Breathing ash out of his burnt mouth, Garp stepped up beside Salind. ‘Even AIs can get pissed off when a friend gets killed.’
‘I guess so,’ Salind replied, remembering the acrobat.
Soper’s scream, the last one, seemed more protracted than that of her two fellows, probably because Geronamid took his time about eating her.
The Sea of Death
So lay they garmented in torpid light,
Under the pall of a transparent night,
Like solemn apparitions lull’d sublime,
To everlasting rest, — and with them
Time Slept, as he sleeps upon the silent face
Of a dark dial in a sunless place.
— Hood
To say it is cold is to seriously understate the matter. The inside of the shuttle is at minus fifty centigrade because of what Jap calls ‘material tolerances’.
‘These coldsuits we’re wearing — take ‘em above zero and they’ll fuck up next time you use ‘em outside,’ he told me.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Two centuries ago I’d have believed you, but things have moved on since then.’
‘Economics ain’t,’ was his reply.
I am careful not to respond to his sarcasm.
The landing is without mishap, but I am surprised when the side of the shuttle opens straight down onto the surface of the planet Orbus.
‘No point maintaining an entrance tunnel,’ says Jap over the com.
I don’t mind. It is for moments like this that I travel, and it is moments like this that fund my travel. I walk out with CO snow crunching underfoot and the clarity of starlit sky above that 2
you normally only get in interstellar space. I gaze across land like arctic tundra with its frozen lakes and hoared boulders. In the frozen lakes trapped faerie lights flicker rainbow colours.
‘What’s that?’ I ask.
‘Water ice. Below one-fifty it turns to complex ice and when it heats up and changes back it fluoresces. Talk to Duren if you want the chemistry of it.’
I don’t need to. I remember reading that this is what comets do. It had taken a little while for people to figure that the light of comets was not all reflected sunlight — that comets emit light before they should.
‘What’s heating it up?’ I ask, turning to gaze at the distant green orb of the dying sun.
‘The shuttle, our landing. There’s nothing else here to do it,’ he replies.
We walk the hundred or so metres to the base and go in through a coldlock. In the lock we remove our coldsuits and hang them up. Jap points to the white imprint of a hand on the grey surface of the inner door.
‘Keep your undersuit and gloves on until we’re inside,’ he tells me. I stare at the imprint in puzzlement. Is it some kind of safety sign? Jap obviously notes my confusion. He explains.
‘Fella took his gloves off before going through the door,’ he says.
The imprint is the skin of that fella’s hand, and some of the flesh too. Later I speak to Linser, the base commander, and ask why they take such risks here. We stand in his room gazing out of a panoramic window across the frozen wastes.
‘Thermostable and thermo-inert materials are expensive, Mr Gregory. A thermoceramic cutting head for a rock-bore costs the best part of fifty thousand New Carth shillings and has to be shipped in. Doped water-ice cutting heads can be made here. Coldsuits that can function from plus thirty to minus two hundred cost fifty times as much as the ones we use. That’s a big saving for a small inconvenience,’ he says.
‘I never thought this operation short of funds,’ I say.
‘Energy is money and there’s none of the former here. It costs fifteen hundred shillings a minute to keep one human alive and comfortable. We have over two thousand personnel.’
I walk up beside him and focus on what has now caught his attention. Machines for moving rock and ice are busily gnawing at the frozen crust out there. Floodlights bathe something that appears a little like a building site.
‘Found an entrance right under our noses,’ he tells me.
‘Lucky,’ say I.
He turns to me with an expression tired and perhaps a little irrational.
‘Lucky?. . Oh yes, you’ve been in transit. You haven’t seen the latest survey results. You see, we were having a bit of a Schrodinger problem with the deep scanners. The energy of the scan was enough to cause fluorescence of the water ices down there, full-spectrum fluorescence. It was like shining a torch into a cave and having the beam of that torch turn on a floodlight. We saw only a fraction of it until we started using those low-energy scanners.’
‘A fraction?’ I say. ‘Last I heard you’d mapped twenty thousand kilometres of tunnels.’
‘That’s nothing. Nothing at all. They’re everywhere you see. Yesterday Duren told me that they even go under the frozen seas. We’re looking at millions of kilometres of tunnels, more than a hundred million burial chambers with one or more sarcophagi in each.’
I absorb this information in silence, slot it in with a hundred other details I’ve been picking up right from Farstation Base to here.
‘Obviously I want to see one of the sarcophagi,’ I eventually tell him.
He glances at me.
‘See and touch it I would have thought. Unfortunately you don’t get to smell anything. Too cold for decay here,’ he says.
‘Seeing and hearing are the most important,’ I reply. ‘Most people don’t go for full immersion for a documentary. There are much more enjoyable FI entertainments.’
‘Okay, get yourself settled in and we’ll run you down in an hour or so. Will you be needing any of your equipment off the shuttle?’
‘No, I have my eyes and ears,’ I reply.
He studies me, his inspection straying to the aug nestled behind my right ear. He seems too tired to display the usual discomfort of those confronted by a human recorder like myself.
The tunnels resemble very closely the Victorian sewers of Old London on Earth. The bricks are made of water ice and are, on the whole, over three quarters of a million years old. A strange juxtaposition of age and impermanence. Just raise the temperature and all the tunnels will be gone. Of course, the temperature will not rise here for many thousands of years. Duren, who walks with me to the first chamber, is distracted and gloomy. I have to really push to get anything out of him. Finally he comes out with a terse and snappy summation.
He tells me, ‘It will keep on getting colder and colder, but not constantly so. Every eight hundred years we get the Corlis conjunction and the resultant volcanic activity. In about a hundred thousand years Corlis will fall in orbit round here and all hell will break loose for a time.
The volcanic activity will destroy all these tunnels, melt all the ice. That’ll last for a few hundred years then things will settle down and freeze again.’
‘So future archaeologists will have to dig the sarcophagi out of the ice?’ I ask.