Edge of Infinity (28 page)

And then, a grinding, shuddering vibration as the mining machine bit into the ant-snake, rolling right over it.

Metal fragments flew into the air, glowing red-hot. One of them landed on Tyche’s arm. The suit made a bubble around it and spat it out. The sandworm came to an emergency halt, and Tyche almost fell off. It started disgorging its little repair grags, and Tyche felt a stab of guilt. She sat still until her breathing calmed down and the suit’s complaints about the cold got too loud.

Then she dropped to the ground and started the climb back up, towards the Secret Door.

T
HERE WERE STILL
a few ants left around the Secret Door, but Tyche ignored them. They were rolling around aimlessly, and there weren’t enough of them to build a transmitter. She looked up. The ship from the Great Wrong Place was still a distant star. She still had time.

Painfully, bruised limbs aching, she crawled through the Secret Door one last time.

The Moon People were still there, waiting for her. Tyche looked at them in the eye, one by one. Then she put her hands on her hips.

“I have a wish,” she said. “I am going to go away. I’m going to make the Brain obey me, this time. I’m going to go and build a Right Place, all on my own. I’m never going to forget again. So I want you all to come with me.” She looked up at the Magician. “Can you do that?”

Smiling, the man in the top hat nodded, spread his white-gloved fingers and whirled his cloak that had a bright red inner lining, like a ruby –

T
YCHE BLINKED.
T
HE
Other Moon was gone. She looked around. She was standing on the other side of the Old One and the Troll, except that they looked just like rocks now. And the Moon People were inside her.
I should feel heavier, carrying so many people,
she thought. But instead she was empty and light.

Uncertainly at first, then with more confidence, she started walking back up Malapert Mountain, towards the Base. Her step was not a rabbit’s, nor a panther’s, nor a maiden’s silky tiptoe, just her very own.

OBELISK

Stephen Baxter

W
EI
B
INGLIN FIRST
saw the cairn of Cao Xi, as it happened, during his earliest moments on Mars.

It came at the end of a long and difficult voyage. Through the last few days of the
Sunflower
’s approach to Mars, Wei Binglin had been content for the automated systems to bring his ship home. Why not? Since the accident, most of the
Sunflower
’smanual controls had been inactive anyhow. And besides, Wei no longer regarded himself as deserving the rank of captain at all; in a ship become a drifting field hospital, he was reduced to the role of caretaker, his only remaining duty to bring those who had survived this, his last flight, into a proper harbour.

So, for the first time in his many approaches to the planet, he let Mars swim out of the darkness before him. In the light of a distant sun, it struck him from afar as a malformed, lopsided, murky world, oddly unfinished, like a piece of pottery by an inadequate student. And yet as the ship entered its parking orbit high above the planet and skimmed around the night side, he saw the colourful layers of a thin but tall atmosphere, a scattering of white in the deeper craters – clouds, fog? – and brilliant pinpricks of light in the night, human settlements, mostly Chinese, a few UN outposts. A world where people were already being born, living, dying. A world where he too, he decided, had come to die.

The surviving crew and passengers of the
Sunflower
had to wait a day in orbit while a small flotilla of vessels came out to meet them, from Mars’s outer moon Deimos, a resource-rich rock itself which served as a centre for orbital operations. Many of the craft brought paramedics and automated medical equipment; some of the injured passengers and crew would be taken to the low-gravity hospital on Deimos for treatment before facing the rigours of a descent from orbit. There were only a handful of bodies to process. Most of the relatives of the dead had been content for the remains of their loved ones to be ejected into interplanetary space. Wei had officiated over these services himself, supported by the faithful of relevant creeds and cultures.

He may no longer have regarded himself as a captain, but the crew of the Deimos station paid him a certain honour. When the last passengers and crew had been lifted off, they sent out a final shuttle just for him, so he could be the last of the crew to leave his ship. But of course the
Sunflower
was not left empty; it already swarmed with repair crews, human and robotic, as it was towed gently by tugs to an orbital rendezvous with Deimos. An interplanetary ship was too valuable to scuttle, even one so grievously injured.

The shuttle itself was a small, fat-bodied glider coated with battered-looking heatshield tiles. In orbit, driven by powerful attitude thrusters, it was a nimble, nippy craft. The pilot, a young woman, allowed Wei to sit beside her in the co-pilot’s seat as she took a quick final tour around the drifting hulk of the
Sunflower
.

He pointed out a great gash in the hull. “There. That is the wound that killed her.”

“I see. The fusion containment failed, I read from the report.”

“We lost our ion drive immediately, and many of the tethers to the lightsail were severed...”

Ships like the
Sunflower
, dedicated to long-haul interplanetary spaceflight, were roomy lightweight hulls driven by the gentle but persistent thrust of ion-drive engines, and by the push of sunlight on their huge sails. A journey from Earth to Mars on such a ship still took months, but months less than an unpowered trajectory, a Hohmann ellipse.

The pilot was watching his face. “The incident was a news headline on Earth and Mars, and elsewhere. The heroic efforts to stabilise the environment systems and save the passengers –”

“That was the achievement of my crew, not of myself.”

“While you, Captain, manipulated your surviving propulsion system, a lightsail like a bird’s broken wing, to put the ship on the Hohmann orbit that eventually brought you to Mars. It was an achievement of courage and improvisation to compare with the rescue of Apollo 13, some commentators have remarked.”

He glanced at her. It was unusual in his experience for such young people to have knowledge of pioneering space exploits a hundred and forty years gone; to many of them it was as if the age of space had begun in 2003, when Yang Liwei became the first Chinese to reach Earth orbit aboard the Shenzhou 5.

But he didn’t feel like being congratulated. “I lost my ship, and many of my passengers. And such a slow crawl out to sanctuary, on a ship full of the injured, was agonising.” He had made daily visits from the bridge to the huddled remains of the passenger compartments. There were broken families back there, families who had lost a father or mother or children, and now were forced to endure more months of confinement, deprivation and suffering, unable even to escape from the scene of their loss. There were even orphans. He remembered one little girl in particular, no more than five years old; her name was Xue Ling, he had learned, and her father, mother and brother were all gone, an optimistic pioneer family wiped out in an instant. She had looked lost, bewildered, even as she rested her head against the stiff fabric of a kindly ship’s officer’s tunic.

“I am sure it was terrible,” said the pilot. “But you brought your ship home.” She tapped her control panels and the shuttle turned its nose to the planet. Soon the craft bit into the air. The atmosphere of Mars was thin, tall; the ride was surprisingly gentle compared with a re-entry at Earth, and the shuttle, shedding its orbital energy in frictional heat, made big swooping turns over a ruddy landscape. “We will be down shortly, Captain –”

“I am no longer a captain. I have resigned, formally. Please do not use that honorific.”

“So I understand. You have decided to give up your career, to commit yourself to Mars.”

“People trusted me to bring them here safely; I failed. The least I can do is honour their memory by –”

She grunted. “By doing what? Becoming a lichen farmer? I suppose to become a living monument is a noble impulse. But somewhat self-destructive, and a waste of your expertise, if you want my opinion, sir.”

He didn’t want it particularly, but he bit back a reprimand. He no longer held rank over this woman.

“You have no family on Earth?”

“No wife, no.”

“Perhaps that will be your destiny on Mars. To help raise the first generation of pioneers, who will –”

“That will not be possible. During the accident – the failure of the shielding around the fusion reactor, and then a loss of shielding fluids from the ship as a whole...” He could see she understood. “I was baked for many months by the radiation of interplanetary space. The doctors tell me I have a high propensity for cancers in the future. And if I am not sterile, I should be.”

“How old are you, sir?”

“Only a little over thirty.”

She did not speak again.

The shuttle came down at a small, young settlement in a terrain in the southern hemisphere called the Terra Cimmeria. This was a landscape peculiarly shaped by sprawling crater walls and steep-sided river valleys; from the high air it reminded Wei of scar tissue, like a badly healed burn. The settlement, called Fire City, nestled on the floor of a crater called Mendel, itself nearly eighty kilometres across, its floor incised by dry channels and pocked by smaller, younger craters. From the air he glimpsed domes half-covered by heaped-up Martian dirt, the gleaming tanks and pipes of what looked like a sprawling chemical manufacturing plant, and a few drilling derricks, angular frames like rocket gantries.

The shuttle swept down smoothly onto a long runway blasted across the crater floor. When it had come to rest, the pilot briskly helped Wei pull on a pressure suit. They clambered into an airlock, where they were briefly bathed in sterilizing ultraviolet. Then the hatch popped, and they climbed down a short stair.

Wei Binglin took a step on the surface of Mars, and another, exploring the generously low gravity, considering the clear impressions his boots made in the ubiquitous, clinging, rust-coloured dust. He could not see the walls of Mendel from here, or anything of the geologically complicated landscape beyond. The crater floor itself was a plain littered with rocks, like a high desert, and a small sun hung in a sky of washed-out brown. A few domes nestled nearby, and a single derrick was visible at the horizon, gaunt, still, like a dead tree. Wei had visited Mars four times before, but each time he had stayed in orbit with his interplanetary craft, or had visited the moon Deimos for work and recreation. He had never walked on Mars before. And now, he realised, he would never walk on any other world, ever again.

That was when he spotted the cairn.

It stood near the runway, a roughly pyramidal heap of rocks. He walked over. The cairn was taller than he was, and evidently purposefully constructed. “What is this?”

The pilot followed him. “This is the landing site of Cao Xi.” The first to reach Mars, who had survived no more than an hour on the surface after his one-man lander crashed. “His body has been returned to his family on Earth.”

“I once saw the mausoleum.”

“But still, this place, where he walked, is remembered. The runway was built here as an appropriate gesture, it was thought; a link between ground and sky, space and Mars. This is a young place still, and everything is rather rough and ready.”

Wei looked around. He selected a rock about the size of his head; it was sharp-edged, but easy to lift in the low gravity, if resistant to be moved through inertia. He hauled the rock up and settled it on the upper slope of the cairn.

“Everybody does that, on arrival,” said the pilot.

“Why was I brought here, to this particular settlement?”

The pilot shrugged.

But the answer was obvious. Knowing nothing of the colonising of Mars, he had asked his former superiors to nominate a suitable destination, a new home. They had been drawn by the symbolism of this place. But Cao Xi had been a hero; Wei was not.

The cairn struck Wei as oddly steep-sloped. “You could not build such a structure on Earth.”

“Perhaps not.”

“I wonder how tall you could make such a mound, here in this partial gravity?”

“I do not know.” She pointed at a rooster-tail of dust behind a gleaming speck, coming from one of the domes. “Your hosts. A family, husband and wife, themselves former interplanetary crew. They have volunteered to be your guides as you find your feet, here on Mars.”

Wei felt a peculiar reluctance to meet these people, these Martians. He did not belong here. Yet he felt no impulse, either, to climb back on the shuttle and return to orbit. He belonged nowhere, he thought, as if he was dead himself. Yet he lived, breathed, was capable of curiosity, such as about this cairn. “Perhaps I will find purpose here.”

“I am sure you will.” The shuttle pilot touched his arm. He could feel the pressure through the suit layers, a kind gesture. “Perhaps you will be keeper of the cairn.”

That made him laugh. “Perhaps so.” It struck him that he did not even know her name. He turned to face the approaching rover.

A
S
X
UE
L
ING
got up to leave his office, Wei checked the schedule on the slate built into his desk. He looked for his next appointment, not for the time. This office was in a privileged position, built into the dome wall so he had an exterior view, and he could judge the time pretty well by the way the afternoon sun slid around the flanks of the cairn.

He was dismayed to see that his next appointment was Bill Kendrick. Trouble for him again, with this American, who had been more or less dumped on him from the UN colony at Eden.

Kendrick was waiting when Xue Ling opened the door. He was tall, taller than most Chinese, wiry. His file said he was forty-five years old, only a little older than Wei; he looked younger save for a shock of prematurely grey hair, which was probably as much an engineered affectation as his apple-smooth cheeks, the taut flesh at his neck.