by Isaac Asimov
“She won’t be, probably. But Earth shares biometric data with Marsnet.”
“Still won’t tell us where she is on Mars. I like the idea—”
“Even Land Ethic Nomads can’t stay out in the sky forever. Send out biometrics, including the photo itself, and tell Pharmholders to check when travelers seek shelter.”
“Yes, yes, Daddy, Mama, we can go home then?” Sekou was not asleep, it seemed.
“Yes, little habling, yes, but close your eyes and go to sleep like Daddy said.”
“Okay. But I have to go so bad!”
Marcus patted the top of the bubble with his gloved hand. “Remember what I said, now. Close your eyes. Mama and Daddy have to talk some.”
Zora said, “There’s one problem. I have no idea where that photo plate is.”
“Ask Sekou.”
Sekou heard his name and was instantly awake, sensing some how that he could be part of the solution to the family crisis. “Mommy! Mommy! It’s in my bedroom. I tried to show you when you read my story to me, only you made me go to sleep.”
Zora felt a shudder of fear and hope. She knew Marcus would volunteer to go back into the hab and retrieve the camera and the photo plate. She knew it was dangerous, but she made an instant calculation: life without Marcus would be hell, and life on Mars without Marcus would be worse than hell.
Marcus had already turned the rover around. She bit her lip. She was going to insist on being the one to go into that hot hab. But she wouldn’t make her bid until the last possible minute. She’d surprise him, force him into letting her do it before he could think. The entire ride was silent. Maybe Marcus was making the same calculations.
* * * *
As they neared the hab, Sekou’s tired little voice piped up. “Can we go back in now?”
“No! Stop asking! Mommy and Daddy are just trying to protect you,” Zora snapped.
Marcus said, “Sekou, my big smart man, you remember about the radiation sensors? You know what bad rays do?”
“Yeah, Dad. I just hoped maybe they went away.”
“Not yet, son. We may have to move to a new hab.”
“Can I take my toys there?”
“You’ll get new ones.”
“But you’ll get my camera?”
“Yes, but I’ll tell you straight up, we have to keep it.”
Zora had been wondering why Sekou no longer clamored for a bathroom, but a glance at his overalls revealed a dark stain on the front. Sekou, noticing her glance, said. “It kind of smells bad, and it’s all cold and wet.”
Zora murmured, “Sorry, baby.” And then, trying to think what Marcus would say, “It’s okay. Don’t worry about it.”
Marcus stopped the rover about thirty meters from the hab entrance. He untoggled the rover door and began to open it.
“Marcus,” she said.
“Don’t, Zora. You can’t do this.”
She had thought very carefully about it. “You’re stronger, I know. But that’s exactly why I should go in and find the camera. If something happened to me while I was in there, you would be better able to care for and defend Sekou than I would be.”
“Zora, suppose you’re pregnant.”
“I’m not. I’m having a period. It just started.” This was not strictly true, but Zora felt like her period was about to start, and anyway, she used a colored-light cycle regulator had never failed her, both in conceiving Sekou and in preventing subsequent conceptions.
“Zora,” he said tiredly, “you playing me?”
She felt a flush of outrage. “You want me to take off my environment suit and show you the blood on my underpants?” Even though actually, come to think of it, she was playing him.
What could she do? If Marcus died, if he got sick and died, her life on Mars without a mate was too horrible to envision—she’d be meteor sploosh, she’d be forced to sell herself, she’d be dead. Mother and child, she and Sekou, would be like naked bacteria in the harsh UV sky of Mars. But it was even worse than that. Without Marcus, she wouldn’t want to go on living. Not even for Sekou. It would be better to venture everything, live or die now, than die slowly as the widow of Dr. Marcus Smythe.
“Let me do it, Marcus.” She heard the pleading in her voice, and the sharp knife of desperation under her groveling.
“Zora—”
“Oh, never mind! You always want to charge ahead, the big bull rover, like some stupid big male animal from Earth.”
Even through the helmet she could see him wince.
She realized just then that they hadn’t turned their coms to private channel, and that Sekou was listening intently.
Marcus said, “How you doing, big guy?”
“Okay,” said Sekou very softly. Then, louder, “It’s wet and icky and smelly in here. How long before we go home?”
Zora closed her eyes and thanked whatever gods controlled their fate that Sekou was in a bubble, because she was very close to hitting him. “We aren’t going—”
Marcus swiftly and seamlessly interrupted her. “Sekou, here’s a trick for getting over the bad parts. Make up good thoughts. Like, if you wanted to invent a toy, what would it be?”
“A camera to take smells and tastes,” said Sekou promptly.
“Those pictures you took, those were good,” Marcus continued. “Maybe help us get a new home. Your Daddy’s going to get the camera.”
“Can I take more pictures then?”
Zora focussed on the back of Marcus’s suit. “When did you tear your suit?” she asked.
Marcus wheeled around and looked at her. “Playing me, girl? My indicators say the suit’s fine.”
“It’s not torn through,” she said reasonably. “But it has a weak spot. That’s bad, baby.”
“Slap some tape on it.”
She rummaged the storage compartment and got out the tape. “I can’t handle this in my gloves,” she said.
He was quiet. “Have to pressurize the rover cabin then, to mend it. That what you want? Mend it.”
She tried not to smile. The nearly invisible spot she had seen on his suit was not likely to cause problems. “You can’t go out into the hab in a weakened suit.”
Marcus stared at her. “What kind of jive is that, Zora?”
“No, Marcus, no! Sekou, tell Daddy he’s got a little tear in his suit.”
Sekou tried to crane his neck, but of course he couldn’t see anything.
“Girl, I know you’re playing me. I know this.”
She threw the tape at his feet. “Be a fool, then. Get us all killed.”
“You’re counting that I can’t take the chance.” He stooped slowly and picked up the tape.
Zora continued, as if she had just thought of it. “You can pressurize the cabin and fix your suit. But it’ll take awhile to pressurize. A half hour at least. I’ll go get the camera with the photo while you the atmosphere builds up.”
“When you come back, we’ll lose all that good atmosphere again.”
She looked at him blandly. “It can’t be helped. You can take the opportunity to get Sekou out and cleaned up. We have no clean clothes for him, but ten minutes over the heater will at least dry his britches.”
Marcus stared back unsmiling. “You’re a jive fool, girl. You get serious radiation sick, I’ll kill you.”
“You saying don’t go?”
He stared longer. Then, “Go.”
* * * *
Zora didn’t look back at the rover as she loped awkwardly in her environment suit to the front airlock of the hab. Once inside, she felt a sense of unreality, her family home having turned alien. Odd to fumble to open the door to Sekou’s tiny room, not to feel the softness of his blanket through her thick glove. Everything was changed, charmed, deadly.
Her com still connected her to her child and her husband back in the rover. “Sekou,” she asked, matter of fact. “Tell Mama where the camera is.”
Sleepy, Sekou’s voice came back, “Under the bed.”
Environment su
its aren’t built for crawling on hands and knees. Under the bed Sekou had stowed all sorts of things, pitiful toys made of household scraps and discards. A whole fleet of rovers made of low quality Mars ceramics with wobbly wheels that only a child would consider round. A doll she had made of scraps of cloth, and upon which he had put a helmet made of a discarded jar.
And way back toward the wall, where her clumsy fat-fingered glove could scarcely reach, the camera.
“The picture is still in the camera, Sekou?”
“Yes, Mama.”
She felt a flash of fury for not having paid more attention to her own child’s plaything. “How do you get the pictures out?”
“You have to develop them.”
“Say what?”
Marcus broke in. “It’s a chemical process. The film emulsion is sensitive to light, you apply chemicals to fix it. You unload the film into the chemical bath in the dark.”
Sekou had done this by himself? Mars god almighty, her boy was going to be something fine as a grown man. “Why can’t we just give the camera to Hesperson? And why can’t we do the developing in the rover?”
“It needs water, if I understand correctly. And I’m not sure Hesperson has the chemicals.”
Sekou’s voice broke in, excited. “They’re already all mixed up. Look behind the sanitizer. And Mama, it has to be way dark or you’ll spoil them. Take them in the bathroom.”
Marcus added, “It’s nineteenth century technology, Zora. Just do as the boy says.”
“Nineteenth century,” she said. “What game are you two running on me?” She felt the fool. She had a Ph.D. in biochemical engineering. How could she not how to work a nineteenth century gadget? But then she couldn’t weave cloth, or knit, or make a fire with flint, either.
“Turn off your helmet light, too,” Sekou added.
* * * *
Thirty minutes later, she was staring at film negatives. “Why is there no color? Insufficient band width? And how could anybody be recognizable?”
“I think any computer could deal with that. Try it on your com.”
She scanned the tiny transparent images into her com and was rewarded with a bright, colorized image of Valkiri. After the com had thought a minute, it added a third dimension to the colorized image, although both color and third dimension looked a little off from the memory she had of Valkiri.
Marcus’s voice in her com startled her. “Bail out of there, woman. You’ve absorbed enough REMs to light up Valles Marineris.”
* * * *
Marcus was back in his suit, Sekou in his bubble, and the pressure in the rover falling rapidly when she got it.
“My suit doesn’t show a radiation load,” she said.
“Something wrong with it. They probably sabotaged our suits, too. Let’s book for Borealopolis.”
Sekou didn’t even ask to see the picture. “Those guys that stayed in my room,” he said, “they did something bad, didn’t they?” Through the haze of the bubble’s surface, she could see betrayal written on his pinched face.
“I’m sorry, Sekou. I think it was just the new girl, the one with the frizzy blonde hair. But we can’t trust them any more.”
She had stopped trusting her conviction that she wasn’t pregnant, too. She’d have to find a machine and test herself the minute they were safely inside the city.
* * * *
Hesperson greeted them inside the city’s outer airlock. His assistant took the image “We’ll run a biometric search on this, right away.”
“And you’ll take us in,” Marcus asked. “We need consumables. Can’t live like Land Ethic Nomads, running from hab to hab, on charity.”
Hesperson smiled warily, “The city management of Boreaolopolis can offer you a nice cubicle, plus free air, water, food, and utilities for up to a year.
“Marcus,” Zora said, “We’ll have to contact Vivocrypt corp about renegotiating our contracts.”
Marcus looked grim. “They’ll want another ten mears of work, no lie.”
Hesperson took them to a cramped, body-smelling holding area where they could unsuit while he arranged for temporary quarters. Zora wanted some hot tea, but she had to find out something first. She slipped away and found a cheap medical test machine in a dark corridor. It looked battered and she wondered if the lancet that nicked her skin was even sterile. Bu in two minutes, it told her what she wanted to know—or didn’t want to know. She was pregnant.
She stood in the corridor in the dimness for endless minutes. How long had she been in the radioactive hab? Her suit com would have the information, but she didn’t want to know, really.
What difference would it make now?
She willed herself to walk back to the holding area.
* * * *
Should she tell Marcus she had lied? Or should she quietly go and abort the fetus? She had lied about the rip in his suit, he had forgiven her that lie. But could she compound the lie, saying she was sure she wasn’t pregnant, a further betrayal?
Her mind was a welter of horror and confused thinking.
“—and you can run routine quality tests on our water treatment until we find you work more suited to your backgrounds,” the assistant was saying. “Any questions?”
Sekou looked up at her and whispered “Can I ask how long before we can go back, Mama?”
And all the stars help her, she had all she could do not to slap him.
* * * *
Hesperson hustled back in, smiling. “Then there’s a break in the search for Valkiri. The image your little boy recorded with matches the face of a Land Ethic radical who had jumped contract from Equatorial City two years ago. Her name was Estelle Query. She was a nuclear engineer in charge of developing ways to maximize heat production in large urban nukes.”
“Figures,” said Marcus.
“What a smart little boy you have here,” said Hesperson. “Somebody will pay big franks for his contract someday.”
Zora was already feeling horrible guilt over nearly losing her temper with Sekou. This just made her want to cry.
“Would you like a nice clean pair of pants?” the assistant asked Sekou. He nodded eagerly and cast an only slightly worried look at Zora and Marcus as she led him out to get cleaned up. Zora buried her face in her hands.
Marcus pulled her hands away and searched her face, perplexed. “Girl, we’re vindicated. They can’t say it was our fault any more. This Valkiri-Estelle bee has as much as admitted she did it.”
“But we can’t go home, Marcus. And Sekou deserves better than a cubicle two meters square with only minimal utilities.”
“Would be good if we could sue her, or her former corp. But there’s no hope there.” He pulled her to him and stroked her shoulders. “Girl, there’s something worse wrong than that. Call it my hoodoo sense, but you’re grieving a bigger grief than our happy ex-home.”
She sobbed for several minutes into his shirt, then pulled away and said, “I lied, Marcus. I am pregnant, and I’ve stupidly murdered our baby. It can’t live after the dose of radiation I took. It might spontaneously abort, but we can’t take the chance. A damaged infant on Mars—the corp will take it away and kill it.”
He grabbed her shoulders and looked hard in her face. Then he shook his head sadly and hugged her close. “Zora, girl, don’t blame yourself. I should have known. Truth be told, I did know there was no rip in my suit. I just thought you wanted to be the big woman. I thought I’d let you have your pride, be the heroine. But you were storying—I knew that.”
She tried to pull away, but he held her tight. She sobbed some more, then said, “You’re so damned intuitive. Did you know I was pregnant, too?”
His embrace loosened, and she saw his sadness. “Truth be told, I think I did. Something in your eyes. Your skin glowed like it did before, when you were big with Sekou. But I told myself, you’re tripping, Marcus man. Didn’t want to think it, straight up.” His voice sank to almost inaudible. “Didn’t want to think you’d lie to me about that.”
After awhile, she said, “And can you forgive me?”
He let go of her and leaned against the cold marscrete wall “Forgive you, forgive myself for not being the man and telling you right out not to play me.”
She could scarcely make her voice loud enough to hear. “Where do we go from here?”
He shrugged. “The medical for the abortion is cheap. Medbots are clean and fast. And as far as surviving here, what we’ve got in our brains is enough to sell to some corp.”
“Sekou,” she said. “They’ll put him in a group school her. But he needs to go back to the on-line school. More than that, he needs a real home.”
“Sekou needs to hear the truth, which is that he’s a smart kid, and strong, despite his minor ills, and he’ll sell high to some corp that likes his brain as much as Vivocrypt liked yours and mine. Now I’m going to find that sorry assistant and ask what we have to do to get a meal around here.” Marcus pushed the door further open. “Whoa. Look who’s here, in all new clothes.”
“Mama, you think I’m smart, too?”
It was Sekou, wearing a jumpuit that had probably been blue when it was new. At least it was clean. The assistant had apparently brought him back and left.
Marcus rubbed the top of Sekou’s head, then continued down the corridor.
Zora bent over and hugged Sekou. She ran over in her mind what they had been saying. How long had the child been standing there listening? She turned from Marcus and hoisted him up into her arms—a heavy bundle though he was a skinny kid. “Mama thinks you’re way too smart for your britches. Where did that jumpsuit come from?”
“I dunno.” He opened his hand, revealing a bright twist of paper, “They gave me a candy. Can I eat it?”
“No! Bad for you!” She resisted the idea that candy might become part of the Smythe family diet now that they were going to live in Borealopolis. It would be hard to adjust to prepared foods from the refectory after having lived primarily for years on cuy and chicken and stuff from their own greenhouses.
He looked at the candy fondly, then put it in Zora’s outstretched hand. “Mama, what does ‘big’ mean?”
“What? It means not small. What are you talking about?”
“I thought it meant like when some lady is going to have a baby.”
