Life on Mars

by Jonathan Strahan (Ed)

  Vijay had been silent until now. Finally, he said, “Dave, I’m very glad we found you. We have something we would like to discuss with you, in the utmost confidence.” We were tethered to a relatively deserted stretch of bulkhead in the JC lounge—“deserted” for the JC lounge would have been “crowded” anywhere Earthside except for a mega stadium concert.

  “Here?”

  He smiled. “My place,” he said.

  He led us back down his private maintenance corridor, where his tiny leftover toilet was. We were strung out sideways again, Helene behind me and Vijay in front of me, and I hunched over a bit, so that we could see each other.

  “You’re a very mysterious person sometimes, Vijay,” I said, trying for a joke and failing. Vijay did me the courtesy of a weak smile.

  “You know what the crew are planning to do with MC?” he said. “You remember? Forming a syndicate? Offering their labor as a package?”

  “I remember,” I said. “It’s totally illegal. And doomed. If the MC market is as tough as they say it is, the big corps will laugh them off and then crush them like bugs.”

  “I agree,” Helene said.

  “Me, too,” Vijay said. “The problem is, they’re not thinking big enough. Look, these syndicates have clobbered competition on Mars. They have the whole thing sewn up. But there are only a thousand Martians today, plus a few kids born Mars-side. We’re about to double their population. That is going to be massively destabilizing.” I started to get déjà vu. And I started to get uncomfortable. Didn’t I just have this conversation with Lainie?

  “Here’s the thing. When the markets there go into chaos, all bets are off. If there was a leadership team with a new corp, a better corp, one that would give the new chums a better deal than the syndicates would, well—”

  “Who wouldn’t join it?” Helene said behind me. I wished I could see her face.

  “Even the old timers who are at the bottom of the food chain. Imagine if there was a trio—a former senior auditor, a former high-powered raider, and a former successful CEO. Imagine the power of a trio running a company with the integrity of the auditor general, the guts of a raider, the acumen of a leading CEO! We wouldn’t have to take whatever deal the syndicates there are offering. We could topple the syndicates, institute a fair, competitive market—”

  My mouth was dry. The thing was, it was a good plan. A wonderful plan. If they’d made me this offer before Lainie had made hers, I would have jumped at it in a second (and that’s without knowing that MC was real life on Mars). But now that I’d made my deal with Lainie, I had already committed to the same syndicate Vijay and Helene were planning on destroying.

  I had a momentary vision of going to Lainie with this, telling her that I had two clever friends who’d be perfect at helping provide cover for her plan. We could start our radical, destabilizing corp, bring all the new chums into it, let everyone think that we were destroying the old order, and meanwhile, we’d be taking our own orders from the syndicate. We would be the syndicate.

  But there were so many ways that could go wrong. Could I trust Helene? She was a raider, after all—she specialized in dismantling corps without regard for the work that went into them. Could I trust Vijay? You don’t get to be an auditor without being stiff-necked about the rules and regulations. And what if Lainie said that she didn’t want any “help” from my friends? What if she made good on her promise to shove me out the air lock for discussing it? (No, I didn’t really think she was serious about spacing me, but with Lainie, there was always a tiny corner of me that believed she meant it).

  And there I was, trying to talk myself out of trusting my only two real friends for millions of kilometers in all directions. I felt, I don’t know, disembodied, like I was hovering over myself, watching myself decide to turn my back on my buddies.

  I wanted to turn and run, but in the narrow slip space with Helene behind me and Vijay before me, there was no way I could. And there was a better me, the me that wasn’t floating above myself but was in myself, sweating so hard it ran down into my eyes, that needed to talk.

  “I need to talk to you,” I said.

  “We are talking,” Helene said from behind me.

  I ignored her. My eyes were locked on Vijay’s. “What did you call it, ‘utmost confidence’? I need to talk to both of you in utmost confidence.”

  Vijay looked grave. “Sounds like you have a secret.”

  Helene sighed. “How come everyone’s got a big, dark secret around here?”

  Dad burst into the cabin, outraged. “Is it true?” he said, his eyes redrimmed, burning, his chest heaving. Mom leapt off the bunk where she’d been working with some of the ship’s polymer maintenance putty to make one of her little abstract sculptures.

  “David, please, calm yourself,” she said, in her I-really-meanit voice. We all listened when Mom used that tone. It made Dad pull up short like he’d been whacked over the nose with a rolled-up magazine.

  He took a deep breath. “Sorry,” he said. “Sorry. Okay.

  “I have just heard the most remarkable rumor about our son here,” he said, gesturing at me. “A truly incredible rumor.”

  Mom started to say something, but I got to my feet and she stopped.

  “It’s true,” I said.

  “What’s true?” Mom said.

  I reached for my handheld and dialed up the ad we’d sent to every mailbox on the Eagle:

  MEMBERS NEEDED

  Announcing an altogether new kind of corp: The Martian New Chums Co-operative is open to anyone who is willing to work for the cause of a fair deal for all Martians.

  WHY?

  Because the deck is stacked on Mars. Four large companies monopolize all the wealth, power, and privilege on our new home, and when you land, you can expect to spend the rest of your life working your guts out for the new aristocrats. You may think that this only applies in Martian Chronicles, but we’ve got news for you: life on Mars IS THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES. No one’s mentioned it to us yet (I wonder why not?) but it makes sense, doesn’t it? After all, why set up a government, stock exchange, messaging system, and all the other machinery of society when you’ve got a perfectly good one sitting right there on your game server?

  Oh yes, there’s LOTS they haven’t told you about life on Mars.

  Rather than whining about it, we’re DOING SOMETHING ABOUT IT.

  The New Chums Co-op will not trade with the cartels. We will make our own oxygen, generate our own power, and manufacture our own goods, buying and selling from anyone except the cartel. We won’t have the same stuff, but your ray guns will go to fellow New Chums, and their ray guns will go back to you, and we’ll all prosper together. We’ll be a democracy: one member, one vote. And we’ll help each other.

  Want to join? Great! The New Chums Co-op will begin signing on members in seventy-two hours, which should give you plenty of time to get your kids to show you how to use Martian Chronicles, get you set up with an account on the Mars server, and verify what you’ve read here.

  In the meantime, watch out for dirty tricks from Mars, Inc.! Watch out for unexplained network outages. Watch out for your fellow colonists being arrested in the name of “preserving morale.”

  Aren’t you old enough to make up your own mind about what’s true and what isn’t? Do you really want a big-daddy corporation locking up people who say things that it disagrees with?

  Membership opens in SEVENTY-TWO HOURS! Meantime, any questions: ask the Co-op’s founders:

  Vijay Mukherjee (senior auditor, retired)

  David Brionn Oglethorpe Smith, III (CEO, DBOS-Corp, retired)

  Helene Gonzales-Ginsburg (liquidity specialist, retired)

  PS: If we get arrested, the Co-op is still on. Organize yourselves. No whining!

  Mom looked at me as if I’d sprouted another head and three extra arms. Dad was trembling slightly, suddenly looking much, much older.

  I leaned back in my seat. I’d known this was coming, had feared it, had come throu
gh the fear. It was a relief to have it out in the open after all the stress of wondering what would happen when my parents found out. When the whole ship found out. Helene had said to me, “The fear of the consequences are always worse than the consequences themselves.”

  “I don’t think they can afford to arrest us, not after everyone on the ship has read it,” I said, trying to sound casual, trying to convince myself that I was calm.

  Dad slumped. “I can’t believe that you—”

  Mom put her hand on his arm. “Is it true, David?”

  “Which part?” I said, again, trying for a nonchalance I didn’t feel.

  “All of it!” I could see that, beneath her calm exterior, she was ready to lose her cool.

  “All of it is true,” I said. “Mars is run by four corps, and everyone works for them. You can verify it for yourself—just create a Martian Chronicles account and start looking around. And yes, Mars runs on the Martian Chronicles server. Have a look and you can see it: our quarters are assigned, in the Burroughs warren, the spaceport is booked for the Eagle’s arrival. The city hall forum is full of people talking about real life.” We had decided not to mention Lainie’s offer to me. I had promised her that I’d keep it a secret, and I didn’t want her to be able to go around telling everyone that I didn’t honor my promises. I needed to be squeaky clean if I was going to be on the Co-op’s steering committee. “And it’s true that we’ve started the Co-op. Technically, it’s just another corp, but Vijay structured the bylaws so that it gets to run like a co-operative. He’s good at that sort of thing.”

  “Vijay?” Mom said.

  “The pove,” Dad said. “The one he pals around with.” He sounded shell-shocked.

  “We’re all poves now, Dad.” I swallowed, looked into his eyes. It was hard to do. “We’re headed to Mars to clean the toilets. That’s the thing that we discovered. And the people Mars-side, they’re fine with that. After all, if we were too good for toilet cleaning, we would have been in the first wave. They’ll say that they’re too good to clean toilets, and they’ll prove it by pointing out that we’re all broke and the only jobs they have for us are the worst, crappiest jobs. Anyone who disagrees will be a whiner.”

  That had been the real surprise, once Mars OS was running on all my devices: the message boards filled with Martians fantasizing about how great it would be once the next wave of colonists arrived, how they’d be able to “solve the labor shortage” and finally hire people at “affordable wages” to do the real work of running the colony.

  A tear slid down Dad’s cheek. “David, you’re making trouble for us, for our family—”

  Mom pulled him into a hug. “Shh,” she said. “Sounds like trouble was already there.” Dad kind of collapsed into her arms and she met my eyes and made a little scooting gesture behind his back. I took the hint and left.

  Standing outside the door was Lainie. She was perfectly composed, leaning against the corridor wall. There was no one else in the corridor. Lainie had that effect on people—if you saw her standing somewhere, you’d go somewhere else.

  “Hello, David,” she said.

  I’d talked this over with Helene and Vijay, too. Helene had been busted dozens of times, and Vijay had made plenty of busts. They knew how it went.

  I nodded and held my wrists out, as though for handcuffs.

  She smiled and shook her head. “Oh, I’m not going to put you in the brig, young Mr. Smith. Not at all. The last thing I want to do is create a martyr for your little cause on Mars.”

  (When I told Vijay about this, he nodded curtly and said, “Smart.”)

  “But I just want to put a little whisper into your ear, a little seed of doubt for you to remember when we land on Mars, when the people I work for take serious steps to ensure that you don’t upset the apple-cart. You ready for it?”

  I nodded, not trusting myself to speak—barely trusting myself not to wet my pants.

  “It’s this: you could have been a king. A CEO. Rich. Famous. Powerful. Admired. You could have had it all. But now, no matter what happens, no matter whether your little ‘co-op’ is crushed or soldiers on raggedly, you will always be a pove, and a leader of poves.”

  She whispered it like a curse, and I knew she was right.

  They arrested us forty-eight hours after Marsfall. Every Co-op member. Conspiracy in restraint of trade.

  We put up quite a defense and accused Mars, Inc. of the cardinal sin of “whining” at every turn.

  And they did let us go, eventually. And by the time they did, nearly every New Chum had signed up for the Co-op, and the game got really, really fun.

  CORY DOCTOROW (www.craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist, journalist, and blogger—the coeditor of Boing Boing (boingboing. net), and the author of the bestselling novel YA Little Brother. His new novel is For the Win. He is the former European director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and cofounded the UK Open Rights Group. Born in Toronto, Canada, he now lives in London.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  There’s a certain circularity to the argument that goes, “We have to get off this planet, we’re using it up!” I often hear it from people who are comfortable with using the planet up to get off-planet, which, to me, sounds a lot like, “I have to eat all the cookies, because once the cookies are gone, I won’t have any cookies!”

  Space exploration is great for science and for our dreams, and it spins off some cool technologies, but it will not reduce population pressure on Earth (you’d have to march people into spaceships at breakneck speed to make any significant dent in population growth and you could feed, clothe, and house a person for years for what it costs to lift her space suit into low Earth orbit).

  Space colonization fantasies are all too often silent on the question of what happens to the world’s majority of poor people when the rich folks have buggered off to the stars after expending the planet to get there.

  GOODNIGHT MOONS

  Ellen Klages

  I’d always dreamed of living on Mars. From the first time I went to the library in Omaha and found the books with rocket ships on their spines, discovered Bradbury and Heinlein and Robinson. Later, I heard real scientists on the news saying it could happen—would happen—in my lifetime.

  I didn’t want to stay behind and watch.

  A big dream, but I was disciplined, focused. I took physics and chemistry, ran track after school, spent my evenings stargazing from the garage roof—and my nights reading science fiction under the covers. I graduated valedictorian, with a full scholarship to MIT, and got a doctorate in mechanical engineering, then stayed on for a second degree in astrobotany. We’d need to grow food, once we arrived.

  My husband was an electronics genius, but a small flaw in Pete Morrison’s left eardrum grounded him early in the NASA program. We lived outside of Houston while I trained: endurance, microgravity, EVA simulations. I even survived the “vomit comet” with flying colors.

  When they announced the team for the Mars mission, I made the list. Four men and two women: Archie, Paolo, Rajuk, Tom, Chandra, and I were overnight celebrities. Interviews, photos, talk shows—everyone wanted to know how it felt to be the first humans to go to another planet.

  Our last public appearance was at the launch of the Sacagawea with her payload of hydrogen and the gas extractor that would fuel our trip back. She would be waiting for us when we landed, in another thirty months. Once she was up, we disappeared for two years of training and maneuvers in Antarctica and the Gobi desert, the most extreme conditions Earth could offer.

  Pete and I said our farewells the night before the launch team was sequestered for the final countdown week. Champagne (for him), filet mignon, red roses, and a king-size bed. Then I was isolated with the others at the base, given so many last-minute shots, tests, and dry runs that I felt like a check mark on an endless to-do list.

  But I made it. On a sunny Tuesday morning, the Conestoga roared up into a bright blue sky. Billions of people watched us set ou
t for a new world.

  Free fall was a relief after the crush of the launch. We’d be floating in zero-g for seven months. Archie and Paolo were a little green around the gills at first, but they got their sea legs soon enough. For me, it was as easy as swimming.

  The tedium of a long voyage set in once we established our routine. Cramped quarters, precious little privacy, and not much to do once we were past the moon. I checked my instruments, sent data packets back to Mission Control, took my turn in the galley. Then on day 37, I tossed my cookies so suddenly there wasn’t even time to grab a barf bag. Everyone laughed, no one harder than Paolo and Archie.

  For three days, nothing wanted to stay down. Didn’t feel like zero-g effects. More like a bug. Chandra, the medical officer, took my vitals. No fever, blood pressure normal—for these conditions. When she took an EPT stick from the supply closet, I laughed. “No way. Brand-new implant when we got back from the desert.”

  “Just a precaution,” she said. “By the book. Anything abdominal I can rule out is a plus.”

  The only plus was the symbol on the stick. The second stick as well.

  “Jeez.” Chandra whistled through her teeth. “Protocol says—”

  “I know.” Pregnant personnel are restricted to ground duty. Pregnant personnel assigned to flight missions are immediately reassigned. That was why we both had the implants. A one-in-a-million chance, but mine was defective.