A Princess of the Aerie

by John Barnes

  An hour went by, and the only event of any interest was a spike of molybdenum in the mix. Per instructions, Jak reset three plates to capture moly instead of nitrogen. This was a matter of pointing at options on a screen, and took less than a minute, but at least it felt like work. Jak watched as the newly assigned plates began their too-fast-to-see do-si-do in and out of the flowing magma, each exiting plate wiping off two kilograms of moly dust onto the rollers—nothing like the tonnes of aluminum and oxygen shuffling out, or the dozens of kilograms of nitrogen, but still, according to the rolling util meter, every forty seconds the quacco was earning the price of a big sack of potatoes.

  Kyffimna came back shortly after to ask, “How’s it all going?”

  “Dull but fine,” Jak said.

  “Dull is fine.”

  “Can you stand another stupid question?”

  “I live for ’em.”

  “Well, then why don’t you just split up all the rock you run through? The tunable-matter plates can extract any kind of atom, and every atom is salable at some price, right, even if you aren’t going to get much for it.”

  Kyffimna chuckled. “How many years of school have you had?”

  “Uh, four years dev school, eight years gen school, and two years at the Academy—uh, fourteen.”

  “At least they taught you to add. Must’ve skipped some economics. A plate can only extract one element at a time. If a plate is extracting something cheap, like silicon, so that it passes up extracting something valuable, like thorium, you lose money. You want to get all you can of the highest-priced stuff, so you take that out first and allocate as many plates as it takes to get it all. Then you extract the most valuable stuff that’s left in the slag, then the most valuable after that, and sooner or later you’re down to something marginal that you don’t take all of.”

  “But there’s stuff like gold and uranium in there—not much, but the NMR shows it.”

  “A plate doesn’t cycle till it’s full, and you have to have enough of whatever you’re extracting in there to support at least two cycles per second or you run the risk of cooking the plate in the heat.”

  Jak looked again at the immense tank, half the size of a soccer field, and the blur of plates flying in and out of it. “Not a dumb question this time, I hope. I bet there are a lot of accidents around anything that big, moving that fast.”

  “Not dumb at all, and the answer is yes. Don’t be one of them. Precesses the hell out of your pizos and their production goes way down for days afterwards. Not to mention that if there’s anything left of you the rest of us have to clean it up.”

  Jak shuddered, then realized. “And I see what they meant in all those songs about getting slagged. That molten rock would dissolve anything in a pressure suit, and the suit itself, masen? You’d end up in solution in it.”

  “Sort of. First suit cooling would fail, then the temp would go way up inside so you’d, um, steam, basically, in your own juices—half a minute to turn you into Jak au Jus—then in another minute the suit would rupture.”

  She wandered off to talk with Dujuv. Jak noticed that it was much, much easier to concentrate on his job than it had been. The blur of the separator plates continued, and the flow of molten rock never slowed.

  She spent a while with Dujuv, and then with Shadow, and seemed happy enough with both. Before going, she stopped by Jak again and said, “You all are doing fine as far as I can see. I’ll stop by at the end of the shift and see how things are going, and just look over your shoulder while you walk through shutdown, but that’s pretty much a formality. Pop wants to have another little talk tonight, he and some other older heets think they have some ideas. You haven’t heard from your uncle yet?”

  “No, which is unusual. Usually when I ask that heet to talk, I don’t get another word in for hours. And I’ve never known him to be at a loss for an idea.” Jak added mentally, as long as quality of the idea is not an issue.

  “All right.” She seemed to be about to get back into the little five-wheeler and take off, but then she said, “Uh, can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “Um, your friend Dujuv. Does he have a demmy?”

  “He’s kind of, well, carrying a torch for someone, but she’s been all done with him for a long time,” Jak said, figuring the truth would be the simplest.

  “Oh. And, uh … what does he like?”

  “Well, I’ve known him a long time,” Jak said, “and, uh—most of his demmies are kind of tiny. Little bitty girls, all of them.”

  “Oh.” Kyffimna sounded very sad. “He’s a really nice heet. I was … oh, weehu, Jak, I’m no good at the discreet stuff. Of course I was sounding you out—”

  “I hadn’t noticed.”

  She laughed and swatted his arm; it was like being batted playfully by a gorilla. “Well, anyway, I was just wondering if he was slow to pick up a hint or something, or if he was mad because of some of the stupid things I said. I mean, I know you all won’t be here long. Just … while you’re here … you know, he’s good-looking and he’s one toktru nice heet.”

  “He’s about as good as they make,” Jak agreed, not sure what else to add, or whether that was just making it worse. “I don’t like to carry bad news, but he’s pretty good about hints and things. I speck he probably got it. Probably it’s not anything you said, though, if that helps you feel better. Masen?”

  “Toktru masen. You’re blunt, Jak, but I needed it. Thanks.” She got on the five-wheeler and drove away.

  At lunch break, as they ate in the cabin of the five-wheeler, Jak recounted the whole conversation to Dujuv, specking he’d think it was funny that the big, strange-looking girl had taken such an interest in him.

  After listening, Dujuv shook his head, wiped more sweat from his hairless scalp with a rag, and took another bite of his sandwich. “Jak, you didn’t have to be that blunt with her, it probably hurt. And she’d have specked, eventually, pizo.”

  “I’m just trying to help. I know she’s not attractive to you and you need to get some distance—”

  “Jak, the only thing she’s done is like me. It’s not her fault that I don’t like her back the same way. It’s gonna hurt her no matter what, and I’m sad enough about that without having you hurt her too.”

  There was a crackle and bang overhead on the five-wheeler cab’s speakers. “Mayday, all channels, Northeast Caloris Territory, Mayday, all channels. We’ve got a magma breakout in the southwest section of Crater Hamner, crew isolated from a vehicle and in danger. All aid requested—”

  “That’s over by the MLB facility on the opposite wall,” Durol Eldothaler’s voice said, in the speakers. “Move, people.”

  Dujuv was at the controls in an instant; Shadow and Jak barely had time to belt in before the five-wheeler was spinning across the waste country. Jak pulled off his suit glove and spoke directly to his purse. “Order everything into emergency shutdown at the site we were working at,” he said. “I don’t know if we’ll be getting back there today, so shut down all the stuff that was on standby for lunch.”

  “Main separator chamber will be drained in ten minutes, shafts will be cleared in twenty minutes, and all above-surface slag will be cooled in three hours. Subsurface magma may remain liquid for up to six days but is not estimated to pose a hazard.”

  “Good.” Jak pressed the reward spot; his purse cheebled, indicating it felt rewarded and would try to do similar things in the future. Then Jak pulled his glove, and then his gauntlet, back on over his purse. He looked around.

  They were just passing the central pinnacle, joining a dozen other vehicles with Eldothaler Quacco insignia, all racing and bouncing over the shattered, partly melted land. The combination of low gravity, loose light dust, and slick melted surfaces meant that traction was sporadic and unpredictable. Dust flew away from the tractors in parabolic arcs, not sticking to itself and unslowed by the air, a stream of tiny streaks like illustrations in a physics book. The five-, ten-, and fifteen-wheelers
bashed over the rough and lumpy ground, wheeled arms flying up and down as needed, sometimes skidding sideways or bounding high on their legs like a hand flexing on a tabletop, sometimes running on only three legs with the other two raised high, almost fastidiously, as if to step over a dirty spot. They were about halfway there.

  Dujuv was on the com, getting directions, and he took a moment to say, “Helmets on and suit up. One of you do me, please. We’ll probably have to pop the cabin open as soon as we get there. Sounds like they’re going to need lots of hands outside.”

  Jak and Shadow closed suits and checked. Luckily, Dujuv had only removed his helmet and sweat cap to eat.

  Still, the cab was about as stable as skateboarding on an airplane wing. Fitting the sweatcap onto Dujuv would have been easy if covering his eyes or folding his ears down had been all right, and getting his earphones on would have been a cinch if they had ignored his cries of “Ouch!” and “Careful!” Shadow and Jak really only struggled in getting his head into the helmet, straight, with the helmet locked down. (It would have been easy enough if Dujuv’s skull had been soft and flexible.) As it was, however, it was a challenge, and they were less than a minute from arrival when a green light in Dujuv’s heads-up display told them that he was okay to step into vacuum.

  From the top of the next rise, the jagged rock wall of the crater, like the brutally twisted lower jaw of some ancient leviathan, lunged up over the horizon.

  Dujuv stopped behind the other vehicles, saying “Go to general freq twenty-two, that’s what everyone’s using,” popped the door on the cab, jumped out, and ran up the line of parked vehicles, Jak and Shadow racing after. Clearly their tove had heard something during the drive here that precessed him pretty badly.

  Over the next low rise, they found a lake of magma, at least four hundred meters across as they faced its narrow side, slightly more than a kilometer long, glowing white everywhere with just occasional red and yellow scum at its very edges. Almost in the center of the lake, at least 150 meters from shore, was a small island of still-bare ground, no more than twenty meters across, and on it, two human figures standing as close to the center as they could manage. At first Jak thought he was seeing them waver from the rising heat between him and them; then he realized that that doesn’t happen in a vacuum. The two workers were weaving as if drunk; the cooling systems on their suits must be close to overload.

  “Where are their cooling fins? And why aren’t they using their rocables?” Jak asked, barely aware that he had spoken aloud.

  Kyffimna answered, moving next to him and putting her helmet against his, to talk via conduction so that valuable radio-cellular communications channels could be kept open. “They don’t have any of either and MLB wouldn’t have given them to them. MLB goes into Bigpile all the time and just grabs up drunks and druggers for day labor. If you don’t have equipment of your own, you work without it—they’re toktru nonunion,” Kyffimna explained. “We’re going to try for a rescue, but we need a creeper bridge, and that’s coming as fast as it can, from the Thomagatz Quacco, they had one and there was a big freight rocket available, so right now it’s all a race against time.”

  “Who’s winning?”

  “Us, barely. That island is sinking because it’s melting; there’s no more magma coming in. So as the magma cools, the island should sink slower and slower, and maybe not sink all the way at all. That ought to give us time enough—if everything else goes perfect and those two heets can keep standing up and stay in the middle of that island. Especially with this many hands on the job—creeper bridges are one of those things where the more people you have, the faster it goes. And the Thomagatzes are sending along four experienced techs to supervise.”

  “Who’s paying for this?”

  “Us and the Thomagatzes, for right now. Then we’ll send MLB a bill, which they’ll fight in court, because the only courts around here are private, and they’ll eventually get it into some court with some judge they can buy or threaten, and they won’t pay. And you’ll notice we don’t have any workers from the MLB side out here helping; because this is going to be a little scary and dangerous—we’ll all have to work less than three meters above the magma, and if you take a dive into that your name is sizzle-sizzle-pop. So the MLB heets are, let’s say, being a little shy about coming out to join us. So we’re losing a pile of money and risking our lives, masen? Dak it now? But—look at that white-hot shit, Jak. Think about what it would feel like to cook in your suit like a potato in foil. We can’t leave two living people in the middle of a rising magma lake, without trying. We’d have to look at ourselves in the mirror afterward. There’s things a lot worse than being broke, or dead.”

  “Rocket coming in, clear the area, five-minute warning,” came over the general freq. Everyone hurried back to their vehicles for shelter from the sodium exhaust.

  Since the door was pointed opposite the landing point, they left it open and did not bother to pressurize the cabin for the short wait. They saw the white flare overhead grow bigger and bigger, then clearly head for the field behind them. Jak looked out from the cabin window and saw the silent shiny shower, a perfect parabola of millions of silvery dust motes, glinting in the sun like a wispy steel rainbow, arcing down to spatter the ground around them. It was the sodium condensing out of the exhaust.

  In the vacuum, it was soundless, but Jak felt a heavy vibration for just a moment through his feet as the rocket touched down and shut off its engines. Then everyone ran to it.

  Passing pieces of the bridge to each other, they had just removed it from the cargo hold, and the people who dakked the djeste of the bridge were arranging the parts, when the general freq crackled. “This is MLB Operations. Anyone working near the accidental magma pool, please be aware that to save vital facilities inside the structure we will be dumping additional magma in five minutes. Magma level will rise about a half meter. Everyone clear the area. Dumping in five minutes.”

  The voice clicked off.

  Durol’s voice on the radio was frantic. “Hailing the controller inside the MLB facility. Hailing the controller inside the MLB facility. There is an emergency in progress with human life at stake and Treaty Law prohibits turning off your radio.”

  The silence continued.

  “Hailing the controller inside the MLB facility. You have two employees stranded on an island in that lake and they are much less than a half meter above the magma. They will not survive if you dump more magma.” He clicked to the group frequency and added, “Keep working on the bridge. They can’t do this. We’re going to get to use that bridge, so get it ready.”

  All the workers scrambled, following the directions of the Thomagatz technicians, linking strut to truss, frame to brace, and piece to piece. Jak had no idea exactly how this thing would do it, but it was a bridge that could reach those people, and he did his best to follow directions as quickly as he could.

  After almost a minute there was a scratchy sound on the emergency frequency. “This is MLB central. Please repeat.”

  Durol did, carefully.

  “Our records show that all our employees are inside, safe.”

  “These are contract workers, I’m sure! They don’t have rocables and they’re in regular pressure suits without gauntlets or therm boots. From the way they’re staggering I’d judge they already are near heat prostration, and I speck their cooling systems may fail at any moment. We will be ready with a creeper bridge in just a couple of minutes. If you wait another fifteen minutes before dumping that magma, then—”

  “Thank you for advising us of the situation,” the voice said.

  On the work frequency, a cry. “They’ve dumped it! They’ve dumped it!”

  Some evil streak in human nature—a streak which is its own punishment—compels us to see the worst. The crowd ran to the ridge top, just in time to see the thick red rolling wave of magma sweep across the island. It was only about waist height, but being many times denser than water, it hit with overwhelming force, and the
two pressure-suited figures were thrown headlong into the magma. One lay still; the other struggled for an instant, then seemed to stop like a running-down movie of a swimmer. A moment later, one suit, and then the other, burst open, and the distant mountains wavered, refracted by the briefly rising column of steam.

  Shadow rushed by Jak and Dujuv; both of them cried out for just an instant, on the frequency they shared with him, but a moment later he was coming back from the lake. He seemed to have run down to its very edge, bent over for one instant, and come back immediately. As he returned, they could see that he was holding a sampling bucket. “We ought to see what is in this magma,” the Rubahy said. “If it is what I fear and hope, we have a real crisis here—opportunity and danger.” He glanced back toward the lake of magma, in which the shapes of the two bodies were still just barely visible. “Over on one of the other channels, I heard that they dictated their wills and then turned off their transmitters, not wanting to burden their friends and relatives with the death cries that your media would surely have picked up and broadcast. They died with honor.”

  Jak shuddered. He was mostly remembering Principle 116: “The dead can have honor, but they can’t eat it, either.”

  Kyffimna said that Durol normally prohibited business discussion until the dishes were cleared away and the last of dessert was eaten, but tonight at dinner in the krilj the whole quacco watched as Bref and Shadow walked through a set of graphs, showing what had been in the magma. The first surprise was that it had been unexpectedly radioactive, not at all common with any material with which they would normally work on Mercury. Even the isotopes used to tag metal were usually either stable, or, if radioactive, had such long half-lives that they were barely even detectable in the trace quantities used. “What does this mean and why did you look for it?” Durol asked.

  “Well,” Shadow said, “my friends, a thought crossed my mind. Before they dumped the red, almost-cool magma, that lake was white-hot, and there was barely any trace of surface cooling—only at the extreme edges, where the liquid was very shallow, am I correct?” They all nodded, and then the implications sank in. “So if that second wave of magma had started off white-hot, they’d have dumped it, not waited for several minutes, and anyway they appeared to be able to contain it … so it wasn’t the heat that was the problem. That meant there was something dangerous about it otherwise—toxins or radioactivity. So I thought we’d better grab some of the material before it was mixed and diluted by other things, because it might be our best chance to find out what they were doing. Well, material at that temperature, highly radioactive, means just one thing—”