The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (15 page)

Di-you-wi relented a little. “Many more got out when they saw the cloud. I mean, it was like one of the ten plagues of the first chapter of their Book, after all. If they made it outside the chaff pattern and kept to the low ground, they made it. But those who stayed and prayed?” He paused dramatically. “The adobe houses of the City of God are mud and dust and weeds, and the great Cathedral is a low pile of stones and bones.”

“Owei humbeyô.” Once upon a time and long ago.

Everyone was quiet for a moment though Jennifer’s mouth worked as if to ask something, but no sound came out. Kimball added the last of the gathered fuel to the fire, banged the dust out of his basket, and flipped it, like a Frisbee, to land in his rickshaw-style handcart. He took the empty stoneware bean crock and filled it from the stream and put it at the edge of the coals, to soak before he cleaned it.

“What happened to Sharon?” Jennifer finally asked into the silence.

Di-you-wi shook his head. “I don’t know. You would have to ask Left-for-dead.”

Jennifer. “Oh, thanks a lot. Very helpful.”

Di-you-wi and his partner exchanged glances and his partner opened his mouth as if to speak but De-you-wi shook his head.

Kimball hadn’t meant to speak but he found the words spilling out, anyway, unbidden. “I would like to say that Sharon’s leg still hurts her. That it didn’t heal straight, and she limps. But that she teaches others to read now down in New Roswell. That I had seen her recently and sold her school some primers just last month.”

Jennifer frowned, “You would like to say that?”

“It was a bad break and I set it as best I could but they bounced her over the lava on their way home and trusted to God for further treatment. She couldn’t even walk, much less run, when the metal fell.”

Jennifer’s mouth was open but she couldn’t speak for a moment.

“Huh,” said Di-you-wi. “Hadn’t heard that part, Left-for-dead.”

Kimball could see him reorganizing the tale in his head, incorporating the added details. “Got it from her sister. After I recovered.”

Jennifer stood and walked over to Kimball’s cart and flipped up the tarp. The books were arranged spine out, paperbacks mostly, some from behind the Porcelain Wall, newish with plasticized covers, some yellowed and cracking from before the bugs came, like anything that didn’t contain metal or electronics, salvaged, and a small selection of leather bound books from New Santa Fe, the Territorial Capitol, hand-set with ceramic type and hand bound – mostly practical, how-to books.

“Peddler. Book seller.”

Kimball shrugged. “Varies. I’ve got other stuff, too. Plastic sewing needles, ceramic blades, antibiotics, condoms. Mostly books.”

Finally she asked, “And her father? The Elder who put you in the stocks?”

“He lives. His faith wasn’t strong enough when it came to that final test. He lost an arm, though.”

“Is he in New Roswell, too?”

“No. He’s doing time in the Territorial prison farm in Nuevo Belen. He preaches there, to a very small congregation. The People of the Book don’t do well if they can’t isolate their members – if they can’t control what information they get. They’re not the People of the Books, after all.

“If she’d lived, Sharon would probably have made him a part of her life . . . but he’s forbidden the speaking of her name. He would’ve struck her name from the leaves of the family Bible but the bugs took care of that.”

Di-you-wi shook his head on hearing this. “And who does this hurt? I think he is a stupid man.”

Kimball shrugged. “It’s not him I feel sorry for.”

Jennifer’s eyes glinted brightly in the light of the fire. She said, “It’s not fair, is it?”

And there was nothing to be said to that.

T
HE HISSING VIBRATION
of the sled’s thruster hummed through the frame of the sled, through the thinly padded seats, through the pressure suits of the two men, into their bodies, their bones, and became something like sound, reverberating inside their helmets. And it didn’t sound good. For minutes at a time it would drone on smoothly, then it would catch and sputter, sometimes producing an almost human-sounding cough, and then settle back into normality. Until the next time. Occasionally Saunders twisted in his seat to look back at the engine behind the open cab, or turned his head to look at Robeson. Robeson was driving the sled, and he stared straight ahead. Neither man spoke.

Suddenly there was a ragged metallic shriek, and the sled veered to the right. Robeson swore, fighting the control stick with one hand as he shut down the thruster with the other.

“What the hell?” Saunders yelled.

Robeson didn’t answer. When the sled bumped to a stop, he unfastened his seatbelt and hopped down to the icy ground. A moment later Saunders heard a soft sound, like a grunt, in his helmet radio. He looked down at Robeson. “What is it?” he said. “What’s wrong?”

“You may as well come down, sir. We’ll be walking from here,” Robeson said.

“What?” Saunders snapped. “What’s the matter with the damn thing?” He lowered himself from the sled and joined Robeson.

Robeson pointed at the sled’s engine. “Burn-through in the main reaction chamber.”

Saunders looked. “That little hole? Can’t you patch it or something?”

“What you’re looking at is the outer housing of the engine. Underneath that everything’s burned to hell. This engine is dead.” Robeson looked toward the horizon, a smooth curve of white against the black sky. Then he looked up, where Saturn was high and to the left. Nearly full, it filled a great swath of the sky. It was waxing gibbous now, so it would be full in about an hour.

“But you haven’t even opened it up,” said Saunders. “How do you know it’s that bad?”

“Because that’s my job,” said Robeson. “And we don’t have time for me to start taking it apart. My suit shows we’re seventy-one klicks from Jansha Base. What’s yours say?”

“Seventy-eight point seven. And I show ninety-two minutes of oxygen. God damn it, that’s too far, Robeson.” Saunders turned away from Robeson and cocked his head back slightly in his helmet. “Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! This is Enceladus Transport Sled zero-five, Stanley Saunders and Joe Robeson calling. Our position is approximately seventy-five kilometers from Jansha Base Station, bearing approximately two eight seven degrees. Our sled is disabled and we are heading for Jansha on foot. We may not have enough oxygen to make it. This is a Mayday call. Anyone receiving please respond.”

They stood in silence, listening to the radio’s background hiss in their helmets.

“No one can hear you,” said Robeson. “We’re too far from Jansha.”

“It’s not that we’re too far, damnit! They can’t receive us because we’re too far over the damn horizon! But something in orbit might pick us up, or the signal might bounce off one of the other moons.”

“Okay,” Robeson answered. “We can hope. But in the meantime we better start walking.”

It wasn’t really walking; it was more of a shuffling skip. Some liked to call it the Enceladus two-step. With .01 g, walking doesn’t really work. And while a person could make superman-style leaps of 50 meters or more, doing so was both slow and dangerous. An energetic jump would leave a person trapped in a slowly drifting parabolic trajectory for more than a minute. With no atmosphere there was no way to control where you landed, and there were places you wouldn’t want to land. The surface of Enceladus is ice, sometimes skating rink smooth, sometimes gravelly pebbles or fine ice powder, sometimes with kilometers-deep fissures, sometimes a field of jagged shards and deadly sharp spires, as hard as earthly glass.

The trick with the two-step is to stay low. Bend your knees, keep one foot well ahead of the other, and nudge yourself forward, not up, with each hop. Watch the ground, watch where you’ll touch down after this hop, and the next one and the one after that. On rough ground you’ll have to keep your hops short and slow. When it’s smooth you can glide a dozen meters or more at a time and build up some speed – if you don’t mind risking your life. Even with needle-sharp adaptive crampons, boots provide almost no traction on Enceladus, so slowing down in a hurry isn’t an option. Suit gyros try to keep your body upright, but they’re easily overwhelmed. If something catches your toe, you’ll fall. If a patch of ice crumbles underneath you, you’ll fall. If your crampons slip, you’ll fall. If you’re moving fast when you fall, you’ll tumble and spin and bounce for a long, long time. Depending on how all that tumbling and bouncing ends, it will either be a time-wasting and undignified nuisance or the end of your life. Being in a hurry on Enceladus is not a good idea.

They skipped. After a few minutes Saunders made another Mayday call. Far to their left, near the horizon, a geyser made a ghostly white funnel-shaped silhouette against the black sky.

“How much oh-two does your suit show, Robeson?”

“Same as you, eighty-five minutes now.”

“Damn,” said Saunders. “Our emergency tanks will add to that, but exerting ourselves like this will probably subtract at least as much. We can’t do seventy-five kilometers in that much time.”

“It might not be that far. These position readouts aren’t too accurate.”

“No kidding they’re not too accurate!” Saunders yelled. “So we might be a lot farther out, damnit!” He hit the side of his helmet with his gloved palm. “The technology on this whole mission is crap! Everything’s jury-rigged and held together with spit. Two damn communication satellites that failed, no damn GPS system, sleds with engines that blow up, Jansha Base springing a leak every time I turn around, and lousy damn technicians who can’t fix anything.” Saunders took a slow, trembling breath.

They skipped. Robeson made a Mayday call, and they listened to the answering silence. Then Saunders spoke. “Robeson?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m sorry. About calling you a lousy technician. That was stupid.”

“It’s okay.”

“I’m scared, Robeson. We’re in big trouble here and I’m scared.”

“I’m scared too, Mr Saunders. Don’t worry about it.”

“You’re not so scared. I can hear your breathing, just like you can hear mine. You’re steady as a rock and I’m hyperventilating like a damn schoolgirl. That’s good; your oh-two will last longer.” He paused and took a deliberately slow breath. “Anyway, I know you’re a good technician, Joe. I wouldn’t have hired you if you weren’t.”

They skipped. They made another Mayday call.

“Joe?” Saunders said.

“George.”

“What?”

“My name is George, not Joe,” Robeson said.

“Oh. Damn. Sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

“I was just thinking,” said Saunders. “If anyone should be whining about this mess we’re in, it should be you.”

Saunders waited, but Robeson didn’t say anything. “When the Wreckage was found, I was one of the ones who was screaming the loudest that we had to get a manned mission out here right away, and to hell with whether the technology was ready or there were safety backups for everything. I lobbied Washington, then I went to JPL . . . When they made me chief mission scientist I felt like . . . like this was what I’d been born for.” He glanced across at Robeson. “For people like me, this mission is the biggest, the most important thing we could imagine. Proof that there were aliens from another star system who came here in some kind of a ship . . .” He paused again. “What I’m trying to say is that I’ve been willing to die for this mission since the first pictures of the Wreckage came back. Or at least that’s what I told myself But it’s different for you, George. You’re just – I mean, you’re a technician. You’re just here because the pay was too good to pass up, right? This is just a job for you.”