Tales of Old Earth Read Free

heat. It was far from being a straight path. She had been walking on autopilot, and stumbled and turned and wandered upon striking the crystals.
    Martha remembered how excited she and Burton had been when they first saw the fields of crystals. They had piled out of the moon rover with laughter and bounding leaps, and Burton had seized her by the waist and waltzed her around in a dance of jubilation. This was the big one, they’d thought, their chance at the history books. And even when they’d radioed Hols back in the orbiter and were somewhat condescendingly informed that there was no chance of this being a new life-form, but only sulfide formations such as could be found in any mineralogy text … even that had not killed their joy. It was still their first big discovery. They’d looked forward to many more.
    Now, though, all she could think of was the fact that such crystal fields occurred in regions associated with sulfur geysers, lateral plumes, and volcanic hot spots.
    Something funny was happening to the far edge of the field, though. She cranked up her helmet to extreme magnification and watched as the trail slowly erased itself. New flowers were rising up in place of those she had smashed, small but perfect and whole. And growing. She could not imagine by what process this could be happening. Electrodeposition? Molecular sulfur being drawn up from the soil in some kind of pseudocapillary action? Were the flowers somehow plucking sulfur ions from Io’s almost nonexistent atmosphere?
    Yesterday, the questions would have excited her. Now, she had no capacity for wonder whatsoever. Moreover, her instruments were back in the moon rover. Save for the suit’s limited electronics, she had nothing to take measurements with. She had only herself, the sledge, the spare airpacks, and the corpse.
    â€œDamn, damn, damn,” she muttered. On the one hand, this was a dangerous place to stay in. On the other, she’d been awake almost twenty hours now and she was dead on her feet. Exhausted. So very, very tired.
    â€œO sleep! It is a gentle thing. Beloved from pole to pole. Coleridge.”
    Which, God knows, was tempting. But the numbers were clear: no sleep. With several deft chin-taps, Martha overrode her suit’s safeties and accessed its medical kit. At her command, it sent a hit of methamphetamine rushing down the drug/vitamin catheter.
    There was a sudden explosion of clarity in her skull and her heart began pounding like a motherfucker. Yeah. That did it. She was full of energy now. Deep breath. Long stride. Let’s go.
    No rest for the wicked. She had things to do. She left the flowers rapidly behind. Good-bye, Oz.
    Fade out. Fade in. Hours had glided by. She was walking through a shadowy sculpture garden. Volcanic pillars (these were their second great discovery; they had no exact parallel on Earth) were scattered across the pyroclastic plain like so many isolated Lipschitz statues. They were all rounded and heaped, very much in the style of rapidly cooled magma. Martha remembered that Burton was dead, and cried quietly to herself for a few minutes.
    Weeping, she passed through the eerie stone forms. The speed made them shift and move in her vision. As if they were dancing. They looked like women to her, tragic figures out of The Bacchae or, no, wait, The Trojan Women was the play she was thinking of. Desolate. Filled with anguish. Lonely as Lot’s wife.
    There was a light scattering of sulfur dioxide snow on the ground here. It sublimed at the touch of her boots, turning to white mist and scattering wildly, the steam disappearing with each stride and then being renewed with the next footfall. Which only made the experience all that much creepier.
    Click .
    â€œIo has a metallic core predominantly of iron and iron sulfide, overlain by a mantle of partially molten rock and crust.”
    â€œAre you still here?”
    â€œAm trying. To communicate.”
    â€œShut