LITMIR.BIZ

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simulated Dr. Murdock gave him a sharp look. “Idiot. Why do you say the planet doesn’t rotate? Of course it does.”

      “Hey!” Doob said. Evidently he wasn’t used to personality coming through in a sim along with basic information. Murdock reminded me of an acid, acerbic professor of A and P—­anatomy and physiology—­I remembered from my training in San Antonio. He’d called students “idiot,” and worse, as well.

      “ ‘Tidally locked means the planet rotates once in its year,” I put in.

      “Precisely,” Murdock said. “GJ 1214 I does spin, and does so fairly quickly, quickly enough that it generates its own magnetic field, which is a damned good thing considering the background radiation flux from the star. It makes one rotation in just over a day and a half as it moves around its star, its day perfectly matching its year.

      “The storm dynamics are quite complex, with smaller storms constantly spinning off of the one big one and following gently curved tracks around the planet and into the night. The atmosphere is fairly thin, about half of Earth’s atmospheric pressure at the surface, so a lot of the heat dissipates before it reaches the nightside. The world-­ocean traps a lot of it. Most of the dissipation, however, appears to be through molecular escape. The star turns water into steam, which rises high in the atmosphere above the Abysstorm. Solar radiation then blasts a lot of that water completely away from the planet. See?”

      The model of Abyss Deep floating above Murdock’s hand developed a faint, ghostly tail streaming away from the daylight side. “In many ways,” he continued, “Abyssworld is similar to a comet … a very large comet with a tail of hot gasses blowing away from the local star.”

      “That can’t be a stable configuration,” I said. “It’s losing so much mass that the whole planet is going to boil away.”

      “Correct. We believe Abyssworld formed much farther out in the planetary system, then migrated inward as a result of gravitational interactions with the two outer gas giants. We don’t have a solid dating system with which to work, but it’s possible that the planet began losing significant mass as much as five billion years ago, when it would have been perhaps six times the diameter it is now.

      “Abyssworld is now losing mass, which has the advantage of bleeding away excess heat. Within another billion years, though, this ongoing loss of mass will significantly reduce the planet’s size, until the entire world ocean has boiled away. At that point, Abyssworld will be dead.”

      “There’s life here now?” Dubois asked. He looked around the encircling landscape, wind-­blasted waves and spray in one direction, and in the other an endless plain of undulating white ice beneath black and lightning-­shot clouds.

      “Of course,” Murdock told him. “The cuttlewhales.”

      Murdock turned, sweeping the ocean panorama with his arm. In the distance, halfway to the horizon, something sinuous emerged from the sea.

      The thing wasn’t close enough to get a decent look at it. It was large, obviously, perhaps fifty meters or more in length, and a good half of that was arcing high above the wind-­whipped surface of the ocean. It was also obviously alive, twisting and arcing and writhing as it plowed ahead through the water, tantalizing in its mist-­shrouded obscurity. It put me in mind of a mythical Earthly sea serpent, and I wanted to see it up close.

      “Can we get out there?” I asked. “Or bring that thing in close? I can’t see through the spray.”

      “Sorry, no,” Murdock told me. “This is the best data we had prior to sending the last courier to Earth.”

      I had to remind myself that the information I was seeing was five years out of date. Had the colony managed to make contact since then?

      Had something gone wrong with that meeting … something that had ended with the colony’s destruction?

      That was what we were going to try to find out.

      “Some of our ­people saw one close up,” Murdock continued, “but they didn’t get any images. They said the head is something like the head of a terrestrial squid or cuttlefish … and that it could change the coloration on its body in pretty complex patterns. Dr. Samuelson believes they may use their chromataphores to communicate fairly complex ideas … which is why he reported that they may be intelligent.”

      A number of species on Earth could change the color and patterning and even the apparent texture of their skin by controlling their chromataphores, which are pigment-­containing organelles in their skin. That didn’t make them intelligent, however. They used it for camouflage or to ­display emotion rather than for more complex communication. Sure, an octopus flashes dark red when it’s angry and white if it’s afraid, which is pretty complex when you think about it, but that doesn’t make them starship ­builders, either.

      I found it interesting that one of the toughest jobs in xenobiology is determining whether a given species is intelligent in the first place. The jury was still out on these Abyss cuttlewhales. Hell, we still aren’t sure what intelligence is, though we know there are many different kinds, and that it includes things like problem-­solving skills, curiosity, and self-­awareness. Wegener, the guy who made first contact with the Brocs, is supposed to have said, “I don’t know what intelligence is, but I know it when I see it.”

      The trouble is that often we don’t know it when we see it … or we find we’ve been looking for all the wrong things. The Europan Medusea are a case in point. Are they intelligent? Beats me. And we may well never know, simply because we don’t have enough in common with them to even begin to communicate with them on a meaningful level.

      “Come on,” Murdock said. “I’ll show you the base.”

      Two hours later, we’d been through the dome top to bottom, and met a number of the researchers there. They seemed like nice ­people, most of them, and that left me with a nagging depression. It was entirely possible, even likely, that every one of them was already dead, that I was speaking, in a way, to their digitized ghosts.

      But the ordeal ended at last, and I emerged back in the lounge area on board the Clymer.

      “That’s it, E-­Car,” Doobie said. “I’m outta here!”

      “Have fun,” I told him.

      And I resolved to have chow in the mess hall, then retire to my quarters for a quiet evening alone.

      Supper was a mystery-­meat culture that was actually pretty tasty if you dialed up the habanero sauce. It was well past the main mess period, and the place was nearly empty. I finished up, then went back to my quarters.

      “Elliot?” It was Joy. My secretary had orders to always route her calls through. I was surprised to find she was standing right outside my compartment. “Can I come in?”

      I thoughtclicked the hatch open and she stepped inside. She palmed the touchpoint on her shipboard utilities just below the throat and they evaporated as she came into my arms, gloriously nude. “I had to see you,” she said. “I … I volunteered for the Haldane expedition, but they wouldn’t take me!”

      “I know. I looked up the personnel manifest.” They were only taking twenty-­four Marines, after all, out of a company numbering almost two hundred ­people. Someone had to stay behind.

      “I was trying to swap assignments with Gibbs, but he wouldn’t agree to it.” She looked disgusted. “The idiot wants to go.”

      “Well, apparently, so do you.”

      “Because I want to be with you.”

      I reached up for my own touchpoint and clicked my uniform away. By that time, I didn’t even need to go to my in-­head menu and turn on my CC-­PDE5 inhibitors. I was ready… .

      But of course Sergeant Tomacek chose that moment to come through the door.

      Bruce Tomacek was one of the three Second Platoon Marines with whom I shared a berthing compartment, a nice enough guy, but with a nasty tendency to

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