Текст книги "2312"

Автор книги: Kim Stanley Robinson

Соавторы: Kim Stanley Robinson
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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 36 страниц)

WAHRAM AND SWAN

Wahram was back in Terminator before Swan returned from Earth. At that point the city was sliding over the immense plain of Beethoven Crater, and Wahram screwed his courage to the sticking point and when she got into town, asked Swan if she wanted to go out with him to a facility in the west wall of Beethoven, to hear a concert and catch up on things. As he made the call, he was, he had to admit, nervous. Her quicksilver manner left him uncertain what to expect; he could not even predict whether he would be going out to Beethoven with her or with Pauline. On the other hand, he liked Pauline; so hopefully it would be all right either way. And with luck Swan would no longer be so intent to learn all there was to know about Alex’s plans concerning the qubes. That, Inspector Genette had made very clear, they had to keep from her.

In any case, the chance to hear some Beethoven was enough to spur him on. He made the call; and Swan agreed to go.

After that Wahram looked up the program for the performance they were to attend, and was excited to see it was a triple bill of rarely played transcriptions: first a wind ensemble playing a transcription of the Appassionatapiano sonata; then Beethoven’s opus 134, which was his own transcription for two pianos of his Grosse Fuguefor string quartet, opus 133. Lastly a string quartet was to play a transcription of their own for the Hammerklaviersonata.

Brilliant programming, Wahram felt, and he joined Swan at the south lock of Terminator with an anticipation so strong that it overwhelmed the uneasiness he felt both about her and about being outside Terminator, on the surface of Mercury. Necessary movement westward—well, this was always true in some sense, he told himself, and focused his thoughts on the concert. Maybe there was no real reason for concern. It was interesting to think that he might be irrationally afraid of the sun.

At the little museum in the west wall of Beethoven, he was astonished to see that they were almost the only people in the audience, aside from the musicians not playing, who sat in the front rows to listen. The facility had an empty main room that would have held a few thousand people, but happily this concert was in a side hall with just a couple hundred seats, arced around a small stage in Greek theater style. Acoustics were excellent.

The wind ensemble, slightly outnumbering its audience, rollicked its way through the finale of the Appassionatain a way that made it one of the greatest wind pieces Wahram had ever heard, fast to the point of effervescence. The transcription to winds made it a new thing in the same way that Ravel had made Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibitiona new thing.

When they were done, two pianists got up, and sitting at grand pianos snuggled into each other like two sleeping cats, they played Beethoven’s own opus 134, his transcription of his Grosse Fugue. They had to pound away like percussionists, simply hammering the keys. More clearly than ever Wahram heard the intricate weave of the big fugue, also the crazy energy of the thing, the maniacal vision of a crushing clockwork. The sharp attack of struck piano keys gave the piece a clarity and violence that strings with the best will and technique in the world could not achieve. Wonderful.

Then some other transcriber had gone in the opposition direction, arranging the Hammerklaviersonata for string quartet. Here, even though four instruments were now playing a piece written for one, it was still a challenge to convey the Hammerklavier’s intensity. Broken out among two violins, viola, and cello, it all unpacked beautifully: the magnificent anger of the first movement; the aching beauty of the slow movement, one of Beethoven’s finest; and then the finale, another big fugue. It all sounded very like the late quartets to Wahram’s ear—thus a new late quartet, by God! It was tremendous to hear. Wahram glanced around at the audience and saw the wind players and the pianists were standing on their feet behind the chairs, bouncing, swaying in place, faces uplifted and eyes closed, as if in prayer; hands sometimes spastically waving before them, as if conducting or dancing. Swan too was back there dancing, looking transported. Wahram was very pleased to see that; he was out there himself in the space of Beethoven, a very great space indeed. It would have been shocking to see someone immune to it; it would have put her outside his zone of sympathy or comprehension.

Afterward, as an encore, the musicians announced they wanted to try an experiment. They separated the two pianos, and the string quartet then sat between them, in a circle facing inward; then they reprised the two big fugues, all playing at the same time. The two pieces overlapped with the wrong instruments applied to each, increasing the cognitive confusion; and the quiet parts in each came at the same time, in an urgent eye of the storm, revealing the structural similarity of the two monsters. When both returned to their main fugues, the six instruments sawed or pounded away in their own worlds, lashing out six different tunes in a crisscross fury, with Messiaenic crashes. They ended together somehow. Wahram wasn’t certain which of them had been extended or curtailed to make that happen, but in any case they finished together with a big crash, and everyone there, already on their feet, could only clap and cheer and whistle.

“Wonderful,” Wahram said afterward. “Truly.”

Swan shook her head. “Too crazy at the end, but I liked it.”

They stayed around to join the congratulations and the discussion among the musicians, who were as interested as could be in what it had sounded like from the outside; more than one said they had been able to focus only on their own parts. Someone played back a recording made of it, and they listened along with the rest, until the musicians began to pause the recording and discuss details.

“Time to get back to Terminator,” Swan said.

“All right. Thanks ever so much for this, it was very fine.”

“My pleasure. Listen, do you want to walk back over to the city tracks? It’s nice after a wild concert like this one. They’ve got suits here we can use. It gives you a chance to walk it out a little.”

“But—do we have time?”

“Oh yes. We’ll get to the platform well ahead of the city. I’ve done this before.”

She must not have noticed his discomfort at being out on the surface of Mercury. Well, so he had to agree. Even though every other member of the audience, and the musicians too, took the tram back. On which they were almost certainly continuing the interesting discussion of the concert, of transpositions in Beethoven, and so on.

But no. A walk on a burned world. When their borrowed spacesuits had confirmed integrity, they exited the hall’s air lock and headed back north toward Terminator’s tracks.

Beethoven Crater had as smooth a surface as he had seen on Mercury. Little Bello was under the horizon to the east. Wahram walked along nervously. Their headlamps illuminated long ellipses of black desert. Fines lofted from the fronts of their boots and drifted back to the baked ground behind them. Their boot prints would last for a billion years, but they were on a track of prints, and the damage to the surface had long since been done. Flanking the dusty trail, the knobby granulated rock caught their headlamps’ beams and reflected them in little diamond pricks of light that looked like frost, though they must have been minute crystal surfaces. They passed a rock with a Kokopelli painted on it; the figure appeared to be holding a telescope rather than a flute and was pointing the glass to the east. For a while Wahram whistled the theme of the Grosse Fugue, half speed, under his breath.

“Do you whistle?” Swan asked, sounding surprised.

“I suppose I do.”

“So do I!”

Wahram, who did not think of himself as someone who whistled for others, did not continue.

They topped a small rise, and before them lay Terminator’s tracks. No city in sight yet; one had to assume it was still over the horizon to the east. The nearest track blocked the view of most of those paralleling it on its other side. It was made of a particular kind of tempered steel, he had heard, and gleamed a dull silver in the starlight. Its underside stood a few meters above the ground, and the thick pylons supporting it were set every fifty meters or so. A loading platform abutted the outer track to the northwest of them, he was happy to see. The tram from the concert was already there.

Sunlight pricked a high point on the west wall of Beethoven. Everything in the landscape was lit by that burnished cliff edge. Dawn was on its way, slow but sure. When it came over the eastern horizon Terminator would make a grand sight. Possibly that was the dome of the globe, already visible as a curved glint.

A stupendous flash of light blazed up from the tracks where the loading platform had been. A bloodred afterimage split his vision in two halves; as it was pulsing back to a less vivid vertical blob, rocks began crashing down around them, kicking up puffs of dust that moved like splashed water. They both cried out, although Wahram had no idea what either said; then Swan was crying, “Get down, guard your head!” and tugging at his arm. Wahram kneeled next to her and put an arm around her shoulders; she seemed to be trying to put her arms over his helmet while ducking hers against his chest. Looking over her, he saw that the tracks where the platform had been had disappeared in a big ball of dust, and the very top of the dust cloud was now high enough to be up in the sunlight. The brilliant yellow of the sunlit part of the cloud illuminated the land around it like a beacon of fire. The land at the foot of the cloud was glowing with a light of its own; it appeared to be a pool of smoking lava.

“A meteor,” he said stupidly.

Swan was talking on the common band. A few more rocks fell on the land around them, invisible until announced by an explosion of dust. It looked like the land was exploding, as if mines were going off. Occasionally a falling rock was hot and looked like a shooting star. Some ember blinks were still up there flying among the stars. They would get hit or they wouldn’t: an awful feeling. Guarding their helmets did not seem like it was going to do much good.

Dust flew up over them, fell back to land in lazy sheets and veils. Gray topped by yellow; but when the top of the dust cloud fell back below the horizontal beams of approaching sunlight, they were plunged into the darkness of Mercurial night, with only the distant lit crater wall to illuminate them with its reflection. Red bars still pulsed vertically in the middle of Wahram’s sight. It seemed much dimmer than it had before.

“There’s a group of sunwalkers just south of here, up under the crater wall,” Swan said grimly. She asked a question on the common band. “One of them’s been hit, and they need help. Come on.”

He followed her away from the tracks, feeling blind and confused. “Was it a meteor strike?”

“Looks like it. Although the tracks have a detect-and-deflect system, so I don’t know what happened. Come on, we’ve got to hurry! I want to get back to the city. It’s… ohhh….” She groaned as the realization appeared to strike her that the city was doomed. “No!” she cried as she dragged him southward. “No, no, no, no, no, no, no.” Over and over as they stumbled along. Then: “How could it be.”

He couldn’t tell if it was a rhetorical question. “Don’t know,” he said. She tugged at him and he kept his eyes on the ground to keep from kicking a rock and falling. Rocks littered the land. He tried to remember what he had seen; had it been a flash? From above? Hadn’t it risen? No—a downward motion. He closed his eyes, but the red bar and light red clouds still bounced around on the black backdrop of the insides of his eyelids. He opened his eyes, glanced at Swan. Later perhaps they could review her qube’s visual record, assuming it kept one. She was muttering now in the irritated tone of voice she seemed to use only when addressing it.

She led him around a hillock, and when they had cleared it, they spotted a group of three people in spacesuits, all three walking, which was good to see, but with one holding one arm with the other hand, and walking awkwardly as a result. The other two flanked this one, helping or trying to.

“Hey!” Swan said on the common band, and they looked up and saw them approaching. One waved. Swan and Wahram joined them a few minutes later.

“How are you?” Swan said.

“Happy to be alive,” said the one holding an arm. “I got hit on the arm!”

“I can see. Let’s get back to the city.”

“What happened?”

“A meteor hit the tracks, it looked like.”

“How could that be?”

“I don’t know. Come on!”

Without further discussion the five of them began walking at speed toward the tracks, striding along in a Martian lope that made the best of the local g. Wahram was all right at it because of his time on Titan, which was about half as heavy as this, but similar enough. Together they bounded down the mild slope, angling eastward to intercept the city as soon as possible. There was a strange keening in Wahram’s ear, an animal moan of distress; at first he thought it was the hurt sunwalker, but then realized it was Swan. Of course it was her city, her home.

They came over a rise that gave them a view of the top half of the city’s dome, bulging over the horizon like the blue bubble of a pocket universe. The city appeared to be moving still. “The tracks ahead of it are damaged,” he said.

“Yes, of course!”

“Is there a way for it to get past a section of broken track?”

“No! How would that work?”

“I don’t know, I’m just… wondering. It seems like most support systems try to avoid criticalities.”

“Of course. But the tracks are protected, there’s an anti-meteor system!”

“It must not have worked?”

“Apparently not!” Again she cried out, a piercing sound in his ear even when damped by his suit’s intercom.

The sunwalkers were chattering among themselves, sounding worried.

“What will we do when we get to it?” Wahram asked on the common band.

Swan stopped groaning and said, “What do you mean?”

“Are there lifeboats? You know—rovers to drive to the nearest spaceport?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Enough for everyone?”

“Yes!”

“And are there spaceships enough at the nearest spaceport? Enough for the whole population of Terminator?”

“There’s shelter in all the spaceports, enough to hold a lot of people. And vehicles to go west to the next ones. And some hoppers can handle being on the brightside.”

As they hurried across the black rubbly plain, Terminator slowly hove up over the horizon. The upper half of the interior of the Dawn Wall was now visible, looking much steeper than it really was, all whitewashed walls and trees. A thick bar of green marked the treetops of the park. Extending forward from the trees were the crops of the farm. A snow globe on silver tracks, headed to its doom. They could see no people in the city, even though it was now looming above them. Certainly no one was on the terraces of the Dawn Wall anymore. It looked abandoned.

And there was no way to get up into it. The platform had been in the impact zone. Everyone who had been at the concert must have been killed. Inside the city they could see a trio of deer: buck, doe, fawn. Swan’s cries pitched up an octave. “ No. No!”

It was strange to be standing there, looking up at the empty city’s Mediterranean calm.

Swan ran under the tracks to the north side of the city, and the rest of them followed. From that side they could see a little convoy of ground vehicles far to the north and west, rolling away from them through the break in Beethoven’s northwest wall. The cars were fast, and soon over the horizon.

“They’ve left,” Wahram observed.

“Yes yes. Pauline?”

“I suppose we could walk to the spaceport?” Wahram said, worried.

Swan was talking to her internal qube, however, and Wahram couldn’t follow the gist of the exchange. Her tone of voice was utterly caustic.

She broke off that argument and said to him, “The cars aren’t coming back. The city will stop automatically when it hits the break in the tracks. We have to leave. Every tenth platform has elevators that go down to shelters under the tracks, so we have to get to one of those.”

“How near is the closest one to the west?”

“About ninety kilometers. The town just passed one back to the east.”

“Ninety kilometers!”

“Yes. We’ll need to go east. It’s only nine kilometers. Our suits will handle the sunlight for the time it will take us.”

Wahram said, “Maybe we could walk the ninety.”

“No we couldn’t, what do you mean?”

“I think we could. People have done it.”

“Athletes who have trained for it have done it. I do enough walking to know, and maybe I could do it, but you couldn’t. You can’t do it by willpower alone. And this sunwalker is hurt. No, listen, we’ll be all right going into the sunlight. It’s just the corona we’ll be exposed to, and no more than an hour or a little more. I’ve done it often.”

“I’d rather not.”

“You have no choice! Come on, the longer we dither, the longer we’ll be exposed!”

That was true.

“All right, then,” he said, and felt his heart pound inside him.

She turned around, held out her arms up to the city, groaned like an animal. “Oh, my town, my town, ohhhh… We’ll come back! We’ll rebuild! Ohhhhh…”

Behind the glassy face mask her face was wet with tears. She noticed him watching her and swung a hand back as if to strike at him. “Come on, we have to go!” She gestured to the three sunwalkers. “Come on!”

As they started running east, Swan howled over the common band, a sound like an alarm siren that had done its duty but continued on in the emptiness after a disaster. The figure running before him did not seem capable of generating such a terrible sound, which stuck him like pins in the ears. A lot of animals had no doubt been left behind inside—the whole little terrarium, a community of plants and animals. And she designed such things. And this one was her home. Suddenly her howl made it clear to him that saving the humans of the place was not really enough. So much got left behind. A whole world. If a world dies, its people don’t matter anymore—so the howl seemed to say.

Dawn kept coming, as always.

Now this was an interesting matter: could he modulate his fear, rein it in and use it to impel him at the optimum pace for the quickest arrival at the platform out there to the east, in the raw light of daybreak? And did that pace match the pace that was going to be set for him by the person he was following? For Swan was moaning still, crying and cursing, keening in a rhythm that was keyed to her running; she bounced forward on the impact of her strides, perhaps helpless to go slower; and yet she was moving faster than he could match. He had to give ground and keep to his own pace, and hope that he would at least be able to keep the distance close enough that he wouldn’t lose her over the horizon. Although of course the tracks would lead him right to the platform, so even if she disappeared over the horizon, that should not matter. And yet he did not want to lose sight of her. The three sunwalkers were already a considerable distance ahead of her, even the one with the hurt arm. So maybe the unhappy noise she was making was in fact slowing her down.

The land dipped and rose here in such a way that he could see many kilometers to the north, and the highlands in that direction were now all ablaze with sunlight. That lit part of the landscape threw light over the shadowed terrain they ran in, and Wahram saw the rumples in the land, and the rubble on it, better than he had ever seen anything before, not just on Mercury but anywhere. Everything looked coated by a layer of friable powder, no doubt the result of the daily bake and freeze.

The light from the north grew so bright he had to look away to preserve his vision for the dark places underfoot and before him. Ahead the moaning silhouette bounded against the stars. He forced his breath into a rhythm with his feet, watched the ground he was running on, focused on a rapid efficient gait. One-third g could be deceptive, being neither light nor heavy. It had the potential for speedy running, but a fall was not a trivial thing, especially in this situation. Swan was on home ground and did not appear to be thinking of him at all.

He ran on. Normally the distance involved would be for him a matter of about forty-five minutes of running, he reckoned, depending on terrain. That was long enough to call for restraint from full speed, even for runners. Was she going out too fast? He saw no signs of deceleration.

On the other hand, she was not getting farther ahead. And he was now in a pace he thought he could sustain. It was neither fast nor slow. He huffed and puffed, watched the ground carefully. Quick glances showed Swan always well short of the horizon. It was all going to work out—then he stumbled and had to catch himself up by way of some desperate windmilling of the arms, after which he kept his head down and focused on the ground more than ever.

It was one of those moments when the shock of the unexpected throws one into a different space. He could see Swan’s boot prints superimposed on the palimpsest of earlier prints. Her stride was shorter than his. He flew over her steps, even though he was losing ground on her. The sunwalkers were halfway over the horizon. Swan’s moaning still filled his ears, but he refused to let himself turn down the volume or turn it off.

Then the sun blinked over the horizon, and again he felt his heart pounding. At first, licks of orange fire popped over the horizon and disappeared. The corona was hotter than the actual surface of the sun by a great deal, as he recalled. Magnetic surges, bowing up in characteristic loops of fire, rising majestically over the horizon and hanging there before blasting off to one side or the other. The sun’s flames, in effect, flying up in stupendous explosions guided by the magnetic fields that roiled in the burn. He ran on looking down at the ground, but the next time he glanced up most of the horizon ahead of him was orange—the sun itself, its orangeness stuffed and writhing with bubbles and banners of yellow. To stop it down to something his eyes could handle, his faceplate had to render the rest of the cosmos black. The horizon was the only thing that could be clearly picked out, a line out there not very high, not smooth, various hills and dips that bounced and blurred. Swan stood out blackly, a runner imago, her silhouette thinned by white light pouring around her. The ground underfoot was now a salt-and-pepper pattern impossible to read, aching white and deep black all jumbled together so that the white parts pulsed and shimmered in his vision. He had to trust it was flat enough to run, because it didn’t look like it. And then after another while it became a black-chipped white that looked flat as a sheet. They were out in full day.

He began to sweat. Probably this was just fear, and the sudden helpless acceleration in his pace. His suit began to hum audibly in its effort to cool him, a slight but terrible sound. His sweat would slide down his flanks and legs and collect at a seal above the boots. He didn’t think enough could collect to drown him, but he wasn’t sure. The black flicker of Swan in the sun had become a sort of spectre of the Brocken, exploding in and out of existence in vibrant pulses. He thought he saw her look over her shoulder at him, but he did not dare wave to her lest he lose his balance and fall. She seemed short, and suddenly he saw she was visible now only from the knees up. The horizon was about as far away as it would be on Titan. That meant he was probably only five or ten minutes behind her.

Then the platform top appeared over the horizon just to her left, next to the southernmost track, and he quickened his pace yet again. In any physical endeavor a little kick at the end could usually be found.

This time, however, it seemed he was truly stretched to his maximum. Indeed it very quickly turned into something more like a desperate attempt to hold what speed he had. He was gasping, and had to force himself to a breath pattern in a rhythm coordinated with his pounding heavy legs, one gasp for two strikes. It was very frightening to look up and see almost the whole visible stretch of the eastern horizon topped by the corona; the slight curve of it seemed to suggest it would eventually fill most of the sky, as if what was rising before them was some kind of universal sun. Mercury looked like a bowling ball rolling into that light.

His sweat now filled his suit to his thighs, and he wondered again if he could drown in it. But then again, he could drink it and save himself. Happily his air supply was still cool in his face.

His faceplate polarization shifted, and the texture of the sun through the black glass of his faceplate articulated into thousands of tongues of flame. Big fields of tendrils moved in concert, whole regions swirling like cats’ paws on water. It looked like a living being, a creature made of fire.

The platform was a block of black in the black, Swan a black movement beside it. He reached her, stopped, gasped for a while with his hands on his knees, his back to the sun. Her keening had stopped, although from time to time she still moaned. The sunwalkers apparently had already taken the elevator down; she was waiting for it to come back up.

“I’m sorry,” he said when he could speak. “Sorry I’m late.”

She was looking at the sun, now four fingers high over the jagged black horizon. “Oh my God, look at it,” she said. “Just look at it.”

Wahram tried, but it was too bright, too big.

Then a loop of the corona flew hugely higher than any they had yet seen, as if the sun were trying to reach out and burn them with a touch. “Oh no!” Swan cried out, and pulled Wahram over to her and against the door, moving to his sun side and pulling him down to shield him with herself, punching elevator buttons over his shoulder and cursing.

“Come on hurry!” she yelled. “Oh that’s a big flare, that’s bad. By the time you see one of those it’s already zapped you.”

Finally the elevator doors slid open and the two of them rushed in. The doors closed. They felt the elevator car drop.

When Wahram’s faceplate and eyes had adjusted to the ordinary light, he saw that Swan’s face under her faceplate was wet with tears and snot.

She sniffed hard. “Damn that was a big flare,” she said, wiping her face. When the elevator stopped and they got out, she said to the sunwalkers, “Any of you have a dosimeter on you?”

One of them replied as if quoting: “If you want to know, you don’t want to know.”

She looked at Wahram, her expression grim in a way he had never seen. “Pauline?” she said. “Find the dosimeter in this suit.” She listened for a while, then clutched her chest, staggered down to one knee. “Oh shit,” she said faintly. “I’m killed.”

“How much did you get?” Wahram exclaimed, alarmed. He checked his wristpad; it showed a radiation spike of 3.762 sieverts, and he hissed. They would be needing a lot of DNA repair the next time they got their treatments—if they could make it. He repeated his question: “How much did you get?”

She stood up and would not look at him. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“That was quite a slice of the sun,” he said.

“It’s not that,” she said. “It was that flare. Bad luck.”

The sunwalkers nodded at this, and Wahram felt a little queasy jolt slither down his spine.

They were in a lock. The elevator doors closed behind them, the door on the other side of the lock slid open, followed by a little whoosh of air. They went into a low room of some considerable size, with several doors and passageways leading out of it.

“Is this a refuge?” Wahram asked. “Do we have to stay here through the brightside crossing? Can we?”

“This is part of a whole system,” Swan explained. “It was built to help with the construction of the tracks. Every tenth platform has a unit like this under it, and there’s a utilidor that connects them all. A work tunnel.” The sunwalkers were already checking some of the cabinet doors on one wall.

“So we could hurry underground in this tunnel and catch up to the nightside? Get to help?”

“Yes. But I wonder if the part under the meteor strike is still passable. I guess we can go see.”

“It’s all heated and aerated?”

“Yes. After some people died when they came down to take shelter, the stations have been made minimally survivable. Actually, I think you have to re-aerate the utilidor section by section as you go along. It’s like turning on the lights.”

One of the sunwalkers gave a thumbs-up, and Swan took off her helmet and Wahram did too.

“Do either of you have radio comms?” one of them asked. “Ours aren’t working, and we’re thinking maybe the sun fried them. And the phone here isn’t working. We won’t be able to tell people we’re down here.”

“Pauline, are you all right?” Swan said aloud, and fell silent.

“How is your qube?” Wahram asked after a while.

“She’s all right,” Swan said dismissively. “She says my head served as good insulation for her.”

“Oh dear.”

They followed the sunwalkers down the hall, took stairs down to a set of large rooms below.

The biggest room down there contained a scattering of couches and low tables, and the long bar of a communal kitchen. Swan introduced herself and Wahram to the three sunwalkers, who were people of indeterminate age and gender. They nodded politely at Swan’s introduction, but did not identify themselves. “How is your arm?” Swan asked the hurt one.

“It’s broken,” the person said simply, and held it out a little. “Clean hit, but the rock was small and just falling, I guess. Tossed up in the big hit.”

Now it seemed to Wahram that this one at least was young.

“We’ll wrap it,” one of the others said, also young. “We can try to straighten it, and then wrap it with a support, no matter how straight it is.”

“Did any of you see the meteor strike?” Swan asked.