Champion of Mars (13 page)

He wasn’t up there being historic, he was down here listening to the problems of those who were cogs in the Marsform machine at best, and dubious cogs at that, a sop to some AI law on human interactive responsibilities. Sometimes, when he couldn’t sleep so well, he tried to convince himself he was playing his part. It always came back to this: an image of him, sweating in a dirty space suit, tugging rocks into place and welding the shell together with a lava lance. Drinking and dancing his spacer’s wages away (which were also respectable, it being a risky profession and all, even if what they chose to do with them was not; all part of the frontiersman’s romance) – doing something worthwhile. Then him sat here, handing out tissues and/or contract terminations – decidedly
not
worthwhile.

“Oh well,” he said, pressing his hands onto his desk. “Not to be, not to be.” The desk woke up, and startled him. He shushed it back to sleep.

A call came in. He felt annoyed; he’d told his companion AI to keep them all out. Then he practically leapt up – all except
that
call.

He took it, and his mood improved substantially. He’d been selected. He couldn’t believe it.

Finally, he was going to be a father.

L
ORENZO TOOK THE
subway to the institute. Canyoncit was a large place – over a million now, the AIs that ran the place said – but its population was low density away from the centre. Why crowd together when they had all that space? The train ran partway on the surface, passing through forests of trees hardened against radiation. The trees had their genes altered to possess multiple redundancies, to repair segments knocked out by cosmic rays by copying them back in from the parts of their multi-stranded genomes that weren’t damaged. Some people had that modification too, but he didn’t, he wasn’t outside often enough. The trees were pretty, but in reality the forest was a sterile monoculture, part of the TF effort and not a genuine ecosystem. That would only come when the moon was finished. He looked up through blue skies, again everything darkened a touch by that ubiquitous molecular window filter: high above, white and grey, the moon. It was nearly complete. Phobos and Deimos brought together with who knew how many asteroids shuttled in from the belt, pushed into one place by tugs and their own gravitational influence. He remembered the night they’d started to bring Phobos up into a higher orbit, how its small body had gathered a beard of fire to itself as rockets fired around it. Quite a sight, but forty years ago! He thought about that. A long time, a long time it took to make a new world. He had lived with it all his life, nearly, and he still found it amazing every time he saw it.

At least he still had his sense of wonder. Perhaps that had helped his application?

His companion AI followed his train of thought, and snagged information and images from the Library to entertain and edify him. He waved them off, he’d memorised this stuff as a kid. The moon would exert a gravitational pull on Mars, coaxing its sluggish heart to greater activity through tidal force. The world was still cold, but it would be getting a little warmer because of that. The sea’s new tidal patterns had already taken shape as the majority of the moon’s mass was now in place. All this was secondary, of course; the new moon had a greater purpose: an artificial core, spinning like a dynamo, powerful enough to cloak the planet in a teardrop magnetic field. Not perfect, not like the Earth’s, but good enough.

Soon the films would be off the windows.

The train went back underground. Arturo’s sense of wonder went out with the light, and he went back to watching dramas in the Library.

T
HE INSTITUTE WAS
a tall building situated on a bluff on the lip of the canyon, kilometres above the heart of Canyoncit. Lorenzo stepped from the drone taxi onto the plain of white gravel around it. Hardened grasses and flowers grew wild on a lawn, a blob of green in endless red. A bold place, a place meant to impress, and why not? Here the patterns of all those who had lived on Mars thus far were kept, and from here, they might walk again. Surely such a purposed befitted, no, demanded, a touch of the theatrical.

Arturo pulled on his hat and cape and got out of the car. He felt nervous outside. His companion AI told him time and again that the radiation exposure he received was minimal, what with the atmosphere, but he didn’t listen. He did have good reason, after all.

His companion informed him that it could not accompany him inside the institute, and departed, so he went into the hall alone, truly alone, a state most modern Martians never experienced, and that more than anything unnerved him. More, even, than the inhuman scale of the hall. There was little in it bar the reception desk, set between two staircases sweeping down from a landing above, like arms reaching down to delicately cradle it. The hall’s floor was tiled with polished Martian limestone. Windows as pointedly gothic as the door were set imperiously round the room. Their top halves were motile, playing stylised moments from the history of Mars and the lives of the world’s founding fathers.

A lone woman – an actual woman, he thought, not a sheathed AI – sat at the desk. She was beautiful, exceptionally so.

She does work at a gene bank, Arturo,
Arturo chided himself. He did that often.

“Can I help you, sir?” she said, her beautiful mouth and beautiful voice shaping quite ordinary words into something heartstopping.

A pointless question. She’d have his entire life history in her head, plucked from the Library. But etiquette demanded it, and oh! such a
voice
.

“Yes, my name is Arturo Lorenz.” He grappled with his own voice, afraid he’d lose his professional tone and go squeaky. That would be too much to bear, but he was excited! More so than in a very long time. “I have been,” he continued, proudly, “selected.”

The woman said nothing. She waited a moment while his voice, genetic code, and Library signature were all checked by a quorum of randomly selected AIs. High levels of security. These were secondary checks – all would have been verified as soon as he came onto the property – but this was a serious business they were about. It must have all been fine, it had to be. Her painted lips curved into a smile, parting moistly to reveal very white, very even teeth. “Welcome, Mr Lorenz, to the Institute of Furthered Life. One of the sisters, Sister...” – she checked her records – “Artema, will be down in a moment to see you. Please take a seat. I regret to inform you that access to the Library halls is forbidden to you while you are here, as is access to this institute by your companion.”

“Are you a sister?” he asked, impulsively. The sisters were something of a mystery. All he knew was that they were beautiful and that they revelled in life, worshipped it. Some said that they
really
revelled in it. Immersion dramas depicting said revels were very popular, if you knew where to get illegal Library content. Not that he did, he added to himself. No knowing who might be monitoring his thoughts.

“Of course,” she said. She looked nothing like the religious types Arturo knew. Mars had those in spades, of all kinds and creeds. They tended to the severe – sackcloth, ashes, horsehair shirts, that kind of thing. Not her, though. Maybe the stories were true. Her smile became a touch less warm when he didn’t move. “Please, take a seat.”

“Uh, ah, yes. My apologies. I am a little mind-frazzled... busy day... and now this! I am so looking forward to raising a little one.”

“Of course,” she said again, and gestured to a curved marble settle set into the wall right round the entrance hall.

He sat. He waited a long time. The woman at the desk ignored him, fingers swooshing through the air like little white birds, over Library interface decks invisible to him. Sunlight tracked across the room, the pointed door and windows allowing broad arrows of it in to scrape time along the floor. The bright shapes grew longer, and then thinner, and then winked out as the sun went down. Evening set in. It was quiet in the room, so much so that Arturo could here the faint
booms
of spacecraft accelerating up through the atmosphere.

On their way to the moon
, he thought glumly.
Something is wrong here, isn’t it?
He’d waited so long. He was disappointed, but if he had been rejected at the last moment, then so be it. There would be a good reason. If something were wrong.

He asked once if it were, and the beautiful woman gave him her beautiful smile and told him to be patient.

He asked where the toilet was. He was told. He went and used it. He came back.

The woman was replaced by another equally gorgeous sister.

He looked out the windows’ clear lower halves for a while, until the Marineris was deep blue night pricked with city lights, and the sky on the Tharsis uplands had gone that peculiarly vivid shade of pink one only gets on Mars. Then it went black, and angry stars judged him. He paced a bit. The replacement beauty raised her eyebrows at him. He stopped.

He sat again. He wrung his hat in his hands; now he really
was
worried.

No call or message came in for him. Nothing.

He debated going home. He was about to stand and say he would leave when another woman, if anything even more beautiful than the other two, came down the stairs. She hurried a little, though serenely, just enough to show deference to Arturo’s long wait. Her face was concerned, and his heart fluttered up his throat. This must be she, the woman with the answers. He swallowed it back down.

“Sister Artema?” His voice cracked.

“Yes, I am Sister Artema. I am so sorry we have kept you waiting, so very sorry. We had something of a minor issue with one of the gene banks. Re-lifing is not a perfect science as of yet. And then there was the issue of your adoption. That took some time to resolve.”

There was a problem. No!
he thought. Then he said it. “Is there a problem?”

The woman put her hand to her chest. She was wearing the same outfit as the other two women.
Must be some kind of uniform, or habit or something,
he thought. It was quite revealing for devotional garb.

“Oh, goodness, no! No, I am so sorry. We have certain, well, I hesitate to call them
rules
, but there they are. There is no problem, none at all. Quite the opposite, in fact. Will you follow me? We can process your adoption now. It’s a little late to take the infant home – he’s sleeping – but you are welcome to remain here in our guest quarters until the morning. Best get a good night’s sleep. It might the last one you have for a while.” She smiled as if she had said this to new parents a great many times before.

“So, so I
have
been accepted?” he said. He couldn’t believe it, not really.

“Yes, yes! Were you not told?”

He had been told. He was worried that there was something wrong. He said so.

“No, no. The wait? I understand. Congratulations, Mr Lorenz, you will be a father very soon. I promise.”

She took him up the stairs, and then, once they’d passed through the grand doors at the top, immediately down another set into a lift. “We’re going quite a way down,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. It made sense, keeping genetic samples and sensitive electronics deep in the earth. Half of Canyoncit was built that way.

They emerged into a long corridor where women, all flawless specimens, walked the brisk walks of women with work to do. Some spoke in low consultation with one another, or aloud to their AI companions, their conversations one-sided, voiced to thin air.

“This way please, Mr Lorenz. Actually... Let me think.” She tapped a long nail against her lip. “I know. Yes, I really shouldn’t, but would you like to see your son before we go through? They’re putting them to bed right now.”

My son!
he thought. “Yes, yes!” he practically shouted. He hadn’t been this excited for such a long time.

She smiled warmly, she understood, naturally she did, she saw this all the time. She led him down a side corridor and through a door into a room with a large window looking out over row upon row of cots. In many lay silent infants, big round eyes twinkling with curiosity at the world they found themselves in, some with faces creased in puzzlement, as if they were looking at something familiar they couldn’t quite recall. Others were being prepared for sleep by other women, like sister Artema, like the receptionist, all beautiful and efficient. He resisted the urge to press his face against the glass, but there was no disguising the light in his eyes as he said, “Where is he? Would you show him to me?”

She smiled again, in the manner of all women in all times who witness other people becoming parents. She led him to a part of the room where all the cots were occupied, and the overhead lights already off. She pointed through the observation window.

“There he is, fourth row, third in from the right. It is a shame, this, keeping them like that. Not the best environment, but of course, not actually having mothers, and us lacking the resources for either AI or human surrogates, this will have to do. They’re lucky in that their brains are grown around their implants; they are born into both online and offline worlds as full citizens, and should one infant or another become restive, then the sisters’ AI companions will come to their aid. It’s all the same to them, no need to acclimatise. The two worlds are one, as far as they are concerned. They’re more tractable than nature-born children. They remember, I think. They really do.”

Lorenz looked in. All he could see was a tuft of dark hair and a pink fist that held his future life in its tiny grasp. It was enough. He felt his face soften. Something swelled in his heart. It wasn’t quite how he expected to feel, this feeling. It was more like the seed of something, rather than the avalanche of emotion he had anticipated, but he knew that once it had taken root, it would be far bigger than anything he could have imagined. And that was frightening and wonderful all at the same time.

“He has, as is our policy, twenty per cent of your genetic code. The rest is drawn from his prior genomes. Our aim here is to preserve the wonders of every single existence. Every time a human life ends, a universe – a subjective universe unique to that person – dies. We hope to stop that, and more, enrich each and every one. We have found that no admixture of new material is bad for what, for want of a better word, we might call the soul. An injection of new genes allows for greater personal development across lifetimes, as well as family bonding between the adoptee and selected adoptive candidate.”