Catherine Asaro - Nebula Awards Showcase 2013

It was on one of these patrols that a small hive was discovered in the fork of an elm tree. Bees lay dead and brittle around it, no identifiable queen among them. Not a trace of honey remained in the storehouse; the dark wax of its walls had been gnawed to rags. Even the brood cells had been scraped clean. But in the last intact hexagons they found, curled and capped in wax, scrawled on page after page, words of revolution. They read in silence.

Then—

“Write,” one said to the other, and she did.

My crew boss Jake was waiting for me at the sealock door. I’d been eight hours outside, checking for microfractures in the metal hull. Tedious work, that. I’d turned my helmet communicator off so as not to be distracted. The look on Jake’s face spooked me.

“What’s happened?” I asked him, seawater dripping from the hair of my beard.

“Jenna,” was all I got in reply. Which was enough.

I closed my eyes and tried to remain calm, fists balled around the ends of a threadbare terrycloth towel wrapped around my neck.

For a brief instant the hum-and-clank activity of the sub garage went away, and there was only my mental picture of my daughter sitting in her mother’s lap. Two, maybe three years old. A delightful nest of unruly ringlets sprouting at odd angles from her scalp. She’d been a mischief-maker from day one—hell on wheels in a confined space like Deepwater 12.

Jenna was much older now, but that particular memory was burned into my brain because it was the last time I remember seeing my wife smile.

“Tell me,” I said to my boss.

Jake ran a hand over his own beard. All of us had given up shaving years ago, when the gel, cream, and disposable razors ran out.

“It seems she went for a joyride with another teenager.”

“How the hell did they get a sub without someone saying something?”

“The Evans boy, Bart, he’s old enough to drive. I’ve had him on rotation with the other men for a few weeks, to see if he’d take to it. We need all the help we can get.”

“Yeah, yeah, skip it, where are they now?”

Jake coughed and momentarily wouldn’t meet my gaze.

“We don’t know,” he said. “I tasked Bart with a trip to Deepwater 4, the usual swap-and-trade run. He’s now—they’re now—two hours overdue.”

“The acoustic transponder on the sub?” I said.

“It’s either broken, or they turned it off.”

“Good hell, even idiots know not to do that.”

Jake just looked at me.

I pivoted on a heel and headed back the way I’d come. With my wetsuit still on I didn’t have to change. I’d grab the first sub I could muscle out of its cradle. Over my shoulder I said, “Whoever is on the next sortie, tell ’em I’m giving ’em the day off.”

“Where are you going to look?” Jake said. “It’s thousands of miles of dark water in every direction.”

“I know a place,” I said. “Jenna told me about it once.”

My daughter was four when she first began asking the inevitable questions.

“How come we don’t live where it’s dry and sunny?”

All three of us were perched at the tiny family table in our little compartment. Lucille didn’t even look up from her plate. As if she hadn’t heard Jenna at all. Too much of that lately, for my taste. But I opted to not call my wife out on it. Lucille had become hot and cold—either she was screaming mad, or stone quiet. And I’d gotten tired of the screaming, so I settled for the quiet.

Folding my hands thoughtfully in front of me, I considered Jenna’s inquiry.

“There isn’t anywhere that’s dry and sunny. Not anymore.”

“But Chloe and Joey are always going to the park to play,” Jenna said. “I want to go to the park too.”

I grimaced. Chloe and Joey was a kids’ show from before… from before everything. Lucille had been loathe to let Jenna watch it, but had caved when it became obvious that Chloe and Joey were the only two people—well, animated talking teddy bears actually—capable of getting our daughter to sit still and be silent for any length of time. We’d done what every parent swears they won’t do, and the LCD had become our babysitter. Now it was biting us in the butt.

My wife stabbed at the dark green leaves on her plate, the tines on her fork making pronounced tack! noises on the scarred plastic.

“There used to be parks,” I said. “But everything is covered in ice now. And it’s dark, not sunny. You can’t even see the sun anymore.”

“But why?” Jenna said, her utensils abandoned on the table.

The room lost focus and I briefly remembered my NASA days. Those had been happy times. Washington was pumping money back into the program because the Chinese were threatening to land on the moon.

I’d been on the International Space Station when the aliens abruptly came. It was a gas. I got to pretend I was a celebrity, being interviewed remotely by the news, along with my crewmates.

The mammoth alien ship parked next to us in orbit, for three whole days—a smoothed sphere of nickel-iron, miles and miles in circumference. No obvious drive systems nor apertures for egress. No sign nor sound from them which might have indicated their intentions.

Then the big ship promptly broke orbit and headed inward, towards Venus.

Six months later, the sun began to dim…

“It’s hard to explain,” I said to Jenna, noting that my wife’s fork hovered over her last bit of hydroponic cabbage. “Some people came from another place—another star far away. We thought they would be our friends, but they wouldn’t talk to us. They made the sunshine go away, and everything started getting cold really fast.”

“They turned off the sun?” Jenna said, incredulous.

“Nothing can turn off the sun,” I said. “But they did put something in the way—it blocks the sun’s light from reaching Earth, so the surface is too cold for us to live there anymore.”

I remembered being ordered down in July. We landed in Florida. It was snowing heavily. NASA had already converted over—by Presidential order—to devising emergency alternatives. The sun had become a shadow of itself, even at high noon. We cobbled together a launch: NASA’s final planetary probe, to follow the path of the gargantuan alien ship and find out what was going on.

The probe discovered a mammoth cloud orbiting just inside of Earth’s orbit: countless little mirrors, each impossibly thin and impossibly rigid. No alien ship in sight, but the cloud of mirrors was enormous, and growing every day. By themselves, they were nothing. But together they were screening out most of the sun’s light. A little bit more gone, every week.

“So now we have to live at the bottom of the ocean?” Jenna asked.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s the only place warm enough for anything to survive.”

Which may or may not have been true. In Iceland they’d put their money on surface habitats constructed near their volcanoes. Chancy gamble. Irregular eruptions made it dangerous, which is why the United States had abandoned the Big Island plan in Hawaii. Besides, assuming enough light was blocked, cryogenic precipitation would be a problem. First the oxygen would rain out, and then, eventually, the nitrogen too. Which is why the United States had also abandoned the Yellowstone plan.

People were dying all over the world when NASA and the Navy began deploying the Deepwater stations. The Russians and Chinese, the Indians, all began doing the same. There was heat at the boundaries between tectonic plates. Life had learned to live without the sun near hydrothermal vents. Humans would have to learn to live there too.