CAVERNAUTS

by David Bartell

Illustration by Vincent Di Fate

Rationality is one of our most characteristic traits—but not the only one.

Why would anyone voluntarily grope around the dark, frozen bowels of a dead moon 400 million miles from Earth, spending two years away from home, only for standard wages? If you’re not an extreme thrill seeker, I can’t tell you.

I’d hoped I’d never have to answer the question, but no bit shield or sociobypass can give complete privacy. People would just answer for me, in my absence from the net, and my foolishness would be confirmed democratically. That’s what happened while I was bound for Callisto on the Ozark. The WyrdNet was buzzing to know why an expectant father like me would bolt to some distant rock, just as I got the news about the baby.

I couldn’t tell them that another woman needed me on Callisto, so I recited a stock joke: I was going just to escape WyrdNet. The general reaction to that is surprise; people don’t know that you’re offline when you’re deep underground. A typical question: “How can you stand being unplugged so long, especially in a dangerous place?” If you weren’t plugged in, you were in a vacuum, alone and ignorant.

I also never tell people that the most beautiful sight in the Solar System is under Callisto base. The cave we call John’s Glen, formed by crystallized urine refuse, is a sight to behold. Sometimes you just can’t tell the truth.

Bart and I returned to Callisto to help our partner Colleen, and as soon as we touched down, we had another reason to revisit those caves.

“Guys, I’ve got bad news,” the base’s Ops Director Trev told us. He was waiting for us outside the airlock. Not a good sign. Colleen was missing, he told us, somewhere down in the caverns.

“Search and rescue,” Bart shouted. “I’ll assemble our gear.”

“Roger that,” I said.

“It’s been too long, Rick.” Trev gave us the particulars, and Bart and I both ran some quick mental calculations.

“She could possibly be alive,” Bart said.

“You’re joking. Listen, fellows, I know you came out all this way and are bored crazy from the trip, and I’m very sorry, but—”

“Bart’s right,” I said. “If she managed to reach one of the P&A caches, there’s a fair chance she’s okay.”

Bart flexed his knees and hit his fists together, his whole body chomping on a bit. I nodded, and he rushed off to assemble our gear. I lingered with Trev, to hear some details.

“No,” he said.

“Trev, it’s Colleen.” To me, just the mention of the name should have had an effect. In a field of mostly men, we tended to pamper the women, even though they were usually made of stronger stuff then we. It’s not that they needed special treatment; it’s that we needed to give it. And it wasn’t just Colleen. One of the engineers was missing too, some guy named Miller.

Trev’s face fell. He’d grown some gray around the temples, which made him tired-looking. “She wasn’t supposed to go down there again. None of you were. We’re officially closing down.”

I swallowed hard. Bart and I had just returned to Callisto for what we heard was a major discovery, only to learn on the way that the operation was dismantling. Colleen made a last-ditch effort to find her diamonds before the entire outpost was decommissioned.

Trev turned his back, looking at a chart on the wall. It was a map of the Devil’s Throat—a natural cavern system that only a handful of living people had visited. “It’s too dangerous,” he said. “We’re on a skeleton crew as it is.”

“Listen, Trev. This is eating me up. Every second we waste…” I couldn’t help but feel that Colleen’s timing was no accident. She knew we were nearing the Jupiter system when she entered the Throat yesterday. It would be like her to milk the eleventh hour preparing for us.

Trev nodded his head in sympathy, but persisted. “There’s a very good reason why you shouldn’t go down there. She said that if she ever got lost in the caverns, no one should come after her.”

“That’s ridiculous. Of course she knows we’d rescue her.”

“It sounded more like a warning than anything noble. My answer is no.”

My head grew hot. “Come on, Trev!” I stepped near, almost getting in his face. He stepped back. “I don’t know what went wrong, but I swear, I’m going to find out.”

Trev held up a hand to stop me and rubbed his eyes with his fingers across the bridge of his nose. He shook his head. But then he slowly came closer, leaning to my ear so as not to be recorded by the ubiquitous WyrdNet.

“Okay,” he whispered. “Go.”

“Roger that!” I whispered back.

Bart had his metallic silver-skinned pressure suit, a Reynolds, and I had my mustard-yellow-and-black Armstrong. Colleen’s was designer metallic green and magenta, a gift from a manufacturer I was under contract not to name. We helped each other put on the equipment, pants first, tops, then air cyclers, power packs, and spare kits. Then boots, gloves, and finally helmets. Even Bart’s narrow skull became spherical when he put his helmet on, and with his deep acne scars, he looked like the pocked moon we were on.

We checked each other’s systems. I’ve never been anywhere where the need for redundant equipment was as great as the caverns of Callisto. On this trip, Bart was my ultimate redundancy. It felt strange without our third. Colleen was the best damn cavernaut that ever was.

We checked our com channels and synchronized slew-up algorithms. By tradition, we exchanged a silent thumbs-up, the standard signal for dead radio situations. Then a “let’s roll” with wheeling fists.

The airlock filled with cold water melted from a frozen subsurface lake. When it was full, the hatch on the top opened, and Bart started up the short ladder. The liquid airlock served to rinse dust from the suits upon return and to reveal any air leaks in our suits. If there’s a leak, you’ll see bubbles. I followed Bart over the top of the airlock and down the outer ramp. Our suits steamed as they quickly dried.

I threw the switch on a post by the ramp, and the lights came on. There was a brief flicker that most would not have noticed, but Bart and I exchanged looks. Probably corrosion in the switch from the occasional vapor vented from the bowels of this moon. If this was not our last trip down, we’d have replaced the switch immediately.

The Devil’s Throat was now hit by a floodlight—a doctor’s light peering into a patient’s mouth. The throat image was pretty obvious when the cavern was discovered, and the inevitable names given by the exploration team stuck. We were operating inside a dangerous, if not malevolent, body.

Off the narrow ramp and into the Devil’s Throat, we passed a hanging outcropping called the Epiglottis. This was not a true stalactite, but we called it that. We were cavernauts, not geologists. Our job was to get the geologists into the cave, install their gear, and get them out safely. We left the science to them.

“Pressure check,” Bart said over the radio. “I’m at point three one atmospheres and change.”

“Point two niner niner,” I said, miffed that Bart preempted my lead. This was his way of asserting himself. It didn’t matter, really; our search and recovery plan was a good one, and Bart knew that a little breach of protocol was okay once in a while. Bart, Colleen and I were well oiled, and Bart knew just how far he could get under my skin without endangering us. My tendency was to let him, and when I thought about it, I had probably been trying to show Colleen that I was taking the higher ground.

It’s a little complicated, but while I was officially the Team Lead, I deferred to Colleen as the expert and almost always yielded procedural decisions to her. Bart knew this and respected me for it.

“Okay, Chief,” he said. Sensing tension, he’d backed off.

We rounded the Epiglottis, leaving behind the last traces of the holographic, wireless WyrdNet, that “web of synchronicity and reciprocity” named from some Norse weaving myth. Here was blessed solitude, quiet like the muting of a sound system that had blared static at full volume. No more inquiries for status, subtle warnings, transaction updates, confirmations of messages blocked, and other electronic leeches. And no more belated messages from my pregnant Sharron.

A personal theory of mine. Something happened to people when virtual computers were invented. Other than a terminus and the occasional plexer, they had no hardware at all. It became easier for people to accept a system as part of themselves when it was not intrusive. This caused a shift in focus away from the physical body. People became more interested in the spirit, or the mind, or the community. Things like tanning salons and fad diets were replaced by philanthropy on AngelWeb, and infoleaks from Mensanet. Throughput addiction became an acceptable lifestyle. You were old-fashioned if you didn’t flash on a holoweb, and you were antisocial if you unplugged.

Something about the startling information silence down here made me feel we might hear Colleen at any moment, calling for help. She wasn’t dead, not yet. I knew I wasn’t in denial, but that’s the rub, isn’t it?

From the Epiglottis, we had installed a fixed line that branched through the most heavily traveled passages. Originally it was wired for lights, but the acidity of the occasional venting caused the system to fail more often than it was worth. A complicated pattern of weak tides from Jupiter and the other large moons kept some little fires burning at Callisto’s core.

Global positioning and NORAN were also useless down there. Suit telemetry worked, at close range. Everything has to be carried, and everything can fail. During the worst incident, each of us had a light fail at nearly the same time. We had spare lights, but Colleen invented a rule on the spot: Always stay arm’s length from the line. That way you could find it in the dark and follow it out. We also started using chemical Glo-Boyz.

The lights had failed due to corrosion, in particular because the rubber seals were not durable. They were artificial rubber, made on Mars from human fingernails and body oils extracted from laundry. We switched to real rubber, even though it was more expensive.

I ran my glove along the fixed line, and it vibrated up my arm. All the lines were coded. They were made of braided nanotubes, coated with some kind of highly reflective plastic. This coating was ribbed so that if you rubbed it the wrong way, it vibrated in your hand. If you ran your hand along it in the direction of the cavern exit, it did not stick like that. Every ten meters there were waffle ridges on the line, alternating from smooth to rough. Rough sections every hundred meters and finer ridges every ten marked the distance. In total darkness, you could tell where you were and stumble your way out.

There was no signal from Colleen or Miller. Any telemetry in the line would register on my console, so clearly they were not on the main line.

My shadow from Bart’s light bobbed on the brown rock wall that curved away to the right. The line branched at Left Lung, and we headed down Line 1 at a pretty good clip. The other path was a shortcut to a lift we’d made, but it was for lowering equipment, not people. The last glow from the lamp above the Epiglottis vanished, so that the cavern was sculpted only by our lights. The fissure slanted steeply left, but you could lean a hand on the smooth wall and walk more or less upright.

We were both silent. Colleen would sometimes hum old show tunes or talk her batteries to death. Callisto was her rebound relationship. Her marriage had torn her up—I know, because I trained with her in the underwater caves of Florida during that time—and she needed something impossibly difficult to get her mind off her ex. She found it here.

“Where do you think she is?” Bart said.

“Probably in the Bowels.”

We approached the first cache of air with hope. Though we were getting no line or radio telemetry, there was a chance she was there. The bottles appeared in our lights, but there was no one there. The cache was untouched, reducing the chances that Colleen and Miller were alive.

We jumped from Line 1 to Line 2, trying not to think about her. This was a shortcut to the Bowels, which we also called Devil’s Anus to make the geologists think it was really dangerous. We didn’t want to have to rescue them.

I began the climb over the Gallstone. Bart waited until I was safe on top. It wouldn’t do if I fell on top of him; one accident needn’t become two. There wasn’t room on top for both of us, so I continued under Pinched Nerve.

There were many such tight spots, but this one had a nasty dip in the middle of it, so you really had to work it. Those of us who were experienced had techniques. Mine was to make sure I entered the dip with my right elbow. Then I’d swivel my right hip, roll halfway in, scuffle my right leg through, and then roll back to my original attitude. If I was carrying an extra air bottle, I’d strap it on my left side so it wouldn’t get in the way. All the work was with the right side; the left stayed limp.

Previously, two men had died here, Ron and Kanuit. Ron got stuck, and Kanuit was trapped behind him.

“I’m through.”

“Okay,” said Bart. “I’m in.”

While I waited, I recorded an audio log entry on our progress. Bart caught up and we drifted in microgravity down Gallstone on a rope ladder. When I got to the bottom, I held the ladder for Bart.

“Hey, look at that!” he said, aiming his wrist light at the ground.

A glint caught my eye, and there sat an object, covered with ice, but clearly artificial. About the size and shape of a bread loaf. I picked it up.

“Termite.”

A termite was a boring robot, made to cut through soil and ice and send back telemetry. Useful to get around hard objects that were impractical to bore through. They were named termites because actual termites had discovered the largest diamond mines on Earth.

“Looks like this one was digging for diamonds and found water.” Bart took it from me to have a closer look. “Doesn’t look damaged, but it’s out of power. It must have bored all the way through the lake, and then through the bottom.”

It seemed to me too much a coincidence that it was so close to the trail, until I recalled Colleen’s fascination with diamonds. Her helmet faceplate was a slenter of some kind, and her corneas had diamond coatings. I also knew her pain in giving up the rock on her ring finger. I wouldn’t put it past her to place this termite where we would find it, maybe as a sign that she had found what she was looking for.

We continued on the line. Everything looked different from the reverse angle. The shadows made the formations look completely different. In effect, Colleen and Bart and I had memorized the tunnels twice, once as they appeared going down, and once as they appeared going out.

A distant booming sound froze us in our tracks. We felt it through our boots. Though this moon wasn’t quite geologically dead, it was comatose. There weren’t quakes.

“That felt like an explosion.”

I shook my head, exaggerating the motion as one does to be understood in an environment suit. “No one should be blasting while we’re down here.”

“It felt like it came from above.”

“Impossible.”

“I should think.”

There was no more sound or vibration, so we continued on. This was the Esophagus, and it was by far the easiest traverse at this depth. Three thousand meters below the Alchemetrix water and oxygen extractor, several thousand from the geo station, the Esophagus was wide and flat, a stroll through a black gullet of a canyon. Alchemetrix sat on an underground layer of ice, typical of this moon. Unlike most moons out here, Callisto was not well differentiated into geologic layers. It was a frozen stew.

“What say we switch places?”

“No, thanks.” I wondered why Bart had asked. Was he bucking for the lead?

“Okay, Chief. Just thought you might be getting tired.” That rankled me, partly because of the way he said it, but mostly because he said it.

The Esophagus narrowed to a V. We straddled it for about fifty meters, until it ended in a sharply pocked wall. It’s to climb for.

“Still want to go first?” He really sounded like he wanted to lead this time.

I hooked my right arm around the line and found a foothold. “Yes,” I said, not wanting to give up the lead, if only because he kept mentioning it.

I stepped up and found handholds. I’d been on Earth for a while and had built my muscles back up. Callisto’s gravity was as feeble as a baby tugging on your finger.

A baby. For a moment, my thoughts were again whisked away to Sharron. Her baby was due any day, and it was hard to forget that, even under the circumstances. As I lifted my foot, my arm whacked against one of my spare air bottles, and my wrist computer went out.

“Uh-oh.”

“Console?”

“Yeah. The LED, at least.”

There was no way to repair the console down here so I switched to my spare, a semi-integrated computer in my left chest pocket. I clipped it to a ring and turned it on. It blinked, and a shaking-hands icon verified that it had connected to my internal computer via radio. I left the broken console in place—I’ve seen them get whacked a second time and come back to life.

Bart bent backward to look up at me. “Want to call the mission?” Was that a sneer in his voice?

“No.”

“Protocol?” asked Bart. Was he challenging me to breach Colleen’s rules? I got the feeling that Bart was somehow pitting me against her. Without her there, would I follow her protocol or assert my own judgment?

“We lose one more vital, we abort. Or did you have a better idea?”

“No, no. Of course not.” So Bart was not about to deny her, either. Either of us bucking protocol would have implicitly excluded her as part of the team. We were still a team of three; neither of us had given up on her yet.

We scooted on our butts about ten meters to Fatboy’s Lap. Bart cleared his throat and all but insisted on taking the lead. This was about the third time he’d asked to go first, so there had to be a pretty good reason for it. Colleen had always gone along with me being in charge, but now I gathered that Bart had been jealous.

Everyone loved Colleen. Dark auburn hair, widely set eyes that scrunched when she smiled, handsome square chin, strong body proportioned for hard work. She had a hit-and-run friendliness that made you feel briefly cared for, and then you’d have to work hard to get her to notice you were even alive. Like me, Bart got past that, into her inner sanctum. What did he have to prove now?

“What is this with you taking the lead?” I said.

“I’m thinking to check the Sinuses, instead of the Bowels.”

“Is there something about all this that you’re not telling me?”

“You know, Chief, there just might be.”

With that tart remark, I wasn’t about to let him go in front. If he had something to say, he’d damn well better say it. He didn’t, so I led on, striking up a harmless conversation.

“What did you think of The Men and the Mirror ?” I said.

“Is that a movie?”

“No, the book we read on the Ozark.” The Ozark was originally named after some place in the Midwest, but the joke was that the Ozark was an ark from Oz, carrying assorted munchkins, witches, flying monkeys, and tin men like us.

“Was that on textnet?”

“No,” I said. “Dead tree. Your initials were in the back of it.” Paper books will always be on spaceships. There’s nothing worse than amp rationing, and no entertainment for days on end. By tradition, we signed the books we read, like carving our initials in a real tree.

“The Men and the Mirror ? I never read it. That was probably Bill McKinney. He reads a lot and has my initials. What was it about?”

“Nineteen-thirties science-fiction stories by some guy named Rocklynne. Dated, but wild ideas. This space detective chases a brilliant criminal to a new moon or something in each story. They invariably get trapped in some landscape feature or alien artifact. There’s no way out, and they’ll both die, unless they work together.”

“I suppose they get out together, and then the criminal escapes until the next episode.”

“Of course,” I said.

“What made you think of that now?”

“The caves, I guess.”

“Right,” said Bart. “Well, since I’m following you, I must be the good guy.”

So much for conversation. Bart was being competitive, and this was no time for that.

I hesitated. For a breath or two I could have sworn I smelled something funny. “Like licking an envelope,” I told Bart.

“I’ve never licked an envelope.”

“Wedding invitations,” I explained, cringing. We never did officially tie the knot.

“Does it taste like glue?”

“I guess so. Any glue in these suits?”

“Maybe in the lamination.”

The smell did not return, so we marched on, my thoughts wandering to the wedding. Sharron had wanted a picture-perfect event, and I went along with it. Imagine seeing your veiled bride approaching you at the altar during rehearsal—the fifth rehearsal—and you’re growing suspicious with her every step. Something is wrong. Your best man leans over and whispers, “She hired a Hollywood bride.” The veil is lifted at the proper moment, and you see your fiancé’s “stunt double.”

A Hollywood bride is a standin, just for show. Brides hire them when they are insecure with their looks or want a trophy version of themselves to appear in the wedding photos. I loved Sharron, but her neurosis got me spooked, and I called a halt to the wedding. We were already shacked up, so I didn’t have anything to lose.

We slid down Nixon’s Nose. The left line went up some vertical pipes called the Sinuses that led straight up to the Throat. The line to the right led to the labyrinth we called the Bowels. We reached the entrance to the Bowels and paused by the broad opening for a map check. We didn’t need a map under normal circumstances, but when your telemetric breadcrumbs are malfing, it could save your life.

“We follow the main into the Bowels. We come back through Cats and Dogs, swinging by the Sinus, in case they tried to get out that way.”

I expected an argument, but he said, “Roger that.”

Bart took the oxygen sensor from his side pocket. “I’m going to check you for leaks.” He was thinking of the glue I’d smelled. It was possible that some contaminant was leaking into the rebreather. He ran the probe carefully around the Opack and my seals—neck, wrists, boots, hoses. Then a once-over of the whole suit. I didn’t have a fartometer, or we’d have used that. (You break a vial of noxious gas inside your suit, and the coating on the outside of the pressure suit turns blue at the site of any leaks. The fartometer was based on those UV indicator creams that turn your skin blue when it starts to sunburn.)

“All good.”

We checked the breadcrumbs. The breadcrumbs were coded magnetic buttons built onto the main lines or snapped onto secondary lines. They worked independently of the active telemetry. When you passed near them, your console recorded your position, and the crumbs recorded your passage. It wasn’t a very good system, but it was the best one that would work. The breadcrumbs didn’t need power—they were just what they sounded like—markers with unique signatures. The consoles did all the work, and they were easier to maintain. Unless they were down, like mine.

The breadcrumbs showed that Colleen and Miller, the engineer, had gone down this way yesterday, but had not come up.

We spooled out to a precipice for a look. Our lights shone across toward the cliff, revealing only the charcoal-shaded wall beyond. Sometimes if you covered your lights you could see a faint orange glow from down below. It always faded a few seconds after the lights were doused. A geologist thought they came from fluorescing diamonds. We doused, looking for any lights giving away someone’s position. We never turn lights off. The more times you switch them on and off, the more likely the switch is to fail and stay off forever. We saw no lights.

We returned to the main line, Bart winding his jump line onto the spool by hand. Since the early days of space flight, there had been many attempts to make self-winding tethers. They all jam up pretty much every time.

We continued toward the enormous room known as Cats and Dogs. This mess of a boulder field just didn’t lend itself to the body motif. So “Cats and Dogs.” Hundreds of roughly rectangular boulders stood scattered on the floor like miniature skyscrapers that had been knocked over by Godzilla. The main ran through the middle, to an edge, and then over a scramble to the base of the Sinuses.

A beep and a flash of my readout stopped my feet and jump-started my heart. “Telemetry?” All I got was the alert, not the data.

“I read it!” Bart said. “It’s a suit transponder!”

“Colleen?”

“Can’t tell. It’s dropping packets. But it’s moving! Colleen, is that you?”

No answer.

“I’ve got a fix.” Bart moved around me.

“Lead the way,” I said, though he had already started. If Bart was that pegged about it, maybe the best thing was to give him some slack.

He raked his primary light around and checked the reflective lines that stretched and sagged into the gloom. He led us past the jumble of Cats and Dogs and onto a pitted area that tilted steeply to the right. As I followed, I could see him checking his heads-up display. “She’s making a beeline for the air cache at Anklebone.”

“Are you sure it’s her?”

“No, but whoever it is, is sucking CO2.”

“I see her!” I cried, shining my light across a boulder field. “Near the cache!”

In microgravity, we could bound over this rock pile, but if you get overconfident, you can get stuck or wreck your equipment. We saw a suited figure moving erratically at the edge of our lights.

“Hurry—she needs help!”

We watched in horror as the figure began pulling at her gloves, as if to take them off. Quickly giving that up, she fell to her knees and struggled with her helmet release.

“Don’t do that!” we both shouted into our helmet mikes.

Forfeiting caution, Bart jumped onto a boulder and then another. I followed, leaping from rock to rock, trying to watch our comrade at the same time. Our lights bounced about madly. Surely Colleen would see them and sit calmly until we caught up.

Instead she yanked the collar release all the way left and pulled the helmet off. She fell behind a rock. Bart was hopping and swearing, and I could not keep up.

Bart stooped over. “It’s not her,” he said. “It’s Miller.”

I rounded the boulder to see Miller twitch and then stop, his helmet lying on the ground next to him.

I had a flashback to an image from my cave diving with Colleen. There were a couple of curious accidents where some guys, with plenty of air, had gotten lost and panicked, probably when their lights gave out. They’d swum into some muddy corner and torn off all their scuba gear, as if it was the equipment that was killing them. One of the victims was nearly naked.

“He’s dead,” Bart said, checking the engineer’s console.

“Look, his light is still working. All he had to do was make it to the cache—it’s right over there.”

“He never trained like we did. Once he ran out of air, he lost it.”

Leaving Miller, we checked the cache. Untouched. My heart was sinking deeper into this place, and for the first time, Callisto felt wretched to me. This was the second untouched air cache. The chances of Colleen being alive were decreasing.

“Miller wouldn’t go anywhere without Colleen,” I said. “Something happened to her, and he left her to get help.”

“Let’s find her. Mind if I lead?”

“Be my guest,” I said. At the moment, his hope was greater than mine.

He took off, not in the direction Miller had come from, but along a waffled wall called Six Pack.

“Bart, don’t you think it’s time to clear the air?”

“Okay,” he said. “You first. Have you ever slept with her?”

“Of course not!”

“I know, you’re a happily married man,” he said, knowing full well I wasn’t technically married. “But admit it, you did have a little thing going.”

Son of a bitch. Why the hell was he distracting us? The best thing to do was to roll with it. “I admit,” I said, “that we flirted some. The truth is, I think she saw me as safe, because I wasn’t chasing her.”

“You never did it.”

“Certainly not. What about you? On Mars, maybe?”

“I wish.”

“Oh, really?”

“Never,” he said. “At least I’m not so secretive about it. Hell, I even joined a sculpture club, just to get close to her. That was Philadelphia, not Mars. Next to caving, sculpting is the most consuming thing she does.”

“And here I thought you had a fling with her.”

We laughed like net spuds drinking fruit beer and lamenting a girl neither had won. It drew us closer, except that with heavy suits, in the dark, and in a vacuum, we were really very far apart.

Bart stopped. He was shining his plasma onto the far wall, over the boulder field. “I thought I saw something shiny,” he said, sweeping the light in a switchback pattern. The high wall leered over us with a prow like the nose of an Easter Island stone god.

“Shiny like what?” I was thinking diamonds.

Theory has it that the core of Jupiter is a moon-sized diamond, and that an ancient meteor smashed some fragments loose. A diamond ring formed around Jupiter, the shards colliding and breaking each other up. In an atmosphere, the surfaces of diamonds bond with gas molecules, capping them off. But in a vacuum, the surfaces had nothing to bond to, except when they bumped into each other. Slowly turning diamond shards recrystallized, bit by bit, until they looked like flat, spiraling snowflakes the size of dinner plates. Or so say the computers.

Something changed, and the diamond necklace unclasped, sliding to the outer moons. Great barbed diamonds spun like whirlpools, snowing onto Callisto, to be there entombed for millions of years. The whole theory could be proven by finding diamonds that showed traces of the snowflake structure. Then we’d learn about Jupiter’s inner structure. Callisto would be the easiest place to find them, since its minerals have not settled.

I wrote a poem about it. The Great Red Spot was a bleeding wound where Jupiter’s treasure was cut from his heart. Callisto stole Jupiter’s diamond necklace before he could reclaim it. She swallowed it, then spurned the old boy, turning her back forever. That’s why her orbit is locked—to avoid his gaze.

Romance aside, these theoretical diamonds would be hot items. Nanomite and Alchemetrix long ago perfected the technique of manufacturing diamond and nanotube structures, using gas solvents to intercalate the molecular planes into any shape. Colleen called such diamonds slenters, after some old term for fake jewels made from Coke bottles. But on paper, the space elevator fell like the Tower of Babel. The carbon nanotubes couldn’t be woven strong enough.

Enter Schwarzites, nanostructures with negatively curved surfaces. Where nanotubes made of carbon-60 were built of hexagons, the theoretical Schwarzites could also have some heptagons and pentagons interlinked. These made the structures much stronger, breaking up the symmetry that invited clean cleavage. It also caused the surfaces to curve themselves into pretty little beads. Among the applications of such knotted lattices were molecular chain links, woven together with traditional nanotubes. This type of “diamond necklace” could loop from the Earth to a space station, forming a viable space elevator.

No one could make Schwarzites, but they could occur naturally, possibly as a result of the Jupiter diamond robbery, with a fair chance that some were stashed on Callisto. That’s what Colleen was after.

I was all for it, but someone else had to figure out how to make it all work. My role was to find the raw materials and bring them home without too many people getting killed.

“There it is!” Bart said. He was holding his beam fixed on the nearer wall.

I added my light to his. From a crack in the ceiling, a trickle of something dark and shiny broadened, following paths of least resistance, all leading down. On a vertical slab was the area Bart focused on—a slick of liquid, some evaporating off, some refreezing, and some tiptoeing through those sleeping cats and lazy dogs.

“Water,” said Bart. “The water and oxygen plant is not far from here. This is melt-off.”

“It’s too cold to melt.” Then a thought struck me. “Colleen said that if anything happened to her, no one should come after her. I thought she was just looking out for us, but what if there was some other reason for the warning?”

Bart flailed his arm at a rock, thought better of it, and slapped his thigh instead. “Great!” he said. “Just great. A warning like that, and you don’t even think to tell me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Damn it!” He hit his leg again and turned to face me. His helmet light shone directly in my eyes so it hurt. “You should have told me! We’re in serious trouble, Chief.”

He looked around again, shining his light first down the tunnel, then up at the dripping wall again. “Come on!” he said, taking off down the tunnel to the Bowels.

“Line!” I reminded him, but he wasn’t slowing down. I hastily looped a jump line to the main and checked the orientation to make sure it wasn’t spooled tails out. The ridges could lead us the wrong way if it was backwards.

Bart was a good way off. I was winded, and I heard Bart’s heavy breathing too. This sort of situation can quickly crumble into chaos, without anyone knowing why.

“Bart,” I said. “Take it easy.”

“Hurry up!” He stopped to wait for me. “Okay. Now let’s get moving.”

“Just a minute,” I said. “Tell me where we’re going, and what this is about.”

“Sharron is expecting any day now, isn’t she?” he said.

“Cut the crap, Bart.”

“You think she’s gonna break water, just stick around here!” With that, he was off again.

Water breaking? So the dripping water on the walls above was just a beginning. The trickles were fed by a source that could only be the lake above. There was a hell of a lot that Bart knew that I didn’t.

“Bart!” I shouted. A waste of air. The radio would clip the volume anyway. Bart said something, but I couldn’t make it out. Com failure or just my heavy breathing? I shouted again, and stopped, to listen in relative silence.

“Hurry…” Words again, mixed with static.

“Bart, I’ve got a com problem. Copy, Bart. Com problem, over.” I degraded to push-to-talk, remembering the resin smell from a while ago. At a starting mix of 100 percent oxygen, an exposed wire would be a fire hazard.

The radio was dead. Through my helmet, I thought I heard sounds, though. Sounds like rushing water, or maybe steam evaporating violently, somewhere far away. Through it all, an imagined voice, like Colleen whispering, “Where are you guys?” as though she was trying to keep me and Bart together just a little longer.

A crackle, and then: “Copy, com problem, over. You there, Chief?”

“I’m here, over.” I walked on until I saw Bart’s light. He was waiting for me. “No more rushing ahead.”

“Roger that.”

“Now tell me exactly what’s going on, before we lose radio completely. The lake is melting above us, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” he said, as we continued down together. There was still an edge to his voice, but he was being dutiful. “I’m guessing the bottom is still frozen, but the warmth is breaking through.”

“Mind telling me about that?”

“It’s supposed to be a secret, and Colleen thought that if you knew, you’d feel obligated to put a stop to it.”

“So this is a scheme to find her diamonds.”

“Of course,” said Bart. “Someone got the idea that if there were some frozen in the lakes, you could melt the ice, and let them sink to the bottom.”

“Good God,” I said. “The whole outpost is practically vacated, so she vented the excess reactor therms into the lake.”

“She or her engineer friends.”

“I knew nothing of all this.”

“Well, I’m sorry,” Bart said.

“And you didn’t think it was important to tell me when we set out to find her?”

No answer.

“Copy?” I insisted.

“I hear you.”

We were at the bottom of the cavern system, near the Sinuses. From there, a nearly vertical shaft led to a broad tunnel, and then back to the Throat—a shortcut for lowering equipment. The ground flattened onto the bowl that sat at the deepest part of the Sinuses.

As we neared the bottom, our lights illuminated something that shouldn’t have been there. It was wide, very tall, and dark. We probed it with our beams.

A peculiar apparatus had been constructed in my absence, a huge lattice of wide metal bands, sitting upright on heavy legs at the nadir of the cavern. It was a broad cage, the size of a Martian sand blower.

“What the hell is that?” I said, but I don’t think Bart heard me. Then I noticed an object inside the cage, resting at the bottom. It was obscured by some of the bars.

“What is it?”

This time he heard me, and he stopped cold. “It’s her.”

I didn’t understand, but looked to where his beam was pointed, at the object in the bottom of the structure.

It was Colleen, lying motionless, trapped in the cage. Her lights and instruments were dark, and I realized we’d picked up no telemetry. The metallic green and purple of her suit glittered, and I thought of how it used to shimmer in front of me as my light shone on her treading form.

She was dead, and it didn’t seem right that she glittered like that. My head grew hot and light, and my stomach hardened as if I’d swallowed a potato whole. Colleen’s faceplate was frosted on the inside, but her face was outlined through the fog. A rivulet of steaming water was collecting directly under her.

“What the hell did Miller do to her?” I said.

“I don’t think he did anything.”

“Well, who the hell put her in this cage?”

“Chief, there’s an opening right here.” He pulled at a crossbar, and a large gate opened. “See? The top’s open too. No one locked her up.”

“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.

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.

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.

The ceiling was curving around and gently upward, so it seemed I was rounding the obstruction. I was elated, and in a few minutes, I was on my belly, still pulling myself along with the screwdriver. I was afraid to stand up, because if something happened, I’d want to be able to dig in quickly.

I became aware of my lights—the water had cleared considerably, and I played my main around. I thought I saw the cable dimly reflected, and I made in that direction. It was the upper part of the cable, shining in my light, angling from somewhere inside the huge obstruction up to what had to be the exit tunnel of Devil’s Throat. Safety be damned, I stood up and took off for the cable.

Immediately I was jerked off my feet, and I fell on my face. Something had caught. I reflexively twirled a hooked hand in a figure eight, but there was no one to signal. My jump line had played out and caught. I ripped it from its carabiner and threw it away. Standing, I could barely get any traction, but I leaned forward and pounded my feet.

My legs hurt, and mud was swirling into the water. I drove on until I could see the cable gleaming just ahead. My gloves seized it like ravenous jaws, and my screwdriver fell away. I pulled myself up, hand over hand through the numbing water.

I heard more sounds of cracking and roaring. A strong upwelling hit me, yanking the cable from my grip. I could only guess what caused it—perhaps some gigantic collapse in the Sinuses was coughing whole galleries of water upward.

I had lost my last umbilical, surrendering at last to the elements I had so methodically conquered. Tumbling, I lost all sense of direction, struggling to keep my limbs from twisting behind me. My air pack was slipping, and I strangled the straps against my chest.

The sound of an otherworldly surf crashing onto a rocky shore filled my helmet, and I imagined that a wave of static was also awakening my radio. I did crash, not onto rock, but onto a sheet of surging current that slapped me in what felt like a horizontal direction.

Suddenly, my faceplate hit something hard. I was on my stomach, on the floor of a tunnel. I could see the glint of what might be a fixed line to one side.

The rush of water subsided and fell back, dragging me with it. I grappled and kicked and managed to brace my legs against a protrusion. A terrible choking sound like the gulp of a leviathan swallowing the sea filled the cavern, and hissing vapor seemed to flee the world as the remnants of the lake fell into the bowels of Callisto.

No, not bowels. A womb.

It was now dry and pitch black, except for one bright bolt ahead. It was an illuminated line, which meant that I had to be just below the Devil’s Throat—and only a couple of hundred yards from warmth and air and life. As I got up and made for the line, I found that my radio had indeed awoken. I was within range of the deep antenna.

The signal strengthened, and the data broadened as the ribbed line vibrated through my fingers, singing to me of the way out. I filtered all the sounds and sights arriving from the WyrdNet, looking for something very specific. When you’re looking for a needle in a haystack, it’s nearly impossible to find. But when you’re looking for a straw in a stack of needles, it’s a lot easier. Whatever doesn’t poke at you to buy something, provide personal data, sign a contract, be your “friend”—that’s the message you’re looking for.

Got it!

Sharron’s blessed face appeared on my heads-up display. I wanted nothing more than to reach through millions of miles of WyrdNet and touch it. She smiled, and her latent voice said, “It’s a boy.” That announcement, carried by excited photons, would soon ripple past Saturn and beyond, in all directions, chasing the very edge of space itself. The universe had just changed, ever so slightly, but forever.

“Have you picked out a name?” she said.

“Yes,” I answered. I was gasping, shivering, coughing, and crying. “Roger That.”

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