Year’s Best SF 16 Read online

  An oceanographer glanced in Trevor’s direction. “It’s from one of the submersibles. Dae Park.”

  “Dae—?” I swear, Trevor suffered an instant of uncontrived amazement. “Dae Park! Excellent! And her news?”

  In my own displays, I was checking out Park’s submersible. It was still sixteen kilometers down. Thank goodness the “Big News” did not involve going deeper. Her boat was either on the bottom or just a few meters up, motionless. Okay, she was within the excursion rules, but near a hillside that could be a serious problem in a big quake. You’d never get me down there. I fly between the stars. Just the idea of being trapped in a tiny cabin under sixteen thousand meters of water makes me queasy.

  Around me, I heard a collective indrawing of breath. I glanced back at the fixed displays, seeing what everyone else was seeing—and I got an idea why someone might go to such an extreme: Park’s lights showed the hillside towering over her boat. It looked like nondescript mud, but some recent landslide had-opened a cleft. The lights shone on something round and hard-looking. The picture’s scale bar showed the object was almost forty centimeters across. If you looked carefully, you could see knobbly irregularities.

  The oceanographer leaned closer to the display. “By heaven,” he said. “It looks like an algae mat.”

  Everyone was quiet for a moment. Even my crew—well, all but the cook—knew the significance of such a discovery.

  “The fossil of one,” came Dae Park’s voice. She sounded very pleased.

  And then everyone was talking except Trevor—who had his cameras soaking it all in. There was significant incredulity, mainly from Ron Ohara’s staff: the video showed just the one object. If this was really life—or had been real life—where was the context? Park’s guys argued back that this was probably millions of years old, transported by heaven knew what geological cycles to the deep mud. Ohara’s people were unimpressed; the rock looked metamorphic to them.

  “People, people!” The voice seemed to surround us. It was probably coming from the same sound system that made the siren noise. It took me a second to recognise Ron Ohara’s voice behind the mellow loudness. “I for one,” Ohara continued, “have no doubt of Dr. Park’s outstanding discovery. I’m sure that if she had focused on shallower water, she would have found living instances of communal life.”

  From her submersible, you could hear Dae Park spluttering, unsure what to do with the simultaneous insult and support. On the other hand, Park was the one who had just made the biggest discovery in the history of starflight. So after a moment, she said sweetly, “Thank you so much, Ron, but we’ve both seen the preliminary genome dredges. If there was significant life here, it was very long ago.”

  “I disagree. I have a—”

  Park interrupted: “You have a theory. We have all heard your theories.”

  This was true. Ohara had droned on about them at the Captain’s table every day of the voyage.

  “Oh, it’s not a theory, not anymore.” You could almost hear him gloating, and I could guess what was coming next. After all, Ohara’s sub had been scouting around the coast just a few meters down.

  “Take a look at what I found.” Ohara preempted all the displays with the view from his boat. The light was dim; perhaps it was true sunlight. But it was enough to see that my guess had been a vast underestimate: the creature’s thorax was almost fifteen centimeters long, its limbs adding another ten centimeters or so. And those limbs moved, not randomly with the currents, but in clear locomotion. It might have been a terrestrial lobster, except for the number of claws and its greenish coloring.

  This was the ninetieth voyage of the Starship Frederik Pohl. My ship and crew had visited eighty-seven star systems, all still within a few thousand light-years of Earth. As such, the Fred Pohl was one of the most prolific ships of the early years of exploration. My discovery of Lee’s World had been one of the high points of that time. This second visit was shaping up to be something even more extraordinary.

  By an hour after sundown all the remote teams were back—and we were close to having an onboard civil war. I eventually slapped them down: “I swear, if you people don’t behave, I’ll leave your junk outside and we’ll lift off for Chicago this very night!”

  For a moment the passengers were united, all against me. “You can’t do that!” shouted Ohara and Park and Dhatri, almost in chorus. Dhatri continued: “You have a contract obligation to the Advanced Projects Agency.”

  I gave them my evil smile. “That’s true but not entirely relevant. APA has clear regulations, giving competent ship management—that’s me—the authority to terminate missions where said competent ship management determines that the participants’ behavior has put the mission at risk.”

  Some eyes got big with rage, but to be honest that was the minority reaction. Most folks, including Dae Park, looked somewhat ashamed that their behavior had brought them to this. After a moment, Trevor nodded capitulation. Ron Ohara looked around at his faction and saw no support. “Okay,” he said, trying for a reasonable tone. “I am always in favor of accommodation. But my discovery beggars the imagination.” He waved at the aquarium-sample box that he had set in the middle of my conference table. “We can’t afford to postpone the follow-up, no matter what the demands of the other—”

  Park cut him off, but with a look in my direction: “So what do you suggest, Captain?”

  Ohara wanted all the ship’s resources turned toward his discovery, a massive dredge around the edge of the continent, led by his techs and using all our sea gear. Park was defending her own find and implying that Ohara was a monstrous fraud. Right now, my job was to keep them from killing each other. I waved those who were standing to take their seats. We were up on the main conference deck, what doubled as the Captain’s table at mess. That gave me an idea. “No more fighting about resource allocation,” I said. “The latest seismo analysis shows we have at least one hundred hours of safe time here. So take a moment to cool off. In fact, it is just about time for dinner. We’ll have some light predinner drinks”—taking a chance there, but I’d make sure Cookie watered the wine—“and discuss, well, things that are not so sensitive. I’ll be the umpire, where that’s needed.” Maybe with a good meal in them, I could get something like an even distribution of resources between Park—who had made an extraordinary discovery—and Ron Ohara’s “miracle.”

  No one was happy, but given my threats, no one complained. On a private channel, I could see Jim Russell’s messaging the cook and staff. I passed around a box of Myanmar cigars I’d brought along. Of course no one but me would touch them. I lit up and for a minute or so they stared at each other, silent except for the coughing of wimps. Finally, one of the Japanese contingent said, “So, how about them Dodgers?”

  Ohara and Park just looked sullen. Every few seconds the ground somewhere beneath the Frederik Pohl gave a wiggle, reminding us all that whatever the seismo estimates, this was a world where evidence could disappear on short notice.

  As Cookie had the drinks brought in, Ohara leaned back and said, “Seriously, Captain, we’re going to have to settle some of this quite soon.” He waved again at the aquarium. Sitting in the middle of it was a greenish critter that looked like a refugee from a very old science fiction video. Ohara’s people called it Frito—I have no idea why. In truth, if it were not fraudulent, Frito was the the most extraordinary living thing ever seen by humans. I noticed that the creature was not nearly as lively as it had been in the discovery video. I bet myself that Ron hadn’t figured how to keep the poor fake supplied with enough oxygen.

  “Just be cool, Ron.” If I could get everyone through dinner . . .

  Then I noticed Cookie was looking at me nervously. His voice came in my ear, on a private voice channel. “Sorry, Captain, but I can’t find any more banquet-class food.”

  We routinely stocked high-class dinners for passengers, and fresh food for the crew too. Given the short voyage times, there was no need for anything less. I gave Cookie an unbel
ieving glare.

  “The victuals are here someplace, ma’am,” continued Cookie’s private communication. “It’s the new container system that’s screwed us.”

  I gave Cookie another look, and then turned back to Ohara: “We’ll return to the resource issues right after a good meal. Our staff has planned something special for us tonight. Isn’t that right, Cookie?”

  Cookie Smith has been with me from the beginning. He doesn’t give a damn about starflight or science, but he’s a real chef. And he knows how to put on a good front. He gave everybody a big grin. “Yes, Ma’am, the very best.” He and his white-jacketed assistants made their exit. Cookie’s parting comment was private, and it wasn’t quite so confident: “I’ll keep looking, Captain.”

  Even if logistics had screwed up the luxuries, Cookie could probably work some kind of miracle with standard rations. The problem was that for now I had to string these guys along with weak wine and sparkling conversation. Actually, that would have been easy on the flight out. Having a Captain’s table does amazing things for the egos of most passengers. (It also keeps the passengers out of the way of my crew, but that’s another story.) This gang of academics was full of theories. Until today their arguments had been in the context of collegial socialization; it’s what they got paid to do at their universities, after all. The trick was for me to put them back in that abstract mood, not raging about who was going to get what equipment in the next twelve hours.

  “So,” I said, looking around the table, “today has truly been a great day for science.” I dimmed the lights a bit. Now the window light provided most of the illumination, a panoramic view from the ship’s sensor mast. The result was a perfect illusion of looking out glass windows onto the last of the sunset twilight. Not counting my cigar smoke wafting around the table, it was a supernally clear evening. I noticed Trevor Dhatri repositioning his cameras. He had been sucking in all the Ohara-Park vitriol, but now he was looking outward. And I have to say that this quiet twilight didn’t need Trevor’s magic touch.

  I waved at the sky. “Space, the final frontier.” The words will forever send a shiver down my back. “If you look carefully, you can see the stars just coming out.” You really could. I was filtering the video stream through an enhancement program—just enough of a boost so you could see the stars as they would appear in the deeper dark, after your eyes adjusted. “We are four hundred light-years from Earth, yet there’s not a single recognizable constellation. Unless you’re an observational astronomer, you probably couldn’t find anything recognizable. Our generation has gone where no one has gone before. Humankind now has answers to questions that have bedeviled us since the beginning of time. We, here, today, have added immensely to those answers. What would we—who know the answers—say if we could talk to earlier generations?”

  One of Park’s guys piped up with, “We’d say that we have only partial answers ourselves.”

  “True,” came a voice from the far end of the table, “but we know enough to render a preliminary assessment, real answers after generations of uncertainty.” That was Jim Russell, bless him.

  I picked up on Jim’s point: “We have hard numbers to assess even the uncertainties. Take the central equation that bioscientists have used to summarize the mystery of life in the universe.”

  “The Venter-Boston relation?”

  “No, no. Before that.” These guys knew way too much about Venter-Boston. “I’m thinking of the Drake equation—you know, for the number of civilizations with which communication might be possible.”

  Silence all around.

  “Okay,” Dae Park finally said, “that’s a good question. More general than Venter-Boston.”

  For a wonder, Ron Ohara seemed to agree: “Yeah. I . . . guess since the stardrive was invented, we scientists have become so focused on the near term that we don’t talk about the questions that really drive the whole enterprise.”

  “Then now might be a good time to see where we stand,” said Dhatri. He sounded sincerely interested in pursuing the topic. I could also see him rearranging his cameras. “Somebody scare up a definition of the Drake equation and let’s supply some answers.

  Now if we’d been back on Earth, I’m sure everyone would’ve had that definition instantly. Groundhogs don’t appreciate the solitude of deep space. In deep space, you don’t have an instant link to the Internet. It can take hours or days to get home. I take considerable satisfaction from this fact. You don’t have to put up with the incessant din of social networking and trivia searches. But some people can’t tolerate the isolation. Many cope by hauling around petabytes of crap that they grab from the web before shipping out. On this occasion, I was grateful for their presence. After a moment, one of the Internet cache boobies popped up a definition from Wikipedia:

  The Drake Equation (1960):

  The number of civilizations in our galaxy with which communication might be possible can be expressed as the product of the average rate of star formation times

  fp*ne*fl*fi*fc*L

  where

  fp is the fraction of those stars that have planets;

  ne is the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets;

  fl is the fraction of the above that go on to develop life at some point;

  fi is the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop intelligent life;

  fc is the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space;

  L is the length of time such civilizations release detectable signals into space.

  The letters floated silvery in my cigar smoke.

  I had not seen the Drake equation in a long time. From the murmuring around the cabin, I could tell that many of the younger folks had never seen it. The equation reached beyond their nearsighted concerns.

  Park gave a little laugh. “So how many systems have APA and the other agencies explored?”

  That’s a question I could answer, since I tracked my ship’s standing: “As of this month? Fifteen hundred and two. If you count robot probes”—which I don’t since the robots can miss what trained explorers might notice—“maybe four thousand.”

  Park shrugged. “Four thousand out of hundreds of billions.”

  “But with the newest versions of the stardrive we can easily reach any point in the galaxy.” That was Hugo Mendes, our staff astronomer. We’d need him if there were navigation problems and we wound up someplace really far from home. “I agree with Mr. Russell. We’ve seen enough to make some good estimates. . . .” He paused, reading the definitions. “You know, some of those factors aren’t stated very well.”

  One of Park’s protégés said, “Yes, but that’s half the fun, seeing how the truth has twisted the Old Timers’ questions.”

  And in a few minutes, they were all absorbed by this long-ago vision of our present.

  The first factor, “fp,” got a big laugh. “Almost every normal star has planets,” Mendes said. “Lots of planets. Too many planets, crashing around, with wild-ass orbits and ejections. As stars migrate around the HR diagram, a lot of them even have second and third generations of planets.”

  Dae Park was nodding. “I remember reading how back in the nineteenth century, the great mathematicians tried to prove the long-term stability of our solar system. They never did, but no one realized that it wasn’t a failure in their math. Only one in a hundred planetary systems lucks into stability for even a billion years.”

  Now in the floating Wiki extract, someone annotated “fp” with a smiley face and the comment “near 1.0, but so what?”

  Trevor leaned forward. “That second factor, ‘ne,’ that’s just about zero if you count all the unstable planetary systems that Hugo said.”

  “Okay, so just count the systems that stay stable long enough to be interesting.”

  No one said anything for a moment. Then, “Hmm, you know, if you count importing life, like we’re trying to do nowadays on our co
lony worlds, ne might be near one.” That was Jim Russell again. I couldn’t tell if he was just working to hold up the discussion or if he were seriously intrigued.

  “Yeah, with terraforming. That’s cheating.”

  Just then Cookie’s voice sounded in my ear. “Captain! I think I found where the logistic jackasses stored our banquet supplies. I’ve brought the containers up to the galley. It’s not everything, but I can put together a nice meal, maybe a little short on dessert.”

  I leaned back from the table and muttered a response: “Excellent. Go ahead with what you’ve got.” I really didn’t care about dessert, that probably being past the time where pacifying distractions would be useful.

  I missed whatever the group decided about “ne.” They had moved on to “fl,” the fraction of habitable worlds that “actually go on to develop life at some point.” Oops, was this a problem? Park and Ohara were already growling at each other.

  I tapped my wineglass on the table. “Ladies and gentlemen! Professors! Isn’t factor ‘fl’ the simplest of all?”

  Jim picked up on that. “Well, yes. The interstellar medium—at least where we’ve been—has enough simple organics that almost any habitable planet evolves bacterial activity. So factor ‘fl’ is essentially one. Certainty.”

  “Only technically speaking,” that from one of Ohara’s techs. “Sure, things like bacteria and archaea pop up very early, but they never go on to anything more. Before Paradise, we never found evidence of a transition to eukaryotes, much less metazoa. But today, all that is changed thanks to Professor Ohara’s magnificent discovery.” The tech waved expansively at Frito’s vaguely glowing form.