The rough but vivid cartoon showed Stella entering some kind of Buck Rogers device and being melted down to slime, while from a second chamber a different woman emerged, to be welcomed by Spacedog with open arms.
Evidently, Stella feared being traded in for a newer model companion, like a car with too many miles on it. She knew I’d do no such thing.
With that mystery off my mind, the only thing I still worried a little bit about, off and on, was the fate of Spacedog’s UFO.
After some thought, I figured that the powerplant inside the protective forcefield was still sucking down neutrinos, and that Spacedog’s suffocated corpse was hauling ass in tight orbit around and around the Sun, or was maybe even stuck at the center, doing Lord knows what to the way the Sun worked.
When the astronomy guys began talking in the Sixties about the Sun not making enough neutrinos to fit their theories, I knew my hunch was right.
But what can I do? All this took place fifty years ago, and Earth’s still around, right? A little hotter on the average, sure, but everyone agrees that’s due to all the chemicals in the atmosphere, not the changing Sun. It’s just that I want to tell someone, so that the information survives after I’m gone. I can’t count on Stella carrying the knowledge forward. Oh, sure, she hasn’t aged one iota in five decades, and she’ll probably be around for another century or two. (You should see the envious looks I get from guys as she pushes my wheelchair down the street. I hope she fixes on a nice young fellow when I kick the bucket.) But in all that time she’s still never said a word. I don’t think she’s got the kind of intelligence that needs or uses speech. So I can’t rely on her.
And I can almost hear Spacedog say, “Verdad, companero! Every racer ultimately all alone is!”
* * *
Glacial
ALASTAIR REYNOLDS
New writer Alastair Reynolds is a frequent contributor to Interzone and has also sold to Asimov’s Science Fiction, Spectrum SF, and elsewhere. His first novel, Revelation Space, was widely hailed as one of the major SF books of the year. His most recent novel is a sequel to Revelation Space also attracting much notice, Chasm City. Upcoming is another big new novel, Redemption Ark. His stories have appeared in our Fifteenth, Seventeenth, and Eighteenth Annual Collections. A professional scientist with a Ph.D. in astronomy, he comes from Wales, but lives in the Netherlands, where he works for the European Space Agency.
In the taut and absorbing story that follows, he takes us to the arid and frozen wastelands of a distant alien planet, where one man must solve an intricate and puzzling mystery before the clock runs out — and his own life runs out with it.
Nevil Clavain picked his way across a mosaic of shattered ice. The field stretched away in all directions, gouged by sleek-sided crevasses. They had mapped the largest cracks before landing, but he was still wary of surprises; his breath caught every time his booted foot cracked through a layer of ice. He was aware of how dangerous it would be to wander from the red path that his implants were painting across the glacier field.
He only had to remind himself what had happened to Martin Setterholm.
They had found his body a month ago, shortly after their arrival on the planet. It had been near the main American base; a stroll from the perimeter of the huge, deserted complex of stilted domes and ice-walled caverns. Clavain’s friends had found dozens of dead within the buildings, and most of them had been easily identified against the lists of base personnel that the expedition had pieced together. But Clavain had been troubled by the gaps and had wondered if any further dead might be found in the surrounding ice fields. He had explored the warrens of the base until he found an airlock which had never been closed, and though snowfalls had long since obliterated any footprints, there was little doubt in which direction a wanderer would have set off.
Long before the base had vanished over the horizon, Clavain had run into the edge of a deep, wide crevasse. And there at the bottom — just visible if he leaned close to the edge — was a man’s outstretched arm and hand. Clavain had gone back to the others and had them return with a winch to lower him into the depths, descending thirty or forty meters into a cathedral of stained and sculpted ice. The body had come into view: a figure in an old-fashioned atmospheric survival suit. The man’s legs were bent in a horrible way, like those of a strangely articulated alien. Clavain knew it was a man because the fall had jolted his helmet from its neck-ring; the corpse’s well-preserved face was pressed halfway into a pillow of ice. The helmet had ended up a few meters away.
No one died instantly on Diadem. The air was breathable for short periods, and the man had clearly had time to ponder his predicament. Even in his confused state of mind he must have known that he was going to die.
“Martin Setterholm,” Clavain had said aloud, picking up the helmet and reading the nameplate on the crown. He felt sorry for him but could not deny himself the small satisfaction of accounting for another of the dead. Setterholm had been among the missing, and though he had waited the better part of a century for it, he would at least receive a proper funeral now.
There was something else, but Clavain very nearly missed it. Setterholm had lived long enough to scratch out a message in the ice. Sheltered at the base of the glacier, the marks he had gouged were still legible. Three letters, it seemed to Clavain: an I, a V, and an F.
I-V-F.
The message meant nothing to Clavain, and even a deep search of the Conjoiner collective memory threw up only a handful of vaguely plausible candidates. The least ridiculous was in vitro fertilization, but even that seemed to have no immediate connection with Setterholm. But then again, he had been a biologist, according to the base records. Did the message spell out the chilling truth about what had happened to the colony on Diadem: a biology lab experiment that had gone terribly wrong? Something to do with the worms, perhaps?
But after a while, overwhelmed by the sheer number of dead, Clavain had allowed the exact details of Setterholm’s death to slip from his mind. He was hardly unique anyway: just one more example of the way most of them had died; not by suicide or violence but through carelessness, recklessness, or just plain stupidity. Basic safety procedures — like not wandering into a crevasse zone without the right equipment — had been forgotten or ignored. Machines had been used improperly. Drugs had been administered incorrectly. Sometimes the victim had taken only themselves to the grave, but in other cases the death toll had been much higher. And it had all happened so swiftly.
Galiana talked about it as if it were some kind of psychosis, while the other Conjoiners speculated about some kind of emergent neural condition, buried in the gene pool of the entire colony, lurking for years until it was activated by an environmental trigger.
Clavain, while not discounting his friends’ theories, could not help but think of the worms. They were everywhere, after all, and the Americans had certainly been interested in them — Setterholm especially. Clavain himself had pressed his faceplate against the ice and seen that the worms reached down to the depth where the man had died. Their fine burrowing trails scratched into the vertical ice walls like the branchings of a river delta; the dark nodes of breeding tangled at the intersections of the larger tunnels. The tiny black worms had infested the glacier completely, and this would only be one distinct colony out of the millions that existed all over Diadem’s frozen regions. The worm biomass in this one colony must have been several dozen tons at the very least. Had the Americans’ studies of the worms unleashed something which shattered the mind, turning them all into stumbling fools?
He sensed Galiana’s quiet presence at the back of his thoughts, where she had not been a moment earlier.
“Nevil,” she said. “We’re ready to leave again.”
“You’re done with the ruin already?”
“It isn’t very interesting — just a few equipment shacks. There are still some remains to the north we have to look over, and it’d be good to get there before nightfall.”
“But I’ve
only been gone half an hour or —”
“Two hours, Nevil.”
He checked his wrist display unbelievingly, but Galiana was right: he had been out alone on the glacier for all that time. Time away from the others always seemed to fly by, like sleep to an exhausted man. Perhaps the analogy was accurate, at that: sleep was when the mammalian brain took a rest from the business of processing the external universe, allowing the accumulated experience of the day to filter down into long-term memory: collating useful memories and discarding what did not need to be remembered. And for Clavain — who still needed normal sleep — these periods away from the others were when his mind took a rest from the business of engaging in frantic neural communion with the other Conjoiners. He could almost feel his neurones breathing a vast collective groan of relief, now that all they had to do was process the thoughts of a single mind.
Two hours was nowhere near enough.
“I’ll be back shortly,” Clavain said. “I just want to pick up some more worm samples, then I’ll be on my way.”
“You’ve picked up hundreds of the damned things already, Nevil, and they’re all the same, give or take a few trivial differences.”
“I know. But it can’t hurt to indulge an old man’s irrational fancies, can it?”
As if to justify himself, he knelt down and began scooping surface ice into a small sample container. The leech-sized worms riddled the ice so thoroughly that he was bound to have picked up a few individuals in this sample, even though he would not know for sure until he got back to the shuttle’s lab. If he were lucky, the sample might even hold a breeding tangle; a knot of several dozen worms engaged in a slow, complicated orgy of cannibalism and sex. There, he would complete the same comprehensive scans he had run on all the other worms he had picked up, trying to guess just why the Americans had devoted so much effort to studying them. And doubtless he would get exactly the same results he had found previously. The worms never changed; there was no astonishing mutation buried in every hundredth or even thousandth specimen, no stunning biochemical trickery going on inside them. They secreted a few simple enzymes and they ate pollen grains and ice-bound algae and they wriggled their way through cracks in the ice, and when they met other worms they obeyed the brainless rules of life, death, and procreation.
That was all they did.
Galiana, in other words, was right: the worms had simply become an excuse for him to spend time away from the rest of the Conjoiners. Before any of them had left Earth’s solar system, Clavain had been a soldier, fighting on the side of the faction that directly opposed Galiana’s experiments in mind-augmentation. He had fought against her Conjoiners on Mars and she had taken him prisoner at the height of the war. Later — when he was older and an uneasy truce looked like it was on the point of collapsing — Clavain had gone back to Mars with the intention of reasoning with Galiana. It was during that peace mission that he realised — for the sake of his conscience — that he had to defect and fight alongside his old enemy, even though that meant accepting Galiana’s machines into his head.
Later, along with Galiana, Felka, and their allies, Clavain had escaped from the system in a prototype starship, the Sandra Voi. Clavain’s old side had done their best to stop the ship from leaving, but they had failed, and the Sandra Voi had safely reached interstellar space. Galiana’s intention had been to explore a number of solar systems within a dozen or so light years of Earth until she found a world that her party could colonize without the risk of persecution.
Diadem had been their first port of call.
A month ago, at the beginning of the expedition, it had been much easier to justify these excursions. Even some of the true Conjoiners had been drawn by a primal human urge to walk out into the wilderness, surrounding themselves with kilometers of beautifully tinted, elegantly fractured, unthinking ice. It was good to be somewhere quiet and pristine, after the war-torn solar system that they had left behind.
Diadem was an Earthlike planet orbiting the star Ross 248. It had oceans, icecaps, plate tectonics, and signs of reasonably advanced multicellular life. Plants had already invaded Diadem’s land, and some animals — the equivalents of arthropods, mollusks, and worms — had begun to follow in their wake. The largest land-based animals were still small by terrestrial standards, since nothing in the oceans had yet evolved an internal skeleton. There was nothing that showed any signs of intelligence, but that was only a minor disappointment. It would still take a lifetime’s study just to explore the fantastic array of body plans, metabolisms, and survival strategies that Diadem life had blindly evolved.
Yet even before Galiana had sent down the first survey shuttles, a shattering truth had become apparent.
Someone had reached Diadem before them.
The signs were unmistakable: glints of refined metal on the surface, picked out by radar. Upon inspection from orbit they turned out to be ruined structures and equipment, obviously of human origin.
“It’s not possible,” Clavain had said. “We’re the first. We have to be the first. No one else has ever built anything like the Sandra Voi; nothing capable of traveling this far.”
“Somewhere in there,” Galiana had answered, “I think there might be a mistaken assumption, don’t you?”
Meekly, Clavain had nodded.
Now — later still than he had promised — Clavain made his way back to the waiting shuttle. The red carpet of safety led straight to the access ramp beneath the craft’s belly. He climbed up and stepped through the transparent membrane that spanned the entrance door, most of his suit slithering away on contact with the membrane. By the time he was inside the ship he wore only a lightweight breather mask and a few communication devices. He could have survived outside naked for many minutes — Diadem’s atmosphere now had enough oxygen to support humans — but Galiana refused to allow any intermingling of microorganisms.
He returned the equipment to a storage locker, placed the worm sample in a refrigeration rack, and clothed himself in a paper-thin black tunic and trousers before moving into the aft compartment where Galiana was waiting.
She and Felka were sitting facing each other across the blank-walled, austerely furnished room. They were staring into the space between them without quite meeting each other’s eyes. They looked like a mother and daughter locked in argumentative stalemate, but Clavain knew better.
He issued the mental command, well-rehearsed now, which opened his mind to communion with the others. It was like opening a tiny aperture in the side of a dam; he was never adequately prepared for the force with which the flow of data hit him. The room changed; color bleeding out of the walls, lacing itself into abstract structures which permeated the room’s volume. Galiana and Felka, dressed dourly a moment earlier, were now veiled in light, and appeared superhumanly beautiful. He could feel their thoughts, as if he were overhearing a heated conversation in the room next door. Most of it was nonverbal; Galiana and Felka playing an intense, abstract game. The thing floating between them was a solid lattice of light, resembling the plumbing diagram of an insanely complex refinery. It was constantly adjusting itself, with colored flows racing this way and that as the geometry changed. About half the volume was green; what remained was lilac, but now the former encroached dramatically on the latter.
Felka laughed; she was winning.
Galiana conceded and crashed back into her seat with a sigh of exhaustion, but she was smiling as well.
“Sorry. I appear to have distracted you,” Clavain said.
“No; you just hastened the inevitable. I’m afraid Felka was always going to win.”
The girl smiled again, still saying nothing, though Clavain sensed her victory; a hard-edged thing that for a moment outshone all other thoughts from her direction, eclipsing even Galiana’s air of weary resignation.
Felka had been a failed Conjoiner experiment in the manipulation of foetal brain development; a child with a mind more machine than human. When he had first met her — in Galiana’s nest on Mars �
�� he had encountered a girl absorbed in a profound, endless game; directing the faltering self-repair processes of the terraforming structure known as the Great Wall of Mars, in which the nest was sheltered. She had no interest in people — indeed; she could not even discriminate faces. But when the nest was being evacuated, Clavain had risked his life to save hers, even though Galiana had told him that the kindest thing would be to let her die. As Clavain had struggled to adjust to life as part of Galiana’s commune, he had set himself the task of helping Felka to develop her latent humanity. She had begun to show signs of recognition in his presence, perhaps sensing on some level that they had a kinship; that they were both strangers stumbling toward a strange new light.
Galiana rose from her chair, carpets of light wrapping around her. “It was time to end the game, anyway. We’ve got work to do.” She looked down at the girl, who was still staring at the lattice. “Sorry, Felka. Later, maybe.”
Clavain said: “How’s she doing?”
“She’s laughing, Nevil. That has to be progress, doesn’t it?”
“I’d say that depends what she’s laughing about.”
“She beat me. She thought it was funny. I’d say that was a fairly human reaction, wouldn’t you?”
“I’d still be happier if I could convince myself she recognized my face and not my smell, or the sound my footfalls make.”
“You’re the only one of us with a beard, Nevil. It doesn’t take vast amounts of neural processing to spot that.”
Clavain scratched his chin self-consciously as they stepped through into the shuttle’s flight deck. He liked his beard, even though it was trimmed to little more than gray stubble so that he could slip a breather mask on without difficulty. It was as much a link to his past as his memories or the wrinkles Galiana had studiously built into his remodelled body.
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