To Climb a Flat Mountain

by G. David Nordley

  He tried to envision some future Cube World with two independent cultures, not speaking the same language, not having the same values, possibly even going to war with each other. The prospect made him shudder.

  “No descendants. No. We’re leaving this place. We’re going to recover our technology, get robots working, make spaceships and a starship, and go home.”

  “That’s a long-term dream,” Helen said. “In the meantime, we need to settle in, build a town with enough room in it for children. We don’t have robots, at least not yet. So we need more people.” She grinned at him. “I’ve never been pregnant before. I’m looking forward to it.”

  He looked at her in abject horror. “With Soob down, we can’t afford to have another person disabled.”

  She shook her head. “Then we’d best get on with it now before we lose someone else. I don’t want to spend eternity being the last person on this planet. Yes, I’ve opened my tubes and I’m giving it my best shot.”

  “You’re making a big decision for all of us.”

  She nodded and smiled cheerfully. “I didn’t think I’d win a vote. You want to kick me off the planet? It’s my body.”

  “You’re not already...”

  “Could even be yours. It’s hard to tell just yet.” She snuggled up to him. “Don’t worry. I can’t get more pregnant.”

  “Hey, if you aren’t I don’t want to...” he said.

  But she sealed his mouth with a kiss and biology took over.

  Afterward, as afterglow faded into sleep, he wondered about man’s ability to rationalize in the face of a determined womanly assault. Helen, he realized, was probably in charge here, preferring to lead from behind him, almost as Collette thought Leo might have led Gabe. In an era of genetic engineering leveling, she was still clearly smarter than anyone else in their small team, but her sexuality made some people forget her mind. She was Helen Athena, all-powerful, leading him on, enticing him. Then she became Collette and they lay down together. Then Collette became Ascendant Chryse and they decided to make babies and fill this planet with them. Then they could outvote Gabe Eddie and Leo. They needed to do it quickly before Leo stopped them.

  Helen woke him up with a kiss before the dream reached its climax.

  “Time to get going.”

  * * * *

  They had their tiny camp packed before sunrise and set out upward under starlight, probing ahead of themselves with their flute plant walking sticks.

  Antares alone provided enough light for them to find their way.

  “It’s much brighter than Venus, up here,” Helen said. “I’d say about minus sixth magnitude.”

  “Hmm, maybe brighter than that. Almost like a crescent moon. I’ll give it minus seven.”

  “Maybe. Lets say that’s a maximum. Split the difference; since it’s something like first magnitude from Earth, that would put it about 7.5 magnitudes, or a factor of 1,000 brighter than Earth. So it’s thirty-some times closer, at least. Only five parsecs or so.”

  “About the same distance between 36 Ophiuchi and Earth,” Jacques said. “You can barely see 36 Ophiuchi at that distance; this star casts shadows.”

  “I wonder what happens here when it goes supernova.”

  “Whoever build this place may have taken that into consideration,” Jacques said, struggling to keep his mind on putting one synapse in front of the next. “Maybe they have predicted the date.”

  The terraces were gone, along with any hint of water. The lava field looked flat, except that they were bent over at almost forty-five degrees to the surface. Part of that was the slope of the mountain to the gravitational field and part of it was the wind they were slogging into. It was dry and cold, but Jacques thought it might change as day came. Footing was treacherous; the lava was covered with a loose grit that could slide underfoot, and thin spots in the lava could give way without warning, leaving one’s foot dangling in a lava tube.

  That said, they were able to maintain a fairly brisk pace without their packs, about three meters a second, Jacques thought. We’re putting some distance behind us. He looked back over the featureless landscape and realized he couldn’t recognize anything.

  “Whoa, Helen. I can’t see our camp!”

  “Can you see the horizon against the mist?”

  “Okay. Yes, I can see it. The bulge.”

  “If we’ve been headed directly uphill, the camp should be just below the bulge. We haven’t gone too far to find it again, I think. But we should build a cairn here. A big one.”

  It was easier said than done. Portable rocks were hard to find in a pahoehoe field, but by stomping around they were able to collapse a small lava tube and use the pieces of its roof to build an upright pillar. ‘Upright’ proved to be about thirty-degrees to the local slope, so they called it “the leaning tower of pieces.”

  They found they would hike upward for about an hour before it became hard to see a cairn, so that became their routine. As dawn came, they could see farther, but could also see better and move faster, so the hour interval remained about the same. Six cairns and an hour into the trip, they realized the ground was getting warm. An incongruous cloud lay ahead of them.

  “Jacques, I don’t think we should try to build a cairn here,” Helen said. “Look.”

  He turned to where she pointed and saw a piece of lava fall with a crunch into a new hole. A river of brilliant orange light shone through it.

  They went quickly right until the steam cloud was no longer in front of them, and the ground seemed cooler to the touch. Some experimental stomping found them shards for the cairn.

  Jacques found he was a little short on breath, and hooked his wrist comp to the solar array. The air near the lava surface was about zero C, but if he held the wrist comp high over his head, it recorded minus twenty-five. Atmospheric pressure was down to 998 millibars.

  “Up ahead ... I think the lava field stops beyond that ridge.”

  Jacques saw and nodded. “I don’t think we can go too much farther...” He stopped to breathe deeply. “...without more oxygen. I’d guess we’re getting about half what we should, partial pressure around a hundred millibars.”

  Helen nodded. “Just a little farther. I want to see where the lava comes from.”

  They pushed on for another thirty minutes and arrived at the ridge. Above the lava was a smooth band of material that looked vaguely like concrete. Beyond that, uphill was a featureless plane of gray. He boosted Helen up over the “concrete” and she pulled him up afterward. It was absolutely flat.

  “Is the shuttle still there?” Helen asked.

  Jacques checked. “Yes, it has a somewhat stronger signal, but...” The reading was coming from directly in front of him, but he was standing at about a thirty-degree angle, which meant that the signal was coming from below Cube world’s surface. “It’s below us, Helen. Ahead and somehow below—a radio propagation trick?”

  “I’m not sure, but I wouldn’t think so.” She pulled out the binoculars and scanned the horizon. “I can’t see anything here. Maybe it’s on the other side of the ridge. On the other face.”

  “How far to the ridge, do you think?” Jacques asked.

  “Maybe a thousand kilometers. At five kilometers an hour, maybe two hundred hours.”

  “A week. We’d need enough oxygen for a week.”

  “Next year, if we can figure out how to store it,” Helen said. “I want to stand on the ridge and look at both faces.”

  “While breast-feeding?” Jacques quipped, and instantly regretted it.

  But Helen just laughed. “There will be time.”

  “Time to go home now.”

  He saw it out of the corner of his eye when he turned around to retrace their steps. It was just a bump in the otherwise geometrically smooth curve of the lava source ridge, an indeterminate distance away.

  “Binoculars, Helen. Over there—a bump on the lava source ridge.”

  She pulled the binoculars from her belly kit, plugged them into the
solar array, and sighted in on it. “It looks like a shelf sticking out of the plain. The top is probably level, gravitationally, the front, vertical. Like a dormer window. Four and a fraction klicks distant.”

  “We should go for it. It probably has something to do with this place.” He stomped his foot on the surface for emphasis and almost lost his footing on the slope.

  “We’d be finding our way home in the dark.”

  “We left that way.”

  They stared at each other. It was clearly more of a risk than Helen wanted, but Jacques weighed that against the potential for a breakthrough. It was a discovery that emphasized the differences in their attitudes: Helen for accepting a long stay and adapting to the world, Jacques putting almost all of his efforts into finding a way out.

  “Okay,” Helen said at length. “But let’s go down to the lava source ridge—it’s almost level on top—easier to walk on. It looks like the front of the structure is just a few meters back from the ridge.”

  They reached the structure well past local noon, but Jacques figured they still had seven hours plus twilight to return and find their camp. Helen was nervous, and he had picked up the pace as much as his oxygen-starved lungs would let him. The structure proved large—maybe twenty meters tall in front—and featureless as they approached from the side. But when they got to the front they saw a huge black rectangle about twenty meters by ten in the wall in front of them.

  “I’d say it’s a door,” Helen said in wonderment. “A great big garage door.”

  They got a greater shock as they approached and it opened by simply vanishing.

  * * * *

  Chapter 15

  Behind the Curtain

  “And there we were,” Helen told the assembled group, “inside this enormous, enormous room with great curving arches, huge pillars—of solid diamond, I’d guess—catwalks the width of airplane runways, huge machines rolling around without making any sound whatsoever.”

  “It was lit inside?” Collette asked.

  Jacques nodded. “There were point sources every few kilometers, I’d guess. They looked like stars, but much brighter. In the distance they kind of merged into a general glow. We only took half an hour inside—it was too cold to stay overnight and we had to get back to camp. But it looks like there’s a road through to the other side of the ridge. Which is where my readings indicate the shuttle is.”

  He looked around the group. Soob nodded and smiled at him; he wasn’t able to speak or walk without assistance, but at least the higher functions of his mind hadn’t been too badly damaged by his near-suffocation. Doc said he was getting better every day.

  If they had all been healthy, they might have tried for the other side immediately, but they didn’t want to do that with only two people, gone into an unknown environment for the entire winter, and they couldn’t bring Soob in his present state. So Eagle’s Nest was getting ready for their second winter. Provisions were piled high in the ice cave. Partitions of flute plant mats broke the wind through the cave and gave them private bedrooms.

  “Did anyone, or anything, notice you were there?” Collette asked. “Seems like pretty loose security to me.”

  “Whatever guards the door apparently didn’t see us as a threat,” Jacques said. “The way it just vanished ... and it was solid before. I touched it.”

  “It could be some form of programmable matter,” Helen said. “People have been working on it forever. Send it one signal and it’s a solid wall, send it another and it’s just dust in the air.”

  “Which we breathed,” Jacques added. “Without, apparently, any ill effects.”

  “So you have alien nanites running around inside you,” Doc concluded.

  Soob grunted and reached for his slate, wrote and handed the slate to Collette.

  “All of us since arrival. Place is managed!” she read.

  “Okay,” Helen said in a loud voice. “Whoever you are, you can stop playing with us. We have better things to do with our lives.”

  There was, of course, no response, and the group had a nervous laugh.

  * * * *

  The winter passed, if not comfortably, with much less difficulty. They had enough food. Jacques rigged a system to keep the top entrance open, and they even managed a few trips to the first two stage camps, bringing more provisions and creating more living room.

  On one trip, they saw a megabat crash into the snow. Why it did so, they couldn’t guess, but its carcass yielded a fresh supply of batskin and more meat than they could eat in years. What they brought back to the cave with them became frozen steaks and jerky for next summer’s expedition.

  Finally the snow melted and Jacques finished his carved stone marker, following their names with: Eagles Nest. Days 72-195

  They had to travel light, of course, and left countless things they had made over the two winters. They told themselves they would be back again someday, knowing it would be unlikely. They imagined tourists going through their cave in some ten thousand years, looking at their carvings, primitive furniture, stone kitchenware, and all.

  Helen had tears in her eyes as she left. She had hoped to raise a child there. Soob touched her arm. He walked well enough, now, but still could not talk. What memories Eagle’s Nest must have for him! But with last looks back, they were on their way, with full packs, along a now well-beaten trail to Tree Line Camp.

  They reached the maintenance entrance a week later, quite prepared for it to not open for them. But it did, and in they went, with Collette, Doc, and Soob making appropriate sounds of wonder at the network of roadways, braces, and catwalks between great vertical tubes that climbed from far below to far above. Here and there, Jacques thought he could see robots moving around on huge catwalks on the inside of the mountain surface, many kilometers away. The place was obviously being actively maintained.

  They had, nominally, forty days’ provisions with them; Jacques thought two weeks would get them through the 1,000 kilometers to the other side. If they found no exit at the other end, they could conceivably retrace their steps on short rations. Shortcut though it might be, it was a long, cold, hard walk through a complete desert. There was nothing to be done about disguising their presence and they had to litter the clean roadway with hirachnoid limb shells and worse.

  On the flat, hard surface, however, they found they could half walk, half jog in a kind of long loping stride that saved their feet and ate up the kilometers. They took turns holding Soob’s hand—his legs were strong enough, but his coordination wasn’t fully back yet. It was a bit embarrassing for him, but he bore it with good grace. Going by the increase in signal strength, they managed between sixty-one and seventy-two kilometers the first day, and between fifty-five and sixty-seven, the second.

  On the first break of the third day, Helen announced, “We’re going downhill!”

  They all looked at her. The road had seemed level when they started, but now, though it was hard to tell in the low gravity, they indeed seemed to be leaning back a bit.

  Doc groaned. “Of course, of course. This is a brace as well as a road. To be in compression—not supported by the vertical members, it has to come closer to the planet at its center than the ends—as an interior buttress, it’s almost straight.”

  “Downhill!” Collette exclaimed, “Then we’ll need to push it a little more now to compensate for being slower later on. But we’ll get more oxygen as we go lower.”

  So they took to loping a little faster—almost a low-gravity jog—and covered around eighty kilometers in two seven-hour sessions that day. The next day was close to eighty kilometers as well, but the apparent downward slope gradually lessened, and by the fifth day they were more or less level and probably approaching the lowest point of the road. From then on, it would be uphill.

  Soob’s balance was improving every day, and by the time they started going uphill, he’d felt comfortable without a hand-holder, though he kept his flute plant walking stick.

  They made camp on the fifth day on
the road, in good spirits. They each carried a double-thickness batskin sack.

  On the sixth day, they noted that their road was joined on the right from below by an arch, the top of which was another road.

  “That looks like a constant-radius road,” Helen said. “With its own support system. It’s not hanging from a shell support column. “It would be nice to avoid the climb and end up somewhere that wasn’t an Antarctic dry valley.”

  Collette shook her head. “How would we get to the surface? It’s covered with rock. We’d be risking too much.”

  They were about to give up when Jacques remembered the network of catwalks just under the surface that he’d seen when they entered. “If we can’t get out, we can climb up on the inside. We’ll have saved enough time for it, I think.”