Selected Stories: Volume 1

by Kevin J. Anderson

  Rex stood with the rifle like a dead weight in his arms. Yes, he did believe what Ardet had told them. He had listened to all the speeches, enough to memorize most of them. He knew what the Worthies stood for. He accepted everything Ardet had claimed, though the actions of the DP invaders were not what he had expected.

  The implant helped him to consider his thoughts, to see them objectively, without the disturbing backwaters and eddies of unruly emotions. He had no testosterone-induced distractions, no aggression, no wild mating drive. In this impossible situation, only the newts among the Worthies could remain solid and true to Ardet’s principles.

  Yes, he believed. He knew what his father would have wanted of him. Ardet had made it plain in his teachings, in his speeches, and in his actions. How else could Rex accept what had been done to him?

  Mother looked at her only remaining son, her face full of emptiness. Jen and Ann stared at him, perhaps seeing echoes of his brothers.

  The female DP spokesman broadcast another message. “You will not be harmed. You will be taken care of. If some of you wish to come back to Earth, we will arrange safe passage.”

  “Don’t believe them,” Jen cried. “They’re barbarians.”

  Heavy footsteps came down the halls. Rex stood like a rock in a fast-moving stream, feeling the weight of great events all around him. He was a Worthy, a vital component of Ardet’s vision. He had his role, he was a newt. He believed in what they stood for.

  The pulse rifle in his hands was armed. The DPs were coming closer.

  He set the weapon aside. Behind him, someone moaned in fear or disappointment. Mother, perhaps?

  If he truly believed in his father’s plan, then he had to accept what he was—and what he was supposed to do.

  Newts were made to be teachers, listeners, faithful workers, a stable class without violent tendencies. If Ardet had wanted his son and all those like him to be heroes, he would never have cut them off at the … knees. Rex didn’t need the implant to tell him that this was for the best.

  As the DP consolidation parties moved toward the family habitat, Rex faced them. He experienced no despair or panic, neither elation nor fear. Just an unending sense of calm …

  In my first quarter of courses to get my MFA (a bureaucratic requirement so that I could be considered “qualified” to teach writing, even though I’ve had over 140 books published), I took a focused class on writing flash fiction. I’ve always written stories according to the length they needed to be, and never focused especially on extreme brevity, but this was an interesting exercise.

  At first, I started out with extremely short, clever bits, like …

  “Last Will and Testament”

  The immortal man wrote his “last” will and testament, again, knowing full well it would never be his last.

  Or …

  “Paradox”

  The time traveler contemplated whether he should go back in time to talk himself out of inventing the time machine, but somehow he couldn’t seem to come to a decision.

  Those are cute, but there’s more of a challenge to writing an actual story, with characters and emotions, a point, in a thousand words or less. I began this collection with the very short “Memorial,” my first published work, which was flash fiction, though I didn’t realize it at the time. This is a new story, written for the flash fiction course, a story that gets to the heart of why every science fiction fan loves Mars. It’s in our DNA.

  Ghosts of Mars

  At the end of a long, slow journey across space, the expedition finally arrived at Mars. The great copper disk hung below the mothership, ominous, enticing.

  The lander detached from the mothership, leaving only Pasternak behind to mind the store; he had drawn the short straw and would not accompany the others to the surface. Strapped in the lander’s pilot seat, Commander Tomkins felt a pang in his heart for the man left behind. Had the Russian dreamed about Mars all his life, as Tomkins had? Had he, too, been inspired by the stories he had read, adventures that fired the imagination … and now, finally, the reality?

  Tomkins rode with Suvi and Chen as they began the slow-motion gravitational ballet down to the surface. The atmosphere whispered against the outer hull as the lander swung around Mars.

  Tomkins opened the comm channel. “Descent nominal as we head around to the far side.” His voice was dry and professional, but in his heart he was speaking to the entire human race, everyone who had dreamed of the Red Planet. “Ionization front building.” He could already hear the static crackling.

  Pasternak responded from above, “All is on schedule, yes? We expect twelve minutes of radio silence.”

  “We’ll talk to you on the other side,” Suvi added. She and Chen had barely cracked a smile during the long trip from Earth. The best in their fields, respected scientific colleagues, but they had never softened into friends. This was a job for them, not a dream. Tomkins was the wide-eyed one, filled with wonder by the very idea of the voyage. He thought of all the books, all those visionary writers who had traveled here first with their own tales …

  The lander dropped into sudden, blissful silence, cruising over the rusty red landscape, looking down at an olive-green sky, air a thousand times fainter than a baby’s smallest breath.

  When they did land, Tomkins, as commander, would be the first to emerge, the first human to leave footprints on the red sands. Once again, he pondered what he would say upon achieving one of the grandest dreams of humanity. How could anyone improve on “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”? What was he going to say?

  The reddish mountains and canyons below tugged at his heart as the lander flew over the deep gash of Valles Marineris, the conical mound of Olympus Mons: magical names, the stuff of legends.

  As the lander continued to burn through the atmosphere surrounded by an impenetrable shield of ionized air, Tomkins heard static on the comm. And then the faintest breathy whispers:

  You made it.

  It wasn’t a real voice, but something ghostly and inspired by his own imagination. He perked up, curious, and somehow he knew who was speaking.

  Look for the canals, said the long-gone voice of Percival Lowell. The Martian race on a dying world, their civilization struggling to survive, pumping water from the ice caps, erecting domed cities. That is what I imagined. How I envy you the sight! It must be marvelous.

  Another voice came through the static. Beware of their tripods and their heat ray, said H.G. Wells. The Martians have long regarded the Earth with envious eyes. Even now they may be building their invasion cylinders to rain down upon us in a war of the worlds. They do not know you come in peace.

  Tomkins listened, unable to believe what he heard. Preoccupied at their own consoles, Suvi and Chen didn’t seem to notice. These were voices from his own inspiration, his own past. These were the original dreamers who had created the quest for Mars in the human spirit.

  Barsoom is a beautiful world with a wondrous civilization, said Edgar Rice Burroughs. I wish I could be there to see the great oxygen factories, the four-armed green Martian warriors led by Tars Tarkas. And the lovely, incomparable Dejah Thoris! In my stories, I sent John Carter there many times, but I myself would go out at night and stare at the red star, wishing with all my heart to be transported there. But it never worked for me.

  The last voice seemed most earnest of all. My heart is about to burst, said Ray Bradbury. Take care that you don’t contaminate the pristine civilizations there. The Martians are majestic, but maybe incomprehensible. They will love you and lure you, but you are there. Really there! At long last. The human race truly made it. Your lander wasn’t just built by scientists and engineers. The road was paved with the dreams of writers like us.

  Our adventures weren’t just whimsical stories, said Burroughs. They were an inspiration.

  I watched through my great telescope in Flagstaff, Arizona, Lowell said. In my journals I painted a picture clarified by hope rather than through the lenses of the long refrac
tor.

  Humans will always speculate, Wells said. They will always explore and discover. We have traveled in our hearts and minds, but you are actually there. We wish we could be with you.

  “You are!” Tomkins said aloud, startling Suvi and Chen, who turned to give him a curious look. He lowered his voice, and repeated, “You are with us. And you got here long before we did.” He felt tears in his eyes.

  The lander broke out of radio silence, and the other two crewmembers quickly transmitted updates, worked the controls to adjust the craft, but Tomkins took a moment just to stare out the window at the raw, pristine landscape. He smiled and nodded. “We won’t let you down,” he whispered. He finally thought of the line he would speak. “We leave the first footprints in the red sands of Mars, but other dreamers left their mark here long before we arrived.”

  With a gentle spray of dust, the lander touched down with a sound like a sigh of long anticipation, and victory.

  Mars! What would science fiction be without the mysterious Red Planet? This is much longer than my flash fiction “Ghosts of Mars,” but it also reflects my continued fascination for Mars. It was, in fact, Mars that made me decide to become a science fiction writer in the first place, when I became enthralled with the classic film, The War of the Worlds, when I was just a kid.

  The core inspiration for this story, though, doesn’t come from Mars, but from computer software. I worked in a large government research lab in the 1980s and 1990s, when personal computers were just beginning to gain a foothold in office work. I was one of the first to have a Mac Plus on my desk, and I loved it.

  It was also the first time I had encountered the phenomenon of obsolete software. As upgrades were made and new versions became available, we would toss out the old versions and install the new, better versions. But it struck me that there was nothing wrong with the old version of the software—which still worked the same as it always had, which was perfectly adequate to do the work and had, in fact, even seemed remarkable when it was the newest version. Yet, it was obsolete, discarded.

  What if a certain group of people were modified to perform a specialized task, and they did that job well, but found themselves obsolete as the task was completed or a better version came along? How would those people react to being discarded?

  I found this scenario so rich that even this novelette wasn’t enough for me to explore all the things I wanted to do. “Human, Martian—One, Two, Three” is the springboard for my complete novel Climbing Olympus (currently available from WordFire Press).

  Human, Martian—One, Two, Three

  Ice, the color of spilled platinum on ochre dust, extended from the breached pipeline. Water had spewed into the thin atmosphere and frozen in lumpy stalactites dangling from the pipe. Before long the solid lake would erase itself again, volatilizing into the Martian sky.

  As she brought the crawler vehicle toward the pumping station, Rachel Dycek tried to assess the area of spilled ice. “Thousands of liters,” she said to herself, “many thousands. A disaster.”

  She turned a sharp eye from the clinging scabs of ice on metal to the broken pipe itself. The thin-walled pipe was more than just breached; someone had torn it apart with a crowbar.

  That almost piqued her interest. Almost. But Rachel didn’t let it happen. Her successor would have to deal with this debacle. Let him show off his talents. He deserved the trouble. She no longer considered herself in charge of the Mars colony.

  As she drove up, three dva emerged from the insulated Quonset hut beside the pumping station. The dva—from the Russian word for “two”—were second-stage augmented humans, surgically altered and enhanced to survive the rigors of the Martian environment. Rachel watched them approach; she recognized none of them, but she had done little hands-on work herself with the second stage. Only the first.

  She parked the crawler, checked her suit’s O2 regenerator system, then cycled through the airlock.

  “Commissioner Dycek!” the leading dva greeted her. He was a squat man covered with thick silver and black body hair, wearing loose overalls, no environment suit. Rachel looked at him clinically; she had spent a great deal of her time in UN hearings justifying every surgical change she had made to the dva and their more extremely modified predecessors the adin.

  The man’s nose and ears lay flat against his head to protect against heat loss, and his nostrils were wide sinks on his face. The skin had a milky, unreal coloration from the long-chain polymers grafted into his hide. His chest ballooned to contain grossly expanded lungs.

  The other two dva, both females also wearing padded overalls, clung beside him like superstitious children. They let the man do the talking.

  “We did not expect someone of such importance to investigate our mishap,” the dva man said. His accent was thick and exotic; from the southern Republics, Azerbaijan or Kazakhstan most likely. He shuffled his feet in the rusty sand, kicking loose fragments of rock. “You see, it is much worse than we reported in our initial transmission.”

  Rachel stepped forward, turning her head inside the environment suit. “What do you mean, is worse? How much water was lost?”

  “No, the loss is what you see here.” The dva man gestured to the metallic sheet of ice. Wisps of steam rose from its surface. The salmon-colored sky had an olive tinge from the algal colonies that had proliferated in the atmosphere for nearly a century. Rachel saw no sign of the seasonal dust storm she knew to be on its way.

  “Come with me,” the man said, “we will show you what else.”

  As the dva man turned with the two women beside him, Rachel finally placed him and his ethnic group. Kazakh, from one of the abandoned villages around the dried-up Aral Sea. The Aral Sea had been one of Earth’s largest fresh-water bodies until the early twentieth century, when it had been obliterated by Joseph Stalin. Trying to rework the desert landscape to fit his whim, Stalin had expended all that water to irrigate rice fields in the desert—rice, of all things!—until the Aral shoreline had retreated kilometers and kilometers inland, leaving boats high on dry land, leaving fishing villages starving and disease-ridden. The area had never recovered, and when the call went out for dva volunteers, many families from the Aral region had leaped at the chance to come to Mars, to make a new start. Even here on a new planet, though, they clung to their ethnic groupings.

  Rachel followed the dva man. Her suit crinkled, unwieldy from its high internal pressure. The three dva led her to their hut and then behind it. Part of the back wall had been knocked down and then shored up. Bright scars showed where someone had battered his way in from the outside.

  Under a coating of reddish dust and tendrils of frost, two iron-hard corpses lay on the ground. Rachel bent down to look at the wide, frozen eyes, the splotched, bloodstained fur, the ragged slashed throats.

  With a grim smile, Rachel could think only of how the new commissioner, Jesús Keefer, was going to have a terrible blot on his first month as her successor. So far Keefer and the UN had kept everything cordial, a comfortable transition period between two commissioners who held nothing but outward respect for each other. But Rachel had been cut out of all responsibility, with nothing to do but twiddle her thumbs in the pressurized habitation domes until the supply ship came to take her back to Earth. After she had gone, Keefer would probably find some way to connect this event with something Rachel had done during her administration. He had to keep his own record clean, after all.

  “We left this other one by himself.” The dva man took her to the far side of the Quonset hut. “We did not want him tainting the soil beside our comrades.”

  The third body lay sprawled, arms akimbo, head cocked against a boulder as if the dva survivors had tossed his body there in disgust. Inside her helmet, Rachel Dycek let out a gasp.

  “Adin,” the dva man said, stating the obvious. First-phase augmented human.

  “I thought they were all dead by now,” Rachel said.

  “Not all,” the dva man answered, gesturing with his stubby hand
at the exaggerated adaptations of the adin. “One other escaped.”

  The dva looked human—distorted to the point of the caricatures found in Western newspapers, but human nevertheless. But the adin, placed on Mars in an earlier stage of the terraforming process, had endured more extreme transformational surgery. The eyes were deep-set under a continuous frill that hooded the eyes to shelter them from cold and blowing dust; the nostrils were covered with an extra membrane to retain exhaled moisture. A second set of lungs made bulbous protrusions in the adin’s back, half hidden by this one’s skewed position in the dust. The adin’s body lay naked in the freezing air.

  “He came out of the darkness,” the dva man said. The two women nodded beside him. “His comrade smashed the pipeline, and we were distracted by the screaming sound of the water. This adin came through the back wall of our dwelling and attacked us. He slashed the throats of our two comrades while they were still trying to wake up. We managed to club him to death.”

  Rachel noticed what she should have seen right away. Frozen blood trailed dark lines from the adin’s ears; his eyes had shattered. “Down here on the plain the air pressure must have been killing him. The adin were adapted for conditions much worse than this.”

  She heard faint sounds from the chemical O2 regenerator system in her suit. It hissed and burbled as it made her air. She marveled at the irony of the atmosphere being too thick, the temperature too warm for the first group of Mars-adapted humans.

  Rachel turned back to the lake of ice and the broken pipeline that stretched from the water-rich volcanic rocks of the Tharsis highlands. “Can you repair this yourselves?” she asked. She did not want to report back to the UN base if she didn’t need to.

  The dva man nodded as if it were a matter of pride. “We are self-sufficient here. But we hope there will be replacements for … for our lost comrades. We have much work to do.”