The Year's Best SF 25 # 2007 Page 11

  “I just put the camera on the handlebars, facing backward, so that I’d have a record when I turned the project in for a grade, and then since I had to take a documentation class the next term, I used the footage. I had no idea people would get all excited about the image of me on that bicycle, food hamper towing behind me, with all that Boreas in the background.”

  “You looked like you were riding over it like a witch on a broomstick,” she reminded him, “because the producer that bought it made it consistent that your head was upright in the picture, and the way a body in a gravitational field positions itself, the bike ended up toward Boreas.”

  “‘It matters not what happened or how it was shot, the editor will decide what it was,’” he quoted, and skied forward a bit to stretch his tired legs and enjoy some exercise in the little daylight there was. Probably it would be another day or two before there was a rescue.

  When he came back, and found her still rolling along on the rescue frame (which, to his eyes, kept looking more and more like a cross) on top of Baggins, she was still awake and wanted some more soup, so he set that up for her. “This probably is a good sign for your quick recovery,” he pointed out. “The rescue people say they’ll pick us up sometime tomorrow, so we could just camp here, but if we cover another fifteen kilometers tonight and tomorrow morning, we can officially say we got out of the Sand Sea all by ourselves. Which is more comfortable for you, stationary or rolling?”

  “With my eyes closed I can’t tell the difference; your porter is pretty good at carrying a delicate object. I can’t get out of the suit anyway, so you’re the one who setting up a shelter might make a difference to. So let’s keep moving till you want to do that, and then move again in the morning when you’re ready.”

  “That’ll work.” It was almost dark now, and though he could steer and avoid hazards all right by light amps and infrared, and find his way by the same navigation system that Baggins used, it was a sort of scary way to proceed and he didn’t like the idea of risking something going wrong with Léoa. “I guess I’ll make camp here.”

  The shelter took a few minutes to inflate, and then Baggins carried her inside and set her on cargo supports, so he could at least remove her helmet and let her breathe air that came from the shelter’s generator, and eat a little bit of food she could chew, mostly just pastelike stuff from tubes that the medical advisor said she could have. When he had made her comfortable, and eaten a sitting-up meal himself, he stretched out on a pad himself, naked but feeling much better after a sponge bath. He told the shelter to make it dark, and didn’t worry about setting an alarm time.

  “Thorby?”

  “Need something?”

  “Just an answer to the last part of the question. So how did orbiting Boreas for a month, living on suit food and watching the frost form on the surface as a lot of the evaporated stuff snowed back in—I mean, basically, it was a novelty act, you were just orbiting a snowball on a bicycle—how did that launch everything for you?”

  “My big secret is it didn’t,” he said, not sure whether telling her could change anything. “For most of the ride I played VR games on my visor and caught up on sleep and writing to pen pals. I shot less than five hours of camera work across that whole month. Sure, orbiting a kilometer up from a KBO’s surface is interesting for a few minutes at a time. The frost spires and the big lacy ground patterns can be kind of pretty, but you know, a teenage boy doesn’t appreciate much that his glands don’t react to. I finally decided that I could stand company again, tossed the food container downward on the stretch-winch, slowed down to about a forty kilometers per hour across a few hundred kilometers of frost—the rooster tail from that was actually the best visual of the trip, I thought, with a line down from my bicycle to the surface, and then snow spraying everywhere from the end of the line—came in, got a shower, put it together, and forgot about it till it made me famous. At which point it also made it famous that Mom had a teenage son, which was badly blowing the ingénue image, so she filed repudiation papers with Image Control, and I’ve never seen or heard from her since. The biggest thing I learned, I’m afraid, was that I like having a lot of time to myself, and people bug me.”

  “What about big explosions?”

  “I like them, I always did. And I liked watching frost re-form after moving Boreas around, and I just like to see stuff change. I know you’re looking for something deeper, but you know, that’s about it. Things end, new things form, new things end, newer things form. I just like to be there.”

  She didn’t ask again, and he heard her breathing grow slower and deeper. He thought about the visuals he had, and about a couple things he wanted to make sure to do when Boreas did its South Pole pass, and was asleep almost at once in the perfect dark and silence of the Martian wilderness.

  “All right,” she said, “I’ll tell you as much as I can, since you are going to ask.” He was sitting beside her reconstructor tank in the hospital. “That’s why you came back, right, to ask why I would do such a thing?”

  “I don’t really know if that is why I came here,” he said. “I wanted to see how you were, I had some days before I go down to the South Pole, and since I put some effort into having you be alive, I guess I just wanted to see the results. I’m not planning to work with you again, so I don’t really have to know why you wrecked my stalkers just before some key shots, only that you might, to avoid you.”

  “I suppose after what I did there’s no question of your ever liking me.”

  “I’m a loner, I don’t like people much anyway.”

  “Some people might guess that’s why you like BEREs. The people who used to love the place the way it was are gone, and the people who are going to love the place it will be aren’t there yet. For just that instant it’s just you and the universe, eh?”

  She must be recording this. It was the sort of thing you asked an interviewee, and her audience in particular would just gobble this down. Perhaps he should spoil it, and pay her back for having spoiled the first Boreas pass for him?

  Except she hadn’t spoiled it. He’d be getting plenty of shots of the later passes and anyway good old Stalker Two had gotten most of what he wanted, including the fiery column from the surprise impact. And even if she hadn’t done that, they’d have missed most of it through having to grab the stalkers and flee for their lives.

  So it mattered, but not a lot; he just didn’t want her around when he was shooting anything important. As for rescuing Léoa, well, what else could a guy do? That didn’t create a bond for him and he couldn’t imagine why it might for her. It was just something he did because it was something people did at a time like that.

  “You’re looking like you’ve never had that thought before,” Léoa said.

  He thought, What thought? and said, “I guess, yeah.”

  “You see? We’re not so different from each other. You like to see the moment when something beautiful changes into something new. And you don’t care that things get all smashed when that happens. In fact you enjoy the smash, the beautiful death of something natural and beautiful, and the birth of a beautiful human achievement.”

  He thought, What? and was afraid he would have to say something.

  But by now she was rolling. “Thorby, that was what I wanted to capture. Thorby, Lonely Thorby, Thorby the Last Mountain Man, finds out he can be betrayed by people he thought were his friends. The change of your expression as it happened. The way your body recoiled. The whole—my idea is, I’m going to overlay all that and interact it, touchlinked back and forth everywhere, with the changes on Mars, show Mars becoming a new living world artificially, and show Thorby engaging and rejoining the human race, artificially, in a dialogue. Show you becoming someone who can hate and maybe even eventually love. Someone who can see that the rest of us are here. The way Mars can learn to respond to life on its surface, in a way that it hasn’t in the three centuries we’ve been there.”

  At least he knew about this. People had been trying to ch
ange Thorby his whole life. He’d never been any good at being changed. “So you wanted to get the moment when I changed, for your docu?” It was a stupid question, she’d told him, but interviewers have to ask stupid questions now and then, if they want to get decent quotes, and habits die harder than passions.

  “That’s it, that’s it exactly. Exactly. I’m giving up on the whole purist-realist movement. You can have it to yourself. It not only isn’t making me famous, it’s not even keeping you famous. I’ve got an idea for a different kind of docu altogether, one where the human change in celebs and the Blooming change in the solar system echo and describe each other in sort of a dialogue. If you’re interested, and I bet you’re not, I’ve recorded sort of a manifesto of the new movement. I’ve put it out already. I told them what I did to you and why and showed your face, which wasn’t as expressive as it could be, by the way. Too bad you never want to do another take. And even though in the manifesto I explain it will be at least twenty years before my next docu, instead of the usual five or six, because I want to get at least that much of the Mars changes into it, the manifesto is still getting the most attention I’ve ever gotten. I’ve got a bigger audience than ever, even pulling in some of my backlist. I’m going to have an impact.”

  It all made sense of a sort, as much as people stuff ever did, so Thorby said, “Well, if that’s what you want most, I’m glad you’re finally having an impact. I hope it’s the impact you want.” To him it seemed to come out stiff and formal and unbelievable.

  But she smiled very warmly and said, “Thorby, that’s so beautiful I’d never dream of asking for a second take.”

  “You’re welcome.” He brushed her forehead with his hand, and added, “Happy impacts.”

  Because she looked like she was trying to think of a perfect reply, he left. He needed to get new gear purchased and checked out, then catch a hop-rocket; Boreas pass over the South Pole was just three days away.

  He wondered why he was smiling.

  Right on Mars’s Arctic Circle, just at 66 N, at winter solstice, the sun at noon should just bounce over the southern horizon, and Thorby had an idea that that might look especially impressive with the big new ring arcing so high across the sky. But to his annoyance, here he was, waiting for that momentary noon-dawn, and the new, thick Martian clouds had socked in every point around the Arctic Circle. Above the clouds, he knew, the new rings were vivid with light, a great arc sweeping halfway up the sky; but down here, nothing, and even the constant meteor shower under the rings was invisible, or showed only as flashes in the clouds indistinguishable from distant lightning.

  He waited but it never cleared, and the time for the midwinter sun passed, so he turned on the ground lights on his hop-rocket to pack up.

  Thorby blinked for a moment. It was snowing, big, thick, heavy, slow flakes, tumbling down gently everywhere, not many just yet, but some everywhere he looked. It was so fine, and so perfect, that he shot it for twenty minutes, using three stalkers to record the snowfall in big slow pans, and two just to record the lacy flakes as they landed on dark soil and lay exposed for just an instant to his view before the stalkers’ lights melted them, working at maximum magnification to catch each unique one, wondering if it was even possible for a Martian snowflake shape to fall elsewhere.

  He stayed there shooting till the wind rose and the snowfall thickened enough so that he had to worry about getting the hop-rocket off the ground. He was laughing as Baggins swallowed up the stalkers and rumbled up the ramp, and he looked around one more time before climbing the ramp and turning off his ground lights. He indulged in a small spiteful pleasure: he knew that his normally expressionless face was cracking wide-open with pure joy, and Léoa and her cameras were in some city or on some ship somewhere, farther from him than anyone had ever been.

  Saving Tiamaat

  GWYNETH JONES

  One of the most acclaimed British writers of her generation, Gwyneth Jones was a cowinner of the James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award for work exploring genre issues in science fiction with her 1991 novel White Queen, and has also won the Arthur C. Clarke Award with her novel Bold As Love, as well as receiving two World Fantasy Awards—for her story “The Grass Princess” and her collection Seven Tales and a Fable. Her other books include the novels, North Wind, Flowerdust, Escape Plans, Divine Endurance, Phoenix Café, Castles Made of Sand, Stone Free, Midnight Lamp, Kairos, Life, Water in the Air, The Influence of Ironwood, The Exhange, Dear Hill, Escape Plans, and The Hidden Ones, as well as more than sixteen Young Adult novels published under the name Ann Halam. Her too-infrequent short fiction has appeared in Interzone, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Off Limits, and in other magazines and anthologies, and has been collected in Identifying the Object: A Collection of Short Stories, as well as Seven Tales and a Fable. She is also the author of the critical study, Deconstructing the Starships: Science Fiction and Reality. Her most recent book is a new novel, Rainbow Bridge. She lives in Brighton, England, with her husband, her son, and a Burmese cat.

  In the vivid and compelling story that follows, she proves that coming to really know your enemy may make your problems harder rather than easier to solve.

  I had reached the station in the depth of Left Speranza’s night; I had not slept. Fogged in the confabulation of the transit, I groped through crushing aeons to my favourite breakfast kiosk: unsure if the soaring concourse outside Parliament was ceramic and carbon or a metaphor; a cloudy internal warning—

  —now what was the message in the mirror? Something pitiless. Some blank-eyed, slow-thinking, long-grinned crocodile—

  “Debra!”

  It was my partner. “Don’t do that,” I moaned. The internal crocodile shattered, the concourse lost its freight of hyperdetermined meaning, too suddenly for comfort. “Don’t you know you should never startle a sleepwalker?”

  He grinned; he knew when I’d arrived, and the state I was likely to be in. I hadn’t met Pelé Leonidas Iza Quinatoa in the flesh before, but we’d worked together, we liked each other. “Ayayay, so good you can’t bear to lose it?”

  “Of course not. Only innocent, beautiful souls have sweet dreams.”

  He touched my cheek: collecting a teardrop. I hadn’t realised I was crying. “You should use the dreamtime, Debra. There must be some game you want to play.”

  “I’ve tried, it’s worse. If I don’t take my punishment, I’m sick for days.”

  The intimacy of his gesture (skin on skin) was an invitation and a promise; it made me smile. We walked into the Parliament Building together, buoyant in the knocked-down gravity that I love although I know it’s bad for you.

  In the Foyer, we met the rest of the company, identified by the Diaspora Parliament’s latest adventure in biometrics, the aura tag. To our vision, the KiAn Working Party was striated orange-yellow, nice cheerful implications, nothing too deep. The pervasive systems were seeing a lot more, but that didn’t bother Pelé or me; we had no secrets from Speranza.

  The KiAn problem had been a matter of concern since their world had been “discovered” by a Balas-Shet prospector, and joined the miniscule roster of populated planets linked by instantaneous transit. Questions had been raised then, over the grave social imbalance: the tiny international ruling caste, the exploited masses. But neither the Ki nor the An would accept arbitration (why the hell should they?). The noninterference lobby is the weakest faction in the Chamber, quarantine-until-they’re-civilised was not considered an option. Inevitably, around thirty local years after first contact, the Ki had risen against their overlords, as often in the past. Inevitably, this time they had modern weapons. They had not succeeded in wiping out the An, but they had pretty much rendered the shared planet uninhabitable.

  We were here to negotiate a rescue package. We’d done the damage, we had to fix it, that was the DP’s line. The Ki and the An no doubt had their own ideas as to what was going on: they were new to the Interstellar Diaspora, not to politics.

  But they were here, at least; so that
seemed hopeful.

  The Ki Federation delegates were unremarkable. There were five of them, they conformed to the “sentient biped” body plan that unites the diaspora. Three were wearing Balas business suits in shades of brown, two were in grey military uniform. The young coleaders of the An were better dressed, and one of the two, in particular, was much better-looking. Whatever you believe about the origins of the “diaspora” (strong theory, weak theory, something between), it’s strange how many measures of beauty are common to us all. He was tall, past two metres: he had large eyes, a mane of rich brown head hair, an open, strong-boned face, poreless bronze skin, and a glorious smile. He would be my charge. His coleader, the subordinate partner, slight and small, almost as dowdy as the Ki, would be Pelé’s.

  They were code-named Baal and Tiamaat, the names I will use in this account. The designations Ki and An are also code names.

  We moved off to a briefing room. Joset Moricherri, one of the Blue permanent secretaries, made introductory remarks. A Green Belt colonel, Shamaz Haa’agaan, gave a talk on station security. A slightly less high-ranking DP administrator got down to basics: standard time conventions, shopping allowances, access to the elevators, restricted areas, housekeeping … . Those who hadn’t provided their own breakfast raided the culturally neutral trolley. I sipped my Mocha-Colombian, took my carbs in the form of a crisp cherry jam tartine; and let the day’s agenda wash over me, as I reviewed what I knew about Baal and Tiamaat’s relationship.