The station had been installed on a flat, open piece of ground, an overhang that overlooked almost everything except the two abrupt peaks that surrounded it and were lost in the clouds. Those, located due north, did not block the sun. From afar, in the silence, Ada had heard the wind turbines creaking.
The guy on his chair had not moved. Coming out of the woods, Ada raised a hand with a friendly "hey there," but he was looking elsewhere. The silence flattened everything. When she was two steps away, she saw that the man's face was leaning to the side. He was no longer breathing. He was dead, too, and yet he looked intact.
She pulled a badge off the sky-blue suit of the corpse. The letters had strangely faded, washed out. Fair enough. Around the base, she found a makeshift cemetery. No grave for the unlucky ones-about fifteen-but some good soul had put them in a suit with a visor, backs to the ground, with a Catholic cross for all of them.
She looked around. From here, a magnificent view of the ocean, which had become the graveyard of countless generations of ships.
The base door was firmly closed with a piston that could be unlocked by pulling a lever. The door yielded without resistance.
No smell in the air. Light entered through bay windows, but when Ada flipped a switch, everything worked. A table, numerous mysterious scientific instruments. Kutkh rolled toward something that looked like a fridge and meowed… Ada opened it and discovered intact food, wrapped in plastic with blank labels.
"Stop whining, Kukth," she said, "the fridge is warm, we don't know how long this stuff has been here."
She still put some energy bars in her pocket and opened one for Kukth, who devoured it. The food looked like it had just come out of the store. The beds were unmade, but nothing seemed messy.
She turned on the central computer and the private LE units. The electronics worked, but nothing booted. For an instant she told herself she was in limbo, in a dream where every written trace, every life, disappeared. Could it be the Empyrean Gates that had plunged Caliban into this lifeless world?
On the table, there was a large chest with a post-it on it. Nothing on the post-it. Super useful, guys, Ada muttered as she tore off the paper. The chest contained several layers of lead and a container with the first written traces:
Stasis container, Masmak Industries
The object was complicated to open, set in several layers like an onion, with electronics to unlock. And at the bottom of all those layers, yet another electronic gizmo, with a dangling plug.
Without really believing in it, she plugged it into an appropriate port on the central computer. The machine finally woke up, displayed a few lines of code, then a video message on the screen. One sees a guy in front of the wind turbine, outside. The scene was more or less identical… there were a few fewer ships in the ocean.
The man speaking had a young, handsome face, messy hair, an adventurer's beard; his tone was feverish; he seemed optimistic and desperate at the same time.
"If you're seeing this message, it means I'm a fucking genius," he began.
Really, Ada thought, hitting pause and going to fetch cans and snacks from the fridge. She settled into a chair and resumed playback.
"I'm David Ilsner, from the Ilsner expedition, under His Highness of Masmak…"
"Never heard of you," Ada commented.
"We landed with a pre-built base, two days ago, June 28th, 2528…"
"Two hundred years ago, you hear that Alpha? The guy's completely out to lunch."
"There is… on Caliban… a strong power. Something radiating. It's unknown. I called it the mess machine. Or rather the anti-mess machine. It concentrates our thoughts into a foggy something. It empties our brain. We turn into vegetables. No sentient or even sensitive life is possible, that's why there are no animals here. I think it's a thing that absorbs entropy… enough to empty our skulls, not enough to rejuvenate us. A Transient thing, of course. Well, the whole team is in vegetable mode. I don't have anything to do performance boosts, and they're going to die of hunger, of thirst; anyway they're not really here anymore…"
The silence that followed lasted nearly thirty seconds.
"Come on, continue! What's happening to you?"
"Uh," he resumed, shaking his head. "I'm holding on because… (he taps his skull)… the Booz injection. My consciousness is fading, but I can copy it elsewhere, too complicated to explain, not the point. I did a triangulation… damn it, two seconds. I'm forced to use two recorders, offset, because the data erases itself. There. I did a triangulation and the mess machine is due north. I'm going to go there and blow it up with this-" (he shows a pile of red bricks behind him) "-(another long silence)… If you're seeing this, it means I'm a fucking genius, but I'm probably dead. I'm a fucking genius because I put the recordings in protected stasis and we can more or less protect ourselves from the mess machine. And I'm dead, because I didn't come back to the base. If you can protect yourselves from the radiation, then you can finish my work. I came here on the trail of the Travelers. They built something huge here… something important… and I don't know what it's for… goddammit, this is bullshit!" (he hits the table and screams). "So close to the solution! And I put my head in the trap. Ah fuck, I'll have died as I lived: like an idiot, and like a genius. All right, bye folks."
Ada bit into chocolate for the first time, bitter and sweet. She wondered if this guy, this David, was serious. He seemed nuts.
She circled the base again. Alpha was staring at the corpses, motionless. She hadn't managed to find a map, but well, north, in the northern hemisphere, that's where the sun never is, right?
She spent a day and a night in that gloomy base. On a soft bed, hands behind her head, she wondered why all those dead people didn't freak her out. In the heart of the night, under the milky clouds, she even went into the makeshift cemetery to confront them.
She had read in the margin of a book on Xeno planets that it was, in a way, sadder that ghosts do not exist, because that meant there was no life after death.
"You were buddies of this David, right?" she said to the dead, in the dark and silence. "To the north, he went to find the Empyrean Gates. The Travelers want us to find them. Us humans, and all the Xenos, to follow the trail back to them. And you died. And David, well, if it was two hundred years ago, him too. Of course I wonder what's behind those damn Gates. Something that kills us? There are less complicated ways to die, right? A magic weapon? To do what? A Gate is something that leads somewhere else. And as far as we know, there is only one thing outside the universe: the Blind Gods. Then I think: if I were a Blind God, chilling, would I want little things to come see me? What's the point? To have full powers like that buffoon Aleph? I keep thinking about it, and you see, I'm wide awake, in the middle of the night, thinking about it with you. I'm thinking that doors are also made to stay closed. To keep people outside, especially idiots. Maybe we have to reach all these Gates to guard them, check every day that they're firmly shut, because if we open them, the wolves will come in. But if that's the case, we're already doomed. I know humans, I am one. They're full of resourcefulness. They're curious. Even if you tell them: don't do that, you'll croak, there are always one or two who will try. I don't give them two days before they open them, the Gates."
She had crouched and was touching a dead man's visor helmet with her fingertip. In the shadowy glow of the stars, the orbit of his empty eyes glittered.
"I'm going to take David's explosives. Maybe the Gates need to be destroyed. Not sure, but… just in case."
She stood up again and returned to the bed thinking of Salman. He would have a damn good piece of advice, but what was he doing right now? Probably stuttering in front of ill-tempered Xenos with the Abandoned. He didn't even know the stellar language, what a disaster.
In the morning, she tossed aside everything that was on the large table and began filling a big backpack: sleeping bag, water, food, emergency blanket, eternal lamps, communicator-the two-hundred-year-old batteries were fully charged for some mysterious reason-because you never know; meds, even though all the pills were in boxes with unreadable labels; and various tools, with her Transient FAM slung across. And a bar of explosive, like the ones David had shown in his video. It was fucking heavy.
She whistled to Kukth and Alpha, and without further delay, she headed straight north, her slow steps making tremble a land that seemed never to have known any animal.
Beyond the pass, more forest descended into a flat valley covered with tall grasses bent by waves of wind, then, in the distance, another mountain again, this time heavily snow-covered.
There was no actual trail, but places where, because of the rock's formation, the path was far more passable, and it was easy for the young woman to find herself, by evening, already on the savanna landscape. There were certainly no snakes, but perhaps the grasses concealed marshes-and marshes, she'd had her fill of them a few days earlier on Antioch. She camped in a sleeping bag, in the eternal silence broken only by a few branches falling in the distance and her own breathing, at the foot of a fruit-snake-skin tree.
That night she imagined that the cloud layer was the shroud in which the ancients wrapped their dead, and that when she was younger, she hadn't been contemplating a planet, but a corpse.
Before the sun tinted the end of the night blue, she was already on the move. The ground was very dry and compact, and the invisible sun beat hard. She tried to eat and drink without counting, telling herself it was simpler to carry all that inside her rather than on her back. The heart of the valley, however, consisted of a "grove" of trees very far apart from each other but whose canopy extended far and horizontally in all directions, which protected her somewhat from the rays. Her cheeks and nose were turning red.
She leaned over the cracked bark of a tree, which seemed, in its jagged edges, to keep tearing itself again and again. She told Alpha, pointing at the bark:
"You see the edges that split apart, Alpha? Well, in each one of them, the Blind Gods are there."
But this did not make him react, or hardly. He came closer to look at them better.
She reached the other side of the plain by the end of the day. The mountain began exactly where she stopped to rest, and cold air, very cold air, flowed down from the snows above. She sat near a smooth stone and told herself that David, who fancied himself a genius, could at least have left her a message, but she was beginning to understand, opening yet another nutrition bar with a blank wrapper, that written messages disappeared.
Another night, this time with the ethereal surge of snow-wind flowing along the stones. Another awakening before dawn, her bladder full from having absorbed the previous day's water in order to be lighter.
She began climbing an immense slope of rocks, visibly struggling, suffering this time from heat above and cold below. The slope was so steep that by midday she crossed a first layer of clouds, entering a frozen fog. She wrapped herself as best she could in her open sleeping bag to resist, but she lacked courage. Kukth, for his part, had taken refuge beneath her clothes and against her stomach.
She couldn't take the pack anymore, and she finished all her provisions, threw away the surplus, and kept one bar of explosives, the sleeping bag she wore on herself, and the lamp she hung around her neck.
Feeling a new lightness, she resumed the ascent, and the first snowflakes began to fall. This time, everything was white, except her and Alpha: the sky was white, the ground was white, and all around was white as well. And the silence was gone: the wind whistled from everywhere. Impossible to know the time except by fatigue, and Ada was exhausted. She found a kind of tall standing stone that sheltered her from the wind on one side. She slipped into the sleeping bag, closed it, her thighs burning, and slept for an indeterminate time, because when she rose, it was daylight. A new day, or still the same one?
She regretted not having rationed herself… She had thought of "north" as a few hours' walk north. In this world where one could go from one planet to another faster than light, it was unimaginable that something could simply be far away.
The bite of the cold was terrible. She was a little thirsty, and truly, a little desperately hungry. She resumed her path, hoping she was going in the right direction. Pain spread through her limbs… and above all, she relived a night from her childhood, scrambling through the snow, fleeing a man who wanted to kill her…
…and as in her memory, she eventually collapsed, lungs and muscles burning, and yet chilled to the bone.
…and as in her memory, Alpha's thin, strong limbs lifted her, and he wrapped her in her sleeping bag. He continued his march north. Reliving a painful episode that had ended well, she felt somewhat reassured. She knew she would be invisible, and already she was warming up. Her lips moistened with the falling snowflakes. She fell asleep, wondering if she would wake up in a black Xeno house carved with glyphs.
A bit feverish, she opened her eyes.
The air was still cool, but she was half-sitting against a stone, protected from the cold by the sleeping bag. There was no more snow, neither above nor below. Alpha had crossed the pass, carrying her. He had saved her, again and again. She didn't deserve it, and she told him so.
"I behave like an idiot and you're the one saving my ass," she said, her head spinning. "I know you're someone important, someone powerful. I'm worth less than the humble lives you've told about…"
She did not finish her sentence, because she had seen what was behind Alpha, who had his back to her. He was facing the valley on the other side of the snowy pass.
Oh, Ada, in your short life, you have seen many mysteries and endured many trials. You have lived, in the height of your youth, more experience than a thousand humans of Prospero before reaching the After. And there, before you, the goal of your journey, lit by the rising sun: the focal point of all the paths scattered across all the Galaxies by the Travelers, the ultimate destination-finally, the Empyrean Gates.