The Next Continent (54 page)

“Not so fast. You forgot to close the tank lid,” said Sohya. He called Control again. “This is Aomine. I'm taking a rover into the crater to retrieve some oxygen. Tae Toenji will be going with me.” He turned to her. “You haven't seen ENG firsthand, have you?”

“No.”

“Great. Better hit the restroom before we go.”

Tae hurried out, looking excited and happy. The SELS supervisor gave a low whistle. “You really know how to handle her.”

“You think so? This is as far as I've gotten in the eleven years I've known her.” Sohya laughed and shrugged his shoulders.

THE ROVER SKIDDED
wildly as it climbed the bright white slope of the crater rim. Sohya corrected with the joystick. Tae squealed in surprise and clutched his arm.

“Sohya! I almost fell out!”

“It's like a roller coaster, isn't it?” He laughed and opened the throttle all the way. The rover's maximum speed was eighteen kilometers per hour. There was no cabin. The chassis hugged the ground, countering any tendency to roll. The suspension was springy, and a jerk on the control stick would instantly induce a skid. It was a bit like being in a sports car. The rover was powered by a thin superconducting cable extending from the cathedral spire. Taking it out for a spin during breaks was a popular activity with the base crew.

At the top of the ridge ahead, forty oblong shapes like yacht sails were spaced at intervals—the heliostats, each with four square meters of mirrored surface, remotely controlled. Moving in tandem, they could send a concentrated beam of light to any point in Sixth Continent. Together they could generate about two megawatts of solar power.

“It looks like Liberty's moving them,” said Sohya. The mirrors were rotating very slowly, tipping toward the sun. “I wonder what they're doing?”

They were almost at the top of the rim. “Could you stop when we get up there?” asked Tae. “I want to check out the view.”

“I was planning to. I have to change the cable anyway. And there's something else.” Sohya pointed to
Apple 7
, just coming into view. He could hear Tae's throat catch. The blackened hole in the core module was clearly visible. “I always stop there to pray for safety.”

At the top of the ridge Sohya got out, swapped the power cable into a distributor box, and attached a new cable. Tae got out of the rover. The ten-meter-high heliostats extended in both directions. She walked along the ridge. To her left lay the base and the outer slope of the crater rim, bathed in light. To her right was an abyss of darkness. As she got closer to
Apple 7
, she could see offerings left by other visitors: canned fruit, sake, books. There was no marker.

“Is he still inside?”

“Of course. If we buried him he wouldn't be able to see the stars. His body won't decay.” Sohya had finished swapping the cables. He placed his palms together and bowed his head.

“Don't you mean he wouldn't be able to see Earth?” asked Tae.

“Wasn't it you who said the stars were his destination?”

She didn't answer but leaned against him. Through the glazing on her visor, he could just make out a tear tracing down her cheek.

“You didn't cry when he died.”

“I know. It's strange. It's taken me till now.”

“What changed?”

“We left him all alone for half a year. I wonder if we did the right thing.”

“He's not alone anymore.”

Sohya started back for the rover. Tae swung round—startled at first, then embarrassed. Somehow she'd expected him to be angry with her. He motioned from the rover. “Let's go. I want to get there by five thirty.”

She looked at the core again, then toward the stars that would be Shinji's forever. At the base of the gentle slope in the sunwashed desert, her palace seemed close enough to touch. Beyond lay a smaller crater. The distances were deceiving. The SETI crater was more than a kilometer away, but it looked startlingly close. A fiery disk and a thin crescent of blue and white hung in the blackness above the horizon.

Sohya was right. The view was superb. Shinji would have many visitors. Tae was almost to the rover when a voice came on the comm.

“Aomine? It's Yamagiwa. Look, this isn't exactly urgent, but I've got something to pass on to you. Johnson Space Center—”

“Aomine here. I'm going to radio silence for a while. I'll contact you on the landline from the vault. ETA is 0530 hours.” He started the rover over the ridge and into the crater.

“What? Aomine, repeat, please.”

Sohya switched off the transceiver. He took a comm cable from behind the seat and connected it to a jack on Tae's backpack, then to his own.

“Why did you switch off? Is that okay?”

“No. But I wanted to be able to talk without people listening in.”

They looked at each other in silence. Suddenly the darkness swallowed them. They were in the shadow zone. Sohya switched on the floodlights, which cast a sharp-edged cone of light on the downslope ahead. The inner surface of the rim was steep; on Earth it would have been a difficult descent even on foot. Sohya steered cautiously as they headed downward.

“I was worried for so long,” said Tae abruptly.

“About what?”

“I thought you were angry with me. For what happened to Shinji.”

“It wasn't your fault. If it was, then I'm just as much to blame. Okay, I was angry with you at first. But later I realized I was really angry at myself.”

“So you're angry.”

“How could I not be? But it's over.”

“I'm sorry.” A small voice. Sohya turned his head inside his helmet to look at her. “When he died, I didn't mourn. Not really.”

“I know.”

“I'm not asking you to forgive me. But it's really hitting me now. I just wanted you to know that.”

“I saw you crying.” He reached over and drew her close. She stiffened, then relaxed against him.

“Thank you, Sohya.”

“It's okay. Don't worry anymore.”

She rested her helmet against his shoulder. They hadn't been alone since she'd arrived two days ago. In fact, they'd hardly been alone together in the past eleven years. Sohya broke the silence. “You've changed.”

“Do I seem different?”

“It's the way you act. You're not as pushy. The old Tae would have been obsessed with collecting money for Phase E. She would have driven a far harder bargain with Liberty Island for the heliostats too.”

“Was I really so pushy?” Judging from her voice, she was blushing. She didn't seem so self-assured now. Sohya was happy to see a spontaneous reaction for a change.

“You're more genuine. What happened? Was it your father?”

“I still can't relax around him.”
Back into her shell,
thought Sohya. Then she added, “But we're both working on it, trying to get closer to each other. That's huge progress.”

“So what I said to you that day at Reika's was right?”

“I guess. All I could think about was doing something really big and showing my father up once and for all.”

“It's good that you finally realized that. But what now? How are you going to keep motivated enough to see this project through?”

“That's something I'm a little concerned about.” Her voice was suddenly tired. “It doesn't belong to me now. It belongs to thousands of people. I'm wondering whether it makes sense for me to keep leading the project. I'm getting more help than I'm giving.”

“Sounds like advice from your father.”

“Yes…Yes, it does.” She looked up at him. “What about you? Do you have the energy to see this through?”

“Are you joking? The Apollo missions were like mountaineers building cairns to show other climbers the way. Sixth Continent is a permanent base camp. I want to show the world what we can do.”

“I envy your confidence.”

“You said it yourself. People really can live on the moon. It's not like Antarctica. It's the real Sixth Continent.”

“But what will I have to live for once it's finished?”

“You need another goal.” The rover swayed as it reached the crater floor. Its floodlights pierced far into the darkness. Tae noticed the color of the surface; it was different here, like a winter snowfield surrounded by a ring of mountains. Far off to the left, the beacon of another vehicle was moving rapidly away, toward Liberty Island.

Sohya trailed a fingertip across the permafrost as it moved past underneath him. “Unravel the secrets buried in this crater. Wouldn't that be a challenging new goal?”

“But Liberty Island is already moving full speed.”

“I don't think they'll find all the answers. Five or ten, maybe twenty years from now, Sixth Continent will be a major research facility. Maybe we'll even mine the helium-3 that the Chinese are going after. There are so many things we can do.”

“And where will you be in twenty years?”

Sohya didn't answer. He was Sixth Continent's construction supervisor. Once construction was finished—what then?

A simple declaration of their true feelings would have bridged the gulf between them. They both knew it, but they had let too many opportunities to say what needed to be said slip away. They had known each other too long. Now neither of them could imagine how honesty might change things, and it scared them both.

They pressed ahead in silence. A few minutes later Sohya halted the rover. They were at the edge of a hundred-meter depression in the crater left by permafrost mining. He played the floodlights over their surroundings. The dragonlike bulk shooter, off-line and inactive, squatted a short distance away near the rim. A single multidozer stood motionless in the pit below.

Sohya advanced down the slope. Moments later, the multidozer moved out of the pit, as if yielding to them, and headed rapidly away. A notch with a vertical wall about three meters high had been cut into the far side of the pit, and a massive frame surrounding an aluminum door was set into the wall of the cut. Sohya stopped nearby and climbed out of the rover, leaving the floodlights on.

“This is the vault. We store hydrogen and oxygen in spent fuel pods here. Don't try to open it with your hands.” He unreeled his suit tether and hooked the end under the bottom edge of the metal slab. It lifted up and inward like a garage door. Beyond was a sloping passage leading down into darkness. They walked into the tunnel.

Seconds later, forty points of light flashed into brilliance above the rim of the crater. The area around the entrance grew brighter. But Sohya and Tae were already inside.

[3]

THE TUNNEL DESCENDED
at a shallow angle for twenty meters. At the end, a room five meters square by two high had been carved out of the permafrost. Twenty or so spherical metal tanks were lined up on the floor, each nearly a meter in diameter.

Tae looked at the smooth walls enclosing them. “This must have taken a lot of time. Was all that work really necessary?”

“Long-term storage on the surface is slightly risky. A micrometeor might puncture a tank. The carpenter robots dug this after they finished shaping the blocks for the buildings. We wanted to keep them busy.”

Tae laughed. “No point in letting them goof off.” She looked closer at a nearby wall. Lit by small spotlights set like epaulets into the shoulders of her suit, the fibers made the coffee-colored permafrost sparkle. “So this is how it looks.” She reached out to touch the wall. Sohya pulled her gently away.

“It's 220 below in here. Touch that wall and the cold could penetrate your glove and freeze the end of your finger. Is your heater on max?”

“I think so. It's pretty noisy.”

“Don't squat down either. You want to keep the joints in your suit open so the heat can circulate. Now let's get some of these tanks out of here.”

Sohya was about to hook the end of his tether to a handcart propped against the wall when Tae said, “Shouldn't you contact Yamagiwa?”

“You're right. Totally slipped my mind.”

She absently reached for her wearcom pendant before she realized it was inside her Manna suit. She checked the comm pad in the suit's left forearm. “There's no signal.”

“The fibers block any signal. That's why we have this.” He pointed to a small interface box in the ceiling. It was connected to a cable that ran down the wall and back up the shaft toward the entrance. He reached up and connected their cables to the box.

“Control, Aomine. We've reached the vault. All conditions nominal. Sorry for being out of touch.”

“Aomine! Are you all right?” It was Yamagiwa. He sounded worried.

“We're fine.” Sohya glanced at Tae in surprise. “What's going on?”

“We thought something might've happened to you. You're underground, right? Did you notice anything on the way there?”

“No, not a thing.”

“That's odd, because Liberty Island is focusing the heliostats right at you.”