by Adam Roberts
‘You didn’t have to blind me,’ Gordius wailed. ‘What have you done? I’ll never get an artificial eye in here!’
That made the other five laugh even louder.
‘I thought you were my friend!’ Gordius wailed. ‘Why did you blind me?’
‘You were trying to throttle me,’ Jac pointed out, mildly.
This was too much for Gordius. He started crying. ‘You’d think with only one eye you’d cry half as much,’ said Marit. ‘But listen to him!’ This was pitched to the others as a comic observation, but nevertheless the general laughter grew less. E-d-C, Lwon and Davide floated back into the central tunnel and started up the diggers again. Gordius curled into a ball and sobbed to himself. Mo went back to sleep, and Marit went back to toc-toc-tocking shards at the far wall.
Jac took himself into the corner, and got out his piece of glass. Smoothing it, working it, grinding over its surface in a circular motion; it was calming. He contemplated his own body as he worked: his throat was very sore, and his bronchial tubes rasped and wheezed as he drew breath. That wasn’t pleasant, but it would improve. There were specks in his vision. That, in a way, was more worrying. If the violence of assault had detached a portion of Jac’s retina it would be very bad. Probably it was only a matter of some broken blood vessels. Hopefully it would improve.
He put his mind from his own pain, and concentrated on working the glass.
Later, the three alphas came out of the tunnel, dusty and panting. It was Gordius’s shift now, but although Jac felt weak, still in pain and little inclined to the work, he took the god-boy’s place. He was worried that working at the digger might send bits of grit into Gordius’s still raw eye socket. An infection could be fatal. It was not as if they had medical facilities, where they were.
So Jac worked his shift. The tunnel was now fifteen metres long, stretching deep into the heart of the stroid. Marit had decided, unilaterally, that it was long enough; he had turned his digger and was starting to excavate a room of his own. Mo followed suit, and Jac didn’t see any reason to do differently. The way things were in the group at the moment, they really needed at least the semblance of some time apart from one another, or they were going to detonate. So the diggers were working their way, slowly, into three separate chambers. If there were six rooms then Gordius would be the one left in the main space.
Not that it mattered. Each room was a box within the box. What’s in the box?
The voice was in the box. Still inside.
Much later, after Jac had finished his shift, and as he settled himself in the corner to sleep, Gordius came over to him. He was due to work on the drills. Though he complained, and whinged, there was no shirking his turn now; but before he slipped into the tunnel he put his wounded head close to Jac’s. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ he said, in a pitiable voice. ‘It was a crazy madness. I should never have done it. You were right to take my eye.’
‘That’s alright,’ Jac told him, embarrassed by his fawning. ‘But I am very weary, now, after everything. I must sleep now.’
‘I just wanted to say I’m sorry! You were right to take my eye! I acted abominably! Will you forgive me for attacking you? You’re my only friend in this hellish place! Will you—’
‘Come on, god-boy,’ yelled Lwon, from the tunnel. ‘Time to work. Come along now.’
‘Will you,’ he dropped his voice, and spoke with a pitiful urgency, ‘will you still take me with you? When you go?’
‘I promised, didn’t I?’ replied Jac.
‘It’s just that – I should never have grabbed your neck. I’m so sorry I did. You haven’t . . . changed your mind?’
‘When I go,’ said Jac, closing his eyes, ‘I shan’t leave you behind, Gord.’
The big man was weeping again, but tears of joy, and from one eye only. ‘Thank you, my friend. I won’t forget it. We’re in this together, you and I. It’s crazy for us to fight.’
‘Come on, god-boy,’ bawled E-d-C, ‘or I’ll have your other eye.’
Gordius went into the tunnel. Jac felt sleep flood up around his consciousness, like the warm water in a station bath. He was gone, or almost, when he felt a hand on his arm.
His eyes opened with an almost audible snap. There, right in front of him, was Marit’s grinning face.
‘What do you want, Marit? Sex, is it? I’m pretty tired. Let me sleep first, and I’ll be able to do more for you.’
‘I heard what you told god-boy,’ said Marit.
Jac processed this. He ran through the various possibilities, selected a reply. ‘So much hair growing in your earholes, it’s a wonder you can hear anything at all. Really it’s like toothbrush bristles in there.’ But he said this with a half-musical lilt, as if feeling his way.
‘Hah,’ said Marit, mirthlessly. ‘I heard you plain enough. He thinks you got a way out of this rock?’
‘That’s what he thinks,’ said Jac, carefully.
‘He’s weak in the head. His will is weak, and he’s none too bright. How can any of us get away from here?’
‘There’s no way,’ agreed Jac.
‘Unless that somebody come get us. And only the Gongsi know we’re here.’
‘Only them,’ Jac said, nodding. For this was true enough.
‘And they won’t be back for a decade or more. Right?’
‘Right.’
Marit leant in closer. His breath was a thing of sulphur and decay. ‘So why does god-boy think different, eh? What have you been telling him?’
‘I haven’t been telling him anything,’ said Jac, choosing his words with care. ‘But he’s clinging on to his sanity by a fingernail’s width. Let’s say this: if he has gotten it into his head that I have a magic road out of this box – well, I certainly haven’t directly contradicted him. Let him hope.’
‘Hope grows,’ noted Marit. ‘Kill it young and it’ll hurt him. Kill it old and it’ll end him.’ He floated away.
Jac shut his eyes again. Nothing could keep him from sleep. But as his consciousness did the slow dissolve of the cheaper bitFlicks, he heard Marit’s harsh little voice coming, as if from a long way away: ‘I’m watching you, Leggy. Always watching.’
Time passed. They dug and dug, and soon enough three new rooms were ready. Then the alphas discussed amongst themselves and decided that the tunnel should be extended five metres, and then a second large chamber cut out. ‘We can break the lightpole in two, and have two separate lit spaces. Grow twice as much ghunk!’ said Lwon. Jac didn’t want to contradict him with the obvious – that with half as much light, the spores would grow half as quickly. Making a second chamber seemed as good a use of their time as anything else.
Gordius’s eye healed, more or less. There wasn’t any infection, although the top and bottom eyelids on that side were, he reported, ‘glued shut’. Jac wanted to test to see whether they were actually sealed together, or whether Gord only didn’t open them because it was uncomfortable for them to move over the deformed, whited-out surface of the dead eyeball. But he couldn’t think of a way of doing it.
So instead he worked at his glass. The piece was nearly complete. The thing to do after that would be: to make a second piece. Every now and again, his time at the drill threw up little pieces of new glass. It was never anything substantial, and he didn’t bother trying to build a larger lump. But he took a few likely looking shards: two handsome sicklemoons in brown-green (once the crap was scraped and polished off them). A straight piece like a miniature sword, or a cocktail stick. A few tiny little D-shaped chips, such as would have delighted the heart of Neanderthal men.
He was nearly ready.
Then two fairly serious problems presented themselves to the whole group in quick succession. The first was something of which they all became only gradually aware, but which shook them into desperate action. It became incrementally clear that the air pressure was lessening, very slowly. That was worrying enough, but even more alarming was the fact that the air was growing less wholesome. Everybody grew br
eathless with the slightest exertion. They checked the scrubber, and it was working fine; but of course it could only recycle what was there, and the excavation was continually making the interior space larger. More ice was needful, to generate more oxygen. There wasn’t enough in their drinking supply. ‘Feed in what we’ve got,’ said Davide, with an anger that did little to disguise his anxiety. The thought of slowly suffocating, Jac thought, was a larger terror to his mind than the thought of dying of thirst. ‘And drink what?’ countered Lwon. ‘Our own piss? No, we need to excavate a whole lot more ice.’
The practical upshot was that they started the second chamber sooner than they anticipated, as they swept the diggers round in a wider arc looking for another seam of ice.
This precipitated the second problem. The waste schutes, attached to the rear of the diggers, had been near full extension for a while. This new direction pulled them taut. That was alright; when E-d-C pulled his schute from the socket it had burrowed through the rock wall, the hole sealed itself. Looking at the tapering point, it seemed that it was designed to fill its own tapering hole with rubble. At any rate, it proved easy enough to reposition the schute. E-d-C set the mouth of it against the rock, inside the tunnel itself; and over the course of about an hour and a half it dug through to the outside again. The same thing was true of the second drill’s waste schute. The problem came with the third digger, the one whose schute had been pushed through the artificial barrier of the seal laid down by Marooner at the very beginning of their stay. Putting the waste schute through this material proved, in retrospect, to have been a bad idea. When the schute was extracted it did not seal the hole, and with a horrifying rushing sound the air in the cavity began to gush into space.
Lwon, Davide and Marit gawped in horror. Mo began shouting incoherently. Everything in the main space was being drawn towards the leak point.
Even Jac found it harder than usual to remove himself from his own somatic responses (pounding heart, adrenalised bloodstream) and find his calm place. He managed it, though. He selected a likely looking rock and placed it over the hole. This slowed the leak but did not stop it, for air was still seeping round the edge. So he retrieved some of the abject matter from the hole in which they stored toilet waste, and worked it with some water from the spigot to make a clay, and with this he made a seal around the rock and the stuff of the ceiling.
The leak was stemmed. ‘Nobody,’ Jac gasped, ‘nobody knock this stone.’
This eventuality had not improved matters, though. The air pressure had been lowered even further, which made everybody yet more breathless. Even the simplest action had become massively laborious and exhausting. For Gordius and Jac there was a single, wan upside, insofar as none of the alpha or beta males had the energy for sex. But the situation was desperate. If they failed to find ice, they would all die soon. It was as simple as that.
So they dug, wearily and inefficiently. They fell into narcoleptic sleeps whilst still operating the machinery.
Day followed day.
Davide, fretfully, blamed E-d-C for this infelicitous turn of events. ‘Why did you think the seal would be a good material to put the schute through, man?’ he said. ‘You can see the schute’s designed for rock.’
‘Shut up,’ gasped E-d-C.
‘You shut up! Your stupidity is choking us all!’
E-d-C growled, plucked a rock from the air, drew his arm back. Davide flinched, visibly, but didn’t back down. ‘Go on then,’ he snarled.
E-d-C’s eyebrows went up. You could see the muscles in his neck tense as he readied himself.
‘Hey!’ yelled Lwon.
Both men snapped their gazes round.
‘Let it go, Ennemi,’ said Lwon, speaking clearly.
Everybody looked from Lwon to E-d-C. ‘I asked,’ he said. ‘I asked everybody. I said, shall I try it? Everybody said, yes. You all said so.’
‘None of us said not to,’ said Davide. ‘That’s not the same thing.’
E-d-C’s eyes widened; he glared at Davide, as at a betrayer. ‘This little man doesn’t get to rebuke me.’ He held the rock up, and drew his arm back.
‘Let it go,’ said Lwon, enunciating each word with precision.
E-d-C turned his eyes on Lwon. His face had fallen. Nobody in the space could mistake the look of hurt in his eyes.
Lwon returned his gaze, levelly.
Jac watched with interest.
‘Let it go,’ Lwon said again.
E-d-C unwrapped his fingers from around the rock, and left it hanging in mid-air. ‘The celebrated arresting officer Bar-le-duc never came within one AU of you,’ he said. Then he pushed himself, wearily, away and went back into the tunnel. Shortly the sound of a digger started up.
Jac went back to polishing his glass. The piece was pretty much there. Rough at the rim, but that didn’t matter. He looked up. Marit was having an animated conversation with Davide. Jac was struck by the scene: Davide happened to be floating in the same orientation as Jac. Marit’s body, however, was one-hundred-and-eighty-degrees turned about, his mouth near Davide’s ear. The oddity of the orientation, and the almost but not quite audible murmuring, gave the scene a diabolic quality. Perhaps the paucity of oxygen in the air that added the shimmery, hellfreeze atmosphere to it.
Time moved on. The black walls darkened in hue. They became essence of black, a perfectly scorched black. They burned, they gleamed, they shined with black. The colour was the truth about the universe. This cosmos that had gleamed for some hundreds of thousands of years with Big Bang light, and now existed in the scorched carbon of the afterburn.
The lid on his box rattled and bulged.
There was nothing to do but hope for water, or they would all die there. Jac considered: there were worse things that could happen than him dying. Of course, there were much better things too.
He tucked the piece of glass away under his tunic. If they didn’t find ice soon, it wouldn’t matter, and none of it would matter, and nothing would matter ever again. That thought was almost restful. The thought hardly disaffected him at all; although it did disaffect him a tiny bit, in the Will at the heart of his being. And he wanted at least to have finished his window. His miniature window. Tiny little window.
Any of them could rip the temporary seal away from the hole in the wall, the rock with its faecal cement, and kill everybody. It would be a simple matter.
He dozed. He dreamed an incoherent dream. Some of the Ulanov deputies dream lucid dreams in which they solve problems, deduce mysteries, uncover conspiracies, get to the bottom of crimes. Such clarity of dreaming was beyond Jac.
Mo shook him awake: it was his time on the drill. His head felt too small for the high-pressure lava his brain-matter had become. Headache, headache. It was very unpleasant, and in a grimly fascinating way; for he could not remove himself from the discomfort, the way he could with conventional pain. He withdrew his mind from the carapace of his nerves and muscles, but the exhaustion and ache was still with him. Its misery had stained his soul grey.
Nothing but dry stone. Slow process. Jac turned his schute off, churned the rock with the digger’s business end, and then sifted through the floating rubble. Black crumbly carbon, or cold igneous chunks hard as sin, or silicates – but no ice. Then Jac turned the schute on and worked the same area, drawing the debris away and clearing away at least some of the rubble.
He fell into an uneasy, unrestful sleep; but he was still at the digger, and he woke to the punches and slaps of a wearily furious Lwon. ‘Leggy! Leggy – wake!’
He had chanced upon ice, but the schute was drawing it away and depositing it into space.
The next hour passed in a delirious, agonised fog. They brought all three diggers to bear on the seam – a deep reach of blue-black ice – and carved out big pieces; and they carried it through and fed it into the scrubber. Ice! At last! The device’s onboard fusion cell worked, and the water was processed and, slowly, the oxygen levels began to rise. It took a long time for the worst of Jac�
��s physical misery to recede.
Replenishment.
Nobody did anything for a long while, except suck some of the renewed supply of ice and munch some ghunk. Everybody was intensely relieved at the find.
The alphas lurked in their chambers, the rest floated in the main space. They had their own rooms now, all save Gordius; but the rooms were cold and lonely, and they preferred to float together. Gordius, who had acquired permanently blue lips and a thousand-metre stare, and whose shivers appeared to have fallen into odd regularised patterns and echoes, was muttering something to himself under his breath, over and over.
Marit had put his head in at Davide’s room and was whispering something – fomenting rebellion presumably. Jac was too drained and worn-through to care.
Dust and debris in the air, everywhere, slowly and inevitably drawn into helices and whorls by the stately rotation of Lamy306. Their world, and prison, turning over on itself in space, like a restless sleeper.
Jac dozed, woke, dozed, woke.
The box was sealed. It felt as if it had been locked beyond the ability of mortals to undo. Only the very faintest noises from inside to indicate that there had ever been anything there at all.
Buzz, buzz.
He took out his piece of glass and began working over it, polishing and smoothing. Nearly there. But he worked slowly, and without panache. Nearly was the asymptote of eternal existential disappointment. This was the geometry of the cosmos. Black and lady grey and blue and purple and –
‘Leggy!’ said Marit. He had floated across to him, and his reeking mouth was close by Jac’s face. Only exhaustion prevented Jac from starting in surprise, or shrieking. ‘Marit,’ he croaked.
‘You finished that window, then?’
He looked at the other man. He almost said: you’re a window, so transparent is your scheming. But there was nothing to be gained in Marit knowing how much Jac knew. ‘What?’
‘I’ve been meaning to ask you, for a long time,’ said Marit, keeping his head where it was but pulling his body closer to Jac’s. ‘How did you lose your legs? Or were you born that way?’