They drove on, crossing kilometers of Martian terrain. Most of the time Corax didn’t have his hands on the controls, the buggy navigating by itself. Yukimi saw tire tracks in the soil and guessed that Corax had come this way before, maybe within the last few days. As the route wound its way around obstacles, the Scaper became little more than a dark, chimney-backed hump on the horizon, seemingly fixed in place. And then even the dark hump was gone.
The ground began to dip down. Ahead, reflecting back the sun like a sheet of polished metal, was what appeared to be a large lake or even a small sea. It had a complicated, meandering shoreline. Yukimi could not see the far side, even with the buggy raised high above sea level. She did her best to memorize the shape of the lake, the way it would look from above, so that she could find it on a map. That was hard, though, so she took out the companion and opened the covers so that it recorded the view through the buggy’s forward window.
“You want to know where we are?” Corax asked.
Yukimi nodded.
“Approaching Crowe’s Landing. You ever hear of it?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Doesn’t surprise me. It’s been a ghost town for decades; I’d be surprised if it’s on any of the recent maps. It certainly won’t be on them for much longer.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’ll soon be under water.”
Corax took control of the buggy again as it completed its descent to the edge of the lake, following a zigzagging path down the sloping terrain. As they neared the water, Yukimi made out a series of sketchy shapes floating just beneath the surface: pale rectangles and circles, some of them deeper than others, and reaching a considerable distance from the shore. They looked like the shapes on some weird game board. They were, she realized, the roofs and walls of submerged buildings.
“This was a town?”
Corax nodded. “Way back when. Mars is on its second wave of history now—maybe even its third. I remember when Shalbatana was nothing, just a weather station that wasn’t even manned half the time. Crowe’s Landing was a major settlement. Not the main one, but one of the four or five largest colonies on the surface. Yes, we called them colonies back then. It was a different time. A different age.” Slowly, he guided the buggy into the waters, picking his way down what must have been a thoroughfare between two rows of buildings. With some apprehension, Yukimi watched the water lap over the tops of the wheels, and then against the side of the cabin. “It’s all right,” Corax said. “She’s fully submersible. I’ve taken her a full kilometer out, but we’re not going anywhere so far today.”
They were driving along a hard surface, so even though the buggy’s wheels were underwater, they didn’t stir up much material. The water was clear enough that Yukimi could see for tens of meters in all directions. As the road sloped down, the sea gradually closed over the cockpit bubble and it was almost possible to believe that they were just driving through a normal, albeit strangely unpopulated, district of Shalbatana City. The buildings were rectangles, cylinders, and domes, all with small black windows and circular, airlock style doors set out from the main structure in rounded porches. There must never have been a bubble around Crowe’s Landing, so the buildings would have been the inhabitants’ only protection from the atmosphere. Yukimi guessed that there were tunnels linking them together, sunk under the road level. Even the newer communities like Shalbatana—and it was strange now to think of her hometown as “new”—had underground tunnels, maintained to provide emergency shelter and communication should something untoward happen to the bubble. Yukimi had been down into them during school field trips.
She wasn’t alone—she was in the cabin with Corax—but there was still something spooky about driving slowly through this deserted colony. She wished Corax hadn’t called it a ghost town, and while she understood that he hadn’t meant that the place was literally haunted, she couldn’t turn her imagination off. As the light wavered down from the overlying sea, she kept seeing faces appear in the windows, brief and spectral like paper cutouts held there for a moment. Once they turned a corner and passed another kind of buggy, left parked there as if its owners had only just abandoned it. But it was a very old-fashioned looking buggy, and the symbols painted on its side reminded her of the faded markings on the old space helmet.
Eventually Corax brought the buggy to a halt.
“We’re here,” he said grandly. “The objective. You see that building to our right, the one shaped like an old-fashioned hat box?”
“Yes,” Yukimi said dubiously.
“It’s still airtight, unlike most of the others. Because of that, it’s watertight as well. And the air lock’s still functioning—there’s just enough power in the mechanism for another cycle. Do you see where I’m headed?”
“Not really.”
“Crowe’s Landing is almost gone now, and in a hundred years it’ll be completely forgotten. The seas will rise, Mars will be greened. A whole new civilization will bloom and prosper. You’ll be part of that, Yukimi—when you’re older. You’ll see wonderful things and live to tell your grandchildren of the way it used to be, before the change-clouds finished their work.” He smiled. “I envy you. I’ve lived a very long time—the drugs weren’t always the best, but at least I had a ready supply—but my time’s coming to an end now and you’ll outlive me by centuries, if luck’s on your side.”
Yukimi thought of all the things in her life that were not the way she wanted. “I don’t think it is.”
“I’m not sure. That airship could have carried on to Milankovic, and then where would you be?”
“Hm,” she said, remaining to be convinced.
“I had an idea,” Corax said. “Not long after I found this place and this building. Mars is changing now and the seas will rise. But they won’t stay that way forever. One day—a thousand or ten thousand years from now, maybe more—the seas will shrink again. People will have other worlds to green by then, and maybe they’ll let Mars return to its primal state. Whatever happens, Crowe’s Landing will eventually come out of the waters. And that building will still be there. Still airtight.”
“You can’t be sure.”
“It’s a fair bet. Stronger odds of surviving than anything left on the surface, with everything that’s to come. Soon there’ll be woods and forests out there, and where there aren’t woods and forests there’ll be cities and people. There’ll be weather and storms and history. But none of that will reach down here. This building’s as close to a time capsule as we’re going to find. Which is why we’ve come.” He tapped a few commands into the buggy’s console and stood up creakily. “That helmet I found? It used to belong to Crowe, one of the very first explorers.”
“Can you be sure?”
“Reasonably. As I said, it’s got provenance.” He paused. “I’m going to put the helmet in there. It’s a piece of the past, a memento of the way Mars used to be. Not just a chunk of metal and plastic but a historical document, a living record. I only played back a tiny part of what’s stored in that helmet. That old fool captured thousands of hours, and that’s not including all the log entries he made, all the thoughts he put down for posterity. An old man’s ramblings . . . but maybe it’ll be of interest to someone. And it’ll all still be inside that helmet when they find it again.”
Yukimi had trouble thinking much further in the future than her seventeenth birthday, when she would receive the golden gateway into the aug. Everything was a blank after that. Centuries, thousands of years—what difference did it make?
“Will anyone understand it?”
“They may have to work at it,” Corax allowed. “But that’s what historians and archaeologists do. And I was thinking: while we’re at it, why don’t we give them something else to puzzle over, in addition to the helmet?”
Yukimi thought for a moment. “You mean my companion?”
“Your thoughts and observations aren’t any less valid than Corax’s. You’ll miss your diary, of course, and ma
ybe you’ll have some explaining to do to your sister when she finds out what happened to it—assuming you tell her, of course. But in the meantime, think what you’ll have done. You’ll have sent a message to the future. A gift from the past to a Martian civilization that doesn’t even exist yet. No matter what happens, you’ll have made your mark.”
“No one’s interested in what I have to say,” Yukimi said.
“Don’t put yourself down. Look, there’s still time to make another entry. Tell them how you got here. Tell them how you feel today, tell them what made you run away from home yesterday. Be angry. Be sad. Get it out of your system.”
“I’ve got to go back to it later.”
“Believe me, this will help. When everything seems like it couldn’t get any worse, you’ll always be able to tell yourself: I did this one brilliant thing, this one brilliant thing that no one else has ever or will ever do. And that makes me special.”
She thought about the companion. It had been a gift from Shirin and—for all that it was dog-eared, and not the smartest in the world—she had treated it with fondness. It reminded her of her older sister. It reminded her of the good times they had spent together, before Shirin bored of childhood games and started looking to the skies, dreaming of worlds to make anew.
But had Shirin really cared? It had been easy for her to promise to keep her side of the bargain, before she said good-bye. Yukimi sometimes wondered if her sister had given her more than a moment’s thought except for the times when her conscience prickled her into sending a message.
“I cared,” Yukimi said to herself. “Even if you didn’t.”
She still had the companion in her hands from when she had shown it the lake.
“You want a moment to yourself?” Corax asked.
Yukimi nodded.
She stayed in the submerged buggy while he took the helmet and the companion into the airtight building. He went out in the underwater armor, a monster born anew. But when he had taken a few paces away from the buggy and turned back to wave, Yukimi waved back. She couldn’t see his face, but she knew it was Corax inside now, and while the armor was still monstrous, it was no longer frightening. Corax had been kind to her, and on some level he had seemed to understand what she was going through.
She watched him enter the building via the porch air lock. Some bubbles erupted out of the dark mouth of the door, and then there was nothing. She didn’t think it would take him long to place the helmet and the companion, especially if he already knew his way around the building.
The buggy started moving.
It was sudden, purposeful activity, not the result of the brakes being loose or some underwater current stirring it into motion. It began to turn, steering back the way they had come. This wasn’t right. Yukimi looked despairingly at the console, with its many controls. She didn’t know which one to hit. There was a red panel, lit up as if it was some kind of emergency stop. She whacked it with her palm and then when there was no response she whacked it again and again. She grabbed hold of the steering joystick Corax had been using and tried yanking it left and right. But nothing she did had any effect on the buggy’s progress. It was already climbing out of the lake, the water beginning to drain off the top of the canopy as it pushed into air. “Stop!” she shouted. “Corax isn’t back yet!”
But either the buggy was too stupid to realize what was happening or Corax had programmed it to ignore her.
Soon it was out of the lake. Once the ripples had settled, Yukimi could see the outline of Crowe’s Landing exactly as it had been before. Nothing had changed. Except now Corax was down there, inside the armor, inside the watertight building.
She remembered him punching commands into the buggy before he had stood up. Had he been telling it to return to the Scaper after a set interval with Yukimi was still aboard?
Numb, but knowing there was nothing she could do, she sat in silence for the rest of the journey.
The flier came not long after the buggy climbed back into the Scaper’s belly. She was sitting alone in the galley, barely able to speak, when she heard footsteps echoing down the long metal corridors from the landing bay. Eventually two adults came into the galley. One was a young-looking man carrying a heavy bag. The other was her father, looking worried and gray. She braced herself for a stinging reproof, but instead her father rushed to Yukimi and hugged her. “I’m sorry,” he said. “We didn’t realize.”
When she could find the words she asked, “Am I in trouble?”
“No,” her father said soothingly. “I am. But you’re not. Not now. Not ever.” He hugged her again, as if he couldn’t quite believe he had her in his arms, that it wasn’t a dream.
“Where’s the old guy?” asked the other man.
“I presume you mean Corax?” Yukimi asked.
“Yeah, Corax.” The young-looking man set his bag down on the table and began unloading it. “I’m his replacement. That’s why the flier was scheduled, so I could take over from him. The sponsors were worried he was getting a little too old for this kind of thing.”
“Corax isn’t coming back,” Yukimi said.
The man looked impatient with her, as if she wasn’t showing sufficient deference. “What do you mean, not coming back? What happened to him? Where is he?”
She looked him straight in the face, daring him to dismiss what she was about to say. “That’s between me and Corax.”
“Are you all right, Yukimi?” her father asked gently.
“I’m fine,” she said. Which, for the moment at least, was the truth. She was sad for Corax, sad that she wouldn’t see him again. But whatever he had done, he must have planned on doing it long before she took her airship ride. That he had shared it with her, that he had allowed her to place the companion in the time capsule, and to record her thoughts before doing so—her angry, bitter, wounded thoughts—was a privilege and a secret she would always carry with her. And whatever happened next, however hard it got with her family, she would have the knowledge that she had participated in something wonderful and unique, something no one else would know about until the seas retreated, on some impossibly distant day in the future of Mars, her Mars.
The flier took off, leaving the other man alone on the Scaper. Her father let Yukimi sit by the window as the flier accelerated back toward Shalbatana City. Nose pressed to glass, she studied the wheeling, rushing landscape for the lake where Crowe’s Landing used to be. She saw a few patches of water, some vehicle tracks, and some of them looked vaguely familiar. But from up above, with an entirely different perspective, she couldn’t be certain.
“Shirin’s coming back from Venus,” her father said, breaking the long silence.
“Oh,” Yukimi answered.
“She says she’s sorry she hasn’t been in touch as often as she’d have liked.”
“I’m sorry as well.”
“She means it, Yukimi. I saw how upset she was.”
Yukimi didn’t answer immediately. She watched the ground hurtle by, thinking of Corax in his armor, the old man and the Martian sea. Then she reached out and took her father’s hand in hers. “It’ll be good to see Shirin,” she said.
ALASTAIR REYNOLDS was born in Barry, South Wales, in 1966. He has lived in Cornwall, Scotland, and—since 1991—the Netherlands, where he spent twelve years working as a scientist for the European Space Agency. He became a full-time writer in 2004 and recently married his longtime partner, Josette. Reynolds has been publishing short fiction since his first sale to Interzone in 1990. Since 2000 he has published eight novels: the Inhibitor trilogy, British Science Fiction Association Award-winner Chasm City, Century Rain, Pushing Ice, and The Prefect. His most recent novel is Terminal World. His short fiction has been collected in Zima Blue and Other Stories and Galactic North. In his spare time he rides horses.
His Web site is www.alastairreynolds.com.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I looked forward to the challenge of writing my Life on Mars story. Given the freedom offered by the
submission guidelines, I opted to tell a story about a Mars that’s already been colonized for several centuries, and a girl growing up who has never known anything other than Mars and, to tell the truth, is a bit jaded by it all. Wanting a reason for her to run away from home—so that she could get on the airship, have an adventure, and learn something about her world—I remembered how I’d felt at sixteen, when my parents split up and it felt like my universe had been chiseled in two. I never ran away but I certainly fantasized about being able to climb into a spaceship and leave it all behind. Instead, I climbed into the mental escape pod of writing.
Above all else what I wanted to convey in this story is the notion of change sweeping away the past, and how that’s not always going to be good for everyone.
WAHALA
Nnedi Okorafor
I wasn’t lost. I wanted to cross “The Frying Pan of the World, Where Hell Meets Earth.” I was fighting my way through this part of the Sahara on purpose. I needed to prove to my parents that I could do it. That I, their sixteen-year-old abomination of a daughter, could survive in a place where many people died. My parents believed I was meant to die easily because I shouldn’t have been born in the first place. If I survived, it would prove to them wrong.
The sun was going down and the “frying pan” was thankfully cooling. Plantain, my camel, was walking at her usual steady pace. We’d left Jos three days ago and we were still days from our destination, Agadez. I’d traveled the desert many times . . . well, with my parents, though, and not here. I was okay, for now.
I was staring at the small screen of my e-legba, trying to forget the fact that I might have made a terrible mistake in running away and coming out here. It was picking up the only netcast available in the region, Naija News.
“Breaking News! Breaking News, o!” a sweating newscaster said in English. He stared into the camera with bulging eyes. He was wearing an ill-fitting Western-style suit. It was obviously the reason for his profuse sweating.
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