Zima Blue and Other Stories Read online

  ‘Well now, that wouldn’t actually be very nice, would it?’

  The man had appeared at the table like a ghost. I looked at him as he lowered himself into the other chair, and then I sighed, shaking my head.

  ‘Christ. You could have at least made an effort to look like Grossart, even if being on time was beyond you.’

  ‘Sorry about that. You know how it is with us Martians and punctuality. Or I’m assuming you used to.’

  My hackles rose. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Well, you’ve been on Earth for a while, haven’t you?’ He snapped his fingers at the waiter, which had begun to work its way back across the ceiling. ‘We’re like the Japanese, really - we never truly trust anyone who goes away and comes back. Two coffees, please.’

  I flinched as a diver zipped by. ‘Make that one . . .’ I started saying, but the waiter had already left.

  ‘See, you’re committed now.’

  I gave the balding, late-middle-aged man another appraisal. ‘You’re not Jim Grossart. You’re not even close. I’ve seen more convincing—’

  ‘Elvis impersonators?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s what they said about Elvis when he came out of hiding. That he didn’t look the way they’d been expecting.’

  ‘I haven’t got a clue who or what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Of course you haven’t,’ he said, hurriedly apologetic. ‘Nor should you. It’s my fault - I keep forgetting that not everyone remembers things from as far back as I do.’ He gestured towards my vacant chair. ‘Now, why don’t you sit down so that we can talk properly?’

  ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’

  ‘And I suppose me saying shit at this point wouldn’t help matters?’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘You’re going to have to do much better than that.’

  It was the word, of course - but him knowing it was hardly startling. I wouldn’t have come to Mars if someone hadn’t contacted my agency with it. The problem was that man didn’t seem to be the one I’d been looking for.

  It all went back a long time.

  I’d made my name covering big stories around Earth - I was the only journalist in Vatican City during the Papal Reboot - but before that I’d been a moderately respected reporter on Mars. I’d covered many stories, but the one of which I was proudest had concerned the first landing, an event that had become murkier and more myth-ridden with every passing decade. It was generally assumed that Jim Grossart and the others had died during the turmoil, but I’d shown that this wasn’t necessarily the case. No body had ever been found, after all. The turmoil could just as easily have been an opportunity to vanish out of the public eye, before the pressure of fame became too much. And it was worth remembering that the medical breakthrough that triggered the turmoil in the first place could have allowed anyone from that era to remain alive until now, even though the Hydra’s landing had been a century ago.

  I’d known even then that it was a long shot, but - by deliberately omitting a single fact that I’d uncovered during my investigations - I’d left a way to be contacted.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Let me fill you in on some background. The first word spoken on Mars was shit - we agree on that - but not everyone knows I said it because I lost my footing on the next-to-last rung of the ladder.’

  I allowed my eyebrows to register the tiniest amount of surprise, no more than that. He continued: ‘They edited it out of the transmission without anyone noticing. There was already a twenty-minute delay on messages back to Earth, so no one noticed the extra few seconds due to the censorship software. Remember how Neil Armstrong fluffed his lines on the Moon? No one was going to let that happen again.’

  The waiter arrived with our coffees, hanging from the ceiling by its four rear limbs while the long front pair placed steaming bowls on the table. The waiter’s cheap brown fur didn’t quite disguise its underlying robotic skeleton.

  ‘Actually I think it was Louis who fluffed his lines,’ I said.

  ‘Louis?’

  ‘Armstrong.’ I took a sip of my coffee, the deep butterscotch colour of a true Martian sky. ‘The first man on the Moon. But I’ll let that pass.’

  He waved a hand, dismissing his error. ‘Whatever. The point is - or was - that everything said on Mars was relayed to Earth via the Hydra. But she didn’t just boost the messages; she also kept a copy, burned onto a memory chip. And nothing on the chip was censored.’

  I took another cautious sip from the bowl. I’d forgotten how we Martians liked our drinks: beer in Viking-impressing steins and coffee in the sort of bowl from which Genghis Khan might have sipped koumiss after a good day’s butchering.

  ‘Tell me how I found the chip and I might stay to finish this.’

  ‘That I can’t know for sure.’

  ‘Ah.’ I smiled. ‘The catch.’

  ‘No, it’s just that I don’t know who Eddie might have sold the chip to. But Eddie was definitely the man I sold it to. He was a Rastafarian, dealing in trinkets from early Martian history. But the last time I saw Eddie was a fair few decades ago.’

  This was, all of a sudden, beginning to look like less of a wasted trip. ‘Eddie’s just about still in business,’ I said, remembering the smell of ganja wafting through his mobile scavenger caravan out on the gentle slopes of the Ares Vallis. ‘He never sold the chip, except to me, when I was making my investigations for the Hydra piece.’

  He pushed himself back in his seat. ‘So. Are you prepared to accept that I’m who I say I am?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Yet.’

  ‘But you’re less sceptical than a few minutes ago?’

  ‘Possibly,’ I said, all that I was going to concede there and then.

  ‘Listen, the way I look isn’t my fault. The Grossart you know from your investigations was a kid, a thirty-year-old man.’

  ‘But you must have obtained longevity treatment at some point, or we wouldn’t be having this conversation.’

  ‘Correct, but it wasn’t the instant the treatment arrived on Mars. Remember that if the treatment had been easily obtainable, there wouldn’t have been any turmoil. And I was too busy vanishing to worry about it immediately.’ He rubbed a hand along his crown: weathered red skin fringed by a bristly white tonsure. ‘My physiological age is about seventy, even though I was born one hundred and thirty-two years ago.’

  I looked at him more closely now, thinking back to the images of Jim Grossart with which I’d become familiar all those years ago. His face had been so devoid of character - so much a blank canvas - that it had always seemed pointless trying to guess how he would look when he was older. And yet none of my expectations were actually contradicted by the man sitting opposite me.

  ‘If you are Jim Grossart—’ My voice was low now.

  ‘There’s no “if” about it, Carrie.’

  ‘Then why the hell have you waited seventeen years to speak to me?’

  He smiled. ‘Finished with that coffee?’

  We left Sloths and took an elevator up sixteen city levels to the place where the divers were jumping off. They started the drop from a walkway that jutted out from the city’s side for thirty metres, tipped by a ring-shaped platform. Brightly clothed divers waited around the ring - it only had railings on the outside - and now and then one of them would step into the middle and drop. Sometimes they went down in pairs or threes; sometimes joined together. Breathing equipment and a squirrel-suit were all they ever wore; no one ever carried a parachute or a rocket harness.

  It looked a lot like suicide. Sometimes, that was just what it was.

  ‘That’s got to be fun,’ Grossart said, the two of us still snug within the pressurised viewing gallery.

  ‘Yes. If you’re clinically insane.’

  I immediately wanted to bite back what I’d just said, but Grossart seemed unoffended.

  ‘Oh, cliff diving can’t be that difficult - not if you’ve got a reasonably intuitive grasp of the Navier
-Stokes equations and a few basic aerodynamic principles. You can even rent two-person squirrel-suits over there.’

  ‘Don’t even think about it.’

  ‘Heights not your thing?’ he said, turning - to my immense relief - away from the window. ‘Not very Martian of you.’

  He was right, though I didn’t like admitting it. Gravity on Mars was only slightly less than two-fifths of Earth’s - not enough to make much difference if you were planning on falling more than a few metres - but it was enough to ensure that Martians grew up experiencing few of the bruising collisions between bone and ground that people on Earth took for granted. Martians viewed heights the way the rest of humanity viewed electricity: merely understood to be dangerous, rather than something felt in the pit of the stomach.

  And I’d been away too damned long.

  ‘C’mon,’ I said. ‘Let’s check out the tourist junk. My great-greatgrandmother’ll never forgive me if I don’t send her back something seriously tacky.’

  Grossart and I went into one of the shops that lined the canyon-side wall of the viewing gallery, pushing past postcard stands flanking the door. The shops were busy, but no one gave us a second glance.

  ‘Christ, look at this,’ Grossart said, hefting a paperweight. It was a snow-filled dome with a model of the Hydra parked on a red plastic base. There was even a replica of Grossart, a tiny spacesuited figure not much smaller than the lander itself.

  ‘Tasteful,’ I said. ‘Or, at least, it is compared to this.’ I held up a keyring, shaped like a sloth if you were feeling generous.

  ‘No, that’s definitely at the quality end of the merchandise. Look.’ Grossart picked up an amber stone and read from the label. ‘“Sloth healing crystal. This gem modifies and focuses the body’s natural chromodynamic fields, ensuring mental and physical harmony.”’

  ‘You can’t prove it doesn’t, can you?’

  ‘No, but I think Brad Treichler might have a few interesting things to say to the proprietor.’

  I perked up at the mention of the Hydra’s geologist. ‘I’d like to meet Treichler as well. And Manuel D’Oliveira, while we’re at it. Is it possible?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I mean here, today.’

  ‘I know what you mean, and - yes - it’s possible. They’re all here, after all.’

  ‘And you don’t mind speaking about them?’

  ‘Not at all.’ He put down the stone. ‘Those guys kept me alive, Carrie. I’ll never forget the debt I owe them.’

  ‘I think we all owe them one, in that case.’ As I spoke I rummaged through a rack of what purported to be recordings of sloth compositions, some of which were combined with whale sounds or Eskimo throat music. ‘Having said that, seeing this must be depressing beyond words.’

  ‘Why, because I was the first man on Mars?’ He shook his head. ‘I know how you think I should feel. Like Elvis in Graceland’s souvenir shop, inspecting an exquisite plastic dashboard figurine of himself. White jump-suits and hamburgers era, of course.’

  I looked at him blankly.

  ‘But I’m not horrified, Carrie. As a matter of fact it actually amuses me.’

  I examined a garment displayed prominently on a shelf. My best friend went to Strata City, Mars, and all I got was this lousy T-shirt, it said on the front.

  ‘I find that pretty hard to believe, Jim.’

  ‘Then you don’t really understand me. What did you think I wanted? Reverence? No. I came to Mars to begin the process of human colonisation. That’s why others followed me, because I took that first, difficult step. Oh, and it was difficult, believe me - but I made it all the same.’

  I nodded. Though seventeen years had passed since I’d written the piece on the landing, I remembered it all: how Jim Grossart had left Earth on a privately funded expedition done the cheap way - done, in fact, more cheaply than anyone else ever thought possible - with only a vague idea of how to get back from Mars afterwards. His sponsors were going to send out supplies, and then more settlers, until there was a self-sustaining colony. Eventually they’d send a bigger ship to take back anyone who wanted to return, but the expectation was that few people would plan on leaving for good. And that, more or less, was how it had happened - but Grossart’s crossing had been every bit as difficult as it had been expected to be, and there had been enough crises along the way to push him to the edge of sanity, and - perhaps - slightly beyond.

  It all depended, I supposed, on what you meant by sanity.

  Grossart continued: ‘You know what would worry me more? A planet that took its past too seriously. Because that would mean there was something human we hadn’t brought with us.’

  ‘What, the ineffable tendency to produce and consume tasteless tourist crap?’

  ‘Something like that, yes.’ And then he held up a crude plastic mask to his face, and suddenly I was looking at the face of the man I had hoped to meet in Sloths, the young Jim Grossart.

  ‘I don’t think you need to worry,’ I said.

  Grossart returned the mask to a tray with a hundred others, just as the manager of the shop started eyeing us unwelcomingly. ‘No, I don’t think I do. Now . . .’ He beamed and rubbed his hands together. ‘You know what I’m going to suggest, don’t you?’

  He was looking out of the shop, back towards the jump-off point.

  I suppose the technical term was blackmail. I wanted a story (or at least some idea of why Grossart had contacted me after all these years), and he wanted to take the big dive. More than that, he wanted to do the dive with someone else.

  ‘Look,’ I said. ‘If it’s such a big deal, can’t you just do it and I’ll see you at the bottom? Or back here?’

  ‘And what if I decided to vanish again? You’d kick yourself, wouldn’t you, for letting me out of your sight?’

  ‘Very possibly, but at least I’d have the satisfaction of knowing I hadn’t been talked into doing something monumentally stupid.’

  We were already in the line for the squirrel-suits. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But you’d also have to live with the knowledge that - when you come to write this up, as I know you will - you won’t be able to include the sequence in which you took the big dive with Captain Jim Grossart.’

  I looked at him coldly. ‘Bastard.’

  But he was right: personal fear was one thing, compromising a story another.

  ‘Now there’s no need for that.’

  ‘Just tell me you know what you’re doing, all right?’

  ‘Well, of course I do. Sort of.’

  We got our squirrel-suits. The first thing you did was attach the breathing and comms gear. Each suit had only a few minutes of air, but that was all you needed. The suits themselves were lurid skin-tight affairs, padded and marked with glowing logos and slogans. They were so named because they had folds of elastic material sewn between the arms and legs, like the skin of a flying squirrel - enough to double your surface area during a fall. Mine was only moderately stiff across the chest and belly, but Grossart’s had a fifteen-centimetre-thick extra layer of frontal armour. We settled on our helmets, locked our visors down and established that we could communicate.

  ‘I’m really not pushing you into this,’ Grossart said.

  ‘No, merely playing on the fact that I’m a mercenary bitch who’ll do practically anything for a story. Let’s just get this over with, shall we?’

  We filtered through the airlock that led to the jumping-off stage. Strata City reached away on either side for several hundred metres; buildings crammed as close as the wall’s topology would allow. Pressurised walkways snaked between the larger structures, while elevator tubes and staircases connected the city’s levels. Not far above, perched on the canyon’s lip, a series of large hotel complexes thrust their neon signs against the early dusk sky: Hilton, Holiday Inn, Best Martian.

  Then - realising as I did so that it was probably going to be a bad idea - I looked down. The city continued below us for several kilometres, before thinning out into an expanse o
f sheer, smooth canyon wall that dropped away even more sickeningly. The Valles Marineris was the deepest canyon on Mars, and now that its deepest parts were in shadow, all I could see at the bottom was a concentrated sprinkling of very tiny, distant-looking lights.

  ‘I hope to God you know what you’re doing, Jim.’

  At the end of the platform an attendant coupled us together, me riding Grossart. With my legs bound together and my arms anchored uncomfortably against my sides, I was little more than a large deadweight on his back.

  Another attendant unplugged our air lines from the platform’s outlets, so that we were breathing from the suits. Then we shuffled forwards and waited our turn.