The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 13

by Gardner Dozois

  It isn’t Roger’s kind of thing, however, and indeed when Eileen looks around she sees him standing in the corner next to the jukebox, pretending to make selections but actually eating his meal right there. That’s Roger for you. Eileen grins as she makes her way through the crowd to him.

  “Hey,” he says as he sees her, and gives her a quick hug with one arm.

  She leans over and kisses his cheek. “You were right, it’s not very hard to find this place.”

  “No.” He glances at her. “I’m glad you decided to come.”

  “Oh, the work will always be there, I’m happy to get out. Bless you for thinking of it. Is everyone else already here?”

  “Yeah, all but Frances and Stephan, who just called and said they’d be here soon. We can leave tomorrow.”

  “Great. Come sit down with the others, I want some food, and I want to say hi to everyone.”

  Roger wrinkles his nose, gestures at the dense loud crowd. This solitary quality in him has been the cause of some long separations in their relationship, and so now Eileen shoves his arm and says, “Yeah yeah, all these people. Such a crowded place, Elysium.”

  Roger grins crookedly. “That’s why I like it.”

  “Oh of course. Far from the madding crowd.”

  “Still the English major, I see.”

  “And you’re still the canyon hermit,” she says, laughing and pulling him towards the crowd; it is good to see him again, it has been three months. For many years now they have been a steady couple, Roger returning to their rooms in the co-op in Burroughs after every trip away; but his work is still in the back country, so they still spend quite a lot of time apart.

  Just as they join Hans and Arnold, who are wrapping up their history of the world, Stephan and Frances come in the door, and they hold a cheery reunion over a late dinner. There’s a lot of catching up to do; this many members of their Olympus Mons climb haven’t been together in a long time. Hours after the other diners have gone upstairs to bed, or off to their homes, the little group of old ones sits at the end of one table talking. A bunch of antique insomniacs, Eileen thinks, none anxious to go to bed and toss and turn through the night. She finds herself the first to stand up and stretch and declare herself off. The others rise on cue, except for Roger and Arnold; they’ve done a lot of climbing together through the years, and Roger was a notorious insomniac even when young; now he sleeps very poorly indeed. And Arnold will talk for as long as anyone else is willing, or longer. “See you tomorrow,” Arnold says to her. “Bright and early for the crossing of the Amazonian Sea!”

  The next morning the iceboat runs over ice that is mostly white, but in some patches clear and transparent right down to the shallow seafloor. Other patches are the colour of brick, with the texture of brick, and the boat’s runners clatter over little dunes of gravel and dust. If they hit melt ponds the boat slows abruptly and shoots great wings of water to the sides. At the other side of these ponds the runners scritch again like ice skates as they accelerate back up to speed. Roger’s iceboat is a scooter, he explains to them; not like the spidery skeletal thing that Eileen was expecting, having seen some of that kind down in Chryse – those Roger calls DNs. This is more like an ordinary boat, long, broad, and low, with several parallel runners nailed fore-and-aft to its hull. “Better over rough ice,” Roger explains, “and it floats if you happen to hit water.” The sail is like a big bird’s wing extended over them, sail and mast all melded together into one object, shifting shape with every gust to catch as much wind as it can.

  “What keeps us from tipping over?” Arnold asks, looking over the lee rail at the flashing ice just feet below him.

  “Nothing.” The deck is at a good cant, and Roger is grinning.

  “Nothing?”

  “The laws of physics.”

  “Come on.”

  “When the boat tips the sail catches less wind, both because it’s tilted and because it reads the tilt, and reefs in. Also we have a lot of ballast. And there are weights in the deck that are held magnetically on the windward side. It’s like having a heavy crew sitting on the windward rail.”

  “That’s not nothing,” Eileen protests. “That’s three things.”

  “True. And we may still tip over. But if we do we can always get out and pull it back upright.”

  They sit in the cockpit and look up at the sail, or ahead at the ice. The iceboat’s navigation steers them away from the rottenest patches, spotted from satellites, and so the automatic pilot changes their course frequently, and they shift around the cockpit when necessary. Floury patches slow them the most, and over these the boat sometimes decelerates pretty quickly, throwing the unprepared forward into the shoulder of the person sitting next to them. Eileen is banged into by Hans and Frances more than once; like her, they have never been on iceboats before, and their eyes are round at the speeds it achieves during strong gusts over smooth ice. Hans speculates that the sandy patches mark old pressure ridges, which stood like long stegosaur backs until the winds ablated them entirely away, leaving their load of sand and silt behind on the flattened ice. Roger nods. In truth the whole ocean surface is blowing away on the wind, with whatever sticks up going the fastest; and the ocean is now frozen to the bottom, so that no new pressure ridges are being raised. Soon the whole ocean will be as flat as a table top.

  This first day out is clear, the royal blue sky crinkling in a gusty west wind. Under the clear dome of the cockpit it’s warm, their air at a slightly higher pressure than outside. Sea level is now around 300 millibars, and lowering year by year, as if for a great storm that never quite comes. They skate at speed around the majestic promontory of the Phlegra Peninsula, its great prow topped by a white-pillared Doric temple. Staring up at it Eileen listens to Hans and Frances discuss the odd phenomenon of the Phlegra Montes, seaming the north coast of Elysium like a long ship capsized on the land; unusually straight for a Martian mountain range, as are the Erebus Montes to the west. As if they were not, like all the rest of the mountain ranges on Mars, the remnants of crater rims. Hans argues for them being two concentric rings of a really big impact basin, almost the size of the Big Hit itself but older than the Big Hit, and so mostly obliterated by the later impact, with only Isidis Bay and much of the Utopian and Elysian Seas left to indicate where the basin had been. “Then the ranges could have been somewhat straightened out in the deformation of the Elysium bulge.”

  Frances shakes her head, as always. Never once has Eileen seen the two of them agree. In this case Frances thinks the ranges may be even older than Hans does, remnants of early tectonic or proto-tectonic plate movement. There’s a wide body of evidence for this early tectonic era, she claims, but Hans is shaking his head: “The andesite indicating tectonic action is younger than that. The Phlegras are early Noachian. A pre-Big Hit big hit.”

  Whatever the explanation, there the fine prow of rock stands, the end of a steep peninsula extending straight north into the ice for four hundred kilometres out of Firewater. A long sea cliff falling into the sea, and the same on the other side. The pilgrimage out the spine to the temple is one of the most famous walks on Mars; Eileen has made it a number of times since Roger first took her on it about forty years ago, sometimes with him, sometimes without. When they first came they looked out on a blue sea purled with whitecaps. Seldom since has it been free of ice.

  He too is looking at the point, with an expression that makes Eileen think he might be remembering that time as well. Certainly he would remember if asked; his incredible memory has still not yet begun to weaken, and with the suite of memory drugs now available, drugs that have helped Eileen to remember quite a bit, it might well be that he will never forget anything his whole life long. Eileen envies that, though she knows he is ambivalent about it. But by now it is one of the things about him that she loves. He remembers everything and yet he has remained stalwart, even chipper, through all the years of the crash. A rock for her to lean on, in her own cycles of despair and mourning. Of course as a
Red it could be argued he has no reason to mourn. But that wouldn’t be true. His attitude was more complex than that, Eileen has seen it; so complex that she does not fully understand it. Some aspect of his strong memory, taking the long view; a determination to make it well; rueful joy in the enduring land; some mix of all these things. She watches him as he stares absorbed at the promontory where he and she once stood together over a living world.

  How much he has meant to her through the years has become beyond her ability to express. Sometimes it fills her to overflowing. That they have known each other all their lives; that they have helped each other through hard times; that he got her out into the land in the first place, starting her on the trajectory of her whole life; all these would have made him a crucial figure to her. But everyone has many such figures. And over the years their divergent interests kept splitting them up; they could have lost touch entirely. But at one point Roger came to visit her in Burroughs, and she and her partner of that time had been growing distant for many years, and Roger said, I love you, Eileen. I love you. Remember what it was like on Olympus Mons, when we climbed it? Well now I think the whole world is like that. The escarpment goes on for ever. We just keep climbing it until eventually we fall off. And I want to climb it with you. We keep getting together and then going our ways, and it’s too chancy, we might not cross paths again. Something might happen. I want more than that. I love you.

  And so eventually they set up rooms in her co-op in Burroughs. She continued to work in the Ministry of the Environment, and he continued to guide treks in the back country, then to sail on the North Sea; but he always came back from his treks and his cruises, and she always came back from her working tours and her vacations away; and they lived together in their rooms when they were both at home, and became a real couple. And through the years without summer, then the little ice age and the crash itself, his steadfast presence has been all that has kept her from despair. She shudders to think what it would have been like to get through these years alone. To work so hard, and then to fail . . . It’s been hard. She has seen that he has worried about her. This trip is an expression of that: Look, he said once after she came home in tears over reports of the tropical and temperate extinctions – look, I think you need to get out there and see it. See the world the way it is now, see the ice. It’s not so bad. There have been ice ages before. It’s not so bad.

  And as she had been more and more holing up in Burroughs, unable to face it, she finally was forced to agree that, in theory, it would be a good thing. Very soon after that he organized this trip. Now she sees that he gathered some of their friends from the Olympus Mons expedition to help entice her to come, perhaps; also, once here, to remind her of that time in their lives. Anyway it’s nice to see their faces, flushed and grinning as they fly along.

  Skate east! the wind says, and they skitter round Scrabster, the northeastern point of Elysium, then head south over the great plate of white ice inserted into the incurve of the coast. This is the Bay of Arcadia, and the steep rise of land backing the bluffs is called Acadia, for its supposed resemblance to Nova Scotia and the coast of Maine. Dark rock, battered by the dark north sea; sea-cliffs of bashed granite, sluiced by big breakers. Now, however, all still and white, with the ice that has powdered down out of the spray and spume flocking and frosting the beach and the cliffs until they look like wedding cake ramparts. No sign of life in Acadia; no greens anywhere in sight. This is not her Elysium.

  Roger takes over the sailing from Arnold, and brings them around a point, and there suddenly is a steep-walled square island ahead, vivid green on top – ah. A township, frozen here near the entrance to a fjord, no doubt in a deep channel. All the townships have become islands in the ice. The greenery on top is protected by a tent which Eileen cannot see in the bright sun. “I’m just dropping by to pick up the rest of our crew,” Roger explains. “A couple of young friends of mine are going to join us.”

  “Which one is this?” Stephan inquires.

  “This is the Altamira.”

  Roger sails them around in a sweet curve that ends with them stalled into the wind and skidding to a halt. He retracts the cockpit dome. “I don’t intend to go up there, by the way, that’s an all-day trip no matter how you do it. My friends should be down here on shore to meet us.”

  They step down onto the ice, which is mostly a dirty opaque white, cracked and a bit nobbled on the surface, so that it is slippery in some places, but mostly fairly steady underfoot; and Eileen sees that the treacherous spots stand out like windows inlaid in tile. Roger talks into his wristpad, then leads them into the fjord, which on one steep side displays a handsome granite staircase, frost lying like a fluffy carpet on the steps.

  Up these stairs Roger climbs, putting his feet in earlier bootprints. Up on the headland over the fjord they have a good view over the ice to the township, which is really very big for a manufactured object, a kilometre on each side, and its deck only just lower than they are. Its square tented middle glows green like a Renaissance walled garden, the enchanted space of a fairy tale.

  There is a little stone shelter or shrine on the headland, and they follow the sidewalk over to it. The wind chills Eileen’s hands, toes, nose and ears. A big white plate, whistling in the wind. Elysium bulks behind them, its two volcanoes just sticking over the high horizon to the west. She holds Roger’s hand as they approach. As always, her pleasure in Mars is mixed up with her pleasure in Roger; at the sight of this big cold panorama love sails through her like the wind. Now he is smiling, and she follows his gaze and sees two people though the shelter’s open walls. “Here they are.”

  They round the front of the shrine and the pair notices them. “Hi, all,” Roger says. “Eileen, this is Freya Ahmet and Jean-Claude Bayer. They’re going to be joining us. Freya, Jean-Claude, this is Eileen Monday.”

  “We have heard of you,” Freya says to her with a friendly smile. She and Jean-Claude are both huge; they tower over the old ones.

  “That’s Hans and Frances behind us, down the path there arguing. Get used to that.”

  Hans and Frances arrive, then Arnold and Stephan. Introductions are made all around, and they investigate the empty shrine or shelter, and exclaim over the view. The eastern side of the Elysian massif was a rain shadow before, and now it bulks just as black and empty as ever, looking much as it always has. The huge white plate of the sea, however, and the incongruous square of the Altamira; these are new and strange. Eileen has never seen anything like it. Impressive, yes; vast; sublime; but her eye always returns to the little tented greenhouse on the township, tiny stamp of life in a lifeless universe. She wants her world back.

  On the way back down the stone stairs she looks at the exposed granite of the fjord’s sidewall, and in one crack she sees black crumbly matter. She stops to inspect it.

  “Look at this,” she says to Roger, scraping away at rime to see more of it. “Is it lichen? Moss? Is it alive? It looks like it might be alive.”

  Roger sticks his face right down into it, eyes a centimetre away. “Moss, I think. Dead.”

  Eileen looks away, feeling her stomach sink. “I’m so tired of finding dead plants, dead animals. The last dozen times out I’ve not seen a single living thing. I mean winterkill is winterkill, but this is ridiculous. The whole world is dying!”

  Roger waggles a hand uncertainly, straightens up. He can’t really deny it. “I suppose there was never enough sunlight to begin with,” he says, glancing up at their bronze button of light, slanting over Elysium. “People wanted it and so they did it anyway. But reality isn’t interested in what people want.”

  Eileen sighs. “No.” She pokes again at the black matter. “Are you sure this isn’t a lichen? It’s black, but it looks like it’s still alive somehow.”

  He inspects some of it between his gloved fingers. Small black fronds, like a kind of tiny seaweed, frayed and falling apart.

  “Fringe lichen?” Eileen ventures. “Frond lichen?”

  “Moss
, I think. Dead moss.” He clears away more ice and snow. Black rock, rust rock. Black splotches. It’s the same everywhere. “No doubt there are lichens alive, though. And Freya and Jean-Claude say the subnivean environment is quite lively still. Very robust. Protected from the elements.”

  Life under a permanent blanket of snow. “Uh huh.”

  “Hey. Better than nothing, right?”

  “Right. But this moss here was exposed.”

  “Right. And therefore dead.”

  They start down again. Roger hikes beside her, lost in thought. He smiles: “I’m having a déjà vu. This happened before, right? A long time ago we found some little living thing together, only it was dead. It happened before!”

  She shakes her head. “You tell me. You’re the memory man.”

  “But I can’t quite get it. It’s more like déjà vu. Well, but maybe . . . maybe on that first trip, when we first met?” He gestures eastward – over the Amazonian Sea, she guesses, to the canyon country east of Olympus. “Some little snails or something.”

  “But could that be?” Eileen asks. “I thought we met when I was still in college. The terraforming had barely started then, right?”

  “True.” He frowns. “Well, there was lichen from the start, it was the first thing they propagated.”

  “But snails?”

  He shrugs. “That’s what I seem to remember. You don’t?”