Vacuum Diagrams

Lvov tried to recapture her mood of a few days before: when Pluto hadn’t mattered to her, when the crash had been just an inconvenience. Now, suddenly, we’re talking about threats to our lives, the destruction of an ecology.

What a dilemma. If I don’t tell of the flakes, their ecology may be destroyed during our rescue. But if I do tell, the GUTship won’t come for me, and I’ll lose my life.

Cobh seemed to be waiting for an answer.

Lvov thought of how Sol light looked over Pluto’s ice fields, at dawn.

She decided to stall. “We’ll say nothing. For now. But I don’t accept either of your options.”

Cobh laughed. “What else is there? The wormhole is destroyed; even this flitter is disabled.”

“We have time. Days, before the GUTship is due to be launched. Let’s search for another solution. A win-win.”

Cobh shrugged. She looked suspicious.

She’s right to be, Lvov thought, exploring her own decision with surprise. I’ve every intention of telling the truth later, of diverting the GUTship, if I have to.

I may give up my life, for this world.

I think.

In the days that followed, Cobh tinkered with the GUTdrive, and flew up to the Interface to gather more data on the Alcubierre phenomenon.

Lvov roamed the surface of Pluto, with her desk set to full record. She came to love the wreaths of cirrus clouds, the huge, misty moon, the slow, oceanic pulse of the centuries-long year.

Everywhere she found the inert bodies of snowflakes, or evidence of their presence: eggs, lidded burrows. She found no other life-forms — or, more likely, she told herself, she wasn’t equipped to recognize any others.

She was drawn back to Christy, the sub-Charon point, where the topography was at its most complex and interesting, and where the greatest density of flakes was to be found. It was as if, she thought, the flakes had gathered here, yearning for the huge, inaccessible moon above them. But what could the flakes possibly want of Charon? What did it mean for them?

Lvov encountered Cobh at the crash scar, recharging her suit’s systems from the life-support packs. Cobh seemed quiet. She kept her face, hooded by her face plate, turned from Lvov.

Lvov watched her for a while. “You’re being evasive,” she said eventually. “Something’s changed — something you’re not telling me about.”

Cobh made to turn away, but Lvov grabbed her arm. “I think you’ve found a third option. Haven’t you? You’ve found some other way to resolve this situation, without destroying either us or the flakes.”

Cobh shook off her hand. “Yes. Yes, I think I know a way. But—”

“But what?”

“It’s dangerous, damn it. Maybe unworkable. Lethal.” Cobh’s hands pulled at each other.

She’s scared, Lvov saw. She stepped back from Cobh. Without giving herself time to think about it, she said, “Our deal’s off. I’m going to tell the inner System about the flakes. Right now. So we’re going to have to go with your new idea, dangerous or not.”

Cobh studied her face; Cobh seemed to be weighing up Lvov’s determination, perhaps even her physical strength. Lvov felt as if she were a data desk being downloaded. The moment stretched, and Lvov felt her breath tighten in her chest. Would she be able to defend herself, physically, if it came to that? And — was her own will really so strong?

I have changed, she thought. Pluto has changed me.

At last Cobh looked away. “Send your damn message,” she said.

Before Cobh — or Lvov herself — had a chance to waver, Lvov picked up her desk and sent a message to the inner worlds. She downloaded all the data she had on the flakes: text, images, analyses, her own observations and hypotheses.

“It’s done,” she said at last.

“And the GUTship?”

“I’m sure they’ll cancel it.” Lvov smiled. “I’m also sure they won’t tell us they’ve done so.”

“So we’re left with no choice,” Cobh said angrily. “Look: I know it’s the right thing to do. To preserve the flakes. I just don’t want to die, that’s all. I hope you’re right, Lvov.”

“You haven’t told me how we’re going to get home.”

Cobh grinned through her face plate. “Surfing.”

“All right. You’re doing fine. Now let go of the scooter.”

Lvov took a deep breath, and kicked the scooter away with both legs; the little device tumbled away, catching the deep light of Sol, and Lvov rolled in reaction.

Cobh reached out and steadied her. “You can’t fall,” Cobh said. “You’re in orbit. You understand that, don’t you?”

“Of course I do,” Lvov grumbled.

The two of them drifted in space, close to the defunct Poole wormhole Interface. The Interface itself was a tetrahedron of electric blue struts, enclosing darkness, its size overwhelming; Lvov felt as if she was floating beside the carcass of some huge, wrecked building.

Pluto and Charon hovered before her like balloons, their surfaces mottled and complex, their forms visibly distorted from the spherical. Their separation was only fourteen Pluto-diameters. The worlds were strikingly different in hue, with Pluto a blood red, Charon ice blue. That’s the difference in surface composition, Lvov thought absently. All that water-ice on Charon’s surface.

The panorama was stunningly beautiful. Lvov had a sudden, gut-level intuition of the rightness of the various System authorities’ rigid pan-environment policies.

Cobh had strapped her data desk to her chest; now she checked the time. “Any moment now. Lvov, you’ll be fine. Remember, you’ll feel no acceleration, no matter how fast we travel. At the center of an Alcubierre wave, space-time is locally flat; you’ll still be in free fall. There will be tidal forces, but they will remain small. Just keep your breathing even, and—”

“Shut up, Cobh,” Lvov said tightly. “I know all this.”

Cobh’s desk flared with light. “There,” she breathed. The GUT-drive has fired. “Just a few seconds, now.”

A spark of light arced up from Pluto’s surface and tracked, in complete silence, under the belly of the parent world. It was the flitter’s GUTdrive, salvaged and stabilized by Cobh. The flame was brighter than Sol; Lvov saw its light reflected in Pluto, as if the surface was a great, fractured mirror of ice. Where the flame passed, tongues of nitrogen gas billowed up.

The GUTdrive passed over Christy. Lvov had left her desk there, to monitor the flakes, and the image the desk transmitted, displayed in the corner of her face plate, showed a spark, crossing the sky.

Then the GUTdrive veered sharply upwards, climbing directly towards Lvov and Cobh at the Interface.

“Cobh, are you sure this is going to work?”

Lvov could hear Cobh’s breath rasp, shallow. “Look, Lvov, I know you’re scared, but pestering me with dumb-ass questions isn’t going to help. Once the drive enters the Interface, it will take only seconds for the instability to set in. Seconds, and then we’ll be home. In the inner System, at any rate. Or…”

“Or what?”

Cobh didn’t reply.

Or not, Lvov finished for her. If Cobh has designed this new instability right, the Alcubierre wave will carry us home. If not —

The GUTdrive flame approached, becoming dazzling. Lvov tried to regulate her breathing, to keep her limbs hanging loose—

“Lethe,” Cobh whispered.

“What?” Lvov demanded, alarmed.

“Take a look at Pluto. At Christy.”

Lvov looked into her face plate.

Where the warmth and light of the GUTdrive had passed, Christy was a ferment. Nitrogen billowed. And, amid the pale fountains, burrows were opening. Lids folded back. Eggs cracked. Infant flakes soared and sailed, with webs and nets of their silk-analogue hauling at the rising air.

Lvov caught glimpses of threads, long, sparkling, trailing down to Pluto — and up towards Charon. Already, Lvov saw, some of the baby flakes had hurtled more than a planetary diameter from the surface, towards the moon.

“It’s goose summer,” she said.

“What?”

“When I was a kid… the young spiders spin bits of webs, and climb to the top of grass stalks, and float off on the breeze. Goose summer — gossamer.”

“Right,” Cobh said skeptically. “Well, it looks as if they are making for Charon. They use the evaporation of the atmosphere for lift… Perhaps they follow last year’s threads, to the moon. They must fly off every perihelion, rebuilding their web bridge every time. They think the perihelion is here now. The warmth of the drive — it’s remarkable. But why go to Charon?”

Lvov couldn’t take her eyes off the flakes. “Because of the water,” she said. It all seemed to make sense, now that she saw the flakes in action. “There must be water glass, on Charon’s surface. The baby flakes use it to build their bodies. They take other nutrients from Pluto’s interior, and the glass from Charon… They need the resources of both worlds to survive—”

“Lvov!”

The GUTdrive flared past them, sudden, dazzling, and plunged into the damaged Interface.

Electric-blue light exploded from the Interface, washing over her.

There was a ball of light, unearthly, behind her, and an irregular patch of darkness ahead, like a rip in space. Tidal forces plucked gently at her belly and limbs.

Pluto, Charon and goose summer disappeared. But the stars, the eternal stars, shone down on her, just as they had during her childhood on Earth. She stared at the stars, trusting, and felt no fear.

Remotely, she heard Cobh whoop, exhilarated.

The tides faded. The darkness before her healed, to reveal the brilliance and warmth of Sol.

It was a time of extraordinary ambition and achievement. The anthropic theories of cosmological evolution were somewhere near their paradigmatic peak. Some believed humans were alone in the Universe. Others even believed the Universe had been designed, by some offstage agency, with the sole object of delivering and supporting humans.

Given time, humans could do anything, go anywhere, achieve whatever they liked.