Unbounded Read online

  Chapter Two: Cold Trove

  Mission Time: +212.2 Earth-years

  Doctor Tai smiled and made a note on his arm-calc. "You're as healthy as a moa," he said.

  Ryder leaned forward on the bed's edge and looked at the grated floor. "What's a moa?"

  Tai smiled again. "You've never been to Zealandia, have you?"

  Ryder shook his head. "North America Province, born and raised."

  "It's a resurrected species of flightless bird. Very large."

  Ryder frowned. "I have a slight headache."

  "That should go away in a few minutes." Tai moved away from the bed.

  "I've also had a few bouts of nausea."

  "Humans have a pair of sense organs often erroneously referred to as the inner ear, called the vestibular system, which we use to balance ourselves. Some people are a bit overly sensitive to Coriolis forces, and this causes nausea. You should adjust to it naturally. If you're still getting nauseated during the next mission segment, come talk to me and we'll look into it further."

  "Okay. Have you heard anything about the new star system?" Ryder asked. He made no motion to stand.

  Tai hesitated, turning halfway back to Ryder. "Just that the sun is a type-K."

  "Hmf, figures. I wonder how long it will be before we run into another type-G."

  The doctor shrugged. "Could be a while, I suppose."

  Ryder jumped down onto the metal grate. "But the question is, how long can you really keep us alive?"

  Tai took a step towards him. "Are you alright, Mr. Kask?"

  "I'm not that old. Call me Ryder." The floor of the medical bay sloped gently upwards at either end. "I'm just thinking out loud."

  "Well, I understand your concerns. But it's too early to give up hope." Tai walked over to an output display on the wall.

  Ryder looked around at the beds in the empty bay, and up at the white spotlights embedded in the ceiling. He ran a hand over his closely cropped hair. "Mm. Well, I guess you have more crew coming in."

  Tai looked back at him and nodded. "Have a good day, Ryder."

  Ryder walked to the door and slid it open. Then he stopped and said, "You know, I always had the feeling some disaster like this would happen. I never could picture the mission working out. But this data discrepancy--isn't it just too bizarre?" He went out into the corridor before Tai could respond.

  Ryder nodded to Kahu, who passed him and entered the medical bay. Ryder continued on for about forty degrees. He reached his cabin and entered.

  Zhong and Ihaia were standing inside, near his desk.

  "What the hell is this?" Ryder said.

  "Have a seat," Zhong said as Ihaia pulled out a chair.

  Ryder slid the door shut behind him. "You're going through my stuff? My files?"

  "We don't want to disrupt crew harmony, but there is a serious security matter to which we must attend," Zhong said.

  Ryder sighed and sat in a chair. He opened his hands. "What do you want?"

  "The last mission segment ..." Zhong looked around the cabin as if observing something.

  "What about it?"

  "Where were you at 21:30? Where did you go after the briefing?"

  "My cabin."

  "Did anyone see you? Was anyone else with you in your cabin?"

  "No. But if you need to verify my whereabouts, just look at the corridor camera recordings."

  Zhong nodded. "How well do you know Nikau?"

  "Not well. I'm familiar with his crew file, of course."

  "Would you say you two are friends?"

  "No, I barely had occasion to speak with him. Why?"

  "Do you know what he was working on?" Zhong asked. Ihaia stood with arms folded, staring at Ryder.

  "No idea."

  "Do you know who amongst the crew are friends of Nikau? Or perhaps, who harbors any dislike?"

  "No, I don't know. What is this about?"

  "I'm not at liberty to disclose that information at this time," Zhong said rotely.

  "You know, I'm over four hundred years old," Ryder said. "Not including time spent in stasis, of course. Approaching middle age, one tends to get a different perspective on things. You kids, in your second century of life, can't fathom what it was like when I was growing up in the slums of Los Angeles, before the Garden World Laws. Every day I dealt with the double sword of criminal thugs on the one hand and Global Unity goons on the other. It was the worst of both worlds--chaotic criminality mixed with a tyrannical rigidity of restricted speech."

  "Global Unity isn't a tyranny any more," Zhong said. "--not since we achieved AI governance. What's your point in all this?"

  "Just that you remind me the way the goons would talk," Ryder said.

  "Appearances can be deceiving. Don't be so swift to judge." Zhong made a sharp nod at Ihaia. "Let's go." They walked past Ryder and exited his cabin.

  Ryder sat alone in silence for a minute, then stood. He left his cabin and made his way along the circumference to Command Sector.

  All the senior staff were busy at their stations; Mbali stood behind them. Ryder slowly walked farther along the sector's arc, straining to hear the hushed conversations.

  "Location confirmed," Anaru said. "We're 7.826 light-minutes from the primary, 36 Ophiuchi B, which is a type K1V."

  "We're at an altitude of two megameters," Tangaroa said. "The planet is 0.668 Earth-mass, 0.88 Earth-radius. Surface gravity is 0.87 g. Surface temperature minus 80.5 centigrade. Surface pressure 0.525 standard atmosphere."

  "No, no, no," Mbali was shaking her head. "This is not good. We'll never be able to bring up the temperature that much."

  "It's locked in water ice. No liquids on the surface."

  "Curse it!" Mbali said. She gritted her teeth. "I need to talk to Fai-tsiri. Everyone, continue to gather as much information as you can." She headed for her office.

  "Uh, Mbali!" Ryder called out. Unhearing, she entered her office, and Ryder followed. Mbali opened the circular door in the back. In the small chamber beyond, Ryder could see the cold reflections of a gynoid. "May I have a moment?" he asked.

  "Not now, I'm busy." Mbali disappeared behind the black door splashed with New Maori calligraphy.

  Ryder walked over to Tangaroa's station. "Why were we revivicated here if the planet is too harsh? Is this the right place?" Ryder asked.

  "Fai-tsiri does nothing by accident, and she makes no mistakes," Tangaroa responded without looking at him.

  "You didn't answer my question."

  "I'm trying to concentrate. Go interview someone else."

  Ryder went to another station, this one unoccupied. He turned on his eye camera and swept his view from one crewman to another. Most of them were waving their hands as they manipulated data which only they could see through their nearly invisible augmented-reality lenses. A few worked more traditionally with fingers in contact with the black surfaces, swimming through glowing symbols. But a few had bionic nictating membranes over their eyes, blind to the outside world as they were visually immersed in their own virtual reality. The long space was dim, lit by the multicolored displays.

  From the corner of his eye, Ryder saw Mbali's office door open. She stepped out and issued orders. "I want a drop prepped ASAP. Standard instrument packages. Go."

  Ryder approached her as the others left their stations and headed out. "This cannot possibly be a candidate planet," he said. "Why are you sending people down?"

  "I'm not. Fai-tsiri is." She scrolled through the projected displays around her.

  "I remind you Command Sector conversations are on the official record. Please don't dodge the question."

  She looked at him. "It's true this world is outside terraformable parameters. But there could be information on the surface which we need. Information which would affect our efficacy on the rest of the mission."

  "What kind of information?"

  "Fai-tsiri would not choose to decelerate into a system unless it had planets in the habitable zone, which are usually detected by
astrometry. When we get close enough, the ship's telescopes do spectrographic analyses of the planetary atmospheres. If the composition or temperature are unsuitable, Fai-tsiri might still decide to stop if the parameters aren't so far out of range we can't terraform. Of course, if we detect unambiguous biosignatures, we would have to move on."

  "Right, the planet must be habitable but uninhabited. I know that."

  "Well, 'habitable' doesn't mean 'able to be inhabited by people.' It means the planet has conditions which are potential habitats for life, as we understand it. The higher the habitability index, the greater the level of potential biodiversity. By this measure, currently Earth is only marginally habitable, and its habitability index has varied significantly over the eons."

  "You still haven't given an explanation for our current status. Based on what you just said, we shouldn't have stopped here. I'd like to speak to Fai-tsiri directly."

  "If you know mission protocols, then you know I can't allow that. Fai-tsiri speaks only to me."

  Ryder stared at her without scowling.

  Mbali raised one corner of her mouth. "Mr. Kask, if you're so interested in what the big boys are doing, why don't you go down to the surface with them?"

  Ryder exited Command Sector and went to a radial hatch, then climbed up the tunnel. He propelled himself quickly along the axis corridor. Upon reaching the hatch that led to the skiff bay, his left hand hooked another grab-bar and his body flipped one hundred eighty degrees, slamming into the bulkhead. He pushed himself through the hatch feet-first, coasting along the radial tunnel, hands hovering above the ladder side-bars. As he gained weight, he waited until he was accelerating about one meter per second per second, then slowed himself on the side-bars as he was lightly pressed into them by the Coriolis force, then stopped, and used his feet to climb down. When he reached the bay, most of the landing team had already boarded the skiff. He saw Tekoha and waved, jogging to catch up with him.

  "What do you think you're doing?" Tekoha asked. "If you're coming down with us, you are almost too late. We're professionals, not schoolboys."

  "I'd like to know the source of your hostility," Ryder said. "We may have to work together in the future."

  "Work? You don't know what work is," Tekoha responded.

  "Excuse me?"

  "You think interviewing people and making vague observations in your little book is work? Do you know what I had to do to get here, to be on this mission? It wasn't enough that I had to get a degree in Biology and a doctorate in Genetics, or learn Standard Global Language to communicate with other scientists around the world. I also had to be the best of the best to be selected, the top of my class every step of the way. And at the time, I didn't know if it would be worth it. But I strove to be the best in the hope that someday, I might possibly be selected for a position on the starship being built at GUSA's Auckland University facility. And what did you do? Get a four-year degree in Journalism? Your job on this mission could be done by automated probes. Try not to consume too many ship resources, and stay out of the way of people who have real work to do."

  Ryder watched him enter the skiff, and then followed. Though they sat across from one another, Ryder did not let eyes fall on Tekoha.

  A few minutes later, they launched, following the same drop procedure as they did at Rock Garden. The false ports along the dorsal section of the curving hull gave some clue to their whereabouts: Ryder watched as the ports went from black to the multicolored fluctuations of plasma, which then faded to dark blue, then light blue, then a bright milk of landing-thruster induced sublimation. A flurry of white particles spun past the ports, and the skiff sighed as it touched down.

  Ryder waited for the others to suit up and gather on the aft elevator, then inserted himself amongst them. Zhong gave an oral command to the skiff computer; the chamber sealed. After the sterilization procedure, they were surrounded by a glaring crack as the floor descended. Ryder's visor darkened in the daylight, and a pale land revealed itself. Dark outcroppings of rock stood a couple hectometers to starboard, but all else was ice. The elevator floor halted slightly above the surface, and the astronauts stepped onto their second exoplanet. Ryder helped Tangaroa carry a few equipment packages onto the hard snow, then stepped back and watched the others get to work.

  "What are you looking for?" Ryder asked.

  "Everything," Tangaroa said. He rotated various physical dials whose projecting flanges gripped well with his gloved fingers. "So far I've confirmed Unbounded's spectroscopic analysis of the atmosphere. No biomarkers. No surprises. Now I'm sampling the snow, which is only a few centimeters thick. It's packed into glacial ice below that. And the snow actually is not of sky-formed flakes, but of glacial particulates from wind erosion."

  "Isn't saying 'glacial ice' redundant?" Ryder asked.

  "No. Glacial is a type of ice formed by compacting snow under pressure for centuries. The snow here is very clean. Now I'm drilling down for an ice core sample." Others gathered round Tangaroa's machine as it raised a cylindrical component to eye-level. He opened the casing to reveal a narrow translucent cylinder inside. "Are you recording?"

  Ryder nodded and gestured to his eye.

  "This is the ice core." Tangaroa waved at it and then consulted the console on the device. "Very few impurities. Though there are some, consistent with mild vulcanism. Again, no biomarkers." He pointed a finger past the suited figures. "I need to get there. I want to hear what the rocks have to tell me." He folded the instruments into their box configurations, and the group trudged towards the outcropping. Ihaia and Kahu stayed near the skiff. Ryder walked a few paces behind Tangaroa, Ariki, Tekoha, and Zhong. The sun was a high in the perfectly cloudless blue sky.

  They reached the rocks about ten minutes later. The skiff did not seem much farther away, but the figures of Ihaia and Kahu were no longer visible. Tangaroa and Tekoha set their boxes down near the base of the dark stone and unfolded them. In addition to being transmitted through his suit's microphone, Ryder heard the sound of the drill through his visor. There was a grating noise as another part of the machine pulverized a small rock sample.

  "This will just take a minute," Tangaroa said. "A couple of these samples need to be heated." He slid components in and out, adjusted dials. Then he studied console read-outs. "The rock is composed of shale. It's over six hundred megayears old."

  Ryder noticed a curving pattern on the dark rock. "What's this?" He pointed. They got closer to the marking.

  "No, it can't be," Tekoha said, pushing Ryder aside. He grabbed a chisel and found a crack, breaking away a large flake, revealing lighter rock beneath.

  For several minutes, the five of them stood in silence and stared at intricate impressions in the uncovered patch of stone.

  "Tangaroa, is there any other explanation? Any geological process which could produce this?" Ariki asked.

  Tangaroa shook his head. Impressions of segmented ovals of various sizes were scattered over the stone face. Amongst them lay fractally structured pennate forms.

  Tekoha scanned the surface with a laser. "Segmented, with transflection symmetry across the long axis. It reminds me of Dickinsonia."

  "Dickinsonia? What's that?"

  "It's an Ediacaran, from Earth. About the same age as this one, actually. This is a very generalized body-plan, so it's not too surprising it also evolved here. Similar forms have evolved independently multiple times on Earth." Tekoha broke away more rock, revealing more symmetrical patterns. "Unbelievable. It's a Lagerstatte--a fined grained fossil bed which rivals the Burgess Shale."

  "But I thought we've already confirmed the sterility of this world," Ryder said. "There is not even a microbe. How could there have been ... whatever this is?"

  "Yes," Ariki said. "That is actually a good question." They looked at Tekoha.

  "Well, it's not entirely inexplicable," Tekoha said. "The hostility of this environment is a clue. Half a gigayear ago, this would have been the bottom of an ocean. Apparently some time after these form
s were fossilized, an ice age set in--and never ended."

  "I thought ice ages were cyclical," Ryder said.

  "Not necessarily--definitely not on Earth, despite some short-termed fluctuations," Tangaroa said. "It is possible for a planet to enter a positive feedback loop, and never recover. It's called an 'ice catastrophe.'"

  "Right, two and a half gigayears ago on Earth, the Huronian Glaciation was a close call," Tekoha said.

  "And there were a couple major ones during Earth's Cryogenian six hundred megayears ago. Possibly all the oceans froze over," Tangaroa said. "It wasn't like the popularly known, and most recent 'Ice Age' of the Quaternary--which Earth is still in--actually an interglacial period. But that most recent glacial period was nothing by comparison to these near ice catastrophes."

  Tekoha nodded. "Once a planet is completely locked in ice, it may be very hard to unlock it. Earth might easily have met the fate of this planet."

  "Well, not easily. I don't think a frozen Earth was really sustainable," Tangaroa said.

  "Right, but without a means of carbon dioxide release, you can imagine a hypothetical world where it would. And on this world, that appears to be the case. Life may have just gotten started here, but was extinguished by runaway cooling."

  "I want to report this to Mbali immediately," Ariki said. He stepped away from the rock and tapped his arm-calc.

  "Do you think she knew, somehow?" Tangaroa asked.

  "Huh? Who?" Tekoha said.

  "Fai-tsiri. Maybe she saw something in the spectrograms ...."

  "And figured out this world was habitable hundreds of megayears ago? I don't think so. It was a lucky guess, if anything."

  "But even if she guessed, why would she want to send us down here to confirm it?" Ryder asked. "The presence of a biosphere is just one more black mark against this planet."

  "It's not present anymore. Unless there are chemotrophs down at some sea vents, below kilometers of ice."

  "You know what I mean."

  "Yes. The presence of any biology, past or present, affects our estimates of the overall likelihood of life's existence on terrestrial bodies," Tekoha said.

  "How?" Ryder asked.

  Tekoha's expression was hidden by his reflective visor. "Every time an instance of independently evolved life is discovered, our estimate for the occurrence frequency of biology increases."

  "I suppose that's true generally, but I don't see how you can use that argument here," Ryder said. "Just as before today, humanity could not extrapolate from Earth alone--from a sample size of one--to any generalities about the frequency of abiogenesis, I would say that from this ..." Ryder made an inclusive wave towards the fossils--". this cold trove, is still not sufficient. Two data points are hardly better than one."

  "Hey, we're aware of how statistics work. But every negative find is also significant."

  "Only if you treat every planet as equally likely to generate life, which clearly is not the case. Your sample set should contain only those worlds where life is actually possible. The problem is we don't know the limits of biology for the same reason we don't know its frequency; we can draw few generalities from Earth. Am I wrong?"

  Tekoha was silent.

  "You can describe the characteristics of Earth life, but you can't define life itself without more observed instances," Ryder said.

  Ariki walked back to them and appeared to listen to their conversation.

  "This is a monumental historical discovery. As a historian yourself, you should realize that," Tekoha said.

  "I do. I'm just cautioning against becoming overly-excited and pronouncing grand conclusions before we know enough."

  "Mr. Kask is right, although this discovery might be the first point in an unfortunate data-set," Ariki said. They looked at him. "If it turns out most habitable planets are in fact inhabited, we may all die before we find refuge. In any case, Fai-tsiri has ordered us back to stasis. We're leaving the system." He moved to pack instruments.

  "Hold on!" Tekoha said. "I need time to look at this!" He jabbed a finger at the fossils.

  "Take a couple scans, and you can study them in your free time. You know what the mission is."

  Tekoha flashed more lasers over the rock before he began to pack. Ryder stood with arms folded and watched them, saying and doing nothing.