So, the problem was straightforward enough: unhook the clamp from the hose, swivel the elevator car away, and jettison it – making sure that it fell away from the hose, not into it.
Sure, simple: just cross the 10 meters of empty space between the cable she’d descended and the parallel cable where the hose was attached, and detach the hose. Then unhook the elevator car and let it drop.
Just.
Mary looked over into that yawning void again and shuddered. She tried to focus on her itches, her discomforts; the slimy feel of her body in its plastic bag of a spacesuit; anything to take her mind off what she was going to have to do. She reached out and ran her fingers lightly over the cable. It felt like a steel rod under her skinsuit fingers, stretched completely taut under the tension of its own weight. She tried not to think about the thousands of kilometers more of it above her.
With a deliberate effort, she brought herself back to the job she’d come to do. She took out the telescoping graphite rods for the traverse. Pencil thin, they hardly looked adequate for the task – although they could have supported one of the shuttles. Holding with both hands to try to keep from trembling, she held out one of the rods, pushing the release at the base. It extended slowly, bobbing around in sympathy with the shaking of her hands. She worked it over toward the elevator on the other cable. The amplitude of its swings increased as it extended, finally sweeping back and forth in oscillations several meters across as it reached the elevator on the other side. Frustrated, she tried to hold it still, clenching her hands still more tightly, but the IOmeter length of rod waved back and forth like a sapling in a breeze.
Finally, the clasp at the end brushed one of the cage bars and grabbed. She had another one for safety, in case the first didn’t latch correctly (she didn’t like to dwell on that possibility). She deployed it too. It went more easily, possibly because her anger at the mindless perversity of her equipment had taken her mind off her acrophobia.
Finally, two thin rods stretched from her elevator to the one holding the hose. Mary double checked her safety line and its reel. Then she clipped a carabiner around each rod, making sure each could slide freely along its rod. Last, she fastened separate lines from each ‘biner to her belt, and one from her belt to her tool kit.
Now the hard part. Mary took a deep breath and leaned backward out of the elevator, holding tightly to the rods behind her. She let herself down between them, feeling her joints crack with the tension, biting her lip as her wrenched arm protested. She finally swung down underneath, a hand clenched around each rod, a foot also wrapped around each, hanging downward between the two like an ancient sloth slung between two tree branches. She was facing upward deliberately, trying not to think of the abyss below her back.
She forced herself to advance, centimeter by centimeter, moving only one hand or one foot at a time. It did not help her peace of mind that the rods flexed slightly as she moved along them. Finally she felt her helmet brush the other elevator. She lifted herself up and pushed back, trying to turn over as she did so, and trying to use her right arm as little as possible. Finally she grabbed one of the other elevator’s cage bars, removed the carabiner lines from the traverse rods and clipped them to the cage, then reeled in her tool kit from the other elevator car.
The empty water tank kept her from climbing inside. Pulling herself up to the top where she could at least stand and hold onto the skystalk for support, she surveyed the situation. The elevator itself would be easy to detach – it had an emergency release for just that purpose – but before she did that she had to unfasten the cargo clamp and swivel the elevator around the cable, so it wouldn’t tangle in the hose when it fell. And then, of course, get out of it before releasing it. Details, details, she thought.
Holding onto the cage with her good hand, she leaned outward so she could reach down to the clamp. It had a lever sticking out that would be forced upward automatically when the elevator car reached the bottom; releasing the hose to continue down, pulled by its own weight, while the elevator crossed the junction to ascend the other cable. She stretched with her left hand and pulled on the lever, awkwardly, since she was right-handed.
It didn’t move.
She pulled harder, but still nothing happened. Apparently the tension from below was putting enough pressure on the clamp to keep it from releasing smoothly. And she couldn’t get enough leverage reaching over the side of the elevator to the clamp – and doing so left-handed to boot.
She hated holding on with her sore arm, but that was what it was going to take. That and a crowbar. She pulled her tool bag up beside her, took out the bar, and leaned back over the edge as far as she dared, trying to find a good purchase for the tool against the stuck clamp. It kept slipping on the rounded lever, and the more she tried the clumsier her fingers became. She felt herself sweating in the skinsuit with her exertions, but the bar finally found solid resistance and with a curse she yanked on it for all she was worth.
Abruptly the latch popped open. The crowbar went flying out of her fingers, pinwheeling off into space, and she felt herself fly up and over backward, breaking her grip on the cage. She choked a shriek while she scrabbled futilely at the slick surface of the hose, with the mindless panic with which the drowning grasp at straws. Then as she peeled away from the skystalk, her hands went to her safety rope without conscious thought.
She fell leisurely in the low gravity, and bounced gently at the end of her tether perhaps five meters below the elevator, rocking back and forth slowly like a small child on a swing. Panting hard, heart thudding, blood rushing in her ears, she slowly forced herself to calm down, all the while clutching the safety line.
The shock of adrenaline had washed away the fear. She looked around her, then looked down, deliberately. The skystalk brushed past her as she swung below the elevator car; on the next pass she reached out and grasped it to steady herself. For a long time she followed the twin cables, with the attached hose paralleling one, down, down, down into the looming bulk of Waterworld below. She thought she could almost see the ballast weight at the end of the stalk, where they’d installed the receiving tank for the water. It was a long way down.
Somehow it didn’t matter any more. She reeled in the safety line and climbed back atop the elevator car.
The rest was easy. She stuck a small chemical rocket pack on the car so it wouldn’t fall back into the stalk when she released it, then unhooked the two graphite traverse rods. She figured she’d just return to the other cable by swinging back on her original safety line. The only awkward part was getting the jammed elevator swung around away from the pump hose while she was standing on it, but she finally managed to grasp the stalk with a grippy and wrench the car around, opening and closing just one of the emergency brakes at a time to let it swivel.
Finally it was ready. With a silent prayer, Mary stepped off deliberately into the abyss, floating down in the gentle gravity until the safety line caught her. Then she simply reeled in. Once back in the elevator she’d ridden down in, she triggered the cable release for the defective elevator, and watched as it slowly started to fall; then she savagely stabbed the ignite button. The little chemical rocket she’d stuck on puffed briefly, pushing the falling car farther away from the stalk as it was supposed to.
The jettisoned equipment arced away and downward. She leaned over to watch, but soon she lost sight of it. Even at a mere 0.15 gee, its speed grew rapidly.
She spoke into her radio. “Mary here. All done. Start the hose deployment again. I’ll watch from here for a while.”
“Roger,” George said.
In a few minutes she could see that the hose was moving again, slowly but smoothly. She considered whether she should remain there for the rest of the deployment, but discarded the idea. Her supplies were low, the sanitary facilities in the skinsuits were primitive, and anyway, her arm was starting to swell. She wasn’t even sure she’d be able to cross over to the other cable again if it became necessary.
And in any e
vent, she didn’t see any reason that it should be just her responsibility to fix the problems the others’ haste had caused. They should never have tried deploying the carbon peripump in the first place. Let Norm come down here if it got stuck again. It would do him good.
“Mary here,” she said again. Fatigue and remembered anger roughened her voice. “It’s moving all right. Bring me up.”
“Okay. Good work, Mary,” George said. He started to say something else, but she cut him off.
“Over and out.”
She had no trouble falling asleep on the ride back up. In fact, it seemed she’d hardly closed her eyes when the alarm woke her. She must have slept the whole 30 hours. Nonetheless, she didn’t feel rested. She felt grimy; she itched unmercifully, and her injured arm now throbbed insistently.
All her crewmates were waiting for her. Even Norm floated there by the airlock in the ship’s non-rotating cargo bay, his eyes showing grudging respect. George spoke first and offered his hand. “Congratulations,” he said simply when she twisted off her helmet.
Something snapped in her at the conciliatory sound of his voice. This situation should have never arisen in the first place, and now he and Ivan and Norm were trying to pretend all was well. Sweetness and light and “well, we’re all in this together.” Bullshit.
Mary ignored his proffered hand. “No thanks to you, you incompetent coward!” she hissed. “If you had taken a stand earlier, I wouldn’t have had to do this!”
George, taken aback, was too tired to be polite. Withdrawing his hand, he said, “The definition of courage, Mary, is ‘grace under pressure’.” He turned away, and neither Norm nor Ivan said a word as Mary pulled herself back into the ship.
Still life with scrap, Norm thought, looking at the monitor. The scene opened out on a junkyard, haphazard pieces of torn metal ripped out of anything that could be spared, waiting to provide metal ions to neutralize the acidic water they hoped to collect there. The metal half filled the enormous oblong storage tank fitted into the ballast mass at the base of the stalk. From there, they’d fill the smaller tanks in the elevator cars to carry the water back to the ship.
They hoped.
George looked up at the chronometer. “Any second now,” he said unnecessarily. “Then we’ll know if this worked.” He avoided looking at Mary, but she bristled anyway. Norm smiled, glad she had found someone else to direct her hatred toward for a while. Before she could say anything, though, movement on the monitor caught their attention.
Water, charged with acid and oxygen, spurted out of the pulsing tube and splashed into the waiting tank, dribbling down to the waiting scrap. Hydrogen boiled off wherever water met metal, bursting into flame as dissolved oxygen also fizzed out of the splashing water. The tank was open to space, though; the flame couldn’t build up enough pressure to do any damage.
At length the starship’s four crewmembers could see the waterline slowly rising in the tank.
Norm looked to the lowermost monitor, the one showing the view at the pumphead. The ceramic trashrack on the base of the cable, a cage to keep the native life at bay while they pumped, seemed to be holding. Even so, the carnage outside was straight out of a nightmare: creatures that looked to be all mouth snapping at the cage and at each other until the water turned murky with their blood. Norm hoped nothing in their physiology would provide any more nasty surprises, but he wasn’t willing to bet on it. They would have to filter and maybe even vacuum-distill every drop of it before bringing it on board.
Unless, of course, Mary wanted to bathe in it unprocessed. It would almost be worth breaking ship’s quarantine to watch her try.
George was as close to achieving harmony as he’d ever been. The very smell of fresh water seemed like perfume. He’d been sitting in full lotus beneath a hot shower for nearly half an hour, and if the recycler didn’t quit first he planned to stay there for the rest of the day. He might just stay there for the rest of the trip, all seven years of it.
The idea that he would be a hero at the end of the journey amused him greatly. The colonists who awakened from SloMo would name mountains after him, maybe even entire continents. Their descendants would learn about the four brave crewmembers who defied all odds to save the ship, and mothers would name their sons and daughters after them for generations to come. No one would mention the arguments and backbiting that surrounded their heroism, nor the long years of embarrassed animosity they were sure to endure before they reached their goal.
George would trade it all in a moment for the blissful sleep of SloMo, but he knew without asking what the others would say to that. The same thing he would say if one of them asked for the same privilege: they couldn’t afford to lose one-fourth of their trained crewmembers, not with so much reconstruction to do before they reached the colony.
No, he was stuck with them, and they with him, for the rest of eternity. He turned his face upward to let the fresh, soothing water cascade over him while he tried to compose a haiku of suitable irony to fit the situation.
They had, after all, survived.
Thousands of kilometers below the star ship, another struggle was underway. The skystalk and the silica peripump had been reeled back into the ship, but the ceramic trashrack at the intake, its fastenings weakened by the incessant battering, had fallen off to sink down into the planet-spanning ocean. Water frothed crimson like a bubbling lung wound as nightmare creatures continued to dash themselves futilely against it, slashing themselves and each other as they attacked the indifferent oxides. The turmoil only increased as time went on, as more and more carnivores sensed the spreading casualties and homed in on the chaos, only to be themselves swept up into it.
The trashrack continued to sink slowly through the frenzied beasts, knocked this way and that like a dust mote drifting in Brownian motion in an afternoon sunbeam.
It tended downward, but it had a long, long way to fall.
Acknowledgment: The authors would like to thank Poul Anderson for his original suggestion of a planet consisting entirely of water.
HOOP-OF-BENZENE
Robert Reed
Now there’s a story title that tells you absolutely nothing about what you are about to experience. And just how do I begin to explain it? You see, we’re creeping up the barometer of extremeness and this is where things start to get a little complicated.
Robert Reed (b. 1956) is one of the new generation of writers who can grasp vast concepts that leave me goggle eyed. Much of his science fiction has been relatively straightforward – well, if you count attempts by aliens to change reality as straightforward. That’s the principle behind his books Beyond the Veil of Stars (1994), Beyond the Gated Sky (1997) and An Exaltation of Larks (1995). But in Marrow (2000) Reed took a rather giant step. It tells of groups of aliens and genetically changed humans who travel through the universe in a ship that is so huge that it contains its own planet. The following story, which was written specially for this anthology, is set in the same world as that but takes place long before the events in Marrow. It’s a story where you become so involved with the characters that you’ll find yourself accepting the extreme concepts as if they are everyday. Until you think about them!
A young captain was chosen because the task seemed quite X~ minor and higher-ranked souls had more vital or interesting duties to perform. What the officer knew was minimal: the apartment’s location, a sketch of its history, plus the name and species of its current owner. But she brought clear orders and the sanctity of her office and, after several centuries of training, she was accustomed to wearing the mirrored uniform as well as its natural authority.
“Hello, sir,” the captain began, offering the standard twostomp greeting. A tall and naturally graceful woman, she was pretty in a human fashion, with an easy smile that was kept hidden for the moment. Employing a crisp, slightly angry voice, she announced, “My name is Washen.”
The alien stared through the diamond door, saying nothing.
“Hoop-of-Benzene,” she called o
ut. Harum-scarums often appreciated a brash tone. “If that’s your name, I wish to speak with you. And if you are someone else, bring Hoop-of-Benzene to me.”
The breathing mouth opened. “I am Hoop,” the alien replied.
“Sir,” she said, repeating the two-stomp greeting. “Three days from now, one of my superiors will visit your district, and the good captain has expressed interest in touring his former home. Which is, as it happens, your apartment.”
The mouth puckered. “Does this good captain have a name?”
“For the moment, he does not. He prefers confidentiality. But I assure you that he’s among the Master Captain’s favorite officers.”
“A Submaster, is he?”
“Perhaps,” Washen allowed. “And perhaps not.”
“In three days, you say.” An enormous hand pressed against the door. “But why in three days? Can you surrender that much?”
Washen considered her audience. Harum-scarum society was built upon ceremony and rank, status and noisy bluster. “As I’m sure you are aware, sir . . . five thousand years ago, my people threw open the hatches of this great vessel. We invited all the species of the galaxy to share in our grand voyage. Fifty centuries of success, and during this milestone year, to mark our many accomplishments, the captains are holding a series of celebrations.”
“I have heard about this business,” Hoop allowed.
“The Master Captain is scheduled to visit your district. All of her Submasters will be attendance, plus a hundred lesser captains, and she will enjoy two feasts given in her honor, and a Janusian wedding, and the new Ill-lock habitat will be christened. As for the nameless captain . . . his visit to your home should take just a few moments. Little more. The man is not a sentimental creature, and I assure you, any disruption to your life will be minimal.”
“No.”
The Mammoth Book of Extreme Science Fiction Page 29
