The New Space Opera

by Gardner Dozois

  Miraculously, he had timed it just right. The towline had yanked the sled’s nose down and then up just before he cut it loose. It hit the top of the natural and rebounded wildly. Light flashed across the gleaming walls of ice as it either hit their pursuer or he tried to avoid it and hit the ice fall.

  He skidded into the next opening they passed, no time to worry about finesse now. Now it was a matter of luck again, and speed. He toed the board’s flood, no point in worrying about giving himself away now. All they could do was go. Ahead, the natural angled off to the right. Qai fought the board into a hard bank, struggling to stay aboard as it bucked across fragments of shattered ice. Fresh, a part of his mind noticed as they arced into the branch. Ice walls flew past and suddenly . . . vanished. Utter darkness swallowed the flood beam and Qai caught a gleam of distant ice. Then they were falling.

  A cavern. They had burst out into the open space above an upwell. If they landed in the sea . . . Gerta screamed, her arms locked around him as they fell. Desperately, Qai toed the board to full power. It wouldn’t hold them above water, but with luck, if their angle of descent was shallow enough, they might skip across the surface for a few dozen meters.

  If the angle was too steep . . .

  The board slammed upward against the soles of his feet and the flood splashed across distant walls of shimmering ice, crusted with flowers of frozen condensation. Wisps of vapor swirled around them. They kept their balance . . . barely. The board slammed the surface again and water sprayed up this time. The wall loomed closer. Close enough. Another slam and Gerta’s balance faltered. Another. She was falling . . . they were falling . . . The board flipped and Qai released the toeholds, bracing himself for the shock of icy sea, his mind a black wail of despair.

  His shoulder hit ice and he tucked his head without thought, rolling, then flinging out arms and legs to stop his momentum. Slid to rest on his face in darkness, the metallic taste of blood in his mouth, his face burning where he had scraped the ice. “Gerta?” He spat out ice. “Gerta!” The flood had gone out, but the faint glimmer from a thin tracery of yellow and orange moss allowed him to make out the walls of the cavern rising up from the narrow shelf they had crashed on.

  Luck. He drew in a shuddering breath. The board had almost slowed enough to drop into the water. “Gerta?”

  A soft moan came from his left and Qai sagged with relief. He started to crawl toward the sound, the pocket suddenly turning as pain lanced through his left side. He’d broken something . . . his left shoulder, felt like. His eyes were adjusting to the moss glow and he spotted her, half a dozen meters from where he’d landed, sprawled facedown less than a meter from the water. He fumbled his headlamp from his ice suit pocket, slipped it on. The soft wash of light from the small flood turned the blood on her face crimson. Ice crusted her hair and her hood had come loose. The cut on her forehead had reopened. He brushed the ice out of her hair with his good hand and wiped the blood from her face with an antiseptic cloth from the tiny emergency aid pack in his suit. Her eyelids fluttered and she groaned.

  “We made it.” Relief flooded him as her blue eyes focused on his face. Pupils the same size, so no head injury . . . not a serious one anyway. “Try moving,” he murmured.

  “I think . . .” She sucked in a breath and winced. “I don’t think anything new got broken.” She eased herself into a sitting position. “What happened to your arm?”

  “My shoulder.” The med kit was back on the sled. He looked up to where the soft glow of the moss vanished into darkness. “This is a young cavern,” he murmured.

  “How can you tell?”

  “Look how sharp all the edges are, and how narrow and steep it is.” He tilted his head and the lamp’s weak beam faded into the deep darkness above them. “Yellow and orange moss are the first ones to grow in a new cavern and there’s hardly any here. No blue-green at all, so this is really new.”

  “Is that a problem?” She tilted her head at him.

  “Not compared to others.” He didn’t laugh because it would hurt. Slabs and shards of fractured ice lay in piles at the base of the cavern wall, and in many places, the black water lapped sheer, vertical surfaces. Qai shivered at how lucky they had been. Only a few narrow sections of fractured ice shelved the open water. A slightly different trajectory would have dumped them into the water. He swung the lamp’s beam around their narrow sanctuary, spotted the board, upended against the wall. “If we can find a natural and get out of here, we might be okay.”

  “Might.” Gerta’s voice was dry. “I don’t like that word.”

  Qai lurched to his feet and made his way over to the board. It had shut itself down and he said a small prayer to the Snow Queen’s icy heart as he touched the power on. They wouldn’t make it back to the Ice Palace on foot without the supplies on the sled. The board hummed to life and relief nearly buckled his knees. “I’ll upgrade that ‘might’ a bit.” He shut the board off, frowning. “Be quiet. Come over here. Quick.” He illuminated the ice at her feet as she crossed the narrow shelf. “Help me hide the board. Try not to make any sound,” he murmured.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “He followed us.” The sled trick had slowed him down but that was all.

  Between them, one-armed, they managed it, piling chunks and thin fracture-slabs of ice to mask the board. It wouldn’t fool a moss miner, Qai thought grimly, but their hunter’s choice of the decoy fissure suggested that he wasn’t a moss miner.

  The moss sang a song of motion that hummed through his flesh as the man and board slid toward them through the ice. The sled trick had had the unintended effect of saving their pursuer from making the same mistake they had and plunging over the lip of the natural. It made him wary. Qai felt his caution through the moss as he slid to the brink of the natural they’d blasted over.

  Their luck was still bad.

  He stood on the lip of the natural, a shadowy figure barely discernible in the dim moss glow. “I see you.” His voice came to them, warped by the ice walls. “You have no options. Step out and I’ll make it a clean kill.” He paused. “Make me chase you down and it will not be an easy passage, Wilmar.”

  “If you let her go . . .” Qai winced as she dug her nails into his arm. “I will.”

  Ice sprayed their faces and Qai rolled away from it, dragging her with him.

  Qai scanned the pocket, looking for a safe pathway down to their level, hoping it didn’t exist. But it did. Yeah, you could just make it from fracture to fracture; enough ice shelf jutted out to support a board’s impeller field. A local would be wary. Even as he looked, their pursuer slid over the lip of the natural and started down, as if he had tracked Qai’s stare. He wasn’t a local, wasn’t wary at all.

  Desperately, Qai looked for another hiding place. But the bottom of the pocket was made up of sheer walls and a few ice falls . . . no crevices or narrow naturals to shelter them. Their pursuer had some sort of scanner.

  “This is the end, isn’t it?” Gerta’s face looked waxen in the feeble moss light. “There’s no way out, is there?”

  He couldn’t lie to her, say the false, brave words that the assassin would turn into dust in moments. The assassin skimmed across the final ledge of ice, skipped over a narrow expanse of open water . . . and was on the ledge. He skimmed toward them slowly, his face goggled and invisible within the hood of his ice suit. “I wonder what you did.” His voice echoed from the sheer walls. “They’re paying me enough. It must have been good. Or you pissed off the wrong person.” His goggles tracked them as he glided by, pivoted his board at the far end of the shelf.

  Beside him, Gerta’s panting breaths emerged in brief puffs of vapor. “I’m sorry,” he said softly.

  “I brought him here, didn’t I?” Gerta kept her eyes fixed on the ice-suited figure as he drifted his board across the ledge.

  “You didn’t know.” The assassin had turned at the end of the shelf. Yeah, an amateur on a board. He made it move okay, but without the fluid economy of someone w
ho knew what he was doing.

  “Final offer on the easy way out.” The assassin raised his voice. “The darts are loaded with a neurotranc. It’ll leave you paralyzed but conscious.” A razored edge of anticipation colored his tone. “I can enjoy my work. Your choice.” He toed the board around, aimed straight at them.

  Without warning, Gerta leaped into motion.

  “No,” Qai yelled, grabbing at her. He missed, his gloved fingers scraping her suit.

  She charged toward the board and the assassin slewed it only slightly, aiming his weapon almost casually. Qai didn’t hear a sound, but Gerta stumbled and lost her footing. Her body tumbled almost in slow motion, sliding finally to rest in a spray of ice crystals.

  The assassin hovered his board above her limp body, checking. Then he slewed his board around clumsily and toed it straight at Qai. He leaned forward, assurance etched in every line of his body. Qai jerked his head from side to side, pantomiming panic, turned, and crouched as if in a desperate attempt to hide. He could almost feel the assassin’s triumph as the board hummed into maximum speed.

  Show-off, Qai thought. He twisted into a spin, the flat plaque of ice he’d selected gripped in both hands. With all the strength in his muscles, he unwound, skimming the plaque on a straight, flat trajectory at the onrushing board. One chance. His feet came off the ground with the force of his throw and he skidded to his knees, his eyes glued on the board.

  It flew ruler-straight, dead-on at the nose of the board. A local would have simply ducked it. The assassin ignored it. As the plaque intercepted the impeller field, the board bucked. Caught by surprise, the assassin lost his balance briefly and the board slewed out of control as he overreacted. It bucked again and then nosed straight up. With a cry, the assassin grabbed wildly for the edges, his foot slipping out of the shoe. The board flipped and he fell.

  Qai raced toward him, pulling his ice knife from his suit. Before he could reach the assassin, the man skidded across the condensation-slick shelf and splashed into Europa’s black sea. He surfaced at once, screaming, grabbing the ledge, then letting go to claw at his exposed face. And sank.

  Qai turned away, shuddering at the sounds erupting behind him. If the man was lucky, one of the big eaters would take him quickly.

  Gerta lay still and limp on the ice, her breathing light and regular, her muscles slack. Out cold. Qai stood over her for a moment, a tide of memory washing through him. Sun. Tundra grass and reindeer. Making love on a soft-tanned skin on the tangled grass with the scent of northern summer and Gerta’s skin dizzying him. Tears stung his eyes. When had he last wept?

  He couldn’t remember.

  She was right. The Snow Queen had frozen him.

  He coupled the assassin’s board behind his, and lashed Gerta to it one-handed. It only took a few hours to reach the Ice Palace. Karina helped him without question. She put Gerta to bed in her own bed at the back of her shop and steeped the fresh rose moss he had stopped to gather into a potent tea. “I hope she’s worth this small fortune, ice-boy.” She stood on tiptoes to kiss him lightly on the lips. Her dark eyes searched his. “You going to tell me the truth, one day?”

  “Not here.”

  Karina raised one eyebrow. “Where then?” When he didn’t answer, she laughed, a rich sound that always warmed him in a way mere heat could never do and handed him the pot of potent rose-moss tea.

  He took it in to where Gerta slept. She was coming out of the drugs. Her eyelids shivered with REM sleep, and as he dripped the tea between her lips, she swallowed reflexively. He fed her tea until her breathing deepened and slowed and her skin showed the telltale flush of deep rose-moss euphoria. When he judged the dose to be high enough, he set the pot aside and gently arranged her on her side, the way she had always slept when they’d shared a bed, her right arm tucked beneath the pillow, top knee bent, snuggled deep into the covers. He combed her hair back, a bittersweet tide rising in his chest. “Don’t you remember?” he murmured. “How we always argued about that story, how I always wondered if Kai maybe hadn’t wanted to stay, if the Gert in the story really had been right to drag him home?” He smiled, touched her cheek with one fingertip. “You were so sure she did the right thing. But I fell in love with the Snow Queen, Gerta. I’m sorry. You were wrong about the mirror. It was evil, yes. But that splinter let me see the Snow Queen’s beauty. I belong to her, now.” He pulled the covers up over her shoulder and tucked her in tenderly.

  Karina was waiting for him in her shop, her eyes bright with questions. But she said nothing, merely kissed him again, and this time it wasn’t light and it wasn’t brief, and the pain from his broken shoulder vanished entirely. “What if I taught you to mine moss?” he breathed as the kiss ended.

  “I think I might like that.” Karina’s white teeth blazed in the dim light of her shop. “I’ve thought I might like that for a while, ice-boy, but I figured you had to do the offering. Your lover, the Snow Queen, let you go finally?”

  “No.” He wouldn’t lie to her. “But that doesn’t mean I can’t love you too.” He kissed her again, pushed her gently away. Then he reached into the open neck of his therms and pulled out the tiny stone memorial of a creature that had lived on another planet, so many millennia ago. He slipped the braided chain over his head. “Tell her you took it off as a memento. Just before you pushed my body into the sea. With as much moss as I fed her, she’s going to believe anything you tell her, and if you tell her just as she’s waking up, she’ll remember seeing it herself.” And she would grieve, but the people who wanted his death would listen for her belief and her grief and hear it. Karina would be safe until she got out into the ice.

  “Get yourself set up and start out looking for moss.” He ran his fingers lightly over her light-braided hair. “I’ll meet you.”

  “How will you know when I leave?” Karina tilted her head. “How will you find me?”

  “The Snow Queen will tell me. She’s not a jealous lover.” He kissed her one last time and left, slipping out of the shop and into the soft glow of the corridor, heading for Cass, the board seller, to trade the rest of the rose moss he’d gathered for a new outfit. Then he’d visit the healer, get his shoulder taken care of. He could heal out in the ice, waiting for Karina. “Thank you, Gerta,” he murmured. “For letting me see what I needed to see.”

  Beyond the bright and artificial light of the Ice Palace, the moss sang to his blood, and his blood answered.

  REMEMBRANCE

  STEPHEN BAXTER

  Like many of his colleagues here at the beginning of a new century, British writer Stephen Baxter has been engaged for more than a decade now with the task of revitalizing and reinventing the “hard-science” story for a new generation of readers, producing work on the cutting edge of science which bristles with weird new ideas and often takes place against vistas of almost outrageously cosmic scope.

  Baxter made his first sale to Interzone in 1987, and since then has become one of that magazine’s most frequent contributors, as well as making sales to Asimov’s Science Fiction, Science Fiction Age, Analog, Zenith, New Worlds, and elsewhere. He’s one of the most prolific new writers in science fiction, and is rapidly becoming one of the most popular and acclaimed of them as well. In 2001, he appeared on the Final Hugo Ballot twice, and won both Asimov’s Readers Award and Analog’s Analytical Laboratory Award, one of the few writers ever to win both awards in the same year. Baxter’s first novel, Raft, was released in 1991 to wide and enthusiastic response, and was rapidly followed by other well-received novels such as Timelike Infinity, Anti-Ice, Flux, and the H. G. Wells pastiche—a sequel to The Time Machine—The Time Ships, which won both the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and the Philip K. Dick Award. His other books include the novels Voyage, Titan, Moonseed, Mammoth, Book One: Silverhair, Manifold: Time, Manifold: Space, Evolution, Coalescent, Exultant, Transcendent, and two novels in collaboration with Arthur C. Clarke, The Light of Other Days and Time’s Eye, a Time Odyssey. His short fiction has been collected in
Vacuum Diagrams: Stories of the Xeelee Sequence, Traces, and Hunters of Pangaea, and he has released a chapbook novella, Mayflower II. His most recent books are the novels Emperor and Resplendent, and coming up is another new novel, Conqueror.

  Baxter’s Xeelee series is one of the most complex sequences in Space Opera, spanning millions of years of time as well as most of the galaxy, and bringing humans into contact (usually hostile contact) with dozens of alien races. Here, in a story that takes place early in the sequence, he points out that while it may be true that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it, you can’t remember the past if you’re not allowed to remember it . . .

  “I am the Rememberer,” said the old man. “The last in a line centuries long. This is what was passed on to me, by those who remembered before me.

  “Harry Gage was on Earth when the Squeem came . . .”

  As he talked, Rhoda Voynet glanced around at her staff. Soldiers all, the planes of their faces bathed in golden Saturn light, they listened silently.

  The old man was a Virtual, projected from a police station on Earth, and the sunlight that shone on his face was much stronger than the diminished glow that reached this far orbit. Rhoda felt obscurely jealous of its warmth.

  “Harry was born on Mars, in the Cydonia arcology. His great-grandparents were from Earth. There was a lot of that, in those days, before the Squeem. Everybody was mobile. Everything was opened up. Anything was possible.