Nebula Awards Showcase 2003 Part 7

"Tling and I have begged him." Her voice was faint. "But he feels commanded."

"By his nanorobs? Can't he think of you and Tling?"

Her answer took a long time to come.

"You don't understand them." She seemed composed again; I wondered if her own nanorobs had eased her pain. "You may see them as micromachines, but they don't make us mechanical. We've kept all the feelings and impulses the primitives had. The nanorobs simply make us better humans. Sandor is going not just for the colonists, but for me and Tling, for people everywhere."

"If the odds are as bad as they look-" Casey squinted doubtfully. "What can one man hope to do?"

"Nothing, perhaps." She made a bleak little shrug. "But he has an idea. Long ago, before he ever left Earth to search for his brother, he worked with his mother on her nanorob research. He has reprogrammed himself with the science. If the killer is some kind of virulent organism, he thinks the nanorobs might be modified into a shield against it."

"Speak to him," Casey begged her. "Get him to take us with him. We'll help him any way we can.""You?" Astonishment widened her eyes. "How?"

"We put you here on Earth," he told her. "Even with no nanorobs at all."

"So you did." Golden color flushed her skin. "I'll speak to him." Silent for a moment, she shook her head. "Impossible. He says every seat on the ship is filled."

She paused, frowning at the ceiling. The robot was moving around the table, offering a bowl of huge flesh-colored mushrooms that had a tempting scent of frying ham.

"We are trying to plan a future for Tling." Her face was suddenly tight, her voice hushed with feeling. "A thousand years will pa.s.s before he gets back. He grieves to leave Tling."

"I saw her this morning," I said. "She's terribly hurt."

"We are trying to make it up. I've promised that she will see him again."

Pepe looked startled. "How can that happen?"

She took a mushroom, sniffed it with a nod of approval, and laid it on her plate.

"We must plan the time," she told him. "Tling and I will travel. I want to see what the centuries have done to my own homeworld. It will take careful calculation and the right star flights, but we'll meet him back here on the date of his return."

"If-"

Casey swallowed his voice. Her face went pale, but after a moment she gave us a stiff little smile and had the robot offer the mushrooms again. They had a name I never learned, and a flavor more like bittersweet chocolate than ham. The meal ended. She left us there alone with the robots, with nowhere to go, no future in sight.

"A thousand years!" Pepe muttered. "I wish we had nanorobs."

"Or else-"

Casey turned to the door.

"News for you." Lo stood there, smiling at us. "News from the emigrant ship. Uneasy pa.s.sengers have arranged for new destinations, leaving empty places. Sandor has found seats for you."

7.

Sandor took us to our seats on the emigrant ship. Wheel-shaped and slowly spinning, it held us to the floors with a force weaker than Earth's gravity, stronger than the Moon's. A blue light flashed to warn us of the s.p.a.ce-time slide. Restraints folded around us. I felt a gut-wrenching tug. The restraints released us.

With no sense of any other change, we sat uneasily waiting.

The big cabin was hushed. Watching faces, I saw eager expectation give way to disappointment and distress. I heard a baby crying, someone shouting at a robot attendant, then a rising clamor of voices at the brink of panic. Sandor sat looking gravely away till I asked him what was wrong."We don't know." He grinned at our dazed wonderment. "At least we've made the skip to orbit. Five hundred light-years. You're old men now."

He let us follow him to the lounge, where a tall ceiling dome imaged a new sky. The Milky Way looked familiar. I found the Orion Nebula, but all the nearer stars had shifted beyond recognition. I felt nothing from the ship's rotation; the whole sky seemed to turn around us. Two suns rose, set close together. One was yellow, smaller and paler than our own, the brighter a hot blue dazzle. The planet climbed behind them, a huge round blot on the field of unfamiliar stars, edged with the blue sun's glare. Looking for the glow of cities, all I saw was darkness.

Anxious pa.s.sengers were cl.u.s.tering around crew members uniformed in the ship's blue-and-gold caps and sashes. Most of their questions were in the silent language of the nanorobs, but their faces revealed dismay. I heard voices rising higher, cries of shock and dread.

We turned to Sandor.

"The telescopes pick up no artificial lights." His lean face was bleakly set. "Radio calls get no answer.

The electronic signal spectrum appears dead." He shook his head, with a heavy sigh. "I was thinking of my brother. I'd hoped to find him here."

With gestures of apology to us, uneasy people pushed to surround him. He looked away to listen, frowning at the planet's dark shadow, and turned forlornly to go. He spoke his final words for us.

"We'll be looking for survivors."

We watched that crescent of blue-and-orange fire widen with each pa.s.sage across the ceiling dome till at last we saw the planet's globe. Swirls and streamers of high cloud shone brilliantly beneath the blue sun's light, but thick red dust dulled everything under them.

One hemisphere was all ocean, except for the gray dot of an isolated island. A single huge continent covered most of the other, extending far south of the equator and north across the pole. Mountain ranges walled the long west coast. A single giant river system drained the vast valley eastward. From arctic ice to polar sea it was all rust-red, nothing green anywhere.

"A rich world it must have been." Sandor made a dismal shrug. "But now-?"

He turned to nod at a woman marching into the room. A woman so flat-chested, masculine, and strange that I had to look twice. Gleaming red-black scales covered her angular body, even her hairless head.

Her face was a narrow triangle, her chin sharply pointed, her eyes huge and green. We stared as she sprang to a circular platform in the center of the room.

"Captain Vlix," he murmured. "She's older than I am, born back in the days when nanorobs were new and body forms experimental. I sailed with her once. She remembered my brother asking if she knew me. That was Earth centuries ago. She had no clues to give me."

Heads were turning in attention. I saw uneasy expectation give way to bitter disappointment. Sandor stood frozen, widened eyes fixed on her, till she turned to meet another officer joining her on the platform. They conferred in silence.

"What is it?" Casey whispered. Sandor seemed deaf till Casey touched his arm and asked again, "What did she say?"

"Nothing good." Sandor turned to us, his voice hushed and hurried. "She was summing up a preliminary report from the science staff. This dead planet is the second they have reached. The other was twohundred light-years away. The implications-"

He hunched his shoulders, his skin gone pale.

"Yes? What are they?"

With a painful smile, he tried to gather himself.

"At this point, only speculation. The killer has reached two worlds. How many more? Its nature is not yet known. The science chief suggests that it could possibly be a malignant nanorob, designed to attack all organic life. It certainly seems aggressive, advancing on an interstellar front from the direction of the galactic core."

"What can we do?"

"Nothing, unless we come to understand it." He glanced at the captain and spread his empty hands.

"Nanorobs are designed to survive and reproduce themselves. They are complex, half alive, half machine, more efficient than either. The early experimenters worked in terror of accident, of creating something malignant that might escape the laboratory. This could be a mutation. It could be a weapon, reprogrammed by some madman-though his own nanorobs should have prevented that."

He looked again at the captain, and slowly shook his head.

"The officers are doing what they can. A robotic drone is being prepared to attempt a low-level survey of surface damage. A search has already begun for any s.p.a.cecraft that might remain in orbit. And-"

He broke off to watch a thin man with a gray cap and sash who darted out of the crowd and jumped to join the officers on the platform.

"That's Benkar Rokehut." He made a wry face. "A fellow Earthman, born in my own century. A noted entrepreneur, or perhaps I should say gambler. Noted for taking unlikely chances. He has opened half a dozen worlds, made and lost a dozen fortunes. He funded the initial surveys and settlements here. He has a fortune at stake."

His golden shoulders tossed to an ironic shrug.

"He may love wild chances, but he doesn't want to die."

Rokehut faced the captain for a moment, and turned silently to address the room. Gesturing at the planet, pointing at features on the surface, he kept turning to follow as it crept overhead, kept on talking. When Captain Vlix moved as if to stop him, he burst suddenly into speech, shouting vehemently at her, his pale skin flushing redder than the planet.

"His emotions have overcome his nanorobs." Sandor frowned and drew us closer. "All he sees is danger.

Though that first lost planet is two hundred light-years from this one, they both lie toward the Core from Earth. He believes the killer pathogen is spreading from somewhere toward the Core, possibly carried by refugees. He wants us to head out for the frontier stars toward the Rim."

The officers moved to confront him. What they said was silent, but I saw Rokehut's face fade almost to the gray of his cap and sash. He s.n.a.t.c.hed them off, threw them off the platform, waved his fists and shouted. Yielding at last, he shuffled aside and stood glaring at Captain Vlix, his fists still clenched with a purely human fury.

She turned silently back to face the room, speaking with a calm control."The officers agree that we do seem to face an interstellar invasion." Sandor spoke softly. "But blind flight can only spread the contagion, if panicky refugees carry it. In the end, unless we get some better break-"

With a sad little shrug, he paused to look hard at us.

"Tycho Station could become the last human hope. It is sealed, shielded, well concealed. The Moon has no surface life to attract or sustain any kind of pathogen." His lips twisted to a quirk of bitter humor.

"Even if it wins, there's hope for humanity. It should die when no hosts are left to carry it. You clones may have another book to write before your epic ends."

Captain Vlix left the room, Rokehut and his people close behind her. The robot attendants were circulating with trays of hard brown biscuits and plastic bubbles of fruit juice.

"The best we can do," Sandor said. "With zero times in transit, the ship carries no supplies or provisions for any prolonged stay aboard. We must move on with no long delay, yet the officers agree that we must wait for whatever information we can get from the drone."

It descended over the glaciers that fringed the polar cap and flew south along the rugged west coast. Its cameras projected their images on the dome and the edge of the floor. Standing there, I could feel that I was riding in its nose. It must have flown high and fast, but the images were processed to make it seem that we hovered low and motionless over a deserted seaport or the ruin of a city and climbed to soar on to the next.

All we saw was dust and desolation. Broken walls of stone or brick, where roofs had fallen in. Tangles of twisted steel where towers had stood. Concrete seawalls around empty harbors. And everywhere, wind-drifted dunes of dead red dust and wind-whipped clouds of rust-colored dust, sometimes so dense it hid the ground.

The drone turned east near the equator, climbing over mountain peaks capped with snows dyed the color of drying blood. It paused over broken dams in high mountain canyons and crossed a network of dust-choked irrigation ca.n.a.ls.

"I've dreamed of my brother." Sandor made a solemn face. "Dreamed I might find him here." He stopped to sigh and gaze across an endless sea of wave-shaped dunes. "Dreams! All of us dreaming we had endless life and time for everything. And now-"

The drone had reached the dead east coast and flown on across the empty ocean. The lounge was silent again, disheartened people drifting away. Casey asked if we were turning back.

"Not quite yet." Sandor tipped his head, listening. "Captain Vlix reports that the search team has found something in low polar orbit. Maybe a ship. Maybe just a rock. Maybe something else entirely. She's launching a pilot pod to inspect it."

Music had lifted back in the lounge, its unfamiliar trills and runs and strains broken by long gaps of nothing I could sense. A woman with a baby in her arms was swaying to a rhythm I couldn't hear. Silentpeople were dozing or wandering the aisles. A silent group had gathered around Rokehut at the end of the room, frowning and gesticulating.

"He still wants us to run for our lives," Sandor said. "For a star two thousand light-years out toward the Rim. An idiot's dream! To complete the slide he'd have to calculate the exact relative position of the star two thousand years from now. He has no data for it."

The attendants came back with juice and little white wafers. Rokehut and his group refused them, with angry gestures, and trooped away to confront the captain again.

"A mild sedative." Sandor waved the robot away. "If you need to relax."

I accepted a wafer. It had a vinegar taste and it hit me with a sudden fatigue. I slept in my seat till Casey shook my arm.

"The pod has reached that object in orbit," Sandor told us. "The pilot identifies it as the craft that brought the last colonists. His attempts at contact get no response. Rokehut has offered him a fortune to go aboard. Permission has been granted, with the warning that he won't be allowed back on our ship. He reports that his service robot is now cutting the security bolts to let him into the air lock."

I watched the people around us, silently listening, frowning intently, expectantly nodding, frowning again.

"He's inside." Head tipped aside, eyes fixed on something far away, Sandor spoke at last. "The pathogen got there ahead of him. He has found red dust on the decks, but he hopes for protection from his s.p.a.ce gear. He believes the killer was already on the planet before the ship arrived. The cargo was never unloaded. All organics have crumbled, but metal remains unchanged.

"He's pushing on-"

Sandor stopped to listen and shake his head.

"The pilot was on his way to the control room, searching for records or clues. He never got there." He leaned his head and nodded. "The science chief is summing up what evidence he has. It points to something airborne, fast-acting, totally lethal. It must have killed everybody who ever knew what it is."

Captain Vlix allowed Rokehut and his partisans to poll the pa.s.sengers. Overwhelmingly, they voted to turn back toward Earth at once. The lounge became a bedlam of angry protest when departure was delayed, hushed a little when Captain Vlix came back to the platform.

"She says Earth is out," Sandor told us, "for two sufficient reasons. We might find that the pathogen is already there. Even if we found it safe, she says we would certainly be regarded as a suspected carrier, warned away and subject to attack if we tried to make any contact."

"That recalls a legend of the old Earth." Casey nodded bleakly. "The legend of a ghost ship called the Flying Dutchman, that sailed forever and never reached a port."

The strange constellations flickered out of the ceiling dome, and the drone's images returned. The limitless ocean beneath it looked blue as Earth's when we glimpsed it through rifts in the clouds, but the sky was yellow, the larger sun a sullen red, the blue one now a hot pink point."The island's somewhere ahead." Sandor stood with us in the lounge, frowning at the horizon. "If we ever get there. It's losing alt.i.tude. Losing speed. Probably damaged by the dust."

White-capped waves rose closer as it glided down through scattered puffs of c.u.mulus.

"There it is!" Sandor whispered before I had seen it. "Just to the right."

I strained to see. The image dimmed and flickered as the drone bored through a tuft of pink-tinted cloud.

Something blurred the far horizon. At first a faint dark streak, it faded and came back as we searched it for color.

"Green?" A sharp cry from Casey. "Isn't it green?"