Bear Head

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  My vision goes misty for a moment as my second set of eyelids close up against the thin air. My mouth’s full of grit the moment I inhale, and will be until we get to the next camp and under pressurised canvas. Indra’s sour expression shows she’s just as delighted with it all as I am.

  “Brian,” I subvocalise into my throat mic, because the thin air won’t carry a voice. “Lid off, Brian.”

  “Nope.” Brian’s still suited up. “Nothing doing.”

  “They’ll dock you,” Indra points out.

  “Let ’em. Fuck ’em.” And Brian never seems to have anything to spend his scrip on anyway, so if he wants to ride home in 10 per cent oxygen comfort and have it garnished from his pay check, that’s his look out.

  Deep breaths of thin, thin air with way too little oxygen and a pressure, so says the Loonie’s instruments, of forty-eight millibars. That’s two-thirds of what you’d need to not kill you, if you were straight up Johnny Earth-man. That’s like 5 per cent of sea-level Earth pressure, or 15 per cent of what you’d find on top of Everest. So you’d think, not so much, right? Bit on the thin side even with all the deep breaths in the world?

  On the other hand, it’s eight times surface Mars pressure; it’s four times the natural pressure of the Hellas Planitia basin, which is seven klicks down and has an atmosphere that’s practically thick soup by Martian standards. Which head start on the whole business is why we’re building a city here, of course.

  We’re within the scurf field here, though it’s patchy like the planet’s going bald. It’s technically green, though with so many photosynthetic layers, and what with the sun so far out, it looks more black to the human eye. Not really grass, not moss, not any damn thing you get on Earth. Bioengineered to break up Mars into something like soil, and into something like atmosphere, and much of what it poops out is pure oxygen. They seeded the first scurf before we ever came. Bees did it, part of all that service-to-humanity stuff before things went sour. Bees seeded the Planitia with scurf, and by the time they came along to install the canopy the atmosphere was already on the turn.

  I’m going to digress but – damn me, I hadn’t believed any of it. I mean I actually got on the goddamn rocket, crammed in with all the others, half a year in space to look forward to, and when we touched down and saw stuff growing on Mars, and took our readings, I realised I hadn’t ever really believed it. Lucky for me things like that work whether or not you believe in them or we’d all have been very sad and then very dead in that order.

  The scurf generates heat, too. I mean, not so much, but the canopy coating traps the feeble sunlight as well. Right then, as we’re riding the Loonie for home, it’s a balmy minus eleven centigrade on our bare faces. I mean, you don’t know fucking luxury until you’ve ditched your suit for a joyride across Mars: minus eleven, 6 per cent O2 and almost fifty millibars pressure. Brian’s still behind his visor but Indra and I look at each other and share a moment, and then she sneezes a jet of dust from both nostrils, all the shit she’s been breathing in that her internal filters have trapped before it can get into her lungs. What a time to be alive!

  You’re giving me the side-eye right about now, probably. Whither, you’re saying, the traditional joys of asphyxiation? Whither explosive decompression of the precious bodily fluids at anywhere under sixty millibars? Whither freezing to death; good enough for our ancestors so why can’t you modern kids just do what you’re supposed to and die horribly on the surface of Mars? And we are modern kids, Brian and Indra and me. We are the generation your parents warned you about. Because I’ve drawn these grand distinctions between ‘human’ and ‘Bioform’ but we’re all Bioforms here. We just happen to be Bioforms engineered out of human stock, rather than the dogs and lizards and badgers who get to do the skilled work. And the bears, always the fucking bears.

  *

  Hell City ain’t never going to be one of those glass-dome-and-fairy-towers places from the old mags. It ain’t even going to be Hell City when they actually get the first batch of citizens in. There are committees working up real nice names for it, all sorts of Paradise this and Eden that. Being in Hellas Planitia meant it was only ever going to be Hell City for us, though. When we arrived the previous crew – meaning Bees – had laid the foundations and built some bunkers we could hole up in, and the scurf was already spreading out and doing its biochemical work with the Martian substrate. For the first year it was suit-work or stay under cover, and half of us had to stay on the ship almost all the time. After that, a hundred million dumb spider-bees had spun enough canopy, and the scurf had brewed up a dense enough atmosphere, plus we’d built enough spare living space. Mostly what’s now the Admin block, admittedly, to which we humble working Joes don’t get access that often, on account of how we don’t rate the good air.

  There’s going to be space for a hundred thousand people in the first living stage of the city. Right now there are fifteen hundred of us, meaning about thirty semi-modded Admin staff, about a thousand at my pay grade and the rest Bioforms. A whole slice of those latter two pies are out hard at work as the Loonie takes us back home. We’ve been seeing the dust of the works since we set off. Travelling over the scurf doesn’t kick up a trail, but when you’re excavating and shifting stuff about, wow, let me tell you, low grav and insanely fine particulates really have a thing going between them. A third of the work crew will be clearing the machinery of dust, replacing seals and parts, taking deep breaths and then sneezing dust out their noses every half minute or so. We get our biomods from all sorts, but that particular charming habit comes from some swimming lizard thing. It does it with salt, just snots it all out on whatever crappy little rock of an island it ekes out a living. We do it with the dust, because every damn breath is 10 per cent sand here on Mars.

  From the Loonie we get to watch like lordly aristos as everyone else does the hard slog. They’ve got Team Weasel running the excavations, setting up the underground chambers, going into the new-carved ducts and holes after the drills to fix up all the connections. Your new Martian colonist isn’t going to want for water and power and cable TV on our watch. Team Weasel’re a mix of their namesake with badger and other relatives, short-limbed, designed to dig. Their fur is puffed out to keep them warm, and they push out of the earth covered in red-pink grit that they shake off in great clouds that float away towards the distant, half-visible sheen that’s the canopy. They got worked hardest at the start, when everything we built was underground. Right now at least half the work’s on the surface, though. Martian colonists don’t want to live their whole lives like moles, for all the Martian sky’s rubbish and the Martian sunlight’s pretty goddamn thin. But everyone gets a room up top with a view, basically, as well as the rooms down below where frankly they’ll still spend most of their time.

  What we’re driving past is that surface-level stuff. We see the odd Weasel popping a head out of the dirt, but where there’s heavy lifting to be done – relative here, low grav after all – that’s not worth getting the machines in, there are a handful of bears and the bigger dogs to do it. These are the free bears, the ones who got modded and came over like we did, new life in the construction industry, must be willing to travel. The other bears, the Bad News Bears, tend to stay inside the bits of the city we’ve already built.

  In between the dig crew and the heavy crew there’s us, of course. The Bioforms call us Vanillas when they think we’re not listening, though we are pretty damn far from baseline humanity. As evidenced by the fact we’re not all dead just by being outside.

  As we cruise grandly through the dig site, kicking up our own dust and making everyone’s life that little bit worse, we get connected back to the Cloud. I access it and see the little ticker that shows 17 per cent of my headware is currently out on loan to the City, and the teeny tiny buck I’m making from that loan. Indra’s headware is full of terrible soap operas, and that’s her call, but I prefer to prostitute mine, and the City dips into my head for storage and processing power, same as most e
veryone else’s. They were going to have a big central computer, back in the first plan for the place. Probably it’d have a nice human name and tell you that it was sorry it couldn’t do that, in a pleasant human voice. Then the DistAI panic kicked in and everyone was worried about Something getting in and taking over, so we got the Cloud. The Cloud is everyone putting their heads together. Even lowly Yours Truly has a big old dataspace in his headware, and it’s up for rent whenever the City needs to do some hard sums, which is most of the time. And sometimes I sell my head to other quarters, but the less said about that the better. Data smuggling can get your pay suspended, everyone knows. Electronic security is everybody’s concern, that’s what it says on the e-billboards. So obviously a working Joe like Jimmy Marten ain’t going to be carrying illegal data in his head for no criminal fixer behind the back of Admin, no sirree.

  Hell City is built into and from Mars. We take Mars and turn it into a cement analogue and do what on a traditional building site you’d call shuttering. You make a big box, the inside of which is the shape of the wall or whatever you want to build, then you fill the box with Mars and let it set, and hey presto, there’s the next bit of Hell City. Early on I did a lot of that, back when I actually cared. I did a good job and I liked it. Then I got bored and stopped doing so good a job. Now I get the crap jobs because, like plenty others, I just stopped giving a shit. Because there is not much to do on Mars. You can watch all the movies and play all the games and talk politics and sports with whoever’ll listen, but eventually your social motor runs down and every damn film looks like the last one and you owe everyone so nobody’ll play. And then you find that, because humans are humans, there’s a whole extra layer of Things To Do On Mars if you’re up for a little extra-legal shenanigans. Because it’s hard to get super excited about building the thousandth identical condo for some future Mars colonist who’ll neither know nor care about you. Who won’t even look like you. They’ll look human.

  The part of the city done enough to live in is all underground, and though it’s not hermetically sealed, the city’s machinery generates a denser atmosphere than the fields outside and screens out more dust. We come in and take deep breaths, feeling the oxygen debt of the last day starting to get paid off. They made us so we could go work out in the open, but not stay out there forever.

  Our welcome party is Dina. Dina’s seven feet tall but she got bred to look like she’s laughing all the time, got these floppy ears, got these adorable, scratchable jowls. She lopes over like she wants you to throw a stick. Under no circumstances throw a stick for Dina, because she will tell you to go pick up your own damn stick and dispose of it in the receptacle provided. No littering on Dina’s watch. Not unfriendly, you get me, but damn she’s a stickler for rules. You get it with a lot of the dog-forms. They like to know where they fit, and they’re all happy-yappy with the people above them, and if you’re below them they make damn sure you stay in line. Dina gives suited Brian a mournful sad-eye look, big burlesque of a downturned mouth, bitterly disappointed dog-face. Bad human is written all over that mutt’s mug, but she doesn’t say it because that’s not her job. She checks in the Loonie and our kit, and Brian finally deigns to disrobe. For a moment he’s standing there in his small clothes staring up at Dina, and I wonder if he’s just going to walk off in his underoos as a protest, but then he togs up in the green and white overalls we all wear. Three good little employees. Dina nods approvingly like she’s our mom sending us off to school. Three good little humans, and though you can tell from ear shape and nose shape and so on that Indra’s people came from here and mine from here and Brian’s from over there, Mars is a great leveller. Or Martian adaptation engineering is. We all have a skin tone of lead and antimony, grey-white like we’re our own corpses, because that’s where our systems dump the excess Martian toxins, and because it’s rad shielding of a sort, not that radiation poisoning’s your worst problem around here.

  They’ll change us back, un-mod us after we’re done, they say. They’ll at least do us so we look like regular humans, so we don’t stand out among those bright new colonists. They say.

  We go our separate ways. Indra and Dina are off to watch some new soap that’s come in on the latest transmission dump; Brian is off to do incomprehensible Brian things I don’t really give a shit about. I am, I decide, off to replenish my personal stash of Stringer because of all the damn things in the solar system, I need stringing along or the boredom and the misery is going to make me top myself.

  Payday came and went while we were out on the range, and I am already figuring out just how much of my scrip I can spare for illicit recreation when I check my balances and the bottom falls out of my world.

  I’m flat broke. Pay day came and went and didn’t leave a forwarding address. Where’s my goddamn money?

  2

  SPRINGER

  Warner S. Thompson was in full flow, speaking to telegenic Jenny Gale of Fortress America. Carole Springer sat in the production control room and watched the different camera angles. The man’s blunt, brutal features: a fist of a chin, heavy brows, a wave of dark hair that looked weirdly plasticky where studio lights hit the gel. Not a good-looking man, Thompson. That wasn’t where the magic was.

  There were two other guests, both vetted by Thompson’s campaign team. One had a multimedia package out on the dangers of DisInt and was only too happy to have a World Senate hopeful give him the nod. The other was some political thinktank type, there to be the intellectual punching bag, to say things like, “But is it really so…?” and “Don’t you think that…?” so Thompson could double down on his rhetorical territory, repeat his points. Thump the tub and beat the drum.

  Camera three had a good shot of Thompson’s craggy profile, eyes squeezed almost shut as he jabbed an aggressive finger at the stooge. “You think that you’re safe when? We’ve heard how deep this ‘HumOS’ has. Who knows who’s?” Jab, jab, jab. Incomplete sentences but one shunted into the next so you never quite noticed. So the viewers at home would just fill in the gaps with their own fears. Leaning forward in his seat, face getting redder, narrowing eyes somehow giving the impression of a hawk zeroing in on its prey rather than a man looking inwards at his own reflection.

  Another “Isn’t this sort of thing going to spread panic?” from the stooge and Thompson favoured the author with a ‘Will you listen to this guy?’ look, his instant-complicity-just-add-nodding special that immediately got the approbation it sought. He had that knack, that if you weren’t on the end of that jabbing finger you’d fall into step behind him, nod and smile and applaud. Because the presence of Warner Thompson was bigger even than the tall, angular hulk that was Warner Thompson, and he wielded it like a bludgeon. You’d do a lot not to get on the wrong end of it.

  “Aren’t people right to panic when they?” he asked, and now he’d found a camera to look at, a direct appeal to the audience, that beaming smile that said I’m the reasonable one here. I’m looking out for you. “Who knows who’s just some sort of? I know some senators, some judges. You got to wonder if. I mean, even you could.” And suddenly his attention was back on the stooge again, as languorously deadly as if Caligula picked you out at a party.

  “Jesus,” said Patrick Grubb under his breath, standing at Carole’s elbow. He was a short, unkempt man, unshaven and looking like he’d been left out on a window ledge in the sun for too long. He was Thompson’s current campaign manager, which mostly meant soliciting donations. Thompson was very keen about donations. Now Grubb mopped at the back of his neck with a handkerchief and grimaced.

  “He can’t say that. Some nut-job’s gonna shoot the poor bastard. He can’t just go about suggesting someone’s part of HumOS or something.” He glowered at Carole, put a hand on her sleeve. “Tell him, when he comes off. Tell him he can’t.”

  “That’s campaign management’s job,” she said and stared at the hand, willing him to remove it. Grubb leant in, though, the sour smell of him, the jowls of him, all abruptly unbearably clo
se. She felt the tremble start up inside her, that she could never show. Get off me get off me get off.

  “You got to tell him,” he insisted in a whisper, as some of the studio people sent them warning glances. “He doesn’t listen to me.”

  Carole Springer was thirty-one, immaculate, blond hair tied into a severe bun, make-up a perfect mask against the world despite the close atmosphere of the control room that had dark patches spreading like flood zones under Grubb’s armpits. Her powder-blue skirt suit, Thompson’s current favourite colour, was tailored for that fine line between emphasising and concealing her figure. She didn’t want Grubb’s hand on it. She didn’t want Grubb leaning in to her like he was doing, pawing at the fabric and the flesh beneath. Get off me get off me get off. “I’m just his PA, Patrick,” she heard herself say.

  “No, no, he’ll take it from you,” Grubb whined. “He can’t go making people targets.”

  Carole finally forced herself to look at him, bloodshot sunken eyes, broken veins across his nose, a man like his own washed-up corpse. She kept her face perfectly still, nothing of her inner world making it out onto the surface, as though her emotions were a colony of troglodytes shunning the light.

  “He won’t take ‘can’t’ from anyone,” she said.

  Abruptly his hand on her arm was a tight grip. “Listen, Missy,” he started, and then there was a low growl from behind them, the third member of Thompson’s executive team weighing in. Boyo wasn’t fooled by Carole’s face or ramrod straight posture, wasn’t deceived when she didn’t lean away from Grubb or try to free her arm. He could tell instantly how she felt. Boyo liked her, though. The two of them had been fixtures of Thompson’s team for years. Grubb was a newer addition, the latest hopeful to try and hitch his political wagon to the man’s rising star. He wouldn’t last long, she knew. He’d overstep the mark, try to pull in his own direction. He had an agenda like they all did: another chancer with an ideology and products to sell. And some day soon Pat Grubb would deviate from Thompson’s trajectory by just a few degrees, would take for himself something in his master’s eye, and then it would be time for a new campaign manager.