by Mike Ashley
Randi, as I got to know her, was something like a black hole; of what goes in, nothing comes out. Things somehow accrete to her orbit and bend to her will without any noticeable verbal effort on her part. She can spend a whole evening without saying anything more than “uh-huh”. Did you like the Bach? Nice place you have. Are you comfortable? Do you want more? Did you like it? Do you want to do it again tomorrow?
“Uh-huh.”
“Say, if you go into Miranda someone should do more than take pictures, don’t you think? I’ve thrown a few words around in my time, perchance I could lend my services to chronicle the expedition? What do you think?”
“Uh-huh.”
My contract with her is unspoken, and is thus on her terms. There is no escape. But we are complementary. I became her salesman. I talked her father into funding Nikhil, and talked Nikhil into accepting support from one of his erstwhile enemies. Randi organized the people and things that started coming her way into an expedition.
Randi is inarticulate, not crazy. She goes about her wild things in a highly disciplined way. When she uses words, she makes lists: “Batteries, CO2 Recyclers, Picks, Robot, Ropes, Spare tightsuits, Tissue, Vacuum tents, Medical supplies, Waste bags, etc.”
Such things come to her through grants, donations, her father’s name, friends from previous expeditions, and luck. She worked very hard at getting these things together. Sometimes I felt I fit down there in “etc”, somewhere between the t and the c, and counted myself lucky. If she had only listed “back door,” perhaps we would have had one.
As I write, she is lying beside me in our vacuum tent, exhausted with worry. I am tired, too.
We wasted a day, sitting on our sausage-shaped equipment pallets, talking, and convincing ourselves to move on.
Nikhil explained our predicament: Randi’s namesake quivers as it bobs up in down in its not quite perfect orbit, as inclined to be different as she. Stresses accumulate over ages, build up inside and release, careless of the consequences. We had discovered, he said, that Miranda is still shrinking through the gradual collapse of its caverns during such quakes. Also, because the gravity is so low, it might take years for a series of quakes and aftershocks to play itself out. The quake danger wouldn’t subside until long after we escaped, or died.
We had to make sure the front door was closed. It was – slammed shut: the wide gallery we traversed to arrive at this cavern is now a seam, a disjoint. A scar and a change of colour remain to demarcate the forcible fusion of two previously separate layers of clathrate.
Sam jammed all four arms into the wall, anchored them with piton fingers, pressed part of its composite belly right against the new seam, and pinged until it had an image of the obstructed passage. “The closure goes back at least a kilometre,” it announced.
The fibre-optic line we have been trailing for the last three days no longer reached the surface either. Sam removed the useless line from the comm set and held it against the business end of its laser radar. “The break’s about fifteen kilometres from here,” it reported.
“How do you know that?” I asked.
“Partial mirror.” Randi explained on Sam’s behalf. “Internal reflection.”
Fifteen kilometres, I reflected. Not that we really could have dug through even one kilometre, but we’d done some pretending. Now the pretence ceased, and we faced reality.
I had little fear of sudden death, and in space exploration, the rare death is usually sudden. My attitude toward the risks of our expedition was that if I succeeded, the rewards would be great, and if I got killed, it wouldn’t matter. I should have thought more about the possibility of enduring a long, drawn-out process of having life slowly and painfully drain away from me, buried in a clathrate tomb.
Then the group was silent for a long time. For my part, I was reviewing ways to painlessly end my life before the universe did it for me without concern for my suffering.
Then Nikhil’s voice filled the void. “Friends, we knew the risks. If it’s any consolation, that was the biggest quake recorded since instruments were put on this moon. By a factor of ten. That kind of adjustment,” he waved his arms at obvious evidences of faults in the cavern around us, “should have been over with a hundred million years ago. Wretched luck, I’m afraid.”
“Perhaps it will open up again?” his wife asked, her light features creased with concern behind the invisible faceplate of her helmet.
Nikhil missed the irony in her voice and answered his wife’s question with an irony of his own. “Perhaps it will. In another hundred million years.” He actually smiled.
Randi spoke softly; “Twenty days, CO2 catalyst runs out in twenty days. We have two weeks of food at regular rations, but can we stretch that to a month or more. We have about a month of water each, depending on how severely we ration it. We can always get more by chipping ice and running it through our waste reprocessors. But without the catalyst, we can’t make air.”
“And we can’t stop breathing,” Cathy added.
“Cathy,” I ask, “I suppose it is traditional for poets to think this way, so I’ll ask the question. Is there any way to, well, end this gracefully, if and when we have to?”
“Several,” she replied a shrug. “I can knock you out first, with anaesthetic. Then kill you.”
“How?” I ask.
“Does it matter?”
“To a poet, yes.”
She nodded, and smiled. “Then, Wojciech, I shall put a piton through your heart, lest you rise again and in doing so devalue your manuscripts which by then will be selling for millions.” Cathy’s rare smiles have teeth in them.
“My dear,” Nikhil said, our helmet transceivers faithfully reproducing the condescension in his tone, “your bedside manner is showing.”
“My dear,” Cathy murmured, “what would you know about anything to do with a bed?”
Snipe and countersnipe. Perhaps such repartee held their marriage together, like gluons hold a meson together until it annihilates itself.
Sam returned from the ‘front door’. “We can’t go back that way, and our Rescuers can’t come that way in twenty days with existing drilling equipment. I suggest we go somewhere else.” A robot has the option of being logical at times like this.
“Quite right. If we wait here,” Nikhil offered, “Miranda may remove the option of slow death, assisted or otherwise. Aftershocks are likely.”
“Aftershocks, cave-in, suffocation,” Randi listed the possibilities, “or other exits.”
Nikhil shrugged and pointed to the opposite side of the cavern. “Shall we?”
“I’ll follow you to hell, darling,” Cathy answered.
Randi and I exchanged a glance which said; thank the lucky stars for you.
“Maps, such as they are,” Randi began. “Rations, sleep schedule, leadership, and so on. Make decisions now, while we can think.” At this she looked Nikhil straight in the eye, “While we care.”
“Very well then,” Nikhil responded with a shrug. “Sam is a bit uncreative when confronted with the unknown, Cathy and Wojciech have different areas of expertise, so perhaps Randi and I should take turns leading the pitches. I propose that we don’t slight ourselves on the evening meal, but make do with minimal snacks at other times . . .”
“My darling idiot, we need protein energy for the work,” Cathy interrupted. “We will have a good breakfast, even at the expense of dinner.”
“Perhaps we could compromise on lunch,” I offered.
“Travel distance, energy level, sustained alertness.”
“On the other hand,” I corrected, “moderation in all things . . .”
By the time we finally got going, we were approaching the start of the next sleep period, and Randi had effectively decided everything. We went single file behind the alternating pitch leaders. I towed one pallet, Cathy towed the other and Sam brought up the rear.
There was a short passage from our cavern to the next one, more narrow than previous ones.
�
��I think . . . I detect signs of wind erosion,” Nikhil sent from the lead, wonder in his voice.
“Wind?” I said, surprised. What wind could there be on Miranda?
“The collisions which reformed the moon must have released plenty of gas for a short time. It had to get out somehow. Note the striations as you come through.”
They were there, I noted as I came through, as if someone had sandblasted the passage walls. Miranda had breathed, once upon a time.
“I think,” he continued, “that there may be an equilibrium between the gas in Miranda’s caverns and the gas torus outside the ring system. Miranda’s gravity is hardly adequate to compress that very much. But a system of caverns acting as a cold trap and a rough diffusion barrier . . . hmm, maybe.”
“How much gas?” I wondered.
He shook his head. “Hard to tell that from up here, isn’t it?”
We pushed half an hour past our agreed stop time to find a monolithic shelter that might prove safe from aftershocks. This passage was just wide enough to inflate our one-metre sleeping tubes end to end. We ate dinner in the one Randi and I used. It was a spare, crowded, smelly, silent meal. Even Nikhil seemed depressed. I thought, as we replaced our helmets to pump down to let the Rays go back to their tent, that it was the last one we would eat together in such circumstances. The ins and outs of vacuum tents took up too much time and energy.
We repressurized and I savoured the simple pleasure of watching Randi remove her tightsuit and bathe with a damp wipe in the end of the tent. She motioned for me to turn while she used the facility built into the end of our pallet, and so I unrolled my notescreen, slipped on its headband, and turned my attention to this journal, a process of clearly subvocalizing each word that I want on the screen.
Later she touched my arm indicating that it was my turn, kissed me lightly and went to bed between the elastic sheets, falling asleep instantly. My turn.
Day four was spent gliding through a series of large, nearly horizontal caverns. Miranda, it turns out, is still breathing. A ghost breath to be sure, undetectable except with such sensitive instruments as Sam contains. But there appears to be a pressure differential; gas still flows through these caverns out to the surface. Sam can find the next passage by monitoring the molecular flow.
We pulled ourselves along with our hands, progressing like a weighted diver in an underwater cave; an analogy most accurate when one moves so slowly that lack of drag is unremarkable.
As we glided along, I forgot my doom, and looked at the marbled ice around me with wonder. Randi glided in front of me and I could mentally remove her dusty coveralls and imagine her hard, lithe, body moving in its skin-hugging shipsuit. I could imagine her muscles bunch and relax in her weight-lifter’s arms, imagine the firm definition of her neck and forearms. A poet herself, I thought, who could barely talk, but who had written an epic in the language of her body and its movement.
Sam notified us that it was time for another sounding and a lead change. In the next kilometre, the passage narrowed, and we found ourselves forcing our bodies through cracks that were hardly large enough to fit our bones through.
My body was becoming bruised from such tight contortions, but I wasn’t afraid my tightsuit would tear; the fabric is slick and nearly invulnerable. On our first day, Randi scared the hell out of me when by taking a hard-frozen, knife-edged sliver of rock and trying to commit hara-kiri with it, stabbing herself with so much force that the rock broke. She laughed at my reaction and told me that I needed to have confidence in my equipment.
She still has the bruise, dark among the lighter, older blemishes on her hard-used body. I kiss it when we make love and she says “Uh-huh. Told you so.” Randi climbed Gilbert Montes in the Mercurian antarctic with her father and brother carrying a full vacuum kit when she was thirteen. She suffered a stress fracture in her ulna and didn’t tell anyone until after they reached the summit.
The crack widened and, to our relief, gave onto another cavern, and that to another narrow passage. Randi took the lead, Nikhil followed, then me, then Cathy, then Sam.
Sam made me think of a cubist crab, or maybe a small, handle-less lawn mower, on insect legs instead of wheels. Articulate and witty with a full range of simulated emotion and canned humour dialogue stored in its memory, Sam was our expert on what had been. But it had difficulty interpreting things it hadn’t seen before, or imagining what it had never seen, and so it usually followed us.
By day’s end we had covered twenty-eight kilometres and are another eighteen kilometres closer to the centre. That appeared to be where the road went, though Nikhil said we were more likely to be on a chord passing fifty kilometres or so above the centre, where it seems that two major blocks came together a billion years ago.
This, I told myself, is a fool’s journey, with no real chance of success. But how much better, how much more human, to fight destiny than to wait and die.
We ate as couples that night, each in our own tents.
II
On day five, we became stuck.
Randi woke me that morning exploring my body, fitting various parts of herself around me as the elastic sheets kept us pressed together. Somehow, an intimate dream I’d been having had segued into reality, and I felt only a momentary surprise at her intrusion.
“You have some new bruises,” I told her after I opened my eyes. Hers remained closed.
“Morning,” she murmured and wrapped herself around me again. Time slowed as I spun into her implacable, devouring, wholeness.
But of course time would not stop. Our helmets beeped simultaneously with Sam’s wake up call, fortunately too late to prevent another part of me from becoming part of Randi. Sam reminded us, that, given our fantasy of escaping from Miranda’s caverns, we had some time to make up.
Randi popped out of the sheets, spun around airborne, in graceful athletic move and slowly fell to her own cot in front of me, exuberantly naked, stretching like a sensual cat, staring right into my enslaved eyes.
“Female display instinct; harmless, healthy, feels good.”
Harmless? I grinned and reminded her: “But it’s time to spelunk.”
“Roger that,” she laughed, grabbed her tightsuit from the ball of clothes in the end of the tent, and started rolling it on. They go on like a pair of pantyhose, except that they are slick on the inside and adjust easily to your form. To her form. I followed suit, and we quickly depressurized and packed.
It took Sam an hour to find the cavern inlet vent, and it was just a crack, barely big enough for us to squeeze into. We spent an hour convincing ourselves there was no other opportunity, then we wriggled forward through this crack like so many ants, kits and our coveralls pushed ahead of us, bodies fitting any way we could make them fit.
I doubt we made a hundred yards an hour. Our situation felt hopeless at this rate, but Sam assured us of more caverns ahead.
Perhaps it would have been better if Nikhil had been on lead. Larger than Randi and less inclined to disregard discomfort, he would have gone slower and chipped more clathrate, which, as it turned out, would have been faster.
Anyway, as I inched myself forward with my mind preoccupied with the enigma of Randi, Miranda groaned – at least that’s what it sounded like in my helmet, pressed hard against the narrow roof of the crack our passage has become. I felt something. Did the pressure against my ribs increase? I fought panic, concentrating on the people around me and their lights shining past the few open cracks between the passage and their bodies.
“I can’t move.” That was Cathy. “And I’m getting cold.”
Our tightsuits were top of the line “Explorers,” twenty layers of smart fibre weave sandwiched with an elastic macromolecular binder. Despite their thinness, the suits are great insulators, and Miranda’s surrounding vacuum is even better.
Usually, conductive losses to the cryogenic ice around us are restricted to the portions of hand or boot that happens to be in contact with the surface and getting rid of our bod
y heat is the main concern. Thus, the smart fibre layers of our suits are usually charcoal to jet black. But if almost a square metre of you is pressed hard against a cryogenic solid, even the best million atom layer the Astrographic Society can buy meets its match, and the problem is worse, locally.
The old expression, “colder than a witch’s tit” might give you some idea of Cathy’s predicament.
“I can’t do much,” I answered, “I’m almost stuck myself. Hang in there.”
“Sam,” Cathy gasped, her voice a battleground of panic and self-control, “wedge yourself edge up in the crack. Keep it from narrowing any more.”
“That’s not going to work, Cathy,” it replied. “I would be fractured and destroyed without affecting anything.”
“Remember your laws!” Cathy shrieked. “You have to obey me. Now do it, before this crushes my ribs! Nikhil, make the robot obey me!”
“Cathy, dear,” Nikhil asks, “I sympathize with your discomfort, but could you hold off for a bit. Let us think about this.”
“I’ll be frozen solid in minutes and you want to think. Damnit, Nikhil, it hurts. Expend the robot and save me. I’m your doctor.”
“Cathy,” Sam says, “We will try to save you, but we have gone only a hundred kilometres since the quake, and there may be a thousand to go. If we encounter such difficulties every hundred kilometres, there may be on the order of ten of them yet to come. And you only have one robot to expend, as you put it. Sacrificing me now places the others in an obviously increased risk. Nothing is moving now, so thinking does not entail any immediate increased risk.”
“DAMN YOUR LOGIC. I’M GETTING FROSTBITE. GET ME OUT OF HERE”
Embarrassed silence slammed down after this outburst, no one even breathing for what seemed like a minute. Then Cathy started sobbing in short panicky gasps, which at least let the rest of us know she was still alive.
Randi broke the silence. “Can the rest of you move forward?”
“Yes,” Nikhil answers, “a little.”
“Same here,” I add.