by Paula Guran
Yily grinned and began to whistle.
"What's that?" Krane asked.
"It's not doing anything," she said. " 'Yankee Doodle,' right?"
But, even when the correct tune had been relayed back to them by Krane, only four of the eleven locks protecting the n-bomb snapped open. They needed seven in sequence. "The Yellow Rose of Texas" snapped open two more. "Moonlight On the Wabash" made two snap back. She tried different keys and speeds, new sequences. Two more. One more. But after that it was no good. She was embarrassed. "My grandma came to Mars in the Revival Follies. We used to sing them all before the dope took her."
"This is getting dangerous," Krane told them. "Something has jammed. Stop!" Oblivious of his growing concern, they kept trying and kept failing as the minutes and the seconds died. "You've got to stop!" Krane told them. "Unless every lock is undone in order, the bomb can't be neutralized. It took us years to work out those codes. We encrypted everything in easily remembered traditional tunes. We—we haven't time to work out the codes again! If anything, we've complicated the situation. We have eight minutes left."
Mac hovered over the bomb, trying different force tools on the remaining locks. "This is hopeless. We could explode the thing at any moment." He watched the most recently tried force tool fade from his glove.
"I guess neither of us is musical enough. Time for Plan B." She reached with both hands into her pack and pulled out a large square metal container. Quickly, she dragged off the box's covering, revealing a compacted canister covered with government warnings, which, as she stroked it with her gloved fingers, began to expand, flopping and twitching like a living thing until it lay in her lap like a long, khaki-colored barracuda. "I'd better set this now."
Stone recognized the unactivated B-9 wombot. He guessed her plan but he said, "What are you going to do with that?" It was his idea too.
But she wouldn't stop. "I'm a lot lighter than you.
"Give me your big scarf," she said. "Hurry! And some of those tools might prove useful here. I'll tell you what to do. We need that spiderwire. Can you disconnect it from your suit?"
"I can try."
So he dragged out his long, white scarf. She began to wind the thing around her waist. No clocks or numbers on the bomb told them how much time they had left. They had only their own chronometers. "Seven minutes."
He was still planning to do the thing himself. "Now," he said, "get those magnets situated. The scarf will be useful. It won't bear any serious strain, but it'll keep the bomb in position while we spiderwire it to the wombot. Leave those ends free. Screw drill might help."
The thing grew firm in her hands as she helped give the cables a few more turns. "Okay," he said. "More magnetic clamps. As many as we have between us." The bomb was settled on the ground, the wombot beside it. At his count, they seized the bomb, rolled it, and bound it with the wire while they fixed the eight magnetic manacles she normally used for heavy-gravity truants. They held the wombot squarely on the bomb. Six minutes. He took a deep breath.
Then, while he was still thinking about it, she had straddled the whole contraption, binding herself to it with the scarf and the remaining spiderwire, leaving her limbs free. There wasn't time to argue. Stone grew more and more unhappy. He realized that he couldn't take over. Too late to start arguing.
Soon she had the whole contraption firmly beneath her, the wombot now fighting like a fish to be free. He gripped it hard as he could with his numbed hands. Then she began powering up her suit.
He couldn't find any more words. He felt sick. He had an unusual set to his jaw as he watched her first switch her own equalizer to run and then eased the bomb but not the wombot, outside her suit's circle of power. She tapped in codes on her arm. Wouldn't she need a helmet? There was a faint flash and she winced. Not a suicide mission! Don't say it was that! The sound of the falls still drowned any noise they made without using the radio. The powerful bionic drone jumped in her hands and lifted over Stone's head with Yily still clinging to it. It bucked and pirouetted and bucked again. He yelled for her to let go, that he would catch her.
"I have to test it first," she said. "There isn't much time."
"Maybe we should say goodbye." Suddenly calm, though scarcely reconciled, he stepped back.
"Maybe." And then she released the wombot.
It leapt into the air, looped once, with her hanging on for dear life, her e-suit flickering and flashing. The wire secured the bomb. She was held only by a few magnetic clamps, spiderwire, and her own strength. But Stone could have sworn he saw her grinning.
The contraption began to move in a straight line. Out over the Nokedu Falls—out through the distant spray, gold and silver in the pink light—and, to Stone's utter horror, down!
Down flew Yily Chen. Down she flew! Out of sight as she was dragged by the wombot into that vast rosy chasm and those wild, dancing, deadly waters. Stone had never known so much fear before. Never so much fear than when he saw her vanish. "Oh, God!" He tried to get his radio back on but there was no reception. "Oh, Yily!" He felt ill. He scanned the goldflecked air with his enhanced eyes. Nothing.
The Nokedu Falls shouted its beautiful, monstrous laughter.
Then, triumphantly, the wombot leapt like a salmon up the falls, into the air above the canal, and seemed to hover for a moment with Yily flying behind it, going through some weird contortions, maybe to gain altitude. Up she came, then back, hurtling almost directly toward him. He dove clear of the thing as it seemed to home on him. Was he the nearest heat? Had he really been the target all along? Then here she came, just in time, jumping clear of the flying bomb, down onto the walkway as the wombot performed a perfect turn and flew like a radium ray straight and true back along the way they had first come—and then vanished from normal space-time. Now it would push through the folds of unseen space, seeking maximum heat, blinking up to the surface through the rock until it hit thin air, still skewering through the folds of space-time, on its way to Sol.
He rolled over as she switched off her suit and fell, laughing, into his arms.
Then Stone did what unconsciously he had wanted to do since he'd first chased the tousled, brown-skinned Martian girl playing hide-and-go-seek in and out of the deep shadows of the tanks. He took her in his arms, tossed away his helmet, and kissed her full on her blood-red lips. She kissed him back with a passion, biting his tongue and grinning as he responded.
Up in RamRam City, a scummer lying on his back, high on jojo juice, saw a quick blossom of brightness appear in Sol's northwest quadrant, a crimson flower against dull orange, and had no notion how lucky he was to be alive or what that brief moment had earned.
Soon Stone and Yily followed the long walkway of polished black granite beside the wide canal and up the great staircase to the chamber where he had first met Krane. The Earthman was gone, but on a hook extending from the deactivated noman's right arm was a soft gray ratskin bag, and when Stone poured the contents into her open palm Yily gasped.
Stone lit the last three inches of his jane, drew deep, smiled, contentedly watching her as she laid them out, side by side on the bag: Seven perfect flame sapphires, pulsing with constantly shifting shades of indigo. Each was a different world. Each was utterly fascinating, ready to reflect and amplify your secret dreams. Should you wish, you could live in one forever.
"Yeah," said Stone happily. "Quite a sight."
Epilogue
They knew what would happen, of course, when the mining companies and the archeologists discovered a plentiful supply of water. That water would still be contaminated by centuries of leakage from an alien super-bomb and would have to be filtered, probably not very thoroughly. That wouldn't be much of a problem, especially with expendable prison labor working down there. Stone guessed what the exploiters would do with the great calm waterway perpetually pouring into a bottomless canyon to be captured and recycled, by some mysterious process, back into the canal again. Power.
"It'll all go," said Yily Chen. "It'll be sensat
ionalized and sanitized. People will run boat tours to the safe parts. There'll be elevators directly down to the falls. Tourist money will bring a demand for comfortable fiction. Guides will play up invented legends and histories. Art critics will explain the grandeur of her design, the beauty of her reliefs, the ingenuity of her architects and engineers. She'll give birth to a thousand academic theories. Crazy theories. Cults. Religions. And that won't be the worst of it when people like Delph start tearing out the metals and the precious jewels . . . "
"No," he said. "It doesn't have to happen. We can keep it to ourselves. Just for a while."
It was what Yily wanted too. She smiled that sweet, sardonic Martian smile. "I guess I was planning to retire," she said.
So they bought Mars. She only cost them two indigo flame sapphires, sold to a consortium of Terran plutocrats. For the pair, Stone and Chen got the mining companies, a couple of ships, RamRam City and other settlements, the various rights of exploration and exploitation, the private prisons Stone had known so well and subsequently liberated so promptly.
Later, it might be possible to create on Mars a paradise of justice and reason, a golden age to last a thousand years where their Martian descendants could grow up and flourish. But meanwhile, for a few good months, maybe more, they had the lost canal to themselves.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Charlie Jane Anders (charliejane.net) writes about science fiction for io9. com, and she's hard at work on a fantasy novel. You can find her work in the McSweeney's Joke Book of Book Jokes, Best Science Fiction of the Year 2009, Sex for America, and other anthologies. She's also contributed to Mother Jones, the Wall Street Journal, the San Francisco Chronicle, ZYZZYVA, Pindeldyboz, Strange Horizons, and many other publications. She organizes the Writers With Drinks reading series. With Annalee Newitz, she co-edited the anthology She's Such a Geek and published an indy magazine called other. She wrote a novel called Choir Boy, which won a Lambda Literary Award and was a finalist for the Edmund White Award.
Dale Bailey lives in North Carolina with his family, and has published three novels, The Fallen, House of Bones, and Sleeping Policemen (with Jack Slay, Jr.), as well as a collection of short fiction, The Resurrection Man's Legacy and Other Stories. He has been a four-time finalist for the International Horror Guild Award, a two-time finalist for the Nebula Award, and a finalist for the Bram Stoker and the Shirley Jackson Awards. His fiction has appeared in Alchemy, Amazing Stories, Asimov's, Clarkesworld, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Lightspeed, Nightmare, SciFiction, and Tor.com, among other places. "Death and Suffrage," his International Horror Guild Awardwinning novelette, was adapted for film by director Joe Dante as part of Showtime Television's anthology series, Masters of Horror. He has two books coming out next year, The End of the End of Everything: Stories and The Subterranean Season.
Best known for her "The Company" series, Kage Baker's notable works include the novel Mendoza in Hollywood and "The Empress of Mars," a 2003 novella that won the Theodore Sturgeon Award and was nominated for a Hugo Award. In 2009, her short story "Caverns of Mystery" and her novel House of the Stag were both nominated for World Fantasy Awards. Baker died on January 31, 2010. Later that year, her novella The Women of Nell Gwynne's was nominated for both Hugo and World Fantasy Awards, and won the Nebula Award. Based on extensive notes left by the author, Baker's unfinished novel, Nell Gwynne's On Land and At Sea, was completed by her sister Kathleen Bartholomew and published in 2012.
Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. When coupled with a childhood tendency to read the dictionary for fun, this led her inevitably to penury, intransigence, and the writing of speculative fiction. She is the Hugo, Sturgeon, Locus, and Campbell Award-winning author of about a hundred short stories and twenty-six novels—the most recent of which are Steles of the Sky (Tor) and the One-Eyed Jack (Prime Books). Her dog lives in Massachusetts; her partner, writer Scott Lynch, lives in Wisconsin. She spends a lot of time on planes.
Paul Cornell—a writer of science fiction and fantasy in prose, comics, and TV—is one of only two people to be Hugo Award-nominated for all three media. He's written Doctor Who for the BBC, Action Comics for DC, and Wolverine for Marvel. He's won the BSFA Award for his short fiction, an Eagle Award for his comics, and shares in a Writer's Guild Award for his television work. His latest urban fantasy novel is The Severed Streets from Tor. He lives in Buckinghamshire with his wife and son.
Eileen Gunn is a writer and editor. Her fiction has received the Nebula Award in the United States and the Sense of Gender Award in Japan, and has twice been nominated for the Hugo Award. Her first short story collection, Stable Strategies and Others, was nominated for the Philip K. Dick and World Fantasy Awards, and short-listed for the James Tiptree, Jr. Award. A new collection, Questionable Practices: Stories by Eileen Gunn was published earlier this year by Small Beer Press. She was the editor/publisher of the edgy and influential Infinite Matrix webzine (2001-2008) and also edited, with L. Timmel Duchamp, The WisCon Chronicles 2: Provocative Essays on Feminism, Race, Revolution, and the Future. Gunn has had an extensive career in high-tech advertising. Originally from the Boston area, she now lives in Seattle with her husband, typographer and book designer John D. Berry.
Mary Robinette Kowal (maryrobinettekowal.com) was the 2008 recipient of the Campbell Award for Best New Writer and a Hugo winner for her story "Evil Robot Monkey." Her debut novel Shades of Milk and Honey (Tor, 2010)—a "fantasy novel that Jane Austen might have written"— was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel. The fourth novel of her Glamourist Histories, Valour and Vanity, was published earlier this year and a fifth, Of Noble Family, will appear next year. Her short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Asimov's, and several "year's best" anthologies. A professional puppeteer and voice actor, she lives in Portland with her husband Rob and nine manual typewriters.
Yoon Ha Lee's first short fiction collection, Conservation of Shadows, was published in 2013. She lives in Louisiana with her family, used to design constructed languages as a hobby, and has not yet been eaten by gators.
Ken Liu (kenliu.name) is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards, he has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov's, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts. Ken's debut novel, The Grace of Kings, the first in a silkpunk epic fantasy series, will be published by Saga Press, Simon & Schuster's new genre fiction imprint, in April 2015. Saga will also publish a collection of his short stories.
Sarah Monette lives in a 108-year-old house in the Upper Midwest with a great many books, two cats, one grand piano, and one husband. Her Ph.D. diploma (English Literature, 2004) hangs in the kitchen. She has published more than fifty short stories and has two short story collections The Bone Key and Somewhere Beneath Those Waves. She has written two novels (A Companion to Wolves and The Tempering of Men) and four short stories with Elizabeth Bear, and hopes to write more. Her first four novels (Melusine, The Virtu, The Mirador, Corambis) were published by Ace. Her latest novel, The Goblin Emperor, published under the pen name Katherine Addison, came out from Tor in April 2014. Visit her online at www.sarahmonette.com or www.katherineaddison.com.
Michael Moorcock, widely acknowledged as one of the premiere masters of SF and fantasy and selected by The Times of London as one of the fifty greatest British writers since 1945, is the author of dozens of works of SF, fantasy, and mainstream fiction, such as the Elric sequence (starting with The Stealer of Souls), the Corum Seres (starting with Knight of Swords), and the Hawkmoon series (starting with Jewel in the Skull). He has received the World Fantasy Award for life achievement and was named an SFWA Grand Master in 2008. Moorcock's first independent novel in nine years, The Whispering Swarm, will be published later this year. It is the first in a trilogy that is both fantastical and
autobiographical. He lives in Texas. Tom Purdom has been publishing science fiction since 1957 and writing about music since 1988. He currently reviews for The Broad Street Review (www.broadstreetreview.com). Purdom has written non-fiction about subjects as varied as arms control and interior decorating for magazines such as Kiwanis and American Education and institutional clients such as the University of Pennsylvania and the United States Air Force. His science fiction credits include five novels and a multitude of highly praised shorter works. Purdom's literary memoir, When I Was Writing, can be found online at www.philart.net/tompurdom/wiwone.htm.
USA Today bestseller and Hugo Award-winner Kristine Kathryn Rusch writes more time travel stories than she usually admits. Gallery of His Dreams, her breakthrough novella, which was nominated for every award in SF, has just been re-released by WMG Publishing. Her time-travel novel, Snipers, appeared in 2013. She'll write more in that series after she finishes a eight-book saga for her Retrieval Artist series. WMG Publishing will release the remaining six books in that saga one per month starting in January of 2015. Rusch writes much more than time-travel stories—other science fiction, fantasy, mystery, romance—and is the former editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. She lives and works on the Oregon Coast.
A prolific writer of novels, short stories, TV scripts, and screenplays (most notably, The Crow), John Shirley (john-shirley.com) has published over three dozen novels and eight collections. Among his novels are Doyle After Death, Demons, the seminal cyberpunk works City Come A-Walkin, and the A Song Called Youth trilogy of Eclipse, Eclipse Penumbra, and Eclipse Corona. His collections include the Stoker and IHG Award-winning Black Butterflies and In Extremis: The Most Extreme Stories of John Shirley. As a musician Shirley has fronted his own bands and written lyrics for Blue Öyster Cult and others. In 2013, Black October Records released a two-CD compilation of Shirley's own recordings, Broken Mirror Glass: The John Shirley Anthology: 1978-2012. His latest novel is historical fiction: Wyatt In Wichita (Skyhorse).
