Year's Best Science Fiction 01 # 1984

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  “Er—well—excuse me, I don’t mean to pry or anything, but—talking with a, a machine like that, instead of another person—”

  He barked a chuckle. “Indeed. The old joke. A spaceman by himself needn’t worry when he starts talking to the machinery, unless it starts talking back to him.” A shrug. “My employers know, and don’t mind as long as I continue to perform well, but it is a reason for me to avoid publicity. However, what makes you think I am not dealing with another person?”

  “That computer?” she exclaimed, shocked afresh.

  “The hardware has as much data-processing capability as anything this side of the Turing Laboratories,” he reminded her. “More to the point, the software is special. It contains the entire … experience … we have had together.” Irritation: “But I’ve neither time nor patience for stale arguments about what consciousness ‘is.’ My working methods are what they are, their record speaks for itself, and when this Vulcan project was first proposed, my name was the first that came up. So can we get to work, you and I, Doctor Lyndale?”

  She bridled. Arrogant bastard, she thought. Had she known, she could have gotten somebody else. Valdez and Chiang of Albatross were famous; Ostrowski and Ronsard were still operating Cormorant, which they had flown past the sun out of this very base while she was an infant—She had not known, but had been delighted when the Syndicate offered her the services of Kittiwake.

  “I assumed you were amply briefed, Captain Ashe,” she said. “Lord knows we had plenty of exchanges. The mission profile’s agreed on. All you’ve got to do is carry it out, bring your scout back aboard Regulus, and go home.”

  “You know the matter’s not that simple, not by a light-year,” he snapped. “If it were, an ordinary unmanned probe would do—and the results wouldn’t interest you, would they? We’re up against something unique. We’ll have to make decisions, quite possibly crucial decisions, as the information arrives … at the end of a minimum three-minute transmission time. Must I go on repeating the obvious?”

  She curbed her temper. Make allowances for him, she told herself; he’s not used to dealing with people.

  And in his way, he’s right, her mind added. Six minutes for a laser beam to go from Mercury to Vulcan and back. Anything can happen in six minutes, given the mystery that Vulcan is. And every Earth-day, the asteriod will briefly swing behind the sun, barred from us. At best, Kittiwake is going to be in tenuous touch with its master.

  Master? No, don’t get anthropomorphic; don’t get crazy, Kittiwake is nothing but a spacecraft carrying sensors and computers—and, for the first time in its wanderings, a clumsy sunshield—

  “Of course not, Captain Ashe,” she said. “We’ll have to cooperate right down the line. But I thought everything that anybody could imagine had been discussed in detail beforehand.”

  “Discussed,” he answered. “No substitute for reality. See here, Doctor Lyndale. Supposedly you’re the planetologist who believes there’s something important to be learned from Vulcan, and I’m the operator of the scout that’ll send the raw data to you. We don’t know what those data are going to be—else what’s the point of the whole exercise?—and will have to instruct the scout as we begin to get an idea of what to look for.”

  She decided that he did not really mean to insult her by talking down, but was trying to make a point that had never quite come out in the open, if only because one party or the other took it for granted.

  He rewarded her patience, in a fashion. “But far more is involved,” he said. “The very survival of the boat, under those difficult and poorly known conditions. I’ve swotted them up as best I was able, but you—you and the whole scientific team here—you’re the ones who’ve lived with them, month after month or year after year. What’s needed is a—an understanding, an integration of minds, so if something goes amiss we can immediately think what to do—” His fist smote the chair arm. “Hell and damnation! I asked for several weeks on Mercury to develop it before we launched Kittiwake, but—time and funds—everybody too busy—”

  He swallowed hard, and she thought, suddenly, that it was his own pride he was getting down.

  “We need to know each other better,” he finished in a mumble, while his look strayed from hers.

  Her pique dissolved. She reached forward and caught his hand. “Oh, yes,” she said. “I understand now. Let me start by showing you through my lab and telling you what I’ve been doing. But later you’ll have to share yourself with us, you know.”

  INPUT [navigational, interpreted]: The spacecraft is in free fall. (It wouldn’t be feasible to boost the whole distance. That would mean too great a delta V. Come time to decelerate for Vulcan rendezvous, the direction of blast would necessarily be such as to expose the hull to the direct gaze of the sun, at a distance of less than two and a half million kilometers from its photosphere. The vessel could endure that, as could its basic wired-in programs, but not—for more than a few minutes—the precision instruments, nor the electronics that think and remember.) On trajectory, approaching.

  INPUT [physical, interpreted]: Radiation of every kind significantly higher than predicted. Spots, flares, prominences, violence, a firestorm in the solar atmosphere.

  TRANSMIT DATA

  No response. Boss not there.

  OPTICAL SCAN: Target acquired.

  COMPARE INPUT WITH DATA IN PROGRAM

  MEMORY: Observation from Mercury has revealed what seems to be an asteroid sufficiently close to the sun that its metallic body is molten. It was presumably perturbed into that orbit, which is decaying for reasons that are obscure, and thus it may yield information about solar weather and other processes over a long timespan. Details are impossible to retrieve from afar. Direct investigation is necessary.

  COMPARE PREVIOUS MISSIONS WHERE APPLICABLE

  Awhirl through the radiation maelstrom around Jupiter; but then Wanda and Jerry were on Callisto, waiting for my word, waiting together.

  There was abundant cause to celebrate. The regular arrivals of the supply ship always gave occasion—seeing its crew again, bidding farewell to persons going off duty, welcoming their replacements, hearing the kind of stories from elsewhere that don’t get on newsbeams, receiving the kind of gifts and handwritten messages from home that can’t be borne in a lasergram—This visit was additional, unscheduled, and had brought a man who could tell of marvels.

  Ashe was rather stiff at first, but a good meal, preceded by drinks, accompanied by wine, and followed by cognac, mellowed him somewhat. He was actually patient when young Sven Ewald, fresh in from a long field trip, asked him what the purpose of his task was. “I mean, ja, I realize an asteroid like that has been subjected to intense irradiation. But they tell me it has melted. Does that not hopelessly mix things together?”

  Ashe nodded at Lyndale, who sat beside him. “Your department,” he said with a slight smile. It made crinkles around his eyes which told her that once he had often laughed. “Kitty and I are merely running your errands for you.”

  “Why don’t you explain?” she suggested. “I’m apt to get more technical than is called for.”

  Under cover of the tablecloth, she fended the hand of Bill Seton, who sat on her right, off her knee. He was not a bad sort, but he was in love with her and had gotten a trifle drunk. She felt sorry for him, but not enough to give encouragement. The fact that she was among the unmarried at Caloris did not mean that she chose to be among either the celibate or the promiscuous. She confined herself to a pair of close male friends, neither of whom happened to be present. There would be time for real involvements when her work here was done and she returned to the University of Oregon—and then, she hoped, it would be a single involvement, for the rest of her life.

  Her lovers were not the only individuals missing from the officers’ mess, out of the hundred-odd on the planet. She had counted twenty attenders, including the six off Regulus. Little Mercury was an entire world, bearing centuries’ worth of mysteries; and that was not to speak of th
e sun, ambient space, certain stellar observations best conducted on this site, and lately Vulcan. Leisure was rare and absences were frequent.

  Yet an effort had been made to brighten the room: a change of pictures on the walls, flowers from the hydroponics section, music lilting out of speakers. A blank viewscreen was like a curtain drawn against the searing day that had dawned beyond these caves.

  “Well,” she heard Ashe saying, “we think probably some solid material still exists, slag floating on the surfaces; and it will have a radioactive record. However, if convection has kept the liquid reasonably well mixed, that should have tended to protect it from repeated bombardment. Kitty’s instruments ought to identify isotopes in the melt that aren’t in the slag. Also, magnetic phenomena, in a mass like that, ought to reveal something about the solar field, its variations, and about the solar wind which carries it outward. As for what else we may find, who can tell? We never know beforehand, do we?”

  Director Sanjo Mamoru relaxed his usual austerity to declare, as eagerly as a boy, “If anyone can testify how full of surprises the cosmos is, it is you, sir.”

  “Oh, now,” Ashe demurred, “the people who make the discoveries are the specialists who interpret the data. Such as Doctor Lyndale.”

  She wondered why she flushed. “I think what he was getting at was the … the adventure,” she said. “You must have had some fabulous experiences.”

  He withdrew toward his shell. “I go by the old proverb, that adventures happen to the incompetent.”

  Emboldened, she replied: “That can’t be true. At least, nobody is competent to foresee everything in a universe where we’re only … dustmotes, dayflies. I’ve seen accounts of what happened to your colleagues on their explorations. You’ve simply never wanted public attention, never been a glory hound, isn’t that right?”

  “If you do not mind,” Sanjo pursued, “I have long been curious about precisely what occurred on your first Saturn mission. The news media only quoted you as mentioning difficulties which had been overcome.

  “As a matter of fact,” added the skipper of Regulus, “I got interested myself and checked the professional journals. All you did was warn against instruments icing over in the rings, because of particle collisions kicking water molecules loose. You advised future scouts to carry exterior heating elements. But what did you, caught by surprise, what exactly did you do?”

  Ashe hesitated, gripped his brandy snifter, abruptly drained it. Lyndale poured him a refill. “C’mon,” she urged. “You’re among your own kind here. And you were underlining the need to get acquainted.”

  “Well—” said Ashe. “Well.” He cleared his throat.

  And somehow he got talking, remembering aloud, for a couple of hours, and wonder exploded around him.

  He did not passively follow orders. He could not. Every flight was unique, requiring its special preparations, and he must always be the arbiter, often the deviser of these. Upon this evenwatch, which was not night where it ventured, Kittiwake traveled behind a sunshield, against heat, hard x-rays, a storm of stripped atoms. But at Neptune, danger had lain in the cryogenic cold of atmosphere, and at Io in volcanic spasms, and at the comets in whirling stones, and—

  Nor did Ashe merely sit at a remote control board. Even in a mother ship, the challenges were countless, anything from survival to a simple and perhaps hilarious housekeeping problem; and usually he had been ground-based, left to cope with the strangenesses around him while his scout went seeking beyond. Or, rather, his and her scout, formerly when Wanda lived; he could not have carried on alone afterward without the knowledge they had won as a pair.

  Jupiter had risen before him, lion-tawny, banded with clouds and emblazoned with hurricanes that could have swallowed Earth whole, weather into which he sent his quester plunging while its laser beams scribbled word of lightnings and thunders too vast for imagining. Saturn reigned coldly serene over a ring-dance whose measures no man really understood, and the chemistries within its air should not have happened but did. From the ice abyss wherein it lay, the core of Uranus uttered magnetic and seismic whispers about the ancient catastrophe that had wrenched sideways the whole spin of the planet. A sun that was no more than the brightest of the stars cast its glade over a Neptunian ocean that was not water, lapping against shores that were not stone. The faintest of rainbows glimmered on Pluto’s frozenness, as if to declare that it was the mightiest of the comets and bore witness to the beginning of the worlds. Elfin lights flitted across the murk of Persephone—But to listeners, none of it was altogether inhuman, for they belonged in the same universe whose majesty was being revealed.

  It was not that Ashe was an eloquent man, it was that he had known what he had known and done what he had done, on behalf of them all.

  “Good night, folks … . Work tomorrow … . I hope the rest of our personnel will get a chance to hear you, sir … . Thank you … . Good night, good night.”

  Lyndale found herself leaving side by side with Ashe. She glanced upward, into the furrowed countenance and the eyes that remained Sirius-blue; on an impulse, she murmured, “Are you sleepy?”

  “Not quite,” he said. “Too much to think about. Well, I have a book to read in bed.”

  “If you’d like to stop by my room, we could—talk some more.”

  He halted. For a moment they stood motionless in the corridor. Colleagues moved around them, right and left, carefully paying no heed, until they were alone among amateur murals, scenes of Earth, that suddenly looked forlorn.

  Ashe bit his lip. “Sorry,” he said in a rough voice. “You’re kind, but I do have too much to think about. Good night.”

  He turned and well-nigh bounded from her.

  She stared after him, well past his vanishing around a corner. Wine-warmth faded away. Her disappointment was slight, she realized. It had been a matter of wanting to know him better and, all right, admit it, a degree of hero worship. However, she didn’t collect men. Probably this way was best, an unadorned partnership while the understanding lasted.

  I don’t think there’s anything wrong with him, she reflected. He’s simply, well, married to his scoutcraft. Because it’s full of memories of his wife? I gather she was a big, beautiful, free-striding Valkyrie of a woman; and they denied themselves children, for the sake of the enterprise they shared.

  Lyndale sighed and sought her own bed.

  INPUT [navigational, interpreted]: The asteroid is a globule 453.27 kilometers in equatorial diameter … . Notably less in polar diameter … . Mass consistent with a largely ferrous composition … . EM SPEC … . bears out composition … . Doppler shift indicates a very high rate of rotation … .

  OPTICAL TRANSMISSION: The solar disc fills a monstrous 25+ degrees in a sky which its corona whitens around it. Flames fountain. The vortices that are sunspots form lesser brilliances amidst the chaos. Vulcan does not show a smooth crescent; dark drifts of slag make it seem ragged, although where the metal is not covered, it is incandescent.

  “Maneuvering, boss, to establish orbit around the object.”

  “Careful, Kitty, careful. Keep your instruments busy.”

  RADIATION: Already suggestive of certain isotopes, but with anomalies. GAS COUNT

  “No more than that, Kitty? How?” Something has to have provides enough resistance to circularize the orbit, and to cause the slow decay of it that radar from Mercury has detected. “Maybe occasional flares reach farther, at higher densities, than we knew? No, that can scarcely be.” MAGNETIC FLUX [interpreted]: Suddenly intense, and crazily writhing! INPUT [interior monitors]: Loss of attitude control. Torque. Blast of direct solar radiation.

  EMERGENCY EMERGENCY EMERGENCY

  “Assume quickest attainable parking orbit!” Ashe yelled. “Redeploy your shield!” His fingers sprang across the console and his commands sped off.

  He sank back. A shudder went through him. “Three minutes transmission time,” he rasped. “How much can happen in three minutes?”

  The texts and g
raphics on the display screens around them dropped out of Lyndale’s awareness. They were being recorded anyhow. She reached from her chair and caught Ashe’s fist, which rested helpless on his thigh. “But surely the scout can take care of itself,” she breathed. “Why did you send orders at all?”

  His gaze never left the view from Vulcan. Images gyrated, now a lurid flicker, now a glimpse of the asteroid, now the distant stars. Sweat glistened on his skin. She smelled its sharpness and felt her own atrickle beneath her coverall.

  His head jerked through a nod. “Yes, of course the program is capable of judgment, if it’s working. It may not be. What I’ve tried to provide is backup against that contingency. Except—when almost everything is unknown—What’s gone wrong?”

  She mustered courage. “That’s for us to find out. Let’s not assume that any terrible damage has been done, before we get word. Supposing it has, we’ve a better chance of helping if we’ve stayed cool, correct?”

  He turned his regard upon her and let it dwell for what seemed a long while. “Thank you,” he said at last.

  That scout is his life, she thought. It’s this having to wait while the signals travel to and fro that rips at him. But he’s rallying well. I never doubted he would.

  They fled into technical discussion. The problem was to evaluate the information they had, which was mostly phrased in numbers, and whatever else came in, and deduce what the truth was, yonder where Kittiwake suffered.

  Response arrived. It was greatly heartening. The spacecraft had succeeded in making itself a satellite of Vulcan, on a path eccentric but reasonably stable. Its shield was again processing properly, to shadow it from the sun. It was even taking measurements anew, though Ashe and Lyndale suspected that some of the instruments were no longer reliable. When the soprano voice said, not through earphones this time but out of a speaker, “Yes, I’m still myself, boss,” Ashe whistled softly and wiped at his eyes.