Crossing Chao Meng Fu

G. David Nordley

Analog Science Fiction

December, 1997

The determination to stick to a task until you complete it, to push through no matter what the odds or how overwhelming the problems you face, can be a positive quality—but, as the thriller that follows amply demonstrates, on the airless, sun-blasted surface of Mercury, with death only inches away at any moment, sometimes it may not be such a good idea……

G. David Nordley is a retired U.S. Air Force officer and physicist who has become a frequent contributor to Analog in the last couple of years as well as selling stories to Asimov’s Science Fiction, Tomorrow, and elsewhere. He won Analog’s Analytical Laboratory readers poll in 1992 for his story “Poles Apart” and also for his well-known story “Into the Miranda Rift. The story that follows is a “prequel” to it.

Begin a ghostly plain

Dim white in pale starlight.

Flat as far as you can see

To where a distant black ridge

Divides reality.

Above the stars shine

Below the ground crunches;

Hillary, Byrd, Peary and Amundsen,

Are your guides. It is beautiful.

But you cannot stop long;

The plain is life itself;

Move on now, trod onward,

Or stand and freeze, they say.

—W. B.

I am in the middle of a line of people walking determinedly across the most everything-forsaken boring waste in the Solar System. I am so sore and tired I could scream—if there were a warm bed around somewhere, I’d crawl in it to shudder. My attitude has hit rock bottom, but it is time to file my report and if I want anything good out of this pain, I’d best sound positive:

“I am Wojciech Bubka, college teacher, occasional poet and now your…” I take a breath of sterile suit air, “…guide to the natural universe, courtesy of the Solar System Astrographic Society and its many sponsors and members. Welcome to my personal journey through exotic, dangerous, and unusual places of the Solar System.” I take another deep breath—got to keep up with everyone else. “Come with me while there are still such places to explore—for as we approach the twenty-third century, this frontier, too, is receding.”

I try to gain a little ground to stop briefly and pan my helmet cam over the dirty ice field. Despite the exertion, the change of pace lifts my spirits a bit. But not even a ten-to-one vertical exaggeration will make this landscape interesting. Come on, Bubka. You’re a poet? Find meaning.

“These are not robot explorations to be experienced in a video display, but personal ones. I seek authentic, not virtual, reality. I seek the go there, see there, and be there experience of the human explorer, not sterile pixels.” Breathe deep. “There is nothing between me and the crunch of crampon spikes on this frozen mud, the strike of an axe into virgin scarps, the strain of muscles, the hiss of sliding ropes, and the sight of wonders. Such is the dream and the experience I seek to share with you here, today, on the frozen wastes of Chao Meng Fu crater on Mercury.”

Said strain of muscles gets my attention as I start walking again, and I groan involuntarily. I am tired from the almost week of walking under a pack that brought my weight close to Earth normal—when what is normal for me is Mars. I wiggle my toes as hard as I can—despite vacuum insulation, thermistor environmental control and loose, fluffy socks, I think my feet are beginning to get cold.

“Come on, mate. Another hour will get us there.” That is Ed Blake, a gentleman adventurer from New Zealand with Antarctic experience. Ed is my tent-mate, lanky, mostly bald and prematurely gray, confident, competent, and reserved—unless he gets that kind of twinkle in his eye. Then beware a terrible pun. He’s cheerful enough to me, but I sense a certain condescension.

Understandable, I think. What the frozen hell am I doing here?

*

I had been getting bored at Jovis Tholis University. Poetry, these days, includes video as well as text—something which would have delighted Will Shakespeare, I assure you—and has blended with drama so much that we distinguish the two by picking nits over length and symbolic content. But even in its media-inflated majesty, a dozen years of going over the same basic stuff while fighting battles with New Reformation censors and left-wing nihilists—neither of whom take kindly to the display of material contrary to their philosophies—has me well on my way to burnout.

JTU is in a dome over an ostensibly extinct volcano on Tharsis, roughly halfway to Olympus Mons from the tether tube terminal on Ascraeus. The location worked, and it became the biggest university on Mars—of which I was an increasingly small and out-of-step part.

As the politics of being an important academic became increasingly burdensome, my dreams of “out there” grew. I might teach at Saturn High Station with its magnificent view of the rings. Or I could compose random meter verse at Hyperion institute, the lonely retreat of mathematical philosophers set on a detached mountain peak that careens about Saturn as metaphor of an uncertain future. Or I could volunteer to ride a comet and watch robots turn it into Martian air while writing my epics in the freedom of isolation as the comet fell for a decade into the inner Solar System. Or, and this was my most favorite, I might become a journalist in the old sense on the first expedition to Pluto and Charon.

Thus did I dream. But so, of course, dream millions of others. Only a chosen few can go anywhere the first time or do anything the first time. I dabbled at trail writing; journals of hikes and visits to parts of the vanishing “Red” Mars, but got little notice beyond a reasonably nice “been there, done that” rejection from the Solar System Astrographic Society. I needed an entree, a contact, an idea, something to lift me out of the background.

Then, last year (Martian year, everyone; almost two standard years ago), Miranda Lotati, the daughter of the man in charge of Solar System Astrographic Society’s expeditions division, walked into my literature class at Jovis Tholis University, a junior transfer from Stanford on Earth. She looked to be a hard, vigorous, and exciting person but could barely choke two words out in succession—about as contrary to stereotype as one could be and still have breasts.

She was not really beautiful—too muscular, too thin in the face, too boyish a figure, but I saw the possibilities in that. Less competition, and perhaps a complement to my esthetic, well, softness, I told myself. I saw the romance of an attraction of opposites who themselves were opposites of conventionality, and I was looking for some romance somewhere—the women of my normal circles were hopeless and helpless in anything but words, and even seemed to take pride in that. I saw in her an invitation to beyond and away from here. If I played it right—and I resolved to do so.

It wasn’t easy. Miranda was a rough-edged, prickly student, and her essays were condensed dullness, never more than the required length. A spoken sentence of more than a half dozen words was a rarity from her, and she sometimes seemed to speak a language so far evolved from today’s English in its lack of articles and verbs that, had it been deliberate, it would have been considered art in some circles. Nonetheless I was intent. I persisted in bringing her along. I bided my time.

I had to expend some moral capital, but convinced myself that she covered the ground on her final well enough to let me pass her. She liked me, I think. But I said nothing unethical to her, nor hinted at anything romantic while she was my student—I have my standards.

I saw her on the last day of classes of the winter semester, after the final grades were in.

“You’re off to Mercury, I hear, to be along on your father’s attempt to walk across Chao Meng Fu Crater?” Shielded from the Sun, that huge crater was an ice field—Mercury’s Antarctica.

She nodded.

“Have you set the expedition membership?”

She shook her head, confirming what was known publicly.

“Will you have any journalists along? It would make a very exciting nature piece.”

She smiled a bit. “Like your Ascraeus Mons hike piece? Dad liked that and sent me here.”

He’d seen that? I tried to remember the rejection letter. I was flattered but a bit worried that it was a little light for a Lotati expedition. Then the alarm bells rang in my head. My competition for the position of expedition bard was standing in front of me.

I reached for a tone of professorial authority. “Randi, uh. You’ve come a long way in your composition…”

She shrugged. “Yeah. Thanks to you. Someone’s got to do the article. Someone who fits on the team. Wish I wrote better.”

“Randi, I suppose I shouldn’t be obscure. Is there any chance I might come myself?”

Her eyes lit up for a moment, then she frowned. “Rough business, exploring.”

“Then my accounts of it should draw interest, maybe enough to push Solar System Astrographic’s allocation priorities a little further up.” Not to mention that a single Astrographic article could bring in the equivalent in allocations of my entire Jovis Tholis University stipend for a year. A Martian year.

“Uh, huh.” A doubtful assent on her part

“Might even help you get to your namesake, out by Uranus. Now there would be an angle that people would notice!”

That got her attention. “Dad’s idea too. My name. Not that easy, though. No place for amateurs, out there.”

I smiled at her. “I bet I’ll make a good explorer. I’m observant, handy, and in reasonably good shape.”

She gave me a somewhat skeptical look and a sigh. “Mercury first. Chao Meng Fu. Hundred fifty kilometer-wide. Never sees the Sun. Covered with granite-hard permafrost. Probably take us two, three weeks to walk it.”

“Walk?”

She nodded. “Unassisted. Carry everything. Vacuum suits, tents, supplies, samples.”

“Walk it? Uh, why?”

She looked at me as if I was born in some other cosmos. “Because we can.”

There is this recklessness about me that allows me to throw words around without fully considering the consequences. “Well, I think I can too. I’ve done enough hiking around Tharsis—I even have a cinder cone named after me.”

She looked skeptically at me. “Oh? How high?”

She had me there. I grinned sheepishly. “Well, ‘Bubka Mons’ is only a hundred meters above local mean. But it’s kind of impressive because there’s nothing else around it.” And I knew someone in the Martian Geology Institute that was laying out the local real estate.

She giggled.

“It is registered, Randi. Anyway, my Ascraeus trip was solo, and by a new route.”

She looked judiciously at me and sighed. “Lose ten kilos. Do fifty kilometers a day.” We stood silent for a couple of seconds as I tried to digest that.

She turned away. “Physics final—see you.” And she was gone, gliding easily down the hall.

Dreams are free; but realizing them has a price. And I resolved to pay it.

*

By the end of last semester, I had walked up a few Martian mountains and lost the ten kilos. I talked to her again and we arranged a checkout hike down to the base of Jovis Tholis and back up to the town again with full packs, breather gear, and by the most difficult route she could pick. She watched every move I made, and seemed satisfied enough to make another “date.”

As this went on, I grew utterly fascinated with her. She was a busy woman. Reporters called her, outfitters called her. She was always meeting young women explorers who knew her reputation as a companion of her father, and old men explorers who had been somewhere with her father. My metaphor for Randi was a black hole; people and things seem to swirl around and accrete to her without any significant verbal effort on her part, as if her presence distorts space so that all roads simply lead to her and none away.

The week she was to leave Mars for Mercury she called me.

“You’re in, Professor Bubka. Can you make the Shannon inbound? Friday?”

By moving heaven and Mars, I could, and did. I had, it seemed, been within her event horizon for some time now.

*

So, Mercury. Mercury gravity is the same as Mars gravity, which some say is more than a coincidence, but a coincidence as yet unexplained. The gravity here is exactly the same as on Mars, but I’m carrying three times my mass in supplies and vacuum survival equipment. I might as well be hiking in Antarctica with a light pack. Indeed, I could use the conditioning to visit Earth! Despite the extra mass, we try to keep up the fifty kilometers a day—a pace I must maintain.

There are eight of us strung out along the Chao Meng Fu crater floor, Dr. Lotati in the lead. Dr. Juanita Tierzo, a Harvard-trained geologist, follows him. Juanita is actually on the JTU faculty—in the Martian Geology Institute—but I had to come to Mercury to meet her. Randi follows her. Then come Ed, myself, and one of Dr. Tierzo’s graduate students, Eloni Wakhweya, a slight Kenyan woman with a big grin. Solar System Astrographic expedition staffers Mike and Karen Svenson come last, pulling an equipment pallet on two large wire wheels.

They meant it; no robots, no powered vehicles, and in my now humbled opinion, no sense. If Mercury had a breathable atmosphere, they’d have done without the spacesuits and all their built-in communications and amenities, too. I’m exhausted, uncomfortable, and increasingly uneasy with this exercise in cosmic hubris.

The view is simple, unrelieved flatness, the kind of view that should reach one’s soul in the way of all great expanses. The crater’s stark lines go its namesake’s art one spareness better; the vertical dimension is almost absent. It too is painted in an ink of five colors, all gray. It is Aldrin’s magnificent desolation, without relief. I appreciate it more in intellectual abstract than in person.

There is light to see: the tips of the peaks behind us blaze like distant arc lamps, and fill the bowl of Chao Meng Fu with a ghostly kind of moonlight. Small, rounded crater rims dot this frozen plane—very few higher than a man, for ice flows in time. The brighter stars shine down on us hard and free. Brilliant Earth hangs just over the horizon, a tiny dazzling blue-white star. Luna lies well away from it, a faint gray dot lost in Sagittarius.

Invisible to us in the Earth’s glare is the beginning of Earth’s Sunshield. This mammoth project will partly shade the heat-polluted atmosphere from the fires of Apollo’s chariot someday. It is taking form at the Earth-Sun L-l point, balanced there with the help of reflected light—they plan to reduce insolation by 1 percent. But more relevant to our endeavor is that it is the home of Solar System Astrographic’s solar radio antenna, which we use to apprise the rest of the Solar System of the status of this madcap adventure. I look that way wondering why I ever left.

“Another five kilometers to the crevasse,” Dr. Lotati tells us on the comnet.

This desolate flat sameness is an illusion; we have real work ahead. The crevasse is a major obstacle, or a major objective if you are a geologist. Halfway between the rim of Chao Meng Fu crater and its central peaks lies a huge crack in the permafrost caused, they think, by an almost infinitely slow lifting of the crater floor, still rebounding from the billion-year-old impact that formed the crater. To this poet, overhead views make the crevasse look like the mouth of the planet—and I worry about being devoured.

*

By noon, universal time, the mouth of Mercury yawns directly in front of us, an ugly black crack that makes the dark gray plain around us look silvery by comparison. We halt to plan our crossing. Juanita proposes that we simply go down into this thing, down into a darkness that has never known the Sun, and out again on the other side. That idea creates enough interest to scare me. But not now. A descent will take planning, and, in the meantime, I luxuriate in not having to move my body.

Yet, standing still, I forget my pain and become curious. The crevasse seems to run to the horizon to my right and left. The other side is the length of a football field away. I shudder—it is impossible to repress the thought that such darkness is not meant for human beings, that the laws of physics will become conscious and punish us for trying it. Perversely, the challenge of that danger attracts me.

Yet, there are reasons to go down beyond the simple thrill of it. Solar Astrographic’s expedition is half stunt, half science—and here is where the other half gets its due. There is a mystery here and the root of it lies in a contrary mysticism of celestial dynamics. Here, a mere sixty million kilometers from its fiery photosphere, are surfaces that have not seen the Sun since the Caloris impact defined Mercury’s final orientation.

This same counterintuitive magic then decrees that the ices of comets that orbit impossibly far—beyond even Pluto, Charon, and Persephone—are actually closer to the Sun, and Mercury, in the energy of their motion than anything in the inner Solar System. Something on Venus would have to be kicked at almost 11 km/s to reach Mercury, best case—but merely nudge a pair of Oort belt comets together and parts of them may fall into Mercury, decades hence. Sometimes these collisions give the planet a very temporary, tenuous atmosphere, which condenses in the deep freeze of Chao Meng Fu. Blame this on Kepler and Newton, not Ptolemy.

So near is far, and far is near, and the crevasse yawns from ‘ere to ‘ere. Does it have teeth? Do its open jaws reveal molecules from the beginning of time, such as measured in the Solar System? Lotati confers with his daughter, and Ed. Randi and Ed have a thing, I’ve found, and spend a fair amount of time touching helmets.

What great ideas I have! I despair of ever being able to itch again, let alone going to Miranda with its namesake. My rented vacuum gear fits like the skin of a hundred-year-old man; stretched taut digging into my flesh here, loose and bulging there. Randi says there’s an art to it and I should take more time getting in. Next time I will.

I edge closer to the brink, attracted to the danger perhaps, or perhaps wanting to demonstrate courage to Randi. I gaze down. Here and there the dust has fallen from the sheer ice walls, and the layered structure is clear. There are Mercury’s sediments. Each comet or meteor creates a temporary atmosphere for Mercury, and that which is not boiled away by the Sun condenses in the polar craters, mixed with ejecta dust. The bedrock lies perhaps a kilometer below us. After three days of the most physical labor I’ve done in decades, I now contemplate a rappel down to the bottom of a bottomless crevasse and the climb back up again.

I look away as though by not observing it, I can create the possibility that it does not exist.

But I have my journalist’s duty. At my command, my helmet camera plays back the view, and it floats, reflected off my face plate, against the stars. It doesn’t fit in the standard field of view, I realize, so I look over the edge again and slowly turn my head from horizon to horizon. An object of professional interest now, it begins to lose some of its scariness for me.

Bubka’s prescription for fear of something—study the hell out of it.

How long and wide! Then I turn off all my lights, let my eyes relax, and turn back to see the solar corona, a peacock’s tail of icy fire spreading from the Sun that sits just under those utterly black mountains that ring our horizon. If Chao Meng Fu did not flatten Mercury’s globe here, we would not be able to see those mountains this far into the trek, so close is Mercury’s horizon—but we have been heading ever so slightly inward, downhill, as well as south.

The furthest streamers of the corona glow far above that rim behind, looking almost like the aurora borealis back on Earth. Awed, I step back, and back again to catch my balance.

I happen to glance down—my boot is barely centimeters from the edge of the chasm.

“Bubka, freeze.” Randi’s voice echoes in my helmet.

I am already frozen.

“Now. Raise right hand,” she continues.

I am carrying a strobe lamp in my right hand so I automatically start to raise my left—

“Your other right!” she snaps, instantly.

This time I get it right, raising both my arm and the strobe lamp.

“Now lean that way. Walk slowly. Away from edge.”

I understand now: if I teeter, she wants me to teeter in the direction of safety. I walk away from the edge with as much dignity as I can muster, as if there were nothing at all wrong, knowing that anyone monitoring my heartbeat will know that I am anything but calm.

She detaches herself from the management group and strides toward me, ghostly dust glittering in my helmet light behind her footsteps. She halts in a cloud of fairy sparkles, grabs my hand, and leads me well away from the edge of the crevasse.

“Professor Bubka, near crevasses, tether. Always, always, tether.”

“Professor” hangs in my mind dripping with irony. On Mars, I taught her literature. Here, I am her student—and I had just come close to failing a test where failure is judged somewhat more harshly than at Jovis Tholis University.

Nodding ruefully, I pull a piton gun from my pack and harpoon the planet. A test pull shows that it’s secure, and I clip the line to my belt. Randi fires a piton in too, clips on, then clips another line between her belt and mine. “Ed, some baby-sitter you’d make! Going to take a look.”

“Sorry, mate. Watching, Randi.”

Baby-sitter?

“Now, Professor Bubka. Let’s go look.” Dark eyes, on a tanned face with a snub nose, twinkle at me behind the clear, non-reflecting visor.

We retrace my footprints together. We walk to the edge together. This time, I think to clip my strobe light to my belt as well.

One of the things I see is half a footprint at the edge of the crevasse. The toe half. Mine.

What I had done was, I realize, foolish, but I think I am forgiven. She pulls on her line, then actually leans out over the cut, to inspect its near side.

“Light.” The word is a request and a command. Crystals from far down glitter in response.

Nervously, wrapping my line around my left hand and playing it out through a “smart slot” belay device, centimeter by centimeter, I lean out with her and shine my strobe on the wall under us. On a clean vertical, the layering resembles a diffraction grating—fine thin grooves, perfectly horizontal, broken occasionally by what must be the sections of ancient buried craters.

The strobe light looks continuous, but contains off-pulses for range—it times a journey of the absence of light. So. The crack goes down, a hundred meters, two hundred, three hundred. At five hundred, I can no longer see the light returning, but it can. I swing it slowly from side to side, as my helmet display paints a graph of angle and range. The walls seem to almost converge about twelve hundred meters below us here, with some flatness between them. I move the beam a bit to the left.

There is something across the chasm at eight hundred meters, just to our left. “Randi?”

“I see it. Bridge. Dad, channel seven.”

“I have it, Randi! I’ll think that is a billion years down if it’s a day! What do you say, Juanita, my Randi’s found a bridge!”

There seemed no point in immediately explaining that I’d found it.

“Eight hundred meters down and all the way across! Can we do it?” Juanita answers, thrill in her voice. “Do we have enough line?”

“Yes and yes,” Randi’s father answers after a moment of thought. Then he points to a slight dip almost above the bridge. “Probably half of an old crater, broken by the crack. That will get us a few meters closer. We could rappel down from there. Perhaps two billion years down, if the crevasse goes to the bottom of Chao Meng Fu. Do you want the bottom, Juanita?”

“God, yes, Emilio, if it isn’t too dangerous.”

Dr. Lotati shrugs. “It has been this way for millions of years of impacts; the walls should tolerate a few ants crawling on them. We’ll go ourselves, instead of waiting for some robots to do it.”

I look across the chasm for the other half of the ancient crater, but, like the other half of my footprint, there is no sign of it. Where did it go? I feel a curiosity as powerful as any hunger. What formed the bridge? What lies at the bottom? We shall find out, if the Laws of the Universe let us.

*

We all have some climbing experience, but only the Lotatis and Ed have very much. It is, however, a very easy climb down in 38 percent gravity. The ropes are well secured to the plain above, the slope is usually less than vertical. Mike and Karen Svenson will remain on the rim with the bulk of the equipment until we are all safely down. They call themselves the “human robots” and have been in excellent humor. When Randi and Dr. Lotati scale the other wall, they will fire a rope across. The Lotatis will then pull over a larger rope on which a tram will carry the equipment. Meanwhile, at the bottom, Dr. Tierzo will supervise sample gathering by the rest of us. That is the plan.

It becomes dark quickly as we descend. The sky contracts to a starry band overhead, one edge of which glows a faint, frozen, shadowy pearl, a reflection lit by a reflection of sunlight on distant peaks. We turn on our helmet lights, and their glare banishes any other source of illumination. They spread sparkly pools of light on the wall—tiny crystals everywhere. I am conscious of a fine mist or fog, just on the edge of the perceivable. Our suits allow the skin’s waste gases to diffuse slowly outward, our footsteps create microscopic dust clouds on which it may condense, our helmet lights evaporate hydrogen gas that has condensed on the wall. Our progress appears tinged with the ethereal.

*

We are three hundred meters down: a football field on end. The descent is easy, simple, routine. You ease rope out under friction, take a pair of steps down, and ease out some more. This descent is demanding and terrifying. You dare not lose concentration. Pitons can pull out, crampons can slip, and you will be just as dead from a fall of a kilometer in Mercury’s gravity as Earth’s. Yes, it will take a few seconds longer and an academic might note that you hit with less velocity—only about five times instead of fifteen times what is needed to smash your helmet and the skull within it.

You dare not cause problems for everyone else. One foot after another.

A person in fear of his or her life needs no more excitement—but if you want it, you glance at the wall in front of you, at layers of ice laid down when dinosaurs were young. This is not on a screen, not a simulation, but never-seen-before reality that puts ice hard in front of your own eyes.

“Ed,” I ask, “do you wonder if anyone might have been here a billion years ago?”

“Eh? Interesting thought, that. The feature would attract someone with enough curiosity to build spaceships, I should think. But the crack itself wouldn’t be that old, now, would it?”

“No, I guess not.” When the layers were laid down, of course, this had been a part of the plain.

Still, my eyes scan every layer, hoping.

“Has everyone got positive pressure in their suits?” Dr. Lotati asks, and receives chuckles. “There is,” he continues, “a significant build-up of nitrogen gas, and a bare trace of nitrogen tri-fluoride, which I would not recommend breathing.”

I call up a temp display and find that it is cold in the crack—about eighty Kelvins, versus a hundred twenty at the surface. As I think about it, I notice traces of frost on the outside of my gloves: our insulation is that good. I have no idea what the biological implications of nitrogen tri-fluoride are, but I would rather someone else perform the experiments. A drop rolls down my face plate.

“Watch your footing, Juanita,” Dr. Lotati says. “It’s slippery here.”

So far, my crampons dig into the dirty clathrate walls with ease, but I can tell it is wet. The wall is mostly ice, but ice that is heavily mixed with crater ejecta, pocked with more volatile ices, and stiffened far harder than anything on Earth by cryogenic temperatures. Dr. Lotati says it’s something like sandstone, but if it weren’t for the gas in the ice, it would be like concrete. There are few cracks, but the piton gun works well, as does the ax.

“Nitrogen tri-fluoride data,” I ask. Floating in the wall, by virtue of my helmet display hardware, are glowing numbers telling me that nitrogen tri-fluoride is liquid over a range of about 80 Kelvins—from about 77 up to 145—which is over 120 Celsius degrees below the freezing point of water. Somehow, stating such temperatures in Kelvins above absolute zero is less scary than using negative Celsius degrees below freezing. The vapor pressure of this big, heavy molecule is almost nil at the low end of this temperature range—a wet vacuum.

A hundred meters to go, and I can see the bridge clearly in the shifting pools of our helmet lights.

“A sliver of wall appears to have detached itself and slid down until it jammed,” Dr. Tierzo tells us. “The top is a jumble with, here and there, flat spaces that may have been part of the original surface, including part of a crater. I wonder if that’s what knocked it down?”

“Hello down there,” Karen Svenson calls. “Yes, that crater would explain what looks like a ray network around where you went down. Now that I know what I’m looking at, this spiderweb network of cracks is a real giveaway.”

I hadn’t remembered any cracks. I ask my suit to play back my recording of our approach to the side. The surface in the depression was smooth. My pulse races. “Playback two hours ago,” I command. In a ghostly video window, my suit shows me almost falling in to the crevasse, but…

“Hey, everyone!” I shout. “Those cracks weren’t there before. Dr. Lotati, I’ve got it on channel six.”

There is a moment of silence.

“Quickly now,” Dr. Lotati speaks briefly and very businesslike. “Those of you still on the wall come down as quickly as possible without panic and without yanking on anything. Mike and Karen, set another belay well back of the cracked area.”

I have my full attention on climbing down, gingerly as possible. Dr. Tierzo is off belay just below me. I remember to lock my crampon spikes out—the bridge is slippery.

Meanwhile, Dr. Lotati has set an ice bolt in at the far end of our bridge. Dr. Tierzo sets another one in the biggest hunk of bridge she can find at our end and pulls the line tight.

Then I am off the wall. I quickly clip my line to the bridge line and release myself from the wall ropes. “Off belay.”

Miranda Lotati and the grad student, Eloni, are still on the wall.

I hear, I think, at very low frequency, a kind of groan.

“We have the protection in,” Karen says. “The cracks are larger!”

“Wojciech can get your line, Ed,” Dr. Lotati says, “release from the wall immediately!”

“No worry. Here.” He tosses me the end of his spare line and I hit it with the loop of a smart ‘biner, which opens, takes the line, and shuts faster than I can see—like that old magic trick with hoops. I take up the slack.

Ed releases and scrambles off the wall, holding the taut line for balance until he reaches me. We move further down the bridge.

“Come on, Eloni,” Ed says encouragingly. The young Kenyan woman is the least experienced of our group—she descends slowly, but flawlessly, a few meters right of where Ed came down. “Toss me the end of your spare line.”

She stops to find it. Miranda Lotati’s feet are but a few meters above her. I hear another groan.

“Come on…” Ed says again.

Finally, Eloni tosses a coiled line toward Ed. It jerks short and dangles below her, a hopeless tangle.

“Sorry, I try to do this too fast.”

“That’s OK, mate,” Ed says. “Just come on down now. We’ll improvise.”

We feel a slight tremor. She freezes.

“Down, Eloni. Fast,” Randi says.

Eloni starts moving again. I can see her tremble.

“Ice!” Karen shouts. Our radios level amplitude, magnifying whispers and buffering shouts—that shout was well buffered.

Eloni freezes.

“Go,” Randi snaps, and clips Eloni’s helmet with the side of her boot. “Get going!”

Galvanized, Eloni half scrambles and half falls the remaining fifty meters, landing on her seat where the bridge butts against the wall. She starts fumbling with the ‘biner holding her line to the wall belay line. Ed, clipped to a line, moves to help her—I think he has a knife in his hand. Heedless, I follow him using crampons and ax. Ed reaches Eloni.

I look up and see the sky falling.

Randi releases and leaps from almost twenty meters up on the wall, unbelayed, right at me. “Catch,” she shouts.

I have time to set my crampon spikes and open my arms. She hits hard, and various pieces of her gear dig into my chest. I grab her as the boots tear free and we skitter together down the side of the bridge. My line stops us after a three-meter slide.

Ten meters from us, with a roar clearly conducted through the ice we lie against, an avalanche of clathrate pours down. There is no sign of Ed and Eloni.

Randi clips a line to my belt, rolls off, and starts to scramble back to the top of the bridge, ice dust streaming around her.

“Ed!” she shouts. “Eloni!”

The fall increases, becoming a white wall. Randi scrambles into it. I follow and am enveloped in a stream of pulverized clathrate, and I can see nothing. It flows over me, not like sand or water, but something in between—not dense, but still exerting pressure.

I wait. My helmet is filled with the sound of my breathing.

“Ed!” Randi shouts again.

“We’re alive.” Ed’s voice is hoarse and strained. “Trapped next to the wall. The fall created a bit of a pocket. No injuries, but it’s getting somewhat cold.”

In spacesuits with rebreathers and plenty of energy, we are in no danger of suffocating. But under our coveralls we wear skintight vacuum suits that depend on a surrounding vacuum for much of their thermal control and the fabric of the vacuum suits, while smart and extremely tough, is necessarily thin. Conduction of heat could quickly freeze Ed and Eloni. But, clinging to the side of the bridge with the landslide still in progress, there is nothing I can do to reach them.

“Got you on locator. Can move.” That is Randi Lotati, for me. Move? How?

I roll over prone to the face of the bridge, reach forward into the flow with my hands, and find purchase. With both arms and legs, I find I can edge forward, too.

“Solid piece—here,” Randi says. “Ice boulder. Think you’re on other side.”

“S—sounds that w—way,” Ed replies.

“Line charge. My side. Push like hell when I say.”

“No, Randi,” Ed pleads, “too dangerous—”

“Push, damn it! Now!”

I hear the crack of the detonation.

“Randi?” I call, and claw my way toward the signals, white sand and occasional rocks still streaming by me. Somehow, though, it seems a bit easier. “Randi, Ed?”

“Wojciech, Ed. We—we’re free. At—at least the rock’s split. Need help with Eloni.”

“I’m trying.” I pant. “Where’s Randi?” I am exhausted struggling against the continuing stream of material from above. I reach forward with my hand and hit flesh. Someone there. The world is gray in my helmet lamp; I can see nothing. “Ed, is that you?”

“Not me, mate. It’s slackening a little. I’ve got some space.”

The someone moans. The groan is female.

“Eloni?” I push the person in front of me again, harder.

“She’s with me, Wojciech,” Ed says.

“Randi?”

She grunts. “Wojciech. I’m OK. I’m just…stuck. Legs won’t move.” I feel a hand brush mine, then lock with mine. “Drag me back.”

“I’ll try.” Trusting the precarious hand link, I sit up into the flow of clathrate mud. It tries to take me away with tremendous force, but my line holds me. Slowly I get my legs around in front of me and pull as hard as I dare. She doesn’t move.

“It’s no good. I’ll hurt you if I pull any harder.”

“Freezing’s worse. Hurt me. Pull.”

God knows how much force I put on her arm, but something seems to unstick, and she comes toward me, slowly at first; then something breaks free and we scoot back about four meters. I can see through whirls of snow here. I can see my clip still on the bridge line, see Randi strung out at the end of my arm.

“Dr. Lotati, she’s out. Over here.”

“What? Wojciech? Where?…There, I have you! I’ll be right over.”

He is there in a moment. “Had you on the other side of the bridge for a moment—propagation freak, I think. Randi, will you be all right for a few minutes?”

“Hurts like hell, Dad, but yes. Thanks, Wojciech.”

Dr. Lotati gives her a pat and plunges into the remains of the ice fall. Minutes later, he and Ed emerge, carrying Eloni between them. “Mike, Karen, this is Emilio,” he says. “We’re all out of the avalanche. I don’t know in what shape yet, but we’re all out.”

“Roger. We suggest all of you rest a bit until this plays itself out.”

“Mike…” He pauses, catching his breath. “We’ll consider that.”

There are several rueful chuckles, and we spend the next five minutes or so watching the river of white dust slowly come to a halt.

Finally the ice fall abates entirely and we take stock. Randi reports a severe sprain in her right shoulder. Ed is recovering from hypothermia and is severely bruised as well. Eloni is better, physically, but appears to be in some kind of psychological shock. The rest of us have minor bruises.

The side of the crevasse looks like a giant took a huge, semicircular bite out of it. Karen and Mark wave at us from an edge that is now at least fifty meters back from where it was. We lost two long lines, buried in the debris. The avalanche has buried half the bridge and I worry that it could start again at any time and bury us along with the other half. I try to do some mental calculations on how long it would take a suborbital hopper to get here and pull us out.

“I think we are here for a while,” Dr. Lotati says, “at least until we’re all up to climbing out again. We might overnight on the bridge.” If he’s worried about the avalanche restarting, he isn’t saying so.

“We’ll need to revise the schedule a bit,” Ed adds. “Another five kilometers per day would do it, I should think. Now, how do we get the gear down here?”

“Toboggan the big tent down to us,” Randi says. “Meantime, collect data.”

I stare at Randi, stupefied.

“Are you OK, Eloni?” I ask, mainly out of concern but perhaps with a secondary agenda of reminding people of something.

Eloni raises her head and looks around in wonder. If she expects a chewing out, it seems she is in the wrong group. I lay a hand very gently on her shoulder, and, as if I touched some kind of hidden button, she leans into me and lets out a very long sigh, which I hear clearly where my helmet touches her. Randi is looking right at us, but in the glare of our headlights, her face is unreadable. Warning bells ring in my head.

“My mistake, Eloni,” Ed says, “pressuring you like that for something that’s not automatic. You needed to think it through, and with me talking at you like that, you couldn’t. My mistake.”

“Eloni,” Dr. Lotati asks, “can you help Juanita get her samples tomorrow?”

Eloni takes a breath and slips away from me. “I—I can do that.” A smile of relief creases the young woman’s features.

“That a way!”

“Randi?” I ask, dumbfounded. “Your arm?”

“I’ll live. Still go for the bottom, Juanita?”

“There may be a pond of liquid nitrogen tri-fluoride down there—it’s unprecedented.”

“Ed?”

He looks down, then at the crevasse sides. “Why don’t I help Randi with the camp and prepare for climbing out of here?”

Apparently, we will sleep here—under the sword of Damocles.

“Wojciech?” Dr. Lotati asks.

I am at a loss for words. I am more tired and sore than I have ever been. How much more tired and sore can I be before I am a danger, I wonder? Everyone has been pummeled and challenged. But these people, these comrades of mine, will not admit disaster. They will press on. It is a collective decision—a spontaneous informal vote of voices that is already a majority. Voicing misgivings on my part would do no good at all, and my fate is tied to theirs. But I wonder that such things can still be in this age of robots. May the ghosts of Byrd, Amundsen, Lewis and Clark, and Bering fill my mind with whatever it is that gets one through. I came here to prove myself worthy and now the question is upon me. I look at the crevasse sides and down into its deep.

“Three climbers would be best,” Dr. Lotati says.

“I’m…I can go with a little rest.”

Dr. Lotati nods. “We can all use some. It’s only 1100. We’ll set up on the bridge. Mike and Karen, we’ll take the big tent—you can probably slide it down on ropes.”

This only takes a few minutes. We anchor the large vacuum tent to the bridge. It fits with about a meter to spare in width—with the door toward the intact wall. Room in the tent is limited. It was meant to sleep four and it is crowded with six of us. Our body odors again mingle in a forgettable stew of smells, and the drop curtain for its tiny commode is woefully inadequate for privacy. But we are relieved and happy—we have been through a memorable adventure and nobody has gotten killed.

Ed is quiet, eats quickly, and is asleep in his sack, fully clothed, in minutes. He says nothing. We will take a very real risk shortly, far, far, from help—for the sake of samples that could easily be gathered by robots a month from now.

As a certified—and some might say certifiable—poet, suicidal undertakings are perhaps in my nature. But the milieu of the Gentleman Adventurer requires that one return from the adventure to recount it. While Ed was gallant in the crisis, the closeness of his brush with death might only now be sinking into him. I, with far less experience, accepted a challenge he did not—does he resent this? No, I tell myself, he is just exhausted.

I have to make myself eat—I’m hungry, but more tired. A warm sleepsack never felt so good, I realize. It seems I have barely closed my eyes when Dr. Lotati is gently rocking me awake.

“It’s 1400,” he says. “Time to go.”

*

The trip to the bottom of the crevasse is a straightforward rappel. With Randi resting her arm, Eloni and I head for the bottom with Juanita in the lead.

“This could be Calorian clathrate—proof that Chao Meng Fu is older.”

“But doesn’t its flatness mean it’s young?” I ask. Old surfaces are heavily cratered.

“Watch for a hollow to your left. No, the surface is young due to deposition—the crater itself is ancient. I’d guess we’re about 3.8 billion years down, below the original crater floor. The walls are shock-fractured rock, not exposed sediment layers. No strata—” a swing of her ax tears a rough section of about a square meter from the wall “—underneath.”

“Look, more signs of erosion,” she adds later.

“Erosion?” The wall is a rough breccia, a compressed clathrate and gravel mixture. The larger stones are sharp, not rounded.

“There is evidence of atmosphere all around us—you can see icicles in the hollows, and a cold glistening wetness on the walls.”

I turn off my radio. “Can you hear me?” I shout.

There is no answer—the vapor is still too thin, even at the bottom, to conduct sound.

We hang from the wall and gaze into the utterly still pool of nitrogen tri-fluoride in the circles of our helmet lamps below us. Unable to resist the temptation, I reach into one of Mercury’s nostrils and break off an icicle and toss it into the pool. It ripples like oily water.

“Wojciech,” Eloni says in a mildly scolding voice, “have some respect! That pool has been built up, molecule by molecule, probably over billions of years.”

“How?” Juanita asks, gently. “Even if the crater is that old, the crevasse isn’t.”

Eloni is silent, then says, “Oh, of course. But where does it come from then?”

“The pool is a mystery, for now,” Juanita says. “Perhaps some comet with an unusual concentration of fluorine ices struck not too long ago. Or something else.” She laughs. “Fortunately, not all mysteries can be solved now. We would run out of things to do!”

I envision tentacles reaching out of that deep to pluck us from the crevasse wall. “Could something have evolved to base its blood on that, the way we use seawater?”

“Not my field,” Juanita answers. “But let’s take a sample.”

She is closest, and deftly dips a sample capsule into the liquid. Nothing emerges to bite her hand off—so much for that fantasy. I might not have had the nerve. Then I have a moment of insight; to do this requires the right balance of imagination and nerve.

“I do not think,” Eloni offers, “that there would be enough energy for life. If there were, the liquid would boil away. Hydrocarbons at these temperatures would be frozen solid, so what could one use to build life molecules? How could anything that would work at these temperatures get here without being destroyed by the Sun first? Still, it is an interesting thought, Wojciech.”

“If the crack could go down a hundred kilometers or so,” Juanita remarks, “it would be warm enough to evaporate everything, possibly warm enough to walk around with the right atmosphere. But Mercury would close a crack that deep; its crust is surprisingly thin, even now. This is not Mars.”

She sounds like my fifth-year teacher back in Krakow. I suddenly feel far, far over my head. These people understand where they are and what they are doing: it holds no terror for them, no fear of sticking a hand where it might not come back. But for me, my overripe literary imagination haunts my mind like the tale of the bogeyman that kept me out of grandfather’s basement until I was seven. I am not comfortable here—but, I tell myself, I will enjoy having been here more when, and if—always if—we get back.

“It’s time to go back,” Juanita says, her vials filled. “Climbing.”

“Climbing,” we all say.

“Belay on,” Dr. Lotati says, from far above us.

The climb back up to the bridge is slow. Once we hit the layered material, we stop to take half-meter cores, drilled slantwise, at those layers which Juanita estimates to have been laid down during the great events of the inner Solar System: layers that may contain glass beads from the Imbrium impact on Luna, Caloris here, Hellas on Mars, and, just possibly, a few grains with the right isotope ratios to be from the K-T impact on Earth. If we find these, we can bring the geological history of the planets together. If, the paradigm goes, we understand better why the Solar System is the way it is, we will understand better why we are the way we are—the forces that have shaped our evolution and those of other sentient races. But we won’t know if the samples contain what we suspect for many months, by which time we will have scattered to the nether ends of the Solar System.

We are tired and bruises remind us of yesterday’s avalanche with each bump, but there is a sense of elation about us. We are the first people to see a pool of liquid on an alien planet in its natural state. And no machine saw it first.

When we arrive back at the ice bridge, Juanita sees me staring nervously at the slide.

“I’ve calculated the slope and the coefficient of friction, Wojciech—I think it’s fully relaxed. It may stay that way for a billion years.”

“Now you tell me!” But would the trip have been as thrilling if she had? “What caused it to go in the first place?”

“Our weight, I think, plus an accumulation of stresses. I’m beginning to think the crevasse is fairly young—otherwise a meteor impact would have caused the slump before we did.”

“There could be more than physical tension,” Eloni says. “Near the surface, over many years, radiation will cause chemical changes and produce unstable molecules in crystalline ice. A physical shock, such as an ax, might release these energies.”

“Possibly,” Juanita says.

I look down at the ice bridge under me. If the crevasse is fairly recent, this would be even more recent—and not, I hope, have had time to accumulate radiation “energies.”

We are physically tired but the midday nap and the feeling of accomplishment leave us too hyper to sleep immediately. After rations, I suggest the idea that had led me to join their expedition in the first place.

“Randi?” I ask. “Dr. Lotati?”

They turn their heads to me.

“Are you aware of the theories of a Dr. Nikhil Ray?”

Dr. Lotati purses his lips as if he had something to say, then thought better of it.

Juanita answers. “He tries to explain the low density of Miranda and some other outer satellites, by making them a sponge of caverns. It is an innovative idea, but, I’m afraid, not well accepted.”

Dr. Lotati grunts. “I’ve met the man. His theories are unorthodox and he has this infuriatingly superior manner about him…Well, we’ll know soon enough anyway. The IPA is finally getting around to dropping sonography stations on the major Uranian satellites.”

As “free” robot-produced resources grew exponentially, so did the Interplanetary Association’s influence on who goes where and does what. The IPA, whose main members are the United Nations of Earth, the Mars Council, and the Cislunar Republic, responds, in large measure, to politicians. They in turn respond to the media and the public—I am counting on this.

“I was,” I venture, “thinking that it might be time to visit Miranda—and that, with the coincidence in their names, Randi might be the one to do it. It would certainly be an interesting angle. Especially if Dr. Ray could be persuaded to come.”

Dr. Lotati frowns. “That would be rather commercial, wouldn’t it?” Ed contributes with a wink in my direction. He is not taking this too seriously.

“Finish school,” Randi says, “do some low g work in the asteroids, Saturn, then maybe.” She grins at me. “My world. Caves?”

“There are certainly caves there,” Juanita says with a grin, “but if they are big ones, you might be sorry about taking Nikhil. He’s already insufferable with the issue in doubt. God help us if he’s right!”

Dr. Lotati and Ed laugh heartily. Randi shrugs, and a flicker of pain crosses her face at the gesture. The shoulder hurts more than she wants us to know, I suspect.

“You can make too much of that,” Ed says. “He’s not a monster, Juanita. He can be very much the gentleman, and his conversation is always interesting. I sometimes wonder if the personality conflicts don’t have more to do with his peer review problems than the merits of his work.”

Dr. Lotati turns and tugs on his beard. “Uranus is the frontier,” he finally says. “There’s only one small inhabited scientific station in the Uranus system, in its outer satellite, Mustardseed. Within the Uranian magnetosphere, radiation is a concern.” He stares briefly at me, then Randi. “Also, I don’t want to associate the Society with Ray’s claims just yet. Let’s see what happens with the seismic study. And let’s see how well Wojciech’s presentation of this expedition is received.”

I glance at Randi. She stares back at me, intently, and the ghost of a smile crosses her face as she wrinkles her nose.

“I could use a shower,” I say—humorously. There will be no showers for several days yet.

But Randi hands me a silver foil wrapper. Her nose has decided that it’s bath time—understandable in view of our exertions. The foil contains a light towelette soaked in a cleaning solution that does not have to be rinsed. She offers them to the others, removes her coveralls, and then releases the seam of her vacuum suit. Her father turns his back to us and, facing the wall of the tent, does the same. Eloni also turns to the wall of the tent. Ed watches Randi, and they exchange a brief smile.

We are a cross section of the Solar System, and a cross section of attitudes about our bodies. I still feel a slight twinge, as if in nostalgia for an old cultural taboo, but the observer of people in me rejoices in the passing of taboos. Ed, surprisingly, seems the one uncomfortable with communal bathing.

Juanita, whose family left Earth a century ago, is already sponging, oblivious to anything else. She is a well-endowed woman in excellent condition, as is everyone on this kind of endeavor. Her hair, unbound, hangs to her shoulders. It is almost all white and makes her skin look darker than it is in contrast. Her only other concessions to her fifty standard years are a slight gut and a bit of looseness on her neck and under her arms.

Randi is still watching Ed watch her, as if she enjoys it. She is a rangy young woman of jet-black hair and well defined, though not exaggerated muscles. Her female features seem like the afterthoughts of a god who in making an athlete decided at the last minute to make a woman, too. There is an intriguing hardness about the rest of her, including an untouched scar on her side. But her face, her smile, and her manner are womanly.

Embarrassed at myself for staring, I turn around like Dr. Lotati and finish undressing—applying the cleaning cloth to my body. But I love women too much to resist another look. When I do, both Eloni and Juanita are looking at me. Our eyes meet, we smile and I relax. My feelings as they watch me bathe are hard to describe—would it make sense to say that I felt first forgiven? I feel something of a sense of camaraderie.

Then Eloni reaches with both hands and turns me to the side of the tent. Its drum-tight bulge instantly reminds me of the vacuum, just beyond that millimeter of tough, impervious fabric.

I feel a damp cloth on my back, up and down, hitting every needful spot. When she is done, I return the favor. She sighs just on the edge of audibility. Almost like a purr.

I feel suddenly very good, and useful—should poetry and nature writing fail me completely, I could do this for a living. Well, maybe.

Dr. Lotati turns to crawl into his sleeping bag, and I accidentally get a brief glimpse of injuries he has chosen not to show the rest of us. Gunshot wounds? Before he can seal the side, Juanita touches his shoulder and crawls in with him.

Eloni turns from the wall then and sees Randi and me, not yet in our sleeping bags. She looks down, then looks up again, then crawls into her sleeping bag. I can’t read the expression on her face.

I get into my bag, pull my suit and helmet in with me, and seal the hood behind me. Its flaps will close and hold pressure if there is an accident while I sleep.

“Lights off,” Randi says, and the tent complies. It is utterly, totally dark. There is movement. As my eyes adapt, I glance in her direction, but her sleeping bag is empty. She is probably not sleeping with Eloni, which leaves Ed. I feel a twinge of jealousy, though I know Ed has known the Lotatis for many years, and gone on several expeditions with them.

The exhaustion of this day does not permit sexual regrets, however. It seems like only a moment, and then I awake to light, discussions about the ascent, and the smell of freshly opened breakfast bars. The discussion is between Ed and Emilio, and it concerns who is to go up the wall with Randi, to set the ropes for the rest of us.

“We need to make time,” Dr. Lotati says.

“All the more reason for you to go with Randi. You’re a team.”

“Thank you, friend, but I am sixty-two years old and you are thirty-eight. You and Randi climb well together.” There is a slight hint of humor in Emilio’s voice to suggest to my perhaps oversensitive mind that he knows they do more than climb well together.

“It’s only a kilometer, mate. You’re as good as ever.”

“I’ll second that,” Juanita says.

Dr. Lotati smiles and shakes his head. “The group comes first.”

Randi embraces her father, wordlessly, but I can see her eyes glisten. Then Dr. Lotati reaches over to Ed and they grasp hands.

Something has passed, I realize, and who am I to witness such a passing? More than ever, I feel an ambitious interloper. I look over at Eloni. She is looking at me. Wistfully? I smile back.

We pack quickly and efficiently, filling the soft pressure packs first with the things that can stand vacuum, then the hard ones. When the tent is bare, the last pack is sealed and we take it down to a tenth of an atmosphere. We check each other’s seals and fit. Randi frowns at mine, and has me depressurize to readjust my fit. If the pressure were much lower, I think, my blood would boil. We normally breathe a fifty-fifty oxygen-nitrogen mix at four-tenths atmosphere, so I still have a quarter of Earth normal oxygen partial pressure. I try not to get excited.

Randi treats this like an everyday event. She tugs, pulls, and smoothes all my joint areas. She is utterly clinical about this, but happens to glance up with a wink when she adjusts my leg seams. “It’s all in the family,” her look seems to say.

I find myself slipping as if to an event horizon. Do I want to befriend this woman to pursue fame and fortune on her distant namesake moon, or has my idea for an expedition to the moon become an excuse to be near the woman? I suddenly realize that I am very, very taken by her.

She reseals my suit and I tell it to bring its pressure up again. She has indeed worked wonders, and I am much more comfortable than I was the day before. She apparently likes what she sees, grins, and squeezes my arm, then turns to the business at hand.

The tent finishes taking itself down to near vacuum. When the sides are noticeably softer, we open the main seal, and the tent ripples as the remaining millibar or so of air escapes. We turn our helmet lights on and emerge into the crevasse again.

The wall is suddenly lit with flood-lights—Mike and Karen have seen us emerge. It is one kilometer of gray-banded dirty clathrate, vertical, except for the parts that are more than vertical.

Randi leads; if she falls, she is less weight on the bolts and pitons that hold our ropes.

“This stuff is like soft sandstone,” Ed says. “I can almost push a piton in by hand, here and there.”

“Use more,” Randi says. “Angle down.”

“OK.” He is silent for a while. “There. I suggest we do this before I lose my nerve. Belay on.”

“Climbing,” Randi answers. They proceed upward carefully but steadily, taking turns.

*

I happen to be looking up when it happens. Randi is climbing when her foothold crumbles. She grabs for a line, says, “Damn!” then, “Falling.” Her effort to grab has pushed her out from the wall, and when the rope goes taut, one of the pitons pops out of the wall with a shower of dust and ice. After a brief hesitation, the other two follow, and Ed yells, “Slack!”

Desperately, Randi tries to slow her fall by digging her hands and crampons into the wall beside her, throwing up a wake of dust. The smoothness of the wall helps; it is not completely vertical, and there are no bumps to throw her out.

The next set of pitons catches her rope, and for half a second it looks like it might hold. But before she comes to a complete halt, they pull out too and she starts to slide down again. Now, only Ed’s own precarious hold on the wall stands between them and a five hundred-meter fall. He is furiously trying to hammer in more pitons, but there is little rope left between him and Randi.

They need another secure line. Why, with six other more experienced explorers present, I am the one to think of something is a mystery. Perhaps it has something to do with creativity, or with not having a mind full of the knowledge of things that wouldn’t work.

“Mike, Wojciech. Can you fire a rocket line right into the wall above them? It ought to penetrate that stuff and anchor itself.”

He doesn’t take time to answer me. There is a flash from overhead and an impact ten meters above Ed. The line it carries is much thinner than climbing rope, but drapes down beside them quickly in the vacuum. It continues to play out, draping all the way down to our little camp.

The line between Randi and Ed snaps tight, and his foot and arm come free in a shower of ice. He should hit the release, I think. Better one death than two, but he tries to hold on to the wall. He doesn’t dare let go and reach for the new, untested line, hanging less than a meter away.

It almost works. Randi, caught short, manages to reach her ax and digs into the wall like a desperate fly. Working with her right hand, she sets one piton and then another, hammering them in with her fist.

Above her, the rest of the ice holding Ed begins to give way as he tries to regain his handhold. “Can’t hold, falling!” He flails for the new line as he starts to slip, but it is out of reach.

They, would, I think, be dead on Earth—but Mercury gravity is more forgiving. Working as Ed slides, Randi reaches the new line and yanks hard on it. She yanks hard again—it must not have been firmly set. Another hard pull and she seems satisfied. Ed slides down beside her in a plume of dust and ice, barely in contact with the wall.

Quickly Randi connects the new line to the line that still connects them, slack now, and loops it around the piton she has just set. “Protection in!”

Thirty meters below her, Ed bounces as the line pulls taut and pops the piton out of the wall in another shower of debris. Ed’s weight pulls Randi free of her holds as well.

They both slide another ten meters, but now the slack in the line from the rocket has been taken up. They slide some more as it stretches, then, finally, stop. All told, Randi has fallen about a hundred meters and Ed perhaps fifty.

“Jupiter!” Karen, on the crevasse rim, exclaims. “Randi, Ed, set yourselves if you can. I can see the rocket: it’s wedged itself vertically in the hole it made when it hit the wall, only about ten centimeters from the face. Try to hold tight while we think of something.”

“OK,” Ed says. “But don’t take too long. I think I’m about at the end of my rope about this.”

The laughter, fueled by relief, is perhaps a little too loud for the quality of the pun. Ed quickly starts hammering in additional protection. Randi, however, is simply hanging passively in her harness.

“Randi?” Mike calls.

“Injured. Both arms.” Her voice attempts calm, but I can hear the pain in it.

“Can you climb?” Mike asks.

Randi tries to lift an arm up to her rope and gasps. “Not now.”

“Descending,” Ed says. “I’d like another belay if you can think of something.”

What we think of is setting our remaining line rocket for maximum range and steering it about six meters under the far edge of the crevasse. It slams in hard, burying itself too far in for Karen to see. “Ice,” Mike says, instantly, as a patch of icy regolith loosened by the rocket impact snows down left of the climbers. The upper layers, as we know, are softer. They pull the line from the far edge until it sets hard—ten kilonewtons tension, Mike estimates. Then they let the line drape down to us, and we walk it over to where Ed can reach it.

He connects the lines, and continues down.

Randi tries to descend. We hear the slightest hint of a cry of pain over the radio, then a loud “Damn! Dad, I can’t lift my hands over my shoulders. Both shoulders shot.”

“That’s all right, Randi, I’m coming.” Dr. Lotati turns and looks at me. “Come on, Wojciech. I want your head on that wall.”

Juanita gives me a pat on the rear, and surprisingly, Eloni gives me a silent hug. Inside her visor, her dark eyes are glistening. I think of how frightened the Kenyan student must be, but she has just contributed in the only way she could think of.

“Thanks, team,” I say, and squeeze her hand.

I clip my ascent ratchet on and start climbing. There are no problems and we reach Randi and Ed in half an hour.

Randi is calm. “Right arm. Won’t go above shoulder. Maybe dislocated. Left arm works, sort of. But hurts too much. Might faint. OK as long as I keep my hands down.”

“I’ll take you down, papoose-style,” Ed offers. “Then we’ll ride the elevator up.”

Dr. Lotati touches Randi. “OK?”

“I’ll make it, Dad.”

“Good, Wojciech and I will go up then, and set the anchor,” Dr. Lotati decides. His voice crackles with leadership and confidence. I smile. Everyone, including him, has forgotten about his age. It won’t be obvious on this climb; if anything, I will slow him down.

We replace Ed’s backpack with Randi, tying her to his shoulder harness, and help guide them down. When they are safe below, Dr. Lotati nods to me, and says, “We have to consider everything we put into this surface to be hazardous, no?”

I nod. We are leaning out from a wall almost half a kilometer above a bridge about half a kilometer above a pool of cryogenic nitrogen tri-fluoride, talking about how the various things that hold our ropes to said wall may give way at any time.

“OK. We use four pitons, or bolts, or a combination, on each belay, and arrange the ropes like so.” He demonstrates, creating what looks at first glance to be a cat’s cradle of ropes between carabiners and pitons. “This equalizes forces among the pitons and minimizes the shock if one lets go.”

It takes me a couple of tries to get it right. He finally pats me on the shoulder, and without further ado says, “Climbing.”

“On belay,” I answer, wondering about people who seem to come alive only when staring death in the face. He ascends deliberately, and deceptively fast.

Actually, I keep up, but exhaust myself in the process. Dr. Lotati is only a centimeter or two taller than his daughter, and hardly much heavier. He is wiry strong; occasional rest stops are the only concession he makes to age—and I need them more than he does. We stop where the second line-bearing rocket buried itself in the fragile clathrate, six meters below the crater floor. The ledge is overhung by about a meter, more where the rocket impact dislodged a large hunk of wall.

“Can you stand a short fall?” he asks me. “I think we’ll need several tries to get around that edge.” I’ve never fallen on a belay line before. I want to impress Emilio; my Mirandas, moon and woman, are at stake. But the idea of trying to scramble almost upside down and free-falling six to ten meters, with only a questionable anchor to stop me if I slip, scares the crap out me. If there were any other way…

“Wojciech?”

“Yes.” Then, perhaps because my mind works best in an emergency, or under a deadline, the idea comes to me. “Dr. Lotati—this is fairly soft stuff. You don’t suppose we could just tunnel through it, up to the surface?”

He looks down at me. “Perhaps! I wouldn’t consider desecrating an Earth climb like that, but I think we will be forgiven here. I knew your head would be good for something!” Then he takes an ax from his belt and swings it into the ice overhead. A good sized hunk falls and shatters into tiny chips on my helmet.

“Ice!” He looks at his handiwork, says, “Si,” and swings again, and again, cutting a notch more than a tunnel as it turns out. We are through and up to the crater floor in less than an hour.

There is a round of cheers when we say, “On top!” Mike and Karen wave from the other side of the crevasse—only a hundred meters away. It has taken us two days to go that hundred meters.

I help set the next set of anchors a hundred meters back from the edge, in firm regolith. The rest is ropes, ascenders and pulleys. Mike and Karen send the remaining gear, and themselves, across in an ersatz tram, and help us hoist the rest of the party. Juanita is the last one to emerge from the crevasse and we all cheer, intoxicated with our close call and our final victory. By the time everything is up or over, we have been awake for thirty hours. Dr. Lotati decides to set up camp immediately.

We have four two-person tents in addition to the large one. They can be independent or their entrances can be sealed to connecting ports in the large tent, forming a mini-base looking something like an inflated starfish minus an arm. That way, early risers can let others sleep.

Randi’s left shoulder is bad—a possible separation—and we have at least three days’ march ahead of us to our pickup point. We discuss an evacuation, but she won’t hear of it. Mike and Ed both have field medical training but Mike has more practice, so he is the closest thing to a doctor we have, and he consults with Earth. It turns out that our optical scattering imager is good enough to build up a picture of the injury; Randi’s humerus is not quite in its socket.

Earth recommends evacuation. Randi says no. Dr. Lotati supports her—we are in an age where injuries can be healed if they can be endured, but the opportunities to do something more significant than entertain oneself and collect one’s automation stipend are few and far between.

Randi, Ed told me several nights ago, is Dr. Lotati’s only son. I laughed and asked Ed what that made him. “The gayest man on Mercury,” he answered—and threw such a convincing leer at me that it took me an unsettling second to get the joke. But the humor disguises a poignant situation—a young woman trying to be, for her father, the son he could never have. How much was from her nature, how much was from her love? Or was there a difference? And what of her mother? Randi’s mother was never mentioned by anyone, and the only public biographical info was that Emilio had divorced her when Randi was six and never married again.

Following instructions from the doctors on Earth, Mike resets the shoulder. It takes him two tries. Randi shuts her eyes and gasps—that is all. Then it is in. Painkillers, anti-inflammatory drugs, and reconstructive stimulants we have—she will be sore, but as good as new in a few months. Climbing is out, but she can walk the rest of the way.

Ed and Randi retire together, her arm immobilized to her body with tape.

Juanita decides to sleep with Emilio. Mike and Karen are a given.

Eloni is looking at me with dark pools of eyes and what could be a hopeful smile on her face. I look at the shy graduate student who had given me a hug to send me up a treacherous wall that had just come within the width of an idea of killing two people. I shrug and reach a hand out to her and she comes and sits by me with the widest grin on her face I have ever seen.

“You wish I were Randi, don’t you?” Eloni asks me.

“That’s not your fault.”

Her smile fades. “I almost got us all killed by being too slow. That was my fault.”

There are times when sympathy can do things lust cannot. I have my arms around her in a second. “No one blames you. You’re part of us, now. Time to enjoy it.”

She kind of melts into me and gently pushes me down onto my back on my sleepsack. She has a low, incredibly sexy voice. “That is about as much as I can enjoy. I hope I do not disappoint you.”

Tired as I am, I’m relieved; and confused. “Eloni, I write about the male and female thing, more from reading than experience, I’m afraid. I may sigh, but disappointment would be putting things a bit strong. But I’m curious. Do you believe in abstinence, and if so, can you tell me why?”

No contraception, I speculate? In this day, I find that hard to believe—but she is studying at Jovis Tholis on Mars, I remind myself, in the middle of the New Reformation.

A certain hardness comes over her face. “You want to know? I spoke literal truth. Abstinence has nothing to do with it. I was mutilated so I cannot enjoy what most women can enjoy. So I hike across glaciers and climb mountains instead,” she smiles wryly. “That is how I get high. Try to understand. I am not Kenyan by birth. Kenya is a civilized nation.”

I have it then. Female circumcision. Back on Earth, the villages all have nice premanufactured houses, with bathrooms, electricity, diagnostic comm ports, and regular food deliveries. But here and there, otherwise gentle people protect primitive cultures from “western interference,” and so we still permit this to be done to children.

“How old were you?”

“Ten. They were very thorough. But in a few years, doctors will be able to fix it, I think. Regenerate the tissue that was taken from me. That’s a spin-off from the interstellar project. They needed to solve tissue regeneration to do cold sleep reliably. For now, I must enjoy giving and being enjoyed while I fantasize what it might really be like.”

What can one say? I take her hand and she squeezes it.

“Oh, yes.” Her voice is low and throaty. “They mutilated me, they tried to keep me barefoot and stupid to carry on their primitive culture. They even tried to keep me from school. But they could not shut off my mind. And here I am, yes, here I am where they thought I could never go doing what they thought to keep from me forever. So I am a space person now, part of another tribe.”

Eloni and I are both, I realize, refugees from cultures that do not want who we are. Hers a primitive one, mine too sophisticated to see itself. I only want to hold her, smother her hurt, and bring a smile to her face. I try to kiss her.

She holds me off. “Someday I have to go back there and try to change what the people do to each other there. I cannot be a space person forever. Do you understand?” She buries her face in my shoulder. “For now. Just for now.”

I understand. This is for now—and whatever our feelings for each other now, our destinies lie in different directions. I nod and she is in my arms. Our lips touch again and the future vanishes. “What do you do want me to do?” I ask.

In answer, she releases the seal of my tight suit.

We remove each other’s remaining clothes and slip into my sleep sack. She wriggles against me and we do kiss, and our hands do stroke and caress, and begin to defy the cold dead gray cruelty outside our bubble with yet another act of life.

But there really isn’t very much room and we are both very tired. So, in each other’s arms, we fall asleep, content with a mostly symbolic defiance.

*

The remaining walk toward the center of Chao Meng Fu is two by two, the time filled mostly with conversations that share what we are and what we know, but sometimes with those comfortable silences in which your mind digests what you have learned, playing this way and that with it. There are more crevasses to cross, but we do so expeditiously.

During one of these crossings, I say, “On belay, Dr. Lotati.”

“Climbing. Wojciech, call me Emilio, it’s quicker.”

A small thing, but it suggests to me a future more interesting than correcting undergraduate papers.

Juanita suggests we share a piece of music for our final approach to the central depot. It is by a twentieth-century composer named Alan Hovhaness, a symphony called “City of Light.” She says it is his symphony number twenty-two.

“Twenty-two?” I ask. “Did I hear you right? I know Haydn wrote over a hundred, but that was when they were short and highly formatted. Beethoven wrote only nine. Tchaikovsky, six. I thought they’d pretty much stopped doing symphonies by the twenty-first century.”

Juanita laughed. “We geologists call Hovhaness our patron composer because he actually wrote a symphony about a volcano—and that was number fifty. By the mid-twenty-first century, they were calling him ‘the American Haydn.’ Now let’s just listen.”

As we approach the brilliant peaks of the Chao Meng Fu central crown—great massive round Sun-gilded domes that speak of power and eternity—I am incapable of understanding why I once thought of this expedition as a stunt. I feel like a piece of steel, bent, hammered, bent and hammered again in the fire with greater strength and balance than I have ever known before.

It is a feeling I want to have again, if I must pursue it to the ends of the Solar System. Perhaps I am not in a class with Ed Blake and perhaps any fantasies I had of a match with Randi must remain fantasies, but I have found in my own backyard a delicate and precious union with Eloni and a friend and colleague in Juanita. And I think I have succeeded in my main objective—I have, I think, the friendship and respect of the people who could bring me out to the frontier which calls my spirit.

As I walk I feel the voices of a more broad-shouldered century calling me; Stanley, Peary, Scott, Teddy Roosevelt, and among poets, of course, Kipling. As I trudge, I amuse myself with a doggerel: Perhaps those prudent people—

Who never risk the pit,

Also never know the joy

Of coming out of it.

Not prize material, perhaps, but sums my experience, and in my present state of deranged ecstasy, I am no critic!

And if my words fail you—as they fail many others of highly educated tastes—then listen to the finale of Hovhaness’ symphony. For if you cannot understand after hearing that, you have left the human race. What I learned, in the crossing of Chao Meng Fu, was that such things still can be, in any age, for anyone who will do them.

MNQ/2009.09.20

13,900 Words

From The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Fifteenth Annual Collection

Gardner Dozois, Editor

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