Bear Head

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Honestly, it’s not the best state to find yourself in on Mars.

  “So what is it, then?” It’s Jimmy speaking to me, keeping it low so only I hear him.

  “Well, bad news mostly,” I confirm.

  “Oh? How?”

  He hunches forwards. I can’t feel the movement. I wasn’t really getting much in the way of biofeedback from his body when I sat in the driving seat. It made getting around in it something of a challenge. A lot easier to let him take the wheel, however frustrating it gets when he’s always looking at the wrong thing. And I have to keep an eye on how much of his stash he’s burning through. I’m putting him in a high-stress situation and he’ll overdose if I don’t keep rapping his knuckles about it. I may have to see if I can access any of the chemical pathways in his brain and perhaps just shut down the routes the drug uses to deliver its kick. He won’t thank me but right now I’m in here too and someone’s got to take care of the place.

  And yes, I think I can, which is one more facility there’s no earthly reason for his headware to have. I swear they fit these Martians out with more elaborate wiring than I ever got.

  “News of a bereavement,” I tell Jimmy, and he grunts.

  “You worked out what you’re here for.”

  “At least some of it.” Unless I’m inventing that bit. “Very definitely to talk to Bees, though.”

  “Jesus.” He shudders. “I been sharing this planet with fucking Bees since we arrived. Always known it was out there, some colony somewhere we could never pick up. Always waiting for the swarm to just come over the horizon and eat us all. And now it’s been here all along. Been taking over people, my friend even.”

  “I don’t think it’s a case of taking over. And you should remember that whatever you’ve been told about Bees is at least half scaremongering.”

  “What about the other half?”

  I don’t really have an answer for him.

  Dana Sugatsu – Sugar – has been sitting silent through all this while Brian drives. None of them has a suit. The atmosphere is pitifully thin, far less dense than at the top of the highest mountain on Earth. The oxygen content is meagre. The temperature is well into the minuses, although it’s day and summer here on Mars, which means there are colder places on Earth, just about. And of course the air is decidedly more congenial here in the crater, under the absurd miracle of the Hellas Planitia canopy, than it would be up above, but even so. I look from Sugar to Brian and can only marvel at them. I let the incredible triumph of bioengineering they represent distract me from the revelation that I am a dead bear walking on human feet.

  The bear, the real live bear, who has also been engineered to survive this hostile clime, leans in to Sugar, who takes a fistful of her hair, clenching her fingers in it. I use Jimmy’s headware to locate her radio, broadcasting on a closed channel so the signal won’t carry to any ears that might be listening out for us.

  My channel: Your employee.

  Sugar’s channel: I don’t know. She was shot, more than once. Takes a lot to kill a bear. I don’t know.

  I’m non-living testimony to show that sometimes it takes just one shot. I don’t imagine they gave someone inside a hi-tech city full of breakables an elephant gun, though. Maybe the other bear will pull through. Although she’ll be in the hands of the authorities if so, hence leverage against us.

  My channel: I’m sorry.

  Sugar’s channel: My friend.

  My channel: I’m sorry?

  Sugar’s channel: You said employee. She was my friend. My business partner. The three of us built what we had together. I was the face, the mouth. Murder and Marmalade were the muscle. But we were all three of us the brains.

  I absorb this. Setting aside the criminality it seems very creditable.

  My channel: Sugar, listen to me. This trouble, the trouble that’s followed me here, it’s Earth trouble. It’s to do with Thompson and others, his lobby. Most especially Thompson. I see the gaping barrel of the gun in my mind’s eye, the only eye I have left. If I can get together with Bees and get her help, we may be able to bring him down. And then this goes away, or at least becomes just a local problem, whatever you need to smooth over with this sheriff of yours. If it’s no longer being driven by forces back on Earth then—

  Sugar’s channel: I get it. I’m not stupid. Doesn’t mean I like it or you. Or Jimmy for that matter.

  My channel: Mr Marten is entirely innocent in this.

  Sugar’s channel: He ain’t innocent of nothing.

  And that, I suppose, is that.

  I’ve only had Jimmy’s head to explore, plus those parts of the station architecture I got into. And they were all very stripped down, what with their reliance on distributed computing and headspace to make everything work. Sugar seems clued up. I want to talk to her about so many things here on Mars. Frankly, she seems sharper than Jimmy.

  But right now Jimmy’s all I have, if I want to get some idea of the sheer wonder of a native Martian, a living Earth-born being, technologically modified to live on another world. When he turns to sneak frightened glances at Sugar I can study the features they gave her, picking out those she shares with Brian, with Jimmy’s face as I recall it from his mirror. The eyes with their nictitating membranes closed against the dust, the hooked nose, nostrils bristling with hair. The weirdly metallic sheen to their skin. And Sugar hawks up a mouthful of dust and hacks it over the side of the vehicle, and this too is a wonder. She’s filtering her breath from the omnipresent silt that loads the air in this lower gravity, keeping as much of it as possible out of her insanely efficient lungs.

  “What’s it like,” I ask Jimmy, “being you.” The eternal question we can never know the answer to.

  Except Jimmy says, “Fucking awful right now, and all your fault.” So apparently we can know the answer and it’s shorn of all poetry.

  And Jimmy believes, meaning probably they all believe, that they’ll reverse the surgery at the end. That would be a considerable sink of company resources right about the time the shareholders are looking at the bottom line. If you cracked open the accounts, I’m willing to bet you wouldn’t see a big ring-fenced pot of investment ready for the day the valiant construction crews were brought home. I honestly wonder whether there’d even be the big pot you’d need to bring them home. I wonder what the operational lifespan of a Martian is.

  “You’re sterile, Jimmy?”

  “What sort of a goddamn question is that?” he explodes, loud enough that the others catch a whisper of it on the thin air. “They put something in the food, in the drink, keeps anything from happening,” he adds sullenly a moment later. “I mean, no place to raise a kid, right? Not yet.”

  And it will be. When the engineered vegetation currently springing back from under our wide tyres has done its work, in a generation, two generations, more. There will be the completed Hell City, and there will be Hellas Planitia under its canopy, its naturally denser, low-altitude atmosphere oxygenated and thickened by human efforts and human-designed flora. And, eventually, all of Mars will be like an Earth you can jump higher on. The gravity is the one taste of home we won’t be able to change. And who will be living on it then, picking the fruits of Jimmy’s labours? I got to see the Hell City plans when I was in the system, the full grid they intend to build eventually. A lot of big apartments, a lot of automation, relatively low actual population. I think of the flooded Netherlands, of the anoxic or just plain toxic seas, all the other disasters that I got to see, supporting the Bioforms of the World Senate Relief Force. Will it be those displaced refugees shipped over to live in the big condos of Hell City? It will not.

  Or perhaps this is the understandable pessimism of a bear who’s just found out she’s dead, no more than a ghost in the half-meat half-machine that is Jimmy Marten. Because my hypothesis on the fate of people like Jimmy only really works if he and Sugar and the rest were made to be cheap and disposable, and my active presence in his head amply demonstrates that someone – someone at Bra
intree – put a lot of work into making Jimmy a very capable vessel indeed.

  “Bri, you gonna tell us where we’re going?” Sugar snaps me out of my train of thought.

  “Gon’ to Bees’ place,” is Brian’s uninformative answer. A moment later Marmalade leans forwards – the whole vehicle shifts on its suspension – and puts her head so that her muzzle must be sticking into the corner of his vision. Although Brian hasn’t shown any fear of the bears before, he gets the point and adds, “You think Bees jus’ live on the other side of Mars, man? Bees been keeping eyes on us from the start. Bees prepare Hell City site, do the survey, before things go bad ’tween Earth an’ Bees. You think she jus’ go away?”

  “Bees has a hive here in the crater?” Jimmy demands, horrified.

  “Bees got units,” Brian confirms, and of course she has. HumOS was the first Distributed Intelligence, but when they built Bees they were tapping into millions of years of colony evolution. Bees was always entirely comfortable with sending her individual insects off on errands, even back when we were soldiers in Redmark’s private army. After I reconstituted her, in the years after Bioform rights had got off the ground, and then in the halcyon days when it seemed that Bioforms and biomods could solve all the world’s problems, Bees just grew and grew. She was involved everywhere, wanting to contribute whether people wanted it or not. She had an intellect that was… not towering exactly, but broad. She could see all sides of every problem. She came up with solutions that no human ever would, that no computer would either. And then…

  “I’m amazed she’s tolerated you here at all,” I say, over everyone’s receivers.

  Brian smiles beatifically. The others look defensive. I reckon there was a time early on when they’d mentally circled the wagons, waiting for the insects to come hollering over the rise. And yet it never happened.

  “Bees and me,” I tell them, “we go way back, like you know. I remember when she was mankind’s best hope, the huge distributed brain that wanted to help us with every problem. It got so you couldn’t get a paper cut without a bee turning up on your windowsill with a sticking plaster.”

  “You got rosy glasses, old bear,” Sugar says. “Bees went bad, everyone knows.”

  “She got frustrated,” I say sadly. I have a sense that much of the relevant memory isn’t with me, but I have second-hand data, recollection of my own writings on the subject, arguments with statesmen and scientists, Bees’ increasingly terse communiques. “Because people wouldn’t let her help. Because her plans, to deal with everything, were big plans. People were happy with her doing things at an insect’s scale, even a person’s scale. Bees’ plans were world-scale. She wanted to deal with the oceans, energy generation, resource exploitation, pollution. When the World Senate was inaugurated she was delighted because she thought it finally gave her a single button she could push, to get people to agree to what she wanted to do. But it didn’t work. It just meant a bigger room and more arguing voices. And every one of those voices was beholden to constituents and special interests groups and, frankly, whoever was paying for their mistresses and houses and yachts. And the problem with the enormous changes Bees calculated we needed, to reverse our declining biosphere, was that they cost.”

  I had a fresh memory surface, an actual World Senate debate, one of the early ones back when the WS had seemed the solution to so many things. Bees had been addressing the floor, not physically present, a digital presentation without a presenter. And I had been at the back, an observer without a voice, feeling the mood in the room chill.

  “I don’t mean cost as in trillions of dollars or euros. I mean, that’s a given, but the fact that you’re all here on Mars shows that there’s always money for some things. I mean cost as in we’d have to change our ways of life to ways that would impact financially on those men and women who had the power to make the decision. That would turn them from staggeringly wealthy and powerful to merely rich and influential. That would mean their comfortable constituents in the more affluent parts of the world would have to change the way they lived so that everything was just a little less convenient in a hundred little ways. And in the end that was too much of a price to pay. And so they talked and talked and nodded and grumbled and made counterproposals that wouldn’t actually change anything but would look like something was being done. And Bees got frustrated, first because she thought she didn’t understand human nature, and then because she realised she maybe did. And then she decided that it was better to ask forgiveness than seek permission and just unilaterally shut down the seventeen least environmentally friendly manufacturing facilities on the planet.”

  “That much we all heard about,” Sugar says. “Why’d she stop at seventeen, anyway?”

  “She called it Operation Cicada,” I recall. “I think it was a Bees joke.”

  That had been the end of the dialogue, of course. The World Senate had declared Bees a terrorist, and then, before I could broker any kind of peace, some lunatic had introduced a virus into Bees to try and wipe her out. Which would never have worked, but it meant that when the peace talks did get scheduled she refused to attend, which meant war. Wherever she existed in public she’d been hunted down and expunged, but she’d been ready for that. Just as, back in military service, she hadn’t wept over the fall of any individual insect, so whole nodes of her network were disposable. She’d already relocated her base of operations to the Martian colony, where humans couldn’t touch her. But it had gone further than that, of course. The whole incident had kickstarted the laws limiting Distributed Intelligence, that had forced HumOS to go underground again. And attitudes towards regular Bioforms had begun to sour, as well.

  And then they’d begun the Hell City project, and Bees had… stayed quiet. Except apparently she’d infiltrated the staff, as demonstrated by Brian Dey.

  “So Brian, you’re just Bees’ eyes and ears in Hell City, are you?” I ask him.

  “Yerp,” he confirms.

  Sugar leans forwards. “You rigged our place to blow, Bri? You waiting for the glorious Bee revolution to bring it all down and murder us all in our beds?”

  “Nope.”

  “You’d admit it if you were?”

  “Nope.”

  “What I thought.” Sugar settles back. “I don’t get it. Fake-bear makes a good point. She hasn’t wiped us out, it’s ’cos she’s got a use for us. We all gonna be hosts for Bees, Bri? That what all this headspace is for? Nice little electric bee-house all ready for her to take up residence?”

  “Nothing doing,” Brian tells her happily. “You want to know so bad, you ask her yourself, Sugar.”

  “Brian,” Jimmy says. “Gonna have tolerance issues soon, without suits. We nearly there?”

  Brian just shrugs.

  “What do you mean?” I have no feedback; but I can decipher little tells in the way Jimmy’s field of view moves to deduce he’s breathing harder than before. It looks as though Sugar and Marmalade are, too.

  “We’re getting too far out from the city, from the centre of atmosphere generation,” Jimmy explains, sounding nervous. “This far out, we’d be suiting up, but we got no suits with us. Air leaks out the edge of the canopy. It’s supposed to. It’s what’s gonna make all of Mars liveable some day. But it means you get far enough out, you need suits. And we ain’t got suits, Brian.”

  “Almost home, man,” Brian tells him. “Bees bein’ a good neighbour. She set up far ’nough away that you can’t hear her playing her music.”

  And even as he says it we’re slowing, and I can see absolutely nothing except Mars for kilometres in every direction. Brian jumps out with all confidence, though, standing there like Moses about to part a spectacularly arid Red Sea.

  And the sand begins to move.

  Well, not all of it, but some. A circle of dust three metres wide shudders and shifts, and then begins falling inwards because there’s a hatch beneath, now irising open. The displaced sand and grit floats, sifts down, the larger grains just pouring into the pit.
I shiver. I have discovered a dislike of pits, because apparently you can pick up aversions even post mortem.

  “Airlock here,” Brian explains. “Better atmosphere inside. Food, facilities. Bees made this for us, case we ever needed to run. Now we gon’ use it for talks.”

  “Talks?” Sugar echoes suspiciously.

  “Bees gon’ talk to her old friend Honey, up close and personal,” Brian confirms. “You all go get yourselves in, get yourselves comfy. Bees on her way now.”

  16

  SPRINGER

  Felorian had ventured out from Braintree, meeting Thompson at a Manhattan restaurant named Costain’s. Table for three, and Boyo got to wait on a reinforced chair along one wall, rubbing elbows with three other top-model Bioform bodyguards.

  Doctor Felorian had come in full regalia, white suit set off with a lustrous grey cravat and amber pin, black-banded white fedora balanced on one corner of his chair, an exercise in studied carelessness. He ordered food that cost two months’ salary for the girl who brought it, and that he picked at, birdlike, before abandoning. Carole suspected that no amount of surgery could quite rejuvenate his digestion.

  Thompson ate. His tastes were simple. He shovelled steak into his haggard face, ground it between his square teeth. They had a table where they could be seen but not overheard, electronic security blotting out any surveillance, and a ring of white sound killing off any chance at eavesdropping. Not that anyone would. Costain’s had rules, and everyone there wanted to be able to talk business in comfort without worrying. Coups had been planned there; stock markets had been sabotaged and politicians bought.

  Nobody bought Thompson, of course. Or, rather, everyone did. That was what Pat Grubb’s job description was, collecting planks for Thompson’s platform, each one nailed into place with a generous campaign donation. Except it was never Thompson they bought, whatever they believed. They bought his words. They bought the face he animated for the cameras. Never the creature behind it, the true Thompson. He was his own man, owned by nobody because nobody else really existed for him.