The Hard SF Renaissance

by David G. Hartwell

  Sam squeezed by me and scurried off. Shortly, his monitors in my helmet display blinked out; he was out of radio range as well—

  Again, we waited for a tug on a line in a silence that shouted misery. Nikhil pretended to examine the wall, Randi stared ahead as if in a trance. I stared at her, wanting to touch her, but not seeming to have the energy to push myself over to her side of the little cave.

  Both hope and dread increased with the waiting. The empty time could mean that Cathy had gone much further than our past rate of progress had suggested, which would be very welcome news. But it could also mean that some disaster ahead that had taken both her and Sam. In which case, we were dead as well. Or, like Randi’s detour from the Boiling Sea, it could mean something we had neglected to imagine.

  “Wojciech, Nikhil,” Randi asked in her quiet, anticipatory, tone, “would you turn off your lamps?”

  I looked at Nikhil, and he stared off in space, saying as much as that he could not care less. But his light went out. I nodded and cut mine. The blackness was total at first, then as my pupils widened, I realized I could sense a gray green contrast, a shadow. My shadow.

  I turned around to the source of the glow. It was, of course, the crack behind me, through which Cathy and Sam had vanished. As my eyes adapted further, it became almost bright. It was white, just tinged with green. The shadows of rocks and ice intrusions made the crack look like the mouth of some beast about to devour us.

  “Is there,” I asked, “any reason why we should stay here?”

  We left. The crack widened rapidly, and after an hour of rather mild crackcrawling, we were able to revert to our distance eating hand-hauling routine. We covered ten kilometers, almost straight up this way. With the sudden way of such things the crack turned into a tubular tunnel, artificial in its smoothness, and this in turn gave into a roughly teardrop-shaped, hundred meter diameter cavern with slick ice walls, and a bright circle at the top. I was about to use my piton gun when Randi tugged my arm and pointed out a ladder of double-looped pitons, set about three meters apart, leading up to the circle.

  We were thus about to climb into Sphereheim when Cathy’s line grew taut again.

  That was, by the clock, the end of day nineteen. We were, it seems, both too exhausted and too excited to sleep.

  The cavern above was almost perfectly spherical, hence the name we gave it, and was almost fifteen kilometers in diameter. A spire ran along its vertical axis from the ceiling to the floor, littered like a Christmas tree with the kind of cantilevered platforms that seventy-five milligees permits.

  By now, we had climbed to within forty kilometers of the surface, so this was all in a pretty good vacuum, but there were signs that things had not always been this way.

  “Cathy?” Nikhil called, the first words he had spoken since the fight.

  “Good grief, you’re here already. We waited until we thought it was safe.”

  “We saw the light.”

  “It came on as soon as I got in here. Sam’s been looking for other automatic systems, burglar protection, for instance.”

  “There,” Sam interjected, “appear to be none. The power source is two-stage—a uranium radionic long duration module, and something like a solid state fuel cell that works when it’s warmed up. The latter appears to be able to produce almost a kilowatt.”

  “Good,” I said, wondering if Sam’s software could discern the contrary irritation in my voice. “Cathy, Randi has a broken ankle.” Even in less than a hundredth of gee, Randi wouldn’t put any weight on it.

  “Oh, no! We need to get a tent up right away. Sam, break off and come down here, I need you. And you!” she pointed at Nikhil. “This is a medical emergency now, and what I say goes. Do you have a problem with that?” The edge in Cathy’s voice verged on hysteria.

  Nikhil simply turned away without saying anything and began setting up the tent.

  Randi reached for Cathy. “Cathy, Nikhil cut his oxygen too thin, trying to save CO2 catalyst for all of us. He wasn’t himself. Ankle hurts like hell, but that was my fault. I’d feel better if you weren’t so, uh, hard on him. Okay?”

  Cathy stood quietly for a couple of seconds then muttered “All right, all right. Give me a minute to collect things, and we’ll get in the tent. I’ll see what I can do. Wojciech?”

  “Yes, Cathy?”

  “As I guess everyone knows, I just blew it with my husband, and I can’t fix things right now because I have to fix Randi’s ankle. He’s in a blue funk.” She pulled the velcro tab up on one of her pockets, reached in and produced a small, thin, box. “Give him one of these and tell him I’m sorry.”

  I looked at her. She seemed on the brink of some kind of collapse, but was holding herself back by some supreme effort of will. Maybe that’s what I looked like to her.

  “Sorry, Wojciech,” she whispered, “best I can do.”

  I gave her hand a squeeze. “We’ll make it good enough, okay? Just hang in there, Doc.”

  She gave me a quick, tear-filled smile, then grabbed the minidoc and followed Randi into the tent, which inflated promptly.

  Nikhil was sitting on the other pallet and I sat next to him. “Look, Nikhil, the way I see it, none of this stuff counts. All that counts is that the four of us get out of this moon alive.”

  He looked at me briefly, then resumed looking at the ground. “No, no. Wojciech, it counts. Do you understand living death? The kind where your body persists, but everything that you thought was you has been destroyed? My reputation … they’ll say Nikhil Ray cracked under pressure. It got too tough for old Nikhil. Nikhil beats up on women. It’s going to be bloody bad.”

  I remembered the box Cathy gave me, pulled it out and opened it. “Doctor’s orders, Nikhil. She cares, she really does.”

  He gave me a ghastly grin and took a caplet envelope, unwrapped it and stuck it through his helmet lock. “Can’t say as I approve of mind altering drugs, but it wouldn’t do to disappoint the doctor any more, now would it? I put her through medical school, did you know. She was eighteen when we met. Biology student studying evolution, and I was co-lecturing a paleontology section. Damn she was beautiful, and no one like that had ever …” he lifted his hands as if to gesture, then set them down again. “I broke my own rule about thinking first, and I have this to remind me, every day, of what happens when you do that.”

  “Look, Nikhil. She doesn’t mean to hurt you.” I tried to think of something to get him out of this, to put his mind on something else. “Say, we have a few minutes. Why don’t we look around, it may be the only chance we get. Soon as Cathy’s done with Randi, we’ll need to get some sleep, then try to make it to the surface. We’ve forty kilometers to go, and only two days before our catalyst runs out.”

  “My line, isn’t that? Very well.” He seemed to straighten a bit. “But it looks as if the visitors packed up pretty thoroughly when they left. Those platforms off the central column are just bare honeycomb. Of course, it would be a bit odd if they packed everything out.”

  “Oh?”

  “Field sites are usually an eclectic mess. All sorts of not-immediately-useful stuff gets strewn about. If the strewers don’t expect the environmental police to stop by, it usually just gets left there by the hut site—the next explorer to come that way might find something useful.”

  “I see. You think there might be a dump here, somewhere.”

  “It seems they had a crypt. Why not a dump?”

  What kind of alien technology might be useful to us, I didn’t know. It would take a lot longer than the two days we had to figure out how to do anything with it. But the discussion had seemed to revive Nikhil a bit, so I humored him.

  We found the junkyard. It was in a mound about a hundred meters from the tower base, covered with the same color dust as everything else. A squirt from my reaction pistol blew some of the dust away from the junk.

  And it was just that. Discarded stuff. Broken building panels, a few boxes with electrical leads. What looked like a bus
ted still. A small wheeled vehicle that I would have taken for a kid’s tricycle, an elongated vacuum helmet with a cracked visor. Other things. I’d been rummaging for five minutes before I noticed that Nikhil hadn’t gone past the still.

  “Nikhil?”

  “It is within the realm of possibility that I might redeem myself. Look at that.”

  The most visible part was a big coil of what looked to be tubing. There were also things that looked like electric motors, and several chambers to hold distilled liquids.

  “The tubing, Wojciech.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “If we breathe through it, at this temperature, the CO2 in our breath should condense.”

  Oh! We could do without the CO2 catalyst.

  “It wouldn’t be very portable.”

  “No, it wouldn’t,” Nikhil nodded slowly, judiciously. “But it doesn’t have to be. Cathy and Randi can remain here while you, Sam and I take the remaining catalyst and go for help.”

  Did I hear him right? Then I thought it through. Randi was disabled, Cathy, by strength and temperament, was the least suited for the ordeal above us. It made sense, but Randi would … no, Randi would have to agree if it made sense. She was a pro.

  “We’d better see if it works first,” I said.

  VI

  An hour later, our still was working. Tape, spare connectors, the alien light source, and Sam’s instant computational capabilities yielded something that could keep two relatively quiescent people alive. They’d have to heat it up to sublimate the condensed CO2 every other hour, or the thing would clog, but it worked.

  Randi’s ankle was a less happy situation.

  “Randi’s resting now,” Cathy told us when she finally emerged from the vacuum tent, exhausted. “It’s a bad break, splintered. Her bones were weak from too much time in low gravity, I think. Anyway, the breaks extend into the calcaneus and her foot is much too swollen to get back into her vacuum boots. Had to put her in a rescue bag to get out of the tent.” Cathy shot a look of contempt at her husband who stared down. “The swelling will take days to go down, and she should have much more nourishment than we have to give her.”

  “I …” Nikhil started, then, in a moment I shall remember forever, he looked confused. “I?” Then he simply went limp and fell, much like an autumn leaf in the gentle gravity of Miranda, to the cavern dust. We were both too surprised to catch him even though his fall took several seconds.

  “No, no …” Cathy choked.

  I knelt over Nikhil and straightened his limbs. I couldn’t think of anything else to do.

  “Stroke?” I asked Cathy.

  She seemed to shake herself back into a professional mode. I heard her take a breath.

  “Could be. His heart telemetry’s fine. Or he may have just fainted. Let’s get the other tent set up.”

  We did this only with Sam’s help. We made errors in the setup, errors which would have been fatal if Sam hadn’t been there to notice and correct them. We were tired and had been eating too little food. It took an hour. We put Nikhil in the tent and Cathy was about to follow when she stopped me.

  “The main med kit’s in Randi’s tent. I’ll need it if I have to operate. She’ll have gotten out of the rescue bag to sleep after I left. You’ll have to wake her, get her back in the bag and depressure …”

  I held up a hand. “I can figure it out, and if I can’t, she can. Cathy, her foot’s busted, not her head.”

  Cathy nodded and I could see a bit of a smile through her faceplate.

  “Randi,” I called, “sorry to wake you, but we’ve got a problem.”

  “I heard. Comsets are dumb, guys. Can’t tell if you talk about someone instead of to someone. Be right out with the med kit.”

  “Huh?” Cathy sounded shocked. “No, Randi don’t try to put that boot on. Please don’t.”

  “Too late,” Randi answered. We watched the tension go out of the tent fabric as it depressurized. Randi emerged from the opening with the med kit and a sample bag. Cathy and I immediately looked at her right boot—it seemed perfectly normal, except that Randi had rigged some kind of brace with pitons and vacuum tape.

  Then we looked at the sample bag. It contained a blue-green swollen travesty of a human foot, severed neatly just above the ankle, apparently with a surgical laser. I couldn’t think of anything to do or say.

  “Oh, no, Randi,” Cathy cried and launched herself toward Randi. “I tried Randi, I tried.”

  “You didn’t have time.” The two women embraced. “Don’t say anything,” Randi finally said, “to him.” She nodded at Nikhil’s tent. “Until we’re all back and safe. Please, huh?”

  Cathy stood frozen, then nodded slowly, took the sample bag and examined the foot end of the section. “Looks clean, anyway. At least let me take a look at the stump before you go, okay?”

  Randi shook her head. “Bitch to unwrap. Cauterized with the surgical laser. Plastiflesh all over the stump. Sealed in plastic. Plenty of local. Don’t feel anything. I did a good enough job, Cathy.”

  I finally found my voice. “Randi … why?”

  “Nikhil’s gone. Got to move. It’s okay, Wojciech. They can regenerate. You and I got to get going.”

  “Me? Now?” I was surprised for a moment, then realized the need. Cathy had to stay with Nikhil. And I’d already seen too many situations where one person would have been stopped that we’d managed to work around with two. Also, our jury-rigged CO2 still’s capacity was two people, max.

  “Now. Go as long as we can, then sleep. Eat everything we have left. Push for the surface. Only way.”

  Cathy nodded. She handed Randi’s foot to me, almost absentmindedly, and went into the tent to attend to Nikhil. Randi laughed, took the foot from me, and threw it far out of sight toward Sphereheim’s junk pile. In the low gravity, it probably got there.

  I tried not to think about it as Randi and I packed, with Sam’s help. Moving slowly and deliberately, we didn’t make that many errors. What Randi had to draw on, I didn’t know. I drew on her. In an hour, we were ready to go and said our farewells to Cathy.

  She would have to wait there, perhaps alone if Nikhil did not recover, perhaps forever if we did not succeed. What would that be like? I wondered. Would some future explorers confuse her with the beings who had built the station in this cavern? Had we already done that with the corpses we found in the Cavern of the Dead Ends?

  I wished I had made love to Cathy that night we spent together—I felt I was leaving a relationship incomplete; a feeling, a sharing, uncommunicated. Here, even a last embrace would have been nice, but she was in her tent caring for her husband, and out of food, low on time, Randi and I had to go, and go now. In the dash to the surface, even minutes might be critical.

  Tireless Sam scaled the alien tower, found the vent in the magnificent, crystallined dome of the cavern roof, and dropped us a line. I was suspended among wonders, but so tired I almost fell asleep as Sam reeled us up. The experience was surreal and beyond description.

  Of most of the next few days, I have little detailed memory. Sam dragged us through passages, chimneys vents and caverns. Occasionally, it stopped at a problem that Randi would somehow rouse herself to solve.

  On one occasion, we came to a wall a meter thick which had cracked enough to let gas pass through. Sam’s acoustic radar showed a big cavern on the other side, so, somehow, we dug our way through. For all its talents, Sam was not built for wielding a pick. I leave this information to the designers of future cave exploration robots.

  Randi and I swung at that wall in five minute shifts for a three-hour eternity, before, in a fit of hysterical anaerobic energy, I was able to kick it through. We were too tired to celebrate—we just grabbed the line as Sam went by and tried to keep awake and living as it pulled us through another cave and another crack.

  In one of a string of ordinary crystal caverns, we found another alien piton. Randi thought it might be a different design than the one we had found before, and
had Sam pull it out and put it in a sample bag, which we stored on Sam—the most likely to survive.

  I mentioned this because we were near death and knew it, but could still do things for the future. Everyone dies, I thought, so we all spend our lives for something. The only thing that matters at the end is: for what? In saving the piton, we were adding one more bit to the tally of “for what?”

  This was almost certainly our last “night” in a tent. I think we both stunk, but I was too far gone to tell for sure. We’d gone for thirty-seven hours straight. Sam says we are within three kilometers of the surface, but the cavern trail lies parallel to this surface, and refuses to ascend.

  In theory, our catalyst was exhausted, but we continued to breath.

  Another quake trapped me.

  Randi was in front of me. Somehow, she managed to squeeze aside and let Sam by to help. Sam chipped clathrate away from my helmet, which let me straighten my neck.

  As this happened, there was another movement, a big slow one this time, and the groan of Miranda’s tortured mantle was clearly audible as my helmet was pressed between the passage walls again. I could see the passage ahead of me close a little more with every sickening wave of ground movement, even as I could feel the pressure at my spot release a bit. But the passage ahead—if it closed with Randi on this side, we were dead.

  “Go!” I told Randi. “It’s up to you now.” As if it hadn’t always been so. I was pushed sideways and back again as another train of s-waves rolled through. Ice split with sharp retorts.

  Sam turned sideways in the passage, pitting its thin composite against billions of tons of rock.

  Randi vanished forward. “I love you,” she said. “I’ll make it.”

  “I know you will. Hey, we’re married, okay?”

  “Just like that?”

  “By my authority as a man in a desperate position.”

  “Okay. Married. Two kids. Deal?”

  “Deal.”

  “I love you again.”