“It seems like a good idea,” Corax said.
“It wasn’t. We promised we’d keep talking to our companions, but Shirin didn’t. For a while, yes. But once she’d been away from Mars for a few months she stopped doing it. Every now and again, yes—but you could tell only because she was feeling bad about not doing it before.”
“I suppose she was busy.”
“We promised each other. I kept up my side of the promise. I still talk to Shirin. I still tell her everything. But because she doesn’t talk to me enough, my companion can’t pretend to be her.” Yukimi felt a wave of sadness slide over her. “I could have really used her lately.”
“It doesn’t mean she doesn’t love you. It just means she’s an adult with a lot of people making demands on her. Terraforming’s very important work. It requires great responsibility.”
“That’s what my parents keep saying.”
“It’s the truth. It always has been. The people who made the Scapers understood that, even if they didn’t get the technology quite right. It’s the same with—what they call them? Those things in the air, swirling around?”
“Change-clouds,” Yukimi said.
He nodded. “I see them sometimes at dusk. Just another machine, really. In a thousand years, there won’t seem much difference between them and this. But they make me feel very old. Even your book makes me feel like an old relic from prehistory.” He stood up, his knees creaking with the effort. “Speaking of recording devices, let me show you something.” He moved to one of the shelves and pushed aside some junk to expose an old-looking space helmet. He brought it back to the table, blowing the dust off it in the progress, coughing as he breathed some of it in, and set the helmet down before Yukimi.
“It looks ancient,” she said, trying hard not to show too much disappointment. It was scratched and dented and the white paint was coming off in places. There had once been colorful markings round the visor and crest, but they were mostly faded or rubbed away now. She could just make out the ghostly impressions where they had been.
“It is. Unquestionably. Older even than this Scaper. I know because I found it and…well.” He stroked the helmet lovingly, leaving dust tracks where his fingers had been. “There’s serious provenance here. It used to belong to someone very famous, before he went missing.”
“Who?”
“We’ll come to that tomorrow. In the meantime I thought it might be of interest. The helmet’s still in good nick—built to last. I had to swap out the power cells, but other than that I’ve done nothing to it. Do you want to try it on?”
She didn’t, really, but it seemed rude to say so. She gave an encouraging nod. Corax picked up the helmet again and shuffled around the table until he was behind her. He lowered it down gently, until the cushioned rim was resting on her shoulders. She could still breathe perfectly normally because the helmet was open at the bottom. “It smells moldy,” she said.
“Like its owner. But watch this. I’m going to activate the head-up display playback, using the external controls.” He pressed some studs on the outside of the helmet and Yukimi heard soft clicks and beeps inside.
Then everything changed.
She was still looking at Corax, still inside the galley. But overlaid on that was a transparent view of something else entirely. It was a landscape, a Martian landscape, moving slowly, rocking side to side as if someone was walking. They were coming to the edge of something, a sharp drop in the terrain. The pace slowed as the edge came nearer, and then the point of view dipped, so that Yukimi was looking down, down at her chest-pack, which looked ridiculously old and clunky, down at her heavy, dust-stained boots, down at the Martian soil, and the point where—just beyond her toes—it fell savagely away.
“The edge of Valles Marineris,” Corax told her. “The deepest canyon on Mars. It’s a long way down, isn’t it?”
Yukimi agreed. Even though she was sitting down, she still felt a twinge of vertigo.
“You can still go there, but it’s not the same,” Corax went on. “Mostly filled with water now—and it’ll only get deeper as the sea levels keep rising. Where I’m standing—where you’re standing—is now a chain of domed resort hotels. They’ll tear down the domes when the atmosphere gets thick enough to breathe, but they won’t tear down the hotels.” He paused. “Not that I’m complaining, or arguing against the terraforming program. It’ll be marvelous to see boats sailing across Martian seas, under Martian skies. To see people walking around under that sky without needing suits or domes to keep them alive. To see Earth in the morning light. We’ll have gained something incredible. But we’ll have lost something as well. I just think we should be careful not to lose sight of that.”
“We could always go back,” Yukimi said. “If we didn’t like the new Mars.”
“No,” Corax said. “That we wouldn’t be able to do. Not even if we wanted it more than anything in the world. Because once we’ve touched a world, it stays touched.” He reached over and turned off the head-up display. “Now. Shall we think about eating?”
IN THE MORNING they left the Scaper, traveling out in a small, four-wheeled buggy that came down from a ramp in the great machine’s belly. “Just a little sightseeing trip,” Corax said, evidently detecting Yukimi’s anxiety about not being back when the flier—scheduled for the afternoon—came to collect her. They were snug and warm in the buggy’s pressurized cabin, Yukimi wearing the same clothes as the day before, Corax in the same outfit he had been wearing under the armor, which—for reasons not yet clear to Yukimi—he had stowed in the buggy’s rear storage compartment.
“Will the Scaper be all right without you aboard?” Yukimi asked, as they powered out of its shadow, bouncing over small rocks and ridges.
“She’ll take care of herself for a few hours, don’t you worry.”
An awkward question pushed itself to the front of Yukimi’s mind. “Will you always be the one in charge of it?”
Corax steered the buggy around a crater before answering. “Until the people who pay for my upkeep decide otherwise.” He glanced sideways, a cockeyed grin on his face. “Why? You think old Corax’s getting too old for the job?”
“I don’t know,” she answered truthfully. “How old are you, exactly?”
“How old do you reckon?”
“Older than my aunt, and I’m not sure how old she is. She’s from Earth as well.”
“Did I say I was from Earth?”
“You mentioned cathedrals,” Yukimi said.
“I could have been there as a tourist.”
“But you weren’t.”
“No,” he said eventually. “I wasn’t. Here I’m the tourist.”
They drove on, crossing kilometers of Martian terrain. Most of the time Corax didn’t have his hands on the controls, the buggy navigating by itself. Yukimi saw tire tracks in the soil and guessed that Corax had come this way before, maybe within the last few days. As the route wound its way around obstacles, the Scaper became little more than a dark, chimney-backed hump on the horizon, seemingly fixed in place. And then even the dark hump was gone.
The ground began to dip down. Ahead, reflecting back the sun like a sheet of polished metal, was what appeared to be a large lake or even a small sea. It had a complicated, meandering shoreline. Yukimi could not see the far side, even with the buggy raised high above sea level. She did her best to memorize the shape of the lake, the way it would look from above, so that she could find it on a map. That was hard, though, so she took out the companion and opened the covers so that it recorded the view through the buggy’s forward window.
“You want to know where we are?” Corax asked.