“I suppose we could walk to the spaceport?” Wahram said, worried.
Swan was talking to her internal qube, however, and Wahram couldn’t follow the gist of the exchange. Her tone of voice was utterly caustic.
She broke off that argument and said to him, “The cars aren’t coming back. The city will stop automatically when it hits the break in the tracks. We have to leave. Every tenth platform has elevators that go down to shelters under the tracks, so we have to get to one of those.”
“How near is the closest one to the west?”
“About ninety kilometers. The town just passed one back to the east.”
“Ninety kilometers!”
“Yes. We’ll need to go east. It’s only nine kilometers. Our suits will handle the sunlight for the time it will take us.”
Wahram said, “Maybe we could walk the ninety.”
“No we couldn’t, what do you mean?”
“I think we could. People have done it.”
“Athletes who have trained for it have done it. I do enough walking to know, and maybe I could do it, but you couldn’t. You can’t do it by willpower alone. And this sunwalker is hurt. No, listen, we’ll be all right going into the sunlight. It’s just the corona we’ll be exposed to, and no more than an hour or a little more. I’ve done it often.”
“I’d rather not.”
“You have no choice! Come on, the longer we dither, the longer we’ll be exposed!”
That was true.
“All right, then,” he said, and felt his heart pound inside him.
She turned around, held out her arms up to the city, groaned like an animal. “Oh, my town, my town, ohhhh… We’ll come back! We’ll rebuild! Ohhhhh…”
Behind the glassy face mask her face was wet with tears. She noticed him watching her and swung a hand back as if to strike at him. “Come on, we have to go!” She gestured to the three sunwalkers. “Come on!”
As they started running east, Swan howled over the common band, a sound like an alarm siren that had done its duty but continued on in the emptiness after a disaster. The figure running before him did not seem capable of generating such a terrible sound, which stuck him like pins in the ears. A lot of animals had no doubt been left behind inside—the whole little terrarium, a community of plants and animals. And she designed such things. And this one was her home. Suddenly her howl made it clear to him that saving the humans of the place was not really enough. So much got left behind. A whole world. If a world dies, its people don’t matter anymore—so the howl seemed to say.
Dawn kept coming, as always.
Now this was an interesting matter: could he modulate his fear, rein it in and use it to impel him at the optimum pace for the quickest arrival at the platform out there to the east, in the raw light of daybreak? And did that pace match the pace that was going to be set for him by the person he was following? For Swan was moaning still, crying and cursing, keening in a rhythm that was keyed to her running; she bounced forward on the impact of her strides, perhaps helpless to go slower; and yet she was moving faster than he could match. He had to give ground and keep to his own pace, and hope that he would at least be able to keep the distance close enough that he wouldn’t lose her over the horizon. Although of course the tracks would lead him right to the platform, so even if she disappeared over the horizon, that should not matter. And yet he did not want to lose sight of her. The three sunwalkers were already a considerable distance ahead of her, even the one with the hurt arm. So maybe the unhappy noise she was making was in fact slowing her down.
The land dipped and rose here in such a way that he could see many kilometers to the north, and the highlands in that direction were now all ablaze with sunlight. That lit part of the landscape threw light over the shadowed terrain they ran in, and Wahram saw the rumples in the land, and the rubble on it, better than he had ever seen anything before, not just on Mercury but anywhere. Everything looked coated by a layer of friable powder, no doubt the result of the daily bake and freeze.
The light from the north grew so bright he had to look away to preserve his vision for the dark places underfoot and before him. Ahead the moaning silhouette bounded against the stars. He forced his breath into a rhythm with his feet, watched the ground he was running on, focused on a rapid efficient gait. One-third g could be deceptive, being neither light nor heavy. It had the potential for speedy running, but a fall was not a trivial thing, especially in this situation. Swan was on home ground and did not appear to be thinking of him at all.
He ran on. Normally the distance involved would be for him a matter of about forty-five minutes of running, he reckoned, depending on terrain. That was long enough to call for restraint from full speed, even for runners. Was she going out too fast? He saw no signs of deceleration.
On the other hand, she was not getting farther ahead. And he was now in a pace he thought he could sustain. It was neither fast nor slow. He huffed and puffed, watched the ground carefully. Quick glances showed Swan always well short of the horizon. It was all going to work out—then he stumbled and had to catch himself up by way of some desperate windmilling of the arms, after which he kept his head down and focused on the ground more than ever.
It was one of those moments when the shock of the unexpected throws one into a different space. He could see Swan’s boot prints superimposed on the palimpsest of earlier prints. Her stride was shorter than his. He flew over her steps, even though he was losing ground on her. The sunwalkers were halfway over the horizon. Swan’s moaning still filled his ears, but he refused to let himself turn down the volume or turn it off.
Then the sun blinked over the horizon, and again he felt his heart pounding. At first, licks of orange fire popped over the horizon and disappeared. The corona was hotter than the actual surface of the sun by a great deal, as he recalled. Magnetic surges, bowing up in characteristic loops of fire, rising majestically over the horizon and hanging there before blasting off to one side or the other. The sun’s flames, in effect, flying up in stupendous explosions guided by the magnetic fields that roiled in the burn. He ran on looking down at the ground, but the next time he glanced up most of the horizon ahead of him was orange—the sun itself, its orangeness stuffed and writhing with bubbles and banners of yellow. To stop it down to something his eyes could handle, his faceplate had to render the rest of the cosmos black. The horizon was the only thing that could be clearly picked out, a line out there not very high, not smooth, various hills and dips that bounced and blurred. Swan stood out blackly, a runner imago, her silhouette thinned by white light pouring around her. The ground underfoot was now a salt-and-pepper pattern impossible to read, aching white and deep black all jumbled together so that the white parts pulsed and shimmered in his vision. He had to trust it was flat enough to run, because it didn’t look like it. And then after another while it became a black-chipped white that looked flat as a sheet. They were out in full day.
He began to sweat. Probably this was just fear, and the sudden helpless acceleration in his pace. His suit began to hum audibly in its effort to cool him, a slight but terrible sound. His sweat would slide down his flanks and legs and collect at a seal above the boots. He didn’t think enough could collect to drown him, but he wasn’t sure. The black flicker of Swan in the sun had become a sort of spectre of the Brocken, exploding in and out of existence in vibrant pulses. He thought he saw her look over her shoulder at him, but he did not dare wave to her lest he lose his balance and fall. She seemed short, and suddenly he saw she was visible now only from the knees up. The horizon was about as far away as it would be on Titan. That meant he was probably only five or ten minutes behind her.
Then the platform top appeared over the horizon just to her left, next to the southernmost track, and he quickened his pace yet again. In any physical endeavor a little kick at the end could usually be found.
This time, however, it seemed he was truly stretched to his maximum. Indeed it very quickly turned into something more like a desperate attempt to h
old what speed he had. He was gasping, and had to force himself to a breath pattern in a rhythm coordinated with his pounding heavy legs, one gasp for two strikes. It was very frightening to look up and see almost the whole visible stretch of the eastern horizon topped by the corona; the slight curve of it seemed to suggest it would eventually fill most of the sky, as if what was rising before them was some kind of universal sun. Mercury looked like a bowling ball rolling into that light.
His sweat now filled his suit to his thighs, and he wondered again if he could drown in it. But then again, he could drink it and save himself. Happily his air supply was still cool in his face.
His faceplate polarization shifted, and the texture of the sun through the black glass of his faceplate articulated into thousands of tongues of flame. Big fields of tendrils moved in concert, whole regions swirling like cats’ paws on water. It looked like a living being, a creature made of fire.
The platform was a block of black in the black, Swan a black movement beside it. He reached her, stopped, gasped for a while with his hands on his knees, his back to the sun. Her keening had stopped, although from time to time she still moaned. The sunwalkers apparently had already taken the elevator down; she was waiting for it to come back up.
“I’m sorry,” he said when he could speak. “Sorry I’m late.”
She was looking at the sun, now four fingers high over the jagged black horizon. “Oh my God, look at it,” she said. “Just look at it.”
Wahram tried, but it was too bright, too big.
Then a loop of the corona flew hugely higher than any they had yet seen, as if the sun were trying to reach out and burn them with a touch. “Oh no!” Swan cried out, and pulled Wahram over to her and against the door, moving to his sun side and pulling him down to shield him with herself, punching elevator buttons over his shoulder and cursing.
“Come on hurry!” she yelled. “Oh that’s a big flare, that’s bad. By the time you see one of those it’s already zapped you.”
Finally the elevator doors slid open and the two of them rushed in. The doors closed. They felt the elevator car drop.
When Wahram’s faceplate and eyes had adjusted to the ordinary light, he saw that Swan’s face under her faceplate was wet with tears and snot.
She sniffed hard. “Damn that was a big flare,” she said, wiping her face. When the elevator stopped and they got out, she said to the sunwalkers, “Any of you have a dosimeter on you?”
One of them replied as if quoting: “If you want to know, you don’t want to know.”
She looked at Wahram, her expression grim in a way he had never seen. “Pauline?” she said. “Find the dosimeter in this suit.” She listened for a while, then clutched her chest, staggered down to one knee. “Oh shit,” she said faintly. “I’m killed.”
“How much did you get?” Wahram exclaimed, alarmed. He checked his wristpad; it showed a radiation spike of 3.762 sieverts, and he hissed. They would be needing a lot of DNA repair the next time they got their treatments—if they could make it. He repeated his question: “How much did you get?”
She stood up and would not look at him. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“That was quite a slice of the sun,” he said.
“It’s not that,” she said. “It was that flare. Bad luck.”
The sunwalkers nodded at this, and Wahram felt a little queasy jolt slither down his spine.
They were in a lock. The elevator doors closed behind them, the door on the other side of the lock slid open, followed by a little whoosh of air. They went into a low room of some considerable size, with several doors and passageways leading out of it.
“Is this a refuge?” Wahram asked. “Do we have to stay here through the brightside crossing? Can we?”
“This is part of a whole system,” Swan explained. “It was built to help with the construction of the tracks. Every tenth platform has a unit like this under it, and there’s a utilidor that connects them all. A work tunnel.” The sunwalkers were already checking some of the cabinet doors on one wall.
“So we could hurry underground in this tunnel and catch up to the nightside? Get to help?”
“Yes. But I wonder if the part under the meteor strike is still passable. I guess we can go see.”
“It’s all heated and aerated?”
“Yes. After some people died when they came down to take shelter, the stations have been made minimally survivable. Actually, I think you have to re-aerate the utilidor section by section as you go along. It’s like turning on the lights.”
One of the sunwalkers gave a thumbs-up, and Swan took off her helmet and Wahram did too.
“Do either of you have radio comms?” one of them asked. “Ours aren’t working, and we’re thinking maybe the sun fried them. And the phone here isn’t working. We won’t be able to tell people we’re down here.”
“Pauline, are you all right?” Swan said aloud, and fell silent.
“How is your qube?” Wahram asked after a while.
“She’s all right,” Swan said dismissively. “She says my head served as good insulation for her.”
“Oh dear.”
They followed the sunwalkers down the hall, took stairs down to a set of large rooms below.
The biggest room down there contained a scattering of couches and low tables, and the long bar of a communal kitchen. Swan introduced herself and Wahram to the three sunwalkers, who were people of indeterminate age and gender. They nodded politely at Swan’s introduction, but did not identify themselves. “How is your arm?” Swan asked the hurt one.
“It’s broken,” the person said simply, and held it out a little. “Clean hit, but the rock was small and just falling, I guess. Tossed up in the big hit.”
Now it seemed to Wahram that this one at least was young.
“We’ll wrap it,” one of the others said, also young. “We can try to straighten it, and then wrap it with a support, no matter how straight it is.”
“Did any of you see the meteor strike?” Swan asked.
They all three shook their heads. All young, Wahram thought. These were the kinds of people who walked around Mercury right before sunrise, torching themselves with solar visions. Although apparently Swan was also one of them. The young in spirit, then.
“What are we going to do?” he asked.
“We can take the utilidor west till we get to the next spaceport on the nightside,” one of them said.
“Do you think the utilidor is still passable under the hit?” Swan asked.
“Oh,” the one said. “I didn’t think of that.”
“It might be,” said the one with the broken forearm. The third one was looking in cabinets against the wall. “You never know.”
“I doubt it,” Swan said. “But I guess we can go look. It’s only about fifteen klicks away.”
Only fifteen! Wahram didn’t say. They stood there looking at each other.
“Well, shit,” Swan said. “Let’s go take a look. I don’t want to just sit here.”
Wahram suppressed a sigh. It was not as if they had a great number of choices. And if they could get through to the west, and hurried, they could catch up to the night, and hopefully the spaceport where the people from Terminator had gone.
So they went to a door at the west end of the room and went through it into a passageway, lit dimly by a string of overhead lights that were part of the ceiling. The walls of the tunnel were raw faces of rock, in some places cracked, in others bare walls with drill bit marks angling upward on their left and downward on their right. They hiked west at a good clip. The one with the broken arm seemed to be the fastest of them all, although one of the other sunwalkers stuck close by the hurt one. No one spoke. An hour passed; then, after a short rest sitting on some cubical blocks of rock in the tunnel, another hour. “Did your Pauline get an image of the strike?” Wahram asked Swan when they were walking again. The utilidor was wide enough for three or four people to walk abreast, as the sunwalkers were proving ahead of t
hem.
“I’ve looked, but it’s just a flash to one side. Only a few milliseconds of light before the explosion upward and out, coming down fast and hot. But why hot? There’s no atmosphere to heat it, so that doesn’t make sense. It kind of looks like it came from, I don’t know, somewhere else. From some other universe.”
“Seems like some other explanation will be forthcoming,” Wahram could not help saying.
“Well, you explain it,” she said sharply, as if speaking to her qube.
“I can’t,” Wahram said calmly.
They walked on in silence. Presumably at some point they were walking underneath the city. Above them, Terminator would be burning up in the day’s rain of light.
Then the tunnel ahead of them appeared to end. They had all put their helmets back on, as it was the easiest way to carry them, and now they shone their helmets’ headlamps into the darkness before them. A mass of rock rubble filled the tunnel, floor to roof. It was cold here, and suddenly Swan said, “We’d better seal our helmets,” and her faceplate slid down. Wahram did the same.
They stood there looking at the blockage.
“All right,” Swan said grimly. “Can’t go west. We’ll have to go east, I guess.”
“But how long will that take?” Wahram said.
She shrugged. “If we sit here, it will be eighty-eight days till sunset. If we walk, it will be less.”
“Walk around half of Mercury?”
“Less than half, because we will be walking and the planet will be rolling. That’s the point. I mean, what else are we going to do? I’m not going to sit here for three months!” She was almost in tears, he saw.
“How far is it again?” he asked, thinking half of Titan as he said it. His stomach contracted within him.
“About two thousand kilometers. But if we walk east at, say, thirty kilometers a day, we shorten the wait time to something more like forty days. So we can cut it in half. That seems worth it to me. And it doesn’t have to be continuous walking. I mean, it’s not like the sunwalkers. We walk a day’s worth, eat, sleep a night, then walk again. Set a daily schedule. If we hiked for twelve hours out of every twenty-four, that would be a lot, but it would save even more days. What, Pauline?”