“Good enough,” Sternberg nodded. “You’re with us.”
“Mil gracias, señor! We must reach el faro.”
“The beacon?” Andersen turned to frown at Sternberg. “It’s true we won’t feel safe here till we know what caused that flash. But still I’m not ready to think it was any sort of signal.”
High in the control dome, where the holoscreens let them look down across the frost-rimmed rocks on the frozen beaches and the endless waste of starlit ice that lay flat to the black horizon, Glengarth cleared them for the expedition.
“Keep in constant touch,” he said. “All we want is information about what’s out there. Take no avoidable risk. Get what data you can. And get back alive.”
“Okay, sir,” Sternberg said. “We’re on our way.”
They turned to shake hands with la rubia, who had come to speak of their plans. Mondragon flinched from a stab of jealousy of these fortunate Anglos, men whom los santos had favored with the culture and learning that made them her equals. One of them, perhaps, fortunate enough to win her love?
He dared not think of all he longed for.
Jake Hinch was waiting in the work balloon when they went down to board the spider. A hawk-faced angry man with a ragged beard and a black beret, he was Stecker’s close companion but still a stranger to everybody else.
“Orders from the captain.” He showed Sternberg a scrawled note on a stained and crumpled sheet of StarSeed stationery, with Stecker’s signature. “I’m taking command.”
“Replacing me?” Sternberg blinked at the note. “Can you tell me why?”
“Ask Stecker.”
The captain was not in the control room. He didn’t answer his cabin phone. Sternberg sent a security man to knock on his cabin door. At last he did call back. Listening, Sternberg made a bitter face.
“Yes sir,” he said. “Very well, sir.” He hung up and turned ruefully to Andersen. “Our good captain. He’s tipsy and not entirely coherent, but he says he’s putting Mr. Hinch in charge because he wants the truth about whatever we find. Yet I gather that he doesn’t fully trust him or anybody else.”
Cruzet and Andersen straightened to salute as Sternberg turned abruptly to leave the balloon. He came back to shake their hands, shrugged at Mondragon, and walked back through the lock. Hinch stood with his bag beside the spider, impatiently waiting.
“Sir,” Andersen told him, “Captain Stecker does confirm that you are in command. What are your orders?”
“As you were,” he muttered. “Carry on as planned.”
Carrying his bag into the vehicle, Cruzet heard the clink of bottles, shrugged at Andersen, and showed him to the curtained cubicle at the rear of the cabin. He went inside and closed the curtain.
The vehicle was new to all of them, but they had trained on the beach and it was easy enough to drive. Andersen let Mondragon take the wheel to pull them through the lock and down the rocky slope to the frozen ocean.
“Steer by the sun. Just to the right of it. Claro?”
“Claro, señor.” Elation hushed his voice. “Just to the right”
Alone in the nose bubble, he caught a faint ozone bite from the air cycler, which Andersen was still adjusting. Listening, he heard the whisper of the turbine, the muffled murmur when the others spoke, the rustle of his clothing when he moved. Nothing else, because this dead world had no air to carry sound.
Lighting the ice for only a few hundred meters, the head lamps blinded him to everything beyond. He turned them off and let his eyes adjust to the starlight. He saw a dim gray world with all color lost, except in the dull red glow of the heat lamp that was their shield against the killing cold.
Leaning over the wheel, he scanned the flat infinity of bone white frost ahead. A film of frozen argon and nitrogen, Cruzet said, the last trace of the vanished atmosphere. He scanned the splendid sky above it, steady stars burning brighter than those he had known in his boyhood in Chihuahua, set in constellations he had never seen. Ice and stars and dead black sun, nothing else.
The cold dwarf sun was a round black spot on the stars. Never rising, never setting, it drifted very slowly higher and very slowly back again with the motion Cruzet called libration. Live stars blazed close around it, never dimming or even twinkling; no air or clouds had veiled them for geologic ages. The level whiteness showed no break ahead, no mark behind except the faint dark scar their tires made.
What of la luz? The alien light?
He recalled the riddle of it when they were coming down to land. A bright sudden light, burning through every color of the spectrum from deepest red to darkest violet, but gone before anybody could be sure of anything. It had seemed to come from far out on the frozen ocean, nearly due east.
Five hundred kilometers out, Andersen said. Closer to a thousand, Cruzet thought. The ice around it had looked bright on the radar image, as if rough enough to make a strong reflection. Perhaps an island mountain? Cruzet, who had seen it at a higher resolution, said it had looked too tall and thin to be any natural mountain.
A fortress of the ice gods?
Those gods of ice had been only a joke from Andersen, but nobody had thought of anything more plausible. The flash had come when the radar search beam swept the spot. Had it been an actual warning, from anything alive?
Would it come again?
Cruzet came at last to take the wheel, and Mondragon climbed into the quartz-domed lookout bubble and kept on watching till he dozed and shook himself awake to watch again. Ice and stars and dead sun-disk, nada mas.
Andersen came to drive. At the kitchen shelf in the cabin, Cruzet stirred dry powder into hot water to make the bitter stuff they called syncafe and opened a pack of omninute wafers. Mondragon sliced a cold slab of soyamax, wishing for the goat enchiladas his mother used to make. They called Hinch to ask if he was hungry.
“Garbage!” he shouted through the curtain, voice thick from whatever he had brought in his bottles. “I’ve got stuff of my own.”
Andersen stopped the vehicle and came back to eat. Mondragon slept a few hours, took the wheel again, and looked out. Frost and stars and dead black sun. Still half asleep, he yawned and worked his stiff hands, stretched and stood behind the wheel, slapped his face and sat again, gripped the wheel and blinked at the level dark horizon.
Something there?
No spectral flash. Only a small black dot on the flat black horizon, but maybe something far away. He rubbed his eyes and veered a little toward it. A mountain? Another dwelling of the ice giants, like those on the ice cap? If actual giants could live here, flashing signs to visitors. His breath came faster. Should he radio the ship?
“There is something out there,” Glengarth had told them. “Likely harmless, but I agree that we’d better find out. If you come upon anything unusual, anything at all, call back at once. If you approach, do it with all the care you can.”
He reached for the radiophone, but stopped his hand when he saw that the object ahead looked suddenly closer, too small for any kind of mountain. When at last it crept into the heat lamp’s glow, he saw that it was no monolithic obelisk, but only a solitary boulder.
Yet that itself was a puzzle to him. What had tossed it here, so far from any land? He steered closer for a better look. It was ice, a dark mass the size of a car, jaggedly broken. Searching his small pool of dim red light, he found nothing else except smaller fragments shattered off when it fell. An ice meteorite, fallen a million years ago? Perhaps a billion?
Level frost, black sun, endless midnight, scars of ancient cosmic cataclysm, nada mas. He shrugged and drove on again, just to the right of the dead black disk. Frost that had never thawed and never would. Stars that never changed. He blinked his aching eyes, his mind drifting back to Cuerno del Oro.
To the flat-roofed adobes around the plaza, to the mud on the rutted streets when the rains came, the dust when they failed, the old stone church where his mother had taken him to mass. He remembered the ragged child he had been, bare feet numb and achin
g on frosty winter mornings when he herded his father’s goats over the rocky hills above the village and wondered if the stars could be diamonds on the doors of heaven.
He thought of Don Ignacio Morelos, who sometimes returned for the fiestas and spoke of the starbirds that flew from the white sands in el norte to scatter brave men and women to find new lives on the richer worlds that might exist out beyond those shining doors.
“I’ll learn to ride the starships,” he used to promise the don. “When I have years enough.”
“Nunca.” The lean old don always shook his head. “The stars want no stupid campesinos.”
Remembering, he felt glad la rubia need never know Cuerno del Oro, never feel the pain of life there, never smell the sewer ditch or swat the flies or hear the hungry ninos crying. She would blame los pobres for all they could not help, scorn the ignorant mojado—
Or was the thought unfair to her?
He thought of her joven hijo Kip, who had found him hiding on the ship, seen his dripping blood and loyally kept his secret. Kip had become un buen amigo, but she was still the Anglo stranger who hardly knew he was alive. Yet she might learn to see him as a man, if he could prove his worth here among these pioneers of the stars.
If he could. Con suerte.
A sharp jolt bought him back to the frost and the boulders. Fragments of broken ice scattered the pale ruby glow all around him. He rubbed his eyes and found more fragments emerging from the starlight ahead, looking always larger until they became a barrier along the starlit horizon.
A sharper jolt. The spider rocked and dropped.
“Carlos?” Cruzet shouted from the cabin. “What hit us?”
He braked the spider to search his small red-lit island. The vehicle had dropped off a ledge half a meter high, hidden under the frost.
“We fell.” He pointed at the ledge. “A drop I never saw.”
“A fracture.” Andersen was peering over his shoulder. “The old sea is frozen to the bottom. Old quakes here could fracture it like any rock.” He turned to scan the boulder wall ahead. “Ejecta, I think, from a meteor crater. We’ll get around it. But then—”
He stopped himself and stood silent, gazing out across the frost, his craggy face lit.
“An adventure I never expected.” He swung to grin at Cruzet. “You know I began in geology. Switched to astrophysics because our old Earth was known too well. Now this whole planet’s ours. A new geology for us to read!”
“Ours?” Cruzet stood with him, staring off into the east, where they thought the flash had been. “Are you sure?”
Andersen went down to keep the fusion engine running.
“My turn to drive.” Cruzet beckoned Mondragon away from the wheel. “Get some sleep.”
He crawled into his berth in the main cabin. Hinch was snoring behind the curtain, but he couldn’t sleep. Cuerno del Oro was too far away, the world of the ice gods too cold and dark and strange. He climbed again into the lookout bubble. Cruzet had steered north to find a way around the crater. The frost beyond lay flat again, white and flat to the black horizon. Ice and midnight, the dead ghosts of ages long forgotten, nada mas.
He sat at the instrument board, staring out across that dead starlit infinity, till the chime of the watch clock roused him to read the temperature of the surface radiation and enter it in the log. He used the sextant, as Andersen had taught him, to get a position that let him add one more black ink dot to the line of black dots on the blank page that was to be their map. And he called the ship.
“Rima Virili here.” La rubia’s voice startled him. A voice like a song, musical with her beauty. “Acting aide to Mr. Glengarth.”
“Buenas—” He stopped himself. He should not let the Spanish remind her what he was. “Carlos Mondragon, reporting.”
“Yes?” Her words were courteous and quick, but empty of the feeling that ached in him. “Anything unusual?”
“No problems.” He tried to speak with the same empty briskness. “Position four hundred seventy-one kilometers east of the ship. Eighteen kilometers north. We swung north to get around a crater where Mr. Andersen says a meteor struck the ice. Ice temperature nine degrees Kelvin. The way ahead looks clear. Nothing unusual. No island, no mountain, no signal light.”
“Thank you, Mr. Mondragon. I’ll inform Mr. Glengarth. Have you anything more?”
He wanted to ask of el joven Kip. And of Day, the younger who had la rubia’s bright hair and grieved for Me Me, the panda doll she had to leave on Earth. He wanted to tell her that even an untaught campesino might have the emotions of a man.
“Mr. Mondragon?” He had not spoken. “Anything else?”
She was still the gringo extranjera. He heard no warmth in her crisp, inquiring tone.
“Nada,” he said. “Nothing more.”
“Keep in touch,” she said. “Mr. Glengarth is concerned. He wants full reports.”
The telephone clicked.
He was nadie. Nobody to her. Nor to any Anglo, except perhaps her fine muchachito Kip. Yet he sat there searching the frost, wondering if her art of terraforming could truly be the magic that might turn this dead and desolate planet into the home she wished to make for los niñitos. How could anything survive at nine degrees Kelvin? Who except the ice gods, which were perhaps only Andersen’s little joke.
Or perhaps the actual masters of the planet?
The endless day dragged into another endless day, and still the ancient frost stretched ahead forever. The black sun crept slowly higher. Radio contact became a matter of chance.
“We’re out of direct signal range,” Andersen said. “Anything we get has to be reflected back from space by, I think, a broken ring of orbital dust, which sometimes is above us and sometimes isn’t.”
They were six hundred kilometers out. Eight hundred. A thousand. Cruzet was ready to turn back. They had eaten their ration of soyamax and omninute, washed down with bitter syncafe, and they were in the bubble, frowning at the tiny crosses that marked their path behind and gazing out across the starlit waste ahead.
“No sign of anything hostile. What we are chasing may be just a mirage.”
“Radar doesn’t make mirages,” Andersen reminded him. “I’ve spoken to Mr. Hinch. He seems happy with his bottles, and he says he ain’t going back. Not to Stecker’s bleedin’ deathtrap.”
“Carlos, are you awake?”
Mondragon was alone in the bubble when Cruzet’s sharp voice jarred him out of sleep.
“Qué?” Groggily, he sat up in the chair. “Now I am.”
“Look out ahead and call the ship. If you can.”
Stiff from sitting too long, he turned to look. Cruzet had slowed the machine. A few hundred meters ahead, a cliff had risen between the frost and the midnight sky, a sheer wall of starlit ice a dozen meters high. It ran straight to the right and the left for as far as he could see.
“Madre de Dios!” he breathed. “Qué es?”
“Another geologic fault. Tony says this was once a zone of quakes.”
“Can we climb it?”
“Look just above it. We may not want to climb it.”
He looked and saw nothing till a hot red point exploded like a nova deep inside the ice. It swelled into a burning disk. Bright orange burst into the crimson center and swelled again, turning green at the center. Hot blue exploded in it, making a target pattern as tall as the cliff. He saw no more change for another half minute. Then darkness spread from the middle till all the color was gone.
“A word from the locals.” Cruzet’s sharp ironic voice crackled out of the interphone. “Welcome, stranger? Or is the message Scram? Scram while you can?”
Eleven
Rima had called people with terraforming know-how to meet for a brainstorming session. A little group in neat blue duty jumpsuits stood with her in the control room, staring after the departing spider, which had faded into the infinity of dim gray starlight under the blaze of the midnight sky and the black sun’s disk. Half had invented excuses not to
come, and those here were grumbling.
“If you’ll excuse me, Dr. Virili—” Fujiwara was a hydroponics engineer, a slim little Asian who spoke everyday American English without accent in a thin high voice. Pausing, he turned to smile and bow deferentially. “We’re still waiting for Captain Stecker. Aren’t you trying to jump the gun?”
“I don’t think so. We came prepared to adapt ourselves to whatever planet we happened to reach. We ought to begin—”
They all fell silent when Jonas Roak came out of the elevator. Wearing grease-spattered coveralls, he smelled of stale sweat and burnt soyamax.
“Sorry I’m late, Dr. Virili. A problem with Jesus.” He made a comic grimace. “Mr. Rivera kept me overtime in the galley.”
“No matter,” she told him. “We’re just beginning.”
“Roak?” Roy Eisen bristled at him. A fusion engineer, Eisen was a gruff-voiced thickset man with the manners of a pugilist. “I thought you were in the brig.”
“I was.” Roak nodded, with a conciliatory smile. “My infernal luck. I was just clearing the ship for takeoff when the captain received the tip about the bomb. Security detained everybody aboard while they searched the ship. We were already in the launch pit before they found the device and the Mexican—he must have panicked and lost himself after he set it.
“So I’m with you.” He squared his shoulders, with a brave smile for Rima. She was the best-looking woman aboard, which made her now the loveliest woman in the world. He had to drag his eyes away from the tempting contours of her jumpsuit. “It isn’t something I’d planned on, but I want to make the best of it.”
“I hope you do.” A neutral tone; he must learn to warm her.
“So you accuse Mondragon?” Eisen stared at him. “What do you know about terraforming?”
“Of course I’m no engineer.” He shrugged, happy that his forged credentials were a trillion miles behind. “Only a certified launch inspector, but I guess you could call me a systems specialist.” He smiled again at Rima. “Any terraforming project will require a diverse team of experts. I think I have expertise to coordinate the effort.”
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