Analog SFF, March 2009 Read online

“Then what? Did you know about this?”

  “Honest, I didn't,” Bart said. “But I know what it is. It's a sieve.”

  Finally it became clear. The cage was a diamond net, the work of many people. As the frozen lake above melted, the runoff would come down here, and any solid matter bigger than a breadbox would be caught in the lattice.

  “Colleen could get anybody to do just about anything,” Bart remarked.

  “Well,” I said, “let's get her out.” I climbed two steps up to the gate, checked my balance on the narrow rung at the top, and hopped in. I had to land on all fours to avoid falling on top of Colleen.

  Bracing myself, I lifted her shoulders—and something caught. I looked out at Bart and waved a crooked hand in a figure eight, the signal that something was stuck. I disconnected her life support harness and lifted her off of it. One of the hoses to her scrubber had caught under the cage bars, and it looked like the other side of the pack had wedged against the adjacent bar. She'd probably fallen and gotten herself locked to the cage floor. Miller couldn't free her, so he tried to go for help, running out of air on the way.

  “She's really stuck,” I said.

  “Leave her.”

  My head reeled. Colleen should only have been using the inboard hoses. You never leave loose ends that can catch on something. She broke her own rule, mistake number one. Then she was stuck, a result of some stupid mistake number two. She should have been able to unbuckle the pack and sit up. There's enough slack in the hoses to turn part way around, but she had not freed herself. Mistake three. Sometimes you never do figure how these things happen.

  “What in the world?” Bart said.

  “What is it?”

  He was shining his light at something on the far side of the cage. “Queenie!”

  “Huh?” I shook my head. Queenie had been Colleen's dog on Mars, put to sleep and buried years ago.

  A deep rumble and then a series of cracks vibrated through the cage and into my suit. The cage shook slightly. Something distant but enormous was giving way.

  “We've got to get the hell out of here,” Bart said.

  “Okay. Help me get her out.”

  “We don't have time.”

  “I'm going to get her out,” I said, breathing through my teeth.

  “There's no time. Look.” He shone his light at the ceiling. It was wet. A rapidly evaporating funnel of water dropped through his beam, hitting me square in the face. Steam fled from it in all directions, but it kept coming.

  “Are you all right?”

  I moved over, but the water hit Colleen, which I didn't like. I leaned forward, so the water hit my back. “I'm fine. Looks like they positioned their sieve in the right place.”

  Bart was still on the backside of the cage. “Get out of there!” he said with an urgent wave. “There could be junk falling on you any second.”

  “It's just water,” I said, feeling pressure of an increasing flow on my back. I held Colleen in one arm, but did not know what to do next.

  “No, Rick! I'm talking about rocks or diamond snowflakes, and they're razor sharp!” That was the first time he called me Rick since we started. He was done playing with my brain. We were in real trouble. “Get the hell out of there!”

  I let Colleen down gently and climbed out of the cage. I expected him to lead the way, but he stood firm.

  “First take a look at this mutt,” he said.

  I rounded the cage, my suit steaming. Sure enough, it was a dog, a sort of cubist sculpture of what looked like diamonds the size of my wrist console. It was about a foot tall, in a sitting position. Not bad for someone who had only dabbled with sculpture.

  “I don't get it,” I said.

  “Queenie here is the best monument we have to Colleen's work. See, she's been recrystallized from smaller pieces.”

  “So she was right. Diamonds did come here from Jupiter.”

  The growing flow of water from above was pouring down on Colleen in a slow-motion waterfall. The air was thickening with mist, and we turned our helmet wipers on. Another distant rumble and crack, and the flow doubled. The bowl we were standing in was filling rapidly. In a moment, it would rise to the top of the cage legs and begin to cover our partner. Also, the humidity was playing tricks with my com link, a frightening sign that my electronics were compromised.

  “Quick, Bart! Put down that dog and help me get her out of there.”

  “Give it up, man.”

  “Okay, Bart, I've had about enough of you,” I shouted. I'd been lenient all this time, out of respect. Obviously, I was the only one left on our so-called team. “You've been fighting me all day, hiding information, needling me.... You damn well are going to help me get Colleen out of this hole!”

  “Rick, don't you see?” His voice was calm but crackled by static. “We can't get her out. We need to take her dog.”

  “What?”

  “It's her legacy.”

  I could see that the dog was some kind of mascot, but I felt obligated to take her home, and I was going to do it. She wouldn't want a virtual burial; she'd want to be there, in person.

  Bart made for higher ground with the dog. “Come on,” he urged. “It will be a hell of a lot harder to swim out of here.”

  “No.”

  “Damn it, Rick! That's the wrong decision, and you know it. Look, as nice as it was, Colleen's body means nothing now.”

  I started up the slope toward him. “I'm going to take you apart!”

  My voice had raised instinctively, even though it was electronically clipped, and now I found my hands raised into clumsy, ridiculous fists. A scene from a space spoof came to mind, where suited men had a hilarious fistfight in zero G. I grunted, half laughing and half furious. A spacesuit is a straitjacket to man's baser instincts. When technology enforces civility, I reminded myself, it is usually a good thing.

  All right, if Bart wouldn't help, I'd damn well get her up by myself. I climbed the cage again, to the door that was still above the water that boiled, cold as it was. Bart stood on a boulder, cradling Queenie and watching me. I heard static, and then: “I'm getting out of here, now!”

  “I'll make you a deal,” I said. “If we can't get her above this water in five minutes, we give up and hightail it out of here. Agreed?”

  Static, then: “No, you idiot, I'm leaving now.”

  I shouted at him, but he either didn't hear or was ignoring me. It was no use. Without Colleen as a bond, our team had shattered like a miscut diamond. Bart turned and pointed the way out with two hands, meaning we both go that way.

  “All right,” I said, and signaled. “I'm coming. Five minutes.”

  Bart started up the passage. He might not find my jump line, but he knew his way out. “I think I figured out why she made a diamond dog,” he said. “Dog is man's best friend. Diamond is woman's.”

  I chortled sarcastically.

  The water was lapping at the bottom of the cage, some steaming, some refreezing. I climbed in again. My chest heaved uncontrollably. “I may be an idiot, but I'm going to get you out of here.”

  I could possibly float her out of the cage and onto higher ground. But there was no way I could carry her all the way out. The Sinuses were almost directly overhead, and our pulleys were there. That's how the cage parts must have been lowered down. I could turn up the pressure on our suits to inflate them. Then we could float up through the vertical passage, to the flat tunnels a thousand feet above. From there I might be able to carry her out Devil's Throat.

  I bled as much air into her suit as it would take. It swelled up and bubbled into the rising water from a one-way overflow vent. There was plenty of pressure—what had started as 100 percent oxygen was probably less than 10 percent now, but that didn't matter. I detached the pack. Next I added some pressure to my own suit.

  I laid down in the waist-deep water, testing my buoyancy. No good. I still sank. Colleen was barely buoyant, not having the burden of the breather pack, but she couldn't keep both of us above water.r />
  A sudden splash next to me made me aware that I could hear through my suit falling objects growing louder. Another object fell, and I saw it this time. It looked like a rough diamond all right, but it wasn't a welcome sight. It nearly hit me. We were sitting at the bottom of the sieve, where all the debris was supposed to fall.

  I had almost no extraneous equipment to doff. I removed a few things from Colleen's suit, but it didn't help. The suits just weren't made for underwater use. There was no buoyancy control at all.

  Something huge plowed into the water next to me. A rock, followed by a diamond that cracked against Colleen's helmet with a sickening sound that seemed far away. Even in low grav, it had accelerated from a great height. The object had made a deep groove in her faceplate, which was a slenter. Whatever had hit the plate was harder than diamond. A Schwarzite chunk, maybe?

  I was standing in the cage, and the water was up to my helmet. I was starting to feel the cold. The water conducted heat from my suit much faster than vacuum. I turned up my heater and immediately smelled hot resin.

  I let the water rise above us. Maybe when we were completely submerged, we would float just under the surface. It was easier to see underwater, without the fog, and when another diamond splashed into the cage, the water cushioned it some. Unfortunately, we weren't floating at all. If I let Colleen go, she did float upward, but when I held on, down we stayed. There had to be a way to make this work. I tried adding more air, but we still didn't float.

  There was nothing more to ditch, except the friend I had given so much for already. Leaving her was unacceptable. Yet, through my stubborn determination broke the hard-earned wisdom of the cavernauts: Get the hell out of there. Colleen's voice was somewhere in that chorus, and that made it okay to give up.

  What the hell was I doing out here, risking my neck for another woman? Colleen was one of the guys, I always said. Sharron understood that, bless her heart, and had let me come out here, but for what? To help Colleen achieve her dream? Maybe Bart was right to take the dog instead of Colleen. Colleen was gone, but her dream might live.

  I looked toward the jump line and the way out, but my light dissipated quickly in the water. Decision one: It was no longer an option going out that way. Options? Colleen's empty suit should make a good float. Decision two: Remove her suit and use it to float up the shaft. Maybe I could use the cable as a guide.

  I started with her pant straps. The waist was sealed with a plastic ring and composite buckles. The seal broke easily, and air bounded into my face and up. I guessed that I was now under fifteen feet of water, and I was starting to feel a slight pressure squeeze.

  My suit held about one-third atmosphere of positive pressure in a vacuum. Under water, I'd be “upside-down,” meaning that the pressure outside my suit was greater than the pressure inside. It was rated to take two atmospheres upside-down, and I did a quick estimate to try to determine how deep I could be before getting crushed.

  The gravity of Callisto was one-eighth G, which meant I could be eight times deeper than on Earth before being crushed. I'd be okay at about 150 meters, but I'd use up my air much faster.

  I pulled off Colleen's pants and wedged them in the gate while I worked on the torso. That was the hard part—her arms were stiff and didn't want to come out.

  I removed the helmet, at last looking at her face. It was not attractive under the dirty refraction, but it wasn't as grotesque as I'd feared. Her freckles were still cute. Then I saw a choker around her neck, a diamond necklace of woven strands with hexagonal links. A model of a space elevator chain. When I pulled on it, the links tightened like a Chinese finger trap. Clever, and no way to get it off.

  Neither did removing the helmet help in loosening her arms from the sleeves. I was expending a lot of air in trying, and it just wasn't working. I could remove the gloves, but they weren't the problem.

  I vomited in my helmet, most of it going down my neck. I let Colleen gently down. She fell like a fluttering feather, hair drifting, legs dressed in thermal underwear.

  There was no time to remove the entire suit. The leggings would have to be enough. With the boots integrated, they should hold air when inverted. I cut a length of line from a jump reel and threaded it through the harness rings. I looped these under my arms and held the pants over my head. Then I dropped down to Colleen's bottle and released her stale air into the pants. They inflated above me like a grotesque parachute. Two boot mints fell out and tumbled over my chest pack. That was so like her, to care what her feet smelled like out here.

  I drifted upward. I shone my light down, seeing Colleen faintly below, defiled and degraded. I was frigid, drifting in a dead moon. I could hear the heaving of ice through the sound of the bubbles escaping the pants as the air expanded. My hands grew numb.

  I turned my attention overhead, to make sure my float didn't bump the roof and collapse. With my wrist light, I scanned for the pulley line. I had a sense of where it was and kicked in that direction. I met the sloping roof and pulled Colleen's pants to the side, pushing on the rock with my other hand. This provided better locomotion, and I guided myself toward the shaft. The slope led that way, and soon I saw a bright line in the water—the reflective pulley cable.

  I met the cable and looped a leg around it. The pressure was getting worse, my pump motor was grinding, and rancid smoke from the electrical heater problem was beginning to choke me. As the water level rose, I rose too, quietly, the occasional crash of ice or rock shaking the water column around me.

  * * * *

  Like it or not, it was times like this when my creative juices flowed. Bart played guitar, Colleen had her sculpture, and I was a frustrated poet.

  Sailing is Freudian, I once wrote. You don't explore, but make love to the sea, caressing her swells, yielding to her seductive currents. But rolling over her sensuous surface is foreplay. To consummate this love, you have to submerge, to fin about inside her.

  With eyes closed or irises agape, you float in sensory overload, the languages of shrimp, porpoises, and propellers as familiar as the mutter of your own bubbles. The buoyancy compensator is an antigravity device; with physical bonds unfettered, the spirit roams where it will, the body—astral, flying in a lucid dream, circumnavigating cities of coral.

  A cave is the womb of a mountain. You can yodel up a trail with a feather in your cap, warbling of frivolous love for the mountain, or you can enter her intimately, seeking her deepest secrets.

  The union of sea and mount is cave diving. The upwelling thrust of the spring tries to deny entry, and you are a salmon, fighting your way upriver to spawn. Between dark walls your senses turn inward, and you can hear your heart beating. It's not how far in you penetrate, but how far out you get that matters. There must be life after depth.

  The cave helps you. Her current siphons you up the canal, head first, panting Lamaze into your regulator. You reel in your line, an umbilical, and in a gush you are squinting in sunlight, dripping, and taking your first unaided breath.

  The deepest mystery is this: You enter the watery cave as the love maker, yet emerge as the love child. You learn to walk and to fly away, seeking unending rebirths, world after world.

  * * * *

  I bumped into something overhead. My makeshift float buckled, letting most of the air escape. The pants fell to the side, no longer holding me up. I grabbed onto the cable with both hands and also squeezed it between my thighs.

  What had happened? I looked up to see a solid ceiling. The cable looked cut, but that couldn't be, because it was holding me up. I groped at it with one hand.

  The cable disappeared into the solid rock above.

  How could that be? Maybe the rock wasn't so solid—it's hard to tell with gloves on. Either the ceiling had become plastic and intruded onto the cable, or the cable had cut into something relatively soft. That sometimes happens in mud caves, which this was not. At least, it hadn't been. The water might have suspended loose material, or perhaps mud was draining from the lake bottom.
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br />   Whatever the case, I was trapped. I tugged the cable, but it didn't move. Instead, the water clouded, and visibility went to zero. I got a jump spool from a pocket and clipped it to the cable. I was going to have to run a pattern around this obstacle.

  I set out to swim in a widening spiral, but as I let go with my hand, I began to drift downward. Damn it! I'd lost my buoyancy. My leg was still hooked on the cable, and I drew myself in, supporting my weight with it. I was under a giant wad of mud with no way to get over it.

  There I hung, blind and freezing. The pressure was building, and it was starting to hurt. Why the hell had I left Sharron for this? She'd raise our kid alone, and when the kid asked where was daddy, she'd hand over the binoculars and point at the night sky. “Your idiot father is frozen dead in one of those dizzy little dots whizzing around Jupiter.”

  She never got my poetry. “If being a cavernaut is such a transforming experience,” she once asked, “why can't marriage be, too?”

  It was getting hard to breathe, like a Sumo was sitting on my chest. The water was still rising above me, increasing the pressure. Buoyant or not, I was getting over that obstacle, if there was any way to do it. I let Colleen's pants go. Maybe they'd find her down in the abyss, restoring a little of her dignity.

  There were some tools in my pocket, and clinging to the cable, I got out the most versatile invention in the history of mankind: a big-ass, flathead screwdriver. If this rock was soft enough to absorb a taut cable, a screwdriver ought to gouge a hole in it.

  I set my jump line to spool out by itself, in case I needed to come back. It was a habit; I wasn't coming back. Then, with a broad arc of my right arm, I stabbed at the surface above with the screwdriver. The ceiling had the consistency of clay, and the driver sank in, to the grip. Using the tool as a lever, I bent my wrist, pulling myself from the cable and along the underside of the roof.

  Floating in low grav, it didn't take much to support me. The screwdriver did the trick, but I only had one. I pulled it out quickly, and took another quick stab at the ceiling before I fell away.

  I snorted to clear my nose, not caring what came out of it. I tried a smaller arc of my arm. I couldn't afford to miss. So with small brisk stabs of the driver, I moved along the ceiling.