Schismatrix plus - Bruce Sterling [144]
Lindsay's heart leaped as he saw the familiar geology. "Just like Europa," Vera murmured. They were floating over an extended tension fault, where volcanic basalt had snapped and rifted, harsh blocks jutting upward, the cracked primeval violence untouched by wind or rain. Rectilinear mountains, lightly dusted with organic ooze, dropped in breathtaking precipitous cliffs, where contour lines crowded together like the teeth of a comb. But here the rift was dead. They saw no sign of thermal energy. "Follow the fault," Lindsay said. "Look for hot spots." He had lived too long for impatience, even now.
"Shall I kick in the main engines?" Pilot said.
"And make the water boil for miles around? We're deep, Pilot. That water is like steel."
"Is it?" Pilot made an electronic churring noise. "Well, I'd rather have no stars at all than blurry ones."
They followed the rift for hours without finding a lava seep. Vera slept; Lindsay dozed briefly, an old man's cat-sleep. Pilot, who slept only on formal occasions, woke them. "A hot spot," he said. Lindsay examined his board. Infrareds showed sluggish heat from deep within the interior of a jutting cliff. The cliff was extremely odd: a long, tilted plane of euclidian smoothness, rising abruptly from an oozy badlands of jumbled terrain. An angular foothill at the base of the cliff lay strangely distorted, almost crumpled, atop a dome-shaped rise of lava.
"Send out the drone," he said.
Vera pulled the robot's controls from under her seat and slipped on a pair of eyephones. The robot sculled easily out to the anomalous cliff, its lights blazing. Lindsay switched his board over to the robot's optics. The tilted cliff was painted. There were white stripes on it, long peeling dashes, some kind of dividing line. "It's a wreck," he said suddenly.
"It's man-made."
"Can't be," Vera said. "It's the size of a major spacecraft. There'd be room in it for thousands."
But then she found something that settled it. A machine was lashed to the smooth clifflike deck of the enormous ship. Centuries had corroded it, but its winged outlines were clear. "It's an aircraft," Pilot said. "It had jets. This was some kind of watery spaceport. Airport, rather."
"A ratfish!" Lindsay exulted. "After it, Vera!" The surveyor lunged after the abyssal creature. The long-tailed, blunt-headed fish, the size of a man's forearm, darted for safety along the broad deck of the aircraft carrier. It vanished through a ruptured crevice in the multistory wreckage of the control tower. The robot pulled up short.
"Wait," Vera said. "If this is a ship, where did the heat come from?" Pilot examined his instruments. "It's radioactive heat," he said. "Is that unusual?"
"Fission power," Lindsay said. "It must have sunk with an atomic pile on board." Common decency forbade him to mention the possibility of atomic weapons.
Vera said, "My instruments show dissolved organics. Creatures are huddling up around the pile for warmth." She tore at an ancient bulkhead with the pressure-toughened arms of the drone. The corroded alloy burst easily, gushing rust. "Should I go after it?"
"No," Lindsay said. "I want the primeval." She returned the drone to its hold. They sputtered onward. Time passed; terrain scrolled by with a slowness he would have once found dreadful. Lindsay found himself thinking again of Czarina-Kluster. Sometimes it troubled him that the despair, the suffering there, meant so little to him. C-K was dying, its elegance dissolving into squalor, its delicate, sophisticated balance ripped apart, pieces flung like seeds throughout the Schismatrix. Was it evil of him to accept the flower's death, in hope of seeds?
He could not think it was. Human time meant nothing to him any longer. He wanted only for his will to leave its mark, to cast its light down those long eons, in a world awakened, a planet brought to irrevocable life. And then
... then he could let go.
"Here," Pilot said.
They had found it. The craft