Cilia-of-Gold
Stephen Baxter
AD 3948
The people—though exhausted by the tunnel’s cold—had rested long enough, Cilia-of-Gold decided.
Now it was time to fight.
She climbed up through the water, her flukes pulsing, and prepared to lead the group further along the Ice-tunnel to the new Chimney cavern.
But, even as the people rose from their browsing and crowded through the cold, stale water behind her, Cilia-of-Gold’s resolve wavered. The Seeker was a heavy presence inside her. She could feel its tendrils wrapped around her stomach, and—she knew—its probes must already have penetrated her brain, her mind, her self.
With a beat of her flukes, she thrust her body along the tunnel. She couldn’t afford to show weakness. Not now.
“Cilia-of-Gold.”
A broad body, warm through the turbulent water, came pushing out of the crowd to bump against hers: it was Strong-Flukes, one of Cilia-of-Gold’s Three-mates. Strong-Flukes” presence was immediately comforting. “Cilia-of-Gold. I know something’s wrong.”
Cilia-of-Gold thought of denying it; but she turned away, her depression deepening. “I couldn’t expect to keep secrets from you. Do you think the others are aware?”
The hairlike cilia lining Strong-Flukes” belly barely vibrated as she spoke. “Only Ice-Born suspects something is wrong. And if she didn’t, we’d have to tell her.” Ice-Born was the third of Cilia-of-Gold’s mates.
“I can’t afford to be weak, Strong-Flukes. Not now.”
As they swam together, Strong-Flukes flipped onto her back. Tunnel water filtered between Strong-Flukes” carapace and her body; her cilia flickered as they plucked particles of food from the stream and popped them into the multiple mouths along her belly. “Cilia-of-Gold,” she said. “I know what’s wrong. You’re carrying a Seeker, aren’t you?”
“ . . . Yes. How could you tell?”
“I love you,” Strong-Flukes said. “That’s how I could tell.”
The pain of Strong-Flukes’ perception was as sharp, and unexpected, as the moment when Cilia-of-Gold had first detected the signs of the infestation in herself . . . and had realised, with horror, that her life must inevitably end in madness, in a purposeless scrabble into the Ice over the world. “It’s still in its early stages, I think. It’s like a huge heat, inside me. And I can feel it reaching into my mind. Oh, Strong-Flukes . . . ”
“Fight it.”
“I can’t. I—”
“You can. You must.”
The end of the tunnel was an encroaching disk of darkness; already Cilia-of-Gold already feel the inviting warmth of the Chimney-heated water on the cavern beyond.
This should have been the climax, the supreme moment of Cilia-of-Gold’s life.
The group’s old Chimney, with its fount of warm, rich water, was failing; and so they had to flee, and fight for a place in a new cavern.
That, or die.
It was Cilia-of-Gold who had found the new Chimney, as she had explored the endless network of tunnels between the Chimney caverns. Thus, it was she who must lead this war—Seeker or no Seeker.
She gathered up the fragments of her melting courage.
“You’re the best of us, Cilia-of-Gold,” Strong-Flukes said, slowing. “don’t ever forget that.”
Cilia-of-Gold pressed her carapace against Strong-Flukes” in silent gratitude.
Cilia-of-Gold turned and clacked her mandibles, signalling the rest of the people to halt. They did so, the adults sweeping the smaller children inside their strong carapaces.
Strong-Flukes lay flat against the floor and pushed a single eyestalk towards the mouth of the tunnel. Her caution was wise; there were species who could home in on even a single sound-pulse from an unwary eye.
After some moments of silent inspection, Strong-Flukes wriggled back along the Ice surface to Cilia-of-Gold.
She hesitated. “We’ve got problems, I think,” she said at last.
The Seeker seemed to pulse inside Cilia-of-Gold, tightening around her gut. “What problems?”
“This Chimney’s inhabited already. By Heads.”
Kevan Scholes stopped the rover a hundred yards short of the wall-mountain’s crest.
Irina Larionova, wrapped in a borrowed environment suit, could tell from the tilt of the cabin that the surface here was inclined upwards at around forty degrees—shallower than a flight of stairs. This “mountain”, heavily eroded, was really little more than a dust-clad hill, she thought.
“The wall of Chao Meng-Fu Crater,” Scholes said briskly, his radio-distorted voice tinny. “Come on. We’ll walk to the summit from here.”
“Walk?” She studied him, irritated. ‘scholes, I’ve had one hour’s sleep in the last thirty-six; I’ve travelled across ninety million miles to get here, via flitters and wormhole transit links—and you’re telling me I have to walk up this damn hill?”
Scholes grinned through his faceplate. He was AS-preserved at around physical-twenty-five, Larionova guessed, and he had a boyishness that grated on her. Damn it, she reminded herself, this “boy” is probably older than me.
“Trust me,” he said. “You’ll love the view. And we have to change transports anyway.”
“Why?”
“You’ll see.”
He twisted gracefully to his feet. He reached out a gloved hand to help Larionova pull herself, awkwardly, out of her seat. When she stood on the cabin’s tilted deck, her heavy boots hurt her ankles.
Scholes threw open the rover’s lock. Residual air puffed out of the cabin, crystallizing. The glow from the cabin interior was dazzling; beyond the lock, Larionova she saw only darkness.
Scholes climbed out of the lock and down to the planet’s invisible surface. Larionova followed him awkwardly; it seemed a long way to the lock’s single step.
Her boots settled to the surface, crunching softly. The lock was situated between the rover’s rear wheels: the wheels were constructs of metal strips and webbing, wide and light, each wheel taller than she was.
Scholes pushed the lock closed, and Larionova was plunged into sudden darkness.
Scholes loomed before her. He was a shape cut out of blackness. “Are you okay? Your pulse is rapid.”
She could hear the rattle of her own breath, loud and immediate. “Just a little disoriented.”
“We’ve got all of a third of a gee down here, you know. You’ll get used to it. Let your eyes dark-adapt. We don’t have to hurry this.”
She looked up.
In her peripheral vision, the stars were already coming out. She looked for a bright double star, blue and white. There it was: Earth, with Luna.
And now, with a slow grandeur, the landscape revealed itself to her adjusting eyes. The plain from which the rover had climbed spread out from the foot of the crater wall-mountain. It was a complex patchwork of crowding craters, ridges and scarps—some of which must have been miles high—all revealed as a glimmering tracery in the starlight. The face of the planet seemed wrinkled, she thought, as if shrunk with age.
“These wall-mountains are over a mile high,” Scholes said. “Up here, the surface is firm enough to walk on; the regolith dust layer is only a couple of inches thick. But down on the plain the dust can be ten or fifteen yards deep. Hence the big wheels on the rover. I guess that’s what five billion years of a thousand-degree temperature range does for a landscape . . . ”
Just twenty-four hours ago, she reflected, Larionova had been stuck in a boardroom in New York, buried in one of Paradoxa’s endless funding battles. And now this . . . Wormhole travel was bewildering. “Lethe’s waters,” she said. “It’s so—desolate.”
Scholes gave an ironic bow. “Welcome to Mercury,” he said.
Cilia-of-Gold and Strong-Flukes peered down into the Chimney cavern.
Cilia-of-Gold had chosen the cavern well. The Chimney here was a fine young vent, a glowing crater much wider than their old, dying home. The water above the Chimney was tur
bulent, and richly cloudy; the cavern itself was wide and smooth-walled. Cilia-plants grew in mats around the Chimney’s base. Cutters browsed in turn on the cilia-plants, great chains of them, their tough little arms slicing steadily through the plants. Sliding through the plant mats Cilia-of-Gold could make out the supple form of a Crawler, its mindless, tube-like body wider than Cilia-of-Gold’s and more than three times as long . . .
And, stalking around their little forest, here came the Heads themselves, the rulers of the cavern. Cilia-of-Gold counted four, five, six of the Heads, and no doubt there were many more in the dark recesses of the cavern.
One Head—close to the tunnel mouth—swivelled its huge, swollen helmet-skull towards her.
She ducked back into the tunnel, aware that all her cilia were quivering.
Strong-Flukes drifted to the tunnel floor, landing in a little cloud of food particles. “Heads,” she said, her voice soft with despair. “We can’t fight Heads.”
The Heads” huge helmet-skulls were sensitive to heat—fantastically so, enabling the Heads to track and kill with almost perfect accuracy. Heads were deadly opponents, Cilia-of-Gold reflected. But the people had nowhere else to go.
“We’ve come a long way, to reach this place, Strong-Flukes. If we had to undergo another journey—” through more cold, stagnant tunnels “—many of us couldn’t survive. And those who did would be too weakened to fight.
“No. We have to stay here—to fight here.”
Strong-Flukes groaned, wrapping her carapace close around her. “Then we’ll all be killed.”
Cilia-of-Gold tried to ignore the heavy presence of the Seeker within her—and its prompting, growing more insistent now, that she get away from all this, from the crowding presence of people—and she forced herself to think.
Larionova followed Kevan Scholes up the slope of the wall-mountain. Silicate surface dust compressed under her boots, like fine sand. The climbing was easy—it was no more than a steep walk, really—but she stumbled frequently, clumsy in this reduced gee.
They reached the crest of the mountain. It wasn’t a sharp summit: more a wide, smooth platform, fractured to dust by Mercury’s wild temperature range.
“Chao Meng-Fu Crater,” Scholes said. “A hundred miles wide, stretching right across Mercury’s South Pole.”
The crater was so large that even from this height its full breadth was hidden by the tight curve of the planet. The wall-mountain was one of a series that swept across the landscape from left to right, like a row of eroded teeth, separated by broad, rubble-strewn valleys. On the far side of the summit, the flanks of the wall-mountain swept down to the plain of the crater, a full mile below.
Mercury’s angry Sun was hidden beyond the curve of the world, but its corona extended delicate, structured tendrils above the far horizon.
The plain itself was immersed in darkness. But by the milky, diffuse light of the corona, Larionova could see a peak at the centre of the plain, shouldering its way above the horizon. There was a spark of light at the base of the central peak, incongruously bright in the crater’s shadows: that must be the Thoth team’s camp.
“This reminds me of the Moon,” she said.
Scholes considered this. “Forgive me, Dr Larionova. Have you been down to Mercury before?”
“No,” she said, his easy, informed arrogance grating on her. “I’m here to oversee the construction of Thoth, not to sightsee.”
“Well, there’s obviously a superficial similarity. After the formation of the main System objects five billion years ago, all the inner planets suffered bombardment by residual planetesimals. That’s when Mercury took its biggest strike: the one which created the Caloris feature. But after that, Mercury was massive enough to retain a molten core—unlike the Moon. Later planetesimal strikes punched holes in the crust, so there were lava outflows that drowned some of the older cratering.
“Thus, on Mercury, you have a mixture of terrains. There’s the most ancient landscape, heavily cratered, and the planitia: smooth lava plains, punctured by small, young craters.
“Later, as the core cooled, the surface actually shrunk inwards. The planet lost a mile or so of radius.”
Like a dried-out tomato. “So the surface is wrinkled.”
“Yes. There are rupes and dorsa: ridges and lobate scarps, cliffs a couple of miles tall and extending for hundreds of miles. Great climbing country. And in some places there are gas vents, chimneys of residual thermal activity.” He turned to her, corona light misty in his faceplate. “So Mercury isn’t really so much like the Moon at all . . . Look. You can see Thoth.”
She looked up, following his pointing arm. There, just above the far horizon, was a small blue star.
She had her faceplate magnify the image. The star exploded into a compact sculpture of electric blue threads, surrounded by firefly lights: the Thoth construction site.
Thoth was a habitat to be placed in orbit close to Sol. Irina Larionova was the consulting engineer contracted by Paradoxa to oversee the construction of the habitat.
At Thoth, a Solar-interior probe would be constructed. The probe would be one Interface of a wormhole, loaded with sensors. The Interface would be dropped into the Sun. The other Interface would remain in orbit, at the centre of the habitat.
Thoth’s purpose was to find out what was wrong with the Sun.
Irina Larionova wasn’t much interested in the purpose of Thoth, or any of Paradoxa’s semi-mystical philosophizing. It was the work that was important, for her: and the engineering problems posed by Thoth were fascinating.
The electric-blue bars she could see now were struts of exotic matter, which would eventually frame the wormhole termini. The sparks of light moving around the struts were GUTships and short-haul flitters. She stared at the image, wishing she could get back to some real work.
Irina Larionova had had no intention of visiting Mercury herself. Mercury was a detail, for Thoth. Why would anyone come to Mercury, unless they had to? Mercury was a piece of junk, a desolate ball of iron and rock too close to the Sun to be interesting, or remotely habitable. The two Thoth exploratory teams had come here only to exploit: to see if it was possible to dig raw materials out of Mercury’s shallow—and close-at-hand—gravity well, for use in the construction of the habitat. The teams had landed at the South Pole, where traces of water-ice had been detected, and at the Caloris Basin, the huge equatorial crater where—it was hoped—that ancient impact might have brought iron-rich compounds to the surface.
The flitters from Thoth actually comprised the largest expedition ever to land on Mercury.
But, within days of landing, both investigative teams had reported anomalies.
Larionova tapped at her suit’s sleeve-controls. After a couple of minutes an image of Dolores Wu appeared in one corner of Larionova’s faceplate. Hi, Irina, she said, her voice buzzing like an insect in Larionova’s helmet’s enclosed space.
Dolores Wu was the leader of the Thoth exploratory team in Caloris. Wu was Mars-born, with small features and hair greyed despite AntiSenescence treatments. She looked weary.
“How’s Caloris?” Larionova asked.
Well, we don’t have much to report yet. We decided to start with a detailed gravimetric survey . . .
“And?”
We found the impact object. We think. It’s as massive as we thought, but much—much—too small, Irina. It’s barely a mile across, way too dense to be a planetesimal fragment.
“A black hole?”
No. Not dense enough for that.
“Then what?”
Wu looked exasperated. We don’t know yet, Irina. We don’t have any answers. I’ll keep you informed.
Wu closed off the link.
Standing on the corona-lit wall of Chao Meng-Fu Crater, Larionova asked Kevan Scholes about Caloris.
“Caloris is big,” he said. “Luna has no impact feature on the scale of Caloris. And Luna has nothing like the Weird Country in the other hemisphere . . . ”
; “The what?”
A huge planetesimal—or something—had struck the equator of Mercury, five billion years ago, Scholes said. The Caloris Basin—an immense, ridged crater system—formed around the primary impact site. Whatever caused the impact was still buried in the planet, somewhere under the crust, dense and massive; the object was a gravitational anomaly which had helped lock Mercury’s rotation into synchronisation with its orbit.
“Away from Caloris itself, shock waves spread around the planet’s young crust,” Scholes said. “The waves focused at Caloris” antipode—the point on the equator diametrically opposite Caloris itself. And the land there was shattered, into a jumble of bizarre hill and valley formations. The Weird Country . . . Hey. Dr Larionova.”
She could hear that damnable grin of Scholes’s. “What now?” she snapped.
He walked across the summit towards her. “Look up,” he said.
“Damn it, Scholes—”
There was a pattering against her faceplate.
She tilted up her head. Needle-shaped particles swirled over the wall-mountain from the planet’s dark side and bounced off her faceplate, sparkling in corona light.
“What in Lethe is that?”
“Snow,” he said.
Snow . . . On Mercury?
In the cool darkness of the tunnel, the people clambered over each other; they bumped against the Ice walls, and their muttering filled the water with criss-crossing voice-ripples. Cilia-of-Gold swam through and around the crowd, coaxing the people to follow her will.
She felt immensely weary. Her concentration and resolve threatened continually to shatter under the Seeker’s assault. And the end of the tunnel, with the deadly Heads beyond, was a looming, threatening mouth, utterly intimidating.
Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 83 Page 10
