But they’d really been here. Unlike any mock-up I’d been in, for instance, there was really no floor. Floor was a concept the sloths had never got their furry heads around, the walls merging like an inverted cave roof. Supposedly they’d evolved on a densely forested planet where gruesome predators used to live on the ground. The sloths must have come down at some point - they hadn’t evolved an advanced civilisation by wiping their bottoms on leaves all day - but that dislike of the ground must have remained with them. Just as we humans still liked to shut out the dark, the sloths liked to get off the ground and just hang around.
It was all very interesting; I would have been happy to spend hours there, but not all in one go. After two hours of showing scholarly fascination in every exhibit, I’d had enough six-limbed furry aliens to last me a fortnight.
We met up in the souvenir shop attached to the grotto. I bought a T-shirt with a tasteful sloth motif on it; very discreet, with the words Sloth Grotto, Golombek, Mars in writing that had been made to look slightly like sloth script if you were not an expert in xenolinguistics.
‘Well,’ I said, beginning to feel just the tiniest bit tired. ‘That was fun. What next?’
‘The lander’s not far from here,’ he said. ‘We could check it out, if you like.’
I should have talked him out of it.
It was all very well, D’Oliveira and the others talking as if they were distinct individuals, but the tiny, single-seat lander would be in screaming contradiction to that. Something was surely bound to happen . . . but I’d hardly be able to write up my story without dealing with the lander issue.
More than that, D’Oliveira seemed willing to go along with it.
It was another tram ride to the outskirts of Golombek. The city was the first port of call for people coming down from space, so it was teeming at all hours with red-eyed newcomers. Most of the shops, bars and restaurants stayed open around the clock, and that also went for the major tourist attractions. Of these, the Hydra was easily the oldest. There’d been a time - long before I was born - when you actually had to take a tour from Golombek to the landing site, but that wasn’t the case now. The mountain had come to Mohammed; the city’s outskirts surrounding the ship in a pincer movement.
D’Oliveira and I spent a while looking down from the pressurised viewing gallery. On either side the city reached away from us in a horseshoe shape, enclosing a square half-kilometre of Martian surface. The lander was in the middle: a tiny lopsided silver cone looking slightly less impressive than the one in the paperweight Jim had shown me. I looked at the other visitors, and observed the way they couldn’t quite hide their disappointment. I couldn’t blame them: I remembered the way I’d first felt on seeing Hydra.
Is that all there is?
But I was older now, and I didn’t feel the same way. Yes, it was tiny; yes, it looked barely capable of surviving the next dust storm - but that was the point. If the lander had been more impressive, Jim Grossart’s achievement wouldn’t have been half the thing it was.
‘Fancy taking a closer look?’ I said eventually.
‘For old time’s sake . . . why not?’
I should have realised then, of course: there was something different about his voice.
We made our way from the gallery to the surface level. People were waiting to board robot buses that followed a pre-programmed track around the landing site, exactly the way I’d done as a child.
‘We don’t need to do it like that,’ he said. ‘You can rent a spacesuit and walk out there if you like.’
‘All the way to the lander?’
‘No, they don’t allow that. But you can still get a lot closer than with the buses.’
I looked out into the arena and saw that there were three people wandering around in sand-coloured suits. One was taking photos of the other two standing in front of the lander, obviously trying to frame the picture so that the backdrop didn’t include any parts of the city. My companion was right: the people in suits were nearer to the ship than the buses allowed, but they were still forty or fifty metres from the lander, and they didn’t seem inclined to get any closer.
Most of the tourists couldn’t be bothered with the hassle of renting the suits, so it didn’t take long to get outfitted.
‘I think they come in two sizes,’ I said, when we were waiting in the airlock. ‘Too small and too large.’
He looked at me without a trace of humour. ‘They’ll suffice.’
The penny dropped. ‘Of course, Brad.’
We stepped outside. It was dark overhead, but the landing site was daytime-bright, almost shadowless. The lander stood two hundred metres from us, surrounded by a collection of equipment modules, surface rovers, scientific instruments and survival packages. It looked like a weatherworn Celtic obelisk encircled by a collection of marginally less sacred stones.
‘Well, Brad,’ I said. ‘I’ve heard a lot about you.’
‘I know what you’ve heard.’
‘You do?’
We started walking across the rust-coloured ground.
‘I know what Grossart and D’Oliveira say about me, don’t you worry.’
‘What, that you’re not as convinced as they are that coming to Mars was such a good idea? It’s hardly intended as criticism. Everyone’s entitled to an opinion.’
Even three at the same time, I thought.
‘They’re right, of course - I don’t think we should have come here - but if that was all they said . . .’ He paused, allowing a glass-bodied bus to cross in front of us, surfing through the loosely packed dust on its wide balloon wheels. The tourists were crammed inside, but some of them looked more interested in their snacks than in the Hydra.
‘What else do they say, Brad?’
‘You know, of course, so why pretend otherwise?’
‘I’m really not sure—’
‘The explosion, damn you. The one that happened in mid-crossing. The one that nearly prevented us landing at all. They say I did it; tried to sabotage the mission.’
‘Actually, they hardly mentioned it at all, if ever.’
‘Oh, you’re good, I’ll grant you that.’
‘I know, but that’s not the point. You couldn’t have sabotaged the mission, anyway—’ But I stopped, because there was only one place that particular argument was headed. Because you didn’t exist then, just as you don’t exist now. Because back then Jim Grossart was all there was . . .
I said, lamely: ‘Even if you’d had second thoughts, you wouldn’t have done something like that.’
‘No.’ His voice was softer now - almost trusting. ‘But perhaps I should have.’
‘I don’t agree. Mars wasn’t some pristine wilderness before we came, Brad. It was nothing; just a miserably cold and sterile blank canvas. We haven’t ruined it, haven’t spoiled anything.’
He stopped and looked around, taking in the tiered galleries of the city that leaned over us like a frozen wave. ‘You call this an improvement?’
‘On nothing at all, yes.’
‘I call it an abomination.’
‘Christ, we’ve only been here a century. This is just our first draft at living on Mars. So what if it isn’t the best we could ever do? There’ll be time for us to do better.’
He didn’t answer for a few seconds. ‘You sound like you agree with Jim Grossart.’
‘No; I could live without some of the things Jim seems to cherish, believe me. Maybe when it all comes home, I’m closer to Manuel D’Oliveira. ’
We carried on walking again, approaching the lander’s encirclement.
‘That mystical fool?’
‘He may be a mystical fool, but he can sure as hell do the big dive.’ I paused, wondering why I was defending one aspect of a man’s personality against another. But D’Oliveira felt as real to me then as anyone I’d ever met, as equally worthy of my loyalty. ‘And he’s right, too - not coming to Mars would have been the greatest mistake humanity could have made. I’m not just talking about the
relics either. They’ll open a few doors for us, but even if we’d come here and found nothing but dust, it would still have been right. It’s the space Mars gives us that makes the difference; the room to make mistakes.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘We already made the greatest mistake. And I could have stopped it.’
We were close to the lander now - no more than forty-odd metres from it, I’d have guessed, but I noticed that the other people were no nearer. Walking side by side, we took a few more footsteps towards the centre, but then our suits began to warn us against getting closer: lights flashing around the faceplate and a softly insistent voice in the headphones. I felt my suit stiffen slightly as well - it was suddenly harder to take the next step.
‘Then speak out about it,’ I said forcefully. ‘Come out of hiding. Tell everyone what you think. I guarantee they’ll listen. No one else has your perspective.’
‘That’s the problem. Too much perspective.’
We were close enough to the lander now that he must have been finding it hard to sustain the illusion that three men had come down in it. I’d feared this moment and at the same time felt a spine-tingling sense of anticipation about what would happen.
‘I’ll make sure they listen, Brad. That was why Jim contacted me, wasn’t it? To have his story heard, his views on Mars known? And didn’t he mean for all of you to have your say?’
‘No.’ He began fiddling with the latch of his helmet. ‘Because it wasn’t Jim who contacted you, it was me. Jim Grossart isn’t real, don’t you understand? There was only ever me.’ He nodded at the lander, even while he struggled with his helmet. ‘You don’t think I’m stupid, do you?’
I tried to pull his hands away from the neck-ring. ‘What are you doing?’ I shouted.
‘What I always planned to do. What it took me seventeen years to summon up the courage to do.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Words won’t make a difference now. Mars needs something stronger. It needs a martyr.’
‘No!’
I fought with him, but he was a lot stronger than me. There was no unnecessary violence in the way he pushed me away - it was done as gently as circumstances allowed - but I ended up on my back in the dust, looking up as he removed his helmet and took a last long inhalation of thin, cold Martian air.
He took a few steps towards the lander, his skin turning blue, his eyes frosting over, and then stumbled, one arm extended, fingers grasping towards the Hydra. Then his suit must have locked rigid, immobilising him.
He looked like a statue that had been there for years.
It shouldn’t have been possible, I kept telling myself. There are supposed to be safeguards that stop you doing that kind of thing in anything less than a breathable atmosphere; rigidly adhered-to rules ensuring that equipment for hire is checked and rechecked for compliance; doubly and triply redundant protective systems.
But I guess the suits we’d rented just didn’t quite live up to those high ideals.
He died, but that means even less now than it did once upon a time. They got him inside reasonably quickly, and though the exposure to the Martian atmosphere had done a lot of harm, and although there was extensive neural damage, all of these things could be repaired given time and - more importantly - money.
‘Who’s the old man, anyway?’ the medics asked me, after I had arranged for my firm to pay for his medical care, no matter how long it took. That had taken some arguing, incidentally, especially after I told them there wasn’t going to be a story for a while.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘He never did tell me his name, but he was interesting enough company.’
The tech smiled. ‘We ran a gene profile, but the old coot didn’t show up in the records. Doesn’t mean much, of course.’
‘No. A lot of people with criminal pasts vanished during the turmoil.’
‘Yeah,’ the medic said, already losing interest.
They kept talking about him as an old man, and it wasn’t until I saw his comatose body that I understood why. He did look much older than he had ever seemed in any of his three guises, as if even his semblance of middle age had been an illusion.
His coma was deep, and the restorative brain surgery was performed slowly and painstakingly. I followed the progress closely at first - checking up on him every week, then every month. But nothing ever happened; he never showed any signs of emerging and all the usual techniques for kick-starting a mind back to consciousness were unsuccessful. The medics kept suggesting they call it a day, but so long as funds were arriving from my firm, they didn’t mind wasting their time.
I checked on his progress every six months, then perhaps once a year.
And life, of course, went on. I couldn’t see any dignified way of finishing the story - not while the principle player was in a coma - so it just stalled while I covered other pieces. Some of them were moderately big, and after a while there came a point when I consigned the whole Jim Grossart story to the bottom drawer: a wild goose chase that hadn’t ended up anywhere. I even stopped being sure that I’d ever met him at all. After that, it was a simple matter of forgetting all about him.
I don’t think I’ve given him a moment’s thought in the last two or three years.
Until today.
I still visit Sloths now and then. It happens to be a reasonably trendy media hangout now, a place to pick up the ground tremors of rumour ahead of the pack.
And there he was, in approximately the same window seat where Jim Grossart had sat ten years ago, looking out at the divers. I read his expression in the window, one of calm, critical detachment, like a judge at a major sporting event.
His face was that of a young man I recognised, but had only ever seen in photographs.
I looked at him for long moments. Perhaps it was just a genetic fluke that had shaped this man who looked like the young Jim Grossart, but I doubted it. It was the way he sat, the stiff, slightly formal bearing. Except that hadn’t been Jim, had it?
Manuel D’Oliveira.
I stared for a moment too long, and somehow my eye caught his, and we found ourselves staring at each other across the room. He didn’t turn around from the window but after a few seconds he smiled and nodded.
The bar was packed that night, and a crowd of drinkers surged in front of me, interrupting my line of sight.
When they’d passed, the table was vacant.
I checked with the hospital the day after - it had been at least two years since I’d been in touch - and I was informed that the old man had at last emerged into consciousness. There’d been nothing unusual about him, they said; nothing odd about his psychology.
‘What happened then?’ I said.
‘The funds allowed for some fairly simple rejuvenative procedures,’ the medic said, as if restoring youth was about as technically complex - and as interesting - as splinting a fracture.
He hadn’t left any means for me to contact him, though.
It might not have been him, I know. It might never have been Jim Grossart I met, and the young man in Sloths could have been anyone with the same set of blandly handsome facial genes.
But there was one other thing.
The old man had emerged from his coma eighteen months before the meeting in the bar, and his rejuvenation had taken place not long after. Which might have meant nothing, except there was something different about the night I saw him. Something that was entirely consistent with him having been Manuel D’Oliveira. It was the night the starship left Mars’ orbit - the one they’ve been building there for the last five years, the one that’s going out into the galaxy to search for the sloth.
The ship they’ve named the Captain James Grossart.
I like to think he was on his way up to her. I checked the ship’s manifest, of course, and there was no one called Grossart, or D’Oliveira, or even Treichler - but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t him. He’d be travelling under a new name now, one I couldn’t even guess. No one would know who he was; just a young
man who had volunteered to join the starship’s crew; a young man whose interest in the aliens might at times verge on the mystical.
And - on his way up - he hadn’t been able to resist one last look at the divers.
Maybe I’m wrong; maybe it was only ever my subconscious playing tricks with a stranger’s face, supplying the closure my journalistic instincts demanded, but, the way I see it, it almost doesn’t matter. Because all I was ever looking for was a way to finish their story.
Now it can be told.
Things get easier when you break into novels, and they get harder, too. Easier because people suddenly start approaching you to write stories for them, and markets that once seemed closed now appear, if not open, then at least theoretically crackable. But by the same token a contract to write novels usually means deadlines, and all of a sudden you find that novels have to take precedence over short fiction if your writing time is finite. I went from being very prolific in the late nineties to not very prolific at all as the new century rolled in. ‘The Real Story’ is one of the few original pieces I finished in 2000. Written for Peter Crowther’s Mars Probes original anthology, it was a story that had been at the back of my mind for more than a few years, kicked off by watching a TV documentary about people with multiple-personality disorder. The heroine of the story, ace reporter Carrie Clay, shows up in ‘Zima Blue’ nearly a thousand years later. Carrie’s universe is one where FTL travel is not only possible but easy, and - I’d suggest - not a bad place to live, especially compared to the backgrounds of some of my other stories. One day I’d like to have enough stories to collect a book full of Carrie tales. At the current rate of one every four years, though, no one should hold their breath.
Zima Blue and Other Stories Page 4