Alastair Reynolds - Beyond the Aquila Rift - The Best of Alastair Reynolds

It took off the helmet, lifting it up above its shoulders. There was a tiny head inside the armor. She could only see the top of it, from the eyes up. It had lots of age spots and blemishes and a few sparse tufts of very white hair. The rest of it was hidden by the armor.

An unseen mouth said, “Hello.”

Yukimi couldn’t answer. She was just standing there trembling. The thing looked at her for several seconds, the eyes blinking as if it, too, was not quite sure what to make of this meeting. “It is, at least in polite circles, customary to reciprocate a greeting,” the thing—the old man inside the armor—said. “Which is to say, you might consider giving me a ‘hello’ in return. I’m not going to hurt you.”

Yukimi moved her mouth and forced herself to say, “Hello.”

“Hello back.” The man turned slightly, his armor huffing and puffing. “I don’t want to seem discourteous—we haven’t even introduced ourselves—but that airship’s on a tight schedule and it’ll be lifting off very shortly. Do you want to get back aboard it? I won’t stop you if you do, but it’d be remiss of me not to make sure you’re absolutely certain of it. It’s continuing on to Milankovic, and that’s a long way from here—at least two days’ travel. Have you come from Shalbatana?”

Yukimi nodded.

“I can feed you and get you back there a sight quicker than you’ll reach Milankovic. Of course you’ll have to trust me when I tell you that, but—well—we all have to trust someone sooner or later, don’t we?”

“Who are you?” Yukimi asked.

“They call me Corax,” the old man said. “I work out here, doing odd jobs. I’m sorry if the armor scared you, but there wasn’t time for me to get out of it when I learned that the airship was coming in. I’d just come back from the lake, you see. I’d been scouting around, checking out the old place one last time before the waters rise…” He paused. “I’m wittering. I do that sometimes—it comes of spending a lot of time on my own. What’s your name?”

“Yukimi.”

“Well, Yukimi—which is a very nice name, by the way—it’s your call. Back on the airship and take your chances until you reach Milankovic—miserable arse-end of nowhere that it is. You’ll need warm clothing and enough food and water to get you through two days, and maybe some supplementary oxygen in case cabin pressure drops. You’ve got all that, haven’t you? Silly question, really. A clever looking girl like you wouldn’t have stowed away on a cargo airship without the necessary provisions.”

Yukimi held up her satchel. “I’ve just got this.”

“Ah. And in that would be—what, exactly?”

“An apple. And a companion.” She observed the faint flicker of incomprehension on the old man’s forehead. “My diary,” she added. “From my sister, Shirin. She’s a terraforming engineer on Venus. She’s working with the change-clouds, to make the atmosphere breathable….”

“Now which of us is doing the wittering?” Corax shook the visible part of his head. “No, there’s nothing for it, I’m afraid. I can’t let you go now. You’ll have to stay here and wait for the flier. I’m afraid you’re going to be in rather a lot of hot water.”

“I know,” Yukimi said resignedly.

“You don’t seem to care very much. Is everything all right? I suppose it can’t be, or you wouldn’t have stowed away on an airship.”

“Can you get me home?”

“Undoubtedly. And in the meantime I can certainly see that you’re taken care of. There’s a catch, of course: you’ll have to put up with my inane ramblings until then. Do you think you can manage that? I can be something of a bore, when the mood takes me. It comes with age.”

Behind Corax, the cargo doors were closed. The loading ramps had retracted and now even larger doors—belonging to the Scaper—were sealing off Yukimi’s view of the airship.

“I suppose it’s too late now anyway,” Yukimi said.

SHE FOLLOWED CORAX’S stomping, wheezing suit down into the deeper levels of the Scaper. By the time they got anywhere near a window the airship was a distant, dwindling dot, turned the color of brass by the setting sun. Yukimi considered herself lucky now not to be stuck on it all the way to Milankovic. She was sure she could do without food and water for two days (not that it would be fun, even with the apple for rations) but it had never occurred to her that it might get seriously cold. But then, given that the airships had not been built for the convenience of stowaways, it was hardly surprising.

Yukimi was glad when Corax got out of the armor. At the back of her mind had been the worry that he was something other than fully human—she had, after all, only been able to see the top of his head—but apart from being scrawnier and older than almost anyone she could ever remember meeting, he was normal enough. Small by Martian standards—they were about the same height, and Yukimi hadn’t stopped growing. The only person that small Yukimi had ever met had been her aunt, the one who sent the snow globe, and she had been born on Earth, under the iron press of too much gravity.

Under the armor Corax had been wearing several layers of padded clothing, with many belts and clips, from which dangled an assortment of rattling, chinking tools.

“Why do you live out here?” she asked, as Corax prepared her some tea down in the Scaper’s galley.

“Someone has to. When big stuff like this goes wrong, who do you think fixes it? I’m the one who’s drawn the short straw.” He turned around, conveying two steaming mugs of tea. “Actually it’s really not that bad. I’m not one for the hustle and bustle of modern Martian civilization, so the cities don’t suit me. There are a lot like us, leftovers from the old days, when the place was emptier. We keep to the margins, try not to get in anyone’s way. Bit like this Scaper, really. As long as we don’t interfere, they let us be.”

“You live in the Scaper?”

“Most of the time.” He sat down opposite Yukimi, tapping a knuckle against the metal tabletop. “These things were made two hundred years ago, during the first flush of terraforming.”

“The table?”

“The Scaper. Built to last, and to self-repair. They were supposed to keep processing the atmosphere, sucking in soil and air, for as long as it took. A thousand years, maybe more. They were designed so that they’d keep functioning—keep looking after themselves, locked on the same program—even if the rest of human civilization crashed back to Earth. Their makers were thinking long-term, making plans for things they had no real expectation of ever living to see. A bit like cathedral builders, diligently laying down stones even though the cathedral might take lifetimes to finish.” He paused and smiled, years falling from his face, albeit only for an instant. “I don’t suppose you’ve ever seen a cathedral, have you, Yukimi?”

“Have you?”

“Once or twice.”

“The Scapers were a bad idea,” Yukimi said. “That’s what my sister told me. A relic from history. The wrong way to do things.”

“Easy to say that now.” He drew a finger around the rim of his tea mug. “But it was a grand plan at the time. The grandest. At its peak, there were thousands of machines like this, crisscrossing Mars from pole to pole. It was a marvelous sight. Herds of iron buffalo. Engines of creation, forging a new world.”

“You saw them?”

He seemed to catch himself before answering. “No; I’d have to be quite impossibly old for that to be the case. But the reports were glorious. Your sister’s quite right. It was the wrong approach. But it was the only way we—they—could see at the time. So we mustn’t mock them for their mistakes. In two hundred years, someone will be just as quick to mock us for ours, if we’re not careful.”