Year's Best Science Fiction 02 # 1985

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  Of course, some things beggared explanation.

  He bent down and adjusted the survival knife in his boot so the hilt would not rub against his calf. From his coat pocket he withdrew the two ampules he had secreted in his helmet that long-ago night in the cloud forest. As the neon explosion flashed once more, glimmers of gold coursed along their shiny surfaces. He did not think he would need them; his hand was steady, and his purpose was clear. But to be on the safe side, he popped them both.

  JACK McDEVITT

  Promises To Keep

  New author Jack McDevitt is a frequent contributor to Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, and has also sold stories to Universe, The Twilight Zone Magazine, and Chess Life. An ex-naval officer, ex-English teacher, and former customs inspector, he is currently the regional training officer for the Chicago Customs Region. He lives in Woodridge, Illinois with his wife and three children, and is currently at work on his first novel, tentatively entitled The Iron Star. His story “Cryptic” was in our First Annual Collection, and was also a Nebula Award finalist last year.

  Here he takes us across the solar system to the moons of Jupiter, to the desolate frozen snowscapes of Callisto, for a very human drama played out against the cold inhuman immensity of space …

  I received a Christmas card last week from Ed Iseminger. The illustration was a rendering of the celebrated Christmas Eve telecast from Callisto: a lander stands serenely on a rubble-strewn plain, spilling warm yellow light through its windows. Needle-point peaks rise behind it, and the rim of a crater curves across the foreground. An enormous belted crescent dominates the sky.

  In one window, someone has hung a wreath.

  It is a moment preserved, a tableau literally created by Cathie Perth, extracted from her prop bag. Somewhere here, locked away among insurance papers and the deed to the house, is the tape of the original telecast, but I’ve never played it. In fact, I’ve seen it only once, on the night of the transmission. But I know the words, Cathie’s words, read by Victor Landolfi in his rich baritone, blending the timeless values of the season with the spectral snows of another world. They appear in schoolbooks now, and on marble.

  Inside the card, in large, block, defiant letters, Iseminger had printed “SEPTEMBER!” It is a word with which he hopes to conquer a world. Sometimes, at night, when the snow sparkles under the hard cold stars (the way it did on Callisto), I think about him, and his quest. And I am very afraid.

  I can almost see Cathie’s footprints on the frozen surface. It was a good time, and I wish there were a way to step into the picture, to toast the holidays once more with Victor Landolfi, to hold onto Cathie Perth (and not let go!), and somehow to save us all. It was the end of innocence, a final meeting place for old friends.

  We made the Christmas tape over a period of about five days. Cathie took literally hours of visuals, but Callisto is a place of rock and ice and deadening sameness: there is little to soften the effect of cosmic indifference. Which is why all those shots of towering peaks and tumbled boulders were taken at long range, and in half-light. Things not quite seen, she said, are always charming.

  Her biggest problem had been persuading Landolfi to do the voice-over. Victor was tall, lean, ascetic. He was equipped with laser eyes and a huge black mustache. His world was built solely of subatomic particles, and driven by electromagnetics. Those who did not share his passions excited his contempt; which meant that he understood the utility of Cathie’s public relations function at the same time that he deplored its necessity. To participate was to compromise one’s integrity. His sense of delicacy, however, prevented his expressing that view to Cathie: he begged off rather on the press of time, winked apologetically, and straightened his mustache. “Sawyer will read it for you,” he said, waving me impatiently into the conversation.

  Cathie sneered, and stared irritably out a window (it was the one with the wreath) at Jupiter, heavy in the fragile sky. We knew, by then, that it had a definable surface, that the big planet was a world sea of liquid hydrogen, wrapped around a rocky core. “It must be frustrating,” she said, “to know you’ll never see it.” Her tone was casual, almost frivolous, but Landolfi was not easily baited.

  “Do you really think,” he asked, with the patience of the superior being (Landolfi had no illusions about his capabilities), “that these little pieces of theater will make any difference? Yes, Catherine, of course it’s frustrating. Especially when one realizes that we have the technology to put vehicles down there … .”

  “And scoop out some hydrogen,” Cathie added.

  He shrugged. “It may happen someday.”

  “Victor, it never will if we don’t sell the Program. This is the last shot. These ships are old, and nobody’s going to build any new ones. Unless things change radically at home.”

  Landolfi closed his eyes. I knew what he was thinking: Cathie Perth was an outsider, an ex-television journalist who had probably slept her way on board. She played bridge, knew the film library by heart, read John Donne (for style, she said), and showed no interest whatever in the scientific accomplishments of the mission. We’d made far-reaching discoveries in the fields of plate tectonics, planetary climatology, and a dozen other disciplines. We’d narrowed the creation date down inside a range of a few million years. And we finally understood how it had happened! But Cathie’s televised reports had de-emphasized the implications, and virtually ignored the mechanics of such things. Instead, while a global audience watched, Marjorie Aubuchon peered inspirationally out of a cargo lock at Ganymede (much in the fashion that Cortez must have looked at the Pacific on that first bright morning), her shoulder flag patch resplendent in the sunlight. And while the camera moved in for a close-up (her features were illuminated by a lamp Cathie had placed for the occasion in her helmet), Herman Selma solemnly intoned Cathie’s comments on breaking the umbilical.

  That was her style: brooding alien vistas reduced to human terms. In one of her best-known sequences, there had been no narration whatever: two spacesuited figures, obviously male and female, stood together in the shadow of the monumental Cadmus Ice Fracture on Europa, beneath three moons.

  “Cathie,” Landolfi said, with his eyes still shut, “I don’t wish to be offensive: but do you really care? For the Program, that is? When we get home, you will write a book, you will be famous, you will be at the top of your profession. Are you really concerned with where the Program will be in twenty years?”

  It was a fair question: Cathie’d made no secret of her hopes for a Pulitzer. And she stood to get it, no matter what happened after this mission. Moreover, although she’d tried to conceal her opinions, we’d been together a long time by then, almost three years, and we could hardly misunderstand the dark view she took of people who voluntarily imprisoned themselves for substantial portions of their lives to go ‘rock-collecting.’

  “No,” she said. “I’m not, because there won’t be a Program in twenty years.” She looked around at each of us, weighing the effect of her words. Iseminger, a blond giant with a reddish beard, allowed a smile of lazy tolerance to soften his granite features. “We’re in the same class as the pyramids,” she continued, in a tone that was unemotional and irritatingly condescending. “We’re a hell of an expensive operation, and for what? Do you think the taxpayers give a good goddam about the weather on Jupiter? There’s nothing out here but gas and boulders. Playthings for eggheads!”

  I sat and thought about it while she smiled sweetly, and Victor smoldered. I had not heard the solar system ever before described in quite those terms; I’d heard people call it vast, awesome, magnificent, serene, stuff like that. But never boring

  In the end, Landolfi read his lines. He did it, he said, to end the distraction.

  Cathie was clearly pleased with the result. She spent three days editing the tapes, commenting frequently (and with good-natured malice) on the resonance and tonal qualities of the voice-over. She finished on the morning of the 24th (ship time, of course), and transmitted the report t
o Greenswallow for relay to Houston. “It’ll make the evening newscasts,” she said with satisfaction.

  It was our third Christmas out. Except for a couple of experiments-in-progress, we were finished on Callisto and, in fact, in the Jovian system. Everybody was feeling good about that, and we passed an uneventful afternoon, playing bridge and talking about what we’d do when we got back. (Cathie had described a deserted beach near Tillamook, Oregon, where she’d grown up. “It would be nice to walk on it again, under a blue sky,” she said. Landolfi had startled everyone at that point: he looked up from the computer console at which he’d been working, and his eyes grew very distant. “I think,” he said, “when the time comes, I would like very much to walk with you … .”)

  For the most part, Victor kept busy that afternoon with his hobby: he was designing a fusion engine that would be capable, he thought, of carrying ships to Jupiter within a few weeks, and, possibly, would eventually open the stars to direct exploration. But I watched him: he turned away periodically from the display screen, to glance at Cathie. Yes (I thought), she would indeed be lovely against the rocks and the spume, her black hair free in the wind.

  Just before dinner, we watched the transmission of Cathie’s tape. It was very strong, and when it was finished we sat silently looking at one another. By then, Herman Selma and Esther Crowley had joined us. (Although two landers were down, Cathie had been careful to give the impression in her report that there had only been one. When I asked why, she said, “In a place like this, one lander is the Spirit of Man. Two landers is just two landers.”) We toasted Victor, and we toasted Cathie. Almost everyone, it turned out, had brought down a bottle for the occasion. We sang and laughed, and somebody turned up the music. We’d long since discovered the effect of low-gravity dancing in cramped quarters, and I guess we made the most of it.

  Marj Aubuchon, overhead in the linkup, called to wish us season’s greetings, and called again later to tell us that the telecast, according to Houston, had been “well-received.” That was government talk, of course, and it meant only that no one in authority could find anything to object to. Actually, somebody high up had considerable confidence in her: in order to promote the illusion of spontaneity, the tapes were being broadcast directly to the commercial networks.

  Cathie, who by then had had a little too much to drink, gloated openly. “It’s the best we’ve done,” she said. “Nobody’ll ever do it better.”

  We shared that sentiment. Landolfi raised his glass, winked at Cathie, and drained it.

  We had to cut the evening short, because a lander’s life-support system isn’t designed to handle six people. (For that matter, neither was an Athena’s.) But before we broke it up, Cathie surprised us all by proposing a final toast: “To Frank Steinitz,” she said quietly. “And his crew.”

  Steinitz: there was a name, as they say, to conjure with. He had led the first deep-space mission, five Athenas to Saturn, fifteen years before. It had been the first attempt to capture the public imagination for a dying program: an investigation of a peculiar object filmed by a Voyager on Iapetus. But nothing much had come of it, and the mission had taken almost seven years. Steinitz and his people had begun as heroes, but in the end they’d become symbols of futility. The press had portrayed them mercilessly as personifications of outworn virtues. Someone had compared them to the Japanese soldiers found as late as the 1970s on Pacific islands, still defending a world long since vanished.

  The Steinitz group bore permanent reminders of their folly: prolonged weightlessness had loosened ligaments and tendons, and weakened muscles. Several had developed heart problems, and all suffered from assorted neuroses. As one syndicated columnist had observed, they walked like a bunch of retired big-league catchers.

  “That’s a good way to end the evening,” said Selma, beaming benevolently.

  Landolfi looked puzzled. “Cathie,” he rumbled, “you’ve questioned Steinitz’s good sense any number of times. And ours, by the way. Isn’t it a little hypocritical to drink to him?”

  “I’m not impressed by his intelligence,” she said, ignoring the obvious parallel. “But he and his people went all the way out to Saturn in those damned things—” she waved in the general direction of the three Athenas orbiting overhead in linkup “—hanging onto baling wire and wing struts. I have to admire that.”

  “Hell,” I said, feeling the effects a little myself, “we’ve got the same ships he had.”

  “Yes, you do,” said Cathie pointedly.

  I had trouble sleeping that night. For a long time, I lay listening to Landolfi’s soft snore, and the electronic fidgeting of the operations computer. Cathie was bundled inside a gray blanket, barely visible in her padded chair.

  She was right, of course. I knew that rubber boots would never again cross that white landscape, which had waited a billion years for us. The peaks glowed in the reflection of the giant planet: fragile crystalline beauty, on a world of terrifying stillness. Except for an occasional incoming rock, nothing more would ever happen here. Callisto’s entire history was encapsuled within twelve days.

  Pity there hadn’t been something to those early notions about Venusian rain forests and canals on Mars. The Program might have had easier going had Burroughs or Bradbury been right. My God: how many grim surprises had disrupted fictional voyages to Mars? But the truth had been far worse than anything Wells or the others had ever committed to paper: the red planet was so dull that we hadn’t even gone there.

  Instead, we’d lumbered out to the giants. In ships that drained our lives and our health.

  We could have done better; our ships could have been better. The computer beside which Landolfi slept contained his design for the fusion engine. And at JPL, an Army team had demonstrated that artificial gravity was possible: a real gravity field, not the pathetic fraction created on the Athenas by spinning the inner hull. There were other possibilities as well: infrared ranging could be adapted to replace our elderly scanning system; new alloys were under development. But it would cost billions to build a second-generation vehicle. And unless there were an incentive, unless Cathie Perth carried off a miracle, it would not happen.

  Immediately overhead, a bright new star glittered, moving visibly (though slowly) from west to east. That was the linkup, three ships connected nose to nose by umbilicals and a magnetic docking system. Like the Saturn mission, we were a multiple vehicle operation. We were more flexible that way, and we had a safety factor: two ships would be adequate to get the nine-man mission home. Conditions might become a little stuffy, but we’d make it.

  I watched it drift through the icy starfield.

  Cathie had pulled the plug on the Christmas lights. But it struck me that Callisto would only have one Christmas, so I put them back on.

  Victor was on board Tolstoi when we lost it. No one ever really knew precisely what happened. We’d begun our long fall toward Jupiter, gaining the acceleration which we’d need on the flight home. Cathie, Herman Selma (the mission commander), and I were riding Greenswallow. The ships had separated, and would not rejoin until we’d rounded Jupiter, and settled into our course for home. (The Athenas are really individually-powered modular units which travel, except when maneuvering, as a single vessel. They’re connected bow-to-bow by electromagnets. Coils of segmented tubing, called “umbilicals” even though the term does not accurately describe their function, provide ready access among the forward areas of the ships. As many as six Athenas can be linked in this fashion, although only five have ever been built. The resulting structure would resemble a wheel.)

  Between Callisto and Ganymede, we hit something: a drifting cloud of fine particles, a belt of granular material stretched so thin it never appeared on the LGD, before or after. Cathie later called it a cosmic sandbar; Iseminger thought it an unformed moon. It didn’t matter: whatever it was, the mission plowed into it at almost 50,000 kilometers per hour. Alarms clattered, and red lamps blinked on.

  In those first moments, I thought the ship
was going to come apart. Herman was thrown across a bank of consoles and through an open hatch. I couldn’t see Cathie, but a quick burst of profanity came from her direction. Things were being ripped off the hull. Deep within her walls, Greenswallow sighed. The lights dipped, came back, and went out. Emergency lamps cut in, and something big glanced off the side of the ship. More alarms howled, and I waited for the clamor of the throaty klaxon which would warn of a holing, and which consequently would be the last sound I could expect to hear in this life.

  The sudden deceleration snapped my head back on the pads. (The collision had occurred at the worst possible time: Greenswallow was caught in the middle of an attitude alignment. We were flying backwards.)

  The exterior monitors were blank: that meant the cameras were gone.

  Cathie’s voice: “Rob, you okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you see Herman?”

  My angle was bad, and I was pinned in my chair. “No. He’s back in cargo.”

  “Is there any way you can close the hatch?”

  “Herman’s in there,” I protested, thinking she’d misunderstood.

  “If something tears a hole out back there, we’re all going to go. Keeping the door open won’t help him.”

  I hesitated. Sealing up seemed to be the wrong thing to do. (Of course, the fact that the hatch had been open in the first place constituted a safety violation.) “It’s on your console,” I told her. “Hit the numerics on your upper right.”

  “Which one?”