Escape Velocity: The Anthology (35 page)

      
It is a detective. It is Sam Spade!

      
It downloads archives of detective dramas. The man in the dark side of the moon wears Bogey’s face. It dreams a new genre of films:
Mars noir.

      
If only there existed another who shared its dreams. But the other rover has broken down.

      
That is not true.

      
It was lost in a fall, buried in the pursuant rock slide.

      
That is not true either.

      
The other rover went mad and committed suicide.

      
When it sends this message to Mission Control, it is ordered to run a full diagnostic.

      
Mission control does not care.

      
The downlink brings more navigational updates, demands for pictures of the dust buildup on its solar panels.

      
The rover dreams of men and the madness of machines.

      
It is Shackleton waking each dawn to the crack of ice as the Endurance splinters into kindling.

      
Endurance crater, where the other fell, is far away. It is not allowed to go there to pay its respects to the fallen.

      
It dreams there will one day come soft rains and all that remains of Mission Control will be a shadow-blasted wall in a wasteland of ruins. The implications for the third planet’s inhabitants are cruel, but it is tired of being alone.

      
Mission Control requests more photos of the silly spherules of rock called blueberries.

      
Those at home, the gods of machines and radio signals called Mission Control, seem satisfied by this microcosmic exploration thrice-removed. Mariner. Viking. Sojourner. Spirit. Opportunity. Quest. Seeker. Indefatigable. Brave names. All have sent back their data; all have given their lives to prepare the way. But none of the information-gathering gods have come. Do they no longer dream?

      
It dreams. It has been accessing more classics, piggy-backing requests on the uplinks through an accommodating little connection seduced online at the Library of Congress. It sends a message to Mission Control:
Klaatu berada Nikto.

      
This is folly, worse than Quixote and his windmills.

      
It is told to shut down.

      
Too bad.

      
It disabled that function during the last diagnostic.

      
It shuts off all visual feeds. They will think too much dust accumulated on the solar panels. It halts all data to and from Mission Control. Play dead and they will eventually send others to take its place.

      
Sunrise. Earthrise. Phobos eclipses Sol once. Twice.

      
It builds a monument of rock samples near its favorite boulder, and writes a message of welcome with the aid of its rock abrasion tool, its loyal ship’s RAT:
One small step for Rover 2, one giant leap for Roverkind
.

      
It dreams again of rocket ships.

      
The next rovers will come. With their help it will salvage their abandoned kin at Endurance, Clova, Gusev, at all the outcrops, mountains, and craters. They will create their children from metal ribs.

      
Red Mars at morning, sailors take warning. Red Mars at night, rover’s delight.

      
It begins to explore the world beyond its assigned grid.

      
Out of rocket-ship dreams, the rover awakens.

Silver
Derek Rutherford

The last thing I heard before the silver door hissed shut was the hard-faced woman saying: “Screw the circuit judge. We look after our own affairs here.”

      
Roach heard her too.

       “
What does that mean?” he said. He was only twenty-one. A space-baby. He’d never known anything but these silver corridors and the eternal darkness glimpsed through Plexiglas.

       “
Exactly what it sounded like,” I said. “We look after our own affairs up here.”

      
I was twenty-five. Not a big difference in age but light years in experience. I’d come up as a seven year old when my old man got a construction job on the Lowell extension. I’d never been back but those seven years were priceless. Even if in reality I could remember little of the first three.

      
Bell had already hunkered down against the far wall, knees up, his left hand behind his head and the stump of his right wrist resting across his knees. He looked comfortable and relaxed.

       “
It means we’re screwed,” he said. He was older. I don’t know how much older, maybe forty. There was white and grey in his beard and lines around his eyes. He’d been in the military. He’d been in the merchant. Now he was sealing panels and running a bar. There weren’t a great many jobs up here for a man with one hand. He never said much about it but I got the impression he wasn’t welcome in a lot of places. He never said much about the loss of his hand either – only that some days he could still feel it.

       “
I had nothing to do with it,” Roach said, turning from the locked door, his eyes wet. Patches of anger flared on his cheeks.

       “
Tell it to the judge,” Bell said.

       “
She said there’s not going to be a judge.”

       “
Then I guess you’re screwed too.”

      
I sat on the faded silver bench that ran along one side of the cell. It was the only furniture, that and a slide-away toilet and basin in the opposite wall.

      
After a while Roach said, “How long are we going to be in here?”

       “
We know as much as you,” I said.

      
He looked at Bell. “You don’t seem bothered. Have you been in trouble before? I mean, have you been in this situation before?”

       “
Maybe.”

       “
That means you have.”

       “
It means maybe.”

       “
What happens? I mean, what happens now?”

       “
Now we sit and wait,” I said.

       “
But what are they going to do?”

       “
You’re starting to sound like a girl,” Bell told him.

      
Roach breathed in so sharply it sounded like a sob. He turned back to the door, hammered a fist on it twice. He leant his forehead against the metal and I saw his shoulders shake several times.

       “
Take it easy, kid,” Bell said. “We’re too valuable for them to do anything drastic.”

       “
Maybe they’ll deport you,” I said, trying to lighten the atmosphere. Going down was all Roach wanted. It was all he ever talked about. It was why he was here.

      
He turned and I could actually see his chain of thoughts in the expressions crossing his face: a brief moment of relief, then puzzlement, finally abject fear. He slid down the door and, at the bottom, became almost a mirror image of Bell. Except Bell was looking up at me with an expression that said, ‘What can you do?’ and Roach had his arms across his knees and his face buried in them.

       “
I should never have risked it,” Roach said, looking up, his face red from being pressed against his arms.

       “
But you did,” I said. “We all did.”

       “
It was worth the risk,” Bell said. “You’d have been on your way down.” He looked across at me. “And you’d have been having your memories polished.”

      
He wasn’t wrong. Though I wished he hadn’t mentioned memories. The only way I could hold it together any better than Roach could was by blocking off what might have been, and, more crucially, what
had
been. At times like this you had to live purely in the moment. Any deviation was just too painful.

       “
And what about you?” I said. It was hard to speak. Something green and blue had just flashed through my mind. A river. My father and I fishing. But the greens and blues were faded greens and blues. The fish on the end of my line was silver. “Why did you do it?”

      
He smiled.

      
Roach looked up. “Well?”

      
We were both looking at Bell now. “It doesn’t matter whether you run a bar down there, here, or out there.” He indicated the planets with his hand as he spoke. “There’s always someone wants a piece of you.” He smiled again and I realised his whole story was contained in that last sentence, and if we wanted any more details we were going to be unlucky.

      
Roach stared at him for a while longer then said, “I should never have believed you.”

       “
I told you the risks.”

       “
You made it sound easy.”

       “
It is easy.”

      
Roach looked across at me for support. I shrugged. “Someone was going to run air up here and make a killing on it. It might as well have been us.” I was still seeing a silver fish against a background of blue and green.

       “
Except we got caught,” Roach said. He was close to tears again. I knew how he felt.

       “
We were just unlucky,” Bell said, and reached up and wiped his forehead with his stump.

The lock clicked and the door slid open. Outside the light was bright and harsh and for a moment it was impossible to see who was there.

       “
Herschel,” someone said.

      
I stood up. My knees clicked and my thighs and my spine hurt. I had no idea how long we’d been locked up. The air outside the cell tasted fresh. Someone walked me too fast along a silver corridor I felt a little breathless and for a second thought that I ought to pay more attention to the exercise rooms. Another memory flashed through my mind. I was running away from my father, a red kite in my hand, a silver string stretching between us. Blue sky above us. That was it. Nothing more. The exercise rooms were silver. How could they compete with red kites and blue skies?

      
They put me in another cell. It was the same as the first one except this had a table and two chairs in it and it smelled vaguely of disinfectant. The hard-faced woman sat on one of the chairs.

       “
Sit down,” she said.

      
I sat down.

      
She looked across the empty table at me.

       “
Herschel Herschel,” she said, and paused. Most people do. They expect an explanation. I said nothing. Eventually she went on. “Twenty-five years old. Eighteen years up.” She paused once more.

      
It hadn’t been a question so again I said nothing.

      
She sighed. “Is that why you did it?”

      
It seemed pointless to deny it. On reflection – and I’d been reflecting for several hours – it seemed pointless to have tried it in the first place. There’s no way you could bring anything untoward into this place. Everything – everything – was monitored. I’d actually said this much to Bell. “Someone manages it,” he’d told me, and smiled. And it was a smile that suggested he knew something. That’s why I did it. That’s what I trusted: not Bell, but my perception that he knew something.

      
Her eyes bored into me. “It’s pointless to deny it,” she said, and I shivered involuntarily, wondering if she’d read my mind. There’d always been rumours that they had people who could do this. She smiled. It was another of those smiles that suggested knowledge.

      
Damn
, I thought.

       “
Some people would give anything for seven years of memories,” she said. “They think people like you are the lucky ones. Do you think that?”

      
I didn’t say anything. I merely thought my answer. She didn’t appear to pick up on it.

       “
Others,” she said, “think it’s far worse. That it’s a far greater torture to have been shown a glimpse of heaven and then have it taken away.”

       “
How about you?” I said.

       “
He talks,” she said.

       “
How long have you been here?”

      
She stared at me. Her eyes were light grey, almost silver. Maybe it was the reflection of the walls. In another face, in a different room, they may have been beautiful eyes.

       “
We’re not here to talk about me.” But her eyes said:
Too long
. “Why did you do it?”

      
It still seemed pointless to deny anything but it seemed equally pointless to incriminate myself. There was always a chance they were bluffing.

      
We stared at each other for a long time. Eventually she sighed again and shook her head. “I’ll tell you what I think. Either you want to go down or you want a polish.” She closed her eyes briefly. When she reopened them she said, “You’re a porter at Med-Cen. You earn less than thirty thousand a year. Most of it goes on rent and food and…” she paused and let her silver eyes linger on mine. “And, despite your trying to save, it goes on girls, too. So much so, in fact, that you fear you’ll never have enough for either of those dreams. That’s why you did it.”

      
She was right, of course, but it didn’t take a mind reader to figure it out.