Antarctica was good to Park. The training of the Deucalion’s crew took place in a biodome there, and Park had initially resisted going; the biodome was for the sole benefit of those going on expeditions, crewmembers who would have to acclimate to building and dwelling in their own biospheres once they’d surveyed Eos’s terrain and established the beginnings of a settlement. Park herself would be stuck on the ship; she’d never need to live in an artificial habitat, so in her view, she didn’t need the training.
But Dr. Keller said that she needed to go to Antarctica anyway, to observe the candidates under the peak of their stress. The biodome, for training purposes, was designed to be even worse than the confines of their future ship—and Antarctica’s bleak and lifeless landscape was the closest they could come to simulating Eos’s alien tundras.
To her surprise, Park loved it. She had never been outside the cities before, but she adjusted well to the blank, razor line of the arctic horizon, the roaring emptiness of the ice. Most candidates, Dr. Keller warned her, would feel claustrophobic: the pressures of their own thoughts would creep up on them. Most of them had never been stranded with themselves for so long before. There had always been diversions to stimulate, occupy, distract—but here, at the bottom of the world, they would feel trapped in the microcosms of their own minds.
Not Park. To her it simply felt like the environment had finally changed to suit her; as if she had always lived within a bubble of ice, peering calmly out at an empty world. Now there were merely a few more people inside the bubble, and she didn’t mind this—even though they peered at her suspiciously, and conversations died when she entered a room. Once or twice she found that someone had taken the battery-powered lantern from her tent, or filled both of her boots with snow.
“It’s like frat row around here,” Dr. Keller said.
“It’s all right,” Park said. “This happened in college, too.”
“For different reasons, I would hope,” said Keller. Together they hypothesized that their presence was fomenting resentment: the expedition candidates knew that they were being evaluated, dissected, their suitability rigorously commented on by Keller and Park to ISF. While the candidates ran through simulations of the various tasks they’d have to perform on Eos, familiarizing themselves with the equipment as well as with each other—Park and Keller were watching. Always watching.
And Park was the more vulnerable target of the two, being younger and more introverted. The Eos team viewed her as an ISF snitch, a ladder-climber, a betrayal to her peer group—and also just plain strange. She was also troublingly unavailable as a sexual partner—none of the expedition members were married—and this isolated her even further. There was no comfortable niche for her in the social structure. No connections to anchor her to the community.
Once, during a patient session, Valentina Hanover asked to be called “Hunter.”
“Hunter,” Park repeated, thinking of her file. “That isn’t your middle name.”
Valentina gave her a look of loathing. “It’s called a nickname, you absolute imbecile.”
That about summed up everyone else’s apparent impressions of Park. She barely spoke to them, and when she did, it always seemed like she came off as baffling, primitive: some kind of specimen that one examined with half-disgust, like protozoic ooze. No, they acted like she was an alien sightseer, ogling the most basic human interactions, and in turn, they ogled her, too—squinted at her from behind the glass, whispered and smirked to each other.
“Of course they’ll steal your boots,” Keller said later, running a hand over her stubbled head. “In environments like this, an academic community reverts to a tribe. The biodome becomes a habitat. And tribes will always choose an enemy, arbitrary or not, to unite against, to single out. It helps them bond.” She shook her head. “Be thankful no one’s poisoning your water supply or burning you at the stake.”
Grim jokes, but then, Keller admitted to succumbing to the dour mood that hung around the biodome like a buildup of stale air. It had only taken a week without sunlight or hot water for the prospective crewmembers to get irritable.
Park, however, was immune. Despite the thefts, despite the stares and scoffs, she carried out her duties briskly, even cheerfully. She was happier than she had been in a long time.
Like Keller, she was responsible for making rounds throughout the biodome, documenting the behaviors of the trainees, making herself available to hear out their anxieties and concerns. Most came to her reticently, feigning perfect composure to distinguish themselves as ideal candidates. The ISF predicted that half of them would be sent home before training was over.
Others were more honest. Park had taken part in the initial interviewing process for each candidate. She had doled out the 556-question psychological tests, compiled profiles from the answers, scaled each candidate according to labile-stabile indexes, assigned numbers to their sociability, impulsiveness, changeability. She’d studied their receptiveness to devices like the MAD. Recorded their cortical arousal, the blooms of light that happened in their brains. And yet none of it had quite prepared her for the complexes that unveiled themselves in Antarctica. There was Peter Rochoff, an agriculturalist, who suffered bouts of insecurity that he tried to smother with over-robust laughter, as if everything Park said was a mean joke that he was confident enough to find the humor in. Lucia Van was one of the most efficient flight engineers Park had ever seen, and yet she was so avoidant of authority figures that Park eventually had to send her home. The biodome designer Wan Xu was a narcissist, something he had somehow kept hidden from the tests: he was constantly exasperated by the inferiority of the minds around him, constantly making himself out to be both the hero and the victim of any given situation. It was too bad he was also one of the most brilliant minds on Earth, at least when it came to building extraterrestrial habitats. Park always left their sessions with her eyes watering, as if she had narrowly escaped an accident—the sideswipe of an angry driver.
And then there was Bebe Hill. Initially Park found herself admiring the woman, out of all others in the crew. Not the steady Wick, nor the ingenious Dr. Jain, nor even “Hunter,” who could sprint in an exo-armor suit that weighed over two hundred pounds. No, in the end it was Bebe whom Park found herself in awe of: a pillowy-cheeked botanist who specialized in space-bred plants.
At their first meeting, Park asked the woman what she considered most important to her. Bebe answered without hesitation: “The perfection of my craft.”
Park was taken aback. She read no lie in the botanist’s topology; there was no insincerity, no calculation. Bebe wasn’t motivated by thoughts of glory in settling a new colony. Wasn’t plagued by insecurities about proving her worth to the crew. She cared about nothing except her work. She wasn’t just dedicated to it, and didn’t just work hard at it; she had real passion for it. Park admired that. She wished she could say the same thing about herself.
Tentatively, they became friends. Bebe, focused on her plant studies, seemed to take little notice of the stigma that Park carried with her as ISF’s “rat”; Park, in turn, was glad to have an acquaintance her own age. She found pleasure in watching Bebe devote herself to the mission—not even Keller did that, not fully—and hoped to model her own behaviors off of what she observed in the other woman.
It was at this point that she learned it was possible to fool a phenotype analyst. A person could lie without knowing they were lying; they could make a false statement while their bodies and minds fully believed it to be true. In other words, she couldn’t read ‘truth’ from someone’s face—only ‘belief.’ Bebe had believed that the most important thing to her was her work—but this wasn’t true. For the first time Park realized how fragile her own craft really was. Everything she read, all of the data that she gathered and interpreted—it all depended on its source. And every source, being human, also held the possibility of being flawed.
Bebe’s flaw was that she fell in love. With the young physicist, Eric Holt. They met a few weeks into the Antarctic training, and within a matter of days Bebe had morphed from a stolid, single-minded worker to a short, wet-eyed woman who sighed every time her boyfriend left the room. Suddenly she no longer cared about her specimens, her research on Eos’s potential plant life and soil composition; now it was all about Holt’s romantic gestures, the latest thing he’d said or done to vex her. Park was horrified—but it was too late to cut the connection, not without creating some very awkward dynamics within the biodome. So she had to bear it out.
Every afternoon Bebe made it a point to seek Park out, flopping down into a nearby chair so she could rant about the latest development with Holt. “I’m not usually like this,” she would say to Park, wiping her eyes with her pinky fingers, so as not to smudge her makeup. “But I’ve never felt this way about someone before.” Park would only nod, never knowing what to say.
Bebe complained about everything: Holt’s youthful cluelessness, his wandering eye, how when she said she loved him, he only smiled nervously and said, “Great.” And, when pressed: “That’s so great.” She pressured Park to give her opinions on Holt, on the other candidates who interacted with him, as if Park were her personal spy. “Do you think he’s sleeping with anyone else? Do any of the others notice him? Have you ever seen him flirting with anyone?”
On and on. Now Bebe seemed to leap out of the most unexpected places: from behind a crate of rations as Park bent to grab a snack, from around a generator while Park tried to warm her hands. She demanded endless emotional conferences, roundtable discussions about who liked her or didn’t like her, about who had hurt her feelings that day or made her feel small when all she really wanted to do was be in love . . .
Through it all Park had to fix a neutral expression on her face and offer calm words of affirmation and redirection, trying to prod Bebe towards focusing on her job. Park was part of the crew’s counseling team, she couldn’t turn anyone away—as much as she wanted to turn and run in a panic whenever she saw Bebe coming. She felt like a resident advisor at a university, rubbing freshmen’s backs while they wept about their roommates eating the last soyogurt in the fridge. At least Bebe did the minimal work to keep her plants alive; Park half-hoped she wouldn’t, so she could send her home. She was so disappointed.
Other than the Bebe problem, however, Park was happy in Antarctica. At night she spent her free time watching documentaries about the first colonists, the pioneers who had settled Mars, Corvus, Io. That would be her, she thought, watching the pre-downloaded streams on her wrist console. Someday someone would make a documentary about her: about the psychologist who had kept the Eos expedition sane and in check. She hoped they would pull interviews from when she was still young. She didn’t want to be remembered as a misty-eyed old woman, shakily recalling adventures in space that could have been half-imagined.
She had no other friends to speak of. Even laying aside her position on the fringes of the biodome’s community, Park simply didn’t have the time for friends: she had her hands full, wading through the neuroses and fixations of the newly formed village. No time to think of any of them on a personal level; no time to think of anything beyond the task at hand, really. Which she liked. After the Bebe fiasco, she thought, it was better to avoid the whole thing altogether. That way you couldn’t be let down.
The weeks passed. One day she had a run-in with the biodome’s only android, a HERCULES model no one had bothered to name. The HERCULES was there to do any heavy lifting or manual labor a human couldn’t do: rapid repairs on the biodome if anything went wrong, accelerated rescue if one of the expedition members got lost on the ice. It was a primitive thing, not human-looking in the way that Park was used to: only a rough approximation of a man, skinless, with metal limbs that were bulky and golem-like. Most of the time it sat alone by the lookout tower, knees clasped, inert.
That morning Park noticed it while she was eating breakfast in the mess tent. Austral summer had blown in; the HERCULES was squatting near the inside flap of the tent, and every time someone lifted the canvas to enter, blinding sunlight shot off of its chrome egg head and into Park’s eyes.
“Could you move away from there?” she asked it. “You’re hurting my eyes.”
“I apologize,” the HERCULES said in its tinny way, though it didn’t understand what she meant. It was unaware of the light coming from behind it, so it only shifted a few inches before settling down again with a clink. Park had to eat with one hand shielding the left side of her face. Meanwhile, the HERCULES watched her.
“Do you need something?” Park asked finally, after she had finished dry-swallowing a dehydrated biscuit, letting it scrape past her throat.
“No,” the HERCULES said.
Something about the way it surveyed her face sent a line of heat running through Park’s stomach. It reminded her of Glenn, though the HERCULES had only the barest approximation of a crude metal face. But the eyes were the same: alert, liquidly understanding. Remote.
“Who activated you?” Park asked it. “What is your protocol?”
“I was told to observe,” the HERCULES answered. Its voice sounded metallic and raw, like the echoing of a sawblade.
“Observe who? Observe me?”
“Yes.”
“Who told you to do that?”
“They instructed me not to say.”
Another prank, Park thought. Someone was “teaching” her what it felt like to be watched all the time. Observed. The best thing to do was to not react. “Take my tray away,” she said. “If you’re going to follow me around, you might as well help.”
“That’s pretty funny,” Keller said afterward, when Park reported in with the HERCULES at her side. “Though childish beyond belief. I suppose you can’t deactivate it?”
“Whoever issued the command told it not to stop until its protocols were satisfied,” Park said. “And to not reveal who they were. I think I just have to wait for it to stop on its own or return to the issuer for further instructions.”
“That’s unfortunate,” Keller said, studying the HERCULES’s tall steel frame. It was standing wordlessly next to her cot, watching the two of them with its head bent down at an awkward angle. “I wish ISF had given us a more recent model. The metal ones are so stupid.”
“I don’t mind it so much,” Park answered. “Androids essentially behave the same in any form.” The HERCULES bent then to examine the packet of files at her feet; Park pushed its head away from her, open-palmed, like it was an inquisitive dog.
“Well, just don’t bring it into your patient sessions,” Keller said. “People tend to get their guard up around androids. Plus there’s a matter of confidentiality: you never know what they’ll say or not say.”
“I understand,” Park said, and then bit her tongue hard enough for it to bleed.
The HERCULES dogged her silently for the rest of that day. Park stopped noticing it, largely, though she didn’t miss the quizzical or irritated glances of the candidates she went to visit. “What’s up with the clunker?” Michael Boone asked, rudely; the HERCULES surveyed him from over Park’s shoulder until Boone told it to fuck off, so that it retreated and watched them from afar. In a way the thing reminded her again of Glenn, the way he had accompanied her ceaselessly through the streets of New Diego; but where Glenn might have offered a quiet question, some sardonic commentary, the HERCULES only watched, and waited. At night, it stood outside of the doorway of her tent until frost crackled on its shoulders and the moon made it glow with white light.
“Come in,” Park said after a while. When the android clunked in, she gave it some air-dropped magazines to look at and told it not to bother her. The HERCULES sat down beside her cot and leafed expressionlessly through an exposé on jungle fashion after the Comeback. Park turned back to her documentaries.
“Why do you watch those?” the HERCULES asked, after an hour or so.
“I like them,” Park answered. She didn’t pause her filmstream. “They’re educational. I can learn from the trials of others: these people had also never been in space, before they went to settle the colonies. But they still succeeded. I suppose it’s comforting for me to watch.”
The HERCULES processed this. “There are other documentaries,” it said. “About cellular processes. Animals.”
“I’m not interested in those,” Park answered, a little flatly. She had endeavored to study animal behavior when she was young, to have something to talk about with her uncle during his visits home; but he was dead now, and they had not spoken much before his death. “I prefer learning about humans.”
“Why?”
Park paused. “I just do,” she said after a moment.
The HERCULES nodded a little, as if it found this answer satisfactory. Then it asked, seemingly apropos of nothing: “Why don’t you call anyone?”
At this Park did stop the documentary. “What do you mean?”
“Other people,” the HERCULES said. “People here in the biodome—they spend their nights calling loved ones. Telling them about their days. You don’t do that.”
It was a statement, not a question. “I wouldn’t be able to tell anyone about my day,” Park told it. “As a psychologist, most of my patient interactions are confidential. Plus, ISF doesn’t want us talking about why we’re here in the first place. It would be a boring conversation.”
“You could converse about other things.”
I don’t have anyone to call, Park almost said. She felt a clenching in her chest, a kind of hard-edged pain, like swallowing a stone. Isn’t it obvious? she thought. That’s why I’m leaving Earth. I don’t have anywhere else to go—or anywhere else to be.
But then she thought: how did the HERCULES know what other people did, compared to her? Had it been ordered to watch others, too? And by whom? She was suddenly conscious of the fact that she didn’t know who had sent it, who might be watching her through it. What information would it be relaying back about her? Would the final report simply say that she was lonely? Connectionless? Unmoored?
“Calling someone could reduce feelings of loneliness,” the HERCULES said, as if it knew her thoughts.
“I like to be alone,” Park answered.
The HERCULES watched her. Park tried to read some expression in its battered metal face, some hint of pity or sympathy or contempt. When it spoke, its voice was as hard and flat as a knife blade.
“No,” it said. “I don’t believe you do.”
Bebe Hill came into Park’s tent after that, puffy as a raincloud in her thermal jacket, swathed in a storm of tears. “It’s Eric,” she said, hiccupping thickly. “He won’t talk to me.”
I’m tired, Park tried to say, but before she could open her mouth, Bebe sank down onto her cot without asking for permission. The HERCULES looked at Park for a directive, and she jutted her chin at the door. After it left, Park listened as Bebe blubbered something about an argument, Holt storming off in a rage, some kind of accusation being bandied back and forth.
“You have to do a favor for me, please, Dr. Park,” Bebe said.
I don’t do favors, Park nearly said, but instead screwed her mouth into a tiny frown and made a gesture to indicate she was listening. She didn’t fail to notice that Bebe had called her “doctor”—an attempt to butter her up, to bolster her sense of importance. But it had the opposite effect: it made her painfully aware that Bebe did not consider her a friend.
“What do you want, Bebe?” she asked warily.
“I need you to tell Eric something for me,” Bebe said.
“Why don’t you tell him yourself?”
“Haven’t you been listening?” the botanist exploded. “He won’t talk to me. Don’t you listen?”
Park said nothing. Bebe, perhaps sensing her displeasure, calmed herself down a little; in meeker tones she said, “Please, could you calm him down? You’re the only one who can.”
Park held back a noise. She was tempted to send Bebe packing, or at least over to Dr. Keller, but from what she could glean from the weeping, it did seem that Holt was agitated about something. And that did fall into the realm of her responsibility—even if matchmaking didn’t. God damn Bebe, she thought. God damn the lies that faces told.
“All right,” she said after a few more minutes of listening to Bebe cry. “Let me go and check on Holt. Stay here.” She pulled on her boots and parka, laboriously worked her gloves onto her fingers.
“He’s in his tent,” Bebe sniffled.
Where else would he be? Park thought irritably. The HERCULES was waiting outside her tent; it straightened its back as she came out, like a soldier saluting a superior. “Come along,” she said, not trusting it to refrain from interrogating Bebe. When they had trudged some distance away, the HERCULES asked, “What’s wrong with her?”
Love, Park thought; or infatuation, or fear of dying in space alone. “She’s just upset,” she said, hoping it would leave it at that. The HERCULES nodded, as if it knew what it meant to be upset, and clunked after her through the snow. Its limbs jerked and twitched like a wind-up toy’s; through the aching rush of arctic air, Park could hear the rotors in its joints squealing and complaining. It needs maintenance, she thought vaguely—she would have to remember who the mechanical engineer in the biodome was. Sometimes it was hard to keep them all straight in her head. That girl Reimi Kisaragi was supposed to be good with robots, wasn’t she?
She reached Holt’s tent, a standard-issue cosmonaut’s shelter stationed at the end of a long row of tents. She paused before the entrance—there was no real way to knock on a tent flap—and said, trying for briskness: “Holt, are you awake?”
“Uh,” he said. “Who is it?”
“It’s Dr. Park. I’d like to speak to you, if you’re free.”
“Oh,” Holt said. Park thought she heard footsteps crunching through the snow behind her; it seemed to her that the HERCULES was pacing in little circles at her back. Holt twitched aside his tent flap and said in a sheepish whisper, “Sorry, Park, but now’s not really a good time . . .”
Despite herself, Park looked over his shoulder. Natalya Severov was there, sitting up in Holt’s cot; her honey-colored hair fell over her thin, freckled shoulders in a golden cloud. She held Holt’s blanket over herself to cover her nakedness, but her eyes were huge and defiant as she stared at Park. Her expression seemed to say: And? What the hell do you want? Park nearly laughed; instead she looked at Holt as if her field of vision had narrowed to just his face and said, “I’m sorry to bother you.”
He knew she had seen; he smiled unhappily. “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell the commander,” he said. Behind him, Natalya huffed. The commander couldn’t care less who you sleep with, Park wanted to say. Neither could I. But before she could respond, a kind of piercing wail came from behind her.
Park turned. It hadn’t been the HERCULES pacing, after all; the android had been standing placidly by her shoulder the whole time. The heavy tread she’d heard was Bebe’s—the botanist had followed them to Holt’s tent. Now she stood there in the sterile moonlight, her breath streaming out of her in gouts of white. Her small frame swelled and expanded like a hot-air balloon.
“A child!” she screamed. “You’re a fucking child, Eric!”
“Look,” he said, coming a little out of his tent, “I’m sorry. But I wanted things—simple.”
“They are simple!” Bebe said. “I love you!”
“I know.” Holt rubbed his head in an embarrassed way; his bare toes shuffled against each other self-consciously. “It’s cold,” he said, looking at Park. “Maybe we can talk about this later.”
Which meant, Park thought grimly, it was up to her to deal with the fallout. It wouldn’t do for Bebe to make a scene, to disrupt the surface-level peace of the community: now she had to herd her off and shut her up someplace secluded. She felt an edge of deep annoyance. Couldn’t they be professional, for God’s sake? Couldn’t anyone get through the mission—which hadn’t even started yet—without these kinds of entanglements? And as for Park . . . this wasn’t her job. She shouldn’t be some unnoticed go-between. Didn’t they have androids to do this—delivering messages in the middle of the night, escorting unwanted bodies elsewhere?
Bebe was still yelling at Holt, who had vanished back into his cozy tent with Natalya. Park turned to the HERCULES and said in an undertone, “Help me take her away.” It nodded—somehow it seemed to understand perfectly—and clasped its metal hand around Bebe’s elbow. Bebe yelped at the iciness of its touch; her head swiveled to gawk at the android, as if some eldritch creature had wrapped its tentacles around her. Park said, “It’s all right, Bebe. Let’s go talk about this somewhere else.”
Bebe meant to fight her, Park saw, or more likely meant to fight Natalya, but then she stared up into the HERCULES’s face and seemed to change her mind. The HERCULES smiled at her, jerkily, the movement like the dents in a crumpled soda can popping back out. Together the two of them led Bebe back to Park’s tent, where Bebe lay flat on her back on the tarp floor, crying, while Park sat on the edge of the cot and droned at her: first standard words of reassurance from the ISF scripts, and then, helplessly, whatever Park thought would have made herself feel better if the situations were swapped.
You wouldn’t want to crack, she insinuated, to lose your composure—not before getting to Eos. The opportunity of a lifetime. Of a million lifetimes. A virgin planet to help discover! Nothing was worth losing that! The violence of emotion would not be allowed aboard the ship, she told Bebe. The irrationality of love had no place in space. So . . . get rid of it.
When that didn’t work, she attempted to explain further. “When you feel love,” she said, “your ascending reticular activating system is stimulated. It’s a cluster of cells deep in your brain stem. It doesn’t discriminate. Not in the way you would think. So you’ll move on. Find someone else.”
Bebe kept weeping. “In other words,” Park said, “this isn’t the end of the world. You can love again.”
Though she didn’t know why Bebe would want to. Luckily, it didn’t seem that the botanist heard any of what Park was saying: she seemed intent on lying on the floor and howling at the arctic moon while the HERCULES watched tentatively through the slit in the tent. Park was reduced to cradling her chin in her hand and making soothing sounds while Bebe gasped and hiccupped with heartbreak.
An hour passed, then two. Eventually the other woman fell asleep on the floor, her tears forming a transparent crust on her face so that it seemed blurry and undefined to Park. Park was left sitting on the edge of her cot, wondering what it was like to feel the things that Bebe felt. What was love, really? Biology, as she’d said—but also nothing more than a pain in someone’s ass.
The next morning, Park trudged toward the mess tent for breakfast. She couldn’t keep her head from drooping a little: she’d scraped barely three hours of sleep, and even then Bebe’s snoring had jolted her awake throughout the night. She bumped forehead-first into someone’s shoulder; they put out a hand to steady her and said, “Are you all right?”
“Fine, thank you,” Park said automatically. She could barely raise her eyes. Later she would realize it was Fulbreech addressing her, though she hadn’t known him then—he was Keller’s patient, and there had been over one hundred recruits in the Antarctica biodome compared to the thirteen who would make it out. She registered a friendly smile, the glimpse of a strong chin. He’d said something in warm tones, but the words were as muffled as if she had stuffed her head with cotton. Park nodded vacantly and marched on without answering.
Commander Wick approached her in the mess tent. Park was gulping coffee so quickly it didn’t even have time to scald her tongue; when the commander sidled up, she choked. In those days Park had still felt shy with him. Wick was a veteran of a dozen colony missions; he had the hallowed glow of a folk hero. She wiped her mouth and said, “Commander. Good morning.”
“Park,” he said. “I need you to do something for me.”
Park waited without saying anything; she didn’t want to appear too eager, too subordinate. It also felt like people needed her a lot, lately. She was beginning to feel worn down with it, fever-warm, like wood after vigorous sanding. Wick continued, “Natalya’s heading out to find an ice aquifer this morning. I’d like you to go with her.”
Park stared at him; she didn’t even try to mask her surprise. As the expedition’s surveyor, Natalya would be in charge of locating landmarks like reservoirs, valleys, and caves on Eos. In Antarctica, of course, they already knew where things were—but for the sake of simulation, they had the recruits go out blind, relying on only what they would have on Eos to find what they needed. Park had heard that there was pressure on Natalya to find a large source of water nearby: they had enough to drink in the biodome, with the water reclaimers, but people wanted baths. They were tired of hastily sponging themselves clean, of always being smelly—especially when it came to showing off, or courting each other. Work performance and personal confidence both suffered. So they needed more water, and now Wick was sending Natalya out to find an aquifer. Along with Park.
“I’m not trained for that,” she said. “I wouldn’t be able to help.”
“It’s not that I need you to survey the land,” Wick said. “But Natalya seems . . . on edge this morning. She needs some company when she goes out on the ice. I figure you’d be good at keeping her head on straight while she’s out there.”
It’s not my job, Park wanted to say again, but she looked into Wick’s deep gray eyes and felt her scalp tighten. “All right,” she said.
So she suited up, donning her bulky helmet and faceplate, which was standard for expedition members when leaving the biodome: it was supposed to replicate the spacesuits and exo-armor jackets they’d be wearing on Eos. Before she left she went to check on the HERCULES, mostly to procrastinate. The thought of spending the morning alone with prickly Natalya filled her with dread. The HERCULES was still standing quietly outside her tent, giving its joints a rest; Park had noticed all throughout that morning that its limbs had been creaking more than usual.
She approached it. The HERCULES peered blandly into her faceplate when she walked up; Park wasn’t sure at first if it recognized her behind the golden visor. Then it said, “You’re leaving the biodome.”
“Temporarily,” Park said. “Yes.” She had it lift an arm, ran her fingers helplessly over its bulky shoulder joint, which was beginning to streak with coppery rust. She’d been the one to help Glenn with his basic maintenance, in the old days; she had a rudimentary knowledge of robotics. But the HERCULES was a foreign model to her—and she didn’t want to risk breaking it completely. For a moment she wondered at her own concern. But it was a little sad, to her. The HERCULES had to hear its own creakiness, the evidence of its own disrepair. It had to be fully aware of its vulnerability. For them to ask it to press on without addressing its slow breakdown seemed cruel.
“I’m sorry,” she said to it. “I don’t know why the roboticists aren’t taking better care of you. I don’t know how to treat you. And of course you don’t have the ability to fix yourself.”
“Do I need fixing?” the HERCULES asked, with what she imagined was concern.
“Not fixing, exactly,” Park said. “Maintenance, yes. Your movements seem hampered.”
The HERCULES nodded slowly, as if it was surprised she had noticed. “Yes. The weather conditions here are extreme. I apologize for my lowered performance.”
“No,” Park said, almost moved. “Don’t apologize. It’s not your fault. I’m just sorry I can’t—help you.”
“No,” the HERCULES echoed. Its eyes sought hers; they bore into her faceplate like twin lightbulbs. “Don’t apologize.” It was mimicking her in its metallic way. “There’s nothing to apologize for, Dr. Park. It’s not your fault. I am here to help you. Not the other way around.”
Natalya was waiting outside the biodome in the cab of an Earthmover drill; the drill’s conic bore of Martian steel gleamed dully in the hard light in front of her. When Park clambered in the cab, already shivering from the cold, Natalya started the drill without a word. Within moments they were churning along across the tundra.
For twenty minutes, neither of them spoke. The snarling grind and grumble of the drill filled the air. Park couldn’t read Natalya’s expression behind her reflective amber faceplate; she could barely tell it was Natalya at all, except by the icy contempt that seemed to be radiating from the surveyor. Evidently Natalya wasn’t too happy about Park’s interruption of her time with Holt the night before; she was probably worrying about how it would look if Park reported it back to ISF. Park was too tired to placate her, to tell her that no one gave a damn about her fling with Holt—except Bebe, of course. As long as it didn’t interfere with work, Park thought. That was the only thing that mattered. It shouldn’t be so hard to understand.
They were heading toward the jagged, bone-white line of cliffs to the south of the biodome—toward the coast, Park estimated. The movement of the Earthmover lulled her; once or twice she caught herself nodding off. Damn Bebe, she thought, and damn Holt and Natalya. Damn anyone who thought she was here for anything other than observing.
“Something’s following us,” Natalya said, finally. Park craned her head to look. In the side mirror of the Earthmover, she could see the HERCULES loping along after them, its metallic body arcing over the ice like a dolphin’s.
“It’s the HERCULES,” she told Natalya. She sensed rather than saw the woman frowning under her faceplate.
“I didn’t request it,” Natalya said.
“Neither did I,” Park answered. “But it’s been—following me.”
If Natalya had thoughts about this, she didn’t voice them. She merely grunted and put her hand on the throttle of the drill like it was the holster of a gun; as if she was preparing to confront some enemy, some approaching wild animal. The Earthmover continued to growl along. Through the searing brilliance of wintry light, Park watched the HERCULES jog after them. She couldn’t see its expression from this distance.
She hadn’t expected it to leave the biodome to follow her. It hadn’t mentioned anything when she left. Would its joints be able to handle the exertion? She thought about its limbs shattering, brittle from the cold—a piston locking up and sending it plunging through the ice. It should be all right, she told herself. Androids were built for conditions that humans couldn’t handle. It could withstand extreme temperatures, immense pressure, endless treks. It didn’t feel weariness or pain. She shouldn’t have to worry about it; after all, what good would a rescue bot like the HERCULES be if a human had to worry about rescuing it from destruction? It’s stronger than it looks, she thought. It doesn’t need me to look after it. I have enough on my plate as it is. She turned her face away from the HERCULES’s needlepoint of light.
She must have drifted—the glassy featurelessness of the horizon made it hard to stay alert. Suddenly Natalya was bringing the Earthmover to a halt beside a towering plateau, a lone knobby white thing that looked like a clenched fist.
“Is this the aquifer?” Park asked, straining to be heard over the rumble of the engine.
Natalya thumped her own shoulder fiercely, signing, Yes. She bent over the Earthmover’s console and began to manipulate the drill over the ice. Park looked around. She couldn’t see how Natalya intuitively knew that this was a place to drill for water. It looked no different than any other place on the tundra. Was it some hidden intuition she had, like the needle of a compass? Or had she been consulting a map without Park noticing all this time?
The HERCULES was still some distance away. Its small body bobbed over the ice like the lure of a fishhook. A high, painful squeal jerked Park’s attention back to the drill; Natalya was hunched over the console, cursing.
“What’s wrong?” Park asked.
“Pneumatic hammer,” Natalya said curtly. “It’s gotten stuck. Some ice in the hydraulic impacts, maybe.” She fumbled with the controls for a while more; the drill screamed in protest until she finally powered it down.
“Can you climb down and take a look?” she asked Park. “I need to figure out this system.”
“I wouldn’t know what to look for,” Park said nervously.
Natalya’s helmet jerked impatiently. “Just see if anything looks caught in the inner mechanisms,” she said. Her voice sounded tight and creaky, like the stretching of a belt behind her visor. She continued to glare until Park opened the cab door and slowly clambered down.
She lifted her faceplate and felt the brutal wind scald her cheeks raw. Park peered helplessly at the coupling of the drill and the cab, then at the enormous cone of the drill itself. It was frozen at full extension, as stuck and rigid as a nail shot through an invisible wall.
“I think I see something,” she shouted.
“What is it?”
Park shuffled closer. “It looks like there’s—” She stopped.
“There’s what?”
There was a small metal rod jammed between the hammer of the drill and the part that moved it, the extension lever or chuck or whatever it was. And the rod was not a rod from the Earthmover, Park thought, but something like the metal stakes the expedition members used to pin their tents to the ground. Probably from someone’s spare pack, she realized. She could feel the blood pulsing in her eyelids. Natalya couldn’t have put it there; the metal stake looked as if it had been balanced precariously within the coupling of the drill, waiting for the right movement to lean full-tilt against the hammer and jam it to a grinding halt. Half of the stake had been twisted and chewed by the explosive force of the drill’s pistons. Yes, someone had put this in the drill to damage it—and if it wasn’t Natalya, and it wasn’t Park . . .
“There’s some rocks caught between the coupling,” Park said. “It looks bad. Hard to remove. You might not be able to use it.”
“Remove them,” Natalya rapped from within the cab. Park turned to gawk at her: hadn’t these people ever heard of credentials? She wasn’t authorized to even look at the Earthmover, let alone touch any part of it. But when Natalya didn’t move—Park could see her busily examining some schematic—Park tentatively turned back to the drill and stretched her glove toward the scrap metal that had been caught in it. This was best, she told herself. She couldn’t let Natalya see evidence of the—she refused to call it sabotage—until Park could get back to camp and figure things out for herself. It wouldn’t do to jump to hasty conclusions, to reinforce the tensions that were already brewing within the dome . . . Best to get rid of the thing and put it out of sight.
But despite herself, she squeezed her eyes shut. She imagined the sudden whir of the drill, the sensation of her fingers catching—the screaming hot emptiness of pain. Then her hand wrapped around the warped piece of metal that was caught between the coupling, and she tugged it free. She was left standing there, blinking in the light, gripping the curled steel stake in her hand.
“Thanks,” Natalya said, without looking at her. She started up the drill again, and this time its whir sounded smooth and clear; the blade dug eagerly into the ice, with an enormous crunching sound like a giant biting into an apple. Park stood beside the drill and watched as it cut a perfect circle into the ice. She tucked the metal stake into the inner pocket of her jacket, feeling it weigh down her torso. The frigid air bit into her bones through her suit, but somehow she still felt weary, rubbed raw; she could have lain flat on the rime and gone to sleep. Maybe she ought to leave the biodome more often, she thought, watching Natalya and the Earthmover burrow deeper into the ice. Maybe there were more things she could do to help the crew—things that didn’t involve letting people cry on her floor all night. Maybe if she pitched in, made more of a physical effort for the community, the collective perception of her would improve. But what was she going to do about this discovery? Maybe Keller could handle it . . .
There was the violent sound of ice cracking; the drill lurched forward like a bucking horse. Park looked nervously at the hole that it had made, but it didn’t seem to be any larger, nor were there any hairline cracks surging toward her on the ground. She turned to ask Natalya if something was wrong—but suddenly she could hear a high, piercing whistle, something that sounded like a metallic scream far behind her, made wavery by the howling wind. And also a strange sound from the cab: Natalya said something like, “Oo!” and jerked the drill free of its cavity, throwing the Earthmover into reverse. Park looked at her dumbly; had the drill gotten stuck again?
“Move!” Natalya screamed again.
Then Park saw it: the cliff above her, the white ledge of it sliding forward slowly, ponderously, almost ridiculously, like a slow-motion fist tipping forward to ready itself for a punch. Park watched it, uncomprehending. She thought, wearily, that the falling ice would cover up their hole, and they would have to start all over again.
Too late did she realize what was going on: the drill had malfunctioned again, punched too strong a hole into the ice, upsetting some deep structural foundation of the cliffs above. They were falling! And falling towards her. But by then her feet seemed rooted to the ground. She stared. Her mind was a thundering blankness. She couldn’t seem to make the connection between her own body and the enormous white waves that seemed to be moving above her. She thought, absurdly: They’re too big. There’s nowhere to run.
Then something hard collided with her body and flung her viciously out of the way.
Park cried out; whatever had thrown her had used superhuman strength to do it. Her body hurtled and tumbled and slid a long distance away and was only stopped by the tangle of her own limbs. She could feel blood running down her throat as she lay there, stunned: first a tickle of warmth, then a muted congealing around her neck. She’d cut her chin on the ice. She sat up just as Natalya crunched up towards her, hunched over like an animal, shouting.
“Are you all right?” the surveyor asked. She bent and grabbed Park’s shoulders, examined her chin. “Why did you just stand there?”
“What happened?” Park asked, dazedly. She looked past Natalya at the cliff, the wreckage of ice gathered at the bottom of it, like pieces of broken vertebrae. She staggered to her feet. The drill was safely parked several yards away, so what was that other stuff around the ice? Some unrecognizable metal debris: long pieces of alloy, straggling wires like clutches of black worms.
“What is that?” she asked.
“What the hell were you thinking?” Natalya demanded. “You were lucky—if the bot hadn’t pushed you—” She shook her head and wrapped her gloved hand around Park’s collar. “Come on. We need to go back.”
“I can’t,” Park said, though she couldn’t say why. She felt sick. “I have to—”
“You have to what?” Natalya snapped. “Stay here with it? Fine, if you want. I can leave you here, out in the cold, if that’s what you really, really want.”
Yes, Park thought. Just leave me alone and go back. Let me be out here. Let me be in the cold. That’s what I really, really want.
But she allowed the surveyor to pull her away, to drag her back to the Earthmover. Only when she was sitting in the cab, with the heat cranked on full blast, clutching a ratty towel to her chin, did she allow herself to have a good look at the cliffs. Though the drill hadn’t moved yet, it looked to Park like the crags were shrinking rapidly; it seemed like they were melting under the dazzling noon light. Beneath them, the splinters of the HERCULES were shifting in the arctic wind. Ah, Park thought. So it was strong enough, after all. She didn’t need to worry. It had done its job.
Then, silently, she began to cry. Through her tears the pieces of the HERCULES glowed like tiny stars.
That night, Park submitted her report to ISF, recommending the termination and recall of Bebe Hill. The botanist had confessed everything when she heard what had happened to Park and Natalya: she’d not only inserted the metal stake, but had tampered with the engine, too, causing the fatal jerk of the drill that brought down the cliffs. “I only meant to make her look bad, have her come back empty-handed,” she told Wick, while a wooden-faced Park watched from behind. She made eye contact briefly with Park. “I never thought you’d get hurt. I’m so sorry, Park.”
Don’t apologize, Park thought. Her heart was both numb and raw with hatred. That had been the HERCULES’s last statement to her: “There’s nothing to apologize for. It’s not your fault.”
But it was. She hadn’t controlled the situation. She hadn’t known how to fix things—the HERCULES, Bebe, Natalya, Holt. She’d been negligent. Things had gotten out of control. That was what happened when you threw things like love into the mix, she thought. It was the unknown variable, the chaotic element.
It couldn’t happen again.
Afterward, fingering the bandage on her chin, she decided to go on her night patrol, something she and Keller sometimes did to catch any problems that erupted under the security of darkness. Mutinous talks behind tent flaps, whispered quarrels. Nightmares. Sleepwalkers and parasomniacs would immediately be sent home.
She was annoyed to find as she stepped out of her tent that the biodome’s snow had turned to slush again. This sometimes happened: Wan Xu had explained that the combined heat and mass of one hundred bodies could turn the pristine Antarctic permafrost into a dark and soupy puddle when the biodome’s circulatory systems went awry. Calculations were off, the dome designer had told her. The air was filtered properly, but sometimes there were fluctuations in temperature; this could cause the snow to melt and refreeze, dirtily, at different periods throughout the day. Adjustments would be made in time for the expedition, Wan Xu said.
The slush, when it happened, always irritated Park. She enjoyed staring out at the tundra through the biodome’s transparent film; the milky hues of dawn would spark against the flat white blade of the land, sending streaks of mandarin, peach, gold, and royal red into the sky. But what good was that when she was trapped inside a bubble of ugliness? The slush made her feel as if she were stuck inside a pimple, pus gathering around her ankles. Almost nothing else bothered her more than the unsightliness of the slush.
Tonight she looked closer, and was startled to find that the slush was palely gleaming; there was a kind of pearly luminescence coming off the ground. Park bent down to examine it further. Yes, there was a faint light moving beneath the mud, shifting in waves.
She went to find Wan Xu. “Oh, I see,” the designer said, poking his disheveled head out his tent flap. “That’s interesting.”
“What is it?” Park asked. “It isn’t happening outside the dome. Could it be something in our atmosphere?”
“It’s plankton,” Wan Xu said. “Bioluminescent. Most likely Noctiluca scintillans. This whole tundra is composed of frozen seawater. The plankton were trapped in the ice; the more the top level melts, the more they’re disturbed, and they glow.”
“This is a common phenomenon, then?” It disconcerted her a little, thinking that there were millions of single-cell organisms milling around beneath their feet. “Do they do this during the spring thaw?”
“Oh, no,” Wan Xu said. “This is by no means a regular occurrence. It’s harmless, but unusual. This wouldn’t occur in a natural system.” He stood there brooding for a while. “Curious. The biodome causes any number of unpredictable results.”
“What’s different about this one?” Park demanded. “What’s different now?”
Wan Xu looked at her, then smiled without mirth. “Dr. Park,” he said slowly, because Park was a psychologist and he was Wan Xu, “I don’t think you understand. This is a manmade structure in a place where man was not supposed to go. A closed system of our own making, not a natural one. We’re playing in the realm of gods now; none of our variables are known. Everything is different here.”
After that, he let his tent flap fall shut, and Park was left to wander the pale-gleaming night alone. Her boots stirred through puddles of liquid light. The backs of her eyes ached—with tiredness, Park told herself. She looked at the moon and wished she were there, arrested in silence and the untouched powdery dust like snow. Beyond the moon, beyond the dark curtain that hung behind it, Eos was waiting. What had she told Bebe? An opportunity of a lifetime. Don’t lose it. Don’t lose sight of what’s important.
Before they left the cliffs, Park had climbed back out of the Earthmover. She’d tried to salvage something from the wreckage, tried to gather up the scattered pieces of the HERCULES. The metal shards had slipped through her hands. Her face had stung from the cold. She’d felt as if the metal stake tucked against her chest was freezing, turning the rest of her to ice. Her body was so numb that she couldn’t hold on to any of the debris.
“Leave it,” Natalya had told her tersely, standing over her like an executioner. “Just give it up, Park. It’s not as if it’s fixable.”