by Dan Simmons
And it is under Pope Julius XIV that the Inquisition has once again begun living up to its original name and sense of terror. And, without preparation, counsel, or knowledge of what accusations may be levied against him, de Soya must appear before them at oh-seven-hundred hours the next morning.
Father Baggio bustles in, a smile on the chubby priest’s cherubic features. “Did you have a nice conversation with Father Farrell, my son?”
“Yes,” says de Soya distractedly. “Very nice.”
“Good, good,” says Father Baggio. “But I think it’s time for a bit of broth, a bit of prayer—the Angelus, I think—and then an early beddie-bye. We must be fresh for whatever tomorrow brings, mustn’t we?”
38
When I was a child listening to Grandam’s endless parade of verses, one short piece I demanded to hear over and over started—“Some say the world will end in fire,/ Some say in ice.” Grandam did not know the name of the poet—she thought it might be by a pre-Hegira poet named Frost, but even at my young age I thought that was too cute to be true for a poem about fire and ice—but the idea of the world ending in either fire or ice had long stayed with me, as enduring as the singsong rhythm of the simple verse.
My world seemed to be ending in ice.
It was dark beneath the ice wall, and too cold for me to find adequate words to describe. I had been burned before—once a gas stove had exploded on a barge going upriver on the Kans and gave me slight but painful burns over my arms and chest—so I knew the intensity of fire. This cold seemed that intense, sort of slow-motion flames cutting my flesh to shreds.
The rope was secured under my arms, and the powerful current soon whirled me around so I was being dragged feet-first down the black chute, my hands raised to keep my face from bashing against inverted ridges of rock-hard ice, my chest and underarms constrained by the tight rope as A. Bettik acted as brake by staying on belay. My knees were soon torn by razor-sharp ice as the current kept throwing my body higher, striking the uneven ceiling of passing ice like someone being dragged across rocky ground.
I had worn socks with the ice more in mind than the cold, but they did little to protect my feet as I banged into the ice ridges. I was also wearing undershorts and undershirt, but they provided no buffer against the needles of cold. Around my neck was the band of the com unit, the mike-patches pressed against my throat for voice or subvocal transmission, the hearplug in place. Over my shoulder and tightly secured with tape was the waterproof bag with the plastique, detonators, cord, and two flares I had put in at the last moment. Taped to my wrist was my little flashlight laser, its narrow beam cutting through the black water and bouncing off ice, but illuminating little. I had used the laser sparingly since the Labyrinth on Hyperion: the hand-lamps were more useful in widebeam and required less charge. The laser was largely useless as a cutting weapon, but should serve to bore holes in ice for the plastique.
If I lived long enough to bore holes.
The only method behind my madness of allowing myself to be swept away down this subterranean river had been a bit of knowledge from my Home Guard training on the Iceshelf of the continent Ursus. There, on the Bearpaw Glacial Sea, where the ice froze and refroze almost daily through the brief antarctic summer, the risk of breaking through the thin surface ice had been very high. We had been trained that even if we were swept away beneath the thickest ice, there was always a thin layer of air between the sea and icy ceiling. We were to rise to that brief layer, set our snouts into it even if it meant that the rest of our faces had to stay submerged, and move along the ice until we came to a break or thin-enough patch that we could smash our way out.
That had been the theory. My only actual test of it had been as a member of a search party fanning out to hunt for a scarab driver who had stepped out of his vehicle, broken through not two meters from where the ice supported the weight of his four-ton machine, and disappeared. I was the one who found him, almost six hundred meters from the scarab and safe ice. He had used the breathing technique. His nose was still pressed tight against the too-thick ice when I found him—but his mouth was open underwater, his face was as white as the snow that blew across the glacier, and his eyes were frozen as solid as steel bearings. I tried not to think of this as I fought my way to the surface against the current, tugged on the rope to signal A. Bettik to stop me, and scraped my face against shards of ice to find air.
There were several centimeters of space between water and ice—more where fissures ran up into the glacier of frozen atmosphere like inverted crevasses. I gasped the cold air into my lungs, shined the flashlight laser into the crevasses, and then moved the red beam back and forward along the narrow tunnel of ice. “Going to rest a minute,” I gasped. “I’m okay. How far have I come?”
“About eight meters,” whispered A. Bettik’s voice in my ear.
“Shit,” I muttered, forgetting that the com would send the subvocal. It had seemed like twenty or thirty meters, at least. “All right,” I said aloud. “I’m going to set the first charge here.”
My fingers were still flexible enough to trigger the flashlight laser to high intensity and burn out a small niche into the side of the fissure. I had premolded the plastique, and now I worked it, shaped it, and vectored it. The material was a shaped explosive—that is, the blast would discharge itself in precisely the directions I wanted, provided that my preparations were correct. In this case I had done most of the work ahead of time, knowing that I wanted the blast directed upward and back toward the ice wall behind me. Now I aimed precise tendrils of that explosive force: the same technology that allowed a plasma bolt to cut through steel plate like hot bolts dropped into butter would send these plasma tendrils lancing back through the incredible mass of the ice behind me. It should cut the eight-meter section of ice wall into chunks and drop them into the river very nicely. We were counting on the fact that the atmosphere generators through the years of terraforming had added enough nitrogen and C02 to the atmosphere to keep the explosion from turning into one massive blast of burning oxygen.
Because I knew exactly where I wanted to aim the force of the blast, the shaping of the charges took less than forty-five seconds and required little dexterity. Still, I was shaking and almost numb by the time the tiny detonator squibs were set in place. Since I knew the com units had no trouble penetrating this amount of ice, I set the detonators to the preset code and ignored the wire in my bag.
“Okay,” I gasped, settling lower in the water, “let out the slack.”
The wild ride began again, the current pulling me lower into blackness and then battering me against the crystal ceiling, then the wild search for air, the gasped commands, the struggle to see and work while the last warmth drained from me.
The ice continued for another thirty meters—right at the outer limits of what I thought the plastique could handle. I set the charges in two more places, another fissure and the last bundle in a narrow tube I burned into solid ceiling ice. My hands were totally numb during the last placement—it was as if I were wearing thick gloves of ice—but I directed the charges up- and downstream in roughly the proper vectors. If there were not an end to this ice wall soon, all this would be in vain. A. Bettik and I had anticipated chopping away at some ice with the ax, but we could not hack our way through many meters of the stuff.
At forty-one meters I burst up and out into air again. At first I was afraid it was merely another crevasse, but when I aimed the flashlight laser, the red beam flicked through a chamber longer and wider than the one where I had left the raft. We had discussed it and decided that we would not blow the explosives if I could see the end of any second chamber, but when I lowered the beam down the length of the black river here, illuminating the same mist and stalactites, I could see that the river—about thirty meters wide at that point—curved out of sight several hundred meters downstream. There were no more riverbanks or visible tunnels here than there had been in our earlier stretch of river, but at least the river appeared to keep run
ning.
I wanted to see what the river did once it rounded the turn, but I had neither the rope nor body heat I needed to float that far, report, and get back alive. “Pull me back!” I gasped.
For the next two minutes I hung on—or tried to hang on; my hands no longer worked—as the android hauled me back against that terrible current, stopping occasionally as I floated on my back and gasped in the frigid air of the crevasses. Then the black ride would begin again.
If A. Bettik had been in the water and I had been pulling—or even if it had been the child—I could not have pulled either of them back through that heavy current in four times the time it took A. Bettik. I knew that he was strong, but no superman—no, miraculous android strength—but he showed superhuman strength that day. I could only guess at the reservoirs of energy he used to pull me back to the raft so quickly. I helped as best I could, slashing my hands by pulling myself along the icy ceiling and fending off sharper crystals, kicking weakly against the current.
When my head broke the surface again, seeing the haloed lantern light and the shapes of my two companions leaning toward me, I did not have the strength to lift my arms or to help pull myself onto the raft. A. Bettik seized me under the arms and lifted me gently out. Aenea grabbed my dripping legs, and they carried me toward the stern of the raft. I admit that my dulled brain was reminded of the Catholic church we stopped by occasionally in the north-moor village of Latmos, the little town where we picked up our food and simple shepherd supplies, and of one of the large religious paintings on the south wall of that church: Christ being taken off the cross, one of his disciple’s arms under his limp arms, his bare and mutilated feet being held by the Virgin.
Don’t flatter yourself, came the unbidden thought through my mental fog. It spoke in Aenea’s voice.
They carried me to the frost-laden tent, where the thermal blanket was ready on a pile of two sleeping bags and a thin mat. The heating cube glowed next to this nest. A. Bettik stripped me of my sodden undershirt, flare bag, and com unit. He untaped the flashlight laser, set it carefully in my pack, laid me firmly within the top sleeping bag with the thermal blanket around me, and opened a medpak. Setting sticky biomonitor contacts against my chest, the inside of my thigh, my left wrist, and temple, he looked at the readouts a moment and then injected me with one ampule of adrenonitrotaline, as we had planned.
You must be getting tired of pulling me out of the water, I wanted to say, but my jaws and tongue and vocal apparatus would not oblige. I was so cold that I was not even shivering. Consciousness was a slender thread connecting me to the light, and it wavered in the cold wind that blew through me.
A. Bettik leaned closer. “M. Endymion, the charges are set?”
I managed a nod. It was all I could do, and it seemed that I was operating a clumsy marionette to do that.
Aenea dropped to her knees next to me. To A. Bettik she said, “I’ll watch him. You get us out of here.”
The android left the tent to push us away from the ice wall and to pole us upstream, using the push-pole from that end of the raft. After the expenditure of energy it had taken to drag me back against the current, I could not believe he could find the strength to move the entire raft the necessary distance upriver.
We began moving. I could see the lantern glow on the mist and distant ceiling through the triangular opening at the end of the tent. The fog and icy stalactites moved slowly across the tiny reference triangle, as though I were peering through an isoscelean hole in reality at the Ninth Circle of Dante’s hell.
Aenea was watching the simple medpak monitors. “Raul, Raul …,” she whispered.
The thermal blanket held in all the heat I was producing, but I felt as if I were not producing any body heat. My bones ached with the chill, but my frozen nerve ends did not convey the pain. I was very, very sleepy.
Aenea shook me awake. “You stay with me, dammit!”
I’ll try, I thought at her. I knew I was lying. All I wanted to do was sleep.
“A. Bettik!” cried the child, and I was vaguely aware of the android entering the tent and consulting the medpak. Their words were a distant humming that no longer made sense to me.
I was far, far away when I dimly sensed a body next to me. A. Bettik had gone away to pole our ice-laden raft upstream against bitter current. The child Aenea had crawled under the thermal blanket and edge of the sleeping bag with me. At first the heat of her skinny body did not penetrate the layers of permafrost that now lay in me, but I was aware of her breathing, of the angular intrusion of her elbows and knees in the tented space with me.
No, no, I thought in her direction. I’m the protector here … the strong one hired to save you. The cold sleepiness did not allow me to speak aloud.
I do not remember if she put her arms around me. I know that I was no more responsive than a frozen log, no more receptive to company than one of the icy stalactites that moved across my triangular field of vision, its underside lighted by the lantern’s glow, its top lost in darkness and mist much as was my mind.
Eventually I began to feel some of the warmth her small body poured out. The heat was dimly perceived, but my skin began to prickle with needles of pain where the warmth flowed from her skin to mine. I wished I could speak just to tell her to move away so that I could doze in nerveless peace.
Sometime later—it might have been fifteen minutes or two hours—A. Bettik returned to the tent. I was conscious enough to realize that he must have followed our plan: “anchoring” the raft with lodged push-poles and steering oar somewhere in the narrowing upper part of the ice cave under the visible segment of farcaster portal. Our theory had been that the metal arch might protect us from avalanche and icefall when the charges went off.
Blow the charges, I wanted to say to him. Instead of keying the com band, however, the android stripped to his tropical yellow short/pants and shirt, then crawled under the thermal blanket with the girl and me.
This should have been comical—it may sound comical to you as you read this—but nothing in my life had moved me as deeply as this act, this sharing of warmth by my two traveling companions. Not even their brave and foolhardy rescue of me in the violet sea had touched me so deeply. The three of us lay there—Aenea on my left, her left arm around me, A. Bettik on my right, his body curled against the cold that crept in under the corner of the thermal blanket. In a few minutes I would be weeping from the pain that came from returning circulation, from the agony of thawing flesh, but at this moment I wept at the intimate gift of their warmth as life’s heat flowed from both child and blue-skinned man, flowed from their blood and flesh to mine.
I weep now in the telling of it.
How long we stayed that way, I cannot say. I never asked the two of them and they never spoke of it. It must have been at least an hour. It felt like a lifetime of warmth and pain and the overpowering joy of life’s return.
Eventually I began trembling, then shaking slightly, and then shaking violently, as if possessed by seizures. My friends held me then, not allowing me to escape from the warmth. I believe that Aenea was also weeping by that point, although I have never asked, and in later days she never spoke of it.
Finally, after the pain and palsy had largely passed, A. Bettik slipped out from under our common cover, consulted the medpak, and spoke to the child in a language I once again could comprehend. “All within the green,” he said softly. “No permanent frostbite. No permanent damage.”
Shortly after that, Aenea slipped out of the blanket and helped me sit up, putting two of the hoar-frosted packs behind my back and head. She set water to boiling over the glowing cube, made mugs of steaming tea, and held one to my lips. I could move my hands by then, even flex my fingers, but the pain there was too great to grasp anything successfully.
“M. Endymion,” said A. Bettik, crouching just outside the tent, “I am prepared to transmit the detonation code.”
I nodded.
“There may be falling debris, sir,” he added.
/> I nodded again. We had discussed the risk of that. The shaped charges should shatter just the ice walls ahead of us, but the resulting seismic vibrations through the ice might well bring the entire glacier of frozen atmosphere down around us, driving the raft to the shallow bottom and entombing us there. We had judged it worth the risk. Now I glanced up at the frost-rimmed interior of the microtent and smiled at the thought that this would give us any shelter. I nodded a third time, urging him to go ahead.
The sound of the blast was more subdued than I expected, much less noisy than the concomitant tumble of ice blocks and stalactites and the wild surging of the river itself. For a second I thought that we were going to be lifted and crushed against the cave ceiling as wave after wave of pressure-propelled and ice-displaced river water surged under the raft. We huddled on our little stone hearth, trying to stay out of the frigid water, and riding the bucking logs like passengers on a storm-tossed life dinghy.
Eventually the surging and rumbling calmed itself. The violent maneuvers had snapped our steering oar, flung one of the push-poles away, dislodged us from our safe haven, and floated us downstream to the ice wall.
To where the ice wall used to be.
The charges had done their job much as we had planned: the cavern it had created was low and jagged, but after probing it with the flashlight laser, it appeared to go through to the open channel beyond. Aenea cheered. A. Bettik patted me on the back. I am ashamed to admit that I may have wept again.
It was not so easy a victory as it first seemed. Fallen ice blocks and surviving columns of ice still blocked parts of the passage, and even after the initial rush of ice into the breach slowed a bit, it meant heavy going with the surviving push-pole and frequent pauses as A. Bettik hacked away at icy obstacles with the ax.