‘None of those things, no. Just mopped up some cell damage, fixed a few things here and there and — um — kick-started you back into the land of the living.’
Iverson nodded, but Clavain could tell he was far from convinced. Which was unsurprising: Clavain, after all, had already told a small lie.
‘So how long was I under?’
‘About a century, Andrew. We’re an expedition from back home. We came by starship.’
Iverson nodded again, as if this was mere incidental detail. ‘We’re aboard it now, right?’
‘No… no. We’re still on the planet. The ship’s parked in orbit.’
‘And everyone else?’
No point sugaring the pill. ‘Dead, as far as we can make out. But you must have known that would happen.’
‘Yeah. But I didn’t know for sure, even at the end.’
‘So what happened? How did you escape the infection, or whatever it was?’
‘Sheer luck.’ Iverson asked for a drink. Clavain fetched him one, and at the same time had the room extrude a chair next to the bed.
‘I didn’t see much sign of luck,’ Clavain said.
‘No; it was terrible. But I was the lucky one — that’s all I meant. I don’t know how much you know. We had to evacuate the outlying bases towards the end, when we couldn’t keep more than one fusion reactor running.’ Iverson took a sip from the glass of water Clavain had brought him. ‘If we’d still had the machines to look after us—’
‘Yes. That’s something we never really understood.’ Clavain leaned closer to the bed. ‘Those von Neumann machines were built to self-repair themselves, weren’t they? We still don’t see how they broke down.’
Iverson eyed him. ‘They didn’t. Break down, I mean.’
‘No? Then what happened?’
‘We smashed them up. Like rebellious teenagers overthrowing parental control. The machines were nannying us, and we were sick of it. In hindsight, it wasn’t such a good idea.’
‘Didn’t the machines put up a fight?’
‘Not exactly. I don’t think the people who designed them ever thought they’d get trashed by the kids they’d lovingly cared for.’
So, Clavain thought — whatever had happened here, whatever he went on to learn, it was clear that the Americans had been at least partially the authors of their own misfortunes. He still felt sympathy for them, but now it was cooler, tempered with something close to disgust. He wondered if that feeling of disappointed appraisal would have come so easily without Galiana’s machines in his head. It would be just a tiny step to go from feeling that way towards Iverson’s people to feeling that way about the rest of humanity… and then I’d know that I’d truly attained Transenlightenment…
Clavain snapped out of his morbid line of thinking. It was not Transenlightenment that engendered those feelings, just ancient, bone-deep cynicism.
‘Well, there’s no point dwelling on what was done years ago. But how did you survive?’
‘After the evacuation, we realised that we’d left something behind — a spare component for the remaining fusion reactor. So I went back for it, taking one of the planes. I landed just as a bad weather front was coming in, which kept me grounded there for two days. That was when the others began to get sick. It happened pretty quickly, and all I knew about it was what I could figure out from the comm links back to the main base.’
‘Tell me what you did figure out.’
‘Not much,’ Iverson said. ‘It was fast, and it seemed to attack the central nervous system. No one survived it. Those that didn’t die of it directly went on to get themselves killed through accidents or sloppy procedure.’
‘We noticed. Eventually someone died who was responsible for keeping the fusion reactor running properly. It didn’t blow up, did it?’
‘No. Just spewed out a lot more neutrons than normal; too much for the shielding to contain. Then it went into emergency shutdown mode. Some people were killed by the radiation, but most died of the cold that came afterwards.’
‘Hm. Except you.’
Iverson nodded. ‘If I hadn’t had to go back for that component, I’d have been one of them. Obviously, I couldn’t risk returning. Even if I could have got the reactor working again, there was still the problem of the contaminant.’ He breathed in deeply, as if steeling himself to recollect what had happened next. ‘So I weighed my options and decided dying — freezing myself — was my only hope. No one was going to come from Earth to help me, even if I could have kept myself alive. Not for decades, anyway. So I took a chance.’
‘One that paid off.’
‘Like I said, I was the lucky one.’ Iverson took another sip from the glass Clavain had brought him. ‘Man, that tastes better than anything I’ve ever drunk in my life. What’s in this, by the way?’
‘Just water. Glacial water. Purified, of course.’
Iverson nodded, slowly, and put the glass down next to his bed.
‘Not thirsty now?’
‘Quenched my thirst nicely, thank you.’
‘Good.’ Clavain stood up. ‘I’ll let you get some rest, Andrew. If there’s anything you need, anything we can do — just call out.’
‘I’ll be sure to.’
Clavain smiled and walked to the door, observing Iverson’s obvious relief that the questioning session was over for now. But Iverson had said nothing incriminating, Clavain reminded himself, and his responses were entirely consistent with the fatigue and confusion anyone would feel after so long asleep — or dead, depending on how you defined Iverson’s period on ice. It was unfair to associate him with Setterholm’s death just because of a few indistinct marks gouged in ice, and the faint possibility that Setterholm had been murdered.
Still, Clavain paused before leaving the room. ‘One other thing, Andrew — just something that’s been bothering me, and I wondered if you could help.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘Do the initials “I”, “V” and “F” mean anything to you?’
Iverson thought about it for a moment, then shook his head. ‘Sorry, Nevil. You’ve got me there.’
‘Well, it was just a shot in the dark,’ Clavain said.
Iverson was strong enough to walk around the next day. He insisted on exploring the rest of the base, not simply the parts the Conjoiners had taken over. He wanted to see for himself the damage that he had heard about, and look over the lists of the dead — and the manner in which they had died — that Clavain and his friends had assiduously compiled. Clavain kept a watchful eye on the man, aware of how emotionally traumatic the whole experience must be. He was bearing it well, but that might easily have been a front. Galiana’s machines could tell a lot about how his brain was functioning, but they were unable to probe Iverson’s state of mind at the resolution needed to map emotional well-being.
Clavain, meanwhile, strove as best he could to keep Iverson in the dark about the Conjoiners. He did not want to overwhelm Iverson with strangeness at this delicate time; did not want to shatter the man’s illusion that he had been rescued by a group of ‘normal’ human beings. But it turned out to be easier than he had expected, as Iverson showed surprisingly little interest in the history he had missed. Clavain had gone as far as telling him that the Sandra Voi was technically a ship full of refugees, fleeing the aftermath of a war between various factions of solar-system humanity — but Iverson had done little more than nod, never probing Clavain for more details about the war. Once or twice Clavain had even alluded accidentally to the Transenlightenment — that shared consciousness state the Conjoiners had reached — but Iverson had shown the same lack of interest. He was not even curious about the Sandra Voi herself, never once asking Clavain what the ship was like. It was not quite what Clavain had been expecting.