Mars Plus

by Frederik Pohl, Thomas T. Thomas

  “Yeah, you got that right,” he agreed. “Besides, we don’t have much room for embassies here on Mars. How many nations do you people have now?”

  “Thirteen hundred and some. The count changes every couple of days.”

  “That’s a lot of tunnel space. And most Martians would get ornery about giving special privileges to social parasites…No offense intended,” he added quickly. “I’m sure your Earth governments really value what you diplomats can do.”

  “Most of the Martians I’ve met have been down-right friendly.”

  “That’s because you’re a paying guest.”

  “Oh, right.” Demeter had almost forgotten her nominal role on this visit.

  “Although…” Mitsuno went on slowly, “when somebody says ‘diplomat,’ I usually hear ‘spy.’”

  Demeter saw him grin to take the sting out of his words.

  “Why, whatever would there be worth spying on up here?” she asked innocently. The real answer, of course, was other Earth spies. Everyone came to Mars to scope out the territory and defend the old claims. “A million square miles of blasted rock, is all,” she concluded aloud.

  “And water,” he pointed out. “Mineral rights, too.”

  Minerals…geology…something. The thought went out of her head immediately.

  Demeter noticed that the walker had stopped moving. The vista out the front window had stabilized on a valley floor of lemon-colored sand littered with black rocks. She started to gesture when the robot voice cut in.

  “You have arrived, Lole.”

  “Let’s stretch our legs,” Mitsuno said to Demeter, heading for the airlock at the back of the vehicle.

  He showed her how to put on the pressure suits. They were sensible garments, cut on the one-size-fits-most pattern. On Demeter, that left plenty of room for her street clothes as well as freedom of movement. The suit offered no plumbing. It would keep her alive on the Martian surface, or even in low orbit, but not for longer than her bladder could hold out. The helmet was big and rested on a well-padded neck ring, which she appreciated. She did not have to carry its weight on her skull and push the bobby pins into her scalp.

  Before Demeter pulled on the gauntlets, she took off her charm bracelet and tucked Sugar into an inside zippered pocket. No sense in letting delicate electronics get caught in the snapseals.

  Then she and Lole crowded into the airlock, and he flushed its atmosphere back into the vehicle’s holding tanks. When the outside door opened, Coghlan expected they’d have to climb down a ladder. After all, the view from the windows had shown the walker carrying itself a good three meters off the ground. But the lock rim was a gentle step off the valley s sandy floor. Demeter glanced back and saw that the machine had assumed a low crouch, with its knee joints flexed above the cabin roof.

  “What’s on the program for today?” she asked, once she’d figured out the suit’s radio channels.

  “I’m prospecting for water or ice, and you’re helping me.”

  Mitsuno went over to the side of the walker’s belly and opened a compartment hatch in the smooth space between two leg swivels. He took out various aluminum cases, laid them on the sand, and unsealed their lids. Inside, inset into foam cutouts, were gray melon-shapes with little black bracing feet on either side and a data panel on top.

  “What’re those?”

  “Transponders.”

  “What are you going to do with them?”

  “You’re going to take one and walk about three hundred meters out that way.” Mitsuno pointed to the east. “Then you take another and go the same distance in the opposite direction. And when that’s done, you’ll put out two more, going north and south this time.”

  “And what will you be doing?”

  “Watching you.” Lole grinned up through his helmet bubble and handed her the first of the recording devices. It was solid-feeling, but not all that heavy.

  She moved around the walker’s outstretched footpads and started off toward the horizon. None of the stones that lay on top of the desert floor was big enough to make her alter course. She just stepped over them, keeping to as straight a line as possible. Soon Demeter had crossed a small rise and walked into a shallow pit. She looked over her shoulder and noticed that the walker had all but disappeared.

  “Lole?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I can’t see you,” she said. “Does line of sight matter to these widgets?”

  “Naw, they read ground motion and compare with their own inertials.”

  “Okay.”

  When she had counted off something like three hundred paces—each one close enough to a meter for this kind of work—Demeter set the transponder down, cocked its legs as Lole had shown her, and turned it on. When she straightened up, she noticed a group of silhouettes on the far horizon. They were dancing figures in inky leotards, with what looked like fluttering capes or demon wings on their shoulders. All except one. It was bright green. It looked, more than anything else, like a jade carving of the Laughing Buddha. It was holding up an aerialist’s parasol.

  Coghlan wished the helmet visor was fitted with zoom optics. As it was, she could get no more definition than naked-eye. The entities looked like mirages or possibly dust devils, and she might have dismissed them as such—except for that lone, green figure.

  When she got back to the walker, she mentioned the apparition to Mitsuno.

  “How many were there, would you say?”

  “Three or four. All alike enough to be some kind of heat distortion. Oh, but one was larger than the rest and green—looked like the Michelin Man with a sunshade.”

  “Wait a minute.” Mitsuno clicked off her frequency. Demeter could see his mouth moving inside the bubble, carrying on an extended conversation.

  “Okay, we’re done for the day here. Go and bring back that transponder, would you?”

  “What’s wrong? Aren’t we hunting water?”

  “No need. They say this is a dry valley.”

  “They? Who?” Demeter felt her neck hairs rise with the finality in his voice.

  “The Cyborgs you saw.”

  “Those were Cyborgs? I didn’t know there were any of ’em left.”

  “Why not? Each one is essentially immortal.”

  “And omniscient?” she asked.

  “When it comes to things Martian—yes, usually.”

  “So we’re just going to pack up and go home? How about we walk over and meet them?”

  “That’s…not a good idea. Old hands find it smart to give Cyborgs a wide berth, unless they ask for your company. And this bunch sounded real short.”

  “Are they dangerous? They looked pretty skinny to me. Most of them did, anyway.”

  “Those guys don’t have meat for muscles, Dem. They’re all servos and solenoids, with tempers to match. You catch them wrong, they could pop your suit before you got turned around to run. Remember, they can breathe out here and you can’t.”

  “I see. So we make like shadows.”

  “Damn straight.”

  “Don’t know if I want to go back for that transponder now.”

  “Just keep your head down and mind your business.”

  “You go,” she insisted.

  “I wouldn’t recognize the spot where you left it,” Mitsuno said reasonably.

  So Demeter trudged back over the rise. When she got to where the sensor was and retrieved it, she glanced up at the horizon.

  The dancing shadows were gone.

  Hoplite Bar & Grill, June 10

  When Ellen Sorbel arrived at the Hoplite, it was clear from the rackup of empties on their table that Lole and Demeter had been there for an hour or two. Probably since they docked.

  Of course Ellen had heard about the bust at Harmonia Mundi. Wyatt had informed her even before Lole locked back inside the walker and turned it for home. The administrative cyber was too pleased with his big chance to say “I told you so.” All along, as Ellen had struggled to analyze the new orbital survey data, Wy
att kept mentioning some old ground report—no, he couldn’t cite a reference—which he thought showed a total lack of any anomalies hydrologic, seismic, or otherwise under the Mundi area. Ellen wondered if the Cyborgs had known about that report; they were usually even worse at recordkeeping than Wyatt.

  “Hey, guys!” Ellen said cheerfully as Mitsuno looked up.

  “Ellen!” Demeter turned and seemed genuinely glad to see her.

  “Sorry about the site—” Lole began.

  “No need. We all strike rocks once in a while. But why were your Cyborgs so sure there was no water? Have they been digging—?”

  “Roger says it’s the wrong kind of formation.”

  “And he would know, I suppose,” Ellen grumped. She had spent most of her life plugging her head into geological core samples, infrared survey data, and acoustic interferometry matrices—and she still didn’t know half as much about Martian substructures as Roger Torraway had squirreled away in that cybernetic backpack of his. “What was he doing out there?”

  “‘Cyborg business,’ he told me,” Lole replied. “As in ‘Please kindly butt out.’ Torraway seemed to be holding some sort of caucus with his friends—including the Russian girl, Shtev.”

  “One of those Cyborgs was Torraway?” Demeter asked, suddenly looking up. “Colonel Roger Torraway?”

  “Sure,” Lole said. “Why?”

  “He came from Texahoma. I’ve been to the place where he was made. I should have gone over today and said hello, greet a fellow countryman.”

  “Demeter is a diplomat-in-training,” Lole explained to Ellen. “Thinks she’s got to make contact with the local nationals.” He turned to Coghlan. “Torraway is not Texahoman, Demeter. He’s one hundred percent Martian. And anyway, when they made him, your country—the Oklahoma part, that is—was still joined to the United States of America. Torraway was an official in its Air Force, which I guess means he ran a blimp or something. But he became the first true Martian when they brought him here.”

  “Now you’re telling me Earth’s history?” Demeter had a smile on her face.

  “Our history, too,” Ellen put in. “Every Martian schoolchild learns about the age of colonization.”

  “What I never understood,” Lole went on, “is why, if those scientists in the United States and Russia wanted to create a race of native Martians, they didn’t let them breed. Why make them surgical eunuchs?”

  “That’s obvious, Lole.” Coghlan shrugged. “The human parts could breed, sure, but they couldn’t adapt their babies with all the hardware needed to survive.”

  “Why not? The von Neumanns do it.”

  “But those’re machines! They were designed to—”

  “So are the Cyborgs, machines,” he said reasonably.

  “It’s different,” Demeter insisted.

  “What I never could figure out,” Ellen interrupted, “is why your country—the old country, whatever—went to the expense of building Cyborgs in the first place. The cost just about broke your economy. And it certainly helped sink the Russians.”

  “Why, so they could explore Mars,” Demeter explained.

  “Ordinary people can explore Mars,” Lole pointed out. “You did this morning.”

  “Well, I guess, it was before they had settlements like this for growing food and stockpiling tanked air and such. It was just easier getting around as a self-contained Cyborg.”

  “But they brought up nonadapted humans on that first mission to accompany Torraway. One of them was his doctor, along to make repairs. They managed just fine, growing food in domes and compressing the air.”

  “I’m sure there was a good reason for the Cyborg programs. The scientists must have checked it out, made computer models—”

  Lole was grinning now. “They made computer models.”

  “What you mean,” Ellen said, “is the computers made computer models.”

  “And the computers made them the way they wanted them, to achieve the goals they had in mind,” Lole finished up.

  “Are we talking fairy tales here?” Demeter asked with a stiffly superior air. “I’ve heard all those stories, too, you know. The grid is self-aware. The grid is God. The grid is the next stage in human-machine evolution…Right, guys! Look, the good Lord knows I have reason enough to distrust the machines. But I don’t anthropomorphize them. I don’t demonize them. Sure, I talk to my charm bracelet. And you two talk to thin air and think of it as this ‘Wyatt’ character. But it’s still all just a machine. Just a bunch of really fast silicon platelets running self-branching response loops.”

  The woman stopped, her chest heaving now, and glared from Lole to Ellen.

  “Are you so sure?” Sorbel said quietly, after a pause. “Jory tells me you don’t even like to talk about sex if they’re listening.”

  “Jory has a big mouth,” Demeter said dryly. “And yes, he’s right. But I also don’t like doing it in front of my cat. That doesn’t make Bitsy part of a feline cabal that’s supposed to dominate human affairs.”

  “Still, you have to admit,” Lole said, “the Earth scientists went and did something really stupid—on the advice of all those computer projections.”

  “But it came out all right in the long run, didn’t it?” Demeter insisted. “Look at yourself today. All geared up to run your seismic tests, and then this ghost voice from out of the wilderness says, ‘Don’t bother.’ So you tug your forelock and back out of there quick enough. Those so-called biased computer projections have given you a council of elders, the voice of tribal wisdom, and a free-floating resource of inherited knowledge. The Cyborgs help make this planet a little more approachable, a little more friendly. That’s what those computer projections from the last century knew you’d need to survive here.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” Lole agreed, but he looked uncertain.

  “Of course I’m right. I never said the grid and its nodes weren’t smart, or subtle. Devious, even. But they just aren’t…human.”

  “Is anybody else thirsty?” Ellen asked, to change the subject. “I sure am.”

  Golden Lotus, June 10

  When Demeter was really tired, or had a few drinks in her—or both, as now—she couldn’t focus enough to compose an intelligible report. So, instead of trying to gather her own thoughts, she put the hotel room’s terminal in interrogation mode. The machine would ask her what she had seen and done during the day’s safari, then it would prepare a draft report taking cues from her previous conversational style. In the morning she could review and edit the final version before sending it off.

  Concept-processing was a function Coghlan had long ago installed in Sugar. Hell, Sugar could probably write up the day from her own aural recordings—except for the time she’d spent tucked in a pocket. Relying on machines like this would eventually turn Demeter into a moron, she knew, unable to think sequentially or remember more than two ideas at one sitting. But tonight the program was a godsend.

  “Where did you go?” the terminal asked.

  “Some place called Har-something Monday, map reference…well, look it up yourself. We were going to do geolog—no, hydrological exploration, looking for possible subsurface water.” Demeter’s jaw quivered as she stifled a yawn.

  “What did you find?”

  “Nothing. We met—or rather, saw in the distance—some Cyborgs who warned us off. Lole says they were having a coffee klatsch of some kind. I didn’t talk to them…Yee-heww!” She yawned again, opening her mouth until the top of her head was like to fall off.

  “What did Lole Mitsuno say about the Cyborgs?”

  “That they were dangerous…difficult, short-tempered. Strong, too.”

  “We know all that. But later, when he was talking about their origins—?”

  “Oh…that making them was some kind of mistake, that the computers on Earth had screwed up the projections.” Demeter could hardly keep her eyes open. This was going to be one garbled report, despite the terminal’s best efforts. “A lot of old wives’ stuff�
�actually.”

  She yawned again. Rather than try to sit up, Demeter lay down on the bed and crawled toward her pillow.

  “Now listen very closely…” the machine suggested.

  Demeter was already asleep and snoring.

  That didn’t matter.

  Chapter 7

  Cries and Whispers

  120 Kilometers East of Harmonia Mundi, June 11

  “Revolution is not in their programming, Roger.”

  Fetya hadn’t spoken in more than three hours. She had simply kept pace with him as Roger Torraway put long distance between himself and that embarrassing confrontation. Together their clublike feet stamped over the wind-packed sand.

  “I wasn’t talking about ‘revolution,’” he objected. “Just some kind of concerted action. A protest march. A demonstration of strength. After all, they benefit from the Deimos generator, too.”

  “Protest implies power shifting.”

  “That’s deep!” He could hear the bitterness in his own voice, slopping over onto the closed signal that carried between them. He detested the feelings that were now bubbling up in him: of dependence and obligation.

  “Is true!” the other Cyborg said. “We were made for exploration. For observation. For description. We serve human needs on Mars, in support of colonizing efforts. Our purpose is not dictating terms to human settlements. Now you want we should damage colonials.”

  “Not damage! Just…withhold our counsel and advice. We have to show the burgomasters how much they need us. How they need us as free and independent beings. Show them how scary and hostile a place this planet can potentially be without us.”

  “Implies somebody has to die first, yes?”

  “Well…”

  “Tell me story of omelets and eggs again, Roger.” She let out a grating chuckle.

  “Damn it, this is serious!” He stamped the ground in midstride.

  “Serious to you means obvious to everybody else?”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “You figure out…”

  The pair plodded along in silence for another hour, good for an additional eight kilometers. With Roger’s compressed time-sense, it passed inside a few gliding seconds. Only the scenery was different: steeper hills, more exposed bedrock, the beginnings of erosion gullies.