She’d been so relieved, and so grateful, and so humiliated too. It was ironic. Now it looked like Hols — who would never have gotten so far off course as to go down the wrong side of the Styx — wasn’t going to get to touch rock at all. Not this expedition.
“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” Martha muttered, though she didn’t know if she were condemning Hols or Burton or herself. Lake Styx was horseshoe-shaped and twelve miles long. And she was standing right at the inner toe of the horseshoe.
There was no way she could retrace her steps back around the lake and still get to the lander before her air ran out. The lake was dense enough that she could almost swim across it, if it weren’t for the viscosity of the sulfur, which would coat her heat radiators and burn out her suit in no time flat. And the heat of the liquid. And whatever internal flows and undertows it might have. As it was, the experience would be like drowning in molasses. Slow and sticky.
She sat down and began to cry.
After a time, she began to build up her nerve to grope for the snap-coupling to her airpack. There was a safety for it, but among those familiar with the rig it was an open secret that if you held the safety down with your thumb and yanked suddenly on the coupling, the whole thing would come undone, emptying the suit in less than a second. The gesture was so distinctive that hot young astronauts-in-training would mime it when one of their number said something particularly stupid. It was called the suicide flick.
There were worse ways of dying.
“Will build. Bridge. Have enough. Fine control of. Physical processes. To build. Bridge.”
“Yeah, right, very nice, you do that,” Martha said absently. If you can’t be polite to your own hallucinations… She didn’t bother finishing the thought. Little crawly things were creeping about on the surface of her skin. Best to ignore them.
“Wait. Here. Rest. Now.”
She said nothing but only sat, not resting. Building up her courage. Thinking about everything and nothing. Clutching her knees and rocking back and forth.
Eventually, without meaning to, she fell asleep.
“Wake. Up. Wake. Up. Wake. Up.”
“Uhh?”
Martha struggled up into awareness. Something was happening before her, out on the lake. Physical processes were at work. Things were moving.
As she watched, the white crust at the edge of the dark lake bulged outward, shooting out crystals, extending. Lacy as a snowflake. Pale as frost. Reaching across the molten blackness. Until there was a narrow white bridge stretching all the way to the far shore.
“You must. Wait,” Io said. “Ten minutes and. You can. Walk across. It. With ease.”
“Son of a bitch,” Martha murmured. “I’m sane.”
In wondering silence, she crossed the bridge that Io had enchanted across the dark lake. Once or twice the surface felt a little mushy underfoot, but it always held.
It was an exalting experience. Like passing over from Death into Life.
At the far side of the Styx, the pyroclastic plains rose gently toward a distant horizon. She stared up yet another long, crystal-flower-covered slope. Two in one day. What were the odds against that?
She struggled upward, flowers exploding as they were touched by her boots. At the top of the rise, the flowers gave way to sulfur hardpan again. Looking back, she could see the path she had crunched through the flowers begin to erase itself. For a long moment she stood still, venting heat. Crystals shattered soundlessly about her in a slowly expanding circle.
She was itching something awful now. Time to freshen up. Six quick taps brought up a message on her visor: ‘Warning: Continued use of this drug at current levels can result in paranoia, psychosis, hallucinations, misperceptions, and hypomania, as well as impaired judgment.’
Fuck that noise. Martha dealt herself another hit.
It took a few seconds. Then — whoops. She was feeling light and full of energy again. Best check the airpack reading. Man, that didn’t look good. She had to giggle.
Which was downright scary.
Nothing could have sobered her up faster than that high little druggie laugh. It terrified her. Her life depended on her ability to maintain. She had to keep taking meth to keep going, but she also had to keep going under the drug. She couldn’t let it start calling the shots. Focus. Time to switch over to the last airpack. Burton’s airpack. “I’ve got eight hours of oxygen left. I’ve got twelve miles yet to go. It can be done. I’m going to do it now,” she said grimly.
If only her skin weren’t itching. If only her head weren’t crawling. If only her brain weren’t busily expanding in all directions.
Trudge, drag, trudge, drag. All through the night. The trouble with repetitive labor was that it gave you time to think. Time to think when you were speeding also meant time to think about the quality of your own thought.
You don’t dream in real-time, she’d been told. You get it all in one flash, just as you’re about to wake up, and in that instant extrapolate a complex dream all in one whole. It feels as if you’ve been dreaming for hours. But you’ve only had one split second of intense nonreality.
Maybe that’s what’s happening here.
She had a job to do. She had to keep a clear head. It was important that she get back to the lander. People had to know. They weren’t alone anymore. Damnit, she’d just made the biggest discovery since fire.
Either that, or she was so crazy she was hallucinating that Io was a gigantic alien machine. So crazy she’d lost herself within the convolutions of her own brain.
Which was another terrifying thing she wished she hadn’t thought of. She’d been a loner as a child. Never made friends easily. Never had or been a best friend to anybody. Had spent half her girlhood buried in books. Solipsism terrified her — she’d lived right on the edge of it for too long. So it was vitally important that she determine whether the voice of Io had an objective, external reality. Or not.
Well, how could she test it?
Sulfur was triboelectric, Io had said. Implying that it was in some way an electrical phenomenon. If so, then it ought to be physically demonstrable.
Martha directed her helmet to show her the electrical charges within the sulfur plains. Crank it up to the max.
The land before her flickered once, then lit up in fairyland colors. Light! Pale oceans of light overlaying light, shifting between pastels, from faded rose to boreal blue, multilayered, labyrinthine, and all pulsing gently within the heart of the sulfur rock. It looked like thought made visual. It looked like something straight out of DisneyVirtual, and not one of the nature channels either — definitely DV-3.
“Damn,” she muttered. Right under her nose. She’d had no idea.
Glowing lines veined the warping wings of subterranean electromagnetic forces. Almost like circuit wires. They crisscrossed the plains in all directions, combining and then converging not upon her but in a nexus at the sled. Burton’s corpse was lit up like neon. Her head, packed in sulfur dioxide snow, strobed and stuttered with light so rapidly that it shone like the sun.
Sulfur was triboelectric. Which meant that it built up a charge when rubbed.
She’d been dragging Burton’s sledge over the sulfur surface of Io for how many hours? You could build up a hell of a charge that way.
So okay. There was a physical mechanism for what she was seeing. Assuming that Io really was a machine, a triboelectric alien device the size of Earth’s moon, built eons ago for who knows what purpose by who knows what godlike monstrosities, then, yes, it might be able to communicate with her. A lot could be done with electricity.