Neal Asher - The Gabble

‘Yeah. Wouldn’t it have been an idea to have mapped some of the other unstable areas before the conjunction?’

‘For what purpose?’ he asks.

‘To find out if there’s any old damage there.’

‘I’m sure such information would be of interest to a planetary geologist, but we are here for the archaeology,’ he says.

He either doesn’t get it or is trying to give me the brush-off.

‘If there’s no damage there that will be because the damage has been repaired. Oh, by the way, you got any other crawlers in this area?’

‘To answer your question: no we do not have any other crawlers in that area.’

‘Then it looks like I’ve found Duren … Tell me, Linser, have you found any evidence, other than the tunnels and the sarcophagi, of their technology?’

‘No, we have not.’

‘Funny that,’ I say, and get out of the crawler.

Duren is inside a large chamber that contains three sarcophagi. He has strung up lights all around and as I walk in through the round door he has his back to me. He is using a cutter to slice open a sarcophagus. There seems nothing scientific about what he is doing. It looks like vandalism. I speak to him over private com.

‘Duren,’ I say.

He turns and holds the business end of the cutting unit in my direction. The disruption field only has a range of a couple of centimetres. I have no intention of getting within that range.

‘You. . what are you doing out here?’ he asks.

It strikes me that he does not sound particularly irrational.

‘I’ve come to see what you are trying to prove,’ I say.

Duren stares at me for a long moment then abruptly turns back to cutting open the sarcophagus. I move round to a position where I can better see what he is doing.

‘You know, it was this place being frozen that led us astray,’ he says. ‘First you think of cryostasis and expect the bodies to be perfect. We found decayed bodies in thick frozen brine and thought it was cryostasis gone wrong. When we found no sign of their technology we then assumed this was some kind of burial.’

‘What is the truth?’ I ask.

He throws back the piece of sarcophagus he has cut away and it crashes to the floor.

‘The truth? The truth is that-’

Oh isn’t melodrama crap. When he is just about to fill me in on ‘the truth’ the biggest fucking earthquake hits. I am on a floor split by a crack a half a metre wide. A haze of broken ice fills the air and huge chunks fall from the ceiling. I hear Duren yelling over the com but cannot make out what he was saying. Something heavy bounces off the helmet of my suit and I realize that I might not actually get out of this alive. I bury my head under my arms and wish I had enough belief in something to pray to it. When the quake is over, some eight minutes later, Duren grabs my arm and hauls me to my feet.

‘We’ll do better in the crawlers,’ he says.

We are in the crawlers when the next quake hits, and the one after that. My crawler ends up on its side with one tread smashed and the ice all around. I don’t get out of it until Duren comes and raps on the screen.

‘Is that it?’ I ask, as I climb out the only door I can get through.

Duren shrugs. ‘Might be a few more aftershocks, but that’s the worst of it I think,’ he says.

I study my surroundings. The tunnel is wrecked: the floor is a metre deep in shattered ice, and rock is exposed in many places. I follow Duren into the chamber.

‘I didn’t need to do it,’ he says, and points.

The sarcophagus next to the one he had cut open has a huge dent in it where a boulder has fallen from the ceiling. There is also a split where the dent is deepest.

‘They’re not particularly strong and yet we’ve never found a broken one, just as we’ve never found a tunnel as badly damaged as that one,’ he says, gesturing towards the tunnel.

‘And what does that mean?’ I ask, not sure I want to know the answer.

‘This is a cold world and here we make things out of frozen water. It never occurred to us that those who lived here would do the same. Frozen, salty water filled with all kinds of impurities. We should have looked closer at those impurities,’ he says.

‘You’re not exactly making yourself clear,’ I say.

He gestures all around us at the shattered ice.

‘Here is their technology. Here is the world in which they lived and will live when they have the energy.’

‘What energy?’ I ask.

‘Geothermal,’ he replies, as if it is obvious.

I only start to get it when the ice melts.

In some way the energy is distributed through the ice very evenly. One minute we are surrounded by shattered ice, the next minute we are up to our waists in water that has an almost glutinous consistency.

‘Here they come,’ says Duren while I wonder if I am going to drown on this insane world.

It takes me a moment to digest what he has said. I turn to the door and see one of the aliens standing there up to its crotch in the water. Standing, it looks like an insectile man with a horse’s skull for a head. I have never been this scared.

‘What. . what’s happening?’ I ask.

‘The repair teams are about their work,’ he says.

‘I thought you said they were dead,’ I say, and though wondering why I am whispering, am unable to stop myself.

‘I never said such a thing. I may have misled you, but I never said they were dead.’

I feel like hitting him, but I don’t dare move. A second alien comes in through the entrance. Both almond-shaped heads turn towards us. I know that if they come at us I will almost certainly shit my pants.

‘But they were decayed,’ I say.

‘It takes energy to prevent decay. Decay is one form of entropy. With little energy to spare you don’t squander it. If you have the technology you reverse entropy when you do have the energy. . You know, it’s easier to store information than to store bodies.’

The two aliens finish studying us then abruptly wade to the sarcophagi. One of them picks up the piece of metal that Duren had cut away and pushes it back into place.

‘You’re still not making yourself clear,’ I say.

Duren turns his head towards me and I can see his expression. He looks as frightened as I feel, though it doesn’t come over in his oh so correct voice.

‘If I wanted to preserve you over a long period of time I would record your thought patterns to crystal and keep a spit of your genetic material to regrow your body. That’s all I’d need.’

The aliens step back and trail their strange appendages in the glutinous water. That water rises up in a glistening wave over the sarcophagi. Through it I can see the damage spontaneously repairing.

Duren goes on, ‘I don’t know how they did it. Their technology is in the water, mostly. I think there is something here of both burial and preservation. They don’t need entire bodies for resurrection. Maybe they’ve kept them so they can repair them from the DNA template, maybe that would use less energy.’

‘If it’s in the water, what are the sarcophagi for?’ I ask.

‘The technology is in the water; self-repairing, regenerating. What they are, their minds and perhaps the DNA templates, are in the sarcophagi. We spent too much time studying the contents of the containers when we should have been studying everything but the contents of the containers.’

The water recedes from the sarcophagi and they are both whole and undamaged. It then proceeds to crawl up the walls and across the ceiling. The two aliens turn and observe us, or so it seems. They have no eyes.

‘What now?’ I ask Duren.

‘I have no idea,’ the scientist replies.

I see that the water on the floor, on the walls, and on the ceiling is dividing into liquid bricks — reforming to how it was before the earthquake. I point this out to Duren.