Грег Иган - Phoresis

Freya hooked her safety ropes onto the stair rail and waited for Gro to join her. There was plenty of room for two people to descend side-by-side, and Freya hated having someone behind her, an invisible presence constantly threatening to stumble and send her sprawling.

“Do you want something to eat?” Gro asked, attaching her own ropes to the right-hand rail.

“No.” Freya never brought food of her own on these trips; the idea of eating on the platforms, let alone the stairs, made her uneasy. Anything that needlessly distracted her, lowered her guard or occupied her hands, could be dangerous. And whether or not that fear was justified, it was more than enough to guarantee poor digestion.

Gro reached back and managed to pull a small loaf out of her pack without unstrapping it, then started chewing as they began their descent. “Here’s a hypothetical to ponder,” she said, her words muffled by the contents of her mouth. “If a dozen new geysers appeared tomorrow, what would you do? Walk away from all this, or keep going?”

Freya wasn’t sure that her own choice would really matter, now. “Wouldn’t it make more sense to ask one of the youngsters?”

Gro didn’t dispute that, but she’d already decided to have her say. “If it were up to me, I’d keep going.”

“Really?”

“The geysers will always come and go; we could never be sure we wouldn’t face the same problem again. And having come this far, we’d be foolish to waste it—to throw away all that expertise, in the hope that we could start again from nothing if we had to.”

“Hmm.” Freya was inclined to agree, though she doubted that the farmers would be willing to keep feeding them. “You haven’t heard rumors, have you?” If there’d been an eruption nearby, half the farmers in the area would already have departed to stake their claims over the fresh soil. But if a geyser had appeared on the other side of the world, with no hope of any of the locals benefiting, word of it would come far more slowly, and take much longer to be confirmed.

“No, I’m just thinking out loud.”

In the silence that followed, Freya’s thoughts drifted, only to settle on her unnatural surroundings. The stairs were set deeply enough in the slanted column that she suffered no fear of toppling sideways, even if that offered the most direct route to death: if she somehow ended up on the cylindrical surface, she would rapidly slide around it, plummet through the air, and crash into the plain below. But it was the unobstructed descent ahead of her that always seemed most perilous, beckoning her forward, inviting her to trip and fall. And however confident she was, intellectually, that any such fall would drag her no farther than the next supporting post for the safety rail, some part of her mind refused to accept that: the slender ropes from her wrist to the rail felt like ineffectual talismans, utterly useless against the power of the stairway’s vertiginous gradient.

Everything about the construction so far was a triumph of fact over intuition. She still couldn’t stare at the slanted tripod legs without expecting them to topple over. The counterweights that rose vertically from each foot, lessening the risk that the torque would tear the base from the ground, just looked like a joke, a gesture, as manifestly inadequate as the ropes. She wouldn’t be happy until the columns actually met up, visibly supporting each other. But then the whole construction would need to be repeated for the next level, even more precariously, with the legs of the new, wider tripods rising up from the tops of the old ones.

“Do you think we’ll live to see the second level complete?” she asked Gro.

“We might. If the Yggdrasil keeps pumping the same amount of water in total, those columns should rise three times faster.”

As noon approached, they were still only halfway down the stairs. They stopped to rest, waiting out the darkness as the sun disappeared behind Tvíburi. Against the backdrop of stars, the black disk of their twin softened to a bluish gray, lit by the half of their own world that was not yet in shadow, glowing in the Tvíburian midnight sky.

When they reached the ground, Erna was waiting for them.

“There’s been a fall,” she said.

Freya nodded grimly, sickened but unsurprised. She’d heard that some of the younger workers had stopped using safety ropes on the stairs, and apparently all her warnings had come to nothing; some people were just too impatient to care. “Who is it? Is she in the medical tent?” Freya started walking toward the tent, trying to control her anger. Reprimands could wait; the poor woman would be suffering enough from her bruises.

“It’s Sonja,” Erna replied, hurrying after her. “They’ve taken her to the tent, but…”

“But what?”

“She’s dead, Freya.”

Freya stopped. “How can she be dead?” No one had mentioned any accidents before she ascended that morning for the inspection. “How long were they treating her?”

“She died when she hit the ground. She fell straight down, from the very top.”

“Not down the stairs? She fell from a platform?”

Gro had caught up with them. “How?”

Erna said, “I don’t know. You’ll need to talk to the people who were up there with her. But we’re still waiting for them to arrive.”

The body lay on a stretcher on the floor of the medical tent, covered by a tarpaulin. Freya lifted one corner, then replaced it.

“Do you know if her mother’s still alive?” she asked Gro.

“She is.”

“I’ll need to go to the village and tell her.”

“Of course,” Gro replied. “But I think you should wait until we have some idea what happened.”

Freya covered her eyes with her forearm. Maybe it had just been a matter of time, but they’d come a long way without a single death. She’d always imagined that if it did happen, it would be part of a calamity that ended the whole project—some miscalculation that saw a whole column of ice snap at the base and crash to the ground. And though she could see why some people resented the encumbrance of the safety ropes on the stairs—where a tumble would be brutal but might well be survivable—surely everyone’s natural instincts compelled them to take infinitely more care around the edges of the platforms.

She turned to Erna. “Which tripod was it?”

“The northernmost.”

“When should the witnesses be down?”

“Soon.”

“I’m going to go wait for them.”

The three of them trudged over the ice, huddled against the biting wind. Maybe the whole thing had been the purest kind of accident, with a gust of wind knocking Sonja off the platform as she switched her second safety rope to a new anchor, and by chance the first one frayed, or its point of attachment came loose. The air was thinner up there, but the wind was faster; it could take you by surprise.

“Which leg?” Freya asked, as they approached the northern tripod.

“I’m not sure,” Erna admitted.

Freya’s anger returned; every ascent was supposed to be logged in detail. “Do we even know who was up there with her?”

“Lofn, Juliet, and… your niece.”

Gersemi. Freya felt a pang of shame, as if this compounded her own culpability. But she had never been softer on Gersemi than she had on anyone else. And apparently it made no difference anyway; they all ignored her pleas to take the protocols seriously.

When they reached the nearest leg of the tripod, Freya peered up along the staircase, but she couldn’t see anyone descending. She wasn’t going to run back and forth between the three legs, waiting for someone to come into view; she sat down on the staircase and motioned to the others to join her. At least here they were sheltered a little from the wind.