Lightspeed: Year One

My father paused in his cleaning to look at me. “What else would I mean?”

My heart was pounding at his scrutiny, and I knew then that the anger I felt for him, the coarse utilitarianism of his first and only attempt to contact me—to use me as a tool of his own, meticulous construction and then cast aside again—had to be coloring my view of things. No human could be so cruel, I told myself—so cold. Everyone, I had almost convinced myself, had a soft spot somewhere. Even my Bo had been kindly, in its way, by the end.

“Her,” I said at last. “That’s what you were doing, wasn’t it? Turning the Bo into something else, something not just for science, but for you. Thirty years alone out here. Thirty years—”

“I was not alone.” The terseness in my father’s voice sings out my only victory—meager, and for me already fraught with remorse. I do not say the words that follow in my head: But now you are, aren’t you?

Some losses are caverns. His, I realize at long last, are active mines.

Our breath has fogged up the tiny porthole in my L-ship berth, blotting out the farthest stars, and home. Captain Sedgwick sits on the edge of the bunk, finding his boots, hitching up his uniform to his hips but no further, not yet. I rest my hand on the small of his browned and hairy back, studying my fingers in a glimmer of starlight, as just days ago I had studied the dead Bo’s—all five digits not quite squid-like, but still strong enough, pliant enough, to hold something fierce in its grip and never let go.

GOSSAMER Stephen Baxter

The flitter bucked.

Lvov looked up from her data desk, startled. Beyond the flitter’s translucent hull, the wormhole was flooded with sheets of blue-white light which raced towards and past the flitter, giving Lvov the impression of huge, uncontrolled speed.

“We’ve got a problem,” Cobh said. The pilot bent over her own data desk, a frown creasing her thin face.

Lvov had been listening to her data desk’s synthesized murmur on temperature inversion layers in nitrogen atmospheres; now she tapped the desk to shut it off. The flitter was a transparent tube, deceptively warm and comfortable. Impossibly fragile. Astronauts have problems in space, she thought. But not me. I’m no hero; I’m only a researcher. Lvov was twenty-eight years old; she had no plans to die—and certainly not during a routine four-hour hop through a Poole wormhole that had been human-rated for eighty years.

She clung to her desk, her knuckles whitening, wondering if she ought to feel scared.

Cobh sighed and pushed her data desk away; it floated before her. “Close up your suit and buckle up.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Our speed through the wormhole has increased.” Cobh pulled her own restraint harness around her. “We’ll reach the terminus in another minute—”

“What? But we should have been travelling for another half-hour.”

Cobh looked irritated. “I know that. I think the Interface has become unstable. The wormhole is buckling.”

“What does that mean? Are we in danger?”

Cobh checked the integrity of Lvov’s pressure suit, then pulled her data desk to her. Cobh was a Caucasian, strong-faced, a native of Mars, perhaps fifty years old. “Well, we can’t turn back. One way or the other it’ll be over in a few more seconds—hold tight—”

Now Lvov could see the Interface itself, the terminus of the wormhole: The Interface was a blue-white tetrahedron, an angular cage that exploded at her from infinity.

Glowing struts swept over the flitter.

The craft hurtled out of the collapsing wormhole. Light founted around the fleeing craft, as stressed spacetime yielded in a gush of heavy particles.

Lvov glimpsed stars, wheeling.

Cobh dragged the flitter sideways, away from the energy fount—

There was a lurch, a discontinuity in the scene beyond the hull. Suddenly a planet loomed before them.

“Lethe,” Cobh said. “Where did that come from? I’ll have to take her down—we’re too close—”

Lvov saw a flat, complex landscape, grey-crimson in the light of a swollen moon. The scene was dimly lit, and it rocked wildly as the flitter tumbled. And, stretching between world and moon, she saw—

No. It was impossible.

The vision was gone, receded into darkness.

“Here it comes,” Cobh yelled.

Foam erupted, filling the flitter. The foam pushed into Lvov’s ears, mouth and eyes; she was blinded, but she found she could breathe.

She heard a collision, a grinding that lasted seconds, and she imagined the flitter ploughing its way into the surface of the planet. She felt a hard lurch, a rebound.

The flitter came to rest.

A synthesized voice emitted blurred safety instructions. There was a ticking as the hull cooled.

In the sudden stillness, still blinded by foam, Lvov tried to recapture what she had seen. Spider-web. It was a web, stretching from the planet to its moon.

“Welcome to Pluto.” Cobh’s voice was breathless, ironic.