The First Poet Laureate of Mars

by T E Olivant

  “I know all this.”

  “Damn these hormones. Ok, so you know how the Augments became the most powerful people in the universe. And then the gangs of h-men started getting organized and they eventually formed the Merchants. The Merchants challenged the Augments for control.”

  “That’s when there was a war.”

  “A cold war. After all, in space resources are too valuable for us just to start blowing each other out of the skies. But yes, people died. Mainly on Augment controlled satellites when the Merchant’s stopped supplying any food. Part of the agreement that ended the war meant that the Augments withdrew from the rest of humanity.”

  “How does this relate to your map of Mars?”

  “I’m not totally sure. I’ve been away for a long time. Generations of your people. And in the intervening years, many things have changed. The Augments are no longer content to stay on Mars hidden away in the Council building. They have been taking a closer involvement in the affairs of h-men. Part of this is allowing the Merchants to set up a base on Mars. At first I thought the Augments were reaching out, trying to build bridges. But now I’m not so sure.”

  Tolly swallowed. “The Augments asked me to do an extensive survey of the Merchant base. They told me that they were concerned that the Merchant’s weren’t being honest about what was going on there. And when I did the survey, I found out they were right to be worried.”

  “That’s what you were telling them about right before you bashed me over the head.”

  “Correct,” Tolly said, ignoring the girl’s somewhat petulant tone. Surely she should have moved on from the kidnapping thing by now. “But they wouldn’t listen. And I think I know why.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they already knew. I’ve lived longer than… well, I’ve lived for a very long time. And I’ve spent most of those years around other Augments. I know when they’re lying to me. Rowhan was definitely lying. I just need more time to work out why.”

  “All right,” Hester said. “What exactly did you see on the survey?”

  “It’s hard to explain to someone with a limited brain.”

  “Wow.”

  “Was that offensive?”

  “Just a little. I mean, to describe how the augmentation of your senses with the data works… It’s impossible. It’s like the best VR you have ever seen, but every single one of your senses is involved, even the ones you didn’t know you had, like proprioception, nociception and equilibrioception.”

  “We are on the clock here.”

  “It’s like flying. You move through the landscape as if you are there. But the data is so detailed you can even see under the ground. And that’s what I discovered. The footprint of the Merchant’s complex is relatively small. But they’ve mined right into the Martian soil. Maybe twenty, thirty stories down.”

  “Without anyone knowing about it?”

  “That’s just it. It shouldn’t be possible. I still don’t understand how they could mine that quickly. It took generations to build the colony here. I just don’t believe the Augments have only just discovered what’s going on.”

  “You think they already knew?”

  “Some of them must have done. But I’ve been away for too long. I don’t understand the politics of what’s happening. And I will not let my people start a war. You need to tell me about the survey. That it exposed terraforming that proves the Merchant base is of significant size. Possibly bigger than the original colony. And I have no idea what they are doing down there. But tell me that the Council might. Tell me not to trust the Council. Or the Merchants.”

  “Is there anyone you can trust? Apart from a fraudulent poet, that is.”

  Tolly was about to answer negatively. His head was throbbing from the receding hormones. Didn’t he used to have an h-man contact on Mars?

  “There was someone. A woman who helped me out in the past. Persus, that was her name. She worked out of the mining station so the Augments couldn’t spy on her.”

  “Ok, that’s something at least. But listen, I’ve thought of a problem. When you wake up you won’t remember me, right?”

  Tolly understood her immediately. “Right.”

  “You’re going to think I’m just some stranger talking nonsense. You need to tell me something that will make you trust me. Something only you would know.”

  “I… I’m not sure…”

  Hester glanced at his datapad. “You have fifteen minutes to think of something.”

  Tolly stared at her. What would make him trust this girl? There was one thing that he tried not to tell anyone. He just didn’t want to say it.

  “There is something. I could tell you my age.”

  Hester pursed her lips. “Even I worked out that the more recent scars are fake. So you’re older than you are trying to be.”

  Tolly smiled. Was his face getting used to this new flexibility? “Of course they are. But the ones underneath are just as fake. Would you like to see the real one?”

  Before she could answer he turned his back and pulled his overalls down to his waist. She gasped, and he remembered his own horror when he first spotted the line that started at the nape of his neck and went all the way down to his tailbone.

  “That’s… but that can’t be a scar from Augmentation. They go through the skull.”

  “For the last couple of centuries, yes. But when we first started, we entered the brain through the central nervous system, right up the spinal column.”

  “Last couple of centuries… you mean you are more than two hundred years old?”

  He nodded.

  “Surely people must know that. Other Augments, for example.”

  “Not many. There might be rumors… but no.”

  “Ok, tell me your exact age.”

  In the end, it wasn’t so hard to say. “I am three-hundred and sixty-eight years old. I am the oldest living Augment and the oldest person in the solar system.”

  Hester just stared at him. Tolly checked his datapad. “And now I have to go. The procedure should only take an hour. Come find me.”

  Chapter 19

  One hour and one minute later Hester was being thrown out of the Augment Tower.

  “I’m waiting for someone,” she repeated to the petite female Augment Yuyan standing in front of her.

  “I’m afraid this area is only for Augments or their guests.”

  “I am a guest! I am the Poet Laureate of Mars.”

  “What is a Poet Laureate?”

  Hester deflated a little. “There was a ceremony upstairs just a few hours ago.”

  The woman’s eyelid flickered. Hester thought she must be a relatively new Augment to display when she was jacking up her hormones. Certainly nowhere near as old as Tolly.

  Nearly four hundred years old. Surely it wasn’t possible? No one could live that long, not even an Augment. Hester would have loved to spend an hour searching the web to see if she could find anything to back up Tolly’s claim, but he had warned her that the Augments monitored everything. Was it all some sort of elaborate scam to trap her into revealing her secrets? It was possible, but then he had already figured out about the poetry, so why would he waste his time with her?

  The female Augment looked up from her datapad. “I have a Poet Laureate ceremony listed that took place this afternoon. The ceremony finished two hours ago. Your presence is no longer required and you may board the shuttle.”

  “I will do, just as soon as…”

  At that moment Tolly strode out of the lift and walked briskly towards the shuttle. Hester nodded to the woman and hurried after Tolly.

  They had talked about what to do now. She was to keep her distance until Tolly got back to his accommodation. Only when she was sure he was alone was Hester meant to approach him. And then she had to do her best to convince him to trust her. She just hoped that she was up to the job.

  Hester took a seat on the shuttle where she could see the back of Tolly’s head. Her own head was thumping where the Augmen
t had knocked her unconscious. It had to be a monumentally terrible decision to help the man who had recently assaulted you. And yet…

  She had to help him. An Augment who was willing to risk everything to save Mars. Even if there was the slightest chance it was true, she needed to do save him. For herself as much as for him.

  The shuttle arrived at the main colony and Hester hurried after Tolly. She had to skip every so often to keep up with his long stride, but she was determined not to lose sight of him.

  “Why are you following me?”

  They had barely stepped off the main concourse into a side alley before Tolly turned around to face her.

  “Because you asked me to. Can we find somewhere private to talk? I have something really important to tell you.”

  “Impossible. There is nothing you want to say that could be relevant to me at present.” The Augment’s face was impassive, colder than she had seen it before. There was no hint of humanity left now.

  “That’s not true. You asked me to come and find you after the… procedure.”

  “You are aware of the memory erasure?”

  “You told me about it. You said that the Augment Council were going to erase the whole of last week from your memory.”

  “One week?”

  “That’s right. I know it sounds crazy but they have erased the last week from your memory. Before this happened you asked me to come and find you.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “I’m not!” Thank God she had her trump card. “You told me your age, it’s…”

  “I know you’re lying because they did not erase a week. And they performed the procedure because I requested it. I asked them to erase the last century. They wiped a hundred years.”

  Chapter 20

  Tolly collapsed on his bed and closed his eyes against the harsh strip lighting. It had taken him ten minutes to get rid of the h-man girl. He had to admit, she was persistent. It was fortunate that the Council had left him a message for when he awoke that explicitly warned against listening to anyone from his recent past. He felt his pocket. The Augment who did the procedure had given him half a dozen insta-tranqs so that he could drift off into instant sleep.

  But… a hundred years? He had to admit, when they told him he had felt… what? Not loss exactly, but a kind of absence of loss. And yet it had to be for the best. Why else would he have requested the procedure?

  You requested the erasure because you could not live with the terrible acts you committed over the last few decades. Many h-men died as a result of your neglect. You had lost yourself. You wanted to reset and try to find it again. You wanted a chance to be better.

  Tolly felt something on his cheek and reached up to touch it. A tear? The Augment who had performed the procedure had said there would be some side effects. She had given him an extra dose of oxytocin and told him to ignore any wayward emotions.

  What did I do? The question he must not ask. It seemed impossible that he could have done things so terrible that he would want to erase that part of himself. And yet…

  Hadn’t he always pushed the boundaries? Living longer than any other Augment, it had to take its toll. Had the passing of the years turned him into some kind of monster?

  Tolly closed his eye and let himself probe gently at his updated brain. His hormones were relatively balanced considering what he had been through. The last thing he remembered was visiting Sat Five just after the first h-men had arrived. He had felt pride as they walked around their new home. It had been Tolly that had deemed the asteroid suitable for grafting onto a satellite and him alone that was responsible for ensuring the base would last for centuries. Perhaps he should look it up and see if he’d been right.

  Unfortunately he didn’t have a datapad, or even a console in his room. The Augments had removed them. They said that it was to prevent him from becoming overstimulated. He was to rest for twenty-four hours or risk severe neurological side effects.

  Tolly knew he should take their advice. But still, when he closed his eyes there was a persistent sense of wrongness that he couldn’t quite shake off.

  Was it the stranger that was stealing his sleep? He had never seen the h-man girl before, he was sure of it. He probably should have reported her to the Augments. They had told him to do so after he had the procedure. But he had been too tired and he just wanted to sleep.

  What had she said? Something about erasing a week? Well, what did a week matter when you had lost a century. Tolly drifted off to sleep.

  Chapter 21

  “Please make it a double.”

  Hester should not have been in a bar. She should have been being clever, working out a way to battle the odds and get Tolly back on her side. She should have been stopping the Merchants and Augments from going to war. She should have been doing a lot of things. Instead, she was drinking Martian gin.

  She had known it would not be easy to convince Tolly that she was there to help. But she had never expected it to go so badly wrong. A century erased? Was it really possible? Yes. She had seen it in his eyes. There was something broken there, and the awful thing was he didn’t even realize it.

  “Another shot please.” The clear liquid – who knew what they made it from, if you had to ask then you didn’t need it – burned all the way down to her stomach. That was it then. The weirdness of the last twenty-four hours was over. There was nothing she could do.

  I was out of my depth anyway, she thought. Now it was time to go back to her life on Mars, trying to figure out how to find enough rhymes for dust.

  And that was the problem. Poet Laureate. What a total balls-up that was. At some point they were all going to realize that she was a fake, just like Tolly had. It had been almost freeing when the Augment had caught her out – getting to be plain old Hester again.

  “Will you leave if I try to speak to you again?”

  Hester swiveled around to be confronted with the impossibly handsome face of Matt Magee. He was dressed in a deep blue casual suit that had probably cost more than her entire wardrobe. Not that that would be hard.

  “Not today, Matt.”

  “It’s Hawk, remember?” He leaned in and she was annoyed to realize he was wearing a scent calculated to be both citrus fresh and impossibly masculine. “Tell you what, you can even call me Derek.”

  She laughed, then gave him a mock-serious look. “I’m having a bad day Derek. This is not the social kind of drinking where we have a chat and giggle and put the world to rights. This is the kind of drinking where we get sad and then pass out. Are you all right with that?”

  “I’m a recovering alcoholic.”

  “Oh,” she blushed. “Well then you can drink water and I’ll pass out. Deal?”

  “Deal.”

  She took a gulp of her gin. It was pretty grim. She could already feel the alcohol numbing her synapses. Was this what it felt like to be an Augment?

  “This might be a touchy subject, but if you’re a recovering alcoholic, what are you doing in a bar?”

  Derek flashed his perfect teeth at her. “To pick up chicks?”

  Hester rolled her eyes.

  “Ok, not all the time. It’s like a test. I need to keep checking if I still pass the test. So I come in and order a water and sit for a while. Then I get up and leave.”

  “That’s really…”

  “Inspirational?”

  “Dumb. Why would you want to make your life harder than it is?”

  She finished her drink and was about to order another when he put his hand on hers. She snatched it away.

  “Sorry. I just wanted to say, before you order another, maybe try talking to someone instead.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “You got that from some sort of program, right?”

  “Maybe. But it works. Trust me.”

  Hester was definitely feeling lightheaded. She moved a little closer to him. “I know that gin can’t solve my problems. I was meant to be helping this guy but he doesn’t know who I am and he won’t speak to me. Oh,
and I a total fraud and once everyone discovers that I am going to be sent right back to Sat Three where I belong.”

  Derek sat in silence for a moment. Was he actually listening to her or was he just a really good pick up artist? She wasn’t too sure.

  “You know, I suffered from imposture syndrome when I started acting. Even now, after all my successes, I still sometimes feel like a fraud.”

  She giggled. “Ah, but you see I actually am a fraud. Only don’t tell anyone.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Hester.”

  “Hester, you are not a fraud.”

  She reached out and patted his shoulder. “Listen, Derek, you should probably just leave. It’s fairly clear what you’re after and you’re not going to get it. Sorry.”

  “I am not that much of a creep. Honest. I can think you’re hot and be your friend, alright?”

  Hester rubbed her temple. Hadn’t she been unconscious earlier? The throbbing behind her eyes could be either concussion or gin, it was hard to tell. “Let’s not talk about me anymore. You want to be my friend, take my mind off this shitty day. Tell me about your, what’s it like to be in the movies.”

  It was like his real face went and hid and the actor smile came back. “You want to know about the movies? It’s a lot of hard work, but so rewarding. I’m a really lucky guy.”

  “Uh-huh. Now tell me what you really think. There must be a reason why you still torture yourself in bars.”

  Derek blinked. The mask slipped. “Honestly? It was great. When I was twenty-one. Now I’m nearly thirty and the roles are drying up. There’s always a new handsome guy waiting to take over, and you can bet they would stab you in the back as soon as you gave them the opportunity. And the only role I’ve ever played is handsome hero. That’s why I’m trying to do something different.”