Collected short fiction, p.776
Collected Short Fiction, page 776
She heard Hinch gasp as if from a blow.
“Only flickering, really. Off and on. And hard to seethe planet’s still half a million kilometers away. When they came again, I called Tony.”
“Natural lighting, I tried to imagine.” Cruzet’s narrow shoulders lifted as if in apology for all he couldn’t explain. “But lightning doesn’t happen at absolute zero.
And not without an atmosphere. The colors were another riddle. Yellow flashes. Fainter greens and violets. All coming from those objects on the ice every time Senn’s search beam passed, as if something took it for a signal.”
“Something?” she echoed. “What?”
“Ice gods?” Andersen seemed to mock her amazement, or perhaps his own. “Ice giants? What sort of creatures would you expect to find there on the ice? Where only the stars have shone for maybe ten billion years?”
“What? What possibly . . .” Her whisper died. They all stared in silence at that dim green image overhead. Hinch moved abruptly, retreating toward the elevator.
“If a landing can be made, I would volunteer.” The stowaway’s voice was so soft she barely heard him. “I think we must know what signals to us from the ice.”
“Our option.” Glengarth turned to scan their faces. “To land or not to land. If we don’t, our high velocity will carry us on to pass close around the dwarf. The gravity assist would sling us off into nowhere at double our velocity.”
“And no second chance,” Cruzet added. “Not to land here or anywhere.”
“So?” She shuddered, staring into empty sky. “We’d just drift?”
“Drift?” A harsh snort from Hinch. “Drift forever? Till we have to hunt each other?”
“I hope not,” Glengarth murmured. “We’re surely too civilized for that.”
“Think so?” Hinch glared from the elevator door. “I’m going down to wake the captain. He’ll find some better answer. And he still commands the ship.”
“When you wake him,” Glengarth called, “let him read the Mission Covenant. A document he should have signed before he came aboard. He’ll find that his status changed when we came out of quantum mode. We are now an independent democracy, governing ourselves. The ship is to land us at whatever site we may select.” Hinch stood gaping, shaking a gnarly fist. “Idiots!” he gasped. A ship of howling idiots!”
The elevator swallowed him.
* * *
“We are civilized.” Glengarth murmured when he was gone.
“And lucky.” Andersen erased that dim green riddle, returning the planet’s false-colored maps. “Lucky to get out of wave mode alive.”
“So now?” Rima asked again. “Can we land?”
“I believe we re agreed.” Glengarth nodded. “Somewhere off the ice. on the hemisphere we don’t see.”
“And we’ll survive. Resolutely, she raised her eyes toward that dim crimson globe. “After all, we were never promised paradise.”
“¡Seguro!” Carlos nodded, grinning at her through the starlight. “Seguro que sí.”
She couldn’t help smiling at him.
“We’ll find our own better answers.” She spoke to the planet’s image. “The ice has hydrogen. There will be soil down off the cap, or something we can turn into soil. We have skills, technology, equipment. For shelter, we can burrow—”
“¡De verdad!” Carlos grinned more widely. “Working in security’, I saw los topos de hierro. The great machines that dig.”
“Our plow s!” Andersen spread his arms. “And a new world to seed.”
* * *
Kip was awake when Rima returned to their cabin. He listened very quietly to what she said about the meeting in the dome, and asked what ice gods would he like.
“Not gods, really.” she told him. “Dr. Andersen was only using a figure of speech to imply that he had no idea what could be making the lights. The ice gods were only Norse myths.”
“Yet something real was there to flash the lights. Something big. if their buildings are two miles tall. If they aren’t gods—”
“We’ve no idea what they are.”
“Why did they signal? To welcome us? Or warn us to keep off?”
“We’ve no way to know. If we land, it will be on the other side of the planet, fifteen thousand kilometers away. We’ll probably never know. which means they will never matter. Better forget them and go back to sleep.”
“They matter to me.” Back on his berth, he lay silent will she thought he was asleep. “Mom?” His voice came suddenly. Are you sorry? Sorry we came?”
She thought she had to be honest.
“Because of you and Day,” she said, “because your future’s so uncertain. I suppose I ought to be.”
“Don’t.” he told her I’m glad we came. Because the ice gods are so exciting. I want to find out what they are.”
Soon she heard his regular breaching, but she lay awake a long time, trying to imagine the landing. On a dead world of old ice and naked stone, under a sky where no sun had shone for a billion or ten billion years. To stay forever. To build a home for Kip and Day. To plant the human seed Was it possible? She couldn’t quite believe. Longing for some small grain of Kip’s reckless confidence, she finally slept.
The children’s cheerful voices woke her. Day was molding a tiny Me Me with clay they had brought from the rec room. Kip was busy with his Game Gate.
“You’ll cheer up. Mom.” he called to her brightly, “when you hear about my dream. I was on a great adventure with my friends beyond the Gate. We landed on the ice cap and met the ice gods. Only like you said they weren’t gods at all. but monsters with the shape of thunderclouds. They fought us with lightning and hail.
“But we beat them! Because heal kills them. Their hailstones all melted before they could hurt us. One of them tried to strike me with lightning, and my warm breath shriveled it to nothing. The hot blast of our engines drove them off the ice. So we’re going to be okay on the planet.
“We’re going to be the real ice gods!”
1995
Dark Star
Anew story by Jack Williamson is always an event. We have been lucky enough to feature two in the past few years, “The Birds’ Turn” (October/November 1992) and “The Litlins” (December 1993). Now Jack favors us with a novelet tied to the novel he is currently working on, The Black Sun.
The novel came out of Jack’s interest in the “dark matter” in the universe, which telescopes have not discovered. “I like to think it will not turn out to be some extraordinary new particle,” he writes, “but simply ordinary matter in masses too small to set off the nuclear reactions that make stars shine.”
ONE
CARLOS MONDRAGON. A lean brown man without friends or money or even much English, he came from Cuerno del Oro, a poor pueblito in the mountains of Chihuahua. Owning only the computer skills he had taught himself, he had stowed away on the quantum ship to escape a world with no room for him, hoping to find a dream.
Don Diego had warned him of the strange quantum craft, which moved at a speed that stopped time. One light-year or a billion, the Don swore, a quantum flight would be less than an instant to those aboard, ending only when or if the ship was about to collide with some great star. Which might happen anywhere or not at all.
He had never expected a black dwarf sun to stop them, or the flight to end on a planet of ice and eternal night. Yet, because of la rubia, he could not be sorry. La rubia, that was his name for the beautiful Doctora Rima Virili, whom he admired for her bright hair and her good shape and her tender smile for her small daughter.
She was the famous Anglo scientist with letters after her name, he only the illegal mojado who had yet to earn his place among these brave pioneers who were risking quantum flight for the chance to claim some new and better planet for humanidad. Her beauty frightened him, no rough campesino could ever hope to touch her.
“The ship’s a seed,” she had told Captain Stecker, when he did not wish to land. “The Mission exists to sow the human seed across the universe. We were meant to root and grow wherever we happened to fall. This may be hard soil, but we come prepared to terraform any soil. I think we can survive.”
They were in the ship’s control room. The holoscreens that arched above them were dark with imaged space, the black sun a round shadow on the stars, the ice planet a smaller blot beside it. The captain was a graceful, smiling Anglo with gold-enameled fingernails and a golden band around his flowing amber hair.
Handsome as un torero, the captain had the manner of Don Alfonso Madera. Cuerno del Oro meant horn of gold. Don Alfonso was a cleverpicaro who had stolen an ancient registro from the church. He made its faded pages into maps of the lost Cuerno mine, which he sold to turistas, bragging in la cantina that he could make los gringos believe that baby shit was gold.
“Anywhere but here.” Without courage of his own, the captain drank it from a bottle; Mondragon heard the thickness in his voice. “We’ll find some better world to settle.”
“A problem, sir,” Cruzet said. “This is the only planet here.”
Los Doctores Cruzet and Andersen were Mondragon’s amigos. They had let himprove his conocimiento of computers and work with them on the radar search team that searched this sunless dark until they found the planet. Cruzet’s thoughts were often away among the stars, but Andersen was muy simpdtico. A red-haired Tejano engineer who understood his Chihuahua Spanish and laughed at the dangers of quantum flight.
“The only planet or no planet, I’m not landing on that snowball.” Speaking louder, Stecker forgot to smile. “Not since that beacon warned us off.”
“Sir, we don’t know it was any kind of beacon.” Andersen spoke with quiet respect. “All we saw was an odd flash of light down on the planet.” He frowned at its black dot on the holoscreen. “Odd because of the way it changed, flickering through all the colors of the spectrum. We had no time to record anything, and it was not repeated. The planet is so cold that it has to be dead.”
“Something’s alive there.” Stecker’s narrow jaw set stubbornly. “Mr. Hinch takes that flash for a response to our radar beam. A message from something that doesn’t want us landing.”
“Look at it, sir.” Cruzet gestured at the tiny blot. “A world without sunlight, cold almost to absolute zero. What could live there?”
Cruzet was short and quick and dark. No Anglo, he came from the place of high tech called CERN, and his accent was hard for Mondragon to understand. He sometimes frowned as if Andersen’s jokes were riddles to him, but he understood the difficult mathematics of the quantum.
“You say it’s dead?” Doubtfully, Stecker squinted at the black blot. “How do you know?”
“Sir, we know dark dwarfs.” Cruzet looked at Andersen and waited for his nod. “They’re born hot. Heated by gravitational contraction and nuclear fission, but too small to bum the hydrogen that keeps bright stars bright. This one’s old. It cooled when the unstable elements were used up. That must have happened several billion years ago. The planet’s close to zero Kelvin now. No energy left for any possible life.”
“Too bad, Rima.” Andersen shook his head at larubia. “A hard world to terraform—”
“Forget it!” Stecker snapped. “We’re not landing.”
Mondragon had no liking for the captain. A man of Earth and not of space, he had been director of Mission StarSeed. Coming aboard to inspect the ship on the day before takeoff, he had abruptly seized command, explaining only that the mission was finished and his work on Earth was done.
“Sir, we’ve no choice,” Cruzet told him now.
“Except to get back into quantum drive,” he said. “And fly on the way we were.”
“Impossible, sir,” Andersen said. “Quantum craft don’t control themselves. The launch from White Sands transformed us from a virtual particle into a virtual wave, firing us out of the pit like a bullet from a gun. We didn’t bring the gun.”
With no choice, they came down to a rocky headland at the rim of the continent of ice that covered half the planet. High cliffs rose north and west toward the ice. The frozen ocean lay south and east, beyond the ancient beach where la rubia and her team of engineers wished to begin excavations for the first habitat.
“No habitat,” the captain told her. “If we excavate for anything, it will be for a launch facility. For whatever we need to get us off this damned snowball before we’re attacked by God knows what.”
“Sir,” El Señor Glengarth protested, “I can’t imagine anything that could attack us.”
He was the first officer and the true master of the ship. Another Anglo, he was yet a fair man who had released Mondragon from security and allowed him to prove his habilidad with computers.
“Just look around us.” Glengarth hadgatheredlos expertos in the control dome to plan for survival. He gestured at the holoscreens that showed white-frosted rocks below and the flat white desert that had been an ocean. “I’m not much concerned about anything more hostile than the temperature.”
He paused, with a small bow of respect for the captain.
“However, sir, it’s true that nobody seems able to explain that peculiar flash. Before we undertake anything else, I want to assemble a vehicle and send out a party to look for the source.”
He turned to smile at la rubia, and Mondragon flinched from a stab of jealousy for these fortunate Anglos, men whom los santos had favored with the culture and learning that made them her equals, privileged to know her, perhaps to win her love.
“With luck, Rima,” he made a small chiste, “we’ll be meeting a native engineer able to help you do your terraforming. You’re going to need any help you can get.”
When the scout máquina was ready, Mondragon volunteered to join Andersen and Cruzet on the search expedition. He wanted to earn his right among these people of science and courage, and perhaps, con buena suerte—
He dared not think of all he longed for.
Jake Hinch came to take command. A hawk-faced angry man with a ragged beard and a black beret, he was a friend of Stecker but still a stranger on the ship. Cruzet and Andersen looked hard at each other when they heard the clink of bottles in his bag, but he merely muttered an order for them to carry on as planned and took refuge in his curtained cubicle at the rear of the machine, making no trouble.
The scout was new to all three of them, but easy enough to drive. A great, ungainly metal insect, it carried its bright steel shell high on six long lever-legs that rolled on big-tired wheels for feet. A heat lamp on a tall mast shone to shield them from the cold. They made practice runs along the old beach, and Andersen let Mondragon take the wheel when they set out across the frozen ocean.
“Steer by the sun,” Andersen told him. “Just to the right of it.”
The cold dwarf sun, the black spot on the stars. Never rising, never setting, it drifted very slowly higher and very slowly back again with the motion Cruzet called libration. Live stars blazed close around it, never dimming or even twinkling; no air or clouds had veiled them for geologic ages. The level whiteness showed no break ahead, no mark behind except the faint dark scar their tires made.
He caught a faint ozone bite from the cycler, which Andersen was still adjusting. Listening, he heard the whisper of the turbine, the muffled murmur when the others spoke, the rustle of his clothing when he moved. Nothing else, because this dead world had no air to carry sound.
He drove without the head lamps. Lighting the ice for only a few hundred meters, they had blinded him to everything beyond. Without them, his eyes adjusted to the starlight. A dim gray world with all color lost, except in the dull red glow of the heat lamp.
He had seen the troubling flash through the wide-field telescope as they orbited to land. A bright sudden light, burning through every color of the spectrum from deepest red to darkest violet, but gone before anybody could be sure of anything. It had come from a spot somewhere out across the frozen ocean, almost due east of the headland.
Five hundred kilometers out, Andersen said. Closer to a thousand, Cruzet thought. The ice around it had looked bright on the radar image, as if rough enough to make a strong reflection. Perhaps an island? A mountain? Cruzet, who had seen it at a higher resolution, said it had looked too tall and thin to be any natural mountain.
A fortress of the ice gods?
Those gods of ice had been only a joke from Andersen, who liked to recall his Viking forebears, but nobody had thought of anything more possible. The flash had come just after the radar search beam swept the spot. Could Jake Hinch be right? Had it been an actual warning, from anything alive?
Would it come again?
Leaning over the wheel, Mondragon scanned the flat infinity of bone-white frost. A film of frozen argon and nitrogen, Cruzet said, the last trace of the vanished atmosphere. He scanned the splendid sky above it, steady stars burning brighter than those he had known in his boyhood in Chihuahua, set in constellations he had never seen. Ice and stars and dead black sun, nothing else.
No sudden flame with all the colors of el aico iris. No signal from the ice gods, if gods or devils either might exist in this ice infieino where no life of any kind should be. Cruzet came at last to take the wheel, and he climbed into the quartz-domed observation bubble and kept on watching till he dozed and shook himself awake to watch again. Ice and stars and dead sun-disk, nada más.
Andersen came to drive. At the kitchen shelf in the cabin, Cruzet stirred dry powder into hot water to make the bitter stuff they called syncafe and opened a pack of omninute wafers. Mondragon sliced a cold slab of soyamax, wishing for the goat enchiladas his mother used to make. They called Hinch to ask if he was hungry.
“Garbage! “he shouted through the curtain, voice slurred with whatever he had brought in his bottles. “I’ve got my own.”
Andersen stopped the scout, and they ate soyamax and omninute.
“Compact calories,” Andersen said. “Planned to keep the colony alive till we can do better. Every nutrient we need.” He made a face. “It will make us try for anything better.”
