Permanence

by Karl Schroeder

  The middle distance was cluttered by a number of closed spherical structures atop tall pillars. Some of these had closed tubes or ducts that angled up and away to merge into the distant walls.

  Michael looked up. The arches made a vaulted ceiling just above his head. Above that, he knew, were the tanks of water Herat had spotted, then the axis where Rue and the others waited. If those tanks were the living quarters, then what they were now seeing was where the creators of this habitat spent their days.

  Something about the tanks seemed out of place. After a moment, he had it: "Professor, if the bottom of this place is at two gees of gravity, why did they put the water tanks at one gee if two was their natural gravity level?"

  "Hell, I don't know. Comfort? Low-gee for sleeping? Hmm— urmm."

  "By rights then we should find some more water at the very bottom, for a normal homeworld environment." He looked down; the sonar didn't show the sort of boundary layer there that Herat had described— only a jumbled blur.

  "Why don't you swim down and take a look?"

  "Yeah. Give me one of the fish." A shimmering, shape-shifting form drifted in his direction: the metal mesobot fish, viewed with sonar.

  He switched from the inscape view for a moment: It was completely dark here now. The sensation of being flipped over slowly— an artifact of the habitat's rotation— was all he could feel. Best not to think about that; he returned to the inscape view.

  Michael dropped a few meters and began to notice a change in the feel of the aerogel liquid. It was thicker, more viscous. Probably the little spheres were more tightly packed down here— something that didn't happen with water, which was essentially incompressible. He was just wondering whether it might harden into a solid mass at a certain level, when something caught his eye. He felt a flood of adrenaline hit him even as he realized what he was seeing.

  "Shit! There's a fan down here. It's a big-bladed thing, on its back. It's turning at a few RPM; I don't know if it's pulling or blowing."

  He had his answer a second later, as the mesobot fish passed him on the left and began arcing slowly down in the direction of the fan.

  "Professor! The combination of the fan and higher gravity's pulling us down! Grab my line."

  The fish turned around and began undulating, trying to escape the pull of the fan. For a few seconds it stayed suspended above the blades, which in sonar-light looked more like pyramids or blocks, their undersides shadowed solid.

  "Bequith, your line's played out and fallen down behind you. We're getting them to reel it in from above."

  He looked around. The line, visible as a kind of wing behind him, was indeed draped down into the blur below. He could see the vague other end of it lifting up past the arches, but too slowly. He was directly over the fan now.

  He looked down and saw a Dalíesque fan blade swinging out to touch his line, just as the mesobot fish lost its fight to climb and fell among the blades.

  Instantly everything blurred; he heard a loud clang through the aerogel. Then something had hold of his line and was pulling him down.

  Yelling, he clawed at the safety clip on his belt. Precious seconds were lost as he fumbled at it; all he could see were vague looming shapes surging by under his feet.

  He found the quick-release and pushed it. The line jerked away and then Michael was sucked down by turbulence. Something struck him hard in the stomach. He fell, landed hard and rolled, hammering his head against the inside of the helmet.

  * * *

  MICHAEL KNEW EXACTLY where he was and what had just happened, but he wasn't sure whether he had been lying here on his back for a few seconds or an hour. It was completely dark and silent. The darkness made sense; the silence didn't.

  "Dr. Herat?" There was no answer. He called up inscape; a flood of diagnostic windows opened like flowers all around him. Since they were artifacts painted on his sensorium by nerve implants, their light didn't make him wince, nor did it illuminate the darkness beyond his helmet visor.

  The diagnostics were clear, though: He had been here about ten minutes and still had almost a day's worth of air left in the suit's recycler. The suit's comm unit was damaged, however.

  He tried to sit up; his head spun and it felt like a great hand was trying to push him down again. He stood, slowly, and though movement was like pushing through a strong wind, he had no difficulty staying up. The worst part was the continuous spinning sensation, which he knew was real: It came from the habitat's rotational gravity.

  From somewhere nearby a steady chop-chop sounded. That would be the fan. He could feel its effect, in regular pushes that almost made him stagger.

  He was supposed to weigh twice his normal weight down here, but it didn't feel like it. Except for the thickness of the medium, it felt more like a standard gee. He could walk, or at least stagger under the strong coriolis effect and his feet touched down as fast as if he were standing in air on board the Banshee.

  Of course. He bet that the creatures that built this place were more buoyant than a space-suited human. They probably couldn't sink in this aerogel and there would be a lower limit below which they couldn't swim— they'd just pop up again. What to him was a floor, would to them be as inaccessible as a distant ceiling.

  By that logic, he would be standing in their machine attic. He might stumble into another fan in this blackness, or something worse.

  But he couldn't just stand here. Or could he? They should be lowering the other mesobots more carefully even now and casting sonar illumination all through this area.

  Wait a second— ten minutes? That was plenty of time for them to have illuminated the whole area and even brought down another diver and some safety line. Where was everybody?

  Maybe he wasn't visible lying down. He tried waving his arms, after cautiously reaching out to make sure he wouldn't hit something. That should do the trick.

  Michael stood there for a few minutes, waiting, while his head throbbed and he imagined all sorts of threats converging on him in the blackness. He waved his arms again and shouted, which was absurd since he just hurt his own ears.

  Nobody answered. Nobody came.

  After a while he decided he must have fallen in the sonar shadow of something big. He would have to walk. Arms out like a blind man, he shuffled forward. Almost immediately his fingers touched a solid wall.

  He groped his way along it. It turned out to be a big metal box, just taller than he was. There was open space beyond it, but he only went a few meters before he encountered a low box with a grill; aerogel was surging up out of this, though not strongly enough to lift him. He skirted it and tripped over some cables. The weird combination of rotational gravity and viscous aerogel made him land on his face again.

  Where were they? Michael ran through his entire repertoire of curses. His voice in his own ears sounded weak, boyish. He didn't want to die down here. Once he had believed death was merely a remerging with the universe. Now he saw that universe as vastly indifferent and himself as trivially small within it. To die was not to merge; it was simply to cease.

  He forced himself to crawl, waving one hand ahead of him. And after a while, he began to see light ahead— at least, a change from total black to graphite gray.

  They must be searching in the wrong place and they'd brought in floodlights to help…? No, that didn't make sense, this stuff wasn't transparent at any wavelength.

  The light brightened and it became evident that it wasn't coming from above but from something on the deck ahead of him. Michael stood up cautiously and walked forward. His faceplate became gray, then white, then bright and milky. He put up his hand and saw it as a shadow. Following the shadow brought him to another collection of shadows, a sort of crosshatch pattern. Some bars with a bright light behind them? He reached out.

  His hand fell on a pipe of some kind. Running his fingers along it, he discovered it ended in a vertical junction about half a meter to the right— and another, on the left. And above….

  It was a ladder. They'
d let down a ladder for him.

  Michael laughed in huge relief and began to climb. This would be a story and a half, that was for sure. It was strange, though, how had they gotten a ladder in here in ten or fifteen minutes? He kept climbing, idly wondering at this, as the light fell away below him. No light emerged above.

  He slowed his climb, then stopped. The ladder was a bit too steady under him to be something that had just been lowered from above. His people hadn't put this ladder here. It was part of the ship.

  For a while he clung there in indecision, feeling his inner ear flip over and over from the habitat's rotation. He had to be visible on this thing. Nobody came, nothing happened, so he resumed his climb.

  After a while he bumped his head and reaching up felt a smooth surface above him. A dead end? He felt about and his hand fell on an indentation, which had several knob-shaped things in it. He twisted one at random, then another, then reached up again.

  His hand felt the surface again, but this time it was soft. He put his hand through it— this was an airlock like the one on the outside of the habitat. Eagerly, he pushed up through it— and into light.

  "Gods and kami." He'd thought he must be back at the axis, but this was not the case. Instead, Michael found himself in a small round room with virulently green walls. Most of the floor space was taken up by the bulging round magnetic lock. The place was illuminated by, of all things, a sort of mirror-ball that hung in the center of the space. Four small spotlights spaced about the edges of the ceiling were aimed at it.

  The room was a little more than a meter and a half tall. He had to crouch to stand.

  A corridor led off from one side of the room. He hulked his way over to this; he seemed to weigh more than usual here, but not unduly much. The corridor sloped up steeply. It too was lit by little spots and mirrored pyramids set into the ceiling.

  Michael checked his suit's readings. External air pressure: five bars, very high by human standards. Temperature: twenty-eight degrees Celsius. Humidity: forty percent. Atmospheric composition: ninety percent nitrogen, eight percent oxygen, two percent carbon dioxide. This might be breathable if you used CO2 scrubbers; he didn't know enough about partial pressures to be able to say for sure.

  Well, there was only one way to go. Michael started climbing.

  The corridor ran a long way. Somewhere around halfway up he realized that the round room must have been in one of those spheres they'd seen balanced halfway up the cathedral space of the habitat. This corridor would be in one of the ducts that had angled up from them to join with the habitat's outer skin.

  The habitat was designed for two entirely different species to use together. Herat, were he here, would doubtless be chattering on about all that. For once, Michael was glad his boss wasn't around; it felt much better to be panicking by himself and not having to do it for two. Herat wouldn't even know he was in danger in a place like this.

  Michael's weight fell rapidly as he climbed. Finally the low corridor ended at a T-intersection. He estimated he was at about the level of those tanks Herat had seen. He would have to get higher than this; if two species inhabited this place, there should be another entrance at the rotational axis. There wasn't one on the shore of Lake Flaccid, but hadn't Corinna said something about there being airlocks at both ends of the sphere? Maybe there was one for each species.

  The corridor he was in now curved off in both directions. It might well circumnavigate the sphere. There were square doorways at regular intervals. He picked a direction at random and walked, glancing with some apprehension through the first several doorways before passing them.

  The doorways led to rooms of various sizes. These were filled with… sheets. Each room held dozens of vertical rods, always in pairs, and between these were tautly strung thick sheets of some clothlike substance. They were usually about three meters wide and six to eight long and were fairly tightly packed in the vertical; he counted up to fifteen stacked above one another. They filled the rooms right up to the door; the only way to get in would be by burrowing through these layers and maybe that was the idea: He pictured some sort of social animal, molelike, used to burrowing and being surrounded by friends and family. Among the taut sheets he glimpsed folded frames of some kind, as well as stacks of complex metal items and what looked like plain old ordinary boxes.

  Tempting as it was to try to reach those, he had already had one close brush with disaster and who knew what traps awaited him in these strange chambers? Over and above that, he just shouldn't touch anything. This location was pristine and should be studied with care.

  Before he was a quarter of a turn around the circle, he found another ramp going up— as well as one going down that he had no desire to investigate. He ran up the ascending way; it curved, indicating that it was following the outer skin of the habitat and not diving into the interior. By the time he reached the top he was weightless.

  This was no longer a room, but something like the space between the walls of two cylinders, laid on their sides. He had no doubt that the inner surface was the floor that verged on the lake. He bounced around the space until he found a gray oval with an indentation next to it, set into the inner wall. He couldn't recall seeing anything like this from the lakeside, but if the aquatic residents of the habitat were blind then they wouldn't have signified the door with color anyway. He pushed the indentation and when the door had deliquesced, he borrowed Corinna's maneuver and flipped himself through it.

  The light here was different— yellow and multishadowed. It came from floodlights that poised in the microgravity like cobras on their cables. He was inside the axis cylinder… and there were his people.

  Rue Cassels perched on one hand on the edge of the lake. Beside her Evan Laurel was playing out line. Their eyes were intent on the surface below them, as if they could drill through it by eyesight alone.

  The temptation was too great. Michael eased off his helmet and drifted over as silently as he could, careful not to cast a shadow over the two watchers. When he was right behind them, he said in his most innocent voice, "What's up?"

  "Listen, we're going after him no matter what you say," said Rue without looking up. Evan did look, did a double take and shouted, "Hey!"

  Rue looked up too. Then, "He's back, he's back," "We've got him, come back!" they were shouting. Both grabbed the lines that led into the aerogel and began hauling on them.

  Michael watched them pull for a few seconds; then he said, "Aren't you going to ask me how I got here?"

  "Sorry," gasped Rue. "We gotta get out of here."

  "What…?" A gloved hand gripped the side of the lake and a second later Dr. Herat was flying through the air, scattering sparkling aerogel beads. He was mouthing something inside his suit— grinning, of course.

  "There's been an explosion on the Banshee," said Evan. "We've got to get back there with the sleds right away."

  "The bastard wanted us to leave you," said Rue. She pulled and Corinna Chandra's faceplate broke the surface. "We told him to get stuffed."

  Herat had his helmet off now. "Bequith, good to see you! Nothing broken, not too shaken, I hope?"

  "A bit shaken," he admitted with a grin of his own. "But nothing serious. Professor, I've found it! Proof of the multispecies theory."

  Herat gave a whoop and threw his helmet. It flew up past the axis and splashed into the aerogel. "Oh, I guess I need that. Excuse me." He dove after it.

  The marines emerged from the gray soup and immediately started gesturing in the direction of the strap palace.

  Michael watched Dr. Herat retrieve his helmet. "What about this explosion?"

  Rue sighed heavily. "I don't know. Crisler said it was in the main life-support stacks. Dr. Katz flew back right away to help save them. Crisler wanted us all to come back and the marines pulled everybody out of the lake. We told them to go yank themselves and went back in."

  So that was why nobody had come to his aid. He didn't feel any better about having been abandoned, but still the news was ch
illing. Had the explosion been deliberate? If so, was somebody willing to risk suicide in order to stop the expedition? Because destroying their life support this far from home was just that: suicide.

  "Was anybody hurt?" he said after an awkward pause.

  She shook her head. "But if the stacks are blown… we won't be able to stay. We'll have to go back into cold sleep and try to make it back to Chandaka." He could hear the deep disappointment in her voice, though her face showed nothing.

  He frowned. "Maybe not. I don't know about food, but we might be able to get our air from here." He told her about the passages he had gone through. Rue listened in silence, then pushed her hair back with a gloved hand and puffed out her cheeks.

  "Okay," she said. "That's the first good news I've heard in a long time. Thanks, Mike."

  "Move out!" commanded the lead marine. They secured their helmets, grabbed their instruments and data packs and one by one flew up to the strap palace.

  They had no idea what awaited them back on the ship, but Michael found himself absurdly happy anyway. He had made a discovery, survived an adventure, and he had brought news that had made Rue Cassels happy. Maybe he had been right to come after all.

  13

  HALFWAY BACK TO the Banshee, Rue's radio crackled into life.

  "Rue, they're locking us up! We haven't done anything, but the bastards are blaming us for the explosion!" It was Max's voice; he sounded outraged. "Hey, give me that, you—" The radio went dead.

  Rue felt fury wash over her. "Crisler," she said. She'd been right not to trust him— he was a control freak just like Jentry.

  The two sleds seemed motionless, while in the distance the two-lobed white shape of the Banshee approached. She could see a black smear on one of the lobes now: a torn section of hull, right where the life-support stacks had been. So Crisler wasn't lying about that, anyway.