Life on Mars

by Jonathan Strahan (Ed)

  Yukimi held up her satchel. “I’ve just got this.”

  “Ah. And in that would be—what, exactly?”

  “An apple. And a companion.” She observed the faint flicker of incomprehension on the old man’s forehead. “My diary,” she added. “From my sister, Shirin. She’s a terraforming engineer on Venus. She’s working with the change-clouds, to make the atmosphere breathable. . . .”

  “Now which of us is doing the wittering?” Corax shook the visible part of his head. “No, there’s nothing for it, I’m afraid. I can’t let you go now. You’ll have to stay here and wait for the flier. I’m afraid you’re going to be in rather a lot of hot water.”

  “I know,” Yukimi said resignedly.

  “You don’t seem to care very much. Is everything all right? I suppose it can’t be, or you wouldn’t have stowed away on an airship.”

  “Can you get me home?”

  “Undoubtedly. And in the meantime I can certainly see that you’re taken care of. There’s a catch, of course: you’ll have to put up with my inane ramblings until then. Do you think you can manage that? I can be something of a bore, when the mood takes me. It comes with age.”

  Behind Corax, the cargo doors were closed. The loading ramps had retracted and now even larger doors—belonging to the Scaper—were sealing off Yukimi’s view of the airship.

  “I suppose it’s too late now anyway,” Yukimi said.

  She followed Corax’s stomping, wheezing suit down into the deeper levels of the Scaper. By the time they got anywhere near a window the airship was a distant, dwindling dot, turned the color of brass by the setting sun. Yukimi considered herself lucky now not to be stuck on it all the way to Milankovic. She was sure she could do without food and water for two days (not that it would be fun, even with the apple for rations) but it had never occurred to her that it might get seriously cold. But then, given that the airships had not been built for the convenience of stowaways, it was hardly surprising.

  Yukimi was glad when Corax got out of the armor. At the back of her mind had been the worry that he was something other than fully human—she had, after all, only been able to see the top of his head—but apart from being scrawnier and older than almost anyone she could ever remember meeting, he was normal enough. Small by Martian standards—they were about the same height, and Yukimi hadn’t stopped growing. The only person that small Yukimi had ever met had been her aunt, the one who sent the snow globe, and she had been born on Earth, under the iron press of too much gravity.

  Under the armor Corax had been wearing several layers of padded clothing, with many belts and clips, from which dangled an assortment of rattling, chinking tools.

  “Why do you live out here?” she asked, as Corax prepared her some tea down in the Scaper’s galley.

  “Someone has to. When big stuff like this goes wrong, who do you think fixes it? I’m the one who’s drawn the short straw.” He turned around, conveying two steaming mugs of tea. “Actually it’s really not that bad. I’m not one for the hustle and bustle of modern Martian civilization, so the cities don’t suit me. There are a lot like us, leftovers from the old days, when the place was emptier. We keep to the margins, try not to get in anyone’s way. Bit like this Scaper, really. As long as we don’t interfere, they let us be.”

  “You live in the Scaper?”

  “Most of the time.” He sat down opposite Yukimi, tapping a knuckle against the metal tabletop. “These things were made two hundred years ago, during the first flush of terraforming.”

  “The table?”

  “The Scaper. Built to last, and to self-repair. They were supposed to keep processing the atmosphere, sucking in soil and air, for as long as it took. A thousand years, maybe more. They were designed so that they’d keep functioning—keep looking after themselves, locked on the same program—even if the rest of human civilization crashed back to Earth. Their makers were thinking long-term, making plans for things they had no real expectation of ever living to see. A bit like cathedral builders, diligently laying down stones even though the cathedral might take lifetimes to finish.” He paused and smiled, years falling from his face, albeit only for an instant. “I don’t suppose you’ve ever seen a cathedral, have you, Yukimi?”

  “Have you?”

  “Once or twice.”

  “The Scapers were a bad idea,” Yukimi said. “That’s what my sister told me. A relic from history. The wrong way to do things.”

  “Easy to say that now.” He drew a finger around the rim of his tea mug. “But it was a grand plan at the time. The grandest. At its peak, there were thousands of machines like this, crisscrossing Mars from pole to pole. It was a marvelous sight. Herds of iron buffalo. Engines of creation, forging a new world.”

  “You saw them?”

  He seemed to catch himself before answering. “No; I’d have to be quite impossibly old for that to be the case. But the reports were glorious. Your sister’s quite right. It was the wrong approach. But it was the only way we—they—could see at the time. So we mustn’t mock them for their mistakes. In two hundred years, someone will be just as quick to mock us for ours, if we’re not careful.”

  “I still don’t see why you have to live out here.”

  “I keep this Scaper from falling apart,” Corax explained. “Once upon a time the self-repair systems were adequate, but eventually even they stopped working properly. Now the Scaper has to be nursed, treated with kindness. She’s an old machine and she needs help to keep going.”

  “Why?”

  “There are people who care about such things. They live on Mars, but also elsewhere in the system. Rich sponsors, for the most part. With enough money that they can afford to sprinkle a little of it on vanity projects, like keeping this machine operational. Partly out of a sense of historical indebtedness, partly out of a cautionary attitude that we ought not to throw away something that worked, albeit imperfectly, and partly for the sheer pointless hell of it. It pleases them to keep this Scaper running, and the others still trundling around. It’s Martian history. We shouldn’t let it slip through our fingers.”

  Yukimi had no idea who these people were, but even among her father’s friends there were individuals with—in her opinion—rather more money than sense. Like Uncle Otto with his expensive private sunjammer that he liked to take guests in for spins around Earth and the inner worlds. So she could believe it, at least provisionally.

  “For them,” Corax went on, “it’s a form of art as much as anything else. And the cost really isn’t that much compared to some of the things they’re involved in. As for me—I’m just the man they hire to do the dirty work. They don’t even care who I am, as long as I get the stuff done. They arrange for the airships to drop off supplies and parts, as well as provisions for me. It’s been a pretty good life, actually. I get to see a lot of Mars and I don’t have to spend every waking hour keeping the Scaper running. The rest, it’s my own time to do as I please.”

  Looking around the dingy confines of the galley, Yukimi couldn’t think of a worse place to spend a week, let alone a lifetime.

  “So what do you do?” she asked politely. “When you’re not working?”

  “A little industrial archaeology of my own, actually.” Corax put down his tea cup. “I need to make some calls, so people know where you are. They’re sending out a flier tomorrow anyway, so we should be able to get you back home before too long. Hopefully it won’t arrive until the afternoon. If there’s time, I’d like to show you something beforehand.”

  “What?”

  “Something no one else will ever see again,” Corax said. “At least, not for a little while.”

  He made the calls and assured Yukimi that all would be well tomorrow. “I didn’t speak to your parents, but I understand they’ll be informed that you’re safe and sound. We can try and put you through later, if you’d like to talk?”

  “No thanks,” Yukimi said. “Not now.”

  “That doesn’t sound like someone in any great
hurry to be reunited. Was everything all right at home?”

  “No,” Yukimi said.

  “And is it something you’d like to talk about?”

  “Not really.” She would, actually. But not to Corax; not to this scraggy old man with tufts of white hair who lived alone in a giant, obsolete terraforming machine. He might not be an ogre, but he couldn’t possibly grasp what she was going through.

  “So tell me about your sister, the one on Venus. You said she was involved in the terraforming program. Is she much older than you?”

  “Six years,” Yukimi said. She meant Earth years, of course. A year on Mars was twice as long, but everyone still used Earth years when they were talking about how old they were. It got messy otherwise. “She left Mars when she was nineteen. I was thirteen.” She reached into her satchel and pulled out the companion. “This is the thing I was talking about, the diary. It was a present from Shirin.”

  He moved to open the book. “Might I?”

  “Go ahead.”

  He touched the covers with his old man’s fingers, which were bony and yellow nailed and sprouted white hairs in odd places. The companion came alive under his touch, blocks of text and illustration appearing on the revealed pages. The text was in an approximation of Yukimi’s handwriting, tinted a dark mauve, the pictures rendered in the form of woodcuts and stenciled drawings, and the entries were organized by date and theme, with punctilious cross-referencing.

  Corax picked at the edge of the book with his fingernail. “I can’t turn to the next page.”

  “That’s not how you do it. Haven’t you ever read a book before?”

  He gave her a tolerant smile. “Not like this.”

  Yukimi showed him the way. She touched her finger to the bottom right corner and dragged it sideways, so that the book revealed the next pair of pages. “That’s how you turn to the next page. If you want to turn ten pages, you use two fingers. Hundred pages, three fingers. And the same to go backward.”

  “It seems very complicated.”

  “It’s just like a diary. I tell it what I’ve been doing, or let it record things for me. Then it sorts it all out and makes me fill in the gaps.”

  “Sounds horrendous,” Corax said, pulling a face as if he had just bitten into a lemon. “I was never very good at diary keeping.”

  “It’s meant to be more than just a diary, though. Shirin had one as well—she bought it at the same time. She was leaving, so we wouldn’t be able to talk normally anymore because of the lag. I was sad because she’d always been my best friend, even though she was older than me. She said our companions would help us bridge the distance.”

  “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “We were both supposed to use our companions all the time. Make entries whenever we could. I would talk to my companion as if Shirin was there, and Shirin would talk to hers as if I was there. Then, every now and again, the companions would—I can’t remember the word.” Yukimi frowned. “Connect up. Exchange entries. So that my companion got better at copying Shirin and hers got better at copying me. And then if we kept on doing that, eventually it would be like having Shirin with me all the time, so that I could talk to her whenever I wanted. Even if Venus was on the other side of the sun. It wouldn’t be the same as Shirin—it wasn’t meant to replace her—but just make it so that we didn’t always feel apart.”

  “It seems like a good idea,” Corax said.

  “It wasn’t. We promised we’d keep talking to our companions, but Shirin didn’t. For a while, yes. But once she’d been away from Mars for a few months she stopped doing it. Every now and again, yes—but you could tell only because she was feeling bad about not doing it before.”

  “I suppose she was busy.”

  “We promised each other. I kept up my side of the promise. I still talk to Shirin. I still tell her everything. But because she doesn’t talk to me enough, my companion can’t pretend to be her.” Yukimi felt a wave of sadness slide over her. “I could have really used her lately.”

  “It doesn’t mean she doesn’t love you. It just means she’s an adult with a lot of people making demands on her. Terraforming’s very important work. It requires great responsibility.”

  “That’s what my parents keep saying.”

  “It’s the truth. It always has been. The people who made the Scapers understood that, even if they didn’t get the technology quite right. It’s the same with—what they call them? Those things in the air, swirling around?”

  “Change-clouds,” Yukimi said.

  He nodded. “I see them sometimes at dusk. Just another machine, really. In a thousand years, there won’t seem much difference between them and this. But they make me feel very old. Even your book makes me feel like an old relic from prehistory.” He stood up, his knees creaking with the effort. “Speaking of recording devices, let me show you something.” He moved to one of the shelves and pushed aside some junk to expose an old-looking space helmet. He brought it back to the table, blowing the dust off it in the progress, coughing as he breathed some of it in, and set the helmet down before Yukimi.

  “It looks ancient,” she said, trying hard not to show too much disappointment. It was scratched and dented and the white paint was coming off in places. There had once been colorful markings around the visor and crest, but they were mostly faded or rubbed away now. She could just make out the ghostly impressions where they had been.

  “It is. Unquestionably. Older even than this Scaper. I know because I found it and . . . well.” He stroked the helmet lovingly, leaving dust tracks where his fingers had been. “There’s serious provenance here. It used to belong to someone very famous, before he went missing.”

  “Who?”

  “We’ll come to that tomorrow. In the meantime I thought it might be of interest. The helmet’s still in good nick—built to last. I had to swap out the power cells, but other than that I’ve done nothing to it. Do you want to try it on?”

  She didn’t, really, but it seemed rude to say so. She gave an encouraging nod. Corax picked up the helmet again and shuffled around the table until he was behind her. He lowered it down gently, until the cushioned rim was resting on her shoulders. She could still breathe perfectly normally because the helmet was open at the bottom. “It smells moldy,” she said.

  “Like its owner. But watch this. I’m going to activate the head-up display playback, using the external controls.” He pressed some studs on the outside of the helmet and Yukimi heard soft clicks and beeps inside.

  Then everything changed.

  She was still looking at Corax, still inside the galley. But overlaid on that was a transparent view of something else entirely. It was a landscape, a Martian landscape, moving slowly, rocking side to side as if someone was walking. They were coming to the edge of something, a sharp drop in the terrain. The pace slowed as the edge came nearer, and then the point of view dipped, so that Yukimi was looking down, down at her chest-pack, which looked ridiculously old and clunky, down at her heavy, dust-stained boots, down at the Martian soil, and the point where—just beyond her toes—it fell savagely away.

  “The edge of Valles Marineris,” Corax told her. “The deepest canyon on Mars. It’s a long way down, isn’t it?”

  Yukimi agreed. Even though she was sitting down, she still felt a twinge of vertigo.

  “You can still go there, but it’s not the same,” Corax went on. “Mostly filled with water now—and it’ll only get deeper as the sea levels keep rising. Where I’m standing—where you’re standing—is now a chain of domed resort hotels. They’ll tear down the domes when the atmosphere gets thick enough to breathe, but they won’t tear down the hotels.” He paused. “Not that I’m complaining, or arguing against the terraforming program. It’ll be marvelous to see boats sailing across Martian seas, under Martian skies. To see people walking around under that sky without needing suits or domes to keep them alive. To see Earth in the morning light. We’ll have gained something incredible. But we’ll have lost some
thing as well. I just think we should be careful not to lose sight of that.”

  “We could always go back,” Yukimi said. “If we didn’t like the new Mars.”

  “No,” Corax said. “That we wouldn’t be able to do. Not even if we wanted it more than anything in the world. Because once we’ve touched a world, it stays touched.” He reached over and turned off the head-up display. “Now. Shall we think about eating?”

  In the morning they left the Scaper, traveling out in a small, four-wheeled buggy that came down from a ramp in the great machine’s belly. “Just a little sightseeing trip,” Corax said, evidently detecting Yukimi’s anxiety about not being back when the flier—scheduled for the afternoon—came to collect her. They were snug and warm in the buggy’s pressurized cabin, Yukimi wearing the same clothes as the day before, Corax in the same outfit he had been wearing under the armor, which—for reasons not yet clear to Yukimi—he had stowed in the buggy’s rear storage compartment.

  “Will the Scaper be all right without you aboard?” Yukimi asked, as they powered out of its shadow, bouncing over small rocks and ridges.

  “She’ll take care of herself for a few hours, don’t you worry.”

  An awkward question pushed itself to the front of Yukimi’s mind. “Will you always be the one in charge of it?”

  Corax steered the buggy around a crater before answering. “Until the people who pay for my upkeep decide otherwise.” He glanced sideways, a cockeyed grin on his face. “Why? You think old Corax’s getting too old for the job?”

  “I don’t know,” she answered truthfully. “How old are you, exactly?”

  “How old do you reckon?”

  “Older than my aunt, and I’m not sure how old she is. She’s from Earth as well.”

  “Did I say I was from Earth?”

  “You mentioned cathedrals,” Yukimi said.

  “I could have been there as a tourist.”

  “But you weren’t.”

  “No,” he said eventually. “I wasn’t. Here I’m the tourist.”