He throws back the piece of sarcophagus he has cut away and it crashes to the floor.
‘The truth? The truth is that-’
Oh isn’t melodrama crap. When he is just about to fill me in on ‘the truth’ the biggest fucking earthquake hits. I am on a floor split by a crack a half a metre wide. A haze of broken ice fills the air and huge chunks fall from the ceiling. I hear Duren yelling over the com but cannot make out what he was saying. Something heavy bounces off the helmet of my suit and I realize that I might not actually get out of this alive. I bury my head under my arms and wish I had enough belief in something to pray to it. When the quake is over, some eight minutes later, Duren grabs my arm and hauls me to my feet.
‘We’ll do better in the crawlers,’ he says.
We are in the crawlers when the next quake hits, and the one after that. My crawler ends up on its side with one tread smashed and the ice all around. I don’t get out of it until Duren comes and raps on the screen.
‘Is that it?’ I ask, as I climb out the only door I can get through.
Duren shrugs. ‘Might be a few more aftershocks, but that’s the worst of it I think,’ he says.
I study my surroundings. The tunnel is wrecked: the floor is a metre deep in shattered ice, and rock is exposed in many places. I follow Duren into the chamber.
‘I didn’t need to do it,’ he says, and points.
The sarcophagus next to the one he had cut open has a huge dent in it where a boulder has fallen from the ceiling. There is also a split where the dent is deepest.
‘They’re not particularly strong and yet we’ve never found a broken one, just as we’ve never found a tunnel as badly damaged as that one,’ he says, gesturing towards the tunnel.
‘And what does that mean?’ I ask, not sure I want to know the answer.
‘This is a cold world and here we make things out of frozen water. It never occurred to us that those who lived here would do the same. Frozen, salty water filled with all kinds of impurities. We should have looked closer at those impurities,’ he says.
‘You’re not exactly making yourself clear,’ I say.
He gestures all around us at the shattered ice.
‘Here is their technology. Here is the world in which they lived and will live when they have the energy.’
‘What energy?’ I ask.
‘Geothermal,’ he replies, as if it is obvious.
I only start to get it when the ice melts.
In some way the energy is distributed through the ice very evenly. One minute we are surrounded by shattered ice, the next minute we are up to our waists in water that has an almost glutinous consistency.
‘Here they come,’ says Duren while I wonder if I am going to drown on this insane world.
It takes me a moment to digest what he has said. I turn to the door and see one of the aliens standing there up to its crotch in the water. Standing, it looks like an insectile man with a horse’s skull for a head. I have never been this scared.
‘What. . what’s happening?’ I ask.
‘The repair teams are about their work,’ he says.
‘I thought you said they were dead,’ I say, and though wondering why I am whispering, am unable to stop myself.
‘I never said such a thing. I may have misled you, but I never said they were dead.’
I feel like hitting him, but I don’t dare move. A second alien comes in through the entrance. Both almond-shaped heads turn towards us. I know that if they come at us I will almost certainly shit my pants.
‘But they were decayed,’ I say.
‘It takes energy to prevent decay. Decay is one form of entropy. With little energy to spare you don’t squander it. If you have the technology you reverse entropy when you do have the energy. . You know, it’s easier to store information than to store bodies.’
The two aliens finish studying us then abruptly wade to the sarcophagi. One of them picks up the piece of metal that Duren had cut away and pushes it back into place.
‘You’re still not making yourself clear,’ I say.
Duren turns his head towards me and I can see his expression. He looks as frightened as I feel, though it doesn’t come over in his oh so correct voice.
‘If I wanted to preserve you over a long period of time I would record your thought patterns to crystal and keep a spit of your genetic material to regrow your body. That’s all I’d need.’
The aliens step back and trail their strange appendages in the glutinous water. That water rises up in a glistening wave over the sarcophagi. Through it I can see the damage spontaneously repairing.
Duren goes on, ‘I don’t know how they did it. Their technology is in the water, mostly. I think there is something here of both burial and preservation. They don’t need entire bodies for resurrection. Maybe they’ve kept them so they can repair them from the DNA template, maybe that would use less energy.’
‘If it’s in the water, what are the sarcophagi for?’ I ask.
‘The technology is in the water; self-repairing, regenerating. What they are, their minds and perhaps the DNA templates, are in the sarcophagi. We spent too much time studying the contents of the containers when we should have been studying everything but the contents of the containers.’
The water recedes from the sarcophagi and they are both whole and undamaged. It then proceeds to crawl up the walls and across the ceiling. The two aliens turn and observe us, or so it seems. They have no eyes.
‘What now?’ I ask Duren.
‘I have no idea,’ the scientist replies.
I see that the water on the floor, on the walls, and on the ceiling is dividing into liquid bricks — reforming to how it was before the earthquake. I point this out to Duren.
‘Just enough geothermal energy from the quakes to repair the damage they made. Neat,’
he says.
One of the aliens squats and places its appendage in the water again. A snake of water, like a rivulet in reverse, traverses Duren’s body. It seems to be probing all round his coldsuit.
When it tries to get into his mask he slaps at it and it drops away, suddenly only water again.
The aliens tilt their heads then abruptly stride to the entrance through ankle-deep water holding the shape of bricks. We follow. We follow them out into the tunnel and there see that the treads have melted away on both of the crawlers. We follow them through the water to a point where the water is suddenly ice again — a neat line round the circumference of the tunnel. We watch them climb back into their own sarcophagi — the water still liquid inside — and seal themselves in.
‘They didn’t do anything,’ I say.
‘They wanted to,’ said Duren, ‘but they probably didn’t have the energy to spare.’
As we walk back to the crawlers I ask him what will happen now that this is known.
‘The project won’t be shut down by accountants. We’ll get funding from Earth Central itself. Maybe, sometime, we’ll resurrect them all,’ he says.
‘It would be nice to see,’ I say, after we have made a call for help from the transmitter of my crawler. And I wonder if we will see it, because, of course, the warming of our coldsuits has damaged them, and they are already starting to malfunction. Perhaps you, who are experiencing this documentary, will see.