Boot steps. Henry’s signature slow shuffle identified him before he rounded the corner into the huge galley. The older man surveyed the perfect table, and his lips curled into a slow smile. "Quit worrying, Kyle," he said. "She won’t say so, but she’ll be glad to see you."
Kyle sighed. "I haven’t been here much this year." Henry watched over Lark when Kyle was visiting Charon. Too often.
Pluto was beautiful as it fell towards the windy dark of aphelion. Crystalline methane and nitrogen clouds sparkled as the light from the base hit them from below, illuminating a gauzy barrier between the frozen surface and the heavens. The clouds drifted across Charon’s face. Charon never moved in the sky: directly overhead from where the trellis touched down, a brilliant white sphere where Earth’s Moon would have been tiny and flat.
From Charon Kyle could see stars, "A handy thing," he reminded Lark whenever he left, "for an astronomer." On Pluto the refreezing atmosphere hid them. Lark fought him, wheedling and demanding, until he let her stay on Pluto after the changing skies made his work impossible here. The base personnel were her family, and Kyle didn’t have the will to fight her. He told himself Little Siberia on Pluto was better for her than the larger and more frenetic Christy Base on Charon. He’d have to watch over Lark in Charon. Here, she was safe. It meant they were separated for months at a time.
Lark worked. Everyone over twelve in Little Siberia base worked.
Lark was sixteen. For years she had been obsessed with the genetically engineered creepers that rooted at Charon and carried water to Pluto’s icy but almost waterless surface. It was a fitting job for a student. The creepers themselves had been shaped by a Christy Base school project in 2181, two years after settlement of the Pluto/Charon bases, while the twin planets were still falling toward the Sun and Pluto’s atmosphere was rebuilding itself. Now, in 2240, a strange white forest spanned the 17,000 klicks between the two white planets. Named after the mythical river guarded by the boatman Charon, the forest Styx was a writhing mass of wide hollow limbs, translucent spiked leaves, and diaphanous flowers clinging to a Hoytether trellis that spanned the gap between the twin planets. Generations of genetic engineers, most of them students, had nurtured and changed the creepers, giving them a high metabolism that manufactured heat and food, turning them into conduits for food, water, and energy. Manipulating the creepers was rich entertainment for bright minds locked in a frozen system.
The creepers mystified Kyle.
Lark was there now, a hundred and sixty klicks above Pluto base, crawling down toward Little Siberia in her tiny exploration module. Henry monitored her progress, keeping her father’s presence at Little Siberia a surprise.
Kyle looked over at Henry. "Did you hear from her? Is she on her way?"
Henry grinned, slow and lazy, not answering immediately. Kyle usually felt like water running downhill past molasses when he was around the older man. He made himself stand still and at least look patient. Finally Henry said, "She’s on her way. Calm down."
"I haven’t seen her for three months. She listens to you. She might not even notice I’m here."
"That’s the way of all teens," Henry said. "It’s not about me."
Kyle smiled tiredly. "I brought her a present." He produced a box from the nearby table, opened it, and held up a yellow dress with orange and black ribbons lining the bodice and strung through the skirt. Little metal balls hung on the ends of the ribbons. "I got her some leggings, too, so it’ll work in Pluto gravity."
Henry shook his head. "Impractical." He was still smiling. "You paid to freight that over, and you’re going to freight it away as well? It must have cost a pretty penny."
"Henry–sometimes you just gotta let go and do something stupid. Lark’s birthday is today–not after we get to Jupiter. We’re leaving in two months. Maybe. I’m competing for a grant to work at Jupiter next year. Lark will need something nice to wear at Jupiter Station. Besides, Chuska Smith makes these. Almost all of us parents with teens pitched in to help her pay the material freight last ship. The kids on Christy Base are excited about moving on."
"Lark isn’t."
"I know." Lark loved Pluto. "She’ll understand when we get to Jupiter. I’m looking forward to showing her Cassini University."
"You think about every place but here."
"Yeah, well, this is the end, Henry. The end of the solar system, and they’re not even planets. Dead end of an astronomy career, too. All the best scopes are on remotes now. There are jobs in Jupiter System, and I have to pay for Lark’s schooling. So it’s not like there’s a choice. Have you decided where you’re going yet?"
"They’ll let an old codger stay until the last ship. Maybe I won’t leave at all."
"You could come with us. Surely they need general repair people at Jupiter Station. Pluto won’t be safe in a few years."
"Yeah, I know, maybe I’ll be blown off by the cyclonic winds of a dying atmosphere." It was a joke–Pluto’s atmosphere was barely thicker than vacuum–but Henry’s voice was flat and noncommittal, his eyes rolled up so the whites showed. "I’m seventy-three, you know. Maybe I’ll hang around as far towards aphelion as I can, and send back data."
"We’ve got automatic sensors for that. You have to think about what you’re going to do." Kyle folded the dress carefully, and set in the box. "Hey, Mars Adventurer is scheduled for . . ." he looked at his watch, ". . . now. Join me?"
"Nah. There’s enough excitement in my life. Besides, don’t you know those are staged? But you go ahead–keep your mind off waiting. She’ll be down soon." Henry shuffled off.
In 2240 CE most of humanity had stopped going anywhere. Travel was too uncomfortable. Even if you never left your own planet, there were changing time zones, motion sickness, unpredictable cuisine . . . and security. Security wasn’t just to stop terrorists and fleeing tax dodgers; there were plague carriers to be stopped too. Viruses changed faster than antibiotics.
Business could be done via virtual reality, worldwide and further. Social relations could be confined to neighborhoods; dating could be done by VR first. The few who still traveled for pleasure now had a higher calling.
They were called "adventurers." They were loaded with sensors to record everything they experienced. They risked their lives and comfort in ways most folk would never consider, in banned national parks, proscribed religious sites, into volcanoes, undersea . . .
Justine Jackson was the scheduled pilot aboard Mars Adventurer. Kyle paid his tourist fee and pulled up a chair to watch the feed. Today Justine was flying an ultra-light glider over the Valles Marineris. The screen took the top half of the east wall of the huge galley. The galley was built to serve a full base; Little Siberia was about 10 percent staffed. It was like being alone in a movie theatre designed for two hundred.
Kyle watched steep red and yellow-orange walls fly by under the glider. He kept one eye on read-outs from Justine’s body-monitors. You couldn’t feel what Justine was going through, but if you could read the telltales, you could imagine. Advanced viewing systems would give motion too.
Suddenly the view spiraled as she did a full 360, a stomach-twisting shift from red canyon to orange sky to red canyon. Justine’s heart rate started to rise as she finished the loop and banked into a roll, signaling how hard the trick really was.
One day the suits would record smell and taste.
But real time would never crack lightspeed. Even though the feed was hours old, it was ahead of any news. The familiar tension about whether Justine would fall to sudden death on the floor of Valles Marineris kept Kyle’s eyes glued to the screen.
Most top adventurers eventually died.
The screen flickered abruptly to black. Had something happened to Justine?
"Kyle?" Suriyah’s voice blasted loudly across the in-base communications.
Kyle blinked, absorbing the abrupt shift.
"Kyle? Can you hear me? There’s a problem."
The screen glowed back to life.
He was looking into the Styx. Vines intertwined, moving, a cross between seaweed and woods, deeply shadowed despite light amplification.
The view was from inside Lark’s ship. Stems twisted around one of the motorized arms, a leaf flapped across the field of view, barely lit and almost translucent, visible more by how it changed the look of the stars than by itself. The perspective changed to another camera facing the dense center of the forest. Stems and leaves were close here too. Spectral white shapes so thick he could only see two stars, and a rim of icy white Charon. The view jumped again, looking down: vines converging to a point on Pluto’s brighter quake-patterned white.
"She’s trapped," Suriyah said.
"Trapped?" It dawned on him that as the cameras cycled, he was seeing nothing but more forest. She wasn’t up against the Styx; she was in it. "She went too far in?"
"She can tell you herself."
"Lark?" She didn’t answer. A shiver ran through him as the images registered. His daughter was stuck a hundred and sixty kilometers above him, caught between worlds in a strange forest.
"Suriyah, I’m coming." Help would be in the communications room.
Half the twenty inhabitants of Pluto Base were already in Communications. Henry was there. He was looking at the only other child on base besides Lark, a blond ten-year-old boy named Paul. "No," Henry was saying, "See, Paul, if we took a regular transport ship, the exhaust would kill the creepers, and we couldn’t help Lark anyway. Transport ships can’t dock with a research bubble."
Kyle interrupted, "Can’t she get loose herself? Her thruster works, right?"
Paul answered. "She’s already tried."
"All right, then . . ." Think. A research bubble was tiny. The hull was transparent, but you had to see around eight extension arms of variable size and their thick mooring points, plus a water tank and the magnetic confinement for a fleck of antimatter in a swivel-mounted motor. In the habitat bubble there was only room for Lark in her pressure suit, and the rest of Shooter wasn’t much bigger. "She could use the arms to grab onto a transport and let it pull her loose."
Suriyah noticed Kyle’s arrival. "No, Kyle, she’s too deep. The vines have been growing around her since she got trapped." She stood next to him and put an arm on his shoulder. Her dark eyes were smoky with worry. "You’d better talk to Lark." She pointed at the bank of observation screens.
Kyle stepped closer. There were images he’d seen from the galley. Another was Lark, using the video link. Her face was pinched, angry.
"Lark?"
"Dad? You’re on Pluto?
"It’s your sixteenth birthday."
"Well, then, I’d better get down there," she said dryly. "But first, I seem to have gotten the marble stuck."
She could have sounded happy to see me here. Kyle had nicknamed the bubbles ‘marbles’–they were clear and round, and the most color was always the observer inside. They had become Shooter and Cleary when Kyle and Lark talked about them. Lark fitted into Shooter like the egg in an eggshell. Her pressure suit was painted as a gaudy Earthly sunrise, primarily bright yellow. It was plugged into Shooter’s systems via a thick umbilical. Within the fishbowl helmet her black hair was pulled back so tightly her dark eyes looked asian. She’d painted yellow streaks into her hair.
"Are you hurt?" he asked.
"No. Twitchy. I broke one of the big grabbers trying to get loose. One was busted already, you know. Shooter’s older’n I am. Two grabbers are twisted up in creeper. The little grabbers are useless. I’ll ruin this damned thing if I keep trying to power out of here."
How did she get a round ball caught in a forest of long vines? A ball festooned with mechanical arms and sampler tubes . . . "Can you go a different direction?"
"I tried backwards and forwards. I’ll shoot for a roll next, I guess."
"You can ruin all the grabbers you want, honey. Just don’t hurt yourself."
"Duh."
Henry contradicted him, "Lark, if you break off an arm, you’ll breach the hull. Stop wiggling the ship randomly. And go to voice-only."
The screen images froze. "Got it," Lark replied, her image in the screen suddenly frozen with an angry, determined look on her face.
"Don’t do anything until we tell you," Henry said. "Think about conserving power. You can turn the video on again when we have a plan."
"Stay calm," Suriyah said, "Breathe deeply, slowly. Relax. Go easy on your water."
"I was fully stocked when I left. That’s power and food enough for days."
"Ten of them, if you’re careful," Henry said. "We’ll have you back in time for your party. But that’s no excuse for waste."
"A-okay. Think I should try for the roll? I can use the little adjustment jets."
"Hang on and let us analyze for a bit." Henry clearly had control.
"You’ll be fine," Kyle said. "We’ll think of something." His stomach was a knot and his fingernails bit into his palms. "If nothing else, you can climb down." No, wait, those ten days worth of air and water were in Shooter! Not the suit!
"Dad, the door’s jammed. I’ve already tried getting it open."
"I’ll be listening, Honey," Henry said. "Just relax and stay available for questions." He turned off the feed that sent the general conversation to Lark.
Paul edged towards the monitors and looked at the one with Lark’s image still frozen on it. "Will she die?" he asked.
Henry put a hand on the boy’s shoulder. "Not if we can help it." He squatted to Paul’s height. "It’s a tough situation. She’ll have to get herself free somehow. You and I can help Lark figure out what to do."
"Can’t we take the other marble?" Kyle interrupted. "I could use the arms to tear my way in–"
Henry shook his head. "The thruster died last week. It’s not repairable. I ordered another one, more advanced. It’ll be on the next ship, the one you’re supposed to leave on."
Kyle winced. More things were breaking and less was being done to fix them as the base lurched towards the end of its useful life. He had no idea what to tell Lark to do. "Lark, can you tell me exactly what happened? I’m sure you said, but I wasn’t in here to hear it. It’s hard to visualize without outside cameras."
"Suriyah sent a remote cam right after I called her. But it’ll be thirty minutes; it had to prep itself before it launched. The left-side grabber broke months ago. Henry and I tied it down. I checked it before I went out. It’s even on the ship-check sheet since it’s been trash so long."
Kyle looked at Henry, who sighed.
"Well, it was tied down, I checked! I was going to the midline of the Styx. You got the vines growing in both directions, Dad, and now it’s weaving a kind of net. It looks really good. I’m trying to study the autotrophic processes in the healthier plants. Something is . . . changing; they’re becoming more active as we get further away from the Sun. You’d expect them to be slower since it’s colder. I want to understand before we have to leave."
Suriyah and Paul were drawing in the corner, looking at the stilled video images and working on a slate. Their whispering was distracting. Kyle moved closer to the mike. "Okay, honey, but how’d you get stuck?" He winced. She hated it when he called her "honey." Sixteen-year-old girls were touchy.
To her credit she ignored the slight. "I . . . I don’t know. The arm must have broken free. I got too close. Anyway, a pretty thin leaf-vine got stuck in it, and I wasn’t going very fast, but it jerked the marble and shifted my course. That’s when the real problem came with the arm; anyway, that’s when I could tell it was dangling freely, and since I was still moving it caught more stuff, and then slammed me into a big vine. I tried to use the topside arm, and I . . . I . . . just got it tangled, too. So I decided I’d try and thrust out of here, and I put it at full power."
Lark sounded defensive; she wasn’t supposed to use full power in the creepers. "You didn’t have a choice, honey." Damn it–there was that word again. What was wrong with him? "It was a good choice, Lark."
"It wasn’t good. The marble was too stuck, and the topside arm broke, and I didn’t get out. That was when I called Suriyah." Lark was quiet, then she said, "There’s a big vine blocking the door, Daddy. It’s feeling around the edges, but the heat leakage has it stopped. But I can’t even go EVA to cut myself free." There was a tremor in her voice.
"We’ll figure it out. Henry and Suriyah and Paul are working on something right now."
Kyle paced. Suriyah had shooed the others out, so only the four of them, and Lark’s frozen face, remained. Kyle talked to Lark off and on, encouraging. She was getting impatient. Kyle felt lost. This wasn’t fair–they were supposed to be having a party. His fists clenched as he kept pacing, nervous. What was taking so long? Why wasn’t Lark already on her way home?
The remote camera was in place, its feed playing on one large wall. As the camera flew closer around Shooter, the damage to two of the arms was clear. One was missing half its length. Shooter was so enmeshed in creeper it looked like it was purposely tied down.
After two hours, Henry keyed Lark, and said, "Okay, we’re ready to go. Turn on your video."
Lark’s frozen image had looked angry. The animated face that replaced it in the live feed looked calmer, serious. The whites of her dark eyes were red. Lark didn’t show any hesitation as she followed Henry’s advice, setting the small directional thrusters to given angles and strapping herself in. There was a limited amount of propellant for the little thrusters; the antimatter was confined for use in the main engine.
Kyle’s eyes stayed on the camera feed. There was a puff of propellant release, the burn of the thrusters, and the little marble pushed forward, rotating, pulling the sheet of creeper forest slightly; a tug of war. The tangle of ship and creepers moved. Lark yelped.
She’d turned off the thrusters.
Her voice was quivery, scared. "It didn’t sound right. The arm . . . the bottom-side arm sounded like it might rip off right below my feet!"
"Damn." Henry swore. "All right. Don’t crack the bubble. Damn engineers should’ve designed the arms to be released from inside."
Kyle had never heard Henry cuss. He closed his eyes briefly. "They’ll all be retired by now. Can we try again?"
"Sure, but something else." Henry directed the camera feed, again, to almost circle the knot of creeper.
Three more hours, two more failures.
A blast of the main motor fried a path through the vines, but the arms weren’t positioned to push the marble backward. Lark’s wriggling had put the marble almost on its side, but how could that change the position of the arms? And the vines were growing back into the charred path.
If an arm tore loose, if the shell was breached, Lark still had a pressure suit. That, they decided, wasn’t the problem. The problem was shrapnel, if the base of an arm spanged loose under high tension.
By the last try, the room was full again. Christy Base was in on it, engineers and pilots tossing out and rejecting ideas. Paul had been hauled off to bed by his parents, Kate and Jason, and they had come back to watch. Suriyah was crying. "Quit forcing it. That girl is in an egg–don’t break it open. She’s got time–no need to kill her now. Go eat," she said to Kyle and Henry. "Tell Lark to sleep. Food and rest will help you all think."
Kyle didn’t want to go, but Suriyah ignored his protests and Henry showed Kate and Jason the log of everything they’d tried, and asked them to look for other ideas.
Kyle couldn’t sleep. He checked on Lark, who was sleeping. He wandered the halls, lost and tired. Finally, he climbed the ladder to the telescope platform on top of the base. The scope was almost useless since the cloud cover had increased over the past five years, but he remembered showing Lark her first view of the Earth from here.
Right now, the sky was unusually clear. Charon was dead overhead, a great black shield still showing details of landscape in the sunlight reflected from Pluto. The Styx rose like Jack’s beanstalk . . .
They still couldn’t build a beanstalk, an orbital tower, on Earth. Their materials weren’t strong enough. But Charon and Pluto were mutually tidally locked–unique within the known Universe–and light enough that a Hoytether had been strung between them. A Hoytether was an array of strands, some left looser than others to take up the slack if nearby strands broke. It already looked like a trellis. And then the games those students were playing with plant DNA paid off, and Styx was born.
Kyle found the bubble in the scope. It hung motionless, huge in the viewfinder, like a soap bubble caught in a white rose bush. Unreachable. His daughter.
He must have dozed. Henry’s hand poking him startled him. "Jason said you were up. I thought you’d be here."
"This isn’t going to work, is it?"
Henry climbed the rest of the way up the ladder and slowly sat down on the observatory floor next to Kyle. The only light shone up from the door where the ladder came in, and the semi-darkness somehow made Henry look even older than usual.
"Did you find her with the scope?"
Kyle nodded.
"I’m afraid to force her free. It’s wasting power, and I don’t trust that little marble."
Kyle pictured Lark dying slowly over days, alone, knowing she was dying. "When this happened, I thought it meant she’d be late for her party. I thought she was irresponsible." He twisted his hands together, stretching his long fingers, fidgeting. "Can we cut her free from here somehow? Do we have any remotes that could do that? Can we make one?"
Henry pursed his lips. "She’s all tangled up. Good chance of cutting her free and having her float off into space, unable to steer."
"There’s no way to repair the other marble? You’re sure?" Kyle asked.
"I’m sure."
"Can we try?"
Henry looked at him gently. "We can try something–I just don’t know what yet. Keep thinking."
"She can’t climb down to us."
Kyle jumped up and started pacing again. "Can I climb to her? Cut her loose?"
"It’s a hundred sixty klicks and a bit." Henry cocked an eyebrow. Both men were quiet for long moments. "We have ten days."
"Damn. No, it won’t work. She’ll run out of air on the way down."
"She can plug into the vines. She just can’t do that with the suit she’s wearing. We’ll have to modify a suit and bring it to her."
It had stopped sounding impossible. A hundred sixty kilometers straight up, in low and dwindling gravity . . .
"It will be a hard climb. I’ll go."
"We’ll both go," Henry said.
Climbing with Henry would be slow. "Can you to stay in communications and direct the climb?"
"Jason can direct. I’m going." Henry stared up at the huge telescope. "I still pass my physical every year. I know more about what might work out there than you do. You need me. So does Lark. And two people have a better chance of getting there than one. What if you get out there alone and you get tired or hurt?"
"I’m in good shape!" Kyle protested. "I work out every day." He’d be fifty in ten weeks.
"It’s going to take more than physical conditioning to save Lark." Henry didn’t have to say she was more likely to listen to him than to Kyle.
"It’s going to be one hell of a climb. It will take endurance."
"And brains."
Kyle sighed. "Okay. So I have endurance, and you have brains. Is that it?"
"No, I have more experience in the Styx."
"I’m in better shape."
Henry didn’t even seem to hear him–he was looking up through an observatory window, where the interworld forest floated above them..
