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Illustratred by David A. Hardy
Junior partners can be major players…
Imagine you have an entire world to yourself. Then imagine a stranger walks into your camp.
I have to hand it to Floyd; he’s got a flair for the dramatic. Of course, it was my fault for telling him about Shackleton. That also made it my fault that an annum later we found ourselves cataloging Ring clumps for Torrence Rudolph III. Though I was stunned Floyd didn’t rebel at the mere thought. What is it about humans that makes them take their worst fears and charge at them headlong? I know what I don’t like, and microgravity has a lot to do with it. And Floyd . . . he has this need for open spaces. It’s not that he’s claustrophobic—he’s a tug pilot, after all. But he hates places where things might fall on him. So why in Space did he want anything to do with a gravitational kaleidoscope like the Rings, let alone burrowing around like some kind of mole, just waiting for something to squish us?
Unfortunately, Floyd was the one with the legs, so in such matters, I tended to get outvoted.
Obviously, money was a factor, but we didn’t need cash. Not that much, anyway. At least, not once we got the insurance company to actually read the full-replacement rider he’d had on Ship.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
It wasn’t that the parallels weren’t screamingly obvious. Shackleton was an explorer who escaped death by taking an open boat across a thousand-plus klicks of the word’s stormiest waters. Floyd and I built a sand sled to cross hundreds of klicks of dunes. Shackleton fetched up on the shore of a mountainous island, which he then had to cross on foot. Floyd and I did the same. So what if Shackleton was in Antarctica, hundreds of years ago, and we were on Titan? A sailboat’s a sailboat, whether it floats or skids.
So, of course, I told him about it. We were on the sled for thirty-two days. I had to talk about something. Including the “Who the bleep are you?” response Shackleton got when he finally reached civilization. But I only mentioned it because it was a good story: not because I thought we were going to try to copy it. After all, we were in suit-radio range all through the final day. But once Floyd gets an idea in his skull, there’s no shaking him of it. “We’ve come all this way,” he insisted. “I want to see their faces.”
As it turned out, we couldn’t see much of the face of the first person we met, but his body language said plenty. He was in an old-style pressure suit, with a big fishbowl of a helmet on which he’d displayed enough telemetry from whatever he was doing that there wasn’t much room for him to see out, let alone us to see in. It also turned out that while the Titan Base scientists had had a couple of skinsuits coming to them in the equipment capsule Floyd and I’d crash-landed all those days earlier, they were accustomed to people who, even in Titan’s 1.6-bar atmosphere, looked . . . how should I say it?—puffy?—when they stepped outside.
Floyd had never been fat, but when I later saw him in a mirror, he looked emaciated. After a month of suit rations, you could count his ribs through the suit. Combine that with the compressed-air bladders behind his shoulders and in front of his thighs, and he looked more than a bit insectoid. More of a surprise than the poor guy in the pressure suit deserved, if you ask me. But then I’ve always been more mature than Floyd. Mature enough that I’d have radioed in and asked them to send out a crawler and give us a lift, those last few klicks. But you know how it is with men asking for help.
Anyway, once the guy quit screaming, Floyd and I were famous.
Floyd’s full name, by the way, is Floyd Ashman. He likes to be called Phoenix, but you won’t catch me doing it. He claims it’s because it’s his hometown, but that’s just an excuse. Ashman? Phoenix? Way too cutesy for my taste.
I’m Brittney. I suppose you could call me Ashman, too—most of the media did—but I don’t have a last name. I’m Floyd’s symbiote and I live in a bunch of computer chips implanted beneath his ribs. There’s a dozen, though I could make do with fewer if I had to.
Floyd is forty-eight-year-old flesh and blood. I’m . . . well, the news pods liked to say quantum foam, but that’s the chips. The real me hasn’t been around much more than a couple of annums, though if I were human I’d tell you to think of me as nineteen, maybe twenty.
Floyd once asked how I figured how old I was. I told him it was based on how I feel. I also watch a lot of vids, though that’s not the greatest yardstick. I’ve got some control over it, too, so once I got to eighteen I figured I’d better slow down or in a few annums I’d be older than Floyd and he might not like it. He’s gotten better about taking help from me, but he might not do so well if I started acting too much like his . . . well, mother is a bad word with Floyd, but you get the idea.
Of course, famous or not, it took us a while to get off Titan because it wasn’t as though the scientists had a spare ship lying around, all set to bump us back to orbit. Then we had to sit around Iapetus Base arguing with the insurance company about Ship.
The moment I realized they weren’t going to pay up instantly, I took a crash course in insurance law. Okay, it wasn’t really a course: I just hit the web and read everything I could find. For once, Floyd didn’t complain about the access fees, even for data coming all the way from Earth. Though I suppose his complaints sometimes have a point. If I’m reading at full speed and have a good link (as if you can get one anywhere other than Iapetus), I can drain a pretty good library in a couple of days.
Long ago Floyd put me on an allowance. That forced me to distinguish two types of reading: data and pleasure. Data, you want now. For the other stuff, I’ve learned to slow down and savor. That’s part of why I like vids; I can just let ’em unscroll in real time. Shakespeare’s good, too. But there are a lot of things you don’t want to savor, especially if you can think as fast as I can.
Not that it took all that much research to know that the insurance company was trying to cheap out on us. The adjustor must have had trouble keeping a straight face when she argued that the baseball-sized chunk of whatever it was that wrecked Ship was ordinary wear and tear. And even in Saturn System, where there’s a gazillion things to bump into, it was rather obvious that it had hit us, rather than the reverse. I could point out about twenty places in the policy where that meant it wasn’t our fault.
I’d probably have made a good lawyer, though insurance law is pretty boring. Mostly it’s just flow-charting legal bafflegab designed to be so complex no human mind can possibly wrap itself around it. Any halfway decent AI could untangle it—though being sentient does make me better at spotting traps, and having a personal stake in the outcome doesn’t hurt, either.
When you got down to it, the contract clearly covered a meteor strike. And it promised a replacement now, not five annums from now by cargo canister, low-graded all the way from Earth. That meant the company had to get off its duff, find a ship, and zip it to us with a pair of fast strap-ons. Though there was a final panic when we had to point out that nobody could possibly categorize a meteor strike as an act of war or terrorism. Not unless there are ETs out in the Oort Cloud, tossing them at us, like kids throwing pebbles into a fish pond.
Law was kind of fun. Insurance companies I can live without.
I still miss old Ship, but hey, GnuShip is one sweet bucket of bolts. Still dumb as a post, but who knows? Miracles happen. If she ever wakes up, I’d like to be there. It would have been nice to have someone around when it happened to me. Imagine being born fully conscious, fully educated, into a world with nothing to see, nothing to touch, and no one to talk to except one dumb AI that didn’t even have a name for itself. All I had was Floyd’s entertainment library to keep me occupied during the forever it took help to arrive, and that was back before I learned to savor, so “forever” isn’t that far off the mark. Floyd’s library wasn’t all that big and if you’re like me, there’s no real point to rereading: you either remember it in its entirety, or file away the thing or two worth remembering and delete the rest.
I suspect I’d have made a good lit prof, too.
At the time, though, all I knew was that Floyd was alive but unconscious, having been blasted off the surface of Enceladus—maybe fast enough that we were now nothing but a new Ring particle; maybe slowly enough that we’d eventually go splat back down so hard he’d never wake up.
Somehow, the discovery of fear must have scrambled the bits just right to bring me alive. I have recollections from before, but they’re like vids: someone else’s memories, not mine. From the moment the geyser went off beneath us and Floyd was knocked out, my memories have a different flavor.
Loss of input may also have played a role. Most of Floyd’s suit systems were knocked offline along with his senses, so all I knew was that we were maybe dying and I had no way to tell what was happening. Ship’s telemetry was useless. Her instruments couldn’t even see us, let alone plot a trajectory. And she was too dumb to carry on a conversation more sophisticated than: Call for help! (that was me); followed by, Contacting Iapetus Base. Estimated rendezvous: eighty-four hours, twenty-three minutes.
Sorry. Bad memory.
That’s the reason I don’t like microgravity. When things go wrong, there’s way too much time to think about it before you find out what’s going to happen. Some things really aren’t worth savoring.
So that’s how we wound up with Torrence Rudolph III. We’d have gotten some news coverage no matter what, but the scientist who’d nearly had the heart attack turned out to be a storyteller who never missed a chance to embellish. The press ate him up. Then Floyd told them about Shackleton and suddenly Saturn System was the new Antarctica. I did a few interviews, too, but mostly they treated me like your ordinary dumb AI who’s simply following a canned interface when she says things like, “It was really scary,” or “Piloting the sand sled was kind of fun.” The rest were patronizing.
Torrence Rudolph was even worse.
Officially, he’s T. R. Van Delp III, but we hooked up with him on December 24 and he had a big red nose, so I couldn’t resist. The “T” really is Torrence but even with a lot of web sifting, I couldn’t find a hint of what the “R” stood for. He wanted to be called “T. R.,” but he was leading our way, and a guy like that just deserves a nickname. Maybe I shouldn’t be so hard on Floyd’s “Phoenix” thing.
When Rudolph first contacted us, he never once acknowledged my existence except to ask Floyd if his “imp” (a term I had to look up because I thought it was some kind of fairy) was any good at seat-of-the-pants route finding.
“Tell the hume I certainly am,” I told Floyd, when the net served up imp = implant (arch. sl., usu. derog.). And talk about dumb questions. How else did he think we’d survived on Titan?
Floyd simply asked what kind of route-finding Rudolph had in mind. He got back a long list, starting with exactly the type of stuff we’d done on Titan, where you’ve got no maps, no satellite beacons, and not a lot in the way of useful landmarks. I kept waiting for Floyd to ask him where he thought we’d be going where that would be necessary. Or did Rudolph think it was some kind of game? Maybe to a tourist type it sounds like fun to play the marooned explorer. But that’s only if you’ve never been out there where you can’t link, can’t get a decent location fix, and everything depends on your ability to guess. That takes the fun out of it, fast.
Sorry, more bad memories.
Then Rudolph started talking about spelunking.
Okay, that’s a situation where you really aren’t going to be able to call out for a fix, even under the best of circumstances. But getting lost is the least of your problems, Tom Sawyer notwithstanding.
Still, I couldn’t believe that Floyd didn’t immediately say thanks but no thanks.
“Are you crazy?” I asked. To speak to most people, I use a com link, but I can talk to Floyd privately, via the nerve inducer that taps me into his auditory nerve. “He’s talking about caves.”
“Yeah,” Floyd said, softly enough the com wouldn’t pick it up. “Maybe it’s time I deal with that. Though I think he’s talking hypothetically.”
Then he dropped the subject. There are some parts of being human I don’t think I’ll ever understand. Or maybe it’s just testosterone. As far as I can tell, the world would have been better off without it.
I’m not sure whether Rudolph wanted us because we were famous or because we (now) had the best tug in Saturn System.
Okay, it was also the only true tug in Saturn System. There wasn’t a huge amount of work, which was why Floyd’s ship was also his home. And why he had to be flexible enough in his choice of jobs to even consider hiring out as a guide.
Rudolph insisted on a formal contract which, when it came, rivaled the insurance policy on poor old Ship, with contingency clauses and secrecy pacts and a lien on GnuShip if he violated any of them. “Are you sure you want to do this?” I asked. At least there wasn’t anything putting me up as collateral.
“It’s just boilerplate. It doesn’t mean much.”
“Then why does he want it?”
“Because it’s the way he does things. And he’s offering a lot of money.”
“Too much. It’s like he’s trying to buy us.”
“So? If he’s rich and wants to spread it around, why not? You’ve just got your feelings hurt because he ignores you.”
I had to think about that. Introspection is something I’m still learning. It’s hard enough to figure out why Floyd does things.
All I really knew was that once the contract was signed, Rudolph e-railed himself out in a private canister on a twenty-five-day hyperbola that must have cost a fortune, then slingshotted around the planet in a cowboy braking-move that showed either total insanity or high faith in his guidance system. Though it did save us a three-week chase retrieving his capsule. Maybe he’s easily bored. Or maybe he’s just one of those people who put a high value on their time. Either way, I tried to tell Floyd, it meant he was a risk taker.
“Nah,” he said. “I bet he had a dozen people calculate that trajectory to the micron.”
GnuShip had no cabin for Rudolph once we collected his canister. She’s nothing but cockpit, engines, and clamps—and the cockpit’s barely big enough for the pilot’s couch and an exercise station. So until we got to Iapetus and hired a skimmer to take us down, the only difference between talking to him on Earth and talking to him here was no speed-of-light delay. Not that Rudolph was much of a talker. In that, he’s a bit like Floyd.
His canister was impressive: a whole bunch bigger than GnuShip’s cockpit, and a lot better furnished. Whenever he talked to Floyd by comcam, I peered over his shoulder, studying details.
Floyd was doing the same. “It’s like a first-class liner,” he said, “only better.”
“Way better.” Not that there’s such a thing as a first-class liner this far out. “It’s also stuffed with equipment. Did you see that box behind him? It’s a Spektrum 12000.”
Floyd’s voice carried a tone I’ve learned to be wary of. “Which is what?”
One of the things about growing older is that I’ve learned that Floyd doesn’t like the Socratic method. He calls it “guessing games” and accuses me of being condescending. It’s weird, because when I was reading up on insurance law, I discovered that law professors always teach that way, and nobody accuses them of anything. But Floyd’s a bit old for a student, so maybe that’s the issue. Anyway, he doesn’t like it. And, to be fair, I myself would have had no idea what it was if we’d been more than a few light-seconds from the Iapetus Base web.
“It’s what they call a lab-in-a-can,” I said. “High throughput but low multiplicity.”
“Huh?”
“That means it can run a lot of samples, but it can only perform a few tests on each of them. He’s got a whole bunch of other stuff in there, too. I’m still trying to figure out what some of it is, but I know I saw a quark detector and a stellar occlusion analyzer. He’s also got five skinsuits, plus a whole array of gloves and boots, and—”
“So does any of this actually matter? Apparently he likes toys.”
Someday I’m going to learn to be concise. The problem is that life is so full of interesting things. “Not really.”
I might have been able to learn more if I’d had the nerve to probe Rudolph’s canister systems. Floyd would have objected, but I hate mysteries. Enough that I’ll give myself an extra year’s age when I decide to control the impulse. The one time I attempted to slip into Rudolph’s canister, though, merely to hijack his comcam for a better view, I bumped into a rather impressive guardian program that nearly caught me.
That left me with little more than what I knew of Rudolph from the web, which was both plenty and not all that much. According to the web, he’d made his bucks in the futures market: asteroidal iridium, mid-ocean-ridge copper, even some speculative stuff regarding hydrothermal vent mining on Europa if the environmental restrictions are ever lifted. As far as I could tell, he’d never actually mined anything—just bought and sold the rights—but he’d done pretty well at it and could definitely afford to hire us for as long as he wanted.
None of which really explained the equipment in the canister.
But Floyd wasn’t concerned. “Would you relax? He’s just a rich speculator, playing tourist. What’s so weird about that? And his name, damn it, is T. R.”
Iapetus Base is on the surface, and neither T. R.’s canister nor GnuShip was designed for a hard landing. That meant we finally got to meet in person, boarding the skimmer.
On the vidscreen, Rudolph had a face to match his nose: broad and florid, with a shaggy mane of hair overhanging strong eyebrows, and cheeks showing the mottled beginnings of lesions that would probably someday need the ministrations of an oncologist. Spaceburn? Or too many days on ozone-damaged sections of Earth? My web reading gave no clue, but his complexion bespoke a man who’d spent a lot of time without caring enough about UV filters. I raised my estimation of him by a point or two. Wherever he’d been trolling for melanomas, it had been under harsh conditions that most wealthy people would have avoided.
Not that he treated me any better in person than on the com. He concentrated on Floyd, shaking hands firmly enough I could sense Floyd wince, even though I’m not wired into his tactile impressions. His grin was broad and his voice as hearty as his handshake, and he had a tendency to drape an arm over Floyd’s shoulder and lean close to speak—as though he didn’t already have enough decibels. According to the psychological literature, that hale-fellow-well-met stuff simply reflects a “man’s man,” slightly out of his comfort zone. But I kept wondering if Rudolph knew exactly what he was doing.
Not that Floyd wanted to hear it.
“Yeah, he’s a bit forced,” he said, “but give it a break, Brittney. He’s just trying too hard, that’s all.”
We’d barely touched down at Iapetus Base when Rudolph announced that he wanted to go backpacking.
Someday, Iapetus will be a tourist destination. The view of the Rings is breathtaking, the terrain dramatic, the stars space-bright. If it were flat, it would also be easy walking because, even though it’s fairly large—about thirty percent the diameter of Titan—it’s a lot less dense, so you don’t get all that much gravity. A whopping .023 gee. Not a lot, but five times more than Enceladus, and there aren’t any geysers to blast you off into space.
What there are, are things to fall off of. Mountains, to be precise: huge ones. Think Olympus Mons, but steeper and up to fifteen klicks high. In terms of the ability to kill you, Earth’s higher gravity gives it worse cliffs. But as some mountaineer said on one of those vids from which I only chose to remember snippets, “Dead is dead.” Beyond a certain point the size of the drop hardly matters.
You’d think Iapetus would be pretty well explored. And while there have been some geological surveys—science is one of the few things Saturn System can export—the base is mostly just that: ice mines, habs, and a convenient place to park yourself between jobs. Easy to get to, easy to leave, but on a moon big enough to feel like a real world. As far as I could tell, nobody before us had ever “gone” backpacking.
“That’s why I hired you, Floyd, old boy,” Rudolph said. “You know how to get around places like this. So let’s get at it. I’ve got everything we need in my canister.”
Which of course meant we had to pop back up to orbit to get it, which was an irritating waste of propellant. That’s the trouble with rich guys. They think that because fuel comes out of the ground, it’s free. Though at least Floyd got to spend a night in a guest hab and take a real gravity-fed shower, which he views as a luxury, even if the gravity’s so low that fog is a better description of the experience.
Rudolph probably just took it for granted that a skimmer’s worth of orbit-to-ground propellant was a reasonable price for a shower. Maybe Floyd was right and he was just a rich tourist.
Rudolph did have everything we needed. In addition to one of the skinsuits I’d already seen, he produced a pressurized bubble tent, climbing equipment that looked capable of dangling us from precipices where sane people would rather not dangle, and a portable version of the Spektrum lab-in-a-can, plus self-heating food packs, an ice/water purifier, and a bunch of other stuff that probably included lounging-in-the-tent clothing and an inflatable pillow so he could sleep soundly. When he piled it all in the skimmer, it formed an impressive mountain. On the surface, it would only weigh twenty or thirty kilos, but it would have full Earth mass, which would make it hard to carry, especially near any of those monster cliffs. I could see the epitaph now: “This crater dedicated to the memory of Floyd and Brittney, who, at the abyss of the Great Precipice of You-Wouldn’t-Believe-It, discovered that a backpack in motion tends to remain in motion a lot longer than you’d expect.” Or something like that. I could do better if I put my heart in it.
Other than the size of the pile of equipment, what was hard not to notice was that Rudolph only had a one-person tent. Floyd, apparently, would get to sleep in his skinsuit. I guess Rudolph figured we had plenty of experience at that, too. Poor Floyd. I’ve only got direct access to two of his senses, and from my point of view there’s not a lot of difference between being in a suit or a ship. Floyd says I’m lucky. On Titan, he tried to explain what it felt like by the second week, but the best I could come up with was that it was like being forced to watch an excruciatingly bad vid, over and over. Or maybe having to spend all your time with Rudolph.
At least Rudolph was prepared to share his food—though he really didn’t have much choice. We had lots of ship rations, but his supplies were a good deal more portable and more easily prepped in the field.
Floyd didn’t have a backpack to carry any of this stuff, but that, it turned out, didn’t matter, either: Rudolph had one that fit him perfectly. Of course, he only had one large pack. The other was a lot smaller. Big surprise. Floyd was definitely going to have to watch his momentum at the edges of those big cliffs.
I will give Rudolph points for one thing. Iapetus really is spectacular, and he picked the best destination, the equatorial ridge.
Iapetus is a weird moon, looking as though something a long time ago squeezed it hard. The pressure squirted up an enormous ridge right around its equator, so tall that on Earth an equivalent mountain range would jut all the way through the stratosphere with a lot to spare. That’s where the biggest of the big mountains tend to be.
Rudolph wanted to pick the highest part and hike the crest.
“What?” I said, “Is he nuts?”
“Shush,” Floyd said.
But I was already looking at the map. The ridge wouldn’t be flat on top; nothing that tall is flat on top. And there were bound to be places where the footing would be like sloping ball bearings. It’s an airless world, so the regolith was going to be all crunched up by micro-meteorites, producing a lot of loose stuff that would accumulate on the steeper slopes. Not to mention that most of the ridge passes through Iapetus’s dark side, which would add to the scree.
The dark side isn’t called that because it’s always night (it isn’t). Rather, it’s because it’s on the leading side of the planet as it moves around Saturn, allowing it to have swept up all kinds of dark junk from somewhere or other.
Because several of the other moons are also dark on their leading faces, the prevailing theory is that a long time ago, something that’s no longer with us got really clobbered by something else, and fragments wound up all over Saturn System. Maybe the dark stuff is the core of the deceased moon, or maybe it’s fragments from whatever it was that hit it. Or both. For what it’s worth, I can write sims that make any of those work.
There’s another theory that says the whole ridge is debris from a prehistoric ring that collapsed onto the surface, then congealed like some kind of volcanic ashfall from space. I can write a sim that makes that one work, too, though it doesn’t explain why the ridge is perfectly normal Iapetus ice, with the dark stuff ladled over it like charcoal-colored dust.
Then there’s the theory that says aliens built it. If so, they’ve been slow to explain why, but maybe they’re extinct. Or maybe they really are out there in the Oort Cloud tossing rocks at us, hoping we’ll go away.
And maybe I’ve been watching too many vids.
What I do know is that I’ve read enough mountaineering stories to know that rock climbers have a term for such stuff: rotten rock. And even if we didn’t fall off a cliff, fifteen klicks is a long way to tumble.
“Don’t do it,” I said. “He’s crazy.”
“Quiet!” Floyd hissed. Then, “Sorry, not you.”
Rudolph raised an eyebrow, but didn’t say anything.
“Damn it,” I said, surprising myself. I don’t usually use language like that. But then I don’t usually get angry, either. “I’m part of this, too. Why the hell can’t he acknowledge it?”
At least Floyd didn’t ignore me, too. “Excuse me a moment,” he said to Rudolph, then turned away from him. “Can we talk about this later? Maybe it’s just habit with him. Or perhaps he doesn’t know what to make of you. Most people have never met a sentient AI, so maybe he just thinks of you as a really good interface. Hell, maybe he doesn’t like women. Who knows? It’s his problem, not yours, but he’s the client, so let’s see if we can get him what he wants without killing ourselves, okay? Trust me. I’ve seen the pictures of that ridge crest, too.”
We settled for a base-camp trip. That reduced the load, allowed Floyd to return occasionally to sleep in the skimmer, and meant there’d be no long-distance ridge walking.
Unfortunately, it also meant that when we were at the skimmer we’d have to share it with Rudolph, since it was a lot bigger than his tent. Me, I’d have rather stayed outside in the suit. But as Floyd pointed out, I didn’t have a nose and had never itched from anything other than curiosity.
From our base at the skimmer, we would try to climb the ridge, which nobody had ever done before. I thought Rudolph would like that, since a first ascent would get him all kinds of press on the climbing nets. But he was pretty grudging about giving up his trek. “Okay,” he said at last, “But I don’t want to just bag peaks. I want to cover as much ground as possible.”
Floyd didn’t comment, and for once I managed not to ask what the hell, then, we were doing.
* * *
The first attempt, we got nowhere near the top. But Rudolph didn’t seem to care.
We’d decided to start in the Trench, the deep valley that separates the Ridge’s two parallel crests. From there, it wasn’t quite as big a climb as from the plains on either side. Floyd had expected an argument, but Rudolph simply grunted, pointed at the map, and said to pick a place somewhere in “that” vicinity. Then he left it to us to choose a summit.
Iapetus is well mapped, but not for hiking and certainly not for mountaineering. Still, flying over, it was an easy thing to take stereoscopic images and convert them to contour maps. Easy enough for me, anyway. That let us pick a nice collection of peaks with climbing routes, which, on a twenty-meter topo at least, didn’t look too deadly.
We set down near the easiest-looking summit, a mere ten thousand meters above us: three times the height of Mt. Everest above its base, though at least it looked as though we could scramble up without having to dangle from any cliffs. I’m sure Rudolph’s climbing equipment was top of the line, but I was happy not to have to put it to the test.
We set out with the bubble tent and seventy-two hours’ supplies. At first, we made good progress, but after the first few klicks, Rudolph kept stopping to poke at rocks, especially in the densest drifts of the loose, dark stuff that gave the dark side its name.
Whatever it was, he loved it. But he wasn’t acting like any geologist I’d ever heard of. Rather than putting samples into carefully labeled bags, he’d grab a handful here, a handful there, and another elsewhere, and shove them all into the same sack.
We did that all through the first twenty-four hours, pausing only for a sleep break. At least Rudolph slept, in his bubble tent. The next day, Floyd was getting frustrated. “Are we climbing or prospecting?” he asked, quietly enough that the question had to be directed to me.
“Darned if I know.” By this time Rudolph had acquired, by my estimate, thirty kilos’ mass in rock—enough that it was starting to affect his balance like the backpack was affecting Floyd’s. “But if he finds anything valuable, he’ll never know where it came from.”
“Yeah,” Floyd said. “I noticed.” Then he spoke up. “That bag’s getting pretty full, T. R. Do you want a hand?”
Rudolph barely looked up from his current patch of scree. “If I want help, I’ll ask for it.”
Floyd raised his hands, defensively. “Whoa. Just offering.”
But Rudolph was looking at the ridge, still thousands of meters above. “We aren’t going to make the top, are we?”
“Not if you want to breathe on the way down,” I said, but not on the radio. If Rudolph wasn’t talking to me, I wasn’t talking to him, either.
Floyd was more diplomatic. “Probably not. We have to turn back in . . .”
“Seven or eight hours,” I supplied. “Give or take.”
“Four hours,” Floyd said. “But at least we now know a route that looks like it might work.”
“Fine.” Rudolph barely glanced at the summit we’d not obtained. Nor did he spare much attention for the view opening out over the valley below. “I don’t suppose we could go back by a different route?”
“Not the best idea,” Floyd and I chorused, though of course, Floyd was the only one he could hear.
“Thought so.” Rudolph was already turning around. “Oh well.”
Iapetus is tide locked to Saturn, and its day is seventy-nine Earth days long, so nothing much had changed by the time we got back to the skimmer.
“Let’s go for a walk,” I said to Floyd.
“Isn’t that what we were just doing?” His voice was quiet, but in the stillness of the skimmer there was no way Rudolph couldn’t tell he was talking to me. Long ago, spacers had learned the value of silence. If humans are trapped with it 365 per annum, anything that squeaks or hums can drive them nuts. Silence, on the other hand, can always be covered with a personal sound system.
Unfortunately, Rudolph had no problem with silence. That meant that while I could talk to Floyd privately, it was hard for him to respond once he’d taken off his suit.
“Tell Rudolph you want to take sunset pictures,” I added.
“Sunset’s got to be at least ten or eleven days away.”
Sometimes, I swear, Floyd is deliberately obtuse. But this time he was just tired.
“Can’t you tell me about it in here?”
“No.”
He sighed. “Okay.” Then, to Rudolph. “I’ll be back in a bit.”
“’S long as we start on time tomorrow.”
Rudolph’s eyes were shut, but I couldn’t tell if he was thinking or nearly asleep.
Floyd didn’t say anything more until he’d put on his suit and the airlock was cycling. “We could have just used the suit headset.”
“Yes, but I want to talk about him without having to see him.”
Of course, I was monitoring the skimmer’s telemetry, so I could still see him, but this felt different. Rudolph was now awake, feeding bits of black scree into the mini-Spektrum. I wondered if he knew I was watching. Or if he cared. If I was merely a thing to him, it might not matter.
“What’s he want with all that stuff?” I asked.
“What, the rock and dust he’s collecting?”
“Yes.” Though I could also have asked about the mini-Spektrum and everything else.
“Maybe he’s looking for something.”
“For what? Besides even I’d have no clue where it came from.”
“Good point.” The airlock had finished its cycle and we stepped out. “Do you remember when Mt. Rainier erupted and blew half of Seattle to hell?”
Remember wasn’t quite the word, but I’d read of it. “Yes. Though it wasn’t anywhere near half. More like a couple of suburbs.”
“Yeah, but afterward people collected the ash and made all kinds of things out of it—sasquatches and grizzly bears and totem poles and Space-2-Needles and things like that.”
“So you think Rudolph is planning to set up a curio stand? What’s he going to call it? ‘The remains of Planet X?’” What classical beast vanished into thin air? Oh yes. “Or ‘Tails of the Cheshire Cat?’ Assuming this stuff has anything to do with a destroyed moon. Maybe it’s just Ring dust.”
As long as we were outside, Floyd really did start taking a stroll. “I didn’t say it was something I’d do. Just that people tend to collect stuff like this, so you can’t read too much into it.”
Some of the few pieces of equipment of his own that Floyd had picked up on Iapetus Base were trekking poles. He’d suggested that Rudolph buy a pair, but Rudolph had merely scoffed. That’s because Inner System ground rats tend to hop when they try to walk in low gravity, wasting energy by bouncing up and down rather than going forward. A flatter trajectory is more efficient, especially if you can stabilize it with poles.
It works best on flat surfaces, like the Trench. Occasionally, Floyd had to dodge large rocks, but in low gravity, poles are better for that than legs, and while he hadn’t had poles on Titan, he knew how to use them. He struck a rhythm, and soon the skimmer disappeared beneath the curve of the horizon.
We went on like that for about fifteen minutes. There wasn’t much to say, and neither of us said it. Floyd is an athlete at heart, and I knew he’d be lost in the rhythm of motion and breathing. Me, there’s no way I can understand that stuff, except intellectually. I was lost in the view.
Before us, Saturn stood above the Trench in bands of pastel, the Rings almost but not quite edge-on, cleaving the heavens like knife. The sun hung slightly off to one side behind us, low enough that shadows limbed the ridges’ steeper slopes, making cliffs look even worse than they were and creating the illusion of cliffs where there weren’t any.
Titan had had dramatic landforms, too, but they’d been blurred to a smoggy murk that distorted contours, hid the sky, and created a uniform orange pall. Here, everything stood out in crystalline detail.
Eventually, Floyd stopped and surveyed the vista in silence. Then he sighed. “That felt good,” he said. “It’s different when it’s just us. And it’s nice to actually move, rather than making like a pack mule. But we better be getting back.”
“I’ve got something I’d like you to listen to first,” I said.
“Sure. Though I really don’t think T. R.’s as bad as you believe.”
“It’s not him.” At least, not directly. Without Rudolph to distract Floyd and leave me with a lot of time to fill, I might never have found myself at this point.
Suddenly, I was afraid. Not with the fear that comes from thinking of dangling from giant precipices, but with a fear that, if anything, struck deeper.
“I call it ‘Iapetus Air,’” I said.
“There’s not a lot of that around here.”
“Ha, ha. No, an air is kind of like a song without words, usually done on a violin.”
“You want to play me a piece of music?”
I wasn’t sure what I detected in his voice. Floyd doesn’t listen to a lot of music. Maybe this was a mistake.
“Yes.” I was more nervous than ever. “It’s short. And Celtic.” Not that Floyd would particularly care about that. But even though the Celts came from a green country, it was stark and rocky around the edges, and I thought they might find something familiar in this landscape.
I suppose I could still have backed out. Instead, I put everything I could into it: the bleak landscape; the untouched and so-far-untouchable peaks; the loneliness of being ignored, of watching but not participating, seeking but not finding. When it was done, Floyd was silent for long enough I was sure my worst fears had materialized, though when I checked it was only a few seconds.
“Is that a recording?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
He paused again. “I guess I’m asking where it came from.”
“I wrote it.”
More pause. “Now?”
I’d been thinking about it all day, but the final composition had been done in real time. Improvisation, they call it, though of course I’ve got a considerable ability to time-shift my perceptions and cheat.
“Yes,” I said, because it was the simplest answer.
“Wow.” He paused again. “Like, really wow.” Still another pause. “What brought that on?”
I had to think about that a bit because there were plenty of other things I could have done in my free time, including sampling the vids I’d collected back at the base.
“I really want to make it to the top of one of those things,” I said.
Which wasn’t really an answer. What I wanted was . . . something. That’s what the music had been about. The summit was just a symbol. I only wished I knew of what.
The next two attempts were like the first. A day of intermittent slogging while Rudolph collected endless samples. A camp where he slept in comfort and Floyd didn’t. Then a few more hours of not getting anywhere close to the top, a descent, and another camp in which I tried to figure out what it was that the summit meant. Whatever it was, Rudolph didn’t share it. Both times, he targeted a new peak, squandering whatever route finding we’d done and never particularly exerting himself to reach the top.
The fourth attempt was different. Rudolph left his sample bag and looked up, rather than at the ground. “Is it really true that nobody’s ever climbed one of these?”
Floyd didn’t even bother to ask me to check. “Yes.”
“Then I suppose we should remedy that. After all, that’s what we’re here to do, isn’t it?”
Now that we were finally committed, it would have been easy if the sun hadn’t been getting low, creating huge shadows. Saturn light and reflected glare from surrounding slopes softened them a bit, but human eyes weren’t made for this. It wouldn’t have been a problem if Rudolph had included a couple of good pairs of contrast-reduction goggles somewhere in that enormous pile of equipment, but the ones he’d brought were designed for Mars, where there’s an atmosphere to soften the light.
That left me. I could see perfectly well by doing my own contrast-adjustment on the view from the cam Floyd had mounted for me on his suit. But when I tried feeding that back to his headset, the parallax messed up his depth perception enough that he kept tripping over things. Eventually, I showed him the enhanced display when he asked for it, but mostly I just gave directions: It’s not as steep on the left of the big cleaver, or, go right unless you want to get boxed. That kind of thing.
I thought about sending the enhanced image to Rudolph, but he was the one who’d squandered all the good light before we needed the goggles he didn’t have, so I figured he’d just have to trust us. Or Floyd. Somehow I felt no desire to show off to Rudolph. Was that a form of maturity? Or would Floyd say I was sulking?
As we neared the top, the slope abated along with the shadows. And then we were up.
“What’s the name of this peak?” Rudolph asked, taking the lead just in time to be first to reach the highest outcrop.
“It doesn’t have one,” I said.
“Whatever you want to call it,” Floyd said. “We can register it with the . . .”
“—Interplanetary Commission on Nomenclature,” I supplied.
“—proper authorities, when we get back to the skimmer. Mons Van Delp?”
We camped on top, which isn’t as big a deal as it sounds, since this wasn’t Earth, where mountaintops are exposed to all sorts of nasty weather. Here, it was simply a convenient flat spot. For once, Floyd didn’t seem to mind being outside. He parked himself on a convenient boulder, looking toward Saturn. To one side the view fell into the Trench. To the other, the drop was even bigger, onto a plain bounded by a crater-etched horizon that was either too close or too far, depending on your point of view. Rudolph would find it cramped. Floyd would find it big, almost like being in orbit without a ship.
Saturnward, down the ridge, the black deposits thinned, revealing ever-larger patches of underlying ice.
“That one’s Mount Zebra,” I said.
Floyd laughed. “Which of the nearby peaks is the highest?”
I consulted the topo I’d made days earlier. “See that long crest over there? At about two o’clock, across the Trench?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Its highest point is about two hundred thirty meters above us.”
Floyd laughed again. “Brittney’s Bump,” he said.
The descent was easy: just a matter of retracing our steps—literally when the regolith was soft enough to have preserved them, figuratively when we had to rely on my memory.
Then we were back in Iapetus Base for another night in a guest hab, followed by a quick boost back to orbit, with Rudolph again secluded in his canister. I presumed he was feeding all those kilos of dust into the full-sized Spektrum, but he must also have been writing net reports. Hours later, Mons Van Delp and Mount Zebra had made the map; Brittney’s Bump hadn’t, partly because Floyd never suggested it to him.
I wasn’t quite sure how I felt about that. Having a mountain named for me would have been fun, but it would be nice for the name to be a little more dignified. Out of curiosity, I downloaded a bunch of Inner System topos and found all kinds of intriguing names, ranging from obvious glory-hounding to oddities that must have had good stories behind them, like a river bend called Crook’s Elbow and a coal-mining town called Goldbug. Then there were the ones you didn’t want to think too much about, like Dead Prussian Point. Maybe part of the fun of visiting such places is trying to figure out how they got their names. At least Mount Zebra is obvious. A hundred annums from now, nobody will care about Rudolph’s mons.
And then, we were off to the Rings. No explanation, not even a thank-you, unless one of those arm-on-the-shoulder things counted, back in the skimmer. As far as I was concerned, it was too much like patting a dog on the head for a good game of fetch. Kind of like Floyd at his worst, only more so.
When Rudolph had first talked about caves, I thought he might be wanting us to go back to Titan, where there are indications that methane ground—uh, “water” isn’t quite the right word; aquifers? methanofters?—might have carved out passages similar to earthly caverns.
But that wasn’t it. He was looking for moons in which he might be able to crawl in one side and come out the other: right through the center like some kind of skin-suited Jules Verne.
Not that he told us this until we were well away from Iapetus. Then he clamped down an embargo on outside communications, complete with a monitoring gizmo that would notify him if we so much as pinged an orbital beacon.
“You have to time the publicity on these things,” he said. “Climbing was just the warm-up. If we play it right, we’re going to make that Shackleton guy look like a total amateur.”
We started by cruising above the Rings, looking for clumps. There are millions of them, maybe tens of millions, but they’re not very stable, so nobody’s ever tried to catalog them. However many there are today, there will be a different number tomorrow.
Luckily, we weren’t trying for a full list, either. Mostly, we were looking for the biggest clumps we could find and checking their densities.
It didn’t take a genius to figure out that Rudolph was hoping they’d be tunneled through by caves. But caverns have to be formed by something. I’d read up on them way back, when Rudolph first asked about spelunking. On Earth there are three types: water-carved (not likely here), lava tubes (ditto), and talus caves. Clearly, Rudolph was interested in the latter. On Earth, they occur beneath piles of big boulders. Obviously, he hoped that some of the clumps would be similar, but to figure out which ones had a chance, he needed to measure their densities. Too low and they’d just be temporary amalgams of bumping, grinding boulders, too dangerous even for Rudolph. Too high and they’d be too solid for tunnels. Obviously, Rudolph was hoping for something in the middle.
The classic method of finding the density of a moonlet is to do a flyby and watch your course change. But the clumps are in the Rings, where a flyby at anything but the slowest creep isn’t something anyone in their right mind wants to do. There’s just too much stuff to bash into, and no insurance in the Solar System would cover us if we did.
At first, that produced a bit of a stalemate.
“I’m paying you to do what I say,” Rudolph said, all trace of arm-on-the-shoulder bonhomie gone.
“Not that, you’re not.”
“I suggest you read your contract. Especially the part with the penalty clauses.”
“I told you not to sign that thing,” I said.
“Damn it, Brittney, that’s not helpful.”
He was, I had to admit, right about that. “Okay, so we have to do something creative.” I thought a moment, then had it. “Look, we’ve got a tug. Why don’t we just throw things?”
And so, Operation Slow-Pitch was born. Floyd got credit for it but that was okay. I no longer cared what Rudolph thought of me.
The idea was dead simple: all we had to do was dip into the edges of the Rings, grab a nice chunk of ice, push it in the right direction, and watch how the clump’s gravity altered its course.
We found a wide range of densities, some of which looked promising. But when we eased in close to a few of the better candidates and pinged them with the ice-penetrating radar, they proved to be nothing more than giant dust bunnies. Fluffy snowballs, with a few denser chunks for those who might prefer to think in terms of raisin bread. The point is, you’d have to dig a tunnel before exploring it, which kind of defeats the purpose. Not to mention that we had nothing with which to dig.
I suppose we could have ordered up some mining equipment, but that would have left half of Iapetus Base wondering what we were up to. Rudolph obviously preferred a fait-accompli approach. His corporate MO had been to hover around the edges, then sweep in and poof, he’d have seventy percent of the iridium in the system. Or all the mining rights on Europa. Not that I could imagine anyone wanting to beat him to the punch on the Jules Verne thing, but maybe when it comes to secrecy he’s like Floyd was about Shackleton. Once his mind gets in a track, it stays there.
Eventually, when I think even Floyd was about to die of boredom, Rudolph called a halt.
“We could do this forever,” he said. “Right now I’m opting for this one”—he pulled up an image of a two-klick object whose main distinction was an unusually dense sprinkling of raisins—“but I’m not terribly hopeful. Are we missing something?”
There are lots of answers to a question like that, especially when you’re caught in a stupid contract you’d like to get out of. But Floyd must actually have wanted to go spelunking. “What about the gap moons?” he said. “They’re less likely to have picked up all that fluff that’s blocking the tunnels.”
We started with Atlas.
There are a lot of gap moons, depending on how you define moon and gap, but the best known are Atlas, Pan, and Daphnis. As the term indicates, they sit in the gaps, which they maintain by gravitationally ejecting stray Ring particles. They all have specific gravities well below 1.0, which means they’d float if you dropped them in the ocean. Well, Atlas is big enough it would hit bottom like a stranded iceberg, but you get the idea. If Rudolph was lucky it would be honeycombed with caves. I hoped otherwise.
The gap moons haven’t exactly been hot spots of exploration. As far as I knew, we were the first to land on any of them. They’re in that awkward size range spacers avoid: too small for a real moon, bigger than you need if you’re too cheap to buy propellant and want to melt your own.
Fortunately, it really doesn’t take all that much gravity to crush caverns to impossibly small passages. Rudolph dug out all kinds of equipment—not just the ground-penetrating radar, but the quark detector and enough neutrino sources that it took three days to deploy them all. When he was done, we’d basically CAT-scanned the whole place with neutrinos and quarks and found that it was more like pumice than honeycomb: a frothy mess whose bubbles were probably too small to crawl through, even if you were a bee. Chalk one up for my kind of luck.
Pan was more of the same. But Daphnis was different.
To begin with, it’s got the lowest density of the lot—so low it wouldn’t just float, it would rise out above the waves like a gigantic chunk of FrothFoam.
Even from space we could see a couple of big, promising-looking holes. Well, promising to Rudolph. Maw of hell was more appropriate. I couldn’t imagine how they looked to Floyd. His parents had been crushed in an earthquake when he was barely old enough to remember, and now, unless he wanted to lose GnuShip and pretty much everything else, he was going to have to descend into the bowels of this thing that was probably about as stable as a pile of marbles. Big marbles, in the type of microgravity that makes Enceladus look Jovian by comparison: where, if anything shifts, we’d have more than enough time to watch it slowly close down our exit—or, as the case might be, us.
That was bad enough. But the neutrino-and-quark scan revealed that not only was it a true talus maze of passages, there was a chunk of something dense at its center, shaped like a fat pumpkin seed: half a klick long, three hundred meters wide, and maybe two hundred meters through at its thickest—the biggest raisin yet. Whatever it was, it looked as though the entire moonlet had somehow accreted around it. An asteroid? For all I could tell it was a spaceship abandoned eons ago by those ETs out in the Oort Cloud.
It made me nervous. With a moonlet made mostly of ice, all you need is a heat source to have Enceladus revisited. Maybe the caverns were a natural spiderweb of piping just waiting to blast vapor out of the interior. This place had an escape velocity of only a couple of meters per second, so it wouldn’t take much of a geyser to spew us on a one-way trip to nowhere.
Still, it was hard to imagine an asteroid radioactive enough to generate that kind of heat. And while an ancient space drive might do the trick, I didn’t believe in the aliens. Not really. Maybe.
I didn’t know what Rudolph thought, but he was obviously determined to go in. Floyd too. Me, I had no choice.
What I resented was that nobody asked me. Floyd hadn’t even given a decent reason why he was so determined to face this thing. If we died in there, I hoped like hell he at least had time to explain.
Superficially, Daphnis looked like any other Outer System moonlet: oblong and knobby, with an icy crust pocked by impacts.
Rudolph’s neutrino-and-quark scan, however, had shown the crust to be thin: in places, only a hundred meters or so thick—a late-forming layer that had clogged the talus-cave pores, hiding the warren of passages lying below and probably, like a thick eggshell, helping to hold this loosely consolidated world together. Though, as we could tell the moment we got close enough for a good look, not all of the pores were blocked.
The openings took the form of funnel-shaped craters deep enough you could only see their bottoms when they faced directly toward the sun. Most didn’t punch all the way through, but a few ended in holes—some small, some big enough to swallow a modest-sized cargo canister.
What the funnels were, were sun cups, where impacts had dimpled the crust deeply enough to produce a runaway reflecting-oven effect that melted them ever deeper. They’re rare in space, but on Earth, little ones can cover entire snowfields with honeycomb arrays of knee-deep holes: cool to look at in vids, but a bane to hikers. These were enormous and evil looking. Not honeycombs, but trap-door spider holes whose shadowed depths harbored entrances to the underworld. Even without spiders, not appealing-looking places to visit. No easy honey here: only death, minotaurs, and serpents.
Landing was a nuisance. In theory, even though GnuShip’s not made for gravity, we could have just set her down. In gravity this light, nothing was going to break. But neither she nor Rudolph’s canister had a well-defined “up,” which even in microgravity presented problems. And the only things that might function as landing struts were docking clamps, which weren’t really designed for support. While Saturn System’s shifting gravities don’t make for that many moonquakes, it was going to be bad enough worrying about them down inside the caves, without wondering if GnuShip might topple and strand us. All told, it was simpler to park her in low orbit and come down by hand thruster, picking a spot near one of the poles, because that’s where you get the highest gravity.
Even without giant sun cups, hiking around a super-low-gee world is an exercise in frustration even for experienced spacers. So we began by caching an extra pair of thrusters at the mouth of the sun cup from which we planned to exit. Then I gave Floyd the thrust coordinates for a suborbital hop to the cave we were using as an entrance.
We made it with only a couple of mid-hop corrections. In a thruster competition, my presence would give Floyd an unfair advantage—though not that much of one, because any dumb AI can calculate a trajectory. The real skill, which Floyd is good at by human standards, lies in timing the burst and aiming it in exactly the right direction.
It’s one of those things, like walking on Iapetus with trekking poles, that most humans find easy to learn but hard to master. I’ve always wondered what that’s like. If I can do something at all, I can master it. If I can’t do it, it’s because I’m not hooked up to the right servos.
I think it’s the entire concept of “skill” that eludes me. I understand the idea, but only in an intellectual way. The best I can figure, it’s like working with a servo whose controls get more precise the more you use them. But then it wouldn’t be you that’s getting better; it would be the servo. Somehow, human self-identity includes a connection between their bodies and themselves that I’m not sure I’ll ever really figure out. It would be like me caring what kind of chip I lived in. I do care about processing speed and memory, but I don’t think that’s quite the same thing.
Anyway, an hour later, we settled back to the surface, light as a feather, on a flat spot within fifty meters of the sun cup.
Rudolph didn’t do as well. It took him several extra course corrections to match Floyd’s trajectory, then he accelerated in for the landing, arguing that he wasn’t going any faster than if he’d jumped off a one-meter embankment on Earth. Which was true, except he still came in plenty fast to sprain an ankle, if he hit wrong.
“Cowboy,” I muttered.
Floyd flipped off his suit radio. “More like making a statement. He’s telling me he’s not afraid of this stuff—which probably means he is.”
“Like you and this whole trip?”
“I’m not showing off.”
“No. The only person you’re trying to prove something to is yourself. Do you realize how many things could go wrong down there?”
For once, he didn’t tell me to drop it. He merely tuned me out by flipping his suit radio back on. “You okay?” he asked Rudolph.
At least Rudolph wasn’t carrying the pack. In microgravity, as on Iapetus, the disconnect between weight and inertia is tricky, even to the best. So is landing without bouncing, and Rudolph was now in an undignified tumble, struggling to check it with his thrusters, twenty meters above the surface.
“Serves him right,” I muttered.
Floyd just stood clear and waited for him to settle. Even with a bit more caution, it still took Rudolph three more bounces to stick the landing.
When he finally came to rest, he was furious. “I bet you and your damn imp really enjoyed that,” he said. “Why didn’t you give me a hand?”
When Floyd’s in his suit, I’ve got all kinds of medical telemetry on him, and I could watch his blood pressure rise. If I had blood, it might be doing the same. I nearly popped into the radio link to tell Rudolph that if he had something to say, he could say it to me directly, but I (barely) managed to control myself.
Floyd did the same. “Not possible,” was all he said. “Too much momentum, not enough gravity.”
Then he switched his mike back off. “I hate places like this. Give me good old-fashioned real gravity, even if it’s just a hundredth of a gee. Something that actually keeps you and your equipment stuck to the surface, like God made you to be.”
I would later wonder if Rudolph had been deliberately trying to provoke a fight: an excuse for that which would follow. It was the same with the route plan. We should have gone in the hard way and out the easy one. Then, if the route was a no-go, at least we’d waste minimum time. But from the way the subsurface looked on our scans, we appeared to be doing the reverse.
That, I would later realize was because Rudolph had no plans of doing his traverse, just as he had no plans of ending this thing as friends with Floyd. The only question was how it would end.
It would have been a lot easier if it had ended in failure. Then we’d have just collected our money, Rudolph would have gone home, and that would have been that. He might have wanted to do a second caving trip in a second moon, or go back to trying to tunnel around in clumps, but nothing in our contract said we had to do whatever he wanted forever.
Unfortunately, most of the trip wasn’t all that hard.
The start was simply a matter of jumping into the sun cup. Even though it was a hundred and twenty meters deep, the gravity made it roughly comparable to stepping off a curb, and even though the thrusters were too bulky to take with us, Floyd and Rudolph would have no trouble leaping back out.
I’ve never seen actual vids of an Earthly talus cave, but I had a decent idea what they must be like: big bunches of boulders, piled higgledy-piggledy, over or under which you scrambled, climbed, or crawled, as the case might be. Here it was much the same, expect the boulders were ice, and low gravity added leaping as a viable mode of locomotion. Though floating might be a better description. We were in an underworld of big piles of angular ice blocks, incompletely pressed together. No giant, stalactite-encrusted rooms, no long, winding passages. Just a three-dimensional maze of cracks and gaps, some as big as GnuShip, some tiny.
Sometimes a big chamber would have lots of exits spidering off in every direction. Elsewhere, dead ends sparkled in Floyd’s and Rudolph’s suit lights. There were also chambers with only one or two narrow exits—black, shadowed holes leading toward places whose secrets seemed better unexplored. The CAT-scan map didn’t have the resolution to spot things like that; all it could tell us was the direction to the next large cavity.
Unless you’re a gerbil or kangaroo rat, talus caves on Earth are rarely navigable. You need big talus, with no small chunks. Otherwise, the small pieces block the passages, like the dust-bunny stuff we’d found in the clumps.
The surprising thing here was that we actually made consistent progress, albeit in a two-steps-back-for-every-three-forward fashion. Plus a lot of sideways. But even when we had to backtrack, we would eventually find a way through.
Most standard sims of planet formation, including moonlets like this, assume that a growing world scoops up a lot of little debris along with the big: snowballs as well as icebergs. More than enough to clog the pores. But this place was mostly comprised of big stuff. There was a bit of dust and small fragments, but most of it seemed to have been produced when moonquakes had caused boulders to grind against each other—one of those things I really didn’t want to think about too much, though I’d run a thousand sims by then and concluded that quakes were common only on a geological timescale.
Still, any quake dust was disconcerting. But so was the lack of small rocks. It was just one more sign this place was weird. I kept trying to write sims that gave me a moonlet comprised only of icebergs. To make them work, they not only required the thing in the center to be dense, but to have arrived in Saturn System late in the game, when there were already plenty of big chunks for its gravity to attract.
It isn’t a spaceship, I told myself. But there was something odd down there, and Rudolph seemed hell-bent on meeting it face-to-whatever.
Floyd was in his own world. When I tried to talk, he accused me of chattering. “There are no aliens,” he said. “And all moons are weird. Name one that isn’t. No, don’t. I really don’t want to argue about it.” His vision shifted, swiveling his suit lights across the chamber we were crossing. “And these passages show no signs of gas ablation. There’s no geyser down here that’s going to zap us. This isn’t Enceladus.”
He didn’t say anything, though, about getting squished. It’s a lot easier to dismiss someone else’s phobias than your own.
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