The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF

by Mike Ashley

  “I quit,” Cathy said. “My arms won’t do any more. Stop with me, or bury me here.” She let go of the line, and floated slowly down to the floor.

  It was silent here, no drippings, no whistling, reminiscent of the vacuum so far above. I tried to break the tension by naming the cavern. “This was clearly meant to be a tomb, anyway. The Egyptian Tomb, we can call it.”

  “Not funny, Wojciech,” Nikhil snapped. “Sorry, old boy, a bit tired myself. Yes, we can make camp, but we may regret it later.”

  “Time to stop. We worked out the schedule for maximum progress,” Randi said. “Need to trust our judgment. Won’t do any better by over-pushing ourselves now.”

  “Very well,” Nikhil conceded, and dropped off as well. He reached Cathy and put his arm around her briefly, which I note because it was the first sign of physical affection I had seen between them. Randi and I dropped the pallets, and followed to the floor. We landed harder than we expected – milligee clouds judgment almost as badly as free-fall, I thought. Worse perhaps, because it combines a real up and down with the feeling that they don’t matter.

  We were very careful and civilized in making camp. But each of us was, in our minds, trying to reach an accommodation with the idea that, given what we had been through so far, the week we had left would not get us to the surface.

  Before we went into our separate tents, we all held hands briefly. It was spontaneous – we hadn’t done so before. But it seemed right, somehow, to tell each other that we could draw on each other that way.

  V

  That last was for day thirteen, this entry will cover days fourteen and fifteen. Yes, my discipline in keeping the journal is slipping.

  We’d come to think of Randi as a machine – almost as indestructible and determined as Sam, but last night, at the end of day fourteen that machine cried and shook.

  Low rations and fatigue are affecting all of us now. We let Sam pull us through the occasional cavern, but it has mostly been wriggling through cracks with a human in the lead. We changed leads every time we hit a place that’s wide enough, but once that was six hours. That happened on Randi’s lead. She didn’t slack but when we finally reached a small cavern, she had rolled to the side with her face to the wall as I went by. We heard nothing from her for the next four hours.

  We ended up at the bottom of a big kidney-shaped cavern 160 kilometres below the surface; almost back to the depth of the upper end of Nikhil’s Smokestack. We staggered through camp set up, with Sam double-checking everything. We simply collapsed on top of the stretched sheets in our coveralls and slept for an hour or so, before our bodies demanded that we take care of other needs. Washed, emptied, and a bit refreshed from the nap, Randi had snuggled into my arms, then let herself go. Her body was a mass of bruises, old and new. So was mine.

  “You’re allowed a safety valve, you know,” I told her. “When Cathy feels bad, she lets us know outright. Nikhil gets grumpy. I get silly and started telling bad jokes. You don’t have to keep up an act for us.”

  “Not for you, for, for me. Got to pretend I can do it, or I’ll get left behind, with Mom.”

  I thought about this. A woman that would attempt to murder her husband to gain social position might have been capable of other things as well.

  “Randi, what did that mean? Do you want to talk?”

  She shook her head. “Can’t explain.”

  I kissed her forehead. “I guess I’ve been lucky with my parents.”

  “Yeah. Nice people. Nice farm. No fighting. So why do you have to do this stuff.”

  Why indeed? “To have a real adventure, to make a name for myself outside of obscure poetry outlets. Mom inherited the farm from her father, and that was better than living on state dividends in Poland, so they moved. They actually get to do something useful, tending the agricultural robots. But they’re deathly afraid of losing it because real jobs were so scarce and a lot of very smart people are willing to do just about anything to get an Earth job. So they made themselves very, very nice. They never rock any boats. Guess I needed something more than nice.”

  “But you’re, uh, nice as they are.”

  “Well-trained, in spite of myself.” Oh, yes, with all the protective responses a non-conformist learns after being squashed time and time again by very socially correct, outwardly gentle, and emotionally devastating means. “By the way, Randi, I hate that word.”

  “Huh?”

  “Nice.”

  “But you use it.”

  “Yeah, and I hate doing that, too. Look, are you as tired as I am?” I was about to excuse myself to the questionable comforts of my dreams.

  “No. Not yet. I’ll do the work.”

  “Really . . .”

  “Maybe the last time, way we’re going.” We both knew she was right, but my body wasn’t up to it, and we just clung to each other tightly, as if we could squeeze a little more life into ourselves. I don’t remember falling asleep.

  Day fifteen was a repeat, except that the long lead shift fell on Cathy. She slacked. For seven hours, she would stop until she got cold, then move forward again until she got tired. Somehow we reached a place where I could take over.

  What amazed me through all of that was how Nikhil handled it. There was no sniping, no phony cheeriness. He would simply ask if she was ready to move again when he started getting cold.

  We ended the day well past midnight. For some reason, I am having trouble sleeping,

  Today the vent finally led us to a chain of small caverns, much like the rift before we encountered the top of Nikhil’s Smokestack. We let Sam tow us most of the way and had only two long crack crawls. The good news is our CO2 catalyst use is down from our passivity, and we might get another day out of it.

  The bad news is that Randi had to cut our rations back a bit. We hadn’t been as careful in our counting as we should have been, thinking that because the CO2 would get us first, we didn’t have a problem in that area. Now we did. It was nobody’s fault, and everyone’s. We’d all had an extra cracker here and there. They add up.

  We ended up, exhausted as usual, in a 500-metre gallery full of jumble. I called it “The Junk Yard”. Sam couldn’t find the outlet vent right away, but we made such good progress that we thought we had time to catch up on our sleep.

  Where are we? It’s day eighteen. We have gained a total of fifteen kilometres in radius over the past two days. “The Junk Yard” was a dead end, at least for anything the size of a human being. There was some evidence of gas diffusing upward through fractured clathrate, but it was already clear that it wasn’t the main vent, which appeared to have been closed by a Miranda quake millions of years ago.

  We had to go all the way back to a branch that Sam had missed while it was towing us through a medium-sized chimney. Logic and experience dictated that the outlet would be at the top of the chimney, and there was a hole there that led onward. To “The Junk Yard”. Miranda rearranges such logic.

  We spotted the real vent from the other side of the chimney as we rappelled back down.

  “A human being,” Cathy said when she saw the large vertical crack that was the real vent, “would have been curious enough to check that out. It’s so deep.”

  “I don’t know, dear,” Nikhil said, meaning to defend Sam, I suppose, “with the press of time and all, I might not have turned aside, myself.”

  We were all dead silent at Nikhil’s unintentional self-identification with a robot. Then Randi giggled and soon we were all laughing hysterically again. The real students of humour, I recall, say that laughter is not very far from tears. Then Nikhil, to our surprise, released his hold to put his arms around his wife again. And she responded. I reached out and caught them before they’d drifted down enough centimetres for their belt lines to go taut. So at the end of day seventeen, we had covered sixty kilometres of caverns and cracks, and come only fifteen or so nearer the surface.

  By the end of day eighteen, we’d done an additional fifteen kilometres of exhausting crac
k crawling, found only one large cavern, and gave in to exhaustion, camping in a widening of the crack just barely big enough to inflate the tents.

  What occurred today was not a fight. We didn’t have enough energy for a fight.

  We had just emerged into a ten-metre long, ten-metre wide, two-metre high widening gallery in the crack we were crawling. Cathy was in the lead and had continued on through into the continuing passage when Nikhil gave in to pessimism.

  “Cathy,” he called, “stop. The passage ahead is getting too narrow, it’s another bloody dead end. We should go back to the last large cavern and look for another vent.”

  Cathy was silent, but the line stopped. Randi, sounding irritated, said “No time,” and moved to enter the passage after Cathy.

  Nikhil yawned and snorted. “Sorry, little lady. I’m the geologist and the senior member, and not to be too fine about it, but I’m in charge.” Here he seemed to loose steam and get confused, muttering “You’re right about no time – there’s no time to argue.”

  No one said anything, but Randi held her position.

  Nikhil whined, “I say we go back, an’, this time, back we go.”

  My mind was fuzzy; we still had four, maybe five days. If we found the right chain of caverns we could still make the surface. If we kept going like this, we weren’t going to make it anyway. He might be right I thought. But Randi wouldn’t budge.

  “No. Nikhil. You owe me one, Nikhil, for, for, two weeks ago. I’m collecting. Got to go forward now. Air flow, striations, Sam’s soundings, and, and my money, damn it.”

  So much for my thoughts. I had to remember my status as part of Randi’s accretion disk.

  “Your daddy’s money,” Nikhil sniffed, then said loudly and with false jollity, “But never mind. Come on everyone, we’ll put Randi on a stretcher again until she recovers . . . her senses.” He started reaching for Randi, clumsy fumbling really. Randi turned and braced herself, boots clamped into the clathrate, arms free.

  “Nikhil, back off,” I warned. “You don’t mean that.”

  “Ah appreciate your expertise with words, old chap.” His voice was definitely slurred. “But these are mine and I mean them. I’m too tired to be questioned by amateurs anymore. Back we go. Come on back, Cathy. As for you . . .” He lunged for Randi again. At this point I realized he was out of his mind, and possibly why.

  So did Randi, for at the last second instead of slapping him away and possibly hurting him, she simply jerked herself away from his grasping fingers.

  And screeched loudly in pain.

  “What?” I asked, brushing by the startled Nikhil to get to Randi’s side.

  “Damn ankle,” she sobbed. “Forgot to release my boot grapples. Tired. Bones getting weak. Too much low gee. Thing fucking hurts.”

  “Broken?”

  She nodded, tight-lipped, more in control. But I could see the tears in her eyes. Except for painkillers, there was nothing I could do at the moment for her. But I thought there might be something to be done for Nikhil. Where was Cathy?

  “Nikhil,” I said as evenly as I could. “What’s your O2 partial?”

  “I beg your pardon?” he drawled.

  “Beg Randi’s. I asked you what your O2 partial is.”

  “I’ve been conserving a bit. You know, less O2, less CO2. Trying to stretch things out.”

  “What . . . is . . . it?”

  “Point one. It should be fine. I’ve had a lot of altitude experience

  “Please put it back up to point two for five minutes, and then we’ll talk.”

  “Now just a minute, I resent the implication that . . .”

  “Be reasonable Nikhil. Put it back up for a little, please. Humour me. Five minutes won’t hurt.”

  “Oh perhaps not. There. Now just what is it you expect to happen?”

  “Wait for a bit.”

  We waited, silently. Randi sniffed, trying to deal with her pain. I watched Nikhil’s face slowly grow more and more troubled. Finally I asked:

  “Are you back with us?”

  He nodded silently. “I think so. My apologies, Randi.”

  “Got clumsy. Too strong for my own bones. Forget it. And you don’t owe me, either. Dumb thing to say. It was my choice.”

  What was? Two weeks ago, in his tent?

  “Very well,” Nikhil replied with as much dignity as he could muster.

  Who besides Randi could dismiss a broken ankle with “forget it”? And who besides Nikhil would take her up on that? I shook my head.

  Randi couldn’t keep the pain out of her voice as she held out her right vacuum boot. “This needs some work. Tent site. Cathy.” Nothing would show, of course, until it came off.

  “Quite,” Nikhil responded. “Well, you were right on the direction. Perhaps we should resume.”

  I waved him off for a moment and found a painkiller in the pallet for Randi, and she ingested it through her helmet lock, and gagged a bit.

  “Still a little ethane here,” she gave a little laugh. “Woke me up. I’ll manage.”

  “Let me know.” I was so near her event horizon now that everything I could see of the outside world was distorted and bent by her presence. Such were the last moments my freedom, the last minutes and the last seconds that I could look on our relationship from the outside. My independent existence was stretched beyond the power of any force of nature to restore it. Our fate was to become a singularity.

  It was a measure of my own hunger and fatigue that I half-seriously considered exterminating Nikhil; coldly, as if contemplating a roach to be crushed. A piton gun would have done nicely. But, I thought, Cathy really ought to be in on the decision. She might want to keep him as a pet. Cathy, of course, was on the lead pitch. That meant she was really in charge, something Nikhil had forgotten.

  “Cathy,” I called, laying on the irony. “Randi has a broken ankle. Otherwise, we are ready to go again.”

  There was no answer, but radio didn’t carry well in this material – too many bends in the path and something in the clathrate that just ate our frequencies like stealth paint. So I gave two pulls on our common line to signal okay, go.

  The line was slack.

  Cathy, anger with Nikhil possibly clouding her judgment, had enforced her positional authority in a way that was completely inarguable: by proceeding alone. At least I fervently hoped that was all that had happened. I pulled myself to where the passage resumed, and looked. No sign of anything.

  “Sam, take the line back up to up to Cathy and tell her to wait up, we’re coming.”

  Sam squeezed by me and scurried off. Shortly, his monitors in my helmet display blinked out; he was out of radio range as well –

  Again, we waited for a tug on a line in a silence that shouted misery. Nikhil pretended to examine the wall, Randi stared ahead as if in a trance. I stared at her, wanting to touch her, but not seeming to have the energy to push myself over to her side of the little cave.

  Both hope and dread increased with the waiting. The empty time could mean that Cathy had gone much further than our past rate of progress had suggested, which would be very welcome news. But it could also mean that some disaster ahead that had taken both her and Sam. In which case, we were dead as well. Or, like Randi’s detour from the Boiling Sea, it could mean something we had neglected to imagine.

  “Wojciech, Nikhil,” Randi asked in her quiet, anticipatory, tone, “would you turn off your lamps?”

  I looked at Nikhil, and he stared off in space, saying as much as that he could not care less. But his light went out. I nodded and cut mine. The blackness was total at first, then as my pupils widened, I realized I could sense a grey-green contrast, a shadow. My shadow.

  I turned around to the source of the glow. It was, of course, the crack behind me, through which Cathy and Sam had vanished. As my eyes adapted further, it became almost bright. It was white, just tinged with green. The shadows of rocks and ice intrusions made the crack look like the mouth of some beast about to devour us.
r />   “Is there,” I asked, “any reason why we should stay here?”

  We left. The crack widened rapidly, and after an hour of rather mild crack-crawling, we were able to revert to our distance eating hand-hauling routine. We covered ten kilometres, almost straight up this way. With the sudden way of such things the crack turned into a tubular tunnel, artificial in its smoothness, and this in turn gave into a roughly teardrop-shaped, 100-metre diameter cavern with slick ice walls, and a bright circle at the top. I was about to use my piton gun when Randi tugged my arm and pointed out a ladder of double-looped pitons, set about three metres apart, leading up to the circle.

  We were thus about to climb into Sphereheim when Cathy’s line grew taut again.

  That was, by the clock, the end of day nineteen. We were, it seems, both too exhausted and too excited to sleep.

  The cavern above was almost perfectly spherical, hence the name we gave it, and was almost fifteen kilometres in diameter. A spire ran along its vertical axis from the ceiling to the floor, littered like a Christmas tree with the kind of cantilevered platforms that seventy-five milligees permits.

  By now, we had climbed to within forty kilometres of the surface, so this was all in a pretty good vacuum, but there were signs that things had not always been this way.

  “Cathy?” Nikhil called, the first words he had spoken since the fight.

  “Good grief, you’re here already. We waited until we thought it was safe.”

  “We saw the light.”

  “It came on as soon as I got in here. Sam’s been looking for other automatic systems, burglar protection, for instance.”

  “There,” Sam interjected, “appear to be none. The power source is two-stage – a uranium radionic long duration module, and something like a solid state fuel cell that works when it’s warmed up. The latter appears to be able to produce almost a kilowatt.”