Джек Макдевитт - Cryptic - The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt

The sky was dark. This place never really experienced daylight. She wondered what it would be like to live where the sun never rose.

“But it does rise,” Daddy explained.

“I know,” she said. He meant well, but sometimes he just seemed to go out of his way to misunderstand her. Of course it rose, and for all she knew it might be up there now among all those stars, but who could tell? It was no more than a light beam.

She lowered her gaze and looked out across the frozen surface, past the Rover. A few low hills broke the monotony of a flat snowfield. It was lonely, quiet, scary. Solitudinous . Janie liked making up new words from the vocabulary list.

The Rover was the sole man-made object on the planet. It looked like a tank, with sensors and antennas aimed in all directions. The International Consortium seal, a blue-white globe, was stenciled on its hull.

“ It’s really much lighter than it looks, ” said Jerry. “ Especially here, where the gravity is light. ”

“Nobody’s ever been to Pluto, Janey,” said Daddy. “It’s very far.”

Of course no one had been to Uranus or Neptune either. But never mind.

A bright star appeared over the hills and began climbing. “ Do you know what it is, Janie? ” Jerry asked.

She was puzzled. Another moon? Was there a second moon she didn’t know about?

Daddy put his hand on her shoulder. “That’s the Ranger,” he said.

Oh, yes. Of course. Given another moment she’d have thought of it herself. “I know, Daddy,” she said.

“ …Orbits Pluto every forty-three minutes and twelve seconds. ”

The place felt cold. She pulled her jacket around her shoulders. This little stretch of ground, the hills, the plain, the snow, had been like this for millions of years, and nothing had ever happened until the Ranger showed up. No dawn, no rain, nobody passing through.

“ Once in a while, ” said Jerry, “ the ground shakes a little. ”

“That’s it?” asked Daddy.

“ That’s the whole shebang. ” Jerry waited, perhaps expecting another question. When no one said anything, he returned to his narrative: “ The snow isn’t the kind of snow you’d see at home. It’s frozen carbon monoxide and methane—. ”

He went on like that for a few minutes but Janie was no longer listening. When he paused she touched her father’s arm. “Daddy, why did the missions stop?” The magazines said it was because there was no place else to go, but that couldn’t be right.

“Oh, I don’t know, honey,” he said. “I think it was because they cost too much.”

“ In fact, ” said Jerry, “ unmanned missions are much more practical. Not only because it’s a lot cheaper to send an instrument package rather than a person, but also because a lot more can be accomplished. They’re safe, and the scientific payoff is considerably better. ”

“That’s right,” said Daddy.

“ People can’t go on deep space missions without getting damaged. Radiation. Zero gravity. It’s a hostile environment out there. ”

This was the reason Janie had come. To put her question to the machines that ran the missions. To get it straight from the horse’s mouth. “Jerry,” she said, “I can understand why you would like to go, but what’s the point of running the missions if we have to stay home?”

She could almost hear Jerry thinking it over. “ It’s the only practical way, ” he said finally, “ to explore the environment. But it’s a good way. Most bang for the buck. And nobody gets hurt. ”

Daddy squeezed her hand.

“ Seen enough, Janey? ” the AI asked.

She didn’t answer. After a moment the snowscape and the Rover blinked off and she was sitting with sixty or so people in the viewing room. Music started playing and the audience began talking and getting up and heading for the doors. A group of teens in front of her were deciding about going down to the gift shop for a snack. Somebody in back wondered where the bathroom was.

“That was pretty good,” said Daddy.

They drifted out with the crowd. Janie had never been to Washington before, had never been to the Smithsonian. She’d done the virtual tour, of course, but it wasn’t like this, where she could touch a coffee cup that had been to Europa, pass through the cabin of the Olympia , from which Captain D’Assez had looked down for the first time on the Valhalla impact basin. She could try on a suit like the one that Napoleon Janais had worn on Titan. And stand before the Mission Wall, where plaques honored each of the thirty-three deep-space flights.

They wandered down the shining corridors, lined with artifacts and images from the Space Age. Here was a cluster of antennas from Archie Howard’s transmit station in the Belt, where he’d directed operations for almost a year until someone decided that mining asteroids wasn’t really feasible and the whole project collapsed. And Mark Pierson’s jacket, with the logo for Jupiter VI, the mission which had made it back leaking air and water while the entire world watched breathlessly. And a replica of the plaque left on Iapetus. Farthest from home. Saturn IX. August 3, 2066.

There were portraits of Yuri Gagarin, Gus Grissom, Christa McAuliffe, Ben MacIntyre, Huang Chow, Margaret Randauer, the whole range of heroes who had taken the human race out toward the stars over the course of almost a century.

“Are we ever going back, Daddy?” she asked.

He looked puzzled. “Home, you mean? Of course.”

“No. I meant, to the moon. To Mars. To Europa.”

Daddy was a systems technician in a bank. He was more serious than the other kids’ dads. Didn’t like to play games, although he tried. He even pretended he enjoyed them, but she knew he would rather be doing something else than playing basketball with her. But he never yelled at her, and he encouraged her to say what she thought even if they might not share the same opinion. It was hard for him. She couldn’t remember her mother, who had died when she was two. He studied her, and then looked around at the pictures of Luna Base, of a crescent Jupiter, of Deimos, of a launch gantry at the Cape. “I don’t think so, darling,” he said.

They were standing just outside the exhibition hall, which contained a mock-up of Mars Base. She could see part of the dome, a truck, and an excavation site.

“There’s no point in people going,” Daddy was saying. “Robots can do everything we can, can go anywhere, and it’s safer.”

“Daddy, I’d love to see Charon. Really see it.”

“I know. We all would, love.” She could tell he had no idea what she was talking about. “The money that’s been saved by not sending people out there has been put into doing real science. Long range missions to the edge of the solar system. And beyond.” He smiled, the way he did when he was going to do a joke. “Of course, I won’t be here when the long ones get where they’re going. But you will. You’ll get to see pictures of whatever’s at Alpha Centauri and, and, what is it, Something-Eridani. That wouldn’t have happened if we’d stayed with the manned program.” He waited for a response. “Do you understand what I’m saying, Janie?”

“Yes, Daddy.”

Where, Janie wondered, was Hal Barkowski?

“He was something of an embarrassment,” said Daddy. “I think they’d just as soon everyone forgot him.”

Hal was the father of artificial intelligence. He’d been Janie’s hero as far back as she could remember, not because of his work with advanced sentient systems, but because he’d been at Seaside Station on Europa when President Hofstatter, during her first month in office, cut off U.S. support for the international space program. The ships had been ordered home, everything and everybody, but Barkowski had insisted on staying at Seaside, had refused to come back even when the last ship left, had stayed and directed the machines until they’d broken through the ice. He’d sent the sub down into the ocean and kept reporting for seventeen months, but the survey had revealed nothing alive, nothing moving in those chilly depths, and eventually, when he was sure no one would be coming back to get him, he’d shut down the base AI, told the world that the president of the United States was a nitwit. And then he’d opened his air tanks.