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

“It looks ancient,” she said, trying hard not to show too much disappointment. It was scratched and dented and the white paint was coming off in places. There had once been colorful markings round the visor and crest, but they were mostly faded or rubbed away now. She could just make out the ghostly impressions where they had been.

“It is. Unquestionably. Older even than this Scaper. I know because I found it and…well.” He stroked the helmet lovingly, leaving dust tracks where his fingers had been. “There’s serious provenance here. It used to belong to someone very famous, before he went missing.”

“Who?”

“We’ll come to that tomorrow. In the meantime I thought it might be of interest. The helmet’s still in good nick—built to last. I had to swap out the power cells, but other than that I’ve done nothing to it. Do you want to try it on?”

She didn’t, really, but it seemed rude to say so. She gave an encouraging nod. Corax picked up the helmet again and shuffled around the table until he was behind her. He lowered it down gently, until the cushioned rim was resting on her shoulders. She could still breathe perfectly normally because the helmet was open at the bottom. “It smells moldy,” she said.

“Like its owner. But watch this. I’m going to activate the head-up display playback, using the external controls.” He pressed some studs on the outside of the helmet and Yukimi heard soft clicks and beeps inside.

Then everything changed.

She was still looking at Corax, still inside the galley. But overlaid on that was a transparent view of something else entirely. It was a landscape, a Martian landscape, moving slowly, rocking side to side as if someone was walking. They were coming to the edge of something, a sharp drop in the terrain. The pace slowed as the edge came nearer, and then the point of view dipped, so that Yukimi was looking down, down at her chest-pack, which looked ridiculously old and clunky, down at her heavy, dust-stained boots, down at the Martian soil, and the point where—just beyond her toes—it fell savagely away.

“The edge of Valles Marineris,” Corax told her. “The deepest canyon on Mars. It’s a long way down, isn’t it?”

Yukimi agreed. Even though she was sitting down, she still felt a twinge of vertigo.

“You can still go there, but it’s not the same,” Corax went on. “Mostly filled with water now—and it’ll only get deeper as the sea levels keep rising. Where I’m standing—where you’re standing—is now a chain of domed resort hotels. They’ll tear down the domes when the atmosphere gets thick enough to breathe, but they won’t tear down the hotels.” He paused. “Not that I’m complaining, or arguing against the terraforming program. It’ll be marvelous to see boats sailing across Martian seas, under Martian skies. To see people walking around under that sky without needing suits or domes to keep them alive. To see Earth in the morning light. We’ll have gained something incredible. But we’ll have lost something as well. I just think we should be careful not to lose sight of that.”

“We could always go back,” Yukimi said. “If we didn’t like the new Mars.”

“No,” Corax said. “That we wouldn’t be able to do. Not even if we wanted it more than anything in the world. Because once we’ve touched a world, it stays touched.” He reached over and turned off the head-up display. “Now. Shall we think about eating?”

IN THE MORNING they left the Scaper, traveling out in a small, four-wheeled buggy that came down from a ramp in the great machine’s belly. “Just a little sightseeing trip,” Corax said, evidently detecting Yukimi’s anxiety about not being back when the flier—scheduled for the afternoon—came to collect her. They were snug and warm in the buggy’s pressurized cabin, Yukimi wearing the same clothes as the day before, Corax in the same outfit he had been wearing under the armor, which—for reasons not yet clear to Yukimi—he had stowed in the buggy’s rear storage compartment.

“Will the Scaper be all right without you aboard?” Yukimi asked, as they powered out of its shadow, bouncing over small rocks and ridges.

“She’ll take care of herself for a few hours, don’t you worry.”

An awkward question pushed itself to the front of Yukimi’s mind. “Will you always be the one in charge of it?”

Corax steered the buggy around a crater before answering. “Until the people who pay for my upkeep decide otherwise.” He glanced sideways, a cockeyed grin on his face. “Why? You think old Corax’s getting too old for the job?”

“I don’t know,” she answered truthfully. “How old are you, exactly?”

“How old do you reckon?”

“Older than my aunt, and I’m not sure how old she is. She’s from Earth as well.”

“Did I say I was from Earth?”

“You mentioned cathedrals,” Yukimi said.

“I could have been there as a tourist.”

“But you weren’t.”

“No,” he said eventually. “I wasn’t. Here I’m the tourist.”

They drove on, crossing kilometers of Martian terrain. Most of the time Corax didn’t have his hands on the controls, the buggy navigating by itself. Yukimi saw tire tracks in the soil and guessed that Corax had come this way before, maybe within the last few days. As the route wound its way around obstacles, the Scaper became little more than a dark, chimney-backed hump on the horizon, seemingly fixed in place. And then even the dark hump was gone.

The ground began to dip down. Ahead, reflecting back the sun like a sheet of polished metal, was what appeared to be a large lake or even a small sea. It had a complicated, meandering shoreline. Yukimi could not see the far side, even with the buggy raised high above sea level. She did her best to memorize the shape of the lake, the way it would look from above, so that she could find it on a map. That was hard, though, so she took out the companion and opened the covers so that it recorded the view through the buggy’s forward window.

“You want to know where we are?” Corax asked.

Yukimi nodded.

“Approaching Crowe’s Landing. You ever hear of it?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Doesn’t surprise me. It’s been a ghost town for decades; I’d be surprised if it’s on any of the recent maps. It certainly won’t be on them for much longer.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’ll soon be under water.”

Corax took control of the buggy again as it completed its descent to the edge of the lake, following a zigzagging path down the sloping terrain. As they neared the water, Yukimi made out a series of sketchy shapes floating just beneath the surface: pale rectangles and circles, some of them deeper than others, and reaching a considerable distance from the shore. They looked like the shapes on some weird game board. They were, she realized, the roofs and walls of submerged buildings.

“THIS WAS A town?”

Corax nodded. “Way back when. Mars is on its second wave of history now—maybe even its third. I remember when Shalbatana was nothing, just a weather station that wasn’t even manned half the time. Crowe’s Landing was a major settlement. Not the main one, but one of the four or five largest colonies on the surface. Yes, we called them colonies back then. It was a different time. A different age.” Slowly, he guided the buggy into the waters, picking his way down what must have been a thoroughfare between two rows of buildings. With some apprehension, Yukimi watched the water lap over the tops of the wheels, and then against the side of the cabin. “It’s all right,” Corax said. “She’s fully submersible. I’ve taken her a full kilometer out, but we’re not going anywhere so far today.”