David Brin: Sundiver

A slender white hand lay on the floor, two meters away, exposed by the opening cloud of smoke. The air cleared a little more and the rest of Culla’s body came into view.

The E.T.’s face was burned, catastrophically. Black crusts of seared foam hung in shreds from the remnants of the huge oculars. A sizzling blue liquid seeped from large cracks in the sides.

Culla was obviously dead.

Jacob crawled forward. First he had to check on LaRoque. Then Fagin. Yes, that was the way to do it.

Then hurry and get someone down here who can work the computer panel… if there was still a chance to reverse the damage Culla’d done.

He found LaRoque by following the man’s moans. He was several meters past Culla, sitting up and holding his head. He looked up blearily.

“Oooh… Demwa, is that you? Do not answer. Your voice might blow my poor delicate head away!”

“Are you… all right, LaRoque?”

LaRoque nodded. “We are both alive so Culla must not be, no? He left his job on us incomplete so we may merely wish we were dead. Mon Dieu! You look like spaghetti! Do I look like that!”

Whatever the effects of the fight, it had brought back the man’s appetite for words.

“Come on, LaRoque. Help me up. We still have work to do.”

LaRoque started to rise, then wavered. He clutched Jacob’s shoulder to keep his balance. Jacob choked back tears of pain. Jerkily, they helped each other up and onto their feet.

The firebrands must have burned out, because the chamber was rapidly clearing. Wisps of smoke trailed in the air, though, hanging before their faces as they staggered along the dome in a clockwise direction.

Once they encountered the P-laser beam, a thin, straight tracery in their way. Unable to go over or under, they went through. Jacob winced as the beam stitched a bloody line along the outside of his right thigh and the inside of his left. They continued.

When they found Fagin, the Kanten was comatose. A faint sound came from the blowhole and the silver chimes tinkled, but there was no answer to their questions. When they tried to move him they found it impossible. Sharp claws had emerged from Fagin’s root pods and dug into the tough springy material of the deck. There were dozens, and no way to loosen them.

Jacob had other business to tend to. Reluctantly, he led LaRoque around the Kanten. They staggered toward the hatchway in the side of the dome.

Jacob gasped for breath next to the intercom.

“Hel… Helene…”

He waited. But no one answered. He could hear, faintly, his own words echoing from topside. So he knew it wasn’t the mechanism. What was wrong?

“Helene, can you hear me! Culla’s dead! We’re pretty badly torn up… though. You… you or Chen come down… down and fix…”

The cold air blasting from the Refer Laser sent him into a fit of shivering. He couldn’t talk anymore. With LaRoque helping, he stumbled up past the duct and fell to the sloping floor of the gravity-loop.

He fell into a fit of coughing, lying on his side to favor his burned back. Slowly the hacking subsided, leaving him raw and aching in his chest.

He fought off sleep. Rest. Just rest here a moment, then over and around to topside. Find out what’s wrong.

His arms and legs sent tremors of sharp pain up to his brain. There were too many and his mind was too unfocused to cut all the messages off. It felt as though one of his ribs was cracked, probably from the struggle with Culla.

All of this paled beside the throbbing burden of the left side of his head. He felt as if he was carrying a hot coal there.

The deck of the gravity-loop felt strange. The tight, wraparound g-field should have pulled evenly along his body. Instead it seemed to. swell like the surface of the ocean, rippling under his back with tiny wavelets of lightness and weight.

Obviously something was wrong. But it actually felt good, like a lullaby. Sleep would be so nice.

“Jacob! Thank God!” Helene’s voice boomed around him, but still it sounded far away — friendly, definitely, warm — but also irrelevant.

“No time to talk! Come up here quick, darling! The g-fields are going! I’m sending Martine, but…” There was a clattering and the voice cut off.

It would have been nice to see Helene again, he thought dimly. Sleep invaded in force this time. For a while he thought of nothing.

He dreamt of Sisyphus, the man cursed forever to roll a boulder up an endless hill. Jacob thought he had a way to be tricky about it. He had a way to make the hill think it was flat while still looking like a hill. He’d done it before.

But this time the hill was angry. It was covered with ants that climbed up onto his body and bit him all over, painfully. A wasp was laying its eggs in his eye.

What’s more, it was cheating. The hill was sticky in places and didn’t want to let him go. Elsewhere it was slippery and his body was too light to get a grip on its surface. It heaved with sickening unevenness.

He didn’t remember anything in the rules about crawling, either. But that seemed to be part of it. At least it helped the traction.

The boulder helped too. He only had to push it a little. Mostly it crawled on its own. That was nice, but he wished it wouldn’t moan so. Boulders shouldn’t moan. Especially not in French. It wasn’t fair to make him listen to it.

He awakened, Wearily, in sight of a hatchway. Which hatchway he wasn’t sure, but it wasn’t very smoky.

Outside, beyond the deck, he could see the beginnings of a blackness, a transparency, returning to the red haze of the chromosphere.

Was that a horizon, out there? An edge to the Sun? The flat photosphere stretched out on ahead, a feathery carpet of crimson and black flame. In its depths it crawled with tiny movements. It pulsed, and filaments sewed elongated patterns above brightly waving jets.

Waving. Back and forth, on and on, Sol waved before his eyes.

Millie Martine stood in the doorway, with her fist up near her mouth and an expression of horror on her face.

He wanted to reassure her. Everything was all right. It would be from now on. Mr. Hyde was dead, wasn’t he? Jacob remembered seeing him somewhere, in the rubble of his castle. His face was burned up and his eyes were gone and he gave off a terrible stink.

Then something reached up and grabbed him. Down was now towards the hatchway. There was a steep slope in between. He tumbled forward and never remembered crashing to a halt just outside the door.

Commissioner Abatsoglou: “Then it would be a fair statement to say that all of the Library-designed systems failed, before the end?”

Professor Kepler: “Yes, Commissioner. Every one eventually deteriorated to uselessness. The only mechanisms still working at the last were components designed on Earth, by terrestrial personnel. Mechanisms which, I might add, were declared superfluous and unnecessary by Pil Bubbacub and many others during construction.”

C.A. : “You aren’t implying that Bubbacub knew in advance…”

P.K.: “No, of course not. In his own way he was as much a dupe as the rest of us. His opposition was based solely on esthetics. He didn’t want Galactic time-compression and gravity-control systems crammed into a ceramic shell and linked to an archaic cooling system.

“The reflection fields and the Refrigerator Laser were based on physical laws known by humans back in the twentieth century. Naturally he objected to our ‘superstitious’ insistence on building a ship around them, not only because the Galactic systems made them redundant, but also because he considered pre-contact Earth science to be a pathetic accumulation of half-truths and mumbo-jumbo.”