They debated the issue for several hours. There was never a question about whether they would go, but rather who would go. George and Hutch to make sure everything was okay? George, Nick, and Tor because it was best to have guys out front when there was danger? Alyx suggested Hutch and herself because women were smarter.
The men laughed because they thought she was joking.
In the end, after it was clear everyone wanted to go, Hutch conceded, and they all piled down to the lander and strapped on e-suits. Alyx enjoyed the feel of the energy surge around her when she activated the Flickinger field. It was warm and clean, and it embraced her like a soft body garment.
Hutch set the rules while they waited for the air pressure outside the lander to go to zero. Nobody was to wander off without a partner. Don’t touch anything unless you poke it first with a stick. Keep in mind the gravity’s different. It’s low, but if you fall off the mountain, you’re just as dead. “And please keep in mind,” she added, “that everything in that place is of immense value. Try not to handle stuff. And don’t break anything.”
Nick sighed and wished everyone a Merry Christmas.
Hutch turned that penetrating blue gaze on him. “I know how it all sounds, Nick. But I really don’t want to lose anybody else.” The lights on the control board went green. “Okay, Bill,” she told the AI. “Launch at will.”
The vehicle rotated, the door opened, and they slipped out into the night.
Hutch did a single orbit, while Alyx watched the rugged terrain flow past. The surface was not dark, as she’d expected. Rather, there was a kind of musty half-light, like the interior of a church near sundown, lit only through its stained-glass windows. It was ominous and lovely and mystical and silent, and she wondered how she could capture its essence with lighting and choreography.
“You can’t,” Nick said, and she realized she must have been giving voice to her thoughts. “You need a holotank for this.”
But that wouldn’t do it either because you knew you were in a holotank and as long as you knew that, knew you were sitting in a safe warm place and that the images were only images and nothing else, the effect wasn’t quite complete. The audience had to be made to forget where it was. It had to be made to believe this was all real rock. The twin globes and that spectral cloud between them and the rings, those magnificent rings, had to be real. She’d never seen so much light in the sky, and yet it didn’t filter down onto the landscape. It only cast shadows, but they were God’s shadows, and when you were out here really out here cruising over them you knew that.
No. Simulations would be inadequate. She glanced over at Tor, who smiled at her. He understood that. It needed expression. It needed to be captured and made to live for an audience in the way only a theater troupe could do.
She saw a wisp of smoke down among the crags, as if somebody was tending a campfire, and pointed it out to Nick. “Trick of the light?” she wondered.
“Maybe. Or maybe it’s volcanic activity. Maybe old Vertical is geologically alive.”
She sat back and let the gentle vibrations of the engines enfold her while she visualized dancers performing under the Twins. While she began to put together a musical score.
Hutch announced that they were beginning their descent. Alyx looked outside again, looked for the house, the oval, with its courtyard and its cupola, but she could see only the tortured landscape and the Halloween glow.
But they were going down. The seat was falling away from her, the harness tugging on her shoulders and legs, restraining her. Then she heard George say, “There it is,” but she still couldn’t see it, had to be up front looking out through the windscreen. (Did they call it a windscreen when the vehicle moved through vacuum?)
A solid sheet of rock appeared out the window, gray, craggy, gaunt, moving steadily upward. It was close enough that she could almost have reached out and touched it if she could have gotten her hand through the window. She wanted to tell Hutch to be careful but she knew how that would be received so she kept quiet but couldn’t suppress a smile when George delivered the fatal phrase.
“Look out,” he said. “We’re pretty close.”
Hutch assured him in a flat voice that everything was okay. George stiffened and turned away to stare out at the cliff. Then he made a show of shrinking down in his seat and cowering with one hand drawn over his head.
Hutch laughed, but Alyx held her breath, hung on, gripping the arms of her chair, squeezing them tight. The upward movement of the cliffs slowed and almost stopped. Then she felt the jar of the landing treads. Hutch held it briefly aloft, gradually transferring weight to the vehicle, allowing it to settle slowly, probably wanting to assure herself the shelf would support them before she committed. Then they were down, and the drone of the engines changed, softened, and cut off.
She released her harness and stood up so she could see out the front. And there it was! It looked like an abandoned skating rink, a train terminal, maybe, the hind end of a mall, sitting out here as part of the spectacle.
The place where God comes when he needs a break.
They switched over to their air tanks, and Alyx looked out the right side, the starboard side, that was the correct way to say it, and she couldn’t see whatever it was they’d landed on. Instead she was looking down into a chasm, hundreds of meters down, where everything got dark and she couldn’t see bottom.
Hutch was standing in the airlock, watching to see that nobody tripped getting out. “Stay away from the edge,” she was saying, as each of them climbed down the short ladder and moved out across the barren ground.
The short stubby wing of the lander was a finger length from the rock wall. She looked up and caught her breath. The face of the cliff rose as far as she could see, maybe a couple of kilometers, maybe ten. It looked like Kilimanjaro up there except it didn’t have the snow, just smooth gray rock going up forever.
And the sky, my God, the sky. Autumn on one side and Cobalt on the other, each with its family of rings, and the big cloud between them like a Chinese globe. And the rim of the big ring, a misty highway arcing through the night.
She stared at it for several minutes. They all did. And then, finally, they began to talk again. Alyx slipped around in front of the lander, moving behind Nick, still watching the sky, and bumped into him when he stopped without warning. He was looking at the other vehicle, the one they’d seen on the Memphis’s screens, safe and mundane and ordinary from far away. But up close it was gray and black and different. There was something in its lines, in the way the hull curved back on itself, that their lamplight burrowed into the row of dark windows and seemed to get lost, that suggested a manufacturer they would not have recognized.
A coat of dust covered it, the roof, the hull, and the wings. It looked as if it had been there a long time. It looked part of the landscape, as solid and permanent as the rock wall. The wings were wider, rounder than those on the lander.
Nick took some pictures, and Hutch looked curiously up at the hatch. Alyx could see Tor considering angles and guessed that he’d be out there without much delay to start a new canvas. She herself visualized it as a prop, and tried to imagine the songs that could be written about this first encounter with a ship from another civilization, running one of the tunes through her head already. It was pure starlight. She wasn’t the ideal composer, and she wished Ben Halver could be there to see it, or Amy Bissell. She couldn’t do anything about that, but she’d do the next best thing, sit with them and tell them what it had been like.
The vehicle had a ladder. Big thick rungs, as thick as George’s forearms, and only three of them, spaced too far apart to be comfortable for a human.
“You’re too close to the edge,” Nick told somebody. “Get back.”
“How long you guess it’s been here?” Hutch asked her.