Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 115 by Neil Clarke

Author:Neil Clarke
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: chinese, science fiction, science fiction magazine, short story, robots, fantasy, magazine, novelette, clarkesworld
Publisher: Wyrm Publishing
Published: 2016-03-31T04:00:00+00:00

5

The voyage out is not a return; nothing ever is.

Plouton-Charon lies more than a hundred degrees off Heimgarð’s course; each second takes hrm farther from it. The Gardens are also swinging behind the Sun; hse will attend no ceremonies celebrating hrs success. The kobolds would in any case likely forbid it: their concern for the safety of their secret would preclude giving the Gardeners any chance to lay hold of hrm.

Heimgarð will not see the effects of the deal hse hammered out, and in hrs fatigue—a surprisingly organic response—hse does not much care. The hammer, hse dully reflects, feels the impact as much as the substance it works.

The kobolds will keep their “gold”: none of Hermaion’s remaining metals will be sent to the Gardeners, who will never know why. Within weeks, however, kobolds by the hundreds will depart for Hesperos—not for any of the tall cities, but to the raging planet itself—and begin quarrying its own resources. Iron, copper, and more run in veins through its crust, waiting to be mined by anything willing to labor in darkness and gravity. Perhaps they will even enjoy it.

In return they have exacted their own price: the broker’s eternal exile. Heimgarð is to leave the inner system, never to return. But as recompense—and perhaps to speed hrm on hrs way—hse has been rebuilt, by techs whose skills even the Gardeners likely cannot match: outfitted with greater fuel capacity, energy storage, stress tolerance, resistance to temperature extremes. And given a destination.

Blue Neptune, smaller and denser than tilted Ouranos, was once inhabited by humans. The Tritonides are gone, the moon’s surface too cold for anything to be operating beneath its surface, and the few structures orbiting the planet can be confirmed, even from this distance, as lifeless hulks. Yet the kobolds wonder: they have calculated the distance from the planetary core at which the gravity is identical to Earth’s, and pondered the stratum’s dynamics: the great heat below, the great cold above, the tremendous winds and pressure. They believe it possible that humans, the remnants of the Triton settlement, may live down there.

Certainly they do not imagine that a spherical shell such as their own, but immensely larger, could have been constructed with the resources of a faltering colony. But a ribbon circling Neptune’s equator, perhaps only a kilometer wide, would be three orders of magnitude simpler. “Think of it as a bridge,” they told him. “Suspended over an icy hell, a bridge attached not to abutments but arching round to join itself, floating freely in the depths.” Such a construct would be wildly unstable, but if it were joined by two more rings, all at right angle to each other . . . the kobolds’ models said it could be possible.

Heimgarð imagined such a folly—a frail gyroscope forever steadying itself under incredible stresses—and doubted greatly that it ever existed. But the underground creatures had their price, and Heimgarð was a part of it. The frenetic makeshifts of the Gardens—the forges of Hesperos; the coming construction of Yggdrasil—were not destined for hrm.

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