“It’s a seed world,” he said. “Anything in here is already out there, no?” Keto, like all the seed worlds, was contaminated by selected terrestrial species—that was the purpose of the seeds.
“But not the other way round,” Ai replied. “There were people—children at least. They’re gone now; they died.”
“Much as I want to, I doubt we’ll ever know why.”
“Unless it happens to us.”
Toran sat back with his arms folded and showed no sign of arguing.
Kali crumpled the empty wrapper of her cake and pushed it into her thigh pocket. “So what is it, city girl?”
Ai closed her hand on the door handle. “I should have something important to say.”
“I think you just said it.” Kali tapped her glasses. “Never mind—when you come up with it, we’ll edit it in. That way you won’t blow it.”
Ai looked out at the empty landscape one last time. This was an asymptote of history—a moment everything led up to and everything led away from, like the vertical on a graph where the line went to infinity and came back. To open the door was impossible. The opponents of the mission were right; the crew had come here for nothing and had to go back. None of the crew watching her knew it yet, but she would have to tell them. This was their first world—if she opened the door this time, they would do it over and over again on other worlds, until they opened it on the wrong one, and then they’d never be able to go home.
She’d never see North Athena again, or her father—whatever her feelings for him might be in the years ahead. She’d never walk the mall in Einstein, among the jacarandas and the cherries, or buy a little house in the hills above the city.
But then, she thought, she’d never have to see Sven again, or tell the whole truth about the things they’d done to each other.
Her fingers brushed against the embroidery of her shirt, tracing the threads of the flames over the center of her chest. She’d sold or given away everything she owned on Athena; the shirt was the last thing of any meaning. She brought it because it would be something familiar on an alien world, but she knew it would have to be burned before she could re-enter the modules of The Child.
That had been the point of the mission for her—to leave all the anger behind and never go back to it, even if it meant dying. She’d accepted the possibility she wouldn’t return before the launch from Athena, perhaps even welcomed it. It was the future that frightened and shamed her less than the one in which she went back to Athena. Perhaps it would be better to live out her life in space; perhaps that’s all she deserved.
She twisted the door handle to the open position.
The cold air on her face caught her by surprise. The handle had moved more easily than in practice. The instructors always made things harder in training than they would be in reality. Ai stared at her open hand and felt her heart beat in her chest. She’d done the thing she’d meant not to: she’d opened the door. It was too late to go back.
The cold air of Keto stung her cheeks and burned her throat.
Chip Detect
Year 5314
Mission Time: Day One, 10:00
Toran MacAten eyes traveled from the harsh, black lava under his boots up the side of the lander, ALV-101, also known as Windrider. It towered forty meters over the plain, a fat, black finger pointed at the sky, the thrust ring of its aerospike engine pinging and twanging like a living thing as it cooled. Eight broad pads of diacom foam circled the base, spreading the vehicle’s weight over the cracked surface below, and the bottom of the propulsion stage was accumulating a thin layer of ice as the fuel regeneration unit filled the methane and oxygen tanks. Toran looked for signs of charring or damage from re-entry, but found none. The pinging and clanging, however, continued, and it worried him.
Kali gestured at the base of the lander as she walked by. “That’s normal. Thermal gradients.” She sniffed the air theatrically. “Biosensors say we’re still alive. Huh, how about that? Where’d Little Miss PPP go? Back inside already?”
It wasn’t so much the lander Toran worried about as the ground under it. In the wet atmosphere of Keto, the regen unit would fill the tanks within a few days. By the time they reached minimum load for return to orbit, the lander would weigh at least eight hundred metric tonnes; it would need every square centimeter of the landing pads to stop it sinking into the island.
Toran turned to look at the island. A stark cone of rock, it swept from the sea up to a single mountain peak in the center. He wasn’t sure he liked it, but it had its own beauty, one of primal simplicity. Athena had some places like it—barren islands to the east of Senta no one visited. They had some Terran life on them, but if there had been life from Earth on Keto, it was long gone. More to the point, there was no sign of human presence either.
“Everyone!” Kali waved her arms to gather the crew. “Time!”
Alon walked back from collecting quick-hit geological samples in the direction of the mountain, Ai from running biological tests in the direction of the sea. Toran watched the two scientists stow their samples while Kali made a show of checking the mission timeline on a piece of Athenian paper. Galia strode around the lander, her long, white dress flowing in the wind, her eyes glittering green points in the sun. Manus followed, running on short legs to catch up.
Alon knelt and unrolled a large sheet of paper, dropping pieces of basalt on each corner. He held up the last one and smiled, saying, “Piece of another world…,” then laid it down. He tapped and stroked the paper until it showed an overhead view of the island.
“We’re here,” he said, “and we want to go to the fault zone here. We’ll continue around to the active volcanic vents, here. We’ll get samples at both places and in the middle.” They could circle the island in the helicopter in a half local day, as long as they kept each stop to thirty minutes. The island was a little over a hundred kilometers at its widest point and had less than five hundred kilometers of coastline.
“At each of these points, I will take core samples.” The map reacted as Alon touched it. “On these valleys and these ridges. The cores will give us both recent data and historical controls for isotope levels. Once I’ve analyzed the samples, we’ll be able to determine the general location of any event.”
“But only in the case of nuclear self-termination,” Toran said. “Otherwise they’ll tell us nothing.”
“Correct.” Alon brushed his beard. Toran thought he looked older than the age in his official bio—his face more lined and his hair more silvered than it should be. Alon’s face had character, and his movements an eerie calm; he had a stillness about him, like a hawk in a tree waiting for its prey. “Do you have any doubt?” Alon asked.
“I have plenty of doubt,” Toran replied.
“Then you’re up next,” Kali said.
Toran didn’t need the map; he stood with his hands in his pockets. “The multispectral surveys don’t show us anything—I couldn’t find the base on them. Perhaps I’m looking in the wrong place, or I’m looking for the wrong thing. After three thousand years, there may be nothing left. But please watch for anything that looks artificial. Rectangles, circles, a glint that could be a piece of diacom. From small things, we may find large things. That’s all.”
“Weather report,” Kali said, advancing to the next item on her checklist. “Galia.”
Galia stepped forward from her place beside Manus. She bent to dust off a patch of ground, then swept her dress under her to kneel in front of the map. Manus and Galia usually stayed close to each other—they were as married as any non-Syncretist North Athenians could be. They’d held a party and swore an oath to each other that had no meaning in North Athenian law. Northern law had never taken romantic relationships as seriously as it took parental ones, reasoning that, in the long lives of the Athenians, one lasted and the other didn’t. Toran had watched the couple closely on the flight from Athena but never understood their relationship. Sometimes they were friendly; other times Galia’s voice was an icy
wind of contempt blowing between them. But Manus always shrugged it off afterward, joking in a self-deprecating way with the other crew. Toran didn’t know what was holding them together or pushing them apart. It was a problem that would have to wait.
“Consider these cyclones,” Galia said, switching the paper to orbital images. “Call them Alpha and Omega. Alpha isn’t headed directly for the island, but it will affect the weather in a couple days. Storms move very quickly here. Yesterday,”—she switched the images back and forth—“today. One thumb width difference. Three thumbs to the island. Two to three days before Alpha gets near. Seven days before Omega hits the island.”
“Thumbs?” Kali asked. “You don’t have anything more scientific?”
“No.” Galia’s eyes flashed as she looked up. “If you can give me a global sensor net and three years’ data, I can give you an accurate simulation.”
“The lander has a seventy-five kilometer an hour wind limit,” Kali said.
“Alpha isn’t headed directly for us. I’ll know the maximum wind speed in two days.”
Kali grunted and turned away; Toran couldn’t see her expression. “We’ll take it a day at a time,” she said.
He put his hat on his head and pressed it down. All his observations of the crew were individually meaningless, but if he collected enough, he could draw a line through them. It took months or years to understand an individual. People put such faith in first impressions, but they were always incomplete and often completely wrong. The truth would reveal itself in time.
Kali pointed up at the lander. “Let’s get this mission where it belongs—back in the air!”
Toran turned to look. At the top of the lander, the cargo containers for the two helicopters were winching themselves down on invisibly thin lines. They descended from arms extended from above the cargo segment on opposite sides of the lander, counterbalancing each other. The top and bottom of the cargo segment had red circles marking rotating interfaces. Kali had already turned the segment to put the helicopters down on the flattest rock at the base of the lander. Above the cargo stage, a conical adapter housed the abort motor and extra consumables for the crew module, and the crew module sat on top. The door of the module was closed again. The crew elevator had left a gap in the retractable platform around the module as it descended on the side out of the wind.
The cargo containers descended slowly down the side of the lander, passing the fuel regeneration unit and its intake vents. The propulsion staged widened from nine meters at the top to eleven at the bottom. As the containers descended the height of the propulsion stage, small wheels on them left trails in the ice forming on the oxygen and methane tanks. Finally, the containers came to rest at the base of the lander.
The propulsion stage of the lander was also an old design, perfected in the twenty-third century on Earth as a satellite launcher and transmitted to Athena on the seed. A thousand years ago, the Athenians had used the design to launch the laser and telescope for the optical link to Mineral, Athena’s first high-speed connection to the Network of Worlds. For a millennium, until Eresh had brought The Child to Athena, spacecraft like the lander had been the planet’s most advanced. For the mission of The Child, the design had been altered to add the fuel regeneration unit, landing gear for unprepared sites, and the crew module. The engineers at Global Astrodynamics had been proud—it wasn’t often they were able to extend the work of the ancients. Usually, they spent their time on technological archaeology, trying to understand what had been done thousands of years ago to make trivial changes. For the mission, other options for landing on alien worlds were rejected: spaceplanes need runways, orbital elevators aren’t portable, and wormhole drives of the kind used by The Child only controlled in a statistical sense and not precise. The landers were primitive, but they worked.
“I need a moment,” Toran said, touching Kali’s shoulder gently. She had to allow him this—it had been agreed he had the right, even if it caused a delay. He turned and walked from the lander toward the sea, until he found a piece of flat ground thirty meters away. He squatted to brush the ground free of dirt, careful not to graze his fingers, then put one knee on the bare rock and laid his hat to the side. The hand-made felt of the hat blended into the basalt, but the solar emblem and the rivets around the base of the crown gleamed in the sunlight.
He glanced over his shoulder at the crew waiting by the lander. Alon had turned to look up at the mountain, relaxing with his hands in his pockets. Kali stood beside him with her arms crossed. Alon’s suit cycled through shades of gray from light to dark and, for a moment, disappeared against the rocky background, leaving his head hanging in the air. Kali leaned toward him and said something; Alon shook his head and laughed in response. His suit reverted to light gray.
Toran turned away, letting the other knee fall to the ground. He felt a shiver in his back and an emptiness in his stomach. He’d suspected for a long time, but now he knew. He hadn’t expected Alon to reveal it so soon or casually. If Alon could assume any color, he could take on the color of the things behind him and become invisible. The technology was ancient, but illegal in North Athena without government authorization. It was the cheapest trick in a whole tool kit of evil, but not the dirtiest. Toran had met other Northerners with access to controlled military technology in Senta, and none of them had been good.
They were an elite, and they had a name: they were the Shinigami. It meant “death god” in one of the ancient languages. They had another name for themselves, but that was how they were known to the public. Popular wallvids in North Athena cast the Shinigami as heroes of justice fighting evil in Senta. Other Northerners believed they were a death squad suppressing the development of the continent. Toran was one of the others. The Shinigami had sole authority under Northern law for the use of lethal means in Senta. They did not use it to build schools and hospitals.
Alon had joined the crew shortly before The Child left orbit around Athena. He’d been declared trained by “other means” and brought a substantial quantity of his own equipment in sealed containers. He exercised alone every day, at odd hours, in the module they called the “dojo.” He’d sat at the auto-hibachi at dinner, discussing plans for surface operations or the finer points of Shinju grammar, without saying anything about himself or his reasons for leaving Athena. Toran had been suspicious from the start and he’d tried to break through Alon’s silence, but he’d gotten nowhere and was afraid to push harder. Toran was sure Alon would reveal himself eventually, by actions if not words. Now he’d done it in an idle moment and it was unlikely it was an uncalculated move.
Alon was more than a geologist or a soldier—he wasn’t the kind to act without a plan; he was the kind who lived to execute the worst of plans. Had he revealed himself on Keto because Keto was in some way a Shinigami mission? Toran didn’t know what that could be—what would a Shinigami assassin want on this planet? Core samples? Unlikely.
Toran knelt, facing the sea, and brought his thumbs and forefingers together in his lap, forming a triangle. He breathed in for a moment and laid his hands on the rock in front, bending to touch his forehead to the ground in the space between his fingers. He paused for a moment and then sat upright, letting his hands fall into his lap, his eyes closing as he entered a state of meditation. As the seconds past, he felt his heart slow down.
Perhaps he was being hasty and letting his emotions control him; there could be more to Alon. Who he was in service to, other than the Astrocorps, or what mission he was on, other than that of The Child, it might not be what Toran was afraid of. He reminded himself of his childhood training: to see below the surface and find the deeper reality. The most obvious conclusion was likely to be false.
He leaned forward again to touch his head to the ground. On Athena, he prayed three times a day—to the rising and setting sun, and to the nearest body of water at noon. It was a common habit among the Syncretists, one he’d chosen on coming of age, but others prayed to the mountains or the forest or the soil
beneath them. There was no one way because it didn’t matter. What mattered was taking the time to think and feel before acting.
Truth is like an onion, he thought, to be peeled, layer by layer, with tears in your eyes.
He believed two things—the complete catechism of Northern Syncretism: there is a God, and the study of nature is how we know Him. Eastern Syncretism added one more belief: there is an afterlife. However, he hadn’t committed himself to this third belief; there was, after all, no observable evidence for it. But he hoped it was true, if not for his sake, then for Fadia’s. He thought for a moment of the long path that had brought him to Keto: the ship, the stars themselves, and, of course, her passing. The Universe works in unpredictable ways, and sometimes you can only react to it—accepting or enduring it—only now and again acting as a prime mover, but otherwise taking the direction it gives you. And Keto was just the first stop on a long road.
He touched his head to the basalt again, feeling the cold on his skin.
The crew waiting by the lander would think he was asking God for something: a safe flight, a successful mission, an uneventful return to orbit. But he’d never asked God for anything, and he wouldn’t now. One didn’t ask God for things, most Northern Syncretists believed. God didn’t give you what you asked for. God gave you imagination and memory and precision of thought, and speech, and the ability to conceive and act. God gave you what you worked for and earned, often enough for it to matter.
He sat up, eyes closed, and pictured himself in the helicopter as it surged free of the ground. It would fly to the coast, turn north, and go over the broken and oxidized flows of the plain. Then it would pass over the valleys of the northwestern coast, and turn east for the first landing zone.
As it flew north, most of the land would be on the right; sitting on that side would give him the best chance to see archaeological sites. If he could find the original seed base, he could understand why Keto had dropped out of the Network. That was why he’d come to Keto.
White Seed Page 3