In spite of these sobering distractions, Conrad could have been happy at his fishery job for a long, long time. Alas, it was not to be. The main outcome of Snowflake's research was the realization that fish stocks were falling dramatically, everywhere, regardless of any human predation. Per Giotti's years-ago warning, the planet's ecology had always been propped up by human action. But now every available hand was digging ore or growing food or stitching together fax machines of increasingly, alarmingly poor quality. There was nothing left to prop up the ecology with, and so it slumped, and fell, and after sixteen years in the salt air Conrad finally couldn't bear to watch the planet die anymore, and so resigned his commission.
From there, he found himself moving southward, building more roads again for lack of anything better to do, until he found his way to the Polar Well itself, where there were no roads and couldn't be any. Like many warm terrestrial planets, P2 had no polar caps per se, but given the grazing angle of the sunlight at extreme latitudes, it did have regions which were permanently in shadow. Most notably the Welclass="underline" a hundred-kilometer-wide depression ringed by sharp-toothed mountains, where the fall of snow and the melting and refreezing of ice made the terrain anew every 460-hour cycle of day and night.
Increasingly, agriculture was a necessity for the colony rather than a diversion. It was a source of fuel—a low-tech means for harvesting the ruddy light of Barnard and converting it into human activity, through the mediating elements of starch and sugar and comestible proteins. But agriculture, unlike fishing, really was at the mercy of an uncooperative climate, and the weather patterns of P2 were surprisingly complex, and surprisingly dependent on the speed and direction of winds in the Polar Well.
So there were sensor stations there, and the sensors were always getting covered with snow and ice or sinking into pools of slush, and no one had ever found a good way to make robots understand how best to clean and care for them. So each of the seven stations—arranged in a rough hexagon with the seventh and largest at the center—had to be manned by one actual human being, who lived alone in a nearby hut. Which sounded nice, didn't it? To be a hermit who also served a vital need for the greater good? When a vacancy opened up, Conrad saw his opportunity and moved in.
Here, in the land of permanent twilight and permanent cold, of snow and ice, of clear, bright starlight that cut through the hazy atmosphere, Conrad found a kind of clarity he had never known before. Maybe it was just the solitude—he'd never had that, either—but he had a lot of opportunity to ponder it, and over time he decided that the environment itself was a crucial element in this new sense of peace.
Here in the Well, human beings could live, but only barely. This wasn't a matter of body forms, but simply the hugeness of nature; lapses of attention quickly became serious, even fatal. Especially in bad weather. In his first season on the job, his immediate neighbor to the east had frozen to death, and had had to be evacuated in a special coffin housed within a robot tractor built especially for this purpose. Ironically, they took him north to Pectoralis and had to thaw him out again there, just to freeze him properly for long-term storage. Such was the fate of the colony's dead: neither heaven nor hell nor simple oblivion, just an icy limbo in the Cryoleum, on a spit of land popularly known as the Fin.
Conrad hadn't known that neighbor—hadn't been moved particularly by his death—but a few years later it happened again. The same isolated hut, the same exact stupid circumstances, and this time the victim was Raylene Pine, a woman Conrad had gotten to know rather well over the radio and through occasional conjugal visits by tractor or, when one of them was feeling particularly ambitious, by snowshoe.
Her death hit Conrad hard, because it was the first time in his long life that he'd ever known anyone who had actually died for real—who had simply dropped out of the world, dropped out of the universe, and in all likelihood would not be coming back. What a strange concept! He wept off and on for weeks, and part of him—the last shreds of his childhood, perhaps—withered away and never did grow back.
Around this same time, in her increasingly disheartened messages to him, Xmary complained that Newhope's fax machine had finally been confiscated: relocated to Bubble Hood and then finally to Domesville. As a not-too-surprising result, the miners and refiners of Barnard space were in a state of open rebellion, and the only thing keeping them even marginally in line was the threat that their frozen dead would not be respected, would not be relocated to the Fin for proper storage. These were fun times indeed, but the discussion's main effect on Conrad was to remind him just how precarious his own situation had become.
It was a hazardous occupation, this monitoring of weather stations in permanent shadow, and as the years slid by Conrad found himself marking time by the deaths of his colleagues. He came to realize that he was pushing the odds himself, that after three or four decades in this place he would surely die, and as had happened in several other cases, they might not even recover his body. The ice was a flat sheet hundreds of meters thick—an ice lake, the geologists insisted on calling it—and sometimes in the expansions and contractions of the day/night transition it would just crack, straight down to the bottom, and sometimes a person would fall in, and then inevitably the cracked ice would warm just enough to collapse and refreeze, and it would have taken the resources of a starship just to identify the body, buried half a kilometer deep in the ice.
And so, reluctantly, Conrad began planning his exit strategy. He would return to civilization; he would get a real job and resume a normal social life. He would even, he supposed, resume regular contact with King Bascal, though the prospect held little joy for him. The fact that they were friends—had always been friends—did not make up for the increasingly heavy-handed tactics of a government under pressure.
But new thoughts can be dangerous in an environment where routine equals safety. One day, while morosely planning this sad excuse for a future, Conrad was hiking along his northern perimeter when the ice groaned and banged and cracked in front of him. Not a deep crack—a crevasse to the lake bottom itself—but a much rarer surface crack that was eighty meters long or so, and just wide and deep enough to admit Conrad's snowshoe and then swallow his foot up to the ankle. He stepped in it, yes, and fell badly, and surprisingly enough it was not his leg that broke but his left arm and collarbone. It was just about the most painful thing that had ever happened to him—death included!—and walking back was a hassle and an agony, and finally a deadly ordeal.
There was a meter of powder on top of a meter of packed snow, with the ice underneath, and while Conrad had sprung for the best snowshoes available—featherlight platters of wellstone which stuck to snow and ice as though they were glue—snowshoeing was still hard work under even the best of circumstances. And these were hardly the best of circumstances; he couldn't use his left arm at all, which meant he couldn't use his left shoeing pole, which meant he was effectively a three-legged creature, rather than a four-legged one as the environment demanded.
Being dazed with pain didn't help matters either, and he had neglected to bring any food or water on this hike. He always carried a wrist phone when he was away from the hut, but when the wind was blowing and whipped up the snow, reception could be spotty. Also, he wasn't sure he'd given the thing a proper charge recently; there was no sunlight here to run it, and it was easy to forget to touch it against a powered wellstone surface. So he dutifully called for help every ten minutes, but no help materialized, and no one called him back.