by Adam Roberts
‘The scrubber will produce a little water, I think,’ said Jac. ‘The reaction takes the carbon from the see-oh-too and—’
‘You’ll be quieter,’ snarled Marit, ‘when I rip out your tongue.’
Jac, smiled, but said nothing more.
It was colder than could easily be expressed, colder than any of them had known before. As Davide said, repeatedly, in tones of gruff incredulity, it was amazing that human beings could exist for any length of time in such cold without simply expiring. They were wearing whatever they had been wearing when they were arrested – tunics, trows, dish-shoes. None of them were in cold-weather gear. Their breath burst from them in great cloudy bursts like ectoplasm; their eyelids kept sticking together as the moisture froze. Working helped a little; and a couple of them imitated Davide’s exercises: furious running up one wall and down the other. At other times they clumped together, scowling, for shared warmth.
The cold was very hard to bear, but the thirst was worse. The dry air and the effortful labour of drilling parched their mouths; their tongues felt like dry horns, the roofs of their mouths were swollen and hard and caked in dust. Their muscles ached from operating the machine, or else from the constant shivering. The seven of them bickered amongst themselves constantly, and there were occasional flare-ups; but nobody had the energy to pursue it. Rock crumbled laboriously from the biting parts of the drills. They stopped continually, examined the face of excavation and checked for ice. It was only rock, nothing but rock.
‘Days,’ said Lwon. ‘Without water, we won’t last more than that. We may not even last that, given that it is so cold.’
But Jac was right; one of the side-effects of the scrubber clearing CO2 from the air was a thin trickle of water from a spigot on the cylinder’s side. It was barely enough to wet a single tongue, let alone supply seven labouring men with sufficient fluid. And given that fact, it possessed the potential to focus strife amongst the seven of them to dangerous levels.
Lwon announced that they would take turns at this trickle, and although Marit loudly challenged his right to make this announcement, everybody agreed. There was no other way. Davide went first, and then Lwon. But it took many hours for the spigot to refill, and with each person to wet his whistle the mood of the group as a whole became more sour.
Matters came to a head quicker than Jac expected. Ennemi-du-Concorde broke off digging and floated towards the spigot. As he approached the scrubber, Marit said: ‘I am next. You take your turn – after me.’
Without so much as looking at him, E-d-C growled: ‘try to stop me and I’ll tear your jaw off.’
E-d-C lifted the massy, weightless scrubber in both hands to bring the spigot to his mouth. At once Marit struck. He launched himself from the wall with both legs and collided hard with E-d-C. The two men spun about in an arc, pivoting over the sliding scrubber. But the space was so confined there was hardly any room for them to scrap. E-d-C’s spine smacked audibly against the wall. Marit started landing blows, like a boxer at close quarters, in at E-d-C’s ribs and stomach. Jac could see that he was holding a piece of rock in his right hand.
But Lwon acted with impressive speed. He was on Marit’s back almost at once, calling to Davide to help, and in moments the two of them had disengaged the struggling Marit. In the course of this, Davide received a stone-holding fist blow on the side of his head, and this did not improve his mood. But then E-d-C swam over to join in, and the three men began pounding Marit.
This punitive battery didn’t last long. The next thing was that Marit, solus, was rotating slowly in the middle of the space, curled into a ball, coughing and shivering. He was a human spindle, and he was drawing a thread of tiny red beads about himself. The thread was coming from his mouth. E-d-C took what little water was in the spigot into his mouth, and, watching him, Jac felt the dryness in his own mouth that much more intensely.
They dug on. Marit sulked in the corner for a bit, but when Lwon kicked him gently and told him to take a turn at the digger, he did as he was instructed.
They dug, thirsting and frozen, for hours. ‘I’ve never felt so physically miserable,’ Mo announced to the group, finishing a shift with the digger, hugging himself and pressing himself close to the fusion cell. ‘It is literally impossible that I could sleep. Sleep is simply an impossibility.’ But he fell instantly into unconsciousness anyway, and Lwon moved his body away from the vent.
Gordius said: ‘we are going to die.’
‘This headache is enough to make me want to excavate my own skull with the digger,’ growled E-d-C.
There was nothing to do but go on. Their environment acquired a hallucinatory aspect. The dark grey walls. The way the continuous brightness of the lightstick laid a straight set of bars and shafts and lines through the cluttered, dusty air of their space. At one point Jac thought the walls were sweating, and pressed his face against it to discover only icy dryness and bitter-tasting dust. There were ashes lining the inside his throat. There was a throb to the fabric of spacetime. The box was not shut sufficiently tightly. The voice was leaking out. Jac listened to the voice, or ignored it, indifferently. It hardly mattered. He was hours from death. They all were.
The drill ground on. Jac felt it inside his own teeth. There were microscopic people trapped in his teeth, clearing the space with minuscule diggers. His nerves sang.
His turn on the machine. He pressed it against the rock, and it moved through the material with a painful slowness.
Everybody’s lips were the colour of the walls.
‘Wait,’ cried Lwon. ‘Wait.’ He was poking his hand at the front of his digger, the skin on his neck twitching with micro-shivers. Jac had this thought: if I lean over and turn the switch on his machine, the digger will devour his hand and arm, and he will die. He restrained the impulse, of course. He felt giddy, nauseous, freaky. Punchy, skittish. Ill, dry, dry, dry.
Lwon was holding something in front of him. It looked like a piece of coal. ‘Ice,’ he said.
Lwon had hit a seam: some cometary body folded into the making of this rock billions of years ago, either dragged in by gravity, or arriving via random collision. Ancient water, older than the oceans of Earth over which the Ancient of Days had brooded in the Book of Genesis. The frozen apotheosis of the origin of things.
They scrabbled enough ice for everyone from the wall. It was painful to suck on it, and it tasted foully of the gunpowdery dust with which it was mixed, but – enduring the cold of it and ignoring the shivers – it was water, and water settled into their stomachs. With water came an awareness of profound hunger, and the seven of them raided the biscuits. Jac decided the best bet was to crunch crumbs together with ground-up ice and take it into the mouth all in one go.
They ate and drank. They shivered and shivered. Nobody drilled for several hours. Instead they clustered together about the fusion cell and dozed, or simply hung there. They were too tired even to celebrate.
Lwon soon roused them. ‘The biscuits will soon be gone,’ he said, forcing his shivering lips around the words. ‘Now we have the ice, we need to grow the spores, and that won’t happen overnight.’ Sluggishly, they gathered ice and tried to arrange it near the lightstick. Microgravity made this hard, until Davide suggested gouging a trench in the rock and packing it with ice.
This took several hours, and when finished there wasn’t enough ice to fill it, so Lwon took the digger back into the seam to extend it. Finally they were able to pack chunks of ice into the trench. Everyone’s fingers were purple with cold. E-d-C broke open the first of the spore envelopes – they had only been supplied with three of them – and pressed the glucky contents onto the ice.
‘Now, we wait,’ he said, trying to warm his hands again by hiding them in his armpits.
‘No,’ said Lwon. ‘Now, we dig.’
There was no day and no night. The light pole shone all the time. E-d-C started scratching a tally on the ceiling – no point in scoring it onto the rock, he observed, since over the years ahead of
them they were going to dig all of that away. He marked it by his own sleeps, figuring that from waking to waking was roughly one mondial day. Jac suspected that E-d-C was a napper; that he might sleep ten times in two days, only ever brief periods, easily woken by the slightest jolt. But he didn’t say anything. It hardly mattered. And prolonged sleep was hard for all of them, because it was so cold. Exhaustion would overtake them and they would slumber, but then after a short time their own shivers would wake them.
Soon enough E-d-C gave up bothering with his tally.
The biscuits were all gone, but the ghunk had not yet bloomed from black to green. Davide tried eating the black paste, but ended up throwing it up. ‘So it doesn’t taste like caviar?’ Lwon asked, sarcastically. ‘Be patient, boys! It’s the green stuff we want, green is the ghunk with all the necessary nutrients. It won’t be long now!’
They went hungry. There was at least water, now; ice from the vein they had discovered, to augment the dribbles from the spigot of the scrubber.
Davide gave up his exercise regimen. He simply didn’t have the energy.
It was still shiveringly cold, all the time. They kept the fusion cell continually on, heating at the top of its range; but its range had been deliberately limited by the Gongsi, and although it put out some small warmth the rock around was so very cold that it chilled the air. ‘We’re not going to warm our air pocket until we’ve raised the temperature of this whole blocking rock,’ growled Mo. Gordius started to say that, since rock was a poor conductor, they wouldn’t need to heat the whole thing; just enough of the rock immediately around them to insulate them from the larger cold. But the others yelled at him, and Marit threw a shard of stone with a baseball pitcher’s force and accuracy straight at his head. It cut a <>-shaped gouge in Gordius’s forehead. Blood beaded out. This made Jac angry. ‘What are you doing?’ he yelled. ‘Hey!’ The others had never seen the legless man angry before, and decided to find it richly amusing. Gordius had gone silent and pale. Jac tended the big-fellow’s wound, pressing the corner of his tunic until the bleeding stopped.
‘I think that upset you more than it did him, Leggy,’ taunted Marit. ‘You in love with the fat boy, or something?’
‘He was explaining the problem of heating this space,’ Jac replied. ‘It’s no reason to cut his skin.’
The others laughed some more, and gave up.
They didn’t understand the situation, anyway, Jac thought. The slow action of the fusion cell was heating such of the icy rock as was exposed to the air. But every day they cut away precisely that rock, and ejected the gravel to space. They were, he reflected, inadvertently working to keep their own environment chilly. Still: there was nothing they could do about that, except endure it.
They went hungry for days. This did nothing to improve their tempers. But finally, one day, one batch of ghunk went green.
The first meal was special. As they ate it, the group almost approached a kind of camaraderie. The first crop of ghunk was plentiful enough for everybody to have as much as they liked, and it tasted – well, it tasted like the starvation had been pushed away to arms’-length again. Stomachs shrunken by hunger were soon filled; and afterwards everybody hung in space or lay against the wall, hugging themselves to try and stay warm. From time to time, somebody would go to the scrubber’s spigot and gather a bundle of glass beads of water. ‘Can we modify the spores?’ Davide asked, after a while. ‘Tweak them? Encourage them to make alcohol?’
Nobody answered, so Gordius, looking timidly from face to face as if expecting immediate rebuke, said: ‘theoretically it ought to be possible. But I’d bet you a credit to a crater the strain they’ve given us has been gene-tagged to block developments like that.’
‘That would be just like them,’ E-d-C agreed, placidly. ‘Not that it would cost them anything. What do they care how we wait out our time here? Drunk for eleven years straight – or enforced sobriety – it’d be the same to them. They choose the latter because it is more cruel. That’s all.’
‘Cruel isn’t right, I think,’ suggested Jac. ‘It’s business, not sadism.’
Marit laughed at this, as if to say; you see a difference? And E-d-C growled: ‘there you go again, defending them.’ But Jac went on: ‘none of this is random, none of it is careless. They’ve done this with thousands of prisoners. Tens of thousands, probably. They’ve been doing it for decades and decades. They’ve got it down to a fine art. This is how they extract the maximum productivity out of – us. This is how they ensure the asteroid has been most thoroughly mined and worked through.’
‘We put all the labour in. Then at the end they take it away, sell it and pocket our money. It makes a man want to mess the whole rock up,’ said Mo. ‘Just to spite them.’
‘Jac’s right,’ said Gordius, emboldened by the success of his previous contribution to the exchange (success being measured, of course, in the absence of physical assault). ‘If we mess up their rock, we’re only messing up our own environment, only hurting ourselves. There’s nothing we can do. They’ve got us very neatly stuck.’
‘Still,’ said Mo, stretching, and talking in an expansive tone. ‘There ought to be a way we could . . . let’s say, near the end of our sentence, drill new tunnels that compromise the rock’s integrity in some way. Not to actually cause us danger, just to make it impossible for the Gongsi to sell it on.’ When nobody replied, he added. ‘Like, lots of shafts near the surface – or.’ But then he laughed, and added: ‘It’s never going to work! There is nothing we can do. They’ve set us on the cable and we got to ride it all the way along! Though they’re bastards, you got to admire their cleverness!’
‘I don’t like to think there’s nothing we can do,’ said Davide, darkly.
‘Come—’ said Mo. He was near enough to Davide to be able to reach out and slap his flank. ‘Don’t fight it! You’ll only fret yourself to pieces. Eleven years isn’t so long. We have food now, we can keep busy, with the drills. Before you know it we’ll be free.’
But Davide shook his head. ‘You want to make yourself into a drone, you go ahead. I refuse to accept that they got me beat. There has to be a way out of this cell.’
‘For instance?’ asked Lwon.
Everybody looked at Davide. He blushed, his dark skin going a red-granite colour. ‘Agents of folly,’ he said, turning his eyes to the wall. ‘All of you.’
‘Drill through to the outside,’ said E-d-C, grinning, ‘take a deep breath, and jump through? Is that it?’ It wasn’t so very funny, but it made Marit and Mo laugh, and Gordius followed a few beats later. ‘A real deep breath?’ E-d-C pressed. ‘Jump all the way back to Earth?’
‘Bit of re-entry heat,’ Marit put in. ‘Warm us nicely.’ They were all shivering.
Davide, finally, was goaded into replying. ‘There’s no way off without a ship, sure’ he said. ‘But who says the first ship that comes by has to belong to the Gongsi?’
‘So you’re going to signal a ship?’ asked Lwon, his voice level and serious. ‘You have a transmitter somewhere secreted about you, do you?’
Davide stared furiously at him. ‘Or even if the first ship that comes along is the Gongsi retrieval vessel,’ he said, shortly. ‘Even if we do have to wait eleven years – why should we just troop aboard meekly and go back to 8Flora? Eh? Why not take the ship?’
‘Take it . . . how?’ Lwon gave the impression of somebody who genuinely wanted to know.
‘There’s metal in this rock,’ said Davide, turning his eyes to the wall again. ‘There must be. Why not extract it, and make weapons from it? Then when the Gongsi team land to collect us – bam! We take them and their ship.’
Nobody spoke for a while, until Lwon did. ‘A plan,’ he conceded. ‘But there are at least three-bit problems with it. How do we turn this ore into metal? Smelt it?’
‘Smelt it,’ repeated Davide, perhaps agreeing with Lwon, or maybe blankly questioning his words by repeating them.
‘We were wondering why the fusion cell has i
ts threshold set so low – yeah? Wouldn’t it be nice to warm this place up more than we’re managing – yeah? Well maybe this is why the Gongsi has set it up the way they have. If they gave us unlimited heat that’s precisely the sort of thing we’d be doing: smelting, forging big-old swords, making ourselves troublesome for the retrieval crew.’ He shook his head. Dust came off his beard and swirled slowly through the air both sides of his face. ‘They’re ahead of us there.’
‘There has to be something we can do,’ insisted Davide.
Jac spoke up. ‘Metal may be beyond us. But what about glass?’
‘Hah!’ said E-d-C. ‘This again? You still want windows, Leggy?’
‘It’s just that I’ve noticed, during my shifts on the digger,’ Jac said, ‘when I’m digging through silicates – I’ve noticed that I get beads of glass. They’re thrown off by the friction, I guess. Well, mightn’t there be a way of . . .’
‘You know the difference between ingenious and clever, Leggy?’ Davide broke in. ‘Maybe you’re the first but you surely aren’t the second. Think it through. What good are glass beads? If we can’t generate the heat to smelt metal, how can we generate the heat to work glass? And if we made a window – how could we fit it into the side of the stroid? How, exactly, would we cut out a window frame without losing all our air? And even if we could? Say we’re talking about a piece a metre wide – sand-glass would be so full of impurities it’d crack at the slightest knock or deformation. It would be a suicide portal.’
Jac said nothing. Everybody was silent.
‘You know what?’ Mo said, suddenly. His own beard was growing out in straggling curly sideburns, and not – it seemed – on his chin at all. He twined dusty fingers into his face hair and tugged. ‘We’ve never had the conversation about why we’re here.’
‘You mean, in an existential sense?’ asked E-d-C.