The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 25 (Mammoth Books) (57 page)

“And if we’re struck—”

I shrugged. “We’ll have to help each other. There’s nobody else to help us, that’s for sure. Look, Edith – maybe the Incoming and the Venusians are typical of what’s out there. But that doesn’t mean we have to be like them, does it? Maybe we’ll find others more like us. And if not, well, we can be the first. A spark to light a fire that will engulf the universe.”

She ruminated. “You have to start somewhere, I suppose. As with this drain.”

“Well, there you go.”

“All right, damn it, I’ll join your think tank. But first you’re going to help me finish this drain, aren’t you, city boy?”

So I changed into overalls and work boots, and we dug away at that ditch in the damp, clingy earth until our backs ached, and the light of the equinoctial day slowly faded.

DIGGING

British author Ian McDonald is an ambitious and daring writer with a wide range and an impressive amount of talent. His first story was published in 1982, and since then he has appeared with some frequency in
Interzone, Asimov’s Science Fiction,
and elsewhere. In 1989 he won the Locus Best First Novel Award for his novel
Desolation Road.
He won the Philip K. Dick Award in 1992 for his novel
King of Morning, Queen of Day.
His other books include the novels
Out on Blue Six, Hearts, Hands and Voices, Terminal Cafe, Sacrifice of Fools, Evolution’s Shore, Kirinya, Ares Express, Cyberabad,
and
Brasyl,
as well as three collections of his short fiction,
Empire Dreams, Speaking in Tongues,
and
Cyberabad Days.
His novel
River of Gods
was a finalist for both the Hugo Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2005, and a novella drawn from it, ‘The Little Goddess’, was a finalist for the Hugo and the Nebula. He won a Hugo Award in 2007 for his novelette ‘The Djinn’s Wife’, won the Theodore Sturgeon Award for his story ‘Tendeleo’s Story’, and in 2011 won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for his novel
The Dervish House.
His most recent book is the starting volume of a YA series,
Planesrunner.
Born in Manchester, England, in 1960, McDonald has spent most of his life in Northern Ireland, and now lives and works in Belfast. He has a website at
www.lysator.liu.se/~unicorn/mcdonald/
.

Here he takes us to a colonized future Mars, and inside a massive terraforming effort stretching over generations that involves digging a REALLY BIG hole.

T
ASH WAS WISE
to the ways of wind. She knew its many musics: sometimes like a flute across the pipes and tubes; sometimes a snare-drum rattle in the guy-lines and cable stays or again, a death drone-moan from the turbine gantries and a scream of sand past the irised-shut windows when the equinox dust storms blew for weeks on end. From the rails and drive bogies of the scoopline the wind drew a wail like a demon choir and from the buckets set a clattering clicking rattle so that she imagined tiny clockwork angels scampering up and down the hundreds of kilometres of conveyor belts. In the storm-season gales it came screaming in across Isidis’ billion-year-dead impact basin, clawing at the eaves and gables of West Diggory, tearing at the tiered roofs so hard Tash feared it would rip them right off and send them tumbling end over end down down into the depths of the Big Dig. That would be the worst thing. Everyone would die badly: eyeballs and fingertips and lips exploding, cheeks bursting with red veins. She had nightmares about suddenly looking up to see the roof ripping away and the naked sky and the air all blowing away in one huge shout of exhalation. Then your eyeballs exploded. She imagined how that would sound. Two soft popping squelches. Then In-Brother Yoche told her you couldn’t hear your eyeballs exploding because the air would be too thin and the whole story was a legend of mischievous Grandparents and Sub-aunts who liked to scare under-fours. But it made her think about how fragile was West Diggory and the other three stations of the Big Dig. Spindly and top-heavy, domes piled upon half domes upon semi-domes, swooping wing roofs and perilous balconies, all resting on the finger-thin cantilevers that connected the great Excavating City to the traction bogies. Like big spiders. Tash knew spiders. She had seen spiders in a book and once, in a piece of video excitedly shot by Lady-cousin Nairne in North Cutter, a real spider, in a real web, trembling in the perennial beat of the buckets working up the scoop-line from the head of the Big Dig, five kilometres down slope. Lady-cousin Nairne had poked at the spider with her fingers – fat and brown as bread in high magnification. The spider had frozen, then scuttled for the corner of the window frame, curled into a tiny ball of legs and refused to do anything for the rest of the day. The next day when Nairne and her camera returned it was dead dead dead, dried into a little dessicated husk of shell. It must have come in a crate in the supply run down from the High Orbital, though everything they shipped from orbit was supposed to be clean. Beyond the window where the little translucent corpse hung vibrating in its web, red rock and wind and the endless march of the buckets along the rails of the Excavating Conveyor. Buckets and wind. Tied together. Wind; Fact one. When the buckets ceased, then and only then would the wind stop. Fact two: all Tash’s life it had blown in the same direction. Downhill.

Tash Gelem-Opunyo was wise to the ways of wind, and buckets, and random spiders and on Moving Day the wind was a long, many-part harmony for pipes drawn from the sand-polished steels rails, a flutter of the kites and blessing banners and windsocks and lucky fish that West Diggory flew from every rooftop and pylon and stanchion, a sudden caress of a veering eddy in the small of her back that made Tash shiver and stand upright on the high verandah in her psuit, a too-intimate touch. She was getting too big for the old psuit. It was tight and chafing in the wrong places. Tight it had to be, a stretch-skin of gas-impermeable fabric, but Things were Showing. My How You’ve Grown Things, that Haramwe Odonye, who was an Out-cousin in from A.R.E.A. and thus allowed to Notice such things, Noticed, and Commented On. Last Moving Day, half a long-year before, she had drawn in an attempt to camouflage the bumps and creases and curves by drawing all over the hi-visibility skin with marker pen. There were more animals on her skin than on the whole of Mars.

Up and out on Moving Day, that was the tradition. From the very very old to the very very young, blinking up out of their pressure cocoons; every soul in West Diggory came out on to the balconies and galleries and walkways. Safety was part of the routine – with every half-year wrench of West Diggory’s thousand of tons of architecture into movement the possibility increased that a joint might split or a pressure dome shatter. Eyeball-squelch-pop time. But safety was only a small part. Movement was what West Diggory was for; like the wind, downwards, ever downwards.

The Terrace of the Grand Regard was the highest point on West Diggory: only the banners of the Isidis Plantia Excavating Company eternally billowing in the unvarying down-slope wind, and the wind turbines, stood higher. Climbing the ladders Tash felt Out-Cousin Haramwe’s eyes on her, watching from the Boy’s Pavilion. His boy-gaze drew the other young males on their high and rickety terrace. The psuit was indeed tight, but good tight. Tash enjoyed how it moved with her, holding her in where she wanted to be held, emphasizing what she wanted emphasized.

“Hey, good snake!” Out-Cousin Haramwe called on the common channel. On her seven-and-a-halfth birthday Tash had drawn a dream snake on her psuit skin, a diamond pattern loop with its tail at the base of her spine, curled around the left curve of her ass and buried its head in the inner thigh. It had been exciting to draw. It was more exciting to wear on Moving Day, the only time she ever wore the psuit.

“Are you ogling my ophidian?” Tash taunted back to the hoots of the other boys as she climbed up on to Gallery of Exalted Vistas to be with her sisters and cousin and In-cousins and Out-cousins, all the many ways in which Tash could be related in a gene-pool of only two thousand people. The guys hooted. Tash shimmied her shoulders, where little birds were drawn. The boys liked her insulting them in words they didn’t understand. Listen well, look well. I’m the best show on Mars.

A thousand banners rattled in the unending wind. Kites dipped and fluttered, painted with birds and butterflies and stranger aerial creatures that had only existed in the legends of distant earth. Streamers pointed the way for West Diggory: downhill, always downhill. The lines of buckets full of Martian soil marched up the conveyor from the dig point, invisible over the close horizon, under the legs of West Diggory, towards the unseen summit of Mt. Incredible, where they tipped their load on its ever-growing summit before cycling back down the underside of the conveyor. The story was that the freshly dug regolith at the bottom of the hole was the colour of gold: exposure to the atmosphere on its long journey up-slope turned it Mars red. She turned to better feel the shaper of the wind on every part of her body. This psuit so needed replacing. There was more to her shiver than just the caress of air in motion. Wind and words: they were the same stuff. If she threw big and fancy words, words that gave her joy and made her laugh from the shape they made from moving air, it was because they were living wind itself.

A shiver ran up through the catwalk grilles and railings and into Tash Gelem-Opunyo. The engineers were running up the traction generators; West Diggory shuddered and thrummed as the tokamaks drew resonances and steel harmonies from its girders and cantilevers. Tash’s molars ached, then there was a jolt that threw old and young alike off balance, grasping for handrails, stanchions, cables, each other. There was a immense shriek like the new moon being pulled live from the body of the world. Shuddering creaks, each so loud Tash could hear them through her ear-protectors. Steel wheels turned, grinding on sand. West Diggory began to move. People waved their hands and cheered, the noise reduction circuits on the Common Channel stopped the din down to a surge of delighted giggling. The wheels, each taller than Tash, ground round, slow as growing. West Diggory, perched on its cantilevers, inched down its eighteen tracks, tentative as an old woman stepping from a diggler. This was motion on the glacial, the geological scale. It would take ten hours for West Diggory to make its scheduled descent into the Big Dig. You had to be sure to have eaten and drunk enough because it wasn’t safe to go inside. Tash had breakfasted lightly at the commons in the Raven Sorority, when the In-daughters lived together after they turned five. The semizoic fabric absorbed everything without stink or stain but it was far from cool to piss your suit. Unless you were up and out on a job. Then it was mandatory.

Music trilled on the common channel, a cheery little toe-tapper. Tash gritted her teeth. She knew what it heralded: the West Diggory Down. No one knew when, where or who had started the tradition of the Moving Day dance: Tash suspected it was a joke that no one had recognized and so became literal. She slid behind a stanchion as her Raven sisters formed up and the boys up on the Lads Pavilion bowed and raised their hands. Slip away slip away before it starts. Up the steps and along the clattering catwalk to the Outermost Preview. From this distant perch, a birdcage of steel at the end of a slender pier, a lantern suspended over the sand, Tash surveyed all West Diggory, her domes and gantries and pods and tubes and flapping banners and her citizens – so few of them, Tash thought – formed up into lines and squares for the dance. She tuned out the Common Channel. Strange, them stepping gaily, hand in hand, up and down the lines, do-sedoh in psuits and facemasks and total silence. The olds seemed to enjoy it. They had no dignity. Look how fat some of them were in their psuits. Tash turned away from the rituals of West Diggory to the great, subtle slope of the Big Dig, following the lines up the slope. She was on the edge of the age when you could leave West Diggory but she had heard that up there, beyond Mt. Incredible, the small world curved away so quickly in all directions that the horizon was only three kilometres distant. The Big Dig held different horizons. It was a huge cone sunk into the surface of a sphere. An alternative geometry worked here. The world didn’t curve away, it curved inwards, a circle over three hundred kilometres round where it met the surface of Mars. The world radiated outwards: Tash could follow the radiating spokes of the scooplines all the way of the edge of the world, and beyond, to the encircling ring-mountain of Mt. Incredible that reached the edge of space. Peering along the curve of the Big Dig through the dust haze constantly thrown up by the ceaseless excavating, she could just make out the sun-glitter from the gantries of North Cutter, like West Diggory, making its slow descent deeper into the pit. A flicker of thought would up the magnification on her visor and she would be able to look clear across eighty kilometres of airspace to A.R.E.A. and spy on whatever celebrations they held there, on the first and greatest of the Excavating Cities on Moving Day. Maybe she might see a girl like herself, balanced on some high and perilous perch, looking out across the bowl of the world.