used red dwarfs because it was easier to record light fluctuations against a dimmer light source, and because planets circling red dwarfs tended to be tucked in a lot closer to their parent suns, and therefore had orbital periods measured in days as opposed to months or years. In 2009, the planet named—by the astronomical convention of the day—GJ 1214b was first detected, and subsequent observations showed that it was a so-called super-Earth, with more than six and a half times Earth’s mass and over two and a half times Earth’s diameter.
The real surprise came when they did the math and determined that the new planet had a density of just one-third of Earth’s, which meant that the huge world had a quite small rocky core covered by either ice or liquid water.
It was, in fact, the first true ocean exoplanet discovered; the side of the world eternally locked beneath a small sun just 2 million and some kilometers away was hot, well above the boiling point of water. At first it was assumed that the surface of any world so close to its parent would have to be well above habitable temperatures. The measured equilibrium temperatures, however, turned out to be from dayside cloud decks; the nightside was cold enough that the global ocean was half covered by a permanent ice cap, with the entire night hemisphere locked in ice.
The extreme differences in temperature between the day and night hemispheres, though, resulted in some absolutely incredible storms.
If Dubois and I had really been standing on the edge of the Abyss Deep icepack in nothing but our shipboard utilities, we would have been dead in moments. The environment was nothing short of hellish, balanced precariously between frigid ice and scalding steam, with a poisonous pea-soup-fog atmosphere and a wind thundering in from the day with tornadic force. The docuinteracive wasn’t recreating all of the possible physical sensations, though. I could see water spray and surface clouds whipping past me, hear the deafening roar of moving air, but the wind didn’t sweep me off my feet. The two of us could stand there, at the very edge of the ice, and take in the view.
And the view was … spectacular.
Despite both high-altitude cloud decks and the scud whipping across the surface of water and ice, I could see the star on the knife-edge horizon across the purple-red ocean, a swollen, deep ruby dome mottled by vast, ragged sunspots. Clouds—black, green, and purple—banked hugely to either side in an emerald sky; lightning played along the horizon. As I watched, fast-moving clouds filled the momentary crack in the sky that had revealed the star, blotting it out.
In the opposite direction, the sky grew darker still and heavy with snow. Ice, undulating and raw, ran off into the distance in a barren white desert, punctuated here and there by upthrusts—slabs, pillars, daggers, and tumbled blocks of ice, some of them hundreds of meters across. A hundred meters away, a low, bright orange dome added a spot of color to the endless white—the colony’s main dome. Smaller domes and Quonset-style huts were scattered about nearby, and I could see a large, bright yellow quantum spin-floater grounded outside the main entrance to the base.
The colony was obscured by a sudden gust of spray and windblown snow. It made me shiver just looking at it, though I couldn’t feel the actual cold.
“The place is a lot like Bloodworld,” Dubois said, turning to look back out to sea. We were standing at the edge of the icepack, though waves and spray made it a little difficult to tell exactly where the sea ended, and the ice began. “Hurricanes, high winds, hellacious storms …”
“It’s worse,” a voice told us. We turned and faced the program’s interactive agent, an older man with the look of a college professor. “I’m Dr. Murdock. I’ll be your guide to Abyss Deep this evening.”
Well, it wasn’t the real Dr. Murdock, of course, since the Abyssworld Expedition’s science team leader was currently on the planet some forty-two light years away … assuming he was even alive now. Based on the real James Eric Murdock, the man in a civilian tunic and dark slacks was a computer-generated image, data seamlessly woven together inside our heads by Clymer’s library AI. This simulation component was the whole point of a docuinteractive; we could ask the program questions, and it could take us through the landscape as if we were really there. The AI running the show was programmed to incorporate the voice, mannerisms, and recorded thoughts of the real Murdock, and present them as though we were actually there.
The simulated Murdock held out his hand, palm up, and a small globe representing the planet came up between us. He rotated it in front of us.
“We call the main atmospheric disturbance Abysstorm,” he said. “It’s generated by the heat of the star, and serves to transfer that heat across the planet.”
On the globe, Abyss Deep’s dayside was blanketed by a perpetual hurricane many thousands of kilometers across, pinned in place by the glare of the star directly over its eye. It showed vast, far-reaching spirals of cloud that reached across half the planet. The nightside was completely covered by ice.
“Hang on a sec,” Dubois said, pointing. “Something’s wrong. Hurricanes are caused by the spin of the planet. Coriolis effect, right? Abyss Deep doesn’t rotate, so the winds ought to blow straight back from dayside to night.”
The simulated Dr. Murdock gave him a sharp look. “Idiot. Why do you say the planet doesn’t rotate? Of course it does.”
“Hey!” Doob said. Evidently he wasn’t used to personality coming through in a sim along with basic information. Murdock reminded me of an acid, acerbic professor of A and P—anatomy and physiology—I remembered from my training in San Antonio. He’d called students “idiot,” and worse, as well.
“ ‘Tidally locked means the planet rotates once in its year,” I put in.
“Precisely,” Murdock said. “GJ 1214 I does spin, and does so fairly quickly, quickly enough that it generates its own magnetic field, which is a damned good thing considering the background radiation flux from the star. It makes one rotation in just over a day and a half as it moves around its star, its day perfectly matching its year.
“The storm dynamics are quite complex, with smaller storms constantly spinning off of the one big one and following gently curved tracks around the planet and into the night. The atmosphere is fairly thin, about half of Earth’s atmospheric pressure at the surface, so a lot of the heat dissipates before it reaches the nightside. The world-ocean traps a lot of it. Most of the dissipation, however, appears to be through molecular escape. The star turns water into steam, which rises high in the atmosphere above the Abysstorm. Solar radiation then blasts a lot of that water completely away from the planet. See?”
The model of Abyss Deep floating above Murdock’s hand developed a faint, ghostly tail streaming away from the daylight side. “In many ways,” he continued, “Abyssworld is similar to a comet … a very large comet with a tail of hot gasses blowing away from the local star.”
“That can’t be a stable configuration,” I said. “It’s losing so much mass that the whole planet is going to boil away.”
“Correct. We believe Abyssworld formed much farther out in the planetary system, then migrated inward as a result of gravitational interactions with the two outer gas giants. We don’t have a solid dating system with which to work, but it’s possible that the planet began losing significant mass as much as five billion years ago, when it would have been perhaps six times the diameter it is now.
“Abyssworld is now losing mass, which has the advantage of bleeding away excess heat. Within another billion years, though, this ongoing loss of mass will significantly reduce the planet’s size, until the entire world ocean has boiled away. At that point, Abyssworld will be dead.”
