The Gabble

The Sea of Death

So lay they garmented in torpid light,

Under the pall of a transparent night,

Like solemn apparitions lull’d sublime,

To everlasting rest, — and with them

Time Slept, as he sleeps upon the silent face

Of a dark dial in a sunless place.

— Hood

To say it is cold is to seriously understate the matter. The inside of the shuttle is at minus fifty centigrade because of what Jap calls ‘material tolerances’.

‘These coldsuits we’re wearing — take ‘em above zero and they’ll fuck up next time you use ‘em outside,’ he told me.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Two centuries ago I’d have believed you, but things have moved on since then.’

‘Economics ain’t,’ was his reply.

I am careful not to respond to his sarcasm.

The landing is without mishap, but I am surprised when the side of the shuttle opens straight down onto the surface of the planet Orbus.

‘No point maintaining an entrance tunnel,’ says Jap over the com.

I don’t mind. It is for moments like this that I travel, and it is moments like this that fund my travel. I walk out with CO snow crunching underfoot and the clarity of starlit sky above that 2

you normally only get in interstellar space. I gaze across land like arctic tundra with its frozen lakes and hoared boulders. In the frozen lakes trapped faerie lights flicker rainbow colours.

‘What’s that?’ I ask.

‘Water ice. Below one-fifty it turns to complex ice and when it heats up and changes back it fluoresces. Talk to Duren if you want the chemistry of it.’

I don’t need to. I remember reading that this is what comets do. It had taken a little while for people to figure that the light of comets was not all reflected sunlight — that comets emit light before they should.

‘What’s heating it up?’ I ask, turning to gaze at the distant green orb of the dying sun.

‘The shuttle, our landing. There’s nothing else here to do it,’ he replies.

We walk the hundred or so metres to the base and go in through a coldlock. In the lock we remove our coldsuits and hang them up. Jap points to the white imprint of a hand on the grey surface of the inner door.

‘Keep your undersuit and gloves on until we’re inside,’ he tells me. I stare at the imprint in puzzlement. Is it some kind of safety sign? Jap obviously notes my confusion. He explains.

‘Fella took his gloves off before going through the door,’ he says.

The imprint is the skin of that fella’s hand, and some of the flesh too. Later I speak to Linser, the base commander, and ask why they take such risks here. We stand in his room gazing out of a panoramic window across the frozen wastes.

‘Thermostable and thermo-inert materials are expensive, Mr Gregory. A thermoceramic cutting head for a rock-bore costs the best part of fifty thousand New Carth shillings and has to be shipped in. Doped water-ice cutting heads can be made here. Coldsuits that can function from plus thirty to minus two hundred cost fifty times as much as the ones we use. That’s a big saving for a small inconvenience,’ he says.

‘I never thought this operation short of funds,’ I say.

‘Energy is money and there’s none of the former here. It costs fifteen hundred shillings a minute to keep one human alive and comfortable. We have over two thousand personnel.’

I walk up beside him and focus on what has now caught his attention. Machines for moving rock and ice are busily gnawing at the frozen crust out there. Floodlights bathe something that appears a little like a building site.

‘Found an entrance right under our noses,’ he tells me.

‘Lucky,’ say I.

He turns to me with an expression tired and perhaps a little irrational.

‘Lucky?. . Oh yes, you’ve been in transit. You haven’t seen the latest survey results. You see, we were having a bit of a Schrodinger problem with the deep scanners. The energy of the scan was enough to cause fluorescence of the water ices down there, full-spectrum fluorescence. It was like shining a torch into a cave and having the beam of that torch turn on a floodlight. We saw only a fraction of it until we started using those low-energy scanners.’

‘A fraction?’ I say. ‘Last I heard you’d mapped twenty thousand kilometres of tunnels.’

‘That’s nothing. Nothing at all. They’re everywhere you see. Yesterday Duren told me that they even go under the frozen seas. We’re looking at millions of kilometres of tunnels, more than a hundred million burial chambers with one or more sarcophagi in each.’

I absorb this information in silence, slot it in with a hundred other details I’ve been picking up right from Farstation Base to here.

‘Obviously I want to see one of the sarcophagi,’ I eventually tell him.

He glances at me.