The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  It wasn't easy. Miranda was a rough-edged, prickly student, and her essays were condensed dullness, never more than the required length. A spoken sentence of more than a half dozen words was a rarity from her, and she sometimes seemed to speak a language so far evolved from today's English in its lack of articles and verbs that, had it been deliberate, would have been considered art in some circles. Nonetheless I was intent. I persisted in bringing her along. I hided my time.

  I had to expend some moral capital, but convinced myself that she covered the ground on her final well enough to let me pass her. She liked me, I think. But I said nothing unethical to her, nor hinted at anything romantic while she was my student-I have my standards.

  I saw her on the last day of classes of the winter semester, after the final grades were in.

  "You're off to Mercury, I hear, to be along on your father's attempt to walk across Chao Meng Fu Crater?" Shielded from the Sun, that huge crater was an ice field-Mercury's Antarctica. She nodded. "Have you set the expedition membership?"

  She shook her head, confirming what was known publicly.

  "Will you have any journalists along? It would make a very exciting nature piece."

  She smiled a bit. "Like your Ascraeus Mons hike piece? Dad liked that and sent me here."

  He'd seen that? I tried to remember the rejection letter. I was flattered but a bit worried that it was a little light for a Lotati expedition. Then the alarm bells rang in my bead. My competition for the position of expedition hard was standing in front of me.

  I reached for a tone of professorial authority. "Randi, uh. You've come a long way in your composition.. ."

  She shrugged. "Yeah. Thanks to you. Someone's got to do the article. Someone who fits on the team. Wish I wrote better."

  "Randi, I suppose I shouldn't be obscure. Is there any chance I might come myself?"

  Her eyes lit up for a moment, then she frowned. "Rough business, exploring."

  "Then my accounts of it should draw interest, maybe enough to push Solar System Astrographic's allocation priorities a little further up." Not to mention that a single Astrographic article could bring in the equivalent in allocations of my entire Jovis Tholus University stipend for a year. A Martian year. "Uh, huh." A doubtful assent on her part "Might even help you get to your namesake, out by Uranus. Now there would be an angle that people would notice!"

  That got her attention. "Dad's idea too. My name. Not that easy, though. No place for amateurs, out there."

  I smiled at her. "I bet I'll make a good explorer. I'm observant, handy, and in reasonably good shape."

  She gave me a somewhat skeptical look and a sigh. "Mercury first. Chao Meng Fu. Hundred fifty kilometer-wide. Never sees the Sun. Covered with granite hard permafrost. Probably take us two, three weeks to walk it."

  "Walk?"

  She nodded. "Unassisted. Carry everything. Vacuum suits, tents, supplies, samples."

  "Walk it? Uh, why?"

  She looked at me as if I was born in some other cosmos. "Because we can."

  There is this recklessness about me that allows me to throw words around without fully considering the consequences. "Well, I think I can too. I've done enough hiking around Tharsis-I even have a cinder cone named after me."

  She looked skeptically at me. "Oh? How high?"

  She had me there. I grinned sheepishly. "Well, "Bubka Mons' is only a hundred meters above local mean. But it's kind of impressive because there's nothing else around it." And I knew someone in the Martian Geology Institute that was laying out the local real estate. She giggled.

  "It is registered, Randi. Anyway, my Ascraeus trip was solo, and by a new route."

  She looked judiciously at me and sighed. "Lose ten kilos. Do fifty kilometers a day." We stood silent for a couple of seconds as I tried to digest that.

  She turned away. "Physics final-see you." And she was gone, gliding easily down the hall. Dreams are free; but realizing them has a price. And I resolved to pay it.

  By the end of last semester, I had walked up a few Martian mountains and lost the ten kilos. I talked to her again and we arranged a checkout hike down to the base of Jovis Tholis and back up to the town again with full packs, breather gear, and by the most difficult route she could pick. She watched every move I made, and seemed satisfied enough to make another "date."

  As this went on, I grew utterly fascinated with her. She was a busy woman. Reporters called her, outfitters called her. She was always meeting young women explorers who knew her reputation as a companion of her father, and old men explorers who had been somewhere with her father. My metaphor for Randi was a black hole; people and things seem to swirl around and accrete to her without any significant verbal effort on her part, as if her presence distorts space so that all roads simply lead to her and none away. The week she was to leave Mars for Mercury she called me. "You're in, Professor Bubka. Can you make the Shannon inbound? Friday?"

  By moving heaven and Mars, I could, and did. I had, it seemed, been within her event horizon for some time now.

  So, Mercury. Mercury gravity is the same as Mars gravity, which some say is more than a coincidence, but a coincidence as yet unexplained. The gravity here is exactly the same as on Mars, but I'm carrying three times my mass in supplies and vacuum survival equipment. I might as well be hiking in Antarctica with a light pack. Indeed, I could use the conditioning to visit Earth! Despite the extra mass, we try to keep up the fifty kilometers a day-a pace I must maintain.

  There are eight of us strung out along the Chao Meng Fu crater floor, Dr. Lotati in the lead. Dr. Juanita Tierzo, a Harvard-trained geologist, follows him. Juanita is actually on the JTU faculty-in the Martian Geology Institute-but I had to come to Mercury to meet her. Randi follows her. Then come Ed, myself, and one of Dr. Tierzo's graduate students, Eloni Wakhweya, a slight Kenyan woman with a big grin. Solar System Astrographic expedition staffers Mike and Karen Svenson come last, pulling an equipment pallet on two large wire wheels.

  They meant it; no robots, no powered vehicles, and in my now humbled opinion, no sense. If Mercury had a breathable atmosphere, they'd have done without the spacesuits and all their built-in communications and amenities, too. I'm exhausted, uncomfortable, and increasingly uneasy with this exercise in cosmic hubris.

  The view is simple, unrelieved flatness, the kind of view that should reach one's soul in the way of all great expanses. The crater's stark lines go its namesake's art one spareness better; the vertical dimension is almost absent. It too is painted in an ink of five colors, all gray. It is Aldrin's magnificent desolation, without relief. I appreciate it more in intellectual abstract than in person.

  There is light to see: the tips of the peaks behind us blaze like distant are lamps, and fill the bowl of Chao Meng Fu with a ghostly kind of moonlight. Small, rounded crater rims dot this frozen plane-very few higher than a man, for ice flows in time. The brighter stars shine down on us hard and free. Brilliant Earth hangs just over the horizon, a tiny dazzling blue-white star. Luna lies well away from it, a faint gray dot lost in Sagittarius.

  Invisible to us in the Earth's glare is the beginning of Earth's Sunshield. This mammoth project will partly shade the heat-polluted atmosphere from the fires of Apollo's chariot someday. It is taking form at the Earth-Sun L-1 point, balanced there with the help of reflected light-they plan to reduce insulation by 1 percent. But more relevant to our endeavor is that it is the home of Solar System Astrographic's solar radio antenna, which we use to apprise the rest of the Solar System of the status of this madcap adventure. I look that way wondering why I ever left.

  "Another five kilometers to the crevasse," Dr. Lotati tells us on the comnet.

  This desolate flat sameness is an illusion; we have real work ahead. The crevasse is a major obstacle, or a major objective if you are a geologist. Halfway between the rim of Chao Meng Fu crater and its central peaks lies a huge crack in the permafrost caused, they think, by an almost infinitely slow lifting of the crater floor, still reboundi
ng from the billion-year-old impact that formed the crater. To this poet, overhead views make the crevasse look like the mouth of the planet-and I worry about being devoured.

  By noon, universal time, the mouth of Mercury yawns directly in front of us, an ugly black crack that makes the dark gray plain around us look silvery by comparison. We halt to plan our crossing. Juanita proposes that we simply go down into this thing, down into a darkness that has never known the Sun, and out again on the other side. That idea creates enough interest to scare me. But not now. A descent will take planning, and, in the meantime, I luxuriate in not having to move my body.

  Yet, standing still, I forget my pain and become curious. The crevasse seems to run to the horizon to my right and left. The other side is the length of a football field away. I shudder-it is impossible to repress the thought that such darkness is not meant for human beings, that the laws of physics will become conscious and punish us for trying it. Perversely, the challenge of that danger attracts me.

  Yet, there are reasons to go down beyond the simple thrill of it. Solar Astrographic's expedition is half stunt, half science-and here is where the other half gets its due. There is a mystery here and the root of it lies in a contrary mysticism of celestial dynamics. Here, a mere sixty million kilometers from its fiery photosphere, are surfaces that have not seen the Sun since the Caloris impact defined Mercury's final orientation.

  This same counter-intuitive magic then decrees that the ices of comets that orbit impossibly far-beyond even Pluto, Charon, and Persephone-are actually closer to the Sun, and Mercury, in the energy of their motion than anything in the inner Solar System. Something on Venus would have to be kicked at almost 11 km/s to reach Mercury, best case-but merely nudge a pair of oort belt comets together and parts of them may fall into Mercury, decades hence. Sometimes these collisions give the planet a very temporary, tenuous atmosphere, which condenses in the deep freeze of Chao Meng Fu. Blame this on Kepler and Newton, not Ptolemy.

  So near is far, and far is near, and the crevasse yawns from 'ere to 'ere. Does it have teeth? Do its open jaws reveal molecules from the beginning of time, such as measured in the Solar System? Lotati confers with his daughter, and Ed. Randi and Ed have a thing, I've found, and spend a fair amount of time touching helmets.

  What great ideas I have! I despair of ever being able to itch again, let alone going to Miranda with its namesake. My rented vacuum gear fits like the skin of a hundred-year-old man; stretched taut digging into my flesh here, loose and bulging there. Randi says there's an art to it and I should take more time getting in. Next time I will.

  I edge closer to the brink, attracted to the danger perhaps, or perhaps wanting to demonstrate courage to Randi. I gaze down. Here and there the dust has fallen from the sheer ice walls, and the layered structure is clear. There are Mercury's sediments. Each comet or meteor creates a temporary atmosphere for Mercury, and that which is not boiled away by the Sun condenses in the polar craters, mixed with ejecta dust. The bedrock lies perhaps a kilometer below us. After three days of the most physical labor I've done in decades, I now contemplate a rappel down to the bottom of a bottomless crevasse and the climb back up again.

  I look away as though by not observing it, I can create the possibility that it does not exist.

  But I have my journalist's duty. At my command, my helmet camera plays back the view, and it floats, reflected off my face plate, against the stars. It doesn't fit in the standard field of view, I realize, so I look over the edge again and slowly turn my head from horizon to horizon. An object of professional interest now, it begins to lose some of its scariness for me.

  Bubka's prescription for fear of something-study the hell out of it.

  How long and wide! Then I turn off all my lights, let my eyes relax, and turn back to see the solar corona, a peacock's tail of icy fire spreading from the Sun that sits just under those utterly black mountains that ring our horizon. If Chao Meng Fu did not flatten Mercury's globe here, we would not be able to see those mountains this far into the trek, so close is Mercury's horizon-but we have been heading ever so slightly inward, downhill, as well as south. The furthest streamers of the corona glow far above that rim behind, looking almost like the aurora borealis back on Earth. Awed, I step back, and back again to catch my balance.

  I happen to glance down-my boot is barely centimeters from the edge of the chasm.

  "Bubka, freeze." Randi's voice echoes in my helmet.

  I am already frozen.

  "Now. Raise right hand," she continues.

  I am carrying a strobe lamp in my right hand so I automatically start to raise my left "Your other right!" she snaps, instantly.

  This time I get it right, raising both my arm and the strobe lamp.

  "Now lean that way. Walk slowly. Away from edge."

  I understand now: if I teeter, she wants me to teeter in the direction of safety. I walk away from the edge with as much dignity as I can muster, as if there were nothing at all wrong, knowing that anyone monitoring my heartbeat will know that I am anything but calm.

  She detaches herself from the management group and strides toward me, ghostly dust glittering in my helmet light behind her footsteps. She halts in a cloud of fairy sparkles, grabs my hand, and leads me well away from the edge of the crevasse.

  "Professor Bubka, near crevasses, tether. Always, always, tether."

  "Professor" hangs in my mind dripping with irony. On Mars, I taught her literature. Here, I am her student-and I had just come close to failing a test where failure is judged somewhat more harshly than at Jovis Tholis University.

  Nodding ruefully, I pull a piton gun from my pack and harpoon the planet. A test pull shows that it's secure, and I clip the line to my belt. Randi fires a piton in too, clips on, then clips another line between her belt and mine. "Ed, some baby-sitter you'd make! Going to take a look."

  "Sorry, mate. Watching, Randi."

  Baby-sitter?

  "Now, Professor Bubka. Let's go look." Dark eyes, on a tanned face with a snub nose, twinkle at me behind the clear, non-reflecting visor.

  We retrace my footprints together. We walk to the edge together. This time, I think to clip my strobe light to my belt as well.

  One of the things I see is half a footprint at the edge of the crevasse. The toe half. Mine.

  What I had done was, I realize, foolish, but I think I am forgiven. She pulls on her line, then actually leans out over the cut, to inspect its near side.

  "Light." The word is a request and a command. Crystals from far down glitter in response.

  Nervously, wrapping my line around my left hand and playing it out through a "smart slot" belay device, centimeter by centimeter, I lean out with her and shine my strobe on the wall under us. On a clean vertical, the layering resembles a diffraction grating-fine thin grooves, perfectly horizontal, broken occasionally by what must be the sections of ancient buried craters.

  The strobe light looks continuous, but contains off-pulses for range-it times a journey of the absence of light. So. The crack goes down, a hundred meters, two hundred, three hundred. At five hundred, I can no longer see the light returning, but it can. I swing it slowly from side to side, as my helmet display paints a graph of angle and range. The walls seem to almost converge about twelve hundred meters below us here, with some flatness between them. I move the beam a bit to the left.

  There is something across the chasm at eight hundred meters, just to our left, "Randi?"

  "I see it. Bridge. Dad, channel seven."

  "I have it, Randi! I'll think that is a billion years down if it's a day! What do you say, Juanita, my Randi's found a bridge!"

  There seemed no point in immediately explaining that I'd found it.

  "Eight hundred meters down and all the way across! Can we do it?" Juanita answers, thrill in her voice. "Do we have enough line?"

  "Yes and yes," Randi's father answers after a moment of thought. Then he points to a slight dip almost above the bridge. "Probably half of an old cr
ater, broken by the crack. That will get us a few meters closer. We could rappel down from there. Perhaps two billion years down, if the crevasse goes to the bottom of Chao Meng Fu. Do you want the bottom, Juanita?"

  "God, yes, Emilio, if it isn't too dangerous."

  Dr. Lotati shrugs. "It has been this way for millions of years of impacts; the walls should tolerate a few ants crawling on them. We'll go ourselves, instead of waiting for some robots to do it."

  I look across the chasm for the other half of the ancient crater, but, like the other half of my footprint, there is no sign of it. Where did it go? I feel a curiosity as powerful as any hunger. What formed the bridge? What lies at the bottom?

  We shall find out, if the Laws of the Universe let us.

  We all have some climbing experience, but only the Lotatis and Ed have very much. It is, however, a very easy climb down in 38 percent gravity. The ropes are well secured to the plain above, the slope is usually less than vertical. Mike and Karen Svenson will remain on the rim with the bulk of the equipment until we are all safely down. They call themselves the "human robots" and have been in excellent humor. When Randi and Dr. Lotati scale the other wall, they will fire a rope across. The Lotatis will then pull over a larger rope on which a tram will carry the equipment. Meanwhile, at the bottom, Dr. Tierzo will supervise sample gathering by the rest of us. That is the plan.

  It becomes dark quickly as we descend. The sky contracts to a starry band overhead, one edge of which glows a faint, frozen, shadowy pearl, a reflection lit by a reflection of sunlight on distant peaks. We turn on our helmet lights, and their glare banishes any other source of illumination. They spread sparkly pools of light on the wall-tiny crystals everywhere. I am conscious of a fine mist or fog, just on the edge of the perceivable. Our suits allow the skin's waste gases to diffuse slowly outward, our footsteps create microscopic dust clouds on which it may condense, our helmet lights evaporate hydrogen gas that has condensed on the wall. Our progress appears tinged with the ethereal.