It’s bitterly cold out here, and dark, but I am prepared and have my instruments ready. I take pictures and measurements and scans. I watch the screen of my PCD as the telescope dumps its data. We’re at the right spot—and still the stars are not entirely where I expect them to be. I ball my fist and shake my gloved hand at the sky. Yes!
Jorak gives me a puzzled look.
* * *
On the way back, I work on my data. I calculate and recalculate, and with each round of checking I become more certain.
Back in Cloud City, I book the small lecture theatre in the library. The locals are going to want to hear this.
At Mellivar, any official speech is a major event, especially when given by someone from outside. The lecture theatre is a room with high ceilings and stately fittings. Seating for the audience comprises many tiers of cushioned benches. The citizens file in, men in long leather coats, women in frilly dresses with petticoats and long sleeves. Most of them wear or carry goggles that keep the balloon piss out of one’s eyes.
They give me strange looks. I’m wearing my Solaris Agency uniform, sturdy pants and short jacket made from moisture-resistant material. It looks positively futuristic compared to their attire.
On the far wall hangs a large painting of a space ship on the ice. It’s far more elegant than any existing ship. I know that with that design, it could never fly, let alone land safely on the surface of Mellivar. The long shadows that fall over the ice suggest that it’s close to the terminator. A group of twenty or so people stand next to the ship. They’ve made a fire and have put up some huts.
The legend of the Starship Poseidon. It vanished about three hundred standard years ago, somewhere in this area. The people of Mellivar believe that the ship developed trouble, landed on their world and that they are descended from the passengers. That is what the scene depicts.
But the real Poseidon was far too big a ship to land on a world, and any contact between the ship and the ice planet would not have had a happy ending. The Poseidon was a deep space vessel without surface landing capability. I’ve seen the images of the ship and am familiar with the design.
But the myth is an attractive one, taught to all children at Mellivar.
My project will give some real answers about what happened to the ship.
The hall’s attendants shut the doors with many people still waiting to get in. The hall is full to overflowing. People are standing at the back and sitting on the steps.
I spot Farber Endovan and his councillors in the audience.
It is time for me to start.
I begin with the explanation that this talk is not in my capacity as auditor, but as student of the university at the Solaris Hub. I tell them that our navigation data of the outer worlds—of which Mellivar is certainly one—are often based on inaccurate measurements, simply because accuracy was not the first priority of the pioneers to this area.
Throughout its settled period, Mellivar has been called a tidally locked world, because it largely behaves as such. But my measurements show that Mellivar is not entirely tidally locked. Although very much in the process of becoming so, it currently has a day of about three hundred and fifty years long. It is why the shores of the ocean are always moving. It is why one shoreline is steep and the others more gentle, and it is also why, back in the time of the Poseidon, their instruments might have caused a crash, because the navigation for the system was calibrated based on the assumption of a tidally locked world. And if anyone thought that would not make a difference, Mellivar’s moon is tidally locked to the planet, so the ship might well have encountered a moon where the onboard navigation said there wasn’t one.
I’m not sure what sort of reaction I expect to get from my speech, but total apathy is not one. During the speech I’ve noticed that people are glancing at Farber Endovan, especially the councillors, and there are undercurrents and lots of hinting in the audience. Based on that, I expect a heated discussion.
The silence is disturbing.
Eventually, Farber Endovan gets up, bows to me and says, “Thank you, Auditor. Rest assured that the citizens of Mellivar have known this for some time.”
And he sweeps out of the room to lukewarm applause.
I guess they did know it, although I’d seen no evidence for this. Still, the reaction is thoroughly odd.
When I leave the hall, people seem to positively avoid me.
At my room, I find that Jorak has obtained a partner.
* * *
My requests to return to the ocean rim and take pictures of the ice cliffs are denied. Well, not in so many words, but my request seems to fall into a black hole.
I can do nothing except the work I’ve come here to do. But the auditing of the accounts is simple and doesn’t take much time—except for that pesky helium export question.
What should I do? The beamsweep is not due for another two weeks and, this far from the hub, its bandwidth is tiny. I want to send the agency the accounts and ask them for advice, but most of the space is prebooked and my allocation leaves me barely enough room to ask a simple question. Not only that—the encryption is nonexistent so everyone will be able to listen in. I might as well not bother.
Anyway, I’m pretty much confined to my room and the area immediately surrounding it.
I lean on the railing to the walkway outside, watching as ground dwellers bring in fish and produce from below, and a steady stream of balloons brings in barrels of what I presume to be helium. I ask Jorak where they harvest it, but he doesn’t reply. I ask him if I can see the council to present my audit report, and the question disappears in the—by now—familiar black hole.
I write my thesis.
I sit on my bed, fiddling with the emergency beacon. I can’t trigger it, not really, not until I’m physically restrained from boarding the shuttle that is still three weeks off. But I fear that if they are going to keep me here—although the fear seems irrational at times—I can’t wait until the next shuttle, because someone will accidentally push me over the side.
Somehow, in some way, speaking about my discovery was stupid, and I just wish I knew why.
* * *
I’m asleep with the curtains drawn to shut out the eternal light when someone enters my room.
I sit up in shock. The intruder is a young man, and he holds his finger to his lips. He’s a man unlike the usual citizens of the city. He wears sturdy leather clothing which bears signs of heavy use. His hair is long and tied in a ponytail, and his face and arms are bronzed.
He whispers, “Quick. The guards are gone.”
I get out of bed, pull on clothes and the suit he tosses me. It’s made of leather and waxed to keep out moisture. It also has a broad belt with metal hoops at the back.
He gestures. “Come.”
He precedes me out of the door. It is only then that I see that he’s wearing some kind of pack on his back with a harness. My suspicions are confirmed when he tells me to climb onto the walkway’s railing.
“Come, quick,” he says again.
He pulls a rope from his pack and threads it through the hoops at the back of my belt.
“Do I get a choice in this?” I ask him. I am not keen on heights.
“Not if you want to get out of here.”
And with that, he vaults over the railing—and he pulls me down with him. We tumble and tumble on our way to the ocean below. The rush of air is deafening. The cold of it bites my skin.
A sharp jerk stops our fall. He’s unfolded a parachute.
Slowly we drift down to the ocean, where a ship is making its way in our direction, sails billowing.
“What’s going on?” I yell at him over the sound of the rushing air.
“We’re going to meet my father,” the young man says.
“Is he going to be able to help me?”
“To get out of here, yes.”
We hit the water not much later. It’s icy cold and soaks me through the leather suit.
The young man pulls
in the parachute while the sailing boat approaches. Someone on board waves at us.
Not much later, a deckhand hauls us in. I lie, shivering, on the deck as the man pulls the leather suit off me and hands me a blanket.
“I didn’t think I’d see you again,” another man says.
I shouldn’t be surprised that it is Clarys Markan. He looks well, strong and bronzed and dressed in the same utilitarian leather outfit as the young man.
I stammer a few words about being grateful, but I doubt they can understand them, because I’m so cold.
“We’ll go straight home, and talk there,” Clarys says.
Home turns out to be an agricultural village floating on a giant platform. There are about ten or so dwellings, surrounded by large floating fields of green.
A boy rushes to catch the rope the deckhand throws to the jetty. He ties the boat up and helps the deckhand unload boxes of fish that Clarys has evidently caught.
I stumble onto the shore, my legs stiff from the cold.
Clarys shows me the way to his home, a modest two-room house where a gas burner spreads welcome warmth.
“You’re lucky,” he says, when we sit at the table, clutching warm cups of tea. “Lucky that my son’s friends had a fish delivery due and he could slip in as a crew member.”
I look at the young man who sits at the end of the table. Yes, now that he mentions it, I do see similarities between the two.
“What’s going on?” I ask.
Clarys starts his story. “You are right about the world not being tidally locked and the cause of the Poseidon’s disappearance. What is more, after some manoeuvres to avoid the moon, the ship took damage, either because they collided with unexpected asteroids or because too much strain damaged the ship, and they attempted to land or crashed on Mellivar.”
“So the legend is right.”
“That much of the legend is right. Everything else is wrong. The state of the wreckage shows that there is very little chance that anyone survived.”
“Wait—state of the wreckage? You found it?” I’m thinking about the revolutionary engines.
“It’s more like it found us, and to be honest it would have been better to have remained hidden.”
I’m puzzled now.
He pours more tea and continues. “I suspected that the planet is not tidally locked long ago, but we lived in Cloud City, where that sort of thing doesn’t matter. But the constantly moving ocean and the constant breaking up of the ice shelf on one side of the ocean reveals unexpected secrets.”
I think I understand. “The wreckage came out of the ice?”
He nods. “The first thing we knew about it was when a fisherman brought us the body of a woman.”
“You were still administrator then?”
“Yes. The young man said he’d found her floating in the water and thought she must have fallen off the platform. But I took one look at the body—wearing a full vacuum protection suit and helmet—and I knew that this was a very old corpse. The young man said he had taken her to Cloud City where he could perhaps sell her suit or get a reward for finding a missing person. But the badge on her suit said Poseidon. I was astonished and needed time to prepare a reaction. I’m sure that you’re aware of the origin story that all children in Cloud City are told. This was going to upset a lot of people.”
He sips from his tea. “Overnight, the badge disappeared off her clothes. I was left with no proof. And what was more, a couple of influential people were saying that the young man who brought the body must have murdered her. I told them that it was a ridiculous proposition, and then I found that my support in the council fell away. They said that if people in Solaris found out that the Poseidon had been found, we would be overrun with people from outside, and control of the city, and of the origin story and the way of life on Mellivar, would be taken away from us. I said that the Solaris Hub could easily withdraw funds, and they said that we don’t need much anyway, just to buy a few things from Artemis, like some medicines, and we could easily make that money by selling helium to them. And the next thing, they’re threatening me. So I came here with my son.” He gestures at the young man who had no doubt listened to this story many times.
All of a sudden everything makes sense to me. The Cloud City council is trying to protect their way of life and protect the myth that they have told their citizens from the moment they were old enough to hear it.
They live by the myth, but they don’t want to know the facts associated with the ship. And by giving that talk, I put my foot right into it.
Then a boy runs in, speaking a rapid dialect that I can’t follow. Clarys gets up from the table and pulls on a jacket. He tosses me one as well. “Come.”
“Where are we going?” I ask him, while running to keep up with him over the floating walkway. For his age, he is surprisingly fit.
“The boy says a group of balloons have left Cloud City. We must protect the wreckage, because they will try to destroy it.”
On a platform at the edge of the village sits a flyer. It’s an old, beaten-up model that went out of fashion over ten years ago.
We’re going in that thing?
Clarys must see my incredulous reaction. “I know it doesn’t look much, but it works.”
I notice that it has been modified with skis so it can land on snow and water.
And we are indeed getting in. Clarys opens the door. There are four seats. Clarys’ son gets in the back, leaving me to sit next to the pilot’s seat. Oh, joy.
The thing is noisy as hell.
While we rise over the misty water, I wonder what one flyer can do against an army of balloons. I wonder if it is my fight to fight. Certainly, the wrongful punishment of people for crimes they didn’t commit is wrong, but will the Solaris Hub appreciate information about the Poseidon more than the people at Mellivar appreciate their quiet way of life? Because the discovery will bring a lot of people here, that part is true.
* * *
We can see the army of balloons long before we reach the ice cliffs. There are more than a dozen, and they carry between them something black in a box.
We wonder what it is.
“Do they have weapons?” I ask.
“Other than knives and pellet guns, no.”
Yet the thing dangling up there looks ominous.
We fly underneath them to have a look, but something clangs off the top of the flyer. They’re throwing objects at us.
We reach the ice cliff first. I can see the remains of the ship from a distance.
“Even more of it has come out since last time,” Clarys says.
The wreckage is huge, warped and twisted. Metal bent in all kinds of ways you would never think metal could bend. I agree, not many people would have made it alive out of that twisted, melted, charred heap of junk. It’s a wonder that the dead woman’s body survived at all.
I take pictures from all angles.
The flyer glides back and forth over the water to get the best view.
Then Clarys’ son says, “Dad, watch it.”
I look out the side window. The balloons are here.
Clarys’ son opens a sliding door in the roof of the cabin. Ice-cold air streams in. He climbs on the seat and, leaning against the rim of the hatch, balances himself. He carries a plasma gun, the old-fashioned model that the Solaris troops no longer use because it “overcharges the target,” meaning it causes far more destruction than necessary. He turns it on and fires at the balloons—once, twice. He’s a decent shot. When stricken, the creatures deflate with a soulful whine while tumbling aimlessly into the freezing water below. If the cabins are not on fire, they sink quickly.
I feel sick. I want to tell Clarys to put down and rescue the people flailing in the water, I want to tell him to stop this. No legend or ancient artefact is worth this much death. Surely an agreement about the wreckage can be worked out in favour of the citizens of Mellivar?
Clarys’ son fires and fires, stopping only to reload the weapon. Each time
a balloon goes down, he gives a whoop of triumph.
Then there is one balloon left. It hovers over the cliff, struggling to stay up while carrying the black thing by itself. It swings back and forth.
Clarys’ son aims.
I tell him, “Stop, enough! They’ve learned their lesson.” Whatever lesson there was to learn.
Clarys says, “They never showed us any compassion. They pushed me out based on lies, they killed a man for a murder he didn’t commit, and they were going to kill you for speaking the truth. I have no mercy.”
His son fires. A hot bream sizzles through the air, hitting the balloon. The poor thing explodes.
Clarys’ son whoops. “We got all the bastards.”
Clarys balls his fist.
But the black thing is falling, and falling.
As it comes closer, Clarys gasps. “It’s a gas tank.”
His son shouts, “Get out of here, Dad! Get out!”
Clarys pushes the throttle of the engine right back. The flyer jerks forward, skimming over the water. It pulls up sharply, narrowly missing the cliff face.
A giant explosion rocks the air. Slowly, as in slow motion, the entire side of the cliff starts to crumble. Chunks of ice tumble down faster and faster. The full wreckage of the ship is exposed. I keep taking pictures as much as I can while being pushed in my seat as the flyer climbs.
Then the giant, twisted shape breaks loose from the ice and slides into the water. Waves lash at the bottom of the cliffs, breaking off avalanches of ice. The sea churns.
Then the water calms. There is no evidence that the ship was ever there.
“We lost it,” Clarys says. His voice sounds dejected.
“I’ve got evidence,” I say.
The Solaris Agency will have plenty of equipment to retrieve the ship. The ocean under the ice is deep, but there are many ways to go down there.
He shakes his head. “There is no point now, because Farber Endovan will deny entry to anyone who comes to investigate. We lost.”
* * *
Later, in his hut, I finally activate the emergency beacon. I can’t go back up to Cloud City and there is no way to get off the planet from down here.
Bridge Across the Stars: A Sci-Fi Bridge Original Anthology Page 41