“What if we can’t?”
“Look, the Airbus cables just keep going straight down, so they didn’t get trapped by this…this valve. Let’s find them.”
“Valve?” Marc asked as he lowered himself through.
“Maybe that’s what it does. I dunno. Theory later. Look.”
With lamps quenched, the gloomy grotto came alive with shimmering luminescence: burst golds, dapplings of orange, vermilion splashes that laced through turquoise filigree.
“My God, how big is this?” Marc whispered.
“Can’t see the walls.”
“Or the floor, through this vapor.”
“So bright, the walls—Turn off your beam.”
Without the back-scatter from the fog she could make out dim glows tapering away on all sides. Like the signature of a distant city…
“It’s moving. See, on the ceiling.” He gestured up.
She played out line to watch the shifting pale patterns above them. Hanging in the blackness, she could see, achingly slowly, the complex seethe of radiance.
She was too stunned to think. Okay, so act. “Well, nowhere to go but down.”
“Yeah… What’s doing this?”
Damnned if I know. On Earth, mats of bacteria luminesce when the bacteria get thick enough. Quorum sensing, it’s called. Here, who knows what could have evolved—colors? shapes? patterns?
“Come on.” She winched down, leaning back in the yoke to watch how her line fed through the hole in the membrane. The cable did not rub against the edges of the thing. It had opened further, maybe two meters.
Marc followed her. “Could all this be directed by intelligence?”
“Doesn’t have to be. Sentience is not the same as intelligence. There’d be a huge selective pressure in favor of controlling the loss of gases. Maybe that’s what the valve does.”
“This is some kind of instinct, then?”
“Can’t tell from what we’ve seen so far.” She turned and gazed down. The flush of light from below was getting well defined. More of the curious swirls and blotchy colors, as above. How close to the floor were they? She let herself down a few more meters and called, “I’m going to turn on a beam. Close your eyes, so one of us keeps night vision.”
“Roger.”
When the beam stabbed down she took her hand off the winch command instantly. About five meters below them were two space suits, one orange, one blue. Facedown. They did not move.
36
FEBRUARY 1, 2018
THEY DANGLED OVER THE TWO FACEDOWN SUITS AND MARC CAREFULLY lowered himself to within a foot of the orange one.
“Gerda,” he called on comm. Nothing. “Chen?”
They looked at each other, only a few feet apart. “Turn her over. Be careful—it looks like the mat has partly grown over them.”
“This fast?”
“Don’t think of it like a plant.”
“I wonder if I can turn her over from here.”
“Try. Don’t put your weight on the mat.”
Marc pivoted in his yoke and took hold of Gerda’s suit with both gloves. “Man, this stuff pulls hard.” His angle was bad, and finally he had to lift Gerda. The pale mat growths resisted, stretching until they popped free. In normal Earth gravity lifting that much would have been impossible, but with some grunting he managed to get her turned over. Her eyes were closed. No expression.
“I can make out her internals,” Marc said, shining his beam through her faceplate. “Air’s to zero.”
“See those tanks lying to the left?” She craned her neck. “Reading full.”
“So they’re…dead.”
“No way to be sure unless we crack their helmets.”
“They’re way beyond the time limits on their tanks.”
“Explains why they didn’t answer. Their audio connection shorted out along with the winch, I’ll bet.”
Marc turned over Chen with the same difficulty and same result. Chen looked peaceful, somehow. “This damned mat, it’s all over them.”
“Maybe they got snagged in it somehow. Looks like ropes of blue linguine.”
