by Neal Asher
When the first sarcophagus was found people started to bandy about phrases like
‘parallel evolution’ while others claimed credence for their own pet theories. Those of a religious bent called the discovery proof of the existence of God, though the selfsame people had heretofore claimed that the discovery of no humanlike races had also been proof of the existence of God. Some claimed the discovery evidenced ancient alien visitations of Earth, whilst still others talked of interstellar seeding. How so very personal, human and petty is each theory.
Coming to make my documentary about the catacombs of Orbus and the passing destruction of the moonlet Corlis I have not thought which of them to give credence.
‘Do you think it’s parallel evolution?’ I ask Duren as I peer through the scanner.
‘Does a scorpion look like a human? It evolved under the same conditions and even on the same planet,’ he says, and totally destroys the parallel evolution argument.
‘What about interstellar seeding?’
‘Same arguments apply,’ he replies, and of course they do.
‘God?’ I ask.
He laughs in my face then says, ‘I try to understand it. I don’t try to cram it in to fit my understanding.’
He definitely has the essence of it there.
I hesitate to call this my first night here as there is little to mark the change from day to night.
You could go outside and spot the sun in the sky, but as Orbus revolves about it once every three solstan centuries that wouldn’t be much help. The personnel at the base work a shift system. My waking period concurs with that of Duren, Jap, and about five hundred others who I have yet to meet. After a night of mares in which I am chased down Victorian sewers by subzero rats I wake to a day of subterfuge and obfuscation. Something has happened and people either don’t know or don’t want to tell the nosy bastard from the Netpress. I use the most powerful weapon in my armoury to get to the bottom of it. Jap takes my bribe.
We don coldsuits in the ball-shrinking coldlock and step on out. Jap leads me to one of the tracked surface cars they call a crawler and we motor over to the nearby excavation. I still find it difficult to take in that the treads of the vehicle we ride in are made of doped water ice.
The whole idea of using such a substance makes me see our civilization as so delicate, so temporary. I guess my objection is that this is the truth.
The excavation is a tunnel that cuts at thirty degrees through rock and ice into the side of one of the Victorian sewers. This is the way I had come yesterday with Duren to view the body, so to speak. We climb out of the crawler and Jap approaches a suited figure who is walking up from the slope.
‘What’s happening, Jerry?’ Jap asks over the com. He’d told me to keep my mouth shut and my ears open for the present.
The woman who replies sounds tired and irritated.
‘Duren flipped. He cut open the sarc in B27 and started to thaw out the chicken. Security got on to him and he took his crawler into the system.’
Jap says, ‘Always thought he was a bit too close to ‘em. He was on it from the start wasn’t he?’
‘You know he was,’ says the woman, her irritation increasing. I wince: Jap isn’t very good at subterfuge.
‘What’s happening now?’ he quickly asks.
‘They still haven’t found him and the computer quite competently tells us that for every hour that passes our chances of finding him halve. Ain’t technology wonderful?’
‘What about the sarcophagus and the corpse?’
‘Linser says waste not want not or some such ancient bullshit. He’s having them moved inside for intensive study. . Here they come now.’
I stare down the slope and see one of the crawlers towing something up the slope. I glance round at Jap and make the hand signal he had only recently taught me. We both switch our com units to private mode.
‘The Corlis intersection is in two solstan days. Would this Duren survive that?’ I ask.
Jap replies, ‘Depends where he is, but yeah, most likely, though not much beyond it. His suit would have to go onto CO conversion after a day and that drains the power pack.’
2
‘So he’d freeze and join the rest of them here.’
‘That about sums it up, yeah.’
Corlis is hammering towards us at fifty thousand kilometres per hour; pretty slow in cosmological terms. It is the size of Earth’s moon and not much different in appearance. Its major differences are its huge elliptical orbit and the smattering of ices on its surface. It will pass close enough to Orbus to perturb both their orbits. Orbus’s orbit by only a fraction, Corlis’s orbit will wind in a completely different spirograph shape round the sun. This has been happening for about three quarters of a million years and is set to change in a hundred thousand years, when Corlis will finally be captured by Orbus. It’s funny, but I find most of the scientific staff rather reluctant to discuss the coincidence of dates: the aliens have been frozen for the same length of time that Corlis has been on its erratic orbit. Only Linser has anything useful to offer.
‘These tunnels, chambers and sarcophagi are all that survived the disaster that sent Corlis on its way, or maybe they are all that survived Corlis’s arrival in this system. The tunnels survived because they are so deep. There was probably a surface civilization but it’s all gone now.’
It doesn’t ring true.
‘When Corlis passes here tomorrow, will we be safe?’ I ask.
‘Oh yes. The nearest disturbance will be five hundred kilometres away at a fault line,’
Linser replies. I get him to show me exactly where on a map, then thank him for his help before going off to see if I can steal a crawler. It is a surprisingly easy task to accomplish.
Just kilometre after kilometre of brick-lined tunnels. To begin with I stop at a few side chambers but find them all depressingly the same. A map screen inside the crawler shows my current position and just how far I have to go. A quick inspection of the mapping index gives me files filled with thousands of such pages, and directories filled with thousands of such files. Linser told me they had mapped but a fraction of the system. I have to wonder if there is any point in continuing — it obviously covers the entire planet and is much the same everywhere. While I am studying this screen a message flicks up in the corner and is also repeated over my coldsuit com.
‘Alright everybody, we’re not going to find him before conjunction. I want you all back at base by twelve hundred, Linser out.’
I look at the message in the corner of the map screen and realize that the only reason I have not been caught is that a lot of crawlers are out being used in the search for Duren. It only occurs to me now that all the crawlers must have some sort of beacon on them, some way they can be traced, and that Duren must have disabled it on his own. I immediately try to use the crawler’s computer to find out more about the beacon. On the menu I get beacon diagnostics and a hundred and one things I can do with said beacon. I cannot find where the damned thing is though.
‘Number 107, didn’t you get my message?’
Linser sounds a bit peeved. I ignore him while I continue to try to locate the beacon.
‘Ah, I see,’ says Linser. ‘That crawler is not your property, Mr Gregory.’
I decide it is time for me to respond. ‘I’ll return it to you in one piece,’ I say.
‘How very civil of you. You do realize you’re heading directly for the nearest fault line; an area that is going to become very dangerous in only a few hours from now?’
‘Yes, I do know,’ I reply. ‘I’m sure that’s where Duren is.’
There is a pause, then when Linser speaks again it is with a deal of irritation.
‘So you think we have not already searched Duren’s most obvious destination?’ he asks.
I feel a sinking in the pit of my stomach, but stubbornness prevents me from turning the crawler round.
‘You may have missed him,’ I say.
‘Well,’ Linser repl
ies. ‘If you are intent on getting yourself killed then that is your problem. We will bill Netpress for any damage to the crawler and for the recovery of your body.
Good day to you Mr Gregory.’
He manages to make me feel like a complete idiot and I nearly turn back, but the stubbornness remains. It has been pointed out to me that stubbornness is not strength. It is in fact a weakness. I keep driving. Two hours pass and the first tremor hits. As the tunnel vibrates and little flecks of ice fall onto the crawler’s screen, I replay the conversation I’d had with Duren as we walked back to his crawler after viewing the dead alien.
‘Most people would wonder if they are in cryostasis,’ I had said.
‘They’re not,’ Duren replied. ‘They are decayed, even though they were pickled in brine before that brine froze.’
‘Were they all preserved at the same time?’ I asked.
‘Oh yes.’
‘How do you account for that then: a hundred million of them going into their sarcophagi at the same time?’
Duren was silent for a while. I didn’t push him.
‘I did say that they are not in cryostasis,’ he said. ‘I did not say that some attempt may not have been made to put them in such.’
‘Is that what you think?’
‘It’s one possibility. Other possibilities include mass murder and mass suicide. It’s weird, it’s an anomaly, and it just is.’
A lump of ice falls from the ceiling and bounces off the screen of the crawler. I nearly fill my pants.
‘You’ve got a lot of seismic activity out there,’ says Linser over the com.
‘No shit,’ I reply.
Just at that moment a big one hits and the crawler slides a couple of yards to one side. I steer back central and note a huge crack dividing the icy ceiling and exposing rock a couple of metres above. Something occurs to me then, and I wonder if I will get a reply that will again make me feel stupid.
‘Hey, Linser.’
‘Yes.’
‘They’ve been here for three quarters of a million years, I make that about a thousand conjunctions. How come I haven’t seen any old damage in these tunnels? That’s a thousand earthquakes.’
Again there is that long pause and I await Linser’s slapdown. It does not come.
‘That is an interesting question, Mr Gregory. There is no damage in the area where you are and that area is an unstable one. You must remember though that we only recently acquired the low-energy scanners and that area is the only unstable area we have mapped so far.’
‘Yeah. Wouldn’t it have been an idea to have mapped some of the other unstable areas before the conjunction?’
‘For what purpose?’ he asks.
‘To find out if there’s any old damage there.’
‘I’m sure such information would be of interest to a planetary geologist, but we are here for the archaeology,’ he says.
He either doesn’t get it or is trying to give me the brush-off.
‘If there’s no damage there that will be because the damage has been repaired. Oh, by the way, you got any other crawlers in this area?’
‘To answer your question: no we do not have any other crawlers in that area.’
‘Then it looks like I’ve found Duren … Tell me, Linser, have you found any evidence, other than the tunnels and the sarcophagi, of their technology?’
‘No, we have not.’
‘Funny that,’ I say, and get out of the crawler.
Duren is inside a large chamber that contains three sarcophagi. He has strung up lights all around and as I walk in through the round door he has his back to me. He is using a cutter to slice open a sarcophagus. There seems nothing scientific about what he is doing. It looks like vandalism. I speak to him over private com.
‘Duren,’ I say.
He turns and holds the business end of the cutting unit in my direction. The disruption field only has a range of a couple of centimetres. I have no intention of getting within that range.
‘You. . what are you doing out here?’ he asks.
It strikes me that he does not sound particularly irrational.
‘I’ve come to see what you are trying to prove,’ I say.
Duren stares at me for a long moment then abruptly turns back to cutting open the sarcophagus. I move round to a position where I can better see what he is doing.
‘You know, it was this place being frozen that led us astray,’ he says. ‘First you think of cryostasis and expect the bodies to be perfect. We found decayed bodies in thick frozen brine and thought it was cryostasis gone wrong. When we found no sign of their technology we then assumed this was some kind of burial.’
‘What is the truth?’ I ask.
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.
