But then he was outside, and it was glorious.
He walked around the base until he found his bearings, and then — always ensuring that the base was in view and that his air supply was adequate — he set off across the ice. Above, Diadem’s sky was a deep enamelled blue, and the ice — though fundamentally white — seemed to contain a billion nuances of pale turquoise, pale aquamarine; even hints of the palest of pinks. Beneath his feet he imagined the crack-like networks of the worms, threading down for hundreds of metres; and he imagined the worms, wriggling through that network, responding to and secreting chemical scent trails. The worms themselves were biologically simple — almost dismayingly so — but that network was a vast, intricate thing. It hardly mattered that the traffic along it — the to-and-fro motions of the worms as they went about their lives — was so agonisingly slow. The worms, after all, had endured longer than human comprehension. They had seen people come and go in an eyeblink.
He walked on until he arrived at the crevasse where he had found Setterholm. They had long since removed Setterholm’s body, of course, but the experience had imprinted itself deeply on Clavain’s mind. He found it easy to relive the moment at the lip of the crevasse when he had first seen the end of Setterholm’s arm. At the time he had told himself that there must be worse places to die; surrounded by beauty that was so pristine; so utterly untouched by human influence. Now, the more he thought about it, the more that Setterholm’s death played on his mind — he wondered if there could be any worse place. It was undeniably beautiful, but it was also crushingly dead; crushingly oblivious to life. Setterholm must have felt himself draining away, soon to become as inanimate as the palace of ice that was to become his tomb.
Clavain thought about it for many more minutes, enjoying the silence and the solitude and the odd awkwardness of the suit. He thought back to the way Setterholm had been found, and his mind niggled at something not quite right; a detail that had not seemed wrong at the time but which now troubled him.
It was Setterholm’s helmet.
He remembered the way it had been lying away from the man’s corpse, as if the impact had knocked it off. But now that Clavain had locked an identical helmet onto his own suit, that was more difficult to believe. The latches were sturdy, and he doubted that the drop into the crevasse would have been sufficient to break the mechanism. He considered the possibility that Setterholm had put his suit on hastily, but even that seemed unlikely now. The airlock had detected that Clavain’s glove was badly attached; it — or any of the other locks — would surely have refused to allow Setterholm outside if his helmet had not been correctly latched.
Clavain wondered if Setterholm’s death had been something other than an accident.
He thought about it, trying the idea on for size, then slowly shook his head. There were myriad possibilities he had yet to rule out. Setterholm could have left the base with his suit intact and then — confused and disoriented — he could have fiddled with the latch, depriving himself of oxygen until he stumbled into the crevasse. Or perhaps the airlocks were not as foolproof as they appeared; the safety mechanism capable of being disabled by people in a hurry to get outside.
No. A man had died, but there was no need to assume it had been anything other than an accident. Clavain turned, and began to walk back to the base.
‘He’s awake,’ Galiana said, a day or so after the final wave of machines had swum into Iverson’s mind. ‘I think it might be better if he spoke to you first, Nevil, don’t you? Rather than one of us?’ She bit her tongue. ‘I mean, rather than someone who’s been Conjoined for as long as the rest of us?’
Clavain shrugged. ‘Then again, an attractive face might be preferable to a grizzled old relic like myself. But I take your point. Is it safe to go in now?’
‘Perfectly. If Iverson was carrying anything infectious, the machines would have flagged it.’
‘I hope you’re right.’
‘Well, look at the evidence. He was acting rationally up to the end. He did everything to ensure we’d have an excellent chance of reviving him. His suicide was just a coldly calculated attempt to escape his situation.’
‘Coldly calculated,’ Clavain echoed. ‘Yes, I suppose it would have been. Cold, I mean.’
Galiana said nothing, but gestured towards the door into Iverson’s room.
Clavain stepped through the opening. And it was as he crossed the threshold that a thought occurred to him. He could once again see, in his mind’s eye, Martin Setterholm’s body lying at the bottom of the crevasse, his fingers pointing to the letters ‘IVF’.
In-vitro fertilisation.
But suppose Setterholm had been trying to write ‘IVERSON’, but had died before finishing the word? If Setterholm had been murdered — pushed into the crevasse — he might have been trying to pass on a message about his murderer. Clavain imagined his pain, legs smashed; knowing with absolute certainty he was going to die alone and cold, but willing himself to write Iverson’s name…
But why would the climatologist have wanted to kill Setterholm? Setterholm’s fascination with the worms was perplexing but harmless. The information Clavain had collected pointed to Setterholm being a single-minded loner; the kind of man who would inspire pity or indifference in his colleagues rather than hatred. And everyone was dying anyway — against such a background, a murder seemed almost irrelevant.
Maybe he was attributing too much to the six faint marks a dying man had scratched on the ice.
Forcing suspicion from his mind — for now — Clavain walked further into Iverson’s room. The room was spartan but serene, with a small blue holographic window set high in one white wall. Clavain was responsible for that. Left to the Conjoiners — who had taken over an area of the main American base and filled it with their own pressurised spaces — Iverson’s room would have been a grim, grey cube. That was fine for the Conjoiners — they moved through informational fields draped like an extra layer over reality. But though Iverson’s head was now drenched with their machines, they were only there to assist his normal patterns of thought; reinforcing weak synaptic signals and compensating for a far-from-equilibrium mix of neurotransmitters.
So Clavain had insisted on cheering the place up a bit; Iverson’s sheets and pillow were now the same pure white as the walls, so that his head bobbed in a sea of whiteness. His hair had been trimmed, but Clavain had made sure that no one had done more than neaten Iverson’s beard.
‘Andrew?’ he said. ‘I’m told you’re awake now. I’m Nevil Clavain. How are you feeling?’
Iverson wet his lips before answering. ‘Better, I suspect, than I have any reason to feel.’
‘Ah.’ Clavain beamed, feeling as if a large burden had just been lifted from his shoulders. ‘Then you’ve some recollection of what happened to you.’
‘I died, didn’t I? Pumped myself full of antifreeze and hoped for the best. Did it work, or is this just some weird-ass dream as I’m sliding towards brain death?’
‘No, it sure as hell worked. That was one weird-heck-ass of a risk…’ Clavain halted, not entirely certain that he could emulate Iverson’s century-old speech patterns. ‘That was quite some risk you took. But it did work, you’ll be glad to hear.’
Iverson lifted a hand from beneath the sheets, examining his palm and the pattern of veins and tendons on the back. ‘This is the same body I went under with? You haven’t stuck me in a robot, or cloned me, or hooked up my disembodied brain to a virtual-reality generator?’