Nebula Awards Showcase 2003

  “I watched a baby giraffe.” Her voice was slow and faint, almost as if she was speaking to herself. “I saw it born. I watched it learning to stand, nuzzling its mother, learning to suck. It finally followed her away, wobbling on its legs. It was beautiful—”

  Her voice failed. Her hand darted to her lips. She stood trembling, staring at me, her eyes wide and dark with pain.

  “My father!” Her voice came suddenly sharp and thin, almost a scream. “He’s going away. I’ll never see him again.”

  She ran back inside.

  •

  When the robots called us to breakfast, we found her sitting between her parents. She had washed her tear-streaked face, but the food on her plate had not been touched. Here out of the Sun, Sandor’s face had gone pale and grim. He seemed not to see us till Tling turned to frown at him. He rose then, and came around the table to shake our hands.

  “Good morning, Dr. Pen.” Casey gave him a wry smile. “I see why you didn’t want us here, but I can’t apologize. We’ll never be sorry we came.”

  “Sit down.” He spoke shortly. “Let’s eat.”

  We sat. The robots brought us plates loaded with foods we had never tasted. Saying no more to us, Sandor signaled a robot to refill his cup of the bitter black tea and bent over a bowl of crimson berries. Tling sat looking up at him in anguished devotion till Casey spoke.

  “Sir, we heard about your problem with the stranded colonists. Can you tell us why their ship came back?”

  “Nothing anybody understands.” He shook his head and gave Tling a tender smile before he pushed the berries aside and turned gravely back to us. His voice was quick and crisp. “The initial survey expedition had found their destination planet quite habitable and seeded it with terran-type life. Expeditions had followed to settle the three major continents. This group was to find room on the third.

  “They arrived safe but got no answer when they called the planet from orbit. The atmosphere was hazed with dust that obscured the surface, but a search in the infrared found relics of a very successful occupation. Pavements, bridges, masonry, steel skeletons that had been buildings. All half buried under dunes of red, windblown dust. No green life anywhere. A derelict craft from one of the pioneer expeditions was still in orbit, but dead as the planet.

  “They never learned what killed the planet. No news of the disaster seems to have reached any other world, which suggests that it struck unexpectedly and spread fast. The medical officers believe the killer may have been some unknown organism that attacks organic life, but the captain refused to allow any attempt to land or investigate. She elected to turn back at once, without contact. A choice that probably saved their lives.”

  He picked up his spoon and bent again to his bowl of berries. I tried one of them. It was tart, sweet, with a heady tang I can’t describe.

  “Sir,” Casey spoke again, “we saw those people. They’re desperate. What will happen to them now?”

  “A dilemma.” Sandor looked at Tling, with a sad little shrug. She turned her head to hide a sob. “Habitable planets are relatively rare. The few we find must be surveyed, terraformed, approved for settlement. As events came out, these people have been fortunate. We were able to get an emergency waiver that will allow them to settle on an open planet, five hundred light-years in toward the core. Fuel and fresh supplies are being loaded now.”

  “And my father—” Tling looked up at me, her voice almost a wail. “He has to go with them. All because of me.”

  He put his arm around her and bent his face to hers. Whatever he said was silent. She climbed into his arms. He hugged her, rocking her back and forth like a baby, till her weeping ceased. With a smile that broke my heart, she kissed him and slid out of his arms.

  “Excuse us, please.” Her voice quivering, she caught his hand. “We must say good-bye.”

  She led him out of the room.

  •

  Lo stared silently after them till Pepe tapped his bowl to signal the robots for a second serving of the crimson berries.

  “It’s true.” With a long sigh, she turned back to us. “A painful thing for Tling. For all three of us. This is not what we planned.”

  Absently, she took a little brown cake from a tray the robot was passing and laid it on her plate, untasted.

  “¿Que tienes?” Pepe gave her a puzzled look.

  “We hoped to stay together,” she said. “Sandor and I have worked here for most of the century, excavating the site and restoring what we could. With that finished, I wanted to see my homeworld again. We were going back there together, Tling with us. Taking the history we had learned, we were planning to replicate the memorial there.”

  Bleakly, she shook her head.

  “This changes everything. Sandor feels a duty to help the colonists find a home. Tling begged him to take us with him, but—” She shrugged in resignation, her lips drawn tight. “He’s afraid of whatever killed Enthel Two. And there’s something else. His brother—”

  She looked away for a moment.

  “He has a twin brother. His father had to emigrate when they were born. He took the twin. His mother had a career in nanorob genetics she couldn’t leave. Sandor stayed here with her, longing for his twin. He left when he was grown, searched a dozen worlds, never found him. He did find me. That’s the happy side.”

  Her brief smile faded.

  “A hopeless quest, I’ve told him. There are too many worlds, too many light-years. Slider flights may seem quick, but they take too long. Yet he can’t give up the dream.”

  •

  “Can we—” Casey checked himself to look at Pepe and me. We nodded, and he turned anxiously back to Lo. “If Sandor does go out on the emigrant ship, would he take us with him?”

  She shook her head and sat staring at nothing till Pepe asked,

  “¿Por qué no?”

  “Reasons enough.” Frowning, she picked up the little brown cake, broke it in half, dropped the fragments back on her plate. “First of all, the danger. Whatever killed that planet could kill another. He got the waiver, in fact, because others were afraid to go. The colonists had no choice, but he doesn’t want to kill you.”

  “It’s our choice.” Casey shrugged. “When you have to jump across hundreds of years of space and time, don’t you always take a risk?”

  “Not like this one.” She shrugged unhappily. “Enthel Two is toward the galactic core. So is this new one. If the killer is coming from the core—”

  Pale face set, she shook her fair-haired head.

  “We’ll take the risk.” Casey glanced again at us and gave her a stiff little grin. “You might remind him that we weren’t cloned to live forever. He has more at stake than we do.”

  Her body stiffened, fading slowly white.

  “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 pass 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 passengers 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 space-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 passengers were clustering 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 passage 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 two hundred 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 spacecraft 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 snatched 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.