Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Introduction
ATTLEE AND THE LONG WALK
THE OLD MAN AND THE MARTIAN SEA
WAHALA
ON CHRYSE PLAIN
FIRST PRINCIPLE
MARTIAN CHRONICLES
GOODNIGHT MOONS
THE TASTE OF PROMISES
DIGGING
LARP ON MARS
MARTIAN HEART
DISCOVERING LIFE
Acknowledgements
ABOUT THE EDITOR
ANTHOLOGIES BY JONATHAN STRAHAN
Best Short Novels (2004 through 2007)
Fantasy: The Very Best of 2005
Science Fiction: The Very Best of 2005
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volumes 1 – 4
Eclipse One: New Science Fiction and Fantasy
Eclipse Two: New Science Fiction and Fantasy
Eclipse Three: New Science Fiction and Fantasy
The Starry Rift: Tales of New Tomorrows
Godlike Machines
Under My Hat
WITH LOU ANDERS
Swords and Dark Magic: The New Sword and Sorcery (forthcoming)
WITH CHARLES N. BROWN
The Locus Awards: Thirty Years of the Best in Fantasy and Science Fiction
WITH JEREMY G. BYRNE
The Year’s Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy: Volumes 1 and 2 Eidolon 1
WITH TERRY DOWLING
The Jack Vance Treasury
The Jack Vance Reader
Wild Thyme, Green Magic
Hard Luck Diggings: The Early Jack Vance
WITH GARDNER DOZOIS
The New Space Opera
The New Space Opera 2
WITH KAREN HABER
Science Fiction: Best of 2003
Science Fiction: Best of 2004
Fantasy: Best of 2004
VIKING
Published by Penguin Group
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First published in 2011 by Viking, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Introduction, story notes, and arrangement copyright © Jonathan Strahan, 2011
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eISBN : 978-1-101-51384-2
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The characters and events to be found in these pages are fictitious.
Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
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For my brother Stephen, again, with gratitude for his endless willingness to share his frontiers with me.
INTRODUCTION: LIFE ON MARS
Jonathan Strahan
Mars has traditionally been the setting for grand tales of romance and adventure: stories of powerful gods of war, beautiful maidens, and mysterious aliens. Tellingly, those tales have grown and changed with each passing year as what we know about the red planet has increased.
Our nearest planetary neighbor has had many names: the ancient Romans called it Mars, but it was known as Nergal by the Babylonians, Ares by the ancient Greeks, Mangala by the ancient Hindus, Ma’adim in Hebrew, Bahram by the ancient Persians, and Sakit by ancient Turks, while the Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese cultures referred to the planet as the fire star, a name based on the ancient Chinese mythological cycle.
Although Mars was known to many of Earth’s ancient cultures, it is only in the past few centuries—since telescopes improved to the point where we could begin to make out its image clearly—that we have begun to learn much about it. The astronomers Giovanni Schiaparelli and Percival Lowell named Martian seas and continents in the late nineteenth century, creating a world that fired the imagination of H. G. Wells, who in The War of the Worlds described an ancient race casting envious eyes across the gulfs of space at our young and vibrant blue world. In A Princess of Mars, Edgar Rice Burroughs told of the swashbuckling adventures of a Virginian soldier on the sweeping plains of Barsoom, a savage frontier world filled with honor, noble sacrifice, and constant struggle, where martial prowess is paramount, and where strange Martian races fight over dwindling resources. Mars often appeared in early twentieth-century science fiction stories, providing either a threatening nemesis or an exotic locale for many, many classic tales.
Then, in 1964, the United States launched the space probe Mariner 4, followed by Mariner 9 in 1971, as well as Soviet probes Mars 2 and Mars 3, and then most significantly Viking 1 and Viking 2 in 1976. They sent back images that swept away any grand visions of a romantic world filled with ancient civilizations, replacing them with photographs of what may be the largest mountain in our solar system—so tall it reaches through the atmosphere into space itself!—the longest, deepest valleys, and many other awe-inspiring sights.
Wonder after wonder . . . but no sign of life.
Our knowledge of the planet changed permanently, and this changed the kind of stories we told. Instead of stirring adventures with four-armed green giants fighting shoulder to shoulder with heroes on dead seabeds, we were treated to tales of shattered, isolated expeditions traversing cold, distant deserts, or epic visions of vast engineering projects to make Mars more Earthlike, with Mars turning first blue as its oceans filled and then green as its forests grew. But, alas, all of those tales were merely dreams.
Or were they?
In early 2004 the president of the United States, George W. Bush, announced that they would send astronauts to the moon by 2020, establish a permanent base on the surface of the moon—and then turn its attention to Mars, with a goal of putting people on the planet. NASA now estimates it can send a manned mission to Mars by 2037. It was a grand vision, and one that looks like it could come true, if not quite as we might have anticipated. In 2001 the Mars Odyssey orbiter was launched, and remains in orbit as I write. It was followed by further probes—the European Space Agency’s Mars Express Orbiter, the Spirit and Opportunity probes and then the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter—all of which added more and more to our knowledge of the planet. The European Space Agency announced that it too intended to put humans on Mars, sometime between 2030 and 2035. There’s even a Google M
ars.
And yet nothing’s assured. Political plans change. There’s no way of knowing exactly when, or if, humans will land on Mars.
Whatever human exploration of Mars turns out to be like, though, we can be sure it won’t be easy or safe. Half the size of Earth, Mars has almost no atmosphere, and what little it has is constantly being stripped away by the solar wind. Relentlessly bombarded by radiation, its gravity is about a third of Earth’s, and it receives only half the amount of light we’re used to, and . . .
. . . and yet it’s Mars! Another world! Modern dreams of Mars are dreams of a cold, hostile place initially made bearable and then possibly made wonderful. In response to former President Bush’s bold and optimistic presidential decree, I challenged some of science fiction’s finest writers to imagine stories set in a world where the mission was a success, and humanity gained a permanent foothold on a new world. Some set their tales on the journey, some soon after colonization, and others in a far, far distant future. The tales that follow are very different from the kind of stories that were being written about Mars one hundred years ago, but they are still filled with stirring adventure and grand romance. I hope you enjoy them as much as I have.
Jonathan Strahan
Perth, Australia
ATTLEE AND THE LONG WALK
Kage Baker
It was close and foul in the shed as the kids packed in, giggling. Attlee wrinkled her nose. Some of the stink came from the sacks of chemical fertilizer being used as seats, and some of it was the goaty sweat of children, but most of it was the ever-present methane fug of the Long Acres.
“Ayck-oh!” said Stot Richards, ducking inside and pulling the door to. “All clear, Supreme Council.” The Supreme Council of the Martian Shadowcats was presently only Hobby Augustus and Jennifer Langshank, since Eddie Penton had started working grown-up hours and attending Collective meetings. Jennifer would probably follow soon, since she had begun to grow interested in boys and was getting a little impatient with the rules and regs of the Shadowcats. Attlee figured that Hobby would stay until she dropped, though, because Hobby loved being in charge.
You could see it in the way she held up her hands now for silence, like she was an Ephesian Mother from the mission up the hill, and in the way she pursed her lips in disapproval when Dinky Purett farted and everyone around him started laughing.
“This is not a laughing matter,” said Hobby. “This is a deadly serious matter! So you just listen up, brother and sister Shadowcats. Because you won’t be laughing when it’s your turn, I can tell you.”
The snickering died down. Hobby leaned forward and lowered her voice dramatically.
“This is the story as we heard it from Blackie Atkins, who heard it from Sharn Penny, who heard it from Pollitt Gardiner, who heard it from Bill Haversham who is dead and gone and killed in the Strawberry cyclone. They say. But some people say that the Old Roach got him, just for knowing that he was there and letting on. So you think about that as you listen. The Old Roach might be listening too.
“It was long years ago, when our mums and dads and our granddads and grandmams first formed the Collective and came up here to Mars. And there was a lazy sod came along among them and he was a Backslider. And in his crate of personal stuff some cockroaches stowed away, and the frozen cold of space didn’t get them, and they didn’t starve neither on the trip. And when the Backslider opened his crate, the cockroaches all ran out and ran away down the Tubes. And everybody thought they’d die, on account of they were Earth bugs.
“But no!
“The black night frozenness didn’t kill them: they changed their blood so they were full of antifreeze. The Ultraviolet didn’t kill them: their scritchy armor got hard and thick and kept it out. The Outside didn’t kill them, either: they learned how to breathe without any air out there. And where they’d been little chippy things on Earth, up here they grew big and strong; big as your hand, big as dinner plates. And they laid their eggs everywhere and ate the insulation off wires and started fires.
“So it was War. And the brave heroes of the Collective gave every kid a hammer, and said, ‘It’s your duty to hunt and kill these enemies of the people, and that ought to be enough for you, but if you’re really good at it you’ll earn threepence for each one you kill.’ So that was when the Bug Hunting started. The kids killed hundreds and thousands of cockroaches, and the smashed corpses was ground up into fertilizer, in aid of making the new perfect world. And so it goes on to this very day.
“But!
“There was one cockroach we didn’t get. One cockroach that was bigger and faster and smarter and meaner than the rest. And he kept growing! Rays from space made him extra big. He got smart enough to pick up commcodes on his long, long antennas, so he listened like a spy to everything the Collective done, and waved his whippy antennas in the air and picked up signals from the shuttles coming in, and from the capitalists up on the mountain, and he learned human ways. There’s even talk he learned to steal clothes, disguise himself as a man, and sneak up the Tubes at night to gamble and drink on Mons Olympus. But that’s just talk.
“Because everybody knows that what he done was, he hid himself far out, way out, at the farthest, farthest ends of the Long Acres. Four times four kilometers and then some. Way out there where there’s nothing but algae bubbling in the canals. That’s where the Old Roach hides, and he only comes creeping back at night when we’re all asleep in our beds. He knows how to steal from the fields. When you go out in the morning to feed your rabbits, and the screen’s torn and maybe a rabbit or two is gone—well, it was the Old Roach done it.”
There was dead silence in the shed as the younger kids listened open-mouthed. Leo Grindell looked as though he was about to cry. Hobby surveyed them triumphantly. She leaned forward and continued:
“And, ever since there’s been Shadowcats, we Shadowcats have had one test, and only one test, for admission to the Supreme Council. And what it is is, any kid that comes of age has to go out to the very end of the Long Acres, all by themselves. All the way. They have to brave the Old Roach. Then they have to come back alive. Not everybody comes back alive. When my cousin Shree was on the Supreme Council, there was one kid who went out and didn’t come home again. And when the mums and dads went looking for him, all they found was his bones.”
That did it for Leo Grindell, who started to bawl. He was only two (in Collective years; the people who lived up on Mons Olympus still measured time in Earth years and would have said he was four), so nobody laughed at him, but some of the older kids looked good and scared. Hobby turned slowly, pointing with her finger, and Attlee braced herself.
“And now it’s your time, Attlee Bonser!”
“I ’n’t scared,” said Attlee defiantly, standing up. She had turned six a month ago and been expecting this. She folded her arms and stared Hobby in the eye.
“Well, you will be,” said Hobby. “Being a smarty-pants won’t help you when you have to go all alone into the farthest, farthest fields. When you’re huddling all by yourself in the dark and cold, waiting to hear the Old Roach coming along down the canalside—skitter skitter skitter! What’ll you do then?”
“Expect I’ll do as well as you did,” Attlee retorted. She hated it when people made fun of her for being smart.
“Yeah, well. We’ll see.” Hobby stood up and folded her arms too. She wasn’t quite as tall as Attlee, in that crowd of stringbean youth, so neither Attlee nor anybody else there was as impressed as they might have been. “Tonight after Lights Out. At Besant Fields. Be there.”
Attlee trudged home to the allotment shelter where she had lived with her mum since her dad had been killed. It was smaller than the place they’d lived in before, of course; as the Council had said, there was no reason to waste a good shelter on just two people when a family could make better use of it. Attlee’s mum had sighed and nodded in agreement, too weary with grief to argue about it. Later—in private, to Attlee, on the understanding that Attlee would never ever tel
l anyone—she had laughed sadly and remarked that neither the old place nor the new would have done for a garden shed back on Earth anyway. Attlee had just shrugged. She’d never seen Earth.
Now, she stepped in through the lock and unmasked. Before sitting down with her lesson plan, Attlee knelt in the kitchen space and rummaged through the locker where they’d stashed her dad’s things. His psuit was in there; so was the billy-can he’d used to take out with him to the fields. The heating element was broken in the billy, and the psuit had some damaged sensors so it didn’t work very well (otherwise both would have gone back into the Collective’s store of goods), but Attlee was good at fixing things.
It took only a little tinkering to fix the billy, swapping out the element from an old hand-warmer. The psuit took a bit more work. In addition to repairing what she could of its broken connections, Attlee had to mend the couple of long gashes where her dad’s mates had tried to cut him out of the psuit when they still thought they could save his life. But what was duct tape for? She’d finished the job and stowed both the psuit and the billy together with some ration packets and a canteen in her pack, and got dinner on besides, by the time her mum came home from work.
They ate dinner in near silence, seated side-by-side on the fold-down, taking turns dipping into the casserole with their spoons. Nobody wasted resources on individual plates in the Collective.
“Done your lessons?” said Attlee’s mum at last.
Attlee nodded. “I finished extraordinarily fast.”
Attlee’s mum winced at the big word. “Don’t brag, girl.”
“Sorry.” Attlee looked sidelong at her mum. “Hobby and Jennifer asked me to a sleepover tonight. Ayck-oh if I go?”
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