Unnerby paused, seemed to tuck his temper away. “Ah, but I’ll tell you a funny story before I boot your ass back to Princeton. You see, I’m a bit unbalanced.” He waggled his left legs. “An argument with a shredder. Until I get well, I help filter the crank notions that people like you keep sending our way. Fortunately, most of the crap comes in the mail. About once in ten days, some cobber warns us about the low-temperature allotrope of tin—
Oops, maybe Iamtalking to an engineer!
“—and that we shouldn’t ought to use it in solder. At least they have their facts right; they’re just wasting our time. But then there are the ones who have just read about radium and figure we ought to make super digger heads out of the stuff. We have a little contest among ourselves about who gets the biggest idiots. Well, Mr. Underhill, I think you’ve made me a winner. You figure on waking yourself in the middle of the Dark, and then traveling overland in temperatures lower than you’ll find in any commercial lab and in vacuum harder than even we can create.” Unnerby paused, taken aback at having given away a morsel of classified information? Then Sherkaner realized that the sergeant was looking at something in Sherkaner’s blind spot.
“Lieutenant Smith! Good afternoon, ma’am.” The sergeant almost came to attention.
“Good afternoon, Hrunkner.” The speaker moved into view. She was… beautiful. Her legs were slender, hard, curving, and every motion had an understated grace. Her uniform was a black black that Sherkaner didn’t recognize. The only insignia were her deep-red rank pips and name tag. Victory Smith. She looked impossibly young. Born out-of-phase? Maybe so, and the noncom’s exaggerated show of respect was a kind of taunt.
Lieutenant Smith turned her attention on Sherkaner. Her aspect seemed friendly in a distant, almost amused way. “So, Mr. Underhill, you are a researcher in the Kingschool Mathematics Department.”
“Well, more a graduate student actually….” Her silent gaze seemed to call for a more forthcoming answer. “Um, math is really just the specialization listed on my official program. I’ve done a lot of course work in the Medical School and in Mechanical Engineering.” He half-expected Unnerby to make some rude comment, but the sergeant was suddenly very quiet.
“Then you understand the nature of the Deepest Dark, the ultralow temperatures, the hard vacuum.”
“Yes, ma’am. And I’ve given these problems considerable thought.” Almost half a year, but better not say that. “I have lots of ideas, some preliminary designs. Some of the solutions are biological and there’s not much to show you yet. But I did bring prototypes for some of the mechanical aspects of the project. They’re out in my automobile.”
“Ah, yes. Parked between the cars of Generals Greenval and Downing. Perhaps we should take a look—and move your auto to a safer place.”
The full realization was years away, but in that moment Sherkaner Underhill had his first glimmering. Of all the people at Lands Command—of all the people in the wide world—he could not have found a more appropriate listener than Lieutenant Victory Smith.
SIX
In the last years of a Waning Sun there are storms, often fierce ones. But these are not the steaming, explosive agony of the storms of a New Sun. The winds and blizzards of the coming Dark are more as though the world is someone mortally stabbed, flailing weakly as life’s blood leaks out. For the warmth of the world is its lifeblood, and as that soaks into the Dark, the dying world is less and less able to protest.
There comes a time when a hundred stars can be seen in the same sky as the noonday sun. And then a thousand stars, and finally the sun gets no dimmer… and the Dark has truly arrived. The larger plants have long since died, the powder of their spores is hidden deep beneath the snows. The lower animals have passed the same way. Scum mottles the lee of snowbanks, and an occasional glow flows around exposed carcasses: the spirits of the dead, classical observers wrote; a last bacterial scavenging, scientists of later eras discovered. Yet there are still living people on the surface. Some are the massacred, prevented by stronger tribes (or stronger nations) from entering deep sanctuary. Others are the victims of floods or earthquakes, whose ancestral deepnesses have been destroyed. In olden times, there was only one way to learn what the Dark might really be: stranded topside, you might attain tenuous immortality by writing what you saw and saving the story so securely that it survived the fires of the New Sun. And occasionally one of these topsiders survived more than a year or two into the Dark, either by extraordinary circumstance or by clever planning and the desire to see into the heart of the Dark. One philosopher survived so long that his last scrawl was taken for insanity or metaphor by those who found his words cut into stone above their deepness: “and the dry air is turning to frost.”
On one thing the propagandists of both Crown and Tiefstadt agreed. This Dark would be different from all that had gone before. This Dark was the first to be directly assaulted by science in the service of war. While their millions of citizens retreated to the still pools of a thousand deepnesses, the armies of both sides continued to fight. Often the fighting was in open trenches, warmed by steamer fires. But the great differences were underground, in the digging of tunnels that swept deep beneath the front lines of either side. Where these intersected, fierce battles of machine guns and poison gas were fought. Where intersection did not occur, the tunnels continued through the chalky rock of the Eastern Front, yard by yard, days on days, long after all fighting on the surface had ended.
Five years after the Dark began, only a technical elite, perhaps ten thousand on the Crown side, still prosecuted the campaign below the East. Even at their depths, the temperatures were far below freezing. Fresh air was circulated through the occupied tunnels, by foram-burning fans. The last of the air holes would ice over soon.
“We haven’t heard any Tiefstadter activity for nearly ten days. Digger Command hasn’t stopped congratulating itself.” General Greenval popped an aromatique into his maw and crunched loudly; the chief of Accord Intelligence had never been known for great diplomacy, and he had become perceptibly more crotchety over the last days. He was an old cobber, and though the conditions at Lands Command might be the most benign left anywhere in the world, even they were entering an extreme phase. In the bunkers next to the Royal Deepness, perhaps fifty people were still conscious. Every hour, the air seemed to become a little more stale. Greenval had given up his stately library more than a year ago. Now his office consisted of a twenty-by-ten-by-four-foot slot in the dead space above the dormitory. The walls of the little room were covered with maps, the table with reams of teletype reports from landlines. Wireless communication had reached final failure some seventy days earlier. During the year before that the Crown’s radiomen had experimented with more and more powerful transmitters, and there had been some hope that they would have wireless right up to the end. But no, all that was left was telegraphy and line-of-sight radio. Greenval looked at his visitor, certainly the last to Lands Command for more than two hundred years. “So, Colonel Smith, you just got back from the East. Why don’t I hear any huzzahs from yourself? We’ve outlasted the enemy.”
Victory Smith’s attention had been caught by the General’s periscope. It was the reason Greenval had stuck his cubbyhole up here—a last view upon the world. Royal Falls had stilled more than two years ago. She could see all the way up the valley. A dark land, covered now with an eldritch frost that formed endlessly on rock and ice alike. Carbon dioxide, leaching out of the atmosphere.But Sherkaner will see a world far colder than this.
“Colonel?”
Smith stepped back from the periscope. “Sorry, sir…. I admire the Diggers with all my heart.” At least the troops who are actually doing thedigging. She had been in their field deepnesses. “But it’s been days since they could reach any enemy positions. Less than half will be in fighting form after the Dark. I’m afraid that Digger Command guessed the stand-down point wrong.”
“Yeah,” grumpily. “Digger Command makes the record book for longest su
stained operations, but the Tiefers gained by quitting just when they did.” He sighed and said something that might have gotten him cashiered in other circumstances, but when you’re five years past the end of the world, there aren’t a lot of people to hear. “You know, the Tiefers aren’t such a bad sort. Take the long view and you’ll see nastier types in some of our own allies, waiting for Crown and Tiefstadt to beat each other into a bloody pulp. That’s the place where we should be doing our planning, for the next baddies that are going to come after us. We’re going to win this war, but if we have to win it with the tunnels and the Diggers, we’ll still be fighting for years into the New Sun.”
He gave his aromatique an emphatic crunch and jabbed a forehand at Smith. “Your project is our only chance to bring this to a clean end.”
Smith’s reply was abrupt. “And the chances would have been still better if you had let me stay with the Team.”
Greenval seemed to ignore the complaint. “Victory, you’ve been with this project for seven years now. Do you really think it can work?”
Maybe it was the stale air, making them all daft. Indecision was totally alien to the public image of Strut Greenval. She had known him for nine years. Among his closest confidants, Greenval was an open-minded person—up to the point where final decisions had to be made. Then he was the man without doubt, facing down ranks of generals and even the King’s political advisors. Never had she heard such a sad, lost question coming from him. Now she saw an old, old man who in a few hours would surrender to the Dark, perhaps for the last time. The realization was like leaning against a familiar railing and feeling it begin to give way. “S-sir, we have selected our targets well. If they are destroyed, Tiefstadt’s surrender should follow almost immediately. Underhill’s Team is in a lake less than two miles from the targets.” And that was an enormous achievement in itself. The lake was near Tiefstadt’s most important supply center, a hundred miles deep in Tiefer territory.
“Unnerby and Underhill and the others need only walk a short distance, sir. We tested their suits and the exotherms for much longer periods in conditions almost as—”
Greenval smiled weakly. “Yes, I know. I jammed the numbers down the craw of the General Staff often enough. But now we’re really going to do it. Think what that means. Over the last few generations, we military types have done our little desecrations around the edges of the Dark. But Unnerby’s team will see the center of the Deepest Dark. What can that really be like? Yes, we think we know: the frozen air, the vacuum. But that’s all guesses. I’m not religious, Colonel Smith, but… I wonder at what they may find.”
Religious or not, all the ancient superstitions of snow-trolls and earth-angels seemed to hover just behind the general’s words. Even the most rational quailed before the thought of a Dark so intense that in a sense the world did not exist. With an effort, Victory ignored the emotions that Greenval’s words conjured. “Yes, sir, there could be surprises. And I’d rate this scheme as a likely failure, except for one thing: Sherkaner Underhill.”
“Our pet screwball.”
“Yes, a screwball of a most extraordinary sort. I’ve known him for seven years—ever since that afternoon he showed up with a car full of half-made prototypes and a head full of crazy schemes. Lucky for us I was having a slow afternoon. I had time to listen and be amused. The average academic type comes up with maybe twenty ideas in a lifetime. Underhill has twenty an hour; it’s almost like a palsy with him. But I’ve known people almost as extreme in Intelligence school. The difference is that Underhill’s ideas are feasible about one percent of the time—and he can tell the good ones from the bad with some accuracy. Maybe someone else would have thought of using swamp sludge to breed the exotherms. Certainly someone else could have had his ideas about airsuits. But he has the ideas and he brings them together, and they work.
“But that’s only part of it. Without Sherkaner, we could not have come close to implementing all we have in these last seven years. He has the magic ability to rope bright people into his schemes.” She remembered Hrunkner Unnerby’s angry contempt that first afternoon, how it had changed over a period of days until Hrunkner’s engineering imagination was totally swept up by the ideas Sherkaner was spewing at him. “In a sense, Underhill has no patience for details, but that doesn’t matter. He generates an entourage whichdoes. He’s just… remarkable.”
This was all old news to both of them; Greenval had argued similarly to his own bosses over the years. But it was the best reassurance Victory could give the old cobber now. Greenval smiled and his look was strange. “So why didn’t you marry him, Colonel?”
Smith hadn’t meant that to come up, but hell, they were alone, and at the end of the world: “I intend to, sir. But there’s a war on, and you know I’m… not much for tradition; we’ll marry after the Dark.” It had taken Victory Smith just one afternoon to realize that Underhill was the strangest person she had ever met. It had taken her another couple of days to realize he was a genius who could be used like a dynamo, could be used to literally change the course of a world war. Within fifty days she had had Strut Greenval convinced of the same, and Underhill was tucked away in his own lab, with labs growing up around him to handle the peripheral needs of the project. Between her own missions, Victory had schemed on how she might claim the Underhill phenomenon—that was how she thought of him, how the Intelligence Staff thought of him—as her permanent advantage. Marriage was the obvious move. A traditional Marriage-in-the-Waning would have suited her career path. It all would have been perfect, except for Sherkaner Underhill himself. Sherk was a person with his own plans. Ultimately he had become her best friend, as much someone to scheme with as to scheme about. Sherk had plans for after the Dark, things that Victory had never repeated to anyone. Her few other friends—even Hrunkner Unnerby—liked her despite her being out-of-phase. Sherkaner Underhill actually liked the idea of out-of-phase children. It was the first time in her life that Victory had met with more than mere acceptance. So for now they fought a war. If they both survived, there was another world of plans and a life together, after the Dark.
And Strut Greenval was clever enough to figure out a lot of this. Abruptly, she glared at her boss. “You already knew, didn’t you? That’s why you wouldn’t let me stay with the Team. You figure it’s a suicide mission, and my judgment would be warped…. Well it is dangerous, but you don’t understand Sherkaner Underhill; self-sacrifice is not on his agenda. By our standards he’s rather a coward. He’s not especially taken by most of the things you and I hold dear. He’s risking his life out of simple curiosity—but he’s very, very careful when it comes to his own safety. I think the Team will succeedand survive. The odds would only have been improved if you’d let me stay with them! Sir.”
Her last words were punctuated by the dramatic dimming of the room’s single lamp. “Hah,” said Greenval, “we’ve been without fuel oil for twelve hours, did you know that, Colonel? Now the lead acid batteries have about run down. In a couple of minutes Captain Diredr will be here with the Last Word from maintenance: ‘Begging your pardon, sir, but the last pools will freeze momentarily. Engineering begs that you join them for final shutdown.’ “ He mimicked his aide’s high-pitched voice.
Greenval stood, leaned across the desk. His doubts were hidden once more, and the old snap was back in his manner. “In that time, I want to clear up a few things about your orders and your future. Yes, I brought you back because I don’t want to risk you on this mission. Your Sergeant Unnerby and I have had some long talks. We’ve had nine years to put you through almost limitless risk, and to watch how your mind works when thousands of lives depend on the right answers. It’s time to take you off the front lines of special operations. You are one of the youngest colonels in modern times; after this Dark, you’ll be the youngest general.”
“Only if the Underhill mission succeeds.”
“Don’t interrupt. However the Underhill affair goes, the King’s advisors know how good you are. Whether or not I
survive this Dark, you’ll be sitting in my job within a few years of the starting of the New Sun—and your days of personal risk-taking must be over. If your Mr. Underhill survives, marry him, breed him, I couldn’t care less. But never ever again are you to put yourself at risk.” He waved his pointed hand at her head, a mock threat with an edge. “If you do, I swear I’ll come back from the grave and crack your thick shell.”
There was the sound of footsteps in the narrow hallway. Hands scratched at the heavy curtain that was the room’s only door. It was Captain Diredr. “Excuse me, General. Engineering is absolutely insistent, sir. We have thirty minutes of electrical power, at the outside. They are begging, sir—”
Greenval spat that last aromatique into a stained cuspidor. “Very good, Captain. We are coming down instanter.” He sidled around the Colonel, and pulled back the curtain. When Smith hesitated to go before him, he waved her through the doorway. “In this case, senior means last, my dear. I’ve never liked this business of cheating on the Dark, but if we have to do it,I’m the one who gets to turn out the lights!”
SEVEN
By rights Pham Trinli should not have been on the Fleet Captain’s bridge, certainly not during a serious operation. The old man sat at one of the duplicate comm posts, but he really didn’t do anything with it. Trinli was Programmer-at-Arms 3rd, though no one had ever seen him behave productively, even at that low rank. He seemed to come and go at his own pleasure, and spent most of his time down in the employees’ dayroom. Fleet Captain Park was known to be a little irrational when it came to “respect for age.” Apparently, as long as Pham Trinli did no harm, he could stay on the payroll.
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