The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Third Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  The technically difficult sections of the climb are done. The upper edge of the immense cliff has been rounded off by erosion, broken into alternating ridges and ravines. Here they stand at the bottom of a big bowl broken in half; at bottom the slope is about forty degrees, and it curves up to a final wall that is perhaps sixty degrees. But the bottom of the bowl is filled with deep drifts of light, dry, granular snow, sheeted with a hard layer of windslab. Crossing this stuff is difficult, and they trade the lead often. The leader crashes through the windslab and sinks to his or her knees, or even to the waist, and thereafter has to lift a foot over the windslab above, crash through again, and in that way struggle uphill through the snow. They secure the rope with deadmen—empty oxygen tanks in this case, buried deep in the snow. Roger takes his lead, and quickly begins to sweat under the glare of the sun. Each step is an effort, worse than the step before because of the increasing angle of the slope. After ten minutes he gives the lead back to Marie. Twenty minutes later it is his turn again—the other two can endure it no longer than he can. The steepness of the final wall is actually a relief, as there is less snow.

  They stop to strap crampons on their boots. Starting again they fall into a slow, steady rhythm. Kick, step, kick, step; twenty of those, a stop to rest. Time goes away. They don’t bother to speak when the lead changes hands: nothing to say. No one wants to break the pace. Kick, step, kick, step, kick, step. Glare of light breaking on snow. The taste of sweat.

  When Roger’s tenth turn in the lead comes, he sees that he is within striking distance of the top of the wall, and he resolves not to give up the lead again. The snow here is soft under windslab, and he must lean up, dig away a bit with his ice axe, swim up to the new foothold, dig away some more—on and on, gasping into the oxygen mask, sweating profusely in the suddenly overwarm clothing.… But he’s getting closer. Dougal is behind him. He finds the pace again and sticks to it. Nothing but the pace. Twenty steps, rest. Again. Again. Again. Sweat trickles down his spine, even his feet might warm up. Sun glaring off the steep snow.

  He stumbles onto flatness. It feels like some terrible error, like he might fall over the other side. But he is on the edge of a giant plateau, which swoops up in a broad conical shape, too big to be believed. He sees a flat boulder almost clear of snow and staggers over to it. Dougal is beside him, pulling oxygen mask to one side of his face: “Looks like we’ve topped the wall!” Dougal says, looking surprised. Gasping, Roger laughs.

  * * *

  As with all cliff climbs, topping out is a strange experience. After a month of vertical reality, the huge flatness seems all wrong—especially this snowy flatness that extends like a broad fan to each side. The snow ends at the broken edge of the cliff behind them, extends high up the gentle slope of the conical immensity before them. It is easy to believe they stand on the flank of the biggest volcano in the solar system.

  “I guess the hard part is over,” Dougal says matter-of-factly.

  “Just when I was getting in shape,” says Roger, and they both laugh.

  A snowy plateau, studded with black rocks, and some big mesas. To the east, empty air: far below, the forests of Tharsis. To the northwest, a hill sloping up forever.

  * * *

  Marie arrives and dances a little jig on the boulder. Dougal hikes back to the wall and drops into the amphitheater again, to carry up another load. Not much left to bring; they are almost out of food. Eileen arrives, and Roger shakes her hand. She drops her pack and gives him a hug. They pull some food from the packs and eat a cold lunch while watching Hans, Arthur, and Stephan start up the bottom of the bowl. Dougal is already almost down to them.

  * * *

  When they all reach the top, in a little string led by Dougal, the celebrating really begins. They drop their packs, they hug, they shout, Arthur whirls in circles to try to see it all at once, until he makes himself dizzy. Roger cannot remember feeling exactly like this before.

  * * *

  “Our cache is a few kilometers south of here,” Eileen says after consulting her maps. “If we get there tonight we can break out the champagne.”

  They hike over the snow in a line, trading the lead to break a path. It is a pleasure to walk over flat ground, and spirits are so light that they make good time. Late in the day—a full day’s sunshine, their first since before Base Camp—they reach their cache, a strange camp full of tarped down, snow-drifted piles, marked by a lava causeway that ends a kilometer or so above the escarpment.

  Among the new equipment is a big mushroom tent. They inflate it, and climb in through the lock and up onto the tent floor for the night’s party. Suddenly they are inside a giant transparent mushroom, bouncing over the soft clear raised floor like children on a feather bed; the luxury is excessive, ludicrous, inebriating. Champagne corks pop and fly into the transparent dome of the tent roof, and in the warm air they quickly get drunk, and tell each other how marvelous the climb was, how much they enjoyed it—the discomfort, exhaustion, cold, misery, danger, and fear already dissipating in their minds, already turning into something else.

  * * *

  The next day Marie is not at all enthusiastic about the remainder of their climb. “It’s a walk up a bloody hill! And a long walk at that!”

  “How else are you going to get down?” Eileen asks acerbically. “Jump?”

  It’s true; the arrangements they have made force them to climb the cone of the volcano. There is a railway that descends from the north rim of the caldera to Tharsis and civilization; it uses for a rampway one of the great lava spills that erase the escarpment to the north. But first they have to get to the railway, and climbing the cone is probably the fastest, and certainly the most interesting, way to do that.

  “You could climb down the cliff alone,” Eileen adds sarcastically. “First solo descent.…”

  Marie, apparently feeling the effects of last night’s champagne, merely snarls and stalks off to snap herself into one of the cart harnesses. Their new collection of equipment fits into a wheeled cart, which they must pull up the slope. For convenience they are already wearing the spacesuits that they will depend on higher up; during this ascent they will climb right out of Mars’s new atmosphere. They look funny in their silvery-green suits and clear helmets, Roger thinks; it reminds him of his days as a canyon guide, when such suits were necessary all over Mars. The common band of the helmet radios makes this a more social event than the cliff climb, as does the fact that all seven of them are together, four hauling the cart, three walking ahead or behind. From climb to hike: the first day is a bit anticlimactic.

  * * *

  On the snowy southern flank of the volcano, signs of life appear everywhere. Goraks circle them by day, on the lookout for a bit of refuse; ball owls dip around the tent at dusk like bats. On the ground Roger sees marmots on the boulders and volcanic knobs, and in the system of ravines cut into the plateau they find twisted stands of Hokkaido pine, chir pine and noctis juniper. Arthur chases a pair of Dall sheep with their curved horns, and they see prints in the snow that look like bear tracks. “Yeti,” Dougal says. One mirror dusk they catch sight of a pack of snow wolves, strung out over the slope to the west. Stephan spends his spare time at the edges of the new ravines, sketching and peering through binoculars. “Come on, Roger,” he says. “Let me show you those otterines I saw yesterday.”

  “Bunch of mutants,” Roger grumbles, mostly to give Stephan a hard time. But Eileen is watching him to see his response, and dubiously he nods. What can he say? He goes with Stephan to the ravine to look for wildlife. Eileen laughs at him, eyes only, affectionately.

  * * *

  Onward, up the great hill. It’s a six-percent grade, very regular, and smooth except for the ravines and the occasional small crater or lava knob. Below them, where the plateau breaks to become the cliff, the shield is marked by some sizeable mesas—features, Hans says, of the stress that broke off the shield. Above them, the conical shape of the huge volcano is clearly visible; the endless hill
they climb slopes away to each side equally, and far away and above they see the broad, flat peak. They’ve got a long way to go. Wending between the ravines is easy, and the esthetic of the climb, its only point of technical interest, becomes how far they can hike every day. It’s 250 kilometers from the escarpment up to the crater rim; they try for twenty-five a day, and sometimes make thirty. It feels odd to be so warm; after the intense cold of the cliff climb, the spacesuits and the mushroom tent create a distinct disconnection from the surroundings.

  Hiking as a group is also odd. The common band is a continuous conversation, that one can switch on or off at will. Even when not in a mood to talk, Roger finds it entertaining to listen. Hans talks about the areology of the volcano, and he and Stephan discuss the genetic engineering that makes the wildlife around them possible. Arthur points out features that the others might take for granted. Marie complains of boredom. Eileen and Roger laugh and add a comment once in a while. Even Dougal clicks into the band around mid-afternoon, and displays a quick wit, spurring Arthur toward one amazing discovery after another. “Look at that, Arthur, it’s a yeti.”

  “What! You’re kidding! Where?”

  “Over there, behind that rock.”

  Behind the rock is Stephan, taking a shit. “Don’t come over here!”

  “You liar,” Arthur says.

  “It must have slipped off. I think a Weddell fox was chasing it.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “Yes.”

  * * *

  Eileen: “Let’s switch to a private band. I can’t hear you over all the rest.”

  Roger: “Okay. Band 33.”

  “… Any reason for that band in particular?”

  “Ah—I think so.” It was a long time ago, but this is the kind of weird fact his memory will pop up with. “It may be our private band from our first hike together.”

  She laughs. They spend the afternoon behind the others, talking.

  * * *

  One morning Roger wakes early, just after mirror dawn. The dull horizontal rays of the quartet of parhelia light their tent. Roger turns his head, looks past his pillow, through the tent’s clear floor. Thin soil over rock, a couple of meters below. He sits up; the floor gives a little, like a gel bed. He walks over the soft plastic slowly so that he will not bounce any of the others, who are sleeping out where the cap of the roof meets the gills of the floor. The tent really does resemble a big clear mushroom; Roger descends clear steps in the side of the stalk to get to the lavatory, located down in what would be the mushroom’s volvus. Emerging he finds a sleepy Eileen sponging down in the little bath next to the air compressor and regulator. “Good morning,” she says. “Here, will you get my back?”

  She hands him the sponge, turns around. Vigorously he rubs down the hard muscles of her back, feeling a thrill of sensual interest. That slope, where back becomes bottom: beautiful.

  She looks over her shoulder. “I think I’m probably clean now.”

  “Ah.” He grins. “Maybe so.” He gives her the sponge. “I’m going for a walk before breakfast.”

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  Roger dresses, goes through the lock, walks over to the head of the meadow they are camped by: a surarctic meadow, covered with moss and lichen, and dotted with mutated edelweiss and saxifrage. A light frost coats everything in a sparkling blanket of white, and Roger feels his boots crunch as he walks.

  Movement catches his eye and he stops to observe a white-furred mouse hare, dragging a loose root back to its hole. There is a flash and flutter, and a snow finch lands in the hole’s entrance. The tiny hare looks up from its work, chatters at the finch, nudges past it with its load. The finch does its bird thing, head shifting instantaneously from one position to the next and then freezing in place. It follows the hare into the hole. Roger has heard of this, but he has never seen it. The hare scampers out, looking for more food. The finch appears, its head snaps from one position to the next. An instant swivel and it is staring at Roger. It flies over to the scampering hare, dive bombs it, flies off. The hare has disappeared down another hole.

  Roger crosses the ice stream in the meadow, crunches up the bank. There beside a waist-high rock is an odd pure white mass, with a white sphere at the center of it. He leans over to inspect it. Slides a gloved finger over it. Some kind of ice, apparently. Unusual looking.

  The sun rises and a flood of yellow light washes over the land. The yellowish white half-globe of ice at his feet looks slick. It quivers; Roger steps back. The ice is shaking free of the rock wall. The middle of the bulge cracks. A beak stabs out of the globe, breaks it open. Busy little head in there. Blue feathers, long crooked black beak, beady little black eyes. “An egg?” Roger says. But the pieces are definitely ice—he can make them melt between his gloved fingers, and feel their coldness. The bird (though its legs and breast seem to be furred, and its wings stubby, and its beak sort of fanged) staggers out of the white bubble, and shakes itself like a dog throwing off water, although it looks dry. Apparently the ice is some sort of insulation—a home for the night, or no—for the winter, no doubt. Yes. Formed of spittle or something, walling off the mouth of a shallow cave. Roger has never heard of such a thing, and he watches open-mouthed as the bird-thing takes a few running steps and glides away.

  A new creature steps on the face of green Mars.

  * * *

  That afternoon they hike out of the realm even of the surarctic meadows. No more ground cover, no more flowers, no more small animals. Nothing now but cracks filled with struggling moss, and great mats of otoo lichen. Sometimes it is as if they walk on a thin carpet of yellow, green, red, black—splotches of color like that seen in the orbicular jasper, spread out as far as they can see in every direction, a carpet crunchy with frost in the mornings, a bit damp in the mid-day sun, a carpet crazed and parti-colored. “Amazing stuff,” Hans mutters, poking at it with a finger. “Half our oxygen is being made by this wonderful symbiosis.…”

  Late that afternoon, after they have stopped and set up the tent and tied it down to several rocks, Hans leaps through the lock waving his atmosphere kit and hopping up and down. “Listen,” he says, “I just radioed the summit station for confirmation of this. There’s a high pressure system over us right now. We’re at 14,000 meters above the datum, but the barometric pressure is up to 350 millibars because there’s a big cell of air moving over the flank of the volcano this week.” The others stare. Hans says, “Do you see what I mean?”

  “No,” exclaim three voices at once.

  “High-pressure zone,” Roger says unhelpfully.

  “Well,” Hans says, standing at attention. “It’s enough to breathe! Just enough, but enough, I say. And of course no one’s ever done it before—done it this high before, I mean. Breathed free Martian air.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “So we can establish the height record right here and now! I propose to do it, and I invite whoever wants to to join me.”

  “Now wait a minute,” Eileen says.

  But everyone wants to do it.

  “Wait a minute,” says Eileen. “I don’t want everyone taking off their helmets and keeling over dead up here, for God’s sake. They’ll revoke my license. We have to do this in an orderly fashion. And you—” she points at Stephen. “You can’t do this. I forbid it.”

  Stephan protests loudly and for a long time, but Eileen is adamant, and Hans agrees. “The shock could start your edema again, for sure. None of us should do it for long. But for a few minutes, it will go. Just breathe through the mesh facemasks, to warm the air.”

  “You can watch and save us if we keel over,” Roger tells Stephan.

  “Shit,” Stephan says. “All right. Do it.”

  * * *

  They gather just out from under the cap of the tent, where Stephan can, theoretically, drag them back through the lock if he has to. Hans checks his barometer one last time, nods at them. They stand in a rough circle, facing in. Everyone begins to unclip helmets l
atches.

  Roger gets his unclipped first—the years as canyon guide have left their mark on him, in little ways like this—and he lifts the helmet up. As he places it on the ground the cold strikes his head and makes it throb. He sucks down a breath: dry ice. He refuses the urge to hyperventilate, fearful he will chill his lungs too fast and damage them. Regular breathing, he thinks, in and out. In and out. Though Dougal’s mouth is covered by a mesh mask, Roger can still tell he is grinning widely. Funny how the upper face reveals that. Roger’s eyes sting, his chest is frozen inside, he sucks down the frigid air and every sense quickens, breath by breath. The edges of pebbles a kilometer away are sharp and clear. Thousands of edges. “Like breathing nitrous oxide!” Arthur cries in a lilting high voice. He whoops like a little kid and the sound is odd, distant. Roger walks in a circle, on a quilt of rust lava and gaily covered patches of lichen. Intense awareness of the process of breathing seems to connect his consciousness to everything he can see; he feels like a strangely shaped lichen, struggling for air like all the rest. Jumble of rock, gleaming in the sunlight: “Let’s build a cairn,” he says to Dougal, and can hear his voice is wrong somehow. Slowly they step from rock to rock, picking them up and putting them in a pile. The interior of his chest is perfectly defined by each intoxicating breath. Others watching bright-eyed, sniffing, involved in their own prerceptions. Roger sees his hands blur through space, sees the flesh of Dougal’s face pulsing pinkly, like the flowers of moss campion. Each rock is a piece of Mars, he seems to float as he walks, the side of the volcano gets bigger, bigger, bigger; finally he is seeing it at true size. Stephan strides among them grinning through his helmet, holding up both hands. It’s been ten minutes. The cairn is not yet done, but they can finish it tomorrow. “I’ll make a messenger cannister for it tonight!” Dougal wheezes happily. “We can all sign it!” Stephan begins to round them all up. “Incredibly cold!” Roger says, still looking around as if he has never seen any of it before—any of anything.

  Dougal and he are the last two into the lock; they shake hands. “Invigorating, eh?” Roger nods. “Very fine air.”