The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 15

by Gardner Dozois

  But the worms were really not all that alien. They had a close terrestrial analog; the sun-avoiding ice-worms that had first been discovered in the Malaspina Glacier in Alaska toward the end of the nineteenth century. The Alaskan ice-worms were a lot smaller than their Diadem counterparts, but they also nourished themselves on the slim pickings that drifted onto the ice, or had been frozen into it years earlier. Like the Diadem worms, their most notable anatomical feature was a pore at the head end, just above the mouth. In the case of the terrestrial worms the pore served a single function; secreting a salty solution that helped the worms melt their way into ice when there was no tunnel already present – an escape strategy that helped them get beneath the ice before the sun dried them up. The Diadem worms had a similar structure, but according to Setterholm’s notes they have evolved a second use for it; secreting a chemically rich ‘scent trail,’ that helped other worms navigate through the tunnel system. The chemistry of that scent trail turned out to be very complex, with each worm capable of secreting not merely a unique signature but a variety of flavors. Conceivably, more complex message schemes were embedded in some of the other flavors: not just ‘follow me’ but ‘follow me only if you are female’ – the Diadem worms had at least three sexes – ‘and this is breeding season.’ There were many other possibilities, which Setterholm seemed to have been attempting to decode and catalog when the end had come.

  It was interesting . . . up to a point. But even if the worms followed a complex set of rules dependent on the scent trails they were picking up, and perhaps other environmental cues, it would still only be rigidly mechanistic behavior.

  “Nevil, come here.”

  That was Galiana’s voice, but it was in a tone he had barely heard before. It was one that made him run to where Felka and Galiana were waiting on the other side of the lab.

  They were facing an array of lockers that occupied an entire wall. A small status panel was set into each locker, but only one locker – placed at chest height – showed any activity. Clavain looked back to the door they had come in through, but from here it was hidden by intervening lab equipment. They would not have seen this locker even if it had been illuminated before Galiana brought the room’s power back on.

  “It might have been on all along,” he said.

  “I know,” Galiana agreed.

  She reached a hand up to the panel, tapping the control keys with unnerving fluency. Machines to Galiana were like musical instruments to a prodigy. She could pick one up cold and play it like an old friend.

  The array of status lights changed configuration abruptly, then there was a bustle of activity somewhere behind the locker’s metal face – latches and servomotors clicking after decades of stasis.

  “Stand back,” Galiana said.

  A rime of frost shattered into a billion sugary pieces. The locker began to slide out of the wall, the unhurried motion giving them adequate time to digest what lay inside. He felt Felka grip his hand, and then noticed that her other hand was curled tightly around Galiana’s wrist. For the first time he began to wonder if it had really been such a good idea to allow the girl to join them.

  The locker was two meters in length and half that in width and height, just sufficient to contain a human body. It had probably been designed to hold animal specimens culled from Diadem’s oceans, but it was equally capable of functioning as a mortuary tray. That the man inside the locker was dead was beyond question, but there was no sign of injury. His composure – flat on his back, his blue-grey face serenely blank, his eyes closed, and his hands clasped neatly just below his rib cage – suggested to Clavain a saint lying in grace. His beard was neatly pointed and his hair long, frozen into a solid sculptural mass. He was still wearing several heavy layers of thermal clothing.

  Clavain knelt closer and read the name tag above the man’s heart.

  “Andrew Iverson. Ring a bell?”

  A moment went by while Galiana established a link to the rest of the Conjoiners, ferreting the name out of some database. “Yes. One of the missing. Seems he was a climatologist with an interest in terraforming techniques.”

  Clavain nodded shrewdly. “That figures, with all the microorganisms I’ve seen in this place. Well, the trillion-dollar question. How do you think he got in there?”

  “I think he climbed in,” Galiana said. And nodded at something which Clavain had missed, almost tucked away beneath the man’s shoulder. Clavain reached into the gap, his finger brushing against the rock-hard fabric of Iverson’s outfit. A catheter vanished into the man’s forearm, where he had cut away a square of fabric. The catheter’s black feed-line reached back into the cabinet, vanishing into a socket at the rear.

  “You’re saying he killed himself?”

  “He must have put something in there that would stop his heart. Then he probably flushed out his blood and replaced it with glycerol, or something similar, to prevent ice-crystals forming in his cells. It would have taken some automation to make it work, but I’m sure everything he needed was here.”

  Clavain thought back to what he knew about the cryonic immersion techniques that had been around a century or so earlier. They left something to be desired now, but back then they had not been much of an advance over mummification.

  “When he sank that catheter into himself, he couldn’t have been certain we’d ever find him,” Clavain remarked.

  “Which would still have been preferable to suicide.”

  “Yes, but . . . the thoughts that must have gone through his head. Knowing he had to kill himself first to stand a chance of living again – and then hope someone else stumbled on Diadem.”

  “You made a harder choice than that, once.”

  “Yes. But at least I wasn’t alone when I made it.”

  Iverson’s body was astonishingly well-preserved, Clavain thought. The skin tissue looked almost intact, even if it had a deathly, granitelike color. The bones of his face had not ruptured under the strain of the temperature drop. Bacterial processes had stopped dead. All in all, things could have been a lot worse.

  “We shouldn’t leave him like this,” Galiana said, pushing the locker so that it began to slide back into the wall.

  “I don’t think he cares much about that now,” Clavain said.

  “No. You don’t understand. He mustn’t warm – not even to the ambient temperature of the room. Otherwise we won’t be able to wake him up.”

  It took five days to bring him back to consciousness.

  The decision to reanimate had not been taken lightly; it had only been arrived at after intense discussion among the Conjoined, debates in which Clavain participated to the best of his ability. Iverson, they all agreed, could probably be resurrected with current Conjoiner methods. In situ scans of his mind had revealed preserved synaptic structures that a scaffold of machines could coax back toward consciousness. However, since they had not yet identified the cause of the madness which had killed Iverson’s colleagues – and the evidence was pointing toward some kind of infectious agent – Iverson would be kept on the surface; reborn on the same world where he had died.

  They had, however, moved him, shuttling him halfway across the world back to the main base. Clavain had traveled with the corpse, marveling at the idea that this solid chunk of man-shaped ice – tainted, admittedly, with a few vital impurities – would soon be a breathing, thinking, human being with memories and feelings. To him it seemed astonishing that this was possible; that so much latent structure had been preserved across the decades. Even more astonishing was that the infusions of tiny machines that the Conjoiners were brewing would be able to stitch together damaged cells and kick-start them back to life. And out of that inert loom of frozen brain structure – a thing that was at this moment nothing more than a fixed geometric entity, like a finely eroded piece of rock – something as malleable as consciousness would emerge.

  But the Conjoiners were blase at the prospect, viewing Iverson the way expert picture-restorers might view a damaged old master
. Yes, there would be difficulties ahead – work that would require great skill – but nothing to lose sleep over.

  Except, Clavain reminded himself, none of them slept anyway.

  While the others were working to bring Iverson back to life, Clavain wandered the outskirts of the base, trying to get a better feel for what it must have been like in the last days. The debilitating mental illness must have been terrifying, as it struck even those who might have stood some chance of developing some kind of counter-agent to it. Perhaps in the old days, when the base had been under the stewardship of the von Neumann machines, something might have been done . . . but in the end it must have been like trying to crack a particularly tricky algebra problem while growing steadily more drunk: losing first the ability to focus sharply, then to focus on the problem at all, and then to remember what was so important about it anyway. The labs in the main complex had an abandoned look to them; experiments half-finished; notes on the wall scrawled in ever more incoherent handwriting.

  Down in the lower levels – the transport bays and storage areas – it was almost as if nothing had happened. Equipment was still neatly racked, surface vehicles neatly parked, and – with the base sub-systems back on – the place was bathed in light and not so cold as to require extra clothing. It was quite therapeutic, too. The Conjoiners had not extended their communicational fields into these regions, so Clavain’s mind was mercifully isolated again; freed of the clamor of other voices. Despite that, he was still tempted by the idea of spending some time outdoors.

  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 was a bulbous helmet. He experimented until he found a suit that fit 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 in itself a billion nuances of pale turquoise, pale aquamarine even hints of the palest of pinks. Beneath his feet he imagined the cracklike networks of the worms, threading down for hundreds of meters; and he imagined the worms themselves, 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 agonizingly 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 that 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 that 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 harder to believe. The latches were sturdy, and he doubted that the drop into the crevasse would have been sufficient enough 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 have surely 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 a myriad of possibilities he had yet to rule out. Setterholm could have left the base with his suit intact and then – confused and disorientated – 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 seemed, 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 then situation.”

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

  Galiana said nothing but gestured toward 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 fertilization.

  But suppose Setterholm had been trying to write IVERSON 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 stepped into Iverson’s room. The room was spartan but serene, with a small blue holographic window set high on 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 pressurized 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 bedsheets 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 that 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? I pumped myself full of anti-freeze and hoped for the best. Did it work, or is this just some weird-ass dream as I’m sliding toward 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 you’ll be glad to hear it did work.”

  Iverson lifted a hand from beneath the bedsheets, examining his palm and the pattern of veins and tendons on the rear. “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?”