Imagination Fully Dilated: Science Fiction Part 20

"This is the tribe's entire history," Susan breathed.

"All their culture," said Leonard. "And their technology."

Susan leaned down, peered at the simple symbols. "It's designed to be understood by people who have forgotten writing. It's a self-regenerating cultural virus."I didn't say anything. I was using my suit's rangefinder and computer to estimate the Legacy's weight.

"If we can only save one artifact," said Leonard, "this is it."

A number appeared in my helmet display. It was a little more than the lander's rated lift capacity, but I had some ideas . . . "I think we can do it."

Leonard turned to Keun-Hang. "Your planet is doomed."

I know this.

"Will you let us take your Legacy to safety?"

Yes,said Keun-Hang.Legacy must survive.

"You're sure the lander can lift it?" Susan said to me as we unbolted the lander's water tank. "We could just take photographs."

"The most important information is inside. Our helmet cameras are too bulky. We have to take the artifact itself." I hoped I was right . . . based on the way the natives had handled it, it was even heavier than I had first estimated. "Leonard, how's the ramp coming?"

"Another few loads of sand and we'll be ready. Maybe two hours."

I looked at my watch. "Make it one, if you can."

The entire tribe pitched in, and they finished the ramp in an hour and a half, not long after we got the last of the seats out of the lander. It took another two hours to get the Legacy inside and strapped down.

"How's it coming?" J.J.'s voice sounded in my helmet.

"I'm just finishing the preflight warm-up. Leonard and Susan, you'd better say your good-byes and get in here. J.J., any new information on the iron flash?"

"Nothing new. We have to leave orbit at 15:40. That's as far as I'm prepared to push it."

Twenty minutes to spare. One way or the other, we were committed now.

Leonard came in and strapped himself into one of the two remaining seats. There was a long, uncomfortable pause before Susan followed him. "I still hoped I might convince Keun-Hang to come with us, but he's resigned to dying. They all are."

"Here we go," I said, and hit the throttle.

The engines roared, and the lander shuddered. Outside the window the vegetation whipped and shredded in a gale of exhaust gases.

We started to lift.

And that's as far as it got. I ran the engines up to a hundred and ten percent and the lander didn't do anything more than rock at the top of its landing gear.

Finally, one eye on the fuel gauge, I throttled down. "No good."

"We have to lighten the load some more," said Leonard."We've already dumped everything we can do without," I replied.

"Then we have to leave the Legacy," Susan sighed.

"It took a couple of hours to get it in here and tied down. We have to take off in fifteen minutes."

Susan considered that for a moment. "How far are we over?"

"Not too much. Maybe thirty, forty kilos."

I realized what that meant at the same time Susan did. She started to unbuckle herself.

"No," I said. "You don't have to."

"I do, and I will. Better that two should live than all three should die."

"Stop," Leonard said before I could. "How old are you?"

"Thirty-nine."

"You've got half your life ahead of you. And you're married, I know."

"Leonard . . ." I said.

He wasn't listening to me. "Nothingis worse than the death of a spouse. I won't let you hurt your husband like my Marilyn hurt me. I'm the one who should stay."

"We shouldall stay!" I shouted.

They just looked at me.

"All of you have been telling me how impossible this planet is ever since we found it. How its...o...b..t is too unstable, how it should have been destroyed when Magnus went off the main sequence, how there hasn't been time for life to evolve. What if this planet, and these people, came from somewhere else, like Susan said?"

"It's only a theory . . ." Susan began.

"But it fits the evidence! And if these people are as old as they say . . . maybe they aren't the primitives here. Maybe we are."

"What?" said Leonard.

Now that we had no alternative, the hopes I had been keeping to myself came rushing out. "Keun-Hang is at least six hundred years old, and there's evidence these people were here-orcame here-when Magnus was still a main-sequence star. They may have technologies as far beyond the Lilliandree as the Lilliandree are beyond us. Even if this tribe has fallen back into barbarism, there must still be some alive who know how to operate their technology. If we leave, we'll be missing the journey of a thousand lifetimes!"

Leonard stared at me for a moment, then: "You stupidchild ! This is science, not science fiction!"

"But . . ."

"Didn't you even notice that their nouns have no number?""What does that have to do with anything?"

"Their language has no concept of singular or plural. When Keun-Hang said 'I,' it could just as well have been translated as 'we.' 'We' have been here for two thousand seasons. 'We' carved our knowledge on this stone."

"It's only natural for a species living under two very different suns to form some kind of theory of stellar evolution," Susan said gently, "but it's only speculation on their part, and it's not even correct. Magnus was a blue supergiant before it left the main sequence, not small and yellow."

I looked from one to the other. "But life takes billions of years to evolve!"

"It did on Earth." Susan's expression held only pity. "But the environment here is so harsh and variable, once life got started it must have evolved much faster."

Leonard unbuckled himself and stood up. "I'm sorry, son, but in the real world not every story has a happy ending. Good luck, and tell Krishna not to water my cactus too much."

Fighting the overloaded lander up through an atmosphere roiling from Magnus's increased output occupied all my attention for the next several hours. But I had a long quiet time to think after that, with Susan fast asleep and the planet receding below.

I clenched my fists, the tough fabric of my s.p.a.ce-suit gloves unyielding between my fingers. I'd been stupid, and overconfident, and unrealistic, and now Leonard was going to die because of me. I could just see him down there, staring up at Magnus, full of regret . . .

I pressed the ship-to-ship call b.u.t.ton. "J.J., do we have any of those soft-impact surface probes left?"

"Yeah, a couple."

"Get the scientists to put together a care package for Leonard, with a Simultaneity transmitter and as many scientific instruments as you can cram in there. You have to launch it before we break orbit."

"You're asking him to collectdata , when he's going todie ?"

"I'm giving him the opportunity to make one last contribution to the field where he's spent his life."

And so, while we accelerated away for the next eight days, Leonard sat on the rock-solid platform of Pointless and gathered some of the best data of the expedition. Keun-Hang and the other natives helped place the instruments, while Leonard and the other scientists devoted all their energies to collating and interpreting the data. Sometimes, when I heard Leonard's voice raised in pa.s.sionate argument, I forgot for a moment that he was a dozen AUs away and getting farther every minute.

We reached the transition gradient and jumped to a point six light-hours away. From here Magnus was no more than a fat red star, but Leonard reported the surface temperature on Pointless was up to forty degrees C and he had taken off his s.p.a.ce suit. "I figure the smell would've killed me before the radiation."

"Instruments indicate the iron flash is beginning," said Martin. "What do you see?"

"The surface of the star has gone calm, like the eye of a hurricane. Now it's shrinking visibly, and growing brighter. There are eddy currents. Solar prominences corks.c.r.e.w.i.n.g out like fireworks. I wish you all could be here to see it. Now the sun is thrashing, like surf. I see white flashes . . . lightning bolts asbig as solar systems. Continents of flame tearing themselves away from the surface." On the screen his gray hair whipped around his face and he had to squint against the increasing brightness. It looked like he was staring out to sea, at a rising sun, in an oncoming storm. "It's growing in diameter now, very rapidly."

He held up a hand in front of his face. "Getting quite hot. I feel a tingling . . . beta particles, I think. Are you getting the data, Susan?"

"Yes," she said, and bit her lip before any more words could escape.

"Good," said Leonard, "because I think this is just about it. Gray, are you there?"

"I am."

"I'm sorry about what I said. You weren't stupid; you just let your dreams overwhelm your reason. Oh!"

The light brightened suddenly on his face, washing out the camera for a moment, then dimmed again.

"Ma.s.sive flare. But Gray . . ."

"Yes, sir?"

"Don't ever stop dreaming. You n-"

Then the image whited out for the last time.

Six hours later we watched through the dome as Magnus exploded from a red star into a searing white light that dominated the sky, visibly swallowing up Charlie, Ballock, Pointless . . . and Leonard. "They'll call it Hart's Nebula," said Susan.

We took a few key readings from the advancing radiation wavefront, then jumped for home.

Lashawnda at the End

James Van Pelt

We landed in steam. It billowed from where we touched down, then vanished into the dry, frigid air.

From that first moment, the planet fascinated Lashawnda. She watched the landing tape over and over, her hand resting on her dark-skinned cheek, her oddly blue eyes reflecting the monitor's light. "I never believe we'll land safely, Spencer," she said.

Lashawnda liked Papaver better than any of the rest of us. She laughed at the gopher-rats that stood on their hind legs to look curiously until we got too close. She reveled in the smaller sun wavering in the not-quite-right blue sky, the lighter gravity, the blond sand and gray rocks that reached to the horizon, but most of all, she liked the way the plants in the gullies leaned her direction when she walked through them, how the flat-leafed bushes turned toward her and stuck to her legs if she brushed against them. Wearing a full contamination suit despite the planet's thin but perfectly breathable atmosphere didn't bother her.

Neither did the cold. By midday here on the equator the temperature might peak a few degrees above freezing, but the nights were incredibly chilly. Even Marvin and Beat.i.tude's ugly deaths the first days here didn't affect her like it did everyone else. No, she was in heaven, cataloging the flora, wandering among the misshaped trees in the crooked ravines, coming up with names for each new species.

When we lost our water supply, and it looked like we might not last until the resupply ship came round, she was still happy.

Lashawnda was a research botanist; what else should I have expected? For me, a commercialapplications biologist, Papaver represented a lifetime of work forteams of scientists, and I was only one guy. After less than two weeks on the planet, I knew the best I got to do was to file a report that said, "Great possibilities for medicinal, scientific, and industrial exploitation." Every plant Lashawnda sent my way revealed a whole catalog of potential pharmaceuticals. Thesecond wave of explorers would make all the money.

Lashawnda was dying, but was such a positive person that even in what she knew were her final days, she worked as if no deadly date was flapping its leaden wings toward her. That's the problem in living with a technology that has extended human life so well: death is harder. It must have been easier when humans didn't make it through their first century. People dropped dead left and right, so they couldn't have feared it as much. It couldn't have made them as mad as it made me. Her mortality clung to me like a pall, making everything dark and slow-motion and sad.

Of course, the plants stole our water. We should have seen it coming. Every living creature we'd found spent most of its time finding, extracting, and storing water.

Second Chair pounded on my door."Get into a suit, Spencer," she yelled when I poked my head into the hallway. "Everyone outside!" A couple of engineers rushed by, faces flushed, half into their suits. "I'm systems control," said one as he pa.s.sed. "There's no way I should risk a lung full of Papaver rot."

When I made it out of the airlock, the crisis was beyond help. Our water tanks stood twenty meters from the ship, their landing struts crunched beneath them just as they were designed to do. They'd landed on the planet months before we got here, both resting between deep, lichen-filled depressions in the rock.

Then the machinery gathered the minuscule water from the air, drop by drop, so that when we arrived the tanks were full. A year on Papaver was enough. Everyone surrounded the tanks. Even in the bulky suits I could see how glum they were, except Lashawnda, who was under the main tank. "It's a fungus," she said, breaking off a chip of metal from what should have been the smooth underside. Her hand rested in dark mud, but even as I watched, the color leached away. The ground sucked water like a sponge, and underneath the normally arid surface, a dozen plant species waited to store the rare substance. Even now the water would be spreading beneath my feet, pumped from one cell to the next. Ten years' worth of moisture for this little valley, delivered all at once.

She looked at me, smiling through the face shield. "I never checked the water tanks, but I'll bet there was trace condensation on them in the mornings, enough for fungus to live on, and whatever they secreted as wasteate right through. Look at this, Spencer." She yanked hard at the tank's underside, snapping off another hunk of metal, then handed it to me. "It's honeycombed."

The metal covered my hand but didn't weigh any more than a piece of balsa wood. Bits crumbled from the edge when I ran my gloved fingers over it.

"Isn't that marvelous?" she said.

First Chair said, "It's not all gone, is it? Not the other tank too?" He moved beside the next tank, rapped his knuckles on it, producing a resonant note. He was fifty, practically a child, and this was only his second expedition in command. "d.a.m.n." He looked into the dry, bathtub-shaped pit in the rock beside the tank where the water undoubtably drained when the bottom broke out.

Lashawnda checked the pipes connecting the tanks to the ship. "There's more here, after only ten days.