by Greg Mellor
The jet was still firing. And that should have been impossible, because the first thing that the MMG team would do was send a POWER-OFF signal to the engine.
The time for impact came when the MMG asteroid was still a clear fifty kilometers out of position, and accelerating away. I saw the final collision, and the payload scraped along the surface of Io in a long, jagged scar that looked nothing at all like the neat, punched hole that we were supposed to achieve.
And we did achieve it, a few seconds later. Our asteroid came in exactly where and when it was supposed to, driving in exactly vertical to the surface. The plume of ejecta had hardly begun to rise from Io’s red-and-yellow surface before von Neumann was pulling a bottle of bourbon from underneath the communications console.
I didn’t object—I only wished I were there physically to share it, instead of being stuck in my own pod, short of rendezvous with our main ship. I looked at my final list, still somewhat incomplete. Was there a pattern to it? Ten minutes of analysis didn’t show one. No one had tried anything—this time. Someday, and it might be tomorrow, somebody on another combine would have a bright idea; and then it would be a whole new ball game.
While I was still pondering my list, my control console began to buzz insistently. I switched it on expecting contact with my own troubleshooting team. Instead, I saw the despondent face of Brunel, MMG’s own team leader—the man above all others that I would have liked to work on my side.
He nodded at me when my picture appeared on the screen. He was smoking one of his powerful black cigars, stuck in the side of his mouth. The expression on his face was as impenetrable as ever. He never let his feelings show there. “I assume you saw it, didn’t you?” he said around the cigar. “We’re out of it. I just called to congratulate you—again.”
“Yeah, I saw it. Tough luck. At least you came second.”
“Which, as you know very well, is no better than coming last.” He sighed and shook his head. “We still have no idea what happened. Looks like either a programming error, or a valve sticking open. We probably won’t know for weeks. And I’m not sure I care.”
I maintained a sympathetic silence.
“I sometimes think we should just give up, Al,” he said. “I can beat those other turkeys, but I can’t compete with you. That’s six in a row that you’ve won. It’s wearing me out. You’ve no idea how much frustration there is in that.”
I had never known Brunel to reveal so much of his feelings before.
“I think I do understand your problems,” I said.
And I did. I knew exactly how he felt—more than he would believe. To suffer through a whole, endless sequence of minor, niggling mishaps was heartbreaking. No single trouble was ever big enough for a trouble-shooting team to stop, isolate it, and be able to say, there’s dirty work going on here. But their cumulative effect was another matter. One day it was a morass of shipments missing their correct flights, another time a couple of minus signs dropped into computer programs, or a key worker struck down from a few days by a random virus, permits misfiled, manifests mislaid, or licenses wrongly dated.
I knew all those mishaps personally. I should, because I invented most of them. I think of it as the death of a thousand cuts. No one can endure all that and still hope to win a Phase B study.
“How would you like to work on the Europan Meta-morph?” I asked. “I think you’d love it.”
He looked very thoughtful, and for the first time, I believe I could actually read his expression. “Leave MMG, you mean?” he said. “Maybe. I don’t know what I want anymore. Let me think about it. I’d like to work with you, Al—you’re a genius.”
Brunel was wrong about that, of course. I’m certainly no genius. All I can do is what I’ve always done—handle people, take care of unpleasant details (quietly!), and make sure things get done that need doing. And of course, do what I do best: make sure that some things that need doing don’t get done.
There are geniuses in the world, real geniuses. Not me,
though. The man who decided to clone me, secretly—there I’d suggest you have a genius.
“Say, don’t you remember, they called me AL . . . .”
Of course, I don’t remember. That song was written in the 1930s, and I didn’t die until 1947, but no clone remembers anything of the forefather life. The fact that we tend to be knowledgeable about our originals’ period is an expression of interest in those individuals, not memories from them. I know the Chicago of the Depression years intimately, as well as I know today; but it is all learned knowledge. I have no actual recollection of events. I don’t remember.
So even if you don’t remember, call me Al anyway. Everyone did.
First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May, 1989.
About the Author
As well as being one of the best “hard science” writers of his generation, the late Charles Sheffield was a theoretical physicist who worked on the American space program and was the chief scientist of the Earth Satellite Corporation. He won the Hugo Award in 1994 for his story, “Georgia on My Mind.” His books included the bestselling non-fiction title Earthwatch, the novels Sight of Proteus, The Web Between the Worlds, Hidden Variables, My Brother’s Keeper, Between the Strokes of Night, The Nimrod Hunt, Trader’s World, Proteus Unbound, Summertide, Divergence, Transcendence, Cold As Ice, Brother To Dragons, The Mind Pool, Godspeed, The Ganymede Club, and the collections Erasmus Magister, The McAndrew Chronicles, Dancing With Myself, and Georgia on My Mind and Other Places. Born in Britain, he was living at the time of his tragically early death in Silver Spring, Maryland, and married to writer Nancy Kress.
First Principle
Nancy Kress
He was even bigger than I expected. All three of them were. Barb and I watched on the link screen as they waited for the transport bay to pressurize, as they climbed out of the rover. Dr. Langley, in his rotation as council leader, made a welcome speech. The parents managed exhausted smiles, but the boy scowled.
“He’s so ugly,” Barb said. “And look at him—he hates us already.”
“He’s scared,” I said. “Wouldn’t you be, if you got taken away to Earth?”
Barb made a vomiting sound and folded her small arms across her chest. “Don’t be so good all the time, Gina. It’s wearying.”
I didn’t answer her. I’m not “good,” just reasonable. If Mom had ever dragged me to Earth from Mars, I’d be just as scared as this boy looked. Not that anyone would be so insane as to leave Mars for Earth.
Barb said, “They should stay where they belong. Hell, Gina, that reco we saw just last night!”
“We don’t know that this kid watches that sort of reco.”
“We don’t know that he doesn’t.”
Now Dr. Langley and the “immigrants”—such a strange word, we haven’t had immigration to Mars in decades and never to Mangala—walked through the rover bay and into Level 1. More people to greet them, more speeches. I tugged on Barb’s hand, and we moved to the boy to do our part. “It would be nice if someone his own age were there to greet David Hansen,” my mother had said, in the tone that meant “You’re elected.” I’d made Barb go with me. Now that didn’t seem like such a good idea. She radiated contempt.
Maybe David Hansen felt it. Or maybe he was just stupid. This was our world; he was the outsider, and he didn’t even try to fake good manners. After the adults’ introductions, while the officials chatted warily, stumbling over each other’s strange accents, David and Barb and I stared at each other, silent. But the message in his eyes was clear. You’re ugly, you’re deformed, you’re monsters, you’re not even human. Last night’s reco lay on my mind.
Does he have any idea how he looks to us?
“Hello,” I said finally. “I’m Gina Mellit and this is Barb Fu. I understand you play chess.”
He wasn’t stupid. He had manners when he chose to use them, although even then a sneer underlay the polite phrases. He was a better chess player than I am, and I’d been Val
les Marineris junior champion. He hated Mars, and I hated him.
But not at first. “He’s scared,” I said to Barb and Hai-Yan and Andre and Ezra until I was tired of saying it and they were tired of hearing it. David wasn’t scared, he was a sick, supercilious son-of-a-bitch. But at first he was just plain sick. They took his family down to Level 2 and gave them a room on the terrace—which Mom and I wouldn’t get until our rotation came up next year—and specially designated a bot to take care of him while his parents, who weren’t sick, went to work in the labs. And then they urged me to play chess with him.
“Why can’t he play against the computer?” I said.
“He can,” Mom said. “He does. But I’m sure he needs human company, Gina. Wouldn’t you, in his place?”
I didn’t say, I’m not in his place. I didn’t say, I wouldn’t ever be in his place. I didn’t say, His place made those recos about us. All those things were true, but you didn’t say them to Mom, who was a Spiritual Guide when she wasn’t a geneticist. The First Principle was even stronger in our family than in my friends’, especially since my father was killed a year ago in an accident on the surface. So I didn’t say any of it. I went to play chess with David Hansen.
The bot let me in. I nodded to it and said, “Gina Mellit to visit David Hansen. Chessboard, please.”
From his bed David said, “Why are so polite to it? It’s just a machine.”
“Why not be polite?” I said.
He did something with his tongue that I knew from the recos meant extreme contempt. And because that kind of reco was the only Earth feed where I’d ever seen that tongue thing, I knew then that he watched them.
The bot handed me an old-fashioned chess set, carved of some heavy Terran wood. I put it on the table beside David’s bed, he sat up shakily, and I held out my closed fists. “Right one,” he said. It held the white pawn. He opened with the Sicilian, I responded, and we played in a thick, ugly silence. He was a romantic player, making bold attacks and sacrifices, and I should have been able to counter that style of play. But somehow the advantage eluded me. Two pawns down, I lifted my eyes from the board to rest them on Mars.
The terrace rooms on Level 2 have a wonderful view. Mangala, a fairly new settlement although I’ve lived in it my whole life, is built against a south-facing cliff. The cliff face is terraced in four levels, each set back from the one below, with steps on the outside that mean you don’t have to wait for the elevators if you don’t want to. Pots on the terraces hold genemod flowers designed by my mother, and at the bottom is the park, full of the genemod plants and trees that the wizards are always improving. The clear plastic of the shield slants down from the top of the cliff, Level 1, to the ground, and then beyond that is the shallow dome of the farm. From David’s bed he could see the green of the park and the farm, and beyond them the red landscape and glorious pink sky.
David followed my gaze. “It’s so ugly.”
“Ugly?” My and Mom’s current quarters were in the worst part of our rotation, at the back of Level 4 where the sound of the excavation bots droned, night and day, even through the stone.
“You don’t even know how ugly it is, do you? You’ve never seen the ocean, or a beach, or mist at morning . . . .” He stopped, bent over the board, and coughed. My anger morphed into pity. Despite being so big—he must top 170 centimeters!— he looked frail. I was never sick.
I said, “Did you live near an ocean? With mists at morning? I’ve seen recos.”
“You’ve seen nothing. A reco can’t capture it.”
“Maybe not. But I know that—”
“You know nothing.”
I stood up. “Finish the game by yourself.”
“Leaving because you’re losing?” he taunted.
I glared at him. But I sat down again.
The First Principle governs Mars. It’s a spiritual principle, not a legal one, and absolutely necessary for survival in any closed environment with limited resources: Put yourself in the other person’s place. David was sick, uprooted, longing for the pestilence that was Earth, despite how hard that was for me to imagine. I advanced my bishop.
We finished the game in silence. He won. I left without looking at him. But as the bot let me out, I heard him breathe behind me, so soft that maybe he didn’t mean for me to hear. But I think he did mean it.
“Bug.”
I didn’t turn around. Neanderthal, I wanted to say, but didn’t.
Don’t be so good all the time, Gina. It’s wearying.
We don’t look like bugs. He does look like a Neanderthal. Too big, too hairy, too few arms.
My great-great-great-grandfather was on the initial genemod team. I’m proud of that, and why wouldn’t I be? On Mars there is no room for waste or excess or stupid ostentation. Form follows function. The beauty which that creates is so much better than any Earth beauty; it’s filled with unity and grace. We have softer colors—through a telescope Earth always looks to me too gaudy, all that bright blue and white. On Mars variations are fashioned with subtlety and for the beauty of perfect fit with the environment. My genes are exactly what they need to be for this gravity, this level of radiation, this type of light. And I am a pretty girl. I see it in the eyes of my friends, my mother, other people. The thick, short bones of my legs don’t lose calcium and strength in this gravity, as David Hansen’s will. My big arms, engineered for strength, could break his too-long neck. The flexible tentacles of my small arms can manipulate objects that his clumsy fingers would crush. The light green of my epidermal photosynthetic cells uses the weak Martian sunlight to augment the energy from my food intake. I can see farther than David Hansen, hear better, use fuel more efficiently. Who the hell is he to presume to condescend?
“I’m not going to play any more chess with David,” I said to my mother. We were on our way to the women’s baths, walking along a corridor deep inside the Level 3 rock. I had my coming-of-age ceremony several weeks ago, and most of my friends have already moved into their adult quarters, but I’m in no hurry. I like my mother. It’s pleasant to have someone to come home to, and there’s no one yet that I’d like to set up a partnership with.
“I wish you would continue the chess, Gina.”
“No. He’s awful.”
“He’s dying.”
I stopped cold. She said it quietly, factually, the way she recites genetic data. I blurted, “Why would anybody bring a dying man all the way to Mars? Especially one who doesn’t even want to be here?”
“David isn’t yet a man.”
“He’s the same age I am!”
“But it’s different there, you know that. David can’t make any decisions on his own and his parents wanted to be here. Earth is dying. You know that, too.”
Of course I knew that. We all knew that. It was the reason immigration had resumed at all. Three generations of arrivals at Mars, five generations when Earth was in too much crisis to fund expeditions and we were left to become ourselves in peace. And now another desperate influx by people frantic to get away while they still could. A phrase from literature came to mind: rats leaving a sinking ship. But I had never seen a rat nor a water ship, and Earth literature mostly bored me.
I said, “Mom—”
“Put yourself in David’s place, Gina.”
David’s place was watching bug recos. Vile, stomach-turning things. And the computer games were worse. Win points by pulling tentacles off the “bugs.” Crush them under big robotic feet. Hit them with “pesticides” that make that tough green skin blister and molt. Tie the girl bugs down and rape them. Pack them naked into a “bug jar” and see how many you can fit. But Mom didn’t know my friends and I had seen bug recos and bug games, and I couldn’t tell her. We had them off an illegal feed that Ezra, who was some sort of electronic genius, had cobbled together during a mapping expo in a surface rover and then narrow-beamed to his receiver.
In my opinion, Earth should die.
“I think,” Mom said carefully, “that maybe ther
e’s a little xenophobia going both ways here. Will you promise me to think about that, Gina?”
“All right,” I said, without enthusiasm. “I’ll think about it. What’s David Hansen dying of?”
“Brain blight.”
She had me, and she knew it. We’d all learned about brain blight. Earthers caught it from one of the microbes that had been engineered in the Second Bio Wars; it created neurotoxins that ate away at the cerebral areas that controlled basic bodily functions. You got weaker and weaker, until your heart or lungs just gave out for good. It was not contagious and not curable, not even by us. Mars has been far more daring in its genetic engineering than has Earth. We had to be, in order to survive, once the reinforcement ships stopped coming. And we’ve been incredibly lucky, with only minor failures or side effects. But much as we’d modified the human body, we still didn’t know enough to do much with the brain. David Hansen’s brain was essentially the same as mine, and it was killing him. He’d been in cold sleep for the voyage out and that had halted the blight, but now he couldn’t have much time left.
Put yourself in his place. Eight years old—sixteen in E-years—and exiled, dying.
I shuddered.
“Don’t do it,” Barbara said. “You’re an adult, your mom can’t make you.”
“My mom doesn’t make me do anything,” I said, which was true. “She only reminds me about the First Principle. Gently.”
“That’s worse.”
“Much worse.”
“How many times did you play him?”
“Six.”
“How many did you lose?”
“Six.”
Barb grimaced. “Did he ever mention . . . you know . . . .”
“The bug recos? No. He doesn’t mention anything, not directly. He just hints at nasty stuff. His parents are never around because they leave him alone all the time.”
“I’d leave him alone, too. He’s shit.”
“While we play he has the link screen on an Earther news feed. It shows disaster after disaster. Yesterday it was all these children dying in some settlement called Africa and the bodies just stacked in a huge pit—you can’t imagine how big—and set on fire to—”
