“Me?” She blinked. “I’ve been head of the Education Committee for the World Council. For five years now.”
“That was your dream.” He smiled. “Congratulations.”
“This isn’t about me. Wil . . . what happened?”
He sighed again. “Did they show you a warrant? Of course they’d have one,” he said as she nodded. “They weren’t from the World Council.” He lifted a hand as her brow furrowed. Smiled gently. “You can look like anything or anyone if you spend enough credit. You can have all the right credentials. Yes, a splinter of that fairy-tale mirror did get stuck in my eye, Gertrude.” He shivered as he said her full name out loud. “I opened my eye and let them put it there. The software was experimental all right. It was clever nanoware. It turned me into a . . . a very efficient computer virus. A human one.”
“That kind of nanoware is illegal.”
“You’re getting it.” He nodded, smiling. “I realized what the information I was harvesting had to mean. And I decided . . .” He ran out of words. He wasn’t a hero, wasn’t a patriot. It just felt . . . wrong. Deeply wrong.
“Oh, my God.” She was staring at him, the gold spoon bending in her white-knuckled clutch. “You were running? Wil!” It came out a cry of pain. “Why didn’t you let me know? I would have helped you . . .”
He shook his head. “I took the nano voluntarily,” he said harshly. “For very good pay, by the way. It’s illegal to enter into that kind of transaction, Gerta. No excuses. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life with a supervision collar around my neck.” And . . . it would have destroyed her dream of a Council committee chair. Because they had been lovers. The Council was very, very conservative about connections among its highest officers. It would have tainted her forever, her defense of him. “How did you find me?” He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes, so that red and orange webbed the blackness behind his eyelids. “Nobody has a real name or history here.”
“It was a postcard.” She laughed, a short, harsh note. “A colleague of mine has a wayward son. And he bought a one-way to Europa. The ultimate act of rebellion.” She laughed again. “Or maybe he has his own splinter of that evil mirror. But he sent her a holo clip of the Ice Palace. She was showing it around, mad at him, sort of proud of him too, I think, for doing something, even if it was just to book transport out to the most godforsaken hole in the solar system. And as I was looking at the holo I saw . . . you.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I recognized you in a second.”
Officially, tourists were supposed to ask . . . read that: pay . . . for permission to record locals. Qai closed his eyes. But of course they didn’t bother. And he hadn’t noticed the holographer. That’s partly why he avoided the Ice Palace, he thought bitterly. Because of the occasional tourists and their frenzy of recording. He was the epitome of the patched-and-scruffy Europa moss miner.
“How can you live here?” Gert hunched her shoulders. “I’m not claustrophobic but it gets to me . . . stuck down here under miles of ice. It’s awful.” She flicked the rim of the cookpot with one fingertip. “Everything stinks, there’s no real light, is there? Just that weird glow. I’d go crazy.”
“Yeah, you probably would.” Qai pried the spoon from her hand, dropped it into the crusted pot along with his own. “You loved the tundra too.” He smiled. “But it was the horizon you loved, as I recall.”
“So what did you love?” One blond eyebrow rose.
“The quiet voice of the land.” He ducked out of the tent, instantly cold in his therms, scooped seawater into the pot and left it for the voracious little microswimmers to scour clean. They’d have it spotless long before the water froze.
She was sitting up straight when he ducked, shivering, back inside. “How can you stand it out there in your underwear?”
“It’s pretty warm underwear.”
“You can come home.” Her eyes blazed with triumph. “I have the power, Wil. I haven’t been coasting, you know. I’ve built a very solid power base in the Council.” She was speaking quickly now, her avalanche of logic designed to overwhelm any argument he might offer. It was so . . . Gerta. For the first time, tears clenched the back of his throat.
“Yes, you’ll be punished, Wil, but I can arrange it so that you’re under my official supervision. I have the pull. And that means you’ll be under the World Council’s authority, so you don’t have to worry about any kind of retaliation from your employer, and—”
“Gerta . . . stop.” He took her face between his hands, the heat of her skin scorching his palms as he leaned across the distance between them. Her fingers brushed his throat, and, with a small cry, she tugged the pendant from beneath his therms.
“The ammonite. The one I gave you for your birthday.” Tears glimmered in her eyes as she took his face between her palms. Her breath smelled of Europa’s sea, but her skin, as his lips closed on hers, tasted of Gerta. He groaned softly with memory as her mouth softened beneath his, their bodies melting together, the gulf of years and cold gone in a heartbeat, so that he smelled the cold tundra wind as he rolled onto her, careful of her splinted arm, his mouth and hands remembering yesterday as she arched beneath him. They drowsed after, and he pulled his ice suit over to cover her, curled around her to keep her warm in the air that was warm to him, too cold to her.
He lay on his side, his arm across her splinted arm lightly, remembering nights so long ago, the moss singing softly in his head, in his blood. Rose, purple, yellow, scarlet, he let the voices wash him away, into the ice, spreading his awareness through the veins of the Snow Queen so that he beat with the measure of her heart, breathed with her . . .
. . . woke to claws, started upright, head full of vague dreams of tundra grass.
“You scared me.” Gerta let go of his hand, pulled his ice suit tunic around her shoulders. “You didn’t wake up.”
“Sorry,” he mumbled, stretching. He faked a yawn, trying to calm her.
“Your eyes were . . . were white. Rolled clear back.” She edged away from him. “I pinched you. Really hard. You didn’t even twitch.”
“I was just asleep.” He smiled, but she retreated a few centimeters more. A vague burn on the back of his bare hand drew his eye. Two tiny red crescents seeped blood. “You pinched hard,” he said dryly. “We need to go.”
“Go where?” She pulled farther away, good arm folded protectively across her chest. “It was like you were dead. What was that?”
Qai closed his eyes briefly. “Let me tell you about the moss.” He opened his eyes, gave her a lopsided smile. “Jupiter’s magnetic field here changes direction every five and a half hours. That creates some . . . interesting effects. Mostly it affects the oceans—that’s how the original explorers guessed that Europa had water under the surface. The pole changes position every time the field changes.” He smiled grimly at her. “But it affects every living creature on the planet too. Most especially . . . the moss.”
“The moss?” She looked at him uncertainly.
“Moss is an Earth term.” He shrugged. “Because it’s fuzzy-looking, I guess.” He smiled. “Although I think all Earth moss is green. The stuff here isn’t moss.” He studied her blue, warrior eyes, so appropriate to her name. “Think of the moss as neurons,” he said evenly.
That took a couple of seconds to sink in and then her eyes widened. “But . . .”
“Oh, it’s more plant than animal, although I don’t think either really apply to Europan life.” He laughed softly, although he felt bleak inside. “But yeah, they’re like neurons.” He waited for her to catch up.
“But it’s everywhere . . . the ice.” She waved vaguely at the walls of the tent. “So you’re saying . . . the planet . . . thinks?”
“Oh, no,” he said. “But the moss is aware. And . . . I can hear it sing. Well, that doesn’t really describe it . . . it’s not a sound.” He sighed. “I don’t think we have a word for it.” He closed his eyes briefly, wanting with a visceral ache to show her, to share it
with her, that wordless awareness, that immensity, that vast, enormous sense of boundless time. He opened his eyes and tried to smile. “I think the software I’m carrying does it . . . nobody else I know has ever said that they’re aware of the moss voice. It’s . . . beautiful.” He shook his head, frustrated. The words didn’t exist to describe it, she wasn’t going to understand, and there wasn’t time.
“I can use it,” he said crisply. “I can become aware of what’s in the ice around me. And we’ve been followed.” He began to pull on his ice suit as he spoke. “I suspect they managed to chip you somehow. They must have decided that I had contacted you or that you are simply a better guesser than they are.” He pulled his ice boots on. “We need to start running, Gerta. I don’t think they’ll let you live if I leave you behind. Even if I hadn’t told you, they’d worry that I had.”
“You’re talking about the corporation that manufactured the nanoware.” Gerta’s eyes widened with comprehension.
“That’s why I brought you out here instead of to the Ice Palace and the hospital. One of them was right behind me.” Dressed, he unsealed the tent, letting in a chill breath of sea. “We can’t really lose him, but if I can get you back to the Ice Palace, you can check into the tourist hostel there and take the next transport downside. If you’re careful, you can avoid them. Just make sure you’re always in a very public place and don’t let strangers get close to you.” He did a quick mental calculation as he slid through the tent opening. “The next transport stops here day after tomorrow. After that, I don’t think another one is scheduled for three tendays. Getting you there in time will be cutting it close, but I think we can do it if most of the naturals I know are still open.” He slithered backward through the opening of the tent before she could voice the protest rising in her eyes.
Outside, he pulled up his handline, released the purple and orange slug that had digested the bait, and coiled up the line, stowing it and the polished-clean cookpot on the sled. Gerta was crawling out of the tent, awkward with her bad shoulder.
“You’re coming back to Earth with me.” Still on her hands and knees, she looked up at him with those warrior eyes. “I wasn’t kidding when I said I could fix things. It won’t hurt my career, Wil, and I won’t leave you here in this frozen hell.”
“I really wish you’d call me Qai. Touch that red spot on the tent, will you? That deflates it.” He skidded the board into position in front of the sled. “We’re going to have to run high. The upper ice shifts all the time and maps are pretty useless. And the oxygen pressure is low.” He hesitated. “You’re going to be pretty uncomfortable, but so will our shadow, if he’s not native.”
“Don’t worry about me,” Gerta said grimly.
The tent had finished deflating. He folded it, slipped it into its case, and webbed the load down on the sled. “Here.” He handed her an energy bar from his emergency rations. “It should taste a little better than the stew last night, anyway.”
“It doesn’t,” she mumbled with her mouth full.
He took the time to filter his bottles full although the back of his neck tingled with threat. The stranger’s presence he’d detected while he was listening to the moss had been huge and loud. Translate that as “close.” But they wouldn’t have time to stop and melt ice to filter for drinking while they were running.
“I can’t believe I’m carrying a chip.” She finished the last bites of the bar. “How could someone do that?”
“Oh, it’s easy. You probably ate something. Toss the wrapper into the water.”
“Littering?”
“Feeding. Watch.”
She tossed the crumbled wrapper into the dark water. The surface erupted instantly, boiling like water in a cookpot. The wrapper seemed to melt away in moments, like a flake of ice on a cookpad.
“What happened?” She stared at the now-smooth water.
“Think of that ocean as one huge appetite.” He cinched the webbing down tight. “Let’s go.”
“What if we fall in?”
“Just don’t.” He stepped onto his board. “Stand behind me and put your arms around my waist. Remember when we used to ride your Uncle Tor’s big old Clydesdale? Remember how we had to kind of be the same body or we pulled each other off? Just do that. If we start going fast, close your eyes. You’ll flinch as things rush at you and we might go over. Boards are very responsive.”
“Okay.” Stress tightened her voice. “Let’s hope you’re wrong about all this.”
Qai kicked the board into start mode. It surged slowly forward as the sled energized, lifting smoothly. He banked into a long curve along the end of the upwell. Their pursuer was behind them. Qai studied the melt-polished walls, searching for a good-sized natural leading up. He spied a likely one, a little narrow for a board towing a sled . . . just as something smacked into the ice wall beside them. Grains of ice stung his face and he caught a glimpse of orange as he heeled the board hard into the natural. Bless Gerta, she had melted to him, her balance shifting with his so that the board didn’t even wobble. No more time to be picky. He toed the speed up, leaning forward to counter the nose’s rise as the sled dragged at it, praying that this was a good choice as they shot through the blue-green dusk of the moss-lined crevice.
“What happened?” Gerta shouted over the rush of their passage.
“Dart.” He leaned into a branch as the natural forked, heading antispinward, toward the Ice Palace. The sled touched the wall and the board shied. For a moment their balance hung by a thread, then he caught it, Gerta balancing flawlessly with him, and they sped down the narrow natural in near-darkness now, because this was a new opening and the first traceries of blue-green moss had barely established.
“It’s dark,” she yelled.
“Can’t risk the floods.” He leaned forward, squinting to make out the path of the natural, watching for fractures, for fallen chunks of ice. New naturals like this could be unstable, could shift and close in an instant. “These cracks channel light for hundreds of meters. We hope he takes the wrong branch. Hang on.” He kicked the board into a hard brake, the towline slackening for an instant before the sled braked. Got to tell Karina that his synchro was off, he thought as the board kissed the wall of the new branch, the sled hitting it harder. The board slewed wildly and he fought for control as the side-to-side sway slowly damped out. Behind them, ice dust drifted in the blue-green twilight, the heavier particles dropping in slow motion to the floor. Damn. Talk about leaving a sign. A fairly wide natural opened on the left, new enough that no moss yet illuminated the narrow gap. A desperate choice, but hopefully their pursuer would think he was desperate. He slewed the board so that the sled caught the far edge of the opening. More ice exploded from the wall, drifting like a thin veil where the side branch met the main natural.
Perfect. He strained his eyes in the near-darkness. If he was lucky . . . if another leftward branch opened.
It did, not a dozen meters farther down the natural they were traveling. Qai slowed the board this time, eased the sled into the new corridor, so narrow here that they had less than a half meter of clearance on either side of the board. This was an older rift. Traceries of blue-green moss laced the walls, providing just enough light to spot any ice falls ahead. He sped up, blessing their luck.
“What are we doing?” Gerta murmured in his ear.
“He’ll see the dust drifting and think we took the last natural.” Qai hoped. “If he’s scanning you, we’re heading in about the same direction as that natural so he may be fooled into taking it.” That would give them more time to get lost in the maze of cracks and crevices up here. By the time he backed out of the decoy and found the right natural, they would have had time to make a lot of turns and he’d have a much harder time tracking them.
They were moving fast again, now, and the natural was leading surfaceward. He felt Gerta’s shuddering breaths but there was nothing he could do about the air except hope the natural led back down before she passed out. Even he was breathing
faster. Qai kept his eyes fixed on the dim limit of visibility, watching for a fall of ice that might block the path. So far so good. They passed another natural, wide enough for the sled. Again, Qai slowed and veered just enough to catch the edge of the opening a glancing blow, this time with the board. Gerta clung to him as it skidded sideways. Behind them, more ice chips swirled in the disturbed air of their passage.
If he knew ice, Qai thought, their pursuer would stop to read the pattern of the settled dust and he’d know they’d cruised on by. If he was a hired assassin, brought to the Queen for this job, he wouldn’t know to do that. “Hang on,” he murmured and toed the board up to speed. “Next opening to the right we take,” he said.
The natural straightened and widened. The younger rift must have caught the tip of this older natural and now they were getting into the main run. The moss thickened, streaked with yellow and pink species so that the light brightened. Qai toed more speed and leaned forward, Gerta moving with him as if they had merged into a single body. They were going to make it, he thought exultantly. He could put a lot of distance between them while their pursuer stopped to check side branches for traces of their passage. They’d have time to get back to the Ice Palace ahead of him.
A wide opening yawned on the left, a new run, the walls where it had broken into this older crevice fractured and buckled. Shards of ice tumbled out across the main crevice and only a few thin patches of moss offered feeble light.
In the depths of that darkness . . . something moved.
Qai looked, the board rocking, nearly losing his balance. Sudden light flared, blinding him. A board’s front flood. He wrenched himself straight on the board, stomped it up to top speed. “Hang on,” he yelled, his stomach knotting.
So much for luck. Their pursuer had taken the bait, but the decoy natural had connected up to this one. What were the chances? He tasted bile, bent forward, the board rocking with its speed, his eyes fixed on the dim edge of vision. An ice fall coming up. Low enough to get over but . . . “Hang on tight!” He held his breath, watching the tumble of dirty ice speeding toward them . . . twenty meters . . . ten . . . Now! He stomped the nose of the board down, felt Gerta’s weight pushing him, then kicked the heel down, leaning forward desperately as the nose leaped up, palm slapping it to keep it from flipping over, cutting the towline loose at the same time. Freed of the sled’s drag, the board bucked and he nearly went off, felt Gerta catch her balance, steady him. Then he had his balance back again, slowed, and sneaked a look back.
The New Space Opera Page 41