so keep them coming.
“Be merciful, Dormeuse. Arasty.”
“I am, little hunter. With you I truly am. Normally I grant the beautiful lie, tell those I am about to rob of life, light and limb, beauty, eons of youth, of how normally death is what makes lives, cultures, ultimately defines civilization. I remind them that it’s right that immortals should reach a point of idle curiosity and need to be challenged, extended, tested. I tell them that whatever their fates individually, those I kill or hurt are helping maintain the tenor of life for all.”
“But you’re actually culling.”
“Avenging. It’s simpler.”
“Out of envy.”
“Bad enough in life. But when it’s all there is, all that’s left, it fills the largest cup, becomes a vast power. I phrase it so they think they will be spared somehow. That they are different and special. To some I even suggest that their personalities will join mine in the tomb matrix. Then, when there is hope, when vanity and optimism is there in hints and the absolute conviction of ego, then I cripple and kill, then I bring them to the worst of hells, to such terrible insurmountable despair. You I have spared this anguish, Beni.”
“Spared me! By telling me the truth?”
“Yes.”
“But I can’t believe you, can I? Not after what you’ve just said.”
“You really should. Look at your display.”
Beni did, saw how simply, elegantly, the tomb’s long-dead owner, this printing of her anyway, had expressed his dilemma.
A maze. He was in a maze. He did not know what to say.
Arasty, the ghost of her, smiled. “Well?”
“Never be importunate, I was always told. Never beg.”
“I’ve told you I’m being merciful. I might listen.”
“All right. Don’t kill me.”
“I won’t.”
“Don’t maim me.”
“I won’t.”
“Let me return.” As part of the trap, he didn’t say, refusing to go so far.
“Earn it.”
“I need to think. Concentrate.”
“Shall I leave?”
“You’d still be here. You’re in the walls.”
“True. The tomb.”
“The trap.”
“The trap, yes. My personality is coded through all this. But it would be easier for you to concentrate.”
And the intercept vanished, took away her glow, left only dim yellow lamplight, tunnelling, vitreous, intimate darkness without her darkling eyes.
Beni stopped, pretended to think, triggered his implant, saw again the plan of her tomb picked out in light, saw that he was at the central chamber, the structural heart of what this thwarted, predatory, former woman had become. Out of despair.
“Oh, Dormeuse, Dormeuse,” he murmured. “I am so sorry.” Imagining how it had to be, the eighty-five labouring over the final secret plan, the hate and loss in their hearts as all the others sailed blissfully on, away, abandoning.
What choice then. What choice now. For them both.
“We can change this,” he said, resolved, striding on to his goal, though he did believe he was already there. “We can make a start here. Try to be friends. Let me try to be that, Arasty. At least try to be that.”
“Yes,” the tomb said, the walls, the night, as he strode on in his cone of yellow light into the endlessness of the hill. “And that is why.”
OUTSIDE the Nothing Stones pull and pull and will forever pull, drawing in the emptiness of infinity, the blackness of eyes made hard, so unforgivingly hard. She is punitive and spiteful and so so determined. It is all she will ever have.
Beni strides on with his young man’s dreams-of success, of being different, better than the best, with his wonderful new dream of achieving something more, something new. He walks into night and does not see the final reading, does not know just how merciful she has been, that this time there is mercy, as much of it as there can ever be. He believes he can still be the greatest of them all. He still believes Ramirez is someone else.
WINNING MARS by Jason Stoddard
Death came as nothing more than a thin white line in the light blue Martian sky. Like a single strand of spider- silk, gossamer and insubstantial. There was no sound.
Glenn shivered. He’d almost picked Nandir’s route, which seemed easier on the rolling and flying legs but more difficult on the Overland Challenge to the travel pod. Perfect for him and-
“Come on!” Alena said, over the local comm. She was standing thirty feet in front of him, looking back, her face twisted into an angry mask.
“We just lost Nandir.”
“I’m going to lose
“Don’t you care?”
An inarticulate growl. Then a sigh. They were, after all, all camera, all the time. “Of course I care. But I want to win.”
Glenn shook his head. He bounced over to her and tried to take her hand, but she pulled away. “Not now!” she said. Her normally full lips were compressed into a thin line, the soft arcs of her face pulled into something harder and more brutal. The face he used to love. The face he still loved.
She bounded away and he hurried to catch up. She’d made it clear that they were only back together for this one ultimate challenge, bigger than Everest, bigger than freeclimbing Half-Dome, bigger than marathoning the Utah desert, bigger than swimming the English Channel, bigger than their four-year marriage, bigger than anything he could give.
He caught up and tried to give her a smile. She looked ahead grimly. The terrain was getting more rugged. Ahead of them rose part of Ius Chasma, a two-thousand-foot near-vertical wall they would have to freeclimb to reach their transpo pod.
The low gravity was both a blessing and a curse. Glenn was still getting used to what he could do. The squeezesuit and header made him top-heavy, throwing off his balance, but his total weight here was still less than
