Edith was out of intensive care, but she’d been kept in the hospital at Truro. She had a TV stand before her face, the screen dark. I carefully kissed her on the unburnt side of her face, and sat down, handing over books, newspapers and flowers. “Thought you might be bored.”
“You never were any good with the sick, were you, Tobe?”
“Sorry.” I opened up one of the newspapers. “But there’s some good news. They caught the arsonists.”
She grunted, her distorted mouth barely opening. “So what? It doesn’t matter who they were. Messagers and Shouters have been at each other’s throats all over the world. People like that are interchangeable … But did we all have to behave so badly? I mean, they even wrecked Arthur.”
“And he was Grade II listed!”
She laughed, then regretted it, for she winced with the pain. “But why shouldn’t we smash everything up down here? After all, that’s all they seem to be interested in up there. The Incoming assaulted Venus, and the Venusians struck back. We all saw it, live on TV—it was nothing more than War of the Worlds.” She sounded disappointed. “These creatures are our superiors, Toby. All your signal analysis stuff proved it. And yet they haven’t transcended war and destruction.”
“But we learned so much.” I had a small briefcase which I opened now, and pulled out printouts that I spread over her bed. “The screen images are better, but you know how it is; they won’t let me use my laptop or my phone in here … Look, Edith. It was incredible. The Incoming assault on Venus lasted hours. Their weapon, whatever it was, burned its way through the Patch, and right down through an atmosphere a hundred times thicker than Earth’s. We even glimpsed the surface—”
“Now melted to slag.”
“Much of it … But then the acid-munchers in the clouds struck back. We think we know what they did.”
That caught her interest. “How can we know that?”
“Sheer luck. That NASA probe, heading for Venus, happened to be in the way…”
The probe had detected a wash of electromagnetic radiation, coming from the planet.
“A signal,” breathed Edith. “Heading which way?”
“Out from the sun. And then, eight hours later, the probe sensed another signal, coming the other way. I say ‘sensed.’ It bobbed about like a cork on a pond. We think it was a gravity wave—very sharply focussed, very intense.”
“And when the wave hit the Incoming nucleus—”
“Well, you saw the pictures. The last fragments have burned up in Venus’s atmosphere.”
She lay back on her reef of pillows. “Eight hours,” she mused. “Gravity waves travel at lightspeed. Four hours out, four hours back … Earth’s about eight light-minutes from the sun. What’s four light-hours out from Venus? Jupiter, Saturn—”
“Neptune. Neptune was four light-hours out.”
“Was?”
“It’s gone, Edith. Almost all of it—the moons are still there, a few chunks of core ice and rock, slowly dispersing. The Venusians used the planet to create their gravity-wave pulse—”
“They used it. Are you telling me this to cheer me up? A gas giant, a significant chunk of the solar system’s budget of mass-energy, sacrificed for a single warlike gesture.” She laughed, bitter. “Oh, God!”
“Of course we’ve no idea how they did it.” I put away my images. “If we were scared of the Incoming, now we’re terrified of the Venusians. That NASA probe has been shut down. We don’t want anything to look like a threat … You know, I heard the PM herself ask why it was that this space war should break out now, just when we humans are sitting around on Earth. Even politicians know we haven’t been here that long.”
Edith shook her head, wincing again. “The final vanity. This whole episode has never been about us. Can’t you see? If this is happening now, it must have happened over and over. Who knows how many other planets we lost in the past, consumed as weapons of forgotten wars? Maybe all we see, the planets and stars and galaxies, is just the debris of huge wars—on and on, up to scales we can barely imagine. And we’re just weeds growing in the rubble. Tell that to the Prime Minister. And I thought we might ask them about their gods! What a fool I’ve been—the questions on which I’ve wasted my life, and here are my answers—what a fool.” She was growing agitated.
“Take it easy, Edith—”
“Oh, just go. I’ll be fine. It’s the universe that’s broken, not me.” She turned away on her pillow, as if to sleep.
* * *
The next time I saw Edith she was out of hospital and back at her church.
It was another September day, like the first time I visited her after the Incoming appeared in our telescopes, and at least it wasn’t raining. There was a bite in the breeze, but I imagined it soothed her damaged skin. And here she was, digging in the mud before her church.
“Equinox season,” she said. “Rain coming. Best to get this fixed before we have another flash flood. And before you ask, the doctors cleared me. It’s my face that’s buggered, not the rest of me.”
“I wasn’t going to ask.”
“OK, then. How’s Meryl, the kids?”
“Fine. Meryl’s at work, the kids back at school. Life goes on.”
“It must, I suppose. What else is there? No, by the way.”
“No what?”
“No, I won’t come serve on your minister’s think tank.”
“At least consider it. You’d be ideal. Look, we’re all trying to figure out where we go from here. The arrival of the Incoming, the war on Venus—it was like a religious revelation. That’s how it’s being described. A revelation witnessed by all mankind, on TV. Suddenly we’ve got an entirely different view of the universe out there. And we have to figure out how we go forward, in a whole number of dimensions—political, scientific, economic, social, religious.”
“I’ll tell you how we go forward. In despair. Religions are imploding.”
“No, they’re not.”
“OK. Theology is imploding. Philosophy. The rest of the world has changed channels and forgotten already, but anybody with any imagination knows … In a way this has been the final demotion, the end of the process that started with Copernicus and Darwin. Now we know there are creatures in the universe much smarter than we’ll ever be, and we know they don’t care a damn about us. It’s the indifference that’s the killer—don’t you think? All our futile agitation about if they’d attack us and whether we should signal … And they did nothing but smash each other up. With that above us, what can we do but turn away?”
“You’re not turning away.”
She leaned on her shovel. “I’m not religious; I don’t count. My congregation turned away. Here I am, alone.” She glanced at the clear sky. “Maybe solitude is the key to it all. A galactic isolation imposed by the vast gulfs between the stars, the lightspeed limit. As a species develops you might have a brief phase of individuality, of innovation and technological achievement. But then, when the universe gives you nothing back you turn in on yourself, and slide into the milky embrace of eusociality—the hive.
“But what then? How would it be for a mass mind to emerge, alone? Maybe that’s why the Incoming went to war. Because they were outraged to discover, by some chance, they weren’t alone in the universe.”
“Most commentators think it was about resources. Most of our wars are about that, in the end.”
“Yes. Depressingly true. All life is based on the destruction of other life, even on tremendous scales of space and time … Our ancestors understood that right back to the Ice Age, and venerated the animals they had to kill. They were so far above us, the Incoming and the Venusians alike. Yet maybe we, at our best, are morally superior to them.”
I touched her arm. “This is why we need you. For your insights. There’s a storm coming, Edith. We’re going to have to work together if we’re to weather it, I think.”
She frowned. “What kind of storm?… Oh. Neptune.”
“Yeah. You can’t just dele
te a world without consequences. The planets’ orbits are singing like plucked strings. The asteroids and comets too, and those orphan moons wandering around. Some of the stirred-up debris is falling into the inner system.”
“And if we’re struck—”
I shrugged. “We’ll have to help each other. There’s nobody else to help us, that’s for sure. Look, Edith—maybe the Incoming and the Venusians are typical of what’s out there. But that doesn’t mean we have to be like them, does it? Maybe we’ll find others more like us. And if not, well, we can be the first. A spark to light a fire that will engulf the universe.”
She ruminated. “You have to start somewhere, I suppose. As with this drain.”
“Well, there you go.”
“All right, damn it, I’ll join your think tank. But first you’re going to help me finish this drain, aren’t you, city boy?”
So I changed into overalls and work boots, and we dug away at that ditch in the damp, clingy earth until our backs ached, and the light of the equinoctial day slowly faded.
Digging
IAN MCDONALD
British author Ian McDonald is an ambitious and daring writer with a wide range and an impressive amount of talent. His first story was published in 1982, and since then he has appeared with some frequency in Interzone, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and elsewhere. In 1989 he won the Locus Best First Novel Award for his novel Desolation Road. He won the Philip K. Dick Award in 1992 for his novel King of Morning, Queen of Day. His other books include the novels Out on Blue Six, Hearts, Hands and Voices, Terminal Cafe, Sacrifice of Fools, Evolution’s Shore, Kirinya, Ares Express, Cyberabad, and Brasyl, as well as three collections of his short fiction, Empire Dreams, Speaking in Tongues, and Cyberabad Days. His novel River of Gods was a finalist for both the Hugo Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2005, and a novella drawn from it, ‘The Little Goddess,’ was a finalist for the Hugo and the Nebula. He won a Hugo Award in 2007 for his novelette ‘The Djinn’s Wife,’ won the Theodore Sturgeon Award for his story ‘Tendeleo’s Story,’ and in 2011 won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for his novel The Dervish House. His most recent book is the starting volume of a YA series, Planesrunner. Born in Manchester, England, in 1960, McDonald has spent most of his life in Northern Ireland, and now lives and works in Belfast. He has a Web site at www.lysator.liu.se/~unicorn/mcdonald/.
Here he takes us to a colonized future Mars, and inside a massive terraforming effort stretching over generations that involves digging a REALLY BIG hole.
Tash was wise to the ways of wind. She knew its many musics: sometimes like a flute across the pipes and tubes; sometimes a snare-drum rattle in the guy-lines and cable stays or again, a death drone-moan from the turbine gantries and a scream of sand past the irised-shut windows when the equinox dust storms blew for weeks on end. From the rails and drive bogies of the scoopline the wind drew a wail like a demon choir and from the buckets set a clattering clicking rattle so that she imagined tiny clockwork angels scampering up and down the hundreds of kilometres of conveyor belts. In the storm-season gales it came screaming in across Isidis’ billion-year-dead impact basin, clawing at the eaves and gables of West Diggory, tearing at the tiered roofs so hard Tash feared it would rip them right off and send them tumbling end over end down down into the depths of the Big Dig. That would be the worst thing. Everyone would die badly: eyeballs and fingertips and lips exploding, cheeks bursting with red veins. She had nightmares about suddenly looking up to see the roof ripping away and the naked sky and the air all blowing away in one huge shout of exhalation. Then your eyeballs exploded. She imagined how that would sound. Two soft popping squelches. Then In-Brother Yoche told her you couldn’t hear your eyeballs exploding because the air would be too thin and the whole story was a legend of mischievous Grandparents and Sub-aunts who liked to scare under-fours. But it made her think about how fragile was West Diggory and the other three stations of the Big Dig. Spindly and top-heavy, domes piled upon half domes upon semi-domes, swooping wing roofs and perilous balconies, all resting on the finger-thin cantilevers that connected the great Excavating City to the traction bogies. Like big spiders. Tash knew spiders. She had seen spiders in a book and once, in a piece of video excitedly shot by Lady-cousin Nairne in North Cutter, a real spider, in a real web, trembling in the perennial beat of the buckets working up the Scoop-line from the head of the Big Dig, five kilometres down slope. Lady-cousin Nairne had poked at the spider with her fingers—fat and brown as bread in high magnification. The spider had frozen, then scuttled for the corner of the window frame, curled into a tiny ball of legs and refused to do anything for the rest of the day. The next day when Nairne and her camera returned it was dead dead dead, dried into a little dessicated husk of shell. It must have come in a crate in the supply run down from the High Orbital, though everything they shipped from orbit was supposed to be clean. Beyond the window where the little translucent corpse hung vibrating in its web, red rock and wind and the endless march of the buckets along the rails of the Excavating Conveyor. Buckets and wind. Tied together. Wind; Fact one. When the buckets ceased, then and only then would the wind stop. Fact two: all Tash’s life it had blown in the same direction: downhill.
Tash Gelem-Opunyo was wise to the ways of wind, and buckets, and random spiders and on Moving Day the wind was a long, many-part harmony for pipes drawn from the sand-polished steels rails, a flutter of the kites and blessing banners and windsocks and lucky fish that West Diggory flew from every rooftop and pylon and stanchion, a sudden caress of a veering eddy in the small of her back that made Tash shiver and stand upright on the high verandah in her psuit, a too-intimate touch. She was getting too big for the old psuit. It was tight and chafing in the wrong places. Tight it had to be, a stretch-skin of gas-impermeable fabric, but Things were Showing. My How You’ve Grown Things, that Haramwe Odonye, who was an Out-cousin in from A.R.E.A. and thus allowed to Notice such things, Noticed, and Commented On. Last Moving Day, half a long-year before, she had drawn in an attempt to camouflage the bumps and creases and curves by drawing all over the hi-visibility skin with marker pen. There were more animals on her skin than on the whole of Mars.
Up and out on Moving Day, that was the tradition. From the very very old to the very very young, blinking up out of their pressure cocoons; every soul in West Diggory came out on to the balconies and galleries and walkways. Safety was part of the routine—with every half-year wrench of West Diggory’s thousand of tons of architecture into movement the possibility increased that a joint might split or a pressure dome shatter. Eyeball-squelch-pop time. But safety was only a small part. Movement was what West Diggory was for; like the wind, downwards, ever downwards.
The Terrace of the Grand Regard was the highest point on West Diggory: only the banners of the Isidis Plantia Excavating Company eternally billowing in the unvarying down-slope wind, and the wind turbines, stood higher. Climbing the ladders Tash felt Out-Cousin Haramwe’s eyes on her, watching from the Boy’s Pavilion. His boy-gaze drew the other young males on their high and rickety terrace. The psuit was indeed tight, but good tight. Tash enjoyed how it moved with her, holding her in where she wanted to be held, emphasising what she wanted emphasised.
“Hey, good snake!” Out-Cousin Haramwe called on the common channel. On her seven-and-a-halfth birthday Tash had drawn a dream snake on her psuit skin, a diamond pattern loop with its tail at the base of her spine, curled around the left curve of her ass and buried its head in the inner thigh. It had been exciting to draw. It was more exciting to wear on Moving Day, the only time she ever wore the psuit.
“Are you ogling my ophidian?” Tash taunted back to the hoots of the other boys as she climbed up on to Gallery of Exalted Vistas to be with her sisters and cousin and In-cousins and Out-cousins, all the many ways in which Tash could be related in a gene-pool of only two thousand people. The guys hooted. Tash shimmied her shoulders, where little birds were drawn. The boys liked her insulting them in words they didn’t understand. Lis
ten well, look well. I’m the best show on Mars.
A thousand banners rattled in the unending wind. Kites dipped and fluttered, painted with birds and butterflies and stranger aerial creatures that had only existed in the legends of distant earth. Streamers pointed the way for West Diggory: downhill, always downhill. The lines of buckets full of Martian soil marched up the conveyor from the dig point, invisible over the close horizon, under the legs of West Diggory, towards the unseen summit of Mt. Incredible, where they tipped their load on its ever-growing summit before cycling back down the under side of the conveyor. The story was that the freshly dug regolith at the bottom of the hole was the colour of gold: exposure to the atmosphere on its long journey up-slope turned it Mars red. She turned to better feel the shaper of the wind on every part of her body. This psuit so needed replacing. There was more to her shiver than just the caress of air in motion. Wind and words: they were the same stuff. If she threw big and fancy words, words that gave her joy and made her laugh from the shape they made from moving air, it was because they were living wind itself.
A shiver ran up through the catwalk grilles and railings and into Tash Gelem-Opunyo. The engineers were running up the traction generators; West Diggory shuddered and thrummed as the tokamaks drew resonances and steel harmonies from its girders and cantilevers. Tash’s molars ached, then there was a jolt that threw old and young alike off balance, grasping for handrails, stanchions, cables, each other. There was a immense shriek like the new moon being pulled live from the body of the world world being pulled. Shuddering creaks, each so loud Tash could hear them through her ear-protectors. Steel wheels turned, grinding on sand. West Diggory began to move. People waved their hands and cheered, the noise reduction circuits on the Common Channel stopped the din down to a surge of delighted giggling. The wheels, each taller than Tash, ground round, slow as growing. West Diggory, perched on its cantilevers, inched down its eighteen tracks, tentative as an old woman stepping from a diggler. This was motion on the glacial, the geological scale. It would take ten hours for West Diggory to make its scheduled descent into the Big Dig. You had to be sure to have eaten and drunk enough because it wasn’t safe to go inside. Tash had breakfasted lightly at the commons in the Raven Sorority, when the In-daughters lived together after they turned five. The semizoic fabric absorbed everything without stink or stain but it was far from cool to piss your suit. Unless you were up and out on a job. Then it was mandatory.
The Year’s Best Science Fiction Page 39
