Perpetual Winter: The Deep Inn (18 page)

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The vice president called for Lucas Zuriaga around ten in the evening. Andrew was still a young man, taller than the other crew members, with light brown curls and lightly freckled skin. His light brown hair had a hint of red, without him being redheaded. When Lucas arrived, Andrew was alone, doing computer models for saving energy. He didn’t seem satisfied with the results. “Please sit down,”
he said. As time had passed, Andrew had consolidated his authority. The times he proposed decisions by consensus were long gone. He was older than most of the others and had critical knowledge, which helped him.

              “Lucas, I felt antagonism from you during the whole process with the Rover.”

              “I disagreed with sending Caroline.”

              “I realized that. Did you want to go?”

              “I think that, given the possibility of dealing with a physically difficult task, a man should have gone.”

              “You, for example.”

              “That would have been ideal.”

              “In one of those spaceships, there are dozens of mechanized exoskeletons. Do you think that a man with an exoskeleton is stronger than a woman with the same exoskeleton?”

              “I don’t know how exoskeletons work, but what happened with the Rover would not have happened with me.”

              “A child with an exoskeleton is as strong as you, Lucas, because the strength is in the system. Women have to be included in all tasks from the beginning. In the future colony, strength will be found in the mechanized systems. If you injure yourself and become weaker, you will not be excluded. And, principally, there is a debate phase and an execution phase for decisions. During the debate phase, we should all speak freely. You did not express your opinion, just as you frequently do not express it, but when the final result is not what you prefer, you want to start over. I don’t understand that.”

              “With mechanized systems, we should choose who will make better use of them. Not by flipping a coin. You’re right; I don’t join in all of the discussions. I remember my father saying that it’s not worth discussing all differences with all people because in ninety percent of cases, questions will resolve themselves and spare us from battling in vain.”

              “Yes, they spare us. But you are playing the odds. If the ten percent probability occurs, no one will forget that, in the discussion phase, you did not show your opposition to it. You kept quiet. You can choose the battles you want to fight, but you have to accept your defeat in the ones you choose not to fight. You were defeated as soon as you chose not to fight and if luck comes your way, it was luck that won, not you.”

              “With the heat of the real problem burning our feet, people will forget how we made the first decision if it was not a good one and everyone will concentrate on how to make the second one, the correct one,” Lucas retorted.

              “No one will forget. No one. We all know that another problem will arise and it would be better for us to understand what happens in the process of generating good decisions.”

              “Many battles, many enemies,” Lucas said.

              “No, Lucas. When the battles are over ideas, enemies are not created.”

              “I would like to have heard you say this during the Inquisition, the New State or even during the 1975 Revolution in Portugal.”

              “During the time of the Inquisition, America did not yet exist. I don’t know what the New State is, but it sounds like something very old and revolutions are always fleeting. Look, we’re on Ganymede forever. That time never existed for me and it should die for you. Are you Christian?”

              “I’m Catholic,” Lucas stressed.

              “Did you go to Mass?”

              “I’m not a practicing Catholic.”

              “You’re not Catholic. There are no non-practicing Catholics, Lucas. The only way to believe in something is to believe in the acts that it implies,” he emphasized. “That is an idea that Latin Americans do not truly understand.”

              “I’m not Latin American. I’m European.”

              “Yes, and I might be mistaken, but I imagine the verbose, hierarchical atmosphere in which you grew up, with its patriarchal egos and nostalgia for a grandiose but lost Iberian past. It’s very different from the straightforward nature of intelligence focused on facts and the specific integrity of those who live according to the truth in which they believe.”

              “I believe the truth includes nuances between black and white,” Lucas said.

              “But it cannot include calling white black when it’s handy and black white when it’s convenient. And there has to be a correlation between acts and words. If not, we can’t trust the words,” Andrew said, now losing the tone of one who is explaining more than arguing.

              “Words and acts are similar worlds, but they are not the same world. In the end, facts and their context prevail. Opinion itself is often dictated by the emotional context, principally when thinking abstractly or far from the time you must decide. Opinion does not follow logical analysis. Context contaminates the opinion, namely, the historical context. Things change. We must be versatile in order to recognize when the scenario changes, if we want to decide well. Now, when I give my word, I honor it,” the European emphasized.

              “I’m more interested in what the actors say rather than what the scenario says because I can always choose the actors and rarely the scenario. But think, perhaps I don’t have a problem changing a decision that is demonstrably wrong. However, I cannot accept that, during the debate phase, you deprive us of your opinion only to see it surface during a crisis at five till midnight. Continue keeping your word when you give it, but I’d like you to give your word more often.

              Lucas looked at him and did not respond. Andrew was about one meter and four centuries from him.

              “What about the Rover?” Lucas changed the topic.

              “We’ll go get it in the morning,” the vice president said.

          Lucas appreciated Andrew not bringing up his changing the batteries for lighter ones. But more than anything, he was pleased with himself. Twelve weeks of reading and he’d managed to speak with the vice president as an equal. Maybe that had come from his biological parents, from the bookish ones. He promised to go to a university, if life one day gave him the opportunity.

              The next morning Lucas and Steven went out and got the cable. They attached it and brought the Rover to the platform. They turned the GPS off since there were still no GPS satellites on Ganymede.

              During the brainstorming session, Andrew requested action plans. Steven Boyd asked if Andrew had advised people of his discovery of the Rover’s preprogrammed failure. Andrew said he was looking over the data and that his opinion had to be validated. “Then also validate a detail: in the video. Professor Crane’s and Senator Tyrell Hendriks’ watches showed the same time, but Emilio Cardoso’s was different. The President’s speech was not live. It was a recording.” “We’ll look into that, Steve,”
the vice president said and then immediately asked Lucas to speak. Lucas proposed that he go out alone with the car on a reconnaissance mission to the logistics ships and contact the surviving volunteers. At first, everyone preferred there be two elements, in part because they didn’t know how the other settlers who had survived would react, but Lucas argued that security during their contact with the volunteers depended specifically on him, since no one else had combat training. Beyond that, the mission’s principal risk was not the other settlers, who ought to be anxious to meet up with them, but a malfunction of the Rover and, in that case, the energy and oxygen reserves that would allow for its return or help would sustain two people less successfully than one. The plan was thus approved.

              The next day, he left in the exploration vehicle. Instead of the light, flexible spacesuit, he wore a standard suit that, with batteries and triple tanks, was much heavier. He felt anxious about what he was going to find. Would there be survivors? Why had they never responded to the white ship’s attempts to make contact? Would they have a Rover capable of circulating in Ganymede’s deep cold, outside the dome? If they did, why had they never come to visit them?

              The darkness was almost absolute and the sky was very beautiful despite being a little bit this side of the fantastic descriptions heard from space. Jupiter dominated the night. It was titanic, occupying a good part of the sky. From the vessel’s round eyes, you couldn’t see it as well—Jupiter, seen from the outside, was a giant. The Rover’s lights had an unusual reach and he soon could see the logistical vessels on the horizon. At that temperature, the jeep moved at eight kilometers per hour on the flat terrain covered with a sheet of ice over which the jeep’s wheels left its tracks. A virgin planet receiving humanity.

              The immensity reminded him of his Atlantic crossing. But there it was an immensity inhabited by storms and here it was an immobile immensity, suspended like an old photo in a deserted house and just as silent. The only sound on Ganymede was his own breathing. It seemed like he could even hear his blood pulsing in his forehead and his ears as if he were simultaneously acting and observing himself. He, as spectator, was seeing himself as an actor playing the story of his life in a scenic environment of palpable unreality. At about two-thirds distance the multiple photo-detection binoculars showed that the ships were heated and close to one another. They had traveled hundreds of millions kilometers and all had made the same mistake in relation to the vault, but a mistake made with enormous precision. Level zero accuracy; level ten precision, as his friend Pierre would say.

              His friend Pierre... that was the first time he’d thought in those terms. The name Pierre made the friendship key on the piano of his chest sound. He mentally scrolled through all seven refugees on the white ship. Andrew, friend. Sofia, friend. Mariah, friend. Steven, companion. Companion? He recalled it again and his internal piano played the note companion. He made an effort to hear the tone of friend, but nothing. Larissa and Caroline were also companions. Would this be a conclusive schism or would they, one by one, migrate from companions in the same tragedy to friends on the journey as time proceeded?

              He had to move away from them to feel friendship. He now realized what he had seen in Caroline’s frozen eyes, when she slipped out of the spacesuit at ten degrees below zero: the happiness of returning home. He no longer wanted the freedom of immensity; he wanted the warmth of hearth and home in the white polar ship. Hearth and home? He received his feelings with incredulity and with even more incredulity the words in which those feeling came wrapped. But he also felt the memory of the warm cocoon’s comfort with its illuminated eyes and the refuge it offered from that no-man’s land’s empty wind. Ganymede’s South Pole was so inhospitable that it transformed any metallic watchtower into a romantically protective cabin, a prison from which they could hardly leave into a welcoming citadel where you dreamed of arriving, such was that vacuum’s lifeless density.

              He ran through his experiences prior to all of this, looking for which key the people he had left behind in that other life and who would never appear again would play. He scoured his memory, from north to south and from east to west, and found nothing but the present. The cosmic space was not emptiness in the sense of the absence of filling, it was not nothingness due to confrontation with things and much less was it being alone to be their very own selves. It was only being distanced from their very selves. It was emptiness, as an anti-world, a palpable nothingness, vigilant and threatening.

             
An absolute isolation, in which we see our own steps and we hear our own breathing as if projected on a white movie screen, but we are distancing ourselves from that screen. Me, divorcing myself from my body speckled with platinum.
Prisoner on a glacial white plane, in the absence of a horizon, of an irregularity, of an imperfection. An acidic scalpel, that in just one hour of travel, vivisects my memory, reduced to the present, with neither memory of my past life nor hope for a future one, in an autopsy suffered without the anesthesia of death.

             
Earth was the promised land and the Cosmic Ether was the hell of the ostracized, now not only by others, but by themselves.

              The world and the soul are two parts of the same thing and that is why, if we weep, we feel a little like we had cried, if we chuckle we feel as if we had laughed and if we are mistaken for a famous star, for a few moments we are a star. Without input that brings tangible news of odors, of sounds, of heat or cold, of color or shapes, of surfaces that we touch, of our bodies internal sensations; with none of this, we are adrift, like a lost balloon within ourselves. Without an anchor to the world, feelings’ bindings that had moored your soul to the port of your flesh being gnawed, disconnected ideas awaken, unwelcome memories, vivid illusions, fears for no reason, time without hours, in the despair that there is no end and in the forgetting of that which once had been a beginning.