“What is it?”
She pointed, and he saw the airlock had started to move. The aperture swung to the right. It reached the edge of the clearing and the view of space beyond grew steadily smaller, like a waning moon.
“Orion,” Jansen called, “we’re about to enter radio silence. Give us twelve hours. Not a minute more.”
“Acknow—”
Hawkins’s voice was cut off instantly as the airlock rotated so the aperture was completely occulted.
“Acknowledged,” Hawkins said. He turned to look at Rao. The two of them were inside the cupola, watching 2I as if there were something to see. Hawkins waited until he saw that the airlock had completely cycled.
“They’ll be back soon enough,” he said. “In the meantime, we still have work to do. We need to keep trying to contact 2I.”
Rao didn’t look at him. Eventually he left the cupola. He figured she would follow when she was ready.
The airlock stopped rotating without a sound. It came to rest with the aperture 180 degrees from where it had started, facing directly into the interior of 2I. Jansen stared through the hole—
—and saw nothing.
There was no light within. Just darkness, more profound than the depths of space. Her suit lights stretched out ahead of her, reflecting off nothing at all.
As her eyes adjusted she saw what looked like thousands of tiny comets, darting and falling across her light.
“What is that, water vapor or something?” Stevens asked.
She looked down at her suit and saw that the fabric was moving a little. Ruffling as if it was caught in a slight breeze. It stopped almost as soon as she noticed it.
It had been nothing like the sudden blast of air you got when a normal airlock equalized pressures, but she was sure it was the same in principle. When the airlock had been open to space it had been filled with nothing but vacuum. Now that it was facing the interior it was refilling with whatever atmosphere existed inside 2I.
She looked down at the trace gas analyzer mounted on the front of her HUT. A line of green lights extended across its tiny screen, and then a series of symbols and percentages scrolled up. “Argon,” she said. “Not much of it, about a fiftieth of an atmosphere. A little water vapor, yeah.” She watched the particles of vapor whiz across her vision. “You think anything living could breathe argon?”
Like aliens, she meant, but she was leery of using that word, especially there. Speak of the devil and he doth appear.
“I don’t know,” Stevens said. “That’s Rao’s specialty, astrobiology. We can ask her when we get back.”
“Right,” Jansen said.
She was scared. Normally she would have tried to hide that from Stevens—both as his mission commander and because she didn’t like people thinking she was weak. Now she couldn’t care less. If he wasn’t just as terrified as she, he was an idiot.
“This isn’t cool,” she said. “Is it?”
“I’m about to shit my pants,” he said.
“That’s why astronauts wear maximum absorbency garments under their space suits,” she told him. “OK. This isn’t going to get any easier.” She kicked off the wall of the airlock, launching herself toward the aperture that now led directly into 2I’s interior. She put out her hands to grab the lip of the opening—then yanked them back in a hurry.
Something had gone flashing past her. Something solid.
Well—not flashing past. It was actually moving pretty slowly, though at a steady pace. She followed it with her suit lights and saw what looked like a metal knob moving around the circumference of the aperture. A bright-orange safety line was tied to it, leading out of sight.
The line moved away from her—everything beyond the aperture was moving, revolving around the opening. It took her a second to understand what was going on. She poked her head through the aperture and moved her lights around in a circle. She saw that what lay beyond the aperture was a cone that flared out away from her at a nearly forty-five degree angle, as if she were at the bottom of a rotating bowl with steep sides. The orange safety line marched up the wall of the cone, stretching out of the range of her lights.
She timed the cone’s motion and found it made a full rotation every three minutes, maybe a little less. It was easy enough for her to climb up into the cone and grab the rope. It pulled her along as if she’d jumped onto a merry-go-round and grabbed one of the horses’ tails.
She looked back and saw Stevens’s helmet, his face lost in the glare of his suit lights. He slid away from her, rotating until he was upside down. No, she thought. She was the one rotating. He was standing still, inside the airlock, which didn’t rotate.
“Come on,” she said. “Looks like we’re climbing from here.”
SUNNY STEVENS: When I saw that the entrance to 2I was rotating, I had a pretty clear idea what was going on. 2I was much too small to generate gravity like you would get on a planet. The interior of the ship was one big drum centrifuge, rotating to generate centripetal acceleration. We didn’t feel any gravity there, at the center of the rotation, but as we descended into 2I, we would feel more and more of it the farther we got from the axis. How much gravity we would eventually experience was impossible to say at that point. I would have needed to know the radius of the drum and how fast it was rotating. We could only speculate.
Once the two of them were out of the airlock, it started to rotate back to its starting position. Soon the aperture rotated away from them, and they were looking at a smooth hemisphere at the end of the cone.
Jansen was no fool. Before they started climbing she tested how they were going to get back. Luckily, that was easy. It turned out even the slightest touch on the back side of the airlock made it cycle again until they could access the aperture. They had a way back, when the time came.
Once they found Wanderer’s crew.
At first they had to pull themselves along the rope, hand over hand.
Jansen had no doubt that KSpace had left the rope there for exactly that purpose. It was pencil thin, made of braided Kevlar. Bright orange—the same color she’d seen splashed all over Wanderer. KSpace’s color. From her perspective the rope didn’t hang straight but had a subtle curve. Even the small part of it she could see in her suit lights was distinctly curved to the left. Coriolis force, she figured. It felt strange—what about this place didn’t?—but it was just physics. Nice, normal, predictable physics.
The rope was tied off to a piton that Foster and his crew had hammered into the surface of the cone. They had guts, she had to give them that. They would have had no idea how 2I would react to having a spike hammered into its skin. They’d just figured they needed a climbing rope, so they’d installed one.
It was utterly dark inside the cone. The only light came from her suit lamps. She kept them pointed at the rope so she could see where she was going, but that meant she couldn’t see anything else. Darkness hovered over her. It crouched on every side. The dancing motes of water in the air meant she could see out to only about twenty meters—beyond that could be anything.
The cone kept expanding, the curve of the floor becoming shallower as they went on. They were like ants climbing down inside the neck of an empty soda bottle, having no idea what they would find ahead of them. The geometry of the place left her feeling disoriented and confused. Soon it didn’t feel as if she was in a conical space at all, but merely as if she were pulling herself along a perfectly flat, perfectly vertical wall. It was an illusion, but it was one that was hard to shake.
She wished she could. She felt she was no longer inside an object with a solid hull—instead she felt as if she’d been transported to the surface of some featureless, endless planet. The darkness around her was infinite, stretching out in all directions. Space had never felt that empty. That absolute.
At first she tried calling out, using her suit radio to call for Foster and his people. To try to make contact. There was no response, so eventually she stopped calling. Stopped talking. It was work, hauli
ng herself along like that. She could hear her own breathing, heavy and rough inside her helmet.
Stevens was behind her. Maybe it was easier for him—all he had to do was follow her. Jansen didn’t think to ask. She just kept moving, forward into the dark.
Eventually she noticed that the tips of her boots were dragging on the floor. She stopped for a second and tried to stand up. It wasn’t easy, but she managed to keep herself stable. She wanted to scuff her boots against the wall—which was now becoming a floor—but she knew that doing so might launch her off into space.
Away from the rope.
She reached into a pocket of her suit and took out two small, complicated devices like carabiners, each with gears and a tiny motor mounted on one end. She’d taken them from Wanderer. These were what the 3-D printer had been making when she broke into their orbital module. She’d wondered, at the time, what KSpace wanted with climbing gear. Now she understood.
The carabiners were belaying devices. Motorized ascenders. Designed to keep mountain climbers from falling off their ropes. The motor would help you climb back up, too, making it a lot easier than using only your muscles.
She turned around and showed Stevens how to clip one of the devices to a D ring on his suit, then thread the rope through the gears. If they started to fall, if they moved too fast in any direction, the gears would mesh together and clamp down on the rope, braking them. The motors connected directly to their suits’ power supplies, but for the moment she left them unplugged. They would be a lot more useful on the return trip, when they needed to climb all the way back to the airlock.
For now—she took a step forward. Gingerly lowered her boot onto the surface. She wasn’t sure what the inner hull was made of, but it was rough enough to give her a little traction. She took another step, holding on tight to the rope.
She looked back at Stevens. She saw his face inside his helmet. His forehead was beaded with sweat. Sweat that was starting to trickle down his cheeks.
She nodded. He nodded back. She turned to face the rope again. Took another step.
Soon they were walking easily. The floor had become a slope. She could feel a gentle tug from below, like a hand grabbing her belt and pulling her forward, into the dark.
That was just gravity. Gravity was OK.
She fought to control her breathing. Took a step. Another.
Her light caught something just ahead. Something that wasn’t just more rope. She hurried forward, her feet slipping a little.
The orange rope ran out about five hundred meters down from where they’d started. It was tied off to another piton.
Just beyond that was a third piton. It anchored a second length of rope, falling away into the dark.
SALLY JANSEN: As we descended, through the dark, the slope felt like it was getting steeper and steeper. It wasn’t—the gravity was just getting stronger, so it felt like if we let go of the rope we would just fall straight down. There was another consequence of the increasing gravity. I started feeling very nauseous. I knew right away why. For nearly a month I’d been living in microgravity. My internal organs had all climbed up into my rib cage. Now they were racing to get back where they belonged, and my stomach was in last place. I knew I could handle it. I wasn’t going to vomit inside my helmet. I was a little worried for Stevens, though.
When they found a third rope below the second, it was bad. When they found the fourth rope, Stevens barely shook his head in disgust.
The fifth rope was probably the hardest.
The gravity increased with every meter they descended. He started feeling heavy, as if his suit were full of rocks. His feet started to slip—if it hadn’t been for their belaying devices, they would just slide downward, into the mist, into the dark…
The thought of it kept at him. It kept popping into his mental space, even as he tried to think of other things. He tried working out math in his head, trying to figure out how big the drum could possibly be. He thought about gyroscopic precession and nutation, about the fact that the outer hull of 2I ought to be rotating as well, in the opposite direction from the drum. The universe outside the drum felt very far away, though. The rope in front of him was right there.
If he unclipped his ascender and just let go…
He would slide at first, and then, as his speed increased, he would start to roll. By that point he wouldn’t be able to stop himself.
He would keep accelerating. He would fall faster and faster, exponentially so, as the hungry gravity sucked him down into the murk. There wasn’t enough air pressure here to provide any significant drag—
He took long shallow breaths and tried to focus on the climbing. When they reached the sixth rope, Jansen insisted on stopping for a minute, both to take a rest and to try calling Wanderer’s crew on the radio, again. He supposed he was glad for the rest. His legs ached from the constant stress of walking down the slope, of bracing himself with every footfall. When the break ended, though, he found a new kind of anguish awaiting him.
From this point on, Jansen decided, they were going to go down backward.
The gravity had grown strong enough that they weren’t walking down a ramp. They were climbing down a steep hill. They would use their hands and their belaying devices to rappel down the rest of the way.
They got themselves turned around. For a second they had to unclip their ascenders from their D rings, which meant they were holding themselves up by pure muscle power. It took Stevens three tries to get his ascender to clip back on.
Jansen reached up and slapped his boot. Time to go.
Backward. Down into the dark. Hand over hand on the rope. The ascender took most of his weight. Still, within minutes his arms were burning.
That was bad. The dark was worse.
Before, he’d been behind Jansen. He could see her lights ahead of him, could see that the world existed down there. Now all he could see was a patch of the slope behind them, a little double pool of radiance made by his own suit lights. The light shifted and bounced around. Most of the time he could see the rope he was holding on to. Sometimes he couldn’t.
He was intimately aware of the vast volume of darkness all around him. Above him, to either side. There could be anything out there. Some enormous monster reaching toward him with silent claws. Aliens watching him with inhuman senses, waiting for the right moment to swoop in and snatch him away from the slope. To drag him upward, always screaming, into nothingness.
They found a seventh rope. And then an eighth.
The mist got thicker as they descended. Their suit lights speared out for maybe ten meters, then five. Beyond the glowing vapor there was… nothing.
He tried thinking about Sandra. She had come this way, climbed down this very same rope. Had she spent the whole time wondering what it would be like to let go?
No, she wasn’t like that. He didn’t think she’d had a dark thought in her life. Sandra had been bright and chirpy and fun—their dates had been little adventures. She’d taken him on a bicycle tour of wineries in Northern California, once—a long day of riding and drinking until they could barely steer their bikes and she’d fallen off of hers but still she’d been laughing, still she’d thought it was hilarious, and when he ran to help she dragged him down into an avocado field or something and she pulled down her bike shorts and they’d fucked right there, under blue sky and in the smell of growing things—
Sandra was still here, somewhere in the drum. Maybe dead. Maybe badly hurt and unable to get back to the ropes.
He couldn’t imagine that, not clearly. It was impossible someone like her could exist in this eternal darkness.
He thought of Parminder. He wondered if he would ever see her again.
The ninth rope was the hardest. He’d been wrong about the fifth rope. Back then, he’d thought maybe this descent could end. That there was a level floor below them, something they were working toward.
As he slid down the ninth rope, a little at a time, bracing himself with his feet against the slick
floor, the darkness filled the inside of his head and he stopped thinking rational thoughts at all. His brain was glued to the bottom of his skull, and he could only slide, and stop, and slide, and stop, because that was what he did now.
Slide and stop. Listen for the sound of Jansen sliding down. Wait for the rope to stop shaking. Then it was his turn. Slide, slow down, stop. Wait for Jansen. Kick off the wall. Slide. Slow down. Bring his feet up to catch the wall. Brace himself.
His arms felt as if they were being pulled out of their sockets.
Kick off the wall. Slide. Slow down. Stop.
Nothing but mist…
There was a tenth rope. Of course there was a tenth rope. There couldn’t not be a tenth rope.
Kick off the wall. Slide.
He closed his eyes, just for a moment. It didn’t matter. The ascender caught him, slowed his fall. It would be faster if he let go. All he had to do was unclip. Gravity would do the rest.
Kick off—slide—slow—stop—legs up—brace—wait—kick off—
When they reached the bottom of the fourteenth rope, Jansen reached up and grabbed his boot. She was saying something, he realized. She’d been talking to him for a long time.
He’d been so lost in his own nonthoughts that her voice seemed to come to him from very, very far away. At first he couldn’t make sense of the words.
She shouted, her mouth wide behind her faceplate.
“We’re here.”
SALLY JANSEN: Fourteen ropes. Climbing down was… It wasn’t much fun, it… There were fourteen ropes. Seven kilometers total, fourteen ropes of five hundred meters each. Fourteen ropes, and… fourteen ropes, and we made it to the bottom. Fourteen.
The slope never really ended. It just became so gentle that Jansen felt as if she were walking on level ground. When she was sure she wouldn’t fall, she unclipped from the final rope and stumbled forward a meter or so, then slumped to the ground.
Jesus, her knees hurt. Years of jogging had given her calves of steel but worn out the cartilage in her knees. It felt as if someone had hammered a spike into her left leg. Her shoulders were ridiculously tight, and her back…
The Last Astronaut Page 11