The Oxygen Wound

Yeva Sarkissian has drilled ninety-one kilometres of ice in her life and she keeps the number. On the nineteenth of December she puts a clean borehole through the West Antarctic ice sheet into Lake Halvorsen, and at 03:48 she shuts down a pump to change a filter cartridge.

Four minutes later, an oxygen electrode three centimetres inside the sediment steps, and holds.

The floor of Lake Halvorsen is one continuous, electrically conductive organism, and it has begun keeping time with their machinery. It answers on a cycle of eleven days. It counts.

And every answer costs it something, because the only thing anyone can send down a borehole is oxygen, and oxygen is the one thing that floor has never had.

The season ends on the eighth of February. After that there are no aircraft until spring, the National Science Foundation has ordered the hole sealed, and the correct thing to do, and everybody in the room agrees it is the correct thing to do, is to close it and never open another one.

Nine of them stay.

The Oxygen Wound is hard science fiction built out of real drills, real chemistry and real law. It is a first-contact novel with no villain in it, in which the only vocabulary either party has is arithmetic, and in which every institution behaves reasonably and that is the problem. It is about competence at the edge of what machinery can do, about a scale that has not noticed us, and about what love has to become to fit through a very small channel.

Twenty-one messages. Eleven days between each one. Somebody has to decide what the last one says.