Last Plane to Heaven (10 page)

In the end, they calibrated it to secretly attack the USS
Fond du Lac
on patrol in the Sea of Okhotsk. According to the boson rifle's firing plan, the submarine should have roughly tripled in mass, then immediately sunk with a loss of all hands, with no culpability pointing back to Moscow.

Nothing happened, of course, except a terrific hum, several dozen cases of very fast-moving cancer among the scientists and technicians who were too close to the primary accelerator grids, and the plug being pulled on the universe.

Though we didn't know that last bit for almost a hundred years.

Inventory of the sample bag recovered from the suit of the deceased taikonaut Radogast Yuang on his return from the First Kuiper Belt Expedition (1KBE). See specification sheet attached for precise measurement and analysis.

•  Three (3) narrow bolts approximately seven centimeters long, with pentagonal heads, bright metallic finish, pitted surfaces

•  One (1) narrow bolt approximately two centimeters long, damaged end, dull metallic finish, heavily corroded

•  One (1) flexible tab approximately eleven centimeters long, plastic-like substance, pale blue under normal lighting, pitted

It is to be noted that these finds do not correspond in materials or specification to any known components of the TKS
Nanjing
or any of the 1KBE's equipment and supplies. It is also to be noted that the China National Space Administration never officially acknowledged these finds.

*   *   *

Lies go by at the speed of time. The truth bumbles along far behind, still looking for its first cup of coffee, while the whole world hears some other story.

All revelation is a lie. It must be. The divine is an incommunicable disease, too large and splintered to fit within the confines of a primate brain. Our minds evolved to compete for fruit and pick carrion, not to comb through the parasites that drop from the clouds of God's dreaming.

But just as an equation asymptotically approaches the solution, so revelation can asymptotically approach the truth about the underlying nature of the universe. The lie narrows to the width of the whisker of a quantum cat, while the truth, poking slowly along behind, finally merges Siamese-twinned to its precursor.

That's what we who remain tell ourselves. Why would I deny it?

There has been a neutron bomb of the soul, cleansing the solar system, and thus the universe, of the stain that was the human race. Some of us remain, befuddled by the curse of our survival.

No corpses surround us. We survivors don't swim amid the billion-body charnel house of our species. They are gone, living on only in the dying power systems and cold-stored files and empty pairs of boots that can be found on every station, the deck of every ship, in the dusty huts and moldering marble halls on Earth and Luna and Mars.

The lie that was revelation became truth, and the speed of time simply stopped for almost everyone except the few of us too soul-deaf to hear the fading rhythm of the universe. Sometimes I am thankful that Marlys could hear the music that called her up. Sometimes I curse her name for leaving me behind.

My greatest fear, the one that keeps me awake most often, is that it is we survivors who vanished. Everyone else is there, moving forward at one second per second, but only our time has stopped, an infection that will make us see a glacier as fit driver for a water wheel, and even the dying of the sun as a flickering afternoon's inconvenience.

I keep waiting for the stars to slow down, their light to pool listlessly before my eyes.

And you? What are you waiting for? There are answers in the Kuiper Belt debris, on the frequencies Sameera Glasshouse tapped, in the trajectory of that old Soviet weapon.

All you have to do is follow them, and find the crack in the world where everything went. One of these days, that's where I'll go, too.

 

West to East

This story arose out of a world-building exercise on a convention panel I've long since otherwise forgotten. We got into a discussion of superrotating atmospheres. I concluded they sounded like a lot more fun than they really are.

I wasn't looking forward to dying lost and unremarked. Another day on Kesri-Sequoia II, thank you very much.

“Good morning, sir,” said Ensign Mallory from her navcomms station at the nose of our disabled landing boat. She was a small, dark-skinned woman with no hair—I'd never asked if that was cultural or genetic. “Prevailing winds down to just under four hundred knots as of dawn.”

“Enough with the weather.” I coughed the night's allergies loose. Alien biospheres might not be infectious, but alien proteins still carried a hell of a kick as far as my mucous membranes were concerned. I had good English lungs, which is to say a near-permanent sinus infection under any kind of respiratory stress. And we'd given up on full air recycling weeks ago in the name of power management—with the quantum transfer chamber damaged in our uncontrolled final descent, all we had were backup fuel cells. Not nearly enough to power onboard systems, let alone our booster engines. The emergency stores were full of all kinds of interesting but worthless items like water purifiers, spools of buckywire, and inflatable tents.

Useless. All of our tech was useless.
Prospero
's landing boat smelled like mold. Our deck was at a seven-degree angle. We'd been trapped down here so long I swear one of my legs was shortening to compensate.

Mallory glanced back at the display. “I'm sure you know best, sir.”

*   *   *

Just under four hundred knots pretty much counted as doldrums on the surface of Kesri-Sequoia II. Since the crash we'd regularly clocked wind gusts well in excess of nine hundred knots. Outside the well-shielded hull of the landing boat Ensign Mallory and I would have been stripped to the bone in minutes. Which was too bad. Kesri-Sequoia II didn't seem to be otherwise inimical to human life. Acceptable nitrogen-oxygen balance, decent partial pressure, within human-normal temperature ranges—a bit muggy perhaps. Nothing especially toxic or caustic out there.

It was the superrotating atmosphere that made things a bitch.

There was life here though, plenty of it—turbulent environments beget niches, niches beget species radiation, species radiation begets a robust biosphere. Just not our kind of life, not anything humans could meaningfully interact with.

Kesri-Sequoia's dryland surface was dominated by giant sessiles that were rocky and solid with lacy air holes for snaring microbiota from the tumbling winds. They were a kilometer long, two hundred meters tall, less than two meters wide at the base, narrowing as they rose. The sessiles were oriented like shark fins into the airflow. Mallory called them land-reefs. We could see four from our windscreen, lightning often playing between them as the winds scaled up and down. Approaching one expecting communication would be like trying to talk to Ayers Rock.

Then there were ribbon-eels—ten meters of razor-thin color flowing by on the wind like a kootchie dancer's prop. And spit-tides that crawled across the scoured landscape, huge mats of loosely differentiated proteins leaching nutrients from the necrophages that lurked in the surface cracks.

All surface life on Kesri-Sequoia II moved west to east. Nothing fought the winds. Nothing made me or Ensign Mallory want to get out and say hello. Nothing could help us get the landing boat back to orbit and the safety of
Prospero
. The atmosphere was so electrically messy we couldn't even transmit our final logs and survey data to the crew waiting helplessly high above.

*   *   *

I stared out the crazed crystal-lattice of the forward portside viewport. I figured when something much larger than a pea hit it that was the end for us. Once the wind got inside the boat, we'd finally be dead.

A ribbon-eel soared by in the distance. The animal glittered like an oil slick as it undulated. “How strong do you figure those things are?” I asked Ensign Mallory. “They look like they're made of tissue.”

She glanced at the exterior telemetry displays, seeing my eel with the landing boat's electronic eyes. “I ran some simulations last week.”

“And?”

Mallory sighed wistfully. “I'd love to dissect one. Those things' muscle fibers must have a torsional strength superior to spider silk. Otherwise they would shred in the turbulence.”

Her comment about spiders made me think of airborne hatchlings on Earth, each floating on their little length of thread. “I wonder if we could use some of those damned things as sails. If we could get the boat off the ground and pointed into the wind, we might be able to climb high enough on deadstick to at least get off a message to
Prospero
.”

They couldn't send the other landing boat, prosaically named “B” to our “A,” after us. Not unless they wanted to condemn another crew. And our first touchdown had been so violent that even if we somehow found a way to power the engines there was no way we'd survive to the end of a second flight.

But getting our last words out had a certain appeal.

“How are you going to catch a ribbon-eel, sir? It's not like we can step outside and go fishing.”

“Fishing…” I went back to the landing boat's stores locker next to the tiny galley at the rear of the three-meter-long main cabin. Standard inventory included four spools of long-chain fullerene—buckywire, or more accurately, carbon nanotube whiskers grown to arbitrary macroscale lengths. In our case a rated minimum of a hundred meters per spool.
That
would be fishing line that tested out to a few hundred tons. “What do you figure ribbon-eels eat?” I asked over my shoulder as I grabbed the four spools.

*   *   *

We only had one local food available to us—the mold from the air ducts. Ensign Mallory scraped out a few cubic centimeters' worth. It sat in the kneepad of our lone hardsuit like so much gray flour.

“This stuff won't stick to anything, sir,” she said. Mallory's voice was almost a whine. Surely she wasn't losing her spirit now that we had something to focus on?

I considered the powdery mess. “Syrup packets from the galley. A little bit of cornstarch. We're there.”

“How are you going to get it outside?”

“We're going to build a little windlock on the inside of the busted viewport up front. Bind this stuff as a paste onto the buckywire, spool it out, and snag us a ribbon-eel.”

Buckybondo is weird stuff—it munges the electron shells of organic molecules. That's the only way to stick fullerene-based materials to anything else. But you can glue your fingers to the bulkhead with it, literally bonding your flesh with the plastoceramics so that only an arc welder or a bone saw will cut you free. I wouldn't let Mallory touch the stuff. We only needed a few drops in the mold paste to stick it to the buckywire. I figured I'd just suffer the risks myself. One of the burdens of command.

*   *   *

Two hours later I was playing out line through the windlock. The wind carried it away past my screen, out of my sight. I figured we'd significantly reduced the service life of the viewport by drilling the hole, but what else were Ensign Mallory and I going to do with the rest of our short lives?

“Slow it down, sir,” Mallory said. She monitored the sensors for ribbon-eels. “The wind is taking your bait too close to a land-reef.”

I thumbed the electrostatic brake on the buckywire reel. The line stopped extending. The buckywire made an eerie clatter against our hull as it vibrated in the wind.

“Ribbon-eel approaching.” She paused. “It seems to have noticed the bait. Draw your line back a little, sir.”

I reeled the buckywire in, moving the bait closer to the landing boat for a moment.

“Damn,” hissed Mallory. “Missed it. Next time, sir, don't go against the wind.”

“Roger that.” I'd only done what she said.

Ten minutes later we caught one. It came shooting up out of the west, grabbed the bait on the fly, and yanked the buckywire reel out of my hand. I lunged toward the damaged viewport, fetching up against our jerry-rigged windlock and nearly breaking my fingers. “Oh, crap!”

“We got it, sir. Can you reel our eel in?”

The wind pressure from the captive ribbon-eel made the viewport creak but the buckywire reel engaged and slowly retracted the line. The nose of the landing boat rocked with the drag from our airborne captive. I glanced at Mallory's screen where the ribbon-eel could be seen thrashing as we tugged it against the wind.

I felt vaguely guilty. I figured I'd worry about the ethics of this once I was dead.

*   *   *

“Now what, sir?”

The nose of the landing boat kept rocking. We were flying the ribbon-eel like a flag. Its drag bumped our vehicle to the starboard. “This isn't enough,” I said. “We'll need at least one more.”

“We've got three more spools.”

I imagined four ribbon-eels, great, colored pennants dragging us into the air. We'd be out of control. “What if I hooked a second wire into the other end of the eel? We could even steer. Like a parasail.”

Ensign Mallory shook her head. “You'll never survive out there, sir.”

“There's always the hardsuit.”

“It's not rated for these conditions.”

I shrugged. “Neither are we, and we're still here.” Terrible logic, but I was down to emotional appeals, even to myself. “Let's hook up the hardsuit to another reel so you have a chance of getting me back. Then I'll go out and hook up the ass end of that eel. If I don't make it back in, you fly the landing boat up to the middle atmosphere. Get above the storms, tell
Prospero
what happened to us.”

“You can't even walk out there, sir.”

“We'll see.”

*   *   *

We passed all three of the other reels out of the windlock. I suited up, took a tube of buckybondo and a pair of electrostatic grippies, and forced myself into the landing boat's tiny airlock.