Galactic North Page 8

  “You sense it, too,” he said wonderingly, looking into the face of the terribly damaged girl. “Our discomfort. And you don’t like it any more than we do, do you?”

  Galiana took the girl’s hand. “It’s all right, Felka.”

  She must have spoken aloud just for Clavain’s benefit. Before her mouth had even opened Galiana would have planted reassuring thoughts in Felka’s mind, attempting to still the disquiet with the subtlest of neural adjustments. Clavain thought of an expert ikebana artist minutely altering the placement of a single flower in the interests of harmony.

  “Everything will be okay,” Clavain said. “There’s nothing here that can harm you.”

  Galiana took a moment, blank-eyed, to commune with the other Conjoiners in and around Diadem. Most of them were still in orbit, observing things from the ship. She told them about the aircraft and notified them that she and Clavain were going to enter the structure.

  He saw Felka’s hand tighten around Galiana’s wrist.

  “She wants to come as well,” Galiana said.

  “She’ll be safer if she stays here.”

  “She doesn’t want to be alone.”

  Clavain chose his words carefully. "I thought Conjoiners— I mean we—could never be truly alone, Galiana.”

  “There might be a communicational block inside the structure. It’ll be better if she stays physically close to us.”

  “Is that the only reason?”

  “No, of course not.” For a moment he felt a sting of her anger, prickling his mind like sea-spray. “She’s still human, Nevil—no matter what we’ve done to her mind. We can’t erase a million years of evolution. She may not be very good at recognising faces, but she recognises the need for companionship.”

  He raised his hands. “I never doubted it.”

  “Then why are you arguing?”

  Clavain smiled. He’d had this conversation so many times before, with so many women. He had been married to some of them. It was oddly comforting to be having it again, light-years from home, wearing a new body, his mind clotted with machines and confronting the matriarch of what should have been a feared and hated hive mind. At the epicentre of so much strangeness, a tiff was almost to be welcomed.

  “I just don’t want anything to hurt her.”

  “Oh. And I do?”

  “Never mind,” he said, gritting his teeth. “Let’s just get in and out, shall we?”

  The base, like all the American structures, had been built for posterity. Not by people, however, but by swarms of diligent self-replicating robots. That was how the Americans had reached Diadem: they had been brought there as frozen fertilised cells in the armoured, radiation-proofed bellies of star-crossing von Neumann robots. The robots had been launched towards several solar systems about a century before the Sandra Voi had left Mars. Upon arrival on Diadem they had set about breeding, making copies of themselves from local ores. When their numbers had reached some threshold, they had turned over their energies to the construction of bases: luxurious accommodation for the human children who would then be grown in their wombs.

  “The entrance door’s intact,” Galiana said when they had crossed from the shuttle to the smooth black side of the dome, stooping against the wind. “And there’s still some residual power in its circuits.”

  That was a Conjoiner trick that always faintly unnerved Clavain. Like sharks, Conjoiners were sensitive to ambient electrical fields. Mapped into her vision, Galiana would see the energised circuits superimposed on the door like a ghostly neon maze. Now she extended her hand towards the lock, palm first.

  “I’m accessing the opening mechanism. Interfacing with it now.” Behind her mask, he saw her face scrunch in concentration. Galiana only ever frowned when having to think hard. With her hand outstretched she looked like a wizard attempting some particularly demanding enchantment.

  “Hmm,” she said. “Nice old software protocols. Nothing too difficult.”

  “Careful,” Clavain said. “I wouldn’t put it past them to have installed some kind of trap here—”

  “There’s no trap,” she said. “But there is—ah, yes—a verbal entry code. Well, here goes.” She spoke louder, so that her voice would travel through the air to the door even above the howl of the wind. “Open sesame.”

  Lights flicked from red to green; dislodging a frosting of ice, the door slid ponderously aside to reveal a dimly lit interior chamber. The base must have been running on a trickle of emergency power for decades.

  Felka and Clavain lingered while Galiana crossed the threshold.

  “Well?” she challenged, turning around. “Are you two sissies coming or not?”

  Felka offered a hand. He took hers and the two of them—the old soldier and the girl who could barely grasp the difference between two human faces—took a series of tentative steps inside.

  “What you just did, that business with your hand and the password . . .” Clavain paused. “That was a joke, wasn’t it?”

  Galiana looked at him, blank-faced. “How could it have been? Everyone knows Conjoiners haven’t got anything remotely resembling a sense of humour.”

  Clavain nodded gravely. “That was my understanding, but I just wanted to be sure.”

  There was no trace of the wind inside, but it would still have been too cold to remove their suits, even had they not been concerned about contamination. They worked their way along a series of winding corridors, some of which were dark, others bathed in feeble, pea-green lighting. Now and then they passed the entrance to a room full of equipment, but nothing that looked like a laboratory or living quarters. Then they descended a series of stairs and found themselves crossing one of the sealed walkways between the toadstools. Clavain had seen a few other American settlements built like this one; they were designed to remain useful even as they sank slowly into the ice.

  The bridge led to what was obviously the main habitation section. Now there were lounges, bedrooms, laboratories and kitchens—enough for a crew of perhaps fifty or sixty. But there were no signs of any bodies, and the place did not look as if it had been abandoned in a hurry. The equipment was neatly packed away and there were no half-eaten meals on the tables. There was frost everywhere, but that was just the moisture that had frozen out of the air when the base cooled down.

  “They were expecting to come back,” Galiana said.

  Clavain nodded. “They couldn’t have had much of an idea of what lay ahead of them.”

  They moved on, crossing another bridge, until they arrived in a toadstool almost entirely dedicated to bio-analysis laboratories. Galiana had to use her neural trick again to get them inside, the machines in her head sweet-talking the duller machines entombed in the doors. The low-ceilinged labs were bathed in green light, but Galiana found a wall panel that brought the lighting up a notch and even caused some bench equipment to wake up, pulsing with stand-by lights.

  Clavain looked around, recognising centrifuges, gene-sequencers, gas chromatographs and scanning-tunnelling microscopes. There were at least a dozen other hunks of gleaming machinery whose function eluded him. A wall-sized cabinet held dozens of pull-out drawers, each of which contained hundreds of culture dishes, test tubes and gel slides. Clavain glanced at the samples, reading the tiny labels. There were bacteria and single-cell cultures with unpronounceable codenames, most of which were marked with Diadem map coordinates and a date. But there were also drawers full of samples with Latin names, comparison samples which must have come from Earth. The robots could easily have carried the tiny parent organisms from which these larger samples had been grown or cloned. Perhaps the Americans had been experimenting with the hardiness of Earth-born organisms, with a view to terraforming Diadem at some point in the future.

  He closed the drawer silently and moved to a set of larger sample tubes racked on a desk. He picked one from the rack and raised it to the light, examining the smoky things inside. It was a sample of worms, indistinguishable from those he had collected on the glacier a few ho
urs earlier. A breeding tangle, probably: harvested from the intersection point of two worm tunnels. Some of the worms in the tangle would be exchanging genes; others would be fighting; others would be allowing themselves to be digested by adults or newly hatched young; all behaving according to rigidly deterministic laws of caste and sex. The tangle looked dead, but that meant nothing with the worms. Their metabolism was fantastically slow, each individual easily capable of living for thousands of years. It would take them months just to crawl along some of the longer cracks in the ice, let alone move between some of the larger tangles.

  But the worms were not really all that alien. They had a close terrestrial analogue: the sun-avoiding ice-worms that had first been discovered in the Malaspina Glacier in Alaska towards the end of the nineteenth century. The Alaskan ice-worms were a lot smaller than their Diadem counterparts, but they also nourished themselves on the slim pickings that drifted onto the ice, or had been frozen into it years earlier. Like the Diadem worms, their most notable anatomical feature was a pore at the head end, just above the mouth. In the case of the terrestrial worms, the pore served a single function: secreting a salty solution that helped the worms melt their way into ice when there was no tunnel already present—an escape strategy that helped them get beneath the ice before the sun dried them up. The Diadem worms had a similar structure, but according to Setterholm’s notes they had evolved a second use for it: secreting a chemically rich “scent trail” which helped other worms navigate through the tunnel system. The chemistry of that scent trail turned out to be very complex, with each worm capable of secreting not merely a unique signature but a variety of flavours. Conceivably, more complex message schemes were embedded in some of the other flavours: not just “follow me” but “follow me only if you are female”—the Diadem worms had at least three sexes— “and this is breeding season.” There were many other possibilities, which Setterholm seemed to have been attempting to decode and catalogue when the end had come.

  It was interesting . . . up to a point. But even if the worms followed a complex set of rules dependent on the scent trails they were picking up, and perhaps other environmental cues, it would still only be rigidly mechanistic behaviour.

  “Nevil, come here.”

  It was Galiana’s voice, but it had a tone he had barely heard before. It was one that made him run to where Felka and Galiana were waiting on the other side of the lab.

  They were facing an array of lockers occupying an entire wall. A small status panel was set into each locker, but only one locker—placed at chest height—showed any activity. Clavain looked back towards the door through which they had entered, but from there it was hidden by intervening lab equipment. They would not have seen this locker even if it had been illuminated before Galiana brought the room’s power back on.

  “It might have been on all along,” he said.

  “I know,” Galiana agreed.

  She reached a hand up to the panel, tapping the control keys with unnerving fluency. Machines to Galiana were like musical instruments to a prodigy. She could pick one up cold and play it like an old friend.

  The array of status lights changed configuration abruptly, then there was a bustle of activity somewhere behind the locker’s metal face—latches and servomotors clicking after decades of stasis.

  “Stand back,” Galiana said.

  A rime of frost shattered into a billion sugary pieces. The locker began to slide out of the wall, the unhurried motion giving them adequate time to digest what lay inside. Clavain felt Felka grip his hand, and then noticed that her other hand was curled tightly around Galiana’s wrist. For the first time, he began to wonder if it had really been such a good idea to allow the girl to join them.

  The locker was two metres in length and half that in width and height; just sufficient to contain a human body. It had probably been designed to hold animal specimens culled from Diadem’s oceans, but it was equally capable of functioning as a mortuary tray. That the man inside the locker was dead was beyond question, but there was no sign of injury. His composure—flat on his back, his blue-grey face serenely blank, his eyes closed and his hands clasped neatly just below his ribcage—suggested to Clavain a saint lying in grace. His beard was neatly pointed and his hair long, frozen into a solid sculptural mass. He was still wearing several heavy layers of thermal clothing.

  Clavain knelt closer and read the name-tag above the man’s heart.

  “Andrew Iverson. Ring a bell?”

  A moment passed while Galiana established a link to the rest of the Conjoiners, ferreting the name out of some database. “Yes. One of the missing. Seems he was a climatologist with an interest in terraforming techniques.”

  Clavain nodded shrewdly. “That figures, with all the microorganisms I’ve seen in this place. Well: the trillion dollar question—how do you think he got in there?”

  “I think he climbed in,” Galiana said, and nodded at something Clavain had missed, almost tucked away beneath the man’s shoulder. Clavain reached into the gap, his fingers brushing against the rock-hard fabric of Iverson’s outfit. A cannula vanished into the man’s forearm, where he had cut away a square of fabric. The cannula’s black feed-line reached back into the cabinet, vanishing into a socket at the rear.

  “You’re saying he killed himself?” Clavain asked.

  “He must have put something in that which would stop his heart. Then he probably flushed out his blood and replaced it with glycerol, or something similar, to prevent ice crystals forming in his cells. It would have taken some automation to make it work, but I’m sure everything he needed was here.”

  Clavain thought back to what he knew about the cryonic immersion techniques that had been around a century or so earlier. They left something to be desired now, but back then they had not been much of an advance over mummification.

  “When he sank that cannula into himself, he can’t have been certain we’d ever find him,” Clavain remarked.

  “Which would still have been preferable to suicide.”

  “Yes, but . . . the thoughts that must have gone through his head. Knowing he had to kill himself first, to stand a chance of living again—and then hope someone else stumbled on Diadem.”

  “You made a harder choice than that, once.”

  “Yes. But at least I wasn’t alone when I made it.”

  Iverson’s body was astonishingly well preserved, Clavain thought. The skin tissue looked almost intact, even if it had a deathly, granite-like colour. The bones of his face had not ruptured under the strain of the temperature drop. Bacterial processes had stopped dead. All in all, things could have been a lot worse.

  “We shouldn’t leave him like this,” Galiana said, pushing the locker so that it began to slide back into the wall.

  “I don’t think he cares much about that now,” Clavain said.

  “No. You don’t understand. He mustn’t warm—not even to the ambient temperature of the room. Otherwise we won’t be able to wake him up.”

  It took five days to bring him back to consciousness.

  The decision to reanimate had not been taken lightly; it had only been arrived at after intense discussion amongst the Conjoined, debates in which Clavain participated to the best of his ability. Iverson, they all agreed, could probably be resurrected with current Conjoiner methods. In-situ scans of his mind had revealed preserved synaptic structures that a scaffold of machines could coax back towards consciousness. However, since they had not yet identified the cause of the madness that had killed Iverson’s colleagues—and the evidence was pointing towards some kind of infectious agent—Iverson would be kept on the surface; reborn on the same world where he had died.

  They had, however, moved him: shuttling him halfway across the world back to the main base. Clavain had travelled with the corpse, marvelling at the idea that this solid chunk of man-shaped ice—tainted, admittedly, with a few vital impurities—would soon be a breathing, thinking human being with memories and feelings. To him it was astonishing
that this was possible; that so much latent structure had been preserved across the decades. Even more astonishing that the infusions of tiny machines the Conjoiners were brewing would be able to stitch together damaged cells and kick-start them back to life. And out of that inert loom of frozen brain structure—a thing that was at this moment nothing more than a fixed geometric entity, like a finely eroded piece of rock—something as malleable as consciousness would emerge.

  But the Conjoiners were blasé at the prospect, viewing Iverson the way expert picture-restorers might view a damaged old master. Yes, there would be difficulties ahead— work that would require great skill—but nothing to lose sleep over.

  Except, Clavain reminded himself, none of them slept anyway.

  While the others were working to bring Iverson back to life, Clavain wandered the outskirts of the base, trying to get a better feel for what it must have been like during the last days. The debilitating mental illness must have been terrifying as it struck even those who might have stood a chance of developing some kind of counter-agent to it. Perhaps in the old days, when the base had been under the stewardship of the von Neumann machines, something might have been done . . . but in the end it must have been like trying to crack a particularly tricky algebra problem while growing steadily more drunk; losing first the ability to focus sharply, then to focus on the problem at all, and then to remember what was so important about it anyway. The labs in the main complex had an abandoned look to them: experiments half-finished; notes scrawled on the wall in ever more incoherent handwriting.

  Down in the lower levels—the transport bays and storage areas—it was almost as if nothing had happened. Equipment was still neatly racked, surface vehicles neatly parked, and—with the base sub-systems back on—the place was bathed in light and not so cold as to require extra clothing. It was quite therapeutic, too: the Conjoiners had not extended their communicational fields into these regions, so Clavain’s mind was mercifully isolated again; freed of the clamour of other voices. Despite that, he was still tempted by the idea of spending some time outdoors.