Age shall not weary them

From a distance the two figures looked stationary on the landscape. Their pastel colours and gently blurred edges seemed to be attacked from all sides by the rugged, red landscape. The wind, though quiet, scarified every surface it touched by carrying with it a thin essence of fine, sharp sand. Light though it was the drifting breeze was surely to scratch and blast the twain into an even finer powder. They stood, turned towards their own destruction: two delicate flowers planted in unsuitable soil and doomed to die.

Yet they continued as though the wind were nothing. Each picked its way in an apelike manner across the inhospitable hillside. Were any other living creature close enough, it might see that the taller figure (dressed in various shades of twilight blue) consulting some hand-held device as he proceeded slowly, cautiously, across gravel and unstable, flat rocks. The shorter figure trod close to the footsteps of the taller, attempting but not always making the sometimes necessarily long jumps from safety to safety.

Every few dozen paces the leader would turn back to his companion and they would exchange a few short noises. It was impossible to see the sources of speech through the helmets they wore, opaque and matt surfaces smoothing out any internal detail. Even close to the pair (and surely nothing was so close as to hear) the sounds carried only emotion in clarity: occasional interest, expectations fulfilled, a growing impatience and desire to be back... somewhere. The muffled sound did not seem to carry whatever fuller, richer meaning there was passing between them; that travelled by some other invisible route. The shorter of the two pointed something out, that they should head towards; the taller, reluctantly, agreed.

"Going out again?"

Kallum was slopping his way through some sort of gruel, and as he asked the question some droppped off his spoon into the bowl with a splat. Mak looked faintly disgusted at him. Kallum would eat anything, but some of the lumps in that stuff defied swallowing as far as Mak was concerned.

"Ella needs more samples."

Kallum shrugged, said: "You'd think we'd have enough for the report by now," and turned his attention back to his spoon.

"You know what she's like. Nothing's ever finished."

Kallum nodded, agreeing. "She won't stop. Not until she's actually submitted the report," he said, "and even then it has to be signed off before she'll stop re-analysing, and arguments over possible additions, back and forth over the eeth' until she has to use her personal credit, and even then riders inserted to the conclusions, footnotes, new citates.... We'll be sending supps and addends for months afterwards, mark my words." And he carried on slurping at his dinner.

A bit unfair, Mak thought. "Well, what we've got now is inconclusive, I suppose. We only had a handful of data from up on the third ridge...." Mak tailed off, grimly fascinated. "Chrypst, Kallum!" he finally cried. "We're in an env-station, not prison. Can't you find something else you like in the stores?"

Looking put out, Kallum glanced down at his food, then back up at Mak. "I was aiming for something fairly plain. But... I suppose it could do with some salt. Maybe.... Any in the cupboards?" Mak started to shake his head, eyes still fixed on Kallum. "Actually," Kallum started trying to sound urbane: "I knew it was missing a little, you know, something."

Mak raised his eyes, looking up towards the planet's surface, shifted his chair back, got up and walked out of the room, all without replying.

"OK, OK!" Kallum called after him. "A bit of pepper as well!"

The scenery had changed gradually as they had travelled along and down the hill. Now, still a few hundred metres from its foot, they were encountering great boulders set upon gritty, compacted sandstone. Occasional, steep slopes of loose sand punctuated the makeshift trail they were following, and they would have to detour to avoid them. This was hardly a simple procedure, as the ground on the hill-side of the trail was a metre or two higher than that on the valley-side, bristling and ribbed with geological strata and imperfections—features that Josi had no doubt catalogued—so it was sometimes necessary to clamber up onto the ridge, walk along a few metres, then drop back onto the path that resumed beyond the subsidence. It took time.

Mak, still in front, shook the device in his hands. He looked intently at it, as if listening for a rattling screw. Then he actually did prick up his ears, and put a hand out behind him, palm towards Ella. They both stood still.

"I thought I heard stones rattling," he said uncertainly.

"Well, yes, Mak," Ella replied. "We've been kicking them up all the way down. Some have probably got ahead of us."

Mak nodded. "You're probably right," he said.

He made his way round a particularly misshapen chunk of the natural wall, with dark recesses here and there, shelters from the hot sun. There was less than five metres separating him and Ella, when into that space leapt a straggly, shapeless form, bundling itself out of one of the larger caves. It whirled as if to stare at each of them in turn, in a panicked flurry of fibres, cloth and straggly hair. Mak caught a glimpse of the whites of two frightened eyes peering out of a wrinkled, dirty once-face, before the creature made a snap decision and tried to bolt between Ella and the wall. But there wasn't enough room for it to pass, and its flank slapped against Ella. Her suit threw off sparks as she stumbled away from her attacker.

"Mak!" she cried, staggering at the edge of a sandy scarp; as he moved to grab a hand, a wrist, anything, she was already gone, a cloud of dust all that remained. Two seconds passed as Mak dithered, listening to the sound of her tumbling away, already almost inaudible; then he swallowed, and jumped.

The hillside was steep as a buttress, and it was all Mak could do to keep his legs ahead of his head. Every bump he felt was, he knew, soaked up in part by the suit. All around him he could see it turning first blue, then cyan, turquoise. Only when it had definitely gone green could he see Ella a few metres below and to the side: luckily he hadn't been kicking rocks down at her as he'd followed.

Her suit, he saw, had tried to help much as his had, but was now in a far worse state: a sickly unripe yellow. Mak tried not to wonder what that impled about what she had hit on the way down. He couldn't see her skin's own hue through the visor, of course, but it was clear from the way that she was lying that she wasn't conscious.

Mak reached for the radio on his belt, but his hand passed through air to his side. He looked to Ella's radio: smashed. Mak's was either still at the top of the slope, or buried under the small landslide that had pursued them both on their way down. So, he thought. Just us. Well, just me, right now. He wondered if she was badly hurt.

Her suit would know. There was a small panel on the side of her helmet, which lifted to reveal a few buttons and a basic screen: he touched one control and the screen woke up, undamaged by the descent. He touched another and her visor became translucent: still that eerie colour, but at least he could see her face now. She looked like she was only asleep. He turned back to the helmet's computer. She was still breathing and nothing obvious was broken, bruises (he read off the displays) on her head and limbs, but... no evidence of concussion or internal injuries.

As he pushed one last button, a little too hard, to close the panel, Ella's eyelids flickered and she groaned some sort of complaint at her head being moved. When he heard her, Mak felt like he was waking up too; he realised he hadn't breathed out for a good twenty seconds, and did so.

They were suiting up in the foyer, by a row of lockers meant for a much larger crew than the skeleton force that the station currently housed. Boots were seamed to trousers; trousers to tops; tops zipped up to the neck and down to the wrists, where gloves, as with the other clothes, merged their fibres quietly and without fuss into the sleeves. Ella was floundering, looking round for something.

"What is it?" Mak asked.

She clicked her fingers. "Thing," she said, still looking.

"Thing?"

She stopped, and looked at Mak. "Radio. I knew I had it with me when I left quarters. I put it down somewhere and now I-"

Mak was already holding it out towards her, giving her a look. She returned it, taking the smooth capsule of electronics from his outstretched hand. "Thanks," she eventually said.

Brief as the moment was, it was still possible for the airlock to interrupt it. Behind them the heavy doors began to hiss and wheeze, and crackle with electrical connections made and then lost; the cameras either side of the entrance showed a weirdly cartoon woman in the shelter of the porch beyond, a rounded, feminine body in what looked like a peach-coloured jumpsuit and helmet. A few seconds later the doors themselves revealed the same image, only the woman now walked out of the frame and towards Mak and Ella.

"Josi!" Ella cried. "Orange! Levels nearly down to zero! What in the world...?"

Josi raised a hand in admonition. "Don't start, Ella," she mumbled, her voice muffled by the visor, and moved over to her locker. She fiddled with buttons by the thin plate covering over her temple. There was a sucking noise, and the almost uniform colour seemed to peel upwards into the mechanism surrounding the plate. Underneath it Josi's clothes were a range of more natural shades. She lifted her helmet off and breathed and whoofed a couple of times.

"Look, I didn't mean to, but-"

But Ella interrupted: "You've been out all night again, haven't you?"

Josi just nodded, and looked from Ella to Mak and back, daring them to judge. She'd just wanted to see the stars. She always just wanted to see the stars.

"Anyway," Josi said eventually, getting flustered, "Kallum will need help with the spectro. I should go and do that." Then, angry at herself, and angrier still at being caught, Josi almost fled from the room, somehow managing to make the automatic door slam behind her. Mak and Ella looked at each other, and both almost simultaneously shrugged, then grinned.

"Ready?" Mak asked.

Ella nodded. "Yep. Let's go kick some!"

As if on cue they both turned round for their helmets, and as one reached up to click the switch at the temple. A pop and a fizz, and a haze of dark purple flowed like water down to their feet, wrapping round their limbs and tightening until it was a second skin.

Ella was leaning against a rounded boulder, perhaps two-thirds as tall as she was. She was flexing each bit in turn, especially her ankle and wrist, both of which she'd managed to twist.

"Lucky," she said, shaking her head. Mak looked up. "I was lucky."

He smiled thinly. "If you'd been lucky you'd still be up there," he countered, pointing up the hill. She smiled back, then looked out over the valley, to the bottom of which they now found themselves much closer. Without meaning to, Ella caught herself looking for something. She wondered aloud: "Where do you think she is now? That woman, I mean. She'd probably still be running if she could. All the way to Monte Vieko and the stream. That's where I'd go...." She tailed off, seeing Mak staring at her.

"She...?" Mak exclaimed. "You mean... that was human? With hair down to...." Mak drew a level with his hand, then realised it wasn't close enough to the ground, and indicated it again. "Down to here?"

Ella just nodded. Mak thought for a while, gasping and hmfing now and then.

"But..." he said finally, "it must have... she must have been five hundred years old. The wrinkles on her. The hair on her. The eyes on her."

Ella tilted her head to one side a little, resignedly, then found that that hurt a bit and straightened her neck. "Mak, use your loafer. Look at your suit."

His jaw gaped for a second, and then he looked down. "OK." He made a show of examining it. "This colour is disgusting, and doesn't do me any favours at all."

They both laughed; Ella gradually turned hers into: "no, no, Mak: look closely. Keep watching."

Obediently Mak looked back at his own body, and waited. After a few seconds, there was a spark from his lower thigh, and then a second later another near his collarbone.

"Well, yeah. Rays. So what? The post-burn pollutants. Or am I missing something? We've had zaps and foofs from our suits all day, except when we were in the lee of Teylor's Scarps...." He tailed off. "Of course. Pollutants." He swallowed. "She didn't have a suit."

Ella nodded. "She was probably eighty. Eighty-five, at most. Eighty-five years wandering round in this poison."

His mouth hung open, and then: "Gott. She was probably crazy too, from the rays. No wonder she looked such a mess." He had a brief memory of all that tangled hair again and shuddered. "No wonder she bolted like that too. I suppose to her I must have looked pretty weird."

"Whereas to everyone else you look absolutely normal, like, all the time."

"Well," he said, patting imaginary dust off his thighs and making as if to go, "you certainly sound like you've pretty much recovered from your terrible ordeal. Practically back to normal, in fact." He looked hard at her, to make sure the joke was really true. "You ready? Reckon you'll make it back to the station OK?"

Ella made a gesture with her hand to say, hold on, and then took a few experimental breaths. She paused for a second as if deep in thought, and then nodded, smiling. "Never better."

They turned towards home, not so far now they'd cut a few hundred vertical metres and three circuitous horizontal kilometres off their journey. They were both quiet for the first half a mile or so, with their own thoughts. That had been close, they silently agreed. Ella noticed, though, that Mak kept looking across at her. Once or twice his mouth had worked, hard to spot even through the reduced shielding across his face.

Finally he spoke: "Hey, Ella."

"Uh-huh?"

Mak chewed on his words a few seconds, and then said: "Don't you be going out without your suit."

She stopped, and turned towards him. Through her visor he saw her smile. "Whyever would I, hm?" she asked.

Mak shrugged. "I... that is, the team here... that is, I'd like to have you around for a good long while yet."

Before he knew it she'd slipped her hand in his, and they were trudging back towards the env-station again. Where their two shields met, they gave out a low, genial buzz. Mak tried not to look down, in case it hadn't really happened.

"Another five hundred years or so?"

"Yeah, I guess. Only..."

"Yeah?"

"... Only don't let yourself go. It'd be down to Kallum to get the knots out of your hair."

"Kallum? OK, you've convinced me. Manicure when I get back, OK?"

They carried on walking in silence, still hand in hand as though it was the way they always came back from their trips outside. There'd be gossip, Ella thought briefly, once Josi spots them on the cameras. That was just fine with her. She pictured the two of them from Josi's point of view, rounding the corner by the env-station, quite obvious in their suits' lurid colours. Looking from herself to Mak and back, she saw all the silly soft-tone yellows and greens and blues, starting to swirl together as their shields shared power, the two of them deceptively strong against the powerless red rock.