Грег Иган - The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 1

Gianni said, “I’m going to stop them.” He walked over to the air lock and began putting on his suit.

Jingyi turned to Aisha. “You need to talk him out of it. It’s too dangerous for anyone fighting out there.”

“I’m just going to talk to them!” Gianni retorted angrily.

“You can talk to them here,” Jingyi replied, gesturing toward the console. Gianni ignored her, but Aisha went with her and sat down at the microphone.

“Yong? Martin?” she tried. There was no response. “Please. Can we discuss this?”

Gianni had everything but his helmet on. “They’re not going to turn around and march back in because you asked them nicely!”

“So what do you think you’re going to do to change their minds?”

“They can’t ignore me if I’m standing right in front of them.”

Aisha said, “I don’t think it’s a good idea to confront them.” The suits didn’t exactly tear easily, but she did not want any kind of altercation in the vacuum. “They’re probably inside the ship by now, anyway.”

“We’ll see.” Gianni fixed his helmet in place and stepped into the air lock.

Aisha felt numb. If she went after him, would that just make things worse? When she heard the outer door close, she hit the button beside the microphone. “Gianni?”

“What?” He was breathing heavily, as if he was trying to run. The launchpad was five hundred meters away, but there was no way that he could overtake the men who’d left ten minutes earlier.

“Just leave it. They’ll probably send another ship within a week.”

“Fuck that! This is our ride home, and they don’t get to take it.”

“Just come back!”

Gianni did not reply.

“I have to go and get him,” she decided.

As Aisha was putting on her suit, Jingyi looked on forlornly. Why hadn’t she left with the others? There was room for her on the ship. Maybe they’d decided to draw straws to pick a babysitter to stay behind. Or maybe she was just too decent to walk out on a pair of novices who might not survive for one day on their own.

When Aisha emerged from the air lock she saw Gianni in the distance, bounding across the rock like a kangaroo wrapped in tinfoil. She couldn’t make out any figures moving around the launchpad.

“Come back, you idiot!” she implored him. “We’ll be fine here!” Even if the wait turned out to be a year or two, Jingyi knew how to keep the crops growing and the base habitable.

Gianni kept running. Aisha waddled forward as briskly as she could, resigned to the fact that she’d never catch up with him.

When he reached the launchpad, she waited, hoping he’d accept the evidence of his own eyes. Zhilin would be going through the final system checks, and nobody was going to step out to debate their plans. Maybe the pricks would end up in prison for this; Aisha was unsure of the legal issues, but she recalled a sea captain being jailed for leaving his foundering ship while his passengers remained trapped below deck.

Gianni climbed the ladder to the hatch. Aisha couldn’t make out exactly what he was doing, but she assumed he was pounding on the hull.

“I’m not leaving until you come out!” he shouted.

“Give it up!” Aisha begged him.

She heard the rattling first through his radio, then she felt the slight vibration of the ground through her boots. She stared at the lander; she couldn’t discern any flames from the engines, but maybe they were too diffuse.

“You need to get down,” she told Gianni, hoping he’d heed the note of terror in her voice when he’d ignored all her other entreaties.

“They’re bluffing!” he retorted. “They’re not going to take off.”

“Jump and run, or I’ll never forgive you!” She could see a ghostly blue light now, flickering around the base of the lander. “Jump!”

“Shut off the engines and come out,” Gianni commanded his adversaries. Aisha had once watched him stand, immovable and unflinching, in front of a carload of thugs, ordering them to step out and face him after they’d shouted insults at her. When he thought he was right, he thought he was invincible.

The lander ascended: five meters, ten meters. Aisha emitted an involuntary sob, then held her breath as Gianni finally let go of the railing. Free-falling, he parted from the spacecraft with a dreamlike lethargy, tumbling slowly into the blue fire of the exhaust.

The buggy needed sunlight, so Aisha kept it moving at a sedate sixteen kilometers an hour; there was no point in outracing its energy source. With the sun all but frozen in the sky, the subtle changes in the light to which she’d grown accustomed were held in abeyance, leaving her with a sense of stasis that was only rendered stranger by the flow of the terrain. She watched the vehicle’s progress on the GPS, and tried to distract herself by attempting to match her ground-level view of a crater or rill beside her with the corresponding features on the satellite map, but after a few days the endless variations on the same theme began to make her feel as if she were stuck in some barren, procedurally generated computer game. The verisimilitude was stunning, but she wanted someone to slip up and insert a shock of greenery, a building or two, a human figure.

Nuri mounted sporadic protests against her own, far more monotonous view. Aisha tried to soothe her without implying that the screams were unwarranted; no one should accept this kind of sensory deprivation, even when they had no choice but to endure it.

The suit recycled as much water as it could, and Aisha piped in liquid meal replacements from the tank at the back of the buggy. When she told the suit to make her faceplate opaque, it wasn’t hard to sleep, at least when Nuri was in a cooperative mood. The buggy had plotted a smooth, safe path across territory that had been mapped down to the centimeter, and that probably hadn’t changed in a billion years. It was not as if they were at risk of hitting an animal or going aquaplaning.

As they approached ninety degrees longitude, Aisha looked back at the Earth suspended above the horizon. Whatever the idiots had done, she doubted that they’d managed to render the whole blue world uninhabitable. Maybe they’d lost the means to send a radio signal—let alone a rocket—to their nearest neighbor, but that had been true for most of human history. So long as the air was still breathable and crops could still grow, to return would be worth the struggle.

“Why doesn’t the skyhook come lower?” Aisha had asked Yong. A gap of six kilometers above the base seemed excessively cautious.

“Because if it came much lower here,” he’d explained, “it would strike the ground at other points in its orbit. There are six locations where one hook or the other comes swinging down; the orbit needs to be high enough that all of them have some clearance.”

Six months later, when Aisha and Jingyi had been gestating the plan, they’d contemplated tweaking the skyhook’s orbit into an ellipse that came in low over the base while still avoiding the highlands of the farside. But the hub’s ion engine would take months to execute the change—and in just two weeks the farside and nearside would rotate into each other’s former locations.

So instead of making the orbit eccentric, they’d kept it circular but shrunk it as much as the safety margins hard-coded into the hub’s navigation system allowed. At the point on the farside opposite Medii, the bottom of the cable would come within ten meters of the ground.

When the buggy reached its destination, Aisha looked up into the star-filled sky, trying not to cower into her seat at the thought of the thousand-kilometer-long whip tumbling toward her.

Nuri woke and started crying. “I know,” Aisha commiserated. “Your mother stinks, and you’re tired of staring at her chin.”