What I also noted in my column was: “...it is now 2008 and I still don't see that any corner has been turned.” I also urged you readers to keep an eye out for some event that History would mark as the beginning of the Fourth Turning.
I think we've seen it.
Certainly the previous 15 years or so have been an age of individualism, though not of the rugged, go-it-alone-in-the-mountains variety. Rather, it has been a narcissistic individualism, no better exemplified than by the explosion in the number of people doing body modification. As I write this, the world has entered an economic crisis the likes of which it hasn't seen since the Great Depression. And right now, some poor fool with a thousand dollars worth of tattoos on his arms is waking up the day after losing his job, and realizing that those tattoos cannot be sold for a dime's worth of food.
If Strauss and Howe are correct, that sort of realization, multiplied billions of times across the globe, should be just the thing to change the thinking, and the character, of this generation into the next one. If we don't see that happening (perhaps already having started by the time you read this) in the next couple years, then I contend that Strauss and Howes’ thesis will have been falsified.
We'll also be even more screwed than we already are, but that's a topic for another column.
Copyright © 2009 Jeffery D. Kooistra
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[Back to Table of Contents]
* * *
Short Story: THE COLD STAR SKY
by Craig DeLancy
* * * *
Illustrated by William Warren
* * * *
Cooperation can be challenging....
* * * *
The day was starting badly.
“You are ignorant and violent, with no lifewealth. I will talk and you will do. Follow me, but don't get in my way as I rescue my kin.”
Thus spake Gurk, floating before me like a betentacled twenty-meter-long yellow blimp. We were in a Greete floating city, in the high atmosphere of the gas giant Purgatorio. Nearly two days I'd been mostly standing around and chafing in my suit while Gurk occasionally insulted me—astonishing given that I was here as a favor, a little offering from humanity to the Greete of help in the mission they were mounting to save one of their ships.
The way I got through this time was I told myself the translation software was not good. Gurk insisted on speaking not Galactic but his own language of squeals and clicks, and he used his own translation bot that radioed translations to my bot. Lots of room there for mistakes. Surely Gurk just squeaked, as he looked down on me with the innumerable tiny golden eyes that ringed his great mouth, “You have much to learn and are admirably willing to fight to acquire this knowledge, even given your economic disadvantages. I look forward to talking with you and observing your engineering skills as we both lead the way in heroically saving my colleagues in danger.”
Give him the benefit of the doubt, right? Can't trust translation bots.
Otherwise, you see, I would have to kill him. First his pet, and then him.
Did I mention the pet? We call them “loons,” short for balloons. When we first entered Greete ships and saw loons caroming off walls, we assumed they were Greete children. Like the Greete they are helium- and hydrogen-inflated organisms that float among the clouds of the Greete homeworld, a Jovian gas giant, but they are spherical and only four or five meters in diameter. Each Greete usually had one of these monsters bouncing about, parroting a few words and getting into everything.
Gurk headed for the huge door to the hall. We were about to board, finally, our shuttle. “Come, savage!” he shouted. Then, with a squidlike contraction, Gurk shot from the room.
Now, understand, the Greete don't walk, so the floor to this chamber was not a flat surface to stroll over but rather a mass of cables and pipes. I now had to climb to the exit fighting through a thorny thicket. In a gravity passing two e-gees. Wearing a spacesuit, because this place was full of helium and methane.
I clambered over some cables and promptly fell on my face. My helmet smacked hard against a pipe. I held my breath, waiting for the leak alarm to sound. Luckily it didn't. After that scare, I looked around, taking stock. A big conduit to my left ran all the way to the door. I could walk along the top.
I pulled myself onto the conduit, and lay there a moment, catching my breath.
“Food food food food food?” a voice called. I looked up. My translator bot had picked up the sound of Gurk's loon, which floated nearby.
I stood uneasily. “Sorry, buddy, I got nothing for you.”
“Food food food food food,” the loon repeated. Then its maw opened wide and it descended over me.
“Aw,” I moaned, as it pulled me up into its gullet. “What a revolting development.”
* * * *
I hadn't asked for this assignment.
“The Greete are in trouble, Tarkos,” Captain Walters had told me, after calling me into his office. Walters and I were both mothership crew, stationed in a circumpolar orbit of Purgatorio, passing over our floating North Pole base twice an e-day. “They've lost a small exploratory boat deep in the atmosphere. Just above the matryoshk layer.”
“I'm sorry to hear that, sir.” The winds could be fast and dense down there.
“It was some kind of research ship. Four Greete on it. The Greete up here have a radar ping but no communications. You'd think that meant the crew was dead, but radar shows the ship has been maneuvering, or attempting to maneuver.”
“Do the Greete have any idea why their crew would opt for radio silence?”
Walters shook his head. Then he frowned and leaned forward to put his elbows on his desk. He pointed at a chair and I “sat"—in microgravity it's mostly just show, but it does make the conversation more relaxed. “The Greete have asked us for help. They don't engineer their ships for high pressures. Their ship that's in trouble is the only one they have here that can handle those depths.” He paused, and then added, “They don't have a suitable ship to launch a rescue. But we do.”
“One of the shuttles, sir?”
Our ship and our two shuttles were Kirtpau design, bought by the U.N. from the crab-like dwellers of the water world Kirt. These vessels could easily go to the bottom of Earth's ocean without so much as getting damp inside.
Walters nodded. “I want you to go on this mission, Tarkos.”
I thought about that a while. I'm one of the youngest and least experienced members of our crew. “Sir, might there not be someone else more suited for this?”
“Probably. Surely.” Walters sighed. “But not on this ship, Tarkos. You speak Galactic, you're an engineer, pretty well-rounded, and a good pilot.” He shook his head. “Tarkos, this mission to Purgatorio was supposed to be scientific and economic, not a diplomatic mission. But...” He waved his hand. I understood his meaning: but things had turned out differently. The Greete were already here in big numbers when we arrived, and events had conspired to make our two species interdependent.
I nodded. “I understand, sir. I will of course do my best.”
“Thanks, Tarkos. Remember that you represent Earth. Be patient, polite, and try to avoid trouble. We've had enough trouble on this mission. We're trying to build some trust in the Galaxy. I'm sorry to say we sorely need that.”
“Yes, sir.”
* * * *
A dim glow of the ship's lights penetrated into the throat of the loon. I radioe
d for help, slapping the sides in the hope of causing indigestion. The loon bumped around, seemingly indifferent. Finally, there was a violent jolt, and the loon coughed me out. I fell, hard, onto flat ground.
It dumped me right on the very teetering edge of the flight deck where our shuttle was parked. I landed face down, my head and shoulders sticking out in empty air. This side of the bay opened onto the naked atmosphere of Purgatorio, where a few Greete floated through a panorama of swirling bands of yellow and orange clouds—and below me, thousands of kilometers of hydrogen and helium and methane provided the insubstantial stuff of the gas giant, and if I fell I'd spend hours plummeting while slowly crushed to death.
“Ah!” I shouted and scampered awkwardly away from the edge.
“In the dark below my sisters die,” Gurk said. Greete are hermaphrodites; I mostly refer to Greete as “him” or “it,” but the translator seemed to pick genders at random. “And you are playing with pet!” The flat voice of the translator did not hide Gurk's tone of impatient disgust. He added, “Stay away from the edge, dense savage. You would sink like a shed scab.”
“Thanks for the advice,” I growled, still shaking with adrenaline.
“You are in my debt again,” Gurk answered smugly. He puffed a second in self-importance, waving his tentacles.
Count to some two-digit prime number, I told myself. Maybe seventeen. Else I'll have to shoot this thing with a grappling hook and deflate him once and for all.
Gurk turned toward the shuttle and commanded, “Open the door.”
I went to the broad back doors of the shuttle, built for unloading large cargo. As I poked at the door lock, dark shapes about a meter long flitted about the entrance to the landing deck: remora probes. One shot in and latched onto our shuttle with a loud clang!
These robot paparazzi followed human ships wherever we went off Earth and would follow us sometimes a little ways into atmospheres—down to a few e-atmospheres of pressure but never any more. The Kirtpau assured us the probes followed most other travelers. The snooping helped races decide which other races appeared trustworthy, an important function in a galactic economy based on trust. As newcomers with a bitter history, we were considered pretty damn untrustworthy right now. Frankly, I suspect the probes also provided something like entertainment: Tonight on Channel Nine! Savage Hu-Mans Fumble About the Galaxy! Tune in!
Gurk swiped a tentacle at the remora probe and it let go of the shuttle and shot away, taking to the air and joining the five or six other probes hovering outside like flies. The loon shot after it with shocking speed, delighted to have something to chase.
The doors to the shuttle swung wide.
“It is disgustingly small,” Gurk said, waving tentacles at the empty interior. “A coffin. Suitable only for your kind. Good only for sinking corpses.”
“It's all we have,” I told him. Lucky for us all, Kirtpau design is minimalist: their ships are mostly empty shells with all essential machinery built into the hull. You could leave the interior bare and fly using virtual controls. Before I dropped to the Greete floating city, we had removed all our equipment from this shuttle—leaving but a single chair for me—to make room for a Greete.
But only just barely to make room. The shuttle was big, but Gurk was bigger. We had offered help on the assumption that it was true a Greete could shrink to nearly a third its usual size if forced to do so.
Gurk made a bunch of sounds that his translator refused to decode as he threw himself at the door.
“Uh, don't you think I should go first?” I asked. How was I going to get through if Gurk was already stuffed in there? But Gurk kept at it, not answering me. There was a great rushing of wind, and squeaking against the edges of the doorway, but finally, to my amazement, Gurk crammed inside. Then he whistled, a sound I well knew from experience was a call to his loon. I'd never get to the front of the shuttle if I went after the loon. I ran for the small gap along the corner of the floor, and crawled through to the front.
Slowly, ponderously, the loon followed behind.
The shuttle was a lifting body. I took my seat and turned to the front windows, with Gurk's squashed face right behind me. I logged into the shuttle's controls through my suit, closed the back doors, and then with the maneuvering jets I pushed us over the edge. The shuttle dropped smoothly and quickly. We met little turbulence as we descended.
“The research ship is trapped, held down by some kind of heavy accretion that has come out of the black carbon,” Gurk explained for the twentieth time. Man, he really thought I was an idiot.
“Yes, sir,” I said. Then, to show a bit of pique, and because I knew snooping annoyed him, I asked again, “what was it doing in the Matryoshka carbon, Gurk?”
Matryoshka carbon, or matryoshk as we called it informally, is what had brought humans to Purgatorio. Complex and nested carbon shells, coming in thousands of shapes but most with carbon-60 balls at their core, formed a black ocean down there. The little shells were our best form of computronium used in our AI program. Some shapes acted as ideal isolators for q-bits; other shapes served as one-electron transistors. Different shapes could be assembled together like building blocks to form nano-scale Turing machines or q-machines. The material was slow and costly to make on Earth, but here could be sucked up like old-time oil and sorted out later.
The Greete, however, had always claimed disinterest regarding matryoshk.
“My brothers suffer and you talk of commerce,” Gurk said. The loon groaned, though whether in sympathy for Gurk's anger or because it was unhappily squeezed into the back of the shuttle, I couldn't say.
The sky above us turned from yellow to orange and finally dark gray as we dropped fast, guided by the ping off their ship. Within half an hour we sailed into grainy black clouds of the upper matryoshk. I used the maneuvering engines to slow us, then deployed our lift zeppelin and inflated it to neutral buoyancy. It was a rough procedure: while the drag of the zeppelin grabbed at the atmosphere, the shuttle bucked and shuddered. But finally we were slowed and floating. I let us drift behind and a bit above the Greete ship and then closed in on it.
We got a dim visual, and I overlaid it with radar to get a clean image.
“Look at that,” I whispered. The wasplike ship had a long tail of black, as wide as the back of the ship and tapering as it stretched behind nearly a hundred meters. As we drifted in closer, I saw that the black crust covered the ship also.
“It looks like Matryoshka carbon,” I said. “But completely covering the ship, dragging it down. They must have tried to thrust out, but been unable to. They're carrying too much mass. Same for floating out.” The Greete ships were designed to grow or shrink, allowing for easy control of buoyancy.
I'd given Gurk radio control, and he hailed the ship. A weak squirt of a message came back.
“Radio accelerates its growth.”
“Radio accelerates its growth,” I repeated aloud. “So that's why they stopped calling for help.”
“You state the obvious, gristle nugget. We must latch onto the ship, and we will tow it to safety before it sinks like this human coffin would without its crude balloon.”
Count to seventeen, maybe nineteen...
“I don't know if we can, Gurk,” I finally answered. “It looks really massive. This shuttle depends upon its lifting body form to get back into the high atmosphere. Let's think this through—it's weird. We've sent probes into the matryoshk layer before. This never happened to them. I think we need a sample.”
“You waste time. The ship grows heavier as you bleat.”
I ignored him. Our shuttle had a simple robotic probe arm with an extensive instruments package. The winds were pretty fast and shifting down here, but the long tail on the Greete ship acted as a stabilizer. It was easy to get in close and reach out with the arm and scrape some of the black out of the tail. I pulled up an electron microscope view.
“Irregular crystal lattice,” Gurk growled.
“Very like,” I agreed. Complex
swirling patterns were revealed at all the different resolutions I tried. While we watched, some of the structures moved, changing form.
I had a dim recollection of my logic and machine theory classes, back in Istanbul, taught by a fierce philosopher who complained always about how dumb we students were. What had she called it?
“Self-replicating Matryoshka carbon,” I said. “We always knew that was possible—the reason we mine the stuff is because certain shapes of it will easily bind with other shapes. This stuff on your ship, it's some kind of self-copying structure. It pulls stray particles of matryoshk with the right shape out of the air here, assembling copies of itself, piling them up.”
“The shape of it reflects the turbulence patterns,” Gurk added.
“Right. There is a still eddy of turbulence behind the ship. It must need some calm air to bind and reproduce.” I frowned, an expression wasted on Gurk. “The question remains, why've we never seen this before?”
“Improbable events happen infrequently.”
“Of course,” I said, trying to be accommodating. “But there're billions of tons of matryoshk below. How improbable could this be?”
“We do not need your primitive attempts at science now. You will lift the ship into the higher wind bands,” Gurk commanded. “And then find a high-velocity stream. That will clean it.”
I grumbled but had to agree with the plan: it appeared the creeping crust couldn't get a grip in fast winds. We wouldn't be able to drag the ship up to the floating city, but we might be able to drag it up into a higher wind band. Besides, if we got away from the matryoshk, then if the wind didn't clean the crust off, the crust would at least lack the raw material needed to grow.
“This shuttle has a grapple,” I said. “It pays out through the probe arm.” I checked the diagnostics and found the line was ready to reel out. “But what do we connect to?”
“There is a toroidal extension on the dorsal peak of the exploratory ship.”
Seizing virtual controls, I tried to lower the probe arm again. But it didn't move.
Analog SFF, June 2009 Page 12