IGMS Issue 18 by IGMS Read Free Book Online Page B

late August, I breached a new duct at the edge of my maps, and when I looked up, I saw a spot of light. I heard voices. I reached the light, a tiny crack at the top of the wall, and peered through.
    On the other side were tourists. Pasty-faced suburbanites following a guide holding a glowing flag. It was an enormous chamber, ten times bigger than any I'd found. Electric lights draped the walls and the ceiling. Paved walkways, with rails, steered the group on their casual walk. The guide's voice droned on about the cave's history and geology.
    I backed away from the crack of light, retraced my steps through my carefully mapped passageways, and climbed out the slope I'd fallen down two months before.
    It turned out I hadn't discovered anything at all. I'd just stumbled into a side entrance to a well-known show cave. My portion was too narrow and dry for tourists, so it had been left undeveloped. There were maps online which matched my drawings precisely.
    In school the next fall, I learned that every square foot of the planet had been scanned, probed, radared, and meticulously mapped in the early 21st century. There were no dark woods anymore, no hidden caves. The twenty-first century's first great accomplishment, the textbooks said. They didn't seem to realize what had been lost.
    I shredded my maps and dumped them into the compost pile behind our house. I never went back to that cave again.
    Shelley is wrong about me. I'm not running, I'm searching. I've always been searching. For something, anything, new, unseen, unmapped. Because when I find that thing no one else has seen, for a moment, at least, I'm back in those dark woods.
    And here, 23 kilometers below the surface of Miranda, three billion kilometers from Earth, I had once again found something new. The concave wall above me was dotted with the gem shards, poking out from the overhang like stalactites. Light from my helmet bounced among them, sometimes reflecting, sometimes refracting, forming a tapestry of color on the canyon wall.
    "Lance? Lance? Are you ready?" Now it was Shelley who was in a damn hurry. She'd noticed that the shards were all jammed upward into the wall, realized they were flung from below. "Magma chamber? Volcanic glass?" she mumbled. She didn't sound convinced. She wanted to reach the bottom.
    Slowly I stood, grasped Shelley's arm, and led her back to the descent line.
    Where were Wil and Katherine? I widened my headlamp beam and swept the ledge. They were twenty meters away, at the rim of the ledge, but nowhere near the rope. I was about to castigate them for the safety lapse when I noticed something: they'd removed their ankle weights.
    Wil saluted. "See you at the bottom, boss!"
    And then they jumped.
    I took a step toward the precipice then caught myself, clinging to the line. I did some quick math in my head: 300 meters, 0.008g. It would be a hard landing, but they'd make it. They'd see the bottom first.
    Shelley laughed. She'd done the math as well. "Didn't think of that, did you?"
    I stood silently on the ledge, the cave dissolving to mist in my mind's eye. I waited, absolutely still, until my heart rate returned to normal. I grasped the rope with both hands and slowly, steadily, resumed my descent.

    In this micro-gravity, it would take Wil and Katherine ninety seconds to reach the bottom. They talked at me the entire way down.
    "It's the deepest canyon in the solar system," said Wil. "Did you really think we'd let you touch bottom first? It's an Armstrong moment!"
    "We'll save a portion for you," said Katherine, in that annoying silky voice. "A third of the floor, somewhere above deepest point, for you to explore on your own. That's only fair."
    "Yeah," added Wil, "a nice cave or two. You can make your maps."
    I stayed silent, continued my steady descent.
    "You're not that different from us, you know" said Katherine. "You think you are, but you're not."
    The ninety seconds were up, and they finally stopped yapping.
    Then the screaming