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

by Gardner Dozois

  When I was done, despite squawks from the MEM, I started unbuckling my mask. Somebody had to be first to try it. I ripped off my mask and took a deep lungful of that thin, cold, Martian air …

  UNITED STATES HELLAS BASE, MARS. 9 NOVEMBER 1983.

  From the beginning we got visits from the Russians. Occasionally, some of us would go over there.

  We’d share tips on operational matters, and under the radar Alexei and I and the other scientists would pool data. It was never more than semi-official. But in the end it was our sheer humanity that united us; in the two bases combined there were just forty-some human souls stuck up here on Mars, and we needed company, no matter what was going on back on Earth.

  So, that November morning—that terrible morning, as it would turn out—I watched Alexei and the others come rolling over the horizon in the rovers we called Marsokhods, having driven from their own base, which we called Marsograd, tucked deep in the rift we called Voyager Valley, a quarter-way around the planet’s circumference. Few of us knew (or could pronounce) the names the Russians themselves gave to these things. But we admired the hardy “khods, more robust than anything we had, although our vehicles ran on methane fuel from our wet-chemistry factory, which was better than anything they had.

  And on this particular visit, Verity was riding back with Alexei and the rest. Despite the fact that she was a veteran Cold Warrior she was one of the most frequent American visitors to the Soviet base, and if you saw her with Alexei you’d have known exactly why. My last hope that she would reject him as a godless Commie was dissipated when it turned out his family was Catholic.

  So there you are. I was forty years old, and still mooning over the woman. Even Mars was no cure for that.

  The arrival of a “khod at the dismal, half-buried collection of shacks we called Hell City was usually a cause for a party. Well, most anything was. This time, though, the mood was sour and stiff, and it wasn’t hard to understand why. Up on that blue dot in the sky—thanks to Soviet atrocities in Afghanistan, thanks to the US deploying Pershing intermediate-range missiles throughout Europe thereby increasing our capability to launch a first strike, thanks to the increasing weaponisation of space, a process even we on Mars were a part of—the armed forces of our respective nations had come to a pitch of tension that hadn’t been matched since Cuba twenty years earlier. As soon as Verity got through the lock she hurried to her cabin to tune into her encrypted comms channel back to NORAD, to get the straight skinny on what was going on at home.

  Meanwhile I hosted Alexei and the rest in our galley area, the only place large enough to accommodate us all. On the wall-mounted TV set an ice hockey game was playing, another sublimated US-USSR confrontation, beamed directly from the Earth for the benefit of both sides of our ideological divide.

  Alexei glanced over his coffee at me. “You are preparing for home, yes?”

  The cycler habitat, a half-dozen ganged Skylabs looping endlessly between the orbits of Earth and Mars, was due in a few days, ready to collect us and take us home.

  I said, “I’ve been preparing a geology package to help train up my replacements. I ought to walk your people through it. I think we’ve established the basic parameters pretty well now. Aside from the lava fields around the Tharsis giants, you basically have a surface of impact ejecta mixed with debris from mudflows and floods. In many ways Mars is a mix of conditions on Earth and the moon, and I’ve recommended to Houston they should have crews trained up in the field on both those bodies before being sent over here.”

  He smiled. “That sounds like a wise geological synthesis, for an astronomer.”

  He was needling me, affectionately enough. “Well, we all cross-trained, Alexei…”

  Verity came bustling in. Her face was pale and drawn, with Martian dust ingrained in her pores. She poured herself a cup of coffee from a perc on the bar, the liquid slopping in the low gravity. Her earpiece whispered continually. “The stupid fuckers,” she muttered.

  Alexei asked, “Which particular stupid fuckers do you have in mind?”

  “My bosses, and yours.” She sat with us and leaned closer so the ice hockey fans couldn’t hear. “I got a feed from NORAD. Allied forces across the world have been put on Defcon Two. It’s an exercise. But a big one, spanning all of western Europe. They call it Able Archer 83. It will be over in a couple of days. But it’s giving the Soviets nightmares. Seems nobody told them it’s just a drill. We’re trying out new comms systems and protocols, so they can’t follow what we’re doing. And the clincher is that the USAF has decided it’s a good opportunity to launch their OWP.”

  That was a new acronym for me. “Say what?”

  “An orbital weapons platform,” Alexei said grimly.

  “A Skylab with nukes,” Verity said. “Hell, you Russians have your Salyuts—”

  “Peaceful scientific and reconnaissance platforms.”

  “Sure they are. And what about the Polyus programme? What’s that but a space battle station? Anyhow, no wonder the old men in the Kremlin are freaking out. We’re spending billions of dollars on this exercise and the build-up to it, but not one grain of thought is being given to how it looks to the other side—or how the Soviets might react.” She stared at her coffee cup. Then, without looking up, she reached across the table and took Alexei’s hand.

  “Let’s talk about something else,” I said sharply. “How’s your own work going, Alexei?”

  So we turned away from those dangerous topics to the strange life forms of Mars.

  The best biological results had been retrieved by the Soviets, in the diverse environments they had explored in the Voyager Valley—judging by the results they’d leaked to us, anyhow. And they seemed to have established the basic parameters of life on Mars. You had a substrate of microbial communities, some of them stretching for hundreds of miles in the shallow, moist soil, together with the very photogenic multicellular stars on the surface, mostly the forms we colloquially called “cacti” and “trees.” The cacti had tough, leathery skin, which almost perfectly sealed in their water stores. The trees had trunks as hard as concrete, and leaves like needles to keep in the moisture. Both forms photosynthesised busily.

  But Alexei had always thought there was more to it.

  Now he leaned towards us, confidential. “As it happens, I do have new observations. We have believed there is no animal form here on Mars. Nothing but the microbes and the plants. We have no fossil traces—”

  “No spikes on the cacti.” That had been my own first observation, on my second Marswalk, when I had explored that crater I saw after my first footfall, full of cacti and dwarf trees. There were no Martian teeth against which those cacti might have needed to evolve protection.

  “And not enough oxygen in the air to enable motility anyhow,” Verity put in.

  “Yet there are sites in the valley where I believe I have seen tracks. Channels dug deep into the strata. Even,” Alexei said dramatically, “a kind of footprint. Very small, bird-like or lizard-like, and embedded in mud and mudstone. Not new—but not more than a few thousand years old, I would guess. Why do we not see these forms being created now?”

  In terms of observations of Mars he had come a long way since first staring at those grainy Voyager orbiter pictures in JPL, I thought.

  Nevertheless I shook my head. “We don’t yet know enough about Mars to eliminate non-biological causes, Alexei.”

  “Of course not. But there could be something we are not expecting—for example, some equivalent of slime molds, which alternate between static and mobile forms. I have a feeling that there is more to this biosphere than we have yet discovered, aspects we do not comprehend…”

  There was a hiss of static.

  We turned. The TV image had fritzed out, the hockey game lost. Some of our colleagues dug comms links out of their coverall pockets.

  And Verity, touching her earpiece, got up and went straight to the galley’s small window, looking east.

  Alexei and I glanced at
each other, and followed. Through the window we looked out over our base, a collection of domes and shacks, and the greenhouse bubbles where we grew our potatoes and beans. A child ran by, with her mask off, just five years old and breathing the air of Mars.

  “They went to Defcon One,” Verity said, listening to her earpiece. “The USAF Skylab didn’t make its correct orbit after launch. Looked like it was descending over Soviet territory. Like a bombing run. It was just a malfunction—but the Russians responded—” I could hear the squeal of static. She pulled the little gadget out of her ear.

  And an evening star flared, low in the Martian sky. It was as sudden, as brutal, as that. Verity had known where to look, to see Earth in the sky.

  I didn’t know what to feel. I retreated to my default mode, the science dweeb. “Quite a stunt, to make bangs bright enough to be visible across interplanetary space.”

  Verity glanced at me. “I guess you have a choice to make about going home when the cycler comes, Puddephat.”

  The star had seemed to be dimming. But then, only moments after the peak, there was another surge of light.

  “The second strikes,” murmured Alexei. He put his arm around Verity’s shoulders. “This is home. Earth is gone. Mars is our mother now. And the future is our responsibility, those of us here.”

  Standing alone, I comforted myself with the thought that the conflict was already minutes in the past, even as its light seared into my eyes.

  HELL CITY, MARS. 28 OCTOBER 2010.

  Alexei Petrov died. He was seventy years old.

  The skin cancer took him, as it’s taken too many of us, that remote sun spitefully pouring its ultra-violet through the thin air here on this mountaintop we call Mars.

  When he knew the game was up, he wrote out a kind of will. Naturally he left all his meagre material possessions to Verity and their kids and grandchildren. But he also willed a gift to me, a box of notes, a lifetime’s research on the Mars ground, beginning with records from the fancy instruments our mission designers gave us and finishing with eyewitness observations written out in his own cramped handwriting, like a Victorian naturalist’s journal.

  The point was, Alexei had come to certain conclusions about Mars, mankind’s second home, which he hadn’t shared with anybody—not even Verity. But when I’d gone through it all, and checked his results, and reworked his findings—and found they tallied with some tentative conclusions of my own—I called on Verity Whittaker Petrova, and asked her to take a walk with me around our little township.

  We lived in a huddle of yellowing plastic domes. Some of the youngsters—we already had second-generation Martians sixteen or seventeen years old—were building houses of the native “wood,” hacked out with stone axes and draped over with alpaca skin, houses that looked like tepees, or Iron Age roundhouses from Europe. But the houses had to be sealed up with ageing polythene sheets, and connected by piping to our elderly air circulation and scrubbing plants, driven by the big Soviet solar cell arrays now that our small NASA nuke plant had failed. Verity had led the effort to build a pretty little chapel, using materials scavenged from the MEM.

  All this was set down on the floor of Hellas basin, a feature so vast that from anywhere near its centre you can’t see the walls. After the One-Day War we had all come here to live together, Soviets and Americans together, including the crew of the abandoned interplanetary cycler. The logic was that we needed as large a gene pool as possible. Besides, once the last signals from the moon bases went silent, we huddled for companionship and warmth.

  Well, we got along in reasonable harmony, save for the occasional fist fight, despite the fact that our two nations had wiped each other out. We avoided political talk, or any discussion of constitutions or voting rights or common ownership of means of production. We were too few to need grand political theories; we would let future generations figure it out. We thought we would have time, you see.

  We walked on towards the farm domes, with their laboriously tilled fields of potatoes and yams and green beans. The work we’d put in was heartbreakingly clear from the quality of the soil we’d managed to create from Martian dirt. We’d even imported earthworms. But a spindly, yellowed crop was our only reward.

  The native Mars life seemed to be struggling too. Between the domes was a small botanical garden I’d established myself, open to the Martian elements. The native stock looked different from my first impression, on that wonderful Independence Day of discovery. The cacti were shrivelled and tougher-looking, and the trees I’d planted had hardly grown. Adult specimens, which had littered the north-facing slopes of Hellas in tremendous forests, were dying back too.

  A gaggle of kids ran by, coming from the alpaca pens, yelling to each other. They were bundled up in shabby coats and alpaca-wool hats, and they all wore face masks. The kids had always loved the alpacas. Verity and I, two fragile old folk, had to pause to let them by.

  “Do you know,” she said, “I didn’t understand a single word any of them said.” After her decades with Alexei she had a faint Slavic accent. “The kids seem to be making up their own language, a kind of pidgin. Maybe we should call it Russ-lish. Rung-lish.”

  “How about Wronglish?”

  That made her laugh, just for a second, this dust-ridden, careworn, sanctimonious matriarch at my side.

  We paused by the alpaca domes ourselves, where those spindly beasts, imported as embryos from the mountains of South America, peered out at us, or scraped apathetically at the scrubby grass that grew at their feet.

  “I think it was the alpacas I noticed first,” Verity said slowly. “How reluctant they became to leave their domes.”

  I took a deep breath, sucking in the stale odours of my own mask. “Did Alexei ever talk to you about his conclusions?”

  “No, he didn’t. But I was married to the man for twenty-five years, Puddephat, and I was never completely dumb, even though I was no double-dome like you two. I learned to read his moods. And I knew that the air pressure is dropping. That’s obvious. A high-school barometer would show it. The partial pressure of oxygen is falling even faster. There’s something’s wrong with Mars.”

  I shook my head. “Actually, I think Mars is just fine. It just isn’t fine for us, that’s all.”

  She stood, silent, grave.

  I sighed. “I’ll tell you what Alexei concluded, and I agree with him. Look.” I scratched axes for a graph in the crimson dirt with my toe. “Here’s a conventional view of Mars—what we believed must be true before we landed here. When it was young, Mars was warm and wet, with a thick blanket of air, and deep oceans. Like Earth, in many ways. That phase might have lasted a couple of billion years. But Mars is smaller than the Earth, and further from the sun. As the geology seized up and the volcanoes died back, and the sunlight got to work breaking up the upper atmosphere, Mars lost a lot of its air. Here’s the air pressure declining over time…” I sketched a graph falling sharply at first, but then bottoming out before hitting zero. “Much of the water seeped away into deep underground aquifers and froze down there, or at the poles. But still you finished up with conditions that were only a little more extreme than in places on Earth. Mars was like high country, we thought. Scattered lakes, vegetation. Verity, this decline took billions of years—plenty of time for life to adapt.”

  She nodded. “Hence the cacti and the trees. Now you’re telling me this is all wrong.”

  “We, and Alexei especially, have had decades now to take a good close look at Mars. And what we find doesn’t tally with this simple picture of a one-off decline.

  “We found extensive lava fields much younger than we’d expected—a whole series of them, one on top of the other. Sandwiched in between the lava strata we found traces of savage glaciation, and periods of water flows—river valleys, traces of outflow events, even shorelines. And we found thin bands of fossils, evidence of life growing actively for brief periods, overlaid by featureless sandstone—the relics of dead ages of windblown dust storms. You can date all
this with crater counts. Cycles, over and over.

  “I’ll tell you what Alexei came to believe, and I think I agree with him.” I scuffed out the graph with my toe, and sketched another. “Mars did start out warm and wet. It had to be so; we see the trace of huge oceans. The biosphere itself is the legacy of that age. But that warm phase was short-lived. Mars lost almost all its air, catastrophically.” I drew a new line that cut right down to the zero line.

  “How low?”

  “Hard to say. To no more than one per cent of Earth’s sea-level pressure. You can tell that from the evidence of the dust transport, the rock-shattering extremes of temperature, the solar weathering…”

  I sketched it for her, speaking, drawing. Mars’s natural condition is dry and all but airless. All the water is either locked up in polar ice caps or is deep in a network of subterranean aquifers. The air is so thin there’s virtually no shielding from the sun, and no heat capacity to keep in the warmth at night; you swing daily from heat to a withering cold. The only thing that moves is the dust, swirling around in a trace of air.

  “And life, Verity, life huddles underground, living off the planet’s inner warmth, and seeps of liquid water in the cracks in the rocks. Spores and seeds and microbes, hiding from the raw sunlight.”

  She pulled off her mask and breathed in, a deep gulping, rasping breath. “It ain’t that way now, Puddephat.”

  “No. But the way it is now, as it happens, is unusual for Mars. We’re coming to the end of a volcano summer.”

  “A what?”

  “Which is when things change.” I drew a series of spikes reaching up from the flatlined graph. “Mars is still warm inside. Every so often the big Tharsis volcanoes blow their tops. They pump out a whole atmosphere, of carbon dioxide and methane and other stuff, and a blanket of dust and ash that warms the world up enough for the permafrost to melt…”

  “And life takes its brief chance.”

  “You’ve got it. Mars turns green in a flash, maybe just a few thousand years. The native life spreads seeds and spores far and wide. At the peak of each summer there probably is some motility—Martian molds squirming in the dirt, Alexei was right about that—but we came too late to see them directly.