Элизабет Бир - Machine

Utterly incompatible was putting it gently. Explosive combination might have been a better phrase.

Loese had big eyes under the thick dark forelock that kept drifting across them. It seemed like it would get in her way piloting, but I suppose modern pilots didn’t really use their eyes for much. The interface was all senso. She pushed the hair back out of those eyes now, narrowed them grimly, and said, “You’re kidding me about going in there. We don’t have cryo tanks, or any power left over to run them with. What are we supposed to do with casualties, splint them?”

“Can’t use a standard ox cryo tank on methane types anyway,” Hhayazh said. “It’s too hot for them. The methane types melt.”

“So,” Tsosie said. “How are we even supposed to help those people?”

“Very carefully,” I answered.

He glared at me, which seemed unfair. Nobody ever glared at Hhayazh when it made sarcastic jokes.

“Our hardsuits can handle the environment in there.” Barely . But he knew that. To change the subject—and because I wanted to know—I asked Sally, “It might all be irrelevant if this one doesn’t have a crew, either?”

“It does,” Sally said. “They appear to be alive, inasmuch as I can determine with remote sensors. They’re superficially similar to other methane species, in that their apparent environmental needs would be compatible with units on Core General. I still believe they’re the assigned crew of SPV I Bring Tidings From Afar (Afar is his call name), which makes them”—she made a ringing sound, like somebody running fingers along the bowls of a glass harmonica—“and therefore a known syster species, albeit one that doesn’t have much to do with ox types. But they seem to be in some kind of stasis or hibernation state. Which I’m going to assume is either natural for them, or medically or pathologically induced, because they don’t appear to be receiving life support.”

“So nobody popped them into cryo chambers?”

“Nobody popped them into cryo chambers. And I don’t have enough medical files on this syster to know if this response is considered normal for their species. They might estivate, for all I know.”

Tsosie folded up his glare. He rubbed his temples with his forefingers and thumb. “Dr. Jens, can you load some ayatanas for—Sally, is there a name for these folks I can pronounce with my vocal equipment?”

“Darboof,” she supplied cheerfully.

“I’ve already got it loaded,” I said. “They don’t estivate.”

“Checking my registry—which is comprehensive—the Synarche Packet Vessel I Bring Tidings From Afar is a fast packet, which means he is one of the rare vehicles that could keep up with us. But the shipmind—Afar—is also nonresponsive.”

Mostly, mail gets around the Synarche by piggybacking on a series of transponders located at the waypoints where ships drop out of white space to visit stations, or just to change direction. They exchange data with any passing ship, and eventually information propagates to its destination—faster than light, but not as fast as a fast ship flying straight. Fast ships flying straight are much more resource-intensive, however.

Fast packets like Afar also carry FTL message beacons with their own tiny white drives, which was how word that this crew needed help had reached Core General. They’d converted one into a distress beacon and sent it to us with whatever crumbs of information they had regarding what they’d found… and we’d come at a run.

Most of us looked at one another. Especially Camphvis and Hhayazh, each of whom could look in several directions at once.

“We still haven’t figured out what a fast packet is doing all the way out here to even find these folks,” Loese said.

“Delivering a message?” Hhayazh said.

Tsosie pressed his palm briefly over his eyes before he looked up again, squaring his shoulders. “It seems unreasonable to have two ghost ships to explore.”

“Well, this one is a lot more modern. And I wouldn’t say that it’s abandoned—” I glanced at Helen’s eyeless face, which turned toward me. She didn’t look accusing, I told myself. I was projecting. “—any more than Big Rock Candy Mountain turned out to be.”

“Ghost ship?” Camphvis asked.

Loese said, “Like the Flying Dutchman . Or is it the Mary Celeste ? I always get those confused.”

“I will look up Flying Dutchman ,” Camphvis said mildly. It would take more than three unruly humans to get her eyestalks in a twist.

“As Llyn said, it would be unfair to say that this ship has been abandoned,” Sally pointed out with a tone I always thought of as strained reason. AIs dealing with organic intelligences must dump a lot of processing power into patience. At least we’re rightminded. Imagine how bad it would be if we were baseline.

I never ask Sally to imagine that, though. I don’t know for sure, but it seems to me that it would be insensitive to point out that I know how annoying organics are and not do anything to fix it. She probably wouldn’t space us all, because she’d just have to pick up the bodies.

Tsosie anchored himself with one hand and made an irritated conversation-cutting gesture with the other. “What’s the differential?”

Sally said, “We are already here, and can intervene four diar before the next closest rescue ship. Which is Ruth. She’s coming in with the other crews and the Judiciary ship full of archinformists and archaeologists. They’re all ox crews, because we thought we were coming for a Terran ship. We can get some methane types out with the next wave, but it will be… a while. Somebody will have to go back with the news that we need them.”

Four diar would seem more like three for these ships, traveling as fast as they were. But the time dilation of relativistic speed wasn’t enough to make a real difference in the decision whether to risk ourselves—and the crew of the other ship—trying to stage a rescue with all the wrong equipment.

He sighed. He looked at me. It wasn’t my call whether we should commit to the rescue: that was his. My command started when the rescue began. But he was asking what I thought anyway.

“Sally,” I said, “can you show us what you’ve got on the interior?”

“Copy,” she said. “There’s some cargo that I don’t understand, also. It looks like they were printing some heavy equipment in one of the bays.”

She slid us highlight feeds of her drone reports. I found myself in Sally’s distributed perspective, floating down a cold, cold corridor in a space with nothing I would consider visible light at all. Somewhere inside me, all the methane-breather ayatanas seemed to take a deep breath and relax.

For them, home was covered in hoarfrost.

Nitrogen-methane atmospheres such as those used by the Darboof tend to be transparent in the red and infrared, though opaque on the blue end on the spectrum. Methane-breathing systers see . But the manner in which they see is not very much like ours at all, and they tend to be profoundly vulnerable to heat and radiation in what we would consider the visible spectrum.

Methanogen worlds are brutally cold and dark by human standards: they have to be, to sustain liquid methane. Instead of intaking the kinds of “organic” (carbon-based) molecules we use to build and power our bodies, methanogens metabolize hydrogen, ethane, and acetylene—and exhale methane, as we exhale carbon dioxide.

Methanogen systers use electricity and chemical reactions to move and to think, just as we do. But the mechanisms by which these operate are quite different. Some have incredibly slow metabolisms. Others, like the Darboof, have adapted to the cold of their environments by evolving bodies that are supercooled superconductors.