Arkfall Read online

  Arkfall

  Carolyn Ives Gilman

  Phoenix Pick

  An Imprint of Arc Manor

  ***

  Arkfall copyright © 2008/2010 by Carolyn Ives Gilman. All rights reserved. This story first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Halfway Human copyright © 1998, 2010 Carolyn Ives Gilman. All rights reserved. This book may not be copied or reproduced, in whole or in part, by any means, electronic, mechanical or otherwise without written permission from the publisher except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any actual persons, events or localities is purely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author and publisher.

  Tarikian, TARK Classic Fiction, Arc Manor, Arc Manor Classic Reprints, Phoenix Pick, Phoenix Rider, Manor Thrift and logos associated with those imprints are trademarks or registered trademarks of Arc Manor Publishers, Rockville, Maryland. All other trademarks and trademarked names are properties of their respective owners.

  This book is presented as is, without any warranties (implied or otherwise) as to the accuracy of the production, text or translation.

  Smashwords Edition

  ISBN (Smashwords Edition): 978-1-60450-418-7

  ISBN (Paper Edition): 978-1-60450-454-5

  www.PhoenixPick.com

  Great Science Fiction at Great Price

  Published by Phoenix Pick

  an imprint of Arc Manor

  P. O. Box 10339

  Rockville, MD 20849-0339

  www.ArcManor.com

  ***

  About “Arkfall”

  Carolyn Ives Gilman

  In my day job as a historian, I read and write a lot about exploration and discovery. Part of the fun of this literature is that we readers can imagine ourselves magically whisked out of our normal routines and obligations, transported to an exotic world where real-life responsibilities do not exist. But when it came to writing a story about exploration, I wanted to think about whether discovery could happen without abdicating the bonds of family and community.

  The setting for “Arkfall” evolved from a daisy chain of speculations. I was reading about Europa, a planet-sized moon covered by a global sea that is capped with ice, and I thought (as most people must), “What if there are deep sea rift zones there, as on Earth? Couldn’t life evolve there as it did here, based on the heat and minerals from deep-sea vents rather than photosynthesis from sunlight?” This was before we knew about Enceladus, which almost certainly does have volcanic activity under the ice, since it spews out eruptions of water vapor laced with organic compounds.

  That first speculation led to: “What would it be like to live in such an environment?” It seemed like life under an ice-capped sea would be claustrophobic and cautious, so I invented the sort of society that would be needed to cope with such an environment. But it also seemed like a failure of imagination to assume that residents of such a world would stick with our mechanistic technologies. So I posited a type of technology that doesn’t start with physics, but with biology. Rather than building habitats and ships inspired by the brittle mechanism, this society would invent things modeled on the pliable living cell.

  It doesn’t make for an exploration story that resembles Lewis and Clark very much—but that’s kind of the point.

  ***

  Arkfall

  1. Golconda Station

  Normally, the liquid sky over Golconda was oblivion black: no motion, no beacons to clock the passage of time. But at Arkfall the abyss kindled briefly with drifting lights. From a distance, they looked like a rain of photisms, those false lights that swim in darkened eyes. First a mere smudge of light, then a globe, and finally a pockmarked little world floating toward the seafloor station.

  The arks were coming home.

  From the luminous surface of the ark Cormorin, Osaji felt the opacity that had oppressed her for months lifting. All around her, arks floated like wayward thoughts piercing the deep unconsciousness of the sea. The sight was worth having put on the wetsuit and squeezed out to see. She was oblivious to the pressure of the deep water, having been born and bred to it. Even the chill, only a few degrees above freezing, seemed mild to her, warmed by the volcanic exhalations of the Cleft of Golconda on the seafloor below.

  After months of drifting through the Saltese Sea, the arkswarm had come for respite to the station of Golconda, the place where their rounds began and ended. Osaji’s light-starved eyes, accustomed to seeing only the glowing surface of her own ark and any others that happened to be drifting nearby, savored the sense of space and scale that the glowing domes and refinery lights below her created. There was palpable distance here, an actual landscape.

  It would have looked hellish enough to other eyes. A chain of seafloor vents snaked along the valley floor, glowing in places with reddish rock-heat. Downstream, black smokers belched out a filthy brew loaded with minerals from deep under the planet’s gravity-tortured crust. Tall chimneys encased the older vents. Everywhere the seafloor was covered with thick, mucky vegetation feeding on the dissolved nutrients: fields of tubeworms, blind white crabs, brine shrimp, clams, eels, seagrass, tiny translucent fish. The carefully nurtured ecosystem had been transported from faraway Earth to this watery planet of Ben. To Osaji, the slimy brown jungle looked like the richest crop, the most fertile field, a welcoming abundance of life. Patient generations had created it.

  Beside her, a pore in the lipid membrane of the ark released a jet of bubbles, making the vessel sink slowly toward the floodlit harbor where a dozen other arks already clustered, docked to flexible tube chutes that radiated from the domes like glowing starfish arms. It was time for Osaji to go inside, but still she lingered. All her problems lay inside Cormorin’s membrane, neatly packaged. Once she went inside, they would immerse her again.

  A voice sputtered over her ear radio, “Will she be coming in soon?” It was the Bennite idiom: tentative, nonconfrontational. But no less coercive for that. Osaji sighed, making her breather mask balloon out, and answered, “She will be pleased to.”

  Pushing off, she dived downward past the equator of the ark’s globe, gliding over its silvery surface. The top portion of the ark was filled with bladders of gas that controlled buoyancy and atmosphere, along with the tanks of bacteria and algae that processed seawater into usable components. Only at the bottom did the humans live, like little mitochondria in their massive host.

  On the ark’s underbelly Osaji found a pore, tickled its edges till it expanded, then thrust her arms and head in, pulling herself though the soft, clinging lips of the opening. Inside, she shook the water off her short black hair and removed her facemask and fins. She was in a soft-walled, gently glowing tube leading upward to the living quarters. As she walked, her feet bounded back from the rubbery floor.

  The quarters seemed brightly lit by the snaking vapor-tubes on the ceiling. As soon as Osaji entered the bustling corridor, Dori’s two children crowded around her, asking questions. Their mother peered out the aperture of her room and called to them, “Is it polite to bother her when she has so much packing to do?” The comment was really aimed at Osaji. Dori’s family had left her in no doubt that she and her baggage would be leaving the ark at Golconda.

  Osaji ran her finger along the sensitive lip of the aperture into her own small rooms, and the membrane retracted to let her through. The first cavity inside, where Osaji had lived for the last round, was stripped bare, all her belongings packed into sacks and duffels. She paused at the aperture to the adjoining vacuole and called out, “Mota?”

  “Saji?” came a thin voice from within. Osaji coaxed the membrane open and had to suppress a groan of dismay. Inside, a frail, white-haired woman sat amid a disorganized heap of belongings. Sh
e had not packed a thing since Osaji had left her. If anything, she had emptied out some of the duffels already packed.

  The old woman’s mild face lit up. “Thank goodness you’re back! I was getting worried. Where did you go?”

  “Outside. I told you I was going outside.”

  “Did you.” She was not contradicting, just commenting. No argument or reproach ever came from Mota. She was the sweetest-tempered aged on the planet. It sometimes drove her granddaughter to distraction.

  “Time is short now,” Osaji said, seizing a sack and starting to shove clothes in it. “Cormorin docks at Golconda in a few minutes.”

  “I remember Golconda,” Mota said reflectively.

  “I know you do. You must have been there sixty times.”

  “Your mother, Manuko, got off there one round and tried going barnacle. She could never get used to it. But your sister—she actually married a barnacle.” She said it as if Osaji had never heard the news.

  “Yes, we’re going to see her in a few minutes.”

  “Oh, good,” Mota said. “That will be nice.”

  Osaji didn’t say: And you are going to stay with her from now on, and set me free.

  The gentle jostle of docking came before Osaji was ready. Dori poked her head in the aperture to say, “We’ve arrived. Everyone can leave now.”

  Seething inside, Osaji said pleasantly, “In a moment.”

  Cormorin had not been a happy ark this round. When joining, Osaji had mistaken Dori’s conventional expressions of respect for real tolerance of the aged. Once under way, Dori had voiced one sweetly phrased complaint after another, and it had become obvious that she resented Mota’s presence. The old lady should not walk the corridors alone, because she might fall. She shouldn’t be allowed in the kitchen, because she might put on a burner and forget it. She shouldn’t help with the cleaning, because her eyes were too poor to see dirt. Once, Dori had said to Osaji, “Caring for an aged is so much responsibility. I already have as much as I can bear.” So she had taken no responsibility at all for Mota. Everything had landed on Osaji, making Dori hint with false sympathy that she wasn’t pulling her weight around the ark. Mota had ended the round a virtual prisoner in her room, because just seeing her seemed to give Dori a fresh case of martyrdom.

  The corridors of Golconda station were a shock to anyone fresh from floatabout. A floater’s world was a yielding womb of liquid where there was never a raised voice, never a command given; floaters all went their lone ways, within the elaborate choreography of their shared mission. The barnacles’ world was a gray, industrial place of hard floors, angles, crowds, and noise. Barnacles had to move in coordinated lockstep—cooperative obedience, they called it. They were packed in too close to survive any other way. The two ways of life were the yin and yang of Ben: each needed the other, but neither partook of the other’s nature.

  A line of porters stood by with electric carts in the hallway, so Osaji approached one, trying to conceal her diffidence. Codes of courtesy were abrupt here, because barnacles always thought time for interaction was short. The porter named an outrageous price. When she attempted to tell her story, he said the Authority set the amount, and there was nothing he could do about it. She gave in, feeling diminished.

  Mota’s baggage filled the cart, so Osaji gave the porter the address, saw the old lady safely seated beside him, and hefted her own bags to walk, more to avoid dealing with another driver than to save the money. Soon she was feeling jostled and invaded-upon. The corridor was half blocked off by some noisy construction, and the moving crowd was compressed into a narrow chute made dingy with too many passing feet and too much human exhalation. When she emerged into one of the domes, she looked for a spot out of traffic to gaze at the wonder of wide space. The brightly lit geodesic framework spanned a parklike area of greenery ringed with company shops and Authority offices. A grove of trees soared a breathtaking twenty feet over her head. They lifted her heart on their branches: she, too, had the potential to grow lofty. If only she could worm past this stricture in her life, she would be able to reach up again.

  And yet, above the trees, the weight of a frigid planetary ocean pressed down. It was a Quixotic gesture of the builders, really, to have nurtured a form of life so unsuited to the environment. Perhaps the human genome was coded for this urge to put things where they didn’t belong. Osaji knew floaters who spoke of the trees with hauteur, for they were symbols of inadaptibility. The floaters were the ones who had pioneered a truly Bennite way of life, not this transplanted impossibility of a habitat. Osaji caught her breath in wonder as a bright bird winged overhead.

  The impulse to act on her long-laid plans grew strong in her. Why not now, before she saw her family, so it would be an accomplished fact? She knew the proper place to go, for she had sought it out last round, but without enough resolve. This time would be different.

  *

  The Immigration Authority was a neatly aligned place. The agents sat behind a row of plain desks, and the clients sat in three straight lines of chairs facing them, waiting for their numbers to be called. No one looked at anyone else. The agents’ soft voices filled the room with a background of sibilant word-sounds that made no words.

  When Osaji’s turn came to face an agent, she dropped her bags in an untidy heap on the floor around her chair. She had barely sat down before she blurted out, “Your client wishes to leave the planet.”

  The agent was a young woman about Osaji’s age, but much prettier, wearing a blue uniform with a crisp white collar. Calm and competent, she said, “Why would that be?”

  Osaji had not come prepared to answer this question. She swam in a sea of reasons, drowning in them. She was afraid to open her mouth for fear she would choke on them. At last she chose one that seemed least dangerous. “To see new places.”

  “So it is a tourism desire?” the young woman asked politely. Her hands were folded on the desktop.

  “No.” Osaji realized that she had made it sound trivial and self-indulgent. “It is necessary for opportunity. To broaden one’s self.”

  “Education, then?”

  Knowing the next question would be which offworld academy had admitted her, Osaji said, “No. It is better to work one’s way.”

  “Financial enrichment?”

  “No!” That was antisocial selfishness. “A person needs to learn the ways of the great worlds, to experience different cultures. How else can a person’s mind expand? Ben is small and stifling.”

  Though she had spoken the last words very softly, the agent caught them. Outwardly, the woman did not react, but her questions changed.

  “Has the Great Work ceased to inspire?”

  “No.” Osaji shifted nervously. She still felt the Great Work of creating a habitable planet from this cratered ball of ice was a noble one, and she honored the dedication of the generations who had gotten this far. But it was slow, centuries-slow, and she would not live to see it done. If she did not leave, she would never even see what a habitable planet looked like. “It is just.... We are free to leave? They always say so.”

  The agent smiled, making her even more formidably pretty. “Of course. It is just that clients often think they wish to leave when what they really need is to solve some personal problem. It would be very selfish to ask us to spend the resources to send a person off-planet just because someone cannot face an obligation.”

  The shame Osaji felt then was like nausea, a sickness rising from her stomach. The woman had seen right through her. Osaji had tried to cloak her cowardice in brave fantasies to make it look less ugly. The truth was, leaving Ben meant abandoning her own grandmother, that sweet and helpless aged who had raised her and who now chained her with responsibility she didn’t want. It was so low, Osaji sat staring at her hands folded in her lap, unable to raise her eyes. And yet, losing her hope of escape felt so painful she couldn’t move from the chair, couldn’t let some other more deserving person take her place.

  The agent said gently, “Very few
people who leave Ben like it on other worlds. We are not suited for that sort of life. Besides, it is nobler to face things here than to flee.”

  Osaji made no sound, but prickly tears began to brim over and drip on her clasped hands. She tried to think as a noble person ought to, about bravely facing her problems, but instead she felt a black resentment. Mota would live for many years yet. Her body did not make her old; her straying mind was the problem. The disease had come upon her early—so early that Osaji, the last grandchild, did not yet have a life of her own, and so became the family solution. The true tragedy was Mota’s. But being her caretaker, there was nothing to aim for—no goal, only monotonous endurance until the end. And then what? All Osaji’s chances would be gone by then.

  At that lowest point, when her prison seemed impenetrable, she was distracted in the most irritating way, by a raised voice at the desk next to her. A wiry, weatherbeaten foreigner was berating his agent.

  “Are you going to get your prigging rear in gear, or do I have to raise hell?”

  The man’s agent, a timid young woman who looked acutely embarrassed by the attention he was drawing, tried to calm him in a low tone.

  “Don’t you whisper at me, you simpering little bureaucrat,” he said even louder. “You are going to give me a visa and a ticket on the first shuttle out of this clam steamer, or you are going to hear some real decibels.”

  “Please, sir,” she pleaded. “Shouting at your agent will not solve your problem.”

  “You don’t know what a problem is, sister. At this rate, you’re going to know pretty soon.”

  Osaji’s agent went to the rescue of her traumatized colleague. “What seems to be the issue?”

  The unkempt offworlder turned on her. He was only half-shaved, and wore mercenary coveralls. “The issue, my dear, is this whole lickspittle planet—on which vertebrate life does not yet exist. The entire goddamned culture is based on passive aggression. Don’t you all know this is a frontier? Where’s your initiative, your self-reliance? Where are your new horizons? I’ve never seen such an insular, myopic, conformist, small-minded bunch of people in my life. This planet is a small town preserved in formaldehyde. Get me out of here!”