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

They were driving along a hard surface, so even though the buggy’s wheels were underwater, they didn’t stir up much material. The water was clear enough that Yukimi could see for tens of meters in all directions. As the road sloped down, the sea gradually closed over the cockpit bubble and it was almost possible to believe that they were just driving through a normal, albeit strangely unpopulated, district of Shalbatana City. The buildings were rectangles, cylinders, and domes, all with small black windows and circular, airlock style doors set out from the main structure in rounded porches. There must never have been a bubble around Crowe’s Landing, so the buildings would have been the inhabitants’ only protection from the atmosphere. Yukimi guessed that there were tunnels linking them together, sunk under the road level. Even the newer communities like Shalbatana—and it was strange now to think of her hometown as “new”—had underground tunnels, maintained to provide emergency shelter and communication should something untoward happen to the bubble. Yukimi had been down into them during school field trips.

She wasn’t alone—she was in the cabin with Corax—but there was still something spooky about driving slowly through this deserted colony. She wished Corax hadn’t called it a ghost town, and while she understood that he hadn’t meant that the place was literally haunted, she couldn’t turn her imagination off. As the light wavered down from the overlying sea, she kept seeing faces appear in the windows, brief and spectral like paper cutouts held there for a moment. Once they turned a corner and passed another kind of buggy, left parked there as if its owners had only just abandoned it. But it was a very old-fashioned looking buggy, and the symbols painted on its side reminded her of the faded markings on the old space helmet.

Eventually Corax brought the buggy to a halt.

“We’re here,” he said grandly. “The objective. You see that building to our right, the one shaped like an old-fashioned hat box?”

“Yes,” Yukimi said dubiously.

“It’s still airtight, unlike most of the others. Because of that, it’s watertight as well. And the airlock’s still functioning—there’s just enough power in the mechanism for another cycle. Do you see where I’m headed?”

“Not really.”

“Crowe’s Landing is almost gone now, and in a hundred years it’ll be completely forgotten. The seas will rise, Mars will be greened. A whole new civilization will bloom and prosper. You’ll be part of that, Yukimi—when you’re older. You’ll see wonderful things and live to tell your grandchildren of the way it used to be, before the change-clouds finished their work.” He smiled. “I envy you. I’ve lived a very long time—the drugs weren’t always the best, but at least I had a ready supply—but my time’s coming to an end now and you’ll outlive me by centuries, if luck’s on your side.”

Yukimi thought of all the things in her life that were not the way she wanted. “I don’t think it is.”

“I’m not sure. That airship could have carried on to Milankovic, and then where would you be?”

“Hm,” she said, remaining to be convinced.

“I had an idea,” Corax said. “Not long after I found this place and this building. Mars is changing now and the seas will rise. But they won’t stay that way forever. One day—a thousand or ten thousand years from now, maybe more—the seas will shrink again. People will have other worlds to green by then, and maybe they’ll let Mars return to its primal state. Whatever happens, Crowe’s Landing will eventually come out of the waters. And that building will still be there. Still airtight.”

“You can’t be sure.”

“It’s a fair bet. Stronger odds of surviving than anything left on the surface, with everything that’s to come. Soon there’ll be woods and forests out there, and where there aren’t woods and forests there’ll be cities and people. There’ll be weather and storms and history. But none of that will reach down here. This building’s as close to a time capsule as we’re going to find. Which is why we’ve come.” He tapped a few commands into the buggy’s console and stood up creakily. “That helmet I found? It used to belong to Crowe, one of the very first explorers.”

“Can you be sure?”

“Reasonably. As I said, it’s got provenance.” He paused. “I’m going to put the helmet in there. It’s a piece of the past, a memento of the way Mars used to be. Not just a chunk of metal and plastic but a historical document, a living record. I only played back a tiny part of what’s stored in that helmet. That old fool captured thousands of hours, and that’s not including all the log entries he made, all the thoughts he put down for posterity. An old man’s ramblings…but maybe it’ll be of interest to someone. And it’ll all still be inside that helmet when they find it again.”

Yukimi had trouble thinking much further in the future than her seventeenth birthday, when she would receive the golden gateway into the aug. Everything was a blank after that. Centuries, thousands of years—what difference did it make?

“Will anyone understand it?”

“They may have to work at it,” Corax allowed. “But that’s what historians and archaeologists do. And I was thinking: while we’re at it, why don’t we give them something else to puzzle over, in addition to the helmet?”

Yukimi thought for a moment. “You mean my companion?”

“Your thoughts and observations aren’t any less valid than Corax’s. You’ll miss your diary, of course, and maybe you’ll have some explaining to do to your sister when she finds out what happened to it—assuming you tell her, of course. But in the meantime, think what you’ll have done. You’ll have sent a message to the future. A gift from the past to a Martian civilization that doesn’t even exist yet. No matter what happens, you’ll have made your mark.”

“No one’s interested in what I have to say,” Yukimi said.

“Don’t put yourself down. Look, there’s still time to make another entry. Tell them how you got here. Tell them how you feel today, tell them what made you run away from home yesterday. Be angry. Be sad. Get it out of your system.”

“I’ve got to go back to it later.”

“Believe me, this will help. When everything seems like it couldn’t get any worse, you’ll always be able to tell yourself: I did this one brilliant thing, this one brilliant thing that no one else has ever or will ever do. And that makes me special.”

She thought about the companion. It had been a gift from Shirin and—for all that it was dog-eared, and not the smartest in the world—she had treated it with fondness. It reminded her of her older sister. It reminded her of the good times they had spent together, before Shirin bored of childhood games and started looking to the skies, dreaming of worlds to make anew.

But had Shirin really cared? It had been easy for her to promise to keep her side of the bargain, before she said good-bye. Yukimi sometimes wondered if her sister had given her more than a moment’s thought except for the times when her conscience prickled her into sending a message.

“I cared,” Yukimi said to herself. “Even if you didn’t.”

She still had the companion in her hands from when she had shown it the lake.

“You want a moment to yourself?” Corax asked.

Yukimi nodded.

SHE STAYED IN the submerged buggy while he took the helmet and the companion into the airtight building. He went out in the underwater armor, a monster born anew. But when he had taken a few paces away from the buggy and turned back to wave, Yukimi waved back. She couldn’t see his face, but she knew it was Corax inside now, and while the armor was still monstrous, it was no longer frightening. Corax had been kind to her, and on some level he had seemed to understand what she was going through.