Galactic North (11 page)

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.

With that in mind he found an airlock, one that must have been added late in the base’s history as it was absent from the blueprints. There was no membrane stretched across this one; if he stepped through it he would be outside as soon as the doors cycled, with no more protection than the clothes he was wearing now. He considered going back into the base proper to find a membrane suit, but by the time he did that, the mood—the urge to go outside— would be gone.

Clavain noticed a locker. Inside, to his delight, was a rack of old-style suits such as Setterholm had been wearing. They looked brand new, alloy neck-rings gleaming. Racked above each one was a bulbous helmet. He experimented until he found a suit that fitted him, then struggled with the various latches and seals that coupled the suit parts together. Even when he thought he had donned the suit properly, the airlock detected that one of his gloves wasn’t latched correctly. It refused to let him outside until he reversed the cycle and fixed the problem.

But then he was outside, and it was glorious.

He walked around the base until he found his bearings, and then—always ensuring that the base was in view and that his air supply was adequate—he set off across the ice. Above, Diadem’s sky was a deep enamelled blue, and the ice—though fundamentally white—seemed to contain a billion nuances of pale turquoise, pale aquamarine; even hints of the palest of pinks. Beneath his feet he imagined the crack-like networks of the worms, threading down for hundreds of metres; and he imagined the worms, wriggling through that network, responding to and secreting chemical scent trails. The worms themselves were biologically simple—almost dismayingly so—but that network was a vast, intricate thing. It hardly mattered that the traffic along it—the to-and-fro motions of the worms as they went about their lives—was so agonisingly slow. The worms, after all, had endured longer than human comprehension. They had seen people come and go in an eyeblink.

He walked on until he arrived at the crevasse where he had found Setterholm. They had long since removed Setterholm ’s body, of course, but the experience had imprinted itself deeply on Clavain’s mind. He found it easy to relive the moment at the lip of the crevasse when he had first seen the end of Setterholm’s arm. At the time he had told himself that there must be worse places to die; surrounded by beauty that was so pristine; so utterly untouched by human influence. Now, the more he thought about it, the more that Setterholm’s death played on his mind—he wondered if there could be any worse place. It was undeniably beautiful, but it was also crushingly dead; crushingly oblivious to life. Setterholm must have felt himself draining away, soon to become as inanimate as the palace of ice that was to become his tomb.

Clavain thought about it for many more minutes, enjoying the silence and the solitude and the odd awkwardness of the suit. He thought back to the way Setterholm had been found, and his mind niggled at something not quite right; a detail that had not seemed wrong at the time but which now troubled him.

It was Setterholm’s helmet.

He remembered the way it had been lying away from the man’s corpse, as if the impact had knocked it off. But now that Clavain had locked an identical helmet onto his own suit, that was more difficult to believe. The latches were sturdy, and he doubted that the drop into the crevasse would have been sufficient to break the mechanism. He considered the possibility that Setterholm had put his suit on hastily, but even that seemed unlikely now. The airlock had detected that Clavain’s glove was badly attached; it— or any of the other locks—would surely have refused to allow Setterholm outside if his helmet had not been correctly latched.

Clavain wondered if Setterholm’s death had been something other than an accident.

He thought about it, trying the idea on for size, then slowly shook his head. There were myriad possibilities he had yet to rule out. Setterholm could have left the base with his suit intact and then—confused and disoriented—he could have fiddled with the latch, depriving himself of oxygen until he stumbled into the crevasse. Or perhaps the airlocks were not as foolproof as they appeared; the safety mechanism capable of being disabled by people in a hurry to get outside.

No. A man had died, but there was no need to assume it had been anything other than an accident. Clavain turned, and began to walk back to the base.

“He’s awake,” Galiana said, a day or so after the final wave of machines had swum into Iverson’s mind. “I think it might be better if he spoke to you first, Nevil, don’t you? Rather than one of us?” She bit her tongue. “I mean, rather than someone who’s been Conjoined for as long as the rest of us?”

Clavain shrugged. “Then again, an attractive face might be preferable to a grizzled old relic like myself. But I take your point. Is it safe to go in now?”

“Perfectly. If Iverson was carrying anything infectious, the machines would have flagged it.”

“I hope you’re right.”

“Well, look at the evidence. He was acting rationally up to the end. He did everything to ensure we’d have an excellent chance of reviving him. His suicide was just a coldly calculated attempt to escape his situation.”

“Coldly calculated,” Clavain echoed. “Yes, I suppose it would have been. Cold, I mean.”

Galiana said nothing, but gestured towards the door into Iverson’s room.

Clavain stepped through the opening. And it was as he crossed the threshold that a thought occurred to him. He could once again see, in his mind’s eye, Martin Setterholm ’s body lying at the bottom of the crevasse, his fingers pointing to the letters “IVF.”

In-vitro
fertilisation.

But suppose Setterholm had been trying to write “IVER-SON, ” but had died before finishing the word? If Setterholm had been murdered—pushed into the crevasse—he might have been trying to pass on a message about his murderer. Clavain imagined his pain, legs smashed; knowing with absolute certainty he was going to die alone and cold, but willing himself to write Iverson’s name . . .