Gregory Feeley - On the Ice Islands

Illustration by Alan Giana

None of them knew the color of the sky. The terrible dispossessed children, living in a universe of corridors and chambers, regarded the screens of wheeling stars with the uncomprehending indifference they might have accorded a history program from Earth; while their quarry, hunted through tangles of conduit and wallboarded spaces they could not clearly remember, dreamed of empyrean blue and open air that they would never see again. The youthful elect, escaped from the decaying carcass of the Centaur in their gleaming ceramic vessels, looked down upon Neptune’s turbid troposphere and imagined its methane clouds seen from beneath, an imagined zone where their floating habitats could bob free of the killer winds yet see them swirling above: the miracle of weather, illuminated by faint sunlight like the smoke-dimmed windows of cathedral stained glass.

Yarrow woke in a panic, thrashing in sweat-slicked sheets that twined about her. Her skins began to breathe more easily as soon as she kicked them free, but her heart continued to pound in the darkness, which she finally banished with a word. Sitting up in the reassuring half-light, Yarrow listened to the fading sounds of struggle, which seemed to recede beyond the new wallboard partitions. A sharp pain stabbed behind her left eye, unmistakable evidence that her vision was not simply a dream.

Sleep was no longer a possibility, and Yarrow pulled her orange jumper from the wall. Regulations decreed that workers wear their clensuit skins at all times and be able to shuck off any additional garments in five seconds, which left little room for fashion. Unwilling to display her indifferent physique among colleagues, Yarrow wore a pocketed singlesuit like a preoccupied lab worker.

The empty crawlspace—wide enough for two people to squeeze past each other—was illuminated every two meters with pairs of facing glow-strips that banished shadows. Yarrow still enjoyed the luxury of ample lighting, enough that the cramped quarters rarely bothered her.

The commode was the size of a closet, which is why workers were encouraged to use the sloptubes in their rooms. Up before her shift, Yarrow was able to get in after only a minute’s wait, a bargain. Glancing at the brightly lit mirror, she considered getting out her comb, then decided to let the next user in. She opened the hatch and floated out, nodding at Ling who (she suspected) would rather die than slip the funnel of the sloptube into her skins.

Yarrow lingered over breakfast, her last meal in a space large enough to seat a crowded six. She sat with the window on her left, her fellow diners overhead and to the right. The empty seat beside her seemed, at that moment, more attractive than axial orientation with her companions, who were deep in uninteresting conversation.

“But only below four hundred bars,” said Chin, one of the engineers. “Get above that and conductivity changes entirely.”

“A sufficiently powerful signal will penetrate both levels,” said Zhou calmly. He stirred the bottom of his bowl and raised a mouthful carefully to his lips. Eating rice with chopsticks was permissible in the Lotus if you let no grains escape.

“Not with that turbulence,” replied Chin.

“The proper wavelength—”

Yarrow had no interest in conditions at the planet’s core, a sullen coal that fed the currents and winds of the world’s layered atmosphere but possessed no true energies. She had not spent her life sailing to Neptune in order to study dead magma.

“Any word from the Ship?” asked Chang. There were half a dozen vessels now deployed through greater Neptune, but the Centaur would never lose its singularity for those who had come out on it.

Tsujimoto scowled. “They just announced that their transmitters would be down for the next two hours. Don’t bother running to check the morning feed.”

Chin pulled a long face, but the others appeared unconcerned. Yarrow, who had no interest in communicating with the Centaur, did not even trouble to react. Hot tea rose in her bulb, which she lifted from the table with a click.

“Up and out, Yarrow?” asked Zhou companionably.

“Ho,” she allowed, without enthusiasm. “In twenty-five minutes.”

Her messmates exchanged smiles. Romantic liaisons during the four-day tour at the Teardrop were a favorite theme, but no one could imagine one here.

“Is Castor up yet?” Chin asked abruptly. Both Zhou and Tsujimoto glanced at their wristbands to calculate whether the pod had swung out from behind Neptune, and so would be available for direct communication. Taking her bulb with her, Yarrow kicked out of the room and down the Lotus ’s long axis, through the narrow tube that separated the life-support module from the docking bay, and into the lock where the duster waited.

George was running a needless systems check when Yarrow poked her head through the seal. He was already in his clensuit; had probably got in and suited up early in order to avoid having to engage in the delicate business of hooking up with Yarrow present. His clensuit, still partway open, revealed his favorite skins, mottled yellow on black in a pattern that he once explained was copied from the terrestrial gila monster. Yarrow had never asked what that meant.

“Everything all right?” she asked blandly.

Since sarcasm was not evident in her tone, he detected none. “Looks good,” he answered, glancing up at her. Still halfway through the seal, Yarrow unsnapped her kit and stuck it to her seat, then began to wriggle out of her jumper. If peeling off a garment to reveal undecorated skins possessed erotic connotations for George, he at least wouldn’t see most of it.

In fact George kept his eyes firmly on the systems displays as Yarrow pushed her way into the cramped cabin, lifted the clensuit that lay in her seat like a desiccated spaceman, and pulled it on, unself-consciously threading its plumbing through her skins. The clock showed six minutes to pushoff, plenty of time by prevailing standards but perhaps not by those of George’s day.

“Ready?” she asked him, a bit maliciously.

At this he glanced sideways at her, and Yarrow noticed the dark bags under his eyes, which always seemed especially lurid when he was under stress. When she’d first met him she had vaguely imagined that the bags were the product of piloting in Earthspace—accelerational stress, living on planets—but later someone told her that the bruised capillaries Chills sported were hibernation damage. Yarrow didn’t understand how the fine structures of the brain and liver could survive eighteen years of cold storage if such grosser injuries had been sustained subcutaneously, but she had never bothered to ask. She remembered from her days as a lab assistant on the Centaur the frozen samples tended to spoil once thawed, and that, as far as she was concerned, was what had happened to George.

“I’m composing myself,” he replied mildly, returning his gaze forward and closing his eyes.

Earthspacers also tended to meditate before piloting missions, even those that were wholly automated. This meditation may have been justified, although Yarrow had her doubts: a sterile transit between points in a vacuum required scant spiritual reserves. But George had traveled from Earthspace through vacuum and lost his soul in the process, so perhaps he was right to accord the act respect.

Yarrow spent the remaining minutes looking about the cabin, which would be her home for four days. Most of the walls were devoted to screen, which George would convert to Views in order to create the illusion (compelling for him alone) of spaciousness; but there were fittings protruding at odd locations, and Yarrow proceeded to familiarize herself with them. The screen before her might show a bank of displays or sunrise on Mercury, but Yarrow’s toothbrush holder would always be at her right hand.