Champion of Mars (12 page)

“He has a still in the garage,” said Jensen disapprovingly. “It is a clear safety breach.”

“You want some?” said Stulynow. Jensen pushed his glass forward. “See, not so bad now, to have a still, is it?”

“Here.” Stulynow clanged his glass hard against Holland’s. “
Na zdroviye
.” He downed with a satisfied gasp. “I promise it not make you go blind. Well, I hope. You can never be entirely sure.”

Holland looked appalled. The android came back to the table, bearing a large cake. “He is joking with you,” she said. “He is adequately skilled.”

“Adequately skilled...” said the Russian with a snort.

Time stood still as Holland stared at the softgel face of the android. Just a sheath, a garment worn by the machine in the box deep in the plant room. It had an anodyne beauty to it, too perfect, no asymmetry to give it that human quirk. It was obviously a machine, at least. He didn’t think he could have stood it if it had been wearing one of those sex-doll bodies some of them sported; almost but not quite human.

“Thank you,” he said finally, and took a gulp of the drink. The android’s eyes clicked shut and open, and it bobbed its head in acknowledgement, and it moved away. Holland breathed easier.

The mood picked up. Stulynow declared the vodka too warm and produced a dangerous looking, homemade chilling sleeve hooked up to a canister of CO
₂
. Half an hour later, they opened a second bottle. Ten minutes after that, Orson and Jensen followed Maguire in a rendition of “Danny Boy.”

Holland’s ears grew booze-warm and buzzy.

H
OLLAND LAY IN
bed, waiting for the anti-intoxicants to take effect. Every time he began to drift off, he started awake, sure that he would see the android standing in the doorway. He thought he was doing well with the machine, not showing his disquiet. He absolutely had to master it. He rubbed his face with his hands and exhaled loudly. There was no future for a scientist who couldn’t work with AI. He’d done well on Earth avoiding the stronger variants for three years, but how long did he realistically think he could do that? Now that public worry over the machines was dying back again, they were becoming ever more pervasive. It was just three years since the Five Crisis, and look at it now. What would it be like in twenty, thirty years? He was thirty-two years old. He had anything up to seventy years of work left in him. If he kept his Frankenphobe reputation, it would be more like four years of work.

He needed to deal with this. There was only one AI here, after all. The near-I, they weren’t a problem. But the AI...

He swung his legs out of from under his covers and sat on the edge of the bed.

Best get it over and done with.

He stood. The floor was cold. He was bare-chested, shivering. He picked up a crumpled T-shirt and tugged it on. He was still a little drunk from Stulynow’s vodka. That helped.

He padded to the door and opened it. The corridor outside was deserted. He walked down it, irritable, half drunk, his nerves taut with apprehension.

The plant rooms were near their sleeping quarters. The cabins were sunk into a lava tube with the top hacked off, and where it protruded above ground this part of the base was built of bricks made from compressed dust, with soil piled against it. The solid blocks, regolith and stone about them provided protection from cosmic rays, both to the men and machines.

Cybele could be called upon from any part of the base; anywhere, in fact, where he was in radio range. But he wanted to speak to it directly. A foolish sentiment. AI did not have a sense of self that was tethered to their physical body, like people, but somehow it was important to him.

He pressed his thumb onto the plate outside Cybele’s room. He trembled so much he had to enter his entrance code twice. The door slid open, the soft noise loud in the silence of the night time base.

Cybele’s base unit filled half the small room. The core of it wouldn’t be so big, he thought, but the shielded sleeve it occupied – a long, dull metal torpedo-shaped case – was massive as a sarcophagus. He stared at it. There was nothing to distinguish this room from the corridor: the same light, the same insistent hum of machinery at work. Colour coded pipes striped the walls. There was no personalisation to it.

He thought of the base unit of the Five at the institute; a different set up, larger; he remembered more cooling systems, but then the Three here was cooled by air from outside, and that was cold enough.

The Five. He should have gone in there with a fire axe, but he hadn’t. He was too frightened, too scared to go in and save six people from being burned alive, hypnotised by its ruthlessness. And yet here he was, ready to face another machine because he was losing sleep.

He felt sick with shame. He berated himself. He was being ridiculous. This machine wasn’t trying to kill him. Perhaps he was mastering his fear, rather than being selfish. Maybe the dreams would never come back.

“Dr Holland?” Cybele’s voice spoke into the room, smooth as always, directionless. “May I help you?”

“Um, er, yes. Cybele.”

“Yes?”

She sounded so reasonable, as patient as a kindergarten teacher. The machines, even before the crisis, they were so fucking superior. “I want you to promise,” he said, trying not to sound like the irrational child he felt himself to be, “not to come into my room. Ever. Is that understood?”

“You are referring to last night? I apologise. My understanding of human psychology is imperfect, and I lack access to appropriately detailed databases.”

“Right.”

“I am improving,” she said. “On my own.”

“Right.”

“I promise I will abide by your wishes.”

“Thank you.”

“Maybe we can be friends?”

Not on your life.
“Maybe.”

“Goodnight, Dr Holland.”

“Er, yes. Goodnight.” He turned to go. Only then did he see the pictures, dozens of Martian landscapes in watercolour, pastel and pencil, on Cybele’s wall.

That night he woke several times, screaming, from the dream where faceless androids tore apart his son while he watched, powerless to act, paralysed. The dream he had told his wife about. The reason she had left him.

His eyes were dry again and had to be massaged into cooperation. He took a drink of water. He finished the bottle, then drank another.

He was soon asleep again. Dr Ravi would have been proud.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Heimark’s Moon

2598 AD

“I
’LL NOT HAVE
another word said on it, it’s ridiculous,” said Arturo Lorenz. His client was boring him. He had a headache again – the window filter’s effect on the light, he was sure of it. Worst of all, the message still had not come. What if he’d been rejected at the last moment?

He would have been the first to hold up his hands and say that he wasn’t focussing on his work today.

“Not from where I’m sitting,” said Ezra Abraham. An Ethiopian, or a Somali, or something like that. “They are racists, racists! Do you want to know what they called me?”

Arturo shook his head quite vigorously. “No, no, that won’t be necessary.” He was well aware of what new arrivals got called. He extended his lower lip over his moustache and made a clucking noise at the back of his throat. He was over by his collection of antique books, all paper, and read a few of the spines, looking for some wisdom to pop into his head. Of course, if it wasn’t going to come off the Library, then it wasn’t going to leap into his mind from a rack of ancient dried wood pulp, was it? Still, the exercise helped him centre himself, and drag his attention back to this man’s problem.

“Look, Mr Lorenz, I’m not going to get all historical on you, and I know you think I’ve got some kind of chip on my shoulder, but I
feel
this, I really do. We had hundreds of years of slavery, then two hundred years of
enormous great walls
keeping us in our place. I come up here, and I get the same old shit. It’s enough to make me want to go back to Earth, you know?” Abraham’s eyes were red. He looked to be on the edge of tears.

“Hmmm, hmmm,” said Arturo. “You know, this has nothing at all to do with your...” He gestured at Abraham. His skin was mid brown, his eyes wide and very white, set in his face like opals. His heart was as open as his face; he had one of those faces a deceitful expression could never, ever crawl across. He was a bright, charming, intelligent young man, and Arturo was sorry for him, and guiltily aware that today he was not getting the best of services.

Where was that message?

“It’s the fact you’re from Earth. Every new immigrant gets a hard time here. My grandparents, well, let me tell you...”

“I don’t care about your grandparents, Arturo. Do something about it! If I get mocked for being from Earth one more time, I’m taking it to court.” Abraham shot out of his chair, leaned forward and pointed his finger. He also looked like he would never get angry, so what kind of judge of character was Arturo anyway? Arturo sighed.

“Please, be calm. I will have a word with the men on your shift, but it could just make it worse.”

Abraham’s flash of anger passed. His shoulders slumped. He looked away again. He spoke to the wall, with its pictures and vases on shelves, not to Arturo. “I do not care. Please do this for me. I do not mean to be thin-skinned, but enough is enough. I am good at what I do. I want to be accepted for who I am, and what I bring to the TF project, not tormented for where I am from.” He looked sad, sad and worn out.

He left. Arturo pulled the name of the shift manager from the Library into his mind, and sent him a message to come to his office when his shift was done.
His office
. He was one of only three people he knew who had one. But then his work often needed doing face to face; a virtspace room in the Library wasn’t any good, especially if there were firings involved. He needed to know where the miscreant in question was. Having them run off, or worse, take out their anger on whoever they suspected of reporting them, well, it just didn’t bear thinking about. Not at all.

What happened to Abraham happened a lot, new blood getting a roasting from old hands. Psychiatrists said it went back to the settlement, the innate prejudice of the pioneer. The earlier generations of Martians felt they had struggled to wrest something from a harsh world, and at a cost of blood. They resented those who came to reap the rewards of their efforts, or so they saw it. It was a selfish proposition, it was Marsform’s enployees’ collective efforts that had made Mars halfway habitable as it was now, not those of individuals, and there many who claimed this prejudice as birthright whose greatgrandparents had done nothing more deadly than write reports. The wealth of nations had poured into the planet; who wielded which pick was absolutely immaterial. But the attitude had become embedded in Martian culture, and now men who hadn’t really done all that much resented other men who would contribute just as much as they had, to the exact same goal, without taking anything away from anybody.

He’d seen it over and over again. Martian culture could be a shock for new arrivals. It was a big planet, and underpopulated, and there were new Martians coming nearly every day, especially when Mars and Earth swung close to each other, so he supposed it couldn’t remain like that forever. At least, that’s what he hoped.

He could do no more than that.

On the other hand, Arturo had some sympathy for the original settlers and their descendants. Back then, real heroes had died to bring life to the endless red sand. If the present was about money and company, not the individual, then in the past the inverse was true, surely? When a few hundred men and women lived in inhospitable conditions so he could sit in his nice, comfortable office...

That was why he had applied to the institute; to welcome some of that genuine pioneering spirit back into the world.

He sighed again. He was sighing a lot recently. Maybe he was a romantic fool too, and he’d bought into the myth of the pioneers despite being scorned by them for not being of original, first-settler stock. He equivocated on the issue, as he did nearly every day, and gave up, leaving it until tomorrow before he gave it another thorough worrying.

He went to that big, over-padded chair of his and flopped heavily into it. His window looked right out over Canyoncit, right down over the broad waters of the Marineris Seaway. It was such a view, a view he would have killed for once – or assumed he would, were he the killing type – and he had never actually been here in the position to enjoy it (now he had the view, he was not so sure; a big window was probably not worth even the most hypothetical of lives). Sometimes, when the sun lined up just right – the
sun
, Sol, not the many mirror suns that cut down through the dust to the bottom of the canyon – sometimes, he thought he still could. Kill, that is. Those times the water shone like molten gold, and each and every one of the big windows set into the canyon walls and skyscrapers did too... Then he was content. No; then, he was
awed
.

If he didn’t have that? He steepled his fingers, took in the rich sight of the canyon again. Then yes. Murder. Quite probably.

On the other hand (I’m up to three hands now, he thought), perhaps he should never have listened to his father. He never wanted to be an advocate. He was chief Employment Arbiter for this section of Marsform, a good job, a fat salary, but it wasn’t enough. Views aside, naturally.

He sighed yet again, not a good sign, nor a good sigh, and patted his stomach. His wage wasn’t the only fat thing about him.

What he’d always wanted to be was a spacer, and if he’d done that he’d be up there right now, working on the moon. The view from his window had the faintest tint to it, a molecule-thick skin on the outside keeping out energetic cosmic radiation. If he were up there, helping, he’d be responsible for making that film redundant; such a thin film, but it was so emblematic of the struggle here on Mars to make another home for the human race. Without it, the life they’d brought could never really flourish. He clapped his hands behind his head, and rocked the chair he was in.