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metal in a machine shop, that was sure. Coldformed, one molecular layer at a
time, grown as crystals were. From the Oort clouders' massive perspective, she
guessed, a delicate job of microengineering.
And the chilling thought came: from that same perspective, the injection of
those "tools" into the zand culture would be no more a "raid" than the
injection of antibiotics into a human bloodstream.
The thing was not dead, instruments said. Maybe shut down by itself, to save
power. Or maybe orders from some mysterious Other. With care, and with the
help of DIS, she could probably feed a trickle of tailored DC into its
superconducting circuitry and bring it back to life. Make it move, clash those
jagged claws, jump up and down.
(Boogie!
she almost heard Grandma say. Her father, alas, never got that loose.)
Possibly attract its makers' attention that way?
If one of her own hemoglobin molecules tried to get her attention, would she
notice?
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That was the relative scale between herself and the hypothetical somber
dwellers in the Oort cloud, in the far dark beyond the warm worlds. Yet they
had made the rickety zand biosphere, whoever or whatever they were.
They had plenty of room, too. Where the sun's gravitational grip slackened,
countless icy islands swung, taking centuries to complete a single orbit
around the dim home star. That archipelago stretched halfway to the next
gleaming stars. As infinities went, it would do quite nicely.
They had come seeking the root of a mystery, never anticipating that the
answer would be so vast and startling. At the end of the twencen, Pluto's
atmosphere had seemed to start cooling off, as the planet arced outward on its
slanting ellipse. Atmospheric specialists predicted it would freeze out
somewhere before 2020.
Only it hadn't. Instead, even as the first probe sped outward, the thin film
of chilly nitrogen and methane cloaking Pluto began to warm. Other compounds
began spiking their spectral signatures up on the most sensitive Earthbound
detectors: water vapor, carbon dioxide, even nitrogen wedded to oxygens.
And as the mission had prepared, a further, ominous puzzle arose: the solar
system's bow shock was moving. This "pause point" is the working front where
the sun's outward wind of particles meets the interstellar plasma. This forms
a surface much like the curve made by a ship powering across a lake, seen from
above. Before, the nearest this bow shock had gotten to the sun was about one
hundred astronomical units, a full hundred times farther than the Earth-sun
distance. But now that fluttery front lay only a few AU beyond Pluto, now just
a tad beyond 40 AU from the sun.
If the solar wind let that wall of molecular hydrogen behind the shock intrude
into the inner solar system, Earth could be destroyed. Even approaching
partway in, say into Saturn, would be very dangerous. That seemed unlikely to
the specialists, but without an explanation of what was happening beyond
Pluto, few found that comforting.
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At first Shanna had thought the bow shock issue was pretty nebulous-after all,
it was about thin gases, right?-and had to keep reminding herself of an old
diagram from the early space program. It showed the solar system plowing
through the interstellar spaces, pushing gas and plasma before it like a
snowplow.
If a voyage from the sun to the nearest star were like a marathon, in reaching
Pluto the runner would have gone only fifteen feet. Both Voyagers and Pioneer
had passed into the outer realm, genuine interstellar space. But if the solar
snowplow weakened-or the pressure of the interstellar gas increased-
the boundary would intrude farther in, brushing the planets. One swipe with
molecular hydrogen and
Earth's oxygen would combine, making water and a lot of energy. The biosphere
would get hot and breathless within days. Even little trickles of hydrogen
could hurt a lot.
She often gazed at the old NASA sketch-from back before it joined ISA-of the
region they were now exploring. All very clean and scientific. No mention of
lethal weather.
And now Pluto held life. Not just chilly slime molds and small crawly
creatures, but a few species in all, crowned by the self-aware zand. And her
bet was that these in turn were being altered by the sky-stones
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them ... and the Darksiders that bled them.
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Earthside scientists now bet that Pluto was driven by energies somehow
imported from where the bow shock roiled and frothed in plasma arcs bigger
than planets.
DIS said, "Transmission due."
"Ummm." She owed it to Earthside, after the grief she'd given them, to at
least keep punctually to their radio schedules. A fundamental rule of
missions: there was always some damn thing interrupting. She told DIS to start
trying revival methods on the newly captured machine. It had gone silent
shortly after they began talking to it. Chow-Lin and Jordin had spent weeks
trying to get the first Darksider-their hitchhiker-to respond, and concluded
that it had been ordered (by what?) to shut down. Now she wondered if anything
would work on the new one.
She switched on audio and visual and tried to relax in her obliging smart
chair. Deep breath-
"This is Astronaut Shanna Axelrod, aboard
Proserpina, in Pluto orbit." It still gave her a charge to be able to say
that. (And Grandma would have warned her not to get so swellheaded.) They
would edit and polish for the whole brimming Earthside audience, of course, as
now required by full-disclosure laws.
She hoped no laser-link pirates had caught her latest reports. They had
started to swoop into the beam and carried off choice nuggets, decrypting them
and bootlegging them in time to compete with the cleaned version.
Embarrassments galore, unless she kept close to the vest. But who could, all
the time?
In the background Schumann sang, and DIS clucked and ruminated, while she
talked. Arpeggios rose from sonorous lower octaves. The longer this mission
went on, the more she needed music's sense of human connection, of grand
prospects. For that, the romantics were better than even Bach, for her.
"Not much progress on the Darksiders. The ones in the cold lab talk for a bit,
then shut down. DIS is working on it, but my guess is they're unable to run
very long without instructions-from where, though?"
She felt a fluttery twinge of unease. Minimal speculation, ISA had ordered. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]