Zima Blue and Other Stories (61 page)

Authors: Alastair Reynolds

Tags: #02 Science-Fiction

BOOK: Zima Blue and Other Stories

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According to the data panel, the cargo pod had been scheduled to lift from Kagoshima spaceport one month before the virus hit. Maybe the panel was wrong; maybe this pod had been prepared and sprayed and then held on the pad until the virus had passed and the reconstruction had begun . . .

But why send him glass?

Renfrew knew, with an appalling certainty, that the vehicle had not been delayed on the pad. It had launched just as its owners had intended,
on time
, with a consignment of precision glassware that might just have been useful back when the base was fully inhabited and they'd needed a steady supply of laser optics for the surveying work.

But somewhere between Earth and Mars, the cargo pod had lost its way. When the virus hit, the pod would have lost contact with the Earth-based tracking system that was supposed to guide it on its way. But the pod hadn't simply drifted into interplanetary space, lost for ever. Instead, its dumb-as-fuck navigation system had caused it to make an extra fuel-conserving loop around the sun, until it finally locked on to the Mars transponder.

Renfrew must have picked it up shortly afterwards.

He stumbled back to the buggy. He climbed into the openwork frame, settled into the driver's seat and didn't bother with the harness. He kept his breathing in check. The disappointment hadn't hit yet, but he could feel it coming, sliding towards him with the oiled glide of a piston. It was going to hurt like hell when it arrived. It was going to feel like the weight of creation pushing down onto his chest. It was going to squeeze the life out of him; it was going to make him open that helmet visor, if he didn't make it home first.

Piano Man had been right. He'd allowed hope back into his world, and now hope was going to make him pay.

He gunned the buggy to maximum power, flinging dust from its wheels, skidding until it found traction. He steered away from the cargo pod, not wanting to look at it, not even wanting to catch a glimpse of it in the buggy's rear-view mirrors.

He'd made it to within five kilometres of the base when he hit a boulder, tipping the buggy over. Renfrew tumbled from the driver's seat, and the last thing he saw - the last thing he was aware of - was an edge of sharp rock rising to shatter his visor.

PART THREE

And yet Renfrew woke.

Consciousness came back to him in a crystal rush. He remembered everything, up to and including the last instant of his accident. It seemed to have happened only minutes earlier: he could almost taste blood in his mouth. Yet by the same token the memory seemed inhumanly ancient, calcified into hardness, brittle as coral.

He was back in the base, not out by the crashed buggy. Through narrow, sleep-gummed eyes he picked out familiar decor. He'd come around on the same medical couch where he had seen Solovyova die. He moved his arm and touched his brow, flinching as he remembered the stone smashing through the visor, flinching again as he recalled the momentary contact of stone against skin, the hardening pressure of skin on bone, the
yielding
of that pressure as the edge of the stone rammed its way into his skull like a nuclear-powered icebreaker cracking hard arctic pack-ice.

The skin under his fingers was smooth, unscarred. He touched his chin and felt the same day's growth of stubble he'd been wearing when he went out to meet the pod. There was stiffness in his muscles, but nothing he wouldn't have expected after a hard day's work. He eased himself from the couch, touched bare feet to cold ceramic flooring. He was wearing the one-piece inner-layer that he'd put on under the spacesuit before he went outside. But the inner-layer was crisper and cleaner than he remembered, and when he looked at the sleeve the tears and frays he recalled were absent.

Gaining steadiness with each step, Renfrew padded across the medical lab to the window. He remembered seeing Solovyova's face reflected in the glass, the first time he'd told her about the piano. It had been twilight then; it was full daylight now, and as his eyes adjusted to wakefulness, they picked out details and textures in the scenery with a clarity he'd never known before.

There were things out there that didn't belong.

They stood between the base and the foothills, set into the dust like haphazardly placed chess pieces. It was hard to say how tall they were - metres or tens of metres - for there was something slippery and elusive about the space between the forms and the base, confounding Renfrew's sense of perspective. Nor could he have reported with any certainty on the shapes of the objects. One moment he saw blocky, unchanging chunks of crystalline growth - something like tourmaline, tinted with bright reds and greens - the next he was looking at stained-glass apertures drilled through the very skein of reality, or skeletal, prismatic things that existed only in the sense that they had edges and corners, rather than surfaces and interiors. And yet there was never any sense of transition between the opposed states.

He knew, instantly and without fear, that they were alive, and that they were aware of him.

Renfrew made his way to the suiting room, counted the intact suits that were hanging there and came up with the same number he remembered from before the buggy accident. No sign of any damage to the racked helmets.

He suited up and stepped out into Martian daylight. The forms were still there, surrounding the base like the weathered stones of some grand Neolithic circle. Yet they seemed closer now, and larger, and their transformations had an accelerated, heightened quality. They had detected his emergence; they were glad of it; it was what they had been waiting for.

Still there was no fear.

One of the shapes seemed larger than the others. It beckoned Renfrew nearer, and the ground he walked upon melted and surged under him, encouraging him to close the distance. The transformations became more feverish. His suit monitor informed him that the air outside was as cold and thin as ever, but a sound was reaching him through the helmet that he'd never heard in all his time on Mars. It was a chorus of shrill, quavering notes, like the sound from a glass organ, and it was coming from the aliens. In that chorus was ecstasy and expectation. It should have terrified him, should have sent him scurrying back inside, should have plunged him into gibbering catatonia, but it only made him stronger.

Renfrew dared to look up.

If the aliens gathered around the base were the crew, then the thing suspended over the base - the thing that swallowed three-fifths of the sky, more like a weather system than a machine - had to be their ship. It was a vast, frozen explosion of colours and shapes, and it made him want to shrivel back into his skull. The mere existence of the aliens and their ship told him that all he had learned, all the wisdom he had worked so hard to accrue, was at best a scratch against the rock face of reality.

He still had a long, long way to go.

He looked down, and walked to the base of the largest alien. The keening reached a shrill, exultant climax. Now that he was close, the alien's shape-and-size shifting had subsided. The form looming over him was stable and crystalline, with the landscape behind it faintly visible through the refracted translucence of the alien's body.

The alien's voice, when it came, felt like the universe whispering secrets into his head.

'Are you feeling better now?'

Renfrew almost laughed at the banality of the question. 'I'm feeling . . . better, yes.'

'That's good. We were concerned. Very, very concerned. It pleases us that you have made this recovery.'

The keening quieted. Renfrew sensed that the other aliens were witnesses to a one-on-one conversation between him and this largest entity, and that there was something utterly respectful, even subservient, in their silence.

'When you talk about my recovery . . . are you saying . . .' Renfrew paused, choosing his words with care. 'Did you make me better?'

'We healed you, yes. We healed you and learned your language from the internal wiring of your mind.'

'I should have died out there. When I tipped the buggy . . . I thought I was dead. I
knew
I was dead.'

'There were enough recoverable patterns. It was our gift to remake you. Only you, however, can say whether we did a good enough job.'

'I feel the same way I always did. Except better, like I've been turned inside out and flushed clean.'

'That is what we hoped.'

'You mind if I ask . . .'

The alien pulsed an inviting shade of pink.

'You may ask anything you like.'

'Who are you? What are you doing here? Why have you come
now
?'

'We are the Kind. We have arrived to preserve and resurrect what we may. We have arrived now because we could not arrive sooner.'

'But the coincidence . . . to come now, after we've been waiting so long . . . to come
now
, just after we've wiped ourselves out. Why couldn't you have come sooner, and stopped us fucking things up so badly?'

'We came as fast as we could. As soon as we detected the electromagnetic emanations of your culture . . . we commenced our journey.'

'How far have you come?'

'More than two hundred of your light-years. Our vehicle moves very quickly, but not faster than light. More than four hundred years have passed since the transmission of the radio signals that alerted us.'

'No,' Renfrew said, shaking his head, wondering how the aliens could have made such a basic mistake. 'That isn't possible. Radio hasn't been around that long. We've had television for maybe a hundred years, radio for twenty or thirty years longer . . . but not four hundred years. No way was it
our
signals you picked up.'

The alien shifted to a soothing turquoise.

'You are mistaken, but understandably so. You were dead longer than you realise.'

'No,' he said flatly.

'That is the way it is. Of course you have no memory of the intervening time.'

'But the base looks exactly the way it did before I left.'

'We repaired your home, as well. If you would like it changed again, that is also possible.'

Renfrew felt the first stirrings of acceptance, the knowledge that what the alien was telling him was true.

'If you've brought me back . . .'

'Yes,' the alien encouraged.

'What about the others? What about all the other people who died here - Solovyova and the ones before her? What about all the people who died on Earth?'

'There were no recoverable forms on the Earth. We can show you if you would like . . . but we think you would find it distressing.'

'Why?'

'We did. A lifecrash is always distressing, even to machine-based entities such as us. Especially after such a long and uninterrupted evolutionary history.'

'A lifecrash?'

'It did not just end with the extinction of humanity. The agent that wiped out your species had the capacity to change. Eventually it assimilated every biological form on the planet, leaving only itself: endlessly cannibalising, endlessly replicating.'

Renfrew dealt with that. He'd already adjusted to the fact that humanity was gone and that he was never going to see Earth again. It did not require a great adjustment to accept that Earth itself had been lost, along with the entire web of life it had once supported.

Not that he was exactly thrilled, either.

'Okay,' he said, falteringly. 'But what about the people I buried here?'

Renfrew sensed the alien's regret. Its facets shone a sombre amber.

'Their patterns were not recoverable. They were buried in caskets, along with moisture and microorganisms. Time did the rest. We did try, yes . . . but there was nothing left to work with.'

'I died out there as well. Why was it any different for me?'

'You were kept cold and dry. That made all the difference, as far as we were concerned.'

So he'd mummified out there, baked dry under that merciless sterilising sky, instead of rotting in the ground like his friends. Out there under that Martian sun, for the better part of three hundred years . . . what must he have looked like when they pulled him out of the remains of his suit? he wondered. Maybe a bleached and twisted thing, corded with the knotted remains of musculature and tissue: something that could easily have been mistaken for driftwood, had there been driftwood on Mars.

The wonder and horror of it all were almost too much. He'd been the last human being alive, and then he had died, and now he was the first human being to be resurrected by aliens.

The first and perhaps the last: he sensed even then that, as godlike as the Kind appeared, they were bound by limits. They were as much prisoners of what the universe chose to allow, and what it chose not to allow, as humanity, or dust, or atoms.

'Why?' he asked.

A pulse of ochre signified the alien's confusion.

'Why what?'

'Why did you bring me back? What possible interest do I hold for you?'

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