The Paradox of the Sets

by Brian Stableford

  All of that had to be thought out piece by piece, laid out within my mind in correct order. It had to be, because it was my only justification for going down into the cracks in the northern crater wall, to follow the tunnels eroded by the water that descended from there into the bowels of the mountain.

  For whatever reason, there was no evidence above ground. That much was clear. We’d examined the vegetation and the rocks, and found nothing we could confidently label anomalous. Gley had searched the area over and over in five summers. If there was something solid, then it had to be underground, no matter how or why it got there. And it might be quite a long way underground. Starting at the surface and digging down we could get down a few feet—no more. In the cracks that ran deep into the mountain we could follow the water—not to its ultimate destination but perhaps to some set of filters which would not only impede our progress but would stop much of what was washed down into the cracks by the torrents of rain. If there was nothing there, then in all likelihood there was nothing we ever could find, and we would have to accept our ignorance, or our wrongness.

  Linda wouldn’t come, I knew, and I didn’t really relish the thought of being down there with Gley, who was already close to obsession, but I knew that I had to go. All this, if you like, is only rationalization—to excuse an insane act by dressing it up to look sane—but I was acting under compulsion. This issue was too important to allow any chickening out. Important to whom? Maybe only to me. But to me, it was all-important. If, somewhere out in the darkness, among the lonelier stars some distance away from the tattered starlight banner of the milky way, mere weeks away from Earth via hyperspace, there were people...then I wanted to know about them. I craved that knowledge—that certainty, if it was indeed certain—more than anything else. More than money. More than love. More than power—unless knowledge itself is reckoned as a kind of power, even when it is knowing that rather than knowing how.

  I was quite prepared to risk suicide if, in exchange for the risk, I had a precious chance at that particular knowledge—the prize of prizes.

  Every man, they say, has his price.

  Sometimes, without for a moment admitting that I’m a cynic, I believe them.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The northern wall of the crater was a good deal more ragged than the southern wall. The one which I’d already crossed three times had been an imposing barrier with a steep drop on each side, but this one had a much steeper drop within and hardly any drop at all without. The slopes of the mountain bulked large above the rim, and channels in the rock cut right through the ramparts to continue into the crater—and into the mighty fissures themselves.

  When it rained in these mountains it could rain very hard indeed—several inches falling in a day. Such rain would flood the caverns below with a torrent they could hardly contain, scouring their walls. But that happened very rarely. Most of the water that followed these channels came in a flood of gentler proportions that lasted more than a fortnight. It happened year after year at just about the same time, when the mountain that looked above us shed much of the snow that had accumulated there during the winter in the spring thaw. Because this side of the mountain faced north it shed perhaps a little less of its snow than the southern face, but we weren’t so far away from the equator, and the sun was to the south of us in the summer noonday. The peak still wore a cloak of white, but it was the thin cloak that it never shed at all, not the thick, bulky coat it would wear in the dead of winter.

  Because the inner face of the crater wall was nearly vertical here the cracks seemed like arches rather than fissures. They extended some way out into the crater floor before splitting into minor furrows, but in the horizontal plane they were shallow. The black maw of each tunnel-mouth was caught in the angle between wall and floor, and though their descent was in most cases precipitous they did indeed look like tunnels into the heart of the mountain rather than like bottomless pits aimed at the center of the earth.

  There were a few stray wisps of water vapor belching irregularly from thinner cracks. I tested the vapor with my hand before putting on the sterile suit, and found it pleasantly warm—it cooled far too rapidly to scald. These vents were in the crater floor, farther in than the large holes, which exuded only an invisible miasma of foul-smelling gas. Much of the gas was the product of decayed vegetation which was swept into the holes by the various floods, but it was augmented by sulfurous gases originating very deep within the crust—the product of the heated rocks which remained from the era of volcanic activity, and which still caused earth tremors—though only little ones—about twice a week. The presence of the sulfur—and, indeed, the heated water vapor—suggested that the cave system was extremely extensive, and no doubt elaborate too. There was no guarantee that people the size of Gley and myself were going to be able to get into a tenth of its forgotten corners, but there seemed to be reason enough to suppose that there would be enough of an underworld to permit an extensive search.

  “Arne Saknussemm would have loved this,” I muttered, as Linda helped me on with my suit. She didn’t answer, but moved away to help Gley with his. She was radiating silent disapproval.

  “If the going gets too sticky,” I said to Gley, “we’re going to have to be careful. Minor tears in the suit won’t matter much—it’s not maintaining sterile conditions we’re determined on—but if it gets too hot down there we could slowly roast. There’s no cooling system to speak of...the theory goes that the water-recycling apparatus helps get rid of some body heat and more can get through the filters as we expel air from our lungs.

  “There’ll be plenty of cold regions down there as well as warm ones,” Gley promised. “We’ll not cook inside our skins.” We attached oxy-bottles just in case they should be needed in a hurry, but for the time being we were prepared to rely on the filtration system in the front of the helmet. Only if it failed to cope with the gas would we seal it and switch to the oxygen supply. We roped ourselves together and checked the security of the tools slung in our belts—pitons, crampons and things like small pickaxes. I had to admit that Gley had taken the trouble to equip himself well for life in the mountains. We had light packs containing a first-aid kit, spare fuel cells for the lamp and flashlights, and plastic bags and bottles for specimens. Gley had borrowed the crude radiation meter from Linda—a measure I approved of—but he had also decided to carry his shotgun—a measure I decidedly didn’t approve of. He had the gun slung across his shoulder on a leather strap, and it seemed to hang comfortably enough, but I couldn’t help feeling that it was likely to be an unwelcome encumbrance in any particularly tight spot.

  Anyone can be wrong.

  We walked into the mouth of the fissure that Gley had previously selected (on what basis I don’t know) as the best bet. It wasn’t the biggest, but it did have a channel extending into the crater as well as out, thus draining water from both the mountain and the crater. As we passed into the gloom I couldn’t help thinking that some graffiti artist ought to have decorated the entrance with the motto from Dante’s Inferno or something equally suitable. I looked back, in defiance of Orphean tradition, and waved to Linda. She gave me a token salute, and then turned around to walk back to the cabin.

  “Ah well,” I said to Gley, “at least there’s a chance you’ll get your wishing done. Not much else to do while she’s waiting except talk to the ship on the radio.”

  He just grunted in reply.

  As the tunnel narrowed and plunged downward we had to go in single file, and there was no prospect of conversation. The “floor” of the tunnel sloped at about thirty degrees from the vertical, on average, but was more or less smooth. This created difficulties by making handholds and footholds scarce and uncertain. As we went deeper, the tunnel became thinner and deeper. There was no problem at all with the height, but occasionally we had to squeeze through between walls that were barely far enough apart to let us pass. It was a tricky operation, necessitating the removal of the packs from our shoulders and a certain amount
of scraping that didn’t do the suits any good at all. Luckily, though, the walls had been pretty well scoured by the water of past rainy seasons and there were very few awkward spurs and ridges.

  Despite the frequent interruptions caused by difficult passages our progress was good during the first couple of hours. Gley led with steady determination, getting on with the job but taking no risks. Whenever he was in doubt he let the flashlight down on the end of one of the ropes so that he could judge the steepness of the descent and map out the footholds. I slipped a couple of times, and on one occasion I slid right down on top of him, but he was as steady as a rock—I gained a lot of confidence just knowing he was there to catch me. He’d done a lot of mountaineering in recent years, and to him the descent was child’s play. There was no steam here, and the air was quite still as far as I could judge. The filters took care of the pollutant gases without any trouble.

  Gradually, as time went on, the slope got a little steeper, until it was only fifteen degrees or so from the vertical. That’s precipitous enough by any standards, and it slowed us down appreciably. I became almost grateful for the narrowness of the slit, for it was always possible to extend my arms to either side and brace myself, and I could search for footholds to either side as well as in front of me. Gley would guide my feet whenever I got into difficulty. I got the feeling that this not only reassured me but also reassured him—he needed to feel that he was in charge and that this was his show. I wasn’t about to argue with him. Any discovery we made could go down in his name for all eternity so far as I was concerned.

  I lost track of time, and there was no way that I could estimate how far down we had come. My arms began to ache and I began to hope fervently that we’d reach some kind of bottom soon. I wanted a cave, or a ledge, or anything that would give us a chance to rest. I also felt hot and sticky, though the temperature outside must have been close to freezing-point. The suit’s thermal insulation was a fraction better than its water-recycling ability and it needed a sweatless interval to catch up. Mercifully, though, the rock faces that surrounded us never became vertical or altered their inclination to the point at which passage would become extremely dangerous.

  We stopped after about two and a half hours while Gley let the light down for the fifth or sixth time.

  “It’s okay,” he said, his voice muffled and sounding rather as if he had a heavy cold. “We ran out of hill and we’ll have to let ourselves down on the rope. But the drop’s only twelve feet or so onto a stone floor.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked, knowing that it was a silly question but wanting so much to be sure.

  “I’m going to hammer a piton into the rock,” he said. “There’s a crevice here. Then I’ll double up the rope and let myself down. You follow. We’ll leave a length of the rope here so we can get back up.”

  I braced myself, and waited for him to complete the task. It was routine, and it didn’t take long, but the wait was doubly painful because I knew that when it ended I could relax for a bit and recuperate.

  Eventually, he said: “I’m on the rope.” And, a few minutes later, “I’m down.”

  I eased myself down to the piton, then locked my legs around the rope. I let myself down a foot at a time, feeling a sudden, irrational need to be doubly careful. I didn’t look down until my feet actually touched bottom.

  Gley had moved away from the rope a little and his body was shielding his flashlight. I looked past his silhouette to see what he was looking at.

  The beam of the torch was reflected back from walls which glittered with crystals of one kind or another, and also from something dead white. They were bones.

  Gley knelt to look at them as I came to his shoulder. They were scattered on the floor, caught by ridges that followed contour-lines around a shallow bowl whose center was beneath the tunnel-mouth from which we’d descended. There were thin cracks extending out from the center into which a certain amount of water could seep, but when the water was really flooding down from above, the bowl obviously filled up. I didn’t look around immediately for the overflow—I was more interested in the debris.

  There weren’t all that many bones—they just showed up well against a matrix of stone and vegetable debris. They were mostly tiny—the remains of creatures no bigger than a rat—but some were much larger. They were limb bones from Sets or goat-like animals. There was one skull that had once belonged to a Set.

  “These didn’t get carried down here by the rain,” said Gley ominously. “The small ones, maybe...but not this.”

  This was the skull of the Set. It had been picked clean of every last vestige of flesh but it wasn’t very old.

  “Maybe your predator uses the fissures as natural trashcans,” I suggested.

  “And maybe this is where it hides out when it’s daylight up above,” he replied.

  “Breathing sulfur dioxide?”

  “There’s not that much poison in the air. Enough to make it dangerous for us—but a creature that built up a certain tolerance could take it. And the methane too.”

  “It would have to hate the light quite a lot,” I said. “Adaptation to living in volcanic caves doesn’t sound like a very safe evolutionary policy to me.”

  “This range has been extinct for thousands of years,” he said.

  Obviously he found a certain aesthetic compulsion in the conviction that the solution to all his mysteries lurked down here. I was only half-prepared to accept the suggestion. I shone my own light around more widely, trying to tell myself that I was just interested in the lie of the land rather than checking that the predator wasn’t sat on its haunches licking its lips while it watched us from some handy covert. The cave seemed to be approximately globular—like a great bubble in the solid rock. Its walls were vertically ridged, though the ridges had been smoothed out to a series of folds like the folds in a curtain. There were two main exits, both slightly below the “equator” of the bubble. Either looked capable of taking our bulk. There were also smaller vertical cracks between the folds. There was nothing of any size lurking close at hand, though the glare of the torch picked out a number of small invertebrates—worms and arthropods—all very pale in color. With a constant supply of fresh water and fresh vegetable debris from above there was a thriving little community here, though the largest predators revealed by the flashlight beam were things that looked remarkably reminiscent of harvest spiders.

  Gley was sorting through the bones carefully, turning the larger ones over in his hands.

  “They’re marked,” he said. “The same kind of teeth.” It wasn’t a surprise. I shrugged.

  He picked up the skull and stared at its blank eye sockets. He refrained from quoting Shakespeare, though I had a pretty good idea he might have known the Set well and might even have called him Yorick.

  “If there are more of these bones,” he said, “some might go back a long way. A very long way.”

  “They might,” I agreed. “But the water will have carried them all the way down. And bones rot. Especially in dilute sulfuric acid. The water coursing through here is fresh enough...but right down below, where anything carried by the floods reaches a permanent resting place...bones don’t survive forever unless they’re dry, or become embedded in sedimentary rocks. Don’t build up your hopes too much on that score. And that’s without taking into account the other obvious objection.”

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  I was surprised he hadn’t worked it out years ago, but it seemed that his thoughts had never before turned to the possibility of there being actual skeletal remains.

  “If you could design androids,” I said, “what would they look like?”

  “Oh,” he said, seeing the thrust of the argument. If the Sets looked like the Set-builders—which they very well might—how would we know if we found the skull of an alien?

  “Even if we did find a skull that looked a little different,” I said, “we wouldn’t have proof. It could always be argued that it was an aberrant Set...or even a memb
er of a slightly different species which now no longer exists. We need more than bones. We need artifacts.”

  Gley dropped the skull, regretfully.

  The silence seemed particularly profound once the echo had died away, and I strained my ears trying to catch a sound that wasn’t there. I found a place to sit where I could lean back against the wall and I reached into the pack for a couple of tubes of broth. I warmed them up by the heat of the larger lamp. While I was doing that Gley went to shine his flashlight into the two afferent tunnels.

  “We’ll take this one,” he said, on due consideration, indicating the one which was most nearly opposite to the direction of slope of the tunnel we’d descended. To judge by the grooves in the rock, that was the one that took more of the water out of the cave. It was also the one which pointed at the heart of the mountain.