The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (16 page)

“Yeah, I guess so,” Robeson said. “It’s a job.” He glanced back and saw that Saunders had slowed and was lagging behind. His voice was soft in Saunders’ helmet as he spoke across a distance of thirty meters. “C’mon Mr Saunders, get a move on. We’re not dead yet.”

They skipped. The terrain changed from rough and boulder-strewn to a field of smooth ripples, a meter high and regular, like frozen waves. “Hold up!” Saunders called, and they stopped.

“I don’t like the look of the ice here,” Saunders said. “We might be coming up on the Suffolk Fissures. Hang on, I’ll take a look.” He crouched low and then jumped straight up. Robeson watched him rise, his body dwindling against the black sky.

“Yes, I was right,” Saunders said as he drifted groundward again. “That’s good; it means we may be closer to Jansha than our suits show.” He landed with a grunt. “We’ll have to bear east for a ways.”

Robeson was looking up at Saturn, still not quite full, the rings a razor-fine line across its face and extending on either side. Saunders chuckled. “I’ve noticed that about you before, Robeson. You look up at Saturn a lot. Most of us hate looking at it. More than a second or two of staring up at it and we start feeling it pulling at us, sucking us up into space.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. When you hear someone screaming in their sleep back at Jansha, that’s probably what they’re dreaming – Big Yellow sucking them up like the mouth of some gigantic monster. I guess you just don’t think about it, like you aren’t thinking about how much trouble we’re in right now. You have no imagination, George, and I envy you like hell.”

They skipped. The terrain changed again as they came to a lowland area. The ice was smooth enough here for them to build up their speed. “This is more like it,” said Saunders. “If only it stays like this for—” A sharp, inarticulate cry came from Robeson. Saunders looked to his right and saw the other man cartwheeling end over end. “Jesus, Robeson, are you okay?” Robeson only swore, his body twirling two meters over the ground. As he drifted near the ground he tried to grab at the ice with one gloved hand and bounced up, spinning on two axes now. “Shit!” he yelled.

“George, stop fighting it! Go limp – you know that.”

“Yeah,” Robeson said, his voice tight.

Over his radio, Saunders could hear the whir of straining gyroscopes in Robeson’s suit. “How the heck did you manage to trip?” he asked. “This place is flat as—”

“Shut up!” Robeson was still flying, spinning, bumping the icy ground now and then. “I saw something! Under the ice – just below the surface. Go back – see if you can find the spot . . . Wait – I’ve got my feet again – I’m going back.” He made long, high skip-steps back, retracing his path.

“Robeson, what are you doing?” Saunders said. “Whatever it was, we don’t have time for it.”

Robeson didn’t answer. Saunders was about to call to him again when he saw Robeson come to a stop, then take a few steps, staring down at the ground. With the slow, drifting motion that falling objects have under the whisper-gravity of Enceladus, he dropped to his knees. Very softly, Saunders heard in his helmet, “Mr Saunders, come here.”

Saunders started moving. “What is it? Are you hurt?”

“I’m fine,” Robeson said. “Just come here. Look.”

Saunders hopped to a stop beside Robeson and looked down. There was a pause before he reacted. Long enough for Robeson to glance at him curiously, wondering if Saunders could see it, or if some quirk of reflection was hiding it from him. Finally Saunders made a ragged gasp. He tried to bring his hand to his mouth, and his glove thumped against his faceplate.

“It’s smaller than we calculated,” he said in a whisper. “It must be barely a meter tall . . .” His voice trailed off. He dropped to his hands and knees and put his helmet close to the ice.

The body was embedded at an angle, with the head higher than the torso. Its legs and feet were obscured by cloudy ice, but its clear, ovoid helmet was almost at the surface. When Saunders touched his own helmet to the ice, his face was centimeters away from the brown, scale-covered face of an alien.

“Transponder flag,” Saunders said without moving from his crouch. Then: “Jesus!” He jerked upright, causing his body to float off the ground. He patted frantically at his suit pockets. “The transponder flags! Tell me you’ve got one! For God’s sake! You have to have one with you!”

“No,” Robeson said. “They’re all back at the sled.”

“Damnit! Then something – something we can leave here as a marker – or something we can at least make a note or recording with, so – so if we don’t make it back, they’ll know about this – we can give them a rough position . . .”

“I’ve got nothing with me,” Robeson said. “Nothing at all. And these suits don’t make recordings.”

“Okay, we’ll make a cairn – pile up some ice . . .” He stopped as he looked around at the flat, featureless expanse that extended to the horizon in all directions. Saunders lifted his arms, making trembling fists in front of his helmet. “Damnit, damnit, damnit!” He kicked at the ground, knocking himself more than a meter skyward. “We can’t even scratch a lousy arrow in the ice!” He was breathing so hard that Robeson could see his chest rising and falling through his suit. “Okay then. Okay. We get back to Jansha. Even these lousy inertial position systems in our suits should be good enough to let us find this spot again by backtracking. With a big enough search team we’ll find it.” He launched himself into a fast skip across the ice. “Come on!” he barked. “From here on we go flat out! As fast as we can, whatever the risk. We have to make it back to Jansha, you hear me?”

“I hear you,” said Robeson.

Saunders glanced behind him without breaking his stride. Robeson was standing still.

“What are you doing, Robeson? Come on!”

“I don’t think we can make it back, Mr. Saunders. Look at your readouts. We’re down to about thirty minutes of air and we’re only about halfway back.”

“So what, damnit? We have to try. You can’t just stay there and . . .” Saunders went silent. Fighting not to lose his footing, he slowly brought himself to a stop, then turned to look at Robeson, now fifty meters behind him. “My God, Robeson,” he said.

“Yeah,” said Robeson. “We don’t have any transponder flags with us, but we’ve got transponders. The ones that are built into these suits. They’ll use that to come after my body, and when they find me they’ll find . . . him.”

“No, Robeson. Look – even if we don’t make it back, we just have to get within radio range . . . We’ll tell them . . .”

“If we make it back to radio range. And they still might never find this guy. You have to be right on top of him to see him through the ice.”

“You can’t . . . you can’t . . . you can’t just . . . Christ, Robeson . . .”

“You said it yourself, Mr Saunders. This is important. The most important thing ever. The Wreckage is nothing but a pile of twisted metal, but this is something real. His body, his suit . . . you guys will learn all kinds of stuff from him. But they have to find him. They have to find him.”

Saunders took a slow breath. “Robeson, I can’t wait, I can’t stand here and argue. I’m heading back to Jansha, and I’m going to make it. I don’t care if I have to breathe vacuum. I’m going to make it back, you hear me? You can damn well sit here and wait to die if you want to. I’m not going to!”

Seconds passed, and Robeson said nothing. Saunders made a sound that might have been a word, but Robeson couldn’t understand it. Then he was moving again, gliding over the ice with long, fast strides.

Robeson touched a control on his forearm that turned off his suit radio. He listened to his own breath echoing in his helmet. It was fast and trembling. “I’m the one hyperventilating like a damn schoolgirl now, Mr Saunders,” he said to himself. He let himself drop to a seated position and put one hand on the ice, close to the alien’s face. “What the hell are you doing way out here, anyway, little guy?” he said. He lowered himself onto his back and looked up. Saturn was full now, and Mimas was just starting a transit, painting a small gray disk on the edge of Saturn’s face. He looked up for a long time in silence. “How can they not look at it?” he said quietly. He stared, trying to imagine something menacing in the vision, the feeling of being pulled up into the blackness, lifted away from Enceladus’ feathery gravity. Instead all he saw was a big ball of pastel yellow, part of it blackened by the shadow of the rings. When he’d seen pictures of it back home, there was nothing much to it; pretty, but nothing special. But here, with the incredible, impossible size of it overhead, it was different. It became something he couldn’t ignore, something joyous – a gigantic, roaring shout of beauty from the sky.

He shifted onto his side to look down at the frozen alien again. One of its eyes was closed, the other showed a narrow white slit. “I bet you didn’t mind looking at it, did you?” he said. “You knew you weren’t going to make it, and you laid down just like this, looking up at the sky. I guess you had no imagination either.”

He rolled onto his back again. He tried to put his hands under the back of his head, but the shoulder joints in his suit made the position uncomfortable. He crossed his arms tight against his chest, trembling. “What the hell were you doing way out here, anyway?” he said again. He was quiet for several minutes. Then he said, “Yeah, I know. Doin’ your job. Just doin’ your damn job, same as the rest of us.”

W
HEN MY MIND
cleared, I found myself in the street. The protector god Bishamon spoke to me then: The boulevard to the spaceport runs straight up the mountain. And you must run straight up the boulevard.

The air was full of wily spirits, and moving fast in the Imperial City was a crime. But what is man to disobey the voice of a god? So I ran. The pavement vibrated with the thunder of the great engines of the Caslonian Empire. Behind me the curators of the Imperial Archives must by now have discovered the mare’s nest I had made of their defenses, and perhaps had already realized that something was missing.

Above the plateau the sky was streaked with clouds, through which shot violet gravity beams carrying ships down from and up to planetary orbit. Just outside the gate to the spaceport a family in rags – husband, wife, two children – used a net of knotted cords to catch fish from the sewers. Ignoring them, prosperous citizens in embroidered robes passed among the shops of the port bazaar, purchasing duty-free wares, recharging their concubines, seeking a meal before departure. Slower, now.