The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 26 (Mammoth Books)

by Gardner Dozois

  ONE DAY, MIDWAY in the course of her life, Mai Kumal learned that her father had died. The solicitous eidolon that delivered the message explained that Thierry had suffered an irreversible cardiac event, and extended an invitation to travel to Dione, one of Saturn’s moons, so that Mai could help scatter her father’s ashes according to his last wishes.

  Mai’s daughter didn’t think it was a good idea. “When did you last speak with him? Ten years ago?”

  “Fourteen.”

  “Well then.”

  Mai said, “It was as much my fault as his that we lost contact with each other.”

  “But he left you in the first place. Left us.”

  Shahirah had a deeply moral sense of right and wrong. She hadn’t spoken to or forgiven her own father after he and Mai had divorced.

  Mai said, “Thierry left Earth; he didn’t leave me. But that isn’t the point, Shah. He wants—he wanted me to be there. He made arrangements. There is an open round-trip ticket.”

  “He wanted you to feel an obligation,” Shahirah said.

  “Of course I feel an obligation. It is the last thing I can do for him. And it will be a great adventure. It’s about time I had one.”

  Mai was sixty-two, about the age her father had been when he’d left Earth after his wife, Mai’s mother, had died. She was a mid-level civil servant, Assistant Chief Surveyor in the Department of Antiquities. She owned a small efficiency apartment in the same building where she worked, the government ziggurat in the Wassat district of al-Iskandariyya. No serious relationship since her divorce; her daughter grown-up and married, living with her husband and two children in an arcology commune in the Atlas Mountains. Shahirah tried to talk her out of it, but Mai wanted to find out what her father had been doing, in the outer dark. To find out whether he had been happy. By unriddling the mystery of his life she might discover something about herself. When your parents die, you finally take full possession of your life, and wonder how much of it has been shaped by conscious decision, and how much by inheritance in all its forms.

  “There isn’t anything out there for people like us,” Shahirah said.

  She meant ordinary people. People who had not been tweaked so that they could survive the effects of microgravity and harsh radiation, and endure life in claustrophobic habitats scattered across frozen, airless moons.

  “Thierry thought there might be,” Mai said. “I want to find out what it was.”

  She took compassionate leave, flew from al-Iskandariyya to Port Africa, Entebbe, and was placed in deep, artificial sleep at the passenger processing facility. Cradled inside a hibernaculum, she rode up the elevator to the transfer station and was loaded onto a drop ship, and forty-three days later woke in the port of Paris, Dione. After two days spent recovering from her long sleep and learning how to use a pressure suit and move around in Dione’s vestigial gravity, she climbed aboard a taxi that flew in a swift suborbital lob through the night to the habitat of the Jones-Truex-Bakaleinikoff clan, her father’s last home, the place where he died.

  The taxi’s cabin was an angular bubble scarcely bigger than a coffin, pieced together from diamond composite and a cobweb of fullerene struts, and mounted on a motor stage with three spidery legs. Mai, braced beside the pilot in a taut crash web, felt that she was falling down an endless slope, as in one of those dreams where you wake with a shock just before you hit ground. Saturn’s swollen globe, subtly banded with pastel shades of yellow and brown, swung overhead and sank behind them. The pilot, a garrulous young woman, asked all kinds of questions about life on Earth, pointed out landmark craters and ridges in the dark moonscape, the line of the equatorial railway, the homely sparks of oases, habitats, and tent towns. Mai couldn’t quite reconcile the territory with the maps in her p-suit’s library, was startled when the taxi abruptly slewed around and fired its motor and decelerated with a rattling roar and drifted down to a kind of pad or platform set at the edge of an industrial landscape.

  The person who met her wasn’t the man with whom she’d discussed her father’s death and her travel arrangements, but a woman, her father’s former partner, Lexi Truex. They climbed into a slab-sided vehicle slung between three pairs of fat mesh wheels, and drove out along a broad highway past blockhouses, bunkers, hangars, storage tanks, and arrays of satellite dishes and transmission towers: a military complex dating from the Quiet War, according to Lexi Truex.

  “Abandoned in place, as they say. We don’t have any use for it, but never got around to demolishing it, either. So here it sits.”

  Lexi Truex was at least twenty years younger than Mai, tall and pale, hair shaven high on either side of a stiff crest of straw-colored hair. Her pressure suit was decorated with an intricate, interlocking puzzle of green and red vines. She and Thierry had been together for three years, she said. They’d met on Ceres, while she had been working as a freetrader.

  “That’s where he was living when I last talked to him,” Mai said. It felt like a confession of weakness. This brisk, confident woman seemed to have more of a claim on her father than she did.

  “He followed me to Dione, moved in with me while I was still living in the old habitat,” Lexi Truex said. “That’s where he got into ceramics. And then, well, he became more and more obsessed with his work, and I wasn’t there a lot of the time. . . .”

  Mai said that she’d done a little research, had discovered that her father had become a potter, and had seen some of his pieces.

  “You can see plenty more, at the habitat,” Lexi said. “He worked hard at it, and he had a good reputation. Plenty of kudos.”

  It turned out that Lexi Truex didn’t know that on Earth, in al-Iskandariyya, Thierry had cast bronze amulets using the lost wax method and sold them to shops that catered to the high-end tourist market. Falcons, cats, lions. Gods with the heads of crocodiles or jackals. Sphinxes. Mai told Lexi that she’d helped him polish the amulets with slurried chalk paste and jewelers’ rouge, and create patinas with cupric nitrate. She had a clear memory of her father hunched over a bench, using a tiny knife to free the shape of a hawk from a small block of black wax.

  “He didn’t ever talk about his life before he went up and out,” Lexi said. “Well, he mentioned you. We all knew he had a daughter, but that was about it.”

  They discussed Thierry’s last wishes. Lexi said that in the last few years he’d given up his work, had taken to walking the land. She supposed that he wanted them to scatter his ashes in a favorite spot. He’d been very specific that it should take place at sunrise, but the location was a mystery.

  “All I know is that we follow the railway east, and then we follow his mule,” Lexi said. “Might involve some cross-country hiking. Think you can manage it?”

  “Walking is easier than I thought it would be,” Mai said.

  When she was young, she’d liked to wade out into the sea as deep as she dared and stand on tiptoe, water up to her chin, and let the waves push her backwards and forward. Walking in Dione’s vestigial gravity, one-sixtieth the gravity of Earth, was a little like that. Another memory of her father: watching him make huge sand sculptures of flowers and animals on the beach. His strong fingers, his bare brown shoulders, the thatch of white hair on his chest, his total absorption in his task.

  They had left the military clutter behind, were driving across a dusty plain lightly spattered with small, shallow craters. Blocks and boulders as big as houses squatting on smashed footings. A fan of debris stretching from a long elliptical dent. A line of rounded hills rising to the south: the flanks of the wall of a crater thirty kilometers in diameter, according to Lexi. Everything faintly lit by Saturnshine; everything the color of ancient ivory. It reminded Mai of old photographs, Europeans in antique costumes stiffly posed amongst excavated tombs, she’d seen in the museum in al-Qahira.

  Soon, short steep ridges pushed up from the plain, nested curves thirty or forty meters high like frozen dunes, faceted here and there by cliffs rearing above fans of slumped debris. The cliffs, Ma
i saw, were carved with intricate frescoes, and the crests of the ridges had been sculpted into fairy-tale castles or statues of animals. A pod of dolphins emerging from a swell of ice; another swell shaped like a breaking wave with galloping horses rearing from frozen spume; an eagle taking flight; a line of elephants walking trunk to tail, skylighted against the black vacuum. The last reminding her of one of her father’s bronze pieces. Here was a bluff shaped into the head of a Buddha; here was an outcrop on which a small army equipped with swords and shields were frozen in battle.

  It was an old tradition, Lexi Truex said. Every Christmas, gangs from her clan’s habitat and neighboring settlements congregated in a temporary city of tents and domes and ate osechi-ryo-ri and made traditional toasts in saki, vodka, and whiskey, played music, danced, and flirted, and worked on new frescoes and statues using drills and explosives and chisels.

  “We like our holidays. Kwanzaa, Eid ul-Fitr, Chanukah, Diwali, Christmas, Newtonmass . . . any excuse for a gathering, a party. Your father led our gang every Christmas for ten years. The whale and the squid, along the ridge there? That’s one of his designs.”

  “And the elephants?”

  “Those too. Let me show you something,” Lexi said, and drove the rolligon down the shallow slope of the embankment onto the actual surface of Dione.

  It wallowed along like a boat in a choppy sea, its six fat tires raising rooster-tails of dust. Tracks ribboned everywhere, printed a year or a century ago. There was no wind here. No rain. Just a constant faint infalling of meteoritic dust, and microscopic ice particles from the geysers of Enceladus. Everything unchanging under the weak glare of the sun and the black sky, like a stage in an abandoned theater. Mai began to understand the strangeness of this little world. A frozen ocean wrapped around a rocky core, shaped by catastrophes that predated life on Earth. A stark geology empty of any human meaning. Hence the sculptures, she supposed. An attempt to humanize the inhuman.

  “It’s something one of my ancestors made,” Lexi said, when Mai asked where they were going. “Macy Minnot. You ever heard of Macy Minnot?”

  She had been from Earth. Sent out by Greater Brazil to work on a construction project in Rainbow Bridge, Callisto, she’d become embroiled in a political scandal and had been forced to claim refugee status. This was before the Quiet War, or during the beginning of it (it had been the kind of slow, creeping conflict that has no clear beginning, erupting into combat only at its very end), and Macy Minnot had ended up living with the Jones-Truex-Bakaleinikoff clan. Trying her best to assimilate, to come to terms with her exile.

  As they drove around the end of a ridge, past a tumble of ice boulders carved into human figures, some caught up in a whirling dance, others eagerly pushing their way out of granitic ice, Lexi explained that one Christmas after the end of the Quiet War, her last Christmas on Dione, Macy Minnot had come up with an idea for her own sculpture, and borrowed one of the big construction machines and filled its hopper with a mix of ice dust and a thixotropic, low-temperature plastic.

  “It’s too cold for ice crystals to melt under pressure and bind together,” Lexi said. “The plastic was a binding agent, malleable at first, gradually hardening off. So you could pack the dust into any shape. You understand?”

  “I’ve seen snow, once.”

  It had been in the European Union, the Alps: a conference on security of shipping ports. Mai, freshly divorced, had taken her daughter, then a toddler. She remembered Shahirah’s delight in the snow. The whole world transformed into a soft white playground.

  “There’s always a big party, the night before the beginning of the competition. Macy and her partner got wasted, and they started up their construction machine. Either they intended to surprise everyone, or they decided they couldn’t wait. Anyway, they forgot to include any stop or override command in the instruction set they’d written. So the machine just kept going,” Lexi said, and steered the rolligon through a slant of deep shadow and swung it broadside, drifting to a stop at the edge of a short, steep drop.

  They were at the far side of the little flock of ridges. The rumpled, dented plain stretched away under the black sky, and little figures marched across it in a straight line.

  Mai laughed. The shock of it. The madly wonderful absurdity.

  “They used fullerene to make the arms and eyes and teeth,” Lexi said. “The scarves are fullerene mesh. The noses are carrots. The buttons are diamond chips.”

  There were twenty, thirty, forty of them. Each two meters tall, composed of three spheres of descending size stacked one on top of the other. Pure white. Spaced at equal intervals. Black smiles and black stares, vivid orange noses. Scarves rippling in an impalpable breeze. Marching away like an exercise in perspective, dwindling over the horizon . . .

  “Thierry loved this place,” Lexi said. “He often came out here to meditate.”

  They sat and looked out at the line of snowmen for a long time. At last, Lexi started the rolligon and they drove around the end of the ridges and rejoined the road and drove on to the habitat of the Jones-Truex-Bakaleinikoff clan.

  It was a simple dome that squatted inside the rimwall of a circular crater. A forest ran around its inner circumference; lawns and formal flowerbeds circled a central building patchworked from a dozen architectural styles, blended into each other like a coral reef. Mai’s reception reminded her of the first time she’d arrived at her daughter’s arcology: adults introducing themselves one by one, excited children bouncing around, bombarding her with questions. Was the sky really blue, on Earth? What held it up? Were there really wild animals that ate people?

  There was a big, informal meal, a kind of picnic in a wide grassy glade in the forest, where most of the clan seemed to live. Walkways and ziplines and nets were strung between sweet chestnuts and oaks and beech trees; ring platforms were bolted around the trunks of the largest trees; pods hung from branches like the nests of weaver birds.

  Mai’s hosts told her that most of the clan lived elsewhere, these days. Paris. A big vacuum-organism farm on Rhea. Mars. Titan. A group out at Neptune, living in a place Macy Minnot and her partner helped build after they fled the Saturn system at the beginning of the Quiet War. The habitat was becoming more and more like a museum, people said. A repository of souvenirs from the clan’s storied past.

  Thierry’s workshop was already part of that history. Two brick kilns, a paved square under a slant of canvas to keep off the rain occasionally produced by the dome’s climate control machinery. A potter’s wheel with a saddle-shaped stool. A scarred table. Tools and brushes lying where he’d left them. Neatly labeled tubs of clay slip, clay balls, glazes. A clay-stained sink under a standpipe. Lexi told Mai that Thierry had mined the clay from an old impact site. Primordial stuff billions of years old, refined to remove tars and other organic material.

  Finished pieces were displayed on a rack of shelves. Dishes in crescent shapes glazed with black and white arcs representing segments of Saturn’s rings. Bowls shaped like craters. Squarish plates stamped with the surface features of tracts of Dione and other moons. Craters, ridges, cliffs. Plates with spattered black shapes on a white ground, like the borderland between Iapetus’s dark and light halves. Vases shaped like shepherd moons. A scattering of irregular chunks in thick white glaze—pieces of the rings. A glazed tan ribbon with snowmen lined along it . . .

  It was so very different from the tourist stuff Thierry had made, yet recognizably his. And highly collectible, according to Lexi. Unlike most artists in the outer system, Thierry hadn’t trawled for sponsorship and subscriptions, made pieces to order, or given access to every stage of his work. He had not believed in the democratization of the creative process. He had not been open to input. His work had been very private, very personal. He hadn’t liked to talk about it, Lexi said. He hadn’t let anyone get close to that part of him. This secrecy had eventually driven them apart, but it had also contributed to his reputation. People were intrigued by his work, by his response to the moonscapes of
the Saturn system, his outsider’s perspective, because he refused to explain it. He’d earned large amounts of credit and kudos—tradeable reputation—from sale of his ceramics, but had spent hardly any of it. The work was enough, as far as he’d been concerned. Mai, remembering the sand sculptures, thought she understood a little of this. She asked if he’d been happy, but no one seemed able to answer the question.

  “He seemed to be happy, when he was working,” the habitat’s patriarch, Rory Jones, said.

  “He didn’t talk much,” someone else said.

  “He liked to be alone,” Lexi said. “I don’t mean he was selfish. Well, maybe he was. But he mostly lived inside his head.”

  “He made this place his home,” Rory said, “and we were happy to have him living here.”

  The habitat’s chandelier lights had dimmed to a twilight glow. Most of the children had wandered off to bed; so had many of the adults. Those left sat around a campfire on a hearth of meteoritic stone, passing around a flask of honeysuckle wine, telling Mai stories about her father’s life on Dione.

  He had walked around Dione, one year. A journey of some seven thousand kilometers. Carrying a bare minimum of consumables, walking from shelter to shelter, settlement to settlement. Staying in a settlement for a day or ten days or twenty before moving on. Walking the world was much more than exploring or understanding it, Mai’s hosts told her. It was a way of re-creating it. Of making it real. Of binding yourself to it. Not every outer walked around their world, but those who did were considered virtuous, and her father was one such.

  “Most visitors only see the parts they know about,” a woman told Mai. “The famous views, the famous shrines and oases. A fair few come to climb the ice cliffs of Padua Chasmata. And they are spectacular climbs. Four or five kilometers. Huge views when you top out. But we prefer our own routes, on ridges or rimwalls you’d hardly notice, flying over them. There’s a very gnarly climb close by, in a small crater the military used as a trash dump in the Quiet War. The achievement isn’t the view, but testing yourself against your limits. Your father understood that. He was no ring runner.”