Life on Mars
Page 16
I tried not to show how much this shocked me. It practically skewered me. It was so much goddamned reality. Made everything I knew seem so . . . fake. Pointless. Like I’d been complaining about a splinter in my toe and this guy had had both of his feet eaten off by a tiger. So first I felt surprised. Then embarrassed. Then angry, though I didn’t know at who or what. Maybe my parents for keeping me from reality, though hell knew that I wouldn’t want to live through what Vijay had been through.
“Dave,” he said. “Please, calm down.” Made me wonder what my face had been doing. I hadn’t said anything. “I just wanted you to see that people aren’t just poor because they’re lazy. Some people work as hard as mules, every day of the week, and die poor.” Unbidden, the thought rose to my mind, They must be stupid then. It’s not enough to work hard. You have to work hard doing something valuable. “Some people work hard as mules and get hit by a bus or a chemical leak. Some people sit around on their fat asses all day and get rich.” I saw that some heads turned when he said this. Statements like that one were about the worst thing you could say to a Mars colonist.
I knew what I was supposed to say here. It was drilled into me. I said it. “If someone figures out how to do more with less, that tells us that he’s doing something right, and he should be rewarded for figuring stuff like that out. We don’t want people to just work harder—we want people to work better.”
He nodded. “Of course, Dave. That’s what we’re told. But Helene is a raider and she’s figured out a way to get a lot of money without working hard at all, by ruining the hard and valuable work of others. Where does she fit in?”
I swallowed. “I suppose that’s why it’s not illegal. But—” I fumbled for the argument. Lots of people were listening. I felt like I was divulging corporate secrets to my competition, even though nothing we were saying had to do with my business. “Just because it’s legal doesn’t mean it’s good.”
“No,” Vijay said. “But you just said that anyone who figures out how to make more money with less work should be rewarded.”
I wanted to sink through the floor. I felt like everyone who was listening in could see that I really was just a loser, one of those people who didn’t really understand everything that Mars Colony stood for, not in my heart. I should have had some decent arguments right there on the tip of my tongue. But all I had was ashamed, furious blushing.
“Listen, pove,” said a voice from below me, loud enough to be heard around the room. “You’re a guest here. Nobody wants to hear your opinion on what successful people deserve or don’t deserve. Why don’t you go hang out with your own kind?” It was Liam, the redheaded mouthy kid. He ran an investment bank in Martian Chronicles, moving giant chunks of money around on behalf of big corps and big players. He was always too friendly with me, and too loud, but he also managed to make me feel like I had to go along with him or he might punch me in the gut. Not that I’d ever seen him be violent—he was just, you know, intense.
Vijay nodded his head, not ducking it, but nodding, as if Liam was confirming something he’d suspected all along, which somehow made Liam seem like even more of a jackass. “As you say,” he said, and took off into the middle of the room, using a hard shove to get himself moving and steering himself expertly through the crowd. Liam swiped at his ankle as he passed, but missed.
Liam righted himself relative to me, so that we were face-to-face. “You need a better class of friend, Smith. Judge a man by the company he keeps. You’re going to have to get yourself set up again Mars-side and the impression you make on this ship will follow you around for the rest of your life. Just some friendly advice from your banker.”
You’re not my banker, I didn’t say. And I also didn’t say, You’re not my friend. And also not, The impression that’ll follow you around for the rest of your life is going to be of a big-mouth jerk.
And also, I didn’t say, Vijay’s my friend and I’m proud to be his.
Instead, I plastered a smile on my face and waved vaguely at him and plucked my way along the wall to the hatch and made for the gravity in the outer rings.
Helene came and got me a couple days later, rescuing me from a truly epic sulk in my parents’ cabin.
“You look like Martian crap,” she said.
“How’s that different from Terran crap?” I asked her.
“It’s redder, with a slightly longer day. Also, less gravity.”
My father chuckled and my mother smiled and I heard the klaxon go off in the back of my head, the one that went ALERT! ALERT! PARENTS ARE ABOUT TO SAY SOMETHING LIKE “IS THIS YOUR LITTLE GIRLFRIEND, DAVID?”
“Mom-Dad-this-is-Helene-we’re-going-out-now-’kay-bye,” I said and grabbed Helene and dragged her down the corridor as fast as I could. From behind me, I heard my parents call sarcastically, “Nice to meet you, Helene!” and “Come by anytime,” and other parents looked at us from their bunks through their open doors as we tore ass toward the hatch that led in-ship, toward the low-grav zones.
“What is it?” I asked, when we were through the air lock that separated the decks.
“I’ve been leaving you messages in-game but you haven’t answered them. Finally, I decided to see when you’d last logged in and I saw that it had been like seventy-two hours ago and I decided you must have something terminal so I came to find you so I could tell you my secret before you died.”
“What secret?”
“You’re really a crown prince who was hidden away by the king and queen, sent to live with a provincial bourgeois family so that the evil grand vizier couldn’t catch you. You are the rightful heir to the ancient kingdom of Freedonia.”
“You’re weird.”
She bowed. “Indeed. So, what is it? Cholera? Plague? The crushing ennui of daily existence in a futile and uncaring universe?”
I squirmed. The deck we were on was lightly trafficked—it had a different night than we did, everybody slept in shifts—and semideserted at this hour. I was conscious of the fact that Helene was very pretty and somehow managed not to smell like the Smell, but rather like something slightly floral and nice. I was conscious of the fact that we were alone. I was conscious of the fact that the last time I’d spoken with Helene, I’d chased her off by treating her to an uninvited lecture on corporate responsibility.
“I just didn’t feel like coming out,” I mumbled, staring at my shoes.
“Oh, right then,” she said. “Okay, back you go. See you later.”
She began to walk away. I stared at her retreating back.
“Wait!” I said.
She looked over her shoulder at me. “Yes?”
“I feel like coming out now,” I said.
“Oh, all right then. Let’s go find Vijay.”
I felt weirdly disappointed. Helene wanted to hang out with me and Vijay, which suggested that the half-formed romantic suspicion I’d felt was totally unfounded. Of course. Why would someone as pretty as Helene want anything romantic to do with someone like me? Besides, she was as weird as a sack of snakes; there was no way to predict what was going on in her pointy little head.
I knew, approximately speaking, where Vijay’s quarters were. The “scholarship” bunkroom—the place where poves who’d been lucky enough to get a free ride on the Eagle slept—was also at the ship’s hub, where there was no gravity to speak of. This allowed for a much higher density of humanity—you didn’t need bunks, just loosely tethered cocoons where people slept. Vijay had told us about it with a shrug, as if to say that it wasn’t any worse than his Bangladeshi orphanage, but I’d had a vision of a huge space, in perpetual twilight, where insectile sacks filled with softly breathing people drifted silently into one another, and it had given me a shiver.
“You’re sure he’s not in the JC lounge?” I asked.
“No, he stopped showing up two days ago. The lag was killing him.” The farther we got from Earth, the laggier the game got, as our play traffic had to traverse the widening light-speed gap between us and the servers twice
, once in each direction. Almost immediately after takeoff, we’d lost real-time voice communications with the dirt-side players. We could leave them voice mails and they could reply the same way, but that was all.
Then we lost real-time graphics. Rather than flying through a constantly updated, pin-sharp rendering of the Mars of Martian Chronicles as it was, we saw it in blocky, symbolic graphics covered in glyphs warning us that these buildings and people and vehicles might or might not still be there.
Finally, the game turned into a set of spreadsheets that were updated once every minute, filled with vital statistics about market activity, sales, mergers, acquisitions, corporate raids . . . And as we sped farther and farther from our worn-out mother planet, the update lag would be worse and worse. Until apogee, the point where we were an equal distance from Earth and Mars, when our antennae would be reversed and we’d begin three months’ worth of reverse flight, finally slowing down enough to put us at a relative standstill by the time we reached our new home. At Turnaround, the ship’s networks would change over to the Martian Internet, a system that was almost entirely separate from Earth’s spam-riddled cesspool. The two networks could barely communicate with one another—for one thing, Martian computers reckoned time differently, counting by Martian seconds, which were 1.025 Earth seconds long (just as the Martian day was 2.5 percent longer than the Earth day).
“So, if you’re sure he’s not in the JC lounge, are you also sure he’s in his quarters? You know Vijay, he could be anywhere.”
“It’s the tail end of his sleep cycle. He’s due to wake up in about thirty minutes. He’ll be there.”
The pove quarters announced themselves with their own Smell, a Smell distinct from the overarching Smell of the Eagle. This was the smell of people stuck together so close that every fart blew directly into someone’s face; every toe dangled tantalizing inches from someone’s nose; every armpit was wafting its perfume into someone else’s breakfast. As we neared it, we heard the Hum, the perpetual sound of a thousand people whispering, trying not to wake the others who were on sleep shift.
The dim room was just as I’d imagined it. Unsurprising, since my impressions were based on candid photos posted to the ship’s blog, snapped by colonists who’d snuck down to see how the other half lived. It really was like looking in on a termite’s nest or the underside of a rotten log, a squirming mass of half-seen humanity wrapped in gauzy harnesses.
“Looks like the povetowns in Martian Chronicles, doesn’t it?” Helene said, in a normal conversational voice that cut through the Hum like a cymbal crash. I squirmed with embarrassment, mostly because I’d been thinking just that. You could always tell when a Martian Chronicles player was a pove, because they built houses and businesses that looked like the pove slums you saw in the news. They were too close together, and they ran businesses right out of their residences, and they always tried to do three thousand things at once—jetpack repair, accounting services, hairdressing, space suit designs, all with enthusiastic, badly spelled signage.
“I guess,” I mumbled and squinted into the darkness. There was a pove sitting by the door, a man with a little cracked palmtop clipped to his flowing white shift. Apparently the backlight had gone—he was reading it by the light leaking in from the doorway, which we were blocking by standing there, gawping. He made an impatient gesture at us. “Come in, come in,” he said in accented English. Maybe he was African? It sounded like the African accents in the games I played.
We scooted past him, and were enveloped in the close, overbreathed air of the pove quarters. I had the same feeling I got when I stumbled into povetowns in Martian Chronicles: claustrophobia, nausea, and an awful, nagging guilt. And then anger. Why were we taking the poves to Mars anyway?
Meanwhile, Helene was floating through the space, peering at peoples’ faces, looking for Vijay. “Found him,” she sang out, again too loud for the space, and people rolled over in their cocoons and gave us dirty looks. I drifted over to her, grinned weakly at Vijay, who was scrubbing at his eyes with his long, skinny hands.
“Hello,” he whispered. “Funny meeting you here.” He struggled out of his cocoon and I saw that he was wearing gray underpants and a T-shirt, and I looked away as he snagged his clothes from the dittybag under the cocoon and pulled them on.
“Toilet,” he said, and led us out of poveland. There was a huge line for the nearest toilet, but he sailed past it and led us down a maintenance corridor that was barely wide enough to pass through, even turned sideways. “ ’Scuse me,” he said, and ducked into a niche I hadn’t even seen. A moment later, I heard the pee-plus-vacuum sound of a low-gee toilet. “I think they used this while they were building the Eagle,” he called over the noise, seemingly unembarrassed by having an audience for his toilet experience. “It’s not even on the as-built drawings. But they must have had a toilet while they were working, after they pressurized her.” Before pressure, everyone would have worked in space suits and gone in a diaper. He emerged, fastidiously wiping his fingers on a sani-wipe that he tucked in the waistband of his loose cotton pants. “Okay,” he said. “Onward, stout comrades!”
He led us farther up the corridor and I felt myself growing heavier, a sense of downhill that told me we were headed into the higher-gee outer rings. I heard muffled conversations from beyond the thin bulkhead—snatches of conversation in Simplified English and then in Spanish, which the crew spoke when there weren’t any colonists around. They were mostly Mexican, poves, really, and they were getting a free ride to Mars and a free start as colonists in exchange for driving the big tin can across the solar system for us.
“Where are we?” Helene said in her stupid loud voice.
“Quietly, please,” Vijay said, without rancor. “Crew quarters. This corridor goes all the way from the center to the outer ring. This is about as far as you can go before you start sliding downhill, though. I thought it’d be fun to come back sometime and do it again with pitons and ropes, see if we can get all the way down to the passenger decks without falling straight down and breaking both legs.”
“That does sound like fun,” Helene said. “Count me in.”
“You two,” I said. But it did sound like fun. We had months left in this tin can. And spending it all playing Martian Chronicles didn’t sound nearly as much fun as it had before we’d actually left for Mars. “Okay, Vijay, you’re officially the coolest guy in outer space. Can we go now? It’d be nice to actually be able to see you guys, rather than the backs of your heads.” We were all turned sideways, remember. There wasn’t even enough room to turn our heads.
“Don’t you want to know what I learned here in my secret perch in crew territory?” He was barely speaking above a whisper—we were all keeping it quiet—but he managed to convey unholy glee.
“Do tell,” Helene hissed in a very loud whisper—like a whispered shout. The voices outside the walls got quieter, and we all held our breath for a second. Then they got louder again.
“Well, I speak some Spanish,” Vijay said. “Just a little, but it’s helpful in Martian Chronicles to be able to audit a company’s books in the language that they’re kept in. And there are so many Mexican and South American corps now in MC—”
“Farmers,” I snorted. Everyone knew that the Spanish-speaking corps were just fronts for “farmers”—players that did mindnumbing, repetitive tasks in-game to amass wealth that they could sell to real players who didn’t want their transactions to show up on the official registry.
I could hear Vijay’s silence from farther up the corridor, just make out his shoulders tightening. “Many of them are very good firms,” he said. “Operating under the highest ethical standards.”
I opened my mouth to say something that would defend my position, but Helene spoke before I could. “You were saying, Vijay?”
“Yes. Well, the thing is, the crew are very active MC players. And they have access to the Martian Internet.”
“Jesus,” I said. “That must be laggy as hell.”
“They’re logging in?”
“Oh, yes. Logging in and even joining up with corps. They want to be sure that by the time they land, they have a good position. Think about it. Once we hit apogee and switch the Eagle’s main systems over to the Martian Internet, there’s going to be a thousand colonists all trying to get in with the corps or found their own, all at once. They’re beating the rush.”
“But that’s cheating!” I said, too loud, and again the voices from outside dipped.
“Go,” whispered Vijay. “Quietly.”
Quietly, we backed down the corridor, turning around to face the way we were going only when we reached Vijay’s secret toilet. We popped back out near poveland, and Vijay floated up onto the ceiling and gestured to us to join him. We put our faces close together and spoke softly.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “But it is cheating.”
“No it’s not,” Helene said. “It’s just taking advantage of circumstances. Look at the colonists who went up on the Falcon.” That was the first Mars, Inc. colony ship, which had made the voyage ten years before. “They got to set up Mars-side Martian Chronicles without anyone else in the way. They had a totally blank world. They could mine the best mineral deposits, grab the best mountains to hollow out and pressurize, stake out the best oxygen patches. Are they cheating? Should they have waited for us to get there before they started?”
I swallowed. “It’s not the same thing,” I said, but I didn’t sound very convincing.
Helene waved her hand at me in a dismissive, floppy gesture.
“What did you find out from them, Vijay?” But before he could speak she put her finger to her lips. “Dave, you might want to move out of earshot until we’re done here. Wouldn’t want you to get tainted by all this cheating.”