Beyond the Aquila Rift: The Best of Alastair Reynolds

by Alastair Reynolds

  “Don’t turn around,” Luttrell says.

  “You had better be right about this camp of yours.”

  Prakash cuts in again. “Soya, what are you doing? Luttrell has transgressed internationally recognised Lunar boundaries. He has attempted to take what does not belong to him. The man is a thief.”

  As if I had not worked that out for myself.

  I think of the fat full Moon, daubed with the emblems of nations and companies. Only a few thousand people up there now, but they say it will soon be tens of thousands. Blink, and it will be millions.

  And I have watched the news and tried to keep myself informed. I know that some of those territorial boundaries are disputed. There are claims and counter-claims. Even our little thumbnail of African soil has not been immune to these arguments.

  So this man, Luttrell. What of him? He had driven to the pipeline, not along it but from somewhere else. Maybe he tried to tap into it. Something happened to him. An electrical shock, perhaps, damaging the systems of his suit. He had hoped that help would come from his own people, from Shiga. Instead what he got was me. And while my people—the people who know best—do not exactly want to kill Luttrell, it cannot be said that keeping him alive is their main consideration.

  What they want, above all else, is for him not to get home.

  “I am not turning, Prakash. I am taking this man back to his friends.”

  “I wouldn’t do that, Soya. You’re only on the Moon under our sufferance. We can pull you out of the link at any moment, slot someone else in.”

  “Who will do as they are told?”

  “Who knows what’s good for them.”

  “Then that is not me.”

  Prakash is right: I can be pulled from the link at any time. Or rather, he would be right, if I did not have so much experience at driving robots. Scraping barnacles off a supertanker, scudding across the Moon: nothing much changes. And I know the tricks and dodges that will make it difficult or time-consuming for the link to be snapped. I have seldom had cause to use these things, but they are well remembered.

  “Will you get into trouble for this?” Luttrell says.

  “I think the damage is already done.”

  “Thank you.” He is silent again. “I think I need to stay awake. Maybe if you told me something about yourself, that would help.”

  “There is not much to tell. I was born in Dar es Salaam, around the turn of the century.”

  “Before or after?”

  “I don’t know. My mother never knew. There would have been records, I suppose. But I have never seen them.” I steer us around a boulder as large as the overlander itself. “It doesn’t matter. That’s all over now. Now tell me where you came from.”

  He tells me his story. We drive.

  IN THE MORNING the dust settles. My refusal to obey Prakash has not gone unpunished. Proficiency ratings have been set back to zero. Black marks have been set against my name, forbidding whole categories of employment. The credits I ought to have earned from the last task—I did, after all, save Luttrell—have failed to appear.

  But I am resigned to my fate. It is not the end of the world, or at least not the end of mine. There are other types of work out here. Whatever is in store for me, I shall make the best of it. Just as long as it keeps my daughter from starvation.

  On the way to the school, Eunice asks me what I did last night.

  “Helped a man,” I say. “He did a bad thing, but I helped him anyway. That has made some people angry.”

  “What did the man do?”

  “It’s complicated. He took something that wasn’t his, or tried to. We’ll talk about it later.”

  I think of Luttrell. When they finally broke me out of the link, we were still some way from his camp. I don’t know what happened after that. I hope his people were able to find him. I watch the news, but there’s nothing. It’s a border incident, that’s all. Not worth a mention.

  While she is in school, I go to the community tent where the water thief waits her verdict. The place is crowded, the atmosphere volatile. The mantises have withdrawn: they have done their work, the patient has been stabilised, she is mostly conscious. I study the fluid in the woman’s drip and imagine that it is pure water. I think of gulping down its sweet clear contents.

  I shoulder my way through the onlookers to the low trestle table, where the votes are being administered. I tell them who I am, although I think by now they know. A finger tracks down a list, a line is scratched through my name. I am invited to cast my vote. There are black balls and white balls, in open-topped cardboard medicine boxes.

  I scoop up one ball from each box, both in one hand. For a moment the possibilities feel equally balanced. In the end, it is the white ball that I let go, the black one that I return to its box. Someone else can have that pleasure.

  Leaving the community tent, I try to gauge the public mood. My sense is that it will not go well for this woman. But perhaps the nurses, doctors and mantises have already done enough. Perhaps the water thief will be strong enough, with or without medicine.

  I am thinking what to do next when something tugs at my hem. It is the little boy, the one who is always following me. I reach into my pocket and feel the fat round bulge of the eye. I think about the purple light, how pretty it is. The eye has been my vigil and my gateway, but I don’t have much use for it now.

  I tell the boy to hold out his hand. He obeys.

  THE OLD MAN AND THE MARTIAN SEA

  IN THE belly of the airship, alone except for freight pods and dirt-smeared machines, Yukimi dug into her satchel and pulled out her companion. She had been given it on her thirteenth birthday, by her older sister. It had been just before Shirin left Mars, so the companion had been a farewell present as well as a birthday gift.

  It wasn’t the smartest companion in the world. It had all the usual recording functions, and enough wit to arrange and categorize Yukimi’s entries, but when it spoke back to her she never had the impression that there was a living mind trapped inside the floral-patterned—and now slightly dog-eared—hardback covers. And when it tried to engage her in conversation, when it tried to act like a friend or even a sister, it wasn’t clever enough to come out with the sort of thing a real person would have said. But Yukimi didn’t mind, really. It had still been a gift from Shirin, and if she stopped the companion talking back to her—which she mostly did, unless there was something she absolutely had to know—then it was still a place to record her thoughts and observations, and a useful window into the aug. When she was seventeen she would be legally entitled to receive the implants that gave her direct access to that shifting, teeming sea of universal knowledge. For now, all she had was the glowing portal of the companion.

  “I’ve done it now,” she told it. “After all those times where we used to dare each other to sneak aboard, I’ve actually stayed behind until after the doors are closed. And now we’re in the air.” She paused, tiptoeing to peer through a grubby, dust-scoured window as her home fell slowly away. “I can see Shalbatana now, Shirin—it looks much smaller from up here. I can see Sagan Park and the causeway and the school. I can’t believe that was our whole world, everything we knew. Not that that’s any surprise to you, I suppose.”

  It wasn’t Shirin she was talking to, of course. It was just the companion. But early on she had fallen into the habit of making the entries as if she was telling them to her sister, and she had never broken it.

  “I couldn’t have done it if we hadn’t played those games,” Yukimi went on. “It was pretty hard, even then. Easy enough to sneak onto the docks—not much has changed since you left—but much harder to get aboard the airship. I waited until there was a lot going on, with everyone running around trying to get it loaded on time. Then I just made a run for it, dodging between robots and dock workers. I kept thinking: what’s the worst that can happen? They’ll find me and take me home. But I won’t be in any more trouble than if I do manage to sneak aboard. I know they’ll find me sooner or
later anyway. I bet you’re shaking your head now, wondering what the point of all this is. But it’s easy for you, Shirin. You’re on another planet, with your job, so you don’t have to deal with any of this. I’m stuck back here and I can’t even escape into the aug. So I’m doing something stupid and childish: I’m running away. It’s your fault for showing me how easy it would be to get aboard one of the airships. You’d better be ready to take some of the blame.”

  It was too much effort to keep on tiptoe so she lowered down. “I know it won’t make any difference: I’m not a baby. But they keep telling me I’ll be fine and I know I won’t be, and everything they say is exactly what I don’t want to hear. It’s not you, it’s us. We still love you, darling daughter. We’ve just grown apart. As if any of that makes it all right. God, I hate being me.”

  She felt a lurch then, as if the airship had punched its way through the pressure bubble that surrounded the whole of Shalbatana City and its suburbs. A ghost of resistance, and then they were through. Behind, the bubble would reseal instantly so that not even a whisper of breathable air was able to leak out into the thin atmosphere beyond.

  “I’m through now,” she said, going back on tiptoe. “On the other side. I guess this is the farthest from home I’ve ever been.” The sun was catching the bubble’s edge, picking it out in a bow of pale pink. Her home, everything she really knew, was inside that pocket of air, and now it looked like a cheap plastic snow globe, like the one her aunt had sent back from Paris with the Eiffel Tower.

  It hit her then. Not the dizzy sense of adventure she had been expecting, but an awful, knife-twisting sense of wrongness. As if, only now that the airship was outside the bubble, was she grasping the mistake she had made.

  But it was much too late to do anything about it now.

  “I’m doing the right thing, Shirin. Please tell me I’m doing the right thing.”

  She slumped down with her back against the sloping wall of the cargo hold. She felt sorry for herself, but she was too drained to cry. She knew it would be a good idea to eat, but she had no appetite for the apple she had brought with her in the satchel. She closed the covers on the companion and let it slip to the hard metal deck, gaining another dent or dog-ear in the process. Sensing her mood, the cartoon characters on the side of the satchel started singing and dancing, trying in their idiotic way to perk her up.

  Yukimi scrunched the satchel until they shut up.

  She listened to the drone of the airship’s engines. It was a different sound now that the air outside was so much colder and thinner than inside Shalbatana City’s dome. She knew from school that the air had once been even thinner, before the changes began. But it was still not enough to keep anyone alive for very long.

  There was enough air inside the cargo hold to last for the journey, though.

  At least that was what Shirin had always said, and Shirin had never lied about anything. Had she?

  “I THINK SOMETHING’S happening,” Yukimi told the companion.

  “We’re changing course.”

  They had been flying high and steady for eight hours, Mars unrolling below in all its savage dreariness, all its endless rust-red monotony. Adults were always going on about how there were already too many people on the planet, but as far as Yukimi could tell there was still a lot of empty space between the warm, wet bubbles of the settlements. Aside from the pale, arrow-straight scratch of the occasional road or pipeline, there had been precious little evidence of civilization since their departure. Unless one counted the lakes, which were made by rain, and rain was made by people, but lakes weren’t civilization, as far as Yukimi was concerned. How anyone could think this world was crowded, or even beginning to be crowded, was beyond her.

  Yukimi closed the book and strained to look through the window again. It was hard to tell, but the ground looked nearer than it had been all afternoon. They didn’t seem to be anywhere near a dome. That made sense, because in the time she had been in the air, there was no way that the airship could have made it to Vikingville, let alone anywhere farther away than that.

  “It’s a good sign,” she went on. “It has to be. Someone must have figured out what I did, and now they’ve recalled the airship. Maybe they even got in touch with you, Shirin. You’d have told them about our game, how easy it would be for me to escape. I’m going to be in a lot of trouble now, but I always knew that was coming sooner or later. At least I’ll have made my point.”

  That was going to cost someone a lot of money, Yukimi thought. She could see her father now, shaking his head at the shame she had brought on him with her antics. Making him look bad in front of his rich friends like Uncle Otto. Well, if that was what it took to get through to her parents, so be it.

  But as the airship lowered, so her certainty evaporated. It didn’t seem to be turning around, or be in any kind of a hurry to continue its journey. The engine note had changed to a dawdling throb, just enough to hold station against the wind.

  What was going on?

  She looked through the window again, straining hard to look down and, yes, there was something under them. It wasn’t a bubble like the one around Shalbatana, though, or even one of those settlements that was built straight onto the ground with no protection from the atmosphere. It was a machine, a huge, metallic-green, beetle-shaped juggernaut inching slowly along the surface. It was bigger than the airship, bigger than any moving thing she had ever seen with her own eyes. The machine was as long as a city district, as wide as Sagan Park. It had eight solid wheels, each of which was large enough to roll over not just her home but the entire apartment complex. And although it seemed to be crawling, that was only an illusion caused by its size. It was probably moving faster than she could run.

  “I can see a Scaper,” she told the book. “That’s what I think it is, anyway. One of those old terraforming mechs.” She held the companion open and aimed down through the window, so that it could capture the view of the enormous machine, with chimneys sprouting in double rows along its back, angled slightly rearward like the smokestacks on an ocean liner. “I didn’t think there were many of them left now. I don’t think they actually do anything anymore; it’s just too much bother to shut them down.”

  But for the life of her she could not imagine why the airship was now descending to rendezvous with a Scaper. How exactly was that going to get her home any quicker?

  “I’m not sure about this,” she told the companion and then closed it quietly.

  Through the window, she could see the airship lowering itself between the twin rows of atmosphere stacks. They were soot black and sheer, as tall as the highest buildings in Shalbatana City. The airship stopped with a jerk, the freight pods creaking in their harnesses, and then a series of bangs and thuds sounded in rapid succession, as if restraining devices were locking into place. The engine note faded away, leaving only a distant throb, one that came up from the floor. It was the sound of the Scaper, transmitted to the cargo hold.

  For long minutes, nothing happened.

  Yukimi was by now quite uneasy, not at all sure that this rendezvous had anything to do with her being rescued. Halting on the back of a Scaper—kilometers from anywhere—had not figured in her plans. She had always assumed that the airships went from A to B as quickly as possible. No one had ever mentioned anything about them indulging in this kind of detour.

  None of this would be happening anywhere else in the solar system, she told herself. Mars was the only place where a girl could run away from home and not be found. Everywhere else, the aug was so thick, so all-pervasive, it was impossible to do anything illegal without someone knowing more or less instantly. You couldn’t hide away inside things. You couldn’t get lost.

  Mars was different, as everyone liked to say. Mars was a Descrutinized Zone. The aug was purposefully thin, and that meant people had to take responsibility for their own actions. You could get into trouble on Mars. Easily.

  Yukimi was pacing around, wondering what to do—with all sorts of imp
ractical ideas flashing through her head—when the cargo doors began to open. She took in a deep breath, as if that was going to help her. But apart from a slight breeze there wasn’t any loss of pressure. As hard blue light pushed through the widening Saps where the doors were rising open, she slunk back into the shadows, hiding between two freight pods. She had put the companion back into her satchel, and she hoped neither of them would make a sound. She very much wanted to be discovered, but she also very much wanted not to be.

  For a long time nothing at all happened. All she heard was faint mechanical sounds in the distance, and the continuing throb of the Scaper. She was aware now of a very slight undulation to their motion, as the colossal machine followed the terrain under its wheels.

  Then she heard something approaching. The noise was patient, rhythmic, wheezing, and it was accompanied by a labored shuffling. Yukimi tensed and pushed herself even farther back, but not quite so far that she couldn’t see the cargo doors. With an agonizing slowness, something horrible came up the ramp. It was a monster.

  Silhouetted, huge and bulbous against the blue light beyond, came something like a man, but swollen out of all proportion, with the head no more than a bulge between wide, ogrelike shoulders. Yukimi’s fear sharpened into a very precise kind of terror. She had never seen anything like this before. The figure stepped into the bay, and at last she saw it properly. It was wearing armor, but the armor was scratched and scabbed and rusty, and bits of it didn’t fit correctly. There were pipes and cables all over the misshapen form, with wisps of steam coming out of its joints. Green fluid dribbled out one of the knees. The bulge where its head should have been was a low bronze dome, caked in grease and dirt, with nothing at all that could pass for a face. It didn’t even have eyes. It just had cylinders sticking out of it at various angles, glassy with lenses, and some filth-smeared grills in the side of the dome. She couldn’t tell if it was a robot or some ancient, grotesquely cumbersome space suit. All she knew was that she was very, very frightened by it, and she didn’t want to know who—or what—was inside.