The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 29

I don’t see that owning stuff is inspiring. I want to talk about Sam.

We didn’t find any veins, or much of anything else, that first southern summer. And meanwhile Sam’s health deteriorated.

By the time we were into Promethei Lingula, I was fixing most meals and doing almost all the maintenance. After the first weeks I did all the exosuit work, because her suit couldn’t seem to keep her warm, even on hundred percent oxygen. She wore gloves and extra socks even inside. She didn’t move much, but her mind was as good as ever, and with her writing the search patterns and me going out and grabbing the rocks, we could still’ve been okay.

Except we needed to be as lucky as we’d been up in Boreas, and we just weren’t.

Look here, botterogator, you can’t make me say luck had nothing to do with it. Luck always has a shitload to do with it. Keep this quibbling up and just see if I inspire any new Martians.

Sometimes there’d be a whole day when there wasn’t a rock that was worth tossing in the hopper, or I’d cover a hundred km of nothing but common basalts and granites. Sam thought her poor concentration made her write bad search patterns, but it wasn’t that; it was plain bad luck.

Autumn came, and with it some dust storms and a sun that spiraled closer to the horizon every day, so that everything was dimmer. It was time to head north; we could sell the load, such as it was, at the depot at Hellas, but by the time we got to the Bouches de Marineris, it wouldn’t cover more than a few weeks of prospecting. We might have to mortgage again; Hsieh Chi, unfortunately, was in the Vikingsburg pen for embezzling. “Maybe we could hustle someone, like we did him.”

“Maybe I could, babe,” Sam said. “You know the business a lot better, but you’re still nobody’s sales guy, Cap. We’ve got food enough for another four months out here, and we still have credit because we’re working and we haven’t had to report our hold weight. Lots of gigs stay out for extra time—some even overwinter—and nobody can tell whether that’s because they’re way behind like us, or they’ve found a major vein and they’re exploiting it. So we can head back north, use up two months of supplies to get there, buy about a month of supplies with the cargo, go on short-term credit only, and try to get lucky in one month. Or we can stay here right till we have just enough food to run for the Hellas depot, put in four months, and have four times the chance. If it don’t work Goodspeed’ll be just as lost either way.”

“It’s going to get dark and cold,” I pointed out. “Very dark and cold. And you’re tired and cold all the time now.”

“Dark and cold outside the cabin,” she said. Her face had the stubborn set that meant this was going to be useless. “And maybe the dark’ll make me eat more. All the perpetual daylight, maybe that’s what’s screwing my system up. We’ll try the Bouches du Marineris next time, maybe those nice regular equatorial days’ll get my internal clock working again. But for right now, let’s stay here. Sure, it’ll get darker, and the storms can get bad—”

“Bad as in we could get buried, pierced by a rock on the wind, maybe even flipped if the wind gets in under the hull,” I pointed out. “Bad as in us and the sensors can only see what the spotlights can light. There’s a reason why prospecting is a summer job.”

She was quiet about that for so long I thought a miracle had happened and I’d won an argument.

Then she said, “Cap, I like it here in Goodspeed. It’s home. It’s ours. I know I’m sick, and all I can do these days is sleep, but I don’t want to go to some hospital and have you only visit on your days off from a labor crew. Goodspeed is ours and I want to live here and try to keep it.”

So I said yes.

For a while things got better. The first fall storms were water snow, not CO₂. I watched the weather reports and we were always buttoned up tight for every storm, screens out and treads sealed against the fine dust. In those brief weeks between midnight sun and endless night, when the sun rises and sets daily in the Promethei Lingula, the thin coat of snow and frost actually made the darker rocks stand out on the surface, and there were more good ones to find, too.

Sam was cold all the time; sometimes she’d cry with just wanting to be warm. She’d eat, when I stood over her and made her, but she had no appetite. I also knew how she thought: Food was the bottleneck. A fusion box supplied centuries of power to move, to compress and process the Martian air into breathability, to extract and purify water. But we couldn’t grow food, and unlike spare parts or medical care we might need now and then, we needed food every day, so food would be the thing we ran out of first. (Except maybe luck, and we were already out of that). Since she didn’t want the food anyway, she thought if she didn’t eat we could stay out and give our luck more of a chance to turn.

The sun set for good; so far south, Phobos was below the horizon; cloud cover settled in to block the stars. It was darker than anywhere I’d ever been. We stayed.

There was more ore in the hold but not enough more. Still no vein. We had a little luck at the mouth of one dry wash with a couple tons of ore in small chunks, but it played out in less than three weeks.

Next place that looked at all worth trying was 140 km south, almost at the edge of the permanent cap, crazy and scary to try, but what the hell, everything about this was crazy and scary.

The sky had cleared for the first time in weeks when we arrived. With just a little CO₂ frost, it was easy to find rocks—the hot lights zapped the dry ice right off them. I found one nice big chunk of wolframite, the size of an old trunk, right off the bat, and then two smaller ones; somewhere up the glacial slopes from here, there was a vein, perhaps not under permanent ice. I started the analytic program mapping slopes and finds, and went out in the suit to see if I could find and mark more rocks.

Markeb, which I’d learned to pick out of the bunched triangles of the constellation Vela, was just about dead overhead; it’s the south pole star on Mars. It had been a while since I’d seen the stars, and I’d learned more about what I was looking at. I picked out the Coal Sack, the Southern Cross, and the Magellanic Clouds easily, though honestly, on a clear night at the Martian south pole, that’s like being able to find an elephant in a bathtub.

I went inside; the analysis program was saying that probably the wolframite had come from way up under the glacier, so no luck there, but also that there might be a fair amount of it lying out here in the alluvial fan, so at least we’d pick up something here. I stood up from the terminal; I’d fix dinner, then wake Sam, feed her, and tell her the semi-good news.

When I came in with the tray, Sam was curled up, shivering and crying. I made her eat all her soup and bread, and plugged her in to breathe straight body-temperature oxygen. When she was feeling better, or at least saying she was, I took her up into the bubble to look at the stars with the lights off. She seemed to enjoy that, especially that I could point to things and show them to her, because it meant I’d been studying and learning.

Yeah, botterogator, reinforce that learning leads to success. Sam’d like that.

“Cap,” she said, “This is the worst it’s been, babe. I don’t think there’s anything on Mars that can fix me. I just keep getting colder and weaker. I’m so sorry—”

“I’m starting for Hellas as soon as we get you wrapped up and have pure oxygen going into you in the bed. I’ll drive as long as I can safely, then—”

“It won’t make any difference. You’ll never get me there, not alive,” she said. “Babe, the onboard diagnostic kit isn’t perfect but it’s good enough to show I’ve got the heart of a ninety-year-old cardiac patient. And all the indicators have gotten worse in just the last hundred hours or so. Whatever I’ve got, it’s killing me.” She reached out and stroked my tear-soaked face. “Poor Cap. Make me two promises.”

“I’ll love you forever.”

“I know. I don’t need you to promise that. First promise, no matter where you end up, or doing what, you learn. Study whatever you can study, acquire whatever you can acquire, feed your mind, babe. That’s the most important.”

I nodded. I was crying pretty hard.

“The other one is kind of weird… well, it’s silly.”

“If it’s for you, I’ll do it. I promise.”

She gasped, trying to pull in more oxygen than her lungs could hold. Her eyes were flowing too. “I’m scared to be buried out in the cold and the dark, and I can’t stand the idea of freezing solid. So… don’t bury me. Cremate me. I want to be warm.”

“But you can’t cremate a person on Mars,” I protested. “There’s not enough air to support a fire, and—”

“You promised,” she said, and died.