Life on Mars

by Jonathan Strahan (Ed)

  “Well, think about it, Gina. From its position, that thing has lain deep underground for a long time—we’ll know how long once we date the metal, if we can, or at least the rock seal over it. A very long time, and if it is alien, no aliens have emerged from it. So probably there’s nothing biologically complex in there, or there was once and isn’t anymore. But unless the thing spontaneously opens, we’re not going to open it. Would you? Who knows what contaminating microbes we might let out, or what effect they’d have? Our Mars is fragile, you know that.”

  I did. Humans didn’t evolve here—school studies constantly emphasized that, and so did everybody else—and we had to be careful. One slip and the “planet not indigenous to us” would snatch at a life, a town, the entire human population. I knew it, but I had trouble feeling it deep in my bones. Mars didn’t feel “not indigenous” to me. It felt like home.

  I said, “So the council will just leave the . . . the alien thing there at the end of the tunnel? Forever?”

  She smiled. “Forever is a long time. But, probably, yes.”

  “Mom—”

  “Yes, honey?”

  But all at once I didn’t want to tell her about David Hansen, the bug recos, throwing the chessboard. After all, I wasn’t really three years old. “Nothing.”

  “All right.” She hugged me and left.

  The alien artifacts, or biologicals, or whatever they were, would stay sealed. David Hansen would not want any more chess, not after I’d clobbered him with the board. Dr. Alvero would, as shift captain, discipline Barb and me, but that was minor. Mom wasn’t angry. I was able to sleep.

  I was wrong about David. He called the next day. “You’re supposed to be here to play me.”

  My belly sank.

  “Gina? Did you hear me? Your mother said.”

  “You sound like a baby when you say that.”

  “Get up here.”

  And I did. From guilt, from duty, from training: Put yourself in his place. The problem was, the First Principle was correct. It was the only way to make a Martian settlement work. But I didn’t have to like it.

  David looked stronger than I’d ever seen him. To my surprise, his elaborate chessboard was already in midgame. As usual there was no sign of either of his parents. I said, “You playing someone else?”

  “No, stupid. This is a famous game—the ‘Immortal Game’ between Adolf Anderssen and Lionel Kieseritzky hundreds of years ago. White to move. Go ahead.”

  Despite myself, I studied the board. “Pawn to d4.”

  “No. Anderssen played knight to d5.”

  The move didn’t make sense. This unknown “Anderssen” was ignoring the upcoming threat to his rook. David grinned. “Want to see the rest of it?”

  I nodded. He played out the game. White gave away both rooks, his queen, and a bishop—and still got a checkmate, using only minor pieces. It was unexpected. It was beautiful.

  David said, “He used a suicide tactic. Kill everything he has to get all the way home.”

  “I can see that.”

  “Can you? Gina, I want you to do something for me. I think I might have been wrong about Mars. I want to see it. Take me outside.”

  Talk about unexpected! “I can’t do that.”

  “Yes, you can. You’re an adult here, and so am I. I researched it. We don’t need permission to suit up and go out, but I don’t know the way or the air lock codes. There are codes, aren’t there, so that little kids can’t get out by mistake.”

  “I’m not taking you outside. Ask your parents.”

  He did that contemptuous thing with his tongue, and then a hand gesture I knew was considered really filthy on Earth. I hated that I was shocked. He said, as if the word was killing him, “Please.”

  “No.”

  He started to curse me then, using some words I knew, some I’d only seen in bug recos, some I’d never heard. I was glad. His foulness finally dissolved my duty, set me free. Nobody ever has to put up with that kind of abuse. I shouted at the top of my voice, startling him, “I could never be in your place!”

  In the momentary silence that followed, I left.

  The dull gold artifact was measured, photographed, assayed, and put through every possible test to see what was inside. Nothing yielded any useful information, not even internal imaging, which revealed only indistinct shadows. Bots carefully scraped away the rock on the thing’s six sides, none of which bore any markings. A perfect cube, the artifact was made of a substance unknown to either Earth or Martian scientists. Geologists determined that rock around it had shifted several thousand years ago; before that the artifact had lain on or near the Martian surface. Images of it became the most accessed data in the solar system.

  On Earth a rising ocean, clogged with the out-of-control algal blooms that had killed the rest of its marine life, broke through the levees around a major settlement called New York. The water rushed in. In the floods and panic and contamination, two million people died.

  I played and replayed the Anderssen-Kieseritzky Immortal Game, looking for something I could not have named. The stupid game even invaded my dreams. Knight takes g7, King to d8. . . Not that I was sleeping all that well anyway.

  I didn’t see David Hansen, but I heard about him. In a settlement as small as Mangala, gossip is as pervasive as fines. His mother was out on a long-explore; she would not return for the rest of the year. David’s father was in Mangala but spent all his days and most of his nights at the lab. After all, wasn’t his son supposed to be an adult, here on Mars? I looked up the Hansens on the link. They did not come from New York. They had lived somewhere called Illinois, a place that had undergone rapid desertification during the recent round of massive climate shifts. The link, calling up Earther feeds from its data base, showed me kilometer after kilometer of dry, cracked, withered ground leading to a barren lakeshore.

  “Gina,” Mom said one day over a very late dinner, just before mess closed down, “there’s talk of. . . of certain recos that have been fed illegally to Mars.”

  I picked up a forkful of soypeach and kept my gaze on it. Ordinarily I like soypeach.

  “You saw them,” Mom said flatly.

  “Yes.”

  She put down her fork. “ ‘Bug’ recos.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  I shrugged. I was an adult; I didn’t have to tell her everything.

  “Vile, ugly, stupid things—that’s what those recos are. From ignorant and diseased minds.”

  “Yes,” I said for the third time, and finally I could look up at her. “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re sorry? Dear heart, you have nothing to be sorry for. It’s the people who made those recos who should be—is that why you’ve been looking so tense and preoccupied the last few weeks? I’ve been worried about you. Ever since you stopped playing chess with David Hansen—was it David who showed you those recos? Was it?”

  “No, Mom. I saw them before he even arrived.” All at once the tension in my head—and of course Mom had noticed it, she loved me—shot up several levels.

  “So David Hansen had nothing to do with it?”

  How to answer that? It was too complicated. I said, “Mom—is the council really never going to open that alien thing?”

  She stared at me. “What’s that got to do with David Hansen?”

  “Nothing—I just—never mind. How is he?”

  “Doing really well. His brain blight might even be in remission. There are a few rare cases of that on record. If he’s one, it’s a great chance for up-close study, maybe even to learn something significant about the immune system. DNA is infinitely adaptable.”

  My linkcom sounded. When I accessed the message, David Hansen’s face stared at me, surrounded by waist-high plants. I recognized them: my mother’s genemod wheat, modified for nutrientenhanced Martian soil. David was out in the farm.

  Instead of speaking, he used the linkcom’s text function, which no one ever does except for data tra
nsmission. I had to squint at the tiny letters: “Come right now and alone or bishop to e7.”

  I stood, my legs shaky, and said, “Barb wants me. See you later?”

  “Sure,” Mom said. “Have fun.”

  I made myself not run out of the mess. Bishop to e7 was the last move in Anderssen’s immortal game with Kieseritzky. David’s words filled my head: “He used a suicide tactic. Kill everything he has to get all the way home.”

  I raced along the underground tunnel from Level 5 to the farm, then up the stairs instead of taking the elevator to the air lock. The farm is pressurized, but the atmospheric mix is different from the town, with more CO2 to aid plant growth. People can breathe it, but just barely and not for too long. Suits hang along the wall beside the air lock. I hesitated, knowing I should put one on, but I didn’t want to take the time. Instead I just grabbed a helmet and rushed into the air lock. It filled agonizingly slowly with the farm air. Come on come on . . .

  Dusk filled the hot air of the farm, steamy and rich with the scents of plants, loam, water. No one else was around at this hour, and without a suit I had no headlamp. It didn’t matter. I had played here, taken botany lessons here, done work shifts here my entire life. Mom was a plant geneticist. I knew every inch of the farm, and I raced sure-footed over the narrow paths between crop beds and mini-fields and hydroponic vats and dwarf fruit trees. The sky beyond the low plastic dome was clear, and Phobos shone above me amid the earliest and brightest stars.

  David stood, also unsuited, between two mini-fields of Mom’s wheat, where the path ended at the far dome wall. Beyond the dome the Martian surface, rock and fines, was shrouded in shadows. David’s back was to the wall. He held the detached cutting arm of a bot, sharper than any razor.

  “David,” I said softly, as if sound might somehow jar him into action.

  “Don’t try to stop me.”

  “You want me to stop you, or you wouldn’t have linked me. You’d have just done it.”

  He laughed. The laugh shivered along my bones. “Is that what you think, Gina? You’re wrong. I linked you because I hate you, hate this place, hate all you bugs—do you know how repulsive you look to me? I can never belong here, never, and I can’t . . . can’t go . . . home . . .”

  He started to cry. I moved faster than I have ever moved before. Somehow—how?—I knew that he could not let me see him cry.

  Time seemed to stop, quiver, slow down. I had the weird sensation of seeing us both from the outside, each movement as clear and distinct as a coming-of-age dance: Gina leaps forward. David thrusts the cutter behind him at the dome wall. Gina closes the distance between them. The wall of tough piezoelectric plastic rips and air rushes out. Gina is upon David. He screams and whips around the arm holding the cutter. He’s clumsy in this gravity. She clutches his body in her big arms, so much stronger than his. Her small arms grasp at the cutter. She feels it slice deep into her thigh before he drops it. Gina screams. They both drop to the ground.

  Time returned to normal. Alarms shrieked. A repair bot threw itself at the hole where the air whooshed out. With my small arms I clamped the helmet over David’s head and the emergency seal molded itself roughly to his shoulders. Then I saw my own blood streaming down my thigh, and everything went dark.

  “Shock,” Barb said. “Your mom said it was only shock.” Her face was as white as the sheet that lay over me in the infirmary. She was my first visitor except for Mom, but I knew all my other friends would come as soon as they were allowed.

  “David?” I croaked. My lungs needed more time to fully recover, but they would. You’re not supposed to run and fight and bleed while breathing that much CO2.

  Barb grimaced. “His father took the fucker to Kasei. They have psychiatric facilities there, you know, that we don’t. If you ask me, he doesn’t need psychiatric help, he needs—”

  “Don’t.”

  “All right.” She leaned closer. “But why did you do it, Gina? Why save his life? You could have been killed, and he’s worthless scum.”

  “No.” I couldn’t say more. So we sat in silence, my friend and I, and she held my hand, and I could still feel my mother’s arms around me from before she left for her work shift, and I knew why the aliens, or their biologicals, or their machines, stayed inside the dull gold artifact.

  It’s the same reason we won’t ever open it: whatever is inside might cause contamination because it does not belong here. No one else believes this theory. “Gina, sweetheart,” Mom said gently when I’d croaked this out to her an hour ago, “think. If that were true, the aliens wouldn’t have taken all the trouble to come here in the first place. They must have meant to establish some sort of presence on Mars, or why bother?”

  My throat wouldn’t let me reply, but I think I know the answer. The aliens did mean to establish themselves here. But once they arrived, they discovered that they couldn’t. It was not home. It would never be home. They discovered that they were not as adaptable as they’d hoped, and so they committed a sort of suicide, an act of despair.

  Or maybe that isn’t it at all. Maybe it wasn’t an act of despair but of altruism. They landed and discovered they could not survive on Mars. Their craft was damaged, or there weren’t the right resources here, or they didn’t have the right science to adapt Martian resources to their needs. So they took the only kind of victory they could achieve: leaving Mars uncontaminated for those who could adapt to it. “A suicide tactic. Kill everything he has to get all the way home.” Maybe the aliens, too, gained a kind of win, that of doing the right thing for us, who would travel here from Earth so much later. Put yourself in their place.

  I don’t know which idea is true, anymore than I know what will happen to David Hansen. His mind is indeed diseased, but not with brain blight. Maybe they can fix his hatred of us, maybe not. Maybe fix is the wrong word. DNA might be infinitely adaptable, but I don’t know if human minds are. If he returns to Mangala, I’ll play chess with him and take him places and try to help him adjust. Carefully. However, no matter what any of us do, David might always feel like an alien on Mars.

  But I am a Martian, and this is my home, and I am in my right place.

  “Oh, I meant to tell you,” Barb says, “the animal wizards have designed the next generation of mebios, and you won’t believe how cute they are.”

  “Yes,” I croaked. “I would.”

  NANCY KRESS is the author of twenty-six books: three fantasy novels, twelve science fiction novels, three thrillers, four collections of short stories, one young adult novel, and three books on writing fiction. She is perhaps best known for the Sleepless trilogy that began with Beggars in Spain. The novel was based on a Nebulaand Hugo-winning novella of the same name. She won her second Hugo in 2009 for the novella “The Erdmann Nexus.” Kress has also won three additional Nebulas, a Sturgeon, and the 2003 John W. Campbell Award (for Probability Space). Her most recent books are a collection of short stories, Nano Comes to Clifford Falls and Other Stories; a bio-thriller, Dogs; and a science fiction novel, Steal Across the Sky. Kress’s fiction, much of which concerns genetic engineering, has been translated into twenty languages. She often teaches writing at various venues around the country.

  Her Web site is www.sff.net/people/nankress/.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The problem with setting a story on Mars is that it must involve the unique qualities of living on the red planet or it might as well be set on Earth. Certainly there is much to explore and discover on Mars, but in the real world, teens do not do much unsupervised exploration or discovery. So I chose to concentrate on the social structure of a Martian colony: what customs, rules, and beliefs would most facilitate people living close together in a fragile environment with great dependency on both their technology and each other? To my surprise, what emerged was a version of a rule already thousands of years old.

  MARTIAN CHRONICLES

  Cory Doctorow

  They say you can’t smell anything through a launch hood, but I still smelled
the pove in the next seat as the space attendants strapped us into our acceleration couches and shone lights in our eyes and triple-checked the medical readouts on our wristlets to make sure our hearts wouldn’t explode when the rocket boosted us into orbit for transfer to the Eagle and the long, long trip to Mars.

  He was skinny, but not normal-skinny, the kind of skinny you get from playing a lot of sports and taking the metabolism pills your parents got for you so you wouldn’t get teased at school. He was kind of potbellied with scrawny arms and sunken cheeks, and he was brown-brown, like the brown Mom used to slather on after a day at the beach covered in factor-500 sunblock. Only he was the kind of all-over-even brown that you only got by being born brown.

  He gave me a holy-crap-I’m-going-to-MARS smile and a brave thumbs-up and I couldn’t bring myself to snub him because he looked so damned happy about it. So I gave him the same thumbs-up, rotating my wrist in the strap that held it onto the armrest so that I didn’t accidentally break my nose with my own hand when we “clawed our way out of the gravity well.” (This was a phrase from the briefing seminars that they liked to repeat a lot. It had a lot of macho going for it.)

  The pove smelled like garbage. There, I said it. No nice way of saying it. Like the smell out of the trash chute at the end of our property line. It had been my job to haul our monster-sized tie-and-toss bags to the curb every day and toss them down that chute and into the tunnel system that took them out to the Spruce Sunset Meadows recycling center, which was actually outside the Spruce Sunset Meadows wall, all the way in Springville, where there was a gigantic megaprison. The prisoners sorted all our trash for us, which was good for the environment, since they sorted it into about four hundred different categories for recycling, and good for us because it meant we didn’t have to do all that separating in our kitchen. On the other hand, it did mean that we had to have a double crosscut shredder for anything like a bill or a legal document so that some crim didn’t use it to steal our identities when he got out of jail. I always wondered how they handled the confetti that came out of the shredder, if they had to pick up each little dot of it with their fingernails and drop it into a big hopper labeled PAPER.