Analog SFF, March 2012 Read Online Free PDF Page B

could infer nothing about the device's true age, its purpose, its origin. Daltry and Karen almost shouted at each other about whether it was a crashed probe or whether it had held—still held, Karen wondered—tiny organisms. Karen wondered if it had even seeded Earth; “We might be its children,” she said. Daltry laughed at both those possibilities, and explained that organisms were primitive “version 1.0 hardware,” doomed to stay on their planets.
    "Space exploration belongs to software, woman."
    Finally Daltry wheeled off to the tent that he and I were going to share. It was big, a four man, so that he could wheel inside and park his chair. Karen had a single tube tent set up near it.
    Karen put her tablet computer on her knees and began typing.
    "What are you writing?"
    "Just notes.” She smiled. “We're immortal now, you know. We're the first explorers of the Ediacarian machine."
    "Taking notes for the ages?” It came out more sarcastic than I meant it, but Karen did not rise to taking offense. Instead, she shrugged, still typing. “Better to form good habits from the beginning. I imagine I'll spend the rest of my life studying this thing."
    That seemed delusional to me. I imagined that any day now this thing was going to be taken away from us by the federal government, if not New York State. It was on public land, after all. Instead of saying that, though, I just frowned.
    Karen glanced up, and took that as a sign I was unhappy she was writing instead of talking to me. She set the tablet aside.
    "So, you glad I brought you in on this?"
    I nodded. “Perhaps. Partially. Yes. As odd as it sounds, I may even be glad that I was fired. Otherwise I never would have come up here. But I'm upset you two won't talk through the social implications of this—our responsibilities."
    "We can learn a bit more before we have to settle anything. We know nothing yet. Come on, Worry, you know how this goes. No one in the world is going to know more about this machine than you and I and Daltry do. This is totally new here. So they'll take it away from us and then they'll stumble around. So why shouldn't we get to do the stumbling?"
    I sipped at the tea we'd made. It was hard to deny that she was right about that. What bothered me was not some fear that we were not best suited to the task, but the idea that we were attempting to seize responsibility for something so important to the whole human race.
    We stared at the fire a while in silence. I looked over to the tent I shared with Daltry. He'd turned on a light, and his silhouette showed starkly on the tent fabric as he lifted himself from the wheelchair and flopped down on his sleeping bag.
    "Why did you leave?” I whispered to Karen.
    She hesitated, eyes meeting my own. Then she looked back at the red embers of the dying fire. Such a long time passed that I thought she wasn't going to answer. I thought of other things I would like to say: things had been going so well when we were together; I had thought we were meant for each other; we could have been business partners; I had wanted to marry her.
    But before I mustered the courage to say any of those things, she said, “I didn't love you."
    "What?” We both knew I meant no question by that.
    "I didn't love you. And I thought maybe you loved me. I thought it would be . . . cruel to stick around. It was getting awkward."
    "Ah.” I opened my mouth. Suddenly I wanted to spit out something the opposite of what I had just meant to say: thank you very much for your heartfelt concern, or, I never even liked you much, or, you really did me a favor because I did so much better after you left. But I didn't manage to produce any stupid, sarcastic comeback before Karen said, “Goodnight,” and rose up from her seat. She disappeared into the dark, heading toward her tent.
    "Just for the record,” Daltry said to me, a few minutes later when I crawled into our tent, “I don't love you either."
    "Go to hell,” I told him.
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