Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 84

by Greg Mellor

  “Don’t tell me. The Earthers are all rotten, we already knew that. Gina, you should—oh, number three bot’s hit something!”

  We were on excavation duty. First-year workers always do jobs in pairs, even when the job mostly consists of watching screens and adjusting bot performance. Barb and I sat in the dusty little Level 6 control room, deep underground, near the end of our shift. She had her boots up on the back of my chair. Two chairs and the control console nearly filled the space, but Barb had jammed in Jiji’s bed as well. The mebio lay asleep, his tail curled around him. I’d left FuzzBall at home. This was a work shift, after all; sometimes Barb can seem a little immature.

  The excavation bots were a mile away, at the end of the new tunnels. Excavation goes on all the time on Mars. We dig out new rooms shielded by tons of rock from the planet’s yearly ten rems of radiation. We dig wells to the underground aquifers. But this particular project was a first: a ten-mile tunnel from Mangala to the nearest town, Kasei. Eventually the tunnel would have a little train running along it. Someday underground trains would connect all the settlements in the Valles Marineris.

  I studied the data from the bot. “Whatever it hit is harder than the surrounding rock. An igneous form we haven’t cataloged yet? Look at this Cixin-scale reading, it—”

  Barb’s boots left the back of my chair and hit the floor with a resounding thump! “Let’s go see!”

  “You know we’re not supposed to do that. For any anomaly we’re supposed to call Dr. Alvero and—”

  “Oh, for once don’t be such a good girl, Gina!”

  Barb’s eyes sparkled. Her comment rankled. And somewhere deep inside, I felt—even while knowing it made no sense—that I had already paid out enough goodness by playing chess with David Hansen. Besides, I was curious to go into the tunnel, too. I’d never seen it live. And it wasn’t as if we didn’t know everything about proper suiting up for unpressurized areas. We’d had that drill since we were five.

  “Okay,” I said, “but let me run the diagnostics first to make sure it’s not just a bot malfunction.”

  It wasn’t. The bot had hit something too hard even to dent, although it kept on trying, its diamond-fiber arm scrabbling against the whatever-it-was. Excavation bots are pretty stupid. I turned it off and we took the suits from their closet. Behind the closet was a small air lock, and behind that the start of the tunnel.

  The ceiling was higher than it looked on the control screen, and a lot dustier. Minuscule particles of rock choked the air. Fines, we called them on the surface, but I couldn’t remember if it was the same for underground particulates. All at once this didn’t seem like such a good idea.

  “Barb—”

  “Come on!” she said over her suit radio. She bolted forward, and I followed.

  The tunnel was about three meters wide. The first part had been reinforced by a construction bot, which we passed, busily working, about two-thirds of the way along. After that the walls were rough rock, sometimes with different colored strata briefly lit by my headlamp before we moved on. My uneasiness grew, although I couldn’t have said why.

  A mile underground seems a lot longer than a mile on the surface.

  When we reached the end, we both stood silent until Barb breathed, “Look at that.”

  “It’s got to be a . . .” A what? Inspiration came to me. “A piece of exploratory junk from a few centuries ago. You know, Precollapse, when Earth was sending those piddly little bots to Mars and maybe one of them fell into a hole and then the tectonic plates shifted and it got squashed—”

  “Into a perfectly flat impenetrable wall?” Barb said scornfully. She uses scorn as a shield. She always has.

  The excavation bot stood frozen in the position I’d turned it off, which somehow made it look as dumbstruck as we were. It had uncovered a square meter of metal. The metal, which should have been scarred by tectonic shifts and rusted by aquifer drips and canted by erosion, gleamed a smooth dull gold. Without thinking I put my glove on it. The gloves are heated, of course, but not as well as the suits, or they’d be too inflexible. Crisscrosses of heating element lace the supple metallic fabric. Through my glove I could feel the metal’s piercing cold.

  Of course it was cold. This was deep underground in the Martian autumn. Everything was cold.

  This was colder.

  That made no sense.

  “This makes no sense,” Barb said scornfully. “Is there some part of the tunnel project we weren’t told about?”

  The tunnel project was open knowledge, like nearly every other project on Mars. You can’t build trust any other way among scientific groups, among settlements, among variations in Martian culture. That’s why we have the First Principle. Put yourself in their place.

  “I think,” I said, “we better go back and call Dr. Alvero.”

  For once, Barb didn’t argue.

  Mom wasn’t home when I got off shift, which is rare. She generally wants to hear about my day. Well, she would hear soon enough. Dr. Alvero had called half the xenologists on Mars and they were all rushing to the excavation tunnel by elevator or rover or dirigible. Those that were too far away were glued to the link.

  “Is it—what is it?” Barb had asked, and I was glad because I couldn’t speak myself.

  “How could we know yet?” Dr. Alvero said sternly. I could read that sternness; he was a friend of Mom’s, and I’d sat with him at dinner in the mess hall lots of times. He was excited and hiding it; he was insisting on proper scientific skepticism; he was aware that Barb and I had seriously violated regs during his shift as captain.

  Barb didn’t believe in proper scientific skepticism. She blurted, “Is it ancient Martians? Or aliens?”

  Irritation replaced sternness. “Don’t be premature, young woman. And don’t finish your shift; that’s not necessary now. Sign out and, please, don’t say anything to anyone about this, at least for now.”

  “But will you tell us if it turns out to be—”

  “Come on, Barb!” I said, tugging on her arm before Dr. Alvero could lose his temper. And if the smooth gold wall did mean aliens, everybody would know soon enough—

  Aliens.

  Halfway back to our rooms, I stopped dead. The terraces around me seemed to waver. Aliens. Was that possible? Microbial fossils had been found on Mars, but only microbial fossils. Somewhere in the long distant past, life had started here, and then had shivered to a halt. Climate change or radiation or something—my mind had gone numb. The life on Mars was us. This was our planet, my home. Arrivals from Earth were bad enough. But aliens—

  It was one of those ideas too big and all-encompassing for the mind to hold onto. Like one’s own death.

  I had stumbled the rest of the way back to our rooms, as if I were as clumsy in Martian gravity as David Hansen. Now I didn’t want to be alone. I scooped FuzzBall from her basket and squeezed her tight. But she didn’t like that and yelped. And anyway, a mebio wasn’t what I wanted. What did I want?

  I wanted my life to stay the same.

  Maybe it would. Maybe the smooth gold wall wasn’t anything that would change anything. After all, it had probably been there already for a long, long time, doing nothing. Maybe our life on Mars could just go on the way it always had, unlike life on Earth that just got worse and worse, rising oceans and dying oceans and too much CO2 and stupid ugly biowars and—

  Put yourself in their place. And I want things to stay the same.

  I went to play chess with David Hansen.

  The first thing he said was, “What’s that?” Until he did, I hadn’t realized I was still holding FuzzBall.

  “Oh, hell, you might be allergic, I shouldn’t bring her in here, sorry . . . .”

  “No, let me see it. Bring it here.”

  I didn’t like his commanding tone but I brought FuzzBall to him anyway. David was out of bed, sitting in a chair with the chess set on a little table beside him. He’d been waiting for me. He looked stronger than last time. When he held out his arms for
FuzzBall, I gave her to him.

  “What is it?”

  “A mebio. Part mechanical, part genetically engineered biological. Not a ‘bug.’” I thought he might react to that, but he was too busy petting FuzzBall, who purred in his arms, little traitor. Well, she was pretty cute, even to an Earther.

  “It looks sort of like a cat. Is it a cat?”

  “I don’t know what genes they started with, but DNA is amazingly adaptable. She eats fines.”

  He looked up. I’d never seen that expression on his face before: open and gentle. He looked almost like a Martian. He said, “What are fines?”

  “The bits of dust that get into everything, no matter how hard you try to make a tight seal. Mebios keep it under control.”

  “You force her to eat dust?”

  “Nobody forces her to do anything. She’s engineered to lick them up, and the saliva-fines mass is shunted to the mechanical part of her crop, where it can easily be removed. Here, I’ll show you.”

  “No! Don’t!” Abruptly he dropped FuzzBall to the floor. She yelped in protest, then began licking the polished stone. “Get it out of here. It’s just another freak. Like you.”

  The gentle look was gone. David stared at me like he hated me. I knew he was going to say it a full three seconds before he did.

  “Bug.”

  Something inside me snapped. The find in the tunnel, the repulsive recos, even the chess games I’d lost, one after another. The big and the small all mixed up, and all sauced with David’s contempt and my fear. My vision went red. I picked up the chessboard and threw it at him.

  The board struck the side of his head in a rain of pawns and rooks and bishops. FuzzBall ran for the door, snarling. But David smiled. Blood streamed down his neck and soaked into his shirt. He said quietly, “Too bad you couldn’t throw it harder.”

  I stared at him, stomped out, and burst into tears.

  When Mom finally arrived home from her lab, she rushed straight into my alcove. “Gina! Are you all right?”

  I hadn’t been able to sleep, but the sudden light disoriented me. Blinking, I tried to see if she knew about Barb and me breaking regs. Of course she knew. Her face wrinkled into dozens of concerned little crevasses.

  “I’m fine, Mom. And I know we shouldn’t have—”

  “But are you all right? I couldn’t leave earlier, the oocytes—”

  I held out my arms, like I was three years old again. She sat on the edge of my bed and held me. That was what I needed, what David Hansen didn’t have; someone who cared more about him than about work, or even about Mars. My voice came out thick. “Is it . . . aliens, Mom?”

  She laughed, a strangled sort of laugh, but I understood it. The situation was too weird to be quite real—even though it was real. She said, “They don’t know. And I don’t think we’ll know for a long time. Maybe not ever.”

  That hadn’t occurred to me. “Why not?” Mom was calmer now, and that made me calmer. I let go of her, a little ashamed of my lapse back into childhood.

  “Well, think about it, Gina. From its position, that thing has lain deep underground for a long time—we’ll know how long once we date the metal, if we can, or at least the rock seal over it. A very long time, and if it is alien, no aliens have emerged from it. So probably there’s nothing biologically complex in there, or there was once and isn’t anymore. But unless the thing spontaneously opens, we’re not going to open it. Would you? Who knows what contaminating microbes we might let out, or what effect they’d have? Our Mars is fragile, you know that.”

  I did. Humans didn’t evolve here—school studies constantly emphasized that, and so did everybody else—and we had to be careful. One slip and the “planet not indigenous to us” would snatch at a life, a town, the entire human population. I knew it, but I had trouble feeling it deep in my bones. Mars didn’t feel “not indigenous” to me. It felt like home.

  I said, “So the council will just leave the . . . the alien thing there at the end of the tunnel? Forever?”

  She smiled. “Forever is a long time. But, probably, yes.”

  “Mom—”

  “Yes, honey?”

  But all at once I didn’t want to tell her about David Hansen, the bug recos, throwing the chessboard. After all, I wasn’t really three years old. “Nothing.”

  “All right.” She hugged me and left.

  The alien artifacts, or biologicals, or whatever they were, would stay sealed. David Hansen would not want any more chess, not after I’d clobbered him with the board. Dr. Alvero would, as shift captain, discipline Barb and me, but that was minor. Mom wasn’t angry. I was able to sleep.

  I was wrong about David. He called the next day. “You’re supposed to be here to play me.”

  My belly sank.

  “Gina? Did you hear me? Your mother said.”

  “You sound like a baby when you say that.”

  “Get up here.”

  And I did. From guilt, from duty, from training: Put yourself in his place. The problem was, the First Principle was correct. It was the only way to make a Martian settlement work. But I didn’t have to like it.

  David looked stronger than I’d ever seen him. To my surprise, his elaborate chessboard was already in midgame. As usual there was no sign of either of his parents. I said, “You playing someone else?”

  “No, stupid. This is a famous game—the ‘Immortal Game’ between Adolf Anderssen and Lionel Kieseritzky hundreds of years ago. White to move. Go ahead.”

  Despite myself, I studied the board. “Pawn to d4.”

  “No. Anderssen played knight to d5.”

  The move didn’t make sense. This unknown “Anderssen” was ignoring the upcoming threat to his rook. David grinned. “Want to see the rest of it?”

  I nodded. He played out the game. White gave away both rooks, his queen, and a bishop—and still got a checkmate, using only minor pieces. It was unexpected. It was beautiful.

  David said, “He used a suicide tactic. Kill everything he has to get all the way home.”

  “I can see that.”

  “Can you? Gina, I want you to do something for me. I think I might have been wrong about Mars. I want to see it. Take me outside.”

  Talk about unexpected! “I can’t do that.”

  “Yes, you can. You’re an adult here, and so am I. I researched it. We don’t need permission to suit up and go out, but I don’t know the way or the air lock codes. There are codes, aren’t there, so that little kids can’t get out by mistake.”

  “I’m not taking you outside. Ask your parents.”

  He did that contemptuous thing with his tongue, and then a hand gesture I knew was considered really filthy on Earth. I hated that I was shocked. He said, as if the word was killing him, “Please.”

  “No.”

  He started to curse me then, using some words I knew, some I’d only seen in bug recos, some I’d never heard. I was glad. His foulness finally dissolved my duty, set me free. Nobody ever has to put up with that kind of abuse. I shouted at the top of my voice, startling him, “I could never be in your place!”

  In the momentary silence that followed, I left.

  The dull gold artifact was measured, photographed, assayed, and put through every possible test to see what was inside. Nothing yielded any useful information, not even internal imaging, which revealed only indistinct shadows. Bots carefully scraped away the rock on the thing’s six sides, none of which bore any markings. A perfect cube, the artifact was made of a substance unknown to either Earth or Martian scientists. Geologists determined that rock around it had shifted several thousand years ago; before that the artifact had lain on or near the Martian surface. Images of it became the most accessed data in the solar system.

  On Earth a rising ocean, clogged with the out-of-control algal blooms that had killed the rest of its marine life, broke through the levees around a major settlement called New York. The water rushed in. In the floods and panic and contamination, two million people died.
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br />   I played and replayed the Anderssen-Kieseritzky Immortal Game, looking for something I could not have named. The stupid game even invaded my dreams. Knight takes g7 King to d8. . . Not that I was sleeping all that well anyway.

  I didn’t see David Hansen, but I heard about him. In a settlement as small as Mangala, gossip is as pervasive as fines. His mother was out on a long-explore; she would not return for the rest of the year. David’s father was in Mangala but spent all his days and most of his nights at the lab. After all, wasn’t his son supposed to be an adult, here on Mars? I looked up the Hansens on the link. They did not come from New York. They had lived somewhere called Illinois, a place that had undergone rapid desertification during the recent round of massive climate shifts. The link, calling up Earther feeds from its data base, showed me kilometer after kilometer of dry, cracked, withered ground leading to a barren lakeshore.

  “Gina,” Mom said one day over a very late dinner, just before mess closed down, “there’s talk of . . . of certain recos that have been fed illegally to Mars.”

  I picked up a forkful of soypeach and kept my gaze on it. Ordinarily I like soypeach.

  “You saw them,” Mom said flatly.

  “Yes.”

  She put down her fork. “‘Bug’ recos.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  I shrugged. I was an adult; I didn’t have to tell her everything.

  “Vile, ugly, stupid things—that’s what those recos are. From ignorant and diseased minds.”

  “Yes,” I said for the third time, and finally I could look up at her. “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re sorry? Dear heart, you have nothing to be sorry for. It’s the people who made those recos who should be—is that why you’ve been looking so tense and preoccupied the last few weeks? I’ve been worried about you. Ever since you stopped playing chess with David Hansen—was it David who showed you those recos? Was it?”

  “No, Mom. I saw them before he even arrived.” All at once the tension in my head—and of course Mom had noticed it, she loved me—shot up several levels.