The Ice Moon Explorer by Navin Weeraratne Page B

upset by the shared
biochemistry, you seem pretty keen on it now."
    "We'd have learned more on how Life itself
emerges, if their biology was unique. I am annoyed about
that. Look at how wrong we were about solar system formation? Until
we could detect and study exoplanets, we had no idea. Biology has
the same problem. We need to find different biologies ."
    "Again, you don't seem overly annoyed that
you haven't."
    "Look at this ," he gestured to the
screen. "How can someone stay annoyed? Because they're our cousins,
we get to bring them back . It's just DNA. I can use the same
de-extinction tools I would on Earth. Any water world with low
enough gravity, will have its natural history preserved. It'll be
frozen in orbit, or returned as snow. Solar radiation out here is
lower. Water ice helps protect against radiation, too."
    "What about Europa? We might well have unique
life there."
"Fuck Europa. If John Dobbs wants to live to see results, they'll
have to use nukes."
    "I heard Dobbs suggested sleeping through the
drilling. Just waking up whenever anything goes wrong. Ten years,
tops."
    We could all do that, sleep for months, even
years. You didn't make it past Mars without hibernation nanotech in
your blood. Mental health wasn't the problem: the Village solved
that. It was just too expensive being an active passenger.
    It was all quite advanced now. The ship or
station AI would handle the details for you. You could sleep for a
month, and feel like you power napped.
    "See? See how ridiculous it is? And they're
right there, in Jupiter's radiation belt. They can't even wear a
suit and walk around. A day's worth of EVA on Europa, is a
radiation death sentence. No, I'm thinking about beyond. Far
beyond."
    "The Kuiper Belt?"
    "Exactly. Sure, Enceladus is contaminated.
But what about the Kuiper Belt? That's more than five times
Saturn's distance from the Sun. There's no chance of contamination.
And there are thousands of Plutoids out there, thousands of
worlds."
    "But not planets," I said quickly.
    "Thousands," he dismissed me with a wave.
"How many have liquid water, under the ice? Geysers will form as
they freeze. Even if the oceans die, the snow and ejected ice will
keep perfect records. Enceladus is just five hundred kilometers in
diameter, and has life. Sedna is a thousand . The Sednoids
may have been captured from other stars. [2] We could study life
from another star, right here in our solar system."
    Silence. On screen a tumbleweed rolled by:
glowing jellies entangled by their own tendrils.
    "You seem very comfortable thinking that far
ahead. That could be a hundred years from now."
    Kapoor froze.
    "Vajra? You okay?" maybe it was just lag.
    "Hey, like you said," unfreezing. "We're
going to outlive our bodies."

    My son never showed. Instead, I received this
message:
    Hey Mom,
    Sorry I can't make it today. Something
unexpected has come up. I'm going to be out for a few days, maybe
longer. It's mission related. I'll see you as soon as that's
done.
    Josh
    He had never bailed on me before.

    The Next Morning, Saturn's E-Ring
    Another day aboard ICE.
    "Morning, Pilot," I got on the treadmill.
Muscle wasting in zero G was still a problem we hadn't solved.
    "Morning, Kara."
    "What's up? You sound a little down."
    "Just tired."
    "Uhuh," It was hard hiding things from Pilot.
Mental health monitoring was core to long-duration mission design.
"Did you meet your son yesterday?"
    "He bailed."
    "I'm sure he had a good reason. It's not like
when you got in; astronaut training is hard."
    "Yeah."
    The only sound was the treadmill.
    "So, we had quite a night last night."
    "What do you mean? I looked out the window.
"Where's the scoop?"
    "I closed it."
    "Was it damaged?"
    "No, we're full."
    "We're full? " I almost fell off the
treadmill.
    "We hit a dense pocket - a very dense
pocket."
    "Wow. How did that even happen?" At our
orbit, we were clearing just a few grams per square meter, per
hour. How had we taken a month's crop in a night?
    "I guess