Galactic North (10 page)

Even before they had all died, things had been far from easy. The self-replicating robots that had brought them there in the first place had failed years before, leaving the delicate life-support systems of their shelters to slowly collapse; each malfunction a little more difficult to rectify than the last. Diadem was getting colder, too—sliding inexorably into a deep ice age. It had been the Americans’ misfortune to arrive at the onset of a great, centuries-long winter. Now, Clavain thought, it was colder still; the polar ice caps rushing towards each other like long-separated lovers.

“It must have been fast, whatever it was,” Clavain mused. “They’d already abandoned most of the outlying bases by then, huddling together back at the main settlement. By that point they only had enough spare parts and technical know-how to run a single fusion power plant.”

“Which failed.”

“Yes—but that doesn’t mean much. It couldn’t run itself, not by then—it needed constant tinkering. Eventually the people with the right know-how must have succumbed to the . . . whatever it was—and then the reactor stopped working and they all died of the cold. But they were in trouble long before the reactor failed.”

Galiana seemed on the point of saying something. Clavain could always tell when she was about to speak: it was as if some leakage from her thoughts reached his brain even as she composed what she would say.

“Well?” he said, when the silence had stretched long enough.

“I was just thinking,” she said. “A reactor of that type— it doesn’t need any exotic isotopes, does it? No tritium, or deuterium?”

“No. Just plain old hydrogen. You could get all you needed from sea water.”

“Or ice,” Galiana said.

They vectored in for the next landing site. Toadstools, Clavain thought: half a dozen black metal towers of varying height surmounted by domed black habitat modules, interlinked by a web of elevated, pressurised walkways. Each of the domes was thirty or forty metres wide, perched a hundred or more metres above the ice, festooned with narrow, armoured windows, sensors and communications antennas. A tongue-like extension from one of the tallest domes was clearly a landing pad. In fact, as he came closer, he saw that there was an aircraft parked on it: one of the blunt-winged machines that the Americans had used to get around in. It was dusted with ice, but it would probably still fly with a little persuasion.

He inched the shuttle down, one of its skids coming to rest only just inside the edge of the pad. Clearly the landing pad had only really been intended for one aircraft at a time.

“Nevil . . .” Galiana said. “I’m not sure I like this.”

He felt tension leaking into his head, but could not be sure if it was his own or Galiana’s.

“What don’t you like?”

“There shouldn’t be an aircraft here,” Galiana said.

“Why not?”

She spoke softly, reminding him that the evacuation of the outlying settlements had been orderly, compared to the subsequent crisis. “This base should have been shut down and mothballed with all the others.”

“Then maybe someone stayed behind here,” Clavain suggested.

Galiana nodded. “Or someone came back.”

There was a third presence with them now; another hue of thought bleeding into his mind. Felka had come into the cockpit. He could taste her apprehension.

“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 hours 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.