Zima Blue and Other Stories

by Alastair Reynolds

  It was real.

  ‘Take me back to the infirmary, Renfrew. Please.’ Solovyova paused. ‘I think I’m ready to die now.’

  He put on a suit and buried Solovyova beyond the outer perimeter, close to the mass grave where he had buried the last survivors when Solovyova had been too weak to help. The routine felt familiar enough, but when Renfrew turned back to the base he felt a wrenching sense of difference. The low-lying huddle of soil-covered domes, tubes and cylinders hadn’t changed in any tangible way, except that it was now truly uninhabited. He was walking back towards an empty house, and even when Solovyova had been ill - even when Solovyova had been only half-present - that had never been the case.

  The moment reached a kind of crescendo. He considered his options. He could return to the base, alone, and survive months or years on the dwindling resources at his disposal. Tharsis Base would keep him alive indefinitely provided he did not fall ill: food and water were not a problem, and the climate recycling systems were deliberately rugged. But there would be no companionship. No network, no music or film, no television or VR. Nothing to look forward to except endless bleak days until something killed him.

  Or he could do it here, now. All it would take was a twist of his faceplate release control. He had already worked out how to override the safety lock. A few roaring seconds of pain and it would all be over. And if he lacked the courage to do it that way - and he thought he probably did - then he could sit down and wait until his air supply ran low.

  There were a hundred ways he could do it, if he had the will.

  He looked at the base, stark under the pale butterscotch of the sky. The choice was laughably simple. Die here, now, or die in there, much later. Either way, his choice would be unrecorded. There would be no eulogies to his bravery, for there was no one left to write eulogies.

  ‘Why me?’ he asked aloud. ‘Why is it me who has to go through with this?’

  He’d felt no real anger until that moment. Now he felt like shouting, but all he could do was fall to his knees and whimper. The question circled in his head, chasing its own tail.

  ‘Why me?’ he said. ‘Why is it me? Why the fuck is it me who has to ask this question?’

  Finally he fell silent. He remained frozen in that position, staring down through the scuffed glass of his faceplate at the radiation-blasted soil between his knees. For five or six minutes he listened to the sound of his own sobbing. Then a small, polite voice advised him that he needed to return to the base to replenish his air supply. He listened to that voice as it shifted from polite to stern, then from stern to strident, until it was screaming into his skull, the boundary of his faceplate flashing brilliant red.

  Then he stood up, already light-headed, already feeling the weird euphoric intoxication of asphyxia, and made his ambling way back towards the base.

  He had made a choice. Like it said in the psych report, he was a practical-minded survivor type. He would not give in.

  Not until it got a lot harder.

  Renfrew made it through his first night alone.

  It was easier than he had expected, although he was careful not to draw any comfort from that. He knew that there would be much harder days and nights ahead. It might happen a day or a week or even a year from now, but when it did he was sure that his little breakdown outside would shrink to insignificance. For now he was stumbling through fog, fully aware that a precipice lay before him, and that eventually he would have to step over that precipice if he hoped to find anything resembling mental equilibrium and true acceptance.

  He wandered the corridors and bubbles of the base. Everything looked shockingly familiar. Books were where he had left them; the coffee cups and dishes still waiting to be washed. The views through the windows hadn’t become mysteriously more threatening overnight, and he had no sense that the interior of the base had become less hospitable. There were no strange new sounds to make the back of his neck tingle; no shadows flitting at the corner of his eye; no blood-freezing sense of scrutiny by an unseen watcher.

  And yet . . . and yet. He knew something was not quite right. After he had attended to his usual chores - cleaning this or that air filter, lubricating this or that seal, studying the radio logs to make sure no one had attempted contact from home - he again made his way to the recreation bubble.

  The piano was still there, but something was different about it today. Now there was a single gold candelabrum sitting above the keyboard. The candles burned, wavering slightly.

  It was as if the piano was readying itself.

  Renfrew leaned through the piano and passed his fingers through the candle flames. They were as insubstantial as the instrument itself. Even so, he could not help but sniff the tips of his fingers. His brain refused to accept that the flames were unreal, and expected a whiff of carbon or charred skin.

  Renfrew remembered something.

  He had spent so long in the base, so long inside its electronic cocoon, that until this moment he had forgotten precisely how the bubble worked. The things that appeared inside it were not true holograms, but projections mapped into his visual field. They were woven by tiny implants buried in the eye, permitting the images to have a sense of solidity that would have been impossible with any kind of projected hologram. The surgical procedure to embed the implants had taken about thirty seconds, and from that moment on he had never really needed to think about it. The implants enabled the base staff to digest information in vastly richer form than allowed by flat screens and clumsy holographics. When Renfrew examined a mineral sample, for instance, the implant would overlay his visual impression of the rock with an X-ray tomographic view of the rock’s interior. The implants had also permitted access to recreational recordings . . . but Renfrew had always been too busy for that kind of thing. When the implants began to fail - they’d never been designed to last more than a year or two in vivo, before replacement - Renfrew had thought no more of the matter.

  But what if his had started working again? In that case it was no wonder Solovyova had not been able to see the piano. Some projection system had decided to switch on again, accessing some random fragment from the entertainment archives, and his reactivated implant had chosen to allow him to see it.

  It meant there was still a kind of hope.

  ‘Hello.’

  Renfrew flinched at the voice. The source of it was immediately obvious: a small man had appeared out of nowhere at the end of the piano. The small man stood for a moment, pivoting around as if to acknowledge a vast and distant invisible audience, his eyes - largely hidden behind ostentatious pink glasses - only meeting Renfrew’s for the briefest of instants. The man settled onto a stool that had also appeared at the end of the piano, tugged up the sleeves of the plum paisley suit jacket he wore and began to play the piano. The man’s fingers were curiously stubby, but they moved up and down the keyboard with a beguiling ease.

  Transfixed, Renfrew listened to the man play. It was the first real music he had heard in two years. The man could have played the most uncompromisingly difficult exercise in atonality and it would still have sounded agreeable to Renfrew’s ears. But it was much easier than that. The man played the piano and sang a song, one that Renfrew recognised - albeit barely - from his childhood. It had been an old song even then, but one that was still played on the radio with some regularity. The man sang about a trip to Mars: a song about a man who did not expect to see home again.

  The song concerned a rocket man.

  Renfrew maintained the ritual that he and Solovyova had established before her death. Once a week, without fail, he cocked an ear to Earth to see if anyone was sending.

  The ritual had become less easy in recent weeks. The linkage between the antenna and the inside of the base had broken, so he had to go outside to perform the chore. It meant pre-breathing; it meant suiting up; it meant a desolate trudge from the airlock to the ladder on the side of the comms module, and then a careful ascent to the module’s roof, where the antenna was mounted on a turret-like
plinth. He’d spend at least half an hour scooping handfuls of storm dust from the steering mechanism, before flipping open the cover on the manual control panel, powering up the system and tapping a familiar string of commands into the keyboard.

  After a few moments the antenna would begin to move, grinding as it overcame the resistance of the dust that had already seeped into its innards. It swung and tilted on multiple axes, until the openwork mesh of the dish was locked on to Earth. Then the system waited and listened, LEDs blinking on the status board, but none of them brightening to the hard, steady green that would mean the antenna had locked on to the expected carrier signal. Occasionally the lights would flicker green, as if the antenna was picking up ghost echoes from something out there, but they never lasted.

  Renfrew had to keep trying. He wasn’t expecting rescue, not any more. He’d resigned himself to the idea that he was going to die on Mars, alone. But it would still be some comfort to know that there were survivors back on Earth; that there were still people who could begin to rebuild civilisation. Better still if they had the kindness to signal him, to let him know what was happening. Even if only a few thousand people had survived, it wouldn’t take much for one of them to remember the Mars colony, and wonder what was happening up there.

  But Earth remained silent. Some part of Renfrew knew that there would never be a signal, no matter how many times he swung the dish around and listened. And one day soon the dish was simply not going to work, and he was not going to be able to repair it. Dutifully, when he had powered down the antenna and returned to the inside of the base, he made a neat entry in the communications log, signing his name at the top of the page.

  On his rounds of the base, Renfrew made similar entries in many other logs. He noted breakdowns and his own ramshackle repair efforts. He took stock of spare parts and tools, entering the broken or life-expired items into the resupply request form. He noted the health of the plants in the aeroponics lab, sketching their leaves and marking the ebb and flow of various diseases. He kept a record of the Martian weather, as it tested the base’s integrity, and at the back of his mind he always imagined Solovyova nodding in approval, pleased with his stoic refusal to slide into barbarism.

  But in all his bookkeeping, Renfrew never once referred to the man at the piano. He couldn’t quite explain this omission, but something held him back from mentioning the apparition. He felt he could rationalise the appearance of the piano, even of the personality that was programmed to play it, but he still wasn’t sure that any of it was real.

  Not that that stopped the piano man from appearing.

  Once or twice a day, most days, he assumed existence at the piano and played a song or two. Sometimes Renfrew was there when it happened; sometimes he was elsewhere in the base when he heard the music starting up. Always he dropped whatever he was doing and raced to the recreation bubble, and listened.

  The tunes were seldom the same from day to day, and the small man himself never looked quite the same. His clothes were always different, but there was more to it than that. Sometimes he had a shapeless mop of auburn hair. At other times he was balding or concealed his crown beneath a variety of ostentatious hats. He frequently wore glasses of elaborate, ludicrous design.

  The man had never introduced himself, but once or twice Renfrew felt that he was close to remembering his name. He racked his memory for the names of twentieth-century musicians, feeling sure it would come to him eventually.

  In the meantime he found that it helped to have someone to talk to. Between songs the man would sometimes sit silently, hands folded in his lap, as if waiting for some instruction or request from Renfrew. That was when Renfrew talked aloud, unburdening himself of whatever thoughts had been spinning around in his skull since the last visitation. He told the man about the problems with the base, about his loneliness, about the despair he felt every time the antenna failed to pick up anything from Earth. And the man simply sat and listened, and when Renfrew was done - when he had said his piece - the man would unlace his fingers and start playing something.

  Now and then the man did speak, but he never seemed to be addressing Renfrew so much as a larger, unseen audience. He’d introduce the songs, tell a few jokes between numbers, throw out an offer to take requests. Renfrew sometimes answered, sometimes tried to persuade the pianist to play one of the songs he’d already performed, but nothing he said seemed to reach him.

  But still, it was better than nothing. Although the style of the music never varied greatly, and one or two of the songs began occasionally to chafe at Renfrew’s nerves, he was generally happiest when the music was playing. He liked ‘Song for Guy’, ‘I Guess that’s Why They Call It the Blues’ and ‘Tiny Dancer’. When the piano man was playing, he did not feel truly alone.

  Renfrew made a point of tending Solovyova’s grave. He cared about the other dead, but Solovyova mattered more: she’d been the last to go, the last human being Renfrew would ever know in his life. It would be too much work to keep the dust from covering the mass burial site, but he could at least do something for Solovyova. Sometimes he detoured to clean her grave when he was outside on antenna duty; other times he pre-breathed and suited up just for Solovyova; and always when he returned to the base he felt cleansed, renewed of purpose, determined that he could get through the days ahead.

  That feeling didn’t last long. But at least tending the grave kept the darkness at bay for a while.

  There were moments when his stratagems failed, when the reality of his situation came crashing back in its full existential horror, but when that happened he was able to slam a mental door almost as soon as the scream had begun. As time had passed he had found that he became more adept at it, so that the moments of horror became only instants, like blank white frames spliced into the movie of his life.

  When he was outside, he often found himself watching the sky, especially when the cold sun was low and twilight stars began to stud the butterscotch sky. A thought occurred to him, clean and bright and diamond hard: humanity might be gone, but did that necessarily mean he was the last intelligent creature in the universe? What if there was someone else out there?

  How did that change the way he felt?

  And what if there was in fact no one else out there at all: just empty light-years, empty parsecs, empty megaparsecs, all the way out to the farthest, faintest galaxies, teetering on the very edge of the visible universe?

  How did that make him feel?

  Cold. Alone. Fragile.

  Curiously precious.

  PART TWO

  Weeks slipped into months, months slipped into a long Martian year. The base kept functioning, despite Renfrew’s grimmest expectations. Certain systems actually seemed to be more stable than at any time since Solovyova’s death, as if they’d grudgingly decided to cooperate in keeping him alive. For the most part, Renfrew was glad that he did not have to worry about the base failing him. It was only in his darkest moments that he wished for the base to kill him, swiftly, painlessly, perhaps when he was already asleep and dreaming of better times. There’d be nothing undignified about going out that way; nothing that violated the terms of his vow to Solovyova. She wouldn’t think badly of him for wishing death on those terms.

  But the fatal failure never came, and for many days in a given month Renfrew managed not to think about suicide. He supposed that he had passed through the anger and denial phases of his predicament, into something like acceptance.

  It helped to have someone to talk to.

  He spoke to the piano man a lot now, quite unselfconsciously. The odd thing was that the piano man spoke back too. On one level, Renfrew was well aware that the responses were entirely in his imagination: his brain had started filling in the other half of the one-sided conversation, based around the speech patterns that the piano man used between songs. On another level the responses seemed completely real and completely outside his own control, as if he no longer had access to the part of his brain that was generating them. A form of psyc
hosis, perhaps; but even if that were the case, it was benign, even comforting, in its effects. If the thing that kept him sane was a little self-administered madness, confined solely to the piano man, then that seemed a small price to pay.

  He still didn’t know the man’s real name. It was nearly there, but Renfrew could never quite bring it to mind. The piano man offered no clues. He introduced his songs by name, often spinning elaborate stories around them, but never had cause to say who he was. Renfrew had tried to access the rec system’s software files, but he’d given up as soon as he was confronted by screen after screen of scrolling possibilities. He could have delved deeper, but he was wary of breaking the fragile spell that had brought the piano man into existence in the first place. Renfrew reckoned it was better not to know, than lose that one flicker of companionship.

  ‘It’s not exactly a rich human life,’ Renfrew said.

  ‘Probably not.’ Piano Man glanced at the window, out towards the point where the others had been buried. ‘But you have to admit, it’s a hell of a lot better than the alternative.’