Free Transcendent by Stephen Baxter Page B

emptiness of the sea.
    At first glance the platform seemed to be resting on a narrow stalk that protruded out of the ocean. But it turned out that the platform was studded with antigravity lifters, and the “stalk” was actually a cable anchored in the deep ice, under tension as the lifters endlessly tried to pull the platform into the sky. It struck Alia as a cheap and quick solution to the problem of stability on a watery world.
    The flitter slowed, and dipped toward the platform. Alia felt reluctant to Skim; she hadn’t done so since leaving the
Nord.
So she and Reath climbed down out of the flitter the old-fashioned way, through a door.
    The wind was strong and buffeting, and cold on her face, only a little above freezing. Reath seemed unperturbed, though he was so tall and skinny he looked as if he might blow away.
    The air was mostly nitrogen and carbon dioxide—scarcely a trace of oxygen; life was rare here. But of course there was Mist in the air, the invisible population of nanomachines and engineered bugs that infested the atmosphere and oceans of every human planet. She stood still to let the Mist suffuse her. Her bones and muscles tingled as they were strengthened to cope with the heavy gravity, and the air she drew into her lungs fizzed with oxygenation. The cold was kept out of her body, but she could taste the salt-laden air in her mouth, the sharp, heavily salted tang of the global sea.
    She made her way cautiously to the edge of the platform. There was no rail, no barrier between her and the abyssal ocean. Near the edge the wind grew stronger, and in the ocean below waves growled back and forth.
    “I’m glad we’re out of reach of those waves,” Alia said.
    “So we are—most of the time. Remember there’s no land here, Alia, nothing to make the waves break. A wave system can just keep on traveling, gathering up more and more energy—”
    “Like the hurricanes.”
    “But we should be safe from being washed away for today.”
    Though the platform was high above the waves it rocked and tipped subtly, its anchoring cable creaking noisily. The motion was slight, but very unsettling.
    “Don’t worry,” Reath shouted over the wind, “we’re quite safe. It’s just that there’s a cable a hundred kilometers long beneath us! No matter how strong the tension in it is, you’re going to get vibrations, resonances. The cable is a string plucked by the ocean! Why, if the worse came to the worst and the cable snapped altogether, the antigravity lifters would just take us flying up through the clouds into space.”
    “I think I’d prefer it if it did snap,” she said. She looked around the platform. Aside from the sleek form of their flitter, glistening with spray, there was only a huddle of automated sensors. “Reath, why have we come here?”
    “Why, for the people,” he said. “Because people are here,
we
must come here. The Commonwealth, I mean. That is the mandate of the Transcendence.”
    “How will they even know we are here? We can’t integrate them if we can’t find them!”
    He held a hand to one ear. “Can’t you hear?”
    She frowned, concentrating, expanding her hearing range. She made out a deep thrumming, subsonic, far below the standard human range.
    “It is a beacon,” he said. “Audible for hundreds of kilometers underwater.”
    “They live
underwater
?”
    “Where else, on a world like this? They will come.”
    “How? Will they swim here?”
    He grinned, his face gleaming with the spray.
    She stepped closer to the edge, peering out at the churning sea. But there was no sign of the swimming citizens.
    Chapter 7
    Suddenly I was standing in the open air.
    I was on a plain. The ground was scrubby and pocked by pits, some like the holes you leave when you dig out a tree stump, some bigger than that. The sky was a lid of cloud, washed-out gray-white, that seemed to suck all the color out of the landscape. There was a breeze on my face, and I could taste and smell salt,