As nearly as disembodied minds may, Guthrie and Demeter relived the centuries of their love. I have glimpsed it in my father and my mother, who are among their incarnations. It is strong and it is strange; for beneath the ordinariness he wears like armor, he is the eternal hero, while she half remembers how again and again she has been a Life Mother. But the ways in which they shared it, these particular two who sought to the black hole, that concerns no one else.
In the end, after all the knowledge was in that could be gathered from aloft, he asked, “When do we send a robot down for a proper look?”
“Soon,” she replied. “But not a robot. Telepresence would be too tricky, too clumsy, under these conditions and with this many unknowns. If nothing else, imagine what harm beyond repair we might do, bumbling around like that. No, I’ll go”
“Huh? Wait just a flinkin’ minute. I—”
Her merriment kissed him. “You haven’t shucked your machismo yet, have you?” Soberly: “In case of trouble, I think you’d be better at mounting a rescue operation. You’ve been in more roughhouses.” The soundless voice rang: “And I want to go, Anse!”
He felt the spirit of Kyra Davis, who once ranged the Solar System, smuggled him away from the enemies, waged the first space dogfight in history, and bore the first child born at Alpha Centauri. He yielded. “OK, if you insist on me hanging around up here gnawing the fingernails I haven’t got, OK” The undertone went: Come back to me, querida.
Yes, if she perished, he could doubtless find another. Although they had brought no spare copies of themselves, for they had found the emotional dangers were too great (also to a download), plenty existed on every human-settled world. But the last branch-off from her line of descent had occurred almost four hundred years earlier, a vast gap in what they had done and known together. Nor could any such union resurrect this one Demeter. Her shade must forever be among those for whom he grieved.
There are still people who say we have abolished death. It is not so. It never can be so.
Speaking little more of what mattered most, the couple set about their prosaic preparations. Study the numerous kinds of map, choose a landing site, plan a schedule of exploration, plan for as many contingencies as were readily conceivable. Plant relay satellites to keep the ship in contact wherever it was. Have the appropriate robot transfer their braincases to appropriate machine bodies.
His was gracile, six-armed, capable of swift movement and of steering equipment by remote control. Hers was twice the bulk, thickly shielded, four stout legs beneath a boxy torso, two arms ending in hands, four specialized limbs, sensory turret forward of the transceiver dish, powerpack good for a thousand strenuous hours. Once upon a time such an exchange of masculine and feminine shapes had been occasion for ribaldry; today they took it for granted.
He did generate his human face in his own turret and say awkwardly, “Have a care, sweetheart. Buena suerte.”
Her image smiled back. “Luck to you, too. Love you. Adiós.” She could not keep her fervor hidden.
He helped her exit, then stood by.
Riding a launcher down, she exulted. Again she was free, in open space. Stars encompassed her, more stars than darkness, a galaxy filled with their hundreds of billions. Dared she hope someday to know them all? And galaxies beyond them—They sang to her sensors, the multitudinous music of the spectrum. The launcher pulsed, accelerating. She recalled the feel of a horse between her knees, sunlit meadows, wind in her hair.
The planet swelled in sight until it occupied half the sky, no longer ahead but below. Crags rose jagged. Her destination came over the rim and she eased down to it. Unsecuring from the vehicle, she set foot on the world.
The site was a flat-topped, steepsided block, like a small mesa, at the middle of a broad valley. Bare and swart, it overlooked crystalline figures clustered densely as far as vision reached. Mountains walled the horizon in the west, otherwise its arc met a deep purplish heaven. Auroras flickered overhead. Beyond them burned the accretion disc, near noon. Ripplings passed through its lens, lightnings forked, annihilation raged at the white heart and sent hard radiation cataracting. Gusts of air whined thin, dry, bitterly cold. Gravity dragged. When she tuned in, Demeter heard a susurrus of hidden electric tides.
“Landed safe,” she called unnecessarily, out of ancient habit. To transmit every sensation would have required a broader band than was available, but Guthrie followed what she saw and did.
For an hour she simply peered at what lay around her. Thereafter she used instruments, optical and electronic. Finally she said, “I’m ready to start off.”
“Are you sure?” he fretted.
“Sooner or later, I was bound to, wasn’t I? Damn the torpedoes! But I will be careful, querido. I truly don’t want to hurt something this wonderful.”
Descent was tricky. She weighed over 40 percent again what she would have weighed at home. Stones rattled from underfoot and bounded downslope murderously fast. Drifts of grit slithered beneath her tread. Thrice she nearly fell. Her body could not tire, but when she reached the bottom her mind was breathing hard.
“Collect your wits, girl,” she muttered, and focused vision on a thing that rose out of the ground before her. About a meter tall, it half suggested a shrub made out of enormous black snowflakes strewn with glitter, exquisite in a goblin fashion. Her touch found it scratchy—fractal, she ascertained—and very slightly vibrant. She could trace buried connections a short distance down into the soil, then their sign was lost in background noise. Roots? No, couldn’t be.
The soil… it was not regolith: inorganic, anhydrous, but finer-grained. What chemistry had milled it?
Other businesses were mingled with a diversity of coralline and prismatic assemblages. Some were darkly ashen, some nacreous, occasional ones reflective as mirrors. Light played across their geometry, soft hues and shimmers, hard brilliances. A kilometer distant, solitary among them, a thing like an arabesque latticework reared globular, six meters high. Sparks flashed and trembled along its intertwined loops. A flaw of wind from that direction carried sounds that might have been made by glass chimes.
“Lovely, a fairyland,” Demeter crooned.
Guthrie’s response came harsh. “Easy, there. In the old stories, the genuine old stories, the fairy folk were not good to deal with.”
“But we’re the aliens here,” she answered, and set forth. Her goal was the hollow globe. Not only was it unique, lines of electric current seemed to converge upon it and flow back from it.
She heard fragile structures snap, she sensed abrupt chaos where circuits broke asunder. No matter how cautiously she moved, this ponderous body of hers crushed and split what it passed through. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she said against all reason.
“Don’t be,” Guthrie counseled. “There’s no dearth of ’em.”
“But it feels—no, you can’t feel what’s happening, can you?”
“Pain? Come on.”
“Oh, no. Except—when I’ve been a mother, and a tree or a flower died—”
“You’re not serious! Are you?”
She halted, sensing electricity fade away from her and make new patterns elsewhere, beneath the flaming lens. “Not really,” she admitted. “It reminds me… but no, it isn’t biological.”
“How could it be? Whatever carbon atoms are in this stuff, they’re secondary.” He had no cause to lecture her about carbon, the single element capable of spontaneously joining into molecules complex enough to encode life. “Remarkable, yes,” he added. “Unbelievable, if we didn’t have it right on hand. How the hell could crystals like these ever grow? Conductive hookups, semiconductors, capacitors, maybe actual heat pumps—We thought we knew fairly well what the possible geochemistries are for every kind of planet under every kind of sun. We were wrong. God damn, but we were wrong! Here’s a scientific revolution. And it’s ours, honey, ours.”