Текст книги "2312"

Автор книги: Kim Stanley Robinson

Соавторы: Kim Stanley Robinson
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Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 36 страниц)

Swan did not look too satisfied with this explanation, and soon afterward she took off again on her own, ignoring the disappointment of the zoologist and the disapproval of some of the other guests. Wahram saw her later that evening at his restaurant; probably she too practiced some form of the pseudoiterative, as she too traveled a lot; and it was a natural human impulse. Wahram ate at the table next to hers and then went to wash dishes, and though he nodded politely to her, she did not speak. When he was done in the kitchen and went back out for a drink, she had gone. Down the street the bonfire was again burning, the dancers dancing.

So that second day had some elements of new habit; but the next afternoon the Wegenerwas making a close passby of Venus, using it as a gravity handle to help sling it faster out to Jupiter. Wahram took a tram forward to the bulkhead, then with the help of handholds pulled through the nearly weightless passageway to the observation room that bubbled out from the forward end of the asteroid. This chamber had a steady view of the hemisphere of stars arched over them—and there, swelling visibly ahead of them, was Venus. Wahram, who at home spent a fair bit of time in micro g like this, balanced happily with one hand holding a strap, eager to watch the second planet pass under them. Swan came in just as they made their final closing, hurrying as usual to avoid being late.

Venus’s atmosphere was now so reduced in density from its native state that it was transparent, and even though the whole planet was in the shadow of its sunshield and therefore in perpetual night, one could make out the dim white dry ice seas, and the black rock of the two continents partially blown and scraped free. Cloud patterns familiar from Earth and Mars swirled over snowy plains and the dry ice oceans, making a salt-and-pepper effect that could not be comprehended even with the most intense effort. The observation chamber rang with the sounds of excited and puzzled viewers. Black as high and white as low didn’t work very well for the human eye, and it was not that simple anyway. Even at their closest approach it was still a mess of stippling. They angled in at it and then Wegenershot by just above the atmosphere, maximizing the gravity sling. Below passed a cluster of lights that someone said was Port Elizabeth. Nearby there was a town called Billie Holliday, where Wahram had once worked in a giant waldo, covering the dry ice in the lowlands with foamed rock. Now they were doing similar things on Titan. Venus and Titan were really the best remaining candidates to join Mars as fully terraformed worlds—shirtsleeve worlds, as some called them, with free atmospheres humans could breathe. The example of Mars showed what could happen: an independent new world, free from all the troubles of the old one.

Swan was dancing by herself. “I want to go back,” she was chanting to no one in particular, or perhaps to her qube. “I want to feel the poison wind slap the poison sea.”

The Venusians had debarked before the swingby, so now Wegenerwas not as humanly interesting. No bonfires, no all-night dances. Wahram spent most of his days in the park; it became the heart of this particular pseudoiterative. They were trying to do a census of its birds and mammals. Often they spotted Swan out there, running by herself. She definitely slept out there, and one night in the kitchen remarked that she never slept indoors if she could avoid it, although of course the entire terrarium was indoors in a certain sense. Out in the park he saw signs that she was also trying to catch some of her food. They once found a rabbit caught in a little snare set by the creek side that spiraled through the park. This kind of thing was illegal, and, more importantly, not done. A few times they also saw the ashes of little fires, with little bones in them not fully burned. Rabbit or fawn, cooked over a little fire… One would have to keep an eye out for hyenas if one did that. Surely the excellent south Indian food in his restaurant was preferable.

Then one morning they came on Swan still crouched by her little fire, her face greasy and streaks of blood still on her hands, with a small mass of fur there between her feet. She looked up at them with a feral glare, very like the look one would have gotten from a hyena caught in the same moment, and for a long time no one knew quite what to say. Poaching was no more popular with the authorities than it had ever been, Wahram saw with a quick glance at the zoologist, although Swan would not get hung for it; and indeed, because of her founder status here, the locals, all half her age at most, were shuffling around, trying to find a way out of the situation.

“I guess this is what they meant by the phrase getting caught red-handed,” Wahram said in his most jovial voice. “But please, I want to see those elephants while I can, and they are moving away from us. I’m sure the situation here will soon revert to normal.” And he walked off in a way that shepherded his guides with him.

Better to explore the park in the other direction. Or he could track the little cheetah family. Once he saw Swan doing that too, but did not approach her. It was clear by now that she felt like being alone. In the town, if she came by his restaurant, she ate by herself. Wahram found that a little disappointing.

In the pseudoiterative, one performs the ritual of the day attentive to both the joy of the familiar and the shiver of the accidental. To be out at dawn was important. The sunny point in the sunline cast shadows up the cylinder, and overhead flocks of birds flew from one lake to another. The migratory birds pretended to migrate, he was told; they took off at dawn and flew around for most of the day, then came back to where they had begun. Perhaps all his movement was a similar thing.

He went forward to the observation bubble when Wegenerpassed the famous asteroid Programming Error. Here one of the excavators had missed one of its commands—the AI error perhaps caused by the unlucky hit of a cosmic ray, some postulated—so that after coring its large iron-nickel asteroid and leaving the interior space floored by steel, the machinery had looped back on itself and begun to eat the remaining rock of the asteroid across the tube of the first cavity; then every time it broke through to the surface of the asteroid, it turned and dived back in, building and leaving behind more tubing as it went. After a few years it had become clear that this process was never going to stop on its own, as the entire asteroid, considerably reduced, had ended up looking like braided steel rope tied in a knot. Some advocated letting the process go on to see what would happen, but there must have been someone who hadn’t agreed with this, because an explosion with an intense electromagnetic pulse had shattered the AI and frozen the thing in the middle of a turn, leaving the excavator snout sticking out of the side like the head of a snake. Indeed at that point the asteroid was a kind of Medusa’s head, a pretzel sculpture that some considered beautiful and others horrifying, the very image of AI foolishness, or the futility of human effort.

Now Wegenerflashed by it so fast that the people in the observation bubble could not blink without missing it; it grew from a dot to a basketball to a dot in the course of a single indrawn breath. There were gasps, then cheers. It was in fact a very striking accidental artwork, Wahram judged, so bulging with curves that it seemed to be still squiggling, as if the head of Ouroboros were chasing a reluctant tail, or, as it occurred to him when describing it back in the kitchen, like a tangle of Klein bottles.

The next day they flashed by another famous error, and more went forward to see this one than had seen Programming Error, which Wahram found depressing. This terrarium, Yggdrasil, had suffered a catastrophic break; an unnoticed ice-filled crack had blown open, in more of an explosion than a leak. Only a few of the inhabitants had survived, something like fifty out of three thousand. It could happen to anyone who did not live on Earth or Mars. Wahram did not care to look.

Lists (2)

Lying naked on a block of ice under a heat lamp

Spending five hours in a spacesuit with only four hours of air

Running around Mercury on the equator

Cutting a solar system diagram into the skin of her chest with a laser knife

Falling slowly (all day) down the Great Staircase, naked, as in Duchamp

Flying in a popper up from the terminator into the light of a coronal flare, ejecting, and crash-landing on spacesuit jets only

Sitting in a chair and staring into the eyes of people who sit down across from her, for a year

Dancing on fire in a flame-resistant clear bodysuit

Rolling bowling balls down the Great Staircase from the top of the Dawn Wall, for an entire day (Pachinko Day)

Spending a week in a worm box

Hanging in an upside-down crucified position in the light of the sun when the gates of the Dawn Wall are opened

Sitting for a week in a pile of onions, peeling one after the next

Leaving shelter in a spacesuit with air but no heat, to see how long she could stay out (fourteen minutes)

Leaving shelter in a spacesuit with air but no heat, to see how long she could stay out while walking in partial sunlight and its radiative heating (sixty-one minutes)

Leaving shelter in a spacesuit with heat but only a helmet full of air, to see how long she could stay out (eight minutes)

SWAN AND A CAT

Swan got off the Wegenerfeeling embarrassed and depressed by the horrid ideas of her youth, in this case the savanna-pampas Ascension—not to mention her own poaching in same, caught red-handed indeed, the smart-ass. But then it got even worse when their taxi unloaded them into a terrarium headed Jupiterward, and it turned out to be the Pleistocene, another of her youthful indiscretions, an ice age north with any number of spavined megafauna resurrected and clomping around in pathetic mutant versions of themselves. Giant short-faced bears, looking around in openmouthed confusion—also dire wolves, saber-toothed tigers, American cheetahs, mastodons, and woolly mammoths, most of them only semi-genuine revivals from ancient DNA, really synthetics, birthed from elephants or lions or Kodiak bears, and thus uneducated in the ways of their kind. It was sad. Swan cursed herself and went feral to get through the remaining week to Jupiter, and almost paid for it with her life; for one thing, it was painfully cold, and then one morning she woke up in a stupidly uncomfortable perch in a tree to find it shaking under the weight of a cat climbing it, a big cat, a who-knew-what—possibly just a mountain lion, maybe a snow leopard, it had such long fur—intent to get to her, and as it was no heavier than she was, it seemed like it could climb the tree high enough to make it happen. Maybe twelve meters to the ground, terrarium spinning at one g—for a second she cursed the long-ago shift away from Martian g in terraria, which at first had been the norm—then fear drove all thought from her head. Get out of the nest. Get higher than a cat your own weight can get: obviously a problem. She pulled herself up onto the branch over her, which pronged up much more vertically than her sleeping branch. The cat eyed her calmly, not moving yet. Topaz eyes in brindled long white fur; upper lip drawn back, teeth white and hungry. No malice in it. Up the vertical branch, feet deep in forks, painful twists to free herself, up and up. Swaying now in the canopy, all the branches around her equally thin and flexible. Some kind of oak. If she kicked it on the snout when it attacked, possibly it would miss and fall. Foreclaws would latch on to her; her kick would have to twist away—maybe up. She tried to get higher, couldn’t.

She was on the Pleistocene. She carried a stun gun.

But she had left it in the nest. “Shit.”

The cat began to shift onto Swan’s branch. Quite a weight to sway it that much.

“Pauline, any suggestions here?”

“Scare it,” Pauline said. “Adrenalate fully, then do something bizarre.”

Swan twisted and let go, fell feetfirst into the face of the cat, screaming as loud as she could. When her feet hit something else, she clasped branches to her and felt something smash into her ribs. Air knocked out of her, no more scream. She scrabbled with her feet for some purchase, found none, looked down. The cat was on the ground, looking up at her. Swan screamed again, felt the stab of a cracked rib. She changed to a raging shout, cursing the cat foully. Kill it like Archilochus. Grating, painful snarl of a voice, bitter shrieking that hurt her throat and screeched unbearably in her own ears, the sound making her aware she had lost it. The cat heaved a heavy sigh and padded away.

She climbed back to her nest and retrieved the stun gun. Getting down out of the tree hurt like hell.

She avoided Wahram completely after that, and by the time they were dropped off on Callisto, she had become a little fond of that stab in her side. It made her feel better; it was an expression of her grief, her anger. The moment of dread involved was not forgotten, but digested into something else, some kind of triumph. She had almost been eaten for breakfast! She had been a fool and survived yet again—how often it had happened. Surely it was a fate. Surely it would keep on happening.

“This is the most basic of false syllogisms,” Pauline assured her when she spoke the thoughts aloud.

The Jovian moons were huge, with Jupiter itself a gargantuan oil painting of overelaborate genius, viscous blobs swirling around from one gorgeous paisley orangerie to the next; every border between the bands was a fantasia beyond compare. Swan loved the sight of it, and the city from which she viewed it wasn’t bad either: the Fourth Ring of Valhalla, built on the eponymous rim of the great multi-ringed crater. Valhalla had six rings, splashed into the side of Callisto like concentric waves on a pond after a rock is thrown in. The city was located on the top of the fourth ring, extending all the way around; now cities were beginning on the tops of the third and fifth rings as well. It was said that they would eventually tent the entirety of Valhalla and, after that, maybe all the rest of Callisto; and it was a big world. There were even those arguing it could be properly terraformed, despite the lack of a starter atmosphere.

It was one big world of four, in fact, because all the Galilean moons were gigantic. But there was some kind of a curse on them, it seemed to Swan; one of them was almost useless, another contested. Io orbited so far within Jupiter’s ferocious radiation belts that it was never going to be occupied at all except by a few small hardened scientific stations. Europa, a big beautiful ice moon, had a great depth of ice for people to delve into to escape the Jovian radiation, strong even there: wondrous ice palaces, with giant Jupiter always gnarling overhead—or everyone had thought at first. But it hadn’t happened, because there had proved to be aliens living in the ocean below, a complete ecology of algae, chemotrophs, lithotrophs, methanogens, scrapers, suckers, fans, scavengers, and detrivores, all swimming or crawling or holding on or burrowing in; and they created a problem. Some thought they had already contaminated this ocean by their exploratory intrusion into it, because examining it with a drill had been the Lake Vostok problem writ large. But they had done their best to sterilize the probes, and then, having discovered and sampled the full ecology, they had sealed off the hole, and now sat on the surface in scientific stations, culturing and studying their sample populations and pondering whether they should stay or go, and if they stayed, what kind of presence they should have. Possibly the proposed ice palaces would be perfectly fine, with the life below completely sequestered by the ten kilometers of glaciosphere that lay between the moon’s surface and its ocean. On the other hand, life being life, spermatozoically wriggling into every place it could reach, contamination might almost certainly be assumed to follow any occupation of the moon. And yet, given that these creatures appeared to be cousins of theirs anyway, long separated by meteor voyage—and now already recontaminated by a visit—would living above them and continuing to be a minor contaminant clearly be such a bad thing? When there were already people out there swallowing the alien microscopic life, and shooting it into their veins? And when life had been bouncing around the solar system and interacting with its cousins all along? These were open questions, interesting and vivid to the Europans and the other Jovians, less so to the rest of the system. Swan remained somewhat interested from her design days, and she approved their recent decision to go ahead and settle Europa, only perching unobtrusively on top of the internal indigenous aquaria.

Now she spent her time walking the High Road that ran all the way round the Fourth Circle of Valhalla, waiting for their flight to Io. She was still avoiding Wahram, who watched her these days with a look of alarmed concern that she could not stand. Jupiter overhead was its usual lurid magnificence. Possibly the Jovians were right to be so self-absorbed; they had a whole little solar system here, full of different things. Between the rings of the crater, the surface of Callisto was a vast knobbly white plain, and Jupiter and the three other moons were up there performing their dance. It was a gorgeous space.

But they were here to see Wang, so soon she grew impatient for the Io shuttle, and tired of the view overhead. Jove squiggling its buffooneries over and over—it was not art but chemistry, mere fractal repetition. The saving grace was that they had recently lit great gas lamps in the upper Jovian atmosphere, to better illuminate the towns located on the Galileans’ Jovian sides. One could see how these painfully brilliant diamond points were distorting Jupiter’s cloud tops, adding new swirls and eddies; that made it art, the whole thing a kind of mad goldsworthy.

Finally the time came for the shuttle to Io.

Swan said, “Pauline, are you going to be all right down there?”

“I will be if you are. You definitely need to stay inside the Faraday cage there to stay safe. The Jovians will no doubt tell you that.”

And during the trip they did, at great length. In a box inside a box, like Russian dolls: they were so proud. Down then to Io, shedding a furious aurora behind their spacecraft, a blaze of transparent blue and green electric banners and flares arcing away as they flew.

IO

Io, the innermost moon of Jupiter, as big as Luna. The yellow slag world, awesome upchucking of a moon’s guts, regurgitation over and over until everything more volatile than sulfur has long since burned off. Sulfur, sulfur everywhere, and nary a place to stand. Four hundred live volcanoes bursting through the slag like angry boils, geysering sulfur dioxide hundreds of kilometers into the air. A moon with an interior hotter than Earth’s—and try putting your hand in front of the steam coming out of the volcanic vent on Néa Kaméni, in the caldera of Santorini, to feel just how hot Earth is; it looks like the steam on your stove top, but you will quickly find it is three times hotter. Even though you snatch your hand away instantly, your skin will blister. And Io’s interior is thirty times hotter than that.

It looks it. A hellworld, flexed hugely in the immense tidal pull between Jupiter and Europa, almost torn apart. That’s gravity at work. Then also Jupiter’s radiation field is so vast and so strong that Io sizzles inside it; even Deinococcus radioduransperishes in it. Nothing lives on Io.

Except humans, and the little suite of biota they carry everywhere they go. For it is possible to find islands of hard rock in the highlands of the enormous volcanoes, and bore into that rock, and hide a little station. A cube to hold Wang’s qube. Everything there must be triply protected, first by physical walls, then by a magnetic field strong enough to counteract Jupiter’s radiation; but this field itself would be enough to kill, so inside that field a Faraday cage is necessary, to protect you from your protection.

Descend in a blue magnetic aurora, a fire of electrons. Below, the moon spreads from a ball to a plain to a tumultuous mountainscape of overlapping volcanoes, the bulky cones hard to spot in all the overlapping swaths of yellow on tan on white on black on brick on bronze, swaths of every burnt color, but most of all, yellow. Here and there scattered rings of black or red or white reveal active vents, pouring out the guts of the interior in irregular circles around the vents; but most of the patches are much less regular, and taken altogether, the surface is a jumble that cannot be resolved by the eye into a topography. It is what it looks like, a molten world, a world on fire. The names humans have applied are redundant. Fire gods, thunder gods, lightning and volcano gods, every combustible deity, from Agni the Hindu god of fire to Volund the German blacksmith of the gods: all these names attempt to humanize the moon, but fail. Io is not a human place. The hard crust on its surface, cooled only by contact with the chill vacuum of space, is so thin that in many places it would not support a standing person. Some early explorers found this out the hard way: walking too far away from their lander, they plunged through the sulfurous ground into red-hot lava and disappeared.

We think that because we live on cooler planets and moons, we live on safer ground than that. But it is not so.