Year's Best Scifi 5 Part 40

After more days of walking, the ice grew thin, the water beneath shallow.

Another day of this and they came to a slope of hard black rock, that pushed its way out of the ice and rose up before them.

The black rock was hard-edged and cold under Night-Dawn's feet, its rise unrelenting. As far as he could see to left and right, the ridge was solid, unbroken, with no convenient pa.s.ses for them to follow, the sky lidded over by cloud.

They grasped each other's hands and pressed up the slope.

The climb exhausted Night-Dawn immediately. And there was nothing to eat or drink, here on the high rocks, not so much as a sc.r.a.p of ice. Soon, even the air grew thin; he struggled to drag energy from its pale substance.

When they slept, they stood on hard black rock. Night-Dawn feared and hated the rock; it was an enemy, rooted deep in the Earth.

On the fourth day of this they entered the clouds, and he could not even see where his next step should be placed. With the thin, icy moisture in his lungs and spreading on his fur he felt trapped, as if under some infinite ice layer, far from any air hole. He struggled to breathe, and if he slept, he woke consumed by a thin panic. At such times he clung to Frazil and remembered who he was and where he had come from and why he had come so far. He was a human being, and he had a mission that he would fulfill.

Then, one morning, they broke through the last ragged clouds.

Though it was close to midday, the sky was as dark as he had ever seen it, a deep violet blue. The only clouds were thin sheets of ice crystals, high above. And-he saw, gasping with astonishment-there were stars s.h.i.+ning, even now, in the middle of the sunlit day.

The slope seemed to reach a crest, a short way ahead of him. They walked on. The air was thin, a whisper in his lungs, and he was suspended in silence; only the rasp of Frazil's shallow breath, the soft slap of their footsteps on the rock, broke up the stillness.

He reached the crest. The rock wall descended sharply from here, he saw, soon vanis.h.i.+ng into layers of fat, fluffy clouds.

And, when he looked ahead, he saw a mountain.

Far ahead of them, dominating the horizon, it was a single peak that thrust out of scattered clouds, towering even over their elevated position here, its walls sheer and stark. Its flanks were girdled with ice, but the peak itself was bare black rock-too high even for ice to gather, he surmised-perhaps so high it thrust out of the very air itself.

It must be the greatest mountain in the world.

And beyond it there was a further line of mountains, he saw, like a line of broken teeth, marking the far horizon. When he looked to left and right, he could see how those mountains joined the crest he had climbed, in a giant unbroken ring around that great, central fist of rock.

It was a giant rock ripple, just as he had sketched in the ice. Perhaps this was the center, the veryheart of the great systems of mountain rings and circular seas he had penetrated.

An ocean lapped around the base of the mountain. He could see that glaciers flowed down its heroic base, rivers of ice dwarfed by the mountain's immensity. There was ice in the ocean too-pack ice, and icebergs like great eroded islands, white, carved. Some manner of creatures were visible on the bergs, black and gray dots against the pristine white of the ice, too distant for him to make out. But this sea was mostly melted, a band of blue-black.

The slope of black rock continued below him-far, far onward, until it all but disappeared into the misty air at the base of this bowl of land. But he could see that it reached a beach of some sort, of shattered, eroded rock sprinkled with snow, against which waves sluggishly lapped.

There was a belt of land around the sea, cradled by the ring mountains, fringed by the sea. And it was covered by life, great furry sheets of it. From this height it looked like an encrustation of algae. But he knew there must be living things there much greater in scale than any he had seen before.

"...It is a bowl," Frazil breathed.

"What?"

"Look down there. This is a great bowl, of clouds and water and light, on whose lip we stand. We will be safe down there, away from the rock and ice."

He saw she was right. This was indeed a bowl-presumably the great scar left where one or other of the Moons had torn itself loose of the Earth, just as the stories said. And these rings of mountains were ripples in the rock, frozen as if ice.

He forgot his hunger, his thirst, even the lack of air here; eagerly they began to hurry down the slope.

The air rapidly thickened.

But his breathing did not become any easier, for it grew warm, warmer than he had ever known it.

Steam began to rise from his thick, heavy fur. He opened his mouth and raised his nostril flaps wide, sucking in the air. It was as if the heat of this giant sheltering bowl was now, at the last, driving them back.

But they did not give up their relentless descent, and he gathered the last of his strength.

The air beneath them cleared further.

Overwhelmed, Night-Dawn stopped.

The prolific land around the central sea was divided into neat shapes, he saw now, and here and there smoke rose. It was a made landscape. The work of people.

Humans were sheltered here. It was a final irony, that people should find shelter at the bottom of the great pit dug out of the Earth by the world-wrecking Collision.

...And there was a color to that deep, cupped world, emerging now from the mist. Something he had never seen before; and yet the word for it dropped into place, just as had his first words after birth.

"Green," Frazil said.

"Green. Yes..."

He was stunned by the brilliance of the color against the black rock, the dull blue-gray of the sea. But even as he looked into the pit of warmth and air, he felt a deep sadness. For he already knew he could never reach that deep shelter, peer up at the giant green living things; this body which s.h.i.+elded him from cold would allow heat to kill him.

Somebody spoke.

He cried out, spun around. Frazil was standing stock still, staring up.

There was a creature standing here. Like a tall, very skinny human.

It was a human, he saw. A woman. Her face was small and neat, and there was barely a drop of fat on her, save around the hips, b.u.t.tocks and b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Her chest was small. She had a coat of some fine fur-no, he realized with shock; she was wearing a false skin, that hugged her bare flesh tightly. She was carrying green stuff, food perhaps, in a basket of false skin.

She was twice his height.

Her eyes were undoubtedly human, though, as human as his, and her gaze was locked on his face.

And in her eyes, he read fear.Fear, and disgust.

He stepped forward. "We have come to help you," he said.

"Yes," said Frazil.

"We have come far-"

The tall woman spoke again, but he could not understand her. Even her voice was strange-thin, emanating from that shallow chest. She spoke again, and pointed, down toward the surface of the sea, far below.

Now he looked more closely he could see movement on the beach. Small dots, moving around.

People, perhaps, like this girl. Some of them were small. Children, running free. Many children.

The woman turned, and started climbing away from them, down the slope toward her world, carrying whatever she had gathered from these high banks. She was shaking a fist at them now. She even bent to pick up a sharp stone and threw it toward Frazil; it fell short, clattering harmlessly.

"I don't understand," Frazil said.

Night-Dawn thought of the loathing he had seen in the strange woman's eyes. He saw himself through her eyes: squat, fat, waddling, as if deformed.

He felt shame. "We are not welcome here," he said.

"We must bring the others here," Frazil was saying.

"And what then? Beg to be allowed to stay, to enter the warmth? No. We will go home."

"Home? To a place where people live a handful of winters, and must sc.r.a.pe food from ice with their teeth? How can that compare to this?"

He took her hands. "But this is not for us. We are monsters to these people. As they are to us. And we cannot live here."

She stared into the pit of light and green. "But in time, our children might learn to live there. Just as we learned to live on the ice."

The longing in her voice was painful. He thought of the generations who had lived out their short, bleak lives on the ice. He thought of his mother, who had sought to protect him to the end; poor One-Tusk, who had died without seeing the people of the mountains; dear, loyal Frazil, who had walked to the edge of the world at his side.

"Listen to me. Let these people have their hole in the ground. We have a world. We can live anywhere. We must go back and tell our people so."

She sniffed. "Dear Night-Dawn. Always dreaming. But first we must eat, for winter is coming."

"Yes. First we eat."

They inspected the rock that surrounded them. There was green here, he saw now, thin traces of it that clung to the surface of the rock. In some places it grew away from the rock face, brave little b.a.l.l.s of it no bigger than his fist, and here and there fine fur-like sproutings.

They bent, reaching together for the green shoots.

The shadows lengthened. The sun was descending toward the circular sea, and one of Earth's two Moons was rising.

Ashes and Tombstones

BRIAN M. STABLEFORD.

Brian Stableford is one of the finest living critics and historians of SF and fantasy (he is the author of large chunks of both The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and The Encyclopedia of Fantasy) and is another of the leading short fiction writers in SF of the 1990s, and a significant novelist. For most of the 1990s he wrote stories in a large future history setting, as yet unnamed, spanning centuries and focussing on immense changes in human society and in humanity due primarily to advances in the biological sciences. Three of these have been rewritten as novels thus far, Inherit the Earth, The Architects of Emortality, and The Fountains of Youth, with more in the works.This story, another selection from Moon Shots, is part of that future history, in which the Hardinist Cabal sends human embryos to the Moon to ensure the resurrection of the human race should calamity strike Earth in the future. There are it seems to me interesting reverberations with Robert A. Heinlein's future history story, "Requiem."

I was following Voltaire's good advice and working in my garden when the young man from the New European s.p.a.ce Agency came to call. I was enjoying my work; my new limb bones were the best yet and my refurbished retinas had restored my eyesight to perfection-and I was still only 40 percent synthetic by ma.s.s, 38 percent by volume.

I liked to think of the garden as my own tiny contribution to the Biodiversity Project, not so much because of the plants, whose seeds were all on deposit in half a dozen Arks, but because of the insects to which the plants provided food. More than half of the local insects were the neospecific produce of the Trojan c.o.c.kroach Project, and my salads were a key element in their selective regime. The c.o.c.kroaches living in my kitchen had long since reverted to type, but I hadn't even thought of trying to clear them out; I knew the extent of the debt that my mult.i.tudinous several-times-great-grandchildren owed their even-more-mult.i.tudinous many-times-great-grandparents.

When I first caught sight of him over the hedge, I thought the young man from NESA might be one of my descendants come to pay a courtesy call on the Old Survivor, but I knew as soon as he said "Professor Neal?" that he must be an authentic stranger. I was Grandfather Paul to all my Repopulation Kin.

The stranger was thirty meters away, but his voice carried easily enough: the Berks.h.i.+re Downs are very quiet nowadays, and my hearing was razor-sharp even though the electronic feed was thirty years old and technically obsolete.

"Never heard of him," I said. "No professors hereabouts. Oxford's forty miles that away." I pointed vaguely north-westward.

"The Paul Neal I'm looking for isn't a professor anymore," the young man admitted, letting himself in through the garden gate as if he'd been invited. "Technically, he ceased to be a professor when he was seconded to the Theseus Project in Martinique in 2080, during the first phase of the Crash." He stood on the path hopefully, waiting for me to join him and usher him in through the door to my home, which stood ajar. His face was fresh, although there wasn't the least hint of synthetic tissue in its contours. "I'm Dennis Mountjoy," he added as an afterthought. "I've left messages by the dozen, but it finally became obvious that the only way to get a response was to turn up in person."

Montjoie St. Denis! had been the war cry of the French, in days of old. This Dennis Mountjoy was a mongrel European, who probably thought of war as a primitive custom banished from the world forever. It wasn't easy to judge his age, given that his flesh must have been somatically tuned-up even though it hadn't yet become necessary to paper over any cracks, but I guessed that he was less than forty: a young man in a young world. To him, I was a relic of another era, practically a dinosaur-which was, of course, exactly why he was interested in me. NESA intended to put a man on the Moon in June 2269, to mark the three-hundredth anniversary of the first landing and the dawn of the New s.p.a.ce Age.

They had hunted high and low for survivors of the last s.p.a.ce program, because they wanted at least one to be there to bear witness to their achievement, to forge a living link with history. It didn't matter to them that the Theseus Project had not put a single man into s.p.a.ce, nor directed a single officially-sanctioned shot at the Moon.

"What makes you think that you'll get any more response in person than you did by machine?" I asked the young man sourly. I drew myself erect, feeling a slight twinge in my spine in spite of all the nanomech reinforcements, and removed my sun hat so that I could wipe the sweat from my forehead.

"Electronic communication isn't very private," Mountjoy observed. "There are things that it wouldn't have been diplomatic to say over the phone."

My heart sank. I'd so far outlived my past that I'd almost come to believe that I'd escaped, but I hadn't been forgotten. I was surprised that my inner response wasn't stronger, but the more syntheticflesh you take aboard, the less capacity you have for violent emotion, and my heart was pure android.

Time was when I'd have come on like the minotaur if anyone had penetrated to the core of my private maze, but all the bull leached out of my head a hundred years ago.

"Go away and leave me alone," I said wearily. "I wish you well, but I don't want any part of your so-called Great Adventure. Is that diplomatic enough for you?"

"There are things that it wouldn't have been diplomatic for me to say," he said, politely pretending that he thought I'd misunderstood him.

"Don't say them, then," I advised him.

"Ashes and tombstones," he recited, determinedly ignoring my advice. "Endymion. Astolpho."

There were supposed to be no records-but in a crisis, everybody cheats. Everybody keeps secrets, especially from the people they're supposed to be working for.

"Mr. Mountjoy," I said wearily, "it's 2268. I'm two hundred and eighteen years old. Everyone else who worked on Theseus is dead, along with ninety percent of the people who were alive in 2080. Ninety percent of the people alive today are under forty. Who do you think is going to give a d.a.m.n about a couple of itty-bitty rockets that went up with the wrong payloads to the wrong destination? It's not as if the Chaos Patrol was left a sentry short, is it? Everything that was supposed to go up did go up."

"But that's why you don't want to come back to Martinique, isn't it?" Mountjoy said, still standing on the path, halfway between the gate and the door. "That's why you don't want to be there when the Adventure starts again. We know that the funds were channeled through your account. We know that you were the paymaster for the crazy shots. You probably didn't plan them, and you certainly didn't execute them, but you were the pivot of the seesaw."

I put my hat back on and adjusted the rim. The ozone layer was supposed to be back in place, but old habits die hard.

"Come over here," I said. "Watch where you put your feet."

He looked down at the variously-shaped blocks of salad greens. He had no difficulty following the dirt path I'd carefully laid out so that I could pa.s.s among them, patiently plying my hoe.

"You don't actually eat this stuff, do you?" he said, as he came to stand before me, looking down from his embryonically-enhanced two-meter height at my nanomech-conserved one-eighty.

"Mainly I grow it for the beetles and the worms," I told him. "They leave me little for my own plate.

In essence, I'm a sharecropper for the biosphere. Repopulation's put h.o.m.o sapiens back in place, but the little guys still have a way to go. You really ought to wear a hat on days like this."

"It's not necessary in these lat.i.tudes," he a.s.sured me, missing the point again. "You're right, of course.

n.o.body cares about the extra launches. n.o.body will mention it, least of all when you're on view. All we're interested in is selling the Adventure. We believe you can help us with that. No matter how small a cog you were, you were in the engine. You're the last man alive who took part in the pre-Crash s.p.a.ce program. You're the world's last link to Theseus, Ariane, Apollo, and Mercury. That's all we're interested in, all we care about. The last thing anyone wants to do is to embarra.s.s you, because embarra.s.sing you would also be embarra.s.sing us. We're on your side, Professor Neal-and if you're worried about the glare of publicity encouraging others to dig, there's no need. We have control, Professor Neal-and we're sending our heroes to the Sea of Tranquillity, half a world away from Endymion. The only relics we'll be looking for are the ones Apollo 11 left. We're not interested in ashes or tombstones."