The Very Best of the Best

by Gardner Dozois

  “No,” said Ford, taking a step backward. “But if you think a big shovelful of cowshite and mega-roaches is beautiful, you’re crazy.”

  Billy shouted something from the front of the cab and a second later Beautiful Evelyn swerved around. Both boys staggered a little at the shift in momentum, glaring at each other, and righted themselves as forward motion ceased.

  “We’re at Five-Hundred-K Station,” Bill guessed. There was another beep. He turned automatically to pull the oven drawer open as Billy came staggering back into the living area.

  “Mons Olympus to Five-Hundred-K in one night,” he chortled. “That is some righteous driving! Where’s the tea?”

  They crowded together in the cramped space, sipping tea and eating something brown and bubbly that Ford couldn’t identify. Afterward Billy climbed into his bunk with a groan, and yanked the cord that inflated his mattress.

  “I am so ready for some horizontal. You guys go up front and talk about stuff, okay?”

  “Whatever,” said Bill, picking up his Gamebuke and stalking out. Billy, utterly failing to notice the withering scorn to which he had just been subjected, smiled and waved sleepily at Ford. Ford smiled back, but his smile faded as he turned, shut the door behind him, and followed Bill, whom he had decided was a nasty little know-it-all.

  Bill was sitting in one corner, staring into the screen of his Gamebuke. He had put on a pair of earshells and was listening to something fairly loud. He ignored Ford, who sat and looked up at the screens in puzzlement.

  “Is this the station?” he asked, forgetting that Bill couldn’t hear him. He had expected a domed settlement, but all he could see was a wide place by the side of the road, circled by boulders that appeared to have been whitewashed.

  Bill didn’t answer him. Ford looked at him in annoyance. He studied the controls on the inside of the hatch. When he thought he knew which one opened it, he slipped his mask on. Then he leaned over and punched Bill in the shoulder.

  “Mask up,” he yelled. “I’m going out.”

  Bill had his mask on before Ford had finished speaking, and Ford saw his eyes going wide with alarm as he activated the hatch. It sprang open; Ford turned and slid into a blast of freezing air.

  He hit the ground harder than he expected to, and almost fell. Gasping, hugging himself against a cold so intense it burned, he stared in astonishment at the dawn.

  There was no ceiling. There were no walls. There was nothing around the freighter, as far as the limits of his vision, but limitless space, limitless sky of the palest, chilliest blue he had ever seen, stretching down to a limitless red plain of sand and rock. He turned, and kept turning: no domes, no Tubes, nothing but the wide open world in every direction.

  And here was a red light appearing on the horizon, red as blood or rubies, so bright a red it dazzled his eyes, and he wondered for a moment if it was the eye of Marswife. Long purple shadows sprang from the boulders and stretched back toward his boots. He realized he was looking at the rising sun.

  So this is where the lights were going to, he said to himself, all those nights they were going away into the dark. They were coming out here. This is the most wonderful thing I have ever seen.

  Somehow he had fallen into the place he had always wanted to be.

  But the cold was eating into his bones, and he realized that if he kept on standing there he’d freeze solid in his happy dream. He set off toward the nearest boulder, fumbling with the fastening of his pants.

  Someone grabbed his shoulder and spun him around.

  “You idiot!” Bill shouted at him. “Don’t you know what happens if you try to pee out here?”

  From the horror on Bill’s face, even behind the mask, Ford realized that he’d better get back in the cab as fast as he could.

  When they were safely inside and the seals had locked, when Bill had finished yelling at him, Ford still sat shivering with more than cold.

  “You mean it boils and then it explodes?” he said.

  “You are such an idiot!” Bill repeated in disbelief.

  “How was I supposed to know?” Ford said. “I’ve never been Outside before! We use the reclamation conduits at home—”

  “This isn’t the Long Acres, dumbbell. This is the middle of frozen Nowhere and it’ll kill you in two seconds, okay?”

  “Well, where can you go?”

  “In the lavatory!”

  “But I didn’t want to wake up your dad.”

  “He’ll sleep through anything,” said Bill. “Trust me.”

  Red with humiliation, Ford crawled into the back and after several tries figured out how to operate the toilet, as Billy snored away oblivious. Afterward he crawled back up front, carefully closed the door and said:

  “Er … so, where does somebody have their bath?”

  Bill, who had turned his Gamebuke on again, did not look up as he said:

  “At the Empress.”

  “No, I mean … when somebody has a bath out here, where do they have it?”

  Bill lifted his eyes. He looked perplexed.

  “What are you on about? Nobody bathes out here.”

  “You mean, you only wash when you’re at the Empress?”

  Now it was Bill’s turn to flush with embarrassment.

  “Yeah.”

  Ford tried to keep his dismay from showing, but he wasn’t very good at hiding his feelings. “You mean I can’t have a bath until we get back?”

  “No. You can’t. I guess people wash themselves every day in the Long Acres, huh?” said Bill angrily.

  Ford nodded. “We have to. It stinks too bad if we don’t. Because there’s, er, manure and algae and, er, the methane plant, and … we work hard and sweat a lot. So we shave and wash every day, see?”

  “Is that why the MAC haven’t got any hair?”

  “Yeah,” said Ford. He added, “Plus my dad says hair is a vanity. Means being a showoff, being flash.”

  “I know what it means,” said Bill. He was silent a moment, and then said:

  “Well, you won’t be sweating much out here. Freezing is more like it. So you’ll have to cope until we get back to the Empress. It’ll only be two weeks.”

  Two weeks? Ford thought of what his dad and mum would say to him when he turned up again, after being missing for so long. His mouth dried, his heart pounded. He wondered desperately what kind of lie he might tell to get himself out of trouble. Maybe that he’d been kidnapped? It had almost really happened. Kidnapped and taken to work in the iron mines, right, and … somehow escaped, and …

  Billy retreated to his Gamebuke again, as Ford sat there trying to imagine what he might say. The stories became wilder, more unbelievable, as they grew more elaborate; and gradually he found himself drifting away from purposeful lies altogether, dreamily wondering what it might be like if he never went back to face the music at all.

  After all, Sam was going to do it; Sam was clever and funny and brave, and he was walking away from the Collective to a new life. Why couldn’t Ford have a new life too? What if he became a Hauler, like Billy, and lived out the rest of his life up here where there were no limits to the world? Blatchford the MAC boy would vanish and he could be just Ford, himself, not part of anything. Free.

  V

  It took them most of a week to get to Depot South. Ford enjoyed every minute of it, even getting used to the idea of postponing his bath for two weeks. Mostly he rode up front with Billy, as Bill stayed in the back sulking. Billy told him stories as they rocketed along, and taught him the basics of driving the freighter; it was harder than driving a tractor but not by as much as Ford would have thought.

  “Look at you, holding our Evelyn on the road!” said Billy, chuckling. “You are one strong kid, for your age. Li’l Bill can’t drive her at all yet.”

  “I’m a better navigator than you are!” yelled Bill from the back, in tones of outrage.

  “He is, actually,” said Billy. “Best navigator I ever saw. Half the time I have to get him to figure coordinat
es for me. You ever get lost in a storm or anything, you’ll wish you had li’l Bill there with you.” He looked carefully into the back to see if Bill was watching, and then unzipped a pouch in his psuit and took out a small bottle. Quickly he shook two tiny red pills into his palm and popped them into his mouth.

  “What’re those?” Ford asked.

  “Freddie Stay-awakes,” said Billy in a low voice. “Just getting ready for another night shift. We’re going to set a new record for getting to the Depot, man.”

  “We don’t have to hurry or anything,” said Ford. “Really.”

  “Yeah, we do,” said Billy, looking uncomfortable for the first time since Ford had known him. “Fun’s fun, and everything, but … your people must be kind of wondering where you are, you know? I mean, it was a good idea to get you away from Mother’s Boys and all, but we don’t want people thinking you’re dead, huh?”

  “I guess not,” said Ford. He looked sadly up at the monitor, at the wide-open world. The thought of going back into the Tubes, into the reeking dark of the cowsheds and the muddy trenches, made him despair.

  * * *

  Depot South loomed ahead of them at last, a low rise of ice above the plain. At first, Ford was disappointed; he had expected a gleaming white mountain, but Billy explained that the glacier was sanded all over with red dust from the windstorms. As the hours went by and they drew closer, Ford saw a low-lying mist of white, from which the glacier rose like an island. Later, two smaller islands seemed to rise from it as well, one on either side of the road.

  “There’s old Jack and Jim!” cried Billy. “We’re almost there, when we see Jack and Jim.”

  Ford watched them with interest. As they drew near, he laughed; for they looked like a pair of bearded giants hacked out of the red stone. One was sitting up, peering from blind hollow eyes and holding what appeared to be a mug clutched to his stomach. The other reclined, with his big hands folded peacefully on his chest.

  “How’d they get there?” he exclaimed, delighted.

  “The glacier deposited them,” said Bill, who had come out of the back to see.

  “No! No! You have to tell him the story,” said Billy gleefully. “See, Jack and Jim were these two Haulers, come up from Australia. So they liked their beer cold, see? Really cold.

  “So they go into the Empress, and Mother, she says, Welcome, my dears, have a drop of good cheer, warm buttery beer won’t cost you dear. But Jack and Jim, both he and him, they liked their beer cold. Really cold!

  “Says one to the other, like brother to brother, there must be a place in this here space where a cobber can swill a nice bit of chill, if he likes his beer cold. Really cold.

  “So they bought them a keg, and off they legged it for the Pole, the pole, where it’s nice and cold, and they chopped out a hole in the ice-wall so, and that keg they stowed in the ice, cobber, ever so nice. And it got cold. Really cold.

  “So they drank it down and another round and another one still and they drank until they set and they sot and they clean forgot, where the white mists creep they fell asleep, and they got cold. Really cold.

  “In fact they froze, from nose to toes, and there they are to this very day, and the moral is, don’t die that way! ’Cause what’s right for Oz ain’t right on Moz, ’cause up here it’s cold. Really cold!”

  Billy laughed like a loon, pounding his fist on the console. Bill just rolled his eyes.

  “They’re only a couple of boulders,” he said.

  “But you used to love that song,” said Billy plaintively.

  “When I was three, maybe,” said Bill, turning and going into the back. “You’d better get him out one of your extra psuits. He won’t fit in any of mine.”

  “He used to sing it with me,” said Billy to Ford, looking crestfallen.

  * * *

  They pulled into Depot South, and once again Ford expected to see buildings, but there were none; only a confused impression of tumbled rock on the monitor. He looked up at it as Billy helped him into a psuit.

  “Is it colder out there?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” said Bill, getting down three helmets from a locker. “You’re at the South Pole, dummy.”

  “Aw, now, he’s never been there, has he?” said Billy, adjusting the fit of the suit for Ford. “That feel okay?”

  “I guess it—whoa!” said Ford, for once the fastenings had been sealed up the suit seemed to flex, like a hand closing around him, and though it felt warm and snug it was still a slightly creepy sensation. “What’s it doing?”

  “Just kind of programming itself so it gets to know you,” Billy explained, accepting a helmet from Bill. “That’s how it keeps you alive, see? Just settles in real close and puts a couple of sensors places you don’t notice. Anything goes wrong, it’ll try to fix you, and if it can’t, it’ll flash lights at you so you know.”

  “Like that?” Ford pointed at the little red light flashing on Billy’s psuit readout panel. Billy looked down at it.

  “Oh. No, that’s just a short circuit or glitch or something. It’s been doing that all the time lately when nothing’s wrong.”

  “Some people take their suits into the shop when they need repair, you know,” said Bill, putting on his own helmet. “Just an idea, Dad. Hope it’s not too radical for you.”

  As Billy helped him seal up his helmet, Ford looked at Bill and thought: You’re a mean little twit. I’d give anything if my dad was like yours.

  But when they stepped Outside, he forgot about Bill and even about Billy. He barely noticed the cold, though it was so intense it took his breath away and the psuit helpfully turned up its thermostat for him. Depot South had all his attention.

  They were surrounded on three sides by towering walls, cloudy white swirled through with colors like an Ice Pop, green and blue blue blue and lavender, all scarred and rough, faceted and broken. Underneath his feet was a confusion of crushed and broken rock, pea-sized gravel to cobbles, ice mixed with grit and stone, and a roiling mist swirled about his ankles.

  Here and there were carvings in the ice wall, roughly gouged and hacked: HAULERS RULE OK and BARSOOM BRUCE GOT HERE ALIVE, and one that simply said THANKS MARSWIFE, over a niche that had been scraped from the ice where somebody had left a little figurine like the one on Beautiful Evelyn’s console. There were figures carved too; on a section of green ice, Ford noticed a four-armed giant with tusks.

  Behind him, he became aware of a clatter as Billy and Bill opened a panel in the freighter’s side and drew out something between them. He turned to see Billy hoisting a laser-saw, and heard the hummzap as it was turned on.

  “Okay!” said Billy, his voice coming tinnily over the speaker. “Let’s go cut some ice!”

  He went up to the nearest wall, hefted the laser, and disappeared in a cloud of white steam. A moment later, a great chunk of ice came hurtling out of the steam, and bounced and rolled to Bill’s feet. He picked it up, as another block bounded out.

  “Grab that,” said Bill. “If we don’t start loading this stuff, Dad will be up to his neck in ice.”

  Ford obeyed, and followed Bill around to the rear of the freighter, where a sort of escalator ramp had been lowered, and watched as Bill dropped the block to the ramp. It traveled swiftly up the ramp to a hopper at the top of Beautiful Evelyn’s tank, where it vanished with a grinding roar, throwing up a rainbowed shatter of ice-shards and vapor against the sunlight. Fascinated, Ford set his block on the ramp and watched as the same thing happened.

  “What’s it doing?”

  “Making carbon dioxide snowcones, what do you think?” said Bill. “And we take the whole lot back to Settlement Base, and sell it to the MAC.”

  “You do?” Ford was astonished. “What do we need it for?”

  “Hel-LO, terraforming, remember?” said Bill. “Making Mars green like Earth? What the MAC was brought up here to do?”

  He turned and trudged back around the side of the freighter, and Ford walked after him thinking: I’ll bet you
wouldn’t hold that nose so high up in the air if I bashed it with my forehead.

  But he said nothing, and for the next hour they worked steadily as machines, going back and forth with ice blocks to the ramp. The tank was nearly full when they heard the drone of icecutting stop.

  “That’s not enough, Dad,” Bill called, and nobody answered. He turned and ran. Ford walked around the side of the freighter and saw him kneeling beside Billy, who had fallen and lay with the white mist curling over his body.

  Ford gasped and ran to them. The whole front of Billy’s psuit was lit with blinking colors, dancing over a readout panel that had activated. Bill was bending close, waving away the mist to peer at it. Ford leaned down and saw Billy’s face slack within the helmet, his eyes staring and blank.

  “What’s wrong with him?” said Ford.

  “He’s had a blowout,” said Bill flatly.

  “What’s a blowout?”

  “Blood vessel goes bang. Happens sometimes to people who go Outside a lot.” Bill rested his hand on his father’s chest. He felt something in one of the sealed pouches; he opened it, and drew out the bottle of Freddie Stay-awakes. After staring at it for a long moment, his face contorted. He hurled the bottle at the ice-wall, where it popped open and scattered red pills like beads of blood.

  “I knew it! I knew he’d do this! I knew this would happen someday!” he shouted. Ford felt like crying, but he fought it back and said:

  “Is he going to die?”

  “What do you think?” said Bill. “We’re at the bloody South Pole! We’re a week away from the infirmary!”

  “But—could we maybe keep him alive until we get back?”

  Bill turned to him, and a little of the incandescent rage faded from his eyes. “We might,” he said. “The psuit’s doing what it can. We have some emergency medical stuff. You don’t understand, though. His brain’s turning to goo in there.”

  “Maybe it isn’t,” said Ford. “Please! We have to try.”

  “He’ll die anyway,” said Bill, but he got Billy under the shoulders and tried to lift him. Ford came around and took his place, lifting Billy easily; Bill grabbed his father’s legs, and between them they hoisted Billy up and carried him into the cab.