Life on Mars

by Jonathan Strahan (Ed)

  “Children,” Vijay said, with mock sternness. “Enough.”

  I glared at Helene, who smiled at me with so much dimple and lip action that I felt myself blushing.

  “Sorry,” I mumbled.

  “Now, what I discovered was this. The Mars-side game is almost nothing like the game we play. It’s a lot meaner, and raiding is the order of the day. Four corps control the entire show, and every corp has to pay tribute to one of them for a license to operate, or face financial ruin. The four main corps hate each other, but they’ll work in concert to destroy any independent corp that threatens their arrangement—anything it takes: price-fixing, unfair advertising, market lockouts. . . .” He went on, rattling off a long list of sins that only auditors truly understood. Basically, these were all the ways that a corp could try too hard, like when all the corps in one sector, like oxygen, make exclusive deals with all the Mars habitats to supply their air at a discount on the condition that the habitats agree not to buy water from some other corp. This was strictly forbidden on Martian Chronicles—Earth-side, at least—though of course people were always trying it.

  “So that’s the shape of things,” he concluded. “The Eagle’s crew are trying to work out—from the spreadsheets and news bulletins they’re getting from the Mars servers—which of the four corps they should go to work for. They’ve decided to offer themselves as a team, thinking that they’ll get higher wages if they all stand together.”

  I shook my head. “That’s collusion!” I said. If there was one thing that was even more against the rules I’d always lived under than unfair competition, it was labor collusion, when a bunch of workers decided in secret to hold out for a higher wage, or to stop some of their friends from being fired or having their hours cut. It wasn’t just illegal in Martian Chronicles—it was illegal on Mars, one of the fundamental tenets of Mars, Inc.’s charter. Totally free labor markets!

  “It’s a different game on Mars,” Vijay said. “Besides, what’s really wrong with it? A company puts a lot of workers together so that it can earn more profits—why shouldn’t workers get together to earn more wages?”

  Helene raised her eyebrows at me, as though to say, Do you have an answer? One that you’re okay saying in front of Vijay?

  I tightened my lips. “Vijay, can I say something to you without worrying that you’ll be offended?”

  He smiled and bobbed up and down in the null-gee. “Of course, Dave. You’re my friend. Let it all hang out.”

  “What you’re talking about is pure pove talk. The world has two kinds of people in it: whiners and winners. A winner goes out and starts a company and figures out how to make as much as possible. A whiner complains that the winner isn’t paying him enough and, rather than starting his own company, complains and demands more money from the winner. The real way to get higher pay is to take a risk, start your own business, make something important in the world.” I checked to see if he was offended. He was floating upside down, so it was hard to tell if he was smiling or not.

  I continued: “Okay, so this is why you can always find the poves in Martian Chronicles. They’re the ones bitching about the unfairness of everything instead of doing something. It’s why there are so many poor people on Earth. It’s a thought virus they all catch from their society, demanding that the world provide for them instead of providing for themselves. And it’s the job of the doers and the winners to ignore the whiners and go on doing and winning so that the whiners will have somewhere to work.”

  Vijay was looking at me with something like a mild smile on his face. I replayed my words and heard just how offensive they might sound to someone like Vijay. “Look,” I said, no longer meeting his gaze. “Look. I’m not saying it’s genetic—no one is saying that poor people are inherently inferior or anything. But it’s a disease, and you catch it from the people around you.”

  Helene shook her head at me. “You really believe everything your dad tells you, don’t you?”

  I nearly turned around and left then, but I was still keenly aware of the loneliness I’d experienced for the three days I’d spent locked up in my parents’ cabin. So I stood my ground and pretended I hadn’t heard her.

  Vijay said, “I’ve heard this theory before. There’s only one thing I wonder about. Maybe you could help me with it.”

  “Go ahead,” I said.

  “Can you explain where the people who died in the P&G leak were whiners?”

  I shook my head. “No, of course not, but—”

  “Do you have any idea how many workers I’ve met who are missing fingers or eyes or hands? How many of them were called whiners and sent away because they asked their employers for compensation because the machines mutilated them?”

  I shook my head again. “You don’t get it—”

  “No,” Vijay said, and I heard that the calm voice he used—that he always used—was just a tight belt cinched around an enormous pool of anger. That Vijay was angry at me, at us, at the colonists. “No, Dave. I do get it. Do you know what cognitive dissonance is?”

  We’d studied it in school, but I hadn’t paid a lot of attention. “It’s like when you believe something and the facts don’t agree with it.”

  “That’s right. So say, for example, that you believe that the world is fair, but when you look around it, you see that you have so very much more than everyone else.” I could see where this was going. I began to walk away, but he floated and skipped after me, continuing to talk. “So you have cognitive dissonance. How can the world be fair if you have more than everyone else? It must be fair for you to have more, then, right? And how can that be? It can only be if you are better than everyone else—and everyone else is therefore worse than you—”

  I reached a hatch and passed through it and moved out toward the living quarters, downhill in the gravity.

  For some reason, there were tears in my eyes.

  I didn’t go back to the Junior Colonists’ lounge for a whole week. Instead, I spent the time with my dad, who seemed pleasantly surprised that his son wanted to hang out with him. It made me feel bad, like I’d been neglecting him. But it also made me ask myself why my father didn’t think it was weird that I wasn’t spending any time with kids my age. Dad had always been busy on Earth, traveling half the time for work, spending his time at home with his computer over his face, barking angrily at it while his hands worked the keyboard like a mad player attacking a church organ.

  I didn’t mind, to be honest. Actually, I preferred it to those times when Dad decided to get all dadlike and insist on throwing a ball with me or take me to some kind of sports match or play some game on the big living-room screen with me. It wasn’t that it wasn’t fun, but there was always a moment when we stopped talking about the game or the project and found ourselves sitting in awkward silence, trying to pretend that the reason we had nothing to say was that we were concentrating too hard on the matter at hand.

  On Earth, Dad had been a hotshot statistical risk analyst. This is not an easy thing to explain. But basically, what he did was tried to figure out how to balance investments to minimize risk. Say there’s an industry that benefits when someone finds a better way of growing wheat—the bread industry, say. And then there’s another industry that suffers when someone finds a better way of growing wheat, like, maybe, I don’t know, the corn industry? I forget how he explained this, to be honest, but this is generally the idea. So what he does is figures out how to invest some money in both industries, so that if someone finds a better wheat-growing technique, the investment in bread pays out, and if no one invents it, the investment in corn pays out. That’s the rough idea. What he did was like ten million times more complicated, though.

  And anyway, it doesn’t really matter now. Now we’re going to Mars, and there are no risk analysts. When we got to Mars, Dad was going to have to start a new business, or start a job, or something. He had bought us into the gold tier for Mars settlements—that meant that we were going to get our own private pressurized space, six
months’ worth of food vouchers, and a million Martian ray guns (this sounds like a lot, but keep in mind that a pressure suit costs MRG450,000 at last count). For this, he traded everything—every penny we had, our house, our furniture, our savings, everything. What were we going to do with it anyway? It wasn’t like we could take it to Mars. Our personal luggage allowance was limited to fifteen kilos each.

  “Dad,” I said, as we loitered in one of the corridors, nodding amiably at the other colonists as they went past on their way to the toilets or the common rooms or wherever it was everyone else always seemed to be going.

  He didn’t hear me. He was looking into space, lips pursed, brows furrowed. It was the expression he’d worn back in his office when he’d been neck-deep in work, computer plastered across his face, only his lips and nose visible. It was weird to see him making that face without a computer. More than weird. Scary. Like he was seeing into a world I couldn’t see.

  “Everything okay, Dad?” I’d never asked him that before.

  “What? Oh, yes, sorry. I was a million miles away.”

  “Fifteen million miles,” I said. “According to the morning Barsoom.” That was the ship’s blog, written by some crew member in Simplified. “But we’re closing fast. Mars in forty-nine days.”

  “Right!” he said. “Right. Exciting, huh?”

  He said it so unconvincingly that my heart nearly broke. For years, he’d been talking about Mars and how great it would be when we got there. He hated Earth, hated all the rules and regulations, all the whiners who wanted him to invest in “ethical” funds that gave up on profits so that other whiners would get paid more. Mars was like some kind of promised land that we were headed to, a better world for people like us.

  “Exciting,” I said. He looked away. “Dad, you don’t seem so excited, though.”

  He put on a big, fake grin. “I’m excited, son. It’s just . . . You know. Space travel isn’t as glamorous as I thought it would be. You know me. I’m no good at sitting idle. I’m just itching to get some work done.”

  “How about starting something up with someone onboard? I heard that lots of people are starting their own little corps. You know, hit the ground running.” I couldn’t believe I was lecturing Dad about business. It was quite a switch from the years and years of Dad telling me that I should be more entrepreneurial, play a harder game of Martian Chronicles.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. Well, that’s something I’ve been thinking about. But you know, I’m investigating opportunities. Don’t want to jump into something that turns out to be a bust.”

  “Dad, what’s going on? Back on Earth you were always telling me to seize the opportunity, fail fast, move on. Why are you being so . . .” I wanted to say scared, but Dad’s face had gone all furious, the way it did, so I didn’t finish the sentence.

  “There’s some things you don’t understand, kid, believe it or not. Some things that you’re going to have to age a year or two before you can grok ’em. Why don’t you run along and play, sonny?” He said it in the tone he used when he was telling off some idiot who just didn’t get it, someone who was a whiner or a bureaucrat. He often asked those people, What planet are you living on? Which I’d always thought was funny. After all, he was the one who wanted to leave the planet and go to a better one.

  It wasn’t funny now. I slunk away to the room and found Mom.

  One of the other moms had come over to our cabin for a chat. All the moms in our corridor had found each other shortly after launch, and it seemed to me that they’d nearly instantaneously formed a tight social club. I kind of envied them the ease with which they came together as a group. It reminded me of when I’d been a little kid at after-school programs and the moms would all be in this tight cluster, chatting away merrily, even as the dads stood off in quiet clumps of two or three, twitching impatiently at their computers.

  Mom and her friend Ms. Bonilla, who spoke Simplified mostly, though Mom said she could also speak French and Portuguese as well as her native Spanish, smiled at me as I entered. I wanted to say something like, “Mom, is Dad losing his freaking mind?” but I couldn’t say that in front of company.

  “Hello, David,” Ms. Bonilla said. She was very pretty and seemed young, and I remembered Mom telling me that she’d had a ton of surgery and took pills all the time to keep up her appearance, because “Mexican companies are even harder on aging women in the boardroom than American ones.” Dad had made a face at that—it was getting into whining territory, and the Eagle was a no whining zone.

  “Good day, Ms. Bonilla,” I said. That’s what we’d all settled on onboard the Eagle, where it was always morning for someone, always afternoon or evening or midnight for someone else, depending on which sleep schedule you kept.

  Mom cocked her head at me. “Things not so good with your father, David?” Of course she knew. She spent more time with him than I did.

  “Always the same for Mr. Bonilla,” Ms. Bonilla said. “All the men. It is the no-activity. They can’t live with no-activity.” A lot of Simplified was like that, taking a word like “activity” and making its opposite by putting “no-” in front of it.

  Mom sighed. “David’s father has it big-big. From big-big important to small-small no-important. Making him crazy.”

  “Mars,” Ms. Bonilla said. I remembered that she had been a “big-big important” too—the head of a giant cement company—but somehow she was coping okay in transit.

  “Mars,” Mom agreed. Mom liked to pore over the Ares Plain Dealer—Colonist Edition issues that came in over the ship’s radio, especially the want ads. “My husband wants start a corp on Mars. Not me. I say work for some time, see how all is, then start a corp. Why run without looking?”

  “But Dad is—”

  “He’s crazy. It’s temporary. There are many no-knowns about Mars. He wants information. Wants to try things. Can’t do either. Your father is big-big information processor. Without information, he starves. He’s big crazy with hunger. Understand that, David. He’s not angry with you. Just frustrated with the delay.”

  That settled it. But if Ms. Bonilla wasn’t there, I would have said, “How come so many other dads manage to cope? Why are there are all these other dads out there trying to form corps and get ready to hit Mars running?” But not in front of company.

  There wasn’t anything to say to Mom. Dad didn’t want to talk to me. My only friends onboard weren’t talking to me (or was it me who wasn’t talking to them?). There was only one thing left to do: get back into the game.

  Here’s how you get to Mars: first, you boost for a couple hours at one gee, which gets your ship really moving. Since there’s nothing in space to stop it—except a few stray hydrogen atoms and the odd gust of solar wind—it’ll just coast Marsward pretty much forever. So you switch the engines off and ride your momentum ever and ever Marsward. If you’ve timed it all correctly, Mars should also be moving toward you, swinging around the sun at 13.3 km/s and closing fast.

  Once you’re closer to Mars than you are to Earth, you flip the ship over, so that your main antenna array is pointed at the red planet, and reboot the ship’s computers, bringing them back online running a Mars-compliant OS that runs on Martian time. Then, about ninety days later, you turn the engines back and boost away from Mars for a few hours, because 13.3 km/s and closing fast is fast—fast enough to turn your rocket into a cloud of atoms and a giant shockwave if you run into Mars instead of going into a gentle orbit around Phobos Base for transfer to a ground shuttle.

  We were almost at Turnaround, which meant that we were nearly equidistant from Mars and the Earth. That meant that almost no one was playing the game anymore, because it was at 640 seconds of latency, meaning that a message sent to Earth took 320 seconds to get there and 320 seconds to get back, which made playing the game nearly impossible.

  I’d planned to do an orderly shutdown of DBOS-Corp long before this, liquidating my shares and giving the proceeds to a charity that helped new players get establishe
d in the game, then leaving my lieutenants to break up the firm’s assets according to their shareblocks and either merge with other corps or try to make it on their own. Without my authorization, none of that would be possible, and the company would just putter on for a couple months until the fact that there was no one at the steering wheel caught up with it and it crashed. I’d put far too much work into it to allow that to happen.

  Or at least, that’s how I’d felt when we left for Mars. Now, in the middle of the black and endless sky, it was hard to figure out what was so important about this imaginary company and its imaginary money. But there was a certain peace in shuffling the paper for my old, familiar company, making the spreadsheets dance to their traditional tunes. I was breaking up my stock, modifying the board, changing the org chart to shuffle corporate officers around. My lieutenants had been sending me increasingly worried notes by long-delayed e-mail, asking me when I’d get around to this, promising (good naturedly) to give me a real thumping when they got to Mars if I didn’t see to this in good time. Well, now they’d be happy. I fired off the signed orders to the Earth-side game server and waited patiently while the speed of light oozed its way across the reaches of outer space and over to planet Earth and then back again.

  But then it was done and the strings were cut. I was free. My company was no longer mine. I was, as of this moment, not a player in either the Earth-side or the Mars-side Martian Chronicles. I found I was pretty happy.

  I set off down the corridor, whistling, heading for one of the observation decks, where there was a huge video-wall that displayed the view of the space before us, Mars glowing with enhanced color. I was whistling “The Red Hills of Mars,” a folk song that I’d learned at Mars camp when I was all of six years old, and as I made my way along, someone else joined in, her whistle a very tuneful trill.