Year's Best Scifi 5 Part 22

I said, "It didn't hardly weigh anything."

"Yes." Junie was sort of whispering then. "It had very little weight, yet it was hard to move. You had to pull and pull, even though it felt so light when you held it. Do you understand what that means, Sam?"

"Somebody might have glued it down?"

"No. It means that it had a great deal of ma.s.s, but very little weight. I'm sure you haven't heard of antimatter-matter in which the protons are replaced by antiprotons, the electrons by positrons and so on?"

I said no.

"It's only theoretical so far. But current theory says that although antimatter would possess ma.s.s just as ordinary matter does, it would be repelled by the gravitational field of ordinary matter. It would fall up, in other words."

By the time she got to the part about falling up, Junie was talking to herself mostly only I could still hear her. "Our theory says a collision between matter and antimatter should result in a nuclear explosion, but either the theory's mistaken or there's some natural means of circ.u.mventing it. Because the WhiteCow Moon rock was composed of nearly equal parts matter and antimatter. It had to be! The result was rock with a great deal of ma.s.s but very little weight, and that's what allows the White Cow Moon to orbit so slowly.

"Listen to me, Sam." She made me turn in my airplane seat till I was looking at her, and I broke the arm a little. "We physicists say that all matter falls at the same rate, which is basically a convenient lie, true only in a hard vacuum. If that barbell you throw around were balsa wood, it wouldn't fall nearly as fast as your iron one, because it would be falling in air. In the same way, a satellite with great ma.s.s but little weight can orbit slowly and quietly through earth's atmosphere, falling toward the surface only as fast as the surface falls away from it."

"Wouldn't it hit a mountain or something, Junie?"

"No, because any mountain that rose in its path would be chipped away as it rose. As light as the White Cow Moon must be, its ma.s.s has got to be enormous. Not knowing its...o...b..t-not yet-we can't know what mountain ranges it may cross, but when we do, we'll find it goes through pa.s.ses. They are pa.s.ses because it goes through them."

Junie got real quiet for a while after she said that, and now I wish she had stayed quiet. Then she said, "Just think what we could do, Sam, if we could manufacture metals like that rock. Launch vehicles that would reach escape velocity from Earth using less thrust than that of an ordinary launch vehicle on the Moon."

That was the main trouble, I think. Junie saying that was. The other may have hurt us some, too, but that did for sure.

We were flying to Tulsa. I guess I should have written about that before. Anyway, when we got there, Junie got us a bunch of rooms like an apartment in a really nice hotel. We were going to have to wait for my bells to come back on a boat, so Junie said we could look for the White Cow Moon while we were waiting, and she would line me up some good dates to play when my stuff got there. We were sitting around having Diet c.o.kes out of the little icebox in the kitchen when the feds knocked on the door.

Junie said, "Let me," and went, and that was how they could push in. But they would have if it had been me anyway because they had guns. I would have had to let them just like Junie.

The one in the blue suit said, "Ms. Moon?" and Junie said yes. Then he said, "We're from the government, and we've come to help you and Mr. Moon."

My name never was Moon, but we both changed ours after that anyway. She as Junie Manoe and I was Sam Manoe. Junie picked Manoe to go with JM on her bags. But that was not until after the feds went away.

What they had said was we had to forget about the Moon or we would get in a lot of trouble. Junie said we did not care about the Moon, we had nothing to do with the Moon, what we were doing mainly was getting ready to write a biography about a certain old man named Roy T. Laffer.

The man in the blue suit said, "Good, keep it that way." The man in the black suit never did say anything, but you could see he was hoping to shoot us. I tried to ask Junie some questions after they went away, but she would not talk because she was pretty sure they were listening, or somebody was.

When we were living in the house, she explained about that, and said probably somebody on the plane had told on us, or else the feds listened to everything anybody said on planes. I said we were lucky they had not shot us, and told her about my dad, and that was when she said it was too dangerous for me. She never would tell me exactly where the White Cow Moon was after that, and it traveled around anyway, she said. But she got me a really good job in a gym there. I helped train people and showed them how to do things, and even got on TV doing ads for the gym with some other men and some ladies.

Only I knew that while I was working at the gym Junie was going out in her car looking for the White Cow Moon, and at night I would write down the mileage when she was in the living room reading. I figured she would find the White Cow Moon and go there at least a couple of times and maybe three or four, and then the mileage would always be the same. And that was how it worked out. I thought that was pretty smart of me, but I was not going to tell Junie how smart I had been until I found it myself and she could not say it was too dangerous.I looked in her desk for Moon rocks, too, but I never found any, so that is why I do not think Junie had been up there on the White Cow Moon yet.

Well, for three days in a row it was just about one hundred and twenty-five on the mileage. It was one hundred and twenty-three one time, and one hundred and twenty-four, and then one hundred and twenty-six. So that was how I knew sixty-three miles from Tulsa. That day after work I went out and bought the biggest bike at the big Ridin' th' Wild Wind store. It is a Harley and better for me than a car because my head does not sc.r.a.pe. It is nearly big enough.

Only that night Junie did not come home. I thought she had gone up on the White Cow Moon, so I quit my job at the gym and went looking for her for about a month.

A lot of things happened while I was looking for her on my bike. Like I went into this one beer joint and started asking people if they had seen Junie or her car either. This one man that had a bike, too, started yelling at me and would not let me talk to anyone else. I had been very polite and he never would say why he was mad. He kept saying I guess you think you are tough. So finally I picked him up. I think he must have weighed about three hundred pounds because he felt like my bell when I threw him up and banged him on the ceiling. When I let him down, he hit me a couple of times with a chain he had and I decided probably he was a fed and that made me mad. I put my foot on him while I broke his chain into five or six pieces, and every time I broke off a new piece I would drop it on his face. Then I picked him up again and threw him through the window.

Then I went outside and let him pick himself up and threw him up onto the roof. That was fifteen feet easy and I felt pretty proud for it even if it did take three tries. I still do.

After that, two men that had come out to watch told me how they had seen a brown Ford like Junie's out on this one ranch and how to get there. I went and it was more than sixty-three miles to go and Junie's brown Ford was not there. But when I went back to our house in Tulsa it was sixty-eight. Not a lot else happened for about two weeks, and then I went back to that ranch and lifted my bike over their fence real careful and rode out to where those men had said and sat there thinking about Junie and things that she had said to me, and how she had felt that time I threw her higher than the wires back in England.

And it got late and you could see the Moon, and I remembered how she had said the feds were building a place for missiles on the other side where n.o.body could reach it or even see it, and that was why they were mad at us. It is supposed to be to shoot at other countries like England, but it is really to shoot at us in case we do anything the feds do not like.

About then a man on a horse came by and said did I want anything. I told him about the car, and he said there used to be a brown car like that parked out there, only a tow truck cut the fence and took it away. I wanted to know whose truck it had been, but he did not know.

So that is about all I have got to say. Sometimes I dream about how while I was talking to the man on the horse a little white moon sort of like a cloud came by only when I turned my head to look it was already gone. I do not think that really happened or the little woman with the baby and the old man with the stick in the cave either. I think it is all just dreams, but maybe it did.

What I really think is that the feds have got Junie. If they do, all they have got to do is let her go and I will not be mad anymore after that. I promise. But if they will not do it and I find out for sure they have got her, there is going to be a fight. So if you see her or even talk to anybody that has, it would be good if you told me. Please.

I am not the only one that does not like the feds. A lot of other people do not like them either. I know that they are a whole lot smarter than I am, and how good at telling lies and fooling people they are. I am not like that. I am more like Roy T. Laffer because sometimes I cannot even get people to believe the truth.

But you can believe this, because it is true. I have never in my whole life had a fight with a smart person or even seen anybody else have one either. That is because when the fight starts the smart people are not there anymore. They have gone off someplace else, and when it is over, they come back and tell you how much they did in the fight, only it is all lies. Now they have big important gangs with suits and guns. They are a lot bigger than just me, but they are not bigger than everybody, and if all of us get mad at once, maybe we will bring the whole thing cras.h.i.+ng down.After that I would look through the pieces and find Junie, or if I did not find her, I would go up on the White Cow Moon myself like Roy T. Laffer did and find her up there.

The Blue Planet

ROBERT J. SAWYER.

Robert J. Sawyer, who lives and works in Ontario, near Toronto, Canada, began to publish SF short stories in the 1980s. His career as a novelist took off in the 1990s, and he became one of the SF popular success stories of the decade. After five well-regarded novels, he won the Nebula Award for The Terminal Experiment in 1996, and has since published five more novels, three of them Hugo Award nominees. He is a hard SF writer in the tradition of Isaac Asimov, more an idea writer than a stylist, often building neat puzzles with a complex moral dimension. His short stories are now infrequent, but clever and readable. "The Blue Planet" was commissioned by the Globe & Mail, the major Toronto newspaper, in December 1999, when the loss of another Mars lander by the US s.p.a.ce program was front page news. The circ.u.mstances of the commission point out the irony, at century's end, of having a newspaper ask a science fiction writer to transform a real-life s.p.a.ce travel back into fiction, perhaps in order to make bad news more palatable and s.p.a.ce travel more exciting.

The round door to the office in the underground city irised open. "Teltor! Teltor!"

The director of the s.p.a.ce-sciences hive swung her eyestalks to look wearily at Dostan, her excitable a.s.sistant. "What is it?"

"Another s.p.a.ce probe has been detected coming from the third planet."

"Again?" said Teltor, agitated. She spread her four exoskeletal arms. "But it's only been a hundred days or so since their last probe."

"Exactly. Which means this one must have been launched before we dealt with that one."

Teltor's eyestalks drooped as she relaxed. The presence of this new probe didn't mean the people on the blue planet had ignored the message. Still...

"Is this one a lander, or just another orbiter?"

"It has a streamlined component," said Dostan. "Presumably it plans to pa.s.s through the atmosphere and come to the surface."

"Where?"

"The south pole, it looks like."

"And you're sure there's no life on board?"

"I'm sure."

Teltor flexed her triple-fingered hands in resignation. "All right," she said. "Power up the neutralization projector; we'll shut this probe off, too."

That night, Teltor took her young daughter, Delp, up to the surface. The sky overhead was black-almost as black as the interior of the tunnels leading up from the buried city. Both tiny moons were out, but their wan glow did little to obscure the countless stars.

Teltor held one of her daughter's four hands. No one could come to the surface during the day; the ultraviolet radiation from the sun was deadly. But Teltor was an astronomer-and that was a hard job to do if you always stayed underground.

Young Delp's eyestalks swung left and right, trying to take in all the magnificence overhead. But, after a few moments, both stalks converged on the bright blue star near the horizon.

"What's that, Mama?" she asked.

"A lot of people call it the evening star," said Teltor, "but it's really another planet. We're the fourth planet from the sun, and that one's the third.""A whole other planet?" said Delp, her mandible clicking in incredulity.

"That's right, dear."

"Are there any people there?"

"Yes, indeed."

"How do you know?"

"They've been sending s.p.a.ce probes here for years."

"But they haven't come here in person?"

Teltor moved her lower arms in negation. "No," she said sadly, "they haven't."

"Well, then, why don't we go see them?"

"We can't, dear. The third planet has a surface gravity almost three times as strong as ours. Our exoskeletons would crack open there." Teltor looked at the blue beacon. "No, I'm afraid the only way we'll ever meet is if they come to us."

"Dr. Goldin! Dr. Goldin!"

The NASA administrator stopped on the way to his car. Another journalist, no doubt. "Yes?" he said guardedly.

"Dr. Goldin, this is the latest in a series of failed missions to Mars. Doesn't that prove that your so-called 'faster, better, cheaper' approach to s.p.a.ce exploration isn't working?"

Goldin bristled. "I wouldn't say that."

"But surely if we had human beings on the scene, they could deal with the unexpected, no?"

Teltor still thought of Delp as her baby, but she was growing up fast; indeed, she'd already shed her carapace twice.

Fortunately, though, Delp still shared her mother's fascination with the glories of the night sky. And so, as often as she could, Teltor would take Delp up to the surface. Delp could name many of the constellations now-the zigzag, the giant scoop, the square-and was good at picking out planets, including the glaringly bright fifth one.

But her favorite, always, was planet three.

"Mom," said Delp-she no longer called her "Mama"-"there's intelligent life here, and there's also intelligent life on our nearest neighbor, the blue planet, right?"

Teltor moved her eyestalks in affirmation.

Delp spread her four arms, as if trying to encompa.s.s all of the heavens. "Well, if there's life on two planets so close together, doesn't that mean the universe must be teeming with other civilizations?"

Teltor dilated her spiracles in gentle laughter. "There's no native life on the third planet."

"But you said they'd been sending probes here-"

"Yes, they have. But the life there couldn't have originated on that world."

"Why?"

"Do you know why the third planet is blue?"

"It's mostly covered with liquid water, isn't it?"

"That's right," said Teltor. "And it's probably been that way since shortly after the solar system formed."

"So? Our world used to have water on its surface, too."

"Yes, but the bodies of water here never had any great depth. Studies suggest, though, that the water on the third planet is, and always has been, many biltads deep."

"So?"

Teltor loved her daughter's curiosity. "So early in our solar system's history, both the blue planet and our world would have been constantly pelted by large meteors and comets-the debris left over from the solar system's formation. And if a meteor hits land or a shallow body of water, heat from the impact might raise temperatures for a short time. But if it hits deep water, the heat would be retained, raising the planet's temperature for dozens or even grosses of years. A stable environment suitable for the origin of life would have existed here eons before it would have on the third planet. I'm sure life only arose once inthis solar system-and that it happened here."

"But-but how would life get from here to the blue planet?"

"That world has prodigious gravity, remember? Calculations show that a respectable fraction of all the material that has ever been knocked off our world by impacts would eventually get swept up by the blue planet, falling as meteors there. And, of course, many forms of microbes can survive the long periods of freezing that would occur during a voyage through s.p.a.ce."

Delp regarded the blue point of light, her eyestalks quavering with wonder. "So the third planet is really a colony of this world?"

"That's right. All those who live there now are the children of this planet."

Rosalind Lee was giving her first press conference since being named the new administrator of NASA. "It's been five years since we lost the Mars Climate Orbiter and the Mars Polar Lander," she said. "And, even more significantly, it's been thirty-five years-over a third of a century!-since Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. We should follow that giant leap with an even higher jump. For whatever reason, many of the unmanned probes we've sent to Mars have failed. It's time some people went there to find out why."

The door to Teltor's office irised open. "Teltor!"

"Yes, Dostan?"

"Another s.h.i.+p has been detected coming from the blue planet-and it's huge!"

Teltor's eyestalks flexed in surprise. It had been years since the last one. Still, if the inhabitants of planet three had understood the message-had understood that we didn't want them dumping mechanical junk on our world, didn't want them sending robot probes, but rather would only welcome them in person-it would indeed have taken years to prepare for the journey. "Are there signs of life aboard?"