Strider's Galaxy (2 page)

"Carry on," he said.

"The
Santa Maria
is a triumph of human endeavor in every sense of the term," said Strider. She looked once more through the "window," deliberately controlling herself. "I will not listen to some pampered fat cat in an office calling it a 'can'."

"I think this stage of the interview procedure is over," said Dulac abruptly. He looked at each of his colleagues in turn. They nodded. Then he swivelled back to meet Strider's gaze.

"Thank you for your time. We can call up a cabble to take you back to City 43 . . ."

#

Once upon a time—centuries before a raped child had brought into existence the infant that became the human being now walking through the darkness towards City 43—much of the Earth had been like the holographic scene Strider had watched in the interview room. Then a soaring population and sheer human greed had killed it—or, at least, had initiated and accelerated the processes that would, a millennium or two ahead, kill it. Maybe not as long as a millennium would be required: the environmental degradation was now moving with almost visible swiftness, and seemed irreversible.

What had really spelled the end was the short three-way nuke war between Indonesia, Japanasia and China in 2047. The war was over in a matter of hours, because that was how long it had taken for the populations of all three nations to be exterminated entirely; it might have gone on a bit longer except that the countries' military leaders had been among the casualties. Aotearoa and Australia chipped in for a final few suicidal minutes. Aside from the millions who died during those few hours, over half the population of the Earth perished over the next couple of decades as a direct consequence of the war, which had been, in essence, about net-usage rights. Kids were born with horrific disabilities; or more often they were not, because people chose to abort them or had pre-empted the moral dilemma by opting for sterilization.

No one had ever tried to calculate how many other human beings had died through the major indirect consequence of the war, which was a radical shift of climate patterns. Various models produced in the twentieth century had suggested that a nuke war would either contribute so much to global warming that life on Earth would bake to death or throw so much crap into the atmosphere that, with the Sun's heat blocked out, life would freeze to death. The nuke war showed the opposing models to be both right and wrong. Most of the northern hemisphere froze, and most of the southern hemisphere baked—which didn't much concern the people of Oceania, who were all dead anyway, but was rough luck for the southern half of South America, which had had nothing to do with the original, now largely forgotten dispute and whose population was largely too poor to emigrate in haste to more temperate climes.

Those temperate climes extended in a band of variable width around the equator. Mexico and United Caribbea and the countries to their south were inundated by North Americans seeking sanctuary from the chill. While parts of Africa became wastelands, others tried to cope with colossal immigration from Europe. In the aftermath of the nuke war, the Arab nations wiped themselves out in the bacteriological War of Hatred, which incidentally destroyed Israel.

When the surviving human population of Earth got down to about four hundred million, of whom ten per cent were in some way handicapped, the world's few remaining political leaders decided that the best option was the urgent terraforming of Mars. It was a task that took several hundred years, and the resultant ecosystem was frail; at most a few hundred million people could survive on the once red but increasingly green planet. They could—with difficulty—live outside if they chose, but most opted to dwell inside the various blisters constructed with an almost obscene haste all over humanity's new world. Water was still a problem: even with cloud-seeding, showers tended to be short-lived and mild. Some people decided instead to remain on Earth; about a hundred million continued to live in the safe zone around the equator, enjoying the fruits of what still seemed a profligate nature while at the same time knowing that the world was dying around them. But anyone with any sense, and who could afford it, went to Mars.

If they were allowed to. The Martian government soon started introducing immigration quotas. There was almost another war—and would have been, except that Earth no longer possessed the technological ability to mount one. This was a good thing: the human species had already had the misfortune to destroy one planet; to have destroyed another would have seemed like carelessness.

#

She was about half an hour into her walk back to City 43 when the attack came.

The Martian night was almost silent, except for the faint, high-pitched whines of nocturnal insects; the insides of the blisters could be noisy, but the plastite walls stopped most of the sound from leaking into the meager atmosphere. Strider had been listening to nothing but the sound of her own footfalls and her hoarse breathing for several kilometers when a hand from behind her snaked around her mouth.

"Don't make any noise," said a voice.

Instinctively, Strider bit the palm that was gagging her, then grabbed the wrist with both hands, fell half-sideways and, rearing up, threw the mugger out in front of her. Although she had been nearly twenty years on Mars, it still seemed to her that he took an inordinately long time to fall to the ground. By the time he did so, she had one boot ready to clamp down on his throat.

"I have friends," the man croaked.

"So have I," said Strider. She wished her voice sounded stronger. While the Martian atmosphere was sufficient to support human life, any prolonged exercise—like walking—led to breathlessness. "What were you wanting?"

Flat on his back, the mugger tried to produce a shrug. She could see his face only as a blur in the darkness. "Your plastic," he said. "What the fuck else do you think I'd want?"

"To kill me, maybe?"

"Nah. My license doesn't extend to killing people, just to mugging them. If you'll let me get my papers out of my pocket . . ."

"No."

"Oh, it's like that, is it?" The man began to shiver.

"Don't worry. Like yourself, I'm not into killing." She looked up towards Phobos again, wondering if the sight of the tiny moon might give her some inspiration. If she let this turd go then all that would happen would be that he'd mug someone else, less capable than herself. Her civic duty was to take him along with her to City 43 and hand him in to the authorities, where he would be charged with incompetence. But she didn't enjoy the prospect. She was already tireder than she'd expected, so beating him unconscious and then carrying him was out of the question. She could pull her lazgun on him, she supposed, and march him all the way to City 43, but in the darkness he could easily escape from her, and he might attack her again . . .

"I've got an idea," she said, looking down once more at the dim blob of his face. "You and I could be friends."

"I don't know what you mean."

"Friends. It's what people often are to each other."

"I—"

"You're currently in no position to argue. I could break your neck if I wanted to."

"You probably couldn't."

"What do you mean?" She leant forward to stare at him more closely.

"I'm not a human. I'm a bot."

"Oh, for—"

"It's true," he said.

"Bots don't go mugging—they've no need to." Bots of whatever type either had free board and lodging or they weren't manufactured in the first place.

"I do."

She rested her boot on his throat; it wouldn't hurt him much and it was a relief to stop standing on one foot. His head buzzed for a couple of seconds, then stopped.

"I think you need to do some explaining."

"Dr Dulac—"

"What's that asshole got to do with this?"

"There are several stages of the interview. You passed the first one. Now you've just passed the second. I wouldn't have hurt you more than necessary, you know."

"Oh, yeah?"

"Do you think you
chose
to walk back to your hotel in City 43? Wouldn't that have been just a bit irrational of you? Do you think you could allow me to sit up?"

"No. Squirm a bit."

Again the bot attempted a shrug. "Have it your own way."

Strider pressed her foot down more firmly as she thought. Dulac had looked so firmly out the fake window that it was only natural that she would want to do so as well; perhaps her desire or otherwise to see that vista was a part of the test: people who were not inquisitive were hardly likely to be the best personnel aboard the
Santa Maria
. She remembered the famous legend about what happened when the first
Viking
had landed on Mars, way back in whatever it was: about half an hour after the initial pictures had begun to come through to Earth, someone on the project had said, "Yeah, but I want to see what's on the
other
side of that ridge." Inquiry was what going into space was all about. And, of course, the holo she had seen was of people walking around under the open sky of a paradisiac world. Probably Dulac had also laced the air of the office with nanobots that would increase her suggestibility when she inhaled them. She giggled suddenly: if he'd done that, he and his four colleagues must have been going berserk all through the discussion of her sex life.

She sobered quickly.

"What other mind games was Dulac playing?" she said.

"I don't know, lady. I'm just a bot. Look, are you
sure
you won't let me sit up? Machines can feel just as much discomfort as human beings when they're pinned down like this."

"Tell me another."

"I possess just enough pain sensors to protect myself from damage, so your boot isn't hurting me. But I've got enough intelligence to realize that I should be vertical, not horizontal, and that this situation is very humiliating. Does that make sense to you, lady?"

"I'll let you sit up—I'll even let you stand up and walk around—if you respond the right way to my earlier idea. You and I could be friends, and walk the rest of the way together to City 43."

"No. I can't do that. I have to get back to the SSIA blister. It's not within my remit to do anything else."

Strider snorted. "Just as a matter of interest, what would you have done if I hadn't overpowered you?"

"Mugged you. But without causing pain, if I could help it."

"Well," she said, "at least you're being franker than you were before." She raised her boot cautiously. "Can you call a cabble for me?"

"It'd be a pleasure, lady," said the bot, slowly raising himself. "Anything to get you as far away from me as possible. There's one on the way already."

#

When she finally got back to her hotel room she stripped off her clothes and twisted the command switch to fill the room with water. Of course, it wasn't real water—there was no water to waste on Mars—but an illusion, the same way that it was only an illusion that she was breathing through gills as she swam around in the warmth. Further illusions ensured that the room expanded so that she was swimming in an infinitude of sunlit ocean, with bright shoals of fishes flickering towards her and then away again.

She twitched her tail to bring herself down to face the mirror that hung over the bed.

You don't look so bad, young Leonie,
she thought, turning from side to side, watching herself move slowly in the water. A small green fish, half-transparent, came up to investigate her elbow; she batted it away gently with the palm of her hand, and it scampered off in panic to rejoin its shoal.
If it weren't for the fact that you're not so young any longer.

She thought she was forty, although she hadn't checked up on her exact age recently. The difference between Earth's and Mars's years made calculating birthdays a nightmare, and nobody cared, anyway. She could expect to live another hundred and sixty or seventy years—more, if she were lucky, thanks to the nanobots that inhabited every cubic micrometer of her body, scouring away detritus and collaborating to perform minor surgery on the rare occasions it was necessary. Dulac probably knew to the millisecond exactly how old she was.

She grinned at herself in the mirror.
Hey! You're younger than you thought! This is the year 2527, and you were born in 2489, so you're now
well
under forty. You're a spring chicken, Leonie.

Her face was one of those that didn't appear beautiful at first—for the early years of her life she'd been plain, if that, and then her bone structure had begun to exert itself on the lines of her features. Now she knew that her appearance was what polite people called "distinguished." She reckoned her best features were her eyes, which were deeply brown—almost as brown as her skin—with glimmers of pink flesh visible in their corners. Her nose was snub, which she liked, and her lips were full, which she wasn't so sure about.

She poked her tongue out at her own reflection, positioned herself carefully just above the bed, then twisted the command switch again to make the water disappear.

She landed with a
pfflumpph
on the bed's forcefield, and felt her tail transmuting back into legs again.

According to the bot—whose name, while they'd been waiting for the cabble to arrive, she had finally established was Pinocchio—most of the other people Dulac and his coterie had interviewed so far had failed. The bot wasn't too clear about the details, but he knew that he'd had to quasi-mug only about ten per cent of the candidates, being successful in almost all cases.

Only an hour or so ago she'd been looking up at Phobos and thinking,
Well, that's it, then.
Now she was beginning to think there was a chance.

She was also beginning to feel both grimy and hungry. The water, while she'd been in it, had given her a delicious sensation of lightness and cool cleanliness, but that had vanished as soon as she'd switched the illusion off.

She rolled from the bed and walked into the shower-room, where she crapped efficiently before standing a while in the cubicle as the ultrasound rasped her clean. As a treat—remembering that it was the SSIA who were paying the hotel bill, not herself—she pressed the button by the side of the shower-head. A measured one hundred and fifty milliliters of cold
real
water splashed over her.