The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fifth Annual Collection

Canoe ^{NANCY KRESS}

“There it is,” Seth says quietly—too quietly for something so momentous. After this, there will never again be a very first approach to an alien star system by humans. The four of us are human, and we often treat Reuben like one, although personally I have my doubts about Peter.

Personal history has no place in this occasion.

Luhman 16 is just barely visible on the bridge screen. We are still pretty far from the star system, but nobody wants to miss the first visual, even though it is hardly inspiring. Two brown dwarfs, looking like tiny smudges in space. The primary, Luhman A, is spectral class L 7.5, solar mass .05, temperature 1350 Kelvin, covered by silicon/oxygen clouds. Luhman B has a partial cloud cover and observable stellar weather. The two stars, three AU apart, orbit their common center of mass every 24.3 years.

None of that matters.

What matters is that this system has planets, six of them. Two, small and cold and dead, orbit Luhman B. Three orbit the primary, close in and almost certainly dead. One gas giant, which back in the unimaginable past failed to gain enough mass to ignite into a tertiary, orbits both. Terran measurements estimated it at three times the mass of Jupiter; Reuben’s data now says it’s closer to two point six. Its period is eight months. It has sixteen moons. Its orbit is more circular than it should be, which suggests that at some point, a collision with something else changed its orbit. It is officially designated as LuhmanAB6, but we on the U.S.S. Kepler have dubbed it Canoe.

Knock knock?

Who’s there?

Canoe.

Canoe who?

Canoe survive this trip?

We got silly after emerging from the Yi Point, mostly from relief that we emerged at all. The William Herschel is the first manned test of the Yi drive, and we four are lab rats. When relief turned to silliness and eventually to boredom, things were said and done that should not have been, things that can’t be undone because even though entangled sections of space cannot be severed, human relationships can be.

“Rachel, Peter, Soledad—I’m so glad to be here with you guys,” Seth says, and there are actually tears in his eyes. We manage to smile at him, although we are embarrassed. On the conventionally powered flight here from the Yi Point, Seth grew more emotional. Long periods of claustrophobia affect people differently, despite all the pre-flight psychological testing, all the inventive ways to keep us occupied, all the careful planning. Seth has become more emotional, Soledad more briskly efficient, Peter and I… well. I should have picked Seth when, against orders, I stopped taking the libido suppressors. I didn’t pick Seth. But despite what Peter and I have done and said to each other, we are still professionals and both of us are excited by Luhman 16.

“I’m glad to be here, too,” I say. Then we get to work.

Just overnight Reuben has gathered an additional mountain of data, and we frantically analyze the AI’s analyses. Reuben delivers meticulous measurements and number-crunching; it can’t do interpretation.

“Fucking Christ,” Soledad says, and we all look up from our work stations. Soledad, who somehow says Mass all by herself every “Sunday,” usually curses only mildly, and in Spanish.

“What?” Peter says. And then more sharply, when she doesn’t answer, “What is it?”

“The planet. It’s going rogue.”

We all leap up and gather around her screen, even though we could just as easily call up the data on our own screens. They don’t convey much to me, ship’s physician and biologist, but I know what “rogue” means. Canoe’s orbit is breaking loose from Luhman AB. Maybe there was another collision, maybe it’s just a slow decay of the gravitational ties that held it so long, so far out. Whatever the reason, Canoe is moving from its star system, drifting off into space, a planet without a home.

“Change of plan,” says Soledad, reverting from analyst to captain. “We visit the inner planets later, Canoe first. Before it gets away. Peter, I need course changes.”

He nods, returns to his console, and begins working with Reuben. Seth says softly, “Going rogue. Sailing off alone into the unknown dark.”

Peter, his back to me, shifts his shoulders slightly. Seth has spoken from romantic ignorance; he can’t know about my and Peter’s vicious fight, doesn’t realize what he is inadvertently echoing.

I return to scanning spectrographic data from Canoe, looking for pre-organics. We don’t expect to find life anywhere in Luhman AB; we are here because it is so close, astronomically speaking, to Earth: six point five light years, and 36,000 years ago, only five light years. We are here because Joseph Yi invented the Yi Drive, which uses the entanglement of certain sections of the substrate underlying space, and this is one of them. We are here to see what another star system is like. We are here because this is what humans do.

Thousands of years ago, my people sailed off into an unknown sea. They set out from Polynesia in multi-hulled outrigger canoes, crossing thousands of miles of open ocean to reach as far as Hawaii, Easter Island, and New Zealand. The greatest premodern sailors in the world, they navigated by star and sun sightings, bird migration, current patterns, cloud formations—all lore passed down through generations in song. I sang the bastard versions of these songs when I was growing up on American Samoa. I am the bastard result of this heritage: Rachel Tuitama, born of a Samoan chief and an American U.N. worker.

There are only three choices in American Samoa, even for the daughter of a matai: work for the fisheries, work for the government, or get out. For decades we have had a higher rate of U.S. Army enlistment than any American state. Also the greatest number of NFL players, but that route wasn’t exactly available to me. Twenty years ago I joined up. I am well educated, superb at what I do, strong if not beautiful, very intelligent. I deserve to be here with Soledad Luisa Perez, Seth Wang, Peter Stackhouse Cameron III. And I am Polynesian, willing to set out into unknown space, out of touch with my homeland, on a barely tested ship for a basically unknown destination.

The Herschel inches toward Canoe. The gas giant grows brighter and brighter in the sky, and we’re kept busy with the new data gathered by ship’s sensors and organized by Reuben. When we finally get close enough for telescopic visuals of the moons, the four of us again gather around Soledad’s screen, the largest, as if it were a fireplace in the Arctic.

“Look at that,” Seth says. “What’s the albedo?”

Soledad says, “Point eight nine. Ice fields.”

All at once a plume shoots out from the moon. It is beautiful: a soaring high streak of white. Seth actually gasps. “Cryovolcanic activity! Launch a probe!”

Soledad nods; she is not the sort of captain to object to what someone else could construe as an order from a subordinate. This is just Seth, wildly enthusiastic. My heart starts a slow thud in my chest. An icy crust could, conceivably, indicate an ocean beneath, as was true of Europa and Enceladus in the solar system. Both moons had disappointed; the oceans held no life, not even microbial. But that didn’t mean the same will be true of Canoe 6. The odds are against it, but still…

The Herschel carries a limited number of fly-by probes, two controlled-crash landers, and one precious nuclear-powered cryobot. Only the probes are retrievable, and there is no chance of humans landing on Canoe 6—too much radiation. But the probes are directable by Reuben, and my chest swells as Soledad gives the AI directions to fly through a plume if possible, and to capture not only data but a sample of whatever the under-ice volcanoes are ejecting. The first is easy, the second will need a lot of luck.

Everybody is antsy until the first data comes back from the probe. Seth suggests card games; nobody else is interested. Peter and I avoid each other as much as possible. If Soledad notices, she doesn’t comment. Patience, beauty, tact, formidable self-control harnessing an even more formidable intelligence—I want to be Soledad Perez.

My father would scorn such a thought. “You are a daughter of Nafanua,” he always said when I misbehaved. I heard that from the time I could understand words at all. Only later did I learn that Nafanua was a goddess of war.

Data streams in. Canoe 6’s diameter is 500 miles, about a quarter as big as Terra’s moon, with a high enough density to suggest a strong percentage of silicates and iron. Its surface temperature reaches an astonishingly warm −50° Celsius. Magnetometer readings show a thin atmosphere of ionized water vapor. Camera images, which we pour over, give close-ups of areas of smooth ice, areas of domed craters, and degraded fractures.

Peter says, “There’s an ocean under that ice.”

“We can’t be sure,” Soledad says.

“Yes, we can!” Seth chokes out. He is practically hyperventilating. “Look at the libration measurements—that entire icy crust is detached from the moon’s core!”

Peter says, “Those degraded craters and fractures indicate a lot of resurfacing. That ice has partially melted and refrozen countless times. There is geological activity going on under there—maybe even an equivalent to plate tectonics.”

They start a long technical discussion. Seth is mission engineer but knows a lot of physics. The three of them toss directions at Reuben that involve equations. I cannot follow most of this, so I wait quietly until I can ask the most important question. “Do you think that ocean could be warm enough to sustain life? Maybe near thermal vents on the sea floor?”

Peter says, “Depends. If the tidal flexing from Canoe 3 is great enough—maybe.”

Seth says, “If it’s aided by enough libration—wobble in the axis of rotation, Rachel—”

I know what libration is, but I don’t interrupt him.

“—and maybe by resonance with another moon on the other side of the planet, to excite Canoe 6’s orbital eccentricity.”

Pete says, “Throw in past radioactivity and maybe some core melting, creating magma chambers that give rise to thermal vents and drive geological activity—”

“If the core is porous enough for water to flow through it, picking up heat—”

“Yes!” Peter says. They go on, driving each other into greater and greater enthusiasm, until Soledad stops it.

“We won’t know anything for sure until and unless we get more information from a cryovolcanic plume.”

She’s right, but my heart goes on thumping anyway. I am mission astrobiologist. It would be great to have a job to go with that job description. Just a few lousy microbes. It would justify everything.

How do you justify the volcanic heat of anger? If Soledad had overheard Peter and me fighting, I would never have any sort of job anywhere again.

The sex was not very good. It was not even complete, perhaps because libido suppressants are so individual, taking longer to leave one person’s system than another.

“I’m sorry,” Peter said.

“It’s okay.”

“It’s not okay. Please don’t say it is when it’s not.”

If I had left it at that, we might have been all right. You try to have the last word, my father always said. That is not good in a woman. As a child, this baffled and scared me—how could I be the daughter of Nafanua and also as obedient as he wanted? As a teenager, his words enraged me. They still do.

“I was attempting,” I said to Peter, “to console you.”

“I don’t need consolation!”

“Fine. You just—” I stopped myself.

He did not. “I just what?”

“Nothing.”

“God, you look so smug. I just should accept failure?”

I shrugged. “If that’s what you want to call it.”

“Your face called it that.”

But it was his face that tipped us over the edge. I have seen that look before, many times, before I saw it on Peter Stackhouse Cameron III: outrage at being judged by someone considered inferior. I said, “My face calls things by their true names.”

“Really? And what is the ‘true name’ for what just happened here? This wasn’t my failure. If you hadn’t wheedled me into sex I wasn’t interested in, or if you were more appealing, I might have responded more!”

Fury took me then. “More appealing? You mean ‘more white’?”

“I didn’t say that. Don’t put words in my mouth.”

“Nothing else about me was happy there.”

It escalated from there. All the boredom of a long flight in cramped quarters, all the unadmitted uncertainty about this expedition, all the buried histories of both of us, so carefully compensated for during the mission selection process, rose in a boiling mass. Two boiling masses. Before it was done, both of us, intelligent people, had located and lacerated the other’s most vulnerable point.

“You are only on the Herschel because of your daddy’s WASPy political connections and your photogenic surface. You’re all surface—never produced a single physics paper of note, depend on Soledad to guide your analyses, can’t even keep it up in bed!”

“I can with someone who didn’t look like… like…”

“Like what? A frizzy-haired fireplug?”

“I didn’t say that!”

“You meant it!”

Rage clamped his jaw so tight—I’d been right and he knew it—that he barely got out his next words. “Don’t you ever tell me what I mean. And as to being here—do you imagine that you’d have been chosen if you weren’t the exotic hybrid needed to satisfy the mission’s ethnic quota?”

I attacked him. I’m strong, and my uppercut to his jaw caught him by surprise. I have never regretted anything so much in my life, especially since he did not hit me back. Both of us emerged, shaking, from the volcano of primitive, neutrally hijacked rage, back to our mission selves. We were United States astronauts. We imposed on ourselves icy calm. I had knocked out one of Peter’s front teeth.

I treated his mouth. Soledad of course noted both his swollen face and the new tooth growing in the organic printer, but she didn’t ask. Seth asked, all sympathetic concern. Peter said he’d slipped and fallen.

We had both fallen. The pool of dark in each human being, under the thin exterior, can be terrifying. I resolved to never let it take me again.

We get lucky. The probe flies right through a plume, captures a sample, and brings it back to the Herschel. Reuben already has spectrometer data on the plume composition: mostly water vapor and ice crystals, with some volatiles and solids. However, those could have been deposited on the surface ice by comet collisions and then picked by the plume as it ascended.

More important, Peter and Soledad have a measure of the hydrogen gas in the plume, which gives them an idea of how much energy and heat are being generated at the bottom of Canoe 6’s ocean. There’s more than expected, which sends them scrambling for theories to explain it.

The sea floor is warm enough for life, or at least this part of it is. It’s also highly saline. The microbes I so desperately hope for would have to be halophiles.

“Good luck, Rachel,” Soledad says. She touches me briefly on the shoulder as I suit up for the tiny biohazard lab. Seth hugs me. Peter nods briefly, his eyes cold.

The lab has a decontamination chamber and its own airlock to receive the probe. The equipment is state-of-the-art. But all I would have needed is a simple microscope to make the most stunning discovery of the space age. Me, Rachel Tuitama.

I send the images to the bridge. My voice is shaky. “Guys—these are complex organics. Multi-cellular. Some of them might be… may be…. there is life down there. And if these things here turn out to be waste products, which they look like… it could be complex life. I’ll know more after I… that’s a nucleus in that fourth image…”

Silence from the bridge. Some things are too big for easy words.

The silence doesn’t last, of course. And of course it’s Seth who breaks it. “Soledad—you have to send down the cryobot!”

She doesn’t agree—or disagree. She says, “Rachel, send all your images, findings, analyses—whatever you find, even if it’s preliminary. Peter, I want those models of possible subsurface conditions—all three of them—as detailed as you can make them based on Reuben’s data. Seth, run checks on the controlled-crash lander, cryobot, and all remaining probes, plus the decontamination equipment for the first two. Also run the check-up diagnostics on Reuben. We need more information, accurate information, and usable analyses.”

I stay in the lab until I can no longer keep my eyes open. The surprises just keep coming, until the biggest one of all: the life on Canoe 6 is DNA-based. Or some form of DNA, with a different base substituting for adenine, just as uracil substitutes for thymine in Terran RNA.

“How?” Seth says. By now we are all punchy from sleeplessness.

Peter says, “Are you sure you didn’t contaminate the sample with your own DNA?”

I am too tired to respond to his tone with the first thing that comes to mind: You think my DNA has a foreign molecule in place of adenine? I say simply, “I’m sure.”

Seth says, “Panspermia? Terra and Luhman 16 were closer together 36,000 years ago!”

Soledad says, “They were still five light years apart. But—I see three possibilities. Panspermia, yes. Comets hitting both Terra and Canoe 6 with similar pre-organic molecules, which so many comets carry. Or, three, there is only one optimal path for complex life to develop, given the basic building blocks, and this is it. Rachel, leave the lab and get some sleep.”

“I can—”

“Leave and sleep.”

She is the captain. But I need to know one more thing. “Soledad—”

“Yes. We will send down the cryobot. Tomorrow.”

Unlike the Herschel’s Yi drive, the cryobot is unmysterious and well-tested. The Yi drive works by “traversing links between entangled sections of the substrate underlying spacetime,” a phrase that points to a huge amount of theory and mathematics—although not, in my opinion, pointing very clearly. The cryobot, on the other hand, is a nuclear-powered amphibious bathysphere capable of melting through Canoe 6’s ice, descending slowly through its salty ocean, and sending back data as it goes. It contains well-understood instruments to make clearly defined measurements. There was no fight over funding cryobots to explore Europa, Enceladus, Ganymede, Ceres.

But we have only one, and it is not retrievable.

The four of us watch the launch, flight, and descent of the ’bot. It lands perfectly on the surface. The melter turns on and we watch the ’bot slowly disappear through layers of ice, sending back pictures and measurements.

“Clay-like particles in the ice—”

“Lower salt content than in the plumes—there might be mechanisms similar to Terra’s to maintain saline equilibrium—”

“Temperature rising… minus 2 C… plus three C…. four—”

“Madre de Dios!”

Soledad. But all of us, those exclaiming and those stunned into silence, stare.

Lights flicker in the darkness. First a few, and then more, and then more and more, until there are enough overlapping and sustained flickers to see them. Data practically screams from our screens, but nobody looks at anything but the visuals.

Creatures, swimming around the descending cryobot. They look like eels, with elongated, cylindrical bodies. They swim so agitatedly around the ’bot that it’s difficult to get a clear count. Light flickers on and off along the tops of their tiny bodies. Then, abruptly, all of them swim away at once, and the ’bot continues its slow, controlled, majestic descent.

Soledad, her voice shaky—Soledad!—says, “Rachel?”

I try to focus on the ’bot data, on the clearest visual freeze-frame, on the information in my memory. “They look like electric eels, but of course they’re not. For one thing, Terran electric eels breathe atmospheric oxygen and they’re predators. These are too small, only six inches or so. I don’t know how they pack that many electricity-generating organs into such a small body. They must eat the equivalent of krill—yes, there’s evidence of multi-cellular biota all through the water. But they have a body-length anal fin, like E. electricus. Obviously they’ve evolved to live in colder and saltier water than Terran eels….”

Seth says, “Why did they all swim off like that?”

“I have no idea.”

Soledad says, “Any ideas on how to get them to return?”

“None. We wait, I guess.”

We do, analyzing data sent back by the ’bot. Currents indicate that yes, there are thermal vents on the sea floor, plus geologic activity, and additional geothermal energy from residual core radioisotope decay. Plants, or plant analogues, wave fronds grayish in the light from the ’bot. A wealth of information about the ocean, about Canoe 6. But all of it feels anticlimactic, after the alien creatures.

“They aren’t really eels,” I say for the fiftieth time. “Even on Earth, electric eels aren’t eels. They’re a species of fish.”

“Do the eels,” Peter asks Seth with an obnoxious emphasis, “show any pattern?”

Seth has been using Reuben to search for patterns in the electric flashes. He says, “There are too many to tell. Too much noise-to-signal ratio.”

Soledad says, “What do Terran eels use their electricity for? Communication?”

Even Soledad calls them eels. I give up. “No, although they’re capable of varying the intensity of their discharges. Lower voltage for hunting, higher voltage for killing prey or defense. Big ones can produce 800 volts, more if they double up their bodies. They will stun and eat small mammals, even. But we haven’t seen anything here to attack. My guess is that these are herbivore-analogs, although I can’t be sure without dissecting one.” Which is not going to happen. We aren’t equipped to get below Canoe 6’s ice, and the eels—damn it, now I’m doing it!—can’t get up here.

Soledad frowns. “If they don’t use the electricity for getting food, then why did it evolve?”

“I don’t know.”

“Doesn’t such a biological adaptation take energy?”

“Yes.”

“But then—”

Seth says, “They’re back.”

There are no electric eels in Samoa; the genus is South American. Samoa has true eels, five species of Anguilla. And we have Sina.

Sitting on my father’s lap, skin to his bare chest, my eyes wide as stars as he told the story: “Once there was a beautiful maiden named Sina who kept a pet eel. The eel grew bigger and bigger, and it fell in love with Sina’s beauty. When the eel tried to grab her, she ran away. But the eel followed her, hiding in the village pool until Sina came for water. Sina cried, ‘E pupula mai, ou mata o le alelo!’ But the demon eyes staring at her did not go away.

“The village chiefs killed the eel. Before it died, it asked Sina to plant its head in the ground. A coconut tree grew there. Now, whenever Sina drank coconut, she was kissing the eel. See, Rachel, the marks on your coconut? Two eyes, and a mouth from which you must drink.”

I have no coconuts aboard the Herschel, and my father is dead. But I have the memory—growing from danger, the coconut tree that nourishes. A gift from the dying.

This time, only six eels swim around the cryobot. Seth sets the ’bot’s lights to an optimal level for recording. The eels advance, retreat, advance again in patterns too repetitious to be random.

“They’re dancing,” Peter says, enough awe in his voice to make me briefly remember why I had once wanted him. Briefly.

“It’s not necessarily an indicator of sentience,” I say. “Bees dance from instinct.”

“It’s beautiful,” Seth says.

The dance goes on for about three minutes. Then all six eels swim away.

“Seth?” Soledad says.

“Reuben is running the programs now. Wait… look.”

We look. Even I, the non-physicist, can see the pattern displayed graphically on the screen. Each eel advanced to almost touch the ’bot and flash its light, then retreated. Another approach, with two touches-and-flashes. Another, with three. The eels’ approaches were not synchronized; each was acting independently of the others. A swim completely around the strange object on the sea floor, and then the whole thing was repeated at different points on the ’bot.”

Peter says, “They can count!”

“Maybe,” says Soledad, always more cautious. “Can this be evolved behavior for any non-sentient reason that anybody can think of?”

No one answers. My head feels numb, as if my entire skull has been iced down after injury. But this isn’t injury, this is—

“We need to try to communicate with them,” Soledad says. “When they come back. If they come back.”

Seth spins around on his chair, tears coursing down his cheeks, carrying the emotion for the rest of us. “We’re not the only intelligent beings in the universe.”

I stare, dry-eyed, at the screen patterns. A daughter of Nafanua does not cry. Not even if the first-discovered alien life is on a dying moon around a planet drifting into darkness.

When the eels return, we are ready. The cryobot has no display screen—who would have expected to need it?—but we can control much else about it. We flash the ’bot’s lights: one pause two pause three pause, repeat. The eels respond, each with a touch-and-flash. We count by flashes to ten; they return only three.

Peter says, “‘One-two-three-many’? That’s the counting pattern of some very primitive primates.”

“Maybe,” Soledad says. “Seth, try primes.”

First, however, comes another eel dance. Seth, recording and running algorithms, says, “This dance exactly matches the first one. To the centimeter.”

I say, “Without hands to make tools, it’s possible their culture advanced along biological patterns rather than technological. Like dolphins. But they might have quite sophisticated social and communicative lives. Language, dance, song.”

Seth says, “I’m not picking up sound waves from them.”

“Pheromonal, then? Are there patterned chemical shifts in the water?”

Determining this takes some time, while the eels finish their dance and, just as abruptly as they arrived, swim off.

“Yes,” Seth says eventually. “Precise chemical shifts between eels. They’re communicating.”

Peter says, “But why not use sound waves? Less dissipation, and you can cover greater distances.”

I say, “Maybe they do, but under different circumstances than these. I mean—there might be protocols for greeting strangers that are different from communication among themselves.”

We try to investigate that, with no success. The eels return every eighty-seven minutes, but we have no idea how they track that time, or what the timing means, or much of anything else. Each time they return to the ’bot, the eels do a different dance; we have no idea what any of them mean. We try flashing a sequence of prime numbers; they do not echo it. We try Fibonacci sequences, spoken words, “Mary Had a Little Lamb” in musical tones—all at a risk of emitting soundwaves that might have violated some important eel custom. No response to anything. Meanwhile, plumes of water continue to rise from the same area of the moon, and we gather more physical data.

Frustration mounts. Soon the Herschel must move on. There’s only so much fuel, so many supplies, so much time before we have to return to the point where the Yi drive will switch on to snatch us back to the solar system. That’s how I think of it, anyway, when I think of anything except the eels. I even dream of them at night. In my dream, eels drift separately in the cold of space, each one with my face.

When I find Soledad alone, getting another cup of coffee in the tiny ward room, I ask my question. “How long—I know you might not have a precise answer to this, but generally—how long can the eels survive while Canoe 6 wanders away from its star?”

She takes a long sip of coffee. Something in her manner tells me that she and Peter have already worked this out, and that the answer isn’t good.

“You already know that sea-floor volcanism is the main source of heat for the moon. Resonance with Canoe 3 also provides some through increased tidal flexing, but that’s going to be lost soon—the data already show a lot of orbital decay in Canoe 3. And the weather on Canoe is getting more violent, spewing out increased radiation on all the moons. Basically, everything is going to go to hell once Canoe gets a certain distance from Luhman, although temperature calculations could vary as the—”

“Soledad,” I say, “how long?”

“It’s already getting colder in the ocean. From the historical data Reuben’s been collating.”

“How long? Best and worst estimates before all the eels die, of cold or anything else.”

Soledad looks at my face. If she was going to say anything about specie variation in endurance factors, she changes her mind. “Best estimate, fifty Earth years. Worst—ten.”

Ten years. Enough time. I have to be careful how I present my idea. “We could—”

“Oh my God! Come in here, quick!” Seth screams from the bridge. We race along the passageway, joined by Peter from his bunk, wearing only boxers.

The eels are back, only twenty-seven minutes from their last appearance. This time there are hundreds of them, including juveniles. They swim as a group toward the ’bot, then away, then toward, then away. It doesn’t take an astrobiologist to interpret the message. Seth says, “They want us to follow them! Soledad?”

She hesitates. It isn’t easy to move the cryobot once it’s settled into mud, and moving it risks damage as temperature and pressure change. Finally she says, “Yes. Go.”

On my screen, I see the reflection of her crossing herself.

Seth issues directions to Reuben, who says in its deliberately mechanical voice, “This action may damage this equipment, or parts of it. Confirm?”

“Confirm,” Soledad says.

The cryobot rises from the mud and we all hold our breaths—would the legs hold? This is not what the thing was intended for. If the legs do hold, will they travel? The terrain is so uneven, with the equivalent of quicksand areas. How far would the ’bot have to go?

Not far. Seventeen point eight meters, and the eels stop swimming ahead and cluster around the ’bot. Seth sets it down.

Peter, seated in his underwear at his console, says, “Not good. There’s a potentially active vent ten meters away, right at the limit of the ’bot’s illumination. If it sends up another plume, the ’bot could be damaged. It—”

“They’re dancing,” Seth says. “Oh!”

The entire swarm of eels begins to move, but much differently than before. Their motions are slow, draggy. Then, all at once, every single one of them turns over and floats face down as they extinguish their lights. Only the ’bot illuminates them, a ghostly school of fish miming death.

They know.

Peter gasps, “How—”

I choke out, “I don’t know. Changing water temperature, maybe changes in the magnetic field coming off canoe… Terran birds migrate by magnetic field…”

The eels turn over and flash their lights. Now all but one swims to the other side of the ’bot and out of sight. The one swims in the opposite direction and stops, motionless.

Seth says, “What the—”

The thermal vent blows. A gush of water and rock and ice and the eel is gone. Simultaneously, the bridge screen that is permanently trained on a close telescopic view of the moon shows a plume rising from the surface, a white streak across the dark sky.

I grope for my chair and sink into it. No one speaks. Then Seth says, “He’s dead. He rode the plume up and… they understand that we must be on the other side of the ice. How—”

Soledad says, “I don’t know. Except…. except that they are much more sophisticated than we thought, much more intelligent.”

I say, “They’ll do it again.”

Peter says, almost angrily, “How do you know?”

Because Polynesians set out again and again onto the uncharted ocean as population pressure made them need more islands.

I cannot, will not, say that to Peter, or to any of them. “Because that’s their only chance. We are their only chance.”

Seth says, “If they’re that intelligent, then they know that their… their messenger was already dead the second the thermal vent geysered.”

“Yes,” I say.

Soledad says, “If Rachel is right, the least we can do is capture a specimen. I’m going to station a retrieval probe in geosynchronous orbit over the vent spot.”

A specimen. But I say nothing. Quarreling over language isn’t worth risking the chance to touch an alien being. Or to save all of them.

An eel is so small. The retrieval probe lasts through five more plumes before it runs out of fuel and crashes to the surface. So does the second probe. We do not get a “specimen.” An alien. An intelligent being.

And we have to leave Canoe.

“We have all the data we’re going to get,” Soledad says. “And we can’t do any more here.”

I’ve waited this long, because bringing home an alien, even dead, would have helped so much. But now I have to speak.

“We can’t do more here,” I say. “But we can get ready to do more on Terra.”

Seth says, “What?”

“We can throw every bit of weight and persuasion and threats, if necessary, around the idea that the next mission has to be back here, not to Wolf 1061 as planned now. A rescue mission, with equipment to bring back a lot of the eels in tanks with their own water and pressure and temperature. A rescue of our interstellar brothers. After all, they have a form of DNA!”

Seth says, “Bring back? As some sort of zoo animals? I didn’t think you, of all people, would want that!”

You, of all people. It goes deep, that setting apart of “the other.” But I can’t afford that fight right now. I say, “Not zoo animals. Fellow beings. Guests, at first. Then immigrants. We can do this—Soledad, you said the eels have at least ten years, maybe as much as fifty. That’s enough time for Terrans to get back here.”

Peter says, “What do you mean ‘threats’?”

“Threats to campaign against any other mission than rescue. In the media, to the government, to other countries if we have to. Go over the heads of the mission planners.”

“You’re talking about our careers,” Peter says. “Risking them!”

“Yes. But to save an entire intelligent species!”

Soledad says, “Rachel—you’re assuming that persuasion and/or threats will be necessary. That the government won’t see by themselves that a rescue mission to Canoe should supersede the Wolf 1061.”

Yes. I am assuming that. But her steady look makes me ask myself: Is my distrust of the U.S. government coming from knowledge or from my own prejudices? The question is like a plume of cold water.

I say lamely, “If they won’t agree right away, I mean.”

Peter repeats, “We would be risking our careers.”

Seth—thank Nafanua for Seth!—turns on him with all the idealism of the romantic. “What does that matter next to the eels’ entire extinction? Rachel, I’m in.”

Soledad says, “This is something for more thinking, and then more discussion.”

I say, “Okay. But these dead eels, one in each plume and more to come because how will the eels know that we’ve left here? They won’t. These eels—” I fight to keep my voice steady.

“These messages must be honored. They are a gift from the dying.”

There is nothing interesting in the rest of the Luhman 16 system, or at least nothing as interesting as Canoe. Or as the discussions that we four hold, endlessly. Sometimes the discussions are rational, looking at data assembled for the hypothetical rescue mission. Sometimes they’re acrimonious, when steps are discussed to follow a turn-down by the government. Sometimes they’re hopeful. But always they are inconclusive.

And always the eels are on my mind, in my dreams, mixed with my memories, until it’s the face of the alien eel I see on each imagined coconut, instead of the two stoma and one drinking hole my father traced for me so long ago.

Canoe travels steadily outward, away from its sun, even though the visual looks no different to me.

After the trip to the Y Point, the jump into the Yi drive is less scary than it was the first time since, after all, we survived once. But it’s still a leap into a mostly unknown state with barely proven physics. We’re all a little subdued on that last day in the Luhman 16 system.

As I prepare for bed in my tiny quarters, a knock sounds. I open the door.

“Rachel,” Peter says stiffly, “I’ve come to apologize.” He grimaces; this is not easy for him. “I said untrue and unforgivable things to you. I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry, too,” I say, probably even more stiffly. ‘For my words and my… for attacking you.”

He smiles, not warmly. “Daughter of Nafanua.” And then, “I’ll support the rescue-mission idea. Even at risk of my career.”

A huge surprise. I expected Peter, not Soledad, to be the hold-out. But how much do each of us really know about what goes on inside others? I nod at him.

“Good night, then.” He turns and I close the door.

I will never like him, will spend as little time with him as possible. But we are linked, as surely as a section of sub-space near Luhman 16 is inexplicably entangled with a section near Terra. Peter and I are entangled by this rescue crusade, by the memory of what happened between us, by just being human together. Little as I may like it.

I go to bed and lie in the dark, staring at the ceiling as if it were an ice shelf above me, calculating, with all the mathematical ability that the eels do not possess, our chances of saving them from the lonely dark.