wanted to start a media campaign to get people to move there, before it was too late.”
“Move there?” Her mind moved back through time and space to the final moment when she had clawed off the suffocating helmet of her suit, on her knees in the blue-gray dust, and sucked in the lungful of impossibly thin, searingly cold free air of Planet Two; the breath she had thought would be her last.… “He was crazy! And so are you.”
Chaim frowned. “Then tell me what we're doing here, picking the bones of the dead. And tell me what the Demarchy's going to do when there's nothing left on them.”
She felt the cold grip of his doomsaying close on her flesh unexpectedly, threw it off in anger. “You sound like you're afraid of the dark.”
“You're damn right I am,” he muttered. But she knew it was not the darkness of this place he was afraid of. He gathered himself and pushed on along the tunnel, his light battering the walls and forcing open the way ahead.
She followed sullenly, overlapping his light with her own.
“Geez Allah!” His curse rattled inside her helmet as she caught up with him where the tunnel ended. “What the hell is this place?”
Peering past him she saw not an opening-out into a larger room or rooms, but an abrupt barricade of some striated material. The passageway funneled down into a narrow wormhole of access. She reached out past his shoulder, running a glove over the wall of unidentifiable material; feeling its solid mass resist her, yet feeling individual striations give under her pressure. She felt a sudden charge build in her as her brain cross-referenced.… “Print-outs! It's all print-outs—kilos and kilos of them.”
“More like tons and tons.” Chaim braced his feet and threw his weight against the wall of paper, but there was no give to the greater mass. “All piled up for the recycler that never came back.”
“No.” She shook her head. He looked at her. “There's way too much here. Even if they saved every news report and corporate hypesheet from the whole of the Main Belt, there must be half a gigasec's worth here. It couldn't be just the postwar breakdown.”
“But why? Why would anybody save old hypesheets, when everything was in info storage anyway?”
She shrugged inside her suit. “Maybe it was a hobby. Are we going on through?”
He bent over, throwing light into the paper-walled tunnel. “I don't know. I can't see anything, if it even ends.… God, what if the whole damn rock's stuffed full of this, and we get stuck with nowhere to turn around?”
“Somebody lived here. There must be something else in there besides paper,” she said impatiently. “I'll go first, if it bothers you.”
“Wait.” He caught her hand, freezing it in mid-motion. “Leave that on. The purifier's dead. You don't know what these places can smell like. Or look like.… I'd better go in first.” She saw his face through the dark reflection of her own, helmet to helmet; saw the strain-sharp line of his mouth that bit the words off raw-edged. “Wait here.”
Remembering that he did know—and that most of the Main Belt had died of slow starvation or thirst—she dropped her hands and waited. He squirmed like an eel into the depths of the print-out mass. The seconds passed, and more seconds; until the darkness lost its form and grew timeless, until she could not keep the image of suffocating gullets choked by warm human flesh out of her mind—
A small grunt of surprise or disgust came out of her suit speakers; Chaim's voice, from somewhere beyond the wall. “Chaim—?” Her own voice startled her more, squeezed with unexpected tension.
“'S okay.” His reassurance slipped, on uncertain footing. “I'm through. Come ahead, there's a room here. But get ready; there's a couple of bodies, too.”
She felt her skin prickle, coldness in the pit of her stomach. But she had spent megaseconds with the frozen corpse of Sekka-Olefin on board his ship, returning to Mecca from Planet Two. She was no stranger to death. She tightened her hands, loosened them again to pull herself into the print-out mass. Clawing with her heavy gloves, thrusting and kicking like a swimmer, she worked her way along the uneven intestine, following the beam of her light. At last she saw the beam spread and diffuse, blinked as it was answered by another light beaconing ahead. Chaim caught her reaching hands to draw her out of the tunnel; unable to avoid it, she let him pull her through.
“Thanks.” She freed herself from his grasp as quickly as she could, looking away. The glancing brightness of her belt lamp showed her a haphazard plastic meshwork crisscrossing the inner surface of the piled print-outs, to keep them from collapsing in slow inevitability toward the iron-rich asteroid's feeble gravitational heart.
In the center of this carefully filled space a small living area barely survived: a tiny metal table and chairs disorientingly bolted to the far wall—following gravity's lines as she did not—and a wide mat of foam heaped with more piles of rags.…
She twisted suddenly in the air, trying to stop her forward motion with nothing to stabilize her; banged into the metal table top with a curse. The echoes of her collision and her shout seeped into the soft detritus along the walls, the room closed its silent disapproval around them again. Chaim still hung at the far side of the room, as though he couldn't force himself to get any closer to the corpses.
She righted herself to the table's axis, watching the slow dance around her of things she had dislodged— empty containers with crusts of dried food at their lips, a stain-dulled knife, a long slender bone … she thought it looked like an ulna. She caught the drifting knife and jerked it out of the air. “What do … what do you think killed— did they die from?” Hating herself as she asked it.
“Starved, probably,” he said. “That's what it usually is.” The words were very soft. His arms folded over his stomach in what she took for empathy. She remembered that he must have seen this sight over and over while he had prospected with his father. He didn't say anything more; she watched him track the rising arc of the pale bone's dance, end over end in the air.
“Who were these people, anyway? Who would live in a—a garbage dump like this, never throwing anything away? Were they insane?” Still trapped in the fascination of the bizarre, she was dismayed by her own inability to close her eyes or look away.
“Of course they were. What the hell else would they be?” His voice was thin and hard, a drawn wire. “Just like we were for coming here. There's nothing here. Let's go.”
She glanced back at him, surprised. “But we just got here. Look, there are other rooms—” She gestured toward the walls of rubbish, other dark, narrow mouths opening on other unknowns.
“Forget it. They won't be any different. There's nothing in this hole but death and garbage.” He began to pull himself toward the entrance.
“Damn it, I worked my butt off getting us here! We're not leaving until I'm sure there's nothing else.” She brandished the knife, forgetting she still held it.
His body whiplashed with angry surprise, or maybe with fear. She let go of the knife, pushing it away from them both, embarrassed. She moved off in another direction, toward the first of the openings. Looking back as she reached it, she saw him still motionless where he had been. “Well, are you going to help me?”
He shook his head, his helmet winked in her light. His arms still pressed his stomach. “No. If you want to wallow in it, go ahead. Not me.”
She turned wordlessly and pulled herself into the opening.
The room beyond was crammed with more print-outs, leaving her only enough space to turn around with claustrophobic eagerness and push her way out again. Chaim drifted, watching, as she moved without comment to the next hole. Beyond it was more paper, but she also found numberless copies of prewar pictorials neatly stacked in boxes. She tried to pull one free, wondering whether they might have historical value; only to find that the pages had fused together from some chemical reaction between the synthetic paper and the ink.
