by MadMaxAU
“But there are still possibilities that offer no conceivable threat to Earth. Give ourselves a shorter period orbit with the Nudge, pack everybody into slots— “
“And hope a decade or two sobers up everybody Earthside?”
Andy’s face was so open it was almost painful to read. “It’s. . . We’ve got to have hope, don’t we?”
“Sure,” Carl said, trying to get some hearty optimism into his voice. “Sure.”
Andy pursed his lips, absorbed with his dreams. Maybe it’s not dumb optimism, Carl thought. Maybe we’ll get a break. I’m just getting tired of wishing.
He thought of showing Andy the poem and then decided to forget it. Andy might very well find the mixture of bile and gallows humor unsettling Let him marinate for a year or so first.
And who knows? Perhaps some archaeologist will find that poem and pronounce it the great work of our sad, luckless expedition. They might put it on a plaque beside the main outer lock, to label the mountainous ice museum that swung through their sky, marking a great failed idea. With us, swimming permanently in our slimy slot fluids, as the prime exhibits.
It wasn’t an absurd notion.
VIRGINIA
Stolen gifts,
Hidden away in time.
Waiting gifts,
Deep within my rhyme.
—Huh? Did you say something, Virginia? —
Jeffers’s voice crackled over her comm as she concentrated on bringing her two balky mechs over an ice mound at the same time. It was always a delicate exercise, for the big machines had enough strength to bound completely away from the rubble strewn surface. These repair drone models had no onboard propellants to bring them back, in case of a miscalculation.
“Um, don’t pay any attention, Jeff. It’s just JonVon acting up again. As soon as we’ve finished with this project I’m going to give him a good memory purging.”
—Sounds like he’s picked up a bit of your hand for scribbling. If he’s been writin’ poems for thirty years, you may be in for some competition, child. —
Jeffers sounded amused, and Virginia laughed. But within she was beginning to get worried. Something was wrong with her bio-organic computer counterpart. In some skills JonVon seemed more subtle, more capable than when she had been slotted, decades ago—a natural result of programming him for slow, steady self-improvement. But in other ways the machine/program now behaved erratically, uncertainly, spontaneously giving forth these bursts that seemed irrelevant, untraceable.
Trash strewn snowfields stretched away toward the row of agro domes around the entrance to Shaft 1. Huge mirrors hung from spidery ice towers nearby, concentrating the sun’s distant spark to turn the domes into bright blazes against the grainy ice.
Beneath the glassy domes, green masses waved gently under artificial breezes. A few workers drifted languidly among the plants, tending the colony’s staff of life. Since awakening from slot sleep, she had had little time to learn about the hydroponics procedures that had been developed, by trial and error over the long decades. But she could tell already that the process could use a lot of automating.
Her mechs arrived where Jeffers’s spacesuited figure awaited her, standing beside a toppled crystal structure. Broken shards of glassy ice were everywhere.
Virginia gasped. “This is terrible! Who wrecked Jim Vidor’s sculpture?”
The statue had been dedicated to Captain Cruz and the dream so many members of the expedition had shared. It had depicted a spacesuited figure, ragged and weary but perseverant, holding out sparkling gifts on his return to a blue globe, the Earth.
Virginia remembered how proud Jim Vidor had been of it, just before his slotting so long ago. It had been a beautiful work, crafted in six shades of ice, traced in native crystal. But now the carved spacer lay crumpled on its side, and the blue planet was crushed.
Deep under the surface, in her lab, Virginia tensed on her webbing as she looked at the vandalism through the mech’s eyes. “Who…?”
Jeffers’s voice was tense. —Dunno. I’d guess some of Sergeov’s Ubers did it. —
“But why?”
The spacer shrugged. —Cruz was an Ortho. —
That seemed explanation enough to him. Virginia felt her skin flush, just then ashamed to be a Percell.
“Has Jim ever seen this?”
—Naw. Matsudo brought him out in 2073 or so, and Lintz’s cyanutes fixed his first disease. But then they had to slot him again a year or so later with a real bad blood infection. I guess in a way it’s a blessing, at that. He’ll never see how bad it’s all gotten since then. Jim was an Ortho. But I liked him a lot. —
“Yeah,” she said, unable to think of anything else to say. She stepped her mechs around the shattered moment to join Jeffers. Come on Let’s see if we can work a miracle or two.”
—Right, pretty Hawaiian lady. — Jeffers reached up and pulled several narrow envelopes off a rack carried by one of the mechs. —This way to the Elephants’ Graveyard. —
They rounded a rocky hummock and Virginia sighed. No mere statistics could have prepared her for the scene before her now. Machines, laid out row upon row, in orderly ranks that stretched nearly to the curved horizon, all frozen, unmoving, locked in a rigor of uselessness and disrepair.
“Where do we start?” she asked in dismay.
Jeffers clapped his gloved hands together and lifted off the ice a couple of meters in his nervous excitement
—Who cares! For three years I’ve been pokin’ way at the hardware, fussin’ in the autofactory, scragging prototype spares. But I keep hittin’ software glitches, ROM blocs, clapes I just couldn’t grok! Frustrated everythin’ I tried. —
He landed facing her mech.
—But now, in just two weeks, you’ve sorted out things that had me dead stopped! —
Her mech lifted a metal hand, exactly mimicking Virginia’s gesture down within her darkened lab. “Now hold on, Jeff. I said this was just a first cut. No promises . . .”
But the man had already jetted over to a spindly repair bot . . . a sophisticated androidlike machine designed for the maintenance of other devices, but now frozen itself in a locked rigor of uselessness.
—Let’s start with this puppy. I already did a physical workover on it. —
Virginia watched nervously as the spacer sorted through the envelopes, selected one, tore it open, and drew forth a gleaming sliver. He pried open an access panel and slipped the reprogramming crystal into the back of the machine.
—Arise! — he commanded, stepping back with a theatrical wave of his arms.
Virginia held her breath. For an instant, it seemed that the frost coating the rigid mech would bind it into immobility. A part of her wondered, Can a statue come to life?
But then the frost cracked, puffing away in tiny, silent explosions as amorphous ice changed state directly into gas. With a wavering delicacy, the machine unfolded. In an unlimbering of stiltlike, mantis legs, it stood up and turned to face Jeffers. Eye cells gleaming, it extended a long arm strong enough to snap the man in two. A many-fingered hand opened, like a blooming flower.
Jeffers laid the stack of envelopes into the sure, deft grasp.
—The Armies of the Dead arise this mornin’! — He laughed. —Come on, angel face. We got some heavy duty resurrectin’ to do! —
Virginia forgave the man his marginal blasphemy. His excitement was infectious. Almost as much as the deadly illnesses and the manpower shortage, this gradual decline in the colony’s mech force had contributed to the pervasive mood of hopelessness, the impossibility of achieving anything real.
Oh, it won’t make enough of a difference, whatever we accomplish out here. Nothing can replace missing human beings.
But we just may be able to make life a bit easier around here.
Jeffers was a dervish on the ice, hurrying from drone to roboid to waldo mech. Virginia thought she had no illusions; still, she grew amazed and more hopeful as they moved along the silent rows of the graveyard,
swapping program slivers, lubricating, energizing.
It was thrilling to watch. Long dead machines, frozen rigid for years, shuddered and stood up. Others rolled by on grapple wheels, or floated free of their moorings. Data channels clicked, beeped, twittered with well ordered computer code.
Their efforts began to multiply as reprogrammed repair bots moved out on their own, taking over whole rows of disabled mechs. What had been a small cluster of activity spread outward like ripples from a spring thawed pool.
As dust drifted away from long quiescent machines, their headphones carried sounds of wonder and growing excitement from the agro domes. Crowds began to gather, staring out at what had heretofore been a silent, frozen army. Airlocks opened, and spacesuited figures spilled onto the snow to stare at the milling mechanical crowd.
Jeffers cried out as a huge lifter mech puffed away on a burst of ionized hydrogen to hover nearby, its green and blue lights glittering. Shadows spread past them as it moved over to moor beside the long-unused supply depot.
The headphone-channel monitors cut in to dampen an overload of cheering from the onlookers.
More and more people appeared on the ice, in spacesuits not used in years, wearing once white tabards now ratty from age. Some threw away caution and leaped in excitement, to arc high overhead for tong minutes while others jeered happily.
Virginia laughed. Halley’s north pole had become a festival —bumping into mechs, which uncomplainingly swerved to avoid more violent collisions. Percells pirouetted with Orthos. Spacers talked excitedly with Arcists. Someone piped music over D-channel, and the weird, twisting dance of near zero gravity filled the sky.
It doesn’t take much . . . just a little good news.
From one agro dome, a dozen spindly children stared . . . some slack-jawed and barely seeing, but a few clapping their hands and tugging at the sleeves of nearby adults, pointing excitedly at the boisterous celebration.
A figure appeared beside Virginia’s mech and reached up to tug on the machine’s arm. Virginia felt it at her own elbow and looked down.
“Oh. Hi Carl!” She felt like a little girl, and it was good to see him smile again, under the glossy faceplate of his grimy suit. “How did you know which mech was me?”
—Osborn to Herbert, channel AF. How did I know, Virginia? It was easy. I just watched the way each mech walked, and picked the one with the sexiest moves. —
She felt herself blush, and was glad that out on the surface none of it would show. “You always did have a gift for bullsh— “
Suddenly, Virginia was interrupted by an awful sound. It was the blood chilling wail of a suit rupture alarm, interrupting every channel, cutting through the celebration, and stopping all chatter in mid breath.
“Oh my gosh. Where. . . ?” She whirled her mech to look. Already several of the most sophisticated models were charging toward a crowd of spectators, drawn now into a cluster near one of the agro domes.
“I can’t tell,” she started to say to Carl. But then she realized that he was already gone launched in a propellant spray toward the site of the commotion.
The alarm cut off abruptly, dropping to a low, mournful drone that denoted cessation of life functions.
Somebody had died.
Virginia started moving toward the crowd, then stopped, feeling foolish. Of course she did not have to take this particular mech over there to get a closer look. With a tongue click and a pulsed subvocal command, she transferred her point of view to a tall, spidery drone standing over the cluster of muttering humans.
She was looking down, then. Carl and Jeffers bent over a spacesuited figure sprawled prone on the ground. The suit was slit open down to bone. Red foam still spread from the gaping opening like a gruesome fog.
Keoki Anuenue and some of his big Hawaiians arrived. They started pushing the crowd back, ordering unnecessary mechs away. The suddenly subdued crowd drifted off, all of the festival mood taken out of them like a noisy stream turned to rock hard ice.
“He Kiai,” she sent to the dark faced Polynesian who tried to usher off her observer mech. The man blinked in surprise. Then he shrugged.
—Ua make oia, wahine. —
Virginia did not need to be told that the figure on the ice was dead. Obviously, it was pointless even to think of slotting.
Her mouth went dry as she saw the slim bladed vibro knife lying next to the corpse. Whoever had done this—taking advantage of the confusion and excitement she and Jeffers had brought about—had left his calling card alongside his handiwork.
She sorted through the comm automatically, searching for the channel and encryption Carl and Jeff were using. At last she found the right combination.
— . . . going to be hell to pay for this. Quiverian and Ould Harrad are sure to capitalize on it. —
—Shit. Malcolm might have been an officious bastard, and an Ortho chauvinist. But at least he wasn’t an Arcist. I could work with him. You know who’s gonna get blamed for this, of course . . . . —
They turned the victim over. The face of poor Malcolm stared up at her, bloated and bug eyed from decompression.
Virginia shut down quickly and pulled out of the mech. She opened her real eyes and found herself back in her own small, safe realm deep under the ice. She removed her neural tap and groaned as she sat up, rubbing the raw area at the back of her head.
Oh yes, she thought. There will be hell to pay over this.
Virginia got up and went to the tiny, hooded water tap to dampen a towel and wipe her face.
Her scalp still hurt. She lifted her hair and bent over between the mirrored surfaces of two holo tanks to examine the neural tap-contact area. An angry red rash was spreading, and the standard treatments didn’t seem to be working, this time. Saul had told her that he felt he might be able to come up with a new approach, but he had not been able to hide from her his anxious uncertainty.
It didn’t take a genius to see that they were all dying.
She thought of the giddy celebration above, so brief, so quickly shattered.
It was nice to feel hope, for a few minutes, at least.
Color flashed above her. She looked up as letters coalesced in the computer’s main display tank. Oh no. It was another of JonVon’s eerie, spontaneous attempts at versification . . . another sign that decay had not limited itself to men and moving machines.
Lost amid the struggles,
Cached in canted rhythms,
Beneficence still dwells,
Cast from forgotten Home.
The figures moved single file across the pitted landscape, linked together by knotted ropes. They stepped carefully, slowly, as they pushed and dragged their burdens over hummocks and crater rims.
It was a silent exodus—shapes in grimy, patched spacesuits, struggling with massive bundles, nearly weightless but cumbersome with inertia—helping each other through fields of fine, black dust, probing to avoid places where it was several meters thick. Elsewhere, they had to brave slick, icy patches and even a few dangerous fields of explosive, amorphous ice.
From Virginia’s vantage point, atop one of Halley’s highest equatorial prominences, the horizon of their tiny world was an arc only a mile or so away . . . close enough almost to touch. Those below would have to cover only twenty kilometers or so, between the northern base and the caves on the comet’s other pole. And yet, watching the Arcist migration, she felt as if she were witnessing something biblical. The self styled refugees scrambled, heaved, and turned to help one another as they carried their possessions toward the new homes that their leaders had promised them.
They had been offered mechs to help, but it was widely known that the sophisticated roboids had been rebuilt by Jeffers and reprogrammed by Virginia . . . both Percells. The Arcists’ suspicious natures won over convenience, so they refused all but the simplest machines.
Three spacesuited men stood on the prominence alongside Virginia’s new mech, also watching the Arcists depart. Carl and Jeffers touched helmets and spoke t
o each other in private, gesturing at the line of shuffling figures. On her other side, Saul leaned against her mech’s flank, humming an absent tune, low and atonal.
The biblical flavor of the scene was heightened by the figure leading the single file caravan. There, in front, using a staff as he strode in long, slow steps, was Suleiman Ould Harrad—once Lieutenant Colonel in the Space Service, now a mystic and spiritual adviser to the Arcist clans. The tall black man had dyed his suit deep midnight blue, and his tabard was white with a single black star.
Behind him, carrying huge burdens or drawing giant, floating sledges, followed scores—from oldsters too long out of the slots to wide eyed children, spindly and staring from inside plastic survival bubbles.
—At lest thirty more Orthos joined then after Malcolm’s assassination, —Carl muttered, perhaps unaware that Virginia could pick up his words through vibrations in the ice. —We have no way of knowing who actually did it, but I can tell you who profited. —
Jeffers nodded.
—I wish I knew how Quiverian did it. —
They fell silent as the caravan drew past them.
On Virginia’s other side, Saul held the tactile pads of her mech, and occasionally squeezed. She felt it deep underground, lying on her web-couch.
A trio of suited shapes detached themselves from the migration and skim floated upslope toward Carl. The one in the lead wore a tabard showing the gold splash of the Arc of the Living Sun. Joao Quiverian spoke on the preagreed channel and code.
—We will expect to continue participating in the vegetable hydro domes, and take our per capita share of power from the fusion pile. —
Carl shrugged. —If you work on the Nudge motors, as you’ve promised, we have no reason to deny you your rights. Go ahead and live at the south pole, if being near the rest of us makes you feel unclean. —
Obviously Carl felt more relieved to have Quiverian’s fanatics out of his hair than anything else.