“How far is it again?” he asked, thinking
half of Titan
as he said it. His stomach contracted within him.
“About two thousand kilometers. But if we walk east at, say, thirty kilometers a day, we shorten the wait time to something more like forty days. So we can cut it in half. That seems worth it to me. And it doesn’t have to be continuous walking. I mean, it’s not like the sunwalkers. We walk a day’s worth, eat, sleep a night, then walk again. Set a daily schedule. If we hiked for twelve hours out of every twenty-four, that would be a lot, but it would save even more days. What, Pauline?”
“Can you turn up Pauline’s voice again?” Wahram requested.
“I don’t want to now. She says twelve-hour days of walking would shorter our time down here by around forty-five days. That’s enough for me.”
“Well,” Wahram said. “That’s a lot of walking.”
“I know, but what are you going to do? Sit here for over twice as long?”
“No,” he said slowly. “I guess not.”
Although really it would not be so very long. A rereading of Proust and O’Brian, a few times through the Ring cycle; his little wristpad was very well stocked. But the way she stood there looking at him, these were not thoughts he felt comfortable expressing.
“I’ll turn up Pauline,” she said, as if giving him something in exchange for his agreement.
“
Solvitur ambulando
,” Pauline said. “Latin for ‘It is solved by walking.’ Diogenes of Sinope.”
“Thus you prove motion is real,” Wahram supposed.
“Yes.”
Wahram sighed. “I was already convinced.”
B
ack at the first underground station they took stock. The three sunwalkers were perfectly happy to walk for six or seven weeks; it was very like their usual mode of existence. Their names were Tron, Tor, and Nar. They were gender nondescripts as far as Wahram was concerned, and seemed to him very young and simple. They lived only to hike around Mercury; they seemed to know nothing more than that, or perhaps they didn’t speak much to strangers. But what they did say seemed childlike to him, or provincial in the extreme. There were whole terraria filled with such folk, of course, but he had gotten used to thinking of the Mercurials as highly sophisticated, steeped in history and art and culture. Now he was learning that it was not universally true. He realized he had thought sun worshippers would be followers of the various early solar religions of ancient Egypt, Persia, the Inca—but no. They just liked the sun.
It looked like they were going to have to spend a couple of nights sleeping on the floor of the unimproved tunnel in between each way station. “Every third day,” Swan said, “we can resupply. It sets a good goal.”
“We might even be able to go farther,” Tron said shyly.
Tron was the one with the broken arm, so Wahram refrained from mentioning that for him personally, thirty-three kilometers a day might prove enough, or too much. That he might be the drag on this group was discouraging. In any case Swan was overseeing the filling of backpacks she had found in the emergency supply cabinets: their spacesuit helmets, some emergency air, water bottles, food, air mattresses, a little pot and stove. A roll of aerogel blankets, not very warm-looking, but the utilidor would stay at this temperature, Swan said; and it was pretty warm.
So: tunnel walk. Possibly similar to spelunking expeditions of
long duration. Little headlamps were included in the packs too, although for now they were not necessary, as the ceiling held a warm square of yellow-white light every twenty meters or so, illuminating the rough rock of the utilidor very well. They were about fifteen meters underground, Swan said. The tunnel had been drilled through bedrock or regolith, with a heat finish that had imparted frequent swirls and dashes of mineral color, reminiscent of the cut surfaces of certain meteorites. In some stretches silver curves lay over pewter, then jet black. The floor had been chipped to a texture that made for a good grip underfoot. The tight curve of Mercury meant that the most distant overhead lights merged into a single bar of light. It was as if they could see the arc of the planet, which Wahram found vaguely encouraging. He was finding the idea of thirty-three kilometers a day, for more than forty days in a row, daunting. Must recall they were down around the forty-fifth latitude south here, so the distance was not as far as it would have been if they were on the equator. Sometimes Terminator’s tracks went even farther south, as he recalled. Things could be worse.
S
o. Walk for an hour, in a tunnel that changed very little, and only in iterative ways. Stop, sit on the ground, rest for a while; then walk an hour more. At the end of three hours, stop and eat. Already that interval felt very long, something like a week or more in ordinary human time, in the time of thinking. But they did that three times before stopping to eat a larger meal, then slept for eight or nine hours.
Hour, hour, hour; hour, hour, hour; hour, hour, hour.
The sensation of lengthening time grew very strong in Wahram. Why it should feel so long was hard to tell; the repetition of the elements of the day he would have thought might streamline and thus speed the hours; but no. Instead it was protraction, a very pronounced feeling of protraction. At the end of each day, as he settled down, footsore and exhausted, to sleep, he could stretch out on his air mattress and say, “One down, thirty-seven to go,”
or even “thirty-three to go,” and feel a little stab of despair. Every hour felt like a week! Could they endure it?
The sunwalkers usually hiked a bit ahead, and by the time Wahram and Swan joined them at a stop, they were always prepping tea. Then, well before Wahram was ready to get up and go again, the young ferals were off, almost apologetically, with a nod and a wave. His days, therefore, were spent mostly with Swan.
She was clearly not happy at the prospect of this hike, even though it was her idea. She was doing it only because the alternative was worse, in her estimation. It was something to be endured, in misery mute or voluble. Some days she went ahead, some days fell behind. “I’m going to get sick at some point,” she said once. It became clear to Wahram that she liked the situation even less than he did—far less than he did, as she told him herself. She hated it, she said; suffered from claustrophobia; could not stand to be indoors; needed copious daily sunlight; needed lots of variety in her daily routines and in her sensory stimuli. These were
necessities
, she told Wahram, and in no uncertain terms. “This is so horrible,” she exclaimed often, making the word an emphatic three syllables with fore and aft stresses. “Horrible, horrible, horrible. I won’t be able to make it.”
“Let’s talk about something else,” Wahram would suggest.
“How can I? It’s horrrr-i-bull.”
Endless repetition of these points would still occupy only the first hour of their twelve-hour day of walking and rests. After such a first hour, Wahram would usually decide it was appropriate to point out that they would need to talk about something else if they were to avoid undue repetition stress on both their parts.
“Tired of me already?” Swan concluded from these observations.
“Not at all. Vastly entertained. Even interested. But this motif, of the unhappy voyage of necessity, it’s limited. It’s played out. I want a different story.”
“That’s lucky for you, because I was going to change the subject.”
“Lucky for me indeed.”
She trudged on ahead of him. There was no reason to hurry to say the next thing; they had all day. Wahram watched her walk ahead of him: her stride was graceful and long, she was in her home g and sinuous, efficient. Very quickly she could get well ahead of him. She did not seem ill yet. From behind he sometimes heard her having conversations with her qube. For whatever reason, she had shifted Pauline’s voice to exterior audibility; maybe she was keeping that little promise to him. The conversations between the two almost always sounded like arguments; Swan’s voice was clearer and more hectoring, but Pauline’s alto, slightly muffled by Swan’s own skin, was somehow mulishly contentious as well. Depending on how one programmed them, qubes could be real fiends for argument, quibblers to the highest degree. Once Wahram caught up enough to be able to eavesdrop on them, and came in on something that had been going on for a while; Swan was saying, “Poor Pauline, if I were you I would be so sad! I feel so sorry for you! It must feel terrible to be nothing but a packet of algorithms!”
Pauline said, “This is the rhetorical device called anacoenesis, in which one pretends to put oneself in the place of one’s opponent.”
“No, not at all,” Swan assured her. “I really am sympathetic. To be so few qubits, to be just algorithms grinding it out. I mean considering that, you do very well.”
Pauline said, “This is the rhetorical device called synchoresis, in which one makes a concession before renewing the assault.”
“Maybe you’re right. I don’t really know why I thought you were stupid, given the huge power of these arguments of yours. And yet—”
“This is both sarcasm and aporia in the bad sense I mentioned before, of a momentary expression of doubt, often faked, before renewing the attack.”
“And
this
is the defense called casuistry, where when you’ve got
nothing
you retreat into a cloud of verbiage. Maybe you’re
right
,
maybe it’s just smart consciousness and stupid consciousness. That would explain a lot.”
Pauline did not seem to be deterred. “Happy to submit our speech acts to a double-blind study to see if any distinctions at all can be made between yours and mine.”
“Really?” Swan said. “Are you saying you can pass a Turing test?”
“It depends who’s asking the questions.”
Swan laughed scornfully, but she really was amused, Wahram could hear it. So at least the qube was good for that.
T
he two of them swapped the lead every half hour, just to mark time and change the view, such as it was. They did not always talk; it would have been impossible, he thought. In any case they hiked in silence for many minutes at a time. Over them the tunnel lights seemed to move independently backward, as if they walked at the top of a vast Ferris wheel, and only just kept pace with the backward sweep of the wheel. At the end of an hour Wahram’s feet were sore, and he was happy to sit down. They used their aerogel sleeping pads as cushions to sit on. Meals came from foil envelopes found in the emergency gear at the stations, and were bland for the most part. After a while they mostly only wanted to drink water, though there were some powders to mix in if one wanted.
In general their rests were about half an hour long. Any longer and Wahram began to stiffen up, and Swan became fretful. And the sunwalkers would get too far ahead. So Wahram would heave himself to his feet and take off again. “Do you think any of these stations have walking poles in them?”
“I doubt it. We can look at the next one. Maybe something could be used as canes.”
A
fter a time of silence she would sometimes snap. “All right tell me something! Tell me about yourself! What’s your first memory?”
“I don’t know,” Wahram said, trying to locate it.
“My first memory,” she said, “comes from a time that my parents tell me I was three. My parents were part of a house that decided to move to the other side of the city. I think we were trading places north to south, in order to look at the other half of the countryside as we passed by it. Or maybe they just told me that. So a bunch of carts were there, and both houses were moving stuff back and forth. Everything my family owned could fit on the back of one battery cart and two handcarts. My mother took me back inside when the place was emptied, and it scared me. I think that’s why I remember it. My room looked much smaller when it was empty, and that seemed backward and scared me, like the world had shrunk. We fill rooms to make them bigger. Then we went back outside, and the other image that sticks with me, along with the empty room, was all the stuff in the bed of the cart, and everyone standing by it at the curb, under a set of trees. Above some trees I could see the Dawn Wall.”
She hiked on for a time in silence, and Wahram felt the empty grumble in his stomach that marked another mealtime’s approach.
“By now that’s all burned down,” she said.
But now her voice was unusually calm. She was no longer grieving in the same way, it seemed.
“When the sun got high enough that the city was out of the shade of the Dawn Wall,” she added, “it would go quick.”
“I know the tracks don’t melt on the brightside,” Wahram said. “Anything else?”
“The city infrastructure will be fine,” she conceded. “The shell. Some metals, ceramics, mixes of the two. Glassy metals. And then just ordinary tempered steel, stainless steel. Austenite steel. We’ll see. I suppose it will be interesting to see what it looks like when night falls on it again. Everything will have burned away except the frame, I guess. As soon as the sun hit, the plants would begin to die. They’ll be dead by now, all the plants and animals, even the bacteria and such. We’ll have to rebuild it.”
“Maybe,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I think they’ll want to understand what happened to the tracks, and feel they are in a position to stop it happening again. Or else build to a different design. Free the city from its tracks, maybe, and roll over the landscape on wheels.”
“That would require some locomotion,” she pointed out. “As it is, the expansion of the tracks drives the city forward.”
“Well, it will be interesting to see what happens, then.” Wahram hesitated. “It would be pointless to rebuild and then have a recurrence.”
“If it was a low-likelihood accident, then a recurrence wouldn’t be likely.”
“I was under the impression that all such happenstances were already guarded against.”
“Me too. Are you suggesting that it was some kind of attack?”
“Yes, well, I’ve been thinking about that, anyway. I mean, consider what happened to us on Io.”
“But who would want to attack Terminator?” she demanded. “Attack it and yet miss it by a few kilometers, killing the town but leaving the people alive?”