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’.
But suppose Setterholm had been trying to write ‘IVERSON’, 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…
But why would the climatologist have wanted to kill Setterholm? Setterholm’s fascination with the worms was perplexing but harmless. The information Clavain had collected pointed to Setterholm being a single-minded loner; the kind of man who would inspire pity or indifference in his colleagues rather than hatred. And everyone was dying anyway — against such a background, a murder seemed almost irrelevant.
Maybe he was attributing too much to the six faint marks a dying man had scratched on the ice.
Forcing suspicion from his mind — for now — Clavain walked further into Iverson’s room. The room was spartan but serene, with a small blue holographic window set high in one white wall. Clavain was responsible for that. Left to the Conjoiners — who had taken over an area of the main American base and filled it with their own pressurised spaces — Iverson’s room would have been a grim, grey cube. That was fine for the Conjoiners — they moved through informational fields draped like an extra layer over reality. But though Iverson’s head was now drenched with their machines, they were only there to assist his normal patterns of thought; reinforcing weak synaptic signals and compensating for a far-from-equilibrium mix of neurotransmitters.
So Clavain had insisted on cheering the place up a bit; Iverson’s sheets and pillow were now the same pure white as the walls, so that his head bobbed in a sea of whiteness. His hair had been trimmed, but Clavain had made sure that no one had done more than neaten Iverson’s beard.
‘Andrew?’ he said. ‘I’m told you’re awake now. I’m Nevil Clavain. How are you feeling?’
Iverson wet his lips before answering. ‘Better, I suspect, than I have any reason to feel.’
‘Ah.’ Clavain beamed, feeling as if a large burden had just been lifted from his shoulders. ‘Then you’ve some recollection of what happened to you.’
‘I died, didn’t I? Pumped myself full of antifreeze and hoped for the best. Did it work, or is this just some weird-ass dream as I’m sliding towards brain death?’
‘No, it sure as hell worked. That was one weird-heck-ass of a risk…’ Clavain halted, not entirely certain that he could emulate Iverson’s century-old speech patterns. ‘That was quite some risk you took. But it did work, you’ll be glad to hear.’
Iverson lifted a hand from beneath the sheets, examining his palm and the pattern of veins and tendons on the back. ‘This is the same body I went under with? You haven’t stuck me in a robot, or cloned me, or hooked up my disembodied brain to a virtual-reality generator?’
‘None of those things, no. Just mopped up some cell damage, fixed a few things here and there and — um — kick-started you back into the land of the living.’
Iverson nodded, but Clavain could tell he was far from convinced. Which was unsurprising: Clavain, after all, had already told a small lie.
‘So how long was I under?’
‘About a century, Andrew. We’re an expedition from back home. We came by starship.’
Iverson nodded again, as if this was mere incidental detail. ‘We’re aboard it now, right?’
‘No… no. We’re still on the planet. The ship’s parked in orbit.’
‘And everyone else?’
No point sugaring the pill. ‘Dead, as far as we can make out. But you must have known that would happen.’
‘Yeah. But I didn’t know for sure, even at the end.’
‘So what happened? How did you escape the infection, or whatever it was?’
‘Sheer luck.’ Iverson asked for a drink. Clavain fetched him one, and at the same time had the room extrude a chair next to the bed.
‘I didn’t see much sign of luck,’ Clavain said.
‘No; it was terrible. But I was the lucky one — that’s all I meant. I don’t know how much you know. We had to evacuate the outlying bases towards the end, when we couldn’t keep more than one fusion reactor running.’ Iverson took a sip from the glass of water Clavain had brought him. ‘If we’d still had the machines to look after us —’
‘Yes. That’s something we never really understood.’ Clavain leaned closer to the bed. ‘Those von Neumann machines were built to self-repair themselves, weren’t they? We still don’t see how they broke down.’
Iverson eyed him. ‘They didn’t. Break down, I mean.’
‘No? Then what happened?’
‘We smashed them up. Like rebellious teenagers overthrowing parental control. The machines were nannying us, and we were sick of it. In hindsight, it wasn’t such a good idea.’
‘Didn’t the machines put up a fight?’
‘Not exactly. I don’t think the people who designed them ever thought they’d get trashed by the kids they’d lovingly cared for.’
So, Clavain thought — whatever had happened here, whatever he went on to learn, it was clear that the Americans had been at least partially the authors of their own misfortunes. He still felt sympathy for them, but now it was cooler, tempered with something close to disgust. He wondered if that feeling of disappointed appraisal would have come so easily without Galiana’s machines in his head. It would be just a tiny step to go from feeling that way towards Iverson’s people to feeling that way about the rest of humanity… and then I’d know that I’d truly attained Transenlightenment…
Clavain snapped out of his morbid line of thinking. It was not Transenlightenment that engendered those feelings, just ancient, bone-deep cynicism.
‘Well, there’s no point dwelling on what was done years ago. But how did you survive?’
‘After the evacuation, we realised that we’d left something behind — a spare component for the remaining fusion reactor. So I went back for it, taking one of the planes. I landed just as a bad weather front was coming in, which kept me grounded there for two days. That was when the others began to get sick. It happened pretty quickly, and all I knew about it was what I could figure out from the comm links back to the main base.’
‘Tell me what you did figure out.’
‘Not much,’ Iverson said. ‘It was fast, and it seemed to attack the central nervous system. No one survived it. Those that didn’t die of it directly went on to get themselves killed through accidents or sloppy procedure.’
‘We noticed. Eventually someone died who was responsible for keeping the fusion reactor running properly. It didn’t blow up, did it?’
‘No. Just spewed out a lot more neutrons than normal; too much for the shielding to contain. Then it went into emergency shutdown mode. Some people were killed by the radiation, but most died of the cold that came afterwards.’
‘Hm. Except you.’
Iverson nodded. ‘If I hadn’t had to go back for that component, I’d have been one of them. Obviously, I couldn’t risk returning. Even if I could have got the reactor working again, there was still the problem of the contaminant.’ He breathed in deeply, as if steeling himself to recollect what had happened next. ‘So I weighed my options and decided dying — freezing myself — was my only hope. No one was going to come from Earth to help me, even if I could have kept myself alive. Not for decades, anyway. So I took a chance.’
‘One that paid off.’
