Fiction River, page 2
“Now actual course.”
A gold line appeared, diverging from the dashed blue line, plunging toward the gas giant’s center like an arrow racing toward a bullseye.
“What the hell?” Saxon breathed. He glanced back at Monica.
Her mouth sagged open in shock.
“We have to course correct,” he shouted.
She shook her head. “Delta vee. We don’t have the delta vee.”
“But—”
“That’s why the refueling maneuver was programmed in the first place.”
Saxon opened his mouth to argue and then closed it again. She was right, he knew she was right. The long voyage had left the starship almost no fuel to maneuver.
For a moment he watched the gold line inch toward the gas giant.
There was no way to save the starship.
“Shipmind, is there enough delta vee for shuttle Veritas to reach Horus?”
“YES, ASSUMING CONSTANT GRAVITATIONAL LOADING.”
Saxon blinked. Constant gravitational loading? What the hell did that mean?
“Plot course,” Monica shouted.
“PLOTTED.”
“Launch!” she bellowed.
A clang reverberated through the shuttle’s hull as it detached from its dying mother. There was a second of silence and then the shuttle’s engines kicked in, punching Saxon back into his chair. It was a high-gravity burn, three gees pinning them to their seats as the little vessel raced away from the danger.
Unable to move his head, Saxon had no choice but to stare out the shuttle’s canopy, watching through a red haze as the great, dying world Osiris tore apart his beautiful starship.
***
The little shuttle whose name was just another word for “truth” skimmed over the scarred surface of a moon never before seen by any human being. Despite its novelty, it looked no different from any of a thousand other moons—including the first one, the one that rode Earth’s sky.
Seas of black basalt covered this moon’s ragged face. Its highlands were smothered in gray dust. And everywhere, everywhere, craters had been punched into the battered surface.
“The craters,” Saxon murmured. “Do you see the craters?”
Monica shook her head, but didn’t answer. Didn’t look up at him.
“They’re wrong,” he said. “There shouldn’t be so many.”
She flashed him an exasperated look. “Horus is at the bottom of the deepest gravity well in this system. Of course there are craters.”
“But half the time it’s shielded from the debris by the planet. And even when it orbits on the planet’s night side a meteor strike is unlikely. The odds of an asteroid plunging in and hitting the moon instead of the planet or the star—” He shook his head. “It would be like threading a needle every time. There should be some, yes, but not nearly this many.”
She didn’t answer, she just stared out the shuttle’s canopy at the battered landscape flashing past.
After awhile he asked, “How long to touchdown?”
It was a question that could have been answered by the shipmind, but Saxon asked Monica because he didn’t know what else to say to her.
“Eighteen point six minutes,” she answered dully.
Horus had fallen into tidal lock, turning the same face to Osiris throughout its seventeen-day orbit, meaning that every square millimeter of the moon’s surface was touched by the sun’s blistering heat. But that didn’t mean that all potential LZ’s were equal. If they could set down in a deep, shadowed crater on the moon’s near side they could largely avoid the ravages of the sun’s brutal touch. It would give them a fighting chance.
For awhile.
Like passengers on a ship that hand sunk in the middle of the sea, they’d swum to the nearest island to avoid drowning, but their refuge was a grim and desolate land that would not sustain them for long.
The truth was that their death warrants had been signed the moment that Pravda had inexplicably veered off course.
But that was too much truth, even for Saxon.
“Why did you come with me?” he finally asked.
Monica turned to look at him, that pretty face hard and bitter in a way that it hadn’t been before. “What?”
“If you really don’t love me, why did you agree to come to Osiris with me?”
Monica looked at him blankly for a moment, then turned to look back out the canopy.
She was a quiet for several minutes and Saxon had decided she wasn’t going to answer when she said, “Your work, it’s important. The mystery of the hot jupiters. They shouldn’t exist, but they do. No gas giant should form this close in. And the idea that they somehow migrated in—” Her snort revealed what she thought of that idea.
“A passing star’s gravity could disturb a system’s equilibrium, knock a gas giant free of its original orbit and—”
“A passing star’s gravity,” she said, her voice mocking. “Hot jupiters are everywhere. 51 Pegasi b. WASP-17b. Kepler-7b. COROT-1b. Scores more.” She shook her head. “Near hits between stars couldn’t explain a tenth of these systems. Not a hundredth.”
She looked at him, those blue eyes meeting his. “I want to know,” she said. “It’s a genuine mystery and I want to know. I guess—I guess that’s the real reason I came.”
He heard the falseness in her words and he was sure that this wasn’t the real reason, but he thought it was somehow closer to the truth than her earlier professions of love.
Like Osiris being stripped of its atmosphere by its mother sun, the crisis was stripping Monica Temple of her layers of artifice. Before they were done they’d reach down and find the metallic core of her truth.
As long as that moment awaited, Saxon wouldn’t grieve his own coming death. As long as he was seeking a truth, big or small, he was alive.
He turned away from Monica and glanced out the canopy, watching the broken, gray surface hurtling past beneath them, while the black sky above remained empty and still.
Suddenly a brilliant emerald light cleaved the black sky, a strobe of green light flashing again and again.
“SIGNAL DETECTED,” announced the shipmind.
***
Saxon stood on the moon’s surface in a suit designed to protect him from a temperature swing of more than a thousand degrees Centigrade.
If he stumbled into full daylight it wouldn’t be enough.
The short, blunt shape of the shuttle nestled against the high, crater wall, swaddled in a blanket of cool darkness. Monica was an exceptional pilot and she’d put the little boat down soft, but Veritas had still buried herself in a couple meters of dust.
Saxon felt the rumble of vibration ripple through the packed dust. The rover’s grappling hooks had caught on the surface above and the rugged vehicle was winching itself up the crater wall, the titanium spikes on its eight wheels cutting into rock as it took an unmanned, vertical drive.
Monica stood next to him, staring at the rover as it made its slow, steady climb.
“Sixty-three kilometers,” she said, her voice crackling over the line-of-sight radio freq. “That’s two days journey on the rover. Two days one way. And that’s if nothing goes wrong. It’s crazy.”
Saxon shook his head. “A four-day round trip against a seventeen-day orbit leaves a healthy safety margin.”
“If nothing goes wrong,” she insisted.
“The shipmind detected digital structure in the light pulses, Monica. Each pulse is a message, a petabyte-sized message. That means intelligence, alien intelligence.”
She shook her head. “Great. And how much good does that do us if you end up dead?”
“Look,” he said, “we’re dead either way. The shuttle doesn’t have the delta vee to reach a stable orbit around Osiris, so we can’t refuel. And eventually the heat will break down our shelter. If there is some kind of alien outpost sixty-three klicks away, it might be our only hope.”
She stared at him, fists on her hips. “That’s what you really believe? That Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Jesus are going to save us?”
“No,” he said, “but it’s better than staying here and doing nothing.”
She shook her head. “It’s got nothing to do with any kind of rescue. You just have to know, that’s all. You just have to know. That’s what drove you out to this star system in the first place and that’s what’s driving you out those last sixty-three kilometers. And it’s going to turn out just as well this time as it did before.”
“How can you not be curious?” Saxon asked.
It was a good question, a worthy question. Despite the centuries mankind had spent scanning the heavens with radio and optical telescopes, the hundreds of SETI projects, the millions of words of science and science fiction, the first few tentative steps outside the solar system, no one had yet found the slimmest hint of the existence of an alien civilization.
First contact would be the most momentous discovery in human history.
First contact might even be worth the life of two human beings.
It was a worthy question—and Monica sidestepped it entirely. “Someone broke you,” she said slowly, “probably a hundred years before I even met you. Maybe even two hundred. You’re always talking about the nobility of truth, but it isn’t really about that, is it, Saxon? The truth is someone lied to you a long time ago and you couldn’t take it. You’re a broken little boy, Saxon, that’s all you are. There’s nothing noble about you. It’s just sad.”
He looked at her for a long moment and then hit a control on the belt, igniting the thrusters in his pack, punching his body straight up and over the crater’s hundred-meter lip.
He had always thought of truth as an eternal flame, a holy light, but he knew it could also be a blow torch.
And he found he didn’t like it when the blow torch was pointed his way.
He climbed into the rover, and without a word to Monica, set out through the darkness.
***
The tough, spidery rover crept across the moon’s rocky surface, moving at a careful 1.3 kilometers/hour—slower than a man could walk. Saxon didn’t drive, didn’t even bother to watch the broken landscape as it passed by. The rover’s AI was capable of navigating the journey on its own.
It almost would have been better if the journey had been more dangerous, had demanded more of his attention. If he’d been driving maybe he wouldn’t have to hear Monica’s words playing over and over again, like a looped distress signal.
You’re a broken little boy, Saxon, that’s all you are.
Why hadn’t he said something to her? She didn’t understand him like she thought she did. She didn’t understand anyone like she thought she did. No one did.
People weren’t equipped to understand themselves. Not anymore.
Human beings were no longer fitted to the universe in which they lived. Homo sapiens had evolved to live thirty, forty years, to bring forth a child with every act of love, to have many children because most of them would die, and to love them fiercely, because in the end a child was a person’s only contribution to eternity.
Now human beings lived forever, the link between sex and procreation was forever broken, and almost no one had children anymore.
Saxon wasn’t one of those Originalists who thought that humanity should return to a simpler time, but he did think that the biological imperatives that first drove man out of the trees and across the savannahs of eastern Africa no longer served humanity.
Why hadn’t he said that to Monica? Now it was too late and the argument just circled uselessly around and around in his mind.
After hours upon hours, lulled by the passage of the monotonous landscape and the thrum of the rover’s vibration growling in his flesh, he fell into a fitful sleep.
***
The sun was a merciless circle of heat in a hard, blue sky, a little bigger than it should have been, a little yellower than it should have been, the difference minute—but real.
It was a hot, sullen day. Elephant-gray Triceratops wallowed in the cool mud, caking on dirt, shielding their hides from the buzzing, biting flies. A royal blue Stegosaurus dipped its beaked head to get a drink, its iridescent, rainbow-colored plates flashing in the sun. Beyond the watering hole, the chest-high grass of the savannah stirred gently, the dried brown stalks whispering softly.
There was no breeze.
A little girl crouched on mud-streaked bare feet not five meters from the stegosaur, digging in the dirt with a stick. She wore a sundress the color of lime sherbet, ash-blond hair hanging across her face in strings, hiding her face as she stared intently at whatever had caught her attention.
A little boy, a year or two older than the girl, stood watching her, his face scrunched up with resentment.
“Go away, Kara,” he said.
She didn’t look up, just kept digging with the stick.
“This palace is mine.”
Why was she always following him? Taking stuff that was his? Stupid sister.
“I can be here if I want, Saxby,” she shot back, still not looking at him.
“Mamma says you have to go,” said Saxby.
“No she doesn’t,” said Kara, her voice sullen. She was digging holes in the mud, watching them fill up with water. What a little baby.
“It’s too scary for babies,” he said.
She looked up at him then, those hazel eyes wide, her mouth a pink, little O, a smudge of dirt marking her left cheek.
“Too scary,” Saxby repeated. “Mamma says.”
“I’m not a baby,” said Kara fiercely.
“What will you do if a monster gets you?” asked Saxby smugly.
Kara turned, looking at the Stegosaurus, the Triceratops herd and... was there a flicker of something in the high grass?
“They’ll scare you dead,” he said.
“They can’t do that,” said Kara “There’s safeties.” But there was a note of concern in her voice.
“They can if you’re a baby,” snapped Saxby.
“No,” she said, but her lower lip was quivering like she was gonna cry.
That was bad. If she went crying to Mama, Mama might take away Dinosaur Palace. All because of a stupid sister.
He opened his mouth—
A pack of creatures darted out of the grass, moving lightning quick.
Saxby flashed on a nightmare the size of a man, black dagger-shaped stripes against a khaki hide, jaws crowded with needle-sharp teeth.
And then the first one jumped.
It caught an Ornitholestes drinking in the open. The little dinosaur whose name meant bird thief was a small scavenger that stood upright, actually a cousin to its attacker. Like the predator rapidly closing on it, Ornitholestes was painted with the same tawny brush of the savannah, but tip-to-tail it gave up a meter in length to its murderous cousin, a meter in length and almost fifty kilos.
The outcome of the contest was never in doubt.
The hunter jumped and its switchblade rear claws flicked out, thirteen centimeters of bone as sharp as a razor. It was those cruel talons that gave the creature its name. Deinonychus.
Terrible Claw.
Predator and prey crumpled to the ground, the Ornitholestes’s face filled with wide-eyed terror, its screams disturbingly human.
The coppery stink of blood suddenly everywhere.
The herbivores reacted at once.
The Triceratops trumpeted, their bugling danger calls filling the blazing hot air, adults turning toward the threat and lowering their massive, three-horned heads. The juvenile ’tops tried to work themselves back into the herd’s center, bleating in terror.
The three-ton Stegosaurus wheeled away from the water, swinging its spike-tipped tail.
And charged straight for the children.
The boy gasped and took a startled step back and tripped, the simulation so real that he forgot for a moment that it was all just for fun and there was no way the pretend dinosaur could hurt him.
The girl’s eyes widened and she fell backwards, arms thrown out, terror stamped into the lines of her little face.
She was afraid just like her brother. But, unlike him, she didn’t get up.
Not even after the stegosaur charged past.
***
Saxon awoke, the dream still in his mind. It wasn’t just a dream, it had really happened—but it wasn’t quite a memory either. He couldn’t remember that day, couldn’t recall why he wanted so badly for Kara to leave, couldn’t remember the shock and fear when she didn’t rise.
Oh, he had watched the vidclip of the event, watched hundreds of times, had reconstructed, reimagined it but he didn’t remember it.
Not really.
His sister had died, and he couldn’t remember any of it.
Because his mother had stolen that memory away.
Children were rare, precious. No parent would trust their progeny to messy biology. Children were engineered, every chromosome, every gene just so.
But sometimes there were mistakes.
In Kara’s case, the mixture of terror and a subtle coronary defect had proved fatal.
Unable to live with the tragedy, Saxon’s mother had administered a heavy-duty psychotropic combined with neural pruning to wipe Kara from their memories.
If it hadn’t been for the nightmares, Saxon never would have known he’d had a sister.
She’d been killed twice, once in a dinosaur holo, her fear accentuated by the excellent simulation and Saxon’s taunts. And then she’d been killed a second time.
In his mind.
All around him the moon’s scarred surface passed away, dusty and gray and as dead as time.
***
Saxon had expected the strange alien signal to lead him to long-abandoned alien ruins or a crashed starship or, at the very least, some kind of advanced communications tower. But when he reached the source of the signal, he found none of these things.
What he found was stranger still.
The artifact sat on a mostly flat piece of black basalt a meter above the moon’s gray surface. Not a speck of dust marred its perfect surface, as if its alien master had set it down a moment ago and would be back for it any time.
