Питер Уоттс - The Freeze-Frame Revolution

ELON MORALES C4B

I knew that name. I’d just forgotten that I had. Good ol’ Elon Morales.

Tarantula Boy.

Now I knew where he was.

Crypt 4B. I brought my BUD back up and pinged it: way back by the dorsal mass bungees, fifteen kliks aft. I didn’t think I’d ever bunked down there, never even visited the place since training. I brought up the manifest.

No Elon Morales in C4B.

I widened the search: Elon Morales, if you are sleeping anywhere on board, please have your coffin call Reception.

Nothing.

Maybe Park spelled his name wrong. Not that I was in any position to j udge; I’d forgotten the damn thing entirely.

Elan Eylon Eilon Moralez Morrales Maroles.

Nothing.

Had I just imagined the guy? Had I misremembered when he said we were both shipping out on Eri ?

Ancient history archives. All Diasporans, everywhere. Elon old buddy? Hello?

No answer.

Well, fuck.

Still, there he was: Elon Morales. There it was: C4B.

I called a roach.

Something was wrong with the cryp t.

I couldn’t put my finger on it at first. The lights rose as I entered, just as they were supposed to. Sarcophagi slumbered in their squashed honeycomb berths to either side, floor to ceiling; the icons winking on their headboards suggested nothing out of the ordinary. The crane hung motionless on its overhead rail, deader than my crewmates until some wake-up call—fifty years from now, or fifty thousand—brought it back to life. There was the raised, rectangular pedestal between the rows—the opposite of an autopsy table, a great socket into wh ich the coffins of the Born Again could be plugged for resurrection. Those stupid arches along the length of the chamber, common to every crypt in the fleet: of no obvious structural value, but someone at the dawn of time had decided that resurrecting the undead warranted some degree of—reverence, I guess. Someone thought the evocation of ancient cathedrals would do the trick.

The weird thing is, it works. Down in the crypt—any crypt—I’ve never heard anyone speak above a hush.

But that wasn’t it either.

I wandered down the aisle, meatsicles stacked to either side. A hint of glycerin and hydrogen sulfide hung in the air, perhaps the faintest whiff of meat gone bad; maybe another ’spore, died in stasis to rot away between stars. Maybe my imagination.

Maybe Elon.

The far end of the chamber resolved ahead of me: a wall of amber resin, the usual translucent, semi-elastic surface concealing the raw basalt behind. I’d never been able to decide whether the stuff had been extruded for structural reasons or merely aesthetic ones.

I put my hand against it. It gave a little, like hard rubber.

I looked back the way I’d come: up past the frozen produce, the dormant crane and its overhead gantry; past the medie val arches and the resurrection pedestal to the hatch in the far bulkhead.

It seemed too distinct somehow, that hatch. All the crypts in which I’d ever slept away the ages had seemed endless when I came back from the grave. Their reaches vanished in the fog of some real or imagined distance. They went on forever.

Too small , I thought.

“Pardon?” Chimp asked from nowhere. From everywhere.

“Nothing. Forget it.” I hadn’t realized that I’d spoken aloud. I wondered how often I did that.

I wondered why it mattered, all of a sudden.

“What’s on the other side of this wall?”

“Just rock,” Chimp replied.

It was less than five hundred meters to the nearest Cache. Barely worth taking a roach. I took one anyway; not just for the sav ed time, but for the extra mass I’d be lugging back. Some of those tiny shaped charges Ghora had used to survey Eriophora ’s unmapped extremities. A seismic integrator—just a scroll of smart plastic, really—to read the echoes. A cutting torch with adjustable focal length and steadicam mount: that was the thing that really weighed.

The Chimp said nothing as I unfurled the integrator and pasted it to the bulkhead. He said nothing as I slapped three charges onto the resin around it; nothing as they detonated, as the integrator compiled the shockwaves and rendered the outlines of some greater unmapped space on its display.

The Chimp did not speak at all until I brought out the torch. “Sunday, I’m not sure this is a good idea.”

I tightened the harness. Set the focus. “Really. Some vital circuitry behind this bulkhead, maybe? Some trunk line I might take out?”

“I don’t know,” he said. And then, surprisingly: “I don’t know what might be there.”

“You don’t know.” I plugged into a nearby power socket. “You don’t find that odd?”

“I do.”

I felt a little sick for some reason. I swallowed it back, hefted the torch.

“Let’s find out,” I said.

The laser cut in with a hum and a snap. The resin split like an opening wound: cauterized, smoking, the polymer blackened and recoiled like something living. The Chimp was talking but I didn’t care, I wasn’t l istening. The skin surrendered in an instant; the stuff behind resisted, stubborn oily gray, grudging cherry-red, a globule of molten white—finally—that beaded and broke and burned its own scar down the face of the bulkhead. I cranked the current, inched the beam up, up, pulled to the left. The stench of burning hair stung the back of my throat; rock and steel cracked and hissed and carved molten rivulets down the wall while the Chimp nattered on about Risk and Expected Payoff and the Virtues of Caution. Fuck you, Chimp, I thought or said or shouted as I pulled the torch across, down, you may not know what’s on the other side of this goddamn wall but I think I do , and I must have said at least some of that aloud because the Chimp fell silent then, the Chimp backed off and contented himself with watching me cut, and burn, and shout in triumph when that big slab of bulkhead finally gave way and slammed down onto the deck like an anchor, like some slain fucking dragon, its spilled viscera red-hot and steaming. It took a few moments before they cooled, for the fog to lift and the glint of all those colossal dark crystals beyond to shine through the hole I’d cut.

If only Ghora could see this , I though t, because I knew he’d be so proud.

I’d rediscovered Easter Island.

“Well,” I said.

The lights had come on when I’d breached the wall, presumably some autonomic reflex beyond Chimp’s conscious control. The backups squatted in orderly rows, chunky effigies of plumbing and circuitry receding beneath a dim vault of columns and arches. Some were smaller than the palm of my hand; others towered beyond reach of the light, vanished into mist and darkness like crystal mountains. Here and there I saw something familiar—the corrugated sheet of a countercurrent exchanger, a roach’s drive train grown twice life-sized—but most of those sculptures were abstract shapes to me.

“Been wondering where these got off to.”

The Chimp said n othing.

“Is this the lot?” Because a walled-off piece of crypt didn’t seem big enough to hold them all.

“I don’t know,” the Chimp said.

“You don’t know. You put them here.”

“I don’t know that either.”

“You’re saying one of us did it? Maybe Kai or Ellin set the alarm to wake them up a terasec early so they could lug everything over here for, what—a scavenger hunt?”

“It was most likely me,” he admitted. “I don’t remember doing it.”

“You don’t remember.”