Michael Swanwick - Slow Life

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2024-11-24 0 0 100.13KB 20 页 5.9玖币
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*Slow Life*
by Michael Swanwick
Different evolutionary backgrounds lead to _very_
different perspectives.
--------
"It was the Second Age of Space. Gagarin, Shepard,
Glenn, and Armstrong were all dead. It was _our_ turn to
make history now."
-- _The Memoirs of Lizzie O'Brien_
--------
The raindrop began forming ninety kilometers above
the surface of Titan. It started with an infinitesimal speck
of tholin, adrift in the cold nitrogen atmosphere.
Dianoacetylene condensed on the seed nucleus, molecule by
molecule, until it was one shard of ice in a cloud of
billions.
Now the journey could begin.
It took almost a year for the shard of ice in
question to precipitate downward twenty-five kilometers,
where the temperature dropped low enough that ethane began
to condense on it. But when it did, growth was rapid.
Down it drifted.
At forty kilometers, it was for a time caught up in
an ethane cloud. There it continued to grow. Occasionally it
collided with another droplet and doubled in size. Finally
it was too large to be held effortlessly aloft by the gentle
stratospheric winds.
It fell.
Falling, it swept up methane and quickly grew large
enough to achieve a terminal velocity of almost two meters
per second.
At twenty-seven kilometers, it passed through a dense
layer of methane clouds. It acquired more methane, and
continued its downward flight.
As the air thickened, its velocity slowed and it
began to lose some of its substance to evaporation. At two
and a half kilometers, when it emerged from the last patchy
clouds, it was losing mass so rapidly it could not normally
be expected to reach the ground.
It was, however, falling toward the equatorial
highlands, where mountains of ice rose a towering five
hundred meters into the atmosphere. At two meters and a lazy
new terminal velocity of one meter per second, it was only a
breath away from hitting the surface.
Two hands swooped an open plastic collecting bag
upward, and snared the raindrop.
"Gotcha!" Lizzie O'Brien cried gleefully.
She zip-locked the bag shut, held it up so her helmet
cam could read the bar-code in the corner, and said, "One
raindrop." Then she popped it into her collecting box.
Sometimes it's the little things that make you
happiest. Somebody would spend a _year_ studying this one
little raindrop when Lizzie got it home. And it was just Bag
64 in Collecting Case 5. She was going to be on the surface
of Titan long enough to scoop up the raw material of a
revolution in planetary science. The thought of it filled
her with joy.
Lizzie dogged down the lid of the collecting box and
began to skip across the granite-hard ice, splashing the
puddles and dragging the boot of her atmosphere suit through
the rivulets of methane pouring down the mountainside._ "I'm
sing-ing in the rain."_ She threw out her arms and spun
around. _"Just sing-ing in the rain!"_
"Uh ... O'Brien?" Alan Greene said from the
_Clement_. "Are you all right?"
_"Dum-dee-dum-dee-dee-dum-dum, I'm ... some-thing
again."_
"Oh, leave her alone." Consuelo Hong said with sour
good humor. She was down on the plains, where the methane
simply boiled into the air, and the ground was covered with
thick, gooey tholin. It was, she had told them, like wading
ankle-deep in molasses. "Can't you recognize the scientific
method when you hear it?"
"If you say so," Alan said dubiously. He was stuck in
the _Clement_, overseeing the expedition and minding the
website. It was a comfortable gig -- _he_ wouldn't be
sleeping in his suit _or_ surviving on recycled water and
energy stix -- and he didn't think the others knew how much
he hated it.
"What's next on the schedule?" Lizzie asked.
"Um ... well, there's still the robot turbot to be
released. How's that going, Hong?"
"Making good time. I oughta reach the sea in a couple
of hours."
"Okay, then it's time O'Brien rejoined you at the
lander. O'Brien, start spreading out the balloon and going
over the harness checklist."
"Roger that."
"And while you're doing that, I've got today's voice-
posts from the Web cued up."
Lizzie groaned, and Consuelo blew a raspberry. By
NAFTASA policy, the ground crew participated in all
webcasts. Officially, they were delighted to share their
experiences with the public. But the VoiceWeb (privately,
Lizzie thought of it as the Illiternet) made them accessible
to people who lacked even the minimal intellectual skills
needed to handle a keyboard.
"Let me remind you that we're on open circuit here,
so anything you say will go into my reply. You're certainly
welcome to chime in at any time. But each question-and-
response is transmitted as one take, so if you flub a line,
we'll have to go back to the beginning and start all over
again."
"Yeah, yeah," Consuelo grumbled.
"We've done this before," Lizzie reminded him.
"Okay. Here's the first one."
Michael Swanwick - Slow Life.pdf

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分类:外语学习 价格:5.9玖币 属性:20 页 大小:100.13KB 格式:PDF 时间:2024-11-24

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