“The table?”
“The Scaper. Built to last, and to self-repair. They were supposed to keep processing the atmosphere, sucking in soil and air, for as long as it took. A thousand years, maybe more. They were designed so that they’d keep functioning—keep looking after themselves, locked on the same program—even if the rest of human civilization crashed back to Earth. Their makers were thinking long-term, making plans for things they had no real expectation of ever living to see. A bit like cathedral builders, diligently laying down stones even though the cathedral might take lifetimes to finish.” He paused and smiled, years falling from his face, albeit only for an instant. “I don’t suppose you’ve ever seen a cathedral, have you, Yukimi?”
“Have you?”
“Once or twice.”
“The Scapers were a bad idea,” Yukimi said. “That’s what my sister told me. A relic from history. The wrong way to do things.”
“Easy to say that now.” He drew a finger around the rim of his tea mug. “But it was a grand plan at the time. The grandest. At its peak, there were thousands of machines like this, crisscrossing Mars from pole to pole. It was a marvelous sight. Herds of iron buffalo. Engines of creation, forging a new world.”
“You saw them?”
He seemed to catch himself before answering. “No; I’d have to be quite impossibly old for that to be the case. But the reports were glorious. Your sister’s quite right. It was the wrong approach. But it was the only way we—they—could see at the time. So we mustn’t mock them for their mistakes. In two hundred years, someone will be just as quick to mock us for ours, if we’re not careful.”
“I still don’t see why you have to live out here.”
“I keep this Scaper from falling apart,” Corax explained. “Once upon a time the self-repair systems were adequate, but eventually even they stopped working properly. Now the Scaper has to be nursed, treated with kindness. She’s an old machine and she needs help to keep going.”
“Why?”
“There are people who care about such things. They live on Mars, but also elsewhere in the system. Rich sponsors, for the most part. With enough money that they can afford to sprinkle a little of it on vanity projects, like keeping this machine operational. Partly out of a sense of historical indebtedness, partly out of a cautionary attitude that we ought not to throw away something that worked, albeit imperfectly, and partly for the sheer pointless hell of it. It pleases them to keep this Scaper running, and the others still trundling around. It’s Martian history. We shouldn’t let it slip through our fingers.”
Yukimi had no idea who these people were, but even among her father’s friends there were individuals with—in her opinion—rather more money than sense. Like Uncle Otto with his expensive private sunjammer that he liked to take guests in for spins around Earth and the inner worlds. So she could believe it, at least provisionally.
“For them,” Corax went on, “it’s a form of art as much as anything else. And the cost really isn’t that much compared to some of the things they’re involved in. As for me—I’m just the man they hire to do the dirty work. They don’t even care who I am, as long as I get the stuff done. They arrange for the airships to drop off supplies and parts, as well as provisions for me. It’s been a pretty good life, actually. I get to see a lot of Mars and I don’t have to spend every waking hour keeping the Scaper running. The rest, it’s my own time to do as I please.”
Looking around the dingy confines of the galley, Yukimi couldn’t think of a worse place to spend a week, let alone a lifetime.
“So what do you do?” she asked politely. “When you’re not working?”
“A little industrial archaeology of my own, actually.” Corax put down his tea cup. “I need to make some calls, so people know where you are. They’re sending out a flier tomorrow anyway, so we should be able to get you back home before too long. Hopefully it won’t arrive until the afternoon. If there’s time, I’d like to show you something beforehand.”
“What?”
“Something no one else will ever see again,” Corax said. “At least, not for a little while.”
He made the calls and assured Yukimi that all would be well tomorrow. “I didn’t speak to your parents, but I understand they’ll be informed that you’re safe and sound. We can try and put you through later, if you’d like to talk?”
“No thanks,” Yukimi said. “Not now.”
“That doesn’t sound like someone in any great hurry to be reunited. Was everything all right at home?”
“No,” Yukimi said.
“And is it something you’d like to talk about?”
“Not really.” She would, actually. But not to Corax; not to this scraggy old man with tufts of white hair who lived alone in a giant, obsolete terraforming machine. He might not be an ogre, but he couldn’t possibly grasp what she was going through.
“So tell me about your sister, the one on Venus. You said she was involved in the terraforming program. Is she much older than you?”
“Six years,” Yukimi said. She meant Earth years, of course. A year on Mars was twice as long, but everyone still used Earth years when they were talking about how old they were. It got messy otherwise. “She left Mars when she was nineteen. I was thirteen.” She reached into her satchel and pulled out the companion. “This is the thing I was talking about, the diary. It was a present from Shirin.”
He moved to open the book. “Might I?”
“Go ahead.”
He touched the covers with his old man’s fingers, which were bony and yellow-nailed and sprouted white hairs in odd places. The companion came alive under his touch, blocks of text and illustration appearing on the revealed pages. The text was in an approximation of Yukimi’s handwriting, tinted a dark mauve, the pictures rendered in the form of woodcuts and stenciled drawings, and the entries were organized by date and theme, with punctilious cross-referencing.
Corax picked at the edge of the book with his fingernail. “I can’t turn to the next page.”
“That’s not how you do it. Haven’t you ever read a book before?”
He gave her a tolerant smile. “Not like this.”
Yukimi showed him the way. She touched her finger to the bottom right corner and dragged it sideways, so that the book revealed the next pair of pages. “That’s how you turn to the next page. If you want to turn ten pages, you use two fingers. Hundred pages, three fingers. And the same to go backward.”
“It seems very complicated.”
“It’s just like a diary. I tell it what I’ve been doing, or let it record things for me. Then it sorts it all out and makes me fill in the gaps.”
“Sounds horrendous,” Corax said, pulling a face as if he had just bitten into a lemon. “I was never very good at diary keeping.”
“It’s meant to be more than just a diary, though. Shirin had one as well—she bought it at the same time. She was leaving, so we wouldn’t be able to talk normally anymore because of the lag. I was sad because she’d always been my best friend, even though she was older than me. She said our companions would help us bridge the distance.”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“We were both supposed to use our companions all the time. Make entries whenever we could. I would talk to my companion as if Shirin was there, and Shirin would talk to hers as if I was there. Then, every now and again, the companions would—I can’t remember the word.” Yukimi frowned. “Connect up. Exchange entries. So that my companion got better at copying Shirin and hers got better at copying me. And then if we kept on doing that, eventually it would be like having Shirin with me all the time, so that I could talk to her whenever I wanted. Even if Venus was on the other side of the sun. It wouldn’t be the same as Shirin—it wasn’t meant to replace her—but just make it so that we didn’t always feel apart.”