The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF

by Mike Ashley

  Randi shook her head. “Can’t argue. Don’t know how. I don’t . . . don’t want to be baggage.”

  “I’d hardly call it being baggage,” Nikhil sniffed. “Enforced rest under medical orders. Now, if you’re going to be a professional in your own right instead of Daddy’s little indulgence, you’ll chin up, follow medical orders, and stop wasting time.”

  “Nikhil, dear,” Cathy growled, “get your damn mouth out of my patient’s psyche.”

  Nikhil was exactly right, I thought, but I wanted to slug him for saying it that way.

  “Very well,” Nikhil said, evenly ignoring the feeling in Cathy’s voice, “I regret the personal reference, Randi, but the point stands. Please don’t be difficult.”

  Lacking support from anyone else, Randi’s position was hopeless. She suffered herself to be taped onto a litter improvised from the same tent braces, sheets, and tape we had used earlier to make her wings.

  This done, Nikhil turned to me. “You mentioned leading a pitch?”

  Fortunately, the route started out like a one-third scale version Nikhil’s Smokestack. It wasn’t a straight shot, but a series of vertical caverns, slightly offset. Sam rocketed ahead with a line, anchored himself, and reeled the rest of us up. The short passages between caverns were the typical wide, low, cracks and I managed them without great difficulty, though it came as a surprise to discover how much rock and ice one had to chip away to get through comfortably. It was hard work in a pressure suit, and my respect for Nikhil and Randi increased greatly.

  At the end of the last cavern, the chimney bent north, gradually narrowing to a funnel. We could hear the wind blow by us. At the end was a large horizontal cavern, dry, but full of hoar crystals. The rift was clearly visible as a fissure on its ceiling. That was for tomorrow.

  The ethane level was down enough for us to forego decontamination, and before we turned in we congratulated ourselves for traversing sixty percent of the rift in less than half our allotted time.

  As we turned in, Randi said she had feeling in her fingers and toes again. Which meant she must have had no feeling in them when she was demanding to lead the pitch this afternoon.

  She’s sleeping quietly, it’s only midnight, and I am going to get my first good night’s sleep in a long time.

  Day eleven is thankfully over, we are all exhausted again, and bitterly disappointed.

  The day started with a discovery that, under other circumstances, would have justified the entire expedition; the mummified remains of aliens, presumably those who had left the strange piton. There were two large bodies and one small, supine on the cavern floor, lain on top of what must have been their pressure suits. Did they run out of food, or air, and give up in that way? Or did they die of something else, and were laid out by compatriots we might find elsewhere?

  They were six-limbed bipeds, taller than us and perhaps not as heavy in life, though this is hard to tell from a mummy. Their upper arms were much bigger and stronger than their lower ones and the head reminded me vaguely of a Panda. They were not, to my memory, members of any of the five known spacefaring races, so, in any other circumstances, this would have been a momentous event. As it was, I think I was vaguely irritated at the complication they represented. Either my sense of wonder wasn’t awake yet, or we’d left it behind, a few geode caverns back.

  “How long?” Cathy asked Sam in a hushed voice. She, at least, was fascinated.

  “If the present rate of dust deposition can be projected, about 230,000 years, with a sigma of 10,000.”

  “Except for the pressure suits, they didn’t leave any equipment,” Nikhil observed. “I take that to mean that this cavern is not a dead end – as long as we do press on. You have your images, Sam? Good. Shall we?”

  We turned to Nikhil, away from the corpses.

  “The vent,” he said, looking overhead, “is probably up there.”

  “The ceiling fissure is an easy jump for me,” Sam offered. “I’ll pull the rest of you up.”

  We got on our way, but the rift quit on us.

  Once in the ceiling caves, we found there was no gas flowing that way, the way where Sam’s seismological soundings, and our eyes, said the rift was. We chanced the passage anyway, but it quickly narrowed to a stomach-crawling ordeal. Three kilometres in, we found it solidly blocked and had to back our way out to return to the cavern. Another passage in the ceiling proved equally unpromising.

  “Quakes,” Nikhil said. “The rift must have closed here, oh, a hundred million years ago or so – from the dust.” So, when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, Miranda had changed her maze, no doubt with the idea of frustrating our eventual expedition in mind.

  Finally, Sam found the outlet airflow. It led back to the north.

  “I hereby dub this the Cavern of Dead Ends,” I proclaimed as we left, with what I hoped was humorous flourish.

  Surprisingly, Nikhil, bless his heart, gave me one short “ha!”

  Randi was not to be denied today, and took the first pitch out in relief of Nikhil. But she soon tired, according to Cathy, who was monitoring. I took over and pushed on.

  The slopes were gentle, the path wide with little cutting to do, and we could make good time tugging ourselves along on the occasional projecting rock and gliding. We took an evening break in a tiny ten-metre bubble of a cavern and had our daily ration crackers, insisting that Randi have a double ration. No one started to make camp, a lack of action that signified group assent for another evening of climbing and gliding.

  “We are,” Sam said, showing us his map on our helmet displays, “going to pass very close to the upper end of Nikhil’s Smokestack.” No one said anything, but we knew that meant we were backtracking, losing ground.

  There was a final horizontal cavern, and its airflow was toward the polar axis. We could pretty much figure out what that meant, but decided to put off the confirmation until the morning. I’d once read a classic ancient novel by someone named Vance about an imaginary place where an accepted means of suicide was to enter an endless maze and wander about, crossing your path over and over again until starvation did you in. There, you died by forgetting the way out. Here, we did not even know there was a way out.

  The beginning of day twelve thus found us at the top of Nikhil’s Smokestack again, on a lip of a ledge not much different than the one about a kilometre away where we had first seen it. We were very quiet, fully conscious of how much ground we had lost to the cruel calendar. We were now less than halfway through Miranda, with less than half our time left.

  Sam circled the top of the Smokestack again, looking for outlets other than the one we had come through. There were none. Our only hope was to go back down.

  “Do we,” I asked, “try the inner river, or try the other branch of Randi’s River and fight our way through the Boiling Sea?”

  Nikhil, though he weighed less than three newtons, was stretched out on the ledge, resting. His radio voice came from a still form that reminded me in a macabre way of the deceased aliens back in the Cavern of Dead Ends.

  “The Boiling Sea,” he mused, “takes the main flow of the river, so it should have an outlet vent. It is obviously in a cavern, so it has a roof. Perhaps we could just shoot a piton up at it, blindly.”

  But I thought of Nikhil’s Smokestack – a blind shot could go a long way in something like that.

  “Sam could fly up to it,” I offered. “If we protect it until we reach the Boiling Sea’s surface, it could withstand the momentary exposure. Once at the ceiling, it could pull the rest of us up.”

  Cathy nodded and threw a rock down Nikhil’s Smokestack, and we watched it vanish relatively quickly. Dense, I thought, less subject to drag. As it turned out, I wasn’t the only one with that thought.

  “Look what I have,” Randi announced.

  It was a large boulder, perhaps two metres across, and loose; Randi could rock it easily, though it must have had a mass of five or six tonnes. “Bet it doesn’t fall like a snowflake,” she said as she hammer
ed a piton into it.

  Even in the low gravity, it took two of us to lift it over the edge.

  Two hours later, about a kilometre above Cathy’s Rock, we jumped off into the drag of the slipstream and watched the boulder finish its fall. It crashed with a resounding thud, shattered into a thousand shards, most of which rebounded and got caught in the chimney walls. We soon reached local terminal velocity and floated like feathers in the dust back to the place we had first departed three days ago.

  Cathy decided that Randi was in no shape for another immersion and didn’t think I should risk it either. I did have a few red patches, though I’d spent nowhere near as much time in the ethane as Randi. We looked at Nikhil, who frowned.

  Cathy shook her head. “My turn, I think.” But her voice quavered. “I’m a strong swimmer and I don’t think Nikhil’s done it for years. You handle the spray, Wojciech. You don’t have to cover every square centimetre, the fibres will fill in themselves, but make sure you get enough on me. At least fifteen seconds of continuous spray. Randi – I can’t hold my breath as long as you. You’ll have to help me get buttoned up again, fast.”

  When all was ready, she took several deep breaths, vented her helmet and stripped almost as quickly as Randi had. This, I thought as I sprayed her, was the same woman who panicked in a tight spot just over a week ago. The whole operation was over in 100 seconds.

  The pulley I’d left was still functional, but that would only get us to the branch in the passage that led to the Cavern of Dead Ends. From there on, Cathy would have to pull us.

  It was not fun to be sealed in an opaque, uninflated, tent and be bumped and dragged along for the better part of an hour with no control over anything. The return of my minuscule weight as Sam winched us up to the roof of the Boiling Sea cavern was a great relief.

  Randi, Nikhil, and I crawled, grumbling but grateful, out of the tent onto the floor of the cave Sam had found a couple of hundred yards from the centre of the domed roof of the cavern. The floor sloped, but not too badly, and with a milligee of gravity it scarcely mattered. I helped Nikhil with the tent braces and we soon had it ready to be pressurized. Sam recharged the pallet power supplies and Randi tacked a glowlamp to the wall. Cathy then excused herself to get the Exoderm out of her tightsuit while we set up the other tent.

  Work done, we stretched and floated around our little room in silence.

  I took a look out the cave entrance; all I could see of the cavern when I hit my strobe was a layer of white below and a forest of yellow and white stalactites, many of them hundreds of metres long, on the roof. The far side, which Sam’s radar said was only a couple of kilometres away, was lost in mist.

  Then I noticed other things. My tightsuit, for instance, didn’t feel as tight as it should.

  “What’s the air pressure in here?”

  “Half a bar,” Sam responded. “I’ve adjusted your suits for minimum positive pressure. It’s mostly nitrogen, methane, ethane, and ammonia vapour, with some other volatile organics. By the way, the boiling sea is mainly ammonia; we are up to 220 Kelvins here. The ethane flashes into vapour as it hits the ammonia – that’s why all the boiling.”

  Miranda’s gravity was insufficient to generate that kind of pressure, and I wondered what was going on.

  “Wojciech,” Randi whispered, as if she were afraid of waking something. “Look at the walls.”

  “Huh?” The cave walls were dirty brown like cave walls anywhere – except Miranda. “Oh, no hoar crystals.”

  She rubbed her hand on the wall and showed me the brown gunk.

  “I’d like to put this under a microscope. Sam?”

  The robot came quickly and held the sample close to its lower set of eyes. I saw what it saw, projected on the inside of my helmet.

  “This has an apparent cellular structure, but little, if any structure within. Organic molecules and ammonia in a kind of jell.”

  As I watched, one of the cells developed a bifurcation. I was so fascinated, I didn’t notice that Cathy had rejoined us. “They must absorb stuff directly from the air.” she theorized. “The air is toxic, by the way, but not in low concentrations. Something seems to have filtered out the cyanogens and other really bad stuff. Maybe this.”

  “The back of the cave is full of them,” Randi observed. “How are you?”

  “My skin didn’t get as raw as yours, but I have a few irritated areas. Physically, I’m drained. We’re going to stop here tonight, I hope.”

  “This is one of the gas outlets of the Cavern of the Boiling Sea,” Sam added. “It seems to be a good place to resume our journey. The passage is clear of obstructions as far as I can see, except for these growths, which are transparent to my radar.”

  “They impede the airflow,” Nikhil observed, “which must contribute to the high pressure in here. I think they get the energy for their organization from the heat of condensation.”

  “Huh?” I wracked my memories of bonehead science.

  “Wojciech, when a vapour condenses, it undergoes a phase change. When ethane vapour turns back into ethane, it gives off as much heat as it took to boil it in the first place. That heat can make some of the chemical reactions this stuff needs go in the right direction.”

  “Are they alive?” I asked.

  “Hard to say,” Cathy responded. “But that’s a semantic discussion. Are hoar crystals alive? There’s a continuum of organization and behaviour from rocks to people. Any line you draw is arbitrary and will go right through some grey areas.”

  “Hmpf,” Nikhil snorted. “Some distinctions are more useful than others. This stuff breeds, I think. Let’s take some samples, but we need to get some rest, too.”

  “Yes, dear.” Cathy yawned in spite of herself.

  In the tent, Randi and I shared our last regular meal; a reconstituted chicken and pasta dish we’d saved to celebrate something. The tent stank of bodies and hydrocarbons, but we were used to that by now, and the food tasted great despite the assault on our nostrils. From now on, meals would be crackers. But we were on our way out now, definitely. We had to be. Randi felt fully recovered now and smiled at me as she snuggled under her elastic sheet for a night’s rest.

  It must have been the energy we got from our first good meal in days. She woke me in the middle of our arbitrary night and gently coaxed me into her cot for lovemaking, more an act of defiance against our likely fate than an act of pleasure. I surprised myself by responding, and we caressed each other up a spiral of intensity which was perhaps fed by our fear as well.

  There are the tidal forces near Randi’s event horizon; she is not just strong for a woman, but strong in absolute terms; stronger than most men I have known including myself. I had to half-seriously warn her to not crack our low gravity-weakened ribs. This made her giggle and squeeze me so hard I couldn’t breathe for a moment, which made her giggle again.

  When we were done, she gestured to the tent roof with the middle finger of her right hand and laughed uncontrollably. I joined her in this as well, but I felt momentarily sad for Nikhil and Cathy.

  It was another of those polite mornings, and we packed up and were on our way with record efficiency. We looked around for the vent and Sam pointed us right at the mass of brown at the rear of the cave.

  “The gas goes into that, right through it,” it said.

  We called the stuff “cryofungus”. It had grown out from either side of the large, erosion-widened vertical crack that Sam found in the back of our cave until it met in the middle. However the cryofungus colonies from either side didn’t actually fuse there, but just pressed up against each other. So, with some effort, we found we could half-push, half-swim, our way along this seam.

  We had pushed our way through five kilometres of “cryofungus” before a macabre thought occurred to me. The rubbery brown stuff absorbed organics through the skin of its cells. Did said organic stuff have to be gas? I asked Cathy.

  “I did an experiment. I fed my sample a crumb of ration cracker.”

>   “What happened?”

  “The cracker sort of melted into the cryofungus. There are transport molecules all over the cell walls.”

  I thought a second. “Cathy, if we didn’t have our suits on . . .”

  “I’d think water would be a little hot for them, but then again water and ammonia are mutually soluble. If you want to worry, consider that your tightsuit is porous. It might,” I could see her toothy smile in my mind, “help keep you moving.”

  “Nice, dear,” Nikhil grumbled. “That gives a whole new meaning to this concept of wandering through the bowels of Miranda.”

  A round of hysterical laughter broke whatever tension remained between us, and resolved into a feeling of almost spiritual oneness among us. Perhaps you have to face death with someone to feel that – if so, so be it.

  At the ten-kilometre point, the cryofungus started to loose its resiliency. At twelve, it started collapsing into brown dust, scarcely offering any more resistance than the hoar crystals. This floated along with the gas current as a sort of brown fog. I couldn’t see, and had Sam move up beside me.

  After three kilometres of using Sam as a seeing-eye dog, the dust finally drifted by us and the air cleared. It was late again, well past time to camp. We had been underground thirteen days, and had, by calculation, another eight left. According to Sam, we were still 215 kilometres below the surface. We decided to move on for another hour or two.

  The passageway was tubular and fairly smooth, with almost zero traction. We shot pitons into the next curve ahead, and pulled ourselves along.

  “Massive wind erosion,” Nikhil remarked as he twisted the eye of a piton to release it. “A gale must have poured through here for megayears before the cryofungus choked it down.”

  Each strobe revealed an incredible gallery of twisted forms, loops, and carved rocks, many of which were eerily statuesque, saints and gargoyles. This led us into a slightly uphill kilometre-long cavern formed under two megalithic slabs, which had tilted against each other when, perhaps, the escaping gas had undermined them. After the rich hoarcrystal forest of the inbound path, this place was bare and dry. Sam covered the distance with a calculated jump carrying a line to the opposite end. We started pulling ourselves across. We’d climbed enough so that our weight was back to twenty newtons – minuscule, yes, but try pumping twenty newtons up and down for eighteen hours .