Life on Mars

by Jonathan Strahan (Ed)

  Suddenly, the gangster veered into the hallway. Tiro straightened. What did you do?

  Sent a fake letter to his chatter. He thinks it’s from a woman upstairs.

  Tiro blinked as Eo’s message scrolled across his visor, virtually steaming with innuendo.

  Where did you learn that? asked Tiro.

  Never mind, it’ll get you in!

  Tiro entered and ran upstairs without pausing to think. Each of his footsteps seemed to boom on the wood like strikes on a bass drum.

  He wove through the mazelike corridors, darting left and right as needed. Eo sent more fake messages, but not all the gangsters took predictable courses. Tiro hid whenever one turned an unexpected corner, willing himself to be invisible among the shadows. On the third floor, he crouched behind a door for an agonizing fifteen minutes while two gangsters finished playing dice. Eo sent a letter to one of their chatters, but the woman only glanced at it and laughed, blanking out its screen for the rest of their game.

  Finally, Tiro emerged in front of the narrow, rickety staircase leading to the roof. Stop, Eo warned as Tiro put his hand on the railing. There’s someone up there.

  Tiro’s stomach churned. Can you get rid of him?

  No prob, Eo replied, smugly.

  A minute passed. Eo? Tiro prompted.

  His visor flashed red. They figured out I was faking messages! They’re looking for me!

  They can’t find you if you don’t do anything else, right?

  I don’t know!

  Calm down, Tiro directed with more confidence then he felt. I’ll take care of it.

  Ignoring Eo’s protests, Tiro started upstairs.

  When he reached the top, he pressed himself into the shadow of the open door and peered out. At night, the observatory was full of glints and shadows. A tall man in leather sat beside one of the telescopes, eating a promise fruit. An illegal compressed-gas projectile gun sat in his holster. The interface lay beyond him, its recess gleaming like water in an oasis.

  Tiro’s heart thumped. The man was sleek, with runner’s muscles, built for speed as well as strength. There was no way to get past him.

  Tiro cleared his throat. He’d always been good at thinking up lies. His father said they flowed from his mouth like scat from a pig’s anus. Thinking of lies was easy. It was convincing people to believe them that was hard.

  “Hey there!” he shouted, coming into the light. “I’m Tiro. I’m the one who gave you the info on the lifted kid. Where’s my reward?”

  The gangster looked up at him, slowly. He set aside his half-eaten promise fruit and got to his feet. “No you’re not,” he said, flicking his gaze up and down Tiro’s body. “We’ve got the woman outside. Some religious bat.”

  “Yeah, but I gave her the information.”

  “Yeah?” echoed the gangster. “Why would a kid turn in his settlement? They send you to bed without supper?”

  Tiro swallowed, trying to conceal his shaking hands. “They made me work with the lifted kid because we’re the same age. They think they can give her friends like a normal person. But she’s an abomination. She’s just a copy of some poor dead kid, keeping its soul from going to the afterlife.”

  A flash of darkness crossed Tiro’s visor, Eo’s expression of pain. Eo had been told he wasn’t a real person all his life, by strangers, by the news. Maybe even by his family—did Eo think that’s what they were saying when they wanted to get him a body?

  Tiro wished he could comfort Eo, but he didn’t dare send him a message.

  The pirate circled Tiro, coming between him and the door. “Why didn’t Benita tell us about you then?”

  Tiro darted a glance over his shoulder at the recess. He hoped he’d seem to be looking for an escape route. He backed a few steps away from the gangster as if afraid, moving toward his goal.

  “I . . . don’t know . . .” he stammered. “Maybe she forgot.”

  The gangster advanced. “Forgot. Sure. Or maybe you don’t want to go to the mines?”

  Tiro kept walking fearfully backward.

  “Want to know what happened to Benita? She’s dead. If she betrayed you, she’d betray us, too. So we killed her. Now tell me how you got up here.”

  That was enough. Tiro turned to run, palming his brother’s data globe. He was halfway across the roof. Could he make it the rest of the way?

  “Stop,” the gangster shouted. Tiro’s feet slammed against the wood. He heard the smack of metal on plastic as the gangster drew his gun. He hardly registered the blast of pain that erupted in his side as he twisted in midair, his arm sweeping outward to toss the globe the last few centimeters into the recess. He crashed to the ground. The gangster’s boots struck the boards as he approached for a final shot, but already the data globe’s lights were pricking the darkness with blue and yellow.

  A child’s voice sputtered from the audio outputs. “I don’t like all this violence.”

  The gangster shouted with pain as his gun’s internal chip heated the metal until it was excruciating. The gun clattered to the floor.

  “That’s better,” Eo continued. “Can you take it from here, Naghmeh, or do I have to do everything?”

  Tiro twisted to get a better look at Sahar as she entered his room. “Did you bring another plant book?”

  “Don’t,” she said, setting a bowl of mushroom soup on his nightstand. “You’ll hurt yourself.”

  “I’m fine,” Tiro grumbled, but Sahar bent to inspect his wound anyway. Before condemning Tiro to three weeks’ bed rest, the settlement’s physician had said that the bullet had missed his major organs, but made a major mess.

  “You finished the volume on diseases already?” Sahar asked.

  “What else do I have to do?”

  “I should shoot all my apprentices.”

  Sahar wore her clothes from the garden. Traces of soil on her boots and cuffs gave her a budding, green smell. Tiro hissed as she touched a tender spot.

  “Are you done yet?”

  “Momentarily.” Sahar completed her inspection and withdrew, letting Tiro tug down his shirt. She paused. “We heard from your parents.”

  Tiro’s mouth went dry. “What did they say?”

  “They’re furious,” she said. “But they’ll get over it.” She went on, “They want to know how you survived, and what you were thinking, and how you’re going to pay them back for their skipper. They also want you to know they’ve quit their jobs in New Virginia and they’ll be here in a month.”

  Tiro sat up. “They’re coming?”

  Sahar grinned. “We’re offering them large salaries, rewarding work, and a place where both of their children can grow as they are. How could they refuse?”

  Tiro matched her grin. For a moment, he was ecstatic, but then a sliver of worry worked its way inside. He slumped onto the bed, his smile gone.

  Sahar frowned. “What’s wrong? Are you in pain?”

  Tiro shook his head.

  “I thought you’d be happy your parents were coming.”

  “I am. It’s just . . .” Tiro trailed off.

  Sahar sat beside him on the bed. “You must have known Eo wouldn’t leave if you let him back into the system.”

  “I didn’t think I had a choice. The gang . . . but I didn’t have to come back. I could have kept driving.”

  “So why did you come back?”

  “I think, in the back of my mind, what you said about me and Jirair got to me. I’m not him. I couldn’t hurt Eo, not even for his own good. I had to let him choose.”

  “And now you wish you hadn’t.”

  “No!” Tiro looked up to see if he’d upset Sahar, but she stared back with placid gray eyes. “It’s just, sometimes . . .”

  Sahar sighed. “Sometimes you listen to them talk and play, and you realize they’re not like you, and they won’t ever be. They’re themselves—and that’s good. . . . But sometimes it breaks your heart.”

  Tiro nodded silently.

  Later, when Tiro recovered, he and Eo w
ould commune on the rooftop observatory. He’d tell Eo all about working with plants while Eo went into flights about mechanics and computing that he could never hope to understand. Tiro would start sleeping in his visor again so that they could spend their nights together as they always had.

  But just now, Tiro was afraid he’d cry if he spoke. He closed his eyes, letting Sahar stroke his hair as he mourned the way he hadn’t known how to the first time he lost his brother’s body.

  RACHEL SWIRSKY is a Californian short story writer whose work has appeared on www.Tor.com, in Subterranean magazine and Fantasy magazine, and in a number of year’s best anthologies. Her latest nonwriting project is trying to tame a litter of feral kittens so they can be adopted out as house pets.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I started working on “The Taste of Promises” by asking my friends what books I should read about Mars. One title kept coming up: Robert Zubrin’s How to Live on Mars: A Trusty Guidebook to Surviving and Thriving on the Red Planet. This witty, fast-paced book was a tremendously fun read and helped me to shape some ideas about what life might be like on a settled Mars.

  Some of my other inspirations came from online reading. For instance, Growth Assembly (http://www.pohflepp.com/?q=growthassembly) considers creating plants that would be engineered to grow product parts. I played with this idea to come up with anthropocentric ecology. I also read about soft mobile morphing robots, which are robots made of materials that can deform and change shape so that the robot can travel through narrow crevices. That got me thinking about what kinds of robots we’d have in the future, which got me thinking about mechanical intelligences, which got me thinking about lifted kids.

  This whole process is pretty different from the way I normally start stories. I know that a lot of other science fiction writers start out by finding a nifty technology. Personally, I usually start writing when I find a kind of character or situation that I don’t think has been written about enough, or that’s always written about in a way that irritates me. These kinds of stories come to me with the plots and characters already established. It was interesting to write a piece and discover who and what it was about along the way.

  DIGGING

  lan McDonald

  Tash was wise to the ways of wind. She knew its many musics: sometimes like a flute across the pipes and tubes; sometimes a snare-drum rattle in the guylines and cable stays or a death drone-moan from the turbine gantries and a scream of sand past the irised-shut windows when the equinox dust storms blew for weeks on end. From the rails and drive bogies of the scoopline the wind drew a wail like a demon choir and from the buckets set a clattering clicking rattle so that she imagined tiny clockwork angels scampering up and down the hundreds of kilometers of conveyor belts. In the storm-season gales, it came screaming in across Isidis’s billion-year-dead impact basin, clawing at the eaves and gables of West Diggory, tearing at the tiered roofs so hard Tash feared it would rip them right off and send them tumbling end over end down, down into the depths of the Big Dig. That would be the worst thing. Everyone would die badly: eyeballs and fingertips and lips exploding, cheeks bursting with red veins. She had nightmares about suddenly looking up to see the roof ripping away and the naked sky and the air all blowing away in one huge shout of exhalation. Then your eyeballs exploded. She imagined how that would sound. Two soft popping squelches. Then In-brother Yoche told her you couldn’t hear your eyeballs exploding because the air would be too thin, and the whole story was a legend of mischievous Grandparents and Subaunts who liked to scare under-fours. But it made her think about how fragile West Diggory was and the other three stations of the Big Dig. Spindly and top-heavy, domes piled upon half-domes upon semi-domes, swooping wing roofs and perilous balconies, all resting on the finger-thin cantilevers that connected the great Excavating City to the traction bogies. Like big spiders. Tash knew spiders. She had seen spiders in a book and once, in a piece of video excitedly shot by Lady-cousin Nairne in North Cutter, a real spider, in a real web, trembling in the perennial beat of the buckets working up the scoopline from the head of the Big Dig, five kilometers downslope. Lady-cousin Nairne had poked at the spider with her fingers—fat and brown as bread in high magnification. The spider had frozen, then scuttled for the corner of the window frame, curled into a tiny balls of legs, and refused to do anything for the rest of the day. The next day when Nairne and her camera returned it was dead dead dead, dried into a little desiccated husk of shell. It must have come in a crate in the supply run down from the High Orbital, though everything they shipped from orbit was supposed to be clean. Beyond the window where the little translucent corpse hung vibrating in its web, red rock and wind and the endless march of the buckets along the rails of the excavating conveyor. Buckets and wind. Tied together. Wind; Fact one: when the buckets ceased, then and only then would the wind stop. Fact two: all Tash’s life it had blown in the same direction—downhill.

  Tash Gelem-Opunyo was wise to the ways of wind, and buckets, and random spiders, and on Moving Day the wind was a long, many-part harmony for pipes drawn from the sand-polished steels rails, a flutter of the kites and blessing banners and wind socks and lucky fish that West Diggory flew from every rooftop and pylon and stanchion, a sudden caress of a veering eddy in the small of her back that made Tash shiver and stand upright on the high veranda in her psuit, a too-intimate touch. She was getting too big for the old psuit. It was tight and chafed in the wrong places. Tight it had to be, a stretch-skin of gas-impermeable fabric, but Things were Showing. My How You’ve Grown Things, that Haramwe Odonye, who was an Out-cousin in from A.R.E.A. and thus allowed to Notice such things, Noticed, and Commented On. Last Moving Day, half a longyear before, in an attempt to camouflage the bumps and creases and curves, she had drawn all over the hi-visibility skin with marker pen. There were more animals on her skin than on the whole of Mars.

  Up and out on Moving Day, that was the tradition. From the very, very old to the very, very, young, blinking up out of their pressure cocoons; every soul in West Diggory came out onto the balconies and galleries and walkways. Safety was part of the routine—with every half-year wrench of West Diggory’s thousand of tons of architecture into movement the possibility increased that a joint might split or a pressure dome shatter. Eyeball-squelch-pop time. But safety was only a small part. Movement was what West Diggory was for; like the wind, downward, ever downward.

  The Terrace of the Grand Regard was the highest point on West Diggory; only the banners of the Isidis Planitia Excavating Company, eternally billowing in the unvarying downslope wind, and the wind turbines stood higher. Climbing the ladders Tash felt Out-cousin Haramwe’s eyes on her, watching from the Boys’ Pavilion. His boy-gaze drew the other young males onto their high and rickety terrace. The psuit was indeed tight, but good tight. Tash enjoyed how it moved with her, holding her in where she wanted to be held, emphasising what she wanted emphasised.

  “Hey, good snake!” Out-cousin Haramwe called on the common channel. On her seventh and a half birthday Tash had drawn a dream snake on her psuit skin, a diamond pattern loop with its tail at the base of her spine, curled around the left curve of her ass and its head buried in her inner thigh. It had been exciting to draw. It was more exciting to wear on Moving Day, the only time she ever wore the psuit.

  “Are you ogling my ophidian?” Tash taunted back to the hoots of the other boys as she climbed up onto Gallery of Exalted Vistas to be with her sisters and cousin and In-cousins and Out-cousins, all the many ways in which Tash could be related in a gene pool of only two thousand people. The guys hooted. Tash shimmied her shoulders, where little birds were drawn. The boys liked her insulting them in words they didn’t understand. Listen well, look well. I’m the best show on Mars.

  A thousand banners rattled in the unending wind. Kites dipped and fluttered, painted with birds and butterflies and stranger aerial creatures that had only existed in the legends of distant Earth. Streamers pointed the way to West Diggory: downhill, always downhill. The li
nes of buckets full of Martian soil marched up the conveyor from the dig point, invisible over the close horizon, under the legs of West Diggory, toward the unseen summit of Mount Incredible, where they tipped their load on its ever growing summit before cycling back down the underside of the conveyor. The story was that the freshly dug regolith at the bottom of the hole was the color of gold: exposure to the atmosphere on its long journey upslope turned it Mars red. She turned to better feel the shape of the wind on every part of her body. This psuit so needed replacing. There was more to her shiver than just the caress of air in motion. Wind and words: they were the same stuff. If she threw big and fancy words, words that gave her joy and made her laugh from the shape they made from moving air, it was because they were living wind itself.

  A shiver ran up through the catwalk grills and railings and into Tash Gelem-Opunyo. The engineers were running up the traction generators; West Diggory shuddered and thrummed as the tokamaks drew resonances and steel harmonies from its girders and cantilevers. Tash’s molars ached, then there was a jolt that threw old and young alike off balance, grasping for handrails, stanchions, cables, one another. There was a immense shriek like a new moon being pulled live from the body of the world. Shuddering creaks, each so loud Tash could hear them through her ear protectors. Steel wheels turned, grinding on sand. West Diggory began to move. People waved their hands and cheered; the noise reduction circuits on the common channel brought the din down to a surge of delighted giggling. The wheels, each taller than Tash, ground ’round, slow as growing. West Diggory, perched on its cantilevers, inched down its eighteen tracks, tentative as an old woman stepping from a diggler. This was motion on the glacial, the geological scale. It would take ten hours for West Diggory to make its scheduled descent into the Big Dig. You had to be sure to have eaten and drunk enough, because it wasn’t safe to go inside. Tash had breakfasted lightly at the commons in the Raven Sorority, where the In-daughters lived together after they turned five. The semizoic fabric absorbed everything without stink or stain but it was far from cool to piss your suit. Unless you were up and out on a job. Then it was mandatory.