Glossary

Mt. Ahrens: Mountain in Catalina, contains glacier and associated glacial lake.
ASCIT: one of the organs of Caltech student government.
Astral Mining: asteroid mining and space flight company, front for Space Group.
Athena: MIT central computer cluster.
Bluv: The binary stars BL Ceti and UV Ceti, which the Gamble flies by on its way from Sol to Tau Ceti.
BOC/Board of Control: group of Caltech undergrads charged with judging disputes regarding academics.
California: Techer name for the continent containing Caltech.
Catalina: large island off the southeast coast of California.
Cetus: Constellation of ‘the Whale’. Chiefly notable as source of the name ‘Tau Ceti’.
Charles River: River flowing by and through campus of MIT in Cambridge. Not transported.
Cruft Labs: corporate computer research lab in Boston, squatting residence of MIT students. Not to be confused with the Cruft Laboratory at Harvard.
Ditch Day: Caltech ritual of a day of skipping class/work and completing obstacle courses and other activities.
Exam: see Test.
Failures: the followers of Andrew Chao, who believe that it is necessary to fail the Examiner’s test.
Feynmann Mountains: mountain range far west of Caltech.
Four Physicists: the four physics students who knew how to produce negative matter before the start of the Test.
Gamble: laser-launched solar sail starship built by the Space Group.
Gamblers: crew of Gamble.
Gell-Mann Mountains: mountain range south of Caltech.
GSC/Graduate Student Council: organ of student government at both Caltech and MIT.
Harvard Bridge: Bridge between Cambridge and Boston, running through MIT. Transported with campus.
Hiatsu: type of electrical runabout, used after gas supply was depleted.
Infinite Corridor: very long hallway through many buildings at MIT.
Jumble: the warren of apartments between Caltech and the sea cliff.
Masamune: Japanese swordsmith of the 13th century.
Massachusetts: Techer name for the continent containing MIT.
Mole: Resident of Blacker House at Caltech.
MITSFS: MIT Science Fiction Society.
New Charles River: River near MIT on Tau.
pede: general class of exoskeletal animals on Tau. Many are poisonous and aggressive.
oligarch: one of the Examiner-trained members of MIT.
pika: MIT cooperative living group. Formerly a member of the fraternity organization PiKappa.
proa: Polynesian double-hulled ship design. Basis for ocean-faring Techer vessels.
Roswell Union of Hackers: Public-disruption art and political activist hacking group formed in mid 2020’s.
Revere Company: transported portion of the MIT ROTC program.
smoot: MIT humorous unit of measurement, equal to the height of an Oliver R. Smoot. Also name for Techer currency.
Space Group: multinational military collaboration to establish a permanent human presence in space. Operate through Astral Mining.
Surf: Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship. Also name of proa sailing from California.
Tau: terrestrial planet orbiting Tau Ceti. Site of the Test. Inhabited by life forms adapted to a cold climate and episodic ice ages.
Tau Ceti: G8 star 11.88 lightyears from Earth. Slightly cooler and older than Sol. Orbited by Tau and Skana and smaller bodies.
Techer: Student of Caltech or MIT.
Test: The Examiner’s test to see if humans are able to handle the knowledge of how to manufacture negative matter.
Throop River: River flowing near Caltech.
tool: one who works hard for a dubious leader.
Stack: obstacle course or set of activities for Ditch Day.
Screamer: Techer term for those who transmit information to Earth. Screamer Lab: Will Chamer’s work area.
Undergraduate Association: organ of MIT student government.
White Towers: field site, military base, and village in the monolith grove to the south of MIT.
Work Week: week spent every year rebuilding pika’s building.
zard: general class of endosketal six-legged animals of Tau.

Avery House, Blacker House, Dabney House, Fleming House, Page House, Catalina Apartments: some of the student housing at Caltech.

Building 64 (5th East, Slugfest, Tetazoo): some of the student housing at MIT.

Dramatis Personae

Examiners: English name for Galaxy-spanning protective service. Move Caltech & MIT to Tau to Test humanity for responsibility.

Earth

Vesna Grohar: astrophysicist and on crew of Gamble. Sister to Janez and Mina.
Christina Noriega: General, USAF. Commander of Gamble.
Kalpana Sarswati: astronomer, operator of SETI array, married to Janez Grohar.

Caltech:

William ‘Will’ Chamer: grad student in electrical engineering, later lead Screamer, eventually chief medic and teacher of Caltech. Trained by Examiners. Married to Mina Grohar.
Zmago ‘Z’ Grohar Chamer: very slightly the elder of the children of Will and Mina. Interests in spaceflight and navigation.
Karen Grohar Chamer: Z’s twin sister. Xenologist and rancher.
David Dorman: undergrad in aeronautical engineering. Head of the Blacker Ninja Division and later the BOC Ninjas.
Mina Grohar: grad in geophysics, lead surveyor of California. Married to William Chamer.
Mackenzie Long: undergrad and resident of Dabney House. Sometime follower of Andrew Chao. Died attempting to return from self-imposed exile.
Sarah Long: daughter of Mackenzie. Rescued by Melinda Yang in infancy. Electrical engineer.
Venkat Sakhar: grad student in molecular biology, supplier of vitamins and insulin. Later Techer Health Minister and President.
John Stansted: grad student in mechanical engineering, BOC ninja. Attempts to poison Patrick Townsend’s patients at the urging of Andrew Chao. Commits suicide in prison.
Patrick Townsend: grad student in biochemistry, med school at UCLA, Avery House RA. Trained by Examiners. Later chief medic of MIT and involved with Kathryn Hildenstoy.
Melinda Yang: undergrad in particle physics, resident of Blacker House. BOC ninja, also surveyor and teacher to the young. Guardian to Sarah Long.
Kevin Zhang: grad student in physics, discoverer of process to make negative matter. One of the Four Physicists.

MIT:

Andrew Chao: undergrad in Course 7 (premed), resident of Slugfest. Leader of the Failures. Dies in Failure War.
Adam Delbert: undergrad in Course 16 and Air Force ROTC. Cadet Captain of the Revere Company.
Elmund Gera: grad student in environmental engineering, resident of pika. Trained by Examiners. Head of Gera Organization. Dies in Failure War.
Kathryn Hildenstoy: undergrad in Course 6, resident of Cruft Labs. Trained by Examiners. Paranoid and militant, but good.
Rob Lessik: undergrad in Course 8. One of the Four Physicists. Killed by Andrew Chao.
Julian Marriner: undergrad in Course 17. Trained by Examiners. Musician. Dies immediately after announcement of Passage.
Luke Maness: undergrad, chief lieutenant of Andrew Chao. Public face of Failures after Chao fakes his own death.
Julia Morbidini: One of the Four Physicists.
Laura Sturm: undergrad in Course 2. Ham radio enthusiast, MIT Screamer. Killed during Failure War.
Zijun Xin: grad student in EAPS. One of the lead surveyors of Massachusetts, builder of White Towers station. Trained by Examiners. Dies during Failure War.

Another Message

2050 June 4 14:00 UT
Post-Test Year 0, Day 1
Tau, Caltech, Screamer Lab

The plan for this day had been formulated for a very long time. Will had set up hand Morse controls like he’d used on the first day. He sat at a table with a gigahertz generator; cables ran over to the same dish he had used just after landing. But the generator had been built by Sarah and various other electrical engineering students, using components made on Tau.

Morbidini, Zhang, and Nick Larson, the last of the surviving Four Physicists, watched over a video feed from the Forge. Mina was next to Will, Z and Karen stood behind them with Vesna. From the White Towers, Townsend and Hildenstoy watched. At MIT, Delbert and his aides also waited. Back on the roof of Moore, Sarah stood with Melinda and the ninjas. Noriega and the Gamblers were in full dress uniforms, at her insistence. All of this was being automatically uplinked to the starship and transmitted via tightbeam laser to the Group receiver at Vesta. That included the outrageously alien shapes of the Examiner shades that stood on air above the crowd. It had been a long night talking to them and listening to the first message from Kal at the SETI Array, narrowly followed by Group transmissions.

Will began to tap out the message, reciting it as he went. “This will be the last message I will send as Screamer for the Institutes. We have passed the Examiner’s Test for humanity.

“In memory of all of those that cannot be here, but most especially Julian Marriner, we charge you to not betray the trust they have shown in us. You all have a choice between self destruction and survival. Please choose survival. We have done so, and those of us who would return to Earth will follow this message as soon as we can.

“Now, here are the instructions of Kevin Zhang, Julia Morbidini, Rob Lessik, and Nick Larson, whom you have known as the Four Physicists. To make negative mass …”

Passage

2050 June 3 13:28 UT
Test Year 22, Day 189, 12:42 CST/20:42 MST
Tau, Caltech – Beckman Mall/MIT – Big Dome

At Caltech, there was a picnic lunch being served to celebrate the year’s graduates. It had hardly been the commencement ceremonies of long ago, with professors posing like rock stars in academic gowns and everyone sweating in black or red in the California sun. But the kids didn’t mind the lack of finery. Karen had accepted Sakhar’s handshake with a smile. She was Caltech’s first student to receive a graduate degree in animal husbandry. Her brother was satisfied with the more orthodox choice of spacecraft navigation, which had applications now that Nerv-1’s new engine was ready to be installed.

After the General gave the keynote speech, everyone stampeded the spread out tables and sprawled back on the grass. At least the Gamblers present hadn’t worn dress uniforms; they had begun to accept Techer informality. None of them had shifted to homespun or zard leather yet.

Will had grabbed an extra plate and piled it with mozzarella and balsamic, lettuce and tomato. “Thanks to Akira and the cowboys.” Karen and Z devoured the food, since they’d been up all morning partying. “I’m proud of you.” One arm around Mina, Karen and Z joking with Vesna and Sarah and with passing friends, surrounded by three thousand of the people who had built upon what they were given, Will was at peace, even as his mental clock told him that the Examiners were due in less than a minute.

Then there came a strange tremor at the limits of his heightened senses. It started to grow, and he saw Mina and the children, and everyone in the crowd, turn their heads towards the now-empty stage …

At MIT, Marriner’s opera had just been performed on the set built inside the Big Dome. The curtain had fallen on Gera and Zijun, as they lay dying amongst the rubble of their anti-missile guns; it had risen and fallen again for the bow and curtain call; and finally been raised on an empty stage. The audience had started to rise, partly joyous over the story they had seen and partly facing the memory of the dead oligarchs.

Julian reclined in his wheelchair in the front row, a faint smile and two tears on his weary face, his eyes closed. He too had peace, even though he could feel the pressure in his lungs when he breathed and the ache in his side where the sutures hadn’t healed, and on a deeper level sense the weakness in his aorta.

And then his nervous system, precisely tuned and sensitive, felt an external compulsion to open his eyes. He didn’t need to open them to hear the crowd pause in their exit and turn back. When he did look, he was probably the only one on the planet not surprised to see:

Three indistinct figures, illuminated and casting no shadows, stood on the stage. At Caltech, the same things were on the stage, but here they were dimmer than they should have been in the noontime light. And everyone heard the voice:

“You have passed the Test.”

The younger Chamers gaped, but joined the uproarious applause: clapping, cheering, hugging, praying. As he embraced Mina, Will heard the voice continue in his head. “Give them a few seconds, and then we will speak again. But this is for you to hear.” And now he heard Julian, and seemed to see the musician in front of him.

Julian had heard the Examiners’ Voice. In the following tenth of a second, a surge of endorphins and adrenalin had been released. His heart pounded. The aneurism burst.

As fast as this happened, a string of point masses detached themselves from the network that was hovering three kilometers above the Big Dome, shot through the masonry without fuss, went through his chest wall, and formed a skein across the breach. There was a pulse of pain as his blood pressure bounced, which vanished as he moved his hand to his chest.

“Contact will be broadened. Do you want me to save you?” This Examiner spoke differently from the others. “Your work has great beauty.”

No. Julian thought. This is enough. The masses fled, and the musician felt his heart shudder and stop for the second time. Tell Will and Kathryn – That we have done the right thing. And tell them to watch that there is never again a Star Chamber, while still doing all they … can to … help … …

The train of thought failed, but there were the gentle emotions of Julian’s last thoughts – grief and loss overwhelmed by love and gratitude and pride of the Passing. And the image of Julian in Will’s vision closed its eyes.

Amongst the rejoicing, as the images solidified into the shapes of three very alien beings, Will staggered, sat down as Mina guided him. He was balanced between joy and grief. “Julian is dead.” She felt the same thing he did, coupled with uncertainty. “They told me, just then. I was right to trust them, after all.”

Risk Factors

2049 October 29 7:20 UT
Test Year 21, Day 340, 8:00 CST/16:00 MST
Tau, MIT – MRI Room

The MRI and PET scanning machines had been enhanced with instructions from the Gamblers, and had a resolution far better than when they had left the Earth. But the scans were not good. There were four tumors along Julian’s large intestine, and others spread throughout his torso. There was a small one just above his heart.

The biopsy was strange. The growth was a fairly typical benign colon variety and would not have spread by itself, but there was also a large block of Tau DNA in the cells that tested positive. A Tau virus had gotten into Marriner’s body and had not died. Instead, it had gotten into the pre-cancer cells and made them malignant. On Earth, it lacked two weeks from fifty-six years since he had been born. He had lived only forty-four.

The chemotherapy available to the Techers was limited. Cancer hadn’t been a priority since landing. The Gamblers had no stores of their own, but had provided the instructions to synthesize many drugs. The best Townsend, Sakhar, and the other biochemists could find took down the small tumors, with several massive doses that nearly killed Julian. But now the larger masses were inert and could be surgically removed. A low dose of a blocker drug would keep any remaining cancer cells dormant. But there was an incipient aneurism on his aorta, and he would not be able to handle the surgery necessary to repair it for several months. So Julian got used to his wheelchair and tried to relax, as the cast rehearsed his opera. They had all volunteered when they heard about his illness.

Tau Ceti Orbit, The Forge Asteroid

The Forge was, to a first approximation, the same as 1950 DA or the Pusher had been after a less than a year of colonization, although Gamble’s mining packages were rather faster in constructing than designs fifteen years older. But there was still the large solar array, the carbonyl-vapor metal processor, the focusing mirrors to burn out water and organics, the small living quarters next to a partially constructed iron shell, and the solar sail tug slowly adjusting its trajectory to bring it to Tau at a safe speed to orbit.

But 1950 DA and the Pusher had not had a large particle accelerator built nearby and flying in formation. The reactions to produce negative matter by the Zhang-Morbidini process require accelerating particular rare isotopes to one percent the speed of light, smashing them together, and catching everything but the neutrinos and the photons. Even in this configuration, it takes about ten to the twenty collisions to produce one negative proton and one negative electron. They need to be separated out and held, in isolation like antimatter. It had taken eight Earth months to build and test the accelerator with more prosaic reactions and ten days of accelerator time to produce that first negative atom. They got lucky: after two more weeks, they had three.

Now the accelerator could be used to smash these bits of negative matter together, with all due precautions given the side effects of missing a minus sign. Smashing negative matter together at high velocity produces a spray of particles, as would be expected: negative matter, negative antimatter, and little bits of matter and antimatter. Capturing and isolation is incredibly important, or the negative matter will annihilate off of random particles. The vacuum in the accelerator chamber was three orders of magnitude higher than the interplanetary space outside.

Getting two particular particles to hit each other, when each one is a proton or electron, is hard. It took another day of run-time to smash the first particles together. In the bare metal control room in the hab, Zhang was pleased when that day ended with seventeen negative hydrogens rather than three.

After two more days, they had a hundred thousand particles. The reaction speed had built up as there were more particles to collide into each other. Ten days into the generation process, they ran into their power limit: with the hundred megawatts available from the array, the maximum production rate was of negative mass was 100 milligrams a day. Even with that amount of material, it had been considered prudent to move the accelerator well away from both the testing lab, trailing a hundred kilometers behind on its own sail, and the living areas.

At the testing lab, a total of 10 milligrams of negative mass had arrived in magnetic bottles. Using remotes, the smiths followed the sequence that the Four had worked out in the first year, as it had been refined over the last two decades. They had a significant amount of negative helium and negative lithium, so Zhang specified the construction of minute grains of negative lithium hydride. These were each only ten nanometers wide and they were held by powerful electromagnetic fields. The next stage was exceptionally delicate.

A speck of normal matter was put into the system. The negative grains were charged and accelerated up to increase their mass, and sent through so that they just missed the normal one, forming a transient cylinder around it. Gravity pushed it to the center of the ring and compressed it. This entire process was a press to steadily push on the central grain with more pressure than exists in the center of most stars.

The grains, long past having a molecular structure, became electron degenerate, with a surface gravity high enough that more matter could be dribbled onto their surface. This was done at the same time as more negative mass was shipped over from the accelerator and added to the accelerated negative points. Over another month, a full three grams of both positive and negative matter had been added, and the grains exceeded neutron degeneracy. They, calmly and with no fuss, collapsed into quark-degenerate point masses. They were stable: the nature of their construction prevented Hawking radiation and quantum decay from siphoning off more than one percent of their mass over the age of the universe.

The plan had been to slow down the negative point masses, then put them next to the positive masses and watch them accelerate: the crudest of the possible ways to use negative matter as an engine. The slowing down did fine, as did the removal, separation, and storage of the different point masses in well-separated locations. Even though the testing center and the Forge were far apart (for this test the distance had been increased to a thousand kilometers), they waited until the hab was behind the rock to start. It was well that they did.

From telemetry analyzed after the fact, they saw the masses in the testing chamber be released and start to accelerate. They moved slowly: the masses were separated by a tenth of a millimeter, and they would only move at 2 microns per second squared. Then there was a corona discharge forming around the masses, the gamma-ray flux spiked, charged particles surged, and the bomb went off.

Six grams of matter (or negative matter) converting to energy is equivalent to ninety kilotons of TNT detonating, but it all comes out in gamma rays and pions and mesons. The structure of the testing station was instantaneously converted to plasma, which expanded like a bomb but absorbed the gammas. It had cooled to merely soft X-rays by the time it became transparent. Each square meter of the rock, the accelerator’s surface, and the solar array absorbed sixty joules of energy, closely followed by a blast of plasma that nearly overwhelmed the magnetic bubble shielding of the main installation. By the time the hab came out of eclipse three minutes later, there was nothing left but a hole in the interplanetary medium. Most of the solar array was fried and useless.

They learned what had happened. Quantum mechanical fluctuations meant that there was a leakage zone on the surface of the mass: jitter of a few microns for a tenth-gram mass. Anything smaller tended to collapse from the oscillations. In isolation or even in normal matter, the points they had used were stable. But when there was a point of opposite sign in the vicinity, the masses started to slowly annihilate each other. It had been a slow process until a charge difference between the masses had pulled them together over the containment. Then everything had annihilated at once.

The good news was that they could simply move the masses further apart and make them larger, although that would slow down construction. The bad news was that they had lost a portion of the stockpile of point masses and it would take even longer to build the larger ones. The Forge’s power supply would be expanded drastically from Gamble’s solar panels once they were in orbit around Tau, and then they could manufacture enough negative mass to use it itself as a power source. But it would be at least six months before they could make an engine large enough to move one of the Nervs at a meaningful acceleration.

Landing

2048 December 1 21:00 UT
Test Year 21, Day 40, 20:00 CST
Tau, Ocean just off the coast of Caltech
New Charles reservoir

Gamble had been in the Tau Ceti system for eleven days before the landings took place. Noriega and the last Watch had flown the ship at through the skydive: a blinding fall almost to the photosphere of Tau Ceti which the Techers could see by daylight until the ship got too close in. More accurately, Gamble had flown itself while the General herself was quietly cursing under ten gees of load and finally carrying on some semblance of a conversation with the Techers – about how to make negative mass, among other things. The crew in suspension had been immersed in fluid to support them without pressure injuries.

The AI’s programming led it to twist the trajectory of the lightsail so that it came alongside a small chunk of rock, just an anonymous forty meter block of undifferentiated matter that outweighed the spacecraft by a factor of ten. When the mining packages were opened, it would be transformed into solar cells. As it was, the crew merely sealed it inside plastic sheeting and baked it for water and organics while Gamble hauled everything towards Tau orbit at a scant two millimeters per second squared, which would get them there in a week.

Most of the organics and a little of the water went into Gamble’s biosphere. The life support equipment for the livestock was running on edge, and the crew was massively hungry as more of them were awakened. But the rest of the water went into the fuel tanks of the four Nervs. Their fission plants were carefully inspected after five years of being powered down and sleeted with the radiation dose that had gotten through the shielding. The cargo holds were loaded with livestock, still in suspend, functional copies of Gamble’s AI and the rest of their data, and a fair share of the colony-building supplies that were now redundant: utility lasers, construction robots, high-efficiency solar cells, medical supplies vintage 2034, display goggles, and one copy of the Mars Virgil as a present to MIT. When two of the shuttles detached from the hub of Gamble’s wheel eight thousand kilometers above Tau, the passenger cabins carried the pilots, Vesna, two of the doctors, and the General. Akutagawa was now in command of the Gamble, in the event of the time delay in contacting the General ever exceeding a second.

Water ran through the core of the reactor, now operating at what would have been meltdown for a power plant, and exited as superheated steam. Nerv-2 dropped its orbit so it would reenter over California while the other shuttle aimed for Massachusetts.

Over the Feynmanns, the shuttle no longer had a sheet of plasma in front of it. By the time it was a hundred kilometers away from the coast, it had gone subsonic and started to call out its approach to Sarah, who was running communications with Athena’s California distribution. The engines shifted into atmospheric mode as the reactor throttled back and started streaming air rather than water. Now the flight was controlled, and the pilot angled north towards Caltech. Five minutes later, the ship hydroplaned to a stop outside the harbor. Will and Mina, Karen and Z, were waiting.

The meeting was a study in contrasts. On one side of the levy the Nerv floated high in the water on empty tanks, its composite hull marked with the icons of the Group. On the other were the well-maintained and designed but nonetheless crude and wind-powered proas. The Grohar-Chamers wore Techer homespun, coarse in the weave but well insulated, and zard leather. Will carried the daisho, Karen led her favorite pedes. Vesna wore a Gambler spacesuit, with its armor cloth and high-level computer monitoring. The two sisters were now almost the same age, thanks to the vagaries of time dilation. But that did not matter to the reunion.

Promotion

2048 September 15 13:00 UT
Test Year 20, Day 319, 6:00 CST/14:00 MST
Tau

Will administered loyalty oaths for a total of a hundred and ninety-five cadets. The swearing-in respected all the rules of the US military circa 2034, with the exception that the cadets were out of uniform. Athena handled the logistics of identity authentication, its semi-intelligent subroutines functioning smoothly despite only having a hundred terabytes of memory.

Delbert had been assigned the rank of Major, US Army. The rest of his people were assembled into lower ranks. Their legal status did not significantly change their duties: after all, their orders were pretty much to work with the Techer government as before. But Delbert and the surviving cadets had been serving as cadets for longer than most soldiers’ entire careers. They deserved this. Of course, now the Techers were accepting military aid from the United States. But this merely made for some bad political jokes.

Far more important were the benefits of the twenty months of messages the Gamble had sent before it passed out of the beam of the Screamer dish four years before. The last of that material had arrived 231 days ago, but the full content was only now being appreciated. As they got a better measure of the equipment Will would be likely to have, the Watchers had increased the bandwidth of the signal, and most of the information had come close to the end. 2034 news and technology saturated Tau with ideas of what had become ‘the old country’. As fashion resurged, new games and cultural trends were tried and then abandoned for the next bit of information from the Group, Will no longer worried about some of the children – young adults, really – being hostile to strangers.

Reply

2048 March 29 2:40 UT
Test Year 20, Day 165, 2:35 CST
Interstellar Space, 1.2 ly from Tau

Vesna’s hair had grown so long in her sleep that she had braided it so that it wasn’t slowly tied into knots by air currents and Coriolos. She had been re-assigned, by the General no less, from the 27th Watch to the 39th and so had slept far longer than between DA-1 and running into the Techer’s light cone. At least her nails had been trimmed at some point in there: that fashion had gone out a few centuries ago, after all.

The astronomer was again sitting at the table in Gamble’s warm deck, but now it was scuffed and dented by four subjective years of Watchers and it was General Christina Noriega, Captain of Gamble, who sat across from her. Akira, Vlad, and Zhujing were cold. It was still incredibly disconcerting to help someone you’d last seen in a coma flex and clean the inert body of someone you’d last seen doing the cleaning.

Vesna had seen the recordings of the first two years of the Test, all that Gamble had been able to receive before they left the Screamer’s beam. She had seen the records of the flyby of Bluv. The two red dwarfs had been blue-shifted to the color of Sol as they approached and the smaller sail carrying the surveillance package was released. The nearer one, UV Ceti, oscillated through blue to red, followed by the second, BL Ceti, as the package was decelerated and left far behind as Gamble tacked, pulls on the sail shrouds adjusting the angle of the sail to the appropriate nanoradian, compensating for the buffeting of the winds of both stars. Vesna seemed to remember a slow dream of terrible pressure: her suspended body’s perception of the gravity loads as the massive velocity of Gamble was rotated by only a few degrees.

Possessed by boredom and worry, she had seen the records of the monitoring station, which had found a bunch of asteroids, and three small planets between the two stars. The largest was just slightly smaller than Tau: three tenths of an Earth mass. It would have been in the habitable zone of UV Ceti, and might have been the target of Gamble, were it not for the red dwarf’s stellar wind and flares. They had stripped the planet’s atmosphere, and now it was nothing but an uninteresting chunk of rock, coated by a thin layer of ice and a whiff of carbon dioxide and water vapor.

She had read two years worth of news summaries from Earth. Little Mina had learned how to walk, was fascinated by the ducks in the river outside her parents’ apartment. Kal had landed an itinerant grant with the SETI Array, so she’d have to spend one month a year in the Atacama, but Janez figured that he could manage. Lissajous had sent along the designs for Gamble II, bound for another planet once the Pusher was expanded to push the larger vessel to slightly higher speeds.

So, after three days spent doing the chores and catching up on the news, Vesna had nothing to do unless she wanted to write more papers on archival data. Now she waited, on the orders of the General. This was the earliest time a response could be expected from Tau, assuming that they had received the message fourteen months ago and immediately repointed their transmitter (or would they have another one by now?). There was disagreement between the two Gamblers as to the probability of that response.

They waited. Ten minutes from the minimum time, twenty. Noriega had expected a much longer wait. But then there came Gamble’s voice: “Signal detected from Tau Ceti. Matches the previously observed format. Transcribing text, to be followed by images, audio, and video data.”

“You win, Lieutenant.” Noriega tossed over a 1972 US dollar coin, one of the ones that had the Eagle landing on the Moon. “Gamble: Show us.”

Thus did Vesna learn about her brother-in-law, her elder niece and her nephew; of the ending of Andrew Chao and the Failures; of the years of the Test; how the Techers had become attached to Tau more tightly than they had thought possible at the beginning. There was also Will’s invitation to General Noriega.

The Techer Foreign Secretary offered an alliance with the Gamblers, to begin building the technologies that the Four had designed. This alliance had the implicit caveat of Noriega becoming creative in her agreement with the Group, as she had modified “support and defend the constitution of the United States, against all enemies” to include flying Gamble into the void.

Vesna did not have the same reservations in this that Noriega did. Her sister was there and she herself was, after all, merely a Eufor Lieutenant by courtesy. But the General took her duty to the United States quite seriously. She had been given her rank by the United States Senate in 2030, and even if she was officially listed as ‘missing in action’ in the China Sea to keep the Group’s secrecy and her position on the general’s list had been reassigned, she wasn’t going to betray her government. Of course, there were a lot of United States citizens on Tau …

Noriega did give answer, dictating a response to the computer, to be received at Caltech in another fourteen months in the standard-of-rest. “I cannot give allegiance to your government since I’m not sure if you are legally legitimate members of the United States, or a sovereign state, or stateless, or even legally dead. I am allowed to do the following.

“First: my orders from the Group were to establish, protect, and help develop a human colony on Tau Ceti d, which would be an independent state pending recognition by the Group governments. Territorial rights would be assigned on the basis of the Outer Space Treaty or later agreement. If I am to follow those orders, I will have to work with you.

“Second: my orders do not mention negative matter, but it may be considered a potential weapon of mass destruction. Standing orders are that those in possession of such weapons shall submit to inspection and search, and that after sufficient data is collected a secure report shall be made to my superiors, that report being declared top secret. There being currently no way to prepare such a report quickly, and to insure its safe delivery, I will not transmit any such classified information.

“Third: as a senior officer of the United States armed forces, I promote all current cadets serving on Tau Ceti d to active service, with all the rights and obligations that those entail, with the exception of officer’s pay. Oaths will be administered by Dr. William Chamer, as he has demonstrated the qualifications for the office. All members of the US military present on Tau will follow the two orders given above, or resign both their commissions and their cadet service.”

Turning to Vesna: “That is all on the record Lieutenant. Off the record: they are right to keep the knowledge secret. I wouldn’t transmit it even if the Examiners give us their blessing: it’s too dangerous.”

“They fought over that, General.” Vesna had found the description of the missiles and Chao’s hostage bomb. “But they say they will trust the Examiners, and they will trust humanity. And, …” Eyebrows wrinkled. “… they mention someone called Gully Foyle. The Stars My Destination.”

Message

2047 June 9 5:15 UT
Test Year 19, Day 111, 13:45 CST/21:45 MST
Tau, Caltech Screamer Lab
White Towers Observatory

Earth lit up. This was what the Screamer antennas and the two comsat relays saw at first. The sudden increase in flux was of course the message Vesna had sent from Gamble a little less than ten years before. But the only thing the Screamers had detected from the solar system so far was an occasional leaked radar pulse and one brief directed SETI message, so it took several minutes to figure out what they were seeing.

The response time was that low because Will had been in the Screamer Lab, testing Sarah on her construction of a spectral analyzer. When the radio flux of the Sun at 2838.6 MHz went up by a factor of a million as the White Towers antenna watched, an alarm went off. The computer had been programmed to automatically compute and plot a spectrum of the signal, taking out the frequency shift in software. When Will looked at the display, he was briefly puzzled. Then he shifted it in frequency slightly, and typed in commands for recording and transcription of the signal intensity every hundredth of a second, blessing remote observing and the finesse of programmers who’d been using the same systems for twenty years. The signal plotted up on the display, slowly creeping across. And Will could read it, because it was in the same Morse code he had set up for Screaming, just much slower than he’d expected for a beacon.

… speaking. Repeat: Space Group starship Gamble to Tau Ceti d. Lieut. Vesna Grohar speaking. Tell Mina that Janez is married and has a daughter who bears her name. We will arrive in the Tau Ceti system from the direction of BL & UV Ceti and will come into orbit on 2048 Nov 20. Map and detailed trajectory information to follow. Please acknowledge by transmitting along that vector. At the time of your receipt of this message, we will be roughly 2.25 lightyears from Tau Ceti, having passed Bluv and adjusted our course 0.9 lightyears ago. This introduction will repeat in six hours. Switching to Gamble description and crew roster.

Gamble: solar-sail spacecraft, capable of interstellar flight with laser-assisted launch. Width: 200 km. Length: 150 km. Mass: 10000 tons. Crew: 200 Commander: Brig. Gen. Christina Noriega, USAF detached service. Ship commissioned 2032 June 2, launched 2034 …

Will was already turning on his transmitter. Sarah got the rhythm and tapped out commands for the reworked version of Celestia that was used in introductory astronomy, to dig out the position of the red dwarf binary.

Fifteen minutes afterwards, the current version of the Screamer’s message was transmitting towards where the starship now was, and Will had gotten permission from Sakhar (who’d taken office as President of the Institutes only six months ago), Julian, and Delbert to be appointed the Techer Foreign Minister. In that capacity, he drafted a message to Gamble’s commander. Then he confirmed to Sarah that she had passed EE52 and left her to see that the transmitter kept running. He went to find Mina.

Sarah read the message from Gamble in fascination. She had still had lingering doubts about the old Techers’ stories. But now there was a signal coming down from the sky, through an antenna and receiver that she had helped to build. So she called Karen and Z and a half-dozen other friends, and they all piled into the Screamer Lab to watch the message from Earth. It was, after all, several years early. They got an extra ten minutes or so of lead by watching the live feed rather than reading it off of the system. First came the graphics of Gamble: light sail and gravity wheel, mining packages and zero gravity breeder reactor, the two fission-rocket tugs. They saw the crew cold in their suspended sleep. The girls cooed over the pictures of Mina the younger, then giggled when Karen remembered that her cousin was now almost thirteen.

Then there came the Space Group charter: the history of secret appropriations from the military, the asteroid mining, the deliberate collision to make the Pusher, the bases on Mars and throughout the asteroid belt, the massive solar power. And then the selection of material from Gamble’s reference library. Vesna had started with an updated astronomical database, which took three days to all arrive.

The message Will and Sarah had just started to transmit would reach the Gamble 1.216 years later, when they of course would be 1.216 light years out. Will observed that his first calculation of arrival times was only approximate – the errors would be roughly eight hours. So when the first data packets of Gambler astronomy arrived, Will began to correct his estimate for the length of the Test.

Gamble had provided incredibly good positions and proper motions on a large number of stars: with a baseline of almost two lightyears and a large optical telescope, they provided the position of Tau Ceti relative to Sol to roughly half the diameter of the star. Using this, Will worked out the length of the Test to the nearest second in the Tau standard of rest. Then he compared the Gamble ephemeris for all the other objects in the system.

With the microsats in orbit, and with twenty years of astronomical observations from the ground, the Techer information on Tau’s system was quite detailed. Even before the Failure War, Sturm had set up radar pings of the inner planets and a few scattered asteroids: the positions of the rocky spheres that were Shamu, Moby, and Tursopsis were known to 200 kilometers. Skana, at 10 AU out, was only known to 10000 kilometers, only about a factor of two better than Gamble’s absolute measurements.

But the astronomers went wild when they saw the rest of the Gamble data: the error in the position of stars was 1 astronomical unit at 100 parsecs. S Doradus’ distance to was given to 1 parsec out of 52000 and at Andromeda they had measured the proper motions of stars in the galaxy’s disc. For the Whirlpool Galaxy and in the Virgo and Fornax clusters, parallax values measured positions directly that had been estimated crudely by timing Cepheid variables. The implications of the data might all have been worked out on Earth five or ten years before, but the Techers were still glad to actually have serious data to work on again. Of course, once Gamble reached Tau, far better data would be available to the Techer astronomers well before it was available on Earth. Ideas flew for finding more Earthlike planets than the five that were in the Group’s catalog, incredibly stringent tests of universal curvature, locating the Examiners by searching for the topological defects of their wormholes.

Then there came the news from Earth. Only two other members of the crew, besides Vesna, had news of the families of the Techers, but everyone whirled under the onslaught of twenty years of history:

There had been constant warfare in the central African nations as they fought for the ability to exploit and sell the diminishing natural resources of the continent while dealing with the pressures of water shortages and mutations to corn rust and HIV, even as the last was first stopped in its spread and eventually cured. The message included the details of the complicated biochemical engineering of the cure, which the Techers could barely make. In any case, it had arrived fifteen years too late for the last of the fourteen patients whose records were now in the Techer morgues.

Climate change had continued, despite eventual cuts from the United States when the price of oil had gone so high as to nearly crash the economy during the interventionist period after the Vanishing. China’s industrialization had brought the total amount of carbon dioxide emissions up, although they too were shifting over to a more sustainable grid because no one could survive to a healthy old age in half of the cities any more. Weather patterns had shifted and forced the messy evacuation of several coastal zones and changed what crops were grown where. Emissions were just leveling off in the mid 2030’s.

Astral Mining’s near-monopoly on space industry, aided covertly by the Group’s generals, was the only thing that had kept a long-range space program functioning. The budgets of NASA and ESA and the Russian and Chinese programs had been slashed to almost nothing as their sponsors tried to fund a massive re-building of the power grid without raising taxes or decreasing military budgets.

There were also technological advances: the Group’s full design for the Gamble spacecraft and their launching lasers, their specifications for the nuclear-thermal rockets they had been flying since 2030, techniques of biotech that made the twenty-year old genetic engineering Sakhar still used seem archaic. Improved computers and algorithms: better ways to make circuitry, the specifications and operating systems for display goggles, the general-purpose AI that ran Gamble that was able to parse most English or Chinese sentences accurately. There had been no computational singularity. Gamble might be able to speak, but it lacked something of creativity.

All of the new toys would take a long time to develop with the Techer infrastructure. About the only thing they could do immediately was to reprogram Athena with a stripped-down version of the starship AI. Almost certainly, Gamble would be in orbit before Z could make it there as a Techer astronaut. But this merely encouraged Will’s son. He had recently developed an obsession with spaceflight, and had hoped to fly to orbit, but now he could hope to fly far further. Tau might be home, but he wanted to see the universe with his own eyes. So he started to plan it out.

Complete Education

2042 July 31 23:37 UT
Test Year 15, Day 85, 18:00 CST (~20:00 local)
Straits of Catalina, South-East Coast of California

The proa was the “Surf” and it was crewed by either ‘surfers’ or ‘serfs’ or ‘research project students’ depending on who was asked. It was smaller but more flexible than the Eagle and the Enterprise and the three other ships currently on the California-Massachusetts loop. Surf was also different from its predecessors in that it was made almost entirely of Tau-made materials. The hulls were wood from thorn trees, the sails and kite woven from the products of the chemical engineers, the solar panels and radio built from parts made at MIT and shipped over. Only three XO3s – the only laptops that had worked without breaking since landing – had been brought directly from Earth.

A research project course had been the endpoint of Techer general education since just over a year ago, when Amy Guo had gone over to Massachusetts for a month-long medical practicum with Townsend and the two others close to her in school. The courses that followed this success were partially designed by the highest level students themselves, albeit with a lot of oversight, and were vaguely at the level of the summer undergraduate research fellowships that had been offered to students on Earth starting after frosh year. The joke in the ship’s name was universally groaned at.

For this course, Mina was commanding the crew of eight who had sailed far south along the California coast from campus. She was the only adult on board. The kids were some of the most intellectually gifted and competitive of their generation and ranged in age from Sarah, just past thirteen Earth years, to Z and Karen, who’d be twelve by the time the ship got home. The bulk of kids their age would be taking the research course in three or four years.

Each of the adolescents had their own particular interests and a project they had chosen for this voyage, which intersected with each other. But they also had an overarching group assignment, which was not directly connected to the cruise but was to be finished by the end of it. The method, used by Townsend to great effect as a focusing tool, had been formulated by a certain visiting professor to Caltech in the mid 1990’s as a high-level form of general instruction. By the time the Surf had returned to Caltech, they were to have prepared a document giving an ‘as complete as possible’ history of the construction of the vessel. That included the stories and motivations of those who had built it, as well as the history of the materials back to the origin of the universe. They approached this very large project with varying, but positive, enthusiasm.

The trip up to this point had been relatively smooth sailing. They had had to detour to avoid a storm system, but the four satellites now in orbit had been more than sufficient to warn them. Mina took it as easy as she could with eight charges. She’d surveyed the Big Wet down to Cape Lewis at 15º S, so Z’s first ten days of seismic data taking held no surprises. The kids were better sailors than she was by this point, and almost as good cooks, so she was able to spend a fair amount of time working on her own comparative geophysics text, which she’d send back to Earth as a follow-up to her thesis. She talked to Will over the radio, and simply sat in the sun woolgathering and watching her children.

Surf was at anchor in smooth fifty-meter water three kilometers out from the shore of Catalina. The rafts would land the next morning. Hannah Zhang and Mark Thye Jr. had wanted a night landing, but Mina had pulled rank on that one. So, for the moment, there wasn’t much for the kids to do either and they relaxed to their favored recreations.

Karen was balanced on one of the spars that connected the two hulls together, practicing a set of straight-line karate katas in bare feet, despite the starting-to-cool weather of early fall. The spar was a twenty-centimeter wide beam a meter and a half above the water. Mina felt her mother’s fear rising, but knew her daughter would react a little badly to Matka’s worrying. At least she had the balance to do this, and hadn’t been practicing when the ship was moving. Karen had been learning the martial arts from her father since she was six, and had showed no signs of declining interest as she entered puberty. That was probably for the best in a prospective alien veterinarian, but of course Mina worried anyway.

She took a picture as her daughter evaded an invisible sword and sent it back to campus. Will would be working the Screamer Lab, she knew. When she or the kids were away, work and training was how he suppressed and coped with his own worry. He’d appreciate Karen’s progress. In a few years, she’d be able to do things that he was getting too old for. Mina was just shy of her own fortieth Earth birthday, as her body had measured time. Will was a year older. Middle age was starting to close around them, but she didn’t mind it so much, if only she were able to brood less often. So after a good-night from Will, making sure that Karen had stopped practicing and gotten onto one of the hulls now that the sun had set, and checking that Z had a thermos of tea to keep him warm during the first watch, Mina went to her bunk and meditated herself to sleep.

Zmago Grohar Chamer was still ‘Z’, even though he’d long since learned enough of his mother’s language to pronounce his name correctly. He was quieter than his sister. At home, she would punch and kick and scream her way through training after spending the day persuading the pedes that domestication meant that they shouldn’t fight each other. He would go running with Dad in the early morning and spend the day and evening carefully planning out and constructing electrical components and studying spacecraft. Will had given him a part-time job predicting the positions of the satellite network. Tau GPS was much to Z’s taste. He wasn’t a weakling; he’d done well in Basic Hunting and Personal Defense; but he preferred to plan things out in advance and not run on adrenalin. So on Surf he was the navigator and quartermaster and sat the first watch because it meant a couple of hours where he could quietly plan without disrupting his rest.

The night passed without much incident, and an hour after dawn the proa had moved in too a kilometer out and one of the two rafts left for shore. It had been scrubbed, its crew had been scrubbed, and so had their sample containers and water jugs. They had no wish to contaminate the island with either Earth or mainland animals.

Hannah, Mark, Z, and Jorge spread out once the raft was safely beached. Two started a little ways inland to test and refill tanks with water from a stream. The others scouted the piscipede moulting ground that started two kilometers down the coast. As on Earth, isolated beaches were at a premium, and there were roughly a hundred thousand live aquatic invertebrates on the other side of the rocks they clambered to the top of, along with decades worth of shed and partially decayed exoskeletons. Z didn’t mind being put on water duty. When the wind brought whiffs from over the mass down the beach, he could tell why the scouts had worn filter masks. Because of the smell, as well as a need to scout a large portion of the island and a desire to not disturb the piscipedes, this would not be the permanent base site for the next three weeks of the project course. That was another two days’ sailing to east.

This Catalina was far larger than its Earth counterpart. From east to west, it spanned fifteen hundred and thirty kilometers, and from north to south, just shy of five hundred. It was two and a half times the size of New Zealand, and it was cold so far south. The southern shores, in particular, were often visited by bergs calved off of the south polar ice. The Channel was sixty kilometers wide and one and a half deep – a fault ran down the center. In the Surf’s main cabin, next to the radio, there was a large composite printout of the best satellite map of the island. On the computers, it could be seen at full resolution, showing fifty-meter dome-like masses of presumed vegetation in sheltered areas of the interior mountains, interspersed amongst bare rocks, snow pack, and the alpine glaciers that reached far down the slopes. During the cold periods, everything else on the island would be blanketed by ice pack.

Even without hot springs to keep them going, plants were surviving centuries of cold in areas out of the wind and snow. Insulation and sunlight were well enough, but where were they getting their water? This was Mark’s problem. Karen was to examine any animals on the island, to see if they sought survival in the ocean or could endure the land. Sarah had agreed to fly ultralight surveys through the mountains. She might be an electrical engineer, but she still liked the scenery and, like Melinda, she knew how to fly. Z would be manning the boat and studying seismic data, while the other four students looked at the pisepedes and other coastal life forms, glacier flow patterns and mineral prospecting possibilities, and planted remote instrumentation stations. So after resupplying on water, they moved eight hundred kilometers east along the north coast, to a site where the mountains were relatively close to shore. On the south side, the mountains were closer still, but glaciers ran down into the sea and that would mean dodging icebergs, so Mina had again exercised her veto.

2042 August 2 04:19 UT
Test Year 15, Day 86, 22:00 CST local
Northern Coast of Catalina

For the next two days, the daily rhythm that the ship had formed repeated itself. Three hundred and fifty kilometers past Molting Beach, they anchored in a slow swell for the next night and for a photographic survey of a large set of folds in a series of sea cliffs. Z again had the first watch, and was settling back for some quiet thinking after a radio conference with Will about satellite radiation drift. But his scanning the horizon and occasionally writing down a line of equations in his scratch files on one of tablets was interrupted by another nightowl.

Sarah was no longer short; she would soon have her share of her father’s height, with maybe a little bit more altitude from her bones reacting to Tau gravity. She now knew the full history of her parents and how Melinda had brought her back. She was closer to Z and Karen than she was to her guardian, although she admired the ninja more than she’d readily admit even as she claimed to be rebelling. She had flirted with an emo-goth worldview for a while, wearing only the purple-black of pede leather and trying to keep her hair in an artistically grieving form while working her shifts in the zard pens under Karen. Self-inflicted misery had not been encouraged by her friends or Mina or Will, so she’d bounced back and Melinda’s distancing herself from her ward’s behavioral choices hadn’t had too much of a negative impact. But Sarah had developed and retained habits of listening to odd philosophical electronica from the music collections and starting conversations about death and existential topics from the oddest bits of information. Z had become adept at seeing this pattern and deflecting it, and did so when his watch was interrupted by a mention of the idea of the spear-carrier, from Rite of Passage. The book was appropriate. The research course was becoming a rite of passage itself.

“I get that the whole point of the spear carrier is that they are seen as expendable and die when they don’t deserve to, but have you considered what that means for the Examiners?” Z had seen his father’s skill at gentle redirection, and was better at it than he knew. He did know that he’d prevented some self-pitying discussion about other people occasionally being unthinking. The Examiners weren’t quite like God, but discussing their ethics would keep things at a higher level.

“If you want to know what the Examiners think about us, why don’t you ask them?” If, having translated from the English-Chinese-Internet jumble of Techer creole, both of the pre-teens sounded a lot like lecturing professors, and Z a lot like his father, it didn’t bother them. This was the environment of the Techer school system. A lot of their parents had talked the same way even when they had been surrounded by the crowds of Earth. “I don’t think they see us as spear carriers or red shirts. If they do, they don’t act like it. If they did, they could have just snuffed out the Four.”

“That’s my point. They claimed to see us as potential equals. But I think even Dad has been treating them as some analogy of the spear-carrier: they aren’t people to us. We treat them like objects and abstract fitness tests. I don’t like it.”

Sarah balanced against the gunwale. “There really isn’t any other way. Would you feel better if we’d started to treat them like gods? They’ll become people when we can see them, if you have faith that the Test will actually end.” She’d started to veer towards theology, where she would argue for agnosticism for hours. Z nudged the conversation back.

“But people should have bodies. So are they computers, brains in vats, green goo? What does an Examiner look like?” As she’d been reading a lot of science fiction recently, Sarah was predisposed to complain about the excess of Star Trek fan fiction in the Techer library, and from there they talked for the rest of the watch without hitting dangerous ground. The only disturbance was a minor pulse from a small earthquake as a glacier somewhere inland gave way and slid slightly downhill. Those were to be expected and had been registered by the seismometers several times a day.

2042 August 7 10:12 UT
Test Year 15, Day 91, 14:00 local
Surf Base Camp/Above Mt. Ahrens Glacier

The ship rode at anchor in a natural harbor. The tents and supplies had been moved to the shore, on an elevated set of barren rocks that were isolated from inland. There was nothing growing on the shore and coastal rocks but an intermittent patchwork of marginally mobile lichen-like growths. The samples would be analyzed by the experts back at campus, but based on their distribution, Hannah was already claiming that some were derived from sea plants while the hardier species were from spores of the permanent growths in the interior. She claimed to be done with her field work, and had spent her off hours writing out the descriptions of mainland California vegetation that were needed for the joint assignment’s description of Surf’s spars, until Mina had ordered her to work as a geology assistant. Jorge’s project was the first rockhammer geology she’d done in the last two years, and she would be giving him more data than he wanted. And it gave her something to do.

Karen was a hundred and fifty kilometers inland, surveying one of the high refuges with young Mark. They were camped for the next day and night on the shore of a glacial lake, held behind a dam of ice. Sarah had dropped them and their supplies on top of a ridge with two trips of her paraglider, homebuilt and larger than the old ones from the Examiners. On one side of the ridge was the lake, which would fill a lot higher in spring, and on the other was one of the plant enclaves. They’d opted to camp at the base of the ridge, in an area that would be wiped clean the next time the lake rose and flooded. Ecological maintaince was the official reason. Unofficially, the lake was more scenic, if also a touch rancid from an algal bloom. The two pop-tents, the food supplies, the oxy-methane fuel tank and stove, and the waste buckets were all lined up on the shore. A hundred meters further from the dam, two Kevlar lines were strung to the top of the cliff, holding with geckle pads. Sarah could land the parachute in the lake valley, but would not be able to take off again, so when they were done, they’d climb back up the cliff.

Mina knew she should not worry about Mark when it came to Karen. He was a nice enough boy, and quite honorable. Even if he weren’t, anyone who pressed Karen’s boundaries too far tended to get thrown into the nearest wall. But Mark would follow the rules and keep to the plan, as witnessed by his careful acoustic mapping of the base of the Mt. Ahrens glacier where it dammed the lake. Already he’d gotten a good estimate of the speed and location of the subsurface channel that carried the outflow. Since Mina needed to worry, she worried instead about what her daughter might do in pursuit of her animals and information on the massive insulated pillow-plants in the enclaves.

Mina had need to be worried. Karen’s assignment for the morning had been to climb over the ridge and obtain detailed photos of the pillows, plus a few soil samples to check the nutrient balance. The pillows themselves were intricate mosaics and layers of dozens of different types of plant, and couldn’t be disturbed without risking centuries of growth. She had climbed the ridge, geckel pad over geckel pad along the rope like she’d practiced up and down the sides of Millikan, and she’d gotten the samples and a good set of photographs. But she had also climbed off to the side on her way back down, to get pictures of the water storing shells of dormant sedentary pisces that had been left twenty meters above the current shoreline by the drainage of the lake. Mina only learned of that little stunt after it was over, and all she could do to forestall something similar was to warn that there wasn’t any more geckel in all of Catalina, so those climbing gloves should be kept as safe as possible.

The color of a few exposed roots in an old rockslide gave the first clue to how the pillows survived. Some of the plants had very long roots, which had grown downwards far enough to follow changes in the water table from the lake. Presumably they went deep enough to get to the sub-glacial part of the lake, which would remain liquid during the cold years. The plants at the top must lose most of the water they brought in to the probing and severing tendrils of the other species, but they were dependent on those for nutrients and pure insulation, so the system was stable. With that basic idea, Mark’s glacial studies – which he’d put into the description of Tau’s climate necessary to explain why vegetation in California grew the way it did, and Karen’s survey of the dormant pisces, Mina could call them back to base. Sarah had launched for the first pickup, and they started to pack up camp.

Their ride was a half-hour out when Z radioed a seismic warning. The glacier on Mt. Murphy, closer to Surf than to the Mt. Ahrens lake, had just slipped again. The ship had felt quite a perceptible jolt two seconds behind the p-wave. Ten seconds later, the lake sloshed gently back and forth. It wouldn’t have been a problem, except for the geckel lines.

Geckel is resistant to sudden forces. The patches did not move when the face of the ridge was very slightly warped. But the rock that one of the lines was anchored to did. When it fell, the jerk went up the line and pulled out the higher tie-down and its support. The falling multiply weighted line started a rockslide. When everything had settled, both lines and all of their support pads were buried under the rubble. Even Kevlar cables have a failure point, and the geckel would be useless after that much pummeling. Now the only climbing gear the kids had was that one pair of climbing gloves and their way out was an angle-of-repose pile of loose scree. They would need to either get past the dam or climb over the upper part of the glacier to get to a point where they could be picked up.

Nobody panicked, in a testament to how well they’d adapted. While she had a brief moment of shock when she heard the stream of curses from the speakers, Mina got on the radio and started to check on Karen – although both she and Mark were obviously conscious – while Z called back to campus and reported the accident. They didn’t call Sarah back yet since she had a small amount of reserve fuel, but they patched her in to the communications as well.

After a few minutes of helpless laughter from her and some pointed words from her mother, Karen was able to give an inventory. They had both been far enough away from the lines that they had been able to move before the rocks landed. But there hadn’t been time to move the supplies, except for the cameras, phones, and the few samples in their backpacks. The tents, most of the extra food, the stove, and heaters were either buried or crushed. Thanks to equal parts luck and its rigid construction, the gas tank hadn’t been breached, which had prevented it from acting like a bomb. Mark started to move it away from the base of the slide by himself – he was big on the new Caltech American-rules football team. In the meantime, Karen tried to find a way up the corner of the ice dam and the ridge.

Twenty minutes later, Sarah was working her way over the top of Mt. Ahrens, and could see the lake. But Karen had had to give up the attempt to climb. Geckel sticks just fine to wet surfaces and the gloves were insulated enough for her hands to stay warm, but the rocks near the ice dam were covered by frigid mud and the pads got coated. For the same reason, she couldn’t free climb up. She had a hammer and a few pins, but the lakeward face of the glacier was by its nature overhanging, knarled, and unstable. So they could not climb out without swimming the lake, and without heat they would be stupid to do so. The fuel tank could no longer be burned in a controlled fashion. Mark figured that the mix would detonate even if they put it under water.

While Karen cleaned off the pads, the radio buzzed with a discussion. Finally, an apparently viable idea developed. Sarah had a line in her payload, intended as a safe way for her to drop the fan if the Tau-built motor were to fail. “I think if I make a close pass over the dam, I can drop the line and have it reach you. I can’t make a tight enough circle for you to work a harness on the end. Want to try for a straight grab?”

“Not necessary. I’ve got a better idea.” Mark had pulled a self-burning wick from his pack. He kept it next to the spare capacitors for his four-shot pistol. “It’s a lot safer, but a lot more noisy. Help me with these rocks, well you?” He jammed the wick into the tank’s valve, tossed Karen a spool of string and picked up a couple of stones the size of his head.

“What are you doing?” That came from Karen, her mother, and Sarah all at once.

He pointed to the tank. “We tie the rocks to this; light the wick; and toss it into the lake. The current will drag it downstream, and we get as far upstream was we possibly can before the tank blows. It should have lodged in the outlet by then. That should take down the dam, and then we just walk out. Nothing crazy like hanging from a forty meter rope.”

They talked him out of it, eventually. Mina did not even attempt to pull rank. Survival came first, and it was her daughter out there. But she did make a few choice remarks off the link to Z, about how teenage boys were the same here as they had been back on Earth. She not needed to remind Mark about the importance of ecological conservation: Sarah and Karen did a plenty good job of that. So Mina reverted to reciting prayers in her head. When Mark realized that he was out voted, he started to waver. When the voice of Will Chamer told him that the mine wouldn’t bring down the ice, he relented. And when Karen jumped up and grabbed the rope and the paraglider dropped down with the extra load, he ditched the tank and followed. Sarah ran up the motor and they were dragged several meters until lift built enough to pick them off the ground.

The pads let Karen dead hang. Without them, she didn’t have enough strength in her grip and upper arms to hold her own weight and that of her pack for a long period of time. Mark had developed enough muscles that when he held with a death grip, he didn’t move. But as Sarah slowly brought them up and around to the top of the ridge, where they could be picked up in an orthodox fashion, his hands started to slip. So Karen helped him a bit. She dug the tips of her boots under his armpits and pulled upward. She was not gentle about it, and let him drop from a meter above the ground when they were above the ridgeline. He bounced and rolled as she landed lightly and Sarah cast off the rope.

Karen drew the first ride back. As she climbed into the second harness, and they flew up and over the mountain, Mark sat down for the wait. He went through a debriefing over the radio, and then sat in silence. His shame gradually shifted, and by the time Sarah got back to pick him up, he had become sullen. When they got back to base, he was angry.

2042 August 7 18:29 UT
Test Year 15, Day 91, 21:30 CST local
Surf Base Camp

Mark started in on Mina after she’d handed him a bowl of spicy miso-zard soup and sat him next to the radiant heater in the main tent. The other students were either asleep like Karen or there to welcome him back. Mostly they remained quiet while he ranted.

“We could have died out there, and you ask me – and your daughter – to take an insane risk to get out of there … don’t give me something about the dam not bursting. I worked it out. Even if the mine didn’t take it out by itself, it would have either blocked the channel and the pressure would have broken it down or widened it drained the lake. It would have worked just fine. Instead we had to play hero. I thought survival came first.” He gradually ran down, but then Jorge broke in and compared this trip to the Test and Mina to an Examiner. This caused an uproar and started Mark going again, and it went on. Eventually Mina decided that they’d blown off enough steam and called for order. She and Will and a lot of the other parents had spent a long time asking themselves how to answer questions like this.

“You could have died out there. If you had, I would be in deep mourning right now. That is the nature of life. It is risky. We try to minimize the risk and ensure that we don’t risk everything for something that doesn’t matter, and to have backup plans. Hanging by van der Waals bonds from an extra-strong rope and being lifted out is a pretty good backup. It isn’t as risky as Mark has said, but that is a natural reaction to fear. Now, blowing the ice dam may have been safer, but it would have meant destroying a lot of the Catalina ecosystem. As the Examiners did say, we have a responsibility to the world. Sarah would prefer I not use this language, but we are the stewards of creation and it is worth a little hardship and even risk of death to keep it safe. Of course, we can’t become irrational and disproportionate in our response – that’s what the tree-huggers back on Earth did.

“Maybe the Examiners made us more willing to accept these sorts of life-and-death truths than we would have been otherwise. Our entire lives have been the Test for so long that we don’t think about it much anymore. Now you have begun to understand. This is the sort of thing that we can’t teach you without your reaching the edge first. A lot of wisdom is like that – it either comes from very thorough study or sudden pain. That is life.”

The children accepted this, but they still argued a lot during the remaining nights on Catalina. Sarah, in particular, was confused. She had not realized how much the adults had thought and understood about life and death and philosophy. When Mina figured this out, she smiled. The children were growing up. Too fast, she thought, but it was for the best.