The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

The old man came down the stairs sniffing. No salty tang of mongrel urine in the porch. He threw back the heavy night curtains. The outer windows were leafy with frost. No taint in the hall. In the study the splendid erection of ATOM 12 was undefiled; a natural challenge to a dog. Why did he always forget to close the door when that thing came to call? Nothing and no one to close them on, most of the time. The living room smelled of vodka and gentle sweat, but no taint of piss. The fire had burned down to gray charcoals. New morning now. Antti wrenched open the curtains, admitting watery, destroying light into every part of the room. He waved clear a circle in the frosted mist inside the window. Real mist beyond, moving slowly across the frozen bay. The sun was high and wan, seeming to dash and veer through the upper streamers of the fog. If it were a morning hoar, it would boil off, but the speed with which the trees on Kuresaari Island were fading hinted at an inversion layer forming out at the limit of the pack ice. They could lie out there for days. Weeks, in a stable winter anticyclone. Breath steaming, Antti watched the ice crystals reform and close as cold coils of fog hastened across the ice to swaddle the wooden house.

In the unsympathetic morning light, the oracle-machine was just a wafer of translucent aquamarine plastic. No more wisdom than a credit card. Wincing at the foolishness of old men and firelight and vodka, Antti slipped open the lid. Still there from the night before. He had forgotten to shut the program down. So clever, and yet too stupid to think of doing it itself.

WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO MY DREAM OF MARS?

Dining room unsullied. Dining table polished and perfect. Table linen pure and unpolluted. Kitchen. And there it was, one paw in a shallow lagoon of cold, orange piss, proudly wagging its tail.

“Hiii! Hutt! Hutt! Hutt! Out with you, pissing beast! Go on, out, out, away with you.”

The thing had a terrible temper, but the wrath of old men is swift and fearless. The vile thing was bundled out the back door before it could open its jaw. It stood there, grubby white on the white, stunned by the suddenness of the cold. Antti bent to the undersink cupboard to fetch cleaner and cloths and disinfectant before young feet in search of cereals came skidding through the amber slick. It was crying now, a kind of sobbing keen that made Antti despise it all the more. Learn Darwin, he thought as he went down on his knees to the crusted piss.

Only when he heard Yuri’s voice from outside did Antti realize he had not heard the dog’s yip for some minutes now. He ran to the door to scold Yuri about silly boys who went rushing out into the cold not properly dressed. He listened. Yuri’s voice was getting farther away. He was out on the ice.

“Bloody cur!” Antti cursed. He dashed down the back path as fast as his years and the winter would let him.

“Yuri!”

The boy was farther even than he had feared, calling into the white fog that came weaving thicker every moment through the trees across the inlet.

“Yuri!”

Come back, oh, come back now, don’t let this be the moment when you decide that everything old men say is stupid and you can safely disregard them.

“Yuri!”

The boy stopped, on the edge of melting into the white and white.

“Come back, come on back. It’s not safe; you can’t see a foot in front of you in this fog, and the ice can still be rotten.”

“But my dog…”

“Come back to the house.” He saw the boy look back to the dimensionless white of the closing fog and knew what he must offer to buy his safety. “I’ll go look for him. You go on back. It’ll be all right.”

Hunting through the drawer of the study desk, Antti looked at his private space fleet and shivered. Venture into the unknown. The alien on your doorstep. He found his mission training compass. It saw me through Kamchatka, it won’t let me down within sight of my own back door. Outside, the cold was paralyzing. Antti took a bearing on the house and went down to the edge of the ice. Pebbles grated beneath his booted feet. And he was there. The door opening, everyone waiting for that first crack of light, that pale slit widening into a wedge, a rectangle of illumination, beyond which lay a new world. Cranking down the ladder, everyone getting into proper order in the lock as narrow as a birth canal; bulking in their excursion suits, rehearsing their lines. Rozdevshensky first, then him, last Nitin. The top of Rozdevshensky’s helmet vanishing over the platform. Rozdevshensky down, a breath-more a sigh-on the helmet intercoms. Then him, lumbering out backward, clumsy as a spring-woken bear. Looking at the strangely lit metal, until the crunch of stones under his booted feet. You’re down. Now, you can turn and look. How it would have been. Should have been.

Antti Selkokari stepped out onto the frozen world.