Galactic North

by Alastair Reynolds

  With that in mind he found an airlock, one that must have been added late in the base’s history as it was absent from the blueprints. There was no membrane stretched across this one; if he stepped through it he would be outside as soon as the doors cycled, with no more protection than the clothes he was wearing now. He considered going back into the base proper to find a membrane suit, but by the time he did that, the mood—the urge to go outside— would be gone.

  Clavain noticed a locker. Inside, to his delight, was a rack of old-style suits such as Setterholm had been wearing. They looked brand new, alloy neck-rings gleaming. Racked above each one was a bulbous helmet. He experimented until he found a suit that fitted him, then struggled with the various latches and seals that coupled the suit parts together. Even when he thought he had donned the suit properly, the airlock detected that one of his gloves wasn’t latched correctly. It refused to let him outside until he reversed the cycle and fixed the problem.

  But then he was outside, and it was glorious.

  He walked around the base until he found his bearings, and then—always ensuring that the base was in view and that his air supply was adequate—he set off across the ice. Above, Diadem’s sky was a deep enamelled blue, and the ice—though fundamentally white—seemed to contain a billion nuances of pale turquoise, pale aquamarine; even hints of the palest of pinks. Beneath his feet he imagined the crack-like networks of the worms, threading down for hundreds of metres; and he imagined the worms, wriggling through that network, responding to and secreting chemical scent trails. The worms themselves were biologically simple—almost dismayingly so—but that network was a vast, intricate thing. It hardly mattered that the traffic along it—the to-and-fro motions of the worms as they went about their lives—was so agonisingly slow. The worms, after all, had endured longer than human comprehension. They had seen people come and go in an eyeblink.

  He walked on until he arrived at the crevasse where he had found Setterholm. They had long since removed Setterholm ’s body, of course, but the experience had imprinted itself deeply on Clavain’s mind. He found it easy to relive the moment at the lip of the crevasse when he had first seen the end of Setterholm’s arm. At the time he had told himself that there must be worse places to die; surrounded by beauty that was so pristine; so utterly untouched by human influence. Now, the more he thought about it, the more that Setterholm’s death played on his mind—he wondered if there could be any worse place. It was undeniably beautiful, but it was also crushingly dead; crushingly oblivious to life. Setterholm must have felt himself draining away, soon to become as inanimate as the palace of ice that was to become his tomb.

  Clavain thought about it for many more minutes, enjoying the silence and the solitude and the odd awkwardness of the suit. He thought back to the way Setterholm had been found, and his mind niggled at something not quite right; a detail that had not seemed wrong at the time but which now troubled him.

  It was Setterholm’s helmet.

  He remembered the way it had been lying away from the man’s corpse, as if the impact had knocked it off. But now that Clavain had locked an identical helmet onto his own suit, that was more difficult to believe. The latches were sturdy, and he doubted that the drop into the crevasse would have been sufficient to break the mechanism. He considered the possibility that Setterholm had put his suit on hastily, but even that seemed unlikely now. The airlock had detected that Clavain’s glove was badly attached; it— or any of the other locks—would surely have refused to allow Setterholm outside if his helmet had not been correctly latched.

  Clavain wondered if Setterholm’s death had been something other than an accident.

  He thought about it, trying the idea on for size, then slowly shook his head. There were myriad possibilities he had yet to rule out. Setterholm could have left the base with his suit intact and then—confused and disoriented—he could have fiddled with the latch, depriving himself of oxygen until he stumbled into the crevasse. Or perhaps the airlocks were not as foolproof as they appeared; the safety mechanism capable of being disabled by people in a hurry to get outside.

  No. A man had died, but there was no need to assume it had been anything other than an accident. Clavain turned, and began to walk back to the base.

  “He’s awake,” Galiana said, a day or so after the final wave of machines had swum into Iverson’s mind. “I think it might be better if he spoke to you first, Nevil, don’t you? Rather than one of us?” She bit her tongue. “I mean, rather than someone who’s been Conjoined for as long as the rest of us?”

  Clavain shrugged. “Then again, an attractive face might be preferable to a grizzled old relic like myself. But I take your point. Is it safe to go in now?”

  “Perfectly. If Iverson was carrying anything infectious, the machines would have flagged it.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  “Well, look at the evidence. He was acting rationally up to the end. He did everything to ensure we’d have an excellent chance of reviving him. His suicide was just a coldly calculated attempt to escape his situation.”

  “Coldly calculated,” Clavain echoed. “Yes, I suppose it would have been. Cold, I mean.”

  Galiana said nothing, but gestured towards the door into Iverson’s room.

  Clavain stepped through the opening. And it was as he crossed the threshold that a thought occurred to him. He could once again see, in his mind’s eye, Martin Setterholm ’s body lying at the bottom of the crevasse, his fingers pointing to the letters “IVF.”

  In-vitro fertilisation.

  But suppose Setterholm had been trying to write “IVER-SON, ” but had died before finishing the word? If Setterholm had been murdered—pushed into the crevasse—he might have been trying to pass on a message about his murderer. Clavain imagined his pain, legs smashed; knowing with absolute certainty he was going to die alone and cold, but willing himself to write Iverson’s name . . .

  But why would the climatologist have wanted to kill Setterholm? Setterholm’s fascination with the worms was perplexing but harmless. The information Clavain had collected pointed to Setterholm being a single-minded loner; the kind of man who would inspire pity or indifference in his colleagues rather than hatred. And everyone was dying anyway—against such a background, a murder seemed almost irrelevant.

  Maybe he was attributing too much to the six faint marks a dying man had scratched on the ice.

  Forcing suspicion from his mind—for now—Clavain walked further into Iverson’s room. The room was spartan but serene, with a small blue holographic window set high in one white wall. Clavain was responsible for that. Left to the Conjoiners—who had taken over an area of the main American base and filled it with their own pressurised spaces—Iverson’s room would have been a grim, grey cube. That was fine for the Conjoiners—they moved through informational fields draped like an extra layer over reality. But though Iverson’s head was now drenched with their machines, they were only there to assist his normal patterns of thought; reinforcing weak synaptic signals and compensating for a far-from-equilibrium mix of neurotransmitters.

  So Clavain had insisted on cheering the place up a bit; Iverson’s sheets and pillow were now the same pure white as the walls, so that his head bobbed in a sea of whiteness. His hair had been trimmed, but Clavain had made sure that no one had done more than neaten Iverson’s beard.

  “Andrew?” he said. “I’m told you’re awake now. I’m Nevil Clavain. How are you feeling?”

  Iverson wet his lips before answering. “Better, I suspect, than I have any reason to feel.”

  “Ah.” Clavain beamed, feeling as if a large burden had just been lifted from his shoulders. “Then you’ve some recollection of what happened to you.”

  “I died, didn’t I? Pumped myself full of antifreeze and hoped for the best. Did it work, or is this just some weird-ass dream as I’m sliding towards brain death?”

  “No, it sure as hell worked. That was one weird-heck-ass of a risk . . .” Clavain halted,
not entirely certain that he could emulate Iverson’s century-old speech patterns. “That was quite some risk you took. But it did work, you’ll be glad to hear.”

  Iverson lifted a hand from beneath the sheets, examining his palm and the pattern of veins and tendons on the back. “This is the same body I went under with? You haven’t stuck me in a robot, or cloned me, or hooked up my disembodied brain to a virtual-reality generator?”

  “None of those things, no. Just mopped up some cell damage, fixed a few things here and there and—um—kickstarted you back into the land of the living.”

  Iverson nodded, but Clavain could tell he was far from convinced. Which was unsurprising: Clavain, after all, had already told a small lie.

  “So how long was I under?”

  “About a century, Andrew. We’re an expedition from back home. We came by starship.”

  Iverson nodded again, as if this was mere incidental detail. “We’re aboard it now, right?”

  “No . . . no. We’re still on the planet. The ship’s parked in orbit.”

  “And everyone else?”

  No point sugaring the pill. “Dead, as far as we can make out. But you must have known that would happen.”

  “Yeah. But I didn’t know for sure, even at the end.”

  “So what happened? How did you escape the infection, or whatever it was?”

  “Sheer luck.” Iverson asked for a drink. Clavain fetched him one, and at the same time had the room extrude a chair next to the bed.

  “I didn’t see much sign of luck,” Clavain said.

  “No; it was terrible. But I was the lucky one—that’s all I meant. I don’t know how much you know. We had to evacuate the outlying bases towards the end, when we couldn’t keep more than one fusion reactor running.” Iverson took a sip from the glass of water Clavain had brought him. “If we’d still had the machines to look after us—”

  “Yes. That’s something we never really understood.” Clavain leaned closer to the bed. “Those von Neumann machines were built to self-repair themselves, weren’t they? We still don’t see how they broke down.”

  Iverson eyed him. “They didn’t. Break down, I mean.”

  “No? Then what happened?”

  “We smashed them up. Like rebellious teenagers overthrowing parental control. The machines were nannying us, and we were sick of it. In hindsight, it wasn’t such a good idea.”

  “Didn’t the machines put up a fight?”

  “Not exactly. I don’t think the people who designed them ever thought they’d get trashed by the kids they’d lovingly cared for.”

  So, Clavain thought—whatever had happened here, whatever he went on to learn, it was clear that the Americans had been at least partially the authors of their own misfortunes. He still felt sympathy for them, but now it was cooler, tempered with something close to disgust. He wondered if that feeling of disappointed appraisal would have come so easily without Galiana’s machines in his head. It would be just a tiny step to go from feeling that way towards Iverson’s people to feeling that way about the rest of humanity . . . and then I’d know that I’d truly attained Transenlightenment . . .

  Clavain snapped out of his morbid line of thinking. It was not Transenlightenment that engendered those feelings, just ancient, bone-deep cynicism.

  “Well, there’s no point dwelling on what was done years ago. But how did you survive?”

  “After the evacuation, we realised that we’d left something behind—a spare component for the remaining fusion reactor. So I went back for it, taking one of the planes. I landed just as a bad weather front was coming in, which kept me grounded there for two days. That was when the others began to get sick. It happened pretty quickly, and all I knew about it was what I could figure out from the comm links back to the main base.”

  “Tell me what you did figure out.”

  “Not much,” Iverson said. “It was fast, and it seemed to attack the central nervous system. No one survived it. Those that didn’t die of it directly went on to get themselves killed through accidents or sloppy procedure.”

  “We noticed. Eventually someone died who was responsible for keeping the fusion reactor running properly. It didn’t blow up, did it?”

  “No. Just spewed out a lot more neutrons than normal; too much for the shielding to contain. Then it went into emergency shutdown mode. Some people were killed by the radiation, but most died of the cold that came afterwards. ”

  “Hm. Except you.”

  Iverson nodded. “If I hadn’t had to go back for that component, I’d have been one of them. Obviously, I couldn’t risk returning. Even if I could have got the reactor working again, there was still the problem of the contaminant.” He breathed in deeply, as if steeling himself to recollect what had happened next. “So I weighed my options and decided dying—freezing myself—was my only hope. No one was going to come from Earth to help me, even if I could have kept myself alive. Not for decades, anyway. So I took a chance.”

  “One that paid off.”

  “Like I said, I was the lucky one.” Iverson took another sip from the glass Clavain had brought him. “Man, that tastes better than anything I’ve ever drunk in my life. What’s in this, by the way?”

  “Just water. Glacial water. Purified, of course.”

  Iverson nodded, slowly, and put the glass down next to his bed.

  “Not thirsty now?”

  “Quenched my thirst nicely, thank you.”

  “Good.” Clavain stood up. “I’ll let you get some rest, Andrew. If there’s anything you need, anything we can do—just call out.”

  “I’ll be sure to.”

  Clavain smiled and walked to the door, observing Iverson ’s obvious relief that the questioning session was over for now. But Iverson had said nothing incriminating, Clavain reminded himself, and his responses were entirely consistent with the fatigue and confusion anyone would feel after so long asleep—or dead, depending on how you defined Iverson’s period on ice. It was unfair to associate him with Setterholm’s death just because of a few indistinct marks gouged in ice, and the faint possibility that Setterholm had been murdered.

  Still, Clavain paused before leaving the room. “One other thing, Andrew—just something that’s been bothering me, and I wondered if you could help.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Do the initials ‘I’, ’V’ and ‘F’ mean anything to you?”

  Iverson thought about it for a moment, then shook his head. “Sorry, Nevil. You’ve got me there.”

  “Well, it was just a shot in the dark,” Clavain said.

  Iverson was strong enough to walk around the next day. He insisted on exploring the rest of the base, not simply the parts the Conjoiners had taken over. He wanted to see for himself the damage that he had heard about, and look over the lists of the dead—and the manner in which they had died—that Clavain and his friends had assiduously compiled. Clavain kept a watchful eye on the man, aware of how emotionally traumatic the whole experience must be. He was bearing it well, but that might easily have been a front. Galiana’s machines could tell a lot about how his brain was functioning, but they were unable to probe Iverson ’s state of mind at the resolution needed to map emotional well-being.

  Clavain, meanwhile, strove as best he could to keep Iverson in the dark about the Conjoiners. He did not want to overwhelm Iverson with strangeness at this delicate time; did not want to shatter the man’s illusion that he had been rescued by a group of “normal” human beings. But it turned out to be easier than he had expected, as Iverson showed surprisingly little interest in the history he had missed. Clavain had gone as far as telling him that the Sandra Voi was technically a ship full of refugees, fleeing the aftermath of a war between various factions of solar-system humanity—but Iverson had done little more than nod, never probing Clavain for more details about the war. Once or twice Clavain had even alluded accidentally to the Transenlightenment—that shared consciousness state the Conjoiners had reached—but Iverson had shown
the same lack of interest. He was not even curious about the Sandra Voi herself, never once asking Clavain what the ship was like. It was not quite what Clavain had been expecting.

  But there were rewards, too.

  Iverson, it turned out, was fascinated by Felka, and Felka herself seemed pleasantly amused by the newcomer. It was, perhaps, not all that surprising: Galiana and the others had been busy helping Felka grow the neural circuitry necessary for normal human interactions, adding new layers to supplant the functional regions that had never worked properly—but in all that time, they had never introduced her to another human being she had not already met. And here was Iverson: not just a new voice but a new smell; a new face; a new way of walking—a deluge of new input for her starved mental routines. Clavain watched the way Felka latched on to Iverson when he entered a room, her attention snapping to him, her delight evident. And Iverson seemed perfectly happy to play the games that so wearied the others, the kinds of intricate challenge Felka adored. For hours on end Clavain watched the two of them lost in concentration; Iverson pulling mock faces of sorrow or—on the rare occasions when he beat her—extravagant joy. Felka responded in kind, her face more animated—more plausibly human—than Clavain had ever believed possible. She spoke more often in Iverson’s presence than she had ever done in his, and the utterances she made more closely approximated well-formed, grammatically sound sentences than the disjointed shards of language Clavain had grown to recognise. It was like watching a difficult, backward child suddenly come alight in the presence of a skilled teacher. Clavain thought back to the time when he had rescued Felka from Mars, and how unlikely it had seemed then that she would ever grow into something resembling a normal adult human, as sensitised to others’ feelings as she was to her own. Now, he could almost believe it would happen—yet half the distance she had come had been due to Iverson’s in fluence, rather than his own.

  Afterwards, when even Iverson had wearied of Felka’s ceaseless demands for games, Clavain spoke to him quietly, away from the others.