Ian Douglas - Abyss Deep

The colony was obscured by a sudden gust of spray and windblown snow. It made me shiver just looking at it, though I couldn’t feel the actual cold.

“The place is a lot like Bloodworld,” Dubois said, turning to look back out to sea. We were standing at the edge of the icepack, though waves and spray made it a little difficult to tell exactly where the sea ended, and the ice began. “Hurricanes, high winds, hellacious storms …”

“It’s worse,” a voice told us. We turned and faced the program’s interactive agent, an older man with the look of a college professor. “I’m Dr. Murdock. I’ll be your guide to Abyss Deep this evening.”

Well, it wasn’t the real Dr. Murdock, of course, since the Abyssworld Expedition’s science team leader was currently on the planet some forty-­two light years away … assuming he was even alive now. Based on the real James Eric Murdock, the man in a civilian tunic and dark slacks was a computer-­generated image, data seamlessly woven together inside our heads by Clymer’s library AI. This simulation component was the whole point of a docuinteractive; we could ask the program questions, and it could take us through the landscape as if we were really there. The AI running the show was programmed to incorporate the voice, mannerisms, and recorded thoughts of the real Murdock, and present them as though we were actually there.

The simulated Murdock held out his hand, palm up, and a small globe representing the planet came up between us. He rotated it in front of us.

“We call the main atmospheric disturbance Abysstorm,” he said. “It’s generated by the heat of the star, and serves to transfer that heat across the planet.”

On the globe, Abyss Deep’s dayside was blanketed by a perpetual hurricane many thousands of kilometers across, pinned in place by the glare of the star directly over its eye. It showed vast, far-­reaching spirals of cloud that reached across half the planet. The nightside was completely covered by ice.

“Hang on a sec,” Dubois said, pointing. “Something’s wrong. Hurricanes are caused by the spin of the planet. Coriolis effect, right? Abyss Deep doesn’t rotate, so the winds ought to blow straight back from dayside to night.”

The simulated Dr. Murdock gave him a sharp look. “Idiot. Why do you say the planet doesn’t rotate? Of course it does.”

“Hey!” Doob said. Evidently he wasn’t used to personality coming through in a sim along with basic information. Murdock reminded me of an acid, acerbic professor of A and P—­anatomy and physiology—­I remembered from my training in San Antonio. He’d called students “idiot,” and worse, as well.

“ ‘Tidally locked means the planet rotates once in its year,” I put in.

“Precisely,” Murdock said. “GJ 1214 I does spin, and does so fairly quickly, quickly enough that it generates its own magnetic field, which is a damned good thing considering the background radiation flux from the star. It makes one rotation in just over a day and a half as it moves around its star, its day perfectly matching its year.

“The storm dynamics are quite complex, with smaller storms constantly spinning off of the one big one and following gently curved tracks around the planet and into the night. The atmosphere is fairly thin, about half of Earth’s atmospheric pressure at the surface, so a lot of the heat dissipates before it reaches the nightside. The world-­ocean traps a lot of it. Most of the dissipation, however, appears to be through molecular escape. The star turns water into steam, which rises high in the atmosphere above the Abysstorm. Solar radiation then blasts a lot of that water completely away from the planet. See?”

The model of Abyss Deep floating above Murdock’s hand developed a faint, ghostly tail streaming away from the daylight side. “In many ways,” he continued, “Abyssworld is similar to a comet … a very large comet with a tail of hot gasses blowing away from the local star.”

“That can’t be a stable configuration,” I said. “It’s losing so much mass that the whole planet is going to boil away.”

“Correct. We believe Abyssworld formed much farther out in the planetary system, then migrated inward as a result of gravitational interactions with the two outer gas giants. We don’t have a solid dating system with which to work, but it’s possible that the planet began losing significant mass as much as five billion years ago, when it would have been perhaps six times the diameter it is now.

“Abyssworld is now losing mass, which has the advantage of bleeding away excess heat. Within another billion years, though, this ongoing loss of mass will significantly reduce the planet’s size, until the entire world ocean has boiled away. At that point, Abyssworld will be dead.”

“There’s life here now?” Dubois asked. He looked around the encircling landscape, wind-­blasted waves and spray in one direction, and in the other an endless plain of undulating white ice beneath black and lightning-­shot clouds.

“Of course,” Murdock told him. “The cuttlewhales.”

Murdock turned, sweeping the ocean panorama with his arm. In the distance, halfway to the horizon, something sinuous emerged from the sea.

The thing wasn’t close enough to get a decent look at it. It was large, obviously, perhaps fifty meters or more in length, and a good half of that was arcing high above the wind-­whipped surface of the ocean. It was also obviously alive, twisting and arcing and writhing as it plowed ahead through the water, tantalizing in its mist-­shrouded obscurity. It put me in mind of a mythical Earthly sea serpent, and I wanted to see it up close.

“Can we get out there?” I asked. “Or bring that thing in close? I can’t see through the spray.”

“Sorry, no,” Murdock told me. “This is the best data we had prior to sending the last courier to Earth.”

I had to remind myself that the information I was seeing was five years out of date. Had the colony managed to make contact since then?

Had something gone wrong with that meeting … something that had ended with the colony’s destruction?

That was what we were going to try to find out.

“Some of our ­people saw one close up,” Murdock continued, “but they didn’t get any images. They said the head is something like the head of a terrestrial squid or cuttlefish … and that it could change the coloration on its body in pretty complex patterns. Dr. Samuelson believes they may use their chromataphores to communicate fairly complex ideas … which is why he reported that they may be intelligent.”

A number of species on Earth could change the color and patterning and even the apparent texture of their skin by controlling their chromataphores, which are pigment-­containing organelles in their skin. That didn’t make them intelligent, however. They used it for camouflage or to ­display emotion rather than for more complex communication. Sure, an octopus flashes dark red when it’s angry and white if it’s afraid, which is pretty complex when you think about it, but that doesn’t make them starship ­builders, either.

I found it interesting that one of the toughest jobs in xenobiology is determining whether a given species is intelligent in the first place. The jury was still out on these Abyss cuttlewhales. Hell, we still aren’t sure what intelligence is, though we know there are many different kinds, and that it includes things like problem-­solving skills, curiosity, and self-­awareness. Wegener, the guy who made first contact with the Brocs, is supposed to have said, “I don’t know what intelligence is, but I know it when I see it.”

The trouble is that often we don’t know it when we see it … or we find we’ve been looking for all the wrong things. The Europan Medusea are a case in point. Are they intelligent? Beats me. And we may well never know, simply because we don’t have enough in common with them to even begin to communicate with them on a meaningful level.