Asimov's Science Fiction - June 2014 (2 page)

"Ryon, go away," Helise said. "Now."

He stood up, straightening his jacket. "Can't blame me for trying," he said. Reaching out, he picked up Cjoi's hand; she was too surprised to pull it away before he'd brought it to his lips, left a tender kiss on it, and let her go. "I do hate to miss out on rare treasures."

"Don't mind him," Helise said, as he sauntered off. "He's as incorrigible as he is charming, but... well. He has his plusses." She was blushing as she said it, and she suddenly seemed so very far away, receding back into a stranger.

Cjoi coughed, picking up another forkful of pasta to cover her discomfort. "I'm sorry," she said. "I'm not used to attention, at least not the flattering kind."

"I... look." Helise fidgeted in her chair. "It wouldn't be a problem for me, if you wanted some time alone with him—"

"No!" Cjoi said, more forcefully than she intended. Helise looked startled, then relieved. "I'm not staying here very long," she added. "I'm taking the next shuttle back out, tonight." She hadn't planned to, but knew she would as soon as she said it. It was too complicated here, her ability to think lost in a muddle of unhappiness.

"Well," Helise said, managing a smile. "I guess that means we do have time for dessert."

Cjoi held her dive sphere at eighty atmos pressure. This was as low as she'd ever gone; even Giardal Enterprises, in all their greed, had known that pushing their divers further was too risky.

They spent a lot on us,
she thought.
Custom-made monsters.

She sat there for a while, nothing to see but thick, toxic cloud through the glass. When she closed her eyes, at night, that same endless shade of gray pervaded her dreams.

Throwing her hand down on the console, she resumed her descent.

One last obligation, before escape. Helise had insisted Cjoi come to her scheduled talk, and since her shuttle was still more than two hours out, she saw no graceful way to say no. "I may never see you again," Helise had said.

"Don't make me part of it," she'd insisted.

The stepped hall was about half-full. Cjoi settled in the back of the room, up against the wall, where the bright lights at the podium wouldn't reach. She wondered how many different colonies the people crowded into the seats toward the front represented, colonies that had survived and thrived enough to produce something as frivolous and wasteful as
tourists.
To her they all looked the same.

She knew the planetary science inside and out; maybe she hadn't known the words ammonia and hydrogen until after she'd been freed, but she knew how they felt, how they burned. Helise walked out onto the floor and took up her space behind the podium as if that was the most natural place for her to be, and when she began to speak, her voice was loud and clear and without hesitation. If her eyes, roving the audience, found Cjoi huddled at the back, her expression did not change. The lights dimmed as the stage screen cleared to a live pic from the planet below, and the audience oooh'd and aaah'd on cue.

"The planet Pahlati was taken into Protectorate custody after it was declared a natural wonder of the galaxy, and deemed to be endangered. You might think it's hard to endanger a gas giant!"

Laughter.

"I was a junior staff member aboard the Protectorate flagship,
Lisians Champion,
eleven years ago. You could hardly see this beautiful vista you are now viewing behind me, so thick were the poaching ships in orbit. And of course, the Giardal Enterprises vessels." Helise pressed a button, and a giant blot of ugly ship appeared on the screen. The
Ama.
It threw Cjoi back in her seat, a visceral panic wrapping itself around her heart and lungs, and she had to force herself to breathe.
It's an image,
she told herself.
An old image. Nothing more. You watched the ship get towed into the scrapdock, watched it be turned to slag. Remember that.

"All of these ships had come for one thing, and one thing only," Helise said. "The Pahlati Diamonds."

At a hundred-twenty atmos, she put her sphere into auto-pilot, holding steady. It was dark now, full into night, but this far down it hardly mattered. She knew this planet, the vortexes of this zone, better than she knew herself.

She'd been pushing up the pressure inside her sphere since she'd sealed herself into it, two days earlier. It had been parked two hops out from the shuttle station that serviced the Protectorate zone around Pahlati, just in case anyone tried to follow her. No one had. She'd had a surprisingly easy time navigating the tiny dead spaces between Protectorate sensors, which were set out to catch much bigger prey.

Interior acclimatization was now nearly caught up; she could feel the changes in her body, a thousand tiny genetic switches thrown to wake the sleeping monster. It was time. She pulled on gloves, then wrapped a control band on her left arm from wrist to elbow. Powering it on, she checked that it was syncing properly with helm control, then untethered herself from the ship's primary console.

She pulled her boots off, carefully, making sure the magsoles were on and she wouldn't suddenly end up with a heavy projectile in the cabin. Reaching overhead, she pulled open the storage bin, carefully extracting her exosuit from its pocket. She hated the feel of it against her skin. Even now, still lagging open at her chest, hood down, it felt like a thick, skin-tight prison.

Sealing it down to the gloves, she slipped her boots back on. Taking a deep breath, she closed her eyes for a long moment, preparing herself. Then she lifted the hem of her tank top, first one side, then the other, and connected the suit's systems up to the implanted ports that ran directly into the cutting-edge, black-market hardware installed in her lungs.

At the press of a button, her seat detached from the control arms and slid through the floor of the control cabin into the narrow space below, clamping onto ring rails with a solid clunk of inevitability.

From her arm-band control, she set the sphere to slowly rotate one hundred eighty degrees. Her seat, running along the rails, stayed at the lowest point as the ship moved around her. From the outside of the control cabin wall, in easy reach above her face, she peeled off the equipment she wanted one piece at a time. Chute. Fluid recycling filters. Charged hi-ox packs. The breather apparatus and mouthpiece. The CO
₂
force-exchanger. She attached them to her suit, hooking them into control, and running another set of checks on each before powering them live. Last was the breather setup; she inhaled deeply, enjoying that last, chill breath of filtered air, before she clicked it into the suit ports that ran into her lung implants. Instantly it began to fill her lungs with foam, and she fought the adrenaline-fear as she choked on it. When she couldn't not anymore, she breathed.

Shaking, she tried to calm herself by checking her med status. Oxygen levels were rising again, back toward normal, as the nanofoam pulsed mechanically through her lungs, adapting itself to the parameters of her immediate environment.

Last, she pulled her hood up around her head, sealed the faceplate—what claustrophobia that once would have brought no longer noticeable against the overwhelming sensory impact of the breather—and clipped in a thick pair of IR goggles. One final check for paranoia's sake, and then she lay there for a moment, letting the last of the wild panic get eased out of her system by the intense focus that always took her, pre-dive, from scared to angry to invincible.

Tapping at her arm, she initiated the drop sequence. She reached up and gripped the ring rail's double bars as the countdown in the peripheral vision of her goggles hit single digits, then, her heart racing, zero.

The hatch doors below her yawned wide, her seat splitting in half to open with them. All that held her now were her own hands, tight on the bars, and that brief recognition that, as always, the odds were against her return.

She smiled, and let go.

Helise clicked again, and the
Ama
disappeared, replaced by an impossibly beautiful, glittering thing, a three-dimensional crystal snowflake set carefully on blue velvet. "This is the largest specimen collected so far, that we know of," Helise said. "It is known as the Orbach Diamond, after the collector from whom it was confiscated."

It should be Nemi's Diamond,
Cjoi thought. It was Nemi who'd caught it, who dove too deep, and came back to writhe and flail and die on the floor of the ship dorm while the masters oooh'd and aaah'd over her prize.
They're remembered, but not the names and faces of those who actually died for them.

"There used to be an entire industry set up around stripping Pahlati of its Diamonds, from the wealthy collectors who coveted them, to the dealers who sold them, to the smugglers who supplied them, to ships like the one I just showed you, to the girls—some as young as five or six standards—who were thrown into the depths of the planet's atmosphere again and again to retrieve them. When the Protectorate was formed, as a collaboration between Earth Alliance and the Gaian Collective, its first mission was to unravel the tangled cord that led us from this very diamond back to Pahlati, and to discover the horrifying circumstances of the industry's smallest employees."

Employees?
Cjoi thought. She shook her head at the idea of it. She hadn't gotten paid, she hadn't gotten credit. If she had a good day, she got just enough food to survive on and just enough sleep to dream she was somewhere—anywhere—else. The irony was that, since leaving, she only ever dreamt about being back here.

A boy in the front row raised his hand, and Helise pointed to him. "Why didn't they just use machines to scoop them up?" he said, his accent upperclass Haudie South.

"For one thing, the fractally complex branches of the Pahlati Diamonds are very fragile. They are also razor-sharp. A machine that could collect and hold them without breaking off tips and spires would be very, very expensive to build."

Cjoi glanced down at her hands, palms up, and the myriad scars from cuts and cold-burns that criss-crossed them, cobwebs etched into her mottled skin where the Diamonds had sliced through her gloves year after year.
Sharp, oh yes,
she thought.
And humans are so much cheaper than machines, both to buy and to replace.

"Now, I'm sure all of you came here because of the Pahlati Diamonds, and by now probably have already seen our collection of recovered specimens in our gallery on C Deck," Helise continued, "but it may not be clear why the Protectorate is involved here. Our mission is the preservation of unique and endangered ecosystems. Does anyone know how that relates to Pahlati?"

The front-row boy spoke up again. "Because it's alive?" he said.

"What's alive?" Helise asked, crouching at the edge of the stage in front of him.

"The Diamond!"

"Right!" Helise grinned. "You're very smart. The diamonds are not geological artifacts at all, but the byproducts of a living organism." She stood, pacing back to the lectern, and clicked up a slide of tiny, bluish spheres. "The Diamonds begin life as a tiny gaseous polyp in the upper atmosphere, sort of like a tiny limbless jellyfish, if anyone knows what that is. It feeds on skymoss spores and whatever aeroplankton it comes into contact with, which means they're almost always found along the edges of the stronger updraft zones where there's more mixing of materials."

Click. A new picture appeared, this time of the clouds from above, glistening under a rising sun.

"So does anyone know how these tiny polyps turn into these complicated crystalline structures? Or why?"

No hand from the audience this time. Helise crouched again, in front of the Haudie boy. "Do you know what a pearl is?" she asked.

"A bead," he said.

"Well, yes." She reached into her pocket and pulled out a pearl, magnified on the screen behind her, and held it out to the boy.
She must have done this a thousand times,
Cjoi thought. Part of her wondered if she'd planted the boy in the front row, or at least herded the family in that direction. But no, it was just that Helise was that good.
Good with people, comfortable in her own skin. This is her element. Not mine.

Watching Helise explain pearls made her want to take her to the ocean, find her pearls of her own—real ones—and try to claim some small corner of Helise's comfort zone to curl up in and rest.

"... polyp, as it expands, builds its diamond shell by an organic process of crystal vapor deposition. It serves to protect the polyp's thin outer membranes, and acts as a mechanism for the polyp to excrete and contain elements that would otherwise be toxic in concentration. The exquisite structure you see behind me is the end result, although no two are the same. The older the polyp, the larger and more ornate the diamond shell. Also, the harder they are to find. Do you know why?"

One of the adults in the third row raised his hand. "Because they break," he said.

"Yes," Helise said. "While the external edges of the shell are very fragile, the base that envelops most of the polyp is, literally, as hard as diamond. It would take a significant event to fracture it and expose the delicate interior of the mantle cavity. And yet, ultimately, that's each of the polyps' fate, if not intercepted and removed from their environment."

"What breaks them?" the boy asked.

"Asteroids!" Another child in the row shouted.

"No, something bigger than asteroids," Helise prompted.

"Comets!"

"The answer is the planet itself." Helise clicked again, and brought up a cross-section diagram of Pahlati, showing all the layers of atmosphere in the gas giant, from the magnetosphere down to the metallic hydrogen wrapped around the purely theoretical core. "As the polyps grow in size, they accumulate more material and become heavier. Their shape, concave on the underside, is designed to maximize the advantage of the strong updrafts that create the light atmospheric bands we see on the planet's face. But the heavier they grow, the farther and faster they sink. We're not sure how big they can get, but we do know that, eventually, they will fall far enough that they will be crushed, shattered, by the dense atmosphere. We also know that, lining the interior of each Diamond's mantle cavity, is the next generation of polyps, waiting to soar on the updrafts back to the sunlight. There, they start the process all over again.