Cryptic - The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt Read online

  Morgan glanced in my direction and stood aside to let me go first.

  “You go ahead,” I said. “I’ll be right with you.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes. I’ll catch up.”

  He looked uncertain. It was a violation of safety procedure, but I let him see there was no need to worry, so he shrugged and headed off.

  Jennifer had been alone.

  The stars were hard and cold, and the spaces between them pressed on me as they must have pressed on her. Saturn floated over the plain, its rings luminous and lovely. A few other moons scattered across the sky. It struck me the planet had not moved since she’d stood here, how long ago?

  I thought about Chung. And Melville. Moby Dick. I’d never read the book. But I’d seen the video. There’s a sequence in which the cook is washed overboard and drifts away from the ship. The seas are heavy, and a moment comes when water and sky fill the universe, when the Pequod is gone, and the cook is utterly alone. They do not get him back whole.

  The image on the plain is terrifying, yes. But not because it has claws and wings, or pitiless eyes. But because it is alone.

  I was beginning to feel the cold, and it was a long way back to the shelter. I looked up (as she must have). Titan was there, with its thin envelope of methane; Rhea and Hyperion, and some of the smaller satellites: frozen, spinning rocks, like this one, immeasurably old, no more capable of supporting a thinking creature than the bloated gasbag they circle. Steinitz had argued for a benevolent cosmos. But Steinitz had never stood alone on that ridge. Only I have done that.

  And one other.

  The universe is a precarious, cold haven for anything that thinks. There are damned few of us, and it is a wide world, and long. I wondered who she was. Long since gone to dust, no doubt. But nevertheless, Jennifer, I wish you well.

  As I write this, there’s a movement afoot to take the Iapetus monument down, to bring it home and install it in the Smithsonian. There, they’d probably put it in a refrigerated cubicle, try to recreate the snowfield appearance. They’d surround it with gleaming staircases and Coke machines. Maybe it doesn’t matter. I suspect her sculptor would be pleased, and possibly amused.

  Before we left to come home, we opened the ground module to space. If anyone else ever passes that way, it’ll be there, just the way we left it. And on the dining board, they’ll find my ID. It’s not a very good picture. You know how official photos are. But they’ll understand. It was the best I could do on short notice.

  LIGHTHOUSE

  (with Michael Shara)

  The applause after a dissertation defense is always polite, sometimes cool, but rarely sustained. Kristi Lang smiled and blushed as all fifty members of her department rose to their feet and cheered. Her fellow graduate students were the rowdiest of all, whistling and banging their coffee cups in unison on chairs and table tops. Greg Cooper, the department head and her mentor, let it go on for a full minute.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said finally, “thank you very much.”

  If anything, the noise intensified.

  He needed a gavel.

  Kristi stood, engulfed in the moment. She nodded, raised her hand, mouthed a thank you. A fresh round of applause, and finally it began to lessen.

  She had discovered a new type of astronomical body. A special kind of brown dwarf. They were calling it a chimera now, but Greg had told her yesterday that they’d eventually be referred to as Lang Objects.

  Greg was tall and thin, with an angular jaw, angular nose, dark hair, intense eyes. His students referred to him as Sherlock Holmes because of his world-class problem-solving skills and his intensely mediocre abilities with a violin. “All right,” he said, signaling for quiet. “Let’s pull ourselves together.” That brought laughter. “I wouldn’t want to cancel the wine and cheese.”

  The people around her were reaching for Kristi’s hand, patting her on the back. Tim Rodgers, tanned and good-looking and brilliant, gave her an approving smile. He was impressed. Maybe even envious.

  The time honored Q and A had to be observed. Greg called for questions. Hands went up. He stepped aside and gave her the lectern.

  Tim remained standing while the others took their seats. He was finishing his own thesis, and had been, until recently, at the top of everybody’s list of People Who Would Go Somewhere. Now he was a distant second.

  “Okay, Kristi,” he said, “you’ve established the existence of a new class of object. How’d it happen?”

  The explanation was simple enough. She’d been doing analytical studies of billions of brown dwarfs and had noticed a few anomalies. Way too much deuterium. But that wasn’t the big news. She was holding that for later.

  “We eventually found two thousand oddballs,” she said. Brown dwarfs were failed stars. The chimeras, the Lang Objects, were anomalous. Odd. And not easy to account for with conventional physics.

  “You briefly mentioned actinides,” came another question. “But I don’t see the connection. Please elaborate.”

  Kristi smiled and tried to look modest. “Think DNA,” she said. “Common origin. Common purpose.”

  The comment puzzled everyone. Brows furrowed. They whispered to one another and waited for her to explain herself.

  In fact, her inspiration had come that past summer from a set of police blinkers mounted over a cabin on Kilimanjaro.

  Hemingway’s mountain. Now the site for the Yuri Artsutanov Space Elevator. Kristi had been on her way to the Clarke Research Station, poised overhead in geosynchronous orbit. She was hunting for the photons that she hoped would help explain the existence of the anomalous chimeras.

  There were nearly two thousand of them, all young, concentrated in the spiral arms of the Milky Way, interlopers, deuterium-rich freaks that had no business existing. Clad in shorts and a Columbia University t-shirt, Kristi drove a Jeep across the savanna. The sky was heavy with clouds, and the smell of cool moisture hung in the late morning air. Storm coming, and she was already late. If she didn’t hustle, she stood a good chance of missing her ride. The weather guy had said clear, bright and sunny, beautiful weather. She’d spent the last few months completely absorbed by her research, had analyzed a million images, looked for the needle in a billion haystacks, written a killer proposal that even Greg Cooper in his Holmes role couldn’t fault. But here she was going to be left standing at the station. Scheduling rides on the Yuri was no easy proposition.

  Not that it would matter in the end. Jeff would make the observations and deliver the petabytes to her account. They’d be perfectly de-biased and flat-fielded, even if she never floated through the observatory hatch. Still, the karma would be wrong. It was once in a lifetime, and she needed to be there when the evidence came in.

  The rim of Kibo, the summit crater, popped momentarily into view as she passed three thousand meters, and then promptly vanished into the gathering clouds. Raindrops began to spatter against the windshield. She started the wipers. The road was wide and designed to take heavy traffic, but it was still uphill all the way, sometimes at an almost impossible angle. The rain intensified, and pounded on the roof.

  She slowed down as visibility dropped to about fifty meters. A truck passed going the other way. A burst of wind pounded the Jeep and water blasted across the windshield.

  Her cell phone chimed. “Kristi.” It was Kwame Shola, the chief of operations at Yuri.

  “How you doing, Kwame?”

  “Not so good. Where are you now?”

  “On the way.”

  “Okay. But take it easy. We got snow like mad up here. Weathermen missed it completely.”

  Great. Just what she needed. “All right,” she said.

  “No heroics, please. If you need it, we have a climber cabin at five thousand meters. Combo is 2718.”

  “Twenty-seven eighteen.”

  “Remember ‘e’.”

  ‘e,’ of course, lower case always, was the base of the natural logarithms, equaling 2.718281808…on into an infinity
of digits. “Okay,” she said. “I’ve got it.”

  Greg had been ambivalent about her working with the chimeras. Don’t know where you’re going to go with them, he said. You could wind up producing a lot of data and still have to throw up your hands and admit you don’t have a clue about what they are or why they even exist. Put the idea on hold, he told her. Confine the research to more conservative areas, at least until you’ve wrapped up your doctorate and gotten an appointment somewhere. He was right, of course. The path of guaranteed success. But she was fascinated by the objects. Her father had always told her to follow her instincts. And her instincts took her right into the shadow of the deuterium dwarfs. They were so intriguing, so difficult to explain, that she simply could not resist.

  She had never wanted to be anything but an astronomer. Her father, who’d been a high school science teacher, had brought home a pair of image-stabilized binoculars from the third Gulf War. When he gave them to the little redheaded six-year-old, she was transfixed. The moon had craters and tall mountains. Jupiter was a tiny disk with moons of its own. And the Milky Way was a glittering pathway of stars. Distant suns, her father had explained. Countless millions of them. Some just like ours, some a lot smaller.

  Why, Daddy, why are some of the stars different from the Sun?

  He’d smiled and told her he didn’t know, but that she could figure it out if she wanted when she grew up.

  And one evening, in the Big Dipper, she’d discovered Mizar. Her father had been on the porch with her and she’d screeched at him, “Daddy, they’re touching!” Twin stars. Over the next twenty years, her father could always get a laugh from her by repeating the phrase in a rising falsetto. But in fact, as she learned later, there were five stars in the Mizar system. By her first year in graduate school she’d found a brown dwarf companion to the five. And used it as a clock to age-date the system. Her Astrophysical Journal letter hung framed in his den. But he got nervous whenever he knew she was going up to the Clarke Station.

  The rain turned to sleet and Kristi slowed the Jeep to a crawl. Her defroster was rapidly losing its battle with the Tanzanian snowstorm. She could no longer see the summit. A burst of wind shook the Jeep.

  She tried to call Kwame for a weather update, but he wasn’t answering. Something big with lights roared past her, going down the mountain. She jerked the wheel hard, hit the brakes, spun across the icy muck, and slid off onto the shoulder.

  Maniac.

  She sat listening to the sound of the retreating truck. Then she pulled carefully back onto the highway. It was getting dark.

  She picked her way uphill, past boulders and patches of lichen. Occasionally the road emerged along the edge of a precipice and she could look out through a hole in the clouds across the savanna. Then the clear patch was gone and the road was winding up through the night while rain and sleet whipped across the windshield. She began to wonder whether she’d missed the 5000-meter signpost when her headlights swept over it. She didn’t see a cabin anywhere, but it didn’t matter because she had no interest in missing her ride. There was still a chance, if the weather broke, that she could make it.

  The cell phone chimed. Kwame. “How you doing, Kristi?”

  “I’m doing just dandy.”

  “You find the cabin yet?”

  “Negative. Doesn’t matter. I want to get up there before my ride leaves.”

  “Kristi, they’ve canceled it. I told you that.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “Why did you think I wanted you to find the cabin? They’re going to try again in the late morning.”

  “Okay.”

  “Go to the cabin.”

  “I’m past it.”

  He sighed. “Can you get back to it?”

  She looked behind her, down the road. It was dark and cold and she could barely see the edge of the highway. “I guess.”

  “Do that, then. Don’t try to come up tonight. It’s too icy. Already had one truck go off the road. Driver was damn near killed.”

  “Okay.”

  “You sure you can find the cabin?”

  “Sure. Relax. Everything’s fine, Kwame.”

  It was about a kilometer back, maybe two. She put the phone down on the seat and peered out onto the highway. Nothing coming in either direction.

  She cut the wheel and started to turn. She couldn’t judge how wide the road was, so she was careful not to go too far forward. She reversed and started back. Felt the rear wheels lose traction. Tried to go forward again. But the Jeep continued sliding back. And down.

  My God, she was going into a ditch.

  She fought the wheel, damning the Jeep and the highway and the storm. But it did no good and the vehicle slid sideways off the shoulder and crunched over a large rock into a snowbank. She shifted gears and gunned the engine. The wheels spun, the Jeep struggled forward a few centimeters, dug a deeper hole, and slid back in.

  Damn.

  She called Kwame.

  “You want me to come get you?”

  She looked down at the tee-shirt and shorts. The heater was on full blast. “No,” she said. “Don’t do that. I’ll make for the cabin.”

  “Okay. Be careful.”

  “I will.”

  “Call me if you have a problem.”

  It was frigid out there. Better was to sit tight and wait for somebody to come along.

  There are twenty-one billion brown dwarfs in the Milky Way, give or take. Kristi had found and mapped almost every one of them. “The light output of brown dwarfs alternates wildly between adjacent wavelengths, Dad,” she’d once explained to him. “My infrared survey filters are tuned to just the right wavelengths, so all other stars appear dimmer. The hard part is keeping track of them all, and repeating the survey a year later to measure their motions. Then we have to sift out all the weird quasars that sneak through the filtering. That’s why we have MEGASPEC. It catches them all.”

  Brown dwarfs were not massive enough to ignite thermonuclear fires in their cores. They would always be failed stars, their dim glow generated by cooling and contracting, “Ninety-nine point six nines” was the delicious phrase she used in colloquia to describe her survey’s thoroughness. No one had ever done that for brown dwarfs. Hell, nobody had ever done that for anything in astronomy. She had nailed the definitive sample for all time. Sure, there’d be a few hundred hiding behind luminous primaries, or lurking directly in front of distant quasars, but she’d gotten the rest. There was no arguing with twenty-one billion spectra and parallaxes and radial velocities and proper motions. She could tell you what the temperature of each one had been a million years ago. And where each one would be ten million years from now. Her census was the last word on how the Galaxy’s failed stars had arranged themselves during the past thirteen billion years. She could chart the few ancient, metal-free brown dwarfs along their orbits looping far out into the Milky Way’s halo. The larger population of metal-rich youngsters, the astronomical infants, clung to the plane of the Milky Way.

  The chimeras (she settled for the term “anomalous objects” in her seminars) had been culled from her complete sample of twenty-one billion by statistical sifting and weighing. Every one of them had a spectrum that called attention to itself, that defied everything she thought she knew about this type of object. The surface abundance of deuterium was impossibly high. It was a heavy isotope of hydrogen, with one proton and one neutron, and the Big Bang had made only a pinch of it, before stingily shutting off production just three minutes after creation. There was no known way that any planet or star or galaxy or anything else was going to concentrate the primordial trace of deuterium to more than a pinch. The textbooks maintained that anything over 0.001% was impossible. Yet Kristi had found two thousand brown dwarfs whose composition was nearly fifty percent deuterium.

  It was frigid out there. The engine, which had been keeping her reasonably warm, coughed and died.

  She tried to restart it.

  Tried again.

  When s
he opened the door, she smelled gasoline and stuck her head outside. There was a stain on the snow. She must have punctured the tank. Or the gas line.

  The mountain highway remained silent.

  Shut the door against the cold.

  Okay. Crunch time. Can’t stay here. The temperature in the Jeep was already dropping.

  She checked to be sure she had her pen flashlight. Staple for astronomers. She turned it on and pointed it out the window, where the beam got lost in the snow. There was a travel bag in back with light clothing, and she could try putting everything on, but she was still going to get pretty cold out there.

  It was only a kilometer back, two at most. She could manage that. She pulled her bag from the back seat and began sifting through her clothes.

  She put on two extra blouses. They weren’t going to help very much, but she’d take what she could get. And there was a sweater. She pulled it around her shoulders. Felt like an idiot.

  She thought about Tim. He was the romance that had never happened. Partly her own fault. Always too busy. And her father, safe and warm in their North Jersey home.

  Love you, Daddy.

  The wind tried to take the door out of her hand. She hung on, dragged her bag out of the back seat, and chunked the door shut. The snow was driving at her, and it seemed to be coming from all directions.

  The ditch was shallower than it had seemed, but the sides were ice, and she had to climb out on hands and knees. When she finally stood on the road, she fished out her penlight and turned it on. The world around her looked desolate.

  The wind cut through her garments and chilled her to the bone. It literally took her breath away. She was wearing canvas shoes and her feet got cold before she’d gone a dozen steps.

  The penlight beam outlined ditches and a snow cover fading into the night.

  She pressed her arms against her chest and tried to push the cold out of her mind. Move out, Scout, she told herself. There’s shelter back there somewhere.