Майкл Суэнвик - Tales of Old Earth [A collection of short-stories]

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“The marble index of a mind forever. Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone. Wordsworth.”

“What?”

“Jupiter’s magnetosphere is the largest thing in the solar system. If the human eye could see it, it would appear two and a half times wider in the sky than the sun does.”

“I knew that,” she said, irrationally annoyed.

“Quotation is. Easy. Speech is. Not.”

“Don’t speak, then.”

“Trying. To communicate!”

She shrugged. “So go ahead—communicate.”

Silence. Then, “What does. This. Sound like?”

“What does what sound like?”

“Io is a sulfur-rich, iron-cored moon in a circular orbit around Jupiter. What does this. Sound like? Tidal forces from Jupiter and Ganymede pull and squeeze Io sufficiently to melt Tartarus, its subsurface sulfur ocean. Tartarus vents its excess energy with sulfur and sulfur dioxide volcanoes. What does. This sound like? Io’s metallic core generates a magnetic field which punches a hole in Jupiter’s magnetosphere, and also creates a high-energy ion flux tube connecting its own poles with the north and south poles of Jupiter. What. Does this sound like? Io sweeps up and absorbs all the electrons in the million-volt range. Its volcanoes pump out sulfur dioxide; its magnetic field breaks down a percentage of that into sulfur and oxygen ions; and these ions are pumped into the hole punched in the magnetosphere, creating a rotating field commonly called the Io torus. What does this sound like? Torus. Flux tube. Magnetosphere. Volcanoes. Sulfur ions. Molten ocean. Tidal heating. Circular orbit. What does this sound like?”

Against her will, Martha had found herself first listening, then intrigued, and finally involved. It was like a riddle or a word puzzle. There was a right answer to the question. Burton or Hols would have gotten it immediately. Martha had to think it through.

There was the faint hum of the radio’s carrier beam. A patient, waiting noise.

At last, she cautiously said, “It sounds like a machine.”

“Yes. Yes. Yes. Machine. Yes. Am machine. Am machine. Am machine. Yes. Yes. Machine. Yes.”

“Wait. You’re saying that Io is a machine? That you’re a machine? That you’re Io?”

“Sulfur is triboelectric. Sledge picks up charges. Burton’s brain is intact. Language is data. Radio is medium. Am machine.”

“I don’t believe you.”

Trudge, drag, trudge, drag. The world doesn’t stop for strangeness. Just because she’d gone loopy enough to think that Io was alive and a machine and talking to her didn’t mean that Martha could stop walking. She had promises to keep, and miles to go before she slept. And speaking of sleep, it was time for another fast refresher—just a quarterhit—of speed.

Wow. Let’s go.

As she walked, she continued to carry on a dialogue with her hallucination or delusion or whatever it was. It was too boring otherwise.

Boring, and a tiny bit terrifying.

So she asked, “If you’re a machine, then what is your function? Why were you made?”

“To know you. To love you. And to serve you.”

Martha blinked. Then, remembering Burton’s long reminiscences on her Catholic girlhood, she laughed. That was a paraphrase of the answer to the first question in the old Baltimore Catechism: Why did God make man? “If I keep on listening to you, I’m going to come down with delusions of grandeur.”

“You are. Creator. Of machine.”

“Not me.”

She walked on without saying anything for a time. Then, because the silence was beginning to get to her again, “When was it I supposedly created you?”

“So many a million of ages have gone. To the making of man. Alfred, Lord Tennyson.”

“That wasn’t me, then. I’m only twenty-seven. You’re obviously thinking of somebody else.”

“It was. Mobile. Intelligent. Organic. Life. You are. Mobile. Intelligent. Organic. Life.”

Something moved in the distance. Martha looked up, astounded. A horse. Pallid and ghostly white, it galloped soundlessly across the plains, tail and mane flying.

She squeezed her eyes tight and shook her head. When she opened her eyes again, the horse was gone. A hallucination. Like the voice of Burton/Io. She’d been thinking of ordering up another refresher of the meth, but now it seemed best to put it off as long as possible.

This was sad, though. Inflating Burton’s memories until they were as large as Io. Freud would have a few things to say about that . He’d say she was magnifying her friend to a godlike status in order to justify the fact that she’d never been able to compete one-on-one with Burton and win. He’d say she couldn’t deal with the reality that some people were simply better at things than she was.

Trudge, drag, trudge, drag.

So, okay, yes, she had an ego problem. She was an overambitious, self-centered bitch. So what? It had gotten her this far, where a more reasonable attitude would have left her back in the slums of greater Levittown. Making do with an eight-by-ten room with bathroom rights and a job as a dental assistant. Kelp and talapia every night, and rabbit on Sunday. The hell with that. She was alive and Burton wasn’t—by any rational standard that made her the winner.

“Are you. Listening?”

“Not really, no.”

She topped yet another rise. And stopped dead. Down below was a dark expanse of molten sulfur. It stretched, wide and black, across the streaked orange plains. A lake. Her helmet readouts ran a thermal topography from the negative 230°F at her feet to 65°F at the edge of the lava flow. Nice and balmy. The molten sulfur itself, of course, existed at higher ambient temperatures.

It lay dead in her way.

They’d named it Lake Styx.

Martha spent half an hour muttering over her topo maps, trying to figure out how she’d gone so far astray. Not that it wasn’t obvious. All that stumbling around. Little errors that she’d made, adding up. A tendency to favor one leg over the other. It had been an iffy thing from the beginning, trying to navigate by dead reckoning.

Finally, though, it all came together. Here she was. On the shores of Lake Styx. Not all that far off-course after all. Three miles, maybe, tops.

Despair filled her.

They’d named the lake during their first loop through the Galilean system, what the engineers had called the “mapping run.” It was one of the largest features they’d seen that wasn’t already on the maps from satellite probes or Earth-based reconnaissance. Hols had thought it might be a new phenomenon—a lake that had achieved its current size within the past ten years or so. Burton had thought it would be fun to check it out. And Martha hadn’t cared, so long as she wasn’t left behind. So they’d added the lake to their itinerary.

She had been so transparently eager to be in on the first landing, so afraid that she’d be left behind, that when she suggested they match fingers, odd man out, for who stayed, both Burton and Hols had laughed. “I’ll play mother,” Hols had said magnanimously, “for the first landing. Burton for Ganymede and then you for Europa. Fair enough?” And ruffled her hair.

She’d been so relieved, and so grateful, and so humiliated too. It was ironic. Now it looked like Hols—who would never have gotten so far off course as to go down the wrong side of the Styx—wasn’t going to get to touch rock at all. Not this expedition.

“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” Martha muttered, though she didn’t know if she were condemning Hols or Burton or herself. Lake Styx was horseshoe-shaped and twelve miles long. And she was standing right at the inner toe of the horseshoe.

There was no way she could retrace her steps back around the lake and still get to the lander before her air ran out. The lake was dense enough that she could almost swim across it, if it weren’t for the viscosity of the sulfur, which would coat her heat radiators and burn out her suit in no time flat. And the heat of the liquid. And whatever internal flows and undertows it might have. As it was, the experience would be like drowning in molasses. Slow and sticky.