Cracking the Sky (16 page)

The TRELLIS

with
Larry Niven

Kyle refolded the napkins
and pulled the tall water drop glasses back towards the plates. Lark wasn’t due for two hours, and he’d changed the sign announcing her sixteenth birthday twice, switched placemats once, and dropped a knife on the floor. He paced.

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, Dad,” 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 non-committal, 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, world wide 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 ten 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 readouts 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 thick 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 nick-named 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 oriental. 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-OK. 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.”