“Picking up the beacon signal,” Marvin Trambi said from the seat beside Antrinell. “It hasn’t shifted much.”
Antrinell got his e-i to lock the beacon signal onto the 3-D radar image projected across the windshield. It shone like a pink star, two and a half kilometers away, on a buttress shaft that was reasonably flat.
The Zanth might not intimidate Antrinell, but every time he ventured across Zanth he was disturbed by its sheer strangeness. Three hours ago they had emerged from the gateway onto a patch of land close to the coast, one of the last remaining clear spots on the planet that was still recognizably a terrestrial-match world, with grass and fern trees still alive despite the green-mist sky. Nervous surviving animals quivered behind bushes and skipped along gullies, triple-segment eyes staring out at the big vehicle that lumbered past. Blotting out the horizon was the Zanth, its boundary creeping forward inexorably toward the sea.
They drew closer to the perverted wonder that had become the ground, and eventually mounted the smooth aquamarine edge of the Zanth as if they were rising onto an ancient cooled lava spill. That impression only lasted a minute. This was no longer a geological landscape crafted by the stately thrust of ice age glaciers and underlying million-year tectonic currents. The Zanth had fallen upon the land, and subsumed its original quality, subverting it, twisting and reshaping both the solid profile and the internal atomic structure, a conquest conducted at both the micro and macro level. It was a process outside of nature, and which nature could never compete against.
The rover was now driving through a bizarre topology, as if the surface were transforming into a hive structure secreted by toxed-up mountain-sized bees. The Zanth consumed soil, rock, water, and vegetation alike, infusing the mass with its own purpose. Sinkholes opened up, kilometers deep and tens of kilometers wide, the consumed material flowing up through vast columns of translucent matter resembling crystal, but never so static, so primitive. The interlocking lattice they wove through the sky was always an erratic asymmetrical labyrinth with strands arching tens of kilometers into the thinning air. Impossible had they been composed of ordinary matter. Pillars as broad as mountains and a hundred times taller: Gravity would have brought them crashing down as soon as they curved away from the horizontal. But fundamental gravity didn’t seem to bother Zanth in its formation phase; it possessed an interstice with quantum fields that defied scientific rationale.
Through this treacherous three-dimensional maze Antrinell drove the rover, inching up curving slopes with inverse cambers; then back down into crater canyons where kilometers below them rivers of sludgy iridescent fog obscured the bottom, if indeed they had one. Across meandering bridges that multiplied at dangerously knobbly junctions, with few continuing strands keeping horizontal. Sometimes the surface below the tires was as clear as glass before it slid away into a rainbow diffraction. Then there were times it seemed as insubstantial as the air that was mutating all around them.
A couple of kilometers from the beacon, Antrinell caught sight of a farmhouse. It was embedded in a purple-tinted column that was twelve hundred meters thick, with bent chrome-green buttress wings that themselves turned and intersected to form an arching bird’s-nest roof a few hundred meters above, as if in tiny worshipful mimicry of the greater composition all around. The perfectly ordinary two-story house was still resting on a scoop of raw soil, as if it had been ripped from the ground by a wild tornado. Now it hung 150 meters above the excursion rover, tilted at a good fifty degrees from horizontal. Its symmetrical composite panel walls and strictly functional PV solar roof portrayed a complete contrast with the irrational chaos of the Zanth topology that had captured it. As Antrinell saw it now, the structure it was in the middle of was a disintegration drizzle, with each particle locked in a slo-mo spray away from the original outline. Recordings of similar embeddings always showed the inevitable absorption into the overall lattice of the Zanth as the structure’s original molecules were methodically broken apart and distorted.
All that witnessing the sad, lost house did for him was reinforce the bitterly won knowledge that every human now labored under: Nothing evaded the Zanth. Nothing survived. Everything became Zanth in the end.
Antrinell began to steer the rover up a sharp incline. The equipment package that included the beacon was just above one of the intersections. Twelve strands curved together amid a cluster of fungal-profile protrusions and undulating hollows.
“I’m going to turn us around before we egress,” Antrinell said.
Marvin pointed at a pair of bulbous distensions thirty meters high, shimmering purple and gray in the weak light percolating through the fog. “There’s room between those two.”
“Okay.” Antrinell shifted the wheel slightly, and the rover tilted as it tracked along a sharp slope. Millimeter wave radar measured the gap between the bulbs. Marvin was right: It was big enough for the rover to pass through. If they got wedged stuck, it was a long walk back to the gateway. Everyone in the HDA’s Frontline research division had seen the recordings of suited figures trapped inside Zanth material, long dead but with their edges dissolving. The fragments expanding. Vanishing.
There were some human sects, with mad perverted followers and manipulative leaders, who considered such transmutation to be the true path to immortality. That to be absorbed then merge with Zanth was the entrance to everlasting life; that your essence would be embraced by Zanth. That somewhere, somehow within its matrix of weird molecules and different quantum composition you would continue, that Zanth would cherish you for your gift of individuality, carry you down the galactic epochs and on through eternity. There was no afterlife, they preached, no truth in the primitive holy books. The Zanth brought a new life now and forever.
Antrinell knew it did nothing of the sort. He’d seen enough Zanth to know it didn’t care, didn’t even notice humans, nor any biological life. He knew what a blight upon God’s creation Zanth really was, and he never wavered from that truth.
The rover nosed through the gap and started down a thirty-degree incline. They were close to the rim of the junction now, front wheels barely five meters away, and the surface was a smooth curve of gold and scarlet diffraction patterns. Antrinell moved them on until they were a safer distance from the edge, and stopped.
Regulations were very clear that at least two people had to remain inside the vehicle at all times. Antrinell and Marvin suited up, leaving their three teammates in the rover to monitor them constantly through a ringlink. Zanth environment suits weren’t nearly as bulky and cumbersome as a spacesuit. They came in two sections, with a tight first skin like a neoprene wet suit, which had a collar seal to attach the big bubble helmet to. A rebreather module and emergency oxygen bottle went on next, worn as a backpack. On top of it all went a one-piece, like a loose boilersuit with integrated boots. The outer layer was a white frictionless metalloceramic fabric, which had a small current constantly running through it. Electricity was about the only thing that could keep the Zanth at bay, though observation had shown it could take hours if not days for the absorption/transformation process to begin once ordinary matter came into contact with any Zanth. Someone in a suit would have to be lying down on the Zanth for a long time before they were in any danger. But still, people felt a lot safer with an electric barrier between them and doom; HDA certainly didn’t begrudge them an extra layer of protection.
The air lock was a clinical-white cylindrical chamber with a ring of black titanium vents around the middle, and a circular door at each end. Antrinell and Marvin waited inside while their e-i’s ran a final batch of checks, then the vents hissed as the pressure was equalized. Rovers always maintained a positive pressure difference with the planetary atmosphere, which grew progressively easier as the Zanth consumed a planet. An atmosphere was clearly not a part of Zanth; the gases were absorbed and converted along with everything else it came into contact with. When the air lock’s outer door swung open, Antrinell was first down the ladder. He tested the ground cautiously, making sure his boot soles had a reasonable traction. Sometimes the surface of the Zanth was as slippery as an ice rink. This time it was okay, and he gave Marvin the all-clear.
Together they walked over to the equipment package. It seemed strangely old-fashioned in this age of smartdust and nanojunction processors. But as experience had shown, the smaller the gadget, the easier it was perverted and absorbed into the Zanth. HDA science teams had soon abandoned the meshed sensors that they took for granted on their own worlds in favor of solid retro blocks of electronics.
The last mission had set this one up on a tripod with two-meter-long telescoping legs that carried quite a high electrical charge. Antrinell was pleased to see the Zanth hadn’t begun its absorption; all three legs remained an unblemished shiny stainless steel. Then he looked at the sensor equipment packages stacked together on top, covered in a plain thermal blanket—also conducting a charge. “Hell.”
“What is it?” Marvin asked.
Antrinell leaned in for a better look, bringing his own helmet-mounted sensors in to focus. In total there were six square packages, twenty-five centimeters along a side, and maybe ten deep. The two in the middle had amber Zanth growing out of the tiny cracks between them—slender fronds with mushroom tips spreading out from a single anchor point in starburst formation. Even fainter were the threads that were staining the thermal blanket itself, radiating out from the base of the fronds. The similarity to terrestrial fungi was uncanny.
“Oh,” Marvin said uneasily. “That’s not good. Do you think it’s growing resistant to electricity?”
“Who knows?” Antrinell waved a sensor wand over the packages. “There’s no defense charge running through the middle two units, but some of their internal circuitry is still functional.”
“Okay, I’ll download the files. Maybe the guys back at Frontline can make something of it.”
Knowing what he would find, Antrinell walked over to the face of the spire that the equipment package was focused on. Two months ago they’d been here and applied a molecular virus to the surface of the Zanth. The stuff terrified most people, and Antrinell was no exception. No one outside of HDA even knew it existed. The precautions surrounding its handling were orders of magnitude stronger than those governing nukes. If it ever got loose on ordinary matter, it could conceivably devastate the entire world. There was one asteroid in a nameless star system where Frontline had opened a gateway that was now a seething mass of brittle fractal foam, its base-energy state lowered by the molecular metamorphosis. But the key was “ordinary matter.”
Looking down on the virus, Antrinell could see it was dead. It had eaten its way into the Zanth, expanding progressively inward until it was a dark russet canker two meters across. At that point the Zanth somehow grew resistant, its own transformed molecules altering again, hardening themselves in some fashion so they could no longer be consumed by the virus. Unable to eat to grow, the molecular virus had simply died.
Antrinell unclipped the sample rod from his belt and dipped it gingerly into the frail meringue-textured virus. It was like breaking the surface of very thin ice. A slight resistance crumpled, then the solid-state probe slid down sluggishly. He watched the readout in his optical grid, detailing the analysis. The virus was definitely dead, reduced to superfine dust with little cohesion. Strands were sucked into the sampler. “Got it,” he said.
“And I have the sensor data,” Marvin said. He took a look at the deep puddle which the virus had become. “Just great. That must have knocked out a good ten kilograms.” He looked around the massive opalescent structures enveloping them. “Only another quizzillion tons to go.”
Antrinell grinned wide enough for Marvin to see his teeth through the darkened helmet. “That’s the optimism that’ll see us all through this.”
“How many quit from despair?”
“You’re not a quitter.” Antrinell pulled the sample probe out of the virus and held it up like a victory cup. “Besides, we made some progress today.”
“Progress? How exactly?”
“Elimination. That configuration doesn’t work. We try another. Then another. Then another.”
“Yeah, right.”
They made their way back to the rover. Once they were inside the decontamination chamber the air lock door swung shut. White walls shone violet, and a thick oily mist sprayed out of the vents. They both stood still, holding their hands up like ballerinas caught in midpirouette. The oil formed a thin skin over the suit and started dripping onto the floor. Then static arced through the chamber, producing a muffled roar as it strobed madly. Antrinell flinched, just as he did every time. There was enough voltage out there to knock him dead if the outer suit developed a break.
The vents reversed, pumping out the atmosphere. Antrinell could feel the inner suit stiffen as it kept him safe against the vacuum. The cycle was repeated three times, which should flush any Zanth-substance molecules back out of the rover. No one had ever seen any evidence that Zanth could expand itself out of a microscopic fragment—it always seemed to achieve active status in chunks weighing in at over two hundred tons—but HDA wasn’t going to take any chances.
As a final precaution, Antrinell and Marvin stripped off their outer suit layers and disposed of them through a chute. Another flush cycle began. Only then did they take off the inner suits. Those got dumped outside as well.
Dressed in fatigues again, Antrinell sat in the driver’s seat and fed power to the hub motors. It was always an anxious moment, finding out if the Zanth had begun to absorb the tires. Fortunately, if that happened, they could shed the external layer of metalized silicone tread like a snakeskin.
The excursion rover moved away smoothly, and the team’s tension drained away. They spent another hour driving carefully along the entangled strands to reach the end of the Zanth, arriving as dusk began to claim the already leaden sky, though they had another two hours of sunlight left. Zanthworld 3 used to have a day that lasted twenty-three hours and forty minutes; now with the Zanth somehow impinging on local gravity its rotation was slowing, already giving it thirty-seven-hour days, and the process still hadn’t stopped. Dusk, like dawn, was a lingering affair.