The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 25

by Gardner Dozois

  “Willie-willies,” Milaba said. “You want to be careful with those, they’re tricksy. As I thought.” She pointed at the readout. “A hard fail in the chip set.” She pulled a new blade out of her thigh pouch and slid it into the control unit. Lights flashed green. Inside its shielded dome the tokamak grumbled and woke up with a shiver that sent the dust rising from the ground. Tash watched the wind whirl it into a dozen dust-devils, dancing around each other. “Just going to check the supply line. You stay here.” She headed up the valley along the line of the power cable. The dust-devils swirled in towards each other. They merged. They fused. They became one, a true dust-demon.

  “Looks all right!” In-Aunt Milaba called.

  “Milaba, I don’t like the look . . .” The dust-demon spun towards Tash, then at the last moment veered away and tracked up the valley. “Milaba!”

  Milaba hesitated. The hesitation was death. The dust-demon bore down on her, she tried to throw herself away but it spun over her, lifted her, threw her hard and fast, smashed her down on to the smooth polished olivine. Tash saw her face-plate shatter in a spray of shards and water vapour. It was random, it was mad, it was a chance in a billion, it can’t happen, it was an affront to order and reason but it had and there Milaba lay on the hard olivine.

  “Oh my gods oh my gods oh my gods!” For a moment Tash was paralyzed, for a moment she did not know what to to, that she could do anything, that she must do something. Then she was running up the valley. The dust-demon veered towards Tash. Tash shrieked, then it staggered away, broke itself on the boulders and spun down to dust again. The psuit would seal automatically but In-Aunt Milaba had moments before her eyeballs froze. “Oh help help help help help,” Tash cried, her hands pressed to Milaba’s face, trying to will heat into it. Then she saw the red button on the safety line harness. She hit it and was almost jolted off her feet as the winch on the diggler reeled Milaba in. Tash hit the Emergency Channel. “This is Diggler Six this is Diggler Six in Windrush Valley. This is an emergency.” Of course it is. It’s the Emergency channel. She tried to calm her voice as the winch lifted the limp Milaba into the air. “We have a suit dee-pee situation. We have a suit dee-pee.”

  “Hello Diggler Six. This is Diggory West Emergency Services. Please identify yourself.”

  “This is Tash Gelem-Opunyo. It’s Milaba.”

  “Tash. Control here.” Tash recognised Out-Uncle Yoyote’s voice. “Get back. Get back here. You should have enough power, we’ll send another diggler up the line to meet you, but you, darling, you have to do it. We can’t get to you in time. It’s up to you. Get back to us. It’s all you can do.”

  Of course. It was. All she could do. No rescue swooping from the skies, in a world where nothing could fly. No speed-star scorching up the slope of the Big Dig in a world where the scoopline was the fastest means of transport. She was on her own.

  It took all her strength to swing Milaba through the hatch into the diggler cab and seal the lock. Almost Tash popped her faceplate. Almost. She re-pressurized the diggler. Air-shriek built to a painful screech then stopped. But Milaba was so still, so cold. Her face was white with frost where her breath had frozen into her skin. It would never be the same again. Milaba knelt, turned her cheek to her In-Aunt’s lips. A whisper a sigh a suspicion a sussuration. She was breathing. But it was cold so cold death cold Mars cold in the diggler. Tash slapped the heater up to the maximum and jigged around the tiny cab. Condensation turned the windows opaque, then cleared. Back. She had to get back. Was there an auto-return programme? Where would she find it? Where would she even begin looking? Wasting precious instants, wasting precious instants. Tash took the control column, stamped on the pedal to release the anchors and engaged the traction motors. Turning was difficult. Turning was scary. Turning forced a small moan of fear when the wind got under the diggler and she felt the right side lift. If it went over here, they were both dead. This was not fun driving. There was no glee, no whee!; at every bounce Tash tensed and clenched, fearful that the diggler would roll over and shatter like an egg, smash an axle, any number of new terrors that only appear when your life depends on everything working perfectly. Come on come on come on. The battery gauge was dwindling with terrifying speed. This was outside. This was the horizoned world. Where was the scoopline? Surely it hadn’t been this far. Come on come on come on. A line on the sand. But so far. Power at twelve percent. Where had it gone what had she used it on? The heating blast? The emergency ree-pee? The burn on the winch? Call home. That would be sensible. That would be the act of a girl with a good head and better sense who did what she was told. But it would use power. Batteries at seven percent, but now she could see the scoopline, the laden buckets above, the empty buckets below, bucket after bucket after bucket. She drove the diggler on. Matching velocities with the scoopline was teeth-gritting, nerve-stretching work. Tash had to drop the diggler into the space between the buckets and hold exact speed. A push too fast would ride up on the preceding bucket. Too slow and she would be rear-ended by the bucket behind. And ever edging inwards, inwards, closer to the line as the batteries slid from green to red. Lights flashes. Tash threw the lever. The shackle engaged. Tash rolled away from the drive column to Milaba on the floor.

  “Tash.” A whisper a sigh a suspicion a sussuration.

  “It’s all right, it’s all right, don’t talk, we’re on the scoopline.”

  “Tash, are my eyes open?”

  “Yes they are.”

  A tiny sigh.

  “Then I can’t see. Tash, talk to me.”

  “What about?”

  “I don’t know. Anything. Everything. Just talk to me. We’re on the line, did you say?”

  “We’re on the line. We’re going home.”

  “Five hours then. Talk to me.”

  So she did. Tash pulled cushions and mats around her into a nest and sat holding her In-Aunt’s head and she talked. She talked about her friends and her in-sisters and her out-sisters and who would go away from West Diggory and who would stay. She talked about boys and how she liked them looking at her but still wanted to be different and special, not to be taken for granted, funny-Tash, odd-Tash. She talked about whether she would marry, which she didn’t think she would, not as far as she could see, and what she would do then if she didn’t. She talked about the things she loved, like swimming, and cooking vegetables, and drawing and words words words. She talked about how she loved the sound and shape of words, the sound of them as something quite different from what they meant and how you could put them together to say things that could not possibly be, and how the words came to her, like they were blown on the wind, shaped from wind, the wind brought to life. She talked of these in words that weren’t clever or mouth-filling, words said quietly and simply and honestly, saying what she thought and how she felt. Tash saw then a richer lode in words; beyond the beauty of their sounds and shapes and patterns was a deeper beauty of the truth they could shape. They could tell what it was to be Tash Gelem-Opunyo. Words could fly the banners and turn the rotors of a life. Milaba squeezed her hand and pushed her broken lips into a smile, and creased the corner of her white, frost-burned eyes.

  The Emergency Channel chimed. Yoyote had her on visual: they were about twenty kilometres downslope from her. They were coming to get her. They would be safe soon. Well done. And there was other news, news that made his voice sound strange to Tash in Diggler Six, like he was dead and walking and talking and about to cry all at the same time. A command had come in from Iridis Excavation Command, from the High Orbital, ultimately all the way from Earth and the Iridis Development Consortium. There had been a political shift. The faction that was up was down and the faction that was down was up. The Big Dig was cancelled.

  * * *

  From here, every way was up. There had been no official announcement from the Council of Diggers for ceremonials or small mournings: in their ones and two, their families and kinship groups and sororities and fraternities the people of West Diggory had decided to
share the news that their world was ending, and to see the bottom of it; the base that had been their striving for three generations; the machine head. Dig Zero. Minimum elevation. So they took digglers or rode down the scoopline to the bottom of the Big Dig, and looked around them, and looked around at the digging heads of the scooplines, stilled and frozen for the first time in memory, buckets filled with their last bite of Mars turned to the sky. As they grew accustomed to the sights and wonders of the dig head, for not one in fifty of the Excavating Cities’ populations worked at the minimum elevation, they saw in the distance, between the black scoopline, groups and families and societies from North Cutter and Southdelving and A.R.E.A. They waved to each other, greeting relatives they had not seen in years; the Common Channel was a flock of voices. Tash stood with her Raven Sorority sisters. They positioned themselves around her, even queen-bee Leyta. Tash was a slam and brief heroine – perhaps the last one the Big Dig would ever have. In-Aunt Milaba had been taken to the main medical facility A.R.E.A. where they were growing her new irises for her frost-blinded eyes. Her face would be scarred and patched with ugly white but her smile would always be beautiful. So the In-sisters and In-cousins stood around Tash, needing to be down at zero but not knowing why, or what to do now. The boys from the Black Obsidian Fraternity waved over and came across the sand to join the girls. So few of us, really, Tash thought.

  “Why?” Out-cousin Sebben asked.

  “Environment,” said Sweto and in the same transmission, Qori said “Cost.”

  “Are they going to take us all back to Earth?” Chunye asked.

  “No, they’re never going to do that,” Haramwe said. He walked with a stick, which made him look like an old man but at the same time interesting and attractive. “That would cost too much.”

  “We couldn’t anyway,” Sweto said. “The gravity down there would kill us. We can’t live anywhere but here. This is our home.”

  “We’re Martians,” Tash said. Then she put her hands up to her face mask.

  “What are you doing?” Chunye, always the nervous In-cousin, cried in alarm.

  “I just want to know,” Tash said. “I just want to feel it, like it should be.” Three taps, and the face plate fell into her waiting hands. The air was cold, shakingly cold, and still too thin to breathe and anyway, to breathe was to die on lungfuls of carbon dioxide but she could feel the wind, the real wind, the true wind in her face. Tash exhaled gently into the atmosphere gathered at the bottom of the Big Dig. The world still sloped gently away from her, all the way up the sky. Tears would freeze in an instant so she kept them to herself. Then Tash clapped the plate back over her face and fastened it to the psuit hood with her clever fingers.

  “So, what do we do now?” whiny Chunye asked. Tash knelt. She pushed her fingers into the soft regolith. What else was there? What else had their ever been. A message had come down Mt. Incredible, from High Orbital, from a world on the other side of the sky, from people who had never seen this, whose horizons were always curved away from them. Who were they to say? What wind blew their words and made them so strong? Here were people, whole cities, an entire civilization, in a hole. This was Mars.

  “We do what we know best,” Tash said, scooping up pale golden Mars in her gloved hand. “We put it all back again.”

  ASCENSION DAY

  Alastair Reynolds

  Alastair Reynolds is a frequent contributor to Interzone, and has also sold to Asimov’s Science Fiction, Spectrum SF, and elsewhere. His first novel, Revelation Space, was widely hailed as one of the major SF books of the year; it was quickly followed by Chasm City, Redemption Ark, Absolution Gap, Century Rain, and Pushing Ice, all big sprawling space operas that were big sellers as well, establishing Reynolds as one of the best and most popular new SF writers to enter the field in many years. His other books include a novella collection, Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days, a chapbook novella, The Six Directions of Space, as well as three collections, Galactic North, Zima Blue and Other Stories, and Deep Navigation and the novels The Prefect, House of Suns, and Terminal World. His newest novel is Blue Remembered Earth and forthcoming is a Doctor Who novel, Harvest of Time. A professional scientist with a Ph.D. in astronomy, he worked for the European Space Agency in the Netherlands for a number of years, but has recently moved back to his native Wales to become a full-time writer.

  Reynolds’s work is known for its grand scope, sweep, and scale. In one story, ‘Galactic North’, a spaceship sets out in pursuit of another in a stern chase that takes thousands of years of time and hundreds of thousands of light-years to complete; in another, ‘Thousandth Night’, ultrarich immortals embark on a plan that will call for the physical rearrangement of all the stars in the Galaxy. Here he offers us an incisive glimpse, full of enough sense of wonder for many another writers’ novels, of what happens when it’s time for a ship to set forth again at last after centuries on the ground.

  LAUTERECKEN WOKE, AND knew that it was his last day on Rhapsody. It had, on balance, been a good stay. The planet had been kind to him, these last ninety-six years.

  But all things must end.

  He eased from the languid embrace of the beauty he had taken to bed the night before. It took him a moment to remember her name. Vindra, that was it. An actress and dancer, famed across half the hemisphere. She’d been as good as they’d promised.

  “Where are you going?”

  She’d curled an arm around him as he made to leave the bed. He smiled and showed her the gold-studded bracelet, with its blue light winking steadily. “My ship is ready, Vindra. Her engines have been building to launch power for a week, and now we must leave.” He softened the remark with a smile. “You can’t say it’s a surprise. I informed your government of my plans more than a year ago.”

  “I didn’t think it was going to happen quite so soon.”

  He nodded in the vague direction of space. “Hyperspace is only predictable on a timescale of days. There’s a window for us now. If we don’t leave now, it could be weeks or months before conditions are favourable again.”

  “You’ve been here nearly a century.”

  “If there was any other way.” He leaned down to kiss Vindra, before taking to the suite’s bathroom. “Ninety-six years seems like a long time, but that’s only because you see things from a planetary perspective. I’m the captain of a starship. My ship has been trading with hundreds of worlds, crossing the galaxy for tens of thousands of years.”

  “Soon I’ll be just a memory to you,” Vindra said sadly. “Even if you came back here, I’ll be long dead. I’ve seen pictures of you, from the day when you first stepped out of your ship. You haven’t aged at all.”

  Lauterecken touched his forehead. “But I won’t forget Rhapsody. And I won’t forget you either, Vindra.”

  A government flier took him out to the ship. It was by far the biggest artificial thing on Rhapsody, although even Lauterecken had to admit that it didn’t look much like a ship anymore. The freighter was a rectangular box, eight kilometres long, four wide and four high. A century ago, learning of its imminent arrival, the citizens of Rhapsody had pooled their planetary resources to dig out a berthing dock, a vast trench as long and wide as the freighter and more than a kilometre deep. From the sides of the dock, they’d extended countless bridges and ramps, allowing easy access to the freighter’s enormous holds and bays. Trade had ensued. Rhapsody was technologically backward, but it produced art and biological constructs that Lauterecken was certain could be sold on for a profit elsewhere in the galaxy.

  For the first few decades the government had kept a noose on the terms of commerce. Then the arrangements started to slacken. Lauterecken started dealing with entrepreneurs and merchants, rather than state-sanctioned brokers. He didn’t care, so long as there was a profit somewhere down the line.

  But with the breakdown of organized trade had come shantytowns and slums, ringing the berthing dock. Over the last fifty or sixty years these festering districts had spilled over the edge of the
dock, spanning the gap and climbing up the side of the freighter. From a distance, the great ship appeared to be furred with corrosion. Only on closer inspection, as the flier approached for landing, was the corrosion revealed to be layer upon layer of teetering shacks, scaffolded together and fixed to the hull by whatever means served. Twenty, thirty stories of them. The slum-dwellers were the poorest of the poor, clinging onto the warmth emanating from the hull, collecting the water that pooled on its upper deck and ran down the sides in rainbowed cataracts.

  He’d been pushing the government to instigate a clearance and relocation program for years, but as far as he could tell their efforts had been lackadaisical.

  “How many still left?” he asked the mandarin in the flier.

  “Between eleven and twelve thousand, last census.” The official grimaced. “I’m very sorry, Captain. We did what we could, but as soon as we clear one sector, they move in somewhere else. If you’d be willing to delay departure for a few more months, we might be able to do something . . .”

  “You’ve had years,” Lauterecken snapped. “A few more months won’t make any difference.”

  The flier came in for landing.

  He stepped onto the raised platform, straightened his back and presented his hands to the flanking input consoles. Blue light spilled from under his palms as the consoles sampled his skin, verifying his identity. A branching coldness shot up his arms, as the ship penetrated his nervous system. The shiver was gone as quickly as it had come, leaving only a tremendous sense of potentiality, and the feeling that his own body image had become diffuse, extending for kilometres in all directions, out to the very limits of the hull.