Zima Blue and Other Stories Read Free

error. 'Whatever. The point is - or was - that everything said on Mars was relayed to Earth via the Hydra . But she didn't just boost the messages; she also kept a copy, burned onto a memory chip. And nothing on the chip was censored.'

    I took another cautious sip from the bowl. I'd forgotten how we Martians liked our drinks: beer in Viking-impressing steins and coffee in the sort of bowl from which Genghis Khan might have sipped koumiss after a good day's butchering.

    'Tell me how I found the chip and I might stay to finish this.'

    'That I can't know for sure.'

    'Ah.' I smiled. 'The catch.'

    'No, it's just that I don't know who Eddie might have sold the chip to. But Eddie was definitely the man I sold it to. He was a Rastafarian, dealing in trinkets from early Martian history. But the last time I saw Eddie was a fair few decades ago.'

    This was, all of a sudden, beginning to look like less of a wasted trip. 'Eddie's just about still in business,' I said, remembering the smell of ganja wafting through his mobile scavenger caravan out on the gentle slopes of the Ares Vallis. 'He never sold the chip, except to me, when I was making my investigations for the Hydra piece.'

    He pushed himself back in his seat. 'So. Are you prepared to accept that I'm who I say I am?'

    'I'm not sure. Yet.'

    'But you're less sceptical than a few minutes ago?'

    'Possibly,' I said, all that I was going to concede there and then.

    'Listen, the way I look isn't my fault. The Grossart you know from your investigations was a kid, a thirty-year-old man.'

    'But you must have obtained longevity treatment at some point, or we wouldn't be having this conversation.'

    'Correct, but it wasn't the instant the treatment arrived on Mars. Remember that if the treatment had been easily obtainable, there wouldn't have been any turmoil. And I was too busy vanishing to worry about it immediately.' He rubbed a hand along his crown: weathered red skin fringed by a bristly white tonsure. 'My physiological age is about seventy, even though I was born one hundred and thirty-two years ago.'

    I looked at him more closely now, thinking back to the images of Jim Grossart with which I'd become familiar all those years ago. His face had been so devoid of character - so much a blank canvas - that it had always seemed pointless trying to guess how he would look when he was older. And yet none of my expectations were actually contradicted by the man sitting opposite me.

    'If you are Jim Grossart--' My voice was low now.

    'There's no "if" about it, Carrie.'

    'Then why the hell have you waited seventeen years to speak to me?'

    He smiled. 'Finished with that coffee?'

    We left Sloths and took an elevator up sixteen city levels to the place where the divers were jumping off. They started the drop from a walkway that jutted out from the city's side for thirty metres, tipped by a ring-shaped platform. Brightly clothed divers waited around the ring - it only had railings on the outside - and now and then one of them would step into the middle and drop. Sometimes they went down in pairs or threes; sometimes joined together. Breathing equipment and a squirrel-suit were all they ever wore; no one ever carried a parachute or a rocket harness.

    It looked a lot like suicide. Sometimes, that was just what it was.

    'That's got to be fun,' Grossart said, the two of us still snug within the pressurised viewing gallery.

    'Yes. If you're clinically insane.'

    I immediately wanted to bite back what I'd just said, but Grossart seemed unoffended.

    'Oh, cliff diving can't be that difficult - not if you've got a reasonably intuitive grasp of the Navier-Stokes equations and a few basic aerodynamic principles. You can even rent two-person squirrel-suits over there.'

    'Don't even think about it.'

    'Heights not your thing?' he said, turning - to my immense relief - away from the window. 'Not very Martian of you.'

    He was right, though I didn't like admitting it. Gravity on Mars was only