Strange Trades

by Paul Di Filippo

  When I can’t stand their fatuous faces anymore—and the face of one in particular—I find I have to get outside the domes, and let the elements abrade some of the emotional callous from my soul.

  I must start initiating the changes a couple of hours before I want to step out. It’s a demanding process, and I can’t do it that often—maybe once a month. (Of course, I could just suit up, but then I’d feel encapsulated, as if I were carrying the colony with me. And besides, it’s more dramatic this way. I know it creeps the others out, to see me do it. They watch me through the transparent walls until I disappear from sight, disbelief plain on their silly faces. It reinforces my failing sense of superiority.)

  Anyway, about three hours worth of self-tampering—much against my old instructor’s advice—allows me, rather like certain seals, to supersaturate my bloodstream with enough oxygen to last for half an hour’s expedition. A slight structural change in my hemoglobin suffices. I toughen my epidermis with a layer of expendable cells that will later messily slough off, stoke the metabolic fires, thicken my corneas, don a pair of insulated boots as my only concession to heat loss, and cycle through the lock.

  Not breathing, I step lightly among the red grit and wind-fluted parched pebbles, kicking one now and then. Their motions are strange in the low gravity, they seem to take forever to fall. A frigid dry scentless breeze strokes my altered flesh like a straight razor dipped in liquid hydrogen. Too much of this caress would be lethal even to me. In the leeward sides of the larger boulders, fine-grained brick-hued dust is piled high.

  Fifteen miles away to either side of me rear the canyon walls: immense, pocked, riven, mile-long slopes whose steepness is obscured by great slumps of eroded rock clinging precariously to their faces. Crumbled talus litters the valley floor at their feet; side cuts open out onto dead-end tributary valleys.

  When I am far enough from the base for solitude, around a slight bend, having used up half my stored oxygen, I stop.

  I look up.

  At dusk, like a man immured in a well on Earth, I am able to view the stars while the weak sun is still up. They stand out faintly in the slit of darkened Martian sky, occulted perhaps by a high lonely transient cloud, blurred slightly by my horned corneas. I try to find the blue-green star I have convinced myself is Earth.

  For a few precious minutes, I dream of returning.

  What I don’t know yet is how reality will exceed my dreams.

  As I turn to go back, I feel like the only person in the universe. No one can reach me here. Even if others were to arrive in suits, they would still be isolated from me. I am at once utterly exposed and totally shielded.

  Then I involuntarily recall what I have been trying to forget. There is one who could stand here unsuited beside me, as an equal. A woman at this moment also exiled to Mars. One bound to me by something different from, but no weaker than, love.

  And stronger than hate.

  I was standing rapt among the cacti when the news first came.

  One of the big linked geodesic domes that comprised the only human settlement on Mars was filled with giant saguaros, multi-armed, towering almost twenty-five feet high—as tall as specimens a century old, although they were only five years removed from biofabbed seeds. Their fantastic growth had been forced by the will of the Banneker psychokineticist who had preceded me.

  Now the cacti were my charges, along with the humans. My fellow exile and I were responsible for the health and continued functioning of both.

  I preferred tending to the cacti.

  Now, fingertips in contact with the solid spined-barrel trunk of one specimen, I had lost myself in their being.

  I dived down, among the busy cell factories of the cactus I touched, thrilled by a sense of repleteness that came from water riches stored safely away. Further and further into the trunk my perception raced, assaulted by a distorted mix of sensory input it had taken me years to learn to untangle. Those tarragon-scented, fuzzy violet tangles were chloroplasts, these bloated electric sparkles were vacuoles. I reveled in a vegetative serenity somehow different from the same mechanisms when present in humans.…

  Deeper now, below the soil, down into the unnaturally thick and elongated filamentary roots, probing, searching with blind tropisms for the water locked as ice beneath the Martian surface. Thirst-seek, thirst-seek, thirst-seek—

  Someone was shaking my shoulder. As if from a great distance, I sensed it. Pulling my psychic feelers back in, I returned to my own body.

  Joelle Fourier, the colony’s aerologist, removed her hand from my shoulder. My face must have expressed some of my annoyance, for she stepped back warily.

  “Doctor Strode, I wouldn’t have disturbed you if it wasn’t important. The expedition is returning, and there’s trouble.”

  English was the lingua franca of the colony. Fourier’s was pleasantly accented. She wore a white quilted coverall with an embroidered ESA patch showing an antique Ariane rocket above the breast. She was a veteran in her abstruse field, already an ancient eighteen. After three years’ association with her, I knew nothing about her save this bare minimum of appearance, name and age, and didn’t care to.

  “What kind of trouble?” I asked.

  “Why, medical, of course. The messages have been vague, but that much is clear.”

  I turned away. “Let Sanjour handle it. It’s her watch.”

  “I cannot make Doctor Sanjour answer. She is locked in her quarters.”

  “Shit. She’s probably cell-burning. Okay, let’s go roust her before she smokes her entire cortex.”

  The cacti occupied circles of raw Martian soil separated by sintered rock paths topped with a ceramic glaze that was micro-grooved for traction when wet by occasional spills made when tapping the saguaros. I followed Fourier toward the dome exit. I fantasized that the cacti all bent toward me, reluctant to let me go, wanting to clutch me in their friendly deadly arms.

  The two domes containing the living quarters were subdivided into truncated pie-pieces that opened onto central plant-filled atriums scattered with chairs and cushions.

  At Sanjour’s door other colonists had gathered, sensing something was up. Their garments exhibited all the different patches of the many nations and organizations that made up the Comity. Their faces looked pale in the weak Martian sunlight that filtered down through the transparent dome top. The mostly young men and women shuffled nervously from foot to foot and whispered among themselves as I approached with Fourier. Make way for the pariah who holds your lives in his hands, folks.…

  They cleared a path to the door for me. I tapped the open button on the security keypad. The red locked light lit up, there was a beep, and the door stayed shut.

  “Who’s got the override code?”

  A boy I recognized as one of the astronomers stepped up.

  “Holtzmann left the codes with me,” he said. “But I don’t know about breaching Doctor Sanjour’s privacy—”

  I saw as through a crimson curtain. “Listen, kid, we’ve got an incoming POGO full of sick citizens, and one of the two available medicos is locked in her room most assuredly burning her fucking neurons up for kicks. I suggest that the situation amounts to enough of an emergency to violate anyone’s privacy. But if you want to call it differently—”

  I shrugged and made as if to walk away.

  “No, no, you’re right, of course. I just didn’t realize— Look, I’ll open it right up.”

  He frantically keyed in the code. The door retreated into the wall.

  I stepped inside.

  The sight of a naked body I knew almost more intimately than my own, both surface and interior, greeted me. Amy was sprawled slack-limbed across her bed. Her eyes were closed, and a rivulet of saliva drooled upon her chin. She might have been just a sloppy sleeper. But she wasn’t. She was lost in a self-induced, self-sustaining bonfire of near-orgasmic pleasure, a pyre fed by the destruction of her own brain cells, which, continued too long, would result in her death.

  Sud
denly I felt overwhelmed by pity and loathing for the two of us. What a couple of pathetic feeble cripples! How had we come to this sorry state, myself lost continually in the no-thoughts of plants, Amy hooked on cell-burning? How—?

  The first time I saw Amy Sanjour naked was as a patient, back on Earth. She had waltzed into my biosculpt clinic, the perfect image of a flighty hypochondriac with the money to indulge herself in a general somatic toning under my capable—and, I admit now, eager—hands. I was utterly taken in by her.

  What I didn’t learn until much later—when she had successfully jiggered and booby-trapped all my PK talents, nearly resulting in my causing the permanent disfigurement of one of my other patients—was that she was as much a peeker as I. No lowly skintwister, she had had a flourishing practice in neuropathology, treating Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and the like.

  This practice she had abandoned upon the death of her sister—a death I arguably could have prevented.

  She had come after me for revenge.

  When I confronted her with what I had learned, a fight ensued. More than a fight. A psychic battle fought on the alternating terrains of our two bodies, a war waged in veins and cells, organs and bones.

  We had stopped short of killing each other—not out of compassion, but inability. Our skills were too evenly matched to allow either one to gain a permanent advantage.

  So there we stood in Amy’s private room at the clinic, out of our mental clinch, bleeding, contused, puffy-faced, with snapped bones. Already our capable bodies were automatically healing themselves. That left only the intractable problem of our relationship to solve.

  I could sense that Amy shared some of the embarrassed remorse and uneasiness I felt. In the space of a few long minutes, we had probed each other so deeply, come to share such a perverse kind of physical intimacy, that there was almost nothing left to say.

  But in the end, Amy did discover something that could be said.

  “I don’t forgive you—but maybe I can help.”

  I accepted that statement without quite knowing what it meant.

  I soon found out.

  That very night, when we were basically recovered from our physical wounds, we became lovers, completing our intimacy on the same bed where we had nearly killed each other. Our fucking—I can use only that term to describe the animality of the impulsive act—was a transposed extension of that earlier encounter.

  At that time, I was already involved with another woman, a teacher named Jeanine. I had considered her the sexiest, most beautiful woman I had ever seen.

  After that night, she came to mean nothing to me.

  There was nothing to compare to sex with a fellow peeker. Throughout medical school, I had avoided the experience, out of a certain nervous reluctance to allow PK access to my body, and out of a sense of my peers as competitors, not friends. Beyond school—well, peekers were not that common, and I simply didn’t have many social contacts with others of my kind. And I had never guessed that the sensations of having a partner freely roaming inside me, while making more conventional love, would be so intense.

  Imagine ghostly feelers opening the taps of lust, stoking biological fires—

  And of course, it didn’t hurt that Amy was outwardly beautiful, a tall, powerful woman, taut as a cable on the Bering Strait Bridge.

  After that night, things moved too quickly to stop, impelled by strong emotions, bereft of logic.

  I stopped seeing Jeanine. It was a messy parting. Amy became a partner in my clinic. She moved into my apartment. For a few months, she was satisfied performing facial and bodily makeovers with me, milking the vain rich of their unearned dollars. Then she got greedy, and revealed an unbelievable scheme. I listened warily. I remember thinking that the trauma of her sister’s death and her aborted, transfigured schemes of revenge on me had completely erased any altruism or professional scruples she had once possessed.

  And since I had never had any, and was hopelessly fixated on Amy, I went along with what she proposed.

  We waited for the perfect mark to approach us on his own, to allay suspicions later. He turned up in the form of a billionaire with several patents on room-temperature superconductors. With the build of a flabby flyweight, he was in the market for a new physique. Over the course of a few months, we gave it to him. Along with a time-delayed embolism. But before that fatal attack, triggered weeks after he left the clinic, we had already insured our share of his fortune. From his bed he had summoned his lawyer and richly endowed a foundation in our names, for the entirely plausible reason of being impressed with our mission to bring beauty to the world. Eyes open, lips moving, he had been unconscious the whole time. Amy, one hand unobtrusively on his shoulder, had manipulated his vocal cords like a puppetmaster. He was to have no memory of the event when he awoke.

  On the day of the billionaire’s death, when he still hadn’t learned of his involuntary donation nor attempted to rescind it, we were congratulating ourselves at home when the cops arrived. Suspicious relatives had requested a peeker autopsy, the only way our tampering could ever have been detected.

  The trial went fast. We couldn’t mount much of a defense. The prosecutor demanded that both of us get two consecutive terms of ninety-nine years each—which we probably could have served, given our superior homeostatic functioning.

  It was at this point that the AMA stepped in. They couldn’t stand the thought of two ex-peekers sitting out all that time in jail. Every five years a “do you remember?” story in the media, continual bad publicity for the whole profession.…So they arranged in behind-the-scenes negotiations a “more clement” sentence, one that would get us off the stage of public opinion, and make it appear as if we were intent on absolving ourselves.

  The Russians established the first Mars colony as a unilateral enterprise in 1999, taking advantage of Earth’s close orbital approach to that world. This was in the days before the Comity, the de facto alliance that—first delicately, tentatively, then more and more strongly—had grown out of glasnost, and the sloughing off of Eastern Europe from the USSR. In those heady early Comity days of fading militarism and joint ventures, all attention had been turned toward remaking the Earth into a better world. The Mars colony had somehow been neglected, struggling along for fifty years as an archaic remnant of Russian aloofness.

  Then, in a freakish but ultimately predictable cataclysm, the colony had been wiped out. A small vagrant asteroid had impacted nearly atop it.

  Suddenly the world was unanimous in the need and desire to rebuild the base. What everyone had ignored became the only topic of conversation. Society could afford to turn its attention outward now, after half a century of peace and progress.

  The Comity colony had been established for two years when our sentencing became an issue. Support for the base was still as strong as ever.

  The colony’s resident doctor had just died in a climbing accident on the slopes of the Tharsis Ridge. (Even a peeker can’t recover from a crushed skull.)

  We were nominated his successors. Transportees, exiles, penitent prisoners in the service of humanity.

  They shot us up with anti-gee drugs and shot us off on the next supply mission. We had peeker-planted blocks on our powers that wouldn’t dissolve until after a fixed number of metabolic reactions, equal to the length of the trip.

  But once on Mars, there was no way they could really make us serve.

  I was down on my knees by the bed, the crowd clustered at the door behind me forgotten. My hands hovered above Amy’s bare midriff, shaking a bit, hesitant. Her abdominal muscle tone was shot to shit. My nails were longish and dirty. Chris.…Where was Amy’s former superb tonus, where were the manicured hands of the self-important Doctor Strode, which had stroked and reshaped the bodies of wealthy socialites?

  Ready to dive beneath Amy’s skin, I was halted by an unusual compunction. Did I have any right to drag her back from her destructive pleasures? What else was left to us, the untouchables of the colony? We’d never fit i
n, the only coerced laborers among all these committed, idealistic volunteers.

  Well, hell—when you came down to it, what did rights count for? The only thing that mattered now was that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life alone among these fresh-faced zealots.

  I slapped palms to flesh and went under, for a stroll down blood lane, through the gardens of organs and bone.

  The stupid bitch had set up roadblocks for me, just like the last time. But she had been in a hurry to get burning, and had been sloppy. Plus her talents were suffering because of her addiction. She lacked some of the deftness now that had almost killed me during our first fight, so long ago.

  I got past the buzzing lime-colored clots and the angry fibrillary nets, shot through the blood-brain barrier, and was in her hypothalamus before she could arouse herself to stop me.

  She had that organ locked in total production of jazzed-up neurotransmitters and endorphins. These opiate-like substances were flooding the receptors in her brain and spine to produce a heavenly buzz, poppy-sweet. Trouble was, both the originating and receiving cells were burning themselves out, all metabolic resources allocated to the output and uptake of the pleasure-juices. She was killing off these and adjacent cells at an alarming rate.

  I intervened in her cortical jury-rigging and got the cells back to normal. Then I initiated some hasty regenerative processes. Brain cells, of course, resisted regeneration more than any other part of the body, and I was hard pressed to force them to obey. Someday Amy would overextend the natural resiliency of her cells, and suffer permanent brain damage. That day, I sensed, was not far off.

  Then I pulled out.

  I could have woken her up from inside.

  But I wanted the pleasure of doing it the old-fashioned way.

  Back in my own shell, I slapped her four or five times across the face with stinging force.

  Suddenly she shot up in bed and grabbed my wrist. I braced for her to enter me with her talent, but she applied only physical pressure, strong enough at that. I had to give her credit for a quick recovery. But then again, she had had the best peeker on the planet inside her.