Alastair Reynolds - Glacial

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GLACIAL

New writer Alastair Reynolds is a frequent contributor to Interzone and has also sold to Asimov's

Science Fiction, Spectrum SF, and elsewhere. His first novel, Revelation Space, was widely hailed

as one of the major SF books of the year. His most recent novel is a sequel to Revelation Space also

attracting much notice, Chasm City. Upcoming is another big new novel, Redemption Ark. His

stories have appeared in our Fifteenth, Seventeenth, and Eighteenth Annual Collections. A

professional scientist with a Ph.D. in astronomy, he comes from Wales, but lives in the Netherlands,

where he works for the European Space Agency.

In the taut and absorbing story that follows, he takes us to the arid and frozen wastelands of a

distant alien planet, where one man must solve an intricate and puzzling mystery before the clock

runs out -- and his own life runs out with it.

NEVIL CLAVAIN PICKED his way across a mosaic of shattered ice. The field stretched away in

all directions, gouged by sleek-sided crevasses. They had mapped the largest cracks before landing,

but he was still wary of surprises; his breath caught every time his booted foot cracked through a

layer of ice. He was aware of how dangerous it would be to wander from the red path that his

implants were painting across the glacier field.

He only had to remind himself what had happened to Martin Setterholm.

They had found his body a month ago, shortly after their arrival on the planet. It had been near

the main American base; a stroll from the perimeter of the huge, deserted complex of stilted domes

and ice-walled caverns. Clavain's friends had found dozens of dead within the buildings, and most

of them had been easily identified against the lists of base personnel that the expedition had pieced

together. But Clavain had been troubled by the gaps and had wondered if any further dead might be

found in the surrounding ice fields. He had explored the warrens of the base until he found an

airlock which had never been closed, and though snowfalls had long since obliterated any

footprints, there was little doubt in which direction a wanderer would have set off.

Long before the base had vanished over the horizon, Clavain had run into the edge of a deep,

wide crevasse. And there at the bottom -- just visible if he leaned close to the edge -- was a man's

outstretched arm and hand. Clavain had gone back to the others and had them return with a winch to

lower him into the depths, descending thirty or forty meters into a cathedral of stained and sculpted

ice. The body had come into view: a figure in an old-fashioned atmospheric survival suit. The man's

legs were bent in a horrible way, like those of a strangely articulated alien. Clavain knew it was a

man because the fall had jolted his helmet from its neck-ring; the corpse's well-preserved face was

pressed halfway into a pillow of ice. The helmet had ended up a few meters away.

No on died instantly on Diadem. The air was breathable for short periods, and the man had

clearly had time to ponder his predicament. Even in his confused state of mind he must have known

that he was going to die.

"Martin Setterholm," Clavain had said aloud, picking up the helmet and reading the nameplate on

the crown. He felt sorry for him but could not deny himself the small satisfaction of accounting for

another of the dead. Setterholm had been among the missing, and though he had waited the better

part of a century for it, he would at least receive a proper funeral now.

There was something else, but Clavain very nearly missed it. Setterholm had lived long enough

to scratch out a message in the ice. Sheltered at the base of the glacier, the marks he had gouged

were still legible. Three letters, it seemed to Clavain: an I, a V, and an F.

I-V-F.

The message meant nothing to Clavain, and even a deep search of the Conjoiner collective

memory threw up only a handful of vaguely plausible candidates. The least ridiculous was in vitro

fertilization, but even that seemed to have no immediate connection with Setterholm. But then

again, he had been a biologist, according to the base records. Did the message spell out the chilling

truth about what had happened to the colony on Diadem: a biology lab experiment that had gone

terribly wrong? Something to do with the worms, perhaps?

But after a while, overwhelmed by the sheer number of dead, Clavain had allowed the exact

details of Setterholm's death to slip from his mind. He was hardly unique anyway: just one more

example of the way most of them had died; not by suicide or violence but through carelessness,

recklessness, or just plain stupidity. Basic safety procedures -- like not wandering into a crevasse

zone without the right equipment -- had been forgotten or ignored. Machines had been used

improperly. Drugs had been administered incorrectly. Sometimes the victim had taken only

themselves to the grave, but in other cases the death toll had been much higher. And it had all

happened so swiftly.

Galiana talked about it as if it were some kind of psychosis, while the other Conjoiners

speculated about some kind of emergent neural condition, buried in the gene pool of the entire

colony, lurking for years until it was activated by an environmental trigger.

Clavain, while not discounting his friends' theories, could not help but think of the worms. They

were everywhere, after all, and the Americans had certainly been interested in them -- Setterholm

especially. Clavain himself had pressed his faceplate against the ice and seen that the worms

reached down to the depth where the man had died. Their fine burrowing trails scratched into the

vertical ice walls like the branchings of a river delta; the dark nodes of breeding tangled at the

intersections of the larger tunnels. The tiny black worms had infested the glacier completely, and

this would only be one distinct colony out of the millions that existed all over Diadem's frozen

regions. The worm biomass in this one colony must have been several dozen tons at the very least.

Had the Americans' studies of the worms unleashed something which shattered the mind, turning

them all into stumbling fools?

He sensed Galiana's quiet presence at the back of his thoughts, where she had not been a moment

earlier.

"Nevil," she said. "We're ready to leave again."

"You're done with the ruin already?"

"It isn't very interesting -- just a few equipment shacks. There are still some remains to the north

we have to look over, and it'd be good to get there before nightfall."

"But I've only been gone half an hour or --"

"Two hours, Nevil."

He checked his wrist display unbelievingly, but Galiana was right: he had been out alone on the

glacier for all that time. Time away from the others always seemed to fly by, like sleep to an

exhausted man. Perhaps the analogy was accurate, at that: sleep was when the mammalian brain

took a rest from the business of processing the external universe, allowing the accumulated

experience of the day to filter down into long-term memory: collating useful memories and

discarding what did not need to be remembered. And for Clavain -- who still needed normal sleep --

these periods away from the others were when his mind took a rest from the business of engaging in

frantic neural communion with the other Conjoiners. He could almost feel his neurones breathing a

vast collective groan of relief, now that all they had to do was process the thoughts of a single mind.

Two hours was nowhere near enough.

"I'll be back shortly," Clavain said. "I just want to pick up some more worm samples, then I'll be

on my way."

"You've picked up hundreds of the damned things already, Nevil, and they're all the same, give or

take a few trivial differences."

"I know. But it can't hurt to indulge an old man's irrational fancies, can it?"

As if to justify himself, he knelt down and began scooping surface ice into a small sample

container. The leech-sized worms riddled the ice so thoroughly that he was bound to have picked up

a few individuals in this sample, even though he would not know for sure until he got back to the

shuttle's lab. If he were lucky, the sample might even hold a breeding tangle; a knot of several

dozen worms engaged in a slow, complicated orgy of cannibalism and sex. There, he would

complete the same comprehensive scans he had run on all the other worms he had picked up, trying

to guess just why the Americans had devoted so much effort to studying them. And doubtless he

would get exactly the same results he had found previously. The worms never changed; there was

no astonishing mutation buried in every hundredth or even thousandth specimen, no stunning

biochemical trickery going on inside them. They secreted a few simple enzymes and they ate pollen

grains and ice-bound algae and they wriggled their way through cracks in the ice, and when they

met other worms they obeyed the brainless rules of life, death, and procreation.

That was all they did.

Galiana, in other words, was right: the worms had simply become an excuse for him to spend

time away from the rest of the Conjoiners. Before any of them had left Earth's solar system, Clavain

had been a soldier, fighting on the side of the faction that directly opposed Galiana's experiments in

mind-augmentation. He had fought against her Conjoiners on Mars and she had taken him prisoner

at the height of the war. Later -- when he was older and an uneasy truce looked like it was on the

point of collapsing -- Clavain had gone back to Mars with the intention of reasoning with Galiana. It

was during that peace mission that he realised -- for the sake of his conscience -- that he had to

defect and fight alongside his old enemy, even though that meant accepting Galiana's machines into

his head.

Later, along with Galiana, Felka, and their allies, Clavain had escaped from the system in a

prototype starship, the Sandra Voi. Clavain's old side had done their best to stop the ship from

leaving, but they had failed, and the Sandra Voi had safely reached interstellar space. Galiana's

intention had been to explore a number of solar systems within a dozen or so light years of Earth

until she found a world that her party could colonize without the risk of persecution.

Diadem had been their first port of call.

A month ago, at the beginning of the expedition, it had been much easier to justify these

excursions. Even some of the true Conjoiners had been drawn by a primal human urge to walk out

into the wilderness, surrounding themselves with kilometers of beautifully tinted, elegantly

fractured, unthinking ice. It was good to be somewhere quiet and pristine, after the war-torn solar

system that they had left behind.

Diadem was an Earthlike planet orbiting the star Ross 248. It had oceans, icecaps, plate tectonics,

and signs of reasonably advanced multicellular life. Plants had already invaded Diadem's land, and

some animals -- the equivalents of arthropods, mollusks, and worms -- had begun to follow in their

wake. The largest land-based animals were still small by terrestrial standards, since nothing in the

oceans had yet evolved an internal skeleton. There was nothing that showed any signs of

intelligence, but that was only a minor disappointment. It would still take a lifetime's study just to

explore the fantastic array of body plans, metabolisms, and survival strategies that Diadem life had

blindly evolved.

Yet even before Galiana had sent down the first survey shuttles, a shattering truth had become

apparent.

Someone had reached Diadem before them.

The signs were unmistakable: glints of refined metal on the surface, picked out by radar. Upon

inspection from orbit they turned out to be ruined structures and equipment, obviously of human

origin.

"It's not possible," Clavain had said. "We're the first. We have to be the first. No one else has ever

built anything like the Sandra Voi; nothing capable of traveling this far."

"Somewhere in there," Galiana had answered, "I think there might be a mistaken assumption,

don't you?"

Meekly, Clavain had nodded.

Now -- later still than he had promised -- Clavain made his way back to the waiting shuttle. The red

carpet of safety led straight to the access ramp beneath the craft's belly. He climbed up and stepped

through the transparent membrane that spanned the entrance door, most of his suit slithering away

on contact with the membrane. By the time he was inside the ship he wore only a lightweight

breather mask and a few communication devices. He could have survived outside naked for many

minutes -- Diadem's atmosphere now had enough oxygen to support humans -- but Galiana refused

to allow any intermingling of microorganisms.

He returned the equipment to a storage locker, placed the worm sample in a refrigeration rack,

and clothed himself in a paper-thin black tunic and trousers before moving into the aft compartment

where Galiana was waiting.

She and Felka were sitting facing each other across the blank-walled, austerely furnished room.

They were staring into the space between them without quite meeting each other's eyes. They

looked like a mother and daughter locked in argumentative stalemate, but Clavain knew better.

He issued the mental command, well-rehearsed now, which opened his mind to communion with

the others. It was like opening a tiny aperture in the side of a dam; he was never adequately

prepared for the force with which the flow of data hit him. The room changed; color bleeding out of

the walls, lacing itself into abstract structures which permeated the room's volume. Galiana and

Felka, dressed dourly a moment earlier, were now veiled in light, and appeared superhumanly

beautiful. He could feel their thoughts, as if he were overhearing a heated conversation in the room

next door. Most of it was nonverbal; Galiana and Felka playing an intense, abstract game. The thing

floating between them was a solid lattice of light, resembling the plumbing diagram of an insanely

complex refinery. It was constantly adjusting itself, with colored flows racing this way and that as

the geometry changed. About half the volume was green; what remained was lilac, but now the

former encroached dramatically on the latter.

Felka laughed; she was winning.

Galiana conceded and crashed back into her seat with a sigh of exhaustion, but she was smiling

as well.

"Sorry. I appear to have distracted you," Clavain said.

"No; you just hastened the inevitable. I'm afraid Felka was always going to win."

The girl smiled again, still saying nothing, though Clavain sensed her victory; a hard-edged thing

that for a moment outshone all other thoughts from her direction, eclipsing even Galiana's air of

weary resignation.

Felka had been a failed Conjoiner experiment in the manipulation of foetal brain development; a

child with a mind more machine than human. When he had first met her -- in Galiana's nest on Mars

-- he had encountered a girl absorbed in a profound, endless game; directing the faltering self-repair

processes of the terraforming structure known as the Great Wall of Mars, in which the nest was

sheltered. She had no interest in people -- indeed; she could not even discriminate faces. But when

the nest was being evacuated, Clavain had risked his life to save hers, even though Galiana had told

him that the kindest thing would be to let her die. As Clavain had struggled to adjust to life as part

of Galiana's commune, he had set himself the task of helping Felka to develop her latent humanity.

She had begun to show signs of recognition in his presence, perhaps sensing on some level that they

had a kinship; that they were both strangers stumbling toward a strange new light.

Galiana rose from her chair, carpets of light wrapping around her. "It was time to end the game,

anyway. We've got work to do." She looked down at the girl, who was still staring at the lattice.

"Sorry, Felka. Later, maybe."

Clavain said: "How's she doing?"

"She's laughing, Nevil. That has to be progress, doesn't it?"

"I'd say that depends what she's laughing about."

"She beat me. She thought it was funny. I'd say that was a fairly human reaction, wouldn't you?"

"I'd still be happier if I could convince myself she recognized my face and not my smell, or the

sound my footfalls make."

"You're the only one of us with a beard, Nevil. It doesn't take vast amounts of neural processing

to spot that."

Clavain scratched his chin self-consciously as they stepped through into the shuttle's flight deck.

He liked his beard, even though it was trimmed to little more than gray stubble so that he could slip

a breather mask on without difficulty. It was as much a link to his past as his memories or the

wrinkles Galiana had studiously built into his remodelled body.

"You're right, of course. Sometimes I just have to remind myself how far we've come."

Galiana smiled -- she was getting better at that, though there was still something a little forced

about it -- and pushed her long, gray-veined black hair behind her ears. "I tell myself the same

things when I think about you, Nevil."

"Mm. But I have come some way, haven't I?"

"Yes, but that doesn't mean you haven't got a considerable distance ahead of you. I could have

put that thought into your head in a microsecond, if you allowed me to do so -- but you still insist

that we communicate by making noises in our throats, the way monkeys do."

"Well, it's good practice for you," Clavain said, hoping that his irritation was not too obvious.

They settled into adjacent seats while avionic displays slithered into take-off configuration.

Clavain's implants allowed him to fly the machine without any manual inputs at all, but -- old

soldier that he was -- he generally preferred tactile controls. So his implants obliged, hallucinating a

joystick inset with buttons and levers, and when he reached out to grasp it his hands seemed to close

around something solid. He shuddered to think how thoroughly his perceptions of the real world

were being doctored to support this illusion; but once he had been flying for a few minutes he

generally forgot about it, lost in the joy of piloting.

He got them airborne, then settled the shuttle into level flight towards the fifth ruin that they

would be visiting today. Kilometers of ice slid beneath them, only occasionally broken by a

protruding ridge or a patch of dry, boulder-strewn ground.

"Just a few shacks, you said?"

Galiana nodded. "A waste of time, but we had to check it out."

"Any closer to understanding what happened to them?"

"They died, more or less overnight. Mostly through incidents related to the breakdown of normal

thought -- although one or two may have simply died, as if they had some greater susceptibility to a

toxin than the others."

Clavain smiled, feeling that a small victory was his. "Now you're looking at a toxin, rather than a

psychosis?"

"A toxin's difficult to explain, Nevil."

"From Martin Setterholm's worms, perhaps?"

"Not very likely. Their biohazard containment measures weren't as good as ours -- but they were

still adequate. We've analyzed those worms and we know they don't carry anything obviously

hostile to us. And even if there were a neurotoxin, how would it affect everyone so quickly? Even if

the lab workers had caught something, they'd have fallen ill before anyone else did, sending a

warning to the others -- but nothing like that happened." She paused, anticipating Clavain's next

question. "And no; I don't think that what happened to them is necessarily anything we need worry

about, though that doesn't mean I'm going to rule anything out. But even our oldest technology's a

century ahead of anything they had -- and we have the Sandra Voi to retreat to if we run into

anything the medichines in our heads can't handle."

Clavain always did his best not to think too much about the swarms of sub-cellular machines

lacing his brain -- supplanting much of it, in fact -- but there were times when it was unavoidable.

He still had a squeamish reaction to the idea, though it was becoming milder. Now, though, he

could not help but view the machines as his allies as intimately a part of him as his immune system.

Galiana was right: they would resist anything that tried to interfere with what now passed as the

'normal' functioning of his mind.

"Still," he said, not yet willing to drop his pet theory. "You've got to admit something: the

Americans -- Setterholm especially -- were interested in the worms. Too interested, if you ask me."

"Look who's talking."

"Ah, but my interest is strictly forensic. And I can't help but put the two things together. They

were interested in the worms. And they went mad."

What he said was an oversimplification, of course. It was clear enough that the worms had only

preoccupied some of the Americans: those who were most interested in xeno-biology. According to

the evidence the Conjoiners had so far gathered, the effort had been largely spearheaded by

Setterholm, the man he had found dead at the bottom of the crevasse. Setterholm had traveled

widely across Diadem's snowy wastes, gathering a handful of allies to assist in his work. He had

found worms in dozens of ice-fields, grouped into vast colonies. For the most part the other

members of the expedition had let him get on with his activities, even as they struggled with the

day-to-day business of staying alive in what was still a hostile, alien environment.

Even before they had all died things had been far from easy. The self-replicating robots that had

brought them here in the first place had failed years before, leaving the delicate life-support systems

of their shelters to slowly collapse; each malfunction a little harder to rectify than the last. Diadem

was getting colder, too -- sliding inexorably into a deep ice-age. It had been the Americans'

misfortune to arrive at the coming of a great, centuries-long winter. Now, Clavain thought, it was

colder still; the polar ice-caps rushing toward each other like long-separated lovers.

"It must have been fast, whatever it was," Clavain mused. "They'd already abandoned most of the

outlying bases by then, huddling together back at the main settlement. By then they only had

enough spare parts and technical know-how to run a single fusion power plant."

"Which failed."

"Yes -- but that doesn't mean much. It couldn't run itself, not by then -- it needed constant

tinkering. Eventually the people with the right know-how must have succumbed to the... whatever it

was -- and then the reactor stopped working and they all died of the cold. But they were in trouble

long before the reactor failed."

Galiana seemed on the point of saying something. Clavain could always tell when she was about

to speak; it was as if some leakage from her thoughts reached his brain even as she composed what

she would say.

"Well?" he said, when the silence had stretched long enough.

"I was just thinking," she said. "A reactor of that type -- it doesn't need any exotic isotopes, does

it? No tritium or deuterium?"

"No. Just plain old hydrogen. You could get all you needed from seawater."

"Or ice," Galiana said.

They vectored in for the next landing site. Toadstools, Clavain thought: half a dozen black metal

towers of varying height surmounted by domed black habitat modules, interlinked by a web of

elevated, pressurised walkways. Each of the domes was thirty or forty meters wide, perched a

hundred or more metres above the ice, festooned with narrow, armored windows, sensors, and

communications antennae. A tonguelike extension from one of the tallest domes was clearly a

landing pad. In fact, as he came closer, he saw that there was an aircraft parked on it; one of the

blunt-winged machines that the Americans had used to get around in. It was dusted with ice, but it

would probably still fly with a little persuasion.

He inched the shuttle down, one of its skids only just inside the edge of the pad. Clearly the

landing pad had only really been intended for one aircraft at a time.

"Nevil..." Galiana said. "I'm not sure I like this."

He felt tension, but could not be sure if it was his own or Galiana's leaking into his head.

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摘要：

GLACIALNewwriterAlastairReynoldsisafrequentcontributortoInterzoneandhasalsosoldtoAsimov'sScienceFiction,SpectrumSF,andelsewhere.Hisfirstnovel,RevelationSpace,waswidelyhailedasoneofthemajorSFbooksoftheyear.HismostrecentnovelisasequeltoRevelationSpacealsoattractingmuchnotice,ChasmCity.Upcomingisanothe...

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Alastair Reynolds - Glacial

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