The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  It was in fact twelve kilometers away, and the light faded steadily as they roared along. Ford could hear the wind howling now. He remembered a story Billy had told him, about people seeing dead Haulers in their high-beams, wraiths signaling for help at the scenes of long-ago breakdowns. The whirling sand looked uncannily like figures with streaming hair, diving in front of the freighter as though waving insubstantial arms. He was grateful when the half-circle of rocks that was Five-Fifty-K Station appeared in her lights at last, and she seemed eager to swerve away from the road.

  Bill punched in the anchoring protocol, and Beautiful Evelyn gave a lurch and dropped abruptly, as though she were sitting down. Ford cut the power; the drives fell silent. They sat there side by side in the silence that was filled up steadily by the whine of blowing sand, and a patter of blown gravel that might have sounded to them like rain, if they had ever heard rain.

  “What do we do now?” said Ford.

  “We wait it out,” said Bill.

  They went into the back to check on Billy—no change—and heated something frozen and ate it, barely registering what it was. Then they went back into the cab and sat, in their opposite corners.

  “So we really are on our own?” said Ford at last. “Areco won’t send Security looking for us?”

  “Areco doesn’t send Mother’s Boys anyplace,” said Bill, staring into the dark. “Mother hired ‘em.”

  “Who’s Mother, anyway?”

  “The lady who found the diamond and got rich,” said Bill. “And bought Mons Olympus, and everybody thought she was crazy, because it was just this big volcano where nobody could grow anything. Only, she had a well drilled into a magma pocket and built a power station. And she leased lots to a bunch of people from Earth and that’s why Mons Olympus makes way more money than Areco and the MAC.”

  “The MAC isn’t supposed to make money,” said Ford. “We’re supposed to turn Mars into a paradise. Our contract says Areco is going to give it to us for our own, once we’ve done it.”

  “Well, you can bet Areco isn’t going to come rescue us,” said Bill. “Nobody looks out for Haulers except other Haulers. And their idea of help would be giving Dad a big funeral and getting stinking drunk afterward.”

  “Oh,” said Ford. Bill gave him an odd look.

  “People in the MAC look out for each other, though, don’t they?”

  “Yeah,” said Ford wretchedly. “There’s always somebody watching what you do. Always somebody there to tell you why what you want to do is wrong. Council meetings go on for hours because everybody has to say something or it isn’t fair, but they all say the same thing anyway. Blah blah blah. I hate it there,” he said, surprising himself by how intensely he felt.

  “What’s it supposed to be like, when Mars is a paradise?”

  Ford looked at Bill to see if he was being mocking, but he wasn’t smiling.

  “Well, it’ll be like… there’ll be no corruption or oppression. And stuff. They say water will fall out of the sky, and nobody will ever have to wear a mask again.” Ford slumped forward and put his head on his knees. “I used to imagine it’d be… I don’t know. Full of lights.”

  “People would be safe, if Mars could be made like that,” said Bill in a thoughtful voice. “Terraformed. Another Earth. No more big empty spaces.”

  “I like big empty spaces,” said Ford. “Why does Mars have to be just like Earth anyway? Why can’t things stay the way they are?”

  “You like this?” Bill swung his arm up at the monitors, that showed only the howling night and a blur of sand. “ ‘Cause you can have it. I hate it! Tons of big nothing waiting to kill us, all my whole life! And Dad just laughed at it, but he isn’t laughing now, huh? You know what’s really sick? If he dies—if we get back alive—I’ll be better off.”

  “Oh, shut up,” said Ford.

  “But I will,” said Bill, with a certain wonderment. “Lots better off. I can sell this freighter—and Dad paid into the Hauler’s Club, so there’d be some money coming in there—and… wow, I could afford a good education. Maybe University level. I’ll be able to have everything I’ve always wanted, and I’ll never have to come out here again.”

  “How can you talk like that?” Ford yelled. “You selfish pig! You’re talking about your own dad dying! You don’t even care, do you? Your dad’s the bravest guy I ever met!”

  “He got himself killed, after everything I told him. He was stupid,” said Bill.

  “He isn’t even dead yet!” Ford, infuriated, swung at him. Bill ducked backward, away from his flailing fists, and got his legs up on the seat and kicked Ford. Ford fell sideways, but scrambled up on his knees and kept coming, trying to back Bill into the corner. Bill dodged and hit him hard, and then again and again, until Ford got so close he couldn’t get his arms up all the way. Ford, sobbing with anger, punched as hard as he could in the cramped space, but Bill was a much better fighter for all that he was so small.

  By the time they had hurt each other enough to stop, both of them had bloody noses and Ford had the beginning of a black eye. Swearing, they retreated into their separate corners of the cab, and glared at each other until the droning hiss of the wind and the pattering of gravel on the tank lulled them to sleep.

  * * * *

  7

  When they woke, hours later, it was dead quiet.

  Ford woke groaning, partly because his face was so sore and partly because he had a stiff neck from sleeping curled up on the seat. He sat up and looked around blearily.

  He realized that he couldn’t hear anything. He looked up at the monitors and realized that he couldn’t see anything, either; the screens were black. Frightened, he leaned over and shook Bill awake. Bill woke instantly, staring around.

  “The power’s gone out!” Ford said.

  “No, it hasn’t. We’d be dead,” said Bill. He punched a few buttons on the console and peered intently at figures that appeared on the readout. Then he looked up at the monitors. “What’s that?” He pointed at the monitor for the rear of the freighter, where there was a sliver of image along the top. Just a grayish triangle of light, shifting a little along its lower edge, just like…

  “Sand,” said Bill. “We’re buried. The storm blew a dune over us.”

  “What do we do now?” said Ford, shivering, and the psuit thought he was cold and warmed up comfortingly.

  “Maybe we can blow it away,” said Bill. “Some, anyway.” He switched on the drives and there was a shudder and a jolt that ran the whole length of the freighter. With a whoosh, Beautiful Evelyn rose a few inches. The rear monitor lit up with an image of sand cascading past it; some light showed on her left-hand monitor too.

  “Okay!” said Bill, shutting her down again. “We’re not going to die. Not here, anyway. We can dig out. Get a helmet on.”

  They went aft to get helmets—Billy still stared at nothing, though his psuit blinked at them reassuringly—and, when they had helmeted up, Bill reached past Ford to activate the hatch. It made a dull muffled sound, but would not open. He had to try three more times before it consented to open out about a hand’s width. Sand spilled into the cab, followed by daylight.

  Bill swore and climbed up on the seat, pushing the hatch outward. “Get up here and help me!”

  Ford scrambled up beside him and set his shoulder to the hatch. A lot more sand fell in, but they were able to push it open far enough for Bill to grab the edge and pull himself up, and worm his way out. Ford climbed after, and in a moment was standing with Bill on the top of the dune that covered the freighter.

  Bill swore quietly. Ford didn’t blame him.

  They stood on a mountain of red sand and looked out on a plain of red sand, endless, smooth to the wide horizon, and the low early sun threw their shadows far out behind them. The sky had a flat metallic glare; the wind wailed high and mournful.

  “Where’s the road?” cried Ford.

  “Buried under there,” said Bill, pointing down the slope in front of them. “It happens
sometimes. Come on.” He turned and started down the slope. Ford stumbled after him, slipped, and fell, rolling ignominiously to the bottom. He picked himself up, feeling stupid, but Bill hadn’t noticed; he was digging with his hands, scooping away sand from the freighter.

  Ford waded in to help him. He reached up to brush sand from the tank, but at his touch the sand puckered out in a funny starred pattern. Startled, he drew his hand back. Cautiously he reached out a fingertip to the tank; the instant he touched it, a rayed star of sand formed once again.

  “Hey, look at this!” Giggling, he drew his finger along the tank, and the star spread and followed it.

  “It’s magnetic,” said Bill. “Happens sometimes, when the wind’s been bad. My dad said it’s all the iron in the sand. It fries electronics. Hard to clean off, too.”

  Ford brushed experimentally at the tank, but the sand stuck as though it were a dense syrup.

  “This’ll take us forever,” he said.

  “Not if we get to the tool chest,” said Bill. “We can scrape off most of it.”

  They worked together and after ten minutes had cleared a panel in the freighter’s undercarriage; Bill pried it open and pulled out a couple of big shovels, and after that the work went more quickly.

  “Wowie. Sand spades. All we need is buckets and we could make sand castles, huh?” said Ford, grinning sheepishly.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It’s something kids do on Earth. Sam says, before we emigrated, our dad and mum took him to this place called Blackpool. There was all this blue water, see, washing in over the sand. He had a bucket and spade and he made sand castles. So here we are in the biggest Blackpool in the universe, with the biggest sand spades, yeah? Only there’s no water.”

  “How could you make castles out of sand?” Bill said, scowling as he worked. “They’d just fall in on you.”

  “I don’t know. I think you’d have to get the sand wet.”

  “But why would anybody get sand wet?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think people do it on purpose; I think it just happens. There’s all this water on Earth, see, and it gets on things. That’s what Sam says.”

  Bill shook his head grimly and kept digging. They cleared the freighter’s rear wheels, and Ford said:

  “Why do you reckon the water’s blue on Earth? It’s only green or brown up here.”

  “It’s not blue,” said Bill.

  “Yes, it is,” said Ford. “Sam has holos of it. I’ve seen ‘em. It’s bluer than the sky. Blue as blue paint.”

  “Water isn’t any color really,” said Bill. “It just looks blue. Something about the air.”

  Ford scowled and went around to the other side of the freighter, where he dug out great shovelfuls of sand and muttered, “It is blue. They wouldn’t have that Blue Room if it wasn’t blue. All the songs and stories say it’s blue. So there, you little know-it-all.”

  He had forgotten that Bill could hear him on the psuit comm, so he was quite startled when Bill’s voice sounded inside his helmet:

  “Songs and stories? Right. Go stick your head in a dune, moron.”

  Ford just gritted his teeth and kept shoveling.

  It took them a long while to clear the freighter, because they only made real progress once the wind fell a little. Eventually, though, they were able to climb back into the cab and start up Beautiful Evelyn’s drives. She blasted her way free of the dune and Ford strained to steer her up, over and down across the rippled slope below.

  “Okay! Where’s the road?” he said.

  “There,” said Bill, pointing. “Don’t you even know directions? We anchored at right angles to the road. It’s still there, even if we can’t see it. Just take her straight that way.”

  Ford obeyed. They rumbled off.

  They drove for five hours, over sand and then over rocky sand and at last over a cobbled plain, and there was no sign of the double row of boulders that should have been there if they had been on the High Road.

  Bill, who had been watching the readouts, grew more and more pale and silent.

  “We need to stop,” he said at last. “Something’s wrong.”

  “We aren’t on the High Road anymore, are we?” said Ford sadly.

  “No. We’re lost.”

  “What happened?”

  “The storm must have screwed up the nav system,” said Bill. “All that magnetic crap spraying around.”

  “Can we fix it?”

  “I can reset it,” said Bill. “But I can’t recalibrate it, because I don’t know where we are. So it wouldn’t do us any good.”

  “But your dad said you were this great navigator!” said Ford.

  Bill looked at his boots. “I’m not. He just thought I was.”

  “Well, isn’t that great?” said Ford. “And here you thought I was such an idiot. What do we do now, Professor?”

  “Shut up,” said Bill. “Just shut up. We’re supposed to go north, okay? And the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. So as long as we keep the setting sun on our left, we’re going mostly in the right direction.”

  “What happens at night?”

  “If the sky’s clear of dust clouds, maybe we can steer by the stars.”

  Ford brightened up at that. “I used to watch the stars a lot,” he said. “And we ought to be able to see the mountain after a while, right?”

  “Mons Olympus? Yeah.”

  “Okay then!” Ford accelerated again, and Beautiful Evelyn plunged forward. “We can do this! Billy wouldn’t be scared if he was lost, would he?”

  “No,” admitted Bill.

  “No, because he’d just point himself at the horizon and he’d just go, zoom, and he wouldn’t worry about it.”

  “He never worried about anything,” said Bill, though not as though he thought that was especially smart.

  “Well, it’s dumb to worry,” said Ford, with a slightly rising note of hysteria in his voice. “You live or you die, right? The main thing, is… is… to be really alive before you die. I could have lived my whole life walking around in the Tubes and never, ever seen stuff like I’ve seen since I ran away. All this sky. All that sand. The ice and the mist and the different colors and everything! So maybe I don’t get to be old like Hardie Stubbs’s granddad. Who wants to be all shriveled up and coughing anyway?”

  “Don’t be stupid,” said Bill. “I’d give anything to be down in the Long Acres right now, and I wouldn’t care what work I had to do. And you wish you were there too.”

  “No, I don’t!” Ford shouted. “You know what I’m going to do? As soon as we get back, I’ll go see my dad and I’ll say: ‘Dad, I’m leaving the MAC Sam did it and so can I. Only I’m not going back to Earth. Mars is my place! And I’m going to be a Hauler, and stay Outside all the rest of my life!”

  Bill stared at him.

  “You’re crazy,” he said. “You think your dad will just let you go?”

  “No,” said Ford. “He’ll grab my ear and about pull it off. It doesn’t matter. Once I’m nine, the MAC says I have a right to pick whatever job I want.”

  “Once you’re nine?”

  Ford turned red. “In MAC years. We have one for every two Earth years.”

  “So… you’re how old now?” Bill began to grin. “Six?”

  “Yeah,” said Ford. “And you can just shut up, okay?”

  “Okay,” said Bill, but his grin widened.

  * * * *

  8

  They drove all the rest of that day, but when night fell they were so tired they agreed to pull over to sleep. Ford stretched out in the cab and Bill went back to crawl into the bunk above Billy, who lay there still, staring and unresponsive as a waxwork.

  * * * *

  He was still alive when morning came. Bill was changing his tube-bags when Ford came edging in, yawning.

  “You wait and see,” said Ford, in an attempt to be comforting. “He’ll be fine if we can get him to the infirmary. Eric Chetwynd’s dad fell off a tractor
and fractured his skull, and he was in this coma, see, for days, but then they did surgery on him and he was opening his eyes and talking and everything. And your dad hasn’t even got any broken bones.”

  “It’s not the same,” said Bill morosely. “Never mind. Let’s get going. Sun’s on our right until noon, got it?”

  They drove on. Ford’s muscles ached less now; he was beginning to feel more confident with Beautiful Evelyn. He watched the horizon and imagined Mons Olympus rising there, inevitable, the red queen on the vast chessboard of the plain. She would come into view soon. She had to. And someday, when he had a freighter of his own and drove this route all the time, a little thing like going off course wouldn’t bother him at all. He’d know every sand hill and rock outcropping like the palm of his hand.