Lightdancer’s quiet, darkened passageways looking for solace, for absolution maybe, or for company, or for peace.
One by one we drifted into the common room. It was lit as by a giant aquarium; the calm blue light of the sun-drenched world turning beneath us flowed in through the crystalline ports. We seemed to have a shared need to look at our adversary, our goal, the source of our fear and hope. We didn’t say much, just gazed out at the planet of doom. It wasn’t a recorded reality we were looking at; it was really there. The southern ocean, bright as beaten steel, washed the ragged coastline of the north. Gentle wisps of lacy, lazy cirrus caressed the land. All was soft, quiet and still.
If you looked closely, you could see a colony now and then as a tiny brown smudge. They were down there, the slugs, roaming about as they had for the last five hundred years and who knows how much longer. For all of our study, our ignorance of the Brainardites was almost pristine, as was our ignorance of the universe, even our ignorance of ourselves. Here were the very same slugs that Brainard had discovered and tried to contact. All of the life forms down there were the same individuals that Brainard’s expedition had seen. Nothing died there—not plants nor animals nor their friends or relations. Life moving, interacting, but never expiring. And yet it took every bit of technological wizardry that Yuri could come up with to keep it from being lethal to us.
How had it happened? How could an ecosystem achieve such an incredibly delicate balance that nothing died? Was this simply another possible scenario in an infinitely diverse creation? Could it have happened this way on Earth? Did we just miss out on the evolutionary jackpot and so have to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune? Or did the Brainardites happen to pray to the right god, or somehow just avoid falling from grace?
We were going to try to find out. We’d cobbled together our gadgets and tools and we would descend into the terror. We would bathe in the pool of immortality and death and try to bring away the forbidden fruit. At one time or another each of our eyes wandered to Alice’s sweet face. She glowed in the blue light of reflected ocean, very pensive, very solemn. I wanted her to smile, to laugh. I wanted to solve the problem.
And then she did laugh. “Hey, Yuri! It’s our last night in microgravity. Let’s go screw our brains out!”
Yuri laughed back at her. “You’re on!”
She kicked off the wall and swam over to him. They hooked arms and legs and became a tangle. “You want to log on while we do it?”
He laughed again. “Why not?” They sailed out the hatch and down the passageway.
Tamika looked at Marcus. “That’s not a bad idea.”
Marcus smiled at her, then turned to us and said, “Have a good night.” They followed Alice and Yuri.
Then Arch looked at me. When something makes sense it just makes sense, but I’d noticed something and I needed to speak: “You know, Alice has been doing that a lot.”
“What?” Arch asked.
“Logging on with her partner while she has sex.”
Arch looked after her. “Hmm. I guess she’s ... I don’t know, lonely?”
“Maybe.” I thought about Alice and me, when we had logged on together. “Maybe.”
I took one last look out the port at the place that had come to define my life. “Come on,” Archie said. “It’ll still be there tomorrow.”
“Yeah,” I answered.
As we swam out of the hatch, the Lightdancer passed into the shadow of the world.
The brakes had kicked in and the gees were building to maximum. We were on the final rotation. Brainard’s Planet was no longer a planet to me. The horizon was flattening, the black sky was turning indigo and then blue and then I was weightless as t
he hook released and I plummeted toward the only alien biosphere humanity had ever found. As air resistance increased, I reached terminal velocity and I was floating rather than falling, buffeted on a mattress of air. Looking around I could see my six companions, stomachs down, arms out, knees bent to the gale. We had almost eighty kilometers to fall before the parasails would open. Death spread out like a map below us.
Even falling through the sky toward the place that had killed so many of us, I felt improbably safe inside the e-suit Yuri had designed. It was really solid, tough. Impressive. I felt like I could swim through a nuclear reactor or take a nap in raw sewage and be just fine. And we had learned a lot. Just knowing that the plague was caused by the slime the Brainardites secreted gave us tools Brainard hadn’t had, or even Steel, the last time she’d been here. Unlike Brainard’s expedition or Steel’s first trip here, we were aiming for the desert north of the tropical belt of life that clung to the edge of the southern ocean. If we had a mishap on landing we would be away from any life forms. It might give us a little more time to deal with damage or trauma.
Our home had preceded us. For the past several days we had been dropping packets to the landing site, two of which had inflated and would serve as our habitat and laboratory. All of them had Yuri’s surefire anti-plague system built in, but hopefully they were far enough away from the inhabited zone that it wouldn’t matter. After we hauled all the supplies into the habitat we would be able to stay on the surface for a couple of months—little enough time to discover a way to save Alice.
I bulleted Yuri, “It looks beautiful from up here!”
[It’s pretty beautiful down there, too. Otherworldly seems inadequate somehow. Wait till you walk through the tube fields. It’s like nothing you’ve ever experienced.]
“I can’t wait. I think.”
Yuri laughed. [Yeah, we’ll need to be careful.]
[You see the small colony to the southeast?] Steel’s voice was focused. The six of us acknowledged. [That’s our primary target. We’ll try to get samples there.] As we continued to fall, smaller things began to resolve. I could see a main trail leading to and away from the village or hive or whatever you wanted to call it. I couldn’t see any individual Brainardites yet, but the mauve/pink of the surrounding tube fields was becoming more intense.
A thin cloud deck was moving in from the west. It thickened to near-opacity as we fell toward it and now I could tell how fast I was falling. It rushed toward me and slammed into me insubstantially, like faeries or fading hope, and I was through it and could really start to look around.
Tamika said, [I can see the hab and lab.]
I could see them, too: two tiny white spots. They were about five klicks from the nearest tube fields, resting on a rocky plain just south of a fair-sized canyon.
Alice called out: [There they are!]
I looked where she was pointing, south toward the trail, and I saw them: beige, double-ended teardrops with crab-shaped carapaces swaying on their backs as they ponderously moved along.
Yuri: [Must be market day.]
Archie: [Yeah, everybody’s out and about.]
Marcus interrupted: [Let’s cut the chatter. We’re coming up on parasail deployment. Disperse.]
We spread out to allow our sails to open and in a few moments they did, simultaneously, just like clockwork. Smooth sailing. The rocky surface of the planet of doom gently rose up to meet our feet. We released our chutes and were down.
After ten days of floating in orbit we were back in the realm of acceleration. I could feel Brainard’s Planet pulling on me: my arms, my head, the fluid in my inner ears. It wanted to crush me, to suck me down into its very core. I started walking toward the habitat, my footfalls like timpani, like thunder, like the sound of the end of the world.
It took us three days to get the supplies stowed and the lab up and running. We also trained with the lasers daily—getting used to the weight, to the range and intensity controls. We burned a lot of rocks.
On the evening of the third day Steel gathered us together in the habitat. As I sat down at our little table my arm brushed against a fork and knocked it to the floor with an absurdly loud CRASH! We all jumped. It was so annoying. I picked it up and placed it carefully back on the table.
Steel looked better now that we were finally here. Memories of past tragedies were being replaced by hope, or mania, or maybe just the comfort of knowing what needed to be done next. She was made of electricity as she took us in—Archie, Marcus, Alice, Yuri, Tamika, and myself. Daimler was on the Lightdancer with Ham. I wondered how they were getting along. I wondered what deals Steel had made with him, or he with her. The thought crossed my mind that he might steal the ship, but that was silly. Where could he go without us? We were the engine.
She almost vibrated as she started to speak, barely able to control the emotions coursing through her. This was where we would make the whole venture pay off or not. We would save Alice’s life or we would fail to save it; there was no third option. She negotiated with the pressure as we negotiated with our weight. “We are here to find out as much as we can about the biological processes at work here. Not just how the plague works, but how the Brainardites work. We all ... we all know what we’re ultimately looking for—” she had to stop, her throat full. For a moment she was unable to even look at us. Then, “and I’m confident we’ll find it, but I want us to be systematic. I want us to be methodical. More than anything I want us to be careful, to be safe.” Again she had to stop speaking. Memories filled her eyes with water. “Tomorrow I just want to go into the tube fields. Not too deep. Just go in and take some samples of the tubes, the spider-plane trees.”
Archie said, “I’d like to collect a few of the smaller sluglets and zooids.” She pronounced it ‘zoh-oids.’ It meant ‘animal-like.’ Most of the perambulatory life here resembled the slugs, only smaller: soft bodies with nothing you could call limbs—no endoskeletons, and no visible sensory organs. Most of them had some sort of hard shell or carapace on their backs and they just wandered around, seemingly aimlessly, never in a hurry. Nobody was in a hurry here except us.
Steel answered, “That’s fine. Tomorrow, though, more than anything, I want us to test our new procedures. Marcus?”
Marcus finished checking something on Steel’s system and then looked at all of us: “We’ll all carry hand lasers. Archie, Alice and Yuri will collect samples and specimens. Mo will flank to the left. Captain, you will flank to the right. You two will be our lookouts. Report anything unusual, unexpected, especially anything moving quickly. Tamika and I will cover from the rear with the two long-range cannons. If anyone spots anything moving toward us at any speed that seems at all threatening, we will retreat beyond the edge of the tube fields. We’ve never seen anything venture out onto the desert. If something does pursue us onto the rock we will continue to retreat. Only if someone is overtaken or the laboratory or habitat is threatened will I give the order to fire. I and only I will give the order to use the lasers. We need to remember that the lasers are probably the most dangerous things on this planet right now, to us as much as to anything else.”
We regarded each other with gravity but also with an awed bemusement. We certainly knew the danger we were facing, but no one had heard this sort of language in over a thousand years, not since the end of the war.
“I haven’t detected any evidence of Brainardite biology beyond the edge of the tube fields,” Archie said. “I think this will be a good place to ... It was a good idea to set up base camp out here.”
Steel examined Yuri with some of her old camaraderie. “Everything’s functioning very well. Great work.”
Yuri smiled, but he said, “We’ll see.”
This caused Steel to soften her posture; her eyes dropped for a moment. “We’ll leave camp first thing in the morning, spend six hours in the field, then back to camp for lab work and analysis. I suggest we all get some sleep.”
We paired up and wandered to our bunks: me and Archie, Marcus
and Tamika, Alice and Yuri. The six of us had kind of settled on partners. It happens sometimes, particularly under stress. Steel went to her bunk alone.
After a quiet night and a quiet breakfast we climbed through hatches in the outer wall of the habitat and into our suits. Yuri had set up the e-suits so they would always stay outside; no surface that came into contact with Brainardite life would ever be in the hab or lab. We slid into them through hatches in their backs, closed up and detached from the hab wall. Five klicks of bare rock separated us from the tube fields. We could see them; the horizon was significantly farther on Brainard’s Planet than it was on Earth. It made the fields seem closer than they were.
The e-suits worked great. It was almost effortless to walk, but it took significant time to speed up, slow down or change direction. It wasn’t like running around naked. We sounded like an ancient cannonade as we tromped over the rock.
We were nearing the closest tubes when Yuri’s voice filled my auditory lobe: [HEY! Hey HEY! Mo! Look what I found! Look what I found!]
I turned and lumbered over to him. Everyone turned to look. “What is it?”
He bent down to the ground and picked up a small stone. It glinted in the morning light as he held it up to me. [Look!] It was a little chondritic meteorite. About the same size as the one I had found on Mars so many centuries ago; the one Krupp had ripped off of my shoulder. [What are the chances, huh? What are the chances? I mean this place has a pretty thick atmosphere. How many of these guys make it to the surface? And yet here it was, right where we were walking!]
The others gathered around to look as he placed it in my hand. I just stared at it. It really was quite similar to the one I had lost, a little smaller. [What are the chances?] Yuri continued, [I know it can’t replace your first talisman, but, but how many people have a talisman from Brainard’s Planet? You know? What are the chances?]
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