Beyond the Ice Limit

by Preston, Douglas

  So be it.

  He eased himself down into the water until it was chest-deep. The shock of the cold took away some of the pain in his arm. The upper, flimsier personnel hatch was gone—lost in the shock wave. All he had to do was hold his breath, dive down and out, and then surface.

  Which he did.

  He came up next to the mangled, half-submerged DSV. He grasped a projecting piece of metal and managed to crawl up out of the frigid water, where he stretched out atop the wrecked mini sub. There were plenty of handholds, which was good, because the seas were heavy and the sky scudding with dark clouds, the storm wind rising. God, he was cold.

  But as he lay atop the bobbing Pete, shivering, he marveled that he was alive at all. It would be a shame if he died now. And just as he had that thought, he heard a sound, and a plane flew overhead, waggling its wings at the sinking Batavia and dropping flares and signal buoys.

  He didn’t know if the blast had destroyed the Baobab. Chances were, the force of the detonation—impeded as it was from inside the Rolvaag’s hull—hadn’t been sufficient for the liquid-liquid explosion. But he did know one thing: they were all going to be rescued. And he had survived—at least, for the time being.

  And then Gideon passed out.

  Epilogue

  GIDEON CREW, ONE arm in a cast fitted with a sling, strolled down Little West 12th Street in the now chic Meatpacking District of Lower Manhattan. Arriving at the nondescript main entrance to Effective Engineering Solutions, he waited under the eye of the security camera until he was buzzed through the outer door. He walked along a drab, painstakingly monochromatic exterior hallway, and was buzzed through the inner door and into the building proper.

  Ahead of him lay the cavernous space he knew so well: a vast room, four stories high, with catwalks running around various levels of its periphery. Its main floor was taken up with a wide assortment of 3-D models, whiteboards, computers, bioelectric and biomechanical setups, and freestanding clean rooms draped with plastic. Technicians in lab coats walked here and there, making notes on tablet computers or speaking together in small groups.

  Only one thing was missing, and Gideon knew what it was. The huge display of the Baobab and its surrounding ocean bed—which previously had taken up a good deal of the central section of the floor—was gone. In fact, everything related to the project seemed to have disappeared—completely.

  “Dr. Crew?” A man in a business suit came up to him. “They’re waiting for you upstairs. Please follow me.”

  Gideon followed the man to a nearby elevator, and they rode to the sixth floor. The man led the way through various white-painted corridors to an unmarked door, then opened it and ushered him through.

  Gideon found himself in a large, tall space he had not been in before. It appeared to be a lecture hall, with a dozen curved rows of seats stretching up and back—in the form of a Greek amphitheater—from a low platform that stood at the front. Small skylights, set into the high ceiling, afforded views of the blue December sky. Behind the front platform lay a long wall of electronic and mechanical equipment, discreetly housed behind panels of smoked glass. A large model sat on a table atop the platform.

  The man closed the door behind him and Gideon made his way down the aisle. Ranged around in the chairs of the two-hundred-seat hall were several familiar faces: Manuel Garza; Rosemarie Wong, the sonar and marine acoustics assistant—and Sam McFarlane. McFarlane was seated in the front row, stretched out, ankles crossed in front of him. Seeing Gideon approach, the meteorite hunter gestured at him, whether in greeting or dismissal Gideon couldn’t be sure.

  He had of course seen all of these people, one-on-one and in passing, during their recovery from injury and exposure, and at the various debriefings that had taken place. But this was the first time he had seen all of them together since the dramatic rescue, complicated by heavy seas, of the survivors of the Batavia.

  Taking a seat in the second row beside Rosemarie, Gideon looked more closely at the model on the table. It appeared to be another re-creation of the seabed: the site of the Rolvaag’s sinking and the sprouting of the Baobab. However, this one was quite different from the initial model. Instead of the horrible, sprouting thing, there was a massive, ragged hole in the seafloor, as if it had suffered the impact of a giant’s fist. It reminded Gideon of Aklavik, the unusual meteorite crater McFarlane had described witnessing in northern Canada: except on a far larger, indeed gigantic scale.

  A door at one corner of the front of the lecture hall opened and Glinn appeared. He walked slowly along the wall of electronics, stepped up onto the platform, and turned to address the small gathering.

  “Thank you all for coming,” he said. “I thought it would be appropriate to formally conclude this mission with a brief discussion, held for those of you who were most responsible for its success.”

  He stepped forward and waved one hand toward the model. “Because, as far as we have been able to tell, the mission was a success. The liquid-liquid explosion, theorized by Sam and detonated by Gideon, seems to have worked. We’ve sent a research ship down to the area—on the sly, of course—and a sidescan sonar was towed across the entire area. The wreck of the Rolvaag is no more; there is a huge crater in the abyssal floor, as this model demonstrates; and it appears the explosion reached deep enough to kill all the parasitized brains. Dead and rotting remains of the creature were observed floating on the surface, but life has already begun to return to the dead zone.”

  “What about the radioactivity of the explosion?” Gideon asked.

  “The ocean is a marvelous thing. Its incredible vastness—the thousands upon thousands of square miles of seawater surrounding the detonation—absorbed and dispersed it. While I wouldn’t recommend taking any dives down to the bomb crater itself, as I said, the surrounding area seems to be flourishing once again. And—as we’d hoped—local and global seismic stations have chalked it up as a single, violent undersea volcanic eruption: nothing more.”

  He took a seat on the edge of the table. “All of you know some of the details. But I’m here to give you the complete picture. It would appear that the worms that had infected so many of the crew and scientific staff of the Batavia—and had, in effect, taken over the ship, at the behest of the Baobab—died along with it. At the moment of the detonation, they became somnolent. From what we can tell, they were in the process of drying up, dying—even as, of course, the ship sank, taking them to the bottom.”

  “And the infected crew?” asked Rosemarie Wong.

  Glinn’s face grew grim. “From what we witnessed, and from later reports, at the moment the Baobab was destroyed, the affected crewmembers became lethargic and confused. They refused to leave the ship. As the Batavia was sinking, many of them began suffering brain hemorrhages—presumably as the worms in their brains died.” He paused. “The official report was that the undersea volcanic eruption sank the ship—which, after all, is not far from the truth.”

  “How many?” asked Sam McFarlane.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “How many lives were lost when the Batavia went down?”

  This time, it was Garza who spoke up. “Fifty-seven.”

  Fifty-seven, Gideon thought. Add that to the hundred and eight who went down with the Rolvaag, and one hundred and sixty-five lives could be chalked up to the so-called meteorite. Not to mention Alex Lispenard; Barry Frayne; Prothero; Dr. Brambell—others. It was tragic, truly tragic: but of course, it could have been much, much worse.

  Apparently, McFarlane thought so, too, because—while at first his face hardened and he appeared about to say something—he relaxed and sat back in his seat.

  Glinn seemed to notice this, because he turned toward the meteorite hunter. “Sam,” he said, “the rest of us in this room are all employees or officers of EES. This was a job we had to take on. You did not. And it was your insights—into the depths of the root structure containing the brains, into the possibility of a liquid-liquid explosion—that helped destroy the Baob
ab.”

  McFarlane made a dismissive gesture. “Gideon here was the real hero. He assembled the nuke. He armed it, placed it. And he did so believing it to be a suicide mission. He was fully prepared to die so the rest of us could live.”

  “And Gideon has my eternal thanks, as well as the thanks of all of us here at EES. He will be around to enjoy that thanks, in the many forms it will take, over the coming months. But you—I know you’re already planning to leave New York.” Glinn patted his jacket pocket. “I have here a check for five hundred thousand dollars—a token of our appreciation for your contribution to the mission.”

  “Keep your check,” McFarlane said.

  Everyone turned to look at him. Even Glinn seemed surprised.

  “Palmer Lloyd got in touch with me,” McFarlane said. “Apparently, you’d already spoken with him.”

  Glinn inclined his head.

  “In any case, he’s sent me a check for many times that amount. And since getting the news, it appears he’s improving by the day. In fact, he’s back to eating his mignonettes dijonnaise with a fork instead of a straw.”

  “What are you going to do with all the money?” Garza asked him.

  “I’m going to use half of it to establish a charitable trust in the name of my old partner, Nestor Masangkay. The other half I’m going to spend.” And he stretched luxuriously in his seat. “There’s this little island in the Maldives I’ve got my eye on. Only a hundred acres, but almost half of that is beach. On a good night, the bioluminescent phytoplankton is something you have to see to believe.”

  This was greeted by a brief silence.

  “What about the worms?” Gideon asked. “Have you been able to determine how the Baobab was able to communicate with them—how it could direct the actions of the Batavia crew in such specific ways?”

  “That’s one of many mysteries that remain to be solved—if solve them we can. It appears—this is classified—that the creature emitted extremely low-frequency radio waves, similar to what we use to communicate with nuclear submarines. While we were at the Ice Limit, such waves were picked up by the US Navy, thousands of miles away. They think the Russians may have deployed a new submarine communications system—and it’s driving them crazy.

  “But there’s an even deeper mystery that troubles us.” Glinn stood again, paced before the model. “While the UQC was on—when you, Gideon, were speaking with Sax—a digital download came in. Perhaps you were aware of it. We rescued a dump of that transmission, in the Batavia’s black boxes, just before we abandoned ship. The download appears to have come from the creature—or rather, from the alien brain the creature was using for its intelligence and central motor control. We know that brain was very large, at least by human standards. We also know—thanks to Prothero and Dr. Wong, here—that it had come, against its will, across light-years of space and millions of years.”

  “That must have given it plenty of time to think,” McFarlane said drily.

  “We can only assume it came from a race more intelligent than ours. Its message was a mass of binary data—zeros and ones. Our engineers have been trying to decode it for three weeks now. It does not appear to have any relationship to numbers or mathematics or known algorithms. Nor does it appear to be language or some form of logical communication. And it does not consist of images.” He paused again. “We believe the alien brain knew what was about to happen; it knew this would be its final communication with us. It must, therefore, have some importance. But the fact is, we’re still working on it—and we have no real leads.”

  “Have you tried playing it?” Wong asked quietly.

  Glinn looked at her, frowning. “Excuse me?”

  “I said: have you tried playing it?”

  “Playing it?” Glinn asked. “You mean, like music?”

  “The underwater environment that the creature came from was, above all, an acoustic environment. Play it.”

  “How would we do that, exactly?” Garza asked.

  “We know the alien heard, and understood, whale song. It listened, and communicated, digitally, via the Baobab. It stands to reason it would also have listened in to the numerous communications of ours that were transmitted undersea—ship to DSV, DSV to DSV—over the UQC.”

  Glinn thought for a moment. “But UQC is an acoustic, analog technology.”

  “Yes,” Garza said. “And that would give the entity access to both analog and digital methods of communication. Not that this would help it any.”

  “The alien brain could only communicate digitally,” Wong said. “But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t trying to send an analog signal. Prothero walked me through the technology once. It wouldn’t know how to use an audio codec, of course—but there’s no reason it couldn’t have sent an uncompressed bitstream of audio data.” She looked around. “What else would take up such a large volume, if not communication?”

  “Sounds far-fetched,” said Garza.

  “It probably is,” Wong said. “All you need to prove me wrong is to run it through a D-A converter.”

  Glinn had been listening silently to this most recent exchange. Now he walked over to a phone on the nearby wall, picked it up. “Hello? Get me the audio lab.” A pause. “Who is this—Smythefield? It’s Eli Glinn, in the auditorium. Bring me up a digital-to-analog converter and a set of powered speakers. Yes, right away.”

  Hanging up the phone, he opened one of the doors of smoked plate glass behind him, revealing a bank of rack-mounted computers. He pulled out a keyboard, turned on one of the computers, typed in a series of commands, then unspooled a TOSLINK optical cable, used for transmitting digital stereo, from the bank of equipment.

  “I’ve transferred the alien download into this CPU’s memory,” he said.

  Gideon noted that Garza shifted in his seat; scoffed. Clearly, he believed this was a waste of time. At least he refrained from saying so.

  One of the doors in the rear of the auditorium opened and two men in lab coats walked down the aisle, carrying several pieces of equipment. Gideon, an audiophile himself, recognized them as an expensive Grace Design DAC stereo monitor controller, along with a high-end set of Dynaudio powered speakers. They placed the equipment on the table, plugged it into receptacles in the base of the platform, and then, at a nod from Glinn, left the room. Glinn inserted the TOSLINK cable into the back of the Grace, then used a pair of balanced XLR cables to connect the powered speakers to the controller. He turned the speakers on, raised the volume controls on their rear panels, adjusted the gain and the signal routing on the controller, then stepped over to the computer keyboard.

  “Initiating playback,” he said.

  At first, nothing happened. And then a long, low, gentle sound came out, rapidly joined by others, and still others, in a mounting chorus. The strangest feeling Gideon had ever experienced in his life began to wash over him. It was as though he was in his chair, here in this auditorium in the EES building in New York City—and yet he was also everywhere and nowhere in the world, simultaneously. It sounded as if he were listening to, experiencing, the most beautiful music imaginable. And yet it was not music. It was something more than music: a form of communication so deep, so profound, so wondrous, as to be utterly beyond description. It was, he thought, as if he were hearing the singing of God. At the same time, he felt a vast psychological weight being lifted from his shoulders. The pain and sorrow that he bore, new and old, that had accumulated every day of his life like a second skin—the loss of his parents, the death of Alex, his own medical death sentence—all of it was gone, gone entirely, replaced by a kind of quiet, transcendent joy. As he sat there, transfixed, he felt the hinges of his mind begin to loosen. He became aware of the singularly unique sensation of being on the cusp of understanding the real meaning of life; as if incredible insights into the very purpose of the universe were about to be laid bare, something beyond language, beyond human understanding; but in order to receive this revelation he felt his own individuality, his own sense of self, evaporating in
to the cosmos…

  And then, suddenly, the music stopped.

  Gideon, gasping, came back to himself. On the platform, Glinn, staggering slightly as if from a physical blow, had shut down the audio system.

  “I don’t think…” Glinn began, and then stopped to take a few deep breaths and steady himself. “I don’t think the world is ready for this.”

  But even though Glinn had stopped the playback, the indescribable joy, the release, that it offered to Gideon did not dissipate—at least, not entirely.

  “It’s a gift,” he heard McFarlane say, his voice strange. “It’s the alien consciousness giving us a gift as a way of saying thank you—for liberating it from its prison.”

  “A gift,” Gideon repeated. And, looking over at McFarlane, he noticed that the bitter, brooding expression that seemed permanently stamped into the meteorite hunter’s face—as deeply as an image embossed into a coin—had eased. It was as if he, too, had just shed the existential darkness that had followed him around, like a shadow, for much of his life.

  Their eyes met. Slowly, McFarlane smiled.

  Gideon returned the smile. Then, as he settled back in his seat, his eyes traveled upward toward the skylights—and the pure light that streamed through them, enveloping him in golden warmth, felt like a caress from creation itself.

  A Note to Our Readers

  More years ago than we’d care to admit, we wrote a thriller titled The Ice Limit. It was about an expedition to the desolate wastes at the frozen tip of South America, with the goal of recovering the world’s largest meteorite.