Zima Blue and Other Stories Read Free Page B

sanity, and - perhaps - slightly beyond.

    It all depended, I supposed, on what you meant by sanity.

    Grossart continued: 'You know what would worry me more? A planet that took its past too seriously. Because that would mean there was something human we hadn't brought with us.'

    'What, the ineffable tendency to produce and consume tasteless tourist crap?'

    'Something like that, yes.' And then he held up a crude plastic mask to his face, and suddenly I was looking at the face of the man I had hoped to meet in Sloths, the young Jim Grossart.

    'I don't think you need to worry,' I said.

    Grossart returned the mask to a tray with a hundred others, just as the manager of the shop started eyeing us unwelcomingly. 'No, I don't think I do. Now . . .' He beamed and rubbed his hands together. 'You know what I'm going to suggest, don't you?'

    He was looking out of the shop, back towards the jump-off point.

    I suppose the technical term was blackmail. I wanted a story (or at least some idea of why Grossart had contacted me after all these years), and he wanted to take the big dive. More than that, he wanted to do the dive with someone else.

    'Look,' I said. 'If it's such a big deal, can't you just do it and I'll see you at the bottom? Or back here?'

    'And what if I decided to vanish again? You'd kick yourself, wouldn't you, for letting me out of your sight?'

    'Very possibly, but at least I'd have the satisfaction of knowing I hadn't been talked into doing something monumentally stupid.'

    We were already in the line for the squirrel-suits. 'Yes,' he said. 'But you'd also have to live with the knowledge that - when you come to write this up, as I know you will - you won't be able to include the sequence in which you took the big dive with Captain Jim Grossart.'

    I looked at him coldly. 'Bastard.'

    But he was right: personal fear was one thing, compromising a story another.

    'Now there's no need for that.'

    'Just tell me you know what you're doing, all right?'

    'Well, of course I do. Sort of.'

    We got our squirrel-suits. The first thing you did was attach the breathing and comms gear. Each suit had only a few minutes of air, but that was all you needed. The suits themselves were lurid skin-tight affairs, padded and marked with glowing logos and slogans. They were so named because they had folds of elastic material sewn between the arms and legs, like the skin of a flying squirrel - enough to double your surface area during a fall. Mine was only moderately stiff across the chest and belly, but Grossart's had a fifteen-centimetre-thick extra layer of frontal armour. We settled on our helmets, locked our visors down and established that we could communicate.

    'I'm really not pushing you into this,' Grossart said.

    'No, merely playing on the fact that I'm a mercenary bitch who'll do practically anything for a story. Let's just get this over with, shall we?'

    We filtered through the airlock that led to the jumping-off stage. Strata City reached away on either side for several hundred metres; buildings crammed as close as the wall's topology would allow. Pressurised walkways snaked between the larger structures, while elevator tubes and staircases connected the city's levels. Not far above, perched on the canyon's lip, a series of large hotel complexes thrust their neon signs against the early dusk sky: Hilton, Holiday Inn, Best Martian.

    Then - realising as I did so that it was probably going to be a bad idea - I looked down. The city continued below us for several kilometres, before thinning out into an expanse of sheer, smooth canyon wall that dropped away even more sickeningly. The Valles Marineris was the deepest canyon on Mars, and now that its deepest parts were in shadow, all I could see at the bottom was a concentrated sprinkling of very tiny, distant-looking lights.

    'I hope to God you know what you're doing, Jim.'

    At the end of the platform an attendant coupled us together, me riding Grossart. With my legs bound