Fox saw a photograph of a crew in front of their spacecraft. Smiling. Behind them, a dark and misty sky. And a murky ocean whose horizon rose much higher than one would expect.
“How did it go?” he said, without taking his eyes off the endless black ocean.
“Communication was lost while they were exploring the ocean. That damned planet is five times the size of Earth and it's almost all water. There is no official version of what happened. But even if there was, well, let's just say it wouldn't be very reliable. Who knows? Maybe they decided to turn off the radios and stay there. Or maybe they were eaten by an alien monster. I don't really care. But getting that thing does interest me.”
Fox looked at the bottom of his glass. Ash and debris floated inside like microorganisms under the lens of a microscope. He let go of it and slid it away with his fingers.
“My time is very valuable,” Viper continued. “I know you need this as much as I do.”
Fox thought about explaining to him why he had lived in seclusion and eating leftovers for months. And that when he'd walked away from Emily he'd felt every last drop of the courage that had accompanied him during his military career leave him at the same time. He could also, by the way, try to explain to him that he was terrified at the mere thought of taking a dip in the shore of that dark body of water.
“I have to go now. And thanks for the drink.”
He got up and went to the door.
“Wait,” Viper said.
He scribbled a telephone number on the back cover of Infoplanet with a black marker. Fox took it and left the bar.
On the beach, the remains of the wreck were piling up in a fragile dam that dreamed of stopping the waves.
Fiodr Capablanca, The Emerald Sea
In Koi City there were many ways to make a quick buck. One could hire oneself out as a hired killer for one of the mafias that reigned in the Russian quarter, or one could offer oneself as a subject for sordid medical tests for one of the big techno-pharmaceutical companies that controlled the economy of the New West. But the trade-offs for those options were not something Fox was willing to take on.
There was also, of course, the possibility of confessing. Just walk into a police station and tell them the exact place where he buried him. He knew that in that instant all that weight that he always carried with him and that seemed to take over his whole being would evaporate instantly, like a sugar cube being dipped in a glass of water.
The problem, of course, was that he would have to spend the rest of his life in one of the prisons of New West. Sometimes, waking up in anguish in the middle of a cold night in his hole in Chinatown, he wondered if it would not be preferable that life without freedom but free of that burden that corroded him like a hungry termite.
A mob of genocidal aliens wouldn't do my business any good, you know what I mean?
He imagined Emily running while hugging her chubby hands around her little stuffed elephant, chased by monsters ready to tear her apart. He imagined her wondering where her daddy was, why he wasn't protecting her from that nightmare. And he saw her big blue eyes reddened with terror and tears.
He realized that he had stopped and was watching the lights of the police station through the rain that was beginning to fall again. Then he was aware of his appearance and that his temple was bloody.
He turned around and continued on his way. He pulled up the collar of his coat to protect himself from the freezing rain. He put away the handkerchief with which he had been plugging the wound and let the water wash it away. Two NWPD (New West Police Department) officers closed in on him with two aircycles. They wore a helmet with a pointed tip, like a hawk's beak.
“A bad night, friend?” one of them said.
The inside of the police station was a hotbed of junkies and unfortunates. The entire floor was covered with a carpet with the emblem of the NWPD, a peregrine falcon on two crossed swords. In a corner, he saw a group of three men handcuffed with the same bandana worn by the young man who had been frisked in the street. One of the offices had its door ajar. Inside, a woman was pointing to a man in a suit who was looking at his shoes.
“I heard it myself!” said the woman, “He said the parasites must be eliminated without quarter!”
The agent, a man whose musculature looked as if it might burst the seams of his shirt at any moment, nodded silently as he alternated scribbling in his notebook with quick glances at the woman.
A fat policeman, his forehead pearly with sweat despite the cold, grabbed Fox by one arm and pulled him into an office. The brass plate on the door read “Lt. I. J. Davids.” On the desk, on top of the scattered pile of papers that acted as a tablecloth, was an ashtray in which not a single extra cigarette could fit. Davids asked him if he had anything to tell them. Fox knew what the right decision was. He felt himself letting go, as if giving himself permission to pee in his sleep, encouraged by the shouts of the woman in the next office as if they were a general's harangue. He opened his mouth ready to end the madness at once. Then the phone rang with a ring that shook the police station.
“Police. No, ma'am. He'll be back, cats sometimes go out to see the world. Hey, go back to bed. No, I'm not sending a patrol car. Don't call again.”
He hung up as if he were sticking an axe into a stump.
“You were going to tell me something,” he said.
“Yes... a man tried to rob me. He attacked me with a bottle and I defended myself. It was in an alley in Chinatown.”
Lt. Davids looked at him as a father would look at his chocolate-smeared son while the little boy claims to know nothing about a cake. Then Fox knew that the man was somehow already aware of everything. That they had known everything from the first moment. Now he would tell him that Agent So-and-so would accompany him in a squad car to the exact spot where he buried Bruce. That he had been given a chance to tell on his own initiative. But that he'd had enough of playing the offended tramp.
“We found this in his coat,” Davids dropped the badge the pink-haired girl had given Fox over the chaos of papers. “I guess you know what's going to happen next.”
“Well, I really don't.”
“Chester! Show this gentleman to his quarters.”
Chester placed handcuffs on him and escorted him down a dark hallway with one arm around him, like a father leading his daughter down the aisle. Fox let himself be led as with each step the wet soles of his boots tore desperate squeaks from the tiles.
It was even colder in the hole to which he had been dragged than at the entrance. Soaking wet clothes didn't help much. Almost immediately he was shivering.
He needed to think of something, anything, so he pulled out Infoplanet.
In the shivering light of the cell's halogen, Fox stared at the cover. It showed a fairly high-quality image of a rocky landscape. The whole scene seemed bathed in a dark haze. Between the crevices of a hillside he thought he saw a clump of blackish bushes, though perhaps it was just a compressed group of small cracks that were drawn in the rock.
The first few pages detailed the biographies and resumes of the crew members. Each page was occupied by two of them, about whom a photograph and an index card were shown. There was John Dillington, a mathematician with a degree from Oxford, looking at Fox through thick tortoiseshell glasses; Alfred Ramirez, an engineer, the only one not pictured in a spacesuit, but standing on a beach, wearing a shirt open to his navel; Mia Globber, botanist, blonde, incipient crow's feet next to her eyes; Holm Amundsen, exobiologist, the youngest of the group; Captain Stuart Dromnik, smiling and giving a thumbs up.
Below was a gallery of schematic images and photographs taken during the expedition. Apparently the planet had formed about twelve billion years ago. As Viper had told him, it was five times the size of Earth. Its geography was characterized by a body of water that covered almost the entire planet, except for a small, rocky and arid continent, where there was hardly any vegetation. The dark aspect of its atmosphere, they suspected, was due to emissions produced
by the combustion of huge amounts of coal in the bowels of the planet, although they could not be entirely sure due to its unique characteristics.
That dark haze seems to permeate the entire planet, Captain Dromnik said. But in a very literal way. Sometimes we find the windows fogged by that haze, as if they had been smoked during the night. Somehow it even manages to get into the hermetically sealed space of the Ulysses. The panels and control consoles have to be cleaned often because it becomes impossible to see the route coordinates.
These statements were accompanied by a photograph in which Dromnik drew with a finger on the black coating covering one of the spacecraft's windows.
In the area where they landed the weather was very similar to the tropical terrestrial zone. High humidity and high but bearable heat. About ninety degrees Fahrenheit during the day and fifty at night.
The heat and humidity are the most unpleasant thing about Erebus, Mia had said, even more so than that damned haze. We can't have the Ulysses' climate control running full time, so sometimes sleeping gets tricky.
The Great Ocean of Erebus reached depths of dozens of miles. The very thought of such a thing took Fox's breath away for a few moments. The maximum depth of the earth's oceans was seven miles. He felt dizzy as he imagined the monstrous abysses beneath the waters of that distant planet.
The Great Ocean of Erebus, Amundsen had said, is beyond human comprehension. It is such a gigantic expanse of water that it is impossible to grasp with our minds. It is impossible to even try to guess what might lie in its cyclopean abysses. It is as fascinating as it is terrifying.
Beneath these statements, a simple photograph. Just the dark sky of Erebus and the infinite oceanic mass churning below. At the edge of the image, a gloved hand could be seen holding a glass containing an ochre liquid. Perhaps tea. Or whiskey.
The storms were noteworthy. Powerful winds reaching seventy miles per hour rippled gigantic whirlwinds that spun water with the dark mist that swept across the planet, which as it swelled with water and electrical ferocity took on a much darker, almost black hue.
Upon landing, before heading to the ocean, they had made an expedition into the interior of Algea, the only continent. They had a camp consisting of three tents and the receiving devices for communications with the base. There were Captain Dromnik, Globber and Amundsen. Globber was looking at a sample of the plant that was most abundant in that area. As he later described it, it looked very much like terrestrial pteridophytes. Dromnik and Amundsen were checking the plans that Astrid (that's what they called the base station's central program) had drawn up. Then they began to hear a rumble that they described as a distant mountain collapsing. Within minutes, a gale awoke that threatened to tear the tents apart. The team had to take shelter in a nearby cave. The plans and much of the equipment had been absorbed by the massive storm.
Turning the page, he found a somewhat blurry picture of the clay sky of Erebus covered by the dark brushstrokes of clouds that were dumping a great waterspout over a rocky valley.
In the continental area they had found some forms of life that Amundsen catalogued as insects, coleoptera and arachnids. At least, of course, those were the most familiar categorizations he could find for those creatures. A couple of images were included. One showed a creature on a lab table. Next to it they had placed a coin so that its size could be appreciated. It was some kind of beetle about the size of a hand. Several orange spikes protruded from its outer casing. In the next photograph they had unfolded the casing with a pair of tweezers, and one could see the turquoise color of its abdomen and elongated transparent wings that reflected the flash of the camera.
But where they found the greatest variety of life forms, and where they were most evolved, was in the unfathomable ocean of Erebus. It accounted for almost eighty percent of the planet's surface. It had almost eight billion years of evolution more than the Earth. The diversity and beauty of the species they encountered was astounding.
On Friday of the third week of the mission they reached the Great Ocean. To get there they had used an amphibious vehicle, moving through what looked like a dry river bed, up a steep slope carpeted with boulders and through clouds of dust blown by the wind around the unexpected visitors. When they reached the top they saw for the first time the horizon line that marked the mighty Great Ocean. A line that, unlike the one that could be seen in the terrestrial seas, blurred into infinity at an unknown and inhuman height.
They stopped the vehicle on the beach, whose sand was formed by thick clayey grains that gave an ochre tint to everything that touched them. The three explorers remained there for several minutes or perhaps hours, contemplating that marvelous horror that shone under the light of Pharex, the star of the Kentor-VI System.
Fox examined a full-page photograph in which Mia Globber could be seen with her back to the camera smiling over her shoulder and pointing at the huge body of water in front of her. An infinite, calm surface, broken only by delicate ripples in its waters infected by the fiery sky, melting away into the unknown in pastel shades of crimson gold.
The dark fog has retreated for the first time, as if to allow us to see this image. It almost looks as if we were on a different planet.
Included below was a brief excerpt from an article in which Dr. Amundsen detailed the aquatic fauna of Erebus. He spoke of crustacean-like animals whose shells were soft and rubbery. When they felt threatened, they would shrink into a ball and release a substance that upon analysis proved to be as lethal as the venom of a rattlesnake. He also described creatures with a broad, flattened structure, which had long snouts with which they scavenged the ocean floor in search of food. They moved undulating like a magic carpet, so Amundsen did not hesitate to give them that name.
A single underwater photograph was attached. It showed a peaceful scene in which the sinuous pattern of the sands at the bottom was being assaulted by hundreds of tiny rays of light that managed to sneak through the near surface. Close to the target, although somewhat distorted by the movement, the figure of one of those beings that Amundsen had called “magic carpets” could be guessed. The long snout was reminiscent of an anteater.
After five days of observation and collecting samples near the shore, they decided to go deeper into the ocean. They sailed in an easterly direction for four days. During that time, measurements were made of the dizzying depths of the Great Ocean. The greatest depth ever obtained was 130 miles.
The weather was favorable throughout the voyage. When they lost sight of the coast they said they felt as if they were on a gigantic plain of impossible horizons.
It's a strange feeling, Amundsen had said in one of the transmissions, as if the ocean doesn't want us to be here. It's a terrifying place. I'm still not used to seeing the water so high on the horizon. And what I certainly haven't gotten used to is the huge abyss that looms below us. As far as the ocean floor is concerned, we are dozens of times higher than Everest. And it's all unexplored terrain. It gives me the creeps.
The watchman's radio could be heard from the control booth. A very old song in which a guy said that his girl was his candy. The watchman, a guy in his forties, with a mustache outlining his upper lip, followed the rhythm with his head. When he looked up and met Fox's gaze, he placed his fingers in the shape of a gun and fired an invisible bullet at him. At that same instant, the lights went out.
Fox leaned back in a corner and let the minutes tick by. The problem was that every second seemed like an hour.
He was falling into a kind of restless slumber when the creaking of the bars woke him up. The watchman with the mustache motioned for him to come out.
“Apparently you have a guardian leprechaun,” he said. Fox thought he suddenly looked at him with more respect.
When he went outside it was still dark. And it was still raining.
He went into a phone booth. It smelled of urine. Sheets of an old newspaper were scattered on the floor. One of the panes read “Death to the LM”.
Just to take shelt
er until it clears, he told himself. However, he surprised his fingers by turning the now crumpled and damp magazine over. He slipped in his leftover interdollar, and dialed.
A pasty voice speaking with a stiffer-than-normal tongue answered.
“Who is it?”
“It's Fox. We need to talk.”
In this way, I may be able to convince you that you are free even though you are bound and gagged.
Daniel H. Lewinson, psychologist and precursor of the theory of masses.
Dereck Simmons, president of WilkinsBank Eastcountry, watched his team. All impeccable as computer-designed figures. The walls, floor and table were made of pristine white methacrylate. The ceiling was a glass window that showed the cloudy sky of that February morning. Behind Simmons hung the New West flag: a huge, all-encompassing sheet; symbols representing over a hundred genders, symbols of all faiths, even voodoo rituals, the peace emblem, company logos, the gun association, the anti-gun association, the silhouette of a fir tree, a smiling cactus... There was such a swarm of symbols of all kinds that the meaning of many of them had come to be forgotten, but they were not removed for fear of offending some potential constituency. The Christian cross, the mere mention of which could mean a minimum of five years of internment in the Academy for the Defense of the Individual Rights of the Citizen, had been surgically removed twenty years earlier, and its place was now taken by the silhouette of a mouse. Theories about the origin of the silhouette were diverse and a consensus on the matter had long since been given up.
On the other hand, it was possible to buy a space on the WilkinsBank Eastcountry flag, as long as one paid enough money. The more space requested, the higher the price, of course. Over the centuries, the flag had grown in size until it had taken over the entire wall at the back of the presidential meeting room of the WilkinsBank Eastcountry Parliament.
Andromeda Expedition Page 3
