Creations (28 page)

Max paused at that point, trying to remember where he’d read about the idea before. Wasn’t there a story, written decades ago, about a voyage to explore a Dyson sphere with as much surface area as millions of Earths? Or wasn’t it a ring, built around an alien star, as far from the star as the Earth was from the Sun? At the time, building such a thing had seemed too far-fetched to even be worth considering, but within Safi’s notes, in calm, level-headed language, was a detailed description of how replicators could finish the job in less than two hundred years. With machines that spread exponentially, it seemed that no job was too big to attempt.

Safi came back an hour later and started unpacking her own things.

“Ariel says we can do what we want tomorrow morning and he’ll message us when we’re ready to go,” she said. “He thinks it’ll be easy to get to where ESOS are operating.”

“And what do we do then?”

“We’ll see how it goes.”

“Fair enough. As long as he trusts me not to put a pressure suit on back-to-front or anything stupid like that.”

Safi smiled. “Ariel’s okay, he’s been here from the start, that’s all. It was a tough environment when they first set this place up. You just have to earn his respect. If you’ve never worn one of these suits before, I’ll make sure you’re okay with it.”

“Thanks,” he said.

Max called back home once they were unpacked, as he’d promised he would.

“I’m here,” he said. “We finally made it.”

“So what’s it like?” Gillian said. The delay was noticeable; no amount of communication gear could beat the speed of light.

“Cramped. I’ve seen it on TV before but there’s no preparing for how narrow all these tubes are. It smells too, like fireworks, old gunpowder. Must be something in the soil or the dust. People bring it in on their boots when they do EVA and the smell just doesn’t go away.”

“Sounds lovely. So what are you going to do next?”

“Safi’s got an old friend here and she’s called in a few favours. We’ve pretty much got the run of the place. Once we get the call saying things are ready, we head out to see what we can find. How are things back home?”

“It’s tough. Max, I’ve got to tell you, knowing Roy was innocent is just cutting me up here. Are you sure we can’t say anything?”

“Not just yet. If we let on that we know who was responsible, everything I’m doing up here might be jeopardised. Wait until I’m back, then we can act. It won’t be long.”

“It’s already been long enough. My sister’s fiancé is in jail for something someone else did. And why? Why make it look like Roy did it at all? Why did they need a scapegoat?”

“To get me to come back after you left, that’s all it could be. Victor must have panicked when he realised why you’d gone, so he did the first thing he could think of.”

“But why did he keep sending those things at all? After you’d gone to the island?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he thought it would look suspicious if the letters stopped too suddenly. Who can know how minds that
sick work? At least people who write those things for real are doing something they think they believe in.”

A flashing SeleCom icon appeared in the corner of the display, telling them their time was almost up.

“Look, it’s not easy booking these link-ups, I think the Earth-Moon relay is tied up pretty much all the time, but if I call you back in two or three days? How does that sound?”

“Make sure you do,” she said. “And come back safe.”

* * *

The message that told Max and Safi they were ready to go came the next morning, far earlier than expected. Safi had just started showing him round the rest of the base when suddenly her omni chimed with an incoming message, taking them both by surprise. She opened it up and checked the display.

“He’s all set, we’re going early. You ready?”

For the first time since setting out on this trip, Max felt reluctant to go, though he couldn’t tell why. He certainly wasn’t afraid of going outside; he trusted himself and the technology around him too much for that. Something else was bothering him though, some nagging memory of what had happened last time he’d gone out into the unknown. He ignored it and decided to press on.

“I’m ready,” he said.

* * *

Five people occupied the pressurised rover that they took from the base; Max and Safi themselves, then Ariel and two of his colleagues from base infrastructure, Harris and Damon. Harris was the older and stockier of the two, by a long way on both counts, though they were both relatively new to the base and Safi hadn’t met either of them before. Damon was lightly built with
sharp, angular features. Even his nose and eyebrows seemed to have been constructed with a protractor.

“This rover was in for motor repair, but we finished early,” Ariel told them. “We have it for the next three days. Will you need transport after that?”

“It depends what we see,” Safi said.

The research site that ESOS were using would be easy to find; all they had to do was follow the service line that led from the base. There were twenty lines in all, one for each site, like shiny, gold foil tents, housing the air, power and water ducts that allowed each satellite settlement to survive. They came out of the base running parallel, but then fanned outward and headed for the horizon. Each one had crossing points at regular intervals, like wide metal ramps spanning the lines.

They found the one marked as leading to site five, then crossed the intervening lines and began to follow its course northward. There were so many vehicle tracks running alongside it that it almost looked as if the soil had been ploughed over. Occasionally the tracks would veer away from the line then rejoin it further on, following the contours of the land as it rose and fell. Boulder fields were also scattered around the landscape, strewn with rocks up to ten feet in height.

For the first half hour another of the service lines ran alongside theirs, but then it split away and headed off to the right, into the distance. Safi moved over to the right hand side of the rover at that point, and stared out of the window as if searching for something.

“What can you see?” Max asked her.

“Nothing,” she said quietly. “Site six is over there, that’s all. That’s where we were.”

Max didn’t ask her any more about it.

“We’re inside their perimeter now,” Harris told them from the driver’s seat soon afterward. “You don’t want these guys to know you’re here, right? Can I suggest we move away from the service
line, off to the east?”

“Sure,” Safi said. “Take us a few miles east, then head north again, toward where they’re operating.”

They made the turn, then moved off over virgin soil, leaving fresh track marks behind them.

“Aren’t we going to leave a trail like this?” Max said.

“Then what do you suggest?” Ariel said testily. Max didn’t bother replying.

“It can’t be helped,” Safi said to him. “This whole area is crisscrossed with tracks anyway, a few more won’t hurt.”

In spite of the grey monotony of the surrounding terrain, Max couldn’t take his eyes off it as they covered the distance. Seeing pictures back home hadn’t prepared him at all for the effect the sight was having on him. The closeness of the horizon was the most unnerving thing; just with his own eyes he could clearly see that they were moving over a ball of rock, far smaller than the Earth. He tried to extend the contour of the ground in his imagination, taking it beyond what his eyes could see, visualising the way it curved away and eventually met up with itself on the other side as if he could gauge the size of the whole surface just by sight. It looked a lot smaller than he’d expected.

“It seems so small when you’re on it, the Moon I mean,” he said.

“It’s bigger than you think,” Safi said. “It’s too big even to count as a moon, strictly speaking. We live on a double planet, a bigger one and a smaller one, orbiting each other. It shouldn’t be called, ‘the Moon’, at all.”

“Really? That’s surprising,” he said.

Suddenly they felt the rover turning off to the left and speeding up, jolting over bumps in the ground as it accelerated. Ariel stood up from his seat and leant over to see what Harris had spotted.

“What can you see?” he said.

“Over there, next to that rise. Looks like an antenna, a relay or
something.”

By now they’d all stood up to look out of the front windows, holding onto the seat backs and handholds as the rover moved forward. They were soon right in front of the structure that Harris had spotted. It was like a small radio mast, eight feet tall, with a pair of antennae and a flashing beacon at the top.

“Can you figure out what it’s sending?” Ariel said.

“Steady repeated signal, no information content,” Harris said, reading figures off a display at his side. “It’s on a frequency they’re cleared to use for telemetry.”

“You want to look closer?” Ariel asked Safi.

“No, I don’t think it would tell us much. Unless you do, Max?” He shook his head. “Okay, let’s leave it,” she said. “Head north, see what we find.”

Their route was now taking them closer to the centre of the site, where the ESOS personnel would be living and working. Max felt the tension within the vehicle rise as the need to stay watchful increased. Then the rover stopped suddenly, and Harris peered out ahead of them.

“We’ve got company,” he said.

Off in the distance, something was moving. It looked like a vehicle of some sort, dull grey in appearance, but it was too far away to judge its size or shape. It seemed to be moving backward and forward across the face of a low ridge, travelling around a hundred yards each time. Damon reached behind his seat and found some binoculars, then held them up and adjusted the focus.

“It’s not a rover,” he said. “It’s too small. Looks like some kind of robot. And it’s towing something.”

“Here, let me see,” Ariel said, leaning forward between the two front seats and taking the binoculars. “That’s a robot. No mistake.”

“You reckon it can see us? It may be transmitting.”

“I can only see one antenna, low gain. Doesn’t look like it’s
built to transmit pictures.” He turned round to face Safi. “What do you want to do? Go over and look at it?”

Safi had her turn peering at it, frowning into the eyepieces for a good ten seconds. “Well, we came here to see what’s going on,” she said. “Let’s go and see what it is.”

Harris got the rover moving again, then took them slowly toward the robot, looking out for any reaction from it as they approached. There was none. He stopped when they were about a hundred yards away, then they watched as it kept on moving, seemingly oblivious to their presence.

“It’s strip mining, look at it,” Max said. Now they were this close it was easy to see what it was doing. The course it had taken over the side of the ridge was clearly marked by a deep furrow where something under its body had dug into the soil as it zigzagged back and forth. Most of the soil was being pushed back out again through a duct at its side, but presumably whatever materials it was collecting were being separated out and stored in the trailer behind it. Even with the trailer attached it was barely ten feet long.

“I want to get out and take a look up close,” Safi said.

“Are you sure it’s safe?” Ariel said, keeping his eyes fixed on it.

“It hasn’t reacted to the rover,” Safi said. “We’ll be safe. Come on, Max, this is your job too.”

They got up and moved to the back of the rover, where the suits were stored. Five of them were attached to the walls there, sized for the five of them in the cabin. Safi went over to the bag she’d brought and pulled out some brightly coloured triangles of fabric, then went over to the suits and started attaching them to the shoulders.

“ID patches,” she said. “Red and white okay for you?”

“Yeah, they’re fine,” Max said. They looked like the Japanese flag in reverse, large white dots surrounded by red. Safi’s ones he recognised from the film clips she’d shown back on the island:
bright saffron yellow, with no other pattern or design. It was some kind of superstition among people who worked in space, he seemed to remember, keeping the same patch colours for life. Then she took out another pair, blue and white in colour. She folded them up and put them in a pocket on her own suit without saying a word.

Getting into the suits was relatively easy. The backpack of each one swung open like a hatch, allowing them to climb straight in through the back. The lower gravity certainly helped too. Once he’d been sealed in Max felt the pressure rise slightly as the suit tested itself for leaks, then a green light lit up on the control panel on his left forearm. The smell inside was of pine, some kind of freshening agent to make it feel less claustrophobic. It was stronger than it needed to be though, almost overpowering.

“This is a basic four-hour suit,” Safi told him. “Just like the tourists wear. It’s all automatic, so don’t worry about the controls or displays, I’ll keep an eye on them.”

“And don’t over-exert yourself either,” Ariel said, checking all the straps and fittings on the outside, yanking them hard to make sure nothing was loose. It almost felt as if he was trying to pull Max over. “These things fog up when you sweat. And you
will
sweat, okay?”

“Sure,” Max said. It felt like he’d just been told he wasn’t fit enough to even be there.

They stepped into the airlock leaving the other three in the main cabin. Prebreathing oxygen to purge their bodies of nitrogen wasn’t required when operating from the rover as the oxygen level in the cabin already matched what they would get inside the suits. Ariel shut the inner door on them, then Safi hit a couple of the controls on the wall and set the vacuum pumps running. Max felt the suit inflating around him as the pressure in the airlock fell; he could hear the material stretching and creaking as it began to take the strain, then the lining flushed cold and
then warm again as the backpack’s conditioners drove argon gas into the insulating layers of the suit. Once enough air had been lost from the airlock, valves opened to vent the rest out into the vacuum, then the outer door unlatched itself. Max was standing closest to it.