第18章 Below the Floor

The hatch took her two hours and cost her the lamp and both gloves and most of the feeling in her hands, and when it finally gave it gave all at once, the weld tearing and the wheel spinning free and a hard brown gust of storm coming down the shaft and into her face like a rescue. She was in a small surface lock, a squat concrete box half buried in the ridge, and the door on the far side was jammed with forty-one years of dust but not welded, and she got it open with her shoulder and stumbled out into the tail of the front. The storm had thinned. The wind still came in long shoves and the sky was still the color of brick, but she could see a hundred meters and the hundred meters was enough to see the ridge and the basin and, off to the north, the smear of orange that was home. She stood in the shallow dust and breathed, and her breath came back at her in the cold, and she was alive in a way she had not expected to be an hour ago. She had never understood the word exposed until that moment. Out on the ridge in the thinning storm, with no cable and no rig and no plan and nothing but her own two legs between her and the walk back, Delyth felt the basin open out around her like a hand, and she felt small in it, and she found she did not mind. Small and real was better than important and buried. She turned her face up and let the wind drag a line of grit across her visor, and the wind was honest, and the grit was honest, and for a moment the whole of the planet was on her side, the way it always had been, the way she had always believed it would be. "Wim," she said into the radio, hoarse, into a channel that had been static for three hours. "Wim Dray. If you can hear me, I am above ground on the ridge, east of the box, and I am alive." The static held for a long moment. Then it cracked, and a voice came out of it, and the voice was thin and raw and it was the best thing she had heard in her life. "Amaral." Wim was crying, or the radio made it sound that way, and it did not matter which. "The head went down and it threw me. I've got the core. I've got the controller core. I'm at the south gate. I can't walk very well. Sabra's here. She came out looking for us in the storm, which was stupider than anything you did." "Stay at the gate. I'm coming." It took her fifty minutes to walk a kilometer, because her legs had gone and the dust was still moving and she kept stopping to make sure the module was still clipped and the sheets were still flat inside her jacket. When she reached the south gate she found the rover with its lights on and Sabra Oyelowo standing in the open lock with a hand on Wim's shoulder, and Wim sitting on the floor with his leg braced and a data core in each gloved hand and his face a mess of relief. Sabra had been out for three hours in a storm that had grounded the whole basin, and she had done it without a work order and with a rover she had signed out to a false job number, and she stood in the open lock now with the frost on her collar and looked at Delyth the way a person looks at a disaster she has decided to stand in front of. "You went down a hole in a dust storm," she said. "In a suit that was written off two winters ago." "I did." "And you came up." Sabra shook her head slowly, and something in her face that had been held tight for a month finally let go. "I told them I was checking a pump. I told myself I was checking my own conscience. I don't know which of us is the worse liar now, Amaral, but I'll tell you what I do know. When this is over, I want it on the record that you walked out of there on your own two feet, because I have never in my life seen a person deserve the ground more than the ground deserved them." Sabra looked at Delyth for a long moment. Then she said, "You're a nightmare, Amaral," and pulled her inside, and shut the door against the storm. Bev Ndiaye came down from the dome at a run and took them both into the clinic and put them on heat and gave Delyth something for the cold that made the ceiling stop moving, and around them the colony went on with its storm routine, its lights on schedule, its corridors sealed, and nobody in it knew that under the ground a station had drowned and that two people had come up out of it carrying the proof. Delyth lay under the blanket and listened to the colony be normal. Somewhere a shift change happened on time. Somewhere a mess hall served a meal that was nobody's favorite. Somewhere a maintenance crew logged a pump that Sabra had lied about, and the log would stand, and by morning the lie would be a fact in the record, which was the exact mechanism she had spent a month trying to prove was possible, and she had just used it herself, and she found she did not feel clever about it at all. The machines kept their own diary. People kept other people's. Both were true, and both were the whole story, and the difference between the two was the only thing she had been fighting about since the first echo at forty meters. Delyth lay on the clinic cot with her hands wrapped in thermal pads and her jaw aching from the cold, and she turned her head on the pillow and looked through the door at Wim, asleep under a blanket with a brace on his leg and two data cores on the table beside him, and at the sheets of survey paper Sabra had laid flat to dry on the counter, and she did the only arithmetic that mattered tonight. The module was in the room. The sheets were in the room. The vial was in the room. The pump controller was in the room. Everything the company had buried, everything it had drowned, everything it had been moving in the dark for eleven nights and pumping into the ground for a month, was now lying on a counter in a colony clinic with three witnesses and a clock on the wall. "Doctor Amaral." Corrinne Deller stood in the doorway with a folder under her arm and the flat, level calm of a person who had not slept. "You said you would bring me an object." Delyth lifted one bandaged hand and pointed at the counter. "They're all objects," she said. "Take the one you like." ---