IGMS Issue 18 (7 page)

When my eyesight adjusted, I saw that I was inside a tall, round dome beneath the hill. Dozens of stalactites clung to the ceiling, some stretching down more than a meter. A beam of sunlight broke through the jagged hole I'd made, dancing off the stalactites and the floor. Narrow passages spoked away from the dome.

I spent the next two months exploring that cavern. I crawled through every passageway I found, some barely wider than my shoulders. I drew maps on construction paper and hid them under my mattress. I told no one.

In late August, I breached a new duct at the edge of my maps, and when I looked up, I saw a spot of light. I heard voices. I reached the light, a tiny crack at the top of the wall, and peered through.

On the other side were tourists. Pasty-faced suburbanites following a guide holding a glowing flag. It was an enormous chamber, ten times bigger than any I'd found. Electric lights draped the walls and the ceiling. Paved walkways, with rails, steered the group on their casual walk. The guide's voice droned on about the cave's history and geology.

I backed away from the crack of light, retraced my steps through my carefully mapped passageways, and climbed out the slope I'd fallen down two months before.

It turned out I hadn't discovered anything at all. I'd just stumbled into a side entrance to a well-known show cave. My portion was too narrow and dry for tourists, so it had been left undeveloped. There were maps online which matched my drawings precisely.

In school the next fall, I learned that every square foot of the planet had been scanned, probed, radared, and meticulously mapped in the early 21st century. There were no dark woods anymore, no hidden caves. The twenty-first century's first great accomplishment, the textbooks said. They didn't seem to realize what had been lost.

I shredded my maps and dumped them into the compost pile behind our house. I never went back to that cave again.

Shelley is wrong about me. I'm not running, I'm searching. I've always been searching. For something, anything, new, unseen, unmapped. Because when I find that thing no one else has seen, for a moment, at least, I'm back in those dark woods.

And here, 23 kilometers below the surface of Miranda, three billion kilometers from Earth, I had once again found something new. The concave wall above me was dotted with the gem shards, poking out from the overhang like stalactites. Light from my helmet bounced among them, sometimes reflecting, sometimes refracting, forming a tapestry of color on the canyon wall.

"Lance? Lance? Are you ready?" Now it was Shelley who was in a damn hurry. She'd noticed that the shards were all jammed upward into the wall, realized they were flung from below. "Magma chamber? Volcanic glass?" she mumbled. She didn't sound convinced. She wanted to reach the bottom.

Slowly I stood, grasped Shelley's arm, and led her back to the descent line.

Where were Wil and Katherine? I widened my headlamp beam and swept the ledge. They were twenty meters away, at the rim of the ledge, but nowhere near the rope. I was about to castigate them for the safety lapse when I noticed something: they'd removed their ankle weights.

Wil saluted. "See you at the bottom, boss!"

And then they jumped.

I took a step toward the precipice then caught myself, clinging to the line. I did some quick math in my head: 300 meters, 0.008g. It would be a hard landing, but they'd make it. They'd see the bottom first.

Shelley laughed. She'd done the math as well. "Didn't think of that, did you?"

I stood silently on the ledge, the cave dissolving to mist in my mind's eye. I waited, absolutely still, until my heart rate returned to normal. I grasped the rope with both hands and slowly, steadily, resumed my descent.

In this micro-gravity, it would take Wil and Katherine ninety seconds to reach the bottom. They talked at me the entire way down.

"It's the deepest canyon in the solar system," said Wil. "Did you really think we'd let you touch bottom first? It's an Armstrong moment!"

"We'll save a portion for you," said Katherine, in that annoying silky voice. "A third of the floor, somewhere above deepest point, for you to explore on your own. That's only fair."

"Yeah," added Wil, "a nice cave or two. You can make your maps."

I stayed silent, continued my steady descent.

"You're not that different from us, you know" said Katherine. "You think you are, but you're not."

The ninety seconds were up, and they finally stopped yapping.

Then the screaming began.

First Katherine: a full throated, high-pitched scream of terror. "Katie! Katie!" shouted Wil. There was a soft grunt, followed by that awful hissing, gurgling sound I'd only heard twice before. Katherine's screams stopped.

Then Wil: another scream, another grunt, another hiss. Silence.

I continued descending, but slowed my speed to two meters per second.

I heard a new noise in my helmet. It was Shelley, hyperventilating. I looked up. She was pulling herself back up the rope, as fast as she could, her sample bins swinging back and forth, whacking into each other.

I squeezed, stopping my descent, then yanked the rope, sending myself flying upward. After three heaves, I reached Shelley and grabbed her ankle. I jerked her down to my eye level, placed my mask against hers and yelled "Stop!" She did.

"What happened?" she asked, eyes wide, still breathing through her mouth. "What happened? What happened to them?"

"Their suits decompressed. They're dead. Or will be shortly."

Shelley closed her eyes. She pulled me toward her, digging her gloved hands into my back. I let her hold me, waiting for her breathing to steady. Five minutes passed.

"Climb back up to the ninth ledge," I said, once she'd calmed. "Go slowly. Wait for me there."

"What about you?"

"I'm going to finish my descent."

Shelley released my arm. I extracted my diamond knife and slashed her sample bins free, cutting her mass by two-thirds. The bins drifted, spinning, toward the canyon floor.

I pulled away from Shelley and resumed my descent.

I slid down the rope slowly, a meter at a time, my headlamp pointed straight down. For ten minutes, I could see only the rope, trailing away into darkness. Then structures emerged. Gray bulks at first, then color.

The canyon floor was filled with gem shards. All different shapes and colors, like pieces of broken sculpture. Some were small and sharp, pointing upward menacingly, others large and smooth, like fallen tree trunks.

I slowed to a stop a few meters above the floor. Kicking against the top of a smooth shard, I swung to my right, until I was above a open patch of ground, and released the rope. Ten seconds later, my feet softly kissed the ground.

I widened my headlamp beam and swept the terrain. Shards, as far as I could see, and blackness beyond. The rope's slack, several hundred meters worth, piled up around them.

I attached a homing beacon to the rope pile and headed away, walking toward Wil's and Katherine's likely landing spot.

I didn't know much geology, but these shards didn't look like volcanic glass. Too fine, too symmetrical. I passed one that was almost a perfect sphere, another with long, red branches, or tendrils. I reached down and touched it. It was flexible, even in this brutal cold.

I found Wil and Katherine. As I'd expected, they were impaled on shards.

Katherine had landed stomach first on a tall spike. It had passed through, leaving her suspended a few feet above the ground, arms outstretched, now frozen in place. Wil hadn't fared much better. He'd landed in a sitting position, hands reaching toward Katherine. Two jagged shards had pierced his rear and thigh, just enough to depressurize the suit. His face was frozen in a scream, eyes lined with burst blood vessels.

I couldn't help but notice they'd never touched the canyon floor.

I extracted their bodies from the spikes and carried them over my head, one in each hand, back toward the rope, navigating around shards.

As I approached the rope pile, I saw two lights, not one. My homing beacon, where I'd left it, and a headlamp.

It was Shelley. She'd followed me down to the canyon floor and now knelt on the ground, mass spec sensor in hand.

She looked up, her headlamp beam swinging to Wil, then to Katherine, then to my mask, momentarily blinding me.

"I never liked climbing," she said. "Even back then. I only did it because of you."

I placed Wil and Katherine on the ground, spun them onto their stomachs, and located their air supplies. Both still more than half full. I pumped the remaining liquid O
₂
into Shelley's and my tanks, topping us off. Now, I would have time to explore.

Shelley had lined up a dozen shards in front of her and was methodically scanning and labeling them.

"Stay within sight of the rope," I said. "And keep your radio on. I'm going to walk around." Shelley did not look up.

I hiked away from Shelley, heading slightly downhill, toward the highest concentration of gem shards.

They were getting steadily grander, more varied in shape and color. I passed one enormous cylinder, stretched across the ground like a fallen sequoia. I pulled out my diamond knife, braced my feet under a rock, and gave it a whack. The cylinder scratched, but didn't crack. The knife rang in my hand, sending vibrations through my elbow.

I continued downhill, passing through a forest of shards, until abruptly, the shards stopped.

I was standing now in flat, open terrain, the ground once again the familiar mixture of white ice and gray rock. I turned my headlamp to max power and aimed it straight ahead.

Well, I'd solved The Mystery of Miranda.

Shelley was right that something had crashed into the moon like a hammer, eons ago, bursting it apart. Only that something wasn't a comet or moon fragment, as her papers had all suggested.

The ship was shaped like an egg, resting on its side, cracked open in the middle. The hull was smooth and black -- the same material as the gem Shelley dug from the canyon wall. Twenty meters high, half again as long. From the canyon floor, I could see only hints of the interior -- wrecked passageways, jumbles of multi-colored shards, strewn about in the chaos of disaster.

From where I stood, I couldn't tell much about the alien occupant of the ship, if there even was one. But with a certainty I couldn't explain, I knew this: He was an explorer. He'd traveled farther and farther, searching, and wound up here, at the bottom of a hidden canyon, dead, in a place no one else had ever seen.

My radio clicked on. "Lance? It's been an hour. Are you okay? Did you find something?"

I knew what Shelley would do if she saw this place. She'd fill her camera stick with pictures of the wreck, bring samples home, write a paper. Geologists, astrobiologists, engineers, historians, tourists would all descend on the canyon, filling it with lights, turning it into a show cave, with the egg and its occupant the centerpiece. There are reasons, I thought, why I focus on the present, and not on the future or the past.

"Stay where you are, Shelley," I said. "There's nothing for you here."

I turned away from the broken egg and headed back toward the rope, navigating around shards, moving as fast as I could.

Shelley and I sat on the ninth ledge, the one with the overhang. She'd spread a dozen shards on the ground in front of her and was stroking them, one at a time. She shook her head. "Still a mystery."

"Is that so bad?" I asked.

"No, I suppose not." She stuffed most of the samples into her suit pockets, as many as she could fit, leaving the larger ones behind.

"I'm sorry about the things I said to you, Lance, on the way down. You really hurt me, all those years ago."

I turned and looked at Shelley, truly looked at her, maybe for the first time. For a moment, I saw what had appealed to me all those years ago. The eager eyes, now softened with age. The desire.

The moment passed.

"Any chance you'll come back, Lance?" she asked. "Bring me with you? Help me gather more samples, figure out where these gems came from?"

I sat with my legs suspended over the cliff's edge, turning a small, red shard over and over in my hand. I tossed it over the ledge and watched it float, slowly, back toward the canyon floor.