Baxter, Stephen - SS - Gossamer.pdf - Stephen Baxter - przemosta

Gossamer

by Stephen Baxter

The flitter bucked. Lvov looked up from her data desk, startled. Beyond the flitter's

translucent hull, the wormhole was flooded with sheets of blue-white light which raced

toward and past the flitter, giving Lvov the impression of huge, uncontrolled speed.

"We've got a problem," Cobh said. The pilot bent over her own data desk, a frown

creasing her thin face.

Lvov had been listening to her data desk's synthesized murmur on temperature

inversion layers in nitrogen atmospheres; now she tapped the desk to shut it off. The

flitter was a transparent tube, deceptively warm and comfortable. Impossibly fragile.

Astronauts have problems in space, she thought. But not me. I'm no hero; I'm only a

researcher. Lvov was twenty-eight years old; she had no plans to die—and certainly not

during a routine four-hour hop through a Poole wormhole that had been human-rated for

eighty years.

She clung to her desk, her knuckles whitening, wondering if she ought to feel scared.

Cobh sighed and pushed her data desk away; it floated before her. "Close up your suit

and buckle up."

"What's wrong?"

Our speed through the wormhole has increased." Cobh pulled her own restraint

harness around her. "We'll reach the terminus in another minute—"

"What? But we should have been traveling for another half-hour."

Cobh looked irritated. "I know that. I think the Interface has become unstable. The

wormhole is buckling."

"What does that mean? Are we in danger?"

Cobh checked the integrity of Lvov's pressure suit, then pulled her data desk to her.

Cobh was a Caucasian, strong-faced, a native of Mars, perhaps fifty years old. "Well, we

can't turn back. One way or the other it'll be over in a few more seconds. Hold tight."

Now Lvov could see the Interface itself, the terminus of the wormhole. The Interface

was a blue-white tetrahedron, an angular cage that exploded at her from infinity.

Glowing struts swept over the flitter.

The craft hurtled out of the collapsing wormhole. Light founted around the fleeing

craft, as stressed spacetime yielded in a gush of heavy particles.

Lvov glimpsed stars, wheeling.

Cobh dragged the flitter sideways, away from the energy fount—

There was a lurch , a discontinuity in the scene beyond the hull. Suddenly a planet

loomed before them.

"Lethe," Cobh said. "Where did that come from? I'll have to take her down—we're

too close."

Lvov saw a flat, complex landscape, gray-crimson in the light of a swollen moon. The

scene was dimly lit, and it rocked wildly as the flitter tumbled. And, stretching between

world and moon, she saw...

No. It was impossible.

The vision was gone, receded into darkness.

"Here it comes," Cobh yelled.

Foam erupted, filling the flitter. The foam pushed into Lvov's ears, mouth, and eyes;

she was blinded, but she found she could breathe.

She heard a collision, a grinding that lasted seconds, and she imagined the flitter

ploughing its way into the surface of the planet. She felt a hard lurch, a rebound.

The fitter came to rest.

A synthesized voice emitted blurred safety instructions. There was a ticking as the

hull cooled.

In the sudden stillness, still blinded by foam, Lvov tried to recapture what she had

seen. Spider web. It was a web, stretching from the planet to its moon.

"Welcome to Pluto." Cobh's voice was breathless, ironic.

Lvov stood on the surface of Pluto.

The suit's insulation was good, but enough heat leaked to send nitrogen clouds hissing

around her footsteps, and where she walked she burned craters in the ice. Gravity was

only a few percent of G, and Lvov, Earth-born, felt as if she might blow away.

There were clouds above her: wispy cirrus, aerosol clusters suspended in an

atmosphere of nitrogen and methane. The clouds occluded bone-white stars. From here,

Sol and the moon, Charon, were hidden by the planet's bulk, and it was dark, dark on

dark, the damaged landscape visible only as a sketch in starlight.

The flitter had dug a trench a mile long and fifty yards deep in this world's antique

surface, so Lvov was at the bottom of a valley walled by nitrogen ice. Cobh was hauling

equipment out of the crumpled-up wreck of the flitter: scooters, data desks, life-support

boxes, Lvov's equipment. Most of the stuff had been robust enough to survive the impact,

Lvov saw, but not her own equipment.

Maybe a geologist could have crawled around with nothing more than a hammer and

a set of sample bags. But Lvov was an atmospheric scientist. What was she going to

achieve here without her equipment?

Her fear was fading now, to be replaced by irritation, impatience. She was five light-

hours from Sol; already she was missing the online nets. She kicked at the ice. She was

stuck here; she couldn't talk to anyone, and there wasn't even the processing power to

generate a Virtual environment.

Cobh finished wrestling with the wreckage. She was breathing hard. "Come on," she

said. "Let's get out of this ditch and take a look around." She showed Lvov how to work a

scooter. It was a simple platform, its inert gas jets controlled by twists of raised handles.

Side by side, Cobh and Lvov rose out of the crash scar.

Pluto ice was a rich crimson laced with organic purple. Lvov made out patterns,

dimly, on the surface of the ice; they were like bas-relief, discs the size of dinner plates,

with the intricate complexity of snowflakes.

Lvov landed clumsily on the rim of the crash scar, the scooter's blunt prow crunching

into surface ice, and she was grateful for the low gravity. The weight and heat of the

scooters quickly obliterated the ice patterns.

"We've come down near the equator," Cobh said. "The albedo is higher at the south

pole; a cap of methane ice there, I'm told."

"Yes."

Cobh pointed to a bright blue spark, high in the sky. "That's the wormhole Interface,

where we emerged, fifty thousand miles away."

Lvov squinted at constellations unchanged from those she'd grown up with on Earth:

"Are we stranded?"

Cobh said, with reasonable patience, "For the time being. The flitter is wrecked, and

the wormhole has collapsed; we're going to have to go back to Jupiter the long way

round."

Three billion miles... "Ten hours ago I was asleep in a hotel room on Io. And now

this. What a mess."

Cobh laughed. "I've already sent off messages to the Inner System. They'll be

received in about five hours. A one-way GUTship will be sent to retrieve us. It will refuel

here, with Charon ice—"

"How long?"

"It depends on the readiness of a ship. Say ten days to prepare, then a ten-day flight

out here—"

"Twenty days?"

"We're in no danger. We've supplies for a month. Although we're going to have to

live in these suits."

"Lethe. This trip was supposed to last seventy-two hours."

"Well," Cobh said testily, "you'll have to call and cancel your appointments, won't

you? All we have to do is wait here; we're not going to be comfortable, but we're safe

enough."

"Do you know what happened to the wormhole?"

Cobh shrugged. She stared up at the distant blue spark. "As far as I know, nothing

like this has happened before. I think the Interface itself became unstable, and that fed

back into the throat... But I don't know how we fell to Pluto so quickly. That doesn't make

sense."

"How so?"

"Our trajectory was spacelike. Superluminal." She glanced at Lvov obliquely, as if

embarrassed. "For a moment there, we appeared to be traveling faster than light."

"Through normal space? That's impossible."

"Of course it is." Cobh reached up to scratch her cheek, but her gloved fingers rattled

against her faceplate. "I think I'll go up to the Interface and take a look around there."

Cobh showed Lvov how to access the life support boxes. Then she strapped her data

desk to her back, climbed aboard her scooter, and lifted off the planet's surface, heading

for the Interface. Lvov watched her dwindle.

Lvov's isolation closed in. She was alone, the only human on the surface of Pluto.

A reply from the Inner System came within twelve hours of the crash. A GUTship

was being sent from Jupiter. It would take thirteen days to refit the ship, followed by an

eight-day flight to Pluto, then more delay in taking on fresh reaction mass at Charon.

Lvov chafed at the timescale, restless.

There was other mail: concerned notes from Lvov's family, a testy demand for

updates from her research supervisor, and for Cobh, orders from her employer to mark as

much of the flitter wreck as she could for salvage and analysis. Cobh's ship was a

commercial wormhole transit vessel, hired by Oxford—Lvov's university—for this trip.

Now, it seemed, a complex battle over liability would be joined between Oxford, Cobh's

firm, and the insurance companies.

Lvov, five light-hours from home, found it difficult to respond to the mail

asynchronously. She felt as if she had been cut out of the online mind of humanity. In the

end, she drafted replies to her family and deleted the rest of the messages.

She checked her research equipment again, but it really was unuseable. She tried to

sleep. The suit was uncomfortable, claustrophobic. She was restless, bored, a little scared.

She began a systematic survey of the surface, taking her scooter on widening spiral

sweeps around the crash scar.

The landscape was surprisingly complex, a starlit sculpture of feathery ridges and fine

ravines. She kept a few hundred feet above the surface; whenever she flew too low, her

heat evoked billowing vapor from fragile nitrogen ice, obliterating ancient features, and

she experienced obscure guilt.

She found more of the snowflakelike features, generally in little clusters of eight or

ten.

Pluto, like its moon-twin Charon, was a ball of rock clad by thick mantles of water ice

and nitrogen ice, and laced with methane, ammonia, and organic compounds. It was like

a big, stable comet nucleus; it barely deserved the status of "planet." There were moons

bigger than Pluto.

There had been only a handful of visitors in the eighty years since the building of the

Poole wormhole. None of them had troubled to walk the surfaces of Pluto or Charon. The

wormhole, Lvov realized, hadn't been built as a commercial proposition, but as a sort of

stunt: the link which connected, at last, all of the System's planets to the rapid-transit hub

at Jupiter.

She tired of her plodding survey. She made sure she could locate the crash scar, lifted

the scooter to a mile above the surface, and flew toward the south polar cap.

Cobh called from the Interface. "I think I'm figuring out what happened here—that

superluminal effect I talked about. Lvov, have you heard of an Alcubierre wave?" She

dumped images to Lvov's desk—portraits of the wormhole Interface, graphics.

"No." Lvov ignored the input and concentrated on flying the scooter. "Cobh, why

should a wormhole become unstable? Hundreds of wormhole rapid transits are made

every day, all across the System."

"A wormhole is a flaw in space. It's inherently unstable anyway. The throat and

mouths are kept open by active feedback loops involving threads of exotic matter. That's

matter with a negative energy density, a sort of antigravity which—"

"But this wormhole went wrong."

"Maybe the tuning wasn't perfect. The presence of the flitter's mass in the throat was

enough to send the wormhole over the edge. If the wormhole had been more heavily

used, the instability might have been detected earlier, and fixed...."

Over the gray-white pole, Lvov flew through banks of aerosol mist; Cobh's voice

whispered to her, remote, without meaning.

Sunrise on Pluto:

Sol was a point of light, low on Lvov's unfolding horizon, wreathed in the complex

strata of a cirrus cloud. The Sun was a thousand times fainter than from Earth, but

Baxter, Stephen - SS - Gossamer.pdf

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