The Hard SF Renaissance

by David G. Hartwell

  It was another of those polite mornings, and we packed up and were on our way with record efficiency. We looked around for the vent and Sam pointed us right at the mass of brown at the rear of the cave.

  “The gas goes into that, right through it,” it said.

  We called the stuff “cryofungus.” It had grown out from either side of the large, erosion widened vertical crack that Sam found in the back of our cave until it met in the middle. However the cryofungus colonies from either side didn’t actually fuse there, but just pressed up against each other. So, with some effort, we found we could half push, half swim, our way along this seam.

  We had pushed our way through five kilometers of “cryofungus” before a macabre thought occurred to me. The rubbery brown stuff absorbed organics through the skin of its cells. Did said organic stuff have to be gas? I asked Cathy.

  “I did an experiment. I fed my sample a crumb of ration cracker.”

  “What happened?”

  “The cracker sort of melted into the cryofungus. There are transport molecules all over the cell walls.”

  I thought a second. “Cathy, If we didn’t have our suits on …”

  “I’d think water would be a little hot for them, but then again water and ammonia are mutually soluble. If you want to worry, consider that your tightsuit is porous. It might,” I could see her toothy smile in my mind, “help keep you moving.”

  “Nice, dear,” Nikhil grumbled. “That gives a whole new meaning to this concept of wandering through the bowels of Miranda.”

  A round of hysterical laughter broke whatever tension remained between us, and resolved into a feeling of almost spiritual oneness among us. Perhaps you have to face death with someone to feel that—if so, so be it.

  At the ten kilometer point, the cryofungus started to loose its resiliency. At twelve, it started collapsing into brown dust, scarcely offering any more resistance than the hoar crystals. This floated along with the gas current as a sort of brown fog. I couldn’t see, and had Sam move up beside me.

  After three kilometers of using Sam as a seeing eye dog, the dust finally drifted by us and the air cleared. It was late again, well past time to camp. We had been underground thirteen days, and had, by calculation, another eight left. According to Sam, we were still two hundred and fifteen kilometers below the surface. We decided to move on for another hour or two.

  The passageway was tubular and fairly smooth, with almost zero traction. We shot pitons into the next curve ahead, and pulled ourselves along.

  “Massive wind erosion,” Nikhil remarked as he twisted the eye of a piton to release it. “A gale must have poured through here for megayears before the cryofungus choked it down.”

  Each strobe revealed an incredible gallery of twisted forms, loops, and carved rocks, many of which were eerily statuesque; saints and gargoyles. This led us into a slightly uphill kilometer-long cavern formed under two megalithic slabs, which had tilted against each other when, perhaps, the escaping gas had undermined them. After the rich hoarcrystal forest of the inbound path, this place was bare and dry. Sam covered the distance with a calculated jump carrying a line to the opposite end. We started pulling ourselves across. We’d climbed enough so that our weight was back to twenty newtons—minuscule, yes, but try pumping twenty newtons up and down for eighteen hours.

  “I quit,” Cathy said. “My arms won’t do any more. Stop with me, or bury me here.” She let go of the line, and floated slowly down to the floor.

  It was silent here, no drippings, no whistling, reminiscent of the vacuum so far above. I tried to break the tension by naming the cavern. “This was clearly meant to be a tomb, anyway. The Egyptian Tomb, we can call it.”

  “Not funny, Wojciech,” Nikhil snapped. “Sorry, old boy, a bit tired myself. Yes, we can make camp, but we may regret it later.”

  “Time to stop. We worked out the schedule for, for, maximum progress,” Randi said. “Need to trust our judgment. Won’t do any better by over-pushing ourselves now.”

  “Very well,” Nikhil conceded, and dropped off as well. He reached Cathy and put his arm around her briefly, which I note because it was the first sign of physical affection I had seen between them. Randi and I dropped the pallets, and followed to the floor. We landed harder than we expected—milligee clouds judgment almost as badly as free fall, I thought. Worse perhaps, because it combines a real up and down with the feeling that they don’t matter.

  We were very careful and civilized in making camp. But each of us was, in our minds, trying to reach an accommodation with the idea that, given what we had been through so far, the week we had left would not get us to the surface.

  Before we went into our separate tents, we all held hands briefly. It was spontaneous—we hadn’t done so before. But it seemed right, somehow, to tell each other that we could draw on each other that way.

  V

  That last was for day thirteen, this entry will cover days fourteen and fifteen. Yes, my discipline in keeping the journal is slipping.

  We’d come to think of Randi as a machine—almost as indestructible and determined as Sam, but last night, at the end of day fourteen, that machine cried and shook.

  Low rations and fatigue are affecting all of us now. We let Sam pull us through the occasional cavern, but it has mostly been wriggling through cracks with a human in the lead. We changed leads every time we hit a place wide enough, but once that was six hours. That happened on Randi’s lead. She didn’t slack but when we finally reached a small cavern, she had rolled to the side with her face to the wall as I went by. We heard nothing from her for the next four hours.

  We ended up at the bottom of a big kidney-shaped cavern a hundred and sixty kilometers below the surface; almost back to the depth of the upper end of Nikhil’s Smokestack. We staggered through camp setup, with Sam double checking everything. We simply collapsed on top of the stretched sheets in our coveralls and slept for an hour or so, before our bodies demanded that we take care of other needs. Washed, emptied, and a bit refreshed from the nap, Randi had snuggled into my arms, then let herself go. Her body was a mass of bruises, old and new. So was mine.

  “You’re allowed a safety valve, you know,” I told her. “When Cathy feels bad, she lets us know outright. Nikhil gets grumpy. I get silly and start telling bad jokes. You don’t have to keep up an act for us.”

  “Not for you, for, for me. Got to pretend I can do it, or I’ll get left behind, with Mom.”

  I thought about this. A woman that would attempt to murder her husband to gain social position might have been capable of other things as well.

  “Randi, what did that mean? Do you want to talk?”

  She shook her head. “Can’t explain.”

  I kissed her forehead. “I guess I’ve been lucky with my parents.”

  “Yeah. Nice people. Nice farm. No fighting. So why do you have to do this stuff?”

  Why indeed? “To have a real adventure, to make a name for myself outside of obscure poetry outlets. Mom inherited the farm from her father, and that was better than living on state dividends in Poland, so they moved. They actually get to do something useful, tending the agricultural robots. But they’re deathly afraid of losing it because real jobs were so scarce and a lot of very smart people are willing to do just about anything to get an Earth job. So they made themselves very, very nice. They never rock any boats. Guess I needed something more than nice.”

  “But you’re, uh, nice as they are.”

  “Well trained, in spite of myself.” Oh, yes, with all the protective responses a nonconformist learns after being squashed time and time again by very socially correct, outwardly gentle, and emotionally devastating means. “By the way, Randi, I hate that word.”

  “Huh?”

  “Nice.”

  “But you use it.”

  “Yeah, and I hate doing that, too. Look, are you as tired as I am?” I was about to excuse myself to the questionable comforts of my dreams.

  “No. Not yet. I’ll
do the work.”

  “Really …”

  “Maybe the last time, way we’ve going.” We both knew she was right, but my body wasn’t up to it, and we just clung to each other tightly, as if we could squeeze a little more life into ourselves. I don’t remember falling asleep.

  Day fifteen was a repeat, except that the long lead shift tell on Cathy. She slacked. For seven hours, she would stop until she got cold, then move forward again until she got tired. Somehow we reached a place where I could take over.

  What amazed me through all of that was how Nikhil handled it. There was no sniping, no phony cheeriness. He would simply ask if she was ready to move again when he started getting cold.

  We ended the day well past midnight. For some reason, I am having trouble sleeping.

  Today the vent finally led us to a chain of small caverns, much like the rift before we encountered the top of Nikhil’s Smokestack. We let Sam tow us most of the way and had only two long crack crawls. The good news is our CO2 catalyst use is down from our passivity, and we might get another day out of it.

  The bad news is that Randi had to cut our rations back a bit. We hadn’t been as careful in our counting as we should have been, thinking that because the CO2 would get us first, we didn’t have a problem in that area. Now we did. It was nobody’s fault, and everyone’s. We’d all had an extra cracker here and there. They add up.

  We ended up, exhausted as usual, in a five-hundred-meter gallery full of jumble. I called it the Junk Yard. Sam couldn’t find the outlet vent right away, but we made such good progress that we thought we had time to catch up on our sleep.

  Where are we? It’s day eighteen. We have gained a total of fifteen kilometers in radius over the past two days. The Junk Yard was a dead end, at least for anything the size of a human being. There was some evidence of gas diffusing upward through fractured clathrate, but it was already clear that it wasn’t the main vent, which appeared to have been closed by a Miranda quake millions of years ago.

  We had to go all the way back to a branch that Sam had missed while it was towing us through a medium-sized chimney. Logic and experience dictated that the outlet would be at the top of the chimney, and there was a hole there that led onward. To the Junk Yard. Miranda rearranges such logic.

  We spotted the real vent from the other side of the chimney as we rappelled back down.

  “A human being,” Cathy said when she saw the large vertical crack that was the real vent, “would have been curious enough to check that out. It’s so deep.”

  “I don’t know, dear,” Nikhil said, meaning to defend Sam, I suppose, “with the press of time and all, I might not have turned aside, myself.”

  We were all dead silent at Nikhil’s unintentional self-identification with a robot. Then Randi giggled and soon we were all laughing hysterically again. The real students of humor, I recall, say that laughter is not very far from tears. Then Nikhil, to our surprise, released his hold to put his arms around his wife again. And she responded. I reached out and caught them before they’d drifted down enough centimeters for their belt lines to go taut. So at the end of day seventeen, we had covered sixty kilometers of caverns and cracks, and come only fifteen or so nearer the surface.

  By the end of day eighteen, we’d done an additional fifteen kilometers of exhausting crack crawling, found only one large cavern, and gave in to exhaustion, camping in a widening of the crack just barely big enough to inflate the tents.

  What occurred today was not a fight. We didn’t have enough energy for a fight.

  We had just emerged into a ten meter long, ten meter wide, two meter high widening gallery in the crack we were crawling. Cathy was in the lead and had continued on through into the continuing passage when Nikhil gave in to pessimism.

  “Cathy,” he called, “stop. The passage ahead is getting too narrow, it’s another bloody dead end. We should go back to the last large cavern and look for another vent.”

  Cathy was silent, but the line stopped. Randi, sounding irritated, said, “No time,” and moved to enter the passage after Cathy.

  Nikhil yawned and snorted. “Sorry, little lady. I’m the geologist and the senior member, and not to be too fine about it, but I’m in charge.” Here he seemed to loose steam and get confused, muttering, “You’re right about no time—there’s no time to argue.”

  No one said anything, but Randi held her position.

  Nikhil whined, “I say we go back, an’, this time, back we go.”

  My mind was fuzzy; we still had four, maybe five days. If we found the right chain of caverns we could still make the surface. If we kept going like this, we weren’t going to make it anyway. He might be right, I thought. But Randi wouldn’t budge.

  “No. Nikhil. You owe me one, Nikhil, for, for, two weeks ago. I’m collecting. Got to go forward now. Air flow, striations, Sam’s soundings, and, and my money, damn it.”

  So much for my thoughts. I had to remember my status as part of Randi’s accretion disk.

  “Your daddy’s money,” Nikhil sniffed, then said loudly and with false jollity, “But never mind. Come on everyone, we’ll put Randi on a stretcher again until she recovers … her senses.” He started reaching for Randi, clumsy fumbling really. Randi turned and braced herself, boots clamped into the clathrate, arms free.

  “Nikhil, back off,” I warned. “You don’t mean that.”

  “Ah appreciate your expertise with words, old chap.” His voice was definitely slurred. “But these are mine and I mean them. I’m too tired to be questioned by amateurs anymore. Back we go. Come on back, Cathy. As for you …” He lunged for Randi again. At this point I realized he was out of his mind, and possibly why.

  So did Randi, for at the last second instead of slapping him away and possibly hurting him, she simply jerked herself away from his grasping fingers.

  And screeched loudly in pain.

  “What?” I asked, brushing by the startled Nikhil to get to Randi’s side.

  “Damn ankle,” she sobbed. “Forgot to release my boot grapples. Tired. Bones getting weak. Too much low gee. Thing fucking hurts.”

  “Broken?”

  She nodded, tight-lipped, more in control. But I could see the tears in her eyes. Except for painkiller, there was nothing I could do at the moment for her. But I thought there might be something to be done for Nikhil. Where was Cathy?

  “Nikhil,” I said as evenly as I could. “What’s your O2 partial?”

  “I beg your pardon?” he drawled.

  “Beg Randi’s. I asked you what your O2 partial is.”

  “I’ve been conserving a bit. You know, less O2, less CO2. Trying to stretch things out.”

  “What … is … it?”

  “Point one. It should be fine. I’ve had a lot of altitude experience …”

  “Please put it back up to point two for five minutes, and then we’ll talk.”

  “Now just a minute, I resent the implication that—”

  “Be reasonable Nikhil. Put it back up for a little, please. Humor me. Five minutes won’t hurt.”

  “Oh perhaps not. There. Now just what is it you expect to happen?”

  “Wait for a bit.”

  We waited, silently. Randi sniffed, trying to deal with her pain. I watched Nikhil’s face slowly grow more and more troubled. Finally I asked:

  “Are you back with us?”

  He nodded silently. “I think so. My apologies, Randi.”

  “Got clumsy. Too strong for my own bones. Forget it. And you don’t owe me, either. Dumb thing to say. It was my choice.”

  What was? Two weeks ago, in his tent?

  “Very well,” Nikhil replied with as much dignity as he could muster.

  Who besides Randi could dismiss a broken ankle with “forget it,” and who besides Nikhil would take her up on that? I shook my head.

  Randi couldn’t keep the pain out of her voice as she held out her right vacuum boot. “This needs some work. Tent site. Cathy.” Nothing would show, of course, until it ca
me off.

  “Quite,” Nikhil responded. “Well, you were right on the direction. Perhaps we should resume.”

  I waved him off for a moment and found a painkiller in the pallet for Randi, and she ingested it through her helmet lock, and gagged a bit.

  “Still a little ethane here,” she gave a little laugh. “Woke me up. I’ll manage.”

  “Let me know.” I was so near her event horizon now that everything I could see of the outside world was distorted and bent by her presence. Such were the last moments of my freedom, the last minutes and the last seconds that I could look on our relationship from the outside. My independent existence was stretched beyond the power of any force of nature to restore it. Our fate was to become a singularity.

  It was a measure of my own hunger and fatigue that I half seriously considered exterminating Nikhil; coldly, as if contemplating a roach to be crushed. A piton gun would have done nicely. But, I thought, Cathy really ought to be in on the decision. She might want to keep him as a pet. Cathy, of course, was on the lead pitch. That meant she was really in charge, something Nikhil had forgotten.

  “Cathy,” I called, laying on the irony. “Randi has a broken ankle. Otherwise, we are ready to go again.”

  There was no answer, but radio didn’t carry well in this material—too many bends in the path and something in the clathrate that just ate our frequencies like stealth paint. So I gave two pulls on our common line to signal okay, go.

  The line was slack.

  Cathy, anger with Nikhil possibly clouding her judgment, had enforced her positional authority in a way that was completely inarguable: by proceeding alone. At least I fervently hoped that was all that had happened. I pulled myself to where the passage resumed, and looked. No sign of anything.

  “Sam, take the line back up to Cathy and tell her to wait up, we’re coming.”