The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF

by Mike Ashley

  “Sam,” Randi ordered. “Telop bug. Rope.”

  “I have these things.”

  “Uh-huh. Have your telop bug bring the rope up to me, around Cathy. When I’ve got it, put a clamp on it just behind Cathy’s feet.”

  “Yes, Randi,” Sam acknowledged its orders. “But why?” It also requested more information.

  “So Cathy’s feet can . . . grab – uh – get a foothold on it.” Randi’s voice showed her frustrations with speech, but no panic. “Can you model that? Make an image? See what will happen?”

  “I can model Cathy standing on a clamp on the rope, then rotate horizontal like she is, then put the passage around her . . . I’ve got it!” Sam exclaimed. “The telop’s on its way.”

  “Please hurry,” Cathy sobs, sounding somewhat more in control now.

  I felt the little crab-like telop scuttling along through the cracks between my flesh and rock. The line started to snake by me, a millimetre Fullerene fibre bundle that could support a dinosaur in Earth gravity, a line of ants marching on my skin. I shivered just as the suit temperature warning flashed red in my visor display. The telop’s feet clicked on my helmet as it went by. I waited for what seemed hours that way.

  “Grab the line.” Randi commanded and we obeyed. “Feet set, Cathy?”

  “I can’t . . . can’t feel the clamp.”

  “Okay. I’ll take up some of the, the slack . . . Okay now, Cathy?”

  “It’s there. Oh, God I hope this works.”

  “Right,” Randi answered. “Everyone. Grab. Heave.”

  I set my toe claws and gave it my best effort forward. Nothing seemed to move much.

  “Damn!” Randi grunted.

  “Use the robot, I’m freezing,” Cathy sobbed.

  “Dear,” Nikhil muttered, “she is using the robot. She’s just not being one.”

  I started to get cold myself. My toes were dug in, but I couldn’t bend my knees, so everything was with the calves. If I could just get my upper legs into it, I thought . . . If I just had a place to stand. Of course, that was it.

  “Randi,” I asked, “If Cathy grabbed the rope with her hands, stood on Sam and used all of her legs? Wouldn’t that make a difference.”

  Her response was instantaneous. “Uh-huh. Sam, can you, uh, move up under Cathy’s feet and, uh, anchor yourself.”

  “Do you mean under, or behind so that she can push her feet against me?”

  “I meant behind, Sam. Uh,” Randi struggled with words again. “Uh, Rotate model so feet are down to see what I see, er, imagine.”

  “Yes . . . I can model that. Yes, I can do that, but Cathy’s knees cannot bend much.”

  “Roger, Sam. A little might be enough. Okay, Cathy, understand?”

  “Y – Yes, Randi.” Seconds of scraping, silence, then “Okay, I’ve got my feet on Sam.”

  “Then let’s try. Pull on three. One, two, three.”

  We all slid forward a bit this time, but not much. Still it was much more progress than we’d made in the last half hour.

  “Try again.” I feel her take up the slack. “One, two, three.”

  That time it felt like a cork coming out of the bottle.

  Over the next hour, we struggled forward on our bellies for maybe another 110 metres. Then Randi chipped away a final obstruction and gasped.

  Haggard and exhausted as I am, my command of the language is inadequate to my feelings as I emerged from the narrow passage, a horizontal chimney actually, onto the sloping, gravelly, ledge of the first great cavern. Involuntarily, I groaned; the transition from claustrophobia to agoraphobia was just too abrupt. Suddenly, there was this immense space with walls that faded into a stygian blackness that swallowed the rays of our lights without so much as a glimmer in return.

  My helmet display flashed red numbers which told me how far I would fall, some 600 metres; how long I would fall, just over two minutes, and how fast I would hit, almost ten metres per second; a velocity that would be terminal for reasons not involving air resistance. Think of an Olympic 100-metre champion running full tilt into a brick wall. I backed away from the edge too quickly and lost my footing in Miranda’s centigee gravity.

  In slow frustration, I bounced; I couldn’t get my clawed boots down to the surface, nor reach anything with my hands. Stay calm, I told myself, I could push myself back toward the cavern wall on the next bounce. I waited until I started to float down again and tried to reach the ledge floor with my arm, but my bounce had carried me out as well as down. A look at the edge showed me that my trajectory would take me over it before I could touch it. There was nothing I could do to save myself – my reaction pistol was in a pallet. Visions of Wiley Coyote scrambling in air trying to get back to the edge of a cliff went through my mind, and I involuntarily tried to swim through the vacuum – not fair; at least the coyote had air to work with.

  The helmet numbers went red again as I floated over the edge. Too desperate now to be embarrassed, I found my voice and a sort of guttural groan emerged. I took another breath, but before I could croak again, Cathy grabbed my arm and clipped a line to my belt. She gave my hand a silent squeeze as, anchored firmly to a piton, I pressed my back against the wall of the cavern to get as far as I could from the edge of the ledge. I shook. Too much, too much.

  I cancelled any judgment I’d made about Cathy. Judge us by how far, not how, we went.

  Sam told us the cavern is twenty-seven kilometres long and slants severely downhill. Our ledge topped a 600-metre precipice that actually curved back under us. We gingerly made our camp on the ledge, gratefully retreated to our piton-secured tents, and ate a double ration silently, unable to keep our minds off of the vast inner space which lay just beyond the thin walls of our artificial sanity. Sleep will be welcome.

  Day six. The inner blackness of sleep had absorbed my thoughts the way the cavern absorbed our strobes and I woke aware of no dreams. After a warm, blousy, semiconscious minute, the cold reality of my predicament came back to me and I shivered. It had taken a full day to complete the last ten kilometres, including five hours of exhausted unconsciousness beneath the elastic sheets. We would have to make much better time than that.

  That morning, Randi managed to look frightened and determined at the same time. No display behaviour this morning – we dressed efficiently, packed our pallet and turned on the recompressors minutes after waking. Breakfast was ration crackers through our helmet locks.

  I stowed the tent in the pallet and turned to find Randi standing silent at the edge. She held the Fullerene line dispenser in one hand, the line end in the other, snapped the line tight between them, and nodded. We had, I remembered, fifty kilometres of Fullerene line.

  “Randi, you’re not considering . . .”

  She turned and smiled at me the way a spider smiles to a fly. Oh, yes she was.

  “Preposterous!” was all Nikhil could say when Randi explained what she had in mind. Cathy, docile and embarrassed after yesterday’s trauma, made only a small, incoherent, frightened, giggle.

  And so we prepared to perform one of the longest bungee jumps in history in an effort to wipe out the entire length of the passage in, as it were, one fell swoop. Nikhil drilled a hole through a piece of the cavern wall that looked sufficiently monolithic and anchored the line dispenser to that. Sam, who was equipped with its own propulsion, would belay until we were safe, then follow us.

  Randi stretched a short line segment between two pitons and showed us how to use it to brace ourselves against the wall in Miranda’s less-than-a-milligee gravity. We held our fly-like position easily and coiled our legs like springs.

  “Reaction pistols?” Randi asked.

  “Check.” Nikhil responded.

  “Feet secure?”

  Three “Checks” answered.

  “Line secure.”

  Sam said “check.”

  Randi cleared her throat. “On three now. One, two, three.”

  We jumped out and down, in the general direction of Miranda’s
centre. After a brief moment of irrational fear, we collected ourselves and contemplated the wonders of relativity as we sat in free fall while the “roof” of the cavern flashed by. It was a strange experience; if I shut my eyes, I felt just like I would feel floating outside a space station. But I opened my eyes and my light revealed the jagged wall of the cavern whipping by a few dozen metres away. It was, I noted, getting closer.

  Judiciously taking up the slack in our common line, Nikhil, who was an expert at this, used the reaction pistol to increase our velocity and steer us slightly away from the roof. A forest of ice intrusions, curved like elephant tusks by eons of shifting milligravity, passed by us too close for my comfort as the minuscule gravity and the gentle tugs of the reaction pistol brought us back to the centre of the cavern.

  We drifted. Weight came as a shock: our feet were yanked behind us and blood rushed to our heads as the slack vanished and the line started to stretch. Randi, despite spinning upside down, kept her radar pointed “down”. We must have spent twenty seconds like that, with the pull on our feet getting stronger with every metre further down. Then, with surprising quickness cavern wall stopped rushing past us. Randi said “Now!” and released the line, leaving us floating dead in space only a kilometre or so from the cavern floor.

  I expended a strobe flash to get a big picture of the cavern wall floating next to us. It looks like we are in an amethyst geode; jumbles of sharp crystals everywhere and a violet hue.

  “Magnificent,” Cathy says with a forced edge in her voice. Trying to make contact with us, to start to put things back on a more normal footing after yesterday, I thought.

  “Time to keep our eyes down, I should think,” Nikhil reminded her, and the rest of us. “Wouldn’t want to screw up again, would we?”

  There was no rejoinder from Cathy so I glanced over at her. Her visor was turned towards the crystal forest and apparently frozen in space. A puff from my reaction pistol brought me over to her and my hand on her arm got her attention. She nodded. The crystals were huge, and I wondered at that, too.

  I check my helmet display – its inertial reference function tells me I’m fifty kilometres below the surface and the acceleration due to Miranda’s feeble gravity is down to seven centimetres per second squared so when we touched down to the rugged terrain a kilometre below in just under three minutes . . . we’d hit it at eleven metres per second – another sprint into a brick wall.

  “Randi, I think we’re too high.” I tried to keep my voice even. This was the sort of thing we left to Sam, but he wasn’t with us just now.

  As if in answer, she shot a lined piton into the wall next to us, which was starting to drift by at an alarming rate.

  “Swing into the wall feet first, stop, fall again,” she said.

  “Feet towards the wall!” Nikhil echoed as the tension started to take hold, giving us a misleading sense of down. The line gradually pulled taut and started to swing us toward the wall. Then it let go, leaving us on an oblique trajectory headed right towards the forest of crystals. Piton guns are neat, but no substitute for a hammer.

  “No problems” Nikhil says. “We dumped a couple of metres per second. I’ll try this time.”

  He shot as Randi reels her line in.

  Eventually we swing into the wall. Cathy seemed rigid and terrified, but bent her legs properly and shielded her face with her arms as the huge crystals rushed to meet us.

  They shattered into dust at our touch, hardly even crunching as our boots went through them to the wall.

  “What the . . .” I blurted, having expected something a little more firm.

  “Deposition, not extrusion?” Randi offered, the questioning end of her response clearly intended for Nikhil.

  “Quite so. Low gravity hoarfrost. Hardly anything to them, was there?”

  “You, you, knew didn’t you?” Cathy accused, her breath ragged.

  “Suspected,” Nikhil answered without a trace of feeling in his voice, “but I braced just like the rest of you. Not really certain then, was I?”

  “Hello everyone, see you at the bottom,” Sam’s voice called out, breaking the tension. Three of us strobe and spot the robot free-falling past us.

  The wall on which we landed curved gently to the lower end of the cavern, so we covered the remaining distance in 100-metre leaps, shattering crystals with each giant step, taking some sort of vandalistic delight in the necessity of destroying so much beauty. We caught up to Sam laughing.

  “This way,” it pointed with one of its limbs at a solid wall, “there is another big cavern, going more or less our way. It seems to be sloped about one for one instead of near vertical.”

  Our helmet displays reproduced its seismologically derived model which was full of noise and faded in the distance, but clearly showed the slant down.

  After a couple of false leads we found a large-enough crack leading into the new gallery. Cathy shuddered as she squeezed herself in.

  That cavern was a mere three kilometres deep – we could see the other end. We shot a piton gun down there, and cheered when it held; using the line to keep us centred, we were able to cross the cavern in ten minutes.

  Cathy dislodged a largeish boulder as she landed, and it made brittle, tinkling, ice noises as it rolled through some frost crystals.

  “Hey,” I said when the significance of that got through to me. “I heard that!”

  “We have an atmosphere, mostly methane and nitrogen. It’s about ten millibars and nearly a hundred Kelvins,” Sam answered my implied question. Top-of-the-line robot, Sam.

  It occurred to me then that, should we all die, Sam might still make it out. Almost certainly would make it out. So someone will read this journal.

  The next cavern went down as well and after that was another. We kept going well past our planned stopping time, almost in a daze. Our hammers made echoes now, eerie high-pitched echo rattling around in the caverns like a steelie marble dropped on a metal plate.

  We made camp only 170 kilometres above Miranda’s centre, eighty-five below the surface. Nikhil told us that if the rift continued, like this, along a cord line bypassing the centre itself, we were more than one-third of the way through, well ahead of schedule.

  Randi came over to me as I hammered in the piton for a tent line and put a hand on my arm.

  “Psyche tension; Cathy and Nikhil, danger there.”

  “Yeah. Not much to do about it, is there?”

  “Maybe there is. Sleep with Cathy tonight. Get them away from each other. Respite.”

  I looked at Randi, she was serious. They say tidal forces that near a black hole can be fatal.

  “Boys in one tent, girls in the other?”

  “No. I can’t give Cathy what she needs.”

  “What makes you think I can?”

  “Care about her. Make her feel like a person.”

  Honestly, I was not that much happier with Cathy’s behaviour than Nikhil’s. Though I thought I understood what she was going through and made intellectual allowances, I guess I saw her as being more of an external situation than a person to care about. What Randi was asking wouldn’t come easy. Then, too, there was the other side of this strange currency.

  “And you? With Nikhil?”

  “Skipped a week of classes at Stanford once. Went to a Nevada brothel. Curious. Wanted to know if I could do that, if I needed to, to live. Lasted four days. Good lay, no personality.” She tapped the pocket of my coveralls where my personal electronics lived, recording everything for my article. “You can use that if we get out. Secrets are a headache.” She shrugged. “Dad can handle it.”

  “Randi . . .” I realized that, somehow, it fit. Randi seems to be in a perpetual rebellion against comfort and normalcy, always pushing limits, taking risks, seeking to prove she could experience and endure anything. But unlike some mousy data tech who composes sex thrillers on the side, Randi has no verbal outlet. To express herself, she has to live it.

  “Randi, I can see that something has to b
e done for Nikhil and Cathy, but this seems extreme.”

  “Just once. Hope.” She smiled and nestled herself against me. “Just be nice. Don’t worry about yourself. Let her lead. Maybe just hugs and kisses, or listening. But whatever, give. Just one night, okay? So they don’t kill themselves. And us.”

  It took me a minute or so to digest this idea. Another thought occurred to me. Randi and I were single – not even a standard cohab file – but Nikhil and Cathy . . . “Just how are you going to suggest this to them?” I asked.

  Randi shook her head and looked terrified. “Not me!”

  I don’t think I’m going to be able to finish the journal entry tonight.

  III

  Day seven. Last night was an anticlimax. Nikhil thought the switch was jolly good fun, in fact, he seemed relieved. But Cathy . . . Once her nervousness had run its course, she simply melted into my arms like a child and sobbed. I lay there holding her as she talked.

  Born to a wealthy Martian merchant family, she’d been an intellectual rebel, and had locked horns with the authoritarian pastoral movement there, which eventually gave rise to the New Reformation. When she was fifteen, she got kicked out of school for bragging about sleeping with a boy. She hadn’t, but: “I resented anyone telling me I couldn’t so much that I told everyone that we did.”

  Her parents, caught between their customers and their daughter, got out of the situation by shipping her off to the IPA space academy at Venus L1. She met Nikhil there as an instructor in an introductory Paleontology class. She got her MD at twenty-two and plunged into archaeo-immunology research. A conference on fossil disease traces linked her up with Nikhil again, who had been ducking the controversy about Miranda’s internal structure by using p-bar scans to critique claims of panspermia evidence in Triton sample cores. His outcast status was an attraction for her. They dated.

  When he became an instant celebrity, she threw caution to the wind and accepted his proposal. But, she found, Nikhil kept sensual things hidden deep, and there was a cold, artificial hollowness where his sense of fun should be. Cathy said they had their first erudite word fight over her monokini on their honeymoon and they had been “Virginia Woolfing” it ever since.