Beyond the Aquila Rift: The Best of Alastair Reynolds

by Alastair Reynolds

  “That’s not how you do it. Haven’t you ever read a book before?”

  He gave her a tolerant smile. “Not like this.”

  Yukimi showed him the way. She touched her finger to the bottom right corner and dragged it sideways, so that the book revealed the next pair of pages. “That’s how you turn to the next page. If you want to turn ten pages, you use two fingers. Hundred pages, three fingers. And the same to go backward.”

  “It seems very complicated.”

  “It’s just like a diary. I tell it what I’ve been doing, or let it record things for me. Then it sorts it all out and makes me fill in the gaps.”

  “Sounds horrendous,” Corax said, pulling a face as if he had just bitten into a lemon. “I was never very good at diary keeping.”

  “It’s meant to be more than just a diary, though. Shirin had one as well—she bought it at the same time. She was leaving, so we wouldn’t be able to talk normally anymore because of the lag. I was sad because she’d always been my best friend, even though she was older than me. She said our companions would help us bridge the distance.”

  “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “We were both supposed to use our companions all the time. Make entries whenever we could. I would talk to my companion as if Shirin was there, and Shirin would talk to hers as if I was there. Then, every now and again, the companions would—I can’t remember the word.” Yukimi frowned. “Connect up. Exchange entries. So that my companion got better at copying Shirin and hers got better at copying me. And then if we kept on doing that, eventually it would be like having Shirin with me all the time, so that I could talk to her whenever I wanted. Even if Venus was on the other side of the sun. It wouldn’t be the same as Shirin—it wasn’t meant to replace her—but just make it so that we didn’t always feel apart.”

  “It seems like a good idea,” Corax said.

  “It wasn’t. We promised we’d keep talking to our companions, but Shirin didn’t. For a while, yes. But once she’d been away from Mars for a few months she stopped doing it. Every now and again, yes—but you could tell only because she was feeling bad about not doing it before.”

  “I suppose she was busy.”

  “We promised each other. I kept up my side of the promise. I still talk to Shirin. I still tell her everything. But because she doesn’t talk to me enough, my companion can’t pretend to be her.” Yukimi felt a wave of sadness slide over her. “I could have really used her lately.”

  “It doesn’t mean she doesn’t love you. It just means she’s an adult with a lot of people making demands on her. Terraforming’s very important work. It requires great responsibility.”

  “That’s what my parents keep saying.”

  “It’s the truth. It always has been. The people who made the Scapers understood that, even if they didn’t get the technology quite right. It’s the same with—what they call them? Those things in the air, swirling around?”

  “Change-clouds,” Yukimi said.

  He nodded. “I see them sometimes at dusk. Just another machine, really. In a thousand years, there won’t seem much difference between them and this. But they make me feel very old. Even your book makes me feel like an old relic from prehistory.” He stood up, his knees creaking with the effort. “Speaking of recording devices, let me show you something.” He moved to one of the shelves and pushed aside some junk to expose an old-looking space helmet. He brought it back to the table, blowing the dust off it in the progress, coughing as he breathed some of it in, and set the helmet down before Yukimi.

  “It looks ancient,” she said, trying hard not to show too much disappointment. It was scratched and dented and the white paint was coming off in places. There had once been colorful markings round the visor and crest, but they were mostly faded or rubbed away now. She could just make out the ghostly impressions where they had been.

  “It is. Unquestionably. Older even than this Scaper. I know because I found it and…well.” He stroked the helmet lovingly, leaving dust tracks where his fingers had been. “There’s serious provenance here. It used to belong to someone very famous, before he went missing.”

  “Who?”

  “We’ll come to that tomorrow. In the meantime I thought it might be of interest. The helmet’s still in good nick—built to last. I had to swap out the power cells, but other than that I’ve done nothing to it. Do you want to try it on?”

  She didn’t, really, but it seemed rude to say so. She gave an encouraging nod. Corax picked up the helmet again and shuffled around the table until he was behind her. He lowered it down gently, until the cushioned rim was resting on her shoulders. She could still breathe perfectly normally because the helmet was open at the bottom. “It smells moldy,” she said.

  “Like its owner. But watch this. I’m going to activate the head-up display playback, using the external controls.” He pressed some studs on the outside of the helmet and Yukimi heard soft clicks and beeps inside.

  Then everything changed.

  She was still looking at Corax, still inside the galley. But overlaid on that was a transparent view of something else entirely. It was a landscape, a Martian landscape, moving slowly, rocking side to side as if someone was walking. They were coming to the edge of something, a sharp drop in the terrain. The pace slowed as the edge came nearer, and then the point of view dipped, so that Yukimi was looking down, down at her chest-pack, which looked ridiculously old and clunky, down at her heavy, dust-stained boots, down at the Martian soil, and the point where—just beyond her toes—it fell savagely away.

  “The edge of Valles Marineris,” Corax told her. “The deepest canyon on Mars. It’s a long way down, isn’t it?”

  Yukimi agreed. Even though she was sitting down, she still felt a twinge of vertigo.

  “You can still go there, but it’s not the same,” Corax went on. “Mostly filled with water now—and it’ll only get deeper as the sea levels keep rising. Where I’m standing—where you’re standing—is now a chain of domed resort hotels. They’ll tear down the domes when the atmosphere gets thick enough to breathe, but they won’t tear down the hotels.” He paused. “Not that I’m complaining, or arguing against the terraforming program. It’ll be marvelous to see boats sailing across Martian seas, under Martian skies. To see people walking around under that sky without needing suits or domes to keep them alive. To see Earth in the morning light. We’ll have gained something incredible. But we’ll have lost something as well. I just think we should be careful not to lose sight of that.”

  “We could always go back,” Yukimi said. “If we didn’t like the new Mars.”

  “No,” Corax said. “That we wouldn’t be able to do. Not even if we wanted it more than anything in the world. Because once we’ve touched a world, it stays touched.” He reached over and turned off the head-up display. “Now. Shall we think about eating?”

  IN THE MORNING they left the Scaper, traveling out in a small, four-wheeled buggy that came down from a ramp in the great machine’s belly. “Just a little sightseeing trip,” Corax said, evidently detecting Yukimi’s anxiety about not being back when the flier—scheduled for the afternoon—came to collect her. They were snug and warm in the buggy’s pressurized cabin, Yukimi wearing the same clothes as the day before, Corax in the same outfit he had been wearing under the armor, which—for reasons not yet clear to Yukimi—he had stowed in the buggy’s rear storage compartment.

  “Will the Scaper be all right without you aboard?” Yukimi asked, as they powered out of its shadow, bouncing over small rocks and ridges.

  “She’ll take care of herself for a few hours, don’t you worry.”

  An awkward question pushed itself to the front of Yukimi’s mind. “Will you always be the one in charge of it?”

  Corax steered the buggy around a crater before answering. “Until the people who pay for my upkeep decide otherwise.” He glanced sideways, a cockeyed grin on his face. “Why? You think old Corax’s getting too old for the job?”

&n
bsp; “I don’t know,” she answered truthfully. “How old are you, exactly?”

  “How old do you reckon?”

  “Older than my aunt, and I’m not sure how old she is. She’s from Earth as well.”

  “Did I say I was from Earth?”

  “You mentioned cathedrals,” Yukimi said.

  “I could have been there as a tourist.”

  “But you weren’t.”

  “No,” he said eventually. “I wasn’t. Here I’m the tourist.”

  They drove on, crossing kilometers of Martian terrain. Most of the time Corax didn’t have his hands on the controls, the buggy navigating by itself. Yukimi saw tire tracks in the soil and guessed that Corax had come this way before, maybe within the last few days. As the route wound its way around obstacles, the Scaper became little more than a dark, chimney-backed hump on the horizon, seemingly fixed in place. And then even the dark hump was gone.

  The ground began to dip down. Ahead, reflecting back the sun like a sheet of polished metal, was what appeared to be a large lake or even a small sea. It had a complicated, meandering shoreline. Yukimi could not see the far side, even with the buggy raised high above sea level. She did her best to memorize the shape of the lake, the way it would look from above, so that she could find it on a map. That was hard, though, so she took out the companion and opened the covers so that it recorded the view through the buggy’s forward window.

  “You want to know where we are?” Corax asked.

  Yukimi nodded.

  “Approaching Crowe’s Landing. You ever hear of it?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Doesn’t surprise me. It’s been a ghost town for decades; I’d be surprised if it’s on any of the recent maps. It certainly won’t be on them for much longer.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’ll soon be under water.”

  Corax took control of the buggy again as it completed its descent to the edge of the lake, following a zigzagging path down the sloping terrain. As they neared the water, Yukimi made out a series of sketchy shapes floating just beneath the surface: pale rectangles and circles, some of them deeper than others, and reaching a considerable distance from the shore. They looked like the shapes on some weird game board. They were, she realized, the roofs and walls of submerged buildings.

  “THIS WAS A town?”

  Corax nodded. “Way back when. Mars is on its second wave of history now—maybe even its third. I remember when Shalbatana was nothing, just a weather station that wasn’t even manned half the time. Crowe’s Landing was a major settlement. Not the main one, but one of the four or five largest colonies on the surface. Yes, we called them colonies back then. It was a different time. A different age.” Slowly, he guided the buggy into the waters, picking his way down what must have been a thoroughfare between two rows of buildings. With some apprehension, Yukimi watched the water lap over the tops of the wheels, and then against the side of the cabin. “It’s all right,” Corax said. “She’s fully submersible. I’ve taken her a full kilometer out, but we’re not going anywhere so far today.”

  They were driving along a hard surface, so even though the buggy’s wheels were underwater, they didn’t stir up much material. The water was clear enough that Yukimi could see for tens of meters in all directions. As the road sloped down, the sea gradually closed over the cockpit bubble and it was almost possible to believe that they were just driving through a normal, albeit strangely unpopulated, district of Shalbatana City. The buildings were rectangles, cylinders, and domes, all with small black windows and circular, airlock style doors set out from the main structure in rounded porches. There must never have been a bubble around Crowe’s Landing, so the buildings would have been the inhabitants’ only protection from the atmosphere. Yukimi guessed that there were tunnels linking them together, sunk under the road level. Even the newer communities like Shalbatana—and it was strange now to think of her hometown as “new”—had underground tunnels, maintained to provide emergency shelter and communication should something untoward happen to the bubble. Yukimi had been down into them during school field trips.

  She wasn’t alone—she was in the cabin with Corax—but there was still something spooky about driving slowly through this deserted colony. She wished Corax hadn’t called it a ghost town, and while she understood that he hadn’t meant that the place was literally haunted, she couldn’t turn her imagination off. As the light wavered down from the overlying sea, she kept seeing faces appear in the windows, brief and spectral like paper cutouts held there for a moment. Once they turned a corner and passed another kind of buggy, left parked there as if its owners had only just abandoned it. But it was a very old-fashioned looking buggy, and the symbols painted on its side reminded her of the faded markings on the old space helmet.

  Eventually Corax brought the buggy to a halt.

  “We’re here,” he said grandly. “The objective. You see that building to our right, the one shaped like an old-fashioned hat box?”

  “Yes,” Yukimi said dubiously.

  “It’s still airtight, unlike most of the others. Because of that, it’s watertight as well. And the airlock’s still functioning—there’s just enough power in the mechanism for another cycle. Do you see where I’m headed?”

  “Not really.”

  “Crowe’s Landing is almost gone now, and in a hundred years it’ll be completely forgotten. The seas will rise, Mars will be greened. A whole new civilization will bloom and prosper. You’ll be part of that, Yukimi—when you’re older. You’ll see wonderful things and live to tell your grandchildren of the way it used to be, before the change-clouds finished their work.” He smiled. “I envy you. I’ve lived a very long time—the drugs weren’t always the best, but at least I had a ready supply—but my time’s coming to an end now and you’ll outlive me by centuries, if luck’s on your side.”

  Yukimi thought of all the things in her life that were not the way she wanted. “I don’t think it is.”

  “I’m not sure. That airship could have carried on to Milankovic, and then where would you be?”

  “Hm,” she said, remaining to be convinced.

  “I had an idea,” Corax said. “Not long after I found this place and this building. Mars is changing now and the seas will rise. But they won’t stay that way forever. One day—a thousand or ten thousand years from now, maybe more—the seas will shrink again. People will have other worlds to green by then, and maybe they’ll let Mars return to its primal state. Whatever happens, Crowe’s Landing will eventually come out of the waters. And that building will still be there. Still airtight.”

  “You can’t be sure.”

  “It’s a fair bet. Stronger odds of surviving than anything left on the surface, with everything that’s to come. Soon there’ll be woods and forests out there, and where there aren’t woods and forests there’ll be cities and people. There’ll be weather and storms and history. But none of that will reach down here. This building’s as close to a time capsule as we’re going to find. Which is why we’ve come.” He tapped a few commands into the buggy’s console and stood up creakily. “That helmet I found? It used to belong to Crowe, one of the very first explorers.”

  “Can you be sure?”

  “Reasonably. As I said, it’s got provenance.” He paused. “I’m going to put the helmet in there. It’s a piece of the past, a memento of the way Mars used to be. Not just a chunk of metal and plastic but a historical document, a living record. I only played back a tiny part of what’s stored in that helmet. That old fool captured thousands of hours, and that’s not including all the log entries he made, all the thoughts he put down for posterity. An old man’s ramblings…but maybe it’ll be of interest to someone. And it’ll all still be inside that helmet when they find it again.”

  Yukimi had trouble thinking much further in the future than her seventeenth birthday, when she would receive the golden gateway into the aug. Everything was a blank after that. Centuries, thousands of year
s—what difference did it make?

  “Will anyone understand it?”

  “They may have to work at it,” Corax allowed. “But that’s what historians and archaeologists do. And I was thinking: while we’re at it, why don’t we give them something else to puzzle over, in addition to the helmet?”

  Yukimi thought for a moment. “You mean my companion?”

  “Your thoughts and observations aren’t any less valid than Corax’s. You’ll miss your diary, of course, and maybe you’ll have some explaining to do to your sister when she finds out what happened to it—assuming you tell her, of course. But in the meantime, think what you’ll have done. You’ll have sent a message to the future. A gift from the past to a Martian civilization that doesn’t even exist yet. No matter what happens, you’ll have made your mark.”

  “No one’s interested in what I have to say,” Yukimi said.

  “Don’t put yourself down. Look, there’s still time to make another entry. Tell them how you got here. Tell them how you feel today, tell them what made you run away from home yesterday. Be angry. Be sad. Get it out of your system.”

  “I’ve got to go back to it later.”

  “Believe me, this will help. When everything seems like it couldn’t get any worse, you’ll always be able to tell yourself: I did this one brilliant thing, this one brilliant thing that no one else has ever or will ever do. And that makes me special.”

  She thought about the companion. It had been a gift from Shirin and—for all that it was dog-eared, and not the smartest in the world—she had treated it with fondness. It reminded her of her older sister. It reminded her of the good times they had spent together, before Shirin bored of childhood games and started looking to the skies, dreaming of worlds to make anew.

  But had Shirin really cared? It had been easy for her to promise to keep her side of the bargain, before she said good-bye. Yukimi sometimes wondered if her sister had given her more than a moment’s thought except for the times when her conscience prickled her into sending a message.