The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 13

by Gardner Dozois

  Cathedral choirs and string quartets, fictions and poetries, we have them. Political theories and histories of poverty and bloodshed, we’ve brought those with us, too. The fear, the prediction, has always been that generation ships must deteriorate into savagery. The fear is that the journey itself will be forgotten and the reality of the ship will be the only reality.

  It may happen. It may not.

  I’m dying and I know it but I can’t feel the reality of it. I may turn away, leave the night and the hunt and go back to my comforting little cave, leave the future to the future and take my lethal medicine. Even tonight. Even right now.

  But I’m so alive. I have so many more questions than answers and this meadow is beautiful. How can I encompass all futures and all pasts? How can I stop trying to do so?

  I wonder what I will do. I wonder what my son will do.

  Look at him. Look, he stalks young deer and the hunt will be slow.

  A memory came to sit beside her. Elena welcomed it.

  I went out in the high desert and I camped in a high mountain meadow. When I woke, I woke in moonlight. The western mesa seemed a sheet of beaten silver, and near me the shadows were solid black under the pines. I knew I had heard a doe cropping grass in the meadow but she was gone now. I knew I had heard her run, and her fawn beside her.

  We humans think we don’t smell much, but I smelled that cougar, fur and breath. We think we don’t hear well, but I heard him huff in frustration when the doe ran. We think we don’t have much position sense, but I knew where he was, just above on the ledge and me beneath. He’d crept down from a high resting place in a pine, so slow, and made one soft jump to land above my shelter. That’s when the doe spooked. I could sense the cougar deciding whether to track her and the fawn; I could feel him deciding how. I felt how his muscles tensed. His fur was lighter and softer on his belly than on his back; I got a damned good look at every hair on it as he leaped down an arm’s length from my face. Cougar, puma, mountain lion, he had many names but all of them meant beauty.

  He was tarnished silver in the moonlight and lean and glossy, so beautiful and so still, and he waited, and waited. I had to breathe sooner or later. The cougar heard me and turned his head to look me over where I hid in my shadow. I have never felt so completely evaluated in my life before or since. He dismissed me, placed me on hold, to wait for his interest if he couldn’t bring down that fawn.

  The deer weren’t making any noise at all but the cougar knew and I knew they hadn’t run far.

  In the chill of the real and present meadow, Cougar stalked the twin fawns.

  All quiet. The doe ripped the high grasses with her teeth and Cougar heard the texture of the grass in the way it tore free, knew the texture of the doe’s strong tongue moving back and forth in her wet mouth. At the edge of the meadow, a lump was an unexpected boulder, no, was Elena, hidden under the folds of her old red and black poncho. Surely she would stay still.

  Cougar stalked his deer. His supple foot found a quiet place to rest between the tall and brittle blades of grass. He saw, so clear in his hunt-sharpened vision, growth-faded spots on the yearlings’ hides. Above him a spotted owl roused and circled the clearing, fleeing on her silent wings, and Ottersdaughter, cautious as a deer herself, hid in the tall meadow grass, ready to spook the deer back towards Cougar if they turned in her direction.

  The fawns were identical twins. Cougar wanted the fatter one. Cougar eased his way between the selected twin and its brother and turning the little buck aside. Still the doe remained unaware of him.

  Cougar angled towards the trees, herding the fawn. Damn. It looked like the fawn would get into the brush. Cougar didn’t want to run it down. He hated botched hunts and meat made bitter by terror and exhaustion. He moved closer.

  So big, the deer’s brown eye. Cautious, wary, little deer. Let’s move that way, over there, it’s where you want to go. You don’t know I’m here. Do not become aware of me.

  The deer took two steps, three, in the direction Cougar wanted.

  I watch the silent meadow, the dappled fawn, my son who is invisible to the deer and almost invisible to me.

  The doe and the other fawn are in the trees now. I hear the doe, her hoofbeats muffled on fallen pine needles. The fawn’s steps behind her are noisier than hers and he takes four steps to her three. I wonder when the doe will notice she has only one of her children beside her.

  I was so young when I first saw Cougar’s father hunt and my blanket was synthetic silver, not this wool I hold now. But the cougar turned the deer towards me, that wild young cougar. And when he had killed, he called out into the wild night, horny young fool that he was. The big female who came to answer him kept him from the meat until she was filled, but then she let him mount her.

  And while he was mounted, I found the courage to get my sampling dart out of my pocket and harpoon up a few cells of him. I doubt he even felt the sting.

  There was no deliberation or wisdom in choosing a cougar to sample. No, Cougar’s totem came from accident, opportunity, chance. And youth. I was very young. Not all choices need to be deliberate. I made mine.

  Cougar got ahead of the deer. He circled through the trees and came up behind Elena. Quiet, quiet. Ottersdaughter made a stand of grass ripple once and the deer moved away from it, stepped closer and closer to Cougar and his mother. Still calm. Cougar waited.

  So close. Elena could have touched the buds of antlers, brushed her fingers against individual hairs on the buck’s shoulder, black or tawny or white. She felt wrapped in stillness, as alive as it is possible to be, forever in the moment, the overwhelming joy of now.

  Cougar stood behind his mother, so close that her warmth rose from her poncho and caressed his cheek. This is the best of my mother’s nights, Cougar knew. There cannot be another night more wonderful than this, a future where she is more complete. I don’t know all her past but I know it’s rich in her and I know she holds it all tonight and will never know it so well again.

  Sweat scent, pine sap, crushed meadow grass, Elena is warm with happiness and her blood is singing. But there will be other nights, many of them, that will be almost as complete. What will I do?

  Out in the meadow, Ottersdaughter stood suddenly, not a human form in this light but simply unexpected, tall, something to run away from. The fawn startled and leaped forward, still unaware of Cougar and his mother. Elena raised her arm; perhaps she meant to guard her face.

  The deer reached the limit of its leaping arc and began to descend. Cougar caught his mother’s arm and held it. The fawn’s chest crashed into the barrier of linked arms. As the striped woollen folds of the blanket settled, the old woman’s throat and the fawn’s bulging neck were only centimetres apart, both of their lives vulnerable and within certain reach.

  With the photographic clarity of his hunter’s vision, Cougar watched moonlight silver the razored edges of his claws as they slashed down.

  MOUNT OLYMPUS

  Ben Bova

  As writer, editor, essayist, and anthologist, Ben Bova has been one of the most prominent and influential figures in the genre for more than forty years. Bova made his first professional fiction sale in 1959, and by 1971, already recognized as one of the best new hard-SF writers on the scene, he was chosen to succeed legendary editor John W. Campbell, Jr., as the new editor of Analog magazine, a position he’d hold until 1978; many credit Bova with revitalizing an Analog that had slipped into genteel senility, introducing the work of writers such as Joe Haldeman, Larry Niven, Roger Zelazny, Frederik Pohl, and George R. R. Martin to the magazine, and winning six Best Editor Hugos in the process. Bova then moved on to be the founding editor of Omni magazine, from 1978 to 1982, before turning his back on editing altogether to take up the life of a full-time freelance writer. Bova’s many books include the novels The Starcrossed, The Kinsman Saga (omnibus of the two-volume “Kinsman” series), The Exiles Trilogy (omnibus of the “Exiles” trilogy), Colony, Privateers, Voyagers, Voyagers II: The Alien Within,
Voyagers III: Star Brothers, The Multiple Man, Cyberbooks, and Mars, and the collections Forward in Time, Maxwell’s Demons, Escape Plus, Future Crime, and Sam Gunn, Unlimited. His many anthologies include The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vols. 2A and 2B, The Best of Analog, The Best of Omni Science Fiction, 2–4, and The Best of the Nebulas. Bova is also perhaps the most tireless promoter of the space programme since the late Carl Sagan, and his nonfiction books include The Uses of Space, The New Astronomies, Starflight and Other Improbabilities, The High Road, and Welcome to Moon Base. His most recent book, of which “Mount Olympus” is a part, is the novel Return to Mars. A new novel, Venus, should be on the shelves by the time our book comes out. Bova has also recently become Publisher of Galaxy Online and he has his own web site at www.benbova.net.

  This new Mars adventure is a gripping story of danger and exploration that is as timely as tomorrow’s headlines and as scientifically accurate and up-to-date as anyone can make it (when it happens, the chances are good that this is the way it will happen!), and demonstrates that no matter how far away we travel, we still have to deal with ourselves when we get there.

  The tallest mountain in the solar system is Olympus Mons, on Mars. It is a massive shield volcano that has been dormant for tens, perhaps hundreds of millions of years.

  Once, though, its mighty outpourings of lava dwarfed everything else on the planet. Over time, they built a mountain three times taller than Everest, with a base the size of the state of Iowa.

  The edges of that base are rugged cliffs of basalt more than a kilometre high. The summit of the mountain, where huge calderas mark the vents that once spewed molten rock, stands some twenty-seven kilometres above the supporting plain.

  At that altitude, the carbon dioxide that forms the major constituent of Mars’s atmosphere can freeze out, condense on the cold, bare rock, covering it with a thin, invisible layer of dry ice.

  TÒMAS RODRIGUEZ LOOKED happy as a puppy with an old sock to chew on as he and Fuchida got into their hardsuits.

  “I’m gonna be in the Guinness Book of Records,” he proclaimed cheerfully to Jamie Waterman, who was helping him get suited up. Trudy Hall was assisting Fuchida while Stacy Dezhurova sat in the comm centre, monitoring the dome’s systems and the equipment outside.

  It was the forty-eighth day of the Second Expedition’s eighteen months on the surface of Mars, the day that Rodriguez and biologist Mitsuo Fuchida were scheduled to fly to Olympus Mons.

  “Highest aircraft landing and takeoff,” Rodriguez chattered cheerfully as he wormed his fingers into the suit’s gloves. “Longest flight of a manned solar-powered aircraft. Highest altitude for a manned solar-powered aircraft.”

  “Crewed,” Trudy Hall murmured, “not manned.”

  Unperturbed by her correction, Rodriguez continued, “I might even bust the record for unmanned solar-powered flight.”

  “Isn’t it cheating to compare a flight on Mars to flights on Earth?” Trudy asked as she helped Fuchida latch his life-support pack onto the back of his suit.

  Rodriguez shook his head vigorously. “All that counts in the record book is the numbers, chica. Just the numbers.”

  “Won’t they put an asterisk next to the numbers and a footnote that says, ‘This was done on Mars’?”

  Rodriguez tried to shrug but not even he could manage that inside the hard suit. “Who cares, as long as they spell my name right?”

  As the two men put on their suit helmets and sealed them to the neck rings, Jamie noticed that Fuchida was utterly silent through the suit-up procedure. Tòmas is doing enough talking for them both, he thought. But he wondered, Is Mitsuo worried, nervous? He looks calm enough, but that might just be a mask. Come to think of it, the way Tòmas is blathering, he must be wired tighter than a drum.

  The bulky hard suits had been pristine white when the explorers first touched down on Mars. Now their boots and leggings were tinged with reddish dust, no matter how hard the explorers vacuumed the ceramic-metal suits each time they returned to the dome’s airlock.

  Rodriguez was the youngest of the eight explorers, the astronaut that NASA had loaned to the expedition. If it bothered him to work under Dezhurova, the more experienced Russian cosmonaut, he never showed it. All through training and the five-month flight to Mars and their nearly seven weeks on the planet’s surface, he had been a good-natured, willing worker. Short and stocky, with a swarthy complexion and thickly curled dark hair, his most noticeable feature was a dazzling smile that made his deep brown eyes sparkle.

  But now he was jabbering away like a fast-pitch salesman. Jamie wondered if it was nerves or relief to be out on his own, in charge. Or maybe, Jamie thought, the guy was simply overjoyed at the prospect of flying.

  Both men were suited up at last, helmet visors down, life-support systems functioning, radio checks completed. Jamie and Trudy walked with them to the airlock hatch: two Earthlings accompanying a pair of ponderous robots.

  Jamie shook hands with Rodriguez. His bare hand hardly made it around the astronaut’s glove, with its servo-driven exoskeleton “bones” on its back.

  “Good luck, Tòmas,” he said. “Don’t take any unnecessary risks out there.”

  Rodriguez grinned from behind his visor. “Hey, you know what they say: There are old pilots and bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots.”

  Jamie chuckled politely. As mission director, he felt he had to impart some final words of wisdom. “Remember that when you’re out there,” he said.

  “I will, boss. Don’t worry.”

  Fuchida stepped up to the hatch once Rodriguez went through. Even in the bulky suit, even with sparrowlike Trudy Hall standing behind him, he looked small, somehow vulnerable.

  “Good luck, Mitsuo,” said Jamie.

  Through the sealed helmet, Fuchida’s voice sounded muffled, but unafraid. “I think my biggest problem is going to be listening to Tòmas’s yakking all the way to the mountain.”

  Jamie laughed.

  “And back, most likely,” Fuchida added.

  The indicator light turned green and Trudy pressed the stud that opened the inner hatch. Fuchida stepped through, carrying his portable life-support satchel in one hand.

  He’s all right, Jamie told himself. Mitsuo’s not scared or even worried.

  Once they had clambered into the plane’s side-by-side seats and connected to its internal electrical power and life-support systems, both men changed.

  Rodriguez became all business. No more chattering. He checked out the plane’s systems with only a few clipped words of jargon to Stacy Dezhurova, who was serving as flight controller back in the dome’s comm centre.

  Fuchida, for his part, felt his pulse thundering in his ears so loudly he wondered if the suit radio was picking it up. Certainly the medical monitors must be close to the redline, his heart was racing so hard.

  Like the expedition’s remotely piloted soarplanes, the rocketplane was built of gossamer-thin plastic skin stretched over a framework of ceramic-plastic cerplast. To Fuchida it looked like an oversized model airplane made of some kind of kitchen wrap, complete with an odd-looking six-bladed propeller on its nose.

  But it was big enough to carry two people. Huge, compared to the unmanned soarplanes. Rodriguez said it was nothing more than a fuel tank with wings. The wings stretched wide, drooping to the ground at their tips. The cockpit was tiny, nothing more than a glass bubble up front. The rocket engines, tucked in where the wing roots joined the fuselage, looked too small to lift the thing off the ground.

  The plane was designed to use its rocket engines for takeoffs, then once at altitude, it would run on the prop. Solar panels painted onto the wing’s upper surface would provide the electricity to power the electrical engine. There was too little oxygen in the Martian air to run a jet engine; the rockets were the plane’s main muscle, the solar cells its secondary energy source.

  Back in the dome, Jamie and the others crowded over Dezhurova’s shoulders to watch the takeoff on the comm centre�
�s desktop display screen.

  As an airport, the base left much to be desired. The bulldozed runway ran just short of two kilometres in length. There was no taxiway; Rodriguez and a helper – often Jamie – simply turned the fragile plane around after a landing so it was pointed up the runway again. There was no windsock. The atmosphere was so rare that it made scant difference which way the wind was blowing when the plane took off. The rocket engines did most of the work of lifting the plane off the ground and providing the speed it needed for the broad, drooping wings to generate enough lift for flight.

  Jamie felt a dull throbbing in his jaw as he bent over Dezhurova, watching the final moments before takeoff. With a conscious effort he unclenched his teeth. There are two men in that plane, he told himself. If anything goes wrong, if they crash, they’ll both be killed.

  “Clear for takeoff,” Dezhurova said mechanically into her lip mike.

  “Copy clear,” Rodriguez’s voice came through the speakers.

  Stacy scanned the screens around her one final time, then said, “Clear for ignition.”

  “Ignition.”

  Suddenly the twin rocket engines beneath the wing roots shot out a bellowing flame and the plane jerked into motion. As the camera followed it jouncing down the runway, gathering speed, the long, drooping wings seemed to stiffen and stretch out.

  “Come on, baby,” Dezhurova muttered.

  Jamie saw it all as if it were happening in slow motion: the plane trundling down the runway, the rockets’ exhaust turning so hot the flame became invisible, clouds of dust and grit billowing behind the plane as it sped faster, faster along the runway, nose lifting now.

  “Looking good,” Dezhurova whispered.

  The plane hurtled up off the ground and arrowed into the pristine sky, leaving a roiling cloud of dust and vapour slowly dissipating along the length of the runway. To Jamie it looked as if the cloud was trying to reach for the plane and pull it back to the ground.