Assemblers of Infinity Read online

  The speakers on the sound system began to play another selection from Parvu's CD changer. She recognized it as Mozart's Requiem Mass. Angrily, Erika switched it off. The music seemed too appropriate.

  Erika rode in silence next to Kent Woodward in the Mars rover. Once again the gusting winds prevented any helicopter from landing near the NIL; the Mars crew had been asked once again to perform a delivery service. Their long Antarctic training schedule left many gaps with time to run errands, and the astronauts did not mind the break in routine.

  Erika wished that Parvu had driven her in the EOV. The Emergency Overland Vehicle was delta shaped, with a cramped driver's compartment and an empty space in the back to haul a passenger.

  The EOV had been intended for use if one of the NIL people were injured and needed to be rushed overland the 120 kilometers to McMurdo Sound Naval Station, or even to the Mars base camp -- one of those "frivolous" emergency measures that Parvu had not designed himself, and he had sworn he'd never use the contraption except in an emergency.

  In the rover, Kent Woodward kept jabbering, regaling her with stories

  -- no doubt exaggerated to make him seem wonderful -- about his college days in Arizona, about growing up in British Columbia, about mountain climbing and off-trail hiking, and his aspirations and excitement about going to Mars. He kept grinning at her, showing off his skill in the rover as if it were a carnival ride, zipping over rock outcroppings and snow drifts that had been packed down for countless years.

  But Erika could think only of the comfortable, safe NIL she was leaving farther behind each minute. She would probably never return. Her years-long association with Jordan Parvu seemed ended now; they would become peers, not partners. Why couldn't she be thrilled by the prospect? She'd be the first person to study alien nanomachines! But if she had wanted glory and public acclaim, would she have come down to the bottom of the planet?

  She thought of her possessions wrapped up into a pitifully small package stowed in the rear sample compartment of the vehicle. Did it all mean that little?

  "What's the matter?" Kent finally asked. Erika looked pointedly out the window at the bleak landscape. "Are you okay?"

  "I don't want to talk about it," she answered. "You're doing enough talking for the both of us." Kent shrugged, then seemed to have no objection about continuing to talk about himself.

  Reaching the Mars base camp, Erika looked with a mixture of amazement and nervousness at the tiny, cramped modules half-buried under heaped snow and dirt. She saw two living canisters, one for backup; together, they seemed barely large enough for one person, yet this facility housed six, stacked like sardines.

  The crewmembers had lived in such close contact for the three-month flight in low-Earth orbit; now they were simulating the 600-day Mars mission in Antarctic isolation. No wonder Gunther Mosby and Kent went out of their way to take advantage of the NIL showers and living spaces.

  Erika, who valued her privacy, wasn't sure she could last even one day in this miserable environment while waiting for the C-141 transport plane to take her to McMurdo Sound.

  Kent dismounted from the rover as its methane engine puttered into silence. He put on his best tour-guide smile and clicked the faceplate down.

  The astronauts were required to participate in the simulation at all times, but Erika herself wore only a heavy parka, scarf, and thick mittens. She wore a radio headphone to communicate.

  "Over there, we've got an optical communications telescope."

  He gestured to a steaming mound several hundred meters from the base.

  "Our own megawatt nuclear power plant is buried over there. Provides all our electricity. Boy, oh boy, you should have heard the environmentalists squawk about 'contaminating the pristine Antarctic environment.' As if it makes any difference around here!" He smiled in the cocksure way that was already beginning to annoy Erika.

  The inflatable airlock on the nearest cylinder opened, and two suited figures emerged to greet her. She knew Kent, and Gunther Mosby, and she was familiar enough with the commander of the expedition, a middle-aged astronaut with graying hair and gaunt cheeks, named Bingham Grace. But Erika had no idea who the other three members of the Mars crew were, and she would never be able to remember all of their names. She just had to try and be as amiable as she could....

  Later, inside the living module with her knees drawn up to her chin and the walls sloping against her back, she still tasted her meal of fresh lettuce grown in the "salad machine." She remembered the sharp, salty taste of caviar during that last special moment with Parvu.

  "Come over here, Erika," Kent said, crouched by a tiny table that flipped down from the wall. He sat across from tall and angular Gunther Mosby, who looked not uncomfortable in his awkward position. Kent held up a pack of plastic cards. "You can't be antisocial in circumstances like this. Play a game of cards with us."

  "Yes, please Dr. Trace," Gunther added. "Kent always cheats and I need a second person to watch him."

  They tried to teach her Schaafskopf for the next hour, but her lack of experience with card games left her at a loss. Instead, they settled for Spades, which Erika won twice in a row.

  At eleven o'clock, Bingham Grace summoned them together for a daily wrap up, gave another little welcoming speech to Erika, and mentioned how nice it was to have company "other than these bozos." He made a special point of looking at Kent and Gunther as he said this, then announced that it was time to go to bed. Erika learned only afterward that their clocks gradually slipped to keep pace with the slightly longer Martian day/night cycle. Antarctica, with its half-year-long days and nights, was the perfect place to readjust the team's daily rhythms.

  Gunther stacked the cards and slipped them into a small container below the flip-down table, gave an exaggerated yawn, and nodded to Erika. "If you will excuse me, Ms. Trace. I am going to bed. I am feeling very horny at the moment."

  Kent raised an eyebrow at her and grinned. "Well?"

  She snorted. "In your dreams."

  Erika stood alone by the towering rocks and ice sheets of McMurdo Sound. She huddled in a Navy parka, syn-fur gloves, and gel body-warmers, shrouding her face with a scarf. The cold bit into her cheeks. The tall rocks and gray-blue ocean looked like the gates of the Underworld -- and she had been cast out.

  The ice shelves extending into the water glowed a cold blue from trapped oxygen bubbles. The seas lurched, as if the ocean itself was shivering. Overhead, enormous albatrosses circled like hang gliders with twelve-foot wingspans. On a series of small islands away from the McMurdo installation, jammed penguin rookeries filled the air with an incredible noise, an incredible smell. It seemed numbingly bleak and exotic at the same time.

  Years before, she had left the lush forests of South Carolina to travel to the city of Boston, then to Albuquerque and the New Mexico desert. She had thought that Antarctica was the most barren place she could ever see; but now, she found herself on her way to the Moon, with a hasty stop in Star City to cram in astronaut training and certification.

  Where would they yank her next? Why couldn't they let her be? Too many times, people had done things "for her own good."

  In the distance she heard a jet. Squinting, she could just make out the silhouette of the C-141 Starlifter come to carry her back to civilization --

  for a few days.

  Erika felt stinging tears from wind whipping off the water. As the plane grew near, terror was alive and gnawing inside her -- not from fear of space travel, or living on an austere moonbase, or even from the responsibility of being the first person to study alien nanotechnology. Erika felt most afraid to be separated from her mentor for the first time in a decade.

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  PART II

  "Nanotechnology will enable the construction of just about anything you could have imagined before, but out of better materials and to more precise tolerances. So any feasible scheme for interstellar flight can be implemented in a better form with nanotechnology."

  -- K.
Eric Drexler

  PERSONNEL REASSIGNMENTS, SECOND QUARTER 2014 (excerpts)

  JASON DVORAK, special envoy from Director Celeste McConnell to Moonbase Columbus, has been appointed Commander of Moonbase Columbus. Dvorak has spent the past ten months on Columbus, implementing many design changes to make Columbus more efficient and more comfortable....

  BERNARD CHU, former commander of Moonbase Columbus, has been transferred to the waystation Collins at L-1, where he will assume the lead administrative function there. Chu commanded Moonbase Columbus for more than two years before this reassignment. Chu is also one of the astronauts who survived the Grissom accident in 2014....

  LT COL (selectee) EILEEN DANNON, former commander of the Collins waystation at L-1, has been removed from her post and reassigned to Earth.

  Familiar to many people for her outspoken criticism of Agency Director McConnell's policies, Dannon will now take a position in the Archives section at the National Space Museum.

  Agency Observer, publication for United Space Agency employees, May 2014.

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  CHAPTER 7

  TO THE MOON

  Erika wasn't in orbit for more than three revolutions before her scramjet-boosted aerospace plane rendezvoused with the Lagrange shuttle-tug.

  Earth wheeled above her as if it were about to drop down on her head, making her dizzy as the vessels approached each other. Coming out of the black backdrop of space, the spindly shuttle-tug reminded her of a tinker-toy model she had once built. Her brother Dick had broken it.

  Once docked, the crew handed her off to the Japanese-contracted tug.

  Everyone seemed rushed -- from the moment she had left Star City, to launching in the aerospace plane that took her to low-Earth orbit. If she had gone the usual route, the trip to the Moon would have taken ten times as long. But the Agency was in a hurry to get her to work.

  Combining aerospace technology and solar-electric tugs yielded an efficient and affordable option for frequent trips to the lunar surface. But this route also required a month-long spiraling trip from LEO to L-1, the Lagrange staging area to the Moon's surface. Director McConnell at the United Space Agency couldn't afford to wait that long. It had already taken Erika two weeks just to get the bare-bones preparations for her assignment.

  So a specially-fitted Japanese tug had been brought on duty at L-1 for just this purpose -- to get Erika to the Moon in the shortest time possible.

  Outfitted with relatively inefficient but fast nuclear-thermal propulsion, the tug would haul Erika to L-1 within 72 hours.

  Numbed by the whirlwind of events, Erika did nothing more than follow instructions, allowing herself to be handed from person to person, strapped into her couch, checked over for safety glitches. She had been too busy to feel terrified, but she knew it would hit her during the three-day journey in which she would have nothing to do. Grudgingly, she let her uneasiness about leaving Parvu fade to be replaced by a growing enthusiasm for the challenge.

  All those training sessions in Star City still seemed a jumble to her

  -- a mish-mash of safety demonstrations, spacesuit fittings, survival techniques, breathing exercises, anabolic procedures, lectures on zero-G and low-G hygiene. A crash survival course instead of the full complement of astronaut-certification training. It had been like taking a drink out of a firehose.

  She longed for the peace and isolation of Antarctica, where Jordan Parvu now had the NIL all to himself. Was that how he wanted it? She didn't think so. No matter what, she was still going to need a lot of Parvu's assistance to figure out the nanomachine infestation. A good way to test whether long distance really was the next best thing to being there, she thought.

  Erika spent the three days in transit studying tapes of the Daedalus events. Events -- not deaths. She couldn't bring herself to keep thinking that someone had died just by getting too close to the gigantic construction. If she got too hung up on the people, the loss of life, she couldn't study it with the proper objectivity. She couldn't let herself feel a grudge against the little machines.

  Waite and Lasserman and Snow could not be living beings to her, not warm flesh with pasts, and lovers, and some sort of future in mind. Seeing the uproar on the newsnets hadn't helped much, interviews with people the three of them had left behind, hometown funerals, grade-school classrooms decorated with crayon-drawn posters portraying them as heroes.

  No. They were simply data points -- W, L, and S -- complex organisms that had been disassembled, just as the regolith sample had been. Erika had always known that nanotechnology was dangerous, hence all of Parvu's incredible sterilization precautions back at the NIL. But these mysterious nanomachines went far beyond anything she and Parvu had attempted. Or imagined.

  She felt like a butterfly collector who had always studied dead and mounted specimens, suddenly thrust into the middle of a dense and uncharted jungle.

  Webbed into place in her cramped cabin, Erika called up her stored data on the portable computer. Staring at the virtual display, she slowed down every portion of the regolith disassembly process in the Sim-Mars vault. Frame by frame she observed the sequence, zeroing in each 3D pixel as it disappeared from view.

  She went over Waite's last transmission. She saw the moonbase control center images of the telepresent hopper being disassembled at the Daedalus construction site. There seemed so much to study, but it was not enough to keep her mind completely occupied. She understood Director McConnell's need to placate millions of uneasy inhabitants of Earth. When someone wanted an answer fast, the easiest way was to grab a local expert and keep the pressure on until a solution was found. Erika had been dropped smack into the middle of the problem. She felt as if she had stepped on a big pile of horse manure.

  Hour by hour she pored over the events. For three days. The other crewmembers, busy with their own tasks, left her alone. That suited Erika just fine.

  She turned her thoughts again to Jordan Parvu. Why hadn't he wanted to come to the Moon? If he wanted to study functional nanotechnology so badly, why didn't he jump at the chance? She couldn't believe he didn't want to take the risk. After all, Antarctica was perhaps the most savage spot left on Earth. And the Sim-Mars isolation lab on the Moon certainly could be no less safe than the NIL.

  No, there had to be something more to it. Jordan did not want to step into the spotlight, but to focus things on her. He did always speak about how much he wanted her to succeed.

  She felt a warm lump in her throat and tears welling in her eyes. That was the real reason. She knew it to the core. Now she had to live up his expectations. This was different from trying to meet her mother's demands --

  she wanted Jordan Parvu to beam with pride over her successes. But that didn't make the monumental pressure feel any less.

  "Hello Dr. Trace, I'm Bernard Chu, commander of Moonbase -- " The wiry, intense man seemed flustered, then smiled thinly. "Excuse me, I'm sorry. With so many things going on, I can't even remember my own title! I'm the Lagrange waystation director -- welcome to the Collins."

  Erika shook the Asian man's hand. "Thank you. And please, call me Erika. 'Doctor' sounds too formal." Her soft South Carolina drawl usually made new acquaintances feel comfortable.

  Chu nodded and held onto Erika's elbow and helped her float out of the chamber. Webbed netting held boxes, ropes, toilet paper, silvery packaging film, and a hundred other things she couldn't identify, nor could she determine any sort of organization scheme. Since she couldn't tell "up" from

  "down" in the weightlessness, storing material in the netting made sense.

  "Since the shuttle-tug normally takes nearly a month to get here, everyone becomes accustomed to zero-G by the time they arrive," Chu said. "But you have not had time to adjust. Are you feeling all right? Space whoops?"

  She did not want to be reminded about the queasiness. "I've managed to keep my food down for the past day."

  Chu nodded. "No problem then. You'll be heading to the lunar surface within the hour. We have the
shuttle outfitted and waiting, pilot ready to go.

  Celeste -- ah, Director McConnell told us not to waste any time."

  "An hour?" Erika blinked her eyes as sudden nervousness rushed up on her again.

  "That's the nice thing about being at L-1 -- we're always in position for a lunar rendezvous. Captain Zed -- I mean Zimmerman -- is the shuttle pilot taking you down." Chu nodded to a lanky, square-jawed man floating upside down at the rear of the room.

  Erika started to greet him, but Zimmerman interrupted her. "If I were you I'd take a shower," he said. "A quick one." Zimmerman pushed himself out of the chamber.

  "He isn't very big on explaining things," Chu said. Erika thought Bryan Zed's silence would be a wonderful change after enduring Kent Woodward in Antarctica. "He means for the dust."

  "Dust?"

  Chu set his mouth and got a faraway look on his face. Suddenly, Erika remembered that he had been the moonbase commander until a few weeks before.

  "Yes, the moondust gets into everything -- even the water supplies, no matter how much they try to filter it. So if you want to feel clean for one last time, take a shower here before you go. Our water is limited, but for Celeste's special guest, we can spare some."

  The words brought back a vision of Kent Woodward and his sidekick Gunther, anxious to take a shower at the NIL. Was it something to do with these astronauts? she thought. "No wonder nobody wants to stay down there for long."

  She looked up at Bernard Chu, expecting the man to nod in agreement; but he looked serious, as if something else were on his mind. "Yes, you must be right."

  "Fifty kilometers above the ground. Check your straps one more time."

  Zimmerman's voice startled her; he had broken the quietness only a few times during the transfer orbit from L-1 to the lunar descent. The trip from the Collins had been one continuous silence, with Zimmerman grunting answers to her questions until she had finally decided to be quiet.