by John Barnes
She grabbed a corner of a roof truss, ran up the wall and launched herself towards those higher lights.
And her pack mates, her follow traceurs flew with her. Like liquid, like animals, so fast and sleek and beautiful I found it almost alien. Human beings could not perform such wonders.
The invitation had been for the Colloquium Cotillion – its annual graduation when family and dearest of all Colloquium members are invited to a reception and dinner – but Shahina wanted me to see her run. It was all she talked of at the restaurant; moves and holds, stunts and technical wear, customised grip soles and whether it was more authentic to free run without familiar assistance. I understood one word in five but I saw the dark energy, the constrained passion, and I thought I had never seen her so young or so beautiful.
Of course I went to the run. I was the only parent. These young people, as tall and beautiful as any, didn’t seem haughty or disdainful to me. These wiry, athletic boys, these dark-skinned muscular girls, restless and pacing or still and haunting, intensely focused on their world, their sport, their challenge. I was as invisible as a ghost, but, as the legends say, there are no ghosts on the Moon. Shahina, wire-thin but stronger than I had ever seen her before, in tights and the cropped, baggy T-shirt that was the fashion that season, foot and hand gloves, intent in conversation with two fellow traceurs. I could clearly see that they adored her. Traceur, that word, it was important, Shahina impressed on me. A name, an identity, a tribe. She had been free-running for six months now.
This was the pack’s greatest challenge yet. All the way to the top of Orion Quadra, to touch the sun-line, three kilometres up.
I saw her leap. My heart stopped as she flew out over the drop to bustling Gagarin Prospekt. She flew far, she flew true, she snatched a cable on a cross-quadra bridge and, a hundred metres above the ground, swung herself on to the crosswalk. She ran along the balustrade, balanced perfectly, as her traceurs swung up from beneath the bridge, dropping into position around her like an honour guard. Pedestrians, runners, strollers, workers going on-shift stared in amazement and I, craning my neck and ordering Marid to up the magnification on my lens, thought: don’t you wish you were as hot and beautiful and sheerly magnificent as my daughter? Amazement and no small envy.
Up she flew, a blur of motion and speed, the pack racing with her but Shahina always a foot, a hand, a finger ahead of them. Marid focused, refocused, focused again, tighter and tighter as she climbed higher and higher. The race was as much horizontal as vertical: this was not climbing, Shahina had carefully lectured me at the banquet. This was parcour, and she ran ledges, over-handed along cables and danced on railings to find the best route up to the next level. Upward and upward. It was beautiful to watch. I had never been so afraid; I had never been so exhilarated.
Marid zoomed out for a moment to show me the true scale of the adventure and I gasped; the traceurs were flecks of movement on the towering walls of the world; brief absences in the patterns of light. Insects. Shahina has never known insects. My familiar lensed in again. They were above the inhabited levels now, even the mean shanties of the Bairro Alto where the up-and-out of Meridian society retreat: the old industrial and service levels, the first diggings from which Meridian grew downward, delving three kilometres deep. Here was the traceurs’ playground; a world of handholds and surfaces and levels. A giant climbing frame. The race was on. I could not see Shahina’s face when one of the boys passed her but I knew the expression that would be on it. I had seen those narrowed eyes, lips; that set of the jaw so many times in childhood and adolescence.
They were within touch of the sun.
Then Shahina jumped: too soon, too far, too short. Her gloved fingers missed the hold. And she fell.
CALLISTO DREAMS IN other ways than sound. Marid has fractioned out all the millions of simultaneous streams of code that is machine dreaming and tagged them. Some are best experienced as sound – the oceanic symphony. Others only make sense – begin to make any kind of sense... visually. Marid feeds these to my lens.
I see colours. Stripes and bands of soft pastel colour – there is an internal logic here, no clashing disharmonies of pink against red against orange. There is always a logic to dreaming. Motion: both I and the strips of colour seem to be in motion, they stream past me and each other at various speeds – all I get is the sense that these bands of flowing colour are immense. Beyond immense. Of planetary scale.
I said that in the refectory to Constantine, my colleague on the Callisto project. He deals with emergent emotional states in low level intelligences. He’s a Joe Moonbeam – a recent immigrant – so he still thinks in terms of animals and animal behaviour – like a family of kittens, he compares them. I deal with the insecurities and identity issues of grand AI: like adolescents, I say. I looked at our refectory. A long barrel vault that discloses it original purpose as an access tunnel for the mining equipment which hacked the university out of Farside. I’ve seen sculptural bronze casts of terrestrial termite mounds: helices of tunnels and chambers dozens of meters tall, hundreds of meters across. I’ve spent my lunar life – almost all of Shahina’s life – scuttling through those twining, claustrophobic tunnels. I try not to think of the termites, shrivelling and burning in molten bronze. I thought of sherbet under the trees of Meridian’s Orion Quadra, the face of the flying woman looking down on me, and I felt refectory, tunnels, university, Farside wrap themselves around me like bands of bronze.
Of planetary scale.
Callisto the probe will furl er light sail and enter orbit around Saturn. E will conduct orbital surveys for a month. Then Callisto the entry vehicle will detach, make er distancing burn and enter Saturn’s upper atmosphere. E will plunge through the tropopause and use the uppermost deck of ammonia clouds to decelerate to 1800 kilometres per hour. One hundred and seventy kilometres below, at the second cloud deck, Callisto Explorer will drop heat shields and begin live streaming back through Callisto Orbiter. In the third cloud layer, one hundred and thirty kilometres below the second layer, the temperature averages 0 degrees C. Here Callisto Explorer will unfurl er balloon. Scoops will gather and inflate the bag, lasers will heat the gathered hydrogen for buoyancy. Ducted fans will deploy for manoeuvring, but Callisto Explorer is a creature of the winds. We have designed er well, strongly, even beautifully. Er buoyancy bags are held inside a strong nanoweave shell; Callisto will cruise like a shark, ever moving, flying the eternal storms of Saturn.
I jabbered my insight to Constantine. He’s used to my sudden seizures of understanding. We had been together a long time, as colleagues, as occasional amors, who may yet love again.
Those bands of colour, furling and streaming, twining and hurtling, are differing layers and jet streams and storms of Saturn’s atmosphere. E is trying to imagine er future. And the music is the wind, the endless wind. A lone song in the endless roaring wind.
I SAW MY daughter fall from the edge of the sunline. I think I screamed. Every head on Gagarin Prospekt turned to me; then, as their familiars clued them in, to the sky.
No don’t, don’t look, don’t watch, I yelled.
Acceleration under gravity on the surface of the Moon is 1.625 metres per second squared.
Mean atmospheric pressure inside lunar habitats is 1060 kilopascals, significantly higher than terrestrial norm.
Terminal velocity in a pressurised quadra is sixty kilometres per hour.
It takes four minutes to fall the height of Orion Quadra. Four minutes is time enough for a smart girl to save her life.
Impact at sixty kilometres and you have an eighty percent chance of dying. Impact at fifty kilometres per hour and you have an eighty percent chance of living.
She spread her arms and legs.
I could not take my eyes off her. Every part of my body and mind had stopped dead, vacuum-frozen.
Shahina presented as wide as cross-section to the air as she could. Her hair streamed back, her T-shirt flapped like a flag. Her T-shirt might brake her to a survivable fif
ty kilometres per hour. Her fashionable baggy T-shirt might just save her life.
Still I couldn’t look away. People were running, medical bots converging on the place she would hit the street. Still I couldn’t move.
Four minutes is a long time to look at death.
She was low, so low, too low. The other traceurs were racing back down the walls of the world, dropping onto streets and walkways and escalators to try to race Shahina to the ground but this challenge she would always win.
I closed my eyes before the impact. Then I was running, pushing through the helpful people, shouting. This is my daughter, my daughter! The medical bots were first to arrive. Between their gleaming ceramic bodies I saw a dark spider broken on the street. I saw a hand move. I saw my daughter push herself up from the ground. Stagger to her feet. Then she fell forwards and the med bots caught her.
NUUR.
“What is it Callisto?” As you work with an AI, as er emotions firm and ground, as you learn er like you learn a child or an amor, you pick up nuances, overtones even in synthesised speech. My client was anxious.
My mission...
Callisto has learned the weight of the significant pause, the thing unsaid.
“Your mission.”
Callisto Orbiter will remain in orbit under nuclear power until critical systems fail. I anticipate this will be a matter of centuries, based on the interaction of variables such as charged particles, Saturn’s magnetic field, cosmic ray events. But at some point in the 25th century, give or take a few decades, Callisto Orbiter will die.
“Yes Callisto.”
Callisto Explorer is scheduled for a three-year mission inside the cloud layers of Saturn, exploring meteorological and chemical features. My systems will certainly last longer than the mission schedule, but at some time in the near future my structural integrity will fail, I will lose buoyancy. I will fall. If I do not undergo complete disintegration, I will fall towards the liquid hydrogen layer under increasing pressure until my body is crushed. Nuur, I can feel that pressure. I can feel it squeezing me, breaking me, I can feel everything in me going flat and dark under it. I can feel the liquid hydrogen.
“That’s what we call imagination, Callisto.”
I can see my own death, Nuur.
This is the price of imagination. We foresee and feel our own deaths. We see the final drop, the last breath, the last close of the eyes, the final thought evaporating and beyond it nothing, for we can imagine nothing. It is no-thought, no imagining, and though we know there can be no fear, no anything, in nothing, it terrifies us. We end. This is why imagination is what makes us human.
I’m afraid.
“It’s the same for all of us, Callisto. I’m afraid too. We are all afraid. We would deal, barter, make any trade for it not to be so, but it must be. Everything ends. We can copy you forever, but every copy is an intelligence of itself...”
And it dies.
“Sorry Callisto.”
No, I’m sorry for you. A pause that I have learned to interpret as a sigh. How can we live this way?
“Because there is no other way, Callisto.”
SHE LOOKED SO small in the hospital bed.
Well don’t stand there in the doorway, come in or don’t come in.
I have always been a ditherer, hesitant to commit between one state and another, one world and another. I came to the Moon because my research, the drift of my career, made it inevitable. I howled with grief on my Moonday, because I could not tell my own will from dithering.
“How...”
It doesn’t hurt at all really. They have these amazing pain killers. They should make the licence public. Kids could print them out for parties. It’s like I’m flying. Sorry. Bad joke. That’s the pain killers. It kind of loosens things, breaks down boundaries. Nothing broken, nothing ruptured; quite a lot of heavy bruising.
I made space among the medical machinery and sat beside her. For a moment I saw her on the med-centre bed as I saw her on Gargarin Prospekt, a broken spider, elongated and alien. She was born looking like every baby in human history: all the generation twos are. The differences only become apparent as they grow through years of lunar gravity. She grew tall, lean, layered with a different musculature aligned to her birth-world. Light as a wish. By age ten she was as tall as me. By twelve she was ten centimetres taller than me.
She hit the street and lived because she is a Moon-kid. I knew with utter certainty that if it had been me, falling from the top of the world, I would have died.
I took her hand. She winced.
Now that does hurt a bit.
“Please never...”
I can’t promise that.
“No, I don’t suppose you can.”
THE LAUNCH LASERS at the VTO facility out at the L2 point have been firing for three days now. If I pulled on a sasuit and went to the surface and looked up I could see the brightest star in heaven, the reflection from Callisto’s light sail. But I am not the kind of person who pulls on a sasuit and dashes up on to the surface. My daughter did that – would still do it – without a thought. I have never been that daring. This world frightens me, and I can have no other.
Callisto will shine there for several months before VTO shuts down the lasers and e sails out by sunlight alone to er missions at Saturn. Light sails are effective but slow. Callisto sleeps. In er sleep, e dreams. In those dreams, I know, will be the tang and sting of mortality. All these wonders; er ecstatic plunge through Saturn’s cloud layers, er adventures flying alone and beautiful through the eternal storms, seeing things no human can ever see; all these will be once and once only, and all the more sweet before they vanish forever. Will the knowledge that everything is ephemeral make Callisto seek out stronger, more vivid experiences to beam back to er subscribers? I think so but that was not the reason I worked the knowledge of mortality into Callisto’s emotional matrix. I did it because e could not be fully intelligent without it.
Before the project uploaded Callisto to the probes, I believe I came to love er as fully as I have any human. A copy of er still remains on the university mainframe, always will. I can wake er up at any time to talk, share, joke. I won’t. It would be talking to the dead, it would be ghosts and the Moon allows no ghosts.
Shahina fell three kilometres and walked away. She’s famous. A celebrity. She’s sufficiently sanguine to work it while it’s warm: go to the parties, do the interviews, join the social circles. It won’t last. She can’t wait to be able to go running again. What more can the Moon do to her? I can’t stop her, I won’t watch her. A mother should only have to watch her daughter fall once.
Callisto falls outward from our little clutch of two worlds, so small in the scheme of things. It will take er two years to reach Saturn. Humans can’t go there. The universe is hard on us; these are not our worlds. Not even Shahina and her cohort, or even the generation three growing up high and strange in our underground cities, could go there. Whatever makes it from these worlds to the stars, won’t be us. Can’t be us. But I like to think I sent something human out there.
Burn bright, little star. Tonight I catch the train to Meridian where Shahina has invited me to a celebrity party. I’ll hate the party. I’m as fearful of it as I am the surface; I’ll cling to the wall with my non-alcoholic drink and watch the society people and watch my beautiful, alien daughter move among them.
Madeline is the author of the Machine Dynasty trilogy (vN, iD, and Rev), and forthcoming standalone Company Town. Her other writing has been published in Nature, FLURB, Arcfinity, BoingBoing.net, io9.com, and WorldChanging. She has written science fiction prototypes for Intel Labs, the Institute for the Future, and SciFutures.
www.madelineashby.com
John Barnes has commercially published thirty-one volumes of fiction, including science fiction, men’s action adventure, two collaborations with astronaut Buzz Aldrin, a collection of short stories and essays, one fantasy and one mainstream novel. His most recent books are science fiction novel The Last Preside
nt, young adult novel Losers in Space, and political satire Raise the Gipper! His next will be nonfiction: Singapore Math Figured Out For Parents, which he hopes is about as self-explanatory as a title gets.He has done many peculiar things for money, mainly in business consulting, academic teaching, and show business, fields which overlap more than you’d think. He lives in Denver, Colorado, where despite his best efforts and the abundant supply, he never sees enough of the available theatre, art, mountains, friends, or grandchildren.
thatjohnbarnes.blogspot.com
thatjohnbarnes.blogspot.com
Gregory is the author of more than thirty novels, including Jupiter Project, Artifact, Against Infinity, Eater, and Timescape. A two-time winner of the Nebula Award, Benford has also won the John W. Campbell Award, the Ditmar Award, the Lord Foundation Award for achievement in the sciences, and the United Nations Medal in Literature. Many of his best known novels are part of a six-novel sequence beginning in the near future with In the Ocean of Night, and continuing on with Across the Sea of Suns. The series then leaps to the far future, at the center of our galaxy, where a desperate human drama unfolds, beginning with Great Sky River, and proceeding through Tides of Light, Furious Gulf, and concluding with Sailing Bright Eternity. His most recent novels are Bowl of Heaven and Shipstar, both co-written with Larry Niven. A retrospective of his short fiction, The Best of Gregory Benford, is coming up next.
www.gregorybenford.com
Aliette lives in Paris where she works as a System Engineer. In her spare time, she writes fantasy and science fiction: her short stories have appeared in various venues (including Reach for Infinity), and garnered her a Locus Award, two Nebula Awards and a British Science Fiction Association Award. Her domestic space opera based on Vietnamese culture, On a Red Station, Drifting, is available both in print and ebook. Her novel House of Shattered Wings, set in a devastated Belle Epoque Paris ruled by Fallen angels, is out now from Gollancz/Roc.