Bear Head

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  And when he’d gone she got in the shower and scrubbed and scrubbed.

  3

  JIMMY

  You’ll maybe not believe this but I was stoked when I first set foot on Mars. Building the future, man! We all were. And, sure, there were scientists and other nerds already here, but they were living underground or in closed systems. They weren’t living on Mars like people wanted. We were going to take a chunk of the planet and make it so, within our lifetimes, people could walk about on it, take a Sunday stroll after church under the canopy of Hellas Planitia, under the Martian sky. And it was a mad project – seriously, put a roof on all that, somehow generate that much atmosphere – but they’d done the math. In fact, the math had been done by a real they. The thing they just called Bees, back when Bees was a good thing, back when Bees was just prepping Mars for us.

  Goddamn Bees.

  But Bees reckoned that, with Bee-tech, Earth life could get a comfortable foothold down in the depths of the Hellas crater, and so they took us and engineered us and shipped us across Heaven and dumped us down in Hell. And we were goddamn stoked. We were all sorts of keen.

  That didn’t last. I mean probably still there are a few clueless schmoes who are still aces about the whole business, but your man Jimmy here is wise to it. It is the company scrip they pay us in mostly. I mean, OK, it’s not like we can run out to a local Walmart with our sweaty hands full of dollars, and OK, when we’re done they promise a good exchange rate with whatever currency we want, but I don’t believe it. Mostly because just about nobody’ll have any scrip left to exchange. I mean, yes, they give you a tiny little hole of a place to lay your head, and company canteen serves out nutritious slop as part of the deal, but anything else, you pay for. Who do you pay? Two choices. You pay the company, or you pay some grifter who’s running a racket on the black market, where you and said grifter both might get picked up by the Bad News Bears for breaking the rules at any moment. And then you’d get fined so that’s even less scrip in your pocket. You pay to download entertainment, you pay for booze, you pay for a bigger room, you pay through the nose for any damn time you break the rules. Everything you get in your wage packet goes right back into the company purse like water into sand. And when I saw how that worked, that was when my keen went just about the same way. Which was unfortunate because, in seeking a prop to help me stay on my two tottering feet, I developed some fairly expensive habits that led me to both volunteer for any crap job with a bonus attached to it, and to take on a few under-the-counter jobs for sharks like Sugar.

  Anyway, there’s me with my account scraping along at just about zero point zero balance and payday just gone, so naturally I go to complain to the boss, meaning Admin.

  Admin is at the heart of Hell City, in the built part. It was the first to get dug out, and it’s the only part that’s fully pressurised and oxygenated round the clock. There’s a grid plan of streets radiating out from it, above and below ground, all those business and residential units that nobody’s allowed in, still coated over with plastic to keep the dust out. There are actual apartments there, a hundred times the size of what they call our nooks where we bed down, but they’re all sold off plan to intrepid colonists on Earth who’re going to come rough it out here in luxury and tell each other how goddamn rugged they are. Nobody wants uncouth engineered labourers soiling their spotless floors and putting our boots up on the chaise longue.

  There are a couple of Bad News Bears slouching on the pokey plaza Admin’s airlock opens onto. These are the other sort of Bioform, the dumbass sort. They’re not full sentient, just force-grown animals with a bunch of headware, so the bleeding hearts rights activists back home don’t get to complain about them being Collared. Although I hear that Collaring is back in, back home. Thank fuck it wasn’t when we were being engineered, say I, or they’d have goddamn well fit us with one, believe you me. So, anyway: Bad News Bears, basically Admin’s heavy mob. Not that they’d ever quite needed one, but there are about thirty of the damn things, and ten of them out of the freezers at any time, maybe. Ten-foot bears, only a little engineered from base stock. Best thing you ever saw to clear out a bar or a card game that’s got too enthusiastic, and it means nobody comes to Admin to make trouble, like I’m doing. Except they’re dumb as bricks, and you just got to know how to handle them.

  I show them my ID. “Just got back from maintenance. Need to report,” I tell them, and their headware processes that as they frown and huff and sniff at me. You don’t show you’re scared of them, basically. They’re not like the dogs, who just love chasing a running man down for the fun of it. Bears are lazy. They’ll come on heavy if you give, but if you keep your cool then you’re too much work most of the time. Unless they’re hungry and you’ve got candy on you.

  I had candy. I slipped a stick of it to each of them, peace offering-like. They crunched it down appreciatively. Dumb as bricks, like I said, but brighter than bears. I make sure all the Bad News Bears know old Jimmy has candy for them. Some day they’ll get sent after me and that knowledge might just be the difference between me getting brought to Admin, and me getting brought to Admin with less than the usual number of limbs.

  Anyway, that gets me in, and I wait around and bug the duty secretary, breathing in the clean, fresh, Earth-standard air. The light’s different, too, all tinted a special shade of blue that’s like the sun, only the sun when you’re seventy-five million klicks closer in. We’re supposed to have something like that all through the living spaces, to keep us from cutting our wrists every damn morning from all-year Seasonal Affective Disorder, but frankly it never seems to work right. It’s only when you get to visit Admin you really find out what you’ve been missing. My body doesn’t know what’s going on, frankly: Christmas and my birthday all at once. Even the suit air wasn’t this rich. Makes you feel almost drunk. I wish I could bring a load of bottles and smuggle it out to sell on the street. And then I’ve made enough of a nuisance of myself that the Chief Administrator’s door slides open and he puts an annoyed head out.

  “Oh Danny Boyd,” I sing out, “the pipes, the pipes!” because he really fucking hates that.

  “Marten,” he names me, like I’m a disease he’s caught. “What do you want?” Project Manager Daniel Boyd is not quite like me. His skin is pinky, hair mousy brown rather than the silvery grey we’ve all gone. His eyes have fewer lids than mine do, because he never needs to worry about blinking away dust twenty-four-seven, or that his vitreous humours or whateverthehell might suddenly pop out of where they’re supposed to be because there’s damn-all pressure outside them. They still modded him, but not so much as me. He’s made to stay indoors on the red planet.

  “Got a bit of a problem there, bossman. Mind if we take it to your office there?” His office has comfy chairs. I have sat in them. I would pay company scrip to do so again. My ass thought it had died and gone to the good place.

  “What do you want, Marten. You said you needed to report, but I’ve read your report already. All good, job done.” And he’s a diligent enough bastard. He would have read it, while sitting in his comfy, comfy chair.

  “Bossman, I can’t help seeing I didn’t get paid.”

  I think I actually feel the slight extra load in my headware, the system borrowing my capacity at standard rates to call up the information, seeing as I’m right there and convenient. Danny Boy’s querying the system, because obviously he doesn’t know my financial standing off by heart. The system’s going through all its different stages, including inferring my consent, and feeding back to him.

  “No, you were paid,” he says. He’s got a tablet there, showing the money going in.

  “I see that,” I say reasonably. “What concerns me more is where it all goes out again around nought point five of a second later.”

  “That’s the garnish,” he says, or that’s what I think he says. For a moment I think I somehow bought the entire Martian parsley crop or something when I wasn’t looking. It must have shown on my face becaus
e Boyd expands, “for your loans. Your loan payments fell due, and you hadn’t paid them, so they were garnished from your wages. I’m sorry, Marten, but it is in the print of the contract you signed with the lender, I’m sure. Check the documents over. If you’ve a complaint about them, bring it to me and I’ll take a look, but usually they’re solid.”

  And yes, obviously I’ve been taking out loans, month to month. Because of that one month when things were tough and I was getting through a lot of Stringer, and then the next month when I needed the loans to pay off the previous loans, and then… and then I was off, wasn’t I, fixing the perimeter when the payments fell due, but, but…

  Boyd sees it on my face, and the bastard thing about him is, he is sympathetic. Easy enough for a man in his position to be an utter corporate bastard, but Danny Boy came to Mars because he believed in the project, and the real corporate bastards stayed home and probably made twice the money. Sympathetic, but won’t lift a finger to help, and what he doesn’t see on my face is that I have no stash left and the need to get some Stringer in me is clawing at my guts. If I was a regular Joe like Boyd I’d be sweating and shaking and obviously strung out for something, but I don’t sweat and I don’t shake and my engineering hides all the bad, bad things I’m feeling right now.

  *

  Outside, back in the dust and the thinner air, I put a call in to the lenders and spend far too long basically pleading with them to give me a new loan. Because that’s how it goes, isn’t it? They give you a cup today so they can get two cups from you tomorrow? Except that downward spiral can’t go on forever and apparently this is as far as it goes. I am no longer a good enough credit risk, says the automated system the lender has here in lieu of an actual human I could grab by the ears and scream at.

  I’m still standing in Admin plaza when I’m doing this, under the incurious gaze of the Bad News Bears. When I look up, feeling my lips peel back from my teeth, feeling like the great vast emptiness of Mars is closing in round me like a coffin, they’re not the only audience I’ve got. I’ve been shouting, I realise; shouting at the lender, whose voice is just a whisper in my implanted earpiece. Shouting on Admin’s doorstep. No wonder someone turned up to see how much of a problem I was.

  “Marten J.” His deep, growling voice comes straight to my ear via my radio receiver and mastoid bone. “You causing trouble again.”

  “Hi Rufus,” I tell him. “I was just moving on.”

  “Sure…” and he lets the word hang, playing with it, turning the end of it into a long, low growl. Rufus is a big dog, almost enough to give a Bad News Bear a run for its money. He’s wearing an armoured tunic that leaves his massively muscled limbs bare, the shaggy hair on them mostly clear of dust because him and his deputies have a little electrostatic field built into them that keeps it off. Rufus is the sheriff of Hell City. I mean, no big hat, but that’s what he is. He carries a gun that could kill a bear real easy, and I saw him do just that four years ago when one of the Bad News crew went crazy, screwy wiring turning it into a marauding monster. One shot from Rufus’s gun, no hesitation, no more problem. His deputies have guns too. Nobody else on Mars does. The self-defence lobby back home are oddly silent about this inequality, but nobody really wants people like Yours Truly to have a finger on any kind of trigger. His posse scares the crap out of me, frankly, serious old-school Bioforms, ex-military models all, dogs, cats, a dragon-type, all of them engineered like me for Martian suit-free EVA. Rufus could track a fugitive across the goddamn sands of Hellas Planitia, and I reckon he’s just desperate for someone to give him the opportunity.

  “No trouble, Sheriff,” I say, all humble like, clamping down on the gnawing inside of me. “Just a personal matter, Sheriff. Sorry.”

  He leans in real close. He’s got a broad face, massive jaws that could crunch me up like breakfast cereal. On his chest, that’s three times as wide as I am, there’s a medal. A picture of a different dog-form, looking nobly off into the distance, along with the words ‘In Memorium Rex’. And you don’t mock that kind of thing. Bioforms who wear that token, they take it real seriously.

  “You smell like you’re in trouble, Marten J.” And he can’t really smell as well as he might – not the way they messed with my body chemistry and not in this thin air. But Rufus has headware too, and he uses it to hunt the system. They gave the bastard a virtual nose for sniffing out bad luck bastards like me, and he knows I’m screwed. He can smell my electronic fear.

  “No trouble, Sheriff,” I say again, and back off from him in case he gets a whiff of my Jonesing. “Sorry.” And I’m taking myself off home as quickly as I can because I don’t know what to do.

  On the way there, I call every dealer who’s talking to me, in case any of them have a sudden fit of inexplicable generosity. None of them fancy advancing me anything on credit, not again, not this time. Suddenly nobody in Hell City wants to know poor Jimmy, and wasn’t I such a good customer to them always? There’s no gratitude.

  I’m going to head home. I’m going to go to what the designers refer to as my ‘nook’, meaning living space the size of a matchbox with a fold-down bed and facilities down the hall that I share with fifty other Joes. I’m going to just crash and hope that being tired wins out over being strung out and maybe when the pangs wake me up in four hours something will miraculously have changed for the better.

  Except.

  Except as I shamble back along the corridor of the workers’ dorms I hear someone banging up ahead, and my special psychic senses tell me it’s my door they’re banging on, mostly because it’s my name they’re shouting. “Marten, yer fuckin’ waste o’ breath!” and similar unkind sentiments directed at Yours Truly who isn’t, thankfully, actually on the other side of the door they’re so abusing. I know the voice. This is Matthias Lau, and if you recall what I said about them not hiring anyone too big nor too small to fit the suits, well, Matty Lau is right on the big end of that scale, and there was that time last month when the loan money had run dry. Matty fancies himself as an up-and-coming loan-shark, see, so he was only happy to slip me a little of his wage packet to tide me over, only he’s still working on the part of the business where people take him seriously enough to want to pay him back. The head of anger on him sounds like he is ready to take the game to the next level, fists and all. I skulk back down the corridor and decide maybe the night’s still young and a fellow like me’s got places to go.

  Except I don’t got places to go, do I? The only place I want to go is some dealer who’s inexplicably up to give me a new line of credit, but Hell City isn’t exactly that flush with people who can smuggle a consignment of illegal pharmaceuticals on the supply run, and there’s only three bent techs cooking Stringer on the domestic market, and I’ve reached the money-in-front stage of my relationship with all of them. So it’s money I need, and by some goddamn lousy coincidence that’s the one thing I haven’t got.

  And there’s only one place I can go that might get scrip into my shaky little palms in the sort of timescale I need.

  I’m going to see Sugar.

  *

  Stringer keeps you going. Drug of choice for those who, as the saying goes, choose drugs. Because Hell City life is many things but what it is most is repetitive and mind-numbingly boring, and absolutely anything you might do to lift that boredom costs you scrip, and so why not drugs? Why not let something else do the heavy lifting from inside your head, exactly? When Stringer’s sitting on your shoulder you feel cool and purposeful and collected. You can go make a pass at that guy or girl, you can put in for that danger money job you didn’t dare to before. You can, most importantly, see off the end of an eight hour shift of utterly tedious Martian make-work and come out feeling that you’ve done something important, made the world a better place. Wellbeing and contentment and not feeling just how rubbish everything is, that’s the gift Stringer gives you, and that’s what it takes back after the hit fades. On my way to see Sugar I actually have to stop and have a bit of a dry-eyed sob about
how utterly I screwed up my life when I volunteered to build Hell City. How the posters and recruiters were lying bastards. How the company doesn’t give a shit. How I’m not human, not any more. My face isn’t my face, and they say they’ll change it back but really? Will they really care about us when we’re done? It’s in the contract, but one of the big attractions to a lot of people about Mars is that it ain’t under the jurisdiction of the World Senate, given that it ain’t, you know, part of the World. Lot of business and tech and mob types gonna end up based out of Hell City, you mark my words, when it’s up and running for business. Greatest tax haven there ever was, and nobody telling you ‘no’ if you’ve got the money to pay for ‘yes’.

  Sugar – Dana Sugatsu – is a construction worker, same as me. You see her on-site still, now and then, toiling away with the rest of us schmoes. Otherwise Admin and the sheriff would take too much of an interest in what she actually does with her time. And I reckon they kind of know, with Sugar and the other fixers. They must realise there’s a whole black market economy going on here in Hell. The planners back on Earth likely figured it into how everything would work here – safety valve for all the bitter, grumbly steam we build up.

  Sugar’s kink is data. We’ve all got headspace, after all, and the drain of Admin doing its job barely scratches the surface of the great big implant we all got. And barely pays a dime, too, when Admin does borrow processing power and storage space, because those rates are fixed in our contracts. But you can rent out your head to others, too. Indra Kaur has five people storing whole back-catalogues of her favourite soaps for her. Some other guy I know, he’s writing some definitive history of some dead guy nobody cares about, paranoid about losing the work so there’s nineteen heads out there got some draft or other of it in them. But there’s other uses you can turn your headware to, if you don’t mind them being absolutely goddamn illegal.