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
