by Paul McAuley
‘The surface is covered with ice, but otherwise it is quite stable.’
The old monk had a mild, diffident manner. He did not look at her when he spoke.
She said, ‘I don’t mean to make you uncomfortable by asking all these questions.’
‘We are not used to people like you. To women, I mean.’ His brown face, framed by the black cowl, darkened. He was blushing.
They walked on in silence, and at last took a side corridor whose walls, floor and ceiling were covered in thick red fur. The air was at blood heat. Double doors at the end were covered in some kind of hide, dyed the same red as the fur. Brother Halga opened them, ushered her in, and announced her to the man who stood at the far end of the dimly lit room.
‘Brother Rothar,’ the old monk whispered, and stepped backwards and pulled the double doors shut behind him.
On one side of the room, shelves holding printed books stepped up into darkness. On the other, a stone wall was muffled by an ancient tapestry: an enlarged reproduction of a section of the ceiling of the Vatican’s Sistine chapel, God leaning out from the clouds towards a casually reclining Adam. At the far end of the room a man was standing in front of a huge fireplace, watching a bank of holos that floated in the darkness to one side. The fireplace was as big as an emergency shelter and held an actual, real fire. The flames crackled and danced above a bed of whitehot pressed carbon chunks and sent little licks of aromatic smoke curling over the monumental lintel, and firelight beat over the Persian carpets that layered the floor.
Indira had been told that monastery was wealthy, but she had not realised how wealthy.
‘Welcome,’ the man said. His voice was subtly amplified. It boomed and rolled, mellow as good whisky, around the corners of the sumptuous room.
He was an old man, thin and straightbacked, with a shrewd, hawkish face. His pale skin was marked with dark blotches. He wore the same black robes as the monks, but instead of a cowl his bald pate was covered with a black skullcap on which molecular shapes were embroidered in gold wire. Heavy gold rings extended the lobes of his large, papery ears.
‘I have arranged for some food,’ he said.
He crossed to the side of the fireplace, tracked by a spotlight that came on somewhere high above, and pulled a Florentine chair from a little burred walnut table. A plastic tray of food was set on the table: a sloppy puree of some kind of green leaf; a slab of gelatine seamed with chunks of uncooked vegetable; dry salty biscuits. A plastic beaker held pure water.
Rothar watched Indira push the puree around and said, ‘The same food is served in our refectory. We are an aesthetic order.’
He gestured, and one of the holos floating to the side of the fireplace inflated. It showed a view looking down on a refectory in which about a hundred blackrobed monks sat in rows, ten by ten, along white plastic tables.
She said, ‘I ate at Cadmus, and then on the bus. This isn’t quite —’
’What you expected? No. It is not what I expected, either.’
The holo shrank back into the array. Others showed views of a weed farm that seemed to stretch forever. Indira realised that Rothar was showing off. This room; his army of monks; the vast farm.
Rothar said, ‘I have been trying to talk with Vlad Simonov about this problem. But he is nowhere on the net.’
He was rubbing his hands over each other. She noticed that when he thought she wasn’t looking at him he made little grabby glances at her body. She wished that she had thought to wear something over her skintight suit liner.
She said, ‘Vlad is working at a mine on the antijovian hemisphere. He’s probably under the ice. What is this problem? When do I start to work? Perhaps I can see the echo traces, and any video you have.’
When Rothar looked at her for a moment, she added, ‘Of the monster. The monster I’ve come to kill.’
‘I’m afraid that there has been a misunderstanding.’
‘A misunderstanding? You have reported a Dragon Class biowar macroform in your area. You made a contract with Vlad Simonov, and Vlad sent me.’
‘There is the misunderstanding. You see, we did not expect him to send us a woman.’
‘One of Vlad’s little jokes.’
‘A very embarrassing joke for both of us, Ms. Dzurisin.’
‘That’s between you and him. Meanwhile, I have a job to do.’
‘I’m afraid not, Ms. Dzurisin. I am revoking your contract.’
Indira sat back in the chair and stared at Rothar, but he would not meet her gaze as he told her that the monastery was forbidden to women. She would leave as soon as the bus returned, he said, in three days.
‘I will pay the kill fee, of course. But I cannot allow you to work here. Meanwhile we will be unable to tend to our farm, because of the . . . intruder. It is costing us a great deal of money. We are very angry with Mr. Simonov.’
He did not seem angry; he had not raised or varied his voice at any time during the interview. ‘I have arranged for accommodation,;’ he told Indira. ‘Please do not leave it. Breakfast will be brought to you, at six a.m. We are a contemplative order. We rise early.’
‘I need to tell my family about the change of plan, but my phone isn’t working,’ Indira said. ‘Perhaps I could plug into your commons. Or are you cut off here?’
‘I suppose that you could go up to the surface,’ Rothar said. A pause. He added, ‘You will be quite safe here. We have been freed of the normal Satanic lust which blinds men. Not by chemical or physical castration. Both are unreliable and have unsatisfactory sideeffects. And of course chemical castration would involve use of those hormones which taint you and your kind. No. We have all submitted to nanosurgery which has isolated the neurons which control the lordotic response. We are incapable of being tempted because we are incapable of arousal.’
Indira stared at him. ‘I see,’ she said.
Rothar made no signal, but at the far end of the room Brother Halga opened the big double doors.
* * * * *
The old monk took Indira back up the helical tunnel and left her in one of the dome’s empty cells. It was as Spartan as the room in which Indira had lived with her foster parents in the refugee centre on Ganymede: three metres long and two wide, a bare concrete floor and fibreboard walls sprayed with thick resin, the only furniture a folddown shelf bunk and a combination shower and toilet. Brother Halga assured her that it was like all the other cells in the monastery. If that was true, then no wonder Rothar could afford a real fire, all those old books, the ostentatious decor. Like any other pseudoreligious sect, the devotees did the work, and the leader got the geld.
Her phone still wasn’t working. And she could not lock the door of the cell. She left the luggage pod outside and told it to keep watch, but found that she could not sleep. It was too cold and she could not switch off the light, only dim it. And something somewhere in the dome made a roaring noise at unpredictable intervals, shutting off with an explosive bang and a dying series of rattles.
Memories of hiding in the city’s service tunnels crept around the edge of her consciousness. She resisted them.
The monks had some kind of religious phobia about women. Fine. Europa was big enough for all kinds of eccentrics. The original charter, drawn up by the first settlers and suspended but not revoked after the Quiet War, had expressly allowed freedom of belief and speech. Let them get on with their devotions; maybe they could keep off the monster by prayer alone. But really, the setup was as ridiculous as one of those old gothic sagas. An order of misogynist monks, a megalomaniac leader who was quite possibly a mad scientist, a secret passage. And a monster, of course, haunting the vast dark ocean at the basement of the monastery . . . .
Indira told herself that it was nothing to do with her. But Rothar’s cold, indifferent dismissal had cut her deeper than she liked to admit.
She tried the phone again. Still no luck. It was two in the morning and she knew that she would not sleep now. She decided to go outside and try her luck with the phone th
ere, and opened the door and told the luggage pod that she needed her pressure suit.
* * * * *
No one tried to stop or interrogate Indira when she used the airlock. She crossed the brightly lit apron, where the trucks squatted over their shadows all in a row, like supplicants, and left the road and climbed to the top of the ridge. Jupiter sat at the eastern horizon, exactly where he had been sitting when the bus had arrived. A crescent of darkness was eating into the bottom of his disc. His yellow light tangled long shadows across the rough, dark ice.
The phone still wasn’t working. Indira went a long way out, in long easy lopes that barely touched the ground, until, about two kilometres out, the phone suddenly woke and started scanning channels. She had to go another kilometre before she could get a steady signal.
It was half past three in the morning. It was half past three in the morning all over Europa. No one had been able to divide the moon’s 85.2 hour day in a sensible way, so Europans kept universal time. Indira left a message with Carr’s avatar, saying that she was fine but the job had panned out and she would be coming back in a couple of days. She put a priority call to Vlad, and his avatar made various excuses until she cut it off and said, ‘This is an emergency. I’m flying the black flag.’
Which was the ridiculous code phrase that gave access to the avatar’s special functions.
The avatar, which looked exactly like Vlad, down to the white ribbons curled in its bushy black beard, froze in the little window in the upper righthand corner of her helmet’s visor, then reformatted. It said, in a voice that was clipped and neutral, now not Vlad’s at all, ‘Of course, druzhok. What do you wish me to do?’
The avatar could not contact Vlad – he really was working – but it was able to give her some information about the Adamists. As the miners had told her, Rothar was some kind of gene wizard. His birth name was Gregory Janes. He had been born in Canberra. Presently he was claiming asylum as a political refugee in the occupied territory of the Outer System. He had been working for the government of Earth’s Pacific Community, but precisely on what was obscured by contradictory rumours, most of which were almost certainly black propaganda. There was speculation that he had worked on the biowar macroforms before the Quiet War, and that he had improved the productivity of the weeds grown in the monastery’s farm.
Rothar had not founded the Adamists, but had taken them over after the death of the charismatic mystic whose acolyte he had become – another crime lurking there, perhaps. The Adamists were an extremist separatist group, the kind that only the pressure cooker of Earth could have evolved. Their creed was simple. They believed that God had created Adam and Lilith as the first of a race who would worship God on Earth as angels did in Heaven. But Lilith had been murdered by Satan, who had then created Eve by ripping a rib from Adam while he had been sleeping. All men since Adam had been tainted by Satan’s mark, fallen but redeemable; all women were the handmaidens of Satan. The avatar told Indira that much of the Adamists’ creed was mixed up with considerable misuse of genetics, involving the Y chromosome and homeoboxes, and asked her if she wanted a precis. She told the avatar to skip it. She had heard enough to know that she was glad Rothar didn’t want her to work for him.
‘And tell Vlad that I’ll see him when I get back,’ she said. ‘We’ll have a lot to talk about.’
She had kept walking while she talked with the avatar, along a folded ridge above the dome that capped the monastery’s shaft. The regolith here was gravelly, marked with tracks and the cleated prints of boots, scored and ridged with fretted humps of bare ice. She had begun to follow a road, she realised, a wide road that had once taken a lot of traffic.
Europa’s surface was one of the youngest in the Solar System. Every part had been flooded and reflooded by eruptions of water and slush ice from the ocean that covered the moon from pole to pole beneath its icy crust; Europa had very few craters because most had been buried or eroded by the constant resurfacing. The landscapes of Mars were billions of years old and the planet was covered in gardened regolith – debris from meteorite strikes – to a depth of more than a kilometre. Ganymede’s much younger regolith was merely metres deep; Europa’s was no more than a few centimetres. But like any moon with almost no atmosphere, the ordinary processes of erosion were so slow that they might as well be nonexistent. A footprint could last a hundred million years before it was erased by micrometeorite bombardment.
And so here. Indira had stumbled upon the road which had served the original mine. All around, the surface was marked by dozens of years of activity. Parts of the road had been worn through to ice, and the ice had been eroded into knobs and long slides, shot through with cracks and columns of bubbles frozen in place that glittered like diamonds in the helmet light of Indira’s pressure suit, diamonds glittering up at her wherever she looked.
She still had a couple of hours before she was due to be woken. She did not relish spending it in the Spartan cell of the creepily uninhabited dome. Instead, she decided to explore.
The suit’s radar soon gave her the location of the old mining station: it was below her, buried in the ice. It had probably been built on some kind of insulated raft with superconducting thread dispersing waste heat to radiators in the ocean far below, and its systems must have been left running when it had been abandoned in place. But something – perhaps a quake caused by the Tyre Macula nuclear device – had deflated its insulating raft, and perhaps some biowar macroform had destroyed its heat sink. The dome had sunk slowly through ice melted by its own waste heat.
Indira was tracing the perimeter of the dome when her proximity alarm beeped. A moment later she saw a figure duck behind a fold of ice. Someone was following her.
She circled around, keeping as low as the pressure suit would allow. No sign of the figure, either visually or on radar. She crossed the old road again, crept in towards the place where she had last seen the figure.
A square hole had been cut into the ice, and steps led down into darkness.
The monks had excavated the old entrance and later reburied it, but a stress fracture had collapsed and partly reopened the long, steep shaft. Indira climbed over a flow of glassy ice and found the airlock.
It was still operational.
The mysterious figure could be behind the door. What the hell. She cycled through.
The airlock walls had been deformed by the pressure of the ice into which it was slowly sinking, but someone had caulked the cracked seams with black resin. And there was an atmosphere beyond the airlock, the usual seven hundred millibar nitrox mix of Europan habitats. Indira kept her suit sealed. It was very cold, -50 degrees Celsius, although not as cold as the surface.
Indira crept through the old mining base, quiet and watchful, looking for any trace of the person who’d been following here. It had been abandoned in a hurry. Perhaps its crew had spotted the incoming missile whose nuclear warhead had blown a hole in the crust to the northwest. Metal equipment lockers lined the corridor which led away from the airlock. Their locks had been punched out and their doors hung open. There was a big rec room in what must be the centre of the dome. Food boxes were stacked along one wall; broken furniture along another. Ice crystals had gathered here and there in little drifts, crunching under her pressure suit’s boots like dry beach sand. Overhead, the curved ceiling groaned and creaked: the structure was compressed all around by the ice into which it had sunken.
The rooms were as small as the cell Indira had been assigned. She looked in one. It was halffilled with a shocking intrusion of ice, its surface glistening bluewhite and smoothly sculptured like a muscle flayed of skin, its depths dirty with suspended silicates. In the next room, bed clothes were frozen with the impress of the man who had last slept there twenty years ago. His clothes were still scattered on the floor, stiff and sparkling with frost. Posters of lithe young women scaled the wall. One pinup stirred against a feeble backglow. She cupped her breasts and began to say something, then froze and rastered back to the beginn
ing of her cycle and stirred again.
As she turned away, Indira heard footsteps coming along the curving corridor – then a beam of light slashed through the air, turning suspended ice crystals into fugitive diamonds. Somehow the person she had been following had managed to get behind her.
Indira dodged back into the room. In her bulky pressure suit she was like a monster intruding on a child’s bedroom. The poster lit up again, and she tore it down and wadded it in her stiff gloves until its scratchy voice died. She killed her helmet’s light and hunkered down, listening intently, her heart beating quickly and lightly.
She had hidden from the soldiers of the Three Powers Occupation Force when they had begun to evacuate Minos. She had been eleven, as stubborn then as Alice was now. The city had been a prime target for the biowar macroforms. Its heat exchangers and its turbines had been destroyed, its yeast reactors had been poisoned. With no food, no power except feeble battery power, its environmental cycling running out of control, Minos had surrendered while the rest of Europa was still notionally at war. Indira had hidden during the evacuation because she had been possessed with the romantic notion that she would join rebel forces who in reality were little more than an invention of the Occupation Force’s black propaganda unit.
She had been found, of course, but she had missed boarding the heavy lifter which had evacuated the rest of her family. And which, in the long slow orbit between Europa and Ganymede, had been crippled by an explosion in its antimatter pod and lost all power. Its crew and passengers had either suffocated or died of cold. Indira hadn’t known about that until she had arrived at Ganymede, fifty days later. She had spent the next two years as a refugee, trying to escape the idea that she was somehow responsible for the deaths of her parents.
