by Nancy Kress
“A mebio. Part mechanical, part genetically engineered biological. Not a ‘bug.’ ” I thought he might react to that, but he was too busy petting FuzzBall, who purred in his arms, little traitor. Well, she was pretty cute, even to an Earther.
“It looks sort of like a cat. Is it a cat?”
“I don’t know what genes they started with, but DNA is amazingly adaptable. She eats fines.”
He looked up. I’d never seen that expression on his face before: open and gentle. He looked almost like a Martian. He said, “What are fines?”
“The bits of dust that get into everything, no matter how hard you try to make a tight seal. Mebios keep it under control.”
“You force her to eat dust?”
“Nobody forces her to do anything. She’s engineered to lick them up, and the saliva-fines mass is shunted to the mechanical part of her crop, where it can easily be removed. Here, I’ll show you.”
“No! Don’t!” Abruptly he dropped FuzzBall to the floor. She yelped in protest, then began licking the polished stone. “Get it out of here. It’s just another freak. Like you.”
The gentle look was gone. David stared at me like he hated me. I knew he was going to say it a full three seconds before he did.
“Bug.”
Something inside me snapped. The find in the tunnel, the repulsive recos, even the chess games I’d lost, one after another. The big and the small all mixed up, and all sauced with David’s contempt and my fear. My vision went red. I picked up the chessboard and threw it at him.
The board struck the side of his head in a rain of pawns and rooks and bishops. FuzzBall ran for the door, snarling. But David smiled. Blood streamed down his neck and soaked into his shirt. He said quietly, “Too bad you couldn’t throw it harder.”
I stared at him, stomped out, and burst into tears.
When Mom finally arrived home from her lab, she rushed straight into my alcove. “Gina! Are you all right?”
I hadn’t been able to sleep, but the sudden light disoriented me. Blinking, I tried to see if she knew about Barb and me breaking regs. Of course she knew. Her face wrinkled into dozens of concerned little crevasses.
“I’m fine, Mom. And I know we shouldn’t have—”
“But are you all right? I couldn’t leave earlier, the oocytes—”
I held out my arms, like I was three years old again. She sat on the edge of my bed and held me. That was what I needed, what David Hansen didn’t have; someone who cared more about him than about work, or even about Mars. My voice came out thick. “Is it . . . aliens, Mom?”
She laughed, a strangled sort of laugh, but I understood it. The situation was too weird to be quite real—even though it was real. She said, “They don’t know. And I don’t think we’ll know for a long time. Maybe not ever.”
That hadn’t occurred to me. “Why not?” Mom was calmer now, and that made me calmer. I let go of her, a little ashamed of my lapse back into childhood.
“Well, think about it, Gina. From its position, that thing has lain deep underground for a long time—we’ll know how long once we date the metal, if we can, or at least the rock seal over it. A very long time, and if it is alien, no aliens have emerged from it. So probably there’s nothing biologically complex in there, or there was once and isn’t anymore. But unless the thing spontaneously opens, we’re not going to open it. Would you? Who knows what contaminating microbes we might let out, or what effect they’d have? Our Mars is fragile, you know that.”
I did. Humans didn’t evolve here—school studies constantly emphasized that, and so did everybody else—and we had to be careful. One slip and the “planet not indigenous to us” would snatch at a life, a town, the entire human population. I knew it, but I had trouble feeling it deep in my bones. Mars didn’t feel “not indigenous” to me. It felt like home.
I said, “So the council will just leave the . . . the alien thing there at the end of the tunnel? Forever?”
She smiled. “Forever is a long time. But, probably, yes.”
“Mom—”
“Yes, honey?”
But all at once I didn’t want to tell her about David Hansen, the bug recos, throwing the chessboard. After all, I wasn’t really three years old. “Nothing.”
“All right.” She hugged me and left.
The alien artifacts, or biologicals, or whatever they were, would stay sealed. David Hansen would not want any more chess, not after I’d clobbered him with the board. Dr. Alvero would, as shift captain, discipline Barb and me, but that was minor. Mom wasn’t angry. I was able to sleep.
I was wrong about David. He called the next day. “You’re supposed to be here to play me.”
My belly sank.
“Gina? Did you hear me? Your mother said.”
“You sound like a baby when you say that.”
“Get up here.”
And I did. From guilt, from duty, from training: Put yourself in his place. The problem was, the First Principle was correct. It was the only way to make a Martian settlement work. But I didn’t have to like it.
David looked stronger than I’d ever seen him. To my surprise, his elaborate chessboard was already in midgame. As usual there was no sign of either of his parents. I said, “You playing someone else?”
“No, stupid. This is a famous game—the ‘Immortal Game’ between Adolf Anderssen and Lionel Kieseritzky hundreds of years ago. White to move. Go ahead.”
Despite myself, I studied the board. “Pawn to d4.”
“No. Anderssen played knight to d5.”
The move didn’t make sense. This unknown “Anderssen” was ignoring the upcoming threat to his rook. David grinned. “Want to see the rest of it?”
I nodded. He played out the game. White gave away both rooks, his queen, and a bishop—and still got a checkmate, using only minor pieces. It was unexpected. It was beautiful.
David said, “He used a suicide tactic. Kill everything he has to get all the way home.”
“I can see that.”
“Can you? Gina, I want you to do something for me. I think I might have been wrong about Mars. I want to see it. Take me outside.”
Talk about unexpected! “I can’t do that.”
“Yes, you can. You’re an adult here, and so am I. I researched it. We don’t need permission to suit up and go out, but I don’t know the way or the air lock codes. There are codes, aren’t there, so that little kids can’t get out by mistake.”
“I’m not taking you outside. Ask your parents.”
He did that contemptuous thing with his tongue, and then a hand gesture I knew was considered really filthy on Earth. I hated that I was shocked. He said, as if the word was killing him, “Please.”
“No.”
He started to curse me then, using some words I knew, some I’d only seen in bug recos, some I’d never heard. I was glad. His foulness finally dissolved my duty, set me free. Nobody ever has to put up with that kind of abuse. I shouted at the top of my voice, startling him, “I could never be in your place!”
In the momentary silence that followed, I left.
The dull gold artifact was measured, photographed, assayed, and put through every possible test to see what was inside. Nothing yielded any useful information, not even internal imaging, which revealed only indistinct shadows. Bots carefully scraped away the rock on the thing’s six sides, none of which bore any markings. A perfect cube, the artifact was made of a substance unknown to either Earth or Martian scientists. Geologists determined that rock around it had shifted several thousand years ago; before that the artifact had lain on or near the Martian surface. Images of it became the most accessed data in the solar system.
On Earth a rising ocean, clogged with the out-of-control algal blooms that had killed the rest of its marine life, broke through the levees around a major settlement called New York. The water rushed in. In the floods and panic and contamination, two million people died.
I played and replayed the Anderssen-Kieseritzky Immo
rtal Game, looking for something I could not have named. The stupid game even invaded my dreams. Knight takes g7, King to d8 . . . Not that I was sleeping all that well anyway.
I didn’t see David Hansen, but I heard about him. In a settlement as small as Mangala, gossip is as pervasive as fines. His mother was out on a long-explore; she would not return for the rest of the year. David’s father was in Mangala but spent all his days and most of his nights at the lab. After all, wasn’t his son supposed to be an adult, here on Mars? I looked up the Hansens on the link. They did not come from New York. They had lived somewhere called Illinois, a place that had undergone rapid desertification during the recent round of massive climate shifts. The link, calling up Earther feeds from its data base, showed me kilometer after kilometer of dry, cracked, withered ground leading to a barren lakeshore.
“Gina,” Mom said one day over a very late dinner, just before mess closed down, “there’s talk of. . . of certain recos that have been fed illegally to Mars.”
I picked up a forkful of soypeach and kept my gaze on it. Ordinarily I like soypeach.
“You saw them,” Mom said flatly.
“Yes.”
She put down her fork. “ ‘Bug’ recos.”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
I shrugged. I was an adult; I didn’t have to tell her everything.
“Vile, ugly, stupid things—that’s what those recos are. From ignorant and diseased minds.”
“Yes,” I said for the third time, and finally I could look up at her. “I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry? Dear heart, you have nothing to be sorry for. It’s the people who made those recos who should be—is that why you’ve been looking so tense and preoccupied the last few weeks? I’ve been worried about you. Ever since you stopped playing chess with David Hansen—was it David who showed you those recos? Was it?”
“No, Mom. I saw them before he even arrived.” All at once the tension in my head—and of course Mom had noticed it, she loved me—shot up several levels.
“So David Hansen had nothing to do with it?”
How to answer that? It was too complicated. I said, “Mom—is the council really never going to open that alien thing?”
She stared at me. “What’s that got to do with David Hansen?”
“Nothing—I just—never mind. How is he?”
“Doing really well. His brain blight might even be in remission. There are a few rare cases of that on record. If he’s one, it’s a great chance for up-close study, maybe even to learn something significant about the immune system. DNA is infinitely adaptable.”
My linkcom sounded. When I accessed the message, David Hansen’s face stared at me, surrounded by waist-high plants. I recognized them: my mother’s genemod wheat, modified for nutrientenhanced Martian soil. David was out in the farm.
Instead of speaking, he used the linkcom’s text function, which no one ever does except for data transmission. I had to squint at the tiny letters: “Come right now and alone or bishop to e7.”
I stood, my legs shaky, and said, “Barb wants me. See you later?”
“Sure,” Mom said. “Have fun.”
I made myself not run out of the mess. Bishop to e7 was the last move in Anderssen’s immortal game with Kieseritzky. David’s words filled my head: “He used a suicide tactic. Kill everything he has to get all the way home.”
I raced along the underground tunnel from Level 5 to the farm, then up the stairs instead of taking the elevator to the air lock. The farm is pressurized, but the atmospheric mix is different from the town, with more CO2 to aid plant growth. People can breathe it, but just barely and not for too long. Suits hang along the wall beside the air lock. I hesitated, knowing I should put one on, but I didn’t want to take the time. Instead I just grabbed a helmet and rushed into the air lock. It filled agonizingly slowly with the farm air. Come on come on . . .
Dusk filled the hot air of the farm, steamy and rich with the scents of plants, loam, water. No one else was around at this hour, and without a suit I had no headlamp. It didn’t matter. I had played here, taken botany lessons here, done work shifts here my entire life. Mom was a plant geneticist. I knew every inch of the farm, and I raced sure-footed over the narrow paths between crop beds and mini-fields and hydroponic vats and dwarf fruit trees. The sky beyond the low plastic dome was clear, and Phobos shone above me amid the earliest and brightest stars.
David stood, also unsuited, between two mini-fields of Mom’s wheat, where the path ended at the far dome wall. Beyond the dome the Martian surface, rock and fines, was shrouded in shadows. David’s back was to the wall. He held the detached cutting arm of a bot, sharper than any razor.
“David,” I said softly, as if sound might somehow jar him into action.
“Don’t try to stop me.”
“You want me to stop you, or you wouldn’t have linked me. You’d have just done it.”
He laughed. The laugh shivered along my bones. “Is that what you think, Gina? You’re wrong. I linked you because I hate you, hate this place, hate all you bugs—do you know how repulsive you look to me? I can never belong here, never, and I can’t . . . can’t go . . . home . . .”
He started to cry. I moved faster than I have ever moved before. Somehow—how?—I knew that he could not let me see him cry.
Time seemed to stop, quiver, slow down. I had the weird sensation of seeing us both from the outside, each movement as clear and distinct as a coming-of-age dance: Gina leaps forward. David thrusts the cutter behind him at the dome wall. Gina closes the distance between them. The wall of tough piezoelectric plastic rips and air rushes out. Gina is upon David. He screams and whips around the arm holding the cutter. He’s clumsy in this gravity. She clutches his body in her big arms, so much stronger than his. Her small arms grasp at the cutter. She feels it slice deep into her thigh before he drops it. Gina screams. They both drop to the ground.
Time returned to normal. Alarms shrieked. A repair bot threw itself at the hole where the air whooshed out. With my small arms I clamped the helmet over David’s head and the emergency seal molded itself roughly to his shoulders. Then I saw my own blood streaming down my thigh, and everything went dark.
“Shock,” Barb said. “Your mom said it was only shock.” Her face was as white as the sheet that lay over me in the infirmary. She was my first visitor except for Mom, but I knew all my other friends would come as soon as they were allowed.
“David?” I croaked. My lungs needed more time to fully recover, but they would. You’re not supposed to run and fight and bleed while breathing that much CO2.
Barb grimaced. “His father took the fucker to Kasei. They have psychiatric facilities there, you know, that we don’t. If you ask me, he doesn’t need psychiatric help, he needs—”
“Don’t.”
“All right.” She leaned closer. “But why did you do it, Gina? Why save his life? You could have been killed, and he’s worthless scum.”
“No.” I couldn’t say more. So we sat in silence, my friend and I, and she held my hand, and I could still feel my mother’s arms around me from before she left for her work shift, and I knew why the aliens, or their biologicals, or their machines, stayed inside the dull gold artifact.
It’s the same reason we won’t ever open it: whatever is inside might cause contamination because it does not belong here. No one else believes this theory. “Gina, sweetheart,” Mom said gently when I’d croaked this out to her an hour ago, “think. If that were true, the aliens wouldn’t have taken all the trouble to come here in the first place. They must have meant to establish some sort of presence on Mars, or why bother?”
My throat wouldn’t let me reply, but I think I know the answer. The aliens did mean to establish themselves here. But once they arrived, they discovered that they couldn’t. It was not home. It would never be home. They discovered that they were not as adaptable as they’d hoped, and so they committed a sort of suicide, an act of despair.
Or maybe that isn’t it at all. Maybe it wasn’t an act of despair but of altruism. They landed and discovered they could not survive on Mars. Their craft was damaged, or there weren’t the right resources here, or they didn’t have the right science to adapt Martian resources to their needs. So they took the only kind of victory they could achieve: leaving Mars uncontaminated for those who could adapt to it. “A suicide tactic. Kill everything he has to get all the way home.” Maybe the aliens, too, gained a kind of win, that of doing the right thing for us, who would travel here from Earth so much later. Put yourself in their place.
I don’t know which idea is true, anymore than I know what will happen to David Hansen. His mind is indeed diseased, but not with brain blight. Maybe they can fix his hatred of us, maybe not. Maybe fix is the wrong word. DNA might be infinitely adaptable, but I don’t know if human minds are. If he returns to Mangala, I’ll play chess with him and take him places and try to help him adjust. Carefully. However, no matter what any of us do, David might always feel like an alien on Mars.
But I am a Martian, and this is my home, and I am in my right place.
“Oh, I meant to tell you,” Barb says, “the animal wizards have designed the next generation of mebios, and you won’t believe how cute they are.”
“Yes,” I croaked. “I would.”
ELIOT WROTE
“Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.” —J.B.S. Haldane
Eliot wrote: Picture your brain as a room. The major functions are like furniture. Each in its own place, and you can move from sofa to chair to ottoman, or even lie across more than one piece of furniture at the same time. Memory is like air in the room, dispersed everywhere. Musical ability is a specific accessory, like a vase on the mantle. Anger is a Doberman pinscher halfway out of the door from the kitchen. Algebra just fell down the heat duct. Love of your sibling is a water spill that evaporated three weeks ago.
Well, maybe not accurate, Eliot thought, and hit DELETE. Or maybe too accurate for his asshole English class. What kind of writing assignment was “Explain something important using an extended metaphor?”