The Year's Best Science Fiction--Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  It took two hours for them to deploy the big waste bag, more to get the awkward plastic liner pinned up and protocols followed. Mars taught hard lessons. How much Mother Earth did for humans without their noticing, for one.

  Here, recycling air, water, and food was an intricate dance of chemistry and physics, so they had to tinker with their systems constantly. The greenhouse helped, but the dance of myriad details never ended. Watch the moisture content of the hab’s air or they would all get “suit throat”—drying out of the mucous membrane until voices rasped. Even then it was hard work in a suit that couldn’t get its heating right—cold feet, hot head. She felt drained on the backhoe ride back.

  THINK GLOBALLY

  She and Viktor sat in the Global Mat Monitoring room, surrounded by screens. There were views from mats in vents and caves all over Mars, concentrated toward the equator, where the Mat density was highest.

  Most of her colleagues here were exobiologists, mingled with hardcore mathist types. The mathists tried to invent ways to communicate with the Marsmat, using screens for signaling and occasionally physical models. The Mat sometimes responded with figures it slowly shaped from itself. Julia had prompted the first, during the First Expedition’s foray into Vent A. The Mat had echoed Julia’s body shape as a hail.

  Now big digital screens stood in dozens of Mat sites, trying to build a discourse with the Marsmat. The work went painfully slowly. Drawings of simple rectangles and triangles sometimes got a reply, usually not. The mathists had to visualize four-dimensional surfaces in a non-Euclidean geometry, just to make sense of some Mat shapes which might be messages. They used terms like “finite state grammars” and talked fast. Apparently, this work took inordinate quantities of caffeine. Mathists further proved that high intelligence did not necessarily guarantee fine table manners. She was happy to leave them to it.

  Masoul, a slim Indian woman sitting with them, ran the Monitoring room and kept treating Julia and Viktor like minor gods. If she only knew what job I was doing a few hours ago … Masoul said, “We have seen no major changes far away, but in the Gusev region, 200 kilometers diameter, we see fluid buildup and movement.”

  “When?” Viktor asked.

  “For several months now.”

  “Any progress on talking to the Mat?”

  Masoul gave them a weary smile. “It is very slow work. We have a vocabulary of shapes and geometries, which the Mat echoes. Then it shapes a series of other forms, but we do not know what they mean.”

  Julia asked, “It shows numerical continuity?—counting in order?”

  Masoul said, “Yes, but some of us feel that may involve mimicry. Like dolphins, which are unsurpassed in imitative abilities among animals, the Mat may just echo. Of course, both can also invent signals.”

  “What could select for echoing?” Viktor wasn’t a biologist but knew this was always the fallback question: how could the Mat be under selective pressure when it was alone on the planet?

  “We think the Mat, so dispersed, may need to talk to parts of itself. We compared data shape formations and pigmentation changes in distant sites. They differ.”

  “How many species you now figure in Marsmat?” Viktor pressed her.

  She gave a small chuckle. “The biologists’ mud fight. We think about three thousand different ones, but it’s probably more.”

  “Microbial mats use all of the metabolism types and feeding strategy that have evolved on Earth, plus some,” Julia said. “Our cute Marsmat has gone far beyond that. But we can’t talk to it!”

  Masoul blinked, startled by Julia’s irked head-jerk. “It shows—here, see, this is new.”

  She ran a video of a Mat responding to a screen displaying another Mat, from a different site. Fast forward: incremental changes. Within a day it had reshaped itself to resemble the distant Mat.

  “Um,” Julia said. “The same mirror test we use on animals like chimps and dolphins. Good!” The method was simple: put a bit of blood on a chimp’s forehead. If it then touched its own forehead in the same place, the chimp realized the reflection is actually him, not another chimp: a crude test of self-awareness.

  Masoul brightened at this approval. “It loves mirrors. At several sites, it reacts with fluid movements when we place a large mirror in a cavern.”

  “Which means … what?” Viktor asked.

  “Earthside has jumped on the study of Mats, so we have a lot of info. In Africa there are big mold-like organisms that can partition its chemical processes, separating out chemicals. It’s almost as if the mold were emulating a larger brain piece by piece, saving the results of one module to feed into the next.”

  Viktor frowned. “So dumb Earthside media are sort of right? I guess we have intelligent slime mold from outer space.”

  “When you have a Ph.D., you call them hypotheses, not guesses,” Masoul said.

  Indeed, Julia and Viktor both had doctorates, based on their papers reporting the First Expedition discoveries. Plus many honorary degrees, some apparently bestowed in hopes they would show up for the ceremony. But the Marsmat was a lot harder to fathom than listening to the whistles and clicks of dolphins.

  TEA FOR TWO

  Julia met Liang just beside the sign, made from a crate:

  The Garden of ETON (EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL ORGANIC NUTRITION)

  “You don’t need those,” she said, gesturing at Liang’s huge insectile sunglasses. “Not much UV here.”

  “I see—you have water screen.” This was his first visit; the Chinese kept to themselves, worked round the clock. He pointed at the dome where the transparent walls held a meter-thick layer of water, warmed by the big nuke, absorbing UV and solar storms. The walls held nearly a full Earth atmosphere and subtracted the UV without editing away the middle spectrum needed for plant growth. All so he and Julia could stroll through aisles of luscious leafy crops. The “grass” was really a mixture of mosses, lichens and small tundra species, but it felt great to stroll on it. Only the toughest stuff from Earth made it here—including a baobab, a tall, fat, tubular tree from western Australia, with only a few thin spidery limbs sprouting from its crown, like a nearly bald man.

  Distraction psychology was everything here, from the new habitat for most of Expeditions Two through Seven, and especially in the ten square-kilometer greenhouse. That meant heating every habitat’s water jacket with their nuclear reactor waste therms, so everything was pleasantly warm to the touch. The walls radiated a comfortable reassurance that the stinging, hostile world outside could have no effect here. Still, indoors on Mars was like being in a luxury gulag. The Siberia outside was never far from mind.

  She circled them around the constant-cam that fed a view to Earthside, for the market that wanted to have the Martian day as a wall or window in their homes. She knew this view sold especially well in the cramped rooms of China and India. It was a solid but subtle advertisement.

  Earthside could see most of the whole base with their snooper cameras—except in the greenhouse bar. They kept secret from Earthside this little robo-served outdoor restaurant and the distillery it ran. On the patio she liked to look at the eternal rusty sands through eucalyptus trees—surreal blue-green and brownish pink, the only such sight in the solar system.

  The eucalyptus stand towering at the dome’s center was her pet project. She had insisted on getting some blue gum trees from her Australian home, the forests north of Adelaide. Then she had to prepare the soil, in joyful days spent spading in the humus they had processed from their own wastes. The French called it eau de fumier or “spirit of manure” and chronicled every centimeter of blue gum growth—which was fast. But their trunks were spindly, with odd limbs sticking out like awkward elbows—yet more evidence that bringing life to Mars was not going to be easy.

  They enjoyed drinks in glasses you could have stood umbrellas in—Liang a straight vodka slush, Julia a gin and tonic. Under 0.38 g, there was plenty of time to catch a tipping glass. Not that you needed an umbrella on Mars, for, say, the next
thousand years.

  Liang was so tense, she deliberately kicked back in her chair, at an angle much easier in lesser gravity. “Took me years to get Earthside management to figure this out and send us the carbon struts.” She pushed toward him a bowl of fried, salty mixed insects from the dispenser and they both dug in.

  She ducked as a white shape hurtled by, narrowly missing her head. “Chicken alert!” It squawked and flapped, turning like a feathered blimp with wings. “Who would have thought chickens could have so much fun up here, in low grav? Plus we get fresh eggs.”

  He gave her a chilly smile. She marveled at its mechanical insincerity. “The damage. It still spreads.”

  “You’ve made no more descents?”

  A nod. “We study it from cameras, just wait.”

  “The gray—”

  “Worse. Older parts, black now.”

  “You’ve looked at causes?”

  “Of course. Ours is a more advanced site than yours.”

  “This is a life-form we have no intuition about. All these Mears, we’ve never seen anything—”

  “What ‘mears’ means?”

  “A Martian year. Look, from our perspective, it’s immortal. It’s faced enormous threats as Mars dried out, meteors hammered it, God knows what else—then we made our stupid mistakes venting oxy in the Vent A descents decades back——”

  “You were crude. We are not.”

  Liang was stiff about something, but what? Outside, the wind whistled softly around the dome walls. Another reason she enjoyed the big dome—the sighing winds. Sounds didn’t carry well in Mars’ thin atmosphere, and the habs were so insulated they were cut off from any outdoor noise.

  “Um. Meaning?”

  “You listen Earthside? The Americans, they used some new weapon to kill all the senior leadership—”

  “Of the Peoples’ Republic of Korea, yeah. Thermobaric bombs—air ignition of fuel, shock wave, big blast effect. Pretty effective in those Party enclaves all bunched up at the city centers.”

  A glare, eyes large. “This makes our collaboration impossible.”

  “We’re not a USA expedition! Our stockholders—”

  “We cannot work with you.”

  “Look, Australia isn’t the USA. Not nearly! But our science here comes first, right? I think there’s some new factor causing the Mat diebacks. I dunno what, but—”

  He sat back, displaying all the personality of a paper cup.

  “I came here to serve notice. Do not come to our site again.”

  She gave him a hard look. “So politics comes first?”

  He gave her a hard look, said nothing.

  “We find ourselves, the entire human presence on another world, carrying out the dictates of people on the other side of the solar system.”

  No response. She got up and walked away, pretty nearly the hardest thing she had ever done. Time to calm down. She decided to make use of the psychers’ classic advice: Take a walk. Breathe deeply. Let the greenhouse calm her. Plus the G&T.

  * * *

  Masoul said, “I called you here because things are moving fast. The fluid flux is building. Seismic rumbles, even—between Vent A and the Chinese cave. There are electrical signals in the Mat, too, highest level we’ve ever seen.”

  Viktor said, “What’s it mean?”

  Masoul frowned. “That gray damage? I tapped into the Chinese feed—they keep it sequestered for days before letting us look, but I hacked their blocks. The gray is growing. The older spots are going black, too.”

  “Forget about working on this problem with them,” Julia said. “Latest news feed says this damned war has stalled—nobody wants to be first to use nukes. So they’re knocking out each other’s satellites.”

  Viktor stood up, agitated. “Go on longer, could cut off our Mars capability. We’ll not get resupplied.”

  “Or go home,” Masoul said. “I’m slated to go back next year. I gather North Korea’s regime has lost its grip on the country, after the Americans decapitated its Party sites. Who’s in the right here?”

  Viktor grimaced. “Wars don’t determine who’s right, only who’s left.”

  WINDS OF MARS

  Glancing back at their original hab, she was struck by how clunky it looked. A giant tuna can, its lines were not improved by the sandbags they’d stacked on the top for radiation protection. Still, it had the familiarity of home, and they’d lived in it fairly comfortably for over two decades now, a hab for two.

  Compared to Airbus’s sleek nuke standing on its tail like a twencen space movie, their gear was now Old School. The Chinese had landed there, then deployed their elegant hab and gear into the cave beyond.

  Their rover purred and lurched as Viktor took it at max speed toward where this had all started—Vent A. The seismic data showed building pressures all along this region of Gusev crater.

  Three billion years ago, this had been a vast lake. Now only a desert remained where great breakers had once crashed on a muddy shore. As they passed by a bluff, she could see fossil rocks from the early surface life of the Marsmat. These had first been noticed far back in 2014, a powerful clue. Most of the ancient water that fed those eras still slumbered under the rusted pink-brown sands. Now some of it was building up below.

  They received bulletins from Earthside’s war as they lumbered out. More explosions in orbit, space capabilities used like pawns in a brutal global chess game. Mars has a lot of past, and so do we.

  As they reached the vent, Phobos rose in the churning ruby sky. “Chinese!” Viktor called. There they were, white suits moving in the slow-motion skipping dubbed “Mars gait” by Earthside media.

  “They must’ve felt it in the cave,” Julia said. “Step on it!”

  They got out and fought against the gathering storm now heading into Gusev, winds howling a hollow moan. She and Viktor had first met the Marsmat in a deep descent of Vent A, and now, decades later, it fumed with vapor as she had never seen it.

  “Liang!” she called on suit com. “What’s happening?”

  The nearest figure turned. Julia could see from his tormented face that in Liang’s mind the frontier between irritation and outright anger had grown thinly guarded, and as his irked mouth twisted she gathered that he had crossed the border without slowing down.

  His voice rasped. “Felt quakes, came here. Iris opened, let out liquids, wind. We will deal with this! Go away!”

  “We came offering help—hey, this is our vent!”

  “Connected to the cave, same fluid surges.” Liang’s face now showed his jittery alarm. “I found why the gray damage. Our waste disposal, human dung—Mat got into it, despite our protocols. Was piping it down, must have—”

  “Look out!” Viktor called.

  She was used to dust devils on Mars, had seen hundreds—but not like this.

  It came not from the storm but from Vent A. The furious vortex was a sulfur-rich yellow stream jetting out of the vent, corkscrewing up. Odd gray clots danced in it, whirling out and up. The blast of it knocked her down.

  She scrambled to her feet and saw the Chinese run, chattering their panic on com. Winds howled with a strange shrill song.

  The vortex rumbled now as it twisted high into a ruddy sky. “Blotches!” Viktor said. “See?—gray mass. It’s ejecting bad stuff.”

  She saw dark masses of it whirring upward in the spreading helix. Something smacked into her helmet. More spattered on her suit and she saw it was the gray, mingled with living parts of the Mat itself.

  “We did not know—I thought—” Liang was struggling with his confusion, his rage.

  “You put your shit where?” she shouted over the hammering storm.

  “Froze, dried, buried in cave—”

  “Not far enough away.” Stupid, she thought but did not say.

  “I had not known—it can expel! Must know its body.” Liang’s reserve had shattered.

  They hunkered down together against the gale. The vortex blow was easing, winds moaning,
wet debris peppering the rusty sands. She watched it in wonder. “Could be, this is a way to transport its genetics, too. Spread it around the planet, looking for new wet spots to populate. Earthside slime molds develop a treelike fruiting structure, spores—toss them to the winds at the reproductive airborne stage. The Mat must’ve done that way back, when there was some real atmosphere. Helped build its global mind.”

  “I…” Liang clung to her, as if he could not stand. “I do not know, such strange place. New ideas…”

  “Look, the Mat fixes itself. It’s smart that way.”

  Viktor said, “Sharp, Mat is. Blows out its dead, spreads itself, both at once.”

  Liang peered up into the howling vortex that plowed into the sky. “I … I should … seen this, before.”

  Julia said, “Nobody has much foresight, especially here. Look at Earthside! We’re a funny species—we fall forward, catch ourselves. Two-footed terrors.” She could joke him through this, get him straight, maybe.

  “And the Korean…” Too much was happening, too fast, for Liang.

  “If Earthside loses its orbital capability, we’ll have to hold out here on our own. That’ll take cooperation. We’ll be the new Martian race.”

  “The war, now this—” Liang gazed around at the whipping winds, as if grasping the strangeness of Mars for the first time.

  “It’s just life finding its way.”

  She could not understand why people feared new ideas. She was frightened by the old ones.

  Elves of Antarctica

  PAUL J. MCAULEY

  Born in Oxford, England, in 1955, Paul J. McAuley now makes his home in London. A professional biologist for many years, he sold his first story in 1984, and has gone on to be a frequent contributor to Interzone, as well as to markets such as Asimov’s Science Fiction, SCI FICTION, Amazing Stories, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Skylife, The Third Alternative, When the Music’s Over, and elsewhere. His first novel, Four Hundred Billion Stars, won the Philip K. Dick Award, and his novel Fairyland won both the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 1996. His other books include the novels Of the Fall, Eternal Light, and Pasquale’s Angel; Confluence—a major trilogy of ambitious scope and scale set ten million years in the future, comprised of the novels Child of the River, Ancient’s of Days, and Shrine of Stars; The Secret of Life, Whole Wide World, White Devils, Mind’s Eye, Players, Cowboy Angels, The Quiet War, Gardens of the Sun, In the Mouth of the Whale, and Evening’s Empires. His short fiction has been collected in The King of the Hill and Other Stories, The Invisible Country, Little Machines, and a major retrospective collection, A Very British History: The Best Science Fiction Stories of Paul McAuley, 1985–2011; he is also the coeditor, with Kim Newman, of an original anthology, In Dreams. His most recent book is a new novel, Something Coming Through. Coming up is a sequel, Into Everywhere.