by Libba Bray
“So Haramwe sprained his ankle.”
Every part of In-Aunt Milaba’s tiny office, from the hand-carved olivine desk to the carafe of water that stood on it, shook to the rattle of the buckets hurtling up the scoopline. Milaba raised an eyebrow. Tash realized a response was due.
“Are his injuries debilitating?”
“Debilitating.” Milaba gave a flicker of a smile. “You could say that. He’ll be out for a week or so. He came down heavily, silly boy. Showing off. When is your birthday?” Tash’s heart leapt.
She knew. Everyone knew everything, all the time. The game was pretending not to know.
“Octobril fifth.”
“Three months.” Milaba appeared to consider for a moment. “Peyko Ruebens-Opollo says for all your fancy talk you’ve a good head and better sense and do what you’re told. That’s good because I don’t need attitude problems or last-minute-good-ideas when I’m out on the line.”
For once the words failed Tash. They hissed from her like air from a ruptured atmosphere cell. She waved her hands in speechless delight.
“I’m taking a digger up Line 12 to Windrush Valley. The feed tokamaks have been fluctuating nastily. Probably a soft fail in a command chip set; they get a lot of radiation up there. Now I need someone with me to hold things and make tea and generally make intelligent conversation. Are you interested?”
Still the words would not come. The rule was that you did not leave the Excavating Cities until you were eight, when you were technically adult. Rules broke and bent with the frequency of scoopline breakdowns but three months was a significant proportion of the long Martian year. Out. Out, and up. Up the line, into the windy valley. In a diggler, with In-Aunt Milaba.
“Yes, oh yes, I’d love to,’ Tash finally squeaked. Now Milaba unleashed the full radiance of her smile and it was like sunrise, it was solstice lights, it was the warmth of the glow-lamps in the Orangery. I say you are an adult citizen of West Diggory, Tash Gelem-Opunyo, the smile said, and if I say it, all say it.
“Be at the Outlock 12 at fourteen o’clock,’ Milaba said. “You do know how to make tea, don’t you?”
Still not got it? It’s easy, easy easy easy. Easy as a heezy, which is a Digger saying. A heezy is the lever on a scoopline bucket that, when struck by the dohbrin (which is a different type of lever found at the load-off end of the scoopline) tips the contents of the bucket down Mt Incredible. Heezy peasy easy. It’s all because air has weight. Air’s not nothing. It’s gas—in Mars’ case, carbon dioxide nitrogen argon oxygen and the leaked breathings from the hundred-and-something years that humans have scratched and scrabbled clawholds on its red earth. It has mass. It has weight. And it flows, the same way that water flows, to the lowest point. Wind is air flowing. People say, no one knows why the wind blows. That’s stupid nonsense. Wind blows from high to low, high pressure to low pressure, high altitude to low altitude; down the slopes of mountains, through canyons and valleys. The air pressure at the bottom of the great and primeval rift of Valles Marineris is ten times that in the long-cold volcanic calderas atop Olympus Mons. Titanic gales and fog blow through that valley. The fog is because the atmospheric pressure at the bottom of the valley is enough—just enough—to allow water to exist as vapour. But that’s still not enough to support big life. That “s like higher than earth’s highest mountain. That’s fingertip-lip-exploding, eyeball-squelching, cheek- bursting pressure. Bug life yes, big life no. That’s not enough to make Mars a green paradise, a home for humanity, a fertile pool of life beyond little blue Earth. What you need is deep. Thirty kilometers deep. Deeper than any place on Earth is deep. Deeper than even Olympus Mons, mightiest mountain on all the worlds, is high. And because air has weight, because atmosphere flows and the wind blows, gas will fill up the hole. That’s the wind that rattles the banners and turns the rotors of West Diggory. As the gas flows the pressure grows until the day comes when the atmospheric pressure at the bottom of the hole is enough for you to walk around without a psuit, in just your skin if you have the urge and your skin is pretty enough. Earth atmospheric pressure. Pressure, that’s always been the problem with making Mars habitable. Get all the gas into one place. When you’ve got enough of it, turning it into something you can breathe is the easy bit. That’s just bugs and plants and life.
Thirty kilometers deep. The scooplines are at minus twenty six kilometers. That’s another five M-years before they hit atmospheric baseline. Then they’ll level out the floor of the crater, take away some of the sides, expand the flat area, though it will all seem so flat, the atmospheric gradient so subtle, that you will seem to be walking out into breathlessness and light-headedness rather than ascending into it. Fifty years after her In-Grandfather Tayhum made the first incision, the Big Dig will be dug. Tash will be seventeen and a half when the wind rushing down the sides of the Big Dig finally fails and the rotors stop and the banners fall and the Excavating Cities finally come to a rest.
Twenty six kilometers up slope, In-Aunt Milaba gave the sign for Tash to throw the levers to disengage the diggler from the scoopline. Thus far the big world of outside had been a thumping disappointment to Tash. She had yet to be outside, properly outside, two-figures-in-a-Mars-scape outside, shiver-in-your-psuit outside. She had transited from plastic bubble by plastic tube to plastic bubble connected by its grip on the scoopline to home.
This was what Tash Gelem-Opunyo saw from the transparent bubble of the diggler. Sand sand sand sand sand, a rock there, sand sand sand rock rock, oh, some pebbles! Sand grit sand more grit something between pebble and grit, something between grit and sand, a bit of old abandoned machinery, wow wow wow! Dust drifted up around it. Sand. Sand. Sand. West Diggory was still visible, down the dwindling thread of the scoopline, now truly the size of a spider. The enormous, horizonless perspectives robbed Tash of anything by which she could judge movement. The sand, the buckets, the unchanging gentle gradient that went up halfway to space. Only by squinting down through the floor glass at the blurred, grainy surface did she get any sense of movement.
Twenty six vertical kilometers equalled two hundred a sixty surface kilometers equalled five and a half hours in a plastic bubble with a relative you’ve grown up in enforced proximity to but until now never really known or talked to. Everyone loves In-Aunt Milaba the Magnificent, that’s the legend, but five hours, Aunt and Niece, Tash began to wonder if this was another wind-whisper legend blown around the corners and crannies of West Diggory. She was beautiful, a feast for the eye and soul, all those things a eight year-old-girl hopes for herself (and did Tash not share the DNA—given that the Excavating cities genepool was shallow as a spit, hence all the careful arrangements of In-relatives and Out-relatives and who would be sent to one of the other Excavating Cities and who would stay) all those things a girl of almost-eight wants for herself but try as she might, and did, Tash could not engage her. Fancy funny words of the type Tash treasured. Poems. Puns. Riddles. Guessing games. Break-the-code-games. Allusions and circumspect questions. Direct questions. To them all In-Aunt Milaba shook her head and smiled and bent over the controls and the monitors and checked her kit and said not a word. So tea, lots of tea, and muttering little rhymes to the rhythm of the huge balloon wheels as the scoopline hauled Diggler Six up the side of the biggest excavation in the solar system.
But now they were released from the scoopline and Milaba was standing at the steering column, driving the diggler under its own power. It was still sand sand sand and occasional rock, but Tash knew a gnaw of excitement. She was free, disconnected from the umbilicals of life for the first time. She was out in the wild world. The scoopline dwindled to a thread, to invisibility behind her, ahead she saw a notch on the edge of vision. Windrush Valley. All the wind-blown words stopped. A flaw in the horizon. A place beyond the Big Dig. Beyond that declivity was the whole curved world. In the silence In-Aunt Milaba turned from the control column.
“I think you could have a go now.”
So this was what she had been
waiting for, Tash to run out of words, and finally listen.
The diggler was ridiculously simple to drive. Plant your feet firmly at the drive column. Push forward to feed power to the traction motors in the wheel hubs. Pull back to brake. Yaw to steer. There was even a little holder on the side of the drive column for your tea. Tash giggled with nervous glee as she gingerly pushed forward the stick and the bubble of pressure glass slung between the giant orange tyres stuttered forward. Within thirty seconds she had it. Thirty seconds later she was pushing it, sneaking the speed bar up, looking for places where she could make the diggler skip over rocks.
“I’d go easy on that throttle,’ Milaba said. “The battery life is eight hours. That’s why we ride the scoopline up and down again. You don’t want to get stuck up here with night coming down, no traction and no heat.”
Tash eased the stick back but not before the diggler hit the small boulder at which she had discreetly aimed and bounced all four wheels in the air. Milaba smiled that morning-sun smile. Then shoulder by shoulder they stood at the controls and rode up into the orange valley. The land rose up on either side, higher as they drove deeper, kilometers high. They felt like oppression to Tash, shouldering close and ominous, their heights breathless and haunted with dark things that lived in the sky. At the same time she felt hideously small and exposed in the fragile glass ornament of the diggler. The wind was rising, she could feel the diggler shake on its suspension, hear the shriek and moan through the cables. The controls fought her but she pushed the little bubble deeper and deeper into Windrush Valley. When her forearms arched and the sinews on her neck stood out from fighting the atmosphere of Mars pouring through this two-kilometer wide notch in Mt Incredible, Milaba leaned over and tapped a preprogrammed course into the computer.
“Suit up,’ she said. “We’ll be there in ten minutes.”
The tokamak station was a wind-scoured blister of construction plastic hunkering between a boulder field and a stretch of polished olivine. It was only when the diggler slowed to a stop and fired sand anchors that Tash realized that it was near and smaller than she had thought. It was not a distant vast city, the power plant was only slightly higher than the diggler’s mammoth wheels. The wind rotor, spinning like it would suddenly leap from its pylon and spin madly away through the upper air, was no bigger than her outstretched hands.
“Mask sealed?”
Tash ran her fingers around the join with her psuit hood and give In-Aunt Milaba two thumbs up. “I’m dee-peeing the diggler.” There was a high pitched shriek of air being vented into the tanks, a whistle that ebbed into silence as the pressure dropped to match the outside environment. The scribbled-over psuit felt tight and stuff. This was true eyeball-squelch altitude. Then Milaba popped the door and Tash followed her out and down the ladder on to the wild surface of Mars.
Gods and teeth, but the wind was brutal. Tash balled her fists and squared her shoulders and lowered her head to battle through it to the yellow and blue-chevronned tokamak station. She could feel the sand whipping across the skin of her psuit. She didn’t like to think of the semizoic skin abrading, cell by cell. She imagined it wailing in pain. A tap on the shoulder, Milaba gestured for her to hook her safety line on to the door winch. Then In-Aunt and In-Niece they punched through the big wind to the shelter of the tokamak shell. Out. Out in the world. Up high. If Tash kept walking into the wind she would pass through Windrush Valley and come to a place where the world curved away from her, not towards her. The desire to do it was unbearable. Out of the hole. All it would take would be one foot in front of another. They would take her all the way around the world and back again, to this place. The gale of possibility died. It was all, only, ever circles. Milaba tapped her again on the shoulder to remind her that there was work to be done here. Tash took the unitool and unscrewed the inspection hatch. Milaba plugged in her diagnosticators. She was glorious to watch at work, easy and absorbed. But it was long work and Tash’s attention wandered to the little meandering dust-dervishes that spun up into a small tornado for a few seconds, staggered down the valley and collapsed into swirling sand.
“Willie-willies,’ Milaba said. “You want to be careful with those, they’re tricksy. As I thought’. She pointed at the readout. “A hard fail in the chip set.” She pulled a new blade out of her thigh pouch and slid it into the control unit. Lights flashed green. Inside it’s shielded dome the tokamak grumbled and woke up with a shiver that sent the dust rising from the ground. Tash watched the wind it whirl into a dozen dust-devils, dancing around each other. “Just going to check the supply line. You stay here.” She headed up the valley along the line of the power cable. The dust devils swirled in towards each other. They merged. They fused. They became one, a true dust demon.
“Looks all right!” In-Aunt Milaba called.
“Milaba, I don’t like the look...” The dust-demon spun towards Tash, then at the last moment veered away and tracked up the valley. “Milaba!”
Milaba hesitated. The hesitation was death. The dusty-demon bore down on her, she tried to throw herself away but it spun over her, lifted her, threw her hard and far, smashed her down on to the smooth polished olivine. Tash saw her face-plate shatter in a spray of shards and water vapour. It was random, it was mad, it was a chance in a billion, it can’t happen, it was an affront to order and reason but it had and there Milaba lay on the hard olivine.
“Oh my gods oh my gods oh my gods!” For a moment Tash was paralyzed, for a moment she did not know what to do, that she could do anything, that she must do something. Then she was running up the valley. The dust-demon veered towards Tash. Tash shrieked, then it staggered away, broke itself on the boulders and spun down to dust again. The psuit would seal automatically but In-Aunt Milaba had moments before her eyeballs froze. “Oh help help help help help,’ Tash cried, her hands pressed to Milaba’s face, trying to will heat into it. Then she saw the red button on the safety line harness. She hit it and was almost jolted off her feet as the winch on the diggler reeled Milaba in. Tash hit the Emergency Channel. “This is Diggler Six this is Diggler Six in Windrush Valley. This is an emergency.” Of course it is. It’s the Emergency channel. She tried to calm her voice as the winch lifted the limp Milaba into the air. “We have a suit dee pee situation. We have a suit dee pee.”
“Hello Diggler Six. This is Diggory West Emergency Services. Please identify yourself.”
“This is Tash Gelem-Opunyo. It’s Milaba.”
“Tash. Control here.” Tash recognized Out-Uncle Yoyote’s voice. “Get back. Get back here. You should have enough power, we’ll send another diggler up the line to meet you, but you, darling, you have to do it. We can’t get to you in time. It’s up to you. Get back to us. It’s all you can do.”
Of course. It was. All she could do. No rescue swooping from the skies, in a world where northing could fly. No speed-star scorching up the slope of the Big Dig in a world where the scoopline was the fastest means of transport. She was on her own.
It took all her strength to swing Milaba through the hatch into the diggler cab and seal the lock. Almost Tash popped her faceplate. Almost. She re-pressurized the diggler. Air-shriek built to a painful screech then stopped. But Milaba was so still, so cold. Her face was white with frost where her breath had frozen into her skin. It would never be the same again. Milaba knelt, turned her cheek to her In-Aunt’s lips. A whisper a sigh a suspicion a sussurationsusurration. She was breathing. But it was cold so cold death cold Mars cold in the diggler. Tash slapped the heater up to the maximum and jigged around the tiny cab. Condensation turned the windows opaque, then cleared. Back. She had to get back. Was there an auto-return programme? Where would she find it? Where would she even begin looking? Wasting precious instants, wasting precious instants. Tash took the control column, stamped on the pedal to release the anchors and engaged the traction motors. Turning was difficult. Turning was scary. Turning forced a small moan of fear when the wind got under the diggler and she felt the right side lift. If it
went over here, they were both dead. This was not fun driving. There was no glee, no whee!; at every bounce Tash tensed and clenched, fearful that the diggler would roll over and shatter like an egg, smash an axle, any number of new terrors that only appear when your life depends on everything working perfectly. Come on come on come on. The battery gauge was dwindling with terrifying speed. This was outside. This was the horizoned world. Where was the scoopline? Surely it hadn’t been this far. Come on come on come on. A line on the sand. But so far. Power at twelve percent. Where had it gone what had she used it on? The heating blast? The emergency ree-pee? The burn on the winch? Call home. That would be sensible. That would be the act of a girl with a good head and better sense who did what she was told. But it would use power. Batteries at seven percent, but now she could see the scoopline, the laden buckets above, the empty buckets below, bucket after bucket after bucket. She drove the diggler on. Matching velocities with the scoopline was teeth-gritting, nerve-stretching work. Tash had to drop the diggler into the space between the buckets and hold exact speed. A push too fast would ride up on the preceding bucket. Too slow and she would be rear-ended by the bucket behind. And ever edging inwards, inwards, closer to the line as the batteries slid from green to red. Lights flashes. Tash threw the lever. The shackle engaged. Tash rolled away from the drive column to Milaba on the floor.
“Tash.” A whisper a sigh a suspicion a susurration.
“It’s all right, it’s all right, don’t talk, we’re on scoopline.”
“Tash, are my eyes open?”