The Year's Best SF 25 # 2007 Page 9

  “Thorby,” she said, “this is not turning into anything that will make either of us famous.”

  He hunched his shoulders, shaping the fine sand under him. “You’re right,” he said. “It’s not.”

  “You’ve already been famous.”

  “It’s one of those things you can’t experience while it’s happening,” he said, “like seeing yourself across a crowded room. Not all that it’s cracked up to be. I like making docus and I like selling them, so that kind of ‘where is he now’ fame doesn’t hurt, and it’s far enough in the past so I mostly get left alone.” He watched Phobos, far south in the sky; from these far northern latitudes you never saw it full, always as a lumpy sort of half-moon.

  “If a model or a musician had taken a tumble in booming sands it would sell systemwide, but if we got stranded out here and you killed and ate me to survive, it would barely show up. Docus are what, half a percent of the market? There’s not even a market in pirating them.” Léoa sighed. “I was just thinking that the mainstream celeb channels haven’t even mentioned that the two leading documentarians of the realistpurist movement are here to record the biggest event of the next few hundred years of the Great Blooming, the re-creation of the Boreal Ocean. Not even to mention that we’ve always feuded and we purportedly hate each other. Not even to do one of those ‘Will they reconcile and have sex?’ stories they like so much. Not even to mention that one of us is the teenager who took the longest bicycle ride in history. Yet two years ago they covered the fad for learning to hand-read, and a couple guys in the retro movement that produced written books—can you believe it, written books, just code, that stuff people used to hand-read—and they covered a blacksmith last year, but docus are so dead, they didn’t bother with us.”

  “We’re not dead enough. Gone but not long enough or completely enough to be a novelty.” He tried to decide whether he could actually see Phobos crawling along eastward, down by the equator, and decided he could. “Maybe we should have the blacksmith build us chariots, and race each other, and do a documentary about that.”

  “Maybe.” The scratchy sound in her radio puzzled him till he saw her rolling over; she was looking for a comfortable position on the dune, and he was hearing her Mars suit pushing dust away.

  “Hey,” he said. “Since you’ve been trying to get me to miss something, I just noticed something I will miss. Phobos. I like the way it looks from this far north.”

  “Well, I’m glad something can touch your heart. I’d have thought you were excited about getting to see it fall.”

  “It won’t be much of a show. Phobos’ll be busted to gravel from all the impacts as it comes down through the rings, so it won’t really be a BERE, just a monthlong high point in the spectacular meteor shower that will go on for fifteen Mars-years or so. I wasn’t even going to bother to shoot it. But what it is right now—I never realized it’s always a half-moon up here in the far north, because it’s so close to the equator and so low in orbit, and besides, it’s fun just to watch it, because it’s so low it orbits really fast, and I’m thinking I can see it move.”

  “I think I can too.” She commanded her stalkers to set up and record the view of Phobos, and then to get the two of them with Phobos behind them as they sat on a dune. “Those shots will be beautiful; so sad though that stories about Great Blooming projects are about as popular as public comment requests by the Global Desalination Authority.”

  He shrugged, hoping it would show up on the stalker’s cameras. “Post-scarcity economy, very long life spans, all that. Everything to do and nothing matters. Story of everyone’s life. Have you thought about doing anything other than docus?”

  “I try not to. I want to get the Great Blooming recorded, even if I call it the Great Vandalism or Bio-Stuff Imperialism. Somebody has to stand up for rocks, ice, and vacuum.”

  “Rocks make okay friends. They’re dependable and loyal.”

  “I wish somebody wanted to watch us talking to each other,” Léoa said. “About all this. About Mars and about the Blooming and all that stuff. I almost wouldn’t care what we had to say, or how things came out, if somebody would just find us interesting enough to listen. You know what I mean.”

  “Yeah.” Thorby didn’t really feel that way himself but he often didn’t know what he felt at all, so he might as well agree.

  They began final checkout just a few minutes before Boreas’s first aerobraking pass. The stalkers were self-maintaining, and they were already in place, but it felt wrong to just assume everything would work.

  “This will be one of your last views of your home,” Léoa said. “How do you feel about that?”

  He turned toward her, flipped the opaquing on his helmet to zero, and turned up the collar lights, so that his face would be as visible as possible, since this was an answer he knew he needed to get right. Already the northern horizon was glowing with Boreas dawn. “Boreas is where I grew up, as much as I ever did, but that doesn’t make it home,” he said. “First of all when I lived there you couldn’t walk on most of it, anyway, and they weren’t going to let a little boy put on a suit and go play outside. When I went back four weeks ago, all that melting and vaporizing that went on while Boreas worked its way down to the lower system had erased even the little bit of landscape I did know; I couldn’t even find Cookie Crumb Hill on radar and thermal imaging, and anyway if I’d found it, it’s so dark down there now, with all the fog and grit flying around, that I doubt I could have gotten pictures that penetrated more than twenty meters into the mess. The Boreas I knew when I was a kid, way out beyond Neptune, is more than a decade gone; it’s nothing like it was. Nothing at all.”

  He was crabbier in his tone than he had meant to be, irritated by her question because he’d blown half his share of the budget to buy passage to Boreas so that he could come back with the seven scientists who were the last evacuated from the iceball’s surface, and what he’d gotten had been some lackluster interviews that he could as easily have done a year before or a year after. Furthermore, since the station had not had windows, he could have done them somewhere more pleasant. He had also acquired some pictures of the fog-and-grit mix that now shrouded what was left of the old surface. (Most of the old surface, of course, now was fog and grit.)

  As Boreas came in over the North Pole, it would swing low enough for atmospheric drag, which, combined with the gravitational drag from coming in an “inverse slingshot” trajectory, should put it into a very eccentric, long orbit around Mars. Doing this with a big natural ball of mixed water ice, carbon dioxide, and frozen methane, with a silica-grit center, was so uncertain a process that the major goals for the project began with “1. avoid impact by Boreas, 2. avoid escape by Boreas.”

  But if all went well, nudgers and roasters would then be installed on Mars’s new huge artificial moon, with the objective of parking it in a nearly circular retrograde orbit below Phobos, well inside Mars’s Roche limit, so that over a few years, Boreas would break up and form a complex of rings. The billions of bits of it, dragged and shredded by the planet’s rotation, would then gradually spiral in across twenty years, creating a spectacular continual meteor shower in the plane of the ring, a carbon dioxide-methane atmosphere at about a bar of pressure, and, as water vapor snowed down, then melted, then rained and ran to the lower parts of the planet, a new ocean in the bed of the dry-for-a-billion-years Boreal Ocean.

  The comet’s pass would light the sky for many hours, but its actual brush with the atmosphere would last less than three minutes. Thorby and Léoa intended to be directly underneath it when that happened.

  “Did you leave anything on Boreas, a memento to be vaporized onto Mars?” she asked.

  He started to say, “No.”

  She picked up her walking stick and knocked off the head of one of his stalkers.

  Startled speechless for an instant, he didn’t speak or move till she whacked the second one so hard that its head flew in pieces into the sand.

  “What are you—�
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  “Destroying your stalkers.” Her voice was perfectly calm and pleasant as she whacked another stalker hard enough to break its stem in half, then drove the tip of her stick down on its head. “You won’t have a record of this. And mine will only be recording your face and appearance. You’ve lost.”

  He thought, Lost what? for an instant, and then he wanted to rush to see if Number Four Stalker, which had been with him for twenty-five years, was all right because it was crushed and he couldn’t help thinking of it as “hurt,” and then he wanted to scream, Why?

  The landscape became brighter than day, brighter than Earth lightning, not at all like the Boreas dawn they had been expecting. A great light flashed out of the north, and a breath later a white, glowing pillar pushed up into the sky. They froze, staring, for some indefinite time; his surviving stalkers, and all of hers, rotated to face the light, like clockwork sunflowers.

  Thorby heard his voice saying, “We’ll need to run, south, now, as fast as we can, I don’t think we’ll make it.”

  “Must have been a big fragment far out from the main body,” Léoa said. “How far away do you think—”

  “Maybe up close to the pole if we’re lucky. Come on,” he said, “whistle everything into the porters. Skis on. Run.”

  Two of his stalkers had not been destroyed, and they leaped into his porter at his emergency call. “Skis and poles,” he told the porter, and it ejected them; he stepped onto the skis, free-heelers designed for covering ground and moving on the slick dust, and hoped his few hours’ practice at a comfortable pace in the last day would be enough to let him go fast now.

  “Baggins, follow, absolute.” Now his porter would try to stay within two meters of his transponder, catching up when it fell behind, until it ran out of power or was destroyed. If he lost it, he might have to walk hungry for a while, but the northern stations were only a couple of days to reach. His Mars suit batteries were good for a week or more; the suit extracted water and air; he just had to hope he wouldn’t need the first aid kit, but it was too heavy to strap onto the suit.

  The great blue-white welding-arc pillar had cooled to orange-white, and the main body of Boreas, rising right on schedule, stood behind it as a reflector. The light at Thorby’s back was brighter than noonday equatorial sun on Earth, much brighter than any sun Mars had ever seen, and the blazing face of Boreas, a quarter of the sky, spread the light with eerie evenness, as if the whole world were under too-bright fluorescent light.

  He hurled himself along the windward side of the south-tending dune crest, using the skating technique he’d learned on Earth snow and practiced on frozen methane beds on Triton; his pushing ski flew out behind him, turning behind the lead ski to give extra push, then reach as far in front of him as possible, kicking and reaching as far as he could. On the slick, small, round, particle sand of the ridge top, in the low gravity, he might have been averaging as much as twenty kilometers per hour.

  But the blast front from the impact was coming at them at the local speed of sound, 755 kilometers per hour, and though that was only two-thirds as fast as Mach 1 in warm, thick, breathable air, it was more than fast enough to overtake them in a half hour or less. At best the impact might have been four hundred kilometers away, but it was almost surely closer.

  He glanced back. Léoa skied swiftly after him, perhaps even gaining ground. The light of the blazing pillar was dimmer, turning orange, and his long shadow, racing in front of him, was mostly cast by the dirt-filtered light of the Boreas dawn. He wasn’t sure whether Boreas would stay in the sky till the sun came up, but by then it would all be decided anyway.

  “Thorby.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ve had it look for shelter, read me some directions, and project a sim so I’m sure, and there’s a spot that’s probably safe close to here. This dune crest will fork in about a kilometer. Take the left fork, two more kilometers, and we’ll be behind a crater wall from the blast.”

  “Good thinking, thanks.” He pushed harder, clicking his tongue control for an oxy boost. His Mars suit increased the pressure and switched to pure oxygen; his pace was far above sustainable, but either he made this next three kilometers or he didn’t.

  Léoa had destroyed his recording setup. He’d known she deplored his entire career of recording BEREs—Big Energy Release Events—at least as much as she disliked the whole idea of the Great Blooming, but he’d had no idea she would actually hash the joint project just to stop him from doing it. So his judgment about people was even worse than he’d thought it was. They had been colleagues and (he’d thought) friendly rivals for decades, and he hadn’t seen it coming.

  He kept pushing hard, remembering that he was pouring so much oxygen into his bloodstream that he had to keep his muscles working hard or hyperventilate. His skis flew around him, reached out to the front, whipped back, turned, lifted, flew out around him, and he concentrated on picking his path in the shifting light and staying comfortably level and in control; in the low Martian gravity, with the close horizon that didn’t reveal parallax motion very well to eyes evolved for Earth, it was far too easy to start to bounce; your hips and knees could easily eat a third of your energy in useless vertical motion.

  The leeward side of a dune crest is the one that avalanches, so he stayed to the right, windward side, but he couldn’t afford to miss the saddle-and-fork when it came, so he had to keep his head above the crest. He heard only the hiss of his breath and the squeal of his skis on the sand; the boiling column from the impact, now a dull angry red, and the quarter-of-the-sky circle of the comet now almost directly overhead, were eerie in their silence. He kept his gaze level and straight out to the horizon, let his legs and gut swing him forward, kept the swinging as vertical as he could, turning only the ski, never the hip, hoping this was right and he was remembering how to do it, unable to know if he was moving fast enough through the apparently endless erg.

  He had just found the fork and made the left turn, glancing back to check on Léoa. She seemed to be struggling and falling a little behind, so he slowed, wondering if it would be all right to tell her she was bouncing and burning unnecessary energy.

  The whole top five meters of the dune crest under her slid down to the leeward in one vast avalanche. For one instant he thought, but how can that be, I just skied it myself and I’m heavier. The ground fell away beneath him in shattering thunder as the whole dune slumped leeward.

  Of course, how did I miss that? In the Martian atmosphere, a cold thin scatter of heavy CO2 molecules, sound is much slower than it is in anything human beings can breathe; anyone learns that after the first few times a hiking buddy’s radio has exmike sound in the background, and it seems to be forever before your own exmike picks it up. But the basalts of the old Martian seafloor are solid, dense, cold, and rigid to a great depth; seismic waves are faster than they are elsewhere.

  He thought that as he flipped over once, as if he were working up the voice-over for his last docu. Definitely for his last docu.

  In the low gravity, it was a long way to the bottom of the dune. Sand poured and rumbled all around him, and his exmike choked back the terrible din of thousands of dunes, as the booming erg was all shaken at once by the S waves running through the rock below it, setting up countless resonances, triggering more avalanches and more resonances, until nearly the whole potential energy of the Sand Sea released at once.

  Maybe just to annoy Léoa, he intoned a voice-over, deliberately his corniest ever, as he tumbled down the slope and wondered how the sand would kill him. “It is as if the vast erg knows what Boreas is, that this great light in the sky is the angel of death for the Sand Sea, which shouts its blind, black, stony defiance to the indifferent glaring ice overhead.”

  He rolled again, cutting off his intoning with an oof! and released his skis. Rolling again, he plowed deep into the speeding current of sand. Something hard hit the back of his helmet. He tumbled faster and faster, then flopped and slid on his belly headfirst.

>   In darkness, he heard only the grinding of fine sand against his exmike.

  The damp in Thorby’s undersuit and his muzzy head told him he’d just done the most embarrassing thing of his life, fainted from fear. Now it felt like his worst hangover; he took a sip of water. Bruised all over, but no acute pain anywhere; slipped out of his urine tube, that seemed to be all that was wrong. If Baggins caught up with him, Thorby would like to get into the shelter, readjust things in the undersuit, sponge off a bit, but he didn’t absolutely have to.

  His clock didn’t seem to be working—it didn’t keep its own time, just reported overhead signal—but the wetness in his undersuit meant he couldn’t have been out more than fifteen minutes or so. He’d be dry in another few minutes as the Mars suit system found the moisture and recycled it.

  He was lying on his face, head slightly downward. He tried to push up and discovered he couldn’t move his arms, though he could wriggle his fingers a bit, and after doing that for a while, he began to turn his wrists, scooping more sand away, getting leverage to push up more. An eternity later he was moving his forearms, and then his shoulders, half shaking the sand off, half swimming to the top. At last he got some leverage and movement in his hips and thighs, and heaved himself up to the surface, sitting upright in the silvery light of the darkened sky.

  There was a pittering noise he couldn’t quite place, until he realized it was sand and grit falling like light sleet around him. The blast wave that had carried it must have passed over while Thorby was unconscious; the tops of the dunes had an odd curl to them, and he realized that the top few meters had been rotated ninety degrees from their usual west-windward, east-leeward, to north-windward, southleeward, and all the dunes were much lower and broader. Probably being down in the bowl had saved his life; maybe it had saved Léoa too.

  He clicked over to direct voice. “Léoa?”