He looked around as he dropped, making sure Emma and Bartholomew were with him, that their tethers didn’t snag. Looked around at the walls of the shaft all about him, and down into the shaft itself, extending deep below his feet, dimly lit by Mars overhead. Their head torches splashed light on the dull walls of the shaft, walls apparently of compressed dirt, smooth and regular.
No air, no suspended dust, so the light beams didn’t show up. Just those splashes of light on the walls. And three human figures descending into the dark. A corpsicle, a time-jump survivor, and an android. Malenfant felt obscurely proud.
As they went deeper, the walls of the shaft sliding steadily past, the muddy Mars light from overhead faded. Malenfant, looking closely at the shaft wall as they passed it, now saw a few heavier lumps of rock in among the impact-smashed dust.
And there seemed to be an overlay, a glistening sheen, like a film of plastic over the dirt.
Bartholomew, cautiously, as they fell slowly past, reached up towards the film. ‘Should I touch this? After what happened to Arkady?’
Malenfant shrugged. ‘We’ll get nowhere if we are too cautious.’
Bartholomew touched the surface with a gloved hand. Let it slide down the face.
The world didn’t end, Malenfant observed.
‘It’s smooth. Treated in some way. The glove is telling me that this wall is coated in something like . . . diamond. A carbon crystal. Only a few micrometres deep.’
‘I guess it wouldn’t take much to hold open a shaft like this, in such low gravity.’
‘I doubt if the structural properties of this construction are as simple as that, Malenfant.’
‘Fair comment.’
Another minute, two. They continued to descend, in silence. Then, looking down, Malenfant saw a tangle of blue, buried deep inside the carcass of Phobos.
‘How deep are we, Deirdra?’
‘Approaching one point two five kilometres.’
‘Are you picking up what’s beneath us? The drone images didn’t do it justice. Looks like some kind of structure down there.’
Emma said, ‘I see something. Blue hoops, as Arkady reported.’
‘It’s what I’m seeing too,’ Deirdra reported from the ship. ‘Hoops, circles, at least metres across, in some kind of formation. Almost blocking the shaft. I had the impression Arkady went a lot deeper than this.’
‘So he did,’ Emma said.
‘There’s no rule that says whatever is down here is static,’ Malenfant said. ‘Anything else, Deirdra?’
‘Deeper down, beyond the hoops – I think the shaft is coming to an end. I’m picking up signals of a much broader space. A hollow. The radar is estimating it might be seventeen, eighteen kilometres across, to the far wall. Some kind of structures in there too. Machinery, maybe. I can’t make much sense of the echoes. The systems are trying to guess at the shape of the chamber, the contents, from a jumble of echoes coming back up the shaft.’
‘Halt,’ Malenfant snapped.
The three of them drifted together.
Malenfant shared a glance with Emma. ‘Eighteen kilometres, Deirdra said. A chamber eighteen kilometres across. Phobos is only twenty-some kilometres across. So most of Phobos is empty space, within a shell a kilometre or so thick.’
‘Holy cow,’ she said. ‘Shklovsky was right.’
‘Which is impossible,’ Gershon protested, from the Step. ‘According to the seismometers. I told you. When we landed. They proved Phobos is a rubble pile, not a shell.’
‘Yeah. I remember. But you also proved that this shaft was too deep to fit into Phobos at all.’ Malenfant shook his head as he tried to keep contrary sets of evidence in his mind. A moon that was hollow, but was not. A ring sculpture that was kilometres deep, but was not. Phobos was an enigma, and not even a self-consistent one.
Deirdra called down, ‘There’s more data coming in. More extrapolated detail from the radar echoes. It’s a muddle, Malenfant. I’m not trained on this, but—’
‘That’s OK. Just tell us what you see.’
‘The wall of the big chamber – there are openings to more shafts, I think. Shafts like yours.’
‘Access to other parts of Phobos?’
‘Well, maybe. But I’m analysing the light that’s coming from them. The blue of the hoops is nearly monochrome, a pure colour. Beautiful, actually. But the light from the shafts is like sunlight.’
Emma called, ‘And is it that odd sunlight that’s been observed before?’
‘You mean, too dim? The odd spectrum?’
The spectrum of a very young Sun, Malenfant recalled Emma guessing.
‘Yeah. Like that. But it’s muddled up. Funny angles. The geometry is tricky and – fluid. The ship’s science system model is flaky; it keeps reconfiguring to keep up with the data.’
Malenfant shared a glance with Emma. More mystery. Malenfant felt stressed, wary. ‘If only one thing about this place made sense . . .’
Deirdra put in, ‘Nobody promised us that what we would find down there would make any sense at all. We should just – well, keep looking.’
Emma grinned at Malenfant. ‘I don’t know who put her in charge, but it was a wise move. But our immediate obstacle is those blue hoops, in the shaft. We should tread carefully.’
‘Agreed,’ Malenfant said. ‘So we stay away from the hardware. But meantime we go on.’
Deliberately he continued his descent.
Down below his feet, the approaching hoops. He could see them more clearly now. Identical, each maybe ten metres across, they were set vertically, so he approached them edge-on. And they touched at their rims, as if joined in an immense bracelet, each hoop at right angles to its neighbours. The whole thing was a big, stately installation, and disturbingly abstract, almost featureless.
‘The Sculpture Garden,’ Deirdra put in, unexpectedly, watching from the lander. ‘The place needs a name. That will do.’
‘Good enough,’ Malenfant said.
As their torchlight played, he saw more detail. There were structures set in the regolith wall of the shaft, he saw, behind some of the hoops. What looked like metallic emplacements. They looked like hatches, in fact, hatches in the walls of compacted rock, behind the hoops.
And beyond that, he glimpsed now the vast, empty, impossible space Deirdra had reported – and whatever tremendous machinery it appeared to contain, barely visible. More blue hoops, he suspected, much larger, some languidly turning. But the details were – elusive.
He turned away and concentrated on the hoops nearby. ‘OK, approaching this . . . bracelet.’
He slowed his descent, trying to get a feel for the overall structure. He counted five of the hoops now, set vertically, each at fixed right angles to its neighbours . . .
No, he thought. That couldn’t be right. He counted again, pointing with a finger at each hoop. Squinted at those angles. Stared down at an arrangement which was oddly uncomfortable for his eyes, as if he were wearing a pair of the distorting spectacles he had been forced to don during some of the more obscure NASA astronaut application tests.
Five hoops. Each at right angles to its neighbours. Which was impossible, right?
‘Watch out for those sharp edges,’ Bartholomew said. He sounded profoundly uncomfortable.
‘Emma,’ Malenfant snapped. ‘Having trouble here. Just tell me what you see.’
‘Five hoops. Each a few metres across. Electric blue. Five. Four. No, five . . .’
‘Yeah. I’m struggling too. They’re at right angles to each other. So I see Hoop One, directly opposite Hoop Three. Counting from the one below me.’
‘OK. OK. I see that. And Two opposite Four. And Three opposite . . . Five? Malenfant, I think I’m getting a headache.’
‘Bartholomew, you aren’t even human. Tell me what you see here.’
‘I . . . I-I-I . . .’
The stuttering made his artificiality obvious as never before, Malenfant thought. He shared an alarmed glance with Emma.
‘Sorry. I see four hoops. No, five. No, four. No, five.’
‘The hoops are upright. Correct? As if standing on their rims. Although I can’t see anything supporting them. And joined at the rims as if in a bracelet. What angle is Hoop One to Hoop Two, Bartholomew? I mean their planes . . .’
‘Ninety degrees. The same as between Hoop Two and Three, and Three and Four, and Four and Five and it’s impossible and andandand—’
‘Take it easy.’
Bartholomew seemed to freeze, just for a second. Then, inside his suit, he gave a kind of start. ‘Sorry. Look, as you say, Malenfant, I’m not human. And my information-processing system differs from the lumps of meat you two carry around in your heads. But it makes no difference. This hoop display is a contradiction, geometrically. You can’t put more than four hoops in an array like this, at right angles to each other.’
‘Like they were painted on the four side faces of a cube,’ Malenfant said.
‘Correct. You just can’t. And yet there are five of them. It’s a cubical array, but a cube doesn’t have five side faces . . . It’s a contradiction, two sets of data that don’t match together, and it’s causing me pain, analogously, as my cognitive system tries to process this.’
‘Me too,’ Emma said. ‘Like a headache, right above my eyes.’
Malenfant grinned. ‘Well, I’m as confused as shit too, but I don’t have any headache. Either I have a higher IQ than the group, or a lower, I guess.’
Deirdra said, ‘I wouldn’t place a bet, Malenfant.’
‘Charming. Look – we expected funny stuff down here, didn’t we? But we didn’t come here to admire the architecture, higher-dimensional or not.’
‘Right,’ Emma said, and Malenfant thought she was trying to pull herself together. ‘So what happened to Arkady? He isn’t hanging around at this Sculpture Garden. But I can see a couple of places he might be at.’
Him, or what was left of him, Malenfant thought grimly. He nodded. ‘You mean those side structures behind the hoops, the metal plates we see.’ Peering cautiously now at the nearest, he said, ‘This looks to me like some kind of bulkhead. With an airlock, maybe.’
Bartholomew turned to inspect the hatch opposite Malenfant. ‘This one too. Human-made, do you think? The tech looks familiar enough. The lock has a big red wheel on it, with thumb grips. And writing . . . Cyrillic, I think.’
Malenfant snorted. ‘You don’t think, Bartholomew. Your brain is a binary computer. You either know a thing, or you don’t.’ He drifted closer to his own bulkhead. ‘Writing on this one too, though. A couple of small instruction tags. And, something bigger.’ He leaned, so his head torch picked it out better. ‘A panel. Or a plaque, screwed on. Shit. It’s in English.’
It was in bold, clear letters, and Malenfant read it out:
ROLLS -ROYCE LTD.
SPACE DIVISION
DERBY, UK
BY ROYAL APPOINTMENT
AD 2000
When he’d done reading, he puffed out his cheeks. ‘I wasn’t expecting that.’
Emma shook her head. ‘There was no other mission to Phobos in your timeline, was there, Malenfant? No crewed mission – any more than there was in mine.’
‘Certainly not sent by the British.’ He looked at the structure before him, the emplacement as a whole around the hatch. ‘Look at this thing. It has the diameter of a space-station module, roughly.’
‘Maybe there’s a habitat behind it, then,’ Emma said, suddenly sounding excited. ‘Behind each hatch. Maybe it makes sense. For a longer stay than we could have managed – a more ambitious mission – you could bring along a hab module, not just to travel in, but to stay a while. You could rendezvous with Phobos, bury your hab module deep underground so it interfaces with this place. And then you can sit in there doing your science, long-term studies, to your heart’s content.’
‘Seems like a lot of work. But OK.’
‘Until,’ Bartholomew said, pointing at the plate opposite with the Cyrillic writing, ‘your Russian rivals show up with the same idea in mind.’
‘But maybe they aren’t rivals, in that sense,’ Emma said slowly. ‘Maybe they came here from different – history strands. As we did, Malenfant.’
Malenfant tried to take in this new concept. Visitors to Phobos from across the manifold, coming together in this Sculpture Garden? Even in the circumstances that was one hell of a strange thought.
Time for a little leadership, Malenfant.
‘So. We’ve seen a lot. Discovered a hell of a lot. And we’ve suffered no worse than headaches, so far. The question is, where do we go from here?’
‘Back to the Step,’ Bartholomew said immediately.
‘Onward,’ said Emma.
‘I would go on,’ Deirdra called down from the ship. ‘How can you stop now?’
‘And I,’ Stavros Gershon called, ‘would vote for onward. But then I’m an irresponsible idiot, as history knows.’
Malenfant grinned. ‘Look at it this way. We already bought the risk of coming this far. You never repeat an EVA if you don’t have to – that’s one thing I did learn in the astronaut office, even if I never went beyond the stratosphere myself. We go on. Where?’
‘The obvious place,’ Deirdra said eagerly, ‘is one of those hab modules. See what’s inside. See who is inside.’
Emma said, ‘Yeah, but how do we get in there? I did say I thought we should keep away from the hoops themselves.’
‘OK,’ Bartholomew said, ‘but – I hate to admit it – I think there’s enough clearance between the hoops and the walls for the hatches to be reachable. Without touching the hoops themselves. It will take a little care, but—’
‘Good,’ Malenfant said. ‘The question is, which do we try first? Emma?’
She thought that over. ‘Well, if Arkady went anywhere, it would be to the hab with the Russian writing.’
‘Good point. Let’s try that one. But, just in case anybody else is home, we ought to let them know we are here . . .’ He dug a luminous marker crayon out of a pocket on his suit leg, and wrote, on the glassy wall below the Rolls-Royce plaque:
No taxation without representation.
(signed) Col. Reid Malenfant, USAF & NASA.
1 September, AD 2469.
‘So that’s done. Let’s go see that Russian camper van. And keep away from the hoops . . .’
48
As Bartholomew had predicted, there was enough room to move around behind the hoops, with caution. They watched each other, and worked hard at keeping their tethers out of the way of the sharp rims.
Malenfant felt oddly moved as he watched his companions manoeuvring through this deadly strangeness. They were just human beings – give or take an android doctor – humans stumbling around in the dark, trying to figure out this baffling stuff, helping each other. But maybe that was pretty much all there was to life itself, he thought.
At last, with great care, Bartholomew approached the Russian hatch and grasped the red wheel. It turned. He glanced back over his shoulder. ‘Surprisingly easy,’ he said. He turned some more, then hauled back the heavy door.
Inside, revealed by their head torches, an empty chamber with another hatch on the far side, with a small window, another red wheel. Equipment strapped to the walls. Cyrillic lettering.
‘An airlock,’ Emma said. ‘I can read Cyrillic. These are all safety notices . . . So we go through?’
Malenfant bent to peer through the window set in the inner hatch. He saw nothing but darkness beyond. ‘If this is an airlock we’ll have to shut the outer door before we can open the inner. And if we close the outer door, we’ll have to dump our tethers here.’
They hesitated. Malenfant imagined the thoughts running through their heads. Maybe this is where we should turn back. Maybe we should let one or two go through, let two or one hang back, still tethered . . .
‘We go together,’ he said. ‘We don’t know what we’ll find. Whatever became of Arkady.’ He didn’t want to float the possi
bility that Arkady could, after so many months, be alive. ‘The inhabitants of this place . . . We’re not even sure it is a hab module. We go together, deal with whatever we find.’
‘Agreed,’ Emma said.
A curt nod from Bartholomew.
So they crowded into the lock, and detached the tethers. Malenfant slammed the hatch shut and sealed it with yet another red wheel – having made sure he could open it again from the inside.
They drifted in darkness, save for the light splashes from their head torches.
‘I don’t hear anything,’ Emma said. ‘No pumps, no valves, no air returning.’
Malenfant looked through that small window in the inner door. Total blackness, save for reflections from his torch. ‘I think this place is inert. Lost power, maybe.’
‘Give it five minutes,’ Emma said.
Bartholomew ran a gloved finger along a metal join, where the inner bulkhead met the chamber’s curved wall. ‘This work is pretty crude. Like it was assembled in a tractor factory.’
Emma laughed. ‘I visited some Russian tractor factories. In my timeline anyhow. Their manufacturing work can be less refined than in the West, but it’s generally good enough. Tough, reliable . . .’
Malenfant said, ‘That’s enough time. Bartholomew, the door.’
For once Bartholomew obeyed without question or wisecrack. With strong artificial hands he dragged at the red wheel.
The inner door swung open easily. There was no hiss of escaping air. Still no lights came on.
‘Let me lead,’ Emma said. ‘I know this technology.’
Malenfant hesitated, then pulled back to let her pass.
Cautiously, she drifted into the darkened space, head-first, her torch splash preceding her. No beam again, so no air, Malenfant observed.
Bartholomew followed, and then Malenfant.
In the glimmers of torchlight, it was difficult to make out details, or even an overall layout. Malenfant had a vague impression of a cluttered workshop, with stuff stuck all over the walls. There was an exercise cycle. A table, like a dining table, with open lids exposing what looked like heating trays. Typical space-station chic. Malenfant saw icicles oozing out of broken pipes, a frost on some of the abandoned surfaces. This place must have been falling apart, the heating failing, even before the lights went out. Whatever, it was a tube of vacuum now.
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