The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 13

by Gardner Dozois

  “No way. Just whatever you’ve told me since, you know.”

  “Oh well.” He shrugs again, smile gone. “Maybe it was just a déjà vu.”

  Back in the iceboat’s cockpit and cabin, they could be crowded around the kitchen table of a little apartment anywhere. The two newcomers, heads brushing the ceiling even though they are sitting on stools, cook for them. “No, please, that is why we are here,” Jean-Claude says with a big grin. “I very much like to be cooking the big meals.” Actually they’re coming along to meet with some friends on the other side of the Amazonian Sea, all people Roger has worked with often in the last few years, to initial some research on the western slope of Olympus – glaciology and ecology, respectively.

  After these explanations they listen with the rest as Hans and Frances argue about the crash for a while. Frances thinks it was caused by the rapid brightening of the planet’s albedo when the North Sea was pumped out and froze; this the first knock in a whole series of positively reinforcing events leading in a negative direction, an auto-catalytic drop into the death spiral of the full crash. Hans thinks it was the fact that the underground permafrost was never really thawed deeper than a few centimetres, so that the resulting extremely thin skin of the life zone looked much more well-established than it really was, and was actually very vulnerable to collapse if attacked by mutant bacteria, as Hans believes it was, the mutations spurred by the heavy incoming UV –

  “You don’t know that,” Frances says. “You radiate those same organisms in the lab, or even expose them in space labs, and you don’t get the mutations or the collapses we’re seeing on the ground.”

  “Interaction with ground chemicals,” Hans says. “Sometimes I think everything is simply getting salted to death.”

  Frances shakes her head. “These are different problems, and there’s no sign of synergistic effects when they’re combined. You’re just listing possibilities, Hans, admit it. You’re throwing them out there, but no one knows. The etiology is not understood.”

  This is true; Eileen has been working in Burroughs on the problem for ten years, and she knows Frances is right. The truth is that in planetary ecology, as in most other fields, ultimate causes are very hard to discern. Hans now waggles a hand, which is as close as he will come to conceding a point to Frances. “Well, when you have a list of possibilities as long as this one, you don’t have to have synergy among them. Just a simple addition of factors might do it. Everything having its particular effect.”

  Eileen looks over at the youngsters, their backs to the old ones as they cook. They’re debating salt too, but then she sees one put a handful of it in the rice.

  In the fragrance of basmati steam they spoon out their meals. Freya and Jean-Claude eat seated on the floor. They listen to the old ones, but don’t speak much. Occasionally they lean heads together to talk in private, under the talk at the little table. Eileen sees them kiss.

  She smiles. She hasn’t been around people this young for a long time. Then through their reflections in the cockpit dome she sees the ice outside, glowing under the stars. It’s a disconcerting image. But they are not looking out the window. And even if they were, they are young, and so do not quite believe in death. They are blithe.

  Roger sees her looking at the young giants, and shares with her a small smile at them. He is fond of them, she sees. They are his friends. When they say good-night and duck down the passageway to their tiny quarters in the bow, he kisses his fingers and pats them on the head as they pass him.

  The old ones finish their meal, then sit staring out the window, sipping hot chocolate spiked with peppermint schnapps.

  “We can regroup,” Hans says, continuing the discussion with Frances. “If we pursued the heavy industrial methods aggressively, the ocean would melt from below and we’d be back in business.”

  Frances shakes her head, frowning. “Bombs in the regolith, you mean.”

  “Bombs below the regolith. So that we get the heat, but trap the radiation. That and some of the other methods might do it. A flying lens to focus some of the mirrors’ light, heat the surface with focused sunlight. Then bring in some nitrogen from Titan. Direct a few comets to unpopulated areas, or aerobrake them so that they burn up in the atmosphere. That would thicken things up fast. And more halocarbon factories, we let that go too soon.”

  “It sounds pretty industrial,” Frances says.

  “Of course it is. Terraforming is an industrial process, at least partly. We forgot that.”

  “I don’t know,” Roger says. “Maybe it would be best to keep pursuing the biological methods. Just regroup, you know, and send another wave out there. It’s longer, but, you know. Less violence to the landscape.”

  “Ecopoesis won’t work,” Hans says. “It doesn’t trap enough heat in the biosphere.” He gestures outside. “This is as far as ecopoesis will take you.”

  “Maybe for now,” Roger says.

  “Ah yes. You are unconcerned, of course. But I suppose you’re happy about the crash anyway, eh? Being such a red?”

  “Hey, come on,” Roger says. “How could I be happy? I was a sailor.”

  “But you used to want the terraforming gone.”

  Roger waves a hand dismissively, glances at Eileen with a shy smile. “That was a long time ago. Besides, the terraforming isn’t gone now anyway,” gesturing at the ice, “it’s only sleeping.”

  “See,” Arnold pounces, “you do want it gone.”

  “No I don’t, I’m telling you.”

  “Then why are you so damn happy these days?”

  “I’m not happy,” Roger says, grinning happily, “I’m just not sad. I don’t think the situation calls for sadness.”

  Arnold rolls his eyes at the others, enlisting them in his teasing. “The world freezes, and this is not a reason for sadness. I shudder to think what it would take for you!”

  “It would take something sad!”

  “But you’re not a red, no of course not.”

  “I’m not!” Roger protests, grinning at their laughter, but serious as well. “I was a sailor, I tell you. Look, if the situation were as bad as you all are saying, then Freya and Jean-Claude would be worried too, right? But they’re not. Ask them and you’ll see.”

  “They are simply young,” Hans says, echoing Eileen’s thought. The others nod as well.

  “That’s right,” Roger says. “And it’s a short-term problem.”

  That gives them pause.

  After a silence Stephan says, “What about you, Arnold? What would you do?”

  “What, me? I have no idea. It’s not for me to say, anyway. You know me. I don’t like telling people what to do.”

  They wait in silence, sipping their hot chocolate.

  “But you know, if you did just direct a couple of little comets right into the ocean . . .”

  Old friends, laughing at old friends just for being themselves. Eileen leans in against Roger, feeling better.

  Next morning with a whoosh they are off east again, and in a few hours’ sailing are out on the ice with no land visible, skating on the gusty wind with runners clattering or shussing or whining or blasting, depending on wind and ice consistencies. The day passes, and it begins to seem as if they are on an all-ice world, like Callisto or Europa. As the day ends they slide around into the wind and come to a halt, then get out and drive in some ice screws around the boat and tie it into the centre of a web of lines. By sunset they are belayed, and Roger and Eileen go for a walk over the ice.

  “A beautiful day’s sail, wasn’t it?” Roger asks.

  “Yes, it was,” Eileen says. But she cannot help thinking that they are out there walking on the surface of their ocean. “What did you think about what Hans was saying last night, about taking another bash at it?”

  “You hear a lot of people talking that way.”

  “But you?”

  “Well, I don’t know. I don’t like a lot of the methods they talk about. But –” He shrugs. “What I like or don’t l
ike doesn’t matter.”

  “Hmm.” Underfoot the ice is white, with tiny broken air bubbles marring the surface, like minuscule crater rings. “And you say the youngsters aren’t much interested either. But I can’t see why not. You’d think they’d want terraforming to be working more than anyone.”

  “They think they have lots of time.”

  Eileen smiles at this. “They may be right.”

  “That’s true, they may. But not us. I sometimes think we’re sad not so much because of the crash as the quick decline.” He looks at her, then down at the ice again. “We’re two hundred and fifty years old, Eileen.”

  “Two hundred forty.”

  “Yeah yeah. But there’s no one alive older than two-sixty.”

  “I know.” Eileen remembers a time when a group of old ones were sitting around a big hotel restaurant table building card-houses, as there was no other card game all of them knew; they collaborated on one house of cards four storeys high, and the structure was getting shaky indeed when someone said, “It’s like my longevity treatments.” And though they laughed, no one had the steadiness of hand to set the next card.

  “Well. There you have it. If I were twenty I wouldn’t worry about the crash either. Whereas for us it’s very likely the last Mars we’ll know. But, you know. In the end it doesn’t matter what kind of Mars you like best. They’re all better than nothing.” He smiles crookedly at her, puts an arm around her shoulders and squeezes.

  The next morning they wake in a fog, but there is a steady breeze as well, so after breakfast they unmoor and slide east with a light, slick sliding sound. Ice dust, pulverized snow, frozen mist – all flash past them.

  Almost immediately after taking off, however, a call comes in on the radio phone. Roger picks up the handset, and Freya’s voice comes in. “You left us behind.”

  “What? Shit! What the hell were you doing out of the boat?”

  “We were down on the ice, fooling around.”

  “For Christ’s sake, you two.” Roger grins despite himself as he shakes his head. “And what, you’re done now?”

  “None of your business,” Jean-Claude calls happily in the background.

  “But you’re ready to be picked up,” Roger says.

  “Yes, we are ready.”

  “Okay, well, shit. Just hold put there. It’ll take a while to beat back up to you in this wind.”

  “That’s all right. We have our warm clothes on, and a ground pad. We will wait for you.”

  “As if you have any choice!” Roger says, and puts the handset down.

  He starts sailing in earnest. First he turns across the wind, then tacks up into it, and the boat suddenly shrieks like a banshee. The sail-mast is cupped tight. Roger shakes his head, impressed. You would have to shout to be heard over the wind now, but no one is saying anything. They’re letting Roger concentrate on the sailing. The whiteness they are flying through is lit the same everywhere, they see nothing but the ice right under the cockpit, flying by. It is not the purest whiteout Eileen has ever been in, because of the wind and the ice under the lee rail, but it is pretty close; and after a while even the ends of the iceboat, even the ice under the lee rail, disappear into the cloud. They fly, vibrating with their flight, through a roaring white void; a strange kinetic experience, and Eileen finds herself trying to open her eyes farther, as if there might be another kind of sight inside her, waiting for moments like this to come into play.

  Nothing doing. They are in a moving whiteout, that’s all there is to it. Roger doesn’t look pleased. He’s staring down at their radar, and the rest of the instrumentation. In the old days pressure ridges would have made this kind of blind sailing very dangerous. Now there is nothing out there to run into.

  Suddenly they are shoved forward, the roar gets louder, there is darkness below them. They are skating over a sandy patch. Then out of it and off again, shooting through bright whiteness. “Coming about,” Roger says.

  Eileen braces herself for the impact of their first tack, but then Roger says, “I’m going to wear about, folks.” He brings the tiller in towards his knees and they career off downwind, turn, turn, then catch the wind on their opposite beam, the boat’s hull tipping alarmingly to the other side. Booms below as the ballast weight shifts up to the windward rail, and then they are howling as before, but on the opposite tack. The whole operation has been felt and heard rather than seen; Roger even has his eyes closed for a while. Then a moment of relative calm, until the next wearing about. A backward loop at the end of each tack.

  Roger points at the radar screen. “There they are, see?”

  Arnold peers at the screen. “Sitting down, I take it.”

  Roger shakes his head. “They’re still mostly over the horizon. That’s their heads.”

  “You hope.”

  Roger is looking at the APS screen and frowning. He wears away again. “We’ll have to come up on them slow. The radar only sees to the horizon, and even standing up it won’t catch them farther than six k away, and we’re going about a hundred fifty k an hour. So we’ll have to do it by our APS positions.”

  Arnold whistles. Satellite navigation, to make a rendezvous in a whiteout . . . “You could always,” Arnold begins, then claps his hand over his mouth.

  Roger grins at him. “It should be doable.”

  For a non-sailor like Eileen, it is a bit hard to believe. In fact all the blind vibration and rocking side to side have her feeling a bit dizzy, and Hans and Stephan and Frances look positively queasy. All five of them regard Roger, who looks at the APS screen and shifts the tiller minutely, then all of a sudden draws it in to his knees again. On the radar screen Freya and Jean-Claude appear as two glowing green columns. “Hey you guys,” Roger says into the radio handset, “I’m closing on you, I’ll come up from downwind, wave your arms and keep an eye out, I’ll try to come up on your left side as slow as I can.”

  He pulls the tiller gently back and forth, watching the screens intently. They come so far up into the wind that the sail-mast spreads into a very taut French curve, and they lose way. Roger glances ahead of the boat, but still nothing there, just the pure white void, and he squints unhappily and tugs the tiller another centimetre closer to him. The sail is feathering now and has lost almost all its curve; it feels to Eileen as if they are barely making headway, and will soon stall and be thrown backwards; and still no sight of them.

  Then there they are just off the port bow, two angels floating through whiteness toward the still boat – or so for one illusory moment it appears. They leap over the rail onto the foredeck, and Roger uses the last momentum of the iceboat to wear away again, and in a matter of seconds they are flying east with the wind again, the howl greatly reduced.

  By that sunset they are merely in a light mist. Next morning it is gone entirely, and the world has returned. The iceboat lies moored in the long shadow of Olympus Mons, hulking over the horizon to the east. A continent of a mountain, stretching as far as they can see to north and south; another world, another life.

  They sail in towards the eastern shore of the Amazonian Sea, famous before the crash for its wild coastline. Now it shoots up from the ice white and bare, like a winter fairy tale: Gordii Waterfall, which fell a vertical kilometre off the coastal plateau directly into the sea, is now a great pillared icefall, with a huge pile of ice shatter at its foot.

  Past this landmark they skate into Lycus Sulci Bay, south of Acheron, where the land rises less precipitously, gentle hills above low sea bluffs, looking down on the ice bay. In the bay they slowly tack against the morning offshore breeze, until they come to rest against a floating dock, now somewhat askew in the press of ice, just off a beach. Roger ties off on this, and they gear up for a hike on the land. Freya and Jean-Claude carry their backpacks with them.

  Out of the boat and onto the ice. Scritch-scritch over the ice to shore, everything strangely still; then across the frosty beach, and up a trail that leads to the top of the bluff. After that a gentler trail up th
e vast tilt of the coastal plateau. Here the trailmakers have laid flagstones that run sometimes ten in a row before the next low step up. In steeper sections it becomes more like a staircase, a great endless staircase, each flag fitted perfectly under the next one. Even rime-crusted as it is, Eileen finds the lapidary work extraordinarily beautiful. The quartzite flags are placed as tightly as Orkney drywall, and their surfaces are a mix of pale yellow and red, silver and gold, all in differing proportions for each flag, and alternating by dominant colour as they rise. In short, a work of art.

  Eileen follows the trail looking down at these flagstones, up and up, up and up, up some more. Above them the rising slope is white to the distant high horizon, beyond which black Olympus bulks like a massive world of its own.

  The sun emerges over the volcano. Light blazes on the snow. As they hike farther up the quartzite trail it enters a forest. Or rather, the skeleton of a forest. Eileen hurries to catch up with Roger, feeling oppressed, even frightened. Freya and Jean-Claude are up ahead; their other companions far behind.

  Roger leads her off the trail, through the trees. They are all dead. It was a forest of foxtail pine and bristlecone pine; but treeline has fallen to sea level at this latitude, and all these big old gnarled trees have perished. After that a sandstorm, or a series of sandstorms, sandblasted away all the trees’ needles, the small branches, and the bark itself, leaving behind only the bleached tree trunks and the biggest lower branches, twisting up like broken arms from writhing bodies. Wind has polished the spiralling grain of the trunks until it gleams in the morning light. Ice packs the cracks into the heartwood.

  The trees are well-spaced, and they stroll between them, regarding some more closely, then moving on. Scattered here and there are little frozen ponds and tarns. It seems to Eileen like a great sculpture garden or workshop, in which some mighty Rodin has left scattered a thousand trails at a single idea, all beautiful, altogether forming a park of surreal majesty. And yet awful too; she feels it as a kind of stabbing pain in the chest; this is a cemetery. Dead trees flayed by the sandy wind; dead Mars, their hopes flensed by cold Red Mars, Mars the god of war, taking back its land with a frigid boreal blast. The sun glares off the icy ground, smeary light glazing the world. The bare wood glows orange.