Year's Best SF 11, page 27
The car drew to a halt.
Pala insisted on seeing for herself. Despite Dano’s objections, she had the suit lift her up to the vertical, amid a protesting whine of exoskeletal motors. As the monstrous gravity dragged at the fluid in which she was embedded, waves of pain plucked at her body. But she could see.
Ahead of the car was another light lake, another pale glow, another splash of dimly lit green. But there were no trees or mirror towers, she saw; nothing climbed high above the sphere’s surface here.
“This is one of a string of settlements around this line of latitude,” Dano said. “The Navy scouts have extended their coverage, a bit belatedly…The interaction of gravity and the sphere’s spin is interesting. The comet debris tends to collect at the equator, where it’s spun off, or at the poles, where the spin effects are least and the gravity draws it in. But you also have Coriolis effects, sideways kicks from the spin. In the in-between latitudes there must be weather, a slow weather of drifting comet ice. Earth’s rotation influences its weather, the circulation of the atmosphere, of course, but in that case the planet’s gravity always dominates. We’ve never encountered a world like this, with such ferocious spin—it’s as if Earth was spinning in a couple of hours…”
“Dano—”
“Yes. Sorry. My weakness, Pala, is a tendency to be too drawn to intellectual puzzles—while you are too drawn to people. The point is that this is the sphere’s true habitable region, this and the south pole, the place all the air and water sink to. It’s just a shame it’s under crushing, inhuman gravity.”
Bicansa appeared in the air.
She stood in the car’s cabin, unsuited, as relaxed as Dano. Pala felt there was some sympathy in her Virtual eyes. But she knew now without doubt that this wasn’t Bicansa’s true aspect.
“You came after me,” Bicansa said.
“I wanted to know,” Pala said. Her voice was a husk, muffled by the fluid in her throat. “Why did you come to the equator—why meet us? You could have hidden here.”
“Yes,” Dano said grimly. “Our careless scouting missed you.”
“We had to know what kind of threat you are to us. I had to see you face to face, take a chance that I would expose—” She waved a hand. “This.”
“You know we can’t ignore you,” Dano said. “This great sphere is a Xeelee artifact. We have to learn what it’s for…”
“That’s simple,” Pala said. She had worked it out, she thought, during her long cocooning. “We were thinking too hard, Dano. The sphere is a weapon.”
“Ah,” Dano said grimly. “Of course. And I always believed your thinking wasn’t bleak enough, Pala.”
Bicansa looked bewildered. “What are you talking about? Since the First landed, we always thought of this sphere as a place that gives life, not death.”
Dano said, “You wouldn’t think it was so wonderful if you inhabited a planet of this star as the sphere slowly coalesced—if your ocean froze out, your air began to snow…The sphere is a machine that kills a star—or rather, its planets, while preserving the star itself for future use. I doubt if there’s anything special about this system, this star.” He glanced at the sky, metal Eyes gleaming. “It is probably just a trial run of a new technology, a weapon for a war of the future. One thing we know about the Xeelee is that they think long term.”
Bicansa said, “What a monstrous thought…So my whole culture has developed on the hull of a weapon. But even so, it is my culture. And you’re going to destroy it, aren’t you? Or will you put us in a museum, as you promised Sool?”
No, Pala thought. I can’t do that. “Not necessarily,” she whispered.
They both turned to look at her. Dano murmured threateningly, “What are you talking about, Missionary?”
She closed her eyes. Did she really want to take this step? It could be the end of her career if it went wrong, if Dano failed to back her. But she had sensed the gentleness of Sool’s equatorial culture and had now experienced for herself the vast spatial scale of the sphere—and here, still more strange, was this remote polar colony. This was an immense place, she thought, immense both in space and time—and yet humans had learned to live here. It was almost as if humans and Xeelee were learning to live together. It would surely be wrong to allow this unique world to be destroyed, for the sake of short-term gains.
And she thought she had a way to keep that from happening.
“If this is a weapon, it may one day be used against us. And if so we have to find a way to neutralize it.” The suit whirred as she turned to Bicansa. “Your people can stay here. You can live your lives the way you want. I’ll find ways to make the Commission accept that. But there’s a payback.”
Bicansa nodded grimly. “I understand. You want us to find the Xeelee flower.”
“Yes,” whispered Pala. “Find the off switch.”
Dano faced her, furious. “You don’t have the authority to make a decision like that. Granted this is an unusual situation. But these are still human colonists, and you are still a Missionary. Such a deal would be unprecedented.”
“But,” Pala whispered, “Bicansa’s people are no longer human. Are you, Bicansa?”
Bicansa averted her eyes. “The First were powerful. Just as they made this star-world fit for us, so they made us fit for it.”
Dano, astonished, glared at them both. Then he laughed. “Oh, I see. A loophole! If the colonists aren’t fully human under the law, you can pass the case to the Assimilation, who won’t want to deal with it either…You’re an ingenious one, Pala! Well, well. All right, I’ll support your proposal at the Commission. No guarantees, though…”
“Thank you,” Bicansa said to Pala. She held out her Virtual hand, and it passed through Pala’s suit, breaking into pixels.
Dano had been right, Palo thought, infuriatingly right, as usual. He had seen something in her, an attraction to this woman from another world she hadn’t even recognized in herself. But Bicansa didn’t even exist in the form Pala had perceived. Was she really so lonely? Well, if so, when she got out of here, she would do something about it.
And she would have to think again about her career choice. Dano had always warned her about an excess of empathy. It seemed she wasn’t cut out for the duties of a Missionary—and next time she might not be able to find a loophole.
With a last regretful glance, Bicansa’s Virtual sublimated into dusty light.
Dano said briskly, “Enough’s enough. I’ll call down the flitter to get you out of here before you choke to death…” He turned away, and his pixels flickered as he worked.
Pala looked out through the car’s window at the colony, the sprawling, high-gravity plants, the dusty, flattened lens of shining air. She wondered how many more colonies had spread over the varying gravity latitudes of the star shell, how many more adaptations from the standard form had been tried—how many people actually lived on this immense artificial world. There was so much here to explore.
The door of Bicansa’s car opened. A creature climbed out cautiously. In a bright orange pressure suit, its body was low-slung, supported by four limbs as thick as tree trunks. Even through the suit Pala could make out immense bones at hips and shoulders, and massive joints along the spine. It lifted its head and looked into the car. Through a thick visor Pala could make out a face—thick-jawed, flattened, but a human face nonetheless. The creature nodded once. Then it turned and, moving heavily, carefully, made its way toward the colony and its lake of light.
The Albian Message
OLIVER MORTON
Oliver Morton lives in Greenwich, England. He is a writer and editor who concentrates on scientific knowledge, technological change, and their effects, and has recently become the Chief News and Features editor at Nature, one of the world’s leading science journals, “where I oversee the journalism in print and online.” He has had a substantial career as a science journalist: he worked on the science and technology pages of The Economist, was editor-in-chief of Wired UK, and has been anthologized in both Best American Science Writing and Best American Science and Nature Writing. His first book is Mapping Mars: Science, Imagination and the Birth of a World, and he is working on his second, Eating the Sun: How Plants Power the Planet, a look at photosynthesis. Asteroid 10716 Olivermorton is named after him.
“The Albian Message” was published in Nature. It is an intriguing hard SF rethinking of what alien artifacts might reveal. It is one of those SF ideas that is so obviously reasonable that it should have been evident all along.
To: Eva P.
From: Stefan K.
Re: Sample handling facility
March 4, 2047
I thought I ought to put into writing my concerns over the sample-return facility for Odyssey. I think that relying on the mothballed Mars Sample Return lab at Ames is dangerously complacent. It is simply not flexible enough, or big enough, for what I think we should be expecting.
I appreciate that I am in a minority on this, and that the consensus is that we will be dealing with non-biological artifacts. And I don’t want to sound like the people from AstraRoche slipped some egopoietin into my drink during that trip to Stockholm last November. But my minority views have been pretty well borne out throughout this whole story. Back when Suzy and Sean had more or less convinced the world that the trinity sequences in the Albian message referred to some sort of mathematico-philosophical doctrine—possibly based on an analogy to the aliens’ purported trisexual reproductive system—and everyone in SETI was taking a crash course in genome analysis, I had to pull in every favor I was owed to get the Square Kilometer Array used as a planetary radar and scanned over the Trojan asteroids. If I hadn’t done that we wouldn’t even know about the Pyramid, let alone be sending Odyssey there.
I’m not claiming I understand the Albians’ minds better than anyone else; I haven’t got any more of the message in my DNA than anyone else has. And it’s always been my position that we should read as little into that message as possible. I remain convinced that looking for descriptions of their philosophy or lifestyle or even provenance is pointless. The more I look at the increasingly meaningless analyses that the increasingly intelligent AIs produce, the more I think that the variations between phyla are effectively random and that the message from the aliens tells us almost nothing except that there’s a radar-reflecting tetrahedron π/3 behind Jupiter that they think we may find interesting.
Everyone assumes that if it hadn’t been for the parts of the message lost in the K/T the “residual variant sequences” would be seen to add up to some great big life-the-Universe-and-everything revelation. And because they think such a revelation once existed, they expect to see it carved into the palladium walls of the Pyramid. But if the aliens who visited Earth, and left their messages in the genomes of more or less everything on the planet, had wanted to tell us something more about themselves, they could have made the messages a lot bigger and built in more redundancy across phylum space; there’s no shortage of junk DNA to write on. The point is, they didn’t choose to leave big messages—just a simple signpost.
The reason I was able to get the SKA people to find the Pyramid was that they knew I’d thought about SETI a lot. But these days people tend to forget that I was always something of a skeptic. What could a bunch of aliens tell us about themselves, or the Universe, that would matter? Especially if, like the Albians, they sent, or rather left, the message 100 million years ago? Well, in the case of the Albians, there’s one type of knowledge they could be fairly sure that anyone who eventually evolved sequencing technology on Earth pretty much had to be interested in. And it’s something that, by definition, is too big to fit into the spare bits of a genome.
I appreciate that everyone on the project now has a lot of faith in what we can do on the fly, especially in terms of recording and analyzing information. I’ll admit that when we started I really didn’t think that the lost craft of human spaceflight would be so easy to reinvent. It still strikes me as remarkable that none of us realized how much could be achieved by leaving a technical problem to one side and concentrating on other things for a few decades before coming back to it with new technologies. But the problem with the sample-return facility won’t just be one of technology. It’s going to be one of size.
You see, extinctions aren’t the noise in the message. They’re the reason for the message. The one thing the Albians knew they could do for whoever would end up reading their message was store up some of the biodiversity that would inevitably be whittled away over time. When Odyssey gets to the Trojan Pyramid, I don’t expect it to find any more information about the Albians than we have already. I do expect a biosphere’s worth of well-preserved biological samples from the mid-Cretaceous. Not just genomes, but whole samples. Sudarat and her boys are going to come home with a hold full of early angiosperms and dinosaur eggs. We need to be ready.
Bright Red Star
BUD SPARHAWK
Bud Sparhawk (sff.net/people/bud_sparhawk) lives with his wife in Annapolis, Maryland “and is a frequent sailor on the Chesapeake Bay.” He is a writer of mostly “hard” science fiction. He started writing in 1975, with sales to Analog. Thirteen years later he returned to writing, and his stories have been appearing regularly in Analog and other magazines, and in anthologies. He has been a Nebula finalist three times for his novellas.
“Bright Red Star” was published in Asimov’s. It is a very tightly constructed military SF horror story about the sacrifice of innocents, in the hard SF tradition of “The Cold Equations.” Sparhawk says “It was written as the events of 9-11 evolved. I tried, in this piece, to address the motivations of those who could allow themselves to commit such heinous atrocities.” But it is not directly about current events at all, which makes it we think more effective.
Our boat floated silent as owls’ wings and settled softly as an autumn snowflake. There was no doubt that the enemy had spotted us—the stealth could only minimize signs of our presence. We’d done everything we could to reduce detectability: hardened plastics, ceramics, charged ice, and hardly any metal. All that did was create doubt, and, possibly, delay. Or so we hoped.
We tumbled quickly from the boat as grounding automatically discharged the ship charge, without which the boat’s ice frame would quickly melt. In a matter of minutes, the only remaining trace of our craft would be a puddle of impure water and the gossamer-thin spider-web of the stealth shield—and that would dissipate at the first hint of a breeze.
We deployed in pincer and arrowhead formation, sending two troops to the north to parallel our advance, two likewise to the south, and two to the point. Hunter and I followed in column.
We moved quickly, carefully, ever wary. That the Shardies would eventually find us was not in doubt, neither was the certainty of our death when they did so. They did not use humans well; however, I doubted they’d find much use for us.
Tactical estimates gave us an hour to save the recalcitrant settlers’ souls. They were some sort of colony—religious or otherwise, it made no difference—only that they had foolishly chosen to remain where others fled.
There was a slight probability we’d have less than an hour and an even smaller possibility of having more, so we moved quickly. I’d estimated twenty minutes to reach their position and ten to twenty to ensure we’d located everyone. That left us five minutes for action and ten as margin for contingencies.
I knew we’d fail if we used more than fifty-five minutes.
“…shards,” one of the last observers managed to croak out before Jeaux II fell silent. That word was the only description of the aliens we’d ever heard, so it stuck.
The Shardies had hit hard when we first made contact with their kind, which could hardly be called contact at all since they attacked first and without provocation. When our ships backed off, their ship followed, attacking again and again with unbelievable ferocity. When its missiles ran out, they tried to ram the thick plate of our exploratory ship. It smashed into tiny ceramic fragments on impact, leaving a cloud of glittering fragments that spun into emptiness, leaving no trace, no hint, of what had so provoked them.
After much debate over the wisdom of such an attempt, we again tried to contact them. The idea of another space-spanning civilization held too much promise to ignore. It took years before we found them, but find them we did.
That is, we assume that someone found them, for a fleet of their ships suddenly appeared near Jeaux II and attacked every sign of human presence: ships, orbiting stations, ground-based settlements—anything that wasn’t of natural origin. The military tried to defend themselves while the civilian ships fled in every direction.
This was a strategic mistake. Since they’d backtracked one of our ships to Jeaux, that meant that they could—and probably would—follow every ship who escaped. Every destination system was now at risk.
Thanks to the brief warning, most of the settled systems managed to mobilize to meet the Shardies attack. The initial losses were great. We had to fall back from system after system, engaged in a running battle with something we do not understand.
We’ve tried to figure out why they attack with such ferocity, why there hasn’t been an attempt at contact, and why they won’t respond to our calls. We fail at every attempt to understand them.
Neither have we deduced anything of their technology from the damaged ships we’ve managed to recover. Hulls, engines, and controls appear to be nothing but dirty glass. We suspect this is the analog of our silicon-based technology, but can’t be sure. Researchers have been working hard, I’m told, but I have yet to hear of anything useful come of it.
