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

by Gardner Dozois

  HELL CITY, MARS. 4 JULY 2026.

  Well, at least one of us lasted long enough to see the fiftieth anniversary of the first human hoofprints on this rustball. My hoofprints. That’s something, isn’t it?

  And I decided it’s a good enough time to finish my autobiography, such as it is, and read it down the comms link for the benefit of a silent universe, and then bury the text in this tin chest in the Martian dirt in the probably vain hope that somebody will find it some day. Who, though? Or what? Maybe some radioactive super-roach from the ruins of Earth, or some smart semi-motile Martian of a future volcano summer will read about our mistakes, and not repeat them.

  Mars abides. Yes, I know the Bible verse (and by the way, I stowed Verity’s copy of the Good Book in this chest): “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the Earth abideth forever.” Ecclesiastes one, four. I always found that line a comfort, in the darkest days, and I always told Verity that it was a by-product of her Bible reading groups, although I have to admit I picked it up in the first place from the title of a pretty good science fiction novel.

  But I digress. If you want to learn the story of me and Mars, and Verity and Alexei, and all the rest, you’ll have to begin at the beginning.

  MOUNT WILSON OBSERVATORY, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA. 21 JULY 1964.

  The city lights washed to the foot of the hill on which the old observatory stood, but that night the sky above was crisp and cool and peppered with stars. The opened dome curved over Verity’s head, a shell of ribbing and panels. I suppose that old dome is crushed like an eggshell now. The telescope itself was an open frame, vaguely cylindrical, looming in the dark.

  I’d always been an astronomy buff. But I only had eyes for Verity Whittaker.

  I was fussing around the telescope, talking too fast and too much, as usual. “This is the Hooker telescope. When it was built, in 1906, it was the largest telescope in the world. These days it’s not hard to book time on it. Most observers want better seeing conditions than you get here now. The city lights, you know … I guess it doesn’t much look like what most people think a telescope is supposed to be. I mean—”

  “You mean it’s a reflector,” Verity murmured. “Come on, Puddephat; I studied basic optics.”

  “Sure.” I laughed nervously; in my own ears it was a painful, grating sound.

  She walked around the small, cluttered space, more glamorous in her USAF uniform than Marilyn Monroe, in my eyes. I was twenty-one, a year younger than Verity, with my hair already thinning at the temples. Why, she was already all but a combat veteran, having flown patrols over Germany and gone toe-to-toe with the Soviets. What could she see in me? She wasn’t even interested in astronomy, which was a subject for old men.

  But we were both attached to NASA’s long-term Mars programme, though both of us were at bottom-feeder level. And to fly the spaceships of the future, pilots like Verity Whittaker were going to have to learn astronomy from dweeb science-specialists like me.

  So here she was, having responded to my invitation to come share some study time, and my heart was pounding. Even the heavy crucifix she wore on a chain around her neck didn’t put me off.

  Restless—she was always easily bored by science stuff—she went over to a small bookshelf laden with a range of volumes of varying ages and degrees of decrepitude. Mars as the Abode of Life by Percival Lowell, 1909; Mars and its Canals by Lowell, 1906 …

  “Not too scientific,” I ventured. “Old Lowell. But oddly prophetic in his way.”

  “If you say so.” She picked out a fiction title: Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles.

  “You like science fiction? Me too. That’s one of my favourites.”

  “Too realistic for my taste. I grew up with Barsoom.”

  “Maybe we could discuss books some time.”

  She didn’t actually say no. She put the volume back.

  I got out of the chair. “Come on over; I have the instrument set up.”

  She sat in the chair and craned her head back. It took her a few moments to figure out how to see. You had to keep one eye closed, of course, and even then you had to align your head correctly, or your view would be occluded by the rim of the eyepiece. But then her lips parted softly—man, I could have kissed her there and then—and I knew what she was seeing. A disc, washed-out pink and green, with streaks of lacy cloud, and patches of steel-grey ocean that would glint if the sun caught them at the right angle. All this blurred, softened, as if depicted in watercolour.

  “I’m looking at Mars?”

  “Right. We’re nowhere near opposition, but the seeing is pretty good.” Her lips closed in a frown, and I knew she didn’t know what I was talking about. “At opposition Mars is almost opposite the sun, seen from Earth. So the planets are at the closest they get in their orbits. Verity, to do their jobs astronomers have always had to be able to figure out where they are in relation to the rest of the universe. Just the skills you interplanetary pilot heroes are going to need. Anyhow, I thought it was appropriate for us to see Mars tonight. It kind of ties in with the main thing I want to show you.”

  She pulled back from the eyepiece. She looked suspicious, as if I was about to whip out my dong. “And what’s that, Puddephat?”

  I went to a desk at the back of the observatory, and came back with a fat folder. “Up until just a few days ago, that view of Mars was pretty much the best we had. But now everything’s different. Look at this stuff.”

  She took the folder. It contained photographs in grainy black-and-white. “What am I looking at?”

  “The pictures radioed back by Mariner 4. The NASA space probe that flew by Mars last week. Mariner sent back twenty-one pictures in all. They cover maybe one per cent of Mars’s surface. Classified, but I’ve got contacts at NASA Ames,” I boasted desperately.

  The first photo showed the limb of the planet, seen from close to; there was a curved horizon. Verity stared. In contrast to an astronomer’s view, the misty, unreal disc, this was how Mars would look to an orbiting astronaut. I could see her imagination was snagged.

  The next few monochrome images looked like aerial pictures of a desert. “It’s hard to make out anything at all.”

  “You have to remember the geometry, Verity; the sun was more or less directly overhead here, so there are no shadows.”

  “High noon on Mars. It looks kind of like Arizona, maybe, seen from a high-flying plane.”

  “Well, you’d know.”

  “Could Mars be like Arizona?”

  “Something like it, but a higher altitude. Mariner confirmed the atmospheric pressure. You could walk around on the surface with nothing more than a face mask and sun cream…”

  The seventh picture showed craters.

  She stared. “This looks more like the moon.”

  “Mars is a small, geologically static world with a thin atmosphere, Verity. So, craters.”

  “We’re screwed.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because nobody’s going to spend billions of dollars to send us to a cratered rockball.”

  “Just keep going.”

  She flicked on, and stopped at the thirteenth frame. “My God.” Suddenly she sounded electrified.

  And well she might have been. The thirteenth picture showed more craters, but with what could only be forests sheltering inside them, bordering neat lakes. Life on Mars, unequivocal proof, coming after centuries of old men staring through telescopes at shifting grey-green patches …

  Verity whooped. “They’re just going to hose money at the programme now!”

  JET PROPULSION LABORATORY, CALIFORNIA. 21 JANUARY 1972.

  We got out of the car and I smuggled Alexei past JPL security, with me in my bright astronaut-corps jumpsuit and flashing my best grin at the star-struck guards and clerks. I murmured, “This is treason, probably. I could get shot for this.”

  Alexei Petrov grinned back at me. “Don’t worry about it. No American soldier yet born can shoot straight.”
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  I hurried him nervously along the central mall, which stretched from the gate into the main working area of the laboratory. JPL was a cramped place, crowded between the San Gabriel Mountains and the upper-middle class suburb of La Canada. Alexei was distracted by the von Karman auditorium, for years the scene of triumphant news conferences. Today there was a crowd at the doors, for the rumour was that the Martian rainstorms had cleared enough for the Voyager mission controllers to attempt a landing. But I hurried him past.

  “We will not go in there? I heard Arthur C. Clarke and Walter Cronkite were coming today.”

  “What, you’re hunting autographs now? We’re going somewhere much more exciting.”

  I led him to the Image Processing Laboratory, rooms full of chattering technicians and junior scientists, and screens and computer printouts showing crude black-and-white images being put through various enhancement processes. Here, away from the sanitised stuff being presented to the celebrities, the raw data sent back by the Voyager orbiters at Mars were being received.

  In common with every other semi-public NASA facility, there were also TV feeds on the walls reporting on the agency’s growing celestial dominion, such as live in-colour Earth-orbit images from the astronauts in the Skylabs, and grainier pictures of the second EVA by the Apollo 18 crew on the moon—even an image from the Cape of the latest unmanned test launch of the mighty Nova booster, big brother of the Saturn Vs. But Alexei, dedicated planetary scientist that he was, had eyes only for the Mars data: images transmitted across the gulf one dot at a time like newsprint wire photos and painstakingly reconstructed. The very latest pictures, live from Mars!

  And, as I’d hoped and half-planned, Verity Whittaker came pushing out of the crowd. At twenty-nine she was more beautiful than ever, her hair cropped sensibly short, her body toned by years of astronaut training. She was still as remote from me as the moon, of course. But she smiled at an old colleague. “Hi, Puddephat. Should have known you’d show up. Who’s your friend?”

  “Lieutenant Verity Whittaker, meet Doctor Alexei Petrov, from the Soviet Academy of—”

  “Puddephat, are you insane? You smuggled in a Soviet?”

  Alexei, a little older than us at thirty-two, wasn’t the way you’d imagine a Soviet citizen. Coming from a relatively privileged stratum of Russian society—his father had been an Academician too—he was tall, slim, with slicked-back dark hair and movie-star looks. And, even as he and Verity faced each other down in those first seconds, I could see something sparking between them.

  “I take it you never met a Soviet citizen before.” His rich Slavic accent rolled out like warm butter.

  “Maybe not, but I met a few Chinese Commie flyers during my tour in ’Nam in ’68, and I don’t care what the official histories say.”

  I sighed; in the astronaut corps we’d had these arguments too many times. “Verity, science can only proceed through openness. I’ve known Alexei for years. He’s in the Soviet Mars cosmonaut cadre—he’s flown in space, which is more than I’ve managed so far. And when I heard he was in the country—”

  “I hunger for data,” Alexei said, his gaze roaming. “My subject, astrobiology, is information-poor.”

  Verity moved to block his view. “In that case, go spend a billion roubles and retrieve your own data. Ah, but your landers failed, didn’t they?”

  Alexei said mildly, “Some commentators say a massive investment in space technology is itself destabilising.”

  “Maybe the way you Soviets do it.”

  “But what of your militarised Skylabs? And is it true that the Apollo 16 crew tested weapons on the moon during their ‘dark’ EVA?”

  But now a stir of excitement distracted us, as the technicians and scientists gathered around the TV monitors.

  In this particular launch window, it had been unlucky for the twin Voyager-Mars spacecraft (and even more unlucky for their sturdy Soviet counterparts) to arrive in the middle of the worst Martian storm season the astronomers had ever seen. The JPL controllers didn’t want to risk dropping their landers down into that planetary maelstrom, and for weeks the orbiters’ cameras sent back nothing but images of clouds punctuated by lightning flashes.

  But now the storms had settled out, and it seemed the mission planners had agreed to go for a descent attempt. The lander attached to Voyager-Mars 2 had already separated, and was shown in grainy images from cameras mounted on the orbiter. It was a squat glider, a trial of the manned landers to be built in a few years’ time, and you could clearly see the Stars and Stripes and UNITED STATES boldly painted on its flanks. The scientists, Poindexter patriots all, whooped and cheered.

  But at that pivotal moment I found myself alone.

  When I looked around I saw Verity was shadowing Alexei as he went through an image archive. He was peering at striking images of liquid water running through the deep canyons, and the tough vegetation of Mars clumping in the crater basins. I saw how their slim bodies brushed close, and he turned his head, just subtly, as if distracted by the scent of her hair.

  And, reader, my heart ripped apart.

  HESPERIA BASE, MARS. 4 JULY 1976 (MARS DATES GIVEN AS AT HOUSTON MERIDIAN).

  I took a step forward, moving away from the MEM, into pale sunlight.

  This was me, Jonas Puddephat, aged thirty-three, walking on Mars—the first on Mars! Who’d have thought it? Not Verity and the rest of our six-strong crew, that’s for sure. We’d argued halfway to Mars about priority, and in the end it was pure diplomatic hypocrisy that had delivered me out the hatch first. President Nixon’s office had decided that this mission, as much militaristic land-grab as science expedition, should be led down the ladder by the only authentic civilian aboard. Verity had always been a strange mix of Cold Warrior and religious zealot, and she retreated into her onboard Bible study group and tried to find some consolation for the snub in the pages of the Good Book.

  But just then I didn’t care about any of that. Let me tell you, it was a moment that made up for all the years of training, and the horrors of the flight itself, from the shattering launch of the Nova booster climbing into the sky on its fourteen F-1 engines, to the months of the cruise in our souped-up Skylab hab module with the growling NERVA nuclear rockets at our back, and finally the hair-raising descent to the ground in the Mars Excursion Module, an untried glider descending into a virtually unknown atmosphere. Not only that, we were rising out of the debris of too many accidents and disasters—too many lives lost, for our accelerated programme put huge pressure on the resources and management structures of NASA, USAF and our main contractors.

  And then add on the fact that, such had been our eagerness to sprint here and beat the Soviets, we had no way of getting home again before a relief mission arrived some twenty-five months later.

  None of that mattered, for I’d lived through it all, and I was here. I whooped in my dweebish way and pumped the air.

  Verity’s voice murmured in his ear. “Checklist, asshole.”

  I sighed. “I know, Verity, I know.”

  So I got to work. I turned to face Nixon. The MEM was a biconic glider, its tile-clad belly and leading edges scorched, sitting on frail-looking skids. I made sure the camera mounted on my chest got a good view of the craft’s exterior, so Mission Control could check for damage.

  Then I set off again, across the Martian ground. Soon I had gone far enough that I could see no signs of raying from Nixon’s descent engines. The soil under my feet was unmarked, without footprints. Ahead of me I saw a dip in the ground, it might have been a crater, where what looked like a forest copse grew, crowding grey-green.

  By God, I thought, we’re here. We came for insane reasons, and probably by all the wrong methods, but we’re here.

  “Puddephat,” Verity said gently. “Are you all right?”

  I tried to focus. “Fine, Verity.” She didn’t need to tell me I was well behind schedule. I hadn’t even got the flag set up yet. But I walked forward, further from the MEM.

  An
d Verity murmured, “Look up.”

  Again I tilted back, and peered up at the zenith. I saw a single, brilliant star passing overhead. Not one of Mars’s moons—it had to be the Stalingrad. The Soviet vessel was an unlikely jam-up of Proton booster stages, a Salyut-derived space habitat, and some kind of lander, launched by three firings of their huge N-1 boosters—or four, if you count the one that blew up—but they had made it too, and here they were. Somewhere up there was Alexei Petrov, peering down at me through a telescope, with envy no doubt eating into his soul. I lifted an arm and waved.

  Again Verity pressed me. “We only beat them here by days, Puddephat. And if they manage to land before you get around to making the claim—”

  “All right, damn it.”

  It took me only a moment to set up the flagpole, and take the Stars and Stripes from its bag and fix it to the pole. “Can you see me, Nixon?”

  “Clear as crystal, Jonah.”

  I straightened up and saluted. “On this, the bicentenary day of my nation’s declaration of independence from foreign tyranny, I, Jonas James Puddephat, by the authority vested in me by the government of the United States of America, do hereby claim all these lands of Mars…”

  While I spoke, I heard Verity and the others discussing contingencies in case the Soviets landed close by. We had rifles and revolvers, engineered to work in Martian conditions and trialled on the moon, and the Nixon even packed a couple of artillery pieces. For years, even before we humans got there, Mars had been an arena projected from our Earthbound Cold War.