The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF

by Mike Ashley

  “Good,” I said, wondering if Sam’s software could discern the contrary irritation in my voice. “Cathy, Randi has a broken ankle.” Even in less than a hundredth of gee, Randi wouldn’t put any weight on it.

  “Oh, no! We need to get a tent up right away. Sam, break off and come down here, I need you. And you!” she pointed at Nikhil. “This is a medical emergency now, and what I say goes. Do you have a problem with that?” The edge in Cathy’s voice verged on hysteria.

  Nikhil simply turned away without saying anything and began setting up the tent.

  Randi reached for Cathy. “Cathy, Nikhil cut his oxygen too thin, trying to save CO2 catalyst for all of us. He wasn’t himself. Ankle hurts like hell, but that was my fault. I’d feel better if you weren’t so, uh, hard on him. Okay?”

  Cathy stood quietly for a couple of seconds then muttered. “All right, all right. Give me a minute to collect things, and we’ll get in the tent. I’ll see what I can do. Wojciech?”

  “Yes Cathy?”

  “As I guess everyone knows, I just blew it with my husband, and I can’t fix things right now because I have to fix Randi’s ankle. He’s in a blue funk.” She pulled the velcro tab up on one of her pockets, reached in and produced a small, thin, box. “Give him one of these and tell him I’m sorry.”

  I looked at her. She seemed on the brink of some kind of collapse, but was holding herself back by some supreme effort of will. Maybe that’s what I looked like to her.

  “Sorry, Wojciech,” she whispered, “best I can do.”

  I gave her hand a squeeze. “We’ll make it good enough, okay? Just hang in there, Doc.”

  She gave me a quick, tear-filled smile, then grabbed the minidoc and followed Randi into the tent, which inflated promptly.

  Nikhil was sitting on the other pallet and I sat next to him. “Look, Nikhil, the way I see it, none of this stuff counts. All that counts is that the four of us get out of this moon alive.”

  He looked at me briefly, then resumed looking at the ground. “No, no. Wojciech, it counts. Do you understand living death? The kind where your body persists, but everything that you thought was you has been destroyed? My reputation . . . they’ll say Nikhil Ray cracked under pressure. It got too tough for old Nikhil. Nikhil beats up on women. It’s going to be bloody bad.”

  I remembered the box Cathy gave me, pulled it out and opened it. “Doctor’s orders, Nikhil. She cares, she really does.”

  He gave me a ghastly grin and took a caplet envelope, unwrapped it and stuck it through his helmet lock. “Can’t say as I approve of mind altering drugs, but it wouldn’t do to disappoint the doctor any more, now would it? I put her through medical school, did you know. She was eighteen when we met. Biology student studying evolution, and I was co-lecturing a paleontology section. Damn she was beautiful, and no one like that had ever . . .” he lifted his hands as if to gesture, then set them down again. “I broke my own rule about thinking first, and I have this to remind me, every day, of what happens when you do that.”

  “Look, Nikhil. She doesn’t mean to hurt you.” I tried to think of something to get him out of this, to put his mind on something else. “Say, we have a few minutes. Why don’t we look around, it may be the only chance we get. Soon as Cathy’s done with Randi, we’ll need to get some sleep, then try to make it to the surface. We’ve forty kilometres to go, and only two days before our catalyst runs out.”

  “My line, isn’t that? Very well.” He seemed to straighten a bit. “But it looks as if the visitors packed up pretty thoroughly when they left. Those platforms off the central column are just bare honeycomb. Of course, it would be a bit odd if they packed everything out.”

  “Oh?”

  “Field sites are usually an eclectic mess. All sorts of not-immediately-useful stuff gets strewn about. If the strewers don’t expect the environmental police to stop by, it usually just gets left there by the hut site – the next explorer to come that way might find something useful.”

  “I see. You think there might be a dump here, somewhere.”

  “It seems they had a crypt. Why not a dump?”

  What kind of alien technology might be useful to us, I didn’t know. It would take a lot longer than the two days we had to figure out how to do anything with it. But the discussion has seemed to revive Nikhil a bit, so I humoured him.

  We found the junkyard. It was in a mound about 100 metres from the tower base, covered with the same colour dust as everything else. A squirt from my reaction pistol blew some of the dust away from the junk.

  And it was just that. Discarded stuff. Broken building panels, A few boxes with electrical leads. What looked like a busted still. A small wheeled vehicle that I would have taken for a kid’s tricycle, an elongated vacuum helmet with a cracked visor. Other things. I’d been rummaging for five minutes before I noticed that Nikhil hadn’t gone past the still.

  “Nikhil?”

  “It is within the realm of possibility that I might redeem myself. Look at that.”

  The most visible part was a big coil of what looked to be tubing. There were also things that looked like electric motors, and several chambers to hold distilled liquids.

  “The tubing, Wojciech.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “If we breathe through it, at this temperature, the CO2 in our breath should condense.”

  Oh! We could do without the CO2 catalyst.

  “It wouldn’t be very portable.”

  “No, it wouldn’t,” Nikhil nodded slowly, judiciously. “But it doesn’t have to be. Cathy and Randi can remain here while you, Sam and I take the remaining catalyst and go for help.”

  Did I hear him right? Then I thought it through. Randi was disabled, Cathy, by strength and temperament, was the least suited for the ordeal above us. It made sense, but Randi would . . . no, Randi would have to agree if it made sense. She was a pro.

  “We’d better see if it works first,” I said.

  VI

  An hour later, our still was working. Tape, spare connectors, the alien light source, and Sam’s instant computational capabilities yielded something that could keep two relatively quiescent people alive. They’d have to heat it up to sublimate the condensed CO2 every other hour, or the thing would clog, but it worked. Randi’s ankle was a less happy situation.

  “Randi’s resting now,” Cathy told us when she finally emerged from the vacuum tent, exhausted. “It’s a bad break, splintered. Her bones were weak from too much time in low gravity, I think. Anyway, the breaks extend into the calcaneus and her foot is much too swollen to get back into her vacuum boots. Had to put her in a rescue bag to get out of the tent.” Cathy shot a look of contempt at her husband who stared down. “The swelling will take days to go down, and she should have much more nourishment than we have to give her.”

  “I . . .” Nikhil started, then, in a moment I shall remember forever, he looked confused. “I?” Then he simply went limp and fell, much like an autumn leaf in the gentle gravity of Miranda, to the cavern dust. We were both too surprised to catch him even though his fall took several seconds.

  “No, no . . .” Cathy choked.

  I knelt over Nikhil and straightened his limbs. I couldn’t think of anything else to do.

  “Stroke?” I asked Cathy.

  She seemed to shake herself back into a professional mode. I heard her take a breath.

  “Could be. His heart telemetry’s fine. Or he may have just fainted. Let’s get the other tent set up.”

  We did this only with Sam’s help. We made errors in the set-up, errors which would have been fatal if Sam hadn’t been there to notice and correct them. We were tired and had been eating too little food. It took an hour. We put Nikhil in the tent and Cathy was about to follow when she stopped me.

  “The main med kit’s in Randi’s tent. I’ll need it if I have to operate. She’ll have gotten out of the rescue bag to sleep after I left. You’ll have to wake her, get her back in the bag and depressure . . .”
<
br />   I held up a hand. “I can figure it out, and if I can’t, she can. Cathy, her foot’s busted, not her head.”

  Cathy nodded and I could see a bit of a smile through her faceplate.

  “Randi,” I called, “Sorry to wake you, but we’ve got a problem.”

  “I heard. Comsets are dumb, guys. Can’t tell if you talk about someone instead of to someone. Be right out with the med kit.”

  “Huh?” Cathy sounded shocked. “No, Randi don’t try to put that boot on. Please don’t.”

  “Too late,” Randi answered. We watched the tension go out of the tent fabric as it depressurized. Randi emerged from the opening with the med kit and a sample bag. Cathy and I immediately looked at her right boot – it seemed perfectly normal, except that Randi had rigged some kind of brace with pitons and vacuum tape.

  Then we looked at the sample bag. It contained a blue-green swollen travesty of a human foot, severed neatly just above the ankle, apparently with a surgical laser. I couldn’t think of anything to do or say.

  “Oh, no, Randi,” Cathy cried and launched herself toward Randi. “I tried Randi, I tried.”

  “You didn’t have time.” The two women embraced. “Don’t say anything,” Randi finally said, “to him,” she nodded at Nikhil’s tent. “Until we’re all back and safe. Please, huh?”

  Cathy stood frozen, then nodded slowly, took the sample bag and examined the foot end of the section. “Looks clean, anyway. At least let me take a look at the stump before you go, okay?”

  Randi shook her head. “Bitch to unwrap. Cauterized with the surgical laser. Plastiflesh all over the stump. Sealed in plastic. Plenty of local. Don’t feel anything. I did a good enough job, Cathy.”

  I finally found my voice. “Randi . . . why?”

  “Nikhil’s gone. Got to move. It’s okay, Wojciech. They can regenerate. You and I got to get going.”

  “Me? Now?” I was surprised for a moment, then realized the need. Cathy had to stay with Nikhil. And I’d already seen too many situations where one person would have been stopped that we’d managed to work around with two. Also, our jury-rigged CO2 still’s capacity was two people, max.

  “Now. Go as long as we can, then sleep. Eat everything we have left. Push for the surface. Only way.”

  Cathy nodded. She handed Randi’s foot to me, almost absent-mindedly, and went into the tent to attend to Nikhil. Randi laughed, took the foot from me, and threw it far out of sight towards Sphereheim’s junk pile. In the low gravity, it probably got there.

  I tried not to think about it as Randi and I packed, with Sam’s help. Moving slowly and deliberately, we didn’t make that many errors. What Randi had to draw on, I didn’t know. I drew on her. In an hour, we were ready to go and said our farewells to Cathy.

  She would have to wait there, perhaps alone if Nikhil did not recover, perhaps forever if we did not succeed. What would that be like, I wondered. Would some future explorers confuse her with the beings who had built the station in this cavern? Had we already done that with the corpses we found in the Cavern of the Dead Ends?

  I wished I had made love to Cathy that night we spent together – I felt I was leaving a relationship incomplete; a feeling, a sharing, uncommunicated. Here, even a last embrace would have been nice, but she was in her tent caring for her husband, and out of food, low on time, Randi and I had to go, and go now. In the dash to the surface, even minutes might be critical.

  Tireless Sam scaled the alien tower, found the vent in the magnificent, crystal lined dome of the cavern roof, and dropped us a line. I was suspended among wonders, but so tired I almost fell asleep as Sam reeled us up. The experience was surreal and beyond description.

  Of most of the next few days, I have little detailed memory. Sam dragged us through passages, chimneys vents and caverns. Occasionally, it stopped at a problem that Randi would somehow rouse herself to solve.

  On one occasion, we came to a wall a metre thick which had cracked enough to let gas pass through. Sam’s acoustic radar showed a big cavern on the other side, so, somehow, we dug our way through. For all its talents, Sam was not built for wielding a pick. I leave this information to the designers of future cave exploration robots.

  Randi and I swung at that wall in five-minute shifts for a three-hour eternity, before, in a fit of hysterical anaerobic energy, I was able to kick it through. We were too tired to celebrate – we just grabbed the line as Sam went by and tried to keep awake and living as it pulled us through another cave and another crack.

  In one of a string of ordinary crystal caverns, we found another alien piton. Randi thought it might be a different design that the one we had found before, and had Sam pull it out and put it in a sample bag, which we stored on Sam – the most likely to survive. I mentioned this because we were near death and knew it, but could still do things for the future. Everyone dies, I thought, so we all spend our lives for something. The only thing that matters at the end is: for what? In saving the piton, we were adding one more bit to the tally of “for what?”

  This was almost certainly our last “night” in a tent. I think we both stank, but I was too far gone to tell for sure. We’d gone for thirty-seven hours straight. Sam says we are within three kilometres of the surface, but the cavern trail lies parallel to this surface, and refuses to ascend.

  In theory, our catalyst was exhausted, but we continued to breathe.

  Another quake trapped me.

  Randi was in front of me. Somehow, she managed to squeeze aside and let Sam by to help. Sam chipped clathrate away from my helmet, which let me straighten my neck.

  As this happened, there was another movement, a big slow one this time, and the groan of Miranda’s tortured mantle was clearly audible as my helmet was pressed between the passage walls again. I could see the passage ahead of me close a little more with every sickening wave of ground movement, even as I could feel the pressure at my spot release a bit. But the passage ahead – if it closed with Randi on this side, we were dead.

  “Go!” I told Randi. “It’s up to you now.” As if it hadn’t always been so. I was pushed sideways and back again as another train of s-waves rolled through. Ice split with sharp retorts.

  Sam turned sideways in the passage, pitting its thin composite against billions of tons of rock.

  Randi vanished forward. “I love you,” she said, “I’ll make it.”

  “I know you will. Hey, we’re married, okay?”

  “Just like that?”

  “By my authority as a man in a desperate position.”

  “Okay. Married. Two kids. Deal?”

  “Deal.”

  “I love you again.”

  Sam cracked under the pressure, various electronic innards spilling onto the passage floor. I couldn’t see anything beyond him.

  “Sam?” I asked. Useless question.

  “Randi?”

  Nothing.

  For some strange reason I felt no pressure on me now. Too worried for Randi, too exhausted to be interested in my own death, I dozed.

  There was definitely CO2 in my helmet when I woke again. It was pitch black – the suit had turned off my glowlamp to conserve an inconsequential watt or two. Groggy, I thought turning on my back would help my breathing, vaguely thinking that the one percent weight on my lungs was a problem. To my surprise, I could actually turn.

  In the utter dead black overhead, a star appeared. Very briefly, then I blinked and it vanished.

  I continued to stare at this total darkness above me for minutes, not daring to believe I’d seen what I thought I’d seen, and then I saw another one. Yes, a real star.

  I thought that could only mean that a crack to the surface had opened above me; incredibly narrow, or far above me, but open enough that now and then a star drifted by its opening. I was beyond climbing, but perhaps where photons could get in, photons could get out.

  Shaking and miserable, I started transmitting.

  “Uranus Control, Uranus Control, Wojciech Bubka here. I’m down at
the bottom of a crack on Miranda. Help. Uranus Control, Uranus Control . . .”

  Something sprayed on my face, waking me again. Air and mist as well.

  I opened my eyes and saw that a tube had cemented itself to my faceplate and drilled a hole through it to admit some smaller tubes. One of these was trying to snake its way into my mouth. I opened up to help it, and got something warm and sweet to swallow.

  “Thanks,” I croaked, around the tube.

  “Don’t mention it,” a young female voice answered, sounding almost as relieved as I felt.

  “My wife’s in this passage, somewhere in the direction my head is pointed. Can you get one of these tubes to her?”

  There was a hesitation.

  “Your wife.”

  “Miranda Lotati,” I croaked. “She was with me. Trying to get to the surface. Went that way.”

  More hesitation.

  “We’ll try, Wojciech. God knows we’ll try.”

  Within minutes, a tiny version of Sam fell on my chest and scuttled past Sam’s wreckage down the compressed passage in her direction trailing a line. The line seemed to run over me forever. I remember reading somewhere that while the journey to singularity is inevitable for someone passing into the event horizon of a black hole, as viewed from our universe, the journey can take forever.

  What most people remember about the rescue is the digger; that vast thing of pistons, beams, and steel claws that tore through the clathrate rift like an anteater looking for ants. What they saw, I assure you, was in no way as impressive, or scary, as being directly under the thing.

  I was already in a hospital ship bed when they found Randi, eleven kilometres down a passage that had narrowed, narrowed, and narrowed.

  At its end, she had broken her bones forcing herself through one more centimetre at a time. A cracked pelvis, both collarbones, two ribs, and her remaining ankle.

  The last had done it, for when it collapsed she had no remaining way to force herself any further through that crack of doom.

  And so she had lain there and, minute by minute, despite everything, willed herself to live as long as she could.