Free Galactic North by Alastair Reynolds Page B

in the surrounding ice fields. He had explored the warrens of the base until he found an airlock that had never been closed, and though snowfalls had long since obliterated any footprints, there was little doubt in which direction a wanderer would have set off.
    Long before the base had vanished over the horizon behind him, Clavain had run into the edge of a deep, wide crevasse. And there at the bottom—just visible if he leaned over the edge—was a man’s outstretched arm and hand. Clavain had gone back to the others and had them return with a winch to lower him into the depths, descending thirty or forty metres into a cathedral of stained and sculpted ice. The body had come into view: a figure in an old-fashioned atmospheric survival suit. The man’s legs were bent in a horrible way, like those of a strangely articulated alien. Clavain knew it was a man because the fall had jolted his helmet from its neck-ring; the corpse’s well-preserved face was pressed halfway into a pillow of ice. The helmet had ended up a few metres away.
    No one died instantly on Diadem. The air was breathable for short periods, and the man had clearly had time to ponder his predicament. Even in his confused state of mind he must have known that he was going to die.
    “Martin Setterholm,” Clavain had said aloud, picking up the helmet and reading the nameplate on the crown. He felt sorry for him, but could not deny himself the small satisfaction of accounting for another of the dead. Setterholm had been amongst the missing, and though he had waited the better part of a century for it, he would at least receive a proper funeral now.
    There was something else, but Clavain very nearly missed it. Setterholm had lived long enough to scratch out a message in the ice. Sheltered at the base of the glacier, the marks he had gouged were still legible. Three letters, it seemed to Clavain: an "I,” a "V” and an “F.”
    IVF.
    The message meant nothing to Clavain, and even a deep search of the Conjoiner collective memory threw up only a handful of vaguely plausible candidates. The least ridiculous was “ in vitro fertilisation,” but even that seemed to have no immediate connection with Setterholm. But then again, he had been a biologist, according to the base records. Did the message spell out the chilling truth about what had happened to the colony on Diadem: a biology lab experiment that had gone terribly wrong? Something to do with the worms, perhaps?
    But after a while, overwhelmed by the sheer number of dead, Clavain had allowed the exact details of Setterholm’s death to slip from his mind. He was hardly unique anyway, just one more example of the way most of them had died: not by suicide or violence but through carelessness, recklessness or just plain stupidity. Basic safety procedures— like not wandering into a crevasse zone without the right equipment—had been forgotten or ignored. Machines had been used improperly. Drugs had been administered incorrectly. Sometimes the victim had taken only themselves to the grave, but in other cases the death toll had been much higher. And it had all happened swiftly.
    Galiana talked about it as if it was some kind of psychosis, while the other Conjoiners speculated about an emergent neural condition, buried in the gene pool of the entire colony, lurking for years until it was activated by an environmental trigger.
    Clavain, while not discounting his friends’ theories, could not help but think of the worms. They were everywhere, after all, and the Americans had certainly been interested in them—Setterholm especially. Clavain himself had pressed his faceplate against the ice and observed that the worms reached down to the depth where the man had died. Their fine burrowing trails scratched into the vertical ice walls like the branchings of a river delta, with dark nodes of breeding tangles at the intersections of the larger tunnels. The tiny black worms had infested the glacier completely, and this