Either that, or she was so crazy she was hallucinating that Io was a gigantic alien machine. So crazy she’d lost herself within the convolutions of her own brain.
Which was another terrifying thing she wished she hadn’t thought of. She’d been a loner as a child. Never made friends easily. Never had or been a best friend to anybody. Had spent half her girlhood buried in books. Solipsism terrified her – she’d lived right on the edge of it for too long. So it was vitally important that she determine whether the voice of Io had an objective, external reality. Or not.
Well, how could she test it?
Sulfur was triboelectric, Io had said. Implying that it was in some way an electrical phenomenon. If so, then it ought to be physically demonstrable.
Martha directed her helmet to show her the electrical charges within the sulfur plains. Crank it up to the max.
The land before her flickered once, then lit up in fairyland colors. Light! Pale oceans of light overlaying light, shifting between pastels, from faded rose to boreal blue, multilayered, labyrinthine, and all pulsing gently within the heart of the sulfur rock. It looked like thought made visual. It looked like something straight out of Disney Virtual, and not one of the nature channels either – definitely DV-3.
“Damn,” she muttered. Right under her nose. She’d had no idea.
Glowing lines veined the warping wings of subterranean electromagnetic forces. Almost like circuit wires. They crisscrossed the plains in all directions, combining and then converging – not upon her, but in a nexus at the sled. Burton’s corpse was lit up like neon. Her head, packed in sulfur dioxide snow, strobed and stuttered with light so rapidly that it shone like the sun.
Sulfur was triboelectric. Which meant that it built up a charge when rubbed.
She’d been dragging Burton’s sledge over the sulfur surface of Io for how many hours? You could build up a hell of a charge that way.
So, okay. There was a physical mechanism for what she was seeing. Assuming that Io really was a machine, a triboelectric alien device the size of Earth’s moon, built eons ago for who knows what purpose by who knows what godlike monstrosities, then, yes, it might be able to communicate with her. A lot could be done with electricity.
Lesser, smaller, and dimmer “circuitry” reached for Martha as well. She looked down at her feet. When she lifted one from the surface, the contact was broken, and the lines of force collapsed. Other lines were born when she put her foot down again. Whatever slight contact might be made was being constantly broken. Whereas Burton’s sledge was in constant contact with the sulfur surface of Io. That hole in Burton’s skull would be a highway straight into her brain. And she’d packed it in solid SO2 as well. Conductive and supercooled. She’d made things easy for Io.
She shifted back to augmented real-color. The DV-3 SFX faded away.
Accepting as a tentative hypothesis that the voice was a real rather than a psychological phenomenon. That Io was able to communicate with her. That it was a machine. That it had been built . . .
Who, then, had built it?
Click.
“Io? Are you listening?”
“Calm on the listening ear of night. Come Heaven’s melodious strains. Edmund Hamilton Sears.”
“Yeah, wonderful, great. Listen, there’s something I’d kind a like to know – who built you?”
“You. Did.”
Slyly, Martha said, “So I’m your creator, right?”
“Yes.”
“What do I look like when I’m at home?”
“Whatever. You wish. To.”
“Do I breathe oxygen? Methane? Do I have antennae? Tentacles? Wings? How many legs do I have? How many eyes? How many heads?”
“If. You wish. As many as. You wish.”
“How many of me are there?”
“One.” A pause. “Now.”
“I was here before, right? People like me. Mobile intelligent life forms. And I left. How long have I been gone?”
Silence. “How long –” she began again.
“Long time. Lonely. So very. Long time.”
Trudge, drag. Trudge, drag. Trudge, drag. How many centuries had she been walking? Felt like a lot. It was night again. Her arms felt like they were going to fall out of their sockets.
Really, she ought to leave Burton behind. She’d never said anything to make Martha think she cared one way or the other where her body wound up. Probably would’ve thought a burial on Io was pretty damn nifty. But Martha wasn’t doing this for her. She was doing it for herself. To prove that she wasn’t entirely selfish. That she did too have feelings for others. That she was motivated by more than just the desire for fame and glory.
Which, of course, was a sign of selfishness in itself. The desire to be known as selfless. It was hopeless. You could nail yourself to a fucking cross, and it would still be proof of your innate selfishness.
“You still there, Io?”
Click.
“Am. Listening.”
“Tell me about this fine control of yours. How much do you have? Can you bring me to the lander faster than I’m going now? Can you bring the lander to me? Can you return me to the orbiter? Can you provide me with more oxygen?”
“Dead egg, I lie. Whole. On a whole world I cannot touch. Plath.”
“You’re not much use, then, are you?”
There was no answer. Not that she had expected one. Or needed it, either. She checked the topos and found herself another eighth-mile closer to the lander. She could even see it now under her helmet photomultipliers, a dim glint upon the horizon. Wonderful things, photomultipliers. The sun here provided about as much light as a full moon did back on Earth. Jupiter by itself provided even less. Yet crank up the magnification, and she could see the airlock awaiting the grateful touch of her gloved hand.
Trudge, drag, trudge. Martha ran and reran and rereran the math in her head. She had only three miles to go, and enough oxygen for as many hours. The lander had its own air supply. She was going to make it.
Maybe she wasn’t the total loser she’d always thought she was. Maybe there was hope for her, after all.
Click.
“Brace. Yourself.”
“What for?”
The ground rose up beneath her and knocked her off her feet.
When the shaking stopped, Martha clambered unsteadily to her feet again. The land before her was all a jumble, as if a careless deity had lifted the entire plain up a foot and then dropped it. The silvery glint of the lander on the horizon was gone. When she pushed her helmet’s magnification to the max, she could see a metal leg rising crookedly from the rubbled ground.
Martha knew the shear strength of every bolt and failure point of every welding seam in the lander. She knew exactly how fragile it was. That was one device that was never going to fly again.
She stood motionless. Unblinking. Unseeing. Feeling nothing. Nothing at all.
Eventually she pulled herself together enough to think. Maybe it was time to admit it: She never had believed she was going to make it. Not really. Not Martha Kivelsen. All her life she’d been a loser. Sometimes – like when she qualified for the expedition – she lost at a higher level than usual. But she never got whatever it was she really wanted.
Why was that, she wondered? When had she ever desired anything bad? When you get right down to it, all she’d ever wanted was to kick God in the butt and get his attention. To be a big noise. To be the biggest fucking noise in the universe. Was that so unreasonable?
Now she was going to wind up as a footnote in the annals of humanity’s expansion into space. A sad little cautionary tale for mommy astronauts to tell their baby astronauts on cold winter nights. Maybe Burton could’ve gotten back to the lander. Or Hols. But not her. It just wasn’t in the cards.
Click.
“Io is the most volcanically active body in the solar system.”
“You fucking bastard! Why didn’t you warn me?”
“Did. Not. Know.”
Now her em
otions returned to her in full force. She wanted to run and scream and break things. Only there wasn’t anything in sight that hadn’t already been broken. “You shithead!” she cried. “You idiot machine! What use are you? What goddamn use at all?”
“Can give you. Eternal life. Communion of the soul. Unlimited processing power. Can give Burton. Same.”
“Hah?”
“After the first death. There is no other. Dylan Thomas.”
“What do you mean by that?”
Silence.
“Damn you, you fucking machine! What are you trying to say?”
Then the devil took Jesus up into the holy city and set him on the highest point of the temple, and said to him, “If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down: for it is written he shall give his angels charge concerning thee: and in their hands they shall bear thee up.”
Burton wasn’t the only one who could quote scripture. You didn’t have to be Catholic, like her. Presbyterians could do it too.
Martha wasn’t sure what you’d call this feature. A volcanic phenomenon of some sort. It wasn’t very big. Maybe twenty meters across, not much higher. Call it a crater, and let be. She stood shivering at its lip. There was a black pool of molten sulfur at its bottom, just as she’d been told. Supposedly its roots reached all the way down to Tartarus.
Her head ached so badly.
Io claimed – had said – that if she threw herself in, it would be able to absorb her, duplicate her neural patterning, and so restore her to life. A transformed sort of life, but life nonetheless. “Throw Burton in,” it had said. “Throw yourself in. Physical configuration will be. Destroyed. Neural configuration will be. Preserved. Maybe.”
“Maybe?”
“Burton had limited. Biological training. Understanding of neural functions may be. Imperfect.”
“Wonderful.”
“Or. Maybe not.”
“Gotcha.”
Heat radiated up from the bottom of the crater. Even protected and shielded as she was by her suit’s HVAC systems, she felt the difference between front and back. It was like standing in front of a fire on a very cold night.
They had talked, or maybe negotiated was a better word for it, for a long time. Finally Martha had said, “You savvy Morse code? You savvy orthodox spelling?”
“Whatever Burton. Understood. Is. Understood.”
“Yes or no, damnit!”
“Savvy.”
“Good. Then maybe we can make a deal.”
She stared up into the night. The orbiter was out there somewhere, and she was sorry she couldn’t talk directly to Hols, say good-bye and thanks for everything. But Io had said no. What she planned would raise volcanoes and level mountains. The devastation would dwarf that of the earth-quake caused by the bridge across Lake Styx.
It couldn’t guarantee two separate communications.
The ion flux tube arched from somewhere over the horizon in a great looping jump to the north pole of Jupiter. Augmented by her visor, it was as bright as the sword of God.
As she watched, it began to sputter and jump, millions of watts of power dancing staccato in a message they’d be picking up on the surface of Earth. It would swamp every radio and drown out every broadcast in the Solar System.
THIS IS MARTHA KIVELSEN, SPEAKING FROM THE SURFACE OF IO ON BEHALF OF MYSELF, JULIET BURTON, DECEASED, AND JACOB HOLS, OF THE FIRST GALILEAN SATELLITES EXPLORATORY MISSION. WE HAVE MADE AN IMPORTANT DISCOVERY . . .
Every electrical device in the System would dance to its song!
Burton went first. Martha gave the sledge a shove, and out it flew, into empty space. It dwindled, hit, kicked up a bit of a splash. Then, with a disappointing lack of pyrotechnics, the corpse slowly sank into the black glop.
It didn’t look very encouraging at all.
Still . . .
“Okay,” she said. “A deal’s a deal.” She dug in her toes and spread her arms. Took a deep breath. Maybe I am going to survive after all, she thought. It could be Burton was already halfway-merged into the oceanic mind of Io, and awaiting her to join in an alchemical marriage of personalities. Maybe I’m going to live forever. Who knows? Anything is possible.
Maybe.
There was a second and more likely possibility. All this could well be nothing more than a hallucination. Nothing but the sound of her brain short-circuiting and squirting bad chemicals in all directions. Madness. One last grandiose dream before dying. Martha had no way of judging.
Whatever the truth might be, though, there were no alternatives, and only one way to find out.
She jumped.
Briefly, she flew.
High Eight
Keith Roberts
Occasionally a writer comes along who demands attention and keeps all the plates spinning on sticks at once. J.G. Ballard was one such. So were Michael Moorcock and Roger Zelazny and Ursula K. LeGuin. And so was Keith Roberts, but in a much quieter, almost apologetic way. Roberts (1935–2000) sold his first stories in 1964 and was soon appearing in Science Fantasy, New Worlds and New Writing in SF, under his own name and various pseudonyms. His first major work, and the one for which he will doubtless always be remembered, was Pavane (1968), a wonderful evocation of an alternate Catholic England that arose with the success of the Spanish Armada and the assassination of Elizabeth I. He produced many more novels and stories over the years but grew increasingly disgruntled with publishers and withdrew from the scene. Roberts had a longing for the quiet life. Much of his work expresses a caution towards technology and progress as in the following, which was first published under a pen name and has only once before been reprinted, and that over thirty years ago.
For Rick Cameron, the trouble started one bright morning in Stan Mainwaring’s office.
Stan was Outside Works Controller to Saskeega Power, Rick was line maintenance boss for the company. They were great buddies; they’d been through school together, clocked nearly fifteen years together at Saskeega. Rick was sitting on his boss’s desk skinning through a copy of the company magazine when the phone blew. Stan picked up the handset. He said, “What? Yeah, you’d better put him through . . .” The phone squawked a long time. Stan’s face changed; his fingers gripped the handset rhythmically, an unconscious reflex. Then, “Yeah, I’ll do that. Yeah, straight away.” He put the instrument down and sat for a moment staring at it, hands spread on the desk top. Rick glanced resignedly at the ceiling.
They’d been using one of the penstocks as a laboratory to check corrosion characteristics on some new metal dressings, they were due to open her up that morning, have a look at what had been happening. Rick had gone over to Main Block to collect Stan, they’d been going to drive up together. Now he had a strong presentiment they wouldn’t be making the trip. He said, “What’s the matter, Stan? Trouble?”
The other looked at him sombrely. “Had a suicide in the night. Old guy wrapped himself round a set of bus bars. They only just found him, Billy says it isn’t too nice. Sheriff’s on the way over, I got to go up and see.”
“Where was it, Stan, where’d it happen?”
The other man shrugged. “Of all the crazy places. High Eight.”
Half a dozen lines went out from Saskeega; Rick’s job was to service and maintain them over a radius of some twenty-five miles from the plant. The shortest run on the sector was the Indian Valley line. That went due west up into the mountains, through Black Horse Pass and down into Indian Valley the other side of the hump. It was the trickiest to service but far and away the most important; it fed the Sand Creek Pool where Sand Creek Atomic Research got their juice. And Sand Creek was about the most important thing in the country. . . . There was something else; the two installations inside the mountain, and the stepdown transformers that fed them. Rick had heard the rumours, he’d heard his boys mutter that they were parts of the Doomsday Brain, that they were bringing the current that ran the Doomsday Brain. He hadn’t let himself think too much about it and he certainly hadn’t worried. He wasn’t the m
an to worry. His job was to service the lines.
The first transformer was at the bottom of the hill, the second one way up on the Black Horse at the head of the pass. Number two on the line, number eight on the sector; she sat up there in the clouds and that was the name they’d given her, among themselves. High Eight . . .
Rick went along with his boss. Privately, he thought it was his baby as much as Stan’s. They drove through Freshet, the little township that had sprung up to house the staff of Saskeega and their families. Passing Rick’s place, his wife gave the car a wave. He shook his head slightly. It was just as well she didn’t know where they were headed and why, Judy was funny about the lines. They got through town and the road started to climb with the towers striding alongside. Standing room on the mountain was strictly limited, the line followed the road most of the way. When they got high enough Rick could see Saskeega below and miles off, the penstocks running down to it, the white threads of the outfalls.
He turned round to Stan. “How in Hell did he manage to get hold of those bars? He must have been crazy . . .” He wasn’t feeling too great himself; once when he was in the army he’d seen a guy take a thousand cycles, hadn’t been a thing left but his shoes. And supertension was worse; you couldn’t fool with a hundred thousand volts, it played too rough. The bus bars were the big terminals where the contacts were made between the transformers and the cables, they were fenced with guard rails. Drop a spanner over those rails and there it stopped till a Routine Outage. Slide under to get it and the voltage waiting there would come crackling out to meet you, shake you by the hand. Rick ran his fingers through his cropped hair. He said again, “The old guy must’ve been crazy as a coot to crawl inside . . .”
Stan didn’t answer, just put his foot down harder. They passed number seven; a few miles on and they could see High Eight perched over a cliff, its white walls shining in the sun. When they reached it Stan swung off the road and stopped. They got out. There were a couple of cars parked, one of the station service trucks and the Sheriff’s estate wagon. They walked towards the building and Sheriff Stanton came out the door. One of his deputies backed out after him, taking a bulb out of a flash camera. Stanton nodded to the Saskeega men, wagged his thumb at High Eight. He said, “Better take a look, fellers, your steak-frier’s sure done him proud.”
The Mammoth Book Of Science Fiction Page 40
