Science Fiction: The Best of the Year, 2006 Edition

by Rich Horton

  Piano Man played an icy line, dripping sarcastic bonhomie.

  "Really."

  "I'm serious. It's a navigation signal, a spacecraft beacon. It keeps repeating the same code, over and over again.” Renfrew leaned in closer: if he'd been able to lean on the phantom piano, he would have. “It's getting stronger. Whatever's putting out that signal is getting closer to Mars."

  "You don't know that."

  "OK, I don't. But there's the Doppler to consider as well. The signal's changing frequency a little from day to day. Put the two things together and you've got a ship making some kind of course correction, coming in for orbital insertion."

  "Good for you."

  Renfrew stepped back from the piano, surprised at his companion's dismissive reaction.

  "There's a ship coming. Aren't you happy for me?"

  "Tickled pink, luv."

  "I don't understand. This is what I've been waiting for all this time: news that someone's survived, that it doesn't all end here.” For the first time in their acquaintance, Renfrew raised his voice with Piano Man. “What the hell's wrong with you? Are you jealous that you won't be all the company I'm ever going to have?"

  "Jealous? I don't think so."

  Renfrew plunged his fist through the white nothingness of the piano. “Then show some reaction!"

  Piano Man lifted his hands from the keyboard. He closed the keyboard cover very gently and then sat with his hands in his lap, demurely, just the way he'd been when Renfrew had first witnessed him. He looked at Renfrew, his expression blank, whatever message his eyes might have conveyed lost behind the star-shaped mirrors of his glasses.

  "You want a reaction? Fine, I'll give you one. You're making a very, very serious mistake."

  "It's no mistake. I know. I've double-checked checked everything..."

  "It's still a mistake."

  "The ship's coming."

  "Something's coming. It may not be all that you expect."

  Renfrew's fury boiled over. “Since when have you the faintest fucking idea what I expect or don't expect? You're just a piece of software."

  "Whatever you say, luv. But remind me: when was the last time software encouraged you to take a deep interest in the fundamental workings of the universe?"

  Renfrew had no answer for that. But he had to say something. “They're coming. I know they're coming. Things are going to get better. You'll see when the ship comes."

  "You're going to do yourself a lot of harm."

  "As if you cared. As if you were capable of caring."

  "You've found a way to stay sane, Renfrew—even if that means admitting a tiny piece of piano-playing madness into your world. But there's a cost to that sanity, and it isn't moi. The cost is you can't ever allow yourself an instant of hope, because hope is something that will always be crushed, crushed utterly, and in the crushing of hope you will be weakened forever, just as surely as if you'd mainlined some slow-acting poison.” Piano Man looked at Renfrew with a sudden, scholarly interest. “How many instants of defeat do you think you can take, big guy? One, two, three? From where I'm sitting I wouldn't bet on three. I think three might easily kill you. I think two might get you on a shitty day."

  "Something's coming,” Renfrew said, plaintively.

  "I thought for a while you had the balls to get through this. I thought you'd banished hope, learned to keep it outside in the cold. I was wrong: you've let it in again. Now it's going to stalk you, like a starved, half-crazed wolf."

  "It's my wolf."

  "There's still time to chase it away. Don't let me down now, Renfrew. I've counting on you not to screw things up."

  * * * *

  That night Renfrew dreamed not of cosmology, but of something stranger and more upsetting. It was not one of the dreams he used to have about the past, for he had trained himself not to have those any more; the sense of sadness and loss upon waking almost too much to bear. Nor was it one of the equally troubling ones about visitors, people coming down out of cold blue skies and landing near the base. When then came through the airlock they arrived with flowers—Hawaiian luas—and utterly pointless but lovingly gift-wrapped presents. Their faces were never familiar at first, but by the end of each visitation, just before he woke, they would always start to transmute into old friends and loved ones. Renfrew hadn't yet trained himself not to have that kind of dream, and given the news about the radio signal he was sure at least one of them would haunt his sleep in the days ahead.

  It was not that kind of dream. What happened in the dream was that Renfrew rose like a sleepwalker from his bed in the middle of the night and crept through the base to the same medical lab where Solovyova had died, and placed his head into one of the functioning scanners, conjuring a glowing lilac image of his skull on the main screen, and then emerged from the scanner and examined the readout to learn that his optic implants had been dead for years; that there was no possible way it was picking up the Bösendorfer, let alone the talking ghost that played it.

  In the morning, when he woke from the dream, Renfrew couldn't bring himself to visit the medical lab, in case he had already been there in the night.

  * * * *

  By day he kept a weather eye on the radio signal. It strengthened and Dopplered, moving quickly against the stars as it fell into the grasp of Mars. Then the signal altered, switching to a different, equally meaningless burst of repeating binary gibberish. Renfrew knew that it meant something, and intensified his vigil.

  A day later, a meteor flared across the twilight sky, etching a fire trail, and dropped behind the closest range of hills under a dark umbrella of parachutes.

  "I'm going out to find where they came down,” Renfrew said.

  "How far?"

  "I don't know how far. Can't be all that far beyond the western marker."

  "That's still twenty kilometres away."

  "I'll take the car. It still works."

  "You've never driven it alone. It's a long walk home if something goes wrong."

  "Nothing's going wrong. I won't be alone."

  Piano Man started to say something, but Renfrew wasn't listening.

  He pre-breathed, suited up, climbed onto the skeletal chassis of the buggy, then went out to meet the newcomers. As the mesh-wheeled vehicle bounced and gyred its way to the horizon, Renfrew felt a thrilled elation, as if he were on his way to a date with a beautiful and mysterious woman who might be his lover by the end of the evening.

  But when he crested the hills and saw the fallen ship, he knew that nobody had ridden it to Mars. It was too small for that, even if this was just the re-entry component of a larger ship still circling the planet. What had come down was just a cargo pod, a blunt cylinder the size of a small minibus. It was tangled up with its own parachutes and the deflated gasbags it had deployed just before impact.

  Renfrew parked the buggy, then spent ten minutes clearing fabric away from the cargo pod's door. The re-entry had scorched the decals, flags and data panels on the pod's skin to near-illegibility, but Renfrew knew the drill. Back when the base was inhabited, he'd occasionally drawn the short straw to drive out to recover a pod that had fallen away from the usual touchdown beacon.

  He was sorry it wasn't a crewed ship, but the pod was the next best thing. Maybe they were still getting the infrastructure back up to speed. Sending out a manned vehicle was obviously too much of a stretch right now, and that was understandable. But they'd still had the presence of mind not to forget about Mars, even if all they could muster was a one-shot cargo pod. He would not be ungrateful. The pod could easily contain valuable medicines and machine parts, enough to relieve him of several ever-present worries. They might even have sent some luxuries, as a token of goodwill: things that the synths had never been very good at.

  Renfrew touched a hand against the armoured panel next to the door, ready to flip it open and expose the pyrotechnic release mechanism. That was when one of the scorches caught his eye. It was a data panel, printed in spray-stencilled letters.
/>   —

  HTCV-554

  Hohmann Transfer Cargo Vehicle

  Scheduled launch: Kagoshima 05/38

  Destination: Tharsis Base, Mars

  Payload: replacement laser optics

  Property: Mars Development Corporation—

  According to the data panel, the cargo pod had been scheduled to lift from Kagoshima spaceport one month before the virus hit. Maybe the panel was wrong; maybe this pod had been prepared and sprayed and then held on the pad until the virus had passed and the reconstruction had begun...

  But why send him glass?

  Renfrew knew, with an appalling certainty, that the vehicle had not been delayed on the pad. It had launched just as its owners had intended, on time, with a consignment of precision glassware that might just have been useful back when the base was fully inhabited and they'd needed a steady supply of laser optics for the surveying work.

  But somewhere between Earth and Mars, the cargo pod had lost its way. When the virus hit, the pod would have lost contact with the Earth-based tracking system that was supposed to guide it on its way. But the pod hadn't simply drifted into interplanetary space, lost forever. Instead, its dumb-as-fuck navigation system had caused it to make an extra fuel-conserving loop around the sun, until it finally locked onto the Mars transponder.

  Renfrew must have picked it up shortly afterwards.

  He stumbled back to the buggy. He climbed into the openwork frame, settled into the driver's seat and didn't bother with the harness. He kept his breathing in check. The disappointment hadn't hit yet, but he could feel it coming, sliding toward him with the oiled glide of a piston. It was going to hurt like hell when it arrived. It was going to feel like the weight of creation pushing down onto his chest. It was going to squeeze the life out of him; it was going to make him open that helmet visor, if he didn't make it home first.

  Piano Man had been right. He'd allowed hope back into his world, and now hope was going to make him pay.

  He gunned the buggy to maximum power, flinging dust from its wheels, skidding until it found traction. He steered away from the cargo pod, not wanting to look at it, not even wanting to catch a glimpse of it in the buggy's rear view mirrors.

  He'd made it to within five kilometres of the base when he hit a boulder, tipping the buggy over. Renfrew tumbled from the driver's seat, and the last thing he saw—the last thing he was aware of—was an edge of sharp rock rising to shatter his visor.

  —

  Part Three

  —

  And yet Renfrew woke.

  Consciousness came back to him in a crystal rush. He remembered everything, up to and including the last instant of his accident. It seemed to have happened only minutes earlier: he could almost taste blood in his mouth. Yet by the same token the memory seemed inhumanly ancient, calcified into hardness, brittle as coral.

  He was back in the base, not out by the crashed buggy. Through narrow, sleep-gummed eyes he picked out familiar décor. He'd come around on the same medical couch where he had seen Solovyova die. He moved his arm and touched his brow, flinching as he remembered the stone smashing through the visor, flinching again as he recalled the momentary contact of stone against skin, the hardening pressure of skin on bone, the yielding of that pressure as the edge of the stone rammed its way into his skull like a nuclear-powered icebreaker cracking hard arctic pack-ice.

  The skin under his fingers was smooth, unscarred. He touched his chin and felt the same day's growth of stubble he'd been wearing when he went out to meet the pod. There was stiffness in his muscles, but nothing he wouldn't have expected after a hard day's work. He eased himself from the couch, touched bare feet to cold ceramic flooring. He was wearing the one-piece inner-layer that he'd put on under the spacesuit before he went outside. But the inner-layer was crisper and cleaner than he remembered, and when he looked at the sleeve the tears and frays he recalled were absent.

  Gaining steadiness with each step, Renfrew padded across the medical lab to the window. He remembered seeing Solovyova's face reflected in the glass, the first time he'd seen the piano. It had been twilight then; it was full daylight now, and as his eyes adjusted to wakefulness, they picked out details and textures in the scenery with a clarity he'd never known before.

  There were things out there that didn't belong.

  They stood between the base and the foothills, set into the dust like haphazardly placed chess pieces. It was hard to say how tall they were—metres or tens of metres—for there was something slippery and elusive about the space between the forms and the base, confounding Renfrew's sense of perspective. Nor could he have reported with any certainty on the shapes of the objects. One moment he saw blocky, unchanging chunks of crystalline growth—something like tourmaline, tinted with bright reds and greens—the next he was looking at stained-glass apertures drilled through the very skein of reality, or skeletal, prismatic things that existed only in the sense that they had edges and corners, rather than surfaces and interiors. And yet there was never any sense of transition between the opposed states.

  He knew, instantly and without fear, that they were alive, and that they were aware of him.

  Renfrew made his way to the suiting room, counted the intact suits that were hanging there, and came up with the same number he remembered before the buggy accident. No sign of any damage to the racked helmets.

  He suited up and stepped out into Martian daylight. The forms were still there, surrounding the base like the weathered stones of some grand Neolithic circle. Yet they seemed closer now, and larger, and their transformations had an accelerated, heightened quality. They had detected his emergence; they were glad of it; it was what they had been waiting for.

  Still there was no fear.

  One of the shapes seemed larger than the others. It beckoned Renfrew nearer, and the ground he walked upon melted and surged under him, encouraging him to close the distance. The transformations became more feverish. His suit monitor informed him that the air outside was as cold and thin as ever, but a sound was reaching him through the helmet that he'd never heard in all his time on Mars. It was a chorus of shrill, quavering notes, like the sound from a glass organ, and it was coming from the aliens. In that chorus was ecstasy and expectation. It should have terrified him; should have sent him scurrying back inside, should have sent him into gibbering catatonia, but it only made him stronger.

  Renfrew dared to look up.

  If the aliens gathered around the base were the crew, then the thing suspended over the base—the thing that swallowed three fifths of the sky, more like a weather system than a machine—had to be their ship. It was a vast frozen explosion of colours and shapes, and it made him want to shrivel back into his skull. The mere existence of the aliens and their ship told him that all he had learned, all the wisdom he had worked so hard to accrue, was at best a scratch against the rock face of reality.

  He still had a long, long way to go.

  He looked down, and walked to the base of the largest alien. The keening reached a shrill, exultant climax. Now that he was close, the alien's shape-and-size shifting had subsided. The form looming over him was stable and crystalline, with the landscape behind it faintly visible through the refracted translucence of the alien's body.

  The alien's voice, when it came, felt like the universe whispering secrets into his head.

  "Are you feeling better now?"

  Renfrew almost laughed at the banality of the question. “I'm feeling ... better, yes."

  "That's good. We were concerned. Very, very concerned. It pleases us that you have made this recovery."

  The keening quietened. Renfrew sensed that the other aliens were witnesses to a one-on-one conversation between him and this largest entity, and that there was something utterly respectful, even subservient, in their silence.

  "When you talk about my recovery ... are you saying...” Renfrew paused, choosing his words with care. “Did you make me better?"

  "We healed you, yes. We healed you
and learned your language from the internal wiring of your mind."

  "I should have died out there. When I tipped the buggy ... I thought I was dead. I knew I was dead."

  "There were enough recoverable patterns. It was in our gift to remake you. Only you, however, can say whether we did a good enough job."

  "I feel the same way I always did. Except better: like I've been turned inside out and flushed clean."

  "That is what we hoped."

  "You mind if I ask..."

  The alien pulsed an inviting shade of pink.

  "You may ask anything you like."

  "Who are you? What are you doing here? Why have you come now?"

  "We are the Kind. We have arrived to preserve and resurrect what we may. We have arrived now because we could not arrive sooner."

  "But the coincidence ... to come now, after we've been waiting so long ... to come now, just after we've wiped ourselves out. Why couldn't you come sooner, and stop us fucking things up so badly?"

  "We came as fast as we could. As soon as we detected the electromagnetic emanations of your culture ... we commenced our journey."

  "How far have you come?"

  "More than two hundred of your light years. Our vehicle moves very quickly, but not faster than light. More than four hundred years have passed since the transmission of the radio signals that alerted us."

  "No,” Renfrew said, shaking his head, wondering how the aliens could have made such a basic mistake. “That isn't possible. Radio hasn't been around that long. We've had television for maybe a hundred years, radio for twenty or thirty years longer ... but not four hundred years. No way was it our signals you picked up."

  The alien shifted to a soothing turquoise.

  "You are mistaken, but understandably so. You were dead longer than you realise."

  "No,” he said flatly.

  "That is the way it is. Of course you have no memory of the intervening time."

  "But the base looks exactly the way it did before I left."

  "We repaired your home, as well. If you would like it changed again, that is also possible."

  Renfrew felt the first stirrings of acceptance; the knowledge that what the alien was telling him was correct.