The Year's Best SF 25 # 2007 Read online

  The comfortable grip of his feet on the train station platform, confirming that he was truly ready for Mars’s real gravity, was as acute a pleasure as the clean thinness of bioprocessed air lightly stained with smells of coffee, frying meat, lubricant, and fresh plastic, as much as the pink late-afternoon light flooding the train station, as much as the restless waves and murmurs of crowd noise.

  He could have laughed out loud at how good it felt to be in his skin, standing on the platform at Olympus Station, a throng of eager hikers, sailplaners, and mountaineers all around him, the whole scene turned warm and sentimental by the pink light pouring in through the immense dome that arched above them.

  It had been a decade since he’d been on Mars, a planet like the rest of the solar system: a place he always came back to, because he never went home.

  “Thorby!” Léoa emerged from the crowd, saw him, and waved; he walked toward her slowly, still relishing the feel of having good ground legs.

  “So do I look like me?” she asked. “Did you know that back in the protomedia days, when they had recording tech but things hadn’t fused yet, that it was a cliché that people always looked better than their pictures?”

  “I’ve mined protomedia for images and sounds too. My theory about that is that you couldn’t get laid by telling the picture that it was the better-looking one.”

  “You’re an evil cynic. Pbbbt.” Even sticking her tongue out, she was beautiful.

  So was he. All documentarians had to be, the market insisted.

  “I never used pixel edit on myself,” she said. He wasn’t sure if she sounded proud or they were just having a professional discussion. “So screen-me does look unusually like real-me. I’ll do a docu about the way people react to that, someday. Want to get a drink, maybe a meal? It’s hours till our train.” Without waiting for him to say anything, she turned and walked away.

  Hurrying to catch up beside her, he called, “Baggins, follow,” over his shoulder. His porter robot trailed after them, carrying Thorby’s stack of packed boxes. Everything physical he owned still fit into a cube with sides shorter than his height. “Did you have a good trip in?” he asked her.

  “For me it’s always a great one. I’ve been here for six Martian seasons, three Earth years, and I’ll never be one of the ones that shutters the window to concentrate on work. I came in from Airy Zero City via the APK&T.”

  “Uh, it’s been a long time since I’ve been on Mars, is that a railroad?”

  “Oh, it’s a railroad—the grandest on the planet. The Airy Zero City–Polar Cap–Korolev-and-Tharsis. The one that tourists take if they only have one day on Mars. Also the one we’ll be taking up to Crater Korolev for jump-off. Among many other things it runs around the edge of the northern ice cap. Strange to think it won’t be long before it stops running. They’re just going to leave it for the divers, you know, and maybe as a spread path for some of the seabed fauna. More to be lost.”

  “If we’re going to start bickering,” Thorby said, smiling, “shouldn’t we be recording it? Or will that draw too much attention?”

  “Not on Mars. It’s a tourist planet—pretending celebs aren’t there is de rigueur. And you don’t look much like your teenaged pictures anymore.”

  “They were mostly in a spacesuit where you couldn’t see my face anyway,” he pointed out. “And I don’t use my face in my docus. I was thinking mainly about you.”

  “Pbbbt. I never was much of a celeb. There won’t be fifty people in all these hundreds who have ever seen any of my work. So the short answer is, if anything, it might be some worthwhile free publicity to do the interview while we walk through here. I’ll bring out my stalkers.” She whistled, a soft high-pitched phweet!—toooeee … wheep.

  A hatch opened on the porter humming along at her heels. A metal head on a single stalk popped up. The stalker hopped out and raced ahead of them to get a front view. Four more stalkers leaped out like toy mouse heads roller-skating on pogo sticks, zipping and bounding to form a rough, open semicircle around Thorby and Léoa, pointing their recording cameras back at the two people, and using their forward sensing to zigzag swiftly and silently around everything else.

  “I intend to look sincere and charming,” Léoa said. “Do your best to look philosophical and profound.”

  “I’ll try. It might come out bewildered and constipated.”

  She was nice enough to laugh, which was nicer than he was expecting. They descended the wide steps onto the broad terrace, far down the low, northwest side of the dome, and took a table near the dome surface, looking northwestward from Mount Olympus across the flat, ancient lava lake and into the broken, volcanic badlands called sulci beyond it. “Our ancestors would have found a lot of what we do utterly mad,” Léoa said, “so I suppose it’s comforting that we can find one thing they did explicable.”

  “You’re trying to get me to say something for the documentary.”

  “You’re spoiling the spontaneity. Of course I notice you do that all the time in your own documentaries.”

  “I do. Spontaneity is overrated when you’re covering big explosions and collisions. They only happen once, so you have to get them right, and that means looking in the right place at the right time, and that means a ton of prep.”

  “All right, well, have you had enough time to prepare to talk about something the ancestors would consider insane? What do you think about putting a train station on top of the highest mountain in the solar system?”

  “Where else would you put it? People who want to climb the mountain still can, and then they can take the train home. People who just want the view just take the train both ways. And once it starts to snow seriously around here, the skiing is going to be amazing. So of course there’s a train station here. They put it here to attract trains, the way Earth people put out bird-feeders to attract birds.”

  She nodded solemnly and he realized she was doing a reaction shot on him, showing her sincerity and trust. He looked away, out through the dome.

  “You’re getting lost in the sky,” Léoa said.

  “I like the pink skies here.”

  “Doesn’t it bother you that there will probably only be a thousand or so more of those?”

  “Not any more than it bothers me that I’ve missed billions of them before I was born.”

  “What about the people who will never see it?”

  “They’ll get to surf the new ocean, and stretch out on the beaches that all the dust washing out of the sulci and down the canyons will form. They’ll love that, in their moments. In my moment, I’m relishing a late-afternoon pink sky.”

  The stalker in the center was spinning back and forth, pointing its camera at each of them in turn; so now it was a Ping-Pong match. They did more verbal sparring and genned more quotes and reactions, ensuring they’d both have plenty to work with when the coproject went to edit. After a while they ordered dinner, and she stopped fishing for him to confess to imperialism or vandalism or whatever she was going to call it.

  She told her Stalker Number Three to silhouette him against the darkening sky and the landscape far below. The little robot leaped up, extended its pencil-thin support to a bit more than two meters, and silently crept around to shoot slightly down on Thorby and get the horizon into the picture.

  When Boreas rose in the northwest, covering much of the sky, they both said, “More profounder versions of what we already said,” as Léoa put it, while the stalkers recorded them with their back to the dome wall. Léoa had her stalkers stand tall, extending till they were about three meters high, to catch the brilliant white light that the huge comet cast into the sulci below; Thorby positioned his low, to silhouette them against the comet head itself. The huge station mezzanine around them, in the brilliant bluish white light, looked like some harsh early photograph with artificial lighting.

  Over coffee and dessert, they watched the fast-rising comet swim through the northern constellations like a vast snake coiling around Cepheus and the Bears befor
e diving over the northeast horizon, making a vivid arc different from that of anything else in the heavens. Finally it was late and they went to their rooms at the station hotel for the night. Thorby managed not to say anything about liking to see stuff smashed up, and she avoided saying she really preferred bare, dead rock and sand to forests and meadows, so the first day was a tie.

  They got off at Korolev Station, on the south side of the crater, pulled on Mars suits, loaded the porters, and walked out past the stupa that was another of the most-photographed places in the solar system.

  Crater Korolev was as far north on Mars as Novaya Zemlya on Earth, nearly circular, about seventy kilometers across, with sharply reared crater walls all around. It was a natural snow trap, gathering both water ice and dry ice in mixtures and layers.

  In a midmorning of Martian spring, the crater floor far below them had its own weather, gas geysers spraying snow, explosive sublimations that sent ground blizzards shooting out radially from suddenly exposed snowfields, and an occasional booming flash-and-crack between the whorls of fog that slithered just above the snow, almost a kilometer below the observation point behind the stupa. Monks in orange Mars suits, on their way to and from the long staircases that zigzagged from the stupa down to another stupa on the crater floor, passed between their stalkers, even less interested in the stalkers than the stalkers were in them.

  “This place makes a lot of lists of scenic wonders,” Léoa said. She knelt at the meter-high shrine that interrupted the rails of the observation platform, palms together in the ancient prayer gesture. The stalkers closed in on her.

  He did the same, to avoid her stalkers’ recording him being disrespectful.

  When Thorby and Léoa stood, and looked again across the stormy snowfields of Korolev Crater, the stalkers leaped up on the railing like an abstract sculpture of birds on a wire, balancing easily with their gyros. Thorby and Léoa deopaqued their helmets completely and turned on collar lights. “It doesn’t bother you,” she asked, “that these snowfields were here before the first human wandered across the African plain?”

  “No,” he said. “After all, the protons and electrons in the snow were probably in existence shortly after the big bang. Everything is made of bits of something older. Everything that begins means something ends. I like to take pictures of the moment when that happens. A day will come when we walk by Lake Korolev and admire the slow waves rolling across its deep blue surface, and then another day will come when this stupa stands on one of the islands that ring Korolev Atoll, and very much within our lifetime, unless we are unlucky, this will be an interesting structure at the bottom of the Boreal Ocean. I hope to see them all; life is potential and possibility.”

  “That was very preachy,” she said, “and you kind of intoned. Do you want to try it again?”

  “Not really. Intoning feels right when I’m serious. I like things that will happen once, then never again. That’s what my problem is with the animators that make their perfect simulations; they never take a chance on not getting what they’re after. Be sure to use that. Let’s get some animators good and angry.”

  “They don’t get angry,” she said sadly. “Nothing’s real to them.”

  He shrugged. “Reality is just a marketing trophy anyway. Twenty thousand years from now, if people want to walk around on a dry, thin-aired, cold Mars, they’ll be able to do it, and it will look so much like this that even a trained areologist won’t see the difference. Or if they want to watch the disassembly of Boreas a hundred times, and have every time be as subtly different as two different Tuesdays, they’ll be able to. Your recording of what was, and my recording of how it changed, will just be two more versions, the ones with that odd word ‘real’ attached.”

  “Attached validly. If reality doesn’t matter, why do animators try to fake their way into having their work labeled ‘real’ all the time? It’s the only thing they do that makes me really angry.”

  “Me too.” He could think of nothing else to add. “Catch the gliderail?”

  In the half-hour zip around to the north side viewing station, they sat on the top, outside deck. Their stalkers shot them with the crater in the background. It was noon now, and the early spring sun was still low in the sky to the south.

  On firm ground, in a Mars suit with robot porters to do all the carrying, a human being can cover about a hundred kilometers in a day without difficulty. Since the country they were crossing was ancient sea bottom (that was the point of everything, really), it would be flat and hard for the next couple of hundred kilometers before the Sand Sea. They could have just taken a hop-rocket to some point in the vast plain, claimed to have walked there, recorded their conversation, and then hopped another hundred kilometers or so to the edge of the Sand Sea, but they were the two most prominent documentarians of the realist movement.

  Visually it was monotonous. They had planned to use the long walk to spar for quotes, but there was little to say to each other. Léoa documented places that were about to be destroyed in the Great Blooming; Thorby recorded the BEREs, Big Energy Release Events, the vast crashes and explosions that marked humanity’s project of turning the solar system into a park and zoo. They were realist-purists, using only what a camera or a mike could record from the real world. Unable to do anything except disagree or agree completely, they tried arguing about whether a terraformed planet can have wilderness, since the life on it was brought there and the world shaped for it, and about whether it was masculine to like to see things smashed and feminine to like to see things protected, and they agreed that animation had no place in docu, all in the first hour.

  For a while she fished for him to tell stories about his brief moment of fame, as the teenager who rode his bicycle around a comet, but he didn’t feel like telling that story during that hike, though he did promise to tell it eventually. It wasn’t that he minded, it was only that the good-parts version came down to no more than four or five sentences for anyone else, and to inchoate, averbal images for Thorby.

  By noon the first day, there was nothing to do but walk and look for something worth recording, or an argument worth having. They walked two more days.

  The Sand Sea was no more conversational, but it was beautiful: an erg that stretched to the horizon, dune after dune in interlocking serpentines stretching for hundreds of kilometers in all directions. From orbit the regularity of the pattern of dune crests was remarkable, but from the dune crests, where they skied, it was busy and confusing like a choppy sea. Down between the dunes it was just piles of sand reaching to the sky on all sides.

  They hadn’t spoken in hours. Léoa didn’t even ask him if he felt sad that all this would be converted to a mudflat and then drowned under three kilometers of water. He couldn’t work up the energy to needle her about protecting a pile of dust the size of France, so that future generations could also visit a pile of dust the size of France.

  They went slowly for the last day, as Léoa got visuals of the Sand Sea. She had built her reputation on doomed landscapes; this would be the biggest to date.

  Thorby was sitting on top of one of the immense dunes, watching the sunset and talking his notes to one of his stalkers, planning the shooting of the Boreas-pass above the North Pole. He felt a low vibration, and his suit exmike, which had only supplied a soft whisper for days, reverberated with deep bass notes, something between a tuba and a bell, or a choir of mountains.

  The dune under him heaved like an ocean wave waking from a long sleep, and he tumbled over, rolling and sliding in a bewildering blur of dust and sky, halfway down the western, windward face before sliding to a halt. The slipping dust piled around him, starting to pin him to the ground.

  He pushed up to his feet, and stepping high, climbed back up the dune. It was more than a minute, while the pure tones of the bass notes in his exmike became a continuous thunder of tympani, before he struggled back to the top. The sun was less than a fingerwidth above the short horizon, and the light would disappear in minutes, the smaller s
olar disk and short horizon of Mars reducing twilight to an instant.

  The thunder was still loud, so he clicked up the volume on his radio. “Are you all right?”

  “Far as I can tell. It buried me to my waist but I got out.” He picked out Léoa, climbing the leeward slope far below. “Booming sands,” she said. “One of the last times they’ll ever do it. The resonance trips off more distant dunes, one dune triggering another by the sounds, till all the dunes with those frequencies have avalanched and added to the din. There’s a scientist I met who sowed microphones all over the polar sea and he could show you maps of how the booming would spread from dune to dune, all over the Sand Sea in a couple of hours. And all that will be silent forever.”

  “Silent as the Boreal Ocean is now,” he said, mindful that their recording mikes were still on and so was the sparring match. All round them, stalkers were finding their way back to the surface, usually stalk first so that they rose like slim reeds from the ground until they suddenly flipped over, spun to clear the dust from their scoopshaped audio pickups, and resumed hopping through the sand like mouse heads on pogo sticks, normal as ever. “There was a time to hear the sands, and there will be a time to hear the waves. And in between there’s going to be some of the grandest smashing you ever saw.”

  She must not have had a good reply, or perhaps she just didn’t want to reply to his intoning again, because she got back to her setup, and he got back to his.

  The Mars suits shed the fine dust constantly, so that Léoa seemed to smolder and then to trail long streaks as the wind shifted during the few seconds of twilight. They finished under the stalkers’ work lights, and lay down to wait on the soft lee of the dune, safe now because it had just avalanched.