Zima Blue and Other Stories (57 page)
'It's still there, but I had to be sure. You certain you want to see it?'
'I haven't changed my mind. Show me the damned thing.'
With great gentleness he unplugged the vigilant machines and wheeled them aside. He could not move the bed, so he took Solovyova from it and placed her in a wheelchair. He had long since grown accustomed to how frail human bodies felt in Martian gravity, but the ease with which he lifted her was shocking, and a reminder of how close to death she was.
He'd hardly known her before the Catastrophe. Even in the days that followed - as the sense of isolation closed in on the base, and the first suicides began - it had taken a long time for them to drift together. It had happened at a party, the one that the colonists had organised to celebrate the detection of a radio signal from Earth, originating from an organised band of survivors in New Zealand. In New Zealand they still had something like a government, something like society, with detailed plans for long-term endurance and reconstruction. And for a little while it had seemed that the survivors might - by some unexplained means - have acquired immunity to the weaponised virus that had started scything its way through the rest of humanity in June 2038.
They hadn't. It just took a little longer than average to wipe them out.
Renfrew pushed her along the tortuous route that led back to the bubble.
'Why a . . . what did you call it?'
'A Bosendorfer. A Bosendorfer grand piano. I don't know. That's just what it said.'
'Something it dragged up from its memory? Was it making any music?'
'No. Not a squeak. The keyboard was hidden under a cover.'
'There must be someone to play it,' Solovyova said.
'That's what I thought.' He pushed her onwards. 'Music would make a difference, at least. Wouldn't it?'
'Anything would make a difference.'
Except not for Solovyova
, he thought. Very little was going to make a difference for Solovyova from this point on.
, he thought. Very little was going to make a difference for Solovyova from this point on.
'Renfrew . . .' Solovyova said, her tone softer than before. 'Renfrew, when I'm gone . . . you'll be all right, won't you?'
'You shouldn't worry about me.'
'It wouldn't be human not to. I'd change places if I could.'
'Don't be daft.'
'You were a good man. You didn't deserve to be the last of us.' Renfrew tried to sound dignified. 'Some might say being the last survivor is a sort of privilege.'
'But not me. I don't envy you. I know for a fact I couldn't handle it.'
'Well, I can. I looked at my psychological evaluation. Practical, survivor mentality, they said.'
'I believe it,' Solovyova said. 'But don't let it get to you. Understand? Keep some self-respect. For all of us. For me.'
He knew exactly what she meant by that.
The recreation bubble loomed around the curve in the corridor. There was a moment of trepidation as they neared, but then he saw the white corner of the floating piano, still suspended in the middle of the room, and sighed with relief.
'Thank God,' he said. 'I didn't imagine it.'
He pushed Solovyova into the bubble, halting the wheelchair before the hovering apparition. Its immense mass reminded him of a chiselled cloud. The polished white gleam was convincing, but there was no sign of their own reflections within it. Solovyova said nothing, merely staring into the middle of the room.
'It's changed,' he said. 'Look. The cover's gone up. You can see the keys. They look so real . . . I could almost reach out and touch them. Except I can't play the piano.' He grinned back at the woman in the wheelchair. 'Never could. Never had a musical bone in my body.'
'There is no piano, Renfrew.'
'Solovyova?'
'I said, there is no piano. The room is empty.' Her voice was dead, utterly drained of emotion. She did not even sound disappointed or annoyed. 'There is no piano. No grand piano. No Bosendorfer grand piano. No keyboard. No nothing. You're hallucinating, Renfrew. You're imagining the piano.'
He looked at her in horror. 'I can still see it. It's here.' He reached out to the abstract white mass. His fingers punched through its skin, into thin air. But he had expected that.
He could still see the piano.
It was real.
'Take me back to the infirmary, Renfrew. Please.' Solovyova paused. 'I think I'm ready to die now.'
He put on a suit and buried Solovyova beyond the outer perimeter, close to the mass grave where he had buried the last survivors when Solovyova had been too weak to help. The routine felt familiar enough, but when Renfrew turned back to the base he felt a wrenching sense of difference. The low-lying huddle of soil-covered domes, tubes and cylinders hadn't changed in any tangible way, except that it was now truly uninhabited. He was walking back towards an empty house, and even when Solovyova had been ill - even when Solovyova had been only half-present - that had never been the case.
The moment reached a kind of crescendo. He considered his options. He could return to the base, alone, and survive months or years on the dwindling resources at his disposal. Tharsis Base would keep him alive indefinitely provided he did not fall ill: food and water were not a problem, and the climate recycling systems were deliberately rugged. But there would be no companionship. No network, no music or film, no television or VR. Nothing to look forward to except endless bleak days until something killed him.
Or he could do it here,
now
. All it would take was a twist of his faceplate release control. He had already worked out how to override the safety lock. A few roaring seconds of pain and it would all be over. And if he lacked the courage to do it that way - and he thought he probably did - then he could sit down and wait until his air supply ran low.
now
. All it would take was a twist of his faceplate release control. He had already worked out how to override the safety lock. A few roaring seconds of pain and it would all be over. And if he lacked the courage to do it that way - and he thought he probably did - then he could sit down and wait until his air supply ran low.
There were a hundred ways he could do it, if he had the will.
He looked at the base, stark under the pale butterscotch of the sky. The choice was laughably simple. Die here, now, or die in there, much later. Either way, his choice would be unrecorded. There would be no eulogies to his bravery, for there was no one left to write eulogies.
'Why me?' he asked aloud. 'Why is it me who has to go through with this?'
He'd felt no real anger until that moment. Now he felt like shouting, but all he could do was fall to his knees and whimper. The question circled in his head, chasing its own tail.
'Why me?' he said. 'Why is it me? Why the fuck is it
me
who has to ask this question?'
me
who has to ask this question?'
Finally he fell silent. He remained frozen in that position, staring down through the scuffed glass of his faceplate at the radiation-blasted soil between his knees. For five or six minutes he listened to the sound of his own sobbing. Then a small, polite voice advised him that he needed to return to the base to replenish his air supply. He listened to that voice as it shifted from polite to stern, then from stern to strident, until it was screaming into his skull, the boundary of his faceplate flashing brilliant red.
Then he stood up, already light-headed, already feeling the weird euphoric intoxication of asphyxia, and made his ambling way back towards the base.
He had made a choice. Like it said in the psych report, he was a practical-minded survivor type. He would not give in.
Not until it got a lot harder.
Renfrew made it through his first night alone.
It was easier than he had expected, although he was careful not to draw any comfort from that. He knew that there would be much harder days and nights ahead. It might happen a day or a week or even a year from now, but when it did he was sure that his little breakdown outside would shrink to insignificance. For now he was stumbling through fog, fully aware that a precipice lay before him, and that eventually he would have to step over that precipice if he hoped to find anything resembling mental equilibrium and true acceptance.
He wandered the corridors and bubbles of the base. Everything looked shockingly familiar. Books were where he had left them; the coffee cups and dishes still waiting to be washed. The views through the windows hadn't become mysteriously more threatening overnight, and he had no sense that the interior of the base had become less hospitable. There were no strange new sounds to make the back of his neck tingle; no shadows flitting at the corner of his eye; no blood-freezing sense of scrutiny by an unseen watcher.
And yet . . . and yet. He knew something was not quite right. After he had attended to his usual chores - cleaning this or that air filter, lubricating this or that seal, studying the radio logs to make sure no one had attempted contact from home - he again made his way to the recreation bubble.
The piano was still there, but something was different about it today. Now there was a single gold candelabrum sitting above the keyboard. The candles burned, wavering slightly.
It was as if the piano was readying itself.
Renfrew leaned through the piano and passed his fingers through the candle flames. They were as insubstantial as the instrument itself. Even so, he could not help but sniff the tips of his fingers. His brain refused to accept that the flames were unreal, and expected a whiff of carbon or charred skin.
Renfrew remembered something.
He had spent so long in the base, so long inside its electronic cocoon, that until this moment he had forgotten precisely how the bubble worked. The things that appeared inside it were not true holograms, but projections mapped into his visual field. They were woven by tiny implants buried in the eye, permitting the images to have a sense of solidity that would have been impossible with any kind of projected hologram. The surgical procedure to embed the implants had taken about thirty seconds, and from that moment on he had never really needed to think about it. The implants enabled the base staff to digest information in vastly richer form than allowed by flat screens and clumsy holographics. When Renfrew examined a mineral sample, for instance, the implant would overlay his visual impression of the rock with an X-ray tomographic view of the rock's interior. The implants had also permitted access to recreational recordings . . . but Renfrew had always been too busy for that kind of thing. When the implants began to fail - they'd never been designed to last more than a year or two
in vivo
, before replacement - Renfrew had thought no more of the matter.
in vivo
, before replacement - Renfrew had thought no more of the matter.
But what if his had started working again? In that case it was no wonder Solovyova had not been able to see the piano. Some projection system had decided to switch on again, accessing some random fragment from the entertainment archives, and his reactivated implant had chosen to allow him to see it.
It meant there was still a kind of hope.
'Hello.'
Renfrew flinched at the voice. The source of it was immediately obvious: a small man had appeared out of nowhere at the end of the piano. The small man stood for a moment, pivoting around as if to acknowledge a vast and distant invisible audience, his eyes - largely hidden behind ostentatious pink glasses - only meeting Renfrew's for the briefest of instants. The man settled onto a stool that had also appeared at the end of the piano, tugged up the sleeves of the plum paisley suit jacket he wore and began to play the piano. The man's fingers were curiously stubby, but they moved up and down the keyboard with a beguiling ease.
Transfixed, Renfrew listened to the man play. It was the first real music he had heard in two years. The man could have played the most uncompromisingly difficult exercise in atonality and it would still have sounded agreeable to Renfrew's ears. But it was much easier than that. The man played the piano and sang a song, one that Renfrew recognised - albeit barely - from his childhood. It had been an old song even then, but one that was still played on the radio with some regularity. The man sang about a trip to Mars: a song about a man who did not expect to see home again.
The song concerned a rocket man.
Renfrew maintained the ritual that he and Solovyova had established before her death. Once a week, without fail, he cocked an ear to Earth to see if anyone was sending.
The ritual had become less easy in recent weeks. The linkage between the antenna and the inside of the base had broken, so he had to go outside to perform the chore. It meant pre-breathing; it meant suiting up; it meant a desolate trudge from the airlock to the ladder on the side of the comms module, and then a careful ascent to the module's roof, where the antenna was mounted on a turret-like plinth. He'd spend at least half an hour scooping handfuls of storm dust from the steering mechanism, before flipping open the cover on the manual control panel, powering up the system and tapping a familiar string of commands into the keyboard.
After a few moments the antenna would begin to move, grinding as it overcame the resistance of the dust that had already seeped into its innards. It swung and tilted on multiple axes, until the openwork mesh of the dish was locked on to Earth. Then the system waited and listened, LEDs blinking on the status board, but none of them brightening to the hard, steady green that would mean the antenna had locked on to the expected carrier signal. Occasionally the lights would flicker green, as if the antenna was picking up ghost echoes from
something
out there, but they never lasted.
something
out there, but they never lasted.
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