Collected Short Fiction, page 777
Mondragon slept an hour and took the wheel again. Frost and stars and the dead black sun. Still half asleep, he yawned and worked his stiff hands, stretched and stood behind the wheel, slapped his face and sat again, gripped the wheel and blinked at the level dark horizon.
Something there?
No spectral flash. Only a small black dot on the frost, but maybe something far away. He rubbed his eyes and veered a little toward it. The mountain Cruzet said looked too thin and high to be a mountain? His breath came faster. Should he radio the ship?
“Keep in constant touch,” Glengarth had told them. “I don’t know what’s out there to concern us. Most likely nothing but we’ve got to play it safe. If you come on anything unusual, anything at all, call at once. If you approach, do it with all the care you can.”
He reached for the radiophone, but stopped his hand when he saw that the object ahead looked suddenly closer, too small for any kind of mountain. When it crept into the heat lamp’s glow, he saw that it was no monolithic obelisk of the ice gods, but only a solitary boulder.
Yet it was itself a puzzle to him. What had tossed it here, so far from any land, since the ocean froze? He steered closer for a better look. It was ice, a dark mass the size of a car, jaggedly broken. Searching his small pool of dim red light, he found nothing else except smaller fragments shattered off when it fell. An ice meteorite, fallen a million years ago? Perhaps a billion?
Level frost, black sun, endless midnight, nada más. He shrugged and drove on again, just to the right of the round black blot. Frost that had never thawed and never would. Stars that never changed. He blinked his aching eyes, his mind drifting back to Cuerno del Oro. The flat-roofed adobes around the plaza, the mud on the rutted streets when the rains came, the dust when they failed, the old stone church where his mother took him to mass. He remembered the ragged child he had been, bare feet numb and aching on frosty winter mornings when he had to herd his father’s goats over the rocky hills above the village.
His first promise of escape had come from Don Diego Morales, who returned for the village fiestas and spoke of the starbirds that flew from the white sands in el norte to scatter the human seed across the new and richer worlds that might exist out among the stars.
“I’ll learn to ride the star ships,” he told the Don. “Cuando tengo suficiente años.”
“Nunca.” The lean old Don shook his head. “The stars want no stupid campesinos. I am allowed to work at the launch site, but only at tasks too heavy or too dirty for a gringo. No hay nada.” He spat brown tobacco juice at a spider in the dust. “They have no place for such as you.”
“Pero yo—” he told the Don. “I will learn what the gringos learn and walk with them among the stars.”
Growing up in the village, he learned all he could at la escuela. He learned his small inglés from the Don and the books the Don brought him from el norte. He learned to repair and run an old computer the Don had brought him when the Anglos threw it away, and saved his few pesos to pay for a new one.
Remembering, he felt glad la rubia could never know Cuerno del Oro, could never feel the pain of life there, never smell the sewer ditch or swat the flies or hear the hungry niños crying. She would blame the people for what they could not help, scorn him for an ignorant mojado—
Or was the thought unfair to her?
He remembered her brave joven hijo Kip, who had found him hiding on the ship, seen his dripping blood, become un buen amigo. She was still the Anglo stranger who hardly knew he was alive, but perhaps if he could earn a place among these pioneers of the stars—
Perhaps.
A sharp jolt bought him back to the frost and the boulders. Fragments of broken ice scattered the pale ruby glow around him. He rubbed his eyes and found more fragments emerging from the starlight ahead, always larger until they became a barrier along the starlit horizon.
A sharper jolt. The scout rocked and dropped.
“Carlos?” Cruzet shouted from the cabin. “What hit us?”
He braked the scout to search his small red island. The vehicle had dropped off a ledge half a meter high, hidden under the frost.
“We fell.” He pointed at the ledge. “A drop I didn’t see.”
“A fracture.” Andersen stood peering over his shoulder. “The old sea is frozen to the bottom. Ice here can fracture like any rock.” He turned to scan the boulder wall ahead. “Ejecta,” he said. “From a meteor crater. We’ll get around it. And then—”
He stopped himself, but his craggy face had lit.
“An adventure I never expected.” He swung to grin at Cruzet. “You know I began in geology. Switched to astrophysics because our old Earth was known too well. Now this whole planet’s ours. A new geology for us to read!”
“Ours?” Cruzet stood with him, staring off into the east, where they thought the flash had been. “Are you sure?”
Andersen went back to keep the fusion engine running.
“My turn to drive.” Cruzet beckoned Mondragon away from the wheel. “Get some sleep.”
He crawled into his berth in the main cabin. Hinch was snoring behind the curtain, but he couldn’t sleep. Cuerno del Oro was too far away, the world of the ice gods too cold and dark and strange. He climbed again into the observation bubble. Cruzet had steered north to find a way around the crater.
The frost beyond lay flat again, white and flat to the black horizon. Ice and midnight, nada más.
He sat at the instrument board, staring out across that dead starlit infinity, till the chime of the watch clock roused him to read the temperature of the surface radiation and enter it in the log. He used the sextant, as Andersen had taught him, to get a position that let him add one more black ink-dot to the line of black dots on the blank page that was to be their map. And he called the ship.
“Rima Virili here.” La rubia’s voice startled him. A voice like a song, musical with her beauty. “Acting aide to Mr. Glengarth.”
“Buenas—” He stopped himself. He should not be speaking Spanish. Not to her. “Carlos Mondragon, reporting.”
“Yes?” Her words were courteous and quick, with none of what he felt. “Anything unusual?”
“No problems.” He tried for the same expressionless briskness. “Position three hundred seventy-one kilometers east of the ship. Eighteen north. We swung north to get around a crater where Mr. Andersen says a meteor struck the ice. Ice temperature nine degrees Kelvin. The way ahead looks clear. Nothing unusual. No island, no mountain, no signal light.”
“Thank you, Mr. Mondragon. I’ll inform Mr. Glengarth. Have you anything to add?”
He wanted to ask of el joven Kip. And of Day, the younger ninita, who had la rubia’s bright hair and grieved for Me Me, the panda doll she had to leave on Earth. He wanted to tell her that even an untaught campesino might have the feelings of a man.
“Mr. Mondragon?” He had not spoken. “Anything else?”
She was still the gringa extranjera. He heard no warmth in her crisp, inquiring tone.
“Nada,” he said. “Nothing more.”
“Keep in touch,” she said. “Mr. Glengarth is concerned. He wants full reports.”
The telephone clicked.
He was nadie. Nobody to her. Not to any Anglo, except perhaps her fine muchachito Kip. Yet he sat there searching the frost, wondering if her art of terraforming could be truly the magic that might turn this planet of ice into the home she wished to make for los ninitos. How could they survive at nine degrees Kelvin? Who except the ice gods, which were only El Señor Andy’s joke—
“Carlos!” Cruzet’s sharp, impatient voice. “Carlos, are you awake?”
“¿Que?” Groggy with sleep, he sat up in the chair. “Now I am.”
“Look out ahead and call the ship.”
Stiff from sitting too long, he turned to look. Cruzet had slowed the scout. A few hundred meters ahead, a cliff had risen between the frost and the midnight sky, a sheer wall of dark ice a dozen meters high. It ran straight to right and left as far as he could see.
“¡Madre de Dios!” he breathed. “¿Que es?”
“Another geologic fault. Andersen says we’re in a zone of quakes.”
“Can we climb it?”
“Look just above it. We may not want to climb it.”
He looked and saw nothing till a hot red point exploded like a nova deep inside the ice. It swelled into a burning disk of rainbow circles that made a target pattern as tall as the cliff. He saw no change for another half minute. Then a darkness spread from the center till all the color was gone.
“A word from the locals.” Cruzet’s sharp ironic voice crackled out of the interphone. “Welcome, stranger? Or is it scram? Scram while you can?”
TWO
CALLING THE SHIP, he waited for la rubia’s voice. For a long time all he heard was the faint rush and murmur of the galaxy’s distant heart. When at last he heard a voice, it wasn’t hers.
“. . . garbled . . . signal garbled . . . please repeat . . .”
“Scout calling.” He tried again. “Reporting a wall of ice—”
“Carlos?” Glengarth’s voice, suddenly stronger, edged with sharp concern. “What’s happening?”
“A wall of ice across our path, señor. Muy alto. El Doctor Cruzet is backing us away.”
“Take no chances—”
“Something else, Señor. Más extraño. A bright light burning in the ice—”
“Can you describe it?”
“Círculos, señor. Circles of light that grow from the center like ripples on water till they show every color del arco ins. Though I think they cease now as we move away.”
“Strange.” Glengarth paused, perhaps not wanting to believe. “Did you see a cause?”
“No, Señor, except that it appeared as we came near. El Doctor Cruzet thinks perhaps it is intended as a signal.”
“From whom?”
“Yo no se. Perhaps the beings of the mountain.”
“Have you seen any mountain?”
“Not yet, señor. Nothing except the white frost that covers the ice all the way to the sky.”
“Perhaps—I hope you find no mountain. Are you in danger now?”
“Yo creo que no. Now we are stopping again, farther from the wall. The circles of color do not return.”
“Let me speak to your commander.”
“Mr. Hinch is below, sir. Sleeping. Or I think borracho.”
“Get me Mr. Andersen.”
“Andy here, sir.” He spoke at once from the nose of the scout. “On the interphone.”
“This wall?” Glengarth’s tone had sharpened. “What about it?”
“It looks natural enough, sir. A natural geologic upthrust. The fault line runs north and south as far as we can see. Nothing to show when it happened. Could have been a billion years ago. But—well sir, I just don’t know—”
Doubt slowed his voice.
“It has certainly stopped us. For all I know, it could have been created to keep intruders off that island. If there really is an island. When you think about what we seem to be facing, anything able to survive here would have to be highly advanced.”
“I suppose. What’s this about Mr. Hinch?”
“He’s down in his berth. Probably drunk.”
“I see.” Glengarth paused. “He’s an odd one. A surprise to me when he wanted command of the vehicle, but he’d had some kind of dust-up with the captain. Any trouble to you?”
“None, sir. He just told us to carry on.”
“Do that. Keep in touch. About this light in the ice?”
“Nothing I can explain, sir. A target-shape of expanding rings, colored like that flash we saw from space. Maybe meant to tell us we’re close enough.”
“I think you are.” A sharper tone. “Wake Mr. Hinch if you can. Inform him that his orders are to turn back at once. And hold the line open. I want constant contact.”
“Okay sir.”
Mondragon kept the headphones on, but the contact was broken. He heard Andersen calling Hinch and then the whisper of the turbine as they pulled farther from the barrier.
“Hold it!” Hinch’s hoarse sardonic bark came close behind him. “If Mr. Glengarth’s still on the line, tell him I’ve been informed. Tipsy, maybe, but not too drunk to run this bleedin’ circus. We ain’t going back.”
Twisting, Mondragon found Hinch behind him at the top of the cabin steps, gaunt face flushed behind the straggle of beard, a pistol in his hand.
“¿Que?” he whispered. “¿Que quiere?”
“¡Escuche!” A slurred command. “Get this! All three of you. To hell with Stecker and the ship. We’re going on to that bleedin’ mountain. If there is a bleedin’ mountain—”
“Señor—” He had to catch his breath. “Señor Hinch, have you looked outside?”
“I see the cliff.” Hinch was breathing hard. The pistol shook in his hand. “I saw the bleedin’ flash. Maybe meant to scare us off, but I don’t scare. We’ll climb the bleedin’ ice—”
“¡Señor!” he begged. “¡Cuidado con lapistola!”
“Cuidado yourself!” Hinch waved the gun. “I ain’t bonacho, and we ain’t turning back.”
“I think we’re in danger, sir,” Andersen called, “if we ignore that signal—”
“We could die.” Hinch laughed, a brief, harsh snort. “So what the bleedin’ hell! We’re already done for, murdered by this crazy mission. We can die slow, of cold and hunger here on the ice. Or faster, if that bleedin’ scumbag Stecker gets us back on his death-trap ship and shoots it off again to God knows what. I’ll take the ice gods, if you want to call ‘em gods. No worse than Rip Stecker.”
“Señor—” Mondragon watched the pistol and searched for words. “La Doctoia Virili says we need not die. She says we came to terraform the planet. She says we have knowledge to keep us alive, on the ice or under it.”
“Turned to bleedin’ cannibals!”
“Creo que no, señor. I think we need not die. The engineers have technology for the art called terraforming—” He shrank from a sweep of the gun. “Please, Señor, I think we must continue our search. Perhaps the light bums to make us welcome.”
“Not very bleedin’ likely!”
“We don’t know.” Andersen’s quiet voice again. “Mr. Hinch, you puzzle me. I believe you came with us because of some misunderstanding with Captain Stecker?”
“If you give a bleedin’ damn—” Hinch stepped back and lowered the pistol, but his eyes had a look of desperation. “Let me tell you what a slimy bastard Rip Stecker is.”
“No friend of mine.” Cruzet spoke somewhere below. “A dirty trick he played, throwing Captain Alt off the ship.”
Startled, Hinch jumped and tipped his haggard head.
“A filthier trick on me! Kidnapped me off the bleedin’ Earth. Got me drunk and kept me aboard when I never meant to come. Just to shut me up about his bleedin’ thievery.”
Livid now, his gaunt face twitched.
“But I ain’t dead. Not quite yet!”
“So, Mr. Hinch?” Andersen asked. “What do you want to say?”
“No secrets here. Not among the dead.” Hinch grinned, his hollowed eyes glaring past Mondragon at the frost and the ice wall and the stars. “Rip’s a slick one. Top con man of the bleedin’ century, if you ain’t already guessed it. He embezzled millions out of the bleedin’ mission. Got aboard the ship maybe two minutes ahead of the law. If you wonder how I know, he used me for his bleedin’ cat’s-paw.”
“Huh?”
“StarSeed Mission used to bebigbusiness. Real bigbusiness!” His ragged voice had slowed, and his arm seemed to relax with the gun. “Every bleedin’ ship cost millions, and they launched a lot of ships. Rip Stecker’s job was raising all those millions. Conning it out of the bleedin’ true believers, and he knew how to diddle the nuts into trading all they had for their chance to shape human destiny—that’s what he called his one-way tickets to die.
“Did it in his own high style.” Hinch laughed again, raucously. “Mark him up for that. Ritzy apartments in New York and Geneva. Women to match. He loved to gamble in top casinos all over the world, drunk half the time. Went wild at the end, squandering ten times his pay. That’s when he got his hooks into me.”
He waved the gun and grinned when Mondragon ducked.
“I’d made my own mistakes. Dipped into the wrong till and did ten years for it. Branded with that, I tried to change my name and make a better start. He found me out and put me to work for him. As mission auditor. I got sick of him and went to the law, which is why he did me in.”
He twisted to glare belligerently at Cruzet.
“And why I ain’t afraid of him, or you, or any bleedin’ ice gods. I ain’t going back to die on the ship and let that bastard gnaw my bones. Got it?”
“Thank you, Mr. Hinch.” Andersen spoke very quietly through the interphone. “I think we’ve got it. I’m glad to know where you stand, but I wonder how you hope to get past this fault in the ice.”
“Your problem.” Hinch grinned. “You’re the engineer.”
He went below again. Mondragon heard a bottle clink. Another kilometer back from the ice wall, Andersen stopped the scout to inspect the reactor and the turbine. Cruzet put on his airskin and went down through the lock to check the tires and steering gear.
“Vehicle still heated into safe service range,” he reported. “An ice fog around us since we stopped. Formed from frozen air that sublimes under the lamp and freezes again as it spreads.”
“Write it in your bleedin’ log.” Hinch was pushing into the bubble. “If you think anything human will ever live to see it.”
Yet, in spite of such sarcasm, he turned suddenly amiable, offering to share his whisky. Mondragon made fresh syncafe and toasted omninute wafers in the microwave. They gathered in the cabin for a meal before Cruzet took the controls to drive them north along the wall. It sank a little, but after ten kilometers it was still four meters high.
“Let’s take a look,” Andersen called. “I think we can climb it here.”
