Life on Mars

by Jonathan Strahan (Ed)

  “Suit up,” she said. “We’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  The tokamak station was a wind-scoured blister of construction plastic hunkering between a boulder field and a stretch of polished olivine. It was only when the diggler slowed to a stop and fired sand anchors that Tash realized that it was near and smaller than she had thought. It was not a distant vast city; the power plant was only slightly higher than the diggler’s mammoth wheels. The wind rotor, spinning as if it would suddenly leap from its pylon and spin madly away through the upper air, was no bigger than her outstretched hands.

  “Mask sealed?”

  Tash ran her fingers around the join with her psuit hood and give In-aunt Milaba two thumbs up. “I’m DPing the diggler.” There was a high pitched shriek of air being vented into the tanks, a whistle that ebbed into silence as the pressure dropped to match the outside environment. The scribbled-over psuit felt tight and stuff. This was true eyeball-squelch altitude. Then Milaba popped the door and Tash followed her out and down the ladder onto the wild surface of Mars.

  Gods and teeth, but the wind was brutal. Tash balled her fists and squared her shoulders and lowered her head to battle through it to the yellow and blue chevronned tokamak station. She could feel the sand whipping across the skin of her psuit. She didn’t like to think of the semizoic skin abrading, cell by cell. She imagined it wailing in pain. A tap on the shoulder, Milaba gestured for her to hook her safety line onto the door winch. Then In-aunt and Inniece punched through the big wind to the shelter of the tokamak shell. Out. Out in the world. Up high. If Tash kept walking into the wind she would pass through Windrush Valley and come to a place where the world curved away from her, not toward her. The desire to do it was unbearable. Out of the hole. All it would take would be one foot in front of another. They would take her all the way around the world and back again, to this place. The gale of possibility died. It was all only ever circles. Milaba tapped her again on the shoulder to remind her that there was work to be done here. Tash took the unitool and unscrewed the inspection hatch. Milaba plugged in her diagnosticators. She was glorious to watch at work, easy and absorbed. But it was long work and Tash’s attention wandered to the little meandering dust-dervishes that spun up into a small tornado for a few seconds, staggered down the valley, and collapsed into swirling sand.

  “Willie-willies,” Milaba said. “You want to be careful with those, they’re tricksy. As I thought.” She pointed at the readout. “A hard fail in the chip set.” She pulled a new blade out of her thigh pouch and slid it into the control unit. Lights flashed green. Inside its shielded dome the tokamak grumbled and woke up with a shiver that sent the dust rising from the ground. Tash watched the wind whirl into a dozen dust devils dancing around each other. “Just going to check the supply line. You stay here.” She headed up the valley along the line of the power cable. The dust devils swirled in toward one another. They merged. They fused. They became one, a true dust demon.

  “Looks all right!” In-aunt Milaba called.

  “Milaba, I don’t like the look . . .” The dust demon spun toward Tash, then at the last moment veered away and tracked up the valley. “Milaba!”

  Milaba hesitated. The hesitation was death. The dust demon bore down on her; she tried to throw herself away but it spun over her, lifted her, threw her hard and far, smashed her down onto the smooth polished olivine. Tash saw her faceplate shatter in a spray of shards and water vapor. It was random, it was mad, it was a chance in a billion, it can’t happen, it was an affront to order and reason, but it had and there Milaba lay on the hard olivine.

  “Oh my gods oh my gods oh my gods!” For a moment Tash was paralyzed, for a moment she did not know what to do, that she could do anything, that she must do something. Then she was running up the valley. The dust demon veered toward Tash. Tash shrieked, then it staggered away, broke itself on the boulders, and spun down to dust again. The psuit would seal automatically, but In-aunt Milaba had moments before her eyeballs froze. “Oh help help help help help,” Tash cried, her hands pressed to Milaba’s face, trying to will heat into it. Then she saw the red button on the safety line harness. She hit it and was almost jolted off her feet as the winch on the diggler reeled Milaba in. Tash hit the emergency channel. “This is Diggler Six this is Diggler Six in Windrush Valley. This is an emergency.” Of course it is—it’s the emergency channel. She tried to calm her voice as the winch lifted the limp Milaba into the air. “We have a suit DP situation. We have a suit DP.”

  “Hello, Diggler Six. This is Diggory West Emergency Services. Please identify yourself.”

  “This is Tash Gelem-Opunyo. It’s Milaba.”

  “Tash. Control here.” Tash recognised Out-uncle Yoyote’s voice. “Get back. Get back here. You should have enough power, we’ll send another diggler up the line to meet you, but you, darling, you have to do it. We can’t get to you in time. It’s up to you. Get back to us. It’s all you can do.”

  Of course. It was. All she could do. No rescue swooping from the skies, in a world where nothing could fly. No speed-star scorching up the slope of the Big Dig in a world where the scoopline was the fastest means of transport. She was on her own.

  It took all her strength to swing Milaba through the hatch into the diggler cab and seal the lock. Tash almost popped her faceplate. Almost. She repressurized the diggler. The air shriek built to a painful screech then stopped. But Milaba was so still, so cold. Her face was white with frost where her breath had frozen into her skin. It would never be the same again. Tash knelt, turned her cheek to her In-aunt’s lips. A whisper a sigh a suspicion a susurration. She was breathing. But it was cold so cold death cold Mars cold in the diggler. Tash slapped the heater up to the maximum and jigged around the tiny cab. Condensation turned the windows opaque, then cleared. Back. She had to get back. Was there an auto-return program? Where would she find it? Where would she even begin looking? Wasting precious instants, wasting precious instants. Tash took the control column, stamped on the pedal to release the anchors, and engaged the traction motors. Turning was difficult. Turning was scary. Turning forced a small moan of fear when the wind got under the diggler and she felt the right side lift. If it went over here, they were both dead. This was not fun driving. There was no glee, no whee! at every bounce Tash tensed and clenched, fearful that the diggler would roll over and shatter like an egg, smash an axle, any number of new terrors that only appear when your life depends on everything working perfectly. Come on come on come on. The battery gauge was dwindling with terrifying speed. This was outside. This was the horizoned world. Where was the scoopline? Surely it hadn’t been this far. Come on come on come on. A line on the sand. But so far. Power at 12 percent. Where had it gone, what had she used it on? The heating blast? The emergency reP? The burn on the winch? Call home. That would be sensible. That would be the act of a girl with a good head and better sense who did what she was told. But it would use power. Batteries at 7 percent, but now she could see the scoopline, the laden buckets above, the empty buckets below, bucket after bucket after bucket. She drove the diggler on. Matching velocities with the scoopline was teeth-gritting, nerve-stretching work. Tash had to drop the diggler into the space between the buckets and hold exact speed. A push too fast would ride up on the preceding bucket. Too slow and she would be rear-ended by the bucket behind. And ever edging inward, inward, closer to the line as the batteries slid from green to red. Lights flashes. Tash threw the lever. The shackle engaged. Tash rolled away from the drive column to Milaba on the floor.

  “Tash.” A whisper a sigh a suspicion a susurration.

  “It’s all right, it’s all right, don’t talk, we’re on the scoopline.”

  “Tash, are my eyes open?”

  “Yes, they are.”

  A tiny sigh.

  “Then I can’t see. Tash, talk to me.”

  “What about?”

  “I don’t know. Anything. Everything. Just talk to me. We’re on the line, did you say?”

  “We�
��re on the line. We’re going home.”

  “Five hours then. Talk to me.”

  So she did. Tash pulled cushions and mats around her into a nest and sat holding her In-aunt’s head, and she talked. She talked about her friends and her In-sisters and her Out-sisters and who would go away from West Diggory and who would stay. She talked about boys and how she liked them looking at her but still wanted to be different and special, not to be taken-for-granted, funny Tash, odd Tash. She talked about whether she would marry, which she didn’t think she would, not as far as she could see, and what she would do then if she didn’t. She talked about the things she loved, like swimming and cooking vegetables and drawing and words words words. She talked about how she loved the sound and shape of words, the sound of them as something quite different from what they meant and how you could put them together to say things that could not possibly be, and how the words came to her, like they were blown on the wind, shaped from wind, the wind brought to life. She talked of these in words that weren’t clever or mouth-filling, words said quietly and simply and honestly, saying what she thought and how she felt. Tash saw then a richer lode in words; beyond the beauty of their sounds and shapes and patterns was a deeper beauty of the truth they could shape. They could tell what it was to be Tash Gelem-Opunyo. Words could fly the banners and turn the rotors of a life. Milaba squeezed her hand and pushed her broken lips into a smile and creased the corner of her white, frost-burned eyes.

  The emergency channel chimed. Yoyote had her on visual: they were about twenty kilometers downslope from her. They were coming to get her. They would be safe soon. Well done. And there was other news, news that made his voice sound strange to Tash in Diggler Six, like he was dead and walking and talking and about to cry all at the same time. A command had come in from Iridis Excavation Command, from the High Orbital, ultimately all the way from Earth and the Iridis Development Consortium. There had been a political shift. The faction that was up was down and the faction that was down was up. The Big Dig was canceled.

  From here, every way was up. There had been no official announcement from the Council of Diggers for ceremonials or small mournings: in their ones and two, their families and kinship groups and sororities and fraternities the people of West Diggory had decided to share the news that their world was ending, and to see the bottom of it; the base that had been their striving for three generations; the machine head. Dig Zero. Minimum elevation. So they took digglers or rode down the scoopline to the bottom of the Big Dig and looked around them and looked around at the digging heads of the scooplines, stilled and frozen for the first time in memory, buckets filled with their last bite of Mars turned toward the sky. As they grew accustomed to the sights and wonders of the dig head, for not one in fifty of the Excavating Cities’ populations worked at the minimum elevation, they saw in the distance, between the black scoopline, groups and families and societies from North Cutter and Southdelving and A.R.E.A. They waved to each other, greeting relatives they had not seen in years; the common channel was a flock of voices. Tash stood with her Raven Sorority sisters. They positioned themselves around her, even queen-bee Leyta. Tash was a brief heroine—perhaps the last one the Big Dig would ever have. In-aunt Milaba had been taken to the main medical facility at A.R.E.A where they were growing new irises for her frost-blinded eyes. Her face would be scarred and patched with ugly white, but her smile would always be beautiful. So the In-sisters and In-cousins stood around Tash, needing to be down at zero but not knowing why, or what to do now. The boys from the Black Obsidian Fraternity waved and came across the sand to join the girls. So few of us, really, Tash thought.

  “Why?” Out-cousin Sebben asked.

  “Environment,” said Sweto, and in the same transmission, Qori said “Cost.”

  “Are they going to take us all back to Earth?” Chunye asked.

  “No, they’re never going to do that,” Haramwe said. He walked with a stick, which made him look like an old man but at the same interesting and attractive. “That would cost too much.”

  “We couldn’t anyway,” Sweto said. “The gravity down there would kill us. We can’t live anywhere but here. This is our home.”

  “We’re Martians,” Tash said. Then she put her hands up to her face mask.

  “What are you doing?” Chunye, always the nervous In-cousin, cried in alarm.

  “I just want to know,” Tash said. “I just want to feel it, like it should be.” Three taps, and the faceplate fell into her waiting hands. The air was cold, shakingly cold, and still too thin to breathe, and anyway, to breathe was to die on lungfuls of carbon dioxide, but she could feel the wind, the real wind, the true wind in her face. Tash exhaled gently into the atmosphere gathered at the bottom of the Big Dig. The world still sloped gently away from her, all the way up the sky. Tears would freeze in an instant so she kept them to herself. Then Tash clapped the plate back over her face and fastened it to the psuit hood with her clever fingers.

  “So, what do we do now?” whiny Chunye asked. Tash knelt. She pushed her fingers into the soft regolith. What else was there? What else had their ever been? A message had come down from Mount Incredible, from High Orbital, from a world on the other side of the sky, from people who had never seen this, whose horizons were always curved away from them. Who were they to say? What wind blew their words and made them so strong? Here were people, whole cities, an entire civilization, in a hole. This was Mars.

  “We do what we know best,” Tash said, scooping up pale golden Mars in her gloved hand. “We put it all back again.”

  IAN MCDONALD lives in Northern Ireland, just outside Belfast. He sold his first story in 1983 and bought a guitar with the proceeds, perhaps the only rock ’n’ roll thing he ever did. Since then he’s written thirteen novels, three story collections and diverse other pieces, and has been nominated for every major science fiction/ fantasy award—and even won a couple. In his day job he works in television development—where do you think all those dreadful reality shows come from? His current novel is The Dervish House, set in near future Istanbul.

  He blogs at http://ianmcdonald.livejournal.com.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  A large part of the job of the writer is to remember, and to remember incorrectly. The most interesting ideas come from half-remembered factoids: ones where you can’t quite recall where they came from, if you’ve got them right, if you ever heard them at all, or if you conflated them with other half-remembered factoids. This idea came from something I may have heard, read, seen on the subject of terraforming Mars, the simple, titanic job of making an uninhabitable planet habitable. It may have been a post, a comment, all I remember was that it said dig a big hole. The rest just flows naturally. Of course this appeals to me because it’s the most environmentally outrageous way of terraforming a world—or rather, a bit of a world. It somehow seems more environmentally destructive than transforming an entire planet, though if you think about it, it isn’t. There’s still wild Mars left. So it’s a story about how complex it can be growing up in a confined space and how much you can see and what lies over that horizon. It’s about learning about disappointments, and how much of life consists of digging holes and then filling them in again.

  LARP ON MARS

  Chris Roberson

  When they first found the body, but before they realized whose it was, Ravi was quick to point out that if the other two had listened to him they’d still be back home playing Battlesnakes.

  “Ri-ight,” Penn said, shuffling back and forth, clearly debating with himself whether they should get any closer to the body than they already had. “I forgot. You’ve never had a bad idea.”

  Whenever things went wrong Ravi was always been quick to say it wasn’t his fault. It had been his fault that they’d been grounded inside the hab the last time around, though: a fact that he conveniently forgot whenever the subject came up.

  “Guys?” Jace shone the light from his helmet lamp at the body, the broken length of plastic with the wrapped-
fabric hilt still held in his hand, then looked back to his two friends. “If we count this as treasure, that means the quest is over, right?”

  “If it is,” Ravi shot back, “we should totally share the experience points.”

  That the three were friends was more a product of proximity than of preference. Still, they made the most of it. During school hours when they were logged onto the classroom, they interacted with students and teachers from all over Mars, but when the bell rang and the school day was over, it was just the three of them. The only other kids living at the O. H. Morton Research Facility down on the southern slopes of the Hellas Planitia were barely out of diapers, like Penn’s baby brother and Jace’s cousin.

  Theoretically they could have interacted online with anyone they wanted, even as far away as Earth if they didn’t mind the communication lag, but in practice it wasn’t worth the effort. Ravi had tried to maintain a long-distance relationship with one of their classmates, a girl named Claire who lived in the shadow of Olympus Mons on the far side of the planet, but had quickly discovered it was too much trouble to keep going.

  For three people pretty much forced by circumstances to be friends, though, they were lucky that they shared as much in common as they did. Jace didn’t understand what Ravi liked about the novels of R. R. Bonaventure, and Ravi couldn’t stand the Thunderskull videos that Penn was always raving about, but by and large they at least tolerated each other’s interests and passions. And there was one passion in particular that all three of them shared: gaming.

  “Okay, okay, we’ll go already,” Ravi had said, after the other two had voted down his Battlesnakes suggestion. “But if we’re going, I’m voting for Boy Detectives.”

  Jace and Penn hadn’t even bothered to deliberate, but replied in unison without hesitation. “Lame.”