He looked around. The line, visible as a kind of wing behind him, was indeed draped down into the blur below. He could see the vague other end of it lifting up past the arches, but too slowly. He was directly over the fan now.
He looked down and saw a Dalíesque fan blade swinging out to touch his line, just as the mesobot fish lost its fight to climb and fell among the blades.
Instantly everything blurred; he heard a loud clang through the aerogel. Then something had hold of his line and was pulling him down.
Yelling, he clawed at the safety clip on his belt. Precious seconds were lost as he fumbled at it; all he could see were vague looming shapes surging by under his feet.
He found the quick-release and pushed it. The line jerked away and then Michael was sucked down by turbulence. Something struck him hard in the stomach. He fell, landed hard and rolled, hammering his head against the inside of the helmet.
MICHAEL KNEW EXACTLY where he was and what had just happened, but he wasn't sure whether he had been lying here on his back for a few seconds or an hour. It was completely dark and silent. The darkness made sense; the silence didn't.
"Dr. Herat?" There was no answer. He called up inscape; a flood of diagnostic windows opened like flowers all around him. Since they were artifacts painted on his sensorium by nerve implants, their light didn't make him wince, nor did it illuminate the darkness beyond his helmet visor.
The diagnostics were clear, though: He had been here about ten minutes and still had almost a day's worth of air left in the suit's recycler. The suit's comm unit was damaged, however.
He tried to sit up; his head spun and it felt like a great hand was trying to push him down again. He stood, slowly, and though movement was like pushing through a strong wind, he had no difficulty staying up. The worst part was the continuous spinning sensation, which he knew was reaclass="underline" It came from the habitat's rotational gravity.
From somewhere nearby a steady chop-chop sounded. That would be the fan. He could feel its effect, in regular pushes that almost made him stagger.
He was supposed to weigh twice his normal weight down here, but it didn't feel like it. Except for the thickness of the medium, it felt more like a standard gee. He could walk, or at least stagger under the strong coriolis effect and his feet touched down as fast as if he were standing in air on board the Banshee.
Of course. He bet that the creatures that built this place were more buoyant than a space-suited human. They probably couldn't sink in this aerogel and there would be a lower limit below which they couldn't swim— they'd just pop up again. What to him was a floor, would to them be as inaccessible as a distant ceiling.
By that logic, he would be standing in their machine attic. He might stumble into another fan in this blackness, or something worse.
But he couldn't just stand here. Or could he? They should be lowering the other mesobots more carefully even now and casting sonar illumination all through this area.
Wait a second— ten minutes? That was plenty of time for them to have illuminated the whole area and even brought down another diver and some safety line. Where was everybody?
Maybe he wasn't visible lying down. He tried waving his arms, after cautiously reaching out to make sure he wouldn't hit something. That should do the trick.
Michael stood there for a few minutes, waiting, while his head throbbed and he imagined all sorts of threats converging on him in the blackness. He waved his arms again and shouted, which was absurd since he just hurt his own ears.
Nobody answered. Nobody came.
After a while he decided he must have fallen in the sonar shadow of something big. He would have to walk. Arms out like a blind man, he shuffled forward. Almost immediately his fingers touched a solid wall.
He groped his way along it. It turned out to be a big metal box, just taller than he was. There was open space beyond it, but he only went a few meters before he encountered a low box with a grill; aerogel was surging up out of this, though not strongly enough to lift him. He skirted it and tripped over some cables. The weird combination of rotational gravity and viscous aerogel made him land on his face again.
Where were they? Michael ran through his entire repertoire of curses. His voice in his own ears sounded weak, boyish. He didn't want to die down here. Once he had believed death was merely a remerging with the universe. Now he saw that universe as vastly indifferent and himself as trivially small within it. To die was not to merge; it was simply to cease.
He forced himself to crawl, waving one hand ahead of him. And after a while, he began to see light ahead— at least, a change from total black to graphite gray.
They must be searching in the wrong place and they'd brought in floodlights to help…? No, that didn't make sense, this stuff wasn't transparent at any wavelength.
The light brightened and it became evident that it wasn't coming from above but from something on the deck ahead of him. Michael stood up cautiously and walked forward. His faceplate became gray, then white, then bright and milky. He put up his hand and saw it as a shadow. Following the shadow brought him to another collection of shadows, a sort of crosshatch pattern. Some bars with a bright light behind them? He reached out.
His hand fell on a pipe of some kind. Running his fingers along it, he discovered it ended in a vertical junction about half a meter to the right— and another, on the left. And above….
It was a ladder. They'd let down a ladder for him.
Michael laughed in huge relief and began to climb. This would be a story and a half, that was for sure. It was strange, though, how had they gotten a ladder in here in ten or fifteen minutes? He kept climbing, idly wondering at this, as the light fell away below him. No light emerged above.
He slowed his climb, then stopped. The ladder was a bit too steady under him to be something that had just been lowered from above. His people hadn't put this ladder here. It was part of the ship.
For a while he clung there in indecision, feeling his inner ear flip over and over from the habitat's rotation. He had to be visible on this thing. Nobody came, nothing happened, so he resumed his climb.
After a while he bumped his head and reaching up felt a smooth surface above him. A dead end? He felt about and his hand fell on an indentation, which had several knob-shaped things in it. He twisted one at random, then another, then reached up again.
His hand felt the surface again, but this time it was soft. He put his hand through it— this was an airlock like the one on the outside of the habitat. Eagerly, he pushed up through it— and into light.
"Gods and kami." He'd thought he must be back at the axis, but this was not the case. Instead, Michael found himself in a small round room with virulently green walls. Most of the floor space was taken up by the bulging round magnetic lock. The place was illuminated by, of all things, a sort of mirror-ball that hung in the center of the space. Four small spotlights spaced about the edges of the ceiling were aimed at it.
The room was a little more than a meter and a half tall. He had to crouch to stand.
A corridor led off from one side of the room. He hulked his way over to this; he seemed to weigh more than usual here, but not unduly much. The corridor sloped up steeply. It too was lit by little spots and mirrored pyramids set into the ceiling.
Michael checked his suit's readings. External air pressure: five bars, very high by human standards. Temperature: twenty-eight degrees Celsius. Humidity: forty percent. Atmospheric composition: ninety percent nitrogen, eight percent oxygen, two percent carbon dioxide. This might be breathable if you used CO2 scrubbers; he didn't know enough about partial pressures to be able to say for sure.