by Dan Simmons
36
We leaned on our poles and stopped the raft’s forward motion before it crashed into the ice wall. We had all of our lanterns lit now, the electric lamps throwing their beams into the frigid darkness of this ice cavern. Mist rose from the black waters and hung beneath the jagged roof of the cavern like ominous spirits of the drowned. Crystal facets distorted and then threw back the beams of puny light, making the surrounding darkness all the more profound.
“Why is the river still liquid?” asked Aenea, hugging her hands under her arms and stamping her feet. She had on every layer she had brought, but it was not enough. The cold was terrible.
I went to one knee at the edge of the raft, lifted a palmful of river water to my lips, and tasted. “Salinity,” I said. “This is as salty as Mare Infinitus’s sea.”
A. Bettik played his handlamp on the ice wall ten meters ahead of us. “It comes down to the water’s edge,” he said. “And extends somewhat beneath it. But the current still flows.”
For an instant I had a surge of hope. “Shut down the lanterns,” I said, hearing my voice echo in the vaporous hollow of the place. “Turn off the handlamps.”
When this was accomplished, I had hoped to see a glimmer of light through or under the ice wall—a hint of salvation, an indication that this ice cavern was finite and that only the exit had collapsed.
The darkness was absolute. No amount of waiting gave us night vision. I cursed and wished for the night goggles I had lost on Mare Infinitus: if they worked here, it would have meant that light was seeping in from somewhere. We waited another moment in the blindness. I could hear Aenea’s shaking, actually feel the vapor from all of our breaths.
“Turn the lights on,” I said at last. There had been no glimmer of hope.
We played the beams on the walls, roof, and river again. Mist continued to rise and condense near the ceiling. Icicles fell constantly into the steaming water.
“Where … are … we?” asked Aenea, trying without total success to stop the chattering of her teeth.
I dug in my pack, found the thermal blanket I had packed at Martin Silenus’s tower so long ago, and wrapped it around her. “That will hold the heat in. No … keep it on.”
“We can share,” said the girl.
I crouched near the heating cube, turning its conductive power to maximum. Five of the six ceramic faces began to glow. “We’ll share it when we have to,” I said. Playing the light over the ice wall that blocked our way, I said, “To answer your question, my guess is Sol Draconi Septem. Some of my richer … and tougher … fen clients hunted arctic wraiths there.”
“I concur,” said A. Bettik. His blue skin made him look even colder than I felt as he huddled near the glowing lantern and heating cube. The microtent had become frost laden and as brittle as thin metal. “That world has a one-point-seven-g gravity field,” he said. “And since the Fall and destruction of the Hegemony terraforming project there, most of it is said to have returned to its state of hyperglaciation.”
“Hyperglaciation?” repeated Aenea. “What does that mean?” Some color was returning to her cheeks as the thermal blanket captured her warmth.
“It means that most of the atmosphere of Sol Draconi Septem is a solid,” said the android. “Frozen.”
Aenea looked around. “I think that I remember my mother talking about this place. She chased someone through here once on a case. She was a Lusian, you know, so she was used to one-point-five standard gravities, but even she remembered that this world was uncomfortable. I’m surprised that the River Tethys ran through here.”
A. Bettik stood to shine his light around again, then crouched close to the glowing cube. Even his strong back was hunched against the massive gravity.
“What does the guidebook say?” I asked him.
He removed the small volume. “Very terse entries, sir. The Tethys had extended to Sol Draconi Septem for only a brief period before the book was published. It is in the northern hemisphere, just beyond the area the Hegemony was attempting to terraform. The main attraction of this section of the river appears to have been the possibility of seeing an arctic wraith.”
“That’s the thing your hunter friends were after?” Aenea said to me.
I nodded. “White. Lives on the surface. Very fast. Very deadly. Almost extinct during the Web days, but they’ve made a comeback since the Fall, according to the hunters I listened to. Evidently their diet consists of the human residents of Sol Draconi Septem … what’s left of them. Only the indigenies—the Hegira colonists who had gone native centuries ago—survived the Fall. They’re supposed to be primitive. The hunters said that the only animal the indigenies can hunt here is the wraith. And the indigenies hate the Pax. Word was that they kill missionaries … use their sinews for bowstring, just as they would a wraith’s.”
“This world was never very amenable to having the Hegemony authorities here,” said the android. “Legend has it that the locals were quite pleased by the Fall of the farcasters. Until the plague, of course.”
“Plague?” said Aenea.
“A retrovirus,” I said. “It trimmed the Hegemony human population from several hundred million to fewer than a million. Most of those were killed by the few thousand indigenies here. The rest were evacuated during the early days of the Pax.” I paused and looked at the girl. She looked like a sketch for a young madonna with the thermal blanket draped around her like that, her skin glowing in the lantern and cube light. “Times were rough around the old Web after the Fall.”
“So I gather,” she said dryly. “They weren’t so bad when I was growing up on Hyperion.” She looked around at the black water lapping at the raft, up at the stalactites of ice. “I wonder why they went to all that trouble just to have a few kilometers of ice cavern on the tour.”
“That’s the strange part,” I said, nodding toward the little guidebook. “It says that the main attraction is the chance of sighting an arctic wraith. But the wraiths … at least from what I heard the offworld hunters say … don’t burrow down in the ice. They live on the surface.”
Aenea’s dark eyes were fixed on me as she absorbed the meaning of that. “So this wasn’t a cavern then.…”
“I think not,” said A. Bettik. He pointed to the icy ceiling fifteen meters above us. “The terraform attempt in those days concentrated on creating enough temperature and surface pressure in certain low areas to allow sublimation of the largely carbon-dioxide-and-oxygen atmosphere from frozen to gaseous form.”
“Did it work?” asked the girl.
“In limited areas,” replied the android. He made a gesture toward the surrounding darkness. “My guess would be that this was quite open during the days when River Tethys tourists transited this short section. Or I should say, open except for containment fields that helped to hold in the atmosphere and hold back the more inclement weather. Those fields, I daresay, are gone.”
“And we’re locked under a mass of what the tourists used to breathe,” I said. Looking toward the ceiling and then down at the plasma rifle still in its case, I muttered, “I wonder how thick …”
“Most probably several hundred meters, at least,” said A. Bettik. “Perhaps a vertical kilometer of ice. This was, I understand, the thickness of the atmospheric glaciation to the immediate north of the terraformed areas.”
“You know a lot about this place,” I said.
“On the contrary, sir,” he said. “We have now exhausted the totality of my knowledge on the ecology, geology, and history of Sol Draconi Septem.”
“We could ask the comlog,” I said, nodding toward my pack, where I now kept the bangle.
The three of us exchanged looks. “Nahh,” said Aenea.
“I concur,” said A. Bettik.
“Maybe later,” I said, although I admit that even while I spoke, I was thinking of some of the things I should have insisted upon bringing from the EVA locker: hazardous environment suits with powerful heaters, scuba gear, even a spacesuit would be much preferable
to the inadequate cold-weather gear in which we now shivered.
“I was thinking of shooting at the roof, trying to break through to daylight,” I said, “but the risk of collapsing it on us seems much greater than any chance of escape that way.”
A. Bettik nodded. He had pulled on a strange woolen cap with long earflaps. The usually thin-looking android now appeared downright roly-poly in all of his layers of clothing. “You have some plastique left in the flare pouch, M. Endymion.”
“Yes. I was just thinking about that. There’s enough left for half a dozen more moderate-sized charges … but I only have four detonators left. So we could try blasting our way up, or sideways, or through that ice wall that’s blocking us. But only four blasts’ worth.”
The shivering little madonna figure looked at me. “Where did you learn about explosives. Raul? In Hyperion’s Home Guard?”
“Initially,” I said. “But I really learned how to use old-fashioned plastique clearing stumps and boulders for Avrol Hume when we were landscaping the Beak estates …” I stood up, realizing that it was too cold to stay still for so long. The numbness in my fingers and toes sent that signal. “We could try going back upriver,” I said, stamping my feet and flexing fingers.
Aenea frowned. “The next operating farcasters are always downriver …”
“True,” I said, “but maybe there’s a way out upriver. We find some warmth, a way out of this cave, a place to hold up for a while, and then we worry about getting through the next portal.”
Aenea nodded.
“Good idea, sir,” said the android, moving to the starboard push-pole.
Before pushing off, I reset the forward mast—cutting a meter or more off so it would clear the lowest stalactites—and hung a lantern there. Another lamp at each corner of the raft, and we pushed off upstream, our lights making thin yellow halos in the freezing mist.
The river was quite shallow—not quite three meters deep—and the poles found good traction against the bottom. But the current was very strong, and A. Bettik and I had to use all our strength to move the heavy raft upstream. Aenea pulled an extra pole from the back of the raft and joined me on my side, pushing and straining to move the vessel. Behind us, quickly flowing black water swelled and swirled over the stern boards.
For a few minutes this terrible exertion kept us warm—I was even pouring sweat, which froze against my clothing—but thirty minutes of poling and resting, resting and poling found us freezing again and just a hundred meters upstream from where we had started.
“Look,” said Aenea, setting her pole down and fetching the most powerful handlamp.
A. Bettik and I leaned against our staffs, holding the raft in place while we stared. One end of a massive farcaster portal was just visible, protruding from the massive blocks of ice like a small arc of some old groundcar’s wheel rim locked in a bank of ice. Beyond the tiny bit of portal still exposed, the river channel narrowed and then narrowed again until it became a fissure only a meter or so wide, until finally it disappeared beneath another ice wall.
“The river must have been five or six times the width it is now at its widest,” said A. Bettik, “if the portal arch extended from bank to bank.”
“Yeah,” I said, exhausted and dispirited. “Let’s go back to the other end.” We raised our poles and quickly floated the length of our ice gallery, covering in two minutes what it had taken us thirty minutes to pole upstream. All three of us had to use our poles to slow the raft and fend off the ice wall at the end.
“Well,” said Aenea, “here we are again.” She shined her handlamp on the vertical ice cliffs on either side. “We could go ashore if there was a bank of some sort. But there isn’t.”
“We could blow one with plastique,” I said. “Make a sort of ice cave.”
“Would that be any warmer?” asked the girl. Out of the thermal blanket now, she was shivering badly again. I realized that she had so little body fat that heat just poured out of her.
“No,” I said honestly. For the twentieth time I walked over to our tent and gear to find something that would be our salvation. Flares. Plastique. The weapons—their cases now covered with the hoarfrost that was settling on everything. One thermal blanket. Food. The heating cube was still glowing, and now the girl and blue-skinned man were crouching by it again. At that setting it would last for a hundred hours or so before losing its charge. If we had some good insulating material, we could make an ice cave cozy enough to keep us alive for three or four times that long at a lower setting.…
We did not have the insulating material. The microtent fabric was good stuff, but it had poor insulating qualities. And the thought of huddling in an ice tomb as our handlamps and lanterns failed—which they would do quickly in this cold—just watching the heating cube cool and waiting to die … well, it made my belly hurt.
I walked to the front of the raft, ran the handlamp beam over the milky ice and black water for the final time, and said, “All right, here’s what we’ll do.”
Aenea and A. Bettik stared at me from the small circle of light by the heating cube. All of us were shivering.
“I’m going to take some plastique, the detonators, all the fuse cord we have, the rope, a com unit, my flashlight laser, and”—I took a breath—“and dive under this goddamned wall, let the current carry me downstream, and hope to hell it’s just a cave-in and that the river opens up down there. If it does, I’ll surface and set the charges where they’ll do the most good. Maybe we can blow an opening for the raft. If not, we’ll leave the raft behind and all swim down there—”
“You’ll die,” the girl said flatly. “You’ll be hypothermic in ten seconds. And how will you swim upstream against this current?”
“That’s why I’m bringing the rope. If there’s a place to get out of the way of the blast there, I’ll stay at the other end while we blow the opening, but if not, I tug a code on the rope and you two haul me back. When I get on the raft, I’ll strip and wrap myself in the thermal blanket,” I said. “It’s a hundred percent insulative. If I have any body heat left, I’ll survive.”
“What if we all have to swim for it?” said Aenea in the same doubting tone. “The thermal blanket’s not big enough for the three of us.”
“We bring the heating cube,” I said. “Use the blanket like a tent until we warm up.”
“What are we warming up on?” asked the girl, her voice small. “There’s no riverbank here … why should there be one there?”
I made a gesture. “That’s why we try to blow an opening for the raft,” I said patiently. “If we can’t, I’ll use the plastique to knock some of the ice wall down. We’ll float on our own chunk of ice. Anything to get down to the next farcaster portal.”
“What if we use all the plastique to get another twenty meters and there’s another ice wall?” said the girl. “What if the farcaster’s fifty klicks away through ice?”
I started to make another gesture with my hands, but they were shaking too much—from the cold, I hoped. I set them in my armpits. “Then we die on the other side of this wall,” I said, the vapor from my breath hanging in front of me. “It’s better than dying here.”
After a moment of silence, A. Bettik said, “The plan seems our best chance, M. Endymion, but—you must see the logic of this—it should be I who swims. You are recuperating, weakened by your recent wounds. I was biofactured for resistance to extreme temperatures.”
“Not this extreme,” I said. “I can see you shivering. Also, you won’t know where to place the charges.”
“You can instruct me, M. Endymion. Using the com unit.”
“We don’t know if they’ll work through this ice,” I said. “Besides, it will be a difficult call. It’ll be like trying to cut a diamond—the charges will have to be set in just the right places.”
“Still,” said the android, “it only makes sense that I—”
“It may make sense,” I interrupted, “but that’s not the way it’s going to be. This is my jo
b. If I … fail, you try. Besides, I’ll need someone very strong to pull me back through the current, win or lose.” I walked over and put my hand on the blue man’s shoulder. “I’m pulling rank on you this time, A. Bettik.”
Aenea cast off the thermal blanket despite her shivering. “What rank?” she demanded.
I pulled myself to my full height and struck a mock-heroic pose. “I’ll have you know that I was a lancer sergeant third class in the Hyperion Home Guard.” The delivery was marred only a bit by the chattering of my teeth.
“A sergeant,” said the child.
“Third class,” I said.
The girl put her arms around me. The hug surprised me and I lowered my arms to pat her awkwardly.
“First class,” she said softly. Stepping back, stamping her feet, and blowing into her hands, she said, “All right … what do we do?”
“I’ll get the things I need. Why don’t you get that hundred-meter section of line you used as a sea anchor on Mare Infinitus? That should be enough. A. Bettik, if you would please let the raft move up against the ice wall in a way that the entire stern won’t be awash with current. Perhaps by tucking the front in under that low shelf of ice there …”
All three of us were busy for a moment. When we reassembled at the front of the raft again, under the abbreviated mast with its fading lantern glow, I said to Aenea, “Do you still think that someone or something is sending us to these specific River Tethys worlds for a reason?”
The girl looked around at the darkness for a few seconds. Somewhere behind us another stalactite of ice fell into the river with a hollow splash. “Yes,” she said.
“And what’s the reason for this dead end?”
Aenea shrugged, which—under different circumstances—would have looked a bit comical, she was so swathed in layers. “A temptation,” she said.
I did not understand. “Temptation for what?”
“I hate the cold and dark,” said the girl. “I always have. Perhaps someone is tempting me to use certain … abilities … which I have not properly explored yet. Certain powers which I haven’t earned.”
