Year's Best Scifi 8 Part 45

"Perhaps you can be," he said. "If you want the risk. The immortals have to guard their own future.

They want no rivals here, but they have agreed to let us send an expedition to colonize the Andromeda galaxy. There's a two-million- year skip each way, which leaves them safe from any harm from us." He frowned and shook his head.

"We ourselves can't feel so confident. No skip so far has ever been attempted. It's a jump into the dark, with no data to let us compute any sure destination. We may be lost forever from our own universe of s.p.a.ce, with no way back. Even if we're lucky, we'll have new frontiers to face, with our industrial infrastructure still to build. We're likely to need the skills and the knowledge you have learned here. I can sign you on, if you want the chance."

I said I did.

My mother dried her tears and kissed me. My father made us kneel and pray together. I hugged them both, and the inspector took me with him to board the departing mother s.h.i.+p.

All that was two million years ago and two million light- years behind us. That long jump dropped us into the gravity well of a giant black hole, but we were able to coast around it in free fall, with no harm at all. The third skip brought us into low orbit around our new planet, a kind world that had no native life and needed no terraforming. My low-tech skills did help us stay alive. The microbots have learned them, and we are well established now.

I have recalled this story for our children and their micro- bots to remember. I was at first uneasy about letting the microbots into my body. For a long time I hardly felt them, but they're beginning now to give me a new zest for life, a new happiness with all my new friends, an endless delight in the wonders of our new world.

Our new sky blazes with more stars than I ever imagined, all in strange constellations, but on a clear night we can make out our home galaxy, a faint fleck of brightness low in the south. Remembering my parents, who lived so far away and long ago, I wish they could have known the true afterlife we've discovered here.

s.h.i.+elds of Mars

GENE WOLFE.

Gene Wolfe (tribute site: http://www.op.net/~pduggan/ wolfe.html and www.ultan.co.uk/) lives in Barrington, Illinois, and is widely considered the most accomplished writer in the fantasy and science fiction genres. His four-volume The Book of the New Sun is an acknowledged masterpiece.

Some people consider him among the greatest living American writers. His most recent book is Return to the Whorl, the third volume of The Book of the Short Sun (really a single huge novel), which many of his most attentive readers feel is his best book yet. He has published many fantasy, science fiction, and horror stories over the last thirty-six years, and has been given the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement. Collections of his short fiction include The Island of Dr Death and Other Stories and Other Stories, Storeys from the Old Hotel, Endangered Species, and Strange Travelers.

"s.h.i.+elds of Mars" is from Mars Probes, along with the DAW 30th Anniversary SF Anthology , and somewhat by default the most significant SF anthology of the year. The story is an homage to the planetary romance tradition, to s.p.a.ce opera, to the value system of honor and loyalty in a racially mixed culture. But in contrast to the Moorc.o.c.k story later in this book, it is not s.p.a.ce opera but ironic science fiction. It transcends the disappointments of Mars as it turned out to be without denying scientific reality, and reinvigorates the SF tropes Mars.

Once they had dueled beneath the russet Martian sky for the hand of a princess-had dueled with swords that, not long before, had been the plastic handles of a rake and a spade.

Jeff Shonto had driven the final nail into the first Realwood plank when he realized that Zaa was standing six-legged, ankle-deep in red dust, watching him. He turned a little in case Zaa wanted to say something; Zaa did not, but he four- legged, rearing his thorax so that his arms hung like arms (perhaps inorder to look more human) before he became a glaucous statue once again, a statue with formidable muscles in unexpected locations.

Zaa's face was skull-like, as were the faces of all the people from his star, with double canines jutting from its ma.s.sive jaw and eyes at its temples. It was a good face, Jeff thought, a kind and an honest face.

He picked up the second Realwood plank, laid it against the window so it rested on the first, and plucked a nail from his mouth.

Zaa's gray Department s.h.i.+rt ("Zaa Leem, Director of Maintenance") had been dirty. No doubt Zaa had put it on clean that morning, but there was a black smear under the left pocket now. What if they wanted to talk to Zaa, too?

Jeff's power-hammer said bang, and the nail sank to the head. Faint echoes from inside the store that had been his father's might almost have been the sound of funeral drums. Shrugging, he took another nail from his mouth.

A good and a kind face, and he and Zaa had been friends since Mom and Dad were young, and what did a little grease matter? Didn't they want Zaa to work? When you worked, you got dirty.

Another nail, in the diagonal corner. Bang. Mind pictures, daydream pictures showed him the masked dancers who ought to have been there when they buried Dad in the desert. And were not.

Again he turned to look at Zaa, expecting Zaa to say something, to make some comment. Zaa did not. Beyond Zaa were thirty bungalows, twenty-nine white and one a flaking blue that had once been bright. Twenty-eight bungalows that were boarded up, two that were still in use.

Beyond the last, the one that had been Diane's family's, empty miles of barren desert, then the aching void of the immense chasm that had been renamed the Grand Ca.n.a.l. Beyond it, a range of rust-red cliff that was in reality the far side of the Grand Ca.n.a.l, a glowing escarpment lit at its summit by declining Sol.

Jeff shrugged and turned back to his plank. A third nail. Bang . The dancers were sharp-edged this time, the drums louder. "You're closing your store."

He fished more nails from his pocket. "Not to you. If you want something I'll sell it to you."

"Thanks." Zaa picked up a plank and stood ready to pa.s.s it to Jeff.

Bang. Echoes of thousands of years just beginning.

"I've got one in the shop that feeds the nails. Want me to get it?"

Jeff shook his head. "For a little job like this, what I've got is fine."

Bang.

"Back at the plant in a couple hours?"

"At twenty-four ten they're supposed to call me." Jeff had said this before, and he knew Zaa knew it as well as he did. "You don't have to be there..."

"But maybe they'll close it."

And I won't have to be the one who tells you.

Jeff turned away, staring at the plank. He wanted to drive more nails into it, but there was one at each corner already. He could not remember driving that many.

"Here." Zaa was putting up another plank. "I would have done this whole job for you. You know?"

"It was my store." Jeff squared the new plank on the second and reached to his mouth for a nail, but there were no nails there. He positioned his little ladder, leaning it on the newly nailed one, got up on the lowest step, and fished a fresh nail from his pocket.

Bang.

"Those paintings of mine? Give them back and I'll give you what you paid."

"No." Jeff did not look around.

"You'll never sell them now."

"They're mine," Jeff said. "I paid you for them, and I'm keeping them."

"There won't ever be any more tourists, Jeff."

"Things will get better."

"Where would they stay?"

"Camp in the desert. Rough it." Bang.

There was a silence, during which Jeff drove more nails. "If they close the plant, I guess they'll send a crawler to take us to some other town."

Jeff shrugged. "Or an orthopter, like Channel Two has. You saw Scenic Mars. They might even do that."

Impelled by an instinct he could not have described but could not counter, he stepped down-short, dark, and stocky-to face Zaa. "Listen here. In the first place, they can't close the plant. What'd they breathe?"

Even four-legging, Zaa was taller by more than a full head; he shrugged, ma.s.sive shoulders lifting and falling. "The others could take up the slack, maybe."

"Maybe they could. What if something went wrong at one of them?"

"There'd be plenty of time to fix it. Air doesn't go that fast."

"You come here."

He took Zaa by the arm, and Zaa paced beside him, intermediate armlike legs helping support his thorax and abdomen.

"I want to show you the plant."

"I've seen it."

"Come on. I want to see it myself." Together, the last two inhabitants of the settlement called Grand Ca.n.a.l went around the wind-worn store and climbed a low hill. The chain-link fence enclosing the plant was tall and still strong, but the main gate stood open, and there was no one in the guard shack. A half mile more of dusty road, then the towers and the gla.s.sy prisms, and the great pale domes, overshadowed by the awe-inspiring cooling stack of the nuclear reactor. On the left, the spherical hydrogen tanks and thousands upon thousands of canisters of hydrogen awaiting the crawler. Beyond those, nearly lost in the twilight, Number One Crusher. It would have been a very big plant anywhere on Earth; here, beneath the vastness of the russet sky, standing alone in the endless red-and-black desert, it was tiny and vulnerable, something any wandering meteor might crush like a toy.

"Take a good look," Jeff said, wis.h.i.+ng Zaa could see it through his eyes.

"I just did. We might as well go now. They'll be wanting to call you pretty soon."

"In a minute. What do you suppose all that stuff's worth? All the equipment?"

Zaa picked his teeth with a sharp claw. "I don't know. I guess I never thought about it. A couple hundred million?"

"More than a billion. Listen up." Jeff felt his own conviction growing as he spoke. "I can lock the door on my store and board up the windows and walk away. I can do that because I'm still here.

Suppose you and I just locked the gate and got on that crawler and went off. How long before somebody was out here with ten more crawlers, loading up stainless pipe, and motors, and all that stuff?

You could make a better stab at this than I could, but I say give me three big crawlers and three men who knew what they were doing and I'd have ten million on those crawlers in a week."

Zaa shook his head. "Twelve hours. Eight, if they never took a break and really knew their business."

"Fine. So is the Department going to lock the door and walk away? Either they gut it themselves-not ten million, over a billion-or they'll keep somebody here to keep an eye on things.

They'll have to."

"I guess."

"Suppose they've decided to stop production altogether. How long to shut down the pile and mothball everything? With two men?"

"To do it right?" Zaa fingered the point of one canine. "A year."

Jeff nodded. "A year. And they'd have to do it right, because someday they might have to start up again. We're pretty well terraformed these days. This out here isn't much worse than the Gobi Desert on Earth. A hundred years ago you couldn't breathe right where we're standing."

He studied Zaa's face, trying to see if his words were sinking in, if they were making an impression.

Zaa said, "Sure."

"And everybody knows that. Okay, suppose one of the other plants went down. Totally. Supposethey lost the pile or something. Meltdown."

"I got it."

"Like you say, the air goes slow now. We've added to the planetary ma.s.s-covered the whole thing with an ocean of air and water vapor three miles thick, so there's more gravity." Jeff paused for emphasis. "But it goes, and as it goes, we lose gravity. The more air we lose, the faster we lose more."

"I know that."

"Sure. I know you do. I'm just reminding you. All right, they lose one whole plant, like I said."

"You never lose the pile if you do it right."

"Sure. But not everybody's as smart as you are, okay? They get some clown in there and he screws up. Let's take the Schiaparelli plant, just to talk about. How much fossil water have they got?"

Zaa shrugged.

"I don't know either, and neither do they. They could give you some number, but it's just a guess.

Suppose they run out of water."

Zaa nodded and turned away, four-legging toward the main gate.

Jeff hurried after him. "How long before people panic? A week? A month?"

"You never finished boarding up."

"I'll get it later. I have to be there when they call."

"Sure," Zaa said.

Together, as they had been together since Jeff was born, they strode through the plant gate upon two legs and four, leaving it open behind them. "They're going to have to give us power wagons," Jeff said.

"Suppose we're at home and we have to get here fast."

"Bikes." Zaa looked at him, then looked away. "In here you're the boss. All right, you had your say.

I listened to everything."

It was Jeff's turn to nod. He said, "Uh-huh."

"So do I get to talk now?"