The Year's Top Hard Science Fiction Stories 8 by Allan Kaster

Author:Allan Kaster [Kaster, Allan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Infinivox
Published: 2024-06-04T00:00:00+00:00

Clockwork Melting

James Maxey

I’M LOST IN concentration, focused on my chisel and hammer, rough shaping the edge of the cog that towers over me. The work goes slowly. The ice is harder than iron. The rising wind and stinging snow fail to break into my awareness until the blizzard has reached full strength.

“Melvin!” I shout. “Melvin! Where are you?”

I go still, listening hard. The wind whipping through the sculptures whistles and groans, the dissonant notes forming an audio Rorschach test. For an instant, I’m certain I hear Melvin calling out, “Blake!”

“Melvin?”

Long seconds pass. Did I really hear his voice? Was it all in my head?

“Melvin! I thought there wasn’t going to be a storm today!”

The wind is all that answers. Maybe he got the forecast wrong. Or maybe today is no longer today. Venus doesn’t have sunrises or sunsets to mark the passage of time. It’s eternal darkness, ceaseless cold, stark and vacant and timeless. My bodily modifications disconnect me from hunger or weariness. I’ve been so lost in my work, the blizzard Melvin told me was a hundred hours distant has probably arrived right on time.

The snow slashes like tiny knives against my bare hands as the world shrinks and vanishes. On Earth we’d have called this a whiteout, but Venusian snow is piss yellow. The phosphorescent cells of my brow grow brighter as I strain to see the cog I’ve been carving. All that’s reflected is gold, gold, gold.

I slide my hammer and chisel back into my tool belt and hunker down, my back pressed against the companion gear I finished carving last month. Last year? Some previous decade? The parts all run together after a thousand years. The physical blueprints crumbled to dust centuries ago. The designs come to me only in fragments. I can no longer picture the final construction.

Not knowing which piece I’m sculpting is a sort of freedom. Each day, I wake with memories of the next sprocket or chain or escapement that must be carved. I trudge out across the ice to cut my memories into the material world. Once a part is complete, I forget all I knew about when and why I made it. I’ve become a robot built from nu-flesh and nu-bone, programmed by some stranger who bore my face long ago, on a different world.

My enhanced metabolism resists the cold, but if I can’t see, I can’t work. I fine tune my retinas into other spectrums, scanning through the ultraviolent, then down into the infrared. Nothing. I can’t see my hands through the driving snow. Sculpting blind is a good way to ruin a cog. My chisel is sharp enough that even my nu-skin fingers might get lopped off. It can take weeks for them to grow back.

Maybe it’s time to give up. Hunker in the bunker, wait for the storm to pass. When I first arrived on Venus, I sheltered from storms for weeks and months. That was when I still had a thousand frozen years before me. Now I have .

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