A Short, Sharp Shock

  It was a long night. When dawn came and light leaked back into the world, in the hour when everything was made of translucent slabs of gray, Thel looked at the swimmer and observed that her whole shape was changing; torso longer, feet longer, ribs visible but not quite human, she was making a slow transformation back to something clearly aquatic—as she had always been, but now it was more pronounced, obvious that her race had descended from some fluid water mammal. She would be forced to crawl all the time if the transformation continued. And if her joints felt anything like his … he exerted the discipline, peered through the black haze of pain, saw that his own legs were thicker and his arms longer and heavier: it was a comfortable prospect to walk on all fours, and climbing the endless granite staircase of the spine was in some senses a happy challenge. Tree ancestor, he thought, and the image of a quick beautiful creature came into his mind, with the word baboon.

  When the sun rose behind them, he looked at the ridge ahead carefully. This was the time of day when Tinou, looking back into the western dawn, would have trouble spotting them; while they looked up the ridge for him with the blaze of a nearby star as their spotlight. And eventually Thel’s patience was rewarded. A head popped over the rock, just above and beyond them, a few minutes’ walk only, and Tinou emerged, looked back blindly into the sun, and then hiked east up the ridge trail.

  All that day they hunted him, hiding when he looked back, and so losing some ground on him. In pain as they were they could not keep pace with him in any case. But after sunset they caught sight of him, settling for the night at a flat spot in the trail.

  There was still a trace of dusk in the sky when they crawled silently over the granite knobs to his camp. He was sleeping in the trails sand, rolled in a blanket, or so they thought; but as they crept toward him his eyes opened, the whites reflecting starlight so that it seemed two glittery little jewels had popped into being, and with a laugh he said, “What persistent little things, crawling around in the night! Come out in the open, my little ones!”

  He was standing over them. “My, my.” Amusement made his beautiful voice bounce musically, a low fast burble. “A monkey and a water rat, it seems! Following me all this way, whatever for?” He loomed over Thel, and anger threaded into the amusement: “What kind of creature jumps through the mirror, eh? What kind of thing?”

  But Thel and the swimmer were long past the snare of language, long past even much hearing Tinou’s beautiful voice. He seemed to recognize this, for when they stood and approached him, spreading out to come at him from two sides, he retreated to the flat spot and his blanket.

  “We want the mirror,” Thel croaked, shuffling in toward him, sidling at angles in hopes of getting close more quickly than Tinou could notice. “Give it to us and we’ll call it quits.”

  Tinou laughed and reached down into his blankets, pulled out the mirror bag. He held it out, then swung it around to throw it over the cliff into the southern sea—but he had not reckoned on Thel’s new animal swiftness, and the bag crashed into Thel’s upper arm as Thel rushed forward, and quicker than Thel could react or plan his numbed arm had caught Tinou by the throat and the claws of his other hand were raking Tinou’s face and knocking aside the flailing arms and then with tremendous force he caught up the sorcerer’s head in both hands and threw the man’s whole body to the ground. The swimmer dove and bit the bent and exposed neck, and awkwardly she got to her feet and they stood watching Tinou’s blood drain out of him. Mortality, how strange: that Tinou, who had given them so much, was now gone! That he had left no more behind than this! It was hard to grasp.

  Thel recovered the mirror bag and checked inside it; the mirror was unbroken, its surface the color of the sky some hour or two before. Meanwhile the swimmer had taken a knife from Tinou’s bag, then found a firestone and clapper. The skeleton of a dead juniper stood twisted in the lee of boulders protecting the flat, and they broke it apart right down to the ground, bashing it with rocks they could barely lift. Thel started a fire while the swimmer cut away the skin over Tinou’s thighs and buttocks, and hacked out big steaks that they roasted on sticks of juniper. When they were full they slept all the way through to dawn, warmed by the coals of the fire, and their first real meal in weeks.

  THIRTY

  THE GREEN FLASH

  They woke in the late morning and hiked on, continuing eastward without discussion; it seemed clear to Thel that it was necessary, that they could not recross the mirror’s smooth barrier on the site of Tinou’s murder. That, in fact, there was a specific moment when it would be possible, a time and a place of which he knew nothing. They would have to watch. Without speaking of it he knew the swimmer had come to the same conclusion.

  So they hiked on. The spine continued to rise, a granite wall splitting the sea, curving sinuously left and right, its top edge shattered over the eons into a broken split serrated knife edge of a ridge, rising unevenly as they crawled ant-like along it. Often they crawled in the literal sense, as it was too painful and precipitous to walk. The moss grew less frequently here and they were often hungry, they often recalled the delicious meal of Tinou and regretted bitterly not staying to eat all of him, or at least not taking with them his heart and liver, they drooled thinking of it. “But livers make you mad,” Thel said, “someone told me. Livers and life.”

  Hunger made them light and they found they could almost float up smaller arêtes, just a touch here and there on the rough grainy rock, something to keep them from blowing away—to keep their shells from blowing away—everything inside having danced off on the wind. Once Thel tried to tell the swimmer how he felt about that, and he couldn’t find the words to express it. He listened to the thin slow trickle of his thoughts and was surprised to hear how simple it had become: I am climbing. I will always climb. The ocean is far below. That is a rock. I hope we find some moss. These were his thoughts. And all that great whirling maelstrom of feeling and significance, of meaning: on the other side of the mirror, back down the peninsula among his forgotten friends, adventures, hopes, loves, dreams. All the dreams forgotten in the moment of waking, the flight that mattered so much … it was strange to no longer desire his desires, to look at the swimmer and see a broken ancient animal, to understand that all their love had been a way of fixing time, each embrace a moment’s touch of the eternal, because the caress preserves. And yet here he crawled, something like a baboon, long knuckled hairy claws at the end of furred forearms, next to something like an otter, and only her eyes remained hers, the face he remembered mostly gone, but all of it evoked by those calm black eyes unfogged by the pain that crippled her gait, clear and calm and looking around, still capable of that small ironic amused squint, as when she laid her forearm next to his and said, “Now you see why we never had children.”

  They had come from different worlds. They spoke different languages. What they had shared had been at least partly illusion. And yet, and yet, and yet … He took comfort in limping along the trail beside her, before her, behind her, thumping shoulders together or sharing moss they found. Beauty is only the beginning of terror, but just to have company, to share the news: there is a block of pink quartz. The seas look high. The wind is strong. And so the terror is staved off. Through black haze, beauty still perceived.

  The ridge became deeply serrated, peaks like the teeth of a crude saw, making progress nearly impossible. Why go on?, Thel thought one morning, but then the swimmer started off, scrambling up a broken cliff, using all fours, and he followed. Why was one of the questions that had gone away. Pain clouded his vision. A birds nest gave them a feast. A storm left them soaked and cold. Near its end lightning shattered the peak above them, leaving their ears blasted, their nerves tingling, the strong smell of ozone in the wind. The shock of it seemed to invigorate the swimmer and she led all the next day with a will, over peak after peak, and down into deep cols. Their bodies were continuing to devolve, and only this allowed them to continue; now she could slither up rock, and how he could cling!

&nbs
p; Then late one afternoon they made their way slowly over a hump of granite, and on the other side of it the peninsula dropped off into the sea, and came to an end.

  It did so in a sheer clean prow, so smooth that it had to have been crafted. Also there was a smoothed waist-high wall to each side, bowing in and meeting at an angle, at the final point of the ridge. They walked out to the meeting of the two walls and leaned out to look. Clearly in some past age some civilization had come here and cut the granite cape smooth, creating two polished curving walls that came together in a straight edge which dropped to the sea in a single swoop, a clean crease like the bowline of a great ship. It was a drop, Thel estimated, of about ten thousand feet.

  They walked around on this last forecastle, south to north and back again, looking down at the workmanship of the two cliffsides. The polished granite was a flecked color, an infinitely dense mix of feldspar, quartz, and hornblende, so that just below them it appeared speckled like a trout, while farther down it seemed only a pinkish brown, like a kind of marble. Stones that Thel dropped over the walls skipped down and disappeared, and he never even saw them mar the dark blue of the sea.

  It was nearly sunset. The swimmer wandered about, collecting rocks and laying them on the triangular block where the two walls met, the outermost point. Thel asked what she was doing and she smiled, gesturing at the mirror bag. “This must be the place, yes?”

  Thel shivered, looked around. They could see for many, many miles, and the horizon was a clear sharp line between sea and sky; but the air was somehow thick, the sunlight in it dark. He took the mirror from the bag and put it on the final tip of the wall, held it in place with the rocks the swimmer had gathered. The eastern sky was full of the setting sun’s yellow, and the mirror’s surface glowed like a lens, as if scooping up all the beautiful sunlight in the world and flinging it westward, in a single coherent beam. “But what will we do?” Thel asked.

  The swimmer stretched and stood on her hind legs, pointing with one foreleg at the glass. “At the last moment of sunset we will leap through,” she said happily. But she was a sea creature, and this was, perhaps, a return to the sea; while he was a tree creature, in a land without trees, and he was afraid. And yet, and yet …

  They sat on the wall and watched the sunset, the light leaking out of the sky, the wind rustling the great space of dusk and the sea. The incredible furnace of the sun fountained light even as it sank into the ocean, which gleamed like a cut polished stone. Overhead a windhover fluttered in place, slicing the wind and sideslipping, and seeing it Thel was calmed. Whatever happened, yes, but more than that there was a kind of glory in it, to fling themselves out into the spaces they breathed, if only for one last dive or flight. The sun pared to a yellow line on the sea, and the sky darkened still; the mirror surface, still a kind of lens gathering sunlight, glowed a rich yellow that greened and greened as the sun’s rays bent around the curve of the globe, prisming under gravity’s pull. Out on the horizon the brilliant yellow line contracted in from both sides, greening all the while, until at last it was nothing but a single point of the most intense emerald light: the green flash, the suns farewell, and the mirror’s surface was flush with green light, the whole circle a pool of glowing green, and the swimmers paw caught Thel by the arm and pulled him to his feet. Overhead the kestrel tipped and dove, down in a curving stoop, shooting by them and falling faster until it burst to white, like a meteor streaking over the sea; and with a cry the swimmer leaped forward and jumped through the mirror, and Thel followed fast on her heels.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  KIM STANLEY ROBINSON is the author of the Nebula and Hugo award-winning Mars trilogy, Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars, as well as The Wild Shore, The Gold Coast, Pacific Edge, A Short,Sharp Shock, Antarctica, The Martians, and other novels. He lives in Davis, California.

  Turn the page for a special preview of

  THE MARTIANS

  by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Kim Stanley Robinson’s superb Mars novels have been showered with science fiction’s highest awards, as well as both critical and commercial success. In THE MARTIANS Robinson returns to the realm he has made his own, a world that brilliantly weaves together a futuristic setting and a poetic vision of the human spirit engaged in a drama as ancient as mankind itself In these stories Robinson sets in motion a sprawling cast of characters who will make the colonization of Mars an epic achievement. In this chapter from THE MARTIANS, Arthur Sternbach introduces Mars to an important detail of one of Earth’s greatest traditions.

  Don’t miss THE MARTIANS, on sale in paperback in October 2000 from Bantam Spectra Books.

  Arthur Sternbach Brings the Curveball to Mars

  He was a tall skinny Martian kid, shy and stooping. Gangly as a puppy. Why they had him playing third base I have no idea. Then again they had me playing shortstop and I’m left-handed. And can’t field grounders. But I’m American so there I was. That’s what learning a sport by video will do. Some things are so obvious people never think to mention them. Like never put a lefty at shortstop. But on Mars they were making it all new. Some people there had fallen in love with baseball, and ordered the equipment and rolled some fields, and off they went.

  So there we were, me and this kid Gregor, butchering the left side of the infield. He looked so young I asked him how old he was, and he said eight and I thought, Jeez you’re not that young, but realized he meant Martian years of course, so he was about sixteen or seventeen, but he seemed younger. He had recently moved to Argyre from somewhere else, and was staying at the local house of his co-op with relatives or friends, I never got that straight, but he seemed pretty lonely to me. He never missed practice even though he was the worst of a terrible team, and clearly he got frustrated at all his errors and strikeouts. I used to wonder why he came out at all. And so shy; and that stoop; and the acne; and the tripping over his own feet, the blushing, the mumbling—he was a classic.

  English wasn’t his first language either. It was Armenian, or Moravian, something like that. Something no one else spoke, anyway, except for an elderly couple in his co-op. So he mumbled what passes for English on Mars, and sometimes even used a translation box, but basically tried never to be in a situation where he had to speak. And made error after error. We must have made quite a sight—me about waist-high to him, and both of us letting grounders pass through us like we were a magic show. Or else knocking them down and chasing them around, then winging them past the first baseman. We very seldom made an out. It would have been conspicuous except everyone else was the same way. Baseball on Mars was a high-scoring game.

  But beautiful anyway. It was like a dream, really. First of all the horizon, when you’re on a flat plain like Argyre, is only three miles away rather than six. It’s very noticeable to a Terran eye. Then their diamonds have just over normal-sized infields, but the outfields have to be huge. At my team’s ballpark it was nine hundred feet to dead center, seven hundred down the lines. Standing at the plate the outfield fence was like a little green line off in the distance, under a purple sky, pretty near the horizon itself—what I’m telling you is that the baseball diamond about covered the entire visible world. It was so great.

  They played with four outfielders, like in softball, and still the alleys between fielders were wide. And the air was about as thin as at Everest base camp, and the gravity itself only bats .380, so to speak. So when you hit the ball solid it flies like a golf ball hit by a big driver. Even as big as the fields were, there were still a number of home runs every game. Not many shutouts on Mars. Not till I got there anyway.

  I went there after I climbed Olympus Mons, to help them establish a new soil-sciences institute. They had the sense not to try that by video. At first I climbed in the Charitums in my time off, but after I got hooked into baseball it took up most of my spare time. Fine, I’ll play, I said when they asked me. But I won’t coach. I don’t like telling people what to do.

  So I’d go out and start by doing soccer exercises with
the rest of them, warming up all the muscles we would never use. Then Werner would start hitting infield practice, and Gregor and I would start flailing. We were like matadors. Occasionally we’d snag one and whale it over to first, and occasionally the first baseman, who was well over two meters tall and built like a tank, would catch our throws, and we’d slap our gloves together. Doing this day after day Gregor got a little less shy with me, though not much. And I saw that he threw the ball pretty damned hard. His arm was as long as my whole body, and boneless it seemed, like something pulled off a squid, so loose-wristed that he got some real pop on the ball. Of course sometimes it would still be rising when it passed ten meters over the first baseman’s head, but it was moving, no doubt about it. I began to see that maybe the reason he came out to play, beyond just being around people he didn’t have to talk to, was the chance to throw things really hard. I saw too that he wasn’t so much shy as he was surly. Or both.

  Anyway our fielding was a joke. Hitting went a bit better. Gregor learned to chop down on the ball and hit gounders up the middle; it was pretty effective. And I began to get my timing together. Coming to it from years of slow-pitch softball, I had started by swinging at everything a week late, and between that and my short-stopping I’m sure my teammates figured they had gotten a defective American. And since they had a rule limiting each team to only two Terrans, no doubt they were disappointed by that. But slowly I adjusted my timing, and after that I hit pretty well. The thing was their pitchers had no breaking stuff. These big guys would rear back and throw as hard as they could, like Gregor, but it took everything in their power just to throw strikes. It was a little scary because they often threw right at you by accident. But if they got it down the pipe then all you had to do was time it. And if you hit one, how the ball flew! Every time I connected it was like a miracle. It felt like you could put one into orbit if you hit it right, in fact that was one of their nicknames for a home run, Oh that’s orbital they would say, watching one leave the park headed for the horizon. They had a little bell, like a ship’s bell, attached to the backstop, and every time someone hit one out they would ring that bell while the batter rounded the bases. A very nice local custom.