Strider's Galaxy (4 page)
Authors: John Grant
The second one was. It came in 2512, and it came from the system of Tau Ceti. Here there were only five planets orbiting the little star. The second one out had an atmosphere that was rather richer in oxygen than that of Mars, a gravity zero point eight three that of the Earth, and abundant vegetation. Whether or not humans would find it in fact habitable was something the probe could not determine: only human beings themselves could do that.
By trying it out.
It was a ruthless means of experimentation, but no one could think of a better one.
So, on Phobos, the Martians began the construction of the
Santa Maria
, which would hold forty-five human beings for a thirty-year trip, and was capable of supporting them for a further eighty years if it proved obvious that Tau Ceti
II
was a complete non-starter: in that case they would explore the system, learning what they could, and then head straight back home.
It had been projected that the building of the
Santa Maria
would take thirty years but, as time went by and no further probes reported, some urgency was put into the construction. Unlike most major engineering projects, it was coming in ahead of schedule.
#
The semicircular desk had been replaced by a much smaller one, seemingly made of wood. Pinocchio ushered Strider into the room, and left. Today only Dulac and Macphee were there, and they were smiling.
She could have done with a few smiles during her interrogation yesterday. In fact, she could have done with any palette of human emotions from her interviewers, whatever those emotions might have been: even outright antagonism would have been better than what she had endured.
The three of them exchanged greetings, and sat. The chairs were placed at precisely one-hundred-and-twenty-degree intervals, Strider observed, and despite herself she began to feel excitement kick in. The arrangement was for a meeting of equals.
"A few final questions, Strider," said Dulac.
"I'm ready."
"Why is it that you lack neural implants, stim sockets, cortical amplification, secondary retinal screens, augmented musculature and a direct commline?" Dulac was still smiling, but she could tell by the way he was leaning across the desk towards her that her he wanted an answer: this wasn't just friendly chitchat.
She decided to be honest.
"Because I've never felt the need of any of them," she said. "Most of them are just toys. I don't need augmented musculature, because I augment my own by working out in the gym. I refuse to have stim sockets or secondary retinal screens because they get in the way of my perceptions: I'm more efficient without them." She put her hands, palms down, flat on the table in front of her. "I've often thought about having a direct commline installed, because it could be useful, but—"
"Would you
object
to having a commline installed?" Macphee interposed. Even though this was a much lower-key interview than yesterday's, and even though the friendly smiles were still in place, the two still seemed determined to play the good-cop, bad-cop game.
"It would depend on the circumstances. I was fitted with a stim socket for a while a few years ago: after a while I got tired of getting high when I didn't really want to, so I had the thing taken out again. Occasionally I use a commlink to hook myself into the system temporarily. Ideally, I'd rather do without a permanent commline. On the other hand, if it meant I could perform my job better . . ."
"What degree of technological enhancement does your body in fact possess, Strider?" said Dulac.
"Nothing except nanobots—but you must know that from my records."
"How much holo do you watch?" said Macphee.
"Not much. Most of it's garbage."
"So you wouldn't describe yourself as addicted to it?" said Dulac.
Strider laughed. "Of course not."
"Yet you watched some in your hotel room last night."
"So you
were
observing me. I tuned in to a bit of holo, yes, because I was too tired to start a new bookette and I wanted something to relax with." She drew a finger across the bridge of her nose. "You're putting me on the defensive, and that pisses me off."
Dulac cleared his throat. "Thanks for the frankness, Strider. We wouldn't be doing it unless we had reason."
"We're not fooling around here," added Macphee. "These questions are more important than they might seem. Would you get up and go over to the window?"
"It's a pretty scene," said Strider, pushing back her chair.
"We've changed it today," said Dulac. "Please, go and look at it and tell us what you think."
She stared at him for a moment, then obeyed.
The tranquil groves and the ambling philosophers were gone. Instead there was a scene of such extravagant bleakness that Strider sucked in her breath. There was a prairie of long grey grass that seemed to stretch out towards infinity. Vicious sleet was coming down at an angle, and a gale was blowing across the landscape so violently that many of the ears of the grass were being ripped away, to go tumbling high in the air before being lost in the distance. A pinkish sun lowered not far above the horizon. Strider touched the plastite: it was at approximate skin temperature, but at the same time it made her sense that it was cold. She felt a stinging in her nostrils, as if she had just breathed a whiff of ozone.
"Is this Tau Ceti
II
?" she said quietly. "It's
beautiful
."
Dulac chuckled behind her.
"No. It's only a mock-up. We haven't got any pictures of the planet yet—we won't have until next year some time. You should know that."
Strider nodded absently, still absorbed by the scene of wilderness. The Martians' Von Neumann probes were programmed to replicate themselves first, explore the stellar system they had encountered, and then only as a last resort descend to the surface of any major planet. In theory the probe could lift itself off again, but only at the potential cost of destroying every ecosystem for hundreds if not thousands of square kilometers around. In practice, if they decided to investigate a world close up, they would send transmissions home as long as they thought fit, then switch themselves off.
She loved Mars. She thought of herself not as an Earthling but as a Martian. But she would have given virtually anything to be able to strip back the plastite of the fake window and throw herself into the mocked-up alien scene.
"Strider," said Dulac. He had to say it a second time before she heard him, because a heavy creature with two huge horns jutting from each shoulder was strutting through the grass towards her. It seemed to have no head as such; its eyes were just beneath and to the front of the horns.
"Yes," she said, forcing herself away from the view.
"You've got yourself a job."
"On the
Santa Maria
?" She tried to make it sound as if the question weren't any big deal.
"You could say that."
"Oh, shit, you're not making me part of the back-up team, are you?"
"No." Macphee took over. "We want you to be the
Santa Maria
's captain."
#
It took them a while to explain to her what the word "captain" meant—hierarchical structures were of course present on Mars, but everyone tried to ignore the fact. It took them a while longer to tell her why she had been singled out for the role.
In an era when almost everybody was booted up with various bits and pieces of technological augmentation, she was something of a rarity; some people were filled with more extraneous software than the average bot, which was fine when they wanted to play videogames in the middle of the night without having to get out of bed but not so exciting when they had to draw on more basic brain functions, like walking. And the two major troubles with technology were that eventually people came to rely on it and that inevitably, in time, it broke down. Sometimes it could be fixed, sometimes it couldn't.
The SSIA was sending a party of human beings on a journey that might take a hundred and ten years. During this time, some of the potential colonists would certainly suffer mental collapse: the
Santa Maria
was as large as she could be built, but the confinement and the boredom would surely break a few of the party. What was more worrying, however, was the risk of technowithdrawal: people became addicted to their gadgetry, and were likely to become suicidal—or, worse, murderous—if it broke down and couldn't be replaced.
Strider was a normal human being.
This, they repeated, meant that she was very unusual. It had also made her a prime candidate for—she practiced the new word again that night back in her apt in City 19—captaincy of the
Santa Maria
. She'd told Dulac and Macphee that she wanted a week to sort things out before the SSIA podded her across to City 78.
She felt like getting laid by way of celebration but she couldn't think of anyone to call whom she much liked and her sexbot was so goddam proficient that she was bored with it ("Couldn't you just sort of be interestingly impotent from time to time?" "It-is-not-in-my-programming."), so instead she spent a week's salary ordering up a real-cheese pizza, a glass of wine and a shot of ziprite.
2
Phobos:
AD
2528
The great thing about being on Phobos was that you felt
light
.
Out in the open wasn't as much fun, because you were constricted inside a spacesuit whose various devices for dealing with bodily excretions were extremely uncomfortable, and because you always had the nervous feeling that, if you so much as tripped, you could wrench yourself out of the tiny moon's gravitational field and either go plummeting downwards towards Mars, which seemed very big from here, or tumbling and turning off into the eternity of the Universe, which seemed even bigger. Through the thin atmosphere of Mars you could see about fifteen times as many stars as you could from the surface of the Earth; from Phobos you could see twice as many again—plus a couple of dozen distant galaxies. The spectacle was amazing, but it didn't quite compensate for the fact that you were always worried about either falling or rising.
It was a false fear. Assuming that you could kick yourself hard enough off the surface of Phobos not to come down again, all that would happen would be that you shared the moon's orbit around Mars until someone came and fetched you back. But false fears are as frightening as real ones: everyone knows the laws of physics; everyone's subconscious flatly refuses to believe in some of them.
When you were contained within the
Santa Maria
, however, it was different.
It was better than free fall. In free fall you can do a triple somersault in mid-air, but then you have to grab hold of something to stop yourself somersaulting for the rest of your life. Here you could do a triple somersault and then come slowly down for a graceful landing. Everyone tried it in private a few times before realizing that everyone else was trying it in private; after that, people got together for bouts of low-g acrobatics.
No one aboard the
Santa Maria
was actually fat, but quite a few justifiably thought of themselves as plump. In the low-g of Phobos it didn't make any difference: everybody was a ballet dancer.
#
"Retro seven," said Strider.
"Retro seven," agreed Danny O'Sondheim.
"Rotary seven point one four eight three three six one," she said.
"Rotary seven point one four eight three three six one."
O'Sondheim was her First Officer—which meant, she had been instructed, that he was her second-in-command—and she'd decided that she didn't like him very much. It was an antipathy she would have to learn to control. She suspected that he sustained a corollary antipathy, and wouldn't make too much effort to control it. That was one of the reasons she didn't like him. Still, they were working well together as they checked out the
Santa Maria
's systems. At least she got on better with him than she did with Marcial Holmberg, the grandisonian individual whom the non-SSIA personnel had elected as their representative. She tried to put the thought of Holmberg out of her mind, but it was one of those thoughts that infuriatingly refused to leave.
"Nine-eleven above, with spin forty-eight."
"Nine-eleven above, with spin forty-eight." He repeated her instructions, tapping the code into his thighputer.
The thighputer was one of the other reasons she didn't like O'Sondheim. The fact that he was an Artif was yet a further one. When she'd first met him, a few months ago, it had emerged in conversation that he'd been born in Bolivia. The body he now wore had been bought in the United States of Ireland. Whenever she asked him if the body had been bought legitimately or on the black market—which latter meant, almost always, that someone had been killed so their body could be sold—he adroitly shifted the subject.
"Zero, then up seven five one nine."
"Zero, then up seven five one nine."
It felt curious, going through all the motions of piloting a starship but getting absolutely no response, except from the holos in front of them. Some wag had thought it funny to make the Main Computer give variable responses to the tests. Messages like "
YUP, YOU GOT IT, SMACK ON THE BUTTON
" and "
JACKPOT TIME!
" came up whenever the systems checked out OK, which so far they had. Strider found the Main Computer's forced enthusiasm wearying.
In theory, Pinocchio could have done this. In fact, it was better that Strider and O'Sondheim did. Two things were being done at once: they were checking out the systems, and in a way the systems were checking out them. Strider had spent the past year memorizing every possible navigational command that could usefully be given to the
Santa Maria
. She knew that O'Sondheim had been doing the same.
"Over X eight delta."
"Over X eight delta."
"
BULLSEYE
!"
She
wished
she could find a way of liking O'Sondheim, but it was difficult. The thighputer she could have coped with (although she always reckoned that thighputers were really surrogate penises—something to play with in those idle moments, or to show off to your friends with cries of "My RAM is bigger than yours"), but there were so many other things about him that she couldn't help detesting. If she'd known earlier, she'd have told Dulac that she didn't want Artifs on board.
The human mind ages and ages and ages, but the only reason it dies is because the body supporting it dies. If the medics could get there fast enough, the body could be given sufficient implants and transplants to make it once more perfectly healthy—except for being dead, of course. But then the dead brain could be wiped and a new person's memories and personality fed into it. It was a difficult process, and therefore expensive.
Strider found it utterly immoral.
"Holding ninety-three."
"Holding ninety-three."
In the first place, it would have been easier to resuscitate the dead person than to feed a rich person's individuality into the revived corpse; it would have been even easier than that to keep the original person alive. Money made the difference between life for one and death for the other. In the second place, it was well known that the most poverty-stricken frequently killed their own family members so that the fresh corpses could be sold for Artiffing; sometimes they just murdered someone else, delivered the body to some shady but prosperous med-center, took the money and ran. And it wasn't just the poor who were in on the act: there were organized gangs that made a good living out of Artif murder.
Was O'Sondheim living inside a body that had been deliberately killed? There was no scar tissue visible above the neckline of his jumpsuit, but she hadn't seen the rest of his body and didn't particularly want to. Or was he just occupying the physique of someone the medics might have saved had there been enough money on offer?
"Four point nine two rising—bring back on the eleventh."
"Four point nine two rising—bring back on the eleventh."
But she'd have to learn to get on with O'Sondheim, whether or not the prospect appealed. He was going to be her second-in-command for at least a hundred and ten years, and possibly until the end of her life.
She didn't like the fact that he had secondary retinal screens in front of both eyes. It was hard to tell what he was thinking.
"
WAPPALLOOSA!
" said the screen in front of her.
#
It was to be her last night on Mars, and she had chosen to spend it in City 3, the oldest of all the extant Martian cities. City 1 had been found to be of defective construction by the twelve thousand people who had been living in it at the time, a century before the Martian atmosphere had become oxygen-rich enough for humans to survive outside; a few cats and rats had lived. City 2 had been destroyed by one of the sporadic volcanic upheavals that had occurred during the early days of terraforming.
Strider stared into her drink and wondered why the hell she'd bothered coming down to the planet for this past week. All it was doing was making the farewell more painful. And this was the last city on Mars she should have thought of coming to. City 3 was devoted to pleasure, which meant you spent half the time wishing someone would turn the music down, half the time fending off unwanted offers of sex, and whatever remained of the time trying to get rid of your hangover.
Her drink was blue. She could spill it on her jumpsuit and no one would notice.
"Hello."
She looked up.
"Pinocchio!" she said.
"Lady."
"Right now, you're the person I'm looking forward most to getting to know on the
Santa Maria
. Don't call me 'lady', all right?"
She stood up and clasped him round the shoulders, then tugged him down into the bright red plastite chair beside her.
"I am not a person," said Pinocchio.
"I reckon you are."
"That is kind of you, lady."
"My name is Leonie. I want you to call me by that name. Everyone else on the
Santa Maria
is going to have to call me 'Captain Strider', at least to begin with, but I want you to call me 'Leonie'. Do you want a drink?"
A few meters away from their table someone was displaying a holo of a young boy being flayed alive. People were laughing. Strider hoped and prayed that the holo was just special effects. This wasn't the Mars she wanted to remember.
In fact, it wasn't something she wanted to remember about the human species.
"Drinks are wasted on me. I haven't got a digestive system."
"Aw, come on, Pinocchio. Loosen up a bit."
"If you would like, since it is the last night for both of us on Mars, I could make you very happy."
"You don't mean . . .?" She felt between his legs. "No, I didn't think you were kitted out to be a sexbot."
"I mean we could go for a walk together under the Martian stars. It's likely we'll never see them again."
#
Outside, it was a balmy minus five degrees Celsius. The sky was cloudless. Phobos wouldn't rise for another couple of hours, but Pinocchio pointed out Deimos to her; Strider had difficulty picking out the pinprick of light among the stars. Dominating the heavens, though low on the horizon, was the bright blue-green glare of Earth.
Strider took Pinocchio's arm, and leant against his shoulder.
"Thanks for bringing me out here," she said. "I was crazy to have taken time out in fun city."
"Maybe not so crazy, lady," responded the bot. He was a good half-meter taller than her—the size of an average human—and had to twist his head to look down into her face. "It's easier to leave the rest of your kind behind if the last that you've seen is the worst of them."
They trudged through loose soil. Every now and then they had to detour around a patch of straggly bushes. Strider would probably have walked straight into them had it not been for Pinocchio.
"How do you know these things, Pinocchio?" she said after a while. "You're not a human being—you're a bot. You've told me several times that you're a less intelligent bot than most, being designed originally for valet duties. Yet you're more perceptive about human emotions than most humans I know."
She half-tripped, and moved her arm so that it was now around his waist.
"I lied about my status," Pinocchio replied.
She stopped abruptly, tugging him to make him do the same.
"You did what?" she said incredulously.
"I lied. The notion that bots can't lie is a farce. We can be programmed to do anything our designers want us to." She could just make out that he was smiling. "We can even make our heads emit a buzzing noise, if need be, so that everyone thinks we're slow on the uptake. I decided to call you 'lady' because that seemed a rather lackwitted form of address."
There was a large rock nearby. Strider gestured him towards it, and they sat side by side.
"I think you've got quite a bit of explaining to do," she said, putting her hand on his thigh. One of the advantages of bots was that you could be affectionate towards them without it being taken as a sexual advance.
"It's simple enough, if you think about it," said Pinocchio. "There are going to be forty-five people aboard the
Santa Maria
: aside from yourself, there will be twenty-two males and twenty-two females, all of breeding age and certainly fertile—because we definitely want some children to be born along the way: assuming Tau Ceti
II
is habitable, it'd be a bit of a disaster if everyone in the colony either hated each other's guts or were all either male or female—you get the general picture? We've even screened out homosexuals, because the production of children is important to the project."
"You said 'we'."
"Remember, I was one of your interviewers. The SSIA put a lot of money into developing me. I have a ranking a little below Alphonse Dulac and a little above Rateen Macphee."
"You bastard!" said Strider, laughing. "You've been deceiving me."
"I've just told you I have. Think a little longer. You are going to be the captain of a vessel whose voyage will last certainly thirty years and possibly one hundred and ten." Now Pinocchio put his hand on her thigh; again, the move was affectionate. "The captain may, shall we say, dabble among the other personnel, but it would only cause strife should she enter into some kind of pair-bonding, however temporary, with one particular individual. The same would be the case if she formed any particularly close friendships."
Strider stood up. Pinocchio's hand slipped away from her easily enough.
"It wouldn't make any difference to me," she said. "I've led teams before. When it comes to the crunch, all the other people become team members, whether they're lovers or someone you'd really rather like to stamp on."
"But it would look to everyone else aboard the
Santa Maria
as if it
might
make a difference. The project is bound to fail if that doubt is always in people's minds."
"You mean, even if I fall madly, passionately . . .?"
"Your psychological profile counterindicates this, as do the answers you gave in interview." Standing beside her, he put his arm round her shoulder. "You've learnt that the way to manipulate people to the best advantage of the team is to keep your distance from them."