The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF

by Mike Ashley

  Randi murmured something.

  “Huh?” Was she going to suggest another respite?

  “Could we be married? Us?”

  It was her first mention of the subject. I’d developed my relationship with her with the very specific intention of creating and reporting this expedition, and had never, never, hinted to her I had any other designs on her person or fortune. I’d been pretty sure that the understanding was mutual.

  “Uh, Randi. Look, I’m not sure we should think like that. Starving poets trying to fake it as journalists don’t fit well in your social circle. Besides, that,” I tossed my head in the direction of the other tent, “that doesn’t seem to put me in the mood for such arrangements. Why – ”

  “Why is: you don’t do that.” Randi interrupted me. This was startling; she never interrupted, except in emergencies – she was the most non-verbal person I knew.

  Okay, I thought. This was an emergency of sorts. I kissed her on the forehead, then stifled a laugh. What a strange wife for a poet she would be! She sat there fighting with herself, struggling to put something in words.

  “Why . . . is sex, working together, adventure, memories of this, not being afraid, not fighting.”

  My parents had had their usual share of discussions and debates, but raised voices had been very rare. The Rays’ loud argument had, apparently, opened some old wounds for Randi. I held her and gave her what comfort I could. Finally, curiosity got the better of me.

  “Your parents fought?”

  “Dad wouldn’t go to parties. Didn’t like social stuff. Didn’t like mom’s friends. His money.” Randi looked me in the eye with an expression somewhere between anger and pleading. “So. She had him shot. Hired someone.”

  I’d never heard anything like that, and anything that happened to papa Gaylord Lotati would have been big news. “Huh?”

  “Someone Mom knew knew someone. The punk wasn’t up to it. Non-fatal chest wound. Private doctor. Private detective. Real private. A settlement. Uncontested divorce. I was six. All I knew then was dad was sick in the hospital for a week. Later mom just didn’t come home from one of her trips. A moving van showed up and moved . . . moved some stuff. One of the movers played catch with me. Another van came and moved dad and me to a smaller house. And there was no more yelling, never, and no more mom. So you know now. When you hold me, that kind of goes away. I feel secure, and I want that feeling, forever.”

  What in a freezing hydrocarbon hell does one say to that? I just rocked her gently and stared at the wall of the tent, as if it could give me an answer. “Look, I care about you, I really do,” I finally told her. “But I need to find my own ‘whys’. Otherwise, the relationship would be too dependent.” I grinned at her. “We should be more like Pluto and Charon, not like Uranus and Miranda.”

  “Who gets to be Pluto and who gets to be Charon?” she asked, impishly, eyes sparkling through embryonic tears, as she began devouring me. One does not escape from a black hole, and once I fell beneath her event horizon and we merged into a singularity, the question of who is Pluto and who is Charon, to the rest of the universe, mattered not. Nor did whatever noise we made.

  We re-entered the real universe late for our next round of backdoor searching; Cathy and Nikhil were almost finished packing their pallet when we emerged from our deflated tent. We stared at each other in mutual embarrassment. Nikhil put his hand on his wife’s shoulder.

  “Sorry. Bit of tension is all, we’ll be right.” He waved at Miranda around us. “Now, shall we have another go at it?”

  “Any ideas of where to look?” I asked.

  “Ethane outlet?” Randi inquired.

  Yes, I thought, those rivers had to go somewhere. I had, however, hoped to avoid swimming in them.

  “There is,” Sam announced, “a large cavern on the other side of this siderophilic nodule.”

  “This what?” Cathy started.

  “This bloody three-kilometre nickel iron rock you’re standing on,” Nikhil snapped before Sam could answer, then he caught himself and lamely added, “dear.”

  She nodded curtly.

  Randi took a couple of experimental swings at the nodule, more, I thought, in frustration than from doubting Sam. “No holes in this. Best check edges,” she suggested. We all agreed.

  After five hours of searching, it was clear that the only ways out were the ethane rivers.

  “Forgive me if I now regret giving in on the rift route,” Nikhil had to say. Cathy was in reach, so I gave her hand a pat. She shrugged.

  We had a right-left choice, a coin flip. Each side of the tidal divide had it’s own ethane river and each river disappeared. Sam sounded and sounded around the ethane lakes at the end of Nikhil’s Smokestack. The inner one, on the side toward Uranus, appeared to open into a cavern five kilometres on the other side of “Cathy’s Rock,” as we called the central nodule. The other one appeared to go seven kilometres before reaching a significant opening, but that opening appeared to lead in the direction of the rift. No one even thought to question Nikhil this time.

  Now that the route was decided, we had to face the question of how to traverse it.

  “Simple,” Cathy declared. “Sam carries the line through, then we all get in a tent and he pulls us through.”

  “Unfortunately, I cannot withstand ethane immersion for that period of time,” Sam said. “And you will need my power source, if nothing else, to complete the journey.”

  “Cathy,” Randi asked. “Ethane exposure, uh, how bad?”

  “You don’t want to breathe much of it – it will sear your lungs.”

  “Positive pressure.”

  “Some could still filter in through your tightsuit pores.”

  She was right. If moisture and gas from your skin could slowly work its way out of a tightsuit, then ethane could probably work its way in.

  Randi nodded. “Block tightsuit pores?”

  A loud “What?” escaped me when I realized she was considering. Tightsuits worked because they let the skin exhale – sweat and gasses could diffuse slowly through the porous, swollen, fabric. Stopping that process could be very uncomfortable – if not fatal. But Cathy Ray, MD, didn’t seem to be in a panic about it. Apparently, it was something one could survive for a while.

  “Big molecules. Got any, Cathy?”

  “I have some burn and abrasion coating, semi-smart fibres. The brand name is Exoderm, what about it Sam?”

  “Exoderm coating will not go through tightsuit pores. But it has pores of its own, like the tightsuits, and may allow some ethane to work its way in after a while. A few thousand molecules a second per square metre.”

  Randi shrugged. “And a tightsuit with pores blocked will cut that way down. Too little to worry about.”

  “I’m going with you,” I announced, surprising myself.

  Randi shook her head. “You try the outer passage if I don’t make it. Get the gook, Cathy.”

  Cathy opened up one of the pallets and produced a spray dispenser. I started unpacking a vacuum tent.

  “This is going to be a little difficult to do in a tent,” Cathy mused.

  “Wimps. Is it ready?” Randi asked.

  Cathy nodded and gave an experimental squirt to her arm. For a moment, the arm looked like it was covered with cotton candy, but the fluff quickly collapsed to a flat shiny patch. Cathy pulled the patch off and examined it. “It’s working just fine, all I need is some bare skin and a place to work.”

  Randi answered by hyperventilating, then before anyone could stop her, she dumped pressure, fluidly removed her helmet, deactivated her shipsuit seals and floated naked before us.

  Cathy, to her credit, didn’t let shock stop her. “Breathe out, not in, no matter how much you want,” she told Randi, and quickly started spraying Randi’s back while Randi was still stepping out of the boots. In less than a minute, Randi was covered with the creamy grey stuff. Calmly and efficiently, Randi rolled her tightsuit back on over the goo, resealed, checked and rehelmeted. It
was all done in less than three minutes. Nikhil was speechless and I wasn’t much better.

  “You okay?” I asked, though the answer seemed obvious.

  Randi shrugged. “One tenth atmosphere, ninety below, no wind, no moisture, no convection, air stings a bit. Bracing. No problem – goo handles stings. Can hold breath five minutes.”

  “You . . . you’d best get on with it, now,” Cathy said, struggling to maintain a professional tone in her voice. “Your skin will have as much trouble breathing out as the ethane has getting in.”

  Randi nodded. “Line dispenser. Clips. Piton gun.”

  I got my act together and dug these things out of the same pallet where Cathy had kept the Exoderm. Randi snapped the free end of the line to her belt, took it off, double-checked the clip, and snapped it back on again.

  “Three tugs, okay? Wait five minutes for you to collect yourselves, then I start hauling. Okay?”

  We nodded. Then she reached for my helmet and held it next to hers.

  “I’ll do it. If not, don’t embarrass me, huh?”

  I squeezed her hand in an extremely inadequate farewell, then she released her boot clamps, grabbed her reaction pistol, and rocketed off to the shore of the ethane lake 1,500 metres away.

  There was, I thought, no reason why one couldn’t weave a fibre-optic comm line into the test line, and use it for communications as well as for hauling, climbing, and bungee jumping. But ours weren’t built that way, and we lost radio with Randi shortly after she plunged into the lake. The line kept snaking out, but, I reminded myself, that could just be her body being carried by the current. I wondered whether there had been a line attached to the alien piton we’d found above, and how long it had hung there.

  Assuming success, we prepared everything for the under-ethane trip. Tents were unshipped, and pallets resealed. I broke out another line reel and looped its end through a pitoned pulley on Cathy’s Rock, just in case someone did come back this way.

  “I doubt that will be needed,” Nikhil remarked, “but we’ll be thankful if it is. You’re becoming quite proficient, Mr Bubka.”

  “Thanks.”

  I kept staring at the dispenser, fighting back the irrational desire to reel her back.

  Cathy grabbed the packed pallets and moved them nearer to the shore, where the changed orientation of the milligee fields left her standing at right angles to Nikhil and myself. She chose to sit there and stare at the lake where Randi had vanished.

  I stayed and puttered with my pulleys.

  Nikhil came up to me. “I don’t think of myself as being Bengali, you know,” he said out of the blue. “I was ten when my parents were kicked out of Bangladesh. Politics, I understand, though the details have never been too clear to me. At any rate, I schooled in Australia and Cambridge, then earned my doctorate at Jovis Tholus.”

  I knew all this, but to make conversation, responded. “J.T.U. is New Reformationist, isn’t it?”

  “It’s officially non-sectarian, state supported, you know. The council may lean that way, but the influence is diffuse. Besides, there is no such thing as New Reformationist geology, unless you’re excavating the Face of Mars.” Nikhil waved his hand in a gesture of dismissive toleration. “So you see, I’ve lived in both worlds; the cool, disciplined, thoughtful British academic world, and the eclectic, compulsive, superstitious Bengali hothouse.”

  No question of which one he preferred. I thought, however, to find a chink in his armour. “You are an Aristotelian then?”

  “I won’t object to the description, but I won’t be bound by it.”

  “Then the golden mean must have some attraction for you, the avoidance of extremes.”

  “Quite.”

  “Okay, Nikhil. Consider then, that within rational safeguards, that the spontaneity may be useful. A safety valve for evolutionary imperatives. A shortcut to communication and ideas. Creativity, art. A motivation for good acts; compassion, empathy.”

  “Perhaps.” He gave me a wintry smile. “I am not a robot. I have these things . . .” disgust was evident in the way he said “things”, “. . . within me as much as anyone else. But I strive to hold back unplanned action, to listen to and analyse these biochemical rumblings before responding. And I prefer myself that way.”

  “Does Cathy?”

  I regretted that as soon as I said it, but Nikhil just shook his helmeted head.

  “Cathy doesn’t understand the alternative. I grew up where life was cheap and pain commonplace. I saw things in Dum Dum, horrifying things . . . but things that nevertheless have a certain fascination for me.” The expression in his unblinking brown eyes was contradictory and hard to read – perhaps a frightened but curious seven-year-old peered at me from beneath layers of adult sophistication. But did those layers protect him from us, or us from him? What had Randi’s night with him been like?

  “Well,” he continued, “Cathy will never experience that sort of thing as long as I keep a grip on myself. She means too much to me, I owe her too much.” He shook his head. “If she just would not ask for what I dare not give . . . Between us, fellow?”

  I’m not sure how I should have answered that, but just then Sam told us the line had stopped reeling out, I nodded briskly to him and we glided “down” to the ethane river shore to wait for the three sharp tugs that would signal us to follow.

  They didn’t come. We pulled on the line. It was slack. So we waited again, not wanting to face the implications of that. I update my journal, trying not to think about the present.

  IV

  It was almost the end of the schedule day when I finally told Cathy to get ready to put the Exoderm on me. There was no debate; we’d probably waited longer than we should have. “Don’t embarrass me,” Randi had said. Grimly, I determined to put off my grief, and not embarrass her. The fate, I recalled, of many lost expeditions was to peter out, one by one. Damn, I would miss her.

  The plan had been to take the other outlet, but we silently disregarded that: I would go the same way, just in case there was any chance of a rescue. I needed that little bit of hope, to keep going.

  By the laws of Murphy, I was, of course, standing stark freezing naked in ethane laced nitrogen half-covered with spray gook and holding my breath when the original line went taut. Three times. Cathy and Nikhil had to help seal me back in. I was shaking so hard, almost fatally helpless with relief.

  We had to scramble like hell to get Sam, Cathy and Nikhil bagged in an uninflated tent. Since I was ready for immersion, and Randi had apparently survived said immersion, I would stay on the outside and clear us around obstacles. I was still double-checking seals as Randi started hauling. By some grace of the universe, I had remembered to clip my pulley line to the final pallet, and it trailed us into the ethane lake.

  It was cold, like skinny-dipping in the Bering Sea. The ethane boiled next to my tightsuit and the space between it and my coveralls became filled with an insulating ethane froth. With that and the silvery white sheen of maximum insulation, my suit was able to hold its own at something like 290 Kelvins. I shivered and deliberately tensed and relaxed every muscle I could think about, as we slipped through the ethane.

  There wasn’t much to see, the passage was wide, broadened perhaps by eons of flow. Strobes revealed a fob of bubbles around me, otherwise the darkness smothered everything.

  The line drew us up? down? to the inside of the passage, out of the current. I grabbed the line and walked lightly against the tension of the pulling line as if I were rappelling on a low-gravity world. The tent with my companions and our pallets were thus spared bumping along the rough surface.

  I asked for the time display, and my helmet told me we’d been under for an hour.

  We rounded a corner and entered a much narrower passage. I became so busy steering us around various projections that I forgot how cold I was. But I noted my skin starting to itch.

  Then I caught a flash of light ahead. Did I imagine it?

  No. In much less time than I thoug
ht, the flash repeated, showing a frothy hole in the liquid above us. Then we were at the boiling surface and Randi was waving at us as she pulled us to shore.

  I flew out of the water with a kick and a flap of my hands and was in her arms. A minute must have passed before I thought to release the rest of the expedition from their tent cum submarine.

  “No solid ground at the end of the main branch. I came up in a boiling sea, full of froth and foam, couldn’t see anything. Not even a roof. Had to come back and take the detour.” She trembled. “I have to get in a tent quick.”

  But with all our decontamination procedures, there was no quick about it, and it was 0300 universal on day ten before we were finally back in our tubular cocoons. By that time, Randi was moaning, shivering and only half-conscious. The Exoderm came off as I peeled her tightsuit down and her skin was a bright angry red, except for her fingers and toes, which were an ugly yellow-black. I linked up the minidoc and called Cathy, who programmed a general tissue regenerative, a stimulant, and directed that the tent’s insulation factor be turned up.

  By 0500, Randi was sleeping, breathing normally, and some of the redness had faded. Cathy called and offered to watch the minidoc so I could get some sleep.

  The question I fell asleep with was, that with everyone’s lives at stake, could I have pushed myself so far?

  Day ten was a short one. We were all exhausted, we didn’t get started until 1500 hours.

  Randi looked awful, especially her hands and feet, but pulled on her back-up tight suit without a complaint. My face must have told her what I was thinking because she shot me a defiant look.

  “I’ll do my pitch.”

  But Cathy was waiting for us and took her back into the tent, which repressurized. Nikhil and I shrugged and busied ourselves packing everything else. When the women reappeared, Cathy declared, very firmly, that Randi was to stay prone and inactive.

  Randi disagreed. “I do my pitch . . . I, I, have to.”

  My turn. “Time to give someone else a chance, Randi. Me for instance. Besides, if you injure yourself further, you’d be a liability.”